Opinion

Rush Limbaugh's other legacy: 

Emboldened feminists

Monica Hesse, The Washington Post

 Published Friday, February 19, 2021


Photo: Keith Jenkins/The Washington Post
Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, together in 1995, a few years after Limbaugh began using the term "feminazi."

In early 2012, Rush Limbaugh leaned into his microphone and went on the attack against a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke.

"So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal," he announced on his radio show, before launching into a prurient and frankly weird diatribe.

Fluke's sin had been testifying before Congress, which was debating whether employers should be required to include birth control in their health insurance plans. Speaking in favor of mandated coverage, she'd told lawmakers of a friend who needed oral contraceptives to treat a difficult medical condition.


To Limbaugh, this made Fluke a "feminazi." That moniker was his calling card - and, to the extent that it was used to short-circuit any real discussion of feminism in millions of American households, it is now part of his legacy.

The man died Wednesday at the age of 70, leaving behind an army of listeners, thousands of hours of content, and a diabolical eight-letter portmanteau.

"Feminazi" took the concept of women's rights, and the concept of the most murderous, evil political philosophy of the 20th century, and lashed them together. It put advocating for gender equality on the same plane as wanting to annihilate people and culture. It provided misogynists with a get-out-of-hard-conversations-free card: Reasonable people have no obligation to listen to Nazis. Why should they extend any courtesy to feminists?

The earliest you ever heard the word was in 1992, which is when Limbaugh first used it on his show. He once said the term was actually invented by a professor friend of his, but Limbaugh was the one who put it in the mouth of America's dads and sons (and yes, moms and daughters). He's the one who spread the gospel of "obnoxious feminists" who were allegedly hellbent on having freewheeling abortions and forcing others to do the same.

"They don't need men in order to be happy," Limbaugh wrote, horrified, in a book published that year. "They certainly don't want males to be able to exercise any control over them."

Reading those sentences today is - well, it's hilarious. Limbaugh, huffily presiding over his vitriolic fiefdom, had accidentally gotten it right: Feminists, like any reasonable humans, didn't want another group of people to exercise control over them based on their gender. They didn't want marital status to dictate their happiness.

Limbaugh presented these basic concepts of equality and personal freedom as the downfall of Western civilization: If women gained, men would lose.

And this was that loud, angry man's greatest trick: Chew on something reasonable; spit it back out as a masticated, unrecognizable blob. A disgusting thing that nobody wants. Equal rights became special rights. Feminists became feminazis. Somehow this made his listeners' mouths water, even while it filled everyone else's with bile.

His hatred of feminism ended up inadvertently shaping it. The way he mischaracterized the movement forced his exhausted opponents to repeatedly re-explain it. The way he attacked it put feminists on eternal defense.

As is so often the case, his issues with feminism revealed his own hang-ups and foibles. When Limbaugh first started using the word in the early 1990s, he insisted it should be used sparingly. "Feminazi" referred specifically to women "to whom the most important thing in the world is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible take place," he said. He estimated there were maybe 25 feminazis in the whole country.

By a decade later, according to Media Matters, a liberal outlet that tracked Limbaugh's use of the word, he described an abortion rights rally as containing "about a half-million" feminazis.

Two years after that, women who'd opposed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's nomination were feminazis.

Two years after that, in 2008, the National Organization for Women promoted a "Love Your Body Day," which Limbaugh renamed, "love your body day if you're a feminazi ... because nobody else does."

Were all feminists feminazis, then? Were all women? All people with bodies?

In the same broadcast, he declared that "feminism was established so that unattractive women could have easier access to the mainstream." And by then the meaning of feminazi had finally become clear: Rush Limbaugh didn't want all women to have access to the mainstream. He didn't like the idea that they might be judged on merits other than the ones he favored. He hated their unruliness, their insistence on dictating the terms of their own humanity. He hated that the country seemed increasingly open to this. So many feminazis, and more every day.

And then, Sandra Fluke.

"If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is," Limbaugh said on his show. "We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."

Limbaugh made Fluke's request for universal medical coverage into a sign of personal promiscuity. "It makes her a slut, right?" he demanded. "It makes her a prostitute. ... She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception."

Nevermind that in her testimony, she hadn't mentioned her own birth control needs, if she even had them. She'd only talked about the needs of women she knew.

Limbaugh's denigration of Fluke revealed a fundamental lack of understanding about birth control - the pill costs the same amount whether you have sex once a month or every day - but a deep insight into what the broadcaster thought might motivate the conservative male psyche: that women could be having sex, lots of it, and not for your benefit or with your say-so. That the men in these women's lives might lose a measure of control.

I talked to Fluke on Thursday to learn about what she was doing now, to hear about her recollections of the time.

She said that she'd been careful, back in 2012, not to respond with details about her personal life, or to try to prove that she wasn't a "slut." She thought that doing so would keep the argument on Limbaugh's terms.

"No person deserves those labels," she said. "Those insults were not a personal insult on one woman, but on women in general, and how they are looked at and how they are talked about."

She instead wanted the discourse about birth control to be a moment where "these types of old, old slurs couldn't stop us from having those conversations," she said.

The conversations that words like "feminazi" were supposed to short-circuit.

In the days and weeks following Fluke's 2012 testimony, she received a lot of messages. The ones she remembers weren't the ones from people who supported Limbaugh, but the ones from people who shared with her their own stories of harassment and perseverance.

When Fluke called me, the first sentence she uttered was sympathy for Limbaugh's family and loved ones. "Anyone who loses a loved one, that's difficult regardless of what else might also be true," she said.

She has spent the decade since her run-in with Limbaugh working against the types of rancor and divisiveness she believes he spent his career sowing. Today, she's the president of a nonprofit that focuses on economic and social justice, on giving everyone an equally loud voice.

Limbaugh's legacy includes introducing the word "feminazi" into the American lexicon. But it also includes, contrary to what he intended, catalyzing the work of women like Fluke. A woman who was called a dumb name by an angry man - and chose to be the bigger person.

Because though it would have driven Rush Limbaugh crazy, she really didn't care what he had to say.

How Rush Limbaugh helped turn feminism into an urgent threat to the Republican Party

Alexa Mikhail, The 19
This story was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Rush Limbaugh, who died Wednesday at the age of 70, was the radio voice of the right, a pioneer in the kind of political commentary popular on opinion-based cable shows today. For decades, he used “The Rush Limbaugh Show” to lob bigoted attacks on feminists and other liberals, and his bombast shaped many of today’s political debates.

Christina Wolbrecht, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has studied political parties over time as well as women’s rights, has written about his influence in the Republican Party. The party had been seen as a champion of women’s rights, she said, but commentary from Limbaugh helped propel the narrative that supporting women in positions of power was a danger.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: From your work studying the GOP and women’s rights, can you talk about Rush Limbaugh’s legacy? How far was his reach?


Christina Wolbrecht: The Republican Party underwent a lot of transformations from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s into a more socially conservative party. And part of that story had to do with so-called culture war issues, including among them one of the most prominent: the question of women’s rights. There were kind of two main strands of arguments against women’s rights as second-wave feminism has defined it. One is the small-government argument: Government should not be involved in telling businesses who to hire and what benefits to offer.

The other argument is articulated more as sort of in opposition to women in nontraditional roles. Phyllis Schlafly would be a really classic example of both of those things. She’s a small-government conservative, but also fundamentally represented this discomfort with women who tried to do things beyond what women have traditionally done: care for children, take care of the home, etc.


So Limbaugh comes out of that second tradition, but I think it’s important to say he takes it even further in many ways — this defining of feminism as an attack on the American way of life, and an attack on sort of this very masculine idea about political power and strength. Women in every sort of extreme stereotype: Women are harpies, women are ball breakers, women just want to take power away from men, women are sluts.


And those ideas have been really powerful. There’s a difference between saying, on an ideological basis, government should not pay for child care. It’s a different argument to say attempts to do [that] are challenging traditional masculinity, are an attack on our rights and our freedoms. So in a sense, his legacy is the sum total of what he said, but it’s also those most outrageous things.

Q: Limbaugh coined the term “feminazi.” What does that mean? How did people respond to it? Is the term still used today?

Wolbrecht: To say that feminism is like Nazism is to say feminism is murderous, is ethnocentric violence. When you use phrases like that, it becomes harder to say, “All right, more women in this society are going to work. What are the right policies to support women? How should we think about that?” That’s a conversation we can sit down and have, but one does not sit down and rationally discuss things with a group that you’ve called Nazis. They have no right to be a part of the conversation.

I think those basic ideas that feminism is an attack on traditional masculinity, that feminism is an attempt to control how people live their lives, remain a powerful argument against feminism. I don’t think it’s too far to go to link that then to the sexism that we see in the sort of extreme MAGA right in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. I think [Limbaugh] was an incredibly powerful and important voice in spreading that idea. I think it has been taken up by lots of other people and in lots of other ways that have continued to make that idea, the “feminazi” idea — even if we don’t use that phrase — a force in politics.

Q: How did Limbaugh shape the public’s perception of women?

Wolbrecht: He provided a very prominent space for articulating views that, some would have argued, were supposed to have been antiquated or sort of pushed out of polite company. You don’t have to agree with Limbaugh, that, you know, a woman who wants access to birth control is a slut. But you can still think, “Why should the government subsidize immoral women who are having sex outside of prescribed heterosexual committed relationships?”


I think the way to think about his impact is those sorts of outrageous over-the-top statements don’t necessarily mean that all of his listeners agree, but they opened up a lot of space for less extreme but still very dangerous and harmful rhetoric.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how Limbaugh framed women’s rights in the GOP? You mention he frames it as a “threat to the American way of life.” What did this mean for how people saw women in places of power?

Wolbrecht: One of the things that made [Limbaugh] powerful is that when you draw on these attitudes and beliefs and ideals and images that people already have, and make new connections for them into contemporary politics, you can have a really enormous impact. So the Limbaugh world in which strong, independent men settle the West, create this great democracy, become a world power, that is not an image or an understanding of America that has a place for women’s leadership. Women can go along and cook the meals on that prairie, and women can support the soldiers as they go to war. But women aren’t creating the government. They’re not making the laws. They’re not doing these things that make America, America.

What Limbaugh did is to help make feminism an urgent threat in the minds of the modern Republican Party. It’s not enough to just say “Some women are going to work now” and “Some women are gonna run for office” and “Some women will be exceptions.” But rather [he said] that women’s power is in fact a threat to this very foundational idea of who we are as Americans. That’s all a response to the idea that women’s power is taking away from traditional masculine power.

Q: How did he connect with his audiences and get a following?

Wolbrecht: He was a really brilliant entertainer. He knew his audience. He knew how to use humor, but also emotion [and] visceral imagery. So was there a market for what he said? Absolutely. Did he also help build his market by helping people see, “You know how you’re frustrated in your own life? Let me give you a villain. Let me give you an explanation.” And so like any good corporation, you both identify your market and then find ways to expand it. Thirty years ago, it was really only in talk radio that you were getting these other voices and where you could focus on a more limited market. Now, that all looks really normal to us now, in the days of social media, and the internet, but Limbaugh was really especially pioneering in that sort of voice for conservatives for this sort of modern version of conservative politics.

Q: You wrote about how the Republican Party was “the champion of women’s rights.” When was this? Where are the parties now when it comes to women’s rights? Why did the political landscape change?

Wolbrecht: When I said that the Republican Party was what’s been identified as the party of women’s rights, what I mean is that in the ’40s and the ’50s, there was a very limited women’s rights agenda. The policies were mostly about treating men and women the same. So they were laws that said, for example, women can be drafted the same as men and women would have the same rules in the military. And there were plenty of traditional women’s rights supporters, people who had been suffragettes just a few decades before, who didn’t want these equality laws. Because basically, what they were saying is, women are held back in lots of ways, including the fact that they have children, and so laws that treat them exactly the same aren’t actually good for women.


Republicans were on the side of equality because they didn’t think the government should have specific laws for women, because they believed in a small government. They were also the party of sort of the professional classes. And so the few professional sort of women during this time period tended to be Republicans, and they told the Republican Party: “We don’t want these protective laws, we want to be able to compete with men.”

A lot is going to change in the 1960s. A lot of those protective laws the courts are going to strike down. We start talking about the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s rights in the late ’60s and 1970s, it’s a very different landscape. There’s been a women’s movement, there’s been changes to civil rights laws. The Republicans supported the Equal Rights Amendment since the 1940s. That all changes in the 1970s. That changes because there’s a backlash to feminism because the Republicans are becoming more conservative and are opposed to any use of the government to achieve social or economic ends.

And by 1980, very publicly, and it was a very big deal, Republicans take the ERA out of their platform with [Ronald] Reagan’s nomination in 1980. They take their first very strong pro-life stance. And that’s really where Republicans have stood for now 40 years.

Q: Do you think that without Limbaugh’s presence on the radio, the Republican Party could still be this “champion of women”?

Wolbrecht: He has certainly made it much more costly. He made it more costly for someone like Mitt Romney, who says, “What if we are the party that wants to support children? Why don’t we have this tax credit?” The extent [to which] those get linked to feminism, it’s very hard for Republicans to support that without looking like they’re the party of this clearly evil “feminazi agenda.” By spreading these ideas by expanding his own market, [Limbaugh] has made it harder for Republicans who still are for small government.

Q: Is anyone carrying Limbaugh’s torch now?

Wolbrecht: In some ways, I think that what we are seeing in our politics today, from Trump and MAGA to Q, are an extension of that “feminazi” phrase, of making these sorts of questions into battles between good and evil. You call someone a Nazi, you’re calling them evil. You’re not saying these are people who have different views about implementation than we do and we’re going to work it out. You are saying these people cannot be allowed to sit in government. I think we are reckoning with a lot of that language now.


Q: So there are these lasting impacts of equating feminism with evil.

Wolbrecht: I think that is indeed true.

If we think about more opportunities for women to be political leaders, people like Limbaugh make political engagement more costly for women. It is an empirical fact that there are rising levels of violence around the world against women in political leadership. And we are seeing that in the United States. We know that women are less likely to run for office because they expect it to be a very grueling and invasive experience. And when Rush Limbaugh calls a woman a slut for saying we should subsidize birth control in health care as a form of public health, that adds to an environment that makes women think it’s just not worth it.

When Rush Limbaugh Was Too Racist for The NFL

Rush didn’t attack the NFL franchise owners for his rejection, which says everything about who he was and who he served.

By Dave ZirinTwitter


Rush Limbaugh looks on from the sideline before 

an NFL game in 2011. 

(George Gojkovich / Getty Images)


In 2010, Rush Limbaugh had a bright idea: The right-wing shock jock would buy an NFL team, specifically the St. Louis Rams, bringing him a new level of power and respectability. The response by players in the league—even in those pre-Kaepernick times—was pretty unequivocal. “I don’t want anything to do with a team that he has any part of,” then New York Giant Mathias Kiwanuka said to the New York Daily News “He can do whatever he wants; it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play.”

The overwhelming dislike of Rush among the ranks of players was rooted in his racism and bigotry. The NFL players, 70 percent of whom are Black, knew Rush Limbaugh as the guy who said, “The NFL all-too-often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.” He was still known for his infamous stint at ESPN where he spewed filth for four entire weeks—his chief target being Black quarterback Donovan McNabb—until he was shown the door.

It turned out that NFL franchise owners, even though many of them shared Rush’s politics, found him to be too vulgar, too gauche, and too much of a media headache to be let into their little club. So they turned down his bid. (In this regard, Rush was very much like the man spawned from his seed-sized heart, Donald Trump, who had made a similar bid to buy the Buffalo Bills, but franchise owners found Trump to be a boorish sleaze and showed him the door. Ironic, given their future fulsome financial support, but these franchise owners like to do their business in the shadows.)

Rush became enraged at this rejection, and went after the media. He was particularly upset with me and Bryan Burwell, the late columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who wrote extremely critically about Limbaugh’s efforts to buy the hometown team. Rush called us “state-run-media scum.” I joked upon hearing that Rush died that I put that on a business card. But the truth is, especially as a young journalist, the experience was quite jarring.

To be sure, “state-run-media scum” is positively tame compared to what Rush said about Jesse Jackson, Sandra Fluke, AIDS victims, Muslims, and all manner of people he made his daily business to dehumanize. It also sounds quaint, considering what too many people—particularly women and people of color—deal with in the sewers of social media. But what made it frightening was his “dittoheads,” his army of followers ready to rumble at Rush’s call to arms. I wouldn’t say I was deluged with communiqués threatening violence against me, but they did come.

I also received an e-mail from Rush’s lawyers threatening legal action. Their charge was that I had defamed him by calling him a racist. I should have laughed it off—I mean that’s like saying one would be defaming water by calling it wet—but I consulted a lawyer out of fear that I was about to be destroyed by legal costs and an ever-swirling whirlwind of personal attacks. (They never pursued their suit, but damned if it didn’t scare me something fierce.) If something positive came out of the entire situation, it is that I reached out to Bryan Burwell to see how he was responding to the attacks and we became friends through the correspondence. Bryan passed away in 2014. I believe he is a forgotten pioneer as one of the great, trailblazing Black sports journalists of his time and someone who was never afraid to bring a political slant to this allegedly apolitical world of sports. Bryan wasn’t scared a lick by Rush, and his courage was contagious.

As for Rush, the threats faded as did his interest in our persecution. Rush didn’t dwell on his rejection by the NFL because it would have meant criticizing the rich, white billionaires to whom he had spent his career in slavish service. Rush still lived on to launch Donald Trump and put his permanent stamp on the Republican Party as one rooted in white grievance, bigotry, and incitement to violence. He was the worst kind of bully: one who would only attack the vulnerable and cry in a corner when the beaten-down dared to strike back. He called us scum for calling out his racism, but as Martin Sheen said in the movie Wall Street, “If that’s scum, I’ll take it over a rat any day.”



Dave ZirinTWITTER

Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation and the author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.

Limbaugh’s Legacy: Normalizing Hate for Profit

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

 FEBRUARY 19, 2021
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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Rush Limbaugh’s death represents a moment for reflection on the state of American politics. Limbaugh amassed a fortune of more than $600 million over 32 years in the talk radio business, in the process building up more than 15 million regular listeners. It was no exaggeration when CNN referred to him as a “pioneer of AM talk-radio.” He made possible the rise of propagandistic partisan media, demonstrating that this format could be incredibly profitable for news channels looking for low-budget programming filled by pundits who tell audiences what they want to hear, while strengthening their prior beliefs and values.

Reflecting on Limbaugh’s legacy, The New York Times described the “rightwing” “megastar” by his “slashing, divisive style of mockery and grievance,” which “reshaped American conservatism.” CNN remembered him as a “conservative media icon who for decades used his perch as the king of talk-radio to shape the politics of both the Republican Party and nation.” MSNBC reported that Limbaugh was a “powerful and controversial voice in American politics” who was known for pushing a “conservative slant.”

One might have plausibly characterized Limbaugh as a conservative in the 1990s and 2000s, despite his conspiratorial paranoia against the Bill Clinton administration, and his long history of sexist and racist rants. But for those following his career over the last decade, it should be clear that Limbaugh had crossed over from conservative to neofascist in his politics. The racist and conspiratorial “birther” nonsense Limbaugh trafficked in during the late 2000s and early 2010s, his reference to liberal activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute,” his labeling of feminists as “Feminazis,” and his incessant race-baiting by trafficking in anti-black stereotypes and rhetoric, all reinforced his profile as a rightwing ideologue who had long straddled the line between conservative and far-right reactionary. But during the Trump years and in the run-up to them, Limbaugh’s politics became noticeably more extreme, as the Republican Party itself moved further and further toward embracing neofascistic politics.

This piece is not devoted to the “greatest hits” of Rush Limbaugh cliches that have gotten so much attention among critics. Rather, I review the most extreme of Limbaugh’s comments in recent years that have consistently been swept under the rug in mainstream academic, journalistic, and Democratic discourse. The simple reason for why you probably haven’t heard most of these statements is because they reveal Limbaugh’s politics to be neofascistic, and referring to a powerful pundit like Limbaugh in those terms simply will not do in polite society. In a country that has long convinced itself, in Sinclair Lewis’s famous words, that “It Can’t Happen Here,” American political culture simply won’t allow for the possibility that the U.S. has become neofascistic in its politics.

To be clear, when I talk about “neofascism,” I’m referring to a school of thought established by social scientists and journalists recognizing that, while the exact features of classical Italian and German fascism are not going to repeat themselves in future settings, we may observe enough of an overlap between the features of classical fascist regimes and current political contexts to speak of an updated, contemporary version of (neo)fascistic politics. More specifically, I am referring to a constellation of traits that relate to neofascistic politics, including the embrace of white supremacy, the rampant trafficking in conspiratorialism fueled by the cult of personality of a demagogic leader, support for paramilitarism and the romanticization of eliminationist rhetoric and violence against alleged enemies of The Leader, efforts to idealize and impose one-party rule, and Orwellian efforts to gaslight political critics by inverting reality and trafficking in blatant propaganda. I explore each of these traits, related to Limbaugh, below.

White Supremacy

Limbaugh’s bigotry never fit the conventional mold of white supremacists donning Klan robes or goosestepping Nazis shouting “Sieg Heil” to The Fuhrer. Modern white supremacy is much more subtle than that; its advocates have spent years – decades really – mainstreaming their hate rhetoric to a popular audience, while denying that they are trafficking in neofascistic themes. Limbaugh pioneered this form of white supremacist hate, although the primary target wasn’t black Americans, but Muslims and undocumented immigrants.

Limbaugh’s Islamophobia was unrelenting. He referred to Muslims in blanket negative terms, including:

1) The position that Muslims are unintelligent and incapable of serious intellectual accomplishments, reflected in Limbaugh’s comparison between “the number of Muslims who have been Nobel prize winners to the number of Jews who have been Nobel prize winners,” which he declared no “contest.” Limbaugh was clear that he believed “Muslim contributions to science and math are myths.”

2) The belief that Muslims are contemptuous of democracy, via Limbaugh’s claim that “there is not a Muslim nation democratic in the way we are anywhere in the world,” and by his dismissal of the 2011 democratic Egyptian uprising as a phony revolution pursued under the “guise” of democracy.

3) The contention that Muslims represent a fifth column in their alleged efforts to take over American politics, evidenced by his wild conspiratorial fearmongering – which was rejected as “dangerous” by Congressional Republican leadership – about the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the State Department through the “presence of Huma Abedin,” one of “Hillary Clinton’s top-level aides,” who Limbaugh described as “so close to the powers that be.” Abedin’s position concerned Limbaugh because, as he explained, “Human’s mother is best friends with the wife of the new Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt.”

4) The myth that the public was in “panic” that “Obama is a Muslim,” with Limbaugh’s Islamophobia buttressed by references to the President as “Imam Hussein Obama,” and his claim that the President was a “defender of Islam,” and dead-set on “constantly denigrating Christians.” Limbaugh characterized Muslims as a foreign, exotic other, via his denigration of Obama for claiming Muslims are “a part of the fabric of America,” to which Limbaugh responded that he “didn’t know that.”

5) The position that Muslims represent a terrorist threat to the nation, via Limbaugh’s objection to distinguishing between “Islamic extremism” and “all of Muslims,” and his contention that “in a more sensible time,” “we did not say ‘German Nazis’ – we said ‘Germans’ or ‘Nazis’ and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.”

Limbaugh’s white supremacy extended to his attacks on undocumented immigrants. Drawing on classic fascist themes out of Hitler’s Third Reich, Limbaugh referred to Latin American immigrants as an “invasive species,” comparing them to “mollusks,” while depicting them as an “invasion force” that “contributes to the overall deterioration of the culture of this society.” Limbaugh lamented that “we have now imported the third world,” and “they have not assimilated.” He warned that, due to undocumented immigrants, “we are at the forefront of a dissolution of a nation” – facing the “breakdown of organized society.” Perhaps not-so-subtly drawing parallels to Nazi-era propaganda and the purity of the nation and its racial and ethnic identity, Limbaugh warned about unauthorized immigration that “the objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture…this is why people call this an invasion.” And Limbaugh recycled Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as an infection when he wonderedaloud about the “dangers of catching diseases when you sleep with illegal aliens.” When taken together, these comments reveal that Limbaugh was a shrewd operator. He was a bigot, consistently smuggling white supremacist themes into his programs, while being careful to avoid recognizing what he was doing, and counting on his listeners’ ignorance to obscure his recycling of Nazi-style white supremacist propaganda.

Conspiracy Theories and the Cult of Personality

Limbaugh made sure his political fortunes were inseparably linked to Donald Trump’s. This was abundantly clear in his conspiratorial rhetoric. He took as articles of faith the former President’s baseless “election fraud” propaganda, coupled with other wild conjecture about Democratic plots to take down Trump. Limbaugh speculated that the Democratic Party was attempting to infect Trump with Covid-19, that “radical leftists” and “the Democratic Party” had engaged in a “fraud” to “beat Trump” via “ballot harvesting” and other election scams in battleground states; that the Covid-19 lockdown represented an effort “to take down the U.S. economy” by imposing “globalism and world government”; that the official Covid-19 death counts were inflated due to “fake causes” listed “on death certificates” and the “staged overrunning of hospitals”; and that newly reported Covid-19 cases were “being reported in states that Trump needs to win,” implying that these cases were part of a coordinated Democratic effort to undermine the former President’s candidacy. None of these assertions were accurate. But fascists aren’t exactly known for embracing leaders who rationally engage in empirical evidence.

Conspiratorial Eliminationism

Closely overlapping with Limbaugh’s white supremacy was his conspiratorial eliminationism, which focused on black Americans and the Democratic Party. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Limbaugh demonized people of color, stoking fear via his talk about “saving America from a race war that the Democrats are out there actively trying to promote…they want chaos, they want this constant us-versus-them aspect of daily life.” In contrast, Limbaugh claimed, Trump was “making it clear that he’s interested in people who are constructive, productive, generally happy. He’s not interested in parasites, the generally miserable.” The “parasites” reference was another example of Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric, echoing Nazi propaganda, but directed against the Republican Party’s political enemies. Limbaugh was equally vicious in his targeting of Black Lives Matter, which he classified as “Marxist” and a “full-fledged anti-American organization.” Limbaugh’s eliminationism also extended to LGBTQ activists, which he condemned for working with the “deep state” to impose a “30 years” long “cultural rot” in America. “What a cesspool the Democrat Party has turned the country into, what a cesspool American morality has become, what a cesspool the American left is turning our culture into,” Limbaugh lamented, as the country “descend[s]” into “a filthy gutter” politics dominated by “transgenders” and “gay people” fighting for, and winning equal rights. Such incendiary rhetoric was clearly intended to reinforce the belief in listeners’ minds that the U.S. was divided between two peoples – the hard working and the virtuous on the one hand, and the morally depraved and the rotten on the other. This language mirrored Nazi propaganda, which pitted notions of an impure minority against the lost purity and greatness of the nation’s past.

Eliminationism and Paramilitarism in Pursuit of One-Party Rule

Limbaugh was pining for civil war well before the events of January 6^th at the U.S. Capitol building. He spoke romantically about rightwing paramilitary-style activists, referencing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter by name in mid-2020, wondering: “Well, where are all the people with guns to ‘push back’ against the left? They’re [the left] threatening to beat you upside the head and do whatever other kind of physical damage to you they can.” Limbaugh called on “armed right-wingers” to “push back against the Democrats, against the left, against the media…who’s got all the guns in this country? We’ve got all the guns,” but the right was “not pushing back. If there’s no pushback and if the pushback isn’t seen, then people are going to get dispirited and think nobody cares about this assault on the country.”

Limbaugh eventually got what he wanted, as neofascist Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6^thseeking to overturn certification of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. At the time, Limbaugh announced that “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession…there cannot be a peaceful coexistence” with “two completely different theories of life, theories of government” which he claimed divided American politics between left and right, and between Democrats and Republicans. Reinforcing this position, Limbaugh romanticized the Capitol insurrectionists, which he likened to Revolutionary War era rebels and patriots: “We’re supposed to be horrified by the protesters…There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence…lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances. I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.” Such statements made clear Limbaugh’s support for paramilitary efforts to impose one-party rule by overturning the 2020 election.

Gaslighting the Public on Neofascism

With such an egregious record of trafficking in, and embracing neofascistic political rhetoric, the rational observer should be asking a simple question: how did Limbaugh get away with it without being run out of the “conservative” media? One answer is that rightwing pundits have become expert gas lighters, smuggling in white supremacist and neofascistic rhetoric into their programs, while consistently stopping short of admitting this is what they’re doing. They rely on the staggering historical ignorance of their audiences, whom they correctly believe know little about classical fascism, and will not notice that they’re smuggling into programs extremist discourse, even as their followers come to embrace neofascistic political ideology.

A second way they get away with it is because the right projects their own neofascistic politics onto critics in Orwellian ways that seek to erase or invert reality. Limbaugh was only one of many pundits, including Mark Levin, Glenn Greenwald, and Tucker Carlson, who claim that white supremacy and paramilitarism on the right do not exist, or that they are being promoted instead by the Democrats and their supporters. Limbaugh echoed this position, maintainingthat “white supremacy or white privilege is a construct of today’s Democratic Party,” and that they “are such a small number – you could put them in a phone booth.” Such a position, of course, is absurd considering that the former President and rightwing media spent years normalizing white supremacist and neofascistic political ideology, to the point where one in ten Americans and a third of Republicans say it is acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views, a third of the country engages in some form of Holocaust-denial, and a third agree that the U.S. should “protect and preserve its White European heritage.”

The United States has entered a crisis moment, fueled by the ascendance of rightwing extremism. The realities of neofascistic politics are being swept under the rug because it simply “won’t do” to admit that large numbers of Americans have embraced the ideology of hate. There is little hope of moving forward and beating back this extremism until Americans are honest about how pervasive the problem has become. “Conservative” media venues have been empowering and enriching the merchants of hate for years. We should remember this toxic history when we reflect on the legacy of Rush Limbaugh and his impact on American values and discourse.

Anthony DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is the author of 9 books, including most recently: Political Power in America (SUNY Press, 2019), Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020), and Unequal America (Routledge, 2021). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com. A digital copy of Rebellion in America can be read for free here.

Limbaugh and the Echoes of Hatred

BY KENN ORPHAN

 FEBRUARY 19, 2021

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When I was attending a Christian college in the States in the 90s, I remember hearing the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh blasting from some of the rooms of the dormitory where I was housed. At the time I remember feeling astonished that anyone could listen to this man for any length of time. Beyond his noxious rhetoric, I found his very cadence to be akin to stab wounds.

Of course, I was leftwing, antiwar, antiracist, anti-capitalist and queer. I wasn’t exactly his demographic. But the tone was unmistakable. It was one of cruelty. Of ridicule. Of dehumanization. Of hatred. And it felt like a battering. That it appealed to many self-professed American Christians at the school I attended was telling. Rush was, to them, a “culture warrior.” Battling “the gays, the blacks and the godless, anti-American communists.”

Fast forward from then to now. Fast forward through the Clinton years and his expansion of the racist carceral state. Fast forward through the Bush years and his murderous war based on lies against a country that never attacked the US. Fast forward through the revelations of war crimes leaked to the public thanks to the courage of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. Fast forward through the relentless attacks on civil liberties. Fast forward through the photographs of horror from the US gulag of Abu Ghraib. Fast forward through Obama’s drone wars, attacks on whistleblowers, and record deportations. And arrive just four years ago at the so-called “Trump era.”

Like Limbaugh, Trump revels in sadism. He has never hid his animus toward women or his visceral racism. He denied climate change and courted more war with his expansion of militarism. But he was a symptom of a greater diseased culture. An echo of the myth of “American exceptionalism.”

How we measure time is important. It is a metric that is not merely linear. It is a tumbler overflowing with events and trends. Of thoughts and actions, of policies and projections, both conscious and not. Limbaugh was one of many harbingers of America’s trajectory. When we look at it through this lens it should not come as a surprise that America ended up with Trump four years ago. But if we stop there, we will miss where it is headed now.

Limbaugh didn’t simply emerge out of nowhere. Neither did Trump. Their animus and cruelty arose from the collective psychic projection of the entire American project itself. A white Christian settler’s dream of “Manifest Destiny” that ended in massacres, genocide and the trail of tears. It was a slave owning empire that expanded via exploitation and brutality.

If we know this, we must also know that there was never any noble era in the official narrative of American history. Not in its experiments on unsuspecting Black men at Tuskegee. Not in the ash shadows on the pavement of civilians vaporized in Hiroshima. Not in the internment of Japanese citizens in concentration camps. Not in Jim Crow. Not in the nuclear bomb tests which irradiated the people of the Marshall Islands. Not in the ditches of Mỹ Lai. All of it led us to where we are now. And if recent history is any guide, political platitudes and niceties will not shield us from the consequences of such dark hubris.

We don’t know what Limbaugh’s inner life was like. We shouldn’t care too much, because the man spent most it lashing out at his opponents, dehumanizing or ridiculing others, especially those who were vulnerable or oppressed by society, and spreading falsehoods. The latter was especially true when it came to climate change and pandemic. But if we don’t recognize that his voice was a bellowing echo of America itself, a long cadence of cruelty, we will never understand that this trajectory has never been altered.

None of this should be disheartening if we do not subscribe to the American enterprise. There are other narratives, ones which have constantly and relentlessly challenged the cruelty of the dominant one. From the Abolitionists, to women’s suffrage, to the labor movement, to Civil Rights, to antiwar, to Indigenous resistance, to queer liberation, to environmental consciousness. All of them presented counter voices to the one echoed by vile figures such as Limbaugh or Trump. All of them have offered conduits for dissent. We need only the ears to hear.

One day, when one of Limbaugh’s vicious broadcasts was blaring from one of the rooms of that college I attended, I also heard the faint sound of a guitar playing outside. I longed to escape this torment, so I wandered out the door following the sounds, to a nearby park where I found a small group of people sitting in the grass under a tree. They were singing about peace and solidarity, and warmly waved me over to join them. Then, after a few minutes, something miraculous happened. I no longer heard the stinging timbre of that man who has just died. His echo of hatred was finally silenced, then, as it is now.

Kenn Orphan is an artist, sociologist, radical nature lover and weary, but committed activist. He can be reached at kennorphan.com.

Limbaugh and the Echoes of Hatred - CounterPunch.org

Rush Limbaugh dead at 70: A media blowhard for American capitalism

Patrick Martin
WSWS.ORG



Longtime right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh died February 17 at the age of 70, to gushing praise from Donald Trump, Fox News and the far-right media empire he played a key role in building. Limbaugh was not the first radio spokesman for ultra-right politics, but he was the most successful since the fascist “radio priest” Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. He now has hundreds of imitators on radio networks large and small, and on Fox television and its even more right-wing competitors like Newsmax and OAN.

Rush Limbaugh speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Wikimedia Commons)

The obituaries that have appeared in the mainstream corporate media have catalogued many of Limbaugh’s verbal outrages, from his denigration of black athletes, to his bullying attack on Georgetown University grad student Sandra Fluke, whom he vilified as a “slut” for suing to force the university to provide birth control pills as part of its health care program, to his ridiculing of Michael J. Fox after the actor contracted Parkinson’s disease.

Lacking in such assessments, however, is an analysis of what Limbaugh’s career reveals about the nature of American capitalism and the trajectory of its political system. He was a thoroughly disgusting human being, a mouthpiece and apologist for reaction and defender of everything backward and benighted in American society. But his rise to wealth, fame and political influence came under definite historical conditions, and these deserve consideration.

Born into a politically prominent Republican family in southeastern Missouri, Limbaugh grew up as something of a disappointment. His grandfather had been a state legislator, then ambassador to India under President Eisenhower, and the local courthouse carried his name. His uncle was a federal judge, and his father a prominent lawyer and chairman of the county Republican Party. But Limbaugh dropped out of college after a year in 1970 to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a radio disc jockey and announcer.

Despite the glibness he would later demonstrate, he was fired repeatedly for inserting political commentary and insults into his announcing, and quit radio for five years to work in promotions for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. He returned to radio in 1984 at a station in Sacramento, California, succeeding another right-wing talk show host, Morton Downey Jr.

In 1987, towards the end of the Reagan administration, as part of a bipartisan campaign of deregulation, Congress repealed the “fairness doctrine,” which required broadcasters to provide equal time to those attacked by radio or television commentators. Limbaugh celebrated what he called “liberation” by moving to New York City and launching a right-wing talk radio program on WABC, flagship of the ABC radio network, which was soon syndicated nationally.

In 1990-1991, Limbaugh’s audience mushroomed as he denounced protesters opposing the Persian Gulf War, entailing the mass slaughter of the Iraqi army. The war of aggression was engineered and carried out by the administration of Republican President George H. W. Bush to cement the domination of American imperialism in the Middle East.

The timing of Limbaugh’s rise is significant. It coincided with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, from 1989 to 1991, which touched off a wave of euphoria in the American ruling elite, whose main political precept had been virulent anti-communism. Ronald Reagan was hailed as the destroyer of the “evil empire,” and pundits like Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history.”

Also important for the American political stage was the utter collapse of the US labor movement, with the trade union bureaucracy’s betrayal and defeat of strike after strike, beginning with Reagan’s smashing of the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike. The AFL-CIO embraced a corporatist policy of labor-management “partnership,” through which the unions were transformed into organizations that blocked strikes, cut wages and drove “troublemakers” from the workplace.

The resulting political disorientation and confusion within the working class, compounded by the suppression of the class struggle, facilitated the rise of a form of right-wing populism, of which Limbaugh was one of the foremost practitioners. Political and media figures pretended to be voicing the complaints of ordinary people, “middle America,” against the dictates of “elites” based in Hollywood and New York City.

In the absence of mass working class struggles over jobs, wages, benefits and working conditions, the burning issues of the day were said to be “cultural” in nature: abortion, gun ownership, the environment, or racial and gender divisions.

This was abetted by the shift in the Democratic Party, which more and more abandoned even a limited identification with economic policies that raised wages and otherwise benefited the working class as a whole, in favor of identity politics. The latter furthered the narrow interests of sections of the upper-middle class, particularly among women and ethnic minorities, who hoped to benefit from a redistribution of privileges within the upper classes rather than their diminution, let alone abolition.

Thus Limbaugh could claim to be defending the interests of workers against “environmental wackos,” or of male workers against “feminazis,” without openly declaring his loyalty to Wall Street and his hostility to the working class. In the process, of course, he became fabulously wealthy, raking in as much as $80 million a year, building a mansion in south Florida patterned after Versailles, and purchasing a $50 million private jet.

Limbaugh helped create the template for hundreds of radio acolytes, as well as Fox News, founded in 1996 by Roger Ailes at the behest of Rupert Murdoch. Ailes had been the producer for Limbaugh’s four-year venture into television (1992-1996), and the format of much of the network’s programming was patterned directly on Limbaugh.

A major political breakthrough for the American ultra-right came in 1994, when the Republican Party swept the congressional elections, taking advantage of the collapse of Bill Clinton’s promise to implement a national health care program, which he failed even to bring to a vote despite Democratic Party control of Congress and the White House.

Newt Gingrich became the first Republican speaker of the House in 40 years, and his majority depended on an influx of extreme-right congressmen endorsed and publicized by Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio hosts. The Republican caucus even voted to make Limbaugh an honorary member, a tribute to his role in promoting their campaigns.

Through the subsequent twenty five-year period, both capitalist parties continued to move to the right, with the Democratic Party taking on the role of advocate for the stock exchange and the Wall Street banks—previously the mainstay of the Republicans—while the Republican Party incorporated southern racists, anti-immigrant bigots and outright fascists, culminating in the nomination and election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Limbaugh followed a similar trajectory, sometimes leading, sometimes lagging behind. He was a fervent proponent of right-wing conspiracy theories against the Clintons, which culminated in the 1998 impeachment, as well as the “birther” campaign that alleged Barack Obama was not an American citizen. He supported unsuccessful right-wing challengers for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, and Ted Cruz against Trump in 2016 before going over to Trump lock, stock and barrel.

At the same time, Limbaugh suffered the consequences of what might appear to be divine retribution, except that it came so late. He went mostly deaf, likely the result of an addiction to oxycodone, for which he was ultimately to spend six weeks in drug rehab and narrowly escape prosecution. A heavy smoker, with a predilection for cigars (and a habit of dismissing the dangers of second-hand smoke), he contracted lung cancer last year and announced in October that the disease was terminal.

In the course of 2020, Limbaugh denied the dangers of COVID-19, comparing it to “the common cold” and claiming it was being “weaponized by the media and by opponents of Donald Trump.” He denounced the wearing of masks, opposed mask mandates, and encouraged young people “to live their lives and spread herd immunity.”

He gave a two-hour interview to Trump (a rare exception—nearly all his radio programs were interminable monologues with no guests). And he upheld the lie that Trump had actually won the 2020 election and helped stoke the insurrection of January 6. In other words, he spent the last year of his life as he had the previous 35, bullying anyone opposed to American capitalism and pav

‘Leftist Scum’ Memer Raised $400K for Planned Parenthood as a Special Tribute to Rush Limbaugh

“You know how to stop abortion?” Limbaugh once said. “Require that each one occur with a gun.”

By Carter Sherman
19.2.21


When Tommy Marcus learned that Rush Limbaugh had died, he grieved in the only way that felt right: He donated $100 to Planned Parenthood in Limbaugh’s memory, because the conservative radio host would have absolutely hated it.

Marcus posted a screenshot of his donation to his Instagram page, Quentin Quarantino, where he’d amassed more than half a million followers through months of posting memes about pandemic life and dunking on conservatives. At the last minute, Marcus decided to turn the post into a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. He hoped it could raise $10,000.

By Friday afternoon, the Quentin Quarantino Rush Limbaugh Memorial Planned Parenthood Fundraiser had collected more than $400,000.

“It was really an experiment, and the results have been unbelievable,” Marcus said. Donations, he said, are averaging out at about $20 each.

“It’s really cool to see that such a polarizing figure and such a bitter history of Rush Limbaugh could inspire such a constructive and meaningful thing.”

Marcus, who’s 25 and based in New York City, works in social media full-time. Before launching the fundraiser, he’d posted several memes that, if they didn’t outright celebrate Limbaugh’s death, made it clear that Marcus was not sorry that the conservative icon was dead.

“Rush Limbaugh has been someone who’s spent decades clogging the airwaves with sexist, homophobic, racist, endlessly discriminatory propaganda,” said Marcus, who singled out Limbaugh’s track record of mocking AIDS and those who died from it as particularly offensive.

“He is really, to me, the embodiment of Trump’s America, of hatred, of the division that we see in our country right now.”

Limbaugh liked to take particular aim at feminists—or, as he called them, “feminazis.”

“You know how to stop abortion?” he once remarked. “Require that each one occur with a gun.”

Infamously in 2012, Limbaugh denounced Sandra Fluke, then a Georgetown University law student, after she testified in Congress in support of health insurance coverage for birth control, by calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

“If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it; we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch,” said Limbaugh, who later apologized after a furious backlash.

Marcus has also taken to posting some of the direct messages he’s received from Planned Parenthood supporters.

“They made me feel less alone and never judged,” one person wrote. “I finally felt heard and safe.”

Another wrote in to condemn South Carolina for passing, on Thursday, a law that would ban abortion after just six weeks of pregnancy—before many people even know they’re pregnant. Planned Parenthood immediately sued over the law. On Friday, the organization secured a court order that will keep it from going into effect.

“During a pandemic that is raging out of control in our state because no one believes in science, this was the legislation they decided to pursue,” the writer messaged Marcus, adding, “As a survivor of sexual assault, waking up the past few days to see your fundraiser for Planned Parenthood has literally made my week.”

Marcus had used his page to donate money to groups like Planned Parenthood and No Kid Hungry, as part of what he calls an effort to “troll for good.” (His Instagram bio includes a description from a former follower: “You’re like if John Oliver made a meme page. Leftist scum.”) But this fundraiser is by far his most successful effort—and now he’s hoping it’ll hit $1 million.

“I’m definitely not going to stop this until it reaches $1 million, because I genuinely believe at this point that it’s completely possible,” he said. “I did not realize it was going to get anywhere near where it is right now.”

Paul Blest contributed reporting.