March 1, 2021: Rush Limbaugh is dead. So are Joseph Goebbels and Al-Ghazali. The similarities don’t end there.

As a young Reaganite after Reagan was gone, I’d hurry down the stairs of the building I worked in. Outside, under that eternal Newport Beach, California sunshine, I’d trot to my car, turn on the radio, grab my lunch, and settle in for an hour of rousing provocation like none on radio before.

Or so I thought. [1]

There were three elements of personal ignorance yet to be illuminated in this experience. Little did I realize, what I was hearing was the seed of a massive social countermovement. Having been first duped as a child by Erich von Däniken's space aliens, I would later discover I was working on the second occasion of three in life. And finally, I'd not yet understood postmodernism either. Postmodern liberalism was the agenda I heard countered in that car. As Ferry and Renaut note in their French Philosophy of the Sixties, postmodernism is "a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning is not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable." [2] Translation: inflated gobbledygook to hoodwink those who can be. Postmodernism bled into liberal American universities in the 1960s as a tool against a dominate, "Eurocentric," white male West, every bit as anti-science and anti-reason as Right-wing Creationists and Trump's Grand Old Putin Party. [3]

Notice this conclusion to reject reason emerged from a reasoned argument—an inherent self-contradiction and standard practice of the movement. Such thinking allows for the wildest of conclusions.

According to postmodernists, given that the West was built on Greek reason (which they consider a form of bigotry), recovered by the Renaissance, codified by Enlightenment, everything about the West was eventually indictable. The entire non-Western world was seen as a victim of the West, and there were plenty of reasons to justify such claims. From colonialism and slavery to opposition of women’s suffrage, reasons to oppose the Western Way were abundant for this forerunner of victim culture. Conveniently, this ignored the same iniquities in non-Western cultures and denied reason’s capacity for self-correction.

Before Marxism proved inane, postmodernism presented itself as another ally against the West. Upon colonizing American university humanities departments from those in France, including sociology, history, anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, it then created new ones like Women's Studies, White Studies, and feminist theory. [4] This is not to say all humanities at university are postmodern. Many possess rationalists seeking truth as best they’re able, and postmodernism could not survive, nor even enter university sciences and engineering where proven truth is required. Without the truth of nature as reasoned by science, no devices built to that nature could ever work; there would be no technology. [5]

Sixties intellectuals spun the new social doctrine which was to be free from the blasphemy of rational examination and beyond it, like a religion which so many of them scorned. Per Ferry and Renaut, postmoderns like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan sought to create “a cult of paradox.” [6] With Foucault’s “there are no facts, only interpretation,” the way was opened to their core oxymoron, summarized as, “There is no truth and that’s the truth.” One presumes it applied to those who preached it, but it didn’t.

This practice would eventually be absorbed and fired back at postmodern liberals by postmodern “conservatives”—today’s populists. Nihilistic relativism born on the Left is now backbone of the Right for the political utility of lying expressed by Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s “Truth isn’t truth.” [7]

What I listened to in Newport was a response to sweeping irrationalism newly defined as “correct thinking” in concert with the birth of authoritarian political correctness. Correctness witnessed today by the Smith College fiasco. [8] Enlightenment liberalism employed by America’s Founders moved in reverse to create a new liberalism, the New Left. [9] Its counter-response was what became the New Right and a new industry, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh. This industry grew to be today’s lie factories for radicalized “conservatism” with no association to traditional conservatism other than appropriation of the name.

Limbaugh exposed the Left’s countless absurdities: racist German shepherds; all boys are sexual proto predators; multiculturalism’s groundwork for tribalism through its replacement of America’s “melting pot” with “identity politics.” [10] To challenge such political nonsense was sacrilege to the Left and Rush relished exposing it with entertaining sound bites we harried Americans crave. His political incorrectness made it keenly satisfying.

But it wasn’t all he was doing. Laced with his revelations was another. I began to notice Limbaugh describe things in hostile terms which I’d personally witnessed with the opposite reaction. I heard him cherry-pick, truncate, and spin, discarding critical parts of a story that would reverse his allegations. I began talking out loud to my radio, asking questions to the bemusement of passersby. By the humblest of inquiries, it was alarming just how flimsy was Limbaugh’s rock-solid bombast. The full truth was an obstacle to winning his political arguments. [11]

Limbaugh’s master technique was to season lies with just enough truth to give his lies something to ride on, dependent on the fact that modernity overwhelms us with too much information we can’t track. His verbal knife flayed detail, nuance, and any need for lengthy attention spans. With relentless repetition, he put words in other’s mouths then told how wrong they were. A perpetual mind reader, he put thoughts, opinions, and schemes in other people’s minds—then told how wrong they were. He took the sins he practiced daily then pasted them to his adversaries. He exaggerated valid ideas to absurdity, then indicted the original idea with his ridiculous extension. He claimed to live in “Realville” but created a fake world in concert with the other fabricators he spawned. While bemoaning the Left’s victim culture, he chronically griped, We always play by the rules; they always take advantage of us; the elites never care about us, the little people, flyovers, hicks. With an absolutist’s emphasis on always, never, everybody, his grievance was easy to swallow. Not only did it require no thought, Limbaugh demanded it. “Don’t doubt me!” he’d say. And when he talked about his cat, the blustering fat man was charming.

While the Left offered ample targets, Limbaugh began to chase ever more trivial matters in a business that demands progressively shocking revelations of universal evil. Because LED light bulbs consume less energy, last longer, and add thus less atmospheric CO2, LEDs became a rallying cry against the “global warming hoax,” “invasions of our liberty,” more “big government control.” From just another appliance, to The Assault on America. He could have spun it differently: “American innovators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists solved another problem to create wealth, jobs, and greater GDP for a stronger USA.” We used to call this Yankee Ingenuity. The Old Right was all for it. For Limbaugh and his flock, everything became hopelessly politicized. [12]

Like the New Left’s reversal of Enlightenment reason, Limbaugh’s New Right would betray everything it once stood for: Reagan, Founders, Christ. [13] This coalescing of tribal safety on its way to a militant cult fully amalgamated with Trump’s rise, stretching Limbaugh’s skills. As Trump flip-flopped on paying porn stars for silence, Trump Tower Moscow, campaign meetings with Russian operatives, Limbaugh was forced to maintain a halo of infallibility for the New Right’s newest Savior.

Per historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, another once-dazzling mob orator was “history’s first master of the media Big Lie who created Hitler’s halo of infallibility,” Joseph Goebbels. [14] As Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, Goebbels vindicated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which claimed the bigger the lie, the more likely it’s believed. For Trump, Limbaugh made this his career after first blasting Trump as a fake. Like Goebbels, Limbaugh, along with the New Right’s silo, “created the myth of the Führer… above the Party, blindly followed,” christened by evangelist Pat Robertson’s “mandate of heaven.” [15] Both Goebbels and Limbaugh employed arguments that appealed “to emotions and instincts, not intellect.” [16] And like Goebbels, Limbaugh “valued reality only as a means to its distortion.” [17]

Run-of-the-mill propaganda.

But Limbaugh had an added X-factor shared with another historical figure. That man’s X-factor was hostility to rational thought fueling his society’s philosophy, art, literature, economics, and science, such as it was in 1100 A.D. Islam. An entire civilization of varied nations ignited by rational inquiry, while in Europe, as physicist Steven Weinberg writes, “Charlemagne and his lords were dabbling in the art of writing their names.” [18]

As Pakistani physicist and historian Pervez Hoodbhoy elaborates, from civilization’s 12th-century beacon emerged one central figure to bring it all down: Al-Ghazali (1058-1111). [19] Like Limbaugh, like the postmodernists, Al-Ghazali set out to wreck the very thing that built his civilization, replaced with unwavering obedience to dogma. Why? Because rational thought was then, as it is now, a danger to religious orthodoxy, be it mainstream or a political cult. Critical thinking inherited from Greece and expanded by the Arabs made a growing number of Muslims hesitant about their Scriptures. Like Westerners who analyze the Bible critically, inconsistencies appear, self-contradictions, rank immorality, they ask questions, they doubt. So too, Islam. For Al-Ghazali, reason was to be exterminated to save the Koran and Al-Ghazali’s definition of right thinking. Islamic extremists “proclaimed a holy war against Rationalism,” writes Hoodbhoy, “against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.” [20] And they won; one of history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. Admirers said Al-Ghazali “saved orthodoxy by depressing science.” [21]

Fast forward nine-hundred years to hear Rush Limbaugh broadcast that science and scientists are “One of the four corners of deceit!” [22] Done so over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science, from a nation that once put men on the moon.

Isn’t it ironic that before Limbaugh died, he turned to science to save his life? But there are some things even science can’t fix, liars first among them. In a nation of so many, it’s a valued skill.

After years of barking at my radio, I was surprised to find how much I missed Limbaugh the day he died. The day I heard all those replays, from his beginnings as a conservative spinner to his demise as another Alex Jones conspiracy-pimp. Limbaugh fought the Left with emotion. He did not defeat them with ideas, and the Right followed to become the empty vessel it is.

Note how disparate sources are identical in their hostility to reason. From fundamentalists—be they Christian, Muslim, or postmodern atheists—to political cults like Stalinists, Nazis, Maoists, or Trumpers. From the Middle Ages to modernity; from America’s New Left to its New Right. And they think they’re different.

Like Al-Ghazali, Limbaugh’s war on rational thought led the way for a post-truth army against science, morality, and the reason democracies depend on. There may be no man more responsible for America’s current decline than Rush Limbaugh, 30-years before Trump, paving the foundation. Will what Limbaugh set in motion fail as Goebbels failed or succeed like Al-Ghazali?



[1] After Newport, I stumbled across another provocative radio personality as one of Limbaugh’s predecessors, but she made the blog title and body too long: Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a Pentecostal evangelist and founder of the Foursqaure Church. McPherson used the new invention of radio to redirect what had been masterful stagecraft in 1920s American theater. She had a massive national following, was one of the most influential women of her time, and was corrupted by money, power, and fame, dying early of an apparently accidental overdose. Limbaugh’s popularity, his talents in the new arena of talk-radio that he created, and his ultimate corruption look something like McPherson’s. Limbaugh crumpled paper near the microphone for effect when disposing of other’s ideas. He whispered, he shouted, he preached fire-and-brimstone doctrine. He was also, once-upon-a-time, a Reagan supporter, championed fiscal responsibility, opposed Russia’s murderous dictators, and said character in leadership was paramount while Bill Clinton was having his parts polished in the chair Lincoln sat. But for a serial adulterer, draft dodger, and 40-year money launderer for the Russians in the name of Donald Trump, all that changed. Limbaugh lived just long enough to see what he created lose along with Trump, but the perverse distortions with which he “reeducated” his tens of millions of “Dittoheads” lives on in their hypocrisy, most notably their claim to be both American patriots and Christians.
[2] Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pg. 12-14. More fully, Ferry and Renaut state, “a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning was not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable.”
[3] While Ferry and Renaut emphasize “imperial colonialism and Nazism” pg. xxii-xv, others include WWI and the Great Depression. In addition to their rejection of reason, the postmodernists wanted to create a philosophy "which means nothing." pg. 5. Hmm...
[4] Examples are provided in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, Encounter Books, 2000. While not all of each department is dominated by postmodernists, for some like feminist theory (part of Women’s Studies) championed by UCLA’s Sandra Harding, there seems no interest in truth, only misandrist propaganda.
[5] Neither postmodernists science deniers, like UCLA’s feminist theorist Sandra Harding who drives a car and uses computers, nor the New Right’s science deniers like Limbaugh and the New Right’s liar’s silo have financial incentive to acknowledge the truth of science represented by its astounding success, it’s foundation in our national defense, its record-breaking Covid-19 vaccine, its building of the West, and their use of science every day.
[6] Ferry and Renaut, pg. 12-14.
[7] Alternative Facts, Wikipedia.
REBECCA MORIN and DAVID COHEN, Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, POLITICO, 08/19/2018.
[8] For anyone who doubts the authoritarian nature of political correctness there are countless examples, but one recent display destroyed the lives of innocent working people at Smith College: Michael Powell, Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College, New York Times, Feb. 24, 2021. Notice this negative assessment of an aspect of liberal political correctness comes from the “liberal” New York Times, something Limbaugh repeatedly asserted could never happen. An earlier example is chronicled by Alan Charles Kors & Harvey A. Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, Harper Perennial, 1999.
[9] The New Left, Britannica. Some of this had already been paved by early 1900s progressives, like J. Allen Smith’s The Spirit of American Government in which he protested the Founder’s form of representative republican government because he wanted a direct democracy like the Greeks had when they lamented the poisoning of Socrates thanks to that form of order. Also early was Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. However, none of these would have argued for expulsion of rational thought.
[10] Limbaugh was also not beyond finding the most fringe Left-wing stories online (or perhaps were not “Left” at all) and painting the Left with it as though it were a common feature.
[11] Of course, like 82% of “Republicans,” Limbaugh also claimed to be a Christian. Yet, long before Limbaugh lied for a living, Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” Ephesians 4:25.
[12] With age, death’s doorway, and his “Dittoheads” increased acceptance of lies, Limbaugh got weaker. After Trump’s January 6 jihadists stormed the Capitol, Limbaugh said on 1/18/21 that the forty Trump rallies before January 6 were all peaceful, yet the Democrats locked down D.C., and for what? Hmm… Because of January 6? Adding that the fence around the Capitol violated what he said is the Democrat’s opposition to walls, a nod to Trump’s border wall, “paid for by Mexico.” After Trump recommended injecting disinfectant into our veins to fight Covid and was excoriated for such abject stupidity, Limbaugh lambasted NYC Mayor Cuomo for having subway train cars disinfected as though the two were equivalent. Other examples of weakness include his complaint that the “drive-by media” will claim Biden inherited the Covid-19 crisis from Trump, not that it belongs to Biden himself. This was said after almost a year of Trump’s colossal ineptitude, erratic distortions, and 400,000 dead in the U.S. In his final weeks, Limbaugh saw the 200,000 flags ordered in rows at the Capitol Mall during the Biden inauguration, and saw in them a sign the U.S. had become China. That’s not merely weak, that’s asinine. More asinine than claiming the Left hid top stories he deemed threatening to them, when any and every Left and center media outlet in the country could he seen and heard covering these stories at the top of their broadcast. Limbaugh only got away with this because he knew his flock never tuned in to anything but he and the Right-wing silo.
[13] We all got to see Trump’s “Christians” parade a golden Donald in flip-flops as their Golden Calf at CPAC’s cult meeting and pep rally in Florida: Zack Beauchamp, This golden statue of Trump at CPAC is a perfect metaphor for the state of the GOP. Apparently CPAC attendees missed the part of the Bible about the Golden Calf., VOX, Feb 26, 2021.
Brett Williams, King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!, on Goodreads, January 4, 2021.
Brett Williams, Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised, on Goodreads, November 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2020.
Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[14] Hugh Trevor-Roper Ed., Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, AVON, 1979.
[15] Ibid. pg. pg. xix. And, Kim Bellware, Trump ‘in danger of losing the mandate of heaven’ over Syria decision, Pat Robertson warns, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019.
[16] Trevor-Roper. pg. xxiii.
[17] Ibid. pg. xxxix
[18] Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Penguin, 2016, pg. 104.
[19] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Zed, 1991. Hoodbhoy spells the name with an added “z:” Al-Ghazzali. In comparison to Limbaugh and the New Right’s hostility to universities, regardless of department or process, Hoodbhoy notes, “With time the attitudes against secular learning hardened. By the 12th century, the conservative anti-rationalists schools of thought had almost completely destroyed [rationalist] influence,” pg. 100.
[20] Ibid. pg. 99.
[21] Ibid. pg. 104.
[22] Rush Limbaugh Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013. Ironically, Rush also had a habit of quoting “scientific” evidence, which is whatever he designated as “real science,” while he was opposed to what he called “junk science.” His definition of junk science is revealed by an old joke: A modern artist is anybody who says they are, and modern art is anything they say it is. Ditto for Limbaugh, whatever served his creed. As scientifically illiterate as most of his followers, Limbaugh didn’t know science from a kumquat and was terrified of integers.

Until next time: May 3, 2021.