Dangerous & Crazy at 570 kHz
Did you know that Biden was a corrupt traitor selling out the country for his pedophile son?
That’s what I heard when I tuned into AM radio yesterday afternoon on the way home from campus. A guest on a talk radio show was taking a laptop victory lap: last month the New York Times reported that federal “prosecutors had examined emails between” Hunter Biden and others which the Times had obtained “from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden.”
Before the 2020 election, the New York Post had published an article using information obtained on the laptop to try to incriminate presidential candidate Joe Biden in corruption related to his son. The very idea that someone would just leave a laptop with incriminating evidence in a repair shop, as Hunter Biden was said to have done, sounded far-fetched. Actually I still am not sure I believe it; now that the emails supposedly obtained from it appear to be real, it’s easier for me to believe that the information was stolen electronically and the pro-Trump shop owner agreed to provide provenance to the data.
Vox summarizes the evolution of the story. The main news in the email is that Joe Biden had met with a Ukrainian business associate of Hunter’s (while both attended a dinner with others); Joe had previously denied any such meeting. Whether they had actually met and whether they had discussed anything relevant to Joe Biden’s official duties as Vice President is still unclear. Despite conservative claims that it was buried at the time, the New York Times wrote about it in October 2020. This is in contrast to the Steele Dossier, Republican Exhibit A in the Plot To Discredit Trump, which the Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, ABC News, and other outlets refused to report on before the 2016 election; curious behavior for a conspiracy determined to bring down the Republican candidate.
And who was the guest peddling the latest tranche of accusations? None other than Rudolph Giuliani.
Would you let this man on your radio show?
If I have time at some later date, I will look more closely at the accusations discussed on the show. Normally I don’t like to even bring up lies and rumors, because often even to debunk them ends up promoting them. However, my guess is that these stories and Rudolph Giuliani won’t go away, so we have to deal with them. When I think of Giuliani now, I mostly remember Kate McKinnon’s Saturday Night Live impressions of him as an unhinged conspiracy-monger.
The thing is, when you listen to Giuliani and ignore the content of what he is actually saying, he sounds like a smart lawyer giving you the inside scoop on complicated dealings he has been carefully following. So what do we actually know about Rudy Giuliani’s credibility?
Well, we know that he was “suspended from the practice of law in the State of New York”. The judgement lays out the basis of the suspension, concluding “that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent [Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statement to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign…”
The document contains too many examples for me to cover here, but the first one is that in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election, “more absentee ballots came in during the election than were sent out before the election,” thus raising the question of fraud, supposedly on behalf of Joe Biden. “Respondent does not deny that his factual statement, that only 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested, was untrue. His defense is that he did not make this misstatement knowingly.” The ruling goes on to tear apart the excuse Giuliani offered for his “misstatement”. Similarly, at various times Mr. Giuliani claimed that from 8,000 to 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia, including deceased boxer Joe Frazier, but failed to provide the court “a scintilla of evidence for any of the varying and wildly inconsistent numbers of dead people he factually represented voted in Philadelphia” even though he had “assured the public that he was investigating this claim.” The claim about Frazier is “unequivocally… false”.
Giuliani claimed that “Georgia election officials engaged in the illegal counting of mail-in ballots.” The claim was based on surveillance video of the counting which “were viewed in their entirety by the Secretary’s office, law enforcement, and fact checkers who, according to [Republican] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all concluded that there was no improper activity.” Giuliani made his claims as late as January 3, 2021, but apparently they had already been refuted by officials on Dec 4, 2020.
I did some searching to see if there was any criticism of the judgement against Giuliani. The rightwing blog Legal Insurrection ran a post accusing the court of applying double standards in going after Giuliani and not other lawyers who had grievances filed against them. The article did not take issue with the accusations of falsehood. Jonathan Turley, a witness for the Republicans in all 3 presidential impeachments (Clinton and Trump) also found “troubling aspects of the opinion” suspending Giuliani, but did not dispute the substance of the accusations against Giuliani, saying “in all likelihood, it will result in Giuliani’s eventual disbarment.”
So who is giving this charlatan a platform?
The radio station is WWRC, 570 AM “The Answer”, licensed in Bethesda, Maryland and owned by the Salem Media Group. The Salem Media Group is a conservative Christian for-profit radio syndicate that owns 117 radio stations in 38 markets. Shows on WWRC include Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka, and Sean Hannity.
Giuliani’s interview yesterday was on the Charlie Kirk show. Kirk is president of Turning Point USA, which targets college campuses; he holds an honary doctorate from Liberty University. As might be expected, the host did not exhibit the faintest skepticism about any of Giuliani’s statements but embraced them all with great enthusiasm.
I have already described the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union as a partisan attack designed to foment hatred. Activists like Giuliani and Kirk, radio stations like 570 AM, and networks like Salem are the ecosystem growing an audience for hatred and division.
After January 6, we can’t afford to ignore the movement that is creating a fictional world of conspiracy theories in which liberals are always the bad guys. Where these people will lead the US is still up for grabs. Meeting the challenge to democracy from a big segment of the right has to remain the number one priority of the reality-based community in the United States.