On Jan. 20, 2021, Rush Limbaugh had a few weeks left to live, and he sat in his studio, on the air, and commented on what he observed while watching coverage of the Joe Biden presidential inauguration. His words from that day resonate now as much as ever, because here we are staring down the barrel of yet another “most important election in our lifetimes.” This one being the 2026 midterms, which soon enough will be followed by a presidential election that for the first time in 12 years will not have President Donald Trump on the ballot.
Remember the sense of broad and deep demoralization on our side from that time. The Jan. 6 protests were still fresh. The way the feds were indiscriminately rounding up conservatives who may not even have entered the Capitol building on that day, it felt like hunting season and patriots were the prey. The outgoing president was already being treated like a criminal, being deplatformed, having gone through yet another hasty impeachment process, and being driven into political exile.
Rush, knowing this was likely the last inauguration he’d ever witness, saw this and felt this and opened his show that day by saying, “They think they got it all back. They think they finally have vanquished all of their opposition. And they haven’t the slightest idea.”
Rush was prescient. Four years later, Trump would return to the White House with a mandate, a Republican Congress, a Republican Senate, and a majority Supreme Court.
We can argue over RINOs and how unreliable these other branches of government have been to the Trump administration, but you always have to remember that any Republican majority is better than the alternative.
Don’t forget what it was like in January 2021 in the way Rush described it:
This inauguration looks like what you would expect from a one-party state. This inauguration looks like the Chinese Olympics with hundreds and hundreds of flags to replace people who were not allowed to show up.
Now, why do you think people weren’t allowed to show up? People are not allowed to show up because of COVID. People aren’t allowed to show up because the threats of the National Guard might open fire on everybody. That’s not why. The reason that they put up all these replacements for people is that I don’t think they were confident a bunch of people would show up for this because I think they know. I think they know that they are not — I gotta be very careful here in the words I choose.
I think they know that this is something that’s been arranged rather than legitimately sought and won. And you can see this in their attitudes, in their smiles. You can see it, hear it in the words that they are uttering.
Like all of us, Rush knew 2020 was rigged, and under the circumstances of that day, for one of the first times in his radio career, he had to be careful with what he said. The chill the Biden administration brought to free speech in America was already being felt by conservatism’s strongest champion.
What Rush never got to learn was all that we learned from the Twitter files and from the disclosures surrounding Missouri v. Biden in 2022. While these developments didn’t lead to legal consequences for who was then a sitting president, they did provide some degree of sunlight on what the left was doing to control the narrative through social media, and all of it was ugly, un-American, and practically traitorous.
Biden’s team oversaw a concerted program of directing big tech and its social media operations to actively censor views it did not like, words it did not like, and people who got on its bad side. Originally, the focus of this Soviet-style information management was COVID-19 content, but it quickly expanded to censorship of views tied to vaccines, the 2020 election, climate change, and other leftist pet issues. If authoritarianism was a drug, the Biden administration was hooked.
What we learned from Missouri v. Biden was that federal government under Biden allegedly threatened social media firms to get them to remove or suppress the speech of everyday Americans, along with leading experts in their fields, which included medicine, public health, the media, and other professions.
The one-party state that Rush described on the day Biden was inaugurated was in full swing, and it wasn’t going to give up without a fight. In order for Trump to return to the White House, he had to endure massive amounts of serious lawfare, criminal allegations, civil lawsuits largely based on lies and uncorroborated allegations, and even a couple of close calls from assassination attempts. The left did not want Trump to return to the Oval Office, and it demonstrated a focus and a will to prevent that at all costs.
Rush:
They’ve been sweating bullets for four years. And they are now convinced that they have re-secured their complete and total hold on power in Washington. But I think they know that it’s fleeting. They’re gonna do everything they can to make sure it’s not fleeting. They’re gonna do everything possible to make sure that they never lose it again. Don’t misunderstand.
But I think all of these people have souls. And they all have deep, dark crevices where they engage in deep thoughts about themselves. And I think when they go there, I think a number of them actually have to admit that they’ve dodged a bunch of bullets here. And I think they know — and this is the big one — I think they know with 74 million, maybe 80 million people who did not vote for Joe Biden, there is no way they can honestly say to themselves that they represent the power base of the country. They’re gonna to have to take it. They’re gonna have to hold on to it and never let go of it.
While better times came for Trump and all conservatives in 2024, now is an appropriate time to revisit and heed Rush’s warnings. Trump can’t do the job the American people hired him to do without some leftist puppet in the judiciary intervening to put a halt on any progress the president might make. He can’t even get his own Senate majority leader to take the most basic step you can take to assure more free, fair and accurate elections — pass the Save America Act.
I’m not even sure Trump knew how deep and vast the Washington, D.C. “swamp” really was and what a surreptitious fight it would put up against him.
The left and its friends, some even on the Republican side and in the deep state, are likely working to make sure that as Rush said, they “are gonna do everything possible to make sure that they never lose it again.”
Rush was right. Count on it. They aren’t waiting for 2028. They’re doing whatever it is they think they can get away with right now. And we can’t let them.
If Democrats win in the midterms, they’ll get more emboldened, they’ll get uglier, more brazen, more audacious in how much they hate America and that flag of ours. They’ll attack conservatives using the powers they have with tenacity and mercilessness.
If your memories of the authoritarian Democrat rule under Biden are fading, a Democrat victory in the fall will bring it all back to you quickly, and when it’s too late to do anything about it. Those were very dark days for the country.
Conservatives can’t let them win again. Conservatives need to match the left by every measure, from getting turnout at the polls, to fundraising, and with smart and strategic spending.
We can’t let them win again, no matter what’s in our way. We have to defeat the left in 2026, because after that there are no guarantees that the country you see today will be the same in 2028. It’s time.
