RUSH: Of course not. We’re not gonna JIP Obama. We’re not gonna join Obama’s speech. What do you mean, are we gonna JIP Obama? JIP means “join in progress” in broadcast lingo. No, we’re not gonna do that. We’re rolling tape on it. If there’s anything newsworthy in there, we’ll say it. You want to make a bet whether he mentions it is word “Trump” or not? I’ll say he doesn’t. I don’t think he wants to go there. We’ll see though.

Anyway, greetings, folks. Hope you had a great weekend. Rush Limbaugh rocking and rolling for broadcast excellence. Three hours straight ahead. The telephone number is 800-282-2882, if you want to appear on the program as a caller. If so, remember the purpose of calls and callers is to make the host look good. But that doesn’t like mean that you call in and just consistently praise me. What that means is that callers are supposed to inspire and ignite the host into further area of inquiry and expertise and that’s what we look for. If you want to send an email, you can do that, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

Okay, now, folks, I need to beg your indulgence here at the beginning for a couple of things. We’re gonna get into everything that’s in the news out there, the French election particularly. You might think, “Come on, why do we need to?” You’re gonna be amazed at the similarities demographically, structurally, politically, what’s happening in France and in the United States. And you’re gonna be amazed at the political coalitions that have sprung up in France that, in many ways, mirror exactly what’s happening in the United States.

The big difference is that Marine Le Pen is not Donald Trump. And the guy that came in number one in the runoff, Macron or whatever his name is, do you know that his wife is 25 years older than he is? He was a student at age 15 and some teacher of his, they got married. She’s 25 years older. She’s 64, he’s 39, or something like that. He’d be the youngest president, prime minister, premier, whatever they call ’em, dictator of France. I’m just joking about dictator. If he wins, he’s gonna be the youngest ever.

But the establishment in France lost. It’s kind of two anti-establishment candidates running there, Marine Le Pen and this guy. This guy edged her out by two points, 23% of the vote, she got 21. The experts are all saying it’s over then, he wins the runoff on May 7. Not so sure about this. And, by the way, Obama called this guy, Macron and weighed in and helped him. And Macron turned the phone call into a campaign ad. I thought the Democrats were opposed to foreign intervention in elections?

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RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, on the French election, I’m gonna get to it in due course. I’ve spent a lot of time — I don’t know why — over the weekend I wanted to find out about this. In most cases, you know, you learn enough to be able to be conversant in it, but I wanted to find out what was really going on, because I wanted to get beyond the American media coverage of this and find out what the real truths on the ground are in France about this election. ‘Cause I just don’t trust media.

Everything is written through the prism of how it can hurt Trump, how it can help Obama, how it can help the Democrat agenda. For example, what I’m talking about is this. Macron, the young wunderkind that’s supposed to be the next winner, leader of France, is described as a moderate centrist independent. That’s how he is constantly referred to in the American media.

Marine Le Pen, who would be for our purposes here the Donald Trump comparison, is always referred to as the extremist right-winger. Every Drive-By article about the French election describes Emmanuel Macron as an independent centrist and Marine Le Pen as an extreme right-winger.

Now, let me tell you, the only reason — and I want you to file this away for later in the program when I circle back to the French election, ’cause there are things here I want to get to first, but I just want to get a little foundation built here. The only reason that Emmanuel Macron is pretending to be a centrist is because his real party is the Socialist Party, which is the American equivalent of the Democrat Party there.

But it is so unpopular, the Socialist Party in France is so unpopular that Francois Hollande, the current president and socialist, didn’t dare run for reelection. Fifty percent of the electorate is opposed to the European Union. You will never learn that when you watch coverage of the election from Saturday in France, or Sunday. You will think because this guy won that France is gonna reject Brexit and wants to go all-in on a unified Europe, and it’s not the case.

So what happened here is that Emmanuel Macron left the Socialist Party. He is a socialist. He is the equivalent of an American Democrat. He started his own party, which he’s the only member, just to ditch the baggage that would accrue to him of being in the Socialist Party. So he is characterized as a moderate centrist, which he’s not. He’s an ultra, left-wing, rabid socialist.

So when I saw that kind of mischaracterization, misdirection, and cover-up, I wanted to dig deep and find out what’s going on. And I’m gonna tell you you’re gonna be stunned how you find out how similar things are in France, demographically, culturally, politically. Some of it is gonna blow your mind. Let me give you one little tidbit.

In the middle of the twentieth century, France built a lot of public housing. Half the population was to live in this public housing. It was five million units of public housing, which is now one-sixth of all households in France, five million public housing units, one-sixth. It’s ugly. It is hideous looking, but it is more or less affordable. But it was originally built for the working class of France, the white working class.

They are gone. They don’t live in this public housing. It is all Muslim now. The white working class has been rejected by the French Democrat Party just as Obama rejected the white working class here. It’s stunning. The Socialist Party in France has decided to do exactly what the Democrat — I don’t know who did it first. I’m not saying they’re copying us.

The socialist Democrats in France have decided on a coalition of immigrants and minorities everywhere they can find them. And the so-called white working class, which this public housing was built for, has been dispatched and is no longer part of the political coalition of the socialist Democrats of France. It’s identical to what the Democrats did here. That’s just one similarity.

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RUSH: James in Lake Tahoe. Great to have you on the program. How are you doing today, sir?

CALLER: I’m doing great, Rush. Thanks a lot. You know, you really nailed it during the first segment there describing the French political scene. And it really is true that the way they are using the language in French, which I happened — I used to live in France — that the way that they describe Le Pen in the media, even in France, is as an extremist and so forth, calling it a catastrophe that Le Pen might win, which is all fake as you’re saying.

The only thing that Macron is saying that is typically what Democrats or socialists do that is a conservative type of thing is Macron is saying that he wants to lower taxes. But everything else is completely from the Democrat playbook. And even the slogan for Macron’s political party, En Marche, means “forward” in French, just like Forward for Hillary Clinton. It’s the same slogan.

RUSH: Was it “Forward” or “Lean In”? Oh wait, “lean in” was Sheryl Sandberg.

CALLER: There’s different ways to translate it. You would translate it as forward. I’m not sure if it’s Hillary’s slogan but the slogan En Marche would be forward, or going forward.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: The other thing is the leftists in France do not accept elections. The same thing that you’ve been saying over the past few weeks. They don’t. There have been riots breaking out. They do not accept the elections. They take whatever they believe that they want to have, and they’re gonna keep on pressing for that no matter what.

RUSH: Well, leftists are leftists wherever you go. That’s the point of trying to explain this to people. You’re right. It’s not just in the United States that the leftists behave as they do. It’s worldwide. And it’s all related to globalism. In France, this election, in many ways, was portrayed as globalism, which is great and wonderful, versus nationalism, populism, which is, of course, horrible, and it’s short sighted, very, very bad, narrow.

And the reason the argument is happening in France is the same reason that it’s happening here, and that is the elites in France are doing very well. And the elites in France are benefiting and doing great because of their close attachments to the economic advances that are made possible by globalism. And there are some of those, but there also are some very large downsides to it. And in France as in the United States, the downsides to globalism is that native — in America it’s kind of a tough definition, but the beneficiaries of globalism in both the United States, the nonelite beneficiaries are illegal immigrants here and immigrants in France.

It’s illustrated by the fact that one-sixth of public housing, one-sixth of housing in France is public built by the government for French citizens. Now none of them live in it. It’s all occupied by immigrants, and primarily Muslims. And so these people have been displaced. They’re French. They’ve been displaced, and they feel like they have been forgotten. They cannot afford to live in Paris, for example, they can’t work there. There’s nothing for them.

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RUSH: Now, since we had the phone call from the man who is intimately aware of the French situation with this election, let’s get into it. I’m not gonna spend a lot of time here, but I think you’ll be fascinated with the similarities, what’s happening in France, what’s happening here. Not saying that they are copying us. It’s just leftists are leftists wherever they go, and they are not people that respect nation states and borders and boundaries. The leftists are the actual one-worlders, globalists, massive, gigantic, worldwide welfare state. It’s insane. But that’s largely what we’re up against.

Now, again, I just want to give you a brief explanation of terms so that you know who we’re talking about. The two top vote-getters are both considered outside the French establishment. In other words, neither a Republican nor a Democrat won, if you analogize it to the United States. But that’s not altogether true. The top vote-getter was Emmanuel Macron, who’s 35, whose wife is 25 years older than he is. He met her when he was 15. She was a teacher; he was a student. He is a former member of the Socialist Party in France, which is so unpopular that the current president, Francois Hollande, did not even run for reelection, he’s so unpopular, his party is so unpopular.

So this guy, Emmanuel Macron, splintered from the Socialist Party and basically created his own party, and he’s it. On the other side, he’s referred to as a moderate centrist independent. Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that just peachy? Isn’t that so cute, cool? Moderate, centrist, independent. What could possibly be bad or threatening about this little guy? Moderate, centrist, independent.

Then, the equivalent to Trump, or conservative over there is Marine Le Pen. And she is always referred to as the extremist right-winger. So you have the moderate centrist independent, Macron, versus the extremist right-winger, Le Pen. He gets 23% of the vote; she got 21%. Some people thought she would get more than that because of the ISIS attack and the terrorism there. The stock markets around the world are going nuts. They’re very relieved because this Macron guy loves the European Union, does not want to get out of it, no Brexit in France, nothing near it is what the experts are saying. They already have this guy elected. In their world it’s just a formality on May 7th, the next round of elections, this guy’s gonna walk away with it, Le Pen’s gonna be defeated again and France is going to be saved as an archliberal state-run by a moderate centrist independent.

This takes to us NBC News and Richard Engel on the Today Show today and the little comment here about the French presidential election. And Mr. Engel here is shocked because the French establishment was rejected. Neither of these two candidates are from the establishment, except Macron, for all intents and purposes, is, but he’s not. The party he left is, but we’ll go with the fact that neither establishment candidate is in the runoff. And here’s the shock and dismay.

ENGEL: French voters rejected the establishment and the ruling parties that have governed in France for decades were thrown out. Emmanuel Macron is now the front-runner to be the next French president. He faces his polar opposite, Marine Le Pen from the far right. Le Pen is anti-immigration, wants out of the EU, to drop the euro, and has been taking a page from the strategy book of President Trump. “It’s time for the French people to be free of the arrogant elites,” she said, promising to close borders and stop terrorism. Analysts say Macron has the clearest path to victory and that following Trump may have actually worked against Le Pen. There has been a trend in global politics toward nationalism, first with Brexit, then President Trump’s election. France could be where that trend comes to an end.

RUSH: All right, look, this is for another time, but I think this analysis that what’s behind’s Trump’s success is nationalism and that’s all it is and that’s all that explains it way misses the point. It’s way too narrow a term to try to fit Trump into. Nationalism, populism, there are elements, of course. But you cannot, in this country, you cannot ignore that one of the key reasons people voted for Trump was to stop Hillary Clinton. The woman was resoundingly opposed by a vast majority of people outside the state of California. She wasn’t even that popular in her own party. But it was stop her and stop the left.

The people of this country who feel like they’re losing it and that it’s losing them, blame the Democrats for it. So Trump got all kinds of support for different reasons. But they want to narrowcast or narrowly peg him as nationalist because it’s so small-minded and it’s so dangerous, this America first stuff, that’s not good, they want to say. So the attempt to link Le Pen to Trump and her loss is an appeal here, an attempt by Richard Engel and the others in the Drive-Bys to say Trump’s losing, too, Trump’s losing his popularity, Trump, Trump. And he’s not. That’s what they can’t come to grips with.

Now we go to Paris. And I was aided in my attempt to understand this, reading an extensive piece by Christopher Caldwell, who writes for the Weekly Standard. He’s a senior editor there. He’s written Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. And he found a pretty good source in Paris — actually in France — a man by the name of Christophe Guilluy. He describes himself as a geographer and a housing consultant, but he’s also obviously adept at demography and political science as well.

He has been investigating the tumult in France in an attempt to explain it and write books about it. And at the heart of his investigation is globalization, what is the impact in France of globalization. He says that it has brought inequalities unseen for 100 years. That it is benefiting a few, but the few that it’s benefiting the wealthy upper middle class elites who are perfectly fine with it. The upheaval and the discord and the inequalities are happening everywhere else throughout French society, demographic upheaval, cultural disruption, and now the French are having an election to in part decide what to do about it.

The focus here by Mr. Guilluy, the geographer and housing consultant, says that French society has been split in two by métropolisation. “In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France.

“These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals — the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other ‘symbolic analysts,’ as Robert Reich once called them — who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige.”

In other words, the picture of France that the world sees is shaped by the people who live in these 16 urban areas, the elites, and not all of them are ruling class in a governmental sense, but they’re benefiting fine and dandy from globalization. And they control the media, they control the entertainment industry, just as in the United States. The same people control the method of influence over popular culture.

“But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France.” Cities that used to be as lively, although smaller, as lively and robust and economically successful as Paris and these cities that way for hundreds of years are now deserts. They have been abandoned. They are haunted by empty storefronts and blighted downtowns. Think of it as the Rust Belt.

You’ve got 16 cities in France that are doing fine and dandy. They are the cultural and media corporate headquarters that determine popular culture and opinion, journalism. The rest of the country is essentially forgotten and a Rust Belt. It used to be thriving, but it isn’t any longer. And this man attributes the primary impacts of globalization for this current circumstance.

But it gets more pronounced than that because these people who’ve been displaced, who have been left out, have been replaced by people that are taken care of and provided for with much greater care and energy than native French. And these are immigrants, largely Muslim.

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RUSH: We are back and we are analyzing France and what the recent election there means and how it’s similar to the United States. It’s probably safe to say if the French had something like an Electoral College, Marine Le Pen would win, but they don’t. They’re not a constitutional republic; they’re not a representative republic. They’re a quasi-parliamentarian democracy, and it’s a different circumstance than ours.

Anyway, Christophe Guilluy, the demographer or geographer, says that he “doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them.” These would be waiters, waitresses, people that work in department stores, any type of retail-level work. These jobs just don’t exist. The city of Paris has become like London or New York and San Francisco. You have two groups of people that live there: millionaires and immigrants. And then you throw the tourists and students in there. There’s no room, for example, in Paris for the median Frenchman, economically.

The French working class cannot work in Paris because they can’t afford to live there. So they have been forced to leave not just Paris but other urban areas. Immigration explains why. While economic opportunities for native median Frenchmen are lacking in Paris, they are also prospering for others. In other words, somebody’s taking the jobs that native French working-class people aren’t taking because they can’t afford to live there. Remember the people taking the jobs live in public housing now.

“Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalization.” In other words, globalization, it’s kind of like communism. It’s perfect; we just haven’t had the right people do it yet. Globalization is actually flawless, there just a little glitch here because we just haven’t quite perfected it. But that isn’t the problem. The rich parts of France have failed to have what they’re doing translate to everybody. It’s still only working for a select few and not outside the cities at all. And fixing the problem involves coming up with a shortcut.

Like the globalists say, “Well, we just need free Wi-Fi and that will make this working class more competitive, and it will raise their incomes.” Do you hear that here? We need to get free Wi-Fi, we need to get that service or that service to the poor or disadvantaged, and that will launch them to a new economic stratosphere. They are saying the same thing in France. But he doesn’t expect that, if it ever happened, to make a difference. It’s a campaign thing, people use it to get elected, but it wouldn’t really make any difference in changing the economic disintegration that is taking place.

Again, in the mid-twentieth century, the French built five million public housing units, which now accounts for a sixth of all households. Public housing is one-sixth of all households in France. It’s hideous looking, but it’s more or less affordable. But its purpose has changed. It does not house native French workers for whom it was built. It now houses millions and millions of immigrants from north Africa who began to arrive in the 1960s.

Between 2001 and 2011, the population of white Londoners, for example, fell by 600,000. And the current rate is happening in France as well. So where are those people going? Where are they going to work, and who are they voting for? And that’s what the election really has turned out to be.

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RUSH: The comment that I made about the Electoral College, in France what happens in the cities, the 16 largest urban areas, led of course by Paris, run the country. The people that don’t live in the cities don’t have a voice. They do in elections, but without the Electoral College they have no strength, and they don’t have an Electoral College. It’s an amazing comparison in that regard. The big city, Paris, Leon, Marseille, which is the French crime capital, at least according to a TV show that I saw. It’s called Marseille, with Gerard Depardieu. You like that show? You watch that show on Netflix? Gerard Depardieu, he’s the mayor of Marseille. Yeah.

At any rate, the point is, those cities now dictate to the rest of the country politically, culturally. It would be in this country as though if New York or San Francisco say what is, that’s the way it’s gonna be in Wichita. Because there is no mechanism like we have here in the Electoral College, which actually promotes a greater and wider array of democratic representation.

At any rate, the two remaining, to me, quite interesting aspects are this. So we’ve described here a circumstance in France which is almost parallel to the United States: globalism and the shrinkage of Paris as a nation state and primarily as a member of the global union. The people who benefit from that are those who live in the cities. They’re doing very well. They’re doing quite well. These are the people that hire gardeners and pool people and household staff and so forth. These are the people that basically have enough money to have employees themselves, nannies, you know, things like this.

But the people being hired for those jobs are not French. They’re immigrants, because in the cities it’s too expensive for working class French people to live. They don’t earn enough money to even afford to be able to live there, so they have to go out into smaller cities and rural areas in France. They have been replaced by immigrants, and it’s not whether it’s illegal or not, it’s just immigrants. And the vast majority are Muslims, and the vast majority of those don’t have any living expense problems because they now live in all the public housing, which is one-sixth of all housing in grants.

Now, you might think that a situation like this would bother the French elites just like you might think that in America the plight of middle class working people in America would bother and concern the Democrat Party, but you would be wrong. They don’t care. The Democrat Party decided to get rid of the white working class as a member of its coalition because they didn’t want to have to appeal to them. These are the people that want to work. These are the people that want to be upwardly mobile. The Democrat Party’s not interested in that. They’re interested in a coalition of minorities that are willing to be dependents.

And that’s the way the Democrat Party here has rolled the dice. And in France the elites have done much the same thing. French elites — this is what fascinated me. According to this researcher, Christophe Guilluy, French elites have convinced themselves that their social supremacy — I mean, they know they’re in the big clique. They know that they’re the top dogs. And they have convinced themselves that that upper class status, that that supremacy has nothing to do with their economic strength. But instead, it’s because they think they are good people. They think they are decent people. They’re not racists, and they’re not bigots, and they’re not sexists, and they’re not homophobes. They are decent people.

They don’t think, according to this guy, that their might, that their power, that their social standing has anything to do with the amount of money they have. The reason for this, according to Monsieur Guilluy, is that “doing so allows them to ‘present the losers of globalization as embittered people who have problems with diversity.'”

Does that sound familiar? Yeah, you people that are opposed to illegal immigration are a bunch of racists. You’re xenophobes, you’re misogynists, you’re all of this stuff, you’re bitter clingers, and who is it that gets to describe you this way? Why, the elites of New York and Washington and San Francisco and Los Angeles, they get to describe you this way. And they set themselves apart because their status in life has nothing to do with the money they have. They’re better people than you.

And it’s the same identical circumstance in France. The elites believing that what sets them apart from everybody else in the country is that they’re better human beings allows them to present the losers, the economic losers as angry people who have problems with diversity. In other words, these elites in France say, it’s not our privilege that the French deplorables resent. It’s the color of some of our employees’ skin. So what they claim, people like this Macron guy and others of his ilk, what they claim is that people voting for Le Pen resent the fact that the elites are hiring people of color and minorities instead of them, and that makes it possible for them to categorize them as racists and bigots and what have you.

French elites have a very colorful vocabulary for those who resist the open society. “One need not say anything racist or hateful to be denounced as a member of ‘white, xenophobic France,’ or even as a ‘fascist.'” You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to not be in the elites, you just have to be middle income or poorer. If you express any discontent with the political system, you are cast as a white xenophobe in France.

The circumstances are just so closely parallel here, and it’s just an illustration that liberalism, socialism, wherever you find it, is identical. And it has its arguments, it has its strategic lexicon for how it separates and divides people, and it is hideous. And of course Le Pen is the equivalent of Trump, which means that she’s a reprobate and absolutely horrible, and this is where that election is. She got within two points of the guy. It’s assumed he’s gonna win this in a slam dunk in the next round on May the 7th.

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RUSH: This is Kathryn in Wichita. Great to have on you the program. How are you doing?

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you to you and Mr. Snerdley for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I have a question for you.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Do you think the Tea Party has inspired an anti-establishment movement that’s spreading to other nations like Brexit and the French election?

RUSH: Well, actually it may have provided — what’s the word — confidence for others to behave accordingly. It may have given them strength, but I think, to be honest with you, I think what’s driving movements like the Tea Party and Brexit is an absolute distaste for liberalism, a distaste for globalism. In the case of Brexit, a distaste for dissolving the identity of the U.K.

In the United States the Tea Party was specific. It was an opposition to out-of-control spending by the government and illegal immigration and the total lack of concern for anything to do with America. It was made up of people who had never been in politics before. There wasn’t a leader. There wasn’t a manifesto. It was just naturally organic. And that’s what scared people.

The fact that there was no organization, that there was no platform, that there was no single leader that you could take out and destroy the movement. To the degree that it inspired others, I don’t think there’s any question about it, but I don’t think it created, I don’t think it caused anything ’cause I think these anti-globalist sentiments, anti-liberal sentiments have been brewing and building for years.