RUSH: They’re asking me if I’ve seen the movie Bully. Yeah, I saw it. Of course I saw it. I’m a powerful, influential member of the media. I got a pre-release screener of it. I saw it. I had mixed emotions about it, but, ultimately, I would recommend it.

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The movie Bully. I was e-mailed by one of the management firms for the movie, they said, “We’d like to send you a screener of this.” I said, “Okay.” I must admit, I felt, okay, this is a liberal movie. It’s got a liberal agenda behind it. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll watch it and find out. And when I watched it, I had a lot of questions. It’s horrible things that happened to real people. But, see, I live in Realville, and so I had some questions. If these are real people and not actors, who wrote their lines? And if they wrote their lines, then is it real? And I know as well as anybody, right now at the corner of 57th and 6th in New York there’s nothing going on. But you put a camera there that everybody can see, and you will forever alter what would otherwise be normal behavior.

Once people see the camera, it’s over. People see a camera and they behave differently. Human nature. Some will ignore it; others will play to it. Others will think, “Oh, my gosh, somebody’s watching me, I’m gonna stop looking like a tourist,” or whatever. So I’m thinking, okay, real people, put a camera in their house, in their school, how real is this? That was my problem with it. But I watched it, and then the next question I had, virtually everybody in this movie is southern. And it’s Hollywood. And I know what Hollywood thinks of people in the South. (interruption) Snerdley, what are you doing? Now, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I’m telling you, this is all the baggage that I took into it. Hang on.

I know that there are bullies everywhere. Why are they focusing on bullies in the South? I know Hollywood thinks, just like Washington establishment people, hayseed hicks, pro-lifers, ah, they’re dumb idiots that live in the South, the way they talk, all this, I know that. So I watched and I had all these questions answered. There’s an excellent reason why. The family’s focused on it. One family, actually, their son committed suicide because of being bullied, and when you watch the movie, what you learn is, the real point of the movie is that the schools and the school buses where the bullying takes place are in denial. Parents will go complain about it. Schools don’t do anything about it. They don’t admit that it’s taking place or they think they can have one meeting with the bully and stop it, and it doesn’t work. And the reason they focused on small southern locales is that the people who live there can’t move.

If you are in New York or Boston or Philadelphia or a large city and your kid is psychologically damaged, physically damaged because of bullies, you can more easily change schools, which is true. They use communities in Oklahoma, Georgia, maybe, three or four. And the movie does really well make the point that — we all know there are bullies everywhere. But it makes the point that many victims of bullies try to get along with them by being the punching bag, by thinking that that’s what it’s gonna take for them to be accepted, to be laughed at, made fun of because of the way they look or whatever. But the real point of this is that the schools don’t do anything about it. And the parents in these little towns have no recourse. They can’t just pack up and move. Their whole lives are there. There’s sometimes maybe only one school in the town. You can’t even change schools in the same city, same little burg.

I thought when I watched this that the blame would have a political component to it, but it doesn’t. The blame in the movie is effectively pointed out as the complacent and the inattentive educators and school administrators who, they’re under constraints themselves. They’re all dependent on money coming in. They don’t want to rock any boat anywhere so they’re almost in a state of denial. I know South Park, the TV show, did a parody of it and so forth. A lot of people are laughing at it and making fun of it. But the people that made the movie did it to bring awareness to the real problem and the damage, kids committing suicide because of it and that it would more easily be dealt with if authority figures in the schools where it’s happening would admit to it and deal with it. They’re afraid of dealing with the parents of the bullies. The bullies themselves deny it. Sometimes there’s no evidence, he said/she said, other than the obvious damage that’s being done to the kid that’s being bullied.

Anyway, I had a whole different take after I watched it than I did going in, and it’s real people. I was told that they shot so much footage that everybody involved forgot the cameras were there after a while, which I do know also can happen. When I did The Haney Project, after a while, I forgot the cameras were there. I was so focused on how badly I was doing or how much I was improving, forget the cameras are there after a while, they shot so much footage. So I told the people that produced it I would share my thoughts since they went to the trouble of closed-captioning a screener for me, which most people don’t go to that trouble. (interruption) Yeah. (laughing) Somebody said, “Send the movie to Obama.” (laughing)

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RUSH: One of the things this movie, Bully, does, without intending to is demonstrate that conflict resolution is worthless. It demonstrates that conflict resolution as a class is worthless in dealing with bullies. I was asked, “Do they teach these kids karate or self-defense?” Many of the victims in the movie are special needs, they’re learning disabled. They’re not capable of that kind of stuff. So that is not focused on.