Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.

The fascist propagandist and well known conservative fop Byron York had just finished boasting online about a new Associated Press poll showing that Trump's stance on crime got a fifty three percent approval rating from voters and only forty five percent disapproval, the only issue on which he is not amazingly underwater, and other Conservatives had already begun yesterday's edition of their New Job do everything to portray Democrats as pro crime when a man walked up to a school chapel in Minnesota, barricaded some of the doors so that children inside couldn't get out, and started shooting them through the walls and windows during their thoughts and prayers.

Trump is instituting a police state, military men pointing guns at citizens on American streets while outfitted more obviously and life threateningly than they were in Fallujah or during the Battle of Agincourt in fourteen fifteen, and the Democrats are afraid to respond in any way that might feed the knee jerk reaction of people who do not know that they are fulfilling Benjamin Franklin's observation that Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Democrats, who have more useless, brain dead strategists and consultants than they have elected officials at the moment, are terrified that they will feed this narrative, even while the most prevalent, heartrending crime of our century, school shootings in a America will continue unaffected, in fact probably increased, because the fascist dictator Trump will not will never will die before he allows any action to be taken against the undeniable, unarguable, unassailable primary cause of atrocities like the one at the Annunciation Church School in Minneapolis yesterday, the effing guns.

You want to push back against Trump as he militarizes this country, as he makes it the United Police States of America, as he and that eyelinered buffoon vance respond to real crime with real victims, real children by claiming they are praying, yeah, praying with an e You want to make something something good happen in the wake of these latest children, we as a nation have sacrificed on our mindless alter of worship to a lie about what the Second Amendment to the Constitution says, you want these to be the last.

Maybe you want the people who cause these nightmares, gun makers and the lawmakers who prostitute themselves for gun money, Republicans, Maga trumpists.

You want them to pay for their crimes.

You want people to recognize that standing ghost life behind that subhuman creature shooting into a school chapel service yesterday.

The figure in the background is Trump, like in one of his own cheesy memes, with gentrified white Jesus standing behind him.

You want any of that to happen, you start with one thing.

You have to say it.

You have to come out and say the truth, and you go from there.

Not alter the truth because a consultant says, there could be damage if you are perceived the wrong way.

Years ago, this was the message inside the Democratic Party about the blatant exploitation of the terrorist threat that was being done by George W.

Bush.

Don't you dare say he has made terrorism into a political weapon for the Republicans.

Don't you dare say he's exaggerating threats, maybe staging threats, definitely timing headlines about threats to try to terrify the public into voting Republican.

Even though that is exactly what he was doing, so much so that even the first head of Bush's Department of Homeland Security confessed his own beliefs about this after he left the office.

Don't you say that it may backfire?

Then many of us said it, and the politicians got to see that the people knew it before they did or before the strategists did, And as they admitted it and talked about it and said it, the Democrats then broke the Bush terror spell and they swept the two thousand and six mid terms in the two thousand and eight presidential election.

Well, the soft on crime issue is backfiring now because those children in Minnesota died yesterday because Donald Trump is using resources to stop imaginary crimes while permitting and enabling the worst crimes, the most heartrending crimes, the most preventable crimes, to continue and escalate.

And instead of telling that truth and maybe saving the next school full of fresh meat from the next trumpest Second Amendment psycho, the Democrats are hiding as Trump sends the wrong guns in the wrong hands to the wrong places, pursuing the wrong criminals.

The criminals are not foreigners with petty records or those who overstayed their official welcome.

The criminals aren't the demented and misfortunate people lying on the floor of Union station in Washington.

And they aren't the day workers breaking their backs to harvest our food.

And they aren't Americans in cities throwing salami subs at border patrol and FBI agents who are just as bewildered as to anybody else as to why the hell they are there.

The criminals are the creatures who make and sell these guns.

The criminals are the politicians who enable these guns to flow freely through every state in this country into any hands they can find an excuse to put them in.

You want to be tough on crime, your great cowardly fraud, Trump, deploy the National Guard to Maryville, Tennessee, and round up the monsters who run the Smith and Wesson headquarters there.

Go to Geneseo, Illinois and shut down the Springfield Armory.

Send your platoons to Connecticut and close Colt and close Ruger.

Do that, and then I will listen to you Trump telling me the Democrats are soft on crime.

And then I'll listen to Democratic consultants telling this not to say anything about the police state forming around us, because right now the leading cause of violent death in this country is the Republican Party and the individual protecting the killers.

The man who might as well have been shooting into that church yesterday is Donald Trump.

And first you have to say that.

First you have to stop calculating.

First you have to take a sacred oath to tell the truth and deal with the consequences.

Trump is destroying this country.

He is increasing the amount of violence here.

He is scattering tin in every major city.

He is throwing matches.

He is daring people to stand up and protest so he can have them shot.

And he is ignoring, deliberately ignoring the true nightmare, the true threat, the true violence, because those guns, those shooters, he likes them.

You have to say it, Democrats.

There is no massaging the message that can let you take back the narrative of who's really tough on crime here.

Trump is not the cure.

Trump is the cause.

Trump is not the law.

Trump is the criminal.

We save this country not by negotiating with Trump over how much police stage, but by destroying it and him and the companies and the politicians who are in the very profitable field of murdering kids in schools.

You have to say it?

Who will Who will say it?

I have some hope.

I have some hope from something I saw this past week, which, as much attention as it did get, did not get enough attention.

I got some hope from somebody who, unlike Chuck Schumer, and unlike Barack Obama, and unlike Kamala Harris, and unlike the other people who should be out front on all of this, somebody who stood up and in less than fifteen minutes, cut through all of the Democratic strategist coward and bullshit and told the truth about Trump and guns and the police state.

The man who did this is the governor of Illinois, JB.

Pritzker.

Pritzker's response is far more important than it even seemed at the time, because it reflects that somebody in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party gets it.

Trump is destroying democracy.

Trump is pointing the guns of American troops against American citizens and daring them to say something against it, or against him, or against Trump's treasonous conspiracy to destroy America.

And just by doing this, Trump is increasing the validation of the use of guns in our society.

Everywhere, at church schools, the negligence by Schumer, Jeffries, most Democratic senators, most governors, all consultants, sadly, all ex presidents is astonishing, especially when Pritzker confirms what I've been saying here.

The first and biggest step is just to say it.

Speak the truth, use the words, and do not waste time.

Trump is not just wrong and evil.

Trump is crazy.

So get out there in front of microphones and call Trump wrong, and call Trump evil, and call Trump crazy.

Mister President, do not come to Chicago.

You are neither wanted here nor needed here.

Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties, and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander in chief, for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever more alarming grabs for power.

The second stage of telling the truth is to call out the liars and the enablers surrounding Trump, to promise them a future in which it's possible Trump gets away with it.

It's possible Trump dies, not in jail, but the future then means they are chased by justice for the rest of their lives.

To remind them that there are three possibilities, and three possibilities alone for them.

One in which they go to jail for their betrayals of America.

A second in which they go to jail because Trump has to make them the scapegoat like he's made everybody else who's ever worked for him escapegoat.

And the third in which both fates befall them and destroy them.

To the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, To the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man.

To any federal official who would come.

To Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous.

We are watching, and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we're going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year.

Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time.

But history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional.

Rule of law.

And just as importantly as standing up to Trump and reassuring those of us who see his insanity that it is him and not us, just as importantly as warning about the United Police States of America and warning these gutless cowards, these hegxeths and heros and gnomes and Levitt's and Rubios and Lutniks, that the only question is who gets you first, a democratic justice department or Trump throwing you overboard.

Just important was Pritzker's warning to the third group which has pushed this nation to the edge of this cliff, the both sides ist reporters and the money grubbers who own their papers and networks and who somehow think Trump will not someday come for them too.

I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a US city, punish his dissonance, and score political points.

If this were happening in any other country, we would have no troubled calling it what.

It is, a dangerous power grab.

I will confess I slept on Governor Pritzker.

I didn't see it, not anymore.

He is eloquent, concise, and most importantly, he doesn't do what everybody else does.

And how often can you look at someone and say, his greatest success is what he's not doing.

He can focus his rage and turn it into controlled, searing commentary rather than mere anger.

This is a tight rope I have fallen off too many times to count.

I want him and Newsom in charge of the opposition henceforth, with Sanders and AOC and anybody else who will goddamned fight.

Newsom incidentally seems to be reprising his federal tax boycott idea answered another sanctimonious tweeted video from that Texas Khanman Abbot, who you could barely see in the video for all the banners and gonfolens he had around him.

Newsom wrote, quote, California is the fourth largest economy in the world.

We contribute eighty three billion dollars to the federal government, while Texas takes seventy one billion.

Nice flags, though we are going to eventually get around to having to do this to the Blue States, cutting off our funding of the federal government and thus ending the failed socialist experiment that keeps financially unstable places like Texas from going bankrupt.

We might as well do it now, but we start by telling the truth.

A couple of notes here before the holiday weekend.

Think about these and I'll then go on at length about them on Monday.

And yes, the next edition will be Monday.

Something for you to actually do on Labor Day.

First, What the hell?

Why does Trump keep talking about going to heaven?

Is that why the tunnel buysed circle jerk cabinet meeting went on for three hours on Tuesday?

Were they saying goodbye to him?

Do they know more about that thing on his hand than we do?

It looks like a pothole repair crew got to his hand.

Looks just like that photo of Queen Elizabeth reaching out her hand to shake hands with Liz Trusts two days before the Queen died.

And now he's fundraising with emails that are title, I want to try to get to heaven.

You want to try to get to heaven?

Well, hell go nuts, who's stopping you?

You need money for the trip?

And yes, once again, no grand jury indictment of the former DOJ lawyer who threw the sandwich at the Trump police state reps standing in front of the subway shop at fourteenth and you.

Democratic leadership is afraid of voter blowback on the crime issue, even as the ordinary citizens are blowing back literal failure to indict a salami sandwich higher evidential threshold than the ham.

I guess a note for next Tuesday.

Again, no media coverage when this was announced.

I didn't see it for three days.

Congressman Kanna is holding a news conference Tuesday with Epstein victims in DC about Trump Tuesday.

Be there, Aloha?

What does this mean?

The House Comber Snipe Hunt Committee has subpoenaed the Epstein estate looking for anything Epstein signed pertaining to the botched prosecution in Florida under the Republican former US attorney there Alex Acosta, you know, Trump's first labor secretary, and Acosta will appear before the committee for a transcribed interview on September nineteenth.

Just keep bringing it up, Just keep bringing it up.

Thank you, Jamie Comer.

I don't care what happens.

I don't care what he says.

Nobody cared what Klain Maxwell says.

Keeping that story alive is all that matters, Jamie Comer, American Hero this week and bookkeeping here weeks ago.

I promised news about enlarging the footprint.

I can't do that quite yet, though we are close.

But I can tell you the fine folks at iHeart Media and I have agreed on a new deal that will keep this podcast going through at least the midterms and presumably beyond.

And god damn it, oh, I wanted it too.

Was retire, but no also of interest here, Honest to god, I don't wish my ex ill in her apparently just restarting attempt to come back from last year's RFK Junior fiasco.

Phone call for you, But my god, her former employer, the one that was supposedly going to be the place that rehired her, that restarted her career, just did a story about her and put in the headline that she was RFK Juniors quote digital lover, Oh, how in the hell do you ever live that down?

I mean, the only option is trademarket and make some T shirts.

Olivia.

That could be the title of your column somewhere Digital lover.

Oh, my lord, shod Day saying that digital Lover not gonna boast, but it is an exceptional Worst Persons She's in it, not shot Day.

Also Stephen Miller and Candice Owens and Stephen A.

Smith.

That's next.

This is countdown.

This is countdown with Keith Oberman.

Still ahead on this initiative, countdown Things I've promised not to tell and something inspired by a question I got about the winner of Worse Persons today and whether or not she could really believe the filth she spews and the sad reality that again then again, these charlatans start by selling a product, and then as they come to realize the audience really believes the product they say and see that they will make more money the more they pretend to also believe in the product.

And then suddenly the product.

The belief takes them over like a mask you put on and cannot remove.

How my personal histories with them suggest the startling probability that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and the others alive and were once human beings who were just salesmen, just entertainment, and then the hate consumed them and replaced them with non human replicants who knew nothing but hate and the money it provided them, that ahead, and things I promised not to tell first.

Believe it or not, they're still new ones, more new idiots to talk about.

The roundup of the latest miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.

Lebron's worst third place, Steven Miller.

We really all knew this guy was warped when his derelict father's finances collapsed and he had to go to public school in Santa Monica, California.

And I told you before the rumor from his classmates that he asked out some Hispanic girl in that public school and she said no.

And ever since that minute, he's been getting weirder and weirder and more and more hateful.

And prejudiced.

Who knows if there's anything to that or not, But none of that explains what we are seeing now.

These are bonafide, full scale hallucinations.

On Fox Shiny, Stephen Miller says, quote President Trump has literally set the people of Washington, DC free.

They're so happy now they can go and live their lives and go to their favorite restaurant or bar or their favorite pool hall or park.

You see moms taking kids out to parks they haven't been doing years because they know the police are there and the President Trump is there with his law enforcement to protect them.

First of all, Trump is Trump is there at the the parks with the kids and the moms.

You've seen this, have you, Steve Mescalin, Aaron Rodgers brand T.

Also, this other party is really the tell they can go to their favorite restaurant or bar or their favorite pool hall.

Pool hall, pool hall.

You say, when was the last time the phrase pool hall was used by.

Humans.

I had a friend, a professional pool player, forty five years ago.

This is I never heard her call it a pool hall.

What the f pool halls?

I mean like Professor Harold Hill calls it a pool hall in the movie The Music man from nineteen sixty freaking two, or maybe Minnesota Fats.

Jackie Gleeson is Minnesota Fats in the Hustler.

I don't even think that Minnesota Fats called it a pool.

Hall pool ball man.

The runner up.

Uh, here we go again, not quite a year after she went from a rising celebrity political interviewer to a punchline, My ex is in the news again.

No, not her, and not her.

The other one Olivia Newsy, although I understand she's playing with the pronunciation again, might be nutsy right now.

She also tried MIZI.

I said, your job is news.

Your name is really Newsy.

Stop throwing back the talking fish who craps gold?

What more do you want out of life?

First name?

Really really Newsy?

Anyway, this is less about her.

I mean I would try to restart my career even after you know.

This is about Vanity Fair magazine, whose new editor is named Mark Guducci.

Gaducci he fired all their established people and he wants to remake the magazine with other people's successes and names newsletter authors like Oliver Darcy per semaphore, their reporting and also per semaphore quote.

He has had conversations with Olivia Newsy about a roll writing for the magazine.

Uh, here we go.

Good for her.

I don't need to remind you of the details of her demise, just the headlines.

She did a huge fawning profile of RFK Junior in the middle of a presidential race.

Then he bragged he had no photos of her and that they'd had phone video sex, which they both seem to think is a relationship of some kind.

So then there was her fiance and he found out about all this, and she tried to get him arrested, and she claimed he leaked it, and then he sued her, and then Politico fired him, and he dropped hints about her episodes and anyway, New York Magazine parted ways with her.

Then the New York Post called me about having lived with her a decade in Morgo and then she disappeared.

To me, the headline was RFK Junior, who's seventy and looks like he was standing way too close when Oppenheimer tested the Manhattan Project that RFK Junior, you mean I was too young for her.

Pool halls.

However, here is the here is the here's the rub.

Her headline now is what her former employer is at The Daily Beast foot as the headline of their version of this story quote RFK Junior's Digital lover plots comeback after nuking her career.

Oh oh no, no, no digital lover.

Oh never gonna wash that out.

Digital lover in pool halls, no doubt.

The real problem with that Daily Beast headline is that, for the last ten months since all this happened, the hot rumor around the news business was that Livvy would be returning to magazine writing or online writing or something once this all blew over.

She'd be returning with with the Daily Beast, which just called her RFK Junior's digital lover.

That was supposedly her best employment option.

Yes, we just hired this reporter used to work for us.

Anything new about her since since our headline called her the digital lover?

Okay, okay, destroy the contract digital lover?

Why is that not like a pop hit?

Already, the newly engaged Taylor Swift sings her number one hit, Digital Lover.

I give you one hundred dollars, Taylor Swift if you put the phrase pool haul in your new hit digital lover, see because it's also a pun.

But our winner Candace Owens, the Stephen A.

Smith endorsed reckless clown with the eye on either side of her head who was too anti Semitic and vile even for The Daily Wire.

Perfect example of this Hannity Limbaus syndrome I'm going to talk about after the next break.

If you hadn't heard, Owens is being sued by the President of France.

I mean, that's a suit being sued for damages by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, for alleging, let me just quote the website, the Bulwark quote, that they are involved in an elaborate criminal conspiracy to hide the supposed fact that Brigitte is transgender unquote.

That's right.

Candace Owens went on her podcast I Guess and not only alleged that, but then said they were conspiring to keep it all a secret, and then they sued her.

And apparently only then did it dawn on her that somebody from another country can sue you for defaming them and alleging that they've committed a crime.

This is Owens on a more recent podcast.

This lawsuit.

We got an estimate this weekend from a legal team.

It is going to cost us millions.

I don't have that money, I really don't, So I thought we could actually sell some T shirts.

Yes, that distance between Candice Owens and reality grows larger the more you look at it.

Thirty dollars T shirts, oh, and thirty dollars caps.

If her costs legally are say five million, she would need to sell one hundred and sixty seven thousand shirts and caps, which is weird because her father in law is a British nobleman worth a reported one hundred and fifty million pounds, and obviously has a son who's a masochist or something.

The bulwark continues.

In theory, Owens could try to reach a cell with the Macrons that would alleviate the need to sell an ungodly amount of merch or facilitate a presidential intervention on her behalf.

But so far she doesn't seem interested in that option.

Owens has decidedly not toned down her conspiracy theories about the Macrons.

The magazine article continues, If anything, they're getting more baroque, Oh good a French word about the French president.

Last week, for example, Owens asked her viewers whether Bragitte Macron as a man had participated in the infamous Stanford prison experiment.

Why would that even matter because she suggested it might link the macrons to a CIA mind control program.

As in aside, I would suggest not a CIA mind control program for Candace Owens, but something that would allow Candace Owens to control her own mind.

But wait, this all gets better if you heard something in that quote that went, why to you?

What Owens really wants right now is statements of support for her and threats on her behalf by Trump and JD.

Vance.

No, no, seriously, save me Jeebis again Owens from her podcast quote, the job of the federal government is to defend us from foreign invaders.

And I would pretty much say Emmanuel mccrawan right now is being a foreign invader.

But no, they meaning Trump and Vance are silent, seriously seriously because she's being sued for something she said, We're being invaded.

I mean, look, Trump has used his office to do stupid things, not just evil things, but stupid things, trivial things.

I'm trying to get Roger Clemens in the Hall of Fame in baseball, Like, honestly, who the f cares?

I've been involved in covering baseball professionally since nineteen seventy five.

I don't the f care.

But Candace Trump claims to like President Macron, and she's not asking for him to try to get the Macrons to drop the suit, or she's not offering an apology in exchange for or something small.

She wants Trump to declare that the president of France is invading the United States of America because Candace Owens being a foreign invader, because he sued her, like anybody in this country would know who Candace fing Owens would be if Macrone hadn't sued her.

And by the way, Macrone then had her investigated.

The Financial Times reported quote lawyers Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron hired investigators to research the US podcaster as they prepared to sue her, leading to a compilation of details, including about her ties to French far right personalities, and her popularity in Russian state media.

Once again, I say, when the lawsuit starts that she will not prevent by apologizing when that lawsuit starts, When the trial starts, who Candace is, who Candace Owens is will be revealed.

And so if you're adjacent to Candace Owens, if you've endorsed her, stephen A, you might wind up indelibly ruined by her.

Just thought save me, jeebus Trump suddenly flashing back to that redneck sovereign citizen guy, the moron and his car six years ago.

Do you remember this about to get arrested.

The cops were literally outside his truck because his kayak was sticking too far out of his truck.

That's not a metaphor.

I'm not referring back to Olivia Newzy and RFK Junior.

This is literally the cops pulled him over for a moving violation.

His kayak was sticking too far out of his truck.

If he just stopped, it probably would have meant nothing more than a small fine, a ticket, maybe just a warning.

Maybe just come out here and put your kayak back in, zip up your pants, and put your kayak back in your car.

And the guy instead starts live screaming himself, praying quote Donald Trump, if you can hear us, please save me, putting his hands up, please save me.

And then he starts crying, and then the cops bust his window.

Now he's Secretary of Kayaking in the Trump administration.

Something, Candace, have we ever seen her and the Trump praying Kayak guy in the same place, Steven A.

Smith, Owens dip Shit and Today's Other Worst Part, Sudden and the World Show, the number one story on the Countdown, and things I promised not to tell and I am often asked.

I was asked this weekend past about this exact question about the relative sincerity of the Wall of Fame of the Mount Rushmore of conservative fascist commentators.

I don't mean the little nebeshy guys who are on now, who turns out have been getting money from the Kremlin wash through intermediaries, and not even the more recent group like Glenn Beck, but the founding fathers of this rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Dead, career dead, brain dead.

I have met them all, and I think the answer about whether or not they are being sincere or this is just a stick that they do for money, is different in each of them, and yet eventually all becomes the same thing.

Many of them do not start out believing a word they are saying, and then they discover success, and suddenly they want to say more of what they have been saying because it pays them so well.

And the next thing you know, after you say something long enough, it's not just the audience that begins to believe it, it's you who begins to believe it.

One day and I tried to get the exact date of this, I know it was a Sunday, that's all ninety five, ninety six.

Perhaps based on the memory of what the ESPN Sports Center newsroom looked like before it's remodeling in nineteen ninety six, I'm thinking it's nineteen ninety five.

I walked in to do the Sunday eleven PM Sports Center and in an otherwise empty newsroom, a very small room with a bunch of cubicles around it, one of which was mine, so small that two anchors would share one computer.

Standing next to my desk, not saying a word, but just looking into the newsroom as if he were Charlie visiting Willie Wonka's chocolate factory.

Was Rush Limbaugh.

And given his size, perhaps that's a good analogy.

Rush Limbaugh saw me walk in and he almost asked for an autograph.

Oh, Keith, Hi, I'm Rush Limbaugh.

Nothing like the person you heard or saw, restrained whispering, behaving as if he were as he said in church, I'm such a fan.

Oh my goodness, Oh, I remember you from the CNN days.

I had to explain to him that we had met once.

No, was a nineteen eighty World Series when you worked for the Kansas City Royals.

It's important to remember that Rush Limbaugh's career path was he thought sports.

He was going to be a broadcaster, a baseball broadcaster, or a baseball executive.

And he got no further down that line then, as he put it, the assistant Media and Community Affairs director of the Kansas City Royals in charge of escorting the first pitch thrower and the national anthem singer onto the field.

That was his job.

But when the head of the PR department for the Kansas City Royals, whose name was Dean Vogelar and how could you forget that name, introduces you to one of his assistants, and the guy's name is Rush Limbaugh, Well you remember that name.

I don't remember the conversation.

I don't know what it was about.

I think he was just standing there and Dean Volgor was being nice to both of us.

But we had met, and he was when I told him this story, he was like, oh my god, I wish we had a picture of that.

It was almost to the point of embarrassing.

I'll take praise from anybody, especially in nineteen ninety five before I fully understood what Rush Limbaugh was doing to this country.

But I will take praise from anybody.

But Rush Limbaugh went from sports into what he did to this country because he failed at sports.

His original radio work was as a sportscaster and call in show host in sports when that was not a very popular thing.

And simply being good at killing four hours by repeating the same argument over who's the greatest player of all time this week was not enough to get you a thirty one million dollar a year contract.

He got fired from that.

He was a disc jockey for a while, and then they said, we got some time to kill, why don't you just go on Limbaugh and do a news talk show.

Well, he was of conservative leaning, and he found out as he began to criticize the liberals of California in the various small markets in which he worked there around to believe the Sacramento area.

The more he did that and the more vituperative he became, the more people listened.

Soon he had a contract.

Soon he wasn't about to get fired from another industry, having failed in baseball and then failed in sportscasting and failed as a disc jockey.

Suddenly he had a contract and then somebody said we should syndicate your show.

Other markets would love to hear this, and you know where it went from there.

But in nineteen ninety five, and that's twelve thirteen years into the Limbaugh dynasty, Rush Limbaugh was speaking in hushed tones, having appeared like a ghost, like the devil in Bristol, Connecticut.

And by the way, I yes, I explained, what the hell, what are you doing here?

I asked him that question.

He explained he had been invited after he years of pestering Chris Berman to sit with the football crew from ESPN that did the Sunday Night I believe it was called Countdown at that point, ironically enough, football Highlight Show.

After the NFL games on Sundays, they watched the games in a room upstairs that US civilians were never permitted to attend, and they watched in low definition all whatever ten twelve NFL games there were simultaneously, and there were options for bringing in your friend.

They once brought in a back specialist who brought his table and was doing acupuncture and was doing everything that you could do to try to improve people's If you could do something for the crew, you could come in.

I don't know what Rushlanbaud did for the crew, but they finally let him in and he was there early, and he was about to go upstairs and join Chris Berman in that room.

And I asked Berman later, what was that like?

He went, I don't know.

The guy didn't say a thing.

I mean, he was just there.

He was just there.

He didn't mean we didn't even do any chiropracty what.

So what lim Blas said to me that echoes through the years, and it's nearly thirty years ago, was that he would at that point trade everything he had, and he was already successful.

I mean, he was already making I don't know ten times what I was making, twenty times what I was making.

He was successful.

He said he'd give it all up if he got to be my co host on Sports Center instead with the pay cut, or Dan Patrick's co host.

He was ready to knock off either one of us because that was his goal.

And much of the fuel for these raging, hateful men and women is that they have not succeeded in their first dream.

My first dream was to be play by plan announcer for the New York Yankees.

I never got close to it.

Did I become bitter or written?

No?

I took my second dream and got that one, and my third, my fourth, and fifth, and my sixth, and myself.

Not for the conservatives.

Rush Limbaugh was going to be the great sportscaster, and he never got close to it.

And when he finally got the opportunity to do it in two thousand and two, I believe when ESPN finally put him on the NFL show, and he did know something about football.

When they finally put him on, like three weeks into it, he existed that Donovan McNabb was highly rated by NFL experts simply because he was African American and they needed an African American to be a top quarterback.

Bye.

Rush, See, you got another chance after all those years, and you blew it in just three weeks.

So that's where Rush Limbaugh came from.

And of course, if every time you say Bill Clinton is a rapist, or you say Nancy Pelosi is a fascist, or you say Kamala Harris is a communist.

If every time you say that, somebody sends you ten thousand dollars, guess what you're going to say, and sooner rather than later, because it's impossible to go on at that volume of work saying things extemporaneously that you don't believe the truth will come out.

At some point.

You have to believe it.

You have to begin to believe it.

You get, as the cliche goes high on your own supply, and each time you get a little higher, they send you a little bit more money.

It is thus not a coincidence that rush Limbaugh nearly went to prison because he had a housekeeper who used to get him vicoden and other painkillers, prescription painkillers by the hundreds.

He took high two digits in painkillers every day because ultimately he could not believe, deep in his soul that what he was saying was true, even remotely true, but to sell fascism.

It is a verified and thoroughly documented fact that the entirety of the Nazi brass in Germany in the thirties and into the war regularly got methamphetamines and other uppers and other prescription painkillers of the time.

There's an entire book on it.

That is just revealing, and that was Rush Windbaugh.

Sean Hannity would seemingly have been the exact opposite.

In two thousand and six, two thousand and five, perhaps I went back to ESPN after years of nuclear war at the request of the head of ESPN Radio to do an hour every day on Dan Patrick's radio show.

And we had a gas and they paid me an extraordinary amount of money and it was such a nice break.

The MSNBC show was just coming into prominence, and it was a lot of work, and an hour with Dan Patrick was not a lot of work.

I would get there.

We did the three o'clock to four o'clock hour, if I remember correctly, I would get there at three o'clock and he'd be in his break.

They'd have a news update from Dan Davis, and I'd say to him on the line, what are we talking about?

Ego to talk about Barry Bonds.

We're gonna talk about this, We're gonna tell Okay, great, let me call up a couple of stories on the computer and we'd go and then at the end of the hour, I'd say, I'll talk to you tomorrow, and there's Keith Olverman, my friend, he has to go save the democracy now.

But the studio that we used often, and I had one in my house, so I didn't have to do this.

But it was nice to get into a big studio, a top Madison Square Garden was at the ABC Radio network, and it helped because every once in a while I had to do things for ABC Radio and WABC in New York as part of the deal.

So I was very happy to be there.

And one day, as I was leaving, I see sitting in a studio, a different studio, a couple of studios away from the one i'd just used for an hour.

To my surprise, there is Sean Hannity and he pounds on the inside of the window like that and waves me in.

And I had already I don't know how many times I put Sean Hannity in on the Worst Person's List, but there he was, in the flesh, and we had never met before.

So again, this is two thousand and five, six somewhere like that, and it's I don't know, three point fifty seven or soeve and he's going on the air at four and he says, listen, I don't understand this.

Why do people think I hate you.

People are assume, Wait, we have a fistfight the moment we ever met.

Every time you put me on that worst person's list, we get another ten thousand viewers.

Every time I make a reference to MSNBC, I'm sure you get another ten thousand viewers.

It's just television.

And I thought, oh my god, I hate this guy more than I hate Wimbaugh.

He didn't believe a word of it, or if he believed it, he didn't think there was anything wrong with it or controversial about it.

He didn't think it was worth standing up for or for somebody else to be standing against.

He assumed I didn't believe what I was saying, that this was just a television act.

In fact, he said just stay there, and he signed a show on he goes.

You know, people think I hate all liberals.

Well, I don't hate all liberals at all.

Some of them are really nice guys.

There's one standing here now.

I'm not going to mention him, because you know, I get him in trouble if we find out he finds we're friendly and we haven't had a fist fight yet.

But he's a great guy, and he just said something really funny about sports, and I'm just gonna quote him, and so, you know what, you hate all those liberals, but leave a little room for the good ones.

And I was like crying out loud, I'd rather deal with Rush Limbaugh.

Well.

And then there was the other, of course, future if Sean Hannity was to become a true believer, because once again he started that show for Fox in nineteen ninety six when they went on the air.

The story I told Drews from ten years later.

Thirteen years later, he was seated a couple of boxes behind me at Yankee Stadium when the Yankees won the two thousand and nine World Series, and we waved and took photos of each other and tweeted the photos.

We were still kind of friendly.

And by you know, twenty sixteen, he was advocating for a man wants to be the dictator of America.

And you can't do that if you don't believe it, if it's pure opportunism, you can't do what Sean Hannity did.

So he, again, like Limbaugh, started selling a product and ended taking the product.

O'Reilly, I believe at some point must have been more moderate than he turned out to be.

His story is largely different.

He was what the exaggerations of my own career say I was, but he was it for real.

He worked in three different local television markets in one year.

He had to move three times in one year.

I never did anything like that.

I never worked in two local markets in one year.

In fact, I only worked in two local markets in my life in television.

I haven't had half the jobs that Bill O'Reilly did, and he was never successful.

But his goal was to be I believe he wanted to be Walter Cronkite.

I'm not kidding Walter Cronkite.

And he got to work for NBC News and ABC News.

He got to be an anchor at the same station in Boston that I worked at for a while, we missed each other by like three months, and he wanted to be He wanted to be Walter Cronkoint.

He wanted to be the voice of America.

He wanted to be the most trusted man in America, absolutely devoid of political bias, trusted by everybody.

Well, that didn't work out because they kept firing him, and so he was working on Inside Edition owned by the Fox people.

When Fox launched the Fox News Channel, in nineteen ninety six, and they said, well, we're going to have to kill some time here.

What have we got.

We got this guy O'Reilly under contract for another eight to ten months here, and he's doing terribly with Inside Edition and everybody hates him there.

Let's move him into the three pm slot or something on his Fox News and then when he contract is up.

I mean, you know, if he makes some sort of impression, we can offer him half what he's making now, and if not, he's out the door.

Well, Fox's primetime lineup and nobody remembers.

This began with at eight o'clock Catherine Cryer, formerly of ABC and CNN and a former judge in Texas and really pretty much a straight down the middle, slightly leaning to the left news anchor and pretty good one.

And she didn't draw flies at eight o'clock.

Instead, O'Reilly, who I believe was on at two o'clock in the afternoon, had an extraordinary spike because he went on expressing his frustration.

People thought he was talking about the country and right wing versus left wing.

He was talking about how everybody had dumped on Bill O'Reilly.

The point of every episode of every show Bill O'Reilly ever did.

Ultimately you could put his name in there when he talked about America or values, or this happened to a friend of his, or why I was so surprised I went to this restaurant in Harlem and they didn't say I want some more iced T MF.

Or every one of those stories is about him and how he did not get to be Walter Cronkite and all the people he was now going to screw back and they loved it, and he became a template, and Hannity looked at that and went, I'm going to do that too.

Bill O'Reilly, by the time I met him, really really believed this.

And again, if you're expressing your own rage and just dressing it up and making it in somehow some fashion generic for everybody in the world, of course you're going to believe it.

You are angry.

Bill O'Reilly will die without ever becoming Walter Cronkite.

I will die without becoming the play by playman of the New York Yankees, and I'll go well, travel would have been terrible crying out loud click in any event, O'Reilly, as I've outlined many times in many places, did not take well to the criticism that I began to unleash on him.

Literally the day I returned to MSNBC in two thousand and three, when I got a phone call from one of my old friends at NBC in Washington, Nora O'Donnell, who said, you should do a segment on Bill O'Reilly.

It's so great to have you back.

He lies every night.

You should do something about O'Reilly, called O'Reilly Factor fiction, and I went, thank you, Nora, thank you for our resuscitate my career at MSNBC.

And as soon as the war began to die down in Iraq, we began to go after Bill O'Reilly.

And God knows he provided all the ammunition I could ever want.

The rule is never punched down, and all he did was punched down.

He wanted somebody to stop me.

He tried to blackmail Jeff mL the GE chairman.

I've told that story a dozen times.

He threatened Jeff Zooker, he threatened to expose this and say that he threatened, And finally we ran into each other at Yankee Stadium.

I went to a Yankee Mets game and had a credential because I was on the Dan Patrick Show every day.

I was actually also a sports reporter two thousand and five, two thousand and six, Yankee Stadium, and there's O'Reilly and I walk out onto the field, and to my surprise, there's Bill O'Reilly and he's got a not a press pass, but a pass given to him by the manager of the Yankees at the time, Joe Tory.

So it was an FOJ friend of Joe pass allows you to get on the field you're not allowed in certain And he was at one end of the Yankee dugout as I came out of the Yankee dugout on the home plate side, and the moment he saw me, he moved ten feet further away.

And every time I would look out onto the field, I could feel his eyes burning a hole in the side of my head, and I would turn my head quickly and he would look away.

I would edge suddenly one inch closer to him, and I could see out of the corner of my eye him edging one inch further away from me.

This went on for ten minutes while I talked to my friends among the sports reporters.

Later, he tried to get into the met clubhouse and his friend of Joe Torre credential did not allow him near the clubhouse, and they asked him to leave.

Two or three days later, I got a call from the Yankees.

There was an international incident, was the way it was described to me, about the fact that I had credentials and Bill O'Reilly did not Fox, to the point of having the president of Fox's operations saying he was calling on behalf of Roger Ayle's demanding to know why I was given access to the Mets clubhouse, but Bill O'Reilly was not, And the head of PR for the Yankees, sounding like he was reading from a script, went through thirty minutes explaining that the Yankees didn't give credentials to celebrities and that these sort of situations won't be tolerated, and only the working press gets credentials.

And you could hear that there were other people on the phone call who were not talking.

You could hear it because every once in a while the guy would stop suddenly and then you'd hear in the background.

I assumed that was O'Reilly.

The next day, I went to Yankee Stadium with my credential, and I went to the PR director of the Yankees and I said, what was that?

He goes, what do you mean?

I said, how come I have a credential today?

Wasn't that about taking away my credentials?

He goes, what did I say at the beginning of that conversation?

I said, you said you were going to make this phone call and talk to me about the fact that we did not issue credentials to celebrities.

Did we have that conversation?

Did I do that?

Yes?

Do we issue you a credential because you're on the Dan Patrick shower, because you're a celebrity.

And I went, I presume the former correct have a nice game.

And that was It.

Never came up again.

O'Reilly believed he had somehow sabotaged my access to Yankee Stadium, and he tried it many other times.

And I saw him once at a Joe Tory event, a charity event, and he did the same thing where he stared at me and then moved an inch away if I got too close to him.

An extraordinarily crazy man and remained such to this day.

But as I always say, I probably owe him ten percent of all of my earnings from MSNBC because he just couldn't ignore me.

I mean, his ratings were initially at least five times mine.

Even at the end, when we'd grown that thing into making one hundred two hundred million dollars a year profit for NBC, his ratings were still twice three times mine.

He should never have once mentioned me.

Instead, he put up a petition one day, had them do it on the Fox News website too, without mentioning my name, because he refused to ever mention my name.

He wanted Phil Donahue reinstated as the eight pm anchor on MSNBC, and he did a whole thing about how Phil Donna, who had been treated so badly, so sign up here on foxnews dot com the get Phil Donahue the eight pm slot that he so richly deserves.

And I was like, thank you, Bill.

So the next thing I did was I got my camera, one of my camera crews from NBC in Secaucus to record everybody on the MSNBC Countdown staff lined up to get to the computer and all of them signing up to get me fired and get Phil Donahue reinstated.

Because one thing about fascists and people who get high on their own supply, but people like Bill Riley never understand people like that who believe all this, that people are at home taking notes, writing down how will I live my life?

This is what Bill O'Reilly says, This is what Hannity says, this is what Limbo says.

One thing is they really believe that they don't recognize that the job is just too largely inform but in many cases, simply reassure people who've already reached the opinion you have that they're not crazy, that there are other people who've reached that same opinion, and to add to their understanding and correct them sometimes or to have them correct you.

It's illumination with maybe a few jokes and an entertaining broadcast of some kind.

It is not I am writing the New Bible, and you will live your life this way.

So we got that count of how many people wanted to have Phil Donahue reinstated like, we managed to get it over five thousand.

I've done all the damage I can do.

Thank you for listening.

Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel.

Our musical directors have Countdown and it was produced by Tko Brothers.

Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums.

Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.

Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.

The Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN, Inc.

Is the sports music.

Other music arranged unperformed by the group No Horns Allowed.

My announcer today is my friend Stevie van Zant.

Everything else was, as always my fault.

That's countdown for today, Day two hundred and twenty one of America held hostage again, just forty one days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless he is removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein and the pavement on his hand, or by how he keeps saying he wants to go to heaven.

Okay, said the Lord.

The next scheduled countdown is Monday, Labor Day, Monday, look for us Monday.

You can listen to it Tuesday and take Monday off.

I wouldn't blame you till then.

I'm Keith Olberman.

Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck, Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.

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