RUSH: Chester in Champaign, Illinois, great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s Justin. Mega dittos and a major honor to speak with you, sir.
RUSH: Your name is Justin?
CALLER: Justin.
RUSH: Justin.
CALLER: But I assure you I’ve been called worse.
RUSH: Well, no, I just forever try to figure out how Justin became Chester when Mr. Snerdley was talking to you.
CALLER: (laughing) I don’t know. A little bit earlier, Rush, you were talking about how the Baltimore Sun printed an article about how college graduates now, increasingly, are coming out of school and they’re going and they’re moving back in with their parents which I think is nearly the textbook definition of a liberal. Now, it won’t come as a huge surprise to you, but, you know, I was an abysmal student who started working in broadcasting, started my own entertainment company, but was a very poor student. And I can’t imagine, you know, any of my friends who went to college and everything, you know, starting their own business and doing anything of the like because when you start talking common sense to these people and you start talking about work ethic and things like that they look at you like you’ve got plants growing out of your ears, and they’ve been taught that academia is a substitute for hard work, and I just think that is a lot of the problem right now with the White House and the country and —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Explain this. People are being told academia is a substitute for hard work. What do you mean by that?
CALLER: I mean, what they’ve been taught is, ‘Well, if you go and you get a big degree, and you get something with a lot of initials after it then it’s going to let you glide on through and you’re going to be able to move through and you’re gonna get a high paying job and you’re going to be responsible for very little –‘
RUSH: Yeah that is the gig.
CALLER: — which is true in the government sector.
RUSH: That is the PR, there’s no question about it. But it doesn’t happen, so what do you do?
CALLER: Well —
RUSH: It’s either one of two things.
CALLER: — run for office.
RUSH: You either go back — well, okay, three things. Three things: You either go back to school, you move in with mom or dad, or you run for office. (laughing) Exactly right.
CALLER: The White House and Washington is filled with these people that if they weren’t in the position that they are now, they’d be living at home in their parents’ basement with no concept of positive cash flow, how things work. All they know is how to spend, how to let other people make decisions for them.
RUSH: In the interests of full disclosure, I need to include myself in this discussion. I’ve mentioned this before on this program, this new book out called Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets. And, by the way, I had nothing to do with this book, I had nothing to do with the title, nothing whatsoever to do with the title of this book. I talked to Zev Chafets, the author, for maybe 16 hours, but I had nothing to do with the structure of the book. I had no input control, output control, textual, none of that. But he has written about an incident — you know, I left home when I was 20, and I’d started working when I was essentially 13. My first job was shining shoes in a barbershop. Then I started working at a radio station when I was 16 and I worked all through the summers, so I really never had your average, ordinary childhood, teenage years. I still went out with the buddies and so forth, but I had to get up at four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning every day in the summertime.
So I leave for Pittsburgh in February of 1971, and by 1975 I had moved back home ’cause I had been fired twice and the only offer I had was from a small station in Wisconsin. I said, ‘This is not what I want to do.’ And I went back home to try to assess things. I sent out a bunch of tapes to radio stations all over the country and I went back home and I was going to collect responses there and it happened to be the summertime, and for two months I vegged. For two months I sat there and I vegged and I went out to dinner with my parents and so forth and just basically recaptured or spent a little bit of the youth period that I had not had because I started working when I was 16. (interruption) No. I was 24. I was not 35 or 36. But, anyway, here’s the point. I thought for sure my dad was going to be livid with me ’cause I’m down in the basement, I’m playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, I’m playing APBA Baseball, I’m out just taking joy rides. That’s why I like the movie The Graduate, ’cause at that period of my life — other than having an affair with the girlfriend’s mother, which I never did — I relate to Dustin Hoffman because he gets out of school and has no clue what he wants, he’s worried about his future. So he’s hanging around the house and his parents are throwing parties, he’s in the swimming pool with a scuba suit on.
This went on for two or three months and I went to my dad and said, ‘You’re probably tired of me being around.’ He said, ‘No, no, I figure you’ll figure out what you have to do on your own in due course. I know what you want to do and I know you’re not really doing it sitting here. I don’t mind you being here.’ But my mother did. And one day a phone call came from somebody I had worked with in Pittsburgh, guy’s name was Jim Carnegie, he was a program director at KUDL Kansas City. And I’m outside, actually sitting in the backyard getting a stupid suntan, my mother comes out and says, ‘There’s somebody on the phone who wants to talk to you about going to work in Kansas City.’ I said, ‘Could you get a number?’ ‘No, you are coming in and you are taking the call, and if you are offered a job, you are going.’ And the next day I was in my car on the way to Kansas City. (laughing) So I have experience with this. I have experience with going home, but remember now, I didn’t go home after college. I quit college to pursue my broadcast career, and then I went back home, it must have been three months ’til my mother couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. Well, it wasn’t that; it was this was just not right, sitting around vegging in the house and eating their food and sleeping in their house in my old room. My dad didn’t mind it for a while but my mother wasn’t having it.
The difference now is that a lot of parents believe that whatever happens to their kids is anybody but the kid’s responsibility or fault. And they’re sympathetic and coddling and so forth, and I was not coddled at any time in my life. So I just wanted to be truthful about this because if I’m going to sit here and be critical of it, there has to be full disclosure that I myself have found myself — I never intended to move back home forever, and I never intended to stay — (interruption) no. Snerdley says two or three months doesn’t count, that I don’t understand what’s going on. You mean they’re coming back and they’re staying home for years? Yeah. Well, okay. Well, I know that. I know that. But still, if I’m going to have credibility talking about this I have to let people know that I have experience with it. Look, at age 24 I was still a kid, according to the government today. I’m still qualified with my parents’ health insurance, which we didn’t have health insurance back then, you just went to the doctor. It was tough, Snerdley, we went to the doctor, doctor diagnosed whatever the problem was, we went home, the doctor sent a bill, we wrote the check. It was scary. It was really scary. We felt like we were on death’s door every day of our lives.