BY JOHN K. WILSON

We are all living in the political and media worlds that Rush Limbaugh created. Limbaugh, who died this morning, transformed America in enormous ways, most of them negative. I harshly criticized Limbaugh in my book about him, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh’s Assault on Reason, which was published exactly 10 years ago.

The title of my book is a reference to what Limbaugh called himself, and Ronald Reagan repeated in a 1992 letter to Limbaugh calling him “the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country”: “I know the liberals call you the most dangerous man in America, but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work.”

The subtitle refers to Limbaugh’s anti-intellectual impact, his attack on reason and the dumbing-down of the conservative movement that reached its peak with the Trump movement. Although Limbaugh did not initially support Trump (whom he knew was not a conservative), his refusal to condemn Trump and eventual enthusiasm for anyone like Trump who was hated by liberals enabled Trump to become president. At the 2020 State of the Union Address, Trump gave Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom to reward him for his support. Before that, Limbaugh helped launch the Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich in 1994 and was named an “honorary member” of the freshman House Republican caucus that had seized power.

Limbaugh was a political entertainer. He took the techniques of mainstream morning radio–he modeled his shtick on the non-political Chicago DJ Larry Lujack–and applied them to political talk radio. It wasn’t anything revolutionary–he made his own sound effects by rustling paper or imitating a news bulletin sound. He played parody songs. He used rock and roll bumper music and theme songs for segments on “feminazis” or the environment. He did voices, such as adopting a stereotypical gay lisp whenever he wanted to say what a liberal man would utter. He used catchphrases like “talent on loan from God” or “my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.”

His jokes often had a purpose. Limbaugh would claim that a research firm (which was actually run by a friend who had been a talk show host with him in Sacramento) had investigated all of his opinions and determined that they were 98.7% correct (or 99.8% or any other number he made up). His many gullible listeners would think this was real and become even more convinced to believe everything he said, all while Limbaugh could claim it was all a joke if anyone ever confronted him.

Limbaugh transformed AM talk radio, and no one will ever replace him because he inspired hundreds of imitators. Yet Limbaugh’s influence on television was as powerful as his influence on radio. At a time when comedy on TV avoided politics like the plague, aside from the mildest topical humor on the Tonight Show monologue, Limbaugh made political entertainment on late-night television a financial and ratings success with his syndicated late-night television show from 1992-96. Limbaugh’s TV producer, Roger Ailes, turned this formula of opinionated political hosts into the most lucrative cable TV network in history, Fox News Channel. And the TV industry, seeing Limbaugh’s success in late night, brought real comedians into political entertainment. Comedy Central debuted Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect a year after Limbaugh’s show. When Maher jumped to ABC, he was replaced by The Daily Show. And now comedians commenting on politics fill the late-night airwaves on every network, all of it unimaginable three decades ago.

Limbaugh even helped launch his fiercest opponents. Consider Rachel Maddow, who occupies an essential space every evening on MSNBC giving her brilliant analysis of politics. As talented as Maddow is, she would never be on MSNBC without Limbaugh’s success. Maddow was a local radio host who got her start in political talk in 2004 by hosting a show on Air America, the progressive talk radio that was explicitly created in response to Limbaugh and his imitators. Ailes created the “America’s Talking” channel that was the forerunner of MSNBC before being hired to start Fox News in 1996. The Fox News model of opinionated conservative talk shows was copied by MSNBC, including the hiring of Tucker Carlson where Maddow first appeared as a regular guest. But the success of Keith Olbermann as an MSNBC host giving a left-wing alternative to Fox News led executives to hire Maddow as a host. The whole concept of having opinionated political talk shows was something that Limbaugh innovated.

For all the negative effects Limbaugh had, it is also important to point to some positive aspects. Limbaugh did not ruin radio; it was a vast wasteland for political discussion when he arrived on the scene, and Limbaugh brought political ideas to radio and invented the genre of political entertainment, no matter how terrible I thought those ideas were. The fact that corporate media spawned vast armies of Limbaugh imitators to fill every moment of airtime and squelch liberal voices is not something to blame on Limbaugh himself.

Some progressives think that Limbaugh and the negative effect of his noxious ideas would have been stopped if only government regulations such as the Fairness Doctrine had been in place. This is pure fantasy.

D.R. Tucker argued, “The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine hurt this country. That one action gave us three decades of radio programs that recklessly reaffirmed prejudices, smeared Democrats so thoroughly that some parts of this country have now seemingly become off-limits for the party, and set Americans at each other’s throats.” Tucker noted, “just under a year later, on August 1, 1988, Rush Limbaugh’s Sacramento, California-based radio program was syndicated nationwide…and talk-radio stations across the country soon began to run right-wing agitprop from dawn to dusk, flooding the public airwaves with shameless demonization of Democrats and progressives–and helping to create the media/political culture that allowed a candidate as vulgar as Donald Trump to seize control of the White House last November.”

Limbaugh had a political talk show on a Sacramento radio station for three years before the Fairness Doctrine was overturned, and no one challenged him. No one can imagine that the FCC would have enforced the Fairness Doctrine against conservatives in the Reagan/Bush years when Limbaugh became a radio star. If anyone did enforce the Fairness Doctrine to silence Limbaugh, courts would have struck it down. The Fairness Doctrine was always doomed. The dubious legal justification for it was the limited number of broadcast stations licensed by the federal government, and the rise of cable networks and the internet completely destroyed that logic.

If the Fairness Doctrine had been in place when Limbaugh began national syndication, conservatives such Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms (who supported it) could have used it to push for stations to add Limbaugh and claim that the liberal mainstream hosts needed to be balanced. And if the Fairness Doctrine had survived until President Donald Trump, he would have used it to silence his media enemies without hesitation.

The problem is not that Rush Limbaugh was permitted by the government to broadcast his radio show. The problem is that progressives failed to respond with popular radio shows of their own. And no government regulation would overturn the profit motive that led to the dominance of conservative talk radio.

Limbaugh also influenced academia. He molded generations of conservative students adept at superficial arguments and suspicious of anything liberal. He shifted the Republican Party to view educators as the enemy and urged defunding colleges as the solution. Limbaugh denounced student financial aid as a plot to help “big education” brainwash students with “skulls full of mush.”

Limbaugh, a college dropout, was so ignorant of higher education that he once attacked Classical Studies as a socialist plot (he thought it meant reading Dickens).

Limbaugh brought an extreme anti-intellectualism to the conservative movement, where conspiracy theories and

In 2012, Limbaugh sparked the greatest uproar of his career when he called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” because she supported Obamacare-mandated coverage of contraception for health insurance paid for by students at religious-affiliated colleges. As boycotts grew and advertisers fled, Limbaugh survived because he had effectively created ideological silos, where conservatives would only listen to him and entire companies would serve those audiences, unafraid of losing liberal customers.

Limbaugh helped spawn the conspiracy theories that have dominated the conservative movement under Trump. On January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riots, Limbaugh announced that “Republicans do not join protest mobs. They do not loot and they don’t riot.” He blamed the attacks on “antifa Democrat sponsored instigators.” Limbaugh even claimed that the Capitol Police were part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit Trump by letting rioters in: “there was nobody to stop them from breaking in…we got set up again.”

Limbaugh was a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, and an anti-intellectual force who transformed the media, the conservative movement, Republican Party, and ultimately America. The harmful effects of his three-decade-long reign as the king of talk radio will be felt for decades to come, from all the radio hosts and politicians who have imitated his hateful and ignorant rhetoric.