RUSH: Then there’s a couple people that believe it… Because gender is everything to the left. Gender, identity politics, race. Whatever you are on the surface is what matters to people on the left. So a couple of political scientists and sociologists got together, they did an experiment, and they hired actors, and they reenacted the presidential debates between Hillary and Trump, except they had a woman uttering the things Trump said and a man say the things Hillary said.
And what they hoped to demonstrate was that the outrageousness and the folly and the stupidity of the things Trump said, those things, as spoken by a woman, would have seen him lose. They wanted to establish that the reason Hillary lost was that she was a woman. “Gender bias.” And so they actually hired actors who studied the debate, the exact lines, even the mannerisms, and then they reenacted the debates. And you know what happened? It was the exact opposite. People who hated Trump turned out to be intrigued and loved him when what he said was spoken by a woman — and, by the same token, people who thought Hillary was cool and liked her didn’t like her at all when what she said was spoken by a man.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I wanted to give you the details of this social-political experiment that took place. “A play has brought parts of the 2016 presidential debates to the stage but with an added twist:
“Donald Trump is played by a woman, while Hillary Clinton is played by a man.” They were actors so it’s not that they were known. “Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD,” whatever that is, I-N-S-E-A-D, “joined forces with Joe Salvatore, an associate professor of educational theater at NYU’s Steinhart School to develop [something called] Her Opponent, a play featuring actors performing excerpts from the three debates verbatim but with the genders of the candidates switched…
“The play gave different names to the Trump and Clinton characters, calling Trump’s persona ‘Brenda King’ and Clinton’s persona ‘Jonathan Gordon.’ A third actor played the moderator in the debates.” So they weren’t named Hillary and Trump. They were given totally different names, but the words uttered were identical — they were verbatim — except a woman played Trump and uttered what he had said and a man played Hillary and uttered what she said. Now, calling this “Her Opponent” is kind of a tip-off as to how they expected this thing to turn out, wouldn’t you think? I mean, I know what this bunch expected to happen.
They expected to demonstrate that the only reason Hillary lost was because of sexism. They wanted to demonstrate that, if a man had said what Hillary Clinton said, he would have won in a landslide. That a woman was uttering what Trump said was probably irrelevant to their experiment but they had to do it in order to complete the project. But the focus obviously was on trying to demonstrate (’cause it’s called “Her Opponent”) that what did Hillary in was this archaic, patriarchal, corrupt American society that values men and denigrates women.
They wanted to prove it by having what Hillary said — which they thought was brilliant and relevant and sensitive. If a man said those things, he would have won in a landslide. And it turned out that they were as wrong as they could have been. They expected the audience — and the audience, by the way, was made up of people from the West Village in New York City. You can’t get more hardcore, hardcore liberal than that. I mean, not even if you go to the Upper West Side. The West Village makes the Upper West Siders look like pretend Romper Roomers.
So you had a full-fledged, dyed-in-the-wool, extremist liberal audience. They set the cake. They set this thing up so that their premise would be established. But “[t]he audience’s reaction to the play brought some interesting results. Salvatore and Guadalupe originally predicted that even though the candidates’ genders were reversed, the candidates’ personalities would match those portrayed in the real-life debates. But the results were exactly the opposite of what they predicted. Guadalupe wrote in a reflection on the experiment: ‘It was an unusual experiment which sparked some surprising reactions in a talkback session after the events.'”
They did this multiple times and had a bunch of different performances of this thing so that they could have more than one audience react to this. “‘The expectation, held by myself [Ms. Guadalupe] and the majority of people polled before the performance, had been that Clinton would look “more presidential” as a man and Trump’s lack of respect for, and aggression towards, his opponent would not be tolerated in a woman.'” Both premises were nuked, about if Hillary had said what Trump said the way he said it, because that was part of this experiment.
The actors acted intonation, stage mannerisms as well as the words that were uttered, and the belief was that if a woman had uttered the inflammatory, insulting, irresponsible, false things that Trump said, that she just would have been excoriated and sent packing. “Audience members found that the arguments from Trump’s character sounded more convincing coming from a woman. ‘About halfway through watching this it hit me — I see how he (Trump) won,’ one audience member commented.
“They also agreed that many of the arguments coming out of the Clinton character’s mouth seemed less believable and said that the character came off as ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘fake.'” In other words, when the male portraying Hillary said what Hillary said, it came across as phony and “fake” and “untrustworthy,” which is exactly how we see her! They didn’t see her that way because they give her a pass since she’s a woman. As a woman, she’s a victim, and so she’s allowed to be untrustworthy or fake because whatever it takes to beat the Republicans or the conservatives.
But when what Hillary said was put in the mouth all of man, it seemed it “‘untrustworthy’ or ‘fake.'” ‘I expected to feel validated in my beliefs,’ a left-leaning member of the audience noted. ‘But I thought Gordon was weak,'” the actor playing Hillary. “‘I found myself expecting him, as a man, to attack more.'” So when Trump’s words — and these people, hard-core leftists who thought Trump was a mean-spirited, misogynists sexist mistreating Hillary.
When Trump’s words were put in Hillary’s mouth, people felt there wasn’t any aggression, there wasn’t any attack. They were just totally confused. And this is interesting to me because it just turns this whole notion of identity politics upside down, and it did it in front of the very people who swear by it. Can you imagine how confused these people were? The whole reason to do this was to concoct another excuse to explain Hillary losing to go along with the Russians hacked her campaign with the assistance of Trump.
They were gonna add to it, “She didn’t have a chance! This country’s so sexist, this country’s so misogynistic, this country is so anti-woman,” and it didn’t work out. So now it’s back to the drawing board. “The experiment challenged people’s perceptions of gender, even if it did not change people’s opinion of the” real Hillary and Trump, which is another fascinating thing. As long it was actors saying what they said, they were shocked. But it didn’t make them like Trump.
The people that hated Trump, who ended up liking the Trump character in this experiment still hated Trump when it was over. Proving another thing, that as far as these voters are concerned, it’s all personal. It really has nothing to do with substance, and if anybody is bigoted and prejudicial, it’s these people on the left. And they ran an experiment to prove how unfair and unjust the country is — and how stupid the American voters are — and it totally backfired on all of them.