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

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. And,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We're going to be coming back for the new year soon. The Oprah episodes will be in the can.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 8 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 10 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 9 Available now.

Speaker 11 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place.
It's a way of life. Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey.

Speaker 1 We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases.

Speaker 1 I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't. We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 1 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members. Come be a part of my Zone 7 while building yours.

Speaker 1 Listen to zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 13 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 3 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 3 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 14 Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 15 A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium. Women began to go missing.

Speaker 15 It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved.

Speaker 15 Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 16 I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight.

Speaker 17 And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke.

Speaker 16 A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.

Speaker 18 How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

Speaker 16 Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You don't like me?

Speaker 3 You don't like my pseudo-rush intro, Sophie?

Speaker 3 Not on board?

Speaker 20 Not a fan of that introduction.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That is inaccurate. Feel free.
Okay. Well,

Speaker 3 we're back.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 How are you doing an hour and a half into talking about El Rushbo? Feeling great. Feeling great.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It never will. It will always be good that he's dead.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Good for him.

Speaker 3 So once upon a time, Paul, the United States used to have a thing called the fairness doctrine.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Now, this was obviously a flawed rule. Some issues, for example, like climate change, don't have two sides, right?

Speaker 3 There may be different sides about like what the right response is, but there's not two sides to the reality of climate change.

Speaker 3 Um, 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

Speaker 3 thingamajig, but while it was in place, right-wing media in the form that we have today did not and could not exist.

Speaker 3 Now, since the dawn of the fake news era, which we're in now, a lot of folks have talked about the

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Cronkite calls Vietnam a quagmire, suddenly national opinion on it switches.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But it did mean that you didn't have something as unbalanced as Fox News, right? Right. It's like the voter guide you get.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 It gives you the measure and says, some people say this, some people say this. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In 1987, the FCC, as the result of a court case, the FCC rejected the fairness doctrine.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The evidence comes out and opinion shifts and it becomes very popular to get Nixon out of office.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Now, after Limbaugh's death, the New York Times let Ben Shapiro, noted novelist, write a column about his professional idol.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's my Benny Shapps. I'm concerned at how good that was of an imitation.
It's really quite good. It's really good.

Speaker 3 So, Rush Limbaugh was aware from the beginning that his whole career hinged on the fairness doctrine's death.

Speaker 3 He starts. being a national voice in 1989, two years after the end of the fairness doctrine.
That's not a coincidence.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I found a Vanity Fair article from 2009 that lays this out quite well.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 According to the official CPAC polling of its members, restoring the

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 he's a, it's really him that's responsible for making this such a popular issue.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it gets popular, though, because of Rush Limbaugh, because he sells it to the American conservative mainstream.

Speaker 3 It's funny, like, sorry, but the idea that, like, with the Nixon era, after Watergate, Nixon, when Nixon resigns,

Speaker 3 that is maybe the last time that there were real consequences

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So really what they're doing is saying,

Speaker 3 we cannot,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Because if it didn't happen.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 was bogus. If there was never going to be a consequence for that,

Speaker 3 then it worked.

Speaker 3 And from now on, like when is it ever going to happen again?

Speaker 3 If it didn't happen then, when is it ever going to happen again?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then it also, it conditions whether, whether you believe, whether you believe in, whether you're, 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?

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 it's because

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Obviously, we like it, it did not, it did not mean that Americans had an accurate understanding of the world.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I think it is at least less toxic.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This was, as we discussed in our last episode, always cloaked in a thick haze of irony. Quote: This is Rush.

Speaker 3 We know that women in groups, same office, same dormitory, same barracks, eventually have synchronized menstrual cycles.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.
Ew, disgusting. Not a fish.

Speaker 3 Rush Limbaugh, everybody. Young Rush Lawrence.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's like, it's just not even that funny. No,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's just that he was saying the bigoted, terrible things that a lot of bad people wanted to say.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Because you put the tiniest effort into constructing these bits. Yeah.
And it's, yeah, it's what it's the same thing with all of these.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 It's not funny. You're just going for shock value, right? That's all you're trying to do.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Not Not that it would be appropriate then, but I haven't heard one, you know? Like,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's the National Organization of Women. Right.

Speaker 3 His hatred. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And you can draw a line from this kind of the way he's phrasing things here. He's like, it's stupid to care about the environment and animals because we're more powerful than them.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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 Russia is saying, you know? Yeah, and he,

Speaker 3 the fact that he made that mainstream is why they have a chance of making that mainstream, you know?

Speaker 3 And the idea that it's so

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 they that he phrased it as this

Speaker 3 matter of personal choice

Speaker 3 rather than like just common sense practical thinking. You know, like, do you really want to

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Not that we're like,

Speaker 3 you know, fuck you, the dodo.

Speaker 3 You should have, you should have had claws or something. It's that we're fucking ourselves.
Like, that's why, why is that been,

Speaker 3 why is that so hard to understand and so hard to comply with and so hard to

Speaker 3 keep as part of the narrative when, because the, the logical extension is, what do you care?

Speaker 3 You'll be dead by the time, by the time this shit, by the time this shit affects people in a meaningful way,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I'm not being funny now, and I'm just being, just being whiny.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's what this is. It's my politics are a sort of rhetorical violence against the people I disagree with.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 You've got these odds, you've got a couple of dudes left on the right who actually believe in something, like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?

Speaker 3 Not that what they believe in is great or that I believe in it too, but they both have

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's not standing for something.

Speaker 3 It's like not

Speaker 3 what I my politics are I don't want somebody telling me what to do.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's where it ends. Yeah.
And it's, it's,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.
Right.

Speaker 3 And that is what as a kid, I was taught conservatism was, but it's not what conservatism has ever been.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Triple-down economics does not function.

Speaker 3 It doesn't. It's well documented, objectively does not work the way they say it does.

Speaker 3 Fighting against environmental regulations damages the world and makes it uninhabitable.

Speaker 3 Fighting against corporate regulations gets a lot of their voters killed by dangerous working conditions and stuff.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 What you can do is own the libs, you know? And that's why, that's all it is now, is owning the libs.

Speaker 3 It's good. It's a good, healthy, healthy society paul

Speaker 3 it's only gonna get better too it's only gonna get better

Speaker 3 uh

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's his own words on this. Now,

Speaker 3 this turned out to be an objectively good business, because none of his listeners seemed to find Rush himself absurd.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rush was his own guest, and this was a deliberate choice he made, and a very intelligent one to make the show more profitable.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 That limits how much money you're going to make and it limits kind of the length of your career.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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 Blazen on it and the words, warning!

Speaker 3 The views expressed on this program are not necessarily the views of the staff, advertisers, or your local station, but they ought to be.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know. It's good shit, man.
It's good shit.

Speaker 3 So the episode itself has a weirdly quiet intro.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He introduces himself and he starts talking about a recent conversation he had with President George H.W. Bush on his radio program.

Speaker 21 So there continues to be more controversy surrounding my performance with the president yesterday when he came by my radio program.

Speaker 21 The press is telling you things that aren't true, but we have the tapes and we have the truth.

Speaker 10 Me, and we'll show you and tell you both tonight.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's telling.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And partly because he was modeling that liberation with such wicked glee, Limbaugh was making himself indispensable.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 what to think of it. I will do all your reading and I will tell you what to think of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Wow. I know, right?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 sort of obfuscating language. He is

Speaker 3 saying very clearly

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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. Yeah.
And this is a huge thing.

Speaker 3 He spends a lot of effort in reinforcing his intelligence.

Speaker 3 After this section of the show, he goes on to introduce the other topics of that episode, which include Fiminazi, Gloria Steinem, and a review of the movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Again, he puts a lot of effort into it. It's absurd, right? But

Speaker 3 it clearly works. It worked on my parents, you know? It worked on all of the people who raised me to some extent.
They're all convinced he was

Speaker 3 fun. Yeah, he's fun.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 effect of the pointer.

Speaker 3 If you're on television and

Speaker 3 you're walking out of a television with a pointer and you're pointing at something, it looks very official. Totally.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. That's why I have a point.
Well, I have a gun, but it works the same way.

Speaker 3 So.

Speaker 3 Robert, why put all your weapons in front of you? Whoa,

Speaker 3 I'm always surrounded by weapons.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Fucking

Speaker 3 here, here's my knife. There we go.
That's a nice knife, Paul. That's lovely.
It's got to be a good idea. Oh, I like

Speaker 3 the nice little hunchback there. That makes it good for kind of close-in work.
Yeah. All right.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This is, I mean, there are like three knives on the table, right?

Speaker 3 This is

Speaker 3 a significant number of

Speaker 3 people on the table.

Speaker 3 All right, I'm a new listener. I apologize.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the show proper starts after this 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Murphy Brown was a very feminist and progressive series for its day. Limbaugh opens his episode by expressing anger at the show's success.

Speaker 3 And then, in what I would consider a fairly abusive manner, he tells his audience why they shouldn't watch it. Clip.

Speaker 21 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 this this

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Murphy Brown was a hugely popular show in this 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This is significant because Murphy Brown was a single mother.

Speaker 3 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 naturally, Rush was furiously not into it.

Speaker 3 I can't let you can't, 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,

Speaker 3 the idea of her being a single mother was a

Speaker 3 plot point that was a story arc that they discussed a lot on the show. It was not a it was not a blithe decision by the character.

Speaker 3 It was um they really talked about uh what it because because it was a show that did that did a lot of satire, talked about issues.

Speaker 3 The the discussion of whether or not she was going to have the baby and what it meant to be a single working mother

Speaker 3 was discussed at great length on the show. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that that's why he wants that's why it is important to him to keep his audience away from it. Now,

Speaker 3 that was not the only kind of groundbreaking thing about Murphy Brown. The show was incredibly significant in its portrayal of gay people.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This was rare in mainstream television for the time and it made Rush Limbaugh furious. We have another clip here of that.

Speaker 21 Just adults teaching kids.

Speaker 23 It doesn't matter what the

Speaker 21 composition is of the family. And nobody has been critical of that.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 this is also really significant.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I am against the fact that the show conceals its political agenda. And I can see why people like most of my family would have found this reasonable.

Speaker 3 But what's happening here is very sinister because Murphy Brown was not trying to be left-wing.

Speaker 3 It was trying to make a point that single parents and that gay people are regular human beings who contribute to society.

Speaker 3 It was trying to point out that single parents are valid and functional people. These should not be political points.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rush was not the first person to talk about the gay agenda or to oppose single motherhood, not even close.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's

Speaker 3 one of his great innovations, unfortunately. Yeah, he pioneered this idea that

Speaker 3 if you are saying this is okay, this thing is okay,

Speaker 3 what you are doing is saying that's that's somehow that's an attack on me and what I believe. Exactly.
So the idea of Dan Quayle saying it glorifies single mothers.

Speaker 3 No one,

Speaker 3 that show, no one was ever saying we should do this instead. Right.

Speaker 3 We should be doing this instead of what you think is right. This is what we should be doing.
Rather than just saying,

Speaker 3 isn't this okay?

Speaker 3 These people exist. Isn't that all right? These people exist.
It's all right. And they shouldn't be hated or punished or

Speaker 3 ostracized for being this.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's just not there at all.

Speaker 3 But if he's able to 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,

Speaker 3 it further separates them from mainstream society. This is the beginning of the splintering of the mainstream American right from

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 reconcile the right with the modern world, with the rest of civilization, because

Speaker 3 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.
That's Russia's great innovation.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 The products and services that support this podcast? Hopefully. Hopefully, hopefully.
Unless it's Raytheon, which is very haunted products. But

Speaker 3 that's a story for another day.

Speaker 5 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 8 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 10 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 11 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place.
It's a way of life. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

Speaker 1 We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 1 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Speaker 1 Listen to zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 15 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 15 We've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 25 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 15 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 26 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 27 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 26 In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 3 She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 28 The men and woman who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 3 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 3 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 27 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage on those led times.

Speaker 26 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 29 I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls in America.

Speaker 29 There are several ways we can all do better at protecting Black women. My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.

Speaker 29 Stories like Tamika Anderson. As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people, talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.

Speaker 29 But Tamika never never bought the car and she never returned home that day.

Speaker 29 One podcast, one mission, save our girls. Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.

Speaker 29 Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 And we're back. So, Paul, I would love to go with this, through this entire episode with you.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It is wild to see those books again. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, boy, oh, boy.

Speaker 3 What's the opposite of Proustian?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It would be very, I think, fun and also intellectually valuable, but we just, we have so much ground to cover.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, at least not

Speaker 3 today.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It is not hard to draw a straight line from Limbaugh's TV show to talking heads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.

Speaker 3 Like today's Fox News personalities, Limbaugh fancied himself as a man of the people who railed against elitist liberal politicians and voters.

Speaker 3 But as he did that, he was flying his private jet around the country to wine and dine with powerful figures.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In 1996, the same year the Limbaugh Show ended, Ailes co-founded Fox News at the behest of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Speaker 3 Much of what ensued, the liberal bashing, fear-mongering, alternative reality in which Fox's personalities lived, was reminiscent of Ailes's weird little Limbaugh talk show experiment.

Speaker 3 So this is is really a test case for what becomes Fox News, you know? And the year Limbaugh's show ends, 1996, is the year Fox News launches.

Speaker 3 What's strange to me is, well, I guess because the show was over, I guess the show, you know, the viewership went down.

Speaker 3 I wonder why he didn't just stick Limbaugh on Fox News in those early days.

Speaker 3 He wanted to, actually.

Speaker 3 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So like, 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.

Speaker 3 Not to the extent that he enjoyed doing his radio show.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rush created the first fully monetized right-wing cult of personality within like the American media at least.

Speaker 3 As you heard in the clips we played, Rush discouraged his listeners from thinking for themselves.

Speaker 3 He was the genius, and if you just agreed with him and thought the way he thought, then you were by definition also smart.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and

Speaker 3 profoundly unhealthy. They're absolutely going to praise me.
And so in order to save some time,

Speaker 3 let's just condense all the

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Because I am so empty as a person as a result of how capitalism has hollowed me. out and hollowed my class out that that I have nothing but the hatred of liberals that you embody.

Speaker 3 Until that first guy came along that had to implement mega dittos. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I already had that happen last year because of one of his fans. Anyway.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I don't know,

Speaker 3 again, at this fucking gun class I was at last weekend, the instructor was like, the far left wants to take your guns away.

Speaker 3 And obviously, I couldn't be like, actually, the far left is pretty heavily strapped. It's liberals who think are.

Speaker 3 But like, that's part of

Speaker 3 this idea that Joe Biden is somehow a leftist, right? That he's a communist. That you hear an Alex, and you hear all over the right now.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And today's Democrats are basically the same as Republicans were when I was growing up in the 90s.

Speaker 3 There's also never any follow-up on these

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 terrified during the Obama years. He's going to take your guns.
He's going to take your guns. He's going to take your guns.

Speaker 3 Barack Obama did not one single thing to restrict gun ownership in the United States. No.

Speaker 3 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 is wrong.

Speaker 3 I think bump stocks are dumb, but Trump objectively restricted gun ownership more than Obama. But you never know it to listen to the right-wing media.

Speaker 3 It's preposterous.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Not that, you know, we'll talk anyway.

Speaker 3 It's separate. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 As I said earlier, the core of Rush Limbaugh's actual ideology was owning the libs.

Speaker 3 His conservatism was built entirely around attacking the other.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I'm going to quote from the Rolling Stone here.

Speaker 3 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 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

Speaker 3 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 erudit foil to debate with, to argue against, but nonetheless, someone who deserved respect and honor due to his success.

Speaker 3 Like, you can see this in the episode of Family Guy that Rush was on, right?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 As opposed to what Rush actually represented, which is the politics of violent elimination of the opponent.

Speaker 3 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 fett him.

Speaker 3 They praised him. They made him like...

Speaker 3 He was never treated as a pariah. Barbara Walters said in an interview, people just can't get enough of him.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 C-SPAN highlighted him in a fawning interview that helped turn him into a household name.

Speaker 3 Within a year of that interview, he was carried by 530 stations and listened to by an estimated 25 million Americans.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 nationwide success. The repeated double standards in his work and his life never hurt his pull with his audience.

Speaker 3 For example, Rush Limbaugh repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton as a draft dodger, which he was, but so was Rush.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Which, on its own, is a reasonable statement, except you spent years attacking Clinton for being a draft dodge. Yeah.
Oh, that's

Speaker 3 so funny and hypocritical. Yeah.
To me, my favorite draft dodge

Speaker 3 explanation of all time is still Dick Cheney. I had other priorities.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Vietnam was a terrible war. We never should have been in it.
It was fundamentally immoral on a national scale.

Speaker 3 But on a human level, John Kerry did the right thing, which is is not use his privilege to get out of fighting in a war that other people of his class got us into.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's infuriating. Yeah.
It's infuriating.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rush would eventually rack up three divorces. And I should have stayed here, it's not bad to be a draft dodger.
The Vietnam War was, again, horribly immoral. It's perfectly,

Speaker 3 what is immoral is dodging the draft and then going on to

Speaker 3 do nothing but encourage more wars that involve American servicemen, right? That's immoral. It is not immoral to dodge the draft and say, hey, this was a bad war.

Speaker 3 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 and I'm not going to support it. That's fine.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's doubly immoral when you're well past the age where it would affect you. Where

Speaker 3 it's, you're now, there's another, there's a later generation of people that will be affected by this very,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 hypocritical line of attack. Yeah, it's the moral inconsistency that's infuriating.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But it's the, if, 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?

Speaker 3 At least I could say Rush Limbaugh believes in something. It's like John McCain.
At least he fucking believed in something, you know?

Speaker 3 It was terrible and fundamentally toxic as well, but it was not he's not like limbaugh uh you know he is a person who has beliefs um i don't know it's that it's like that line from uh uh the big lubowski right like say what you will about the tenets of national socialism dude at least it's an ethos you know

Speaker 3 uh

Speaker 3 so Rush Limbaugh was not a man who I think believed in much other than the fame and wealth of Rush Limbaugh. He would eventually rack up three divorces and four wives.
He never had any children.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And one key aspect of his functional value system was rejecting illegal drugs.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He repeatedly called addicts junkies. Up the river.
Yeah, you should go to prison if you do illegal drugs.

Speaker 3 He repeatedly called addicts junkies and suggested that drug dealers deserved death for their crimes.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In 2003, she went public and narked 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.

Speaker 3 We don't know exactly what Rush is, if he was just a customer or if he had some other role in it, but he was buying huge amounts of painkillers.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he got it prescribed to him initially for an injury, and he got addicted like most people do.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Trauma or an injury or an emotional depression, whatever. That's most people who have a problematic addiction.

Speaker 3 Limbaugh said anyone who does that should go to prison. Then he did that, you know?

Speaker 3 But he gets caught, no?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, he gets caught.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He checked himself into rehab while his multimillion-dollar team of lawyers went to work defending him in court.

Speaker 3 The legal battle would go on for three years, during which time he began doctor shopping to maintain his addiction.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 activity.

Speaker 3 Fuck's sake, that's it's very frustrating.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Uh-huh.
Oh,

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 just gobbling up

Speaker 3 while he's gobbling down these pills. But I had no idea.
I guess I didn't, I didn't,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's so fucking upsetting.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's it's the but I'm also consistent about the fact that I don't think doing or possessing any substance should be illegal. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
With the exception of like, you know, some explosives.

Speaker 3 There's a line to be drawn. I don't think people should have surface-to-air missile launchers, but heroin.

Speaker 3 Speaking of heroin, you know who supports our podcast, Sophie?

Speaker 3 I don't know. The fine people at the Sinaloa cartel.
So. Oh, God.
I was like, what very specific

Speaker 3 Easter egg is Robert going to drop right now? Yes, this is a cartel-supported podcast. And I just want to say,

Speaker 3 let's go to ads before I get us in some trouble.

Speaker 5 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 7 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 8 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 10 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 11 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place.
It's a way of life. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

Speaker 1 We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 1 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Speaker 1 Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 15 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 15 Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 25 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 15 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 29 I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.

Speaker 29 There are several ways we can all do better at protecting black women. My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.

Speaker 29 Stories like Tamika Anderson.

Speaker 29 As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people, talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.

Speaker 29 But Tamika never bought the car, and she never returned home that day.

Speaker 29 One podcast, one mission, Save Our Girls. Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.

Speaker 29 Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Malcolm Glaubal here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.

Speaker 30 35 years.

Speaker 30 That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur.

Speaker 30 35 long

Speaker 3 years.

Speaker 3 I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.

Speaker 2 He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize. Turn to the left, tell my family I love them.

Speaker 2 So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you.

Speaker 3 From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Ah, we're back. Good times.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And like, while he was playing these clips of black men and boys, he would stand in front of the TV and make gorilla noises and grunts. The apparent joke being that black people were like monkeys.

Speaker 3 Like, that's kind of... I don't know what else he could be saying.

Speaker 3 Pretty satirical. Very satire.
Very satirical. Like,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Get it? The joke is that they're food.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 it turned out that he was a fucking monster.

Speaker 3 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 decades and decades of violence.

Speaker 3 Not that they supported ethnic groups one over the other, like they did in Rwanda, which led to the Rwanda genocide. None of that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I didn't know that he'd actually gone to the lengths of trying to smear Nelson Mandela. Yeah, communist.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's good stuff. I mean, Nelson Mandela also was at one point some guy, somebody who supported like terrorism and stuff, which also is totally justified.

Speaker 3 If your government is the apartheid government of South Africa, terrorism is not necessarily the wrong thing to do.

Speaker 3 I would say it's not off the table. It's not off the table.

Speaker 3 Sometimes terrorists are right.

Speaker 3 That it's like, you could argue that the founding fathers of this nation, who despite their own bigotry and slave, like the government they're rebelling against also allowed slavery, they were right to do terrorism to get rid of having a king because kings are bad, you know?

Speaker 3 Like, terrorism is justified sometimes.

Speaker 3 So, Rush was repeatedly critical of professional sports for the presence of black athletes, as we see in this 2007 quote.

Speaker 3 Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the bloods and the crips without any weapons. There, I said it.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.

Speaker 3 He was saying this after the LA riots, you know, that this is like just, this is what the NA, you know, this is not people reacting to horrible violence the only way that they can, right?

Speaker 3 This is not a riot being the language of the unheard. This is what the NAACP wants because they're all criticized.
It's like Rush to criticize athletes. I bet he couldn't even do like a jog.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's it's pretty great.

Speaker 3 I, the, the 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, obviously, anyone rioting in Los Angeles in 1993 was a thousand times more justified than George Washington.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Any race of people should not have guilt. If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians.
God, Rush, bitch. It's amazing.

Speaker 3 How many Caucasians fought to keep fought and died to keep slavery going, Rush? Is this just like at this point, when you say things like that, right?

Speaker 3 He is,

Speaker 3 what do you think the percentage is of

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I think he comes to believe it because these beliefs become a reflection of bullshit. Well, I think what it is, it starts, he's not a political person.
He doesn't care about politics.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And again, he's a fucking narcissist. I think that's how it works.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So another repeated Rush Limbaugh bit was attacking the daughters of Democratic presidents for being ugly.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Which is like just very vile.

Speaker 3 I don't even think it's like

Speaker 3 the Trump boys and Ivanka made themselves political figures, perfectly fine to insult and attack them. You're never going to hear me saying anything bad about like Tiffany or Baron because they're

Speaker 3 children, you know? Like,

Speaker 3 don't fucking talk about them if they don't make themselves into a major part of things, you know?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But at that time, when he was saying that shit, she was

Speaker 3 a child.

Speaker 3 She was a child. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 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.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's hard. You can't overstate how vile he was.
When

Speaker 3 the Marty from Back to the Future,

Speaker 3 Paul Johnson

Speaker 3 Fox made some political statements that Limbaugh disagreed with. Limbaugh mimicked having Parkinson's disease to mock him on his show.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He's such a bad person.
To say that, to

Speaker 3 implied that Michael J. Fox was playing it up.
for the cameras when he went and testified before Congress.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 like burned into my brain forever.
It's horrific.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's like, and to say that it would be, like, I think what he did was perfectly reasonable.

Speaker 3 I'm 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I never, again, supported keeping that shit illegal because you can't when you see it, right? You can't. It's medicine.

Speaker 3 Not that most people who use it use it medicinally, which doesn't, isn't wrong.

Speaker 3 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. Yeah.

Speaker 3 In a way that maybe if I had, like, it would have taken longer otherwise, I think. Completely.

Speaker 3 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 forgot about that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's weird. So he said it's hard.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I like that you went into your Shapiro voice for that quote. It's like what the fuck, man? You couldn't do what he's doing.
How dare you?

Speaker 3 Like, so this combat drew enough widespread condemnation that Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN. But obviously, this had little to no impact on his bottom line.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The early 2000s saw the explosion of Fox News. This is the period where it became the most watched news network in the country.

Speaker 3 A slew of Limbaugh imitators rose up, men like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson, to name a few.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 actual demonstrable political power. And I'm going to quote the Rolling Stone again here.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In 1992, after he'd 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.

Speaker 3 Limbaugh had only praise for Bush from that day forward, at least until he lost to Bill Clinton in November. That set a pattern.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And Rush was always very clear.

Speaker 3 And Rush was always very clear about where he wanted to see the party head. Smaller government, stronger, more powerful corporations.

Speaker 3 He said outright, I consider myself a defender of corporate America.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Nowhere is this clearer than in his hatred of the Clintons. It started when George H.W.

Speaker 3 Bush lost to Bill, robbing Rush of a president who would directly, you know, take him into the White House, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rolling Stone writes, Conspiracy theories, once the province of fringe right-wingers, started to become the mainstream Republican fare they are today during Clinton's two terms, and Limbaugh was the great popularizer of the genre.

Speaker 3 Long before Fox Host began amplifying the fringier theories about American politics, Limbaugh was busy mainstreaming wingnut world.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And this is this is significant, because Russia'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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 She's very much in line with everyone else in the party and everyone else who

Speaker 3 has held those positions and is not as bad as some of them, right? She's more hated by certain people.

Speaker 3 Even on the the left, you'll find people who are more directly aggressive towards her than they are to fucking Kissinger.

Speaker 3 And it's not that she's not bad. She is.
So is Bill. They're greedy.
Bill's a rapist. They have supported,

Speaker 3 in addition to the Iraq war, a number of violent actions overseas that were disasters. But

Speaker 3 they did that as part of

Speaker 3 within a large group of people, right? There's nothing about them that is exceptionally bad for

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The Clintons are not like, my parents

Speaker 3 hated Trump when he was running and voted for him because their hatred of Hillary Clinton was,

Speaker 3 it's beyond rational.

Speaker 3 And again,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 you can't, it's almost impossible to analyze the Clintons, their impact, their crimes, and their, and their, um, and their, their behaviors, their policies with any sort of rationality because this

Speaker 3 they have been turned into goblins, right?

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 It's very frustrating. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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 do, or at least the way you're criticizing them isn't reasonable, suddenly you're defending them.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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 occupied the White House on any given year.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And like,

Speaker 3 you know, Hillary,

Speaker 3 even if she had

Speaker 3 killed as many people overseas as Trump did, probably fewer people domestically in terms of policy.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 anyway, yeah, I totally agree that it's like, it's a very weird

Speaker 3 thing that

Speaker 3 absolutely sprung out of the Rush Limbaugh

Speaker 3 personal demonization

Speaker 3 that then gets into, you know, like the fucking Alex Jones shit where

Speaker 3 she's a demon.

Speaker 3 There's a fly on her. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it's not that she doesn't deserve condemnation for a lot of things, but like, for one thing, I don't know.

Speaker 3 I don't want to fucking get onto a defending because I don't like Hillary Clinton. Exactly.
Yes.

Speaker 3 But she's also has it like, it's very frustrating. Yeah.
It's very, it's all just very frustrating.

Speaker 3 And he's, and he creates this culture and it, it spreads. Now it's not just the Clintons now.
Now it's, it's everyone, right? You don't have to analyze people that you disagree with.

Speaker 3 You come up with a three-word thing about them and you spread these, like,

Speaker 3 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, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding.

Speaker 3 Cut to Texas being submerged in a layer of snow that destroys civil society

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 20 Yep.

Speaker 3 His conclusion was, what? You know, now it's...

Speaker 3 It never affected him.

Speaker 3 It never affected him. Now he's dead.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He hates more of the outdoors anyway.

Speaker 3 As far as he knows, he was right about this. He was right about this.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Bush's term, and there are a couple of reasons for this.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In the first four years of Obama's term, the number of hate groups in the United States rose by 755%.

Speaker 3 This surge in public anti-black racism, I know it's pretty shocking when you actually look at the number, right? 755%.

Speaker 3 Yeah. The idea that, like, oh man, there's a black president.
We're going to need more hate groups, guys.

Speaker 3 The hate groups,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 3 the fact that Barack Obama, yeah, so this surge in anti-in public anti-black racism was heralded, incited, and led by Rush Limbaugh, the USA's most prominent bigot.

Speaker 3 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 Russia's program while Obama was still on the campaign trail.

Speaker 3 Now, the context of this is that Limbaugh was talking about the fact that

Speaker 3 Al Sharpton, Barack Obama and Al Sharpton had like a public series of arguments, right? I think Sharpton was backing Hillary at first.

Speaker 3 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:

Speaker 3 Barack, the magic Negro, lives in D.C.

Speaker 3 The LA Times, they called him that because he's not authentic like me.

Speaker 19 Yeah, the guy from the LA paper said he make guilty whites feel good

Speaker 19 They'll vote for him and not for me Cause he's not from the hood

Speaker 19 See real black men like Snoop Dogg or me or Farrakhan

Speaker 19 Have talked the talk and walked the walk Not coming late and one

Speaker 19 Oh Barack the magic Negro lives in BC

Speaker 19 The LA times they called him that cause he's black.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 I think that's enough of that. Yes.

Speaker 3 Pretty bad.

Speaker 3 I mean, I just, I guess I just wish that non-comedy people would stay in their lane. Yeah, stay in their lane.

Speaker 3 Bro, yeah.

Speaker 3 Like the the meter was terrible.

Speaker 3 It's bad.

Speaker 3 It's not funny unless you're a bigot, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Unless you're a bigot.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And why? Because she's a cow, you know?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I just bring it up a ton. That's all.
Yeah. I just, I can't talk about it enough, but I'm not a bigot.
It's just convenient that he's black.

Speaker 3 It's not a problem that I have with him, but it's convenient for me for my satire.

Speaker 3 God, I hate this guy. Why is he even doing satire at this point? Like, has he pretended, has he dropped that pretense?

Speaker 3 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 traders and whatnot because it's the kind of thing that's easy to spread right you you make a

Speaker 3 racist song and people laugh and at first it's a joke and then it becomes less of a joke it's the it's the whole story right that's exactly what limbaugh's doing you know it's not even all that much less racist um he just doesn't say the n-word um 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.

Speaker 3 Limbaugh declared that stopping Obama was, quote, what I was born to do.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In 2009, Rush declared, in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Ben Shapiro is very open about the fact that Limbaugh was his hero and idol.

Speaker 3 Alex Jones altered the way he spoke and altered the acoustic setup of his InfoWars studio in order to more closely resemble Rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Kind of proving that he was effectively the leader of the Republican Party. Yeah.
You know, it puts me in mind of Howard Stern

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 it was ridiculous.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Every other universe is where we are, and that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it.

Speaker 3 The real America. Yeah.
The real America and there can be no coexistence. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now we're in the age of,

Speaker 3 you know, because Biden said,

Speaker 3 you know, he's looking for unity. Anytime somebody's looking for unity

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 there is a criticism of a famous monster like Rush Limbaugh, the response from the right is always, oh, where's the famous unity?

Speaker 3 I thought you you wanted unity.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 if you don't come to believe the things that I believe,

Speaker 3 you are against America. And

Speaker 3 you are the real racist. You're the real misogynist.

Speaker 3 You are the real hater

Speaker 3 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 it it I don't know that we can

Speaker 3 but the the the way to do it is not to

Speaker 3 not to yield to these people yeah

Speaker 3 it's it's it's not to just let them

Speaker 3 get what they want because what they want is the annihilation of the other and and honestly the annihilation of themselves because it's a fucking death cult at this point yeah like they can't be allowed to win and like the people,

Speaker 3 and that's not to say that

Speaker 3 every aspect of what has what of traditional conservative ideology is wrong. They have some points.
That's why it brings people in.

Speaker 3 The idea that like, you should always be wary about giving the government control of things. You fucking should, you know? Like, absolutely.

Speaker 3 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 won, because fucking Reagan was president before Limbaugh came onto the scene, and he was terrible and very toxic.

Speaker 3 Not like toxicity in the Republican Party goes back very far. But also,

Speaker 3 it's not for nothing that the Republicans used to be the party of Abraham Lincoln. You know,

Speaker 3 it's not,

Speaker 3 there is a way to have a conservatism that is influential in society that isn't a fucking death cult.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, I have, I'm a pretty committed leftist, but I also do not seek a society that forces my beliefs on other people. But

Speaker 3 you can't,

Speaker 3 you can't

Speaker 3 give these people an inch because they'll take everything. That's how they are.
You know, that's what, in part, what Rush had a big impact in making them into.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Right-wing radio host and never Trumper Joe Walsh, who is another actually principled conservative, draws a direct line between Limbaugh and Trump.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It wasn't about conservatism.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And Joe Walsh, again, not a guy

Speaker 3 I agree with on much, but he's right on the money here. He's analyzing it properly.
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 I think the thing also about Trump is like Rush, doesn't really have any deeply held beliefs. Right? No.
Like that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 All he cares about is his own aggrandizement. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 3 It's narcissism. Trump and Limbaugh are very similar.
Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Rush bent the knee to Trump, declaring him everything but the second coming.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It was watered down by the sheer mass of right-wing

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Rush had long denied the dangers of smoking, particularly second-hand smoke, but this was a new level for him.

Speaker 3 When Trump lost re-election to Biden, Limbaugh immediately called the election a sham and joined the chorus of voices claiming fraud.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Joe Walsh, a former Limbaugh lover,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He is very conservative, but his constant principled resistance to President Trump proves that he is not a fascist.

Speaker 3 And it turns out what Limbaugh was really selling, what he was preparing the American right for all along, was fascism.

Speaker 3 If you want confirmation of this, you need look no further than how America's most prominent neo-Nazis reacted to Limbaugh's death.

Speaker 3 Chris Cantwell was one of the speakers and organizers of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He is a straight-up Nazi.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Cantwell gained prominence among the alt-right as a podcaster with shows like Outlaw Conservative.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But he was interviewed for another fascist podcast by a guy named Jared Howe on, like, right after Limbaugh's death.

Speaker 3 And in this clip I'm about to play, the crying Nazi Chris Cantwell discusses his reaction to learning about Rush Limbaugh's death.

Speaker 3 And when I heard, you know, when I heard Catherine's voice,

Speaker 16 I choked up and I said, oh, no. You knew.
You know.

Speaker 16 knew.

Speaker 19 I and w the

Speaker 3 week, I had actually

Speaker 3 she wrote a letter to Rush because I kept on hoping that, you know, I'd get out of here in time that I could like call into the show or drop an email.

Speaker 3 And I started to realize, like, all right, he's at Dylan Hose for two weeks.

Speaker 3 If I'm going to contact this guy, just I'm probably going to have to do it by mail. And I was actually going to I forgot to do it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 But,

Speaker 19 you know, when I heard her voice, I choked up and I said, oh, no, my family hurt me.

Speaker 19 I'm going to tell her all my discussion that'd be dead.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 so, yeah, I heard it when it happened. And then I was like, you got to be fucking kidding me, man.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's, I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 he's legitimately affected by this. He's mourning Rush Limbaugh, this Nazi.
And he's not the only Nazi mourning Rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So it's literally, this is the Daily Holocaust. And it is maybe the most prominent Nazi podcast on the internet.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Now, these guys are hardcore Nazis. So they consider Russia moderate, and they do demean him at times for that.

Speaker 3 But they also also recognize that he paved the way for their financial success and cultural influence.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 32 News cucked on that.

Speaker 32 Sven.

Speaker 32 Got some bad news for you, buddy. Rush Limbaugh is dead.
Oh, serious?

Speaker 18 Wow.

Speaker 32 I mean, I guess I can't see what he's saying about Texas.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I'm very sad about that.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't be here if not.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't be here, says host of The Daily Show, 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.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 like, yeah.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 he said some dumb things, and I am going to dance on his grave.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There were a lot of people.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 If this is what you make of your life,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Because you materially harmed their lives.
Yes. You did.
And the lives of people that

Speaker 3 they loved.

Speaker 3 You have made life that much harder for generations of people that will come out.

Speaker 3 of humans. Yeah, you have Brush Limbaugh had a material, significant, negative impact on billions of people, many of whom are yet unborn.
Yeah, like

Speaker 3 rest in piss, anyway,

Speaker 3 rest in piss, Brush. I wish the lung cancer had worked faster.
You know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyway, Paul, you got a got some pluggables to plug at the end of this

Speaker 3 beat episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm going to be appearing on the Daily Show in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 3 Big TDS fan. By the way,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 Nazi content creators, I guess you call 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.

Speaker 3 Sorry, back to your. No, not at all, Paul.

Speaker 3 You can follow me at P.F. Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram.
And

Speaker 3 I have a few podcasts that you can listen to.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So go out into the world, tie one half of your brain behind your back, and then die because that would actually kill you.

Speaker 3 That would immediately lead to your death.

Speaker 3 Exposed brain. There's a reason we have skulls, people.
Don't keep your brain inside of it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyway,

Speaker 3 podcast.

Speaker 20 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Speaker 5 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

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Speaker 1 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place, it's a way of life.
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Speaker 13 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

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Speaker 15 A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium. Women began to go missing.

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Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 16 I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight.

Speaker 17 And so I pointed the gun at him and said, This isn't a joke.

Speaker 16 A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.

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Speaker 16 Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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