RUSH: I want to go to the audio sound bites, and I want to start here first with our buddy Brian Ross. Grab sound bite 29 then we’ll go to 33. Brian Ross, ABC News, when there was a mass shooting in Colorado — I think it was a movie theater, I’m not sure. Brian Ross’s first instinct, first instinct was to try to find a connection between the shooter and conservatism. So he got the shooter’s name, and the first thing he did — instinctively — was look at a roster of Tea Party organizations to see if he could find the guy’s name there.

So there was a mass shooting in a movie…

You note these things just don’t happen. Conservatives don’t do these things, much as the media is waiting constantly for it to happen, it doesn’t. Things like this are perpetuated by genuinely insane, out-of-balance people or people like this guy Hodgkinson. At any rate, he found a name on a Tea Party roster in Colorado that was very close to the shooter’s name. So Brian Ross goes on ABC and says, “We can’t be sure, but the shooter could possibly be a member of the Tea Party.” Well, he knows as well as anybody: You don’t even have to confirm it! Just put it out there as a possibility and let your buddies on Twitter take care of the rest — and they did, and for a while the narrative was that the mass shooter in Colorado was Tea Party.

So it’s kind of poetic justice that Brian Ross today could not cover this up.

ROSS: He’s (pause) politically active, according to his social media. On Facebook just a few days ago he was critical of Trump. He said, “Trump and company need to be destroyed because Trump is destroying democracy.” We know he’s 66; he ran a home inspection business, which seemed to have gone out of business sometime last year.

RUSH: Home inspection where he lost his license to inspect homes. But that doesn’t even scratch the surface of who the guy is and the hatred for Donald Trump that he harbored. Look, I know people are able to arrive at opinions independently of stimulation or influence. I understand this. But I have been worried for quite a while about the cumulative effect or impact of this constant anti-Trump hysteria everywhere in mainstream media: New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC. It’s hysteria. It’s lies.

It’s things that are completely manufactured about Trump personally, about Trump and Russia, about climate change, about any number of things. As you know, I have been seriously, folks — seriously in a humanitarian sense, not political. I have been very concerned about what all of this is doing to the average, base Democrat voter. I have sensed them getting more and more fringe and imbalanced, and the evidence for it is everywhere in the things that they tweet. They openly promote violence, and advocate some of the most despicable things happening to their political enemies.

The hatred is raw, it is undiluted, it’s just savage. These are the mainstream of the Democrat base, and I don’t have any doubt that they are being radicalized. They’re being radicalized. In this case, this guy’s favorite TV shows, Comedy Central, Bill Maher, left-wing comedians. John Oliver on HBO. Half the people at Comedy Central. Rachel Maddow was his all-time favorite. He thought she should run for president. These people have radicalized guys like this all over this country.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while all of this has gone on, since this program began — it’ll be 30 years ago in just a month or about to. Since this program began, the American media has attempted to portray you people in this audience as being identical to the guy that shot up members of Congress today in Virginia. You know it as well as I do. You’ve heard it. You’ve listened to them say it. They’ve tried to characterize me and you as agents of hate and all of this. And it’s all rooted in nothing more than political, ideological differences. And it’s been going on for I don’t know how long.

Every time there has been a mass shooting or an act of terror, I guarantee you the first thing the media has done — and this was really par for the course in the first 15 to 20 years. Before Fox News kicked up, the first thing the media did when there was any kind of a mass crime or shooting, is they tried as hard as they could to find evidence that the perpetrator was a listener of this program and then of talk radio and then later a viewer of Fox News. They have been doing this since this program began, and they have yet to be able to find one example where that linkage has been established. Not one.

I have been very sensitive to it. The reason I’ve been sensitive to it is because of the way it characterizes you, the audience to this program. As a result, I’m sure you’re aware of it too. Now, I do believe that the message on this program is in no way related to hate. It is not fatalistic. This program each and every day is nothing but upbeat and inspiring. Of course we talk about things going wrong but from the point is of trying to fix them, from the standpoint of it’s possible to fix them, that it’s necessary to do so.

And to have it categorized as something other than that has been something that’s common for 20 or 30 years. And then this event happened today, and it’s something that I have honestly been worried was it going to happen because I don’t think that you can bombard people with this kind of hatred from the time they were in day care all the way up to kindergarten, and then middle school, high school. You get ’em into college, and they start watching their late nine comedians, and all of this stuff is just… Some of it disguised as “comedy,” but it’s all coming from a foundation of anger and rage and hate.

We had a Drive-By call. We had a caller from Houston who has demanded that I stop calling this a shooting and refer to it instead as a matter. That calling it a shooting is judgmental. We don’t know that it was a shooting. The FBI hasn’t confirmed it was a shooting. They haven’t confirmed the motivation. They haven’t confirmed that congressman who were shot were actual targets. Meanwhile, they know the Russians did whatever they didn’t do. Here’s Bernie Sanders condemning the act of his supporter. Audio sound bite number 33.

SANDERS: I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice this morning is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign.

RUSH: Apparently?

SANDERS: I am sickened by this despicable act. And let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society, and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.

RUSH: Okay. So Bernie’s condemning the action of his alleged shooter that was apparently a volunteer in his campaign that was cheated on by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat National Committee. The Bernie people have gotta be doubly angry. They hate Trump, they hate the Russians, and they also have been told that Hillary Clinton and Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz rigged the primaries against Crazy Bernie.

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RUSH: Dave, Indianapolis. Welcome, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Greetings, Rush. Longtime listener since the early nineties —

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: — and I have to say it’s a great privilege to speak with the unchallenged king of the airwaves.

RUSH: Thank you so much, sir. I really appreciate that. I really do.

CALLER: Okay. I promised a couple short points so I’ll keep my promise. I’ve been skimming over this fellow’s Facebook page. It is still online for some reason, but I noticed a pattern here and a point that I think needs to be made that fits right into what you’re talking about today. And that is the fact that if you read through the comments that this fellow has been making over the years, they are pretty much lockstep in with the media propaganda talking points —

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: — and most especially keywords: oligarchy, 99%, pay your fair share, Koch brothers, it goes on and on. This fellow —

RUSH: That’s exactly right. Dave, I’ll tell you, I saw the same thing, and it alarms me because this guy, in letters to the editors that he’s written to his hometown newspaper, Belleville, Illinois, he sounds like a policy wonk.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: It makes the point that mainstream leftist progressives are being driven insane. This guy can repeat everything that he’s heard in the media verbatim, and it sounds like he is one of them.

CALLER: He is an absolute manufactured product of the media sphere and the negativity that is flooding people’s minds right now. And I don’t want to keep you, I know your time is short but —

RUSH: No, no, have at it.

CALLER: — I want to make a point about this being your fault. I did email Snerdley a screen capture that I got from his Facebook page, and I quote his comment: “Rush is full of it.”

RUSH: I saw that.

CALLER: So you should feel vindicated.

RUSH: Yeah. Apparently I have appeared numerous times on the guy’s Fakebook page. What he does, whenever there are cartoonists who caricature me from my days on TV or whatever, apparently he puts those on his Facebook page and everybody else sees them. I forget who the cartoonist is, but it’s always focused on how outrageous it is that I’m as popular as I am or that I earn what I earn, what this guy thinks I earn, how outrageous it is. How I’m the source of so many of the problems in America.

Why would he think that? Who is it that tells him that? For 30 years it’s what the Drive-By Media, TIME magazine cover: “Is Rush Limbaugh good for America? I don’t mean to make this about me. I’m not one of those people. I’m just citing evidence, folks. Something else here about the shooter that Dave pointed out here as evidence of how the media may have, along with Democrats, really ginned this guy up. Back on March 22nd, this Hodgkinson guy tweeted the following: “Trump is a traitor. He has destroyed our democracy. It’s time to destroy Trump and company.”

The shooter’s tweet was posted above a petition from Change.org to remove Trump and Pence for misprision of treason. And here’s what the petition says. “That the above parties, having had certain knowledge of relationships of one Donald John Trump with numerous Russian oligarchs and one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former high-ranking KGB officer who is the current president of the Russian Federation.” Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

So the shooter was acting on the fake news, the big lie, that Trump had colluded with Putin. This guy believed everything he heard. This guy soaked it up and believed everything and thought Trump should be sent packing along with the Republicans.

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RUSH: Oh, man. Oh, that is a great description. I wish I had come up with this one myself. I just got an email. The email said, “Rush, I’ve studied Hodgkinson’s Facebook page. His Facebook page looks as hysterical as a 10-person CNN panel on Trump and Russia.” What a perfect way to describe it! His Facebook page looks exactly like what you would see in your average 10-person panel on CNN discussing Trump and Russia.

Here’s the thing about this — I’m having to stop and get hold of myself here because this boggles my mind. I’ve run out of ways to describe how this affects me. This entire — what do we call it? Thing, story, narrative that Trump colluded with the Russians or that the Russians hacked our election, is a total lie.

It is a hoax. It is a manufactured narrative that has been fed by anonymous leaks from nameless people with no evidence whatsoever. And it has been the primary news story going on six straight months, maybe seven, seven straight months uninterrupted, the number one story.

This story has spawned countless congressional investigations and a seemingly endless FBI investigation. It has now resulted in the creation of a special counsel because James Comey and his gang couldn’t find any evidence of this even when they tried to plant it! They came up with a faked dossier ostensibly describing despicable acts Trump had committed in Russia and elsewhere. That’s the equivalent of planted evidence, and they couldn’t even make planted evidence stick.

It’s greater than nothing here. There is no “there” there. There is no evidence. There isn’t even a scintilla. This is all a manufactured political theory to explain what to Democrats is inexplicable: Them losing an election to Donald Trump. And they have been hysterical for seven straight months now. It’s been the lead story. CNN cannot let go of it. The New York Times can’t. There isn’t a shred.

And yet if you look at this guy’s Facebook page and if you look on his Facebook page the various television, celebrities, hosts, personalities and shows that he watches, or watched, it is all this Russia story. Everything. There’s some climate change in there, obviously there would be. But it is astounding, folks. This guy was driven to pick up a gun and start shooting people because of the hatred he harbored.

Now, I have to ask a question. If this had not happened as it has happened for the last seven months, would this guy be as enraged, would he have been as he was? Well, we can’t know. With numerous assassination plays and television shows and so forth that have now permeated the popular culture, it is, as I say, I’ve run out of descriptive words. This guy’s Facebook page reads and looks exactly like your average CNN 10 person panel on Trump and Russia.

And when you really stop, and stop looking at this as an observer and actually immerse yourself in it, you realize that all of it, all of it, it’s worse than a lie because everybody involved in it knows there isn’t any evidence. Everybody involved in this has known since early January that Donald Trump was not even a target of this investigation that couldn’t have found anything because there isn’t anything to find. And since in January, CNN, New York Times, ABC, you name it, have led every one of their believers, listeners, viewers, to believe that Trump was involved.

And worse than that, they have raised expectations with the passing of every month that the day is approaching that we’re going to find and disclose the truth and we’re gonna be able to impeach Donald Trump. They started talking about writing articles of impeachment. All of it, all of it taking place around and about nothing, something entirely made up. I know I’m being redundant. It’s the only way I know how emphasize this.

And, by the way, I appreciate your indulgence. I know you all know, I operate under the belief that while we’ll never have this admitted to us, there are lots of leftists and progressives that tune in here every day ’cause these people need their hate quotient. They need their shot. They need their injection of hate every day. This is how they sustain themselves. This is how they’ve been conditioned.

This is how their heroes, their idols, their news leaders, their political leaders, this is how they keep them engaged, is with hate and the expectation that there’s gonna be a reward for all the hate. That the hate is going to be justified. That the hate is going to be rewarded because this evil guy, Trump, who stole what’s ours is gonna get his and he’s gonna go to jail and he might even get the death penalty and we’re gonna see to it that he gets the max punishment.

This is what they’re thinking. This is what they’re hoping. This is what they’re desperately desiring. And all of it, all of it is founded in nothing. And this guy, Hodgkinson, wherever you go to find evidence of his thinking and belief, it mirrors what you see in the Drive-By Media every day. As I said, this is what alarms me more than the fact that he’s a fringe lunatic. He is a lunatic, or was. But he’s mainstream.

This has been my point all along, that the Democrat Party mainstream are not really mainstream citizens or human beings. They have been radicalized. They have become defenders of militant Islamic terrorists, for example. The only enemy they have is us, folks, Republicans and conservatives. They’re willing to open the borders of this country to anybody who wants to come in. They don’t see any potential harm or problem whatsoever.

They mock and laugh at the idea that there is militant Islamic Jihad going on. But they are armed and ready to do battle with American Republicans and conservatives. And it is my contention they have been brought to this point. They have been educated with it. They have been propagandized. They have been indoctrinated. They have been inspired in the classroom and on television by what they consume throughout various forms of media.

I guess that’s the essence of why this is so troubling to me. Because it’s again something right out in the open for all of us to see and recognizance and admit, but I don’t know how many people actually will. Then you got the FBI out there saying, “Well, we’re not sure yet he was even targeting congressmen.” Oh. “And we’re still looking for a motive. We can’t be sure that targeting congressman was the objective.”

So something that happened right in front of our eyes and it’s patently clear what happened here, the guy signs on to this change.org resolution to impeach Trump. Over here is a giant Stack of nothing that the FBI firmly believes, is investigating and is gonna have an independent counsel even look further. It’s surreal. It’s like the Twilight Zone, in a way.

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RUSH: Okay. The Democrat base voter who shot up the Republican Congress today in Virginia, he was a mainstream Democrat voter. He was not a Looney Tune kook burger. This is the point. He lives in Belleville, Illinois. He’s been in the Virginia area two weeks. Why? How did he know that members of Congress are gonna be on that baseball field practicing for a charity game?

There may be a way to know. Maybe there’s a website for it. Maybe he could have consulted it. Who knows. How would he know that practice is at 5:30 in the morning? Who the hell does that anyway? Who practices baseball as the sun’s coming up? But that guy was there, and he knew that it was taking place.

So he’s in Virginia for two weeks, he knows where the field is, he knows who’s gonna be there — I don’t know. And I’d keep a sharp eye on the guy’s Facebook page too. Don’t be surprised if some leftists go in there and try to modify it to make the guy look like an NRA member. You can modify WikiLeaks. Not predicting it.