With Trump’s attempt to steal the November election disintegrating before his eyes, Rush Limbaugh has taken the first step in guaranteeing that Trumpism will live in infamy by giving his unofficial endorsement of Josh Hawley for President in 2024.
Back in July, I wrote an article about how Trumpism would live on long after the November 2020 election regardless of the outcome. So, it isn’t all that surprising to learn that talking heads representing the same faux conservative media responsible for creating the no-win binary election between Trump and Biden in the first place are already positioning themselves for 2024 in a vain attempt to remain relevant within the dying Republican Party.
Over the past four years, we’ve watched as the Rush Limbaughs of the world destroyed conservatism while fighting to save Trump and the Republican Party because #notDemocrat, and we were repeatedly told how being #neverTrump and #neverGOP was a waste of time because some day Trump will be gone, and the GOP will be forced to get its act together. They were wrong on both counts.
To begin with, I’ve never believed that Trump was responsible for the GOP’s demise. Republicans have been self-destructing under the “leadership” of Mitch McConnell for a long time; Trump is just the end result of that destruction. After years of lies and betrayals of conservative values, the GOP was primed and ready for Trump to rebrand the party in his image.
So, to say the Republican Party will change after Trump is gone is to ignore how it was responsible for him becoming President in the first place.
Next, it’s simply a fact that Trump and the GOP have adopted the far-left’s socialist ideology and created a new conservative agenda commonly referred to as the Nationalist agenda. This rebranded conservatism has become the identity of the Republican Party and will remain so long after Trump is gone; it’s openly embraced by Sen. Josh Hawley.
Hawley is a big-government nationalist who has adopted much of the anti-capitalist agenda of socialist Democrats. A few recent examples include:
- April 2019 – Hawley joined GOP Sen. Rick Scott on a bill imposing price controls on prescription drugs. The bill was so socialist in application that it has been described as legislation that “could have been written by Bernie Sanders.”
- July 2019 – Hawley gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference where he attacked the upper-class as too “powerful,” and he called for “a new consensus” to address the “discontent of our time.”
- February 2020 – Hawley introduced an FTC overhaul bill I referred to as a socialist’s dream. His tyrannical proposal would strip the agency of its independence and relocate it to the Department of Justice. The legislation also gives the Attorney General “all authority” to go after so-called “Big Tech.”
- June 2020 – Hawley joined fellow Republican Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Braun, and Tom Cotton to introduce the Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act. This so-called “reform” to the Communications Decency Act targets social media platforms identified by Trump and the GOP as violators of the CDA for “censoring” conservative voices. In reality, it destroys the First Amendment by giving the White House and the Attorney General’s office new power to control internet content and target political enemies.
Still, Sen. Josh Hawley has become a darling within the Republican Party and is considered Presidential material by many. And in a story posted by the Trump propaganda machine known as Breitbart.com, we read a transcript from the Rush Limbaugh radio show where El Rushbo praises Hawley following the recent Big Tech hearings, and how Hawley’s performance in those hearings earned him Limbaugh’s unofficial endorsement:
I tell you, our new senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley? This guy is the real deal. I remember Josh Hawley. I introduced President Trump at the last rally of the 2018 midterms. It was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, my hometown. Josh Hawley was there since it was in Missouri, and he got some speaking time at it. He’s got hell of a voice. Those of us in the voice business, we say, “He’s got a really, really great set of pipes.”
But Josh Hawley, he is all over these tech guys. And there is testimony going on today, Zuckerberg and what’s his name, the Rasputin-looking guy, Jack Dorsey from Twitter. And they’re all up there testifying. And it’s all such a joke. Kathryn and I were watching some congressional testimony, Senate testimony yesterday, or maybe we were watching some senators who were getting ready for this today.
They were talking about how “We’re not gonna let these guys get away with this! We’re not gonna (grumbling).” And I said, “You know, they say this before the hearing, and at the hearing, nothing happens. And they tell us that they’re gonna get to the bottom what happened to Russia probe, and they never get to the bottom of it.” They just pontificate. They just throw us a bunch of crumbs.
But when it comes down to time for the pedal to hit the metal, the rubber to hit the road, nothing ever happens, nothing ever changes. But it might be different with Josh Hawley someday because he really had Zuckerberg kind of sputtering and fuming in there today. Under oath, under questioning by Josh Hawley of Missouri. Zuckerberg admits that Facebook does have “tools” to track its users across the internet, across platforms, across accounts without user knowledge. (emphasis mine)
Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the next logical step will be for Nationalists like Sen. Josh Hawley to run on a Trump 2.0 platform where Republicans promote all of Trump’s socialist nationalism without the baggage that comes from being Trump — thus allowing the Party that destroyed conservatism to continue embracing the socialist agenda of the far left.
Trump and Trumpism will be with us long after he’s out of office, but if Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the faux conservative media have their way, it will be back in the White House in 2024.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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