Rush Was Right
What was once controversial (when Rush Limbaugh said it) is now mainstream.
Bradley Steffens | June 5, 2026
On April 20 of this year, onetime liberal firebrand Alan Dershowitz announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he was officially leaving the Democrat party and registering as a Republican. Discussing his decision the next day with Newmax’s Greg Kelly, Dershowitz stated, “I cannot be associated with the Democrats in any way. I want to see them defeated.”
A longtime listener of the late, great Rush Limbaugh, I had to smile. For thirty years, Limbaugh had said the same thing, and been vilified for it. The “reach across the aisle” crowd, including Republican lawmakers and failed presidential nominees, condemned him for being divisive. But Rush was adamant. “These people cannot be dealt with, cannot be compromised with,” he told his radio audience for the umpteenth time on May 7, 2018. “They have to be defeated.”
Dershowitz is only the latest of a growing number of commentators who, knowingly or not, are echoing El Rushbo’s most controversial statements. For example, in the early 2000s, America’s Anchorman was denounced for suggesting that critics of the Iraq war were actually rooting against American success so they could gain political advantage. “They not only wanted the war in Iraq to fail; they proclaimed it a failure,” Limbaugh told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting on February 28, 2009. “There’s Dingy Harry Reid waving a white flag: ‘This war is lost.’”
In April 2026, conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson said virtually the same thing about critics of the Iran War. “Anything that looks unfortunate from the point of the American success in Iran, they cling to,” Hanson told the audience of his April 14 podcast for The Daily Signal. “They don’t look at the war empirically. They look at it entirely in political terms. In fact, people as diverse as Tom Friedman or Bill Crystal, if you collate what they have written, they almost feel that anything that happens negatively in Iran might be positive because it would hurt Donald Trump and then therefore that would be in the long-term interests, forgetting that we have 100,000 soldiers in the theater, risking their lives.” On May 5, Hanson was even more direct: “Donald Trump has ... to deal with an opposition who feels the war was a mistake or they’re actually rooting in some cases for the Iranians.”
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/rush_was_right.html
