Rush Limbaugh, Paladin of Hate, Dead At 70


“And nothing of value was lost.”

 
 
Rush Limbaugh has officially been canceled. Not “canceled,” mind you, like the Bill Burrs and Joe Rogans who take routine jabs at women and trans people and yet still manage to inundate your Netflix feed each and every time you log on. No, this time it’s permanent, more or less (less if Rush’s mini-me, Alex Jones, has something to say about it, though his future prospects are dubious at best these days).

Truth be told, Rush’s death hits closer to home than usual for me. People I was once very close with fell prey to his frenzied rhetoric over the years, and they’ve never been the same since. People who became so earnest in their hostility to outside ideas that they were no longer capable of rational dialogue. People who, whatever their strengths on an interpersonal level, became dialectically unreachable after years of siloing themselves in reactionary echo chambers. Before long, I began to identify which of those folks in my life truly were a lost cause — unworthy of my time, consideration, and mental energy going forward. I responded accordingly by removing them from my personal spaces, thereby relieving myself of the cognitive burden associated with interacting with them.

Many of those people were fans of Rush Limbaugh. If you’ve ever confronted a baby boomer for saying something absurdly obtuse or inaccurate, there’s an outsize chance it can be traced back to Limbaugh’s radio show. For decades, he filled the airwaves with aggressive bigotry and zany conspiracy theories, transforming everyday men and women (mostly men) into zealots for a thoughtless and particularly antisocial brand of right-wing politics. He provided a permanent platform for climate denial, allowing fallacies and misconceptions to spread further than ever before. His success, virtually unmatched by competitors on either side of the aisle, set the stage for Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Mike Cernovich, and other rabid tagalongs to pick up the torch.

Even as death’s door approached, Rush spent his final months on this earth peddling pandemic falsehoods and stanning for Trumpism. He told his impressionable audience on several occasions that the coronavirus is no more serious than the common cold and denounced lockdowns as a form of leftist overreach. Along with the virus, he helped spread the impeached president’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In doing so, he stoked latent unrest among the more extremist elements in our society and then downplayed the violence at the Capitol that ensued. The demagogic grifter, who once gleefully spelled out the “formula” for manipulating his listeners, profited off an ecosystem of lies and toxicity to the very end.

In a sentence, Rush Limbaugh was an utter abomination to the human race who sowed division and intolerance on a scale only a rarefied few throughout history have matched. He was a lifelong misogynist, a vile and disgusting racist, and a constant source of hatred toward gay and trans persons. His stigmatization of the LGBT community, especially, was ritualistic in nature and bordered on extravagance. During the height of the AIDS epidemic he aired a segment titled “AIDS Update” in which he read off names of gay men who had died from HIV while party horns and bells rang out in the background, with the lead-in music set to “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” by Dionne Warwick. There was a dark malevolence to his rhetoric that signaled a deeper moral rot, and I like to think that this, in addition to the lung cancer, played some role in his early demise.

Many op-eds will be published this week examining this man’s contemptible legacy, but the truth is that no one could ever hope to capture the plenitude of his wretchedness. This was a man who dedicated his life’s work to fanning the flames of acrimony in U.S. politics and seemed to take sincere pride in doing so. In fact, there may be no single person more responsible for the decay of political discourse in this country. He radicalized members of my own family and I won’t soon forget it. The broken, mean-spirited, empathetically challenged soul whose media empire ran on equal parts hurt and hate, should now be left in ignominy where he belongs, a stinging blight on American culture writ large.

Let it never be forgotten that the latter decades of Rush’s life were spent magnifying anti-intellectualism, normalizing hate, and creating discord in a nation that rewarded his efforts with obscene amounts of wealth and notoriety. He embodied everything that is wrong with America and represented the worst of us. While I find no joy in the knowledge that cancer has taken another human life, I am consoled by the fact that his passing will help ease some of the suffering his words have caused.

 

Note: This piece was adapted from a Facebook post published on February 17, 2021.

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Feature image credit: 2011 George Gojkovich | Getty Images

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