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

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Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I continually fail to introduce like a professional, which is particularly shameful this week because our guest is a very professional voice artist mr paul f tompkins hi thank you for having me thank you for being here paul um you are the voice of a lot of characters that that that a lot of people enjoy uh I think most famously, to me at least, is Mr.
Peanutbutter.

To be fair, I'm also the voice of a lot of characters that people hate.

That's true.

That's true.

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

That's the mark of success.

You're doing it right.

Exactly.

And today we're talking about a truly historical success of a creative mind. A man hated by tens of millions of people and who should be hated by billions.
A man who has done, I would say, incalculable harm to the future of human life and all life on this planet. Mr.
Rush Limbaugh. Correct.
Yeah. Paul, do you have any kind of history with rush limbaugh like in terms of your upbringing and stuff i don't know much about how you grew up yeah do you know what i forgot uh that i forgot first of all i forgot how long he's been around yeah and i remember watching him in his earliest days on tv um and watching that show like as a goof the way i would watch you know the morton downey jr show or wally george or whatever and just like who is this clown and he's like doing this this sort of you know what seemed like a character you know at the time because he i think he fancied himself an entertainer and had a show that had little skits in it and stuff like that and i i thought he was just ridiculous and so uh uh i watched him ironically and um and then things just got worse like i i sort of got tired of it i remember getting tired of it and like okay this is just like the same thing over and over again and it's not um it's not pushing that uh that button in my ironic pleasure center anymore so i just stopped watching but he um despite despite my my jumping ship he continued to do what he was doing he lost the paul f tompkins demographic but he kept the my parents and everyone that raised me demographics

so what was your upbringing particularly political would you say not you know what not super political i was raised uh my family was a um uh lower middle class uh a big uh catholic family um in philadelphia in in a uh a sort of suburb called Mount Airy. And we were both of my, my family was like lifelong Democrats, you know, Philadelphia Democrats.
And so that was kind of it. Like we were just sort of, you know, like a conservative liberal family.
And yeah, I, I, i we we didn't talk a lot about politics in the house growing up um and that was kind of it but i knew that we were we were liberal democrats you know who were weirdly enough guided by guided by i'm not even gonna say faith i think we were guided by my parents um sort of morals where they were greatest generation depression babies um and uh they voted straight democrat um but they were not like even though we were catholic it was like we were not single issue voters, you know. Yeah.
But my family was, my parents were brought up with the same sort of prejudices that people of their generation were brought up with, you know. But yeah, politics did not figure in.
It was like when I got, you know, a little older and out of the house and everything, that's when I started investigating my own politics, and it was like a long journey. That is very exciting to me, just because you came from kind of more of a liberally background, and your introduction to Rush Limbaugh was kind of watching it as a character, right? Yes, exactly.
Yeah.

I grew up very conservative. My parents were also lower middle class, verging on poor, and when I was like kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but extremely conservative.
I would say like our family religion was conservatism. And so Rush Limbaugh was caught whenever I was driving with my mom or my dad, Rush was on.
We listened to him. My parents talked talked about him so my upbringing with him was that this guy is like the prophet of of what's what's right you know both in the political sense and in the moral sense um so i'm very excited about this and i'm excited that you know who morton downey jr is because we're gonna be talking about him a bit too absolutely so yeah um rush limbaugh is it's hard to oversell this guy's influence on our current state of like i think it would be fair to say we're kind of like verging on civil conflict right now between the right and left in the united states for sure yeah for sure um so yeah and i think rush limbaugh has a huge might be the man most responsible for that i i i totally agree that his influence cannot be, is it overestimated like yeah it cannot be overestimated it's like i i the day he died i tweeted i tweeted uh if i had to say something positive i i guess if i had to say something positive i'm glad rush limbaugh lived long enough to get cancer and die um and then that got that got picked up by uh foxnews.com they did a roundup of you know uh liberals celebrating cheering rush limbaugh's death which really was just like hey if you want to harass some people here's here's who to harass and i had people i had people in my mentions on twitter like saying things like uh you better pray you never meet me like people implying violence because i said i'm glad rush limbaugh is dead i had somebody call my call my house and say rush limbaugh contributed far more good to society than you ever will fuck you my god for rush limbaugh this guy but i mean this guy had a show he had a show he wasn't a legislator he wasn't he wasn't like some some sort of freedom fighter this guy just had a show where he said mean things.
Yeah, where he repeatedly celebrated the deaths of his enemies and made half a billion dollars doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. Let's get into Rush's life.
So the first thing I learned about him when I started digging into him that might be the thing I learned about him that surprised me the most. Rush is not short for anything.
Rush is a full first name. And in fact, Rush Limbaugh is the third Rush Limbaugh in his family line.
They are very proud of that name. His grandpa, Rush Senior, was born and raised in Bollinger County, Missouri.
So he and I are both Missouri babies. He grew up into a world that was changing rapidly.
Rush Senior saw an electric light for the first time when he was 12 he took his first railroad trip in 1904 to see the world's fair real name i always thought that he i always thought that was like one of those things where he was like i choose that that is the most shocking thing about him he it rush is not only his full name it is the only name his family seems to give their firstborn sons hey if it ain't broke yeah if it ain't broke uh so rush uh rush senior became a lawyer uh he opened an office in cape gerardu um missouri and he basically never left the town again he retired in 1994 at the age of 102 which i mention because it suggests that all those cigars are Rush Limbaugh smoked,

saved us about 32 years more of his show.

Wait, I'm sorry.

Did you say he retired at 102?

In 1994, yeah.

And then how long did he live after that?

Did he get to enjoy his retirement? I think he died immediately.

He's one of those guys who worked until he died, basically.

Some people are like that. His grandson was like that.
So Rush Sr. was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when he was 40.
His main political issue was fighting FDR and the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right? This is deeply, deeply embedded in the Rush Limbaugh line. In 19 rush limbaugh senior was a republican delegate at the republican national convention where he helped nominate alf landon for the noble job of losing to franklin delano roosevelt in an election you don't nobody nobody was better at campaigning than fdr it was never a successful thing to run against that fan i know somebody had to be his Washington generals.
Yeah. Alf Landon, the Washington generals of Republican politics.
So my main source for the early life and family history of Rush Limbaugh is a fairly comprehensive, if I would say kind of fawning biography of Limbaugh by Zeev Chaffetz. And Zeev, it's a weird first name, Zee apostrophe E.V.
Chaffetz. He notes that over the course of decades of lawyering, Rush Sr., quote, quietly but inevitably became well-to-do, which is an interesting way of phrasing.
It was like, there was no stopping it. He just got, it was kind of a way of making it seem like he just, he didn't really want to become rich.
He just became rich, You know, that is the most suspicious sounding phrase. I know.
Inevitably, quietly and inevitably got rich. It's sinister.
My God. It is very sinister.
So Rush Jr., who is our Rush Limbaugh's father, was born at some point. Quick Googling.
Obviously, he had to have been born. Quick Googling didn't return a date he's the only rush limbaugh without a wikipedia page which i guess kind of a kind of a shot to him um i could have probably found it out if i'd really dug into it but it doesn't really matter that much for our purposes yeah he did what he had to do he gave us rush he gave us our rush yes our rush our rush so rush jr is only important for the impact that he had on our rush he was a world war ii combat pilot which is undeniably rad you got to give him that um and his biography notes that he maintained a military crew cut for his entire life he was heavyset and topped out at about 300 pounds which earned him the nickname big rush oh big big rush man one of those nicknames you you cannot combat like it's no like no we're this is big rush sorry big rush sorry big rush you can ask politely it's not gonna happen why are you in a big rush uh so big rush became an attorney sorry that's what you would tell people like all right because i'm always rushing around i'm always rushing around so Big Rush became an attorney.
That's what he would tell people, because I'm always rushing around. I'm always rushing around.
So Big Rush became an attorney, like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape Girardeau during holidays.
His very conservative politics influenced these speeches, and his most famous one was a tearful, hagiographic speech about our nation's saintly founding fathers. Again, you can see he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab that R.
Rush has. And you have to admit, if you know anything about R.
Rush Limbaugh, he was an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very good at what he did.
That's why he had the impact that he had. Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah. Now, R.
Rush Limbaugh, Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, to give his full name, was born in Cape Girardeau, Mississippi on January 12, 1951. By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with a brother and a parents who loved him.
Baby Rush spent his childhood imbibing a steady diet of his dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil conniving communists. One of our Rush's childhood friends recalls of Big Rush of his dad.
Quote, we'd go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd sit in front of the television drinking black cherry pop, eating popcorn and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters.
He'd yell at Dan Rather. They're all typical liberals and Rather's the worst one of the bunch.
And we'd try to keep him going, you know. Mr.
Rush, what do you think about this? Mr. Rush, what do you think about that? Sometimes he'd say, Kinder, that was this friend's name, you're going to be the first Dutchman on the moon.
I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh taskmaster with his sons.
That's an odd comment. That's so weird.
So Rush has a a brother or rush has a brother he has a brother david um who's his younger brother no no no i think that's the oldest the oldest son is the rush gets the rush name yeah they didn't do a george for yeah david becomes like a lawyer doesn't really leave cape giardot and is like um you know he's he's he unlike his brother has a family has like a wife that he's you know stays with and all that stuff did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy i think yeah i think he was born wealthy he and his brother were both born rich as hell um so and and our rush's brother david provided an even more telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was like under big rush my dad stood out sometimes he provoked people who didn't agree with him to violence once for example he was in a bar slamming fdr and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up i never did ask him the details of that one but it was a couple guys not a fair fight i know that much i have to assume he deserved to get the kicked out of him i'm gonna guess he was saying something like the people who got screwed over in the great depression deserve to starve to death we shouldn't be helping them that's gonna be my guess and he got the shit kicked out of him by some uh wpa guys something like that if your name is if your name is big rush and two guys go after you i think that's a fair fight that's a fair fight you're big you know yeah he's not a. He's 300 pounds.
They're probably each about a buck 50, you know?

Fair fight.

Exactly.

Fair fight by mass.

They're thin from being poor.

Yeah.

So, R. Rush was born into the Eisenhower years, which will probably always be remembered as like the high point of both capitalism and the United States.
This period of peak American exceptionalism imprinted itself deeply on Russia's's growing brain his father was made a special ambassador to india's legal system their family got their first television um yeah yeah what does that mean i think it means you know india's was newly independent in the eisenhower years right they had just the uk had just left they had just partitioned with pakistan they're developing their own independent legal system and they're a democracy that was heavily based at least initially on the u.s so the president like picked guys who were established lawyers like big rush and also established republicans to be kind of help set up the indian legal system wow um that's kind of what happened so yeah his his father's a big man in republican politics rush grows up seeing in the period where america is undeniably like like literally is half of the global economy right that's a very significant thing for him um so the family in the 50s gets their first tv but radio is still the dominant method of entertainment in those days and russia's childhood and early adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for djs um my dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time he's like seven or eight years younger than rush um and he he grew up the only thing my dad ever wanted to be was a dj and he wasn't a radio dj for like 20 30 years you know that was like the coolest thing that you could do, right? You didn't have Spotify. You didn't have the internet.
People learned about new music from DJs who were kind of like picking what they were going to play on the radio. It was like the absolute raddest thing you could be.
And that's what Rush, like he idolizes these big DJs of the time. And that's all he wants to be for basically his entire young life is a DJ.
Yeah. Now, when Rush was three, Brown versus the Board of Education was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to the integration of US schools.
Now, Zev Chaffetz doesn't write anything specific in the biography about how Rush Sr. talked about race to his son.
I have not, we don't get any of that information. And I'm not necessarily blaming Chaffetz for that because the Rush family is very PR savvy.
They don't talk about it. You know, I don't know who he would have gotten that info from.
But our Rush would have definitely picked up on the great deal of conflict in Cape Girardeau over racial matters. Missouri is an odd state in that it is both Midwestern and Southern.
During the Civil War, it was split between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers, and the town that Rush grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides. There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of schools in Missouri and in Cape Girardeau.
And Zeev Chaffetz, to his credit, writes about this. Quote, In 1952, Cape built its white students a new school, Central High.
Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the Supreme Court and basketball changed that. Cape Girardot took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title.
The 1953 team was expected to be a powerhouse, but word got around that the kids from Cobb were even better. An informal game was arranged between Central and Cobb High, says historian Frank Nickel.
Cobb won. Shortly thereafter, Cobb mysteriously burned down.
Black students went to school and churches and private homes that year, but a more permanent solution was... Yeah, that's the kind of town he grows up in.
The black kids win at basketball and they burn their school down. Wow.
Yeah. Cape Girardeau is a very racist town.
And kind of more to the point like we don't know exactly what what russia's dad would have said about any of this we don't know that he would have supported the burning down of the black school we don't know that he wouldn't though that's right um and you know the the conservatives were definitely more on the don't integrate side of things, right?

Now, a compromise was eventually reached in Cape Girardeau, and the compromise was that black kids would be allowed to attend Central High, but they would be put in special classes that were taught by former teachers of Cobb, the school that had been burned down.

This was kind of integrating by not integrating.

So there were black and white kids in the same school, but not in the same classes. is the way things were in cape geardo when rush limbaugh started school um so yeah that's you can infer from that what you will based on some of the things rush limbaugh says and does later in life i think we're missing some important information about what his dad thought about black people um yeah i don't remember him ever uh being concerned as to the investigation of that fire i don't think he was burned down high school he might have done it like that is rampant and irresponsible speculation on my part but also uh the only reason i think he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't have been able to run away from it, from what I can tell.

He didn't do well in that fight, is all I'm saying.

So Rush had an upbringing that would have been fairly standard for a rich kid of his era.

He played basketball.

He did chores.

He had plenty of friends.

He was not an overly active kid.

He did not like sports.

He hated his one year in the Cub Scouts.

Rush Limbaugh hates the outdoors his entire life. He did not like school, but he was popular, largely because his family was rich and had a huge basement with a pool table and a bunch of other luxuries.
The kids Rush hung out with during this time give us some of our best hints about the darker elements of his childhood. One of them told Zeve Chaffetz, quote, Russia's dad didn't suffer for...
So, kind of abusive? not I don't think by the standards of the time. And I haven't heard any that he was like beating his kids or anything, but kind of mentally abusive.
Again, probably more or less in line with what most, most men of his social class would have been like to their kids. You know, I don't think this i mean how many how many of these guys were born out of the the the sort of ritual humiliation uh by their fathers in front of an audience yeah i think most of them you know it's like it's such a it's such a common thing that i i'm i guess i'm just glad my dad was a guy who uh didn't say.
Yeah, it's better than humiliating you in front of your friends when you say something he disagrees with. So every one of Russia's early friends that I've seen interviewed is very consistent about the fact that he was not political from an early age.
He rarely, if ever, talked politics, and he did not express strong beliefs. One of his friends even remembers him as a particularly good debater in school because, quote, he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat.
When he did express political opinions, they were generally conservative. One friend noted that the only time he saw child Rush express a strong political sentiment was after the 1960 presidential election, when Rush was nine.
Quote, Rushwall kennedy won darn nixon lost shucks so grows up conservative because his dad is conservative but it's clearly politics is not a big part of his life from an early age he's not like ben shapiro right we're from the get-go he's being sort of um like focused into becoming a political commentator that does not happen with rush limbaugh right he's more from the get go, he's being sort of like focused into becoming a political commentator.

That does not happen with Rush Limbaugh.

Right.

He's more from the darn shucks school of the darn shucks school of political commentary.

Yeah.

So Rush got his first gig at age 13 working at a downtown barbershop.

He later told his biographer that he liked the gig because it gave him a chance to talk to adults who who he preferred to his peers because, I didn't think kids were interesting.

When it came to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect.

He was bad at sports, heavyset, and not at all smooth.

In his 1993 biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story,

biographer Paul Colford recalls one particularly embarrassing incident

during a game of Spin the Bottle when Rush was a teenager.

He spun the bottle and it stopped pointing at the prettiest girl at the party, which is how she's described in this anecdote. Quote, she looked at him and gasped.
Couldn't do it. Not with him, that is.
And everyone in the room witnessed his humiliation. It was a wound he would nurse forever.
That's nice. Thank you, biographer, for for that and it's one of those things you know I think there's I'm sure this has an impact on the kind of man he becomes but also I think most of us have a moment like that where we have a crush on some person of the opposite or the same sex and they're not into us and it's horribly embarrassing it's a pretty normal and most of us don't grow up to destroy civil society and the environment right yeah we've all been there and rush was there too obviously this is a part of whatever toxic stew gets cooked up at him um but i don't know how like it's one of those things i think you can kind of lean too much on oh this is why is why.
He was always forever humiliated by this thing. And that's why he became the man he was.
Like, well, we all have that in our past. And we all don't do this shit.
It's very much like the original origin story of Lex Luthor that Superman blew out his hair. Superman was responsible for him going prematurely bald.
And he became a supervillain because of this. Yeah, and you know, there are a lot of other bald men in that world who don't become supervillains.
Yeah. So, Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer or to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas, right? The Limbaugh's were big men in Cape Girardeau.
They were kind of like the primary, the most prominent men in the entire town. And he, Big Rush, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and do something respectable.
Didn't have to be a lawyer, go into politics, do something important, right? Do something that he can brag about to the other rich guys. Now, the fact that young Rush only ever wanted to be on the radio infuriated his father.
For his part, Rush seems to suspect that his love of radio was born in part from his hatred of school. Quote, my mother would be fixing me breakfast and I'd be listening to the guy on the radio.
He'd be having fun and I was preparing to go to prison. I mean, join the club, Rush.
Yeah, we all hate school. It's trash everybody it never occurred to me to relate it to the guy on the radio like how come he gets to have fun this full-grown adult and i have to go to school yeah i mean there's a lot of kids let's i'll take my adopted hometown portland for example a lot of kids there who hate school they don't destroy the entire.
They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends. And that's much healthier, Rush.
You can just buck up a Starbucks if you're nursing some rage at the educational industrial complex or whatever. So despite his irritation, Big Rush clearly did love his son.
And when little Rush was 16, his dad used some of his local clout to get his son a part-time job at the local radio station. Wow.
Rush started doing what you'd today call internship, you know, fetching coffee, cleaning up, handling odd tasks here and there, and eventually he was allowed to actually introduce and play records on air. The summer before his senior year of high school, Big Rush paid for his son to attend a six-week radio engineering course in Dallas.
This was a big moment for Rush. He was away from home for the first time, living in a boarding house.
He started smoking cigarettes, thank God, and he got a license that allowed him to actually run the radio without adult supervision. Once he had this, station management let him hang out alone all weekend and weekdays after school, playing records and for the first time presenting himself to an audience on air.
So he gets started and this is one of those things. His dad, clearly there are some abusive elements of their relationship.
His dad is not supportive of Rush's radio career, but also is, like his dad is, doesn't think it's a good idea, but also enables him like not just gets him a job but pays for him to get educated so again this is not a guy i'm sure you know he had his frustrations with his father this is not a guy who grows up with a dad who just doesn't get him and refuses to support him this is a very supportive upbringing this kid has even though his father's not yeah exactly um yeah so uh rush you know becomes kind of famous within his you know the teen set at his town because he's the guy with the radio show and in high school and he was not at all political at this point his most well-known bit involved reading the daily beauty tips that the associated press sent out back then um which he like and he would like kind of mock the beauty tips because he thought it was silly that the AP was sending out daily beauty tips, which is fair. That is a silly thing for the AP to do.
Now, Rush's professional idol at this point was a guy named Larry Lujak, a Chicago DJ who was famous for his sense of humor and comedic stylings. Rush later called him the only person I ever copied.

Lujak was known for audibly shuffling papers

during his monologues and different bits,

a tactic Limbaugh copied and used repeatedly

through his decades on air.

That was like his signature bit?

No, no, no, it wasn't a bit,

but it was like a thing he would do to emphasize

that I've got evidence or I've got information here. You know, it was a thing.
Rush and it was a big Rush Limbaugh thing. You know, it's how you convince people who maybe aren't that credible that you you have good information.
Right. Like, look, I have papers.
Yeah, he's been handed. He's been handed this ream of paper that has information on it.
So it's true. But but but lujack was not a political guy right he

was just a dj not and he fucking hated rush limbaugh because when rush got famous in the early 90s rush was like yeah larry lujack is the only man i ever copied and they asked lujack about it and his response was basically fuck that guy oh bless you bless you good man yeah yeah you can't you can't pick who finds you influential,

you know? Yeah.

Um... Bless you.
Bless you, Larry Lujak. Good man.
Yeah. You can't pick who finds you influential, you know? Yeah.
So back in those days, again, being a radio DJ was pretty much the coolest thing you could do. And Rush's side job made him very popular at high school.
He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work was intoxicating, and Rush seemed to know at once that this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing.
Obviously, his ambitions did not make his father happy, and during Rush's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio. No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though.
He was miserable at home with his father after graduating. He enrolled in a local college just to please the old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go to school very often.
Sometimes his mother would drive him to college just to make sure that he went. Rush came of age during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in US history.
I mean, he's literally becoming an adult in like 1968, I think. Some shit went down that year, you know.
There's a lot of teenagers doing some exciting things.

Now, given how Rush turned out,

you might expect him to have been active

and involved in the politics of his time,

but he was not.

And to hear him tell it now,

or to hear him tell it when he related this to his biographer,

the civil rights movement and the Vietnam years

basically all passed him by.

He never attended political rallies.

He only dimly remembers hearing of Bobby Kennedy's death. When Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated, his radio station asked him to help send out news reports for the local NBC affiliate because there were uprisings all around the country. And Rush did this, but he didn't actually engage with the news.
He was not actually interested in what was happening. He was just interested in kind of the business of how news was disseminated.
Quote, this is what he said later. I remember talking to them about the broadcast business, NBC.
I was 17, playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don't recall feeling any concern.
So that is how, again, a lot of privilege. There are massive race-based uprisings in a number of U.S.
cities. Hundreds of thousands of National Guard troops are called up as after the civil rights leader is assassinated.
The country is on the brink of open conflict. And Rush Limbaugh, I don't give a fuck.
Like, I just want to play my records, you know? Wow. He's just a rich white kid, you know, in the middle of Missouri.
He doesn't give a shit. It's so wild to think about someone being alive at that time.
Yeah. And not having a strong feeling either way about anything that's going on yeah he's not doesn't even have strong hard right sympathies he just doesn't give a fuck about it right that is like a kind of privilege that i can't even begin to fathom yeah and it is important that like he's not just taking the right wing side of things we're like we have martin luther king he was a commie he just doesn't care like none of this even makes it into his mind like the idea that you would say martin luther king who is that again that which guy bobby who got killed kinna what dimly aware dimly aware he was assassinated yeah it's it's quite a thing so I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the New York Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early 20s.
Quote, love of radio eventually won out over formal education, and he dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling his parents. Then began a long checkered odyssey, typical of radio.
Limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities working under different names and broadcast styles he was rusty sharp and jeff christie he was a dj a newsreader a talk host in each place he developed components of what would later emerge as the limbaugh style in pittsburgh he was a prankster convincing listeners that he could see them through a new experimental picture phone so he's kind of like a a drive time morning dj like hey yeah we're gonna i don't know i can't do the dj voice but like playing like sound bits and doing doing gags like he's very like not even really a shock jock yet because he's not like combat that has that's like starting to evolve in this period of time right yeah um i did find some audio from run of Russia's very first broadcast in 1974 while he was still in Pittsburgh. And I think it's interesting because in it, you can hear Rush in mid transition from that drive time DJ voice to the voice of the Rush Limbaugh who would help breed a modern American fascist movement.
So here he is on WXZ's solid rock and gold show. So without further ado, here is Rush Limbaugh in 1974.
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It is now showing. So, very silly, as all radio from the 1970s sounds today, right? As most radio today sounds.
But also, you would never have guessed, based on his early performances, that he was going to become what he became, right? No. I mean, look, he has, undeniably, great voice.
Great voice. Very good at imparting information.
Like, actual, factual information. This movie is, for sure, playing here at this time.
Day of the Dolphin, absolutely. I can't wait to see it.
It's the exciting movie, Day of the Dolphin. But that he's just straight reading things that you cannot misinterpret in any way.
If only he'd stuck to that. But yeah, it's so, I guess I don't want to get ahead of us, get ahead of ourselves.
But the idea that this guy would not be content doing just this is like, when does it, the idea that it turns like, I don't know. Yeah, I'm sorry.
We'll get to that. I think it's fair to say this is what he loved and he would have been perfectly happy if he could have made a good we're getting the kind of like a hitler at art school story we're like yeah maybe if he'd gotten to keep being a drive time radio dj things would have been better you know i had a i had a conversation with a friend of mine who also does podcasts and radio.

And for neither of us, it is our thing, our first thing.

But we had a conversation where we shared our love of being good at reading copy.

Like when you have to do ads, there is something that's weirdly satisfying about like, oh, I sound like a guy on the radio.

I'm doing a good job at reading this and making it sound natural and whatever.

And it's like, isn't that enough? Isn't that enough? It is a good feeling when you nail an ad read. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone who does a job that, like, I think pretty much everyone who has worked, there's a joy in professional competence of any type.

Yes, yes.

If you're working – if you're running like the cashier at a grocery store, right?

When you get really good at bagging, it's this –

Oh, yeah.

The kind of ecstasy of competence, right?

Yes.

Where you can kind of lose yourself in a task and be like, I'm as good at this thing as I can be. Even if you don't like the job, there's a satisfaction in that.
And I think Rush was happy in this period. He wasn't rich, he wasn't influential, but he was doing a thing he loved well, and he was happy in this period in the early 70s.
So his early material in Pittsburgh is interesting to me because it's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from him. One of his reoccurring bits was the Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air, where he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw coming into the station on Sundays.
He thought these guys were grifters, and he hated them. The center of this bit was that no matter your problem, God would solve it if you'd send the preacher a hundred dollars um that's interesting to me and this is like a a real like running theme in his early career is he made fun of preachers all the time of the exact kind of religious grifters that later helped make him a wealthy man it's very interesting to me um yeah uh there's also he also would read letters from fans uh and at one point he read a letter that he said was from a young woman who wanted to be a DJ and was worried that her gender would hold her back.
Here's what he told her on the air. This is interesting to me, too.
You just have to master two techniques, and I'm going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of microphone.
To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie, is cueing up the record.
Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record, then turn the record until you hear the beginning of the record. Back it up a quarter of a turn and when you get through talking, the record will start.
After you have mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex. And you can interpret that a couple of ways.
I was already upset about the mansplaining about how to turn on a microphone and then he goes, oh wait, you can't do it. Well, I think there's two ways to interpret this.
One of them is what you've said, Sophie, that he was just being incredibly sexist. One of them is that he might have been acknowledging anyone could do this job, but you won't be able to as a woman because of sexism in the industry and i'm really not sure which one he was going for there i could be both yeah it could be both there is a kind of lording it over like you know what this is a dumb job but you're still not allowed to do it you're still not allowed to do it ladies yeah yeah yeah that's probably probably accurate it's probably a bit of both.
of both. You know what all ladies are allowed to do? Products? Is it ads, Sophie? Is it participate in capitalism as consumers? Yes, it is participate in capitalism.
Well, ladies, stick it to Rush Limbaugh by engaging positively with the system he spent his life propping. Alright, shit.
You know, I didn't like the phrase stick it to Rush Limbaugh very much. Neither did I, Sophie.
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Raytheon is such a cool name. It is a it's so good yeah i mean this in this ongoing bit i do i often like the r9x missile i think it's made by lockheed raytheon's guidance chips i believe are in it to be fair it's just the name raytheon is such a good shady defense industry like it's the name of a company that ends the world, right? Like, you're talking about, like, you know, they're going to make a Skynet that kills us all at some point.
Their name is just too on point to not be. Yeah.
So, back to Limbaugh. Rush was popular in Pittsburgh, and his bosses appreciated everything but his long-windedness.
They repeatedly sent him memos that stated, shut up and play the records. And for a while, he was content to mostly just do that.
But in 1974, the economy took a nosedive, and Rush was fired. He had to move back home with his family, where he lived for seven miserable months.
His dad repeatedly badgered him to move on and start a real career. But Rush was committed to radio, and eventually he landed a new gig in Kansas City, where

he started taking listener phone calls for the first time.

This was the dawn of the era of insult comedy, a sort of mean-spirited comedy based on pranks

and primarily executed by shock jocks, guys embodied by Howard Stern, really, who entertained

via ostentatious cruelty.

Hungry for success- Can I ask you this? I'm sorry't know if you'll if you'll know or not like talk talk radio how much of a thing is it at this point of people calling in to radio stations to have conversations with broadcasters it's starting at this point right this is really kind of the of talk radio. And Rush is on the ground floor of that, right? Does it start with sports or does it start with issues? I think it starts with issues.
It starts with their, before what we know as talk radio, you had had people who would take calls and talk about politics, both on TV and on the radio. And one of the things that Rush changes, to skip ahead a little bit, is that those that those guys had mostly been interchangeable right they were just sort of fielding calls and engaging with with callers rush and that kind of turns into with these shock jocks more of kind of a comedy-based entertainment you have these pranks you have insults you have all this stuff so it kind of it evolves out of a thing that had been going on for much longer right.
It's an extension of the idea of the original idea of the DJ was maybe a personality, but his main thrust was, I'm giving you this music that you crave. And that's why you like me, is because I'm going to maybe get tracks before other people get them.
And you're going to hear this stuff first. there's still a thing of it's not about my personality necessarily it's mainly about i am the i i'm i'm i'm i'm the santa claus of music i'm giving you these things yes and that's why you like me yes and i have access to them first and all this stuff right right so rush kind of as this you know he kind of sees the writing on the wall right he loses his gig as a traditional dj because that is starting to become less profitable right and there's you know in general the economy's taking a shitter um so he he he realizes that kind of the way things are going is more based around personalities and and comedy and entertaining people and he starts to pivot to that.
So this is, there's a, well, an interesting quote that Rush himself wrote in one of his many interminable books about how he felt about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote, I found out something about myself, something that was quite disturbing.
I found out I was really, really good at insulting people. For example, the topic one day was, when you die, how do you want to go? I want to go the cheapest and most natural way I can, one nice lady caller from Independence, Missouri said.
My response was, easy, have your husband throw you in a trash bag and then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage. When I went home after a day of this, I didn't like myself.
Is that being, I don't know if that's being good at insulting people yeah that's not really it's so that's just that's just being cool ready to insult people yeah yeah it is though one of the things people will state and i can't categorically say this but it seems accurate based on my recollections of the show is even when people would disagree with rush on the air, he wasn't an asshole to them.

Like, he was not cruel to his callers, to their faces, right?

He would say cruel things about liberals, but when people would call in, he would not,

like, call them monsters.

He would not, like, he seems to have genuinely not liked insulting people to their faces, or at least over, insulting people over over the uh the phone or

whatever um while he was disturbed by this he was not disturbed by racism mainly racism against black people yeah yeah yeah here's where we're going um at one point during his call-in show he claimed he had a black collar and he came claimed to not be able to understand the man's accent limbaugh hung up on this black man after saying take that bone out of your nose and call me back which is was this pretty damn racist or i mean he says it was we'll get to that at another point he asked his audience have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? Now, during a 1990 interview, after he'd kind of risen to political prominence, Newsweek asked Limbaugh if he thought these statements had been racist. He replied, you may interpret it as that, but I know, honest to God, that's not how I intended it at all.
Gee, don't get me in this one. I am the least racist host you'll ever find.
Now, if we're going to try to analyze Rush from the length of his career, I think we can say two things. He's probably being honest when he said that he felt bad about insulting collars because he did not continue to do that.
He is probably being dishonest when he says that he's not racist because he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things about black people consistently throughout his entire career yeah i mean the the i the number one indication that someone is racist is when they say they're the least racist i have has that ever been said by him by a non-racist person usually when someone yeah it's always got to be it's always got to be not only am i not racist i am the least racist person you're ever going to meet Like, you don't, maybe don't know. Racist but on my body.
It's always got to be, it's always got to be, not only am I not racist, I am the least racist person you're ever going to meet. It's like, you don't, maybe don't go that far.
Yeah. Because it's so, so easily disproved.
Also followed by the, I don't see color people. I don't see color.
I would say, I think most of the people, I think I don't see color people tend to be performative Obama voters.

The I am the least racist person in the world people tend to have strong opinions on why they should be able to say the N word. Like that would be the split between the right and the left.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And both of you are fucking racist.
So shut the fuck up. You mean me and Robert, right? Yes.
Yes. she's she's found out about our opinions on lichtenstein which i refuse to apologize for in the fucking swedes my god the swedes yeah you do you do have

issues with the swedes i have huge issues particularly blue swede um what did uga chaka

mean why did you say that at the start of that song okay sorry he's rush was Rush was still at this point in his career

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he was he was he was he was later told an interviewer, he was scary smart about everything, but I can't recall us talking much about current events. He was funny, though.
I was an audience of one. Limbaugh's years in Kansas City were not super successful,

and he seems to have recalled them somewhat

sourly, as the New York Times summarized.

Limbaugh likes to say,

Everything I did in Kansas City, I failed at.

He got fired from the station and

quit radio forever to become an executive

with the Kansas City Royals baseball team.

Five years later, he quit the Royals,

convinced his career there was stymied, and went

back to radio, this time as a news commentator.

Again, he got fired for

being too controversial. Also in

Thank you. Five years later, he quit the Royals, convinced his career there was stymied, and went back to radio, this time as a news commentator.
Again, he got fired for being too controversial. Also in Kansas City, he married twice, both marriages eventually ending in divorce.
Do we know what the sources of the type of controversies? Yes, we're about to get into that. Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we're about to get into that. Well, sorry.
Fucking Paul, come on. So it was in Kansas City where Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator, made his first public appearance.
After getting pushed out of the Royals, no one really liked him there. He had one friend who was on the team, and that's why he got to keep the job.
And when that guy got traded, they pushed him out because they all hated him. So after getting pushed out of the Royals, he a gig at kmbz a local station he started satirizing what he considered to be a left-wing caricature of a right-wing political commentator right the initial right-wing rush limbaugh was satire um and he was being purposefully controversial and unreasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point this was a joke initially.
This did not go over well with his middle-of-the-road Mormon station manager, but it made Limbaugh popular with his audience. See, Limbaugh had caught on to the fact that radio was in the middle of a revolution.
This was the era where the first big shock jocks, men like Don Imus and Howard Stern, began their ascents to stardom. I found a wonderful write-up about this era on Long Reads, which argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk radio star named Joel Pine in the 1950s.
And I'm going to quote from this now. We might do an episode on Pine at some point.
Quote, His unconventional style, dressed up to dress down pinkos and women's libbers and riff onon Rather Than Read reports was neither news nor entertainment.

It seemed to be best described, well, the New York Times and Time both did anyway,

as an electronic peep show.

The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest,

but Pine, with a syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets,

was the most Machiavellian.

When it comes to manipulating media,

icons of talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine,

He was the father of God. So, Pine is doing the Rush Limbaugh bit in the 50s and early 60s, but America is not ready for that yet, right? Even 50s America is like, this guy's racist and a fucking lunatic.
So now, just so I understand, Rush is this satire that he was doing. Yeah.
The idea was here is what uh left-wing people think right-wing people are like and yeah the point he is trying to make is they see us as they see the left wing sees the right wing as uh extreme and uh hateful and um you know racist and and close-minded like is that is that the point he was trying to make i i think so because he he's he he even says like it was a satire right like that's how it's portrayed in his biography that he was kind of his personality was satiric in nature um and and that's kind of the only way i can interpret it is that he was trying to satirize what like kind of the loony right winger you know okay but through the through the lens of here's how the left sees them i that's that was never said directly yeah it sounds like it's a it's a uh a protective phrase of like i was not satirizing these guys directly i was not satirizing right-wing people i was satirizing how left-wing people see right-wing yes that is how i have interpreted what i've read yeah okay yeah that does sound like a base covering kind of thing yeah it a bit i i do think he started not believing everything he said it started as a joke and him intentionally to provoke controversy because controversy brings in listeners and gets gets attention gets word of mouth that's why he was doing it and the story of rush limbaugh is these these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes what he really believes and is you know yes so he's he's an apolitical guy who's like this is this is what this is what politics sounds like to me i guess yeah i think so and i i yeah that that's how i interpret it we'll go we'll go over that more so obviously pine kind of the first right-wing radio shock jock had peaked too early and kind of i guess to steal a phrase from the nazis shown his power level too early during the Watts riots, and he got kicked off the air. Rush, though, started getting political at exactly the perfect time.
This was the early 1980s. Howard Stern came onto the scene in 84.
Don Imus had risen to prominence in the 1970s. Imus was another guy my dad listened to a lot growing up.
Imus in the morning was like a big part of getting ready for school don imus is going to be in the fucking tv and you were like this guy's having so much fun and i have to go to prison i have to go to prison this guy's having fun he's talking about nappy headed hose which was like the phrase that he i forget what it was in reference to but like that's what got him in trouble um it was a women's basketball team yeah it was a basketball team basketball team because dynamis was also very racist um sure so yeah the world was still not quite ready for the rush limbaugh

we knew uh during while he was like starting to be political at kmbz but a diet version of what

he would become was now acceptable and one man who recognized the potential of limbaugh stick

was norm woodruff a consultant to the station who became the acting program director at sacramento's K-F-B-K-F-B-K-F-B-K-F-B-K guy you mentioned at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Jr. Morton was extremely popular, and he was very extreme in his antics.
This had allowed his local station in Sacramento to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully controversial things. This did backfire on Morton eventually when he told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman named Tom Chin.
Downey jr. was fired and went into the world of television where he would somehow simultaneously blaze a trail for both tucker carlson and jerry springer we will do an episode on him someday because he's a very influential guy yeah um but his for today he matters because his firing number one his success proved that being a purposefully controversial

right-wing bigot was really

profitable for a radio station,

and because when he got fired, Sacramento

had a hole in the station's roster

that they needed to fill with another

racist right-wing shithead, just one

who was not quite as racist as

Morton Downey Jr.

Rush Limbaugh stepped up and said,

not being quite as racist as that guy is my middle name for now for now eventually i will be much worse so rush limbaugh moved to sacramento when he started at the station his new boss woodruff told him we want, but don't make it up. If you actually think something,

if you actually believe it,

you can tell people why.

We'll back you up.

But if you're going to say stuff

just to make people mad,

if all you want to do is rabble rouse,

if all you want to do is offend and get noticed,

that's not what we're interested in,

and we won't back you up.

He was clearly lying.

I think this was ass covering by the station, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. But they would never, would never ever push back on his bigotry but you know who does push back on bigotry paul ads yeah the products and services that support this podcast so we're back uh and at this point rush limbaugh has launched himself as a a right-wing shock jock and he is an instant hit zeev chaffetz writes quote the station let him go on the air solo unencumbered by sidekicks or guests and encouraged his highly personal right-wing monologues for the first time in his career he marketed heavily and aggressively.
There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button, captioned, How would you like to punch Rush Limbaugh? Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr.
had been a big star in Sacramento with a five share of the market, 5% of people listening to the radio in a given 15-minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that.

He was sharp-edged, but good-humored. The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs

of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr., reported the Sacramento Bee, but he skates a little further

from the edge of the hole in the ice. Rush was rewarded for his success with a six-figure salary,

an estimable income in the mid-1980s, even by his father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life, he really mattered.
He was invited to deliver speeches, just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns.
Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle, his wife at the time, bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on air.
So, he's a hit! You know, know this is the start of and it's really just

almost straight up from there for his the rest of his career right he finds his niche and he runs with it um again he's he's a very intelligent talented man yeah anybody else will find the big rush part really funny it is very funny it's it's very funny an hour in it's still funny now, I have long argued that Sacramento is the very mouth of hell itself. And the fact that Rush Limbaugh first saw success as a right-wing firebrand there serves to support my hypothesis.
Again, his conscious decision as an entertainer was to be a satirical version of a right-wing polemicist, deliberately exaggerating the things he did believe for comedic effect. The audience thought he was funny, but I don't think they got the joke.
And there is some evidence for this. When an Ohio evangelist...
I would say there's a ton of evidence. A lot of evidence.
Yeah. So I think the earliest evidence for this, I should say, is when an Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the theme song from Mr.
Ed held a satanic message when played backwards. You know, we're kind of talking about the satanic panic period during this.
Rush found this ridiculous. And again, he had a long history of mocking the evangelical religious right.
So when he heard this, he told his listeners that a Slim Whitman recording also contained a backwards message from Satan. Zev Chaffetz writes that, To his delight, many Limbaugh listeners took Limbaugh at his word and flooded the station with phone calls promising to destroy their Slim Whitman albums to keep the devil out of the house.
Rush considered this a hilarious prank. He did not apologize or, as far as I know, correct the record.
So we see in this, he's joking, right? right he is not he again his whole history is mocking these people yeah he does not believe this but he doesn't correct people because it gets he realizes oh they're engaged they're destroying stuff that means i have power right i think he even found it kind of it might have been something that kind of addicted him to this this idea that like i can make even if i'm deliberately being absurd and

lying i can make people take action based on those absurdities that's got to be addictive and i think it is for him it is absolutely undeniable and and especially like if you've spent time on twitter and if you've ever been like i have on occasion deliberately stupid on twitter and gotten sincere replies to something that is so

obviously a joke

so obviously a joke

it absolutely is fun there's no way around that there's no way around that seeing people take you at your word when you say something that's so patently absurd is it's joyful it does give you like a real jolt and there's a this is a bit of a different case but i think there's some similarities so last summer you know i was covering a lot of the protests in portland oregon including doing a lot of live streaming and very early on they the police put a fence up around the police station and there would be marches where like a couple of thousand people would march to the fence and somebody would like touch the fence and the police would tear gas like six square blocks of traffic and i started calling it the sacred fence and the joke like the comment that i was making is that the police are endangering the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a fence because it's sacred to them right that went viral within the city and there were dozens of protests at the sacred fence, as everyone called it, including numerous attempts to tear it down. And I know that the way that I framed it had a significant impact on a lot of people getting hurt, damaging a fence, getting arrested.
And it was both kind of intoxicating, and it also scared the hell out of me. It was one of the reasons why I pulled back to some extent on some aspects of

my coverage.

Cause I got really worried about the kind of impact that you can have on

people by doing that sort of thing.

I didn't want to be,

it was very concerning to me,

but it was also,

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of it that I wanted to do

more stuff like that.

And I didn't,

but I wanted to,

you know?

And that's, that is the key, the key difference of,

uh,

uh,

you know,

you seeing some,

you know,

you,

you,

you,

you,

you,

you,

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you,

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you,

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you,

you,

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you,

you,

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you,

you,

you,

you,

you,

you,

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you,

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you, you, you, you, you key difference of uh uh you know you seeing something that um catches catches fire in a forgive the the phrasing but catch fire in a in a charged situation um and how easily people can glom onto something when uh everything's so churned up um and then realizing like oh words have power i have to be careful rather than words have power here we go here we go let's use it to sell gold yeah yeah yeah uh so rush's domestic life while he's enduring all this professional success his domestic life life, life with his, I think she was his second. I think she was his third wife, actually.
Um, I don't know. He had a couple, he had a lot of wives.
I think actually, no, this was his second wife. His domestic wife life with his second life at this period was less than joyful.
He was famous and popular, constantly feted for dinners and invited to big events. And his wife, Michelle, was much less successful.
She quit her job to be his assistant, but she hated the work. Oh, God, that sounds horrible.
It's a nightmare. That's grim.
That gives me the heebie-jeebies. They were not a good fit.
Michelle loved the outdoors. Rush Limbaugh despised them.
Two of his colleagues tell a story from around this time of how they convinced him to go

rafting once that i think is telling about rush limbaugh's personality so this is one of rush's friends talking about at the time they took rush limbaugh on a on a rafting trip in whatever river it is that goes through sacramento quote it's a very very mild ride bob gave russian oar and told him to observe oh you're you're going to really love this. I love the opening thing.
Look, you have to know. Before I start the story, you have to know.
We're at a baby river. Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current.
Rush panicked, stuck the oar out, his a board and upon impact he fell overboard we got rushed back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the grim reaper what a fucking baby i've had people fucking shoot at me and i've had people show me with artillery and i've never spent three hours talking about it leave fucking baby so sacramento is where limbaugh started picking up what would become a voluminous list of mostly self-inflicted nicknames he was el rush bow the all-knowing all-caring all-sensitive sensing maha rushy he was also a harmless little fuzzball and the epitome of morality and virtue he started claiming that his show was hosted by the eib or excellence in broadcasting network which did not exist this joke mainly served as a vehicle for rush to express his grandiosity he declared himself on the cutting edge of societal evolution, swore that he was serving humanity, and had himself introduced as having talent on loan from God. His opinions were, quote, documented to be almost always right, 97.9% of the time, by the Sullivan Group, which also did not exist.
And again, joking and also at a certain point he starts meaning all of this very literally yes right like that's kind of how narcissists work so it may surprise people to know that rush to hear that rush limbaugh's career was launched into the stratosphere in sacramento because california is to most people outside of California California at least, a bastion of liberal politics. Now, if you actually live and spend time in the state, you know, like, for example, if you've ever been to fucking, I don't know, what is that, Orange County, right? Or if you've been up near Redding, there's a shitload, like, there are more right-wing Californians than there are right-wingers than there are in, like, a number of U.
right like california has a ton of right-wingers and it has a long powerful conservative political tradition california gave us ronald reagan it gave us governor arnold schwarzenegger who in one of the most surreal turns in political history is now among the only rational voices on the right in the united states yeah um, yeah, California has a powerful right wing. And yes, they are, especially in the last 20 something years, overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists.
But in this fact is one of the hints to Rush Limbaugh's rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north of the center of California, not far from some of the most productive farmland in the country.
It is also not far from North Central California, places like Redding, which are right-wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs, and that's partly a response to the liberal and left-wing government that they live under.
They see, and this is not, they are not entirely or even largely wrong in seeing this. They see themselves oppressed by many of the rules liberals in the cities put in terms of things like gas taxes, right? If you're living in, if you're a farmer, you know, in central or Northern California, a gas tax that is reasonable for people in LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento is a hardship on you and you're not contributing to the kind of pollution in the cities that the gas taxes are meant to fight.
You know, the strict gun laws and stuff. There's a lot of things, reasons these people have to be angry.
And Rush Limbaugh became their voice. So this kind of infuriated, very radical right wing who hates the liberals and left that govern California have a voice in Rush Limbaugh.

He obliges their sensibilities with a ceaseless stream of attacks on liberal California.

And that's what makes him huge is because there's millions of right wingers in California and Rush Limbaugh becomes like, yeah, he's their voice.

You know, you could you might even be able to argue that nowhere but California could have produced Rush Limbaugh as he became. Yeah.
So I'm going to quote from the book Rush Limbaugh, An Army of One here. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep Ugglo-Americans off the streets.
Militant feminists became feminazis. The Green Movement was full of environmental wackos.
The American left became commie pinko liberals, and the residents of Rio Linda, California were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing deadlet, deadlet, deadlet introduced news updates on what he regarded as the absurdities of liberal activism.
Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him as a dimwit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Before long, Rush was too big to stay in Sacramento, which is again the very mouth of hell itself. He was introduced to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio, who had started his own big radio company based out of New York City.
McLaughlin had listened to Rush's show and decided it had the potential to go national. He offered Rush a partnership, and after some haggling, Rush agreed.
He moved to New York and made the EIB network a reality. Rush was 37 years old at this point, and 21 years into a career of doing almost nothing but broadcasting on the radio.

Again, the voice of the so-called populist American, right?

Never did anything but radio, really.

In 1988, he launched a new version of the Rush Limbaugh show, this time for an audience across the nation.

It's sort of hard to find his stuff from the late 1980s, but I found this guest appearance he did not long after, in 1991, on another colleague's show for the same network.

It gives you a sense of where his radio personality was by this point and of how he presented himself, right? Of how he kind of introduced himself anytime he was coming on the air. So that's that's we're going to play this now.
This is kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh. We all know.
We all know now. One of of radio's great broadcasters and he's with us today in the studio we invited him rush limbaugh this morning it's about time you know i smoked a little dope to get ready for this in here and i'm ready to go man to time one go to time one brain behind your back no half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Well, I'll tell you one thing. As I use my talent on loan from God.
Oh, man. I heard you got a little loan from ABC Capses when you renegotiated your new contract.
No, I loaned them some money. And I brought you a gift.
Los Angeles Times. Oh, great.
Have a good time. It's very.
Favorite thing. Well, I wowed him there, didn't I? It's nice to have a big article on how you flopped in the New York Times six minutes before 9 o'clock.
You started out with just like a small group of stations on your show. Started out with 56, an hour of 337, with a weekly audience of about 6.5 million, an average quarter hour cum of a million seven.
Most listened to radio talk show in America. And that means the that's that's rush limbaugh at kind of

when he he goes viral for the first time what do you think about that about that how he presents

himself on here what does that say to you it's so um it's so the the fully formed version of him

that that i first experienced and like he's really going for it like he's really he's really uh like

Thank you. formed version of him that that i first experienced and like he's really going for it like he's really he's really uh like he's so aggressive in it and and like saying i'm gonna come like clearly the the intention is i'm gonna come on your show and i'm gonna take it over and i'm gonna i'm gonna be the the the the i'm gonna be the alpha here i'm gonna dominate you um with this the the la the present presentation of the la times is because why that guy got fired from the la times yeah i mean like no i think he'd been in los angeles and they savaged him in a review right right right okay yeah so it's it's um you know it's that frankly it's like it's all the shit that i hate yeah yeah it is it is it's it's so it's it's aggressive it's mean it's um you know it's he's also correcting him on one of his you know uh eight catchphrases you know you have to get it right i say it like this every time this is the way it goes um you know it's just uh it's a drag it's a drag it's it's a drag it's also i think there's a thing that he's doing here when we talk about all these phrases half my brain tied behind my back uh you know the uh talent on love from god all these different phrases that were that he he continuously used for decades i i don't want to i don't know i hope this doesn't seem a little pompous, but I kind of make a comparison between that and like the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? This like the way that anytime you've got Homer introducing, it's always like, you know, the, there, there's certain phrases.
Anytime Achilles comes up, he uses the same kind of phrases, same couple of phrases to introduce him, these descriptive phrases to introduce a character that are repeated constantly throughout the, because it's a, because it was a spoken story, right? Like that's where you're supposed to deliver it. That works.
It gets in people's heads. They associate those phrases with those characters.
Rush is kind of doing, this is an old tactic, but it works. It's the same thing Trump does with his insults, crooked Hillary, right? Sleepy Joe.
These are effective tactics. And that's what Rush is doing to inculcate his followers, primarily with this idea that he is a genius, right? And again, he's joking, but he's also not, because this shit buries itself in your brain.
He knows what he's doing. He's a very savvy person.
Yeah, it's like when you, people like that, that understand the importance of branding over having an actual thing to say. Like, honestly, the content is secondary to the presentation of, here's who I am.

I'm going to tell you through repetition.

This is my whole thing.

It's like comics that, to me, it always makes me think of comedians that majored in marketing in college. Yeah.
And then it's like, OK, but are they actually that funny or did they just are they able to really sell themselves so well that the content is secondary to the image? You have two kinds of people who really are able to build a following you have people who are able to build a following because folks genuinely just enjoy that the work that they're bringing into the world they like their personality they like what they're doing and then you have folks who are able to build a following primarily because they do cult leader shit right yeah that's the that's what the marketing comedians right that's what this is cult leader shit this is how you do it yeah um we do a little bit of that here um but look look, we're all guilty a little bit. We're all guilty a little bit.
And I'll be guiltier when I get, I don't know, a couple of hundred people killed by the FDA in my mountaintop compound, which is always the goal, Paul. You're very welcome if you would like to have an armed standoff with the Food and Drug Administration.
That's how you know you're successful. That's how you know you're successful.
When a three-letter agency burns you down by...

Anyway, I don't need to Waco this time.

I do love Waco.

I'm going for the EPA.

I want the EPA to get this standoff with me.

Ooh, ooh, that's a good one.

Yeah.

Wow, I'm so impressed.

It took almost an hour 20 for Robert to mention Waco.

Good job.

Yeah.

I'm getting...

You know, I realized I was Waco-ing a lot.

Yeah.

Trying to cut back, you know. A a little less Waco in the diet.
A whole hour and 20, and then here he is. First Waco.
But we'll talk off air, Paul, about synergizing our cults in the near future. Anyway, so Rush did not tone himself down at all after he went mainstream.
In fact, he grew more extreme, and he seems to have quickly forgotten that he was ever practicing satire. In 1990, at the very height of the AIDS crisis, Rush launched a new segment on his show, the AIDS update.
And I find it interesting how different sources report on this. When Limbaugh died, it was obviously a big story, the fact that he'd done this AIDS update.
And it was, in fact, Limbaugh AIDS update was like the second or third most Googled term alongside his name the day he died. Snopes and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story.
But Zeev Chaffetz's biography of Limbaugh came out well before Rush's death and before the AIDS updates were really talked about all that much outside of the community they most impacted. And I think it's interesting how Zeev wrote about it, not knowing was one going one day going to become a significant story.
So this is how Zeev wrote about the AIDS update. After an act up demonstration at St.
Patrick's Cathedral in New York city that disrupted a mass Limbaugh chastised militant homosexuals for their disrespectful behavior. And shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless AIDS update segments produced, introduced by Dionne Warwick's I'll Never Love This Way Again.
In his traveling stage show, The Excellence in Broadcasting Tour, he did a bit when he put a condom over the microphone to illustrate safe speech. So that's how the AIDS update was kind of framed by Zeeve before it was a big story.
Now, here's how Snopes characterized it in their fact check after Limbaugh died and i think before that but like already that doesn't sound good that no i don't think zeev is trying to whitewash him i think that he just doesn't see it as a big story yeah even just plainly stated that is it's terrible yeah it's terrible yeah and it sounds worse when snopes goes into more detail on this yeah Quote, At the height of the HIV AIDS crisis,

the Rush Limbaugh show featured an AIDS update

in which Limbaugh joked about an epidemic

that had claimed more than 100,000 lives

between 1981 and 1990.

Specifically, Limbaugh targeted gay men who had died.

In addition to joking about their deaths,

Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment,

including Kiss Him Goodbye,

I'll Never Love This Way Again,

and Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Snopes.com uncovered an interview in the Cedar Gazette from 1990, in which Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon my reaction to what I consider to be extremism in the political mainstream by a group of people.
Per the Cedar Gazette, Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims, but militant homosexuals who blame church and government officials for the epidemic. The AIDS update is meant to offend them, Limbaugh said.
Damn right. According to a 1998 Los Angeles Times article, it was a popular segment, but it also created outrage among AIDS activists, something not helped by Limbaugh reportedly saying, gays deserved their fate.
Mocking the horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get a conservative radio host fired today, so obviously this was never more than a mile bump in Limbaugh's career back in 1990, and it says a lot about where the right would go that a segment dedicated to mocking joyfully the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular, right? That would become the mainstream for Republicans. Now, in 1990, it was still a

thing he had to apologize for. And that year is the year he became officially famous, 1990.
He had his first live TV appearance on June 2nd when C-SPAN did a special on talk radio. And yeah, so this is like, he does kind of have to sort of say that he regretted doing this, that he felt like he was kind of attacking people who um um like he was like i didn't mean to be mocking people who had died i was trying to attack these militant activists and so i stopped who are so far still alive yeah yeah who are so far still alive for the moment yeah um anyway that so he does a tv appearance on c-span in 1990 on june 2nd which is kind of his first big TV appearance.
And then the New York Times does a big profile on him. From that, quote, With its characteristic attention to production values, the network simply set up a camera inside a spare WABC 77 studio in New York and let the self-proclaimed most dangerous man in America roll.
Cut to a schlub in a cheap white dress shirt, black tie, and hastily barbershopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat and grumbling about the TV lights, planted behind his desk and mic, interrupting the station's young newscaster, Kathleen Mahoney. She's trying to do her five-minute top-of-the-hour update, oddly for 1990, while wearing a mask, because, as she explains, the host had warned her it could be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on TV as a liberal feminist he was only joking limbaugh insists you said wear a bag over my head maloney says limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off complimenting her beauty and interjecting impatiently the news just holds up everything here i'm trying to make the news worthwhile there's a lot in there jesus christ that's his that's a new york times report on aspan appearance.
Yeah. He's like both saying you should cover your face because my listeners will harass you for being a liberal feminist and also take off that mask.
Let everyone see your pretty face. Yeah.
He's simultaneously both threatening her and sexually harassing her. It's wild.
It's good. It seems there's something about that that seems so modern do you know what i mean yes yes yeah that could uh he's because he he he brought he created the modern right you know yeah so you can see it you know in 1990 that's what he's doing yeah now 1990 is as i said also when the gray lady published their first full feature dedicated to El Rushbo.
The article is fascinating and valuable since it seems like few copies of his early 1988 to 91-92 episodes exist. So this New York Times write-up provides us with several fascinating insights into how Rush's show evolved during this period, and more to the point, into where American conservatism was about to

follow in his wake. At one point, a critic calls in.
This is, again, the New York Times writing about his show from an episode we don't have anymore. So at one point in the show, a critic calls in and tells Rush, quote, I believe you are doing a great disservice by using the program to convince people that if poor people are not successful, it is their fault.
You were just a paid advocate of the rich and you despise

the poor. Now, that's

very accurate. The author of the New York Times article notes that perhaps due to his guilt over his crueler shock jock days, Rush is very polite to his liberal callers.
And this is what the New York Times writes as Rush's answer. You misunderstand my point.
There is nothing wrong with being rich it's not evil

most rich people earned it by virtue of hard work this has always been the country that people come to because there has always been a chance for opportunity and if you start punishing the people who bust their tail to be prosperous then you're going to unmotivate people to try that i am not a paid defender of the rich i am a proud promoter of the american way of life yeah what are the I guess that's a thing you can just say

that most rich people earned their money like yeah it's it's a it's objectively untrue but yes you can say that objectively untrue but i guess if you if you are born to wealth but then you also get a job that makes you even wealthier it's like that's hard work i mean look at uh elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, all guys who were born to wealth. They weren't born crazy rich.
They weren't born with fuck you money, but they were born into wealth and then they were able to get fuck you money because of the, and there's a lot written about that. You know, Bill Gates having access to a computer in an era when basically no one did.
Bezos being able to secure a huge loan from his parents in order to help start his first business uh elon musk also getting a loan from his dad to start a business you know it's the way it always works for these people and they they spin that as self made you know um yeah because in their mind it's true because in their mind it's true and they do work hard and if you work hard you can convince yourself that you've it as opposed to like, I worked hard, but it only – like, I can say I worked hard. I can also say I am only financially successful because I got lucky.
And I know other people who worked as hard as I did who have not been nearly as financially successful. And it's not because of a lack of talent.
It's because I got a break that they didn't leaving that leaving that part out is how you're able to convince other people that uh that the majority of people who are the majority of people are wealthy did through hard work yeah it's nonsense so that new york times piece reveals that by 1990 rush was already popular enough to draw massive in-person crowds and this was unheard of for a talk radio personality. Today, we're well acquainted with right-wing thought leaders who can draw thousands upon thousands of fanatically loyal followers to in-person gatherings, but Rush was really the first.
From the Times, quote, there are towns where he is unheard and unheard of, and then there are places like Tampa, where the announcement of a Rush Limbaugh stage show sold out the 2,200-seat Ruth Eckerd Hall in four days. The occupants of those seats are out of them and cheering when Limbaugh appears in a three-piece tuxedo.
They're like the crowd for a country western concert, says Dan Woolley, the hall's director of operations, after sizing up the crowd in the lobby. Surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers.
You're going to have fun tonight, Limbaugh tells them. And at the same time, you're going to learn some things.
Pacing constantly, he does some jokes that poke fun at the Japanese and the liberal media. One of his jokes is that Judgment Day comes and the Washington Post article banner reads, World ends tomorrow.
Women, minorities, hardest hit. It's like that's the, you know, you see what he's going that's the you know you see what he's going for there yeah i see what he's going for sure yeah later in his live show rush engaged in a popular bit wherein he brings a piece of shit to a modern art gallery uh and the joke is that like modern art is so dumb that if you like poop and take like right it's very obvious this is it you can find ben shapiro making the same basic joke decades later.
And the gist of it is that liberals are so dumb, they'll stare at shit if you tell them it's art. The Times introduces this bit and then moves on to something that I found chillingly relevant.
Quote, Art criticism is a Limbaugh staple. He believes there is a culture war going on between those upholding decent values, conservatives, and the commie-lib hordes trying to devalue human life, and worse, undermine private enterprise.

Limbaugh's sermon on art brings out the evening's only heckling, a female cry of censorship.

Oh no, Limbaugh protests. He never spoke that word.

But seconds later, he allows that censorship isn't really so bad.

It has been used throughout this nation's history as a means of maintaining standards. As a means of maintaining standards.
Yeah. What the fuck is he talking about? What he's talking about is threading the needle that the right is now the sit, like right.
The mate I went to, I was in fucking, I took a concealed handgun course in Texas. Cause I'm getting my out of state permit so I can be armed in more parts of the United States because of all that is like going to cooking school in Paris.
Yeah. Well, and the thing started with like a 30 minute lecture from the instructor on cancel culture.
Like this is the big thing within the right. I know.
I know. I know.
Wow. This is the big thing within the right now.
And it Limbaugh is starting both like saying like, well, the liberals want to like censor us when I want to cut out all ideas they disagree with. And then he he moves on to saying, but also it's OK to censor people sometimes, right? Because this is what the right believes.
It's cancel culture if people don't like it and if they suffer financial consequences for being racist. But it's not cancel culture if they go out of their way to censor left-wing and liberal voices, which they do through things like school books, right? Objectively true.
Well-documented. This is how the right works.

Absolutely.

I know no one listening is going to disagree,

but it's frustrating.

But it is,

it is absurd.

The idea of,

you know,

like it's,

it's cancel culture.

If you,

if you compare being conservative to being a Jew in 19,

late 1930s Berlin to like, it should be illegal to give the finger to the flag. Yeah.
It's amazing. And that, Paul, is the end of part one of what is going to be like three hours of talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Wow. Way more time than he deserves, but somebody had to do it.
I mean, he deserves he deserves this much time not in a good way but in a we need to understand what this man has done to us all absolutely and it's also if you're if you're willing to go to bat for rush limbaugh because you think it's mean that somebody is glad that he's dead um let's lay it all out and here's here's why some people might not be so sad that a human life has been lost. Here's three hours of evidence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Evidence both that he deserves to have his death cheered and also that he loved laughing at people's deaths.
Yeah, yeah. You're honoring him in a way, yeah.
You are, you are. It's what he would have wanted.
But you know what I want right now, Paul? I want you to plug your pluggables. Well, let's see.
You can find me on social media, at P.F. Tompkins, on Twitter and Instagram.
I have a bunch of podcasts going on at any given time. Freedom, which I co-host with Lauren Lapkus and Scott Ackerman, and Stay F Up Homkins, which I co-host with my wife.
We started a podcast during the pandemic, and unfortunately, we are still doing it. And I do shows, the first live streaming improv shows, the first Monday of every month with my friend Lauren Lapkus, and all those tickets can be found at paulftompkins.com slash live.
Well, speaking of cancel culture, this episode is now over and thus canceled. Because of the libs.
It's done. Bye! Bye.
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