Best of The Program | Guest: Christopher Rufo | 2/18/21

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

You're listening to The Best of the Blenbeck Program.

Rush Limbaugh and I have had one thing in common.

One thing in common.

And that is

every show,

Rush didn't know what his first words were going to be.

You could ask him right before he went on the air and he'd prepare for hours, five or six hours the night before, four hours before every program in the morning.

And by noon Eastern time, he had his, what he called, stacks of stuff arranged in front of him in columns.

He could see the subject matter on everything he had and

he could look at it.

He would grab it.

And early on, before Rush Limbaugh was Rush Limbaugh, people would come in and say, Okay, Rush, what are you going to talk about today?

What do you, you know, what's the most important thing you're going to talk about today?

What is it?

And he'd always respond, I don't know, I can't tell you.

Until the on-air light went on and he said those first words into his golden microphone.

It was a spontaneous coming together of his thoughts,

And no one,

no one except talk radio people can understand that.

The greatest actors, the greatest performers, they don't write their own script.

And if they do, they write it in advance.

Unlike us, unlike Rush,

we speak for three hours every day unscripted.

Unlike most, his desk was his broadcast studio.

He didn't move from an office into a studio just before the program.

When he arrived every morning, it was about a mile down from his house,

he worked in his studio.

It was built to be soundproof, but also have the very best creature comforts for a person to work from seven, eight, ten hours with minimal movement.

My studio was next to his in Radio City.

My studio didn't have all the bells and whistles that his studio had.

One of them

was a secret cigar smoke vent

because you couldn't smoke in Radio City.

It was illegal in New York.

And nobody nobody wanted to smell the recirculating cigar smoke.

So, God only knows how he got it done on a historic building, but

he had a cigar vent put into the window

and the window put back together so it didn't disturb the historic building, and no one even knew it was there.

The morning before the mornings before his show were quiet,

he really was a man of few words.

In his studio for many years,

there wasn't even a broadcast engineer, it was just him.

Later, when he lost his hearing, he needed a broadcast engineer to help hear the audio His cochlear implants wouldn't pick up or discern.

I was there when they found out that Rush Limbaugh had

lost his hearing.

I remember that night, I think Stu was with me.

We were in Gabe Hobbs' office.

And we had just heard that Rush, it was still quiet, no one was going to talk about it for at least another two weeks, that Rush had lost his hearing.

And I remember listening listening to him at that time, and he was he was talking like this an awful lot

from behind my golden microphone.

And he was forcing his voice down, and it sounded weird.

And I wondered what was going on with Rush.

That night I found out.

He thought he was losing his lower register.

He thought his voice was getting higher.

And so he was forcing his voice down just a bit.

He wasn't losing his lower register.

He was losing his hearing.

I remember

how the company

did everything they could

to help him through that.

I remember he came back on the air and he had two stenographers, an oscilloscope,

and they had wired his board right

where you would hear him do this.

That board was wired so it would send vibrations.

So when someone was speaking on the phone, he could feel their voice.

He could see the voice pattern through the oscilloscope.

He could feel it through his hands.

And two stenographers were writing down everything a caller was saying.

In case one of them didn't get it right, he could compare the two.

So he could watch in real time what they were saying,

watch the voice pattern of the caller, and feel the voice with his hands while still processing what he was going to say.

Tell me the person that can do that.

Tell me the person that can do that,

and you never knew.

He didn't know what his own voice sounded like anymore.

While he was talking on the air, he couldn't hear himself.

We hear ourselves on tape and we think, that doesn't sound like me.

But it actually does.

It sounds exactly like you.

You're just not used to not hearing it from the inside.

You hear your voice different because it's coming from the inside.

So you're not hearing it without all the resonance inside of you.

Rush couldn't hear that anymore.

From behind my golden microphone.

He had that inflection

because he had to remember what his muscles felt like

when he was using inflection.

I didn't know Rush Limbaugh.

I guess in some ways I'm a little like Rush.

He didn't like to take telephone calls, and after the cochlear implants, he couldn't.

But he didn't like off-air conversation.

He would email, later text message, instant message.

But when you did meet him, he listened.

For a guy who's on the air all the time, you'd think

that he'd have a lot to say, and people around him would want to hear him talk.

All right, Rush, what do you really think?

What do you think really is going on?

But 90% of the conversations with Rush Off Air

was your voice.

He was a profound listener.

I think that's one of the reasons why he knew the country so well.

Rush Limbaugh is responsible for saving the AM band.

All around the country,

I grew up on AM radio.

RCA

had invented FM radio back in the late 40s.

The guy who actually invented it, I think his name was Armstrong, he...

He killed himself because of RCA.

He realized he had been used by RCA.

and Sarnoff.

He had invented something much better than AM radio.

But RCA and Sarnoff said, There are too many AM radios to sell before we give up on this thing.

And they locked FM up into their vaults and they sold more and more AM radios until they couldn't sell anymore.

And that's when they introduced FM.

I grew up, I started on AM radio before FM was really anything.

It was still

and here's another rock and roll hit, Inegara De Vita, Mian.

By the time

the 1990s came, I was programming AM radios,

AM radio stations, and

they were dying.

There was nothing.

And a guy who used to be the head of ABC, ABC Radio, decided towards the end of his career that he would take

some of his salary

in something brand new.

Satellite time.

And ABC was like,

okay.

All right, dude, that's what you want.

You want X number of hours this year of satellite time.

Okay.

What are you going to use it for?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Just keep storing them up for me.

And by the time he left AM radio, or I'm sorry, ABC radio,

satellite was really starting to come into its own.

But it was still mainly television or radio news.

I remember when ABC News used to come in, not on satellite, it had come in on a telephone line.

Satellite was just beginning to start to be used by radio, but not for syndicated talk, it didn't exist.

There was the fairness doctrine, which made AM radio impossible, talk radio impossible, because everything I said had to be followed by a guy who was just as insane as Glenn Beck, except on the other side.

Nobody wanted to listen to a station like that.

The fairness doctrine was dropped.

Rush Limbaugh, who had been turned down by so many great people, Jack Swanson from KGO, right?

Wasn't that where Jack was?

KGO?

In San Francisco, Jack was a guy who was one of the first to reach out to me and say, you know, I think you have something, kid.

I think there's something to this talk radio thing.

Don't give up.

And I said, wow, that's great.

Would you hire me?

And he said, oh, no.

But remember, I'm the guy who didn't hire Rush Limbaugh.

Jackie got two now.

He went to work.

Rush went to work with this little radio station in Sacramento.

And nobody thought it would work.

Nobody thought it would work.

Rush did.

He knew from his childhood, he knew he was going to be successful.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

From behind my cardboard microphone,

this is the Glenn Beck program

with no hands tied behind my back and talent on loan from Milton Burrell, who's been dead for a long time.

Welcome to the program.

I will tell you, I got into this

business,

this talk radio business

in

the late 1990s, but I only did shows, fill-in shows.

I was doing comedy morning shows,

and

I was sick of it.

And I got into talk radio because I felt I had something to say, but I really got into it also because I wanted to make fun of it.

All these intellectuals that just, you know, were high and mighty, and most of them, and this time, all the local ones were like attorneys that were all trying to get on.

I'm an expert, I'm a local official on the school council, and they were boring as snot.

And I got into it because I wanted to make fun of all of it, and I saw things in a completely different way.

I think Rush Limbaugh did the same thing in a way, he was making fun of the media

and he mocked all of that.

Most people don't know that

the roots of this show

really kind of stem back to Florida and Rush Limbaugh.

I knew the first time we ever did a talk radio show, Stu will verify that this is true because it was just like, he was so sick of me.

And this is like 19, what, 98, 97?

We did our first talk radio show, and it was just, it was for like an an hour, two hours maybe.

And I took my headphones off after the first break, and I looked at him, and he was running the board and helping produce.

And I looked at him over the board, and I said, We're going to replace Dr.

Laura.

And he said,

What?

And I said, This show's going to replace Dr.

Laura.

And he said, How about we finish our first show?

And I told him, I said, Mark my words.

Well,

the first time

I was on kind of a job interview, I had done shows for WABC and I had filled in here and there,

but nobody would give me a job.

And

I changed my life.

I was really struggling in the 90s.

I changed my life.

I was an alcoholic.

I was going on five years sober.

I had found an amazing woman that loved me and

also was just really good for me.

And then I met my wife, too.

No, I'm kidding.

And I married her, Tanya.

And

my life changed, but I couldn't get a job.

I get baptized, and

the day after my baptism, I just remember this because of the, I tried for two years to try to get somebody to,

you know, represent me.

I talked to everybody.

I couldn't get anybody to represent me.

And it was a Monday afternoon, and my phone rings at my apartment, and

guy on the other side of the phone said, hey, I understand you're looking for an agent.

And I said,

yeah,

I have been for two years.

And he said,

My name's George Hiltsick.

He was the biggest agent of radio at the time by far, by far.

He had done everything in his career.

He was an NBC executive.

He was part of the original Saturday Night Live legal team.

A legend.

George is a legend.

He's a legend.

He's a legend.

But anyway, he calls me up and he said,

well, I heard from Jack Swanson, KGO, that maybe

I should pay attention to you.

And I said, okay, well, thanks.

And he said, well,

Jack's the guy who passed on Rush Limbaugh, so let's not get too excited, joking.

And I said,

well, that's great.

What do we do?

And he said, well, I want to check you out.

I want to check you out.

And he said, I've heard many things about you, good and bad.

He calls me back on Wednesday and he said, all right, I'll take you on.

Now, I'm thinking to myself over the last couple of days, I'm thinking to myself, there's a chance this guy won't take 10% of my money.

And

I said that to George.

He said, I'll take you on.

I said, really?

Honestly, I've been thinking about this for a while.

You mean to tell me that you would pass up 10% of what I'm already making

because you wanted to check me out and see?

And he said, you're entering a new territory.

He said, you want to go into talk radio.

He said, you can't be a fraud in talk radio.

And I've heard stories about you in the past, but I understand that you're trying to change your life.

You've sovered up.

You're stable.

And you're a good man.

And I said, wow.

Well, thank you.

Yes, I am.

And he said, well, that's why I'm taking you on because no one can fake who they are for three hours without a script every day.

The audience is too smart.

They will figure you out and you're done.

He said, and I've wasted my time.

So I take that job.

I take him as a a client.

I get a job at WFLA in Florida.

And

I had to do

kind of a job tryout before.

And what they decided to do was to let me do my first network show.

I had never, I mean, I like, what did we have?

20 shows in our back pocket that we had done?

And

they said, we want you to do this

network show.

And Rush Limbaugh

has allowed us to put you into his studio in New York City.

And I'm like, wait, wait, what?

So I go into the Rush Limbaugh studios.

And Stu and I, I'll never forget this giant oil painting.

There's a picture I think I tweeted today, a giant oil painting of Rush behind the microphone.

And there's the golden microphone.

And Stu and I look at each other like, I can't believe this.

And I did my first show because of his kindness of letting us use that studio.

Two years go by.

I'm working in Florida and we went from worst to first.

Actually, we went from worst to

worse

to first in a two-year period.

And

There was this one week, and I don't even know.

I don't even know if I've asked you this.

Did you know who was on that phone line that week?

You don't even remember this.

So

one week just before

Premiere offers me a position,

the phone line at WFLA

is tied up all week during my show.

Started at 3 o'clock, was over at 7.

One phone line was tied up.

And I didn't know why.

And nobody would tell me.

Well, I find out later that Rush Limbaugh was listening to my show every day that week.

Good thing they didn't tell me.

That would have freaked me out.

But he had been asked to listen to my show by Premiere.

Now I find this out later.

The head of Premiere, Craig Kitchen, goes down to Florida to meet with Rush.

And

Rush knows that the meeting is about me.

And Craig said to me

later, after we started to really know each other, we were talking about this bogus, with talent alone from God.

And how much of an act that was, how humble he really was in person, how quiet he was in person.

He wasn't that beat his chess guy.

That part was an act, but his listeners knew that.

They're in on the

joke.

In on the joke.

And he said, in fact,

you know we had to ask Rush for permission out of courtesy

to hire you.

And I said, what?

They said, yeah, he listened a few weeks ago you know when you were

when you were you know on the air before we before we offered you this gig he listened we asked him to listen and I remember the phone line I'm like oh my gosh that's who it was

they had him listen for a week because they had so much deference for him

because I was going to be before him on the network They wanted to make sure that Rush was okay with the lead-in.

Apparently he said yes.

But the point of the story is: while he was sitting there at dinner, when Craig sat down, the first thing he said was, It's been a good run.

It's been a great run, Craig, hasn't it?

And Craig said,

Yeah, it has.

He's like, We've accomplished a lot,

and I'm

comfortable, so

don't worry about it.

You know, not everybody lasts,

you know, know, forever.

He actually thought that he was having dinner because they were going to say to him, it's over.

Are you kidding me?

Most people don't last 30 years in this business, but Rush Limbaugh didn't know he wasn't most people.

He still had the excitement and he still had the humility

to go, it could be over at any time.

That's hard for somebody who's worth $600 million.

That's hard for somebody who has 27 million listeners a week.

To put that into perspective, Colbert has about 3 million a night.

Rush had 27 million a week.

Do the math.

How humble he really was.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Many members of the media are taking sick, twisted glee in the death of Rush Limbaugh, and they're also trying to set the history against him, make sure that that's cemented in by playing all kinds kinds of bad things that

he has said, either in jest or in mistakes that he later apologized for.

You know, it doesn't matter to people anymore.

If it's even true, it doesn't matter anymore.

And he may be the last example of somebody who's just

really bulletproof, really bulletproof.

And even he had some scary times.

We were supposed to be with him the day he lost his Monday night football gig.

And that was a really weird day.

And

yet he had carved hisself

a place where he could

continue to do what he did because he listened to the listeners.

And that's what I did with the Blaze.

And we are grateful, truly grateful, that the only people we have to to answer to are you.

And we ask you to join us

at

blazetv.com slash Glenn.

Save 30% on your subscription now.

But talk radio is going to come under attack because everything is and they have to shut you up.

Last night I did a show, our Wednesday night special on national suicide and what's actually killing our kids.

And I started the show with Christopher Rufo because we started with the

non-literal suicide, the national suicide that really comes from critical race theory.

Christopher is the contributing editor for the City Journal and the director of Center on Wealth and Poverty.

He is the guy who is really responsible for rooting this out and letting people know what critical race theory is and how deeply embedded into the system.

If you missed last night's show, we talked about this curriculum that that is in public schools up in New York,

and they identify the eight white identities that you have.

And it starts at white supremacist, and then

I think one of them is a race trader.

And that's on the good side of the scale, by the way, if you're a race trader, if you're selling out the white race,

it's crazy.

I wanted to bring Christopher back.

This is the only thing that we have done today that is not related to Rush Limbaugh because I think this is so important.

Chris, welcome to the program.

It's great to be with you.

Thank you.

First of all, any thoughts on Rush Limbaugh?

Did you listen to it?

Yeah, you know,

I didn't.

I grew up actually,

I don't know if you know this, Glenn, as a kind of

liberal bohemian in California.

That was my upbringing and political orientation for most of my youth.

And then I started kind of questioning those assumptions.

It started to not match with reality.

I started veering more towards the center.

And I wrote one of my first pieces for City Journal where I was still kind of in the center, maybe center-right.

And Rush read it on air.

I got a flood of emails.

And it was very strange because I had been growing up hearing all of these bad things about Rush Limbaugh.

And then I started listening.

I said, oh, interesting.

Rush Limbaugh is reading my story.

I started listening.

I said, Man,

what people in California and the people that are spewing so much venom on Twitter hear is so different than what you actually hear from his words.

And I became a fan subsequently, and

it was very sad to hear the news.

Yeah, I wanted to get Tammy Bruce.

Maybe we get Tammy Bruce.

See if we can get Tammy Bruce on the show tomorrow.

She tweeted something.

She was very, very, you know, she was a head of the National Organization of Women for a while, and then she met Rush Limbaugh.

And it changed her life.

And she said the same thing.

Everything I believed and everything I had been told about him and his audience just wasn't true.

Let's talk about critical race theory because I am getting messages from people who want to know, I have to go into a critical race theory kind of thing in my office, and they'll fire me if I say anything.

I saw Accenture, I think, let a 30-year partner go because he spoke up against this and said, we shouldn't be doing any of this.

Tell me about how critical race theory is going to be affecting people if it hasn't already in their places of business and what they should do.

Yeah, I mean if it if it isn't already in your workplace and your workplace is like a large corporation, a publicly owned firm, it's coming and it's going to come under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which sound great, but sometimes are really aggressive

propaganda and indoctrination campaigns.

Can you say first what the difference between equality, which our Constitution talks about, and equity, which is critical race theory.

What is the difference?

Because they sound the same and people think, ah, equity, equality, it's the same.

It's not.

Yeah, equality is the idea that we're all created equal under God and that we, the government, should protect individual rights regardless of race, creed, color, religion, etc.

And essentially, it's the equal protection under the law.

Equity is the critical race theorists basically say, hey, equality hasn't worked.

We still have large racial disparities.

There's still kind of systemic racism in society.

So they've abandoned the idea of equality, treating people equally, and replaced it with equity, which is treating groups as units and then trying to equalize outcomes based on group identity.

So it's a very kind of quick way to think about it is: equality is something like the equality of opportunity, and equity is the equality of results, which we've seen over and over in the 20th century lead to human and social disaster.

Okay, so I'm in my office.

Thank God this isn't happening at my company, but I'm in my office and I get a note that says I have to attend this racial diversity and equity

class and I want nothing of it.

And maybe there are people in my office, but no one will say anything.

What do I do?

And

what happens if nobody does stand up against it?

Well,

there's a couple things you can do.

One is if you feel confident enough and you feel like you have the conviction to do so, you can stand up.

You can speak out.

You can send a letter to the HR department letting them know that these theories don't actually lead to better outcomes in the business literature.

They put the firm at legal risk for lawsuits and that they conflict with your own deeply held beliefs.

Wait, wait, wait.

How do they open up the firm for lawsuits?

Well, you know, I'm working on this, but I think there's a strong case to be made, and there's

some kind of analogies in case law that if critical race theory, for example, traffics in racial stereotypes, they say white people can be reduced to the essence of whiteness and it's analogous with oppression.

You know, that's a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

If they compel speech, especially in public institutions, institutions, that's also a violation of the law.

And then if it creates a toxic work environment, which in many cases it does, it's pitting people against each other.

It's creating a kind of race-based harassment, which is a protected category.

Again, these are all actual violations of the law.

And I think big companies are maybe the quickest to potentially

change tack because

their legal departments, if this starts becoming a cost center, if it starts becoming a legal risk, if they start fearing lawsuits, they're going to probably disband a lot of these programs pretty quickly.

So I think that's one excellent way forward that we could hopefully see unfold in the next few years.

You have giant companies.

You're read up on the great reset, Chris.

Yeah.

I mean, you see these what are called ESGs, these standards in these big companies, and that's the first red flag.

If your company has an ESG, environmental, social justice, and governmental standards, you're already in trouble.

Yeah, and I think people are going to have to make a big decision.

If your beliefs, your politics, your faith is important, and you work at a company that is actively kind of mobilizing against it, you have a tough ethical and moral choice to make.

Do you stay and fight?

Or do you find employment with a company that lets you express yourself more authentically?

And I've talked to a lot of people in the last six months where they say, you know, I have these obligations.

I have a family.

I have a career.

I have a reputation.

But this is just eating away at me, this political indoctrination, trying to shame people, trying to create collective guilt based on race or faith or identity.

And I tell them, you know, you really have two options.

You're going to have to sit and take it.

Or you're going to have to have some courage and stand up for those convictions.

And in some cases, people are actually starting to fight back.

And in, you know, some cases, even fewer, unfortunately, they're actually having success at shutting down these programs.

You did a great story in the City Journal on anti-racism comes to the heartland.

And you talk about Springfield, Missouri, how

the teachers are being forced to locate themselves on the oppression matrix, which is what?

The oppression matrix is a kind of graph graph or grid that was designed by some social justice academics that basically said, these are the checklists that makes you an oppressor.

These are the checklists that makes you an oppressed person.

So white, male, heterosexual, English-speaking Christians were the kind of dominant oppressors.

And then, you know,

the other side.

And it was a middle school in Springfield, Missouri, a place that is not a kind of progressive stronghold.

It's not LA or New York.

And they were forcing teachers to to essentially locate themselves on this oppression matrix and telling white male teachers, you are an oppressor, telling female or people of color that we're teaching in the system, you are an oppressed,

taking in none of the actual reality of the situation, no one's individual stories and categorizing them in this way.

And teachers were absolutely outraged.

You know, they leaked me the documents and

hopefully the school district will think twice before doing it again.

It also, they handed out flyers or some

training materials.

And the handout originally listed MAGA as, quote, a form of covert white supremacy.

Now, they took that off because people found out about it.

And so they went back into the hiding and they scampered under the refrigerator like cockroaches do.

MAGA,

this should show you where we're headed when they say, hey, we got to find find extremists.

The stuff that is being passed out to our teachers in schools is really revealing

on who they think those dangerous extremists are, and they're the people in the red states.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's right.

And I think we've seen an evolution of language.

For the last four years under...

the Trump administration, there was this drumbeat from the media constantly saying, making the association that white conservative Christians are, by definition, white supremacists.

And there was an attempt to tie those two phrases together.

And then on January 6th, and I know you condemned it, I condemned it, the violence at the Capitol,

they were gleeful.

You could, those 72 years after, they said, this is our big opportunity.

We can now move from white supremacists to white supremacist domestic terrorists.

And it's really a kind of maybe spontaneously coordinated, but clearly a coordinated language campaign to basically create the connotation between conservative and Republican voters and white supremacists and domestic terrorists.

And these phrases are dangerous.

I mean,

it's

truly the worst thing that can be.

And they're trying to basically annex all conservative voters into that kind of linguistic umbrella, which then they could use to silence, to deplatform, to outlaw, and to marginalize

what I I think is, you know, if not a majority, a strong plurality of the country.

Christopher Ruffo, thank you so much.

We'll talk again.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

You can follow him on Twitter at realchrisrufo, r-u-f-o, or his website is christopherrufo.com.

Thanks, Chris.

We'll talk again.

Bundle and safe with Expedia.

You were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row, we were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and subject to availability, flight inclusive packages are at all protected.