One reason the Left hates Rush so much is that he was so effective at skewering their pretensions to moral and intellectual superiority. He made it okay to laugh at them, to judge the failure of their policies without ritually celebrating their alleged good intentions.
Rush did to the Left what they had done to the culture they destroyed in the 60s and 70s. He used humor to destroy their pieties and expose their hypocrisies. More than anyone in the post-Cold War era, he DISRESPECTED them, and he had a blast while doing it.
The Left strongly believes in forcing its subjects to show respect and piety. Your parents might have taught you respect must be earned, but the Left believes the opposite. If you force people to act like they respect you, it doesn't matter if they really do in their hearts.
The Left destroyed the conservative culture of postwar America by relentlessly mocking and disrespecting it, treating its traditions and beliefs like hypocritical garbage that no thinking person REALLY believed in. They mocked the idea that anything was worth conserving.
As we see daily - hourly - these days, the Left is VERY sensitive to anyone using their own tactics against the establishment culture THEY created. And nobody was better at it than Rush Limbaugh. His humor is what they loathed and feared. It's how he converted so many liberals.
The best humor, the sharpest wit, makes people think. "Why am I laughing so hard at this?" Laughter makes you see the world from a different angle, at least for a moment. Truly confident people don't flinch at humor, because they know they can handle being laughed at.
The Left absolutely CANNOT handle being laughed it. It demands reverence for its political leaders and their supposedly noble intentions. Its ideas are gospel and must be viewed from no angle but unquestioning obedience. They demand a monopoly on satire and irreverence.
Rush made fun of people and institutions that had literally never been mocked before. It simply wasn't DONE. Even when someone in media gingerly noted left-wing policies didn't work out as planned, they always paid homage to their soaring good intentions and brilliance.
Rush was an early high-profile target of cancel culture, as we've come to know it today. Those who tried to silence him were pioneers of the tactics that have become common, including pressure campaigns to scare off advertisers. He was among the first targets of "deplatforming."
Every time they tried to deplatform him, every time they really went berserk, it was because he made fun of a lefty plastic saint. He told a joke about some person or group who wasn't supposed to be mocked, perhaps most famously the utterly ridiculous Sandra Fluke.
The rule is that conservatives can be mocked and impugned in the most vicious terms, given absolutely zero credit for good intentions, zero respect for even proven track records of accomplishment, but lefties must be ritually worshiped for their pure and noble intentions.
Rush was funny and perceptive. You aren't supposed to use incisive humor against the moral colossi of the Left. You aren't supposed to doubt they are good and selfless and only want what's best for children, animals, the homeless, minorities, the Earth, etc.
"Selflessness" is really the key. Leftists are collectivists - totalitarians, authoritarians, communists, fascists - every form of their ideology presumes absolute control by Good and Wise Leaders who can redistribute wealth and bring cosmic justice to our wretched nation.
Rush showed us how ridiculous the Left's pretentions to selflessness, wisdom, and pure devotion to the collective good really are. His humor exposed their corruption. You're not supposed to doubt their sincerity the way he did, and you're not supposed to have fun doing it. /end
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