RUSH: Folks, I saw something that I have to comment on.
You know, this is outside the realm of the presidential race, but it is still right smack-dab in the middle of what we all care about, and that is the future of this country. You know and I know how frustrating it is to try to persuade liberals to abandon liberalism, or to put it another way, you know how hard it is to get liberals to switch to conservatism. One of the things that… I’ll give you a couple examples of frustrating things to me.
For example, we had eight years in the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Ronaldus Magnus and we had eight years of an economic boom. We had eight years of unemployment lowering. We had jobs created. We were just rolling. The Soviet Union was beaten back without firing a shot. It was one of the most incredible eight years in this nation’s history, and yet people forgot it, or they were able to be convinced it wasn’t real. “It was trickle-down.
“The only thing that happened during the eight years, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.” No, that’s what’s happening now, folks. Or how about this example? We have all these young people that just want Big Government, they want socialism, and yet you point out to them, “It’s never worked anywhere. Show me where it’s working! Show me Cuba. Show me the ChiComs. Show me anywhere. Show me Venezuela.”
Show them anywhere where it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t shake them. They still think they can make it work. Very, very frustrating. When facts, when what you can see does not persuade them, what you can make them see? Socialism has never worked, at any time in the world. Marxism, Leninism, has never worked at any time in the world. Not as designed. I mean, it works for the people running it, but it does not work for the proletariat.
It does not work for the hoi polloi. It does not work for the people in the middle class, the lower class. They get shafted each and every time by it. And yet I ran across… You know, the New Republic was bought by one of these Facebook co-founders, and he and his husband are running this thing now. Chris Hughes, I think, is his name. The New Republic used to be on par with National Review.
It was the liberal equivalent of National Review. It was a liberal journal of opinion. It was highly regarded for its quality. Among intellectuals and people interested in opinion journalism, it was a high quality thing. It was really respected. It was looked on with great respect, even though it was filled with liberalism. They had their radicals in there. Michael Kinsley, people like that, used to edit it and write there.
But then it got sold and these new young Facebook guys came in and bought it. Well, the Facebook guy and his husband came in and bought it, and they have remade the whole thing in their own youthful image, and all of the great holdover writers and editors are practically gone now, and they have repopulated it with young people from current Millennial generation, and the magazine still has a leftist slant, a big leftist slant.
But it really has done what it can to destroy any linkage to its past. I still look at it. And The Economist. Because it was one of the magazines I always read as part of show prep in understanding liberalism within intellectually understanding it, to be able to explain to people why it wasn’t working, wouldn’t work, was bad. The latest edition of The New Republic has a story in it that is entitled: “What If Stalin Had Computers?”
So these are 35-, 40-year-old young people, and what are they doing? The piece is about maybe the Soviet Union was just a couple of generations early. Good grief, if the Soviet Union had our tech knowledge and wizardry, and if the Soviet Union had computers, then the command-and-control economy they were trying could have actually worked!
So here you have young people… We talk about the difficulty in persuading people to give up the romanticism of socialism, and here come this new crop of young people romantically looking at socialism. It always attracts them. Never mind it’s never worked. It always attracts a group of people that think they are the ones that can finally do it, pull off a giant command-and-control not just economy, but entire culture.
They believe with incredible vanity that a select few elites can actually create an entire nation and society and culture that is better than anything any free market can create, because they are good people and the free market has bad people in it and cheats. Yeah, scam artists. But they, the good people with their command-and-control techniques, can make sure that the bad people are dealt with and identified and gotten rid of.
And what obviously happens is that the scams and the crooks and so forth end up running the country under socialism. But the point here is, Josef Stalin was a mass murderer. Every Soviet leader, up to Mikhail Gorbachev, could lay claim to being a mass murder to one degree or another. And here come these young kids at the New Republic thinking (summarized), “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What if? What if Stalin, what if Mao — oh, my God, what if Gorbachev — had just had the computers and us that we have today!
“Can you imagine with the data collection and the data mining and the algorithms what beautiful results we could create for people?” So it finally cemented something I know, and that is all of this liberalism, most of it — all of this dreaming and fantasies — is all rooted in emotion. There isn’t a single element of intellectual application to it.
When you have evidence, thousands of years of evidence all over the place including countries you can look at today and see incontrovertibly it doesn’t work, and yet you romanticize about making it work? Every generation seems to have in it these romanticized young people who think they are the ones finally who will have success. “The Soviet Union, they didn’t work because didn’t have enough money.
“They weren’t able stick it out long enough because evils of Reagan. Gorbachev? They tried to assassinate him. But if Gorbachev would have just had 10 more years and our skills at data mining, oh, my God! What a great place it could have been.” So it has affirmed for me, folks, that changing these people’s minds is not possible because all of this isn’t in their heads. This is all emotion.
This fascination with all of this socialism and the fairness and the equality and the abundance, it’s all dreams. It’s what the environmental movement is. You know, you can pull your hair out trying to tell these people, “Do you realize there isn’t any evidence for what you believe?” “What do you mean, no evidence?” “There isn’t. It’s just computer models!” Just like these hurricane models out there that change every six hours. There’s no evidence of global warming. No evidence of man-made. There isn’t any.
“Well, but we have the models!”
They want to believe it, they want to believe they can fix it, they want to believe they can. It’s all emotion. And skulls full of mush. I mean, it helps to have a skull full of mush combined with this emotion in order to make it stick. That’s all. I saw this story, “What if Stalin Had Computers?” and I said, “To hell with it. You know, what am I wasting my time trying to change their minds with facts and intellect for? It’s not the way to go about it.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, let me tell you what would happen, ladies and gentlemen, if Stalin had computers. You know what would happen if Stalin had computers? Stalin would use those computers to track every citizen. He would use those computers to make sure every citizen was following orders and behaving — and if they weren’t, they would end up in his gulag. If Joseph Stalin or any… All you have to do is look at China. If you want to find out what Stalin would have done if he had computers, check the ChiComs.
Check the political prisoner jails in China. Check people who engage in religion that the state disapproves of in China. Check and see what happens to ’em. This is why this is, to me, so absurd. What if…? The assumption that Stalin was a good guy. A mass murderer! The assumption that Stalin is a good guy, and, “My God, if he would have just had us and our brilliant data sets and our data mining capabilities and our computers! Oh, my God, Stalin could have been wonderful.”
Stalin was a criminal. Stanley was a deadly, mass-murdering thug and here you have… That is known, that has been demonstrated, that could have been taught to these kids. I say “kids;” they’re in their thirties. It’s known what Joseph Stalin did. I don’t care about the New York Times and their Duranty guy getting a Pulitzer for ignoring the murders. I mean, it’s 17 million people minimum that he wiped out, but yet they romanticize him, and they think, “Oh, my God!”
Because, see, they think they’re good people, wonderful people, and if they could just make sure Stalin had what they had, if Stalin had them, then, oh! The beauty is in their mind that command-and-control, a few elites, a few really smarter than everybody else elites can create a freer, richer, more productive nation than people exerting their own liberty and free will. And that’s the problem.
So I say, “How do you persuade these people?” (chuckles)
Obviously going after them in a typical, mental series of exercises to persuade ’em isn’t gonna work ’cause there’s nothing mental about that we’re doing. They’re not… If they really believe this stuff, they’re stupid; they’re not bright! So it’s all emotion. It is a triumph of emotion over common sense that makes them believe that if these murdering-thug dictators only had them and their computer technique and ability and high-tech, advanced data mining and whatever algorithms, you name it, “Think of the good that could be done! Think of the magic that could have been done!”
It’s dangerous as it can be, especially when the evidence to the contrary is within their eyesight. They don’t even have to study history. It’s within their eyesight to see that it doesn’t work. Give Castro computers and see what he does with them. He wouldn’t know the first thing to do with one. But if he did, if he knew what they were capable of, do you think Castro would use his computers to further enslave people, to further track people, to further punish people?
Damn right he would, exactly as the ChiComs do, because that’s the kind of people they are and were.