RUSH: From the UK Daily Mail. And I think this is — well, I’ll withhold my characterization of it, just give you the headline.

“Poor People?’s DNA is Declining in Quality, Say Scientists: Study Reveals How Stressful Upbringings Damage Genes. Stress can leave damaging and lasting imprints on the genes of the urban poor. This is according to a new study that claims poor people’s DNA is declining in quality as a result of difficult upbringings.

Now, is that even possible? DNA as a result of sociological circumstance? This story claims that not only is it likely, it’s happening. “The results are based on the finding that people in disadvantaged environments have shorter telomeres — DNA sequences that generally shrink with age — than their advantaged peers. The study looked at the telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit.”

Now, again, telomeres, if I’m pronouncing that right, telomeres “are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes.” And by now I know I’ve lost the people in Rio Linda, but I’m nevertheless gonna persevere here. “In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long.” (laughing) How long is a nucleotide, Snerdley? (laughing) And these nucleotides, they shorten with each cell division and as a result of stress.

“Previous research has found telomere length can reliably predict life expectancy in humans. The study found that low-income residents of Detroit, no matter their race, have shorter telomeres than the national average.” length of a telomere. (interruption) It is. It’s telomere inequality. It’s chromosome inequality. It’s nucleotide inequality brought on by living conditions inequality.

“Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study said in an interview with The Huffington Post,” which should give you a lot insight here, “There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods.” I’ll tell you, this is a first for me, that living in poor minority neighborhoods can make your DNA worse and in fact can telegraph your future. Now, some of you I’m sure will remember this, but you know my first reaction to this? And I had many. But my first reaction to this was that this story can now be trumpeted by the left to validate abortion among poor people.

I remember when I first started getting involved on the radio as a participant in the abortion debate, both locally in Sacramento and then nationally as this program went on the air, I began hearing all kinds of justifications for it. We heard, for example, that it’s actually an illness, pregnancy is an illness and that it’s unfair that women are saddled with this and sometimes abortion is a cure. Now, Snerdley, no calls on abortion. It’s not what this is about. This is about the left seeking yet again to advance its agenda while dividing the people of this country on any kind of line they can, racial, economic, sociological, you name it. This is despicable.

We also heard that not only was pregnancy a sickness, but that a fetus was an unviable tissue mass, and we heard all kinds of excuses. One that we heard frequently was, “Well, would you want to bring a baby into that world,” meaning one of poverty and dilapidation and thirst and socioeconomic disaster, and this prompted a number of us to start doing research into famous people and find out what their backgrounds were.

We found out a tremendous number of famous experts, people who had become stars in entertainment, stars of medicine, many of them had come from poverty. Many of them had survived poverty or very bad socioeconomic circumstances. And we were forced to do this because the left, in its continual perversion, was looking for any justification whatsoever for abortion and to call it something other than what it was. And when I saw this story, that DNA, that poverty and being poor and disadvantaged becomes part of who you are, becomes part of your DNA?

How do you escape your DNA, folks? Has anybody ever told you how to escape your DNA? You can’t, right? Your DNA is who you are. Your genealogical history, that’s who you are. Your genome is yours. No two DNAs are alike. DNA convicts people. DNA is a unique identifier unlike any other identifier we have. I’ve never heard anybody say that you can escape it. I’ve never heard anybody say that you can change it. I mean, not with behavior.

I know that some people say you can mess around with medicine, surgery, who knows what, splicing, I know that, but I’m talking just in terms of these people are saying that they’re not doing anything medically to make this happen. They’re just living continuously in poverty and that is affecting their DNA. You know how ridiculous this is? Until the last century, this is again part of the whole discussion of American exceptionalism.

Folks, I’m not making this up. Until the last century, just about everybody in the world came from poverty. The world! Everybody in the world came from, was born into poverty. Such was the average economic circumstance for most people, I mean the vast majority. The story of humanity from the beginning of time has been one of tyranny and bondage.

The examples of free people with liberty are so rare that the United States is the first nation in the history of the world to so form itself and codify its existence on the basis that every human being possesses liberty and freedom with certain God-given, God created characteristics. Until that time everybody was a subject of somebody, everybody was in their own prison of one thing or another, and most of the world lived in poverty, which just destroys the premise of this entire research story and news story to boot.

So what benefits the left for people to start believing that poverty is in your DNA and you can’t escape your DNA? What’s the point of pointing this out? Why in the world would anybody even target this? And then you ask the usual question, who benefits from this, and all kinds of answers start popping up to you. Who benefits from the idea that people can never escape poverty. Name me a political party. The Democrat Party obviously benefits.

If you think that people born to poverty can never get out of it, it destroys the whole concept of achievement, of hard work, of self-reliance, destroys all of that. It destroys the idea of self-determination. It renders meaningless the whole concept of freedom and liberty if you can’t escape your DNA.

So what are we to do here? If people living in places like Detroit are forever condemned to poverty, what else does it let you do? Well, it lets you then assign blame for that. And who is to blame for people in poverty, according to the Drive-By Media today? It’s the Republican Party. The Republican Party is responsible because they’ve stolen everybody’s money. The Republican Party cares nothing about anybody but the rich. You know the drill.

So now you add to it that poverty is now part of someone’s DNA, disadvantage is part of someone’s DNA, then you have just established a never-ending requirement for the Democrat Party. You have just established a never-ending requirement for the poor to support the Democrat Party, because the Democrat Party is the only party that cares about people in poverty, so goes the conventional wisdom.

This is insidious. This is absolutely outrageous, this effort being made here. Let’s just add this to the list of things that are tragically affecting all the poor people living in places like Detroit and like Baltimore. Bad DNA! Of course, guess who gets blamed? That’s what’s coming up. Obama blames the rich. Do you know what Obama said when he was at Georgetown yesterday? He said the problem really is rich people are removing themselves from areas of commonality.

The rich people? Yeah!

They’re joining their private clubs, and they’re living in their private neighborhoods, and they don’t go to public schools. Everything is private. The rich are segregating themselves from the poor. It is absolutely atrocious, in his belief. He is now going to take this belief that the rich are purposely segregating themselves and punish them and force that not to be the case. That’s some of what he said yesterday. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood.

DNA is a specific thing. I do believe that people trapped in a never-ending cycle of poverty with no role models to show them how to escape it — I do believe — it can be self-perpetuating. I don’t know about it becoming evolutionary, though. As I say, if it were evolutionary, we would have never gotten out of it, because prior to the last century practically everybody came from poverty, especially as we define poverty today. Everybody was poor, compared to the way we define it today.

But this study says that difficult, hardscrabble poverty upbringings have an impact on DNA regardless of race; that the DNA weakens. And they will say all the more reason why we need government programs, all the more reason why we need a compassionate Democrat Party, because it’s impossible to lift people out of poverty. See, that’s the thing. That’s where it’s headed. “We don’t need conservatism! Conservatism’s a false premise. Conservatism claims to lift people out of poverty.

“We’ve just proven you can’t. Poverty is in their DNA!” Yeah? Well, if that is true, why is it in their DNA? They live in cities run by you! “That’s not the point, anymore,” they will say. “That’s old news! It’s not useful to assign blame anymore. We now know that once you’re in poverty, you are forever in poverty because of your DNA, and that means we know that you cannot lift yourself out of it, which means conservatism is fraudulent.” That’s where I think all of this is happening.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a question. I have a question about telomeres and DNA and poverty. And once you’re in poverty, your DNA changes and it means you’re condemned to it and so forth. What happens to people who, in 2008 and 2009, were in the middle class, and hoping for an upward arc in their economic lives, and after six years of the Obama administration they have fallen below the poverty line?

What about middle-class people who end up in poverty because of Obama policies? What about their DNA? I mean, they haven’t been poor. They were not in poverty until Obama came along. So does their DNA change once they end up in poverty? And, by the way, I did a little research on this. I hope you find this fascinating, as do I. This researcher from Stanford got in gear.

There actually is a scientific and historical term for the claim that environment can cause inheritable changes in DNA in a single generation. The name for this, the historical term is Lysenkoism. Capital “L,” Lysenkoism. Lysenko was a guy. He was Josef Stalin’s house biologist. I kid you not. (laughing) He was a freaking communist, and he’s the guy that came up with the idea that environment can cause inheritable changes in DNA in a single generation, Lysenko. And it has the term Lysenkoism.

Now, the obvious appeal (laughing) to liberals is thus understandable: A former communist biologist comes up with this.

This makes it all perfectly clear.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lysenkoism, by the way, if you look it up… Let me spell it for you ’cause I know a number of you want to research these things on your own. L-Y-S-E-N-K-O. Lysenko. Lysenkoism is also synonymous with scientific fraud? How could it not be? It traces back to communism. It traces back to a mass murderer, Josef Stalin. So if you want to look it up on your own, you will see that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It turns out that Lysenkoism is also defined as “the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.” Like global warming. Lysenkoism is “the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process,” which is exactly what the libs are doing claiming that poverty is converted to your DNA and it becomes part of your genome. (laughing) It’s absurd.