Liberal Radio and Its Dark Angel: Meet the amazing Sheldon Drobny

National Review, Oct 27, 2003 by Byron York

'Everything is going very well," says Sheldon Drobny of his new project, the much-publicized move to create a liberal talk-radio network. "We're moving along toward being on the air in early January. In fact, we're going to be on the air in a very big way."

Drobny is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist in Chicago. Along with his wife Anita, he has put $10 million into what the New York Times has called "the most ambitious undertaking yet to come from liberal Democrats who believe they are overshadowed in the political propaganda wars by conservative radio and television personalities." To run the network, the Drobnys created a company called AnShell Media, and they have spent the last several months looking for investors willing to put more money into the venture.

"I'm a devoted capitalist," Drobny says. "The fact is, there is an audience out there. If you have a consistent message on a network which has 14 to 16 hours a day programming, you will get an audience equal to what Rush Limbaugh has."

Drobny declined to comment on who will appear on the network, but it's well known that his top talent choice is the conservative-bashing comedian Al Franken. It appears that the two sides have not yet come to terms, but in August, Franken told the liberal web magazine Salon that "there's been progress, and chances are growing that this will happen and I'll be a part of it."

Many liberals look to Drobny as a leader in the movement to "fight back" against what they contend is conservative media bias. Indeed, both Drobnys have been virtually canonized by some liberal commentators. "Mr. and Mrs. Drobny, I salute you, you're wonderful," Newsweek's Anna Quindlen wrote in July. The Drobnys, she added, "are my kind of folks" (although Quindlen doubted liberals would be able to master "the technique of disdain, derogation and dismissal" that she said characterized conservative talk radio).

But there is another side to Sheldon Drobny, one that has not been included in the news accounts of the talk-radio project. In addition to his businesses and philanthropies (he has given large sums of money to hospitals, universities, and Jewish causes), Drobny enjoys writing. He writes an occasional column for a small website called MakeThemAccountable.com, and in it he has aligned himself with the wilder-eyed extremes of the Bush-hating Left.

For example, Drobny has written that he sees similarities between President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and the pre-World War II strategy of Adolf Hitler. "The corporate masters and their current spokesman, George W. Bush . . . use exactly the same excuses Hitler used to sell to the public his maniacal desire to conquer Europe," Drobny wrote earlier this year. Those corporate masters, he explained, included General Electric, News Corporation, and the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, a group that "essentially dictate[s] what the government does" in a process Drobny called "quasi- fascist."

Drobny has also worried that Americans do not understand the Bush family's extensive links to the Nazis. "Very few Americans know that Prescott Bush, our president's grandfather, supplied Nazi Germany with [support for its rearmament]," he wrote on MakeThemAccountable.com. "The information is documented, but is not known by most Americans because, as in any successful fascist regime, the press is prevented from publishing it."

In response to an e-mail inquiry about his writings, Drobny sent as documentation a chapter from a 1991 book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. The authors argue that Prescott Bush got rich helping finance the Third Reich, and the money he made became the core of the Bush family's wealth. "For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune," Tarpley and Chaitkin write. "This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush." And of course, the first President Bush is leaving that legacy to his son, President George W. Bush.

That particular chapter of Tarpley and Chaitkin's book-entitled "The Hitler Project"-has been cited on popular left-wing websites, such as Buzzflash.com and Bartcop.com. But Tarpley and Chaitkin are not in the mainstream of opposition to the president. Both men are longtime associates of the fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche, and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography was published by a LaRouche organization called Executive Intelligence Review. The same press has also published titles like "George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring"-an attempt to link the former president and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme-and "Would a President Bob Dole Prosecute Drug Super-Kingpin George Bush?"

Tarpley and Chaitkin's book received no notice in the press, but their charges were repeated a few years later in another book, The Secret War Against the Jews, by authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons. Commenting on that book in 1995, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman called it "so exaggerated, so scantily documented, so overwrought and convoluted in its presentation, that Loftus and Aarons render laughable their claim to offer 'a glimpse of the world as it really is.'"