Recently, I blogged about the second anniversary of the death of Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer (The Second Anniversary of the Great One’s Passing). In that blog, I discussed Limbaugh’s contribution to AM radio and my relationship to that media. In the same breath I celebrated Chuck Harder, the left-populist radio host for the pro-labor/anti-globalist For the People. Some may have thought it odd that I linked the two. One reason I did so was explicit: these two figures were part of the AM radio continuum at the time and this blog was in part an autobiographic note. But the other reason had to do with the left-right convergence in the gathering populist-nationalist movement.
Chuck Harder (1942-2018), leftwing populist and pro-labor radio host
I will say a bit more about the movement in a moment. But before I get to that, I asked just now Open AI’s ChatGPT to tell me about Chuck Harder. I didn’t know whether the chatbot would even know who Harder was. I was pleased to discover that Harder made enough of an impact to come to the attention of the chatbot during the period it was scraping data across the Internet. However, I was displeased to see, until challenged, the chatbot portrayed Harder as a conservative, pro-business voice!
Here’s the initial prompt:
Here is the chatbot’s initial response:
Here is my challenge to the initial response:
Here is the chatbot’s mea culpa:
I don’t believe the false portrayal is an accident. For decades, Harder waged a war of resistance against the transnationalist’s agenda of establishing a one-world government and, to wage this war, he gave a platform to economic nationalists. Harder fought for the people the power elite consider the rabble, i.e., the average American worker who was—and is—losing his jobs to foreigners thanks to the globe-trotting of powerful corporations and industries. Harder opposed the outsourcing and exporting of jobs, plant closings and foreign relocations, mass immigration, especially the influx of illegals and porous borders.
Harder was a forerunner of Steve Bannon and the MAGA crowd (see The Economic Nationalism of Steven K. Bannon). To be sure, Bannon is a rightwing populist, but Harder’s anti-globalist politics prefigured the present-day convergence of left and right wing populism in the revival of democratic-republican and liberal values and practices currently challenging corporate state power and its transnationalist ambitions (see Bridging the Left-Right Divide to Confront the New World Order).
We see this convergence in the appearance of Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic Party member, at the Vision 2024 National Conservative Forum (held on March 18, 2023). We see this also in Naomi Wolf’s apology to conservatives for believing the legacy media coverage of the events of January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol after Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired previously unreleased footage.
We can also see the chatbot’s politics at work in the portrayal of Harder as “anti-tax” and a “conspiracy theorist.” On the matter of conspiracy theory, Harder’s opinion regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was cited as the example. In fact, the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy and that the lone gunman theory presented in the Warren Commission Report was implausible. The HSCA was established in 1976 to investigate the assassination of Kennedy (as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.) and released its findings in 1979. In the final report, the HSCA stated that it believed Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, although it was unable to identify the specific individuals or groups involved. The Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy was not supported by the evidence.
Then there is this (spoiler alert: it was the CIA):
freedom and reason 