RUSH: Melissa Harris-Perry is a professor. I believe she’s at Tulane. It’s a major university, wherever she teaches. She’s an African-American professor at Tulane. That’s right. She also has a show on PMSNBC. Of course they’ve got this slogan over there called “Lean Forward” or some such thing. Hosts of their shows are cutting promos that they run on the network, and last week they began airing a new Lean Forward promo for her show, which airs on the weekends. This is that promo.
HARRIS-PERRY: We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.
RUSH: There you have it. Now, I’m sure some of you hear this and you’re livid, and you’re outraged. The thing that I really want to impress upon you is that this is not far out. This is not new. It is not unusual. It used to be. Stuff like this used to be. If anybody five years ago, or even two years ago, had said this? “Whoa, whoa! It’s really lunatic stuff,” people would have said. “Oh, man, that is really extreme!” But it isn’t new. What’s new is that she has total confidence in saying it.
She’s not worried that a majority of people are gonna disagree with this. But this is Marx-Engels, Communist Manifesto. The nuclear family has always been under attack by communists, by leftists. The nuclear family — just like religion — must be destroyed, and in its place, “the community,” the collective. So, while this is outrageous in its self-contained form, it isn’t anything new. I guess one of the things that is the most frustrating to me is that liberalism and socialism and Marxism and this kind of stuff have been out there on display for people to see and recognize and accept as true for decades.
It isn’t anything new. Yet in the past people would hear something like this and choose not to have to deal with it. That would have meant taking action, and it was much easier to say, “Nah, that’s never gonna happen. I mean, that’s just not going to happen.” So where has that left us? All of these things we thought were never gonna happen are now happening — and the opposition party, which in this case is the Republican Party, has basically one item in their agenda, and that’s to stop these guys.
But there is no alternative. There is no vision. There is no equally correlating long-term vision being articulated by the opposition to this. All we’re doing, all the party’s doing, is saying, “We have to stop those guys. In the way of stopping it, we’ll agree with some of it. Maybe partial amnesty or whatever. We’ll moderate our terms here on social issues. Okay, gay marriage? Fine. We can see where that’ll work. All right, all right.” But there’s no push-back, and so there’s no reason for Melissa Harris-Perry to be worried about any negative fallout or feedback from this.
Because as far as she’s concerned, everybody thinks this now. I want you to listen to it again. I want you to listen to just how naturally it flows off her tongue. I want you to listen to how matter of fact it all is; how she just presumes everybody agrees with this. This is not something she even has to defend. This isn’t an argument that she has to win the debate about. This is a conclusion now that we’ve all come to, and everything in here is a conclusion. “We’re not spending enough on education.”
We’re going bankrupt on all we’re spending on education! We’re getting nothing for it. I’ve got the story of what’s happening at Bowdoin College up in Maine coming up. I’ll give you the details here just a second. “We’re never invested as much in public education as we should have”? We’re throwing money down a rat hole drain of public education! We lead the world in public education spending. We lead the world in getting the least for it. “We’ve had a private notion of children that your kid is yours and your responsibility”?
How old-fashioned!
How utterly irresponsible was that! How selfish could you be, thinking that your kid is yours? That was never the deal. The kid belongs to all of us. Look, as I say, Mrs. Clinton tried this. It Takes a Village — and what was the reaction then? Everybody laughed at it, made fun of it, and had jokes at her expense. I know I did. A lot of people did. Back then, in the nineties when Mrs. Clinton’s book came out, nobody ever thought anything like that would ever really happen, where the state would literally claim ownership of your kids.
It was so foreign, it was so out of the realm of common sense and even belief that people never, ever took it seriously. Yet these people keep plugging away, and they keep setting up their Head Start programs, and they keep setting up national publicly funded government-run day care centers, and they keep furthering the notion that somebody else can raise your kids better than you can. They got traction on the idea that fathers are the worst thing for a kid, especially for girl kids ’cause fathers are predators.
Fathers are dangerous, rapists. They beat up their mothers on Super Bowl Sunday. All this outrageous stuff everybody laughed at and said, “No way anyone will believe that,” they just kept plugging away at it and they think it’s commonly accepted as fact. Here, listen. This is a professor. I don’t know of what, but it doesn’t matter. She could be a professor of history. She’s teaching this rotgut. It doesn’t matter. Okay, here’s Melissa Harris-Perry.
HARRIS-PERRY: We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.
RUSH: Folks, that is as foreign as anything I’ve ever… That, to me, is insanity. This is, you know, go get the guys in the white coats, bring the little van up, take her away. That’s what this is. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families. We need to recognize that kids belong to whole communities, and not ’til then will we start spending the right amount of money on it. So how does this manifest itself?
You need your yard mowed, what do you do? You go knock on the door down the street and say, “Your kid that you don’t own, I do today for the next hour. Your kid’s gonna mow my yard, and then after that my trash needs taking out, and after that I need somebody to go to the grocery store for me. My kid’s tied up, so I’m claiming your kid.” How does this work? What is the practical application? What she is saying, Melissa Harris-Perry, what she is saying here is as old as communist genocide. But, the fact that it is said in America on a cable news channel, and is considered fairly benign is what has changed. What’s changed is that people believe this. This isn’t that big a deal anymore. That’s what’s changed, folks.