RUSH: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook — you know, he dropped out of Harvard. He was at Harvard. He dropped out of there because Facebook took off. So he went out to California and did what he did to build Facebook up. So he went back, went back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, yesterday to do the commencement address. Are you ready for this? The 366th commencement.
You want to know why this country is so screwed up? Because there have been 366 graduating classes from this place. The country’s not that old. The country’s 230-some-odd years old, 366 graduating classes, and most of them end up in the establishment wearing the same clothes, the same shoes, walking the same way, talking the same way, but, more importantly, thinking the same things.
So, anyway, Zuckerberg goes back, and he had some really, really, oh, just some brilliant solutions to our problems, my friends. I think Zuckerberg ought to get together with that guy that was thrown to the ground by the manly and studly Greg Gianforte. What was his name, Ben Jacobs. Ben Jacobs and Mark Zuckerberg, they ought to get together. I’m sure they have similar worldviews.
Zuckerberg thinks that everybody ought to have an identical income, that we need to have a — what does he call it — a universal basic income. We’ll talk about how to pay for it later. But we need as many people as possible running around not worrying about how to pay the bills. That’s when you get real creativity. That’s in the second bite. Here is the first. Mark Zuckerberg, commencement, Harvard yesterday.
ZUCKERBERG: There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars and —
RUSH: Wait, wait, stop the tape. Mark Zuckerberg, don’t give me some woman here. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. You’re not playing the right bite. That was a woman, right? Oh, really? Oh, jeez. Oh, it’s too long. There’s too much time gone by to bleep that, aw, jeez. Well, that’s what happens when you have artificial hearing. Honest to God, it sounded like a female editor at some liberal magazine. Okay. Friday, cue the thing back up. Gee, I thought it was a girl. Ah, it’s embarrassing.
ZUCKERBERG: There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t even afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business. We all know you don’t get successful just by having a good idea or working hard. You get successful by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up, instead of having the time to learn how to code. If I didn’t know that I was gonna be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, then I wouldn’t be standing up here today. And if we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.
RUSH: Okay, so you can see where this is going, right? You need me to translate this? You don’t understand what he’s saying here? Okay, first there’s something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t even afford to pay off their loans. There’s something wrong with our system. No, there’s not. There’s something magical about our system that you can do this.
What does he focus on? He doesn’t focus on him and what he’s done — and I’m not suggesting he brag about it. He’s talking about students at freaking Harvard as though they have drawn the shortest straw in the world! They’re gonna graduate from Harvard and they don’t have any money and they can’t succeed, not like I did. It’s not fair!
Give them some of your money, Mark. Why don’t you seed their start? You’ve got $56 billion dollars, 45, whatever, seed them all, just the graduating class, give ’em each a hundred grand and say you’re on your own, don’t worry about your student loans. By the way, if you’re worried about student loans, it’s TrySofi.com.
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RUSH: We’ll get back to the Zuckerberg speech at Harvard and my translation, which is gonna be as important as his speech, but I want to get back to the phones. I just realized it’s been a while, and we got Daniel here from Helmville, Montana, on the phone. I’m glad you waited, and it’s great to have you here. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, mega dittos. I’ve been trying for years to get a hold of you. You got me through a lot of years in the blue state of Illinois, so I’m tickled to death to talk to you.
RUSH: I’m glad you got through here. Thank you.
CALLER: We moved out here a couple years ago, live up here on a mountain off the grid, and it’s just a great area. But to get to the point, it’s just reeks of common sense people out in this area. And I think that the news coverage and the way they covered this Gianforte thing, I think it really helped Gianforte because people know that people may lose their temper once in a while if they’re goaded or pushed into it, but I really think that he’s a better candidate and people saw it and they just voted for Gianforte.
RUSH: I think you’re right. That was my instinctive feeling yesterday that that was gonna be the result. You go back and look at the tape, I think I predicted that he was gonna win yesterday. I was never in the field of doubt about this I think the media was trying to place everybody in. Here’s the thing about what Gianforte did. The media is their own worst enemy. When this stuff happens, what do they do? They go in there when one of our own was attacked and treated like a dishrag, and they act like everybody is outraged by it.
They act like it’s a great crime and that everybody wants this Gianforte guy buried, when the truth of the matter is, I would predict to you — I don’t know what percentage, but there’s a lot of people that watch modern-day journalism and get viscerally angry at reporters and their invasive questions, say, of people in grief or the way that Trump’s people or Trump are being treated. They get viscerally angry and there’s nothing they can do about it.
So they see something like this, and there’s a part of them that cheers it on, because they believe that journalists have gone way beyond the bounds of fairness and that they’re actually trying to criminalize certain political beliefs, and they’re fed up with it. I don’t doubt that for a moment.
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RUSH: We’re gonna go back to the beginning here with Mark Zuckerberg’s commencement speech at Harvard. They’ve had 366 graduating classes. He starts by saying, “There’s something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years and millions of students can’t even afford to pay off their loans.” Uh, there’s nothing wrong with the system! Why is it…? While he’s having incredible success, why does he feel the need to run down the society?
I’ll tell you why. A, he has been guilted into it by the other rich guys much older than he is (who I am confident are having success influencing him). There’s another reason that rich people do this too. He is effectively building a moat around himself. He’s insuring himself against the barbarians at the gate. If Mark Zuckerberg can come along and convince people that it’s unfair he has this amount of money — that it’s not right, and that he wishes he didn’t and that other people did — then the people clamoring for income redistribution will leave him alone ’cause they are all gonna think he’s on their side.
Is a well-honed trick that wealthy people who endeavor to get into politics always use. They condemn the system that created their wealth. They go a long way toward condemning themselves by saying, “I’m nothing special! I just got lucky. (snickering) It’s not fair that I got lucky and other people don’t.” So he’s insuring himself, building a moat around his life where people leave him alone — which is very, very important as far as these people are concerned. He’s not gonna be targeted when they go to wealthy people to redistribute, in his mind.
But he’s also been guilted into this, and into thinking there’s something wrong with the system. He ought to have the exact opposite attitude. He ought to be telling them how it happened. There nothing wrong with sharing with people the elements of your success that you think were important, because you could be highly influential and inspiring. There’s nothing inspiring about this. Instead, to wring your hands over the student loan program? Who’s running that, by the way? Who’s running the student loan program?
And, by the way, there’s one thing about this. I don’t know about student loans at Harvard, because Harvard’s financial aid program… There are a bunch of different programs, and they pay a hundred percent of tuition, fees, room, and board for students from families earning less than $85,000 a year. Families with incomes from $85,000 to $150,000 pay between zero and 10% of their income, which means, for example… See, 90% of families earning less than $150,000, a Harvard education, is competitive, or maybe even less expensive than a public university in a student’s home state. But, look, all that aside.
The student loan program is a disaster. And it is being administered by the very people who claim to be the best and brightest in preparing our young people for their future. And look what they do. Tuition never goes down. Room and board never goes down. They always attack corporate America as raping America at the gas pump, raping America the cell phone price, raping America here, raping America, raping America on drugs, you name it. Higher education is never accused of gouging people, is it? No. Nobody ever talks about tuition needing to come down because that’s where the left’s professors are paid.
Anyway, this is the first bite again. (replaying of sound bite) Forgive me here, but the exploitation of economic disparity is a common thing that the left has been using for years — and, sadly, it works, particularly on young people. It goes right to the whole fairness and equality (which, to them, equals sameness). But yet who’s he talking about? He’s talking about people who are at, by reputation, the greatest university in America, who are a leg up on how many other people that never get in there!
Now, the advantage that that is is totally ignored and in fact is turned into a liability, because they don’t have the time to actually work because they’re so busy supporting their families? I just … When supposedly smart people miss a golden opportunity to genuinely inspire, it just frosts me. But I’ll tell you, class warfare is one of the foundations of Marxism. Class warfare, class envy, exploiting it. Anyway, so he’s got a solution for all of this unfairness. He has a solution for all this mean-spirited extremeness. He’s got a solution for the inequality.
ZUCKERBERG: Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights, and now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
ZUCKERBERG: We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find the meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.
RUSH: Uh, Zuck? There’s nobody I know that utilizes the GDP to explain individual wealth. I don’t know who’s doing that. I don’t know anybody who ever has. GDP is an expression of the health the United States economy, and it is extremely relevant. It is extremely useful and meaningful. It is very substantive. But it has nothing to do with tabulating and scoring someone’s individual wealth. “We should have a society that measures progress not by GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful.” Well, okay, let’s do a meaningful index.
Let’s establish the Mark Zuckerberg meaningful index, and we’re gonna start researching it. We’re gonna ask people to participate, and we’re gonna ask people to define for us what they’re doing that’s meaningful and what isn’t, and what it would take for them to feel meaningful. I can already tell you what the answers are gonna be. Fame, red-carpet parties, TMZ doing a story on my family, TMZ doing a story on me in Vegas, TMZ doing a story on me and my Ferrari. (I don’t know.) (sigh) “…measures progress not just by economic metric but by a role we find meaningful.” Anyway, that’s not a big deal.
We should explore ideas like universal basic income. Now, you notice something here. Zuckerberg runs something called if what. Zuckerberg has, I don’t know, $30 billion. That’s the net worth. But Zuckerberg is not talking about Facebook paying his employees a (What does he call it?) “universal basic income.” No. The government’s gonna do that. Government is gonna do it. Facebook isn’t gonna pay it.
He wants government to take over “compensation.” He wants, for example, all pajama boys to earn the same amount of money and be guaranteed that manly, studly Republicans are not gonna throw them in the ground. And he’s gonna define what is the basic universal income. And it’s gonna be enough so that people don’t have worry about paying the bills so they have time to go out and code and create their own Facebook. One more bite here…
ZUCKERBERG: In a recent survive of Millennials around the world asking what most defines our identity, the most popular wasn’t nationality, ethnicity or religion. It was “citizen of the world.” That’s a big deal. Every generation expands the circle of people we consider one of us. And in our generation, that now includes the whole world. This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness, and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism — forces for the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration, against those who would slow them down.
RUSH: Okay. So you can see who has gotten hold of him. You can see who has bent, shaped, flaked, and formed him. “Every generation expands the circle of people we consider one of us…” What else? “Every generation expands its definition of equality.” “Every generation expands its definition of meaningfulness.” I’m trying to think… I’m trying to think what my generation was expanding. He said, “[T]he circle of people we consider one of us.”
My generation I guess expanding the circle of people who were doing sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. But Zuck’s generation is “expanding the circle of people we consider one of us.” Do you believe his Millennial poll? The most popular answer that defined their identity was “citizen of the world”? Look, look, look, look! Do not pooh-pooh that. I mean, do not pooh-pooh that the result may be legit. You can pooh-pooh those who think it, but don’t pooh-pooh the idea.
Don’t think he’s making this up. What are they being taught? And what is immigration but closing off the world to them? What is the…? How in the world…? They are not benefiting from the free flow of information. They have not been taught anything. They’ve been propagandized and they have been indoctrinated. There is no free flow of information for them. They want to shut it down! They want to shut down Fox News.
They want to shut down any flow of information that doesn’t have anything to do with what they believe. They’re 180-degrees, totally wrong about what they believe and what they’ve been taught. “Citizen of the world.” What have the Marxists been attempting to do all these years? Deemphasize the United States! Cut it down to size. Proclaim that the United States is guilty and the reason for the suffering in the world. Zuckerberg has clearly bought into that.
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RUSH: I tell you, I don’t think most Millennials could find the world on a map. Well, he says they want to be “citizens of the world.” They Probably couldn’t find it on a map.