Rush Limbaugh's Ultimate Betrayal of His Audience

The Atlantic ^ | CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

[ToxicMich]

For almost a decade, I’ve been angrily documenting the way that many right-wing talk-radio hosts betray the rank-and-file conservatives who trust them for information. My late grandmother was one of those people. She deserved better than she got. With huge platforms and massive audiences, successful hosts ought to take more care than the average person to be truthful and avoid misinforming listeners. Yet they are egregiously careless on some days and willfully misleading on others.

And that matters, as we’ll come to see.

[Always A Marine]

Has anybody actually read this article before commenting on it? The writer excoriates Rush Limbaugh for his support of Donald Trump instead of the 15 GOP primary losers. The target audience of this column is the globalist elites and tools who manipulate both wings of the UniParty toward their One World agenda. It is an echo chamber hit piece aimed at Trump and Limbaugh, but which actually exposes the camouflaged globalists hiding behind GOP lines. The UniParty divides and conquers by taking both sides of every issue except national sovereignty — and that is why they are united tooth and nail against the American nationalist, Donald Trump.

[SkyDancer]

And then the time he went on and on and on about his cat.

[Arrian]

A cardinal premise of Principled Conservatism is that we are mere dwarves standing on the broad shoulders of the massive Giants of Antiquity; who see as far as we do because of them.
Limbaugh and the rest of the yip-yap crowd, whatever their political orientation; will never ever be conflated w/the likes of Pericles and Cicero.

[pb929]

God forbid the VOTERS actually choose our nominee, rather than the media elitists at the Atlantic or elsewhere.

Oh, and I think Connor needs to get himself up to speed on the state of the race. Trump has been crushing it the past 2 weeks and Hillary has been in hiding. It is definitely NOT likely that she will be the next President.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for saving me time.

I don’t listen to Rush/Levin nor waste my time going to Hate Trump web sites.

[frnewsjunkie]

I used to listen to Rush every day. I quit for awhile when he was so anti Trump. I now listen when it’s convenient... he is not a must any more with me. The straw was when he was making fun of Trump every day and one of those days he came on the air welcoming those who had said they’d quit ... saying he knew they’d be back. Taking his audience for granted was not a smart move. He was making fun of Trump’s followers also... not a smart move.

He used to be more humble and he now has an arrogant tune to his message.. I thought he might retire, but he just signed for another how many years. He’s a different Rush than he was for so many years.

He has become a reluctant Trump backer, because he does not want hillary. He wanted Cruz and he’ll never admit to that being the wrong choice. Some days he’s for Trump and some days, he’s not so much. I listened to him the day he was on a kick about Trump changing his tone on immigration. I wanted to tell Rush to just shut up.. he was giving that idea legs to walk on.. room for more discussion on something that was not true. Times like that, he’s a reluctant commentator on Donald Trump. Times like that I don’t much like Rush. Didn’t used to be that way.. he used to be 100% for things I am for.

[Fantasywriter]

I was interested enough that I was actually going to read the article. Then I came to the following:

'[Rush] has an audience of millions. And over the years, parts of the conservative movement that ought to know better, like the Claremont Institute, have treated him like an honorable conservative intellectual rather than an intellectually dishonest entertainer. The full cost of doing so became evident this year, when a faction of populists shaped by years of talk radio, Fox News, and Breitbart.com picked Donald Trump to lead the Republican Party, a choice that makes a Hillary Clinton victory likely and is a catastrophe for movement conservatism regardless of who wins.'

Grampa Dave, I'm willing to bet you agree with me, that is a load of manure. No point in reading further; the author is clueless.

[LNV]

I also read the article. Yep, their point is that Rush should have taken down Trump early in the primary. Unlike the bolsheviks at the Atlantic, I don’t think Rush has that much power.

[Grampa Dave]

"I haven’t listened to more than 7 consecutive minutes a minute of Rush for about 10 years."

[lacrew]

You mis-understand Limbaugh. Yes, he would be an ass, IF he had been a strident supporter of Trump. But he really wasn’t...he did fill a lot of air time talking about the media’s backflips over Trump, but that’s his bread and butter - it just happened to be over Trump this time.

But what Rush was trying to explain is his theory (mine too) of ‘once a Trump supporter, always a Trump supporter’. This was evident in the primaries. IOW, this ‘softening’ on immigration probably won’t lose him many supporters.

IMHO, I expect Trump to do SOMETHING other than actively encourage illegal immigration and 3rd world refugees. To me, any finger in the dyke is better than what HRC would do. The details aren’t that critical - just as long as he does SOMETHING.

[LS]

Here is Rush’s problem from the beginning: while he was a Cruz guy he tried to straddle Cruz/Trump because I think he knew Trump would win. (You can really hear the bitterness in his voice when he talks about how Trump beat these “16 guys.”)

Now, as an “analyst” that Rush positions himself to be, he utterly failed to explain NOT JUST WHY TRUMP WON, but why Cruz lost and why conservatives and evangelicals did NOT support him.

That is key, because to do so would have exposed CRUZ’S weaknesses. Rush still doesn’t get that part of his job was to explain why Cruz didn’t catch fire.

[Buckeye McFrog]

As an entertainer Rush was much better back in the days when his show was funny.

Paul Shanklin parodies. Sarcastic Animal Rights and Condom updates. Barney Frank intro’d with My Boy Lollipop.

Humor is one of the top Alinsky weapons. So why did he stop using it?

[jennychase]

Those who have access to internet knows Rush limbaugh intentionally ignore positive news about Trump and make himself as news. Rush lies, twist words. All these conservative Radio talk shows will have crash landing. I stopped listening to them because they are old news and gloat about themselves.
Rush and his lesbian problem is sick.

[Wallace T.]

Limbaugh's time is over. Along with Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and others, time has passed them by. Since the turn of the century, conservative talk radio and magazines like National Review and Human Events have become a controlled opposition to the uniparty. I suspect these talkers would retire and the magazines go entirely on-line or disappear entirely in the case of a Trump victory. Bill Bennett, sort of an elder stateman of the neo-conservative movement, recently retired from talk radio, possibly seeing the future.

Perhaps their lack of enthusiasm for Trump may reflect their hope that under a Hillary Clinton administration, their niche of whining about liberal double standards, political correctness, and hypocrisy about minority racism will remain intact. Their complaints about all these items are valid, but they only serve to allow conservatives to blow off steam and receive affirmation for their beliefs.

The conservative talkers react so predictably to leftist actions that liberal outlets accuse them of receiving "talking points" from some common source. Look at the Colin Kapernick controversy over his refusal to stand for the National Anthem. He is a brainwashed mixed race athlete, whose black father deserted him at birth and who was raised by a white foster family. I suspect he has mental issues and has kept bad company. However, his refusal is a sideshow that should be ignored. Yet the day after his refusal, I listened to Limbaugh, Levin, Michael Savage, and Mark Davis (Dallas area talker) all denounce Kapernick for several minutes. These sorts of rants have kept them popular with their audiences. However, I must wonder if those audiences are getting as disillusioned with their verbal fireworks as full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Trump offers the first realistic opportunity to break the post-Reagan political and social order in this country. Limbaugh, Levin, Beck and the others have profited from the current order.

[LS]

BTW, in addition to what I said above about Rush’s bitterness, in this season he has been particularly deceitful in that

NO ONE GETS ON RUSH’S SHOW BY ACCIDENT. This nasty first caller is exhibit #1 (though every day the first caller is a Trump basher, it seems). Rush takes the call, lets the guy rant, then pretends to step back and be analytical.

[Osage Orange]

Well bigbob....I’ve learned more from talk radio than I have from you.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Rush still doesn’t get that part of his job was to explain why Cruz didn’t catch fire.

He didn't catch fire because the number of voters who are currently still onboard with "movement conservatism" is now too small to win anything.

Tough for Rush to deal with that reality as it really sticks in his craw at gut level.

[Chauncey Gardiner]

Take a look at left wing and mainstream media if you want to see real betrayal.

[LS]

Good point about the news. He does NO “poll analysis” any more (course neither do the TwitterBot anti-Trumpers like Jay Cost and Adian Gray who used to actually ANALYZE stupid polls).

We here at FR (Ravi on voter registrations, SamAdams76 on social media numbers) do far more analyses than all these guys put together.

[Pelham]

This appears to be nothing more than a catfight among RedState GOPe butt-kissers.

Conor Friedersdorf is faulting Limbaugh for not consistently attacking Trump as a phony, which all good RedState neverTrumpers must do.

Conor is offended because some days Rushbo’s evil twin Mushbo is at the mike.