In the 1980s and 1990s, conservative radio was dominated by Rush Limbaugh, and the AIDS epidemic was in full swing. So of course, the subject came up on the air quite often. So how did Rush deal with the epidemic? How did he treat the dead and dying, their families, and their loved ones?
He mocked them.
In a recurring segment he called the “AIDS Update” he would mock the dead and dying by naming them on air and doing vile “tributes” to them that were meant to cause as much pain as possible for his own enjoyment. He often set these segments to music, choosing songs with titles like “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” or “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” to further harass and bully specifically the gay men that made up a majority of AIDS victims at the time.
While there is no way to calculate the amount of violence caused by Limbaugh’s daily hate speech marathons, it is certainly fair to say that a great deal of violence, specifically violence towards the LBGTQ community, was generated by Rush Limbaugh and his crusade against difference.
When Rush Limbaugh died in February of 2021, he was celebrated up and down the right side of America’s political spectrum. He was more than a celebrity. He was an icon, an example of the righteousness of American Conservative values. And all those years of spewing the worst forms of hatred to the most vulnerable of Americans – the hate that is the very backbone of modern American Conservatism – that part somehow got left out of the eulogies and tributes.
And on the left, the story was reported out with accuracy but little if any actual criticism. No one bothered to mention the AIDS Update, nor any of the other times Rush spewed unspeakable hate onto the airwaves. In short, half the media celebrated his hate, and the other half refused to even call it hate, much less stand up to it. Mainstream media once again did the only thing it is good for. It failed us.
Now we’re doing it again. Another paragon of Conservative thought has died a predictable death, and we are now in the business of sanitizing his hate because that is what American media does. And while I understand our collective desire to focus on the recently dead’s good works instead of his faults, I do not agree with it. As I see it, the best tribute is fairness, and the simple truth behind the legacy of Charlie Kirk is that while he may have lived a different life in private, his public life was disgusting. He taught hate wherever he went, and the fact that his hate was popular and drew crowds does not make it righteous in any way, just as his public declarations of his Christianity do nothing to counter the simple fact that Charlie Kirk vigorously and vocally hated most of the people Jesus loved.
I do not condone the violence that killed Charlie Kirk. I would not wish what happened to him and his family on anyone for any reason, but I am also human enough to understand that hate like he preached always leads to violence, which is something Kirk certainly knew, even if he expected that violence to land on someone else, as it typically does. But hate is a rabid dog, and once it’s off the leash, as it clearly is in America, no one can say with any accuracy who will get bit, and in what order. Sometimes, the dog bites the man with the leash. That’s just the way it goes.
I thought long and hard about this piece and about whether or not it would do any good to say the things I have said in it. Given how far I have deviated from everything I’ve read from my counterparts in the mainstream media, I worried a bit about how this unflattering tribute might be received. I wondered if I treated him fairly, as the title of this piece promises. And then I did what Conservatives rarely do – I put myself in another person’s shoes and I asked how Charlie Kirk might talk about me if I were the victim.
After a few minutes of that, publishing this piece became easy, even necessary.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Finally, an honest take on todays media, right and left. Thank you Brett.
Excellent commentary Brett!