Conservatism 101: A Rogue’s Gallery of Fakes

by John Massaro
(book excerpt, 2020)

DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED president with the overwhelming support of the White working class and a solid chunk of the White middle class — conservatism USA. He appealed to the hopes and dreams of so many frustrated people in this country who for so long have yearned for real leadership, who were absolutely starved for it. Was he not the embodiment of conservatism and the American dream himself, a billionaire businessman with an American flag pinned in his lapel? He was going to make America great again — whatever that was supposed to mean. He had a vision and a concrete plan to straighten things out after eight years of Obama’s Left-liberal misrule. He was going to drain the swamp.

I, for one, was not swept along by the huge wave of enthusiasm generated by the crowds that turned out for Trump’s campaign rallies. Even though, at the time, I knew nothing of his history of schemes and failures as a business tycoon, inherited from his equally sleazy father, I had an uneasy feeling about him. On the other hand, I admit to being taken by his style. I found his choice of words most refreshing, and I was especially delighted by his pledge to reduce our military presence abroad. In my lifetime he was the only presidential candidate to speak in the straight-shooting language of the American workingman.

I truly believed there was a chance that he would do at least some good.

I am revising this in February 2020, shortly after Donald Trump was acquitted in the play-acting impeachment hearings, which bored the country to death, and which I knew would not culminate in his removal from office — not that that would have changed anything. It has been more than three years since this man became president, and it has become painfully obvious to me and a lot of other people, including many of the 63 million who voted for him, though probably not most of them, that he is the biggest impostor ever to slither into the White House. He broke all records in reversing the number of promises he made as candidate once he became president, as well as the speed with which he reversed them. Even before he was sworn in, most of his key cabinet appointments were snakes dredged from the swamp he had promised to drain.

America is now in the kind of disarray that I pictured a Clinton presidency would bring, and whether or not Trump finishes his first term, or is re-elected — and in spite of the living fossils who will stand by him no matter what, imagining that he must be doing everything right because he has been relentlessly attacked by “liberals” and “Democrats” over the most frivolous matters imaginable — conservatism has reached its inevitable dead end. And who better to stand on its corpse than this impulsive, narcissistic man-child of no moral, emotional or intellectual depth, of no core beliefs or values other than a love of money, cheap sex, Israel, and military might, whose life never had any purpose other than to claw his way to the top of the heap? And now that he’s there he can watch his country sink faster than under any previous administration, while continuing to live in a world of make-believe, as evidenced by his countless lies and idiotic “tweets” and public statements. The acrimony between Trump, his remaining supporters, and his many critics in the government, military, media and entertainment has become a theatre of the absurd, a spectacle of divisiveness on the level of a school cafeteria food fight between children, with all the players vying for top honors in stupidity and irrelevance. I fail to see any qualitative difference between Trump haters on one side and his diehard defenders on the other side.

Donald Trump’s tattered presidency is the logical sequel to his earlier years. Anyone who takes the trouble to examine his record as a New York City real estate developer will discover, as I belatedly did, that he is not a man of the people but a man of the gutter. And it’s in the gutter where so many proponents of conservatism dwell. One of Trump’s former friends and supporters, who wrote a flattering book about him but later turned against him, though he may have flipped again, is San Francisco-based talk show host Michael Savage, host of The Savage Nation, which at one time was syndicated on 400 radio stations with a weekly listening audience of more than ten million. He also runs a web site, michaelsavage.com. Savage is a Bronx Jew whose real name is Michael Weiner.

He is widely described as a conservative, and has taken many stands popular with conservatives. (Of late the equally nauseating conservative pseud Ben Shapiro has moved in on some of his air time.)

Weiner’s opinions are all over the map. He is noted for saying outrageous things on his radio show, even outdoing the cackling idiocy of Ann Coulter, another of this bunch who is often tagged with the ridiculous label “far right.” This was Weiner’s take on autism, as heard on July 16, 2008:

I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.

As the father of an autistic child, I can’t even say that this offends me. Rather, it saddens me that this country has sunk to such a level of mental retardation that a throwback like this still has a large following among listeners who call themselves conservatives. This tirade did result in a backlash which saw some advertisers pull out of his program, but no such backlash occurred following his April 17, 2006 show when he called for the killing of 100 million Moslems. But this tough talker was always shy about grabbing a gun and doing any killing himself. While in his twenties and with a war being fought in southeast Asia, Weiner was palling around with LSD guru Timothy Leary and that poster boy of degeneracy, pedophile “poet” Allen Ginsberg.

Weiner’s Talmudic fantasy came on the heels of a statement made the previous month, on March 8, by Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor fame, that “in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the Earth.” This call to genocide undoubtedly pleased his Jewish paymasters. Earlier in life, however, this studio warrior showed a marked preference for the college campus over the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. For two decades, before his excessive libido led to his dismissal at Fox News, the pompous O’Reilly, who had fobbed himself off as a down-to-earth guy with working-class roots, was America’s favorite TV conservative commentator.

O’Reilly actually thinks he’s smart. He’s so shallow that he thinks all the books he has written are really great because they all became New York Times bestsellers. He’s not so dumb, however, that he doesn’t recognize which side of an issue is the safe side to be on. On the February 2, 2015 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, he was on camera with Megyn Kelly — who, in an amusing turn of events, and joined by other women, later tattled about the off-camera lewd behavior of this slob who quietly spent more than $40 million to settle several sexual harassment lawsuits. While this bimbo talked a mile a minute, sounding like the usual broken record, about the wonderful measles vaccine, and how her three children are all up to date on their shots, and so on and so forth, O’Reilly nodded and nattered in agreement.

It happens that O’Reilly and I attended the same high school (he graduated just before I started) and, owning an alumni directory, I know his address. He lives on a private road overlooking Manhasset Bay — quite a climb up the socioeconomic ladder from Levittown, where he grew up.

It also happens that Manhasset Bay used to be a favorite fishing spot of mine, and through a neighbor who had worked as a security guard in the area, I had permission to park in a private driveway and walk down to the water where I would cast from shore for striped bass. O’Reilly’s home was almost directly across the street. Mr. Working Class lives in a mansion that not one workingman in America would ever be able to buy unless he wins the lottery. His latest gig is something called the Great American Wealth Project. Completely out of touch with unemployed blue collar Americans, he wants to see them get rich, which is the meaning of life for all good conservatives. Since becoming a liability because of his carnal misconduct, he started his own online news show, which is nothing but the usual conservative blather.

For sheer hypocrisy and hot air, however, no one has surpassed Rush Limbaugh, America’s most listened to radio personality and most famous conservative (still at work after a diagnosis of lung cancer). Anal cysts prevented Limbaugh from fighting in Vietnam, but like the others, he discovered his manhood later in life behind a microphone, beating the war drums in lockstep with the media mantra of the day. It’s hilarious that Limbaugh so often denounces the very media that have long employed him and made him one of America’s wealthiest celebrities. Rush makes about $40,000 an hour, somewhat more than the average salary of his dumbsh__ fans. A few times a year I turn the radio dial to listen to the braying of this jackass for a few minutes, and each time I do I’m left speechless as to how anyone can take him seriously. This includes his scorn of the fact that vaccines cause autism, and his pummeling of the British doctor Andrew Wakefield, about whom more later. With the Internet, though, it’s gratifying to see that there are intelligent Americans out there who see through all this nonsense, and every day are calling out Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and their fellow racketeers. “Conservatism Incorporated” is the fitting term that intelligent Americans have stamped on the whole sorry business.

But for now business is still good. Among the most recent to join the pack is Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA scam. “Three cheers for Donald Trump for being the first president ever to appoint an open homosexual, Richard Grenell, to a cabinet post,” Kirk recently crowed on social media. This was eight months after our family values president held an LGBT rainbow flag and called for the decriminalization of homosexuality around the world; two months after our pro-free speech president, signed an executive order cutting off federal funds to colleges which allow students to criticize Israel; two years after our pro-gun ownership president, of whom the NRA leadership is so enamored, buckled under media pressure after the Parkland, Florida school shooting and said, “I like taking guns away early…. Take the guns first, go through due process second.” Even Clinton and Obama didn’t go this far.

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Source: Author; an excerpt from the book Will Vaccines Be the End of Us?