Conservative talk show host Michael Savage suggested that autism is "a fraud and a racket," during his July 16th show. Savage, who is known for his polarizing positions, went on to state:
"I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot.' If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, 'Don't behave like a fool.' The worst thing he said -- 'Don't behave like a fool. Don't be anybody's dummy. Don't sound like an idiot. Don't act like a girl. Don't cry.' That's what I was raised with. That's what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That's why we have the politicians we have."
Here's the audio if you think you can endure it:
Savage's daily show, the Savage Nation, is broadcast on over 350 radio stations and reaches approximately 8.25 million listeners a week. The only more popular radio shows are The Rush Limbaugh Show and the Sean Hannity Show.
Savage has undergone a radical political evolution over the last thirty years. While getting his doctorate in Berkeley in 1978 in nutritional ethnomedicine, he was a close friend of beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. By 1980, he had become disaffected with the San Francisco literary scene and began to articulate an extreme form of conservatism. In 1994, he mailed a demo radio tape about illegal immigrants and epidemics to 250 radio stations in an attempt to become a talk show host. Less than a year later, he was given a weekday show on KFSO in San Francisco.
His slogan at the time was "To the right of Rush and to the left of God."
To contact Savage you can email him at:
michaelsavage@paulreveresociety.com
You can also contact his broadcaster Talk Radio Network at:
Talk Radio Network
P.O. Box 3755
Central Point, Oregon 97502
Phone: 541-664-8827
Fax: 541-664-6250
