RUSH: Folks, I’m not gonna be here Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, in addition to Labor Day, we have our best-of show on Labor Day. Normally my summer schedule is to take a week in June and a couple of weeks in August, and I have not done that. I think I took four or five days in June. And so broadcast partners came said, “You know, take some time, will you? We don’t want you burning out. We’ve got the election coming up. It’s gonna be intense.”
So I have been forced out of the air chair here Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And I thought, this is embarrassing to have to say this. So I thought about suspending myself. And I said okay, what have I done that I could suspend myself for? And I couldn’t come up with anything. I thought it would be hilarious to suspend myself. I used to suspend Snerdley for like 45 minutes or an hour if he was getting mad and cursing callers. But he’s been on his best behavior for the past bunch of years, so there haven’t been any real suspensions here. Well, at least as far as I know he’s been on — (laughing) they’re all laughing in there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, folks, a reminder: If you missed the first half hour, the first hour of the program, make sure you go to RushLimbaugh.com sometime today or tonight and revisit the opening monologue on a new movie out called Greater. I don’t want to repeat what I said, but it’s all there. It’s a new movie that I really hope as many of you who can get a chance to see it. And that’s all I’ll say. I don’t want to waste any more time. Not waste time. I never waste time. But I previously discussed it. Just go to RushLimbaugh.com and find out why if you missed the first hour of the program.
Obama Regime to Classify State Voting Systems as Infrastructure
RUSH: Gonna get back to the phones here just a second, but since we were discussing Hillary with the last caller, the point that I wanted to make is, you remember at her… I think it was the Democrat Party convention, her acceptance speech, when she came out with this proposal to invest in “infrastructure,” in our roads and bridges, and she had this specific figure attached to it like $250 billion or $300 billion. Remember the reaction that we all had?
It just doesn’t seem that this kind of hypocrisy ever attached itself to Democrats. Well, get this, from the Cybercast News Service. When Hillary says that she’s gonna spend money on infrastructure, that’s just half the story, because “[t]he Obama White House may designate certain state voting systems as ‘pieces of critical infrastructure,’ which would give federal technology experts ‘more of a role in assisting the administrators of those networks as they deter intrusions,’ White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday.”
So they’re going to turn state voting systems — the machines, the networks, the whole shebang. They’re going to try to re-designate that stuff as “critical infrastructure.” So now when Hillary starts talking about appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars for infrastructure, she can include the federal government messing around in state election systems, voting systems. Josh Earnest said, “That’s something that’s being discussed by senior members of the president’s National Security team.”
“According to a Reuters report, U.S. intelligence officials are worried that hackers sponsored by Russia or other countries may attempt to disrupt the presidential election, and the FBI is asking states to boost the security of their voting systems.” And as part of that upgrade, the federal government will now classify voting systems as infrastructure. Well, once you let the Feds get their money hands in on state voting? Oh, my gosh. They just don’t stop. They’re just trying to infiltrate and swallow and surround as much as they can.
Lesbian Farmer Story Still Percolating Out There
RUSH: Yep. That lesbian farmer story is still alive out there. You know, it’s classic. It’s a Washington Free Beacon story. So I see it, and I report it, repeat it, I actually repeat it and I add some unique commentary to it, and it gets a life of its own at the New York Daily News, at New York Magazine, The Advocate, Conan O’Brien, and it’s still percolating out there, the lesbian farmer story. This is where the USDA’s offering financial grants to lesbians to become farm babes. Who knew.
Wealthy Swedes Have Homes Confiscated for Migrants
RUSH: Did you hear what happened in Sweden? Did I mention this? In Sweden where they have been overrun by, quote, unquote, refugees from Syria and other places, they’ve run out of places to house them where the refugees will accept. The refugees are refusing to accept the housing Sweden is providing. So you know what Sweden did? They went to the wealthy, who have second homes, and they basically confiscated them, said, “Look, wealthy people, you’re only using that big house six weeks a year. Well, we’re taking it, and we’re gonna house the refugees in there for a while.”
Investor’s Business Daily: Caution: Men (Not) At Work
RUSH: Okay. Investor’s Business Daily, IBD, headline: “Caution: Men (Not) at Work — While the Fed and government policymakers fret over “full employment,” a new study by one of America’s leading demographers and economists argues that in fact we are in the midst of a full-blown unemployment crisis — one that remains, in his words, ‘hidden.'” It’s not hidden from me. Anybody with half a brain knows that we have an unemployment crisis: 94 million Americans not working!
The labor force participation rate is right now around 62%. That’s the lowest it’s been since the seventies, the Jimmy Carter seventies. “This Friday, a new jobs report will come out. If the Wall Street consensus is correct, it will show the unemployment rate continuing to hover around 5% while nonfarm payrolls will grow about 180,000 for the month. But that won’t tell the whole story.
“Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow,” that just means he’s a thinker, “at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in a new book called ‘Men Without Work,’ due out next week, that we’re suffering not from full employment, but massive underemployment — in particular, nearly one out of six working-age men have no job and are no longer looking for one. A release for his book calls this ‘a hidden time bomb with far-reaching economic, social and political consequences.’ With 10 million fewer male workers in the labor force than we should have, it’s hard to disagree. This portends an entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work…”
When talking about men — and men and women are different, and I don’t care what anybody thinks, says, or tries to say otherwise. Men and women are different, and men have derived their sense of self-worth from their work. Not only, but a great, great percentage. A great percentage of the self-worth that men have comes from their career, their job, their work. That is how they define themselves. Their job, their work, their career, their adjustments is from where they derive their self-esteem, and it may be becoming true for an increasing number of women as our culture evolves.
I’m not trying to exclude women, but for the longest time that was one of the unhidden, unmentioned but very tangible aspects of men working. And you take that away and you have a problem on your hands. Not just the idle time, not just the lack of revenue, not just no income being produced, not just the inability to provide for yourself. The whole idea for many past generations of men — the test was, the objective was, the measure of a man was — how well he provides for family, protection, income, and all that.
Now, feminism sought to attack that, because they saw that as giving men more substance and more meaning and not including women and so forth. But, look, all that’s cockamamie, because it happens to be psychologically and physiologically true. Men do not derive their self-esteem from whether or not they can play golf, how many beers they can consume on Friday night or any of that. Now, sadly some do, but I’m speaking here now on traditional majority ways.
If you take all that away, you have a recipe for big problems.
You have men who feel worthless, purposeless, and unnecessary. And that is what is being discussed here: “An entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work, it’ll have an enormous impact on future generations of young men. It’s not exclusively a problem of the lower income classes, however. Today women make up 57% of all college graduates, meaning that men in the current generation will be enormously underrepresented in the well-paying professions that require a college degree.”
That is not, by the way, by accident. There is a reason fewer and fewer men go to college. There’s a reason fewer and fewer men want to go to college. So this guy’s theory is that “[i]n short, men are in danger of becoming a hidden, and combustible, underclass,” and that’s not good. A pull quote from the piece: “This is indeed a silent time bomb ticking at the heart of our economy. To ignore it will surely lead the U.S. down the path to terminal economic and productivity decline, a lower standard of living and an also-ran status among the global economies.”
Men and women are different. And men not working, men not producing, are men who don’t have a lot of self-worth. And you know what happens from that. If you don’t like yourself, forget anybody else. If you don’t value yourself, if you have a perpetual inferiority complex, just in itself that’s not good. It’s exacerbated by these kinds of economic trends. “Okay, Rush, so what’s your solution?” Well, that’s not… We’re not at that stage yet, and I doubt that a whole lot of people would automatically agree with any of this.
So we still have to reach the, quote/unquote, “consensus” on the existence of this program.
The piece has all kinds of stats that I could share with you, but it’s numbers. You lose track of numbers when you’re listening to them and don’t have them in front of you. But “‘Over the last three decades the labor-market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels,’ wrote MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor and Education.” And that occupational stature is every bit as important as the wage levels the two go together.