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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins

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Published Jan 7, 2025, 10:00 AM

Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and you know we're still coming down from our end of the year celebration. I'm headed off to Cees where we'll be doing reporting before it could happen here and better offline, we're going to be coming back for the new year soon. The Oprah episodes will be in the can. Very excited to introduce you all to that, but for this week, we're going to be going back to a rerun, so please enjoy the story of Rush Limbaugh. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I continually failed to introduce like a professional, which is particularly shameful this week because our guest is a very professional voice artist, mister Paul F. Tom Good.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for being here. Paul, you are the voice of a lot of characters that that that a lot of people enjoy. Uh. I think most famously to me at least, UH is mister peanut Butter also.

The voice of a lot of characters that people hate.

That's true. That's true because if you're really achieving as an artist, a lot of people are going to hate anything that you do.

That's the that's you're exactly.

And today we're talking about a truly historical success of a creative mind, a man hated by tens of millions of people and who should be hated by billions, A man who has done, I would say, in calculable harm to the future of human life and all life on this planet, mister rush Limbaugh.

Correct.

Oh yeah, Paul, What do you have any kind of history with rush Limbaugh, Like in terms of your upbringing and stuff. I don't know much about how you grew up. Yeah.

Do you know what I forgot that I forgot? First of all, I forgot how long he's been around. And I remember watching him in his earliest days on TV and watching that show like as a goof the way, I would watch, you know, the Morton Downey Junior Show or Wally George or whatever, and just like, who is this clown? And he's like doing this this sort of you know what seemed like a character, you know at the time, because he I think he fancied himself an entertainer and had a show that had little skits in it and stuff like that, and I I thought he was just ridiculous, and so I watched him ironically, and and then things just got worse. Like I, I sort of got tired of it. I remember getting tired of it and like, Okay, this is just like the same thing over and over again, and it's not it's not pushing that that button in my ironic pleasure center anymore. So I just stopped watching. But he, despite despite my my jumping ship and you to do what he was doing.

Yeah, Tomkins demographic, but he kept the my parents and everyone that raised me demographics. What was your upbringing particularly political? Would you say?

Not, you know what, not super political. I was raised. Uh. My family was a uh lower middle class, uh, big Catholic family in Philadelphia, in in a a sort of suburb called Mount Airy, and we were both of my My family was like lifelong Democrats, you know, Philadelphia Democrats, and so that was kind of it, Like we were just sort of you know, uh like a conservative liberal family. Uh. And yeah, I I we we didn't talk a lot about politics in the house growing up, and that was kind of it. But I knew that we were. We were liberal demo crats, you know, who were weirdly enough, guided by guided by I'm not even gonna say faith. I think we were guided by my parents' sort of morals where they were greatest generation Depression babies, and uh, they voted straight Democrat. But they were not like even though we were Catholic, it was like we were not single issue voters, you know, but they but my family was my parents were brought up with the same sort of prejudices that people of their generation were brought up with, you know. But but yeah, politics did not figure any. It was like when I got when I got you know, a little older and out of the house and everything, that's when I started, you know, investigating my own politics. And it was like a long journey.

You know, that is very exciting to me, just because your your you, you came from kind of more of a you know, a liberally background, and your introduction to Rush Limbaugh was kind of watching it as a character, right. Yes, yeah, I grew up very conservative. My parents were also lower middle class, verging on poor in when I was like kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but extremely conservative. I would say, like our family religion was conservatism, and so Rush Limbaugh was caught. Whenever I was driving with my mom or my dad, Rush was on. We listened to him. My parents talked about him, so My upbringing with him was that this guy is like the profit of of what's what's right, you know, both in the political sense and in the moral sense. So I'm very excited about this, and I'm excited that, you know who Morton Downey Junior is, because we're gonna be talking about him a bit too. Absolutely, So, yeah, Rush Limbaugh is It's hard to over sell this guy's influence on our current state of Like, I think it would be fair to say we're kind of like verging on civil conflict right now between the right and left in the United States, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so yeah, And I think Rush Limbaugh has a huge might be the man most responsible for that.

I totally agree that his influence cannot be Uh is it overestimated?

Like, yeah, he cannot.

It's like I I the day he died, I tweeted, I tweeted, Uh, if I had to say something positive, I guess if I had to say something positive, I'm glad Rush Limbaugh lived long enough to get cancer and die. And then that got that got picked up by foxnews dot Com. They did a roundup of you know, uh, liberals celebrating Rush Limbaugh's death, which really was just like, hey, if you want to harass some people, here's here's sudo harass. And I had people, I had people on my mentions on Twitter like saying things like, uh, you better pray you never meet me, Like people implying violent because I said I'm glad Rush Limbaugh is dead. I had somebody call my house and say, this, Rush Limbaugh contributed far more good to society than you ever will.

Fine, God, my God.

For Rush Limbaugh. This guy. But I mean, this guy had a show. He had a show. He wasn't a legislator. He wasn't he wasn't like some some sort of freedom fighter. This guy just had a show where he said mean things.

Yeah, where where he repeatedly celebrated the deaths of his enemies and made half a billion dollars doing it. Yes, Okay, let's let's get into Russia's life. So the first thing I learned about him when I started digging him into him, that might be the thing I learned about him that surprised me the most. Rushi is not short for anything. Russia is a full a full first name, and in fact, Rush Limbaugh is the third Rush Limbaugh in his family line. They are very proud of that name. His grandpa, Rush Senior was born and raised in Bolinger County, Missouri, so he and I are both Missouri babies. He grew up into a world that was changing rapidly. Rush Senior saw an electric light for the first time when he was twelve. He took his first railroad trip in nineteen oh four.

Real name, I thought that.

I always thought that was one of those things I know. It was like I choose that. That is the most shocking thing about him. He rush Lama is not only his full name, it is the only name his family seems to give their firstborn sonsy a apro so, Rush Senior became a lawyer. He opened an office in Cape Girardou, Missouri, and he basically never left the town again. He retired in nineteen ninety four at the age of one hundred and two, which I mention because it suggests that all those cigars Rushmoke w r Us are Rush Limbaugh smoked saved us about thirty two years more of his show, Sweet I'm.

Sorry, Did you say he retired at one hundred.

And two in nineteen ninety four? Yeah?

And then how long did he live after that?

Did he get to So I think he died. I think he died immediately from what Yeah, Like he's one of those guys who worked until he died. Basically some people are. His greatest son was like that. So Rush Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when he was forty. His main political issue was fighting FDR in the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right, this is deeply, deeply embedded in the Rush Limbaugh line. In nineteen thirty six, Rush Limbaugh Senior was a Republican delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he helped nominate Alf Landon for the noble job of losing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an election. You don't nobody was better at campaigning than FDR. It was never a successful thing to run against that family.

I know, somebody had to be his Washington generals.

Yeah, alf Landon, the Washington generals of Republican politics. So my main source for the early life and family history of Rush Limbaugh is a fairly comprehensive, if I would say, kind of fawning biography of Limbaugh by Zeve Chaffitz and Zev. It's a weird first name ze apostrophe. Ev chaffits. He notes that, over the course of decades of lawyering, Rush Senior quote quietly but inevitably became well to do, which is an interesting way of phrasing it. Just like there was no stopping it. He just got It was kind of a way of making it seem like he just he didn't really want to become rich. He just became rich.

You know, that is the most suspicious sounding phrase.

Long time, inevitably, quietly, in inevitably got rich. Sinister yea godah, it is very sinister. So Rush Junior, who is our Rush Limbaugh's father was born at some point. Quick googling obviously he had been born. Quick Googling didn't return a date. He's the only Rush Limbaugh without a Wikipedia page, which I guess kind of a kind of a shot to him. I could have probably found it out if I'd really dug into it. But it doesn't really matter that much for our purposes.

Yeah, he did what he had to do. He gave us rush.

He gave us our rush. Yes, our rush, our rush. So Rush Junior is only important for the impact that he had on our rush. He was a World War II combat pilot, which is undeniably rad You gotta give him that, and his biography notes that he maintained a military crew cut for his entire life. He was heavy set and top dad out at about three hundred pounds, which earned him the nickname Big Rush o.

Big rush Man, one of those nicknames you you cannot combat like Big Rush. Sorry, Big Rush, Sorry, Big Rush. You can ask politely, It's not gonna happen.

Why you in a big rush? Uh? So Big Rush became an attorney.

Sorry, because I'm always rushing around.

I'm always rushing around. So Big Rush became an attorney like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape Girardeau during holidays. His very conservative politics influenced these speeches, and his most famous one was a tearful hagiographic speech about our nation saintly founding fathers. Again, you can see he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab that our Rush has. And you have to admit if you want to, if you know anthing about our Rush Limbaugh he was an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very good at what he did. That's why he had the impact that absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. Now our Rush Limbaugh A Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the third to give his full name, was born in Cape Girardeau, Mississippi, on January or Missouri sorry, on January twelfth, nineteen fifty one. By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with a brother and a parents who loved him. Baby Rush spent his childhood and bubing a steady diet of his dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil, conniving communists. One of Our Russia's childhood friends recalls a big Rush of his dad. Quote. We'd go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd sit in front of the television, drinking black cherry pop eat popcorn and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters. He'd yell at Dan Rather, they're all typical liberals, and Rather's the worst one of the bunch. And we'd try to keep him going. You know, mister Rush, what do you think about this? Mister Rush, what do you think about that? Sometimes he'd say kinder. That was this friend's name. You're gonna be the first Dutchman on the moon. I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh taskmaster with his sons. An odd comment, that's so weird.

So Rush has a has a brother, or.

Russia has a brother. He has a brother, David, who was his younger brother. No, no, no, I think that's the oldest. The oldest son is the Rush gets the Rush name.

Yeah, they didn't do it George for me.

Yeah, David becomes like a lawyer, doesn't really leave Cape Girardeau and is like, you know, he's he's he unlike his brother, has a family, has like a wife that he's you know, stays with and all that stuff.

Did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy.

I think yeah, I think he was bored wealthy. He and his brother were both born rich as hell. So and and our Russ's brother David provided an even more telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was like under Big Rush. My dad stood out sometimes. He provoked people who didn't agree with him to violence. Once for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did ask him the details of that one, but it was a couple guys. Not a fair fight, I know that much. I have to assume he deserved to get the shit kicked out of him. Yeah, I'm gonna guess he was saying something like, the people who got screwed over in the Great Depression deserve to starve to death. We should stay helping them. That's gonna be my guess. And he got the shit kicked out of him by some WPA guys, something like that.

If your name is if your name is Big Rush and two guys go after you, I think that's a fair fight.

That's a fair fight. You're big, you know.

Yeah, he's a little Rush.

He's three hundred pounds. They're probably each about a buck fifty. You know, their fight exactly, the fight by mass thin poor. Yeah, that's so. Our Rush was born into the Eisenhower years, which will probably always be remember. It is like the high point of both capitalism and the United States. This period of peak American exceptionalism imprinted itself deeply on Russia's growing brain. His father was made a special ambassador to India's legal system. Their family got their first television. Yeah, yeah, look because he was I think it means you know, India's was newly independent in the Eisenhower years. Right, They had just the UK had just left, they had just partitioned with Pakistan. They're developing their own independent legal system, and they're a democracy that was heavily based at least initially on the US. So the president like picked guys who were established lawyers, like Big Rush and also established Republicans to be kind of helped set up the Indian legal system. Wow, that's kind of what happened. So yeah, his father's a big man in Republican politics. Rush grows up seeing in the period where America is undeniably like like literally is half of the global economy. Right, that's a very significant thing for him. So the family in the fifties gets their first TV. But radio is still the dominant method of entertainment in those days, and Russia's childhood and early adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for DJs. My dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time. He's like seven or eight years younger than Rush, and he grew up the only thing my dad ever wanted to be was a DJ, and he wasn't a radio DJ for like twenty thirty years.

You know.

That was like the coolest thing that you could do.

Right.

You didn't have Spotify, you didn't have the Internet. People learned about new music from DJs who were kind of like picking what they were going to play on the radio. It was like the absolute raddest thing you could be. And that's what Rush like. He idolizes these big DJs of the time, and that's all he wants to be for basically his entire young life is a DJ. Now, when Rush was three, Brown versus the Board of Education was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to the integration of US schools now Zeve Chaffits doesn't write anything specific in the biography about how Rush Senior talked about race to his son. I have not We don't get any of that information. And I'm not necessarily blaming Chaffits for that, because I think the Rush family is very pr savvy. They don't talk about it. You know, I don't know who he would have gotten that info from but our Rush would have definitely picked up on the great deal of conflict in Cape Girardeau over racial matters. Missouri is an odd state and that it is both Midwestern and southern. During the Civil War it was split between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers, and the town that Rush grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides. There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of schools in Missouri and in Cape Girardeau, and Zeeve Chaffits to his credit rights about this quote. In nineteen fifty two, Cape built its white students a new school, Central High. Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the supreme court and basketball changed that. Cape Giardu took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title. The nineteen fifty three team was expected to be a powerhouse, but word got around that the kids from Cob were even better. An informal game was arranged between Central and Cob High, says historian Frank Nicol, Cob won. Shortly thereafter, Cob mysteriously burned down. Black students went to school and churches and private homes that year, But a more permanent solution was, yeah, they that's the kind of town he grows up and the black kids win at basketball and they burned their school down.

Wow.

Yeah. Cape Girodeau is a very racist town and kind of more to the point, like, we don't know exactly what Russia's dad would have said about any of this. We don't know that he would have supported the burning down of the black school. We don't know that he wouldn't though, that's right, and you know, the conservatives were definitely more on the don't integrate side of things right now. A compromise was eventually reached in Cape Girodo, and the compromise was that black kids would be allowed to attend Central High but they would be put in special classes that were taught by former teachers of cob the school that had been burned down. This was kind of integrating by not integrating. So there were black and white kids in the same school, but not in the same classes. And this is the way things were in Cape Gerarda when Rush Limbaugh started school. So yeah, that's you can infer from that what you will based on some of the things Rush Limbaugh says and does later in life. I think we're missing some important information about what his dad thought about black people.

Yeah, I don't remember, if ever being concerned as to the investigation of that fire.

I don't think he would burned down. He might have done it like that is rampant and irresponsible speculation in my part, but also, uh, the only reason I think he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't have been able to run away from it. In mind, from what I can tell, he didn't do well in that fight, is all I'm saying. So Rush had an upbringing that would have been fairly standard for a rich kid of his era. He played basketball, He did chore, He had plenty of friends. He was not an overly active kid. He did not like sports. He hated his one year in the Cub Scouts rushing them ball. Hates the outdoors his entire life. He did not like school. But he was popular, largely because his family was rich and had a huge basement with a pool table and a bunch of other luxuries. The kids Rush hung out with during this time give us some of our best hints about the darker elements of his childhood. One of them told Zev Chaffets quote, Russia's dad didn't suffer fools lightly. He was always very disapproving of Russia's ambitions to have a career in radio. Russia's mom was a kind, gentle person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down Russian David in front of their friends, and when he did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times. So kind of abusive, not I don't think, by the standards of the time, And I haven't heard any that he was like fading his kids or anything, but kind of mentally abusive. Again, probably more or less in line with what most most men of his social class would have been like to their kids. You know, I don't think this was abnormal.

I mean, how many how many of these guys were born out of the the the sort of ritual humiliation by their fathers in front of an audience.

Yeah, I think most of them.

You know, It's like it's such a it's such a common thing that I guess I'm just glad my dad was a guy who didn't say anything.

Ever, Yeah, it's better than humiliating you in front of your friends. When you say something he disagrees with. So every one of Russia's early friends that I've seen interviewed is very consistent about the fact that he was not political from an early age. He rarely, if ever talked politics, and he did not express strong beliefs. One of his friends even remembers him as a particularly good debater in school because quote he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat. When he did express political opinions, they were generally conservative. One friend noted that the only time he saw child Rush express a strong political sentiment was after the nineteen sixty presidential election when Rush was nine. Quote, Rush wrote on a drywall Kennedy Ie darn Nixon lost. Shucks. So grows up conservative because his dad is conservative. But it's clearly politics is not a big part of his life from an early age. He's not like Ben Shapiro, right, where from the get go he's being sort of like focused into becoming a political commentator. That does not happen with Rush Limbaugh.

Right, He's more from the darn shucks school of the darn.

Shucks school political commentary.

Yeah.

So Rush got his first gig at age thirteen, working at a downtown barber shop. He later told his biographer that he liked the gig because it gave him a chance to talk to adults, who he preferred to his peers, because I didn't think kids were interesting. When it came to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect. He was bad at sports, heavy set, and not at all smooth. In his nineteen ninety three biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story, biographer Paul Colford recalls one particularly embarrassing incident during a game of Spin the bottle when Rush was a teenager. He spun the bottle and it stopped at and it stopped pointing at the prettiest girl at the party, which is how she's described in this anecdote quote. She looked at him and gasped, couldn't do it, not with him, that is, And everyone in the room witnessed this humiliation. It was a wound he would nurse forever. Oh ah, yeah, that's nice.

Uh, thank you biographer for that.

And it's one of those things, you know, I think there's I'm sure this has an impact on the kind of man he becomes, but also I think most of us have a moment like that where we have a crush on some person of the opposite or the same sex, and they're not into us, and it's horribly embarrassing. It's a pretty and most of us don't grow up to destroy civil society in the environment. Right, Yeah, we've all been there, and Rush was there too. Obviously this is a part of what ever toxic stew gets cooked up at him. But I don't know, like it's one of those things I think you can kind of lean too much on. Oh, this is why he was always forever humiliated by this thing, and that's why he became the man. He was like, well, we all have that in our past, and we all don't do this shit.

It's very much like the original origin story of Lex Luthor that uh yeah, Superman blew out his hair Superman. Superman was responsible for him going prematurely bald, and he became a super villain because of this. Y.

Yeah, and you know there are a lot of other bald men in that world who don't become Superman. Yeah. So Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer or to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas. Right, The Limbaughs were big men in Cape Girardo. They were kind of like the the the primary, like the most prominent men in the entire town. And he Big Rush wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and do something respectable. Didn't have to be a lawyer, going to politics, do something important, right, something that he can brag about to the other rich guys. Now, the fact that young Rush only ever wanted to be on the radio infuriated his father. For his part, Rush seems to suspect that his love of radio was born in part from his hatred of school.

Quote.

My mother would be fixing me breakfast and I'd be listening to the guy on the radio. He'd be having fun, and I was preparing to go to prison.

God, I mean join the club, Rush.

Yeah, we all hate school.

It's tradish everybody. It never occurred to me to related to the guy on the radio, like how come he gets to have fun, this full grown adult, and I have to go to school.

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of kids. Let's I'll take my adopted hometown, Portland, for example, a lot of kids there who hate school. They don't destroy the entire planet. They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends, and that's much healthier.

Rush.

You can just buck up a Starbucks if you if you're nursing some rage at the educational industrial complex or whatever. So despite his irritation, Big Rush clearly did love his son, and when little Rush was sixteen, his dad used some of his local clout to get his son a part time job at the local radio station. Rush started doing what you'd today call internshit, you know, fetching coffee, cleaning up, handling odd tasks here and there, and eventually he was allowed to actually introduce and play records on air. The summer before his senior year of high school, Big Rush paid for his son to attend a six week radio engineering course in Dallas. This was a big moment for Rush. He was away from home for the first time, living in a boarding house. He started smoking cigarettes, thank god, and he got a license that allowed him to actually and he got a license that allowed him to actually run the radio without adult supervision. Once he had this, station management let him hang out alone all weekend and weekdays after school, playing records and for the first time, presenting himself to an audience on air. So he gets started, and this is one of those things his dad clearly there are some abusive elements of their relationship. His dad is not supportive of Rush's radio career, but also is like his dad doesn't think it's a good idea, but also enables him right, like, not just gets him a job, but pays for him to get educated. So this is not a guy I'm sure you know he had his frustra strations with his father. This is not a guy who grows up with a dad who just doesn't get him and refuses to support him. This is a very supportive upbringing. This kid has his father's not yeah exactly.

Yeah.

So Rush, you know, becomes kind of famous within his you know, the teen set at his town because he's the guy with the radio show and in high school and he was not at all political at this point. His most well known bit involved reading the daily beauty tips that the Associated Press sent out back then, which he like, and he would like kind of mock the beauty tips because he thought it was silly that the AP was sending out daily beauty tips, which is fair, it is that has a silly thing for the AP to do.

Now.

Russia's professional idol at this point was a guy named Larry lou Jack Lujack, a Chicago DJ who was famous for his sense of humor and comedic stylings. Rush leader called him the only person I ever copied. Lujack was known for audibly shuffling papers during his monologues and different bits, a tactic Limbaugh copied and used repeatedly through his decades on air, and as.

In kind of like his signature bit no.

No, no. It wasn't a bit, but it was like a thing he would do to emphasize that, like I've got evidence or I've got information here. You know, it was a thing Rush, and it was a big Rush Limbaugh thing. You know. It's it's how you convince people who maybe aren't that credible that you you have good information.

Right, Yeah, he's been handed he's been handed to this ream of paper that has information on it. So it's true. But but Lujack was not a political guy, right he was.

He was not, And he fucking hated Rush Limbaugh because when Rush got famous in the early nineties, Rush was like, yeah, Larry Lujack is the only man I ever copied. And they asked Lujack about it, and his response was basically, fuck that.

Guy, bless you good man.

Yeah, yeah, you can't pick who finds you influentially, you know. Yeah, So back in those days again, being a radio DJ was pretty much the coolest thing you could do, and Russia's side job made him very popular at high school. He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work was intoxicating, and Rush seemed to know at once that this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing. Obviously, his ambitions did not make his father happy, and during Russia's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio. No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though he was miserable at home and his father with his father, after graduating, he enrolled in a local college just to please the old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go to school very often. Sometimes his mother would drive him to college just to make sure that he went. Rush came of age during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in US history. I mean, he's literally becoming an adultho in like nineteen sixty eight. I think like some shit went down that year, you know, there's a lot of teenagers doing some exciting things. Now, given how Rush turned out, you might expect him to have been active and involved in the politics of his time. But he was not. And to hear him tell it now, or to hear him tell it when he related this to his biographer, the civil rights movement in the Vietnam years basically all passed him by. He never attended political rallies. He only dimly remembers hearing of Bobby Kennedy's death. When Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, his radio station asked him to help send out news reports for the local NBC affiliate because there were uprisings all around the country, and Rush did this, but he didn't actually engage with the news. He was not actually interested in what was happening. He was just interested in kind of the business of how news was disseminated. Quote this is what he said later. I remember talking to them about the broadcast business NBC. I was seventeen, playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don't recall feeling any concern. So that is how we again a lot of privilege. There are massive race based uprisings in the number of US cities, hundreds of thousands of National Guard troops are called up. As after the civil rights leader is assassinated, the country is on the brink of open conflict in Russia, Limbache, I don't give a fuck, Like I just want to pla him a record. So you know, Wow, he's just a rich white kid, you know, in the middle of Missari. He doesn't give a shit.

It's so wild to think about someone being alive at that time. Yeah, and not having a strong feeling either way about anything that's going on.

Yeah, he's not doesn't even have strong hard right sympathies. He just doesn't give a fuck about it.

Right. That is like a kind of privilege that I can't even begin to fathom.

Yeah, and it is important that, like he's not just taking the right wing side of things, where like we have fu Martin Luther King, he was a comedy. He just doesn't care, Like none of this even makes it into his mind.

Like the idea that you would say, Martin Luther King, who is that again?

That which guy Bobby who got killed?

Kidd of what dimly aware? That diminated?

Yeah, it's it's quite a thing. So I'm going to quote now from a write up in The New York Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early twenties. Quote. Love of radio eventually won out over formal education, and he dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling his parents. Then began a long, checkered odyssey typical of radio. Limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities, working under different names and broadcast styles. He was Rusty Sharp and Jeff Christi. He was a DJ, a newsreader, a tak host. In each place he developed components of what would later emerge as the Limbaugh style. In Pittsburgh, he was a prankster, convincing listeners that he could see them through a new experimental picture phone. So he's kind of like a drivetime morning DJ, like yeah, we're gonna I don't know, I can't do the DJ voice, but like playing like soundbits and doing doing gags. Like he's very like not even really a shock jockey yet because he's not like that has that's like starting to evolve in this period of time. Yeah, I did find some audio from Run of Russia's very first broadcast in nineteen seventy four while he was still in Pittsburgh, and I think it's interesting because in it you can hear Rush in mid transition from that drive time DJ voice to the voice of the Rush Limbaugh who would help breed a modern American fascist movement. So here he is on wxz's Solid Rock and Gold Show. So without further ado, here is Rush Limbaugh in nineteen seventy four.

Also appearing with SHAWNAA at opening the show. I'llby Billy Cook's Rainbows and Gypsies. See the exact name of Dolphin rated PG. Now showing at the Ardmore Drive in Bellevue, Bethley Senema, camp Horn Drive in Carnegie, set him A and Cinema World Nay of the Dolphin, also showing in the Hampton Plaza, McKay Cinema, OH Penn Hills Region and Ronji the leads ce Day of the Dolphin.

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Very silly as all radio from the nineteen seventies sounds today, right, he has most radio today sounds but also like there's you would never have guessed based on his early performances that he was going to become what he became, right.

No, I mean, look, he has undeniably great voice, great noise, very good at imparting information like actual factual information. This movie is for sure playing here at this time day if the Dolphins. Look, yeah, I can't wait to see it. Yeah, it's the exciting movie Day of the Dolphin. But that he's just straight reading things that you cannot misinterpret in any way, if only he'd stuck to that. But yeah, I it's so. I guess I don't want to get ahead of us and get ahead of ourselves. But the idea that this guy would not be content doing.

Just this.

Is like what when does it the idea that it turns like I don't know, I don't.

Yeah, I'm sorry, we'll get to that.

But I.

Think it's fair to say this is what he loved, and he would have been perfectly happy if he could have made a good We're getting to kind of like a Hitler at art school story where like, yeah, maybe if he'd gotten to keep being a drivetime radio DJ, things would have been better.

You know, I had I had a conversation with a friend of mine who who also does podcasts in radio, and for neither of us it is our thing, our first thing, but we shared a we we had a conversation where we shared our love of being good at reading copy like you have to do ads. There is something that's weirdly satisfying about like, oh, I sound like a guy on the radio. I'm doing a good job at reading this and making it sound natural and whatever, and it's like there it like there's isn't that enough? Isn't that enough? That there's there? It is a good feeling when you nail an ad read.

Yeah, look, it's I mean, I think I think everyone who does a who who does a job that like, I think it pretty much everyone who has worked. There's a joy in professional competence of any time you know you're working, you know, if you're like if you're if you're running like the cash cashier at a grocery store, right when you get really good at bagging, like it's this, oh, the the the kind of ecstasy of competence right where you can kind of lose yourself in a task, you know, and be like I'm as good at this thing as I can be. Even if you don't like the job, there's a satisfaction in that. And I think Rush was happy in this period doing He wasn't rich, he wasn't influential, but he was doing a thing he loved well and he was happy in this in the in this period in the early seventies. So his early material in Pittsburgh is interesting to me because it's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from him. One of his reoccurring bits was the Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air, where he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw coming into the station on Sundays. He thought these guys were grifters and he hated them. The center of this bit was that no matter your problem, God would solve it if you'd send the radio preacher one hundred dollars. That's interesting to me, and this is like a real running theme in his early careers. He made fun of preachers all the time, of the exact kind of religious grifters that later helped make him a wealthy man. It's very interesting to me. Yeah, there's also he also would read letters from fans, and at one point he read a letter that he said was from a young woman who wanted to be a DJ and was worried that her gender would hold her back. Here's what he told her on the air. This is interesting to me too. You just have to master two techniques, and I'm going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of microphone. To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie is queuing up the record. Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record. Then turn the record till hear the beginning of the record. Back it up a quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking, the record will start. After you have mastered those two techniques, girls change your sex and you can interpret that a couple of ways.

That about the man explaining about how to turn on a microphone and then he goes, oh wait, you can't.

Do it well that that. I think there's two ways to interpret this. One of them is what you've said, Sophie, that he was just being incredibly sexist. One of them is that he might he might have been acknowledging anyone could do this job, but you won't be able to as a woman because of sexism in the industry. And I'm really not sure which one he was going for there, yea, yeah, it could be both, Because it could be both.

There is a kind of lording it over, like you know, this is a dumb job, but you're still not allowed to do it.

You're still not allowed to do it ladies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that's probably probably accurate. It's probably a bit of it.

But Robert, you know what all ladies are allowed to do?

Products?

Is it at Sophie? Is it participate in capitalism as consumers?

Yes, it is participating or capitalism.

Ladies. Stick it to Rush Limbaugh by engaging positively with the system he spent his life propping.

All right, shit, you know I didn't like the phrase stick it to Rush Limba very much.

Neither did I, Sophie. Here's some mats. Oh we're back, we're back from those ads, and Paul, I can see the glow on your face that only comes upon a man's face the first time that he gets to help advertise the fine products and surfaces brought to us by the people at Raytheon. Are you feeling good, Paul about now? You are inextricably tied to wonderful products like the R nine X knife missile.

I Yeah, as a boy growing up in Philadelphia, I dreamed of advertising for missiles.

That's what everyone wants to do, right, Yeah, since cavemen painted on walls, they dreamed of Raytheon. And now we are in the privileged position of getting to sell their products. And I couldn't be happier.

Here's what sucks. Raytheon is such a cool name.

It is great.

It's so good.

Yeah, I mean this in this ongoing bit I do. I often just like the RNIX missile I think is made by Lockheed. Raytheon's guide it to be fair. It's just the name Raytheon is such a good shady defense industry. Like it's the name of a company that ends the world, right, Like you're talking about like like a you know they're going to make a sky net that kills us all at some point. Their name is just too on point to not be Yeah. So back to Limbaugh. Rush was popular in Pittsburgh and his bosses appreciated everything, but his long windedness. They repeatedly sent him memos that stated it shut up and play the records, and for a while he was content to mostly just do that. But in nineteen seventy four, the economy took a nose dive and Rush was fired. He had to move back home with his family, where he lived for seven miserable months. His dad repeatedly badge him to move on and start a real career, but Rush was committed to radio, and eventually he landed a new gig in Kansas City, where he started taking listener phone calls for the first time. This was the dawn of the era of insult comedy, a sort of mean spirited comedy based on pranks and you know, primarily executed by shock jocks guys The Body by Howard Stern. Really you entertained via ostentatious cruelty hungry as.

I don't know, if I don't know, if you'll if you'll know, or not. Like talk radio, how much of a thing is it at this point of people calling in to radio stations to have conversations with broadcasters.

It's starting at this point, right, This is really kind of the birth of talk radio, and Rush is on the ground floor of that.

Right, does it start with sports or does it start with issues?

I think it starts with issues. It starts with their Before what we know is talk radio. You had had people who would take calls and talk about politics, both on TV and on the radio. And one of the things that Rush changes to skip ahead a little bit is that those guys had mostly been interchangeable, right, They were just sort of fielding calls and engaging with with callers. Rush and that kind of turns into with these shock jocks more of kind of a comedy based entertainment. You have these pranks, you have insults, you have all this stuff. So it kind of it evolves out of a thing that had been going on for much longer.

Right, It's an extension of the idea of the The original idea of the DJ was maybe a personality, but his main thrust was I'm giving you this music that you crave, and that's why you like me is because I'm gonna maybe get I'm gonna maybe get tracks before other people get them, and you're gonna hear You're gonna hear this stuff first. But there's still a thing of it's not about my personality necessarily it's mainly about I am the I'm I'm I'm, I'm the Santa Claus of music. I'm giving you these things, yes, and that's why you like me.

Yes, And I have access to them first and all this stuff. Yeah. Right, so Rush kind of as this. He kind of sees the writing on the Walwaite. He loses his gig as a traditional DJ because that is starting to become less profitable, right, and there's, you know, in general, the economies taking a shitter. So he realizes that kind of the way things are going is more based around personalities and comedy and entertaining people, and he starts to pivot to that. So this is uh, there's a well an interesting quote that Rush himself wrote in one of his many interminable books about how he felt about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote. I found out something about myself, something that was quite disturbing. I found out I was really really good at insulting people. For example, the topic one day was when you die, how do you want to go? I want to go the cheapest and most natural way I can. One nice lady caller from Independence, Missouri said My response was easy, have your husband throw you in a trash bag and then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage. When I went home after after a day of this, I didn't like myself.

Is that being I don't know if that's being good at insulting people.

Yeah, that's not really, that's just.

Being ready to insult people.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

Though.

One of the things people will state, and I can't categorically say this, but it seems accurate based on my recollections of the show is even when people would disagree with Rush on the air, he wasn't an asshole to them, Like, he was not cruel to his callers to their faces. Right, he would say cruel things about liberals, but when people would call in, he would not like call them monsters. He would not like He seems to have genuinely not liked insulting people to their faces or at least over like directly insulting people over over the phone or whatever. While he was disturbed by this, he was not disturbed by racism, mainly racism against black people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, here's where we're going. At one point during his call in show, he claimed he had a black collar, and he he claim to not be able to understand the man's accent. Limbaugh hung up on this black man after saying, take that bone out of your nose and call me back. Which is or I mean he says it was. We'll get to that. At another point, he asked his audience, have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? Now during a nineteen ninety interview after he had kind of risen to political prominence, Newsweek asked Limbaugh if he thought these statements had been racist. He replied, you may interpret it as that, but I know, honest to God, that's not how I intended it at all. Gee, don't get me in this one. I am the least racist host you'll ever find. Now, if we're going to try to analyze Rush from the length of his career, I think we can say two things. He's probably being honest when he said that he felt bad about insulting callers because he did not continue to do that. He is probably being dishonest when he says that he's not raised because he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things about black people consistently throughout his entire career.

Yeah, I mean, the the the number one indication that someone is racist when they say that the least racist has that ever been said by him by a non racist person, usually with yeah, it's always got to be, it's always got to be. Not only am I not racist, I am the least racist person you're ever gonna meet. It's like you don't maybe don't go that far because it's so so easily disproved.

Also followed by the I don't see color people.

I don't see color. I would say I think most of the people. I think I don't see color. People tend to be performative Obama voters. The I am the least racist person in the world. People tend to have strong opinions on why they should be able to say the N word exactly. Like that would be the split between the right and the left version it is yeah, yeah, yeah, and both of you are fucking racist.

So shut the.

Fuck up, jimmy me, Robert right.

Yes, yes, she's found out about our opinions on Liechtenstein, which I refused to apologize for. In the fucking Swedes, my god, the Swedes, Yeah.

You do have issues with the Swedes.

I have huge issue particularly blue Swede. What did you who get shakamine? Why did you say that at the start of that song? Okay? Sorry? Rush was Rush was still, at this point in his career, completely apolitical. His roommate and close friend at the time later told an interviewer he was scary smart about everything, but I can't recall us talking much about current events. He was funny, though I was an audience of one. Limbaugh's years in Kansas City were not super successful, and he seems to have recalled them somewhat sourly. As The New York Times summarized, Limbaugh likes to say, everything I did in Kansas City, I failed at He got fired from the station and quit radio forever to become an executive with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Five years later, he quit the Royals, convinced his career there was steymiat and went back to radio, this time as a news commentator. Again, he got fired for being too controversial. Also in Kansas City, he married twice, both marriages eventually ending in divorce.

What are the do we know? What the sources of the the what the type of controversies?

Yes, we're about to get into that. Yeah, Okay, yeah, we're about to get in this. Sorry, come on. So it was in Kansas City where Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator made his first public appearance after getting pushed out of the Royals. No one really liked him there. He had one friend who was on the team, and that's why he got to keep the job, and when that guy got traded, they pushed him out because they all hated him. So after getting pushed out of the Royals, he got a gig at KMBZ, a local station. He started satirizing what he considered to be a left wing caricature of of right wing political commentator. Right the initial right wing Rush Limbaugh was satire and he was being purposely controversial and reasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point. This was a joke. Initially this did not go over well with his middle of the road Mormon station manager, but it made Limbaugh popular with his audience. See Limpaugh had caught on to the fact that radio was in the middle of a revolution. This was the era where the first big shock jocks, men like Don Imus and Howard Stern, began their as sense to stardom. I found a wonderful write up about this era on Longreads, which argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk radio star named Joe Pine in the nineteen fifties, and I'm gonna quote from this now we might do an episode on Pine at some point. Quote His unconventional style, dressed up to dress down pinko's and women's libbers and riff on rather than read reports, was neither news nor entertainment, it seemed to be best described. While the New York Times and Time both did anyway as an electronic peep show, The personality free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pine, with a syndicated show on more than two hundred radio outle, was the most machiavellian when it comes to manipulating media icons of talk. Author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine he was the father of them all. Pine briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid sixties for a week's vacation after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts Riots, suggesting the world wasn't quite ready for his kind of conservative appeal. So Pine is doing the Rush Limbaugh bit in the fifties and early sixties. But America is not ready for that yet. Right, even fifties America's like, this guy's racist and like and a fucking lunatic.

Yeah. So, now, just so I understand Russia's this satire that he was doing. Yeah, the idea was, here is what left wing people think right wing people are like? And yeah, the point he is trying to make is they see us as they see the left wing sees the right wing as extreme and h hateful and you know, racist and closed minded. Like is that is that the point he was trying to make.

I think so, because he's he even says like it was a satire, right, Like, That's how it's portrayed in his biography that he was kind of his personality was satiric in nature. And and that's kind of the only way I can interpret it is that he was trying to satirize what like kind of the looney right winger, you know.

Okay, but through the through the lens of here's how the left sees them.

I That's that was never said directly.

Yeah, it sounds like it's a it's a a protective phrase of like I was not satirizing these guys directly. I was not satirizing right wing people. I was satirizing how left wing people see right wing. Yes, that is how I have interpreted what I've read. Yeah, okay, yeah that does sound like a base covering kind of thing.

Yeah, it a bit. I do think he's started not believing everything he said. It started as a joke in him intentionally to provoke controversy, because controversy brings in listeners and gets attention, gets word of mouth. That's why he was doing it. And the story of Rush Limbaugh is these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes what he really believes and is you know.

Yes, so he's an a political guy who's like this is this is what this is what politics sounds like to me.

I guess, yeah, I think so, and I yeah, that's how I interpreted. We'll go over that more so. Obviously, Pine kind of the first right wing radio shock jock, had peaked too early and kind of I guess, to steal a phrase from the Nazis, shown his power level to early during the Watts riots, and he got kicked off the air. Rush, though, started getting political at exactly the perfect time. This was the early nineteen eighties. Howard Stern came onto the scene in eighty four. Don Imus had risen to prominence in the nineteen seventies. Imus was another guy my dad listened to a lot growing up. Imus in the morning was like a big part of getting ready for school. Don Imus is going to be on the fucking TV.

And you were like, this guy's having so much fun and I have to go to prison.

I have to go to prison. This guy's having fun. He's talking about nappy headed hose, which was like the phrase that he I forget what it was in reference to, but like that's what got him in trouble.

It was a women's basketball team.

Yeah, it was a women's basketball team. Because don i'mis was also very racist. Sure, so yeah, the world was still not quite ready for the rush limball. We knew h during while he was like starting to be political at KMBZ, but a diet version of what he would become was now acceptable. And one man who recognized the potential of limbasch stick was Norm Woodruff, a consultant to the station who became the acting program director at Sacramento's KFBK network KFBK needed a new right wing talk radio host after firing their previous one, a guy you mentioned at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Junior. Morton was extremely popular and he was very extreme in his antics. This had allowed his local station in Sacramento to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully controversial things. This did backfire on Morton eventually, when he told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman named Tom chin Downey Junior was fired and went into the world of television, where he would somehow simultaneously blaze a trail for both Tucker Carlson and Jerry Springer. We will do an episode on him someday because he's a very plential guy, absolutely, but his for today he matters because his firing number one his success proved that being a purposefully controversial right wing bigot was really profitable for radio station, and because when he got fired, Sacramento had a hole in the station's roster that they needed to fill with another racist right wing shitthead, just one who was not quite as racist as Morton Downey junior, rush Limbas stepped up and said, not being quite as racist as that guy is my middle name. For now, for now, Eventually I will be much worse. So Rush Limbaugh moved to Sacramento. When he started at the station, his new boss, Woodruff told him, we want controversy, but don't make it up. If you actually think something, if you actually believe it, you can tell people why. We'll back you up. But if you're going to say stuff just to make people mad, if all you want to do is rabble rouse, if all you want to do is of fend, then get noticed. That's not what we're interested in, and we won't back you up. He was clearly lying. I think this was ass covering by the station.

Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah, but they would never would never ever push back on his bigotry.

But you know who does push back on bigotry. Paul ads the products and services that support this podcast. So we're back. And at this point rush Limbaugh has launched himself as a right wing shock jock, and he is an instant hit zeev chaffits rights quote. The station let him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests, and encouraged his highly personal right wing monologus. For the first time in his career, he was marketed heavily and aggressively. There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button captioned how would you like to punch Rush Limbaugh. Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian a snapshot. Morton Downey Junior had been a big star in Sacramento, with a five share of the market five percent of people listening to the radio in a given fifteen minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that he was sharp edged but good humored. The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Junior, reported the Sacramento b but he skates a little further from the edge of the hole in the ice. Rush was rewarded for his success with a six figure salary, an estimable income in the mid nineteen eighties, even by his father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life, he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches just like Big Rush.

He was an.

Occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle, his wife at the time, bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on air. So he's a hit.

You know.

This is the start of and it's really just almost straight up from there for the rest of his career. He finds his niche and he runs with it.

Yeah.

Again, he's a very intelligent, talented man.

Anybody else to find the big Rush part really funny?

It is very funny. It's very funny. Now we're in It's still funny.

Now.

I have long argued that Sacramento is the very mouth of Hell itself, and the fact that Rush Limbaugh first saw success as a right wing firebrand there serves to support my hypothesis. Again. His conscious decision as an entertainer was to be a satirical version of a right wing polemicist, deliberately exaggerating the things he did believe for comedic effect. The audience thought he was funny, but I don't think they got the joke. And there is some evidence for this when an Ohio evangelist, a lot of evidence. Yeah, So, I think the earliest evidence for this, I should say, is when an Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the theme song from Mister Ed held a Satanic message when played backwards. You know, we're kind of talking about the Satanic Panic period during this. Rush found this ridiculous. And again he had a long history of mocking the evangelical religious right. So when he heard this, he told his listeners that a Slim Whitman recording also contained a backwards message of from Satan. Zeef Chaffitz writes that, to his delight, many Limbaugh listeners took Limbaugh at his word and flooded the station with phone calls promising to destroy their Slim Witman albums to keep the Devil out of the house. Rush considered this a hilarious plank prank. He did not apologize or as far as I know, correct the record. So we see in this he's joking, right, he is not. Again, his whole history is mocking these people. He does not believe this, but he doesn't correct people because it gets he realizes, Oh, they're engaged. They're destroying stuff. That means I have power, right. I think even found it kind of It might have been something that kind of addicted him to this, this idea that like I can make even if I'm deliberately being absurd and lying, I can make people take action based on those absurdities. That's got to be addictive, and I think it is for me.

It is absolutely undeniable. And especially like if you spend time on Twitter, and if you've ever been like I have on occasion, deliberately stupid on Twitter and gotten sincere replies to something that is so obviously a joke, so obviously a joke, it absolutely is fun. There's no way around that. There's no way around that. Seeing people take you at your word when you say something that's so patently absurd is it's joyful. It does give you like a real jolt.

And there's a This is a bit of a different case, but I think there's some similarity. So last summer, you know, I was covering a lot of the protests in Portland, Oregon, including doing a lot of live streaming, and very early on the police put a fence up around the police station and there would be marches where like a couple of thousand people would march to the fence and somebody would like touch the fence and the police would tear gas like six square blocks of traffic, And I started calling it the Sacred Fence, and the joke, like the comment that I was making is that the police are endangering the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a fence because it's sacred to them, right. That went viral within the city, and there were dozens of protests at the Sacred Fence, as everyone called it, including numerous attempts to tear it down. And I know that the way that I framed it had a significant impact on a lot of people getting hurt, damaging a fence, getting arrested, and it was both kind of intoxicating and it also scared the hell out of me. It was one of the reasons why I pulled back to some extent on some aspects of my coverage because I got really worried about the kind of impact that you can have on people by doing that sort of thing. I didn't want to be It was very concerning to me. But it was also I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of it that I wanted to do more stuff like that, and I didn't, but I wanted to, you know.

But and that's that is the key, the key difference of uh, you know, you seeing something that catches catches fire in a forgive the phrasing, but catch fire in a in a charged situation, and how easily people can glom onto something when everything's so churned up, and then realizing like, oh, words have power, I have to be careful rather than words have power.

Here we go, here we go, let's use it to sell gold. So Russia's domestic life while he's enduring all this professional success, his domestic life with his I think she was his second. I think she was his third wife. Actually I don't know. He had a couple. He had a lot of wives. I think actually, no, this was his second wife. His domestic wife life with his second life at this period was less than joyful. He was famous and popular, constantly feted for dinners and invited to big events, and his wife, Michelle was much less successful. She quit her job to be as assistant, but she hated the work. That it's a nightmare that gives me the Yeah. They were not a good fit. Michelle loved the outdoors, rush Limbaugh despised them. Two of his colleagues tell a story from around this time of how they convinced him to go rafting once that I think is telling about Rush Limbaugh's personality. So this is one of Russia's friends talking about at the time, they took Rush Limbaugh on a on a rafting trip in whatever river it is that goes through Sacramento. Quote, it's a very very mild ride. Bob gave Russian or and told him to Oh, you're gonna really love this.

You have to know before I start the story, you have to.

Know we're on a baby.

Yeah.

Bob gave Russian ar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current. Rush panicked, stuck the ore out his arm, stiff as a board, and upon impact he fell overboard. We got rushed back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the Grim Reaper about a fucking baby. I've had people fucking shoot at me, and I've people showed me with artillery, and I've never spent three hours talking about it.

Baby.

So Sacramento is where Limbaugh started picking up what would become a voluminous list of mostly self inflicted nicknames. He was l Rushbo, the all knowing, all caring, all sensing Maha Rushi. He was also a harmless little fuzzball and the epitome of morality and virtue. He started claiming that his show was hosted by the eib OR Excellence in Broadcasting Network, which did not exist. This joke mainly served as a vehicle for Rush to express his grandiosity. He declared himself on the cutting edge edge of societal evolution, swore that he was serving humanity, and had himself introduced as having talent on loan from God. His opinions were quote documented to be almost always right ninety seven point nine percent of the time by the Sullivan Group, which also did not exist. And again he's joking. And also at a certain point he starts meaning all of this very literally, yes, right, Like that's kind of how narcissists were. So it may surprise people to know that Rush to hear that Rush Limba's career was launched into the stratus in Sacramento because California is, to most people outside of California at least, a bastion of liberal politics. Now you actually live and spend time in the state, you know, like, for example, if you've ever been to fucking I don't know what is that Orange County right or if you've been up near reading, there's a shitloak like there are more right wing Californians than there are right wingers than there are in like a number of US states. Right Like, California has a ton of right wingers and it has a long powerful conservative political tradition. California gave us Ronald Reagan. It gave US Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in one of the most surreal turns in political history, is now among the only rational voices on the right in the United States. Yeah so, yeah, California has a powerful right wing and yes they are, especially in the last twenty something years, overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists. But in this fact is one of the hints to Rush Limbaugh's rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north of the center of California, not far from some of the most productive farmland in the country. It is also not far from north central California places like Redding, which are right wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs and that's partly a response to the liberal and left wing government that they live under. They see and this is not they are not entirely or even largely wrong in seeing this. They see themselves oppressed by many of the rules liberals in the cities put in terms of things like gas taxes, right, you're living in if you're a farmer, you know in central or northern California, a gas tax that is reasonable for people in La San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento is a hardship on you, and you're not contributing to the kind of pollution in the cities that the gas taxes are meant to fight. You know, the strict gun laws and stuff. There's a lot of things reasons these people have to be angry, and Rush Limbaugh became their voice. So these this kind of infuriated very radical right wing who hates the liberals and left that govern California have a voice in Rush Limbaugh. He obliges their sensibilities with a ceaseless stream of attacks on liberal California. And that's what makes him huge is because there's millions of right wingers in California, and Rush Limbaugh becomes like, yeah, he's their voice. You know it, you could. You might even be able to argue that nowhere but California could have produced Rush Limbaugh as he became uh yeah, so I'm going to quote from the book Rush Limbaugh an Army of One here. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep Ugglo Americans off the streets. Militant feminists became feminazis, The green movement was full of environmental wackos. The American left became commie pinko. Liberals and the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing ded Ded Dedalate introduced news updates on what he regarded as the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him as a dim wit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them with half my brain tied behind my back. Just to make it fair. Before long, Rush was too big to stay in Sacramento, which is again the very mouth of Hell itself. He was introduced to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio, who had started his own big radio company based out of New York City. McLaughlin had listened to Russ's show and decided it had the potential to go national. He offered Russia partnership, and after some haggling, Russia greed. He moved to New York and made the EIB network a reality. Rush was thirty seven years old at this point, in twenty one years into a career of doing almost nothing but broadcasting on the radio. Again, the voice of the so called populist American right. Never did anything but radio, really. In nineteen eighty eight, he launched a new version of the Rush Limbaugh Show, this time for an audience across the nation. It's sort of hard to find his stuff from the late nineteen eighties, but I found this guest appearance he did not long after in nineteen ninety one on another colleague show for the same network. It gives you an idea of where his radio personality was by this point, and of how he presented himself right, of how he kind of introduced himself anytime he was coming on the air. So that's that's we're going to play this now. This is kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh. We all know, we all.

Know now one of radios and great broadcasters, and he'sa.

With us today on the study. We invite a name Rush Limbaugh. That my ry, Hey thrill. It's about time, you know.

I smoked a little dope to get ready for this in here, and I'm ready to go, man to one goal to time, one brain behind you back, Oh half my brain tied behind my back. Just to make it fair, Well, I'll tell you one thing, Yes, I use my talent on loan from god.

Man. I heard you got a little loan from ABC.

Can't say when you negotiating a new contract. Oh, I loan Limb some money, and I brought you a gift Los Angeles Times.

Oh great, good.

Wowed him there, didn't I that's nice having a big article on how you've flopped in the New York Times six minutes before nine o'clock.

You started out with just like.

A small group of stations on your shot with fifty six an hour of three hundred and thirty seven, with the weekly audience about six and a half million, an average quarter of our acuum of a million, seven most listened to radio talk show in America.

That's that's Rush Limbaugh that kind of when he goes viral for the listin what do you think about that? About that how he presents himself on here? What does that say to you?

It's so it's so the the fully formed version of him that I first experienced, and like he's really going for it, like he's really he's really like he's so aggressive in it, and and like saying I'm gonna come Like clearly the intention is, I'm gonna come on your show and I'm gonna take it over, and I'm gonna I'm gonna be the the the the I'm gonna be the alpha here. I'm gonna dominate you with this, the the La the present presentation of the La Times is because why that guy got fired from the La Times.

Yeah, I mean, like no, I think he'd been in Los Angeles and they savaged him in a review, right, Okay, Yeah.

So it's it's you know, it's that Frankly, it's like it's all the ship that I hate.

Yeah, yeah, it is, it is.

It's it's so it's it's aggressive, it's mean, it's you know, it's he's also correcting him on one of his you know, uh eight catch phrases. You know, you have to get it right. I say it like this every time. This is the way it goes. You know, it's just uh, it's a drag. It's a drag.

It's it's a drag. It's also I think there's a thing that he's doing here when we talk about all these phrases, half my brain tied behind my back. Uh, you know, the uh from God, all these different phrases that were that he continuously for decades. I don't want to I don't know. I hope this doesn't seem a little pompous, but I kind of make a comparison between that, like the Iliot and the Odyssey, Right this like the way that anytime you've got home or introducing it's always like you know, the there's certain phrases. Anytime Achilles comes up, he uses the same kind of phrases, same couple of phrases to introduce him, These descriptive phrases to introduce a character that are repeated constantly throughout the because it's a because it was a spoken story, right Like that's where you're supposed to deliver it. That works. It gets in people's heads. They associate those phrases with those characters. Russia's kind of doing. This is an old tactic, but it works. It's the same thing Trump does with his impulse insults Crooked Hillary, right, sleepy Joe. These are effective tactics, and that's what Russia is doing to inculcate his followers, primarily with this idea that he is genius. Right, and again he's joking, but he's also not because this shit buries itself in your brains. He knows what he's doing. He's a very savvy per.

Yeah, it's like when you when you people like that that that understand the the importance of branding over having an actual thing to say, Like it honestly, the the what you what? The content is secondary to the presentation of here's who I am. I'm gonna tell you through repetition, this is my whole thing. It's like they're they're you know, comics that uh to me, it always makes me think of comedians that majored in marketing in college. Yeah, and then it's like, okay, but are they actually that funny or did they just are they able to really sell themselves so well that that the content is secondary to the image.

You have two kinds of people who really are able to build a following. People who are able to build a following because folks genuinely just enjoy that the work that they're bringing into the world, they like their personality, they like what they're doing. And then you have folks who are able to build a following primarily because they do cult leadership. Right, Yeah, that's the that's what the marketing comedians, right, that's what this is. Cult leadership. It, this is how you do it. We do a little bit of that here, but we're all guilty a little We're all guilty a little bit, and I'll be guiltier when I get I don't know, a couple of hundred people killed by the FDA in my mountaintop compound, which I you know is always the goal. Paul, You're very welcome if you would like to have an armed standoff with the.

You know you're successful.

That's how you know you're successful when a three letter agency burns you down. By anyway, I don't need to Waco this time. I do love Waco. That's a good one.

Yeah, I'm so improudb We took in almost an hour twenty for Robert to mention Waco.

Good job. Yeah, I'm getting you know, I I realized I was wacoing a lot, trying to cut back, you know, get a little less.

And then here he is first Waco.

But well, we'll talk off air, Paul about synergizing our cults in the near future. Anyway, So Rush did not tone himself down at all after he went mainstream. In in fact, he grew more extreme, and he seems to have quickly forgotten that he was ever practicing satire. In nineteen ninety, at the very height of the AIDS crisis, Rush launched a new segment on his show, the AIDS Update. And I find it interesting how different sources report on this. When Limbaugh died, it was obviously a big story, the fact that he'd done this Aid's Update, and it was, in fact, Limbaugh Aid's Update was like the second or third most googled term alongside his name the day he died. Snopes and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story. But ZEEV. Chaffits's biography of Limbaugh came out well before Rush's death and before the AIDS updates were really talked about all that much outside of the community they most impacted and not. I think it's interesting how Zev wrote about it, not knowing that this was one going, one day going to become a significant story. So this is how Zev wrote about the AIDS Update. After an act up demonstration at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City that disrupted a mass Limbaugh chastised militant homosexuals for their disrespectful behavior, and shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless AIDS Update segments produced introduced by Dion Warwick's I'll Never Love This Way Again in his traveling stage show The Excellence and Broadcasting Tour. He did a bit when he put a condom over the microphone to illustrate safe speech. So that's how the aid's Update was kind of framed by Zeve before it was a big story. Now here's how Snopes characterized it in their fact check after Limbaugh died.

And I think before that, like already that doesn't sound good that.

No, I don't think Zeeve is trying to whitewash. Yeah, I think that he just doesn't see it as a big story.

Yeah, even just plainly stated that is it's terrible.

Yeah, it's terrible, and it sounds worse when Snopes goes into more detail on this yeah quote. At the height of the HIV AIDS crisis, the Rush Limbaugh Show featured an AIDS update in which limbad joked about an epidemic that had claimed more than one hundred thousand lives between nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety. Specifically, Limbaugh targeted gay men who had died. In addition to joking about their deaths, Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment include kiss Him Goodbye, I'll Never Love This Way Again, and looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Snopes dot Com uncovered an interview in The Cedar Gazette from nineteen ninety in which Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon my reaction to what I considered to be extremism in the political mainstream by a group of people. Per the Cedar Gazette, Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims, but militant homosexuals who blamed church and government officials for the epidemic. The AID'S update is meant to offend them, Limbas said, damn right. According to a nineteen ninety eight Los Angeles Times article, it was a popular segment, but it also created outrage among AIDS activists, something not helped by Limbaugh reportedly saying gays deserved their fate. Mocking the horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get a conservative radio host fired today. So obviously this was never more than a mile bump in limbaugh'squreer back in nineteen ninety. And it says a lot about where the right would go that a segment dedicated to mocking joyfully the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular right that would become the mainstream for Republicans. Now, in nineteen ninety it was still a thing he had to apologize for, and that year is the year he became officially famous. Nineteen ninety. He had his first live TV appearance on June second, when c SPAN did a special on talk radio. And yeah, so this is like he he does kind of have to sort of say that he regretted doing this, that he felt like he was kind of attacking people who like he was, like, I didn't mean to be mocking people who had died. I was trying to attack these militant activists, and so I stopped.

Work so I fear that alive?

Yeah yeah, who are so far still alive for the moment? Yeah?

Anyway?

That So he does a TV appearance on c SPAN in nineteen ninety on June second, which is kind of his first big TV appearance, and then The New York Times does a big profile on him from that quote, with its characteristic attention to production values, the network simply set up a camera inside a spare WABC seventy seven studio in New York and let the self proclaimed most dangerous man in America a roll cut to a shlub and a cheap white dress shirt, black tie, and hastily barbershopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat and grumbling about the TV lights planted behind his desk, and Mike interrupting the station's young newscaster, Kathleen Mahoney. She's trying to do her five minute top of the Hour update oddly for nineteen ninety while wearing a mask, because, as she explains, the host had warned her it could be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on TV as a liberal feminist. He was only joking. Limba insists, you said wear a bag over my head, Maloney says, Limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off, complimenting her beauty, and interjecting impatiently. The news just holds up everything here. I'm trying to make the news worthwhile. There's a lot in there.

Fuck Jesus Christ.

That's a New York Times reportan of span appearance. Yeah, he's like both saying you should cover your face because my listeners will harass you for being a liberal feminist, and also take off that mask let everyone see your pretty face. Like he's simultaneously both threatening her and sexually harassing her.

It's wild that It's good. It seems there's something about that that seems so modern. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, yes, yeah, that could. He's because he broughtly created the modern right, you know, so you can see it, you know, in nineteen ninety that's what he's doing. Yeah, now, nineteen ninety is as I said. Also, when The Gray Lady published their first full feature dedicated to el Rushbo, the article is fascinating and valuable, since it seems like few copies of his early nineteen eighty eight to ninety one ninety two episodes exist. So this New York Times write, it provides us with several fascinating insights into how Russia's show evolved during this period, and, more to the point, into where American conservatism was about to follow in his wake. At one point, a critic calls in, this is again The New York Times are writing about his show from an episode we don't have anymore. So at one point in the show, a critic calls in and tells Rush quote, I believe you are doing a great disservice by using the program to convince people that if people are not successful, it is their fault. You were just a paid advocate of the rich and you despise the poor. Now that's very accurate. The author of the New York Times article notes that perhaps due to his guilt over his crueler shock jock days, Russia is very polite to his liberal callers, and this is what The New York Times writes as Russia's answer. You misunderstand my point. There is nothing wrong with being rich. It's not evil. Most rich people earned it by virtue of hard work. This has always been the country that people come to because there has always been a chance for opportunity. And if you start punishing the people who bust their tale to be prosperous, then you're going to unmotivate people to try that. I am not a paid defender of the rich. I am a proud promoter of the American way of life. Yeah, what are the.

I guess that's a thing. You can just say that most rich people earned their money, Like.

Yeah, it's objectively untrue. But yes, you can say that objective untrue.

But I guess if you are born to wealth, but then you also get a job that makes you even wealthy, yeah, that's hard work.

I mean, look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, all guys who were born to wealth. They weren't born crazy rich, they weren't born with fuck you money, but they were born into wealth and then they were able to get fuck you money because of the he And there's a lot written about that. You know, Bill Gates having access to a computer in an era when basically no one did. Bezos being able to secure a huge loan from his parents in order to help start his first business. Elon Musk also getting a loan from his dad to start a business. You know, it's the way it always works for these people, and they they spin that as self made, you.

Know, yeah, because in their mind it's true.

Because in their mind it's true, and they do work hard. And if you work hard, you can convince yourself that you've earned it, as opposed to like, I worked hard, but it only like I can say I worked hard, I can also say I am only financially successful because I got lucky. And I know other people who worked as hard as I did who have not been nearly as financially successful. And it's not because of a lack of talent. It's because I got a break that they didn't, you know.

And leaving that, leaving that part out is how you were able to convince other people that that the majority of people are away, the majority of people are a wealthy through hard work.

Yeah, it's nonsense. So that New York Times piece reveals that by nineteen ninety, Rush was already popular enough to draw massive in person crowds, and this was unheard of for a talk radio personality. Today we're well acquainted with right wing thought leaders who can draw thousands upon thousands of fanatically loyal followers to in person gatherings. But Rush was really the first. From the Times quote, there are towns where he is unheard, unheard and unheard of. And then there are places like Tampa, where the announcement of a Rush Limbaugh stage show sold out the twenty two hundred seat Ruth Eckert Hall in four days. The occupants of those seats are out of them and cheering when Limbaugh appears in a three piece tuxedo. They're like the crowd for a country western concert, says Dan Woollet, the hall's director of operations, after sizing up the crowd in the law surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers. You're gonna have fun tonight, Limbaugh tells them. And at the same time, you're gonna learn some things. Pacing constantly, he does some jokes that poke fun at the Japanese and the liberal media. One of his jokes is that Judgment Day comes and the Washington Post article banner reads world ends tomorrow, Women, minorities hardest hit. It's like that's the you know, you see what he's going for there, Yeah, I see what he's going for sure.

Yeah.

Later in his live show, Russi engaged in a popular bit wherein he brings a piece of shit to a modern art gallery. And the joke is that, like, modern art is so dumb that if you like poop and take right, it's very obvious. This is it. You can find Ben Shapiro making the same basic joke decades later. And the gist of it is. That gist of it is that you know, liberals are so dumb they'll stare at shit if you tell him it's art. The Times introduces this bit and then moves on to something that I found chillingly relevant. Quote art criticism is a limbas staple. He believes there is a culture war going on between those upholding decent values conservatives and the kammie lib hordes trying to devalue human life and worst undermine private enterprise. Limba's sermon on art brings out the Evening's only heckling, a female cry of censorship. Oh no, Limbaugh protests, he never spoke that word, but seconds later he allows that censorship isn't really so bad. It has been used throughout this nation's history as a means of maintaining standards.

Some means of maintaining standards. Yeah, what the fuck is he talking about?

What he's talking about is threading the needle that the right is now the scent like right, the main I went I was in fucking I took a concealed handgun course in Texas because I'm getting my out of state permit so i can be armed in more parts of the United States. Because of all.

That is like going to cooking school in Paris. Yeah.

Well, and the things started with like a thirty minute lecture from the instructor on cancel culture, like this is the big thing within the right. I know, I know, I know, this is the big thing within the right now. And it Limbaugh is starting both like saying like, well, the liberals want to like censor us, want to cut out all ideas they disagree with, and then he moves on to saying but also, it's okay to censor people sometimes, right, because this is what the right believes. It's cancel culture if you if people don't like it and if they suffer financial consequences for being racist. But it's not cancel culture if they go out of their way to censor left wing in liberal voices, which they do through things like school books. Right, objectively true, well documented. This is how the right works.

Absolutely.

I know no one listening is going to disagree, but it's frustrating.

But it is. It is absurd, the idea of of you know, like it's it's cancel culture. If you if you compare being conservative to being a jew in late nineteen thirties Berlin, to like it should be illegal to give the finger to the flag.

Yeah, it's amazing. And that, Paul is the end of part one of what is going to be like three hours of talking about Rush Limbaugh.

Wow, way more time than he deserves.

But how he had to do it. I mean, he deserves this much time, not in a good way, but in a we need to understand what this man has done to us all absolutely.

And it's also if you're if you're willing to go to bat for Rush Limbaugh because you think it's mean that somebody is glad that he's dead. Let's lay it all out and here's here's why some people might might not be so sad that a human life is of evidence.

Yeah yeah, yeah, evidence both that he deserves to have his death cheered and also that he loved laughing at people's deaths.

Yeah yeah, in a way. Yeah, you are, you are.

It's what he would have wanted. But you know what I want right now, Paul, I want you to plug your pluggables.

Well, let's see. Uh. You can find me on social media at PF Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram.

I have.

A bunch of podcasts going on at any given time, Freedom, which I co host with Lauren Lapis of Scott Ackerman and Stay Off Homekins, which I co host with my wife. We started a podcast during the pandemic and unfortunately we are still doing it. Uh and I do UH. I do shows the first live streaming improv shows the first Monday of every month with my friend Lauren Lapus and that. All those tickets can be found at Paul F. Tompkins dot com slash live.

Well, speaking of cancel culture, this episode is now over and thus canceled because of the libs it's done by Bye.

Behind the Bars is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards

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