Michael Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is in his eighties now, and his exposure is limited to out-of-print books (he wrote 40 of them) and podcast that can be easily avoided. I used to stumble across his syndicated rant show on the car radio in D.C. now and then, and I was repeatedly horrified, not just that enough Americans would listen to his mad white nationalism to provide him with a living wage, but that there were people who thought like him at all. Savage is a misogynist, mocks autism, wants to eliminate all immigration to keep the U.S. as white as possible, and generally represents the worst pathologies of conservatism, allowing the news media to use him a template to smear anyone to the right of Barack Obama. In the early 2000s his theme was that liberalism was a mental illness; he even published a book about that theory. Like so much of Savage’s bile, that position seemed especially ominous to me, an echo of both fascism and the Soviet treatment of dissidents. I alluded to this obsession of Savage’s in a 2009 essay on the old Ethics Scoreboard, writing,
Zealots on both the Left and the Right, rather than make an honest effort to challenge the views and assumptions of those on the other side, increasingly opt to smear their character with broad and crude generalizations. Democrats and liberals hate America, and want to destroy everything that is good and decent. Republicans and conservatives are fascists and hypocrites. Liberals are evil: they encourage the killing of babies and the destruction of the family. Conservatives are evil: they secretly lead lives of sexual excess and mad fetishes. This mode of public debate could be laughed off as self-evidently ridiculous, except that individuals held in high regard by millions engage in it routinely. Listen to conservatives Michael Savage (whose writings claims liberalism is a mental illness) or Marc Levin on your radio. Or read one of newly-seated Democratic Senator Al Franken’s books, before he realized that accusing all Republicans of being fat, venal and stupid was a serviceable road to power.
That was a correct assessment then and is correct now; the problem is (and calling it just a “problem” is, as Jonathan Turley would say, “problematic”) that the two polar extremes have largely now taken over national discourse. Their excesses are just as repulsive (or should be), but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with influence who can act as a counterweight.
But I digress…the original inspiration for this post is that Michael Savage’s assertion that “liberalism is a mental disease” appears to be coming true. Witness Ryan Polly, whom , a hospital system of over 20,000 employees, MaineHealth, has chosen to place in a position of power in its organization. Polly is a vice president of DEI there” the fact that any organization actually spends money to create a bureaucracy around the latest leftest fad is itself evidence of a metastasizing cultural malady, but Polly is special. According to a Fox News report, he hosted an antiracist prayer service in which white attendees were made to apologize for their internalized racism, because, Polly teaches, all whites (like him) are racists.
In a video Fox News said it reviewed but then was “scrubbed” (by who or what? Helluva job at journalism there, Foxy!), Polly confessed during the prayer services that he maintains “racist narratives and biases,” because of his skin color. Embracing Critical Race Theory and its ilk, Polly says, is essential, for “only then can we become equipped to… challenge the systems that have been designed to give us the advantage and oppress everyone else…As the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at a major health system, I think frequently about my role as a white person first and as a diversity leader second. I think about the responsibility I have to continue the deep internal work of… understanding my own racist narrative and biases. I think about the privilege my whiteness affords me and the choices Whiteness allows me to have… My whiteness keeps me and my family safe.”
Obsessed with skin color much, Ryan? I expect someone who talks like this to start clawaing at his flesh screaming, “GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF ME!“
There was more to the “prayer”: “This evening has been designed with white people in mind but not to take the stage. We have plenty of places to take the stage,” it began. “We [need] to… begin the work to join the fight… We need to ensure we… do the work to challenge our ignorance, our biases and the racist thoughts that we’ve acquired through the life of Whiteness.”
The Life of Whiteness! Sounds like a TV sitcom…no, wait, that was “The Life of Riley.” Never mind….
Polly went on (and on and on): “Let us develop the courage to dive [into] deeply experienced discomfort. Let’s sit with it… knowing that the answers come not from our own conscious thinking because that thinking is shaped by racist constructs. The answers lie deeper,” he said. “Let us leave with the tenacity to become anti-racist and continue the fight, even on the days when we could simply choose not to. Amen.”
Ramalamadingdong. In a sane company, in a sane society, an employee who started babbling like that would be gently led off by nice attendants with butterfly nets. At MaineHealth, they had a chatbot author an official statement stating defending Polly and stating,
“Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion stems from our organizational values, mission and vision. This work strengthens our connections with patients and ultimately helps us to deliver higher-quality care. Consistent with our value of Respect and our role as an institution of learning, we welcome and encourage divergent viewpoints and dialogue among our patients and care team.”
Shabop-shabop! The prayer and video had provoked complaints, for some reason. One source at MaineHealth (who insisted on being anonymous, because he still wants to be paid by a racist brain-washing facility) told Fox News to call on his employer to remove Polly, “and get back to the business of taking care of patients.” “Left unchecked, this dangerous messaging will lead to even more division and distrust,” the brave whistleblower said.
Gee, ya think?
It is increasingly becoming apparent that much as I hate to admit it, Michael Savage was on to something when he diagnosed earlier versions of Ryan Polly as suffering from a genuine mental disorder. Now what can be done about that pandemic?
________________
Pointer: Steve Witherspoon
Source: Fox News
Ethics Alarms 
“Now what can be done about that pandemic?”
Probably not very much. Both political parties have become asylums run by the inmates, where the people least suited to be in charge are in charge, not just in charge, but firmly in charge. I never thought I’d see the day when the Bill of Rights was this close to being thrown in the trash. I’m used to the Second Amendment being under attack. Everyone knows an unarmed population is easier to control, and the Democratic Party keeps hoping that the next mass shooting (unless it’s by an unhinged transgender person) will be the one that pushes the American people over the edge. I’m not used to seeing the constant attacks on the First Amendment, where every statement, every joke, every thought, must be viewed through the DEI lens, and the questions you are supposed to ask before you speak are not, “is it true?” or “is this helpful?” or is it needed?” but “will someone be offended?” I’m not used to seeing freedom of religion under attack, as the de facto state faith of worshipping atypical sexuality seeks to become dominant. I was always used to the press being kind of liberal, but I wasn’t used to the press becoming the propaganda arm of one party. I was also used to running into the very occasional self-hating white person who blamed his own people for all the world’s problems. I was not used to that view becoming dominant.
How do you get out of this? I don’t know. The undoing of mass brainwashing is something I have never encountered, unless we’re prepared to treat our own people like we treated the German people after WW2.
And so whiteys in a panic (lol: Get it off me! Get it off me!) contritely surrender the prayer service’s stage to be led in prayer by pasty Polly praying to which of the governing ideologies exactly (never mind, no distinction necessary as DEI is all-inclusive, a one-size-fits-all road map to a life of Blackness, read it while scraping whiteness off your shoes) and surrender what else while sodomidically inserting an empty (think “pod people” like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) white head along side that of Polly’s through the back door of what at one time was regarded as an Institution of Higher Learning ..
Apology? Savage is and remains Savage to this day (I just checked), and as a hard-nosed R-winger, and old, he could be shocked silly at hearing an apology, injurious to his health .. could be viewed as elder abuse, so No, don’t bother.
So funny these anti-racist blatherers mimic whack job television evangelists. They need people to join their church so everyone will be saved (and they, the evangelists) will be able to make their next payment on their jet.
” I was also used to running into the very occasional self-hating white person who blamed his own people for all the world’s problems. I was not used to that view becoming dominant.”
But it’s not dominant, Steve. We have to be careful not to interpret the loudest voices as being the majority voices. There’s a propaganda campaign out there being waged by academia and the entertainment industry that is being disseminated by the mainstream news media because it has been embraced by the leadership of the party that those entities transparently support. They have the soapbox, so to speak, so it just seems like they are dominant.
But your analogy of Germans is apt to a certain degree. It isn’t the mass brainwashing that’s the problem. Most Germans didn’t believe everything the Nazi government told them. What poisoned German society was the silencing of dissenting opinions. Once decent, responsible Germans with families and careers that could be threatened realized that their lives could be upended by voicing a “defeatist” (that’s what the German propaganda machine called it) opinion, they were intimidated enough to keep quiet.
That’s the danger here. Millions of Americans across the country, even across racial and ethnic lines, see how ridiculous this whole thing is, but, when they see that they could lose a job, be harassed by a mob of figurative brownshirts and become social pariahs at the whim of a Twitter user with enough followers to make a post go viral for all the wrong reasons, they remain silent.
Wait until kids start turning their parents in for so-called Hate Speech.
This may well be it.
this reminds me of a previous blog post.
Would people be so willing to crush dissent if there was a substantial chance of violent retribution?
Maybe not, but you are only allowed to threaten violent retribution if you are an unhinged transgender person. A conservative who threatens violent retribution is a dangerous white supremacist who needs to be locked up forthwith, pending trial, no bail, no credit for time served, no civil liability if he later beats the rap.
It is indeed a useful exercise to step outside one’s own perspective, to examine one’s own viewpoint for biases and hidden assumptions, and to challenge them where they are found. But this is not because of “whiteness”, but because of humanity. There is not one group which, because of race, or sex, or whatever else, can benefit from humility, introspection, and openness, while other groups can safely assume their viewpoint is true, universal, and unbiased. To pretend such a thing is to deny that group part of their humanity.
And which group has demonstrated a willingness to do so and how was that willingness exploiter by others?
Ryan Polly sounds as extreme as Fred Phelps!
For all that people love to talk about racism in the US, the country is actually much more divided along political lines. If you look at marriage demographics, interracial marriage is 50% more common than democrat-republican marriage. According to a number of polls (I know, polls…) this is true across a variety of situations, like a child bringing home a boy/girlfriend, or hiring at the business place. People are much more likely to reject someone from a different party than from a different race.
I read an interesting hypothesis about the sort of people like Ryan Polly. Tribalism is a strong part of human nature, like it or not. People will support those who have similar beliefs and traits, but everyone else is a potential threat. This is just the biological result of thousands of generations of primitive human societies. It doesn’t make sense that white people would denounce other white people in favor of black people, or straight people would approve trans and gay people over other straight people, etc. But it all makes sense through the lens of the actual tribes that exist in America. I’ll just call these the Blue tribe and Red tribe to avoid the confusion of various political labels.
If you are part of the Blue tribe, then the elevation of black, gay, trans etc. people makes perfect sense. They are not some other that is resisting them, but rather allies in the realm of Blue politics. And things like being white or loving America is associated with the Red tribe. Thus you have the Ryan Pollys of the world, where a white man goes on about how the white man is incurably racist. The phenomenon of Blue Americans who espouse hatred of America is along the same vein.
The important take away here is that Polly is not some mentally ill nutjob (well maybe he is, but not per se because of the racist nonsense he spews.) He is just signaling to other members of his tribe what a good boy he is. I think everyone can relate to the desire to socially belong. The problem is Polly presents this as some deep genuflection about the nature of racism and whiteness. There is nothing deep or meaningful in any of his garbage; in fact, it is hard to imagine a more shallow or petty argument. He is just saying “These people are not like me and that is why they are bad.” Ryan Polly is just like any other bigot in human history, he just chose Red and Blue instead of White and Black.