All for twelve minutes of hate radio
Cancel Culture and Radio Talking Heads
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other.
- George Orwell, 1984
Cancel culture is alive and doing just fine, thank you.
The MAGA website Wisconsin Right Now* reported last week about a bar manager in Door County who allegedly made a bartender remove a Charlie Kirk sweatshirt and then burned it in front of the patrons and other employees.
I know you’re shocked, shocked, that in small town in Wisconsin an incident of rude behavior happened in a bar. What are the odds?
Of course, had the employee showed up in a Chicago Bears sweatshirt and the bar manager burned it publicly, the bar manager would be celebrated in Wisconsin from Kenosha to Superior. But the bartender decided to be political instead and allegedly got the disproportionately rude reaction from the bar manager.
The bar manager also happens to be a local village trustee, and the pressure is on to get him to resign from his position with the village and the bar. The incident, according to Wisconsin Right Now, is also being investigated by the sheriff’s department. I’m curious: just what is the legal penalty for a controlled fire in a bar?
The incident has been picked up by the local congressman, who is outraged, outraged, by the alleged behavior of this relatively unknown bar manager. “This type of disgusting behavior has no place in Northeast Wisconsin or anywhere else in America,” Rep. Tony Wied wrote on Twitter (X). “The left's unhinged hatred for conservatives has completely broken them.”
Yes, according to Wied, the sweatshirt wasn’t burned by just one anonymous bar manager in a small town in Door County, it was burned by the “left’s unhinged hatred.” We should all be grateful for Wied’s sense of perspective when it comes to being outraged, or he might find something worth being really outraged about, like President Donald Trump’s conduct every single day. But waving the flaming sweatshirt is a nice distraction from the Trump Administration canceling a Navy shipbuilding contract that directly affects his district. One cancel cancels out another cancellation.
(Wied is also a big fan of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth waging an undeclared war on the high seas against alleged drug smugglers, including killing the survivors of the destroyed vessels. So his capacity for actual outrages is rather limited.)
Congressman Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, even decided to join the hate fest even though the alleged incident occurred outside his district. (I’ve blacked out the names of the bar and the bar manager because I won’t contribute to the hate being directed at them.)
That’s right. Tiffany is lecturing on “Wisconsin values.” Wait until he finds out what happened on January 6, 2021, when a bunch of Trump supporters, incited by President Trump, violently stormed the Capitol to try to force the overturning of the 2020 presidential election, effectively disenfranchising Wisconsin voters in the process. Heck, one congressman, someone named Tom Tiffany, even signed onto a Texas lawsuit to overturn Wisconsin’s presidential election results, and then still voted - twice - after the January 6 insurrection to overturn the election. How’s that for Wisconsin values?
But never one to be left out of the hating party is Dan O’Donnell, the afternoon talk show host on WISN-AM in Milwaukee, nearly 200 miles from the alleged incident. But no outrage is too small or too far away if it gives O’Donnell twelve minutes of material to yell into a microphone on Monday.
The bar manager, in a social media post, apologized for the incident and announced he was stepping down as manager due to “threats of violence towards our employees and myself”. O’Donnell took advantage of the post to call this relatively unknown person a “left-wing psychopath” on social media.
When called out for his behavior, O’Donnell retreated to attempting to belittle me (“I’m sorry, who are you again?”) (we’ve actually met and corresponded) and then responding to others that there is no evidence of any threats.
“I'll take it there is no evidence he was threatened other than him saying that he has been threatened. If that is correct and you're too stupid to answer this very simple and obvious point, please respond by quoting your own tweet,” O’Donnell posted on Twitter (X) in response to one anonymous critic.
Of course, it didn’t take me very long to find this on the Wisconsin Right Now Facebook page:
Threats? What threats? Oh, those threats, in between the comments calling the bar manager a homosexual (using cruder language).
Because, as we know, there are never any threats from Trump supporters, especially in Wisconsin. But even if O’Donnell didn’t want to believe the threats are real, should a talk show host on one of the biggest radio stations in the state take the risk of further inflaming the situation by calling this relatively obscure bar manager a “left-wing psychopath?”
As long as it brings in the ratings and fills twelve minutes between commercials with hate, apparently anything O’Donnell is willing to say is okay. Until O’Donnell has his next target for twelve minutes of hate. Be careful out there. It could be you.
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This bar manager is not first to get the attention of Dan O’Donnell and his desire to become nationally famous by getting someone “cancelled.” When local TV news anchor Ted Perry re-posted a bad joke suggesting it would have been better if Sen. Mitch McConnell died rather than Alex Trebek, O’Donnell was out front demanding Perry’s firing even after he apologized.
At the time, I was the editor/publisher of RightWisconsin, and I quickly leapt to Perry’s defense.
Republicans trying to make a big deal out of this should ask themselves, ‘Do we believe in ending ‘cancel culture’ or not?’ Because if conservatives are going to embrace “cancel culture,” anyone who has made a joke about President-Elect Joe Biden’s possible death before the end of his term should delete their Facebook account right now.
Nearly everywhere O’Donnell was quoted, so was I. Perry was eventually reinstated.
Last year, one of O’Donnell’s colleagues was suspended for making fun of Gov. Tim Walz’s child who has learning disabilities. O’Donnell didn’t call for his colleague’s dismissal. Nor has O’Donnell demanded the firing of another WISN host, Vicki McKenna, despite her marching with the Proud Boys and engaging in consporacy theories. Nor has O’Donnell expressed any regret about appearing with Candace Owens in a documentary about Steven Avery even though Owens was already saying nice things about Hitler.
I might have missed it, but I can’t recall O’Donnell ever criticizing Sen. Ron Johnson for any of his wacko conspiracy theories or for his role in the fake elector plot.
Someday O’Donnell is going to say something that arouses a mob to cancel him. It’s inevitable. He better hope that he’s the beneficiary of more Christian charity and forgiveness than he has shown towards his political enemies.
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Jessica McBride of Wisconsin Right Now responded to one of my posts saying she did condemn the violent threats. I haven’t been able to see where, but I might have missed it. McBride also then complained about the threats and mistreatment she received when her personal life when public after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel invaded her privacy. I reminded her that I criticized the coverage at the time, so it was pointless to bring it up to me again.
But you would think that having gone through the public humiliation and exposure McBride went through would’ve made her more sensitive about attacking some nearly anonymous bar manager who never did anything to her. Instead, her experience seems to have hardened her heart. The best we can do is pray for her to find some peace rather than continue to seek out enemies, including some small businessman in a small town who never expected to be the latest target of hatred. By now he’s learned his lesson. Will McBride?
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Can you trust Yelp? The bar where the alleged incident took place is the victim of a series of bad reviews, almost all of them written after the controversy went public. Interestingly, many of the reviews were written by people from out of state. Either there has been a shocking increase in Christmas tourism in Door County or, more likely, the reviews are being written by Trump supporters who have never been there. Since most of the bad reviews are about the alleged incident and have nothing to do with the actual food or service at the restaurant, I’m betting the latter.
The restaurant currently has an average of 3.1 stars on Yelp. On TripAdvisor, the restaurant has an average rating of 4.1 stars.
This was one of the reviews on Yelp dated December 28:
I'm not sure where to start but I will say that seeing a Texas-sized cockroach crawling up the wall *right next* to our table, and about 6 inches from my plate was pretty disturbing. I also was served very undercooked chicken. The owner basically blew it off like no big deal?! And then I heard him address one of his servers so horribly and pretty publicly that I almost stepped in. D O N O T E A T H E R E ! Horrid man, brow-beaten staff, disgustingly filthy and dangerous food.
The review about the “Texas-sized cockroach” was written by “Ashley M.” of Richardson, TX. She should have said it was an experience just like home.
Will Yelp eventually pull down these obviously libelous reviews?
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Finally, the Lovely Doreen and I know a few local business owners, and one of them told me how their business was used as a political backdrop without the owner’s consent. The politician, who holds statewide office, and the political staff seemed to think that of course the business would be honored to disrupt their customers just so the politician could have a photo op.
What happened to this bar manager and his restaurant could have very easily happened to the local business that we know. All it takes is one political side to get unhappy and suddenly the business is struggling. In the case of the business owner that my wife and I know, it could’ve happened without the owner even supporting the politician just because the wrong people got the wrong impression.
Is this really the world in which we want to live?
James Wigderson is a writer living in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He is the former editor/owner of RightWisconsin and a former columnist for The Waukesha Freeman. Once described as “the spokesman for the state’s far right,” by the Capital Times, Wigderson is now a critic of the new Republican Party under President Donald Trump. He also puts ketchup on hot dogs.