H
Harry Hope
Guest
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/102
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
I think what has happened with Jeremiah Wright is that, whatever you
think of him, and however unfair the media has been to him, he has
given the right a way to mobilize resentment against Barack Obama that
they never had before ... [Wright] is presented as the quintessential
angry black man that the right wing loves to incite hatred against. So
Sean Hannity is running with this as far as he can.
-- Journalist Max Blumenthal
BuzzFlash:
Max Blumenthal, you wrote a piece for The Nation, where many of your
articles appear.
This one was about the relationship between Sean Hannity and a man
named Hal Turner.
You point out the hypocrisy of Sean Hannity, who recently seems to be
playing unending loops of Reverend Wright's excerpted statements on
his program.
Why did you write the article, and what did you find out?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, I wrote the article in June 2005, and it's been almost
completely ignored until now.
I've been saying since then that the way to handle Sean Hannity, when
he brings up the issue of race, as he so often does, is to confront
him with his relationship with Hal Turner, who is one of the most
vitriolic and vocal neo-Nazi personalities in the United States.
Finally, Malik Shabazz, of all people, someone who said Jews were
warned in advance of 9/11, confronted Sean Hannity on Hannity and
Colmes about his relationship with Hal Turner.
Hannity, as I predicted, went into contortions explaining this
relationship, and had to be rescued by his stand-in co-host, because
it destroyed his argument on race.
Hal Turner is someone who hailed the fire-bombing of an apartment
containing what he called "savage Negroes."
He's called for the murder of immigrants.
He posts bomb-making tips on his website, and he says, "I'm not a
bomber. I create bombers."
He's been investigated by the FBI in the killing of the family of
Judge Joan Lefkow because he had posted death threats against her and
called for her killing for her prosecution of Matthew Hale, the
neo-Nazi leader.
This is someone who Sean Hannity had allegedly fostered a friendship
with, and whose career Sean Hannity promoted in a way.
Sean Hannity actually allegedly counseled him on personal issues.
So there's a lot Sean Hannity has to explain about his relationship
with Hal Turner.
Hal Turner has been very forthright about it, saying on his personal
website that Sean Hannity and he are both conservative Irish Catholic
guys, and they have a lot of views in common on race.
And he says in private Sean Hannity made no secret that he agreed with
Hal Turner.
BuzzFlash:
How does Hannity respond to this?
It's clearly documented that Hal Turner did come on Hannity's WABC
program on a number of occasions.
And according to Hal Turner, he was given sort of the express line
into the program, so that he could be on the air.
How is Hannity responding to this?
Max Blumenthal:
Hannity would like to ignore it.
I don't think he wants to respond to it.
But he brings on a lot of guests who he thinks he can browbeat on the
issue of race because of their own, controversial and even racist
views.
I think these guests, if they go on, should do what Malik Shabazz did,
and confront Sean Hannity about his relationship with Hal Turner.
Sean Hannity doesn't have a convincing explanation for it, and it
really undermines his whole argument that we should be living in a
race-neutral society, and that he, in fact, is "color-blind."
You know, this isn't a superficial relationship.
Sean Hannity got his radio show when he took over from Bob Grant at
WABC.
Bob Grant was sort of the original Hal Turner.
He was a hysterical racist.
During the nineties, he was sort of a popular figure in New York
broadcasting.
A lot of the backlash, kind of Giuliani-supporters, liked him.
He was kind of below the radar promoting neo-Nazi groups like the
National Alliance.
He said, "I don't have a problem with the National Alliance."
That's the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States.
Grant insisted that Arabs were responsible for the Oklahoma City
bombing, when it actually was a follower of National Alliance founder,
William Pierce, who was responsible.
WABC came under a lot of pressure from the NAACP to dump Grant for his
anti-black statements, like calling Haitian refugees subhuman
infiltrators, and saying that the United States contained millions of
sub-humanoid savages who would feel more at home around the sands of
the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya, and so on and so on.
The protests had a big effect.
Finally, Grant was sort of on the ropes.
So along comes Hal Turner, who was a frequent caller to Bob Grant's
show.
He organized a huge pro-Bob Grant rally in Trenton, New Jersey, which
turned into kind of a confabulation of the neo-Nazi movement.
A lot of people from the white supremacist national movement showed
up, and it kept Bob Grant on the air for two more years.
But, finally, he did himself in and was replaced by Sean Hannity.
Sean Hannity inherited Hal Turner as a frequent caller.
Hannity also credited Bob Grant as his mentor. Hannity says in his
book, Let Freedom Ring, "I'd grown up listening to Bob Grant, one of
the most entertaining hosts I'd ever heard."
Sean Hannity had had his own problems when he was a broadcaster at the
University of Santa Barbara, which is a relatively liberal school in
California.
He claimed that he was ousted by the left-wing management there, but,
in fact, he had repeatedly made vitriolic, homophobic statements on
the air, claiming that homosexuality could be "corrected" and that it
wasn't a biological phenomenon.
So he was ousted.
Then he did the right-wing radio circuit in the South, filling in for
Neal Boortz, this broadcaster who said Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
looks like a ghetto slut.
He's an open racist.
Sean Hannity had kind of always been in the shadows of these racist
figures.
Now finally, he fills in for one of them on WABC, inheriting this big
fan base of angry white males, including Hal Turner, who called
himself Hal from North Bergen when he called in.
What Hannity did was kind of outsource a lot of his racism to Turner.
He'd have Turner call in and bash black people, and Hannity wouldn't
say anything.
And his audience would get a big rise out of it.
For example, in August 1998, Hal Turner reminded Hannity that if it
wasn't for the graciousness of the white man, black people would still
be swinging on trees in Africa.
This is something that you would rebuke if you're Sean Hannity and you
really are against racism.
Instead, Hannity continued taking Hal Turner's calls.
In fact, Sean Hannity promoted Hal Turner's candidacy for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
At the time, Hal Turner was a major Republican activist in New Jersey
who had been the New Jersey coordinator for Pat Buchanan's
presidential campaign.
Sean Hannity had Hal Turner on to promote his candidacy on December
10, 1998, and to attack his presumptive opponent, Robert Menendez, as
a left-wing nut.
At the same time, these guys were allegedly talking off air during
commercial breaks.
Turner posted this on a Google discussion forum.
Hannity called Turner from his job at Fox News to continue a
conversation they'd been having while he was at ABC.
Apparently Sean Hannity had been sent an e-mail by someone who didn't
like Hal Turner, thought he was an extremist, possibly dangerous, and
told him that Hal Turner had a long history of cocaine abuse and had
been involved with cocaine dealers.
Not only that, but that he had sort of had homosexual relationships,
which was, hypocrisy, because Hal Turner was a vitriolic homophobe.
And Hal Turner confessed this on a Google discussion forum.
He said, I've done things I'm not proud of, and had dark times in my
life, and these experiences have shaped the way I live today -- the
"right"way.
He said that Hannity laughed and commented that he knew the feeling.
And he said that these kinds of chats with Hannity were not unusual,
and that they usually happened when they were on commercial breaks.
Afterwards, when Sean Hannity got his big break in television, and got
his show, "Hannity and Colmes," he allegedly brought Hal Turner's
young son onto the set, and they got to hang out backstage.
BuzzFlash:
Now for the record, Max, I'm reading an exchange which was one of the
usual Fox circuses.
Here's this guy, Shabazz, who claims that he's leading a black panther
party that's supporting Obama, but Obama doesn't want the endorsement
and never sought it.
Of course, it becomes a cause celebre on Fox, even though this is all
part of the circus of Fox.
Suddenly Shabazz confronts him on his relationship to Turner.
Hannity says that man was banned from my radio show ten years ago, and
that the accusation of a relationship is an absolute lie.
So Hannity is denying this.
Other than Turner's allegations that they had a relationship, what is
there to base the allegation on?
Do we have tapes of these ABC radio conversations from the late
Nineties?
Max Blumenthal:
I acquired transcripts of them from someone who had monitored these
shows, who was involved in opposing Bob Grant, and then later, in
opposing Sean Hannity -- Bill Jenkins, who is from an anti-racist
group based in New Jersey called One People's Project.
Hal Turner has confirmed for his part that all of these conversations
took place, and Sean Hannity hasn't denied them.
Sean Hannity had banned Hal Turner from the show in 1998, but he also
allegedly took Hal Turner after that onto the set of Fox News, and let
him backstage to hang out at "Hannity and Colmes."
So he's being disingenuous.
Their relationship kind of collapsed after Hal Turner tried to get the
endorsement of the New Jersey state Republican Party in 2000.
Instead, they endorsed his primary challenger, Theresa de Leon, who
was a dark-skinned Latino woman.
Hal Turner basically went bezerk and denounced the Republican Party.
He said, I'd never judged people on their race, not prior to that
point.
To paraphrase his resentment, "And there I was on the receiving end in
America -- the decision that I wasn't good enough because I was a
white male."
So he became the persecuted white male, and swung to the far shores of
the right and embraced the neo-Nazi movement that he'd always quietly
associated with, and that Sean Hannity had known that he quietly
associated with.
But he became a liability to Sean Hannity, and the two kind of split
then, after 2000.
BuzzFlash:
I'd like to go back to Bob Grant for a moment.
Apparently, Bob Grant wasn't kicked off the air for his racial
statements.
He was kicked off the air because of something related to claiming
that AIDS was a fantasy, or some homophobic statement, basically.
It wasn't the race issue.
And he was replaced by Sean Hannity, who is in some ways more
acceptable.
I mean, Bob Grant was an older guy with a toupee.
Sean Hannity comes in -- clean-cut, Catholic school student, smooth
style, unctuous, wrapping himself in the flag.
Not as crude as Bob Grant.
Not as David Duke as Bob Grant in terms of his language, but basically
selling the same package, which is racism.
At the website FAIR, which is a media watchdog group, in the way Media
Matters is, it says that when Bob Grant was the king of WABC, he
referred to black church-goers as "screaming savages."
He advocated eugenics, promoting the Bob Grant "mandatory
sterilization" program.
Then we see Sean Hannity walking in, and subsequently getting on Fox,
and becoming the spokesperson for the new right wing.
His godfather is really Bob Grant, a raving racist.
Sean Hannity is just selling it in a more unctuous, sugar-coated form.
Max Blumenthal:
Right.
I think Sean Hannity learned his lesson at the University of Santa
Barbara.
He also watched closely as Bob Grant amassed this massive base of
angry white males, and was driven off the air by civil rights groups
and had all his advertisements pulled.
Sean Hannity realized that there really is what Bill Clinton called
this thing of darkness, this undercurrent of racism and hatred in
American society, that's waiting to be tapped into.
At the same time, if you want to have a national profile, you have to
tap into it through codes, and you have to do it in a subtle way, not
the way Bob Grant, who was an older man who didn't understand new
media, did it.
If you want to be an open racist, you're going to wind up like Hal
Turner, on short-wave radio, sort of on the fringes.
So Sean Hannity's been really artful about it.
He managed to cast himself as "color-blind" -- which is really a
subtle conservative way of opposing affirmative action and denying it.
He's clever.
And Alan Colmes was his foil, if not his doormat, which gives him a
little bit of credibility, too.
So he has the perfect format for this.
I think what has happened with Jeremiah Wright is that, whatever you
think of him, and however unfair the media has been to him, he has
given the right a way to mobilize resentment against Barack Obama that
they never had before, because he does have a long relationship with
Barack Obama.
He has been extremely important in Barack Obama's ascendancy.
He is presented as the quintessential angry black man that the right
wing loves to incite hatred against.
So Sean Hannity is running with this as far as he can.
He doesn't have to say anything.
All he has to do is put up an image of the angry black man, and say
this contradicts everything Barack Obama has said about unity and
hope.
And his fans go wild.
BuzzFlash:
Sometimes we forget that really Fox built an acceptable packaging upon
a foundation of racist talk-show hosts who were the original
exploiters of the working class displacement, and job anxiety due to
jobs shifting overseas, at a time when there was busing, and
affirmative action was reaching its peak in the Seventies.
In Chicago, there Howard Miller was a host.
There was almost one in every city.
Sometimes we think this is a relatively new phenomenon.
But really what we've got is a smoother-talking, car salesman version
of an old phenomenon that is socially acceptable to television,
because Hannity's image is the clean-cut guy on television, kind of
the guy next door.
He seems very earnest, but he's selling the same package of goods as
Bob Grant was selling.
Would you agree with that?
Max Blumenthal:
I would agree with that.
And also, he's added the toxic combination of illicit sex to what
Grant was selling.
It's really race and illicit sex - sort of like what Eliot Spitzer was
doing, or what's going on in the clubs where your children may be
hanging out in.
You know, Sean Hannity went to the Bunny Ranch, which is this legal
whorehouse in Las Vegas.
It was one of the most lurid segments I've ever seen on Fox News, with
close-up shots of all of these prostitutes' body parts, with cheap
porn music playing, and Sean Hannity kind of making his way through
this whorehouse, being groped on by all these prostitutes.
And he's telling them, I think there's a better life for you.
Maybe you can get out of this job and get a decent profession --
trying to appear as the good Catholic boy.
So I called up Dennis Hof, who is basically the pimp, the head of the
Bunny Ranch.
And I said, "What was Sean Hannity like there?"
He said, "Oh, we have guys like Sean Hannity come through here all the
time. They always try to "save" our girls. And some of our girls have
college educations. They like this job and the independence it gives
them. So we call Sean Hannity Captain Save-A-Hooker."
And I started thinking -- "Captain Save-A-Hooker" -- who does that
remind me of?
And I thought of Travis Bickle, the protagonist of the movie Taxi
Driver, played by Robert DeNiro.
I think Taxi Driver is the perfect reflection of the kind of character
that Sean Hannity is trying to reach out to with his really
sophisticated media techniques -- someone who is really lonely and
dislocated, and surrounded by unfamiliar ethnic groups that he really
resents.
He is desperate for companionship, and at the end of Taxi Driver, what
does Travis Bickle try to do?
He tries to save the hooker -- the perfect portrayal of the right-wing
backlasher.
He has all this resentment, but it's really coming from a position of
weakness.
Fox News perfected this formula which reaches out to this kind of
people.
It's really disturbing, because, when you're coming from a position of
weakness, and you're desperate, and you become consumed with
resentment, you tend to react in really destructive ways.
I think if Barack Obama is elected, they've incited a lot of hatred
that I think is potentially dangerous.
The same thing with Hillary Clinton and what they've done against her.
They've turned on Obama, because he's in the lead.
But they've incited sexist hatred against Hillary for years.
BuzzFlash:
Well, we are talking about the angry white male here, so it would
follow that they would be both sexist and racist.
Max Blumenthal:
Absolutely.
BuzzFlash:
What you mentioned about Sean Hannity is in a way about having it both
ways -- presenting and denouncing lurid sexuality.
Of course, this is Fox.
Max Blumenthal:
There's a video produced by Robert Greenwald that I think everyone
should see.
All he did was collect clips of all the lurid sexuality on Fox News,
and put it together in a video.
That video is banned from the website Digg because it was considered
too pornographic, although all it consisted of was footage from Fox
News.
BuzzFlash:
Stephanie Miller, the progressive talk-show host, does a right-wing
roundup every morning of what they've said.
It's amazing.
And Bill O'Reilly, as you were saying about Sean Hannity, is consumed
with showing sex that he deplores, but lingering on it for great
lengths of time with very vivid photographs.
Max Blumenthal:
Bill O'Reilly is the unhinged version of Sean Hannity.
This is the guy who's a complete wreck psychologically.
BuzzFlash:
For both of them, their primary audience is the white male who feels
somehow the world has collapsed around him.
We've got uppity women like Hillary Clinton, and we've got uppity
blacks like Barack Obama.
Basically, our instincts as humans is that we want the power that we
have.
The white male's power has now been shared with women and minorities,
and the angry white males are resentful and furious about this.
Sean Hannity defines patriotism and being a loyal American as
upholding the white male power structure.
On the other hand, if you're a white male, you kind of like this T and
A stuff.
So Hannity and Bill O'Reilly both indulge in showing pictures that are
quite graphic and sexual, and denouncing them.
But it's pretty clear they're showing them for titillation.
Max Blumenthal:
Well, if you're watching these shows, you're allowed to sort of be
titillated by it, as long as you know that you will never be able to
touch those breasts because you're busy watching Bill O'Reilly and
Sean Hannity.
So why not resent the celebrities and all the "latte liberals" and the
hip-hop stars who get to touch those breasts?
Why not hate them instead, since you can't do this? It's all about
resentment and weakness.
BuzzFlash:
And it's about "them."
The Fox Television Network, in particular, is built around "us against
them," meaning white Americans against the Islamic faith, the
terrorists, the Muslims, the immigrants, the Mexicans, the blacks, the
women who don't fall in line.
Max Blumenthal: Sam Francis,who was sort of the brains behind Pat
Buchanan and behind the white nationalist movement, called it the
sandwich strategy.
He described the working class, the producer class, as being squeezed
between the elitist cosmopolitan one-worlders from above -- the
corporatists, the people that Lou Dobbs denounces -- and sort of the
brown huddled masses who are open to communist opinions from below.
They're being squeezed out of existence by the collusion of the
one-worlder elitists and the dark-skinned masses.
This is the narrative that you hear every day on Fox News and that you
also hear on Lou Dobbs and on right-wing radio.
And it all comes down to white victimhood.
BuzzFlash:
Isn't that ironic, because what we're hearing is that Hillary Clinton
is a victim.
Barack Obama's minister claims that blacks are victims.
White males who follow Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh
or Bob Grant are saying, in essence, we've been victimized by these
people.
We're victims.
Our power has been taken away from us.
Jobs have been taken away from us.
And it's all by "them."
I want to commend your work, though.
You're one of the few people who goes right into the center of these
right-wing conclaves.
You've confronted Ann Coulter at CPAC, and you've gone and done video
work at many of these conferences.
You just call these people up or attend the events and ask the
questions.
And you're to be commended, along with News Hounds, and Robert
Greenwald, for following Fox, which is really a propaganda network.
But isn't this really sort of again socially palatable demagoguery?
Fox News loops the Jeremiah Wright tape, or an Osama bin Laden tape,
all the time.
Is it emotionally playing and toying with the audience?
Max Blumenthal:
They're emotionally conditioning the audience and generating sort of
Pavlovian responses.
Fox News and Sean Hannity's producers are playing to sentiments that
are already there, for whatever reason.
And his audience was a ready-made audience that had been established
since before the days of Bob Grant.
We can never forget that he inherited Bob Grant's audience, so he has
an audience that has strong racial animus.
If you look at how Keith Olbermann has been conditioning his audience
against Hillary Clinton, you know, his audience typically opposes
racism.
So he paints Hillary Clinton as a racist.
Sean Hannity is doing the mirror inverse -- painting Barack Obama as
the racist.
These guys are successful because they know how to exploit the
sentiments and the deep, dark resentments of their viewers.
And there's something about TV that's so public, because you're seeing
everyone's private life exposed.
All these public figures are exposed, and they're torn naked on the
TV.
But at the same time, it's so private because you can watch it in your
home by yourself, or listen to right-wing radio in your car by
yourself on the way to work.
And you can feel however you want, and you can react however you want.
And no one can see.
And this is how you prepare yourself for the day on your way to work,
and get yourself going.
It's how you close out your day -- with Hannity and Colmes before you
go to bed.
It becomes a really sort of sadistic rhythm for a lot of people.
And it inspires their political passions on both sides.
I think it contributes to a really poisonous discourse that we're
having.
Until we see that all of us are victimizing each other, then I don't
think we're going to get past this.
And people like Sean Hannity are going to continue to get rich while
their audiences continue to get poorer and poorer, and get angrier and
angrier.
BuzzFlash:
Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel are an odd couple to be sure, a right winger
and kind of a regular democratic guy who was Mondale's campaign
manager.
They wrote a book together called Common Ground, in which they
referred to Sean Hannity as the leader of the pack among the
bottom-feeders of political polarizers.
They describe polarizers as those who "make money by keeping politics
inflamed in order to sell books, maintain readership, sustain
writings, fill speaking schedules or sell tickets."
Some people forget that people like Hannity and Coulter and others
charge forty-fifty thousand dollars a speech.
They are multi-millionaires at this point.
Sean Hannity makes himself out to be a spokesman for the regular
American, the regular guy.
He's a multi, multi millionaire at this point.
The man's in a private jet whenever he has a speaking engagement.
He won't even go first class.
This is a guy who is virtually in the Donald Trump category in terms
of travel style and lifestyle.
Yet he paints himself as sort of a lunch bucket guy with a sportcoat
or a suit on.
Max Blumenthal:
Right.
BuzzFlash:
Do you think he is the huckster first, or the believer in this first?
Or is he the believer in the demagoguery and the racism and the
sexism, and he's also the huckster, so he's got the perfect
combination to make him a multi-millionaire?
Max Blumenthal:
Definitely Sean Hannity's a huckster.
But as far as his views on social issues, I think we have to judge
people by their behavior.
I don't know of anything he's done that is contradicting his views,
although one caller recently called up and said he was having an
adulterous affair, and Sean Hannity said he knew what it was like
before sort of correcting himself.
BuzzFlash:
He knew what it was like?
Max Blumenthal:
He knew what it was like to have an adulterous affair, before sort of
correcting himself.
Sean Hannity's a performer.
But at the same time, he's definitely an exploiter.
But there's no evidence that he has contradicted any of the views he's
espoused in public in any way that Bill O'Reilly has, or Michael
Savage, whose real name is Michael Weiner.
Weiner's become one of the biggest gay-bashers in the United States,
but he used to be a homosexual in San Francisco who bragged about
having a gay relationship with a black man, and he ran in beatnik
circles before he reinvented himself.
These people are the real frauds, in my opinion, because there's a
massive gulf between their private lives and their public personas,
and they're bamboozling everyone by portraying themselves as culture
warriors.
BuzzFlash:
Hannity was in a film a few years back, which was done by some young
filmmakers in Utah, called This Divided State.
Max Blumenthal:
Yes.
BuzzFlash:
They showed where Michael Moore spoke, and it was a very interesting
film about this community and the school, and the conflict that
developed over having a liberal speaker, who was "balanced out" by a
conservative speaker.
I found Hannity's appearance in the auditorium, packed with probably
five thousand, eight thousand people, quite intriguing.
He picks out someone in the audience.
He said, is there a liberal here?
And someone raised their hand.
It almost seemed like a plant -- I don't know if it was.
But he did this creepy, scary, effective job of using this person as a
foil for everything that's wrong in America.
He was so smooth and oleaginous about it that it was absolutely scary
to me that this guy certainly has the skill.
His skill is almost like that of a magician.
He used almost every logical fallacy one could think of, but in a way
that was convincing.
I found it frightening because he was tremendously effective at what
he did.
There was no logic to it.
In fact, it was all nonsense.
But he knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew the tricks of the trade.
And it was using illogic in a magical sort of way to make him and
those people feel that they were the true patriots, and this liberal
in the audience was a fool, while saying, of course, I respect you,
and I'm sure you're a decent person.
You're just misled -- horribly misled.
Is there any way to defang someone like Sean Hannity?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, the best way is to point to personal hypocrisy, and to the fact
that there is another Sean Hannity.
Since you brought up that movie, I think it's really one of the most
vivid portrayals of Sean Hannity in action, and how he can incite
resentment so masterfully.
It also shows Michael Moore to be a really classy person.
He greets the crowd and he says, I respect you, whether you're
Republican or Democrat, because you're children of God to me.
Sean Hannity comes out attacking Michael Moore in a personal way, and
it shows incredible contrast between these two cultural icons, one of
whom represents the right, and one represents the left.
But the best way to confront Sean Hannity, I think, has been
demonstrated to be to point out his relationship with Hal Turner.
That shows that there's another Sean Hannity, that there's another
alter ego that's wrong, and racist, and crude, and isn't scripted, and
is just like his audience -- hateful, resentful, and coming from a
position of weakness.
BuzzFlash:
He's working with that so-called Freedom Alliance that Oliver North is
affiliated with.
Max Blumenthal:
Right, and I think that is another point that can be used to undermine
Sean Hannity's narrative, because he is taking in a lot of money at
these rallies, and he's giving it to an organization of a convicted
felon.
When you look at the tax filings of Freedom Alliance, much of that
money isn't going to the troops.
It's going to supposed "administrative costs" for Oliver North.
It's paying Oliver North.
It's paying his staff.
And it's going into a black hole.
So Hannity is exploiting the troops, as well, and this is another
point to use against him.
And the organization that I had mentioned before -- One People's
Project -- has actually organized a campaign to boycott Sean Hannity
merchandise because he's using his merchandise to covertly fund Oliver
North.
BuzzFlash:
Max, thank you very much for the insights on Sean Hannity and the
right-wing hate radio, and best of luck to you.
Max Blumenthal:
Thank you.
_________________________________________________
BuzzFlash Interview conducted by Mark Karlin.
Resources
Hannity's Soul-Mate of Hate (Max Blumenthal/The Nation)
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios..
http://mediamatters.org/index
http://www.youtube.com/watch...
Harry
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
I think what has happened with Jeremiah Wright is that, whatever you
think of him, and however unfair the media has been to him, he has
given the right a way to mobilize resentment against Barack Obama that
they never had before ... [Wright] is presented as the quintessential
angry black man that the right wing loves to incite hatred against. So
Sean Hannity is running with this as far as he can.
-- Journalist Max Blumenthal
BuzzFlash:
Max Blumenthal, you wrote a piece for The Nation, where many of your
articles appear.
This one was about the relationship between Sean Hannity and a man
named Hal Turner.
You point out the hypocrisy of Sean Hannity, who recently seems to be
playing unending loops of Reverend Wright's excerpted statements on
his program.
Why did you write the article, and what did you find out?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, I wrote the article in June 2005, and it's been almost
completely ignored until now.
I've been saying since then that the way to handle Sean Hannity, when
he brings up the issue of race, as he so often does, is to confront
him with his relationship with Hal Turner, who is one of the most
vitriolic and vocal neo-Nazi personalities in the United States.
Finally, Malik Shabazz, of all people, someone who said Jews were
warned in advance of 9/11, confronted Sean Hannity on Hannity and
Colmes about his relationship with Hal Turner.
Hannity, as I predicted, went into contortions explaining this
relationship, and had to be rescued by his stand-in co-host, because
it destroyed his argument on race.
Hal Turner is someone who hailed the fire-bombing of an apartment
containing what he called "savage Negroes."
He's called for the murder of immigrants.
He posts bomb-making tips on his website, and he says, "I'm not a
bomber. I create bombers."
He's been investigated by the FBI in the killing of the family of
Judge Joan Lefkow because he had posted death threats against her and
called for her killing for her prosecution of Matthew Hale, the
neo-Nazi leader.
This is someone who Sean Hannity had allegedly fostered a friendship
with, and whose career Sean Hannity promoted in a way.
Sean Hannity actually allegedly counseled him on personal issues.
So there's a lot Sean Hannity has to explain about his relationship
with Hal Turner.
Hal Turner has been very forthright about it, saying on his personal
website that Sean Hannity and he are both conservative Irish Catholic
guys, and they have a lot of views in common on race.
And he says in private Sean Hannity made no secret that he agreed with
Hal Turner.
BuzzFlash:
How does Hannity respond to this?
It's clearly documented that Hal Turner did come on Hannity's WABC
program on a number of occasions.
And according to Hal Turner, he was given sort of the express line
into the program, so that he could be on the air.
How is Hannity responding to this?
Max Blumenthal:
Hannity would like to ignore it.
I don't think he wants to respond to it.
But he brings on a lot of guests who he thinks he can browbeat on the
issue of race because of their own, controversial and even racist
views.
I think these guests, if they go on, should do what Malik Shabazz did,
and confront Sean Hannity about his relationship with Hal Turner.
Sean Hannity doesn't have a convincing explanation for it, and it
really undermines his whole argument that we should be living in a
race-neutral society, and that he, in fact, is "color-blind."
You know, this isn't a superficial relationship.
Sean Hannity got his radio show when he took over from Bob Grant at
WABC.
Bob Grant was sort of the original Hal Turner.
He was a hysterical racist.
During the nineties, he was sort of a popular figure in New York
broadcasting.
A lot of the backlash, kind of Giuliani-supporters, liked him.
He was kind of below the radar promoting neo-Nazi groups like the
National Alliance.
He said, "I don't have a problem with the National Alliance."
That's the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States.
Grant insisted that Arabs were responsible for the Oklahoma City
bombing, when it actually was a follower of National Alliance founder,
William Pierce, who was responsible.
WABC came under a lot of pressure from the NAACP to dump Grant for his
anti-black statements, like calling Haitian refugees subhuman
infiltrators, and saying that the United States contained millions of
sub-humanoid savages who would feel more at home around the sands of
the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya, and so on and so on.
The protests had a big effect.
Finally, Grant was sort of on the ropes.
So along comes Hal Turner, who was a frequent caller to Bob Grant's
show.
He organized a huge pro-Bob Grant rally in Trenton, New Jersey, which
turned into kind of a confabulation of the neo-Nazi movement.
A lot of people from the white supremacist national movement showed
up, and it kept Bob Grant on the air for two more years.
But, finally, he did himself in and was replaced by Sean Hannity.
Sean Hannity inherited Hal Turner as a frequent caller.
Hannity also credited Bob Grant as his mentor. Hannity says in his
book, Let Freedom Ring, "I'd grown up listening to Bob Grant, one of
the most entertaining hosts I'd ever heard."
Sean Hannity had had his own problems when he was a broadcaster at the
University of Santa Barbara, which is a relatively liberal school in
California.
He claimed that he was ousted by the left-wing management there, but,
in fact, he had repeatedly made vitriolic, homophobic statements on
the air, claiming that homosexuality could be "corrected" and that it
wasn't a biological phenomenon.
So he was ousted.
Then he did the right-wing radio circuit in the South, filling in for
Neal Boortz, this broadcaster who said Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
looks like a ghetto slut.
He's an open racist.
Sean Hannity had kind of always been in the shadows of these racist
figures.
Now finally, he fills in for one of them on WABC, inheriting this big
fan base of angry white males, including Hal Turner, who called
himself Hal from North Bergen when he called in.
What Hannity did was kind of outsource a lot of his racism to Turner.
He'd have Turner call in and bash black people, and Hannity wouldn't
say anything.
And his audience would get a big rise out of it.
For example, in August 1998, Hal Turner reminded Hannity that if it
wasn't for the graciousness of the white man, black people would still
be swinging on trees in Africa.
This is something that you would rebuke if you're Sean Hannity and you
really are against racism.
Instead, Hannity continued taking Hal Turner's calls.
In fact, Sean Hannity promoted Hal Turner's candidacy for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
At the time, Hal Turner was a major Republican activist in New Jersey
who had been the New Jersey coordinator for Pat Buchanan's
presidential campaign.
Sean Hannity had Hal Turner on to promote his candidacy on December
10, 1998, and to attack his presumptive opponent, Robert Menendez, as
a left-wing nut.
At the same time, these guys were allegedly talking off air during
commercial breaks.
Turner posted this on a Google discussion forum.
Hannity called Turner from his job at Fox News to continue a
conversation they'd been having while he was at ABC.
Apparently Sean Hannity had been sent an e-mail by someone who didn't
like Hal Turner, thought he was an extremist, possibly dangerous, and
told him that Hal Turner had a long history of cocaine abuse and had
been involved with cocaine dealers.
Not only that, but that he had sort of had homosexual relationships,
which was, hypocrisy, because Hal Turner was a vitriolic homophobe.
And Hal Turner confessed this on a Google discussion forum.
He said, I've done things I'm not proud of, and had dark times in my
life, and these experiences have shaped the way I live today -- the
"right"way.
He said that Hannity laughed and commented that he knew the feeling.
And he said that these kinds of chats with Hannity were not unusual,
and that they usually happened when they were on commercial breaks.
Afterwards, when Sean Hannity got his big break in television, and got
his show, "Hannity and Colmes," he allegedly brought Hal Turner's
young son onto the set, and they got to hang out backstage.
BuzzFlash:
Now for the record, Max, I'm reading an exchange which was one of the
usual Fox circuses.
Here's this guy, Shabazz, who claims that he's leading a black panther
party that's supporting Obama, but Obama doesn't want the endorsement
and never sought it.
Of course, it becomes a cause celebre on Fox, even though this is all
part of the circus of Fox.
Suddenly Shabazz confronts him on his relationship to Turner.
Hannity says that man was banned from my radio show ten years ago, and
that the accusation of a relationship is an absolute lie.
So Hannity is denying this.
Other than Turner's allegations that they had a relationship, what is
there to base the allegation on?
Do we have tapes of these ABC radio conversations from the late
Nineties?
Max Blumenthal:
I acquired transcripts of them from someone who had monitored these
shows, who was involved in opposing Bob Grant, and then later, in
opposing Sean Hannity -- Bill Jenkins, who is from an anti-racist
group based in New Jersey called One People's Project.
Hal Turner has confirmed for his part that all of these conversations
took place, and Sean Hannity hasn't denied them.
Sean Hannity had banned Hal Turner from the show in 1998, but he also
allegedly took Hal Turner after that onto the set of Fox News, and let
him backstage to hang out at "Hannity and Colmes."
So he's being disingenuous.
Their relationship kind of collapsed after Hal Turner tried to get the
endorsement of the New Jersey state Republican Party in 2000.
Instead, they endorsed his primary challenger, Theresa de Leon, who
was a dark-skinned Latino woman.
Hal Turner basically went bezerk and denounced the Republican Party.
He said, I'd never judged people on their race, not prior to that
point.
To paraphrase his resentment, "And there I was on the receiving end in
America -- the decision that I wasn't good enough because I was a
white male."
So he became the persecuted white male, and swung to the far shores of
the right and embraced the neo-Nazi movement that he'd always quietly
associated with, and that Sean Hannity had known that he quietly
associated with.
But he became a liability to Sean Hannity, and the two kind of split
then, after 2000.
BuzzFlash:
I'd like to go back to Bob Grant for a moment.
Apparently, Bob Grant wasn't kicked off the air for his racial
statements.
He was kicked off the air because of something related to claiming
that AIDS was a fantasy, or some homophobic statement, basically.
It wasn't the race issue.
And he was replaced by Sean Hannity, who is in some ways more
acceptable.
I mean, Bob Grant was an older guy with a toupee.
Sean Hannity comes in -- clean-cut, Catholic school student, smooth
style, unctuous, wrapping himself in the flag.
Not as crude as Bob Grant.
Not as David Duke as Bob Grant in terms of his language, but basically
selling the same package, which is racism.
At the website FAIR, which is a media watchdog group, in the way Media
Matters is, it says that when Bob Grant was the king of WABC, he
referred to black church-goers as "screaming savages."
He advocated eugenics, promoting the Bob Grant "mandatory
sterilization" program.
Then we see Sean Hannity walking in, and subsequently getting on Fox,
and becoming the spokesperson for the new right wing.
His godfather is really Bob Grant, a raving racist.
Sean Hannity is just selling it in a more unctuous, sugar-coated form.
Max Blumenthal:
Right.
I think Sean Hannity learned his lesson at the University of Santa
Barbara.
He also watched closely as Bob Grant amassed this massive base of
angry white males, and was driven off the air by civil rights groups
and had all his advertisements pulled.
Sean Hannity realized that there really is what Bill Clinton called
this thing of darkness, this undercurrent of racism and hatred in
American society, that's waiting to be tapped into.
At the same time, if you want to have a national profile, you have to
tap into it through codes, and you have to do it in a subtle way, not
the way Bob Grant, who was an older man who didn't understand new
media, did it.
If you want to be an open racist, you're going to wind up like Hal
Turner, on short-wave radio, sort of on the fringes.
So Sean Hannity's been really artful about it.
He managed to cast himself as "color-blind" -- which is really a
subtle conservative way of opposing affirmative action and denying it.
He's clever.
And Alan Colmes was his foil, if not his doormat, which gives him a
little bit of credibility, too.
So he has the perfect format for this.
I think what has happened with Jeremiah Wright is that, whatever you
think of him, and however unfair the media has been to him, he has
given the right a way to mobilize resentment against Barack Obama that
they never had before, because he does have a long relationship with
Barack Obama.
He has been extremely important in Barack Obama's ascendancy.
He is presented as the quintessential angry black man that the right
wing loves to incite hatred against.
So Sean Hannity is running with this as far as he can.
He doesn't have to say anything.
All he has to do is put up an image of the angry black man, and say
this contradicts everything Barack Obama has said about unity and
hope.
And his fans go wild.
BuzzFlash:
Sometimes we forget that really Fox built an acceptable packaging upon
a foundation of racist talk-show hosts who were the original
exploiters of the working class displacement, and job anxiety due to
jobs shifting overseas, at a time when there was busing, and
affirmative action was reaching its peak in the Seventies.
In Chicago, there Howard Miller was a host.
There was almost one in every city.
Sometimes we think this is a relatively new phenomenon.
But really what we've got is a smoother-talking, car salesman version
of an old phenomenon that is socially acceptable to television,
because Hannity's image is the clean-cut guy on television, kind of
the guy next door.
He seems very earnest, but he's selling the same package of goods as
Bob Grant was selling.
Would you agree with that?
Max Blumenthal:
I would agree with that.
And also, he's added the toxic combination of illicit sex to what
Grant was selling.
It's really race and illicit sex - sort of like what Eliot Spitzer was
doing, or what's going on in the clubs where your children may be
hanging out in.
You know, Sean Hannity went to the Bunny Ranch, which is this legal
whorehouse in Las Vegas.
It was one of the most lurid segments I've ever seen on Fox News, with
close-up shots of all of these prostitutes' body parts, with cheap
porn music playing, and Sean Hannity kind of making his way through
this whorehouse, being groped on by all these prostitutes.
And he's telling them, I think there's a better life for you.
Maybe you can get out of this job and get a decent profession --
trying to appear as the good Catholic boy.
So I called up Dennis Hof, who is basically the pimp, the head of the
Bunny Ranch.
And I said, "What was Sean Hannity like there?"
He said, "Oh, we have guys like Sean Hannity come through here all the
time. They always try to "save" our girls. And some of our girls have
college educations. They like this job and the independence it gives
them. So we call Sean Hannity Captain Save-A-Hooker."
And I started thinking -- "Captain Save-A-Hooker" -- who does that
remind me of?
And I thought of Travis Bickle, the protagonist of the movie Taxi
Driver, played by Robert DeNiro.
I think Taxi Driver is the perfect reflection of the kind of character
that Sean Hannity is trying to reach out to with his really
sophisticated media techniques -- someone who is really lonely and
dislocated, and surrounded by unfamiliar ethnic groups that he really
resents.
He is desperate for companionship, and at the end of Taxi Driver, what
does Travis Bickle try to do?
He tries to save the hooker -- the perfect portrayal of the right-wing
backlasher.
He has all this resentment, but it's really coming from a position of
weakness.
Fox News perfected this formula which reaches out to this kind of
people.
It's really disturbing, because, when you're coming from a position of
weakness, and you're desperate, and you become consumed with
resentment, you tend to react in really destructive ways.
I think if Barack Obama is elected, they've incited a lot of hatred
that I think is potentially dangerous.
The same thing with Hillary Clinton and what they've done against her.
They've turned on Obama, because he's in the lead.
But they've incited sexist hatred against Hillary for years.
BuzzFlash:
Well, we are talking about the angry white male here, so it would
follow that they would be both sexist and racist.
Max Blumenthal:
Absolutely.
BuzzFlash:
What you mentioned about Sean Hannity is in a way about having it both
ways -- presenting and denouncing lurid sexuality.
Of course, this is Fox.
Max Blumenthal:
There's a video produced by Robert Greenwald that I think everyone
should see.
All he did was collect clips of all the lurid sexuality on Fox News,
and put it together in a video.
That video is banned from the website Digg because it was considered
too pornographic, although all it consisted of was footage from Fox
News.
BuzzFlash:
Stephanie Miller, the progressive talk-show host, does a right-wing
roundup every morning of what they've said.
It's amazing.
And Bill O'Reilly, as you were saying about Sean Hannity, is consumed
with showing sex that he deplores, but lingering on it for great
lengths of time with very vivid photographs.
Max Blumenthal:
Bill O'Reilly is the unhinged version of Sean Hannity.
This is the guy who's a complete wreck psychologically.
BuzzFlash:
For both of them, their primary audience is the white male who feels
somehow the world has collapsed around him.
We've got uppity women like Hillary Clinton, and we've got uppity
blacks like Barack Obama.
Basically, our instincts as humans is that we want the power that we
have.
The white male's power has now been shared with women and minorities,
and the angry white males are resentful and furious about this.
Sean Hannity defines patriotism and being a loyal American as
upholding the white male power structure.
On the other hand, if you're a white male, you kind of like this T and
A stuff.
So Hannity and Bill O'Reilly both indulge in showing pictures that are
quite graphic and sexual, and denouncing them.
But it's pretty clear they're showing them for titillation.
Max Blumenthal:
Well, if you're watching these shows, you're allowed to sort of be
titillated by it, as long as you know that you will never be able to
touch those breasts because you're busy watching Bill O'Reilly and
Sean Hannity.
So why not resent the celebrities and all the "latte liberals" and the
hip-hop stars who get to touch those breasts?
Why not hate them instead, since you can't do this? It's all about
resentment and weakness.
BuzzFlash:
And it's about "them."
The Fox Television Network, in particular, is built around "us against
them," meaning white Americans against the Islamic faith, the
terrorists, the Muslims, the immigrants, the Mexicans, the blacks, the
women who don't fall in line.
Max Blumenthal: Sam Francis,who was sort of the brains behind Pat
Buchanan and behind the white nationalist movement, called it the
sandwich strategy.
He described the working class, the producer class, as being squeezed
between the elitist cosmopolitan one-worlders from above -- the
corporatists, the people that Lou Dobbs denounces -- and sort of the
brown huddled masses who are open to communist opinions from below.
They're being squeezed out of existence by the collusion of the
one-worlder elitists and the dark-skinned masses.
This is the narrative that you hear every day on Fox News and that you
also hear on Lou Dobbs and on right-wing radio.
And it all comes down to white victimhood.
BuzzFlash:
Isn't that ironic, because what we're hearing is that Hillary Clinton
is a victim.
Barack Obama's minister claims that blacks are victims.
White males who follow Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh
or Bob Grant are saying, in essence, we've been victimized by these
people.
We're victims.
Our power has been taken away from us.
Jobs have been taken away from us.
And it's all by "them."
I want to commend your work, though.
You're one of the few people who goes right into the center of these
right-wing conclaves.
You've confronted Ann Coulter at CPAC, and you've gone and done video
work at many of these conferences.
You just call these people up or attend the events and ask the
questions.
And you're to be commended, along with News Hounds, and Robert
Greenwald, for following Fox, which is really a propaganda network.
But isn't this really sort of again socially palatable demagoguery?
Fox News loops the Jeremiah Wright tape, or an Osama bin Laden tape,
all the time.
Is it emotionally playing and toying with the audience?
Max Blumenthal:
They're emotionally conditioning the audience and generating sort of
Pavlovian responses.
Fox News and Sean Hannity's producers are playing to sentiments that
are already there, for whatever reason.
And his audience was a ready-made audience that had been established
since before the days of Bob Grant.
We can never forget that he inherited Bob Grant's audience, so he has
an audience that has strong racial animus.
If you look at how Keith Olbermann has been conditioning his audience
against Hillary Clinton, you know, his audience typically opposes
racism.
So he paints Hillary Clinton as a racist.
Sean Hannity is doing the mirror inverse -- painting Barack Obama as
the racist.
These guys are successful because they know how to exploit the
sentiments and the deep, dark resentments of their viewers.
And there's something about TV that's so public, because you're seeing
everyone's private life exposed.
All these public figures are exposed, and they're torn naked on the
TV.
But at the same time, it's so private because you can watch it in your
home by yourself, or listen to right-wing radio in your car by
yourself on the way to work.
And you can feel however you want, and you can react however you want.
And no one can see.
And this is how you prepare yourself for the day on your way to work,
and get yourself going.
It's how you close out your day -- with Hannity and Colmes before you
go to bed.
It becomes a really sort of sadistic rhythm for a lot of people.
And it inspires their political passions on both sides.
I think it contributes to a really poisonous discourse that we're
having.
Until we see that all of us are victimizing each other, then I don't
think we're going to get past this.
And people like Sean Hannity are going to continue to get rich while
their audiences continue to get poorer and poorer, and get angrier and
angrier.
BuzzFlash:
Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel are an odd couple to be sure, a right winger
and kind of a regular democratic guy who was Mondale's campaign
manager.
They wrote a book together called Common Ground, in which they
referred to Sean Hannity as the leader of the pack among the
bottom-feeders of political polarizers.
They describe polarizers as those who "make money by keeping politics
inflamed in order to sell books, maintain readership, sustain
writings, fill speaking schedules or sell tickets."
Some people forget that people like Hannity and Coulter and others
charge forty-fifty thousand dollars a speech.
They are multi-millionaires at this point.
Sean Hannity makes himself out to be a spokesman for the regular
American, the regular guy.
He's a multi, multi millionaire at this point.
The man's in a private jet whenever he has a speaking engagement.
He won't even go first class.
This is a guy who is virtually in the Donald Trump category in terms
of travel style and lifestyle.
Yet he paints himself as sort of a lunch bucket guy with a sportcoat
or a suit on.
Max Blumenthal:
Right.
BuzzFlash:
Do you think he is the huckster first, or the believer in this first?
Or is he the believer in the demagoguery and the racism and the
sexism, and he's also the huckster, so he's got the perfect
combination to make him a multi-millionaire?
Max Blumenthal:
Definitely Sean Hannity's a huckster.
But as far as his views on social issues, I think we have to judge
people by their behavior.
I don't know of anything he's done that is contradicting his views,
although one caller recently called up and said he was having an
adulterous affair, and Sean Hannity said he knew what it was like
before sort of correcting himself.
BuzzFlash:
He knew what it was like?
Max Blumenthal:
He knew what it was like to have an adulterous affair, before sort of
correcting himself.
Sean Hannity's a performer.
But at the same time, he's definitely an exploiter.
But there's no evidence that he has contradicted any of the views he's
espoused in public in any way that Bill O'Reilly has, or Michael
Savage, whose real name is Michael Weiner.
Weiner's become one of the biggest gay-bashers in the United States,
but he used to be a homosexual in San Francisco who bragged about
having a gay relationship with a black man, and he ran in beatnik
circles before he reinvented himself.
These people are the real frauds, in my opinion, because there's a
massive gulf between their private lives and their public personas,
and they're bamboozling everyone by portraying themselves as culture
warriors.
BuzzFlash:
Hannity was in a film a few years back, which was done by some young
filmmakers in Utah, called This Divided State.
Max Blumenthal:
Yes.
BuzzFlash:
They showed where Michael Moore spoke, and it was a very interesting
film about this community and the school, and the conflict that
developed over having a liberal speaker, who was "balanced out" by a
conservative speaker.
I found Hannity's appearance in the auditorium, packed with probably
five thousand, eight thousand people, quite intriguing.
He picks out someone in the audience.
He said, is there a liberal here?
And someone raised their hand.
It almost seemed like a plant -- I don't know if it was.
But he did this creepy, scary, effective job of using this person as a
foil for everything that's wrong in America.
He was so smooth and oleaginous about it that it was absolutely scary
to me that this guy certainly has the skill.
His skill is almost like that of a magician.
He used almost every logical fallacy one could think of, but in a way
that was convincing.
I found it frightening because he was tremendously effective at what
he did.
There was no logic to it.
In fact, it was all nonsense.
But he knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew the tricks of the trade.
And it was using illogic in a magical sort of way to make him and
those people feel that they were the true patriots, and this liberal
in the audience was a fool, while saying, of course, I respect you,
and I'm sure you're a decent person.
You're just misled -- horribly misled.
Is there any way to defang someone like Sean Hannity?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, the best way is to point to personal hypocrisy, and to the fact
that there is another Sean Hannity.
Since you brought up that movie, I think it's really one of the most
vivid portrayals of Sean Hannity in action, and how he can incite
resentment so masterfully.
It also shows Michael Moore to be a really classy person.
He greets the crowd and he says, I respect you, whether you're
Republican or Democrat, because you're children of God to me.
Sean Hannity comes out attacking Michael Moore in a personal way, and
it shows incredible contrast between these two cultural icons, one of
whom represents the right, and one represents the left.
But the best way to confront Sean Hannity, I think, has been
demonstrated to be to point out his relationship with Hal Turner.
That shows that there's another Sean Hannity, that there's another
alter ego that's wrong, and racist, and crude, and isn't scripted, and
is just like his audience -- hateful, resentful, and coming from a
position of weakness.
BuzzFlash:
He's working with that so-called Freedom Alliance that Oliver North is
affiliated with.
Max Blumenthal:
Right, and I think that is another point that can be used to undermine
Sean Hannity's narrative, because he is taking in a lot of money at
these rallies, and he's giving it to an organization of a convicted
felon.
When you look at the tax filings of Freedom Alliance, much of that
money isn't going to the troops.
It's going to supposed "administrative costs" for Oliver North.
It's paying Oliver North.
It's paying his staff.
And it's going into a black hole.
So Hannity is exploiting the troops, as well, and this is another
point to use against him.
And the organization that I had mentioned before -- One People's
Project -- has actually organized a campaign to boycott Sean Hannity
merchandise because he's using his merchandise to covertly fund Oliver
North.
BuzzFlash:
Max, thank you very much for the insights on Sean Hannity and the
right-wing hate radio, and best of luck to you.
Max Blumenthal:
Thank you.
_________________________________________________
BuzzFlash Interview conducted by Mark Karlin.
Resources
Hannity's Soul-Mate of Hate (Max Blumenthal/The Nation)
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios..
http://mediamatters.org/index
http://www.youtube.com/watch...
Harry