The news this morning February 17, 2021,  of the passing of Rush Limbaugh was a gut punch but not a surprise to his many millions of fans.  With his brave announcement last year acknowledging a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, the inevitable denouement of a terminal disease was ordained, and Rush knew it and faced it without ambiguity.  He spent the last year doing what he had done for thirty years, projecting the voice of a great unrepresented populous into the national discourse, making it impossible to ignore by the elites, who yearned for the day when he, and they, would go away.  The day has come.  Most obvious is not the great emptiness of his passing, but of a great silence, because into the breach there was  only one spiritual voice, the Great MahaRushi, reaching out to millions who felt somebody stood up for them and their quant, old fashion values of liberty, individualism, and patriotism.  It is now gone.

The magic elixir that was Rush Limbaugh was never really understood by the elites, even those who stood to make millions from the popularity of his program.  Limbaugh was Twitter before there was Twitter, the Internet before there was Internet, connecting people in a shared experience three hours a day, year after year.  With Rush coming to the national stage in 1988 from a short run as a talk jockey in Sacramento, California to a small but national platform in New York on the ABC network, the idea of an opinionated point of view projected over the duration of three hours maintaining audience interest was unheard of.  Opinion was something left to the back pages of newspapers, informing people the “correct” way to think on issues and was considered unseemly and definitely unprofitable in public discourse.  Conservative opinion was treated like a zoo animal, to be viewed from a safe distance as absurd esoterica on programs such as William Buckley’s Firing Line.   The assumption I suspect of the producers at ABC hiring the Missouri born rock and roll deejay was that it would fill a couple months of  air time creating publicity, until they could think of something else.  The rapidly developing truth of the matter was that no one foresaw the pent up demand, because no one had really wanted to know it was there.  Ronald Reagan had been an enigma to them, appealing to a massive group of people that crossed party lines and therefore identified as “uncontrollable”.  With Reagan gone, the assumption was this transient cultural anomaly “died” with the end of his Presidency.  Limbaugh perceptively interpreted Reagan’s special connection with average Americans and converted it into a daily revival meeting.

The syndicated show started as a few score of syndicated stations, and rapidly grew into the behemoth of over 600 stations in 50 states reaching over twenty million people daily.  Five days a week, every week, the middle of the day was tied to a spot on the dial of an assumed defunct technology, radio, over the previously archaic radio AM frequency  in nearly every town in America.  People listened at work – in their cars, in trucks, down highways, at construction sites, on tractors – fulfilling their good feelings for the day with a complete dose of Limbaugh’s unique mix of unfettered opinion, biting satire, and out and out entertainment.   A phenomena in the 1990’s were the development of “Rush” rooms – places in restaurants or work cafeterias where people could eat and drink and in a communal fashion share exclusively Rush.  The most liberal of cities had to face the reality of talk radio breaching the liberal consensus, for the simple reason it made money, and if the station had Rush, it made massive money, and a bunch of careers.  Alternative media was born, and Limbaugh invented it.  Limbaugh opened the revival all those years with the stirring opening notes of the Pretenders’ anthem “My City Was Gone” and a statement he was reaching out “across the fruited plain” to all of the millions who sought him out, the first telling recognition and smack back at  the developing elite snobbery regarding that ‘backward’ land mass between the coasts they derided as “Fly Over Country”.   The elites could not possibly stand him, because progressively they could not stand being restrained by those who would not submit to the post-history world of globalism, special interest groups, and international consumerism.

The undeniable impact of Limbaugh was his singular effect on trumpeting the 1994  “Contract with America”, Newt Gingrich’s multi-point take down of Washington elitism as a strategy for nationalizing congressional elections.  Limbaugh’s incessant  mantra for support for the radical conservative idea brought untold  political power to bear, and what had been casually derided as a blustering, buffoonish “shock jock” schtick,  became revolutionary political science, with the Democrats losing what had been over 40 years of uninterrupted congressional supremacy –  the stunning outcome of over 60 seats turning republican and Gingrich vaulted into the Speaker’s chair.  Limbaugh was greeted by the incoming representatives with thunderous applause and ‘honorary” membership in the class. He was credited by most with being the difference maker, the revolutionary.  From that point onward, no political national campaign to could hope to progress without securing their “Limbaugh” flank.

Limbaugh grated at the misconception that he was a Republican front; he saw himself as a conservative and saw no rational alternative from the democrat side of the aisle. The ever more progressive fracture of the common sense middle left him labelled as a party insider to the media and frequently he felt stuck supporting candidates he felt had abandoned his conservatism.  He tolerated Bush, grated at McCain, and overlooked the formless Romney to support the fiscal conservative Ryan.  He began to see real heat from Washington elites when he stated that if their anointed messianic figure, the new President Obama, was to govern on a socialist agenda, he hoped he would fail.  Obama had already been re-invented as a uniting figure, having cracked the invisible race barrier to power, and Limbaugh’s alternative opposition was something that could not be tolerated.  The attacks regarding Limbaugh’s  frailties became personal, and incessant. A rehab stay for opioid addiction resulting from his multiple back surgeries made his private medical history somehow fair game for a “crusading”district attorney.  His sudden deafness left his unique gift- the art of communication, in maximal peril.  He soldiered on, performing the almost impossible task of doing a talk show for three months unable to hear his own voice, until the technology of cochlear implants saved his gift, and our access to it, for another decade.  He became an elite outcast, but his loyal audience never buckled  and continued to grow.

Limbaugh kept his one of a kind cultural bonafides thirty years into his career, when he recognized, before almost all others the phenomena that was Trump.  In 2015, confronted with a packed slate of Republican candidates that dominated the establishment conversation, Limbaugh instead listened to his audience and realized that the irregular newbie politician Trump connected with the “fly overs” like no other candidate.  To the amazement of many, Limbaugh started promoting the Trumpian movement long before there was any semblance of documented electoral support.  As with Gingrich’s revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Party of 2010, Limbaugh saw through his audience a yearning and loyalty to the brash Trump that no other establishment candidate could hope to achieve,.  Limbaugh presciently saw in Trump a real chance at defeating his arch nemesis Hillary Clinton, and her drive to install the permanent marriage of crony capitalism and the eternal government ruling class.  November, 2016, Limbaugh was once again right regarding the American pulse, and the pundits left breathless at the stunning Trump win.

The Trump years for all their achievements left Limbaugh having to defend the combustible Trump with a diminishing set of rhetorical weapons through vicious counter attacks led by the marriage of political opposition and a media no longer hiding their uniform bias against all the Limbaugh principles of a successful American society.  Two impeachments, a devastating pandemic, and Limbaugh’s ominous diagnosis left both Limbaugh and Trump terminally wounded.  Trump spasmed into post-electoral incoherence and was washed from the scene not by the millions who supported him, but a ludicrous clinging to a “rigged” election and the pathetic band of capitol interlopers that thought they were somehow protesting an injustice.  Limbaugh fought the ever more devastating  effects of radical chemotherapy, sapping his strength, and eventually succumbing to the irresistible force of the malignancy.  February 2nd proved to be the last on air time for the great one.

And now he belongs to the ages.  El Rushbo has led his last revival and we have been allowed into the great radio tent of liberty, attending the “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” for the last time.  The ever present three hour conversation lead by El Rushbo and his Excellence in Broadcasting Network across the American fruited plain with millions of us Americans who harbored the quant notion that the founders had been on to something great, is no more.  The great heart of liberty, individualism, and optimism for America’s future through its original calling, has been silenced.  Somehow, we at the Ramparts, absent our great captain, will carry on.  Thank you Rush , for all the hours and laughs, restored convictions, and pride in this great country we shared – together.  God Bless.