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Dec. 23, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:34
December 23, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
I'm Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man with talent on loan from God.
Great to have you here.
Our telephone number.
If you want to be on the program, we're doing open line Friday on Tuesday today, which pretty means whatever you want to talk about.
You can even switch subjects many times in the same call.
800-282-288-2.
And the email address, we check those two.
The email address is Lrushbow at EIB net.com.
As you know, if you've been listening for any time, um steady time recently.
One of the things that I have remarked upon is a fairly recent quote unquote discovery I've made about the left and one of their techniques.
I really think, and I really do mean this.
I don't mean to be exaggerating this.
When talking about the base Democrat or the base leftist voter, uh the most politically active, the people that troll websites and leave comments, the uh basically people that harass others in the political system, people who's whose they're not content to just live their lives.
They're so miserable and deranged that they share it, and they try to spread that misery as far and wide as they can.
I really think that what has happened is that the political agenda of the far left, as they constantly articulate it, has created some genuine insanity among their base voters.
I mean some real mental illness.
Now I think liberalism itself is a quasi mental illness.
But I think that the base of the left has been driven almost out of their minds by a constant barrage of the people they trust and believe in.
Never-ending hate, never-ending anger.
And I th people like let's take the civil rights coalitions.
I mean, they're out shouting the Jacksons and the Sharptons, you name out shouting and they're claiming and threatening and all this, and they're fundraising.
You know, they're doing it clearly to raise money and stay in positions of power, but their believers are taking it all to heart, and they're taken to the streets, and they are killing people.
And they are engaging in acts of destruction disguised as the public protest.
And I think that this is everywhere.
I I think college professors, depending on how angry they are when they teach, can end up creating genuine mental instability.
I think one of the reasons why we're having such trouble, you and me, in dealing with this, is we we fashion ourselves as rational, and therefore we, in our own rationality, try to come up with rational ways to talk to them, interact with them, uh, convince them they're wrong, or perhaps even persuade them, and it's a mistake.
Rational and irrational don't mix.
There isn't anything in common.
Who really have nothing in common, and I'm not talking about all of them.
This is a but it's a larger number than you would believe, and they're they're easily spotted.
Uh many of them are anonymous, but you can spot them in the things they post on the internet, the protests they engage in, the action that they take.
And I think that the leadership of the left, from college professors to elected officials to you name it, is creating uh a genuine mental instability among their followers.
They're creating anger and rage and are doing it every day.
They never let up.
Every day, the people in charge of the left and its agenda are just enraged at everything.
They're livid.
They're never happy.
They never smile.
Even leftist comedians now are just livid and filled with rage, and I'm telling you, it has had a deleterious effect on followers.
And people that end up being true believers.
Like I say, Sharpton and Jackson, they're who they're who they are.
I mean, they're out there doing what they do, and Sharpton will go out and say, oh, we might have knocked down to that campus by that grand jury, but we're not gonna stay in a man.
We're gonna get up.
Yeah, we're gonna not cut those gloves up.
Well, that is heard by his.
He's just fundraising.
You know, he's just ramble-rousing, keeping his supporters loyal, but they hear it.
You know, Obama says things like, they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun.
People hear this stuff and they consider it a license.
And I don't I'm not absolving the leaders of any responsibility for it.
I am exempting them from it in the innocent.
And I could be wrong about that.
They I think they have just as much rage, but I think they're users.
And I think they're creating this rage out there on purpose to create this army constant chaos, constant crisis, one after another.
We can't even take a breath.
Because the time we take a breath, there's something new that's popped up that we can't understand.
It doesn't make any sense.
Nobody stands up against it, everybody wants to appease it, and we feel like we're losing losing control of everything.
I think it's being done on purpose.
And it really is a disservice to people for creating in the in the country the leftist side of the population.
I tell you, you sit down and actually talk to some of these people, and it is just impossible.
And you and you you hear it now.
New York Times wanting war crimes, charges against Dick Hain, Dick Cheney.
War, and they're dead serious about okay.
You have a reader of the New York Times, somebody's already mentally deranged reading that.
All they got to do is see the magic word Halliburton, and they are loaded for bear.
And these people are everywhere, folks.
They uh they've taken over the university, they've taken over uh academies.
They're in the media.
And I I thought of all this with this next story that I found on campus reform.
And this is another one of these great young conservative websites that is springing up.
It's a new generation of alternate alternative or alternate media.
Young people who are decided to chronicle some of the outrages on campus, which is brand new.
It used to not, if everything happened there was one way, one-sided.
Did you know that at Stanford University they have a dean for religious life?
At Stanford University, they have a law school dean, they have a dean of students, they have a dean of this dean.
They have a dean for religious life.
Okay, fine and dandy.
Now, what's what got me on this?
We had a couple of callers yesterday who were totally pessimistic.
They express their sorrow and concern.
They think that we've gone so far down that there's no saving the country.
And by that they meant as it was.
Everybody knows there's always going to be an America, but will there be an America of the founding with those kinds of values.
There's a great story in the Wall Street Journal that's the counterbalance to this.
I think his name is Dan Stevens, and he believes that we are actually not in bad shape at all, and that we're in great shape, and he tries to explain why, and I'll get to that here before the program ends.
Because it'd be a great counterbalance to this story in campus reform.
Anyway, the dean for religious life is named Jane Shaw, the very Reverend Jane Shaw.
I have her picture here, and she looks like a dean of religious life.
And she believes that churches are focusing too much on religion.
And they need to change their focus to art.
She's the dean for religious life at Stanford.
In a recent interview, she said she's not Very churchy as a person, yet somehow she qualified as the dean for religious life.
She advocated that the church welcome people more without trying to convert them.
And the way to do that is just drop all this religion all the time.
It's not necessary to do religion all the time in the church.
The church can do art, the church can do global warming, the church can alert people to climate change, the church can do a lot of public good if it would just drop all the religion.
What does it even mean?
Not necessary to do religion.
What do you mean do religion?
What does that even mean?
Stop praying, stop singing, stop doing sermons, stop reading the Bible?
What does it mean?
Oh, by the way, she happens to be an LGBT activist and a lesbian.
And she's the dean of religious life.
Now it's stories like this, I'm sure that that convince the two callers I talked about yesterday that they're right that we are so screwed that there's no coming back with this kind of infiltration by by these mentally ill people who should be offering balance.
You know, the academy's always been a place of openness and we're told openness of ideas and intellectual rigor, and there's none of that going on, or very little of it anymore.
It's indoctrination, even at the institutions of highest higher learning.
She's also a Brit.
I listened to a little bit, it's hard to hear.
She has an accent, obviously, but even she doesn't seem to have any depth at all.
She seems like a totally surface individual.
But how does somebody like this, and at Stanford, this is no slouch place, how does somebody like this end up in a position called a dean for religious life?
Try this as a poll quote.
I think the great crisis of our day is climate change and the environment.
Now, to me, this is proof of someone who's not intellectual.
She is a priest, by the way.
She's a priest from Harvard and Oxford, and this is what she thinks is the biggest crisis of the day.
Climate change and the environment?
Well, why does she think that?
Because she knows what they are tickets to.
If you gain control of people and you convince them that religion, the religion of God needs to take a back seat because the churches are too religious and start getting into art.
What does that mean?
Well, global warming and climate change.
You then convert these people to believing in the earth and the environment as religion.
And then it becomes inarguable.
Once you invest your faith in the religion of God, the religion outside the religion of God and the religion make it the religion of climate change, global warming of the earth.
Well, then you can't be converted.
It's your religion.
It's offensive for anybody to even try.
It's your religion, it's your faith.
Nobody can argue with your faith.
So I rather hope that more people would take that seriously and begin to think and reflect on what they are doing with their own lives and how they can bring some pressure to bear to change things.
This woman ordained as a priest at the Church of England, which is the equivalent of the Episcopal Church in the uh in the United States.
And to me, this is a classic illustration of how this pollution, if you or this perversion of our great institutions is taking place with utter sheer nonsense.
And parents are spending whatever cost $20,000 a semester or year to send their kids to this place to be taught this gunk.
We got to get the religion out of our churches.
That's the problem.
There's just too much religion going on in there, and we need to stop it.
We need to replace the religion with social justice in churches.
This is a one-off.
This is a couple.
No, see, we used to say that about these people 20 years ago.
I'll admit, running into stories like this 20 years ago, we'd laugh about it, and we would immediately dismiss it as quackery And kookery.
And here it is 20 years later, and they have made more inroads into the mainstream than anybody ever thought.
And one of the reasons why is everybody thought it was so insane, so stupid, so silly that all we did was laugh at it.
But here they are.
And I think it's it's uh just more evidence and another example of what we're actually dealing with.
And I guarantee you this woman is the dean of religious life.
You think there's probably not some anger in the way she tries to reach people.
Anger about what they arrived at school believing and how they were wrong and how they were being propagandized by their parents and whatever.
Just a very unfortunate thing.
And it's all it's all these people making this happen are the epitome of unhappiness in their personal life.
Misery, miserable.
No matter what they get, they're never happy, no matter how much they get, no matter how much they win.
It never makes them happy, which keeps them constantly demanding more.
And they cast themselves, portray themselves as victims, which means we can't oppose it that makes us mean spirited and judgmental.
They cast themselves as minorities, same thing.
And so the slow erosion of what we all believe in continues and them and the attempted massive takeover at destroying it also goes on at the uh at the same time.
But it's this time of year that my faith in all of this stuff eventually bottoming out and blowing up is at its highest.
And I wish I could tell you why.
It's not something tangible that I can point to and say this, this, this, and this are what give me confidence.
It's there are those things, obviously, but many of them are personal.
And I would be foolish to deny that they are positive for me, but I do try to imagine how they are positive for the country at large.
And I would love to be able to tell you how.
I'd love to be able to give you tangible things that you could point to.
I could point to you could grab on to as evidence that I think this stuff is going to eventually implode on itself.
Unfortunately, I can't.
I can just I can just share with you the idea and the and the firm belief that I do think these people are ultimately going to lose.
Don't know when, and we're going to be shocked a lot more in the future at apparent signs that we're and by the way, I'm not saying don't do anything to stop it.
There's nothing automatic.
I don't think that just the forces of good are going to triumph one day.
But I do think they are.
Always have.
Got to take a break now.
We'll come back and continue with more after this.
Don't go away.
And here's Helen in Carey, North Carolina.
I'm glad you called.
Great to have you with us, Helen.
Hello.
How are you today, Russ?
I'm fine.
Thank you very much.
I'm great.
I want to say much love from a long, long time.
Old lady here who just loves you to death.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I've listened to all these people who are saying you know, all the wonders of you, but they missed the most important one, and I wanted to bestow that on you because I believe it's the highest honor you can give a man is that his word is golden.
I've listened to you for years.
I thought it was even in the 70s.
I told um Mr. Snerdley, and um my mind is a little bit addled there, but um the whole time that we have listened to you.
Never a lie.
Not one.
That is amazing to have spoken as much as you have.
It's an inspiration, and you are a Godwink.
You know, I've never even thought about that.
You have never lied.
I've never even thought about it.
And such an inspiration.
How do you know?
I I listen to Every word you say.
And uh if I could, I actually have written a letter to people.
And it's uh I'd like to give it to you as a gift because it's inspired by you.
It takes a whole minute.
You mean you want to read it?
I'll just read it to you.
Well, the problem is I've only got fifteen seconds left in uh in this.
But about um a gift.
And the gift is amazing as you are.
Well, I I'm speechless.
I appreciate I've never even thought you're I'm sure you're right.
No point.
I'm I had never thought about I mean, I I've said it, I never lie to you about my core beliefs, certainly, and I haven't changed them.
And I've not misled anybody about them.
That's that's absolutely true, but I've never thought about it the way she put it.
But that is a high compliment.
And it's something that she perceived.
She can't possibly know that, so she's uh she's that's quite a testament.
I I really made me speechless.
That doesn't happen very often.
Anyway, folks, welcome back.
I want to I want to share with you this piece.
I found it.
I was referring to it earlier in the Wall Street Journal by a guy named Brett Stevens.
It's uh called the Marvel of American Resilience.
And let me just give you a pull quote at near the end of the piece, so you'll know where it's building to.
We are larger than our leaders, we are better than our politics, we are wiser than our culture, and we are smarter than our ideas.
Enjoy the holiday.
Now, here's how it begins.
Imagine an economic historian in 2050 talking to her students about the most consequential innovations of the early 21st century, the monotees, the right flyers, the penicillins of our time.
What would make her list?
What would be on the list of the most consequential innovations of now, the early 21st century?
And there's not an iPhone on the list, and there's not an iPad on the list, and there's not an uh not an app on the list.
First thing here would be fracking.
Shorthand for the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that is making America the world's leading oil and gas producer.
Surely fracking would be noted.
Surely social media, the bane of autocrats like Turkey's president, and of parents like me would also get a mention.
Maybe mobile apps, yeah.
The emerging science of cancer immunotherapy.
Hopefully, with fingers crossed, that will be on the list in 2050 as a great American initiative and innovation.
And after drawing up this list, our historian would then observe that each innovation had made in USA stamped all over it.
How strange she might say if it's so many Americans of the day spent so much of their time belly aching about the wretched state of their schools, the paralyzed nature of their politics, their mounting fiscal burdens, and the predictions of impending decline.
Perhaps because I grew up as an American living abroad, I've always been struck by the disconnect between American achievement and American self-perception.
And to this day, I find it slightly amazing that in the U.S. I can drink water straight from a tap, that a policeman has never asked me for a contribution, that my luggage has never been stolen, that nobody gets kidnapped for ransom, that Mao-esque political purges are conducted only in the editorials of the New York Times.
Try saying the same thing about everyday life in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the so-called BRICS countries anointed by a Goldman Sachs guru as the economies of the future, but they're not.
We are.
But back to our future historian.
Why she might ask her students, did the U.S. dominate its peers when it came to all the really big innovations?
Now this is where it get gets interesting here, folks.
Well, fracking would make a great case study.
The fracking revolution happened in the U.S., not because of any great advantage in geology.
China, Argentina, and Algeria each has larger recoverable shale gas reserves than we do.
And it didn't happen because America's big energy companies are uniquely skilled or smart or deep pocketed.
Take a look at Exxon Mobil's 2004 annual report, you'll barely find a mention of fracturing or horizontal drilling.
Nor finally did it happen because enlightened mandarins in the federal bureaucracy and national laboratories were peering around the corners of the future.
Nope.
Instead, fracking happened in America, precisely because America is America.
And that is because Americans, almost uniquely in the world, have property rights.
They have property rights to the minerals under their yards.
And because the federal government wasn't really paying attention, and because federalism allows states to do their own thing.
And because the against the grain entrepreneurs like George Mitchell and Harold Ham could not be made to bow to the consensus of experts who said this stuff would destroy, would pollute, and wouldn't work.
They did it anyway.
And because our deep capital markets were willing to bet against the experts and go with the entrepreneur.
So he's describing American exceptionalism here.
He's describing American uniqueness, property rights, made it worthwhile for somebody to tear up their backyard and see what was underneath, and when they learned what was there to go for it.
They owned the property, they had the ability to do it.
It doesn't happen too many other places in the world.
So when I talk to foreigners, they're even more impressed than many Americans by this Renaissance.
They understand it can only have happened in America.
Isn't it interesting that you have nothing in your newspaper or your daily news digest about any of this?
Have you seen what the unemployment rate is in North Dakota?
Have you seen what the economic output in North Dakota?
Have you seen the boom?
Do you know that they do not have enough housing yet for all the employees moving there to work?
You don't hear a word about it.
You don't hear a word about fracking other than how it's destroying the planet, going to cause an earthquake or what have you, but you don't hear any of the upbeat possible positive optimism.
Fracking, fracturing is largely to explain the falling oil price.
The Saudis are scared to death.
Well, wait, not so much the Saudis, but the rest of OPEC is scared to death.
And so they are trying to get the price of oil down to put the frackers out of business.
After all, competition.
It's bloody in the free market, folks.
It's designed to be.
And so here's a guy noting something uniquely genuinely American that's happening without government even noticing much, even much less being involved.
It's happening because of things that are uniquely American.
If it can happen here, it can happen in any number of places, and usually does.
Despite all the bickering, despite all the pessimism, despite all the arguments, the people in North Dakota are not paying attention to any of that.
They've got fracking going on.
That was a fascinating take.
And it's the kind of thing that is much needed.
People need a dose of optimism.
They need a dose of positive reinforcement.
And more than that, people need to hear the evidence that America can be and still is the America they've always known.
And in parts of the country it is.
And if it is in parts of the country, it can be everywhere again.
Or it can certainly, we can certainly reclaim a lot of ground we have perceived to have lost.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
And Bret Stephens makes the point that fracking is just one thing, one industry.
There will be many more.
He says, innovation depends less on developing specific ideas than it does on creating broad spaces.
Autocracies, dictators can always cultivate their chess champions, their piano prodigies, their nuclear engineers.
They can always mobilize their top 1% to do something.
But what do they do with the remaining 99% of their population?
That's where they have no answer.
other than to administer, dictate and repress.
But a free society willing to place millions of small bets on people unknown and things unseen doesn't have this problem.
Flexibility is its true test of strength.
Success is a result of experiment, not design.
Failure is tolerable to the extent that adaptation is possible.
And this is the American secret.
It's the American secret we often forget because we can't imagine it any other way.
It's why we're slightly shocked to find ourselves coming out ahead, even or especially when our presidents are feckless and our policies foolish.
Americans and America still triumphs.
But we often forget it because we're in the midst of it, and we just expect it because we're Americans.
But this guy was an American growing up overseas, and he didn't live it.
He watched it from afar.
He concludes we're larger than our leaders.
We are better than our politics.
We are wiser than our culture, and we are smarter than our ideas.
So enjoy the holiday and have faith in your fellow citizens.
Have faith in entrepreneurism, have faith in freedom, because it is the nature of triumph.
Knowing full well there are all out of salts on it.
But some people pay no attention and just keep exercising their freedom and just keep plugging away.
And that's the lesson for all of us.
Just like I always say, if they're going to have a recession, don't participate.
If they're going to have a bad down economy, if they're going to do this, don't participate.
Live your life, be above it.
You can.
Quickly, Chris, Newport Beach, California.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Russ, you're a living legend.
How are you, Chief?
Uh thank you, sir.
Very much.
I'm doing well.
Listen to you since 85, first time calling in, and I can't believe I don't have a political question, but let's talk a little rock and roll.
Elton John at your wedding, and you kind of act like it's no big deal.
Are you kidding?
What do you mean I act like it's no big deal?
Well, I don't hear you talk.
Let me ask you.
Who came up with the set list?
Did you come up with the set list or did Elton?
No, we worked with him on it.
Catherine and I, we he gave us, he gave us uh an hour.
And whatever, whatever number of songs we could squeeze into 55 minutes or an hour.
Well, there were certain things he couldn't do.
He needed an orchestra.
I wanted circle of life, but he couldn't, he needed orchestra.
He needed he just made solo piano.
Talk about Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters, one of my favorites.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, there's a he was, in fact, I tell you, Elton was he was fabulous.
He was great, and he was uh he was shocked, you know, when he when he found out what some of our favorite songs were.
Not an angry show.
He was he was pleasantly surprised.
It was a learning experience for Elton, believe me.
Well, I was gonna say, did he have Nigel Olsen with him, one of my favorite drummers of all time?
Uh no, he didn't have a he was just him on the piano.
Oh boy.
It was just Elton that was again that, and that affected um the playlist.
But again, the the playlist we we got 90% of what we wanted.
Uh maybe a hundred percent of it.
Like I would have, as I say, um, I would have loved to have circle of life, but that was Lion King or Disney, and he needed an orchestra for that, uh, for that to work.
But no, we picked it.
Uh, and I tell you this, since you seem to be desiring information, he talked to the audience, he talked to us between every tune, and he explained why he was singing this next song.
Uh he told the uh he told our guests that uh Rush particularly liked this requested or Catherine, this was one of her favorites and so forth.
It was very personable.
And uh we did a pretty good job of keeping his appearance secret, so that the most of the guests had no idea who it was.
They we filed into the big ballroom at the at the Hotel The Breakers.
And all I did was uh when everybody was seated and I got the ghost signal, I just got in the microphone and said, ladies and gentlemen, Elton John, and the place erupted into a standing ovation.
And he he didn't know what he was going to get.
I mean, let's face it, uh there are so many cliches about conservatives and liberals and so forth.
He loved it.
He had a he just had a bang up great time, and we uh we did with him.
And he was uh if you're an Elton John fan, Chris, you trust the fact that he he is exactly what you would hope to be if you had a chance to meet him.
He's just a great guy.
And here we go, folks, an annual tradition.
Silent night, Manheim Steamroller.
And take a brief moment to once again express my total gratitude for all of you being here as often as you can, son in your case every day.
Profoundly greatly appreciated.
I owe you all a debt of gratitude and thanks I'll never be able to repay.
You've made so much possible for me and my family.
A number of you have often told us what the show means to you, and that's great, but what you've meant to all of us is even more.
Hope you have a great Merry Christmas.
I hope you have a great remainder of the year, and that whatever you hope and dream for next year and the years beyond come true.
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