Stultum facit fortuna, quem vult perdere. “Whom Fortune wishes to destroy, she first makes mad.”
Fortune is slowly and painfully destroying right-wing (former) radio talk-show host Larry Elder. First, he was dropped by his mainstream publisher, St. Martin’s Press, forcing him to throw in with the lunatic fringe conspiracy nuthouse World Net Daily (official proponents of the “Obama is an illegal alien Kenyan Muslim” slur). Then, last month, Larry was fired by KABC radio for stinking up the coveted drive-time slot. Elder’s show was #32 in the ratings, with an estimated listenership of (it’s almost painful to type) 12,000 people. L.A. County has 10,000,000 people, a large proportion of whom are stuck in their cars during drive-time. And Larry was getting only 12,000 listeners.
He’s now podcasting on his own, and trying (poorly) to use Facebook to raise interest in his podcast.
And he’s going crazy. I predicted this in a previous post from last year. Not only has my prediction come to pass, it is coming to be surpassed. Larry Elder, the “Sage from South Central” who routinely attacks people like Al Sharpton for “race baiting,” posted this photo, not a retweet or a repost but an Elder original, depicting undocumented immigrants as orangutans:
As you can see, Elder’s Facebook friends added their own nuggets of totally not-racist wisdom, like “I just knew Obama would bring his family over from Kenya.”
Yep, no race baiting there. The man who gets all butthurt when his opponents call him a racist has no problem comparing immigrants to apes. He also retweeted an image of Houston Mayor Annise Parker (who is openly gay) as a “gay Nazi.”
Yes, Larry is indeed going mad. Most likely, the crazy was always inside of him, but when he was on an actual network and had an actual publisher, he (or his bosses) could restrain or at least temper it. But now that Larry is in podcast-land, the real, unedited him is emerging.
It’s an ugly sight. Expect it to get uglier.