RUSH: I ran across a piece by a writer named Matthew Continetti. I’ve seen that name before, and I may have even quoted pieces that Matthew Continetti has written on prior broadcasts. This is a piece that ran on May 31st in the Free Beacon, and it’s called, “The California Captivity of the Democratic Party.”

I’ll tell you why it fascinates me. You and I, we look at the state of California, and we have red flags and warning bells that go off. We see a disaster. If the country goes the way of California, then the country is lost, at least in terms of the way it was founded. California’s an abject mess. High taxes. You have a caste system of economics. You’ve got the poorest of the poor, the least educated of the least educated. You have the wealthiest of the wealthy; you have the most powerful of the powerful.

You have the extremes of wealth and the extremes of poverty, and it’s all run by the American left. It’s all run by Democrats. It’s all run by moneyed people. Mr. Continetti’s point here is that the state of California, when you and I look at it, we say, “My gosh! The Republican Party hasn’t been a factor there since when? The eighties? Nineties? The Republican Party hasn’t mattered in California, and it may not for a long time.”

You know, anything can happen in politics, but if the trends continue the Republican Party may as well not even exist there. It’s one-party state control, one-party rule. (sigh) It’s tax increase here, tax increase there, cost of living down, real estate prices skyrocketing. The average American canned afford much of anything in California. You go… Well, the debt is horrendous. You go inland in California, and you find an entirely different way of life than you’ll find on the coasts.

But Continetti’s point is that California is exactly what the American left wants the country to be. California is nirvana to them. “The state represents…” This is a pull quote from Continetti’s piece. “The state represents a possible future for the entire nation, and the preferred future of the American left: environmentally stringent, demographically heterogeneous, Pacific-oriented, inequality-obsessed (and inequality-prone), and devoid of conservatives in positions of influence.”

Another pull quote: “The Southern Democrats are long dead, the Midwestern and Rust Belt Democrats are dying, and the New England Puritan Democrats have ceded control of their party to the donors in the West. If President Obama and his party leadership have a problem with the California captivity of the Democratic Party, I cannot detect it. What they should not forget, though, is that California is known not only for its starlets and startups but also for its earthquakes.”

One of the points of the piece is, you and I look at California and we ask, “How in the world can people continue to vote such things against themselves? How can this happen?” It’s the same question that so many people have. “Why in the world is every Democrat in favor of higher taxes? Don’t they pay them, too? What in the world explains it?” No matter what answer you give people, none of it makes any sense.

Let me read just a few passages in Matthew Continetti’s piece. “This is a story about politics and power in [California], and it begins with the money.” In fact, it was Karl Marx, folks, who said that the most important and powerful thing in power is money. The left has made everybody think that everything they do for altruistic and charitable reasons and they don’t care about money. The exact opposite is true.

“This is a story about politics and power in [California], and it begins with the money. In early May a luxury resort in Laguna Beach, Calif., hosted a five-day semi-annual meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a secret, invitation-only organization of liberal moneybags that since its formation in 2005 has directed some $500 million in contributions to progressive groups. Never has a wolves’ den been so posh. The Alliance discloses neither its members nor its beneficiaries, but some of the details of its structure have leaked out over time.

“The Los Angeles Times, which was granted exclusive access to the Laguna retreat, reports that Chris Hughes, the Facebook millionaire who owns a failing lifestyle magazine, has joined the ranks of the Alliance, which has ‘roughly 100 members, who pay annual dues of $30,000,’ and who ‘are required to contribute at least $200,000 to organizations in the group’s portfolio.'” Anyway, what motivates these people is having access to power, getting it via money, and making sure that there is no opposition anywhere.

Now, I’ve often said that’s Obama’s objective is the elimination of all opposition, and it is. But it turns out that the California Democrat Party, the liberals in Hollywood and in academia, want that too. You got Silicon Valley, you got Hollywood, you got academia. Those are the three elements of liberalism in California, and they all exist to advance each other at whatever cost to anybody else, and they insist on no Republicans being anywhere in power.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, one of the reasons I want to tell you about this piece I read on California, I want to add to it, this Matthew Continetti piece. What happened to California? There is no Republican presence there at all. There is no opposition to the Democrat Party or the American left in California at all. Whatever the left wants, they get. And that state is exactly what this country’s gonna become. And when did it happen? After amnesty in 1986. And that’s why California’s important because we’re about to repeat history here. If we grant amnesty again — back then it was only three million. If we grant amnesty to 11 to 12, 15, 20 million, whatever it is, this country could end up being California, and by that, I mean, totally run by the American left and the Democrat Party with no opposition that has a chance whatsoever. Which is exactly what California is.

To the outward appearance, California is a hedonist’s delight. California, the great weather, the great attractions, you’ve got all of the great cities, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, all the way up and down the coast. You go inland, you have abject poverty, zero education, everybody in that state voting for Democrats because they are all dependent on the government to one extent or another. The government of California is in debt to the tune of $16 billion and no hope of ever getting out of it. And the people who run it love it that way, is the point. They don’t care. They don’t see it as a problem. Listen to it as it’s described here in this piece by Matthew Continetti.

“Saddled in recent years with high unemployment, high taxes, high government expenditures, and a hefty deficit, CaliforniaÂ’s economy nonetheless has generated considerable money for President Obama.”

It’s not even close. The amount of campaign money that’s come to Obama from Democrats is in a vast majority from California, from Hollywood, from Silicon Valley, from academia. It is where all of the hypocrites in this country are. You’ve got Algore, noted environmentalist wacko, who has become a multimillionaire spreading a hoax, buys a TV network that nobody watches, and sells it to a bunch of oil sheiks in Qatar. “Well, what about your belief that oil is destroying the planet?” “Well, they do good coverage on stuff.” Utter hypocrisy.

Hollywood is what? Hollywood is total make believe. It is entirely fantasy land. “Best of all for Obama, his relationship to the entertainment and tech industries has undergone hardly any of the scrutiny to which he would be subjected if he were a Republican drawing funds from Wall Street, oil, and gas. In the imaginations of American journalists, so many of whom live on the comparatively dull, and alternately humid and frigid, East Coast, California occupies a special place, a picturesque landscape full of beautiful people who profit from make-believe. Hollywood wealth in particular enjoys immunity from criticism or skeptical inquiry.”

Hollywood, they can get away with whatever they want. They are always put up on pedestals. Whatever they say, dumb actor here, dumb actress there, can pontificate on the farm big bill or anything. It gets spread around on all the media as gospel. It’s utterly meaningless, and yet it has become gospel. California is the nerve center for the low-information population of this country. California is almost singularly responsible for the existence of a low-information population, growing and growing and growing. Because California is the land of make believe, it’s the land of pretend. And they can pretend to be and do anything.

But the most important thing, folks, as it relates to the future, California used to be a Republican stronghold. And it was a powerful Republican stronghold. And it was prosperous for everybody who lived there, not just for the left and the people that work for them. The state was not in nearly the budget troubles that it’s in now. It used to be what a lot of people think of it as today. But when amnesty hit in 1986, that was the beginning of the end of the Republican Party in California, and with it the beginning of the end of any opposition to liberalism, the Democrat Party, the American left, however you want to call it, and California has become a one-party state. It has become — for the liberals, remember, this is important. They set up two sets of rules.

The liberals love to tell you how they care about the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, the hungry, the homeless, the thirsty. They lead the nation in all of that. Criminal activity sky-high in California, poverty sky-high, racially segregated state sky-high. If all you know of California is the coast, it’s a beautiful place. But the point is, the liberals get to have it however they want it in that state, and they get to tell themselves that they’re the beautiful people, and they get to tell themselves that they’re the most compassionate, the most caring, and the most concerned, and they say, “Look at all the taxes we’re paying to help with all the poverty,” and yet it doesn’t ever fix anything, but they end up getting richer and richer and richer and wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and more powerful, which is also fine, don’t misunderstand. But there’s no push-back. There’s no opposition to it whatsoever.

And if it’s a harbinger of what could happen, this guy’s point in this piece is that the rest of the Democrat Party better be concerned as well. The Rust Belt Democrats don’t matter as much anymore. Southern Democrats hardly ever exist. The New England Puritan Democrats they’re called, these guys are on the downswing, too, in terms of influence and power. It’s California where Begala and the boys go to get money for Obama. It’s where Clinton went to get his money, and women, and his good times. It’s where they all go to get the money they need to do everything they’re doing in the rest of the country, because it’s where all of their donors are. It’s where all their ideological true believers with money to enable them to do what they do, live and work. And yet the state of California, an abject economist would look at it and say, “This can’t go on. This can’t sustain itself.”

This state may need to be bailed out at some point, is how bad it is. And it will be if it ever comes to that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me close the loop. I mean, what is so frustrating to me here — and it has been for a while, I just haven’t spent much time telling you about it, the whole shebang that is California and the way it impacts politics. We had a guest on this program. Well, actually I interviewed him for the Limbaugh Letter. He’s Herbert Meyer, who worked in the Reagan administration in intelligence. He wrote an op-ed, I guess about a month before or maybe two months before we had him in here as a guest.

He said, “The greatest unreported story in the world today is the disappearance of poverty around the world.” I read that, and I said, “What in the world do you mean? That’s the greatest story in the world? Here we are saddled in the middle of an administration which is taking this country — more and more people in this country — to abject poverty, at least dependence on government, and this guy talks about ‘the greatest unreported story in the world today is the disappearance of poverty’?”

Lo and behold, The Economist, just this week in its current issue: “Towards the End of Poverty — Nearly 1 Billion People Have Been Taken out of Extreme Poverty in 20 Years. The World Should Aim to do the Same Again.” Let me give you the only important pull quote from this Economist story: “Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow — and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.”

One billion people were lifted out of poverty in 20 years, and it hasn’t been because of liberalism. It hasn’t been because of socialism. Socialism and liberalism haven’t lifted a single person out of poverty. Socialism and liberalism sustain people in a bare subsistence and call it compassion. Capitalism! One of the Undeniable Truths of Life, I think it was the second edition, said this. I forget the exact verbatim quote. It said: One of the greatest problems in the world today is the unequal distribution of capitalism.

Herb Meyer came along years after I’d made that statement with his realization that people were escaping poverty all over the world, and it was an unreported story. When everybody read that, when I shared it with people, they asked, “What is he talking about?” Everybody thinks the world is sinking fast into poverty. Why? Because the environmentalist wackos say everybody is going into poverty. The environmentalist wackos say we’re all gonna die.

Scientists say we’re gonna die. We’re all dying from malaria. Disease is going bonkers! We’re killing people and losing people left and right. They paint this picture of doom and gloom and death and destruction and pestilence and disease. When the truth is that around the world, people are escaping poverty because of the increase in capitalism around the world! Now, it is an untold story. The Economist, I don’t know what made ’em do it but they’ve got it complete with the charts and graphs.

Herbert Meyer was right. Everywhere we look… Well, not everywhere, but many places we look around the world, the world is beginning to behave as we once did in America. We are going the opposite way! Europe, in many places, have seen them bottom out. They want to do something about it. They don’t quite know how but at least they want to. There’s good news out there.

But it is not because of liberalism. It’s not because of socialism. It’s not because of compassion. It’s not because of transfers of wealth. It’s not because of redistribution. It isn’t because of high taxes. It’s because of deregulated economic growth, unfettered capitalism, and free trade. That is lifting people out of poverty in numbers greater than have ever been seen before.