Real-life repercussions come with what the liberal media is doing to society. The so-called progressives not only want to remake this nation, they want to punish people who dare to say no. While they can’t punish each of us one-by-one, their next-best effort is to terrorize us by proxy using their liberal media cohorts and what they do to others.
Talent on Loan from God
I am a media person. I love the industry. I respect its value and inherent ability to do good, so much so that I am invested in it not being destroyed by a legacy media determined to annihilate dissent and conservative points of view.
My understanding of how threatening free speech was to my comrades on the left really was when I became a radio talk show host at KFI-AM in Los Angeles in 1993. Just a few years prior, I was elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Yes, I was a community organizer and pushed that cart for the left.
I was excited by the idea of being able to engage with radio listeners, likely mostly conservatives, because they needed to hear the truth (as the thirty-something Tammy told herself). I thought everyone would be thrilled, but nah. Almost everyone in my life told me not to take the radio job. It would be awful, I was told. Conservative radio talk show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlesinger, were broadcast by that station, and I was told I certainly did not want to be associated with them.
But I wondered why we wouldn’t want to engage with a conservative audience and talk with callers, perhaps influencing them. That was impossible, my fellow liberals said; conservatives were hopeless. And evil. Also Hitler.
Not surprisingly, I took the job anyway, intrigued with the potential and always sure that a good conversation with anyone was worthwhile. Very quickly, I found out why the leftists in my life were so opposed to my joining a conservative radio station as, yes, the token liberal. Speaking with conservatives every day changed me. And meeting Rush Limbaugh changed my life. This is my story about that surprising meeting, first published on social media37 upon news of his death in February 2021. I remain grateful it has been widely shared by so many others:
In the 90s, I was a host on a talk radio station in Los Angeles, the same that aired Rush. I was president of LA NOW, & the liberal weekend host when he visited the station. He was so vilified by my then-crowd, I expected a monster. Instead, I met a remarkable, kind and encouraging man.
He was gregarious and generous when we met. He shook my hand and I was shocked that he was nice and genuinely curious about my radio work and activism. I realized I was going to have a fascinating conversation.
There were many events during this time as a radio talk show host that changed me. It was my first job in the medium starting in 1993. My meeting Rush and our conversations made me realize the left had been lying to me about many things.
Rush was not a monster, he wasn’t evil, he did not mean people harm, he wasn’t a bigot, or any of the other smears lobbed against him by my leftist associates. I liked him very much, and while we disagreed on many things (then) he was nothing as he had been painted.
In my conversations with him we talked about the issues and despite the disagreements, he also took time to give me advice about hosting, style, connecting w the audience, etc. He encouraged me and gave me advice that made a huge difference in my career.
He approached me and everyone else as separate individuals worthy of respect and with a desire to help and inspire. Regardless of the fact that I stood for everything he stood against. It was a generosity of spirit you would never see on the left.
The impact of realizing that I’d been lied to about Rush was significant, but that as a conservative he represented more of what I felt was valuable and important was a revelation. He made it possible to even consider that, which is what made him so dangerous to the left.
During this time as an activist leftist, it was talk radio, the audience, & meeting Rush Limbaugh that was the undeniable trigger making it possible for me to rethink my alliances & eventually leave the leftist establishment. It wasn’t just Rush, but I’d also been lied to about conservatives in general, realizing that by speaking with callers every day who were conservative and responding fairly & with curiosity to my arguments on the air. Rush made that medium, and experience, possible.
My leftist associates begged me not to go into talk radio. I eventually realized they were so opposed because of what I would learn. That leftist effort to deny access to ideas and information continues with even more vitriol & punishment for those who dare to challenge leftist lies.
Rush created the potential of the medium, and set the tone for entertainment, analysis, and education. Honest conversations open to everyone is anathema to the left which is why they’re obsessed with creating fear & the cancel culture.
The ugliness of the left will be seen throughout today and the days to come in response to the death of Rush, an American titan & defender of conservative values. The left is ugly and horrible but it is exactly their nature and should serve to remind you the importance of our fight.
The good news is, Rush not only changed our lives by helping us understand the imperative of freedom & generosity, but he now serves as an even more essential example for all of us.
Rush may be gone, but now it’s up to all of us to continue his commitment to our great nation. Thank you, Sir, for the time you took with an arrogant and smug LA leftist feminist, one of the millions of lives you changed for the better.38
This experience was invaluable for me because it crystallized why there was such an obsession on the left with controlling information and speech, while demonizing conservatives.
Ironically, the bigger the liberal bias, the weaker the whole liberal ecosystem becomes. It can spread bigger untruths, but it has to do so to maintain its hegemony. When the predicted doomsday never arrives, you need complete compliance in pretending the prediction was never made, or be so successful with gaslighting and fearmongering that you can convince people to not believe their lying eyes. Hence, journalists are turning inward and demonizing other media, such as Fox News, and even other journalists within liberal news organizations who remain committed to independent and fair journalism.39
Chapter 9 A Climate of Crisis
The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of catastrophe.
—DANIEL BOTKIN1
Your money or your life!” If cornered by an armed robber making that demand, just about all of us would hand over our cash and credit cards. Death, after all, is the ultimate fear. Self-preservation is a powerful motivator.
The left is exploiting our fear not just of our own deaths, but of a nightmarish and absurd scenario it has concocted forecasting the collapse of civilization and death on an unprecedented scale of most of the people, animals, and plants on Earth due to climate change. Imagine Chicken Little’s cry that “the sky is falling,” but on steroids.
Compounding the problem, many leftist news organizations have proclaimed this climate hysteria to be “settled science” and refuse to even report on alternate views, treating eminent scientists who dissent like ignoramuses who claim the Earth is flat. This illustrates how, for much of America, the belief in impending climate catastrophe is no longer grounded in science but has become a new radical environmentalist theology. Forget about evidence, forget about open debate—just embrace climate alarmism as an immutable article of faith, or risk being denounced as a heretic.
Daniel Botkin, a biologist and ecologist working on the issue of global warming since 1968 and the source of our epigraph for this chapter, knows the importance of following the science, not the political shiny object. Open-minded enough to remain committed to where the evidence takes him, Botkin has moved from a global warming true believer to a climate rationalist.
“I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now,” Botkin wrote in an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate.”2
This suggestion that scientists would propagate what the political elite call “noble lies” isn’t fantastical at all. Noble lies are falsehoods meant to facilitate actions that the political establishment has decided are best for everyone or will provide legitimacy to a particular political narrative or social goal. As we discussed, we were all subjected to the impact of this disgusting, patronizing, and dangerous fear-based strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lying for them is second, if not first, nature. Being able to excuse it as a necessary tool to manage the contemptible hoi polloi is simply too good for them to resist.
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is also the man who hysterically and infamously predicted the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency would condemn the world to a global recession. Instead, before the pandemic, the Trump years lifted 6.6 million people out of poverty, a feat not seen since the 1960s. That’s the largest three-year poverty reduction for the start of any presidency since the initial drop in 1964, when the War on Poverty began.3 So it’s not surprising someone as unhinged as Krugman holds the same point of view of leftist activists advocating for the American people to be lied to about serious issues to allow the government to do whatever it wants.
In 2012, on HBO’s Real Time, hosted by Bill Maher, Krugman famously described how good it would be for authorities to lie to the American people about an invasion from outer space, allowing the government to go on a spending spree. “I actually have a serious proposal, which is that we have to get a bunch of scientists to tell us that we’re facing a threatened alien invasion, and in order to be prepared for that alien invasion, we have to do things like build high-speed rail,” Krugman said. “And then, once we’ve recovered, we can say, ‘Look, there were no aliens.’ But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and that somebody has to be the US government.”4
Krugman’s line about “whatever it takes” could be the motto of leftists. Since the end justifies the means in their minds, they believe it’s acceptable to lie and create as much fear as possible so the citizenry will drink their toxic cocktail of bigger government, higher taxes, and less freedom. After all, lying about an apocalyptic end and the fear it creates is the point.
Climate change is even better than an alien invasion. It’s everywhere. It’s impossible to predict. It could make life worse even if we “win.” The solutions happen to be all the things progressives have been trying to do since before Al Gore was born. Governments, businesses, and individuals have caved to the pressure of alarmists to support massive, harmful, and enormously costly changes to the way we work and live to avoid what we’ve been told will be the greatest catastrophe in global history. Many of these changes will destroy jobs, lower standards of living, increase global hunger, and turn the clock backward on human progress. But how can we resist, if mass extinction is the only alternative?
Like all armed robbers, climate alarmists are eager to take our money. For example, the group GlobalGiving, which wants us to—surprise!—give it money, said in 2021 that the estimated cost of ending global climate change ranges “between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next two decades.”5 Quite a price tag; the upper estimate is about the size of the combined gross national products of the six wealthiest nations in the world: the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.6 But hey, we have to do as the alarmists command, or as they repeatedly assure us, we will all—you guessed it—die.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, the $50 trillion cost of ending climate change came up again when Louisiana senator John Kennedy asked some very simple questions of Biden’s Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk about the progressive goal of the US going “carbon neutral” by 2050: “If we spend $50 trillion to become carbon neutral by 2050 in the United States of America, how much is that going to reduce world temperatures?” Turk seemed stunned that someone wanted to know what the result of all that spending would be. Here’s how the exchange went:7
Turk: So, first of all, it’s a net cost. It’s what, um, benefits we’re having from getting our act together and reducing all of those costs and climate benefits. . . .
Kennedy: Let me ask you. Maybe I’m not being clear. If we spend $50 trillion to become carbon neutral by 2050 in the United States of America, how much is that going to reduce world temperatures?
Turk: This is a global problem, so we need to reduce our emissions and we need to do everything to, uh . . .