RUSH: Huntington Beach, California. This is Lorenzo. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hi.
CALLER: I’m honored to be here with you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Goodness. Hello?
RUSH: Hi. You’re on the air. Your big show biz break.
CALLER: I wanted to say I was an ultraliberal all my life, from teen days, from being a hippie. And I had a woman that I worked with when Obama was elected, I thought it was the end, the revolution was over, everything was gonna be all right and we were gonna take everything over and everything was gonna be fine, but then, you know, I started listening to you and because a woman that I work with, she used to say, “Listen to Rush Limbaugh.” So I listened and we thought you were nuts. But one day you were talking about political correctness and free speech and that hit me so hard because you couldn’t say something, and I started thinking, and then I started reading like you were talking about some columnists and the Washington Post and I started reading them and realizing what they were saying was okay for them, but for anybody else to, it was wrong. And then when you were talking about the bailout and the bailout with all this money, and really, nobody ever saw it. It never went anywhere and it hit home. And then I realized everything you said was true and these people were liars and they were trying, like you were just talking about a little a while ago, about them trying to control the whole country, what we think, what we eat, what we do, everything, all of our rights and everything that we grew up with —
RUSH: You know, Lorenzo, this is fascinating because it normally takes more than a few — what period of time happened here for your conversion to be fully complete?
CALLER: I would say about three years.
RUSH: Oh, okay, is sounded like it mighta happened over the course of two months.
CALLER: Well, a lot of it did, you know, as I looked more and more, but I still couldn’t believe it. You know, you still have these tinges, and I kept wanting to say, “Nah, he’s okay, nah, he’s okay, nah, he’s okay.” But, my goodness, you know, we had no gravitas anywhere in the world. You know, it was unsafe to travel anywhere anymore. You know, when you used to go somewhere as an American they loved you and now it’s like everyone wants to kill you, and no matter what everything’s become unsafe, money, there’s nothing of value or anything.
RUSH: Lorenzo, I need you to hold on. I gotta break I must take. Can you hold on for a minute here?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Good. I want to find out what revolution you were talking about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to Lorenzo in Huntington Beach, California. You said, and this is a semantic thing here, but you said with Obama’s election, you’re all happy back then, the revolution.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Now, seriously, this is not a trick question and there’s no wrong answer here. I’m just genuinely curious about your attitude and others. What revolution did you think was underway and thus complete with Obama’s victory?
CALLER: Well, that our thoughts and programs and everything we’ve always believed in as liberals and ultraliberals was finally going to be recognized around the world. And that we would be looked at as the elitists we thought we were. And of course we were going to make sure that every corporation was going to hire the poor and everyone was gonna be fed and there was gonna be a house for everyone and the consequential of the cost. But you never think of anything like when you’re pushing all these things because they’re so a noble —
RUSH: Well, see this is what is fascinating to me, Lorenzo, because I believe that throughout liberalism you have, just like any other group, you have the leaders, you have the rank-and-file, you have the followers and so forth. I do believe that many, what I would just call citizen liberals, actually believe what you just said is possible. That utopia is entirely possible, that nobody’s ever hungry, that nobody’s ever poor, that nobody’s ever unhappy, that nobody’s ever laughed at, that nobody’s ever made fun of. At the same time the liberal elites who are exploiting that know full well it’s not possible.
CALLER: Yes, and they also, with every cause, all of a sudden you start helping them and raising money for ’em, everything becomes a cause where the whole nation’s in crisis and we have to stop Rush Limbaugh, we have to stop this, we have to stop whoever it is, and they send out a million letters, you know, saying we’ve gotta get you, we need your money, we’ve gotta do it. And I realized all these people I was helping were collecting money and they were collecting money, after money for everything. I said, “What the heck are they doing with it all?”
RUSH: What’s interesting about this to me, if I remember what you said correctly, it all began to unravel for you when we had an explanation or discussion here of political correctness and who could say what and who couldn’t and therefore there really wasn’t any freedom of speech. And that, from the way you spoke, it sounded like it unraveled pretty quickly. And that’s somewhat amazing to me. That’s why I asked you how long this awakening took you. When you said three years, that made sense. It sounded like you switched overnight but that’s not what it was.
CALLER: Well, being a writer by profession, you know, I deal with words all the time, but it’s so funny, you don’t look into the depth of some words. I could look into it but not on all these political speak and all these senators and all these people that all of a sudden when you looked at ’em you realized they were saying no and everything was staged, everything was fake, and yet you couldn’t call a name to somebody or you couldn’t raise your voice to anyone or, God forbid, you may say something, you know, that was out of sorts, somebody —
RUSH: Lorenzo, why do most liberals like you not experience this awakening?
CALLER: Because they don’t want to. Because they have to look within themselves —
RUSH: But you did. I mean you had this woman that kept telling you to listen to me, you thought I was nuts, thought I was Looney Tunes, didn’t know what I was talking about, yet one thing that I said caused everything to unravel for you, so you had to be skeptical a little bit on your own?
CALLER: Well, of course there was some skepticism. I mean when you have people, you know, like the Schumers and that type that you knew were not out for the good of the people, but I believed in the people, you know, Robert Kennedy and that type. I maybe was idealistic way back then, but being young, we thought, you know, this was out for the good of the people and the good of everyone for the country, and to have peace, prosperity, you know, helping each other, that feeling back in the sixties where you reached out across and you helped people. But that was gone, and it became so divisive, and a lot of it was just because they were giving to us these images to cast anyone who was conservative as the devil. And really, I mean they all had the same noble thoughts in their heart, we’d all like to see everybody —
RUSH: That’s another thing.
CALLER: — taken care of, but in their own way. And the smartest —
RUSH: Why?
CALLER: — thing was doing the work yourself, not having the — that was the other thing. One day you were talking about doing the work and watching these friends that were just never working, but they were always taking and taking and taking. So finally I said, you know, you borrowed this much or that, whatever, but from the country they were taking, from the government they were taking, generations. You know, I have a friend who’s a grandmother but her granddaughter lives in public housing, her great granddaughter lives in public housing and they have for generations. I said, “Why don’t you go out and get a job?”
RUSH: Lorenzo, let me go back to something else. Why is, among a group of people that you used to be part of, why is there so much hate for people who are really nothing more than political opponents? Nobody’s trying to shut you down. Nobody was trying to kick you out of society. Nobody was trying to prevent you from speaking. Why is there such hate among these people, do you think?
CALLER: Because when you start with becoming a liberal, what’s fostered in it is the cause that all the others are looking to take advantage of the poor, they’re looking to take advantage of anyone, to make something off of them, to treat them like slaves almost, workers, et cetera, et cetera. And so you start with that to begin with, that everyone that is not liberal or radical or whatever is, you know, a capitalist extreme and they’re out there to just take the money and that’s it, nothing else —
RUSH: Okay. So they really believe that the achieved and the accomplished are literally seeking to harm other people and that makes them mad? Interesting. Well, look. This is eye-opening. I’m glad you called. And congratulations, and welcome home. It’s really cool to have you here with us, Lorenzo. Thanks very much.