American Blowhard
How Rush Limbaugh changed America and me.
Illustation by the author.
Many people assumed the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots would mark Donald Trump’s "viking funeral." The spectacle was so disastrous, so chaotic, so hilarious that it seemed certain to drag his burning ship into the depths of public disgrace, never to surface again. As Trump’s fervent followers stormed the Capitol and took selfies in ransacked congressional offices, several Fox News personalities sent panicked messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Laura Ingraham fretted that Trump was “destroying his legacy.” Sean Hannity begged for the debacle to end: “Can (Trump) make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?”
One person in Trump’s orbit who didn’t flinch was radio host Rush Limbaugh. “There are a lot of people calling for the end of violence…” Limbaugh chided on his show. “I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual Tea Party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord didn’t feel that way.”
At the time, Rush knew he was broadcasting from death’s door. He was in the final stages of terminal cancer, visibly wasting away, probably zonked on his favorite painkiller, Oxycodone. Unlike Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, he understood that January 6th wasn’t destroying Trump’s legacy—it was cementing it. Limbaugh knew that, as world-shaping narcissist, you could never admit defeat, never back down, and most importantly: never. shut. up.
When The Rush Limbaugh Show debuted in 1988, the Republican Party was experiencing growing pains. George H.W. Bush’s presidency was faltering, the Christian Coalition was widening the gap between church and state, and Pat Buchanan’s blood-and-soil populism was gaining momentum. A year earlier, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had scrapped the Fairness Doctrine, a longstanding policy that ensured equal airtime for voices on both the left and the right. Seizing the opportunity, Rush became a brash new conservative voice, determined to chew a hole in the ass of mainstream media and “elite” society. And like millions of Americans, I loved him for it.
Yes, I was an early foot soldier in the American clown show. During high school, I was an avid fan of right-wing alternative media. If Steven Crowder’s YouTube channel had existed back then, I’m sure I would’ve been one of the pizza-faced trolls clogging his live chat. I would’ve loved the antics of Matt Walsh and Tim Pool. But in the ’90s, Steven Crowder was just a young Canadian voice actor on the animated series Arthur, and this Arthur (me) was something called a “Dittohead.”
Dittoheads were Rush super fans who listened to his radio talk show so fervently that their mindset came to “ditto” his. Given the time period, Dittoheads believed that Anita Hill was a liar, Hillary Clinton was a “feminazi,” and Jesse Jackson resembled a “composite sketch of a wanted criminal.” Rush’s “jokes” and catchphrases were like memetic leeches, crawling into tens of millions of reactionary ear holes, weekdays from noon to 3:00 PM. For Dittoheads, that meant fifteen rapturous hours of Rush a week. His hot air became the oxygen we breathed and over time, our pliable brains became facsimiles of his. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.
My family lived in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital. It was a typical Midwestern town, full of fast-food franchises and empty downtown storefronts. Jeff City, as we called it, was small enough that you might see Governor (and future Attorney General) John Ashcroft singing “The Old Rugged Cross” at First Assembly of God Church or spot Republican Congressman Roy Blunt grocery shopping at Kroger. The Limbaugh family was Missouri royalty. Rush’s father, Rush Sr., had been a legislator and ambassador to India in the 1950s, and Rush’s brother and nephew were prominent judges. Rush was Missouri’s favorite son, and his radio program fizzed out of car radios and gas station PA systems like Shasta soda.
During my tumultuous junior year, I took a break from high school and enrolled in a printing and commercial art program at a vocational career center. The school was supposed to prepare us for the labor force but was essentially a holding pen for hillbillies and headbangers too lazy to drop out.
Our days went like this: the teacher would take attendance, give a quick lecture about how we were all delinquents who should be in jail, then drag out a boombox and crank “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” Afterward, he’d retreat into his office and close the door, leaving us to soak up Rush’s wisdom and work on “art projects” like airbrushing palm trees onto scraps of sheet metal.
My fondest memory from this time was when the dirt-baggiest of my classmates, a kid named Tommy, made a DIY tattoo gun out of a sewing machine motor and the high E string of a guitar. During an afternoon class, he inked an image of Eddie, Iron Maiden’s mascot, onto his calf. If memory serves, it looked something like this:
Halfway through the tattoo, Tommy’s white high-top sneaker filled with blood, and his calf ballooned to the size of a softball. This was the funniest thing any of us had ever seen, and the class descended into pandemonium. One kid stood on a table with a box cutter and offered to amputate Tommy’s leg. Fearing gangrene, Tommy limped to the nurse’s office, looking embarrassed. Our teacher wasn’t bothered—he just turned up Rush.
Thinking back, I assume he wanted Rush to drill “personal responsibility” into our skulls, so he didn’t have to. The plan was destined to fail—our skulls were pretty thick—but he did successfully turn us into Dittoheads.
“This is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America!” he would bellow at the top of each episode. “With the largest hypothalamus in North America!”
It never occurred to us that the hypothalamus wasn’t the smart part of the brain. That’s the frontal lobe. The hypothalamus is a nubbin, buried deep inside the skull, that eats, sleeps, and fucks—the vestigial lizard brain. And as lizard-brained teens, Rush’s lizard-brained takes made perfect sense. He blamed “enviros” for inventing climate change and Marxist “libtards” for everything else. In the years since, his takes have been chopped up, composted, and recycled into today’s right-wing memes. Back then “political correctness” was ruining society, today its “cancel culture” and the “woke mind virus.”
All of Rush’s obsessions resonated deeply with my dad. He was a change-averse evangelical who felt the whole world had gone sideways during the 1960s. Like Rush, he thought gay rights, gender equality, and affirmative action were plots designed by “cultural Marxists” to subvert the natural order.
For me, Limbaugh was part of a passing teenage phase. I started watching films by Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. I got into bands like The Smiths and The Pixies. In comparison, Rush’s radio show seemed painfully uncool and out of touch. I came to desire a wilder, weirder more thoughtful worldview. My best friend Jeff lent me a worn copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and like many other questioning, sensitive teenagers, the book had a profound impact on me.
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” wrote Vonnegut. “It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.”
This passage helped me understand America better than my hundreds of hours as a Dittohead.
Over the years, my father became more and more transfixed by right-wing media. A.M. radio and Fox News were like an IV drip that kept him flooded with new cultural outrages and conspiracy theories. Innocuous conversations would often shift into diatribes about the erosion of Western values or the threat of Sharia law.
In 2015, I was sad to see my father join the Trump bandwagon, but it made sense. He hated Hillary Clinton with an anger usually reserved for child molesters and parking enforcement officers. Rush was responsible for this; he’d spent 20 years assassinating every aspect of her character, priming his fans for her arrest—or, preferably, her public hanging.
In October 2016, when Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” audio leaked, I guessed MAGA nation would embrace his transgression as a badge of honor. Proof of their devotion. I suspected this because Dittoheads had rallied around Rush the same way during his scandals.
Rush’s hypocrisy wasn’t a public relations problem because it was intrinsic to his appeal. Rush detested moral degeneracy but was a serial womanizer. He lectured his audience about how to raise their kids but didn’t have any of his own. He thought drug abusers deserved the death penalty, but he was himself an opioid addict. To his listeners, his lack of self-reflection was invigorating. He was the proud torchbearer for all the suburban assholes, blowhards, and know-it-alls who wished the rules didn’t apply to them.
In his 60s, Rush suffered a myriad of health problems. He was partially deaf, reportedly from opioids. He had cardiac troubles and was fighting cancer. Even his famously cherubic frame deflated, giving him the appearance of a skeleton with oversized dental veneers.
Limbaugh died in February 2021, but not before Trump honored him with The Presidential Medal of Freedom, an award previously given to Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, and Helen Keller. Trump declared that Limbaugh was “the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet.” As Melania placed the medal around his neck, Rush held back tears. At the time of his death, Rush was worth an estimated $600 million.
Not long after Rush’s death, my father asked me how I felt about his passing. He assumed I’d have some teenage fondness for the man and maybe even say something nice. Instead, I felt my ears get hot. My anger surprised me. “Let him rot,” I thought. I resented that so much of my upbringing had been dominated by Rush’s petty diatribes. But I softened my response to spare my father’s feelings and to avoid seeming triggered.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “I think he’ll be remembered for making America a more cruel and arrogant place.”
I’d stopped talking to my dad about politics in 2020. I had gone to a BLM protest, and he accused me of being part of an al-Qaeda-inspired Antifa terrorist cell. His media diet had expanded from Limbaugh to YouTubers like Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and yes, even Jordan Peterson—people who had made fortunes tearing families like ours apart. He was in his 80s but had been red-pilled like a teenager on 4chan. I was sick of talking about it.
Early in 2024, my dad’s dedication to Trump wavered. He didn’t like the weird sex stuff (Stormy Daniels, Jeffrey Epstein) or Trump’s voter fundraising scams. During the primaries, he supported Nikki Haley, hoping she could restore integrity and piety to the Republican Party. He even donated $100 a month to her campaign, despite being on a fixed income.
I happened to be back home in Missouri for the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5, 2024. Dad took me to Twisted Pickles, a local bar/restaurant, where a group of his friends were gathered around a flat-screen TV watching Fox News, nibbling on coffee cake. Early election results were rolling in—projected Trump wins in Maine and North Carolina.
Fox played a segment about illegal immigration. It featured footage of a dozen or so people squeezing under a tall metal fence and sprinting across the Arizona border. The video was only a few seconds long, but Fox repeated it on a loop, giving the viewer the impression that the U.S. was being overrun. Under siege. It was a cheap editing trick, but effective.
The Twisted Pickles crowd was elated by Trump’s re-election prospects. They hadn’t been fazed by January 6th, the impeachments, the felonies, the hoarded classified documents, the sex scandals, the endless grifting. Their concerns were the migrant crisis, Hunter Biden, and fuck California. Sleepy Joe was on his deathbed, and Trump was going to pull the plug. In 2020, MAGA nation had been robbed, but this time, they were determined to reverse the course of history. Haley had offered a soft-spoken option for conservatives but failed to realize that the soft-spoken era of politics was over. Trump’s politics, Limbaugh’s politics, were about yelling at a problem until it cowered. Every argument had to be simplified and hardened into a projectile that could be hurled at your opponent over and over again.
Later that evening, back at my folks’ apartment, I asked my father how he felt about the results. Super Tuesday was over. Trump had carried 14 states, walloping Haley. She eked out a single victory in Vermont. Trump was going to be the Republican nominee and, in all likelihood, win the presidency.
Dad smiled and let out a sigh.
“Well, you have to admit, Arthur, Trump was a pretty great president.”