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MMA

  1. ### On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone discusses how right-wing media leaning on “more bloodthirst and more cruelty” in SNAP coverage

10/28/25

October 28, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

BASIL SMIKLE (GUEST): And the the point I would make in addition to that is if you are looking to punish people, right, they're mostly punishing their supporters. There are more people in this country from red states -- there are more white Americans, particularly Republicans, that are on these programs. So if you want to even use the sort of, you know, that sort of welfare queen trope that a lot of Republicans have historically used, it doesn't even touch that or come close to touching that. So the suggestion -- the point I would think is that they're only just trying to punish Americans using this tactic.

ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Well, Angelo, to build on the point that Basil just made, I'm sure you've seen the highly partisan framing of the USDA's -- a government agency's communication in a message saying that Democrats are to blame and, quote, "The well is about to run dry." I wonder the extent to which on conservative media that message is being echoed or how they are justifying to Basil's point about the fact that this is a lot of Trump's own supporters who are being impacted by this, how they are explaining that away.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the way they look at it is in a few dimensions. One, they never acknowledge the reality, right, that it's going to be a lot of their own supporters. Even though they all kind of know it, they never actually acknowledge that. The predominant right-leaning narrative is what's been that way for 20-plus years going all the way back to Rush Limbaugh, you know, sort of really reinforcing the false notion of a welfare queen or, you know, one of the things he used to say about the WIC program in particular was that it was all just a gigantic fiction because why would you need a program like this if they were able to have babies in the first place? Surely, they weren't that desperate if they were able to have babies. So clearly, it was just sort of a Democratic fiction, and that's been percolating forever.

So it's basically the notion that it's liberals and Black people that are getting this program predominantly. So to some extent, they're happy. There's a lot of schadenfreude and they're leaning into the cruelty that there's a whole bunch of people that don't get it, that they don't like, that are going to be punished.

And on the flip side, some of this soft undercurrent, and you sort of got to that in your messaging, is that, yeah, there are going to be some of their people that are going to suffer from this. And to an extent, they're perfectly fine with that as long as they know that they can convince their people that it's Democrats at fault. Because recognize that a big part of what they want to do here is not only to punish liberals and Democrats, any of their perceived political opponents, but to keep the anger flowing on their side so that they can continue to justify and rationalize the cruelty that they're inflicting on the country and our slide toward authoritarianism. And you sort of need that as the fuel to then justify all the other extreme measures that you're taking. So that's the large framework that's playing out in the right-wing media right now. More bloodthirstY and more cruelty.

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mma

Project 2025 seeks to fulfill the right-wing media dream of cutting vital food assistance

The extreme right-wing initiative proposes cuts to programs benefiting millions of Americans

Written by Casey Wexler & Reed McMaster

Published 10/29/24 mma

Right-wing media have spent over a decade attacking and calling for cuts to vital food assistance programs, with particular focus on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as “food stamps”) as well as free school lunch programs.

Now, Project 2025 — an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration — proposes fulfilling their wish of cutting off hundreds of thousands of Americans from vital food assistance.

Project 2025 calls for sweeping cuts to the food stamp program, which would eliminate food assistance for some Americans and slash the purchasing power of families

Project 2025 also aims to cut free school lunch programs, cutting children off from vital nutrition

In 2010, Rush Limbaugh attacked school lunches and suggested hungry children should “dumpster dive.” Limbaugh provided a list of places kids could supposedly go to get meals such as their own kitchens, McDonald’s, and a dumpster, stating, “There are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.”}: Premiere Radio Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [6/16/10]|

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an 10 24

Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and current lieutenant governor, is in trouble again.

Not just because Robinson has referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and a “perv,” expressed support for reinstating slavery, said he watched transgender pornography, called homosexuality “filth” and the Holocaust “hogwash,” and has asserted that “some folks need killing.”

He’s in trouble now because he blew off a vote on a declaration that would have granted Governor Roy Cooper key emergency powers ahead of Hurricane Helene’s landfall. Robinson was the only member on the Council of State — a board of nine — who didn’t vote in favor of the declaration. Cooper got the power he needed, but Robinson is now criticizing him for not doing more in the wake of the storm.

Yet Robinson still commands the support of 63 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, according to an East Carolina University poll released Wednesday.

Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.

The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.

It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.

The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich saw an opportunity to build the Republican Party around similar lies and conspiracy theories. Gingrich’s efforts attracted the first group of modern crackpot candidates into the GOP.

Starting in 2016, Trump attracted another group, even wackier than the previous one.

It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.

If Trump loses the 2024 election, the Republican Party won’t change, because its base is filled with this poison. So it will continue to attract more crackpot candidates loaded with even more venom; it will nominate them, and some of them will win.

In the current election cycle, the poison doesn’t begin or end with Trump. It includes a Republican vice presidential candidate who calls women who choose not to have children “childless cat ladies,” claims Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, won’t concede that Trump lost the 2020 election, and won’t commit to be bound by the outcome of the 2024 election.

It’s produced a slew of Republican candidates for Congress saying similar things. In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown’s Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, is parroting the same racist lies about Haitian immigrants.

In Arizona, the Republican candidate for Senate, Kari Lake, has denied the outcome of the 2020 election, tried to overturn the governor’s race she lost in 2022, appeared at QAnon and white nationalist-tied events, and has a history of violent rhetoric.

Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia has called abortion “elective surgery” and compared it to a “Hollywood nose job.”

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who was at Trump’s January 6 rally and appears to have been among the insurrectionists who breached police barricades at the Capitol, calls abortion “genocide.”

Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane is promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump — blaming a mole within Trump’s Secret Service detail and saying that the FBI can’t be trusted to “give us the truth”; that the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, didn’t act alone; and that the gunman behind the second attempt is an “asset” of a foreign adversary — despite evidence contradicting all these theories.

Back in North Carolina, Michele Morrow, the current Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction, has been warning voters about a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that, she says, torture and kill children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Morrow says the plus sign in LGBTQ+ “includes PEDOPH*L*A!!” She claims that transgender therapy is “a disgusting plan of Big Pharma to make our children unable to reproduce” and that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children. She says Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China, and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”

Morrow discourages parents from sending their kids to public schools, which she refers to as “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers.” She was on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, and proposed then that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, which, she said, “completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, ‘Now the military rules all.’”

Despite all this, Morrow has an even chance to become the state’s top educator. A poll by Raleigh-based WRAL last month found that she is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent.

You see the problem. When the base of one of our two political parties both fuels and is fueled by crackpots, some of those crackpots get elected.

The only way forward is with an entirely new Republican Party that rejects and detoxifies the old one and puts an end to this doom loop. Will Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and some as yet unknown young politicians lead the way?

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/angelo-carusone-and-msnbcs-chris-hayes-discuss-how-fox-news-echo-chamber-will-be

mma 4 23

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 linesin 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 polls

KARL 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 brainparts 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 

an 9 22 kirk swear

Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently posted some thoughts 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 complicated 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 gamethat 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 despise your political opponents and push disinformation and conspiracy theories. It was either un-American or, sadly, quintessentially American 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) andmuch of Trump's inner circle playing good ol' boys, affecting down-home dialects, 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 retrograde religious dogma they pretend to believe.

The Trumpist cult and other far-right political organizations around the globe continue to profitably press their pseudo-populist game planof 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 phony Wharton grad who reluctantly departed from the White House in January 2021 saidhe loved the "poorly educated," 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 black-hole heart for people who cannot, or will not, see how he is hoodwinking them. None of us finds it easy to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing we may be wrong.

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 propagandaTV andsocial media are bringing authoritarianism to America under a marketing label borrowed from Hungary: "illiberal democracy."

Today's Christian fascists 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 deliberately cruel media spectacle.

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; theFox–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 aphony,shameless,sexually predatory,pathologically insecure,malignant narcissist 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.

ref

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/from-newt-gingrich-to-donald-trump-rush-limbaughs-legacy-is-the-modern-gop/

no lnx twt

from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh's legacy is the modern GOP

The right-wing cult Rush Limbaugh created was appropriated by Donald Trump — and lives on

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Columnist

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 19, 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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."

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?]

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.

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

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.

MORE FROM HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

---some lnx

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.

Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh's narrative into a partisan weapon, launchinga program [gopack lang memo https://uh.edu/englin/rephandout.html] 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....

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 theoriesfor years,

https://www.newsweek.com/vince-fosters-suicide-rumor-mill-churns-185900

:{

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 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:

... https://www.click2houston.com/news/politics/2021/02/18/even-without-listening-you-live-in-limbaughs-media-world/

no lnx

even without listening, US lives in Limbaugh’s media world

[pix FILE - In this Feb. 4, 2020 file photo, Rush Limbaugh reacts as first Lady Melania Trump, and his wife Kathryn, applaud, as President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington.  Limbaugh, the talk radio host who became the voice of American conservatism, has died. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

FILE - Rush Limbaugh, left, shakes hands with President Donald Trump as he introduces Trump at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit at on Dec. 21, 2019, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Limbaugh died of lung cancer on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, four weeks after Trump left office. He was memorialized as the "greatest of all time" on Fox's website, but to critics who saw Limbaugh as a spreader of bigotry, it was good riddance. Limbaugh remained at the top of the heap among radio hosts even until his death. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez, File)

FILE - This Nov. 5, 2018 file photo shows radio personality Rush Limbaugh introducing President Donald Trump at the start of a campaign rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo. Limbaugh, the talk radio host who became the voice of American conservatism, has died.  (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

Logan Nichols vacationing from California drops off a bouquet of flowers at the home of talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 20121 in Palm Beach, Fla. Limbaugh, 70, died this morning of lung cancer. ]

NEW YORK – You didn't have to like or even listen to Rush Limbaugh to be affected by what he did.

Conservative talk radio wasn't a genre before him. Without Limbaugh, it's hard to imagine a Fox News Channel, or a President Donald Trump, or a media landscape defined by shouters of all stripes that both reflect and influence a state of political gridlock.

To his fans, Limbaugh's death Wednesday of lung cancer at the age of 70 was an occasion for deep mourning. For his foes, it was good riddance. Somewhere, Rush could surely appreciate it.

He left a legacy.

“He was the most important individual media figure of the last four decades,” said Ian Reifowitz, professor of historical studies at the State University of New York and author of “The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump.”

That assessment was freely offered even though Reifowitz, as the title of his book suggests, isn't a fan. He blames Limbaugh for setting a blueprint for white identity politics and the dividing of the nation into uneasy tribes.

Limbaugh's death led Trump to call in to Fox News Channel for his first television interview since leaving office — and he did it twice.

Former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox he was inspired by Limbaugh to become a talk radio host himself, which launched his political career. Ex-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany reminisced about riding as a child in her father's pick-up truck as Limbaugh's show played on the radio.

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“I am the definition of a ‘Rush baby,’ and it's not just me,” McEnany said on Twitter. “There are tens of thousands of us all across the conservative movement.”

Radio hosts talked politics before Limbaugh, men like Jerry Williams in Boston and Barry Farber in New York.

But the idea of conservative talk radio didn't take hold until Limbaugh, after bouncing through DJ jobs in Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Sacramento, went national from a perch at New York's WABC in 1988, said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine.

Limbaugh was a sensation among people who liked to tweak liberals, outraging with political incorrectness. Before Limbaugh, only 30 or 40 stations did “talk radio,” and many weren't political, Harrison said. Now there are thousands.

To the end, Limbaugh led the field. He reached an estimated 15.5 million people each week and lost in the ratings for three months only once in some three decades, to advice host Laura Schlessinger, Harrison said. Bumper stickers proclaimed, “Rush is Right.”

“There is no talk radio as we know it without Rush Limbaugh. It just doesn't exist,” said Sean Hannity,who has 15 million radio listeners beyond his Fox News Channel show. “And I'd even make the argument in many ways: there's no Fox News or even some of these other opinionated cable networks.”

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched Fox News in 1996. MSNBC started the same year.

Politics seemed second to entertainment in Limbaugh's early years.

“I'm trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold it for as long as I can so that I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertising rates,” Limbaugh told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” in 1991. “This is a business.”

But he soon became more than a business leader. Republicans credited Limbaugh for helping them win the House majority in 1994.

“It wasn't just that he transformed the media landscape, but he transformed the Republican Party,” said Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” “He became a power player and someone who could move voters.”

Conservative radio host Mark Levin called Limbaugh “a tremendous patriot.” Once a universally accepted compliment, the term “patriot” has become more complicated through its use by some of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“He refused to accept the attacks that came against this country from within,” Levin said on Fox News. “He refused to accept the ideological changes in this country. He defended the traditions of this country. And he spoke for tens of millions of us.”

To SUNY's Reifowitz, Limbaugh led the way in getting people “scared about the browning of the country.”

Some of Limbaugh's language was downright ugly. He invented the term “feminazi,” called Chelsea Clinton a “dog” when she was 12 years old and had to apologize for calling a young woman a “slut” for arguing that birth control be covered by health insurance. He mocked the death of AIDS victims and played the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro” when Barack Obama was elected president.

The headline on HuffPost’s obituary on Wednesday said Limbaugh “saturated America’s airwaves with cruel bigotries, lies and conspiracy theories.” The Root called him a “spouter of racist, hate-filled garbage.”

On Foxnews.com, Limbaugh's obituary's headline was “Greatest of All Time.”

Limbaugh didn't embrace Trump right away, but soon fell in line. Trump's appeal mystified many in politics at first, but “if you had been listening to Rush Limbaugh for 20 years, he sounded very familiar,” Hemmer said.

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.

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“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.”

The economic lessons taught by Limbaugh are clear each night on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, routinely the three most-watched cable networks. They're not really news networks in prime time; they present political talk.

“It’s hard,” Hemmer said, “to overstate his importance.”

Harrison, who interviewed Limbaugh several times over the years, said the talk show host “began to take himself more seriously” in his later years.

Limbaugh even appeared to measure words more carefully. After receiving social media blowback in December for suggesting that the nation was “trending toward secession,” he later made clear he wasn't advocating that.

To the end, however, he remained loyal to Trump, who awarded Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address last year.

Limbaugh supported Trump's false claims that the election was stolen and, on Jan. 7, compared rioters at the Capitol to people who sparked the Revolutionary War.

https://thinkprogress.org/right-wing-media-claims-hurricane-matthew-is-a-government-conspiracy-putting-lives-in-jeopardy-cee3a6b884c#.dvmi4u825

matthew

Hurricanes draw strength and precipitation from warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures. If humans continue to emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the oceans will continue their record warming pace, and storms will continue to get more intense. Hurricane Matthew has broken records for accumulated energy and how long a storm has stayed a Category 4 storm.

Rush Limbaugh ridiculed climate science on his show, after spending a minute or two dismissing the threat of past hurricanes like 2005’s Wilma as overblown, and mocking people who say cutting carbon emissions can reduce the likelihood or intensity of extreme weather. Then he suggested that hurricane forecasting depended on political and electoral factors “because there are votes.”

“These are acts of God,” he said, according to a clip shared by Media Matters. “Do you have an insurance policy on your home or anything? You know the force majeure, the ‘act of God,’ which is events that you can’t control, that man has no say-so over? Hurricane is one of those, but I guess the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is going to steal the purview of hurricanes away from God. And next we’re going to go on, we’re going to stop war with climate — Look, the long way around telling you that there is politics in everything. There’s politics in the weather. There’s politics in the forecasting of the weather. There’s politics in hurricanes. There’s politics in the forecasting of hurricanes because there are votes.”

==

Drudge Report Archives, [11/2/15; Media Matters,11/3/15]

LimbaughCriticized Media Outlet For ReportingThat Study Does Not Disprove Global Warming.On the November 2 edition of his show, Rush Limbaugh criticized the Christian Science Monitorfor reporting that the NASA study is not evidence that "global warming is over":

LIMBAUGH: Is global warming over? No, no, of course not. We're not supposed to assume that! We only assume when the ice is melting that there is global warming. But when the ice is expanding? No, no, no, no, no. That does not mean that there isn't any global warming! See how this works? Premiere Radio Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [11/2/15;Christian Science Monitor,11/1/15]

American Thinker: "The Fraud Is Falling Apart."Conservative blog American Thinker published a blog post headlined: "Oh-oh! NASA study finds Antarctic ice cap growing." In it, American Thinker asserted that the global warming "fraud" is "falling apart." American Thinker, [11/2/15]

The Telegraph: Antarctic Ice Growing "Despite Fears Over Global Warming."The Telegraph reported: "Antarctica's ice floes have been found to be growing faster than they are shrinking despite fears over global warming." *The Telegraph*, [11/2/15]

The Daily Express: "What Global Warming?"The Daily Express published an article headlined, "What global warming? Antarctic ice is INCREASING by 135 billion tonnes a year, says NASA." The article asserted: "Global warming theories have been thrown into doubt after Nasa also claimed current horror predictions into future sea-level rises may not be as severe." *The Daily Express*, [11/2/15]

Newsmax: "NASA Debunks Global Warming." Right-wing website Newsmax published an article headlined: "NASA Debunks Global Warming: Ice Sheets Growing." Newsmax, [11/1/15]

Conservative Media Have History Of Distorting Scientific Research To Fit Deniers' Agenda.Over the past several years, scientists have frequently had to call out right-wing media for distorting their studies to promote climate science denial. *Media Matters*, [10/23/15]

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tag recover:

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RUSH

this is  tag, also newer content 11/14

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from TP

One instance of Nancy Pelosi questioning the authenticity of the Tea Party movement was reported by Think Progress in April 2009.

On that occasion Pelosi was quoted as saying when appearing on KTVU News, which is shown in the San Francisco area:

What they want is a continuation of the failed economic policies of President George Bush which got us in the situation we are in now. What we want is a new direction. … This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle clas

Think Progress appeared to be lending support to Pelosi's claims when it noted that Tea Party events have been organized by what it describes as "the well-funded right-wing think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works".

But Pelosi has also drawn angry responses from her opponents in respect of comments she has made in which she has seemingly either tried to compare Tea Party activists in some way to Nazis or complained about their use of Nazi symbols when protesting against the policies of President Obama.

Also in April 2009 the Weekly Standard stated that Tea Party activists had indeed been compared to Nazis, although it attributes the comparison to a senior aide to House Democratic leaders and not specifically Nancy Pelosi.

Confirming Pelosi's "Astroturf" accusation around that time the Weekly Standard highlighted a document circulated to the media by the unnamed aide which apparently spoke of "neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists" attending Tea Party events and reporters needing protection from the police while at a Tea Party event in Cincinnati.

Then in August the Washington Times opined that the House Speaker had not been offended when placards suggesting former President George W. Bush was a Nazi were carried by protesters in her own Congressional district.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh entered that same row over the use of Nazi imagery.

According to the Los Angeles Times Limbaugh repeated an observation by the Sweetness & Light blog that the logo created for President Obama's healthcare program was similar to Nazi symbols.

Limbaugh paraphrased the same blog when he explained why he thinks it is the Democratic Party that has much in common with the Nazi Party that ruled in Germany from 1933 through 1945 under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. He asserted:

Well, the Nazis were against big business -- they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare

6/15

bad news just keeps coming for conservative talker Rush Limbaugh.

Which bulletin was worse, though? The news in April that he was being dropped by WIBC in Indianapolis, a booming talk powerhouse that played home to Limbaugh's radio show for more than two decades, or the newsthis week that the talker's new address on the Indianapolis dial is going to be WNDE, a ratings doormat AM sports station that has so few listeners it trails the commercial-free classical music outlet in town?

The humbling, red-state tumble is just the latest setback for the conservative talker who has seen his once-golden career suffer a steady series of losses recently.

Divorced from successful, longtime affiliates in places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Indianapolis, Limbaugh's professional trajectory is heading downward. That's confirmed by the second and third-tier stations he now calls home in those important media markets, and the fact that when his show became available, general managers up and down the dial passed on it. Apparently turned off by the show's hefty price tag, sagging ratings, and disappearing advertisers, Limbaugh continues to be a very hard sell.

It's a precipitous fall from the glory days when the host posted huge ratings numbers, had affiliates clamoring to join his network, and dictated Republican politics. All of that seems increasingly distant now. With his comically inflated, $50 million-a-year syndication deal set to expire next year, Limbaugh's future seems uncertain. "Who would even want someone whose audience is aging and is considered toxic to many advertisers," asked RadioInsight last month.

For Limbaugh, the troubles were marked by key events from 2012 and 2013. The first came in the form of Limbaugh's Sandra Fluke implosion, where he castigated and insulted for days the graduate student who testified before Congress about health care and access to contraception, calling her a "slut" and suggesting she post videos of herself having sex on the Internet. The astonishing monologues sparked an unprecedented advertiser exodus.

The following year, as the host struggled to hang on to fleeing sponsors, radio industry giant Cumulus Media decided to negotiate its Limbaugh contract in public, making it clear through the press that the company was willing to cut ties with the pricey host in major cities where Cumulus owned talk radio stations. In the end, Limbaugh stayed with Cumulus stations, but the company sent a clear signal to the industry: Limbaugh was no longer an untouchable and general managers weren't clamoring to hire him. Since then, the talker's fortunes have only faded.

Another looming problem? Conservative talk radio is a "format fewer advertisers are interested in buying because of its aging audience," noted radio consultant and self-identified Republican Darryl Parks. Limbaugh himself recently conceded a generational disconnect: "Now that I've outgrown the 25-54 demographic, I'm no longer confident that the way I see the world is the way everybody else does."

That disconnect may be fueling Limbaugh's waning political influence. Once a mighty player whose ring was constantly kissed by Republicans, this campaign season seems to be unfolding with Limbaugh on the sidelines, his clout and his ability to drive the conversation seemingly surpassed by other conservative mediaplayers.

Here's a perfect example. In April, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin conducted an awkward interview with Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, asking the Hispanic candidate about Cuban food and if he'd answer at least one question in Spanish. Limbaugh immediately castigated Halperin's Q&A on his show, but nobody seemed to pay much attention to his complaints.

Fast-forward one week and syndicated conservative columnist Ruben Navarrettelodged similar complaints about the interview. (i.e. "This was bad journalism, bad form, and bad manners.") Except this time the complaint went viral and Helperin was quickly forced to apologize.

At BuzzFeed, a writer marveled at how Halperin's controversial interview had gone unnoticed for nine days. But it hadn't gone unnoticed. Limbaugh highlighted the interview right away. It's just that nobody cared about the talker's critique at the time.

Limbaugh's unfolding major-market woes will do little to boost his faltering influence. Last year he was bounced off a high-profile station in Los Angeles, shipped down the dial, and deposited on a has-been outlet (KEIB) that today has trouble securing a 1.0 rating, according to Nielsen ratings.

Note that his forced farewell from WIBC in Indianapolis was likely painful. The station hosted the talker for 22 years before announcing in April it was time for him to go. Especially embarrassing for Limbaugh was the fact that WIBC is sticking with its conservative talk radio lineup, it just no longer wanted Limbaugh to be a part of it.

Then, after WIBC announced it was dropping Rush, no stations in the market stepped forward to pick him up, which meant Limbaugh then had to be bailed out by iHeartMedia. Formerly known as Clear Channel, iHeartMedia owns the syndication company that produces and sells Limbaugh's radio show, Premiere Radio Networks, and iHeartMedia owns hundreds of radio stations. So with no Indianapolis takers in sight, iHeartMedia was forced to shoe-horn Limbaugh onto its own, lowly rated all-sports channel in the market. (The station will soon besimulcast via a new iHeartMedia FM translator signal in the Indianapolis market.)

"There's no way iHeartMedia would've placed Limbaugh on an owned Sports station if the company had any other affiliation options in the market," noted RadioInsight when the news broke on Tuesday. "But when everyone one else says no and you need to save face, options become limited."

That same desperate scenario is playing out in Boston, where Premier hasn't been able to find a new home for Limbaugh. This, after WRKO announced it was dropping the show. One station owner recently told the Boston Globe that Premiere had offered the Limbaugh show four times, and four times the station turned it down.

Fact: Years ago station owners lined up for the chance to pick up Limbaugh's powerhouse program.

Now, rumors are still swirling in Chicago that talk radio powerhouse WLS is poised to drop Limbaugh. The move was first reported in March and quickly denied by WLS's owner, Cumulus Media. But Limbaugh's ratings are clearly down in the Windy City. According to a March report in the Chicago Tribune, Limbaugh's WLS show ranks 24th in the market, drawing 121,000 listeners in a metropolitan area of roughly 10 million people.

"The Chicago rumors come as no surprise to me," wrote consultant Parks, "as three different Cumulus executives have told me on different occasions they wish they could get rid of Limbaugh's show and they can't sell it."

Ratings and revenue. That's what the radio business has always revolved around. These days, Limbaugh's having trouble delivering either.

Eric Boehlert is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of "Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush." He can be reached ateboehlert@aol.com.

==

This past Monday I wrote a Daily Kos article about the Republican talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, being dropped, after 22 years, from the Indianapolis radio station WIBC. Many other news /opinion sites covered the story, as well as IBJ (Indianapolis Business Journal). Most of the stories basically said the move was a simple change in direction:

Officials for WIBC parent Emmis Communications this month notified Los Angeles-based syndicator Premiere Networks that it would not extend its deal to air Limbaugh’s show.

Here's where the IBJ piece was a little different. Emmis' local market manager, Charlie Morgan, said the mega company's decision to drop Limbaugh was much more than a simple change - and they have been contemplating this move for 18 months.

While Morgan expects some WIBC listeners to be “hugely disappointed” by the change, he said losing Limbaugh could open up the station to more advertising opportunities.

"There are some—primarily national—advertisers that refuse to air commercials during Limbaugh’s show, Morgan explained. "

Emmis officials began notifying its advertisers of the change Monday.

And there it is - bonafide proof once again, that the boycott against Rush Limbaugh and his sponsors is not only working, it's remarkably effective. It's changing the face of talk radio altogether. Right now the biggest problem with radio - is Rush Limbaugh. And the hundreds of thousands of Limbaugh boycotters couldn't be more pleased.

Advertisers can't handle the pressure and loss of customers. Most companies, other than those run by Republican Dittoheads, are avoiding Rush Limbaugh like the plague. This was not the case in 2012. That year, self-proclaimed 'El Rushbo' enjoyed sitting on the king's throne of Conservative 'hate radio' with a plethora of large lucrative sponsors. That all changed after he called an unknown college student a'slut' and 'prostitute' while she advocated for insurance-paid birth control at a congressional hearing. Once Limbaugh's rant hit social media and went viral, huge sponsors like Ford, GM, McDonald's, Subway, Carbonite…began to pull their ads immediately after seeing the public's outrage. Yes, the good old days are long gone for Limbaugh, though his camp begs to differ and continues to make lame attempts to derail the boycott Limbaugh used tojoke about. Also, his PR team is now blitzing search engines like Google with 10 or more RushLimbaugh.com stories per day - from the same show. Guess they need those page views to generate revenue because it sure isn't coming from sponsors.

Kudos, once again, to the many individuals, groups/organizations and websites involved in this successful movement. They are not mentioned enough. It's been a slow, agonizing fall for Rush Limbaugh, and it's given the protestors some pretty glorious victories and affirmations along the way. There will be more celebrations to come. Some organizations like NOW (The National Organization For Women) NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthoodhave been after Limbaugh for years. The amazing StopRush volunteers have been relentless. Other Limbaugh protestors and bashers include:

News Websites/Blogs like Media Matters, Daily Kos, Daily Kos 'Sluts',  Liberals Unite, UniteWomen.org, Addicting Info, Occupy Democrats, ReverbPress, The Smoking Gun, Alternet, UntraViolet, and Huffington Post.

Facebook Pages like Boycott Rush Limbaugh's Sponsors To Shut Him Down, Being Liberal, Honoring Richard Myers, Pro-Choice Liberals, Miss R*EVOLutionaries, Chicks on the Left, Living Blue In Texas, Pragmatic Progressives, Everlasting GOP Stoppers, Too Informed To Vote Republican, Worley Dervish, Lady Grey, The Beer Party, Lady Liberals, Red State Dems, The Ale Party, One Million Sluts Against Rush Limbaugh and Political Loudmouth.

Facebook 'Groups' like FlushRush, Join The Fight To Flush Rush, Fight Laws Against Women, Pro-Choice Democrats, End Citizens United, ERA Action, and Stop Republican Laws Against Women.

Well Known Individuals like Gloria Steinem, Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, Rachel Maddow, Al Franken, Stephen Colbert, Peter Gabriel, Spike Lee, Andy Borowitz, Crystal Ball, the late, great George Carlin, Ed Shultz, Sandra Fluke, Ice-T, Jane Fonda, and Gloria Allred.

Individuals Equally Important include the late Daily Kos diarist Richard Myers, Wojtek Wacowski, Rick Unger, Cenk Uygur, Angelo Carusone, Karen Teegarden, Jen Senko, Matthew Desmond,  Samuel Wynn Warde, Kimberley Johnson, HRHPrissy, Freya Malin, John Jorgenson, Kitty Fitzgerald, LOrion, ProgLegs, Gary Flinn, and Certinot.

The list is massive. The Limbaugh Sponsor & Clear Channel/iHeart Petition, alone has over 131,000 signatures.

==

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/10/1343857/-Rush-Limbaugh-threatens-to-sue-DCCC-for-mentioning-that-stuff-he-says

Oh, Rush Limbaugh. How far you have fallen.

The conservative pundit is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for a series of fundraising e-mails that suggested Limbaugh was condoning campus rape in comments he made on his widely syndicated program on Sept. 15.

He wasn't condoning rape, you see, but you'd be surprised at how often Rush Limbaugh keeps getting broadsided by the unfortunate things that keep burbling out his mouth-hole. According to the DCCC, when discussing the horribleness of campus anti-rape policies Rush said "How many of you guys [...] have learned that 'no' means 'yes' if you know how to spot it?", but what the voice of all conservatism really said was, well, exactly that. But it had context! Damn you non-conservatives, always taking things out of context!

“Seduction used to be an art. Now, of course, it’s ‘brutish’ and it’s ‘predatory’ and it’s bad,” he said on the air. Quoting the Ohio State policy, he said, “‘consent must be freely given, and can be withdrawn anytime, and the absence of ‘no’ does not mean ‘yes.’ ”

He then commented, “How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it? I’m probably. . . . Let me tell you something, in this modern [world], that is simply, that’s not tolerated. People aren’t even going to try to understand that one. It used to be said as a cliche, it used to be part of the advice young boys were given.”

So now you've got Sex Advice From Rush Limbaugh in your brain and are never going to get it back out again.

Anyway, so Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently still on the radio here and there even after his previous observations on sex and who in America was or was not clearly a slut landed him a ticket on the slow boat to deserved obscurity, has decided that what his brand really needs is a very public airing of his extended further comments on sex and rape and how to properly woo the womenfolk these days.

Works for me. Rush Limbaugh was the voice of all true conservatism for a very long time, a kingmaker who could and would sink any Republican who dared criticize him and whose various conspiratorial fantasies were required elements of any Republican campaign. Have him spend his remaining days suing anyone who still takes note of what he says. That'll work out grand.

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