00:00:00.000Hey 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.
00:00:22.000If you want to support this program and the work we are doing, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:26.000Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:30.000And I encourage all of you to do what Rush Limbaugh told you to do: get involved with Turning Point USA.
00:01:03.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:09.000We did our broadcast live as the news broke that the man who invented the medium that you are listening to right now died.
00:02:19.000The great Rush Limbaugh, the man who invented talk radio, and he was more than the inventor.
00:02:25.000He was the perfecter, the innovator, the defender, and the inspiration behind the spread of talk radio, passed away.
00:02:35.000It came as a shock to many, and we knew that Rush was battling lung cancer.
00:02:40.000And the tributes that have been pouring in on radio stations and television stations across the country have been incredible.
00:02:47.000Now, the liberals have been reacting as we anticipated they would.
00:02:52.000But 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.
00:03:01.000I heard the news, as you did, live on this program.
00:03:05.000So, what I said yesterday was spontaneous and was kind of off the cuff.
00:03:11.000And 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.
00:03:25.000So, you go back to when Rush started his radio career, it was right at the end of the Reagan presidency.
00:03:31.000Rush, in many different ways, was ahead of the technology that he was using.
00:03:37.000He almost invented satellite radio and podcasting before the internet age.
00:03:46.000You see, radio before Rush Limbaugh was maybe a couple drive-time hosts.
00:04:22.000But 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.
00:04:47.000You 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.
00:04:57.000Rush was fighting this before I was born.
00:05:00.000But 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.
00:05:25.000Rush Limbaugh treated his audience not as subjects, but as friends.
00:05:34.000Rush would commonly tell me when I had an opportunity to spend time with him how much he valued his audience.
00:05:42.000The 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.
00:05:59.000Our email is freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:06:14.000He 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.
00:06:27.000He demonstrated that the conservative movement must be a bottom-up conservative movement.
00:06:34.000He invented the idea of taking callers.
00:06:39.000He turned it into an entire day, Open Line Friday.
00:06:41.000You can talk about whatever you want to.
00:06:47.000It wasn't just successful because people had an opportunity to have their voice be heard or talk to Rush Limbaugh.
00:06:54.000It 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.
00:07:05.000And 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.
00:07:13.000The man who started this with long-form creation of arguments, who might spend an entire hour on a little news clipping, that was Rush.
00:07:26.000He actually trusted his audience to want to pay attention to something for more than just a 90-second drive-by news clip.
00:07:35.000You see, the Democrats, after Reagan, they realized that the conservatism of the Reagan Revolution was likely to go away.
00:07:45.000The George H.W. Bush conservatism was coming back in power.
00:07:49.000The Chamber of Commerce was going to have a seat at the table.
00:07:52.000Bad immigration policy was going to be passed.
00:07:55.000But Rush Limbaugh kept that Reagan revolution going.
00:09:07.000You see, I remember listening to Rush during the Republican primaries when Donald Trump came onto the scene.
00:09:13.000And Rush never liked weighing into primaries, but you could always tell he had a little bit of a soft spot for Trump.
00:09:20.000Because I think Rush saw himself in Trump, and I think Trump saw himself in Rush.
00:09:25.000An 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.
00:09:43.000A lot of people have been going on television and they've been saying, Rush Limbaugh started talk radio.
00:09:56.000Talk radio is a communication line straight to the people, uncensored, uninterrupted, unfiltered.
00:10:06.000Talk 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.
00:10:18.000For 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.
00:10:31.000It 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.
00:10:47.000There's so much more I want to say about Rush, and I want to build that out.
00:10:50.000And some people, not a lot, are saying, okay, Charlie, move on from the Rush thing.
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00:12:23.000Democrats and the liberal media are reacting to the death of the greatest of all time, Rush Limbaugh, by sneering and celebrating.
00:12:32.000It reminds me of how different Donald Trump reacted when he heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
00:12:43.000In almost a poetic moment, you might remember Donald Trump was doing a rally while the news was announced of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing.
00:12:52.000And we have on camera how Donald Trump reacted to that.
00:12:55.000This was Donald Trump's first reaction to responding to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:14:22.000He sounds like a very tolerant person.
00:14:25.000Daniel Summers, who writes for The Daily Beast and a pediatrician, had some very awful words.
00:14:35.000He 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.
00:14:47.000And no context, any of the comments that they're trying to pull out.
00:14:51.000And 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.
00:15:08.000And 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.
00:15:44.000The division that we have in America, first of all, can't be placed on any singular person.
00:15:52.000But 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.
00:16:07.000It's a political movement that calls the rest of the country deplorable, reprehensible.
00:16:14.000Rush just started to give a voice to the people that were already there.
00:16:16.000He activated sentiments that were prior to his coming on the scene completely and totally silenced.
00:16:28.000Just 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.
00:16:54.000That's the way that they are capturing a man who lived a full American life.
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00:19:20.000But Operation Chaos had contributed to the polarization of American politics.
00:19:24.000And 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.
00:19:41.000That ultimately would become the defining feature of Republican politics.
00:19:52.000It was hilarious, and Democrats do it all the time.
00:19:55.000So, 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.
00:20:13.000I don't understand how that is controversial.
00:20:46.000She just has no idea what she's talking about.
00:20:49.000And this is a multi-month operation that happened, and Rush was faulted for interfering in elections.
00:20:58.000Well, they have open primaries, so you can do whatever you want.
00:21:02.000And 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?
00:21:22.000Joy Reid continued by saying that he got away with sexism, racism, and manipulation with no evidence whatsoever.
00:21:29.000Cut 54, I think this is Charlie Sykes.
00:21:32.000He was a radio talk show host from Wisconsin.
00:21:34.000I used to really respect his commentary.
00:21:37.000I think he's a pretty intelligent person.
00:21:39.000He's become very nasty and very mean in recent years, incredibly sarcastic, never has a positive thing to say about anyone on the right.
00:22:22.000But he shaped so much of the way the right wing transformed itself over the last few years.
00:22:28.000His legacy is a conservative movement that is, in fact, more dishonest, more open to dishonesty, crueler, dumber than it was before.
00:22:40.000Role 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.
00:22:50.000Because, you know, the bottom line, dirty secret about Rush Limbaugh is he was utterly uninterested in ideas.
00:22:55.000He 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.
00:23:24.000In a 45-second segment, Charlie Sykes contradicted his own argument.
00:23:30.000You know, he wasn't much of a deep thinker.
00:23:32.000He 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.
00:23:39.000It says either he was incredibly influential or he wasn't influential.
00:23:42.000It's either he shaped the thinking or he didn't shape the thinking.
00:23:45.000Now, 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.
00:23:56.000I don't know if Charlie Sykes ever met Rush Limbaugh.
00:23:59.000I spent extensive time with Rush, and he was a deep thinker.
00:24:03.000I 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.
00:24:26.000You could tell by how quickly Rush responded and how focused he was.
00:24:33.000The 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.
00:24:46.000And Charlie Sykes probably hadn't listened to a Rush Limbaugh program in over a decade.
00:24:50.000All he knew was the short sound bites of what he was told to think.
00:24:55.000Not to mention, the books that Rush Limbaugh published for children were very thoughtful about American history.
00:25:06.000And 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.
00:25:32.000If 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.
00:25:49.000I'm all for intellectual conservatism.
00:25:52.000The problem is the people that call themselves intellectual conservatives aren't that intellectual at all.
00:25:57.000They know a lot of the base of philosophy.
00:26:03.000So have a lot of other people, myself included.
00:26:06.000But 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.
00:26:19.000And 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.
00:26:27.000There's a lot of happening in the country.
00:26:44.000And there's a lot of lessons to learn from it.
00:26:46.000However, 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.
00:29:04.000The 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.
00:29:21.000But 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.
00:30:11.000So 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?
00:30:23.000It's because the people who listened to Rush, the ideas he represented, his audience is who the liberals hated.
00:32:14.000Not even the audience, the influence, the capacity for mobilization, the clarity of thought.
00:32:19.000That's not to say that Milton Friedman was not a clear thinker.
00:32:23.000But in the modern era, no one's even close.
00:32:28.000Ronald Reagan would probably be the closest.
00:32:31.000It would be Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan, who were the two most influential American conservatives post-World War II.
00:32:40.000Then Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman.
00:32:48.000The Democrats and the left, it's a better term, it's just the left.
00:32:57.000They 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.
00:33:24.000And so, what better way than to misrepresent who they were and what they were communicating?
00:35:21.000He 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.
00:35:35.000What would the conservative movement look like without Rush?
00:35:39.000What would the country look like without Rush?
00:35:42.000I know people that even disagreed with him, but they were moved more in the conservative direction because of Rush Limbaugh.
00:35:50.000Because 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.
00:36:04.000And that leaves a call to action to all of us.
00:36:07.000And that's why what we're doing at Turning Point USA is so important.
00:36:10.000We were honored to host Rush twice at Turning Point USA.
00:36:13.000Not 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.