Vou get behind the wheel of your car, preferably American, you place the automatic gearbox in the driving position, you block your speed limiter at 75 miles (120 km / h) which should not be exceeded on highways endlessly straight from the United States, and you turn on the car stereo.
On the way to a real American experience! Not by listening to country music, R’n’B or rap, but by letting yourself be taken by a flood of uninterrupted words, belching, invective, nervous laughter. You are listening to the host of one of those conservative talk shows that saturate the airwaves across the country.
The first and most famous of them, Rush Limbaugh, who died on February 17, was given a nationwide media burial, worthy of what he stood for: the man who changed, for the worse, American politics. The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, as conservative Fox News broadcaster, hailed a representative in an editorial. “Traditional American values that the dominant culture too often belittles”.
Rush Limbaugh’s show was three hours, five days a week. His audience had declined, but with 15.5 million listeners each week, he remained number one, just ahead of Sean Hannity, Fox News star and Donald Trump’s favorite foil, and other figures like Mark Levin or Glenn Beck.
The first eight of the same genre have a weekly audience of more than 80 million people. It is a movement less visible than Fox News or social networks, but which testifies to the vigor of this other America of which a part still does not believe that Joe Biden was truly elected in November 2020.
Rush Limbaugh didn’t believe it either. According to New York Times, which was based on an MIT analysis carried out between November 22, 2020 and January 5, on forty-five programs, he explained on thirty-two occasions that the elections were rigged. He was for once allowed to be overtaken by his dolphin Sean Hannity, who explained it in thirty-five of his forty-five shows.
Fantasized enemy
Rush Limbaugh couldn’t find a better president than Donald Trump – who presented him with the prestigious Medal of Freedom in 2020 – a man of power who resembles him, using the same techniques in bad faith, without the slightest superego, convinced that everything he says becomes true because he has just stated it. Both were in constant struggle against a fantasized enemy supposed to want to destroy the voiceless, which they claim to represent.
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