Charlamagne Tha God recently sat down with Rush Limbaugh to have a candid dialogue about systemic racism, but now that the dust has settled, the Breakfast Club host says the whole encounter ended up being both unproductive and inauthentic.
During Wednesday night’s episode of A Late Show, Charlamagne explained to Stephen Colbert why Limbaugh’s response to white privilege left him disappointed. He felt like he’d “wasted” his time.
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“I said ‘you’re being delusional right now,’” Charlemagne recalled of his response to Limbaugh’s stating that white privilege doesn’t even exist. “What really bothered me about that conversation is, after I left that conversation I felt like it wasn’t productive.”
He then went on to explain how watching Limbaugh deny the existence of privilege in one breath, to then seeing him clearly defining what it for a caller by the end of the interview, made it clear to him that the entire interaction was just a performance and not a sincere meeting of the minds.
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“After we left his show, he was taking callers, and a caller asked him ‘What is white supremacy? What does Charlamagne mean when he talks about white supremacy, white privilege?’ He broke it down so eloquently. Rush broke it down like he knew exactly what it was,” Charlamagne said.
Colbert chimed in that he could relate given that’s exactly how he felt after his interview with President Donald Trump, which he also thought was performative and disingenuous.
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“They say anything they want in front of the microphone,” Colbert said about politicians and talking heads like Trump and Limbaugh. “But then they come on your show and they act like the reasonable man.”
During the sitdown, Charlamagne also revealed that since he and Limbaugh both work for iHeart media. It was executives at the company who even suggested the two hosts have a discussion in the wake of Geoge Floyd’s death.
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