Originally posted Thursday, August 28, 2019 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
Veteran talk-show host Neal Boortz is opting for a "full" retirement, pulling the plug on his daily commentary on WSB and his own subscription-based podcast for a life of full-time leisure.
At age 74, more than six years removed from his successful nationally syndicated daily talk show, he couldn’t sift through the daily news grind anymore - even in small doses.
"The stress, the anxiety, in spades. I can't believe what is happening to this country," Boortz said during his final commentary last Friday on 95.5 WSB Atlanta's News and Talk. "I can't watch the news anymore. I'll watch 'America's Funniest Home Videos" even if [host] Alfonso [Ribeiro] is a dork!"
He thinks America is heading to a disaster, if not already in one.
“The Democrats aren’t satisfied with taxing income,” he said in an exclusive interview Wednesday. “They want to tax wealth!”
He believes the United States has outlived its life expectancy and on the road to irrelevancy.
As for Millennials and their younger Gen Z brethren? Get off Boortz’s lawn!
“They think socialism is such a wonderful thing,” he said. “They were raised with participation trophies. We’re not going to keep score. There are no winners and losers! ... I don’t have to work at this. I’m on the playing field. I won! That’s the way I was raised. Where’s my stuff?”
And political correctness? Out of control. “Things are so rotten out there now,” Boortz said. “Everybody is a racist. Everybody is trans. People are posting their pronouns on their Twitter bios. Men are competing with women in sports.”
Boortz was a full-time talk-show host in Atlanta with a Libertarian streak going back to the late 1960s. He was syndicated for 14 years before retiring from that gig at the start of Barack Obama's second term in early 2013.
He kept his kept his hard-core fans happy with shots of Boortz thoughts a couple of minutes a day on WSB and for a small monthly fee, podcast rants for a few thousand subscribers.
The podcast money, he said, paid for aviation fuel and hangar space for his hobby of airplane flying. .
But it was still work. And enough was enough: “I stretched that out for six years. That’s a pretty good run.”
But otherwise, he is planning trips to Texas and Alaska. On quieter days in Naples, he’ll relax in front of the TV in the morning, avoiding “Fox and Friends” and catching re-runs of childhood favorites “The Lone Ranger and “The Rifleman” instead.
He said after just a few days of stopping the commentaries, he already feels calmer.
His farewell message? “I’m just going to enjoy my family, my friends and my travels while the rest of you can pull the country back from the brink,” he told the WSB audience.
Not that he’ll entirely disappear.
He will still return every summer for the annual WSB Careathon for the Aflac Cancer & Blood Disorders Center of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and joke around with Clark Howard and former producer Belinda Skelton.
And he is planning a book offering not so warm-and-fuzzy advice for recent high school graduates tentatively titled “What You Know That Ain’t So.”
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