Rush Limbaugh Program - July 15, 2016, Friday, Hour #2

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 15, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program

36:19

July 15, 2016, Friday, Hour #2

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Buck Sexton here in For Rush, joined now by John Schindler.
	He is a columnist for the New York Observer.
	You can read his latest at Observer.com.
	He's also formerly of the National Security Agency.
	This is a CIA to NSA chat, John.
	We can call it spies like us.
	What's up?
	I'm totally in, brother.
	Spies like us.
	I'm right here.
	So let's talk a bit about some of the responses that we've seen and some of the debate that's broken out now in this country in the aftermath of yet another huge mass casualty, jihadist attack, this one in southern France.
	Your piece here says Hollande warns what Obama won't.
	Islamic terrorism is real.
	Tell everybody what you mean by that.
	Look, France just suffered the third mass casualty jihadist terrorist attack in 18 months.
	As usual, the platitudes are coming out from around the world about this is terrible, this is awful.
	France, even on the left, is having a more mature debate about this than we are in the United States.
	I'm not here to defend President Holland.
	He's made a lot of mistakes.
	He's a socialist.
	He'd be on the left wing of our political spectrum.
	But even he did not mince words in the aftermath of last night's horror and talked about all of France being under the threat of Islamic terrorism, which is so obviously true, you have to jump through great mental hoops to avoid saying it.
	Yet President Obama, Hillary Clinton somehow managed to avoid saying the obvious.
	And in times like this, that contrast is really stark, where the reality of what the entire West is up against here is so obvious, average citizens get it, but a lot of our political class doesn't.
	And in the election years we're in now, I think this makes this a really hot-button issue for a lot of Americans.
	Yeah, how can somebody not look at this, not look at the way that with Hillary Clinton, we've got a former Secretary of State, you would think somebody who is very aware of the scale of this threat, of how seriously it has to be taken, of how there has to be a vision.
	I mean, people talk about policy, but it really has to be how can we, over the next 12 months, over the next five years, over the next 10 years, how can we start to really defeat this enemy?
	And I think that a lot of people who perhaps aren't necessarily overly focused on sort of global terrorism as an issue, they look at the threat to the homeland and they say, well, how can I trust Hillary Clinton to handle this issue when there seems to be such a hesitation to even speak honestly about the issue?
	Right.
	And I think any American right now should be asking that question.
	What actually is the harm in calling the enemy what he actually is?
	Look, there are multiple layers of jihadist terrorism.
	There are things actually ordered by Al-Qaeda Central, Islamic State, ISIS Central.
	Those are very much the outlier.
	What we're having a lot more of is what seems to have happened in Nice of a disaffected, angry, relatively young Muslim man who very likely without orders from anyone decided to mow down more than 100 people, killing 84 of them at least as of this hour.
	He is reported to have shouted Alau Akbar, as has been the case with previous instances of what I call car jihad in France.
	This happened multiple times before.
	It's very clear what his motivation was.
	I think you almost have to be a Harvard law graduate like Obama not to see what the motivation is.
	And I think people across the Western world are becoming increasingly tired of this sort of institutionalized escapism by our political elites about what's really going on here.
	Now, we hear after this sort of thing happens from both sides of the political spectrum.
	And of course, right now, because we're in the midst of a presidential election season, you've got the Twitter accounts from both of the party nominees weighing in on this.
	They're calling into different cable news shows.
	So it's to say that, well, we shouldn't politicize this.
	It becomes a political issue in this country right away.
	There's no way to avoid that right now because it's it's forced on us as a political issue.
	And then we get into the who has a better that people always want to ask this and then take this in whatever direction they choose.
	But what should be done in response to this?
	Right.
	And.
	And on the Clinton side of things, I hear a lot of, and I actually wrote about this briefly or tweeted about this yesterday.
	I said, look, they're just going to talk about allies and stronger allegiances and being smart.
	And these are platitudes.
	These aren't strategies.
	These aren't ideas.
	What are some ideas?
	What are to secure the homeland?
	For everybody who's listening right now, how do we stop this from happening in this country again, by the way, is the proper formulation.
	Not from happening, as we know.
	It's happened far too often already.
	It just happened in Orlando last month.
	Right.
	Look, I mean, first of all, terrorism is by its nature a political act.
	So saying we're politicizing discussion of terrorism is saying nothing, really.
	Of course we are.
	The enemy has politicized this.
	That's what we do now.
	Ideas that people until recently thought were frankly pretty crazy that Trump has said we have to, he initially said ban Muslim immigration, but stop immigration for a while from regions where terrorism is a big problem, suddenly doesn't look very crazy anymore.
	And if you poll it with the American people, a lot of the American people think this is something that we at least need to think about.
	I'm not saying that's going to stop all this, but look, the individual in Nice last night was a 31-year-old man from Tunisia, legally resident in France.
	Perhaps had he not been legally resident in France, this wouldn't have happened.
	No one's suggesting shutting the borders is going to end terrorism.
	That's not reality.
	But screening people who come into the United States for Islamist views, as we once screened people for communist views or affiliations, seems to me a pretty commonsensical place to start.
	And why are we not discussing that?
	I think there's a tremendous amount of amnesia, sort of a collective amnesia, and maybe an intentional one with the media on that point.
	People will say, an ideological test for immigrants.
	U.S. citizens, different conversation.
	Another one that we should have perhaps another time.
	Totally different.
	But we're talking about immigrants, totally different.
	And there's a long-standing history of U.S. law that looks, as you point out, for communist, socialist, anarchist ties to either official groups or whether you even, you know, if you show up and you sit with an immigration officer and you say, well, I'm part of this group that kind of wants to overthrow the United States government, that's grounds for saying, sorry, you're not allowed to be here next plane out.
	I guess at the time, depending on what we're talking about, it could have been next boat out.
	But the point here is the same.
	The media acts with all this breathless indignation.
	It seems like they forget, or maybe they just like to assume that foreign non-U.S.
	citizens have constitutional rights.
	That is not true.
	Exactly.
	Until the mid-90s, U.S. immigration, well, after the Soviet Union fell, U.S. immigration was asking newcomers, you know, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or any organization dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government?
	Political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, is a subversive organization which advocates, at least indirectly, the overthrowing of our democratic way of life.
	Why are we not asking about that?
	And by the way, what the public doesn't understand is if you're coming to our country and you lie about that, you could be subsequently evicted from the country forever because you lied on your immigration forms.
	That actually is a deterrent in many cases.
	We should be asking about terrorist involvement of any kind, any kind, not just Islamic terrorism.
	But why are we not asking about Islamist political organizations as a criteria for whether you should or shouldn't come to the United States?
	John, you make a very important point there.
	Once someone's on the record, for example, if somebody files out or files their immigration forms and they're coming through the process legally, and I guess we could have a whole, again, another separate conversation about illegal immigration and the threat of terrorists using that as a means of getting into this country.
	As we've seen, by the way, well, we've seen sort of a new version of immigration, legal or not, happening in Europe, and that's directly led to some of the consequences we've seen with these mass casualty attacks.
	But in this country here, when somebody files those forms, then when they start to say things like, you know, I want to go join ISIS or, you know, I wish I could wage jihad, the sorts of indicators that people point to with indignation, and understandably so after something like Orlando, this gives the authorities more to work with, right?
	I mean, if the policy is if you're, you know, if you're ideologically aligned with groups or, you know, groups that want to overthrow the United States government, we can boot you.
	That's right.
	And we have done so many times with other groups, whether they be communists, whether they be Nazis, whatever.
	There's ample precedent for this.
	We are not reinventing the wheel here.
	We just need to put terrorism and political Islam in that same wheelhouse that U.S. immigration has used for many decades.
	That's all I'm asking for.
	And when people talk about greater cooperation with our allies on this issue, we look at countries that have pretty skilled, pretty adept intelligence services.
	They're catching a fair amount of this.
	And one thing that I didn't hear getting much attention the last 24 hours was there was a rather large ISIS cell, including people who had trained in Syria, the French wrapped up, I think it was a year or two ago in southern France.
	I mean, this is they are playing whack-a-mole over there as well as in other places, in other places in Europe.
	But this notion that if we just do more cooperation, you know, we don't have any allies that are sitting around saying we think there's an impending attack in America, but we're not going to tell them about it.
	So I just feel like this is a political myth of the highest order.
	Look, intelligence cooperation with our allies, especially on counterterrorism, has literally never been better.
	And it gets better all the time as it has in the 15 years now, almost since 9-11.
	And the French intelligence services are highly competent.
	They're highly adept.
	And also, to be fair, after the Batiklan atrocity last November in Paris, the gloves really have come off.
	They're under almost a state of emergency, quasi-martial law almost, and how the police and intelligence services can operate against terrorism.
	The problem here is not lack of information.
	There's plenty of information.
	We're told already that the individual Anis was not on the radar of the intelligence services as a suspected extremist.
	And I see no reason to doubt that so far.
	He seems to have been a petty criminal of a kind who was very common.
	The reality is there is not an intelligence fix to a problem of the magnitude France is facing now, where you have Salafi jihadism, to use its proper term, the ISIS ideology, out there as an attraction to really angry, hateful individuals who are otherwise enmeshed in crime and dysfunctional lives.
	No intelligence service is good enough to stop every single one of those.
	And I think that's a painful fact the West needs to wake up to.
	And step one needs to be keeping people inclined to this out of our countries in the first place.
	How much of this?
	How much of this, John, in terms of the decision-making that we can look back on from this administration, whether we're talking about the anti-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria or sort of just the rhetoric of this White House about America, both abroad and at home with regard to the fight against Islamic extremist terrorism.
	How much of the mistakes that you've seen would you say is attributable to a lack of political will, to be honest about it here at home?
	I think the weight of that on this issue cumulatively has become enormous over time.
	Look, federal law enforcement, our intelligence agencies understand perfectly well after almost two terms of Barack Obama where their priorities are, what is on message, what is off message.
	They have banned inside our classified areas of our government discussions of jihadism, what I call the J-word or Islamist terrorism, the I-word.
	Even though, again, the French socialist president just talked about Islamic terrorism, we can't even internally in our own government.
	I'm not going to say there's any individual plot that went off because we couldn't confront these things, but the climate has been chilling, to say the least, inside federal law enforcement and our intelligence agencies.
	For all the billions of dollars we spend on fighting terrorism, the dishonesty at the core of this administration about what this enemy is, what he represents, what he wants, which is no secret.
	They talk about this all the time.
	The enemy is perfectly happy to use the terms that we won't use to describe them.
	I ask only that we call them what they call themselves.
	This should not be too much to ask, but apparently it is.
	John Schindler is the national security columnist for The Observer.
	You can read his latest at Observer.com.
	My intelligence community brother, John, good to have you on.
	Thanks for joining us today on the Russian Bush Show.
	Thank you.
	Great to talk to you.
	800-282-2882, Buck Sexton.
	And for Rush, a lot more.
	Come and stay with me.
	Buck Sexton here in for Rush Open Line Friday.
	Continues on, 800-282-2882.
	Let's take some calls, everybody.
	What do we have here?
	Debbie in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
	What's up, Debbie?
	Hey, I just wanted to say these Republicans who are anybody but Trump, they need to remember that Trump was selected by the people.
	And that said, you know, Trump is, he represents a political revolution.
	And a lot of people that are offended by him are offended by his speech, his manner.
	They think he's sexist, racist, whatever they want to call him.
	But the fact of the matter is, you're not going to succeed with a political revolution with the church lady polite personality.
	This isn't going to happen.
	And so the George Wills and all these people that are taking their choice and going home can keep going as far as I'm concerned.
	I'm an independent.
	I generally vote Republican.
	I'm right of center politically, but I'm a former elected official as well on the local level.
	And I've seen firsthand how the media deliberately biases coverage to influence elections.
	There's a lot of pressure to keep office, to stay in office.
	There's a lot of pressure to please everyone.
	I get that.
	But our elected officials have a responsibility to serve the greater good and do the right thing regardless of their own personal careers.
	Unfortunately, a lot of our politicians are career politicians.
	They've forgotten what it's like to be in the real world or what the real world is all about.
	And I think Trump is somebody who's got a long track record of business success.
	You look at his family.
	His children are successful.
	They're intelligent.
	They're well-spoken.
	And that's what I look at when I choose a candidate.
	I look at the individual.
	I look at their individual successes.
	And for people who are still doubters, all I'll say is Trump's got a big ego.
	That's true.
	And I don't think he's going to let himself fail if he gets elected as president.
	All right, Debbie.
	Thank you for a very eloquent and insightful call.
	I appreciate you giving us a ring here on the EIB.
	Good to talk to you.
	A couple of things Debbie brought up there.
	One of them is with the Never Trump movement, and I say this knowing that some of my very dear friends, both sort of inside of the chattering classes of punditry and outside, are never Trump.
	And so this has been an issue that I've had to go back and forth with them on for quite a while.
	I've always been never Hillary.
	I will not pretend to be an early Trump supporter.
	I was certainly not.
	I openly supported Ted Cruz.
	All of that said, there is a difference in my mind, and yeah, this is a radio show, so if you think I'm wrong, by all means, light it up.
	Tell me what you think.
	Difference in my mind between saying that, as a matter of conscience, I won't cast my vote for Donald Trump and saying, as a matter of conscience, we need to change the rules to override the will of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump, who won fair and square through the system.
	To me, that's just not the same thing.
	It's just not.
	You know, if you feel like someone's playing too rough, you know, on the sports field, you have the right to not show up to the next game.
	You can do that.
	But you don't have the right to sort of pay off a ref and say, you're now in, you know, make it go our way.
	I don't think that's okay.
	And I think there's an important distinction to be made there.
	I think there's also a moment here where we're seeing two things happening simultaneously.
	One of them is that you have Trump trying to deal with the system, with the establishment, with the political apparatus in this country, right?
	And specifically the Republican political apparatus.
	And we could critique him, and I'm sure many people have here and elsewhere.
	I mean, there's plenty of room for debate and criticism about how he's gone about that.
	But you at least get a sense that he's not from within.
	He's not from within that sort of beltway banded background.
	Whereas on the other hand, you do have a Clinton candidacy that perhaps more than any other any of us could point to is completely propped up by and supported by certainly the Democrat establishment, but more broadly, by the political establishment overall.
	She is the candidate of the elites.
	She is the candidate of the big E establishment across the board.
	And even though she's actually a really weak political candidate in terms of her own skills on the campaign trail and her abject, preposterous dishonesty, even with all of that, there are people who still just believe that more or less she's business as usual.
	More or less she's somebody that we can deal with and reason with.
	So even if on policy we dramatically disagree with her, even if on character and the substance of who she is and her record, we see her for the person that she is, we'll take her over Trump.
	I just don't understand that.
	It doesn't make sense to me.
	I stand before you openly and honestly, or I guess technically I'm sitting, if we're going to really be honest, but holding myself up and telling you that so we're all on the same page.
	We know where I'm coming from.
	So the establishment has gone for Hillary in a huge way.
	Let's see what that will lead to going forward.
	800-282-2882, Buck Sexton and for Rush.
	Stay with me.
	Indeed, Buck in for Rush here on the EIB, 800-282-2882.
	Open Line Friday continues.
	And now we're joined by Kim Strassel.
	She is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and she's the author of a book that's just out, The Intimidation Game, How the Left is Silencing Free Speech.
	Great stuff in this book.
	Kimberly, thank you for giving us a ring.
	It's great to be there, Buck.
	So I was just before you came on, just talking about how certainly the political establishment is behind Hillary.
	We would expect that.
	She's the Democrat nominee.
	Even Bernie's thrown in the towel.
	So it looks like it's going to be Hillary.
	We all know that.
	But there's more than just politics at the sort of party level that's at play.
	You talk in your book about this at some length.
	The left is trying to use the apparatus of government itself to push political ideologies.
	So give us some examples of this.
	What are some of the most egregious instances that you uncovered?
	Yeah, so there's two parts about trying to control speech.
	There's when they censor things, when they only put out their line, and we've seen that with President Obama refusing to talk about radical Islam or censoring press conferences that they have.
	The other side of this is when you see the hard left out there and they are actually training the apparatus of government, targeting it on their opponents and intimidating them and scaring them out of speaking.
	So the book runs through what really happened at the IRS.
	And we know that what happened is that Democrats called on the IRS to go out and target conservatives and Tea Party groups.
	We know the president himself spent 2010 talking about these nonprofits suggesting that they'd broken the law.
	We know from documents and emails that you had a very partisan IRS full of bureaucrats like Lois Lerner who wanted to take this action and that this was done deliberately to put conservatives on ice.
	We also see this happening even more scary in prosecutors who are abusing their power to go after conservatives and scare and silence them.
	We saw that in Wisconsin where we had several liberal prosecutors go after about 30 groups that had supported Governor Scott Walker's reforms and in that case there were pre-dawn raids and secret gag orders and subpoenas and the taking of financial information and emails and generally tying these people up in legal defense for years in order to keep them out of the political arena.
	Now we also have seen the email situation with Hillary reach, for me at least, and I would imagine for you as well, not an unexpected conclusion.
	I never thought that the Department of Justice would bring charges.
	But it seems like it was even more obvious what some of the thought processes were going into this, given that you had the meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac between Bill and Loretta Lynch right before the announcement came out.
	You had Comey speaking before the DOJ made their official announcement.
	You know, it's scary enough that the IRS has engaged in politicized targeting.
	And as you point out in your book, this is on the record.
	This is a matter of fact.
	This is not a matter of opinion.
	But I think a lot of people right now in the election season are also getting a sense that, oh, even the DOJ itself, perhaps even senior elements of the FBI, have allowed themselves to become highly politicized and are favoring one political party and perhaps one political candidate.
	I couldn't blame people for coming to that conclusion because it's one that I've come to.
	Right, absolutely.
	And this is why the intimidation game is so scary, because Barack Obama's greatest legacy may well be, or one of his greatest legacies, will be the degree to which he politicized the federal bureaucracy, which as you and I and everyone know is enormous these days, and much of it has police powers.
	So yes, what happened with Hillary Clinton, highly politicized.
	There is no question that if she had been held even minimally to the same standards of other federal employees who'd been caught handling information this way, that she would be indicted at this very moment.
	The fact that she wasn't was entirely due to politics.
	But we see this same politicization in the Securities and the Exchange Commission, which has been pursuing regulations that would make it harder for corporations to engage in politics.
	We see it at the Federal Election Commission, where there is a highly politicized staff that has been targeting conservative organizations, going out of its way to attempt to put them out of action while giving a pass to liberal organizations that do the same thing.
	We see it at the FCC.
	We see it at the EPA and its selective enforcement of actions against groups that it doesn't like.
	So this is a very scary thing, and it's why everyone does need to understand what's going on.
	This is also coordinated.
	It's a tactic.
	It's well honed.
	It's replicated again and again, often by the same politicians.
	It's now a political strategy by the left that we all need to be aware of.
	It seems like there is a reality that is setting in now in the minds of pretty much everybody who's paying attention and honest about it, that there is clearly an apparatus of government, a sort of fourth branch of the government that is the bureaucracy that is self-propagating, self-sustaining, and self-interested, and that it will do things in order to achieve those goals, but also that it leans left.
	And that I can't think of anything from any of these organizations that you've cited here, where you've pointed out in your book, The Intimidation Game.
	I can't think of an equivalent situation on the right.
	And if I did see it, it would make me angry.
	I think that's part of what needs to be kept in mind.
	If I did see it, I would shout it down, and I would want there to be accountability.
	It feels like the government apparatus, the federal bureaucracy, is leaning left and is actually trying to help certain candidates win office.
	Yes, you have to think about who goes into government service.
	And often they do lean left.
	We've had surveys that show that that is obviously the case in terms of the voting records of many who work for the federal government.
	They have enormous amounts of power because the size of government has grown so much.
	Also, because the authorities that we have given agencies have grown so much.
	Also, because there is no accountability.
	We saw that nothing has ever happened to Lois Lerner, despite damning evidence that's just out there about what she did and how she deliberately went out and got these groups for partisan reasons.
	So there's no accountability and there's no transparency.
	You mentioned Hillary Clinton's email server.
	Government has become incredibly adept, especially the Obama administration, at hiding the actions of everything they do.
	So we have these laws like the FOIA laws and others that are meant to give us information, but often we're just stonewalled.
	Even congressional investigators are stonewalled.
	And so there's no way of rooting out what's been done, no way of holding them accountable.
	And when the bureaucracy sees that they have that much license, it's then a green light to them to go after their political enemies, to take risks and do things that they normally would not do.
	Kimberly, what can be done, maybe to, before I take us too deep into the depths of despair here, what could be done, if not to fix this problem that you addressed in the intimidation game, what could be done to start to sort of turn the curve in the other direction, to begin to improve the situation, if anything.
	I mean, if this is just a sort of a clarion call and a warning, that's worthy too.
	But is there anything we can do to fix this?
	Well, again, I think the most important thing is to understand, and I lay it out in the book, to understand what's actually happening and to understand that these events that you see out there, the prosecutorial abuse, the IRS attacks, the attacks on people who give money in ballot initiatives, the attacks on companies and free market groups, these are not random, but this is all part of a strategy and tactics that are used again by the same group of people.
	It is a political philosophy and movement.
	So you have to know how it works so that when it then happens to a group that you're in or an organization you care about or a company that you work for, that you can call it out.
	Because one thing that does come out in the book is that usually when the bullies, the intimidators, the abusers are called out, they back down because there is still a huge public sentiment in defense of political engagement and political speech.
	So that often helps.
	I think we need to rethink transparency laws too because they're being used for bad purposes by when in particular when people are using them to get the names of contributors to different organizations and causes, they then put them on target lists and go after and get them.
	We should keep transparency focused on the government.
	And I think we need to hold our politicians more account to those and support those that actually openly say they believe in constitutional protections and in reining in the size and scope and power of the federal bureaucracy.
	Kimberly Strassel is a Wall Street Journal columnist and author of the intimidation game, How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, available in bookstores and on Amazon.
	Kimberly, thank you so much for calling.
	Thank you for having me, Buck.
	800-282-2882, Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh.
	We're having a lot of fun that MEIB, but we're going to have more.
	Stay with me.
	Buck Sexton here, InfoRush today on the EIB.
	Open Line Friday continues on, 800-282-2882.
	Before we get to calls, and we're about to take a bunch of them, so if you're on hold, stay with me.
	Want to just make sure you know that if you've missed any of Rush's show this past week, it's easy to catch up on them.
	All you have to do is join the member side of his website, Rush247, at rushlimbaugh.com.
	A membership means that you can access archives and podcasts of the last 30 days of the program.
	Plus, you get the Ditto Cam, which is awesome, and a free Never Hillary bumper sticker.
	I've got one.
	I've got it on my bookcase as a warning to visitors.
	Never Hillary.
	Let's take some calls.
	Maggie in Ohio, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	You're speaking to Buck.
	Hi, Buck.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	I wanted to go back earlier.
	You were playing back an episode where you were on CNN and they were arguing with you, giving you the third degree about how you were saying terrorism is coming here.
	I said ISIS is coming after us, and someone took objection to the usage of us.
	Right.
	Well, the argument to that, and I think it's noteworthy to remember that they were arguing that Muslims are killing the Muslims, you know, especially over there in Europe and Middle East.
	But it's noteworthy to remember that back in India, this resort hotel, or is this a hotel, I suppose?
	You're talking about the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
	They were all over the city of Mumbai, including at a major hotel frequented by Westerners.
	Yeah.
	And remember, they were going through and asking, sorting out the Muslims from the non-Muslims?
	This has been true in many cases.
	It was true at the Kenya Westgate Mall attack.
	It was true in the most recent attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they were trying to separate out Muslims from non-Muslims.
	Sometimes the way they do it is they ask you to recite a Quranic verse, and if you can't, then you're executed on site.
	But this has happened in many large-scale terrorist attacks, yes.
	Right.
	So that kind of blows their theory out of the water that it's mostly, you know, it doesn't matter.
	If you're not the Muslim that believes in the kind of, for lack of a better phrase, Muslimism as they believe in, you're a goner.
	And if you're a Christian or, you know, even an atheist, they don't care.
	If you believe the way they do, exactly the radical part.
	I think I know where you're going, Maggie.
	I mean, let me just try to add a little context, but I think I have an understanding of where you're trying to take this.
	So first, if you're looking at aggregate numbers, people who fall under the broad umbrella of jihadism kill more Muslims by a large factor than they do non-Muslims.
	Now, that's largely because of, well, when you look at where the biggest conflicts are occurring right now between jihadists and others, where they're trying to either establish a larger Islamic state in Iraq and Syria or other countries where they're trying to overthrow what they believe to be apostate regimes, there's a whole process.
	There's really a doctrine of takfir, which means that a Muslim jihadist will say that another Muslim is no longer a Muslim and therefore can be killed.
	So this is how they get around the prohibition that is a general prohibition in Islam of killing fellow Muslims.
	But as to your point about killing us, I mean, I just, or picking people out for execution, they clearly have a, depending on the group you're talking about and where they are, they target specifically Western interests.
	They target Americans.
	Those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan know the rhetoric is always against crusaders and Jews.
	By that they mean people from the West, Europeans, North Americans, South Americans, anybody who's sort of from what's broadly considered to be the Christian, Western Christian world.
	And that's a very real part of their rhetoric as well.
	But the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind is that jihadists are at war with everyone else.
	And so that's essential for the understanding of what us is in this context.
	And you even have people that will show that it's a small minority, percentage-wise, of the Muslim world that's, for example, supportive of ISIS.
	I just saw some stats today on this.
	But even a small percentage of 1.6 billion people is tens of millions of people who are at least supportive of ISIS ideologically.
	So it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we have a unite ⁇ we, everybody who is not a jihadist, who is not a radical Islamist, is not somebody who is trying to promote, espouse, support violence in the name of Islam, that we all stand united against those who do.
	And that's why I think the notion of us and who comprises that us in this fight against global jihadism is so essential.
	I hope that's a fair response and a fair sort of context to add to your statements, Maggie.
	I do appreciate you calling in.
	Thank you very much.
	Yeah, we go.
	We've got loads of time.
	It's rocking and rolling.
	You know, it's like when the bartender says we're done, I'm like, you're not done.
	Come on.
	Just put another, put another, yeah, put another Patron Silver on that table, sir.
	Let's take Maria in Arkansas.
	You're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	You're speaking to Buck, Maria.
	Thank you for taking my call, Buck.
	And what I don't understand is nobody is talking about the consent of the governed because that is a very important sentence in the Declaration of Independence.
	And I believe that's what got Trump where he's at.
	And Paul Ryan better put Obama and Hillary in Levinworth before he sues Trump.
	Maria, do you have parakeets?
	I thought I heard a parakeet in the background.
	No, I'm outside and I have birds.
	Oh, birds.
	Okay.
	I was going to say.
	I thought I heard some pet parakeets.
	Anyway, even you come on.
	Why do you guys even trump?
	Why doesn't he call it consent of the governed?
	It's not populism.
	It's called consent of the governed.
	Of course, Paul Ryan wouldn't know anything about it.
	He doesn't have it.
	Republicans do not have it.
	10% of approval rating for Congress is not the consent of the governed.
	Yeah, consent of the governed.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	Thank you, Maria.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate the sentiment.
	It's just the repetition of the consent of the government.
	Yes, yes.
	We need the consent of the governed.
	Between the my I'm jumping to conclusions.
	Microaggression against sparrows or whatever was making those noises.
	Obviously, it was not parakeets.
	But yes, the consent of the governed is very important.
	I'm not by no means.
	I don't discount that.
	It's very, I don't know why Mr. Snurdly is saying I'm even laughing.
	Am I even laughing, Mr. Snerdley?
	I'm not laughing.
	He's talking nonsense.
	Okay, this is Buck.
	We're going to go into a break.
	We're going to be back in a few.
	Buck Sexton here in for Rush.
	Always fun on Open Line Fridays.
	Always fun to be with you in any context on the EIB.
	800-282-2882.
	We've got some calls.
	We will be taking them coming up here in the next hour.
	So if you're on hold, stay with us.
	And if you want, there's still a slot or two.
	You can give us a ring.
	We're going to be talking about the DNC speakers list, which has been finalized.
	Ooh.
	And maybe we'll go back and forth a little bit on your thoughts on Mike Pence.
	Haven't really heard too many people weigh in on that one.
	I mean, I wonder, I feel like the analysis about how VP, you know, people don't get that excited about it either way.
	But if you have thoughts on whether Pence was a good choice or not for Trump, or if you have thoughts on whether the, I was about to say, the Trump, never Trump movement is over and done with, I would like to hear them.
	And I'm sure the rest of the audience would too.
	And we've got some other stories we're going to get to.

▲