Paul F. Tompkins and Robert Evans dissect Rush Limbaugh's rise following the 1987 FCC fairness doctrine repeal, detailing how he cultivated "Ditto Heads" through tribal warfare rather than policy debate. The discussion exposes his hypocrisy regarding draft dodging, concealed drug addiction, and racist rhetoric against Black people and Michael J. Fox, alongside his denial of climate change and COVID-19 risks. Ultimately, the analysis argues Limbaugh sold fascism instead of conservatism, creating a blueprint for figures like Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro that paved the way for Donald Trump's nomination while eroding rational political discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Intro Stuffing and Pseudo Rush00:04:05
Coal Zone 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 CES where we'll be doing reporting for 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.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Broadcasting from his studio in, I don't know, some fucking place with one liver tied behind his back to make it fair for all of the narcotics in his system.
Robert Evans is presenting behind me.
You don't like me?
You don't like my pseudo-Rush intro stuffing?
I'm not on board?
Not a fan of that introduction.
This is Behind the Bastards.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that will never be as big as the Rush Limbaugh show because Sophie won't let me use cultic mind control techniques on our audience.
The Fairness Doctrine Asterisk00:15:48
That is inaccurate.
Feel free.
Okay.
Well, we're back.
The man you just heard is Paul F. Tompkins, our guest for this exploration of the life and times of Rush Limbaugh.
Hi, everyone.
Hey, Paul.
How are you feeling?
How are you doing an hour and a half into talking about El Rushbo?
Feeling great.
Feeling great.
I feel energized that he is dead.
Yeah.
I too feel happy that he's dead.
Yeah.
It's fun.
It hasn't worn off yet.
It never will.
It will always be good that he's dead.
There's a few people who are like that, where it's like, every now and then I'm just like, think back to the fact that Reinhard Heydrich is dead.
And it's like, good for him.
You know, good for him.
So once upon a time, Paul, the United States used to have a thing called the fairness doctrine.
Now, in short, the fairness doctrine required anyone with a broadcast license to present controversial issues in a balanced way, providing roughly equivalent time to present both sides of an issue.
Now, this was obviously a flawed rule.
Some issues, for example, like climate change, don't have two sides, right?
There may be different sides about like what the right response is, but there's not two sides to the reality of climate change.
And while the, but while the, you know, the fairness doctrine, so the fairness doctrine, not a, not a perfect, not a silver bullet sort of thingamajig, but while it was in place, right-wing media in the form that we have today did not and could not exist.
Now, since the dawn of the fake news era, which we're in now, a lot of folks have talked about the time of guys like Walter Cronkite, right?
When you had newsmen who basically every American trusted, who could shift massive national issues just based on their considered opinion, right?
Cronkite calls Vietnam a quagmire, suddenly national opinion on its switches.
And a big part of why these guys were trusted is they were required to lend equal weight to both sides.
They couldn't just be partisan shills.
Now, this generally meant that they would give kind of the conservative opinion and the liberal opinion as opposed to the far left or the far right, but it did mean that you didn't have something as unbalanced as Fox News, right?
It's like the voter guide you get.
Yeah, exactly.
It gives you the measure and says, some people say this, some people say this.
Yeah.
And as flawed as the fairness doctrine was, it was part of why most Americans lived in a semi-unified media ecosystem back in up prior to 1987.
Now, obviously, this did not last.
In 1987, the FCC, as the result of a court case, the FCC rejected the fairness doctrine.
Conservatives cheered this on because fair media was seen by arch conservatives, guys like Roger Stone, as a big reason why Americans had broadly supported the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the end of the Watergate investigation.
Watergate is one of these situations where when the investigation starts, the vast majority of conservatives are against it, right?
Don't think Nixon did anything wrong.
The evidence comes out and opinion shifts and it becomes very popular to get Nixon out of office.
This is the last time that happens, right?
This is the last time that like people's minds get changed by the facts on a political issue in America.
And it's the last time this happens because the right goes after the fairness doctrine.
After about a decade or so of fighting, they're able to get it killed.
And the end of the fairness doctrine was the necessary precursor to the creation of a wholly separate walled garden of right-wing content, which was seen by dudes like Roger Ailes as a necessary step to protecting right-wing voters from ever learning about other opinions, which would, they believed, protect the next criminal right-wing president from impeachment.
Now, after Limbaugh's death, the New York Times let Ben Shapiro, noted novelist, write a column about his professional idol.
Benny Schapps called the fairness doctrine, quote, a standard that, in practice, allowed for the domination of broadcast media by liberals with sporadic commentary by conservatives.
That's my Benny Schapps.
I'm concerned how good that was of an imitation.
It's really quite good.
It's really bad.
So Rush Limbaugh was aware from the beginning that his whole career hinged on the fairness doctrine's death.
And like he starts being a national voice in 1989, two years after the end of the fairness doctrine.
That's not a coincidence.
Now, with his unparalleled national platform and his status as a chief thought leader of the American right, Limbaugh went about turning the fairness doctrine into his main boogeyman.
I found a Vanity Fair article from 2009 that lays this out quite well.
Quote, the single most important issue in Russia's radio career is now among the hot button issues in conservative politics, the fairness doctrine, a formalized, fair and balanced rule for covering the controversial issues on the nation's airwaves, which the Reagan FCC killed in 1987.
The most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which puts substantial blame on talk radio for a generation of conservative dominance in Washington, wants to revive the doctrine, which would pretty handily destroy conservative talk.
According to the official CPAC polling of its members, restoring the fairness doctrine is the third most significant Democratic Congress policy initiative opposed by the right wing, ranking only behind expanding government and public health care.
So, yeah, there is with Russia's orchestration a rabidness to the cause.
Opposing the fairness doctrine is up there with opposing abortion.
And he's, you know, he's a, it's really him that's responsible for making this such a popular issue.
It starts off as a thing that kind of high up extreme right-wingers, guys who had been Nixon's right-hand men, push because they want to protect the next guy like Nixon.
And it gets popular, though, because of Rush Limbaugh, because he sells it to the American conservative mainstream.
It's funny, like, sorry, but the idea that like with the Nixon era, after Watergate, Nixon, when Nixon resigns, that is maybe the last time that there were real consequences for any, for the, for the highest office.
Yeah.
Where after that, you know, Clinton's impeachment, Trump's impeachment, whatever, it doesn't mean anything.
It really is just like an asterisk in history, you know, essentially, of saying like, just so you know, people, some people thought this was bad and they, and they said so officially, but there's no real consequence for any of this.
So really what they're doing is saying, we cannot, Nixon should not have had a consequence.
We got to make sure that there's never a consequence ever again.
And unfortunately, that meant for everybody, for like for, I don't know what, if, if, because if it didn't happen, if it didn't happen after Bush, which there was not even an impeachment for Bush, like for the Iraq war that we all know now was bogus, if there was never going to be a consequence for that, then it worked.
And there, there, and, and from now on, like, when is it ever going to happen again?
If it didn't happen then, when is it ever going to happen again?
Yeah, I don't think it can because this propaganda ecosystem churns out people who would fight to the death rather than have somebody who on paper is supposed to agree with them face consequences for blatantly criminal activity.
Yeah.
And then, and then it also, it conditions, Whether you believe in, whether you're on Russia's side or not, whether you're on that side of things or not, it conditions everybody to feel like it's okay that there's no consequences because what are you going to do?
Yeah.
It's just the way things are.
You can draw a fucking line between kind of the things that Rush starts because it has an impact on liberals and the left, too.
You've got this, it's it's because it's because obviously with the fairness doctrine, nobody ever heard anything from the far left, right?
The far left, in fact, was criminally prosecuted a lot of times for their opinions in this period.
But the positive thing about the fairness doctrine is that it was a large part of why there was a broadly agreed upon understanding of the basic, a basic reality in the United States, right?
Yeah.
That we don't have anymore.
And when you lose that, I kind of think when you lose that, the only like things inevitably escalate to deadly violence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's bad, right?
Not that, again, under the fairness doctrine, Americans were led into Vietnam, were led into Grenada, were led into Panama, were led into all these horrible, horrible things.
Obviously, we like it, it did not mean that Americans had an accurate understanding of the world.
But when they had an inaccurate understanding of the world, it was still broadly similar, right?
And that is better than where we are now, I guess.
I think it is at least less toxic.
I guess you could argue the United States had more power.
The government had more power to pursue violent activity overseas and stuff.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's a complicated issue, but whatever.
Whatever you can say about Rush Limbaugh, he was not a dumb man.
He was a huge bigot, though.
And that 1990 New York Times write-up makes it clear that, among other things, he was quick to realize that rampant misogyny was an incredible marketing tactic.
This was, as we discussed in our last episode, always cloaked in a thick haze of irony.
Quote, this is Rush.
We know that women in groups, same office, same dormitory, same barracks, eventually have synchronized minstrel cycles.
We also know that there's this thing called PMS, and we know it turns a woman into a Hellion.
We know that PMS has been used as a defense against a charge of murder.
Here's my proposal.
We have 52 battalions.
We can prepare the nation so that we'll have on any given week of the year a combat-ready battalion of Amazons to go into battle.
Imagine that you're Manuel Antonio Noriega.
You were in the Papal Nuncio in Panama City.
You feel safe.
All of a sudden, you hear this blood-curdling scream outside.
I am outraged.
And there is Sergeant Major Molly Yard leading a battalion of Amazons with PMS over the hill.
That would be enough to scare the pants off of anybody.
Disgusting.
Not a fancy.
Grush Limbaugh, everybody.
Young Rush.
I mean, it's like, it's just not even that funny.
No, it's not.
That's one of the things that sucks about Rush Limbaugh is that he, for somebody who did a lot of bits and, you know, was supposedly doing satire, he just wasn't that funny.
He wasn't.
It's just that he was saying the bigoted, terrible things that a lot of bad people wanted to say.
And the fact that it was so horrible and the fact that it scratched their id made them laugh and made them think he was a genius because somebody was finally telling them it was okay to be as shitty as they kind of wanted to be from the beginning.
Because you put the tiniest effort into constructing these bits.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah, it's the same thing with all of these.
You've got this kind of strain of comedians who thinks that it's important that they be allowed to say the N-word.
Not a single one of them has ever told a good joke involving the N-word, right?
Exactly.
It's not funny.
You're just going for shock value, right?
That's all you're trying to do.
And that can be, there's not that no good humor comes from shock value, but again, I haven't heard a single good joke from a white comedian involving the N-word.
Not that it would be appropriate then, but I haven't heard one, you know?
Like, So from the beginning, the villains of the Rush Limbaugh expanded universe were, as the New York Times explained, quote, black activists, gay activists, abortion rights activists, homeless activists, animal rights activists, militant vegetarians, environmentalists, artists with erotic tendencies, and above all, the now game gang.
That's the National Organization of Women.
His hatred.
Yeah.
Rush said that his hatred for these people caused him an uncontrollable urge to tweak.
Quote, the simple fact of the matter, Limbaugh is apt to inform dolphin savers and tree lovers, is that we are human beings and we are the most powerful, smartest species, and we can damn well do whatever we want.
And you can draw a line from this kind of the way he's phrasing things here.
It's like, it's stupid to care about the environment and animals because we're more powerful than them to the like the shit that Identity Europa and Patriot Front, these like explicitly fascist organizations exist now, will put up these signs like these posters of the United States that say not stolen, conquered, right?
Where it's like, fuck the indigenous people, we beat them and so we deserve all this, right?
That's just an extension of what Rush is saying, you know?
Yeah.
And he, the fact that he made that mainstream is why they have a chance of making that mainstream, you know?
And the idea that it's so that they, that he phrased it as this matter of personal choice rather than like just common sense practical thinking, you know, like, do you really want to do you really want to put your trash in two separate trash cans?
You know, and it's like, well, it's not so much that it's a hassle.
It's that we're going to make Earth unlivable for ourselves.
Not that we're like, you know, fuck you, the dodo.
You should have, you should have had claws or something.
It's that we're fucking ourselves.
Like that's why, why has that been, why is that so hard to understand and so hard to comply with and so hard to keep as part of the narrative when because the logical extension is, what do you care?
You'll be dead.
By the time, by the time this shit, by the time this shit affects people in a meaningful way, to you, a meaningful way, you'll be dead.
So what do you care?
And these are people that are allegedly all about the family.
And it's like, well, I mean, do you plan on having grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren?
Like, do you care about what?
I don't know.
I'm not being funny now and I'm just being just being whiny.
What you're getting at, Paul, and what the core of this is, is that Rush doesn't believe in positive things.
And I don't mean positive in a good sense.
I mean, he doesn't believe in things that should be done.
He believes in tweaking people.
That is what he turns American conservatism into.
He turns it from we're conservatives.
These are the things we believe about how the government and how society should be run into conservatism is owning the libs.
That's where we are now.
And that's what this is.
It's my politics are a sort of rhetorical violence against the people I disagree with because improving the world, changing or making positive alterations to the world is difficult and complicated and involves a lot of debate and trial and error.
That's hard.
All I want to do is own the libs.
That's what Rush Limbaugh created, brought into the world and turned into the entire.
That's the only thing that's left in conservatism, right?
You've got these odd, you've got a couple of dudes left on the right who actually believe in something like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?
Not that what they believe in is great or that I believe in it too, but they both have clearly have a principles that aren't just owning the libs.
But they're on the fringe now because owning the libs is all the right has.
And it's just, it's not, it's not, it's not standing for something.
It's like not what I my politics are.
Single Mothers and Murphy Brown00:16:52
I don't want somebody telling me what to do.
I believe in a vague idea of a John Wayne movie and, you know, things were better in this bygone era before these people started to suggest that maybe we could improve things.
And that's where it ends.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, it's very frustrating, Paul, because that, the core of that idea that like, I want to be left alone, that's more or less my politics.
That's what led me to anarchism is like, don't fucking tell me what to do.
And I don't want to tell you what to do.
And that is what as a kid, I was taught conservatism was, but it's not what conservatism has ever been.
And I think a big part of why, why the Republican establishment embraces Rush is that by the early 90s in particular, by the mid-90s, definitely, it has become clear that nothing that the right does works for the actual people that vote them into office.
Triple-down economics does not function.
It doesn't.
It's well documented, objectively does not work the way they say it does.
Fighting against environmental regulations damages the world and makes it uninhabitable.
Fighting against corporate regulations gets a lot of their voters killed by dangerous working conditions and stuff.
All of the wars they get us into are disasters and expensive and do not achieve the foreign policy or even the basic national security goals they set.
Conservatism, as Americans do it at least, does not work.
And when you know that, you can't go back to the drawing table.
You can't admit failure.
You can't acknowledge the mistake.
What you can do is own the libs, you know?
And that's why, that's all it is now is owning the libs.
It's good.
It's a good, healthy, healthy society, Paul.
It's only going to get better, too.
It's only going to get better.
So Rush's justification for the outrageous caricature of a right-winger that he played on his show had always been that these liberals and leftists advocating for black lives and women's liberation and basic environmental safeguards were absurd.
And as Rush put it, I demonstrate absurdity by being absurd.
That's his own words on this.
Now, this turned out to be an objectively good business because none of his listeners seemed to find Rush himself absurd.
The character he played became the man he was.
And the once apolitical wannabe DJ turned into a mouthpiece for the very worst of our society's impulses.
One thing that made the Rush Limbaugh show groundbreaking was that for the first time in an explicitly political talk show, the focus was not on guests or actual reporting or anything but the personality Limbaugh had created.
Rush was his own guest.
And this was a deliberate choice he made and a very intelligent one to make the show more profitable.
If the focus of your show is on the news and on what guests have to say, you can kind of slot any person with a decent voice in to replace the host, right?
That limits how much money you're going to make and it limits kind of the length of your career.
Rush himself explained in an interview, I wanted to be the reason people listened.
That's how you pad your pocket.
That's how you establish yourself.
And that's very smart.
He did, in fact, establish himself.
In 1992, Rush's radio success finally got the TV people listening.
They decided to try him out as on-screen talent.
He teamed up with Roger Ailes, the man who would later invent Fox News.
And together they produced one of the most outrageous and vile news programs ever made.
It would, sadly, also turn out to be one of the most influential.
And now, Paul, it is time for you and I to take a journey into this particular piece of far-right history.
So this episode from 1992 of the Rush Limbaugh Show opens with a title card, which features an image of a microphone with the name Rush and Blazand on it, and the words, warning, the views expressed on this program are not necessarily the views of the staff, advertisers, or your local station, but they ought to be.
Forgot about this.
Yeah, I know.
It's good shit, man.
It's good shit.
So the episode itself has a weirdly quiet intro.
No music, just Rush with a pointer standing in what looks like an office with wall-to-wall bookshelves and TVs interspersed within the books on the bookshelves.
He introduces himself and he starts talking about a recent conversation he had with President George H.W. Bush on his radio program.
So there continues to be more controversy surrounding my performance with the president yesterday when he came by my radio program.
The press is telling you things that aren't true, but we have the tapes and we have the truth.
Me.
And we'll show you and tell you both tonight.
So that's telling.
That's extremely important what he does here.
You have to remember, Fox News was not a thing yet at this time.
Fake news was not a buzzword.
Limbaugh is groundbreaking in that he was not only critiquing mainstream news as being fake and lying, but he's also telling his listeners, I am the truth.
This paragraph from a write-up by Rolling Stone gets to the core of why I find what he's doing here so terrifying.
Quote, he wasn't selling political ideas, and he never has.
He was selling political attitude, the swaggering certitude, the mocking dismissiveness, the freedom to offend, the right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.
And partly because he was modeling that liberation with such wicked glee, Limbaugh was making himself indispensable.
Within six weeks of tuning in regularly, he would tell new listeners they'd be on the cutting edge of social evolution.
Best of all, he promised, I will do all your reading and I will tell you what to think of it.
I will do all your reading and I will tell you what to think of it.
Yeah.
Wow.
I know, right?
That's so abusive.
It's so, and it's so bald.
It's like, it's right out there.
It's like he's not, there's no, it's not like sort of obfuscating language.
He is saying very clearly what the deal is.
This is fucking unbelievable.
And this is the, this is the logical extent of this.
I'm so smart.
You know, I got to tie half my brain behind my back just to make it fair.
You know, I'm this big genius.
I'm so smart.
You don't need to read or think.
I'll do it for you.
And then you too will be smart.
And this is a huge thing.
He spends a lot of effort in reinforcing his intelligence.
After this section of the show, he goes on to introduce the other topics of that episode, which include Feminazi, Gloria Steinem, and a review of the movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
Then we cut into, yeah.
Then we cut to the actual intro, which is terrible 1990s talk show music played over a series of mocked up news articles with titles like EIB linked to higher IQ.
Limbaugh gets patent.
Limbaugh says no to presidential bid.
Limbaugh checks brain on donor's card.
Limbaugh to carry a torch at the mental olympics.
Again, he puts a lot of effort into, it's absurd, right?
But it clearly works.
It worked on my parents, you know?
Yeah.
It works on all of the people who raised me to some extent.
They're all convinced he was.
He's fun.
Yeah, he's fun.
He's fun.
But he also says things that I like to hear.
But he's fun.
He's just fun.
But he's fun.
I think also you cannot underestimate the effect of the pointer.
If you're on television and you have a you're you're walking over a television with a pointer and you're pointing at something, it looks very official.
Totally.
Absolutely.
That's why I have a point.
Well, I have a gun, but it works the same way.
So Robert, why put all your weapons in front of you?
Well, I'm always, I'm always surrounded by weapons.
What's going to happen during this discussion?
You don't have anything on you right now, Paul.
I got my machete right here.
Yeah, you're not strapped, Paul.
Hold on a second.
Fucking here.
Here's my knife.
There we go.
That's a nice knife, Paul.
That's lovely.
It's kind of like a nice, the nice little hunchback there.
That makes it good for kind of close-in work.
Yeah.
All right.
Now we're all armed.
We can properly get back to the show.
I didn't realize this was a knife on the table show.
I apologize.
This is, I mean, there are like three knives on the table, right?
This is a significant number of beauty on the table.
All right, I'm a new listener.
I apologize.
So the show proper starts after this point, after these fake news articles kind of go through.
And Russia's first subject on this episode is the then-new TV series, Murphy Brown.
Murphy Brown was obviously the titular character of the show.
She was a recovering alcoholic, investigative journalist, and a primetime news anchor and a single mother.
Murphy Brown was a very feminist and progressive series for its day.
Limbaugh opens his episode by expressing anger at the show's success.
And then in what I would consider a fairly abusive manner, he tells his audience why they shouldn't watch it.
Clip.
Oh, and people on my radio show didn't.
You probably watched it too, but you didn't have to.
You know why you didn't have to?
Because I told you.
You didn't have to.
I have the script.
I told you everything that was going to happen on this show.
I told you it wasn't funny.
I told you it was defensive.
I told you this show was a little heavy-handed.
I said that they're focusing on the wrong thing in this show.
And they really did.
You've heard a lot of people say a lot of things about this show, but I'll tell you, the most important thing is that they got very defensive about what a family is.
They trot out all these various examples of what a family is.
And that's not what the vice president or any of the family values people.
That's profoundly abusive, I think.
You shouldn't have watched this show because I told you not to.
And I told you not to because it's not good for you to imbibe this.
And I think it's important to break down exactly what he's doing here.
First off, he is trying to physically separate his audience from mainstream American society.
Murphy Brown was a hugely popular show in its day.
He is literally telling them, you don't need to watch this thing.
Other people are watching because I am telling you not to.
And he justifies this by saying that Murphy Brown is an assault on family values, which he goes on to call functional values, because families like the ones portrayed on Murphy Brown were in Limbaugh's eyes non-functional.
This is significant because Murphy Brown was a single mother.
She was one of the first single mothers portrayed on American TV as not just existing, but as being a successful person and a competent parent.
So now Rush was furiously not into it.
I can't let you.
We can't let people watch this because it will give them the wrong idea, not just about single mothers.
I also think it's worth noting that on the show itself, the idea of her being a single mother was a plot point that was a story arc that they discussed a lot on the show.
It was not a blithe decision by the character.
It was, they really talked about what it, because it was a show that did a lot of satire, talked about issues, the discussion of whether or not she was going to have the baby and what it meant to be a single working mother was discussed at great length on the show.
Yeah.
And that's why he wants, that's why it is important to him to keep his audience away from it.
Now, that was not the only kind of groundbreaking thing about Murphy Brown.
The show was incredibly significant in its portrayal of gay people.
In several episodes, most notably in 1992 and 1994, homosexuals were shown as not just normal, functional members of society, but as existing in significant numbers throughout American society.
There's an episode where like one of the characters buys a bar and it becomes through kind of like comedic hijinks or whatever, becomes a gay bar.
And he's like slowly realizes what it is.
But the point the episode was making is that gay people are all around us.
They're part of our community.
They are a significant, meaningful part of our society.
This was rare in mainstream television for the time, and it made Rush Limbaugh furious.
We have another clip here of that.
Just adults teaching kids.
It doesn't matter what the composition is of the family.
And nobody has been critical of that.
When Quayle said that they glorified single mothers, what he was trying to point out, my friends, was, and I think this show proved it last night.
This is another thing.
This show's got an agenda, and they say all day long they don't have an agenda.
But last night's show proved it.
It's okay that they have an agenda.
Just say so.
Like this show, we are perfectly upfront and honest about what I am and what I believe on this show.
And we'll let that float out in the marketplace and let you accept it as it is.
There's no attempt here to fool you.
There's no attempt here to deny what I am.
But that's what they're all about.
Now, this is also really significant.
So what Rush is doing here is he's framing his objection to Murphy Brown as reasonable and not based in hate.
He's saying, I'm not against single mothers or I'm not against gay people or whatever.
I am against the fact that this show conceals its political agenda.
And I can see why people like most of my family would have found this reasonable.
But what's happening here is very sinister because Murphy Brown was not trying to be left-wing.
It was trying to make a point that single parents and that gay people are regular human beings who contribute to society.
It was trying to point out that single parents are valid and functional people.
These should not be political points.
And recognizing the humanity of huge chunks of the population should not count as an agenda.
But it was critical for Rush Limbaugh to turn it into one.
Because if you can take the basic humanity of marginalized people and make it a political talking point, then you make it into something people can oppose on principle and thus frame their bigotry as not hate, but simply a political stance that they have every right to.
Rush was not the first person to talk about the gay agenda or to oppose single motherhood, not even close.
But before him, the most prominent voices attacking these groups of people were on the religious right, which had first arisen as an organized political force in the late 70s.
They were obviously influential, but they were also obviously religious extremists.
And a lot of non-religious conservatives and libertarian types did not want to identify with fundamentalists.
Rush, who had a documented history of mocking religious conservatives, provided the more libertarian right with a secular justification for bigotry against gay people and single mothers and women in general.
And that's one of his great innovations, unfortunately.
Yeah.
He pioneered this idea that if you are saying this is okay, this thing is okay, What you are doing is saying that's it.
That's somehow, that's an attack on me and what I believe.
Exactly.
So the idea of Dan Quel saying it glorifies single mothers.
No one, that show, no one was ever saying we should do this instead.
Right.
We should be doing this instead of what you think is right.
This is what we should be doing rather than just saying, isn't this okay?
These people exist.
Isn't that all right?
These people exist.
It's all right.
And they shouldn't be hated or punished or ostracized for being this, for being the way they are.
He's not even talking about a slippery slope.
He's just saying that if you are saying this is okay, that means you are saying the way we live is not okay.
Yes.
And that's just not there at all.
It's just not there at all.
But if he's able to make it be that way to his listeners, then he can, number one, make sure they will always oppose these things that he just finds gross.
And number two, it further separates them from mainstream society.
This is the beginning of the splintering of the mainstream American right from the United States, from most of the people in this country.
And it was the beginning of making sure that there was no, you cannot reconcile the right with the modern world, with the rest of civilization, because you doing a different thing than them is an attack on them.
Like we're being attacked because you're different and so we get to fight you.
Hopefully, Hopefully, Hopefully00:05:02
That's Russia's great innovation.
And also that the way you think is the real America and not what these people think.
Exactly.
That's haunting.
But you know what isn't haunting, Robert?
The products and services that support this podcast?
Hopefully.
Hopefully, hopefully.
Unless it's Raytheon, which is fairy haunted products.
But that's a story for another day.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Limbaugh TV Test Run00:04:34
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
And we're back.
So, Paul, I would love to go with this through this entire episode with you.
In fact, I would love to do a reoccurring series where we just go through point by point every episode of Rush Limbaugh's TV show and talk about it.
I think it would be amazing.
It is wild to see those puts against.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, boy, oh, boy.
What's the opposite of Proustian?
Yeah.
It would be very, I think, fun and also intellectually valuable, but we just, we have so much ground to cover.
This has to be the end of that episode of the show.
Yeah, we can't do a rewatch of the, we can't do a rewatch podcast with the Rush Limbaugh show.
Yeah, at least not today.
I think we've gotten the point across and characterized what he's doing on the show and why it was significant.
Now, the Rush Limbaugh TV show was what you'd call a modest success.
The 30-minute syndicated series ran from 1992 to 1996, which is not a long run, but isn't a super short run either.
You know, it was not a huge hit, but it was successful.
That said, its actual impact on history was much greater than its four seasons might suggest.
As I said earlier, Roger Ailes was the executive producer of Limbaugh's TV debut.
Limbaugh and Ailes had met in 1990, and Rush would later say that their meeting was, quote, like finding a soulmate.
And I'm going to quote here from a write-up that I found on Quartz.
The persona Ailes helped Limbaugh create on that show, something between a commentator, political strategist, news anchor, and entertainer, is exactly the kind of act you can see today on Fox News.
It is not hard to draw a straight line from Limbaugh's TV show to talking heads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
Like today's Fox News personalities, Limbaugh fancied himself as a man of the people who railed against elitist liberal politicians and voters.
But as he did that, he was flying his private jet around the country to whine and dine with powerful figures.
The myth he created of himself with the help of Ailes is the same myth that we see pushed again and again on Fox News by its biggest names.
In retrospect, Ailes may have been using Limbaugh's TV act as a test run for Fox News to see if the brand of conservative opinion that was working on the radio could be translated to and expanded on TV.
In 1996, the same year the Limbaugh Show ended, Ailes co-founded Fox News at the behest of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Much of what ensued, the liberal bashing, fear-mongering, alternative reality in which Fox's personalities lived, was reminiscent of Ailes' weird little Limbaugh talk show experiment.
So this is really a test case for what becomes Fox News, you know?
And the year Limbaugh Show ends, 1996, is the year Fox News launches.
What's strange to me is, well, I guess because the show was over, I guess the show, you know, the viewership went down.
I wonder why he didn't just stick Limbaugh on Fox News in those early days.
He wanted to, actually.
Okay.
Yeah.
So like Ailes actually tried to get Rush to join the network, I think, in 2006, but Limbaugh kind of preferred radio.
I don't think he actually liked being on TV very much.
Not to the extent that he enjoyed doing his radio show.
So I think that was mainly the reason.
But also by the time Fox News really got going, Ailes had a half dozen Rush Limbaughs, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
Which we'll talk about a bit later.
So throughout the mid and into the late 1990s, the Rush Limbaugh show was a bona fide cultural phenomenon.
Infuriating John Kerry Politics00:10:56
Rush created the first fully monetized right-wing cult of personality within like the American media at least.
As you heard in the clips we played, Rush discouraged his listeners from thinking for themselves.
He was the genius.
And if you just agreed with him and thought the way he thought, then you were by definition also smart.
As a result, from the very early point, he gave his fans the nickname Ditto Heads.
The New York Times explains the etymology of this term as it evolved on his show.
Ditto, a time-saving greeting used by callers to avoid tedious repetition of the obvious.
For example, you're wonderful, Rush, and I agree with everything you've said.
Ditto head, then, means a Limbaugh fan.
So you're like literally, he's saying, my fans are people who say and believe all of the exact same things that I do.
Yeah.
And profoundly unhelpful.
They're absolutely going to praise me.
And so in order to save some time, let's just condense all the fawning praise that you will no doubt give me into one word.
So we know that what you're saying is, Rush, I love you.
You are everything to me.
And I need you to know that before we get into whatever fucking issue we're going to get into.
Yeah.
You are the only thing that matters to me, or at least your beliefs are, because I am so empty as a person as a result of how capitalism has hollowed me out and hollowed my class out that I have nothing but the hatred of liberals that you embody.
Until that first guy came along that had to implement mega dittos.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then there's mega dittos.
And I can't even get too much into some of the terms used on the Rush Limbaugh show because it makes me want to punch things until my hands are broken.
And I already had that happen last year because of one of his fans.
Anyway, the core of the Rush Limbaugh show was not, as he would always claim, advancing conservative ideology, but was instead attacking liberals and the left, who he referred to as commie libs or pink commie libs.
And I don't know, again, at this fucking gun class I was at last weekend, the instructor was like, the far left wants to take your guns away.
And obviously I couldn't be like, actually, the far left is pretty heavily strapped.
It's liberals you think are.
But like, that's part of this idea that Joe Biden is somehow a leftist, right?
That he's a communist.
But you hear an out and you hear all over the right now.
That was Limbaugh saying anyone who is not a conservative is a far left.
So it doesn't matter that actually the Democratic Party is a profoundly conservative political party.
And today's Democrats are basically the same as Republicans were when I was growing up in the 90s.
There's also never any follow-up on these the fear-mongering claims whenever there's an election.
Like, what happened to the Obama sleeper cells?
Like, he never, are they still in play?
Is he still waiting to give them the word?
Like, they never go back and say, oh, it turns out that didn't happen.
It's this, I mean, that's kind of the thing about Republican talking points.
Like, the other thing, they kept panic, like, like terrified during the Obama years.
He's going to take your guns.
Barack Obama did not one single thing to restrict gun ownership in the United States.
No.
Whereas actually, Trump actually did ban certain fire, the bump stock.
Like Trump put through more restrictions on gun rights than, not that I'm saying anything wrong.
I think bump stocks are dumb, but Trump objectively restricted gun ownership more than Obama.
Like you never know it to listen to the right-wing media.
It's preposterous.
You would think that by now people would know, no, no one's coming to take your guns.
No one's going to take your fucking guns.
There's too many of them.
Not that, you know, we'll talk anyway.
It's separate.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
As I said earlier, the core of Rush Limbaugh's actual ideology was owning the libs.
His conservatism was built entirely around attacking the other.
And over his years on air, Rush built up an audience of millions and eventually tens of millions who began to see political victory as being not about achievements that improve life, but about tearing down and harming the enemy.
This is why you get to a point where now mainstream Republicans are selling mugs with like that are like the tears of my enemies are in the, yeah, you know, I'm going to quote from the Rolling Stone here.
Quote, any Republican candidate is better than any Democratic candidate, Limbaugh told his audience early on, which might sound kind of innocuous on the surface, except that for Limbaugh, the superiority of our side and the inferiority of them was increasingly over the years a deadly serious matter.
It became tribal warfare, which, you know, is kind of where we are now.
100%.
On January 23rd, 1995, Time magazine featured Rush Limbaugh on its cover.
We see him wearing a suit and smoking a cigar.
Smoke curls up out of his mouth behind the bold words, is Rush Limbaugh good for America?
Now, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that he was not.
But for the most part, the liberal media that Rush attacked and demonized embraced him as kind of like the loyal opposition, as an erudite foil to debate with, to argue against, but nonetheless, someone who deserved respect and honor due to his success.
Like, you can see this in the episode of Family Guy that Rush was on, right?
Where it's like he has these fun bickering arguments with the token liberal on the show, but in the end, they really both like each other, you know?
As opposed to what Rush actually represented, which is the politics of violent elimination of the opponent.
And that's what's most amazing to me is no matter what he said about the mainstream media, about the liberal media, whatever, they feted him.
They praised him.
They made him like he was never treated as a pariah.
Barbara Walters said in an interview, people just can't get enough of him.
The Los Angeles Times described him as a self-styled commander-in-chief fighting his private culture war against the many liberal do-gooder notions that interfere with his right to eat and wear and spend whatever he damn well wants and say whatever he damn well pleases.
C-SPAN highlighted him in a fawning interview that helped turn him into a household name.
Within a year of that interview, he was carried by 530 stations and listened to by an estimated 25 million Americans.
He started writing books with titles like The Way Things Ought to Be, each of which dutifully went on to become a New York Times bestseller.
For a man who built his career attacking the liberal media, Rush never received anything but encouragement and financial support from his so-called enemies.
The fundamental hypocrisies that undergirded his career were seldom called out.
Rush Limbaugh had not even registered to vote until he was 35 years old.
Two years before his show became a nationwide success.
The repeated double standards in his work and his life never hurt his pull with his audience.
For example, Rush Limbaugh repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton as a draft dodger, which he was, but so was Rush.
Limbaugh took the route that most wealthy young Americans during Vietnam took and found a doctor who would diagnose him with a bullshit injury so that he couldn't be called up for service.
When he was eventually called on this by some journalists who were doing their jobs, he responded, I had student deferments in college and, upon taking a physical, was discovered to have a physical, by the virtue of what the military says, I didn't even know it existed, a physical deferment.
And then the lottery system came along when they chose your lot by birth date and mine was high.
And I did not want to go, just as Governor Clinton didn't.
Which on its own is a reasonable statement, except you spent years attacking Clinton for being a draft dodger.
Yeah.
Oh, that's a lot of fun.
You draft dodgers.
You're so funny and hypocritical.
Yeah.
To me, my favorite draft dodge explanation of all time is still Dick Cheney.
I had other priorities.
Yeah.
I mean, that's just, that's incredible.
And it's true.
Both Cheney and George W. Bush did, like Rush, like Clinton, everything they could to not actually go and fight in Vietnam.
One of the things that will always be the most infuriating thing in politics, one of the most infuriating things to happen in American politics to me is the way in which John Kerry, who is a, whatever else you can say about him, fought courageously, went to, went, despite the considerable privilege he was born into, did an incredibly dangerous job, was wounded multiple times, and risked his life repeatedly for the lives of his men, right?
Vietnam was a terrible war.
We never should have been in it.
It was fundamentally immoral on a national scale.
But on a human level, John Kerry did the right thing, which is not use his privilege to get out of fighting in a war that other people of his class got us into.
And he was portrayed during that campaign as like a liar and a craven coward while George Bush, who did everything he could to not fight in Vietnam, was seen as this brave warrior hero.
It's I it's still very frustrating.
I don't even like John Kerry, but my God, the man who did the thing all of you say is what you're supposed to do as a man.
Yes.
It's infuriating.
Yeah.
It's infuriating.
The Ditto heads continued to listen to their idol slam Clinton for being a draft dodger, even while they celebrated a man who, by his own admission, had done the exact same thing.
Rush would eventually rack up three divorce.
And I should have stayed here.
I'm not, it's not bad to be a draft dodger.
The Vietnam War was, again, horribly immoral.
It's perfectly, it's, what is immoral is dodging the draft and then going on to encourage, to do nothing but encourage more wars that involve American servicemen, right?
That's immoral.
Yeah.
It is not immoral to dodge the draft and say, hey, this was a bad war.
We shouldn't get involved in stupid, pointless wars that just kill people for the profits of a tiny number.
Like, that's bad.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to support it.
That's fine.
Yeah.
It's doubly immoral when you're well past the age where it would affect you.
Where it's, you're now, there's another, there's a later generation of people that will be affected by this very, you know, hypocritical line of attack.
Yeah, it's the moral inconsistency that's infuriating.
John Kerry, I actually, and John Kerry did not support the Vietnam War and became after he got out a very, very outspoken voice against it.
But it's the, if Limbaugh had served in Vietnam and then gone on to be a war hawk, then at least he would be ideologically consistent, you know?
At least I could say Rush Limbaugh believes in something.
It's like John McCain.
At least he fucking believed in something, you know?
It was terrible and fundamentally toxic as well, but it was not.
He's not like Limbaugh.
You know, he is a person who has beliefs.
I don't know.
It's like that line from the Big Lebowski, right?
Like say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude.
At least it's an ethos, you know?
So Rush Limbaugh was not a man who I think believed in much other than the fame and wealth of Rush Limbaugh.
Charged for Drug Crimes00:02:52
He would eventually rack up three divorces and four wives.
He never had any children.
Despite this, tens of millions of conservatives listened to him opine on family values and traditional morality on a daily basis.
Rush called it functional values.
And one key aspect of his functional value system was rejecting illegal drugs.
At one point on his TV show, at the height of the drug war, Rush told his audience, if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up the river.
He repeatedly called addicts junkies.
Up the river.
Yeah, you should go to prison if you do illegal drugs.
He repeatedly called addicts junkies and suggested that drug dealers deserved death for their crimes.
While he enthusiastically supported the drug war and the use of the carceral state to lock up mostly black men for selling drugs, Rush Limbaugh was actively trafficking huge amounts of opiate painkillers.
Rush used his housekeeper as a hookup, handing her cigar boxes filled with cash in exchange for thousands of pills of OxyContin, hydrocodone, and the like.
In 2003, she went public and knocked on him to the police.
When the story broke, he was charged for his crimes, and Florida Sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into a drug trafficking ring.
We don't know exactly what Rush's, if he was just a customer or if he had some other role in it, but he was buying huge amounts of painkillers.
We're talking about a guy who was spending probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on his addiction.
And did it come from, did he have some injury that got him hooked on it?
Yeah, he got it prescribed to him initially for an injury and he got addicted like most people do.
But this is not just with prescription painkillers.
Most people who have a problematic addiction to a drug get addicted because of something negative that happens in their life, right?
Yes.
Trauma or an injury or an emotional depression, whatever.
That's most people who have a problematic addiction.
Limbaugh said anyone who does that should go to prison.
Then he did that, you know?
But he gets caught, no?
And he, oh, yeah, he gets caught.
And when he gets caught, it is a big story.
In 2003, his housekeeper went public, wore a wire, recorded him doing a drug dealer, deal, narced on him to the police.
And when the story broke, he was charged for his crimes.
And Florida Sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into that drug trafficking ring.
His third wife left him.
He checked himself into rehab while his multi-million dollar team of lawyers went to work defending him in court.
The legal battle would go on for three years, during which time he began doctor shopping to maintain his addiction.
He was charged again with fraud for concealing information to obtain prescriptions from four different doctors who prescribed him roughly 2,000 pain pills during one six-month period.
The case would eventually wrap up in 2006 when Limbaugh agreed to a plea deal that allowed him to avoid prosecution if he sought treatment and avoided other criminal activities.
Fuck's sake, that's very frustrating.
Cartel Supported Podcast00:06:47
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Oh, yeah.
I actually didn't, I didn't really, I wasn't really cognizant of all the legal side of this.
I just remember the hypocrisy of him being, you know, shaming.
Just gobbling up.
Yeah, shaming while he's gobbling down these pills.
But I had no idea.
I guess I didn't, I didn't, I didn't bother exploring that side of it.
Right.
And like, he doesn't even, he barely, it's not even a slap on the wrist.
It's like a little light tap on the wrist.
It's not even a slap on the wrist.
It's so fucking upsetting.
And again, the immorality here is that he always advocated criminal consequences for people who did exactly what he did.
And then he didn't go on to suffer them.
And that's what's it's not that like there's nothing morally wrong with being addicted to painkillers.
If it were legal, I would absolutely be a painkiller addict.
Seems rad.
It's it's the but I'm also consistent about the fact that I don't think doing or possessing any subset should be illegal.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With the exception of like, you know, some explosives.
There's a line to be drawn.
I don't think people should have surface to air missile launches.
Speaking of heroin, you know who supports our podcast, Sophie?
I don't know.
The fine people at the Sinaloa cartel.
So I was like, where very specific like Easter egg is Robert going to drop right now.
Yes, this is a cartel-supported podcast.
And I just want to say, let's go to ads before I get us in some trouble.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come.
Look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Racism After LA Riots00:10:42
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
Good times.
So while Rush was using his wealth and power to avoid the legal consequences that he enthusiastically supported existing for the crimes he committed, he continued to act as the voice of America's conservative conscience.
Mostly, this meant being super racist.
At one point on his TV show, he played video clips of black men and boys standing in front of the TV.
And like while he was playing these clips of black men and boys, he would stand in front of the TV and make guerrilla noises and grunts.
The apparent joke being that black people were like monkeys.
Like that's kind of, I don't know what else he could be saying.
Pretty satirical.
Very satire.
Pretty satirical.
Like I think he got that from a New Yorker cartoon.
It would be like if Jonathan Swift actually murdered Irish children and ate them and then was like, this is a satire.
Get it.
Get it?
The joke is that they're food.
Rush repeatedly blamed corruption and violence in African, like the African national governments as the fault of black people getting rid of white colonial leaders, as we see in this quote from 2007.
Quote, right, so you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa.
You get rid of the white government there.
You put sanctions on them.
You stand behind Nelson Mandela, who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders.
You go to Ethiopia, you do the same thing.
Right.
He's saying that because the black people got rid of their colonial oppressors, that's why Africa's in bad shape.
Not the decades of trauma those governments pushed, not the fact that when those governments gave up colonial control, they put people like Idi Amin, who had been a British military sergeant in charge of the government and turned out that he was a fucking monster.
Not because those governments, like colonial governments, continued to suck wealth out of these countries and support kleptocratic dictatorships that allowed them to suck more wealth out, that made the country dysfunctional and that led to consistent like decades and decades of violence.
Not that they supported ethnic groups one over the other like they did in Rwanda, which led to the Rwandan genocide.
None of that.
It's because they got rid of the white people.
Even though the white people didn't actually leave, you know, it's super fucked up.
I didn't know that he'd actually gone to the lengths of trying to smear Nelson Mandela.
Yeah, communists.
Jesus Christ.
Oh, it's good stuff.
I mean, Nelson Mandela also was at one point somebody who supported like terrorism and stuff, which also is totally justified.
If your government is the apartheid government of South Africa, terrorism's not necessarily the wrong thing to do.
I would say it's not off the table.
It's not off the table.
Sometimes terrorists are right.
That is like, you could argue that the founding fathers of this nation, who despite their own bigotry and slave, like the government they were rebelling against also allowed slavery, they were right to do terrorism to get rid of having a king because kings are bad.
You know, like terrorism is justified sometimes.
So Rush was repeatedly critical of professional sports for the presence of black athletes, as we see in this 2007 quote.
Look, let me put it to you this way.
The NFL all too often looks like a game between the bloods and the crypts without any weapons.
There, I said it.
Wow.
The inherent criminality of black people was a belief that Rush held deeply, and he expressed it constantly.
In 1993, he said, the NAACP should have riot rehearsals.
They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.
He was saying this after the LA riots, you know?
This is what the NAA, this is not people reacting to horrible violence the only way that they can, right?
This is not a riot being the language of the unheard.
This is what the NAACP wants because they're all principal.
Rush to criticize athletes.
I bet he couldn't even do like a jog.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
Yeah, the talking point of like, they just, these, you know, these people, they just love to riot.
Yeah, they just love to, not these people are being oppressed and murdered.
And finally, violence was the only thing they could think to do because they were given no other options and they reached the end of their human tether, like the people I idolize who founded this nation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look, slavery is over.
What more do you want?
I mean, when I say that, I don't mean to say like that.
Obviously, anyone rioting in Los Angeles in 1993 was a thousand times more justified than George Washington.
And that said, I still think getting rid of a king, all other things being equal, getting rid of a king is a valid reason to do violence.
Kings are bad.
Yeah.
So Rush repeatedly argued that white people shouldn't be blamed for slavery, saying it's preposterous that Caucasians are blamed for slavery when they've done more to end it than any other race.
Any race of people should not have guilt.
If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians.
Rush, bitch.
It's amazing.
How many Caucasians fought and died to keep slavery going, Rush?
Is this just like at this point, when you say things like that, right?
He is what do you think the percentage is of for in Rush's mind, I actually believe this or what is the most out to what is the most outrageous thing that I could say?
I think he comes to believe it because these beliefs be aware of the people who are in the world.
I think he believes his own bullshit.
Well, I think what it is, it starts, he's not a political person.
He doesn't care about politics.
He starts with a joke because he starts doing this persona because it gets him listeners.
But he's also a narcissist.
And these beliefs aren't political stances to him.
They're aspects of his personality.
And his narcissism dictates that he comes to believe it because believing it and defending these things is the same as defending himself.
And again, he's a fucking narcissist.
I think that's how it works.
It's like the Trump thing where he starts out telling a lie, but then he repeats the lie enough times that it becomes true to him because he is saying it.
Yes, that's exactly the case.
So another repeated Rush Limbaugh bit was attacking the daughters of Democratic presidents for being ugly.
In 1988, he called Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy, the most unattractive presidential daughter in the history of the country.
In the early 1990s, he declared Chelsea Clinton to be the White House dog, which is like just very vile.
I don't even think it's like the Trump boys and Ivanka made themselves political figures.
Perfectly fine to insult and attack them.
You're never going to hear me say anything bad about like Tiffany or Baron because they're children, you know?
Like, don't fucking talk about them if they don't make themselves into a major part of things, you know?
Now, Chelsea Clinton's done, has it put herself in the public eye, and it's perfectly fair to criticize her for the things she does in the public eye.
But at that time, when he was saying that shit, she was literally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what you're, what he said about her is a kind, you can't be a good person and say that about a child to an audience of millions.
100%.
Yeah.
In 2012, when Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke went before Congress to argue that contraceptives should be covered by the Affordable Care Act, Limbaugh called her a slut and a prostitute.
It's hard.
You can't overstate how vile he was.
When the Marty from Back to the Future, Paul.
Oh, Michael J. Fox.
Michael J. Fox made some political statements that Limbaugh disagreed with.
Limbaugh mimicked having Parkinson's disease to mock him on his show.
Like such a bad person.
To say that, to implied that Michael J. Fox was playing it up for the cameras when he went and testified before Congress.
I remember this.
I remember this so well because Michael J. Fox deliberately did not take his medication and said that and said, I want you to see this is what happens.
And Rush Limbaugh accused him of like playing it up.
Like, it's not that bad.
And he's jiggling all around.
Like, that's burned into my brain forever.
It's horrific.
I mean, it's like, and to say that it would be, like, I think what he did was perfectly reasonable.
I am not going to take my medicine because you need to know what it is like for people who don't have access to the medicine.
I'm rich.
I have access to all the medicine I need.
Here's what it's like if you don't.
I want to make this less abstract to you.
Yeah.
I had a friend.
One of the big things in terms of like me changing my political attitudes, it started with like me changing my attitudes on drugs, this conservative that like marijuana should be illegal, that it was immoral.
I had a friend who's much older than I met on World of Warcraft who had multiple sclerosis, and we were video chatting.
And she showed me how badly her hands shook before she started smoking, right?
She like showed me herself shaking and then she took a hit, which was difficult for her.
And I watched in real time how it affected her.
And I never, again, supported keeping that shit illegal because you can't when you see it, right?
You can't.
It's medicine.
Not that most people who use it use it medicinally, which doesn't isn't wrong.
Like it's not wrong to use it recreationally, but just the idea that what she was doing was a crime made it clear to me how immoral our drug laws were.
In a way that maybe if I had, like it would have taken longer otherwise, I think.
Completely.
So yeah, anyway, Limbaugh did occasionally face consequences for his bald-faced bigotry.
In 2003, ESPN hired him as an on-air commentator.
Oh, I forgot to think about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he was fired after like seven weeks because he said Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb didn't deserve any of the praise he received.
That's real.
So he said it's horrible.
Yeah.
He said Donovan McNabb didn't deserve the praise that he received because, quote, I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.
They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.
I think that there's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn't deserve.
People just like this guy because he's black, not because he's a good quarterback.
The media is invested in black men being good quarterbacks, you know?
I like that you went into your Shapiro voice for that quote.
It's what the fuck, man.
You couldn't do what he's doing.
How dare you?
Like, so this combat drew enough widespread condemnation that Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN.
Cult Leader Personality Demonization00:09:54
But obviously, this had little to no impact on his bottom line.
Maybe it annoyed him personally, but it didn't hurt him financially.
By the early aughts, Rush was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He had a private jet.
He had a palatial mansion in Florida.
He smoked cigars that cost more than some people's cars.
This is disgusting, but I think any fair accounting of Limbaugh's career has to acknowledge how impressive it was, too.
The early 2000s saw the explosion of Fox News.
This is the period where it became the most watched news network in the country.
A slew of Limbaugh imitators rose up, men like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson, to name a few.
While these folks were all hugely successful and influential, none of them ever eclipsed Rush.
This is because, in addition to wielding influence, Rush held actual demonstrable political power.
And I'm going to quote the Rolling Stone again here.
His sky-high ratings and the rabid fandom of his ditto heads, who just happened to fit the profile of people who voted frequently in Republican primaries, made it inevitable that the GOP would come courting.
In 1992, after he boosted Pat Buchanan's pitchfork populist Make America First Again challenge to George Bush, the president became so hell-bent on gaining Limbaugh's favor for the general election that he not only invited the host to the White House, but toted his bags personally into the Lincoln bedroom.
Limbaugh had only praised for Bush from that day forward, at least until he lost to Bill Clinton in November.
That set a pattern.
Limbaugh might instinctively gravitate to the radicals, but he was ultimately a team player, the national precinct captain of the Republican Party, as Mother Jones described him.
Two years later, Limbaugh basically co-captained the Republican Revolution with House leader Newt Gingrich when their efforts produced a landslide that brought 73 anti-government zealots to Congress.
The host was made an honorary House freshman and feted at a GOP orientation in December, where the new members wore Rush was right buttons and listened to his marching orders.
This is not the time to get moderate, he said.
This is not the time to start trying to be liked.
Ronald Reagan himself declared Limbaugh the number one voice for conservatism in our country.
And Rush was always very clear.
And Rush was always very clear about where he wanted to see the party head.
Smaller government, stronger, more powerful corporations.
He said outright, I consider myself a defender of corporate America.
Yeah.
It would not be wrong to view Rush Limbaugh as something of a cult leader.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting this conclusion is, in my mind, Limbaugh's embrace of the irrational.
Politics for Rush Limbaugh was never about concrete results or observable reality.
It was a fight between good, his side, and evil, anyone who disagreed with him.
And since those were the stakes, it didn't matter if he lied or spread conspiracy theories because the essence of what he was saying, that the Democrats were monsters, was true.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his hatred of the Clintons.
It started when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill, robbing Rush of a president who would directly, you know, take him into the White House, right?
From an early stage, Rush realized that lying about the crimes committed by Bill and Hillary was a more productive route than criticizing them on policy.
And so in 1994, he announced, Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton and the body was taken to Fort Marcy Park.
Rolling Stone writes, Conspiracy theories, once the province of fringe right-wingers, started to become the mainstream Republican fair they are today during Clinton's two terms.
And Limbaugh was the great popularizer of the genre.
Long before Fox hosts began amplifying the fringier theories about American politics, Limbaugh was busy mainstreaming wingnut world.
The conspiracy cranks, the John Birchers, the Christian Zionists, the science deniers, the info warriors, their wildest fantasies, fears, and paranoias all came out to play in the national prime time on the Rush Limbaugh show, repackaged by the host into a palatable fare for the Republican masses.
And this is significant because Rush's demonizing of the Clintons, who there's plenty of very valid things to critique them on, but at the end of the day, pretty normal neoliberal politicians.
It's even spread on the left this idea that Hillary Clinton is somehow more of a warmonger than other liberals, right?
Is somehow like exceptionally bad when she's not.
She's very much in line with everyone else in the party and everyone else who has held those positions and is not as bad as some of them, right?
She's more hated by certain people.
Even on the left, you'll find people who are more directly aggressive towards her than they are to fucking Kissinger.
And it's not that she's not bad.
She is.
So is Bill.
They're greedy.
Bill's a rapist.
They have supported, you know, in addition to the Iraq war, a number of violent actions overseas that were disasters.
But they did that as part of within a large group of people, right?
There's nothing about them that is exceptionally bad for the crew that they run with.
But this absolute demonizing of them that has a real impact on the 2016 election, that's a big part of why we get Trump is something that Rush Limbaugh pioneers.
The Clintons are not like, my parents hated Trump when he was running and voted for him because their hatred of Hillary Clinton was, it's beyond rational.
And again, a lot of super valid criticisms of Hillary Clinton.
I don't think she should have ever been president.
Also, hard to say she would have been worse than Trump.
And if you are saying like she would have, for example, been more, killed more people overseas than Trump, you're not actually paying attention to the death toll as a result of American airstrikes and missile strikes and drone strikes as it changed from the Obama administration, where Clinton was Secretary of State, to the Trump administration.
Because there was a massive escalation in death under that, in addition to repealing of the rule about any sort of reporting about civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes, Trump was worse on this sort of stuff, but you'd never know it.
Anyway, I don't want to get into a rant on this, but like you can't, it's almost impossible to analyze the Clintons, their impact, their crimes and their behaviors, their policies with any sort of rationality because this they've been turned into goblins, right?
Absolutely.
It's very frustrating.
And it makes it so that if you try to say like, well, actually, this thing you're criticizing them on isn't a reasonable thing to, or at least the way you're criticizing them isn't reasonable, suddenly you're defending them.
And it's like, no, that's not what I'm, it's very, I hate it.
I hate everything.
Yeah.
Sorry.
It gets that that sort of specific personality demonization gets in the way of actually accomplishing discussions of policy and where and where we are as a country and how we do things.
Because absolutely.
They were completely typical of the people that occupy the White House on any given year.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And like, you know, Hillary, even if she had killed as many people overseas as Trump did, probably fewer people domestically in terms of policy.
If you're talking about the, if you're going to talk, get into the pandemic and stuff like that, if she had been elected and had, you know, anyway, yeah, I totally agree that it's like, it's a very weird thing that absolutely sprung out of the Rush Limbaugh personal demonization that then gets into,
you know, like the fucking Alex Jones shit where it's like, see, she's a demon.
There's a fly on her.
Yeah, exactly.
It's this, it's this turning people from like, okay, let's analyze what this person's actually done, how it's worked, when it's been successful, when it's been unsuccessful, when it's been moral, when it's been immoral, and to, no, she's just a criminal.
She's just a warmonger.
And we don't have to analyze what she actually did or anything.
We don't have to, we just have to condemn her.
And it's not that she doesn't deserve condemnation for a lot of things, but like, for one thing, I don't know.
I don't want to fucking get onto a defending because I don't like Hillary Clinton.
Yes.
But she's also has it like, it's very frustrating.
Yeah.
It's very, it's all just very frustrating.
And he creates this culture.
And it spreads.
Now it's not just the Clintons now.
Now it's everyone, right?
You don't have to analyze people that you disagree with.
You come up with a three-word thing about them and you spread these, like, like Bill Clinton has committed crimes.
He's a fucking rapist.
You don't have to make up that he and his wife are having people murdered.
Like, he's a rapist.
That's bad.
But of course, a lot of people calling him a rapist are rapists themselves.
So they have to make it up that now, no, he's a murderer.
You know, it's fucking bullshit.
It's very frustrating.
So Rush also led the charge on demonizing and denying global warming and climate change.
In his book, CI Told You So, he declared that quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding.
Cut to Texas being submerged in a layer of snow that destroys civil society.
Or the entire West Coast burning down last year.
Anyway, he lampooned Al Gore and scientists who warned about climate change as, quote, a few hardline doomsayers who are sticking to their thermostats.
Yeah.
Yep.
His conclusion was what?
Stoking White Resentment00:06:55
You know, now it's, it never affected him.
It never affected him.
Now he's dead.
Yeah.
And he, yeah, he hates the outdoors anyway.
As far as he knows, he was right about this.
He was right about this.
Limbaugh was unquestionably the single most influential American conservative from about 1989 to at least 2008.
Now, his star did start to fade by the end of George W. Bush's term, and there are a couple of reasons for this.
For one, he'd been outed as an opiate addict, gone to rehab three times, and through it all had repeatedly defended an administration that led the United States into two disastrous and expensive failed wars.
By the time Barack Obama was elected, many of the more libertarian-minded right-wing were starting to reject the neoconservative ideology that Rush had spent eight years hyping up.
Now, the fact that Barack Obama was the man who finally broke eight years of GOP power wound up being the salvation of Limbaugh's influence.
Yes, he'd encouraged the nation to burn through its treasure and influence, losing two wars, but now a black man was president.
The floodgates of right-wing racism opened wide.
In the first four years of Obama's term, the number of hate groups in the United States rose by 755%.
This surge in public anti-black racism.
I know it's pretty shocking when you actually look at the number, right?
755%.
Yeah.
The idea that, like, oh man, there's a black president.
We're going to need more hate groups, guys.
The hate groups, the extant hate groups, we're not going to get it done.
We need more hate groups.
There is a black president who in his actual policies is not wildly different from George H.W. Bush.
But like, yeah.
The fact that Barack Obama, yeah, so this surge in public anti-black racism was heralded, incited, and led by Rush Limbaugh, the USA's most prominent bigot.
There are a lot of different clips that I could select to make this point, Paul, but none is more appropriate than this song that aired on Rush's program while Obama was still on the campaign trail.
Now, the context of this is that Limbaugh was talking about the fact that Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and Al Sharpton had like a public series of arguments, right?
I think Sharpton was backing Hillary at first.
So this is this song that you're about to hear.
The singer is supposed to be Al Sharpton singing about Barack Obama.
And I'm just going to let Sophie play the clip now.
Sentiment guilty whites feel good.
They'll vote for him and not for me because he's not from the hood.
See real black men like Snoop Dogg or me or Farah Khan have talked to talk and walk the walk, not coming late and won.
Oh, Barack the Magic Negro lives in DC.
The LA times they called him that because he's black.
All right.
I think that's enough of that.
Yes.
Pretty bad.
I mean, I just, I guess I just wish that non-comedy people would stay in their lane.
Yeah, stay in their lane, bro.
Yeah.
Like, the meter was terrible.
It's bad.
It's not funny unless you're a bigot, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Unless you're a bigot.
So Limbaugh had other Obama zingers saying at one point, if he weren't black, he'd be a tour guide in Hawaii.
In 2008, he compared Obama to a cartoon monkey.
He repeatedly called Michelle Moochelle.
And why?
Because she's a cow, you know?
And all the while he claimed that racism had nothing to do with his hatred of Obama.
Doesn't matter to me what his race is.
He's liberal is what matters to me.
Yeah, okay.
Barack the magic Negro guy.
Yeah.
I just, I just bring it up a ton.
That's all.
Yeah.
I can't talk about it enough, but I'm not a bigot.
It's just convenient that he's black.
It's not a problem that I have with him, but it's convenient for me for my satire.
God, I hate this guy.
Why is he even doing satire at this point?
Like, has he pretended, has he dropped that pretense?
Yeah, I mean, I can play you songs that, like, there's a bunch of Nazis that will go through and like rewrite Disney songs to be about hating the Jews and stuff or about race traitors and whatnot, because it's the kind of thing that's easy to spread, right?
You make a racist song and people laugh.
And at first, it's a joke, and then it becomes less of a joke.
It's the whole story, right?
That's exactly what Limbaugh's doing, you know?
It's not even all that much less racist.
He just doesn't say the N-word.
When candidate Obama became President Obama, Rush said, I hope he fails, explaining that rooting for liberalism to fail is rooting for America to succeed.
Limbaugh declared that stopping Obama was, quote, what I was born to do.
One of his tactics to this end seemed to be stoking fears that because Obama was anti-white, he was trying to gin up a race war.
In 2009, Rush declared, in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.
Clearly, he would have preferred it when, you know, I don't know, when white kids were burning down black kids' schools in his hometown.
Those were the days.
Those were the days, my friend.
I thought they'd never end.
Yeah, it's great.
Limbaugh was not the only person who stoked white resentment and anti-black bigotry in this period.
He was not close to the only person, but he was the man who had created the blueprint and the cultural space that all of those other right-wing media figures acted in.
Ben Shapiro is very open about the fact that Limbaugh was his hero and idol.
Alex Jones altered the way he spoke and altered the acoustic setup of his InfoWars studio in order to more closely resemble Rush Limbaugh.
In 2010, Limbaugh was picked to address CPAC, the conservative political action conference.
He was the main event that year and gave what he called his first address to the nation.
Limbaugh was so central to the Republican Party at this point that RNC Chairman Michael Steele was asked on CNN if Limbaugh was the effective party leader.
When Steele claimed that Rush was just an entertainer, this pissed off Rush Limbaugh, who attacked Michael Steele on air and caused such an outpouring of right-wing rage against the RNC chairman that Michael Steele was forced to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh.
Kind of proving that he was effectively the leader of the Republican Party.
Nazis Mourning Rush Limbaugh00:13:27
Yeah.
You know, it puts me in mind of Howard Stern coming into the Philadelphia market and forcing John DiBella, the host of the Morning Zoo, to apologize for being on the radio.
Jesus, I didn't know that it happened.
Oh, it was, it was, it was ridiculous.
So as leader of the Republican Party, Limbaugh spent the Obama years repeatedly hammering home the idea that there could not be peaceful coexistence between the right and left in the United States.
Quote from Rush, we live in two universes.
One universe is a lie.
One universe is an entire lie.
Everything run, dominated, controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie.
Every other universe is where we are.
And that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it.
The real America.
Yeah.
The real America.
And there can be no coexistence.
Yeah.
Now we're in the age of, you know, because Biden said, you know, he's looking for unity.
Anytime somebody's looking for unity and there's a criticism of a famous monster like Rush Limbaugh, the response from the right is always, oh, where's the famous unity?
I thought you wanted unity.
And it's like, well, do you care about unity?
You don't give a shit about it.
You're already living in a world that says, if you don't come to believe the things that I believe, you are against America.
And you are the real racist.
You're the real misogynist.
You are the real hater of all things that are decent.
So it's, I don't know how we, I don't know how we unfuck ourselves from this, from this situation.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know that we can.
But the way to do it is not to not to yield to these people.
Right.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's not to just let them get what they want because what they want is the annihilation of the other.
And honestly, the annihilation of themselves, because it's a fucking death cult at this point.
Like they can't be allowed to win.
And like the people and that's not to say that every aspect of what has what of traditional conservative ideology is wrong.
They have some points.
That's why it brings people in.
The idea that like you should always be wary about giving the government control of things.
You fucking should, you know?
Like, absolutely.
There's a space, there is a space for conservatism in society that is not what Rush Limbaugh turned it into, which is not to say that it wants, because fucking Reagan was president before Limbaugh came onto the scene and he was terrible and very toxic.
Not like toxicity in the Republican Party goes back very far.
But also, it's not for nothing that the Republicans used to be the party of Abraham Lincoln.
There is a way to have a conservatism that is influential in society that isn't a fucking death cult.
And we have to, at very least, get back to that if we're going to continue to be a democracy that doesn't spiral inevitably into civil war.
I'm a pretty committed leftist, but I also do not seek a society that forces my beliefs on other people.
But you can't give these people an inch because they'll take everything.
That's how they are.
That's what part what Rush had a big impact in making them into.
By 2015, Rush Limbaugh had succeeded in leading a rightward push that finally prepared the Republican Party to nominate an obvious fascist, Donald Trump.
Limbaugh embraced Trump early on.
Right-wing radio host and never Trumper Joe Walsh, who is another actually principled conservative, draws a direct line between Limbaugh and Trump.
Quote, the average Trump supporter loves Trump because he fights, man.
He fights, not because of any policy or issue or political philosophy.
That's why they loved Rush before him.
It wasn't about conservatism.
I still can't tell you after 30 years what the fuck he believes in, but he knew how to prey on audiences' grievances and resentments, which is what conservative talk radio does.
Rush was a son of a bitch.
He'd lie about the dims and punch them and make fun of them.
That gave him a cult-like following from the beginning.
Trump sort of inherited it.
And Joe Walsh, again, not a guy I agree with on much, but he's right on the money here.
He's analyzing it properly.
Absolutely.
I think the thing also about Trump is, like Rush, doesn't really have any deeply held beliefs.
Right?
No.
Like that.
You couldn't say this guy, even convincing himself, really cares that much about anything beyond what's right in front of his fucking face that is about him.
All he cares about is his own aggrandizement.
Yeah, right?
It's narcissism.
Trump and Limbaugh are very similar people.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Rush bent the knee to Trump, declaring him everything but the second coming.
And we will not labor long on Rush during Trump's years because once he had helped shepherd his massive audience into Trump's arms, his cultural influence faded.
It was watered down by the sheer mass of right-wing ideologues who flooded the internet and increasingly urged their followers to embrace irrationality, conspiracy, and fascism.
In February of 2020, Rush led the charge denying the reality of COVID-19.
He called it the common cold and mocked even his old ally Matt Drudge for caring about the burgeoning plague.
He urged his listeners against mask wearing, calling it a symbol of fear.
Rush had long denied the dangers of smoking, particularly secondhand smoke, but this was a new level for him.
When Trump lost re-election to Biden, Limbaugh immediately called the election a sham and joined the chorus of voices claiming fraud.
By this point, though, he was sick, and the playing field was so flooded with men who sounded like him, triggered the libs like him, lied like him, that his voice hardly rose above the din.
Rush had succeeded in building a right wing so made in his own image that he no longer stood out in it.
His last show was February 2nd.
He died less than two weeks later, killed by the lung cancer he denied had anything to do with smoking, because that was another thing Rush denied his entire career.
Joe Walsh, a former Limbaugh lover, like when he was much younger, he got into talk radio because of Limbaugh, eventually wound up, and to be fair, before Trump, rejecting Limbaugh in a lot of ways, found the whole arc of Rush's career to be terribly sad.
Quote, I didn't think that at the end of his life, Rush would sell out to Trump the way he has.
He had every opportunity this final year to come clean and be decent.
I mean, he was still on this February, lying about a stolen election.
He'll keep up this act till he dies.
And it's sad.
When a writer from Rolling Stone asked if maybe the reason he kept backing Trump was that Limbaugh truly believed in what Trump said, Walsh countered with a theory of his own.
Quote, maybe, knowing him, it's one last big extended fuck you.
Maybe it's Limbaugh saying, I'm not going to bend to the dims and anybody else, no matter what.
Never.
To the end, I'm never going to do it.
And at the end of this, I can't help but think that there's something terribly meaningful in the fact that Joe Walsh rejected Limbaugh in his later years and at his end.
Walsh gained prominence as a voice of the rising Tea Party.
He is very conservative, but his constant principled resistance to President Trump proves that he is not a fascist.
And it turns out what Limbaugh was really selling, what he was preparing the American right for all along, was fascism.
If you want confirmation of this, you need look no further than how America's most prominent neo-Nazis reacted to Limbaugh's death.
Chris Cantwell was one of the speakers and organizers of the Deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
He is a straight-up Nazi.
He assaulted left-wing counterprotesters at the event.
And when this brought legal consequences on him, he filmed himself crying in fear, earning the nickname the crying Nazi.
Cantwell gained prominence among the alt-right as a podcaster with shows like Outlaw Conservative.
And Chris Cantwell openly sees Rush Limbaugh as the man who invented his style of content, who made his career possible.
He's in jail right now because he made a bunch of illegal threats and stuff, but he was interviewed for another fascist podcast by a guy named Jared Howe on like right after Limbaugh's death.
And in this clip, I'm about to play, the crying Nazi Chris Cantwell discusses his reaction to learning about Rush Limbaugh's death.
And when I heard, you know, when I heard Catherine's voice, I choked up and I said, oh no.
You knew.
You know.
Yeah, I knew.
And what is it?
Catherine Limbaugh.
I had actually wrote a letter to Rush.
I kept on hoping that, you know, if I'd get out of here, it's not that I could call onto the show or drop an email.
And I started to realize, like, all right, he's at Phil and Hosea for two weeks.
If I'm going to contact this guy, just probably going to have to do it by mail.
And I was actually going to, I forgot to do it.
I was going to ask you to get me, see if there was an address that I could write to.
And it turns out it's a little late for this.
Yeah.
But, you know, when I heard her voice, I choked up.
I said, oh, no, my family hurt me.
What's going on?
I'm going to tell her all my cousin had to be dead.
And so, yeah, I heard it when it happened.
And I was like, you guys, you fucking kidding me, man.
So that's, I mean, you know, he's legitimately affected by this.
He's mourning Rush Limbaugh, this Nazi.
And he's not the only Nazi mourning Rush Limbaugh.
The Daily Shoah is one of the most prominent Nazi podcasts on the internet.
The word Shoah is the Hebrew term.
I think it means calamity for the Holocaust.
So it's literally, this is the daily holocaust.
And it is maybe the most prominent Nazi podcast on the internet.
Now, TDS, as its hosts call it, has been on the ears for years at this point, since before Trump was in office.
And the hosts of the Daily Shoah consider Limbaugh to be something of an idol.
Now, these guys are hardcore Nazis, so they consider Russia moderate, and they do demean him at times for that.
But they also recognize that he paved the way for their financial success and cultural influence.
And in this next audio clip, you can hear several members of the Daily Show, can't emphasize that name enough, learn live about Rush Limbaugh's death and the emotional impact it has on them is undeniable.
News cocked on that.
Yes, what happened today?
Well, Sven, got some bad news for you, buddy.
Rush Limbaugh is dead.
Oh, seriously.
Well, I guess I can't see what he's saying about technology.
I'm not going to dance on his grave.
He said a lot of really dumb things, but I'm still kind of sad about that.
I'm very sad about that.
I wouldn't be here if not.
I wouldn't be here, says host of The Daily Shoah, without Rush Limbaugh.
I can't think of a more damning thing to say in a man's passing, but that he was truly, honestly mourned by Nazis.
Yeah.
The end of the day, that's what you can say about Rush.
And that is the end of our episodes on Rush Limbaugh.
Wow.
You doing, Paul?
I'm good.
I mean, look, he said some dumb things, and I am going to dance on his grave.
I am absolutely going to dance on his grave.
He sucked, and I'm glad he's dead.
He was a bad person.
And I have to say, on social media, when the story broke, people were talking about it.
There were a lot of people that wanted to say, you know, you can, you, you know, you can say whatever you want, but Rush was hugely successful, more successful than you will ever be, had more influence.
He was a millionaire.
Guys, take the W. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
You can't.
And this is the problem with these guys, with Trump, with people like this, is it's not enough for them to win.
They need people to lick the boots.
They need people to say, you are the greatest.
It is never enough for them.
It is never enough for them to be hated, to be feared, to have all the marbles.
They need you to say, I love you too.
Yes.
They need it.
And that is, that is what the only solace I can take in a life like this is that in the end, he didn't get the thing that he wanted, which was everybody saying, you're the greatest and I love you.
No.
And that was rest and piss.
Yeah.
It was rest and piss and a bunch of Nazis crying.
Yeah.
If this is what you make of your life, this is how, this is what's going to happen is that you're going to have people saying rest in piss.
You're going to have people saying this.
And it's, and, and sorry, you can have all the success you want.
You're never going to get that love.
It's not going to happen.
And people are actively making plans to shit on your grave.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
Because you materially harmed their lives.
Yes.
You and the lives of people and the lives of people that they loved.
You have, you have made life that much harder for generations of people that will come out.
Yeah.
You have Brush Limbaugh had a material, significant, negative impact on billions of people, many of whom are yet unborn.
Yeah.
Rest in peace, Brush.
Rest and piss, Brush.
I wish the lung cancer had worked faster.
You know?
Materially Harmed Lives00:04:35
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Paul, you got a got some pluggables to plug at the end of this beat episode.
Yeah.
I'm going to be appearing on the Daily Show in a couple weeks.
Big TDS fan.
By the way, I want to shout out and give thanks to Daniel Harper of the wonderful podcast, I Don't Speak German, which is the deepest dives you're going to find on Nazi content creators.
I guess you've got Nazi thought leaders in the United States.
Very important work.
Daniel Harper, I don't speak German.
He provided those clips to me.
Thank you, Daniel.
Yeah.
Sorry, back to your.
No, not at all.
You can follow me at P.F. Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram.
And I have a few podcasts that you can listen to.
You know, just all the usual stuff.
You can find out about me on PaulFTompkins.com.
Amazing.
PaulF Tompkins.com.
Well, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards.
So go out into the world, tie one half of your brain behind your back, and then die because that would actually kill you.
That would immediately lead to your death.
Exposed brain.
There's a reason we have skulls, people.
Keep your brain inside of it.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Bye, guys.
Podcast.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzone media.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.com/slash at Behind the Bastards.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.