RUSH: This is Phil in Melbourne, Florida. Hi, Phil. I’m glad you waited. It’s your turn, and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Rush, I grew up in Cape Girardeau four years behind you and had a similar childhood. In a small town like that we had unbridled freedom. You’ve mentioned it many times. I played pinball in the same bus station you did. We’d leave on Saturday morning and say, “What time’s dinner?” We’d be home at five o’clock. Our parents didn’t know where we were. Rush, that’s what makes you the perfect host at doing what you’re doing. You have realized freedom and how wonderful true freedom is, and you’ve realized down through the years that liberalism, liberalism in every form takes away our liberty. It’s not necessarily what they attest to, like liberal laws concerning incarceration and things, but every time something like that does happen, they chip away at our freedoms and our liberties in this country. It’s something that I just wish everybody could understand, that when it comes to you, not knowing you personally, but knowing how you grew up, you have to love liberty and freedom. You do, and I know you do. I can tell you do.
RUSH: Well, of course.
CALLER: And that’s what we need in this country. We need a fresh dose of that, for people to be afraid to have their kids go outside, their kids are not expressing themselves, they don’t have freedom themselves, they grow up thinking, what’s the big deal about freedom and movement, you know?
RUSH: Let me find something. Speaking of which, I put this I think in the middle to back of the Stack, but you will not — it’s about further — up. I just found it. More speech restrictions at the University of Michigan. Now, before I get to that, Phil, let me thank you and add to what you said. This is Phil in Melbourne. He said he grew up in Cape Girardeau, which is my hometown. You say you were four years behind me there or ahead of me?
CALLER: Behind you.
RUSH: Four years behind me. All right. Now, I was once asked, just to kind of buttress Phil’s point here, at the risk of offending him, I don’t want to offend people, but I was asked once way back a long time ago if I thought growing up in the heartland, in the center, the middle of the country, small town, was a factor in my success in terms of being able to attract a large national audience, as opposed to succeeding in a region here, region there, but maybe not working in a region over there.
I’d never thought about that until I was asked the question, then I thought about it. And I thought the answer to it was “yes.” I thought it was a clear factor, but I didn’t want to offend anybody with the answer, but I do think there was something about Midwestern small town values and the way that I learned life growing up. And coming from a family that was steeped in — politics doesn’t cover it. Yeah, we talked politics, but it was more we talked what was happening in the country. And we heard opinions about it. This happened all the time. And the freedom and liberty, I do not take that for granted. I think so many people do. You can’t blame ’em, they’re born to it, few have ever had to fight for it.
The periods every year where we remember those who died fighting for it or are becoming less and less prominent, Pearl Harbor Day, June 7th, D-Day, these days as the survivors are dwindling, there’s less and less — I don’t know if it’s attention or less and less — I don’t want to say respect, but it’s become old news. It’s way back there in the way-back past when a lot of people weren’t alive. So I have a profound appreciation for it and the Constitution. That’s why I’m writing these children’s books. I mean, you nailed in part there, because I don’t take it for granted, not just because of my job. To me it’s rooted in the uniqueness of this country. Why is this country so great? I’ve asked this question all the time.
How do you think it is that a group of people, us, Americans, in less than 250 years, have become economically, militarily, culturally dominant in the world like no other group of people, population, country ever has? When countries have been around thousands of years. There’s an answer to this question. It has to do with our Constitution. It has to do with the Declaration of Independence. It has to do with the entire American spirit and existence. Now, revolutions are not unique, and civil wars are not unique, although ours was in a way because we were fighting slavery and a number of other things. Over half a million people died to defend it, defeat it.
But, yeah, these are things that I do not take for granted. I think a lot of people can’t help themselves that do. But there’s another thing about growing up in the Midwest. I’m kind of afraid to admit this. I didn’t know, I mean, really, folks, I did not know until I was in my thirties that people had second homes and that they would go someplace different for the summer or go someplace different for the winter. We had one home and everybody in town had one home and you lived is there year round, and you took vacations in the summer. That’s the only time you could. That’s when the kids were out of school. There was no spring break then.
So one of the vacations we went to Florida. I grew up thinking nobody goes to Florida in the summer, everybody leaves ’cause it’s so hot. The only time we were able to go was the summer. And, yeah, it was hot. But, so what? That’s when we went. So there’s just some cultural things. Now, there was a family that had a house in Michigan and they went there for a couple weeks in the summer, but they didn’t live there. It was just a rental. It wasn’t a cultural thing like when I found in New York that everybody had two homes, and everybody who was anybody had two homes. You had one in the city and one in the country.
The one in the city might have been a cracker box, matchbox place that you slept in Monday-Friday. Not everybody, but the people I was working with and so forth, it was considered gauche to stay in the city for the weekend when I moved to New York. You were really oddball weirdo if you stayed in the city for the weekend. IÂ’d look out, “There’s a lot of people here.” “Yeah, but they’re nobody. People loath this city if they stay here. They don’t want to stay here every weekend. You see the restaurants are closed and all that?” I said, “Maybe so.”
Anyway, all that stuff was new to me. I learned it quickly. But even now I’ve got one house. The whole notion of two houses justÂ… I see these people, these wealthy people got four or five, and I can’t imagine the hassle. I cannot imagine the hassle. (interruption) What do you mean, wait a minute? (interruption) I have one house. I sold my New York apartment ’cause of New York tax audits. I sold that a long time ago. I’m not complaining. Don’t misunderstand. I’m just trying to buttress what old Phil here was saying.
Anyway, I think there is something to it. I don’t know if I had grown up — now, this may not be true. For me, if I had grown up, say, in New York and had only that as a childhood, I don’t know that I would have succeeded at this program. Snerdley thinks I would have. (interruption) Okay. All right. Snerdley is saying that I would have succeeded no matter where I grew up ’cause I had the right parents. Well, thank you. That’s a factor, too. No question. Anyway, we’ll never know ’cause I didn’t grow up in Boston, New York, or Washington. I grew up in Missouri.
Anyway, these speech restrictions, I think people are losing freedom and liberty every day. It’s gotten to the point when you speak up about liberty and freedom, there’s some people who will laugh at you. “Oh, come on, we’re not losing our liberty, get off of it. Would you come up with something real? We’re not losing our freedom.” That is a standard reaction when you start talking about one of the things that the nation’s threatened by with the Obama administration. “You know, you’re gonna criticize him for anything, right? What do you mean, losing our freedom. That’s silly. We’re not losing our freedom.”
What do you think political correctness is? What do you think being afraid to say this or that because you’re here or there is? What do you think tax law is? What do you think net neutrality, if they ever get that done, what do you think that really is all about? There’s no question that this is happening. And on campus especially, where, I mean, what is the academy? The academy is where people of disparate points of view gather and share a wide array of opinions. Yes, the academy is where diversity of thought and diversity of ideals, diversity of life’s experience all meet to combine a rich textured mosaic of the beautiful landscape that is — BS. There’s no such thing on campus anymore. No, diversity isn’t permitted.
“Dozens of posters plastered across the University of Michigan caution students not to say things that might hurt others’ feelings, part of a new ‘Inclusive Language Campaign’ at the state’s flagship public university that cost $16,000 to implement. Words declared unacceptable through the campaign include ‘crazy,’ ‘insane,’ ‘retarded,’ ‘gay,’ ‘tranny,’ ‘gypped,’ ‘illegal alien,’ ‘fag,’ ‘ghetto’ and ‘raghead.’”
Those words are no longer permitted at the University of Michigan. But that’s not all. You are not permitted to say, on campus, within earshot of anybody else at the University of Michigan, “I want to die.” You are not allowed to say, “My God, that test almost killed me.” You are not allowed to say, on campus at the University of Michigan, “Man, that test raped me.”
“Students have been asked to sign a pledge to ‘use inclusive language’ and to help their peers ‘understand the importance of using inclusive language,’ according to campaign materials. Though only in existence for one semester, the Inclusive Language Campaign has maintained a strong presence throughout the university. Students roaming the campus frequently encounter posters of all sizes reminding them: ‘YOUR WORDS MATTER,’ and asking questions such as: ‘If you knew that I grew up in poverty, would you still call things “ghetto” and “ratchet”?’”
You are not allowed to talk about the ghetto on campus ’cause it might offend somebody who actually grew up in one. And you are not allowed to say “that test raped me” because you might offend an actual rape victim. You’re not to trivialize rape by saying that a test raped you because it’s impossible for a test to rape you. You cannot say, “Aw, jeez, you know, I want to die,” because that might create insensitive for someone to kill you. I’m not kidding. You can’t say “that’s so ghetto.”
I don’t know why you can’t say ratchet, unless it’s an insult to Hillary, Nurse Ratched? Why can’t you say ratchet? What does that mean? When I hear ratchet, I think of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And when I think of that, I think of Hillary and the testicle lockbox. The university budgeted $16,000 for the campaign. The program comes at a time when the university’s raised tuition and fees for the last two consecutive years. I’ll bet that you complaining about the cost of tuition is also not allowed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Words you can still use, University of Michigan. Tea bagger, cracker, redneck, right-wing fascist, Nazi. Those words are still permitted.