Trump was also called “ an entertainer” who knows how to play to an audience - an attempt to excuse his most grievous sins as a kind of performance art, right up to the deadly insurrection he incited at the Capitol last month.ĭespite Limbaugh’s brief time on ESPN, the network helped normalize his brand of brazen demagoguery. In the radio show host, the one-time reality show host saw a blueprint for limning this nation’s worst impulses, and he used it to get into the White House. In his final shows, he perpetuated mendacious election fraud claims after more than 81 million people rejected his greatest acolyte, Donald Trump. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease and railed against Black Lives Matter. He spread “birther” lies about President Obama called a young woman a misogynistic slur for testifying about the importance of birth control and insurance coverage mocked actor Michael J. Influential in all the wrong ways, Limbaugh would remain on radio for nearly two more decades. “He creates controversy, and what he said Sunday is the same type of thing that he said on radio for years.” “Rush Limbaugh is known for the divisive nature of his rhetoric,” Jackson said. Bush clamored for an endorsement that could make a campaign.Ī week after Limbaugh’s ESPN departure, Tom Jackson, one of two Black men who had to share the “Sunday NFL Countdown” stage with the bellicose radio host, chastised the network for its cynical hiring gamble. He became the template for Fox News, and every Republican president dating back to George H.W. Clinton never mentioned Limbaugh by name, but everyone knew who had the biggest mouth and the biggest audience.įor 30 years, Limbaugh did more than coarsen this nation’s political discourse he injected it with poison that millions mainlined. by their very words, that violence is acceptable.” Days earlier, Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government white supremacist, had blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Years before Limbaugh’s ill-conceived ESPN stint, President Clinton excoriated the “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves “that. ESPN executives saw his base of angry white men as symbiotic with their own, ignoring the fact that women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others who despised everything Limbaugh represented also watched the network. Limbaugh was neither funny nor entertaining, except to those never targeted by his vitriol. “What set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.” never understood how *funny* he was,” tweeted Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review. After his death Wednesday, fans were still defending him. Meanwhile, anyone who denounced Limbaugh as dangerous was dismissed as a scold who just didn’t get the joke.
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