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      Afghans dread the ‘danger hours’ as fragile gains of 20 years slip away

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      Ghazaal Habibyar’s trembling hand hovered over her mobile phone, unable to type the numbers. “I was afraid to hear bad news,” she recalls of that morning in Kabul when she heard there’d been an explosion close to her young son’s school.
      “Why should we have to choose between educating or protecting our children?” asks the 38-year-old mother of two – a former Afghan deputy minister of mines and petroleum. That day, her six-year-old son was sitting safely in class.
      This is how the day begins now in Kabul – the time of day in a time of war that is most worrying of all. Afghans call them “the danger hours”.
      “There’ve been blasts before me, and blasts behind me,” says 22-year-olduniversity student Sadeq Alakozai. “Every day we wonder whose turn it will be.”
      One morning, a magnetic “sticky” bomb slapped on a minibus took the life of a popular TV presenter at the same time Alakozai and his friends were driving to work on the same street. Another morning, a district security chief was assassinated in a blast so strong it flipped the police car upside down at a busy roundabout just before they reached the same corner.
      Afghanistan – map
      From 7.30am to 9.30am, when the diesel fume-soaked streets of the capital are choked with traffic as government employees go to work, is the time to avoid, if you can. Every day someone somewhere in Afghanistan is picked off: journalists and judges; civil servants and scholars; activists and academics.
      Many of the victims came of age in the two decades since the Taliban were toppled from power in the US-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks; their lives are being cut short as the last of the US-led Nato forces deliberate over a departure date and the Taliban boast of victory.
      The Taliban’s path back to power could either run through accelerating moves by President Joe Biden’s team to negotiate a political way out of war, or what many fear could be the most blistering of battles this summer in a country which has already lived through more than 40 years of pain.
      No one takes responsibility for this wave of assassinations. The Afghan government blames the Taliban. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government, which is also under fire for not being able to protect its people. And, in a time of rising insecurity and impunity, anyone with a gun and a grudge can exploit the moment.
      Many see a concerted campaign by Taliban supporters to kill off or frighten away what is described, in shorthand, as the “gains of the last 20 years”: educated, ambitious women; a vibrant media; an active civil society.
      “They claim these realities were created under the US military occupation and are like foam on top of water, which goes away as soon as you touch the waters underneath,” says Tamim Asey, a former deputy defence minister who now chairs the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. More

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      'Talk to me': Molly Jong-Fast on podcasting in the new abnormal

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      Molly Jong-Fast has known great success as a writer but over the last year on The New Abnormal, her podcast on politics in the time of Covid, she has become both half of a crackling double act and an interviewer with a habit of making news.The double act formed with Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and the co-founder of the Lincoln Project who is now taking a spell off-air. The producer Jesse Cannon has stepped in but the interviews remain largely the realm of Jong-Fast.Years ago, Molly and her mother, the author Erica Jong, gave a joint interview of their own. Molly, the Guardian wrote, was “loud, arch and snappishly funny [with] the mien of a runaway train, words hurtling forth, helter-skelter.”It remains the case. Before the pandemic, she threw famous dinner parties which brought unlikely people together. Now a contributing editor for the Daily Beast, she throws politicians, scientists, policy wonks and comedians together on a podcast, a form of broadcasting well suited to pandemic life. Down the phone – or up it – from Wall Street to the Upper East Side, appropriately socially distanced, I appropriate one of her own ways to start any interview. A few introductory remarks, then …“Talk to me about that.”And she does.I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing“As you know, as someone who lives in New York, our lockdown came fast, and it came very profoundly, and we were locked down. Actually, it was this time last year. I had just come back from [the Conservative Political Action Conference] in Washington DC. As I was coming home, I got an email that said, ‘If you were at CPAC, you may have been exposed to a super-spreader, and you need to quarantine.’ So I actually called the school nurses at all my kids’ schools and I said, ‘You guys, what I do?’“Since nobody really knew anything about the virus, they said, ‘Look, you can do whatever you want, but we would really appreciate if you would just keep your kids home for two weeks.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely. We don’t know anything.’ As someone who is not a doctor but who is completely obsessed with my own physical health in a totally deranged and neurotic way, I’m proud to say I’ve worried about every pandemic that comes. I was worried about H1N1 before.“And you could see this coming. I have friends in Milan … You saw these stories about Milan, and you knew we were a week behind or we were two weeks behind. I had a friend in London … her mother had a fancy private doctor and the fancy private doctor would send her these letters about who was going to get treatment in the hospital and who was going to be left at home to die.“So I had a sense that that stuff was coming, so I really made sure that everybody locked down way early in my house. Then I had nothing to do.“So I said, ‘Let’s start a podcast.’ I had sort of been the driver behind it because I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing. But I’m always interested in what other people have to tell me. So … I get a lot from it.“Another thing about me is, besides being dyslexic and a horrible student, I have terrible, terrible ADHD, which has never been medicated. I don’t take medicine for it because I’m 23 years sober, so it just would be too complicated for me. And I’m a person who was, in my heyday, a terrible cocaine addict, so I would not trust myself for a minute with ADHD drugs.”I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we ge people and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh’Jong-Fast chronicled those wild years in two novels and a memoir about being the daughter of a writer who wrote a lot about sex. In the 1970s, her mum invented “the zipless fuck”. But I digress. As Jong-Fast likes to say to interviewees: “Continue.”“But I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we get these people, and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh.’ I’m like, ‘This is very boring.’ So I think that has made the pod good, because I do these interviews and I get very bored. Then I’m like, ‘Come on. Get going here, people.’”New Abnormal interviews are fascinating and often hilarious. That’s down to a mix of the ethics of podcasting, looser than for talk radio – as Cannon says, “FCC guidelines would never be able to handle what we do” – and the ethics of the Daily Beast, a New York tabloid in website form, pugilistic and intelligent, taking the fight to the man.Another Jong-Fast interview technique, very much in the vein of the podcast’s one beloved regular segment, Fuck That Guy, is to ask key questions in the bluntest way possible. Take two recent examples. To the White House Covid adviser Andy Slavitt: “Can you explain to me what’s happening with AstraZeneca, because that seems to me very much a clusterfuck.” To Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, there to discuss Brexit: “What the fuck is wrong with your country?”What the fuck is that all about?“Well, as someone who was interviewed a lot when I was young and would sit through endless mother being interviewed, grandfather [the novelist Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus] being interviewed, always watching, I always think that the worst questions are the questions where you tell the person what you want them to say.“Look, I get it. I write things all the time where I want people to say stuff, but you can’t really get them to say it anyway … Part of it is I always think you should make it so they’re comfortable enough to really tell you what’s going on and to let you in. Also, I think they know that I don’t have a malicious intent. I just want people to see who they are.”What they are, in many cases after a year of lockdown, is suffering.“I had Mary Trump on the pod again today,” Jong-Fast says, of the former president’s niece. “She’s a psychiatrist, so she and I always talk about mental health because I’m just a sober person, and when you’re sober you’re always in your head thinking about mental health. We were talking about how we really are in the middle of this terrible mental health crisis, and everyone is just in denial about it.”Donald Trump has left the White House. The Biden administration is flooding the zone with vaccines. But we are still in the new abnormal.“I’m always surprised no one sees that. So it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t understand why I have a terrible headache. It can’t be because hundreds of thousands of Americans have died.’ So it is weird.”‘I wish we could get more Republicans’The New Abnormal has featured Democrats – senators, representatives, candidates – and bureaucrats and technocrats too. But in both the very strange election year in which the pod was born and in the brave new world of Biden, few Republicans have followed.“I wish we could get more,” Jong-Fast says. “I think I got one Republican guy who was running for Congress, but it’s not so easy.”That was John Cowan, from Georgia, who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene and her racially charged conspiracy theories – and lost.“Yes, and he’s going to run again. He’s a neurosurgeon. I was thrilled to get him. But they’re not so interested in coming on, even the sort of moderates.”She does the booking herself, so perhaps Congressman Adam Kinzinger or Senator Mitt Romney might one day pick up the phone to find Jong-Fast full blast.“‘You are a fucking genius. Why are you so brilliant?’ I’m very good at schnorring people into doing things for me. I’m very able to just endlessly schnorr people. I think that’s key to getting the guests.”I don’t know what schnorr means.“It means you sort of just put the arm on people to get them to come on the pod. The guests are the big thing because the people who want to come on are often not people you really want.”A lot of listeners want Wilson to return. Jong-Fast, formerly an unpaid adviser to the Lincoln Project, calls him “a very good friend” but is uncomfortable talking about his absence from the podcast – which was prompted by allegations of sexual harassment against another Lincoln Project co-founder and reporting on fundraising and internal politics.Cannon calls Wilson “one of the most politically astute people in America” and “a genius”. And he may well be back, one day, to reconstitute the double act, the Florida Republican and the Upper East Side liberal lobbing spiralling profanity at the extremity, inanity and insanity of Trumpism and life under Covid-19.But it’s not all about fighting back.“I wish there were a little bit more good-faith want for people to interact with the other side,” Jong-Fast says. “Look, there are people on the other side, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are not good-faith actors, and you can’t even try. But there are people like Mitt Romney who, while I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, he’s a very good-faith actor. So I think there’s a real chance.”If you’re reading, Mitt, if Molly calls … pick up the phone. More

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      Optimizing for outrage: ex-Obama digital chief urges curbs on big tech

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      [embedded content]
      A former digital strategist for Barack Obama has demanded an end to big tech’s profit-driven optimization of outrage and called for regulators to curb online disinformation and division.
      Michael Slaby – author of a new book, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life – described tech giants Facebook and Google as “two gorillas” crushing the very creativity needed to combat conspiracy theories spread by former US president Donald Trump and others.
      “The systems are not broken,” Slaby, 43, told the Guardian by phone from his home in Rhinebeck, New York. “They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers. They can be designed differently. We can express and encourage a different set of public values about the public goods that we need from our public sphere.”
      Facebook has almost 2.8 billion global monthly active users with a total of 3.3 billion using any of the company’s core products – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – on a monthly basis. Its revenue in the fourth quarter of last year was $28bn, up 33% from a year earlier, and profits climbed 53% to $11.2bn.
      But the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of poisoning the information well. Critics say it polarises users and allows hate speech and conspiracy theories to thrive, and that people who join extremist groups are often directed by the platform’s algorithm. The use of Facebook by Trump supporters involved in the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has drawn much scrutiny.
      Slaby believes Facebook and Twitter were too slow to remove Trump from their platforms. “This is where I think they hide behind arguments like the first amendment,” he said. “The first amendment is about government suppression of speech; it doesn’t have anything to do with your access to Facebook. More

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      'Like a bad joke': Al Jazeera staff bemused at rightwing US venture

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      Al Jazeera’s surprise decision to launch a digital platform for conservatives in the US has left many within the Qatar-based news organisation dumbfounded and confused, staff have told the Guardian.The network has announced the launch of Rightly, a platform that will host programmes and produce online content aimed at “audiences currently underrepresented in today’s media environment”, in this case right-of-centre Americans.It will be overseen by Scott Norvell, part of the founding team of Fox News, who said in a press release that Rightly aimed to show the wide spectrum of the American right.“American conservatism has never been monolithic,” Norvell said. “With Rightly, we are hoping to create a platform that amplifies the voices of an array of personalities that more accurately reflects the racial, cultural and generational diversity of centre-right politics in America than existing outlets.“We aim to bring new Americans, young Americans and Americans of colour together and present conservative ideas that transcend the barriers which identity politics aim to put between us,” he said.The platform’s first show, “an opinion-led interview programme”, will launch on Thursday.The announcement of the new franchise appears to fit awkwardly with a Qatar government-funded organisation that has fashioned itself as a leading international outlet of the global south and an alternative to the western media perspective on regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Africa.“So far the co-workers I’ve talked to are just dumbfounded,” said an Al Jazeera employee who asked not to be named. “They didn’t know it was coming and are confused why they would do this.”An Al Jazeera journalist based outside Qatar said the decision was a shock to staff. “It’s pretty weird,” they said. “I can’t see how it works for them.” Some Al Jazeera staff were calling the new platform Wrongly, they added.A staff member said they learned about the venture from Guardian coverage on Tuesday. “I was convinced there was some new satirical section of the Guardian I didn’t know about,” they said. “It seems like a bad joke or bad dream we’re all waiting to wake up from. Everyone is totally bemused.”Another said it was “worrying” that the network was moving from producing news – albeit from a clear perspective – to trying to promote a political agenda, citing a remark from Stephen Kent, the host of the upcoming interview programme, that he was aiming to “rebuild the right meme by meme”.“Maybe it was said in jest,” the Doha-based staff member said. “I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the show.”Al Jazeera’s Arabic network was controversial in the US in the years after the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York for regularly airing propaganda videos from al-Qaida leaders including Osama bin Laden. It launched a left-leaning American news channel in the US in 2013, but pulled funding three years later.It has remained a significant presence online with its AJ+ video network and its international channel, Al Jazeera English, remaining popular in the US.Al Jazeera English staff were among those on social media expressing bewilderment and concern over the move.Shutting down Al Jazeera was a key demand of the Gulf Arab states who launched a blockade against Qatar in 2017. Donald Trump, the US president at the time, endorsed the siege, which was finally dropped through negotiations that were clinched on 5 January this year, after it became clear Trump would not serve a second term.Tarek Cherkaoui, the author of a book about international and Arab media outlets, said the launch of the new platform may be “pure realpolitik” on the part of decision-makers in Doha after three difficult years, in which they realised they had failed to build links with the American right.“Decision-makers in Doha knew they had missed something, the coming of Donald Trump to the helm of the White House, but also the fact that [his adviser and media mogul, Steve] Bannon was one of the most prominent people shaping Trump’s worldview, and they had omitted to build bridges to any of these people,” said Cherkaoui, who is the manager of the TRT World Research Centre, part of a Turkish state-funded media outlet.There was logic in reaching out to the centre-right, he added. “They’ve found that they cannot go into the Trump heartland because it’s too hard to play there … They found that this centre-right is very unappreciated and has problems with their narrative and are finding it hard to push against the hardcore Trumpists.” More

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      Trump ally Nunes sees CNN Ukraine lawsuit thrown out by New York judge

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      A defamation lawsuit brought against CNN by the California Republican Devin Nunes, a leading ally of former president Donald Trump, was tossed out by a Manhattan judge on Friday.The lawsuit seeking more than $435m in damages was rejected by US district judge Laura Taylor Swain, who said Nunes failed to request a retraction in a timely fashion or adequately state his claims.Nunes alleged the cable news company intentionally published a false news article and engaged in a conspiracy to defame him and damage his personal and professional reputation. His lawsuit said CNN published a report containing false claims that Nunes was involved in efforts to get “dirt” on the then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.Lawyers for Nunes said in court papers CNN knew statements made by Lev Parnas and included in their report were false.Parnas, an associate of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court to making illegal contributions to politicians. His trial is scheduled for October.Parnas and another defendant worked with Giuliani to try to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden’s son, prosecutors said. Giuliani has said he knew nothing about the political contributions by the men. He has not been charged.The Ukraine affair led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which the Senate acquitted him in February last year. Trump was acquitted again last week, after being impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol riot.The Nunes lawsuit said Parnas was telling lies to try to get immunity.“It was obvious to everyone – including disgraceful CNN – that Parnas was a fraudster and a hustler. It was obvious that his lies were part of a thinly veiled attempt to obstruct justice,“ the lawsuit said.CNN lawyers said Nunes and his staff had declined to comment before publication on whether Nunes had met with a Ukrainian prosecutor.“Instead of denying the report before it was published, Representative Nunes waited until it appeared and then filed this suit seeking more than $435m in damages – labeling CNN ‘the mother of fake news’,” lawyers for CNN wrote. “In his rush to sue, however, Representative Nunes overlooked the need first to request a retraction.”The lawyers noted that California law, which Judge Swain said was appropriate for the case, requires that a retraction be demanded in writing within 20 days of the publication of a story. Messages seeking comment were sent to lawyers for Nunes and CNN. More

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      Andrew Neil reveals politics team for GB News channel

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      Andrew Neil has unveiled the all-male team leading the political coverage at GB News, his new 24-hour channel aimed at rivalling Sky News and the BBC.GB News chiefs have warned against “false imagining” of the channel as a British version of the opinion-led, right-wing US network Fox News.However, the latest appointments suggests right-wing voices will feature heavily at the soon-to-launch media outlet.Tom Harwood, senior reporter at the right-wing website Guido Fawkes, has joined the political team. “I’m thrilled to be able to announce I am off to GB News as political correspondent,” he tweeted. “Honoured to be joining such a high calibre, exciting team.”Dan Wootton, Talk Radio presenter and former executive editor at The Sun, will be one of GB News’ on-air presenters.Journalist Darren McCaffrey has been appointed political editor and one of the presenters at GB News. He joins from Euronews, where he presents the Raw Politics show.“Journalism is at its best when it reflects the widest range of views rather than just the loudest ones,” said Mr McCaffrey. “I know only too well that local voices are sometimes left out and GB News’ mission to change that is something I’m incredibly excited to be part of.”Sky News journalist Colin Brazier has also confirmed his is leaving to present a daytime news and debate programme on GB News. “It will be an important punctuation mark in the evolving story of news broadcasting in Britain and I’m thrilled to be there at the start,” he said.The channel has yet to reveal a launch date, but Mr Neil – who is GB News chair and is also set to host its flagship evening programme – said last year he was aiming to get it on air in March 2021.Earlier this month Mr Neil attacked a left-wing social media campaign, using the hashtag #DontFundGBNews, which targeted potential GB News advertisers and asked them not to partner with the channel.“The woke warriors trying to stir up an advertising boycott of GB News, a channel that hasn’t even started broadcasting, are hilarious,” the former BBC interviewer tweeted.GB chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos also wrote to The Guardian to complain about a characterisation of the channel as “anti-impartiality”.Mr Frangopoulos stated: “To call us an ‘anti-impartiality news channel’ is not only untrue but baseless given we haven’t launched yet. It also misunderstands Ofcom’s due impartiality rules which do not allow a biased news station in this country.” More

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      Rush Limbaugh, influential rightwing talk radio host, dies aged 70

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      Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host whose nastily personal and bigoted riffs on the daily news won millions of devoted fans and altered the landscape of American media and politics, has died, according to his wife, Kathryn.Limbaugh, 70, had been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer a year ago.“Losing a loved one is terribly difficult, even more so when that loved one is larger than life,” Kathryn Limbaugh said on his eponymous radio show, now in its fourth decade. “Rush will forever be the greatest of all time.”At the height of his influence in the mid-1990s, Limbaugh commanded a daily radio audience of millions, known as “dittoheads”, who tuned in to hear him dissect the sins of the Bill Clinton administration and wage battle against the “commie libs” he accused of plotting to destroy the country.In a 1995 Mother Jones cover story, the late columnist Molly Ivins singled Limbaugh out as a bully and called him a “major carrier” of “plain old nastiness in our political discussion”, describing the typical Limbaugh listener as a young white male without a college degree but with a firm sense that the world had done him wrong.“Limbaugh offers him scapegoats,” Ivins wrote. “It’s the ‘feminazis’. It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.”The formula was wildly successful, and pointed the way for media organizations such as Fox News to satisfy the demand for opinion content that seemed devilishly honest if you identified with it – and hate speech if you did not.Limbaugh may have created something much bigger by contributing to a style of politics that, three decades after the Rush Limbaugh show was first syndicated, produced the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.Trump, who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, midway through a State of the Union address a year ago, called into Fox on Wednesday to praise Limbaugh and mark his death.He was a “fantastic man” and a “fantastic talent”, the former president said. “Whether [people] loved him or not, they respected him.”The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, hailed Limbaugh as a “generational media trailblazer”. Former vice-president Mike Pence said “he made conservatism fun”. Senator Ted Cruz called him “a tireless voice for freedom and the conservative movement”.But not every elegy was as fond. “Rush Limbaugh helped create today’s polarized America by normalizing racism, bigotry, misogyny and mockery,” tweeted the gun safety advocate Shannon Watts. “He was a demagogue who got rich off of hate speech, division, lies and toxicity. That is his legacy.”Limbaugh was born and raised in Missouri, his father a former pilot and mother a homemaker. He worked as a disk jockey in high school and hosted radio programs in increasingly large markets in Pennsylvania, Missouri and California before landing a national gig at WABC.Limbaugh did not find his brand as a conservative lightning rod and iconoclast until 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission repealed a 1940s-era rule mandating that radio stations allot equal airtime to both sides of any controversial issue.That meant Limbaugh could go on at indefinite length, and even critics conceded his extraordinary ability to do so, hosting a three-hour radio show filled with breathless ranting, daily. In a televised spinoff, Limbaugh did what he usually did – sit in front of a microphone, smoke cigars and rant – but with the added thrill for viewers of watching the spittle fly.Limbaugh is credited with helping to invent a new style of communication, the modern talk radio format – and, as critics would have it, a new means of amplifying hatred, laying the groundwork for a conservative media sphere that would culminate 30 years later in Pizzagate and QAnon.Limbaugh was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame and National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.In 2003, he entered treatment after becoming addicted to the painkiller OxyContin following back surgery.He spent time off air and his career appeared to be idling before a comeback in the Obama years and then his full rehabilitation in the eyes of Trump and his supporters.Like Trump, Limbaugh offered listeners a blend of grievance politics, cruel humor, arrogant showmanship and privileged smugness that Trump showed could win much more than ratings wars.The style and the political pose established Limbaugh as godfather of generations of angry white men in the media, many of them on Fox News: Bill Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and their descendants, not to mention the conspiracy-minded networks that are challenging Fox for supremacy.Limbaugh insisted that racism was dead. He compared Chelsea Clinton, then 13, to a dog, and made fun of the labor secretary Robert Reich, who suffered bone disease as a child, for being short. He launched effusively sexist tirades, like this one quoted in a 1990 New York times piece:
      We know that women in groups – same office, same dormitory, same barracks – eventually have synchronized menstrual cycles. We also know that there is this thing called PMS, and we know that it turns a woman into a hellion. We know that PMS has been used as a defense against a charge of murder.”
      Ivins faulted Limbaugh as a bully in her Mother Jones profile.“He consistently targets dead people, little girls, and the homeless – none of whom are in a particularly good position to answer back,” she wrote.“Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel. It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people, as Limbaugh does, it is not only cruel, it’s profoundly vulgar.” More

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      Rush Limbaugh obituary

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      Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting “caller abortion”. His listeners, whom he dubbed “ditto-heads” ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of “pants on fire” untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.He was then fired from a nighttime show in Pittsburgh when new management took over. In Kansas City his morning current affairs talk show on KUDL then an evening talk show on KFIX both ended in sackings for what he described as differences with management; at this point he considered himself a “moderate failure”.He married Roxy McNeely, a radio sales executive, in 1977; they divorced in 1980.By then Limbaugh was working with the Kansas City Royals baseball team in group ticket sales and special events, and in 1983 he married Michelle Sixta, an usherette in the Royals’ Stadium Club. That year he returned to radio with KMBZ in Kansas City, but again got fired for being controversial, in part about the local Chiefs football team. However, one consultant who had enjoyed his KMBZ style suggested him as a candidate to replace the equally controversial Morton Downey Jr on KRBK in Sacramento, California, to which Limbaugh moved in 1984. At KRBK Limbaugh began to attract attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes. Limbaugh’s deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: “I am too much in love with myself.”The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his “southern command” centre. In 2003 the sports network ESPN hired him as an analyst on their Monday Night Football broadcast team, but a few weeks into the season he upset viewers by saying that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated “because the media is very desirous that a black quarterback do well”.It was an especially odd remark given that one-third of the league’s starting quarterbacks were black; that year one of them, Tennessee’s Steve McNair, would be joint winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Limbaugh resigned three days later. The following Monday he admitted to an addiction to prescription drugs, including OxyContin.He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was “no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation”, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society. But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New York’s WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.In 1992 Limbaugh wrote, with John Fund, The Way Things Ought to Be. Both it and the 1993 sequel, See, I Told You So, were bestsellers. In 2013 he wrote the first in a series of six children’s books featuring a character called Rush Revere – named after the Americn patriot Paul Revere – who goes back in time to have adventures during the American revolution.In 2017, after the ascension to the presidency of his Palm Beach neighbour Donald Trump, Limbaugh joined Trump in suggesting that dire warnings about the possible impact of Hurricane Irma in Florida were fake news designed to push “a climate change agenda”. He quickly became an object of derision when he had to evacuate his home before the storm hit.In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the president’s lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.He is survived by Kathryn. • Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, broadcaster, born 12 January 1951; died 17 February 2021 More