RUSH: A friend of mine sent me a note over the weekend. “Two 21-year-old young men. One of them over here, clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. Two-time golf major championship champion: Masters, USA. Jordan Spieth, University of Texas. Great family, live in Texas, wholesome, everything you would want and expect in an American family over there. And over here you have 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who looks like one of the Three Stooges. And of course who walked into a church and shot nine people dead. Two 21-year-olds. What’s the difference? How do you explain one and the other? Now the answer… I was thinking about this myself. It isn’t simple. A lot of people think the answer to that is very simple, but it isn’t.”
You come up with off-the-cuff, immediate, reactive answers and they would be right but they don’t go nearly deep enough. You could say, “Well, take a look at the various families.” Yeah. Okay. Fine. Then take a look at the different economic circumstances. Yeah, fine. But you see, the problem with that is that a lot of great people have come from the same circumstances that Dylann Roof came from.
A lot of great people were born to poverty and had lousy parents or no parents, and they overcame it and they rose up and they became successful. The names are famous, too. I don’t have them at the top of my head, here, but that argument has already been vetted in the abortion argument. You know, when the abortion argument was at its peak back in the ’80s and ’90s, one of the arguments made by the pro-choice crowd was:
“We don’t want to bring children into that world! Look at the poverty and pestilence and disease!” So poor people having abortions was considered a good thing, because it was just criminal practically. We wouldn’t want to bring a child into those circumstances Yet that caused people like me to go look at all of the great people who were born into less than ideal circumstances.
A bunch of scientists, a bunch of great people. Not everybody is born wealthy and the rich, obviously. It is a dilemma. And then I’m still struck by, ladies and gentlemen, it’s not that long ago — what, 8 or ten years ago — that the subject of… Maybe not even 8 or 10. Gay marriage, transgenderism, transnationalism, transracism, all of that was considered so outside the mainstream and so fringe.
Nobody ever thought it was going to matter to anything. Now here it has become mainstream. In fact in many people’s view, it has become dominant in American politics. So a lot of people are scratching their heads. How did this seemily happen overnight?