00:00:00.000Hey everybody, diving back into the archives, I found a speech that Rush Limbaugh gave at the Turning Point USA Lifetime Achievement Award dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
00:00:10.000It's never been aired publicly before, so you get to enjoy it right here.
00:00:16.000Thanks to those of you that support us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:20.000If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help our team of researchers and editors continue to do what they do, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:28.000Rush Limbaugh, his speech at Mar-a-Lago.
00:00:48.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:54.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:24.000And the fact that it's been constantly supported by so many millions of people, I can't tell you how gratifying that it is.
00:02:32.000And it is still the happiest three hours of my life, that radio show every day, and prepping for it, having the opportunity to tell people what's right, have the opportunity to tell people what's wrong, have the opportunity to stand up for what you believe in in front of 30 million people, have the opportunity to persuade them.
00:02:50.000It is a golden opportunity, and I take it seriously, but it's much different today than when I started.
00:02:57.000Things evolve, and hopefully you change and you adapt and you stay current with the times.
00:03:03.000But when I first started out, I was trying to be funny and irreverent and sarcastic, and I was.
00:03:10.000And a couple of things happened early on that taught me something that I was a DJ for 16 years and didn't really succeed at that.
00:03:21.000And the time you hit 30 and you're still telling people about Donnie Osmond records.
00:03:27.000So I wanted to get into talk radio, spoken word format, where there was no other reason that people would listen to radio but me.
00:03:34.000Not the music, not promotions, not contests, not giveaways.
00:03:37.000I wanted to find out if I could be the reason people would listen because I always thought I could, but I was never given the opportunity to do it at various radio stations that I worked at.
00:03:48.000And it finally all came together for me in Sacramento, California.
00:03:51.000I actually replaced a guy that got fired, Morton Downey Jr., because he told a joke about an ethnic member of the city council out there and wouldn't apologize for it.
00:04:01.000So I got the job and the best thing in the world that happened, I was doing 9 a.m. to noon, the radio station hired a new morning team, a couple of guys, Dave and Bob were their names.
00:04:13.000And in radio, prime time, back then, it isn't anymore because of me.
00:04:19.000But back then, prime time was morning drive, 5 a.m. to 9 a.m.
00:04:24.000So they go and hire these Dave and Bob characters and they promptly forgot about me.
00:04:29.000I was free to do whatever I wanted to do.
00:04:31.000Nobody was watching because they were focusing all their energy on the morning show.
00:04:36.000And with no supervision, with nobody telling me I can't do this, and my whole career had been, you can't say that.
00:05:37.000I want everybody to agree or at least think about it.
00:05:41.000But I also had this side of me that was featuring irreverent and sarcastic humor.
00:05:46.000And it succeeded, but it's something that's not found in the media much.
00:05:50.000To be credible when you're discussing issues seriously, forcefully, and to also be credible when you're laughing and making jokes and being irreverent, it's a tough thing to do.
00:06:01.000And my radio show was really the only place nationally where that happened.
00:06:06.000If Ted Coppel during the Nightline days had come out and opened Nightline with a 10-minute joke monologue, you'd just, what the hell is this?
00:06:14.000In the same token, if Johnny Carson had come out and spent 10 minutes really seriously telling you about politics, not while you're there, you turn it off, make you nervous.
00:06:38.000I was in my early 30s when this program started and I just celebrated 30 years back in August.
00:06:43.000So you get older, you get older, you become more mature.
00:06:47.000Hopefully you learn some things, you make mistakes and learn from them.
00:06:52.000But the thing that I found out, and even when I first started this and I was dead set on being the most listened to, there were two things that happened that taught me how serious it was.
00:07:06.000If you make a successful politician, a successful media person has to make a connection with the audience.
00:07:16.000In fact, when I saw the first Trump rally, I knew that he was going to win the election.
00:07:22.000There was nobody in American politics, there still isn't, that has that connection with their voters or with their audience.
00:07:30.000When Trump came down the elevator, June 15th, June 16th, 2015, everybody remembers what he said.
00:07:49.000And then the campaign goes on and the first polling data comes out and Trump is way ahead, not in the lead, but he's way ahead of a whole lot of people, including Jeb.
00:08:48.000The media did not make Donald Trump, and the media, despite their best efforts, cannot destroy him.
00:08:55.000When the media, and this is a very important point, when the media makes you, when you're nothing and the media comes along and starts giving you a bunch of buzz and PR and a bunch of hype, you are a prisoner to it.
00:09:10.000And you had better keep doing whatever it is they like, which nobody can do because the media loves to build people up and then chop them off and chop them down.
00:09:25.000They've thrown every, one of the reasons why we have such partisanship, the Democrat Party has been able to get rid of every Republican they've wanted to.
00:09:57.000And earlier today, it's another great example.
00:10:00.000All kinds of people after the meeting at the White House, where the president told the Republicans, I'm not signing this unless there's border security in it.
00:10:09.000So they came out of the White House and says, well, the president's very serious about this, border security, but we're not sure if we're going to be able to get the votes.
00:10:16.000And a lot of Republicans have gone home.
00:10:20.000Nobody's got the guts to vote against this now, not with President Trump leading the way, putting his career and his presidency on the line.
00:13:08.000So an issue like this happens, whatever it is.
00:13:11.000And the first statement the president makes is to demonstrate open-mindedness, no prejudice, a willingness to listen and comprehend and understand.
00:13:22.000But it didn't take, what, five minutes?
00:13:25.000And then he unloads on her at one of his rallies.
00:13:29.000It shouldn't have surprised anybody that his first statement, well, I found her compelling.
00:13:36.000It buys off the media for a while and it gives them, it forces them to acknowledge that Trump is not closed-minded about things and not acting in a prejudicial way.
00:16:17.000So they walk, they walk out of there and they think the first thing they do, they go to the cameras and microphones outside the White House and they start spinning their version of what happened.
00:16:28.000And they started talking about the president really doesn't know about this.
00:19:54.000I used to do commencement speeches back when conservatives were invited to do them, which is a long time ago.
00:20:01.000And when I did my first commencement speech, I was in my early 30s.
00:20:05.000And so I got it there, and I'm telling you students, everybody at every other university in the country today, every commencement speaker is looking at the audience like I'm looking at you and saying, you are the future.
00:20:16.000Let me tell you something, you're not.
00:20:19.000You got to go through me to get where you're going.
00:20:22.000The world is not just going to open up and welcome you.
00:20:33.000And it's important that they be encouraged.
00:20:35.000I don't know how many of you here tonight are actual participants in Turning Point.
00:20:39.000I know there's a lot of donors and parents here, but boy, it is so important to encourage each other, especially as surrounded as it appears that we are, to have all of the mainstream media aligned against us.
00:20:55.000And not just us personally, aligned against what we believe in, aligned and arrayed against our founding.
00:21:04.000There is pressure every day on people who are young and who are conservative.
00:21:09.000And it is the most powerful pressure you can imagine, peer pressure.
00:21:13.000It's mocking, it's laughing at, it's making fun.
00:21:17.000And there aren't many people who want to put up with it.
00:21:20.000Life shouldn't, nobody is raised wanting to be disliked.
00:21:41.000We don't even have that chance for the people that we're up against.
00:21:44.000They're predisposed to hate us because they are the bigots and they're the people who are prejudiced.
00:21:49.000They're the people who have no idea who we really are and that we have to face it.
00:21:54.000But the young people today that are part of Turning Point or any other youthful organization that is conservative are under immense pressure.
00:22:02.000Look at what's going on at college campuses.
00:22:04.000It's absurd, this stupid snowflake stuff where you can't even speak your mind.
00:22:32.000No matter how much you think somebody already knows about themselves, no matter how much you think people are secure, encouraging them with your kids, it's a little bit different because you can't go overboard doing it.
00:22:47.000But outside your family, encouraging people is one of the, especially during these times, because it creates confidence and assuredness.
00:22:57.000And believe me, there's no substitute for confidence.
00:23:00.000There's no substitute in confidence in who you are, confidence in what you believe.
00:23:05.000It is confidence and your heart that allows you to persuade, that allows you to engage people.
00:23:10.000It's confidence that says you don't need a teleprompter.
00:23:13.000It's confidence that says you don't need notes.
00:23:17.000And there are people trying to shake and destroy this out of all of us, and especially our young people.
00:23:24.000And this is one of the things that's so wonderful about Turning Point is that it is allowing for these people who instinctively know right from wrong, they instinctively know our value system and our value base to get together and have it validated from person to person rather than mocked and laughed and made fun of.
00:23:45.000And this is making all of these people stronger, these young people, it's making them stronger, it's giving them confidence, and it's happening at the grassroots, which is another thing that's crucially important.
00:23:58.000And we have the opportunity to start sneaking up on people with this demographic because it's largely ignored or laughed at and made fun of.
00:24:08.000So congrats, Charlie, for what you're doing.
00:24:10.000And I hope you continue to have interest in it and your passion in it doesn't wane because there's no substitute for that.
00:24:18.000Now, I mentioned earlier that there's some things that I had learned during the course of my program.
00:24:25.000And these things, by the way, have helped me to understand the success that President Trump has with his rallies and how they worked.
00:24:34.000I used to do miniature versions of them myself when the show was new.
00:24:38.000We started with 56 little radio stations.
00:24:40.000The audience, all 56 combined, you could put in a thimble.
00:24:47.000And so when we get a new station, I would go there on a Saturday and do a public appearance, stand it back an hour and a half, and draw large crowds.
00:24:56.000And I would do these things that I saw.
00:24:58.000One of the reasons I just glommed on, because it brought me back to 1988, 89, 90.
00:28:31.000There were still wires in these days, that an Ohio minister had discovered a satanic message in the Mr. Ed TV show theme song.
00:28:44.000And media reported this, and they said, when the minister played the song backwards is when he heard the satanic message.
00:28:55.000Now, I could have dealt with that as I just did with you here and just say it like that, but I have always had a working philosophy, demonstrate absurdity, illustrate absurdity by being absurd.
00:29:10.000So at the time this was happening, the left had this thing called a great peace march.
00:29:16.000They were marching from California to Washington.
00:29:19.000When they got to Washington, they were going to simulate what happens when a nuclear bomb goes on.
00:29:26.000And so we were tracking them, and I had an update theme for, as they were making their trek across the country, Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca, the song I was using.
00:29:37.000So I decided that I would discover a satanic message in Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca.
00:29:45.000Now, this little bit went on for a full week.
00:29:49.000I'm not going to take a week to tell you about it.
00:29:52.000I went into the production room and we put the record on tape, reel-to-reel tape.
00:29:57.000That's the only way there's no turntable, please, backwards.
00:31:13.000So, three days of this goes by, and I finally act like, okay, I'm now under pressure from station management to let you know what I have discovered.
00:31:24.000I have said that I will do this under protest.
00:31:30.000I have no desire, but I'm being forced to do it.
00:31:34.000I discovered because of this Ohio minister that when I played Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blama blocka song backwards, there is a satanic message in it too.
00:32:37.000And when it was over, I told the audience, this is why I don't think I can continue.
00:32:42.000Now, I'm thinking while the song is playing and I'm executing what I think is the finale of the bit, I'm thinking they're thinking this is the smartest.
00:32:50.000This is the greatest thing you've ever heard.
00:33:52.000So if it wasn't, this is a special circuitry that only received, it splits the highs out, splits the lows out, and boosts the mid-range, which is where satanic messages lurk.
00:34:07.000So the point of all this is, is that here I think that I am impressing everybody with my creative ability, but a lot of people, not a lot of people got it too, don't miss it, but a lot of people believed it.
00:34:21.000And since these two things happened, I've had a, and it's a long time ago, but I do not monkey around now with things that I passionately believe in my heart.
00:34:34.000I still try to have humor, you know, mocking and making fun of the left, but I too benefit from this connection with my, and my audience is now approaching 27 million people over the course of a week, 27 million unique people.
00:35:06.000So I'm not, my humor has different expressions anyway, but you grow older and you grow more mature.
00:35:14.000But the idea that people are listening closely and have this bond, and believe what I say, is something that I give service to each and every day.
00:35:27.000And I have, folks, I have to tell you, it is the greatest blessing that I have ever had is to have the opportunity I do each and every day.
00:35:37.000If you would have told me 30 years ago when I'm just starting this, if you would have told me then that everything that's happened was going to happen and that I hit 65, I would have said to you, well, by now, maybe I'll be doing three days a week, slowly fading away.
00:36:27.000You had the back in, this is, it seems strange even to think about, 1988, three networks, the Washington Post, New York Times, that was it.
00:36:34.000CNN was only just starting and they were the only cable news network and they were nowhere near like they are today.
00:36:47.000And then my radio show starts and it's it.
00:36:49.000And contrary to the media said, my audience, which are mind numb robots that don't know anything, and they follow whatever I say, it's not that at all.
00:36:57.000There were people who thought like me, they just never had anywhere in the media to validate it.
00:37:03.000So anyway, the show picks up and other radio stations started doing their own talk shows and Fox News starts in 1997.