RUSH: I have a story here in the Stack. Did I put it at the top? Yes. Right here it is, a story in the UK Telegraph. “Are Smartphones Making Our Children Mentally Ill? — Julie Lynn Evans has been a child psychotherapist for 25 years, working in hospitals, schools and with families, and she says she has never been so busy.

“‘In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year — mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don’t get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.’ … There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems amongst youngsters,'” and one of the reasons is cell phones, smartphones. “Something is clearly happening,” she says, “because I am seeing the evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the Internet and the smartphone.”

So we have a psychotherapist here who says that her practice is booming because kids have too much access to the Internet. That’s really what it boils down to. The smartphone means that kids have way too much access to way too much stuff, and it’s all depressing, and it’s all confusing, and they can’t process it. And they all end up thinking everybody else is happy as they can be while they are not. They think everybody is living a Life of Riley.

They’re very happy, they’re wealthy, everybody’s content. Except they’re not. The impression this woman says all of these kids get is that everybody’s happy but the individual isn’t, and it depresses them. So she thinks the problem is too much access to too much information by too much technology. Now, if you want to claim that kids today are different than they were a generation or two ago, I won’t argue with you. I mean, things change.

I, frankly, think… In fact, I was thinking about this driving in. It was something on the radio… Oh, it was the Louis Armstrong song, What a Wonderful World. There’s a line in that song he was singing about young kids, as a man in his seventies: “They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” I’ve always been drawn to that line, “They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” I’m thinking about myself. When I was…

Well, you take your average teenager today, 13, 14, 15 or younger who has mastered a computer, mastered a smartphone, mastered searching the Internet. Folks, when we were 13, 14, or 15, there was none of that. I mean, it wasn’t even there to learn. So it’s hard to compare. But the point is that young people today clearly do have far more access to far more information. At least it’s easier to get.

We had to go to the library, had to find it published works. Magazines, books, newspapers, what have you. It was not nearly as convenient, and it was not nearly as omnipresent as it is today. But I don’t think that’s what’s got kids screwed up. I don’t think it’s the tech that has kids screwed up. I don’t think it’s smartphones or any of that. That’s just the easiest thing to blame it on.

What we’re looking at is another abject failure of liberalism to control people to try to perfect humanity; it can’t be done. It would make more sense to take troubled children and try to analyze their problems, figure out what’s wrong with ’em. Blame it on the smartphone? Why in the world do you arrive at that, when there are other possibilities that make infinitely more sense? Busted-up families, single-parent families, poverty.

Liberal, PC education in school, to me, is culprit number one in screwing people up. Not just in grade school, and not just in middle school, not just in high school, but in college. If you want to talk about the insecurities of young people, look no further than the classroom, if you ask me, where there’s nothing but an endless parade of hate being taught. I’m telling you, you cannot be exposed to never-ending hate and vitriol and anger and come out of there happy and content.

You just can’t do it.

It’s why I have always urged people… You know, back in the days when people used to ask me, “Hey, you know what? I want to do radio, too. How should I do it?” I always told people, “Do not hang around the failures. Do not hang around people that don’t like it. Do not hang around people who think the business was unfair to ’em. All you’re gonna get is a negative stream. You don’t want to hang around people who don’t think you can succeed because they didn’t.

“You don’t want to hang around people who are bitter. Find the successes and learn from them.” By the way, Snerdley, if I may make another departure, you know something else I was thinking? The way I climbed the ladder of radio is totally obsolete today, totally unnecessary. Just another example. If somebody called me today and said, “Hey, Rush, what do I have to do to become like you, get a national radio talk radio and become a big star? What do I have to do?”

It would be a mistake for me to say, “Well, you gotta start a small station and work your way up. You know, get fired a couple of times, but be willing to do anything.” All that old advice, that’s not the way to do it. All you have to do now is get a YouTube channel. Get a YouTube channel, start producing videos, hope maybe one or two of them catch on, and draw some attention to yourself. There’s an alternative way of doing, is on my point. You could still do it that way. It’s still possible.

There are still radio stations, and there are still small markets, and you can still start small and work up and get big. But at the same time, look at the number of people who have become miniature celebrities within their own universe just as the result of one YouTube video. I mean, there’s a way you can expose yourself. It took me… Let me put it this way, ’cause Snerdley’s frowning at me. I started when I was 16, and came to New York in 1988. So it took me 30 years, 30 years of work before I had the chance to even be exposed to the whole nation with what I was doing.

A kid on YouTube today can do it today. (interruption) Well, no. Staying there is another thing. I’m talking about the track of getting started. It’s important to be able to be adaptive, is my point, and there’s all kinds of ways now to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in a much short period of time. I’m not talking taking shortcuts and not doing the work. Don’t misunderstand. But, I mean, it was 30 years before I even had a chance, before the powers that be would even let me be on a satellite.

Today, a kid can do a YouTube video and be all over the world.

Now, nobody may watch it, but if somebody does and it takes off, then the kid’s immediately known. He may get hired somewhere. It’s a whole different thing. Well, by the same token, you want to blame technology for this? The problem with kids being depressed is not they’re mentally ill. It’s not the smartphone. It’s not the tech. That is the opening of opportunity! It’s what they’re being taught. It’s the drivel. It is the hate-filled rhetoric that they’re subjected to every day in school, at least, and — Who knows? — at home, maybe.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m gonna get back to this: “Are Smartphones Making Our Children Mentally Ill?” Because there’s a lot more out there making kids — I don’t know — mentally ill, confused, depressed, unhappy. It’s not the phones. It’s not the tech.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Here we go again, classic example again. Police in Charlottesville, Virginia, just had a press conference, in fact it’s still going on, to announce the police announced that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the rape story about what was going on at UVA in Rolling Stone magazine, absolutely no evidence.

Now, what has happened, Rolling Stone publishes a story about rape all over the campus at the University of Virginia. This begets a liberal groundswell, a feminist groundswell of news stories claiming that there is a culture of rape all over America university after university after university. Then we find out that there’s absolutely no evidence, that the story at the University of Virginia was made up, a total fabrication, somewhat similar to the Duke lacrosse case.

When this was discovered, what does the media then do? The media circles the wagons and says, “Well, maybe the details are not quite true at the University of Virginia, but that doesn’t matter,” they say, “because the story nevertheless was true, because the story does represent the reality of the rape culture on campus.” Meanwhile, it was totally bogus. So totally bogus, totally false, becomes nevertheless real. Even though the particular story involved had no truth to it, it still served to properly raise everybody’s consciousness level.

Okay. So you are a young, impressionable woman, and this is just the latest in a bizarre series of episodes designed for the last 30 to 40 years, designed to make you suspicious of men just because they exist. That men are natural born predators and that they are really out there scouting young women and really, really doing it on campus. And then we got fake, made-up numbers about the number of rapes and the percentage of rapes on campus. None of it’s true. But that doesn’t matter, you see, because the feminists have an agenda they need advanced and Rolling Stone played along, published a totally made-up, fake story that was later acknowledged to be fake but then claimed to be a great story because it raised consciousness.

So a number of women who read Rolling Stone, watched the media aftermath, despite a fake story, end up believing that they are at great crisis, and they are in grave danger on American campus. What would that do to you? You run around believing this kind of made up, falsehood stuff, it’s bound to affect you. It certainly isn’t going to make you happy. It isn’t going to be make you content. It isn’t going to relax you. It’s going to do all of the opposites. It’s gonna make you mad. It’s gonna make you fearful. It’s gonna make you distrustful. It’s gonna make you all kinds of negative things.

It’s gonna have a double, triple whammy of negativism on your entire psyche. And all of this is by design to advance some cockeyed, screwball, leftist agenda, the purpose of which is to simply gain control over more and more people. And of course it’s more complicated that. Which takes us right back to, are smartphones making our children mentally ill? No. The tech, the access to the Internet is what this is about. The access to news, it is the access to information? No, not by itself. It’s not making people mentally ill. What’s making them mentally ill is BS journalism, fake news, the leftist agenda that they’re taught from kindergarten on.

They’re taught to be filled rage. They’re taught to be filled with fear. They’re taught to be scared. They’re taught to not trust people, other than government. They have no time for any of the positives in life. See, it would be really hard, if you have a bunch of unstable, so-called mentally ill kids. It’d be really tough to blame that on single-parent families. Can’t do that, because single-parent families, why, those are the chosen families to the American left, because they need the most government help. Government, Washington must work for single-parent families. So we can’t blame it on that.

We can’t blame it on being poor because the Democrats are taking care of that. We can’t blame it on liberalism or political correctness. We can’t blame it on education in school, because that would mean we’d have to blame it on liberals, and we can’t blame anything on liberals, because they are the savior for everybody and everything. We can’t blame children being mentally ill for — look at the barrage of sexualization and gender confusion on television now as a matter of course. You want to blame this on smartphones? You want to blame people not knowing who they are.

You want to blame people be confused and angry and upset and unhappy on the smartphone, rather than on their environment and the trash that they’re exposed to and the liberal education they’re exposed to, the indoctrination, propaganda they get? Look at what kids are being fed at school lunch today because of Michelle Obama. They’re throwing it out. They don’t want any part of it. But we can’t blame that because that would be to blame Michelle Obama. So blaming the real culprits, can’t do that because the real culprits are liberalism and the Democrat Party. That would be too hard. That might make the case for the necessary of real reform. Can’t do that.

So let’s blame the Internet. Government wants to take over the Internet anyway, so let’s blame that. This would be a good reason to blame the Internet because Obama wants to nationalize it anyway, and Obama is the font of compassion, right? Obama, the Democrats, they care more than anybody, so if the Internet is poisoning our kids, fine and dandy, let’s let the government take over the Internet next, and they’ll fix it. Right. Exactly right. Blame the Internet, blame the phone, blame everything but the real, real culprit.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s another great example of what I’m talking about. We had news not long ago that the comedian Chris Rock said he was no longer gonna play college dates. College students don’t laugh anymore. College students, he said, are so politically correct that nothing’s funny to them anymore. They can’t laugh at themselves, they can’t laugh at other people, they can’t laugh at other situations. They’re too busy wringing their hands on things.

Why do you think that is? I mean, PC is what it is. But if you don’t see the humor in anything, if you can’t see humor in life, then you’ve gotta be constantly enraged, angry, on edge, what have you. Who’s doing this? I’m telling you that this does not lead to anything productive. These young college kids are being made to feel at risk or worried they’re going to offend people or whatever it is.

They are going to be perfectly positioned to support the idea that a command-and-control central authority should be handing out punishment, and that would be who? The government. That would be their definition of Washington “working,” and now Jay Leno has discovered much the same thing. He was on Late Night with Seth Meyers Friday night on NBC. Seth Meyers said, “You’re playing a lot of college campuses now. Have colleges changed any, Jay?”

LENO: College kids now are so politically correct, I mean, to the point where… I’ll give you an example. We had interns at the show.

MEYERS: Sure.

LENO: College interns. Like the last year of the show when the interns would come and say, “Mr. Leno, I’m getting; lunch. What do you want?” I said, “I don’t know. Where are you going?” He said, “We’re getting Mexican.” I said, “I don’t really like Mexican.” He goes, “Whoa! That’s kind of racist. That’s racist!”

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

LENO: Being anti-guacamole is not racist, okay? !”

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

LENO: You have no idea what racism is! That’s not racist, you idiot, you moron!

RUSH: Hey, Jay? Welcome to the club, man. I don’t know how much you’re responsible for this. Ah, I probably shouldn’t say that, but all these people that have bought into this politically correct culture of ours are culpable here. I can totally see this. Here’s Leno in his office, he’s got some intern in there, and he said, “I don’t like Mexican.” And the intern seriously says, “Whoa, that’s kind of racist!” To say you don’t like Mexican food!

Now, if you think that’s racist, then you’re obviously gonna fall in for the idea that whoever says something like that needs to be called out on it and maybe even punished. What does it lead to? It leads to people not saying what they really think about things, going along with things, and they end up being miserable and unhappy because of that. There’s so much fear, and it’s being played on so well.