RUSH: I’ve got all kinds of people asking me today, “Why is this insane degree of anger at Donald Trump? This seems unlike anything we’ve seen yet. Why so over the top?” I’ve been asking myself the same thing. It’s my job here, man, to come up with these answers. The best thing I can come up with is he said there were nice people on both sides. That seems to have just sent everybody over the edge.
That seems to have been the equivalent of giving aid and comfort to racists and Nazis and white supremacists and bigots and sexists and homophobes, transgenderphobes, cisgenders, you name it. By claiming that there were nice people on both sides, that seems to have sent everybody over the edge. Not that alone. And, folks, there is no other news today.
For the first time in the history of the EIB Network, outside of a major event like 9/11, this is the — 30 years here, 29-some years, I can’t remember any other day, not even OJ. You know, we went no OJ all the time here. Rodney King, doesn’t matter. There any number of things. I’ve never seen a day where there isn’t anything in the news except this. CBS last night, 100 percent of the CBS Evening News was this, basically Trump’s press conference yesterday, his third press conference on this whole thing in Charlottesville, Virginia.
And it has become clear, as I have observed all of this, that where we are in America culturally right now, is that the Alt-Left, which is alternatively known as Occupy Wall Street — same people that protested at Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore, Maryland. The same people that protested in Oakland, California, at Berkeley. The same people that have been protesting leftist causes my entire life, it’s the same groups, it’s the same people. The bodies may change; I mean people grow older, new people join the movement. There’s nothing new about this leftist movement.
What is new is that apparently we’ve reached the point in American history where they have 100 percent moral authority. They are not capable of racism. That’s the wrong way to put it, because of course they are racists themselves, and they are bigots. What I’m trying to say is that the media and even — heck, folks, it’s a bunch of people on the right now. As far as the popular culture is concerned, the Alt-Left, as just a title I’m giving them to distinguish them from the others, but the militant leftist protesters have been judged now to be free of morality. That’s still not the right way to say it. They are incapable of being immoral.
We are not permitted to say that they’re immoral. We’re not permitted to judge them in any way. They have moral authority. And that’s where we are. And so any criticism of people on the left is going to tie you automatically with the Alt-Right, the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and whoever it is that makes up that group. That must be universally condemned, the same type of people that on the left are immune. We can’t go after them. They are now protected, is probably the best way to describe this.
It’s a challenge today to go through this, not for the reasons that you might think. I’ve never been one to join conventional wisdom. I’ve never been one to join the pack. And I’m not going to join conventional wisdom today just to join conventional wisdom.
The easy thing to do today, the easy thing for anybody to do would be to, without question and without curiosity, just dump all over, not just Trump, but the Republican Party. Because the way this is being played out, it’s the Republican Party that has questions to answer. It’s the Republican that has to have its come-to-Jesus moment over this stuff. Because it is, as it’s being played out here, it’s the Republican Party which has flirted with racism all of these decades. And it’s the Republican Party that’s flirted with bigotry. It’s the Republican Party that must explain itself today.
And I simply, as an almost instinctive thing, reject conventional wisdom. I always have. It’s a personality quirk of mine. And it’s not just in matters of politics.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s what I think is gonna happen here and after I take just a brief amount of time explaining this, we’re gonna then turn back and get into some of the specifics. Many, many teachable moments here. And a lot of eye opening realities that, if you don’t keep things in perspective, it’s gonna depress you tremendously, and that’s what we’re here today to try to prevent.
I think that this current round of whatever this is — and it’s just the latest. This has been going on with these leftist groups for as long as I have been doing this program. I remember back in — this had to be 1989 or maybe 1990. If you’ll please indulge me here for a moment. I want to give you my historical perspective of this, because it’s truly missing on all of this news reporting and coverage.
When the program was new, we started with 56 radio stations, and they were all very small, and we would not survive if we stayed on only those 56. There was nothing wrong with them; it’s just they were not large enough and in big enough cities to sustain what we were trying to do here. So it became imperative to get stations in the top 10, actually top 15 markets to carry the program off the bat. And one such market was Los Angeles.
I remembered whenever we got a new clearance, a new station, one of the things I did was always sit down for an interview with the local newspaper, because they, of course, were totally perplexed and confused. They didn’t know who I was, but they knew this radio show was taking off and that I was some kind of conservative. And even back in 1989 and ’90, being conservative was the same as being a Martian. Being a conservative was the same as being an unknown oddity.
And at the time that we were getting our Los Angeles station, the AIDS protests and riots were going crazy. They were throwing condoms at Cardinal O’Connor in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They were marching all over the Left Coast. They had just come off a number of years of blaming Ronald Reagan for AIDS because he had not said anything about it when he was president. It was the same then as it is today, the same outrage. You get just as mad watching these people as you get mad watching them today.
And back then, I remember sitting and talking to an LA Times reporter about this. She was prepared to write a story of how I was this brute and I was insensitive, all because I’m a conservative, she didn’t know who I was. And I finally asked her, “You want to characterize me this way. What about all of these people that are destroying businesses and conducting protest marches that are damaging and destroying property?”
And her answer to me was, “Well, that’s the only way they can be heard.” As far as she was concerned, they were totally justified. They were leftist protesters. It didn’t matter that they were AIDS related protesters or if they were protesting at the time George H. W. Bush. They were leftist protesters, and, as such, they were thoroughly justified. You could not question them. You could not doubt them. And they were victims.
So they were entitled to do anything they had to do to get noticed. They were entitled, as far as the media’s concerned, to do anything they had to do in order to be heard, to have their grievances addressed. I came from the majority, and, as such, I was automatically the enemy. And I automatically was out of touch. And I automatically didn’t understand.
So I’m sitting here wondering why I’m being pasted, why I’m being ripped to shreds just because I’m a conservative and have a new radio show. And, meanwhile, people are literally damaging property and attacking other people are being given a pass. My point in telling you the story is nothing’s new. It hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse. If anything, the left has now achieved moral authority.
If it’s Black Lives Matter, if it is Occupy Wall Street or whatever manifestation of the left that they exist in today, it’s the same thinking, it’s the same organizers, it’s the same people in many regards. I mean, the people that are showing up here in Charlottesville were probably in Ferguson, and they were in Baltimore, and they will be at the next place. They travel around. Many of them are bought and paid for. But as far as the media is concerned, they have achieved moral authority. They are incapable of violence, for example.
This is maddening. If you allow yourself to get caught up thoroughly in this, you’ll go crazy trying to untangle what appears to be no common sense, what appears to be just inexplicable. How in the world can this group be given an exemption? But they have been, because they’re victims, and because they are helping to advance the anti-conservative agenda that the media and the Democrat Party and all these people happen to support. And so anything that advances that is morally okay, morally superior.
But that’s only one half of it. The other half of it is when otherwise conservative people see this and join it because of a fear of being tainted by the criticism of people on the right — let me explain. We have people who are conservatives. They self-identify, claim they’re conservatives. Others who are Republicans may not be actual conservatives, but they’re pointed out as conservatives.
And then over here you’ve got these Looney Tunes. You’ve got the Klan, which is Democrats, has always been Democrats, but now they somehow get tied to the right wing. You have the Nazis, which are socialists, which is much closer to the Democrat Party than anything you and I believe. You have white supremacists, you have all of those people, and because the media has characterized those people as creatures of the right, there is an element of conservatism scared to death of being identified with them.
And so as to avoid being identified, let’s say you’re a conservative that works at a popular conservative magazine, you’re an editor, you’re a writer, you’re a blogger, and you see this that’s happening in Charlottesville or you see what happened in Ferguson. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as what happened in Baltimore. It’s the same thing. And you see what happened, and you size up what’s happening. And in this case in Charlottesville, we have white supremacists, we have Nazis, we have the Klan.
So you’re a conservative at one of these magazines, and you are not going to run the risk of being identified with these wackos on the right, so what do you do? You cross the line and you side with the people who are condemning them so that you will not be tagged and associated. And in a strict human sense, it’s totally understandable.
But in the process, what happens? There is no renouncement of what’s going on on the left. People who would normally renounce, denounce, criticize correctly what’s going on on the left don’t because they feel the need to join the chorus on the left in condemning that which is said to be extreme right wing.
And so the left continues to get away with no criticism. You look at the media, the media will not tolerate any suggestion that there’s even violence in the Alt-Left. The violence in? That was all on the right, if you ask the media. There wasn’t any violence on the left. The violence on the left happened after the Alt-Right went out after ’em.
It’s not true. The left-wing protesters are in fact the ones who do violence. They destroy things. They start fires. They destroy automobiles. In Ferguson they were destroying private property of people who lived in the neighborhood. They most certainly do violence. They most certainly threaten violence. They lead with it. But today, they’re exempt. You can’t say they are violent. If you do, they will come after you.
By “they” I mean the media, the establishment, whatever you want to call it. They’ll come after you and tar you and feather you and destroy you and lump you in with the extreme so-called wackos on the right. Well, nobody wants that to happen, so they don’t denounce the left. They join the left in open criticism so as to avoid being tainted themselves. So that’s where we are right now.
There’s one person who’s not doing that. Who is that? There’s only one person not doing it. That’d be Donald Trump. You see what’s happening to him. Donald Trump is trying to tell the truth. This is plain as day what happened to him on this. On Saturday, Trump goes out, says what he says about it. Unsatisfactory. Violated conventional wisdom. Trump did not specifically identify the Klan, the white supremacists and the Nazis. And therefore, Trump must be sympathetic to them. A firestorm was created, and the media then demanded that Trump do it again, and this time, call ’em out by name. So Trump did.
Now, somebody in the White House probably was very persuasive in suggesting President Trump do it. I’m sure they watch the media in there, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people there that think that you can accommodate the media. You can’t. We can’t. Those of us on the right cannot accommodate them. We cannot turn them. We cannot make them understand. We cannot ever be seen favorably by them. Trump has learned this.
So he goes out after whatever pressure there was on him in the White House to change his statement, and identify by name Nazis and the white supremacists and the bigots and the Klan and whatever. He goes out and does it, and what’s the media do? “You didn’t mean it,” they say. “You didn’t mean it. You’re only doing this because we pressured you and that means it wasn’t in your heart. So you don’t get any credit from us. You’re just a phony. You don’t mean it!” Trump’s sitting there fuming, ’cause he knew instinctively this is what’s gonna happen.
He’s probably mad at somebody in the White House for steering him this way. So he does the press conference — it happened yesterday — and yesterday’s press conference was Trump erupting over, I think, any number of things, people that made him do things he didn’t want to do in the two previous press conferences. When he says, “Look, I went out there before we knew all the facts; then I went out there and I mentioned the names, and you people say I get no credit for that.”
So yesterday’s press conference was probably Trump as Trump criticizing both sides, but he stepped in it when he said, “There are fine people on both sides.” That’s all it took. I dare say that this hysteria that’s taking place in the media, both on the left and on the right, is rooted in Trump saying, “There are fine people on both sides,” because there aren’t fine people in the Nazis, and there aren’t fine people in the white supremacists, and there aren’t fine people in the Klan.
Well, by the same token, there aren’t a lot of fine people in these various movements that exist on the left. But you can’t say that. Trump was probably trying to be accommodating, and he was trying to identify both sides as being somewhat guilty and somewhat responsible. But because he said, “There are fine people on both sides,” that is what blew this all up and provided the ammo for the hysteria that is now perceived to be legitimate. Now, how long is this gonna go? How long is this episode gonna last? Some people think this is it. This isn’t gonna blow over. This is the worst it’s been.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/08/16/americas-anchorman-analyzes-the-insane-degree-of-anger-at-donald-trump/
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