When Rush Limbaugh began working in radio, over 50 years ago, the counterculture of the radicals had swept over the country. In the same year that hippies trekked to lie in the mud of Woodstock, a teenager in a small Missouri city began his own little radio counterculture.
Two generations later, Rush’s counterculture had become a bastion against the leftist culture.
Long before Andrew Breitbart, Rush innately understood that the war was cultural. Talk radio was his battlefield and he was its general. In his studio, he masterminded a war that took a medium that some thought was dying and turned it into a weapon to take back America.
The rise of Rush and talk radio badly panicked the same leftist elites who are now busy deplatforming conservatives on social media. And for the same reasons. As Rush Limbaugh went national, the Left struggled to bring back the Fairness Doctrine to muzzle him.
"When the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy," Al Gore later ranted. "Safeguards were enacted… including... the Fairness Doctrine —though a half century later...they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves."
Gore, as usual, was lying. Rush Limbaugh cut to the chase with acerbic wit. He called things what they were. But he was too busy enjoying life to hate anyone. Even as leftists celebrate his death on social media, in life he got on well with people from all political backgrounds. The real hate came from the radicals who were obsessed with personally destroying him by any means.
Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer came after Rush Limbaugh, digging into his medical records while trying to lynch him by exploiting his medical condition. Meanwhile Jeffrey Epstein was raping little girls. Krischer gave him a pass, but then Epstein was a Democrat.
Rush Limbaugh was the original target of cancel culture, but they could never cancel him. Leftists spent a generation trying to destroy Rush with nothing to show for all their hate.
All the boycotts failed. Every time Rush spoke truth to leftist power, a new advertising boycott would be organized by leftist pressure groups. The media would tout the handful of advertisers who had dropped their ads, but the show and its audience would remain as strong as ever.
Barack Obama was so worried about Rush that he inaugurated ‘Operation Rushbo’. Like every other effort to take on Rush Limbaugh and silence him, it failed. By the time President Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush at the State of the Union, the conservative counterculture’s happy warrior had become the heroic face of the resistance to the radicals.
Decade after decade, Rush Limbaugh remained resilient and relevant. Despite the attacks on his finances, on his medical history, and on his personal life, he never wavered in his convictions, never watered down his views to make them more palatable, or to try to fit in.
The secret of Rush’s resilience lay in the passionate mixture of conviction and entertainment. Like President Reagan, a former radio announcer, and President Trump, who was, among many other things, a television personality, Rush understood that what people were moved by and what they really cared about was not the abstractions. At the core of every broadcast was his understanding of the lives of his listeners which powered his ability to speak to them.
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