TODD: Rush guided us through times of tumult, and we — myself — as one guest host, are guiding us into this era as we use Rush’s wisdom and bravery and decision to go engage in tough decisions and tough conversations to talk about what’s happening today. There is… Do you guys know what “woke supremacy” is? I love this phraseology from Senator Tim Scott, who…

What was it the Democrats called him? A token? Oh, sorry. No they said his legislation was token legislation. Did they use the filibuster to stop his legislation, this man who happens to be black and a Republican, speaks about woke supremacy — and I’ve been looking at this from a perspective of mental energy. We have finite mental energy.

So when we spend a lot of time, let’s say, in mental energy worrying about the future, that’s bandwidth from a brain-processing perspective that we can’t apply elsewhere — let’s say to dealing with today’s problems. It is emotional energy. It draws from our reserves of emotional energy, draws down on our patience and our kindness when we’re spending our time worrying about the future.

That’s one example. One thing, I think, that the left and the party — when I say “the party,” I expand the left beyond Democrats, and I include technocrats like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and I include opportunists like Tony Fauci. Because they’re all clearly working towards a goal of control for the party — ad crony capitalists, like some of the companies that are just married to government.

One of the things I think they’re really good at is flooding the mental zone. So they flood people with such a large array of absurdities. You can study every bit of data, for instance, on mask usage and come up with one conclusion: It has not stopped or saved a life. Saved a life, it’s one-tenth of 1% maybe. Maybe.

Lockdowns have taken more lives, and yet it’s such mental energy to fight against that. Now, what was Rush’s model of mental energy? Stay to the principles. If you stay to the principles, then you don’t have to have to have the mental energy of going back and changing and morphing your principles. With wokeism, it’s an assault on everything.

Racism is not racism if it’s the right racism. Harvard making it nearly impossible for Asians to get into Harvard. That’s not racist, even though they have a personality test, basically a personality test at Harvard — kind of a likability test as it’s been described by lawyers. Although the people doing the applications, reviewing them, never meet the Asian people.

They’re determining their likability from a piece of paper or a submission online. But that’s not racism, and they admit effectively, “Yeah, we’re trying to stop Asians from getting in. We’ve got too many Asians. But that racism is good!” They’re teaching racism, teaching racism, saying that if you’re white, you are racist and there’s nothing you can do about it because it’s in your DNA.

That’s racist, but it’s such mental energy to say, “Oh, now I need to fight that. So let’s see. I’m fighting wokeism on this front and that front, and I’m fighting it on the gender front, and I’m fighting it on the COVID front,” and wokeism and COVID-19 works like this: We’re supposed to ignore Nancy Pelosi not wearing a mask when we are told that we have to wear masks at all times.

We’re supposed to ignore the changing, ever-changing COVID rules that always seem to advantage the elites or the clients of the elites. We’re supposed to ignore these things. In Seattle and in other, like, really woke cities there are separate trainings for race, literally in government offices. White people attend one training; black people attend another.

Black people are literally taught that they are victimized to this day by systems… I want to get to that in a second. White people are taught they are victimizing people. Systems. Let’s say that the banking system is racist. Let’s say that it is. I’m not saying it is. It was. Redlining was racist. That happened. That’s real. But let’s say that the banking system is racist.

Does the banking system run itself? Is it a self-aware computer system? No. It requires people. But when the woke crowd says it’s systemic, then we don’t have to name the people — and “woke supremacy” means that the new theory of race (which is “racism is good if it’s good racism”) is making certain people supreme to others.

Absolute racism! Tim Scott just nails that. Let’s talk to Rebecca in Georgetown, Texas. Rebecca, you’re on the Rush Limbaugh program. Todd Herman your guide today. Welcome, Rebecca.

CALLER: Hi. Thank you very much. I would like to extend my most sincere comfort and condolences to the Limbaugh family. I’m a nurse, and I work with patients with terminal diagnoses, and it’s just so hard when it’s that someone who’s so close to you. So the Limbaugh family and our listening family as well, my deepest sympathies.

TODD: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. You wanted to talk about systemic racism. We got about a minute on that.

CALLER: Yeah. If you could explain to me what they mean when they say “dismantle the systemic racism,” and can’t we do that without substituting another group in place of the community which is now the focus of said discrimination?

TODD: What they mean depends on who they are. I think what the instructors of this mean is everything is racist, and if you go to the Black Lives Matter, Incorporated, paperwork in their website, what they want is we need to dismantle the family. And if you go talk to Jason Riley — a black man who wrote the book Please Stop Helping Us — the destruction of the black family, the intact black family through the Democrats’ welfare scheme is probably what destroyed black society.

That was systemic. Was it intended to be racist? We don’t know. It had that result. But they’ve not changed things like that. So I think if we were really to dismantle systemic racism, we’d have to go and say, “Wait a minute. Where are maybe even unintentionally racist things, like telling black kids, ‘You can’t make it’?” Like exploding the fact that, yeah, sometimes “unarmed black people” doesn’t necessarily mean “undangerous” are killed by cops?

The numbers are monumentally smaller than what people been led to believe. Democrats on average think it was 10,000 unarmed black men killed in 2019. The number was 27. So an honest conversation about this is one thing. The way the left wants to have it is another. It’s a good topic and we’ll get further into that later in the show. Rebecca, I appreciate you calling today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: Rush admired a number of African-American scholars like the late Walter Williams (who was a guest host on this program, part of the EIB family), the economist Thomas Sowell, and author Shelby Steele who Rush cited often. I want to revisit a passage here from 2017.

RUSH: I mentioned Shelby Steele. I’ve quoted him often. He is a scholar at the Hoover Institute on the campus at Stanford. He is African-American, a very brilliant man, and — very much to our benefit — a conservative. One of the most recent pieces of his that I’ve come across is headlined: “The Perils of Political Correctness.” And here’s how he begins this piece: “Societies have many of the qualities individuals have. America is a particularly great society. There’s been no country like this ever before in all of human history.

“America is a particularly great society. There’s been no country like this ever before in all of human history. And all of the sins that America has committed in its past are nothing that’s new. Many countries around the world had slavery and so forth,” in many places. The U.S. never gets any credit for eliminating it, for defeating it, for wiping it out. You ever ask yourself why that is? Never!

Like I say, folks, I haven’t seen the Democrats this unhinged since Lincoln freed the slaves, as a matter of fact. The Democrats are fit to be tied back when that happened. Well, they were the plantation owners. You know John Lewis? John Lewis, the dogs were set upon and the fire hoses when they are marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. You know who was behind the dogs and the fire hoses?

Democrats!

I gotta rein it in here. I know I scare 24-year-old women, to whom passion is a very frightening thing. Bull Connor — who beat countless protesters — George Wallace, Lester Maddox. All these universities who had closed doors were in states run by Democrat governors. The Democrats were the segregationists. The KKK was the military arm of the Democrat Party back then.

John Lewis was “beat upside the head” (his words) by Democrats, not Republicans, not people like Donald Trump. He was beat upside the head and violence was committed against him and the other marchers by Democrats. We defeated slavery! We eliminated it. It still exists in many places (including in the Middle East, ladies and gentlemen).

Anyway, writes Mr. Steele, “Nevertheless, [having grown] up during the Civil Rights Era, America was brought to account for the sin of slavery, for its mistreatment of women, for all of these things that white supremacy, in a sense, fostered. … Still, we all live with the knowledge of this past tragedy and of the hypocrisy of it. I think that knowledge has generated in American life this need to be redemptive, to prove that we are not like that anymore. And so how do you show yourself to be redemptive?”

See, this is what I was trying to drill down, dig down deep and try to explain Democrat behavior. And that is they’re unable to forget that there was slavery in our past 200 years ago, and they think we still need redemption. Even though there isn’t slavery now and hasn’t been for hundreds of years, they are convinced that we still need to be redemptive, that we still need to prove that we aren’t like that anymore. “So,” Mr. Steele says, “how do you show yourself to be redemptive?”

“You keep deferring to those groups that are associated with that victimization and you keep trying to give them things and, in a sense, use them as a vehicle for America’s redemption.” This is what I spotted when I ran into so many sportswriters so, so almost sympathetic. You know, a black person would get the job as a manager of a baseball team or a coach, and they would think it was one of the greatest achievements in their lives, and they would write pieces and profiles, “Whoa, this is just…”

I’d ask, “What’s the big deal?” I mean, not that I was opposed it. Don’t misunderstand. I’m trying to understand why they are having a cow over it. And this explains it. They’re still so imbued with guilt over something they didn’t even do, and they are then so obsessed with the need to show people that they have no ties to any of that victimization that happened in the past, that they never were approving of slavery, and they still to this day aren’t.

So what they do is defer — constantly defer — to the groups associated with the victimization and then keep giving them things. And the giving them things can be inclusive of never criticizing them, putting them on pedestals, allowing them to be and say and do whatever they want because they’ve got the right to because they come from something that happened 200 years ago.

And then this: “One of the points that I feel very strongly about,” writes Mr. Steele, “coming as a black [man], is that the deference that America has shown [black Americans] since the ’60s with the War on Poverty and the Great Society and welfare, these deferential policies that defer to our history of victimization now victimize us more than racism did.”

Let that sink in. Let me read that again: All of the great things that American has done for African-Americans “since the ’60s with the War on Poverty and the Great Society and welfare, these deferential policies that defer to our history [as blacks] of victimization now victimize us more than racism did,” and it does!

It not just victimizes, it stigmatizes. It’s “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s the presumption that because there is this thing that happened to African-Americans 200 years ago, it makes it today impossible for them to ever be full-fledged, because they’ve got so many strikes against them.

So it’s the low expectations, the constant victimization, the stigmatization that they can’t do anything without the help of liberals — and so we need these programs. And Mr. Steele is saying this is not helping us. This is not helping African-Americans or any other minority. It’s continuing to perpetuate the idea that we’re prisoners of American society in general. Not plantation owners anymore, but just the country itself. And we can’t escape this penalty box we’re in without the help of liberals, government programs, or what have you.

He says, “I grew up in segregation. I know exactly what it’s like. And I had a more positive attitude toward America than many blacks do today who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action.” He says he was living during the days of segregation; he had a better outlook on his life than blacks today do after affirmative action. He says, “I think that deference has become a very corrupting influence on the people that it tries to help.

“It’s honorable that it wants to help these people, but they never ask the people to be responsible for their own transformation and uplift and that’s the great tragedy of deference and political correctness,” and there again is “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” He’s admitting it here.

All of this assistance, whatever it is, affirmative action, Great Society, War on Poverty — or the way John Lewis and others are allowed to be, do, say whatever they want — no matter how crazy it is, how wrong it is — because of something that happened to them that was horrible 50 years ago.

He says, we are not asking the beneficiaries of all this political correctness or all these programs to step up and “be responsible for their own transformation.” Well, the reason that is, is because the left really doesn’t believe it’s possible. This is the problem. That’s “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The left does not believe that there can actually be progress for blacks in America. When there is — when you come across a Clarence Thomas — what do they do to him? Shelby Steele gets the same treatment Clarence Thomas has gotten. When there are blacks who have escaped the plantation of affirmative action and liberal assistance programs, what does the left do to them?

It calls them Uncle Toms, attempts to deny them anything they’ve achieved, claims that they have betrayed their people. They have betrayed the neighborhood. They have betrayed and are no longer down for the struggle. They’re not allowed to escape it! This is the key. There still are plantation owners; they are Democrats.

They are left-wing liberals, and they are demanding that victims of slavery continue to act like it’s still happening today so that the left can get credit for caring and whatever else they want — for supposedly trying to help. He’s nailed it here. Anyway, this piece by Shelby Steele goes on. He says, “As I said in a recent Wall Street Journal article, political correctness is just the codification of deference…

“As blacks, we live in a society that keeps trying now to help us and to redeem itself through us,” and that’s exactly right. These leftists are trying to make themselves feel like better people. They’re better than you, better than me. They’re good people because they understand the plight and the suffering, and at least they’re trying to do something about it, which they never accomplish.

This never-ending effort to help blacks redeem themselves “just pushes us into a symbiotic relationship with white America. We become their poster boy for redemption… It’s now begun to hurt the fabric of American life.” Shelby Steele on the Perils of Political Correctness.

TODD: Let’s compare the Maha, thoughts expressed that way to Joe Biden. “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!” I’d say Rush nailed it.