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> I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.

That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.

Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).

I think you mean 2021 by the way.

Good catch! I fixed it.

He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.

> No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.

How popular is universal healthcare in America?

According to the latest poll data I was able to find on Google (from 2024), about 2/3rds of Americans support universal healthcare[0]. At the very least, one can confidently say a majority of Americans per capita support it.

That said, the American political apparatus is designed such that the votes of rural conservatives (who tend to oppose it) count more than elsewhere, so that doesn't actually matter.

[0]https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...

Makes zero sense. There’s already a “liberal” and a “conservative” party. The liberal Democrats tend to lean more towards liberal standpoints. They haven’t become like rural conservatives simply because of the archaic political system favoring smaller states.

Every Democrat policy standpoint would have to filter through the rural conservative polling in order to be vetted.

But I don’t see that. Democratic policy positions can be quite liberal and urban coded. The obfuscation comes in on issues which hurt their donors. Then the idealized rural voter is moved from being a backwards hick to a precious Bipartisanship partner.

The Democrats moving towards a universal healthcare standpoint when 90% of Democrats and 65% of independents say “Yes, is the government's responsibility” would be a no-brainer for galvanizing their existing voters and gaining new ones if they cared about winning elections. dot dot dot

The Democrats have to appeal to the right to hold and maintain power, especially for Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than Donald Trump in 2016 - but lost because (among other reasons) Trump was more successful campaigning in rural states and appealing to those voters. Democrats have to be seen in church and profess faith in Christ, they need the support of police unions and the military, they have to have homestyle meals in small town diners and prove to the South they aren't too "Northern." Republicans don't need to do any of that, as the de facto party of "Christian values" their bona fides are presumed by default, and they can be as intransigent and radical as they like.

It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people. If you realize the system was designed to keep slaveholding states in the union by biasing rural votes (more likely to be white and conservative) over urban votes (more likely to be non-white and progressive) despite city-dwellers being the majority per capita, it makes perfect sense.

You didn’t respond to my point but that’s fine.

You bring up Hillary Clinton who neglected to campaign enough in crucial swing states. And the strategy for successfully campaigning in those swing states (based on what people tell me) seem to be to appeal more to Rust Belt issues, not The South. She’s also from the same milieu as Trump, but somehow he managed to dissociate himself from being a New England liberal and managed to spin his relationship to her as “lock her up”. Meanwhile Clinton was busy calling Trump voters a basket of deplorables, getting celebrity endorsements, and then when she lost taking a self-indulgent yoga vacation or whatever.

So which is it? Basket of deplorables or appealing to the oh-so-unfairly powerful rural/Republican base? It’s fine to take some basket-of-deplorables stance but it seems to not harmonize with your premise.

Who was Clinton supposed to appeal to again? Not rural voters apparently, and not working class people. Certainly not on the issue of universal healthcare. And she spent more effort whining about leftists not supporting her than she did trying to appeal to them.

Maybe I would take your theory seriously if the Democrats were at all competent at counter-messaging. But the Republicans managed to assert that K. Harris and the rest were all-in on identity politics last election. Then Harris and the rest said no that’s not us and probably never even brought it up, but the imprint that they did still managed to linger. So what’s the lesson? That Americans can’t have <insert popular thing> because the Democrats are incapable of setting any kind of narrative themselves and instead have to merely react to what the Republicans say? It seems that way.

Well. A modified theory is that they have plenty of counter-messaging against the left. There are also plenty of things they are willing to “sacrifice” in order to have “bipartisanship” with the Right on—namely things that the Left want. Then things become structurally insormountable because of Founding Fathers etc. Funnily enough this defeatism is not followed up by courting the supposedly precious rural voters. It’s just to sigh and conclude that half the country (or half the voting population) are chronically racist. Oh well I guess a fascist dictatorship is inevitable, and [I would rather have that than compromise with leftists] | [there is nothing that any liberal or non-racist can do about it].

> It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people.

I don’t assume that America, the Democrats, or you intend that.

> I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide

I heard he celebrated AIDS deaths on air, which is disgusting behavior

Yes he had a recurring segment where he read obituaries of gay men who’d died of AIDS in a mock-sappy voice set to disco music.

I don't understand how anyone can listen to that and come out with clear conscience. "Yes, this is someone I want to listen to."

Oh, I can explain it pretty easily.

I listened to rush a fair bit. It started because he was my father's favorite broadcaster when I was a child and it continued on into my early 20s.

One thing that rush did in an excellent way was making you feel like you were smart, special, and inherently in the right by listening to him and supporting him. It was much like listening to a preacher if you have any sort of religious upbringing (which I did).

And while rush did primarily work at demonizing people, he often demonized "the right people". Primarily democrats. He also knew his audience well and did a great job of hyping the "us v them" notions. He knew a lot of his audience was rural, for example, so he'd spend a good amount of time talking about how much more wise country folk and truck drivers were vs people that live and work in the cities. He had an answer for why things were bad, it's the unions, feminists, democrats, muslims, big government, clinton, obama, socialists, communists, etc. He could always give a reason why something was bad and would expressly tell his audience "You don't need to look into this, because listening to me will make you smarter than any college professor". He trained his audience to explicitly trust him.

And, frankly, he could be both funny and entertaining to listen to. He'd take in calls and had a good delay that allowed him to only air the dumbest liberals on the planet. He was further not afraid of simply hanging up on them and calling them morons if they ever started to get the upper hand in a conversation.

It also helped that in terms of broadcasting, he was infinitely accessible. I, in rural idaho, had really easy access to him because radio stations carried him. AFAIK, the most left wing broadcast in idaho in my youth was NPR. Which, today I find laughable that I thought of it as "leftist".

It’s going too far to say Rush advocated genocide, but he absolutely preached that all who opposed him were not just wrong but evil, that ends justify means, that people with different views are subhuman.

It’s the age-old populist / proto-fascist playbook. He didn’t attempt to convince on the merits, but on the argument that those who disagree aren’t real people.

How about

https://www.etsy.com/listing/500290818/we-believe-yard-sign-...

? Complex issues get distilled into 3 or 4 word slogans with the total effect of suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her, that there's one exact right way to think about every issue, people who disagree are evil, deluded, subhuman, affected by perverse psychology, etc. You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.

I don't have the numbers to prove it but my belief is that kind of thinking is basically right wing and that putting one of those yard signs in your yard shifts the vote +0.05 R or something just as 15 minutes listening to Rush does. Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people everything the want all the time is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.

Pre-2016, I might have agreed with you. We shouldn't be so strident. We should be more accepting. Today, yeah, fuck that. You take your +0.05 R and you reconsider your position. I'm fine with mine.

It sounds like you think that any statement of values expresses superiority. Is that correct?

Also, this is something you made up, not something anybody on the left has expressed, and especially not represented by that sign: “Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people what they want is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.”

> not something anybody on the left has expressed

I very much agree with your larger point, but let's be real: Some do. There is a very small and vocal minority fascist-ish left, but this sign is in no way representative of it.

Houle said the left. He didn’t say small and very vocal minority.

Source: let’s be real.

My favorite source

> You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.

I think if this was just an isolated position or opinion it'd be easier to have some charity and understanding. That doesn't seem to be the case.

A good example of this is the international chess federation banning trans women from women's competition. [1] What advantage does higher testosterone offer for someone playing chess? That's where these concerns seem to be more "I just don't want to accommodate trans women" and less "I'm concerned about an unfair advantage".

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194593562/chess-transgender-...

Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.

How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.

They are also penalizing trans men. How is that justified?

Women's chess is a protected category. On that basis, FIDE are stating that women who don't want to be women can opt out of that category if they so wish, but men who say they are women cannot opt into it.

They are talking about someone born with a vagina that identified as a man (a trans man) being banned from men's competitions.

Are you suggesting that men's competitions are protected?

I don't think that is correct. What FIDE is doing is taking away titles earned by people who are now trans men that they earned when they played as women.

In international chess there generally aren't any men's competitions. There are competitions that are restricted to women and competitions that have no sex or gender restriction.

How about 2 5-word signs?

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...

In "reality", the tradeoffs aren't so stark.. (e.g. procrastination & distractions whilst on the path of "wisdom" are worth ~50 miles)

(Got that meme from other upforum sophists)

(Plus a sizable cohort of the lawnowners have an unshakeable faith in the dominance of their sense of humor over "reality" )

The political situation in the Americas, is imho, "just" the Monroe Doctrine reaping it's mimetic oats: US WASPs making their ancestral values the fount of honor in W Hemi => LatAm its political arrangements viable in the US via guerilla psyops (pop culture, Catholicism, etc etc).

Caricature: Bezos vs Thiel (note the swap of cultural affiliations)

Edit: just waking up.

> suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her

Da fuq? No, it's a statement of beliefs (which I share). None of it is meant to belittle those that disagree, it's simply stating a belief system.

As opposed to calling Democrats DemonRats and implying that they're all evil and are destroying America?

"No human is illegal" are four well-chosen words that would be a meaningless truism except in opposition to the construct of "illegal alien."

If you thought "Science is Real" you might read something like

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/03/how-migration-...

and understand that the discourse of politically oriented folks about immigration is not at all evidence based. Tacking one cause to another cause tends to work terribly for progressive causes

The best critique of "Science is Real" is the Habermas classic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)

which points out a failure mode of our civilization in terms of reconciling expert knowledge, popular participation, and reality which remains unanswered.

I see what you're saying but the issues matter, as well as the delivery.

None of the slogans in that sign should be remotely controversial. Where exactly is the "complex issue"? "Water is life"? "Science is real"? This sign is statement that some issues warrant absolutism - a line in the sand regarding fundamental values. Such a line is an unavoidable feature of any moral framework. The specific values in question are what count.

The real moral fight is "you should care about others" vs "fuck you I got mine", and this is what distinguishes left from right, rather than propensity to nuance.

I upvoted you because I think your comment, while wrong, contributes to the discussion.