“Rush Limbaugh radically transformed the Republican Party. Limbaugh had more influence on the trajectory of the American right than the vast majority of political leaders it is not a stretch to say that Trump’s presidency may not have happened without him. In return, Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom - America’s highest civilian honor - during the 2020 State of the Union speech. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the 2016 presidential primary, he came around to Trump and Trumpism, becoming one of the former president’s most influential boosters in conservative media. “Limbaugh was the fountainhead for an entire generation of radical right-wing GOP politicians who owe their careers to the politics of resentment and white racial rage.”įoremost among these leaders, of course, is former President Donald Trump. “Rush built upon an already robust right-wing media and organizational infrastructure and married it to lowbrow entertainment culture, appealing to a deeply politicized audience of angry white men who did not consider themselves political,” writes David Astin Walsh, a historian of conservatism at the University of Virginia. Bigotry dressed up as “jokes” or “entertainment” were the stock in trade of Limbaugh’s show he built and maintained a massive audience across decades not in spite of this commentary, but because of it. He once did an impression of former Chinese President Hu Jintao that consisted mostly of saying “ching chong” over and over again he had a guest on to sing a song titled “ Barack the Magic Negro.” He repeatedly mocked the death of gay men from AIDS in the 1980s, suggested that the Clintons murdered their aide Vince Foster in the 1990s, called the NBA “the Thug Basketball Association” in 2004, and claimed that college student Sandra Fluke owed him a sex tape in return for taxpayer-subsidized birth control in 2012. Obituaries for talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70, have frequently described him as a “ conservative provocateur.” This is technically accurate but euphemistic, akin to calling Bashar al-Assad a “controversial leader.” Limbaugh’s stock in trade was bigotry and offense his career-long defining trait was a willingness to channel the conservative id in unusually blunt and crude terms.
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