Calling Out Michael Savage for Promoting Mass Hysteria
Let’s get this straight right from the jump. I’m not throwing shade on Michael Savage. I’m out to expose him for the fraud he is …and I don’t even know the guy.
I’m calling out Michael Savage, the wild and wildly popular right wing hoax purveyor and talk show host: Michael Savage, you are a fool, and proof for this assertion can be found on page 11 of your newest book, Stop Mass Hysteria.
Under his real name, Michael Allen Weiner, a 76 year-old New Yorker, has collected degrees in biology (B.S., Queens College, CUNY, 1963), botany (M.S., University of Hawaii, 1970), anthropology (M.S. University of Hawaii, 1972), and nutritional ethnomedicine (Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1978.)
With those credential, you might expect Dr. Weiner to have fairly well-informed attitudes about health and nutrition but it turns out that the doctor is a quack. A proponent of natural cures drawn from various indigenous cultures, he’s written 18 book about health and nutrition with such titles as Bugs in the Peanut Butter: Dangers in Everyday Foods and The Complete Book of Homeopathy: The Holistic & Natural Way to Good Health.
No serious scientist takes homeopathy seriously, but Dr. Weiner does. While there are one or two homeopathic remedies that sometime appear to work, the vast majority of those remedies are chemically indistinguishable from distilled water which puts them firmly into the quack category. The ones that sometimes seem to work are in much higher concentrations than the usual homeopathic remedies. Taken as a whole, Weiner’s books put him somewhere between an ordinary health nut and a medical quack along the same lines as a Doctor Oz.
As Michael Savage, however, he’s written 23 books with such titles as, The Death of the White Male: The Case Against Affirmative Action, The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Churches, Schools, and Military, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions and most recently Stop Mass Hysteria: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt, many of them NY Times bestsellers, according to Michael Savage. (I did not know that Trump hunts witches. Live and learn.)
His lucrative life as a right leaning talk show host began with a fluke. One of his manuscripts was turned down by his publisher and Savage put together a fake video clip excoriating the publishing house for not publishing his right wing clap trap. The clip went viral, and Michael Savage became a talk show guru.
On the basis of his published writings as both Michael Weiner and Michael Savage, he might be described as a health nut who believes that white, Christian people are under assault from the heartless, atheistic left-wing, that strong borders will prevent the spread of virulent, immigrant-borne diseases, and that there are natural cures for everything from heart disease, to cancer, HIV, and liberal thinking.
Stop Mass Hysteria, his latest book, is perhaps his most hypocritical one. In it, the man who has been banned from entry into the United Kingdom since 2009 for “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred,” proposes the theory that the widespread hatred expressed by liberals toward Donald Trump is part of a historical pattern of mass hysteria in America. Far from proposing a way to stop mass hysteria, this book promulgates it.
Weiner-Savage sees evidence of such hysteria going back to the rejection of Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of the New World (which of course he wasn’t), on the grounds that the sparsely-inhabited lands he claimed for Spain (or rather stole for Spain) were actually occupied by around 100 million highly sophisticated residents of advanced civilizations.
Savage calls these people “uncivilized natives” as if that excuses the taking of their lands and their lives and scorns liberals for calling Columbus what he actually was, a brute-force colonizer and a slave merchant. Savage acknowledges that Columbus and his crew introduced syphilis, measles, smallpox, and influenza, along with slavery, rape and pillage, to the New World but claims that the “modern day furor” against Columbus, along with the refusal to call his visit “the discovery of America,” is evidence of this left wing hysteria. (Yes, I know there was slavery, rape and pillage before Columbus arrived, but it was strictly at the retail level and never approached the wholesale level that Columbus brought with him.)
On page 53, Savage resurrects the old fable that Christopher Columbus was actual a Marrano, a term that refers to Jews of Spanish descent to converted to Christianity in the late 15th century while continuing to practice Judaism in secret. Columbus was Italian, not Spanish, and did not move to Castillo until 1485. You can’t call someone a Marrano who wasn’t even Spanish to begin with.
On page 55, in a nonsensical segue immediately after naming Columbus as a Jew and defending him against his detractors,Savage claims that the “anti-Israeli rhetoric and passions of Barack Obama — a Muslim by virtue of his parental descent and tradition — helped to fire new waves of anti-Semitism, the most open and vitriolic since the days of Goebbels and Hitler.”
He makes this claim without offering any evidence to support his contention, conveniently ignoring the fact that Mr. Obama is also half-Christian as well as half-white, and that he was raised mostly by a white, Christian family. (You can find numerous references to Obama’s anti-Semitic leanings in the right wing fringe media, but Savage never bothers to reference or footnote any of them. I wouldn’t either because they also lack verification.)
So, in a book in which Savage claims to be addressing the problem of mass hysteria, he seems to be doing his damnedest to exacerbate it further.
Which brings us back to the humdinger on page 11 of the book, where Savage manages to convict himself of the rabble rousing behavior he is attempting to excoriate.
I had my own brush with this madness (writes Savage in a reference to his previous comments about mainstream media’s habit of excoriating Trump for every single thing he says) when President Trump invited me to visit him in the Oval Office this past April. We discussed a topic about which I am passionate: a ban on the catastrophic and inhumane hunting of elephants. About ten minutes into our meeting, a red button flashed on his desk. I thought — I feared — that it was a nuclear launch button. I asked, half-jokingly, ‘Mr. President, did you just launch a nuclear weapon?’
The president laughed and answered ‘Yeah, I launched an atomic bomb.’ Then he waited a moment — with what professional entertainers would call perfect comic timing — and added. “No. I’m ordering a Diet Coke.’
He asked if I wanted one. I laughed. It was self-effacing and funny. How did the Trump-hating mainstream media play it?
“President Trump Jokes About Launching Nukes with Talk Show Host Michael Savage.”
They (the media) will say anything, twist any event, distort any fact, spin any achievement to make him (Trump) appear incompetent, dangerous and hateful.
Wow! You really can’t make this stuff up. Here’s my meta-analysis that I think proves that Michael Savage is an idiot.
1. The president absolutely did make a joke about launching nuclear weapons. Therefore, the headline cited by Savage is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. Donald Trump, by Michael Savage’s own admission, said exactly what the headline said he said.
2. Nobody twisted anything. The president made a joke about launching nuclear weapons. Fact, not fiction, according to Michael Savage himself.
3. A Google search for this exact headline produced just 21 results but only five of them had anything to do with the incident in question. None of them came from liberal sources.
4. The very first time this headline appeared online was on April 25, 2018…ON MICHAELSAVAGE.COM, talk show host’s own website. Here’s the Google listing for that post:
5. The story was picked up on April 27 by the Washington Examiner, a well-known conservative weekly magazine:
6. The next appearance of this headline was on KSFO-AM, a right wing talk show channel owned by Cumulus Media:
Facts are tricky things. Sometimes, they can come back to bite you. I am sure that somewhere along the line the late night comics must have picked up on this story, but the only references to this headline that I can find are from right wing outlets with ties to….Michael Savage.
Michael Weiner aka Michael Savage is one of those people who have made a career — and a considerable fortune — lying to the American people to create impressions that exacerbate the hysteria on the RIGHT while claiming that the left is hysterical. He is a rabble rouser with a following, and that makes him a very dangerous man, but not a very smart one.
But here’s the really sad thing about this whole story: no one noticed and when it is brought to their attention, no one seems to care.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: I guess it’s okay to plant a FAKE story in the media and then claim that the story is coming from left wing lunatics instead of right wing assholes.
I think it is safe to say that much of the animus that the American people — and the news media — feel toward Donald Trump comes from his very inept misuse of humor. Humor has a place in politics, but the president of the United States should not be cracking stupid jokes because the rest of the world takes the powers of the president very seriously and we don’t him doing a stand-up routine from the Oval Office. Nuclear war isn’t funny.
PS to Michael Savage: You are aware that Trump’s sons have been out killing elephants, right?