00:00:27.000If you want to email us your thoughts, you can always do so, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:31.000And if you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support to get behind the work we are doing to hire more staff, expand, and reach millions of young people every single month.
00:01:11.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:23.000Welcome to this special Thanksgiving episode of the Charlie Kirk Show with my friend, the legendary James Golden, otherwise known as Bo Snerdley.
00:01:45.000You know, sometimes you just got to be able to move about, you know, and the suit and tie, you know, maybe I maybe I could graduate to just the polo shirt like Rush used to do, right?
00:02:03.000Let me just say something to everybody that doesn't know.
00:02:06.000Rush really made a big deal of how much he enjoyed meeting you, Charlie, and how vital he thought you were to the future of this nation.
00:02:17.000And I've told you that too many times over.
00:02:21.000Rush and I had many a discussion about you, Charlie.
00:02:24.000We both talked about you to each other and what our expectations.
00:02:29.000Yeah, we have expectations of you, what our expectations were, because what we see in you, what Rush saw in you, what I see in you, and I've told you this from the very beginning, you're a natural leader of people.
00:02:42.000You have a charisma about you that you can't, I mean, look, you can't teach anybody how to do this.
00:02:48.000You have natural leadership qualities.
00:02:51.000And what you've been able to do with Turning Point and what you've been able to do just in the past few years with organizing people, especially young people in this country, is nothing short of phenomenal.
00:03:03.000And Rush loved the time that he spent with you.
00:03:06.000He talked about you on the air and how impressed he was with you and what you're doing.
00:03:13.000And we just are all so grateful to you and the work that you're doing, moving the conservative, not just conservative, but you're moving a very optimistic American message into the next generation and into the future.
00:03:57.000You know, it is what I hope Charlie to do is to give people a behind-the-scenes look at who Rush Limbaugh really was, not as defined by his critics on the left who never listened to the program,
00:04:12.000who never took the time to really delve into who Rush Lumbaugh was, what he was about, and also to give people kind of a behind-the-scene looks at what it was like working with him and a bit about my own background and how we came to work together.
00:04:28.000So, one of the things that I hope that we accomplished in this book is not only was Rush an amazing professional at what he did, he earned every single accolade that he got in terms of as for his success as a broadcaster and as the best broadcaster of our times.
00:04:49.000And he earned that through hard work, through perseverance, through not giving up when there were many times where his career could have stalled permanently, but he just kept going at it.
00:05:01.000And then he had the most amazing success.
00:05:04.000So, yes, Rush was the most important broadcaster to me of our generation.
00:05:10.000If it were not for his success in reviving AM radio, first of all, when it was on its death throes, and then his program brought in a rash of other talk shows.
00:05:24.000It grew talk radio into a medium that played a large role in shaping and still does America's body politic and also our culture.
00:05:36.000But he also impacted what we see on television and the cable news landscape and the publishing landscape, especially for conservative authors, because of the multi-million sales he had as an author.
00:05:54.000And then with children's book with he and his wife Catherine, this man left an amazing footprint for American radio, television, and print.
00:06:07.000And that just touches the surface of it.
00:06:10.000I mean, my political journey started listening to WLS in Chicago, Rush Limbaugh, from, it would be, let me think about this, it would be from 11 Central to 2.
00:06:49.000He was always dominant, but that was a time when he kind of really created the Tea Party movement.
00:06:55.000And in some sense, it's when all of a sudden AM radio then became an actual political movement, which was something that was really special.
00:07:04.000And so this being Thanksgiving, James, talk to us a little bit.
00:07:07.000And again, the book is, I want everyone to pick it up, Rush on the Radio by James Golden.
00:07:12.000Talk to us what Rush used to do on Thanksgiving or the day before Thanksgiving that he really got famous for.
00:07:19.000Rush wrote in his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, a chapter about what he called old dead white guys.
00:07:28.000Well, in it, he talked about the original Thanksgiving and how what we learned in school, Thanksgiving, the Native Americans coming to save the pilgrims' butts, wasn't the real story of Thanksgiving.
00:07:41.000The real story of Thanksgiving through the eyes of William Bradford and the first colony that tried to successfully come here and start economy.
00:07:52.000And they failed the first time because they tried a collectivism approach, a socialist approach, where everybody would work collectively toward one greater goal.
00:08:05.000And what happened was that some people were lazy.
00:08:07.000They didn't see the benefit of working hard so that others benefited.
00:08:11.000And as a result, the first attempt to colonize led to horror.
00:08:18.000I mean, starvation, difficulties in the wintertime.
00:08:21.000Now, Bradford, William Bradford, saw the error of his ways.
00:08:25.000And what they tried next was an approach where every family would have their own plot of land to work as hard or as little as they wanted to.
00:08:37.000And what this produced was prosperity because people saw the value in working for themselves and how an individual effort took over and prosperity came.
00:08:53.000And this is what they were thankful for, the success.
00:08:57.000And they shared this bounty with the Native Americans.
00:09:01.000That was the true story of Thanksgiving.
00:09:03.000If you want to boil it down to the parlance today, it was the battle between socialism and capitalism.
00:09:11.000And as a result, in American society, we still, to a large degree, or to some degree, have a capitalist mentality where it is up to you and your individual achievement and desire and ambition to succeed.
00:09:27.000And if you have all of those things, America is still a land of opportunity.
00:10:24.000After he left the studio, sometimes we'd be around, the three of us that were there in there with him, Dorn Bacchinsky, our stenographer, Russia's stenographer, and Brian Johnson, his engineer in Florida.
00:10:36.000We have another engineer in New York, Mike Ramone, who's been with us for 30 years, over 30 years.
00:10:42.000And if we stayed around the studio, about 40 minutes after he left, Rush's printer would start firing off with stories for the next day.
00:11:04.000And he brought so many things of interest to the show, things that interested him.
00:11:09.000But more to the point to me was, this was a man that studied this medium.
00:11:14.000He wanted to be a broadcaster at age six.
00:11:17.000At age six, he had a little toy that was put out, I think, by Remco or one of the toy companies, where you could broadcast inside your house.
00:11:27.000So he had the microphone, he had his toy set rigged up and would broadcast to his mother.
00:11:32.000He knew what he wanted to do from the time he was a child.
00:11:39.000This man could make anything sound interesting.
00:11:42.000He knew how to tell a story on the radio.
00:11:45.000He knew how to make something compelling with just his voice and using his voice and his tremendous vocabulary and intellect.
00:11:55.000But all of that success, Charlie, isn't the Rush Limbaugh story to me.
00:11:59.000The Russian Bauha story to me is the human being that he was.
00:12:03.000He was, despite the image of the bombast, the tongue-in-cheek bomb bastard that he used on the air, he was a very reserved, quiet, almost shy person, impeccable manners, always, always grateful for whatever the smallest thing that someone could do for him, always polite.
00:12:24.000I saw this over three decades, the way that he treated people.
00:12:29.000Okay, the generosity that this man had, unparalleled.
00:12:33.000There are thousands of people around this country who benefited from Rush's generosity on a personal basis, but he wouldn't allow the stories to be told.
00:12:42.000He said, People, please do not tell where you got this gift or where you got this money to pull you out.
00:12:49.000He didn't want it known that he was doing all of this.
00:12:54.000But then the talk radio audience and his audience under his leadership and other talk show hosts, Charlie, the millions, tens of millions of dollars raised over that 30-year period went for things like leukemia research.
00:13:10.000Now, Charlie, leukemia doesn't have a political bent to it.
00:13:15.000Leukemia can affect anyone from any walk of life, any age, any gender.
00:13:20.000And so the help that people got from Rush Lumbar and the talk radio audience in finding cures for this disease, childhood leukemia, all sorts of leukemia, these benefit society.
00:13:31.000He and his wife, Catherine, raised millions more to help the families of first responders, fallen first responders, so that the people that they left behind, their children, their spouses, wouldn't have to worry about having a house to live in or having a foundation so those kids could later go to school.
00:14:01.000I have my own personal stories of his generosity, even to me before I started working with him, which is in this book.
00:14:08.000This was a man that was extraordinary.
00:14:10.000And that's what I hope that we capture here.
00:14:12.000An extraordinary man that was extremely gifted at what he did for a living, but was even more gifted by the very nature of the decent human being that he was.
00:14:28.000And I could say personally how generous he was and how magnanimous he was and so different than the caricature the media tried to paint him as.
00:15:07.000This was in response to a caller who called into the show and asked Rush, is it time to panic yet?
00:15:13.000And this was back several administrations ago.
00:15:16.000And after trying to dispel this person's fears, Rush said, Listen, I'll tell you when it's time to panic.
00:15:24.000And for years after that, people would call in when we had these various shifts in administrations and we'd have things going on like they're going on now underneath the Biden administration, where things look particularly desperate.
00:15:37.000And then ask Rush, Rush, is it time to panic?
00:15:41.000And it wasn't time to panic for Rush for one simple reason.
00:15:44.000He believed ultimately America, the goodness of America, and because of the goodness of Americans, would prevail.
00:15:53.000That no matter the difficulties, he was always optimistic that the people of this country, the good people of this country, outnumber those who don't like living in this country and who wish this country ill.
00:16:06.000And that the good people of America, those that were interested in seeing the traditions of America continue and our institutions, our finest institutions continue, would prevail.
00:16:23.000And I maintain that if Rush were here right now, that is what he would be telling those that felt the sense of panic: no, this isn't a time to panic.
00:16:32.000And he was always optimistic, and he always believed our best days were ahead of us.
00:16:37.000A relentless cheerleader for the country.
00:16:39.000And I argue he was the most influential conservative, elected or not elected, for 30 years running.
00:16:48.000And I'm not diminishing Trump or anything, but the audience that Rush commanded when he would do a segment blistering a Republican senator, that was worth more than running $100 million of attack ads for some rhino in Kansas or whatever.
00:17:08.000James, anything you wanted to make sure you mentioned to our audience on this Thanksgiving about Rush or about the book?
00:17:13.000I want to mention how grateful I am to have worked with a man of Russia's caliber, how grateful I am that I have contact with so many Americans who also listen.
00:17:24.000I say, you know, I'm a fan just like you are.