RUSH: What do you think, just off the top of your head — or maybe you’ve heard. What do you think the percentage of the American population is that’s gay?

Let me just take a stab at it. I’m not gonna mention any names on the other side of the glass. I just want all three of you to tell me what you think the answer. There’s no wrong answer. I mean, there is a wrong answer and a right answer, but I’m not doing this to trick anybody, and there have been recently some media figures who have spouted a figure that’s incorrect. (interruption)

Okay, well, no, you just tell me: What do you think the gay population of the country is? (interruption) Okay… (interruption) Okay, 5%. What do you think, Snerdley? (interruption) Three percent. What do you think? (interruption) Three? (interruption) What do you think? Five percent of the population. Okay. I think it was The Forehead on CNN recently said that one-out-of-10 Americans are gay.

Well, the Washington Post says that less than 3% of the US population “identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” and these are numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why would…? Now, wait a minute. Of all government agencies, why would the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention be figuring out the sexual orientation of the American population?

Well, just asking. I mean, why wouldn’t the Census be reporting these numbers? Why does the Center for Disease Control and Prevention even know this? Well, I can see where they would know given they’re part of government. Why are they the source for this? “The National Health Interview Survey, which is the government’s premier tool for annually assessing Americans’ health and behaviors…”

(Gasp!) What? Health and behaviors? Okay. “The National Health Interview Survey … found that 1.6% of adults self-identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7%, seven-tenths of a percent consider themselves bisexual.” So that adds up to 2.3%. “The overwhelming majority of adults, 97.6% label themselves as straight in the survey most recently taken in 2013.”

“An additional 1.1% declined to answer.” They said they didn’t know or they said they were something else. They were not gay, they were not lesbian, they were not bi, and they were not straight. They were something else. Now, given pop culture, are you shocked that less than 3% of the population is gay? I’m just asking.

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RUSH: Okay, you’re a casual observer of media and let’s say that you spend a lot of time watching prime-time television. You can’t miss a television show where one or more of the stars, major characters, are gay. Story lines revolve around the gay lifestyle, homosexuality, any number, both socially and politically. You can’t miss it. It is everywhere in the pop culture.

Now, how does this happen? If less than 3% of the population is gay, how does 2.3% of the population end up dominating both the pop culture and political worlds? How does this happen? I would venture to say that people who do not know, solely by virtue of their immersion in pop culture, would be shocked to learn the gay population is less than 3%. Most of them would think it’d be much higher, what with all the talk about gay marriage, what with all the gay entertainment story lines presented, by the way, in a positive way, not snarky or anything of the sort.

So I imagine a lot of people hearing this are surprised. “What? Less than 3%, how can that be?” So put another way, 97% of the population is not. So how does it happen? To me, folks, this is a fascinating question and answer that explains how major culture shift occurs. How in the world can 2% of the American population end up dominating, in many ways, an entire political party and entertainment pop culture? Because there is an answer to this.

They couldn’t do it alone. They’re not large enough. There aren’t enough. They do not, in strength and numbers alone, have any power whatsoever. So from where do they get their power? How do they derive it and how is it used and how is it implemented? And then how is that power used to persuade? And, by the way, not just persuade, but to effect real change?

Let’s do it another way. What percentage of the population of this country self-identifies as conservative? The last I saw it was 35, 37%, something, might be 33. Don’t know. The exact number is not important. It’s over 30, and it’s under 40, so it’s somewhere in there. The self-identified portion of the population that’s liberal is 20%. The self-admitted gay population is 2%. So how is it that a combined 22% of the population has succeeded in relegating 37% of the population as the real minority, and not just a minority, but an extreme, wacko, insane, lunatic, you name it, minority?

How has it been possible? How has a genuine, I mean, a microscopic minority been able to flip things on a majority in practically everything? There’s one common element that links all this, and it’s the media. It is the media that expands, solidifies, creates impressions of large and big and powerful, by virtue of — I mean, it’s as simple as saying that if half of the prime-time network television programs feature gay characters and gay story lines in a positive nature, what are average, ordinary, unaware viewers, what are they going to conclude?

So it takes this really small minority. Even if you combine the self-identified liberals with the self-identified homosexuals, you’re at 22% versus 37, 35, whatever it is, percent. It’s 37. Thirty-seven percent self-identify as conservative. How has all this happened? And right there, the answer, and you know it as well as I do, it’s the media. The media has decided who they’re going to align with and promote and, in so doing, they have established basically a falsehood.

They have created an impression that is not accurate that everybody believes, or a lot of people believe. So much so that the self-identified majority in this country now believes that it barely exists. The 37% of the population that identifies as conservative thinks that it is barely hanging on by a thread, in terms of numbers. That 37% thinks it is outnumbered by liberals and that 20% liberals includes African-Americans and probably includes the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender population. So it may not be 22, it may just be 20% total. But if you break that down even further then you’ve got the African-American population is, what, 13% and declining, by the way.

So how does this happen? Can the media alone do it? Just your average, ordinary, everyday reporters and writers and television hosts, are they enough? Even if they’re all aligned and unified, is that enough to pull this off, or do they need backup, do they need an imprimatur? Who is it that allows them? They’re all employees. Who is it that allows them? The reporters, the television hosts, you name it, the writers of these shows, the producers of these shows, the directors of these shows, who is it that permits them to do all this?

I mean, if you have knowledge that 2% of the country is gay, why would anybody do prime-time television programming oriented? That’s certainly not mass appeal, so why would you do it? A-ha. You’re not doing it for mass appeal. There’s a political agenda behind it. This is my point. There’s a political agenda to everything that the left does. And part of the political agenda is creating mirages, creating falsehoods, making what isn’t true look real. And they’re able to do it with a combination of consistency and pictures.

It’s a fascinating thing. We really are being governed by, we are engaged in a roiling of our culture that is resulting in massive, seemingly overnight changes that are in no way associated with the majority of the country, and yet they continue to happen and made to look as though the real majority barely even exists.

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RUSH: Here’s Greg in San Diego as we head to the phones. First call today. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. It’s very exciting. I think I have an answer for or at least an opinion on your question about how does the minority relegate a majority. It has to do with distribution of method. In business we always look at our market share. If we were to look at our market share of distribution of our message, Big Government versus conservatism, the Big Government people have about a 95% market share now through the alphabet news stations, ABC, CBS, NBC, academia, newspapers, Hollywood. Where we only have about 5% market share of our distribution of message, mainly through your show, Sean Hannity’s show, several others, and a little bit of Fox News. That’s it.

RUSH: Wait. You left somebody out of there. You didn’t mention the Republican Party in there, Greg.

CALLER: Imagine that. (chuckles)

RUSH: (laughs) You can’t even include the Republican Party in the less government-market share message.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: That’s profound.

CALLER: It’s interesting that the same group of people got cut off from funding several years ago because of that. So I guess we’re on our own, the conservatives versus Big Government types. Their market share might get bigger because the distribution now will include the Republicans. So the fight is even bigger. Now, if we sit back and look at how do we increase our market share or distributional methods —

RUSH: Well, here. There’s an answer, because now the answer to that involves — I guess — the shrinkage of the sample. We can say, for example, that the homosexual population is less than 3% of the country, but what percentage of the entertainment industry is the gay population?

CALLER: Hey, Rush, can I sidebar for a second? There’s a truck in front of me that has a Reagan-Bush bumper sticker on it. I’m on the freeway.

RUSH: Is there a gun rack that you can see in the rear window?

CALLER: No. It’s just a Chevrolet.

RUSH: It’s a Chevrolet? And still on the road? With a Reagan-Bush sticker?

CALLER: Surprised it’s not pulled over with its foot out waiting for a tow truck. Just kidding. Anyway, let’s go back to distribution of message.

RUSH: That’s what I’m talking about. If you reduce the sample size, instead of saying what is the gay population of the country and reduce it to what is the gay population of the entertainment industry, you got a big difference there, I would guess. I have no idea what the number is, but I know it’s larger than 3% — and it’s gotta be way, way higher than that.

But even with that, even with that, it still takes a legitimizing factor. It also requires a portrayal of the gay lifestyle in a certain way in order to create the message that you want. You can’t just have gay characters. You’ve gotta portray them in a certain way. All of this requires a common element. It requires the media, be it ownership, be it the news… You can say that the TV itself is media, which it is.

The market share example is a good way to look at it, but then when you get into market share, market share doesn’t explain everything. In business, the most sought-after thing is the profit. You can have all the market share in the world; if you’re not profitable, it won’t matter. I give you two examples, Samsung versus Apple, without getting into great detail about that.

Regardless, no matter how we do this, it’s all going to end up back at the media. It’s gonna end up back at the media and who runs that, to explain all of this massive cultural shift, all of the political shift, the cultural change. It’s all gonna lead back to that, and I tell you if you want to take it there, it’s all gonna lead back to the ruling class versus country class.

Always. The ruling class is a small bunch of people compared to the rest of the country. They’re tiny. Call ’em the elites, whatever you want. The 1%, the truly rich, they are tiny. But the power! What gives them the power? How do they use it and so forth? It’s all being done here to illustrate the size of the challenge that exists here.

You can either come up with a strategy to wrest control of the media from those who currently have it, or you can devise a strategy that would seek to discredit the message of the media. Regardless of however you go, whichever strategy you decide to employ, it’s a massive undertaking.

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RUSH: Gay bashing? There wasn’t any of that. (interruption) Oh, I can see your point, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Snerdley’s all concerned that my brilliant segment on perceptions in the first hour is going to lead to stories of me gay bashing. There wasn’t any gay bashing. Everything in it was factual.

Greetings, and welcome back, El Rushbo, serving humanity, executing assigned host duties flawlessly, zero mistakes. Our telephone number is 800-282-2882, e-mail address ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

I did forget one salient piece of data. The Centers for Disease Control reports — of all the government agencies it’s kind of odd that they would be reporting this instead of the Census, but nevertheless, the CDC says that 2.3% of the American population self-identifies as gay. Now, that, by the way, self-identifies, it’s not that it’s been discovered. This is what people admit. So it could be a little higher, could be a little lower, it’s all dependent on how honest people are with the researcher. But we’ll use the 2.3% number since that’s what’s published. The thing I left out is the percentage of the population that’s gay that the American public believe is true. What do you think that is?

Now, this all started with me asking the trusted and loyal staff here for their wild guesses on what they thought the percentage of the population in America that’s gay is, and they said three to five percent. The Forehead, Paul Begala on CNN said recently that one in 10. I think it was The Forehead, said that one in 10 Americans are gay. The number’s 2.3%. But then when I left out was what does the average American believe the gay population percentage is, and why?

Most Americans, a majority of Americans think that the gay population is 13 times higher than 2.3%. And that is a testament and the evidence of the assertion that I made that you cannot — I mean, you have the self-admitted majority in this country is conservatives, 37%. The people who self-admit or self-identify as liberal is 20%. And then of that 20%, 2.3% for the most part identify as gay. Now, most gays are leftist, but there may be some who aren’t. So it’s not necessarily true that all 2.3% are contained in the 20% that identify as liberals, but it’s close.

Let’s see the actual number here. It’s 13 times. The average American believes that the gay population is 13 times higher than the 2.3% that it really is. And that’s the media. But the media can’t do it alone. They have to have people that allow them to. They’re all employees. We had a caller talk about market share. “Wait a minute, Rush, the percentage of the population is one thing, but what about market share?” And he said the market share for the proposition that Big Government’s the answer to everything is 95%. They own it, they’re everywhere, and that may be five or 10 percent wrong either way, but the market share argument is also interesting, at least to facilitate an understanding of the challenge ahead.

I think something crucial in all this is literally understanding why something is, you know, what is the nature of the problem, what’s the reason for it. So essentially young Americans, defined as Americans under 35, believe 30% of the population’s gay. How does that happen? The real percentage is 2.3, but persons under 35 think it’s 30%. Now, you and I know the answer to this.

It’s not just that there are TV shows that star gay actors and actresses. They’re now portraying gay characters with gay storylines, and they’re positive. They are excellent parents. They have warm and fun-loving families and all this. They’re now becoming preachers and ministers. So you see how a purposeful effort can succeed. You can take a genuine minority and convince people that it is much larger than it is. But it really is in the pop culture that you find the primary agents of influence, I think.

So, again, it’s just a way of illustrating how this happens, and I firmly believe that you couldn’t — again, I don’t mean to be repetitive here — but you couldn’t have any of this happen were it not for the fact that the bosses want this to happen. The people that run the entertainment networks, companies, organizations, TV studios, movie studios, publishing houses, they want it to happen. They may, in fact, actually be gay themselves. That’s where the market share argument comes into play. You can say, “Okay, the population of the country, 2.3%, but what is the population percentage of Hollywood that’s gay?” It’s gonna be a much larger number.

A fascinating thing to me is that the functioning, real live, living and breathing majority has successfully been relegated to a status that most people think is dying out, barely holding on, made up of some of the weirdest, kookiest, stupidest freaks. That’s the majority in this country and how it is thought of. The majority, in terms of self-identifying.