Right Back at You: Tribes Fight Back Against the

Rightwing Assaults on Deb Haaland

BY ARIANNA AMEHAE

FEBRUARY 19, 2021acebook

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Image of pro-Haaland billboards in Montana.

Responding to Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) publicly stated commitment to block the confirmation of the first Indigenous nominee for Secretary of the Interior, tribal organizations are launching a high-profile campaign to rally support for Congresswoman Deb Haaland (D-NM), President Biden’s pick to lead the Interior Department.

Beginning in Daines’ home state of Montana, the Global Indigenous Council (GIC) and Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council (RMTLC) have billboards highlighting Haaland’s historic nomination being raised in two of the state’s main population centers, Billings and Great Falls.

Under the headline “The First People of this land. The last to receive the vote” the billboards proclaim “Our first Secretary of Interior” with a striking image of Haaland shot by nationally renowned photographer, Joseph Kayne.

“With his condescending and cynical remarks, Senator Daines may succeed in ginning up the MAGA base, but he also evokes the ‘Great White Father’ in his paternalistic attitude toward not only Representative Haaland but his Indigenous constituents. His buzzword of choice to undermine her is ‘radical’ and so we’ve given it right back to him,” said Rain Bear Stands Last, executive director of the Global Indigenous Council, in reference to print and digital ads that will also begin running in Montana this week before appearing in other states.

“The only radical thing about one of the First People of the Land being nominated to care for it, is that it took over 244 years to happen,” reads the ad in which the GIC and RMTLC are joined by the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association (GPTCA). The allied organizations represent every tribe in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and tribal nations in states as geographically disparate as Idaho, Louisiana, Arizona, and Alaska. The organizations are based in DC, Billings, MT, and Rapid City, SD.

The alliance recently issued strongly worded letters in support of Haaland that were sent to Daines, Montana’s senior US Senator, Jon Tester, and Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, all members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Montana’s state legislative Indian Caucus also vociferously challenged Daines and the state’s freshman US Representative, Matt Rosendale, on their intent to derail Haaland’s confirmation. Rosendale, described the tribal leaders’ perspectives as “pathetic.”

“These attempts to conceal her outrageous radical views on public policy under a veil of identity politics are pathetic,” Rosendale wrote.

Tom Rodgers, President of GIC, said Rosendale’s comment “wasn’t worth dignifying with a response,” and pointed out that Rosendale is “irrelevant to the process” as he has no vote on Haaland’s confirmation. “At a time when courage and leadership in the public square is sorely lacking, we should all pray like Kipling that when fate lays on us our task, we do not shame the day,” continued Rodgers.

“That was really disappointing,” said RMTLC Chairman Gerald Gray of Rosendale, “because he didn’t even reach out to us before making his opposition to Congresswoman Haaland public. Tribal members in Montana are your constituents, aren’t you supposed to ascertain what we think so that you can represent us?” questioned Gray, who is also chairman of the Little Shell Tribe.

Daines, whose Los Angeles, California, roots belie his pioneering “fifth-generation Montanan” bio, is a multi-millionaire and among the wealthiest Members of Congress. The oil and gas sector is consistently among his most generous political contributors. Daines has cited Rep. Haaland’s opposition to the presently halted Keystone-XL Pipeline as one of the major factors in his quest to block her confirmation.

In their letter of support for Haaland, the GIC, RMTLC, GPTCA alliance drew attention to the role of fossil-fuel development on the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis. Montana has the fifth highest rate of MMIWG cases in the country. The Indigenous community makes up 6.5% of the state’s population but accounts for approximately 30% of its reported missing persons.

“Unlike many in high political office, Rep. Haaland has never tried to disassociate extractive industry from the clear evidentiary pattern that identifies it with MMIWG cases. With the Bakken as just one example, extractive industry man camps at oil and shale fields, and along pipeline and construction routes, provide what has been accurately called ‘the nitroglycerin’ to the MMIWG crisis. There is good reason for tribal nations and their tribal members opposing projects such as the Keystone-XL Pipeline; not only would that have created immense vulnerability to reservation communities along its proposed route, it, like similar initiatives from a bygone age, threatened environmental catastrophe,” the alliance leaders’ wrote.

The letter identified the contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides for 20% of the irrigated farmland in the US, as an example of a potential “environmental catastrophe.”

“Without that aquifer, the US loses its ‘breadbasket.’ TransCanada’s proposed 274-miles of Keystone-XL Pipeline in Nebraska was, in places, to be laid where the aquifer is 10-feet or less underground. Scientists concluded that if the Ogallala Aquifer was contaminated by Tar Sands crude it would be ‘virtually impossible to restore’ to a pristine state.”

A 35^th generation New Mexican of Laguna and Jemez Pueblo heritage, Haaland’s state is among the 8 that would be worst hit by Tar Sands bitumen polluting the Ogallala Aquifer.

Daines and Rosendale have both used Rep. Haaland’s support of the Green New Deal as evidence of her “radical views.”

“It shouldn’t be necessary to clarify civics for members of a congressional delegation but given that they are both part of the Sedition Caucus, maybe it is,” said Rain. “In the unlikely event that the Green New Deal ever makes it to the Senate floor, as Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland wouldn’t have any vote in Congress to get it there. The Biden-Harris administration has consistently stated that it is committed to a just transition from fossil-fuel dependence, which means those workers won’t be abandoned, and we will have a habitable planet beyond the next decade,” he continued.

“I am also concerned by the responses I received about the role of the Department and lack of appreciation for issues that impact Montana such as wildlife management and hunting and sportsman access,” Daines posted on his social media accounts, to rationalize his objection to a Native American woman heading the Interior Department.

“Public lands are ancestral Indigenous territories, yet the original stakeholders have been omitted from any decision-making process and hence many sacred lands and mountain ranges have become pasture for livestock while the main species prospering on the great plains are nodding donkeys,” wrote the GIC, RMTLC, GPTCA alliance in response.

“As we stated in our letter to the senators, Deb Haaland has consistently demonstrated intellectual honesty when it comes to her decision making and she has an exemplary record of public service. We believe she is the most-fitting nominee for Secretary of the Interior in our nation’s history and she won’t just act in the interests of Native Americans, she’ll act in the best interests of all Americans,” said Bill Snell, executive director of the RMTLC.

“After Zinke and Bernhardt, it probably is a radical idea to have a Secretary of Interior who will protect public lands and not plunder them. Preserve endangered species and not blow them away to hang as trophies on a wall. Who will uphold the federal-Indian trust responsibility and address the crippling disparities in federal services to Indian Country,” added Rain. “The only endangered species threatened by Secretary of Interior Haaland might be Daines’ and Rosendale’s extractive industry cronies,” the GIC executive director concluded.

The GIC/RMTLC/GPTCA alliances letters to Daines, Tester and Rounds and can be downloaded here.

Indian Farmers’ Protest: A Strong Democratic Test?

BY NILOFAR SUHRAWARDY

 FEBRUARY 19, 2021
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History is taking a new turn in India with farmers’ protests showing no sign of yielding to the government’s rigid stand. More than six months have passed since the protest began against several agricultural laws. So far, several rounds of talks between the two sides have only come to a dead end with neither willing to backtrack from their respective stands. Indian democracy and leadership are certainly showing signs which were last markedly visible in people’s freedom struggle against colonial powers. The symbolic change is that this protest is against the government democratically elected to power by Indians and not imposed upon them by force. Nevertheless, the rigid stand adopted by the government against farmers’ protest is hardly suggestive of leaders giving adequate importance to democratic principles laid out in the Indian Constitution.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as Father of the Nation, gave great importance to identifying himself with the then common Indian while leading the freedom struggle against British Empire. He chose to dress like them, eat and live as they did, and succeeded in ensuring their support. This page from Indian history is being referred to as it clearly signals that when people’s support is won over for any struggle, prospects of the same succeeding increase strongly. Leadership at any level cannot succeed without people extending support to the same.

In this context, what can be said about the scenario reflected by the ongoing farmers’ protest in India and the attitude of the central government towards the same? Interestingly, the farmers’ protest is marked by various farmers’ unions’ support from most parts of the country. The attempt made by certain elements to create a rift within the same has interestingly not succeeded. In fact, farmers appear to be displaying no communal division along religious, regional and/or any social barrier. This point is marked by their paying special attention to act as security guards when Muslims among them offer prayers.

The farmers have refused to backtrack from their stand even though they have been attacked by water cannons, tear-gas shells, sticks, and other means. There have also been reports of their water supply, Internet and so forth being cut. Undeterred, farmers’ sit-in agitation along the capital city (Delhi)’s borders shows no sign of coming to a halt till the government withdraws controversial agricultural laws.

Interestingly, though farmers have earned support from political rivals to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, it is not appropriate to bracket them as one political group. Secondly, their agitation is not being led by any one leader or group. In fact, frequent meetings at different places marked by the coming together of farmers from various villages of regional zones add a highly democratic touch to this protest. These gatherings are described as Mahapanchayats, that is Great Assemblies of Village Councils. Though various politicians address these Mahapanchayats, these clearly are suggestive of farmers’ protest drawing support from the grass-roots. Besides, large gatherings at these Mahapanchayats in addition to that at sites of farmers’ protest suggest are too significant to be ignored.

The preceding point indicates that each and every farmer participating in the protest and/or supporting it apparently identifies him/herself strongly with its agenda. The farmer has not been forced, pushed or drawn into the protest by any external factor and/or appeal of any great leader. Indian farmers, whether rich or poor, are known to be strongly attached to their farms which in most cases has been part of their family’s property for generations. More than 60% of the Indian population is engaged in the agricultural sector. Targeting this sector through laws or any other manner is clearly equivalent to attacking what farmers link their bread ‘n’ butter as well as family passionately with.

Where does this place the hype linked with Prime Minister Modi’s wave? Nowhere. Unfortunately, the Indian premier doesn’t seem to be taking serious note of this hard reality. The so-called “wave” linked with his image that is said to have spelled his return to power for the second term in 2019 parliamentary elections matters little for protesting farmers. Rather, the nature of farmers’ protest and its continuity has simply burst it. Certainly, attempts have been made to divert people’s attention to other issues but neither has had any impact in reducing support and sympathy for farmers.

Mahatma Gandhi moved with the people, whose support led to his emergence as their leader. He made the extra-effort to first understand the Indian situation through affected people’s eyes. In contrast, at present, no government representative appears willing to understand farmers’ protests from the latter’s angle. The manner and number in which farmers have surged forward display the determination of each to exercise his/her democratic right to protest as one group; which is only growing stronger and not weakening/faltering despite attempts made to target it. This certainly symbolizes the strength of Indian democracy. Sadly, the government appears to have shut its eyes to recognize and accept this political reality.

Given that the present party heading the government has risen to power by playing on communal cards using extremist designs, it isn’t surprising that it appears to be oblivious of people’s democratic vision and strength. Rigid and hardstand of the government against farmers’ protest certainly exposes this harsh truth. Perhaps, in the coming days, concern for his political image may prompt Modi to take a U-turn on this front. At present, his reputation as a master-strategist and the so-called Modi-wave bear little weight against support and sympathy being voiced for farmers from within and outside India. That farmers have been out protesting for more than six months is too serious an issue to be taken lightly. Political rhetoric can please people’s ears for a while but not when it is reiterated frequently with little concern for their grievances, not even along humanitarian lines!

Nilofar Suhrawardy is a senior journalist and writer with specialization in communication studies and nuclear diplomacy. Her latest book is Modi’s Victory, A Lesson for the Congress…? (2019). Others include:– Arab Spring, Not Just a Mirage! (2019), Image and Substance, Modi’s First Year in Office (2015) and Ayodhya Without the Communal Stamp, In the Name of Indian Secularism (2006).

How Rush Limbaugh Invented Donald Trump


By Isaac Chotiner February 19, 2021

Like Trump, Limbaugh recognized that, to much of his audience, cultural grievance mattered more than political ideology.

Photograph by Jim Watson / Getty

Rush Limbaugh’s death this week, at seventy, of lung cancer, closes the book on more than a quarter century of conservative media defined by Limbaugh and his friend Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman and C.E.O., who died in 2017. Before Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics, and even before Fox began dominating the cable airwaves, in the late nineties, Limbaugh had an unparalleled ability to rile up the Republican base and move the Party closer to his vision of pure Reaganism. That vision consisted of lower taxes and less regulation, opposition to abortion, and an aggressive posture abroad—the so-called “three-legged stool” of the Ronald Reagan coalition. For decades, this was Limbaugh’s mantra, with an emphasis on tax cuts. But his embrace of Trump in his final years, and his willingness to subsume his conservatism into the cult of one man, offered a different view of Limbaugh. He finished his career less as a leader of the Republican Party than as simply another Trump follower.

Limbaugh, who was born to a prominent Missouri Republican family, began his broadcast career in his teens, and landed a spot on Sacramento radio, in 1984. Four years later, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” went national, beaming from New York’s WABC. (It remained his flagship station for most of his career, although Limbaugh eventually moved to Florida.) Averse to taking callers—that was often reserved for Fridays—Limbaugh had a remarkable ability to sustain a monologue, with only the commercials as breaks, for virtually the full three hours that his show aired each day. (Trump’s ability to command the microphone for an astonishing amount of time is the only comparable example I can think of, but Limbaugh, unlike the former President, could stay remarkably focussed.) He would often start a show by informing his listeners about his “stack” of clippings—usually news articles and alerts—and find ways to connect them to some overarching point he wanted to make, which often had to do with the magical effects of tax cuts on the economy, and the wastefulness of the federal government. “If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representations was bad, he should see how it is with representation,” he once said.

As he got older and richer, he was fond of half-jokingly talking about his wealth and success. He boasted of “talent on loan from God,” and once stated, “I can’t even destroy myself. I’ve tried a couple times myself and it doesn’t work. I’m literally indestructible.” Like Trump, who enjoys informing audiences about his Ivy League education and telling them that he has better things to do than come to their rallies, Limbaugh relished the fact that those vaunted tax cuts he always talked up were going to people like himself.


An endless stream of articles and books over the past five years have wrestled with the question of how Trump was able to pull off his particular act, appealing to audiences that didn’t attend any college, let alone one in the Ivy League. Limbaugh’s success offers a clue. His radio program was home to Club for Growth bromides about the beauty of the private sector, but it also had another side, which consisted largely of bigotry. This was a man who featured a segment called “aids Updates,” in which he mockingly read the names of victims of the disease to the sounds of Dionne Warwick. He said that feminism was invented to “allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” He uttered too many racist comments to count, but displayed a special hostility toward Barack Obama. “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering,” he once said.

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That’s Not Who We Are” Is the Wrong Reaction to the Attack on the Capitol


Limbaugh, like Trump, never seemed particularly passionate about conservative Christian causes. He took the “right” positions on abortion and gay marriage, but had an early insight that to much of his audience cultural grievances mattered more. One can argue that mocking aids victims and coming out strongly against gay marriage are both forms of bigotry. But many people who have unsavory political views do not make a habit—or a career—out of personal cruelty. In a Limbaugh monologue from 2013 on gay marriage, he stated, “A lot of people have no personal animus against gay people at all. It’s, instead, a, um, genuine, I don’t know, love, respect, for the things they believe define this country as great.” He wasn’t describing himself, and you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Compare that to comments such as “There are a bunch of really crafty guys out there who probably, in the normal course of events, can’t get women to look at ’em. And they’ve decided, you know what? I’m gonna go be tranny.” The conviction was in the vitriol.

And yet, as much as Limbaugh was willing to lie to his audience about the details of Obamacare—he even claimed it would increase the divorce rate—he did seem to have a kernel of principle in his fealty to low taxes, less regulation, and free markets. Thus, Limbaugh could have viewed the rise of Trump in two ways. One would have been to say that here was someone who didn’t care at all about movement conservatism; who probably only dimly knew who William F. Buckley, Jr., was; who broke with right-wing orthodoxy on trade and tariffs; and who had no vision of capitalism beyond its usefulness in making him richer and more famous. The other way was to view Trump as someone who had the same catalogue of resentments as Limbaugh did, and—perhaps more importantly—was hated by the same people.

Limbaugh didn’t wait long before making his decision: he was all in. By early 2016, he was defending Trump daily, and, perhaps more significantly, striking the same rhetorical tones. “The Republican Party doesn’t like the Republican base,” he said, in January of that year, explaining that élitism was the establishment’s reason for opposing Trump. If Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. revealed the degree to which cultural resentment mattered more to conservative voters than any single issue, Limbaugh’s journey served as an exemplar of this fact. When Trump took a stance that Limbaugh would have once objected to—such as imposing new tariffs—Limbaugh simply changed his opinion and backed Trump.

Limbaugh’s appeasement, or worse, of Trump raises the question of how much control he ever wielded in the Party. Limbaugh’s influence was at times overstated. His favored candidates did not necessarily win primaries—witness his failure to derail John McCain, in 2008—and his ability to steer voters was probably always less than what was assumed. But if he didn’t always have direct power, his role in laying the cultural groundwork for Trump cannot be understated. The Republicans never became the vehicle of pure economic libertarianism and fealty to conservative ideas that Limbaugh may have once hoped, but they did become a party that Limbaugh could love.


Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with major public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.

Rush Limbaugh Was a Repulsive Demagogue

Rush Limbaugh was a right-wing demagogue who also happened to have considerable talents as a broadcaster — and he used them to make the world a worse place for the ordinary people he claimed to speak for.

BY BEN BURGIS

Rush Limbaugh was an American radio personality who lacked any real political principles and yet had a unique talent for "triggering the libs." (Rush Limbaugh / Facebook)

Rush Limbaugh’s first book, The Way Things Ought To Be, came out in 1992. Bernie Sanders was an obscure first-term congressman. The Democratic Socialists of America was a tiny fraction of its current size. The Cold War was over.

Yet Limbaugh, who died this week at the age of seventy, devoted a full chapter of his book to the dangers posed by “socialist utopians” advocating “national health care.” He didn’t quote any of these utopians, or name any names. He didn’t discuss the experience of countries that already had “national health care.” He simply asserted as fact that if we “turn[ed] over” the health care system “to the government,” the result would have “the efficiency of the Post Office and the bedside manner of the IRS.”

The line was vintage Limbaugh — comedic and boisterous and completely nonsensical. Government-run health insurance programs are more efficient than private sector equivalents. Residents of nations with “national health care” live longer than we do, have fewer of their children die as infants, and have generally better rates of “mortality amenable to health care.” They don’t stay in jobs or even marriages they hate out of fear of losing their insurance.

Reading or listening to Rush, anyone who knew anything about the history of social democracy would be left muttering to themselves with irritation.

And that, of course, was half the point. The image Limbaugh projected was of someone who wasn’t obsessed with politics but who felt moved by the absurdities he saw and used his humor and intelligence to, as we would put it today, trigger the libs. This in turn helped his fan base see themselves in the same light.

Reducing progressives to sputtering consternation was the entire goal — or at least it was for Rush. The plutocrats who owned the hundreds of radio stations that broadcast his message every day had bigger fish to fry.

Jeff Christie and Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh’s radio career began in the 1970s. Back then, he was an apolitical DJ who called himself “Jeff Christie.” If you listen to those clips, you can hear “Christie” talking about “serving humanity” from his radio station in Pittsburgh. He told his listeners that he “shouldn’t have to tell them” how great the Stevie Wonder track he was introducing was and how important it was for them to listen to it. All of that sounds a lot like the Rush who would be nationally syndicated under his own name in 1988 — the one who spoke from behind a “golden microphone” with half of his brain “tied behind his back just to make it fair.”

But by 1988 he was combining this over-the-top and charmingly absurd self-promotional schtick with an aggressive and cruel brand of right-wing politics. He was more or less openly racist. He tried out a bit in 1990 called the AIDS Update, where he played “Looking for Love in the Wrong Places” while mocking people who were dying excruciating deaths. (He later apologized.) And he was a relentless opponent of unions, comparing them to “mafia fetuses” and fuming about “union thugs” who were trying to “steal” from taxpayers by bargaining for higher wages in the public sector.

If he’d been syndicated two years earlier, all of this would have generated endless headaches for his bosses. The “Fairness Doctrine” — enforced by the Federal Communications Commission until 1987 — mandated that the private corporations that leased the public’s airwaves couldn’t provide commentary on controversial subjects without giving airtime to contrasting views. Once this doctrine was scrapped, companies were free to build the talk radio landscape we know today.

Limbaugh’s Victory

Limbaugh’s show used to air from noon to three every day on my local AM station in mid-Michigan. Sean Hannity was on from three to six and second- or third-tier conservative hosts filled the remaining hours until “Coast to Coast,” whose hosts talked about aliens and paranormal events more than politics, came on at midnight.

As a student and antiwar activist in my early twenties, I listened to a lot of talk radio in the car. Part of it was about knowing the enemy. Part of it was just that, other than NPR, gospel radio, and various music stations, there weren’t a lot of options. And in Limbaugh’s case, as despicable as I found his views and infuriating as I found many of the things he said, the truth was that listening to him could be fun.

Sean Hannity always sounded like the kind of guy who wouldn’t skip a beat if you woke him up at four in the morning. His eyes would open and the first thing out of his mouth would be a rant about how liberals loved Saddam Hussein. He did this thing where callers would tell him he was a great American and he would respond, “No, sir, you are a great American,” and you could practically hear them snapping to attention and saluting each other.

Rush wasn’t like that. He loved to go off topic, chattering about football or entertainment, and I often heard him mock the segment of his audience that didn’t like when he did that — “the ‘stick to the issues’ crowd.” His show started with inviting, upbeat music. He’d call himself “El Rushbo” and talk about how he was smoking cigars. He’d do his routine about being in a “bunker” representing the “southern command center” of a fictional EIB (“Excellence in Broadcasting”) network.

None of this made him a Lenny Bruce–level comic genius, but the overall effect was warm and inviting. It made his digs at liberals seem less like angry recitation of talking points than just telling it like it was and having a little subversive fun.

And he was very, very good at it. Between 1988 and 2016, he not only created the kind of talk radio we know today but built an audience that was thoroughly primed for the kind of thing Donald Trump would offer them — an endless meandering monologue, mixing comedy with demagoguery and trading on the idea that the audience was collaborating with the performer to make liberals cry.

Where the most prominent figure in conservative media used to be Yale graduate William F. Buckley, who spoke in a posh faux-English accent as he intellectually fenced with people like democratic socialist Michael Harrington, Rush was essentially a calmer and more self-aware Trump in his personal style. If he wasn’t exactly Trumpist in his personal politics, that’s because he had few if any real political principles.

The last two Republican presidents openly hated each other, but both effusively praised Limbaugh. And why wouldn’t they be grateful? He was equally happy to whip up the GOP base for God, Country, and George W. Bush in 2004 and for Trump’s War Against the Deep State in 2016 and 2020 — even if that meant that he was a tireless apologist for the Iraq War when I used to drive around Lansing, Michigan listening to him in 2003, and by 2020 he was suggesting that Democrats in the deep state had tricked Bush into invading Iraq.

Cockburn vs. Limbaugh

The late Alexander Cockburn called Limbaugh the “dirigible of drivel.” That’s certainly accurate. Limbaugh was fond of arguing, for example, that anthropogenic climate change couldn’t be a serious problem. After all, he reasoned, God created nature and so it would be impossible for mere humans to do anything to disrupt it. “[I]f you believe in God then intellectually you can’t believe in manmade global warming.”

It should take about thirty seconds to realize that an exactly parallel argument could be made about nuclear war. If God created humanity, surely He wouldn’t let us destroy ourselves in an atomic exchange. One wonders why Rush’s idol Ronald Reagan was so intent on creating a missile defense shield.

Rush’s frequent claim that poverty was caused by a “dependency mentality” and a failure to instill the poor with a spirit of ambition and self-reliance made similarly little sense. If the whole point of ambition is to climb the ladder of a hierarchical economic system, it’s impossible by definition for everyone to escape poverty that way.

But these responses are almost beside the point. While there’s certainly a role for debunking the bad arguments of right-wing blowhards, the point of Limbaugh’s bizarre chains of reasoning was to tell his listeners a story about the world that struck a chord and made them feel good about themselves. You might have a crappy job, but at least you’re not one of those moochers looking for a handout. Don’t worry about climate change — that’s just silly hippy stuff. Your children and grandchildren will be fine.

A decade and a half before his “dirigible of drivel” quip, Alexander Cockburn wrote a column called, “Where’s the Left’s Reply to Limbaugh?” In it, he noted dedicated fact-checkers’ attempts to listen to the endless hours of Limbaugh’s show and correct all the lies. When Limbaugh said, “It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive, and the same with causing emphysema and other diseases,” the fact-checkers responded by pointing to a 618-page report by the Surgeon General.

Cockburn knew that this would have little effect. He remembered Ronald Reagan’s never-ending trail of lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs. “[D]emagogues,” Cockburn concluded, “aren’t done in by careful itemization of error. They fizzle out because people weary of the act or because the political equation changes or because they face a real political challenge.”

He suggested a more productive strategy: zeroing in on the fact that Rush claimed to be speaking for “the ordinary Joe” as he was “singing hymns to the innocence of the tobacco companies and assuring the small-business people that the Reagan tide lifted them in the ‘80s along with the super-rich.”

The World Without Rush

Now that Limbaugh has refuted his own “hymns to the innocence of the tobacco companies” by dying of lung cancer, some on the left might feel inclined to celebrate. The odious old hypocritical bigot is gone!

After a year of far too much death, that kind of thing might seem a bit distasteful even to many of us who loathed everything Limbaugh stood for. And it’s not as if Limbaugh’s passing is some sort of political victory. The corporate overlords who own all those AM radio stations won’t be giving Limbaugh’s old time slot to Ana Kasparian. They’ll find some new reactionary cretin to replace him.

What I am prepared to celebrate are the many signs that, in the years since Cockburn wrote that column, the political equation has started to change. Bernie Sanders’s runs for president, the election of “the Squad” to Congress, and the explosive rise of the Democratic Socialists of America have all conspired to make it a little harder to pretend to be all about “the ordinary Joe” even while conspiring to deny Joe health care. And the rise of new media sources like Chapo Trap House, where the hosts are at least as irreverent as Limbaugh ever was, has made the “socialist utopians” seem a lot more fun.

The equation is still changing at an agonizingly slow rate. The climate crisis Limbaugh spent his life minimizing looms over us, and the economic inequality he devoted so much of his career to rationalizing is out of control. But maybe, just maybe, we’re finally getting a little bit closer to achieving a world where Limbaugh’s ideas are as dead as he is.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor and the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left. He is host of the podcast Give Them An Argument.

Rush Limbaugh Was a Repulsive Demagogue (jacobinmag.com)

 HEAVEN WON'T HAVE HIM, 

AND HELL KICKED HIM OUT 

SO RUSH LIMBAUGH THE THIRD 

IS IN PURGATORY 

WITH THE MILLIONS OF SOULS 

OF DEAD BABIES 

Rush Limbaugh: A Life Deceitfully and Fraudulently Lived 

He must never stand as a model for others to follow.

February 19, 2021 by Warren Blumenfeld



Ding Dong, the Rush is dead. Which old Rush? The Limbaugh Rush. Ding Dong the Rush Limbaugh is dead!

No, I refuse to feign sadness for the patriarchal white supremacist nativist homophobic misogynistic ableist adultist that was Rush Limbaugh who died at the age of 70 miserable self-serving bigoted years on planet Earth 2.

It is only fitting that his passing occurred within one month of the forced evacuation from the Oval Office of the worst President of the United States, Donald Trump, into exile and infamy.

With these intlerant sideKKKicks of division and deception leaving virtually simultaneously we can hope signals the nearing of an end of a tragic chapter in the U.S.-American book of history, but I do not count on this.

During this Trumpian-inspired right-wing cultural moment within the context of declarations of “fake news,” “conspiracy theories,” “witch hunts,” and verifiable distortions and lies, reaction was launched to anything and everything reported that goes against their agendas and “values”.

Within this environment, the backlash to derail, by demeaning and impugning the integrity and motivation of new youth advocates for gun safety was predictable in its speed and veracity.

People in the extreme crevices of the political right through many centrists accuse these young people of serving as pawns or coconspirators of the political left’s anti-gun agenda, that they are mere puppets who have been coached what to say and how to say it.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh verbally attacked student activists who had undergone a terrifying mass gun massacre at their school, Margorie Stoneman Douglas high school:

Everything they’re doing is right out of the Democrat Party’s various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the N.R.A. and guns.

During the height of the AIDS pandemic in 1990, Limbaugh instituted a short-lived recurring vitriolic on-air radio segment he called his “AIDS Update” in which he mocked gay and bisexual men who were dying. He did this under musical selections of such songs as “Back in the Saddle Again,” “Kiss Him Goodbye,” “I know I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” and “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.”


In 1989, his suggestion to cure the AIDS pandemic was “do not ask another man to bend over and make love at the exit point. That’s what you don’t do.”

Limbaugh called out gay then U.S. Representative and chair of U.S. House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, as “the banking Queen.” And he said that Democrats will “bend over, grab the ankles, and say ‘Have your way with me.’” He also quipped that “When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation.”

Trump awarded this ultra-conservative radio indoctrinaire, who feigned surprise as the fear and hate mongering “leader” at the podium of his State of the Union Address on February 5, 2020 as he announced to all assembled that Limbaugh was the newest recipient of the prestigious Medal of Freedom – the highest prize awarded to a civilian — as First Lady Melania pinned it around Limbaugh’s stiff neck.

Limbaugh was a verifiable racist as one of the chief architects of the “birther” movement challenging Barack Obama’s citizenship status and referring to his mixed racial heritage as “halfrican-American” and as “Barack the Magic Negro.”


The radio neo-nationalist arrogantly asked: “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”

And he said about the NFL:

The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.

And he elaborated:

I think it’s time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association,” he demanded. “Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ’em gangs.

Back in the 1970s, Limbaugh told a Black caller:

Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.

On his show in 2013, he excused slavery imposed on black people by white people when he said,

If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians. The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world.

In his mocking “translation” of Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2011, Limbaugh chanted:

Ching cha. Ching chang cho chow. Cha Chow. Ching Cho. Chi ba ba ba. Kwo kwa kwa kee. Cha ga ga. Ching chee chay. Ching zha bo ba. Chang cha. Chang cho chi che. Cha dee. Ooooh chee bada ba. Jee jee cho ba.’ Nobody was translating, but that’s the closest I can get.

His legacy of misogyny rivals that of Donald Trump. Limbaugh coined the term “feminazis” to slander members of the women’s movement, and he called prominent women “sluts” and “prostitutes,” like Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke after she called for universal contraception coverage.

He wrote in an article titled “Undeniable Truths” that, “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”

He mocked and referred to Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, as a phony and a fraud.

One of his final lies and bigoted pronouncement he voiced on air a day following the 2021 inauguration was that Joe Biden did not win the election.

In my Jewish tradition, when a beloved family or community member dies, we wish that “their memory be a blessing.”

In Rush Hudson Limbaugh III’s case, I hope his memory remains as a warning of a life deceitfully and fraudulently lived and one that must never stand as a model for others to follow.

A queer-friendly theatre at the centre of a row between the local LGBT+ community and an allegedly homophobic church has erected a tribute to Rush Limbaugh.

 

Locals were appalled to see a Rush Limbaugh tribute on the LGBT-friendly theatre (Twitter/@heatherdparish)

In recent weeks the conservative Adventure Church has drawn angry protests as it attempts to move into Los Angeles’ Tower Theatre, a historic venue beloved by LGBT+ locals where it currently holds Sunday services

The pastor insists he “welcomes” LGBT+ members and blames the city of Fresno for the controversy. But queer locals were further incensed by a message displayed on the building’s fronting on Thursday (18 February).

“Thank you Rush for teaching us,” read the words on the Tower Theatre marquee, in place of the usual cinema listings. “You will be missed very much. But never forgotten. R.I.P.”

It’s not confirmed whether Adventure Church is responsible for posting the sign, but the fawning tribute has appalled an already angry community who have been pushing back against the congregation for months.

Limbaugh.

In recent weeks the conservative Adventure Church has drawn angry protests as it attempts to move into Los Angeles’ Tower Theatre, a historic venue beloved by LGBT+ locals where it currently holds Sunday services

The pastor insists he “welcomes” LGBT+ members and blames the city of Fresno for the controversy. But queer locals were further incensed by a message displayed on the building’s fronting on Thursday (18 February).

“Thank you Rush for teaching us,” read the words on the Tower Theatre marquee, in place of the usual cinema listings. “You will be missed very much. But never forgotten. R.I.P.”

It’s not confirmed whether Adventure Church is responsible for posting the sign, but the fawning tribute has appalled an already angry community who have been pushing back against the congregation for months.

“Don’t talk to me about how welcoming Adventure Church is to the LGBTQ community when they allow this up on the marquee next to their church name,” Fresno resident Heather Parish wrote on Twitter.

Rush Limbaugh died aged 70 on Wednesday (18 February) after making a name for himself with his extreme anti-LGBT+ views on The Rush Limbaugh Show.

He’ll be missed by few queer people, who mainly knew him for his obsessive homophobic hatred. Among his cruellest acts was a dedicated radio segment which mocked and celebrated AIDS deaths by announcing each one to a soundtrack of disco music.

The 700-seat Tower Theatre was built in 1939 as the city’s first suburban cinema. Now a hub for arts and culture, it reportedly carries a price tag of $6.5 million.

The building has hosted Fresno’s Reel Pride Film Festival for more than three decades and is the finishing spot for the local Pride parade, giving it a special significance for Fresno’s LGBT+ community.

But with the theatre out of action due to coronavirus, Adventure Church has been renting the building for its Sunday services since the beginning of the pandemic – an arrangement it hopes to make permanent.

Last week the ongoing protests caught the attention of stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman, who called on her fellow celebrities to intervene.

Rush Limbaugh tribute on queer-friendly theatre horrifies community (pinknews.co.uk)

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.