And the ignorance tick on the campuses, talk about it. They're just getting away with all this rather.
Than know in fact. Fifty five KRC, it's ato six Here at fifty five kr CV Talk station, it being Thursday. We'll hear from my heart media aviation expert Jay Rattler at the bottom of the hour. As is always the case, a welcome edition to the fifty five KC Morning Show. I'm please to announce David Harsanyi my next guest. You may have read what David has written in the past.
He's a senior writer the Washington Examiner or a nationally syndicated columnist, author of four books, contributed to New York Post. His works appeared in My Favorite Place, The Wall Street Journal, among others including The Washington Post, Reason, USA Today, National Review, numerous other publications, and he's been a feature on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Soon to Be Demised, NPR, ABC, World News Tonight, and
other outlets. Welcome to the fifty five KC Morning Show, David Harsin, you to talk about your book, The Rise of Bluing on how the Democrats became a party of conspiracy theorists. Good to have you on the show today.
David, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Among all the things you talk about. And you know what I've observed over the years and my political philosophy fifty nine years so old, so you know where I am and what I've seen throughout my life. I remember the Soviet Union and all that's happened in between now and that. But the Democrats seem to me to be always accusing the Republicans of engaging in conduct that they are absolutely engaging in right before our very eyes. It's something a deflection. They literally will do things that they
then accuse the Republicans of doing. And I have always just sort of out loud wondered, how is it that they think they can get away with it, or maybe, as this most recent election has shown, maybe they aren't getting away with it and more smarter than they take us to be.
Dad, Well, that goes back, and that's where I start my book. When Killer Clinton showed up on the Today Show and said that there had been a vast right wing conspiracy to undermine her husband, which was not true. Yeah, there's a lot of projection and deflection about that kind of stuff. Take the whole case of the Democratic Party or not the whole case. The half the cases that was that Trump is hitler, but the other half was that democracy was in dire h you know, danger because
Republicans might take over. And then the next sentence they'll say, but yeah, so we need to pack the court, you know, we need to sen of misinformation, we need to get rid of the electoral college. I think maybe, you know, their version of democracy is just something that you know, it's just Democratic party policies, not actually the constitutional order.
So yeah, they do that with a ton of stuff, and they get away with it because a lot of our institutions are run by people who agree with them, media, higher education, and you know, many government agencies and so on.
So they that's how they get away with it.
Well, getting away with it, and what their desire is I guess I want to try to drive to that latter point. They say that, you know, we here on the more conservative side of the ledger I consider myself a little libertarian, so but that we are undermined, we are going to ruin, We're going to undermine the constitution, et cetera. What are they really ultimately looking for? It
seems to me that they want more power. They want to confiscate more of our wealth, they want to dictate the terms of conditions, more of our lives, all in the name of it, mostly predicated these days on the underlying religion that they have been teaching to our young people now for about two decades. Is global warming crap, Like my exhalation while feeding the plants is wonderful, but it's also killing the globe. Literally everything hinges on. Oh my god, we're all going to die airgo. We need
to confiscate and regulate. That's the antithesis of the freedoms and liberties that are founding fathers placed in the Constitution.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean in the book I wrote, it's not just about conspiracy theories. It's about currents of paranoia, paranoid style politics, and global warming. Climate change has been a big part of that. I'm a little younger than you, not much, And you know I remember that, you know, twenty thirty, even almost thirty years ago, there were you know, we were told the world was going to start ending.
That's when it began, and that ten years ago they.
Said it was going to Yeah, so there's this apocalypse always coming. And because there's the apocalypse coming, we have to do a B and C. Now that you know, the Green New Deal, whatever, it's always something new, And all those policies are socialistic, I mean all of them are. Carbon dioxide is everywhere and then everything. If you want to control that, you can basically control the entire economy, and that's what they want to do. So you know, that kind of paranoia drives there.
They try to.
Scaremonger you into doing the things that they want. And it's the same with other stuff. I'll give you the one. What I think is one of the most pernicious strains of paranoia the suppression of the vote, telling a whole oh yeah, you know, telling Black Americans, you know, voting buck, that they are strippted agency, that they cannot vote, that people want to stop them, you know, from from being wealthy, or that people want or that cops are hunting them
in the streets. Now, obviously they're a racist out there, not saying every shooting is not doesn't have very component to it, but many of them don't.
And yet the whole BLM.
Thing happened, and it was based on basically conspiracy theories. I mean, there was no in Michael Brown and others. There was no racial component to it at all, you know, and anyway, so that's one of them as well.
And this, this conspiracy theory, this this anger and the fear mongering, has been enabled by a media that is almost exclusively up until recently exclusively dominated by left leaning commentators and left leaning talking heads. How they ended up taking over all of media is beyond my comprehension, David. But you know what, again, this election I think confirmed and has shown most of these left wing organizations that
people are smarter than that. They've moved away from the msnbcs and the CNNs and even the NBC's ABC's of the world. They've gone out into the world and they start consuming contact like content like the podcast Joe Rogan. He'll have long, engaging conversations with people of all political stripes, doing a more deep dive. People really consume that and are interested in it because it's informative. It offers greater insight in what people really think and believe, and it
provides an opportunity for a back and forth. It reveals again what you've laid out in your book, a lot of nonsense and garbage. We can find that now with the internet in these days.
Yeah, I mean I agree with all that, but we also have to admit that Well, let me just take a step back and say, when I was young, you know, I was growing up in New York and there were many newspapers, and we knew they were all biased in some way. You read it, you know, you knew it was biased, but you could read between the lines and you could figure out what was going on. They didn't
make things up for the most part. You know, you could have the CIA director come on the to a former CIA director would come on the TV and say something. You'd probably believe it because he wouldn't lie to you about it.
But that is no longer the case.
Things have become so politicized in media that they made up the Russia collusion hoax. I mean, either they made it up or they were too stupid not to know it was it was true, and either way they shouldn't be journalists. And then there was no reckoning. They went on and they hid Joe Biden's you know, acuity decline in his physical decline. Then they turned you know on a dime when it was you know, they'd gas light us. And then they turned on the dimes, So they're not
even journalist, they're activists. But here's the thing, if we need there are a lot of boring Like Joe Rogan's conversations are great, but there's a lot of boring journalistic work that needs to be done, and that takes a lot of money, and the big media has that money and they're not doing their job. So if tomorrow Donald Trump actually did something terrible and they told us that about it, no.
One would believe them. No one would believe them.
And we need a media that is and does look at the powerful, and we don't have that. So that's bad for America. It's good that we stopped listening to them because they've been lying to us, but it's bad that they don't do the right thing.
Well what I mean, yeah, absolutely, And here's a question I've been asking out a loud of my listeners because I got a kind of sense that they might start waking up to this echo chamber that they have been stuck in and realize that we are smarter than what they had been feeding us and change their ways. I mean, CNN may be moving a little bit more centrist, offering
more political points of view. I know that there are some newspapers out there who are all in sad, sad, desperate shape to even stay afloat, didn't offer a political support for Kamala Harris took a lot of hits from the left wingers, but sort of maybe engaging in a shift to more responsible journalism. Do you think it's too late for them to do that or can we might
find it? Maybe this might be an opportunity for a renaissance where we can actually start counting on media to provide us with maybe an unbiased assessment of the facts and not offer any commentary at the same time.
I hate that. I can't be very positive that's okay, Yeah, I think it's not so.
The owner of the Washington Post, doesn't you know, endoors and everyone goes bananas there, which just shows you how oft the ranch they are exactly. The Pull paper is already hardcore left. Every single concle conservative writer on their opinion pages is actually just hates Trumps. You don't have to like Donald Trump. I'm critical of Donald Trump. But the thing is you're not representing the readership of your
paper or America. There are half the people in this country who more than half voted for Donald Trump, you know what I mean, and no one knows or understands what that is about. Is this guy Scott Jennings on CNN who does very good job. He's a conservative, but what makes me laugh is that he brings up topics and these other people don't even like It's like they never even heard the arguments. They don't understand what the other side's all about. So, but the problem isn't that
you can just have an owner who changes things. The entire culture going down into journalism school all the way up. I mean, you have assistant editorial people revolting against the New York Times OpEd page editor and who gets fired The oppt page guy gets fired for running something they didn't like. Young people today are coming out of journalism school, not all.
Young people, but especially them.
They cannot abide by a differing opinion because they don't see it as a an opposing opinion. They see it as an immoral evil, you know, thing that needs not to be heard. They don't they don't debate. I mean, I got to say, I've been around a while, and I don't think I had a real policy debate with a liberal or a left winger in a long time, and certainly not in this election. It was all just you are a Russian spook. Yeah, you know, bought by big this and big that. Your NRA owns.
You, you know whatever.
So yeah, well, I mean I've always observed, David, and I know you feel the same way about this. Once, anytime an actual debate, when it gets reduced to someone screaming at you and calling you names, you can chalk one up in the win column, because name calling is
not debate. And them screaming at you know, Donald Trump Nazi, Donald Trump Nazi not only is absolutely ridiculous from a factual standpoint, they're not supporting their cause by offering thoughtful logic and reason in support for what they're advocating.
So cause because yeah, I so, for instance, I don't like libertarian whatever. I'm a free market guy. I don't like terifs, I don't like certain things Donald Trump says. But you just keep calling him Hitler. You force someone like me to get out there and defend it because he's not Hitler. And you know what, Hitler was a really bad guy, and real bad things happen, and historically, in context, it's a terrible thing to the mean history in that way. So you push people actually to defend
Donald Trump, who might not like all the stuff he's doing. Absolutely, and you know when you do that, no one will trust anything you say about the guy, as I mentioned before. So yeah, I mean I think they undermine their case.
Well, and the other one. They keep running around screaming Donald Trump fascist. I keep reminding everyone, why would you please go and look up a dictionary and read what the word fascist means. You know, it is the state control of the means of production. And that is exactly what the left is all about. They are literally about controlling every aspect of business. They are the definition of fascist.
But because Donald Trump is a charismatic leader, oh see, like Barack Obama was there ergo he is hitler, he is a fascist. It's just insane, and they undermine their own credibility. And they also well it's basically are admitting to their own ignorance about factual definitions. But moving over, you mentioned something about the money that is required to run a news outlet, whether it's biased or not, it does take money. I've been saying this for years and years,
aren't they not? Are they not undermining their own business model when they continue to attack free markets and business. Generally speaking, they are advocating for putting themselves out of business, because what advertisers are going to support that kind of thing.
Well, they're you know, you're assigning rationality to people who are not very irrationally. I mean, you know a lot of times politics and partisanship, and this goes across all you.
Know, parties and everything.
You know, you get irrational, you're part of people don't like money. Use this word but a mob in a sense, not a violent mob. But you're just its group think.
And they they just think. Listen.
And the incentive is the incentives of the first Donald Trump presidency. All the incentives for journalists was were to be over the top. You've got ratings if you kept saying that, you know, Trump was hitler. Think about this, what report if you're a reporter is doing good tempered work. You're doing you know, you're digging in, you're you're you know, you're just doing your job. You're not going to get
a million followers. The person who has a million followers is the one who's saying Donald Trump's going to you know, make American to handmaid's tailor or whatever. That's the person who gets all the attention. So all the incentives for these people are to be over the top and to talk that way. So until all of that changes, I'm not sure you know that they can change. And yeah,
I mean maybe they'll be hurt, maybe not. I mean, the New York Times actually this pretty well, but the Washington Post I think lost like seventy million dollars or something last year.
Yes, so they have they have.
These sugar daddies who back them, and that's fine. I mean, listen, had happened, but it's not a good business model, as you point out.
So I don't know. I don't know if they're going to come to their senses. Nym.
Well, David Harsani, author of the book we're talking about today. You can get a copy of it on my blog page for you five KC dot com, The Rise of bluing on. You can read into that the reason for the title How the Democrats became a Party of conspiracy theorist David. It has been a real pleasure having you on. I'm gonna encourage my listeners to get a copy of the book, read it and thoroughly enjoy it, and then let their friends read it. When they're done with it.
As I always encourage Dave, keep up the great work. I know we're going to continue to read what you write and all these media outlets that you write for. It's been an enjoyable experience having you on the morning show, and I know it's going to be a really enjoyable experience reading your book or reading your book, The Rise of bluing On. Have a wonderful day, my friend.
You two. Thanks for having me so much. Thank you.
It's eight twenty coming up on Jay Ry left bottom of the hour for Ihartmedia. Some really fun stuff to talk about with Jay, which is typically the case. Don't go away, He'll be coming up soon. Fifty five KRC dot com kick off Christmas with our iHeartRadio Holiday