It’s not often I kick someone off my radio show for being utterly obnoxious. I’ve ended calls with members of the public before, but I don’t recall throwing a guest off air before. But it happened on Thursday.
I had been shocked to see Donald Trump speculate in his press conference that the Potomac air crash could have been caused because of socalled DEI initiatives and that employing minorities, especially disabled people, might have led to it. He said this without offering an evidence and while the bodies were still being recovered from the bottom of the river. Outrageous. I also have questions about the effectiveness of positive discrimination in the workplace, but there is a time and a place for that debate, and it wasn’t then.
So we dropped the phonein we had planned and switched to getting callers’ reactions to what Trump had said. We got on Simon Marks, our US correspondent and then came Trump supporter, the very shouty and aggressive Kurt Schlichter from Townhall.com. He wouldn’t hear a word said against his hero and defended him right from the outset on the basis that Donald Trump calls a spade a spade and isn’t it refreshing. I tried to point out that his words were ill timed and surely he ought to be concentrating on words of condolence and giving resources to the inquiry so we could all know for definite what happened. Je was having none of it. Eventually I tired of his insulting bigotry and looked at Chris my producer and asked him to “get rid of this numbskull and never invite him on again.”
The texts and whatsapp messages that came in were 98% supportive of what I had done, but the next day the Trump supporters got involved, and, well, you can guess the rest.
I am the editor of my programme as well as the presenter, so I am totally entitled to have on who I want. I value free speech but I don’t want bigots on my show promulgating hatred against minorities. I could happily argue the guy under the table but at a certain point, if I lose the will to live, I suspect most of my listeners do too.
Anyway, should you wish to view this four minutes of ranting, click HERE.