 What do we want to say about Rush Limbaugh's legacy? So I think without a doubt, he's the most influential man in radio in about 50 years, the most influential man in talk radio ever. He essentially invented a new industry. There was talk radio before him, there was political talk radio before him, but what he did was unique. He would do three hours with very few guests and very few callers. And he did great radio, okay? He worked so hard, everything seemed to be planned and rehearsed. And he sounded like he was having a good time, but there wasn't dead air, okay? There wasn't, you know, awkward pauses. He just had everything lined up. So he was not a very social person. He wasn't at ease around people. His show was his life. And he was an absolute master, to essentially do three hours on his own. This radio is such hard work and bad radio is the norm. So remember Air America? That was the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh and it was just so bad. I mean, there was dead air, there were awkward pauses, there was lack of preparation. Bad radio, like bad conversation is just painful to sit through. This is Gregory Hood writing. So it wasn't just talent, it just wasn't hard work, but he also tapped into a great need that conservatives, even if they could elect presidents of the United States, such as Ronald Reagan, they felt largely shut out from the news media. So Rush Limbaugh offered a way to talk back to the elites, who even in the 1980s were dominantly liberal. Now, Rush went about as far as you could go and stay on the air. I mean, he ran parodies about Barack Obama, songs like, you know, Barack the Magic Negro. Okay, you couldn't go any further than he did. I mean, they tried to cancel his advertisers many times because of his offensive comments, but Rush managed to just stay within the Overton window, probably helped that his producer, James Gordon, better known as post-nerdly was black, but Rush had a way of talking about racial differences that managed to keep him from getting in trouble. So he would discuss racial double standards with crime, drugs, immigration, but he rarely tackled race explicitly. He had an ability to shift conversations onto safe territory after a dangerous beginning. So he knew his limits and he wasn't gonna throw away his career for anything. He understood himself primarily as an entertainer. Now, he lost his job for ESPN when he pointed out correctly that the media was rooting for a black NFL quarterback and that they praised Donovan and McNabb way beyond his actual accomplishments because they were so eager to see a black quarterback succeed. So he spoke a lot of tough truths that you're not supposed to say publicly. And whatever timidity he may have shown on really tough issues, he went about as far as you can in his position. I mean, Dennis Prager similarly. I remember arriving at UCLA in 1988 and hearing Dennis Prager say things about race and I hadn't heard on the radio before. So we need to say that America had certain crime problems and education problems and infant mortality problems. He would point out that these were disproportionate problems within the black community. And the different racial communities had different life results. It seems like common sense, but people weren't generally saying that on the radio. And then Rush Limbaugh in 2016, he read a Sam Francis essay on the air, right? So it wasn't just conservatism anymore. He was now talking about nationalism. And I think Sean Hannity ever went that far. So what did he accomplish? Well, he helped to create conservative talk radio. He helped to create a movement. Now, you might say the movement didn't accomplish much but how much worse might the country have been without it? So Peter Brimlow argues that Rush was largely silent on immigration, but he did provide fuel to fight back attempts to pass amnesty, such as in 2007. So you can look at Rush as a safety valve, taking the justified anger of the working class, perhaps wasting it on unimportant battles. So you can't expect people to give up their career, I guess, to give up their life, to be a martyr for the truth, all right? It was clear that Rush Limbaugh placed his ratings number one, right? Now, at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf says, Rush Limbaugh hurt conservatism and fueled divisive racial paranoia. I think that's absurd. Charlie Seig says Limbaugh's legacy was playful, bigotry. I think that's absurd. Peggy Noonan uses Rush Limbaugh's death in the Wall Street Journal today to suggest we bring back the fairness doctrine because America is now more polarized, more bitter and less stable. The reason we're more polarized, less bitter and more stable is not because we don't have the fairness doctrine, it's because we have less that we have in common. So the ruling ethos is the less we have in common, the better, right? Diversity is good means the less we have in common, somehow that's better, but that's absurd. The more we have in common, the stronger we are. So Rush told conservatives that they had a right to feel that they were being treated unfairly and that the media was deceiving them. And he did call out the hypocrisy of the media and all this talk about equality when you consistently have things like affirmative action which are discriminating against, for example, whites and Asians. So he said a lot of tough truths. Now, he supported the 2003 Iraq invasion, right? And then he eventually came around to supporting Donald Trump. So how much of a coherent ideology did he have or did he just want to stick with the winners? And who's going to inherit his microphone? Probably thinking the best possibility is Mark Stein. Like he's no Rush Limbaugh, but yeah, Luke's got the crystal light out. Oh, let's take a simultaneous sip of our crystal light classic orange. How Luke Hand or Dennis Prager's eventual exit. So I think I listened to probably less than 200 hours of Rush Limbaugh in my life. So I probably listened to like 10,000 hours of Dennis Prager. So I found Rush Limbaugh compared to Dennis Prager lower IQ and just more Rawly partisan. So Rush was always about how the Republicans are good and the Democrats are bad. And I just did not find that type of analysis appealing. It's just too Rawly partisan. When the Republicans got hammered in the 2006 election, Rush said on his show, I now no longer have to carry the water for the people who'd lost. So he'd been supporting the president and the GOP on Iraq and on their immigration compromise. And why was he carrying their water? So what happens is even when you just do a live stream like this, it's very easy to get hooked on the applause and the positive comments. And then you have a base. You realize everyone in public life has a base of support. People on talk radio, people on TV, whether you're on the right or the left, you tend to have a base of support if you're a rabbi. And you don't want to get crosswise with them. If you oppose your base, they will desert you and then you'll lose your influence and power and your audience and your income. So people like Rush, he was constantly alert to where the base was and he would try to give up what it wanted. Because he knew if he didn't give the base what it wanted, they would leave. Now, this comes at a price of degradation of public discourse and a degradation of honesty. All right, Rush was not so much a leader. He was a follower of those who were in power and where his listeners were, where his base was. There's a good profile of Rush, January 20th, 1991 by Bob Baker in the Los Angeles Times. And you might remember when Rush first went on the air in 1988, 89, 1990, he would revel in giving these acidic gay community updates and he would be little gay activists for besieging America for a cure for AIDS. And from Rush's perspective and from a common sense perspective, AIDS was like the easiest disease not to get. Because simply abstain from having unprotected anal sex and sharing intravenous needles and you have very little chance of getting AIDS. So that is common sense. But when Rush became the target of protest by AIDS activists, he stopped talking about, he stopped making fun of them. And he admits to Bob Baker, frankly got tired of being identified as a gay basher. So Rush would try to see what he could get away with. He would say the jokes, but when the blowback got too intense he would shift. So he doesn't like the idea that he's insensitive, right? It's Bob Baker. He wishes it would go away. Don't they understand that the jokes just come so fast to him? He used to repress any of his jokes. Why can't he just have fun? Why can't he just laugh from one diatribe to another? And he praised this essay in Esquire, The Case Against Sensitivity. Sensitivity is the new fascism. You can no longer make fun of politically correct groups. What happened to free speech? Why doesn't everybody lighten up? I do liberals assume he's racist just because he taunts every black leader from Jesse Jackson to David Dinkins. That doesn't mean he has anything against blacks. Look forward, talent unlearned from Hashem. What happened to my Ascension? I got some Ascension. So I like to wait about two hours after my meal because Ascension is high in alkaline and it can interfere with your digestive process. So I had Breckie about 90 minutes ago. So I'll start hitting the Ascension in about 30 minutes. Lauren says, I never liked Rush Limbaugh but trashing him now is somewhat pointless comparatively. Criticism, if him was more meaningful before he passed away. Yeah, your arm has only tweets, I don't accept this new norm which supposes that when a public figure dies it is a signal for everyone who disagreed with him to start dancing on his grave. Well, I think this new norm just means that people have more access to give their opinions on social media. A decent public culture regards funerals as a time when each of us looks for the positive meaning that can be found in the life of the deceased. If we absolutely can't bring ourselves to abide by this civilized, civilizing custom then the very least we can honor those who are grieving by keeping quiet and saving what we have to save for another time. Most elementary concern for one's nation dictates that at a time when the other fellow is mourning his dead then start up again with your old war against the deceased. This is a special kind of cruelty that people don't forget, is purposely seeking to wound in a way that will not be healed for a very long time, if ever. Supposed it is pointless to emphasize that every nation needs a minimum of decency even across bitter political divides. It is this minimum of decency that limits future conflict. It is this alone that prevents the dissolution of the nation. I can see that there are some who just don't care anymore. I think it's gotten so bad that no minimum of decency applies to USA. Why not let others do the cruel and inhuman work of making funerals more bitter for the bereaved? So these are interesting points by your Amazonie. My approach is to speak the same way about the dead as the living. So I don't believe I've ever danced on anyone's grave but I don't think I've ever shied away from criticizing people who've just died. So I think I've generally spoken about them the same way as if they were alive. I guess there's no longer the threat of libel once they're dead. So in public life, if someone was a public figure, then I think public discussion should be primarily about what is true. It should not primarily be about the feelings of those who loved and mourned him. Lawrence says Rush did deserve criticism. We should have done that when he was alive. He was garbage. We should have said so last year and years before. So I did not particularly care for him. I just found him too partisan and I just didn't get enough sustenance. I would rather listen to a left of center talk radio host like Michael Jackson on KBC where he'd have a lot of guests and callers. I just felt there was more intellectual stimulation. Art Bell's in the chat. Luke turns on the crystal lights. How will Luke handle the eventual ex of Dennis Prager? Rush started as a music DJ. Charming the masses was his goal. He walked his positions back and forth. He was edgy at times to borrow Howard Stern's strength, the sports team approach to politics. Yes. So there was a good comment on Steve Saylor's blog. Rush's biggest influence was in teaching regular conservatives, regular Americans to talk back to the elites. They'd been conservative media before. They'd been Bill Buckley in national review. But Rush was like a precursor to YouTube comments, bloggers and Twitter. I think that's true. So in the same way that 60s garage bands or the Ramones taught teenagers around the world, the romance anyone could start a rock band, Rush made regular Americans feel like they could take on the liberal establishment. And he was funny. He was irreverent. Never came off as nerdy or stilted. Came off as confident. And Trump perhaps would have been unthinkable without Rush Limbaugh. So Rush even had a successful TV show in the 1990s. He got great ratings. He ended up because there was just too much of a commitment for him to make. Rush was such an influence that an entire radio network, Air America, was started and failed in an attempt to mimic and counter his impact. So the mark of a good teacher is that they helped their students become so skilled and confident at learning that the teacher becomes superfluous. So a good teacher helps a student becomes his own teacher. And so Rush raised up millions of Rush Limbaugh's. And his legacy has just been taken for granted now for decades. So Rush was funny. Rush was entertaining. But he didn't really emphasize the problems and the dangers posed by mass immigration to everything we hold dear. On several occasions, he said he would support amnesty as long as recipients could not vote for 20 years. As though two decades would turn an immigrant from the third world into a flag-waving Americans. So he seemed to think that he was a civic nationalist. That he seemed to think that all racial groups could succeed just given enough time, economic prosperity and federal government set-asides. So Rush understood the medium of radio. Like he understood it's theater. He understood it is performance. It's not just a casual conversation. Bill Buckley loved Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, that's true. Like Rush, Bill Buckley was willing to shift with the political winds. So a good show like this and a good show on the radio is not a conversation. Like if I was to do this properly, according to this medium, I would speak to you with 10 times as much energy as I would carry on an everyday conversation. To do good radio, you need to bring 10 times as much energy as you would to an ordinary conversation. You need to bring like three times as much energy as you would to a public address. People, you need to be alive and vibrating and communicating with every fiber of your being. Now, yeah, I wonder what's gonna happen with this show? I mean, Mark Steiner thinks the best are the potential hosts. It's here in 2021 when we got live streams and most of us don't even listen to the radio anymore. It's hard to appreciate what a breath of fresh air Rush Limbaugh was when he first came on the scene on radio in Sacramento. So I was living in Sacramento when he arrived in 1984. There were conservative talk show hosts on San Francisco radio stations in the 1980s, but they weren't as brash and funny and confident as Rush. So, KGO Radio, the Talk Radio Powerhouse in San Francisco gave Rush Limbaugh a trial run. And then they brought in Pete Wilson, TV news anchor to take calls from listeners on what they thought of him. And Rush was just too much for KGO, but he was not too much for KNBR and then KSFO. So, yeah. Rush was a lot of fun. If you enjoyed that type of humor, he was fun and he was brash. So here's some comments on Steve Sayler's blog. Rush appeared to the excitable dimwitted boomers. His idea of a profound intellectual argument was referring to a teenage girl like Chelsea Clinton as a dog. What made Rush so successful? He made petty ignorant intellectually lazy people feel good about themselves. Before Rush, Republicans were respectable. The circus on January 6th would have been unimaginable. Before Rush, Republicans were the party of Reagan, now they're the party of Trump. Rush opened the door, Trump walked through it. So Rush was originally quite skeptical of NAFTA, that free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. Then, apparently, Alan Greenspan called Rush up and got him on board. And a week later, Rush was saying, let's send all the stupid people jobs down to Mexico. Now, there may be good arguments for that. Okay, there's nothing wrong with sending all the stupid people jobs to Mexico and to China. But that comes at a very big price to our own stupid people who are our fellow citizens. Have you noticed that no one respects the dead anymore? Well, it depends on what genre. So anyone can say anything right now in the comments unless YouTube, so Rush was crass as it seems for good, just scrolling through the chat. Well, it's a Michael Savage, he was too much for me. He just seemed too over the top. And also, I'll be honest, I listened to Dennis Prager and there really wasn't time to listen to anyone else. I decided I wanted to blog about Dennis Prager and then for all the good of listening to Prager and all the bad of listening to Prager and all the media, okay, I just simply didn't have time to listen to anyone else. Yeah, Rush was a humorist for a certain segment of suburbia. Now, a lot of people have been listening to him for 30 years, like since 1988. He single-handedly remade the AM radio industry. It used to be listening to AM radio as like listening to a funeral. But now you can drive across the country and you could find Rush Limbaugh continuously as one station faded out, another station came in. So for those who liked him, he was like a best friend you could always count on. He was a conservative every man. He made millions of Americans feel like they were not alone. And he was optimistic about America and America's ability to overcome and defeat the left. So Rush is good humor, good cheer, his optimism or some of his best traits. So he was kind of the eternal boomer. Never saw the full reality of just how corrupt the GOP establishment is. How much the world immigration's killing the country. How much the Democrats have stoked anti-white race hatred. How narrow and leftist the ruling clique is. I think Limbaugh, he discovered that his wealth could not buy membership in an elite society, unless his politics fit in an elite. So Rush, best days as Americans are still ahead of us. So the working class in this, they could vote for someone who cared about them, like Trump, and they could listen to someone who understood and was one of them like Limbaugh. But now, how do they feel? With contemptuous left-wing overlords who want to break their will for turning on the heat in winter. Thank you, Rush, for saving off the left as long as you could. His calls tend to be boomer types. It seems like in the 1980s, 1990s, there's this huge influx of middle-aged white boomers. X hippie sympathizers turning to conservatism probably helped create the conservative phenomenon. And Rush Limbaugh was their go-to source for information. And they loved the Democrats of the real races. They love that type of thinking. Art Bell says, regarding 10 times the energy needed for radio, I find Dennis Prager to be lower energy than many talkers. He opens okay, but calms down. Yeah, that's good observation. Radio requires more energy than the Dennis Prager's giving to it. So, yeah, I see my stream here is not propagating very clearly. I don't know what's wrong. I pay like $100 a month for high-speed internet. And this is what I get. Come on, man. That is a better internet than this. A few weeks ago, a caller started talking about how immigration was making whites a minority in America. Rush Limbaugh hung up on it without refuting any of his points. And again, whites becoming a minority in America is greatly exaggerated because of how the census is operated. So if you identify as Asian and white, the census on the country was Asian. If you identify as black and white, the census on the country was black. So the artificial way that the US census is conducted grossly undercounts the percentage of the country that is white. So that's creating this hysterical fear among some white people that they're going to become an oppressed and persecuted minority. Limbaugh's great talent was his voice. He would take complex issues and make them appear simple. That's also Prager's talent. So it's also known as dumbing things down for nine-year-olds. So like the LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, most of their articles are written so that at least an eighth grader can understand them. A heart collision census, Prager's AAA not syndicated in New York. He's virtually, he's a cheap local talk show. So he's not, he's not really a talk show host. He's a public speaker and an author who just so happens to host a talk show. Trump borrowed heavily from Pap-Ukraine and Ross Perot even though it's influenced by San Francis. But Trump himself probably owes more to reality TV like that. Now, how relevant has Rush been to the public forum of politics? He's got his 20 million weekly listeners. He could hammer home week after week, year after year without opposing legal immigration. He chose not to. He could have opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, chose not to perhaps one day a legitimate balanced nuanced biography will be published about the most dangerous man in America. Yeah, he's been on autopilot for the last quarter century. So it's not a surprise he was simply AWOL on America's biggest problems and the slow, steady decline of what was a unique nation. The America Rush Spokob was one that grew up with his generation but is rapidly passing out of existence. So Rush felt an obligation to consistently side with team Republican. Though in recent years, he did get, I think Rush was always engaging what could his audience tolerate? What could they hear? In Rush, when he started out, he was nationally syndicated for two hours in 1988, provided he did two radio for WABC. And he got this call or a black caller who told him, white people are scared of what black people would accomplish if white people stopped oppressing head of what black people would accomplish if white people stopped oppressing them. Rush responded, no, that's not what white people are scared of. They're scared that black people won't accomplish much no matter what we do for them. So Rush used to be on WABC right before Bob Grant and Bob Grant was much more forthright and racial issues. Along with his acerbic manner, I probably kept Bob Grant from succeeding when he tried to go national. And I think Rush Limbaugh took lessons from Bob Grant's problems. So Bob Grant was an early victim of council culture, he lost his flight at WABC and a black listener sent a tape of some of his statements to the station's management. Perhaps no serious threats to the establishment would be allowed to broadcast to tens of millions of people for over 30 years and a massive fortune of $600 million. Okay, I got some very bad behavior in the chat. So I've got to time some people out. Lion or Nation has low energy, a cranky, low ball uncorporated and feel superior to his audience. Proves that by hitting he 100% ignored YouTube comments that YouTube has demonetized him for five months. Ignoring comments is a sign of snobbery. I expect it from Richard Spencer. Minus his hatred, Richard could get hired by NPR if he could contain his resentment to other ethnic pointes. Imagine a person whose way of trying to affirm their own existence is by being immature and obnoxious to annoy people online. That's not anything to be proud of. Halsey's talk about Israel with Syrian girl almost sounded like Naturaikata, I was shocked. Halsey is a man of hidden depths, right? Halsey English is not just a pretty face, pretty face. Okay, so the accidental observer wrote about Rush Limbaugh back in 2014. When he started out in 1988 on national radio he was a fresh, populist voice from middle America and he conspicuously rejected white guilt, particularly white male guilt. Now you ridiculed those who tried to cower the white man with demands of sensitivity for this or that victim group and even Rush could be racially insensitive though not nearly as much as Bob Grant. Bob Grant used to refer to black criminals as savages. David Letterman had a quip about having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have and that seems to be an attitude that Rush Limbaugh adopted and repeated. So he flamboyantly defied and rejected white guilt and he flamboyantly and repeatedly objected giving in to automatic sympathy for various victim groups. So he'd make fun of homeless people, feminists, ecologists, sexual deviants. He made many criticisms of blacks but he maintained a certain ambiguity. Rush used a black ball screener for many years, a black producer that people couldn't call him racist. So, you know, what's the whole point of Robin Quivers? Now, what does she contribute to the Howard Stern Chair? She provides cover for people who want to accuse him of being racist. So Rush was always careful not to let any overt racist callers on the air, one or two slipped by in the early years, one mentioning Arya Nations and the other David Duke but Rush always tried to cut that out very quickly. So Rush did not want to allow anyone further to the right of himself on the air. No one, no one more, no one more racist than Rush was allowed on the air. So, you know, Tom Leifers or Nolan Combs, they would have, you know, far more racist guests and callers than what Rush Limbaugh would tolerate. Yeah, Rush's black producer, both snowedly stayed within the entire time. So that provided cover. Now, Rush started out with very Caucasian rock music as bumper music. You know, Tom Petty, Bachman Turner overdrive, exclusively in his first year, probably reflecting his personal taste. Then he changed that over time to more urban contemporary music. And so the black guy recorded a Rush rap that Limbaugh aired ad nauseam, all the better to appear not racist. But with time, Rush looked less and less like an unapologetic white man. There was one time that Rush got into trouble talking about the Jews. So in mid-1993, when the dusky Lonnie Guinear was up for consideration as Bill Clinton's assistant attorney general for civil rights, Rush Limbaugh scoffed the assumption that as a person of color, she had risen from poverty. And he said, let me tell you something. Lonnie Guinear is Jewish. And he explained that being Jewish, she'd grown up in the lap of luxury. Well, Rush didn't immediately realize what he'd done, but a week or so later, he came on the air in a nervous funk, accounting how at a social function, the Jewish actor Kirk Douglas had made some vague imputation of anti-Semitism towards him. That apparently threw Rush into such a panic that he took the earliest opportunity to proclaim to his radio audience that he'd pay $1 million to anyone who could prove he'd ever made any anti-Semitic statement. And when nobody claimed the reward, it mean he'd never said such a thing. Then Rush became the recipient of a free trip to Israel. Limbaugh received a free trip too when he had some criticisms of Jews. And Rush never again made any comments about Jews qua Jews, that was anything less than reverential. Rush uncritically supported the 1990, 1991 war against Iraq. Rush pretty much always fell in line with the Republican party. This is Rush's political thought. Life is not fair, folks. And if you spend your life trying to make the playing field even you're never going to excel, you have to accept life as it is. As in when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Rush was always ambivalent about President George H.W. Bush, but when George H.W. Bush invited Limbaugh to the White House and carried his bags, then Limbaugh became much more of a supporter. So you could call Limbaugh an absurd huckster for the globalist and plutocratic wing of the Republican party during electoral campaigns. And after the election, complain that the candidate to whom he'd given his support wasn't really conservative. In 1996, Rush called Pat Buchanan liberal for taking a stand against free trade. And then later, Rush would admit that Buchanan was the genuine conservative and Bob Doar was not. So Rush probably started out as a populist, was an unashamed, unapologetic white man, took the opposite path from Pat Buchanan for many years, supporting the plutocracy's free trade and unnecessary foreign wars for America. Yeah, everyone likes a free trip. Rush wouldn't talk about immigration. That's why he blacklisted Michael Savage. Rush was conservatism incorporated. Okay, so Rush got going in talk radio in Sacramento where I lived between 1980 and 1993. So I did not regularly tune into Rush. I preferred the more genteel talk radio on KGO out of San Francisco where there are more guests. But the one week that I consistently tuned into Rush was when he had a lot of guests. He went to Washington, D.C., circa 1986. And they had guests on like Martin Kondracki from the New Republic. And so that week when Rush had a ton of guests, I listened to him the whole week. But otherwise I preferred Ron Owens on KGO and the other talkers on KGO in San Francisco. So I never had strong feelings about Rush in any direction. I mean, I found him a bit much, a bit over the top, a bit cartoonish and a bit to 100 IQ, the audience that the type of show that he'd deliver. So I've never asked myself, oh, you know, I wonder what Rush Limbaugh thinks about this or that. So I think Dennis Prager's callers anyway seem to be about split 50-50 between men and women. Seems like Rush's listenership was like 95% male. According to YouTube analytics, my audience is about 100% male. So the Los Angeles Times writes, it was 1984 and young Rush Limbaugh had been fired from five stations in three cities. He'd even left radio for three years. He was mired in loneliness, aimlessly walking through life. But when Morton Downey Jr. taught a racist joke at KFBK in Sacramento, Morton Downey Jr. got fired. Rush Limbaugh snagged his 9 a.m. to Noonslot. So he found a fertile audience in liberal California's capital. So the week that Rush Limbaugh made his Sacramento debut, talk radio veteran David Hall, a news reporter at KBFK was walking through a hallway when he heard a voice blaring from a speaker. I stopped calling my tracks. He could hear someone going on and on about Teddy Kennedy and Chapa Quiddig. I thought, oh, this guy's got a crackpot guess. But the Rush Limbaugh show really did guess the crackpot voice was coming from the host chair. So it was that KFBK that Rush Limbaugh developed his format of music, now wacky and savage humor, conservative politics. And it was at KFBK in Sacramento. He used his signature music, the instrumental opening of the pretenders, my city was gone. And that's where he used trademark lines like on the cutting edge of societal evolution. And his decades long rift about disliking Rio Linda. Half Galician says Rush Limbaugh's audience couldn't be that big without it being half women. Lionel is raving about how HBO is a tough Woody Allen documentary this weekend. Will you cover it? Well, I try to bring my friend Justin Levine on. So who's the wife there who's bringing the accusations against Woody Allen? She had three kids die very young. She had three dead kids, Mia Farrow. So HBO documentary about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow ignores Mia's three dead kids, her child molester brother, and other family tragedies. That three of the 11 children that Mia Farrow adopted over time died young, one committed suicide. I don't blame her. I believe that these actions are primarily a reflection of these children's genetics. And when you adopt kids, they're obviously not getting your genetics. Now, none of these things is mentioned even briefly in the HBO doc series coming Sunday, Allen versus Farrow, which Mia Farrow is portrayed as a saint and Woody Allen as Satan. It's not a documentary, it's much more of an op-ed piece and a toast to Mia Farrow, who gives the performance of her life worthy of an Oscar. Yeah, if Woody Allen's a child molester, surely there'd be other examples of his molestation rather than this one girl that he's accused of. You know, child molesters don't satisfy themselves with one child. So count me a skeptical that Woody Allen's child molester. And Woody Allen's had this solid marriage to Sunyi. So they've been together since 1992, that's 28 years. So Mia Farrow comes across very much as a scorn lover who weaponized their adopted daughter Dylan in a war against Woody. So back in 1992, it's probably hard to imagine that Woody Allen and Sunyi would still be together. But they've lasted, they raised a family. Now, child molesters have a lot of victims. There's only one purported victim of Woody Allen. There's no other suggestion of any other impropriety of Woody Allen and young children. So this story of Woody Allen supposedly abusing daughter Dylan feels very much like Mia Farrow's last act of revenge. The perfect Mia Farrow family is a continuing theme through all four of these HBO episodes, but doesn't seem to really match up with reality. I'll throw down a link in the video description. So when Rush Limbaugh began at KBFK in Sacramento, hardly anyone knew his name, but soon he was on billboards. He was on TV, he was written up in the Sacramento Bee. He was making commercials. He was so over the top that I just, he was such a huckster for various products. I just, I found him a little, little much. He became the grand marshal of Sacramento, St. Patrick's Day Parade. His popularity was unparalleled in Sacramento talk show history. Ratings tripled during his tenure. And he made his debut as a TV regular in Sacramento, facing off with the liberal mayor of Davis. Bob Baker in the Los Angeles Times, 1991. This is a good opening. Welcome to a world where Howard Cursell's voice seems to have been grafted to Pat Buchanan's brain and amplified through the cracked sensibilities of the Stanford marching band. Mr. Limbaugh's neighborhood is the hottest place in talk radio. It is unlike any other spot on the dial. A gag and bombast infested stream of consciousness, current events lecture, the careens between blood series conservative politics and dead pan irreverence. It is a place without any guests, a place where the host is the show, a place where callers play second fiddle. They've used meticulously screened to avoid any sluggish or repetitive moments that might bog down the breakneck pace. The show is so flat out weird. Rush Limbaugh affably advises new listeners they will require six weeks to understand it. By then they will be on the cutting edge of societal evolution. You'll never have to read another newspaper again. I will do all your reading and I will tell you what to think. So Rush lived a fairly hermit-like computer nerd existence. His show was his life and then he would just erupt into the microphone. There was just a supreme grace and confidence to this bluster. So Rush completely reinvented himself uncomfortable with traditional restrictive radio formats. He developed his own format. Kind of like Howard Stern did. And another powerful thing about Rush that made him so relatable is that he would admit just about everything. He'd talk about his four divorces, his firings, more than five, his weight gain, his home exercise programs, his problems with perspiring heavily, that he hated crowds unless he's performing in front of them and that he would cry in bed watching field of dreams. And so he would create a talk radio show that was just far more compelling than the more civilized talk shows and more compelling than the confrontational netherworld of shock, jock radio in which audience and guests would routinely assorted. So Rush would bring incredible enthusiasm and energy to his show. These qualities made him seem boorish when he appeared on the cooler medium of television. Rush was a news junkie, man who overcompensates for being in college drop out by devouring and dissecting all manner of newspapers and magazines. Radio junkie maintains the art of breathlessly pacing a show cutting from one fact to another without breaking stride. A political junkie, delighted to interpret everything through the frame of liberal versus conservative. He was an attention junkie, a man who looks at his fame with a heartfelt reverence most people reserve for their newborn baby. So he's very much like Donald Trump in that respect. And he was a control junkie. The show was his period. Callers who attempted to duplicate the host style of ironic humor were reminded never to try it in their homes. So he consolidated call screening rules and you'd never hear two consecutive calls from the same geographic area. So Rush didn't want any John Birches. He didn't want anyone to the right of him. He didn't want any one word government theorists. He didn't want to hear about UFOs. He didn't want to hear about abortion rants. He didn't want to argue gun control. He didn't want people who were going to read from the Bible on air. From Rush's perspective, religion and faith is a sacred and personal thing. I don't want devout believers of any religion or cause because they don't think. I want people to think about things with a passion and Rush didn't want any racist or bigots to feel they have a home on the show. It's an entertainment show. So that was Rush's perspective. He was producing an entertainment show. Regarding Lionel Nation, he ignored commenters on his YouTube channel, them typing hateful stuff. That's probably what caused the five plus month demonetization penalty. Okay, I can't play anything because I'm just doing this show on my cell phone. So I can't play anything else right now. Yeah, a man who abuses Sun Yi would never abuse his other top two children as TV Cooper. Guys, if there's someone in the chat room who annoys you, just block them. Like there's someone who's been texting me and I've just been ignoring them. And then finally I responded today and they wanted to talk to me about something. And so I said, okay, I'm here. What's up? And then they went on like this five paragraph rant about how I hadn't apologized for not getting back to them sooner. So even though I've been acquainted with this person for almost 20 years, I just blocked him. All right, Peter Brimlow said, he has many reasons to praise Rush Limbaugh and many reasons to be disappointed with him from an immigration patriot point of view. Breitbart is promoting Rush Limbaugh's 2009 CPAC. So that's the Conservative Political Action Committee. Keynote address. And Brimlow says, I attended that conference. It was notable for the intense grassroots energy triggered by Obama's election and the equally intense determination of CPAC's conservatism incorporated manages to prevent the immigration issue from surfacing. And Rush Limbaugh played right along with the hosts. When Peter Brimlow wrote his book, Alien Nation, his publisher's Random House were desperate for a blurb from Rush Limbaugh. But despite approaches from various mutual friends, we never got any answer. Finally, in 1996, at Bill Buckley's election night party, I went up to Limbaugh and told him he should change sides on immigration. So Limbaugh was welcoming. Brimlow thought we needed to restrict immigration. So generally when Rush would talk about immigration, it was the same way that the Wall Street Journal would talk about, a very welcoming and pro-immigration. And Limbaugh put on a very serious face and said, honestly, I've not made up my mind yet. Then a few years later at dinner party in Palm Beach, Peter Brimlow taught him the same thing again. Again, Rush put on that serious face and said, honestly, I've not made up my mind yet. So apparently, Rush got asked that question a lot. So it became clear Limbaugh was never gonna make up his mind. He did play a heroic role in helping stop the Bush amnesties, but he was hesitant about addressing the tougher parts of the immigration problem. He never criticized legal immigration. He was a blind Bush backer. So Peter Brimlow says, I don't blame Rush Limbaugh for this, because he had a big business to run and he was very vulnerable to advertiser pressure. Patriotic immigration reform is not good for your media career. Now, later on, Rush did let slip. He had made up his mind about immigration and he thought it was disastrous. And after the 2020 election, he even speculated about the increasing likelihood of secession because of demographic replacement. So Rush knew immigration was a disaster. He just did not wanna make a fuss about it even in the face of death when he had nothing to lose. Abel says, have Lionel Nation or Richard Spencer on your show. If they get too edgy or dull, you can reach for the Crystal Light Van Hammer. Yes, curate your chat so that you have a good experience on here. Whole entire reason I subbed to Luke Ford's channel and joined was for some adult level talk instead of the same sort of immature juvenile talk that one can find anywhere on the internet. We don't tolerate immature people in here. I doubt that Richard Spencer would come on my show. He blocked me on Twitter. So on TV, we have the lonely voice of Tucker Carlson, writes Gregory Hood, attacking our hostile elites and broaching topics no one else will. And we have some platforms emerging from the wreckage of the Trump presidency like Revolver and a revitalized Chronicles magazine under Paul Gottfried. The best of conservatives, such as the late Roger Scruton want to live in a certain kind of society but lack the will to do what is necessary to create or preserve that they are content to lose politely. I will always remember how Rush would make my friends and me laugh. I will marvel at his skill and admire his bravura. I wouldn't be here where it not for him. We have a lot to learn from his rhetorical approach but we have nothing to learn from his ideas. His patriotism for a country that has ceased to exist. His repetition of cliches about free enterprise limited government. This is no time to play coy the clock in his midnight. Rush taught us an important lesson. Even in mortal combat, we can laugh at our foes and mock their pretensions. So I think Richard Spencer said that I did the best, about the best interview with him that's ever been done. Rush would always talk about how he was a conservative first and a Republican second and how he was all about principles like the power of truth. And following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Rush Limbaugh finally expressed ambivalence about George W. Bush. But overwhelmingly Rush simply fell in line with whatever the powers of the Republican party supported. So yeah, I've been reading a lot of different perspectives on Rush Limbaugh. So in conclusion, he was a master of his medium. He saw himself primarily as an entertainer and so it's probably wrong to expect more from him than that. He was often reckless with his facts. He was attacked for being divisive and sometimes yeah, he was tasteless and cruel, but the attacks on him were equally so. I don't think America's divisions are the responsibility of talk radio or of too much free speech. Our divisions are primarily the result of Americans having less and less in common with each other. We're not bound by very strong ties anymore. Rush was reckless in things he said about the 2020 election with raising the specter of massive voter fraud. So he played a role along with the other major right-wing talkers that essentially encouraged people to believe the election had been stolen and therefore encouraged them to adopt the perspective of a victimized group. And then once you decide that you're a victim, then there are no longer any moral constraints on you. Talk to you later.