The greatest lie(s) ever told: Rush Limbaugh and the white supremacist blueprint in middle grades historical fiction

ABSTRACT

U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical fiction series, Rush Revere: Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans by Rush Limbaugh. The analysis worked to answer two central research questions: How does the Rush Revere series promote white lies about U.S. history? and What curricular violence is enacted through the Rush Revere series? Findings illuminate how each book individually centralizes an aspect of white supremacy—exceptionalism, capitalism, militarism, patriotism, paternalism—that collectively then creates the infrastructure to indoctrinate young readers into white supremacist ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Curricular violence
• historical fiction
• middle grades
• Rush Limbaugh
• white supremacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In efforts to address the systemic racism rooted in the institutions, structures, and systems of the United States, including language, we intentionally lowercase the w in white and capitalize the first letters of ethnoracial labels like including Black, Brown, and Indigenous to honor them as proper nouns (Matias et al., 2014). By engaging in this practice, the authors seek orthographic equity. We believe the term white has a specific set of meanings and consequential implications, especially in the context of white supremacy, and the word Black, in particular, has distinct communal and cultural significance (Tochluk, 2010). Thus, the use of these labels and terminologies in education scholarship deserves deliberate attention and action oriented toward anti-racism and justice (Leonardo, 2009; Thompson, 2004).

2. The books can be found at https://officialrushlimbaugh.com/rush-revere/. The first two books in the series solely credit Rush Limbaugh as the author. For the remaining three books, “with Kathryn Adams Limbaugh” is noted below Limbaugh’s name in smaller text on the book covers. Kathryn Adams Limbaugh was Limbaugh’s wife whose contributions are detailed in the book acknowledgments but not on the dust jacket. Beginning with the third book, the interior title pages note two consultants below Kathryn’s credit: Jonathan Adams Rogers, a historical consultant, and Chris Schoebinger, a children’s writing consultant. Schoebinger was mentioned in the acknowledgments to the first book, Brave Pilgrims, for giving assistance in the “writing, editing, and reaching a younger audience” (Limbaugh, 2013, p. 206). Rogers is credited in different ways in the last three books of the series: as “historical consultant” in American Revolution and Star Spangled Banner and as “historical writing consultant” in Presidency. No further detail about Kathryn Limbaugh, Rogers, or Schoebinger and their respective authorial contributions is included in the texts.

3. We use “Rush series” to refer to the entire collection of texts and “Limbaugh” to refer to the series author, Rush Limbaugh.