And, if I had to synthesize the description of this, the column appears at the Claremont website, Claremont review of books, Claremont University. They are a highly respected conservative organization. Dr. Larry Arnn, who runs Hillsdale College, used to run Claremont. And there’s a piece by somebody who is not using his name in the byline. He’s using the name of a famous Roman, Publius Decius Mus, seeking to be anonymous here. This piece is a shaming of the conservative intellectuals that comprise the Never Trump movement.
It is shot between the eyes of conservative intellectuals who say that Trump is beneath them. They can’t stomach Trump. They can’t possibly vote for Trump. It would be distastefully, personally unacceptable and so forth. And the reason this piece appeals to me is because it validates so many of the instincts that I have had over the years, in recent months particularly, and that I’ve shared with you about what is happening to the conservative movement and how conservatism’s being defined, and who seeks to define it and what it means going forward.
And there’s even a term used for the conservative Never Trumpers. He calls them “the Washington Generals.” I wonder where he got that? That happens to be my term for our side. Specifically, the Republicans in Congress. I think I named them the Washington Generals, happy to be on the field, happy to wear the uniform, but supposed to lose and happy to do so. And that’s just a flavor.
The piece is so good. It is just a home run, every paragraph. So I’m gonna… Folks, this is on a par with Dr. Angelo Codevilla’s ruling class versus country class piece from the American Spectator a few years ago. The title of this piece, by the way, is “The Flight 93 Election.” What does that mean, “The Flight 93 Election”? Yeah. I’ll explain that when we get back.
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RUSH: You remember Flight 93. That’s the plane on 9/11 that the passengers rushed the cockpit and captured the cockpit from the terrorists but the plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania. It still was denied its target, however. And in one sense, it was considered a greatly heroic and successful action by the passengers, the civilians on that plane. Well, this piece — and, by the way, we’ve linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com. I imagine you’re gonna have trouble getting to it since I’ve ballyhooed it here.
I’m telling you, folks, it is really good. It’s one of these pieces that you’ll read it and wish you had written it. In my case, I read it, and I was silently jumping for joy because it contains so much of what I said. But it’s said so well here and so pointedly and the gloves off. As I say, it’s a shaming of conservative intellectuals by an anonymous conservative intellectual. Now, I don’t know why the writer chose the route of anonymity. Maybe to maintain the focus on the piece.
The name is gonna leak; it always does. Remember Primary Colors, the book that came out about the Clinton campaign, and eventually people found out it was Joe Klein who wrote the book? So we’ll find out who wrote this, the point is. “The Flight 93 Election — 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”
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RUSH: “The Flight 93 Election — 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto[matic]. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” This is a shaming of conservative, Never Trump intellectuals is what this piece is, and it’s powerful.
“To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic,” to say, “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto[matic]. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” The “ordinary conservative” says, “The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high — except,” well, sometimes. “Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no ‘end of history’ and that all human outcomes are still possible. …
“But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!” Yeah! He’s mocking this whole idea that eight years of Hillary on top of eight years of Obama will leave us anything. “The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues — immigration, trade, and war — right from the beginning.
“But let us back up. One of the paradoxes — there are so many — of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad.” Now, I’m gonna take some time to translate what this means as I interpret it. As you know, there are people in the conservative movement who just can’t bring themselves to support Trump, vote Trump, say anything good about Trump, and they’ve made it known they’ll vote for Hillary.
At the same time, they indicate that they’re trying to tell us that things are very bad. But if they’re willing to vote for Hillary they must not think they’re that bad, if voting for Hillary and what all that means for the next eight years leaves us anything after that. “On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism.
“Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes,” like ISIS. “A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six-figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on.
“Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.” The point is, nobody on the conservative right disagrees: We’re all in a downward spiral and these illustrations are what a lot of people on the conservative right agree with. Culturally and morally and politically we’re in a swamp, we’re in a sewer, and we’re trending downward, and there’s no end in sight.
“Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet, these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted — tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?”
In other words, we’ve got a lot of conservative intellectuals at the tanks writing policy papers, position papers, as though everything’s the same, as though everything’s normal. “We’re just through a normal election cycle. We win some; we lose some. We gotta keep plugging away. Eventually we’re gonna win,” with no acknowledgment of the reality of what we face. They’re in it for themselves. They want their pet ideas adopted. They want their paychecks.
They want their paychecks to be cashed. They want to stay in the game. They want to be part of whatever the movement is in Washington, DC. But here’s the thing: “If conservatives are right…” This is a key ‘graph here, folks. “If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if [conservatives] are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed ‘family values’; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right…”
[I]f conservatives are right “about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if [conservatives] are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere — if [conservatives] are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe — mustn’t they? — that we are headed off a cliff.
“But it’s quite obvious that [some conservative intellectuals] don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article…” I hate naming names, but since this guy did it I’ll mention who the names are. “A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative — indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the ‘condition of America’ and finds it wanting. What does [he] propose to do about it?
“The usual litany of ‘conservative’ ‘solutions,’ with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, ‘civic renewal,’ and — of course! — Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes?
“What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? ‘Civic renewal’ would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve ‘civic renewal’? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.” The point here is — and it rings true to me because we’ve discussed I don’t know how many times. My way of saying this is I turn on TV or I read various things and I look at all of these people on our side who properly detail all the things going wrong.
“They get it all right: We’re losing our culture, we’re losing our morality, we’re losing our politics, we’re losing education. We’re losing everything and they get that all right. But there’s no sense of urgency to stop it or to fix it, and there’s no willingness to join the battle! They just write what they write, say what they say, and then go back and do it again the next day, get the Fox News gig or the book deal and keep talking. But joining the fray…? And then when people who are joining the fray get hit and attacked, they’re nowhere to be found defending anybody. In fact, many of them join the attack on whoever it is on the conservative side that’s getting hit!
And so this author is really calling them out, he’s saying, “Look, you guys are just as good as anybody at identifying the problems. The idea that you can have eight more years of Hillary Clinton and still employ these traditional conservative solutions to a population changing before our eyes that doesn’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about is insane.”
And I’m still only on page two. Let me skip a couple of paragraphs here. “Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad — But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation,” that things are really bad.
“If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others. Whatever the reason for the contradiction –” the contradiction is identifying the problems head on, getting them exactly right, and then doing precisely nothing about it. “– there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs — to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society –”
In other words, we’re being torn apart in front of our eyes, and to hold that conservative, cultural, economic, political beliefs are incompatible with the transformation going on at the moment, “– and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.
“Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.”
Now, let me give another hint where this is headed. What this column is really about is a shaming of Never Trumpers who proudly and loudly proclaim — conservative intellectuals — it’s a infinite audience that’s being targeted here. It’s not you, folks. It’s conservative intellectuals, the think tankers, the people that rely on fundraising and donations and the magazine types. I’m not naming any names and he doesn’t do so, either, but he’s written for that audience, and he’s basically calling them out for their holier-than-thou attitude about Donald Trump.
Because the whole point of this is this guy’s opinion. He is every bit the intellectual conservative of those he’s criticizing. The point of this whole piece is that Donald Trump’s the only hope, that conservatism no longer applies. We’re way past that. Conservatism, as has been applied the last ten years, what do we have to show for it? We have a bunch of midterm election victories, but nothing done with them.
And if you’re really serious about how bad things are but you can’t find yourself to oppose Hillary Clinton, then you’re worthless. That’s what this is essentially saying, but in 10 pages. It’s great.
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RUSH: Just a few more excerpts here from the column The Flight 93 Election from Claremont.com. Folks, I want to tell you, if I chose to I could spend probably two hours on this today. It is that deep. I should say in depth. It’s not deep in the sense it’s hard to understand. Quite the contrary. But in a nutshell the message and theme — and there are a couple of them here, but if I had to whittle it down, conservatism can’t just be an academic exercise when the country is hanging in the balance.
And the focus within the conservative movement on who is and who isn’t a genuine conservative misses the entire point and is a waste of time when the country is hanging in the balance. There’s only one possible way to stop the downward trend we’re on, and that’s to beat Hillary Clinton, and the only way to do that is to vote for Donald Trump. And it’s a plea to intellectual conservatives who refuse to do so.
Can you separate your vote from support? If you can’t bring yourself to support Trump, can you at least vote for him to stop the downward trend that you all acknowledge is occurring? This is one of the big themes of the piece: How can you sit there and agree how rotten things are, how we’re in a downward spiral, how everything we believe in is being transformed and torn apart and not react as though we’re in a big crisis, as though we can just continue to do what we’re doing, writing our same old policy papers, enunciating our same old principles to an audience that is further and further removed by virtue of immigration and other tricks the Democrats are using to totally change the face of the electorate in this country.
Here’s another excerpt. “More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years?” Take over the House is about it, when you get right down to it, 1994. That’s my interpretation. The writer here says that, well, practically nothing has been achieved in the last 20 years. But then if you go tell conservatives that, they’ll say, “Well, our ideas haven’t even been tried.”
“Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas ‘haven’t been tried,’ who is ultimately at fault?” This gets to the point. You can sit there and you can enunciate conservatism all day, you can write conservatism all day, but you can’t sit there and say, “Our ideas haven’t had a chance,” because if you’re not trying to get them implemented, if you’re not actually trying to persuade people, if you’re not out there fighting for hearts and minds, if you’re just pontificating, then you can’t sit back and say, “Our ideas haven’t been tried.”
“The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘creative destruction.’ Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?”
Now, if you are a conservative intellectual and you’re reading this, that is a deep cut. That is a deep wound. That is an allegation that you’re only in it for the money and that you don’t want to upset anything that might interrupt your fundraising.
So whereas you might really acknowledge that we’re in dire straits and you might, in your heart, think the only thing we can do is vote Trump, you won’t dare say so because it might upset your strident conservative donors who might freeze you out. That’s who he’s calling out in this paragraph. Anyway, really, I can’t go through the whole thing, folks, it would take too much time. I’ve gotta take a break now. But you really should read it.
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RUSH: Look, I have more from this piece, “The Flight 93 Election,” and, as I say, I could probably spend the whole program on this, because it is all about who we are and where we are as a country and as conservatives and the conservative movement, which are three different things. Movement conservatives are different than just people living their lives as conservatives. There are people in the conservative movement who derive their standard of living from it, who earn their living as accredited members of it.
But most people are not that. Most conservatives are not that. They’re just average, ordinary American citizens, and they don’t work in think tanks and they don’t work at conservative magazines or Fox News or even have talk radio programs. They’re just out there — you and so forth. And there is a divide, there is a discord that’s happened, and part of it is… Well, it’s hard to say that one thing has launched the discord. It’s a culmination of many things that have taken years and years and years to implement and to unfold.
So I think rather than just head right back into this, you know, I’ll do an excerpt here or there for the remainder of the program. Because, as I say, it prints out to 10 pages, and I really do want you to read it. We’ve linked to it. It’s from the Claremont site. We’ve linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com. I think we shut down their website for the first half hour if you were trying to get it. But patience and perseverance will triumph and you will eventually be able to get to that link.
Again, just go to RushLimbaugh.com and you’ll find it. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it at the top. I haven’t been to our page yet to look exactly where it is, but it will be at the top, nearby. But let me give you just one more paragraph or two excerpt of this — and again, to summarize what this is: It is a conservative intellectual writing anonymously calling out other conservative intellectuals over their refusal to support Trump. While acknowledging how bad things are, refusing to support Trump is an admission that things really aren’t that bad.
They don’t think they’re that bad, expect ’em to get that bad, and we’re not in a crisis, and, therefore, there’s not really a whole lot called for outside the status quo. And really when you get right down to it, folks, have you not found that to be the case? You run into people who say, “Yeah, the country…” They don’t think it’s a crisis. One of the biggest problems I have had over the course of the last eight years with Obama is running into people who acknowledge that Obama’s not great.
Things are not good, bad things are happening, but the admission that we’re in a crisis… Particularly the Republican Party; forget conservatism. The Republican Party has not wanted to even get anywhere near admitting that we’re in a crisis; because when you do that, when you take that step? Well, it’s a call to arms. And this writer is essentially calling out other conservative intellectuals and basically asking, “Are you guys even working in the political arena, or you just in the fundraising arena?”
And, believe me, when the people he’s aiming this piece at read that, they’re gonna get ticked. I mean, they’re gonna get ticked at a lot of this, but that cuts right to the motivations, right to the reasons that they do what they do. Are they really out trying to change hearts and minds? Are they really, really in the political arena or are they on a distant stage in Washington or New York writing and speaking but no more than that? We’ll see where it goes.
This is gonna rankle a lot of feathers, and I don’t know how many people would have come across it on their own, which is why I’m highlighting it today. But here’s a paragraph where the writer — again, remember the audience: Conservative intellectuals. If you don’t know what I mean by that, “conservative intellectual” for this purpose is a writer, somebody working at a think tank, somebody working in policy, somebody blogging.
You know, just sharing with you their smarts and their brainpower and illustrating their beliefs and understanding of conservative principle but not doing anything to implement it anywhere. “How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class…” Now, Davos is the World Economic Forum, and that’s where all of the elite — wealthiest of the wealthy — leftists go every February, Davos, Switzerland, to have an economic conference where they basically sit around and have a party.
And they ski, and they contemplate how they can entrench themselves and the establishment even deeper and protect themselves even more from any outside influences. It’s a very exclusionary existence. It’s a very small group, meaning there not too many people qualified to be in it, and they don’t want anybody new in it, and they exist to keep people out and to rig as much of the world’s affairs for their own benefit. So that’s the Davos class.
“If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are” that the last twenty years have been pretty good for you. “If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted — perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably — your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics.” I particularly love that because I invented that. To my knowledge I did. Who were the Washington Generals?
Well, for you young conservatives and young people in general, the Washington Generals were the foil team for the Harlem Globetrotters led by Meadowlark Lemon. They lost every game, by design. They were there as clown prince idiots. They were on the field in uniform opposition only. Their purpose was to allow the Globetrotters to strut their stuff and to demonstrate how great they were. They were basically a bunch of fools.
But they got paid, and they got to wear the uniform, and they got to travel around with the Generals, and they felt pretty good about themselves. That’s the analogy. “If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are” that the last twenty years have hunky-dory! “If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted … your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics.” Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid.
“To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davo [crowd] oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.” (chuckling) Each of these paragraphs is a pack of dynamite (chuckling), and this paragraph basically is attacking Republicans and conservative intellectuals who are happy to lose.
Happy to be in the establishment. Happy to be on the field with the winners. Happy to be called by name by the winners, happy to be seen on the team as the winners. And if you ever do win anything, it’s when you join the bad guys, as useless idiots to help them with amnesty, to help them with lower wages for the American people, to help them by saddling college graduates with insurmountable debt, to help the establishment outsource American jobs. By helping the establishment deindustrialize the country, by helping the establishment negotiate trade deals — and war after war after war.
“All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same…” Now, this is a major indictment, because you know there are a lot of people running around wringing their hands. “Oh, my God, we have the best field of Republican candidates in 20 years!” How many people remember that? I remember in August and September when Trump was just commandeering everything, and you could turn on TV, you could read columns, and you could read people lamenting, “My God, this is the best field of Republican candidates we have had in I don’t know how long!”
This writer is saying that all 16 of Trump’s competitors would have done nothing to change anything that is happening. They were the Washington Generals. “They would have ensured more of the same — as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change.”
That’s another stick of dynamite. And it’s a point close to my heart. How many times have I said we get up every day, we try to go about our life, and then we find out we gotta defend something. Something’s under attack. We don’t have time to advance the ball. We’re too busy trying to stop the advance of the left. We’re reacting to everything, and whatever they propose, we come up with an alternative. They propose Obamacare, we propose health care but our way, done smarter.
We never oppose them. We never say “no.” We never say “stop.” At least, the establishment Republicans, the conservative elites that this guy is writing to. “Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their ‘opposition’ may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support.”
So you have Republicans joining the Democrats on amnesty, claiming we have to do it for whatever reason, you can’t tell the difference in the two, right? But at least the Republicans are not dreaming up this insanity. They’re not dreaming up “elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ‘Islamophobia,’ and Black Lives Matter.” The Republicans aren’t dreaming up any of that. The Republicans are not creating that stuff. All they’re doing is to help ratify it, which is an indictment itself.
So that paragraph, too, another stick of dynamite. This guy is accusing conservative intellectuals who think they’re mouthing and writing powerful opposition to Obama, he’s accusing them of helping. ‘Cause they don’t really stop anything. They don’t really try. They just write as though here’s the latest news of the day, and it’s not conservative, it’s liberal or whatever it is. But there isn’t any outrage. There’s no sense of crisis attached to it.
“A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West.”
What he’s saying is, with this, is that, look, it’s not bad enough that they’re advancing their leftist progressive agenda unstoppably. What they’re gonna do if she wins, they’re gonna get into vindictive persecution, and they’re gonna take out, they’re gonna do everything they can to destroy any and all opposition. And he cites evidence like Obama and the IRS and a couple of other examples.
He’s basically saying, you think that you’re gonna continue to have your platform if Hillary Clinton gets elected, you think you’re gonna continue to have your platform to continue to criticize Hillary, don’t count on it. They’re gonna come for you. They’re gonna come for all of us. They don’t want any opposition. They’re tired of playing the game that they have a legitimate opponent. They don’t think they do, the left, this guy’s opinion.
They think they’re on the cusp of getting rid of all opposition and the election of Hillary Clinton will tell them that they have gotten rid of all opposition, and they’re gonna make it official by getting rid of any dissent. That’s what this guy’s theory is. And it’s time people woke up and realized what’s at stake, is what he’s trying to do with — my interpretation, but I think I’m fairly close.
“We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers.” We see it the way Google manipulates searches. We see it the way Facebook manipulates their trending news items. “We see it in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns — operated through the former and aided by the latter — of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.
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RUSH: Okay, back to another excerpt here from “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont.com — and again if you’re having trouble finding it, there’s a link to it at the top of our page at RushLimbaugh.com. What do we have to lose by fighting back? Again, keep in mind… I realize some people just tuning in at every break, so let me again remind you what this piece is. It’s an anonymous column written to conservative intellectuals who make up the Never Trump movement. Now, it’s targeted to conservative intellectuals because this guy is one. (interruption)
Well, he didn’t name names so I’m not gonna suppose. I mean, you could fill in your blanks here, I guess. I assume he means to include elected Republicans in this as well, anybody who’s a Never Trumper. And there’s some of the Never Trump crowd, folks — believe it — who really want Trump to lose so that they can be validity in what they said when they called him such a reprobate. And this man’s point is: How can you be a conservative and want him to lose? How can you be a conservative and want Hillary Clinton to win?
How can you be a conservative and want another eight years just like the previous eight? How in the world can you want that? And he concludes that if your paycheck derives from being part of an opposition and your paycheck derives from donors and fundraisers, then fine and dandy. But you’re not really doing anything for anybody. And he’s frustrated that there are so many Never Trumper who are trying to act like they are high and mighty on principle here as though the preservation of conservatism is paramount.
And his point is, conservatism’s about to be erased. Opposition to the Democrats and to Hillary and Obama’s about to be erased if they keep winning. There isn’t gonna be any opposition, principled or otherwise! That’s his belief. Ten pages of it. “So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys — and paychecks.” That’s a dynamite sentence. He’s basically calling these people out: What do you have to lose by fighting back?
He’s chastising people who are afraid to oppose Hillary or Obama or the Democrats for fear they’re gonna do kicked out of the establishment, for fear they’re not gonna get their paychecks, for fear they’re not gonna be able to maintain their donations and their fundraising. But then he says. “But those are going away anyway.” Don’t you understand? All of that’s going away anyway! There isn’t gonna be a Washington Generals; there isn’t gonna need to be a Washington Generals. There isn’t gonna need to be a foil anymore, ’cause there isn’t gonna be any serious opposition to worry about.
“Among the many things the ‘Right’ still doesn’t understand is that the Left [the Democrats] has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on.” His point here is that the Democrats and the media and so forth, they’re just going through the motions of acting like there’s a serious opposition and they’re tolerating it for the sake of how it looks. But they have concluded that it doesn’t need to go on like this anymore, that we really don’t need to legitimize the Republican Party as an opposition. We don’t need to legitimize conservatism, anymore. So we can just erase ’em.
The left “don’t think they need a foil anymore,” they don’t think they need the Washington Generals on the court every day, “and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot,” and then the killer paragraph: “If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms,” we won the House in 1994, “but we do nothing with them.” Well, we did. You know, that’s not true. In 1994, we did a lot with the House.
The conservative agenda, the Contract with America, welfare reform. There was a lot done, and that’s frustrating, ’cause nothing was done beyond it. In fact, efforts were made in the Republican Party to erase it. “After the Carthaginian’s famous slaughter of a Roman army at Cannae, he failed to march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry commander to complain: ‘you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.'” Well, we don’t either. “Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us.”
He writes, “I will mention but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements — the universities and the media above all — are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our existence. … If it hadn’t been abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the campaign of 2015-2016 must surely have made it evident to even the meanest capacities that the intelligentsia … is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against this onslaught, ‘conservative’ media is a nullity, barely a whisper.
“It cannot be heard above the blaring of what has been aptly called ‘The Megaphone.’ Second, our Washington Generals…” Let me give you an illustration of that. Fox News. Nothing against Fox News, but what do you think their highest rated program generates in terms of audience every day? Three million. The highest rated program generates three million viewers a night. Now, I don’t know how many viewers a week that adds up to. In radio… We do radio ratings differently than TV and we end up tabulating by the day, by the quarter hour, and by the week.
TV, I think, does the same, demographics and so forth. But still, three million people. It’s a lot, and they’re good, and they’re effective but it doesn’t come close ’til you add up ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC. Throw them in there. Their audiences are even smaller than Fox but they are part of “The Megaphone.” This is just to illustrate. “Second, our Washington Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is supposed to have said that ‘the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.’ But with an opposition like ours, why bother?
“Our ‘leaders’ and ‘dissenters’ bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them. Fearful, beaten dogs…” Now, I don’t need to explain that to you. That’s (stammering fearfully), “Don’t call me a racist! Don’t call me a racist! I’m for amnesty! I join you on amnesty! Don’t — don’t — don’t call me a racist! Don’t call me a Nazi! Please don’t call me names! I — I — I — I — I agree with you on amnesty,” and so forth. “Third and most importantly,” and this is it, “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.
“As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta … think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are. … Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their ‘natural conservatism’ …?” Oh, can I share with you say story about that?
I can’t… Folks, from the first moment people started trying to sell me on agreeing with amnesty, you know what I heard (and I heard it from the very people this guy’s talking about)? “Rush, you have got to support it. You’ve got to support amnesty! Let me tell you, Rush, these…”What were they called? “Hispanics, Latinos, they’re all natural conservatives, Rush! They’re Catholic, most of them are. They’re traditional family values! They’re all conservative. They believe in hard work” and so forth.
That was the sales pitch, that they are conservatives-in-waiting. Well, we find out they’re not. They never have been. There is no such thing as a conservative-in-waiting. A conservative has to be weaned off of liberalism. Something that is not conservative in and of itself will become liberal. Conservatism is an actual intellectual application. Liberalism is just the easiest choice anybody can make. All you have to do is pretend to care about things and say so. Conservatism, all of these values and principles of conservatism require action to implement, not just thought.
But liberalism, all you have to do is say and whine, moan, complain, pretend to be victims, feel sorry for victims and so forth, and you’re automatically a good person. I’ll never forget, the earliest days of the sales pitch to join this amnesty movement, “Rush, they’re natural conservatives, God-fearing, hardworking, self-reliant, rugged individuals. You gotta support, let them in the country. That’s how we’re gonna get rid of the Democrat Party.” Except it didn’t happen, because the borders have been open for all of these years.
“It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!
“This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”
A conservative intellectual at Claremont saying Trump, in the last seven election cycles, is the only candidate ever to stand up to oppose what is bringing about the dissolution and destruction — this is not a stick of dynamite. This is 10 or 12 sticks of dynamite. We’re getting close to nuclear explosions here, when this piece is read by the people he’s aiming it at.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, I knew this was gonna happen. Every time I try to put this down and move on I look at the next paragraph and say, “I gotta read that, too.” So here’s one more, folks, and then we’re gonna get back to the phones. I have audio sound bites of Trump coming up, the sound bites that occurred before we joined his speech today in progress and his big finish which occurred during one of our commercial breaks.
Now, this writer again at Claremont, anonymous. “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time — or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan’s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration.” But neither were right on all three.
“Yet, among recent political figures — great statesmen, dangerous demagogues, and mewling gnats alike — only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent — more practically wise — than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.”
So that’s the nuclear bomb that’s been tossed into the clubhouse of conservative intellectualism. The alleged buffoon, Donald Trump, is more prudent, more practically wise, than all of our wise and good intellectuals who so bitterly oppose him. And that should embarrass them. That their failures instead make them feel even more smug and arrogant is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.
In fact, “Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults.”
So Trump’s bombast gives the opponents, “See, we can’t trust him. See, he’s a loose cannon. See, he’s too barbaric. See, he’s too unsophisticated, see?” Well, Trump is working on that, by the way, as you heard earlier in the speech.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So I checked the email, and I’ve got an incredible number of people saying, “Rush, you need to start naming names! You can’t just do things like you’re doing today and leave it up for people to figure who you’re talking about. It’s too important. You gotta name the names.” The writer did not name the names. Look, folks, this is not difficult. The clues are throughout this: Think tankers, fundraising, donations, Never Trumpers. I mean, if you can’t spot a Never Trumper who is also a conservative, then God help us.
I mean, the Never Trumpers are pretty public about being Never Trump, aren’t they? Never Trump conservatives are pretty late proud people. (interruption) Now Snerdley is saying… (interruption) You’re saying some hide their Never Trumpism? (interruption) Okay. Some of them…? (interruption) Some of them do? (interruption) All right. (interruption) Well, okay. But, look… (interruption) Well, I do know who all of them are. That’s… (interruption) Well, I probably don’t know who all of them are.
I probably know who a good number of them are, but what gets me is all these emails from people who think you’re not gonna be able to do that. Honest to God, I’m getting emails from people who think you are going to continue to be fooled by watching, reading, and listening to people who are Never Trumpers but you think they’re conservatives and you’re not gonna understand. I have more faith in you than that. I don’t think you all are a bunch of horses that need to be led to the water. (interruption)
What are you frowning at me for, Mr. Snerdley? You’re one of these, too? You actually think that some of these Never Trumpers are well hidden and…? (interruption) I don’t know how hard it is to spot somebody who’s against Trump. I mean, they don’t hide that. I mean, you can find them. They’re comprised of many people who think anybody voting for Trump is selling out the conservative movement. Do you think that? Do you think a Trump supporter or conservative supporting Trump is selling out the conservative movement? Do you think that? (interruption)
That’s my point: Who does? But they do.