11 December 2009

Noam Chomsky on the dissatisfactions of the Right

"So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on..."

Full interview here, via Reddit.

4 comments:

  1. I often wonder what Noam smokes that might explain his thought processes . . .

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  2. @Deana - I'm not really sure I can answer that, but what I can say is that if Margaret Mead, at her age, smoked grass... she'd have one hell of a trip!

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  3. Why is it that guns are ALWAYS mentioned in these liberal screeds? No matter what the subject is the gratuitous mention of a gun is invariably thrown in. I guess it's part of the dogma just like the religious right always throws in a mention of God.

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  4. Noam Chomsky is a dead head. He smoked away any sense of logic years ago. William F. Buckley was 1000x his intellectual superior.

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