“Radio was Hannity’s tutor,” where “hyperpoliticized” figures influenced his style 

NY Times Magazine: Hannity cited two former New York talk radio hosts and a novelist as key influences on him. From when he was young, Fox host Sean Hannity would “tune into local right-wing talkers like Bob Grant and Barry Farber, progenitors of the hyperpoliticized style that Rush Limbaugh would perfect,” according to a much-criticized New York Times Magazine profile. The article also mentioned that Hannity read novels by Taylor Caldwell, “a conservative writer and member of the John Birch Society,” including Bright Flows the River, which he “cites as a favorite.” From the November 28 profile:

Radio was Hannity’s tutor: From morning till night, he’d tune into local right-wing talkers like Bob Grant and Barry Farber, progenitors of the hyperpoliticized style that Rush Limbaugh would perfect.

Grant is today best remembered for his declaration, in 1991, that the United States was being taken over by “millions of subhumanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari.” He was adept at toggling between genteel patter, with guests he agreed with, and explosions of indignant fury, at those he didn’t. In one memorable exchange from the late 1980s, he demanded to know the whereabouts of a caller who called him a “bigot,” roaring: “I want to meet you to kill you, you skunk! Get off my phone!”

[...]

Between jobs, he read the novels of Taylor Caldwell, a conservative writer and member of the John Birch Society. Man “was made for rude combat” and “crude ferocity,” Caldwell writes in the novel “Bright Flows the River,” which Hannity, a martial-arts practitioner, cites as a favorite. [The New York Times Magazine, 11/28/17; The New York Times Magazine, 12/15/17]

Hannity’s early influencers called black people “savages,” insisted that Obama is secretly Muslim, and saw communists everywhere

Bob Grant

Bob Grant was a radio talk show host whose “combative style became the template for broadcasters such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.” According to a Washington Post obituary, Bob Grant (born Robert Ciro Gigante) was a “longtime conservative radio host” whose career began “in the 1940s at WBBM in Chicago. He moved on to radio and television jobs in Los Angeles and was named afternoon drive-time host at [New York City’s] WABC in 1984.” WABC terminated Grant in 1996 after he made offensive remarks about Ron Brown, then-U.S. Commerce secretary. Grant then “moved to WOR in New York before returning to WABC in 2006,” and permanently retired in the summer of 2013. He died in December 2013 at the age of 84. [The Washington Post, 1/3/14; The Daily Caller, 1/2/14]

Grant’s birtherism led him to effectively endorse Donald Trump for president in the 2012 election cycle. In a 2011 blog post shared on the conservative website Free Republic, Grant attacked then-President Barack Obama as a “surreptitious, cunning opportunist who will not even produce his birth certificate.” Grant insisted it was “not racist” to demand Obama’s birth certificate, and said that “there is only one potential candidate who has demonstrated he is not afraid” to suggest Obama was ineligible for the presidency. Grant concluded, “If you people are looking for someone different; if you are looking for the right man at the right time, then you don’t have to look any further than the man who stands beside me in a photo on the wall at the Reo Diner Restaurant . . . Donald Trump!” [Free Republic, 4/8/11]

Grant used his radio program to promote white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. Grant “repeatedly permitted and even assisted hate groups” in promoting their agenda and spreading their hatred to audiences on his WABC show, according to progressive media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The groups that Grant expressly allowed his callers to promote included one connected to the “SS Action Group,” the National Alliance (a neo-Nazi organization Grant declared he did not “have any problem with” and whose then-leader inspired the Oklahoma City bombing and praised the bomber as “a man of principle,”) and the David Duke-founded National Association for the Advancement of White People. On several occasions Grant assisted callers in promoting these groups, helping them read contact addresses, encouraging them to repeat the information, and on one occasion, crediting his promotion of a book by white supremacist Jared Taylor to have “boosted sales.” From the June 1995 FAIR article:

At least twice, a caller has given out contact information for the National Alliance, describing the group on one occasion (3/10/93) as an “organization fighting for” the “white race,” and on another (3/24/93) recommending it to “white Americans who are concerned about the future of their race and nation.”

[...]

Callers to the number given out on Grant’s show were sent the National Alliance’s official program, an unabashedly fascist document that calls for “a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values” and a “racial cleansing of the land.”

When a recent caller to Grant’s program (3/27/95) recommended the National Alliance (as a group “for support of European-American males”), Grant declared twice: “I don’t have any problem with the National Alliance!”

The talkshow host has also allowed the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP)–the white supremacist group founded by David Duke–to recruit members through his program. One caller (8/12/93), after praising the group, asked Grant: “With your permission, I’d like to give out the address and the phone number.”

“Go right ahead,” Grant replied–and even helped the caller out when he stumbled over the address. On an earlier broadcast (7/5/93), after a caller gave out the NAAWP phone number, Grant encouraged him to “say it again.” (Two years later, Grant agreed with a far-right caller who dismissed the NAAWP as a “crackpot” group.)

Another caller (4/26/93) praised the newsletter American Renaissance, which is described by its editor, Samuel Jared Taylor, as “racialist” and “from the point of view of the European majority.” The caller read a quote from the newsletter–“When neighborhoods lose their white majorities, schools decay, crime increases, taxes rise, welfare proliferates, and what was once an outpost of civilization subsides into barbarism”–and then asked Grant: “Can I give out the address?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Grant replied. After the address was read, Grant boasted that his touting of Taylor’s book, Paved With Good Intentions, had boosted sales.

Other callers have asked for and been given permission to give out addresses where people can order “pro-white music.” One caller (4/25/94) gave out an address for an outfit called Angel’s Action Gear–an address shared by a neo-Nazi organization called the SS Action Group, as well as by the NAAWP. [FAIR, June 1995, The New York Times, 6/9/01, Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 1/2/18]

Grant “frequently” hosted David Duke around the time he was an active Klansman. “The white supremacist David Duke had been a frequent guest on [Grant’s] show in the 1970s,” according to a New York Times obituary of the radio host. Duke founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK) in 1973, incorporated the group in 1975, and left it in 1980, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Duke infamously called on his fellow Klansmen to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms," thereby, as the SPLC put it, bringing “the art of media manipulation to the Klan” in order to “captivate the public through political discourse,” instead of lynchings and other hate crimes. Prior to founding the KKKK, when Duke was a student at Louisiana State University, he led at least one neo-Nazi rally dressed as Adolf Hitler, “singing Nazi songs and doing the salute,” according to an eyewitness account published in Newsweek. [The New York Times, 1/2/14; Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 1/2/18; Newsweek, 11/17/91]

Grant “routinely” referred to black people as “savages.” Grant was known for his racist broadsides against black people, with comments such as not being able to “take these screaming savages, whether they're in the African Methodist Church, the A.M.E. church, or whether they're in the streets, burning, robbing, looting." Grant also said of African-Americans, “We have in our nation not hundreds of thousands but millions of sub-humanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya–people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized.” According to FAIR, Grant “routinely” called black people “savages.” In 1993, Grant claimed that white people were “a little higher up on the evolutionary scale” than black “savages,” and once dismissed an African-American caller by saying, “His kind…weren’t intended to speak a civilized language.” [The New York Times, 4/18/96; New York Daily News, 1/17/97; FAIR, January 1995, June 1996, 1/3/14]

Grant attacked prominent African-Americans with ethnic slurs. Grant belittled civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. by referring to him as “that scumbag Marty” and once remarked that the government had to recognize “Martin King Day” or “there would be trouble from the savages.” According to The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch, Grant also called New York City’s first (and only) African-American mayor, David Dinkins, “the men’s room attendant,” and tried to assure Gourevitch that “there was nothing racial or ethnic in his choice of slur.” [UPI, 4/17/16, FAIR, 1/3/14; The New Yorker, 1/2/15; The New York Times, 1/2/14]

Grant called Haitians “subhuman scum” who procreate “like maggots on a hot day” and suggested they should be drowned. In 1991, following a coup in Haiti, the U.S. government temporarily housed thousands of Haitians in refugee camps at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Grant’s reaction to what he called “subhuman scum” being helped by the American government as they sought safety from a dictator was to say that “the ideal situation would be -- if they drowned them, then they would stop coming." Grant’s anti-Haitian bigotry continued for years: In 1992, according to FAIR, he characterized Haitian refugees as “‘swine’” and ‘sub-human infiltrators’ who multiply ‘like maggots on a hot day,’ and, in 1994, he complained that AIDS “is not prevalent enough” in Haiti, because “there’s too many of them” still alive. [Organization of American States, 9/30/97; The New York Times, 1/2/14, 4/18/96; FAIR, January 1995] 

Grant angrily dismissed callers who challenged his racist caricatures of black people. A New York Times podcast promoting the magazine’s Hannity profile included a brief clip from one of Grant’s radio shows, in which Grant defended himself for calling black people “savages” by asserting that “if they act like savages, I call them savages.” When a caller said, “Do you know that Europeans were barbarians,” Grant quickly hung up on her saying, “So long, babe. You scum.” From the December 2 New York Times podcast:

BOB GRANT (HOST): But right now it’s Diane, who is our first caller.

CALLER: Yes, oh, OK. I’m calling, I just turned on the radio, and I must say I'm kind of outraged here, Bob, to hear you referring to American blacks as “savages.” How dare you?

GRANT: I dare very easily because if they act like savages, I call them savages.

CALLER: You can’t say “they.” Do you know that Europeans were barbarians who --

GRANT: All right, here we go. So long, babe. You scum. [The New York Times, ‘The New Washington’: Sean Hannity, 12/2/17]

Grant was fired from radio shows for being racist and misogynist, and hoping for the death of the first African-American secretary of Commerce. In 1979, Grant said that a woman at another radio station was promoted because “she passed the gynecological and pigmentation test,” a remark for which his then-employer WOR radio fired him. During his career at WOR, Grant also faced a suspension for referring to black boxers as “baboons.” In 1996, Grant was terminated from WABC radio for his comments about Ron Brown, who served as secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton. Upon hearing that Brown, who was African-American, was in a plane crash, Grant commented, “My hunch is that he is the one survivor. I just have that hunch. Maybe it’s because, at heart, I’m a pessimist.” (Grant later said he “shouldn't have made it sound as if I wished Ron Brown were dead. That wasn't my intent.”) Grant’s 1996 termination followed a campaign led by FAIR, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and others who wanted to hold Grant accountable for his racially offensive vitriol; modern neo-Nazis remember this campaign and its outcome as “When the Jews Fired Bob Grant.” [Newsmax, 1/2/14; FAIR, June 1996; The New York Times, 4/18/96; New York Daily News, 1/12/97; National Vanguard, 10/16/16] 

Grant repeatedly wished death on NBA legend Magic Johnson for having HIV. Grant directed a considerable amount of vitriol toward former Los Angeles Lakers player Earvin “Magic” Johnson who went public with his HIV diagnosis in 1991 at a time when, according to PBS, “HIV/AIDS was still largely seen as a disease that affected gay men and drug addicts.” Grant remarked that Johnson could “make a contribution” to society by developing AIDS, complained that “unfortunately, all he has is the H.I.V. virus and that could last for a long time,” once said he prayed for Johnson’s death, and asked, “Why is it taking so long for the HIV to go into full-blown AIDS?” [PBS, 11/7/11; The New York Times, 4/18/96; FAIR, January 1995]

Grant proposed that gay rights activists and environmentalists be “mow[ed] down” or put up “against a wall” to be shot. In 1994, Grant commented on a gay rights parade, saying, “Ideally, it would have been nice to have a few phalanxes of policemen with machine guns and mow them down.” Grant’s calls for the violent death of people who didn’t fit in his worldview also targeted environmentalists, about whom he said: “I’d like to get every environmentalist, put them up against a wall and shoot them.” [FAIR, January 1995; The New York Times, 4/18/96]

Grant appeared on Hannity & Colmes after retiring from talk radio and “happily” “plead[ed] guilty” to paving the way for commentators like Hannity. On the January 16, 2006, edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Hannity told Grant that he “really cut the path for all of us that follow after you,” to which Grant replied “happily, I plead guilty to that.” Grant also defended his calling black people “savages” by falsely claiming he was only referring to rioters in Los Angeles, CA. Hannity & Colmes gave Grant a platform again in 2008 after a lifetime achievement award he had won was rescinded, when he complained to co-host Alan Colmes that “one lone kook with an email” got his award rescinded, and asserted that his opinions on race were “valid” and that “I don’t have to apologize for anything.” [Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, 1/16/06; 2/17/08]

Taylor Caldwell

Taylor Caldwell was a bestselling author “known for her family sagas and historical fiction.” Taylor Caldwell was a “highly popular American novelist known for her family sagas and historical fiction,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Caldwell’s literary career lasted from 1938 to 1981, and several of her works were adapted into television shows or movies. According to The Washington Post, Caldwell was raised in a “violently conservative British home” before moving to the United States in 1970, and she was “active in conservative political causes and organizations” throughout her adult life. Caldwell died in 1985 at the age of 84. [Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 12/19/17; The Washington Post, 9/2/85]

Caldwell’s “eccentric” and “frequent correspondence” to the FBI office frequently denounced people as communists or communist sympathizers. In the late 1950s, Caldwell wrote to the FBI office in Buffalo, NY, at least three times warning that three separate people were communists or communist sympathizers, including Herbert Harris, a future Democratic member of Congress. In 1956, Caldwell received a letter criticizing her attacks on the free speech rights of communists and civil rights activists; Taylor responded by forwarding the letter to the FBI. On September 4, 1958, the bureau wrote that they were “aware of numerous prior correspondence from this office involving Mrs. Janet M. Reback,” Caldwell’s married name, and that she was “eccentric and given to frequent correspondence with the Buffalo office.” The FBI repeatedly determined that “no further action” was required on Caldwell’s tips. [FBI, accessed 1/2/18, accessed 1/2/18]

Caldwell was a conspiracy theorist about Kennedy's assassination before he was killed. Shortly after President John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Caldwell “said she sent a first warning to President Kennedy [in] late August that the ‘liberal Communists would attempt to take his life,’” and later “sent Mr. Kennedy another, and rather desperate, warning” after “reading some articles by some prominent leftists,” according to a December 1963 Detroit Free Press article. Internal FBI documents reveal the bureau did not take her seriously “because of Miss Caldwell’s known unreliability” and “penchant for intermingling fact and fiction indiscriminately,” and demonstrate that the FBI previously encountered an article she wrote about “the internal security of the United States” that was actually “completely fictional.” [FBI, accessed 1/2/18, accessed 1/2/18]

Caldwell pushed conspiracy theories that “liberals/prominent leftists” were going to kill President Lyndon Johnson. After the Kennedy assassination, Caldwell wrote, “Listening now to the whispers of the ‘liberals,’ I am convinced that our new president is in mortal danger at this time.” According to a Washington Capital News Service blurb in FBI documents, Taylor did not identify the source of the “whispers,” nor did she identify the “prominent leftists” she alluded to in an earlier warning about Kennedy’s assassination. [FBI, accessed 1/2/18]

Caldwell claimed a vague note from “her Negro friend in New York City” was a warning about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Internal FBI documentation shows that Caldwell once contacted the bureau about “her Negro friend from New York City” who had written to her that there was “a terrible thing about to happen.” After Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY) was assassinated in June 1968, Caldwell “speculate[d]” that her friend’s warning was about the assassination. According to FBI documents regarding Caldwell’s claim, “She felt that Senator Kennedy’s death was more than just a mere coincidence … and that there must definitely be some connection between the information she had previously received” and the assassination. [FBI, accessed 1/2/18]

Caldwell was on the board of governors of the Federation of Conservatives, a far-right political group opposed to civil rights. The Federation of Conservatives, founded circa 1960, declared itself in opposition to “all government officials and candidates who are socialists, ‘liberals,’ pinkos, welfare statists, and one-worlders,” as well as “federal interference in schools, housing, voting, and other matters constitutionally belonging to the states,” in clear opposition of the civil rights movement. Caldwell was the very first name on a 1960 list of the group’s “board of governors.” [FBI, accessed 1/2/18] 

Caldwell was a member of anti-Semitic pressure group Liberty Lobby, and served on its “distinguished board of policy.” According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Liberty Lobby was “an important source of anti-Semitic propaganda” in the second half of the 20th century. The ADL wrote that Liberty Lobby’s founder, Willis Carto, was “one of the most virulent anti-Semitic propagandists in the United States” before his death in 2015. CIA documentation shows that Caldwell was included on “a partial list” of Liberty Lobby’s “distinguished board of policy,” which at the time also included Thomas Pickens Brady, a segregationist Mississippi judge whom Time magazine called “the philosopher of Mississippi's racist white Citizens' Councils,” and Richard Cotten, a man memorialized by neo-Nazis as “a pioneer pro-White broadcaster.” [ADL, 10/30/15; CIA, accessed 1/2/18; Time, 10/22/65; National Vanguard, 10/26/10]

Liberty Lobby opposed “so-called ‘civil rights’ laws” and supported a 1952 immigration law vetoed for its “absurdity” and “cruelty” but cited in Trump's Muslim ban. According to an FBI photocopy of a Liberty Lobby promotional pamphlet, the organization's policy positions included opposition to “so-called ‘civil rights’ laws,” “world government,” and “federal aid to Education,” while supporting “states’ rights,” withdrawal from the United Nations, a “pro-American foreign policy,” and the “Realignment of Parties.” Liberty Lobby’s list of political positions also included supporting the “McCarran-Walter Immigration Act,” officially named the “Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.” The law was vetoed by President Harry Truman for its “absurdity” and the “cruelty” it inflicted on immigrants, but Congress overrode his veto. The law, which was extensively modified in 1965 and remains partially in effect, was prominently cited in Trump’s first and second iterations of the Muslim ban.

[FBI, accessed 1/2/18; University of California, Santa Barbara, accessed 1/2/18; U.S. Congress, accessed 1/2/18; The White House, 1/27/17, 3/6/17] 

Caldwell supported a white politician’s attempt to unilaterally declare an “all-white breakaway regime” in present-day Zimbabwe. According to the Washington Post obituary for Caldwell, she “served as president of the National Coordinating Committee for Friends of Rhodesian Independence, a group supporting the all-white, breakaway regime of Ian Smith.” Smith was the prime minister of Rhodesia, then a British colony in present-day Zimbabwe, in 1964. According to The New York Times, in response to continent-wide calls for liberation, Smith “announced in emotionless tones that Rhodesia had declared independence from Britain rather than bow to pressure from London for concessions toward the black majority.” Smith’s racist insurrection led to “severe repression and a seven-year guerrilla war, costing about 30,000 lives, most of them black fighters and civilians.” [The Washington Post, 9/2/85; The New York Times, 11/21/07]

Caldwell is considered one of the “significant figures” in the history of the John Birch Society, a far-right conspiracy theorist group. According to the SPLC, the John Birch Society (JBS) is an “arch-conservative” group that pushes conspiracy theories of “secret socialist plots and accusations of treason at the highest levels of American government.” JBS suggested that President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, claimed communism is “flourishing under different names, like the Muslim Brotherhood,” and recently stated that the shooter in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, CT, was a victim of “systematic abuse” in the form of affirmative action, “massive Third World immigration,” and, more generally, the “comprehensive” “assault on white men.” (The author of the Sandy Hook claim “swears he’s being facetious,” according to the SPLC.) JBS considers Caldwell a “significant figure” in its history. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 3/1/13; The John Birch Society, accessed 1/2/18] 

Barry Farber

Barry Farber is “one of America’s talk-radio pioneers.” According to his biography in the National Radio Hall of Fame, Farber began his radio career “in the ’50s when he joined WRCA/New York City” as a producer. Farber’s first radio show began broadcasting in 1960, and “two years later he began a 15-year association with WOR/New York as an evening and overnight host.” After a brief hiatus to unsuccessfully run for mayor of New York City in 1977, Farber returned to radio and still hosts The Barry Farber Show regularly. He also has a regular column at WorldNetDaily (WND), a website that regularly pushes conspiracy theories. [National Radio Hall of Fame, accessed 1/2/18, WND, accessed 1/2/18; Media Matters, 4/7/11, 4/12/11, 4/23/14, 1/24/17, 12/26/17]

Farber endorsed Trump in the 2016 election by comparing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to the evil of Nazi Germany. Farber lamented that Trump’s 2005 comments about sexually assaulting women were making voters “dismally – perhaps catastrophically – under-view the danger confronting America” in Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and others “who have led America to the edge of engulfment by evil.” Farber wrote that although there were “moral reasons” to reject Trump, “in 1941 we allied with the murderer of hundreds of millions of people in order to destroy the even greater evil of Nazi Germany. If we hadn’t 'endorsed' and supplied and supported Josef Stalin’s criminal Soviet Union, most of you would be speaking German today – and I’d be a lampshade!” [WND, 10/11/16]

Farber compared sexual harassment allegations against Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore to communists executing people “not out of bourgeois justice, but out of revolutionary conviction.” In a November 14, 2017, column, Farber likened “the bipartisan frenzy to dump” then-Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore to “sadistic murderer Ché Guevara,” boasting that Cuba “execute[s], not out of bourgeois justice, but out of revolutionary conviction!” Farber complained that “those who claim to despise rushing to judgment are now racing one another to judgment,” and that Moore (who Farber said was only “a little – just a little – too far right for” him) should be believed because “he simply denies his guilt. And there’s no way to prove him wrong.” [WND, 11/14/17]

Farber pushed a conspiracy theory that a white supremacist Charlottesville rally and its counterprotests were “part of the slow-motion coup d’état” targeting Trump. Farber’s August 15, 2017, WND column claimed that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, to protest the planned removal of a statue of a confederate general and subsequent counterprotests were “a stage show” and “part of the slow-motion coup d’état aimed at ridding the White House of President Donald Trump.” Farber wrote that “by Saturday, Aug. 12, one thing was becoming clear. Too much good news was coming out of the Trump White House,” and “Trump’s supporters were beginning to feel the heady warmth of total vindication.” Farber speculated that Trump’s “enemies” pounced on the president’s first statement after the violence in Charlottesville as “insufficiently forceful and condemnatory” with the ultimate goal of getting Trump to “denounce all haters by name to the point where any and all political advantage you enjoy as a conservative must be officially surrendered to the liberals!” [WND, 8/15/17] 

Farber defended Confederate iconography as “reverence without disloyalty” while calling the South a racial “success story.” In an August 22, 2017, column, Farber conceded that there are “those who brandish the Confederate flag with the same diseased passion as some Germans revere the swastika,” but claimed they’re outnumbered by Southerners like him who also wave the Confederate flag, but don’t have “a racist corpuscle in my entire bloodstream.” Nonetheless, Grant said that just like there is “beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine and sex without love,” “Southerners like me practice reverence” for the South “without disloyalty” for the United States. Grant insisted that “we Southerners don’t brag enough about the speed of our turn-around,” claimed Union soldiers would “have scant respect for those leaders” who want to remove statues of Confederate leaders, and closed the column by calling the South a racial “success story.” [WND, 8/22/17]

Farber wrote that he was a “birther” because he doubted details in Obama’s biography and had never seen him speak Indonesian even though he lived there. Farber wrote in 2010 that Obama’s life story was filled with “blizzards of reasons to question his autobiographical accuracy,” and resembled “the Sherlock Holmes tale of ‘The Dog That Did Not Bark.’” Farber, who has a lifelong “infatuation with linguistics and languages,” was “excruciatingly curious” to learn if Obama spoke “the language of the nation with the largest Muslim population in the world,” and wondered that if Obama did speak Indonesian, why did his campaign not exploit his bilingualism, and if he did not speak the language, “What gives?” [WND, 3/10/10, Language Club of Westchester, accessed 1/2/18]

Farber said Islam “remain[s] spiritually flat-tired and broken-axled in the 12th century,” and accused Obama of betraying “Muslims who don’t want to kill.” In 2009, Farber wrote that “Christianity and Judaism have outgrown their earlier grotesqueries,” but “Islam has simply refused to budge. They remain spiritually flat-tired and broken-axled in the 12th century.” Farber claimed that Obama offered “nothing but betrayal” to the “millions of Muslims who don’t want to kill anybody” but fear terrorist retribution. [WND, 11/11/09] 

Farber hoped that an erosion of civil liberties could be used to force Muslims who oppose America’s wars out of the U.S. military. Farber wrote in 2009 that law enforcement agencies have “ways of knowing who the potential ‘Hasans’ are,” a reference to former Army psychiatrist and Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hasan, because “like all animals, they offer tracks, mating calls and many other clues.” Farber hoped that “maybe one of those clues can be revealed,” explaining that “if an innocent American traveler can be jerked out of an airport security line and jailed for making a dumb joke about a bomb in his luggage, then perhaps we’ll assume the right to remove a Muslim” from the military for opposing America’s wars. [WND, 11/11/09]

Farber compared LGBTQ rights activism to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. In 2012, Farber wrote that “enemy overreaching has done as much or more to rescue America than our own overcoming,” attributing the Allied victory in World War II in part to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Noting that German and Japanese “overreach” contributed to the fall of Berlin and “two mushroom clouds” in Japan, Farber said, “It will be fascinating to see if the gay community can discipline its present overreaching and, if not, how much the gay agenda will suffer.” Farber complained that Americans who “maintain that marriage is between a man and a woman” were being called homophobic by “the gay high-command,” and said that we should “end the thunderous emphasis on sexual-preference bigotry,” and simply teach children that all bigotry is wrong. Farber called ending that emphasis “flattening out the bulge,” a reference to the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge in which Allied forces defeated a surprise German offensive (the “bulge”) on the Western front. [WND, 5/22/12; U.S. Army, accessed 1/2/18]

Farber speculated Andrew Breitbart’s death could be a conspiracy and feared the aftermath could be like “that period between the first and second planes hitting the WTC.” After the 2012 death of Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News Network, Farber wrote a column insisting that he was not a conspiracy theorist because “a conspiracy theorist says, ‘Of course, Andrew Breitbart was assassinated,’” whereas Farber, a “broad-minded person,” was just saying, “There’s something not quite right here!” Farber cited Dr. Michael Baden’s suspicions about the “terse announcement” of Breitbart’s death and toxicology reports then-underway, along with other questions, to ponder “one of three possibilities” explaining his death: His death was natural “despite the breathtaking circumstances,” “somebody wanted Breitbart silenced,” or his death was “the start of a campaign to silence the right with terror.” Regarding the final possibility, Farber wondered if America was “in that period between the first and second planes hitting the WTC?” [WND, 3/6/12]