Book review: Walt savages Savage's "Savage Truth"

Michael Savage (né Michael Alan Weiner) is a famous (it says here) talk/shock jock. He is also a "#1 New York Times bestselling author", according to the dust jacket of Stop the Coming Civil War (Center Street, 2014) which attracted Walt's attention on a recent visit to the Fort Mudge library.

When someone uses the American flag as a backdrop for his publicity pic, you pretty much know what you're going to get. Here's a sample.

Mr. Savage has summarized his political philosophy in three words: borders, language, and culture. He calls himself a conservative nationalist, while critics (and there are many) characterize his views as "fostering extremism or hatred." Since 2009 he has been barred from entering the UK on those grounds.

Critics on the right (and there are many) call him a "cuckservative".

The King of Speak-your-mouth opposes illegal immigration to the United States, supports the English-only movement and argues that liberalism and progressivism are degrading American culture and emasculating American men.

Walt agrees with most of those views. But if you paid 26 bucks for Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt thinks you overpaid by about $25.01. It's a crappy book, a veritable witches' brew of vitriol, hyperbole and right-wing rant, masquerading as a political manifesto.

Mr. Savage argues that "The United States may well be [note the hedge words] in the midst of a military, economic, and cultural collapse that is turning us into a country in danger of catastrophic failure and leading to the nighmarish scenario of a civil war." He presents his talking points as five questions, which you can get from the dust jacket:

• Why have so many of our top military commanders been summarily pushed aside, after years of brave service? 
• Is the falsification of records by VA personnel in order to cover up the horrific neglect of our brave soldiers a sign of what's to come with Obamacare? 
• How is Obama's irresponsible foreign policy not just weakening us in Russia, China, and the Middle East, but actually endangering our security at home as well? 
• What does it mean for our freedom and our way of life that negligent immigration law enforcement allows illegal aliens to cross the southern border into our country with little fear of penalty?

That's it. That's all. The "author" takes those four points and repeats them, rearranging the order, for ten chapters. Eventually -- I chose this word deliberately -- he tells us who the combatants in "the coming civil war" will be. North vs South? Black vs White? Noooo... It will be:

• The haves against the have-nots.
• The illegal aliens against hard-working middle-class families.
• Liberals who hate the Second Amendment versus lawful gun owners, millions of whom refuse to register their guns and ammunition in anti-gun jurisdictions.
• Climate activists whose policies cause forest fires and exacerbate drought against those who understand the effect of human activity on the climate is negligible.
• Anti-Christian communist educators versus god-fearing families.

So there you have it. Walt just saved you 26 bucks. Choose which side you want to be on and act accordingly. But what does "accordingly" mean? In the final chapter of Stop the Coming Civil War, Mr. Savage tells us that to win (not stop) the war "...our resistance must be a peaceful resistance. It must be waged through the ballot box, or else this country will descent into chaos and violence."

The ballot box? Who can Americans vote for who will stand up for hard-working, middle-class, god-fearing etc. families? Believe it or not, Mr. Savage says "Vote Republican"! He calls on Republicans and "Independents generally" to "return to being a nationalist party, a party that understands that such actions as cutting entitlement spending will spur us to take action against the leftist takeover that is occurring before our very  eyes."

The goal is to have Republicans win both houses of Congress in 2014 and elect a Republican president in 2016. That will avert the coming civil war and make America great again. Oh... wait... haven't I heard that phrase somewhere recently?

Walt cannot disagree with Mr. Savage's argument that a Republican president and Congress will be better for America than the incumbent administration, but if that president is a "moderate Republican" or "cuckservative" like Jeb, the difference will hardly be noticeable.

My main quarrel with Stop the Coming Civil War is that it's badly written, a point I'll return to later. It's not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants. And it's hard to take seriously someone who (at page 7) calls "the most vicious of all terrorist groups... the Islamic State of Iran and Syria". Too bad Center Street didn't invest a few dollars in the services of an editor and fact-checker.