BRETT: So overhanging all of what it is that we are facing in this country today is the continuing fight against the covid-19 virus, right, which has been ravaging — or is not ravaging now, but at one point was ravaging — the United States of America. We have seemed to have gotten much more of a handle on it at least at this point as people are getting vaccines.

We’re getting permission to walk around outside without masks on if we’re vaccinated and spending time with people who are also vaccinated. I mean, that is the ultimate punch line of the last number of days, the idea that the CDC comes out and tells everybody, “You’re allowed now to go outside without a mask as long as you’re vaccinated and those around you are vaccinated.”

The vast majority of people that I know, that I’ve been around didn’t even know there was a federal mask mandate on being outside. But the CDC has listed it. It’s been described by the people at the New York Post as the CDC’s “reign of error,” giving you mixed messaging, telling you all sorts of different things emerging in a given point. “Officials are offering mixed messages about masks.

“In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, before embracing them as a simple but effective tool for slowing the spread of covid-19…” That’s what the New York Times defines this as. Well, Rush talking about covid which would ultimately have a tremendous impact on our economy and our spending and our election, Rush talked about covid and the power of positive thinking in this way.

RUSH: The case fatality rate, again, how many people have tested positive, whatever number that is, versus how many are dying. And that gives you the morbidity rate. As far as I’m concerned, personally and being interested in it, that latter way would be of more relevance to me. ‘Cause if you don’t get covid-19, then the odds of dying from it are pretty slim. So what does it matter what percentage of the population? But if you do get it, okay, now we’re talking. Now what are the odds of survival?

Well, that’s what you can calculate with the case fatality rate. And that’s what Trump said. So these guys, “Well, he has a different way of thinking. Trump has this really curious thing called positive thinking. It’s a philosophy, the idea that you say something and you believe it and it happens.”

I’m telling you, folks, the disconnect between, say, people under 40 and everybody else in terms of traditional, human philosophy, American values, it is stunning. No, no, no, I’m not naive. I’ve known all kinds of people make fun of positive thinking. Don’t misunderstand. If it happens in a specific personal way, not an overall rebuke of the effort or of the mind-set.

Have these people never listened to professional athletes talk about how they go about their jobs? Have you ever listened to people that play golf? Folks, you cannot be a PGA tournament champion without the ability to think positive and to banish, you not only have to do that, you have to banish negative thoughts about yourself and your ability as often as you can. If you can’t do that, you’re never gonna win. If you get caught up in the “I can’ts” or the “I am horrible, I can’t play this game,” if you get caught up in that, you’re cooked, you’re done, you’re toast.

How many of you have seen Tiger Woods didn’t make the cut in the post-round interview talk about how well he thinks he’s playing, just didn’t make enough puts or just, you know, wasn’t quite good enough off the tee. You never hear these guys saying that they suck. Never. And all professional athletes, I mean, the true champions — and there are very few of those — all of them are the same way when it comes to the notion of positive thinking.

In fact, I would venture so far as to say that most successful people have a modicum or a portion of their existence that is devoted to positive thinking, that they can do it, that they are good. You can’t otherwise achieve great heights if you are obsessed with negativism, particularly about yourself. And here’s another thing. How many of you have encountered people who are just constantly negative all the time about themselves and about you and about this — you don’t want any part of ’em.

You don’t want to hang around them. It’s why I’ve always said to people who ask me advice questions on life, the first thing I, if you like radio, I said, “Whatever you do, do not hang around with people who failed at it. They are a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere. Do not hang around ’em. They don’t want you to succeed because they didn’t.”

And this goes for anybody, in any endeavor, whatever you want to do, make sure you find the people who’ve succeeded at it. If you’re gonna try to learn something from somebody, if you’re gonna try to be inspired or motivated, do not talk to people who failed, ultimately failed. If you want to talk to people who have succeeded, who experience failure along the way and how they dealt with it, fine. But you want to find the people who have succeeded, and that’s whose brains you want to pick.

And what is that? That’s positive thinking. That’s can-do, the old can-do spirit. And the idea that this is some kind of foreign, oddball, weird philosophy that is only useful to salesmen and reality TV stars? No wonder the media’s as devoted to negativism as they are. No wonder these people crash and burn every day. No wonder their lives are dominated by failure, catastrophe, chaos, and so forth. They thrive in it.

But I just want to remind you one more time about the media and their purpose here. They know that if realism, if a mature, realism of the assessment of where we are as a nation in regard to the economy and covid-19, if reality replaces panic, then they, the Democrats and the media, are doomed. If we learn to live with it like we have with the flu, that’d be the worst thing possible for them.

And again, the flu is far more prevalent out there. It hospitalizes more, it infects more, it kills more, in raw numbers. And yet we’ve learned to deal with it. We’ve never shut down the country because of it. And if we learn to live with covid-19, which we’re gonna have to, by the way. We can’t stay sequestered for the rest of our life. We can’t stay quarantined. We’re gonna have to learn to live with it. This another thing Trump was pointing out. Anyway, to me that’s all nothing more than common-sense reality. And the idea that all of that is the essential equivalent of a foreign language to people under 40, whew. What an eye-opener.

BRETT: He is so right, and I can tell you this personally. He is so right. Nobody would go out there and buy a book called Don’t Even Bother. That’s how some people are just wired, right? Don’t even bother. Or go to the website DontEvenBother.com.” I don’t even know if that’s a real website, but Don’t Even Bother.

And Rush talking about being around people who have been successful at things and specifically when he’s talking about don’t hang around would people who haven’t been successful in radio if you want to be in radio? I can tell you firsthand that he lived those words and has been a motivation for so many people in every walk of life, and that is what is so cool. That is what is so cool about having known him the way I did and the enduring impact on all of our lives. It is…

It’s an incredible thing.

He really unpacked the mystery there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Question this hour is why would you lay in a hammock when the government is giving you a souped-up La-Z-Boy? Oh, the world of restaurants and dining establishments. You know, restaurant owners are reopening their restaurants, but do you know what’s missing? The staff. Many of them are getting $600 or $700 a week from their state unemployment office and another $300 from the federal government — all of that post-tax money.

It’s all government money one way or another, but at $1,000 a week, who wants to go back and wash dishes, cook food, wait on tables when you can collect the cash and stay at home? When this whole shutdown started — when everyone from elected officials to billionaires suggesting restaurants shut down and stay shut down — an awfully large number of small business owners were involved here, all of them are affected.

Rush had fun at the expense of one of the billionaires last year. Here’s how that sounded.

RUSH: Bill Gates was on CNN with Jake Tapper. They were talking about the coronavirus pandemic. Let me get the actual sound bite, the transcripts up. All right. Here we go. This is I guess it’s Sunday morning, State of the Union is the show, Jake Tapper’s the host, talking to Bill Gates about the pandemic. And Tapper says, “There are a lot of governors who oppose bringing back these lockdown orders and forcing businesses to close. What do you think?”

GATES: Bars and restaurants in most of the country will be closed as we go into this wave. And I think, sadly, that’s appropriate. The next four to six months really call on us to do our best because we can see that this will end, and you don’t want, you know, somebody you love to be the last to die of coronavirus.

RUSH: All right. So we have a billionaire here. As far as you know that’s his only qualification. I don’t know what Bill Gates’ qualification is to determine when we have lockdowns, who gets locked down, for how long do they get locked down. Where is his level of expertise? And where is somebody on this show challenging this? He just gets to run around and say whatever he wants and nobody challenges this. And what is he saying? He says we need to keep closing down businesses.

So when did Gates become the expert in this? Why should anybody be taking advice from him? I know he donates a lot of money. I know he’s got this foundation where he does mosquito nets in Africa and so forth, does a lot of things like that, but I’m reading some bloggers here, the bloggers have checked into him. He’s not a doctor, and Gates is not a researcher. He’s not a professor in any medical field at all. Yet CNN and a bunch of other news networks very often ask for his opinion on health care issues.

But he’s not a medical expert. And they never question his reasoning. He just gets to pontificate and it’s because he’s a billionaire. That’s right. It was Neil Cavuto. It was Cavuto who accused Trump of killing people by suggesting hydroxychloroquine. Neil Cavuto. That’s exactly right. I appreciate the reminder.

Now, Tapper asked Gates when he thinks we’ll be able to get back to some form of normal life. Gates predicts late summer, late summer we’re gonna get back to normal life. Well, how about the bar and restaurant owners that Gates wants to shut down for six more months? How in the world are they ever going to be able to reopen? They are going to be wiped out. They cannot withstand a six-month shutdown or a six-month lockdown.

These are small business owners. Restaurants and bars are small businesses. They’re never gonna be able to get back to a quote unquote normal life if they are shut down for six months like Bill Gates wants to shut them down. How are they gonna pay the mortgages on their businesses? How are they gonna pay the mortgages on their homes? Now, billionaires don’t have these concerns. Billionaires are not worried about mortgage payments and other bills that have to be paid.

These people that own these bars and restaurants, they just want to stay open, they want their employees working, they do not want six months of a shutdown or lockdown. Gates said the next four to six months really call on us to do our best because we can see that this will end, and you don’t want somebody that you love to be the last to die from coronavirus. Gates actually said, you know, early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccination rates in our country the risk of reintroduction will be there and, of course, the global economy will be slowed down which hurts America economically in a pretty dramatic way.

This is obviously somebody out of touch. I know it’s an accusatory thing to say because, you know, we kind of celebrate billionaires in America. Well, some of us do. Some people equate being a billionaire with being brilliant. And that’s not necessarily the case at all. But, I mean, Bill Gates says more shutdowns needed, six months shutdown, bars and restaurants. That’s the last thing that’s needed. That is the last thing that’s gonna be helpful. Shutdowns don’t advance anything. They just delay the inevitable.

I don’t think it’s about science. I think it’s about destroying capitalism. You can’t get more capitalist than American small business, can you? I mean, that’s the essence of capitalism. The vast majority of jobs in this country are produced by small business, not major, big time corporations. And if you go after the small businesses, if you succeed in shutting them down, then you can bring about the changeover to socialism.

By blaming these bars and restaurants, by blaming American small business for the problems that we’re having with covid-19, if you succeed in convincing enough Americans that these small businesses are the problem, then you shut them down, you blame small business as it is, that can then be said to be capitalism is the problem, and then the solution will be government. Government will come in and fix whatever happens. Government will make the owners of these businesses whole, we’ll do something, we’ll protect ’em.

But I think the objective here is not science, and it’s not to somehow save people from getting covid-19. It’s not to stop the spread. It is about promoting globalism and getting rid of American capitalism. This is the obstacle that Donald Trump was. Trump, his campaign, Make America Great Again, was purely rooted in American capitalism. Revitalizing America, bringing jobs back that had been lost because of globalism, and he succeeded in doing it. I mean, more than anybody ever dreamed of. So now that they think they have gotten rid of Trump, now it’s time to get rid of Trumpism. That means get rid of small business, get rid of capitalism, and get back to the direction we were going under Barack Obama. We were headed toward globalism.

BRETT: And that is the prescription to fix this whole problem. “Globalist,” as Rush said. The World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, those phrases that you hear being thrown around by the elites. That’s the plan. The plan is to just not have you have to get up and go to work every single day. “You just stay home, and you collect a check. We provide a house for you. We provide public transit for you. We provide schooling for your children starting at age 2.

You’re gonna be just fine! You don’t have to do anything. You just stay there and reap the benefits and we just take care of you.” Why do you have to work? That’s the notion of the Great Reset coming out of the pandemic. The number is really quite startling when you think about the number of restaurants that failed as a result of the shutdown: 110,000 minimum was the number at the end of 2020.

That’s 110,000 dreams, restaurants, went under in that year. And they were targeted in a brutal way by billionaires like Bill Gates, and they were targeted in a brutal way by politicians, unelected health directors, you name it. Remember all those videos you would see of those restaurants, especially out in the West Coast, where they’d come in and they’d padlock the doors?

And if the people tried to sell food outside, they’d go and have those people arrested? There’s a number of places. A very famous restaurant in the San Fernando Valley called Pineapple Hill was the center of this. They closed the woman down who was running that restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and that same day, Garcetti green-lit a movie shoot using her parking lot of that bar and restaurant that had been shut down, using her parking lot as a staging point for a movie crew.

Steny Hoyer is a senior leader. He’s the majority leader in the House of Representatives. He said recently the $600 weekly supplemental jobless benefits were, quote, “very, very hard for any employer to replicate.” That’s triumphalism at the idea of putting businesses under so the government can subsidize unemployment.

I’m talking about paying people $600 plus $400 ($1,000, as we mentioned) out of that piece in Just the News paying all that money to stay idle rather than being a working, productive person. So 110,000 restaurants went under during the coronavirus, forced to shut down. There will be no mention of that tonight at the speech in Washington, D.C., nor for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who lost their jobs tied to that industry.

They don’t write the big checks like Wall Street and Hollywood do.