RUSH: We’re gonna start with Bruce in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Great to have you, sir. Thank you for calling.

CALLER: Well, thank you. This is really an honor.

RUSH: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

CALLER: Yeah, I just like to say that the schools have done a tremendous job in creating generations of simple-minded Americans.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I mean, they can’t put one fact with another fact with another fact together and come up with their own conclusion. You know: “What is he really saying? What is the real agenda?” to find out what really agenda is. They just sit there wait to be told what to think, constantly. They’re manipulated. There is no conscious thought on their part as to what is going on.

RUSH: There’s no education taking place. You’re right.

CALLER: None!

RUSH: Indoctrination is what’s going on.

CALLER: It shows itself on every issue. Like the church and abortion and contraception. What about the banning of prayer at, you know, servicemen’s funerals? It’s all part of the same agenda. Nothing’s independent.

RUSH: That’s true. I know. And it’s proving to be beneficial to them. Because there is a huge section of the dumb masses out there, and Obama’s aiming for ’em! That’s who he’s seeking a majority of votes from. That’s the people who he hopes bring him victory: The dumb masses. The Obama idiots. I guarantee it.

I have a story here. This is from the University of Tennessee, Tennessee Today. It’s from Knoxville. The story is about researchers at the University of Tennessee, and it got me to thinking about something. “Electric cars have been heralded as environmentally friendly, but findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles. Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major [ChiCom] cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles.

“What [Professor] Cherry and his team found defies conventional logic: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars. ‘An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,’ Cherry said. ‘Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.’ Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles.” Look, let me cut to the chase here. What this made me start thinking of was the earliest years of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, the 1900s, look at the quantum leap forward civilization took in those 100 years.

My grandfather was born in 1893. And he saw more advancement in human technology, quality of life in the first 50 years of his life than had happened in all of human history prior to it. Look at all that happened. I’m just going to give you the highlights: The telephone, radio, television, air-conditioning. You want to talk about something that revolutionized productivity and lifestyles? We have space travel, air travel, the jet engine. I could go on. The quantum leap forward with the railroads? Of course that got started in the 1800s, but it got me to thinking about what a bunch of wusses we are today compared to the people who built this country. Do you realize that if…? I know the liberals are enamored with trains. If you go to Obama’s budget, it’s got $35 billion here and $35 billion there for more trains, and the reason they’re into trains is it’s mass transit.

It puts you with your fellow citizens all together like cattle rather than have you be independently able to get where you want to go. But we’re a bunch of wusses. What is this electric car crap? Do you realize how asinine 40 miles on a charge is? You need a backup gasoline engine to get you another 300 miles! It takes how long to charge the thing? Hours! And what charges it? Electricity from coal-powered plants! And all this is done on the basis of guilt. We’ve been guilted into thinking our existence is the poison. Our existence is poisonous; it is destructive. And I think back to the real people: The pioneers, the men and women who built the country, crossed the country not knowing where the hell they were going in covered wagons and built the railroads.

Tough!

Guts!

Blood!

Sweat!

Tears!

Now we expect to advance with barely breaking a sweat, and if we break a sweat we want to sue somebody. What a bunch of wusses, culturally, we are compared to the dynamism that built this country! It just breaks my heart to see what’s happening to us.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I do want to spend a little bit more time here on this electric car business. I’m gonna have trouble expressing myself on this. But I’m gonna give it a shot. Once again: A college professor, university professor at Tennessee (and a grad assistant or an assistant professor) have done a study on emissions — and they did it in China. And they have found that electric cars are more polluting than gasoline cars are.

Now, I’m not gonna bore with you all the minutia here, but it has to do with what they call “fine particles.” And they did environmental health impact studies “of five vehicle technologies in 34 major [ChiCom] cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team found defies conventional [wisdom]: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.” And I was thinking about the overwhelming advances in lifestyle, technology, standard of living in the twentieth century. It’s overwhelming when you stop to think what happened in those hundred years. Maybe add ten years to the late 1800s to it. It literally is overwhelming, if you just go the first 60 years of the twentieth century.

You look at the people who built the railroads. I don’t care who was used as laborers. Don’t look at this as some sort of a, “Yeah, well, they were discriminated against, and they were paid beans.” It doesn’t matter. It got done. It got done by hard, tough, fearless people. The same thing with discovering oil and getting it out of the ground. And where would we be without it? What we find ourselves in the midst of now is a world (and certainly our country is part of this), a culture now that is anti-progress. Whether they know it or not, I’m sure some of the dupes in this think that they are totally into progress. That we’re getting rid of all this bad, old-fashioned, filthy, rotten, polluting, disgusting stuff like the internal combustion engine.

It turns out the internal combustion engine means more to freedom, liberty, economic advancement than any electric car ever will! The electric car is the product of cowards. The electric car is the product of people who are afraid to go outside and live. All of the environmentalist wacko movement is made up of wusses who want you to think that they are trying to achieve what is impossible: Heaven on earth! Pristine, no filth, no dirt, no grime, no nothing. It’s not possible. I think back to the hardscrabble, tough people that built this country — and I’m not talking about the Founding Fathers. That’s a separate category. That’s political. I’m talking about people that rolled up their sleeves and did the impossible.

And look all they accomplished!

We don’t have people like that today. If we do they’re not allowed to function. Do you realize if we had the same mind-set today and the same government and the same regulations — the same union characteristics, the same environmentalist movement, the same tort bar — the 1900s wouldn’t have happened? They’d have stopped the railroad! They would’ve stopped rockets. They would’ve stopped the jet engine! They would’ve stopped it all. Who knows if the telephone would have even survived. And I am not exaggerating. We have people today who are so anti-progress. And of course they’re cloaked (and they cloak themselves) in this notion of purity and heaven on earth and utopia.

And they are making wusses out everybody that they come in contact with. I could cite all of these examples that we’ve mentioned over the course of the 23 years of this program. But this notion here that electric cars are more harmful than gasoline cars? And these guys are shocked! See, I’m not shocked. I see conventional wisdom and I distrust it immediately. What is conventional wisdom? Conventional wisdom is a bunch of know-nothings agreeing. When everybody agrees on something, something’s wrong. So these guys are shocked! Just like, how many people are shocked that coffee does not cause heart attacks now? Or how many people are shocked that red wine does not lower cholesterol? All these malarkey things that we’ve been led to believe.

We’ve got “agents” in kindergarten inspecting lunch boxes and finding that a turkey-and-cheese sandwich and a banana don’t qualify as edible because it’s not healthy? Says who? I remember when I was in Little League Baseball. I made a team first year, eight or nine years old. The next year it was a big honor to be chosen as catcher for tryouts. And during the tryouts, a pitcher threw a wild pitch. I ran back to get it and I cut my head on the backstop fence. And it was bleeding pretty bad, and the coach said, “Don’t worry about it.” He grabbed some dirt, rubbed it in there and said, “Get back behind the plate.” I was nine years old!

Do you realize that coach would be in jail today? Child abuse, you name it. I’m sure you can think of your own examples of this kind of stuff. My problem is that we are not progressing. We are not taking giant leaps forward. We are in certain areas like high-tech, that’s indisputable, but we’re going backwards in areas that are crucial to our liberty and freedom and economic advancement. We’re going backwards in areas that are important for making men out of boys and women out of girls. We’re wussifying everybody. When you look at what people are afraid of today in everyday life, and you look at what those fears prevent from happening and the progress that those fears stop?

Not to mention all the political crap that is going on. Fear is being used to stop progress! Back in the 1890s there were people who were predicting doom if we got rid of the horse and buggy. Fear has always been used to try to squelch human progress and advancement. The problem is we’re making up our fears. We are inventing our traumas. I love to tell this story. It’s about the Greatest Generation, the World War II bunch and what they faced and what they overcame. Our parents and grandparents, what they had to go through just to survive: Two World Wars and a Great Depression. Their kids, the Baby Boomers (and I’m one of them) have had so much idle time, have had it so easy, we’ve had to invent our traumas.

So we come up with Attention Deficit Disorder and whatever else that we think is causing us stress. I’m not denying the stress is real, but I don’t think we know what it really is compared to our parents and grandparents. But we make it real. I mean, it paralyzes us. There’s no question it does. And the way we deal with things today versus the way they used to be dealt with, such as bullies? You can’t play dodge ball anymore because somebody might get hurt. You can’t throw a freaking football on the beach in California! Or a Frisbee! That was enacted last week when I was out in California. Good God! And under what pretext is that, that you can’t throw a football? What, did somebody get hit by one?

Really? I made a prediction last fall that I wouldn’t be surprised in my lifetime if football is banned, as it’s played today. And the media, the sports media, by and large is contributing to it and they don’t even know it. I saw something funny. I was reading a football blog and the subject of football being banned came up and they were outraged. I’m thinking, you guys are leading the charge and you don’t even know it. And the reason it’s gonna be banned is because it’s risky. And what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna do concussion studies and they’re gonna do studies on head injuries and they’re gonna find that it’s much worse, that football players who die at age 50 or 60, we can’t tolerate this, we cannot permit it, and it’s gonna be found that it will be criminal to allow this kind of activity to go on.

So you take the risk out of everything. People that want to take the risk, people that want to engage, knowing full well the consequences. The Huffing and Puffington Post November 11, 2009: “Should We Ban Football?” I’m telling you, it is going to happen in our lifetimes. The serious discussion of banning football will happen. And the people at the NFL had better understand that it is going to happen. Snerdley says, “It’ll never happen.” It may never happen but I’m gonna tell you, a serious effort’s gonna be made. You think these namby-bamby do-gooders are gonna just stop and go away? I don’t know where the line in the sand is. The line in the sand continually moves here because we got more and more dumb masses that are oblivious to all that’s happening to them.

I’m just telling you, if football isn’t banned it won’t be for lack of trying. Somebody, someday, and sooner than you think, is going to suggest it, just like they suggested banning the SUV. Just like all this rotten stuff happening with the so-called environmental movement. And it’s all based on it’s too risky, it’s too dangerous, people might get hurt, can’t do this. If you can’t throw a football on a beach, at some point you’re not gonna be allowed to in a stadium. Once this stuff starts, the people behind it who start it don’t ever stop. They don’t give up. They don’t realize the errors of their ways. Now, we think we’re making progress with these electric cars. I’ve got nothing against any of these companies. Why wouldn’t they, if the government’s gonna subsidize you and give you hundreds of millions of dollars for producing one and then pay you to give it away to a customer who doesn’t want one, if they want to get involved with the government that way, go right ahead.

I’m just here to tell you, that with pure common sense, there’s nothing better than the internal combustion engine right now. And until market forces require the innovation and invention of a free people, there won’t be. But you cannot mandate improvement like this. It just doesn’t come from the top down. You can’t have a bunch of bureaucrats who wouldn’t know how to start a car tell you how to make one. And that’s what’s happening in way too many areas of life. And every day little by little freedom, liberty is lost, and it’s so infinitesimal. Especially if it’s couched in, “Well, it’s better for society the large,” and people would get rid of it, especially if you tie security to it, if you say it also will make you safer. Do you realize how much freedom people give up for that alone, whether it’s real or imagined?