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

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Glenn dedicates the show to legendary conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, who passed away Wednesday after his battle with cancer. Glenn reminisces on the opportunity he once got to do a show from behind the golden microphone and tells less well-known stories of all Rush did for the talk radio industry. Christopher Rufo, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, joins to share Rush’s impact on his life and the latest on how fast critical race theory is spreading into schools and workplaces near you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The best of the Glenn Beck program Slimbaugh and I have had one thing in common one thing in common and that is every show Rush didn't know what his

first words were going to be you could ask him right before he went on the air and he'd prepare for hours five or six hours the night before four hours before every program in the morning and by noon Eastern time he had his what he called stacks of stuff arranged in front of him in columns

he could see the subject matter on everything he had and uh he could look at it he would grab it and early on before Rush Limbaugh was Rush Limbaugh people would come in and say okay rush what are you going to talk about today what do you know what's the most important thing you're going to talk about today what is it and he'd always respond I don't know. I can't tell you. Until the on air light went on and he said those first words into his golden microphone.

It was a spontaneous coming together of his thoughts and no one, no one except talk radio people can understand that. The greatest actors, the greatest performers, they don't write their own

script and if they do, they write it in advance. Unlike us, unlike Rush, we speak for three hours every day unscripted. Unlike most, his desk was his broadcast studio. He didn't move from an office into a studio just before the program. When he arrived every morning, it was about a mile down from his house. He worked in his studio. It was built to be soundproof, but also have the very best creature comforts for a person to work from seven, eight, ten hours with minimal movement. My studio was next to his in Radio City.

My studio didn't have all the bells and whistles that his studio had. One of them was a secret cigar smoke vent. because you couldn't smoke in Radio City. It was illegal in New York. And nobody wanted to smell the recirculating cigar smoke. So God only knows how he got it done on a historic building, but he had a cigar vent put into the window and the window put back together so it didn't disturb the historic building

and no one even knew it was there. The mornings before his show were quiet. it. He really was a man of few words. In his studio for many years, there wasn't even a broadcast engineer. It was just him. Later, when he lost his hearing, he needed a broadcast engineer to help hear the audio. His cochlear implants wouldn't pick up or discern. I was there when they found out that Rush Limbaugh had lost his hearing. I remember that night, I think Stu was with me. We're in Gabe Hobbs' office. And we had just heard that Rush, it was still quiet. No one was going to talk about it for

at least another two weeks, that Rush had lost his hearing. And I remember listening to him at that time, and he was talking like this an awful lot. From behind my golden microphone. And he was forcing his voice down, and it sounded weird. And I wondered what was going on with Rush. That night I found out. He thought he was losing his lower register. He thought his voice was getting higher. And so he was forcing his voice down just a bit.

He wasn't losing his lower register. He was losing his hearing. I remember how the company did everything they could to help him through that. I remember he came back on the air and he had two stenographers, an oscilloscope, and they had wired his board right where you would hear him do this. That board was wired, so it would send vibrations. So when someone was speaking on the phone, he could feel their voice. He could see the voice pattern through the oscilloscope. He could feel it through his hands.

and two stenographers were writing down everything the caller was saying in case one of them didn't get it right. He could compare the two. So he could watch in real time what they were saying, watch the voice pattern of the caller and feel the voice with his hands while still processing what he was going to say. Tell me the person that can do that. Tell me the person that can do that and you never knew. He didn't know what his own voice sounded like anymore. While he was talking on the air, he couldn't hear himself. We hear ourselves on tape and we think, that doesn't sound like me.

But it actually does. It sounds exactly like you. You're just not used to not hearing it from the inside. You hear your voice different because it's coming. from the inside. So you're not hearing it without all the resonance inside of you. Rush couldn't hear that anymore. From behind my golden microphone. He had that inflection because he had to remember what his muscles felt like when he was using inflection. I didn't know Rush Limbaugh. I guess in some ways I'm a little like Rush. He didn't like

telephone calls and after the cochlear implants he couldn't but he didn't like off-air conversation he would email later text message instant message but when you did meet him he listened for a guy who's on the air all the time you'd think that he'd have a lot to say and people around him would want to hear him talk all right rush what do you really think what do you think really is going on. But 90% of the conversations with Rush off air was your voice. He was a profound listener.

I think that's one of the reasons why he knew the country so well. Rush Limbaugh is responsible for saving the AM band. All around the country, I grew up on AM radio. RCA had invented FM radio. back in the late 40s, the guy who actually invented it, I think his name was Armstrong, he killed himself because of RCA.

He realized he had been used by RCA and Sarnoff. He had invented something much better than AM radio. But RCA and Sarnoff said, there are too many AM radios to sell before we give up on this thing. And they locked FM up into their vaults, and they sold more and more AM radios until they couldn't sell anymore. And that's when they introduced FM. I grew up, I started on AM radio.

Before FM was really anything, it was still, and here's another rock and roll hit, Inegada de Vita. By the time the 1990s came, I was programming AM radios, AM radio stations and they were dying. There was nothing. And a guy who used to be the head of ABC, ABC Radio, decided towards the end of his career that he would take some of his salary in something brand new, satellite time.

And ABC was like, okay, all right, dude, if that's what you want. You want X number of hours this year a satellite time. Okay. What are you going to use it for? I don't know. I don't know. Just keep storing them up for me. And by the time he left AM radio, or I'm sorry, ABC Radio,

satellite was really starting to come into its own. But it was still mainly television or radio news. I remember when ABC News used to come in not on a satellite, it had come in on a telephone line. Satellite was just beginning to start to be used by radio, but not for syndicated. Talk, it didn't exist. There was the fairness doctrine, which made AM radio impossible. Talk radio, impossible, because everything I said had to be followed by a guy who was just as insane as Glenn Beck, except on the other side.

Nobody wanted to listen to a station like that. The fairness doctrine was dropped. Rush Limbaugh, who had been turned down by so many great people, Jack Swanson, from KGO, right? Wasn't that where Jack was? KGO? In San Francisco, Jack was a guy who was one of the first to reach out to me and say, you know, I think you have something, kid. I think there's something to this talk radio thing, don't give up. And I said, wow, that's great.

Would you hire me? And he said, oh, no. But remember, I'm the guy who didn't hire Rush Limbaugh. Jackie got two now. He went to work. Rush went to work with this little radio station in Sacramento. And nobody thought it would work. Nobody thought it would work.

Rush did. He knew, from his childhood, he knew. he knew he was going to be successful. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. Behind my cardboard microphone. This is the Glenn Beck program. With no hands tied behind my back and talent on loan from Milton Burrell, who's been dead for a long time.

Welcome to the program. I will tell you, I got into this business. this talk radio business in the late 1990s, but I only did shows, fill in shows. I was doing comedy morning shows. And I was sick of it. And I got into talk radio because I felt I had something to say, but I really got into it also because I wanted to make fun of it. all these intellectuals that just of you know were high and mighty and most of them and that this time all the local ones were like attorneys that were all trying to get on and I'm an expert I'm a local official on the school council and they were boring as snot and I got into it because I wanted to make fun of all of it and I saw things in a completely different way I think Rush Limbaugh did the same thing in a way he was making fun of the

media and he mocked all of that. Most people don't know that the roots of this show really kind of stem back to Florida and Rush Limbaugh. I knew the first time we ever did a talk radio show, Stu will verify that this is true because it was just like he was so sick of me. and this is like 19, what, 98, 97? We did our first talk radio show, and it was just, it was for like an hour, two hours maybe. And I took my headphones off after the first break, and I looked at him, and he was running the board and helping produce.

And I looked at him over the board, and I said, we're going to replace Dr. Laura. And he said, what? And I said, this show's going to replace Dr. Laura. and he said, how about we finish our first show? And I told him, I said, mark my words. Well, the first time I was on kind of a job interview. I had done shows for WABC and I had filled in here and there, but nobody would give me a job. And I changed my life.

I was really struggling in the 90s. I changed my life. I was an alcoholic. I was going on five years sober. I had found an amazing woman that loved me and also was just really good for me. And then I met my wife, too. No, I'm kidding. And I married her, Tanya.

And my life changed, but I couldn't get a job. I get baptized. And the day after my baptism, I just remember this because of the, I tried for two years to try to get somebody to, you know, represent me. I talked to everybody. I couldn't get anybody to represent me. And it was a Monday afternoon and my phone rings at my apartment. And a guy on the other side of the phone said, hey, I understand you're looking for an agent.

And I said, yeah, I have been for two years. And he said, my name's George Hill. He was the biggest agent of radio at the time by far, by far. He had done everything in his career. He was an NBC executive. He was part of the original Saturday Night Live legal team. A legend. George is a legend.

He's a legend. But anyway, he calls me up. And he said, well, I heard from Jack Swanson, a KGO that maybe I would, I should pay attention to you. And I said, okay, well, thanks. And he said, well, Jack's the guy who passed on Rush Limbaugh, so let's not get too excited, joking. And I said, well, that's great.

What do we do? And he said, well, I want to check you out. I want to check you out. And he said, I've heard many things about you, good and bad. He calls me back on Wednesday. And he said, all right, I'll take you on. Now, I'm thinking of myself over the last couple of days. I'm thinking to myself, there's a chance this guy won't take 10% of my money.

And I said that to George. He said, I'll take you on. I said, really, honestly, I've been thinking about this for a while. You mean to tell me that you would pass up 10% of what I'm already making because you wanted to check me out and see? And he said, you're entering a new territory. He said, you want to go into talk radio. He said, you can't be a fraud in talk radio.

And I've heard stories about you in the past, but I understand that you're trying to change your life. You've sobered up. You're stable. And you're a good man. And I said, wow. Well, thank you. Yes, I am. And he said, well, that's why I'm taking you on.

Because no one can fake who they are for three hours without a script every day. The audience is too smart. They will figure you out and you're done. He said, and I've wasted my time. So I take that job. I take him as a client. I get a job at WFLA in Florida. And I had to do kind of a job tryout before.

And what they decided to do was to let me do my first network show. I had never, I mean, like, what did we have? 20 shows in our back pocket that we had done. And they said, we want you to do this network show. And Rush Limbaugh has allowed us to put you into his studio in New York City. And I'm like, wait, wait, what? So I go into the Rush Limbaugh studios. And Stu and I, I'll never forget, this giant oil painting.

There's a picture I think I tweeted today, giant oil painting of Rush behind the micro And there's the golden microphone. And Stu and I look at each other like, I can't believe this. And I did my first show because of his kindness of letting us use that studio. Two years go by, I'm working in Florida. And we went from worst to first. Actually, we went from worse to a lot worse to first to first in a two year period. and there was this one week,

and I don't even know, I don't even know if I've asked you this. Did you know who was on that phone line that week? You don't even remember this. So one week just before Premier offers me a position, the phone line at WFLA is tied up all week during my show, started at 3 o'clock, was over, at seven. One phone line was tied up. And I didn't know why. And nobody would tell me. Well, I find out later that Rush Limbaugh was listening to my show every day that week. Good thing, they didn't tell me. I would have freaked me out. But he had been asked to listen to my show by Premier. Now, I find this out later.

the head of premier Craig Kitchen goes down to Florida to meet with Rush and Rush knows that the meeting is about me and Craig said to me later after we started to really know each other we were talking about this bogus with talent alone from God And how much of an act that was, how humble he really was in person, how quiet he was in person.

He wasn't that beat his chest guy. That part was an act. But his listeners knew that. They're in on the joke. In on the joke. And he said, in fact, you know we had to ask Rush for permission out of courtesy. to hire you. And I said, what?

They said, yeah, he listened a few weeks ago, you know, when you were, when you were, you know, on the air before we, before we offered you this gig. He listened. We asked him to listen. And I remember the phone line. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's who it was. They had him listen for a week because they had so much deference for him. because I was going to be before him on the network. They wanted to make sure that Rush was okay with the lead-in.

Apparently, he said yes. But the point of the story is, is while he was sitting there at dinner, when Craig sat down, the first thing he said was, it's been a good run. It's been a great run, Craig, hasn't it? And Craig said, yeah, it has.

It's like, we've accomplished a lot. and I'm comfortable. So don't worry about it. You know, not everybody lasts, you know, forever.

He actually thought that he was having dinner because they were going to say to him, it's over. Are you kidding me? Most people don't last 30 years in this business, but Rush Limbaugh didn't know

he wasn't most people. He still had the excitement and he still had the humility to go it could be over at any time. That's hard for somebody who's worth $600 million. That's hard for somebody who has 27 million listeners a week. To put that into perspective, Colbert has about $3 million a night. Rush had 27 million a week. Do the math. How humble he really was.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. Many members of the media are taking sick, twisted glee in the death of Rush Limbaugh. And they're also trying to set the history against him, make sure that that's cemented cemented in by playing all kinds of bad things that he has said, that he has said either in jest or in mistakes that he later apologized for, you know, it doesn't matter to people anymore. If it's even true, it doesn't matter anymore. And he may be the last example of somebody who's just really bulletproof, really bulletproof.

And even he had some scary times. We were supposed to be with him the day he lost his Monday night football gig. And that was a really weird day. And yet he had carved himself a place where he could continue to do what he did because he listened to the listeners. And that's what I did with the Blaze. And we are grateful, truly grateful that the only people we have to answer to are you. And we ask you to join us at blazedtv.com slash Glenn, save 30% on your subscription now. But talk radio is going to come under attack because everything is and they have to shut you up.

Last night I did a show, our Wednesday night special on national suicide and what's actually killing. our kids. And I started the show with Christopher Roo folks. We started with the non-literal suicide, the national suicide, that really comes from critical race theory. Christopher is the contributing editor for the City Journal and the director of Center on on wealth and poverty. He is the guy who is really responsible for rooting this out and letting people know what critical race theory is and how deeply embedded in the system. If you missed last night show, we talked about this curriculum that is in public schools up in New York. And they identify the eight white identities that you have.

And it starts at white supremacist. And then I think one of them is a race trader. And that's on the good side of the scale, by the way, if you're a race trader, if you're selling out the white race, it's crazy. I wanted to bring Christopher back. This is the only thing that we have done today that is not related to Rush Limbaugh because I think this is so important. Chris, welcome to the program.

It's great to be with you. Thank you. First of all, any thoughts on Rush Limbaugh? Did you listen to him? Yeah, you know, I didn't. You know, I grew up actually, I don't know if you know this, Glenn, as a kind of liberal, bohemian in California.

That was my upbringing and my political orientation for most of my youth. And then I started kind of questioning those assumptions. It started to not match with reality. I started veering more towards the center. And I wrote one of my first pieces for City Journal, where I was still kind of in the center, maybe center right, and Rush read it on air.

I got a flood of emails. And it was very strange because I had been grown up hearing all of these bad things about Rush Limbaugh. And then I started listening. I said, oh, interesting. Rush Limbaugh is reading my story. I started listening. I said, man, what people,

in California and the people that are spewing so much venom on Twitter here is so different than what you actually hear from his words. And I became a fan subsequently, and, you know, it was very sad to hear the news. Yeah. I wanted to get Tammy Bruce. Maybe we get Tammy Bruce. See if we can get Tammy Bruce on the show tomorrow. She tweeted something. She was very, very, you know, she was ahead of the national organization of women for a while. And then she met Rush Limbaugh. And it changed her life. And she said the same thing. Everything, I believed and everything I had been told about him and his audience just wasn't true. Let's talk about critical race theory because I am getting messages from people who want to know

I have to go into a critical race theory kind of thing in my office and they'll fire me if I say anything. I saw Accenture, I think, let a 30-year partner go because he spoke up against this and said, we shouldn't be doing any of this. Tell me about how. critical race theory is going to be affecting people, if it hasn't already, in their places of business and what they should do? Yeah. I mean, if it isn't already in your workplace and your workplace is like a large corporation, a publicly owned firm, it's coming.

And it's going to come under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which sound great, but sometimes are really aggressive propaganda and indoctrination campaigns. Can you say first what the difference between equality, which our Constitution talks about, and equity, which is critical race theory? What is the difference? Because they sound the same and people think, ah, equity, equality, it's the same. It's not. Yeah, equality is the idea that we're all created equal under God and that we, the government should protect individual rights regardless of race, creed, color, religion, et cetera. and essentially it's the equal protection under the law.

Equity is, the critical race theory is basically say, hey, equality hasn't worked. We still have large racial disparities. There's still kind of systemic racism in society. So they've abandoned the idea of equality, treating people equally, and replaced it with equity, which is treating groups as units and then trying to equalize outcomes based on group identity. So a very kind of quick way to think about it is equality. is something like the equality of opportunity, and equity is the equality of results, which we've seen over and over in the 20th century lead to human and social disaster.

Okay, so I'm in my office. Thank God, this isn't happening at my company, but I'm in my office, and I get a note that says, I have to attend this racial diversity and equity class, and I want nothing of it, and maybe there are people in my office, but no one will say anything, what do I do and what happens if nobody does stand up against it? Well, there's a couple things you can do. One is if you feel confident enough and you feel like you have the conviction to do so, you can stand up, you can speak out, you can send a letter to the HR department,

letting them know that these theories don't actually lead to better outcomes in the business literature. They put the firm at legal risk for lawsuits and that they conflict with your own deeply held beliefs. How do they open up the firm for lawsuits? Well, you know, I'm working on this, but I think there's a strong case to be made and there's some kind of analogies in case law that if critical race theory, for example, traffics and racial stereotypes. They say white people can be reduced to the essence of whiteness, and it's analogous with oppression. That's a violation of the Civil Rights Act. If they compel speech, especially in public institutions, that's also a violation of the law. And then if it creates a toxic

work environment, which in many cases it does, it's pitting people against each other. It's creating a kind of race-based harassment, which is a protected category. Again, these are all absolutely. actual violations of the law. And I think big companies are maybe the quickest to potentially change tack because their legal departments, if this starts becoming a cost center, if it starts becoming a legal risk, if they start fearing lawsuits, they're going to probably disband a lot of these programs pretty quickly. So I think that's one, you know, excellent way forward that we could hopefully see unfold in the next few years. You have giant companies. Are you, you read up on the Great

reset, Chris? Yeah. I mean, you see these, what are called ESGs, these standards in these big companies, and that's the first red flag. If your, if your company has an ESG, environmental, social justice, and governmental standards, you're already in trouble. Yeah, and I think people are going to have to make a big decision. If your beliefs, your politics, your faith is important, and you work at a company that is actively kind of mobilizing against it, you have a tough ethical and moral choice to make. Do you stay and fight, or do you find employment with a company that lets you express yourself more authentically?

And I've talked to a lot of people in the last six months where they say, you know, I have these obligations, I have a family, I have a career, I have a reputation. But this is just eating away at me, this political indoctrination, trying to shame people, trying to create collective guilt based on race, or faith or identity. And I tell them, you know, you really have two options. You're going to have to sit and take it, or you're going to have to have some courage and stand up for those convictions.

And in some cases, people are actually starting to fight back. And in, you know, some cases, even fewer, unfortunately, they're actually having success at shutting down these programs. You did a great story in the City Journal on Anti-Racism, comes to the heartland. And you talk about Springfield, Missouri, how the teachers are being forced to locate themselves on the oppression matrix, which is what?

The oppression matrix is a kind of graph or grid that was designed by some social justice academics that basically said, these are the checklists that makes you an oppressor. These are the checklist that makes you an oppressed person. So white, male, heterosexual, English-speaking Christians were the kind of dominant oppressors and then, you know, the other side. And it was a middle school in Springfield, Missouri, a place that is not a kind of progressive stronghold. It's not L.A. or New York. And they were forcing teachers to essentially locate themselves on this oppression matrix.

And telling white male teachers, you are an oppressor, telling female or people of color that we're teaching in the system, you are an oppression. press, taking in none of the actual reality of the situation. No one's individual stories and categorizing them in this way. And teachers were absolutely outraged. You know, they leaked me the documents and hopefully the school district will think twice before doing it again. It also, they handed out flyers or some, you know, training materials. And the handout originally listed MAGA as, quote, a form of code. overt white supremacy. Now, they took that off because people found out about it.

And so they went back into the hiding and they scampered under the refrigerator like cockroaches do. But MAGA, this is, this should show you where we're headed when they say, hey, we got to find extremists. The stuff that is being passed out to our teachers in schools is really revealing on who they think those dangerous extremists. are, and they're the people in the red states. Yeah, absolutely, that's right. And I think we've seen an evolution of language. For the last four years under the Trump administration, there was this drumbeat from the media constantly saying,

making the association that white conservative Christians are, by definition, white supremacists. And there was an attempt to tie those two phrases together. And then on January 6th, and I know you condemned it, I condemned it, the violence at the Capitol, they were gleeful. You could, you could, those 72s after, they said, this is our big opportunity. We can now move from white supremacists to white supremacist domestic terrorists. And it's a really kind of maybe spontaneously coordinated, but clearly a coordinated

language campaign to basically create the connotation between conservative and Republican voters and white supremacists and domestic terrorists. And these phrases are dangerous. I mean, it's a truly, you know, the worst thing that can be. And they're trying to basically annex all conservative voters into that kind of linguistic umbrella, which then they could use to silence, to de-platform, to outlaw and to marginalize. What I think is, you know, is not a majority of strong plurality of the country. Chris Rufel, thank you so much.

much. We'll talk again. Thank you for all of your hard work. You can follow him on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo, RUFO, or his website is Christopherrufo.com. Thanks, Chris. We'll talk again.