{"id":12189,"date":"2020-02-13T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T18:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=12189"},"modified":"2020-02-12T15:03:55","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T23:03:55","slug":"limbaugh-a-genius-at-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/limbaugh-a-genius-at-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Genius&nbsp;is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not \u2014 and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, a genre in which he not merely excelled but that he also singlehandedly reinvented as something entirely different \u2014 and entirely more powerful and instrumental in American life \u2014 from what was imaginable pre-Limbaugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even stranger still, his ascendance coincided with the presumed nadir of radio itself. It was supposedly a has-been, one-dimensional medium, long overshadowed by television. Even in the late 1980s, radio was about to be sentenced as obsolete in the ascendant cyber age of what would become Internet blogs, podcasts, streaming, and smartphone television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stranger still, Limbaugh has prospered through two generations and picked up millions of listeners who were not born when he first went national and who had no idea of why or how he had become a national presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times. While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not. He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power. It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about \u201cglobal warming\u201d would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2020\/02\/rush-limbaugh-radio-genius-changed-political-landscape\/\">Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Genius&nbsp;is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not \u2014 and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else. By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-3aB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12899,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/losing-an-american-genius\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":0},"title":"Losing An American Genius","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 28, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it\u2014from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays\u2014live from noon to three\u2014the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week.\u00a0 Last week\u201432 years, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2923,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/more-on-rush\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":1},"title":"More on Rush","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner All these highbrow conservative attacks on Limbaugh keep missing the point. 1) There is a certain sort of genius there that can do 15 hours of talk per week, ad hoc, and hold an audience of 20 million plus for over 20 years. There\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;March 2009&quot;","block_context":{"text":"March 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/march-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2906,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-vs-limbaugh\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":2},"title":"From vs. Limbaugh","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In the end, the controversy boils down to an argument of the moment versus one of the ages. Frum believes that conservatives have to change their message to appeal to new constituencies without which the Republican party will lose future elections. Limbaugh argues\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;March 2009&quot;","block_context":{"text":"March 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/march-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12889,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/remembering-rush-limbaugh-with-comments-from-dr-victor-davis-hanson-heard-exclusively-on-the-trevor-carey-show\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":3},"title":"Remembering Rush Limbaugh With Comments From Dr. Victor Davis Hanson Heard Exclusively on The Trevor Carey Show","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 21, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Listen to \"Remembering Rush Limbaugh With Comments From Dr. Victor Davis Hanson Heard Exclusively on The Trevor Carey Show\" on Spreaker.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":928,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-real-point-of-the-lefts-uproar-over-limbaugh\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":4},"title":"The Real Point of the Left&#8217;s Uproar over Limbaugh","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Frontpage Magazine Rush Limbaugh has got the progressives pitching a fit over some remarks on his radio show about a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke. Fluke had made the preposterous claim, while addressing House Democrats over President Obama\u2019s rule forcing Catholic institutions to pay\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Women&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Women","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/women\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11765,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-04-04-2019\/","url_meta":{"origin":12189,"position":5},"title":"Angry Reader 04-04-2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: Sir: I thought you were supposed to be an intellectual. Hoover Institution and all that. Then you go off on an illegal immigrant killing an American. That's Rush Limbaugh turf. (the 2 semester and out fellow) I guess you're just another partisan propagandist after all. Sorry.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Angry Reader&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12189"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12192,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12189\/revisions\/12192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}