RUSH: Tom in Sacramento, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yes, dittos, Rush, from Sacramento via one of your favorite towns, Berkeley, California. I just pulled off the freeway so I could chat with you.
RUSH: Appreciate that. Thank you.
CALLER: Well, we’ve talked off and on over the years. I’ve silently sat in the back of the room, occasionally rose my hand to comment on your teaching, sir, and where we go to on this is the shopping cart issue. And I want to thank you very much for all your support over the years to me personally, for being my wing man out there while I had to pick these carts up and no media outlets that I know of understood the problem like you did.
RUSH: You were in the grocery store business?
CALLER: This is the grocery shopping cart retrieval problem that you talked about over the last —
RUSH: Yes, I know, because the homeless were stealing the shopping carts, and everybody was telling the grocery stores, ‘Hey, go ahead, I mean, they need something. Have a little compassion, have a heart,’ and I thought it was outrageous. Two things about it were outrageous, number one, for some liberal to approach a homeless guy say, ‘I love you, man. I really care about you, here’s a shopping cart,’ is not a sign of compassion, it’s an insult. And then to tell the grocery store owners, ‘Hey, look the other way, let ’em have the shopping carts, they don’t have anything else.’ And you’re right, nobody was defending you guys.
CALLER: Well, we didn’t have a whole staff of people that we could go and talk to about it. My wing man for 15 years was you. And if it hadn’t been for you I might have got a bad attitude and tried something else, and bottom line it was okay for me for a while, I branched out into something else, but I talked to you a couple of times over the years, and your support, believe me, has not gone unnoticed. So everything you did I think might have pushed the envelope to getting these new systems in place to solve the problem, which, you know, the problem has been curtailed quite a bit.
RUSH: Well, it was never as big as it was made out to be. That was the original fraud. The whole Mitch Snyder Community for Creative Nonviolence with Martin Sheen and the boys showing up on cold winter nights, kicking the homeless off of their sewer grates so that Sheen and his buddies could sleep on the sewer grates in order to illustrate and raise consciousness to the problem. All they did was they were homeless for one night, not even homeless. Where did the homeless go? They freeze. The sewer grates at least had some sort of warmth coming out of them and they were running around with three million homeless and they were blaming it on Reagan like they were blaming AIDS on Reagan. They’re blaming it on Bush, lack of Republican compassion. They finally did a homeless census and they found there are nowhere near three million homeless, and there was an eye-opener for a lot of people to start questioning the numbers that the media just throw out and echo from these left-wing do-gooder public works sites, like Mitch Schneider’s.
Leftist activism is only about one thing: It’s about expanding government, raising taxes, and denying as much individual freedom and liberty to the general population as possible. And all the causes are just the venues, the methods that they use, feminism, all of it, it’s just liberalism disguised as something else, generally compassionate and caring and all these sorts of things so the problem was never as big as it was. Tom, I’m going to take your compliment seriously, because this was one of these things that nobody criticized. It had never happened in the media. You have an aggrieved group of people that are homeless, and of course they were portrayed as homeless not by any action they’d taken. They were homeless because Reagan didn’t care and Bush didn’t care and America didn’t care. They are otherwise healthy and normal and ready-to-work people that were just trampled on every day. That was never true. Largely they were mentally diseased in one degree or another, and were thrown out of institutions, had no ability to take care of themselves, and they were used.
They were used by Democrats and the leftists to once again blame America, see how unfair America is, see how unkind capitalism is, how can you dare sit there and be comfortable and cozy and full when you see these people scrounging Dumpsters for food, how can we let this happen in our country? And of course we came along here on the EIB Network, and we didn’t criticize the homeless. We attacked the whole premise that the left advanced about homelessness and who was responsible for it and what the fix for it was. That hadn’t been done. We did it as an update with Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, Ain’t Got No Home, and it did inspire other people to finally start opposing these things because most people didn’t have the guts to because they didn’t want the charge that they were unkind or heartless or cold or cruel, mean-spirited or what have you. So people were just living with it, or ignoring it, or what have you, or in some cases even being beguiled by it into donating money to fix it, and that led to the whole shopping cart business. They started stealing the shopping carts, and the advocates for the homeless — if you were homeless, would you want an advocate for your circumstance? The advocates for the homeless never tried to get ’em out of the circumstance. They exploited them, like giving them a shopping cart. Then they realized, by the way, that shopping carts have trouble at curbs. Sometimes the wheels come off. So they wanted to manufacture reinforced wheels on shopping carts. They’re the ones that had compassion.