RUSH: Folks, I just continue to marvel at the left’s singular focus on nothing. Their attempt to manufacture something out of literally nothing is unabated. It goes on. It defies common sense. And at the same time, do you remember last week when Trump made his, what I thought was just a great speech in Poland about Western civilization and Western values and how Poland was instrumental and crucial to the United States in terms of European partnership in this regard. And Trump made the statement that, do we have the will, will we have the energy, the desire to defend Western values, which is who we are and what we are.
I knew there was objection to it at the time, but it’s singularly instructive to note the literal cow that the left is having over the assertion of greatness of Western values. Places in mainstream media, mainstream media, which is indicative of just how far out to the left the mainstream of the American left or Democrat Party has become. The nonsense, the paranoia, the fear, the hate, the unbridled hate over the expression of Western civilization, Western values.
For those of you that are not quite sure how to define Western civilization, you have to think of people like Winston Churchill, you have to think of the founders of this country. Western civilization is simply that which led to the United States of America. It’s instrumental in the founding, the values, the overall view of humanity and the world. And it has been one of the greatest acknowledgments of the human condition in the history of the human condition, and that being the United States’ Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the entire setup of the United States of America.
Look, I’ve always known that liberals are far gone, and I’ve always known they’re extreme, and I’ve always known they’re hateful. But I continually — and I shouldn’t be, I guess — but I continue to be surprised over just how far gone they are. There is now a genuine — we have to just call it what it is. There is a genuine hatred for this country and its great traditions and institutions. And it appears at first glance to me like it happened overnight. It hasn’t happened overnight; that’s the point.
It has been effervescing for decades. We had four years of George W. Bush and all of this was is there, but it wasn’t expressed, it wasn’t portrayed as mainstream liberal Democrat thought. Within a week of the election of Barack Obama, it seems like that wing of the party, the people that voted for Obama because of his policy orientation, not because of his race, had become something distinctly not American. And it was like a jack-in-the-box popping up to me. And it was a shock.
And the sad thing is it continues to be. Even though I know who these people are, and I know how long they’ve been out there, and I know that they’ve been infiltrating and inculcating and propagandizing in schools and in the pop culture for decades and decades, the fact that mainstream names, people that have, you know, up until the last two or three weeks we see their name on a news story, you think liberal, you think Democrat, but you don’t think wacko extremist.
What this is adding up to is Trump’s speech on Western civilization is now being called a shining example of racism and bigotry, white nationalism, white supremacy. And in this we are discovering what these people have always thought of this country. It’s just recently, relatively recently that for whatever reasons they feel entirely comfortable and confident in going public with it, with no caveats and no qualifiers. It’s just stunning. And it’s on display each and every day here.
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RUSH: This is an offshoot on Trump’s speech on Western civilization and Western values. And wait ’til you hear some of the actual reaction from journalists whose names you probably know. You’ll be stunned into disbelief or laughter.
“CNN’s White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny Calls Trump Poland Address ‘White America, America First.’” Jeff Zeleny used to be at the New York Times. This is supposedly a highly respected journalist. And he heard Trump’s speech on Western civ and Western values and said, this is great, I mean, this is white America, America first, as though both things are almost criminal, and now politically unacceptable.
We can’t have America first. There’s no such thing as America first. All cultures are identical and the same. Nothing special about America. There’s nothing exceptional about America. The problem with America has always been it’s too white, and now we’re doing something about that, and Trump aims to stop it. So Trump is a white nationalist putting America first, and this is a political crime.
Somebody at MSNBC named Nance, don’t know their first name, “Trump’s Poland Speech Was the Fulfillment of Osama Bin Laden’s Ideology.” Let me read that to you again. People that watch MSNBC heard some vaunted analyst say that Donald Trump’s speech in Poland on Western civilization was the fulfillment of Osama Bin Laden’s ideology.
How many of you can tell me what Osama Bin Laden’s ideology is, or was? Sharia law, ladies and gentlemen, Islamic supremacy, Sharia law, death to infidels who do not believe in Islam. The ideology of Osama Bin Laden is mass murder, however it can be achieved, and an MSNBC analyst equated Donald Trump’s speech in Poland with that. Is it any wonder that deranged lunatics on the left are grabbing guns and trying to shoot Republicans?
Howard Dean: “Trump Administration is a Criminal Enterprise Running This Country Right Now.” Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post: “The World Looks at North Korea as a ‘Crazy State,’ But We Won’t Talk About How ‘Unstable’ Trump Is.” This is because of his Western civilization speech in Poland. So now Trump is worse than Kim Jong-un, the potbellied little dictator of North Korea, who’s getting his jollies firing off would-be nuclear missiles.
And Maxine Waters makes the cut here: “Trump ‘Looking More Like a Dictator than a President’.” We gotta include her just for the humor value of all of this. All of that a deranged, delusional hatred and anger at Donald Trump for the expression of Western values and Western civilization, which, to put this in perspective, won 49-state landslide victories in 1979 and 1984. Ronald Reagan, two 44-, 49-state landslide victories based on the decency, the goodness, the tradition of Western civilization and Western values. And look now some short decades later.
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RUSH: I think the big deal of the day is the reaction to Trump’s Western civ speech. Folks, really, in my estimation what’s happening to our country and what’s happening to our culture is the singular greatest issue most important, to me, anyway. The daily onslaught, the daily attack, the attempt to totally destroy American civilization, Western, American culture, bothers me as much as anything else going on out there.
And to me it’s mind-boggling to listen and see some of the reaction to that speech. You realize, as I said, those same values, the same belief, country founded by God, we are all created by God, endowed with certain inalienable rights — life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. This is the stuff that’s under assault as white nationalism, as white racism, as the problem with America is, it’s been all white too much of the time, and white values. That means Christianity. We were a slave nation. Let me tell you something about that.
The real truth about the United States and slavery is that we ended it. The United States of America was one of the first nations in history to end slavery, and 500,000 plus Americans lost their lives in the process. It was called the Civil War. There are other factors as well, but slavery was a key element. And the reason is that slavery did not comport with American values! It had to go, and it did! And yet if you listen to the mainstream, if you listen to civil rights activists, why, you would think slavery is still alive and well and that that’s what white nationalism is. It’s so patently absurd.
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RUSH: This all comes under, folks, all comes under the umbrella of what is happening to our culture, how it is being systematically destroyed. It’s been under attack for my entire lifetime and prior to that. But it has now gotten to the point where it’s way beyond even what — I thought where we are in the culture of our destruction would have to take us losing a war and the victors doing this to us. This is happening without us entering a war or losing it unless you want to call it the culture war that we are losing.
I’ll give you some examples of what I’m talking about. The freakout that the left entertained after Trump’s Warsaw speech, I’ve already given you some quotes. Let me give you a couple of others. Peter Beinart writes for The Atlantic. The Atlantic for the longest time has been a mainstream publication. I mean, it’s like any other leftist journal; it’s a journal of leftists opinions disguised as straight-down-the-middle journalism and so forth. But never does anybody think that it’s been co-opted by genuinely anti-American extremists.
And Peter Beinart, I remember him being on This Week with Brinkley on the roundtable, he never sounded like he sounds talking about this. Jonathan Capehart, the Washington Post, same thing. They’re liberal commentators, been around forever, but they never sounded anywhere near as deranged and insane as they sound reacting to Trump’s speech.
Beinart criticized Trump for using the term “the West” 10 times. He criticized Trump for using the phrase “our civilization” five times. “His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what Trump means.” Capehart, Beinart, any number of others, said that Trump’s Western civilization speech in Poland was nothing more than the alt-right. They don’t even know what the alt-right is! They think the alt-right is a bunch of Nazi white supremacists, and that’s who they think Trump is speaking to.
And I’m not exaggerating, folks. That’s exactly what they think Trump was doing, was shouting out to Nazi white supremacists, which make up the majority of the conservative and Republican Party today. I mean, it’s mind-boggling stuff to me. Sarah Wildman at Vox — I don’t know who is she but she’s a young Millennial writer at Vox — she said the speech often resorted to rhetorical conceits typically used by the European and American alt-right.
She called Trump’s speech an alt-right manifesto. Do you know what upset her in Trump’s speech? When Trump said “For family, for freedom, for country, and for God.” That drove them nuts. That literally sent them over the edge. “For family, for freedom, for country, and for God.” These are the people who think our education system needs to be fixed. These are the people who think that Barack Obama was the answer to all of our problems.
Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post: “Trump’s white nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw.” What he didn’t like was Trump’s presidential speech where he said, “We write symphonies,” meaning we, Western nations, Western civilization, we write symphonies. That just offended the hell out of Jonathan Capehart. He called it white nationalist dog whistles, that particular line. I knew that the left opposed Western civilization. The fact that they hate it, I mean, viscerally, literally hate it, I guess I should have seen it.
That’s what all of this leftism today I guess should have meant to me, and it did, but not to the degree. This is deranged irrational. This is off-your-rocker kind of hatred that is not grounded in any kind of reality whatsoever. Peter Beinart said the West, just calling America, calling Western European “the West” as in Western civilization is a racial and religious term. Stunning stuff.
And this is what I think is the greatest challenge that we face, because it’s the area that there is the least push-back by any political opponent. There’s no push-back by the Republican Party on any of this cultural stuff. In fact, what has been the refrain? We’ve gotta leave the social issues alone, Rush, the social issues are killing us. That usually is meant abortion. “Don’t talk about it, Rush.”
But now anything to do with it is culture, Republicans don’t want to get anywhere near it, and, man, the culture is the foundation for everything that follows, and they are succeeding. Well, they’re actually not, but they’re making inroads way too rapidly for my taste.
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RUSH: Here is somebody named Amanda Marcotte, she writes at Salon.com. “Trump’s Alt-Right Poland Speech: Time to Call His White Nationalist Rhetoric What It Is.” Now, folks, again, particularly those of you who are Millennials, if you’re under the age of 40, I know most people’s historical perspective begins with the day they were born. Anything that happened prior to anybody’s birth is ancient history. In many cases, depending how young you are, it’s irrelevant, doesn’t mean anything, it’s old fogyish or what have you.
This is fundamentally, crucially important here. What is being savaged, what is being attacked, what is being miscategorized, what is being smeared, what is being slandered and libeled is the distinct American culture that millions of people the world over have risked everything to become part of. This distinct, unique American culture is what has led to the greatest standard of living in the history of mankind. It has led to the greatest freedom and liberty known by all in the history of mankind.
The distinct American culture that took a nation before it was 150 years old and turned it into the superpower of the world. Nations and populations who had been around for thousands of years had not come close to achieving what was achieved for people, for average, ordinary people, like happened in the United States of America.
There were distinct reasons for it and they are traceable directly to the founding of this country, which, sadly, many of you, if you’re under 40, have not been taught. You simply have been lied to. You haven’t been taught the truth of the American founding. I came across some stuff the other day that was just despicable, about Thomas Jefferson. It’s a Jefferson that you and I do not know that is being taught today as a mad rapist, knocked up 100 of his slaves, 100 illegitimate Jefferson babies during the time of Monticello. This is being taught as mainstream history.
The greatness of many of the founders is being erased and replaced with some of the most vile and despicable rotgut, and it’s then attached to the descendants of the founders, in racial terms, white, Christian, religious. It is an all-out assault on the very things that created this country, which gave humanity its greatest repository of human freedom and liberty and dignity. The greatest opportunity for economic advancement, standard of living, life expectancy.
No matter how you measure it, the United States of America has been unrivaled. But it’s been under assault, and many of the things that led to the greatness of this country have been under assault and under attack, and some have been destroyed. Now, listen to this from Salon. You people under 40, what she’s writing about here, won two landslide elections in 1980 and 1984 and you could say in 1988, George H. W. Bush running as the Reagan third term. That’s how he ran.
“Trump argued that Western (read: white) nations are ‘the fastest and the greatest community’ and the ‘world has never known anything like our community of nations.’ He crowed about how Westerners (read: white people) ‘write symphonies,’ ‘pursue innovation’ and ‘always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers,’ as if these were unique qualities to white-dominated nations, instead of universal truths of the human race across all cultures.”
Now, once again this woman, Amanda Marcotte, in a sense can’t be blamed because she’s a product of the same education system that has poisoned her mind. In her world, there is no humanity. There are white people who are bad. There are black people who are victims. There are Asians who are victims. There are women who are victims. There are Africans who are victims. There are Russians who are on the road to getting to right, there’s the Soviet communists and the Sandinistas, and they were this great people.
But in her world when she hears Trump talk about the greatness of Western civilization, the greatness of the United States, in her world she’s the one that sees race, she’s the one that thinks Trump is talking about white people. Trump is talking about humanity. It is not that white people had a free rein in the United States of America.
It is that United States of America created a bastion of liberty and freedom that unleashed creativity and risk taking and entrepreneurism and the pioneer spirit for everybody who lived here! It wasn’t just for white people, and it wasn’t white people that singularly pulled this off. How can it be when we are a nation of immigrants, for crying out loud, as these people continually love to point out.
There’s a reason that it happened in the United States. There’s a reason we got to the Moon first. There’s a reason we lead the world in scientific innovation, and it’s not because the way was paved for white people. It was because anybody who happened to live the United States enjoyed more freedom and more opportunity, both personal and economic, than anywhere in the world, than anywhere the world had ever known.
The history of the world is one of tyranny, political prisoning, dictatorship, poverty. That has been the story for the vast majority of people who have lived on this planet, and that is the root of American exceptionalism. America is the exception to what life was like, and America inspired copycats. America spread its vision of freedom and liberty, and those nations that picked it up became what is known as the western world.
Trump is not insulting anybody with this speech. He’s simply recognizing reality. And he’s pointing out that it’s under assault, and it’s under assault by people like Amanda Marcotte who do not know what she’s talking about. She is simply a product of an education system that has turned people into racially identified political application. They have no ability to see human beings as human beings. Everything is race and gender. And therefore everything’s discrimination and everything is victor versus captor.
“He crowed about how Westerners (read: white people) ‘write symphonies,’ ‘pursue innovation’ and ‘always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers,’ as if these were unique qualities to white-dominated nations.” No, that’s not what he said, Ms. Marcotte. He was praising a way of life. He was praising a way of government. He was praising a founding of a nation and a distinct American culture which was open to one and all.
And when immigrants arrived here that’s what they wanted to become. They wanted to become Americans. And they did. And they came from all over the world. And there are success stories in every racial group in this country. There are success stories in every gender group. And there are failures in every group. Not everybody makes it. Not everybody achieves. Not everybody reaches the pinnacle. But in this country, you’re not penalized for trying, except via the tax code.
Trump didn’t say a word about race in his speech, not a single word. Western civilization’s not limited to one race. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a Clarence Thomas. There wouldn’t be any number of so-called minorities who are excellent role model success stories, who are uniquely ignored by people like Amanda Marcotte. Alt-right manifesto, white supremacy, Donald Trump addressing white nationalist Nazis with his speech. These are mainstream American publications writing this drivel.
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RUSH: Back to the phones we go. Bob in Pensacola, Florida. It’s great to have you with us. How are you doing, sir?
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks a lot. Hey, I gotta preface this by telling you that I’m a pilot and I have flown all over the world. In fact, I’m getting ready to go fly right now. I don’t have much time. And I’ve flown from the western world to the rest of the world, and I’d like to know why it’s only in the western world where you can assume you’re gonna get clean water and decent sanitation facilities. Why are we still teaching civilizations that are thousands of years older than ours how to produce clean water?
RUSH: Why are we not teaching civilizations how to produce —
CALLER: No, why do we have to?
RUSH: You know, this is a question actually that — let me share — I’ve told this story before, but old Bob here raises a good question. I asked it in a different way. My first time in Europe was to the U.K., I believe. And then my second time, I think it was the U.K. I forget which one. Second time was to Rome. And neither place did I stay in anything spectacular. I mean, they were nice, you know, middle class hotels and this kind of thing.
And I was stunned. I was stunned at what I considered — don’t anybody be offended. I’m just trying to be descriptive here in a comparative way. I was stunned at the relative — well, the difference in the inferiority in things like plumbing and toilets and flushing and so forth wherever I went. And I started asking people, how in the world is it, I mean these people have been around thousands of years, in some cases, and we have been around at the time 210, 220.
And here’s the answer I got, which at first it made sense. Rush, we are the United States, and we’re big, and there are 50 states, and every state has different resources, it has different population makeup, got different creativity, and all 50 are united. In Europe, they’re not united. There was no European Union at this time. The U.K. was itself; France was itself; Italy was itself.
Now, they traded, but they maintained their distinct cultures, and they all had unique resources that were not pooled. This was said to me to be the best explanation that the person I was asking could come up with. And at first it made sense. It sounded logical, to the point that might support something like the European Union coming along.
And why in fact did the European Union come along? What was the idea behind that? Well, it was to compete with us, but it was also to try to equate us and to equal us or to accomplish in Europe what we had accomplished. And they failed to understand, it was not simply the unification of 50 states. It was the circumstances under which the people in the entire country existed. The rules, the culture, and all this, which was uniform in macro ways.
But his question is, how come we’re still teaching people how to sanitize their water? How come we’re still teaching people various things? And the point of the question is, what is it about us that has vaulted us into this leadership position, as he travels all over the world. What he’s talking about is one of the first reactions that I’ve had when I — and, by the way, then I went to Hong Kong, which is my single foray into Asia. And I didn’t have the same questions in Hong Kong that I had in Europe.
Hong Kong is maybe, the time I was there, before the ChiComs took it over from the Brits, before the Brits gave it back, Hong Kong was as close as you could get to unbridled, raw capitalism. And I was stunned as what a small area it was and is and how many people lived there and that it worked. And it was capitalism that was making it work.
So there is a point to the question here. And what it all boils down to is to me the single greatest offensive thing is, that is the never-ending attempt by people on the left to denigrate this country as the problem in the world, as the focus of evil. We’re the focus of racism; we’re the focus of bigotry; we’re the focus of slavery, we’re the focus all of these horrible things that the American left is attempting to disintegrate and destroy, when in fact it’s just the exact opposite. It’s always been, in terms of the culture war, a rhetorical call to arms for me.
And then there have been the attempts to make us feel guilty over our relative prosperity and feel guilty over our freedoms. And that was part and parcel of what motivates people like Obama. You know, why was Obama comfortable with an American economy in decline? ‘Cause we deserved it. We deserved to find out how the other half lived, so to speak.
In the world of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, we didn’t do anything but steal. Our greatness is because of our theft. We roamed the world and we took what other people had and we brought it home and we said it was ours, and we created a superpower on the backs of who? All of these poor people around the world. And that’s how you get the rich stole everything from the poor, because we traveled around the world and we just took it and we appropriated it and we made it ours. And that’s unjust.
In their world, America is unjust, from the days of the founding. It’s illegitimate, because in their world, like Amanda Marcotte, it was founded for white people by white people and for nobody else, and an added bonus if you were Christian. And this is the rotgut that not only is being taught now, but it has been taught for a very, very long time.
And you don’t think people would end up believing this, but they do. Young minds have been manipulated into believing this kind of stuff, and it’s just a shame. I mean, put it one way. But Bob, I’m glad you called. Bob, before you go, what do you fly, what kind of airplanes do you fly?
CALLER: Well, right now I’m flying a Learjet. I’m flying air medical flights all over the U.S.
RUSH: That would be a Lear 35 or Lear 55?
CALLER: Yes, sir, an old one.
RUSH: Well, hey, those are fun. Pilots love the Lear 35. The Lear 35 for a pilot is like buying a Porsche or Ferrari. You don’t care who’s driving along with you. You don’t care about passengers. In his case, a medical flight, he does.
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RUSH: Cleveland, Ohio. It’s Jack. Welcome, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network. How you doing, sir?
CALLER: Hey, we’re doing well. Thanks for asking. Independent dittos to you. You know, it’s nice to follow the vice president, for one, and greetings from the south shore of Lake Erie. You know, I wanted to follow up with Bob real quick ’cause he talked about water. The reason people educate people about water is because if we don’t have water, Rush, we’re all gonna die. I think you’d agree with that statement, wouldn’t you?
RUSH: Yeah, but no, his question is —
CALLER: No, no. That’s what he said, right? You’d agree with that, because, you know, if we mess up our water, we’re all dead. We all need to drink water. And I’ll give you a real good example what — you know, look at line five up in the Straits of Mackinac. We have the Great Lakes, we’re blessed with the Great Lakes here, a fresh body of water. God put that there for a reason. They’ve got 64-year-old pipeline there that needs to be fixed. If that thing leaks, it’s gonna wreck oil everywhere. And we’ve got the opportunity to fix those things. But, you know, when we don’t have our people in government working together, because they’re supposed to work together. That’s what the preamble of the Constitution says, right?
RUSH: No, the preamble of the Constitution doesn’t say a thing about the government working together. Or pipelines. Now, folks, I’m not gonna be rude here, but that’s it for Jack. Jack lied. Jack told Mr. Snerdley he wanted to ask why we’re spending so much time on Russian influence when we have super PACs and nobody knows who funds them, which would be a fascinating subject. Instead, Jack’s off on pipelines polluting the Great Lakes while lampooning the fact that we still have to teach people how to clean water, not how to drink it!
Everybody knows how to drink it, for crying out loud. That’s not what he said. His question was, why do we still have to teach people how to sanitize it? It’s a comment on how backwards so much of the world remains and the reasons are many for that, but one of them paramount is there probably are all kinds of people in countries with filthy water who would know how to do it who don’t have the freedom or the opportunity or the permission, however you want to look it. Nice try, Jack, but I didn’t get up just yesterday.
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RUSH: Rick in Pasadena. It’s great to have you, sir. Thank you for waiting. How are you?
CALLER: Great pleasure to get a chance to talk to you, Rush —
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: — after all this time, 32-year veteran here. And I just had a quick point I wanted to mention. You were talking about the issue of slavery and the founders earlier. A lot of people are not aware, because it’s not taught anymore, but the original drafts of the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson wrote are still available online, and they are one of the bitterest attacks on the institution of slavery ever written. I wish that was taught.
RUSH: You know, I’m glad you mentioned this. The original 13 colonies, everybody talks about we need to compromise, we have to compromise. They had to compromise at the founding. What was the objective? To form a union. And you got 13 colonies. To unionize and break away from the king and found the United States of America. The Southern colonies would not go for it if slavery were not permitted. They had to bite the bullet in the North, the northern colonies. It was a necessary evil in order to achieve the big objective.
But Rick here is right. It was a very fractious battle. It was by no means unanimous. And the Constitution was written specifically to allow slavery to be outlawed. Because of our values as established, slavery was not compatible, and we got rid of it. That’s also not what’s taught. I appreciate the call.