The Returns: Hush Rush

Pushkin. I promise not to get too technical with you, but bear with me for a second. I am speaking to you now through an electro voice ARI twenty microphone. It's black with a mesh cap at the top, kind of clunky, very eighties looking. It's pretty weighty. I think if you clubbed someone with it, you could probably knock them unconscious. Same deal if you just talk real slow

There's a place in our world where the known things go. A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves cluttered with proof. Inside. I've been cataloging my collection of evidence about propagandists, hypnotists and conspiracy theorists, labeling reels with masking tape and sharpies, organizing them by date, reel after reel of tape. It's like the Nixon Novle Office in here, recordings of the sorts of people we've been listening to all season, episode after episode.

Your command of whole life in the months of worldwide lungfuls.

The man who makes his living by telling the truth, the.

Man who I got to say.

I want you to keep on going back and back and back in your mind, the wall of secrecy, the news media being silent, and the Patsy's locked up, and the psychological profile.

Robert Ripley, access Sally, Maury Bernstein, May Brussel, Valentine, Yeah, boys, Kaya and I I mean, each of them asking you, the listener, to doubt what you think you know, and very often that doubt is delivered through the medium of radio. I've got just one more of these voices. He's all the rest, all balled up together.

You are, my.

Friends, about to be exposed to the kind of bristling, cogent analysis available nowhere else. Because of this, your initial reaction may be shock and disbelief.

That's the voice of mister Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jill Lapour, host of a show that could hardly be more different from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know and why sometimes it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. Step over the threshold and along the passage of time to the year nineteen eighty eight.

Don't fight it, don't even try. Just surrender yourself.

Surrender yourself that's his mantra, it's not mine. My mantra is never surrender. What's the first thing you do when you get in the car, Collect the seatbelt, switch on the ignition, Turn on the radio. Yeah, find the right station. Here's a little there you want there, jingle one gracious Roman.

Her just say times.

Carry radios first became common in the nineteen thirties. For decades radio was am radio, local stations, maybe with some top of the hour news and a lot of sports.

Baseball.

You by the first bag of the bank of since that or your money grows safely and high return certificates of the body.

Something else that had long been popular on AM radio gospel shows.

The voice of the Hour of Decision, Billy Graham, So for you, for the nation, this is the Hour of Decision.

By the nineteen seventies, the most popular AM radio shows were drivetime shows, the ones that aired during your commute. Rock and Roll hosted by fast talking djsk.

Nine oh three and fourteen k on the award winning Ye Rock Game.

Roll Over the show with Bunny and Product for all some of you, no doubts, no wondering, one award.

I have won.

I'll tell you not out of the Marconia Warren More Textlent Rock Kennery, that.

Young Boogaroo, that's the young Rush Limbaugh. Jeff Christy, this is non to radio backs in.

Boy, congratulate our name and acclaiment winners.

Jeff round With of Eastmont.

I'll tell you, Jem I will think you twelve six packs of Carefree sugarlist gun to get to it all day.

Limbaugh was born in Missouri. He went to Southeast Missouri State University for a year, but dropped out to work in radio. In nineteen seventy one, he got a job as a disc jockey at an AM station outside Pittsburgh. He got fired after a year and a half and went to a station called.

Kqv And that one time made the twelve more entries for you in the Camfree Rock Concert contrast.

You and Jack Box for Tomorrow is.

Two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen sent the lot of guys that you can remember it. Bob deccannell makes the next.

Call the one.

Limbaugh died in twenty twenty one at the age of seventy. His obituaries head headlines like We're living in the world. Rush Limbaugh created and that's true. But even though you may think you know all the ways we now live in Rush Limbaugh's world, there's more to understand. It has to do with what a lot of this season has been exploring how we hear voices on the radio. There were lots of testimonials to Limbo after he died, but

So I listened.

People are thinking of a Jefferson Startist show.

Work of way details them.

Limbaugh even when he was Jeff Christi. He was a big guy, wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality, a little George Costanza meets Fred Flinstone. In nineteen seventy four, he lost yet another job. He moved back home with his parents in Missouri. He was twenty three. It was a very tough time to try to make a career in AM radio, mainly because FM radio was on the rise.

FM radio a fight free static three FM or FM stereo car radio. Child Survey It's out of silent day.

Starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of Elvis the Little Richard, people bought FM radios for their houses. But the FMI I only really exploded in the nineteen seventies, when, for the first time, you could get FM in your car. At this point, AM radio was mono, just one track. FM was stereo. It was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to switch from plain old mono to stereo. He'd bring your car into the shop and switch out your AM radio

All the DJs got fired.

I was spared as assistant program director, and you know what that meant, programming the automation machine.

Limba didn't last long as an assistant program director. He took a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile, AM radio stations were beginning to figure out that if they could leave music to the FM band and concentrate on talk shows, they could start making money again. In mono talk sounds fine, even if you might not agree with what someone's saying.

The simple fact matter is that the homeless advocacy in this country is, I think, based upon fraud.

In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name, Limbaugh started a new kind of talk radio show in Sacramento on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format. Soon he had a deal for national syndication.

The opinions expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program did not necessarily reflect those of WABC Radio or its management, and now here's Rush Limbaugh.

Either way. That's a Gutlass disclaimer. The view is expressed by the host of this show ought to become federal law in the station and sponsors all who heartily endorse them.

The Rush Limbaugh Show was a one way wall of talk. Limbaugh was funny, he was angry. His program started with a news digest, then a series of opinions mixed with calls from listeners who agreed with those opinions. Year's voice now, and it sounds so utterly familiar. That's because it's the voice of the political YouTuber, or of a certain sort of podcaster, brash, annoying, know it all. But it was a new voice then, and it spoke to listeners for three hours a day, five days a week.

So to give you just a bit of an idea about the show, there are no guests never. We don't talk about single issues or themes unless they evolve as the program goes. It is pretty much an open line discussion each and every day.

Limba revolutionized radio open line. It was all him, even some of the ads. At a time when human resources departments were newly requiring sexual harassment training, Limbaugh spent a lot of his time on air attacking feminists, especially after Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll give you two glorious nyems for an Anita Hell.

Trading cards have always been for males only.

It's just not fair, It's not right. Damn I spilt ill past my Betty freedan.

Feminazi cards are designed with a woman in mind.

I'll up front, I remember in those years my dad listening to Limba, who drove my mother nuts. I bet a lot of families had an experience like that. Limba. He'd say it seemed anything, so partly people tuned in for the thrill of it, to hear what he'd say next. For the rest of us, though, it was like getting kicked in the face every day. He went after feminists, He liked to mock environmentalists, gays and lesbians. He made a lot of jokes about aides. Despite or really because

If you listened to this show every day, you never need to read another newspaper again, never read on a magazine. I do it for you, and you get a bonus. I tell you what to think about this incredibly complicated and controversial issue.

I tell you what to think. And he wasn't joking. Limba presented himself as a prophet liberals and Feminazis, they were heretics. Limba was talking politics, but his show was less like a news program than like those old radio gospel shows. Politics as preaching, listening as worship, conservatism as a new religion. Scholars call this called sectarianism, and in this era, sectarianism was headed to Washington.

At gopack, our mission is to gain control of the US House of Representatives.

We're developing a farm team of future congressional candidates.

That's audio from what's known as a go Pack tape, one of the thousands of tapes made by a GOP political action committee that had become the mouthpiece for just one man.

This is Congress and Nude Gingrich. As a candidate, you've probably been listening to tapes from gopack all year, and you know that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain basic approaches.

Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia. Gingrich heard what Limbaugh was doing on air, and in the late nineteen eighties started to record his own version of that format through these go pack cassette tapes. If you were a Republican running for office or working on a campaign, you'd probably listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.

In this tape, we have a speech I gave to the Republicans in California. We decided to share with you as an example of how you can bring all the basic values together.

This is the sound of modern political history, shifting gears and burning out the clutch. The tapes were mailed to thousands of people every month. One Republican from Minnesota told PBS's Frontline how crucial they were when.

They would come.

I mean, and you spent some time in a car, particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.

When they would come in the mail.

I mean I would open them up right away, and I would put them in a cassette player within twenty four hours.

The purpose of the tapes was to create a single national message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads.

There are two movements in America. There's a left wing radical movement, and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority, the basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of how we think you can draw those lines.

Gingrich proposed a set of dualisms for candidates to use in ads. You might think this kind of hyper polarized rhetoric is more recent, a product of social media, maybe, but you'd be wrong.

We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but allowing honest citizens stone guns. The radical left introduced to build a legalize sex with animals, but we oppose legal sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind of sex with animals.

In the early nineteen nineties, and a memo sent out with the tapes, go Back supplied candidates with a vocabulary list. It suggested words to use to help define your campaign change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth.

Moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard work, initiative, common sense.

Go Peck also listed words to use to describe your political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal.

Lie, shallow, traders, sensationalists, in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose, self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete.

This was political warfare on all fronts. Gingrich trained the officers, Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingrich's political power grew, and so did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week. In nineteen ninety one, Limba appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.

What are you trying to do with this show?

I'm trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold it for as long as I can so that I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertiser rates. This is a business.

You're in it for the money.

Sure, of course, I'm doing a lot of this for money.

That's Limbaugh earning points for being honest. It's also a tactic. Donald Trump would adopt honesty about loving money. Listeners adored it. For talk radio, the money came rolling in, and not just for Limbaugh. Between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety four, an average of twenty new talk radio stations went into

No sports, no back, no information for mindless shatter your station.

Kay BBL Talk Radio on Alice Springfield's papered conservative and author of the well selling book Only Turkeys Have Left Wings, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Birch Barlow.

You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on the Simpsons.

Good morning, fellow freedomlikers, Birch Barlow, the fourth branch of government, the fifty first State.

The more famous Limbaugh got, the more worried observers got, especially about how he talked about talk, how he talked about the freedom of speech, how he talked about fairness itself.

This is also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator. There is no First Amendment here except for me.

Well, right, the First Amendment only constrains the government, not a privately owned radio station. But for most of the twentieth century there'd been some rules in place, rules that date to a time when people understood just how dangerous radio could be if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties, a guy named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from

When I went on to the FCAC, I knew absolutely nothing about it. But at the time, we will monitor all the access broadcast.

I did an episode earlier this season called The Inner Front. It talks about how the US government monitored Radio Berlin and Radio Tokyo. That was part of the FCC's job during the Second World War, but the content of those enemy broadcasts really changed how Durer and the FCC thought about the power of radio.

My god, this is a terrific medium. The other can be magnificent. I can completely ruin you if you've got this thing in the wrong hands. So then Adam again to take a more place to look at an American broadcast.

The FCC started enforcing some rules that were on the books but that have been mostly ignored, and Der's influence would lead to a new rule that would shape broadcasting for the next half century. In nineteen forty nine, the FCC established what became known as the Fairness doctrine.

Under the American system of broadcasting, the individual licensees of radio stations have the responsibility for determining the specific program material to be broadcast over their stations.

So you could broadcast whatever you wanted.

Except This choice, however, must be exercised in a manner consistent with the basic policy of the Congress that radio be maintained as a medium of free speech for the general public as a whole, rather than as an outlet for the purely personal or private interests of the licensee.

The fairness doctrine is about the public interest. It says the government has an interest in what radio is dinations broadcast. It says that on the issues of the day, radio stations have to broadcast more than one view.

This requires that licensees devote a reasonable percentage of their broadcast time to the discussion of public issues of interest in the community served by their stations, and that such programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposition positions.

In the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by way of congressional action, and the Johnson administration added a guarantee for a right of reply after a criticism during a broadcast. It wasn't often enforced, but it did happen sometimes, like when Medgar Evers once got seventeen minutes of airtime to respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when conservatives attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test ban treaty, stations were required to play a pro test ban speech by the

All mankind has been struggling to escape from the dockning prospect of mash destruction on Earth.

In nineteen sixty nine, the Supreme Court affirmed much of the Fairness Doctrine, but conservatives are getting more and more peeved about it, believing that the Fairness Doctrine suppressed conservative views. By the nineteen eighties, they really wanted to get rid of it, and it was vulnerable because it was a regulation, not a law. In nineteen eighty five, a new FCC head appointed by President Reagan said he would fight to

Dead, and now here's Russe Limbaugh.

Limbaugh could not have operated if the Fairness Doctrine had still been in place, at least not without worrying that the FCC might come after him because he used his airtime to promote partisanship. In fact, he was more than a partisan. Limbaugh wanted to be a king Maker. In nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan failed to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior. But when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Limbaugh sounded a

The Clintons are running around on this national tour. Now, you know, I don't know how else to say this. I mean, the president gets away when he says something it isn't true later being told about, Oh yeah, I was an inadvertent statement. The motto of this administration every day is what can we do to fool him? Today?

Bill Clinton, for sure did sometimes lie, no question, but fooling people was not the motto of his administration. Clinton got exasperated. You can hear him on Saint Louis AM Radio practically begging for a rite of reply.

After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh, I'll have three hours to say whatever he wants, and I won't have any opportunity to respond. And there's no truth detector. You won't get on afterwards and say what was true and what was.

In nineteen ninety three, Democrats in Congress tried to bring back the fairness doctrine. Limbaugh like to call their effort the hush rush Bill, but other people on talk radio didn't see.

It that way.

I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.

That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen ninety three.

I like it.

I like the fact that we as broadcasters have to be fair. It is not out to get any broadcast. I know Rush Limbaugh thinks they're out to get them. All it means is that a station who has if you have eight right wing hosts, you better put some left wing hosts on.

I don't know what's wrong with that.

But the fairness doctrine was not reinstated, and in nineteen ninety four, in the midterm elections, Republicans flipped the Senate and the House. It was a wipeout. They took ten governorships, they won state legislatures if they elected Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House. The freshman Republicans in the House named Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class, and he went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged by reporters asking him how talk radio had led the Conservatives to victory.

These reporters who asked me questions about talk radio were all trying to say, in a roundabout way, that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to mind numbed robots, and every day would send out code in my show that would force them to march to the polls on November the eighth of the poll the lever I wanted them to poll.

Listening to Limbaugh's speech to the freshman Republican members of the House, you can hear them giggling as Limbaugh turned to a new topic, reports of secret meetings that Built and Hillary Clinton were holding in the White House about me.

They're trying to come up with a liberal version of me.

They're scouring America looking for some liberal.

Host who can automatically end up on six hundred and sixty radio stations.

They think that they can.

Just pluck some liberal out of the sky and put him on the radio and create a bunch of liberal mind numb robots.

Point taken Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numb robots. But remember he asked his listeners to surrender to his point of view, and millions of them did just that you might not like the fairness doctrine. You might want some other sort of guidelines or mechanisms in place, you might want none at all. But whatever your view, you still got to wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't really work if people only listen to one kind of

Hen you welcome me out, Franken, show, I'm out, Franken.

The left answer to Rush Limba would be for a while, this guy, Alan Stuart Franken, a comedian best known at the time for his work on Saturday Night Live. Franken had written a book called Rush Limbo Is a Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations. He came out in nineteen ninety six. The audiobook version gives you an idea of Franken's vibe at the time.

I thought the title, aside from the obvious advantage of being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books. Let me explain why it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing out that he's a big lard butt.

Franken told c SPAN he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite.

If Rush Limbaugh were to write a book about you, what would its title be?

Uh, The guy who got me, the guy who held me accountable, the guy who my ass.

Franken owned his comedy style deadpan, a bit obnoxious, part smart alec, part frat boy. Here he is talking to an audience of college students.

What I do is in propaganda.

What I do is taking what they say and using it against them.

What I do is jiu jitsu.

They say something ridiculous and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule.

That's my job.

Franken had a lot in common with Limbaugh. They were both born in nineteen fifty one. They're both from the middle of the country. Limba's from Missouri, Franken grew up in Minnesota. They both love to perform. Then there are the differences. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken graduated from Harvard. The same year that Franken published Rush Limbaugh as a Big fat Idiot, a new cable television network started up,

Bill Clinton got call Stumpen.

Legan turn Monica Lewinsky the blue stain dress.

All this time, and especially after nine to eleven, a lot of liberals were still wishing there was a liberal Limbaugh, so they started a new radio network called Air America. Air America would launch all kinds of careers, including Rachel Maddows before joining MSNBC. She had her own Air America show. Now, Franken came to Air America from the USO. He'd been going on tours entertaining the troops overseas Bob Hopestyle. He saw that work as a chance to show that right

It's about.

Answering these fuckheads that have been on the air and lion and delivering this simplistic, black and white babble about how the world works, as if they know something, and they have built this infrastructure of feeding people misinformation about economic justice and about how our society is run. And it's about time that somebody fought back.

Talk to me, talk about the right wing.

Dis honesty.

Franklin launched his own Air America radio show in two thousand and four. He delivered something surprising, an old fashioned variety show sort of Marx Brothers but about politics with lots of skits.

Show is brought to you by the Union of Jewish Archaeologists.

We look at fossils of arightly Man and asked, was.

This a Jew?

What else Franken was doing was different from anything else on the air, mostly though it was different from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Everything about Franken Show was designed in opposition to Limbaugh's show. Unlike Limbaugh, who only had guests occasionally, Franken Show featured them, and unlike Limbaugh, Franken invited calls from people who disagreed with him. When Franken did monologues, he often got serious.

In the early sixties, We'd watch TV. We watched the news, maryor TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see southern sheriff's sicken police dogs on black demonstrators.

Made that so that no Jew can be for that.

The most important part of Franken Show came when he fact checked the Rush Limbaugh Show.

How many people listened to him Fifteen to twenty million, right, right, Okay, so those people believe him, right, yeah, Okay, so most of his listeners believe is seventy five percent people making minimum wage are teenagers in their first job. I had our staff look at up sixty one point one percent of people earning minimum wage are twenty or over. You know, we got our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt.

Frankn put on a good show, but Air America turned out to be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run, beset by financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for Al Franken's show never got above a million and a half weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience of the Rush Limbaugh Show. There are lots of theories about why left wing radio failed. One of them is that liberals would rather listen to something more thoughtful and

In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next two years, the budget deal on the some of the extreme across the board cuts of the sequester that will enable us to make more.

In twenty fourteen, Franken won reelection to the Senate. He was sort of a non story. Meanwhile, rush Limbaugh's tirades grew louder and louder all through Obama's two terms in office. Limbaugh urged obstructionism, the rejection of all compromise. Thank you.

Let's say, as conservatives, liberals demand that we be bipartisan with them in Congress. What they mean is we check our core principles at the door. Come and let them run the show, and then agree with them. That's my partnership to them.

Okay, I've got to stop the tape. I am so sick of this. Hel Franken, when he was writing that book about Limbaugh, said it took a real toll on him to have to listen to this guy all the time. I feel that it's like reading hate mail. To be honest, I find listening to Al Franken pretty grading too. But when you're researching historical development, you don't choose the evidence you enjoy. Your job is to listen to all of it.

To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.

And that has to be what you're focused on.

In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against a new.

Opponent, politicians are all talk.

And no action.

That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still fighting the far right.

I'm Al frankan Minnesota senator and world renowned expert on right wing megalomaniacs, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and now Donald Trump.

And that was the right genealogy, Limbaugh made Trump possible. Trump's whole I alone can fix it. Thing that was straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that Limbaugh cultivated, those dittoheads that became trump Ism, those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh. All this led the political outsider Trump to an unexpected victory. But long after Trump won, Limbaugh remained fixated on the outgoing president.

The first moment that Trump does anything that is the unraveling of an Obama agenda item.

Obama's going to be on TV. Hey, you know what, I won't go on TV.

I'm glad you'd exclue.

TMP about destroy Obama.

Ker.

I find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong it was, Because, of course, Obama did not go on television and damn Trump's every move. Instead, Obama kept quiet for pretty much all four years of Trump's administration. Obama played by old school rules. The ex president steps out of politics, the rules that every other American president of whatever party had played by from the beginning. Limba, though, seemed no longer able to imagine that anyone still played

I can do anything whatever you want, grab them by them, I can do any of them.

After the Access Hollywood tape came out just before the twenty sixteen election, Trump said it was just locker room talk.

I've been in a lot of locker rooms.

That's Al Franken on Late Night with Seth Myers.

I you know, I belong with a health club OA in Minneapolis.

I think you can tell.

Yeah, we can tell.

And our locker room banter is stuff like is Trump crazy?

In the end, though, one politician who would be brought down for trump sins would be Al Franken. In twenty seventeen, a conservative talk radio host named Leeann Tweeden went on the air at KABC in Los Angeles with a bombshell.

Who is your abuser?

Senator Al Franken. It was in two thousand and six we were going on a USO tour. He gave me the script, and you know, it was full of sexual innu windows and it was supposed to be funny, you know.

Tweeden told the story of how back in two thousand and six, she and Franken had been together in Kuwait, backstage at a USO tour, rehearsing for the show.

And he mashes his mouth up against mine and he sticks his tongue in my mouth. And as it happens, it happens so fast, and he puts his tongue in my mouth and his mouth is just wet and slimy. I was violated. I was disgusted. That's not what I was expecting. All I could think about was that's what you wrote that in the script for, so you could do that to me.

Also, there was a cringey photo.

A photo has surfaced today showing Tweeting asleep on the flight back home, and it reveals Franken groping her.

Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but then seven other women made accusations against him, mostly about unwanted touching. Pressured by his Democratic Senate colleagues, Franken resigned. His speech on the Senate floor was.

Bitter, I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Ovoil office.

When the New Yorkers Jane Mayer reinvestigated the case, Franken told her that he regretted resigning. Seven current and former senators who urged him to resign said they regretted it too. As Mayor told NPR, there were holes in Tweeden's story.

She had never been subjected to any fact checking. She had never produced any corroborators. And I spoke to eight people on that USO tour who had no political agenda, and most of them were in the military, and they were right there and they just didn't she is voice she saw it.

As Mayor pointed out, Leanne Tweeden claimed, Franken wrote the controversial skit in two thousand and six for her, but in fact, and this is indisputable, he wrote it in two thousand and three. Other actresses had played that same role, but something else was lost in the frenzy around Tweeden's allegations.

Here tonight is a special man, be loved by millions of Americans who just received a Stage four advanced cancer diagnosis. This is not good news. But what is good news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet.

Limbaugh was dying of lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering in the political wilderness all that year. Trump and Limbaugh kept saying that Democrats were going to steal the twenty twenty election. But stealing elections was a go peck golden oldie, the two nut Gingrich had played back in nineteen eighty eight.

They're going to buy a registration, they're going to buy votes, they're going to turn out votes, They're going to steal votes. They're going to do anything they can.

Now you have to understand that, stop the steal, Gingrich said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty he was saying it all over again. Two days after the.

Election, you know, one's to be of any doubt. You are watching an effort to steal the presidency, and I says.

Joe Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then two months later, on January sixth, the next episode of the Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many ruvers of doubt that dumped us into the sea of political catastrophe, the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this. Against the backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of

There's a lot of people calling for the end of violence. There's a lot of conservatives social media who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual Tea Party guys the minute Lexington and Conquered didn't feel that way.

Rush Limbaugh died six weeks after that broadcast. The King of a m Radio left behind in America more bewildered and angry than ever, the nation split by a growing canyon of talk with no bridges of meaning. That canyon looked like it might just swallow up the oldest democracy in the world. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton