Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Morton Downey Junior: The Ur-Media Grifter

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Robert is again joined by Tom Reimann to discuss Morton Downey Junior. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? 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. 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. That was German name for paratrooper. I don't know why I started the episode saying that. Nobody knows why you did that. How are you doing? Do you know that the German word for paratrooper is fallschirmjäger? I did not know that.

Well, now you do. Thank you. The Nazis had an aquatic little jeep that could go in the water. They called it schwimmenwagen. That's sweet. That's kind of funny. What do we call it? That's our schwimmenwagen. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is.

It sounds like a G.I. Joe vehicle. It does. The old... The Schwimmenwagen. Tom. Yeah. How are you feeling? Two pieces of shit under this.

I'm vibing on some clown shoes right now. You are vibing on some clown shoes. Well, right now, Tom, this exact moment, the second in time that we both inhabit, which may be eternal. If certain philosophers are right, this very moment could go on forever. Both forwards and backwards in time. Could be completely encompassing, as all moments are. This moment, we're going to talk about a guy you have heard of, Mr. Morton Downey. Oh.

Joan Yarre. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Dance is all the way down. Yeah. Just hits my ears. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's a name. That's a name. Yeah. Tom. Yeah. That's a way, as we call him. He's like a pinky ring that fell into a puddle of toxic waste and became a man. He plays the slimy journalist that Danny Glover punches in the face in Predator 2.

He sure is in Predator 2. You're goddamn right. He's just playing himself. Yeah. He's absolutely playing himself in Predator 2. Which is incredible. Yeah. Easily the second best Predator movie. It's easily the second Predator film.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. You can't take that away from it. Yeah. It is the second one of them. Indisputably the second Predator film. Yeah.

I know. He was sort of like the ying to Phil Donahue's yang at the time, where Phil Donahue was like kind of nice and personable and Morton Downey was a real son of a bitch. Yeah. Morton Downey was a real piece of shit. Yeah. Morton Downey Jr., Tom, is that if you start researching Morton Downey Jr., the first like Google result that tries to autofill when you start typing his name in is, is Morton

Downey Jr. related to Robert Downey Jr.? And my answer to that is it does not appear to be so. No. Just a fun coincidence. Which is weird because he does have a famous dad like Robert Downey Jr., but just a completely different one. I just, that's very funny. So let's, let's, let's, let's talk about MDJ.

So Morton Downey Jr. was born on December 9th, 1932 in Los Angeles, California. His father was obviously a guy named Morton Downey. Yeah. Two thirds of these guys are Californians. Oh, that in the 30s. I'm like, fuck, he's old. Yeah. Like a lot of these, as far as ancient dusty old racist mummies.

Well, that's because they were established by the time the 80s got going and they could really start fucking some shit up for everybody. That's true. I keep thinking the 80s was four decades ago. Yeah. It's been a long time since the 80s. Thank God. So, um, his father was obviously Morton Downey, which probably means nothing to everyone listening,

but it meant an awful lot to people in the 1920s and early 30s. Morton Downey's nickname was the Irish Nightingale, and he was one of the most popular singers of his day. He had Morton Downey Jr., whose first name was Sean, with his first wife, Barbara Bennett. And Barbara was famous because she was the sister of two women who were famous actresses. Morton Downey Sr. would ultimately have five children, four sons and a daughter. He was not a nice man, or at least people who knew Morton Downey Jr. say he did not think well of his father.

There is, in fact, significant evidence that he despised the man. He desperately wanted to succeed as a singer, and he tried repeatedly as a young man to follow in his father's footsteps, appearing on early game shows where his performance was reviewed positively by guys like Dean Martin. I thought he had an all right voice, but most experts agree he just didn't have what his father had. There was something lacking in his voice that he was just never going to have the kind of career his dad had.

The Downey family were well-to-do. He grew up rich-ish. If you want to know how well-to-do they were, they lived in Hyannisport in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and their next-door neighbors were the Kennedys. That's how much money they got as kids. Rich-ish? Yeah. Yeah, they're hanging with the Kennedys.

Morton Downey Jr. was good friends with Joe Kennedy, while Morton Downey Sr. was good friends with Joe Kennedy. When Morton Downey Jr. was a child, he would hang out regularly with the Kennedy boys. He knew Robert and JFK when they were younger. They were all buds together, I guess. Downey, and he's a bit younger, but Downey attended New York University, and like our other subjects, seems to have immediately known he wanted a career in radio. He got a job as the program director and announcer for a radio station in Hartford, Connecticut

in the early 1950s. Over the next decade and change, he was hired primarily as a DJ, although he also sang for several pop and country records and wrote a handful of songs that saw modest success. Like Wally George, Morton Downey Jr. bounced around various markets, Phoenix, Miami, Kansas City, San Diego, and Seattle. Also like Wally, he was a huge asshole and had trouble working with people. He was forced to resign from a Miami network when he gave the home phone number for a competing DJ out on the air and insulted the man's wife.

Oh boy. Like Doc's the guy on live on the air. I want to hear him croon. I had no idea that was his background. Oh, I mean, we can. He cut an album, Tom. Oh boy. You know what, Tom?

We'll play this right now. Sweet. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's do this now. I need you to hear his song about the war on drugs. What's it called? Hey there, Mr. Dealer. Man, hey there, Mr. Dealer, and drunk, pushin' son of a...

Messing up the minds of the kids of America, just to make your f***ing rich. You're the sleaze-bag of the country, the garbage of our lives. He's like attacking the microphone. You're the wind to welcome you to his eternal home. He looks like a skeleton at a costume contest dressed as Dean Martin. All right, that's probably enough of hay there, Mr. Dealer. Dear God, it is enough. This will mean more when you had...

Dean Martin was too kind to him. He was better when he was younger, too. His earlier shit is, I think, because he was famous when he recorded this. So he was like doing a thing. But he's still like, yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah, I don't think he had a bad voice and the stuff you can hear from younger. There's a good documentary about him. He's attacking the song.

But yeah, he is going real aggro there. And it's because, you know, he was already a name at that point. I think he was he was doing a bit or maybe he just like was out of his mind because that's what being famous does to you after a while. I know you can see the cocaine just like in an aura. Yeah, yeah, it followed him around. In 1968, Morton took a break from his work, his career, which was again, he was kind of a mix of a DJ and a kind of a pinch hitter in the music industry

coming in to do background vocals and stuff to work on that campaign for his good childhood friend, Bobby Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, Morton wrote a book of poetry with the title Quiet Thoughts Make the Loudest Noise. The book was a way of processing grief and you can still find a handful of hardcover copies on Amazon for like one hundred and forty eight dollars. So I am not buying one of them. But I did transcribe one of the poems he wrote specifically about

Robert Kennedy's death from the documentary of Acatur. And I'm going to read that to you now. Row upon row of grief racked followers, sunken cheeks, replacing their years ago happy faces, saying proudly for their departed friend, their final hope and wondered why a man must die to be a hero. And whether we honor only those our own selfish hearts destroy. Hmm. Yeah. I don't think sunken cheeks is what he meant to say, but.

But yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's kind of profound. All right. All right, Morton. He's certainly like a man who's thinking about like the nature of. Yeah, that was it was thoughtful. You wouldn't call him a shallow man based on that. He's a man who's trying to process complicated and sorrowful emotions in an artistic way, clearly a person capable of not just feeling grief, but of expressing it artistically.

He continued to sing occasionally and he made his living as yet another disc jockey until in 1983, the same year that the Wally George TV show starts a year before Rush Limbaugh got some talk radio, he gets a job as a talk radio host on WDBO in Orlando, Florida. So, yeah. And again, they're both kind of writing this wave of right wing populism in the rise of the religious right and Ronald Reagan, like they're part of a thing. They're not starting it, but they are also influencing the way this thing grows.

So Wally George and Morton Downey, Jr. both rode that right wing wave and helped to shape it. Morton Downey, Jr. was even more incendiary and control, uncontrolled than Wally. He lost his first talk show gig after he punched a guest, an abortion rights activist named Bill Baird, who he then called a son of a bitch. So how many episodes in was that? So, yeah, Wally George screams at people and stuff. And I think shoved some folks a few times.

Or Nanny Jr. just cold cocks a motherfucker like months into his first talk show. And again, a radio talk show. Wonder if you can hear like the meat sound on the microphone. I haven't found this audio, but I bet it's great. Next, according to the New York Times, quote, Mr. Downey was soon hired by KFBK AM Radio, a news talk station in Sacramento, California. There he told a joke in which he used the word Chinaman several times. Angering Tom. Yeah, not that surprising, is it?

So yeah, he tells a joke in which he uses the word Chinaman several times, which pisses off Tom Chin, a Chinese-American member of Sacramento City Council. I was listening in his car and wonder why I wonder why that bothered him. I wonder why he got angry at that. Mr. Chin called the station. According to the councilman and to Paul R. Aaron, then the station's program director, Mr. Chin was put through to Mr. Downey, who let loose a verbal tirade against him.

Mr. Downey was discharged the next day. So he tells a racist joke on air. It offends the member of the city council who calls and then he proceeds to be racist to that guy life on the air and loses his job. Yeah, yeah, that's usually probably should be what happens. Yeah, yeah, now the station had to obviously had to shit. Can Morton Downey Jr. I like that he was like, oh, I'm sorry, I'll just be racist to you directly then.

Yeah, do you do? What would you like me to just be a piece of shit to your face? I did not mean to do it to your back on the air. Absolutely not. Oh, forgive me. Let me be an asshole directly to be an asshole directly to you. I don't mean to be rude. So they had to fire him, but he was also and you'll you'll hear different things about how popular he was by some accounts.

He was he was very successful by some accounts, just modestly successful. I can't tell you which, but he did well enough that the station was like, well, this guy is built an audience. They're very dedicated. And so when he leaves, they decide they need to replace him with another right wing firebrand, someone who can stir up the same kind of populist rage, but also isn't quite as racist. You know who they picked, Tom?

I don't know who followed him into the job. You might you might have heard of this guy, little fella. He might know his name, Rush Limbaugh. Oh, yeah. That's how Rush gets his first big political gig. Was Morton Downey being too racist on the air? It was too racist. And so Rush Limbaugh came in and said, I can be slightly less racist than that.

I can be for a while, for a little while. Eventually I'll be much more racist than that. Yeah, I could be slightly less racist to people's faces. Yeah. Again, for a while. For a while. I love the idea of like, man, that was too racist. Let's get Rush in here. Let's get that Rush Limbaugh kid in here.

Yeah. We're going to tone things down somewhat. Now, Tom, where do you go when you've just gotten fired from your right wing radio job for being too much of a racist? Television. No, I mean, but what city do you go to? Portland, I don't know. No, Cleveland.

Cleveland. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. It's the Portland of the East. Yeah, you get your ass on down to Cleveland. Hey, our rivers are very rarely on fire, unlike Cleveland. So he gets hired by WERAM to improve the poor ratings of its talk show department. He was forced out there when he again hurled racial slurs

at an elected leader. This one a municipal court judge. Who could have seen this coming? Who could have guessed? Wally George, the man who punched an abortion rights activist and lost his first radio show, lost his second for screaming racial slurs at a city counselor would lose his third show for screaming racial slurs

at a municipal court judge. Whomst among us? Whomst among us? Has not on a bad day hurled racial slurs at a circuit court judge or whoever it was. Those of us who have not gone to jail have done that. So while his former employer wrestled with a lawsuit as a result of this, Morton Downey, Jr. moved to Chicago

to do it all over again. So during both of these. The OJ strategy. Yeah, the OJ strategy. He flies Chicago. Chicago forgives all sins. During his first two dalliances with talk radio, Morton Downey, Jr. had a regular segment on his shows

called The Executive Intelligence Report, which is him reading from a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche. We're going to have to do a whole episode on Lyndon LaRouche at some point. But for now, you'll have to be satisfied with this quick description of Lyndon, courtesy of a New York Times obituary. And again, this is the source of Morton Downey, Jr.'s

Executive Intelligence Report. Quote, Lyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cult-like political organization who ran for president eight times, once for a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96. Defining what Mr. LaRouche is. Yeah, right?

That's a motherfucking sentence. That is an entire sentence. Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan, and Lothed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner, and other anti-Semites,

though he himself made anti-Semitic statements. And boy did he, a lot of them. He was a fascist, Tom. He was a fascist political cult leader. I like to be obituary. I was like, we don't know what the fuck he believed in. Yeah, he believed in Lyndon LaRouche having a bunch of followers who basically, it was a cult.

Like they lived for this man, and they would go out and proselytize on the street. They would hand out papers at college campuses. LaRouche argued that environmentalists were trying to wipe out the human race, which is a claim that Alex Jones now parrots. He believed Queen Elizabeth was trying to murder him personally.

He argued that Jews had founded the KKK, and he described indigenous Americans as lower beasts. So this is the source of Morton Downey Jr.'s intel. I'm finding a couple of consistent threads in his belief structure. That perhaps his obituary could have latched on to. It may, I think they may have gotten into that later. That was like the first two paragraphs.

I just, I read that obituary and was like, my god, that is a sentence. Yeah, that first sentence almost knocked me out of my chair. Yeah, what a fucking life. Ran for president eight times. Once from prison, literally once. It was a tax thing, I think. Again, we'll do, I'll have to read into him,

and we'll do a whole episode on Lyndon LaRouche. He's quite a character. But yeah, the head of Morton Downey Jr.'s intel program. Now, the fact that Morton Downey Jr. platform this guy is very fucked up, and it's arguably more fucked up because Morton Downey Jr. did not really like him. As he told the New York Times, I decided I was going to be as friendly towards these people

and get as much information out of them as I could, because someday I would expose them. Now, that's bullshit. It's true that he did eventually get Lyndon LaRouche on his TV show, and he tore him apart, like it was a very aggressive interview with Lyndon. But he also continued to spread LaRouche's newsletter and other publications after that point,

calling the fascist cult leader's intelligence information, quote, the second or third best in the world. Based on what, Morton Downey Jr.? He Morton Downey Jr. doesn't know? Ninth-billed cast member of Predator 2. Yeah, I mean, he did make the top 10. Look, in fairness, that's more than either of us have ever done in terms of Predator movies.

That's true, but I'm not out here saying this is the second or third most reputable intelligence report in the world. No, you're not. No. Based on your experience, which is you and I both did get to look at the Predator costume. Yes.

Oh, wait, no, I did. Oh, you weren't there that day? I didn't go to ADI, but I saw the video. It was rad. It seems like it would be. Just knowing that I was that close to something that had touched Morton Downey Jr. was just powerful, Tom. Really powerful.

You know what else has touched Morton Downey Jr.? In a sexual manner. These products and services probably, right? They fucked him. They fucked him apart. These products and services have been inserted into Morton Downey Jr. Absolutely.

That is, again, the only promise we make about our sponsors. So if he seems fine with us, I'm just going to continue. Yeah. That's an ad. That's an ad throw. That's an ad throw, baby. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

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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 gun badass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So by 1987, Rush Limbaugh's show had exploded in popularity. Wally George was the talk of Orange County. This is kind of the height of the Wally George show, too. And despite Morton's mixed success on radio, a station in New York slash New Jersey, I guess it covered both, decided,

let's give this guy a TV show. And I think they're looking at Wally George over in OC. They're seeing Rush Limbaugh blow up on the radio, and they're like, this guy could be a hit on TV. And in fairness, they're not wrong. He was. Yeah, he was. Filmed in Secaucus, the Morton Downey Jr. show

was cut very much in the shape of Wally George's hot seat. In fact, Wally even had Morton on his show in the late 1980s, and it was immediately hostile. And I'm first going to play this clip of Morton Daddy Jr. on the Wally George show. Oh, boy. It's really a Freddy versus Jason moment. I was going to say two rats fighting over a dead cat.

Oh, boy. And I have to say, before, if you're wondering what Morton Downey Jr. looks like, well, so if he gets this clip together. Remember Iron Giant? Remember the bad guy from Iron Giant? He looks like Christopher McDonald. The sleazy fed?

Yeah, he looks like Shooter McGavin. He looks like Shooter McGavin, yeah. He does. He was the same. I was blew me away to learn that Shooter McGavin and the fed from the Iron Giant are the same guy. Incredible thing. He looks like Shooter McGavin with novelty teeth.

He does. He does. He looks like Shooter McGavin if Shooter McGavin did, like, birthday parties for children. Oh, here it is. You're coming up with the usual simplistic answers, Wally, that conservatives who don't know what the hell they're talking about, stop.

You've got an audience out here. You've got an audience of monkeys out here who do everything that you tell them to do. He's not wrong. I'm warning you. The next time you do this. You warn me, punk. God.

Wally George looks incredible. Look at him. He's amazing. What a man. He looks like the entertainment director at a cruise ship, but like a bad cruise ship. The cops have come on now. They're pulling Morton Downey Jr. off the show,

and tackling him. He's three sheriffs, definitely. He gets tackled by Wally Jr. off the stage. Morton Downey Jr. I still get total Roger Stone vibes from that guy with like a chest. And obviously, all of that was set up ahead of time. The plan was always, I suspect, for Morton Downey Jr.

to get tackled by sheriff's deputies on the seat of Wally George's hot seat. It seems so extreme. And he's already so famous at that point that they would not dare do that to him unless it was staged. Yeah. Yeah, it's very funny.

And honestly, I can't tell you, it may not have been pre-planned as much as both men just naturally knew going in. This is how this is going to end. I'm Morton Downey Jr. and the Wally George show. Of course, I'm going to get tackled off stage during a nearly physical fight between the two of us. This is just how this has to happen.

I am naturally enough of a right-wing shithead firebrand. That's just in my blood. Well, the thing that really. The moment we were on a camera together, this was what had to happen. Right. Whoever wins, we lose. Yeah, the real Freddie Jason situation.

The thing that stuck out to me was when there's a scene. Well, not a scene. I'm fucking talking about this. It's a movie because it's so staged. There's a part in the clip where Wally George stands up after Morton Downey says, don't warn me. He stands up like he's going to fight. But he buttons his coat.

He buttons his fucking coat. That's a thing you do when you know you're going to be on camera. You do the opposite when you know you're about to start throwing hands is you want to unbutton that coat. So it's like. Yeah, you want to unbutton. You might even want to take that.

If you're really going to throw hands, you take that shirt off and you fold it on the table and you say, all right, here's how things are going to go. So the fact that he's stepping buttoned his jacket, it's like, all right, you know, you're not going to get to a fight. Of course. Yeah, it would have been very fun. But I don't think either of.

Well, actually, no. Morton Downey, Jr. definitely threw a punch. He punched that guy who came on his radio show to everything. You know, all the terrible piece of shit he is and all the funny things we're going to do to make fun of him on this episode. Morton Downey doesn't look like he hasn't been in a fight. No, no, Morton Downey, Jr.

Morton Downey, Jr. wouldn't have survived to this age if he hadn't learned a couple of things about fighting because that's a man who pisses people off. Yeah. Yeah. Wally George is a man who was very careful to never piss anyone off until he felt like he wouldn't get the shit beaten out of him. Yeah, like he was an adult and polite society.

That was a kid who hid. Yeah, he was like, that's a dude who could bully into giving you an extra ride on the teacups at the carnival. Now, Morton Downey, Jr. was different from Wally George. And in fact, well, he started off as way more out of control. Again, he got fired from his first job for assaulting a guest. He toned it down for his actual TV show. Not much, but in an intelligent way.

He was actually in a lot of ways. He was kind of a mix between Wally George and Joe Pine, because like Wally George, he would be like a lunatic a bunch of the time and like very loud, getting to fights on stage and whatnot, a showman. But like Joe Pine, he could actually sit down and have conversations with people, even once he disagreed with without just screaming at them.

And there were actual debates on his show. So he was not the same as Wally. And I think that's why he was he made more of an impact, because Wally George, it was never anything but just like pure id. And there was a little bit of thinking on the Morton Downey, Jr. show. Not I'm not saying that to praise it, just to like characterize what he was doing.

It was a bit different than Wally George. He opened his first episode with the words, certain things really burn my buns. And that more or less summed up the focus. Morton was irritated by a lot of things. Feminism, environmentalism, social justice, and he wanted to make his audience angry, too. Like Wally, he was happy to platform people with differing beliefs

so long as they would get into arguments with him that made good television. His show was an immediate success and its wide audience meant that some of his guests became stars in their own right. One of his early interviews was a little known congressman. You might have heard of Tom named Ron Paul. Now, Morton Downey, Jr. Not a friendly introduction of Ron Paul here. He brings the congressman up on stage by saying,

we're going to talk to a man who could be snorting cocaine in the Oval Office. Because again, Ron Paul, the thing that like one of the things that made him prominent early on is he's for the decriminalization or legalization of all drugs. And Morton Downey, Jr. is as a Republican in this period of time, an arch-drug warrior. So here's Ron Paul on the Morton Downey, Jr. show. In other words, you believe that the government should stay out of our

personal business altogether. All right, that's good, guys. It also happens to be my personal business if I want to kill my four-year-old kid. Right? No, no, no. Wait a minute. Wait, you're giving Libertarian a distorted explanation. No, sir.

You people gave it to yourselves on your platform. No, let me explain that. The answer is that we are allowed to do what we want. We even permit people to smoke cigarettes. That happens to be the most deadly drug in the United States today. Kill 325,000 people and maybe we ought to make it a little legal. I wish you'd ban it. I wish you'd ban it.

If you would, sir, I'd put it out in your eye right now. You can buy it out on the street and take $5 a package. So you see what I... Number one, Ron Paul really comes across as a reasonable man in that interview. He sure does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but you see that... You see what I'm talking about.

He's kind of a mix of Wally George and Joe Pine, because he's way more aggressive and rude than Joe Pine, but he's also... He's not just shouting over him. Ron Paul gets... and he'll quiet his audience down and whatnot. Like, he's found this middle level between the two men. That's certainly not like... I mean, he's a bully, he's a dick,

but he's not what Wally George was. It's not quite that same level of like... It's not as much of a lynch mob, the audience. Yeah, still a lot of audience participation, but yeah, less violently fascist. Yeah, but still the bad faith arguments. Still, of course, in the same way that Joe Pine was bad faith arguments. Exactly.

They all have this in common. They all have this in common. And I just think it's interesting how Morton, I think, is very consciously mixing Joe Pine with Wally George. In order to kind of like... Wally went way too far. Joe Pine is not far enough for today's TV. Nobody would listen to Joe Pine today.

Yeah. He's too calm, you know? He's like, he wants to maintain... He wants the same kind of controversy and intense emotions of Wally George, but he wants to maintain firm control of the show. Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly it. And this is probably why his show...

And also, you know, the fact that when he has people on him he really disagrees with. He does allow them more of a chance to make their point. Ron Paul gets to say a lot in this interview. And this is... I don't want to say this is like the reason he became prominent, but this is a decent part of it. This is a significant reason for his,

like, why he started to become well-known. And it's in part because he does get... He looks good up there. He makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of people, like, listening to Ron Paul on the Morton Downey Jr. show would be like, well, this is actually a reasonable man. Especially considering the kind of, like,

angry young men who would watch the Morton Downey Jr. show. I'm sure a lot of them got into Ron Paul watching this in a way that, like, with Wally George, that, I'm sure, never happened, because he never let people say that much. And yeah, I mean, it's hard to watch the Ron Paul interview and dislike the man. Where Joe Pine was always chivalrous to his female guests, though,

even those he disagreed with. Morton felt no need to hold his punches. At one point, he had on a vegan, which is, again, that was, like, the first thing we saw Joe Pine doing, is, like, talking to a vegan so he can make fun of him, which is a big, a long, reoccurring thing in, like, right-wing politics.

And yeah, she made the point, this vegan that Morton's talking to, made the point that vegan diets were healthier. To which, Wally responded, I eat raw hamburger. I eat raw fish. I smoke four packs of cigarettes a day. I have about four drinks a day. I'm 55 years old and I look as good as you do, which is going to be funny later.

Although you do have to be fair, he looks a lot younger than Joe Pine does when Joe Pine was, like, 40. Yeah, Joe Pine looked like a pyramid, like a pyramid-made man. He says he's smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. Joe Pine is smoking four packs of cigarettes an hour. Like, he's during a show.

Not on his commute. So one of his most popular sparring partners was feminist lawyer Gloria Alred, who, again, gained a lot of her popularity because of the Morton Downey Jr. show. This is a big vector for a lot of people who are still prominent today, again, not the only reason.

But, like, this is a big show. This is a significant cultural moment. And she has a big role in it. She's a regular guest. And she and Downey would, like, spar a lot constantly. You might have expected her to hate him, like, given her politics and his politics.

They certainly fought like he and us on the air. But as the documentary Evocateur makes clear, the two got along. This was a game. And they were both happy to play it in order to make themselves famous. And I'm going to have Sophie play this clip. This is from the documentary Evocateur,

which I really do recommend. But anyone who had breasts was a feminist. There are almost no feminists who have ever burned a bra. So let me get that straight. There's almost no feminist who ever had anything that they needed to wear a bra for. Between us, there was a certain amount of sexual tension. Likewise, on your jockstrap, but in any case.

How does she know she has a tape measure on her tongue? Like, Jesus. Yeah, I know, right? That's just gross all around. I feel like I need to shower. But also, you see the difference again. When Wally George never had it, like, it wasn't yelling at people he was, like, friendly with.

Like, clearly he wanted that with some of them. Like, he was willing to, like, talk with blaze and be like, hey, we could have a good thing going. He was able to find people who were media trained who were talented in their own right, who could go on and have show arguments with him to keep the crowd braing. But there was nothing.

He didn't, again, he didn't believe in shit. But while Wally George, like, couldn't, I guess, I don't think Wally, when Morton Joanie Jr. was willing to do, was have someone get in hits on him verbally. Like, he wanted that kind of sparring, you know? Because that's good TV. I think Wally George was just too brittle a man to accept that. Yeah, yeah.

And Morton Joanie, I don't, I think, never would have taken anything really personally, because he's a showman. And he gets that, like, well, I'm having Gloria on, like, neither of us believe in anything. We just are using this as a vehicle for our own personal fame. Yeah. And we can say, like, have whatever fights we want to have. And yeah, they would have made a good couple,

because they're both the same person. More or less. Yeah. So eight months into its run, the Morton Joanie Jr. show was a wildfire hit. The New York Times sent in a reporter to watch the show as it was taped. And his recollection does a good job of setting up the mood.

Quote, You're not licking the boots of the bureaucracy that doesn't give a damn about the American people, he commanded. Bureaucratic bitch, he shouted as the congregation. An unruly, as unruly as any splatter film crowd at the nearby Lowe's Metal Plaza 8, jumped up and loudly voiced its approval.

So, yeah, it's combative. But as you saw from that Gloria Aldred quote, they'll cheer it like somebody getting in a hit on Morton, too. There's it's not the same. We're getting closer to Jerry Springer here. Yeah, we're getting closer to Springer here. That's right. It's more about the spectacle.

They just want to see, they just want to see shit fly. Yeah. Mort was separated from later imitators. People like Jerry Springer and from people like Wally George, who was a little earlier, by his willingness to physically confront his guests. He came very close to getting into fights on several occasions. And his studio, yeah.

His studio was the first in television to put the audience through a metal detector. Oh, man. And I'm sure there was a mix of that's practical, because yeah, somebody might get fucking stabbed, but also that's like, that's another thing we can brag about. That's juice, yeah.

This TV's so hot, we gotta have a metal detector for the audience. We gotta have a metal detector for the audience. That's how intense this show is. Yeah, it's a gimmick. As with Wally George, his live audience, particularly skewed towards young and disaffected men, a lot of the same kind of guys who would have been in the alt-right

and would have been like edgy kids online today. The documentary of Aucatur includes interviews with some of these audience members, including Joshua Rothman, who is now a history professor, who was part of Wally's regular audience when he was like fucking like, he looks like he's like 16 and this.

I'm sure he was a little older, but here's Joshua explaining the appeal of showing up to a taping of Mort's show. If you guys and that other, the grem went over there, light your pants. This is him as a kid. And shove it where it belongs. He was also sort of perfect for 17-year-olds

because it had no nuance at all. Everything was black or white. And 17-year-olds, everything is either totally one thing or totally the other. There is no middle. We are America. We're number one.

You know what I think? I think Donald Trump should take his board game and just go to hell. Yeah. That's all you got, man? Yeah. Looked like he was going to say something colorful. There's 16-year-olds, you know?

So that says a lot of it right there. Yeah. Both like, we didn't have YouTube. If you're a kid and you want to like, you feel like you have something to say, you could get on TV. If as long as you're willing to like, shout something stupid,

Morton Downey Jr. will put your ass on television. Yeah. As long as you're willing to get possibly beaten up by him on the air. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, yeah. No, I get it.

I get it. It's, he's given them not only in, he's given them an outlet. Yeah. And it seems like they, like we were talking about with the crowd of Wally's show, it's more that it's not necessarily the political views. It's they're latching on to this sort of

maximum anger, anything goes kind of environment. It's this space where they can let out, like every 17 year old is angry as shit about a bunch of different things. Yeah. And you could get on Morton Downey Jr. show and you could either express real anger with something or what's probably more common,

you could express the anger inside you and just throw it at anything. Yeah. Like it doesn't matter. He just wants you to be loud and yelling and he'll be happy with you. And, and there's no, you can be edgy if you want to just say something fucked up on TV.

He can, he'll let you do that. It's like shit posting too. Like all of this like 4chan stuff, you can see those impulses, he's giving people an outlet for them. Yeah. And they show the clip from their homemade video that they, that they made like a sketch

that they did at home pretending to be Morton Downey Jr. So it's clear that it's, it's his like bombastic this character that he is that they're latching on to less than his views. It's more just the way he speaks and the way he behaves and the way he sort of, you know, it's like when people would chant, when people would chant Jerry, Jerry,

Jerry Springer, when people would get into fights. It's nothing to do with Springer himself. Yeah. And it's, it's nothing to do. These kids don't care about, I'm sure didn't. I mean, I'm sure at the time they agreed with whatever political shit he was saying, but they didn't think about politics.

They were fucking 17 year olds. Like they were just, they identified with the, the way that he expressed emotion and the way that he let them do it. And they identified with an angry white man, being an angry white man on television and being colorful about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Morton absolutely played the role of a religious extremist. Again, I don't think he believed in anything. Certainly not God, but he knew that fights over religion could make good television. And I'm going to play an excerpt here from an episode titled God versus atheism. And we don't think that children should be forced

to pray when they don't want to. Any child is free to pray at any time that he wants to the public schools today. We just don't. I'm going to say we're going to give you a minute to pray anytime you want. No, they, the government doesn't tell children when to pray, what to pray, how to pray,

or even if they should pray. Doesn't sin breaths like you and Madeline Muriel here got in there and made sure we can't even say in the Pledge of Allegiance, the word God anymore in a public school because of you guys. Yeah. And it's the same shit you see nowadays.

It's a stupid useless argument we're still making. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Later on in that same interview, Downey tells his atheist guest, this is a nation of freedom. Are you a religion? Then you have no fucking freedom. Just like, like nine year old.

What? You know, yeah, I don't even know what the fuck that's supposed to mean. Now, while the Mourn Downey Jr. show had lots of yelling and fighting, some of its most sinister impacts came from the segments that were calm, thoughtful debates. In my research, I came across a round table

discussion from 1988 about black crime featuring Reverend Al Sharpton, who's another person who really, the Mourn Downey Jr. show massively increased his platform, his profile. Like he owes a lot of his fame to the Mourn Downey Jr. show.

It like, it made him, it helped make him into like a regular fixture on TV. While the authority or while the audience does hoot and holler some, the discussion is very simple. And it's kind of chilling because one of Mourn's guests here goes on an extended tirade about black on white crime statistics,

which is like a major argument point for fucking neo-Nazis today. So here that is. In the United States, in 1986, more murders were committed by blacks, 12% of the population, than were committed by whites, 85% of the population.

These are the numbers right here, right out of the Justice Department figures. And you can check them later if anyone has any doubts on that. When you check the murder figures in interracial crime, now interracial means that you have a perpetrator of one race

and a victim of another race. When you check those figures, you find, and I'll just get to the conclusion of it, you find that a black in 1984, a black crack, was over 15 years old, more likely to murder a white than a white was to murder a black.

That's enough of this. So obviously this guy's statistics are very flawed. And one of Mourn's other guests, Dr. Gloria Toot, does point this out pretty much immediately. And we're going to play that clip now too. Here's her like slapping back on this. Number one, your credit is erroneous. Crime is being reduced in America,

not simply by blacks, but by Americans in general. We have less crime in 1987 than we had 10 years ago. Number two, the Justice Department and state and local government officials in crime have admitted that the reporting statistics are an error.

As it relates to the crime reported by minorities and crimes reported about whites. Number three, also it has now been acknowledged by those officials that in many instances, the white criminal is not convicted or even arrested where as your minority is. And I could go on and on and on,

but the facts that he has given are just not accurate and we do ourselves a disservice and we don't look at what the problem is. So obviously that's a more productive debate than was ever had on the Wally George show. It seems more like the kind of stuff you might have heard on Joe Pine. And in fairness, he is bringing on people

to contradict and argue with this guy talking about black on white crime. So you could call this on one level a more responsible and productive debate than a lot of what you see on right wing TV today. But I can't help but see in this echoes of the kind of fascist platforming that would become much more common in later years

without the measured pushback that Morton show at least gave it. The specter of black on white crime and high crime rates among black people are two of the most virulent and productive talking points of the fascist right. I could go on a rant about Dylan Roof here who was, he claims, inspired to go on his massacre

by reading about black on white crime. But this discussion has very deep roots and I'm kind of torn between seeing Morton here as someone who handed it better than some people in the right because he did have two very well prepared black guests to counter this line of argument or whether I'm just more unsettled

by the fact that he put this fucking argument on television at all. Like I don't know kind of where to land on that but it leaves me feeling unsettled. Yeah, no, I don't trust anything that any of these people do. So it's, he just did it for, he knew this was a hot button issue for a lot of people

and he had a full panel so that he could maximize the outrage and the controversy. And just, you know, you don't get one person on there to talk about their views because that's not going to start a fight. You have to get somebody else on there to contradict what they're saying or counter what they're saying.

Yeah, yeah. That's, I think, I think what's going on here. But you know who won't platform people spreading Nazi talking points about race related crimes, Tom? Hopefully the fine people bringing us these products and services. Yeah, they absolutely do not. Unless it's in which case,

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Yeah! So, Reverend Al Sharpton was another media figure who got a massive early boost to his career

thanks to the Morton Downey Jr. show. Maybe not early, but this really increased a lot of his visibility. He and Morton were regular sparring partners, and they also were clearly friends. Al made for great television. At one point, he called another guest a punk F-word in a moment of rage.

In fact, it was Al's friendship with Morton Downey Jr. that would prove to be the downfall of the Morton Downey Jr. show. From the Chicago Tribune, quote, it all came to a head when the show began focusing on the case of Tawanna Brawley a 15-year-old African-American girl who claimed to have been raped by six white men,

including a police officer, and had KKK and other vile words scrawled on her body. Show after show was devoted to this case, many featuring the Brawley advisor and then relatively unknown Al Sharpton. Downey beat that story to death and his ratings began to plummet,

especially after Brawley's accusations were deemed false by a grand jury. So, this does seem to be a case where Brawley was lying. I think it's because she'd like stayed out late and like had to come up with an excuse and it just was like a kid doing a dumb thing and then it blew up and became national news. It's a very sad story.

I think she's still like for the rest of her life will owe money to one of the people she accused who sued her. It's like pretty fucked up tale. And Morton Downey Jr. jumped on it and took it as a crusade. Not because he cared about this woman and thought that it was true, but because, you know, it was TV

and he's Morton Downey Jr. It's a hot button to share the day. I think it's because of the quality behind the debate we just listened to. Yep, yep, exactly. Now, the Tawana Brawley case led to one of the most infamous moments of 1980s television. When Mort had Al Sharpton on

with a black right-wing activist named Roy Ennis, the stated goal of the episode was to determine who was the leader of Black America. Both Ennis... It's so, boy, Tom. It's a little more complex than is it Sharpton or Ennis, but that's kind of like the inference that like, yeah.

Both Ennis and Sharpton receive a chorus of booze when they're introduced because that's the kind of show this is. Oh, boy. Mort starts the interview by bringing up comments Sharpton made criticizing Ennis. Sharpton goes on a rant calling Ennis a sellout and then this happens

and it's Ennis speaking at the start of this. Go ahead. I wanted a few non-bigoted black leaders run, I would say. Let me state now, let's deal with the facts. Let's go to the record. Tonight we want to deal with the records and the facts. Please do it.

On this program, your program, you heard me, you have me in tape defending this man recently, even after the shenanigans with him and the other suitors. That's a lot of crap. You heard your joke.

Brother! I got it. Oh, shit. Yeah. He just shoved his ass down onto the stage and a bunch of dudes rush up to start shoving. Holy shitballs.

Yeah. He pushed him right off the stage. He pushed him right off the damn stage. Yeah. And it went fucking viral. This moment was huge. Every TV show, every news show had clips of this for fucking weeks.

In a way that no genocide today goes as viral as the clip of Al Sharpton getting shoved off a stage went. Which is not a great... That's not great. Cause I know why. I bet I know why. Yeah, I bet you see that.

But we all do. That it's racism. After the Tawana Brawley case fell apart, nothing could abate the downward slide of Morton's ratings. The next year, in 1989, he made a desperate stab at regaining his relevance. He filed a police report claiming three skinheads had jumped him,

opened him up and drawn a swastika on his forehead in an airplane... in an airport bathroom. The police almost immediately came forward and said that the facts of the case, as he had reported it to them, or as he reported it to the media, did not align with what he had said.

Basically, they said he's fucking lying. We have no evidence that any of this is true. We can't substantiate any of his claims. And it came out later when one of his friends testified he faked it. He drew a swastika. The cops are different from the photos that he put up on TV of the swastika on his forehead.

He just faked getting jumped by skinheads to try to drum up a media controversy. He's just a desperate scumbot bag. He made several comeback works. Scumbot. Scumbot, yeah. And enjoyed creating only to be a scumbag. Just a shit droid full of

just spewing poop. So he made a few different comeback attempts. And he tried to make a living doing talk radio. And he maintained, actually, surprisingly robust career in movies. You've already mentioned he's night filled in Predator 2. He was in Revenge of the Nerds 3.

Which is really quite a film. He was in The Silencer. He was in Tales of the Crypt to name but a few episodes. Although Wally George really should have been the one in Tales from the Crypt. Honestly, yeah. In 1996, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Which was embarrassing. How dare you? Really, we have to thank Comrade Cigarettes for getting two thirds of these guys out of the planet. Critical support to chain smoking. This was embarrassing to Wally.

He lived by the sword, Robert. He made a big deal about being a smoker on the air. Kind of like the way kind of Bill Hicks did. If you listen to some of those routines. He's taken a drag on a cigarette in every clip we've listened to. He would talk about these aren't bad for me.

I look better than you. We read that clip a little bit earlier. He definitely doesn't. Motherfucker looks like Skeletor. He doesn't look good. He's all teeth. He had made so much hay out of being a smoker.

He had autographed cigarettes. He had promised never to quit. But then he gets lung cancer. He immediately becomes an anti-smoking activist begging people to stop. I used a cigarette as a combat weapon. And I never gave much thought to the chance that the cigarette would most likely kill me.

Just very funny. Morton died in 2001, but his influence lives on. When his show was cancelled in 1989, a TV reviewer with the Chicago Tribune wrote that the cancellation, quote, removes from our lives one of the most abrasive people ever to appear on television.

But do not think that this represents a move towards a calmer climb. Downey wedded people's appetites for confrontational TV. There will be someone to take his place. That's prescient. There will be a few someone. In an opinion column for CNN,

Michael Smirkonish makes this point, quote, When Fox News launched in 1966, it adopted the talk radio playbook, and NBC briefly gained viewers by giving Keith Oberman a Downey-like platform for his diatribes against President George W. Bush. The model for each

was a toned down version of that which Downey had established. Entertainment masked his news, constant conflict, good guys versus bad guys, and preordained outcomes. But Downey's influence extended beyond media outlets and should be appreciated as more than just another contributing factor

to the decline of America's cultural health. The media paradigm he fathered has taken a toll on the way in which we are governed. There has been a noticeable uptick in incivility and polarization among our leaders in the exact same period in which the media has moved to the extremes, in part because of the power that Downey's

successors exert over primary voters. Now in this column, Smirkonish cites Brian Rosenwald, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who did his doctoral dissertation on talk radio. Rosenwald writes, Downey's heirs have fostered polarization through their influence in primary elections.

Republican members of Congress must fear infuriating talk radio and cable news hosts because media personalities can use their platforms to offset several major advantages, including significantly greater fundraising and name recognition held by incumbents in primary elections, hosts demand

purity from elected officials, label compromises treason, and glorify Congress's rhetorical bomb throwers such as Senator Ted Cruz. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty good. There's some quotes in this that are talking about like polarization in Washington that

notes that like as late as the 1970s the typical member of one party voted with his colleagues, his party members just over 60% of the time and that those numbers have raised every decade. In 2010, Democrats voted together 91% of the time, Republicans 89% of the time.

Unfortunately, those able to reverse those trends have ceded the debate to the loudest voices. A Gallup survey released in January found that more Republicans regard themselves as independent 43, as more Americans regard themselves as independent 43 than Democrat 30 or Republican 26%.

But any ground gained by the nonpartisan ranks continues to be offset by higher political interest resting at the political extremes. It's all about passion. As documented by Pew Research Center this past spring, liberals and conservatives exceed moderates and independents in their levels

of political interest, which translates into voter participation. So it's got, most people have been turned off by this hyper-partisanization but those who stay in the game just get angrier and angrier at each other and it just makes for an angrier country. And Morton Downey Jr.

was certainly the most successful person on TV doing it before our modern media era. Because Wally George was kind of a marginal figure. He was influential in OC and influential to other media figures. But Morton Downey Jr. had a national show, right? Like he was everywhere. I knew

who he was and I was a little kid. I didn't even really know why I knew who he was. Exactly. People knew Morton Downey Jr. He was kind of this perfect synthesis and that's what it took to really get like this kind of, specific kind of right-wing media off the ground was a synthesis of Joe Pine

and Wally George. Morton Downey Jr. was the first guy to do that. And you know, he eventually, he flew too close to the sun and drew a swastika on his own forehead. Hahaha But, you know. Like the tail of it was. Just as in the tail of it was. It did happen in an airport, Tom.

Swastika, honestly. That's true. Oh, what a dope. What a dope. Yeah, three people I didn't, I don't like very much. That's fair. Well, if it's any consolation they're all super dead. They are very dead. Two thirds of them

because they smoked too much. Hahaha. Oh, bam, but it's a good thing they didn't do like irreparable damage to the country. No, thankfully we're sailing right along. Yeah, that's a good thing. Like the beginning, like the seeds they planted haven't grown at a terrifying

fucking forests of racism. Oh, yeah. No, that never happened. Speaking of which, I'm going to open my news app for the first time since 1991. See what's been happening. Oh, dear. Tom, I have some bad news about the Twin Towers. No. You may want to sit down

for this one. Goddamnit, did they smoke too many cigarettes too? In a way, Tom. In a way. Hahaha. Ah, Tom, that brings us to the end of our long journey. Ah, thanks, thanks. Thanks for sitting through this with me.

And a lot of clips. I now know I have a fuller picture of Morton Downey Jr. in my mind than I did before. I'm glad. That's the only goal I've ever had for this show, which is why this is our final episode. Mmm. All right, Tom, what do you get? I'm just, I'm just, you're just

exhausted now. I'm just sad now. I'm exhausted and I'm sad. I'm going to get, I'm going to get a flax and Wally George wig. I am going to get a Wally George wig. I'm going to get a Wally George after this. Maybe I'll watch Hot Rod again. Watch Predator 2.

Watch Predator 2. You're right. With Gary Busey. Thank God. Yeah, Danny Glover punches Morton Downey right in the face. The best thing about Gary Busey's role in that is that Wally George could absolutely have played Gary Busey's character in that movie. Gary Busey is playing Wally George

in that movie and fucking Morton Downey Jr.'s in it too. My God, what a film. I'm going to get to Predator because he's on America. I kind of want to re-watch Revenge of the Nerds 3 and see what the fuck Morton Downey Jr. was doing in that shit. I wouldn't.

Yeah, I didn't. I didn't really enjoy watching it the first time. At least Predator 2 has the benefit of being Predator 2. I think they were on a beach. If I'm remembering right, it was on, it was in like the Bahamas or something. I think it's Nerds in Paradise. Nerds in Paradise, that's right. I think, that's one of the samples at least.

Jesus Christ, Revenge of the Nerds. That whole movie is a bastard. It's the Morton Downey of a film series. You could do an episode on Just the Revenge of the Nerds. Jesus Christ. Alright, well you got to plug anything, Tom. Oh, sure.

I have a podcast network, Gameplay and Employee that I do with my podcasting partner, David Bell, also from Cracked. He is from Cracked. Yeah, we all used to work there. We did, Tom. You can check it out. Gameplay and Employee.com. Gameplay and Employee where you can

check out our Patreon. We got all kinds of cool stuff on there, like exclusive podcasts and other things that we do with our patrons. It's a lot of fun. You should check it out. I also do write to get Collider. And I write for some more news with your friends, Cody and Katie, Robert. Yeah, yeah. I mean, friends, enemies,

frenemies, yeah. Frenemies. Eternal opponents. And I also write for 100 hot talk. All kinds of things. You can find me, just google me. Yeah, just google Tom Ryman. Find him at his home, you know? Please do. Yeah.

Attack him in an airport bathroom and draw swastika on his forehead to improve his career for unclear reason. I really do wonder, like, what was the game plan there, Morton? Like, how is this going to help? He was going to make that in like three months

of shows, man. Yeah. Hunting down the Nazis who beat him up. Yeah, he had a whole plan. He had a whole pitch deck, man. God, I wish we'd all just agreed to, like, see what he was going to do first before we called him on it. I do want to kind of see where he's going with this.

Obviously, this is all his bullshit, but let's see how long he rides this. Yeah. Very funny. All right, well, that's the episode. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, 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 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.