RUSH: Folks, when I’m right, I’m right. (shuffling paper) I just received… There’s a column in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard by Alice B. Lloyd. It’s called, “The Activist’s Dilemma: The More We Shout … The Less They Care?” This piece basically says what my opening monologue says, in its own way. “The more extreme a protest or demonstration, the more media attention it gets,” the more sunlight shines on it. “But the more extreme the protest, the less likely it is the [people] at home will identify with its motivating spirit. This trade-off, between publicity and influence, they call ‘the activist’s dilemma.’ …
“Extreme protest tactics get on TV but turn off audiences, says social science.” This is “Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School and Stanford’s Robb Willer,” and it only stands to reason. It all goes hand in hand with the fact that not only do protesters not have the ability to keep this fevered emotional pitch up week after week, the audience doesn’t want any of this! This is why I told you… What really got me going on this is people telling me…
I haven’t heard this — I mean, in discussing presidential politics. People are telling me they’re bored with all the attacks on Trump, meaning they were not effective. They weren’t working. They weren’t dispiriting people. They weren’t, because Trump’s fighting back. The Republicans never did, and the activists and the protesters are so over the top on everything, they’re actually boring people, and they’re converting people into Trump supporters.
Yes siree, Bob.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, that CIA agent who wrote that big op-ed over the weekend announcing he was quitting the CIA, and we were all supposed to panic? He was quitting the CIA! He said it wasn’t political. He just couldn’t work for somebody like Donald Trump. He just couldn’t gather intelligence for someone like Donald Trump. He could not analyze intelligence for someone like Donald Trump. He just couldn’t do it, just couldn’t do it. It turns out the guy was a total Clinton hack. He had donated five grand to Hillary’s campaign.
He was spinning for the administration. That’s what spokespeople do. Nothing wrong with that. But this guy wants us to believe he’s this unaffected, down-the-middle, nonpolitical CIA analyst that just can’t abide what’s happening here with Trump. Turns out he’s a Democrat Party hack who’s worked as a spinmeister for the Regime on the Iran deal. See, this is the kind of thing that is happening here and is bringing all of this out into the sunlight because none of it’s working. That’s the bottom line. None of this worked on Reagan, all these protests.
It didn’t — and, by the way, whatever you may think, all of these protests against George W. Bush did not work on Bush. He did not pull us out of Iraq. These protests do not work. And when they don’t work and when there’s evidence that they’re being ignored — in this case by Trump and his administration — they get louder. They get more unhinged, they get screwier, and they become even more noticeable as genuine wackos. And they end up producing the opposite of their intent. And what research has shown, contrary to what you…
Now, there’s one caveat here. These kinds of protests have, depending on who’s doing it, paralyzed Republicans in the House and Senate, and not all of them. But the protests have paralyzed them, and the protests did cause Republicans to go along with Democrats during the Obama administration. I still think the racial component was the primary factor in the Republicans’ refusal to oppose Obama and even stand up, and nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise. So that’s a one-off.
But even from this Weekly Standard piece: The problem is the left can never win this way, and they haven’t. I mean, look at Chicago 1968, similar behavior to this. The Democrats lose the election. To who? (snorts) (chuckles) Nixon! Who they hated. “One takeaway from the activist’s dilemma might be that an ideal political discourse — an open enough exchange of ideas that the best ones win fair and square, for the good of us all — gets lost when ugly behavior makes ordinary people tune out.” And that’s exactly what happened.
The Democrat… The longhaired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking whoever they are, they’ve been flushed out. They’re in public now. They’re in the arena of ideas. They’re not hidden. They’re in the arena of ideas, and they’re losing the battle of ideas, and as they lose the battle — and I the define losing by they’re ineffective — they get even rowdier. They get even raunchier. They go overboard and all this the ends up doing is causing people to town out like I heard for the first time last night: “I’m getting bored with this.” That’s the worst thing in the world that could possibly happen.
I’ll give you some other examples of this. Here’s Trump lashing out at the so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans. He says they’re actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. This is exactly right. Many of these protests, people are being bused in, they’re being paid to go, they are in some cases they’re even pretending to be angry Republicans. Not all of them. I mean, you got some genuine leftist protesters at these Republican town halls. But many of them are pretending to be angry Republicans in their attempt to intimidate the elected Republican conducting the town hall.
“About 900 people filled the Mariposa Fairgrounds and Exposition Center to toss pointed questions at the five-term congressman. Such a large crowd was a sign of how the resistance to President Trump has crept into the California’s Republican hinterlands…” That’s BS! The “large crowd” proves the Democrats are busing in people. The large crowd proves that — and in this case, more people than half the entire population of McClintock’s district showed up! They bused in more people than half the population. Now, let me come down later in the story.
“Tuesday was a bit of town hall deja vu for McClintock, who was one of a few sitting politicians at the vanguard of the Tea Party revolution…” Stick with me on this, folks. McClintock “was one of a few sitting politicians at the vanguard of the Tea Party revolution that launched just a few weeks into Obama’s term in early 2009. Then, conservative activists worried the new health care law being crafted at the time would become a government takeover of health care. Much like liberals are doing now, conservative activists flooded town halls around the country and delivered an earful to their representatives.”
Ah, ah, ah. That’s not what happened. Those were not “conservative activists.” That’s what’s noteworthy about the Tea Party and what the left still is in denial about. The Tea Party was not conservative activists. The Tea Party was not made up of people who had ever done anything like this before. They were not bought and paid for. They were not bused in. They were average, ordinary, everyday Americans fed up and scared to death by what Barack Obama was doing and the lack of resistance to it by the Republicans. Pure and simple!
Now, the Democrats, because they use progression, they can’t think outside their own box. So if people show up and start asking questions at a town hall, “It’s got to be an organized protest,” ’cause that’s what they do. In the Democrat world, nothing is left to chance. You don’t call a meeting and hope a bunch of protesters show up. You make sure they’re there. Well, they think everybody does that. The Tea Party was not conservative activists. And to say that they were “activists” is fake news. The Tea Party people had never been active. People there had never been previously involved in politics in their entire lives.
That’s what was so frightening actually the left, it was so organic and so natural, and there wasn’t a single leader to go out and destroy and thus destroy the whole movement. They created Occupy Wall Street. They actually manufactured what they thought the Tea Party was on the left to do battle with it. And then there’s this, in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Tea Party conservatives were able to translate that grassroots energy into flipping the Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. Achieving that same feat will be a daunting challenge for Democrats, who need to turn 24 seats to regain control of the House in 2018,” and that, my friends, in a nutshell, is why the Democrats are organizing these protests.
They somehow think that it will cause them to win a midterm landslide like the Tea Party did. They haven’t the slightest idea what the Tea Party was even now. This demonstrates they have no idea what the Tea Party was. They think they’ve just gotta show up in numbers like they think the Tea Party did and harass Republican members of Congress and — voila! — they are going to win the midterms. You know what this is like? And this goes part and parcel with the fact that all they’re doing is exposing themselves and who they really are. You know what this is like?
Air America.
What did they think they had to do?
All they had to do was go on the radio and start fundraising for liberalism, and that would make them the most listened to radio network in America. That’s all they had to, because they never studied what happened. They thought “funding” was the answer to a successful radio network. They were just clueless, totally clueless. Look at every liberal in the last 30 years the left has decided to put up against this program. They all failed after six months! No one even got close because they don’t know what it is. Now the left is making the same mistakes when it comes to replicating the Tea Party.
They think the Tea Party was an organized protest, so all they’ve gotta do is replicate what the Tea Party did and magic will happen in the 2018 midterms. And what they don’t understand is that in the process of doing all this, they are wide open in as bright a light as you could shine on ’em. They finally are demonstrating who they are. Their radicalism is on full display. Their oddball-ishness is on full display. Their mean-spirited behavior is on full display. And Trump continues to fight back, which forces them to get even more radical, which is slowly starting to reverse their fortunes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So I’m watching CNN during the break here, and they’re playing a portion of Spicer’s press conference (also known as The Shark Tank) from earlier today. And of course early today, Donald Trump tweeted that many of the protesters at these Republican town hall meetings with bought and paid for, that they’re not all genuine. So Spicer explains that. Jonathan Karl of ABC News is interrogating Spicer. “What do you mean? How do you know? How do you…?”
Spicer starts explaining Trump’s tweet and says, “Well, we know that there are a number of people being paid to show up, and we know that there are many people making a lot of noise. Just ’cause a lot of noise doesn’t mean it’s a lot of people,” blah, blah, blah, blah. Karl keeps pressing. They go back to Brooke Baldwin who is the infobabe there talking about this, and I swear, I don’t think she knows! That’s the only thing I could come up with here.
Do you all remember during the campaign the revelation in the Project Veritas video by James O’Keefe? He talked to this guy named Robert Creamer. Robert Creamer is the husband of a congresswoman from Illinois named Jan Schakowsky. This Creamer guy runs an organization that recruits protesters and pays them, in some cases, $1500 a day. What Creamer admitted… He didn’t know he was being secretly videoed. What he admitted was that the Clinton campaign had hired him to go out and hire a bunch of people to show up at Trump rallies and to perpetuate violence and to try to shut the event down, which they succeeded in doing in Chicago.
And this Creamer guy’s bragging about it. Again, he doesn’t know he’s being secretly videoed. He’s bragging about it, and he’s name dropping and talking about how he does it, and we found out that this guy had had over 300 visits to the White House in Obama’s two terms and 57 some odd of those visits he met with Obama. And his only job is to hire and arrange and organize protests at Republican events. So this was widely disseminated in conservative media. Trump obviously knows it about it. I’ve heard him address it and talk about it. Spicer knows it.
It’s all over the place, and it’s not the first time that we’ve learned of this. We’ve learned that protesters were paid and bused in to Ferguson and into Oakland, California, and into Baltimore. It is standard operator procedure. George Soros funds these operations. And yet, when any… Like, protests are now happening at Republican congressional and senatorial town hall meetings. So Trump tweets what he knows. Many of these people there bought and paid for. It’s not legitimate.
They’re just showing up to cause trouble. And the Drive-By Media reacts as through this is the biggest lie they’ve ever heard. In fact, it’s insanity! And so Jonathan Karl starts asking Sean Spicer about it in ways that make you think Karl believes that Spicer has literally lost his mind. And then they come back for the panel discussion on CNN about it, and it doesn’t appear that any of them, at least… Well, the panel discussion started after the program. So I don’t know what’s actually being said on the panel.
But the infobabe and her first guess, a CNN reporterette, were just acting like this is the craziest thing they ever heard. And the CNN reporter says, “Well, there were reporters at every one of these events, and these reporters say that it filled with many people that are scared to death about Obamacare being taken away from them because they do not know what it is going to be replaced with, and they’re deathly afraid of losing everything.” The idea… We’ve already done this! The San Francisco Chronicle let the cat out of the bag.
Left-wing protesters are imitating what they think the Tea Party did when they started showing up at Republican town halls in 2010. The Chronicle lets the cat out of the bag that these left-wings believe that that’s how Republicans won the House is by causing trouble at Town Hall meetings. They don’t even talk about the substance of what those town hall meetings were. They think the Tea Party was exactly what they are: Bought and paid for. The Tea Party was not bought and paid for. It was purely organic.
My point here is, this is something that is undisputed. It’s widely known, or it could be known, if people would get outside their little cocoons and bubbled in which they live. It’s easily findable that Robert Creamer, husband of Jan Schakowsky, was hired by Hillary Clinton to round up people and pay them to go disrupt Trump rallies. It’s not allegations. It’s hard news. It has been produced. It has been reviewed. It has been substantiated. And yet they don’t know. And when they hear something like this in the Drive-By Media, they think people have lost their minds.
“This doesn’t happen. Why, liberals don’t do this kind of thing! These are really grievanced people. These people are really afraid.” No, they’re not. They’re bought and paid, and half of them don’t even know why they’re there. They’re just there to make noise. I don’t know. I just… I find it literally fascinating.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to audio sound bite number 4. I think so earlier that the Drive-Bys don’t understand Trump or me, anybody suggesting that all these protests at Republican town halls are bought and paid for, that this is not real, that it is anger is not real. They don’t understand how anybody could say that! We’ve put together a montage from last night and this morning of a bunch of Drive-By people who are giddy over these protests. They just are happy that these Republicans are being harassed.
MATT LAUER: (b-roll noise) The mood of voters is now on full display at fiery town hall meetings all across the country.
ANA CABRERA: (b-roll noise) Angry crowds greeting Republican lawmakers at town halls nationwide.
KATHARINE HARLOW: Nationwide voters are packing these town halls.
KRISTEN WELKER: (b-roll noise) In town hall meetings across the country, Republican lawmakers are feeling the heat.
ABBY HUNTSMAN: …anger boiling over at Republican town halls.
BORIS SANCHEZ: Quite a bit of anger from —
WOMAN: (giggling)
BORIS SANCHEZ: Democratic activists and constituents…
HALLIE JACKSON: (b-roll noise) …some of that anger boiling over at Republican town halls across the country.
MARIA BARTIROMO: …angry protesters, this outpouring from voters…
HEATHER CHILDERS: (music/b-roll noise) Angry voters yelling, interrupting questions and jeering. For an hour this went on.
BRIAN WILLIAMS: It’s getting rough out there.
In previous years, when protesters have been going nuts against, say, George W. Bush or Republicans or conservatives, what I would hear from people is, “When are they gonna start fighting back? This is… Don’t they understand they’re being destroyed? When are they gonna start fighting back?” Trump is fighting back. Trump is not being dissuaded from his agenda. Trump is marching full speed ahead, 100%, and he’s accomplishing things. And so there’s no concern over not fighting back.
And the worst thing could happen for these protesters is for people to get turned off by it. It’s only human nature. Every day it’s the apocalypse. Every day it’s, “Trump is Hitler!” Except Bush was Hitler, too. There’s nothing new. It’s just… There’s a Morning Consult poll: Half of the audience of Saturday Night Live is already bored with what Saturday Night Live is doing when they parody Trump. And the stuff never works. This kind of over-the-top protest never accomplishes its goal. And, in fact, what does happen — there’s research to back this up — is the more over the top it is, the more insane and divorced from reality that it is, the more likely it is to actually make people sympathetic and supportive of Trump.
But this is all they’ve got. And the great thing about this is, folks, that they’re now exposing who they are. They are making it clear, the media is in full view now who and what they are. Everybody can now see it. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s ripe for a full-fledged backfire. Still a lot depends on Trump moving the agenda forward as it always was gonna be dependent on that, as it always will be.
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