Hannity Quotes

People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.

At heart, American conservatives like myself are believers in the Constitution. We believe that the principles embodied in the Constitution are enduring, and that to whatever extent we deviate from them we put our liberties at risk. Our views are consistent because we believe in absolute truths and the essential soundness, even righteousness, of the Founder's vision of government.

Our prevailing philosophy is “you do you”—be who you were made to be, make your own decisions, and live your best life. We just want you to actually do you—not Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity—based on the experiences that you’re having every day and the values that you want to infuse into your life. And we want you to do you with your friends and neighbors and fellow parishioners and colleagues. Political pundits have become fond of discussing partisan politics as “tribal.” We don’t want your tribe to be your political party. We want it to be the communities in which you live, worship, and work—diverse in thought as they may be.

I eat chunky little boys like Sean Hannity for lunch.” True enough, Keller thinks. This woman faced down the goddamn Zetas. “We

Trump even relies on Fox talking heads as trusted advisers. Sean Hannity, the Washington Post reports, “is so close to Trump that some White House aides have dubbed him the unofficial chief of staff.

When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2

The Fox News network, especially opinion broadcaster Sean Hannity, had a Svengali-like influence on Trump that Rosenstein privately labeled “malicious.” Too many right-wing nuts had influence. He also found no comfort or credibility with mainstream media reporters, who he believed were prisoners of their partisan sources.

Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.

The founders wisely worried that future generations might take liberty for granted. Going well beyond that, the left seeks to redefine liberty as selfishness. If you drive a car, or eat meat, or take a long shower,

Breitbart began holding forth at length in various venues about the evils of “cultural Marxism.” He appeared on Fox News and told Sean Hannity and his audience: “For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, America dealt with Communism, which was economic Marxism. And what America was susceptible to during that period of time was cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism, and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

I dealt with people like this for 20 years. They will get up every day. They will kill somebody and go have some chicken at KFC. You will catch them eating chicken and drinking a beer after they just murdered three people. Sean, these people are out there. They're all over the place.

After the summit at Beachy Head, there comes a broad, parklike expanse of land with a selection of paths plunging downhill to the old resort town of Eastbourne. The views over the town’s sweeping seafront with its golden beach and scallops of advancing waves are very fine, too, though marred by a single high-rise apartment house called South Cliff Tower, which stands distractingly in the foreground. It’s a charmless building that should never have been allowed, but there you are. The world is full of shitty things that should never have happened. Look at Sean Hannity.

Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured not the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits - Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump - dutifully filled this role. In their telling, 'Black Lives Matter' was not a call to end state violence against Blacks-and in that way, to end state violence against all-it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.

notes that an American could live in India for forty years and even become an Indian citizen, but he could not “become Indian,” and Indians wouldn’t consider such a person an Indian. Being an Indian, he says, “is entirely a matter of birth and blood. You become Indian by having Indian parents.” And that’s the norm throughout the world, but America is unique because “becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas.”14

Democrats have become the party of socialism, open borders, sanctuary cities, the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), underfunding the military, abortion on demand, infanticide, environmental extremism, gun confiscation, higher taxes, radical identity politics, suppression of free speech and religious expression, and among some Democratic members of Congress, undisguised anti-Semitism. They’re also the party of intolerance, smears, lies, character assassination, besmirchment, and fake Russian dossiers.

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

Hannity & Colmes was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics. An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays. Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.” In his twenties, Hannity drifted. He tried college three times but dropped out. By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working as a house painter. In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management. Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled The Pursuit of Happiness, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.

A person does not have to be born in America to become American. Dinesh D’Souza became a citizen in 1991. Though born in India, he rightly considers himself American. He notes that an American could live in India for forty years and even become an Indian citizen, but he could not “become Indian,” and Indians wouldn’t consider such a person an Indian. Being an Indian, he says, “is entirely a matter of birth and blood. You become Indian by having Indian parents.” And that’s the norm throughout the world, but America is unique because “becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Obama wasn’t a leftist president, and especially don’t listen to the liberal media. They lied to you throughout the Obama years, and they’re still lying today. I wish Americans had heeded our warnings because Obama was serious when he vowed to fundamentally transform the nation. He proved it during his eight long years in office by ramming through Obamacare on a party-line vote, appointing activist judges, issuing unconstitutional executive orders, downsizing our military, traveling the world apologizing for America, engineering long-term economic malaise, waging war on coal and coal miners, haranguing the cops, conferring legal status on more than one million illegal aliens via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and aggravating race relations in this country.

Once unbound from the shackles of truth, Fox’s power came from what it decided to cover—its chosen narratives—and what it decided to ignore. Trump’s immature, erratic, and immoral behavior? His sucking up to Putin? His mingling of presidential business and personal profit? Fox talk shows played dumb and targeted the “deep state” instead. Conservative media types were like spiders, spinning webs and trying to catch prey. They insisted the real story was an Obama-led plot against Trump to stop him from winning the election. One night Hannity irrationally exclaimed, “This makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore!” Another night he upped the hysteria, insisting this scandal “will make Watergate look like a parking ticket.” The following night he screeched, “This is Watergate times a thousand.” He strung viewers along, invoking mysterious “sources” who were “telling us” that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” There was always another “iceberg” ahead, always another twist coming, always another Democrat villain to attack after the commercial break. Hannity and Trump were so aligned that, on one weird night in 2018, Hannity had to deny that he was giving Trump a sneak peek at his monologues after the president tweeted out, twelve minutes before air, “Big show tonight on @SeanHannity! 9: 00 P.M. on @FoxNews.” Political reporters fumbled for their remotes and flipped over to Fox en masse. Hannity raved about the “Mueller crime family” and said the Russia investigation was “corrupt” and promoted a guest who said Mueller “surrounded himself with literally a bunch of legal terrorists,” whatever that meant. Some reporters who did not watch Fox regularly were shocked at how unhinged and extreme the content was. But this was just an ordinary night in the pro-Trump alternative universe. Night after night, Hannity said the Mueller probe needed to be stopped immediately, for the good of the country. Trump’s attempts at obstruction flowed directly from his “Executive Time.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

We are currently living through a version of 28 Days Later. In this analogy, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of their depraved ilk comprise the group that’s spent two decades exalting ignorance, demeaning truth and preaching bigotry, seeding and feeding the rage virus.

Unavoidably, the Rio Grande became ground zero for political posturing, attracting the conservative firebrand Sean Hannity, who taped his Fox News show on the banks of the river. Republicans including Rick Perry, the Texas governor, blamed the “border crisis” on DACA, the program that gives temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But as congressional Democrats and the Obama administration pointed out, the unaccompanied minors did not qualify for DACA. What they did quality for, according to human rights experts, was refugee status—something President Obama was careful not to give them. The politics of immigration was so poisonous even helpless kids couldn’t be seen as kids. When Hillary Clinton, a longtime champion of children’s rights, was asked to weigh in, she said tens of thousands of children and teenagers should be sent back to their home countries. “We have to send a clear message: just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean your child gets to stay,” Clinton said at a CNN-hosted town hall.

The Tea Party Movement was a mass rebellion funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.” Behind

On closer inspection, as the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and the Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson observed in their 2012 book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

For all of Hannity’s flattery, for all of his zealous commitment to the president, Trump, in almost equal proportion, had become disdainful of him. This was partly standard practice. Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion. “Hating himself, he of course comes to hate anyone who seems to love him,” analyzed Bannon.

As a New York Times poll later showed, over three-quarters of its supporters identified as Republican. The bulk of the remainder felt the Republican Party was not Republican enough. Finally, although many of its supporters were likely political neophytes, from the start the ostensibly anti-elitist rebellion was funded, stirred, and organized by experienced political elites. On closer inspection, as the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and the Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson observed in their 2012 book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: Government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible—except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle. This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and “reporters”—call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis. This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists. Through multiple overlapping outlets covering radio, television, and the Internet, they relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultraconservative dogma disguised as news and infotainment—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

When I see Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously. I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.

Liberty is our watchword. Liberty is what makes America unique. The left, by contrast, has all but abandoned liberty in favor of government-forced outcomes, though their agenda guarantees not only less liberty but less prosperity as well.

The [Leftists] reject our nation’s heritage, its values, and its very founding. They want to dilute our sovereignty by subsuming us in a larger international collective and by eradicating our borders. This is the key to understanding the left today. They don’t merely oppose specific American policies, they oppose our long-standing societal values, and they resent the institutions and culture that arose from those values. They have little use for liberty because it limits their ability to impose their political vision. They want to take more of your money and spend it on their priorities. And they want to dictate the most minute details of your life, decreeing what kind of straws you can drink from, what kind of lightbulbs you can use, and what kind of power your home can use.

The claims of the president directly contradicted much of the early public health information. And while information would sometimes find its way onto the networks, more often they would parrot the president’s misinformation—and, because conservative outlets were his primary source of news, he would parrot theirs. That led to a situation where, for instance, the Fox News medical contributor told Hannity viewers on March 6, 2020, that “the virus should be compared to the flu,” calling flu-level illness the “worst-case scenario.” Misinformation spread about masks, lockdowns, and even death totals, which pundits on Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio, and social media falsely argued were much lower than reported. 23

Russia and China are now moving against us openly – in Afghanistan, the Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Even so, our conservative pundits are like blind men. They see the incompetence in Washington, yet they do not see the grand strategy that continues to unfold, step by step. We can still hear Sean Hannity and Mark Levin saying that “Reagan won the Cold War.” This slogan, however, is not an argument. It is not historically correct. It is a lie we learned from the communists. But nobody dares to re-examine it. J.R.Nyquist

A Maddow–O’Donnell handoff is always drearily about anti-Republican solidarity, just as a Tucker Carlson–Sean Hannity baton-pass, while less formalized, never leaves the anti-Democrat theme for a second. We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second. This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society.

that all men are… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That is, they recognized that their rights derived from God, not government, and

Madison wasn’t naive enough to believe that citizens’ rights would be secured by virtue of a grant on a piece of parchment. The delegates would need to design a system that would ensure liberty by leveraging man’s weaknesses instead of ignoring them—pitting men against other men and levels and branches of government against one another. These competing institutions under the control of fallen men would keep each other in check, thereby maximizing individual liberties. “This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public,” Madison explained. “We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.” Had the framers crafted a pure democracy, there would have been no safeguards against encroachments on citizens’ unalienable rights. The rights of the minority would have been subject to abuses at the hands of the majority—a concept Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.”41 The delegates’ challenge was to establish a federal government sufficiently strong to protect its citizens from domestic and foreign threats but without enough power to imperil the people’s liberties. Their solution was to build into the Constitution a scheme of governmental powers and limitations. The government would

limitations on government to guard against its natural tendency to expand at the expense of individual liberties. They reserved for the states those rights not granted to the federal government and distributed federal power among three separate, coequal branches of government.

Obama warned in October 2019. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”31

[the Democratic presidential nominee] will be the most progressive candidate the Democratic Party has ever seen.

Some of Trump’s most powerful confidants, or as I call them, wingmen, made even more than the execs. Hannity cleared $30 million a year from Fox—on top of the money he made for his daily radio show. Bret Baier made $12 million a year. Laura Ingraham, who hasn’t been there as long,

basic truth which would be a major foundation stone of God’s new nation, and which by 1776 would be declared self-evident: that in the eyes of their Creator, all men were of equal value.

forty-one of the 102 passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to establish a colony dedicated to God’s glory and the advancement of the Christian faith.19

Americans were rediscovering God’s plan to join them together by His Spirit in the common cause of advancing His Kingdom.

When a society rejects moral absolutes, it has no basis to protect individual rights against the tyranny of the majority—because without such standards, any action, no matter how good or evil, and any deprivation of our liberties, can be rationalized. As scholar M. Stanton Evans declared, “Moral relativism, however derived, must undermine the very possibility of freedom. No system of political liberty has ever been created from such notions, nor is it theoretically conceivable that one could.”78 All forms of despotism throughout history, Evans observed, have sprung from moral relativism. For freedom to exist there must be basic assumptions about the intrinsic dignity of human beings. It is this Judeo-Christian assumption that underlies the belief that our rights are God-given and must be protected not just against individual dictators and despots but against the tyranny of the majority.

Fox News wasn’t always like this. For twenty years, the network was conservative without being conspiratorial, at least most of the time. It was patriotic without being propagandistic. Now, though, at the time I’m writing this, three-plus years into the Trump presidency, Fox is a chest-thumping house ad for the MAGA agenda. Trump props up the network and the network props up Trump. Anchors and guests who point out Trump’s lies get marginalized. Commentators who cover up his failings and foibles get promoted. While the network gives the Trump administration a huge boost, it also creates tension within the White House. Trump’s obsession with the opinion shows causes chaos when he latches on to impossible and downright illegal policy ideas. Aides begrudge the fact that Hannity often has more power than they do. But they watch too, because they need to know what the boss is hearing and what mood he’s going to be in. They try to get certain officials booked on certain shows with the knowledge that Trump can be easily manipulated by what he sees on the air.

Hannity is just one member of this crazy cable news cabinet. While he deserved credit for getting longtime Fox News commentator John Bolton hired as national security advisor, Carlson got the credit when Bolton eventually fell out of favor with Trump. The sacking of Jeff Sessions? Jeanine Pirro was in Trump’s ear for that one. The resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen? Lou Dobbs was central in it. Pat Cipollone leading the president’s legal team? Laura Ingraham was instrumental. But

Hannity would tell you, off off off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates said. Another colleague concurred: “Hannity has said to me, more than once, ‘he’s crazy.

On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader. Instead, they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.

Colmes was sent off to the Siberia of Fox News Radio in the weeks after Obama’s victory. Hannity was now the solo host. The pretense was going, going, gone: Hannity & Colmes had never been a fair fight, but at least it was a fight. Not anymore. The ascendance of a black president radicalized the network and ushered in an era with fewer left-right debates and more lectures. Hannity the star began to transform Hannity the show into what it is today—a nightly anti–Democratic Party attack ad for people who distrusted the nightly news.

Has the press piled on Donald Trump? Of course it has. But no matter what Sean Hannity tells you, this is not the smoking gun of anti-Republican bias. It is simply an eyewitness account of historic depravity.

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

In fact, I was struck with President Trump’s deliberate use of “we”—since we just had a president who found it hard to get through a sentence without the word “I.” Sean Hannity told me once he counted seventy-nine uses of “I” in one of President Obama’s speeches. But Trump, whom the media often caricatures as focused on himself, opened his first speech as president by saying, “We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.” Notice how he continues with this language: “Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.

the left seeks to redefine liberty as selfishness.

becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas.”14

Consider that for a second. Democrats controlled the executive branch for eight years under Obama and produced nothing but problems, from health-care chaos and unaffordability, to economic stagnation, to foreign policy aimlessness. Under President Trump, prior to the coronavirus panic, the nation was reinvigorated, with an unprecedented economic boom, strong foreign policy leadership, deregulation, exceptional judicial appointments, and energy independence. What, exactly, would the left have us turn around? Do they want a rebirth of malaise, executive overreach, and an America-last foreign policy? Do they want to reimpose the Obamacare mandate? In fact, yes, you can bank on it.

The FBI press office would receive inquiries about fictional scenarios from right-wing news outlets; we would shoot them down; the news outlets were unable to move forward. Then the story would appear on some fringe, alt-right website, without a byline. Once it was picked up by the blogosphere and on social media, an outlet such as Sinclair would have cover to repeat it, which would enable Fox News to get on board, and then Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham would talk about it for weeks. This is a practiced, intentional strategy of news circulation. The stories may be fictional and the information false, but the consequences of the strategy are real.

The inside joke became—echoing Karl Rove as Bush’s brain and later Steve Bannon as Trump’s brain—that now it was Sean Hannity who had become Trump’s resident genius. Trump had ended up with someone even stupider than he was. Yet this was fitting, because Trump deeply resented the implication that he ever needed to depend on someone else’s acumen or intelligence—or, really, that there could possibly be anyone who was smarter than he was. But with Hannity as his sidekick, he could feel quite certain that no one would think he was relying on someone smarter. (This, in fact, was a frequent internal debate: Who was stupider, Trump or Hannity?)

A contemptuous Hannity, with grandiose ambitions of his own, insisted that this scenario was ludicrous. He would top the ticket, with Bannon, “if he’s lucky,” taking the second spot.

estimated Hannity’s net worth at $300 million to $400 million. From his earliest days as a big earner at the network, Hannity had invested in rental properties across the country. “He may own every shitty piece of real estate in America,” said Ailes, fondly. Bannon, never one to miss the obvious joke, wondered, “How many illegals live in Hannity’s rentals?

Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh hearing. “That’s a lot of fucking hobbits,” said Bannon.

numerous high-profile U.S. persons, including former Ambassador Michael McFaul,72 Roger Stone,73 Sean Hannity,74 and Michael Flynn Jr.,75 retweeted or responded to tweets posted to these IRA-controlled accounts. Multiple individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign also promoted IRA tweets

In the Trump circle, Hannity was jocular, funny, and generous—the use of his plane was frequently on offer—and he injected a note of both energy and optimism into the nearly always beleaguered Trump camp. At the same time, virtually everybody, including most of the Trumpiest figures in Trumpworld, thought Hannity was a figure of rare daftness and incoherence. Even Trump would shout at his television, “No follow, Sean, no follow.

Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.

Never ever ever worry. Never. Worry waste of time and energy and will kill u. Whatever happens F IT.