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My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh's 3 hour show nearly every day when I was growing up. Until recently I only knew that Pretenders song as his show's intro music. My childhood impression was that he was a funny, smart, winkingly transgressive guy sticking it to corrupt elites. 1/
If you were someone with no knowledge of politics or government (like, a child), Rush made you feel smart. And the show was a quality program, careening from soapbox rant to parody songs to arguing with irate liberal callers. It was never boring. It was fun. It was addictive. 2/
Especially if you had a lot of time to listen to the radio, like my dad, who enthusiastically repeated Rush's hot takes (and jokes) as his own. Until I was a teenager and my social circle expanded beyond my family, I assumed Rush's professed worldview was basically fact. 3/
Luckily, my natural teenage rebellion phase coincided with meeting folks who knew better than a Rush Dittohead, and I was allowed to mature my sensibilities. But even if my dad dropped off listening to Rush, he's still moved on to other gross conservative charades du jour. 4/
Rush Limbaugh did so much harm to my family. Hearing so much unchallenged white male grievance for so long can't help but seep into your brain. The toxicity of so fervently buying into the Rush worldview cost my dad (and by extension our family) professionally and personally. 5/
Even worse, the Rush-shaped void at the moral center of our family was toxic for our greater community. Like lots of white families, ours peddled soft (and sometimes hard) bigotries toward all "other" races and religions and orientations and identities and lifestyles. 6/
If you ever felt like maybe you were kinda the bad guy, you could just turn on Rush for a couple hours. You'd come away thinking that, if anything, you were being too easy on the degenerates and the scumbags who want a slice of your pie instead of making their own. 7/
I know Rush's voice like that of a family member, and I struggle to disentangle his toxicity from memories of my upbringing. His show's influence on me and on my family played a non-trivial part in making me a very hurtful and angry teen. 8/
Rush Limbaugh was a charismatic, reassuring deceiver, giving legions of fans permission to believe/spread bigotry and lies. The damage he did to this country, and to families like mine, is incalculable. And I still can't listen to that Pretenders song. 9/9
tl;dr
To borrow a Hitchens line about Jerry Falwell, you could have given Rush an enema and buried him in a matchbox. If there's a hell, Rush is in it.
To borrow a Hitchens line about Jerry Falwell, you could have given Rush an enema and buried him in a matchbox. If there's a hell, Rush is in it.
