LIMBAUGH 2

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see main and tag<div>
</div><div>see who broke am with GINGRICH</div><div>
</div><div>ur-trump polarization/ conspir

4/16
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</div><div>mma 4 23</div><div>
</div><div>cHRIS HAYES (HOST): Fox News has settled the defamation suit brought against them by Dominion Voting Systems, but the underlying problem -- and it's a deep and profound one -- is not going anywhere. And now Fox has to pay 787 million dollars for a bind they got themselves into. It's a bind that the whole country is in, in a certain way, but what I'm talking about is the problem, which is that tens of millions of our fellow citizens live in such a constrained informational environment and are so distrusting of any alternative sources of information, they operate in what is basically an entirely separate informational sphere.I think the best way to understand this is just to look at some data, right? The spectrum of sources, for instance, that the median Republican primary voter consumes versus the median Democratic voter. So, Democrats consume and trust a wide variety of sources -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, this network -- a broad spectrum of the mainstream media, the progressive media, across the board. The spectrum of what Republicans consume is way, way smaller. First and foremost, they trust Fox News. That is their dominant source along with just a few others, like talk radio and OAN. It's a very, very small universe of ideologically partisan-aligned sources of information.And here's the thing, that didn't happen by accident. That is the product of a successful effort by Fox News and others, a lot of other conservatives who have waged a decades-long war -- going back to the 1960s -- on the mainstream media and any other trusted American institutions.The late Rush Limbaugh enshrined the battle lines in what has become a famous or infamous model -- monologue on what he called the Four Corners of Deceit.[CLIP BEGINS]RUSH LIMBAUGH: So we have now the Four Corners of Deceit, and the two universes in which we live. The Universe of Lies, the Universe of Reality, and The Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.[CLIP ENDS]HAYES: Government, academia, science, the media. Corrupt, exist by virtue of deceit. This is what Limbaugh and the conservative movement taught people, hammered into their heads after day after day, month after month, year after year, that they -- the Rush Limbaugh's of the world, the Fox News's of the world -- are the sole source of reality. They exist in the universe of reality and everyone else is in the universe of lies. And you can't trust anyone but them, the Rush Limbaugh's and the Fox News's. You can't trust the government, government official or government statistics. You can't trust scholars. You can't trust scientists or the mainstream media reporters.And, of course, knowledge, what we know about the world is inescapably predicated on trust. We just can't verify firsthand the overwhelming majority of things we know about the world. I wasn't there for the randomized control trials for the vaccine, for instance, right? So, what we do is we use trust as a means of coming to know about the world. For example, if a reporter from the New York Times says, "I have seen this atrocity happening on the ground in Ukraine and I've talked to folks who saw it, firsthand witnesses, they told me about it," I can't go check for myself, right? My disposition is to trust that it's true. And not completely, right? I would look for other verifications, see if other outlets report similar findings as a kind of verification. We've seen that with atrocities and massacres that have happened in Ukraine.But trust is the foundation here. And those trust relationships -- with credible media sources, researchers, again, government bureaucratic statistical entities -- they end up being the way that we form a lot of knowledge of the world. The American right has made it their mission to sever each of those trust relationships, to cut their base off from any other institution that produces knowledge.Now, this has created this incredibly dangerous situation, in which conservatives are -- really are -- severed from any connection, again, to the main institutions of knowledge production in our society. Think about it, think of what the Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science and media. Because they are severed from those institutions, these tens of millions of folks can then be sort of captured, dominated entirely by Fox News and its conservative allies. This is an incredibly lucrative thing. They've got customers who only come to them. Rush Limbaugh -- who died a very, very, very, very wealthy man -- understood this.But here's the thing. Disconnecting their audience from other possible sources of authority has also left Fox vulnerable. They're vulnerable to someone else who is even more of a grandiose liar, an even more effective demagogue coming along and winning over their audience's trust. And this is precisely what happened with the phenomenon of Donald Trump.Now, remember, in the beginning, when he first got in the 2016 race, Fox and the Republican establishment wanted Trump out.[CLIPS BEGIN]GLENN BECK: I am really trying to understand how conservatives can look at Donald Trump's record, which he himself self-identifies more as a Democrat than as a conservative or a Republican, and say, "That's our guy."RICH LOWRY: He's insulted and bullied his way to the top of the pollsKARL ROVE: We saw an angry, defiant, you know, fuming, threatening bully.MEGYN KELLY: You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I don't think I've ever heard such a stream of disconnected ideas since I quit psychiatry 30 years ago.[CLIPS END]HAYES: Of course, that didn't work. The base decided they trusted Trump more than they trusted Fox. And again, here's -- this is what's key here, Fox themselves had produced a situation in which they were helpless to do anything, right? They created an audience that was completely unwilling to believe anyone else who would say, "Yes, he's a sexist and a crook and he's dangerous."And we saw the same thing play out again after the 2020 election. Fox wanted to, in the main, institutionally, rely on their trust relationship with their audience and tell the viewers the basic truth that Joe Biden won the election. It wasn't rigged, and that what Donald Trump did was, as Rupert Murdoch actually wrote in an email, "Pretty much a crime." I agree, Rupert. So Fox tried that for a couple weeks after the election. But the viewers started to turn away because they no longer trusted Fox, they trusted Donald Trump who was telling them that the election was stolen.Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott understood this. She laid it out plainly in another e-mail made public, again, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit: "We have damaged their trust and belief in us." Yes, it was basically a trust showdown. One that Fox couldn't win unless they adopted Trump's line, which they did.Because here's the thing, they couldn't go to their base and tell them, "Hey, look, don't just listen to us. Look at every other independent assessment of the election. Look at the official numbers provided by government. Look at the courts, another part of the government. Look at the reporting in the media, in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times and NPR and on and on and on." They couldn't do any of that because they are the ones who told their audience not to believe any of those people, because those people were -- in Rush Limbaugh's words -- the Four Corners of Deceit. So Fox was left on its own, desperate to win back their audience. And so they decided to peddle Donald Trump's lies.And this is still a very much live issue because, listen to me here, the exact same problem is happening now, again, in the 2024 Republican primary. When Donald Trump attacks his likely opponent, Ron DeSantis, claiming, for example, that "He is, for a Republican, an average Governor who got 1.2 million less votes in Florida than me," DeSantis can't really hit back. So in that example, right, Trump fails to mention that he won Florida by less than four points. DeSantis swept the state, with a margin of nearly 20 points. I mean, he only got fewer votes because it was a midterm, not a presidential.But again, who is going to say that? Who is going to inject that context? Republican primary audience is so cut off from reality those facts can't get through. And where can Ron DeSantis turn to appeal to? Like a Washington Post fact-check? Not going to work. There's no referee. Fox News and the conservative movement destroyed the conditions for that.So now, it's just a head-to-head battle of who you like more, who you believe, who you trust more. They trust Donald Trump. And until Rupert Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the rest of the Republican party and the political operatives -- Ron DeSantis will be working on his campaign -- unless they figure out how to dismantle the situation they themselves built, Fox News and the rest of the right will always lose to Donald Trump or anyone else who can out-demagogue him.Angelo Carusone is the President and CEO of Media Matters For America -- a watchdog group for right-wing media -- and he joins me now. How much, do you think -- we played that Ben Smith clip in the opening -- when it comes to the Dominion case itself, Fox has put it on the air for about a few seconds, maybe a few minutes. There's a very funny graphic of their website in which it's just like utterly buried and there's just 200 words and doesn't name the settlement figure. How much have they just kept their viewers away from this entire story? ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT) Oh, entirely. They've just entirely kept them away. Even when they've mentioned it, they haven't mentioned the settlement to their audience, like the number, they just sort of say "settled." And when they talked about it, to your monologue, they actually talk about it in the context of "It's gonna sure disappoint the rest of the news media that was so excited for this trial to take place." That's how they framed it for their audience. They actually frame it within the context of the Four Corners of Deceit.So, there's no acknowledgment -- even that little bit of acknowledgement they gave to the court that said, "Well, we acknowledge what the court said, that maybe some of the things we said were false," they don't even give that statement to their audience. So, they are keeping them pretty far away from it.And the other parts of the right-wing media, because there is this sort of resorting, reshuffling that's happening right now. You know, they've been waiting for Fox to be on the ropes too because it meant bigger audience share and more power for them. Other parts of the right-wing media, like the Daily Wire and elsewhere, which is sort of the closest analogue to a Fox competitor, an emerging Fox competitor, they mention it, but barely.They'll say, "Well, yeah, Fox kind of lied because they had to give something to their audience. They whiffed it here, but Fox is still pretty good. But it does show you that, maybe, you should think about some other places, perhaps like our show." So, they're even being very careful with how they sort of introduce this to the sort of larger Fox ecosystem. HAYES: Well, you would think, right, you would think there's an opening here. I mean, I've seen Steve Bannon get up and say, "Read the transcripts. They think nothing of you." About Fox, right? And this is purely a self-interested thing for him to say. He's got his podcast while he awaits trial, which is cute. And he wants people to listen to that rather than listen to Fox. And he's trying to pry them away in exactly the way that Trump pried people away from Fox. It's all just these trust relationships, but no one can referee any of it. There's no one to appeal to outside of this universe CARUSONE: No, and to your, you know -- one of the mechanics of how Trump was able to hijack the Fox audience is that he used those other outlets as a cudgel. You know, the first time One America News and others were used against Fox was not the election. You can go all the way back to 2016, when Trump was boycotting Fox News for two weeks and Sarah Palin suddenly had a show on One America News where Donald Trump was the featured guest. Or during COVID, where they had Chanel Rion from One America News come in and say all the things that Fox News wasn't saying for a couple weeks, until Fox News finally started to get in line on some of this, right? So, he used -- because there is a fusion of the right-wing media and the Republican political power. So, whoever sort of has the key within the right-wing media then gets to exercise that political power. HAYES: And this is the thing that I think is important, and one of the takeaways from Dominion and from the primary, is they're chasing as much as they're leading. And they're more dangerous the more they're chasing. This is the thing that everyone has to understand, right? That like, the further they're chasing, the more they're driving down to the most lizard brain parts of their audience. They're just trying -- that is the most dangerous it gets, but that's always the project. CARUSONE: Yes, what you just said is so very important because now, it's starting to transcend well beyond just misinformation and false ideas and false narratives. There's a bloodthirstiness within the right-wing media. Because, keep in mind, in 2022, it was the first time in a quarter century that Rush Limbaugh wasn't the single largest name in the get out the vote operation in the country. Fox News has been on its heels for the past year and a half because they're trying to figure things out. And the entire right-wing echo chamber's resorting.There's a bloodthirstiness right now, and Fox News just got a license to lie. They are going to satisfy that bloodthirstiness, because they're back off their heels and they need to shore up that power, fast. Before somebody else comes in and hijacks it <div>=</div></div></div><div>
<div>ampli echo escalator:</div><div>
</div><div><div>A parallel process of line-shifting has been unfolding among conservative intellectuals, most of whom responded to the launch of Trump's presidential campaign six years ago with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. The dismissal didn't last. While many shifted to the center and refused to endorse Trump's hostile takeover of the party, plenty of others went along with it, adjusting their prior positions to bring them into alignment with the nominee on policy and attitude. No commentator did so with more enthusiasm or popular impact than Michael Anton.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, "The Flight 93 Election" portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who aimed at nothing less than its thoroughgoing destruction. Rush Limbaugh paid tribute to the power of the argument (and amplified it for a vastly larger audience) by reading the essay aloud, paragraph by paragraph, on his radio show. In doing so, Anton, with Limbaugh's help, gave legions of Trump-skeptical conservatives permission to vote, even to express outright enthusiasm, for the untested right-wing populist.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </div><div>=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/rush-limbaugh/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/rush-limbaugh/</a>  legis day  86 racism_{}=<div><div></div><div>an 9 22 kirk swear</div><div>
</div><div>Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently <a href="https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/a-modest-proposal-to-fix-high-school-sports" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">posted some thoughts</a> on the subject of high school sports, of all things. High schools do a good job at elevating elite athletes, he wrote, to the detriment of students of more average ability, or who lack parents who could afford to pay for soccer or baseball camps starting at age six.Gladwell, who is a lifelong, serious runner — and can run a mile at age 55 nearly as fast as I did when I was 15 and winning races on the track team — came up with a law he named after himself: In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.We can easily expand Gladwell's Law to the whole of society. Don't many of us view life in America as a dispiriting continuation of the ruthless, often shallow competitions of high school? And our thinking about how we relate to so-called elites can be <a href="https://www.rattle.com/?s=Elites" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">complicated</a> by our culturally driven feelings of envy and shame.At least arguably, America's national sport is not played with a ball. It's electoral politics, which has always had elements of ruthless competition but used to be a lot more "sporting" than it is now. At its best, politics is about knowledge, hard work, compromise, mutual respect and some acknowledgment of shared goals, even alongside vigorous disagreement. None of those qualities are evident in the churlish zero-sum game that the Republican Party, with its backs against the demographic wall, has played in recent years.This sea-change goes back at least as far as 1994, when Newt Gingrich invited Rush Limbaugh to train the incoming Republican House majority on how best to <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/from-newt-gingrich-to-donald-trump-rush-limbaughs-legacy-is-the-modern-gop/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">despise your political opponents</a> and push disinformation and conspiracy theories. It was either un-American or, sadly, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/pat-buchanan-donald-trump.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">quintessentially American</a> at the time, and has since metastasized into the right's embrace of false narratives, ever-wilder conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism — which is epitomized by a certain orange-hued former president, but certainly not limited to him.We see prissy, stuck-up, wholly self-interested Ivy Leaguers like Ted Cruz (Princeton; Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford; Yale Law), Ron DeSantis (Yale; Harvard Law) and<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league-apologists-january-6-gop-elitism-populsim/621153/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> much of Trump's inner circle</a> playing good ol' boys, <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tag/donald-trump?source=%2Fopinion%2Fsen-john-kennedys-full-trump-mode-is-just-his-latest-stage-persona" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">affecting down-home dialects</a>, and decrying the "elites" on the left who supposedly dominate American business, politics and culture. This would be merely laughable if they weren't also insisting that religious liberty means that everyone must live by the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/southern-baptists-roe-gop-dobbs/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">retrograde religious dogma</a> they pretend to believe.The Trumpist cult and other far-right political organizations around the globe continue to profitably press their pseudo-populist game plan of going after elites (often the "educated elites") to inflame and enrage the mind of the common citizen.If we know something about the role of actual elites throughout history, we know that they have understood the power of anger and contempt in motivating the masses; while a helping hand may be quickly forgotten (or even resented), an insult, real or imagined, locks itself in memory.When the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-book-idUSKBN2482UR" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">phony Wharton grad</a> who reluctantly departed from the White House in January 2021 said <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">he loved the "poorly educated,"</a> they were happy not to take that as an obvious insult. How, exactly, did he intend it? Both as contempt and affection. Any con man keeps a special place in his <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/05/22/formation-of-a-black-hole-on-the-spectacular-implosion-of-the-republican-party/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">black-hole</a> heart for people who cannot, or will not, see how he is hoodwinking them. None of us finds it easy to deal with the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2007/07/20/12125926/why-its-hard-to-admit-to-being-wrong" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">cognitive dissonance of realizing we may be wrong</a>.While Republican politicians have for decades praised and catered to the needs of oligarchs (as well as the merely wealthy who merely dream of being oligarchs), creating the greatest income disparity since the Roaring '20s, they have simultaneously encouraged working- and middle-class Americans to resent people who went to college and quite likely graduate school and have become specialists in various fields: historians, scientists, journalists, civil servants, elementary school teachers. Somehow, in this demented narrative, those professions are part of an administrative system that thwarts ordinary people's quest for freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (And some of them asked you and your kids to wear a mask during a global health crisis.)The "elites" despised by the actual Republican elites like Cruz, Hawley and DeSantis are, of course, the people able to expose their grifting, their disinformation campaigns, their flouting of the rules, their contempt for the rule of law (at least as it applies to them) and their determination to retain power at any cost. They and their compatriots in propaganda<a href="https://tuckercarlson.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> TV</a> and<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/right-wing-influencers-leading-social-media-crusade-against-esg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> social media</a> are bringing authoritarianism to America under a marketing label borrowed from Hungary: <a href="https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/illiberal-democracy-and-the-struggle-on-the-right/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"illiberal democracy."</a>Today's <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/06/28/christian-fascism-is-right-here-right-now-after-roe-can-we-finally-see-it/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Christian fascists</a> don't ask what Jesus would do; they ask what Viktor Orbán would do. Anti-immigrant "Christians" get a kick out of seeing red-state governors troll the libs by using real human beings as pawns in a <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/09/17/markey-calls-for-probe-of-desantis-marthas-vineyard-maneuver_partner/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">deliberately cruel media spectacle</a>.As these beliefs begin to spread in cult-like fashion, then teachers, judges, health experts, academics and even members of law enforcement — whom Republicans have always claimed to venerate — become objects of derision, even death threats.In this classic divide-and-conquer move,[us vs them, polarization]  the right has worked hard to get Americans to believe the worst possible things about elites, those conspiratorial, secular liberals who read books, believe that science and history should be based in research rather than political agendas and maintain a naive faith in democracy and the rule of law.Such has been the power of this slow brainwashing that the right has gleefully separated brothers from sisters, children from parents, and friends from friends. The MSNBC–New York Times side regrets the loss of political comity; the Fox–Wall Street Journal side [murdoch] cries for insurrection or civil war, or just shrugs at such threats.All of this (or at least a lot of it) has been in service of a<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> phony</a>,<a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/08/21/how-redefined-shameless-hypocrisy-and-made-it-politically-indispensable/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> shameless</a>,<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexual-misconduct/story?id=51956410" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> sexually predatory</a>,<a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/01/19/donald-trumps-biographers-hes-narcissistic-belligerent-and-deeply-fears-that-hes-illegitimate/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> pathologically insecure</a>,<a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-dangerous-case-of-donald-trump-37-psychiatrists-and-mental-health-experts-assess-a-president-updated-and-expanded-with-new-essays-updated-expande/9781250212863" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> malignant narcissist</a> who somehow (surprising even himself) was elected president, impeached twice and refused to concede defeat after losing by more than 7 million votes, inciting a violent, if amateurish, insurrection.Meanwhile, there really are elites in America — you know, the people who went to school with Hawley and Cruz and DeSantis and can afford multiple residences, exotic vacations, well-tended stock portfolios and Washington lobbyists. Those elites are still pushing discredited Reagan-era "trickle-down" economics, working to destroy the last threadbare remnants of the social safety net and gleefully eroding democracy — all while laughing at how easy it was to convince the "people" to look somewhere else.</div><div>=</div></div><div>
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</div><div><a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/from-newt-gingrich-to-donald-trump-rush-limbaughs-legacy-is-the-modern-gop/">https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/from-newt-gingrich-to-donald-trump-rush-limbaughs-legacy-is-the-modern-gop/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>no lnx twt</div><div>from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh's legacy is the modern GOP</div><div>The right-wing cult Rush Limbaugh created was appropriated by Donald Trump — and lives on</div><div>By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON</div><div>Columnist</div><div>PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 19, 2021</div><div>
</div><div>Back in 2014, former Trump staffer Sam Nunberg was assigned to listen to talk radio all day and summarize the talking points for his boss as he assessed whether he was going to enter the presidential race. Trump had already learned the power of the right-wing media when he flirted with a run in 2012 by flogging the absurd "Birther" conspiracy theory and had decided that if he ran it would be as a Republican. But he didn't really know right-wing media. His experience with talk radio over the years had been with Howard Stern, whose show appealed to a different crowd. He was a TV guy and in those days he watched CNN as much as he watched Fox News.</div><div>
</div><div>So he got the notes and picked out the issues that appealed to him, like immigration and terrorism, and chose a few about which he was clueless but were crowd-pleasers like railing against "common core." He picked up some discrete stories that seemed to resonate with the GOP base such as the story of "Bowe Bergdahl, the dirty, rotten traitor" which also signaled his aggressive attitude toward military matters. And, of course, he added his own hobby horses like foreign trade which fit into this issue matrix perfectly since it was driven by the same xenophobia that drove the anti-immigrant fervor that was already at fever pitch on the right.</div><div>As it turned out, Trump was perfectly suited to become the first Republican nominee to run exclusively on the culture war issues that had animated conservative talk radio for the previous two decades. He may not have been a listener but he was a member of the tribe. And because he was naive about politics he had no sense that projecting the worst of hate radio was politically dangerous so he just put it all out there, unfiltered. I think most observers, including his GOP rivals, assumed that would be the kiss of death. Instead, it turned out to be massively popular among Republican voters.</div><div>
</div><div>They should have known, of course. The right had been primed for such a thing for years. And there is no one more responsible for that than Rush Limbaugh.</div><div>
</div><div>His radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It's not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.</div><div>
</div><div>Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh's narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn't have done it without him.</div><div>
</div><div>Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans.</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh passed away this week and the right-wing encomiums to his decency and intellectual prowess are unsurprising but infuriating nonetheless. I don't think any single political figure other than Donald Trump has ever been this polarizing, so seeing these flowery tributes to his decency and fine character is hard to take. But if there's one thing the entire country, regardless of party or ideology, can agree upon it's that Rush Limbaugh is one of the most influential political figures of our time. His mean-spirited, crude "guy at the end of the bar" routine was the template for all of right-wing media and remains so today.</div><div>And for a time, the mainstream media was more than willing to accept him as one of their own. Back in 2002, the former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, complained that Limbaugh had unleashed a torrent of invective against him, resulting in death threats to Daschle's family. The reaction from then Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz was stunning:</div><div>
</div><div>Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws? Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence? He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.</div><div>
</div><div>We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader's job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month's Democratic debacle. What we can't understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.</div><div>
</div><div>Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He's so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh had indeed appeared on election night coverage, shocking anyone who knew what a depraved character assassin he was. The idea that he "poked fun" at Democrats "mainly about policy" was beyond absurd. After all, this was the man who shared insane conspiracy theories for years, like the one that claimed Vince Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media were finally forced to stop featuring Limbaugh after he made racist comments on ESPN, but that only made him more powerful in the GOP. Nicole Hemmer, author of "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics", observed:</div><div>
</div><div>As Limbaugh's political strength became evident, many Republican politicians felt they couldn't cross him, or run the risk of alienating his millions of listeners, Hemmer said. "Many of these listeners didn't care if Rush Limbaugh crossed the line (of propriety)," she said. "They cared more about loyalty to him than any kind of underlying set of principles."</div><div>
</div><div>As you can see, the cult Limbaugh created was simply appropriated by Donald Trump. The "Us vs Them" ethos fit him to a T. He saw no need to pander to anyone but his own voters and set about demonizing those who didn't vote for him, even to the point of threatening to withhold federal aid and favoring the states that voted for him. And he in turn has inspired a whole new generation of politicians to follow his example:[desantis?]</div><div>
</div><div>Rush Limbaugh's legacy will, unfortunately, live on in the Republican politicians who grew up listening to his derisive, contemptuous rhetoric and then watched as Donald Trump used it to wield power. He created a monster and we'll, unfortunately, be living with it for a long time to come. </div><div>
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</div><div>By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON</div><div>Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.</div><div>
</div><div>MORE FROM HEATHER DIGBY PARTON</div></div><div>
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<div>dead cancer kos</div><div>it doesn’t take looking for something obscure to reveal Rush Limbaugh as an asinine blowhard who discovered that it’s possible to build a career on endless hate. Limbaugh’s <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh" rel="noopener" target="blank" title="" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">most famous quotes</a> are sufficient to show exactly who he is. Dipping even a toe into that tub of ugliness he has filled over decades on right-wing radio makes it clear that even breaking Limbaugh’s decades of verbal sewage down into categories is difficult. Should they be divided by year? He certainly does not become less objectionable over time. If anything, the praise Limbaugh has received for daring to be an asshole has sent him on an unending quest for the most offensive statements he can create. By topic? There is no topic where he’s been less than hideous.</div>Cancer is a scourge. It should not happen to anyone. But having cancer does not remove one speck of damage that Limbaugh has done to the nation. And it’s a lot. That last night Trump handed over to Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor usually reserved for America’s best … shows that he is America’s worst.“Feminism,” said Limbaugh in his most-quoted line, “was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.” It was on his radio show that the slur “feminazi” was coined, as Limbaugh bellowed daily against the crime of women seeking to claim value not given to them by men. “Militant feminism” was another of those terms that slipped into a million conversations, deployed against any woman who dared to speak in public. Among the many sins Limbaugh laid at this altar, he declared that abortion was how militant feminists “impose their will on the rest of society, particularly on men.” The idea of consent has been a favorite target of Limbaugh’s attacks, or more properly, in his defense of rape. “If the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police,” said Limbaugh. “But consent is the magic key to the left.”If the idea that women might deny men sex is worth Limbaugh pounding his studio table, so is the idea that women have any role to play in the world besides generating babies. It’s not just his unending lies about abortion; birth control of any kind is offensive to Limbaugh. He famously referred to college student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for arguing that contraceptives should be more widely available. But even that might pale beside the amount of time Limbaugh has spent warring against condoms—as a means of both preventing pregnancy and guarding against disease. In the process, he’s repeatedly made claims concerning failure rates and “holes” that have sowed confusion and generated a genuine threat to health that has almost certainly left behind a body count. Oh, and along the line Limbaugh claimed that the average penis was now somehow smaller because of feminazis.When people weren’t Limbaugh’s target, he had a whole planet to pick on. He told his listeners that both Styrofoam and plastic were biodegradable, but that paper is not. When he was not declaring the climate crisis a hoax—or a conspiracy—and attacking scientists, Limbaugh was constantly making up his own statistics, such as pushing the now widely cited idea that there is “more forest in North America now than when Columbus landed.” There’s not.And, of course, there was racism. There was constant racism. Limbaugh told a black listener who phoned in to take “that bone out of your nose and call me back.” If that racist statement is too subtle, Limbaugh also had some comments about the NAACP to make things super clear. “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal,” said Limbaugh. “They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.” Turning to President Obama, Limbaugh laughed about the nickname “Curious George," taken from the monkey in children’s books. As African American unemployment was going down under President Obama, Limbaugh constantly insisted that it was going up, that black Americans were “depressed” because Obama was a “hoax,” and also that black women in America were very upset over Tiger Woods’ “choice of females.” Woods was far from the only black athlete who frequently wound up in Limbaugh’s crosshairs. He used his brief stint as an NFL commentator to sneer at quarterback Donovan McNabb as someone who had no real talent and who was only leading a team because "the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well."Of course, Republicans don’t just love Limbaugh for his racism, sexism, anti-environmentalism, and just plain ignorance. They’re also there for his insightful political points—such as calling Amy Carter "the most unattractive presidential daughter in the history of the country," Chelsea Clinton—12-year-old Chelsea Clinton—the “White House dog.” In these days where it’s a criminal offense to mention the name of Donald Trump’s children, Republicans are still chuckling at these chestnuts.Naturally, Limbaugh was also a big fan of that other Republican favorite: torture. He dismissed war crimes at Abu Ghraib, saying, “It's sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank. Sort of like that kind of fun.” When that statement generated some pushback, Limbaugh was having nothing of it. He had this cogent defense of those involved: “I'm talking about people having a good time. These people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?” Apparently beating, shocking, and setting dogs on helpless people is a great emotional release. On the other hand, Limbaugh was really against the facility at Guantanamo Bay … for its shortage of torture. “We need to call it, 'Gitmo, the Muslim resort,'” said Limbaugh. “Any resort that treated people like this would have ads all over the New York Times trying to get people to come down and visit for some R&R, for some rest and relaxation.”It’s impossible to find a topic on which Limbaugh hasn’t been odious. On which he hasn’t been intentionally hurtful. On which he hasn’t been cruel, spiteful, and deceitful. It’s difficult to find a single admirable quality in the man, either on the air or off.But for America’s right … he’s right. Limbaugh is the man who showed them you could make a living from nastiness, build a movement on pure hate. No wonder Trump loves him.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rush-limbaugh/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Limbaugh slams Trump’s lawyers: They promised 'blockbuster' evidence — then 'nothing happened' - Alternet.org ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rush-limbaugh-the-us-is-trending-toward-secession-and-a-peaceful-coexistence-between-red-america-and-blue-america-is-impossible/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Limbaugh: US 'trending toward secession' — and ‘peaceful coexistence’ between red and blue states is impossible - Alternet.org ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rush-limbaugh/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Limbaugh says the US may be 'trending toward secession' — and ‘peaceful coexistence’ could be impossible - Alternet.org ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/rush-limbaugh/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Right-wing talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh dead at 70 - Alternet.org ›</a></li></ul></div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-has-done-more-to-permanently-damage-america-than-any-man-not-named-donald-trump/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-has-done-more-to-permanently-damage-america-than-any-man-not-named-donald-trump/</a>
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</div><div><a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/02/19/rip-rush-limbaugh/">https://theintercept.com/2021/02/19/rip-rush-limbaugh/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div data-reactid="217" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AFTER RUSH LIMBAUGH died on Wednesday, there was an outpouring of analysis of his impact on U.S. politics. He popularized a hard-right perspective on economics, celebrating the worthy wealthy and pouring scorn on the undeserving poor. Along the way, he amassed a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars.What’s gotten no attention, however, is the hilarious irony at the core of Limbaugh’s life: His career and wealth were a handout from the U.S. government.This is because Limbaugh was a radio broadcaster. The section of the electromagnetic spectrum used for radio is an extremely valuable resource, and different stations in the same area can’t broadcast at the same frequency. This means the federal government has to regulate radio, and grant monopolies in the form of licenses to broadcast at every point on the band. And until fairly recently, the government handed out these licenses — and thereby the opportunity to exploit the radio spectrum — at essentially no cost.this situation is equivalent to huge gold mines on public land. Imagine if the government simply gave the rights to extract the gold to corporations, and then the corporations hired a contractor to mine the gold, splitting the proceeds with them. The contractor would easily grow stupendously wealthy. But it would be a little hard to take if he constantly lectured everyone else about the nobility of the rich and the dangers of dependence on the government.</div><div data-reactid="228" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Yet this is exactly what Limbaugh did. No. 1 on a <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/second35undeniabletruthsoflife/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Limbaugh list</a> of “undeniable truths”: “There is a distinct singular American culture — rugged individualism and self-reliance — which made America great.” No. 2 on the list: “The vast majority of the rich in this country did not inherit their wealth; they earned it. They are the country’s achievers, producers, and job creators.” Down at No. 27 is “Our cities have not been neglected, but poisoned with welfare dependency funds.”Limbaugh returned <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:rushlimbaugh.com+tax&client=safari&rls=en&ei=t5kvYO6SFYKF9PwPwPWt8Ak&start=10&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwiuypea5fXuAhWCAp0JHcB6C54Q8NMDegQIBxBH&biw=1649&bih=1009" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">obsessively</a> to these themes for decades, turning them into common sense in the minds of his listeners. “There will always be poor people,” <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/americas-anchorman/35undeniabletruthsoflife/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">he said</a>, and “this is not the fault of the rich.” He <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/10/15/the-top-1409-individual-taxpayers-pay-more-than-the-bottom-70-of-america-combined/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">proclaimed constantly</a> that the super-wealthy are not under-taxed, but woefully <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/10/27/mick-mulvaney-explains-who-really-pays-taxes-and-why-every-tax-cut-can-be-called-a-tax-cut-for-the-rich/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">over-taxed</a>. (The misleading statistics he used are one of the right’s<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;"> favorite lies</a>.)For Limbaugh, all of this was a deeply felt issue of morality. “The rich, as you know, are under assault,” he <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/01/21/in_defense_of_the_working_rich/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">explained</a>. “They are maligned, criticized, ridiculed, impugned, and instead they ought to be held out and up as the role models.” <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2008/10/23/liberals_and_the_dependent_class/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Meanwhile</a>, “There’s no question we have a dependent class in this country, and it’s growing. … These are people who have had their futures taken away from them.”Limbaugh’s own dependency on the federal government had its roots in the Communications Act of 1934. At the time, radio was a thrilling new invention, much like the internet in the 1990s. Idealists saw it as opening vast new possibilities for public education and edification, and tried to amend the act so it would reserve 25 percent of the spectrum for nonprofit organizations. Corporations had a different view, which was that they should be given the radio spectrum so they could commercialize it and make as much money as possible.The idealists lost when the Senate rejected their amendment. A previous 1927 bill had stated that each radio station “must be operated as if owned by the public. … It is as if people of a community should own a station and turn it over to the best man in sight with this injunction: ‘Manage this station in our interest.’” The 1934 Act downgraded this language to require that stations should operate for the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” What this meant was largely unspecified, and in any case would almost never be enforced.Instead, most of the radio spectrum was simply handed over to corporations, for fees so low that it might as well have been free. The broadcast industry then predictably consolidated, especially since it was largely impossible for companies to lose their licenses. Sixty years after the 1934 Act, the Federal Communications Commission did start auctioning off available radio spectrum, but there has always been exceedingly little to auction. All of Limbaugh’s main stations appear to have acquired their licenses decades before the auctions were established.This government dole made Limbaugh incredibly rich. In 2008, he <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/rush-limbaugh-net-worth" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">signed a contract</a> with Clear Channel Communications paying him $400 million over eight years. In 2018, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2018/12/06/the-worlds-highest-paid-radio-hosts-of-2018/?sh=7d52e6bd2560" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">he made</a> $84.5 million. He lived in a Florida mansion <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/real-estate/the-50m-florida-house-rush-limbaugh-left-behind-for-his-wife" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">worth</a> $50 million and had a net worth at the end of his life <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/rush-limbaugh-net-worth" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">estimated</a> at $600 million.In fairness to Limbaugh, he did work his radio gold mines with skill and verve. In a fairer world, he could have accumulated perhaps 1 percent of his wealth. It is also the case that he is by no means unique. Other radio hosts, the stars and creators of hit broadcast TV shows, professional athletes, corporate media executives — all have grown extraordinarily rich, thanks to the government’s giveaway of the electromagnetic spectrum.But few have had the gall to gobble down so much public wealth while simultaneously berating the public about their failures and laziness. Hopefully in the future Limbaugh will be remembered not just for the stones he threw, but the fact that he threw them while living in the world’s biggest glass house.</div></div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-media-2649880889">https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-media-2649880889</a></div><div>
</div><div>...<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/desperate-not-take-responsibility-what-theyve-set-motion-pro-trump-media" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Media Matters has a good round-up of the various strategies</a> being employed by right wing media to spin Wednesday's events as something less serious than an attempted coup spurred on by Trump himself. </div><div>
</div><div>Fox News' <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-warns-democrats-will-strip-americans-rights-you-were-born-response" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Tucker Carlson is reframing the insurrectionists </a>as the real victims, subject to imaginary liberal incursions on vaguely defined "freedom." <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/calling-fox-laura-ingraham-uses-trumpist-insurrection-condemn-black-lives-matters" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Laura Ingraham is working the "both sides do it" angle</a>, falsely equating random and disorganized acts of vandalism during Black Lives Matter protests with the Trump crowd's direct attempt to overthrow the U.S. government and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/media/reliable-sources-january-8/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">likely murder congressional leaders</a>. </div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-speculates-groups-antifa-are-ones-storming-us-capitol" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Sean Hannity is still working the "antifa did it!" lie</a>, even after the FBI announced no evidence linking anti-fascist activists to the Trump-motivated mob. And <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/all-sudden-protesting-congress-being-called-end-world-how-rush-limbaugh-and" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Rush Limbaugh is denying that the insurrection was violent</a>, saying it was simply people taking "selfies," ignoring the fact that five people died, including a Capitol police officer who was beat to death by someone wielding a fire extinguisher. These tactics of deflection also ignore that the mob clearly intended more mayhem— rioters weren't carrying weapons and wearing armor for their health — and it was only a matter of luck that things didn't get worse.</div>Unfortunately, such right-wing media pressure campaigns have worked, going back at least to the 1990s, when a campaign by figures like Rush Limbaugh to downplay <a href="https://www.salon.com/2012/04/22/oklahoma_city_the_bubba_job/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Timothy McVeigh's 1995 terrorist attack</a> on a federal building in Oklahoma City effectively shut down needed discourse about the role that extremist rhetoric on the right played in the attack. Similarly, <a href="https://archive.thinkprogress.org/republicans-blasted-obama-administration-for-warning-about-right-wing-domestic-terrorism-de556496606c/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">feigned outrage on the right over an FBI report </a>in 2009 over the threat of domestic terrorism from returning veterans caused the Obama administration to buckle, withdrawing the report. Since then, there's been an air of heightened skepticism in mainstream media towards efforts by progressive activists to highlight the growing threat of domestic terrorism. Mainstream journalists have tended, all too often, to treat those warnings as hysterical, even in the face of terrorist attacks in <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-is-the-best-of-america-no-wonder-a-white-nationalist-terrorist-attacked-it/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">El Paso</a> and <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/01/24/every-extremist-killing-in-u-s-last-year-was-linked-to-far-right-new-adl-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Pittsburgh</a>.Right-wing efforts to minimize right-wing violence can work, so Democrats need to act swiftly to take control of the narrative. Republicans must not be allowed to rewrite history to minimize the seriousness of this situation. And the best possible tool that Democrats have right now to evade right-wing gaslighting is impeachment.The good news is that Democrats seem to understand this. After giving Vice President Mike Pence the whole weekend to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office, House Democrats announced that they would be introducing <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/politics/house-democrats-impeachment-plans/index.html?utm_content=2021-01-11T14%3A23%3A24&utm_term=link&utm_source=twCNN&utm_medium=social" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">an article of impeachment on Monday</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/status/1348634080536104966" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">accusing Trump of "incitement of insurrection</a>." Still, there still seems to be some desire on the part of House Democrats to give Pence another 24 hours, leading to a confusing timeline where the impeachment is likely not to be brought to the floor until Tuesday....<div>
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<div>2020 retro</div><div>
</div><div>several weeks after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election, a caller told Rush Limbaugh that he was willing to die for President Donald Trump. “No one stands for us, Rush,” the caller said. “Only you and Donald Trump.”Due to Limbaugh’s willingness to constantly reassure an aging, conservative audience that their vision of America is never wrong, is part of what has enabled him to build such a devoted following and why he remains an incredible influence in the conservative movement. Here are just a <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84bfb89146ba9bdc000d050f6bc14ec761a65593412cacc5a8a4ce1e1477e4309652de861db297ace60a6bb3d9ecd423862412b48ab4b099" title="few ways Limbaugh misled" style="">few ways Limbaugh misled</a> his audience and proved to be a dangerous force in 2020.<ul style=""><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19, echoing his long-standing climate denialism. In now-infamous remarks on February 24, Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84bfb89146ba9bdc653a9b7b4feb09de93da5a2ededf23c5d2fb7a90ffbc131acdb602b26333895b487255b6bb05ad110bb7ad420b016000" title="compared" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">compared</a> coronavirus to “the common cold.” Ten months later and with more than 300,000 Americans dead, Limbaugh, like Fox News, is largely avoiding discussion of record daily death tolls.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh dismissed the systemic injustices highlighted by Black Lives Matter protesters. In the days after the killing of George Floyd, Limbaugh downplayed the threat of white supremacists, claiming, “The number of white people in America today who actually think they’re better than anybody else, on the basis of skin color, is so infinitesimally small you couldn’t count them.”</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh worked to undermine listeners’ trust in the 2020 electoral process. In addition to sexist and racist attacks on Democratic candidates, Limbaugh claimed that expanded mail-in voting would allow Democrats to “flood the system with fake ballots, fake votes. Since election day, Limbaugh has promoted wild conspiracy theories, including false viral claim that Wisconsin <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84bfb89146ba9bdc77f58099bf704bc2818557cd1c3da2720823d8efd3fc673296bc3dd24cb9e35f97639313bda91f2d2ed6e40981f9e919" title="reported" style="">reported</a> more votes than eligible voters.</li></ul></div><div>=
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</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rush-limbaugh-the-us-is-trending-toward-secession-and-a-peaceful-coexistence-between-red-america-and-blue-america-is-impossible/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rush-limbaugh-the-us-is-trending-toward-secession-and-a-peaceful-coexistence-between-red-america-and-blue-america-is-impossible/</a></div><div>
</div><div>during his long career in talk radio, Rush Limbaugh has thrived on us-versus-them rhetoric — claiming that that liberals and progressives have a viewpoint that is diametrically opposed to true Americanism. And during his <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-there-cannot-be-peaceful-coexistence-between-liberals-and-conservatives" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">December 9 broadcast</a>, the far-right radio host argued that the divisions between Red America and Blue America are so huge that "secession" might be inevitable.The 69-year-old Limbaugh told listeners, "I actually think — and I've referenced this, I've alluded to this a couple of times because I've seen others allude to this — I actually think that we're trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you're talking about votes." [twt]limbaugh went on to say that Red America and Blue America might have reached the point where agreeing to disagree is no longer possible."A lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can't go on this way," Limbaugh argued. "There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can't be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way."Although President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive win in the 2020 presidential election — winning 306 electoral votes and defeating President Donald Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote — most Republicans in Congress have been afraid to publicly acknowledge that Biden won. They are afraid of being attacked by Trump on Twitter or slammed by Limbaugh or another far-right pundits. Yet Limbaugh claimed that "RINOs" — Republicans in Name Only — are doing a lot to prevent conservatism from prevailing in the U.S."I know that there's a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that (secession) is where we're headed, whether we want to or not — whether we want to go there or not," Limbaugh told listeners. "I myself haven't made up my mind. I still haven't given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win. And our problem is the fact that there are just so many RINOs, so many Republicans in the Washington establishment who will do anything to maintain their membership in the establishment because of the perks and the opportunities that are presented for their kids and so forth."<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/rush-limbaughs-cancer-diagnosis-shouldnt-be-used-to-deify-him-here-are-5-times-he-showed-contempt-for-human-suffering/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Rush Limbaugh's cancer diagnosis shouldn't be used to deify him ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-has-done-more-to-permanently-damage-america-than-any-man-not-named-donald-trump/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Rush Limbaugh has done more to permanently damage America ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rush-limbaugh/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Limbaugh slams Trump's lawyers: They promised 'blockbuster ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/politics/rush-limbaugh-donald-trump-medal-of-freedom/index.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Rush Limbaugh awarded Medal of Freedom in surprise State of the ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Limbaugh-t.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Rush Limbaugh Is Just Getting Warmed Up - The New York Times ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/sunday-review/rush-limbaugh-trump-medal.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Rush Limbaugh in His Own Words - The New York Times ›</a></li></ul></div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-broadcast-group-spreads-debunked-project-veritas-disinformation">https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-broadcast-group-spreads-debunked-project-veritas-disinformation</a>no lnx vid pix
Sinclair Broadcast Group is spreading misinformation from the far-right group Project Veritas about Michigan ballots -- even though the premise behind the claim was debunked the same day as Sinclair began spreading it.
On November 4, Project Veritas published a video which included a conversation between the discredited organization’s founder, James O’Keefe, and an anonymous “whistleblower” whose voice is altered. The anonymous person alleges, without evidence, that the post office they supposedly work for in Traverse City, Michigan, was backdating mail-in ballots to make it look like they were received by Election Day on November 3 when they were actually collected November 4. The video attempts to make this person look more legitimate by showing blurred photos of what appears to be a U.S. Postal Service ID card.
Both PolitiFact and the Record-Eagle, a local newspaper based in Traverse City, debunked the premise central to these allegations the day after Project Veritas released its video. PolitiFact, citing city and county elections officials, explained that “the postmark on a ballot in Michigan isn’t relevant to whether or not the ballot gets counted. That’s because ballots in Michigan must have been received on Election Day in order to have been counted. ... The postmark date is not a factor.” The Record-Eagle also explicitly stated that “this backdating narrative could not have impacted the local election”:
“We already counted all the ballots received by 8 p.m. and they’re all secured, so we’re not counting any late ballots. So it doesn’t even matter if they did that, because it’s not going to affect anything,” said Bonnie Scheele, Grand Grand Traverse County Clerk.Ron Krumrie, union vice-president, confirmed the video does use the name of a current Barlow Branch supervisor and does depict a postal worker badge.Krumrie echoed Sheele’s assessment, saying no such scheme, if attempted, could not have succeeded in getting late ballots counted.In Michigan, it is arrival time, not postmark date, that determines the cut-off.“Absentee ballots had to be addressed to whatever town office the voter is registered in, and they had to be in the hands of the precinct by 8 p.m. Tuesday night,” Krumrie said.Tracy Wimmer, the secretary of state’s director of media relations, dismissed the video’s claims.“Postmarks on ballots don’t matter in Michigan because they have to be physically received by 8 p.m. on Election Day,” she said in an email. “Any ballot that someone attempted to turn in yesterday, regardless of the postmark, would be rejected.”Despite multiple postal and election officials debunking Project Veritas’ claims, Sinclair still published and spread an article by conservative political writer Ellie Bufkin uncritically repeating the far-right group’s unfounded fraud allegations:The nation is now in the third day of waiting for a result on the highly contentious presidential election, reports of irregularities among ballots and concerns over fraud have been shared in multiple states.Project Veritas, a conservative news outlet, published a video late Wednesday in which an unidentified person claiming to be a Michigan postal worker alleged that postal marks were being altered to show that ballots arrived before the Nov. 3 deadline.
Veritas’s report was similar to several other accusations across the country that alleged ballot irregularities, most of which would swing in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Key battleground states were called for Biden Wednesday, including Michigan and Wisconsin, but as of Thursday, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has requested a recount in Wisconsin and filed a suit over reports of fraudulent vote counts in Michigan.This right-wing election disinformation was shared on dozens of local Sinclair TV station websites across the country.
Sinclair Broadcast Group articles uncritically repeating Project Veritas claims about Michigan ballotsThe article was also shared on at least 20 Facebook pages belonging to Sinclair-owned or -operated stations.
Sinclair stations sharing articles pushing false Project Veritas claims on FacebookAdditionally, at least two Sinclair stations broadcast the Project Veritas allegations on their local news programs. WPBN in Traverse City covered the allegations at least five times -- though unlike the Sinclair article, it mentioned both that the claims were unverified and that according to Michigan law, this alleged scheme wouldn’t work.
Video fileCitationFrom the November 5, 2020, edition of WPBN's 7&4 News at 11PM
AMANDA SKRZYPCHAK (ANCHOR): Accusations made in a video interview by Project Veritas has launched an investigation by the U.S. Postal Service. UpNorthLive News has not been able to independently confirm the authenticity of the interview or video, and will not air it at this time. However, this is video of the Traverse City Barlow Branch, where the video claims a postal supervisor instructed employees to take mail-in ballots received on Wednesday and postmark them Tuesday, November 3. According to Michigan law, ballots have to be in the clerk's office by 8 at night on Election Day. A communication spokesperson for the Postal Service sent us this statement saying the postal service “is aware of the video, which has been referred to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Office of the Inspector General.”WSBT in South Bend, Indiana, likewise mentioned that the Project Veritas allegations were unverified, but it failed to include an explanation that these claims would have no effect on the election even if they were true.vid CitationFrom the November 6, 2020, edition of WSBT 22 First in the Morning 6am
LEANNE TOKARS (ANCHOR): The inspector general is investigating an allegation of voter fraud involving mail-in ballots in Michigan. Federal investigators arrived at a post office branch in Traverse City yesterday. The investigation comes after a conservative group called Project Veritas posted a video that implied postal workers were backdating mail-in ballots. Now in that video, a postal supervisor allegedly instructs employees to take ballots received Wednesday and backdate them with a Tuesday postmark. Nothing in this claim or video has been independently verified.
Project Veritas has released multiple videos after Election Day that attempt to discredit how the Postal Service is handling mail-in ballots, usually by claiming that postal workers are backdating ballots received after November 3. So far, the group has targeted Michigan and Pennsylvania with this narrative and also released a secretly recorded video that purports to show a postal worker in Nevada offering ballots to a Project Veritas operative. These post-Election Day videos are heavily edited, short, and offer no corroboration, but they have already received widespread attention from right-wing figures -- including Rush Limbaugh, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Donald Trump Jr. -- who are citing them as evidence to falsely suggest significant voter fraud is happening in swing states. Project Veritas, in the meantime, continues to beg for tips from supporters about alleged voter fraud.=</div><div>=
<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-can-only-explain-election-one-way-vast-conspiracy-theories">https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-can-only-explain-election-one-way-vast-conspiracy-theories</a></div><div>
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<div>he and tuck both mock CA agw</div><div><h3 class="editorial-compacttitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.33333; margin: 0px; background-color: rgb(247, 249, 251);"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/rush-limbaugh-falsely-claims-its-absolute-bunk-climate-change-has-worsened" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; outline: 0px;"> Limbaugh falsely claims “it’s absolute bunk” that climate change has worsened the California wildfires</a></h3><p class="dateline-compact" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0.3rem 0px 0px; align-items: center; display: flex; font-weight: 600; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase; background-color: rgb(247, 249, 251);"><svg viewbox="0 0 24 24" class="icon icon--article" aria-labelledby="icon-label--article" /><use xlink:href="#article" xmlns:xlink="xlink" /><time datetime="2020-09-11T17:53:22-0400" style="box-sizing: border-box;">09/11/20 5:53 PM EDT</time><div><div>=</div><div>random grab 920 mma</div><div>
</div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-margin-cell" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px; word-break: normal; border-collapse: collapse;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; background-color: transparent; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv2304804704camarker-inner" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: normal; border-collapse: collapse;"><h2 style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1;">Week In Dumb</h2></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv2304804704stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv2304804704camarker-inner" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px; word-break: normal; border-collapse: collapse;"><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 31px;"><ul style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial;"><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Fox host Jesse Watters <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e28b81cc3b183c57ee578ed58acacf339a74b6c75cc64864787768c4bc62991ece4dab4b130663b94cc703462c696b75b4" title="claims">claimed</a> COVID-19 lockdowns cause an “explosion in cases and deaths."</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Fox anchor Martha MacCallum <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e2cdabe66bb892c27b1983715cb2a9d3b2e38e1dd95444ba74f67ea8ae5dfb3bf5ac2e791e673811f5dbb285cdc29dee2c" title="claims">claimed</a> that “nobody is being supportive” of the Kenosha shooter one day after Trump himself defended the Kenosha shooter.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">TPUSA's <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e2872c60d38132a17de186452b3b979344d7c9b003fd69165615dc031ec7fc4bf5ce218a9797baea9ce32eaa62eae03548" title="Charlie Kirk">Charlie Kirk</a>: “By historical standards, this is not a pandemic."</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Rush Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e23efab9a9702c48eafd9da399b3756b069d095d11314882ba0d24c26b55b0641e4eafe2346afab5377d8ca07472cc6ab9" title="claimed that">claimed that</a> the report of Trump disrespecting fallen troops was a plot to distract from the "Pelosi hair salon story."</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e2fff7d58d70524ab34fca36df2218559338590fc3eab536d23531d55f524392594f076dd65eb74c13080fa91ec4e5d104" title="also pushed">also pushed</a> a new conspiracy theory about mail-in voting, and his plan for Trump to steal the election.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Tucker Carlson guest Eric Metaxas <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e283430313fb1c9b42ed47fbeb9965099bf31220e3c4bd8962a50ced5a085b4cf91818c3b24635e3dc68babc0a0503deb5" title="compares">compared</a> recognizing “white privilege” in church to having a “swastika on the altar."</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Fox's Tammy Bruce <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e28a1a29509ce9c3960703f0462c04a29730f4203aa4fb29aaaed5eaf5e84f18d9dc37aad8b5a6651a3b6fb5f85225f7bb" title="claims">claimed</a> Donald Trump “never said” there were “very fine people on both sides." That's <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=b3d79ada348659e28347f9c71584c43d527840d618aa58a3866b8377861aa3dcc05f64580610ba7a5976f1ccd9ac5c5583a4fc23ba6a14c9" title="a total lie">a total lie</a>.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Fox host Greg Gutfeld <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763c5f344c40bab874d6a07cb90a5408c8a4c1d62577be0e0a1a904aa4469a1866c542d5eeb7d60ea1059af45a07b46800fb" title="dismisses">dismissed</a> violence from right-wing militias as “a lie” and “easily disprovable.”</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Trump <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763c614bd2e9b402548f5dc572330fa89924c4b8703205c36c9fc2020b857836a888430584bdcf2fd1abb5498307cacc1079" title="encouraged">encouraged</a> his supporters to commit voter fraud, but too much of the media responded with a shrug.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Anti-vaccine figure Del Bigtree <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763c97ac8fec4358d48dae9be5d1c38a216b213a845651fb8fa1388d118be43b59d276f428cdc572ed102ddfb02753ac55ac" title="partnered">partnered</a> with Roku after YouTube banned him for sharing dangerous coronavirus misinformation; he's still on Facebook as well.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">After Kenosha shootings, former Sheriff David Clarke <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763ceccc6fac0ca12df51f1df0ce5b168c18213bfe13a2fbbf3be2fd674241726d3f94212510d2e6c82c01483be97b90ad4a" title="advised">advised</a> radio listeners on how to get away with killing protesters.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Mainstream media <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763cafcc18367b515925030cb575a36cc2723a7ec1e9e291f8297620bc5edbca4ebac8c51af37899bb6b3222e89f1cab5e83" title="are whitewashing">are whitewashing</a> Patriot Prayer, a violent far-right group in Portland.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style: disc;">Facebook's political ad ban before Election Day is <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=d1bec079b994763c6a15bbbb03f7dc453dfd6dfcfae3ca801f6f15dc0a933e40a7fa19996da504fc702fcc810dcb1c5c8344e96de5206222" title="little more">little more</a> than a public relations stunt.</li></ul></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div></div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>no lnx twt many</div><div>
</div><div>It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”</div><div>
</div><div>Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.</div><div>
</div><div>Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.</div><div>
</div><div>The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.</div><div>
</div><div>What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.” In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.</div><div>
</div><div>A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH. This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.</div><div>
</div><div>The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”</div><div>
</div><div>Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.</div><div>
</div><div>Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.</div><div>
</div><div>[twt]</div><div>
</div><div>When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”</div><div>
</div><div>“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”</div><div>
</div><div>Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”</div><div>
</div><div>Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.</div><div>
</div><div>As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.</div><div>
</div><div>Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.</div><div>
</div><div>Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh. In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.</div><div>
</div><div>On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”</div><div>
</div><div>This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.</div><div>
</div><div>Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.</div><div>
</div><div>When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.</div><div>
</div><div>Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%. To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.</div><div>
</div><div>One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.</div><div>
</div><div>When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings. However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”</div><div>
</div><div>This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.</div><div>
</div><div>Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.</div><div>
</div><div>Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.</div><div>
</div><div>Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)</div></div><div>=</div></div><div>
<div>2x?</div><div><a href="https://www.edf.org/news/environmental-defense-fund-report-documents-limbaughs-errors">https://www.edf.org/news/environmental-defense-fund-report-documents-limbaughs-errors</a></div><div>
</div><div><div class="column content-intro" id="pageIntro" style="margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 40px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; line-height: 30px; box-sizing: border-box; float: none; width: 670px; clear: both;"><h1 style="margin: 0px; line-height: 45px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Environmental Defense Fund Report Documents Limbaugh's Errors</h1></div><div class="column content-wrapper clearfix" id="contentArea" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; width: 960px;"><div class="content-primary content-primary-col2" id="contentColumn" style="margin: 0px auto; border: 0px; outline: 0px; line-height: 30px; width: 670px; float: none; padding: 0px !important;"><div class="region region-content" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px;"><div id="block-edf-content" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px;"><article role="article" about="/news/environmental-defense-fund-report-documents-limbaughs-errors" class="edf"><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px;"><div class="date" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; line-height: 18px !important;"><div class="date" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; line-height: 18px !important;">November 29, 1994</div></div><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px;"><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px;">(November 29, 1994—Washington, D.C.) The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) today released <a class="" href="http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pdf.cfm?ContentID=2432&FileName=WayThingsReallyAre%2Epdf" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.15s ease-out 0s;">The Way Things Really Are: Debunking Rush Limbaugh On The Environment</a>, a report analyzing some of the many scientific inaccuracies in the books The Way Things Ought To Be and See, I Told You So, written by radio and television personality Rush Limbaugh. The study corrects Limbaugh’s claims in three areas: Ozone depletion, climate change, and old growth forests.“Limbaugh’s environmental opinions have more in common with science fiction than with science fact,” said EDF senior scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “His claim that impending global climate change is not real and that ozone depletion is a hoax flies in the face of conclusions reached by the World Meteorological Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and thousands of scientists around the world.”“The conservative Reagan and Bush Administrations were once skeptical about ozone depletion and climate change too, but based on the facts they signed treaties addressing these problems,” said Oppenheimer. “Limbaugh’s repeated insistence that these problems don’t exist insults the intelligence of his listeners, viewers, and readers.”“Limbaugh’s views on the spotted owl and forests are disconnected from scientific reality,” said David Wilcove, an EDF ecologist. “He ignores hard evidence that the owl is in danger of extinction and misinterprets the studies he cites. His habitually misleading and erroneous assertions combined with the use of discredited and outdated studies make Limbaugh’s point of view virtually irrelevant to any informed discussion of the environment.”“Limbaugh is correct on one point,” said Oppenheimer. “These issues are confusing and difficult to communicate. Unfortunately, it is Limbaugh himself that is causing a great deal of this confusion through his continued distortion of science.”The Environmental Defense Fund, a leading, national, NY-based nonprofit organization, represents 250,000 members. EDF links science, economics, and law to create innovative, economically viable solutions to today’s environmental problems.
EXCERPTS:

RUSH FICTION: “Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than 1,000 times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical and insensitive corporations in history…”SCIENTIFIC FACT: Cumulatively speaking, Pinatubo’s impact on the ozone layer has been about 50 times less than that of CFC’s. Volcanoes emit two sorts of ozone-depleting compounds: hydrochloric acid (amounts measured in the stratosphere were largely unchanged by the Pinatubo eruption) and sulfur dioxide (converted in the stratosphere into tiny particles which act in combination with chlorine from man-made CFC’s. This temporarily increased the rate of ozone depletion by several percentage points during 1992 and 1993). Nearly all the chemicals emitted by Pinatubo have already washed out of the stratosphere, unlike CFC’s, which remain for as long as a century.RUSH FICTION: Limbaugh claims environmental “prophets of doom” have exaggerated the problem of ozone depletion, suggesting that it has been limited to “occasional reduced levels of ozone over Antarctica.”[//singer?]SCIENTIFIC FACT: Substantially reduced levels of ozone have been measured over most of the globe, including N. America, Europe, and elsewhere. Scientists have observed a thinning of the ozone layer at all latitudes outside the tropics. By 1991, the depletion over N. America averaged nearly 5%. Since 1991, ozone depletion has further intensified. The most recent World Meteorological Organization assessment confirms that “the weight of scientific evidence” points to CFC’s and related compounds as the chief cause of global depletion.RUSH FICTION: “Algore’s (sic) book is full of calculated disinformation. For instance, he claims that 98% of scientists believe global warming is taking place. However a Gallup poll of scientists involved in global climate research shows that 53% do not believe that global warming has occurred, 30% say they don’t know, and only 17% are devotees of this dubious theory.”SCIENTIFIC FACT: These numbers, apparently from a George Will column of 3 September 1992, are supposed to show the findings of a Gallup poll taken in late 1991 to ascertain the opinions of research scientists concerning global warming. Nowhere in the actual poll results are there figures that resemble those cited by Will or Limbaugh. Instead, the poll found a substantial majority of the scientists polled, 66%, believed that human-induced global warming was already occurring. Only 10% disagreed, and the remainder were undecided.RUSH FICTION: “A fact you never hear the environmentalist wacko crowd acknowledge is that 96% of the so-called `greenhouse’ gases are not created by man, but by nature.”SCIENTIFIC FACT: The greenhouse effect is, by and large, a natural phenomenon, produced by gases in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor that have warmed the Earth for eons, enabling its climate to support life. However, in nature these gases usually remain in balance, leading to a stable climate, while the greenhouse gases added by humans over the last 200 years have accumulated to the point that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, for example, is now more than 25% above what it had been for the previous 10,000 years. The scientific consensus is that the accumulation of CO2 and other gases due to human activity will alter the climate substantially, warming the globe by three to eight degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.RUSH FICTION: “It reminds me of the researchers who recently ventured into the forests of California. Do you know what they found? No, not Algore. They found spotted owls. It seems the place is teeming with spotted owls -even though they’re supposed to be an endangered species.”SCIENTIFIC FACT: Fewer than 2,000 pairs of the Northern spotted owl are thought to survive in California forests—a number that could hardly be described as “teeming”. More importantly, at a meeting of experts called by the U.S. government in December 1993 at Fort Collins, Colorado, virtually every biologist who presented data concluded that the total numbers of the owl are still in decline, and the population loss rate appears to be accelerating.</div></div></div></article></div></div></div></div></div><div>=<div>=</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVzrqYyNjVdpA2RCHJG6XZcGcH2S-brSMgnM4OWkNA4/edit">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVzrqYyNjVdpA2RCHJG6XZcGcH2S-brSMgnM4OWkNA4/edit</a></div><div>
<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-covid-19-lockdowns-are-attempt-establish-global-world-government">https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-covid-19-lockdowns-are-attempt-establish-global-world-government</a></div><div><div>
</div><div>this triggered [heh] my 4 horse analysis/ map]</div></div><div>
</div><div>LIMBAUGH (HOST): I just ran across something, and it breaks my -- it breaks heart. It really does, even though it doesn’t surprise me. USA Today is running an op-ed piece today by somebody I’ve never heard of. It’s some guy named David Rothkopf, R-o-t-h-k-o-p-f. Never heard of him, doesn’t matter. It’s an op-ed piece. It’s not a news story, but it will probably be a news story before long.And here is the headline: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/26/donald-trump-shatters-american-national-greatness-myths-column/5489389002/&source=gmail&ust=1595967931346000&usg=AFQjCNHANPW2Hfghghoo7VXs-IV7ex7fmA" href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/26/donald-trump-shatters-american-national-greatness-myths-column/5489389002/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">“America’s National Greatness Myths Are Shattering. Can They Survive? Should They Survive?”</a> National greatness myths. So, you see, here’s another column, another op-ed piece from the left which has no respect whatsoever for this country, no understanding of the greatness, of the exceptionalism, of the uniqueness, of the blessed nature of this country. And it’s not hard to understand those things if they’re ever explained to you.If people who understand how this country came to be can explain it to people, they will be in awe of it. It is a magical, wonderful story about how this country became something no other country ever has, about how this country was the first in human history to embody, acknowledge, and promote the concept of human liberty as that which comes first in any society. It comes before a government. It comes before government power. This country embodied the idea that a Constitution should limit what government can do to people, not limit the people.The fact that this country established and acknowledged that by virtue of our holy creation that we have certain unalienable rights, which means they can’t be taken away by anybody. That’s what inalienable means. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, those three things were acknowledged to be the natural state of the human being in the United States and everywhere. Never before in history had that been done.Most people in this world from the beginning of time have lived under tyranny, have lived under bondage, have lived under dictatorship, have lived in poverty, have never known the standard of living this country made possible. The greatness of this country’s not a myth. The greatness of this country is very specific. There's [[are]] specific reasons, specific explanations for it. It’s just heartbreaking that they haven’t been taught in almost 50 years.We’ve lost two generations to the public education system, which then enables some dummkopf like this guy to write a piece saying America’s national greatness myths are shattering. Should they survive, can they survive? Here’s the subhead. “Rather than restore some idealized, jingoistic version of who we are, let’s use this painful moment of self-doubt to remake the reality of America.”Speak for yourself, buddy. We who love this country have zero self-doubt about it. None. “Let’s use this painful moment of self-doubt to remake the reality -” how about we use this painful moment of self-doubt to vanquish the American left, to vanquish communism and socialism, which has never worked anywhere? How about we use this painful moment to teach more and more Americans the truth about their great and wonderful and God-blessed country?“Live long enough and you can see the rise and fall of myths in real time. It does not take statues being pulled from their pedestals to reveal the fragility of the conjured history upon which so much of society depends. … The world is not, we are reminded, as we believed it was. Not only is that unsettling, it forces us to ask, what else about our bedrock beliefs about life may someday turn to quicksand? National myths can crash in an instant.”[[National myths can crash in an instant.]] National myths are not crashing. National myths are not collapsing of their own weight of immorality and falsehood. National myths don’t exist. What’s happening is that America’s greatness is being disassembled right in front of our eyes. America’s history is being erased right in front of our eyes. Everything about America is being substantially destroyed, from our economy to our liberty and freedom, to our Constitution. And it is done at the urging, at the bequest of, with the support of the Democrat Party of the United States of America.This -- none of this could be happening of its own. It couldn't -- this is not happening because a majority of the American people want this. That’s what makes this so outrageous. We are being ruled and governed here by a really small minority who are using the power of fear and intimidation and economic destruction — that is key.Once you take people’s money away from them, you own them. Once you take people’s ability to earn a living and you become the provider, you own them. That’s the first thing they did, was shut down this nation’s economy. Now they’re trying to get it shut down again under bogus COVID-19 numbers.“America’s National Greatness Myths Are Shattering. Can They Survive?” They damn well better survive or the world is not gonna be the place — you know in Italy right now, do you know how much money Italy is losing a day? Italy is losing $115 million a day in the hotel business alone. Do you know why? Because nobody from the United States is traveling or anywhere else. COVID-19 has [[it]] shut down[[.]] -- now, in the past it’s been, shall we say, fashionable to rip America as the biggest and the baddest, the United Nations rips America, other people rip America.But at the end of the day, everybody needed America. Every nation on Earth’s economy needs America. But our economy has been shut down. We got 44 million people out of work. We’ve got in Chicago alone 4,400 businesses which have been shut down and are said never to reopen again. And that’s one city. In Rome and throughout Italy, they’re losing $115 million a day via tourism. There isn’t any. They miss the United States.The world depends on it. This is another thing that is by design in all of this. You take out the United States of America and you take out the United States economy, and you have set up your precious globalism and world government because you are creating worldwide poverty and thus worldwide need. And when you, the global government or whoever you are, become the provider to those in need, guess who you own?But none of this could be happening if it weren’t for the fact that the United States is under assault and being taken down on the basis of a pack of lies. That our great history is nothing but a bunch of lies, that our history is nothing but a bunch of myths. How in the world can anyone with any kind of intellect at all look at the United States, see its role that it played in the establishment of human liberty and freedom, and want no part of it?Well, obviously people to whom human liberty and freedom are a problem. To communists and socialists, human liberty and freedom, free choice, that’s a problem. The state becomes the repository of all freedom. The state determines who can do what, when, where, why. The state determines who has what. The state determines who gets what.But how in the world can this -- I ask myself how in the world can otherwise intellectually qualified people not value the concept of individual liberty and freedom? And yet people who are leading this anti-American movement are of exactly that frame of mind, that somehow individual liberty and freedom pose the threat, pose the problem to the ongoing future.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>mma</div><div>note attack at strongest pt empathy: also emotion/vuln is wimpy/womanly, trump want to have all xian, joe a commie who hates god[tho photoshop him at prayer --> hide in basement</div><div>
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background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; display: block; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;" /><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-attacks-bidens-religious-faith-talk-about-family-tragedies-crutch" rel="bookmark" class="teaser-cardlink" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; display: block; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;" /><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-attacks-bidens-religious-faith-talk-about-family-tragedies-crutch" rel="bookmark" class="teaser-cardlink" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; display: block; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;">Limbaugh attacks Biden’s faith: Discussing tragedies like his son dying is “a crutch”</a></h2><svg viewbox="0 0 24 24" class="icon icon--video" aria-labelledby="icon-label--video" /><use xlink:href="#video" xmlns:xlink="xlink" /><time datetime="2020-08-07T17:04:15-0400" style="box-sizing: border-box;">08/07/20 5:04 PM EDT</time></div></div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/black-lives-matter/rush-limbaugh-protesters-portland-are-actors-not-real-mothers-and-veterans">https://www.mediamatters.org/black-lives-matter/rush-limbaugh-protesters-portland-are-actors-not-real-mothers-and-veterans</a></div><div>
</div><div> LIMBAUGH (HOST): A couple of sound bites here to illustrate what is happening. Here is Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, reaming the attorney general, Bill Barr — or trying to.(BEGIN CLIP)REP. JERRY NADLER (D-NY): You really can’t hide behind legal fictions this time, Mr. Barr. It’s all out in the open, where the people can see what you are doing for themselves. The president wants footage for his campaign ads — and you appear to be serving it up to him as ordered. In most of these cities, the protests had begun to wind down before you marched in and confronted the protesters.And the protesters aren’t mobs. They are mothers and veterans and mayors. In this moment, real leadership would entail de-escalation, collaboration, and looking for ways to peaceably resolve our differences. Instead, you used pepper spay and truncheons on American citizens. And now you are projecting fear and violence nationwide, in pursuit of obvious political objectives. Shame on you, Mr. Barr. Shame on you.(END CLIP)RUSH: Folks, every bit of that is just not true. “It’s all out in the open. People can see what you’re doing for themselves. The president wants footage for his campaign ads, and you appear to be serving it up to him.” As though it’s all peaceful out there. “Yeah, there’s just — there are no mobs. There’s mothers, there are veterans, there are mayors.”There aren’t any mothers. There aren’t any veterans. These are people that are actors — they are paid. They’re antifa. They are Black Lives Matter. And they are all being paid, and they’re putting on different uniforms — different T-shirts and so forth — to look like veterans, to look like mothers. But they are all violent, leftist, anti-American protesters, in association with the Democrat Party.Bill Barr is not creating these protests. He’s not creating the video. It’s the Democrats who are trying to suppress the video, and make it look like something that it isn’t. I mean — this is what I meant when I said it is surreal and it’s difficult to describe. Because there is reality that you can see — it’s staring you in the face. And right to your face, these Democrats are attempting to redefine what’s going on. “Bill Barr is responsible for the violence to give Donald Trump campaign ad video.”</div><div>
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</div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/black-lives-matter/rush-limbaugh-millennial-white-women-are-becoming-your-average-neer-do-well-hood">https://www.mediamatters.org/black-lives-matter/rush-limbaugh-millennial-white-women-are-becoming-your-average-neer-do-well-hood</a></div><div>
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<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-complains-about-dr-anthony-faucis-interviews-its-kind-stuff-just">https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-complains-about-dr-anthony-faucis-interviews-its-kind-stuff-just</a></div><div>7/10
<div><div>=</div><div><div>5/24/grab</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/">https://www.mediamatters.org/</a></div><div>
</div><div>Coronavirus and Fox News:</div><div>Trump watching Fox News amid pandemic </div><div>Timeline: How Trump’s Fox News fixation shaped the federal coronavirus response</div><div>05/07/20 11:52 AM EDT</div><div>Fox & Friends advertises protests against social distancing 4/18/20</div><div>Promotion, praise, and a ton of coverage: How Fox News embraced protests against coronavirus safety measures</div><div>04/20/20 6:22 PM EDT</div><div>laura-ingraham-what-trump-needs-to-do-control-narrative-testing-04-21-2020.jpg</div><div>Fox News spins to “control the narrative” of Trump's failures on coronavirus testing</div><div>04/22/20 2:14 PM EDT</div><div>Hannity 4/9/20</div><div>Sean Hannity’s astounding coronavirus hypocrisy</div><div>04/10/20 2:22 PM EDT</div><div>Fox News interviews Arizona sheriff who won't enforce social distancing orders </div><div>Fox is cheering on rogue sheriffs linked to a pro-militia group</div><div>05/07/20 1:56 PM EDT</div><div>Sean Hannity</div><div>Six different polls show how Fox’s coronavirus coverage endangered its viewers</div><div>04/09/20 1:28 PM EDT</div><div>Sean Hannity defends Trump's outburst against reporter who asked him what he would say to frightened Americans</div><div>How Fox’s Sean Hannity has downplayed the coronavirus pandemic in America</div><div>04/01/20 1:17 PM EDT</div><div>Laura-Ingraham-Attack-Seth-Rich-Family.png</div><div>Laura Ingraham's coronavirus coverage has been a cesspool of misinformation — and a danger to public health</div><div>05/08/20 7:08 AM EDT</div><div>Ebola Trump</div><div>Fox News' coronavirus coverage stands in stark contrast to its coverage of Ebola in 2014</div><div>03/10/20 11:51 AM EDT</div><div>Coronavirus and right-wing media:</div><div>hugh-hewitt-mitchmcconnell-interview-states-bankruptcy-04-22-2020.jpg</div><div>Led by Hugh Hewitt, right-wing media cheer for states to file “bankruptcy” from coronavirus as a chance to cut public pensions</div><div>04/24/20 5:36 PM EDT</div><div>fake-news-radio-1.png</div><div>Across the country, right-wing talk radio hosts promote local protests against stay-at-home orders</div><div>04/24/20 10:27 AM EDT</div><div>rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-deaths-04-07-2020.jpg</div><div>Coronavirus deaths are being undercounted. Rush Limbaugh continues to allege the opposite.</div><div>04/07/20 5:18 PM EDT</div><div>Coronavirus social media</div><div>A Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and to right-wing media figures</div><div>04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT</div><div>Dr. Anthony Fauci</div><div>Pro-Trump media have ramped up attacks against Dr. Anthony Fauci</div><div>03/24/20 2:21 PM EDT</div><div>Coronavirus COVID-19</div><div>Right-wing media figures spread “empty hospitals" theory to downplay the threat of coronavirus</div><div>03/30/20 2:58 PM EDT</div><div>Chanel Rion OAN</div><div>Pro-Trump OAN pushes wild conspiracy theory that novel coronavirus was created in a North Carolina lab</div><div>03/18/20 11:26 AM EDT</div><div>Bryan Fischer</div><div>American Family Association is lying about coronavirus on its evangelical radio network</div><div>03/25/20 4:48 PM EDT</div><div>Facebook </div><div>The Daily Wire and The Western Journal use Facebook page networks to spread right-wing spin about coronavirus</div><div>03/25/20 4:08 PM EDT</div><div>Coronavirus and mainstream media:</div></div><div></div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vp-mike-pence-rewards-rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-another">https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vp-mike-pence-rewards-rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-another</a></div><div>
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</div><div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s anti-intellectualism didn’t come from nowhere — the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all</div><div>
</div><div>Written by The Washington Monthly April 24, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump recently created a stir by retweeting a call by a Republican politician to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. The reason: Fauci had the temerity to contradict the president on scientific facts. Then, whether out of fear or a willful suspension of intellect, the president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx proclaimed that Trump has been “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data”—in contradiction to the avalanche of lies Trump puts out in his daily propaganda rallies masquerading as pandemic briefings.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet these are but surface examples of an ongoing tension between experts and Trumpists. It is a dynamic that has been at play since the very beginning of the administration: the war between experts and propagandists, between actual facts and “alternative facts.” Driving it is a wave of anti-intellectualism growing in America. And now, in this era of pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives are at stake. So, too, is the nation’s credibility. Given Donald Trump’s relentless antipathy toward truth and expertise, the outlook doesn’t look promising.</div><div>
</div><div>As the novel coronavirus rampaged across the country, a storm broke out in the White House over how to respond. Rather than taking dramatic actions early on to curtail the spread of the virus and prepare states and hospitals to meet the coming surge, the administration reverted to its profound anti-intellectualism, all in a bid to deflect its own failure in protecting American lives.</div><div>
</div><div>Disturbingly, Trump promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychlorine to tackle the virus, despite the fact that it hasn’t gone through the proper testing and approval process. After hearing about a country doctor in upstate New York who claimed to have treated patients for the disease with a cocktail of hydroxychlorine and other drugs with positive results, the president ran with it as a magic bullet. “I’ll tell you what, what do you have to lose?” he said. A just-released Veterans Administration study shows not only no benefit from use of hydroxychlorine, but there were more deaths among patients given the drug.Then, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro asserted that studies have showed the drug to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in treating Covid-19 patients. Asked his qualifications for making such a claim, Navarro told CNN, “I’m a social scientist.” Others also trumpeting the medicine include the president’s usual Fox News chorus, led by Sean Hannity, and Rudolf Giuliani. This has had real impact: the White House directed health officials to put the anti-malarial medication ahead of other efforts to combat the outbreak. The federal government has since stockpiled 29 million pills.</div><div>
</div><div>Scientists, however, are counseling caution. “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist. American Medical Association President Patrice Harris added: “You could lose your life. It’s unproven.” Axios reported a major blow-up in the situation room at one point between Navarro and a skeptical Fauci, who has confided to colleagues that Trump “almost always” ignores the advice he gives him before the daily press briefings.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s own CDC issued a statement on April 7 saying, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Medical experts are cautioning it will take a minimum of 12 to 18 months to come up with a vaccine.</div><div>
</div><div>In the meantime, Trump is putting the public health at even greater risk by propagating lies and misinformation. As of this writing, the coronavirus has claimed more than 47,000 American lives. Fatalities far surpass those in China, a nation with four times our population. And the rate of confirmed cases is growing faster in the United States than in all of Western Europe. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts some 67,000 Americans could die by August. Right now, one American dies of coronavirus every 45 seconds.</div><div>
</div><div>How many more will die depends on who is calling the shots: experts or hacks.</div><div>
</div><div>The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous. There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives,and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences. He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously. That came after he disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunded a $200 million USAID program for detecting virus outbreaks overseas. Simply put, the president rid the government of some of its best resources to prepare for and respond to this kind of emergency. These actions come on top of the administration’s measures to marginalize science and fact-based research, including denying climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge. Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has named science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media. The coronavirus, Limbaugh said, “appears far less deadly” than the flu, but the government and the mainstream news media “keep promoting panic.”</div><div>
</div><div>The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking. Pro-Trump Pentecostal preacher Rodney Howard-Browne has called his followers to attend church services in defiance of social distancing restrictions, dismissing coronavirus as a “phantom plague.”</div><div>
</div><div>Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism also extends into the halls of Congress, where a sitting congressman declared a few years ago that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and where the chairman of a Senate environmental committee brought a snowball into the chamber to prove that climate change is a hoax.</div><div>
</div><div>The coronavirus is not a hoax. It’s a mega-killer. A month after President Trump assured everyone that it would “go away,” more than 850,000 Americans have tested positive and the U.S. leads the world in the number of Covid-19-related deaths. Now, with his call over the weekend to “liberate” states imposing shelter-in-place orders, and red-state governors taking a care-free approach to social distancing, the risk of these numbers burgeoning out of control becomes very real.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.</div><div>
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</div><div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh baselessly claims Fauci is a ‘Clinton sympathizer’ who wants to ‘get rid’ of Trump</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon April 9, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>Right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh baselessly accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of being a “Hillary Clinton sympathizer” who wants “to get rid of Donald Trump” during a Tuesday broadcast.</div><div>
</div><div>After claiming that the media tries to use its press briefings to undermine President Donald Trump, Limbaugh accused ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl of bringing in a reporter from Phoenix TV, a privately owned company stationed in Hong Kong with connections to the Chinese government. Limbaugh claimed that Fauci “gave Karl a-thumbs up, like a ‘job well done’ kind of thing” after the press briefing.</div><div>
</div><div>“We’ve got all of these Hillary Clinton sympathizers still in the medical expert team here, and we know that one thing has not changed,” Limbaugh added. “And that is these people’s desire — above everything else — to get rid of Donald Trump.”</div><div>
</div><div>“Can you believe these people don’t care about the economy being shut down? It is stunning to me. People are being ruined,” he continued. “I talked to a number of friends of mine. These are people that own their own business. A guy — a good friend of mine in South Carolina — told me he’s losing a million dollars a day. Another friend’s business is totally shut down — he’s ruined. And there’s no end in sight to this.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump and Fauci reportedly have a strained relationship. The president blocked Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine during a Sunday press briefing. Hydroxychloroquine is an unproven drug treatment for the novel coronavirus, which the president has hyped in previous statements even as he reportedly failed to disclose that he holds a financial interest in a French pharmaceutical company that manufactures it. Fauci has expressed frustration at the way Trump behaves during press conferences, telling Science magazine that he feels “exhausted” but “can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh concluded his monologue by falsely claiming that “there is an all-out subtle effort for the status quo because it’s going to hurt Donald Trump. That is the objective. That is the only thing at the forefront of some of these people’s minds while they portray themselves as being primarily concerned with public health.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump lashed out at Karl during the Tuesday press briefing after the ABC News reporter asked about an inspector general report which found that the federal government had failed hospitals in a number of ways, including not providing them with sufficient medical supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile and offering them inconsistent guidance (which the report also blamed on state and local authorities).</div><div>
</div><div>Trump berated Karl for not mentioning in his question that the official who issued the report, Christi Grimm, had been appointed principal deputy inspector general by former President Barack Obama. However, Trump never appointed a replacement inspector general when Grimm’s predecessor resigned in June 2019.</div><div>
</div><div>“Whenever he sees the words or hears the words ‘inspector general,’ he thinks these are the people who forced me to go through impeachment,” Karl told Mediaite’s Dan Abrams on Tuesday.</div><div>
</div><div>He also questioned the sincerity of Trump’s attacks on the press, observing that “he praises me to his friends, and then he’ll come out right after and blast me in front of the cameras. I know for a fact he does this with Maggie Haberman.”</div><div>
</div><div>You can watch the full video below via Media Matters for America:=</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/1144189/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/1144189/</a></div><div>
</div><div>rush ~ fauci hillary</div><div>
</div><div></div><div><div>=</div><div>4/20</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-writer-accuses-rush-limbaugh-of-having-blood-on-his-hands-for-dismissing-the-coronavirus-crisis/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-writer-accuses-rush-limbaugh-of-having-blood-on-his-hands-for-dismissing-the-coronavirus-crisis/</a></div><div>
</div><div>jon last bulwark</div><div>
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<div>an 320</div><div>
</div><div><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rush-limbaugh-argues-that-medical-experts-are-just-part-of-the-deep-state/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’</a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rush-limbaugh-argues-that-medical-experts-are-just-part-of-the-deep-state/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;"></a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/alex-henderson/" title="Posts by Alex Henderson" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-align: right; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Alex Hender</a>son</h3></div><div>
</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">an 320</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rush-limbaugh-argues-that-medical-experts-are-just-part-of-the-deep-state/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’</a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rush-limbaugh-argues-that-medical-experts-are-just-part-of-the-deep-state/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;"></a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/alex-henderson/" title="Posts by Alex Henderson" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Alex Hender</a>son</h3></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Alex Henderson March 27, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>Far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, like President Donald Trump, has been a frequent source of nonsense during the coronavirus crisis: on his February 24 show, he equated COVID-19 with “the common cold.” And on Friday, the 69-year-old Limbaugh argued that health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cannot be trusted because they are part of “the Deep State” and have an anti-Trump agenda.</div><div>
</div><div>In audio that Media Matters has posted on its website, embedded above, Limbaugh can be heard on Friday telling listeners, “We’ve talked about the Deep State all these years since Trump was elected — the Trump-Russia collusion, the FBI — well, the Deep State extends very deeply. And the American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh added, “And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while — and they’re at the CDC, and they’re at the NIH…. But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh, who lives in South Florida, went on to criticize social distancing measures in that part of the U.S.</div><div>
</div><div>“I’ve been watching people routinely accept whatever the authorities say,” Limbaugh told listeners. “Where I live, the local town government is driving around town, trying to spot people violating the social distancing ordinances. And when they see it, they publish it on their web site: ‘This is very troublesome. We at the town are very troubled by groups of people congregating, violating the social distancing.’ Well, what do you think people are going to do? People are not just going to sit around here and stop living.”</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh and Trump have both repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus crisis. Back in February, when thousands of people were dying from it in mainland China, Trump insisted that his critics were exaggerating the threat posed to other parts of the world.</div><div>
</div><div>On February 24, Limbaugh insisted that the mainstream media were exaggerating the threat posed by coronavirus as a way of attacking Trump, telling his audience, “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”</div><div>
</div><div>That day, Limbaugh also told listeners, “The drive-by media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as, ‘Oh, my God, if you get it, you’re dead’.… I think the survival rate is 98%. Ninety-eight per cent of people (who) get the coronavirus survive. It’s a respiratory system virus.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Stephen King</div><div>@StephenKing</div><div>Rush Limbaugh says coronavirus no worse than the common cold. Sage advice from a lifelong cigar smoker who has lung cancer.</div><div>
</div><div>In late February, Trump told reporters he had a “hunch” that the death rate from coronavirus was lower than what the World Health Organization (WHO) was reporting. And it was also during that period that Trump denounced coronavirus warnings coming from Democrats as a “hoax.” Since then, the number of deaths from coronavirus has passed 25,000 worldwide, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.</div><div>
</div><div>On March 11, Limbaugh argued that the cancelations of major events like basketball games and the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas were an overreaction.</div><div>
</div><div>“Where does this end?,” Limbaugh asserted. “Especially when you realize there are diseases out there that kill many more than are being killed by this.”</div><div>
</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div><div>
<div><ul style=""><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84a74f631ce0f26c2d53fd2c56b334f79d281c253e011ce0b8be0d0314506eb6fd879917f1044cae5f7c75b86e4d32cd0bfa9dc48f7f2e5a" title="told" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">told</a> Alex Jones that coronavirus in the U.S. is “the deep state” trying to take out Trump.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fox News and right-wing media <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84a74f631ce0f26cff6cd63f1f6032862d00a64e669b71b4f13af14212962971ffed3e37325368023fdddb88f4a2247e5323db63743bbd9f" title="have seized on" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">have seized on</a> coronavirus crisis to attack abortion.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Erick Erickson <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84a74f631ce0f26c7e6772ad2e4bf2085f0f5e3b1d4cacb2602c3e26b275bb98a9bcff7f2e37203eb1c4aa31da9cdb44841117e13a408170" title="tweeted and then deleted" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">tweeted and then deleted</a> a celebration of an Asian American reporter's offense at racist coronavirus comment.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fox’s Dan Bongino <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84a74f631ce0f26c11f74b817fd59c73704c22a55a81de145d8e9ae5137f3e8376ee850ea2d8a34e4c7492fff6cda306fe486f5d6132bc51" title="said that" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">said that</a> you can’t be racist about China because “China is not a race.”</li><li style="">Rush Limbaugh guest host Mark Steyn <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=84a74f631ce0f26cd74f56697d2be2dbaa51a9302efd82d5b9d5afcc445846d099a83503df8a9424745ae1f511009a6cc3df02d21c6b51f9" title="said that" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">said that</a> San Francisco faces a COVID-19 shutdown because it's “a big gay town.” (In case you are wondering, Limbaugh was off all week.)</li></ul></div><div>
<div>mma 320 also jnz not covering himself in glory</div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-margin-cell" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: transparent; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv9195317834camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px;"><h2 style="line-height: 1;"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2b943360806cc9fb5cefe7d490db9ea8a47f77154b39fa3d49b679aa8df77f5a363793a545cbe1d39a98262659323a1f0" title="People will die because of what Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh has said about coronavirus" style="">People will die because of what Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh has said about coronavirus</a></h2></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv9195317834stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv9195317834camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><div style="line-height: 31px;">It was <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b21a2636b14a230f6d1538e5bb069f1979656f4400e732cdcd4335e02c17c0c391b8f5f2b003cf21afb029a6cf75b40469" title="just over a month ago" style="">just over a month ago</a> that Donald Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union. Since then, Limbaugh has used his show to grossly lie about the coronavirus pandemic, ensuring that some of his listeners will get sick and possibly die.Here is a partial list of what Limbaugh has said:<ul><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2a1a4c0f3e4d0fdd5c643dac0eaf762d69abcf2a5fb09992a6383e841a7a0ec933386dc733f23258ab087d4e016b9ea84" title="said that" style="">said that</a> the coronoavirus is the "common cold" and is just an "effort to get Trump."</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2b7f21c5f5261e2312643df4e0f3de16022503f10e03292b7e3432ca4199cce90de4a76c43e68415e8b77d65594bfcf7e" title="said that" style="">said that</a> the coronavirus is being overhyped by media who want it be deadly, just like hurricanes.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2486252b29ed111a01a0b85a60d23e61a22dc2a79d0cdf3cd350414bec18ec415228c64bebff79ee5db3ebc7362f93a39" title="downplayed" style="">downplayed</a> concerns over the coronavirus destroying the U.S. economy, mocking media who said it was a "possible global pandemic." It has since been officially declared a global pandemic.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2eff8cf753743c91c59f2563f5b038f128f59b5682dfb9d636b54eaf9905aa1c5ee18b56631014231e45348fbd7d6df9b" title="said that" style="">said that</a> a CDC official warning of coronavirus should be ignored because she is Rod Rosenstein's sister.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b25bd04fd48f99ea4064bdddcbc7525c800ddf7307fb72d8e1c9af9c857464e74ba00a87894d02e251cf1e1a52ea431344" title="Limbaugh" style="">Limbaugh</a>: “Can you remember any natural disaster where the Trump administration is thought to have really blown it?” <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b27a61b194aa80ea4e92fb0c79f6f6e076b6938863a056f3f6a147701a1924ec9e49626ebe1e9376861f442abe06ddff2c" title="Yes we can" style="">Yes we can</a>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b23aa21f3368e67519d396bdd923ea24e1c462beea20c9317fc0a153aaa9224175569386cc3eae9f71c8a40c3857bf5685" title="claimed that" style="">claimed that</a> concerns about Trump holding rallies was just Democrats who wanted to stop them because they were so successful.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2ee5fbd7550e33e60aaa8b6dd84b8d67ae0919a5b1b13d6160aa553f2414d1974d2e1f4be94bdb5fd390b8f2d6b1c5865" title="likened" style="">likened</a> coronavirus to a hurricane: “Exaggerated and built-up, lied about before anybody knows its true strength and nature.”</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2de1129788d89b2e1e84186be1599f99ac263d1ea2f244411b5652c7bd9aae269b808c2af91bd0d957d794acbe57ec964" title="Limbaugh" style="">Limbaugh</a>: Coronavirus is like the common cold, and “all of this panic is just not warranted.”</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2b527bf5adf3f85af915b2bdcfea670164f903c034fc3fdf311da76358c36dbf87a1be11f142e9eb29cc7a489f7c8a45f" title="blamed" style="">blamed</a> coronavirus concern on movies like Contagion and mocked attempts contain its spread.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b243aff8f233f59dacd7c6c87bdfb4f4029d91452714422411cde7275face00670703d2f8761b8afb544c731b55cd5306e" title="suggested" style="">suggested</a> using coronavirus distance learning as an opportunity to hire less teachers.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b235d96d3a6036be959a3ef3b5204cdfc3ae19635f59c78406952d47d4924589abcda348718bb59bd096e5a9e5a2b00c1b" title="Limbaugh" style="">Limbaugh</a>: “We're shutting down our country because of the — the cold virus.”</li><li style="margin-bottom: 1em;">Worst of all, <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b28cc385102a02946a9a9209f5d361844ef4f3f5d127998fdc43a3bd91d845f89de0334ee5937ff1f15cce1e0cfe2a7e9b" title="here's what Limbaugh said" style="">here's what Limbaugh said</a> about the coronavirus on Wednesday: “Who cares if it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu? ... What does lethal mean? Does lethal kill you?” Yes, Rush, "lethal" means that it kills you.</li></ul>Vice President Mike Pence <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2c5036d1d9b358f183db8d97693c6842b0aef8e1a2a6b300786b603a946f6706365ae8fad0b60a1f2c9cc88d97f961bf7" title="admitted" style="">admitted</a> on the Today show this week that there has been "irresponsible rhetoric" about the pandemic. He's right, but Pence <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=e927f96fa742d8b2a7c528ff26a77e9b0b05931597954a88850121fb795f39a99d6b23cd7a9fc63f157bbcefccc5114334a8069a28483496" title="didn't bother calling out" style="">didn't bother calling out </a>Limbaugh on that rhetoric when he sat in studio with Limbaugh just last week. Right-wing media have spent decades building up themselves as science deniers -- and now that a pandemic is here, it's too late to suddenly admit that they are wrong.</div></td></tr></tbody></table><div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">fox News <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=6752c771d7d2993fc4e475b8af842e3b72ed1769758eda7349b95f7d8b2146fdea4fa3f353b3af34cee296ec3e2b1a687f4bde7208787f4d" title="has been the epicenter" style="" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">has been the epicenter</a> of climate change denial in the United States for over a decade now.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">mma 3/20 4 min montage of fox bs</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">several fear alarm eg</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">rush bs pop psych on savior syndrome</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wusreLZ9g-Y" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://</a></div></div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div><div></div><div><div>no lnx an 320</div><div>
</div><div>Here’s why Trump slammed Fox News for being too ‘politically correct’</div><div>Fox News</div><div>Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon March 6, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>President Donald Trump blasted Fox News while appearing on the right-leaning network, telling its highest-rated host Sean Hannity that the cable channel invites “inappropriate” guests who criticize him in a desire to be “politically correct.”</div><div>
</div><div>“They put people on I think are inappropriate and say very, very false things, and people don’t challenge them. I think they’re trying to be very politically correct or ‘fair and balanced,’ right, is the term,” Trump told Hannity during a phone interview.</div><div>
</div><div>After Hannity agreed with Trump’s opinion, the president added: “I think they hurt themselves, if you want to know the truth.”</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier in the interview, Trump complained to Hannity that “the media is all on [the Democrats] side” with the exception of “yourself” and other Fox personalities, including Fox News host Mark Levin and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. Trump also mentioned Rush Limbaugh, a radio host who the president incorrectly identified as working for the Fox networks.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump has a history of attacking Fox News after the network invites guests who are critical of the president or releases unfavorable poll numbers about him. During a rally in Colorado last month, Trump criticized Fox News and Fox Business Network host Neil Cavuto, saying “they had this woman on Neil Cavuto who doesn’t treat us good” and that Cavuto himself is “not too good.”</div><div>
</div><div>That comment referred to A. B. Stoddard, a RealClearPolitics associate editor who claimed that Trump performed poorly during the presidential debates in the 2016 cycle. Trump incorrectly claimed in a tweet that he “won every one of my debates,” even though respondents in post-debate polls picked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as the winner of those contests.</div><div>
</div><div>The president also attacked Fox News in November for releasing a poll, which found that nearly half of Americans wanted him impeached and removed from office.</div><div>
</div><div>“You’re reading the wrong polls. I have the real polls,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “I have the real polls. The CNN polls are fake. The Fox polls have always been lousy. I tell them they ought to get themselves a real pollster. But the real polls — if you look at the polls that came out this morning — people don’t want anything to do with impeachment. It’s a phony scam. It’s a hoax.”</div><div>
</div><div>A spokesperson from Fox News pointed Salon to an earlier statement by the network saying “our polling unit has long been held in high regard for being a nonpartisan source of research.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump criticized Fox personalities Andrew Napolitano, Shepard Smith (who left in October) and others one month earlier after Fox News released a poll showing an increase in support for his impeachment and removal from office.</div><div>
</div><div>“From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days,” Trump tweeted at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>The president then launched a series of personal attacks at Fox News personalities whose opinions he views as unfavorable, including Judge Andrew Napolitano.</div><div>
</div><div>“With people like Andrew Napolitano, who wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice & I turned him down (he’s been terrible ever since), Shep Smith, @donnabrazile (who gave Crooked Hillary the debate questions & got fired from @CNN), & others, @FoxNews doesn’t deliver for US anymore,” Trump added. “It is so different than it used to be. Oh well, I’m President!”</div><div>
</div><div>Fox News anchor Bret Baier, responding to a presidential attack in 2019 after the network released an unfavorable poll about Trump’s chances in the 2020 election, said that “we have a news side and an opinion side. The opinion folks express their opinions. We do polls. Our latest poll had the Democratic candidates head-to-head, several of them ahead of President Trump. And this poll tracks exactly what the Real Clear Politics average of polls — even a little the other way — and this poll matches what we are seeing out there.”</div><div>
</div><div>Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume expressed similar thoughts earlier that year when Trump attacked the network for hosting a town hall event with former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who at that time was running for president.</div><div>
</div><div>“Say this for Buttigieg. He’s willing to be questioned by Chris Wallace, something you’ve barely done since you’ve been president,” Hume wrote on Twitter.</div><div>
</div><div>He added, “Oh, and covering candidates of both parties is part of the job of a news channel.”</div><div>
</div><div>You can watch the full interview below via YouTube:</div></div><div>=</div><div><h2 class="entry-title grid-title" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">=</h2><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vp-mike-pence-talks-coronavirus-conspiracy-theorist-rush-limbaugh" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vp-mike-pence-talks-coronavirus-conspiracy-theorist-rush-limbaugh</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">v President Mike Pence, who President Donald Trump has <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/politics/trump-coronavirus-stock-market/index.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">placed in charge</a> of overseeing the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, appeared Friday afternoon on The Rush Limbaugh Show — which has been the source of a mixture of conspiracy theories, denialism, and other misinformation about the virus.</div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">During the program, Pence stated that the government is on top of the situation, saying, “President Trump has no higher priority than the health of the American people.”Radio host Rush Limbaugh offered his support to Pence and discussed the problem as a matter beyond politics. “I'm for you guys, I want you to succeed because this needs success. I mean, this problem needs to be dealt with successfully, hopefully as apolitically as possible,” Limbaugh said. “The virus doesn't know whether it's infecting a Republican or a Democrat, a woman, a man, anything. And until we get a better handle on it, we want competent people working on this.”However, the segment made no mention of all the irresponsible rhetoric and conspiracy theories that its own host had been spreading earlier this week[pix]kicking off the week on Monday, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-effort-get-trump" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Limbaugh falsely claimed</a> that the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19 is actually just “the common cold,” but added that it “probably is a [Chinese Communist] laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized” as part of “an effort to bring down Trump” through negative media coverage.</div></div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Limbaugh then only <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-mocks-concerns-over-coronavirus-i-have-no-interest-lying-you-about" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">dug in further</a> on Tuesday, downplaying the potential impact of coronavirus in the U.S. and declaring:</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I'm not going to play ball with this, I'm not going to join a panic over something that I have been independently informing myself about. I have no interest in lying to you about anything, it doesn't help me, it doesn't help you, it doesn't further anything. It doesn't help a thing for me to knowingly lie to you about something as serious as a “possible global pandemic,” and that's how the media is treating this.</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">He later <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-media-wants-coronavirus-be-deadly-just-they-hope-hurricanes-so-they-can" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">went on to claim</a> that the coronavirus was not a major threat, but that the media was only hoping for it to sufficiently evolve to become one:</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): They hope for hurricanes — on the first day of hurricane season, they hope for Hurricane Katrina so they can say “climate change,” anything to advance the leftist agenda. Now, the leftist agenda includes getting rid of Trump. They would love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out, so they could blame Trump for it.”</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Limbaugh did not repeat or even acknowledge any of these conspiracy theories during the interview with Pence — nor did Pence mention that Limbaugh had been spreading them.Later in the program, Pence projected a message of nonpartisan national unity in the crisis.“We're going to follow the facts, we're going to follow the science, we're going to tune out the politics, and keep reaching out to people across the spectrum,” Pence said. “And I have to tell you, my conversations with many of the officials that I mentioned to you in the Democratic Party, I get that sense — I think this is a real moment where we have an opportunity to really come together and work this issue on behalf of the American people. And that's going to continue to be our focus.”Pence also rebutted the story that any kind of <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/white-house-reportedly-shutting-down-media-appearances-disease-expert-dr-fauci" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">“gag order” had been imposed</a> on Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, as was reported Thursday in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronavirus-pence.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">The New York Times</a>.“I was told that Dr. Fauci testified at a briefing in Congress today that there is no gag order and there is not. What we want to make sure is happening is that with so many different agencies involved, that we're providing that information in a consistent and a systematic way,” Pence said. “We're going to give the American people the facts. We're going to follow what the scientific community is recommending on this. And we're going to let the health care experts lead.”However, the message that the Trump-Pence administration is “going to let the health care experts lead” is another talking point that should contrast sharply with Limbaugh’s rhetoric during the coronavirus crisis. On Thursday, Limbaugh was <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/pro-trump-media-claim-cdc-overhyping-coronavirus-because-nancy-messonnier" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">one of many right-wing media figures attacking Dr. Nancy Messonnier</a>,director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because she is also the sister of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. (Rosenstein is a <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/amid-reports-trump-may-fire-rosenstein-over-mueller-inquiry-fox-news-drumbeat-urges" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">frequent</a> <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/what-trumps-fox-news-cabinet-wants-him-do-about-rod-rosenstein" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">target</a> of <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/effort-impeach-rod-rosenstein-brought-you-sean-hannity-jeanine-pirro-and-lou-dobbs" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">pro-Trump propagandists</a> for having <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">appointed</a> Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the Russia investigation.)Beyond Limbaugh, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21156158/mike-pence-coronavirus-trump-administration-hiv-science" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Pence</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/09/17/the-origins-of-donald-trumps-autismvaccine-theory-and-how-it-was-completely-debunked-eons-ago/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Donald</a> <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/donald-trump-spouts-climate-denial-without-rebuttal-msnbcs-morning-joe" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Trump</a> have had their own serious issues when it comes to “following the science.”</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div><div>
<div>2/20 announce lung cancer, melania give medal of freedom at sotu?!</div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-says-deep-state-faked-evidence-about-wmds-iraq-embarrass-george-w-bush">https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-says-deep-state-faked-evidence-about-wmds-iraq-embarrass-george-w-bush</a></div><div>
</div><div>LIMBAUGH (HOST): Let’s go back to the Iraq war, 2003. George W. Bush spends a year and a half traveling the country, preparing everybody, lobbying the American people to support it. [He] goes to the United Nations, has satellite photos, all kinds of stuff. Colin Powell was up there showing the photos supposedly of weapons of mass destruction installations in Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and the Europeans — our allies in the intelligence community — all support this.Now Bush, as a Republican, [was] probably not popular with the deep state particularly after how he was elected. You know, there was outrage with the Florida recount in 2000. A lot of Democrats, a lot of deep staters think that Gore should have been president. He won the popular vote. They think the Supreme Court unfairly put Bush in there. I think there was as much resentment in the deep state, we just didn’t call it that then, for George W. Bush as there is today for Donald Trump — and if not the same, it’s close.I think, “How could so many different intelligence agencies get something so wrong as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” And remember, they gave Bush mounds of satellite photo evidence, documentation evidence. Colin Powell was dispatched to the United Nations to present this evidence — and it was all bogus, because we went in there. It was the pretext for invading Iraq after 9/11. We get in there, and there are no weapons of mass destruction.It was one of the most embarrassing things. The Bush administration had to scramble; everybody had to scramble. What I have seen this bunch of people in the intelligence community be capable of; what they’ve tried with Trump here, this whole Russia meddling, Trump colluding? This whole thing is a gigantic lie, a totally bogus hoax, a silent coup. That’s when I began to think the weapons of mass destruction thing was a setup against Bush too.My point is this: Why should we believe these people? They haven’t been right about anything in the last four years. They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. They didn’t get Benghazi right. Why should we believe them? We shouldn’t. It is a continuation of an insane mindset that the deep state and the Democratic Party are in because they can’t find a way to defeat this guy. They’re almost insane with their inability to land a punch on Donald Trump.They don’t understand it. They have deployed every weapon they have to destroy political opponents, and it’s worked most every time they’ve tried it on whoever they wanted to damage or get rid of. But they can’t even land a glancing blow on Trump. So now, after the Mueller report says there was no collusion, what are we back to? Trump is a Russian agent! The Russians want Trump to get reelected. We just had a four-year, quasi-phony investigation when there was no evidence.The only thing was a fake dossier. There were lies to the FISA court to get warrants to spy on Trump. They couldn’t even make up any evidence that would stick — and yet, here we are. We’re gonna recycle this whole thing, that Trump is the chosen one of Vladimir Putin (and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, by the way). The Democrats can’t stop it! Despite knowing who is behind meddling in our elections, the Democrats can’t find a way to stop it. “Trump’s gonna win, so we have to taint it. The Russians are meddling in our elections!”These people are doing more damage to the integrity and the honor of the American election system than Vladimir Putin would ever dream of being successful at, and they’re making themselves look like abject fools in the process. So right on time, here comes the New York Times publishing their piece — and I’m gonna tell you what, folks. Remember yesterday, how the drive-by media was just absorbed with the Roger Stone sentence? The Roger Stone sentence, something so irrelevant and untied to anything serious — and yet they’re glued to it.They have the reporters and the reporterettes and their infobabes outside [and] inside the courtroom when the sentence is announced. They’re hoping for seven to nine years; it comes back three years and four months. They’re devastated. They’re disappointed. But I’m telling you, they covered that Stone sentencing so closely because they think it gives them a chance to prove Trump is guilty of colluding with the Russians. Even though Stone was not charged with anything to do with colluding with the Russians, they still think the Stone sentence gave them an opportunity to make this case.I believe that they all knew this New York Times story was coming because that news is from last week when the House Democrats’ Intelligence Committee were told about the Russians hoping that Trump gets elected working to make it happen. That’s old news. It’s from last week. They held it for the day after the Stone sentence. They don’t realize how transparent they are. Anyway, folks, this -- I hope you’re taking time to savor this rather than get mad at it. I hope you’re taking time to enjoy this, because you are watching the literal implosion and the self-commission to insanity of a major political party in this country: The Democrats.</div><div>
<div><h3 class="editorial-compacttitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.33333; margin: 0px; background-color: rgb(247, 249, 251);"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-claims-democrats-go-out-and-they-find-disabled-people-greta-thunberg" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; outline: 0px;">Limbaugh claims Democrats “go out and they find disabled people” like Greta Thunberg and Michael J. Fox</a></h3><p class="dateline-compact" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0.3rem 0px 0px; align-items: center; display: flex; font-weight: 600; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase; background-color: rgb(247, 249, 251);"><svg viewbox="0 0 24 24" class="icon icon--audio" aria-labelledby="icon-label--audio" /><use xlink:href="#audio" xmlns:xlink="xlink" /><svg id="audio" viewbox="0 0 25 24" /><path d="M12 16a4 4 0 0 1-4-4V4a4 4 0 0 1 8 0v8a4 4 0 0 1-4 4zm10-4c0 4.829-3.441 8.869-8 9.798V24h-4v-2.202C5.441 20.869 2 16.829 2 12h4c0 3.309 2.691 6 6 6s6-2.691 6-6z" fill="inherit" fill-rule="evenodd" /><time datetime="2019-12-13T15:12:05-0500" style="box-sizing: border-box;">12/13/19 3:12 PM EST</time></div><div>=
<div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/jim-naureckas/" title="Posts by Jim Naureckas" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Jim Naureckas</a>, [rush limbaugh rein of error bk]<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/julie-hollar/" title="Posts by Julie Hollar" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Julie Hollar</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/fair/" title="Posts by FAIR " class="author url fn" rel="author" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">FAIR </a></div><div>
<div><div class="header-list-style" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 class="entry-title grid-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2014/12/rush-limbaugh-furious-black-actor-might-be-next-james-bond/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;">Rush Limbaugh Is Furious That a Black Actor Might Be the Next James Bond</a></h2><div class="grid-post-box-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;">by <a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;" /><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> December 24, 2014</a></div></div><div class="item-content entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 18px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The right-wing radio host is apparently thoroughly confused by the concept of fiction.</a></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">ref 2 mma</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/rush-limbaugh-and-other-conservative-media-dismiss-ny-times-report-showing-el-paso-shooter" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/rush-limbaugh-and-other-conservative-media-dismiss-ny-times-report-showing-el-paso-shooter</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Conservative media figures dismissed an analysis from The New York Times showing hundreds of instances in which they used the same sort of anti-immigration rhetoric as the manifesto of the gunman who shot and killed 22 people in El Paso, TX, in early August.</div><div class="editorial-fullarticle" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2.25rem;"><div class="field field--name-field-stories-content field--type-entity-reference-revisions field--label-hidden" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;">El Paso mass shooter’s white supremacist manifesto echoed language used by prominent Fox News figures and other conservative media personalities</h2>Multiple Fox News personalities have pushed rhetoric that white Americans are going to be “replaced” by non-white immigrants -- the same white supremacist conspiracy theory referenced by the El Paso shooter. The shooter wrote in his manifesto that he wanted revenge against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and warned of “cultural and ethnic replacement.” Media Matters showed that multiple Fox News personalities, including prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, had spread similar rhetoric on the channel. [Media Matters, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/you-dont-need-read-el-paso-killers-manifesto-just-turn-fox-news" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">8/5/19</a>]NY Times: “There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by” the shooter. The New York Times conducted its own analysis of the manifesto written by the El Paso shooter and found that his numerous references to an “invasion” by Hispanics and cultural “replacement” of white people overlapped in hundreds of instances with comments from prominent Fox News and other conservative media personalities, including Carlson and Rush Limbaugh.</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, theUnited States would lose its identity. “The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”It remains unclear what, or who, ultimately shaped the views of the white, 21-year-old gunman, or whether he was aware of the media commentary. But his post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions. …At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today. [The New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/11/business/media/el-paso-killer-conservative-media.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/11/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;">Conservative media respond by attacking NY Times and mocking concern over white supremacist rhetoric</h2>Radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested a 14-year-old quote from then-Sen. Barack Obama was as incendiary as his own language. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed of the New York Times story that “they worried about me because I called this invasion a ‘flood’” and then played an audio clip of remarks then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made in December 2005 in which he used the phrase “flood of illegals” to distance his own rhetoric from the shooter’s. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3825041" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">8/12/19</a>]Limbaugh: NY Times story is just the latest attempt to sabotage me. During his second segment responding to the Times story, Limbaugh said it’s the latest in a long line of attempts to discredit him specifically and conservative media in general.</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I appreciate the emails that you have sent that I caught during the first breaks here in the program about not taking this thing in The New York Times today apparently seriously enough.You know, when I know that there isn’t any truth to it, then that’s the primary reason I’m able to laugh at it. And I know the motivation behind it. They simply -- folks, they cannot defeat us on ideas or debates of ideas, in the arena of ideas.It’s been a constant attempt by the left since I started this program to discredit me, to impugn me. And their purpose has been to make sure I don’t acquire an even larger audience. They are trying to poison the minds of people who don’t listen into never trying the program. That’s the objective of it, and that’s always been the objective.…Now we have an obviously deranged lunatic who is just part of the crowd that has been influenced, but only influenced, by conservative media. This guy apparently, according to The New York Times, was immune to being influenced by anybody else. He was incapable of making up his own mind or coming to his own deranged conclusions on his own. And this has been the baseline, or foundational, attack on me and all of conservative media since it began.It’s actually an attack on all of you. That you’re dumb, uninformed hicks who don’t know anything and don’t think anything every day until you get marching orders after listening to this program or as a result of listening. This has always been absurd. And I think it’s always been a very weak and very, very telling admission on their part, and that is they hold average people in contempt. Average people are not smart enough to think on their own. They’re not smart enough to live life the right way. They’re not smart enough to make the right decisions, even with their own money.So I don’t get worked up by it anymore because it’s been a feature of 30 years. And I’ll tell you this. By righteously opposing it and standing here -- sitting here -- pounding my fists on the table and acting out is not gonna stop it, either. I just mock it. I just try to make fun of it. And then I welcome other people to the montage. Now they’re adding -- you know, it used to just be me. Now they’re throwing a bunch of other people into it because conservative media has expanded and become so big that now their efforts to destroy conservative media go beyond me. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3825046" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro dismissed those linking conservative media rhetoric to the El Paso shooter as a “conspiracy theory.”</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Again, I don’t like the language of “invasion,” and I don’t believe I’ve used it. If I had, I’m sorry I did, because I don’t think that it is correct. But I’m fairly certain I never did, because I never considered it a quote-unquote “invasion” when illegal immigrants cross our southern border. But -- and I certainly don’t believe in the idea of quote-unquote “racial replacement,” because I literally do not care about the races of people who live in America. I care about their ideas and their ideology. But The New York Times decides that because there is language that sounds similar to stuff that Tucker Carlson has said, they’re now going to attribute this shooter to Tucker. …Again, this is a conspiracy theory. And a conspiracy theory, this one, is deliberately designed in order to link together basic conservative tropes about immigration with white supremacism. [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3825051" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Breitbart News Daily's Alex Marlow: NY Times story is “such bad journalism,” and “they’re going to have blood on their hands” for taking the shooter’s manifesto seriously. </div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">ALEX MARLOW (HOST): This is where I’m obsessed with this story from yesterday, where The New York Times had five bylines on how the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars and they cited something like 50 or 60 examples of [unintelligible] -- almost everyone on Fox News personalities using the term “invasion.” And this assumes so much -- it's such bad journalism because it is, it assumes a couple of key things. First of all, it assumes that because the -- it takes the manifesto seriously, which I keep saying is a mistake that only will encourage more serial killers or more mass shooters. These are lunatic ravings that are designed to give attention. And to give attention to it, and to take it literally, it means that all you have to do is write something and then shoot people, and then you get a platform forever for whatever insane ideas you have. So I think the media taking these manifestos literally is actually going to -- they’re going to have blood on their hands if they keep doing this. But this has been the tactic of most of the media, to take the manifesto of the El Paso shooter seriously. And the implication that if you used the word “invasion,” it means that you’re culpable for violence from one lunatic, who again, his idea of stopping the invasion was going to a Walmart and shooting a lot of people who were not invaders. That was his way of dealing with the invasion. So, it is -- and this just prints five bylines here. The New York Times. It takes five people to go through Fox News and say, “They used invasion,” the implication being this is why this guy shot people at a Walmart. It’s so stunningly irresponsible, even for The New York Times. [Sirius XM Patriot, Breitbart News Daily, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3825031" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Conservative blogger and pundit Erick Erickson mocked the Times’ analysis, saying it “blames the dictionary for El Paso shooting.”</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">Oh how awful. The shooter in Texas used the same language the President and Rush Limbaugh have used to talk about the caravans of illegal aliens flooding our southern border.The particular word is “invasion.” That’s what the President called it. That’s what Rush Limbaugh called it. That’s what the dictionary calls it.I realize many journalists and progressives will seal clap this story. They’ll get excited by it and might even go blind in the bathroom stall while reading it. But the technical term for a horde of people crossing the border without permission is “invasion.” ...Has there been incendiary rhetoric? Absolutely. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused the United States of running a concentration camp and a leftwing radical used that same language to justify his firebombing of an ICE facility.Most of the media has willfully ignored that.They’d rather blame Rush, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and Donald Trump.They might as well blame the dictionary. [The Resurgent, <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/08/12/new-york-times-blames-the-dictionary-for-el-paso-shooting/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Conservative radio host Mark Simone deflected to the Dayton, OH, shooter’s support of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), calling the NY Times “a total joke.”</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">MARK SIMONE (HOST): Hey, the fake news has been -- you know, it’s been fake news for two years. Michael Goodwin wrote an incredible piece about The New York Times, how it went from being -- they used to call it the “Gray Lady,” the paper of record -- to being the sleaziest fake news organization ever. In fact, he’ll be with us later this hour and we’ll talk about it. But if you look at today's New York Times, they have an article, front page, above the fold, and it's a photograph of the El Paso shooter's manifesto with certain words underlined. It's a big -- right above the fold on the front page. The biggest place they could put it, and it's all about how look how the El Paso shooter's manifesto says similar things to the right-wing talking points. This is the big story. Now, nowhere in the paper does it mention that the Dayton shooter, his manifesto was all Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren stuff. The Dayton shooter a huge supporter of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, quoting their stuff left and right. You think we'll see that article tomorrow? You think we'll ever see that article? This is why The New York Times has become a total joke. [WOR-AM, Mark Simone Show, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3824996" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Philadelphia talk show host Dom Giordano defended using “invasion” to describe the border situation and pushed the white supremacist “replacement” theory.</div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;">DOM GIORDANO (HOST): All right, the word of the day, according to The New York Times, front and center, is “invasion.” You can't say “invasion” anymore. Now they're going after not just Fox News, but talk radio, and they talk about how talk radio hosts and callers and others use this word “invasion.” Now, in fairness, I might start using it more now. I don't think I've used it enough. That's exactly what it is that's going on at the border. The numbers are staggering. It's a perfectly legitimate word. Now the word they allege that the El Paso gunman used -- and they claim is being used a lot -- I guess Tucker Carlson -- and I see Tucker most nights -- is replacement. That’s the one you’re going to start to hear more. In other words, this plays into the big narrative that white working-class people believe they’re being replaced by people the Democrats, mainly open-borders crowd, want to bring into the country. And there are books, there are conspiracy theorists out there that this is an organized effort to do that exactly. Versus an outcome that comes out of this invasion. I mean, these people that were arrested in Mississippi -- did you see the outcome of this now?…Now these companies are going to be holding job fairs to have to replace these workers that were here illegally. And the theory is, and there seems to be some evidence of that, they’re going to have to up the wages and benefits. Bingo. So is that not a case of replacement, where they’re able to replace low-skilled high school graduates, or not even, that are in these tough jobs, meatpacking, and all that?...And by extension, even though I don’t think it’s a planned thing, it’s just an economic thing, they were replacing American workers in these industries. [WPHT-AM, The Dom Giordano Show, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3825026" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px;">8/12/19</a>]</div></blockquote></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div> <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-deeper-meaning-and-history-behind-trumps-racist-lie-that-the-squad-hates-america/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-deeper-meaning-and-history-behind-trumps-racist-lie-that-the-squad-hates-america/</a>rush l bkno lnx many
The deeper meaning and history behind Trump’s racist lie that The Squad ‘hates America’
 [pix: President Donald J. Trump and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh walk together Friday, April 19, 2019, following their round of golf at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)]Written by Ian Reifowitz / Daily Kos July 28, 2019“How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump? Why have white anxiety, fear, and anger aimed at non-whites and about demographic change become far more strongly correlated with support for the Republican Party in recent decades, and in particular between 2008 and 2016? And since that time, how have we become, according to a new poll from CBS News/YouGov, a country where a strong majority of Republicans believe that Democrats try to “put the interests of racial minorities over whites,” while an even stronger majority of Democrats believe Trump and his party aim to do the opposite, to put white interests above those of non-whites?The simplest answer is: President Trump. He not only has heightened racial division, but also connected it to partisanship by making it central to his politics. Trump labeled Mexican immigrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “drug dealers”; also said there were “very fine people” among a bunch of neo-Nazis; and most recently told four congresswomen of color (aka The Squad) that they should “go back” to the countries they came from (all but one were born here) because, he claims, they “hate our country,” and, even worse, are not even “capable of loving our Country.”Trump’s baldly racist sentiments and policies have clearly played a major role in convincing Democrats that his party favors whites. As for the belief expressed by Republicans in the CBS poll, Trump has also has an impact, as he has repeatedly accused Democrats of favoring Americans of color.Let’s look at just a few examples. During the 2016 campaign, Trump often pitted racial groups against each other in a zero-sum game. He repeated on multiple occasions the falsehood that “illegal immigrants are treated better in America than many of our vets,” and likewise charged that Obama and Hillary Clinton showed more concern for the former than the latter. Trump also falsely stated that “illegal immigrant households receive far more in welfare benefits,” and declared that “immigrants are taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us.” Such statements—which are clearly meant to evoke images of non-white immigrants—appear to have had an electoral impact, as the data shows that, in both the 2016 Republican primary and general election, “racialized perceptions of economic deservingness were … strongly related to support for Donald Trump.”However, Trump is far from the first Republican to adopt this tactic. Others—namely the right-wing media—have been spewing this kind of bile for many years. Leading the way has been the person who has maintained the largest audience of any radio host for going on three decades: Rush Limbaugh.In researching my new book, I examined eight years of Limbaugh show transcripts and documented how Limbaugh painted Obama and his party as favoring minorities over whites, echoing the beliefs exhibited in the CBS poll. More broadly, while Obama was president Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited.Limbaugh aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of his presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task. Limbaugh’s efforts helped lay the groundwork for the election in 2016 of a man who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency.The reach of Limbaugh’s message, both during the Obama presidency and for the three decades prior, has made him the single most potent media voice worsening the tribalization of our politics. He has done this by strengthening the connection between white racial resentment and support for Republican candidates and causes. He was alt-right before the term even existed.Racial fear stands at the core of Limbaugh’s telling of the story of the Obama administration—and white conservatives have been listening. According to Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler, “even after controlling for economic conservatism, moral traditionalism, religious beliefs and activity, and military support, racial attitudes became significantly stronger predictors of white partisanship in the Age of Obama … the effect of racial attitudes on party identification increased relative to nonracial predispositions.” In sum, Tesler found that the data “suggest that Democrats and Republicans had increasingly separate realities about race in the Age of Obama—a logical upshot of the spillover of racialization into mass politics.”Presaging Trump’s slandering of The Squad, Limbaugh over and over again falsely charged Obama with hating America—and the whites whom Limbaugh feels truly represent our country. What was the basis of this charge? Obama had the temerity to cite real problems we face and propose practical solutions.In summary, Limbaugh branded President Obama as anti-American, by claiming that he hated America largely because of its racism; “not American,” by questioning his American birthplace (something Trump did even more vociferiously); and anti-white, by accusing him of wanting to redistribute resources from whites to minorities, most specifically to African Americans, in order to right historical wrongs. According to Limbaugh, Obama was essentially Santa Claus for (only) black people because he gave them welfare and free Obamaphones. Finally, the host scared whites by stoking fears that they would face race-based retributive violence since a black man was president.It is worth noting that Trump has also criticized America—he referred to “American carnage” in our streets, rejected American exceptionalism (something Limbaugh falsely claimed Obama did many times), called America a “laughingstock,” and defended Putin’s murders by saying: “What, you think our country is so innocent?”Yet Limbaugh never denounced Trump as an America-hater. The host did, however, say that Obama was “our first anti-American president,” that he “hates America,” “doesn’t like much of what’s American,” sees “this country as a great Satan,” and believes “by virtue of its character, America was evil.” And that’s just from one particularly bile-filled 11-week stretch in 2010.In order to further establish Obama’s supposed anti-Americanism, Limbaugh said that the president rejected the original principles of our country, as well as the Constitution itself, and the [white] men who crafted it. “Obama talks about ‘remaking’ America [which] means destroying these traditions, institutions that have defined America and its greatness since the founding,” the host stated on July 3, 2009. He added on December 15, 2009, that the president was not proud of our country: “America as talked about by Barack Obama—is an America of guilt … guilty of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, discrimination, imperialism, colonialism.” Two years to the day later, Limbaugh asserted that Obama believed America was “criminal.” The host also said on December 30, 2011,  that the president considered America to be “exceptionally evil.” For good measure, he includedMichelle Obama as well, citing her “bilious disgust with America” on October 31, 2011.Perhaps most explosively, Limbaugh asked in March 2011 if the military had a “contingency plan for—I don’t want to say an anti-American president, ‘cause that’s gonna cloud my real intent here.” After being criticized for appearing to call for a military coup, the host fell back on his usual shtick, that this “was a media tweak … That’s what’s called stirring the excrement.”Even when discussing proposals that did not obviously relate to race, Limbaugh repeatedly characterized Obama and Democrats as favoring Americans of color over whites. For example, on February 22, 2009, just before Obamacare passed, he characterized it as “a civil rights bill. This is reparations.” On July 20, 2010, Limbaugh warned that, under Obamacare, “minorities” in “the federal bureaucracy” serving a black president could decide whether “the rest of us” live or die. Expanding his policy horizons, on July 22, 2009, the host declared: “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations!”The language Limbaugh used when the topic was Black Lives Matter or immigration was just as racist. On the latter, more than a week of attacks on Obama over the violent death of Kathryn Steinle culminated in a diatribe on July 15, 2015, in which Limbaugh juxtaposed Obama not reaching out to her family while instead having written to four dozen felons he had set free by commuting their sentences, and connecting with Michael Brown’s family in Ferguson, Missouri. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Latino people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally.As America moved into the party conventions in the summer of 2016, Limbaugh declared on July 12 that Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama all believed “there’s nothing redeemable about that America. It has to be ‘transformed,’ I think is the word Obama uses.” Later in that same broadcast, he stated that, “Obama stands with people he thinks have been given the shaft ever since this country was founded. I think his objective is to even the playing field, as he defines it. And the way he does it is to transfer discrimination from one group to the next, rather than end it. His prescription is payback.” This is how you convince Republicans that the Democratic Party has it in for whites.On July 28, after Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention—a speech that soared with positive language about our country, including the words “America is already great”—Limbaugh dismissed those words as insincere: “That’s not Barack Obama. That’s not what he believes. That’s not who he is … Obama is the guy who thinks America’s founding was unjust and immoral. He doesn’t relish it. He doesn’t cherish it.”Hearing this for eight years certainly helped convince Republicans that Democrats prioritize the interests of minorities over whites and, by extension, that only Republicans would protect white interests. By further defining America as essentially equivalent to white America, Limbaugh made clear that anyone who “hates America” hates whites.This context is vital to understanding why Trump lied about The Squad supposedly hating America. In this, as in his broader rhetoric on immigration and, in fact, in the way he defines Americanness, Trump is following the trail blazed by right-wing media figures, and none more so than Rush Limbaugh.Since the day he descended on that escalator at Trump Tower, the racist-in-chief has been speaking the language of racially resentful and alienated whites, language Limbaugh broadcasted to millions of Americans five days a week after Barack Obama became president in 2009. Trump presented himself as the champion of those white people in the struggle against their enemies, people like President Obama and other liberals, as well as those whom liberals championed—particularly Americans of color and immigrants.Trump’s road to the White House was significantly smoother than it would otherwise have been because Limbaugh had already paved the way for him. Going forward, the clash between the Obama and Limbaugh/Trump definitions of Americanness—exemplified by President Individual 1’s most recent attacks on Ilhan Omar and the rest of The Squad—will remain central to our public discourse for the foreseeable future.Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas). Some of the material in this post is excerpted (in some cases with slight alterations) from the book, with full permission.<div>=</div></div><div>
<div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-the-race-baiting-invective-of-rush-limbaugh-on-the-obama-presidency-led-to-trump/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-the-race-baiting-invective-of-rush-limbaugh-on-the-obama-presidency-led-to-trump/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>How the race-baiting invective of Rush Limbaugh on the Obama presidency led to Trump</div><div> Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh</div><div>
</div><div>written by Robin Lindley / History News Network July 8, 2019</div><div>252</div><div>Ultimately, the right wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.</div><div>
</div><div>Ian Reifowitz, The Tribalization of Politics</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—the first African American to attain this exalted office. Hundreds of thousands crowded the National Mall during the ceremony to wish the new president well.</div><div>
</div><div>However, rather than offering the president words of encouragement and congratulations, voices from the far right almost immediately expressed the hope that President Obama would fail and serve no more than one term. He had inherited a faltering economy, a war, a country still divided by race and other vexing issues, while the right-wing media labeled him as anti-American and unpatriotic, as a black president who would please his constituents of color to the detriment of white citizens.</div><div>
</div><div>Popular far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was one of the most vociferous voices, and was the one with the largest audience. He uttered unceasing, racially-charged attacks on President Obama virtually every day of his two terms in office.</div><div>
</div><div>Historian Ian Reifowitz examines Limbaugh’s hateful invective and American political polarization in his new book, The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Ig Publishing).</div><div>
</div><div>To better understand the attacks on President Obama, Professor Reifowitz took on the daunting task of analyzing the transcripts of Limbaugh’s radio shows and associated materials from the Obama years. As a result, Professor Reifowitz has documented the manifold instances of Limbaugh’s hateful race-baiting and “othering” of the president. And Limbaugh has profited greatly as a leader in sparking white fear of racial peril.</div><div>
</div><div>The book traces the election of Donald Trump and the recent rise in white supremacist activity to the incendiary language of racism that the right-wing relies on to win politically. Historian Keri Leigh Merritt commented that The Tribalization of Politics is “is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how the US has reached its lowest point in race relations since the Civil Rights Movement.”</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Reifowitz teaches history at Empire State College of the State University of New York. His other books include Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846-1919, and Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. He has published a number of academic articles in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Nationalities Papers, and East European Quarterly, among others. Professor Reifowitz is also a contributing editor at Daily Kos, and his articles have appeared in the Daily News, Newsday, The New Republic, In These Times, Truthout, Huffington Post, and others. His awards include the 2009 Susan H. Turben Award for Scholarly Excellence, and the 2014 S.U.N.Y. Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities.</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Reifowitz graciously responded to a series of questions in an email exchange on his work and his new book.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: You’re a historian specializing in the modern history of the United States. How did you decide to study history, and then to focus on the American past?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Reifowitz: I’ve always, since I was in college (too many years ago) been interested in multiethnic societies, and specifically how they work to create ‘national’ bonds across lines of ethnicity to bind together their diverse population.</div><div>
</div><div>My graduate study, which led to my first book and other early academic publications, focused on Austria-Hungary. That state tried and failed to create strong enough national bonds, i.e., bonds based on citizenship in and loyalty to a common state, that would have allowed it to survive World War I and the overthrow of the Habsburg dynasty. Even while pursuing that research, I’d also been reading and thinking about another multiethnic society, the one we live in, that faces some of the same issues (thankfully, we don’t have to rely on a monarchy as the foundation of our unity).</div><div>
</div><div>Eventually, my passion for understanding how unity and diversity were playing out today drove me to begin writing and researching the contemporary U.S. I published a couple of articles in The New Republic, and later in other outlets, and began to read more deeply and develop my ideas further. Then along came Barack Obama. I wrote my previous book, Obama’s America, in which I examined his conception of American national identity, one that incorporates pluralism and inclusiveness into a strong, unifying vision of national community that, one would hope, Americans of every background could adopt.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did you come to write about Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric in the Obama Era? Did the project grow out of your past research for Obama’s America?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: To continue the story from above, one section of Obama’s America examined critics (mostly on the right, but a few to Obama’s left) who criticized Obama’s vision of American national identity. I had spent some pages examining Rush Limbaugh’s rhetoric from the first couple of years of Obama’s presidency, and that had energized me (albeit with a sort of dark energy, compared to the more uplifting work of looking at Obama’s writings and speeches).</div><div>
</div><div>Then, in the summer of 2015, the idea came to me for another book, and I thought: why not do a comprehensive, close examination of everything Limbaugh said about the Obama presidency. I put together a proposal, started the work in late 2015 and kept up the research until Obama left office, and then started writing. In the meantime, of course, Trump had emerged and been elected. Trump’s campaign and then victory helped me decide to focus the book on Limbaugh’s race-baiting, both in order to document it in a comprehensive way for people, and to draw parallels between what he was doing—playing and preying on white anxiety—and what Trump did in his campaign (and, to be sure, for years beforehand, starting with his own incendiary, racist rhetoric about the Central Park Five and right up to him claiming the mantle of birther-in-chief).</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: You address our current political “tribalization” by focusing on Limbaugh’s rhetoric. In your view, what is tribalization, and how does it affect our politics now?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll give you the definition I used in the book’s introduction rather than come up with something off the top of my head.</div><div>
</div><div>“Tribalization refers to a transformation much more profound than merely convincing Americans to be partisans who vote based on a shared set of policy preferences. It means cleaving America in two, and, in the case of Limbaugh, creating a conservative tribe animated somewhat by political ideology, but more so by racial and cultural resentment that feeds a hatred of the opposing tribe.”</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: This new Limbaugh project had to be daunting and possibly distasteful to you in view of your past research on President Obama and your favorable view of his efforts to unite our diverse nation. How did you feel as you put your book together? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: Well, I did mention above that I felt a different kind of passion motivating me on this project compared to the Obama book. But I have to admit that, once I got deep into the research, there were times when I wished I hadn’t committed to the project. There were plenty of times that I didn’t want to read through another word of Limbaugh.</div><div>
</div><div>I guess my stubborn streak helped. I wasn’t going to abandon a project that I’d already invested so much time and energy in, and certainly wasn’t going to do so because Limbaugh’s rhetoric was hard to stomach. I hoped I was doing something important, that could make some connections that would help people better understand where our politics has gone in the past few years.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: What was your research process for your new book?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I went to RushLimbaugh.com and read through the transcripts for every show he did during the eight years Barack Obama was president, which he thoughtfully published free of charge. To be honest, if the transcripts didn’t exist, I don’t know that I could have done the research by listening to the audio recordings. That might have been too much. Thankfully I didn’t have to find out.</div><div>
</div><div>I also read secondary sources on contemporary politics, in particular on matters of race and identity. After I started focusing on the connections between Limbaugh and Trump, I read political science scholarship on public opinion in 2016, which documented how white anxiety and resentment correlated with votes for Trump both in the primary and general election, and I incorporated that information into my analysis.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: What did you learn about Limbaugh’s origins?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I read some about his rhetoric in early years, how he had used racist language even before making his turn toward talking full-time about politics in the 1980s. But the focus of the book is on what he said about Obama, which spoke for itself. To clarify, I don’t care if he actually believes what he’s saying, because the effect his words have is the same whether he’s just a cynical opportunist or a true believer. I’m not especially interested in his motivations.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did you come to focus on Limbaugh in your book. You see Limbaugh as a major force in dividing the US during the Obama era, but other potent Obama detractors included the current president, Senator Mitch McConnell and much of the Republican Party, Fox News, the Tea Party, and others. How would you weigh Limbaugh’s influence, if possible?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: My background, in terms of the kind of work I do, focuses on analyzing political rhetoric. Limbaugh was the person whose rhetoric I chose to examine because he broadcasts about two hundred shows a year, so there would be essentially no important issue relating to the Obama presidency that he would not address. Plus, he had the largest radio audience in the country throughout all eight years Obama was president (and decades before as well, and even in the years since up through the most recent month).</div><div>
</div><div>I used him as a case study—where the biggest part stands in for the whole of the right-wing media. The transcripts helped as well, as it would be impossible to read every word broadcast on, say, Fox. This way, I had a closed, yet comprehensive, set of data to use as my source base.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining your process. Do you see Limbaugh as an ally of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazis? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: His show helps push sanitized versions of some of their ideas into the mainstream. The views he expresses are not the same as the views of the KKK or American Nazis, but he taps into some of the same hate and fear that they do. I don’t think that makes him an ally, but more like an enabler.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh view Senator Obama before he was elected in 2008? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I didn’t look at the pre-inauguration rhetoric in a comprehensive way, but from what I saw nothing changed on Election Day.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh usually describe President Obama? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: You want the whole book in a nutshell? Here’s a brief summary from the book:</div><div>
</div><div>“While Obama was president, Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited. The host aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist, black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of Limbaugh’s presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task, a task reflected in the title of this book. The tribalization of politics is exactly what Limbaugh set out to achieve.”</div><div>
</div><div>I’ll add: “[Limbaugh] portrayed him in a way designed to exacerbate white racial anxiety about a black president, or depicted him as a foreign “other,” outside the bounds of traditional Americanness.”</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh exploit Islamophobia and the fear of immigrants to attack President Obama?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz:  He repeatedly sought to portray Obama as some kind of “secret Muslim” or somehow more sympathetic to Muslims—even terrorists—than to Christians and/or the interests of the United States. On immigrants, I’ll give you the following example:</div><div>
</div><div>“On July 1, 2015, two weeks after Trump’s infamous comments [made during his announcement that he was running for president] about Mexican immigrants being rapists and bringing drugs into the United States, a woman named Kathryn Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by Jose Inez Garcia Zarate [an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record].</div><div>
</div><div>“. . . On the campaign trail, Trump pounced, and Limbaugh followed suit a few days later. On July 7, in comments designed to inflame white racial resentment, the host claimed that Steinle’s name would “never be as well-known as Trayvon Martin,” and that the president would not deliver the eulogy at her funeral, even though Obama had not delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Martin or any other citizen killed by police. Obama did, however, speak at the memorial service for the five Dallas police officers murdered a year later….Limbaugh speculated that the president did not care about Steinle’s murder, and blamed it on the administration’s immigration policies, which were “coming home to roost”—this was a phrase uttered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright that was discussed so often on Limbaugh’s show. The host again talked about Obama hating America and wanting to alter its “composition” in order to change “the face of the country.”</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh attacked the president over Steinle on three more shows over the next week. On July 15, 2015, the host contrasted Obama not having contacted the Steinle family to his having written letters to forty-six felons whose sentences he commuted, and to his outreach to the family of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Hispanic people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally. If there’s one segment that both encapsulates Limbaugh’s tribalizing history of the Obama presidency, and shows how his race-baiting rhetoric set the way for the rise of Trump, this was it.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: How did President Obama respond to Limbaugh’s attacks, particularly in terms of dealing with claims that he was pro-Muslim, anti-police, and anti-white? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: He basically ignored them, but I did not examine Obama’s responses comprehensively.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Limbaugh attacked President Obama almost daily during his eight years in office. For Limbaugh, it seems that the ideals of equality, tolerance, democracy, community, and serving the common good are anathema and, indeed, anti-American. What is your sense of Limbaugh’s view of these ideals? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: He would pay lip service to most of those ideals in the abstract, while attacking Obama and other liberals for seeking to change the traditional definition of them to something involving retribution and reparations that would take from whites and give to non-whites. He would turn any criticism of racial inequality in America back around and argue that the problem of racism in America stemmed from people overexaggerating it. For example, on July 25, 2013, Limbaugh “accused “the left” of wanting “race problems” to remain unsolved, and in fact wanting to make them worse. Why? Because “too many people make money off of racial strife, and therefore they’re always going to promote it.” Here’s a quote from May 26, 2010, about Obama and liberals in general: “everything’s about race. Everything is about skin color to these people, or however they classify people, however they seek to group them, whatever, they’re victims.” This is how he viewed racism in America.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Beyond Limbaugh, what are some things that you learned about the massive right-wing media misinformation machine?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I didn’t do too much with them, because they do generally move in lockstep. I did note in the book that in the summer of 2018, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on Fox News echoed Trump’s language of white anxiety regarding immigration and demographic changes. Limbaugh had spoken similarly as well during the Obama presidency, which I documented in greater depth.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Were there any particular findings that surprised you as you researched and wrote your book?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: Nothing really surprised me in terms of ideology, Rush pretty much delivered exactly what I expected when I started the research. I was already pretty familiar with his bile. However, when I came across Limbaugh’s comments connecting Tiger Woods and his sex-related scandals involving white women to Obama—which suggested that the president might be involved in something analogous based on little more than the fact that both were multiracial guys with a similar skin tone—that was something beyond even what I had expected. There were also a few times, at least until I got used to it, when I was surprised by how baldly Limbaugh just lied about facts and statistics, in particular regarding the economy. Either he really didn’t understand them, which is not likely to be true because he didn’t manipulate them to make President Trump look bad—only President Obama—or he just thought lying was the right thing for him to do.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Limbaugh wasn’t new to exploiting race to divide Americans. In fact, that’s been a Republican strategy for decades. What did you find about how Republicans use race to their political advantage? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I wrote this in the book: “As journalist Dylan Matthews noted in an article entitled “Donald Trump Has Every Reason to Keep White People Thinking About Race,” a vast corpus of social science research indicates that “even very mild messages or cues that touch on race can alter political opinions,” and added that “priming white people to so much as think about race, even subconsciously, pushes them toward racially regressive views.”</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: What do you see as Limbaugh’s role in the election of President Donald Trump?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll share an example from the book, with some data, that demonstrates the role Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric played in paving the way for Trump:</div><div>
</div><div>“Public opinion research data suggests that exactly this kind of rhetoric helped move some whites who had previously voted for Obama into Trump’s column by 2016—most Obama-Trump voters expressed high levels of anger toward non-whites and foreigners. It might be hard to imagine Obama voters being bigoted, but John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck found that significant numbers of whites who voted for Obama in 2012 expressed varying degrees of white racial resentment while also overwhelmingly embracing liberal positions on issues such as taxation and the existence of climate change. It might be surprising, but about 25% of those whites who found interracial couples unacceptable nonetheless voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. The country’s racial climate during Obama’s second term contributed to this phenomenon of racially resentful white Obama voters shifting to Trump, as [according to Zack Beauchamp at Vox] Black Lives Matter and Ferguson “kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.” Limbaugh took full advantage of that climate, and his race-baiting helped pave the way for Trump.”</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: What has Limbaugh been doing since Trump’s election? Does he continue to blame President Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton for problems the nation faces. </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ve stayed away from Limbaugh to some degree, just to give myself a break. But he’s still a huge media figure. He’s done exactly what I expected, which is the same thing he did once Trump became the presumptive nominee. He’s been a huge Trump backer and has continued to use rhetoric aimed at ginning up white anxiety, to make sure those anxious whites keep on remembering who their (false) champion is. I did check to see what Limbaugh said about Tiger Woods recently, now that Trump has embraced him, and in fact Limbaugh has done a 180, offering nothing but praise for how been Tiger has been a friend to Trump. However, while discussing Tiger and Trump, Limbaugh made sure to remind his audience that Obama is still the one to blame for exacerbating racial tensions in America. He certainly doesn’t blame Trump—or himself, for that matter. None of those things qualify as a surprise.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: What are some good ways to counter the hateful and inaccurate rhetoric of Limbaugh and his fellow extremists in the right-wing media? </div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll leave folks with the concluding paragraphs of the book, which are as close as I get to offering a prescription going forward regarding how to counter the Limbaugh/Trump vision of America:</div><div>
</div><div>“White racial identity has been the foundation of the single most destructive form of identity politics over the course of American history. In colonial times, slave-owners raised the status of white indentured servants—many of whom had developed close relationships with the enslaved African Americans alongside whom they worked—transforming these “plain white folks” into equal citizens and telling them that they were superior to blacks, who were thus undeserving of freedom. Why did they do this? Because the slave-owning elites had one fear above all: a white-black coalition of the masses that would unite to overthrow them. Similarly, after emancipation, the Southern economic elites made sure to bind poor whites to them through the race-based advantages conferred by Jim Crow, all in the name of thwarting that same white-black, class-based political partnership.</div><div>
</div><div>“In this century, some working- and even middle-class whites, especially those without a college degree, have been drowning economically in a way they have not since the Great Depression. For many, whatever privilege comes with being white is not enough to keep them afloat. They are angry, afraid, and looking for a scapegoat. Limbaugh has been only too happy to oblige. He has absolutely no interest in helping the country figure out how to deal in a productive way with the white anxiety that arises from demographic change. He is interested in one thing, and one thing only: exacerbating this phenomenon in order to keep separate whites and Americans of color who do share common economic interests. That is how Republicans win elections.</div><div>
</div><div>Limbaugh’s divisive approach, in that specific regard, is a carbon copy of the approach taken by the nineteenth century Southern white elites. The more he can get working, and middle-class whites to identify with their racial identity—their tribe—above their economic interests, the better he will be able to prevent the multiracial, progressive coalition assembled by President Obama from growing strong enough to defeat Limbaugh/Trump-style conservatism once and for all. Ultimately, the right-wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Thanks for those powerful words. What are you working on now?</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Ian Reifowitz: Right now? How about a nap? I’m still teaching full time, so I’ll be spending time thinking about a new project over the coming months.</div><div>
</div><div>Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful comments Professor Reifowitz and congratulations on your fascinating new book, “The Tribalization of Politics.” </div></div><div>
<div>mirror /projection</div><div>mma</div><div>
</div><div><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.1; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 10px !important;"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/06/28/rush-limbaugh-rants-7-minutes-about-how-democrats-are-country-s-biggest-hate-group/224090" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border: none;"> Limbaugh rants for 7 minutes about how the Democrats are "the country’s biggest hate group"</a></h2></div><div>
<div><ul style="" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><li>Fox "news" anchor Martha MacCallum <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=cd63cf57fe82b2c7a3396a79edcea8376254577de1217d18b0ed6d506870dd7f5a9afa2d1963eaf852d7eb3eb4187196616e42bcde567ddf" title="absurdly claimed" style="">absurdly claimed</a> that Democrats are not really upset with Barr for lying to Congress, saying that they are really upset at Mueller. How ridiculous was this spin? It was <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=cd63cf57fe82b2c7bdfd5540ee54c0dd25660d3ee4769094c54bbcdf26acbd0f68f4020384c6ada1d226c8705afbd0089d20794da3228204" title="word-for-word" style="">word-for-word </a>the same spin that Rush Limbaugh used. Nevertheless, MacCallum hosted the presidential town hall with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and is scheduled to host another this week with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).</li></ul></div><div>
<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/03/15/rush-limbaugh-suggests-new-zealand-shootings-might-be-false-flag-attack-committed-leftist-smear/223154" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold !important;"> Limbaugh suggests New Zealand shootings might be a false flag attack committed by a leftist to smear conservatives </a></div><div>
<div>WITH chris hedges podcast with david roberts</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://mxplx.com/meme/113/">https://mxplx.com/meme/113/</a></div><div>
</div><div>rush 4 pillars of deceit: media, academic, science and </div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div class="titleblock" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><h1 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Limbaugh Attacks Science and Academia as</h1></div><div class="memedivlistitem" style="padding: 5pt; margin: 5px 2px; text-align: left; border: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 255); border-radius: 10px; background-repeat: repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x; background-position: 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px; min-height: 100px; position: relative; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 100% 0%, color-stop(0.01, rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.3)), color-stop(0.23, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), color-stop(0.4, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.61, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2)), color-stop(0.7, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.8, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), to(rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.25))); z-index: 10;">You know, folks, the two universes here -- The Universe of Lies, The Universe of Reality -- they don't overlap anymore. And this is even bigger than global warming, which was my point yesterday. It's about everything that the left is involved in. What this fraud, what the uncovering of this hoax exposes, is the corruption that exists between government and academia and science and the media. Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It's all lies! It is all oriented toward a political outcome. It's bigger than global warming. And of course science has been corrupted here. Science is being used for political purposes.It always has been, but this is a new low -- or a new high, depending on your perspective. But what they have done here is now make it reasonable to doubt everything some scientist says who gets government money from somewhere. And if you know what's good for you, if you know that they're leftists, you won't believe anything they say any time, anywhere, about anything. Their ideas are so hideous, are so insidious, so anti-free market, that they have to dress their ideas up in a phony cloak of compassion: Saving the planet, saving the polar bears, saving the water, saving the earth, saving whatever it is. "Saving the poor," while they destroy the poor. It just infuriating. So we have now the Four Corners of Deceit, and the two universes in which we live. The Universe of Lies, the Universe of Reality, and The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That's how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.</div><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Notes:</h2><div class="memedivlistitem" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 5pt; margin: 5px 2px; text-align: left; border: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 255); border-radius: 10px; background-repeat: repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x; background-position: 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px; min-height: 100px; position: relative; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 100% 0%, color-stop(0.01, rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.3)), color-stop(0.23, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), color-stop(0.4, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.61, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2)), color-stop(0.7, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.8, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), to(rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.25))); z-index: 10;">Science, academia, government, and media form four pillars of a web of lies in Limbaugh's world, while the world he describes, the world of conservative talk radio, Fox News, and Conservapedia, is reality.</div>Folksonomies: <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/taxonomy=irrationalism" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">irrationalism</a>Taxonomies: <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/taxonomytrue=/science" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">/science</a> (0.654063) <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/taxonomytrue=/technology%20and%20computing/hardware/computer%20components/disks" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">/technology and computing/hardware/computer components/disks</a> (0.465495) <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/taxonomytrue=/science/ecology/pollution" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">/science/ecology/pollution</a> (0.463715)Keywords: <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/keyword=global%20warming" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; 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margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">Reality</a> (0.638146): <a href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Reality" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">dbpedia</a> | <a href="http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/m.0b_71" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">freebase</a> <a href="https://mxplx.com/memelist/concept=Nature" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">Nature</a> (0.627631): <a href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Nature" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">dbpedia</a> | <a href="http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/m.05h0n" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">freebase</a> | <a href="http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rwQrzNZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">opencyc</a><div class="referencedivlistitem" style="padding: 5pt; margin: 5px 2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 2px solid rgb(255, 0, 0); border-radius: 10px; background-repeat: repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x; background-position: 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px; min-height: 120px; position: relative; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 100% 0%, color-stop(0.01, rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.3)), color-stop(0.23, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), color-stop(0.4, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.61, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2)), color-stop(0.7, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.8, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), to(rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.25))); letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://mxplx.com/Reference/id=63" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;"><img src="https://mxplx.com/framework/images/reference.gif" width="13" height="13" border="0" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: -15%;" /> ClimateGate Hoax: The Universe of Lies Versus the Universe of Reality</a> <div class="reference" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px auto;">Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article:  <a href="https://mxplx.com/ReferenceList/author=54" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">Limbaugh, Rush</a> (11/24/2009), ClimateGate Hoax: The Universe of Lies Versus the Universe of Reality, Premiere Radio Networks, Retrieved on -0001-11-30<li style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><a href="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_112409/content/01125108.guest.html" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">Source Material</a> [www.rushlimbaugh.com]</li></div>Folksonomies: <a href="https://mxplx.com/referencelist/taxonomy=irrationalism" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">irrationalism</a></div><div style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px; text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); clear: both;"> <h3 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px; text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Schemas</h3><div class="schemadivlistitem" style="padding: 5pt; margin: 5px 2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 2px solid rgb(0, 255, 0); border-radius: 10px; background-repeat: repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x, repeat-x; background-position: 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px, 0px 0px; min-height: 100px; position: relative; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 100% 0%, color-stop(0.01, rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.3)), color-stop(0.23, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), color-stop(0.4, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.61, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2)), color-stop(0.7, rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.1)), color-stop(0.8, rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.1)), to(rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.25))); letter-spacing: 1px;"><div class="divListItemDate" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: absolute; top: 4px; right: 4px;">28 MAR 2011</div><h2 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><img src="https://mxplx.com/framework/images/schema.png" class="schemaListIcon" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: -15%; width: 25px; height: 25px;" /> <a href="https://mxplx.com/schema/22/" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;">American Anti-Intellectualism</a></h2>Examples of prejudice against nerds in America.<div class="folksonomies" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: absolute; bottom: 4px; width: 680.484px;">Folksonomies: <a href="https://mxplx.com/schemalist/taxonomy=prejudice" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">prejudice</a> <a href="https://mxplx.com/schemalist/taxonomy=anti-intellectualism" class="menulink" style="padding: 1px 5px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold; vertical-align: middle; line-height: 30px; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px 0px inset; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, color-stop(0.05, rgb(237, 237, 237)), to(rgb(223, 223, 223))) rgb(237, 237, 237);">anti-intellectualism</a></div></div><div>
</div><div>
both beck and rush peddler apocalyptic seeds, gold? (opposite/ flipside of magical thinking?)
<div>Limbaugh <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://mediamatters.nationbuilder.com/r?u=3YhLhUxTGfXV40jjcf0E7z4H6Szh2ve6Id8D7jzs32-XEz3V6tV7ACrU01PRW_aXNcAi8D-oUson2w0JHDUauYmkSj94TJqL8yXVoY9PybXNyqu_ug6iFA1mp2qtagSVY6znj3rmH9S5WV_PN-1Z9WiA8UbSEKRGUSOzi9XHe-btC1620aFkEniMqSIs1Fnw&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=916weekly&n=65&v=1437" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">shared a fake story</a> that sharks were flying around in Hurricane Florence, even holding up a fake chyron for the camera.?! mma</div><div>
<div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">escalator</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no many lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Spygate: How Right-Wing Media Creates a Conspiracy Theory Out of Thin Air</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">BY JAY WILLIS</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This is how conservative media transformed a small news item into a full-blown conspiracy theory that the president (apparently) believes to be true.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>The plot goes like this: During the summer of 2016, on the clandestine orders of then-president Barack Obama, the FBI and CIA hatched an ambitious plan to topple the Trump campaign from the inside. In a scandal of unprecedented scope, Democratic politicians commandeered American counterintelligence resources to spy on their primary political opponent and boost Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the election. The Russia investigation that has dominated headlines for nearly two years is, in fact, a desperate smokescreen conjured up by terrified Deep State actors to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing, and to frame the president for heinous crimes he didn't commit.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On May 8, The Washington Post reported on the White House's decision to back the Justice Department's withholding of information from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, on the grounds that disclosure would expose the identity of "a U.S. citizen who has provided information to the FBI and CIA." The authors added, though, that the individual had been a source of information used by the special counsel's office—and that it was unclear whether Trump knew this "key fact" when his administration chose to side with law enforcement.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It didn't take long for him to find out. Almost immediately, the right-wing-media ecosystem began laundering and repackaging this news item, weaving its constituent elements together with Trumpian talking points until a full-blown conspiracy theory worthy of the president's tweets emerged on the other side. This metamorphosis is what would happen if a word cloud sourced from a Trump rally were used in a giant game of telephone—but one in which the gibberish end result were then broadcast as news to hundreds of millions of recipients.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">How did this happen?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>May 10</div><div>Two days after the initial report, citing "the Washington Post's unnamed law-enforcement leakers," The Wall Street Journal publishes an analysis by conservative commentator Kim Strassel. "[W]e might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign." Such a development, she writes, "would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting." Strassel continues (all emphasis mine):</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[W]hen precisely was this human source operating? Because if it was prior to that infamous Papadopoulos tip, then the FBI isn’t being straight. It would mean the bureau was spying on the Trump campaign prior to that moment. And that in turn would mean that the FBI had been spurred to act on the basis of something other than a junior campaign aide’s loose lips.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>This is at once cautious and bold, introducing the salacious vocabulary of espionage to a detail about an intelligence source—but only, she clarifies, if the allegations are true. Strassel does not offer a reason for entertaining her hypothetical, other than her characterization of the players' accounts of the investigation as "suspiciously vague."She is, in the classic style of well-compensated public intellectuals filling up column inches, just asking questions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>That night, other journalists are happy to offer answers. On Sean Hannity's Fox News show, journalist Sara Carter, citing Strassel, tells listeners of “concern that the FBI actually had a spy within the Trump campaign.” Hannity is dumbfounded: “What? What?” he splutters. "Yes," replies Carter. Blogs like Gateway Pundit kick off the breathless hyperbole category. "Now we know why the Deep State has been working so hard to take down President Trump and the republic," said the post, linking to and block-quoting Strassel. "OBAMA DEEP STATE HAD A SPY INSIDE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN!"</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 11</div><div>The baton is passed to Fox News, which syndicates Strassel's article and changes the headline from “About that FBI ‘source’” to “Did the FBI place a mole inside the 2016 Trump campaign?” On Fox & Friends, the president's morning program of choice, Pete Hegseth weighs in, hesitantly at first. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign? Just asking the question. There’s an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it." Ainsley Earhardt quotes at length from the column before positing that it means the FBI and DOJ had someone "paid to go and spy on President Trump."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picks up the thread, encouraging the conflation of the FBI and President Obama. Strassel's article mentions Obama only once, and only in passing. But this is Rush Limbaugh, not a major newspaper; he can say things like this without fear of repercussions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When I say “the FBI,” I mean the Obama administration. They infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy, and while they had that spy implanted, they were unmasking and leaking and obtaining FISA spying warrants and conducting criminal investigations of Trump advisers. This is a big deal...For our purposes, folks, the important thing is that the Obama administration infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>The buzz grows louder online. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign?" asks Andrew McCarthy, praising Strassel's column as "essential reporting," in a National Review article that published early the next morning. Right-wing blog ZeroHedge makes an affirmative statement—“WSJ: The FBI Hid a Mole in the Trump Campaign”—out of his question. Also citing Strassel, Tucker Carlson refers to a "government spy" and a "mole" sent by "the Obama administration." His guest, NRATV personality Dan Bongino, reveals that he believes there to have been more than one spy, referring to "reporting." He does not elaborate on-air.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 14</div><div>The week begins with lawmakers joining the fray. On Fox & Friends, GOP congressman Ron DeSantis calls for a follow-up investigation into the matter. "I know that we’re actively trying to get the underlying documents that would tell us: Did they spy on the Trump campaign or not?” he asks, implicitly treating the premises of that query as if they were beyond dispute. To Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Network, Matt Gaetz expresses unease with "reports" he'd heard "about potential human intelligence being collected on a rival presidential campaign."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>These men are egged on by, among others, Rush Limbaugh, who asserts he knows the identity of the spy that the FBI "put in the Trump campaign," and Hannity, whose radio guest David Limbaugh—Rush's younger brother—opines that "an official policy inserting a confidential source into a presidential campaign" would be "unprecedented" and "worse than Watergate." Like DeSantis, he includes a soft qualifier, though: "If it happened! We have to get to the bottom of it."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 15</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Nunes appears on the Fox & Friends set, hinting that the campaign might have been "set up" by the FBI. “I believe they never should have opened a counterintelligence investigation into a political party,” he explains. And although he at first avoids using the word "spy," his hosts are happy to put it in his mouth. Steve Doocy suggests that Nunes's narrative implies that Trump was "framed," while Earhardt adds that "it makes it sound like there was a spy."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Some 12 hours later, Hannity is again agape at the "possibility of an FBI mole that was inside the Trump campaign." He runs snippets of the "stunning" Nunes interview, scarcely able to believe his ears. "The powerful tools of intelligence used to spy on an opposition party candidate, and those powerful tools used against Americans?" he muses. "No, that can't happen here."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 16</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On Laura Ingraham's show, Rudy Giuliani at once broaches the subject of the FBI "possibly placing a spy in the Trump campaign" while admitting that he doesn't know if the gossip is true. The next morning, on Fox & Friends, he’ll again dip his toes in the water before retreating to solid ground. "That would be the biggest scandal in the history of this town—at least, involving law enforcement," Giuliani warns.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He's intrigued by the possibility, though. "Maybe two spies!" he wonders aloud.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Meanwhile, outside the MAGAsphere, a New York Times article helps breathe new life into the conspiracy theory. The authors of that report—an account of the 2016 law-enforcement inquiry into the Trump campaign—note that “at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos.” Referring to the preceding week of innuendo, they characterize this detail as a “politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As noted by USA Today's Brad Heath, FBI guidelines allow agents to use informants, among many other methods of information-gathering, when assessing whether a matter warrants a full criminal investigation. The Bureau's partial reliance on a "source" here isn't especially remarkable.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Furthermore, given their knowledge of the Kremlin's election-meddling efforts, it isn't difficult to understand why the intelligence community might have an interest in a campaign's ties to Russia, regardless of the candidate's political affiliation. Marco Rubio—a man not known for being fond of Hillary Clinton—said as much after reviewing the underlying evidence along with the rest of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found no secret political motivation for opening the inquiry. “There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he reasoned in comments cited by the Times. “That’s what they did.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>It doesn't matter. One little opening is all it takes. Breitbart, mentioning the May 8 Post story and Strassel's follow-up, proclaims that the Times report "confirmed" that the FBI ran a "spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps." (The article itself mentions only the FISA warrant on Page, but the headline's plural form—"wiretaps"—does its job of making things sound especially ominous.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 17</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Other right-wing outlets aggregating the Times report draw the same conclusions Breitbart did. “FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign,” blares The Federalist, which justifies its assertion with a helpful explanatory aside.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This paragraph [in the Times report] is noteworthy for the way it describes spying on the campaign—“at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos”—before suggesting that might not be spying. The definition of spying is to secretly collect information, so it’s not really in dispute whether a government informant fits the bill.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Note that the write-up does not actually suggest that the FBI "planted" anyone in the campaign. But by setting out an expansive definition of "spying," articles like this one allow other publications—ones that might not so carefully define their terms—to use the word in that more specific (and more nefarious) context.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>It is the National Review's coverage—assisted by cable news—that finally allows this story to reach the hallways of the Executive Residence. "With the blessing of the Obama White House," writes Andrew McCarthy, again attributing the actions of law-enforcement officials to affirmative decisions of the then-president, the FBI "took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans—Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries."He continues:</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Obviously, Russia was trying to meddle in the election, mainly through cyber-espionage—hacking. There would, then, have been nothing inappropriate about the FBI’s opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible not to do so. That’s what counterintelligence powers are for.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>This is the thrust of his argument, and it is nonsensical. McCarthy seems to assume that counterintelligence investigations "against Russia" and counterintelligence investigations "against the Trump campaign" must be mutually exclusive propositions, and that under no circumstances could a Russia-related intelligence probe look at the activities of Russia-related Trump officials. (His analysis is aided by a gross oversimplification of a key provision of FISA.) It would be "irresponsible," he urges, not to investigate what Russia may have been doing. But by virtue of their affiliation with a politician, everyone on the campaign should be insulated from any attendant scrutiny.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Before his column publishes, McCarthy hops on Fox & Friends to promote it. “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign,” he says in a strange moment of confidence and timidity. (In a fun, incestuous right-wing-media aside, while listing McCarthy's credentials, F&F co-host Brian Kilmeade adds, "Hopefully a Fox News contributor soon.") Not long afterward, Trump takes to Twitter to express his outrage, shouting out McCarthy by name for a job well done.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Donald J. Trump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@realDonaldTrump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate!</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Law-enforcement pushback begins in earnest. Sources tell CNN that, no, the source was not placed within the Trump campaign. The Times provides even more details about the timeline, affirming that the informant spoke to campaign members only after the FBI learned of their dubious contacts with Russia. "No evidence has emerged," it reiterates, "that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It's too late. Because Donald Trump is president of the United States, the content of his tweets becomes breaking news regardless of its accuracy. "Trump: Justice Department planted spy in 2016 campaign," declares an AP headline that runs, among other places, in The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. The body text notes that Trump's "own lawyer" has said that the allegation "might not be true." But for readers inclined to believe what Donald Trump says, or for those who only saw the headline as they scrolled through their social feeds, it might as well have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Epilogue: May 18–20</div><div>The next day, the president tweets again, and again, with grateful acknowledgements for the hard work put in by Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs, David Asman, and Gregg Jarrett.</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div><div>
<div>
</div><div>analysis: with both trump and rush, fairly simple alorithm that generates postions?</div><div>NB both need to generate BS daily, rush has to feed the beast, Naomi Klein says disasters have to be constant to keep us off balance.</div><div>
<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2015/09/28/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-on-mars-rus/205820" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold !important;">After NASA Announces It Found Water On Mars, Rush Limbaugh Says It's Part Of A Climate Change Conspiracy </a> September 28, 2015 2:35 PM EDT
<div style=""><div>===</div><div>AN</div><div>
</div><div>Two days ago, right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh said that Hurricane Irma’s news coverage was a ploy to create “<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/al-roker-rips-rush-limbaugh-hurricane-irma-conspiracy-theory-article-1.3475736" style="text-decoration-line: none;">fear and panic</a>,” and predicted that the storm <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/09/06/rush-limbaugh-spins-a-web-of-conspiratorial-nonsense-about-hurricane-irma/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">probably wouldn’t impact</a> the major population centers of South Florida.</div><div>It took Limbaugh about a day to change his mind.On Thursday, the bag of bluster announced that he’d be going to be taking a hiatus from his Palm Beach, Florida, house and studio, leaving someone else to handle his show.<twitterwidget class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" id="twitter-widget-0" data-tweet-id="905855934408396801" style="position: static; visibility: visible; display: block; transform: rotate(0deg); max-width: 100%; width: 500px; min-width: 220px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><div data-twitter-event-id="0" class="SandboxRoot env-bp-350" style="direction: ltr; background: 0px 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.4; white-space: initial; position: relative;"><div class="EmbeddedTweet EmbeddedTweet--edge js-clickToOpenTarget tweet-InformationCircle-widgetParent" data-click-to-open-target="https://twitter.com/fineout/status/905855934408396801" data-iframe-title="Twitter Tweet" data-dt-full="%{hours12}:%{minutes} %{amPm} - %{day} %{month} %{year}" data-dt-explicit-timestamp="11:10 AM - Sep 7, 2017" data-dt-months="Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec" data-dt-am="AM" data-dt-pm="PM" data-dt-now="now" data-dt-s="s" data-dt-m="m" data-dt-h="h" data-dt-second="second" data-dt-seconds="seconds" data-dt-minute="minute" data-dt-minutes="minutes" data-dt-hour="hour" data-dt-hours="hours" data-dt-abbr="%{number}%{symbol}" data-dt-short="%{day} %{month}" data-dt-long="%{day} %{month} %{year}" data-scribe="page:tweet" id="twitter-widget-0" lang="en" data-twitter-event-id="1" style="overflow: hidden; cursor: pointer; border: 1px solid rgb(225, 232, 237); border-radius: 5px; max-width: 520px; position: relative;"><div class="EmbeddedTweet-tweet" style="padding: 20px 20px 11.6px;"><blockquote class="Tweet h-entry js-tweetIdInfo subject expanded

                   is-deciderHtmlWhitespace" cite="https://twitter.com/fineout/status/905855934408396801" data-tweet-id="905855934408396801" data-scribe="section:subject" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none;"><div class="Tweet-header u-cf" style="position: relative; padding-left: 45px; white-space: nowrap;"><div class="Tweet-brand u-floatRight" style="float: right !important; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><span style="background-color: initial;"><br /></span></div><div class="Tweet-brand u-floatRight" style="float: right !important; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><span style="background-color: initial;"><br /></span></div><div class="Tweet-brand u-floatRight" style="float: right !important; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><span style="background-color: initial;">imbaugh’s previous statements indicated that he was unsure that there would be serious devastation to areas — it was all media hype! — and, on Thursday, he stood by those remarks. He argued&nbsp;that, if you’re not going to be in the eye of the storm, it won’t be as bad as the media and government say it would be.</span></div></div></blockquote></div></div></div></twitterwidget><blockquote style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">So when they say “hurricane category 4, maximum sustained winds 155 miles,” there is a place where that is happening, but it’s not very large. It’s not the whole hurricane. But all of this is done on purpose because — and once it’s committed to, once you reach the three-day forecast range, which we’re in now, 72 hours out, once you reach that, they’re committed.</p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">But even as Limbaugh cast doubt on the government’s forecasts, he heeded them in case they were right.</p><blockquote style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">They’re committed to it. It’s part of the way they warn. Even if they think that it’s gonna turn and be offshore east, they can’t move that track in advance of that happening, because they can’t be sure. If they were to move that track offshore east, say tonight at five o’clock, in two hours, and it moves and they’re right, but then late Saturday night it makes a jog left back over land, they would be in deep doo-doo, because people believe them too. And they can’t afford now that they’ve invested and committed to a landfall in south Florida, they have to stick with that until the hurricane makes a move that is off that track. They can’t make a move now because of the model.</p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">President&nbsp;<a data-reactid="239" href="http://time.com/4930328/donald-trump-chuck-schumer-oval-office/" rel="" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Donald Trump</a>‘s seaside resort Mar-a-Lago has also been ordered to evacuate as Irma, a ferocious category 4 storm, approaches Florida.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">Last year, Limbaugh revealed how damaging&nbsp;a category 4 storm would be. &nbsp;He also blamed Obama for part of the panic during Hurricane Matthew,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/10/05/an_update_from_eib_hurricane_central/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">while admitting</a>&nbsp;that yes, being in a hurricane is actually pretty bad!</p><blockquote style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">Now, we’ve lived through Category 2s here, and they are devastating.&nbsp; You lose power and you lose your phone lines and trees are blown over and the roads are impassable, and there’s some home damage, depending on the construction of the home and how old it is.&nbsp; It’s not pretty.&nbsp; Category 1 even can feature some of that.&nbsp; Category 4, like is headed for the East Coast of Florida right now could be catastrophic if it comes ashore.</p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">Just remember: Even Rush Limbaugh listens to the meteorologists.</p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">==</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rush-limbaugh-uncorks-wild-new-conspiracy-theory-about-hurricane-irma">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rush-limbaugh-uncorks-wild-new-conspiracy-theory-about-hurricane-irma</a></div><div><br /></div><div>September 5, 2017</div><div>Alexander Nazaryan</div><div>Posted with permission from Newsweek</div><div><br /></div><div>Hurricane Irma is gathering strength over the Atlantic Ocean as it heads towards the Caribbean. Already rated Category 5, it is expected to make landfall in Florida by the end of the week, with many worried about a repeat of the havoc caused in Texas and Louisiana by Hurricane Harvey.</div><div><br /></div><div>None of that seems to worry Rush Limbaugh.</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>On Monday, the right-wing radio personality delivered a customarily freewheeling monologue in which he seemed to suggest that hurricanes were a liberal conspiracy intended to convince the public that climate change is real.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Limbaugh is not a meteorologist, as he acknowledges at the opening of the monologue, before proceeding to muse on meteorology. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Limbaugh is a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, and the hurricane-themed monologue appeared to be driven by his observation that bottled water had already been sold out in local stores, in preparation for Irma’s imminent landfall.“The reason that I am leery of forecasts this far out, folks, is because I see how the system works,” Limbaugh said, alluding to alleged conspiracies against President Donald J. Trump. “Hurricane Harvey and the TV pictures that accompany that go a long way to helping further and create the panic.”</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Related: Limbaugh is making the GOP the party of wimps</div><div><br /></div><div>Hurricane Harvey flooded 50 counties, killed 63 people and displaced more than a million. Limbaugh did not offer evidence of how any of this was a conspiracy by the "Deep State," environmentalists or other groups that might presumably want to exaggerate the storm’s devastation.</div><div><br /></div><div>The crux of Limbaugh’s argument was that “in the official meteorological circles, you have an abundance of people who believe that man-made climate change is real. And they believe that Al Gore is correct when he has written—and he couldn’t be more wrong—that climate change is creating more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes.”</div><div><br /></div><div>It is not clear what Limbaugh meant by “official meteorological circles.” Perhaps this is a reference to people who have studied meteorology and are experts in the field. Recently, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory published an extensive review that said it was “premature” to declare a causal link between human activity and hurricane strength. However, that same review said that “it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The journalist John K. Wilson has called Limbaugh “the country's leading denier of global climate change.” That mantle has been proudly claimed by President Trump, who does not appear to believe that global warming is real. Nor do most national Republican politicians. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Republicans “worry a great deal” about climate change; conversely, 66 percent of Democrats evinced a heightened level of concern about it.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>On Monday’s program, Limbaugh said that “there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere. All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”</div><div><br /></div><div>The National Hurricane Center did not respond to a request for comment on Limbaugh’s assertions about hurricanes.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Near the end of the segment, Limbaugh suggested that hurricane coverage was a means for local media outlets to increase ratings and local retailers to increase sales, returning to the observation with which he’d begun.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>“You cannot find a case of bottled water here in Palm Beach,” he said. “You can’t. Miami, probably even worse.”</div><div><br /></div><div>==</div></div><div style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="">==<br /></font><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Free Beacon</span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2bIedjA&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=826weekly1&n=46&v=235" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline: none; line-height: 21px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">launched a wild conspiracy theory</a><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">: that President Obama was sending lesbian farmers to infiltrate the American heartland. Limbaugh, who has a&nbsp;</span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F1W0aKxw&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=826weekly1&n=47&v=235" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1472231308398_29094" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline: none; line-height: 21px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">lengthy history</a><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;of opposing LGBT rights,&nbsp;</span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2bjhFNf&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=826weekly1&n=48&v=235" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline: none; line-height: 21px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">angrily lashed out</a><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;at people mocking him, saying that "leftists" and "young millenials" simply don't understand his brilliance. In a related story, news about Rush Limbaugh's latest contract&nbsp;</span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2axW7MJ&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=826weekly1&n=49&v=235" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1472231308398_29092" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline: none; line-height: 21px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">doesn't mentionits price</a><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;because he no longer draws a salary.</span></font></div><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">2009 newsweek</font></div><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><br /></font></div><div style=""><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rush Limbaugh, the man who did more than anyone else to create the modern Republican brand in the 1990s, is now destroying it. Everyone knows he has "jumped the shark" culturally—become a black-shirted joke even as he dominates the headlines. But it's worse than that for Republicans. Limbaugh has taken the great GOP calling card—toughness—and shredded it. The party of Lincoln is in danger of becoming the party of Jell-O.&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;">(Article continued below...)</em></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Witness the specter of party leaders from Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to Republican Party chairman Michael Steele all issuing craven apologies to Limbaugh after uttering the truth, which is that Rush's rhetoric is "ugly" and that he was wrong to say he hoped President Obama would fail. The monster the GOP collectively created—Rush's "dittohead" army of conservative listeners—makes life miserable for anyone who dares criticize the Great Bloviator. By enforcing right-wing political correctness, the dittoheads are making their party leaders look weak.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strength, of course, has been the great, well, strength of the GOP. Starting with reactionary vitriol directed at the New Deal (echoed today) and extending through the Cold War, Republicans have long had the advantage of looking and sounding more muscular than Democrats. For most of the last century, conservatives have been depicted as "rock-ribbed" and liberals as "whiny."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem became especially acute in the 1970s, when former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Jimmy Carter was turned into a girlie man. An editor&nbsp;<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3DD173DF93AA15754C0A964958260" linktype="External" resizable="true" status="true" scrollbars="true" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-style: none none solid; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(247, 34, 16); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">jokingly entitled a Boston Globe editorial about Carter “More Mush From the Wimp”</a>&nbsp;and it accidentally ran in the paper. This symbolized public attitudes toward liberals, and the caricature paved the way for Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and the 1994 GOP takeover of the House of Representatives.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Limbaugh was a key player in that takeover. For two decades, he has provided a daily three-hour national advertisement for the GOP specifically and the conservative movement in general. Because most mainstream media types in Washington and New York don't listen, they never fully understood how big Rush had become.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But nothing lasts forever. Rush's audience remains huge, with a weekly audience of more than 20 million, and will stay large for as long as he broadcasts. If his listeners can forgive him sending his poor housekeeper into a parking lot to score drugs for him, they will forgive anything. But these folks no long represent the American mainstream. In fact, while 28 percent of Americans still identify themselves as Republicans, 29 percent call themselves independents. Plenty of the indies might still be listening to Rush, but they don't take their marching orders from him anymore. To them, he's just another entertainer.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Obama first mentioned Limbaugh in a meeting with Republicans during his second week in office, he was chastised for elevating him in a way that didn't befit a president. But it quickly became clear that any contest between Barack and Rush was not really a contest at all—and that this is a fight the president is happy to have. The president's popularity is in the 60s, and the entertainer's, according to internal Democratic polling, is in the 20s. So Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs are now piling on, describing Limbaugh as the "intellectual force" and "de facto chairman" of the party.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px none; list-style: none outside none; margin: 0px 0px 22px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It works. And it will keep on working until enough Republicans grow a spine. When they show enough guts to ignore the thousands of calls and e-mails from dittoheads, maybe they'll get their party—and their self-respect—back.</font></p></div><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">===<br /></font><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">6/16</font></div><div style=""><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want to announce the price of his next contract for several reasons. First, he may not have one at all.&nbsp;His parent companie&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1514588/edit" target="_blank" title="" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">iHeart and Cumulus are&nbsp;going under financially and/or going&nbsp;bankrupt.&nbsp;His predominant audience is now over 65.&nbsp;Sponsors/advertisers won’t go near his toxic show so talk radio is costing the radio industry millions income, he’s scores of big and little&nbsp;radio stations, his ratings are low&nbsp;</a>and he’s&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">just bad business</strong>. Other than that, I can’t imagine why he’s not talking about future contracts.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thanks to&nbsp;the many activists/volunteers and concerned consumers who made this happen —&nbsp;&nbsp;and the “free market” when it works&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">for the people:</strong></font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 30px 60px; margin: 20px 0px; border: none; width: 660px; line-height: 24px; z-index: -1; letter-spacing: 0.125px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Join/Visit/Like:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Boycott-Rush-Limbaughs-Sponsors-to-SHUT-HIM-DOWN/253645602134?ref=hl&hc_location=timeline" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Facebook: BoycottRush Facebook Group</a>&nbsp;(Over 107k&nbsp;following)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sign:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.change.org/petitions/sign-here-tell-limbaugh-sponsors-clear-channel-cumulus-we-will-not-buy-support-misogyny-racism-or-hate-speech?utm_campaign=url_share_after_sign&utm_medium=url_share&utm_source=share_petition" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Limbaugh Sponsor & Clear Channel Petition</a>&nbsp;(Over 142k&nbsp;signatures)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Join:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/flushrush/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Facebook's Join The Fight To Flush Rush</a>&nbsp;(Over 25k&nbsp;members)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Visit:&nbsp;<a href="http://stoprush.net/rush_limbaugh_sponsor_list.php#current_a" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The StopRush Database</a>&nbsp;</font></p></blockquote></div><div style=""><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">===<br /><br />

<h2 id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1460735741210_53291" style="">Rush Limbaugh has a big problem</h2>

Rush Limbaugh is in trouble. He was given a massive contract despite a

track record of bigotry, sexism, and chicanery. Now, the company that

owns his contract is <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F1Xtd2SV&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=415weekly1&n=7" style="">teetering on the edge of bankruptcy</a> -- and

Limbaugh's contract is nearly up. A crucial catalyst in Limbaugh's

downfall has been Stop Rush and Flush Rush activists who have put <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2FWwBy5p&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=415weekly1&n=8" style="">increasing pressure</a> on right-wing radio ever since

Limbaugh's days-long sexist outburst at a law student in 2012.<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F1Qw4U2W&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=415weekly1&n=9" style="">
</a>
==
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