Call it, the Age of Rush or the Age of Limbaugh. Either way – from irrelevant academics, to absurd think tank fellows, to has-been writers in blogs and magazines, to anonymous factotums in what Rush calls the “drive by” media – vast intellectual and social ordinance will be brought to bear, like WWI artillery to lay down poison gas or a saturation barrage against the fact that we are living in the Age of Rush. He owns it.

And if they cannot wipe out this deserved recognition, they will soil it, and try to shame those who he has touched, informed and shared his life with. Let them soil themselves. We have the Elizabethan Age, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Age, the Information Age – and the Age of Limbaugh.

This sentinel of sanity has stood for all of us who have not gone insane. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, on NYC’s WABC, Rush’s Parodies came up out of the dark like a hooded lurker, but instead of a beatdown, suddenly offered you a steak and lobster dinner.  

Rush’s “General Dinkins Where are You?” parody sung to the tune of Car 54 Where Are You? reflected the collapse of local government as the city descended into chaos. While the twiddling media skipped a beat and lost their rhythm. Long before the gay LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ movement began its St. Vitus Dance, Rush put on Klaus Nomi with his unforgettable You Don’t Own Me.  A cry of individuality that soon gave lie to the legacy and horror of the crazed, late 70s and early 80s. A time of wanton license that spawned the Bathhouse scene, a crack epidemic, publicly funded S&M “art” and every form of human abuse, ultimately crushed by AIDS.

Paladin had lots of gay friends back in the day.  No one could tell them what to do. “Love the One You’re With” morphed into “Rump Anything that Breathed.” No rules, no remorse, no consequences. By 1988 when Rush began Broadcasting in NYC on a national program the first generation of sexual radicals were beginning to die truly horrible deaths. Now they’re all gone.

Yet what we saw in front of our noses and in the streets never seemed to be reflected in any news program or magazine. The simple warning, “don’t be promiscuous and don’t use intravenous drugs with multiple partners” became verboten. Something you didn’t say in public if you wanted to be included in polite society. A thoughtcrime before the Woke Millennials were even born.

Early on in Rush’s program callers called in saying, “I’ve always thought this way, but never heard anyone else say it!” Taking those callers at their word and with them their vast audience, Rush’s talk format on AM Radio expanded the marketplace of ideas, a thousand new programs, a thousand new hosts, countless magazines and authors and publishers. The Age of Limbaugh had arrived.

Sometime in the early 2000’s, GWB might have just been elected – Paladin was at a Thanksgiving dinner—the family and guests typical New Yorkers, that is to say as Liberal as they come. As Paladin brought stuffing or mashed potatoes around to the extended table, the talk turned to politics, when suddenly a dozen people all ejaculated the same two words, with a mixture of surprise, horror and revulsion – “Fox News!”  

Paladin was reminded of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate, missing only the murmurs of “B–B! B–B!”

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B! …B-B!’ — over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. (Sic) Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold (Sic) this sub-human chanting of ‘B-B! …B-B!’ always filled him with horror.

No, the Thanksgiving guests never started chanting, that would come later with Code Pink, and BushHitler and Pussy Hats and Antifa and Hands up don’t shoot.

Fox News started in 1996, and it took years for its influence to become strong enough to breach the walls of theses liberals’minds. EIB built that intellectual engine. Fox news sprung it on them. They never saw it coming. Rush, you’re bigger than the medal of Freedom.  

You ARE Free Speech.

While the rest of us wear Thoughtcrime as a badge of honor.

Featured photo is an edited compilation of Rush Limbaugh screenshot from the SOTU, 2/4/20, CNN video  and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Wikipedia,  CC BY-SA 3.0.

Paladin is an Entertainment/IP Warfare Rōnin and self-identifies as a Y-chromosome Victory Girl.