Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Ballad of Wally George

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Robert is joined by Tom Reimann to discuss Wally George. 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. What's... I'm Robert Evans. This has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast opened poorly. Is that it? Well, it was the whole episode. Yeah, it was the whole episode. You want to try again?

No, tell me. We don't do second takes. The amateur operation you run, you might do things like second takes and proper introduction. But here we just go, what's atonally and then trail off for several seconds of dead air. Yeah, there's no editing in podcasting. Like the pros. Oh, man. That's called cinema verite, Tom. No.

That's how that works. I know what that term means. What is this? Is this a show? What's happening? This is Behind the Bastards, episode two on our episode about the men who built the right-wing media landscape and are consequently ratcheting our world ever closer to calamity. Tom. Robert. Robert.

Is your name? It is. Of all the Rhymens I know, certainly the Thomas. Absolutely. Perhaps the Rhymenist of the Toms that I know. Tom, you are co-founder, co-host of the Gamefully Unemployed Podcast Network, which people like on Patreon. You write for Collider and you are about to listen to a lot of really, really unpleasant clips

of people that are just not very nice. I woke up this morning and I was thinking, man, I hope before the sun sets on this day I get to hear a bunch of shitheads have terrible opinions. Tom, I heard your prayers. I am here to answer them. I texted them to you. You do that every night. As I do with all of my prayers.

I just text them to you. Yeah, and they're usually a lot more erotic than this, but I'll take it. Tom, it would take years, by some counts more than a decade, before Joe Pine would have a true successor. He was so far ahead of his time that it was not until the 1980s, he died in 1970, that the media landscape was truly ready for someone to pick up the... Torch seems like the wrong word. No, it seems like the right word. Yeah, it is.

It seems like the correct word. The first man to follow in his wake was Wally George. Have you heard of Wally George? No, and I'm usually pretty up on my wallies. Yeah, no, no, he's not. Of all the wallies, one of the most consequential of the wallies. So George Walter Perch was born on December 4th, 1931, in Oakland, California. His father owned a small shipping company.

His mother, Eugenia, had been a vaudeville performer and a child actress in Hollywood. She'd starred in Western's opposite Cowboy Actors, whose names have apparently been forgotten to time, because they were not Val Kilmer and Tombstone, so who gives a shit? Wally spent most of his childhood in San Mateo, when he was in high school, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Hollywood where he finished his education. Tom, who was the sheriff in Deadwood? Timothy Olyphant. Yeah, Timothy Olyphant. That's the other one. That's the other Cowboy.

Val Kilmer, Timothy Olyphant. That's all you need. Those are the only two Cowboys. Sam Elliott. Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott. Yeah, of course Sam Elliott. So, you're talking about Sam Elliott in The Hunt for Red October, because he's honorarily a cowboy, even though he never got to live out his Montana dreams, right?

Yeah, that's it. No, that's Sam Neal. That's Sam Neal. Jesus Christ, Tom. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. How did I do that? Those are two very different dudes. Extremely. Now, I'll say this. I'll bet Sam Elliott appreciates ducks, too. Sam Neal is a duck that's his best friend. I bet Sam Elliott has loved a duck or two in his life, cared for a duck. Those eyes look like a duck has brought a twinkle to them once or twice.

Yeah, yeah. Has she been? You can't smile the way Sam Elliott smiles, unless you've been friendly with a duck. Yeah, there's a duck in that life, I can tell. There's a duck in that man's heart somewhere in there. So, Wally spends most of his childhood in San Mateo, but when he's in high school, his parents divorce, and that's not common in the 40s, right? It's got to be a great marriage for that to be happening in the 40s.

Alternatively, maybe it's two parents who are uncommonly aware of how bad a toxic union can be for a kid. I don't really know what the case was. I'm going to guess it was a really unpleasant situation, judging by the way all the judge becomes. I don't think no fault divorces existed yet in California, so you had to sue for a reason. Yeah, you had to fist fight a judge to get a divorce. So, his mother moves to Hollywood where he finishes his education.

He was immediately drawn to the entertainment industry, obviously. His family's involved in it. At age 14, he gets a gig working as a DJ at an AM radio station in Glendale. Prior to this, Wally had been a stutterer, just like Joe Pine. I do find that interesting. Both these guys are dudes who stutter when they're kids. He credits his first radio gig with curing him. He kind of like overcomes his speech impediment on the job,

which I did with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Now, he subsequently worked in bit gigs at other local radio stations. He held ambitions to write for television, and in his early 20s, he did write one episode of the TV show Bonanza. Okay. Way to go, Wally George. Good work, Wally. That's a real TV show.

After we listen to this, after we record this, I'm going to have to go watch that episode and see if anything pops out to me. Is there anything problematic about Wally George's episode of Bonanza? Is there anything problematic about an episode of Bonanza? It's the one Bonanza episode that in the middle has a seven-minute rant about Martin Luther King Jr. So, Wally got his first radio show, the Wally George show, on KTYN FM in Inglewood. I was trying to do my radio voice for that one.

It came across. Yeah, thank you, Tom. I love how not imaginative any of these people are. It's always either just the My Name show or the My Name report or the My Name file. That's the only thing they have. Yeah, I think there's a degree of it that's just like, look, you're going to move, as we saw with Joe Pine, it's not uncommon to just spend like a year or less at most of the places you work.

You're moving around all the time. You're trying to build brand recognition. So, at least you want people to like know your name, you know? Yeah. And to be fair, everybody doesn't, they don't say let's watch tonight. So, the tonight show, they say let's watch Carson. Let's watch Leno. Yeah, let's watch Carson.

Let's watch Leno. Let's watch... No, there's no one else anyone wants to see. That's it. It's stopped. Yeah, that's it. It's done now. Yeah, I mean, I have no animosity towards Stephen Colbert,

but my God, late night TV is just a horrible idea. We should know that now. We should accept it. Craig Ferguson needs to be allowed to take it out behind a barn and shoot it. That's who should do it, Craig. Crying like the boy in old Yeller isn't loads his dad's shotgun. Johnny Carson's shotgun. I never wanted this one.

So, he gets his first show in 1969, which is the year before Joe Pine dies. And yeah, he goes through, you know, he does like the, they all do. He runs through like a series of shows on different networks. He produces and co-hosts talk radio programs. One with L.A.'s then mayor, Sam Yorty, for like nearly a decade. So, he's in like talk radio for a while, but kind of a respectable turn of talk radio. He starts his own radio show and it does well enough that he's able to, in 1979, he starts his own talk radio show again.

And this one does well enough that he's able to launch his own TV show off of it, called Hot Seat, which first airs in 1983 at an independent radio station in Anaheim, California. Now, 1983 is a year before Rush Limbaugh started his first political radio show. And a decade before the first episode of the Jerry Springer show in 1991. Hot Seat with Wally George would include elements from both of these later shows. From an article in Timeline, quote, George had a way of riling even the most collected and intelligent guests. In his first year, for instance, George invited then ACLU lawyer and later journalist,

Jeff Cohen, to talk about police brutality and surveillance of lawful, politically motivated organizations. At first, Cohen's responses to questions like, Why do you want to handcuff the police department from catching criminals? Seem prepared. Choreographed. But after a few minutes, the interview intensifies. Both raise their voices.

The audience clatters and gesticulates. George interjects with an age-old challenge. I have nothing to hide, so what do I care if police watch me? The audience braves with joy. But for all his cruel bravado and personal attacks, George consistently stumbled when the tables were turned. His ideology was full of contradictions. In one episode, he spits, I say Martin Luther King does not deserve a national holiday in his name.

There are many more Americans who deserve it a heck of a lot more. So that's the kind of guy he is. We're no longer like the genteel playing it being polite kind of guy. He's very much a recognizable sort of right-wing media figure. Yeah, he's keeping it authentically asshole. Yeah, keeping it authentically asshole. In November of 1983, Wally earned his first national news story when he so irritated his guest, Blaze Bonpain, a pacifist in the Human Rights Act.

I mean, that name rules. That is a good name, right? Now, the short version of the story is that Blaze got angry and flipped Wally's desk. He had to be escorted out by security. That sounds like something a person named Blaze would do. It does, it does, because he's a Blaze, man! He's full of fire! Sounds like an American Gladiator.

It's gonna flip your desk. Wally gets like a pacifist activist to flip his desk on TV. To flip his desk! This has never really happened before. This is like a huge deal. Like, this is the first Geraldo getting hit with a fucking chair, you know? God, what a great moment that was. I found an interview with Blaze that sheds more light on this incident.

And what came after? Because this incident really, like, you could draw a direct line from this to Jerry Springer. I'm sorry, what year was this again? This is 1983. 1983? It starts in 1991. Okay. And this is really like, this chunk I'm gonna read is interesting, because it gives you

a sense of the way in which Wally is helping to give birth to not just the cultural space that guys like Jerry Springer occupy, but like what reality TV becomes. So this is him, this is Blaze talking about what happened after he flips that desk and gets escorted off by security. Quote, he called me. This had to be 1983 and asked if I could come on his program. It was right during Reagan's war in Grenada. In a phone conversation, he seemed just delightful.

I was in the background listening to his interviews just before me. A Mexican-American attorney and Wally was just insulting him with racial slurs and so on. And I was quite irritated just hearing him operate. When it was my turn, I went to the interview and he had a large group of young people in the audience. And just as he was getting started, I turned towards the audience and I said, I hope you won't go and die as the enemy in a place like Grenada where you're not wanted. He got a little upset when I made that comment.

He came over and assaulted me and battered me. He attacked me from behind. It was a little difficult for a long-standing boxer to not respond, but I thought that would be a terrible thing to do. So I looked at his desk and I saw there was no one near it and no one that would be harmed. So I just flipped the desk over and walked out. I came home and I told my wife and children how surprised I was. And within moments, we saw it on ABC, CBS, NBC.

It was all over the country. I think that particular episode has been played a thousand times across the country. I still see it. It's amazing how it made an impact on TV. There was no staging, however. After the security man ushered me to my car, I went home. And the following morning, Wally called me and said, Blaze, we have a terrific thing going here.

We can do this all over the country. I said, Wally, you're a charlatan and there will be no further interviews. Thank you. You see, like, Wally doesn't believe in shit. No, yeah. Like, Wally is just like, yeah, I'll bring this guy. Like, I want him to throw shit. Like, this is great TV.

So that's more of the thing that I was talking about last episode where it's like, is he genuinely getting pulled in this direction or is he getting pulled in this direction? Like, this is make this makes good TV. And yeah, that's like the guiding light of a lot of these chuds is that they don't actually believe in a lot of things, if anything at all. No, they just believe in whatever gets them the money, gets them the attention. I think Joe Pine might have believed in things. He certainly fought for something at one point.

Wally clearly doesn't. Like, he's just happy to like, yeah. Like, he called the next day like it was a pro wrestling match. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, we can do this all over. We can turn the country. What the fuck are you talking about? Joe Pine is like, not a good person, not a nice person.

No. Pretty racist and bigoted, I'm sure in a lot of ways. Although I doubt excessively for his time, which is not saying anything good about him. It's talking about like the white dudes in the 1960s, his generation. We're pretty fucking racist. But I don't think I wouldn't qualify him as a bastard based on like the things he intentionally did. Once we're at Wally George, we're in like the like full bastard territory. Sweet.

Because Joe Pine is a guy who's like willing to do things and like judge up controversy, but also can listen to people and like has something he believes in and is trying to get across. With Wally George, it is pure. I'm into this right wing shit just for the because it's what it gets the rage views. It gets people angry. It gets people riled up. I don't care who I have on. I want folks to fight.

I just want to like tickle people's amygdala and make them angry. Does he start selling brain pills, Robert? No. No, he does not. Not to mine. Well, I don't know. Maybe I can't comprehensively say he never sold brain pills. I cannot make that claim to a point of certainty, Tom.

I was going to get so excited. It showed up later that like Alex Jones and like a lot of the folks who came after Wally George built an audience that was cult like in its devotion. By 1984, an audience of mostly college age men were waiting up to six months for their chance to sit in his 80 person studio audience. People would like sign up for this shit way ahead of time. They'd shout Wally, Wally, and wear shirts with American flags on them, roaring until he forced them to stop.

Where Joe Pine could be mocking and even cruel as long as he maintained an air of genteel politeness, Wally George was free to scream, shout and even strike people. He told one interviewer in 1984, they say that I'm a lunatic, that I'm a maniac, but why do you have to smile at your guests and be nice and let them say what they want to say? Yes, Wally completed the transition from Joe Pine, a right-wing firebrand whose work was still firmly rooted in the outward civility of the 1950s to modern right-wing media. Wally would not sit and listen to, for example, a trans woman explaining her life.

He had no interest in letting guests say their piece. The central conceit of his show was that left-leaning guests would be allowed to show up and try to make an argument while Wally and his audience harassed and insulted them. I want to play this segment from his show where he has a popular radio DJ on. The DJ brings U2 albums to hand out to the audience. It was 1984. And he chastises Wally for having previously claimed the band were devil worshippers, which is an argument Wally George made a number of times.

Here's Wally's reply. You said you two were a bunch of devil worshippers. They are. They're terrible. They're Christians. Three of the four meant they're Christians. You're saying I'm wrong? You're wrong.

Wally is never wrong. Oh my God, that's what he looks like. I don't want to prove it to me. I don't want to prove. He looks like Rick Flair with a Prince Valiant haircut. We're getting beyond the issues. He looks incredible. I have you down here now.

It's like Colonel Sanders buys the same time. He does. He looks like Colonel Sanders guru. Now the FCC is cracking down on what they call... Like his spiritual advisor. Shock radio. And I say it's about time. I say the FCC should crack down.

There's a lot of nonsense. A lot of really filth and sexual innuendo that little kids are listening to. And I say it's about time that the FCC crack down on these filthy radio stations. All right. All right. That's enough of this clip. So, first off, he looks incredible. He looks incredible.

He is. He looks... The amazing thing about Wally George. He looks like a carnival magician. You watch... He looks like a guy that ties balloon animals. He looks amazing. You watch 30 seconds of Wally George and every fake media figure from a Paul Verhoeven movie

in the 1990s suddenly make... Because they're all him. They're all Wally George. Like every media figure that like got mocked in one of those like surreal 90s movies is fucking Wally George. He looks like Julian Sands as a TV preacher. He looks like if Julian Assange was a warlock. Yes.

Yes. If a vampire bits Julian Assange's neck, he would turn into Wally George. This is what he would turn into. It's incredible. He's in... For those of you who aren't going to look at the picture, he has like shoulder length white hair that can't be real, cannot be real. It's either a wig or like so flat ironed that it just lays there.

And he's got a white suit. He looks like Mr. White from the Venture Brothers, but not an albino. Right. He's just an amazing, amazing commitment to a very specific aesthetic. Yeah. He's like, this is my thing and I'm just going to blunt force it on people. I am the 1980s. A third of my body weight is cocaine.

Yeah, he does. He looks like the shredder dumped mutagen on a pile of cocaine. Yeah. And like that's the creature. Cocaine was a man. That's Wally George. Yeah. But mutated.

So, Tom... Yeah. Here's him talking to Larry Rice, a same-sex marriage advocate and an AIDS awareness activist. Oh boy. Hooray. A gay pride parade. I say it is very offensive.

It is very offensive for gays to be running around, groping each other in the park. What do you think about that? I don't think it's very fair for you to make fun of people whose lifestyle is not the way you want it to be. I think it's... Oh, really? I think it's kind of sad, you know, because, like, they don't hurt you, what they do and, you know...

I'm saying it's offensive, you stupid network. It's offensive. Isn't it? And you're offensive. It's not fair. I'll tell you what, because people like you, you're the people that cause the problem. People who are gay, people who are gay, they do have a very rough, they have it very rough in this world, okay?

Because of people like you. And I think... Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is very upsetting. I think that if real people make it so hard for them to live, that they have a lot of, like, mental disorders and things.

All right, that's probably about enough of that. It's, man, if you guys listening can stomach looking up this clip, it's rough. It's a nightmare. It keeps cutting us. It's horrible. His audience, and they're just, like, huge grins and nothing but high school bullies, like, screaming like... Yeah.

And this guy is just... It's horrible. He's just trying to get his point out, and he's saying, like, these completely rational things. Oh, my God. But it's also... It's very interesting comparing him to Joe Pine. Number one, you can think back to Joe Pine, who, again, I'm certain held very regressive

views on gay people. But asking with genuine interest, oh, so someone who is a transvestite isn't necessarily a homosexual. Oh, that's interesting to me. As opposed to Wally George, who just starts screaming at how offensive, like, the thought of a gay person existing is, like... With his flaxen shoulder-length hair and long-sleeve turtleneck with a blazer on, he's screaming about how a gay pride parade is offensive.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he definitely has some stares. Yes, he does. He looks like... He looks like a disguise that Roger Stone would wear, right? Yeah. He does look like a disguised man. He looks like Roger Stone in a Bond villain wig. Yeah.

And the other thing that's different is that, you know, Joe Pine could be... We played him being very rude to some people, but also, they were all people who could go toe-to-toe with him rhetorically, like Krasner, you know, obviously he didn't respect Krasner. Krasner's media trained. Krasner was ready for what he got, you know? He gave as good as he got. This poor man, Larry Rice, nothing against him, because he's saying very reasonable things, he's clearly not media trained.

Not really... He's not... And he's so... You can see... Nothing against him. Yeah. The clip is so upsetting, because you can see... It's very upsetting.

It's part of why... It's part of, like, the bad faith of, like, debate me, because the tactic is just to keep shouting at you these things to keep you off topic, and it's like not only is this guy battling this overbearing dipshit of a host, but the entire audience is jeering at him the whole time. So, like, I can't imagine being in that, like, even if you are media trained, like, even if you are media trained, being in that situation is like, Jesus, like, I can't... I can't find footing to even make my argument.

No one can do well in that kind of an environment, but it's again, it's one of those things, I do think that, like, Joe Pine was someone who did want to debate people and would debate people and would go out of his way to get people who could present themselves well on television, even if what they were saying was like... And I'm not going to say that maybe this was comprehensively true of everything he did, but all of Wally George is like this. It is nothing but this. It's just hate.

I want to point out that his little turtleneck matched the wallpaper of his set. It did. It sure did, Tom. And then he's got a little behind him is a framed photo of a space shuttle taking off. It just says USA at the bottom. Yeah. And so his set is like a little boys room. And it's...

I keep bringing up Joe Pine, like, positively, not to say nice things about Joe Pine and please don't take this as like me trying to defend his legacy, but to point like how badly things have degenerated, like, 16, 17 years later. How stark the difference is, yeah, I'm sitting here trying to think of like, man, what happened and, you know, a lot of things happened. Reagan, for one, yeah. Yes, yeah, between 1970 and 1984. The religious right became a political block, which it wasn't when Joe Pine was on the air.

The religious right was not a political block that didn't happen until 79. So yeah, it's just, it's a very bleak, but very clear slide downhill. He's Proto 700 Club, too, just the way he looks, the way he looks. Well, I don't know if he was Proto. When did the 700 Club stop? That's true. Solid radio. We're going to Google it.

1966. So he's not Proto the 70, the 700 Club, oh, I got to give you that. All right. Okay. Yeah. So Tom, you know what did come before the 700 Club and will be there long after? Um, I don't know. I don't know.

Are you going to tell me? The products and services, Tom, that support this podcast. Yep. Wow. Solid, solid throw to add, man. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

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He's a shark and not 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. 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

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We're back and we're we're we're not better than ever. We just are continually sliding downhill. We're not even we're not even better than Ezra at this point. No, we're not. Now, Tom, yeah, so let's talk some more about that horrific interview with Larry Rice. Does that really upset me? It's really upsetting. It's hard to watch.

And again, it's the kind of thing like you just didn't feel that way listening to the Joe Pine Clips. Even when he was being a shithead, yeah, it's not that kind of a. Well, it's it's the it's it's frighteningly close to a lynch mob. Yeah, yeah. I think if he'd ordered them, they would have. Yeah, it's it's really alarming. It's a very upsetting clip to watch.

It's really fucked up. Yeah, it's fucked. And it gets a lot worse. Just like a fucking clown, too, doesn't like this guy on vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking Wally George. That's a clown name.

That's a clown. You name Wally motherfucker. So he goes on in that interview to say here in the United States, we don't want perverts marrying each other. And then when they start discussing AIDS prevention, he tells Larry, I don't want these gay AIDS carriers to spread their disease to all of us heterosexuals. People like you were spitting at me. I could catch AIDS from you.

Just a mountain of shit dressed in a terrible suit. Now when it comes to evaluating the appeal and the impact of Wally George, I think this passage from that timeline article does about the best job possible, quote, hot seat commodified old white man anger and gave it room to fester. George's fury was the entire point. It gave audiences permission to act out their basest impulses during the conservative Reagan era. The lure of the show was merely having an outlet for anger, period.

It was a contractual yelling match with the viewers invited. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Kind of feel like that. It all ties together. Seems relevant.

Gosh, somebody else really rose to prominence in the 80s. Gosh, who was that? I mean, there's Don Imus and Howard Stern. Imus is a big one. Major media figure. Oh, I'm being facetious. Oh, Rush Limbaugh. Yeah.

Limbaugh. Yeah. Trump. Yeah. This is the era they're all. This is where all of them dickheads came from. All those real pieces of shit. Now, during his rise to prominence, as we stated, there were a number of dudes inhabiting a

similar field. Rush Limbaugh gets on the radio a year later. Don Imus and Howard Stern, who were less offensive figures, not much less in the case of Don Imus, are starting around this period. But the fact that Wally George worked most prominently on TV, giving his viewers and live audiences an outlet to vent their rage and frustration on human beings, made him unique. In his 19, again, it's like half a lynch mob, and that's half of the appeal to what Wally

George does. Yeah, that's clear. In his 1999 autobiography, he coined the phrase, combat TV, to describe the thing that he invented. And now that's like all news programs. Yeah. It's just bleak. One of Wally's most popular guests was a special piece of shit named Tom Metzger, the

head of a Nazi organization called White Aryan Resistance. I suppose you could critique him, again, like Joe Pine, platforming a Nazi, and he is kind of doing that. But Wally, I don't know, certainly can't be accused of equivocating on Nazism, because I'm going to play you a clip of that next. All across this great country now in our 11th year, and we have the future of Tom Metzger on the show. The Batman villain.

Now, as I was about to say before we went to our break, some of you don't know what Tom Metzger has been involved in. I'm going to go back to that case up in Oregon, where some of Tom Metzger's followers went up to Oregon and they beat a black man to death with, thought you applaud that, you idiot. They beat this black man to death with baseball bats, followers of Tom Metzger. You see, he sits there with that smug little grin on his face, because he doesn't get his hands bloody. He sends out his henchmen and his followers to do his dirty work for him.

All right, all right, all right. It's very, very telling that he had to tell somebody in the audience to stop clapping. That's exactly right, Tom. That's what I was going to point out, because he is certainly not, and to the extent that he platforms Metzger, he's mostly screaming at him. But you can see, again, where things have gone that like this, to stop his audience from clapping at the murderer who would get us along. The kind of horseshit that you're encouraging is bringing these people in, Wally.

It's fascinating, but it's also, there's something so bleak about that too, because there are a lot of mostly horrible things you can say about Wally, and I'm sure Tom went on a show because he saw it as a platform, but Wally never for a second pretended that this guy needed to be heard out. He just had him on to scream at him, which, again, as bad as Wally George has, makes him better than a lot of right wing media today. It's even gone downhill since Wally George is the point I'm making, not trying to praise Wally George.

But it's like... The bar has lowered even more than this cesspool. Yeah, and I don't know, maybe if fucking Richard Spencer, he would have heard out. I don't know. He didn't often hear people out, so I don't know that he would have invited anyone on that he couldn't have just screamed at, but yeah, it's a little bleak. That said, he was very happy to capitalize off the outrage that bringing a guy like Metzger on generated, and I certainly don't want to be praising him for yelling at Tom Metzger.

He's doing it to make money. I want to quote from an article on Wally by OC Weekly, Orange County, which is, for those of you who do not know, like the Republican, one of the biggest Republican stronghold in California pretty much. What made those hot seat appearances by Metzger in the 1980s and 90s so relevant was just how clearly the lines between good and evil were drawn. George wore the white hat, literally, and Metzger was the bad guy. There was no gray to be found, and the audience reaction corroborated those roles.

George's last interview with Metzger was around 1992, against the backdrop of that year's LA riots, and George absolutely laid into Metzger. George repeatedly scolded Metzger for being un-American and referred to war as a bunch of dumb Nazis. George kicked Metzger off his stage after an unprecedented but understandable four minutes. It was a proud moment for Orange County conservatism, as embodied by George, it stood up to the emblematic scourge of white supremacy. And obviously, I don't particularly agree with that take, but it's interesting that

this modern OC conservative writer is looking back at Wally George and be like, remember when we yelled at Nazis as opposed to marching with them in the streets? I'm not trying to say that this guy's right, because this shouldn't be a proud moment for conservatism. He brought him on his fucking show. Several times. But it's interesting to me that this guy looking at, because I'm sure he's referring to these mobs you've had like attacking vaccine sites and fucking Wiespa and whatnot in LA, some

of which include fucking Nazis. And he's like, oh, remember when we used to at least yell at Nazis? It's bleak. Wally filmed his show in Orange County, and he was a local institution and incredibly influential to the combative form of conservatism that exists in that enclave to this day. But as the author of that article points out, modern OC conservatives, though very much the descendants of Wally George often lack his very minimal ethical convictions, quote, prescient of what occurred in Charlottesville and Trump's reaction to it.

The 1992 interview with Metzger captured a moment in time when conservative Republicans rallied openly against white supremacy in the Nazis. Watching that episode, it is equal parts antiquated and Orwellian, with George orchestrating an audience full of young, mostly white, conservative Orange County men and fomenting and rallying viciously against Metzger and what he stood for. To riff on Trump's own axiom, George made it clear that there were not very fine people on both sides. In a fitting into the segment, George stood up behind his desk and led his audience in

a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with particular vocal emphasis on the last line, with liberty and justice for all. He then expanded on that theme to his audience as he looked deploringly at Metzger, reminding him the phrase meant to encompass all races, all religions, and all creeds. And yeah, it's bleak. I mean, I feel like George Wally's, oh Wally's the kind of dude that would have this guy on to scream at him, not because he really personally finds his politics all that distasteful. No, because I don't think he cares about any, I don't think, I'm sure he finds the, because

I don't think he cares about politics much. No, it was just of one, I don't know, it was just a thing, creating a situation where he could be the good guy and generate, you know, ratings for his TV show, I don't know. I refuse to applaud him for any part of this. No, no, no, I'm not quoting this to applaud him. I'm quoting this because it's interesting to see someone writing from that perspective of a British county conservative going on. No, yeah.

Remember when we didn't like Nazis? Yeah, remember when we had at least that line that we would cross? And when you're looking back at Wally George, and like, remember those high moral standards? Yeah, like on a good old days, when we believed in things and there's this guy that like, calls a dude who flipped his desk over the next day, be like, we should tour the country with this. We should tour the country. Believe in anything?

He believes in TV. No, he doesn't believe in a goddamn thing. Now, it is unclear to me whether or not Wally George, living in the modern era, would have fully embraced the white nationalist authoritarian politics that have since devoured the GOP. I suspect so in a way that I don't know if Joe Pine would have as racist as I'm sure Joe Pine was. Joe Pine at least was in World War II. Like I think he might brush up against that a little bit.

I think if he saw a dude with a swastika flag in a march, he'd be like, well, fuck those guys. Yeah, whatever's happening over there. Whatever's happening over there, I don't like that flag, yeah. So yeah, I don't know, I can't say what Wally would have done clearly. But if we're to judge purely off his TV appearances, maybe no, if we were to judge what we know about him morally, probably yes. He seems cut from the same grifter cloth, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Wally is, it's worth noting, one of the very first conservative political voices to use a phrase that has since become infamous. We must make America great again. Wally said this regularly on his show throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside Rush Limbaugh, he also popularized phrases like liberal lunatics calling his detractors, strippers, mud wrestlers, and bimbos of all sizes and shapes. By the 1990s, Hot Seat was no longer close to unique.

Jerry Springer and Rush Limbaugh had both entered TV by then. Rush's foray didn't last long, but in 1996, Fox News started up and provided a much more respectable venue for far-right hate speech. Meanwhile, Jerry Springer delivered a gleefully apolitical approach to combat television that more people found appealing than Wally's right-wing rants. The fact that Springer himself was a much more pleasant person than Wally George may have had something to do with this. In 1995, George's wife left him in the least surprising turn of all time.

She took their seven-year-old daughter with her, thank God. We do not know how many times Wally was married. At least four, some sources say as many as six times. I like that it's like a fucking legend. We don't know. It is. We don't really know how many times this guy got married. Of course that fucking Cripp Keeper looking dude, we don't know.

Don't know how many wives he's got locked in a closet like Bluebeard. Wives survived. Right, exactly. Wally had several kids, but he was not really a father to any of them. He would have kids, but he was no one's father. I think it's fair to say. Man, judging by his said, I thought he would have delighted in having little kids. Yeah, having a little kid around to scream at.

You guys into rocket ships and blue turtlenecks. His most prominent child, Tom, was the actress Rebecca DeMorne. No shit. That's his daughter. Yeah, that's his daughter, Wally George's daughter. What's about Rebecca DeMorne? Oh, they have kind of the same hair like you can see it. Man, that's that's fucked up.

I mean, I mean, she's in hand that rocks the cradle. She's in the that the sweet three musketeers, you know, the Disney one with with Oliver Platt and Charlie Sheen and Keith Sutherland. She's in that TV version of the shining. She is in that TV version of the shining Tom. That's a man. That just shattered my entire universe. Yeah, you didn't expect that, did you, Tom?

Didn't expect to learn that today, did you? Was she the... No, that's too late. I was going to say, was she the one that the wife took? But no, she was our Rebecca DeMorne was already in movies at that point. Yeah, I think she was. Yeah. No, he was just having kids and abandoning them left and right, Tom.

You know who else has kids and abandons them? The sponsors are responsible for these delightful products. Absolutely. Not a single one of them. Not a single one of them raised their own kids. Oh, that's going to help us get sponsors, Robert. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you.

You're great. Sophie, look, I think some people, you know, like to like raise their kids in a loving environment and some people like the song A Boy Named Sue and think that that's a good way to raise a kid. And both options are equally respectable. And what does that have to do with their sponsors? Well, if you can abandon your kids as long as you name them Sue, it's fine. As the song shows, they'll turn out okay.

We'll also accept... As they'll learn how to fight. We'll also accept Ramblin Man. Ramblin Man? Sure. Absolutely. Great, great childrearing advice in Ramblin Man. All right.

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Listen to CSI on trial 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.

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all of the parenting lessons anyone listening to this will ever need to know. Certainly anyone we're talking about will never ever be observed. So Rebecca DeMorne, am I saying her name right? As far as I know. All right. Yeah. You know who she is, obviously. What's she in?

What's her big shit? I just rattled. Are you serious? I just rattled them all off. Oh, wait, Tom. Okay. Well, my brain doesn't work, Tom. Hand that rocks the cradle is probably your biggest thing.

Right. Hand that rocks the cradle. I'm sorry. I'm on drugs. It's more that I'm mostly sober now. It's more that I was on drugs for 13 straight years. My memory doesn't do so great. You knew me during...

Yeah, I remember that. I was there. Yeah, you were there for some of that. That night, I gave everybody way too much. That you put Dave in the hospital? Hallucinating. Yeah. I mean, in fairness, Dave decided the hospital was the right place to be at that place.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. I haven't been able to watch Back to the Future since. We were coming up during that when we realized we had grossly misjudged the amount of the possible we had taken. We fucked up the dosage by a whole lot. Yeah, it was something like 60-60 doses or so.

So, his most prominent child was the actress Rebecca DeMorne, who fucking hated Wally George. He publicly attacked him, and Wally blasted her in interviews as bitter, twisted, and out to ruin me. I found an old L.A. Times article that provides more context to Wally during the downswing of his career. You know she's my daughter, don't you, asks George. He can't help basking in the reflected glory of her celebrity status, even while conceding that she grew up in England without knowing him and wants nothing to do with him now.

What really bothers me more than anything is that she's given interviews saying I never tried to contact her until after she became a star. It's not true. I embarrass her. She hangs out with left-wing actors like Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton. They don't like me because I badmouthed Hollywood. They've convinced her I'm bad for her career.

I just love that trifecta. It's like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Jack Harry Dean, Harry Dean, Stanton, famed leftists all. It's very funny. In fact, yeah. Sorry. Just laughing at that. Yeah.

It's very funny. It's one of those things. Probably nothing would have maybe saved his career more than if he'd actually made up with his daughter and done a big TV special about it, but she never gave into that shit. That's clearly what he wanted was some kind of like big public, you know, for show. He obviously didn't give a shit about her. He abandoned her. No, I'm sure.

But I'm sure once she was very famous, he wanted her on his TV show. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the mid 1990s, George's audience was too small for the Nielsen company to rate, which means it reached less than 24,000 households in the Los Angeles area. As a result, in order to chase notoriety and attention, he was forced to find weirder and

weirder guests for hot seat. One frequent attendee was Oderous Oerungus, the lead singer for Guar. Oderous loved, Tom turns his head. Oderous loved Wally, telling one interviewer, honestly, of all the talk shows we've been on everything from Springer to Joan Rivers to Jimmy Fallon, it was our favorite one. That cheesy little public access show with that weirdo Wally George, he kicked ass on all of those other multimillion dollar fucking Hollywood TV creation, constructed human being yuck.

Those people really made me sick. Yeah. Fucking Guar. That's why a man who dresses up as a monster for a living would enjoy being on Wally George's show. Yeah. I mean, that was their whole thing. They just wanted to offend people and shock people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get why Wally George and him hit it off. Dexter Holland, lead singer of the Opspring, was also a guest on the Wally George show and described it as punk, which I do think gets it something important. For many of his young fans especially, the appeal wasn't that Wally was right wing. It wasn't that they didn't hate right wingers, they weren't left wing, they just didn't

care about politics. They liked that he was raucous, violent and unhinged. They liked that as members of his live audience, they could be raucous, violent and unhinged. They could scream and shout at people and threaten them and sometimes he would get into fucking fights on the show. There's more than a little Wally George in the alt-rights DNA. I don't care as much about the politics that I'm claiming as I do about getting to offend you.

That's Wally George. And that's a big part of modern conservatism now. Other regular guests who sparred with Wally expressed a belief that he was not really conservative. He was a showman first and foremost and would happily platform anyone fringe enough to be entertaining. Still, there was more than a hint of lynch mob to Wally's audience. Nicholas Shrek, lead singer of Radio Werewolf, recalled,

It was like Wally was a microcosm of Hollywood taking over politics. In a way it could seem harmless or like it was just a joke, but when we were actually in the studio and Wally was presenting me as a scapegoat for all societal ills, the audience was whipped into a genuine frenzy. They did not take it as a joke and it felt very dangerous to be there. It's easy to think he was a humorous phenomenon, but it was part of the whole. It was a very violent craziness to the 80s that I don't think Americans can remember exactly how it was.

I went to a Ronald Reagan rally in 1984 and I sensed that same inherent violence. You know the novel Lord of the Flies? It reminded me of that. Yep. There's a lot in there. It feels a little relevant, doesn't it? Nicholas Shrek, on to something there. Yeah, like I said, one of the main things about watching that clip that was so unpleasant

and upsetting is how close it is to a lynch mob. It's just like he's a big goofball. We had a lot of fun talking about how ridiculous he looks, but that is a frightening situation. There's no joke about that audience. There's nothing funny about that audience. Absolutely not. I have gone toe-to-toe with more or less that audience in the street with a bunch of weapons on their side.

It's the same fucking people. Well, it's very... It's the same motivation. Oh, man, it's so parallel to Trump, because Trump himself, the man, is a big stupid idiot that's ridiculous looking and you can just look at him and be like... Yeah, it could have just as easily been a Democrat if that had been the easy way to get what he wanted. Yeah.

Yeah. Just look at that big stupid asshole, but then you look at the crowds that follow him and be like, oh, there's nothing funny about that. This is not at all humorous. No. This is scary. Wally's health started to fall apart in the early 1990s. No!

And by 1990... I know, Tom. This is really going to break your heart. Oh, no. Brace yourself here. Don't tell me. I can't take it. By 1993, he had to quit recording new episodes of his show, but since Hot Seat had been daily

for like a decade, the show stayed in reruns for another decade, and Wally would regularly record new introductions and conclusions to various best of episodes. He died in 2003 of pneumonia. So we have a lot to thank cigarettes and pneumonia for, but none of them work fast enough. Yep. Satan called home another angel, another one of his glorious angels. Speaking of Satan's angels, Tom, any pluggables to plug? That's the end.

That's the end of part two. We got one more in the chamber. Oh, okay. It's all ran a little longer. Oh, shit. All right. We're on a podcast network with my buddy, David Bell. We work together.

Yes, we do. If you want to head over to patreon.com.com or Game Center for Unemployed, you can support our network. We do a bunch of free podcasts. Motherfucker. We also do a bunch of exclusive podcasts just for patrons, like Fox, Mulder's, Maniac, Tom and Jeff, Watch Batman and Star Trek, The Next Futurama. So check that out.

If you would please. Yeah, assholes. Do it. We gonna do, not do it. I'm sorry, I love you all. Anyway, see you in episodes over. 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 was 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 podcast. 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 oughta 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 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 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.