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

Robert is joined again by Paul F. Tompkins to continue to discuss Rush Limbaugh. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and you know, we're still coming down from our end of the year celebration. I'm headed off to CES where we'll be doing reporting before it could happen here and better offline. We're going to be coming back for the new year soon. The Oprah episodes will be in the can. Very excited to introduce you all to that. But for this week, we're going to be going back to a rerun. So please enjoy the story of Rush Limbaugh.

• 0:34Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

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• 1:45Robert Evans?

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• 2:20Robert Evans?

  Broadcasting from his studio in, I don't know, some fucking place with one liver tied behind his back to make it fair for all of the narcotics in his system, Robert Evans

• 2:32Speaker 03

  I hated it, I hated it.

• 2:33Robert Evans?

  You don't like me, you don't like my pseudo rush intro Sophie?

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Not, not a fan of that introduction. This is behind the bastards.

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  This is behind the bastards. A podcast that will never be as big as the Rush Limbaugh show because Sophie won't let me use cultic mind control techniques on our audience.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  That is inaccurate, feel free.

• 2:58Robert Evans?

  Okay, well, we're back. The man you just heard is Paul F. Tompkins, our guest for this exploration of the life and times of Rush Limbaugh.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  Hi, everyone.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  Hey, Paul, how are you feeling? How are you, how are you doing an hour and a half into talking about El Rushbo?

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Feeling great, feeling great, feeling, I feel energized that he is dead.

• 3:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I too feel happy that he's dead.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's fun. It hasn't worn off yet.

• 3:29Robert Evans?

  It has, it never will. It'll always be good that he's dead. There's a few people who are like that, where it's like every now and then I just am like, think back to the fact that Reinhard Heidrich is dead. It's like, good, good for him, you know? Good for him. So, once upon a time, Paul, the United States used to have a thing called the fairness doctrine. Now, in short, the fairness doctrine required anyone with a broadcast license to present controversial issues in a balanced way, providing roughly equivalent time to present both sides of an issue. Now, this was obviously a flawed rule. Some issues, for example, like climate change, don't have two sides, right? There may be different sides about like what the right response is, but there's not two sides to the reality of climate change.

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  And while the, but while the, you know, the fairness doctrine, so the fairness doctrine, not a, not a perfect, not a silver bullet, uh, sort of, of, of thingamajig, but while it was in place, right wing media in the form that we have today, did not and could not exist. Now, since the dawn of the fake news era, which we're in now, a lot of folks have talked about the time of guys like Walter Cronkite, right? When you had newsmen who basically every American trusted, who could shift massive national issues just based on their considered opinion, right? Cronkite calls Vietnam a quagmire, suddenly national opinion on it switches. And a big part of why these guys were trusted is they were required to lend equal weight to both sides. They couldn't just be partisan shills.

• 4:59Robert Evans?

  Now, this generally meant that they would give kind of the conservative opinion and the liberal opinion as opposed to the far left or the far right, but it did mean that you didn't have something as unbalanced as Fox News, right?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Right. It's like the voter guide you get.

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  It gives you the measure and says, "Some people say this, some people say this."

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And as flawed as the fairness doctrine was, it was part of why most Americans lived in a semi-unified media ecosystem back in, up prior to 1987. Now, obviously, this did not last. In 1987, the FCC, as the result of a court case, the FCC rejected the fairness doctrine. Conservatives cheered this on because fair media was seen by arch-conservatives, guys like Roger Stone, as a big reason why Americans had broadly supported the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the end of the Watergate investigation. Watergate is one of these situations where, when the investigation starts, the vast majority of conservatives are against it, right? Don't think Nixon did anything wrong.

• 5:58Robert Evans?

  The evidence comes out, an opinion shifts, and it becomes very popular to get Nixon out of office. This is the last time that happens, right? This is the last time that, like, people's minds get changed by the facts on a political issue in America. And it's the last time this happens because the right goes after the fairness doctrine. After about a decade or so of fighting, they're able to get it killed. And the end of the fairness doctrine was the necessary precursor to the creation of a wholly separate walled garden of right-wing content, which was seen by dudes like Roger Ailes as a necessary step to protecting right-wing voters from ever learning about other opinions, which would, they believed, protect the next Criminal white right wing president for impeachment.

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  Now, after Limbaugh's death, the New York Times let Ben Shapiro, noted novelist, write a column about his professional idol. Benny Shapps called the Fairness Doctrine, quote, "A standard that, in practice, allowed for the domination of broadcast media by liberals with sporadic commentary by conservatives." Uh, that's my Benny Shapps voice.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  I'm concerned at how good that was of an imitation.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  It's really quite good. It's really quite good.

• 7:08Robert Evans?

  So Rush Limbaugh was aware from the beginning that his whole career hinged on the Fairness Doctrine's death with his, and like, he starts being a national voice in 1989, two years after the end of the Fairness Doctrine. That's not a coincidence. Now, with his unparalleled national platform and his status as a chief thought leader of the American right, Limbaugh went about turning the Fairness Doctrine into his main boogeyman. I found a Vanity Fair article from 2009 that lays this out quite well. Quote, "The single most important issue in Rush's radio career is now among the hot-button issues in conservative politics: the Fairness Doctrine, a formalized, fair and balanced rule for covering the controversial issues on the nation's airwaves, which the Reagan

• 7:49Robert Evans?

  FCC killed in 1987. The most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which puts substantial blame on talk radio for a generation of conservative dominance in Washington, wants to revive the Doctrine, which would pretty handily destroy conservative talk. According to the official CPAC polling of its members, restoring the Fairness Doctrine is the third most significant Democratic Congress policy initiative opposed by the right wing, ranking only behind expanding government and public health care." So, yeah, there is, with Rush's orchestration, a rabidness to the cause. Opposing the Fairness Doctrine is up there with opposing abortion. And he's, you know, he's a, it's really him that's responsible for making this such

• 8:30Robert Evans?

  a popular issue. It starts off as a thing that kind of high-up, extreme right-wingers, guys who had been Nixon's right-hand men, push because they want to protect the next guy like Nixon. And it gets popular, though, because of Rush Limbaugh, because he sells it to the American conservative mainstream.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  It's funny, like, sorry, but the idea that, like, with the Nixon era...

• 8:56Speaker 04

  After Watergate, Nixon, when Nixon resigns, that is maybe the last time that there were real consequences.

• 9:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  For any, for the, for the highest office.

• 9:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Where after that, you know, Clinton's impeachment, Trump's impeachment, whatever, it doesn't mean anything.

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  It really is just like an asterisk in, in history, you know, essentially of saying like, but just so you know, people, some people thought this was bad and they, and they said so officially, but there's no real consequence for any of this. So really what they're doing is saying, we cannot, Nixon should not have had a consequence. We got to make sure that there's never a consequence ever again. And unfortunately that meant for everybody, for like, for, I don't know what, if, if, because if it didn't happen, if it didn't happen after Bush, which there was not even an impeachment for Bush, like for the Iraq war, where that, that we all know now was bogus.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  If there was never going to be a consequence for that, then it worked.

• 10:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  And there, there, and, and from now on, like, when is it ever going to happen again? When, if it didn't happen, then when is it ever going to happen again?

• 10:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think it can because this propaganda ecosystem churns out people who would fight to the death rather than have somebody who on paper is supposed to agree with them, face consequences for blatantly criminal activity.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then, and then it also, it conditions whether, whether you believe, whether you believe in, whether you're, you're on Russia's side or not, whether you're on that side of things or not. It conditions everybody to feel like it's okay that there's no consequences because what are you going to do?

• 10:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  It's just the way things are.

• 10:47Robert Evans?

  You can draw a fucking line between kind of the things that Rush starts because it has an impact on, on liberals in the left too.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:54Robert Evans?

  You've got this, it's, it's, and it, it's because obviously with the fairness doctrine, nobody ever heard anything from the far left, right? The far left, in fact, was criminally prosecuted a lot of times for their opinions in this period.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:07Robert Evans?

  Um, but the positive thing about the fairness doctrine is that it was a large part of why there was a broadly agreed upon understanding of the basic. A basic reality in the United States, right? Yeah. That we don't have anymore. And when you lose that, I kind of think when you lose that, the only like things inevitably escalate to deadly violence. Yeah. Yeah.

• 11:31Robert Evans?

  And that's bad, right? Not that, again, under the fairness doctrine, Americans were led into Vietnam, were led into Grenada, were led into Panama, were led into all these horrible, horrible things. Obviously, we like, it did not, it did not mean that Americans had an accurate understanding of the world. But when they had an inaccurate understanding of the world, it was still broadly similar, right? And that is better than where we are now, I guess. I think it is at least less toxic. Oh, I guess you could argue the United States had more power, the government had more power to pursue violent activity overseas and stuff. I don't know. I don't know. It's a complicated issue, but whatever. Whatever you can say about Rush Limbaugh, he was not a dumb man. He was a huge bigot, though.

• 12:16Robert Evans?

  And that 90 New York Times write-up makes it clear that, among other things, he was quick to realize that rampant misogyny was an incredible marketing tactic. This was, as we discussed in our last episode, always cloaked in a thick haze of irony. Quote, this is Rush. "We know that women in groups, same office, same dormitory, same barracks, eventually have synchronized menstrual cycles. We also know that there's this thing called PMS, and we know it turns a woman into a hellion. We know that PMS has been used as a defense against a charge of murder. Here's my proposal. We have 52 battalions. We can prepare the nation so that we'll have on any given week of the year, a combat-ready battalion of Amazons to go into battle. Imagine that you're Manuel Antonio Noriega. You were in the Papal Nuncio in Panama City. You feel safe. All of a sudden, you hear this blood-curdling scream outside.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  I am outraged! And there is Sergeant Major Molly Yard, leading a battalion of Amazons with PMS over the hill. That would be enough to scare the pants off of anybody."

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Ew, disgusting, not a fan.

• 13:13Robert Evans?

  Rush, Rush Limbaugh, everybody.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Young Rush.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  I mean, it's like, it's just not even that funny.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  No. It's not. It's not.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  That's one of the things that sucks about Rush Limbaugh is that he, for somebody who did a lot of bits and, you know, was supposedly doing satire, he just wasn't that funny.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  He wasn't. It's just that he was saying the bigoted, terrible things that a lot of bad people wanted to say.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  And the fact that it was so horrible and the fact that it scratched their id made them laugh and made them think he was a genius because somebody was finally telling them it was okay to be as shitty as they'd kind of wanted to be from the beginning.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Because you put the tiniest effort into constructing these bits.

• 13:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's, yeah, it's the same thing with all of these. You've got this kind of strain of comedians who thinks that it's important that they be allowed to say the N-word. Not a single one of them has ever told a good joke involving the N-word, right?

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:11Robert Evans?

  It's not funny. You're just going for shock value, right? That's all you're trying to do. And that can be, there's not that no good humor comes from shock value, but again, I haven't heard a single good joke from a white comedian involving the N-word. Not that it would be appropriate then, but I haven't heard one, you know? Like, so, from the beginning, the villains of the Rush Limbaugh Expanded Universe were, as the New York Times explained, quote, "black activists, gay activists, abortion rights activists, homeless activists, animal rights activists, militant vegetarians, environmentalists, artists with erotic tendencies, and above all, the Now Game, Gang." That's the National Organization of Women.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  His hatred, yeah. Rush said that his hatred for these people caused him an uncontrollable urge to tweak, quote, "The simple fact of the matter, Limbaugh is apt to inform dolphin savers and tree lovers, is that we are human beings and we are the most powerful, smartest species and we can damn well do whatever we want." And you can draw a line from this kind of the way he's phrasing things here is like, it's stupid to care about the environment and animals because we're more powerful than them. Um, to the like the shit that, uh, identity Europa and Patriot front, these like explicitly fascist organizations exist now. We'll put up these signs like these posters of the United States that say not stolen conquered, right? Where it's like, fuck the indigenous people. We beat them.

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  And so we deserve all this, right? That's just an extension of what Russia is saying, you know?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:39Robert Evans?

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

• 15:46Speaker 04

  And the idea that it's so that that they, that he phrased it as this, uh, uh, matter of personal choice, um, rather than like just common sense, practical thinking, you know, like, do you really want to, do you really want to put your trash in two separate trash cans? You know? And it's like, well, it's not so much that it's a hassle. It's that we're going to make earth unlivable for ourselves. Not that we're like, you know, fuck you, the dodo. You should have, you should have had claws or something. It's that we're fucking ourselves. Like that's the, why, why is that been, why is that so hard to understand? It's so hard

• 16:31Speaker 04

  to comply with and so hard to, uh, uh, uh, uh, keep as part of the narrative when, because the, the logical extension is what do you care? You'll be dead. By the time, by the time this shit, by the time this shit affects people in, in a meaningful way to you, a meaningful way, you'll be dead. So what do you care? And, and these are people that are all allegedly all about the family. And it's like, well, I mean, do you plan on having grandchildren, great grandchildren, great, great grandchildren? Like, do you care about what? I don't know. I, I don't, I'm not being funny now. And I'm just being, just being whiny, but

• 17:09Robert Evans?

  What you're getting at, Paul, and what the core of this is, is that Rush doesn't believe in positive things. I don't mean positive in a good sense. I mean, he doesn't believe in things that should be done. He believes in tweaking people. That is what he turns American conservatism into. He turns it from, we're conservatives, these are the things we believe about how the government and how society should be run, into conservatism is owning the libs. That's where we are now, and that's what this is. Is it's my politics are a sort of rhetorical violence against the people I disagree with. Because improving the world, changing or making positive alterations to the world

• 17:52Robert Evans?

  is difficult and complicated and involves a lot of debate and trial and error. That's hard. All I want to do is own the libs. That's what Rush Limbaugh created, brought into the world and turned into the, that's the only thing that's left in conservatism, right? You've got these odd, you've got a couple of dudes left on the right who actually believe in something like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? Not that what they believe in is great, or that I believe in it too, but they both have a, clearly have a principles that aren't just owning the libs. But they're on the fringe now because owning the libs is all the right has.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's just, it's not, it's not, it's not standing for something. It's, it's, I, it's like not, what I, my politics are, I don't want somebody telling me what to do. Yeah. I believe in a vague idea of a John Wayne movie and, you know, things were better in this bygone era before these people started to suggest that maybe we could improve things. And that's where it ends.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's, it's.

• 19:05Robert Evans?

  It's very frustrating, Paul, because that the core of that idea that like, I want to be left alone, that's more or less my politics. That's what led me to anarchism is like, don't fucking tell me what to do. And I don't want to tell you what to do. Right. And that is what as a kid I was taught conservatism was, but it's not what conservatism has ever been. And I think a big part of why, why the Republican establishment embraces Rush is that by the early 90s, in particular, by the mid 90s, definitely, it has become clear that nothing that the right does works for the actual people that, that vote them into office. Triple down economics does not function, you know?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

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

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:46Robert Evans?

  The invite, they're fighting against environmental regulations, damages the world and makes it uninhabitable, fighting against corporate regulations gets a lot of their voters killed by dangerous working conditions and stuff. All of the wars they get us into are disasters and expensive and do not achieve the foreign policy or even the basic national security goals they set. Conservatism as Americans do it at least does not work. And when you know that, you can't go back to the drawing table. You can't admit failure. You can't acknowledge the mistake. What you can do is own the libs, you know? And that's why, that's all it is now is owning the libs.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  Um, it's good. It's a good, healthy, healthy society, Paul.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  It's only gonna get better, too.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  It's only gonna get better.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  So Rush's justification for the outrageous caricature of a right winger that he played on his show had always been that these liberals and leftists advocating for black lives and women's liberation and basic environmental safeguards were absurd. And as Rush put it, "I demonstrate absurdity by being absurd." That's his own words on this. Now, this turned out to be an objectively good business because none of his listeners seemed to find Rush himself absurd. The character he played became the man he was, and the once apolitical wannabe DJ turned into a mouthpiece for the very worst of our society's impulses. One thing that made the Rush Limbaugh Show groundbreaking was that for the first time in an explicitly political Talk show, the focus was not on guests or actual reporting or anything but the

• 21:19Robert Evans?

  personality Limbaugh had created. Rush was his own guest, and this was a deliberate choice he made and a very intelligent one to make the show more profitable. If the focus of your show is on the news and on what guests have to say, you can kind of slot any person with a decent voice in to replace the host, right? That limits how much money you're going to make and it limits kind of the length of your career. Right. Rush himself explained in an interview, "I wanted to be the reason people listened. That's how you pad your pocket. That's how you establish yourself." And that's very smart. He did, in fact, establish himself. In 1992, Rush's radio success finally got the TV people listening. They decided to try him out as on-screen talent.

• 22:03Robert Evans?

  He teamed up with Roger Ailes, the man who would later invent Fox News, and together they produced one of the most outrageous and vile news programs ever made. It would, sadly, also turn out to be one of the most influential. And now, Paul, it is time for you and I to take a journey into this particular piece of far-right history. So, this episode from 1992 of The Rush Limbaugh Show opens with a title card which features an image of a microphone with the name Rush in blazoned on it and the words, "Warning: The views expressed on this program are not necessarily the views of the staff, advertisers, or your local station, but they ought to be..." Oh, forgot about this! Yeah, I know, it's good shit, man, it's good shit.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  So, the episode itself has a weirdly quiet intro, no music, just Rush with a pointer standing in what looks like an office with wall-to-wall bookshelves and TVs interspersed within the books on the bookshelves. He introduces himself and he starts talking about a recent conversation he had with President George H.W. Bush on his radio program.

• 23:04Speaker 05

  So, there continues to be more controversy surrounding my performance with the President yesterday when he came by my radio program. The press is telling you things that aren't true, but we have the tapes and we have the truth, me, and we'll show you and tell you both tonight.

• 23:21Robert Evans?

  So- That's telling. That's, that's, that's extremely important what he does here. You have to remember, Fox News was not a thing yet at this time. Fake news was not a buzzword. Limbaugh is groundbreaking in that he was not only critiquing mainstream news as being fake and lying, but he's also telling his listeners, "I am the truth."

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  This paragraph from a write-up by Rolling Stone gets to the core of why I find what he's doing here so terrifying. Quote, "He wasn't selling political ideas, and he never has. He was selling political attitude, the swaggering certitude, the mocking dismissiveness, the freedom to offend, the right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment. And partly because he was modeling that liberation with such wicked glee, Limbaugh was making himself indispensable. Within six weeks of tuning in regularly, he would tell new listeners they'd be on the cutting edge of social evolution. Best of all, he promised, 'I will do all your reading, and I will tell you what to think of it.'"

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 24:22Robert Evans?

  "I will do all your reading, and I will tell you what to think of it."

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Wow.

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  I know, right?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  It's so abusive. It's so, and it's so bald.

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  It's right out there. It's like he's not, there's no, it's not like, um, a, a, a sort of obfuscating language. He is saying very clearly.

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  What the deal is. This is fucking unbelievable.

• 24:48Robert Evans?

  And this is the, this is the logical extent of this. I'm so smart, you know, I gotta tie half my brain behind my back just to make it fair, you know, I'm this big genius. I'm so smart, you don't need to read or think, I'll do it for you, and then you too will be smart.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  And this is a huge, he spins a lot of effort in reinforcing his intelligence. Um, after this section of the show, he goes on to introduce the other topics of that episode, which include feminazi Gloria Steinem and a review of the movie The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Then we cut in, yeah, then we cut to the actual intro, which is terrible 1990s talk show music played over a series of mocked up news articles with titles like, "EIB Linked to Higher IQ," "Limbaugh Gets Patent," "Limbaugh Says No to Presidential Bid," "Limbaugh Checks Brain on Donor's Card," "Limbaugh to Carry a Torch at the Mental Olympics."

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Again, he puts a lot of effort into, and it's absurd, right? But yeah, it clearly works. It worked on my parents, you know?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  It worked on all of the people who raised me to some extent. They're all convinced he was-

• 25:56Speaker 04

  He's fun. Yeah, he's fun. But he also says things that I like to hear. But he's fun. He's just fun.

• 26:03Robert Evans?

  But he's fun.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  I think also you cannot underestimate the, um, the effect of the pointer. If you have, if you're on television and you have a, you're, you're walking out of a television with a pointer and you're pointing at something, it looks very official.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 26:23Robert Evans?

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

• 26:30Speaker 04

  Robert, why are all your weapons in front of you?

• 26:34Robert Evans?

  Well, I'm always, I'm always surrounded by weapons.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is normal.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  What's, what's going to happen during this discussion?

• 26:41Speaker 03

  You don't have anything on you right now, Paul? Like I have a machete right here.

• 26:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're not, you're not strapped, Paul?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Hold on a second. Fucking, uh, here's my knife.

• 26:53Robert Evans?

  There we go. That's a nice knife, Paul. That's lovely.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  It's got a-

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  Oh, I like the nice, the nice little hunchback there. That makes it good for kind of close in work. Yeah. All right. Now we're all armed. We can properly get back to the show.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  I didn't realize this was a, this was a knife on the table show. I apologize.

• 27:10Robert Evans?

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

• 27:14Speaker 03

  I know.

• 27:14Robert Evans?

  This is a significant number of knives-

• 27:17Speaker 04

  That's a beauty.

• 27:18Robert Evans?

  On the table.

• 27:19Speaker 04

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

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  So the show proper starts after this point, after these fake news articles kind of go through. And Russia's first subject on this episode is the then new TV series, Murphy Brown. Uh, Murphy Brown was obviously the titular character of the show. She was a recovering alcoholic investigative journalist and a primetime news anchor and a single mother. Uh, Murphy Brown was a very feminist in progress, progressive series for its day. Limbaugh opens his episode by expressing anger at the show's success. And then in what I would consider a fairly abusive manner, he tells his audience why they shouldn't watch it.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  People on my radio show didn't. You probably watched it too, but you didn't have to. You know why you didn't have to? Because I told you. You didn't have to. I had the script. I told you everything that was gonna happen on this show. I told you it wasn't funny. I told you it was defensive. I told you this show was, was, was, uh, was a little heavy-handed. I said that they're, they're focusing on the wrong thing in this show, and they really did. I, I don't know if you've heard a lot of people say a lot of things about this show, but I'll tell you the most important thing is that they got very defensive about what a family is. They trot out all these various examples of what a family is, and that's not what the Vice President or any of the family values people.

• 28:39Robert Evans?

  That's profoundly abusive, I think. This, this, you shouldn't have watched the show because I told you not to. And I told you not to because it's not good for you to imbibe this. Um, and I think it's important to break down exactly what he's doing here. First off, he is trying to physically separate his audience from mainstream American society. Murphy Brown was a hugely popular show in this day. He is literally telling them, "You don't need to watch this thing other people are watching because I am telling you not to." And he justifies this by saying that Murphy Brown is an assault on family values, which he goes on to call "functional values", because families like the ones portrayed on Murphy Brown were, in Limbaugh's eyes, "non-functional."

• 29:22Robert Evans?

  This is significant because Murphy Brown was a single mother. She was one of the first single mothers portrayed on American TV as not just existing, but as being a successful person and a competent parent.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  So naturally Rush was furiously not into it.

• 29:38Robert Evans?

  I can't let, you ca- I, we can't let people watch this because it will give them the wrong idea, not just about single mothers.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  I also think it's worth noting that on the show itself, the idea of her being a single mother was a, uh, a, a, a plot point that, uh, was a story arc that they discussed a lot on the show. It was not a, it was not a blithe decision by the character. It was, um, they really talked about, uh, what it, because it, because it was a show that did, that did a lot of satire, talked about issues. The, the, the discussion of whether or not she was going to have the baby and what it meant to be a single working mother, um, was discussed at great length on the show.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that that's why he wants, that's why it is important to him to keep his audience away from it. Now, that was not the only kind of groundbreaking thing about Murphy Brown. The show was incredibly significant in its portrayal of gay people. In several episodes, most notably in 1992 and 1994, homosexuals were shown as not just normal, functional members of society, but as existing in significant numbers throughout American society. There's an episode where like one of the characters buys a bar and it becomes through kind of like comedic hijinks or whatever, becomes a gay bar and he's like slowly realizes what it is. But the point the episode was making is that gay people

• 31:02Robert Evans?

  are all around us. They're part of our community. They are a significant, meaningful part of our society. This was rare in mainstream television for the time, and it made Rush Limbaugh furious. We have another clip here of of that.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  Just adults teaching kids. Doesn't matter what the composition is of the family, and nobody has has been critical of that. When Quayle said that they glorified single mothers, what he was trying to point out, my friends was, and I think this show proved it last night. This is another thing. This show's got an agenda, and they say all day long they don't have an agenda. But last night's show proved it. It's okay that they have an agenda. Just say so. Like this show, we are perfectly upfront and honest about what I am and what I believe on this show. And we'll let that float out in the marketplace and let you accept it as it is. There's no attempt here to fool you. There's no attempt here to deny what I am. But that's what they're all about.

• 31:57Robert Evans?

  Now, this is also really significant. So what Rush is doing here is he's framing his objection to Murphy Brown as reasonable and not based in hate. He's saying, I'm not against single mothers, or I'm not against gay people or whatever. I am against the fact that the show conceals its political agenda. And I can see why people like most of my family would have found this reasonable. But what's happening here is very sinister because Murphy Brown was not trying to be left wing. It was trying to make a point that single parents and that gay people are Regular human beings who contribute to society. It was trying to point out that single parents are valid and functional people.

• 32:40Robert Evans?

  These should not be political points. And recognizing the humanity of huge chunks of the population should not count as an agenda. But it was critical for Rush Limbaugh to turn it into one. Because if you can take the basic humanity of marginalized people and make it a political talking point, then you make it into something people can oppose on principle. And thus frame their bigotry as not hate, but simply a political stance that they have every right to.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:08Robert Evans?

  Rush was not the first person to talk about the gay agenda or to oppose single motherhood, not even close. But before him, the most prominent voices attacking these, these groups of people were on the religious right, which had first arisen as an organized political force in the late 70s. They were obviously influential, but they were also obviously religious extremists. And a lot of non-religious conservatives and libertarian types did not want to identify with fundamentalists. Rush, who had a documented history of mocking religious conservatives, provided the more libertarian right with a secular justification for bigotry against gay people and single mothers and women in general. And that's one of his great innovations, unfortunately.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, he pioneered this idea that if you are saying this is okay, this thing is okay. What you are doing is saying that's, that's somehow, that's an attack on me and what I believe. So the idea of Dan Quayle saying it glorifies single mothers.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  No one, that, that show, no one was ever saying, we should do this instead.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  We should be doing, we should be doing this instead of what you think is right. This is what we should be doing, rather than just saying, isn't this okay? These people exist, isn't that all right?

• 34:30Robert Evans?

  These people exist, it's all right, and they shouldn't be hated or punished.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:35Robert Evans?

  Or, or ostracized for being this, for being what they are.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  He's not even, he's not even talking about a slippery slope. He's. He's just saying that if you are saying this is okay, that means you are saying the way we live is not okay.

• 34:49Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  And that's just not there at all. It's just not there at all.

• 34:53Robert Evans?

  But if he's, if he's able to make it be that way to his listeners, then he can, number one, make sure they will always oppose these things that he just finds gross. And number two, it further separates them from mainstream society. This is the beginning of the splintering of the mainstream American right from the United States, from most of the people in this country. And it was the beginning of making sure that there, there was no, you cannot reconcile the right with, with the modern world, with the rest of civilization. Because you doing a different thing than them is an attack on them.

• 35:33Robert Evans?

  Like, we're being attacked because you're different and so we get to fight you. That's Russia's great innovation.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  And also that the, the way you think is the real America and not what these people think.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's haunting. But you know what isn't haunting, Robert?

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  The products and services that support this podcast?

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Hopefully.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  Hopefully, hopefully, unless it's Raytheon, which is very haunted products, but that's a story for another day.

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• 37:10Robert Evans?

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• 37:51Robert Evans?

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• 38:19Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Paul, I would love to go with this through this entire episode with you. In fact, I would love to do a reoccurring series where we just go through point by point, every episode of Rush Limbaugh's TV show and talk about it. I think it would be amazing.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  It is wild to see those clips again.

• 38:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  I, uh, boy, oh, boy. Yeah. What's the, what's the opposite of Proustian?

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Robert Evans?

  I, it would be very, I think, fun and also intellectually valuable, but we just, we have so much ground to cover. We, that, this has to be the end of that episode of the show.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, we can't do a re-watch of the, we can't do a re-watch podcast with the Rush Limbaugh show.

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, at least not, not today. I think we've gotten the point across and characterized what he's doing on the show and why it was significant. Now, the Rush Limbaugh TV show was what you'd call a modest success. The 30-minute syndicated series ran from 1992 to 1996, which is not a long run, but isn't a super short run either. You know, it was, it was not a huge hit, but it was successful. That said, its actual impact on history was much greater than its four seasons might suggest. As I said earlier, Roger Ailes was the executive producer of Limbaugh's TV debut. Limbaugh and Ailes had met in 1990, and Rush would later say that their meeting was, quote, "like finding a soulmate." And I'm going to quote here from a write-up

• 39:42Robert Evans?

  that I found on Quartz. "The persona Ailes helped Limbaugh create on that show, something between a commentator, political strategist, news anchor, and entertainer, is exactly the kind of act you can see today on Fox News. It is not hard to draw a straight line from Limbaugh's TV show to talking heads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Like today's Fox News personalities, Limbaugh fancied himself as a man of the people who railed against elitist liberal politicians and voters. But as he did that, he was flying his private jet around the country to wine and dine with powerful figures. The myth he created of himself with the help of Ailes is the same myth that we see pushed again and again on Fox News by its biggest names. In retrospect, Ailes may have been using

• 40:23Robert Evans?

  Limbaugh's TV act as a test run for Fox News to see if the brand of conservative opinion that was working on the radio could be translated to and expanded on TV. In 1996, the same year the Limbaugh Show ended, Ailes co-founded Fox News at the behest of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Much of what ensued, the liberal bashing, fear mongering, alternative reality in which Fox's personalities lived, was reminiscent of Ailes's weird little Limbaugh talk show experiment." So this is really a test case for what becomes Fox News, you know? And the year Limbaugh Show ends, 1996, is the year Fox News launches.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  What's strange to me is, well, I guess because the show was over, I guess the show, you know, the viewership went down. I wonder why he didn't just stick Limbaugh on Fox News in those, in those early days?

• 41:14Robert Evans?

  He, he, he wanted to, actually.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, like, like, Ailes actually tried to get Rush to join the network, I think, in 2006. But Limbaugh kind of preferred radio. I don't think he actually liked being on TV very much. Not, not, not to the extent that he enjoyed, you know, doing his radio show. So I think that was mainly the reason. But also, by the time Fox News really got going... Ales had a half dozen Rush Limbaugh's, you know?

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  Which we'll talk about a bit later. So throughout the mid and into the late 1990s, the Rush Limbaugh Show was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Rush created the first fully monetized right-wing cult of personality within like the American media at least. As you heard in the clips we played, Rush discouraged his listeners from thinking for themselves. He was the genius, and if you just agreed with him and thought the way he thought, then you were by definition also smart. As a result, from the very early point, he gave his fans the nickname "ditto heads." The New York Times explains the etymology of this term as it evolved on his show. "Ditto, a time-saving greeting used by callers to avoid tedious repetition of the obvious. For example, 'You're wonderful, Rush, and I agree with everything you've said.'

• 42:27Robert Evans?

  Ditto head, then, means a Limbaugh fan." So you're like, literally, he's saying, "My fans are people who say and believe all of the exact same things that I do."

• 42:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  And profoundly unhealthy.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  They're absolutely going to praise me, and so in order to save some time, let's get, let's just condense all the, the, the, the fawning praise that you will no doubt give me into one word. So we know that what you're saying is, "Rush, I love you. You are everything to me. And I, I need you to know that before we get into whatever fucking issue we're gonna get into."

• 43:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You are the only thing that matters to me. Or at least your beliefs are, because I am so empty as a person as a result of how capitalism has hollowed me out and hollowed my, my class out, that, that I have nothing but the hatred of liberals that you embody.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Until that first guy came along that, uh, had to implement mega ditto's.

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  Yes, yeah. And then there's mega ditto's and I, I can't even get too much into some of the terms used on the Rush Limbaugh Show because it makes me want to punch things until my hands are broken. And I already had that happen last year because of one of his fans. Anyway.

• 43:40Robert Evans?

  The core of the Rush Limbaugh Show was not, as he would always claim, advancing conservative ideology. But was instead attacking liberals and the left who he referred to as commie libs or pink commie libs. And I don't like, again, at this fucking gun class I was at last weekend, the instructor was like, the far left wants to take your guns away. And obviously I couldn't be like, actually, the far left is pretty heavily strapped. It's liberals.

• 44:06Robert Evans?

  But like, that's part of part this idea that Joe Biden is somehow a leftist, right? That he's a communist that you hear and Alex and you hear all over the right now. That was Limbaugh saying anyone who is not a conservative is a far left. So it doesn't matter that actually the Democratic Party is a profoundly conservative political party and today's Democrats are basically the same as Republicans were when I was growing up in the 90s.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  There's also never any follow up on these, these, the fear mongering claims whenever there's an election, like, what happened to the Obama sleeper cells? Like, he never, are they still in play? Is he still waiting to give them the word? Like, we, they never go back and say, oh, it turns out that didn't happen.

• 44:47Robert Evans?

  It's this, I mean, that's kind of the thing about Republican talking points. Like the other thing, they kept panic, like, like terrified during the Obama years. He's going to take your guns. He's going to take your guns. He's going to take your guns. Barack Obama did not one single thing to restrict gun ownership in the United States.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:04Robert Evans?

  Whereas actually, Trump actually did ban certain fire, the bump stock, like Trump put through more restrictions on gun rights than, not that I'm saying anything is wrong, like bump stocks are dumb, but Trump objectively restricted gun ownership more than Obama. But you never know it to listen to the right wing media. It's, it's preposterous.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  You think that by now, people would know, no, no one's going to take your guns.

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  No one's gonna take your fucking guns. There's too many of them. It's not that, you know, we'll talk anyway.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  That's separate. Yeah, absolutely.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, yeah. As I said earlier, the core of Rush Limbaugh's actual ideology was owning the libs. His conservatism was built entirely around attacking the other. And over his years on air, Rush built up an audience of millions and eventually tens of millions who began to see political victory as being not about achievements that improve life, but about tearing down and harming the enemy. This is why you get to a point where now mainstream Republicans are selling mugs with like, that are like, the tears of my enemies are in the, yeah, you know? I'm going to quote from the Rolling Stone here, quote. Any Republican candidate is better than any Democratic candidate, Limbaugh told his audience early on, which might sound kind of innocuous on the surface, except that for

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Limbaugh, the superiority of our side and the inferiority of them was increasingly over the years, a deadly serious matter. It became tribal warfare, which, you know, is kind of where we are now.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  100%.

• 46:33Robert Evans?

  On January 23rd, 1995, Time Magazine featured Rush Limbaugh on its cover. We see him wearing a suit and smoking a cigar. Smoke curls up out of his mouth behind the bold words, "Is Rush Limbaugh Good For America?" Now, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that he was not, but for the most part, the liberal media that Rush attacked and demonized embraced him as kind of like the loyal opposition, as an erudite foil to debate with, to argue against, but nonetheless, someone who deserved respect and honor due to his success. Like, you can see this in the episode of Family Guy that Rush was on, right? Where it's like, he has these fun bickering arguments with the token liberal on the show, but in the end, they really both like each other, you know? As opposed

• 47:17Robert Evans?

  to what Rush actually represented, which is the politics of violent elimination of the opponent. And it's, that's what's most amazing to me, is no matter what he said about the mainstream media, about the liberal media, whatever, they feted him. They praised him. They made him like, he was never treated as a pariah. Barbara Walters said in an interview, "People just can't get enough of him." The Los Angeles Times described him as "A self-styled commander in chief fighting his private culture war against the many liberal do-gooder notions that interfere with his right to eat and wear and spend whatever he damn well wants and say whatever he damn well pleases." C-SPAN highlighted him in a fawning interview that helped turn him into

• 48:00Robert Evans?

  a household name. Within a year of that interview, he was carried by 530 stations and listened to by an estimated 25 million Americans. He started writing books with titles like "The Way Things Ought To Be," each of which dutifully went on to become a New York Times bestseller. For a man who built his career attacking the liberal media, Rush never received anything but encouragement and financial support from his so-called enemies. Fundamental hypocrisies that undergirded his career were seldom called out. Rush Limbaugh had not even registered to vote until he was 35 years old. Two years before his show became a nationwide success. The repeated double standards in his work and his life never hurt his pull with his audience.

• 48:41Robert Evans?

  For example, Rush Limbaugh repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton as a draft dodger, which he was, but so was Rush. Limbaugh took the route that most wealthy young Americans during Vietnam took and found a doctor who would diagnose him with a bullshit injuries that he couldn't be called up for service. When he was eventually called on this by some journalists who were doing their jobs, he responded. I had student deferments in college and upon taking a physical was discovered to have a physical, uh, by the virtue of what the military says, I didn't even know it existed. A physical deferment and then the lottery system came along when they chose your lot by birth date and mine was high. I, and I did not want to go, just as Governor Clinton didn't, which on its own is a reasonable statement, except you spent years attacking Clinton for being a draft dodger. Yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so funny and hypocritical.

• 49:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  To me, my, my favorite draft dodge, uh, uh, explanation of all time is still Dick Cheney. I had other priorities.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  I mean, that's, that's just, that's incredible.

• 49:39Robert Evans?

  And it's truly. Both Cheney and George W. Bush did, like Rush, like Clinton, everything they could to not actually go and fight in Vietnam. One of the things that will always be the most infuriating thing in polit-, one of the most infuriating things to happen in American politics to me is the way in which, um, John Kerry, who is a, whatever else you can say about him, fought courageously, went to, went to, despite the considerable privilege he was born into, did an incredibly dangerous job, was wounded multiple times and risked his life repeatedly for the lives of his men, right? Vietnam was a terrible war. We never should have been in it. It was fundamentally immoral on a national scale, but on a human level,

• 50:19Robert Evans?

  John Kerry did the right thing, which is not use his privilege to get out of fighting in a war that other people of his class got us into. And he was portrayed during that campaign as like a liar. And a craven coward while George Bush, who did everything he could to not fight in Vietnam, was seen as this brave warrior hero. It's, I, it's still very frustrating. I don't even like John Kerry, but my God, the man did the thing all of you say is what you're supposed to do as a man.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:51Robert Evans?

  It's, it's infuriating.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:53Robert Evans?

  It's infuriating.

• 50:56Robert Evans?

  The ditto heads continued to listen to their idols slam Clinton for being a draft dodger, even while they celebrated a man who by his own admission had done the exact same thing. Rush would eventually rack up three to four, and I should have stayed here. I'm not, it's not bad to be a draft dodger. The Vietnam War was again horribly immoral. It's perfectly, it's what, what is immoral is dodging the draft and then going on to encourage, to do nothing but encourage more wars that involve American servicemen, right? That's immoral.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  It is not immoral to dodge the draft and say, hey, this was a bad war. We shouldn't get involved in stupid pointless wars that just kill people for the profits of a tiny number like, that's bad. I'm not going to do it and I'm not going to support it. That's fine.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's definitely immoral when you're well past the age where it would affect you. Where it, it's, you're now, there's another, there's a later generation of people that will be affected by this very, uh, uh, you know, hypocritical line of attack.

• 51:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's the moral inconsistency that's infuriating. John Kerry, I actually, and John Kerry did not support the Vietnam War and became after he got out a very, very outspoken voice against it. Um, but it's the, if, if Limbaugh had served in Vietnam and then gone on to be a warhawk, then at least he would be ideologically consistent, you know?

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:11Robert Evans?

  At least I could say Rush Limbaugh believes in something. It's like John McCain. At least he fucking believed in something, you know? It was terrible and fundamentally toxic as well, but it was not, he's not like Limbaugh, like, you know, he is a person who has beliefs. Um, I don't know. It's that, it's like that line from, uh, uh, the Big Lebowski, right? Like, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, dude, at least it's an ethos, you know?

• 52:40Robert Evans?

  So Rush Limbaugh was not a man who I think believed in mush much other than the fame and wealth of Rush Limbaugh. He would eventually rack up three divorces and four wives. He never had any children. Despite this, tens of millions of conservatives listened to him opine on family values and traditional morality on a daily basis. Rush called it functional values, and one key aspect of his functional value system was rejecting illegal drugs. At one point on his TV show, at the height of the drug war, Rush told his audience, "If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused, and they ought to be convicted, and they ought to be sent up the river." He repeatedly called addicts junkies.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Sent up the river.

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you should go to prison if you do illegal drugs.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Classy.

• 53:21Robert Evans?

  He repeatedly called addicts junkies and suggested that drug dealers deserved death for their crimes. While he enthusiastically supported the drug war and the use of the carceral state to lock up mostly black men for selling drugs, Rush Limbaugh was actively trafficking huge amounts of opiate painkillers. Rush used his housekeeper as a hookup, handing her cigar boxes filled with cash in exchange for thousands of pills of Oxycontin, hydrocodone, and the like. In 2003, she went public and knocked on him to the police. When the story broke, he was charged for his crimes, and Florida sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into a drug trafficking ring. We don't know exactly what Rush's, if he was just a customer or if he had some other role in it, but he was buying huge amounts of painkillers.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 54:06Robert Evans?

  We're talking about a guy who was spending probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on his addiction.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  And did it come from, did he have some injury that got him hooked on it, or?

• 54:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he got it prescribed to him initially for an injury, and he got addicted, like most people do. And this is, but this is not just with prescription painkillers. Most people who have a problematic addiction to a drug get addicted because of something negative that happens in their life, right?

• 54:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:29Robert Evans?

  Trauma, or an injury, or, or an emotional depression, whatever. That's most people who have a problematic addiction. Limbaugh said anyone who does that should go to prison. Then he did that, you know?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  But he gets caught, no?

• 54:44Robert Evans?

  And he, oh yeah, he gets caught. And when he gets caught, it is a big story. In 2003, his housekeeper went public, wore a wire, recorded him doing a drug dealer, hell yeah, narked on him to the police, and when the story broke, he was charged for his crimes, and Florida sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into that drug trafficking ring. His third wife left him, he checked himself into rehab, while his multimillion dollar team of lawyers went to work defending him in court. The legal battle would go on for three years, during which time he began doctor shopping to maintain his addiction. He was charged again with fraud for concealing information to obtain prescriptions from four different doctors, who prescribed him roughly 2,000 pain pills during one six-month period.

• 55:27Robert Evans?

  The case would eventually wrap up in 2006, when Limbaugh agreed to a plea deal that allowed him to avoid prosecution if he sought treatment and avoided other criminal activity.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Oh, for fuck's sake, that's such bullshit.

• 55:39Robert Evans?

  It's very frustrating.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I actually didn't, I didn't really, I wasn't really cognizant of all the, the legal side of this. I just remember the hypocrisy of him being, you know, uh, uh, just gobbling, yeah, shaming and while he's gobbling down these pills, but I had no idea, I guess I didn't, I didn't, uh, I didn't bother exploring that side of it.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Right, and like, he doesn't even, he barely, it's not even a slap on the wrist, it's like a little light tap on the wrist, it's not even a slap on the wrist, it's so fucking upsetting.

• 56:15Robert Evans?

  And again, the immorality here is that he always advocated criminal consequences for people who did exactly what he did, and then he didn't go on to suffer them, and that's what's, it's not that, like, there's nothing morally wrong with being addicted to painkillers. If it were legal, I would absolutely be a painkiller addict, it seems rad. It's, it's the, but I'm also consistent about the fact that I don't think doing or possession any substance should be illegal.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 56:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, with the exception of like, you know, some explosives. There's a line to be drawn, I don't think people should have surface-to-air missile launchers, but heroin, speaking of heroin, you know who supports our podcast, Sophie?

• 56:55Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 56:57Robert Evans?

  The fine people at the Sinaloa cartel, so.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Oh god, I was like, what very specific, like, easter egg is Robert gonna drop right now?

• 57:07Robert Evans?

  Yes, this is a cartel-supported podcast, and I just wanna say, let's go to ads before I get us in some trouble.

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• 58:56Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. Good times. So, while Rush was using his wealth and power to avoid the legal consequences that he enthusiastically supported existing for the crimes he committed, he continued to act as the voice of America's conservative conscience. Mostly, this meant being super racist. At one point on his TV show, he played video clips of black men and boys standing in front of the TV. And, and like, while he was playing these clips of black men and boys, he would stand in front of the TV and make gorilla noises and grunts. The apparent joke being that black- People were like monkeys, like that's kind of, I don't know what else he could be saying.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Pretty satirical.

• 59:34Robert Evans?

  Very satire, right?

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Satirical. Like, I think he got that from a New Yorker cartoon.

• 59:41Robert Evans?

  It would be like if Jonathan Swift actually murdered Irish children and ate them and then was like, "This is a satire."

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Get it?

• 59:48Robert Evans?

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

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  Rush repeatedly blamed corruption and violence in African, like African nation, national governments as the fault of black people getting rid of white colonial leaders, as we see in this quote from 2007. Quote, "Right, so you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there, you put sanctions on them, you stand behind Nelson Mandela, who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders, you go to Ethiopia, you do the same thing." Right? He's saying that because the black people got rid of their colonial oppressors, that's why Africa's in bad shape, not the decades of trauma those governments pushed, not the fact that when those governments gave up colonial control, they put people like Idi Amin, who had been a British military sergeant in charge of the government,

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  and turned out that he was a fucking monster, not because those governments, like colonial governments, continued to suck wealth out of these countries and support kleptocratic dictatorships that allowed them to suck more wealth out, that made the country dysfunctional and that led to consistent, like decades and decades of violence, not that they supported ethnic groups one over the other, like they did in Rwanda, which led to the Rwanda genocide, none of that, it's because they got rid of the white people. Even the white people didn't actually leave, you know? It's super fucked up.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  I didn't know that he'd actually gone to the lengths of trying to smear Nelson Mandela.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, communist.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  Uh, it's good stuff. I mean, Nelson Mandela also was at one point some guy, somebody who supported like terrorism and stuff, which also is totally justified. If your government is the apartheid government of South Africa, terrorism's not necessarily the wrong thing to do, you know?

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  I would say it's not off the table.

• 1:01:31Robert Evans?

  It's not off the table. Sometimes terrorists are right.

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

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

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  So Rush was repeatedly critical of professional sports for the presence of black athletes, as we see in this 2007 quote. "Look, let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it."

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:02:12Robert Evans?

  "The inherent criminality of black people was a belief that Rush held deeply, and he expressed it constantly. In 1993, he said, 'The NAACP should have riot rehearsals. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.'" He was saying this after the LA riots, you know? This is like, this is what the NAACP, this is not people reacting to horrible violence the only way that they can, right? This is not, a riot being the language of the unheard, this is what the NAACP wants, because they're all criminals.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Who has Rush to criticize athletes? I bet he couldn't even do like a jog.

• 1:02:45Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  The, the, yeah, the talking point of like, they just, these, you know, these people, they just love to riot.

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they just love to, not, "These people are being oppressed and murdered, and finally, violence was the only thing they could think to do, because they were given no other options, and they've reached the end of their human tether, like the people I idolize who founded this nation."

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Look, slavery is over, what more do you want?

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  I mean, and when I say that, I don't mean to say, like, that obviously, anyone rioting in Los Angeles in 1993 was a thousand times more justified than George Washington and the like. That said, I still think getting rid of a king, all other things being equal, getting rid of a king is a valid reason to do violence. Kings are bad, yeah. So Rush repeatedly argued that white people shouldn't be blamed for slavery, saying, "It's preposterous that Caucasians are blamed for slavery when they've done more to end it than any other race. Any race of people should not have guilt, if any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians."

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Rush bitch.

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  It's amazing. How many Caucasians fought to keep fought and died to keep slavery going? Rush?

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Is this just like at this point, when you say things like that, right? He is, what do you think the percentage is of, uh, for in Rush's mind? I actually believe this or what is the most out to what is the most outrageous thing that I could say?

• 1:04:09Robert Evans?

  I think he comes to believe it because these beliefs become a reflection.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  I think he believes his own bullshit.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  Well, I think what it is, it starts, he's not a political person. He doesn't care about politics. He starts with a joke because he starts doing this persona because it gets him listeners.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Robert Evans?

  But he's also a narcissist and these beliefs aren't political stances to him. They're aspects of his personality and his narcissism dictates that he comes to believe it. Because believing it and defending these things is the same as defending himself. And again, he's a fucking narcissist. I think that's how it works.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  I like the Trump thing where he starts out telling a lie, but then he repeats the lie enough times that it becomes true to him because he is saying it.

• 1:04:50Robert Evans?

  Yes, that's exactly the case. So another repeated Rush Limbaugh bit was attacking the daughters of Democratic presidents for being ugly. In 1988, he called Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy, the most unattractive presidential daughter in the history of the country. In the early 1990s, he declared Chelsea Clinton to be the White House dog.

• 1:05:13Robert Evans?

  Which is like, just very vile. Um, I don't even think it's like I, the, the, the Trump boys and Ivanka made themselves political figures perfectly fine to insult and attack them. You're never going to hear me saying anything bad about like Tiffany or Barron because they're they're children, you know, like, yeah, don't fucking talk about them if they don't make themselves into a major part of things, you know? Now Chelsea Clinton's done, has it put herself in the public eye? And it's perfectly fair to criticize her for the things she does in the public eye.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  But at that time, when he was saying that shit, she was literally a kid.

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  She was a child.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And what you're, what he said about her is a kind, you can't be a good person and say that about a child to an audience of millions.

• 1:05:57Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Robert Evans?

  In 2012, when Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke went before Congress to argue that contraceptives should be covered by the Affordable Care Act, Limbaugh called her a slut and a prostitute. It's hard, you can't overstate how vile he was. When Marty from Back to the Future, Paul

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Oh, Michael J. Fox.

• 1:06:21Robert Evans?

  Michael J. Fox

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

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

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Robert Evans?

  Like, he's such a bad person.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  To say that, to imply that Michael J. Fox was playing it up for the cameras

• 1:06:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  when he went testified before Congress. I remember this, I remember this so well because Michael J. Fox deliberately did not take his medication and said that, and said, "I want you to see, this is what happens." And Rush Limbaugh accused him of like, playing it up. Like, "It's not that bad." And he's jiggling all around. Like, that's like burned into my brain forever.

• 1:07:02Robert Evans?

  It's horrific. And it's like, and to say that it would be, like, I think what he did was perfectly reasonable. "I'm not going to take my medicine because you need to know what it is like for people who don't have access to the medicine. I'm rich, I have access to all the medicine I need. Here's what it's like if you don't."

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  I want to make this less abstract to you.

• 1:07:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I had a friend, one of the big things in terms of like me changing my political attitudes, it started with like me changing my attitudes on drugs, this concern that like marijuana should be illegal, that it was immoral. I had a friend who's much older that I met on World of Warcraft, who had multiple sclerosis, and we were video chatting, and she showed me how badly her hands shook before she started smoking, right? She like showed me herself shaking, and then she took a hit, which was difficult for her. And I watched in real time how it affected her, and I never again supported keeping that shit illegal, because you can't when you see it, right?

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Robert Evans?

  You can't. It's medicine. Not that most people who use it, use it medicinally, which doesn't, isn't wrong, like, it's not wrong to use it recreationally, but just the idea that what she was doing was a crime, made it clear to me how immoral our drug laws were. Um, in a way that maybe if I had like, it would have taken longer otherwise, I think.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Completely.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  Um, so yeah, anyway, Limbaugh did occasionally face consequences for his bald faced bigotry. In 2003, ESPN hired him as an on air commentator. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. And he was fired after like seven weeks because he said Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb didn't deserve any of the praise he received.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  That's right. It's horrible.

• 1:08:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He said Donovan McNabb didn't deserve the praise that he received because, quote, "I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think that there's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn't deserve. People just like this guy because he's black, not because he's a good quarterback. The media is invested in black men being good quarterbacks, you know?

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  I like that you went into your Shapiro voice for that quote.

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  It's, what the fuck, man? You couldn't do what he's doing? How dare you? Like, so this combat drew enough widespread condemnation that Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN. But obviously this had little to no impact on his bottom line. Maybe it annoyed him personally, but it didn't hurt him financially. By the early aughts, Rush was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He had a private jet. He had a palatial mansion in Florida. He smoked cigars that cost more than some people's cars. This is disgusting, but I think any fair accounting of Limbaugh's career has to acknowledge how impressive it was too. The early 2000s saw the explosion of Fox News. This is the period where it became the most watched news network in the country.

• 1:09:46Robert Evans?

  A slew of Limbaugh imitators rose up, men like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. While these folks were all hugely successful and influential, none of them ever eclipsed Rush. This is because, in addition to wielding influence, Rush held actual demonstrable political power. And I'm going to quote the Rolling Stone again here.

• 1:10:08Robert Evans?

  His sky-high ratings and the rabid fandom of his ditto heads, who just happened to fit the profile of people who voted frequently in Republican primaries, made it inevitable that the GOP would come courting. In 1992, after he boosted Pat Buchanan's Pitchfork populist "Make America First Again" challenge to George Bush, the president became so hell-bent on gaining Limbaugh's favor for the general election, that he not only invited the host to the White House, but toted his bags personally into the Lincoln bedroom. Limbaugh had only praise for Bush from that day forward, at least until he lost to Bill Clinton in November. That set a pattern. Limbaugh might instinctively gravitate to the radicals, but he was ultimately a team player, "the national precinct captain of the Republican Party," as Mother Jones described him. Two years later, Limbaugh basically co-captained the Republican Revolution with House Leader

• 1:10:52Robert Evans?

  Newt Gingrich, when their efforts produced a landslide that brought 73 anti-government zealots to Congress. The host was made an honorary House freshman and feted at a GOP orientation in December, where the new members wore "Rush was right" buttons and listened to his marching orders. "This is not the time to get moderate," he said. "This is not the time to start trying to be liked." Ronald Reagan himself declared Limbaugh "the number-one voice for conservatism in our country." Thanks Reagan. You suck. And Rush was always very clear about where he wanted to see the party head: smaller government, stronger, more powerful corporations. He said outright, "I consider myself a defender of corporate America."

• 1:11:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It would not be wrong to view Rush Limbaugh as something of a cult leader. One of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting this conclusion is, in my mind, Limbaugh's embrace of the irrational. Politics for Rush Limbaugh was never about concrete results or observable reality. It was a fight between "good," his side, and "evil," anyone who disagreed with him. And since those were the stakes, it didn't matter if he lied or spread conspiracy theories, because the essence of what he was saying, that the Democrats were monsters, was true. Nowhere is this clearer than in his hatred of the Clintons.

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  It started when George H. W. Bush lost to Bill, robbing Rush of a president who would directly, you know, take him into the White House, right? From an early stage, Rush realized that lying about the crimes committed by Bill and Hillary was a more productive route than criticizing them on policy. And so in 1994, he announced Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was taken to Fort Marcy Park. Rolling Stone writes, "Conspiracy theories, once the province of fringe right-wingers, started to become the mainstream Republican fare they are today during Clinton's two terms. And Limbaugh was the great popularizer of the genre. Long before Fox hosts began amplifying the fringier theories about American politics, Limbaugh was busy mainstreaming Wingnut World.

• 1:13:00Robert Evans?

  The conspiracy cranks, the John Birchers, the Christian Zionists, the science deniers, the info warriors, their wildest fantasies, fears, and paranoias all came out to play in the national prime time on the Rush Limbaugh Show, repackaged by the host into a palatable fare for the Republican masses." And this is significant, because Rush's demonizing of the Clintons, who, there's plenty of very valid things to critique them on, but at the end of the day, pretty normal neoliberal politicians. It's even spread on the left, this idea that Hillary Clinton is somehow more of a warmonger than other liberals, right? Is somehow like exceptionally bad, when she's not. She's very much in line with everyone else in the party and everyone else who has held those positions and is not as bad as some of them, right?

• 1:13:44Robert Evans?

  She's more hated by certain people. Even on the left, you'll find people who are more directly aggressive towards her than they are to fucking Kissinger. And it's not that she's not bad. She is, so is Bill. They're greedy, Bill's a rapist, they have supported, you know, in addition to the Iraq War, a number of violent actions overseas that were disasters. But they did that as part of, like, within a large group of people, right? There's nothing about them that is exceptionally bad for the crew that they run with. But this absolute demonizing of them that has a real impact on the 2016 election, that's

• 1:14:27Robert Evans?

  a big part of why we get Trump, is something that Rush Limbaugh pioneers. The Clintons are not like, "My parents hated Trump when he was running and voted for him because their hatred of Hillary Clinton was..." It's beyond rational. It's, and again...

• 1:14:45Robert Evans?

  Lot of super valid criticisms of Hillary Clinton. I don't think she should have ever been president. Also, hard to say she would have been worse than Trump. And if you are saying like she would have, for example, been more, killed more people overseas than Trump, you're not actually paying attention to the death toll as a result of American airstrikes and missile strikes and drone strikes as it changed from the Obama administration where Clinton was Secretary of State to the Trump administration. Because there was a massive escalation in death under that. In addition to we're appealing of the rule about any sort of reporting about civilian casualties from US airstrikes. Trump was worse on this sort of stuff, but you'd never know it. Anyway, I don't want to get into a rant on this.

• 1:15:24Robert Evans?

  But like, you can't, it's almost impossible to analyze the Clintons, their impact, their crimes and their, and their, and their, their behaviors, their policies with any sort of rationality. Because this, they've been turned into goblins, right?

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Robert Evans?

  It's very frustrating.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Robert Evans?

  And it makes it, it makes it so that if you try to say like, well, actually this thing you're criticizing them on isn't a reasonable thing to, or at least the way you're criticizing them isn't reasonable. Suddenly you're defending them. And it's like, no, that's not what I'm, it's very, I hate it. I hate everything.

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  Sorry.

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  It gets, that, that sort of specific personality demonization gets in the way of actually accomplishing,

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  you know, discussions of, of policy. And where, and where we are as a country and how we do things. Because absolutely, they were completely typical of the, the people that occupy the White House on any given year. You know what I mean?

• 1:16:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  And, and like, you know, Hillary, even if she had killed as many people overseas as Trump did, probably fewer people domestically in terms of policy. If you're talking about the, if you're going to talk, get into the, the pandemic and stuff like that. If she had been elected and, and had, you know, Anyway, yeah, I totally agree that it's like, it's a very weird um, uh, thing that uh, that's that that absolutely sprung out of the the Rush Limbaugh uh, uh, personal demon, personal demonization.

• 1:17:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  That that then gets into, you know, like, this fucking Alex Jones shit where she's a demon. There's there's a fly on her.

• 1:17:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. It's this, it's this turning people from like, okay, let's analyze what this person's actually done, how it's worked, when it's been successful, when it's been unsuccessful, when it's been moral, when it's been immoral, and to, no, it's she's just a criminal. She's just a warmonger. And we don't have to analyze what she actually did or anything. We don't have to, we we just have to condemn her. We should, and it's not that she doesn't deserve condemnation for a lot of things, but like, for one thing, I don't know, it it, I don't want to fucking get onto a defending, because I don't like Hillary Clinton.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:17:48Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, but she's also has it like, it's very frustrating.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Robert Evans?

  It's very, it's all just very frustrating. Um, and and he's in, he creates this culture, and it it spreads now. It's not just the Clintons now. Now it's it's everyone, right? You don't have to analyze people that you disagree with. You come up with a three-word thing about them, and you spread these like, like, Bill Clinton has committed crimes. He's a fucking rapist. You don't have to make up that he and his wife are having people murdered. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, he's a rapist. That's bad. But of course, a lot of people calling him a rapist are rapists themselves, so they have to make it up that now, no, he's a murderer, you know? It's it's fucking bullshit. It's very frustrating. So Rush also led the charge on demonizing and

• 1:18:33Robert Evans?

  denying global warming and climate change. In his book, See, I Told You So, he declared that quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding. Cut to Texas being submerged in a layer of snow that destroys civil society. Yeah. Uh, or the entire West Coast burning down last year. Anyway, uh, he lampooned Al Gore, uh, and scientists who warned about climate change as, quote, "a few hardline doomsayers who are sticking to their thermostats."

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 1:19:07Robert Evans?

  Ah, his conclusion was what?

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  You know, now it's, it never affected him.

• 1:19:13Robert Evans?

  It never affected him. Now he's dead.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  It didn't affect me, so it's not real.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  As far as he knows, he was right about this.

• 1:19:22Robert Evans?

  He was right about this. Limbaugh was unquestionably the single most influential American conservative from about 1989 to at least 2008. Now, his star did start to fade by the end of George W. Bush's term, and there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, he'd been outed as an opiate addict, gone to rehab three times, and through it all had repeatedly defended an administration that led the United States into two disastrous and expensive failed wars. By the time Barack Obama was elected, many of the more libertarian-minded right wing were starting to reject the neoconservative ideology that Rush had spent eight years hyping up. Now, the fact that Barack Obama was the man who finally broke eight years of GOP power wound up being the salvation

• 1:20:04Robert Evans?

  of Limbaugh's influence. Yes, he'd encouraged the nation to burn through its treasure and influence, losing two wars, but now a black man was president. The floodgates of right-wing racism opened wide. In the first four years of Obama's term, the number of hate groups in the United States rose by 755%. This surge in public anti-black racist, I know, it's pretty shocking when you actually look at the number, right?

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  755%.

• 1:20:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  The idea, like, oh man, there's a black president, we're gonna need more hate groups, guys. This is, the hate groups, the, the extant hate groups, we're not gonna get it done. We need more hate groups.

• 1:20:42Robert Evans?

  There is a black president who in his actual policies is not wildly different from George H. W. Bush, but like, yeah. Um, the fact that Barack Obama, yeah, so this surge in anti, in public anti-black racism was heralded, incited, and led by Rush Limbaugh, the USA's most prominent bigot. There are a lot of different clips that I could select to make this point, Paul, but none is more appropriate than this song that aired on Rush's program while Obama was still on the campaign trail. Now, the context of this is that Limbaugh was talking about the fact that, um, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama and Al Sharpton had like a public series of arguments, right? I think Sharpton was backing Hillary at first. Um, so this is this song that you're about to hear. The singer is supposed to

• 1:21:27Robert Evans?

  be Al Sharpton, singing about Barack Obama. And I'm just gonna let Sophie play the clip now.

• 1:21:34Speaker 05

  Barack the magic negro lives in DC. The LA Times, they called him that 'cause he's not authentic like me. And the guy from the LA paper said he made guilty whites feel good. They'll vote for him and not for me 'cause he's not from the hood. See real black men like Snoop Dogg or me or Farrakhan. Have talk the talk and walk the walk, not coming late at one.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  Oh, Barack the magic negro lives in DC. The LA Times, they called him that 'cause he's not authentic like me.

• 1:22:27Robert Evans?

  I think that's enough of that.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:30Robert Evans?

  Pretty bad.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

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

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  Yes, stay in their lane, bro.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, or that, that, like, the, the, the meter was terrible. It, it.

• 1:22:47Robert Evans?

  It's bad. It's not, it's not funny unless you're a bigot, you know?

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:52Robert Evans?

  Unless you're a bigot. So Limbaugh had other Obama zingers saying at one point, if he weren't black, he'd be a tour guide in Hawaii. In 2008, he compared Obama to a cartoon monkey. He repeatedly called Michelle Moochelle. And why, because she's a cow, you know? And by, and all the while, he claimed that racism had nothing to do with his hatred of Obama. Doesn't matter to me what his race is. He's liberal is what matters to me. Yeah, okay. Barack the magic negro guy, yeah.

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  I just, I just bring it up a ton, that's all.

• 1:23:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but I just, I can't talk about it enough, but I'm not a bigot.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

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

• 1:23:35Robert Evans?

  God, I hate this guy.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  Why is he even doing satire at this point? Like, has he, has he pretend, has he dropped that pretense?

• 1:23:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, I can play you songs that like, there's a bunch of Nazis that will go through and like rewrite Disney songs to be about hating the Jews and stuff, or about race traitors and whatnot, because it's the kind of thing that's easy to spread, right? You make a racist song and people laugh, and at first it's a joke, and then it becomes less of a joke. It's the, it's the whole story, right? That's exactly what Limbaugh is doing, you know? It's not even all that much less racist. He just doesn't say the N-word. When candidate Obama became President Obama, Rush said, "I hope he fails," explaining that rooting for liberalism to fail is rooting for America to succeed. Limbaugh declared that stopping Obama was, quote, "What I was born to do."

• 1:24:27Robert Evans?

  One of his tactics to this end seemed to be stoking fears that because Obama was anti-white, he was trying to gin up a race war. In 2009, Rush declared, "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering." Clearly, he would have preferred it when, you know, I don't know, when white kids were burning down black kids' schools in his hometown.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  Those were the days.

• 1:24:51Robert Evans?

  Those were the days, my friend. He thought they'd never end. Yeah, it's great. Limbaugh was not the only person who stoked white resentment and anti-black bigotry in this period. He was not close to the only person, but he was the man who had created the blueprint and the cultural space that all of those other right-wing media figures acted in. Ben Shapiro is very open about the fact that Limbaugh was his hero and idol. Alex Jones altered the way he spoke and altered the acoustic setup of his Infowars studio in order to more closely resemble Rush Limbaugh. In 2010, Limbaugh was picked to address CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was the main event that year and gave what he called his "first address to the nation."

• 1:25:37Robert Evans?

  Limbaugh was so central to the Republican Party at this point that RNC Chairman Michael Steele was asked on CNN if Limbaugh was "the effective party leader." When Steele claimed that Rush was just an entertainer, this pissed off Rush Limbaugh, who attacked Michael Steele on air and caused such an outpouring of right-wing rage against the RNC chairman that Michael Steele was forced to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh. Kind of proving that he was effectively the leader of the Republican Party.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, it puts me in mind of Howard Stern, uh, coming into the Philadelphia market and forcing John Dibella, the host of the Morning Zoo, to apologize for being on the radio.

• 1:26:16Robert Evans?

  Jesus, I didn't know that had happened.

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  Oh, it was, it was, it was ridiculous.

• 1:26:22Robert Evans?

  So as leader of the Republican Party, Limbaugh spent the Obama years repeatedly hammering home the idea that there could not be peaceful coexistence between the right and left in the United States. Quote from Rush, "We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. Every other universe is where we are, and that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it."

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  Again, real America.

• 1:26:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the real America, and there can be no coexistence.

• 1:26:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. This now, now we're in the age of, you know, because Biden said, you know, is looking for unity. Anytime somebody's looking for unity and there is a, there's a criticism of a famous monster like Rush Limbaugh. The response from the right is always, "Oh, where's the famous unity? Where, well, I thought you wanted unity?" And it's like, "Well, do you care about unity? You don't give a shit about it. You're already living in a world that says, if you don't, if you don't come to believe the things that I believe, you are against America and you are, you are the real racist, you're the real misogynist,

• 1:27:38Speaker 04

  you are the real hater of all things that are decent. So it's, I don't know how we, I don't know how we unfuck ourselves from this, from this situation."

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:27:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it, I don't know that we can, but the, the way to do it is not to, not to yield to these people, right?

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, it's not to just let them. Get what they want because what they want is the annihilation of the other and honestly, the annihilation of themselves because it's a fucking death cult at this point. Yeah. Like, they can't be allowed to win and like the people and that's not to say that every aspect of what has what a traditional conservative ideology is wrong. They have some points. That's why it brings people in. The idea that like you should always be wary about giving the government control of things. You fucking should, you know, like Absolutely. There's a space, there is a space for conservatism in society that is not what Rush Limbaugh

• 1:28:43Robert Evans?

  turned it into, which is not to say that it was because fucking Reagan was president before Limbaugh came on to the scene and he was terrible and very toxic, not like toxicity in the Republican Party goes back very far, but also it's not for nothing that the Republicans used to be the party of Abraham Lincoln, you know, there it's not there. There is a way to have a conservatism that is influential in society that isn't a fucking death cult and we have to at very least get back to that if we're going to continue to be a democracy that doesn't spiral inevitably into civil war, you know, I have, I'm a pretty committed leftist, but I also do not seek a society that forces my beliefs on other people, but

• 1:29:28Robert Evans?

  you can't, you can't give these people an inch because they'll take everything. That's how they are, you know, that's what in part what Rush had a big impact in making them into. By 2015, Rush Limbaugh had succeeded in leading a rightward push that finally prepared the Republican Party to nominate an obvious fascist, Donald Trump. Limbaugh embraced Trump early on. Right wing radio host and never Trumper Joe Walsh, who is another actually principled conservative, draws a direct line between Limbaugh and Trump. Quote, "The average Trump supporter loves Trump because he fights, man, he fights, not because of any policy or issue or political philosophy. That's why they loved Rush before

• 1:30:11Robert Evans?

  him. It wasn't about conservatism. I still can't tell you after 30 years what the fuck he believes in, but he knew how to prey on audiences grievances and resentments, which is what conservative talk radio does. Rush was a son of a bitch. He'd lie about the dims and punch them and make fun of them. That gave him a cult like following from the beginning. Trump sort of inherited it." And I Joe Walsh, again, not a great, I, I degree, agree with on much, but he's right on the money here. He's analyzing it properly.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The thing, I think the thing also about Trump is like, like Rush, doesn't really have any deeply held beliefs, right? Like that, you could, you couldn't say this guy, even convincing himself, really cares that much about anything beyond what's right in front of his fucking face, that is about him.

• 1:30:59Robert Evans?

  All he cares about is his own aggrandizement, right? It's narcissism. Trump and Limbaugh are very similar.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:31:06Robert Evans?

  Rush bent the knee to Trump, declaring him everything but the second coming. And we will not labor long on Rush during Trump's years, because once he had helped shepherd his massive audience into Trump's arms, his cultural influence faded. It was watered down by the sheer mass of right wing ideologues who flooded the internet and increasingly urged their followers to embrace irrationality, conspiracy and fascism. In February of 2020, Rush led the charge denying the reality of COVID-19. He called it the common cold and mocked even his old ally Matt Drudge for caring about the burgeoning plague. He urged his listeners against mask wearing, calling it a symbol of fear. Rush had long denied the dangers of smoking, particularly secondhand smoke, but this was a new level for him.

• 1:31:49Robert Evans?

  When Trump lost reelection to Biden, Limbaugh immediately called the election a sham and joined the chorus of voices claiming fraud. By this point, though, he was sick and the playing field was so flooded with men who sounded like him, triggered the libs like him, lied like him, that his voice hardly rose above the din. Rush had succeeded in building a right wing so made in his own image that he no longer stood out in it. His last show was February 2nd. He died less than two weeks later, killed by the lung cancer he denied had anything to do with smoking, because that was another thing Rush denied his entire career.

• 1:32:25Robert Evans?

  Joe Walsh, a former Limbaugh lover, uh, like when he was much younger, he got into talk radio because of Limbaugh, eventually wound up, and to be fair, before Trump rejecting Limbaugh in a lot of ways, found the whole arc of Rush's career to be terribly sad. I didn't think that at the end of his life, Rush would sell out to Trump the way he has. He had every opportunity this final year to come clean and be decent. I mean, he was still on this February, lying about a stolen election. He'll keep up this act till he dies, and it's sad. When a writer from Rolling Stone asked if maybe the reason he kept backing Trump was that Limbaugh truly believed in what Trump said, Walsh countered with a theory of his own. Quote, "Maybe, knowing him, it's one last big extended fuck you.

• 1:33:08Robert Evans?

  Maybe it's Limbaugh saying, I'm not gonna bend to the dims and anybody else, no matter what. Never. To the end, I'm never gonna do it." And at the end of this, I can't help but think that there's something terribly meaningful in the fact that Joe Walsh rejected Limbaugh in his later years and at his end. Walsh gained prominence as a voice of the rising Tea Party. He is very conservative, but his constant principled resistance to President Trump proves that he is not a fascist. And it turns out what Limbaugh was really selling, what he was preparing the American right for all along, was fascism. If you want confirmation of this, you need look no further than how America's most prominent neo-Nazis reacted to Limbaugh's death.

• 1:33:50Robert Evans?

  Chris Cantwell was one of the speakers and organizers of the Deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. He is a straight-up Nazi. He assaulted left-wing counter protesters at the event, and when this brought legal consequences on him, he filmed himself crying in fear, earning the nickname "The Crying Nazi." Cantwell gained prominence among the alt-right as a podcaster with shows like Outlaw Conservative. And Chris Cantwell openly sees Rush Limbaugh as the man who invented his style of content, who made his career possible. He's in jail right now because he made a bunch of illegal threats and stuff, but he was interviewed for another fascist podcast by a guy named Jared Howe on, like, right after Limbaugh's death.

• 1:34:31Robert Evans?

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

• 1:34:40Robert Evans?

  When I heard, you know, when I heard Catherine's voice, I, I choked up and I said, oh no. You knew. You know, and I, yeah, I knew, I, and what, what did it? Catherine Limbaugh. I had actually, uh, she wrote a letter to Russia because I kept on hoping that, you know, I'd get out of here inside, I could like call into the show or drop an email and I started to realize like, all right, he's at Villanova for two weeks. Uh, if I'm going to contact this guy, just, I'm probably going to have to do it by mail. And I was actually gonna, I forgot to do it. I was going to ask you to get me, see if there was an address that I could write to. And, uh, it turns out it's a little late for this. Yeah. But, uh, you know, when I, when I heard her voice, I choked up and I said, oh no, if I still heard me, you know, he'd do exactly what's wrong with it. Tell him I'm like, this

• 1:35:23Robert Evans?

  guy's going to be dead. And, um, and so, yeah, I heard it when it happened and I was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me, man. So that's, I mean, you know, you, you, you, he's legitimately affected by this. He's mourning Rush Limbaugh, this Nazi. And he's not the only Nazi mourning Rush Limbaugh. The Daily Shoah is one of the most prominent Nazi podcasts on the internet. The word Shoah is the Hebrew term. It me, I think it means calamity for the Holocaust. So there, it's literally, this is the daily Holocaust. And it is maybe the most prominent Nazi podcast on the internet. Now, TDS, as its hosts call it, has been on the ears for years at this

• 1:36:03Robert Evans?

  point, since before Trump was in office. And the hosts of The Daily Shoah consider Limbaugh to be something of an idol. Now, these guys are hardcore Nazis, so they consider Russia moderate and they do demean him at times for that. But they also recognize that he paved the way for their financial success and cultural influence. And in this next audio clip, you can hear several members of The Daily Shoah, can't emphasize that name enough, learn live about Rush Limbaugh's death and the emotional impact it has on them is undeniable.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  News cucked on that. Well, yes, what happened today? Well, Sven, that's bad news for you, buddy. Rush Limbaugh is dead. Oh, man. Are you serious? Wow. I mean. Well, I guess I can't see what he's saying about Texas. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dance on his grave. He, he said. A lot of really dumb things, but I'm still sad kinda sad about that. I'm very sad about that. I wouldn't be here if not.

• 1:36:57Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't be here, says host of the Daily Showa, without Rush Limbaugh. I can't think of a more damning thing to say in a man's passing, but that he was truly, honestly mourned by Nazis.

• 1:37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Robert Evans?

  You know?

• 1:37:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The end of the day, that's what you can say about Rush, and that is the end of our episodes on Rush Limbaugh.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:37:22Robert Evans?

  You doing, Paul?

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  I'm good. I mean, look, he said some dumb things, and I am gonna dance on his grave.

• 1:37:28Robert Evans?

  I am absolutely gonna dance on his grave.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  He sucked, and I'm glad he's dead. He was a bad person. And I have to say, on social media, when, when the story broke, people were talking about it, there were a lot of people that wanted to say, you know, you can, you, you know, you can say whatever you want, but Rush was hugely successful, more successful than you will ever be, had more influence, he was a millionaire. Guys, take the W. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:37:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:57Speaker 04

  You can't, and this is the problem with these guys, with Trump, with people like this, is it's not enough for them to win. They need people to lick the boots. They need people to say, you are the greatest. It is never enough for them. It is never enough for them to be hated, to be feared, to have all the marbles. They need you to say, I love you too.

• 1:38:20Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  They need it. And that is, that is what, the only solace I can take in a life like this, is that in the end, he didn't get the thing that he wanted, which was everybody saying, you're the greatest, and I love you.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  No, it was rest in piss.

• 1:38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Robert Evans?

  It was rest in piss and a bunch of Nazis crying.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you, if you make, if this is what you make of your life, this is how, this is what's going to happen, is that you're gonna have people saying rest in piss. You're gonna have people saying this. And it's, and, and sorry, you can have all the success you want, you're never gonna get that love. It's not gonna happen. And...

• 1:39:00Robert Evans?

  People are actively making... Making plans to shit on your grave.

• 1:39:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Robert Evans?

  Because you materially harmed their lives.

• 1:39:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:39:08Robert Evans?

  You.

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  And the lives of people they knew and the lives of people that they loved. You have, you have made life that much harder for generations of people that will come after you.

• 1:39:17Robert Evans?

  Of humans.

• 1:39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Robert Evans?

  You have Rush Limbaugh had a material, significant, negative impact on billions of people, many of whom are yet unborn.

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Rest in piss, Rush.

• 1:39:29Robert Evans?

  Rest in piss, brush. I wish the lung cancer had worked faster, you know?

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, Paul, you got some pluggables to plug at the end of this upbeat episode?

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Yay.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  I'm gonna be appearing on The Daily Show in a couple of weeks.

• 1:39:46Robert Evans?

  Big TDS fan. By the way, I wanna, I wanna shout out and give thanks to Daniel Harper of the wonderful podcast, I Don't Speak German, which is the deepest dives you're going to find on Nazi content creators. I guess you go Nazi thought leaders in the United States. Very important work. Daniel Harper, I Don't Speak German. He provided those clips to me. Thank you, Daniel.

• 1:40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07Robert Evans?

  Um, sorry, back to your.

• 1:40:08Speaker 04

  No, not at all. Um, uh, you can follow me at PF Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram. And, um, I have a few podcasts that you can listen to, um, you know, just all the usual stuff. You can find out about me on paulftompkins.com.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:40:25Robert Evans?

  Paul F Tompkins dot com. Well, that's gonna do it for us here at Behind the Bastards. Um, so go out into the world, tie one half of your brain behind your back, and then die because that would actually kill you. That, that would, that would immediately lead to your death. Exposed brain. There's a reason we have skulls, people. Keep your brain inside of it. Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Bye, guys.

• 1:40:50Robert Evans?

  Podcast.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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