Charlie Kirk: Rush Limbaugh Inspired Me, and Millions

The moment I learned of the “Great Maha Rushie’s” passing, I was sitting down at a microphone in the middle of my first segment of a daily three-hour nationally syndicated radio show that airs from 12 to 2 p.m. Eastern — just like Rush.

There aren’t too many people who are going to have that particular memory. For that I owe Rush Limbaugh a debt that I will try, but never succeed, to repay fully for the remainder of my life.

My debt to Rush is much greater than simply having him be responsible for creating the entire industry of talk radio, an industry into which I entered into late in 2020 with my own show.  Before The Charlie Kirk Show, there was Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Before there was TPUSA, there were the ideas in the mind of a rebellious and out-of-place teenager in the north Chicago suburbs. Rush Limbaugh is as much responsible for those two antecedents of The Charlie Kirk Show as he is for the show itself.

From the moment I was old enough to have my license, I knew that if I slipped out of school at lunchtime, I could sit in my car and listen to the man who was giving context, shape, structure, and humor to the ideas that I was desperately trying to assemble and organize within my own thoughts. I might have been in school to learn, but Rush was teaching me more than I would ever learn in a classroom.

Of his tens of millions of listeners during those more than 30 years on the radio, there is probably not one who wouldn’t have gladly emptied their bank account just to meet the man and thank him for what he had done and what he had meant to them.

Of those millions, there were precious few who would ever get that chance. I did.

I was one of those fortunate enough to get to know the man behind the Golden EIB Microphone. I can assure you that as powerful as his words were when delivered in that booming on-air voice, they were even more powerful when delivered quietly in a private setting.

It was in January of 2017 that a mutual friend, Byron Thomas, arranged for me to meet Rush at a private club on a Saturday morning for breakfast. Rush was an avid golfer, and this was to be a brief meeting before he started his round.

I’ll never forget his order at the breakfast table: an entire plate of bacon.  He casually explained with a grin, “the grease and fat make me smarter.”

That initial meeting lasted a lot longer than was intended, and we talked about a lot more than just food. He asked me about my family, about TPUSA, and about my ideas on different issues. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but that meal was the start of a friendship that would continue up to and through his receiving the diagnosis of lung cancer that would ultimately claim his life.

We had a chance to host Rush, who made so few public appearances (his hearing loss and cochlear implants made him uncomfortable at large public gatherings) at not one, but two appearances at TPUSA events.

In December of 2018 we presented him with a lifetime achievement award for his work in shaping our movement. One year later, in what would be one of his last public appearances, he stepped onto the same stage and introduced President Donald J. Trump before he addressed our students.

It was fitting to have Rush receive the honor of introducing the president, since it is quite likely that Donald Trump never could have become president without all of the “advance” work performed by Limbaugh over the previous 25-plus years, making ready the American political landscape for Trump’s ideas and style.

A few months later, President Trump would return the favor by introducing Rush at his 2020 State of the Union speech and presenting Limbaugh, who had just recently announced his cancer diagnosis, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here are some of the accomplishments of the man who meant so much to me and to tens of millions of Americans:

• He invented the modern format of talk radio, and along the way he invented the podcast before podcasts existed by producing close to three hours each day of essentially uninterrupted content. Nobody had ever attempted anything so bold in radio.
• He helped those people who considered themselves conservative to understand and articulate their core political beliefs, and he converted liberals to conservatism through a relentless combination of wit and analysis, combined with his uncanny ability to correctly predict events. Andrew Breitbart is one of the many whom Rush helped convert to the right.
• He made it possible for other conservative commentators to get a spin behind a microphone and have their voices heard. This includes not just radio, but television, as well. Without Rush we would not have had Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, or Ben Shapiro. Without Rush, I wouldn’t be here, either.

There is, of course, much more for which he is responsible.  You can argue that he kept the Reagan Revolution alive after Reagan. He was a constant distraction, bordering on obsession, to the administrations of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He held vacillating Republicans in check for fear that they would become a target on his show if they betrayed “America first” principles, either by word or by vote.

All this, and more, he did with half his brain tied behind his back, just to make it fair.

Now, the man who led us, the man who was his generation’s version of William F. Buckley, Jr., has passed. What are we to do?  Who is going to replace him?

The answer is clear. No singular person is going to replace him. He was the “first” of his kind in American media and politics, and by definition there can only be one “first.” What will be required is for thousands of us to step up.

We need to step up, and we need to step up together. He has carried our movement on his shoulders, and they were big and strong. No single one of us can carry the burden he carried. Only by lifting together can we summon the necessary collective strength.

He prepared us for this. For over thirty years he schooled us at what he called the EIB Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. I have been studying since high school; many of you have been studying since 1988 — or even before, when he was a local radio host in the 70s.

So, dust off your workbooks. Read the notes you wrote in the margins.  It is now time for millions of students to become the masters.

As I write this early on a Thursday morning, knowing that in a few hours I will be settling in for my three-hour nationally syndicated radio show that occupies the same time slot that Rush has owned for over 30 years, some listeners might wonder if I think of myself as an “heir” to Rush’s radio legacy.  I assure you I do not.  His role needs to be filled by thousands, not by one or a few.

I am, as are each of you, fortunate that he lived — and that through his life, he showed us how to fight. How to fight with a smile. How to add a tinge of sarcasm when appropriate. How to change diction and inflection in order to emphasize an important point.

Above all, as he fought, he was irreverent. Dear Lord, he was irreverent.

The Charlie Kirk Show will not even dare to try to be the next Rush Limbaugh show. The Charlie Kirk Show will try to simply be a show that does the best it can to help honor, preserve, and continue in the spirit of the man who made my show, and so many other shows, possible.

Don’t think that now that he has passed that you can no longer hear his voice.  It lives inside millions of us, and it will for us in the next generation.

Open your mouths and speak. You will hear it resonate.

Charlie Kirk is the founder and president of Turning Point USA, Chairman of Students for Trump, and host of the nationally syndicated Salem radio show and podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show.