The Charlie Kirk Show - What Rush Taught Us About Thanksgiving with James Golden
Aired: 2021-11-24
Duration: 18:51


=== Remembering Rush Limbaugh (06:22) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody, happy Thanksgiving.
[00:00:01]  James Golden joins us for a flash episode to remember Rush Limbaugh.
[00:00:06]  It's a great short conversation.
[00:00:08]  I hope you enjoy it.
[00:00:09]  No advertisers on this episode.
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[00:00:40]  Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
[00:00:42]  We are thankful to you.
[00:00:43]  Thank you for supporting us, for praying for us, and being there for us.
[00:00:46]  Bo Snerdley, James Golden is here.
[00:00:48]  Buckle up here.
[00:00:49]  We go.
[00:00:50]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:52]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:54]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:57]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:01]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:02]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:03]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:10]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:11]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:20]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:23]  Hey, everybody.
[00:01:23]  Welcome to this special Thanksgiving episode of the Charlie Kirk Show with my friend, the legendary James Golden, otherwise known as Bo Snerdley.
[00:01:33]  James, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:01:36]  Charlie, it is so good to be here, especially Thanksgiving.
[00:01:40]  Wow, what a great, what a great treat.
[00:01:41]  Charlie, I love your casual look.
[00:01:44]  Thank you.
[00:01:44]  I appreciate that.
[00:01:45]  You know, sometimes you just got to be able to move about, you know, and the suit and tie, you know, maybe I maybe I could graduate to just the polo shirt like Rush used to do, right?
[00:01:56]  Maybe, yeah, right.
[00:01:58]  Right?
[00:01:58]  Yeah.
[00:01:59]  Just the polo shirt.
[00:02:00]  But can I say something?
[00:02:02]  You just mentioned Rush.
[00:02:03]  Let me just say something to everybody that doesn't know.
[00:02:06]  Rush really made a big deal of how much he enjoyed meeting you, Charlie, and how vital he thought you were to the future of this nation.
[00:02:17]  And I've told you that too many times over.
[00:02:21]  Rush and I had many a discussion about you, Charlie.
[00:02:24]  We both talked about you to each other and what our expectations.
[00:02:29]  I'm sorry.
[00:02:29]  Yeah, we have expectations of you, what our expectations were, because what we see in you, what Rush saw in you, what I see in you, and I've told you this from the very beginning, you're a natural leader of people.
[00:02:42]  You have a charisma about you that you can't, I mean, look, you can't teach anybody how to do this.
[00:02:48]  You have natural leadership qualities.
[00:02:51]  And what you've been able to do with Turning Point and what you've been able to do just in the past few years with organizing people, especially young people in this country, is nothing short of phenomenal.
[00:03:02]  Thank you.
[00:03:03]  And Rush loved the time that he spent with you.
[00:03:06]  He talked about you on the air and how impressed he was with you and what you're doing.
[00:03:13]  And we just are all so grateful to you and the work that you're doing, moving the conservative, not just conservative, but you're moving a very optimistic American message into the next generation and into the future.
[00:03:30]  Well, thank you.
[00:03:31]  That touches me.
[00:03:32]  And we miss him.
[00:03:35]  But I want to say, James, you played a role in the growth of Turning Point.
[00:03:38]  You spoke at our conferences for years when we were just a small little group at the local hotel, remember?
[00:03:44]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:45]  You would always show up.
[00:03:46]  And look how far we've come.
[00:03:49]  It's really amazing.
[00:03:50]  So thank you for saying that.
[00:03:52]  And you have a book out, Rush on the Radio.
[00:03:56]  Tell us about that.
[00:03:57]  You know, it is what I hope Charlie to do is to give people a behind-the-scenes look at who Rush Limbaugh really was, not as defined by his critics on the left who never listened to the program,
[00:04:12]  who never took the time to really delve into who Rush Lumbaugh was, what he was about, and also to give people kind of a behind-the-scene looks at what it was like working with him and a bit about my own background and how we came to work together.
[00:04:28]  So, one of the things that I hope that we accomplished in this book is not only was Rush an amazing professional at what he did, he earned every single accolade that he got in terms of as for his success as a broadcaster and as the best broadcaster of our times.
[00:04:49]  And he earned that through hard work, through perseverance, through not giving up when there were many times where his career could have stalled permanently, but he just kept going at it.
[00:05:01]  And then he had the most amazing success.
[00:05:04]  So, yes, Rush was the most important broadcaster to me of our generation.
[00:05:10]  If it were not for his success in reviving AM radio, first of all, when it was on its death throes, and then his program brought in a rash of other talk shows.
[00:05:24]  It grew talk radio into a medium that played a large role in shaping and still does America's body politic and also our culture.
[00:05:36]  But he also impacted what we see on television and the cable news landscape and the publishing landscape, especially for conservative authors, because of the multi-million sales he had as an author.
[00:05:54]  And then with children's book with he and his wife Catherine, this man left an amazing footprint for American radio, television, and print.
[00:06:07]  And that just touches the surface of it.
[00:06:10]  I mean, my political journey started listening to WLS in Chicago, Rush Limbaugh, from, it would be, let me think about this, it would be from 11 Central to 2.

=== The Power of Optimism (03:20) ===

[00:06:22]  That's right.
[00:06:22]  Just make sure I get it right.
[00:06:24]  And my lunch used to be from 117 to 2.03.
[00:06:29]  And so I used to go to my old Silver Ford Explorer and listen to Rush.
[00:06:34]  And I was like, who is this guy?
[00:06:36]  He gives me the courage and the confidence to say what I really believe.
[00:06:40]  And that was when Rush was just dominating.
[00:06:45]  That was back in 2010, 2011.
[00:06:47]  Not that he never stopped dominating.
[00:06:49]  He was always dominant, but that was a time when he kind of really created the Tea Party movement.
[00:06:55]  And in some sense, it's when all of a sudden AM radio then became an actual political movement, which was something that was really special.
[00:07:04]  And so this being Thanksgiving, James, talk to us a little bit.
[00:07:07]  And again, the book is, I want everyone to pick it up, Rush on the Radio by James Golden.
[00:07:12]  Talk to us what Rush used to do on Thanksgiving or the day before Thanksgiving that he really got famous for.
[00:07:19]  Rush wrote in his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, a chapter about what he called old dead white guys.
[00:07:28]  Well, in it, he talked about the original Thanksgiving and how what we learned in school, Thanksgiving, the Native Americans coming to save the pilgrims' butts, wasn't the real story of Thanksgiving.
[00:07:41]  The real story of Thanksgiving through the eyes of William Bradford and the first colony that tried to successfully come here and start economy.
[00:07:52]  And they failed the first time because they tried a collectivism approach, a socialist approach, where everybody would work collectively toward one greater goal.
[00:08:05]  And what happened was that some people were lazy.
[00:08:07]  They didn't see the benefit of working hard so that others benefited.
[00:08:11]  And as a result, the first attempt to colonize led to horror.
[00:08:18]  I mean, starvation, difficulties in the wintertime.
[00:08:21]  Now, Bradford, William Bradford, saw the error of his ways.
[00:08:25]  And what they tried next was an approach where every family would have their own plot of land to work as hard or as little as they wanted to.
[00:08:37]  And what this produced was prosperity because people saw the value in working for themselves and how an individual effort took over and prosperity came.
[00:08:53]  And this is what they were thankful for, the success.
[00:08:57]  And they shared this bounty with the Native Americans.
[00:09:01]  That was the true story of Thanksgiving.
[00:09:03]  If you want to boil it down to the parlance today, it was the battle between socialism and capitalism.
[00:09:09]  And capitalism won.
[00:09:11]  And as a result, in American society, we still, to a large degree, or to some degree, have a capitalist mentality where it is up to you and your individual achievement and desire and ambition to succeed.
[00:09:27]  And if you have all of those things, America is still a land of opportunity.
[00:09:34]  That's so beautiful.
[00:09:35]  And Rush would, he had a famous, you know, kind of Christmas series he would do and a famous Thanksgiving series he would do.

=== No Time to Panic (09:08) ===

[00:09:42]  Talk to us more about the man of Rush, you know, that Rush was.
[00:09:47]  Just his optimism, doing three hours of radio a day, I could say from personal experience, two hours is a lot.
[00:09:53]  He would do three hours, almost no guests, callers on only one day, Open Line Friday.
[00:09:58]  Just talk to us about the man.
[00:10:00]  How much prep did he put in?
[00:10:01]  How much study did he do?
[00:10:03]  Tell us from your inside perspective.
[00:10:05]  I'd be so fascinated by that.
[00:10:07]  Rush never stopped working.
[00:10:09]  And this was his work ethic was astounding.
[00:10:13]  Rush would get to the studio at 8 o'clock in the morning or 8:30-ish and prep right up until the time of the show.
[00:10:20]  So three hours.
[00:10:21]  Wow.
[00:10:21]  Okay.
[00:10:22]  But it didn't end there.
[00:10:24]  After he left the studio, sometimes we'd be around, the three of us that were there in there with him, Dorn Bacchinsky, our stenographer, Russia's stenographer, and Brian Johnson, his engineer in Florida.
[00:10:36]  We have another engineer in New York, Mike Ramone, who's been with us for 30 years, over 30 years.
[00:10:42]  And if we stayed around the studio, about 40 minutes after he left, Rush's printer would start firing off with stories for the next day.
[00:10:52]  And it could go on and on.
[00:10:53]  Now, he would take a break.
[00:10:55]  And I'm not saying he worked around the clock, but he really did work all the time.
[00:10:59]  He said, and he used to say, show prep, life is show prep.
[00:11:03]  Life is show prep.
[00:11:04]  And he brought so many things of interest to the show, things that interested him.
[00:11:09]  But more to the point to me was, this was a man that studied this medium.
[00:11:14]  He wanted to be a broadcaster at age six.
[00:11:17]  At age six, he had a little toy that was put out, I think, by Remco or one of the toy companies, where you could broadcast inside your house.
[00:11:27]  So he had the microphone, he had his toy set rigged up and would broadcast to his mother.
[00:11:32]  He knew what he wanted to do from the time he was a child.
[00:11:36]  And his skill set was unparalleled.
[00:11:39]  This man could make anything sound interesting.
[00:11:42]  He knew how to tell a story on the radio.
[00:11:45]  He knew how to make something compelling with just his voice and using his voice and his tremendous vocabulary and intellect.
[00:11:55]  But all of that success, Charlie, isn't the Rush Limbaugh story to me.
[00:11:59]  The Russian Bauha story to me is the human being that he was.
[00:12:03]  He was, despite the image of the bombast, the tongue-in-cheek bomb bastard that he used on the air, he was a very reserved, quiet, almost shy person, impeccable manners, always, always grateful for whatever the smallest thing that someone could do for him, always polite.
[00:12:24]  I saw this over three decades, the way that he treated people.
[00:12:29]  Okay, the generosity that this man had, unparalleled.
[00:12:33]  There are thousands of people around this country who benefited from Rush's generosity on a personal basis, but he wouldn't allow the stories to be told.
[00:12:42]  He said, People, please do not tell where you got this gift or where you got this money to pull you out.
[00:12:49]  He didn't want it known that he was doing all of this.
[00:12:54]  But then the talk radio audience and his audience under his leadership and other talk show hosts, Charlie, the millions, tens of millions of dollars raised over that 30-year period went for things like leukemia research.
[00:13:10]  Now, Charlie, leukemia doesn't have a political bent to it.
[00:13:15]  Leukemia can affect anyone from any walk of life, any age, any gender.
[00:13:20]  And so the help that people got from Rush Lumbar and the talk radio audience in finding cures for this disease, childhood leukemia, all sorts of leukemia, these benefit society.
[00:13:31]  He and his wife, Catherine, raised millions more to help the families of first responders, fallen first responders, so that the people that they left behind, their children, their spouses, wouldn't have to worry about having a house to live in or having a foundation so those kids could later go to school.
[00:13:51]  Again, there's no politics in that.
[00:13:54]  That's just doing good.
[00:13:56]  And that's what Rush Limbaugh was about.
[00:13:58]  He was a good, decent man.
[00:14:01]  I have my own personal stories of his generosity, even to me before I started working with him, which is in this book.
[00:14:08]  This was a man that was extraordinary.
[00:14:10]  And that's what I hope that we capture here.
[00:14:12]  An extraordinary man that was extremely gifted at what he did for a living, but was even more gifted by the very nature of the decent human being that he was.
[00:14:26]  A truly American story.
[00:14:28]  And I could say personally how generous he was and how magnanimous he was and so different than the caricature the media tried to paint him as.
[00:14:39]  You're right.
[00:14:40]  Reserved, just never wanted to dominate a room when he walked in.
[00:14:44]  It was totally different than you would think, right?
[00:14:46]  Right.
[00:14:47]  Than actually how he hosted radio.
[00:14:50]  So the last thing I want to ask you, James, is that Rush used to say, I'll tell you when to worry.
[00:14:57]  He never told us to worry.
[00:14:59]  Talk about that.
[00:15:00]  Okay.
[00:15:01]  And what he said, the actual quote, Charlie, was, I'll tell you when it's time to panic.
[00:15:05]  There, yeah, you're right.
[00:15:06]  This was in response.
[00:15:07]  This was in response to a caller who called into the show and asked Rush, is it time to panic yet?
[00:15:13]  And this was back several administrations ago.
[00:15:16]  And after trying to dispel this person's fears, Rush said, Listen, I'll tell you when it's time to panic.
[00:15:24]  And for years after that, people would call in when we had these various shifts in administrations and we'd have things going on like they're going on now underneath the Biden administration, where things look particularly desperate.
[00:15:37]  And then ask Rush, Rush, is it time to panic?
[00:15:39]  And he would say, no.
[00:15:41]  And it wasn't time to panic for Rush for one simple reason.
[00:15:44]  He believed ultimately America, the goodness of America, and because of the goodness of Americans, would prevail.
[00:15:53]  That no matter the difficulties, he was always optimistic that the people of this country, the good people of this country, outnumber those who don't like living in this country and who wish this country ill.
[00:16:06]  And that the good people of America, those that were interested in seeing the traditions of America continue and our institutions, our finest institutions continue, would prevail.
[00:16:20]  And so, no, it is not time to panic.
[00:16:23]  And I maintain that if Rush were here right now, that is what he would be telling those that felt the sense of panic: no, this isn't a time to panic.
[00:16:32]  And he was always optimistic, and he always believed our best days were ahead of us.
[00:16:37]  A relentless cheerleader for the country.
[00:16:39]  And I argue he was the most influential conservative, elected or not elected, for 30 years running.
[00:16:46]  He had more power than presidents.
[00:16:48]  And I'm not diminishing Trump or anything, but the audience that Rush commanded when he would do a segment blistering a Republican senator, that was worth more than running $100 million of attack ads for some rhino in Kansas or whatever.
[00:17:04]  It was really special.
[00:17:06]  Rush on the radio.
[00:17:07]  We have two minutes remaining.
[00:17:08]  James, anything you wanted to make sure you mentioned to our audience on this Thanksgiving about Rush or about the book?
[00:17:13]  I want to mention how grateful I am to have worked with a man of Russia's caliber, how grateful I am that I have contact with so many Americans who also listen.
[00:17:24]  I say, you know, I'm a fan just like you are.
[00:17:27]  I just had a better seat.
[00:17:28]  I had a seat in the studio where I could watch this man.
[00:17:31]  How grateful I am to know so many people such as yourself, Charlie, because of this program.
[00:17:37]  How grateful I am for this country and for what this country stands for in the world.
[00:17:41]  We have to define Russia's legacy.
[00:17:44]  We cannot leave that to the left.
[00:17:46]  That's our job.
[00:17:47]  And Charlie, once again, I just want to thank you for all the work that you're doing.
[00:17:51]  And, you know, Rush, I call him a second generation founding father.
[00:17:55]  That's what he is.
[00:17:56]  He is a second generation American founding father.
[00:18:01]  And I love Rush Limbaugh.
[00:18:02]  Our entire staff loved this man, which is why we stayed with him.
[00:18:06]  And we want to stay with his memory and make sure that memory has its rightful place in American history.
[00:18:12]  Amen.
[00:18:12]  Well, James, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:18:14]  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone listening.
[00:18:16]  Again, the book is Rush on the Radio.
[00:18:18]  Everyone, go pick up a copy.
[00:18:19]  Great Christmas gift as we're heading towards the end of the year.
[00:18:22]  A tribute from his sidekick for 30 years.
[00:18:25]  America remained a freer country thanks to Rush Limbaugh.
[00:18:30]  And James, you were his right-hand man, call screener and advisor.
[00:18:34]  And it was a beautiful thing.
[00:18:36]  So thank you so much, James.
[00:18:38]  God bless you and have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
[00:18:40]  You too, Charlie.
[00:18:41]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:18:42]  You bet.
[00:18:42]  Talk to you soon.
[00:18:46]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:18:47]  Email us your thoughts.
[00:18:48]  Freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:18:50]  God bless you guys.
[00:18:50]  Speak to you soon.