I was not a fan of Limbaugh and never listened to him, but I don't find this amateur psychoanalysis persuasive at all.
"protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown; Eric Garner’s death in Staten Island; Trayvon Martin’s death in Sanford, Florida in 2012; and George Zimmerman’s acquittal. . . .And what they produce for so many people—not just liberal but conservative, not just white but black, brown, and other—is anxiety, guilt and confusion. The weight of injustice and suffering is just too heavy to ignore'
Even as someone who voted straight Dem his whole life until very recently, it was clear to me that a far left black nationalist activist class was weaponizing these incidents to push their extreme anti-law enforcement agenda, and the MSM was all too happy to go along with it.
Brown was a thug who really was assaulting an officer when he was shot, shortly after he'd finished robbing a store and assaulting someone else, as Obama's own DOJ established. Garner was a low life breaking the law and resisting arrest, and his ilk have once again been given free reign in NYC to everyone else's detriment. Martin was also assaulting the person who killed him in self-defense.
More importantly, even if every one of these incidents was perfect example of an unwarranted killing of an innocent person, they would still be a handful of isolated incidents in a nation of 330 MILLION people where every year almost a hundred people are killed by their own lawnmowers.
I think you may be missing the point. It's not that each of these incidents are themselves evidence of deep injustice. It's that they trigger the whole constellation of emotions around these issues. You ...'ed the other stuff like slavery, segregation, etc. One doesn't need to believe that a given incident was an example of racism to be triggered on our ongoing dysfunction around race.
I don't think I am missing the point. I simply don't believe they "trigger the whole constellation of emotions around these issues" for Limbaugh's audience. They certainly didn't trigger that for me AT ALL, and I considered myself a fairly liberal democrat at the time. Nor was I much "triggered" by segregation and slavery, which had been over for 50 and 150 years respectively at that point. The fact of the matter is very few people even on the left were much troubled by any purported "ongoing dysfunction around race" until the race grifters of the Great Awokening ginned it up.
You are skeptical that I didn't have the same emotional triggering that you did? I am rather flabbergasted that you universalize your particular reaction to such a great degree.
Race’ has become a dominant issue of the left, because other narratives are either unheard of ignored. Consider a few facts. Singapore has only 38+ times the per-capita GDP of Haiti, with no (very few) white people in either place. Baltimore had 348 homicides in 2019 versus just 45 in Nebraska. Of course, Nebraska does have more people (1.934 million) than Baltimore (595 thousand). New York state spends roughly 3X on education compare to Utah. Of course, Utah does have higher NAEP scores.
These facts (and a lot more) undermine the media narrative of ‘white supremacy’ so they are unheard/ignored. Only the allowed narrative (slavery, segregation, ‘white supremacy’) is ever heard.
I remember in 2012-14 or so when the Awokening really got underway there was a LOT of pushback in the comments sections of liberal publications like the Atlantic and Slate. First the comments were heavily censored, and when that didn't work they were abolished completely. Ideological conformity was enforced more and more aggressively.
The end result, I think, is that when first Quillette and then Substack broke the embargo, a lot of people on the left were very surprised and bewildered by how much dissent from woke ideology existed even among liberals. Including, seemingly, the author of this piece.
The word frequency charts seem to show that 'woke' took off around 2010. I don't know why. One explanation is the GFC (promoting 'woke' as an alternative to resentment of the financial elite). The problem with this explanation is that the advocates of 'woke' don't agree, indeed they vehemently disagree.
I don't think that is a great indicator, because that term was floating around for a while before it became a useful shorthand for the resurgence of 70s era New Left BS.
You're fighting the wars of 2020. That stuff came from a moment when society was collectively losing its mind. Nobody pays any attention to it anymore. Even iconic liberal cities like San Fransisco have kicked their "social justice" obsessed officials to the curb. The BLM organization is widely regarded as a joke. Elite universities are reinstating standardized testing, and officials are facing comeuppance for hypocritically not defending Jewish students. Etc.
Yes, you'll always be able to find things to criticize, but the five-alarm fire on the left that began several years ago has largely been doused, because the left is mostly healthy and sane. Even with the absolutely disgusting response by the far left to Oct 7th, the percentage of people who buy into the pro-Hamas bullshit is relatively small. They have sparked plenty of outrage among Democratic voters, even those normally sympathetic to Palestinians, and left-leaning publications have pushed back against the disinformation. It's a problem, but it's being confronted and addressed on the left, the way it should.
And yet the Republican right-wing propaganda machine is as powerful as ever. Roughly 2/3 of Republicans still think the 2020 election was stolen. Fox News just had to fork over three quarters of a billion dollars for amplifying election lies about Dominion voting systems, after having been caught on tape acknowledging they knew about it and even discussing firing a journalist who fact checked their bullshit because their stock price was tumbling. And yet here they are, still having the audacity to call themselves a News station, still employing people like Maria Bartiromo, still shoveling Trump's shit.
Meanwhile, most Americans seem oblivious to the fact that the Republican nominee for President is a crook running mostly to undermine our justice system and keep himself out of jail. He conspired to try to overthrow our system of government, tried to corrupt state officials in the process, and stole government secret documents which he refused to give back, lying about not having them and covertly secreting them away from Mar-a-lago to Bedminster. In a sane version of this country he'd already be in jail and nowhere near recapturing the Presidency.
But we aren't a sane or serious country anymore. One of our two major political parties is now controlled by a personality cult, due to a majority of its members having spent decades in an ever more hermetically sealed alternate reality, one for which Limbaugh was one of the original progenitors. And since the "reasonable middle" are a bunch of loafs who apparently can't be bothered to stop playing Baldur's Gate 3 long enough to actually pay attention to what's going on in the world, we are teetering on the brink of having the Heritage Foundation's dystopian Project 2025 running the country, with a blithering fool at the helm who threatens every international relationship we have, and the stability of the Western world with it.
If you always voted Democrat, certainly you don't think climate change is a hoax. Certainly you wouldn't want an America where women are prosecuted for having abortions. You most certainly aren't cool with the ridiculous proliferation of guns in America. And you certainly can't like the idea of a President in thrall to the corrupt, theocratic fundamentalist Christian megachurches dragging us back to the 19th century.
The lies peddled about Joe Biden should be obvious to anyone paying attention. The economic problems he's being blamed for are a worldwide phenomenon, and the U.S. is handling them better than almost anyone else. The war in Ukraine is dragging on because Trump holds out a lifeline to Putin, and his minions in Congress are able to kill funding – just like they killed funding for an immigration bill on Trump's orders so they didn't end up fixing the issue Trump wants to run on. Many of them, of course, are too busy fishing for evidence that doesn't exist of imaginary crimes to impeach Joe Biden on, getting scammed by conmen and Russian agents along the way who offer to give them exactly the evidence they publicly announce they're looking for. Biden continues to deliver job-creating public infrastructure projects for red states that will never vote for him, while their hypocritical, do-nothing Congresspeople and Senators take credit for legislation they voted against; as opposed to Trump, who tried to get the DHS to stop sending wildfire payments to California, a state utterly irrelevant to his election prospects.
Biden took over a country in shambles from a president too busy trying to overthrow an election to worry about the pandemic that was ravaging the country at the time, and he's been steadily guiding us back through worldwide pandemic-induced economic turmoil, while Trump blathers on about moronic ideas like 100% import tariffs on cars in an attempt to appeal to union workers that his first administration completely shafted and whom red states continue to threaten. Trump inexplicably receives credit for being handed a country in fantastic shape, despite his utter incompetence causing our national debt to balloon so he could give an enormous tax cut to the wealthy when it was least needed, and pay off the farmers he screwed when he killed off the TPP (to the delight of the Chinese), and somehow escapes blame for his failure to take the pandemic seriously or to encourage people on the right to get vaccinated, all while his completely dysfunctional political party kowtows to him and grinds Congress to a halt.
Sorry I've ended up going on a rant here, but saying you always voted Democrat until recently is the kind of thing that concerns me these days. I certainly hope you're back to voting Democrat, or at least plan to be, after everything we've seen recently, because otherwise I honestly don't know what you're waiting for. Surely you aren't considering putting Trump back in office because wokeness got out of hand a few years ago. You must realize that restoring him to power will only be breathing fresh life into it.
I live in a state where Biden cannot lose, and would not vote for Trump in any case. I am willing to vote Republican at the state and city level on select occasions. I am encouraged that a lot of the woke stuff has seen real reversals, but I disagree about the degree to which it still has currency.
This article is essentially about the 2014-2021 period. The author still seems to think that even Rush Limbaugh fans bought into the BLM framings of race over that timeframe, and thinks it caused them a great deal of emotional distress that they needed Limbaugh to ameliorate. I think that is ridiculous, as I've stated.
It is quite unclear if the fanaticism of the identity politics left is receding or advancing. It is quite possible, to find evidence of pushback to the prevailing leftwing / progressive craziness. ‘Defund the police’ has been recognized as one of the worst political slogans of all time. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that leftwing craziness has advanced of late. ‘Trans’ and DEI are basically post-2020 themes. Both are massively promoted by the identity politics left. Consider the recent atrocity at UCLA. I quote from J. Coyne’s blog.
“There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.
Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”
. . . In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.””
The domination of the media by the far-left shows no signs of abating. The same is true for academia and some professions. The sad career of Claudine Gay provides a useful datapoint. She was hired in July of 2023 (quite recently). It was quite clear she had no track record to recommend her. There were already rumors of plagiarism swirling around her. The rumors later proved to be quite true. She was hired (in 2023) because of her skin color and sex. Note that Harvard is still upset by her departure. The Harvard Crimson has an article titled “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty”.
The far-left also continues to dominate the professions. The terms AFAB/AMAB continue to be widespread use, even though they are medically/scientifically wrong. Several American medical groups have endorsed GAC. The fact that the UK, Sweden, Norway, France, Finland, etc. have all looked at the same data and found it wanting is conveniently ignored.
Typing 'rowling transphobe' into Google should disabuse you of any notion of the 'sane' left. The phrase only get 342 thousand hits. Many of the hits are from 2023/24. Try the same with 'white supremacy'? I guess 150 million hits rounds to zero. I guess.
Comparing Rush and his program to MSNBC is a swing and a miss. Limbaugh always admitted that his show was entertainment. MSNBC is a cable news channel.
Not quite sure how to take this. Rush was transparently engaged in a political project. The website I reference at the top, overseen by his widow and brother, is all about celebrating him as a political figure. He took license as an "entertainer" to perform in a certain way, but it's hard to believe that he didn't know he was a player in much the same way that Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes are political players.
You would be more accurate comparing Rush to Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel. And his was radio and not cable news TV. You are way off in your attempt to manufacture a narrative of political equivalency here. They are miles and miles apart.
Political commentary is just that and Rush was clear and honest about it. Maddow and Hayes are political commentary masquerading as news... they are dishonest about it.
There is no equivalent in radio that I am aware of... as liberal talk radio has been tried and failed. Alan Colmes tried it for a while after breaking off from Sean Hannity and Fox News. Liberals seem to like visual entertainment to satiate their tribal political needs.
Limbaugh admitted this in moments when he had little choice but to confront his dishonesty. Like after the '06 midterms, when he expressed relief that he didn't have to defend the Republican Congress anymore.
MSNBC may lean liberal, but it has actual standards of journalism. Rush increasingly leaned into conspiratorial nonsense as his career wore on, and in the end was the same pure propaganda that Fox News has become.
To this day, the lies about Ferguson have continued. No less than Kamala Harris has claimed that Michael Brown was 'murdered'. Of course, other's have lied about Michael Brown / Ferguson. The list of liars includes E. Warren and T. Coates. Have any of the Ferguson liars been punished / condemned in any way? Of course, not.
“Grief, shame, guilt and confusion become anger, resentment, contempt, and certainty.” This idea reminds of the phrase, “The only emotion that men are allowed to express is anger.” It is no surprise that Rush’s audience is made up of mostly men, 72% men according to Pew Research study in 2009. American culture discourages and looks down upon expressions of grief or shame and it elevates displays of anger as demonstrating strength.
Oh, and anyone who thinks it's unfair to call Limbaugh a racist might want to remember the time he told a caller "Take the bone out of your nose and call back."
Oppenheimer's right, the last thing we need is a "Rush of the left". In fact, one of the ways of illustrating the difference between liberalism and conservatism is that no one who's tried to be the liberal version on Limbaugh has ever succeeded, and no one who's tried to be the conservative version of Jon Stewart has ever succeeded
I was not a fan of Limbaugh and never listened to him, but I don't find this amateur psychoanalysis persuasive at all.
"protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown; Eric Garner’s death in Staten Island; Trayvon Martin’s death in Sanford, Florida in 2012; and George Zimmerman’s acquittal. . . .And what they produce for so many people—not just liberal but conservative, not just white but black, brown, and other—is anxiety, guilt and confusion. The weight of injustice and suffering is just too heavy to ignore'
Even as someone who voted straight Dem his whole life until very recently, it was clear to me that a far left black nationalist activist class was weaponizing these incidents to push their extreme anti-law enforcement agenda, and the MSM was all too happy to go along with it.
Brown was a thug who really was assaulting an officer when he was shot, shortly after he'd finished robbing a store and assaulting someone else, as Obama's own DOJ established. Garner was a low life breaking the law and resisting arrest, and his ilk have once again been given free reign in NYC to everyone else's detriment. Martin was also assaulting the person who killed him in self-defense.
More importantly, even if every one of these incidents was perfect example of an unwarranted killing of an innocent person, they would still be a handful of isolated incidents in a nation of 330 MILLION people where every year almost a hundred people are killed by their own lawnmowers.
I think you may be missing the point. It's not that each of these incidents are themselves evidence of deep injustice. It's that they trigger the whole constellation of emotions around these issues. You ...'ed the other stuff like slavery, segregation, etc. One doesn't need to believe that a given incident was an example of racism to be triggered on our ongoing dysfunction around race.
I don't think I am missing the point. I simply don't believe they "trigger the whole constellation of emotions around these issues" for Limbaugh's audience. They certainly didn't trigger that for me AT ALL, and I considered myself a fairly liberal democrat at the time. Nor was I much "triggered" by segregation and slavery, which had been over for 50 and 150 years respectively at that point. The fact of the matter is very few people even on the left were much troubled by any purported "ongoing dysfunction around race" until the race grifters of the Great Awokening ginned it up.
Eh. Color me skeptical.
You are skeptical that I didn't have the same emotional triggering that you did? I am rather flabbergasted that you universalize your particular reaction to such a great degree.
You're right. That was too glib. Sorry about that.
I think it's complicated, but I shouldn't make assumptions about your state of mind.
Race’ has become a dominant issue of the left, because other narratives are either unheard of ignored. Consider a few facts. Singapore has only 38+ times the per-capita GDP of Haiti, with no (very few) white people in either place. Baltimore had 348 homicides in 2019 versus just 45 in Nebraska. Of course, Nebraska does have more people (1.934 million) than Baltimore (595 thousand). New York state spends roughly 3X on education compare to Utah. Of course, Utah does have higher NAEP scores.
These facts (and a lot more) undermine the media narrative of ‘white supremacy’ so they are unheard/ignored. Only the allowed narrative (slavery, segregation, ‘white supremacy’) is ever heard.
I remember in 2012-14 or so when the Awokening really got underway there was a LOT of pushback in the comments sections of liberal publications like the Atlantic and Slate. First the comments were heavily censored, and when that didn't work they were abolished completely. Ideological conformity was enforced more and more aggressively.
The end result, I think, is that when first Quillette and then Substack broke the embargo, a lot of people on the left were very surprised and bewildered by how much dissent from woke ideology existed even among liberals. Including, seemingly, the author of this piece.
The word frequency charts seem to show that 'woke' took off around 2010. I don't know why. One explanation is the GFC (promoting 'woke' as an alternative to resentment of the financial elite). The problem with this explanation is that the advocates of 'woke' don't agree, indeed they vehemently disagree.
I don't think that is a great indicator, because that term was floating around for a while before it became a useful shorthand for the resurgence of 70s era New Left BS.
The word frequency charts imply 'woke'. They don't actually use the word 'woke'. See "How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening" in Tablet.
BLM- Scores more Black people are killed by other Black people than police officers, where's the outrage?
You're fighting the wars of 2020. That stuff came from a moment when society was collectively losing its mind. Nobody pays any attention to it anymore. Even iconic liberal cities like San Fransisco have kicked their "social justice" obsessed officials to the curb. The BLM organization is widely regarded as a joke. Elite universities are reinstating standardized testing, and officials are facing comeuppance for hypocritically not defending Jewish students. Etc.
Yes, you'll always be able to find things to criticize, but the five-alarm fire on the left that began several years ago has largely been doused, because the left is mostly healthy and sane. Even with the absolutely disgusting response by the far left to Oct 7th, the percentage of people who buy into the pro-Hamas bullshit is relatively small. They have sparked plenty of outrage among Democratic voters, even those normally sympathetic to Palestinians, and left-leaning publications have pushed back against the disinformation. It's a problem, but it's being confronted and addressed on the left, the way it should.
And yet the Republican right-wing propaganda machine is as powerful as ever. Roughly 2/3 of Republicans still think the 2020 election was stolen. Fox News just had to fork over three quarters of a billion dollars for amplifying election lies about Dominion voting systems, after having been caught on tape acknowledging they knew about it and even discussing firing a journalist who fact checked their bullshit because their stock price was tumbling. And yet here they are, still having the audacity to call themselves a News station, still employing people like Maria Bartiromo, still shoveling Trump's shit.
Meanwhile, most Americans seem oblivious to the fact that the Republican nominee for President is a crook running mostly to undermine our justice system and keep himself out of jail. He conspired to try to overthrow our system of government, tried to corrupt state officials in the process, and stole government secret documents which he refused to give back, lying about not having them and covertly secreting them away from Mar-a-lago to Bedminster. In a sane version of this country he'd already be in jail and nowhere near recapturing the Presidency.
But we aren't a sane or serious country anymore. One of our two major political parties is now controlled by a personality cult, due to a majority of its members having spent decades in an ever more hermetically sealed alternate reality, one for which Limbaugh was one of the original progenitors. And since the "reasonable middle" are a bunch of loafs who apparently can't be bothered to stop playing Baldur's Gate 3 long enough to actually pay attention to what's going on in the world, we are teetering on the brink of having the Heritage Foundation's dystopian Project 2025 running the country, with a blithering fool at the helm who threatens every international relationship we have, and the stability of the Western world with it.
If you always voted Democrat, certainly you don't think climate change is a hoax. Certainly you wouldn't want an America where women are prosecuted for having abortions. You most certainly aren't cool with the ridiculous proliferation of guns in America. And you certainly can't like the idea of a President in thrall to the corrupt, theocratic fundamentalist Christian megachurches dragging us back to the 19th century.
The lies peddled about Joe Biden should be obvious to anyone paying attention. The economic problems he's being blamed for are a worldwide phenomenon, and the U.S. is handling them better than almost anyone else. The war in Ukraine is dragging on because Trump holds out a lifeline to Putin, and his minions in Congress are able to kill funding – just like they killed funding for an immigration bill on Trump's orders so they didn't end up fixing the issue Trump wants to run on. Many of them, of course, are too busy fishing for evidence that doesn't exist of imaginary crimes to impeach Joe Biden on, getting scammed by conmen and Russian agents along the way who offer to give them exactly the evidence they publicly announce they're looking for. Biden continues to deliver job-creating public infrastructure projects for red states that will never vote for him, while their hypocritical, do-nothing Congresspeople and Senators take credit for legislation they voted against; as opposed to Trump, who tried to get the DHS to stop sending wildfire payments to California, a state utterly irrelevant to his election prospects.
Biden took over a country in shambles from a president too busy trying to overthrow an election to worry about the pandemic that was ravaging the country at the time, and he's been steadily guiding us back through worldwide pandemic-induced economic turmoil, while Trump blathers on about moronic ideas like 100% import tariffs on cars in an attempt to appeal to union workers that his first administration completely shafted and whom red states continue to threaten. Trump inexplicably receives credit for being handed a country in fantastic shape, despite his utter incompetence causing our national debt to balloon so he could give an enormous tax cut to the wealthy when it was least needed, and pay off the farmers he screwed when he killed off the TPP (to the delight of the Chinese), and somehow escapes blame for his failure to take the pandemic seriously or to encourage people on the right to get vaccinated, all while his completely dysfunctional political party kowtows to him and grinds Congress to a halt.
Sorry I've ended up going on a rant here, but saying you always voted Democrat until recently is the kind of thing that concerns me these days. I certainly hope you're back to voting Democrat, or at least plan to be, after everything we've seen recently, because otherwise I honestly don't know what you're waiting for. Surely you aren't considering putting Trump back in office because wokeness got out of hand a few years ago. You must realize that restoring him to power will only be breathing fresh life into it.
I live in a state where Biden cannot lose, and would not vote for Trump in any case. I am willing to vote Republican at the state and city level on select occasions. I am encouraged that a lot of the woke stuff has seen real reversals, but I disagree about the degree to which it still has currency.
This article is essentially about the 2014-2021 period. The author still seems to think that even Rush Limbaugh fans bought into the BLM framings of race over that timeframe, and thinks it caused them a great deal of emotional distress that they needed Limbaugh to ameliorate. I think that is ridiculous, as I've stated.
It is quite unclear if the fanaticism of the identity politics left is receding or advancing. It is quite possible, to find evidence of pushback to the prevailing leftwing / progressive craziness. ‘Defund the police’ has been recognized as one of the worst political slogans of all time. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that leftwing craziness has advanced of late. ‘Trans’ and DEI are basically post-2020 themes. Both are massively promoted by the identity politics left. Consider the recent atrocity at UCLA. I quote from J. Coyne’s blog.
“There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.
Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”
. . . In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.””
The domination of the media by the far-left shows no signs of abating. The same is true for academia and some professions. The sad career of Claudine Gay provides a useful datapoint. She was hired in July of 2023 (quite recently). It was quite clear she had no track record to recommend her. There were already rumors of plagiarism swirling around her. The rumors later proved to be quite true. She was hired (in 2023) because of her skin color and sex. Note that Harvard is still upset by her departure. The Harvard Crimson has an article titled “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty”.
The far-left also continues to dominate the professions. The terms AFAB/AMAB continue to be widespread use, even though they are medically/scientifically wrong. Several American medical groups have endorsed GAC. The fact that the UK, Sweden, Norway, France, Finland, etc. have all looked at the same data and found it wanting is conveniently ignored.
Typing 'rowling transphobe' into Google should disabuse you of any notion of the 'sane' left. The phrase only get 342 thousand hits. Many of the hits are from 2023/24. Try the same with 'white supremacy'? I guess 150 million hits rounds to zero. I guess.
Comparing Rush and his program to MSNBC is a swing and a miss. Limbaugh always admitted that his show was entertainment. MSNBC is a cable news channel.
Not quite sure how to take this. Rush was transparently engaged in a political project. The website I reference at the top, overseen by his widow and brother, is all about celebrating him as a political figure. He took license as an "entertainer" to perform in a certain way, but it's hard to believe that he didn't know he was a player in much the same way that Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes are political players.
You would be more accurate comparing Rush to Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel. And his was radio and not cable news TV. You are way off in your attempt to manufacture a narrative of political equivalency here. They are miles and miles apart.
Political commentary is just that and Rush was clear and honest about it. Maddow and Hayes are political commentary masquerading as news... they are dishonest about it.
There is no equivalent in radio that I am aware of... as liberal talk radio has been tried and failed. Alan Colmes tried it for a while after breaking off from Sean Hannity and Fox News. Liberals seem to like visual entertainment to satiate their tribal political needs.
Limbaugh admitted this in moments when he had little choice but to confront his dishonesty. Like after the '06 midterms, when he expressed relief that he didn't have to defend the Republican Congress anymore.
MSNBC may lean liberal, but it has actual standards of journalism. Rush increasingly leaned into conspiratorial nonsense as his career wore on, and in the end was the same pure propaganda that Fox News has become.
LOL. Right.
MSNBC has standards of journalism. LOL. Right.
Did Maddow ever apologize? They had Adam Shciff on 30 times so he could lie about Trump Russia collusion.
If MSNBC has standards of journalism then the standards support lying for politics.
Well I can't argue with that.
To this day, the lies about Ferguson have continued. No less than Kamala Harris has claimed that Michael Brown was 'murdered'. Of course, other's have lied about Michael Brown / Ferguson. The list of liars includes E. Warren and T. Coates. Have any of the Ferguson liars been punished / condemned in any way? Of course, not.
“Grief, shame, guilt and confusion become anger, resentment, contempt, and certainty.” This idea reminds of the phrase, “The only emotion that men are allowed to express is anger.” It is no surprise that Rush’s audience is made up of mostly men, 72% men according to Pew Research study in 2009. American culture discourages and looks down upon expressions of grief or shame and it elevates displays of anger as demonstrating strength.
Oh, and anyone who thinks it's unfair to call Limbaugh a racist might want to remember the time he told a caller "Take the bone out of your nose and call back."
Oppenheimer's right, the last thing we need is a "Rush of the left". In fact, one of the ways of illustrating the difference between liberalism and conservatism is that no one who's tried to be the liberal version on Limbaugh has ever succeeded, and no one who's tried to be the conservative version of Jon Stewart has ever succeeded