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April 21, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:47
April 21, 2016, Thursday, Hour #2
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Yeah, the New York Post says it is, so the artist, at one time known as Prince, then known as a symbol, in fact the Prince, has apparently died at his home in um Paisley Park, Minnesota.
His uh given name was Prince Rogers Nelson.
That's all we know.
There isn't any cause of death given.
Everybody is a jet had to make an emergency landing last week in Moline, Illinois, and it was said that he had bad flu or what have you.
But emergency responders were called to the estate, and the first news reported by TMZ was that there was a death at the estate of Prince, but nobody knew who.
Now the New York Post says that it is Prince.
Uh the Drudge Lead headline says it's Prince.
And I guess TMZ will uh post that.
I think they have the first story.
If you Google it, TMZ is the only story you find uh listed there.
Greetings, folks, and welcome back.
Great to have you, as always, Rush Limbaugh.
We're doing open line Friday on Thursday today, because I'm out tomorrow.
So if any of you uh if you if you have any gripes, complaints, I mean, this is a day that I have given the whole program over to you when we go to the phones.
I mean, have at it.
If you need to unload and get something off your chest.
Now, I want to I want to stay focused on this LGBT thing because it is an indication of the culture war that we are in, and in some people's minds, we've already lost it, and we just don't know it.
We on the right continue to fight it as though it's still a war being waged when in fact the left won it a long time ago.
Theoretically, in the eyes of many, I'll tell you what prompted this was a piece I found on the Federalist website today, the title of which is the intellectual case for Trump.
Trump is the culture warrior we need.
Now, this was posted obviously before Trump's statements this morning on NBC, where he essentially advocated LGBT people being able to use whatever bathroom they want, and expressing criticism of states like North Carolina and Georgia for doing what they did because it's making it hard for businesses to operate.
But to me, this is classic.
I mean, here we you you don't have to go back very far.
I mean, a year, certainly five years, and the whole idea of anybody being able to use any restroom they want and be applauded for it and and not having any ability to speak out again.
That was unheard of.
Uh but it's it's just one of many things, folks, that that illustrate what many believe to be the cultural decay, others believe it's cultural evolution.
But we have redefined marriage after how many thousands of years the definition of marriage is out the window now.
To accommodate a tiny percentage of the population.
We're not accommodating, we are actively changing how a substantive institution is defined.
And it happened essentially overnight.
And any opposition to it is shouted down and ridiculed.
So this piece, and I mean, there I can give you other examples too, other than gay marriages, any number of things that that people just look if you can't can't comprehend it, doesn't it make any sense, within the framework of right versus wrong.
And see, I don't think the culture war has been about rice right versus wrong for a long time.
And people haven't figured that out.
They continue to fight it in a uh on a moral or a morality battlefield, but that's not at all.
In fact, obliterating morality has been what the culture war is all about, not asserting it and not having it triumph.
The whole Point of the culture war is an us versus them framework now.
And the us is all of the disparate minorities of the world versus the them, which is the people they claim to be the oppressive majority.
And the whole point of the us versus them battle has been to obliterate the whole notion of morality.
Just wipe it out on the belief that nobody has the right to define it.
Nobody can write laws that are based in morality and have them apply to everybody because your morality may differ from mine, and there isn't any universal morality.
There isn't any universal right and wrong.
And the culture warriors believe that there is universal right and wrong only because the majorities have had the tyrannical power to use right and wrong as ways to oppress people.
That the whole concept of right and wrong are nothing more than political power movements.
And they always found themselves on a minority or losing side of these.
So something as simple as morality and right and wrong has now become politicized, and therefore illegitimate.
Because you don't have the right to tell somebody what's right and wrong, and you don't have the right to define morality.
And if you do, then you're a problem.
You're the problem.
You're the oppressive old fogy fuddy-duddy problem.
Meanwhile, you think you're just standing up for what's right and just and wholesome and good.
And their whole objective has just been to erase all of that.
So this piece that I came across is by somebody I've never heard of.
I hope I'm pronouncing his name right.
Matthias Holt, M Y T H E O S, Matthias Holt.
It's a long piece, and folks, it's above my pay grade, frankly.
I had to spend a lot of time today trying to weed through this because it's got a lot of terms in it that I don't use and understand, like postmodernist frictionism and transgressive free speech and Prometheusism and Nietzscheism and I don't know who niche is, I don't, but the application of this stuff is beyond me.
But the opening couple of paragraphs will suffice here in helping me then to explain.
His whole point is that we've lost the culture war.
Those of us in the right, we've lost the culture war.
We lost it a long time ago.
We don't know it.
We're still we're still fighting it as though the outcome is still up for grabs.
We can still win it.
His point is we lost it long ago.
Because we've never understood exactly what it was about.
And this is this Mr. Holt's belief that Trump is the only guy who can reverse it.
Donald Trump is the only guy that can come along because of his ability to get away with violating political correctness.
His ability to say things nobody else could say, his ability to call a spade a spade or do whatever it is he does and get away with it and triumph over it and prosper at the same time is why this guy thinks that Trump is the one guy who can actually reverse the direction of the culture war.
Now, again, this was written before Trump's statements of support for LGBT bathroom usage as they desire.
Here's how the piece begins.
A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible.
A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues, would be left out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years.
A man whose serial gaffs and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage.
An utterly inexperienced politician who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates would be rejected by both Parties at any other time in the modern era.
But Mr. Holt writes here, in Trump's case, the supposedly disqualifying positions and attributes have proven to be the basis for his unexpected success.
Why?
Well, in part, it's because he corrects massive ideological failures by the right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the left, eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal order to exist.
Let me let me read that again because that's a good example of how this gets into the weeds.
Why Trump survived what would disqualify others?
It's because he corrects massive ideological failures by the right.
He corrects massive failures of conservatism, which have enabled the left to overreach and totally obliterate the social and cultural basis that defined Western civilization.
That's that's his premise.
Conservatism has failed to stop the left.
There's nobody alive as a conservative who could do it, they've tried.
Trump comes along as a as a as a non-ideological.
Blunt to the left in their cultural war advance.
For decades, the institutional right, i.e., conservatism as you and I know it, has ceded American culture to the left, in spite of many voices that pointed out ample areas where the right could carve out a counter-cultural movement against leftist domination.
The cause of this is particularly a denial of how swiftly the culture has moved left, leaving conservatism under the false impression it's still fighting the culture of war in the 90s.
Conservatism's obsession with the 90s era battles over sex, drugs, rock and roll lyrics, and so forth, that's more than just an anachronism.
It represents a self-inflicted wound that ignored how the left used the culture to repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society.
We now know the left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.
Meaning, we've lost the culture war.
The right doesn't know it and continues to fight it on outdated old-fashioned terms and turf.
Trump, whether he knows it or not, comes along and is able to fight back against whatever this destructive nature of the left is by stopping it and thwarting it with all kinds of politically incorrect statements and gets away with it.
Whether Trump knows he's doing it or not.
That's this guy's theory.
If you continue to read this, it gets more and more esoteric.
And I don't I'm not going to burden you with that.
It's a good piece.
I'm just not gonna.
I'm gonna summarize it for you instead.
I I read this because it was sent to me by somebody who thought that it was uh interesting.
And what this piece further delves into is the premise that the left has actually won the culture war by turning the free market against the right.
Now, how does that manifest itself?
What is the free market?
How to have the left turn the free market against the right?
Well, it that could be summed up by reminding you of what happens when a pizzeria says they wouldn't serve a gay wedding reception.
Or what happens when a little bakery, a mom and pop bakery says they wouldn't bake a cake For a gay wedding because of religious principles.
The left comes in, co-opts the free market from the right, and turns it back against them, is what this guy means.
In other words, the left used what the right thinks is its primary defense, free market, freedom, constitution, religious freedom, First Amendment, and turned it right back on everybody, and nobody knew how to react to it.
People were bullied, people were cowed into silence by virtue of fear.
And corporations, long thought to be the definitions of the free market, joined the left rather than defend the concept of freedom.
So the concept of freedom fades away, becomes meaningless, replaced by grievance industries demanding tolerance as the new freedom.
I have tried to make the point over the course of many years here that these battles that we face, culture political, that they're no longer rational.
None of this LGPT stuff is rational.
Not a single thing happening is rational.
It's all irrational.
None of it makes any sense.
It's got everybody scratching their heads, but they don't know how to stop it, don't know how to oppose it.
Anybody tries is shot it down, targeted for destruction or what have you on Twitter.
It's become us versus them.
It's tribal.
We are...
We are stunned.
How many of you?
How many of you are literally shocked and stunned that logical arguments do not persuade people anymore?
How many of you have found yourself in an argument with people and you're using logic, inescapable logic?
As far as you're concerned, there's no question the difference in right and wrong in terms of whatever it is you're discussing.
And it doesn't persuade anybody.
And you end up at your wit's end over this.
But the problem you see is that the left has shifted this entire culture battle or culture war from right versus wrong to us versus them.
There isn't any right versus the only way they can win this war is by obliterating the concepts of right versus wrong, because they are wrong.
And they know it, and they don't want to be thought of that way.
So they just obliterate the whole concept of right versus wrong, and it gets replaced by something we could call us versus them, where it becomes more important to be on the right side of an issue, quote unquote, the correct side, the popular side of an issue than it is to be right as incorrect.
And this piece by Mr. Holt explores how the left has done this by transforming itself from being totally outside capitalism to becoming totally corporatist in the crony sense and how they I just saw the clock.
I have to take a brief time out.
Back in just okay, now look, I'm not sure that I buy what this guy's saying, but I just want to sum up what his point is.
I've never heard of the author before, uh, Matthias Holt at the Federalist.com.
But his point is that the right, conservatism, is stuck fighting culture wars that we lost 20 years ago, and we don't know how to stop the left.
We don't know how to make the alliances necessary to break the left's hold on culture, so we keep losing it, because we're still fighting right versus wrong when they're us versus them and we're the them and we're not hip and we're not cool, nobody wants to be us.
I mean, how else can you explain look at planned parenthood is applauded for chopping up babies and selling the parts?
People will not even condemn that.
How do you explain that?
That can't be taking place in a right versus wrong paradigm.
There's no way right versus wrong matters.
If Planned Parenthood can survive being exposed as behaving as they do.
If they can survive and thrive and people send them even more money.
Then we're not in a right versus wrong circumstance anymore.
If Planned Parenthood survives that and grows, then what must we look at this as?
Us versus them.
And this whole story at the Federalist is an argument that it's going to take somebody like Trump who can battle the media and the left and its culture toe-to-toe and draw support from the masses in society who hate what the left has done but are afraid to say so themselves.
They hate what the left is doing.
They just this is the guy's theory.
Masses of people hate what's happening to the culture, but they don't know anybody on their side capable of stopping it.
Here comes Trump.
It looks like he can.
So they happily sign up and they don't care about any deficiencies in anybody.
This is just this guy's theory.
Um I say I I don't I don't if I buy the whole thing, but I wanted to take the time to explain it to you.
Such as it's true that right versus wrong doesn't matter, but it does explain a lot.
We are doing open line Friday on Thursday.
Here is Mark in Waterbury, Connecticut.
Back to the phones we go.
Great to have you, sir.
Hi.
Rush Limbaugh, I've been listening to you since 1988.
Longtime listener, first time caller.
I just retired, now I can listen to you any time I want.
I used to listen to you on my lunch hour.
Thank you, sir, very much.
In 88, you're a lifer.
Yes, I am, sir.
I'm I'm very happy that you're on the air.
And uh the thing I'm ticked off about is these left wing liberals, they use the 21st century morals and they tried to apply it to the 17th and 18th century.
Rush, if we live during those times or during the Roman times, we'd be going to the Colosseums looking at gladiators killing animals and human beings.
It's just ridiculous what they're doing.
What specifically are you referring to?
Well, our founding fathers are you talking about the change of faces on dollar bills, for example, or what what what's got you fired up?
Well, they they still uh complaining about uh slavery slavery and what went on in those days.
I mean, that's that's how it was in those days.
We were ignorant in those days.
Through time, education gets stronger and we're more enlightened.
Well, no, no, look.
I okay, so I I get I get your point now.
We're trying to apply a sensibility, a sensitivity, and a morality today to periods of time two hundred years ago to condemn what went on two hundred years ago.
And you think the left is doing that, and that's the way that they are are succeeding in doing it.
I understand how you think that.
Um I I don't think that's actually what they're doing.
I think they are using what was life, what life was like and what what was normal, what passed for acceptable norms 200 years ago as being illegitimate then,
and therefore anything that was say created, like a nation, anything that was founded, what have you, is thus illegitimate from the beginning, was never legitimate, was never just, was never moral, and that provides the justification for ripping it apart today.
Now it it may be a circuitous way of saying what you're saying that they're trying to apply them, but they're they're not they're not doing that.
They don't care about the morality.
They don't care about 200 years ago.
They don't care.
They are using it.
What they care about is today.
And they're looking for ways to justify blowing everything Up.
And so they fall back on that, but they're not, they're not wringing their hands over the way things were 200 years ago and feeling sad and mad and angry.
They're using what took place and in the process, they're bastardizing what took place 200 years ago.
Let me give you one little example just on slavery.
And to the people that don't know this and have not been taught this, uh their case is easy to make.
The case that this country was founded as a slave nation, and that this country was built on slave labor, and that this country was built on the backs of minorities and so forth make it unjust.
If you haven't been taught about the days of the founding and how things happen, you'll readily accept that.
You will accept the guilt that comes along with it, and you will then support whatever things being done today, they're supposedly remedial, designed to fix it.
If you go back to the days of the Declaration, you go back to the days of the Constitution, you will find that the whole idea of slavery was repugnant to a vast number of people in America, particularly those at the Constitutional Convention and those in the days of the Declaration of Independence.
We had the 13 colonies, and among those 13 were some slave states.
And there was at the time, because of the vagaries of the day, which is a good point that you're making here, it would have been impossible to rebel against Britain.
It would have been impossible to craft the declaration, it would have been a possible to fight the revolutionary war.
It would have been impossible to create, to invent, to found the United States if they didn't find ways to accommodate.
They needed every colony to become part of the United States.
So they had to make deals with these Southern slave states.
They hated it, you can read it, they didn't like it, and the Constitution was written in such a way as to be able to fix all of these wrongs over the course of the evolution of this new nation, which indeed has happened.
The Constitution had an amendment process.
The Constitution had the Bill of Rights, which established some principles that were in conflict for some people at the days of our founding, but they were built in to be able ultimately to address these problems.
Everybody knew that there were flaws.
Nothing is ever perfect.
But accommodations had to be made.
Compromises, if you will.
Now the modern-day left, they doesn't care about any of this.
Because that's way too complicated, plus that's factual, plus that's true, plus it destroys them.
It takes away ammunition they want to use.
Their premise is the whole idea of America is flawed, the whole idea of America is unjust, the whole idea of America is illegitimate because of the way it was founded, and that justifies every bit of what they're doing to tear it apart, to transform it, to redefine it, what have you.
And then if you take it further, these arguments now have nothing to do with right versus wrong, then you have people fighting on two different battlefields for the same thing.
We happen to be on the wrong one when trying to stop them.
Now, about your your theory that it's a mistake to apply modern-day morality to ancient American history.
I mean, true morality is timeless.
Real morality, the concepts of right and wrong are timeless.
They do not bend in shape unless human beings make that happen because they don't like what you get with timeless right and wrong and timeless morality.
And if the people who are wetted to the universal characteristics of right and wrong and morality, Don't defend it.
Don't stand up for it.
Defend it.
For whatever reason, it's going to fall.
It's going to plummet.
It's going to be redefined.
But it isn't going to be redefined.
It's going to be eliminated.
Which is where we're headed.
There is no right and wrong.
There's us versus them.
And the them are always wrong.
We are the them.
And in an us versus them argument or circumstance.
Then it comes down to which side do you want to be on?
Which side do you want to be seen to be on?
Which side is the coolest, the hippist, what however you want to, which side is the more popular, which side has the most support in the media, however you define it.
And so the um the them, us, we we end up being defined as boring buddy dutties, fogies anti-fun, uh, but it's worse than that.
We want to deny other people fun.
We want to deny other people freedom.
We want to deny other people to be who they really are, but who what they they want no boundaries, no limits whatsoever, because they don't believe in morality and guardrails helping to protect, define, and sustain a culture or country.
That that's that's goes against everything they stand for.
They don't want any limits on things like that, other than the ones they self-impose day to day, but they don't want any any standardized limits on behavior or whatever, because that might end up defining them as unusual, abnormal, what have you.
So the them, the traditionalists, and don't think of the Victorians, by the way.
It's not that.
It's uh they end up being defined as uh obstacles to freedom.
This is what concept of using the free market against free marketers.
So all of these things that you my my point going on to this, you think what they're doing is trying to apply a current day morality to the old days.
That's not what they're doing.
They're coming right out and saying that based on what they think the founding of this country was illegitimate.
Nothing to do with what's happening today, other than what's happening today is a result of all this illegitimacy and immorality and racism, sexism, whatever.
And so anything goes if it's remedial, anything that readjusts, corrects for, fixes, rectifies is permissive.
And I just I just I don't think most people understand that that's the battlefield on which this is all happening.
Still get caught up in right and wrong and think that some white knight's gonna come along and be able to convince everybody what is right.
And it's it's not a matter of that, or anymore, I don't think, to uh to a lot of people.
Anyway, I'm up against it on time here.
I'm sorry to end that on a on an inconclusive point, but I must.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Don't go away.
Open line Friday on Thursday, Rush Limbaugh serving humanity.
Simply by showing up.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that the rules committee is meeting down there, but it it doesn't none of what they're doing, folks affects the convention.
They can't, they can't write rules today that affect the convention.
I don't know what people are telling you about what's going on down there.
That means there's something going on.
The candidates are down there making their case to the conven to the RNC.
I mean, there is an outcome that's gonna come from these meetings, but this is not about writing delegate rules at the convention.
I don't care what anybody's telling you, that's not what's going on, they can't.
Those rules can only be changed at the convention with delegates to the convention voting on these proposed rule changes, and they can only they can't even be proposed here.
Not serious, I mean ideas can be generic ideas.
Anyway, I'll explain all this later.
Andrew in Orlando, Florida.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Good afternoon, Rush.
I uh I'm calling in, first time caller.
I have a unique perspective on a kind of comment that you made earlier, and uh you were discussing the interview with Matt Lauer, and you said that Trump is okay with a person deciding they're a woman at two o'clock and deciding that they're a man at four o'clock and choosing whichever bathroom that they that they uh prefer.
And uh the comment just makes me nervous for our party, and I think that it can be polarizing um to the LGBT community who often votes strictly and and solely on one issue, and that's you know, the the issue that they've struggled with their whole life and this is how it works, folks.
This is exactly how it happens.
So I have what I have said today runs the risk of blowing the election for the Republicans because I I I you I'm making you nervous.
What I said makes you nervous for our party because I could be polarizing the LGBT community.
Is that right?
Yes, sir.
Or anybody who who sympathizes with uh with the struggle that they've had.
I I don't understand it, but I have a unique perspective.
I have a father that's gay, so I have to you know sympathize in some area with the struggles that they that they face as well.
And so I I just I fear that we're polarizing and pushing them to the democratic side, and and that's uh gonna have a lot larger effect on us when policy from Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders gets pushed through.
That's gonna be something that's gonna affect us a lot more than what sign is is next to the door.
Oh, so that's what's about a sign next to the door.
So this this is folks, this is how it works.
You see, if you stand up for what you believe, you are going to run the risk of turning people against the party and therefore losing the election.
Therefore, we have to be tolerant of all of this if we have a prayer of winning, if we want to have a prayer of of winning the election, and I assume that that's what you think Trump is doing by essentially advocating for the LGBT bathroom issue in North Carolina and Georgia,
that he's simply accommodating people and wanting their votes rather than uh stand up for what he might think is right or wrong.
He's sacrificing that in order to attract uh voters.
And if we want this is the same thing.
I've I've had this call on ethanol, I've had this call on gay marriage, I have had this call on practically every issue that has resulted in the culture war being lost.
And this is how this is how it happens.
People are urged to be quiet.
Don't say what you really think about.
This is gonna hurt us.
Don't say what you really think.
It's not worth it.
We're just talking about signs and bathroom doors here.
Don't don't don't make a big deal about it.
Thank you, Andrew.
Appreciate it.
John and Orlando, your next two calls from Orlando right in a row.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Megaditto's rush all the way from the beginning.
Um I've got uh I I call it with regard to my perspective with regard to to Trump's statement.
I'm a trumpeter.
I play the trumpet.
I'm like Trump right now, and but will vote wherever the R is on the ballot um come election day.
Uh however, I think his message this morning was was right on right on point with his his brand for the campaign and and the major memes that he's going after, which is common sense and and the establishment.
Uh the the common sense meme, what I heard him say was that if it's uh if it says man on the the restroom and the person goes in and and they say they're a man and they're using the restroom, fine.
If it says female, I'm not going in the stall to check on them.
So I think he was saying stay away from trying to to go into a battle that you may not be able to win, particularly right now, and let's deal with the exceptions which are are out in the wings.
Don't legislate to the lowest common denominator.
I didn't hear him say any of that, but but if if that's what you heard, I'm not gonna argue with you because that's what I'm learning to do here.
Rush, I I I'm agreeing.
Can you can you hear me now, Rush?
Yeah, I hear you.
I've I heard everything you said, yeah.
Ah, okay.
So Trump came out in favor of LGBT, came out in favor of raising taxes, uh, and the and the the $20 bill snap who know how big a deal that is.
But so none of that surprised you from oh, and he came out for Path of Citizenship after uh deportation to bring them back in legally.
There's a common sense element there that that I'm I I believe I'm filtering, so yes, I'm I'm I'm fine with a lot of what he said.
I don't you know I'd like to go charting it like uh like Don Quixote against uh a windmill, but I don't think that some of those battles are winnable right at the moment.
No, they never are.
They they never are.
If they're not winnable at the moment, they're never winnable.
Gotta run.
Take a break.
Don't go away, folks.
Be back right after this.
Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize.
I have to admit a total misunderstanding of the LGBT bathroom issue.
You know what I thought it was?
I thought the people in North Carolina and Georgia were writing these laws to protect women from predatory males.
I thought the sponsors of these uh the the people demanding to be able to use these bathrooms for predatory men who wanted to have easy access to women and children in bathrooms.
But apparently that's not what this is about.
It's about signs on the door.
I misunder.
I thought it was about protecting women and children from predatory males.
So forgive me.
Uh and I've now also learned that in order to win people to our side, we have to abandon every position we've got.
That's how we do it.
I've learned a lot today.
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