His life was ruled by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News. What happened when he quit cold turkey

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Rush Limbaugh got his start at KFBK in Sacramento, but he touched millions of lives around the nation. When he died last week, I immediately thought of a Limbaugh fanatic I knew in high school.

Rusty Manseau was a normal kid in most ways but one: his exceptional dedication to Limbaugh. Manseau idolized Limbaugh like other teens idolized Kurt Cobain. We worked together on the school newspaper and mostly got along — but we avoided politics. After graduation in 1994, we lost touch.

Decades later, however, Manseau came to mind when I heard about Limbaugh’s death. I wondered how he would react to losing his hero. When I looked him up on Facebook, I was astonished by what I found.

In a lengthy post, Manseau acknowledged Limbaugh’s outsized influence on his life. He also shared the story of how he finally broke from Limbaugh and forged his own political identity.

I gave Manseau a call (for the first time since high school) and interviewed him for The Sacramento Bee’s California Nation podcast.

Manseau told me he’d become a young Limbaugh fan after a friend recommended the show.

“I knew very little about politics,” said Manseau, who is now a graphic artist and a former Lexington Herald-Leader staffer. “I didn’t know anything about Republicans or Democrats.”

Things changed after he started listening to Limbaugh, who transformed him into a right-wing Republican.

“I was young, I was impressionable,” Manseau said. “I honestly didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. But the way he said it, it was entertaining. He used humor and it just drew me in.”

This was the Rusty I met in 1992 when I moved to Lexington, Ky., from California and enrolled at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.

“I didn’t really totally understand the issues,” Manseau said. “But I felt like I belonged. The way Rush spoke to his audience … it was like a family.”

Limbaugh’s grip on his mind lasted decades. Manseau also ingested a steady diet of political rage from Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, rejecting news outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

“I think it made me more cynical, more distrusting ... more angry,” he said.

He reached a breaking point when President Barack Obama won re-election in 2012. Limbaugh and Fox had promised something akin to a socialist apocalypse if Obama remained in office.

“I was so stressed about the prospect of another four years of Obama that I couldn’t even process having to deal with that,” he said. “Not that things were bad, because they weren’t bad. But I believed them to be, right?”

Anguished, Manseau made a fateful decision. He decided to quit politics altogether. He went cold turkey, unplugging from Limbaugh, Fox and the Drudge Report.

This resulted in an unexpected shift.

“The unintended consequence of that was that, within a year, I found that I wasn’t as conservative as I thought I was,” he said. “I didn’t set out to walk away from the Republican Party or to walk away from Rush permanently. I didn’t think my ideology would change like that.”

Instead of seeing President Obama as a socialist agent bent on destroying the nation, Manseau said he came to see Obama as a competent leader who presided over a period of economic growth.

“It was great,” he said.

Manseau’s advice for those still hooked on angry right-wing media outlets that skew reality: “If you really believe that these are your views and not the views of right-wing media personalities then I would say, prove it: Take the challenge. And the challenge is: Do what I did. Walk away from all of it.”

Freed from the constant barrage of anger and lies, Manseau — formerly a top Limbaugh fan — is currently registered as a Democrat.

This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "His life was ruled by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News. What happened when he quit cold turkey."