My column today is about WAVES OF RANCOR: TUNING IN THE RADICAL RIGHT by Robert Hilliard and Michael Keith. The book documents how the citizens of this nation are being saturated with the hate and violence pouring out of radio and talk shows. It is well worth your time to read.
For three years I had a show on a Palm Springs radio station that carried G. Gordon Liddy. I listened to him giving instructions on how to shoot human beings … “head shots … head shots … kill the son of a bitches …” I could not believe what I was hearing. Many other staff members of the station were equally embarrassed. Documentation from the book, about Liddy and others, is enough to wake up even the most lethargic American citizen.
From the Bob Grant program: “I’d like to get every environmentalist up against a wall and kill them.”
Out of KVOR in Colorado Springs, Chuck Baker pushes his “violent cleansing of the government.”
On KFYI in Phoenix, Bob Monhan has told his audience that gun control advocate Sarah Brady “should be put down.”
KSFO in San Francisco has hosts that say we should “shoot illegal immigrants as they cross the border.”
‘Pastor’ Pete Peters on WWCR, Worldwide Christian Radio from Nashville, (a l00,000 watt station) tells his listeners that … “the bible says its O.K. to kill homosexuals.”
Today there are more than l000 Christian ‘Patriot’ hate groups on the air with millions of listeners.
And on short-wave are the John Birch society, KKK, and Christian fundamentalist groups flooding the air waves with this kind of violent talk.
Any person with an I.Q. above three can figure out that this kind of violent talk, with God and the bible thrown in, is the fertilizer for the next Oklahoma bombing, abortion clinic murder, Columbine massacre, Jewish center bloodbath, or a Matthew Shepherd being tied to a fence on a freezing night and beaten to death.
Tim McVeigh, who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building has said that he was an avid listener to these hate radio stations .
Maybe we cannot do much about short-wave radio, but we can ask the regular AM/FM stations that broadcast hate radio programs some questions. We can ask them to discuss responsibility, ethics, morality and the role of radio in the most violent industrialized nation in the entire world, this United States of America.