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Part 1 of 2

On his website A Son of the New American Revolution, Larry C. Johnson, former CIA analyst, lamented what he called the “Missouri Listener”: those Midwesterners in the hinterland who are woefully unaware of current events, content with mainstream news and analysis, and simply accept the mainstream media’s latest interpretations of events in Ukraine, the Middle East, China, or wherever.

Talk radio is a strong example. Its heyday was in the 1980s and ’90’s. In 1991, driving from Boston to St. Louis, I flipped on the car radio as I crossed from West Virginia on I-70 on the way to Cambridge, Ohio, and a strident, militant voice came over the radio firing attacks on liberals in a continual rat-tat-tat. “When they listen to me,” the man intoned, “they demand equal time. My reply is: I am equal time!”

Such was my introduction to Rush Limbaugh, a fellow Missourian, and I remained a listener until his death in 2021.

Rush revolutionized talk radio and spawned a score of imitators. One of his more strident St. Louis shadows was Jamie Allman. Unlike Rush, Jamie had gone to journalism school, and had been a reporter for KDNL-TV in St. Louis, racking up 13 Emmy awards for investigative reporting. He was also a spokesman for the St. Louis Archdiocese, and isn’t shy about rapping about his Catholicism. Jamie has a full smile matched by wide eyes and a raspy voice that can switch from that of a cozy pal to harsh, in-your-face accusations. Now bald, a photo of him from when he was younger shows a brash, cocky, long-haired kid —  the kind who’d like to show up the teacher in class or snap a towel at you in the shower.

Although officially a libertarian, Jamie is an unabashed conservative, and on his TV show, The Allman Report, he reveled in exposing liberal corruption. A major battle Jamie took on was the case against Eric Greitens. Greitens, a Jewish former Navy SEAL and Afghanistan war vet, ran for Governor of Missouri in the 2016 election, promising, as Trump had, to drain the swamp. Greitens looked people in the eye and stood straight in a sleek body, in sharp comparison to the usual flabby legislators. He was nevertheless kept at arm’s length by the GOP in Missouri, yet still won the election.

Governor Greitens attacked the Low Income Housing Bill, a plan where tax credits could be sold to other people, saying that it was in effect a bribery and money-laundering scheme. Both political parties were poised to make a mint out of property credits to come. Greitens put a stop to it. Allman reported that this had freaked out the deep state. The GOP in particular, which was looking for such credits to fill their coffers, decided behind closed doors that the voters had made a mistake and that it was time for a change.

Greitens also made serious enemies when he signed a bill making Missouri a right-to-work state. Missouri is a red state, but St. Louis and Kansas City are union cities — and unions will go to the barricades to crush right-to-work laws. In St. Louis, no politician dares take on the unions. Greiten’s bill was later repealed in a state-wide referendum. Greitens, for all his cheerful talk of reform and buzz about him being a future presidential candidate, could already see fins circling his boat.

Allegations were then made about Greiten having an affair with his (female) hairdresser, who accused him of threatening her, tying her hands, and photographing her. It was a sordid and wacky case which I won’t go into, but it provided his enemies with a great base to remove him. Likewise, accusations that he had mishandled campaign funds began to grow. A local newspaper whose editor had held a long grudge against Greitens kept up continual coverage of these scandals until The St. Louis Post-Dispatch got wind of it, and the story about Greitens’s hairdresser became a major story there. Kim Gardner, the St. Louis City Circuit Attorney — black, radical, and backed by Soros money — pressed charges against Greitens, who was soon overwhelmed by endless criminal charges and a media feeding frenzy. When his photo was plastered across the Post’s front page, the joy in the liberal community was ecstatic. St. Louis and Missouri then had its own Nixon and Watergate. We got him!

The GOP did little if anything to defend Greitens. When he finally resigned in 2018 after having served only 18 months in office, Lieutenant Governor Parson, a presumably stalwart ex-sheriff and law-and-order advocate, took the oath of office, and the Low Income Housing Bill was immediately reintroduced in the Missouri legislature.

Allman never ceased taking Greitens’s side. Allman loves vets, and although like many talkies he had never served in the military, is proud that his son Ethan served in Iraq. Allman made no friends in the GOP establishment. He was bothered by the way in which Kim Gardner had gone full speed ahead with an ultra-liberal policy of relaxing crime control measures in St. Louis. The GOP in Jefferson City merely shrugged her off as a local problem. Her administration became a mess, letting many criminals loose and her staff undergoing a 100% turnover.

Donald Tisaby, the private investigator Gardner hired to investigate Greitens, was himself charged with six counts of felony perjury in his rather lackadaisical investigation. As it was, Gardner’s run as Circuit Attorney ended when one of her past cases caught up with her: a felon who had violated house arrest orders 51 times had his armed robbery case dropped because Gardner’s office was not ready to take his case to trial. Later, in a reckless driving case, he severed the legs of a girl who was visiting the city. After that, Gardner immediately resigned.

Greiten’s crisis seemed to be a dress rehearsal for Trump’s legal battle, including the relentless prosecution by local black civic officials, a murky sex scandal, a never-ending media circus, and the GOP simply closing the door on any support. Greitens, who in 2016 was listed as an up-and-coming political force as a brash new politician who would drain the swamp, was himself swamped into retiring from public life.

Of course, unlike the many accusations against Greiten, Trump has remained clean, for all the good it has done him. Unlike the Missouri Listener’s fear of a “tainted” politician, Trump’s followers almost revel in the charges heaped on him.

I’ve described this case at length to indicate Allman’s credentials. He is strident and can out-Limbaugh Limbaugh when it comes to raging against the Left, and has fought the good fight.

Another example was the 2008 presidential campaign. The Missouri GOP caucus (Missouri doesn’t have a primary) went all out to support Mitt Romney. Ron Paul supporters were shouted down and denied entrance, and when they complained about being kept out, the GOP heads called the police to have them arrested. Allman, hackles up, denounced the GOP leadership — who ignored any complaints, and dutifully carried water for Romney.

The good fight became a dogfight during the Trump years. Allman was considered a loudmouth, but cared less about insults from the Left (would we)? But he had a downfall of sorts in 2018, when, on April 10, there was a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. David Hogg, a student at Stoneman Douglas, began a crusade against guns, and for a wile was as popular as the moonfaced activist Greta Thunberg. Popular? Sainted was more like it.

On his Twitter account, Allman wrote: “I’ve been hanging out and ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass.” His radio show on KDNL was immediately cancelled, and he was replaced by Mark Cox, a temperate host whose demeanor and folksy voice suggest Mr. Moderate.

Allman was nevertheless back on the air a couple of years later at Salem Radio, a station for Christianity, patriotism, and American values. With Allman came his standard repertory of guests: Judge Andrew Napolitano, Jim Talent, former Missouri Representative Jay Carifano, Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, and Stacey Washington, whose Stacey on the Right is a black female’s view of conservatism. There was also Doug Giles, a slow talking, rural Texan with an accent out of True Grit who favored guns, God, and true manhood; and Father Tom, a priest Allman enjoyed having on the show to discuss Christianity from a conservative Catholic viewpoint.

He was back in the saddle. His program’s bumper music was a bouncy “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Allman’s style has always been combative and energizing. He’s fun to listen to, and prizes his escape from urban, decadent St. Louis: “I live in a good place free of idiots,” he said. He also attacked plans to extend Metrolink, the St. Louis light rail system, to St. Charles county across the Missouri River. Conservative and Libertarian parties in St. Charles wanted nothing to do with Metrolink extension, seeing it as a financial boondoggle that would lead to packs of inner-city blacks coming out of the city to prey on local residents. It was regarded as horrible and racist thinking. But when Metrolink extended its line to the Galleria Mall in mid-county, you could see gangs of black kids detraining and going to the mall, where crime exploded.

Allma ended up backing the wrong horse, however. Salem Radio, proudly announcing that it was “Christian, patriotic radio,” decided the St. Louis market wasn’t paying enough and sold the station to the Catholic Church, which promptly dumped Allman and all the other conservatives, substituting wall-to-wall Spanish-language masses.

In the meantime, Allman continued his fiery rhetoric on hot-button topics. In Ferguson, he supported the police anywhere and everywhere. “After Ferguson,” he bragged, “I bought a 13-round three-gauge Bullpup, and if you come into my neighborhood, you’ll see the barrel of a gun at your nose.” Yet for all his strident, fist-shaking talk, Allman was strangely reticent on the rash of statues being destroyed across the country, especially Confederate ones. “If black people want them down,” he mutely noted one day on the air, “then I guess they just have to come down.” This was a real volte-face, but Allman always has a soft spot for blacks. Like many conservatives, he holds to the dream that blacks are, in their hearts, family-loving, law-abiding, and want values, but that the Democrats have led them astray. Allman seems to follow the conservative belief that once the right Republican candidate is found, blacks will forsake the Democrats and the era of values and conservatism will emerge.

When Allman denounces the decline of public schools, he goes back to Brown v. Board of Education, but with a different take. He argues it destroyed blacks far more than whites, because the former could no longer could make it to school board meetings. Busing had taken their kids far away, and they were at the mercy of progressive bureaucrats. Okay, Jamie, but why about all the white kids and teachers left at the mercy of the black mob that had been dumped into their laps? He also catered to a lot of blacks on his show. As on Rush’s program, they always got to go the front of the caller line, and he courted many black conservatives and speakers.

In the 2020 election Allman proudly banged the drum for Trump. He, like almost every other conservative talk show host, echoed Trump’s continual proclamations that black and Hispanic unemployment had gone down, that minority opportunities were soaring, and praised the Platinum Plan, a thinly-disguised form of reparations to buy off the blacks. As Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent noted, this killed Trump’s support among many of the whites who had voted him into office. Wallace believed Trump wasn’t cheated of his victory; he threw it away by catering to minority voting groups who would always go back to the bureaucratic trough. White voters deserted Trump, and it showed.

Yet Allman’s conservative fight went on in other areas. In 2020 Allman despised the COVID restrictions, reporting how contrived many of the statistics that allegedly justified them were and how the virus’ origins in a Wuhan lab were being ignored. He preferred blaming the Chinese, but did note that the Chinese lab had been developed by Fauci, who escaped all blame or even a minor investigation.

Allman was bothered by Trump’s failure to get the COVID panic under control. Trump would offer a forceful plan or strategy in his public statements, then promptly let Fauci and Dr. Birx take the podium and dismantle or play down the same strategy. Allman observed that Trump had, by giving daily airtime to Fauci and Birx, in effect made them co-presidents.

The local COVID restrictions enacted in Missouri by Sam Paige, the St. Louis County Executive, were challenged by Allman. When reports came out of a vast morgue being developed in north county, supposedly to handle “thousands of deaths,” with stacks of coffins kept at the ready, Allman chided the local media for refusing to investigate it. Allman also noted that the closing of restaurants and businesses was being partly financed by COVID money that was being sent to Paige, who in effect bribed these establishments to stay closed. Any efforts to investigate Paige’s methods were stopped by the fact that he temporarily closed all council meetings to the public — for “safety reasons.” Allman attacked the state of Missouri for not reining in Paige’s enforced closings and masking regulations, noting that for some reason St. Louis government was being left alone to do what damage it could, both in terms of COVID restrictions and inaction during the George Floyd riots. He wondered if there had been some sort of quid pro quo between Gardner and Governor Parson that stemmed back to the campaign to get rid of Greitens.

After his cancellation, Jamie Allman got back on the air at 107.9, a new station: Patriot Radio. (I’ve become wary of the word “patriot,” which seems like a term that means nothing and is only a rallying point to keep the base anchored.) Allman was back with his bouncy music, raspy cheerleading ,and usual repetoire. Yet , like many Counter-Currents readers, I have tired of conservatism. The station aired many irritating ads, such as one for the United Negro College Fund, where, to soft music, a Morgan Freeman-like voice cozily reassures the listener that the ice cream cone, the traffic light, the mailbox, elevator, lasers, and blood bank were all invented by African-Americans. What’s a conservative station doing saying this?

We’ve learned that conservatives aren’t exactly in the business of change or bringing back what has been lost. They are in effect conserving the status quo. Allman’s histrionics on the air are best summed up in a catch phrase of his, when he denounces some liberal who has taken a beating: “They rode him like a rented mule.” He almost — nay, sincerely — gloats. It’s an ugly, sneering term, borrowed from Mike Lange’s description of a Pittsburgh Penguins game and final goal. “He beat Casey like a rented mule.” Saying “beat” on the air could cost Allman another job, so the crudeness was softened.

All of this tough-guy talk is standard on the talk show circuit. Even a major sponsor, Black Rifle Coffee, founded by a former military sniper, used  the sound of a rifle shot in its ads to suggest another hit in Afghanistan. All to peddle coffee.

Allman has been deriding Trump’s rhetoric for being too soft. “What Trump needs is an ad like the Marvel comics movie The Avengers,” he once said. “Trump walks proud in the middle, flanked by three guys on either side . . .  toting Bullpups.”

Trump, once reelected, will make everything all right, of course. It recalls a recent thread on Occidental Dissent where Hunter Wallace lamented those Baby Boomer conservatives who are still obsessed with the 1980s and Reagan/Bush who are now, via more defense spending for Ukraine and Israel as well as more to “contain” China, are happily returning to Cold War politics. Allman and many like him still see Trump as this great white force that — with balls, grit, and, yes, Bullpups — will drain the swamp and make the bad men stop what they are doing.