Counter-Currents
Pioneering TV Talk Show Beta Male Phil Donahue Has Died, And I Finally Have Something Nice to Say About Him
Jim Goad
Phil Donahue. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
1,257 words
When I read that Phil Donahue—who for over a quarter-century reigned as “The King of Daytime TV”—had died this past Sunday, I grinned and rubbed my hands at the prospect of issuing a robustly defamatory obituary.
It’s almost comical how many times I’ve already written about Donahue. I’d never cast him in a good light, and nearly all my scorn hinged on the fact that he was a prominent “male feminist” back when such creatures hardly existed. A quick search of his name on my hard drive yielded five separate times I’d mocked the man born in Cleveland as Philip John Donahue 88 years ago.
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I’d first written about Donahue in the 1991 debut issue of my magazine ANSWER Me!, when he still ruled daytime TV talk shows. In an article called “Twelve Steps to Hell,” I recounted attending a meeting of Marijuana Anonymous:
“Shhh!” whispers the group leader, a pepper-haired graduate of the Phil Donahue school of male submissiveness.
Donahue gets two nods in my 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto, published a year after his pioneering daytime talk show had finished a 29-year run. In Chapter 7, I mention a novel called Children of a Lost Spirit, which is about a Caucasian woman who gets raped by a Sasquatch and liked it so much that she joins their clan:
Camille is eventually saved from Otta’s further sexual predation by a valiant, sensitive, Alan Alda/Phil Donahue-style Sasquatch named Geh. He massages her back and playfully engages in snowball fights with her.
In Chapter 8 of Redneck Manifesto, which covered 1990s anti-government trends, especially the militia movement in the wake of 1995’s Oklahoma City Bombing, I bring up Donahue again:
White-haired pussy-whip Phil Donahue wanted to lambaste the militias as backwoods honky bigots, so his TV producers flew in the leader of the Ohio Militia. Donahue must have shit his adult diapers to discover the man was BLACK.
It would be another 14 years before I wrote about Donahue, this time in a 2011 weekly news roundup:
I usually prefer Aussies to Oprah Winfrey, but I’m afraid I’ll have to take her side in this controversy. This has only happened once before in history—when she drove Phil Donahue off network TV.
I found a need to bring up Donahue one more time in a 2014 piece called “Feminism As a Mating Strategy Among Beta Males”:
My instinctual gut revulsion for male feminists grew deeper throughout the 1970s and 1980s as Alan Alda and Phil Donahue taught a whole generation of well-meaning yet gullible TV-watching pubescent males that it was sexy for guys to be feminists. They’re the ones who killed it for males, at least white ones, on TV. (Kurt Cobain would do the same thing for white males in music about 15 years later.)
Now, ten years later, Phil Donahue has finally issued his death rattle. England’s The Times says “he was hailed as a proto male feminist” and Salon.com is eulogizing him as someone who “showed how feminism and open-mindedness are crucial for democracy”:
With an audience of predominantly women on the airwaves and in the studio…his program took women seriously as an audience, offering them not cooking tips and fashion advice, but substantive discussions on politics, race, gender, psychology, and the arts.
OK, but the main reason his daytime studio audience was predominantly composed of women was because back then, women were more “oppressed” than men in the sense that they didn’t have to work as much as they do now. But gradually, enabled by men such as Phil Donahue, feminism “liberated” women from languid daytime idleness while their kids were in school. What often passes notice about feminism is that it may have been little more than a sordid plot to drive down wages and male earning power by forcing women to join the labor force.
To be fair, though, Phil Donahue pioneered more than being a high-profile male simp. He first cut his teeth as a daytime TV talk show host in the tiny market of Dayton, OH, where he explained that “stars were not available to us. So I knew that the only way we would survive would be issues.” He focused on controversial, hot-button topics—one per hourlong show, in front of a live audience, from whom he took questions as he prowled the studio with his wireless mic.
The Phil Donahue Show’s first guest, in 1967, was outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, back when atheism was far more offensive to the public. A year later, while still in Dayton, Donahue interviewed what he called “a real, live homosexual” long before gayness had become mainstreamed. In 1974, he moved the show to the massively larger market of Chicago, where it was rechristened as Donahue.
Phil Donahue was undeniably biased against straight white males. Like so many who followed in his wake, he seemingly refused to accept the possibility that there might have been anything wrong with Jews, women, gays, or blacks. He helped nudge formerly fringe topics such as Black Power, transvestitism, abortion, and anti-war sentiments into the mainstream. In the 1970s and early 1980s, though, the establishment media wasn’t nearly as canonically leftist as it is now, and Donahue certainly played a role in pushing things in that direction. To his credit, though, he never relented in his dedication to covering controversial figures and topics.
In 1985, the Donahue show made its final move, this time to New York. By then, what was considered “fringe” and “controversial” had shifted significantly since 1967. From 1985 to 1996, this led to some fascinating exchanges between Donahue and people whom he tried to make look foolish but who only wound up making him look dumb—but he kept letting them speak, unedited and in front of a live audience.
Such figures included Donald Trump, Milton Friedman, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, and the ever-delightful Khalid Muhammad.
When Donahue started filming a new show on MSNBC in 2002, he allowed Jared Taylor to mop the floor with him. But MSNBC fired Donahue not long after his show started. They claimed it was due to low ratings, but not only did he have the network’s highest-rated show, a leaked MSNBC internal memo revealed that his dismissal was due to his opposition to the looming Iraq War back when all of the establishment media, left and right, had War Fever and feared upsetting the public, advertisers, and/or America’s military-industrial complex.
It’s always refreshing, if a bit discombobulating, to realize that someone you thought was a complete fool had merit. Even when Phil Donahue disagreed with someone, he let them talk.
There has never been anyone quite like him, before or since. Both the mainstream media and all of podcasting—which are essentially “talk shows,” but mostly without audiences and frequently without guests—seem to be in the thrall of our nauseatingly polarized “epistemic crisis” where if opposing viewpoints are offered, they are typically ripped out of context and wildly misrepresented.
In being such an avid proponent of feminism, though, Donahue may have unwittingly let Pandora out of her box. Although he seemed to have had a happy 44-year marriage to his unabashedly feminist wife Marlo Thomas, others haven’t been so lucky.
Comedian Phil Hartman, who brilliantly lampooned Donahue’s subservience to the female cause in this clip from Saturday Night Live, was one such case. In 1998, Hartman’s drug-and-alcohol-addled wife shot and killed him while he was sleeping in bed.
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23 comments
SCTV’s Dave Thomas also did a great Donahue: https://youtu.be/Yj3oOS0wnE4
Joe Piscapo did a good Phil Donahue as well. To his credit at least he did have serious and usually interesting guests on his show. He blazed a trail for the less appealing day time talkers like Maury, Montel, Geraldo and of course our all time favorite Oprah.
Does anyone out there have a clip of Phil with Mr. Taylor?
It’s hyperlinked on the name “Jared Taylor” above.
Thanks. Don’t know how I missed that.
Yes Phil Donahue was an extreme liberal but he had two things going for him:
1-his show was the only place traditional conservatives could sometimes make an appearance which in the pre-internet days was important.
2-he largely presented himself as intelligent and fair-minded and the level of discussion on his show was way above that of his eventual copy-cat; the totally insufferable and truly horrendous Oprah-beast.
I didn’t like him in his heyday (although I was frequent viewer) not realizing that it was going to get worse-like Fred C Dobbs cited: Maury, Montel, Geraldo etc. and the Oprah-beast.
Phil was a mushy headed liberal in every way. Maybe he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq because of pressure from his half-Arab wife. He took issue with Taylor’s insults to nonwhites, but just couldn’t resist returning the favor. Was this a professional interview or a beer-fueled debate in a bar?
I won’t be praying any Holy Rosaries for the Dead for Phil Donahue.
I remember when David Cole and Bradley Smith were on Donahue circa 1994 with jew extraordinaire “skeptic” Schermer the Squirmer and a bevy of female “Holocaust survivors” who said that gassed and cremated jews from the Auschwitz complex smelled like “fried chicken” which caused the poor jewesses to forever link KFC with their ashy relatives. It was a feel good romp for the whole family.
Donahue may have been a p.c. douche but I began to appreciate him after his daytime show was cancelled and replaced by the likes of (((Jerry Springer and Maury Povich))).
Donahue would often have a single guest on (I recall Ayn Rand, Henry Kissinger and the great Pat Buchanan) and they’d have an intellectual discussion/debate for the entire hour.
Needless to say you don’t see that anymore on daytime TV in dumbed-down Third World Weimerica.
Agree with him or not, he was clearly the most civil and sincere of the odious lot he inadvertently spawned. And best hair.
Devon Stack (Black Pilled) has just done a fun and very shareable Insomnia Stream featuring our man Phillipe Rushton playing Gulliver to Liliputians Donahue, his “independent expert” and the stacked studio audience, with callers from the holocaust survivors knitting circle providing the two minute hate.
I’m not so sure about the 44 year happy marriage. I remember reading that they had what the kids call an “open marriage”, and if that makes a man happy he’s what old timers call a “cuck”. If you remember, back then, “racist” opinion was valid and a White person was still allowed to publicly have pride in his ancestry. They might have allowed Jared Taylor on, but mostly they looked for silly people in SS uniforms or Klan members with bad grammar. The 5 White kids Phil had with his first wife are worse off because of their father’s success. All of us are.
But he had great hair.
This accounts for his success as much as anything else. His show was television for women, not the agora.
Your “12 Steps to Hell” may have influenced a High Times article in, I believe, 1994 wherein one of the magazine’s writers infiltrates a Marijuana Anonymous meeting and relates this bit from the group’s leader: “Look at Aerosmith. They quit drugs and now they sound better than ever.” “At this point,” says the writer, “he lost all credibility with me.”
I see lot of Donahue bashing which sounds catty. I hadn’t thought of him much until Judge Napolitano released an old clip of Donohue in a fiery argument with Bill O’Reilly over Iraq and how Donohue thought it a stupid waste of resources, O’Reilly shooting back that it was “terrorists’ and we had to fight them no matter what, etc. I kind of admire Donahue for his anger, especially saying wars should be decided by Congress and not the President.
I suppose Donohue was a male feminist, but it was semi-trendy then. I tried that, but realized with women it doesn’t really get you anywhere, and if you model yourself after Alan Alda you’re essentially modeling yourself after Hawkeye Pierce, a fictional character in a Jew/liberal TV series…real Plato’s cave stuff.
I do remember Donohue having controversial and extreme conservative types on his show, but then, I remember when David Duke was on TV and radio, especially many radio talk shows, and was treated as something with a legitimate point of view you could argue about, but still respected it.
Those days are gone.
Sometime back in the early eighties, Saturday Night Live did a skit about Alan Alda. One of the lesser-known cast members portrayed him. It was about how to pick up women by copying the sensitive characters that he played, especially the Hawkeye character. He was basically implying that if you copy his style of being a sensitive, male feminist, you could pick up women a lot easier. Of course it was a parody of him, with the implication that it wouldn’t work in real life.
One of his shows that sticks out to me was about the book “The Bell Curve”. When the book came out in the nineties, he invited the author Charles Murry on the show for a debate. Charles Murry agreed to it with the stipulation that it not have an audience. He knew that to many audience members would be upset and that it would be too difficult to debate the topic of race and I. Q. That is the only time, that I know of, that the Donahue show didn’t have an audience. Donahue got upset and was emotional throughout that show. However, he was respectful to Charles Murry and let him make his opinions.
Learning that these arguments were presented and properly debated in the 90s is quite disturbing. Did it make a difference at all?
In 1970 Donahue tried to interview Jerry Rubin, but was overwhelmed by him instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He3LhsE0sEk
This piece felt as though it ended rather abruptly for some reason.
Donahue was a classic example of why we must purge liberals from the ranks of any white Ethnostate. His simping and cucking were obviously manifestations of a genetic proclivity – the type of evolutionarily defective genome which destroys white societies.
What we need is not white nationalism, but prowhite nationalism. I am not in the least interested in the racial salvation of the Phil Donahues of our race.
At least Donahue believed in free speech for those that he disagreed with unlike the Woke crowd of today who want anyone they disagree with banned. When the 2 holocaust revisionists appeared on his program he appeared to show respect for Bradley Smith possibly because he was a Korean War veteran but less so for David Cole whom he considered a turncoat because he was Jewish.
http://www.bitchute.com/video/hWWzvwYoGBfy
Donahue is a classic example of the lefties strategy to purge whiteness. Phil (and his ilk) competes to keep his job by jockeying to have the most progressive values. Those whites who fail to meet the threshold are purged and replaced by the ‘under represented’.
The result is an ever march leftward. Decades ago Donahue might have been seen as a progressive feminist, but time has moved on and he now seems a dinosaur who modern progressives would reproach for allowing such controversial guests.
Decades ago, he would seem like a progressive. One of the differences between then and now is that free speech and open debate have eroded significantly. If you notice some of these comments about Phil Donahue, commentators cite the fact that he was respectful to his guests and allowed open debates on various topics. He seems to have had a similar mindset as some conservatives. What I mean by that is using logic, common sense, scientific fact, and decency to win the debate. He may have believed that he had the truth on his side. When fair debates didn’t work, the left changed their strategy. Now, the left doesn’t tolerate debates on the issues they disagree with. Now they stifle anything that contradicts their view. This is done on social media, the mainstream media, and on college campuses. Another way they get their ideology across is to make disagreeing with it look uncool. Someone like Phil Donahue wouldn’t be tolerated today. He would be guilty of allowing hate to be tolerated.
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