RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, over the course of many years of this program, one of my objectives has been to find the conclusive, unalterable explanation of liberalism. And the key is the simplest, because there’s so many definitions of it, and there’s so many explanations. I’m talking about ways in which to persuade people what it is and why you should never buy into it, become one, or be it. It has been a quest of mine to come up with the simplest, best explanation for what is happening.

For example, I touched on it earlier here, and I stumbled across a column inadvertently by a guy named Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage Mag who describes the current circumstance in our country as a civil war. And he goes on to explain why it’s a civil war. And he touches on a couple things that really intrigued me. So I then began exploring them on my own, asking questions of myself, and then trying to answer them as a means by which I could arrive at an explanation for you that gets close, or as close as possible, to the way I’m thinking.

Let me ask you this. Are all of you that are on my team on this stuff, are all of you who voted for Trump, all of you anti-Democrat, all of you conservatives, Libertarians, whatever, do you not every day ask yourself in one form or another, when is this gonna end? Or maybe it is another variation: How are we going to beat these people? Or does it become “will we?” And then, if you go further, “how?”

But in any case, people are wondering, why in the world are things this way? Why does winning an election seem to mean nothing? Why does the left refuse to accept the constitutional norms that make this country what it is? Why does the left constantly object and refute and refuse to abide by the constitutional — because the Constitution and the adherence to it is the glue that keeps this country together. The Constitution is the glue that maintains this country for what it is: a constitutional republic.

But for that to exist, both or all political factions have to ultimately agree that the Constitution is the authority. And I think where we are right now is that the left doesn’t accept any authority other than themselves. In their minds, there is no losing an election. You have elections because you have them, and you’d like to win them, but losing them doesn’t change a thing. It just changes the way you go about accomplishing what you want to accomplish. But you never adopt the attitude of having lost, because you simply don’t accept the fact that the other side won, for whatever reason.

I’m not even talking about this specific thing where they think Trump colluded with the Russians. I’m talking about any election, George W. Bush. They never accepted the authority that Bush was president. They had an excuse there, too, the Florida recount. But it is this refusal to accept the authority. Like we do. When we lose elections, what do we do? We let ’em pick their judges. They won. That’s what our system means. We fight some of them, like Merrick Garland, but for the most part they get their nominees and their bureaucracy, they get their judges.

We respect the authority. We grant that there is an authority that is keeping the country glued together. They do not. And so when asking the question, when is it going to end? Well, how do civil wars end?

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RUSH: Democrats have generally, not always, had their way in terms of public opinion on controversies like this, such as government shutdowns or Republicans nominating “out-of-the-mainstream” judges. But this is gonna backfire on them too. I don’t know whether the nuclear option’s gonna be triggered. I don’t really know. I don’t… We won’t know that until probably Friday, because there’s a lot of posturing now from both sides, primarily Democrats, claiming unity, claiming, “The triggering of the nuclear option would be the last straw.

“That would be the end of life as we know it! That would be a terrible, terrible thing to do to the Senate, blah, blah, blah,” (chuckling) despite the fact that Harry Reid’s done it how many times previous! This is what I meant in the previous hour. For the Democrats, there is no history prior to Trump’s election. They have no history. There is no behavioral pattern of the Democrats that you could go monitor or analyze or repeat. It doesn’t exist. It’s not relevant. Whatever Harry Reid did? He didn’t do it! You just think he did. They didn’t do anything.

They have to act like what Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are contemplating here has never been done. “It’s the biggest assault on our way of life we’ve ever seen. It’s outrageous!” Yeah. That’s how they lived and died on the left with this stuff. So let me continue with this quest. It’s one that I am on to satisfy myself as well. I’m trying to find the magic explanation — for the purposes of persuasion, the maximum explanation — of liberalism that you could use in any instance of the left behaving as they do.

I was intrigued when I stumbled across a column that’s back on March 27th at Frontpage Mag (that website’s David Horowitz’s website) called, “The Civil War Is Here,” by Daniel Greenfield “a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.” He says, “A civil war has begun. This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede,” as the South did. The left “wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority.

“The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control. The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left. It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning. [The left] was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow,” as in sanctuary city and immigration law.

When Obama’s in the White House, he is the ultimate, final authority, and whatever he says goes, and leftists everywhere fall in line. Which is why you have state governors happy to have the federal government take over health care, happy to have the federal government take over sanctuary cities, immigration, whatever. But when a non-leftist wins, then the left does a 180 and totally supports and invests the state’s unilateral opposition to the authority vested in the Republican presidential winner. So now they are totally behind and for states “unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow.

“(As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over. [The left] was for Obama defying the orders of federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever.

“It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become ‘patriotic’. There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them.

“But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the president and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.”

And that is the bomb that Mr. Greenfield throws and drops in this piece. That what we’re actually in the middle of here is a civil war with the left and its political arm. The Democrat Party is actually committing treason by refusing to accept the authority that the Constitution is in holding together our constitutional republic.

“After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials.” Think deep state. “Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions. This isn’t just hypocrisy. … Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.”

Remember now, what got me going on this is, if you’re like me, do you ever wonder when all of this is gonna end? Let me phrase it a different way. Do you ever wonder when the day will come the Democrats will accept they lost? Do you ever wonder when the Democrats will accept that Trump is president? And the answer is, they never will. They never will. They will never acknowledge losing the election.

They will never acknowledge Trump winning the election because they will never acknowledge the authority that the Constitution vests in the outcome of elections. They simply oppose it and resist it when they aren’t the authority. And when they aren’t the authority, they seek ways to behave outside the Constitution and outside those limits of authority in order to subvert and undermine that authority. And, as such, they are not willing participants in a constitutional and representative republic.

And because of this — and his column is much longer than those things I’ve shared with you — Mr. Greenfield maintains we’re in a civil war. He asks the ultimate question: When do civil wars end? “Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other.”

Now, that also is what happens after elections. The winners know they won; the losers know they lost, and the losers in our system — our system is premised, our system is dependent, our system requires all of the participants to accept this authority. If all participants don’t, then we have a problem. And if this gets to the point where a majority of our citizens — and we’re not there yet — but if we get to the point where a majority of our citizens happen to think and act like today’s modern leftists and Democrats, then it’s over. If the majority of the Americans refuse to accept the Constitution, refuse to accept its authority — There’s a reason why it isn’t taught.

There’s a reason the founding is not taught, why it’s maligned and impugned. “The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority,” whether they win elections or not. There’s gonna be gay marriage no matter what the vote is. There’s gonna be transgenders using whatever bathrooms they want no matter what the vote is. There’s gonna be racism as we define it no matter what the vote is. There’s going to be bigotry however we define it, whatever the vote is.

Whatever the people think, whatever the popular majorities and consensus think, is irrelevant. Even if there is no science supporting climate change, there is going to be climate change, and you will accept it, and you will love it. And if you don’t, you become an enemy of the left. And that’s something you don’t want to be, in their in minds.

How do Republicans behave when they lose elections? Well, we know all too well. We say, “Hey, they won. They get to pick their judges,” with rare exceptions, such as refusing to grant a hearing to Merrick Garland. But for the most part, I can hear Orrin Hatch saying it. I can hear numerous Republicans, McCain, “Hey, they won the election. They get to choose.” It’s not up to us to oppose every nominee they have. They won the election. They get to choose. That’s what we say.

Now, part of that is just a refusal to fight. Part of it is acquiescence to the authority. The left never, ever for a fleeting moment thinks this way. They never think, “You know, Trump won. He gets his judges.” What’s the left say? What’s Chuck Schumer saying? Chuck Schumer says: You want to solve this problem? You let us join you in picking the judges. And that way we will never have a conflict ever again. Well, that’s not what the Constitution says. The president chooses his nominees, and the Senate is there to advise and consent, not to stop, not to define. The Senate is there primarily to make sure that whoever the president’s picked is qualified. That’s it.

But that’s not what it’s become. To the left, they are there to stop everything that winning an election entitles a president to do. As such, Mr. Greenfield says we’re in the middle of a civil war here. We’re not having a political argument. We’ve got a civil war. And we have one faction of our American people who do not want to secede. They want to rule whether they use the Constitution or not. And so how does this end? Well, that remains the big question. But before you get to that, before you get to that “how does it end,” I think part of ending it is educating people to exactly what’s going on.

The Democrats are not who they are. The media is not who they are. They’re not interested in fairness or tolerance or equality or any of these buzzwords they throw around. They are authoritarian, totalitarian Stalinists. There’s no compromise. There’s no bipartisanship. None of that is permitted. Not in this modern era.

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RUSH: Now, I want to go back to the quest that I continue today to try to explain the left. Who they are; why they do what they do; how it can all end; how can they be stopped; how can they be defeated; why do they need to be stopped. When you get to that question, “Do they need to be stopped,” yes, because they’re undermining the country, folks.

The way liberalism has manifested itself, it’s now become radical leftism. It’s not even liberalism anymore. It is, but it’s gone way, way, way beyond that. And I want to share with your another passage from the column that got me thinking about all this, “The Civil War is Here,” by Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage Mag. He says liberalism and the left, progressivism, is not just hypocrisy.

You know, you look at Gorsuch, for example. They’re going batty over the idea that Mitch McConnell may pull the trigger on the nuclear option. And people said, “What do you mean? Harry Reid did it for countless hundreds of judges Obama appointed. Aren’t you being a little hypocritical? You’re getting mad we might go nuclear on a Supreme Court nominee when you’ve already gone nuclear on every district court nominee so that Obama could pack the court?”

And as I’ve always instinctively pointed out, hypocrisy’s not the way to go after these people. Hypocrisy never sticks to them. It never hurts them to be hypocritical because that’s not what they are. This is not really hypocrisy, what they’re doing here and getting away with, in terms of trying to stop the nomination and confirmation of Judge Gorsuch, because hypocrites maneuver within the system.

Today’s left has no allegiance to the system. And that is the point. The left does not accept the system. Even when they win, they are about destroying the system. When they lose, they ignore it and dare you to stop them. The left accepts no law other than law dictated by it’s ideology. He said, do not think of liberalism as activism. Do not think of it as protest. Do not think of liberalism as politics or civil disobedience. It’s none of those things. It is treason, according to Mr. Greenfield, it is treason.

Now, I love analogies as a way of explaining something. I can imagine that right now you’re saying, “Treason? Rush, you gotta be real careful. You…” I’m quoting Mr. Greenfield for you here, but I still want to try to try to explain this by analogizing the left in America. There is a group that they are very close to. And if I just said so, it would shock you. I’m going to try to explain it after saying so. The way the left behaves today — in virtually everything that they do — do you realize how close it is to radical Islam?

You know, minus the terrorism. Let’s look at the similarities. For the kind of Islamists we’re talking about, the Sharia Islamists, there is no authority but Islam. To the left, there is no authority but themselves. They respect and recognize no other authority. They don’t recognize the authority of elections. They don’t recognize the authority of public opinion. They don’t recognize the authority of the Constitution, even though they all swear an oath. Why do you think we require everybody in government to swear an oath to the Constitution?

‘Cause that’s glue, folks. That’s the glue that keeps everything together. The reason all of these oaths of office and oaths of naturalization require pledging fidelity to the Constitution is that that is supposed to be the compact that unites all of us. Winning or losing, we are united as Americans, defined by our Constitution. Swearing the oath announces the understandings based on which we become “we, the people.” If you have a huge movement in the country that’s not just rejecting but actively undermining the Constitution, then it becomes a real question.

And once that group becomes big enough — a majority of the population — then it becomes questionable whether we even have a “we, the people” anymore. And this behavior is very, very close to Sharia Islam. There is no authority but Islam. It’s a core tenet: The ruler must be obeyed as long as he complies and enforces Sharia. And if the rural abandons Sharia, they assassinate him like in the case of Anwar Sadat or Mubarak. Now, they don’t do assassinations here, but if the left’s leader abandons them, you know what happens to them.

They’re immediately forgotten, destroyed, cast aside, and ruined. But here, let me try it a different way. If Islamists are in the role of Democrats in my analogy, Americans assume the role of the GOP. We proclaim that our commitment to tolerance means that we have to make room at the table even for Islamists and people we disagree with. Notwithstanding that they deny our right to govern ourselves under our own principles. In other words, you’ve heard people say, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” That’s because in a “we, the people” situation we have to tolerate those who disagree with us. We have to tolerate those. We’re not supposed to cave in to them, but if there is a mutual respect for authority. Of course, Sharia Islam is never gonna accept the U.S. Constitution. The American left doesn’t, either, when it goes against them. Maybe if you look at the Islamist analogy, it could be somewhat easier to understand the American left. It’s not that Islamists have no respect for authority. It’s that they believe there is no authority outside them. They clearly granted Obama all the authority in the world, and they were gonna grant Hillary all the authority in the world. But that’s within their system.

But they’re never gonna grant George W. Bush the authority.

They’re never gonna acknowledge the authority of Donald J. Trump.

They’re never, ever going to do that.

I have to take a break. Hang on.

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RUSH: My point is to the left, the Democrat Party, the media — however you want to describe ’em — everything but what they believe and everything but who they believe is illegitimate. There is no crossing the aisle. There is no compromise. There is no working together to prove Washington or government works. There is only one way. When they are in power, they pretend it’s because their beliefs are a popular mandate. But that is disproven every time they lose. Their views cannot be the result of a popular mandate; otherwise, they would never lose elections.

When they lose elections — when they’re not in power — their beliefs dictate that everything else must be delegitimized, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing today. Everything about this Russian collusion and everything about Susan Rice and all of these investigations and the leaking, it’s all about delegitimizing the duly elected, constitutionally legal president and Congress. It’s about delegitimizing that. It’s not about working with them. It’s not about them having a head case and not understanding yet that they lost. It’s not about that they’re gonna come to their senses down the road.

It’s not that they’re emotionally unstable and are one day gonna realize they lost and they are gonna come back to the table. That’s not who they are anymore. This is not your dad’s Democrat Party. That Democrat Party of the sixties and seventies? It’s gone. It has been radicalized, and it is like Sharia Islam. There is nothing else, and there’s no room for anything else. And if you aren’t with them, then you are never to be even acknowledged. You are to be delegitimized. You are to be destroyed. Pure and simple. There is no compromise. There is no bipartisanship.

There is always a pretense that they represent the popular mandate, when they very rarely really do.

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RUSH: My earlier question: “How do civil wars end?” Well, they only end is when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. If you look at the Civil War, the actual Civil War, the South wanted to secede. The left does not want to secede. They want to take over and eliminate the Constitution or rewrite it to reflect what they believe and call it the same thing. They don’t want to secede. So how do you get to the point where they accept the authority that is the Constitution and just end what…

‘Cause look, this battle is never ending. It doesn’t end when they lose elections. It never does. It doesn’t change when they lose elections, right? I mean, they don’t change. The media doesn’t change. Republicans win the elections, but it’s still the biggest battle in the world. It’s every bit the battle as when Republicans are in the minority. It’s every bit as big. It just changes. But elections don’t end it. Elections do not defeat them. Just some things to think about here.