I Dread These Days Because the Left’s Attacks Are Always the Same

RUSH: I have been dreading this today like I dread every such day, but I’m looking at media and I get the impression that there are some that are actually looking forward to this or having — I don’t want to say fun with it, but I get the impression that there are a lot of people really energized by this, and that, of course, is because they think it’s going to help them mobilize their political agenda. And I’m just sick of it.

I have to tell you, I’m just sick of it. I’m sick every time one of these happens. I mean, the first time of any note was, you know, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing. I wake up, Bill Clinton is blaming me. And from that point on and probably prior to that, from that point on, every time one of these things happens, what do we do? We hear the initial report and we’re just devastated. We hate it. We hate that this is happening to our country.

Then the next thing that happens is we have to hear that we, because of what we believe, because of our religious values, our political values, that we’re responsible for it. So that begins a cycle of people either cross-blaming or defending themselves. And it’s just a never-ending cycle that does not change. And, as such, we never even get close to the root of this, we never get close to it.

We never get close to explaining it, to understanding it. It just is a repeating cycle here that, at the end of it, there’s just ongoing heartbreak added to frustration. The first thing that happens, you know Trump’s gonna get blamed, and Trump gets blamed. I’m convinced that if they could, they would stop Trump’s rallies.

If you read certain tweets and certain messages today, the left is portraying Trump’s rallies as white supremacist rallies where these kinds of shooters are getting this idea to go ahead and do it, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth! There is no white supremacy movement here that is in any way representative of even a tiny minority of the American people. And yet the media, the Democrats try to portray white supremacy as the base of the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s support.

What are you supposed to do with this? Well, you have to refute it, because they’re out there trying to make the case and they’re trying to make the case Trump’s rallies — that’s gonna be coming up. You watch, somebody’s gonna suggest Trump’s rallies not be allowed to happen now because that’s where all this is coming from. Never mind the fact that if you look at the manifesto of the shooter in Dayton you find a total deranged leftist progressive. But I don’t even want to use that.

It’s gotten very frustrating to have to join the pattern on all this. But it’s almost a must. It’s almost a must because of the oppressive — I’ll give you an example. I don’t want to play the sound bite yet. I’m not there yet. But yesterday Mick Mulvaney was on Meet the Press with F. Chuck Todd. I’m just looking for the number here on the roster because I just want to read his question to you.

Here’s Chuck Todd’s question to Mick Mulvaney. “We’ve heard Beto O’Rourke say that the president’s rhetoric is fueling more hate in this country, the president has used, as you well know, words like ‘invasion’ to talk about illegal immigrants. Isn’t this kind of rhetoric and especially in light of what we’ve just seen, isn’t it dangerous?”

So the assumption is that Trump is responsible for this, and Mulvaney, the chief of staff, is there having to refute it, which he did greatly. He did exceedingly well. But it’s just the presumption here that everybody starts, these people like it. They like this for the opportunity it gives them to take another slash and dash at Donald Trump.

And I think that’s what really irritates me more than anything about this is that some people seem to look at this as a political opportunity and are using it for everything they’ve got. Then we have these massive numbers of Democrats demanding that Congress be called back to pass something? It almost reaches an hysteria.

So there we have once again another Democrat tenant, that government must do something, that government is the only institute that can do anything about it, we’ve got to have legislation, we’ve got to have members of Congress come back. There is nothing these people can do that will fix this. There isn’t anything an active legislation is gonna do. There isn’t any gun control legislation that’s gonna address this.

We have a systemic cultural problem, and not a single piece of legislation will make a damn bit of difference in this. And everybody involved in it knows it. It’s just that the left will do anything, will take the opportunity, the occasion of anything to advance their political agenda, which requires as, point number one, the constant expansion and growth of government.

Is there anything we’ve learned from the past few days of mass shootings? Well, we’ve learned that dangerously unstable, mentally ill people act dangerously, mentally ill-like and unstable. So if we know that we have some dangerously unstable, mentally ill people, if we know this, what is being done at the local level to identify them and stop them?

After the school shooting in Florida we had this. After the movie shooting, it’s the same cycle. It just never ends with nobody even seeming seriously interested in getting to the bottom of this. Like is there a common theme? In all of these shootings, can you find a common theme?

Well, you can’t find a common political theme because the shooters are all over the place — and have you noticed, by the way, that more and more of these shooters have manifestos? Do you know who the first mass murderer was to have a manifesto? (interruption) Well, outside… (interruption) Well, yeah. I’m not talking about Hitler and Stalin, these guys. (interruption) Yeah, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. He had a manifesto. The New York Times published the thing.

So these people that have serious derangement problems have these manifestos. The media prints them. The media’s eager to get their hands on them. But their manifestos are all over the political board. There’s not a common ideological foundation to all of these people. They’re all over the board. And it isn’t guns. I don’t need to repeat the trope here. Trump did it today in his remarks. He said, “The guy pulls the trigger, not the gun. The gun doesn’t shoot itself,” which is perfectly logical, it’s unassailable. And yet Trump is under assault for not doing more to control guns and…

The gun show loophole? What in the world are we talking about? All this talk of closing the gun show loophole? It’s nothing more than the left seeking again to advance their putrid ideology on the backs of a bunch of just — unfortunately — dead people. I just hate it, folks! I have to… I hate it! I hate when these people try this, and they do it at every turn. Trump blamed video games, the internet, social media. I think there’s something to the internet angle of this, but not video games and the like.

I addressed it a little bit last week. When we were talking about Russia collusion and the absence of it, I said, “The real collusion that worries me is Google. Google and Facebook.” When the people that run… Let me put it this way: When the people that run Google and Facebook have the power to manipulate and motivate voters more than elected leaders can do, then we have a problem (and we’re getting there) because that means elected leaders are gonna become subservient to the people that run Google and Facebook.

If Google and Facebook have a better opportunity and are better at mobilizing people, turning them into action — and this (shootings) are action. If these social media titans have the ability to manipulate and to motivate… And Google is out saying that they are going to do everything they can to see to it that Trump loses in 2020. Google is in bed with the ChiComs. The ChiComs are telling Google what they can and can’t do in their search results, and Google is saying, “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. What else do you want us to do?”

In a protracted battle against the U.S. and the ChiComs, Google has sided with the ChiComs. But the real point is that when social media people and leaders — CEOs, executives — end up having more perceived power than elected officials in our representative republic, then we have a problem, because that means elected officials are gonna be subordinate, ’cause everybody reacts and responds to power. I’m gonna develop this more as the program unfolds. I’m just setting the table here now with some organized, random thoughts.

But as I examine these shootings in the aftermath and as I learn about the people that do them, there’s one thing that does strike me that there may be in common here, and it goes back to a fear that I have often expressed at the outset of the growth of social media. And that expressed fear was the majority of a population easily accepting that their lives are miserable because of what they’re reading about how other lives are lived. This began as a quest for fame, a quest for likes, a quest for retweets — any example of massive feedback — so that you can become a star, so that you can become famous.

And the quest for fame that I saw was one of the first things that raised red flags for me because I have achieved fame, and it’s not what people think that it is, especially people that have had no experience with it and have no understanding of it. It isn’t what Entertainment Tonight makes it look like. It isn’t what all of these entertainment-oriented podcasts, TV shows and the like make fame look like. It’s not the red carpet life. But despite even that, if all these people are on social media and everybody is tweeting and Instagramming and Facebooking how exciting their lives are — and they’re lying about it.

Other people are reading about it. Their lives aren’t nearly as exciting. So they get feelings of… Some of them. Not everybody. But some get feelings of inferiority, of irrelevance. They’re living meaningless lives while it seems everybody else is having a blast and having important things happen to them. When in fact, everybody’s lying about their lives on social media, or practically everybody. And what this has… My concern was that the quest for all of these surface achievements like the pursuit and acquisition of fame — and, believe me, we have it now.

We have people that nobody knows who think that they are nationally famous ’cause they’ve got a YouTube show with X-number of followers. But when they leave and go outside the universe of YouTube, nobody knows who they are, and they encounter that, and that’s a shock. They walk out thinking everybody’s gonna know who they are because YouTube’s made ’em a star, and nobody knows who they are. There’s that, and then there’s the people that never even acquire it but pursue it.

I think all this ultimately leads to the one thing that some of these shooters — that these shooters — may have in common (it’s still an open question) and that is isolation. If you add in the fact that there are busted-up families, redefinition of what a family is, ongoing arguments over what’s normal and what isn’t normal, and then you throw in the daily absorption on social media of how much fun everybody else is having and how much travel everybody else is doing, how many exciting things and places other people are doing, measured against your own boring, nonconsequential, inconsequential life, what are you gonna end up feeling?

Especially if you have an underlying mental illness to begin with. Now, granted, I’m not talking about everybody. But to a certain extent this does affect people. It’s like, in a way, never getting out of high school and having the symptoms of high school be ongoing and deepen as life goes on. Rather than leaving high school behind and all of the pain — the growing pains of high school — they stay with you and they intensify. It leads to social isolation, and then they feel like there’s no place for them. Social, societal rejection.

You used to be able to turn to religion to find meaning and purpose, but that’s kind of been blown to smithereens now as people have mocked and made fun of that. So the breakdown of the family and the redefinition of what is a family and the idea that, “Well, you don’t really need a mom and a dad. That’s old-fashioned. That’s quaint. We move on.” I think there are certain things human beings need that thousands of years of societal evolution have accommodated. And in the last number of years, many of those foundational things have been blown up, distorted or destroyed.

I think it’s led to a lot of people feeling unanchored, desiring to get noticed, to be noticed, desiring to be somebody and then noticing how it happens. How is it done? How do you get famous? How do you get noticed? How do you get everybody talking about you? And in none of this that I’m talking about is there a dominant political ideology. Now, we could enter that into this equation, and it could be a factor that adds on to some of these other things to make it even worse.

But if all of this that I’ve described is compounded by mental illness and then drugs, and nobody knowing or responding to what the shrinks all say are desperate cries for help, then eventually they’re gonna go out and get the attention they want. They’re gonna go out and do something that gets them noticed. And they know that when that happens, there’s gonna be days and days of coverage of it — and they are gonna be the focus, which is what they’ve always wanted since they first logged into Facebook or Twitter or wherever.

RUSH: I think we’ve got cultural rot, folks. We’ve lost social moorings. There aren’t any guardrails — or they are very, very wide now, allowing for a wide berth on the highway of right and wrong. I still believe and I have believed for a long time that you just cannot have abortion — the killing of over a million babies a year — and have that not have some impact on the popular perception of the sanctity of life. I don’t know to what degree it plays a role, but it has to play, in my estimation, a significant role. And what about social media influence?

RUSH: Let me ask a question. Just to ponder a thought. What’s normal? How do we define normal? I mean, you might go to the dictionary and you might look up the word and find a definition for it. But how do you define it? What is normal? And how did normal come to be?

To me, this is a question at the root of our cultural and societal desecration, degradation, corruption, what have you. For example, is it normal what we in say 1960, 1980, any time in the past or today — well, not today. That’s the point. Is normal the result of centuries of human behavior, societal evolution, in free societies? Is what’s normal defined by how a majority of human beings have chosen to organize themselves for the best and betterment of all?

For example, who decided that marriage was between a man and woman? Well, the Bible of course, religion, descends from there, and marriages, many of them take place in the eyes of God. But aside from that, it wasn’t just because it was decreed. It worked. Years and years, decades, centuries and centuries marriage was a specific thing.

Was that because people were discriminating? Was it because people were bigoted? Was it because people were mean? Was it because people were exclusionary? Was it because people wanted to humiliate and embarrass others? I contend it’s none of that. It’s just the best way for men and women to live together who especially are going to have kids — you know, the old nuclear family thing.

Now, I’m not trying to erase the biblical and religious foundation of this thing, of this stuff. But you have to understand there are a lot of people that believe in marriage that are not Christian, they don’t have a Judeo-Christian view of things, so I’m trying to expand it just beyond that. My point is that whatever we have decided or defined as normal has not been because some powerful government decreed that it was or some legislative body or court decreed that it was, but rather human behavior determined what’s normal.

And I don’t mean to focus on marriage, but marriage is one of the things now where it’s no longer what it used to be. It’s been blown to smithereens in some people’s view. In other people’s view it’s been expanded, and it’s now not exclusionary, and it’s not discriminatory. But were these previous things discriminatory?

Was the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman, was that designed to discriminate against people who didn’t know whether they were men or women? Or discriminate against people who love people of the same sex? No! Discrimination nothing to do with it. It had to do with that which seemed to make the most sense to everybody because of a time and true, time-honored, tested way of living.

Now, all of those things that used to be considered normal really bothered a lot of people who didn’t think they fit in with it. And so thought it was exclusionary. They thought it was discriminatory. They thought the normal were a bunch of superiorists and intolerant people who didn’t want to let them be normal, and they didn’t like thinking they were abnormal, so they began a quest to have the way they lived and wanted to live to also be declared normal, and this led to an eruption.

Now, nobody put it in these terms. Nobody dared talk about normal and abnormal because that itself implied discrimination, superiority, and so forth. But I’ll tell you that everybody thought about it in those terms. And it’s not just in marriage. It’s in any number of societal arrangements that normal, what was normal for God knows how long has been blown to smithereens now. And now we don’t know what’s normal.

You have to navigate all this on defense every day of your life. You’ve gotta navigate all of these new social structures that have now been infused with angry political motivations and objectives. It’s led the people who have always defined normal a certain way afraid to even say so and in many quays afraid to even live so. And now the things that were always considered abnormal are now celebrated, and the acceptance of the abnormal is now said to be enlightened.

And so I think there are people’s heads spinning all over this country who are trying to fit in, try not to be discriminatory, but they still think that a lot of what’s going on is destructive not based on politics and not based on ideology; based on all of those centuries of human living that ended up devising, evolving mechanisms, institutions whereby people lived and arranged themselves in ways to promote the betterment for everybody.

But obviously there were those left out in those arrangements. And they have now decided “to hell with that.” They have now said that those previous arrangements, these institutions which I believe evolved for better purposes with better instincts, with no discrimination or intimidation intended whatsoever — people getting married decades ago were not doing it smiling that other people couldn’t. It didn’t matter. It’s just that’s the next phase of your life. You met somebody, you fall in love, you get married, you have kids. A lot of people did it because it was rote. It was the next thing to do. It was a pattern.

But it wasn’t done to exclude. It wasn’t done with discrimination in mind. It wasn’t done with mean-spiritedness. But now with the explosion of what used to be normal to accommodate all those things in the past that weren’t, now everybody’s being accused of discriminating or being bigoted in their adherence to these previous institutions. And this has led to a culture war. I’m really giving just the basics here. It’s led to a culture war that we have been waging for 25 or 30 years or maybe longer, and it shows no signs of abating or getting worse. And it’s being exacerbated by many factors.

And as these rapid, massive changes occur, there are some who aren’t able to adapt, who aren’t able to peacefully coexist with it. They end up feeling isolated, they end up feeling rejected, just their heads are spinning. Now, all around them because of social media, they think everybody else is just having a ball, is just having a blast. Hell, people think that anyway without social media.

You add social media to it where a lot of people go on these social sites and lie about what a great time they’re having every day and every night, and it adds up to this one thing I think all these shooters have in common: that’s rejection. Invisibility. They don’t like it. They don’t like being rejected. They don’t like the perception of being rejected, and they certainly don’t like being invisible. But everybody gets rejected. It’s a way of life. Everyone’s rejected, rejected countless times a week. You’re rejected applying for a job.

Remember Woody Allen’s great quote: The only difference in the old days and the days when he had a lot of money was being rejected by a higher class of woman. Everybody gets rejected by somebody, someday, everywhere. Some people develop coping mechanisms, it becomes part of life, you deal with it, you mature, and you move on. Others haven’t.

Then in all of this, let’s bring in the political opportunists who — rather than try to really understand this — just want to come in here and blame every political opponent that they would like to wipe out, and see incidents like this as a mechanism that would allow them to do so. And so nothing ever, ever gets done. We talk all around the surface, the edges of this thing, like gun control, gun show loophole, all this meaningful, irrelevant stuff. Now, social media. What about social media’s influence in all of this?

Well, we are told by the people — the political opportunists — here that it is the words of Donald Trump (or in 1995, my words) or the words of some Republican or conservative that is inspiring these people to go get guns. “So we need to have control on these words! We need to be able to shut down Donald Trump. We need to be able to shut down Donald Trump’s rallies. We need to shut down Fox News. We need to shut down talk radio,” blah, blah. It goes on. But aren’t the very same people advocating for the censorship of those who say things they don’t like, using the same techniques they decry?

Are these people not lying through their teeth? You tell me that all of these years of the leftists in this country telling anybody who will listen that there isn’t gonna be a habitable planet in 20 years, 10 years, 15…? You think that doesn’t affect people? You think that doesn’t scare the hell out of young people, that the planet’s gonna be destroyed, the climate is gonna be destroyed? These people have been at this for 30 years. They have been trying to scare people into voting Democrat for I don’t know how long, and it got to such extremes that now these people really do believe that there will not be a habitable planet in, whatever, 12 years, 20, 25, 50, you name it.

I maintain that to somebody who’s really unmoored and not attached and not secure, that can scare the ever-living hell out of them — and I know people who are deathly afraid! They are young people, and they’re running around scared. They’ve bought into this and they’re scared to death. Now, what’s the difference? Why are they leftists allowed to openly scare the bejeezus out of people with one lie after another? Why is that not considered as incendiary? Why is it not considered that that could be responsible?

If we’re gonna talk about the words and the phrases and the things that people hear that could be motivating them to go out and mass kill, what about things like that? Why does the left get total immunity on this? This is why I keep emphasizing what we conservatives believe. We love everybody. We want the best for everybody. We believe in the beauty of human potential in a free society like the United States of America, and the only thing we’re trying to frighten people of is liberalism, which is something that can be voted out.

We’re not trying to scare people to the point that if they don’t do what we want them to do, they’re going to die. That’s the special province of the left. Take a look at all the things the left says are gonna kill people. Every corporation. Right now, the pharmaceuticals and the health department or the health agency company. Oh! Big Oil. Oh, yes! We gotta shut down coal. Coal is gonna kill the planet. I’m telling you, folks, this stuff has to have an impact on the already very fragilely balanced — and in the case of the Dayton shooter, it looks like it did.

RUSH: Still have lots to see here, folks. I have barely scratched the surface. I’ve got all kinds audio sound bites. I had some great stuff today ready to go before the two shootings happened. So we’ll have to probably broom those for a while. Maybe later today, certainly later in this week. But this is just… You know, I don’t want to mislead anyone. This just depresses me, I can’t tell you how much, that this happens in our country. And that the same aftermath, the same predictable political aftermath happens. We have so politicized everything here to our detriment.

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