Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Robert is joined by Paul F. Tompkins to discuss Rush Limbaugh.FOOTNOTES: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-29-na-limbaugh29-story.html  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/11/usa.julianborger1 https://longreads.com/2019/03/15/how-the-shock-jock-became-the-outrage-jock/  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/05/rush-limbaugh200905 https://newrepublic.com/article/161405/rush-limbaugh-racist-sexist-conservative-media-worse https://www.metroweekly.com/2021/02/rush-limbaugh-mocked-gay-people-dying-from-aids-on-his-radio-show/ https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/16/magazine/the-rush-hours.html https://www.businessinsider.com/presidential-medal-awardee-rush-limbaughs-racist-and-sexist-comments-2020-2 https://www.politico.com/story/2012/03/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-rush-073661 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/politics/rush-limbaugh-conservative-media.html  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rush-limbaugh-draft/  https://people.com/politics/rush-limbaugh-most-controversial-moments/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rush-limbaugh-dead-trump-ruined-america-1129222/  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/wolcott200705 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-10-15-0310150127-story.html https://twitter.com/AmITooRemoved/status/1362201339472740355 https://qz.com/1973960/rush-limbaughs-short-lived-tv-show-helped-usher-in-fox-news/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rush-limbaugh-racist-quotes/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPgO9NLy-7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-aDkrKgSk Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I continually fail to introduce like a professional, which is particularly shameful this week because our guest is a very professional voice artist, Mr. Paul F. Tompkins. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here, Paul. You are the voice of a lot of characters

that a lot of people enjoy. I think most famously to me at least is Mr. Peanut Butter. To be fair, I'm also the voice of a lot of characters that people hate. That's true. That's true, because if you're really achieving as an artist, a lot of people are going to hate anything that you do. That's the mark of success. That's how you know you're doing it right exactly. And today we're talking about a truly historical success of a creative mind. A man hated by tens of millions of people and who should be hated by billions. A man who has done, I would say, incalculable harm to the future of human life and all life on this planet,

Mr. Rush Limbaugh. Correct. Yeah. Paul, do you have any kind of history with Rush Limbaugh? Like in terms of your upbringing and stuff, I don't know much about how you grew up. Yeah. Do you know what? I forgot that I forgot. First of all, I forgot how long he's been around. I remember watching him in his earliest days on TV and watching that show like as a goof, the way I would watch, you know, the Morton Downey Jr. show or Wally George or whatever. And just like, who is this clown? And he's like doing this, this sort of, you know, what seemed like a character, you know, at the time, because he, I think he fancied

himself an entertainer and had a show that had little skits in it and stuff like that. And I thought he was just ridiculous. And so I watched him ironically and and then things just got worse. Like I sort of got tired of it. I remember getting tired of it and like, okay, this is just like the same thing over and over again. And it's not, it's not pushing that button in my ironic pleasure center anymore. So I just stopped watching. But despite my jumping ship, he continued to do what he was doing. Yeah. He lost the Paul F. Tompkins demographic, but he kept the my parents and everyone that raised me demographic. So what was your upbringing, particularly political, would you say?

Not, you know what, not super political. I was raised. My family was a lower middle class, a big Catholic family in Philadelphia in a sort of suburb called Mount Airy. And we were, both of my, my family was like lifelong Democrats, you know, Philadelphia Democrats. And so that was kind of it. Like we were just sort of, you know, like a conservative liberal family. And yeah, I, we didn't talk a lot about politics in the house growing up. And that was kind of it. But I knew that we were, we were liberal Democrats, you know, who were weirdly enough guided by, guided by, I'm not even going to say faith. I think we were guided by my parents, sort of morals where they were greatest generation, depression babies. And

they voted straight Democrat. But they were not like, even though we were Catholic, it was like, we were not single issue voters, you know. But they, but my family was, my parents were brought up with the same sort of prejudices that people of their generation were brought up with, you know. But, but yeah, politics did not figure in it. It was like, when I got, when I got, you know, a little older and out of the house and everything, that's when I started, you know, investigating my own politics. And it was like a long journey, you know. That is very exciting to me. Just because you're, you're, you came from kind of more of a, you know, a liberally background. And your introduction to Rush Limbaugh was kind of

watching it as a character, right? Yeah. Yeah. I grew up very conservative. My parents were also lower middle class, virgin on poor. And when I was like kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but extremely conservative, I would say like our family religion was conservatism. And so Rush Limbaugh was caught whenever I was driving with my mom or my dad, Rush was on, we would, we listened to him. My parents talked about him. So my upbringing with him was that this guy is like the prophet of, of what's, what's right, you know, both in the political sense and in the moral sense. So I'm very excited about this. And I'm excited that you know who Morton Downey Jr. is, because we're going to be talking about him a bit too. Absolutely. So yeah, Rush Limbaugh is,

it's hard to oversell this guy's influence on our current state of like, I think it would be fair to say we're kind of like verging on civil conflict right now between the right and left in the United States. For sure. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, and I think Rush Limbaugh has a huge, might be the man most responsible for that. I totally agree that his influence cannot be, is it overestimated? Yeah, it cannot be overestimated. It's like, I, the day he died, I tweeted, I tweeted, if I had to say something positive, I guess if I had to say something positive, I'm glad Rush Limbaugh lived long enough to get cancer and die. And then that got, that got picked up by FoxNews.com. They did a roundup of, you

know, liberals celebrating Rush Limbaugh's death, which really was just like, Hey, if you want to harass some people, here's who to harass. And I had people, I had people in my mentions on Twitter, like saying things like, you better pray you never meet me. People implying violence because I said, I'm glad Rush Limbaugh is dead. I had somebody call my call my house and say, Jesus, Rush Limbaugh contributed far more good to society than you ever will. For Rush Limbaugh, this guy, but I mean, this guy had a show. He had a show. He wasn't a legislator. He wasn't, he wasn't like some, some sort of freedom fighter. This guy just had a show where he said mean things. Yeah. Where, where he repeatedly celebrated the deaths of his enemies and made half a billion

dollars doing it. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's get into Rush's life. So the first thing I learned about him when I started digging him in it into him that might be the thing I learned about him that surprised me the most. Rush is not short for anything. Rush is a full, a full first name. And in fact, Rush Limbaugh is the third Rush Limbaugh in his family line. They are very proud of that name. His grandpa, Rush Senior was born and raised in Bollinger County, Missouri. So he and I are both Missouri babies. He grew up into a world that was changing rapidly. Rush Senior saw an electric light for the first time when he was 12. He took his first railroad trip in 1904 to see the World's Fair in St. Louis. Yeah. He, I always thought that I was like,

one of those things he was like, I choose that. That is the most shocking thing about him. He, Rush Limbaugh is not only his full name, it is the only name his family seems to give their firstborn sons. Hey, if it ain't broke. Yeah. If it ain't broke. So Rush Senior became a lawyer. He opened an office in Cape Girardoux, Missouri, and he basically never left the town again. He retired in 1994 at the age of 102, which I mentioned because it suggests that all those cigars, Rush, Rush, Rush Limbaugh smoked, saved us about 32 years more of his shows. Wait, I'm sorry. Did you say he retired at 102? Yeah, in 1994. Yeah. And then how long did he live after that? Did he get to enjoy his retirement? I think he died immediately. From what, yeah, like he's

one of those guys who worked until he died, basically. Say some people are like that. His grandson was like that. Rush Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when he was 40. His main political issue was fighting FDR in the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right? This is deeply, deeply embedded in the Rush Limbaugh line. In 1936, Rush Limbaugh Senior was a Republican delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he helped nominate Alph Landon for the noble job of losing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an election. You don't, nobody, nobody was better at campaigning than FDR. It was never a successful thing to run against that fan. I know. Somebody had to be his Washington generals. Yeah. Alph Landon,

the Washington generals of Republican politics. So my main source for the early life and family history of Rush Limbaugh is a fairly comprehensive, if I would say kind of fawning biography of Limbaugh, by Zeev Chaffetz. And Zeev, it's a weird first name. Zeev, apostrophe, E.V. Chaffetz. He notes that over the course of decades of lawyering, Rush Senior, quote, quietly, but inevitably became well to do, which is an interesting way of phrasing. It was like, there was no stopping it. He just got who's kind of a way of making it seem like he just, he didn't really want to become rich. He just became rich, you know? That is the most suspicious sounding phrase I've written a long time. Inevitably, quietly and inevitably got rich. It's sinister. My God. It is very sinister.

So Rush Junior, who is our Rush Limbaugh's father, was born at some point. Quick Googling, obviously he had been born. Quick Googling didn't return a date. He's the only Rush Limbaugh without a Wikipedia page, which I guess kind of a kind of a shot to him. I could have probably found it out if I'd really dug into it, but it doesn't really matter that much for our purposes. Yeah, he did what he had to do. He gave us Rush. He gave us our Rush. Yes. Our Rush. Our Rush. So Rush Junior is only important for the impact that he had on our Rush. He was a World War II combat pilot, which is undeniably rad. You got to give him that. And his biography notes that he maintained a military crew cut for his entire life. He was heavy set and top data out at about

300 pounds, which earned him the nickname Big Rush. Big Rush. Man, one of those nicknames that you cannot combat. No, no, no. This is sticking. Sorry, Big Rush. Sorry, Big Rush. You can ask politely. It's not going to happen. Hey, man. Why are you in a Big Rush? So Big Rush became an attorney. Sorry, that's what he would tell people because I'm always rushing around. I'm always rushing around. So Big Rush became an attorney, like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape Girardeau during holidays. His very conservative politics influenced these speeches. And his most famous one was a tearful, hagiographic speech about our nation,

saintly founding fathers. Again, you can see he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab that our rush has. And you have to admit, if you know anything about our Rush Limbaugh, he was an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very good at what he did. That's why he had the impact that absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Now, our Rush Limbaugh, a Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the third to give his full name, was born in Cape Girardeau, Mississippi on January or Missouri, sorry, on January 12, 1951. By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with a brother and a parents who loved him. Baby Rush spent his childhood in biving a steady diet of his dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil conniving communists. One of our Rush's childhood friends

recalls of Big Rush of his dad, quote, we'd go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd sit in front of the television drinking black cherry pop, eating popcorn and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters. He'd yell at Dan, rather, they're all typical liberals and rather is the worst one of the bunch. And we'd try to keep him going. You know, Mr. Rush, what do you think about this? Mr. Rush, what do you think about that? Sometimes he'd say, kinder, that was this friend's name. You're going to be the first Dutchman on the moon. I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh task master with his sons. An odd comment. That's so weird.

So Rush has a brother or? Rush has a brother. He has a brother, David, who is his younger brother. No, no, no. I think that's the oldest the oldest son as the rush gets the rush name. Yeah, they didn't do it. George Foreman. David becomes like a lawyer, doesn't really leave Cape Girardeau and is like, you know, he's he, unlike his brother, has a family, has like a wife that he's, you know, stays with and all that stuff. Did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy? I think yeah, I think he was born wealthy. He and his brother were both born rich as hell. Um, so and and our rush's brother, David, provided an even more telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was like under big rush. My dad stood out. Sometimes he provoked people

who didn't agree with him to violence. Once, for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did ask him the details of that one, but it was a couple guys, not a fair fight. I know that much. I have to assume he deserved to get the shit kicked out of him. I'm going to guess he was saying something like the people who got screwed over in the great depression deserve to starve to death. We shouldn't be helping them. That's going to be my guess. And he got the shit kicked out of him by some WPA guys, something like that. If your name is if your name is big rush and two guys go after you, I think that's a fair fight. That's a fair fight. You're big, you know? Yeah, he's not a little rush. He's 300 pounds. They're probably each about a

buck 50, you know, fair fight. Exactly. They're fight by mass. They're thin from being poor. Yeah. So our rush was born into the Eisenhower years, which will probably always be remembered as like the high point of both capitalism and the United States. This period of peak American exceptionalism imprinted itself deeply on Russia's growing brain. His father was made a special ambassador to India's legal system. Their family got their first television. Yeah. I think it means, you know, India's was newly independent in the Eisenhower years, right? The UK had just left. They had just partitioned with Pakistan. They're developing their own independent legal system and they're a democracy that was heavily based, at least initially on the US. So the president like picked

guys who were established lawyers like big rush and also established Republicans to be kind of help set up the Indian legal system. Wow. That's kind of what happened. So yeah, his his father's big man in Republican politics. Rush grows up seeing in the period where America is undeniably like like literally is half of the global economy, right? That's a very significant thing for him. So the family in the 50s gets their first TV, but radio is still the dominant method of entertainment in those days. And Russia's childhood and early adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for DJs. My dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time. He's like seven or eight years younger than Rush. And he grew up. The only

thing my dad ever wanted to be was a DJ and he wasn't a radio DJ for like 20, 30 years. You know, that was like the coolest thing that you could do, right? You didn't have Spotify. You didn't have the internet. People learned about new music from DJs who were kind of like picking what they were going to play on the radio. It was like the absolute raddest thing you could be. And that's what Rush like he idolizes these big DJs of the time. And that's all he wants to be for basically his entire young life is a DJ. Yeah. Now, when Rush was three, Brown versus the Board of Education was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to the integration of U.S. schools. Now, Steve Chaffetz doesn't write anything specific in the biography about how Rush senior talked about

race to his son. I have not. We don't get any of that information. And I'm not necessarily blaming Chaffetz for that because the Rush family is very PR savvy. They don't talk about it. You know, I don't know who he would have gotten that info from. But our Rush would have definitely picked up on the great deal of conflict in Cape Gerardo over racial matters. Missouri is an odd state in that it is both Midwestern and Southern. During the Civil War, it was split between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers and the town that Rush grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides. There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of schools in Missouri and in Cape Gerardo. And Steve Chaffetz, to his credit, writes about this, quote, in 1952, Kate built

its white students a new school, Central High. Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the Supreme Court and basketball changed that. Cape Gerardo took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title. The 1953 team was expected to be a powerhouse, but word got around that the kids from Cobb were even better. An informal game was arranged between Central and Cobb High, says historian Frank Nicol. Cobb won. Shortly thereafter, Cobb mysteriously burned down. Black students went to school and churches and private homes that year, but a more permanent solution was, yeah, that's the kind of town he grows up in. The black kids went to basketball and they burned their school down. Wow. Yeah. Cape Gerardo is a

very racist town and kind of more to the point like we don't know exactly what what Rush's dad would have said about any of this. We don't know that he would have supported the burning down of the black school. We don't know that he wouldn't, though. That's right. That's right. And, you know, the the conservatives were definitely more on the don't integrate side of things, right? Right. Now, a compromise was eventually reached in Cape Gerardo. And the compromise was that black kids would be allowed to attend Central High, but they would be put in special classes that were taught by former teachers of Cobb, the school that had been burned down. This was kind of integrating by not integrating. So there were black and white kids in the same

school, but not in the same classes. And this is the way things were in Cape Gerardo when Rush Limbaugh started school. So, yeah, that's you can infer from that what you will based on some of the things Rush Limbaugh says and does later in life. I think we're missing some important information about what his dad thought about black people. Yeah, I don't remember ever being concerned as to the investigation of that fire. I don't think he was. He might have done it like that. He's rampant and irresponsible speculation on my part, but also the only reason I think he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't have been able to run away from it in my from what I can tell. He didn't do well in that fight is all I'm saying. So,

Rush had an upbringing that would have been fairly standard for a rich kid of his era. He played basketball. He did chores. He had plenty of friends. He was not an overly active kid. He did not like sports. He hated his one year in the Cub Scouts. Rush Limbaugh hates the outdoors his entire life. He did not like school, but he was popular largely because his family was rich and had a huge basement with a pool table and a bunch of other luxuries. The kids Rush hung out with during this time give us some of our best hints about the darker elements of his childhood. One of them told Steve Chaffetz, quote, Rush's dad didn't suffer fools lightly. He was always very disapproving of Rush's ambitions to have a career in radio. Rush's mom was a kind, gentle

person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down Russian David in front of their friends. And when he did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times. So kind of abusive, not I don't think by the standards of the time. And I haven't heard any that he was like reading his kids or anything, but kind of mentally abusive, again, probably more or less in line with what most most men of his social class would have been like to their kids. You know, I don't think this was abnormal. I mean, how many how many of these guys were born out of the the the sort of ritual humiliation by their fathers in front of an audience? Yeah, I think most of them, you know, it's like it's such a it's such a common thing that I guess

I'm just glad my dad was a guy who didn't say anything ever. Yeah, it's better than humiliating you in front of your friends when you say something he disagrees with. So everyone of Rush's early friends that I've seen interviewed is very consistent about the fact that he was not political from an early age. He rarely if ever talked politics and he did not express strong beliefs. One of his friends even remembers him as a particularly good debater in school because quote, he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat. When he did express political opinions, they were generally conservative. One friend noted that the only time he saw child Rush express a strong political sentiment was after the 1960 presidential election, when

Rush was nine, quote, Rush wrote on a drywall, Kennedy won darn Nixon lost shucks. So he grows up conservative because his dad is conservative, but it's clearly politics is not a big part of his life from an early age. He's not like Ben Shapiro, right? We're from the get go. He's being sort of like focused into becoming a political commentator. That does not happen with Rush Limbaugh. Right. He's more from the Darn Shucks School of the Darn Shucks School of Political Commentary. Yeah. So Rush got his first gig at age 13 working at a downtown barber shop. He later told his biographer that he liked the gig because it gave him a chance to talk to adults who he preferred to his peers because I didn't think kids were interesting.

When it came to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect. He was bad at sports, heavy set and not at all smooth. In his 1993 biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story, biographer Paul Colford recalls one particularly embarrassing incident during a game of spin the bottle when Rush was a teenager. He spun the bottle and it stopped at and it stopped pointing at the prettiest girl at the party, which is how she's described in this anecdote. She looked at him and gasped, couldn't do it. Not with him, that is. And everyone in the room witnessed this humiliation. It was a wound he would nurse forever. That's nice. Thank you, biographer, for that.

And it's one of those things. I think there's... I'm sure this has an impact on the kind of man he becomes. But also, I think most of us have a moment like that where we have a crush on some person of the opposite or the same sex and they're not into us. And it's horribly embarrassing. It's a pretty... And most of us don't grow up to destroy civil society in the environment. We've all been there. And Rush was there too. Obviously, this is a part of whatever toxic stew gets cooked up at him. But I don't know. It's one of those things I think you can kind of lean too much on, oh, this is why he was always forever humiliated by this thing. And that's why he became the man he was like, well, we all have that in our past. And we all don't do this shit.

It's very much like the original origin story of Lex Luthor that Superman blew out his hair. Superman was responsible for him going prematurely bald. And he became a super villain because of this. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there are a lot of other bald men in that world who don't become super. So Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer or to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas, right? The Limbas were big men in Cape Gerardo. They were kind of like the primary, like the most prominent men in the entire town. And he, Big Rush wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and do something respectable. Didn't have to be a lawyer, go into politics, do something important, right? Do something that he can brag about to the other rich guys. Now, the fact that

Young Rush only ever wanted to be on the radio infuriated his father. For his part, Rush seems to suspect that his love of radio was born in part from his hatred of school. Quote, my mother would be fixing me breakfast and I'd be listening to the guy on the radio. He'd be having fun and I was preparing to go to prison. I mean, join the club, Rush. Yeah, we all hate school. It's trash. It never occurred to me to relate to the guy on the radio. Like, how come he gets to have fun this grown adult and I have to go to school? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of kids. Let's I'll take my adopted hometown, Portland, for example, a lot of kids there who hate school, they don't destroy

the entire planet. They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends and that's much healthier, Rush. You can just fuck up a Starbucks if you're nursing some rage at the educational industrial complex or whatever. So despite his irritation, Big Rush clearly did love his son. And when Little Rush was 16, his dad used some of his local clout to get his son a part time job at the local radio station. Rush started doing what you today call internship, you know, fetching coffee, cleaning up, handling odd tasks here and there. And eventually he was allowed to actually introduce and play records on air. The summer before his senior year of high school, Big Rush paid for his son to attend a six week radio engineering course in Dallas. This was a big moment for Rush.

He was away from home for the first time, living in a boarding house. He started smoking cigarettes, thank God. And he got a license that allowed him to actually and he got a license that allowed him to actually run the radio without adult supervision. Once he had this station management let him hang out alone all weekend and weekdays after school playing records and for the first time presenting himself to an audience on air. So he gets started and this is one of those things. His dad clearly there are some abusive elements of their relationship. His dad is not supportive of Rush's radio career, but also is like his dad is doesn't think it's a good idea, but also enables him, right? Like not just gets him a job, but pays for him to get educated. So again, this is not a

guy, I'm sure, you know, he had his frustrations with his father. This is not a guy who grows up with a dad who just doesn't get him and refuses to support him. This is a very supportive upbringing this kid has, even though his father's not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So Rush, you know, becomes kind of famous within his, you know, the teen set at his town because he's the guy with the radio show and in high school. And he was not at all political at this point. His most well-known bit involved reading the Daily Beauty Tips that the Associated Press sent out back then, which he like, and he would like kind of mock the beauty tips because he thought it was silly that the AP was sending out Daily Beauty Tips, which is fair. It is that is a silly thing for the AP to do. Now, Rush's

professional idol at this point was a guy named Larry Lujak, Lujak, a Chicago DJ who was famous for his sense of humor and comedic stylings. Rush later called him the only person I ever copied. Lujak was known for audibly shuffling papers during his monologues and different bits, a tactic Limbaugh copied and used repeatedly through his decades on air. And as in kind of... That was like his signature bit. No, no, he wasn't a bit, but it was like a thing he would do to emphasize that like, I've got evidence or I've got information here, you know. It was a thing, Rush. And it was a big Rush Limbaugh thing, you know. It's how you convince people who maybe aren't that credible that you have good information, right? Like, look, I have

papers. He's been handed this ream of paper that has information on it, so it's true. But Lujak was not a political guy, right? He was just a DJ. No, he was not. And he fucking hated Rush Limbaugh because when Rush got famous in the early 90s, Rush was like, yeah, Larry Lujak is the only man I ever copied. And they asked Lujak about it. And his response was basically, fuck that guy. Bless you. Bless you, Larry Lujak. Good man. Yeah. Yeah. You can't pick who finds you influential, you know. Yeah. So back in those days, again, being a radio DJ was pretty much the coolest thing you could do. And Rush's side job made him very popular at high school. He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work was intoxicating and Rush seemed to know at once

that this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing. Obviously, his ambitions did not make his father happy. And during Rush's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio. No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though. He was miserable at home with his father after graduating. He enrolled in a local college just to please the old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go to school very often. Sometimes his mother would drive him to college just to make sure that he went. Rush came of age during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in U.S. history. I mean, he's literally becoming an adult in like 1968, I think. Like some shit

went down that year, you know? There's a lot of teenagers doing some exciting things. Now, given how Rush turned out, you might have expected him to have been active and involved in the politics of his time, but he was not. And to hear him tell it now or to hear him tell it when he related this to his biographer, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam years basically all passed him by. He never attended political rallies. He only dimly remembers hearing of Bobby Kennedy's death. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, his radio station asked him to help send out news reports for the local NBC affiliate because there were uprisings all around the country. And Rush did this, but he didn't actually engage with the news. He was not actually

interested in what was happening. He was just interested in kind of the business of how news was disseminated. This is what he said later. I remember talking to them about the broadcast business in BC. I was 17 playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don't recall feeling any concern. So that is how, again, a lot of privilege. There are massive race-based uprisings in a number of U.S. cities. Hundreds of thousands of National Guard troops are called up as after the civil rights leader is assassinated. The country is on the brink of open conflict. And Rush Limbaugh, I don't give a fuck. I just want to play him a record. He's just a rich white kid in the middle of Missouri. He doesn't give a shit. It's so wild to think about someone

being alive at that time and not having a strong feeling either way about anything that's going on. He doesn't even have strong hard right sympathies. He just doesn't give a fuck about it. That is a kind of privilege that I can't even begin to fathom. And it is important that he's not just taking the right wing side of things. We're like, well, you have Martin Luther King, he was a commie. He just doesn't care. Like none of this even makes it into his mind. Like I did it, you would say, Martin Luther King, who is that again? Which guy? Bobby, who got killed? Ken or what? Dimly aware that RFK was assassinated. Yeah, it's quite a thing.

Oh, so I'm going to quote now from a write up in the New York Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early twenties, quote, love of radio eventually won out over formal education, and he dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling his parents, then began a long checkered Odyssey typical of radio limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities, working under different names and broadcast styles. He was Rusty Sharp and Jeff Christie. He was a DJ, a newsreader, a talk host. In each place, he developed components of what would later emerge as the limbaugh style. In Pittsburgh, he was a prankster, convincing listeners that he could see them through a new experimental picture phone. So he's kind of like a drive time morning DJ.

I don't know. I can't do the DJ voice, but like playing like sound bits and doing gags, like he's very like not even really a shock jock yet, because he's not like combat that has that's like starting to evolve in this period of time. Yeah. I did find some audio from Run of Rush's very first broadcast in 1974 while he was still in Pittsburgh. And I think it's interesting because in it you can hear Rush in mid transition from that drive time DJ voice to the voice of the Rush Limbaugh who would help breed a modern American fascist movement. So here he is on WXZ's solid rock and gold show. So without further ado, here is Rush Limbaugh in 1974. Also appearing with Shanna Knight opening the show will be Billy Cook's Rainbows and Gypsies. See the exciting

name of Dolphin rated PG now showing at the Ardmore Drive in Bellevue, Bethel Cinema, Camphorn Drive in Carnegie Cinema and Cinema World. Day of the Dolphin also showing at the Hampton Plaza, McKee Cinema, Oaks, Penn Hills, Regent and Rodgerson theaters. See Day of the Dolphin now at these to Wickley, South Hills, South Park Drive in, South Hills Drive in and Sunset View Drive in. I certainly hope new people are writing all of this down. Don't miss a Day of the Dolphin, it is now showing. So very silly as all radio from the 1970s sounds today, right? Yes. Most radio today sounds. But also like there's you would never have guessed based on his early performances that he was going to become what he became, right? No. I mean, look, he has undeniably great voice.

You know, very good at imparting information, like actual factual information. This movie is for sure playing here at this time. Day of the Dolphin, absolutely. I can't wait to see it. Yeah, I'm not. It's the exciting movie Day of the Dolphin. But that he's just straight reading things that you cannot misinterpret in any way if only he's stuck to that. But yeah, it's so, so I guess I don't want to get ahead of us and get ahead of ourselves. But the idea that this guy would not be content doing just this is like when does it the idea that it turns like I don't know. Yeah, we'll get to that. I think it's fair to say this is what he loved and he would have been perfectly happy if he could have made a good we're getting the kind of like a Hitler at art school

story where like, yeah, maybe if he'd gotten to keep being a drive time radio DJ, things would have been better. You know, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who who also does podcasts and radio. And for neither of us, it is our thing, our first thing. But we shared a we had a conversation where we we shared our love of being good at reading copy, like you have to do ads. There is something that's weirdly satisfying about like, oh, I sound like a guy on the radio. I got doing a good job at reading this and making it sound natural and whatever. And it's like, there it like there's isn't that enough enough that there's there's it is a good feeling when you nail an ad read. Yeah, I mean, I think I think everyone who does a who who who does a job

that like, I think it pretty much everyone who has worked, there's a joy in professional competence of any kind, you know, if you're working, you know, if you're like, if you're if you're running like the cash cashier to grocery store, right? When you get really good at bagging, like it's this, oh, yeah, the kind of ecstasy of competence, right, where you can kind of lose yourself in a task, you know, and be like, I'm as good at this thing as I can be, even if you don't like the job, there's a satisfaction in that one. I think Rush was happy in this period doing he wasn't rich, he wasn't influential, but he was doing a thing he loved well, and he was happy in this in the in this period in the early 70s. So his early material in Pittsburgh is interesting

to me, because it's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from him. One of his reoccurring bits was the friar shuck radio ministry of the air, where he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw coming into the station on Sundays. He thought these guys were grifters, and he hated them. The center of this bit was that no matter your problem, God would solve it if you'd send the radio preacher $100. That's interesting to me. And this is like a real like running theme in his early career is he made fun of preachers all the time of the exact kind of religious grifters that later helped make him a wealthy man. It's very interesting to me. Yeah, there's also he also would read letters from fans. And at one point he read a letter that

he said was from a young woman who wanted to be a DJ and was worried that her gender would hold her back. Here's what he told her on the air. This is interesting to me, too. You just have to master two techniques. And I'm going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of microphone to use it simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie is queuing up the record, get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shock, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm in the needle, place it on the outside editor of the record, then turn the record till you hear the beginning of the record, back it up a quarter of a turn. And when you get through talking, the record will start after you have

mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex and interpret that a couple of ways about the mansplaining about how to turn on a microphone. And then he goes, oh, wait, you can't do it. Well, that that I think there's two ways to interpret this. One of them is what you said, Sophie, that he was just being incredibly sexist. One of them is that he might he might have been acknowledging anyone could do this job, but you won't be able to as a woman because of sexism in the industry. And I'm really not sure which one he was going for there. There is a kind of lording it over like, you know, this is a dumb job, but you're still not allowed to do it. You're still not allowed to do it, ladies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that that's probably, probably accurate. It's

probably a bit of you know what all ladies are allowed to do products. Is it at Sophie? Is it participate in capitalism as consumers? Yes, it is participate in capitalism. Well, ladies, stick it to Rush Limbaugh by engaging positively with the system he spent his life propping. All right, shit. You know, I didn't like the phrase stick it to Rush Limbaugh very much. Neither did I, Sophie. Here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the

little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic

science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back from those ads. And Paul, I can see the glow on your face that only comes upon a man's face the first time that he gets to help advertise the fine products and services brought to us by the people at Raytheon. Are you feeling good, Paul, about now you are an inextricably tied to wonderful products like the R9X knife missile? As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, I dreamed of advertising for missiles. That's what everyone wants to do, right? Yeah.

Since cavemen painted on walls, they dreamed of Raytheon. And now we are in the privileged position of getting to sell their products and I couldn't be happier. Here's what sucks. Raytheon is such a cool name. It's so good. Yeah. I mean, this ongoing bit I do, I often, like the R9X missile, I think is made by Lockheed. Raytheon's guidance chips, I believe are in it. To be fair, it's just the name Raytheon is such a good, shady defense industry. It's the name of a company that ends the world, right? You're talking about like, they're going to make a Skynet that kills us all at some point. Their name is just two on point to not be. Yeah. So back to Limbaugh. Rush was popular in Pittsburgh and his bosses

appreciated everything but his long-windedness. They repeatedly sent him memos that stated, shut up and play the records. And for a while, he was content to mostly just do that. But in 1974, the economy took a nosedive and Rush was fired. He had to move back home with his family, where he lived for seven miserable months. His dad repeatedly badgered him to move on and start a real career. But Rush was committed to radio and eventually he landed a new gig in Kansas City, where he started taking listener phone calls for the first time. This was the dawn of the era of insult comedy, a sort of mean-spirited comedy based on pranks and, you know, primarily executed by shock jocks, guys embodied by Howard Stern, really, who entertained via ostentatious cruelty.

Hungry for success. Can I ask you this? I'm sorry. I don't know if you'll know or not. Like talk radio, how much of a thing is it at this point of people calling in to radio stations to have conversations with broadcasters? It's starting at this point, right? This is really kind of the birth of talk radio and Rush is on the ground floor of that, right? Does it start with sports or does it start with issues? I think it starts with issues. It starts with there. But before what we know is talk radio, you had had people who would take calls and talk about politics, both on TV and on the radio. And one of the things that Rush changes to skip ahead a little bit is that those guys had mostly been interchangeable, right? They were just sort of

fielding calls and engaging with with callers. Rush, and that kind of turns into with these shock jocks, more of kind of a comedy based entertainment. You have these pranks, you have insults, you have all this stuff. So it kind of it evolves out of a thing that had been going on for much longer. Right. It's an extension of the idea of the the original idea of the DJ was maybe a personality, but his main thrust was I'm giving you this music that you crave. And that's why you like me is because I'm going to maybe get I'm going to maybe get tracks before other people get them. And you're going to hear you're going to hear this stuff first. But there's still a thing of it's not about my personality necessarily. It's mainly about I am the I am I'm I'm I'm the

Santa Claus of music. I'm giving you these things. Yes. And that's why you like me. Yes. And I have access to them first and all this stuff. Right. Right. So Rush kind of as this, you know, he kind of sees the writing on the wall, right? He loses his gig as a traditional DJ, because that is starting to become less profitable, right? And there's, you know, in general, the economy is taking a shitter. So he realizes that kind of the way things are going is more based around personalities and comedy and entertaining people. And he starts to pivot to that. So this is there's a well, an interesting quote that Rush himself wrote in one of his many interminable books about how he felt about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote, I found out something

about myself, something that was quite disturbing. I found out I was really, really good at insulting people. For example, the topic one day was when you die, how do you want to go? I want to go the cheapest and most natural way I can. One nice lady caller from Independence, Missouri said, my response was easy, have your husband throw you in a trash bag and then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage. When I went home after after a day of this, I didn't like myself. Is that being, I don't know if that's being good at insulting people. Yeah, that's not really insult. That's just, that's just being ready to insult people. Yeah. Yeah. It is, though, one of the things people state, and I can't categorically say this,

but it seems accurate based on my recollections of the show is even when people would disagree with Rush on the air, he wasn't an asshole to them. Like he was not cruel to to his callers, to their faces, right? He would say cruel things about liberals. But when people would call in, he would not like call them monsters. He would not like, he seems to have genuinely not liked insulting people to their faces or at least over like directly insulting people over over the phone or whatever. While he was disturbed by this, he was not disturbed by racism, mainly racism against black people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here's where we're going. At one point during his call in show, he claimed he had a black caller and he came

claimed to not be able to understand the man's accent. Limbaugh hung up on this black man after saying, take that bone out of your nose and call me back. Which is pretty damn racist. I mean, he says it was. We'll get to that. At another point, he asked his audience, have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? Wow. Now, during a 1990 interview, after he'd kind of risen to political prominence, Newsweek asked Limbaugh if he thought these statements had been racist. He replied, you may interpret it as that, but I know honest to God, that's not how I intended it at all. Gee, don't get me on in this one. I am the least racist host you'll ever find. Now, if we're going to try to analyze Rush from

the length of his career, I think we can say two things. He's probably being honest when he said that he felt bad about insulting callers because he did not continue to do that. He is probably being dishonest when he says that he's not racist because he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things about black people consistently throughout his entire career. Yeah. I mean, the number one indication that someone is racist is when they say they're the least racist. Has that ever been said by a non-racist person? It's always got to be, it's always got to be not only am I not racist, I am the least racist person you're ever going to meet. It's like, you know, maybe don't go that far because it's so easily disproved. Also followed

by the I don't see color people. I don't see color. I would say I think most of the people, I think I don't see color people tend to be performative Obama voters. The I am the least racist person in the world people tend to have strong opinions on why they should be able to say the inward like that would be the split between the right and the left. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And both of you are fucking racist. So shut the fuck up. You mean me, Robert, right? Yes. Yes. She's she's found out about our opinions on Lichtenstein, which I refuse to apologize for in the fucking Swedes. My God, the Swedes. Yeah, you do. You do have issues with the Swedes. I have huge issues, particularly blue, sweet. What did you get? I mean, why did you say that

at the start of that song? OK, sorry. He's rush was rush was still at this point in his career, completely apolitical. His roommate and close friend at the time later told an interviewer, he was scary, smart about everything. But I can't recall us taking talking much about current events. He was funny, though. I was an audience of one. Limbaugh's years in Kansas City were not super successful, and he seems to have recalled them somewhat sourly as the New York Times summarized. Limbaugh likes to say everything I did in Kansas City, I failed at. He got fired from the station and quit radio forever to become an executive with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Five years later, he quit the Royals, convinced his career there was stymied and went

back to radio this time as a news commentator. Again, he got fired for being too controversial. Also in Kansas City, he married twice, both marriages eventually ending in divorce. What are the do we know what the sources of the what the what the type of controversies? Yes, we're about to get into that. Yeah, OK. Yeah, we're about to get into that. Sorry. Paul, come on. So it was in Kansas City where Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator, made his first public appearance after getting pushed out of the Royals. No one really liked him there. He had one friend who was on the team, and that's why he got to keep the job. And when that guy got traded, they pushed him out because they all hated him.

So after getting pushed out of the Royals, he got a gig at KMBZ, a local station. He started satirizing what he considered to be a left wing caricature of a right wing political commentator, right? The initial right wing Rush Limbaugh was satire, and he was being purposely controversial and unreasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point. This was a joke initially. This did not go over well with his middle of the road Mormon station manager, but it made Limbaugh popular with his audience. See, Limbaugh had caught on to the fact that radio was in the middle of a revolution. This was the era where the first big shock jocks, men like Donna Imus and Howard Stern, began their ascents to stardom. I found a wonderful

write up about this era on long reads, which argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk radio star named Joel Pine in the 1950s. And I'm going to quote from this now. We might do an episode on Pine at some point. Quote, his unconventional style dressed up to dress down pinkos and women's livers and riff on rather than read reports was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described, well, the New York Times and Time both did anyway, as an electronic peep show. The personality free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest. But Pine, with a syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. When it comes to manipulating media, icons of

talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, he was the father of them all. Pine briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid 60s for a week's vacation after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn't quite ready for his kind of conservative appeal. So Pine is doing the Rush Limbaugh bit in the 50s and early 60s, but America is not ready for that yet, right? Even 50s Americans like this guy's racist. And a fucking lunatic. Yeah. So now, just so I understand, Rush is this satire that he was doing. Yeah. The idea was here is what left wing people think right wing people are like. And yeah, the point he is trying to make is they see us as they see the left wing sees the right

wing as extreme and hateful and, you know, racist and close minded. Like, is that is that the point he was trying to make? I think so, because he even says like it was a satire, right? Like, that's how it's portrayed in his biography that he was kind of his personality was satiric in nature. And that's kind of the only way I can interpret it is that he was trying to satirize what like kind of the loony right winger, you know. Okay. But through the through the lens of here's how the left sees them. I that's that was never said directly. Yeah, it sounds like it's a protective phrase of like, I was not satirizing these guys directly. I was not satirizing right wing people. I was satirizing how left wing people see right wing. Yes. That is how I have

interpreted what I've read. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That does sound like a base covering kind of thing. Yeah. A bit. I do think he started not believing everything he said. It started as a joke and him intentionally to provoke controversy because controversy brings in listeners and gets gets attention gets word of mouth. That's why he was doing it. And the story of Rush Limbaugh is these these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes what he really believes and is, you know. Yes. So he's he's an apolitical guy who's like this is this is what this is what politics sounds like to me, I guess. Yeah. I think so. And I yeah, that that's how I interpret it. We'll we'll go we'll go over that. Yeah. So obviously, Pine kind of the first right wing

radio shock jock had peaked too early and kind of I guess to steal a phrase from the Nazis shown his power level too early during the Watts riots and he got kicked off the air. Rush though started getting political at exactly the perfect time. This was the early 1980s. Howard Stern came on to the scene in 84. Don I miss had risen to prominence in the 1970s. I miss was another guy my dad listened to a lot growing up. I miss in the morning was like a big part of getting ready for school. Don I miss is going to be on the fucking TV. And you were like this guy's having so much fun and I have to go to prison. I have to go to prison. This guy's having fun. He's talking about nappy headed hose, which was like the phrase that he I forget what it was in reference to,

but like that's what got him in trouble. It was a women's basketball team. Yeah, it was a women's basketball team because Don I miss was also very racist. Sure. So yeah, the world was still not quite ready for the Rush Limbaugh. We knew during while he was like starting to be political at KMBZ, but a diet version of what he would become was now acceptable. And one man who recognized the potential of Limbaugh Stick was Norm Woodruff, a consultant to the station who became the acting program director at Sacramento's KFBK network. KFBK needed a new right wing talk radio host after firing their previous one. A guy you mentioned at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Jr. Morton was extremely popular, and he was very extreme in his antics. This

had allowed his local station in Sacramento to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully controversial things. This did backfire on Morton eventually when he told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman named Tom Chen. Downey Jr. was fired and went into the world of television where he would somehow simultaneously blaze a trail for both Tucker Carlson and Jerry Springer. We will do an episode on him someday because he's a very influential guy. But for today, he matters because his firing, number one, his success proved that being a purposefully controversial right wing bigot was really profitable for radio station. And because when he got fired, Sacramento had a

hole in the station's roster that they needed to fill with another racist right wing shithead, just one who was not quite as racist as Morton Downey Jr. Rush Limbaugh stepped up and said, not being quite as racist as that guy is my middle name. For now. For now. Eventually, I will be much worse. So Rush Limbaugh moved to Sacramento. When he started at the station, his new boss Woodruff told him, we want controversy, but don't make it up. If you actually think something, if you actually believe it, you can tell people why we'll back you up. But if you're going to say stuff just to make people mad, if all you want to do is rabble rouse, if all you want to do is offend and get noticed, that's not what we're interested in. And we won't back you

up. He was clearly lying. I think this was asked covering by the station, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But they would never would never ever push back on his bigotry. But you know who does push back on bigotry, Paul? Ads? Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty

wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergey Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system

today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. And at this point, Rush Limbaugh has launched himself as a right wing shock jock, and he is an instant hit. Zeef Chaffetz writes, quote, the station let him

go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests and encouraged his highly personal right wing monologues. For the first time in his career, he was marketed heavily and aggressively. There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button captioned. How would you like to punch Rush Limbaugh? Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. had been a big star in Sacramento with a five share of the market, 5% of people listening to the radio in a given 15 minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that. He was sharp edged, but good humored. The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor. Morton Downey Jr. reported the Sacramento Bee, but he skates a little further from the edge of the hole in the ice.

Rush was rewarded for his success with a six figure salary, an estimable income in the mid 1980s, even by his father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life, he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle, his wife at the time, bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on air. So he's a hit. You know, this is the start of and it's really just almost straight up from there for his the rest of his career. He finds his niche and he runs with it. Again, he's a very intelligent, talented man. Anybody else will find the Big Rush part really funny. It is very funny.

It's very funny. An hour in, it's still funny. Now, I have long argued that Sacramento is the very mouth of hell itself. And the fact that Rush Limbaugh first saw success as a right wing firebrand there serves to support my hypothesis. Again, his conscious decision as an entertainer was to be a satirical version of a right wing polemicist, deliberately exaggerating the things he did believe for comedic effect. The audience thought he was funny, but I don't think they got the joke. And there is some evidence for this. When in Ohio, evangelists, I would say there is a ton of evidence. A lot of evidence. Yeah. So I think the earliest evidence for this, I should say, is when an Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the theme song from Mr. Ed held a

satanic message when played backwards. You know, we're kind of talking about the satanic panic period during this. Rush found this ridiculous. And again, he had a long history of mocking the evangelical religious right. So when he heard this, he told his listeners that a slim Whitman recording also contained a backwards message from Satan. Zeke Chaffetz writes that to his delight, many Limbaugh listeners took Limbaugh at his word and flooded the station with phone calls, promising to destroy their slim Whitman albums to keep the devil out of the house. Rush considered this a hilarious prank. He did not apologize or as far as I know, correct the record. So we see in this, he's joking, right? He is not. Again, his whole

history is mocking these people. He does not believe this, but he doesn't correct people because it gets he realizes, oh, they're engaged. They're destroying stuff. That means I have power, right? I think he even found it kind of it might have been something that kind of addicted him to this, this idea that like I can make even if I'm deliberately being absurd and lying, I can make people take action based on those absurdities. That's got to be addictive. And I think it is for him. It is absolutely undeniable. And especially if you've spent time on Twitter and if you've ever been like I have on occasion, deliberately stupid on Twitter and gotten sincere replies to something that is so obviously a joke. So obviously a joke. It absolutely is fun. There's

no way around that. There's no way around that. Seeing people take you at your word when you say something that's so patently absurd is it's joyful. It does give you a real jolt. And there's a this is a bit of a different case, but I think there's some similarities. So last summer, you know, I was covering a lot of the protests in Portland, Oregon, including doing a lot of live streaming and very early on they the police put a fence up around the police station. And there would be marches where like a couple of thousand people would march to the fence and somebody would like touch the fence and the police would tear gas like six square blocks of traffic. And I started calling it the sacred fence and the joke like the comment that I was making is that

the police are endangering the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a fence because it's sacred to them, right? That went viral within the city and there were dozens of protests at the sacred fence as everyone called it, including numerous attempts to tear it down. And I know that the way that I framed it had a significant impact on a lot of people getting hurt, damaging a fence, getting arrested. And it was both kind of intoxicating. And it also scared the hell out of me. It was one of the reasons why I pulled back to some extent on some aspects of my coverage, because I got really worried about the kind of impact that you can have on people by doing that sort of thing. I didn't want to be it was very concerning to me. But it was also I'd be lying

if I said there wasn't an element of it that I wanted to do more stuff like that. And I sure didn't. But I wanted to, you know, and that's that that is the key the key difference of you know, you seeing something that catches catches fire in a forgive the the phrasing, but catch fire in a in a in a charged situation and how easily people can glom on to something when everything's so churned up. And then realizing like, Oh, words have power. I have to be careful rather than words have power. Here we go. Here we go. Let's use it to sell gold. So Russia's domestic life while he's enduring all this professional success, his domestic life life with his I think she was his second I think she was his third wife, actually.

I don't know. He had a couple. He had a lot of wives. I think actually, no, this was his second wife, his domestic life with his second life at this period was less than joyful. He was famous and popular, constantly fed for dinners and invited to big events. And his wife, Michelle was much less successful. She quit her job to be his assistant, but she hated the work. Oh, God, that sounds horrible. It's a nightmare. That's grim. That gives me the GVG. Yeah, they were not a good fit. Michelle loved the outdoors. Rush Limbaugh despised them. Two of his colleagues tell a story from around this time of how they convinced him to go rafting once that I think is telling about Rush Limbaugh's personality. So this is one of Russia's friends

talking about at the time they took Rush Limbaugh on a rafting trip in whatever river it is that goes through Sacramento. Quote, it's a very, very mild ride. Bob gave Russian ore and told him to you're going to really love this. You have to know before I start the story, you have to know we're on a baby river. Yeah. Bob gave Russian ore and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current. Rush panicked, stuck the ore out his arm, stiff as a board and upon impact, he fell overboard. We got Rush back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the Grim Reaper. What a fucking baby. I've had people fucking shoot at me and I've people

shell me with artillery and I've never spent three hours talking about it. We fucking baby. So Sacramento is where Limbaugh started picking up what would become a voluminous list of mostly self-inflicted nicknames. He was El Rushbo, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensitive, sensing Mahoroshi. He was also a harmless little fuzzball and the epitome of morality and virtue. He started claiming that his show was hosted by the EIB or Excellence in Broadcasting Network, which did not exist. This joke mainly served as a vehicle for Rush to express his grandiosity. He declared himself on the cutting edge of societal evolution, swore that he was serving humanity and had himself introduced as having talent on loan from God. His opinions were, quote,

documented to be almost always right, 97.9 percent of the time by the Sullivan group, which also did not exist. And again, he's joking and also at a certain point, he starts meaning all of this very literally. Yes. Right? Like, that's kind of how narcissists work. So it may surprise people to know that to hear that Rush Limbaugh's career was launched into the stratosphere in Sacramento, because California is, to most people outside of California, at least, a bastion of liberal politics. Now, if you actually live and spend time in the state, you know, like, for example, if you've ever been to fucking, I don't know, what is that, Orange County, right? Or if you've been up near Redding, there's a shitload. Like, there are more right-wing Californians than there

are right-wingers than there are in, like, a number of U.S. states, right? Like, California has a ton of right-wingers and it has a long, powerful conservative political tradition. California gave us Ronald Reagan. It gave us Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in one of the most surreal turns in political history, is now among the only rational voices on the right in the United States. So, yeah, California has a powerful right-wing. And yes, they are, especially in the last 20 something years, overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists. But in this fact is one of the hints to Rush Limbaugh's rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north of the center of California, not far from some of the most productive farmland in the country.

It is also not far from north-central California, places like Redding, which are right-wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs, and that's partly a response to the liberal and left-wing, like, government that they live under. They see, and this is not, they are not entirely or even largely wrong in seeing this. They see themselves oppressed by many of the rules liberals in the cities put in terms of things like gas taxes, right? If you're living in, if you're a farmer, you know, in central or northern California, a gas tax that is reasonable for people in LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, is a hardship on you, and you're not contributing to the kind of pollution in the cities that the

gas taxes are meant to fight, you know, the strict gun laws and stuff. There's a lot of things, reasons these people have to be angry, and Rush Limbaugh became their voice. So these, these, this kind of infuriated, very radical right-wing who hates the liberals and left that govern California have a voice in Rush Limbaugh. He obliges their sensibilities with a ceaseless stream of attacks on liberal California, and that's what makes him huge, is because there's millions of right-wingers in California, and Rush Limbaugh becomes like, yeah, he's their voice, you know? You could, you might even be able to argue that nowhere but California could have produced Rush Limbaugh as he became. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from the book Rush Limbaugh,

an army of one here. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep ugly Americans off the streets. Militant feminists became feminazis. The green movement was full of environmental wackos. The American left became Kami, Pinko liberals, and the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing deadlet, deadlet, deadlet introduced news updates on what he regarded as the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him as a dimwit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. Before long, Rush was too big to stay in Sacramento, which is,

again, the very mouth of hell itself. He was introduced to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio, who had started his own big radio company based out of New York City. McLaughlin had listened to Rush's show and decided it had the potential to go national. He offered Rush a partnership. And after some haggling, Rush agreed. He moved to New York and made the EIB network a reality. Rush was 37 years old at this point and 21 years into a career of doing almost nothing but broadcasting on the radio. Again, the voice of the so-called populous American, right? Never did anything but radio, really. Yeah. In 1988, he launched a new version of the Rush Limbaugh show, this time for an audience across the nation. It's sort of hard to find his stuff

from the late 1980s, but I found this guest appearance he did not long after in 1991 on another colleague's show for the same network. It gives you an idea of where his radio personality was by this point and of how he presented himself, right? Of how he kind of introduced himself any time he was coming on the air. So that's we're going to play this now. This is kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh we all know now. One of radio's great broadcasters, and he's with us today in the studio. We invited Rush Limbaugh this morning. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, thrill. It's about time. You know, I smoked a little dope to get ready for this in here and I'm ready to go, man. Time one brain behind your back. No, half my brain tied

behind my back just to make it fair. Well, I'll tell you one thing. As I use my talents on loan from God. Oh, man. I heard you got a little loan from ABC Caps A's when you're negotiating your new contract. No, I loaned them some money and I brought you a gift. Los Angeles Times. Oh, great. Well, I wowed them there tonight. It's nice to have a big article on how you flopped in the New York Times six minutes before nine o'clock. You started out with just like a small group of stations on your show. I started out with 56 an hour of 337 with a weekly audience of about six and a half million and average quarter hour of a million seven most listened to radio talk show in America. That's Rush Limbaugh at kind of when he he goes viral. What do you think about

that about that? How he presents himself on here? What does that say to you? It's so the fully formed version of him that I first experienced and like he's really going for it. Like he's really he's really like he's so aggressive in it and and like saying I'm going to come like clearly the the intention is I'm going to come on your show and I'm going to take it over and I'm going to I'm going to be the I'm going to be the alpha here. I'm going to dominate you with this. The presentation of the LA Times is because why that guy got fired from the LA Times or something like no. I think he'd been in Los Angeles and they savaged him in a review. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's um you know it's that frankly it's

like it's all the shit that I hate. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's it's so it's it's aggressive it's mean it's um you know it's he's also correcting him on one of his you know uh eight catch phrases you know you have to get it right. I say it like this every time this is the way it goes um you know it's just uh it's a drag. It's a drag. It's it's a drag. It's also I think there's a thing that he's doing here when we talk about all these phrases half my brain tied behind my back uh you know the uh the talent on love from god all these different phrases that were that he he continuously used for decades. I I don't want to I don't know I hope this doesn't seem a little pompous but I kind of make a comparison between that like the Iliad and the Odyssey right this

like the way that anytime you've got home or introducing it's always like you know the there there's certain phrases anytime Achilles comes up he uses the same kind of phrases same couple of phrases to introduce him these descriptive phrases um to introduce a character that are repeated constantly throughout the because it's a because it was a spoken story right like that's who you're supposed to deliver it that works it gets in people's heads they associate those phrases with those characters rushes kind of do this is an old tactic but it works it's the same thing trump does with his impulse insults crooked hillary right sleepy joe these are effective tactics and that's what rush is doing to to inculcate his followers

primarily with this idea that he is a genius right and again he's joking but he's also not because this shit buries itself in your brain um he's he's he knows what he's doing it's he's a very savvy person yeah it's like when you when you people like that that understand the the importance of branding over having an actual thing to say like it honestly the the what you what the content is secondary to the presentation of here's who I am I'm going to tell you through repetition this is my whole thing it's like they're you know comics that to me it always makes me think of comedians that majored in marketing in college yeah and then it's like okay but are they actually that funny or did they just are they able to really sell themselves so well you know that that the

content is secondary to the image you you have two kinds of people who really are able to build a following you have people who are able to build a following because folks genuinely just enjoy that the work that they're bringing into the world they like their personality they like what they're doing and then you have folks who are able to build a following primarily because they do cult leader shit right yeah that's the that's what the marketing comedians right that's what this is cult leader shit this is how you do it yeah um we do a little bit of that here um but look we're all guilty a little bit we're all guilty a little bit and I'll be guiltier when I get I don't know a couple of hundred people killed by the FDA in my mountaintop compound which I you

know is always the goal Paul you're very welcome if you would like to have an armed standoff with the that's how you know you're successful that's how you know you're successful when a three-letter agency burns you down by anyway I don't need to Waco this time um I want to go for the EPA I want the EPA to get this standoff that's a good one yeah wow I'm so impressed I took an almost an hour 20 for Robert to mention Waco good job yeah I'm getting it you know I realized I was Waco-ing a lot um trying to cut back you know a whole hour 20 and then here he is first Waco but we'll we'll talk off air Paul about synergizing our our cults in the near future anyway so Rush did not tone himself down at all after he went mainstream in fact he grew more extreme and he seems to have

quickly forgotten that he was ever practicing satire in 1990 at the very height of the AIDS crisis Rush launched a new segment on his show the AIDS update and I find it interesting how different sources report on this yeah when Limbaugh died it was obviously a big story the fact that he'd done this AIDS update and it was in fact Limbaugh AIDS update was like the second or third most googled term alongside his name the day he died Snopes and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story but Zeve Chaffetz's biography of Limbaugh came out well before Rush's death and before the AIDS updates were really talked about all that much outside of you know the community they most impacted uh and not I think it's interesting how Zeve wrote about it not knowing

that this was one going one day going to become a significant story so this is how Zeve wrote about the AIDS update after an act up demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City that disrupted a mass Limbaugh chastised militant homosexuals for their disrespectful behavior and shortly thereafter began broadcasting a reverent and tasteless AIDS update segments produced introduced by Dionne Warwick's I'll Never Love This Way Again in his traveling stage show The Excellence in Broadcasting Tour he did a bit when he put a condom over the microphone to illustrate safe speech so that's how the AIDS update was kind of framed by Zeve before it was a big story now here's how Snopes characterized it in their fact check after Limbaugh died and I think before

that but like already that doesn't sound good that no I don't think Zeve is trying to whitewash yeah I think that he just doesn't see it as a big story yeah even just plainly stated that is it's terrible yeah it's terrible yeah and it sounds worse when Snopes goes into more detail on this yeah quote at the height of the HIV AIDS crisis the Rush Limbaugh show featured an AIDS update in which Limbaugh joked about an epidemic that had claimed more than a hundred thousand lives between 1981 and 1990 specifically Limbaugh targeted gay men who had died in addition to joking about their deaths Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment including kiss him goodbye I'll never love this way again and looking for love in all the wrong places

Snopes.com uncovered an interview in the Cedar Gazette from 1990 in which Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon my reaction to what I consider to be extremism in the political mainstream by a group of people. Per the Cedar Gazette Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims but militant homosexuals who blame church and government officials for the epidemic. The AIDS update is meant to offend them Limbaugh said damn right according to a 1998 Los Angeles Times article it was a popular segment but it also created outrage among AIDS activists something not helped by Limbaugh repeat reportedly saying gays deserved their fate mocking the horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get a conservative radio host fired today so obviously

this was never more than a mile bump in Limbaugh's career back in 1990 and it says a lot about where the right would go that a segment dedicated to mocking joyfully the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular right that would become the mainstream for republicans now in 1990 it was still a thing he had to apologize for uh and that year is the year he became officially famous 1990 he had his first live tv appearance on june 2nd when c-span did a special on talk radio um and yeah so this is like he does kind of have to sort of say that he regretted uh doing this that he felt like he was kind of attacking people who um um like he was like I didn't mean to be mocking people who had died I was trying to attack these militant activists and so I stopped

who are so far still alive yeah yeah who are so far still alive for the moment yeah um anyway that so he does a tv appearance on c-span in 1990 on june 2nd which is kind of his first big tv appearance um and then the new york times does a big profile on him uh from that quote with its characteristic attention to production values the network simply set up a camera inside a spare wabc 77 studio in new york and let the self-proclaimed most dangerous man in america roll cut to a schlub in a cheap white dress shirt black tie and hastily barbershopped helmet of hair already wiping sweat and grumbling about the tv lights planted behind his desk and mic interrupting the station's young newscaster kathleen mohoney she's trying to do her five minute top of the hour

update oddly for 1990 while wearing a mask because as she explains the host had warned her it could be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on tv as a liberal feminist he was only joking limbaugh insists you said wear a bag over my head maloney says limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off complimenting her beauty and interjecting impatiently the news just holds up everything here i'm trying to make the news worthwhile there's a lot in there the fuck jesus christ that's his that's a new york times report on his cc span appearance yeah he's like both saying you should cover your face because my listeners will harass you for being a liberal feminist and also take off that mask let everyone see your pretty face yeah like he's simultaneously both threatening her

and um and sexually harassing her it's wild that that's good it it seems there's something about that that seems so modern do you know what i mean yes yes yeah i thought that could uh he's because he he he brought the created the modern right you know yeah so you can see it you know in 1990 that's what he's doing yeah now 1990 is as i said also when the gray lady published their first full feature dedicated to l rush bow the article is fascinating and valuable since it seems like few copies of his early 1988 to 91 92 episodes exist so this new york times right it provides us with several fascinating insights into how russia's show evolved during this period and more to the point into where american conservatism was about to follow in his wake at one point a critic calls

in this is again the new york times are writing about his show from an episode we don't have anymore so at one point in the show uh a critic calls in and tells rush quote i believe you are doing a great disservice by using the program to convince people that if poor people are not successful it is their fault you were just a paid advocate of the rich and you despise the poor now that's very accurate uh the author of the new york times article uh notes that perhaps due to his guilt over his crueler shock jock days rush is very polite to his liberal callers and this is what the new york times writes as rush's answer you misunderstand my point there is nothing wrong with being rich it's not evil most rich people earned it by virtue of hard work this has always

been the country that people come to because there has always been a chance for opportunity and if you start punishing the people who bust their tail to be prosperous then you're going to unmotivate people to try that i am not a paid defender of the rich i am a proud promoter of the american way of life yeah what are the i guess that's a thing you can just say that most rich people earned their money like yeah it's it's it's objectively untrue but yes you can say that objectively untrue but i guess if you if you are born to wealth but then you also get a job that makes you even well yeah it's like that's hard work i mean look at uh elon musk jeff bezos bill gates all guys who were born to wealth they weren't born crazy rich they weren't born with

fuck you money but they were born into wealth and then they were able to get fuck you money because of the key and there's a lot written about that you know bill gates having access to a computer in an era when basically no one did uh bezos being able to secure a huge loan from his parents in order to help start his first business uh elon musk also getting a loan from his dad to start a business you know it's the way it always works for these people and they they spin that as self-made you know yeah um yeah because in their mind it's true because in their mind it's true and they do work hard and if you work hard you can convince yourself that you've earned it as opposed to like i worked hard but it only like i can say i worked hard i can also say i am only

financially successful because i got lucky and i know other people who worked as hard as i did who have not been nearly as financially successful and it's not because of a lack of talent it's because i got a break that they didn't you know that leaving leaving that leaving that part out is how you're able to convince other people that uh that the majority of people who are the majority of people are wealthy did through hard work yeah it's nonsense so that new york times piece reveals that by 1990 rush was already popular enough to draw massive in-person crowds and this was unheard of for a talk radio personality today we're well acquainted with right-wing thought leaders who can draw thousands upon thousands of fanatically loyal followers to in-person gatherings

but rush was really the first from the times quote there are towns where he is unheard unheard and unheard of and then there are places like tampa where the announcement of a rush limbaugh stage show sold out the 2200 seat ruth eckard hall in four days the occupants of those seats are out of them ensuring when limbaugh appears in a three-piece tuxedo they're like the crowd for a country western concert says dan woolli the halls director of operations after sizing up the crowd in the lobby surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers you're gonna have fun tonight limbaugh tells them and at the same time you're gonna learn some things pacing constantly he does some jokes that poke fun at the japanese and the liberal media uh one of his jokes is that judgment day

comes and the washington post article banner reads world ends tomorrow women minorities hardest hit it's like that's the you know you see what he's going for there yeah i see what he's going for sure yeah later in his live show rush engaged in a popular bit wherein he brings a piece of shit to a modern art gallery uh and the joke is that like modern art is so dumb that if you like poop and take right right it's very obvious this is it you can find ben ship hero making the same basic joke decades later and the the gist of it is that just of it is that you know liberals are so dumb they'll stare at shit if you tell them it's art uh the times introduces this bit and then moves on to something that i found chillingly relevant quote art criticism is a limbaugh staple he believes

there is a culture war going on between those upholding decent values conservatives and the commie lib hordes trying to devalue human life and worse undermine private enterprise limbaugh's sermon on art brings out the evening's only heckling a female cry of censorship oh no limbaugh protests he never spoke that word but seconds later he allows that censorship isn't really so bad it has been used throughout this nation's history as a means of maintaining standards yeah what the fuck is he talking about what he's talking about is spreading the needle that the right is now the sit like right the mate i went i was in fucking i took a concealed handgun course in texas because i'm getting my out of state permit so i can be armed in more parts of the

united states because of all i'm i mean that is like going to cooking school in paris yeah well and and the things started with like a 30 minute lecture from the instructor on cancel culture like this is the big thing within the right i know i know i know wow this is the big thing within the right now and it limbaugh is starting both like saying like well the liberals want to like censor us when i want to cut out all ideas they disagree with and then he put he moves on to saying but also it's okay to censor people sometimes right because this is what the right believes it's cancel culture if you if people don't like it and if they suffer financial consequences for being racist but it's not cancel culture if they go out of their way to censor

left wing and liberal voices which they do through things like school books right objectively true well documented this is how the right works absolutely um i don't know when listening is going to disagree but it's frustrating but it is it is absurd the idea of you know like it's it's cancel culture if you if you compare being conservative to being a jew in 19 late 1930s berlin to like it should be illegal to give the finger to the flag yeah it's amazing and that paul is the end of part one of what is going to be like three hours of talking about rush limbaugh wow way more time than he deserves but how are you had to do it i mean he deserves this much time not in a good way but in a we need to understand what this man has done to us all

absolutely and it's also if you're if you're willing to go to bat for rush limbaugh because you think it's mean that somebody is glad that he's dead um let's lay it all out and here's here's why some people might might not be so sad that a human life is three hours of evidence yeah yeah yeah evidence both that he deserves to have his death cheered and also that he loved laughing at people's deaths yeah yeah you're on him in a way yeah you are you are it's what he would have wanted but you know what i want right now paul i want you to plug your plugables well let's see uh you can find me um on social media at pf tompkins on twitter and instagram uh i have a bunch of podcasts going on at any given time um freedom uh which i co-host with lauren lapkas

and scott ockerman and stay of homekins which i co-host with my wife we started a podcast during the pandemic and unfortunately we are still doing it um uh and i do uh i do shows the first uh live streaming improv shows the first monday of every month with my friend lauren lapkas um and um that all those tickets can be found at paulftompkins.com slash live awesome well speaking of cancel culture this episode is now over and thus canceled because of the libs it's it's done bye what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smeadly butler was all that stood between the us and fascism i'm ben boland i'm alex french and i'm smeadly butler join us for this sorted

tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space

well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts