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On The Reidout, Joy Reid spoke with Dana Milbanks and Charlie Sykes about Rush Limbaugh's legacy. Everyone agreed that Limbaugh had a great deal of influence in shaping today's Republican Party and paving the way for Trump to become president*. This included Limbaugh normalizing racism, misogyny and other bigotries for conservatives. The part that made me spit coffee on my monitor was when Sykes came out with this:
Absolutely. There's no question about it. You can't overstate Rush Limbaugh's role in basically building up the entertainment wing of the GOP to be absolutely dominant. So it's a little bit painful, talking about it the day on the that he dies, because I've been working on a piece in which i argue that right now we are all living in the world of Rush Limbaugh made in his own image. When you think about what he did. and the influence that he had. He was an entertainer. he was not a deep thinker. He was not a thought leader. but he shaped so much of the way the right wing transformed itself, over the last few years. He popularized what -- you know, he popularized conservative ideas, but he also played a very central role in the derangement of it.