The Charlie Kirk Show - The Incomparable Legacy of Rush

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, we continue to remember the greatest of all time, Rush Limbaugh, and the impact that he had on talk, radio, and communication, the deeper lessons against cultural leftist hegemony, and how he continued the Reagan Revolution, that and so much more brought to you by all of you that support us at charliekirk.com/slash support.

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00:00:30.000 And I encourage all of you to do what Rush Limbaugh told you to do: get involved with Turning Point USA.

00:00:35.000 Go to tpusa.com.

00:00:37.000 That's tpusa.com.

00:00:39.000 Important episode.

00:00:40.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:41.000 Here we go.

00:00:42.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:44.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

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00:00:50.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:53.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:54.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:55.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:02:05.000 Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:07.000 Yesterday was a tough day.

00:02:09.000 We did our broadcast live as the news broke that the man who invented the medium that you are listening to right now died.

00:02:19.000 The great Rush Limbaugh, the man who invented talk radio, and he was more than the inventor.

00:02:25.000 He was the perfecter, the innovator, the defender, and the inspiration behind the spread of talk radio, passed away.

00:02:35.000 It came as a shock to many, and we knew that Rush was battling lung cancer.

00:02:40.000 And the tributes that have been pouring in on radio stations and television stations across the country have been incredible.

00:02:47.000 Now, the liberals have been reacting as we anticipated they would.

00:02:52.000 But I want to take a minute and share some of the thoughts that I had had opportunity to reflect on in the last 24 hours.

00:03:01.000 I heard the news, as you did, live on this program.

00:03:05.000 So, what I said yesterday was spontaneous and was kind of off the cuff.

00:03:11.000 And the more I thought about it over last night and this morning, and listen to other people's tributes, the more I realized that there will never be another Rush Limbaugh.

00:03:25.000 So, you go back to when Rush started his radio career, it was right at the end of the Reagan presidency.

00:03:31.000 Rush, in many different ways, was ahead of the technology that he was using.

00:03:37.000 He almost invented satellite radio and podcasting before the internet age.

00:03:46.000 You see, radio before Rush Limbaugh was maybe a couple drive-time hosts.

00:03:51.000 It was music-heavy.

00:03:56.000 Radio was More about local news and traffic and maybe sports.

00:04:04.000 Rush turned radio into a masterpiece.

00:04:10.000 He used politically incorrect commentary, but more than anything else.

00:04:15.000 And I mean politically incorrect commentary in a good way, not a bad way.

00:04:18.000 But more than anything else, he was a champion of free speech.

00:04:20.000 He was an innovator.

00:04:22.000 But what's so amazing, and the reason why the left hated him so much, and the reason why the Democrats tried to cancel him as early as 1991, there's an amazing 60 Minutes piece where it shows that they were already, they being the left and the media, were doing everything they can to get advertisers to stop advertising on the Rush Limbaugh program to try and pull support from the Rush Limbaugh program in 1991.

00:04:47.000 You think that this is all a new thing of activist pressure going after corporate America and corporate interests to try to get them to pull ad dollars.

00:04:57.000 Rush was fighting this before I was born.

00:05:00.000 But the reason they hated him was not just because of what he said, not just because of the audience that he created, but also he was the first person to demonstrate that a non-elected, non-college graduate could activate people every single day for conservative ideas.

00:05:19.000 Rush Limbaugh obliterated gatekeeper conservatism.

00:05:25.000 Rush Limbaugh treated his audience not as subjects, but as friends.

00:05:34.000 Rush would commonly tell me when I had an opportunity to spend time with him how much he valued his audience.

00:05:42.000 The one thing I learned from Rush Lumbaugh as we are doing radio and podcasting is you have an open email to your audience where people can email you in real time thoughts and criticisms, points of feedback, and corrections.

00:05:59.000 Our email is freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:06:01.000 I think he was L. Rushbo at EIBNet.

00:06:04.000 He read every email.

00:06:06.000 He didn't respond to them all, but he did that for a reason, because he wanted to see in real time what his audience was thinking.

00:06:12.000 He loved his audience.

00:06:14.000 He had more respect for the 45-year-old plumber or carpenter than the Harvard professor who told his students that Rush Limbaugh was a bigot.

00:06:27.000 He demonstrated that the conservative movement must be a bottom-up conservative movement.

00:06:34.000 He invented the idea of taking callers.

00:06:39.000 He turned it into an entire day, Open Line Friday.

00:06:41.000 You can talk about whatever you want to.

00:06:43.000 Now, why was that so successful?

00:06:47.000 It wasn't just successful because people had an opportunity to have their voice be heard or talk to Rush Limbaugh.

00:06:54.000 It was important because Rush used that as a focus group to learn from his audience so he can understand what the people of our country are thinking in real time.

00:07:03.000 He pioneered that path.

00:07:05.000 And as we look at all the success of long-form podcasting, and we have our podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, we have our YouTube channel, we have all the different feeds.

00:07:13.000 The man who started this with long-form creation of arguments, who might spend an entire hour on a little news clipping, that was Rush.

00:07:26.000 He actually trusted his audience to want to pay attention to something for more than just a 90-second drive-by news clip.

00:07:35.000 You see, the Democrats, after Reagan, they realized that the conservatism of the Reagan Revolution was likely to go away.

00:07:45.000 The George H.W. Bush conservatism was coming back in power.

00:07:49.000 The Chamber of Commerce was going to have a seat at the table.

00:07:52.000 Bad immigration policy was going to be passed.

00:07:55.000 But Rush Limbaugh kept that Reagan revolution going.

00:07:58.000 He kept that energy alive.

00:08:01.000 And the cultural hegemony that the left always desired was always met with a fierce critic.

00:08:11.000 I think deep down, establishment Republicans hated Rush Limbaugh.

00:08:18.000 They feared him, but they knew that Rush Limbaugh was keeping the conservative base active, not passive.

00:08:29.000 That's not something to take for granted, by the way.

00:08:32.000 The rest of the world consumes their information from a couple of news agencies, sometimes they're government-funded.

00:08:41.000 That's the America that Democrats wanted us to live through in the 90s and early 2000s.

00:08:48.000 They wanted us to get all of our information from NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN.

00:08:53.000 This is before the creation of Fox News.

00:08:55.000 And so then all of a sudden, an outspoken conservative from Missouri catches fire.

00:09:04.000 And that bothers them.

00:09:05.000 Does that sound familiar?

00:09:07.000 You see, I remember listening to Rush during the Republican primaries when Donald Trump came onto the scene.

00:09:13.000 And Rush never liked weighing into primaries, but you could always tell he had a little bit of a soft spot for Trump.

00:09:20.000 Because I think Rush saw himself in Trump, and I think Trump saw himself in Rush.

00:09:25.000 An outsider into an insider's game, redefined the media landscape, challenging all the gatekeepers, all of the ivory tower conservatives, and saying things that other people were afraid to say, but everybody else was thinking.

00:09:43.000 A lot of people have been going on television and they've been saying, Rush Limbaugh started talk radio.

00:09:51.000 What does that mean?

00:09:53.000 What is talk radio?

00:09:56.000 Talk radio is a communication line straight to the people, uncensored, uninterrupted, unfiltered.

00:10:06.000 Talk radio is where decent patriotic Americans go to make sense of a chaotic world that is being misrepresented and a narrative that is being propagandized to them.

00:10:18.000 For all intents and purposes, Rush Limbaugh liberated the American conversation away from a couple networks and activated millions of voices, including my own, to speak out.

00:10:28.000 That is a moral good.

00:10:31.000 It is a moral good to give people a voice, not just to have a couple of people in the ruling class control what thoughts, what ideas are allowed to be conveyed in the American discourse.

00:10:47.000 There's so much more I want to say about Rush, and I want to build that out.

00:10:50.000 And some people, not a lot, are saying, okay, Charlie, move on from the Rush thing.

00:10:53.000 That's not how this works.

00:10:55.000 Rush is worthy of more than just one segment.

00:11:00.000 You're talking about one of the most influential people in American political history.

00:11:09.000 With the ever-increasing amount of makes and models of cars, it's impossible to stock all the parts you need in a traditional storefront.

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00:11:33.000 Why would you choose to spend 30, 50, or 100% more for the exact same auto parts at a chain store or a new car dealership?

00:11:40.000 Chain stores have different price tiers for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers.

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00:11:48.000 Go to rockauto.com because they offer the lowest prices possible.

00:11:51.000 Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.

00:11:56.000 Go to rockauto.com, the shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.

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00:12:23.000 Democrats and the liberal media are reacting to the death of the greatest of all time, Rush Limbaugh, by sneering and celebrating.

00:12:32.000 It reminds me of how different Donald Trump reacted when he heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

00:12:43.000 In almost a poetic moment, you might remember Donald Trump was doing a rally while the news was announced of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing.

00:12:52.000 And we have on camera how Donald Trump reacted to that.

00:12:55.000 This was Donald Trump's first reaction to responding to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

00:13:09.000 She just died.

00:13:11.000 Wow.

00:13:14.000 I didn't know that.

00:13:15.000 I just telling me now for the first time.

00:13:19.000 She led an amazing life.

00:13:22.000 What else can you say?

00:13:23.000 She was an amazing woman.

00:13:25.000 Whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life.

00:13:32.000 I'm actually sad to hear that.

00:13:34.000 I am sad to hear that.

00:13:36.000 Thank you very much.

00:13:39.000 And yes, that was Elton John playing in the background, almost just like a movie scene.

00:13:45.000 Helton John is playing, and Donald Trump comes up and reacts to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

00:13:50.000 That is different than how many liberals are reacting, verified people on Twitter.

00:13:57.000 Shannon Watts says, Rush Limbaugh helped create today's polarized America by normalizing racism, bigotry, misogyny, and mockery.

00:14:04.000 He was a demagogue who got rich off of hate speech, division, lies, and toxicity.

00:14:07.000 That is his legacy. 1.00

00:14:08.000 This woman is a fool. 1.00

00:14:10.000 Another person on Twitter: once I learned my aunt listened to Rush Limbaugh, I learned to never speak to that aunt again. 1.00

00:14:20.000 This person is from Crooked Media.

00:14:22.000 He sounds like a very tolerant person.

00:14:25.000 Daniel Summers, who writes for The Daily Beast and a pediatrician, had some very awful words.

00:14:35.000 He says, Rush Limbaugh was a terrible human being in life, and I refuse to abide by the convention that his death absolves him from criticism for his legacy of bigotry.

00:14:44.000 No evidence at all whatsoever.

00:14:47.000 And no context, any of the comments that they're trying to pull out.

00:14:51.000 And no mention, of course, the tens of millions of dollars that we know of, by the way, because he gave anonymously more than you would ever imagine to the charities that he gave back to, the millions of dollars he raised for veterans, the millions of dollars he raised for first responders.

00:15:08.000 And even more than that, the work he did to advance American education using his platform as a place to encourage civics, to encourage teaching the next generation why this country is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.

00:15:28.000 So the reaction is to be expected.

00:15:33.000 And it's just beyond disappointing.

00:15:35.000 And this is one of the things that now they're going to say.

00:15:37.000 They're going to say, Rush Limbaugh created the division that we have now in America. 0.93

00:15:42.000 It's a bunch of nonsense.

00:15:44.000 The division that we have in America, first of all, can't be placed on any singular person.

00:15:52.000 But it is largely because of a political movement that disguises and camouflage itself, camouflages itself, fighting for unity, and then does the exact opposite when they govern.

00:16:07.000 It's a political movement that calls the rest of the country deplorable, reprehensible.

00:16:14.000 Rush just started to give a voice to the people that were already there.

00:16:16.000 He activated sentiments that were prior to his coming on the scene completely and totally silenced.

00:16:28.000 Just so you know, over the course of 25 years, Rush and his audience raised over $44 million for the leukemia and lymphoma society through his annual curathon, not to mention the Tunnels for Tower Foundation, not to mention the work he did for Hillsdale College, not to mention the work he did for first responders, not to mention the work he did for veterans, but the way that the activist media is saying he's a bigot, he's a homophobe, he was a terrible person.

00:16:54.000 That's the way that they are capturing a man who lived a full American life.

00:17:03.000 He had plenty of controversies.

00:17:05.000 He had plenty of personal battles he had overcome.

00:17:08.000 He lost his hearing, for goodness sake.

00:17:11.000 Can you imagine hosting a radio program and not being able to hear?

00:17:16.000 You know that Rush Lumbaugh, when he had callers, he had a transcription service.

00:17:20.000 And that's how he knew what the callers were saying.

00:17:25.000 We're all looking for ways to save money, right?

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00:17:35.000 That's how much Gabby, G-A-B-I customers save per year on average on car or home insurance.

00:17:41.000 That's why when I was shopping for insurance, I used Gabby.

00:17:44.000 This is the time of year we go shopping for insurance.

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00:17:57.000 Just link your current insurance account, and in just minutes, you'll be able to see quotes for the exact same coverage you currently have.

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00:18:51.000 Bet Midler.

00:18:52.000 Rush Lumbaugh has gone to his reward.

00:18:54.000 Bet it's hot.

00:18:56.000 The Vitriol, Rolling Stone, Rush Limbaugh that did his best to ruin America.

00:19:03.000 Let's get to some of the tape here.

00:19:04.000 Let's cut 53, Joy Reed, who has just become impossible to watch. 1.00

00:19:12.000 She's a very angry person. 1.00

00:19:13.000 She never used to be that way. 0.87

00:19:14.000 She actually used to be somewhat of a fair liberal, and she's become very angry in recent years. 0.98

00:19:19.000 Let's go to cut 53.

00:19:20.000 But Operation Chaos had contributed to the polarization of American politics.

00:19:24.000 And more importantly, the idea of injecting chaos and sexism, manipulation, racism, and dirty tricks directly into the artery of the Republican Party, bloodying people up rather than faking compassionate conservatism and trying to get crossover votes.

00:19:41.000 That ultimately would become the defining feature of Republican politics.

00:19:45.000 Rush ultimately got his way.

00:19:48.000 So hold on a second.

00:19:49.000 Operation Chaos didn't work.

00:19:52.000 It was hilarious, and Democrats do it all the time.

00:19:55.000 So, Operation Chaos is when Rush Lumbaugh in 2008 announced an idea to have all the Republican Party voters and Limbaugh supporters temporarily cross over to vote in the Democrat primary and vote for Hillary Clinton because Barack Obama looked like he was going to be the nominee.

00:20:13.000 I don't understand how that is controversial.

00:20:15.000 Democrats do this all the time.

00:20:17.000 You want to see a certain candidate win, and then you offer support for the candidate that you think you're more likely to beat.

00:20:24.000 In this case, Rush believed that Clinton was much more likely to lose than Barack Obama.

00:20:32.000 I don't understand how that possibly sowed the seeds of division in this country.

00:20:37.000 She doesn't even understand what Operation Chaos is.

00:20:39.000 She's probably confusing it with another Operation Chaos, which was a CIA operation.

00:20:44.000 That's a completely different topic.

00:20:46.000 She just has no idea what she's talking about.

00:20:49.000 And this is a multi-month operation that happened, and Rush was faulted for interfering in elections.

00:20:58.000 Well, they have open primaries, so you can do whatever you want.

00:21:02.000 And how is it any different of Rush Limbaugh when he was mobilizing his base for Operation Chaos than the New York Times or the Washington Post mobilizing liberal bases to go support Republican projects or Republican candidates that they think are easier to defeat or less likely to be grassroots conservatives?

00:21:22.000 Joy Reid continued by saying that he got away with sexism, racism, and manipulation with no evidence whatsoever.

00:21:29.000 Cut 54, I think this is Charlie Sykes.

00:21:32.000 He was a radio talk show host from Wisconsin.

00:21:34.000 I used to really respect his commentary.

00:21:37.000 I think he's a pretty intelligent person.

00:21:39.000 He's become very nasty and very mean in recent years, incredibly sarcastic, never has a positive thing to say about anyone on the right.

00:21:47.000 Everything is just negative to him.

00:21:49.000 I just don't like negativity in my life.

00:21:51.000 I don't like negativity in the commentary.

00:21:52.000 It's one of the reasons I love Rush.

00:21:54.000 He was a happy warrior.

00:21:55.000 He was full of joy.

00:21:57.000 He was always looking at the positive.

00:21:59.000 He was looking at how we can play offense, how we can build, how we can do new things.

00:22:02.000 Charlie Sykes is the opposite.

00:22:04.000 People that focus on tearing down and negativity frustrate me more than anything else.

00:22:10.000 Cut 54, who's an allegedly conservative Charlie Sykes on MSNBC, CUT 54.

00:22:18.000 He was an entertainer.

00:22:19.000 He was not a deep thinker.

00:22:20.000 He was not a thought leader.

00:22:22.000 But he shaped so much of the way the right wing transformed itself over the last few years. 0.96

00:22:28.000 His legacy is a conservative movement that is, in fact, more dishonest, more open to dishonesty, crueler, dumber than it was before.

00:22:40.000 Role model in the way that you could twist truth, the way that you could use insults and add homonym attacks instead of actually dealing with ideas. 0.79

00:22:50.000 Because, you know, the bottom line, dirty secret about Rush Limbaugh is he was utterly uninterested in ideas.

00:22:55.000 He was much more, he was much more interested in the kind of smash mouth, own the liberals politics that Donald Trump was so good at.

00:23:03.000 Not interested in ideas.

00:23:05.000 So just look at the inherent contradiction of what Charlie Sykes said. 0.97

00:23:10.000 And Charlie Sykes is a pretty smart guy, but he just had one of the dumbest 45 seconds on cable television I've ever heard.

00:23:16.000 So in 45 seconds, he says he was not a thought leader, but he also shaped the thinking of the entire conservative movement.

00:23:24.000 He said that.

00:23:24.000 In a 45-second segment, Charlie Sykes contradicted his own argument.

00:23:30.000 You know, he wasn't much of a deep thinker.

00:23:32.000 He wasn't a thought leader, and he really wasn't that influential, but he was probably the most important person that shaped all of the thinking on the conservative side.

00:23:39.000 It says either he was incredibly influential or he wasn't influential.

00:23:42.000 It's either he shaped the thinking or he didn't shape the thinking. 0.93

00:23:45.000 Now, this idea that Rush was crueler or dumber or more dishonest comes from someone who has made an attempt to not be informed about Rush Limbaugh.

00:23:56.000 I don't know if Charlie Sykes ever met Rush Limbaugh. 0.70

00:23:59.000 I spent extensive time with Rush, and he was a deep thinker.

00:24:03.000 I can show you emails back and forth between Rush and I, and with his family's permission, eventually I will probably make them public, of Rush and I talking about very specific points of philosophy, specifically when it came to postmodernism, when it came to Jacques Derrida, going back and forth of what really motivates the nihilistic left.

00:24:26.000 You could tell by how quickly Rush responded and how focused he was.

00:24:31.000 This was a deep thinker.

00:24:33.000 The great one, Mark Levin, said on his program yesterday that whenever he visited Rush in his home, it was filled with open books and notes, lectures he was listening to.

00:24:46.000 And Charlie Sykes probably hadn't listened to a Rush Limbaugh program in over a decade.

00:24:50.000 All he knew was the short sound bites of what he was told to think.

00:24:55.000 Not to mention, the books that Rush Limbaugh published for children were very thoughtful about American history.

00:25:04.000 They were really well done.

00:25:06.000 And so this idea that Rush Limbaugh was nothing more than a shock jock radio show host that said things for headlines and only used incendiary and cruel commentary is not the truth at all.

00:25:20.000 It's the opposite.

00:25:20.000 I believe Rush Limbaugh made the conservative movement wiser and more likely to pursue deeper ideas and thinking.

00:25:29.000 He kept people engaged.

00:25:31.000 He kept them alert.

00:25:32.000 If it was up to Charlie Sykes and the type of people that he hangs around with, we would be having the same sort of watered-down policy conversations with no capacity to communicate those ideas to the broader audience.

00:25:49.000 I'm all for intellectual conservatism.

00:25:52.000 The problem is the people that call themselves intellectual conservatives aren't that intellectual at all.

00:25:57.000 They know a lot of the base of philosophy.

00:26:00.000 They've read plenty of books.

00:26:03.000 So have a lot of other people, myself included.

00:26:06.000 But to say as if they have more wisdom when it comes to the correct way to engage in American politics because you're more snobbish than I am, that's a bunch of balderdash.

00:26:17.000 Cut 55, a CBS report.

00:26:19.000 And by the way, the reason we're doing this, and I know some of our younger listeners that never had a chance to grow up with Rush, I know some of you are saying, Charlie, come on, move on with Rush.

00:26:27.000 There's a lot of happening in the country.

00:26:29.000 Again, this guy created the medium.

00:26:33.000 He was the Michelangelo of talk radio.

00:26:36.000 He was the Leonardo da Vinci of modern American political thinking.

00:26:41.000 He invented it.

00:26:42.000 He perfected it.

00:26:43.000 He mastered it.

00:26:44.000 And there's a lot of lessons to learn from it.

00:26:46.000 However, if we do not defend his legacy now, then my children will be taught by some uninformed person one day, either in a classroom, I never send my kids to public school.

00:27:00.000 I will homeschool them.

00:27:01.000 However, they'll be taught one day that Rush Limbaugh was a Joe McCarthy-style figure.

00:27:10.000 He was a shock-jock journalist who divided America, and anyone who knew him or followed him was a terrible person.

00:27:16.000 They're trying to rewrite the history, own the history, so that they can attack half the country that he influenced. 0.83

00:27:23.000 That's why it's so important we get the legacy straight now.

00:27:27.000 It's more than just honoring an honorable man, which is a moral thing to do.

00:27:33.000 It's about the political consequences of what they're trying to tell us because of this moment.

00:27:40.000 Let's play Cut 55, the CBS News report.

00:27:43.000 But everything Rush Limbaugh did engendered controversy.

00:27:47.000 Maybe nothing more than getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address last year.

00:27:54.000 Destroying the very culture.

00:27:56.000 One of the loudest, most provocative voices on the national scene in the last three plus decades is now silenced.

00:28:04.000 What a cruel and dark way to word it.

00:28:06.000 He's now silenced.

00:28:08.000 Well, yeah, he's dead.

00:28:09.000 I mean, I guess he's silenced.

00:28:11.000 I mean, instead, you could say he's passed away.

00:28:15.000 I mean, how would they frame the passing of Rachel Maddow or people like that?

00:28:23.000 Who's the guy that passed away two weeks ago, the guy that founded Hustler magazine?

00:28:28.000 We'll get the name.

00:28:29.000 He was Larry Flint.

00:28:32.000 Is that right?

00:28:33.000 Okay, Larry Flint.

00:28:35.000 I don't know much about this guy.

00:28:37.000 All I know is that he was someone that definitely pushed the boundaries of what was decent for publication.

00:28:46.000 He was eulogized by the activist media.

00:28:48.000 This is a guy that, in the most vanilla way I can describe it, normalized widespread dissemination and publishing of pornography.

00:29:01.000 And that's a fair way to say it.

00:29:04.000 The activist media treated him as a free speech warrior and champion who pushed the boundaries of the First Amendment, who was a blazing pioneer for what was previously the old conservative orthodoxy.

00:29:21.000 But Rush Limbaugh, who raised tens of millions of dollars for our veterans and leukemia, Rush Limbaugh, who taught the need for patriotic education, and Rush Limbaugh, who, by the way, criticized the left, which is always the moral thing to do.

00:29:35.000 So God bless him for that.

00:29:36.000 They call him as someone who basked in controversy.

00:29:39.000 He engendered controversy, the loudest, most provocative voices.

00:29:42.000 Yet the guy that normalized widespread consumption of pornography in our country was a First Amendment champion.

00:29:48.000 That's the way they wrote the articles two weeks ago when this guy that I had just, I never heard of him.

00:29:53.000 All I knew that he sued Jerry Falwell and won because of some awful thing that he wrote.

00:29:59.000 It was before my time.

00:30:00.000 I just read a little about him last week.

00:30:03.000 Who did more good for America?

00:30:05.000 The Hustler magazine guy or Rush Limbaugh?

00:30:09.000 It's not even close.

00:30:11.000 So why is the activist media treating Rush Limbaugh like he was Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist from the National Socialist Workers' Party in the 1930s and 40s?

00:30:23.000 It's because the people who listened to Rush, the ideas he represented, his audience is who the liberals hated.

00:30:32.000 And that's who Rush loved the most.

00:30:35.000 You.

00:30:36.000 He loved his audience.

00:30:37.000 He loved meeting his audience.

00:30:39.000 He loved learning from his audience.

00:30:40.000 And we know this from how the Democrats and the media have been treating all the news stories the last couple months.

00:30:48.000 It's you thereafter.

00:30:50.000 It's just Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump who are in the way.

00:30:57.000 Look, a lot of you guys have had Mike Lindell's back.

00:31:00.000 I know a lot of you guys want to continue to have his back.

00:31:03.000 And the amazing company that you guys are supporting is MyPillow.

00:31:06.000 The inventor and CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, is fighting very, very hard.

00:31:10.000 And a lot of you guys say, I want to reward courage.

00:31:13.000 If you go to mypillow.com and use the promo code Kirk, you guys can basically get this amazing pillow that they sent me.

00:31:19.000 You guys can get Giza dream seeds.

00:31:21.000 You guys can get toppers, robes, you name it.

00:31:23.000 If you want to support the good guys, support people with courage, I know a lot of you guys do, mypillow.com promo code Kirk.

00:31:30.000 Remember, all my pillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.

00:31:36.000 And you can get the Giza dream seeds.

00:31:38.000 You can get the whole thing.

00:31:39.000 Go to mypillow.com, promo code Kirk, mypillow.com, promo code Kirk.

00:31:46.000 We have big shoes to fill.

00:31:49.000 Everyone does.

00:31:51.000 When a legend like Rush passes on, it's so important to take a pause.

00:31:56.000 I was thinking about who was the last person in American conservative grassroots that was even close to Rush.

00:32:03.000 Some would say William F. Buckley.

00:32:06.000 I think that's probably right.

00:32:09.000 Milton Friedman.

00:32:11.000 But no one came even close to Rush.

00:32:14.000 Not even the audience, the influence, the capacity for mobilization, the clarity of thought.

00:32:19.000 That's not to say that Milton Friedman was not a clear thinker.

00:32:23.000 But in the modern era, no one's even close.

00:32:28.000 Ronald Reagan would probably be the closest.

00:32:31.000 It would be Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan, who were the two most influential American conservatives post-World War II.

00:32:40.000 Then Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman.

00:32:48.000 The Democrats and the left, it's a better term, it's just the left.

00:32:57.000 They are now on a some would say a diabolical campaign to not just destroy the ideas that Rush and President Trump represented, but also to attack the people that consumed the information and the broadcasts.

00:33:24.000 And so, what better way than to misrepresent who they were and what they were communicating?

00:33:31.000 Rush was a counterpuncher.

00:33:33.000 The media knew this.

00:33:34.000 The media actually ignored Rush at times because they knew that the more air they gave him, the bigger he would become.

00:33:43.000 Massive cancellation campaigns came at Rush before the term cancel culture was even thought of.

00:33:51.000 And I've been getting a lot of emails from people, and they say, Charlie, how can we best remember Rush Limbaugh?

00:33:59.000 How can we best memorialize his life?

00:34:04.000 And I think the answer to that is probably to pursue meaningful action for the conservative movement.

00:34:15.000 Do what Rush did.

00:34:18.000 And you might say, well, I can't host the national radio show.

00:34:20.000 No, no, no, no.

00:34:22.000 What Rush did is he did one thing every day that was meaningful to help improve the country.

00:34:29.000 One of the things I admire is his stamina.

00:34:31.000 Doing this for 30 years, barely ever taking a day off.

00:34:37.000 I want you to think about that.

00:34:38.000 30 years every day.

00:34:42.000 Is that what you're willing to do?

00:34:44.000 Because it needs to be.

00:34:46.000 Where you say, every day I'm going to make a sizable, significant, and impactful decision to impact the country that I live in.

00:34:57.000 It might be running for a school board.

00:34:59.000 It might be influencing a neighbor. 0.99

00:35:00.000 It might be correcting someone when they say something that is politically foolish. 0.96

00:35:06.000 Rush's stamina was incredible. 0.56

00:35:08.000 He could have retired and done it one day a week and done some live appearances and golfed for the last decade.

00:35:14.000 But he was in the chair right up to the end.

00:35:17.000 It's where he wanted to be.

00:35:21.000 He loved the space of being able to communicate these ideas, communicate American patriotism to an audience that was being propagandized to believe the exact opposite.

00:35:35.000 What would the conservative movement look like without Rush?

00:35:39.000 What would the country look like without Rush?

00:35:42.000 I know people that even disagreed with him, but they were moved more in the conservative direction because of Rush Limbaugh.

00:35:50.000 Because even if you didn't like him, there was an energy, there was a charisma, there was a wit, there was a magic to the way he went about his program every single day.

00:36:01.000 So now he is gone.

00:36:04.000 And that leaves a call to action to all of us.

00:36:07.000 And that's why what we're doing at Turning Point USA is so important.

00:36:10.000 We were honored to host Rush twice at Turning Point USA.

00:36:13.000 Not something that almost any organization can say, but he went out of his way to speak at our conferences and speak at our events because he saw the need for young people to get involved and understand these ideas.

00:36:25.000 And he was an optimist.

00:36:26.000 He believed our best days were ahead and the most promising things were to come.

00:36:35.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:37.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:39.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:36:43.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:36:44.000 God bless.

00:36:48.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 18, 2021

The Incomparable Legacy of Rush

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