Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I continually
Speaker 1: failed to introduce like a professional, which is particularly shameful
Speaker 1: this week because our guest is a very professional voice artist,
Speaker 1: Mr Paul F. Tom Good. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here. Paul Um. You are the
Speaker 1: voice of a lot of characters that that that a
Speaker 1: lot of people enjoy. Uh. I think most famously to
Speaker 1: me at least, UH is Mr Peanut butter Um to
Speaker 1: the voice of a lot of characters that people hate.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's true because if you're really achieving as
Speaker 1: an artist, a lot of people are going to hate
Speaker 1: anything that you do. That's the you're doing it right exactly.
Speaker 1: And today we're talking about a truly historical success of
Speaker 1: a creative mind. A man hated py tens of millions
Speaker 1: of people and who should be hated by billions, a
Speaker 1: man who has done, I would say, in calculable harm
Speaker 1: to the future of human life and all life on
Speaker 1: this planet. Mr rush Limbaugh. Yeah, Paul, what do you
Speaker 1: have any kind of history with Rush Limbaugh, like in
Speaker 1: terms of your upbringing and stuff. I don't know much
Speaker 1: about how you grew up. Yeah, do you know what
Speaker 1: I forgot. Uh that I forgot. First of all, I
Speaker 1: forgot how long he's been around. And I remember watching
Speaker 1: him in his earliest days on TV UM and watching
Speaker 1: that show like as a goof the way, I would watch,
Speaker 1: you know, the Morton Downey Junior Show or a little
Speaker 1: Wally George or whatever, and just like, who is this clown?
Speaker 1: And he's like doing this this sort of you know
Speaker 1: what seemed like a character you know at the time,
Speaker 1: because he I think he fancied himself an entertainer and
Speaker 1: had a show that had little skits in it and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and I I thought he was just ridiculous,
Speaker 1: and so uh, I watched him ironically and um, and
Speaker 1: then things just got worse. Like I I sort of
Speaker 1: got tired of it. I remember getting tired of it
Speaker 1: and like, Okay, this is just like the same thing
Speaker 1: over and over again, and it's not, um, it's not
Speaker 1: pushing that uh that button in my ironic pleasure center anymore.
Speaker 1: So I just stopped watching. But he, um, despite despite
Speaker 1: my my jumping ship and you to do what he
Speaker 1: was doing. He lost the Paul left Topkins demographic, but
Speaker 1: he kept the my parents and everyone that raised me demographics.
Speaker 1: So what was your upbringing particularly political? Would you say not,
Speaker 1: you know what, not super political. I was raised, Uh.
Speaker 1: My family was a um uh lower middle class, uh,
Speaker 1: big Catholic family, UM in Philadelphia, in in a sort
Speaker 1: of suburb called mount Airy, and we were both of
Speaker 1: my My family was like lifelong Democrats, you know, Philadelphia Democrats.
Speaker 1: And so that was kind of it, Like we were
Speaker 1: just sort of um you know, uh like a conservative
Speaker 1: liberal family. Uh and um, yeah, I I we we
Speaker 1: didn't talk a lot about politics in the house growing up. Um,
Speaker 1: and that was kind of it. But I knew that
Speaker 1: we were. We were liberal Democrats, you know, who were
Speaker 1: weirdly enough, guided by guided by I'm not even gonna
Speaker 1: say faith. I think we were guided by my parents,
Speaker 1: um sort of morals where they were greatest generation Depression babies. Um.
Speaker 1: And uh they voted straight Democrat um. But they were
Speaker 1: not like even though we were Catholic, it was like
Speaker 1: we were not single issue voters, you know. Um, but
Speaker 1: they but my family was my parents were brought up
Speaker 1: with the same sort of um prejudices that people of
Speaker 1: their generation were brought up with, you know. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: politics did not figure in it. What it was like
Speaker 1: when I got when I got uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: little older and out of the house and everything, that's
Speaker 1: when I started, um, you know, investigating my own politics.
Speaker 1: And it was like a long a journey. You know.
Speaker 1: That is very exciting to me. Um, just because you're
Speaker 1: you're you, you came from kind of more of a
Speaker 1: you know, a liberally background, and your introduction to Russia
Speaker 1: Limbaugh was kind of watching it as a character, right. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I grew up very conservative. Um My parents were also
Speaker 1: lower middle class, verging on poor. And when I was
Speaker 1: like kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but
Speaker 1: extremely conservative. I would say like our family religion was conservatism,
Speaker 1: and so Russia Limbaugh was caught. Whenever I was driving
Speaker 1: with my mom or my dad, Rush was on. We would,
Speaker 1: we would, we listened to him. My parents talked about him.
Speaker 1: So my upbringing with him was that this guy is
Speaker 1: like the profit of of what's what's right, you know,
Speaker 1: both in the political sense and in a moral sense. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm very excited about this, and I'm excited that
Speaker 1: you know who Morton Downey Jr. Is because we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about him a bit too. So yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh is it's hard to oversell this guy's influence
Speaker 1: on our current state of Like, I think it would
Speaker 1: be fair to say we're kind of like verging on
Speaker 1: civil conflict right now between the right and left in
Speaker 1: the United States. Yeah, for sure. Um so yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think Rush Limbaugh has a huge might be the
Speaker 1: man most responsible for that. I totally agree that his
Speaker 1: influence cannot be Uh is it overestimated, like cannotated? It's
Speaker 1: like I the day he died, I tweeted, I tweeted, Uh,
Speaker 1: if I had to say something positive, I guess if
Speaker 1: I had to say something positive, I'm glad Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: lived long enough to get cancer and die. Um. And
Speaker 1: then that got that got picked up by uh fox
Speaker 1: news dot com. They did a round up of you know,
Speaker 1: uh liberals celebrated Rush Limbaugh's death, which really was just like, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to harass some people, here's here's pseudo rass.
Speaker 1: And I had people, I had people in my mentions
Speaker 1: on Twitter like saying things like, uh, you better pray
Speaker 1: you never meet me, like like people implying violence because
Speaker 1: I said I'm glad Rush Limbaugh is dead. I had
Speaker 1: somebody call my call my house and say Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: contributed far more good to society than you ever will
Speaker 1: find for Rush Limbaugh. This guy, but I mean, this
Speaker 1: guy had a show. He had a show. He wasn't
Speaker 1: a legislator. He wasn't he wasn't like some some sort
Speaker 1: of freedom fighter. This guy just had a show where
Speaker 1: he said mean things, where where he repeatedly celebrated the
Speaker 1: deaths of his enemies and made half a billion dollars
Speaker 1: doing it. Okay, let's let's get into Russia's life. So
Speaker 1: the first thing I learned about him when I started
Speaker 1: digging him into him, that might be the thing I
Speaker 1: learned about him that surprised me the most. Russia is
Speaker 1: not short for anything. Russia is a full a full
Speaker 1: first name, and in fact, Rush Limbaugh is the third
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh in his family line. They are very proud
Speaker 1: of that name. His grandpa, Rush Senior was born and
Speaker 1: raised in Bollinger County, Missouri, so he and I are
Speaker 1: both Missouri babies. He grew up into a world that
Speaker 1: was changing rapidly. Rush Senior saw an electric light for
Speaker 1: the first time when he was twelve. He took his
Speaker 1: first railroad trip in nineteen o four. He always thought
Speaker 1: that was one of those things. It was like, I
Speaker 1: choose that. That is the most shocking thing about him.
Speaker 1: He rushed Limba is not only his full name, it
Speaker 1: is the only name his family seems to give their
Speaker 1: firstborn sons. If he broke uh So Russia Rush Senior
Speaker 1: became a lawyer. He opened an office in Cape are
Speaker 1: do Um, Missouri, and he basically never left the town again.
Speaker 1: He retired in nineteen ninety four at the age of
Speaker 1: a hundred and two, which I mentioned because it suggests
Speaker 1: that all those cigars rush us are Rush Limbaugh smoked
Speaker 1: saved us about thirty two years more of his show.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, did you say he retired auto in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four? Yeah? And then how long did he live
Speaker 1: after that? I think he died. I think he died
Speaker 1: immediately from what YE like. He's one of those guys
Speaker 1: who worked until he died. Basically, some people are like that.
Speaker 1: You know, his grandson was like that. Uh So Rush
Speaker 1: Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when
Speaker 1: he was forty. His main political issue was fighting FDR
Speaker 1: and the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right,
Speaker 1: This is deeply deeply embedded in the Rush limball line.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty six, Rush Limbas Sr. Was a Republican
Speaker 1: delicate at the Republican National Convention, where he helped nominate
Speaker 1: Alf Landon for the noble job of losing to Franklin
Speaker 1: del Roosevelt in an election. You don't nobody, nobody was
Speaker 1: better at campaigning than FDR. It was never a successful
Speaker 1: thing to run against that. I know, somebody had to
Speaker 1: be his Washington generals, Yeah, Outland and the Washington generals
Speaker 1: of Republican politics. Uh So, my main source for the
Speaker 1: early life and family history of Rush Limbaugh is a
Speaker 1: fairly comprehensive, if I would say, kind of fawning biography
Speaker 1: of Limbaugh by Zev chaffits uh and Zev it's a
Speaker 1: weird first named ze apostrophe e v. Chaff It's uh.
Speaker 1: He notes that over the course of decades of lawyering,
Speaker 1: Rush Senior quote quietly but inevitably became well to do um,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting way of phrasing it. Just like
Speaker 1: there was no stopping and he just got it. Was
Speaker 1: kind of a way of making it seem like he
Speaker 1: just he didn't really want to become rich. He just
Speaker 1: became rich. You know, that is the most suspicious sounding phrase. Inevitably,
Speaker 1: quietly and inevitably got rich. Sinister, God, it is very sinister. Um.
Speaker 1: So Rush Junior, who is our Rush Limball's father, was
Speaker 1: born at some point Quick Google obviously he had been born.
Speaker 1: Quick Googling didn't return a date. He's the only Rush
Speaker 1: Limball without a Wikipedia page, which I guess kind of
Speaker 1: a kind of a shot to him. Um. I could
Speaker 1: have probably found it out if I'd really dug into it.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't really matter that much for our purposes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he did what he had to do. He gave us Rush.
Speaker 1: He gave us our rush. Y O U R Rush.
Speaker 1: So Rush Junior is only important for the impact that
Speaker 1: he had on our rush. He was a World War
Speaker 1: two combat pilot, which is undeniably rad. You gotta give
Speaker 1: him that, um, and his biography notes that he maintained
Speaker 1: a military crew cut for his entire life. He was
Speaker 1: heavy set and top data out at about three hundred pounds,
Speaker 1: which earned him the nickname Big Rush, Big Rush, one
Speaker 1: of those names. And you you cannot combat like your
Speaker 1: Big Rush, sorry, Big Rush us. You can ask politely,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna happen. Why are you in a big rush? Uh?
Speaker 1: So Big Rush became an attorney because I'm always rushing around.
Speaker 1: I'm always rushing around. So Big Rush became an attorney
Speaker 1: like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on
Speaker 1: to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful
Speaker 1: orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape Girardo,
Speaker 1: doing during holidays. His very conservative politics influenced these speeches,
Speaker 1: and his most famous one was a tearful hagiographic speech
Speaker 1: about our nations saintly founding fathers. Again, you can see
Speaker 1: he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab
Speaker 1: that our Rush has. And I you have to admit,
Speaker 1: if you know anything about our Rush Limbaugh, he was
Speaker 1: an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very good at what
Speaker 1: he did. That's why he had the impact that absolutely Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: our Rush Limbaugh A Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the third to
Speaker 1: give his full name, was born in Cape Girardo, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: on January or Missouri sorry, January twelfth, nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with
Speaker 1: a brother and the parents who loved him. Baby Rush
Speaker 1: spent his childhood and bubing a steady diet of his
Speaker 1: dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil, conniving communists. One
Speaker 1: of our Russia's childhood friends recalls of Big Rush of
Speaker 1: his dad quote, We'd go over to his house sometimes
Speaker 1: just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd
Speaker 1: sit in front of the television, drinking black cherry pop,
Speaker 1: eating popcorn, and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters.
Speaker 1: He'd yell at Dan Rather, they're all typical liberals, and
Speaker 1: Rather's the worst one of the bunch. And we'd try
Speaker 1: to keep him going. You know, Mr Rush, what do
Speaker 1: you think about this? Mr? Rush? What do you think
Speaker 1: about that? Sometimes he'd say Kender, that was this friend's name.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be the first Dutchman on the moon. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he
Speaker 1: was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he
Speaker 1: was a harsh taskmaster with his sons. An odd comment.
Speaker 1: So Rush has a has a brother or Russia and
Speaker 1: a brother. He has a brother, David Um who was
Speaker 1: his younger brother. No, no, no, I think it's the oldest,
Speaker 1: the oldest son as the Rush gets the Rush name.
Speaker 1: They didn't do a George for David becomes like a lawyer,
Speaker 1: doesn't really leave Cape Gerardo and is like, um, you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's he unlike his brother has a family, has
Speaker 1: like a wife that he's you know, stays with and
Speaker 1: all that stuff. Did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy.
Speaker 1: I think yeah, I think he was bored wealthy. He
Speaker 1: and his brother were both born rich as hell. Um
Speaker 1: so and and our Russia's brother David provided an even
Speaker 1: more telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was
Speaker 1: like under Big Rush. My dad stood out. Sometimes he
Speaker 1: provoked people who didn't agree with him to violence. Once,
Speaker 1: for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR and
Speaker 1: a couple of guys jumped him and beat him up.
Speaker 1: I never did ask him the details of that one,
Speaker 1: but it was a couple of guys, not a fair fight.
Speaker 1: I know that much. I have to assume he deserved
Speaker 1: to get the ship kicked out of I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: he was saying something like, the people who got screwed
Speaker 1: over in the Great Depression deserve to starve to death.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't be helping that that's gonna be my guest.
Speaker 1: And he got the ship kicked out of him by
Speaker 1: some w p A guys something like that. If your
Speaker 1: name is if your name is Big Rush and two
Speaker 1: guys go after you, I think that's a fair fight.
Speaker 1: That's a fair fight. You're big, you know. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a little Rush, he's three hundred pounds. They're probably each
Speaker 1: about a buck fifty. You know, their fight exactly, they're
Speaker 1: fight by mass being poor. Yeah, that's so. Our Rush
Speaker 1: was born into the Eisenhower Years, which will probably always
Speaker 1: be remembered as like the high point of both capitalism
Speaker 1: and the United States. This period of peak American exceptionalism
Speaker 1: imprinted itself deeply on Russia's growing brain. His father was
Speaker 1: made a special ambassador to India's legal system, Their family
Speaker 1: got their first television. Um, yeah, yeah, he was. I
Speaker 1: think it means you know, India's was newly independent in
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower years, right, they had just the UK had
Speaker 1: just left, they had just partitioned with Pakistan. They're developing
Speaker 1: their own independent legal system, and they're a democracy that
Speaker 1: was heavily based at least initially on the US. So
Speaker 1: the president like kicked guys who were established lawyers like
Speaker 1: Big Rush and also established Republicans to be a kind
Speaker 1: of help set up the Indian legal system. Um, that's
Speaker 1: kind of what happened. So yeah, his his father's a
Speaker 1: big man in Republican politics. Rush grows up seeing in
Speaker 1: the period where America is undeniably like like literally is
Speaker 1: half of the global economy. Right, that's a very significant
Speaker 1: thing for him. Um. So the family in the fifties
Speaker 1: gets their first TV, but radio is still the dominant
Speaker 1: method of entertainment in those days, and Russia's childhood and
Speaker 1: earlier adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll
Speaker 1: and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for DJs. Um
Speaker 1: My dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time.
Speaker 1: He's like seven or eight years younger than Rush. Um,
Speaker 1: and he he grew up the only thing my dad
Speaker 1: ever wanted to be was a DJ, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: a radio DJ for like twenty thirty years. You know,
Speaker 1: that was like the coolest thing that you could do, right.
Speaker 1: You didn't have Spotify, you didn't have the Internet. People
Speaker 1: learned about new music from DJs who were kind of
Speaker 1: like pick what they were going to play on the radio.
Speaker 1: It was the like the absolute rattus thing you could be,
Speaker 1: and that's what Rush like. He he idolizes these big
Speaker 1: DJs of the time, and that's all he wants to be.
Speaker 1: For Basically, his entire young life is a DJ. Now,
Speaker 1: when Rush was three Brown versus the Board of Education
Speaker 1: was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to
Speaker 1: the integration of U S schools now Zeve Chaffittz doesn't
Speaker 1: write anything specific in the biography about how Rush Senior
Speaker 1: talked about race to his son. I have not We
Speaker 1: don't get any of that information. And I'm not necessarily
Speaker 1: blaming Chappits for that because I think the Rush family
Speaker 1: is very pr savvy. They don't talk about it. You know.
Speaker 1: I don't know who he would have gotten that info from, um,
Speaker 1: but our Rush would have definitely picked up on the
Speaker 1: great deal of conflict in Cape Gerardo over racial matters. Uh.
Speaker 1: Missouri is an odd state and that it is both
Speaker 1: Midwestern and Southern. During the Civil War, it was split
Speaker 1: between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers, and the town that Rush
Speaker 1: grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides.
Speaker 1: There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of
Speaker 1: schools in Missouri and in Cape Gerardo, and Zeve Chappitts,
Speaker 1: to his credit, writes about this quote. In nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: Kate built its white students a new school, Central High.
Speaker 1: Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the supreme
Speaker 1: court and basketball changed that. Cape Gerardou took its high
Speaker 1: school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title.
Speaker 1: The nineteen fifty three team was expected to be a powerhouse,
Speaker 1: but word got around that the kids from Cobb were
Speaker 1: even better. An informal game was arranged between Central and
Speaker 1: Cob High, says historian Frank Nichol cob one. Shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: Cob mysteriously burned down. Black students went to school and
Speaker 1: churches and private homes that year. But a more permanent
Speaker 1: solution was, yeah, they that's the kind of town. He
Speaker 1: grows up and the black kids win at basketball and
Speaker 1: they burned their school down. Wow. Yeah, Cape Gerardo is
Speaker 1: a very racist town. Um and kind of more to
Speaker 1: the point, like, we don't know exactly what what Russia's
Speaker 1: dad would have said about any of this. We don't
Speaker 1: know that he would have supported the burning down of
Speaker 1: the black school. We don't know that he wouldn't though,
Speaker 1: that's right. Um, and you know, the the conservatives were
Speaker 1: definitely more on the don't integrate side of things, right. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: a compromise, a compromise was eventually reached in Cape Girardo,
Speaker 1: and the compromise was that black kids would be allowed
Speaker 1: to attend Central High but they would be put in
Speaker 1: special classes that were taught by former teachers of Cobb,
Speaker 1: the school that had been burned down. Um. This was
Speaker 1: kind of integrating by not integrating. So there were black
Speaker 1: and white kids in the same school, but not in
Speaker 1: the same classes. And this is the way things were
Speaker 1: in Cape Girardo when Russia Limballs started school. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's you can infer from that what you will based
Speaker 1: on some of the things Rush Limbaugh says and does
Speaker 1: later in life. I think we're missing some important information
Speaker 1: about what his dad thought about black people. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't remember, if ever being concerned as to the investigation
Speaker 1: of that fire. I don't think he would burn high school.
Speaker 1: He might have done it like that is rampant an
Speaker 1: irresponsible speculation on my part, but also uh, the only
Speaker 1: reason I think he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been able to run away from it. In mind,
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, um, he didn't do well
Speaker 1: in that fight, is all I'm saying. So Russia had
Speaker 1: an upbringing that would have been fairly standard for a
Speaker 1: rich kid of his era. He played basketball, he did shores,
Speaker 1: He had plenty of friends. He was not an overly
Speaker 1: active kid. He did not like sports. He hated his
Speaker 1: one year in the cub Scouts. Russia the ball hates
Speaker 1: the outdoors his entire life. Um, he did not like school,
Speaker 1: but he was popular, largely because his family was rich
Speaker 1: and had a huge basement with a pool table and
Speaker 1: a bunch of other luxuries. The kids rush hung out
Speaker 1: with during this time give us some of our best
Speaker 1: hints about the darker elements of his childhood. One of
Speaker 1: them told Zeve Chaffits quote, Russia's dad didn't suffer fools lightly.
Speaker 1: He was always very disapproving of Russia his ambitions to
Speaker 1: have a career in radio. Russia's mom was a kind,
Speaker 1: gentle person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He
Speaker 1: was not above calling down Russian David in front of
Speaker 1: their friends, and when he did it, there was a
Speaker 1: string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times.
Speaker 1: So kind of abusive, not I don't think, by the
Speaker 1: standards of the time, and I haven't heard any of
Speaker 1: that he was like leading his kids or anything, but
Speaker 1: kind of mentally abusive. Again, probably more or less in
Speaker 1: line with what most most men of his social class
Speaker 1: would have been like to their kids. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't think this was abnormal. I mean, how many how
Speaker 1: many of these guys were born out of the the
Speaker 1: the sort of ritual humiliation by their fathers in front
Speaker 1: of an audience. Yeah, I think most of them. You know.
Speaker 1: It's it's such a it's such a common thing that
Speaker 1: I'm I guess I'm just glad my dad was a
Speaker 1: guy who didn't say anything. Ever, Yeah, it's better than
Speaker 1: humiliating you in front of your friends when you say
Speaker 1: something he disagrees with. So every one of Russia's early
Speaker 1: friends that I've seen interviewed is very consistent about the
Speaker 1: fact that he was not political. From an early age.
Speaker 1: He rarely, if ever talked politics, and he did not
Speaker 1: express strong beliefs. One of his friends even remembers him
Speaker 1: as a particularly good debater in school because quote. He
Speaker 1: could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat.
Speaker 1: When he did express political opinions, they were generally conservative.
Speaker 1: One friend noted that the only time he saw child
Speaker 1: Rush express a strong political sentiment was after the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty presidential election when Rush was nine. Quote Rush wrote
Speaker 1: wrote on a drywall, Kennedy one darn Nixon lost. Shucks.
Speaker 1: So grows up conservative because his dad is conservative. But
Speaker 1: it's clearly politics is not a big part of his
Speaker 1: life from an early age. He's not like been Shapiro right,
Speaker 1: where from the get go he's being sort of um
Speaker 1: like focused into becoming a political commentator. That does not
Speaker 1: happen with Rush Limbaugh. He's more from the darn shucks
Speaker 1: school of the darn shucks school political commentary. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Rush got his first gig at age thirteen, working at
Speaker 1: a downtown barber shop. He later told his biographer that
Speaker 1: he liked the gig because it gave him a chance
Speaker 1: to talk to adults, who he preferred to his peers
Speaker 1: because I didn't think kids were interesting. When it came
Speaker 1: to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect. He
Speaker 1: was bad at sports, heavy set, and not at all smooth.
Speaker 1: In his biography The Rush Limball Story, biographer Paul Colford
Speaker 1: recalls one particularly embarrassing incident during a game of spin
Speaker 1: the bottle when Rush was a teenager. He spun the
Speaker 1: bottle and it stopped at and it stopped pointing at
Speaker 1: the prettiest girl at the party, which is how she's
Speaker 1: described in this anecdote quote. She looked at him and gasped,
Speaker 1: couldn't do it, not with him, that is, And everyone
Speaker 1: in the room witnessed this humiliation. It was a wound
Speaker 1: he would nurse forever. Uh, that's nice, thank you Bogher
Speaker 1: for that. And it's one of those things, you know,
Speaker 1: I think there's I'm sure this has an impact on
Speaker 1: the kind of man he becomes, But also I think
Speaker 1: most of us have a moment like that where we
Speaker 1: have a crush on some person of the opposite or
Speaker 1: the same sex and they're not into us, and it's
Speaker 1: horribly embarrassing. It's a pretty and most of us don't
Speaker 1: grow up to destroy civil society in the environment. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've all been there, and Rush was there too. Obviously
Speaker 1: this is a part of whatever toxic stew gets cooked
Speaker 1: up at him. Um, But I don't know how Like
Speaker 1: it's one of those things I think you can kind
Speaker 1: of lean too much on. Oh, this is why he
Speaker 1: was always forever humiliated by this thing, and that's why
Speaker 1: he became the man. He was like, well, we all
Speaker 1: have that in our past, and we all don't do
Speaker 1: this ship. It's very much like the the original origin
Speaker 1: story of Lex Luthor that uh yeah, Superman blew out
Speaker 1: his hair. Superman Superman was responsible for him going prematurely bald,
Speaker 1: and he became a supervillain because of this. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know there are a lot of other bald men
Speaker 1: in that world who don't become Superman. Yeah. Uh so,
Speaker 1: Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer or
Speaker 1: to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas. Right,
Speaker 1: The Limbaughs were big men in Cape Girardo. They were
Speaker 1: kind of like the the the primary, like the most
Speaker 1: prominent men in the entire town. Um, and he Big
Speaker 1: Rush wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and
Speaker 1: do something respectable. Didn't have to be a lawyer, going
Speaker 1: too politics, do something important, right, do something that he
Speaker 1: can brag about to the other rich guys. Now, the
Speaker 1: fact that young Rush only ever wanted to be on
Speaker 1: the radio, infuriated his father. For his part, Rush seems
Speaker 1: to suspect that his love of radio was born in
Speaker 1: part from his hatred of school. Quote. My mother would
Speaker 1: be fixing me breakfast and I'd be listening to the
Speaker 1: guy on the radio. He'd be having fun, and I
Speaker 1: was preparing to go to prison. I mean joined the
Speaker 1: club Rush. Yeah, we all hate school. It's tradish everybody.
Speaker 1: It never occurred to me to related to the guy
Speaker 1: on the radio, like, how come he gets to have fun,
Speaker 1: this grown adult, and I have to go to school? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of kids. Let's I'll take
Speaker 1: my adopted hometown Portland for example, a lot of kids
Speaker 1: there who hate school. They don't destroy the entire planet.
Speaker 1: They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends. And that's
Speaker 1: much healthier. Rush. You can just buck up a Starbucks
Speaker 1: if you're if you're nursing some rage at the educational
Speaker 1: industrial complex or whatever. So despite his irritation, Big Rush
Speaker 1: clearly did love his son, and when little Rush was sixteen,
Speaker 1: his dad used some of his local clout to get
Speaker 1: his son a part time job at the local radio station.
Speaker 1: Rush started doing what you today call internship, you know,
Speaker 1: fetching coffee, cleaning up, handling odd tasks here and there,
Speaker 1: and eventually he was allowed to actually introduce and play
Speaker 1: records on air. The summer before his senior year of
Speaker 1: high school, Big Rush paid for his son to attend
Speaker 1: a six week radio engineering course in Dallas. This was
Speaker 1: a big moment for Rush. He was away from home
Speaker 1: for the first time, living in a boarding house. He
Speaker 1: started smoking cigarettes, thank god, and he got a license
Speaker 1: that allowed him to actually and he got a license
Speaker 1: that allowed him to actually run the radio without adult supervision.
Speaker 1: Once he had this, station management let him hang out
Speaker 1: alone all weekend and weekdays after school, playing records and
Speaker 1: for the first time, presenting himself to an audience on air.
Speaker 1: So he gets started. And this is one of those
Speaker 1: things his dad. Clearly there are some abusive elements of
Speaker 1: their relationship. His dad is not supportive of Russia's radio career,
Speaker 1: but also is like his dad is, doesn't think it's
Speaker 1: a good idea, but also enables him right like, not
Speaker 1: just gets him a job, but pays for him to
Speaker 1: get educated. So we get this is not a guy.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know he had his frustra strations with
Speaker 1: his father. This is not a guy who grows up
Speaker 1: with a dad who just doesn't get him and refuses
Speaker 1: to support him. This is a very supportive upbringing this
Speaker 1: kid has, even though his father's not yeah exactly. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: So Rush you know, becomes kind of famous within his
Speaker 1: you know, the team set at his town because he's
Speaker 1: the guy with a radio show and in high school
Speaker 1: and he was not at all political at this point.
Speaker 1: His most well known bit involved reading the daily beauty
Speaker 1: tips that the Associated Press sent out back then, UM,
Speaker 1: which he like, and he would like kind of mock
Speaker 1: the beauty tips because he thought it was silly that
Speaker 1: the AP was sending out daily beauty tips. Which is fair,
Speaker 1: it is that has a silly thing for the AP
Speaker 1: to do. Um now. Russia's professional idol at this point
Speaker 1: was a guy named Larry lue Jack lu Jack as
Speaker 1: Chicago DJ, who was famous for his sense of humor
Speaker 1: and comedic stylings. Rush Leader called him the only person
Speaker 1: I ever copied. Lue Jack was known for audibly shuffling
Speaker 1: papers during his monologues and different bits, a tactic Limbaugh
Speaker 1: copied and used repeatedly through his decades on air. UM
Speaker 1: and as a kind of like it significant bit. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a bit, but it was like a thing
Speaker 1: he would do to emphasize that, like I've got evidence
Speaker 1: or I've got information here. You know. It was a
Speaker 1: thing Rush, and it was a big Rush Limbaugh thing.
Speaker 1: You know. It's it's how you convince people who maybe
Speaker 1: aren't that credible that you you have good information. Right,
Speaker 1: he's been handed, He's been handed that has information on it,
Speaker 1: so it's true. But but lu Jack was not a
Speaker 1: political guy, right, he was just he was not, and
Speaker 1: he fucking hated Rush Limbaugh because when Rush got famous
Speaker 1: in the early nineties, Rush was like, yeah, Larry lu
Speaker 1: Jack is the only man I ever copied. And they
Speaker 1: asked lu Jack about it, in his response is basically,
Speaker 1: fuck that guy good Man. Yeah. Yeah, you can't. You
Speaker 1: can't pick who finds you influentially, you know. Yeah. Um
Speaker 1: So back in those days, again, being a radio DJ
Speaker 1: was pretty much the coolest thing you could do, and
Speaker 1: Russia's side job made him very popular at high school.
Speaker 1: He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work
Speaker 1: was intoxicating, and Rush seemed to know at once that
Speaker 1: this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing. Obviously,
Speaker 1: his ambitions did not make his father happy, and during
Speaker 1: Russia's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell
Speaker 1: at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio.
Speaker 1: No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though he was miserable
Speaker 1: at home and his father. After with his father, after graduating,
Speaker 1: he enrolled in a local college just to please the
Speaker 1: old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go
Speaker 1: to school very often. Sometimes his mother would drive him
Speaker 1: to college just to make sure that he went. Rush
Speaker 1: came of age during one of the most exciting and
Speaker 1: tumultuous periods in US history. I mean, he's he's literally
Speaker 1: becoming an adult in like nineteen sixty eight. I think, um,
Speaker 1: like some ship went down that year. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of teenagers doing some exciting things. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: given how Rush turned out, you might have expect him
Speaker 1: to have been active and involved in the politics of
Speaker 1: his time. But he was not. And to hear him
Speaker 1: tell it now, or to hear him tell it when
Speaker 1: he related this to his biographer, the civil rights movement
Speaker 1: in the Vietnam years basically all passed him by. He
Speaker 1: never attended political rallies. He only dimly remembers hearing of
Speaker 1: Bobby Kennedy's death. When Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated,
Speaker 1: his radio station asked him to help send out news
Speaker 1: or ports for the local NBC affiliate because there were
Speaker 1: uprisings all around the country, and Rush did this, but
Speaker 1: he didn't actually engage with the news. He was not
Speaker 1: actually interested in what was happening. He was just interested
Speaker 1: in kind of the business of how news was disseminated.
Speaker 1: Quote this is what he said later. I remember talking
Speaker 1: to them about the broadcast business NBC. I was seventeen,
Speaker 1: playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I
Speaker 1: don't recall feeling any concern. So that is how again
Speaker 1: a lot of privilege. There are massive race based uprisings
Speaker 1: and the number of US cities, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: National Guard troops are called up as after the civil
Speaker 1: rights leader is is assassinated, the country is on the
Speaker 1: brink of open conflict in Russia, limbol, I don't give
Speaker 1: a funk, like I just want to play a record,
Speaker 1: So you know, Wow, he's just a rich white kid,
Speaker 1: you know, in the middle of Mazara. He doesn't give
Speaker 1: a shit. It's so wild to think about someone being
Speaker 1: alive at that time and not having a strong feeling
Speaker 1: either way about anything. Yeah, he's not doesn't even have
Speaker 1: strong hard right sympathies. He just doesn't give a about it.
Speaker 1: That is like a kind of privilege that I can't
Speaker 1: even begin to fathom. Yeah, and it is important that,
Speaker 1: like he's not just taking the right wing side of things.
Speaker 1: Were like, well have Martin Luther King? He was a comedy.
Speaker 1: He just doesn't care, Like none of this even makes
Speaker 1: it into his mind. Like the idea that you would say,
Speaker 1: Martin King, who is that again? That which guy Bobby
Speaker 1: who got killed? Kind of what demly aware that assassinated? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's quite a thing. Uh So I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote now from a right up in the New York
Speaker 1: Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early twenties. Quote. Love
Speaker 1: of radio eventually one out over formal education, and he
Speaker 1: dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling
Speaker 1: his parents. Then began a long, checkered odyssey typical of radio.
Speaker 1: Limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities working under
Speaker 1: different names and broadcast styles. He was Rusty Sharp and
Speaker 1: Jeff Christie. He was a DJ, a newsreader, a talk host.
Speaker 1: In each place he developed components of what would later
Speaker 1: emerge as the Limball style. In Pittsburgh, he was a prankster,
Speaker 1: convincing listeners that he could see them through a new
Speaker 1: experimental picture phone. So he's kind of like a drivetime
Speaker 1: morning DJ, like, yeah, we're gonna I don't know, I
Speaker 1: can't do the DJ voice, but like playing like sound
Speaker 1: bits and doing doing gags. Like he's very like not
Speaker 1: even really a shock jock yet because he's not like
Speaker 1: combat that has that's like starting to evolve in this
Speaker 1: period of UM. I did find some audio from Run
Speaker 1: of Russia's very first broadcast in nineteen seventy four, while
Speaker 1: he was still in Pittsburgh, and I think it's interesting
Speaker 1: because in it you can hear Rush in mid transition
Speaker 1: from that drive time DJ voice to the voice of
Speaker 1: the Rush Limball who would help breed a modern American
Speaker 1: fascist movement. So here he is on w x z's
Speaker 1: Solid Rock and Gold show. So without further ado, here
Speaker 1: is Rush Limbaugh in nineteen seventy four Billy Cook's rights
Speaker 1: and gypsies. See the exciting the Dolphin rated p G
Speaker 1: and now showing at the Ark Moore Drive in Bellevue.
Speaker 1: Bethel said him a camp Horn drive in Carnegie said,
Speaker 1: and send him a world. They have the Dolphin offs
Speaker 1: showing in the Hampton plasack hen Hills region and run
Speaker 1: the leader Sea of the Dolphin now at these the
Speaker 1: Wiggly South Hills South Park Drive in the South Hills
Speaker 1: Drive in and Subset Drive. And I certainly hope you
Speaker 1: people are writing all of this down. Don't miss a
Speaker 1: Day of the Dolphin. It is now showing so very
Speaker 1: silly as all radio from the nineteen seventies sounds today, right,
Speaker 1: his most radio today sounds. But also like there's you
Speaker 1: would never have guessed based on his early performances that
Speaker 1: he was going to become what he became. Right, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, look, he has undeniably great voice, very good
Speaker 1: at parting information like the actual factual information in this
Speaker 1: movie is for short playing here at this time, Day
Speaker 1: of the Dolphin. Yeah, I can't wait to see it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the exciting movie. Day of the Elphen. But that
Speaker 1: he's just straight reading things that you cannot misinterpret in
Speaker 1: any way, um, if if only he's stuck to that.
Speaker 1: But uh, yeah, I I it's so, I guess I. I
Speaker 1: I don't want to get ahead of us, get ahead
Speaker 1: of ourselves. But the idea that this guy would not
Speaker 1: be content doing just this, UM is like what when
Speaker 1: does it the idea that it turns like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm sorry, we'll we'll get to that.
Speaker 1: But I think it's fair to say this is what
Speaker 1: he loved and he would have been perfectly happy if
Speaker 1: he could have made a good we're getting to kind
Speaker 1: of like a Hitler at art school story where like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe if he'd gotten to keep being a drivetime radio DJA,
Speaker 1: things would have been better, you know, I had. I
Speaker 1: had a conversation with a friend of mine, um who
Speaker 1: who also does podcasts and radio and for neither of
Speaker 1: us it is our thing, our first thing, but we shared, ah.
Speaker 1: We we had a conversation where we we shared our
Speaker 1: love of being good at reading copy, like when you
Speaker 1: have to do ads, there is something that's weirdly satisfying
Speaker 1: about like, oh, I sound like a guy on the radio,
Speaker 1: like doing a good job at reading this and making
Speaker 1: it sound natural and whatever and it's like there's like
Speaker 1: there's isn't that enough is enough that there's there's it
Speaker 1: is a good feeling when you nail an ad read. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, I think I think everyone who does
Speaker 1: a who who who does a job? That like, I
Speaker 1: think it pretty much everyone who has worked. There's a
Speaker 1: joy in professional competence of any time you know you're working.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're like if you're if you're running
Speaker 1: like the cash cashier the grocery store, right when you
Speaker 1: get really good at bagging, like it's this, oh, the
Speaker 1: the the kind of ecstasy of competence, right where you
Speaker 1: can kind of lose yourself in a task, you know,
Speaker 1: and be, like him as good at this thing as
Speaker 1: I can be, even if you don't like the job.
Speaker 1: There's a satisfaction in that. And I think Rush was
Speaker 1: happy in this area doing He wasn't rich, he wasn't influential,
Speaker 1: but he was doing a thing he loved well and
Speaker 1: he was happy in this in the in this period
Speaker 1: in the early seventies, um so his early material in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: It is interesting to me because it's exactly the opposite
Speaker 1: of what you'd expect from him. One of his reoccurring
Speaker 1: bits was the Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the air,
Speaker 1: where he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw
Speaker 1: coming into the station on Sundays. He thought these guys
Speaker 1: were grifters and he hated them. The center of this
Speaker 1: bit was that no matter your problem, God would solve
Speaker 1: it if you'd send the radio preacher a hundred dollars um.
Speaker 1: That's interesting to me, and this is like a real
Speaker 1: like running theme in his early careers. He made fun
Speaker 1: of preachers all the time, of the exact kind of
Speaker 1: religious grifters that later helped make him a wealthy man.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting to me. Um. Yeah, there's also He
Speaker 1: also would read letters from fans h and at one
Speaker 1: point he read a letter that he said was from
Speaker 1: a young woman who wanted to be a DJ and
Speaker 1: was worried that her gender would hold her back. Here's
Speaker 1: what he told her on the air. This is interesting
Speaker 1: to me too. You just have to master two techniques,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to explain them right now. Number one,
Speaker 1: the use of microphone. To use it, simply turn the
Speaker 1: microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second,
Speaker 1: which is the biggie, is queuing up the record, get
Speaker 1: the record you want to play, take it out of
Speaker 1: the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the
Speaker 1: arm in the needle, placed it on the outside editor
Speaker 1: of the record. Then turn the record until you hit
Speaker 1: here the beginning of the record. Back it up a
Speaker 1: quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking,
Speaker 1: the record will start. After you have mastered those two techniques,
Speaker 1: girls change your sex, And you can interpret that a
Speaker 1: couple of ways. That about the man splaining about how
Speaker 1: to turn on a microphone and then he goes, oh, wait,
Speaker 1: you can't do it. Well that that. I think there's
Speaker 1: two ways to interpret this. One of them is what
Speaker 1: you've said, Sovie, that he was just being incredibly sexist.
Speaker 1: One of them is that he might he might have
Speaker 1: been acknowledging anyone could do this job, but you won't
Speaker 1: be able to as a woman because of sexism in
Speaker 1: the industry. And I'm really not sure which one he
Speaker 1: was going for. Their Yeah, could be both. There is
Speaker 1: a kind of lording it over, like you know, this
Speaker 1: is a dumb job, but you're still not allowed to
Speaker 1: do it. You're still not allowed to do it, ladies. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's probably probably accurate. It's probably a bit of
Speaker 1: you know what, all ladies are allowed to do products?
Speaker 1: Is it at Sophie? Is it participate in capitalism as consumers? Yes,
Speaker 1: it is participating. Well, ladies, stick it to Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: by engaging positively with the system. He spent his life
Speaker 1: propping all right, ship. You know I didn't like the
Speaker 1: phrase to stick it to Rush Limbab very much. Neither
Speaker 1: did I, Sophie. There's some mats ah, we're back. We're
Speaker 1: back from those ads. And Paul, I can see the
Speaker 1: glow on your face that only comes upon a man's
Speaker 1: face the first time that he gets to help advertise
Speaker 1: the fine products and surfaces brought to us by the
Speaker 1: people at Raytheon. Are you feeling good Paul about now?
Speaker 1: Now you are inextricably tied to wonderful products like the
Speaker 1: RN I and X knife missile. I Yeah. As a
Speaker 1: boy growing up in Philadelphia, I dreamed of advertising from missiles.
Speaker 1: That's that's what everyone wants to do, right since Caveman
Speaker 1: painted on walls. They dreamed of Raytheon. And now we
Speaker 1: are in the privileged position of getting to sell their products.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't be happier. Here's what sucks. Ray Theon
Speaker 1: is such a cool name, so good. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: this in this ongoing bit I do. I often like
Speaker 1: the RNA and X missile. I think it is made
Speaker 1: by Lockheed Raytheon's chips. I believe in it, to be fair.
Speaker 1: It's just the name Ray Theon. It's such a good,
Speaker 1: shady defense industry. Like it's the name of a company
Speaker 1: that ends the world right, like you're talking about like
Speaker 1: like a you know, they're going to make a sky
Speaker 1: net that kills us all at some point. Their name
Speaker 1: is just too on point to not be Yeah. Um
Speaker 1: so back to back to Limbaugh. Rush was popular in Pittsburgh,
Speaker 1: and his busses appreciated everything but his long windedness. They
Speaker 1: repeatedly sent him memos that stated it shut up and
Speaker 1: play the records, and for a while he was content
Speaker 1: to mostly just do that. But in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: the economy took a nose dive and Rush was fired.
Speaker 1: He had to move back home with his family, where
Speaker 1: he lived for seven miserable months. His dad repeatedly badgered
Speaker 1: him to move on and start a real career, but
Speaker 1: Rush was committed to radio and eventually he landed a
Speaker 1: new gig in Kansas City, where he started taking listener
Speaker 1: phone calls for the first time. This was the dawn
Speaker 1: of the era of insult comedy, a sort of mean
Speaker 1: spirited comedy based on pranks and you know, primarily executed
Speaker 1: by shock jocks. Guy's Body by Howard Stern really who
Speaker 1: entertained via ostentatious cruelty hungry and I don't know if
Speaker 1: I don't know, if you'll if you'll know or not?
Speaker 1: Like talk talk radio, how much of a thing is
Speaker 1: it at this point of people calling into radio stations
Speaker 1: to have conversations with broadcasters. It's starting at this point, right,
Speaker 1: This is really kind of the birth of talk radio,
Speaker 1: and and rushes on the ground floor of that. Right,
Speaker 1: does it does it start with sports or does it
Speaker 1: start with with issues? I think it starts with issues.
Speaker 1: It starts with their Before what we know is talk radio,
Speaker 1: you had had people who would take calls and talk
Speaker 1: about politics, both on TV and on the radio. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that Rush changes to skip ahead
Speaker 1: a little bit is that those guys had mostly been interchangeable, right,
Speaker 1: They were just sort of fielding calls and engaging with
Speaker 1: with callers Rush and that kind of turns into with
Speaker 1: these shock jocks more of kind of a comedy based entertainment.
Speaker 1: You have these pranks, you have insults, you have all
Speaker 1: this stuff. So it kind of it it evolves out
Speaker 1: of a thing that had been going on for much longer. Um.
Speaker 1: It's an extension of the idea of the The original
Speaker 1: idea of the DJ was maybe a personality, but his
Speaker 1: main thrust was I'm giving you this music that you crave,
Speaker 1: and that's why you like me is because I'm gonna
Speaker 1: maybe get I'm gonna maybe get tracks before other people
Speaker 1: get them, and you're gonna hear You're gonna hear this
Speaker 1: stuff first. But there's still a thing of it's not
Speaker 1: about my personality necessarily. It's mainly about I am the
Speaker 1: i I'm I'm, I'm, I'm the Santa clause of music.
Speaker 1: I'm giving you these things and that's why you like me. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I have access to them first and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: So Rush kind of as this, you know, he kind
Speaker 1: of sees the writing on the wall white. He loses
Speaker 1: his gig as a traditional DJ because that is starting
Speaker 1: to become less profitable, right, and there's you know, in general,
Speaker 1: the economies taking a shitter. Um so he he he
Speaker 1: realizes that kind of the way things are going is
Speaker 1: more based around personalities and and comedy and entertaining people,
Speaker 1: and he starts to pivot to that. Um so this
Speaker 1: is uh. There's a well, an interesting quote that Rush
Speaker 1: himself wrote in one of his many interminable books about
Speaker 1: how he felt about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote.
Speaker 1: I found out something about myself, something that was quite disturbing.
Speaker 1: I found out I was really really good at insulting people.
Speaker 1: For example, the topic one day was when you die,
Speaker 1: how do you want to go? I want to go
Speaker 1: the cheapest and most natural way I can. One nice
Speaker 1: lady caller from Independence, Missouri said. My response was easy,
Speaker 1: have your husband throw you in a trash bag and
Speaker 1: then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage.
Speaker 1: When I went home after it, after a day of this,
Speaker 1: I didn't like myself. Is that being I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's being good at insulting people. Yeah, that's not
Speaker 1: really so, that's just that's just ready to insult people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is, though. One of the things people will state
Speaker 1: and I can't categorically say this, but it seems accurate
Speaker 1: based on my recollections of the show. Is even when
Speaker 1: people would disagree with Rush on the air, he wasn't
Speaker 1: an asshole to them, Like he was not cruel to
Speaker 1: to his callers to their faces. Right, he would say
Speaker 1: cruel things about liberals, but when people would call in,
Speaker 1: he would not like call them monsters. He would not
Speaker 1: like he he seems who have genuinely not liked insulting
Speaker 1: people to their faces or at least over like directly
Speaker 1: insulting people over over the phone or whatever. Um. While
Speaker 1: he was disturbed by this, he was not disturbed by racism,
Speaker 1: mainly racism against black people. Yeah, yeah, here's where we're going. Um.
Speaker 1: At one point during his call in show, he claimed
Speaker 1: he had a black collar, and he came claimed to
Speaker 1: not be able to understand the man's accent. Limbaugh hung
Speaker 1: up on this black man after saying, take that bone
Speaker 1: out of your nose and call me back, Which is
Speaker 1: I mean? He says it was, Well, we'll get to that.
Speaker 1: At another point, he asked his audience, have you ever
Speaker 1: noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? UM? Now,
Speaker 1: during a nineteen interview, after he had kind of risen
Speaker 1: to political prominence, Newsweek asked Limbaugh if he thought these
Speaker 1: statements had been racist. He replied, you may interpret it
Speaker 1: as that, but I know, honest to God, that's not
Speaker 1: how I intended it at all. Gee, don't get me
Speaker 1: on in this one. I am the least racist host
Speaker 1: you'll ever find. Now, if we're going to try to
Speaker 1: analyze Rush from the length of his career, I think
Speaker 1: we can say two things. He's probably being honest when
Speaker 1: he said that he felt bad about insulting colors because
Speaker 1: he did not continue to do that. He is probably
Speaker 1: being dishonest when he says that he's not racist, because
Speaker 1: he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things about black
Speaker 1: people consistently throughout his entire career. Yeah. I mean, the
Speaker 1: the the number one indication that someone is racist when
Speaker 1: they say that the least racist I has that ever
Speaker 1: been said by him by a non racist person. Usually
Speaker 1: with somebody, it's always got to be. It's always gotta be.
Speaker 1: Not only am I not racist, I am the least
Speaker 1: racist person you're ever gonna meet. It's like you don't
Speaker 1: maybe don't go that far. Because it's so easily disproved,
Speaker 1: also followed by the I don't see color people, I
Speaker 1: don't see color. I would say I think most of
Speaker 1: the people I think I don't see color. People tend
Speaker 1: to be performative Obama voters, the I am the least
Speaker 1: racist person in the world. People tend to have strong
Speaker 1: opinions on why they should be able to say the
Speaker 1: N word, like that would be the split between the
Speaker 1: right and the left version. Yeah yeah, and both of
Speaker 1: you are fucking racist, so shut up. Yes, yes, she's
Speaker 1: she's found out about our opinions on Lichtenstein, which I
Speaker 1: refused to apologize for. In the fucking Swedes, my god,
Speaker 1: the sweet yeah you do have is shoes with the Swedes.
Speaker 1: I have huge issue particularly blue sweet. Um, what did
Speaker 1: uga chackamin? Why did you say that at the start
Speaker 1: of that song? Okay? Sorry? Rush was Rush was still,
Speaker 1: at this point in his career, completely a political His
Speaker 1: roommate and close friend at the time later told an
Speaker 1: interviewer he was scary smart about everything, but I can't
Speaker 1: recall us take talking much about current events. He was funny, though.
Speaker 1: I was an audience of one uh Limbaugh's years in
Speaker 1: Kansas City were not super successful, and he seems to
Speaker 1: have recalled them somewhat sourly. As The New York Times summarized,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh likes to say, everything I did in Kansas City,
Speaker 1: I failed at He got fired from the station and
Speaker 1: quit radio forever to become an executive with the Kansas
Speaker 1: City Royals baseball team. Five years later, he quit the
Speaker 1: Royals convinced his career there was stymied, and went back
Speaker 1: to radio, this time as a news commentator. Again, he
Speaker 1: got fired for being too controversial. Also in Kansas City,
Speaker 1: he married twice, both marriages eventually ending in divorce. What
Speaker 1: are the do we know what the sources of the
Speaker 1: what the what the type of controversies? Yes, we're about
Speaker 1: to get into that. Okay, yeah, we're about to get
Speaker 1: into come on. So it was in Kansas City where
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator, made his first public appearance after
Speaker 1: getting pushed out of the Royals. No one really liked
Speaker 1: him there. He had one friend who was on the
Speaker 1: team and that's why he to keep the job. And
Speaker 1: when that guy got traded, they pushed him out because
Speaker 1: they all hated him. Um So, after getting pushed out
Speaker 1: of the Royals. He got a gig at k m
Speaker 1: b Z, a local station. He started satirizing what he
Speaker 1: considered to be a left wing caricature of a right
Speaker 1: wing political commentator. Right the initial right wing rush. Limbaugh
Speaker 1: was satire um, and he was being purposefully controversial and
Speaker 1: unreasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point. This
Speaker 1: was a joke. Initially this did not go over well
Speaker 1: with his middle of the road Mormon station manager, but
Speaker 1: it made Limball popular with his audience. See, Limbaugh had
Speaker 1: caught onto the fact that radio was in the middle
Speaker 1: of a revolution. This was the era where the first
Speaker 1: big shock jocks, men like Don Imus and Howard Stern,
Speaker 1: began their a sense to start them. I found a
Speaker 1: wonderful write up about this era on long Reads which
Speaker 1: argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk
Speaker 1: radio star named Joel Pine in the nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from this now. We might do an
Speaker 1: episode on Pine at some point. His unconventional style, dressed
Speaker 1: up to dress down pinko's and women's libbers and riff
Speaker 1: on rather than read reports, was neither news nor entertainment.
Speaker 1: It seemed to be best described well The New York
Speaker 1: Times and Time both did Anyway as an electronic peep show.
Speaker 1: The personality free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite
Speaker 1: the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest,
Speaker 1: but Pine, with a syndicated show on more than two
Speaker 1: radio outlets, was the most machiavellian when it comes to
Speaker 1: manipulating media Icons of Talk author Donna Holper told Smithsonian
Speaker 1: Magazine he was the father of them all. Pine briefly
Speaker 1: descended from his soapbox in the mid sixties for a
Speaker 1: week's vacation after bringing a gun to his show during
Speaker 1: the Watts Riots, suggesting the world wasn't quite ready for
Speaker 1: his kind of conservative appeal. So Pine is doing the
Speaker 1: Rush limbob bit in the fifties and early sixties, but
Speaker 1: America is not ready for that yet. Right, he can
Speaker 1: get even fifties Americans like this guy's racist into like
Speaker 1: and a fucking lunatic. Yeah. So, now, just so I
Speaker 1: understand Rush's this satire that he was doing. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea was here is what uh left wing people think
Speaker 1: right wing people are like? And yeah, the point he
Speaker 1: is trying to make is they see us as they
Speaker 1: see the left wing sees the right wing as uh,
Speaker 1: extreme and hateful and um, you know, racist and closed minded, Like,
Speaker 1: is that is that the point I was trying to make.
Speaker 1: I think so, because he he he even says like
Speaker 1: it was a satire right Like, That's how it's portrayed
Speaker 1: in his biography that he was kind of his personality
Speaker 1: was satiric in nature. Um and and that's kind of
Speaker 1: the only way I can interpret it is that he
Speaker 1: was trying to satirize what like kind of the loony
Speaker 1: right winger, you know, but through the through the lens
Speaker 1: of here's how the left sees them. I that's that
Speaker 1: was never said direct Yeah, it sounds like it's a
Speaker 1: it's a protective phrase of like, I was not satirizing
Speaker 1: these guys directly. I was not satirizing right wing people.
Speaker 1: I was satirizing how left wing people see right wing. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is how I have interpreted what I've read. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: yeah that does sound like a base covering kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it a bit. I I do think he started not
Speaker 1: believing everything he said. It started as a joke and
Speaker 1: him intentionally to provoke controversy, because controversy brings in listeners
Speaker 1: and gets gets attention, gets word of mouth. That's why
Speaker 1: he was doing it. And the story of Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: is these these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes
Speaker 1: what he really believes and is you know, so he's
Speaker 1: he's an a political guy who's like this is what
Speaker 1: this is, what this is what politics sounds like to me.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, I think so, and I yeah that
Speaker 1: that's how I interpreted. Well, we'll go we'll go over
Speaker 1: that more so. Obviously, Pine kind of the fur right
Speaker 1: wing radio shock jock had peaked too early and kind
Speaker 1: of I guess to steal a phrase from the Nazis
Speaker 1: shown his power level to early during the Watts Riots,
Speaker 1: and he got kicked off the air. Rush, though, started
Speaker 1: getting political at exactly the perfect time. This was the
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties. Howard Stern came onto the scene in
Speaker 1: eight four. Don Imus had risen to prominence in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. I Miss was another guy my dad listened
Speaker 1: to a lot growing up. Um, I Miss in the
Speaker 1: morning was like a big part of getting ready for school.
Speaker 1: Don Imus is going to be in the fucking TV
Speaker 1: and you were like, this guy's having so much fun
Speaker 1: and I have to go to prison. I have to
Speaker 1: go to prison. This guy's having fun. He's talking about
Speaker 1: nappy headed hose, which was like the phrase that he
Speaker 1: I forget what it was in reference to, but like
Speaker 1: that's what got him in trouble. Um. It was a
Speaker 1: women's basketball too. It was a women's basketball team because
Speaker 1: don Imus was also very rasist um. So yeah, the
Speaker 1: world was still not quite ready for the rush Limball.
Speaker 1: We knew uh during while he was like starting to
Speaker 1: be political at k m b Z, but a diet
Speaker 1: version of what he would become was now acceptable. And
Speaker 1: one man who recognized the potential of limbosh Stick was
Speaker 1: Norm Woodruff, a consultant to the station who became the
Speaker 1: acting program director at Sacramento's k f b K network.
Speaker 1: Kf b K needed a new right wing talk radio
Speaker 1: host after firing their previous one, a guy you mentioned
Speaker 1: at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Jr.
Speaker 1: Morton was extremely popular and he was very extreme in
Speaker 1: his antics. This had allowed his local station in Sacramento
Speaker 1: to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully
Speaker 1: controversial things. This did backfire on Morton Eventually, when he
Speaker 1: told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which
Speaker 1: was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman
Speaker 1: named Tom Chen, Downey Jr. Was fired and went into
Speaker 1: the world of television, where he would somehow say simultaneously
Speaker 1: blaze a trail for both Tucker Carlson and Jerry Springer.
Speaker 1: We will do an episode on him someday because he's
Speaker 1: a very um but his for today he matters because
Speaker 1: his firing number one, his success proved that being a
Speaker 1: purposefully controversial right wing bigot was really profitable for radio station,
Speaker 1: and because when he got fired, Sacramento had a hole
Speaker 1: in the station's roster that they needed to fill with
Speaker 1: another racist right wing shiphead, just one who was not
Speaker 1: quite as racist as Morton Downey Jr. Rush limboss stepped
Speaker 1: up and said, not being quite as racist as that
Speaker 1: guy is my middle name for now, for now, Eventually
Speaker 1: I will be much worse. So Rush Limbaugh moved to Sacramento.
Speaker 1: When he started at the station, his new boss Would
Speaker 1: Ruff told him, we want controversy, but don't make it up.
Speaker 1: If you actually think something, if you actually believe it,
Speaker 1: you can tell people why. We'll back you up. But
Speaker 1: if you're going to say stuff just to make people mad,
Speaker 1: if all you want to do is rabble rouse, if
Speaker 1: all you want to do is a find and get noticed,
Speaker 1: that's not what we interested in, and we won't back
Speaker 1: you up. He was clearly lying. I think this was
Speaker 1: asked covering by the station, right, Yeah, but they would
Speaker 1: never would never ever push back on his bigotry. But
Speaker 1: you know who does push back on bigotry. Paul adds
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast. So we're back. Uh.
Speaker 1: And at this point, Rush Limbaugh has launched himself as
Speaker 1: a a right wing shock jock, and he is an
Speaker 1: instant hit zeve Chaffit's rights quote. The station let him
Speaker 1: go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests,
Speaker 1: and encouraged his highly personal right wing monologues. For the
Speaker 1: first time in his career, he was marketed heavily and aggressively.
Speaker 1: There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a
Speaker 1: button captioned how would you like to punch Rush Limbaugh?
Speaker 1: Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian
Speaker 1: a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. Had been a big star
Speaker 1: in Sacramento with a five share of the market five
Speaker 1: percent of people listening to the radio in a given
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes segment. Limbaugh tripled that he was sharp edged
Speaker 1: but good humored. The new morning host espouses many of
Speaker 1: the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr. Reported
Speaker 1: the Sacramento b but he skates a little further from
Speaker 1: the edge of the hole in the ice. Rush was
Speaker 1: rewarded for his success with a six figure salary, an
Speaker 1: estimable income in the mid nineteen eighties, even by his
Speaker 1: father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life,
Speaker 1: he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches just
Speaker 1: like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television
Speaker 1: and wrote newspaper collumps. Politicians and celebrities sought him out.
Speaker 1: He and Michelle, his wife at the time, bought a
Speaker 1: new house and furnished it with products he had he
Speaker 1: endorsed on air. So he's a hit. You know, this
Speaker 1: is the start of and it's really just almost straight
Speaker 1: up from there for the rest of his career. He
Speaker 1: finds his niche and he runs with it again. He's
Speaker 1: he's a very intelligent, talented man. Anybody else will find
Speaker 1: the big ru part really funny. It is very funny.
Speaker 1: It's very funny. It's still funny now. I have long
Speaker 1: argued that Sacramento is the very mouth of Hell itself,
Speaker 1: and the fact that Russia Limbaugh first saw success as
Speaker 1: a right wing firebrand there serves to support my hypothesis. Again,
Speaker 1: his conscious decision as an entertainer was to be a
Speaker 1: satirical version of a right wing polemicist, deliberately exaggerating the
Speaker 1: things he did believe for comedic effect. The audience thought
Speaker 1: he was funny, but I don't think they got the joke.
Speaker 1: And there is some evidence for this, when an Ohio
Speaker 1: evangelist a lot of evidence. Yeah, so I think the
Speaker 1: earliest evidence for this, I should say, is when an
Speaker 1: Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the theme song from Mr.
Speaker 1: Ed held a Satanic message when played backwards. You know,
Speaker 1: we're kind of talking about the Satanic Panic period during
Speaker 1: this Rush found this ridiculous, and again, he had a
Speaker 1: long history of mocking the evangelical religious right, so when
Speaker 1: he heard this, he told his listeners that a Slim
Speaker 1: Whitman recording also contained a backwards message of from satan
Speaker 1: Zeve Chaffitz writes that to his delight, many Limbaugh listeners
Speaker 1: took Limbaugh at his word and flooded the station with
Speaker 1: phone calls promising to destroy their Slim Whitman albums to
Speaker 1: keep the Devil out of the house. Rush considered this
Speaker 1: a hilarious plank, prank. He did not apologize or as
Speaker 1: far as I know, correct the record. So we see
Speaker 1: in this he's joking, right, he is not. Again, his
Speaker 1: whole history is mocking these people. He does not believe this,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't correct people because it gets he realizes, Oh,
Speaker 1: they're engaged, they're destroying stuff. That means I have power, right.
Speaker 1: I think he even found it kind of. It might
Speaker 1: have been something that kind of addicted him to this,
Speaker 1: This idea that like I can make even if I'm
Speaker 1: deliberately being absurd and lying, I can make people take
Speaker 1: action based on those absurdities. That's got to be addictive,
Speaker 1: and I think it is for him, is absolutely undeniable,
Speaker 1: and especially like if you spend time on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: if you've ever been like I have on occasion, deliberately
Speaker 1: stupid on Twitter and gotten sincere replies to something that
Speaker 1: is so obviously a joke, So obviously a joke. It
Speaker 1: absolutely is fun. There's nowhere around that. There's nowhere around
Speaker 1: that seeing people take you at your word when you
Speaker 1: say something that's so patently absurd is it's joyful. It
Speaker 1: does give you a real jolt, And there's a This
Speaker 1: is a bit of a different case, but I think
Speaker 1: there's some similarity. So last summer, you know, I was
Speaker 1: covering a lot of the protests in Portland, Oregon, including
Speaker 1: doing a lot of live streaming, and very early on,
Speaker 1: the police put a fence up around the police station
Speaker 1: and there would be marches where like a couple of
Speaker 1: thousand people would march to the fence and somebody would
Speaker 1: like touch the fence and the police would tear gas
Speaker 1: like six square blocks of traffic. And I started calling
Speaker 1: it the sacred Fence, and the joke, like the comment
Speaker 1: that I was making is that the police are endangering
Speaker 1: the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a a
Speaker 1: fence because it's sacred to them, right. That went viral
Speaker 1: within the city and there were dozens of protests at
Speaker 1: the sacred Fence, as everyone called it, including numerous attempts
Speaker 1: to tear it down and I know that the way
Speaker 1: that I framed it had a significant impact on a
Speaker 1: lot of people, um, Getting hurt, damaging, defense, getting arrested. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it it was both kind of intoxicating and it
Speaker 1: also scared the hell out of me. It was one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why I pulled back to some extent
Speaker 1: on some aspects of my coverage because I got really
Speaker 1: worried about the kind of impact that you can have
Speaker 1: on people by doing that sort of thing. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to be It was very concerning to me. But
Speaker 1: it was also I'd be lying if I said there
Speaker 1: wasn't an element of it that I wanted to do
Speaker 1: more stuff like that. And I didn't, but I wanted to,
Speaker 1: you know. But and that's that that is the key,
Speaker 1: the key difference of uh, you know you seeing something that, um,
Speaker 1: catch just catch, just fire in a forgive the phrasing,
Speaker 1: but catch fire in a in a charge situation. Um.
Speaker 1: And how easily people can glom onto something when everything
Speaker 1: is so churned up. UM, And then realizing like, oh,
Speaker 1: words have power, I have to be careful rather than
Speaker 1: words have power. Here we go, here we go, Let's
Speaker 1: use it to sell gold. Uh. So Russia's domestic life
Speaker 1: while he's enduring all this professional success. His domestic life
Speaker 1: life with his I think she was his second I
Speaker 1: think she was his third wife. Actually, um, I don't know.
Speaker 1: He had a couple. He had a lot of wives.
Speaker 1: I think actually, no, this was his second wife. His
Speaker 1: domestic wife life with his second life at this period
Speaker 1: was less than joyful. He was famous and popular, constantly
Speaker 1: fitted for dinners and invited to big events. And his wife,
Speaker 1: Michelle was much less successful. Um. She quit her job
Speaker 1: to be as assistant, but she hated the work. It's
Speaker 1: a nightmare that they were not a good it. Michelle
Speaker 1: loved the outdoors. Rush Limbaugh despise them. Um. Two of
Speaker 1: his colleagues tell a story from around this time of
Speaker 1: how they convinced him to go rafting once that I
Speaker 1: think is telling about Russia Limball's personality. So this is
Speaker 1: one of Russia's friends talking about at the time they
Speaker 1: took Rush Limbaugh on a on a rafting trip in
Speaker 1: whatever river it is that goes through Sacramento. Quote, it's
Speaker 1: a very very mild ride. Bob gave Russian oar and
Speaker 1: told him to abide. You're gonna really love this if
Speaker 1: you have to know before I start the story, you
Speaker 1: have to know we're on a Yeah, Bob gave Russian
Speaker 1: oar and told him to absorb the blow of the
Speaker 1: canyon wall to give us a little spring back into
Speaker 1: the current. Rush Panicked stuck the oar out his arms
Speaker 1: stiff as a board, and upon impact he fell overboard.
Speaker 1: We got rushed back in the raft and the next
Speaker 1: day he spent the entire three hours of his show
Speaker 1: talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the Grim Reaper.
Speaker 1: What a fucking baby. I've had people fucking shoot at me,
Speaker 1: and I've people showed me with artillery. I've never spent
Speaker 1: three hours talking about it, le fucking baby. Uh So,
Speaker 1: Sacramento is where Limbos started picking up what would become
Speaker 1: a voluminous list of mostly self inflicted nicknames. He was
Speaker 1: l Rushbo, the all knowing, all caring, all sense of
Speaker 1: sensing Maha Rushie. He was also a harmless little fuzzball
Speaker 1: and the epitome of morality and virtue. He started claiming
Speaker 1: that his show was hosted by the E I B
Speaker 1: or Excellence in Broadcasting Network, which did not exist. This
Speaker 1: joke mainly served as a vehicle for Rush to express
Speaker 1: his grandiosity, he declared himself on the cutting edge edge
Speaker 1: of societal evolution, swore that he was serving humanity, and
Speaker 1: had himself introduced as having talent on loan from God.
Speaker 1: His opinions were quote dot meanted to be almost always
Speaker 1: right nineties seven point nine percent of the time by
Speaker 1: the Sullivan Group, which also did not exist. And again
Speaker 1: he's joking. And also at a certain point he starts
Speaker 1: meaning all of this very literally, right, Like that's kind
Speaker 1: of how narcissists were. So it may surprise people to
Speaker 1: know that Russia to hear that Russi Lumba's career was
Speaker 1: launched into the stratosphere in Sacramento, because California is, to
Speaker 1: most people outside of California at least, a bastion of
Speaker 1: liberal politics. Now, if you actually live and spend time
Speaker 1: in the state, you know, like, for example, if you've
Speaker 1: ever been to fucking uh, I don't know, what is
Speaker 1: that uh, Orange County right where if you've been up
Speaker 1: near Reading there's a ship. Look like, there are more
Speaker 1: right wing Californians than there are right wingers than there
Speaker 1: are in like a number of US states. Right Like,
Speaker 1: California has a ton of right wingers, and it has
Speaker 1: a long powerful conservative political tradition. California gave us Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: It gave us Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in one of
Speaker 1: the most surreal turns and political history, is now among
Speaker 1: the only rational voices on the right in the United States.
Speaker 1: Um so, yeah, California has a powerful right wing and
Speaker 1: yes they are, especially in the last twenty something years,
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists. But
Speaker 1: in this fact is one of the hints to Russia
Speaker 1: Limballs rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north
Speaker 1: of the center of California, not far from some of
Speaker 1: the most productive farmland in the country. It is also
Speaker 1: not far from north central California places like Reading, which
Speaker 1: are right wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these
Speaker 1: areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs, and
Speaker 1: that's partly a response to the liberal and left wing
Speaker 1: like government that they live under. They see and this
Speaker 1: is not they are not entirely or even largely wrong
Speaker 1: in seeing this. They see themselves oppressed by many of
Speaker 1: the rules liberals in the cities put in terms of
Speaker 1: things like gas taxes, right you're living in if you're
Speaker 1: a farmer, you know in central or northern California. A
Speaker 1: gas tax that is reasonable for people in l A,
Speaker 1: San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento is a a hardship on you,
Speaker 1: and you're not contributing to the kind of pollution in
Speaker 1: the cities that the gas taxes are meant to fight.
Speaker 1: You know, the strict gun laws and stuff. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of things reasons these people have to be angry,
Speaker 1: and Rush Limbaugh became their voice. Um so these these
Speaker 1: this kind of infuriated very radical right wing who hates
Speaker 1: the liberals and left that governed California have a voice
Speaker 1: in Rush Limbaugh. He obliges their sensibilities with a ceaseless
Speaker 1: stream of attacks on liberal California. And that's what makes
Speaker 1: him huge is because there's millions of right wingers in
Speaker 1: California and Rush limbab becomes like, yeah, he's their voice.
Speaker 1: You know, um you could you might even be able
Speaker 1: to argue that nowhere but California could have produced Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh as he became uh yeah, so I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from the book Rush Limbaugh an army of one here
Speaker 1: he mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to
Speaker 1: keep uglow Americans off the streets. Militant feminists became feminazis.
Speaker 1: The green movement was full of environmental wackos. The American
Speaker 1: left became comie Pinko. Liberals and the residents of Rio Linda, California,
Speaker 1: were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing Debtalate Detalate. Detalate introduced
Speaker 1: news updates on what he regarded as the absurdities of
Speaker 1: liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring.
Speaker 1: When they attacked him as a dim wit, he responded
Speaker 1: by claiming that he was so much smarter than his
Speaker 1: critics that he could vanquish them with half my brain
Speaker 1: tied behind my back. Just to make it fair. Before long,
Speaker 1: Rush was too big to stay in Sacramento, which is
Speaker 1: again the very mouth of Hell itself. He was introduced
Speaker 1: to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio who
Speaker 1: had started his own big radio company based out of
Speaker 1: New York City. McLaughlin had listened to Russia's show and
Speaker 1: decided it had the potential to go national. He offered
Speaker 1: Russia partnership, and after some haggling, Russia agreed, He moved
Speaker 1: to New York and made the E. I B Network
Speaker 1: a reality. Rush was thirty seven years old at this point,
Speaker 1: in twenty one years into a career of doing almost
Speaker 1: nothing but broadcasting on the radio. Again, the voice of
Speaker 1: the so called populoust American right. Never did anything but radio,
Speaker 1: really um In nineteen eight he launched a new version
Speaker 1: of The Rush Limbaugh Show, this time for an audience
Speaker 1: across the nation. It's sort of hard to find his
Speaker 1: stuff from the late nineteen eighties, but I found this
Speaker 1: guest appearance he did not long after in nineteen on
Speaker 1: another colleague show for the same network. It gives you
Speaker 1: an idea of where his radio personality was by this point,
Speaker 1: and of how he presented himself right, of how he
Speaker 1: kind of introduced himself anytime he was coming on the air.
Speaker 1: So that's that's we're gonna play this now. This is
Speaker 1: kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh. We all know, uh,
Speaker 1: we all know now one of radios and great broadcasters,
Speaker 1: and he's with us today in this studio. We invited
Speaker 1: Rush thrill. It's my time. You know. I smoked a
Speaker 1: little dope to get ready for this in here and
Speaker 1: I'm ready to go, man to time. One brain behind you,
Speaker 1: half my brain tied behind my back. Just to make
Speaker 1: it fair, well, I'll tell you one thing. I use
Speaker 1: my talents on loan from God. Man. I heard you
Speaker 1: get a little loan from ABC Catas when you renegotiating
Speaker 1: a new contract. No, I loaned Limb some money and
Speaker 1: I brought you a gift Los Angeles Times. Great, they
Speaker 1: were saying, well, I wowed him there, didn't as nice?
Speaker 1: Have a big article on how you flopped in the
Speaker 1: New York Times six minutes before nine. It's like you
Speaker 1: started out with just as like a small group of
Speaker 1: stations on your start with fifty six and our three
Speaker 1: and thirty seven, with the weekly audience about six and
Speaker 1: a half million, an average quarter r of a million.
Speaker 1: Seven must listen to radio talk show in America. Universe.
Speaker 1: That's that's Rush Limbaugh at kind of when he goes
Speaker 1: viral to them. What do you think about that? About
Speaker 1: that how he presents himself on here, What does that
Speaker 1: say to you? It's so um, it's so the the
Speaker 1: fully formed version of him that that I first experienced,
Speaker 1: and like he's really going for it, like he's really
Speaker 1: he's really uh, like he's so aggressive in it and
Speaker 1: and like saying I'm gonna come Like clearly the the
Speaker 1: intention is I'm gonna come on your show and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take it over, and I'm gonna I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: the the the the I'm gonna be the alpha here.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna dominate you, um with this. The the l
Speaker 1: A the present presentation of The l A Times is
Speaker 1: because why that guy got fired from the l A Times. No.
Speaker 1: I think he'd been in Los Angeles and they savaged
Speaker 1: him in a review. Okay, so it's it's um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's that Frankly, it's like it's all the ship that
Speaker 1: I hate. Yeah, it's it's so, it's it's aggressive, it's mean,
Speaker 1: it's um, you know, it's he's also correcting him on
Speaker 1: one of his you know, uh eight catch phrases. You
Speaker 1: know you have to get a ride. I say it
Speaker 1: like this every time. This is the way it goes. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just, uh, it's a drag. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's a drag. It's also I think there's a thing
Speaker 1: that he's doing here. When we talk about all these phrases,
Speaker 1: half my brain tied behind my back. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: the god, all these different phrases that were that he
Speaker 1: continuously used for decades. I I don't want to. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I hope this doesn't seem a little pompous,
Speaker 1: but I kind of make a comparison between that and
Speaker 1: like the Iliad and the Odyssey. Right, this like the
Speaker 1: way that anytime you've got home or introducing it's always
Speaker 1: like you know, the there's certain phrases. Anytime Achilles comes up,
Speaker 1: he uses the same kind of phrases, same couple of
Speaker 1: phrases to introduce him. These descriptive phrases, um to introduce
Speaker 1: a character that are repeated constantly throughout the because it's
Speaker 1: a because it was a spoken story, right, Like that's
Speaker 1: where you're supposed to deliver it. That works. It gets
Speaker 1: in people's heads. They associate those phrases with those characters.
Speaker 1: Russia is kind of doing. This is an old tactic,
Speaker 1: but it works. Um. It's the same thing Trump does
Speaker 1: with his impulse and insults Crooked Hillary, right, sleepy Joe. Um.
Speaker 1: These are effective tactics, and that's what Russia is doing
Speaker 1: to to inculcate his followers, primarily with this idea that
Speaker 1: he is a genius, right, and it again he's joking,
Speaker 1: but he's also not because this ship buries itself in
Speaker 1: your brain. Um, he's he's he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: It's he's a very savvy person. Yeah, it's like when
Speaker 1: you when you people like that that that understand the
Speaker 1: importance of branding over having an actual thing to say.
Speaker 1: Like it honestly, the the what you what the content
Speaker 1: is secondary to the presentation of here's who I am.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you through repetition, this is my
Speaker 1: whole thing. It's like they're they're you know, comics. That
Speaker 1: to me, it always makes me think of comedians that
Speaker 1: um majored in marketing in college. And then it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: but are they actually that funny or did they just
Speaker 1: are they able to really sell themselves so well that
Speaker 1: that the content is secondary to the image. You have
Speaker 1: two kinds of people who really are able to build
Speaker 1: a following. People who are able to build a following
Speaker 1: because folks genuinely just enjoy that the work that they're
Speaker 1: bringing into the world, they like their personality, they like
Speaker 1: what they're doing. And then you have folks who are
Speaker 1: able to build a following primarily because they do cult leadership. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's what the marketing comedians, right, that's what
Speaker 1: this is cult leadership. This is how you do it. Um.
Speaker 1: We do a little bit of that here. Um. But
Speaker 1: we're all guilty a little We're all guilty a little bit.
Speaker 1: And I'll be guiltier when I get I don't know,
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred people killed by the FDA in
Speaker 1: my mountain top compounds, which I you know is always
Speaker 1: the goal. Paul, You're very welcome if you would like
Speaker 1: to have an armed standoff with thes How you know
Speaker 1: you're successful. That's how you know you're successful when a
Speaker 1: three letter agency burns you down. By anyway, I don't
Speaker 1: need to Waco this time, UM want to that's a
Speaker 1: good one. Yeah, Well I took an almost an hour
Speaker 1: to Wanny for Robert to mention Waco, good job. I'm
Speaker 1: getting you know, I I realized I was wacoing a lot,
Speaker 1: trying to cut back. You know, here is first wake up.
Speaker 1: But we'll we'll talk off air, Paul about synergizing our
Speaker 1: cults in the near future. Anyway, So Rush did not
Speaker 1: tone himself down at all after he went mainstream. In fact,
Speaker 1: he grew more extreme, and he seems to have quickly
Speaker 1: forgotten that he was ever practicing satire. At the very
Speaker 1: height of the AIDS crisis, rush launched a new segment
Speaker 1: on his show, the AIDS Update. And I find it
Speaker 1: interesting how different sources report on this. When Limbaugh died,
Speaker 1: it was obviously a big story, the fact that he'd
Speaker 1: done this AIDS update. Uh. And it was in fact,
Speaker 1: limbaugh AIDS Update was like the second or third most
Speaker 1: googled term alongside his name the day he died. Snopes
Speaker 1: and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story.
Speaker 1: But Zeep Chaffitz's biography of Limbaugh came out well before
Speaker 1: Rusha's death, and before the AIDS up dates were really
Speaker 1: talked about all that much outside of, you know, the
Speaker 1: community they most impacted, uh and not. I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting how Zev wrote about it, not knowing that this
Speaker 1: was one going, one day, going to become a significant story.
Speaker 1: So this is how Zev wrote about the AIDS Update.
Speaker 1: After an ACT UP demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral in
Speaker 1: New York City that disrupted a mass, Limbaugh chastised militant
Speaker 1: homosexuals for their disrespectful behavior, and shortly thereafter began broadcasting
Speaker 1: irreverend and tasteless AIDS update segments produced introduced by Dion
Speaker 1: Warwick's I'll Never Love This Way Again in his traveling
Speaker 1: stage show The Excellence and Broadcasting Tour. He did a
Speaker 1: bit when he put a condemn over the microphone to
Speaker 1: illustrate safe speech. So that's how the AIDS update was
Speaker 1: kind of framed by Zev before it was a big story.
Speaker 1: Now here's how Snop's characterized it in their fact check
Speaker 1: after Limbaugh died. And I think and before that, like
Speaker 1: already that doesn't sound good that. No, I don't think
Speaker 1: zev is trying to whitewash it. I think that he
Speaker 1: just doesn't see it story even just plainly stated that
Speaker 1: it's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible, and it sounds worse when
Speaker 1: Snopes goes into more detail on this quote. At the
Speaker 1: height of the HIV AIDS crisis, The Rush Limbaugh Show
Speaker 1: featured an AIDS update in which Limbaugh joked about an
Speaker 1: epidemic that had claimed more than a hundred thousand lives
Speaker 1: between nineteen one and nineteen ninety. Specifically, Limbaugh targeted gay
Speaker 1: men who had died. In addition to joking about their deaths,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment, including kiss Him Goodbye,
Speaker 1: I'll Never Love This Way Again, and Looking for Love
Speaker 1: and All the Wrong Places. Snopes dot Com uncovered an
Speaker 1: interview when The Cedar Gazette from nineteen ninety in which
Speaker 1: Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon
Speaker 1: my reaction to what I considered to be extremism in
Speaker 1: the political mainstream by a group of people. Per The
Speaker 1: Cedar Gazette, Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims,
Speaker 1: but militant homosexuals who blamed church and government officials for
Speaker 1: the epidemic. The AIDS update is meant to offend them,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh said, damn right. According to a nineteen nine Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Times article, it was a popular segment, but it
Speaker 1: also created outrage among AIDS activists, something not helped by
Speaker 1: Limbaugh repeat reportedly saying gays deserved their fate. Mocking the
Speaker 1: horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get
Speaker 1: a conservative radio host fired today, So obviously this was
Speaker 1: never more than a mild bump in Limbo's career. Back
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety and it says a lot about where
Speaker 1: the right would go that a segment dedicated to mocking
Speaker 1: joyfully the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular,
Speaker 1: right that would become the mainstream for Republicans. Now, in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety, it was still a thing he had to
Speaker 1: apologize for. Uh. And that year is the year he
Speaker 1: became officially famous. Nineteen ninety. He had his first live
Speaker 1: TV appearance on June two, when c SPAN did a
Speaker 1: special on talk radio. Um and yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: like he he does kind of have to sort of
Speaker 1: say that he regretted uh doing this, that he felt
Speaker 1: like he was kind of attacking people who um um
Speaker 1: like he he was like, I didn't mean to be
Speaker 1: mocking people who had died. I was trying to attack
Speaker 1: these militant activists and so I stopped. Yeah, who are
Speaker 1: so far are still alive? Yeah? Um? Anyway, that so
Speaker 1: he does a TV appearance on c SPAN in nineteen
Speaker 1: nine on June second, which is kind of his first
Speaker 1: big TV appearance. Um. And then The New York Times
Speaker 1: is a big profile on him. Uh. From that quote,
Speaker 1: with its characteristic attention to production values, the network simply
Speaker 1: set up a camera inside a spare w a b
Speaker 1: C seventy seven studio in New York and let the
Speaker 1: self proclaimed most dangerous man in America roll cut to
Speaker 1: a shlub in a cheap white dress, shirt, black tie
Speaker 1: and hastily barber shopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat
Speaker 1: and grumbling about the TV lights planted behind his desk,
Speaker 1: and Mike interrupting the station's young newscaster, Kathleen Mahoney. She's
Speaker 1: trying to do her five minute top of the Hour
Speaker 1: update oddly for nineteen ninety while wearing a mask because,
Speaker 1: as she explains, the host had warned her, it could
Speaker 1: be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on TV
Speaker 1: as a liberal feminist. He was only joking. Limbaugh insists,
Speaker 1: you said wear a bag over my head. Maloney says.
Speaker 1: Limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off, complimenting her
Speaker 1: beauty and interjecting impatiently, the news just holds up everything here.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make the news worthwhile. There's a lot
Speaker 1: in there. Jesus, that's his that's a New York Times
Speaker 1: important a Span appearance. Yeah, he's like both saying you
Speaker 1: should cover your face because my listeners will harass you
Speaker 1: for being a liberal feminist and also take off that
Speaker 1: mask let everyone see your pretty face. Like he's simultaneously
Speaker 1: both threatening her and um and sexually harassing her. It's
Speaker 1: it's good. It seems there's something about that that seems
Speaker 1: so modern. What mean? Yes, I feel that he's because
Speaker 1: he brought, he created the right, you know, so you
Speaker 1: can see it, you know, in nineteen that's what he's doing. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, As I said, also when The Gray Lady
Speaker 1: published their first full feature dedicated to l. Rush Bow.
Speaker 1: The article is fascinating and valuable since it seems like
Speaker 1: few copies of his early nineteen two episodes exist, So
Speaker 1: this New York Times right. It provides with several fascinating
Speaker 1: insights into how Russia's show evolved during this period, and
Speaker 1: more to the point, into where American conservatism was about
Speaker 1: to follow in his wake. At one point, a critic
Speaker 1: calls in, This is again the New York Times writing
Speaker 1: about his show from an episode we don't have anymore.
Speaker 1: So at one point in the show, a critic calls
Speaker 1: in and tells Rush quote, I believe you are doing
Speaker 1: a great disservice by using the program to convince people
Speaker 1: that if poor people are not successful, it is their fault.
Speaker 1: You were just a paid advocate of the rich and
Speaker 1: you despise the poor. Now that's very accurate. The author
Speaker 1: of the New York Times article notes that, perhaps due
Speaker 1: to his guilt over his crueler shock jock days, Rush
Speaker 1: is very polite to his liberal callers, and this is
Speaker 1: what The New York Times writes as Russia's answer. You
Speaker 1: misunderstand my point. There is nothing wrong with being rich.
Speaker 1: It's not evil. Most rich people earned it by virtue
Speaker 1: of hard work. This has always been the country that
Speaker 1: people come to because there has always been a chance
Speaker 1: for opportunity. And if you start punishing the people who
Speaker 1: bust their tail to be prosperous, then you're going to
Speaker 1: unmotivate people to try that. I am not a paid
Speaker 1: defender of the rich. I'm a proud promoter of the
Speaker 1: American way of life. Yeah, what are the I guess
Speaker 1: that's a thing. You can just say that most rich
Speaker 1: people earned their money, Like, yeah, it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: objectively untrue. But yes, you can say that untrue. But
Speaker 1: I guess if you if you are born to wealth,
Speaker 1: but then you also get a job that makes you
Speaker 1: even wealth. Yeah, that's like work. I mean, look at
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, still Gates, all guys who were
Speaker 1: born to wealth, they were born crazy rich. They weren't
Speaker 1: born with fuck you money, but they were born into
Speaker 1: wealth and then they were able to get fuck you
Speaker 1: money because of the he And there's a lot written
Speaker 1: about that. You know, Bill Gates having access to a
Speaker 1: computer in an era when basically no one did. Uh
Speaker 1: Bezos being able to secure a huge loan from his
Speaker 1: parents in order to help start his first business. Uh.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk also getting a loan from his dad to
Speaker 1: start a business. You know, it's the way it always
Speaker 1: works for these people. And they they spend that as
Speaker 1: self made you know, um, yeah, because in their mind
Speaker 1: it's true. Because in their mind it's true, and they
Speaker 1: do work hard. And if you work hard, you can
Speaker 1: convince yourself that you've earned it, as opposed to like,
Speaker 1: I worked hard, but it only like I can say
Speaker 1: I worked hard, I can also say I am only
Speaker 1: financially successful because I got lucky. And I know other
Speaker 1: people who worked as hard as I did, who have
Speaker 1: not been nearly as financially successful. And it's not because
Speaker 1: of a lack of talent. It's because I got a
Speaker 1: break that they didn't, you know. That's and leaving leaving that,
Speaker 1: leaving that part out is how you were able to
Speaker 1: convince other people that that that the majority of people
Speaker 1: who are the majority of people are a wealthy through
Speaker 1: hard work. Yeah, it's nonsense. So that New York Times
Speaker 1: piece reveals that by nineteen ninety, Rush was already popular
Speaker 1: enough to draw massive in person crowds, and this was
Speaker 1: unheard of for a talk radio personality. Today we're well
Speaker 1: acquainted with right wing thought leaders who can draw thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of fanatically loyal followers to in person gatherings.
Speaker 1: But was really the first. From the Times quote, there
Speaker 1: are towns where he hasn't heard, unheard and unheard of,
Speaker 1: and then there are places like Tampa, where the announcement
Speaker 1: of a Rush Limbaugh stage show sold out the seat
Speaker 1: Ruth Eckert Hall in four days. The occupants of those
Speaker 1: seats are out of them and cheering when Limbaugh appears
Speaker 1: in a three piece tuxedo. They're like the crowd for
Speaker 1: a country western concert, says Dan Woollet. The halls director
Speaker 1: of operations. After sizing up the crowd in the lobby
Speaker 1: surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers. You're gonna
Speaker 1: have fun tonight, Limbaugh tells them. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: you're gonna learn some things. Pacing constantly, he does some
Speaker 1: jokes that poke fun at the Japanese and the liberal media.
Speaker 1: One of his jokes is that Judgment Day comes and
Speaker 1: the Washington Post article banner reads world ends tomorrow. Women
Speaker 1: minorities hardest hit. It's like that's the you know, you
Speaker 1: see what he's going for their Yeah, I see what
Speaker 1: he's going for. Yeah. Later in his live show, Russi
Speaker 1: engaged in a popular bit wherein he brings a piece
Speaker 1: of ship to a modern art gallery, and the joke
Speaker 1: is that, like, modern artists so dumb that if you
Speaker 1: like poop and take right, it's very obvious. This is it.
Speaker 1: You can find Ben Shapiro making the same basic joke
Speaker 1: decades later. And the gift of it is that just
Speaker 1: of it is that, you know, liberals are so dumb,
Speaker 1: they'll stare at ship if you tell them it's art.
Speaker 1: The Times introduces this bit and then moves on to
Speaker 1: something that I found chillingly relevant quote. Art criticism is
Speaker 1: a Limboss staple. He believes there is a culture war
Speaker 1: going on between those upholding decent values conservatives and the
Speaker 1: commie lib hordes trying to devalue human life and worst
Speaker 1: undermine private enterprise. Limbos sermon on art brings out the
Speaker 1: evenings only heckling a female cry of censorship. Oh no,
Speaker 1: Limbo protests he never spoke that word, but seconds later
Speaker 1: he allows that censorship isn't really so bad. It has
Speaker 1: been used throughout this nation's history as a means of
Speaker 1: maintaining standards. Means maintaining standards. Yeah, what the funk is
Speaker 1: he talking about? What he's talking about is spreading the
Speaker 1: needle that the right is now the sit like right,
Speaker 1: the main I went I was in fucking I took
Speaker 1: a concealed handgun course in Texas because I'm getting my
Speaker 1: out of state permits so I can be armed in
Speaker 1: more parts of the United States because of all that
Speaker 1: is like going to cooking school in Paris. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and and the thing started with like a thirty minute
Speaker 1: lecture from the instructor on cancel culture, Like this is
Speaker 1: the big thing within the right. I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I know this is the big thing within the right
Speaker 1: now and it it Limbaugh is starting both like saying like, well,
Speaker 1: the liberals want to like censor us when I want
Speaker 1: to cut out all ideas they disagree with, and then
Speaker 1: he he moves on to saying, but also, it's okay
Speaker 1: to censor people sometimes, right, because this is what the
Speaker 1: right believes. It's cancel culture if you, if people don't
Speaker 1: like it and if they suffer financial consequences for being racist.
Speaker 1: But it's not cancel culture if they go out of
Speaker 1: their way to censor left wing and liberal voices, which
Speaker 1: they do through things like school books. Right, objectively true,
Speaker 1: well documented. This is how the right works. Um, I
Speaker 1: don't know when listening is going to disagree, but it's frustrating,
Speaker 1: but it is. It is absurd, the idea of of
Speaker 1: you know, like, it's it's cancel culture if you, if
Speaker 1: you compare being conservative to being a jew in late
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties Berlin to like it should be illegal to
Speaker 1: give the finger to the flag. It's amazing, And that,
Speaker 1: Paul is the end of part one of what is
Speaker 1: going to be like three hours of talking about rush
Speaker 1: Limballow deserves, but how to do it. I mean, he
Speaker 1: deserves this much time, not in a good way, but
Speaker 1: in a we need to understand what this man has
Speaker 1: done to us all. Absolutely. And it's also if you're
Speaker 1: if you're willing to go to bat for Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: because you think it's mean that somebody is glad that
Speaker 1: he's dead. Um, let's lay it all out and here's
Speaker 1: here's why some people might might not be so sad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: evidence both that he deserves to have his death cheered
Speaker 1: and also that he loved laughing at people's deaths. Ye,
Speaker 1: you're in a way, you are, you are. It's what
Speaker 1: he would have wanted. But you know what I want
Speaker 1: right now, Paul, I want you to plug your plug doubles. Well,
Speaker 1: let's see. Uh. You can find me um on social
Speaker 1: media at p F Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram. I
Speaker 1: have a bunch of podcasts going on at any Human Time,
Speaker 1: UM Freedom Uh, which I co host with Lauren Laftas
Speaker 1: and Scott Ackerman, and Stay of Homekins, which I co
Speaker 1: host with my wife. We started a podcast during the
Speaker 1: pandemic and unfortunately we are still doing it. Um uh
Speaker 1: and I do UH. I do shows. The first live
Speaker 1: streaming improv shows the first Monday of every month with
Speaker 1: my friend Lauren Laptus um and um that all those
Speaker 1: tickets can be found at Paul left thompkins dot com
Speaker 1: slash Live. Well, speaking of cancel culture, this episode is
Speaker 1: now over and thus canceled because of the lips. It's
Speaker 1: done by Bye m h.