Florida Governor DeSantis Confirms He Will Order Flags Be Flown Half-Staff in Honor of Rush Limbaugh

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Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 12:32 pm

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has confirmed he will order that flags be flown at half-staff at public buildings in honor of conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh. The often controversial radio personality died earlier this week of lung cancer.

“What we do when there’s things of this magnitude, once the date of internment for Rush is announced, we’re going to be lowering the flags to half-staff,” DeSantis told the crowd during a political rally in West Palm Beach.

In a statement released earlier this week, DeSantis said Limbaugh “busted through a media landscape in which a handful of media outlets served up pre-cooked, liberal narratives.”

Limbaugh hosted The Rush Limbaugh Show, which has been in national syndication on AM and FM radio stations.

He courted significant controversy for his often inflammatory comments about issues such as immigration and climate change. Limbaugh was also a noted science denier who claimed for years that the 2010 BP Oil Spill had not actually harmed the environment. He went so far as to blame the disaster on extremist environmental activists despite all the evidence to the contrary. He also infamously mocked AIDS victims on his show at the height of the epidemic during the 1980s and 1990s, declaring that homosexual men––who were often used as a scapegoat for the disease––deserved to die.

More recently, Limbaugh often pushed conspiracy theories that the Covid-19 pandemic is overblown, downplaying the scale of devastation nationwide even as the United States continues to lead the world in total number of deaths from the coronavirus. And as one of former President Donald Trump‘s most loyal defenders, he regurgitated Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, statements that would contribute to the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, which took place when groups of Trump’s supporters attempted to overturn the results of an election President Joe Biden won decisively.