When "Feminazi" Found Us
How a single word traveled from the tractor cab to the high school hallway and changed everything.
It was the second floor of my high school. At the end of each hallway were these narrow vertical windows—maybe eight inches wide, two feet tall. Just enough space to lean your head against the glass and look out across nothing.
You could see for miles. Rows of corn in grid formation. A far-off cluster of silos. The curve of a gravel road slicing between fields. Maybe a propane tank behind a farmhouse or a water tower poking up from another dying town. That view was a reminder. However far you thought you might go, this was where you were.
And still, the radio waves found us.
We were nowhere, but Rush Limbaugh was there. His voice came through the static at noon like a sermon, louder than the Case IH engine rattling under the cab. Every tractor in Pocahontas County seemed tuned to him. Every F-150. Every breakroom with a microwave and a half-used can of Folgers.
Eventually, he made it into the hallway.
It was between classes. I was a freshman, shoulder to the wall, inching down the row of lockers outside of typing class, trying not to draw attention. The kid who said it was one of my older brother’s dipshit friends—the kind of guy who wore his letterman jacket year-round like it was keeping his ego warm, but who I now love to get drunk with whenever I get back there. He was exiting a class I was entering, which felt cosmically unfair.
I still don’t know why a senior was taking freshman typing. Maybe it was a graduation requirement, maybe a scheduling error, maybe he just needed a place to hide from the law.
I mostly deserved it, so every day he made a point of shoving me into a locker as we passed. Not hard enough to break bones—just enough to publicly reestablish the food chain. Like a little slapstick reminder that the high school caste system was functioning as intended.
That day in 1992, after delivering the daily nudge, he leaned back against the lockers and said it like he’d just invented sarcasm.
“Feminazi.”
He was talking about Mrs. Carradine, the typing teacher. She was strict. Expected discipline. Pretended to not hear the boys’ tit jokes. That was enough.
The guys around him laughed.
I didn’t know what the word meant exactly. But I knew it wasn’t just some made-up insult. It had weight. It had traveled. I could tell it came from somewhere louder, older, deliberate, and angrier than any of us.
Later I’d learn Limbaugh coined it. I’d learn about the Fairness Doctrine—how Reagan scrapped it in 1987 and opened the floodgates for people like Rush to dominate the airwaves without having to offer balance or shame. But at that moment, I just remember the way that word landed in the hallway like a flare on the highway.
The teacher never heard it. But I did.
And it stuck with me because it felt like the beginning of something.
What Rush built wasn’t just outrage. It was infrastructure.
He turned political speech into emotional spectacle. Words stopped being a way to communicate and became traps. A clumsy phrase, a dumb metaphor, anything off script—it could be clipped, looped, broadcast for weeks.
He made nitpicking a weapon. He turned the offhand into the unforgivable.
And somehow it got rebranded as "truth telling." That was always the spin. Rush wasn’t being mean, he was just brave enough to say what others were too polite to say out loud. But was it truth, or was it just license?
License to be cruel. License to mock women for their voices or their weight. License to sneer at gay men dying of AIDS. License to turn the poor into a punchline.
It wasn’t truth. It was performance. A punishing little sport dressed up as patriotism.
And like every American cultural product—from advertising to sitcoms to Sunday sermons—it sold best when it flattered the consumer. Rush made millions of people feel like they were the aggrieved party, the victim with teeth. He did for cruelty what McDonald's did for beef—he scaled it.
That same brand of cruelty-as-authenticity defines the present.
Trump calls his enemies “vermin” and floats execution fantasies on national TV, then calls it common sense. Joe Rogan offers up anti-vax misinformation under the flimsy tarp of “just asking questions.” Tucker Carlson smirks his way through Great Replacement theory while dressed like an off-duty weatherman. Elon Musk quote-tweets Nazi accounts and calls it “free speech.”
None of it is truth. It’s tone. It’s a performance of rebellion by people who have never known accountability.
A Democrat uses a word like “Latinx” and suddenly they’re a coastal elitist out of touch with “real Americans.” Biden says “Putin cannot remain in power,” and the media melts down like he dropped a nuke. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene shares Holocaust memes and Josh Hawley encourages a coup, and we all just blink and move on.
Rush taught the right that tone is the real terrain. That all you need to win is a sneer, a nickname, a soundbite. That you don’t need to be right—you just need to be louder and crueler and never apologize.
And liberals?
Liberals were late to the game. Still are.
They held onto civility like a holy relic. They wrote op-eds and quoted James Baldwin while the other side accused kindergarten teachers of grooming children. They debated climate policy while Republicans lit libraries on fire.
Even now, you can’t tell if it’s restraint or resignation. Is it principle, or is it the slow collapse of a worldview?
Because in a world where “owning the libs” is a political platform, decency starts to look like surrender.
Americans have always had a taste for this stuff. We don’t like to admit it, but the evidence is everywhere.
In the 19th century, partisan newspapers regularly called their opponents drunkards, child abusers, and whores. Political cartoons showed Abraham Lincoln getting lynched. Public hangings were scheduled like county fairs. Lynchings were photographed and printed on postcards. Joe McCarthy destroyed lives on live TV and got standing ovations for it. Morton Downey Jr. made shouting an art form. We’ve always had the capacity for bloodlust—and we’ve always figured out how to call it moral.
At the same time, we like to see ourselves as decent. Churchgoing. Respectful. The kind who shovel driveways and bring casseroles when someone dies. So we split the difference. We keep our kindness local and outsource the cruelty to people on screens. We cheer for humiliation on Fox or MSNBC, then shake hands at high school basketball games and pray for unity.
What does that contradiction say about American morality? Maybe it’s not morality at all. Maybe it’s just a cover story. Something we tell ourselves to feel good while we look away. A polite fiction that breaks the moment it’s inconvenient.
And if that’s the case, it’s terrifying. Because a cover story won’t stop a border patrol van. It won’t shut down “Alligator Alcatraz,” the ICE facility so abusive it had to be renamed by human rights groups. It won’t intervene when masked federal agents snatch citizens off the street into unmarked vans like it’s a Chilean coup.
A morality based on vibes and slogans and self-image will buckle the second it’s tested. And the test isn’t coming. It’s already here.
When people say we’ve lost the ability to have honest political conversations, I think back to that hallway in 1992. To the dipshit testing out a new word. To that voice crackling over tractor radios. To that moment when a teenager learned that sneering cruelty wasn’t just allowed.
It was admired.
That wasn’t politics. That wasn’t truth telling. That was infection.