Help! Talk Radio Ate the Presidency!

In November 2016, my Facebook feed was filled with friends’ dreaded anticipation of Thanksgiving with extended family, and particularly with that uncle: the unapologetic Trump supporter full of crude, bigoted bluster. So many white families seemed to have an uncle like this — even if in liberal families everyone had written him off as a mean, eccentric old coot — that political pundits felt the need to weigh in on dinner etiquette.

At the time, I noticed the pattern, but I assumed that the similarities among uncles were organic, coming out of similar subject positions as older white men angry to see their privilege eroding. But after reading historian Brian Rosenwald’s Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States, I suddenly understood those obnoxious uncles, and so much more about the past few years’ politics, in a new way…

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