Jonah “The Whale” Goldberg has been taking tons of heat for the latest revision to the title of his long-awaited magnum oafus Liberal Fascism, which now bears the unashamedly preposterous subtitle “The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.” Rumor has it that “From Hegel to Whole Foods” edged out “From Walt Whitman to Weight Watchers” by only a slim (so to speak) margin.

People have been particularly perplexed by Jonah’s notion that fair-trade shade-grown coffee somehow goes “Hand im Handschuh” with the Final Solution, so Jonah tries to explain himselff over at America’s Shittiest Website™:

Indeed, one gets the sense reading . . . some of my libertarian-reader email, that because Mackey [the owner of Whole Foods] is a libertarian . . . anything having to do with him, Whole Foods or the organic food fetish is beyond criticism. [They] might want to read, for starters, the writings of Ludwig Klages, Hitler’s Table Talk, The Nazi War on Cancer or How Green Were the Nazis before [flying] off the handle. . . .

Well, now that clears everything up, doesn’t it? Since, allegedly, the Nazis liked ecology and healthy eating, then both those things become fascist. Similar logic, of course, makes cigars communist because Castro likes to smoke them and cotton sheets racist because Klansmen like to wear them.

Of course, Jonah’s real beef with Whole Foods is that they don’t sell jelly donuts and Orange Fanta.

The problem was not the lack of fairness (though isn’t it odd that so many Republicans and a significant minority of Democrats don’t mind being viewed as anti-fairness?) but with media consolidation.

As with any industry setting up trusts, broadcast networks limit competition in a way that’s just the opposite of free market theory. By controlling the message that they claim best serves their corporate interests (read: shareholder profits), they limit what should be the freest market in any democracy, the open discussion of competing ideas.

Republicans have argued that the Democratic Party are threatening to throw conservative hosts off talk radio, which is absurd. The vote total alone makes it clear their claim is false.

But the CEOs of talk radio and television news do not base their hosting choices on who draws the biggest traffic and generates the biggest ad dollars, which shareholders should want. Based on political leanings in the country, there should be a majority providing a centrist slant, maybe 30% offering conservative views and 20% offering liberal. Instead, the country’s getting about 90% conservative, 8% liberal and 2% centrist (give or take 2 to 3 points.)

Media CEOs could provide far more profits to shareholders by correcting that disparity. But in doing so, they’d lose the political clout to influence who gets elected and protects the economic and personal interests of the mega-wealthy (read: the CEOs and corporate board members).

The airwaves are finite. There’s a limited amount of spectrum to use and it’s been accepted that the public has a legitimate concern in seeing that spectrum doled out in a way that serves the broadest public interests. Which is no longer happening.

The broadcast trusts need to be busted. More owners is the answer, not Congressional control of opinion generators. If more owners existed and if every market had at least two cable-TV providers, companies would be forced to compete for listeners and viewers and offer better content to do so. That’s how the public’s largest interests are best served.

What we currently are doing is allowing potentially great ideas to be excluded from public discussion, or at least marginalized