Rush Limbaugh transcript, March 2019
RUSH: Back to the phones to Richmond, Virginia. This is David. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I’m so glad you opened with Ocasio-Cortez’s role in this Democrat debacle, ’cause she proves to continually be the gift that keeps on giving to conservatives who argue against socialism. And she does that whether it be through a lack of understanding of economic growth or a lack of understanding of government deficit spending or more recently, our ultimate fear as what socialists can lead to, is totalitarian government control. So I just love that she keeps giving us these illustrations of why we constantly make a case against what socialism could become in this country.
RUSH: Well, this is one of the things that always amazes me about it, however. I have to tell you, folks, that both intellectually and emotionally, even though I understand it, I’m stunned. I’m literally shocked that it remains as attractive as it is, when there’s not been one proven successful attempt. And no matter when anybody has been alive, there have been socialist and communist regimes to study, to see, to witness all over the world.
The history of human existence is one of tyranny, bondage, slavery. That’s what’s exceptional about the United States. We’re the first nation so constituted in the history of the world, in the history of humanity. It’s hard to realize. It’s hard to comprehend because we’ve been born into this country and surrounded by its loving embrace that contains the opportunity for prosperity and happiness and contentment, so much so that those are objectives.
But most human beings who’ve lived on this planet didn’t have time to dream or focus on happiness because staying alive, finding food every day was object number one. Staying out of political prison, stay free of oppressive governments, it’s been the circumstance for the vast majority of human beings alive on the planet at any one time. And it’s true today.
Now, it’s also true that more people are coming out of poverty today and in the past 10 years than at any time expressed as a percentage in world history. And this is due, in large part, to the expansion of ideas and economies that have been brought to the world by the United States and the example that a free market capitalist nation sets because it expands those benefits all that prosperity beyond its own borders.
Yet while living in this country and benefiting from all of the opportunity and all of the prosperity, you cannot find a time in our nation’s history where there have not been a sizable percentage of people who hate it and look to the gulags around the world and think that’s the answer. Yet it’s never worked. There isn’t a socialist nation on earth with a prosperous, free, and growing population. There certainly isn’t a communist nation on earth that gets anywhere near any of that. And yet it remains a great allure. It remains a great attraction.
So you start asking, how does this happen? How can eyewitness evidence fail to register? How can one not see the literal disaster of Venezuela? Do you know what’s going on in Venezuela now? The government is literally shooting people. Guess what happened five years ago? Five years ago the citizens were forced to give up their guns, five years ago. Now they’re being shot by the government, trying to keep order. What are the people of Venezuela trying to do? Get food! They are an oil, or were, an oil-rich nation.
So how is it that young people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and any number of others exactly like her can grow up in a land of plenty and prosperity and be convinced to hate it and long for something like that Cuba or Venezuela or — and they will tell you that that’s not what they long for. They don’t think socialism has worked because it hasn’t been done right yet. So what is this allure? What is the attraction? What is it? What happened? Where did it happen to, say, Cortez that she became convinced the United States is fraudulent, it’s unjust and immoral and that there is this utopia out there – it hasn’t been created yet — but the United States is destined to be it if only the right people with the right amount of money end up in charge.
So what’s the psychological explanation for that? How would the brilliant psychological experts, psychiatrist, psychologist, explain this? Who knows. I think it’s a product of education and formative years. But there’s something more to this. There has to be something more to it. You know, ideology, ideological attachments may be genetic in certain ways, since so much of what people say they believe in literally makes no sense what sophistry. It is utter defiance of common sense, defiance of what you can see. And yet they refuse to believe what they see and imagine what could be if only they were in charge.
So I still get caught up in this question and answer of how in the world can they even think this? And then they come out, and it’s routine! This was happening 30 years ago when I started this program in Sacramento. And before that, if you go back to the forties and fifties, we had generations of people back then who believed the same garbage: the United States, focus of evil in the world, transform from nuclear weapons to other kinds of weapons that were the great threat.
But it’s always had one thing in common. And that is that whatever the Republicans of the day are thought of, conservatives of the day, they have always been portrayed as the problem, as the judgmental, no-fun bunch of people. But if you ask me, I don’t see any fun being had by people on the left. I see a bunch of mandatory conformity. I see constant rage, constant anger, constant unhappiness, constant dissatisfaction. And it’s totally understandable. None of what they want is even possible. It is impossible for us all to be the same. It is literally impossible.
It’s not possible for everyone to be the same. It’s not possible for everybody to be equal. It’s not possible. No two things will ever be equal. And yet they are able to discard and discount all of that. It’s largely education and indoctrination, I know. Propagandizing that occurs at the youngest ages in education. And we lost control of that, we as conservatives lost control of public education two, three generations ago.
But still, just in terms of flat-out common sense, it’s a really tough thing to understand how — and then as each generation produces their own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the media treats them each as a newly arrived, never-seen-before star or angel or some kind of persons dropped among us to finally show us the way, turn on the lights and show us the way. And all of this just repeats itself. The objectives of the people like these new, young, socialist Millennials can never be met. They can never even come close to being met, their goals, their objectives.
So if you strip all of this away, then what really is motivating them? What is behind all of this? And they’re making it plane each and every day. And that is they insist on controlling how everybody else lives, because without that, there is no way they can even pretend to get close to their dream utopia. They must have control over everything and everybody as much as they can get, predicated on the fact that you are not capable of living life on your own and by yourself.
You’re not capable of making the right decisions. You’re not capable of you spending your money the right way. You’re not capable of caring for the less fortune enough. You’re not capable of anything. They have to do all of this for you. But in this country, people are not controlled and don’t want to be, and they reject it and repelling is makes the Ocasio-Cortez types even angrier, and the war just gets even deeper.
They can demonstrate all day long how this doesn’t work. They can demonstrate to everybody how stupid it is, like get rid of airplanes in 12 years. She should have been laughed off the public stage 30 seconds after announcing the New Green Deal. She should have become a national laughingstock. But no. She’s a modern-day heroine whose intentions are good. We should give her a chance, you know, this kind of thing. They remain, at the end of the day, very dangerous. What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s enough that they demo it, because the world is demonstrating every day socialism fails, and it’s not stopping them.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Joe Biden calls Mike Pence a decent guy, and here’s a tweet from Cynthia Nixon. I’m looking at it on Fox. “You call a guy that’s the most anti-LGBTQ guy in America a nice guy?” You’re crazy! And Biden says: You know what, you’re right, Cynthia. I was making a point in a foreign policy context. But you’re right, Pence is a reprobate.
If you wonder what socialism is, you cannot, you cannot discuss socialism or communism or any of these other left-wing ideologies without realizing how unnatural they are to the human spirit. And this is why virtually every aspect of socialism and communism requires force. You must be forced to compel or to believe, to behave, you must be forced to comply because the human spirit exists in total defiance of socialism and communism.
The human spirit, that with which we are all born, is to be free. We just don’t think about it. We’re born into it. We don’t know anything else. That’s why those of us who do so blanch and so oppose all of the isms, all the communisms, all the socialism, because they are in direct violation of our God-created and given human spirit. I don’t care how you characterize it — yearning to be free, expecting to be free, wanting to be free, freedom of mind, freedom of action, freedom of choice, those don’t exist in any kind of socialism or communism.
You must be forced to check all that at the door. You must be forced to leave all that aside in exchange for being part of the collective. And the collective is one mind and one set of values and one set of ambitions and there’s no variance allowed unless you’re in the select few in the leadership. Because it’s all a giant scam. Socialism and communism are giant scams.
Let me give you a stat you may not believe. What nation do you think on earth has the most billionaires in it? Nope. It’s not the Arabs, and it’s not America. It’s China. Now, you might say, “Well, that makes sense, Rush, there are more Chinese than there are anybody.” Yeah, but how in the hell? They’re not called the ChiComs for nothing. China is communist like the Soviet Union was. Yet there are more billionaires there than you could shake a stick at.
Well, how do you think that happened, and who do you think they are? They didn’t get there without being anointed, selected, chosen, permitted by the ChiCom leadership. You know, when I was growing up — this is the big difference. And I think it has to do with how values are inculcated. When I was growing up, I’ve been fired seven times. I’ve been broke a bunch of times. And from the time I left home, I left home when I was 20. So from the time I left home at age 20 until 19 — what it was — 87. So almost 20 years I never made more than 22 or $23,000 a year. And for many of those years I never made more than 15,000 or 10.
And I did what a lot of people do. I drive around town where the rich people lived, and I would try to imagine how they got there. And wherever I lived I would do that. But at no time did I hate ’em. And at no time did I resent them. And at no time did I want to punish any of them. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to enjoy the kind of success that I saw all around me! From the time I was a kid to growing up, young adult, adult status, I had people tell me, “Son, they ain’t gonna let you make serious money ’til you’re 40. You’re just gonna have to be patient.”
I said, “Why is that?”
“Because up until you’re 40, you don’t know nothing, Son. Nobody gonna pay you much unless you start your own business, ain’t gonna pay you anything ’til you’re 40.” Well, that was a value of the generation at that point. But the point behind it was that it took a lot of living to acquire enough experience to develop enough talent and ability to be worthwhile to somebody. And the difference today is that you have people like Cortez or any of the others, same circumstance exists, they’re growing up, they don’t have much, they resent how much things cost.
But they have been taught to hate and resent the people that have what they don’t have. And they have also been taught that the people who have what they don’t have didn’t get it honestly, that they cheated somebody out of it or that they stole it or that they’re corrupt. It’s not legit, in other words, and so they become victims. The greatest political trick of our era is how successful the Democrat Party has been at spreading victimology all across every demographic reach of our society. Because once you succeed at doing that, once you convince somebody they are a victim of anything, they have for the rest of their days a built-in excuse to fail that does not involve them.
Their failure, their unhappiness, their misery, is always somebody else’s fault. And then you can have real fun in trying to tell them whose fault it is. In most people’s case it’s gonna be those conservatives and their rigid demands and their morality, don’t want you to have fun. Those would be Big Business people who are destroying the planet. Or you can name any person or business in the world as being responsible for your victimhood, for the fact that you don’t have what you think you should have, what you think you deserve, what you otherwise would have.
But the key to it is getting people to believe they’re victims ’cause that’s when they quit. That’s when they stop. That’s when they stop trying to figure out how they can participate in prosperity. That’s when they stop with all the ambition. That’s when they give up any hope of being able to achieve or accomplish or succeed. Because they have been convinced it’s not possible. Then you’ve got the resentment that builds into that and attaches to that, and then that eventually becomes hatred. And that becomes the Democrat Party base.
And they have to keep feeding that. So they have to keep forcing resentment and hatred on people, and the Democrat Party does that better than anybody with their class envy rhetoric and so forth. And why it, folks, that — and I’m not alone — why is it that when I was growing up and didn’t have anything, like most people growing up don’t have anything, why is it that I, when I would travel around these neighborhoods where there was a lot of success, why is it that I said, “I want to live here someday,” instead of saying, “Screw these people, they’re a bunch of cheats and they’re the reason I’m not gonna have anything.” Why did I not hate them, and people today do? (interruption) What? What do you think the answer is?
I don’t know that I believed it myself. I mean, I went through plenty of days where I didn’t — I mean, I always knew what my desires were. Whether I believed in myself, you know, that was a day-to-day thing. I went through many days thinking I wasn’t gonna get there, but I didn’t have anything other than what I loved doing, so I stuck with it. But I believed in the system. I believe that — who knows why? You know, it may have been the way I was brought up. Who knows what external forces affect people. But in my case, I always thought that there was a way to get there. I always thought there was a way to succeed. I always wanted to succeed. Every goal I had was a broad-based goal about success.
The idea of becoming a victim and running around with resentment, it never appealed to me and it never occurred to me. But, folks, this is what we’re up against. And if you spend any time studying Millennials wherever you find them or whatever lines of work or wherever they are, you find resentment for practically everything that has to do with capitalism. You find resentment for what things cost. I mean, if something cost more than I could afford when I wanted it, then I tried to find a way to be able to afford it, if I really wanted it, rather than trash and beat up the country because it was out of my reach at the time.
I don’t know. I just think it’s a sad thing when there’s so much opportunity, so much robust economic upward mobility available to people in this country versus anywhere else in the world and the degree to which young people have been successfully taught to hate it and resent it and think of themselves as — now, look. I’m not naive. I know that throughout human history all of this socialist and communist stuff has appealed to young people. Nothing new. But isn’t it time it stopped?
Honest God, when I see Cortez and her little press conference, we got 12 years to live, my literal first reaction was sadness. What in the world are we doing to these people? What in the world are we doing to our young people, to have them believing this stuff? What good can come from thinking you’ve only got 12 years left on this planet? If there is ever anything that’s the equivalent of a cold shower on a happy life, it’s to tell somebody that the ecosystem that makes life possible is gonna cease to exist in 12 years unless we force everybody to go back to living in the times when horse manure was the way we pave streets.
What have we done to the — well, I’ll tell you what we’ve done to these young people. The American left and the Democrat Party has gotten hold of their minds and has converted them into these fatalistic, socialist, bitter, resentful victims who have somehow been convinced that voting Democrat is the only way out, voting Democrat is the only way to stay alive, voting Democrat’s the only way to have clean air, voting Democrat is the only way to get cows to stop farting. Voting Democrat is the only way to do anything. Put it in those terms, it’s especially stupid how successful people have been.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.