RUSH: Tony in Orlando. Great to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: It’s great to speak with you, Rush. I told your call screener I wanted to say “thank you.” I moved to Orlando about 10 years ago. I’m a registered Democrat, and I was a liberal, and I actually voted for the commander-in-chief the first time. I drank the Kool-Aid, so to speak, and I started listening to you. I heard a lot of disparaging remarks from a lot of my friends. By chance I came across one of the radio stations on the way down from the Panhandle down to Orlando and I started listening, and a lot of the things started to make sense that you said. And I started doing my own research, and, you know, I’ve definitely vastly changed in the last eight years. And I wanted to say thank you.
RUSH: Well, you’re welcome. Can I ask you a question about that?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: In your liberal days, you probably really believed — I mean, it probably was something that you thought you’d figured out. This is not criticism and I’ve got a question I really want to know the answer to. You probably really believed it and so forth. Then all of a sudden you’re driving along and you hear something, that for some reason makes you start questioning it. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but if the situation were reversed and I’m rock-ribbed conservative and if I heard something that made me start doubting what I believed, I’d be scared, or worried. How did you feel? What were you thinking when all of a sudden, “Oh, my gosh, this is making sense”?
CALLER: I want to say specifically it was a discussion you were having pertaining to global warming. In the last eight or 10 years I’ve gotten really close to my great uncle, who just turned 90 two months ago, World War II, Korean War vet. And we started talking about the wars, and he hit on the whole global warming thing, and he said how he thought it was all hogwash because he was around in Florida in the hurricane of 1935, and how the barometric pressure on record was lower than Hurricane Andrew that hit south Florida. I’m like, really? So I started to do my research, and according to the whole global warming proponents, they say that the hurricanes, the global weather has gotten worse every year since weather patterns started being tracked by NOAA and the government.
RUSH: Right. The big problem with that is there haven’t been any —
CALLER: Exactly. And the hurricane in ’35 was actually stronger than Hurricane Andrew. And I said, “Well, that’s not what I’ve been told for years and years.” And that was kind of what started the domino effect. I went to an Obama rally prior to that and I voted for him. I started doing my research listening to yourself and Mr. Beck. And I’m actually planning on having a rally in support of Michael Tahmooressi here in the next three months if they don’t release him from Mexico in Orlando.
RUSH: Right, but see, even with that, you say you do your research, but even with that you had to believe what you were seeing in your research. A lot of people are just unable to have their core beliefs change like this. That’s why I was asking you how it felt. ‘Cause, I mean, ultimately what you end up concluding is that you were wrong if you now have changed, you were wrong all those years about things.
CALLER: I was. I was. I was wrong. And, you know, but you reach a lot of conclusions whenever you start doing your own research and you do your duty and pass a lot of the liberal and Democratic blogs.
RUSH: Right. So listening to this program inspired you to go out and learn on your own.
CALLER: It did. It did. And my great uncle had a large part in it, too. So, yeah, I’m very grateful to you for that. I appreciate it, sir.
RUSH: Well, I thank you for the call. That’s fabulous, and I am really appreciative when I hear things like that ’cause this shows that it happens. We just don’t hear about it, obviously, every time it happens, but we know that there are conversions, if you will, taking place out there each and every day. And this guy, his conversion’s gonna hold because it is the result of he has persuaded himself that what he was hearing here is actually correct. He’s not a mind-numbed robot, in other words, as the left likes to portray those of you in this audience. So thank you again, Tony. I appreciate that.