Michael Savage

Michael Alan Weiner (commonly known by his pseudonym Michael Savage and hereafter referred to as Savage) is a San Francisco-based right-wing author and radio personality. Savage's daily syndicated radio program Savage Nation appears on approximately 350 stations, reaching an estimated weekly audience of 8 million listeners. Savage Nation is syndicated by Talk Radio Network, which also syndicates right-wing personality Laura Ingraham.

Raised by immigrant parents in New York City, Savage began his career in the 1960s as an herbal medicine researcher. He settled in Northern California in the mid-1970s where he earned his Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California-Berkeley. His metamorphosis into a right-wing radio host was described in a 2003 Salon.com article by journalist David Gilson.

Savage's radio program launched in 1994 and is noted for its particularly extreme rhetoric. In 2003, Savage hosted a short-lived televised version of his show for MSNBC, also called The Savage Nation, before being fired by the cable channel for referring on the air to a caller as a "sodomite" and saying that the caller should "get AIDS and die."

Savage has written three books expressing his hatred for liberals: The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture (WND Books, 2003); The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith, and Military (Nelson Current, 2004); and Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions (Nelson Current, 2005).

Savage on Muslims

"I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity. ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings." [5/14/04]

"[W]hen I see [Muslim extremists] hanging from lampposts, with their guts hanging out, then I'll believe that there's a difference between radical Islam and the rest of Islam over there. But if I don't see that -- if I don't see the massive uprising against them, I can only assume that they're the shock troops of all of Islam in the Middle East." [6/25/04]

Savage on lesbians

"They're jealous that they don't have an AIDS epidemic that they can cash in on -- so they came up with, like, "Oh yeah, we have illnesses too, and we want money." What are the illnesses? "Well, we're fat and we smoke. And we clobber each other, so therefore we need money. Lotsa federal money for the lesbian community." [6/24/04]

Savage on Democrats

"The radical Democratic left is an army of soulless ghouls. Being of the living dead, they live in a world of death and try to impose it on we the living. Witness who led the charge: a radical homosexual, [Rep.] Barney Frank [D-MA]. A radical abortion Mafiosa, [Sen.] Barbara Boxer [D-CA]. What is difficult for we the living to comprehend is the reason they can engage in such anti-life abominations is because they have no souls. They have said that the tears of Terri Schiavo are mechanical. They have said that her smile is reflexive. They can rip an emerging child from the womb, murder it, and call this a compassionate act. Like [Josef] Mengele -- the doctor of death from the Nazi concentration camps -- the radical, soulless Democrats keep referring to "the doctors," as if a medical degree guaranteed humanity. Therefore, choose life. God bless George W. Bush." [3/22/05]

"And we have all of the leaders -- we have Obergrupenführer Clinton; we have Grupenführer Carter; we have Brigadeführer Daschle. ... There are only a few rotten führers on the bottom of the corporals; they're the ones wearing the little funny green costumes down there. But they're all there. That's how I see them." [7/30/04]

Savage on the 2004 presidential election

"I'm voting for Bush, I just made up my mind. There's nothing in this for me. I'm a white male, I'm a white, male, married heterosexual." [7/30/04]

Savage on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY)

"The most Godless woman in the Senate, right out of the Marxist playbook." [6/9/04]