C (13:09)

She just died.

A (13:11)

Wow.

C (13:14)

I didn't know that. I just. You're telling me now for the first time she led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman. Whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life, actually. Sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that. Thank you very much.

A (13:39)

And yes, that was Elton John playing in the background. Almost just like a movie scene. Elton John is playing and Donald Trump comes up and reacts. Truth, Bader Ginsburg. That is different than how many liberals are reacting verified people on Twitter. Shannon Watts says Rush Limbaugh helped create today's polarized America by normalizing racism, bigotry, misogyny and mockery. He was a demagogue who got rich off of hate speech, division, lies and toxicity. That is his legacy. This woman is a fool. Another person on Twitter once I learned my aunt listened to Rush Limbaugh, I learned to never speak to that aunt again. This person is from crooked media. He sounds like a very tolerant person. Daniel Summers, who writes for the Daily Beast and a pediatrician, had some very awful words. 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. No evidence at all whatsoever and no context, any of the comments that they're trying to pull out. 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, 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. So the reaction is to be expected, and it's just beyond disappointing. And this is one of the things that now they're going to say. They're going to say, Rush Limbaugh created the division that we have now in America. It's a bunch of nonsense. The division that we have in America, first of all, can't be placed on any singular person. 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. It's a political movement that calls the rest of the country deplorable, reprehensible. Russia started to give a voice to the people that were already there. He activated sentiments that were, prior to his coming on the scene, completely and totally silenced. 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 Cure A thon, 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. That's the way that they are capturing a man who lived a full American life. He had plenty of controversies. He had plenty of personal battles. He had overcome. He lost his hearing, for goodness sake. Can you imagine hosting a radio program and not being able to hear? You know that Rush Limbaugh, when he had callers, he had a transcription service, and that's how he knew what the callers were saying. We're all looking for ways to save money, right? Especially now. So let me ask you this. How would you like to keep an extra $961 in your pocket every single year? That's how much Gabby G A B I customers save per year, on average, on car or home insurance. That's why when I was shopping for insurance, I use Gabby. This is the time of year we go shopping for insurance. We. Well, Gabby takes the pain out of shopping for insurance by giving you an apples to apples comparison of your current coverage with 40 of the top insurance providers like Progressive Nationwide and Travelers. 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. That's what I did. Gabby is so easy and fast to use. I know lots of people that have used it and I could tell you that logging in with your current insurance provider and showing how many quotes there are, I'm telling you the dollar amount that Gabby will save you is significant. So Gabby customers save $961 per year on average. I bet that'd be really nice to have in your pocket every year. If they can't find you the savings like they did for so many people that I know, they'll let you know so you can relax knowing that you have the best rate out there and they'll never sell your information. So no annoying spam or robocalls. You're probably overpaying on car and home insurance. See how much Gabby can save you. It's totally free to check and there's no obligation. You go to gabby.com/charlie. That's G A B I.com/charlie. Gabby.com/charlie. Bet Midler Rush Limbaugh has gone to his reward bet. It's hot the Vitriol Rolling Stone Rush Limbaugh that has did his best to ruin America. Let's get to some of the tape here. Let's cut 53. Joy Reid, who has just become impossible to watch. She's a very angry person. She never used to be that way. She actually used to be somewhat of a fair liberal and she's become very angry in recent years. Let's go to cut 53.

B (19:20)

But Operation Chaos had contributed to the polarization of American politics and more importantly, the idea of injecting chaos and sexism, manipulation, racism and dirty tricks directly into the the artery of the Republican Party, bloodying people up rather than faking compassionate conservatism and trying to get crossover votes that ultimately would become the defining feature of Republican politics. Rush ultimately got his way.

A (19:48)

So hold on a second. Operation Chaos didn't work. It was hilarious. And Democrats do it all the time. So Operation Chaos is when rush Limbaugh 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 gonna be the nominee. I don't understand how that is Controversial Democrats do this all the time. 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. In this case, Rush believed that Clinton was much more likely to lose than Barack Obama. So I don't understand how that possibly sowed the seed to division in this country. She doesn't understand what Operation Chaos is. She's probably confusing it with another Operation Chaos, which was a CIA operation. That's a completely different topic. She just has no idea what she's talking about. And this is a multi month operation that happened and Rush was faulted for interfering in elections. Well, they have open primaries, so you can do whatever you want. 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. Joy Reid continued by saying that he got away with sexism, racism and manipulation with no evidence whatsoever. Cut 54. I think this is Charlie Sykes. He's a radio talk show host from Wisconsin. I used to really respect his commentary. I think he's a pretty intelligent person. 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. Everything is just negative to him. I just don't like negativity in my life. I don't like negativity in the commentary. It's one of the reasons I love Rush. He was, he was a happy warrior. He was full of joy. He was always looking at the positive. He was looking at how we can play offense, how we can build, how we can do new things. Charlie Sykes is the opposite. People that focus on tearing down and negativity frustrate me more than anything else. Cut 54. Who's an allegedly conservative? Charlie Sykes on MSNBC. Cut 54.

D (22:18)

He was an entertainer. He was not a deep thinker, he was not a thought leader. But he shaped so much of the way the right wing transformed itself over the last few years. His legacy is a conservative movement that is in fact more dishonest, more open to dishonesty, crueler, dumber than it was before. Role model in the way that you could twist truth, the way that you could use insults and ad hominem attacks instead of actually dealing with ideas. Because you know, the bottom line dirty secret about Rush Limbaugh is he was utterly uninterested in ideas. 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.

A (23:03)

Not interested in ideas. So just look at the inherent contradiction of what Charlie Sykes said. 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. So in 45 seconds he says he was not a thought leader, but he also shaped the thinking of the entire conservative movement. He said that in 45 second segment. Charlie Sykes contradicted his own argument. You know, he wasn't much of a deep thinker. He wasn't a thought leader and, 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. So it's either he was incredibly influential or he wasn't influential. It's either he shaped the thinking or he didn't shape the thinking. 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. I don't know if Charlie Sykes ever met Rush Limbaugh. I, I spent extensive time with Rush and he was a deep thinker. 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 Russia 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. You could tell by how quickly Rush responded and how focused he was. This was a deep thinker. 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. And Charlie Sykes probably hadn't listened to a Rush Limbaugh program in over a decade. All he knew was the short sound bites of, of what he was told to think. Not to mention the books that Rush Limbaugh published for children were very thoughtful about American history. They were really well done. 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. It's the opposite. I believe Rush Limbaugh made the conservative movement wiser and more likely to pursue deeper ideas and thinking. He kept people engaged. He kept them alert. 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 dramatically to the broader audience. I'm all for intellectual conservatism. The problem is the people that call themselves intellectual conservatives aren't that intellectual at all. They know a lot of the base of philosophy. They've read plenty of books. So have a lot of other people, myself included. 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. They. That's a bunch of balderdash. Cut 55, a CBS report. 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 Russia. There's a lot of happening in the country. Again, this guy created the medium. He was the Michelangelo of talk radio. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of modern American political thinking. He invented it, he perfected it, he mastered it. And there's a lot of lessons to learn from it. 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. I will homeschool them. However, they'll be taught one day that Rush Limbaugh was a Joe McCarthy style figure. He was a shock jock journalist who divided America and anyone who knew him or followed him was a terrible person. They're trying to rewrite the history, own the history, so they can attack half the country that he influenced. That's why it's so important we get the legacy straight now. It's more than just honoring an honorable man, which is a moral thing to do. It's about the political consequences of what they're trying to tell us because of this moment. Let's play cut 55, a CBS News report.

E (27:43)

But everything Rush Limbaugh did engendered controversy, maybe nothing more than getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address last year, destroying the very culture. One of the loudest, most provocative voices on the national scene in the last three plus decades is now silenced.

A (28:03)

What a, what a cruel and dark way to word it. He's now silenced. Well, yeah, he's dead. I mean, I guess he's silenced. I mean, instead you could say he's passed away. I mean, how would they frame the passing of Rachel Maddow or people like that who's the guy that passed away two weeks ago, the guy that founded Hustler magazine. Look at the name. He was Larry Flint. Is that right? Okay, Larry Flint. I don't know much about this guy. All I know is that he was someone that definitely pushed the boundaries of what was decent for publication. He was eulogized by the activist media. This is a guy that, in the most vanilla way I can describe it, normalized widespread dissemination and publishing of pornography. And that's a fair way to say it. The activist media treated him as a free speech warrior and champion who pushed the boundaries of the First Amendment, who front was a blazing pioneer for what was previously the old conservative orthodoxy. 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. So God bless him for that. They call him as someone who basked in controversy, he engendered controversy, the loudest, most provocative voices yet. The guy that normalized widespread consumption of pornography in our country was. Was a First Amendment champion. That's the way they wrote the articles two weeks ago when this guy that I just. I never heard of him. All I knew that he sued Jerry Falwell and won because of some awful thing that he wrote. It was before my time. I just read a little about him last week. Who did more good for America? The Hustler magazine guy or Rush Limbaugh? It's not even close. So why is the activist media trust treating Rush Limbaugh like he was Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist from the National Socialist Workers party in the 1930s and 40s? It's because the people who listened to Rush, the ideas he represented, his audience is who the liberals hated. And that's who Rush loved the most. You. He loved his audience. He loved meeting his audience. He loved learning from his audience. And we know this from how the Democrats and the media have been treating all the news stories the last couple months. It's you. Thereafter, it's just Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump who are in the way. Look, a lot of you guys have had Mike Lindell's back. I know a lot of you guys want to continue to have his back. And the amazing company that you guys are supporting is my pillow. The inventor and CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, is fighting very, very hard. And a lot of you guys say, I want to reward courage. If you go to mypillow.com and use the promo code Kirk. You guys can basically get this amazing pillow that they sent me. You guys can get Giza Dream seats, you guys can get toppers, robes, you name it. 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. Remember, all Mypillow products come with a 60 day money back guarantee and a 10 year warranty. And you can get the Giza Dream seats. You can get the whole thing. Go to MyPillow.com promo code Kirk. MyPillow.com, promo code Kirk. We have big shoes to fill. Everyone does. When a legend like Rush passes on, it's so important to take a pause. I was thinking about what's. Who was the last person in American conservative grassroots that was even close to Rush? Some would say William F. Buckley. That's probably right. Milton Friedman. But no one came even close to Rush, not even to the audience. The influence, the capacity for mobilization, the clarity of thought. That's not to say that Milton Friedman was not a clear thinker. But in the modern era, no one's even close. Ronald Reagan would probably be the closest. It would be Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan who were the two most influential American conservatives post World War II then Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman. The Democrats and the left. What's a better term is just the left. 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. And so what better way than to misrepresent who they were and what they were communicating? Rush was a counter puncher. The media knew this. The media actually ignored Rush at times because they knew that the more air they gave him, the bigger he would become. Massive cancellation campaigns came at Rush before the term cancel culture was even thought of. And I've been getting a lot of emails from people and they say, charlie, how can we best remember Rush Limbaugh? How can we best memorialize his life? And I think the answer to that is probably to pursue meaningful action for the conservative movement. Do what Rush did. You might say, well, I can't host the national radio show. No, no, no, no. What Rush did is he did one thing every day that was meaningful to help improve the country. One of the things I admire is his stamina. Doing this for 30 years, barely ever taking a day off. I want you to think about that 30 years, every day. Is that what you're willing to do? Because it needs to be where you say, every day I'm going to make a sizable, significant and impactful decision to impact the country that I live in. Might be running for school board, might be influencing a neighbor. It might be correcting someone when they say something that is politically foolish. Russia's stamina was incredible. He could have retired and done it one day a week and done some live appearances and golfed the last decade, but he was in the chair right up to the end. It's where he wanted to be. He loved the space of being able to communicate these ideas, communicate American patriotism to an audience that was being propagandized to. To believe the exact opposite. What would the conservative movement look like without Rush? What would the country look like without Rush? I know people that even disagreed with him, but they were moved more in the conservative direction because of Rush Limbaugh. Because even if you didn't like him, there was a energy, there was a charisma, there was a wit, there was a magic to the way he went about his program every single day. So now he is gone. And that leaves a call to action to all of us. And that's why what we're doing at Turning Point USA is so important. We were honored to host Rush twice at Turning Point usa. 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. And he was an optimist. He believed our best days were ahead and the most promising things were to come. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com if you want to get involved with Turningpoint USA, go to tpusa.com thanks so much for listening. God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.