RUSH: From The Daily Caller: “Boycotts Against NRA Have Backfire Effect, Galvanize Conservatives — The liberal campaign against the NRA has successfully pressured some companies to sever their partnerships … but it’s having another, unintended effect: galvanizing conservatives who feel the NRA has been unfairly attacked. … [M]any on the right are rushing to the NRA’s defense,” and many are abandoning these businesses which are abandoning the NRA.
I, this program, have had personal experience with all of this — and because of that, I know exactly what’s happening out there, and I know that it’s not being reported. But I’m gonna tell you what’s happening. For every Delta Airlines or any other company that announces that they’re canceling whatever partnership arrangement they had with the NRA, the left is applauding them, but I’ll tell you what else is happening.
They are hearing from Americans the media doesn’t know exist, and the media’s not reporting, and they are hearing in even greater numbers than the left-wing bot boycott programs on Twitter and Facebook that they’re never flying United again or Delta, whichever airline it is. They are hearing from Americans opposed to this in greater numbers than they are hearing from the pro-boycott crowd. But you are not gonna be told that.
That will not be reported. That’s gonna be entirely completely ignored. But the evidence that it’s happening is FedEx. FedEx told the boycott people to basically pound sand. That they’re gonna continue their existing relationships and they’re not gonna be bullied into changing their business model and business plan. FedEx wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t confident that they’ve got the support of their customer base.
FedEx is not acting in a knee-jerk, panicked reaction or way like many of these other businesses do who’ve never experienced a bot attack. And that’s exactly what this so-called NRA boycott is. It’s a bot attack. The vast majority of so-called tweets and emails that these businesses are getting from people claiming to never fly the airline again or utilize the business again, I know exactly how these campaigns are created. I know exactly how many people are being used to make these bots, 10, 20 people made to look like 10 or 20,000.
What’s different now is there is pushback. The NRA hit back at the companies boycotting ’em in a statement released over the weekend. The group noted that “Some corporations have decided to punish NRA membership in a shameful display of political and civic cowardice. In time, these brands will be replaced by others who recognize that patriotism and determined commitment to Constitutional freedoms are characteristics of a marketplace they very much want to serve.”
The vast majority of NRA members — you know what? I’d venture to say the vast majority of NRA members didn’t even know all these tie-ins existed and weren’t taking advantage of these so-called discounts. But now they’re learning about them and now they’re learning to stay away from them.
“FedEx Under Fire for NRA Discounts as Activists, Florida Students Press Boycott; Company Says No Change Coming — FedEx stood pat on discounts to National Rifle Association members as the NRA’s list of supporting companies continued to shrink amid boycott threats.” This is in USA Today.
“FedEx was one of the largest and most recognizable companies that hadn’t pulled back from the NRA in the wake of a Valentine’s Day mass shooting at a Florida high school. After days of questions about whether it would join the other companies, FedEx issued a statement Monday signaling no change in the discount program.”
They said: “The NRA is one of hundreds of organizations in our alliances/association Marketing program whose members receive discounted rates for FedEx shipping. FedEx has never set or changed rates for any of our millions of customers around the world in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues.”
So this prompted a response from David Hogg, a senior at the high school, called out FedEx in a Saturday morning segment on MSNBC demanding that more people boycott FedEx, and created a hashtag to help people do so. The fact that FedEx did not buckle when the high school senior told them to buckle has just irritated the left even more, and they’re on a search-and-destroy mission against FedEx.
But you watch what’s gonna end up happening here. It’s gonna backfire on these companies joining with the demand for the NRA boycott. This is not a grassroots boycott. The thing that you have to understand for this and all other boycotts, these are not grassroots boycotts. These are not individual citizens outraged over the NRA. These are not individual citizens outraged because Delta Airlines or whatever other company has a deal with the NRA.
These are astroturfed boycotts ginned up by Democrat front organizations, The Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress blog, all of the bots generated by activist community organizers on Twitter and Facebook, but it is not a grassroots boycott. It’s being made to look like one, which is the favorite trick the media has. Whatever left-wing activist groups believe and want, the media treats it as though it is the same thing as a majority of what the American people want, and it never is.
Whether it’s baking a cake for a gay wedding reception or photographing one or whatever, religious freedom and pizza deliveries, you name it, it’s never as the Drive-By Media is portraying it. Just like these boycotts are not grassroots. They are manufactured. And so, therefore, is the response to them. Purely political, being made to look natural, like every other liberal, left-wing Democrat protest is.
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RUSH: Here’s a good perspective on this. Our old buddy Seton Motley has a piece that has cross-appeared… I think it’s in Red State. It’s appeared on his own blog, and it’s a way of illustrating the fake grassroots of this Democrat boycott. Folks, that’s the thing that you have to remember. It is not grassroots. With the left, it rarely is. Let’s go back. Remember one week after the election, we have now learn the Russians sponsored a “Trump’s not my president” rally in New York, and we learned that NBC promoted and CNN promoted it — unwittingly, of course.
As far as they were concerned, the Russians were trying to help Trump. But this was an anti-Trump rally, because again, to remind you, what the Russians are into is destabilization of whoever wins. Everybody thought that Hillary was gonna win. So during the primaries, the Russians are doing their magic on social media — which still isn’t a drop in the bucket compared with what Americans were doing. The Russians could not compete with the number of Americans that were trying to affect the outcome of the election.
That’s what Americans do! The Russians were bit players.
It’s just that they’re foreign actors, which makes their participation illegal. So all these networks are trying to say that Trump was colluding with Russia to help Trump win. That’s not what they were doing. Nobody thought Trump was gonna win, so the Russians’ actions during the campaign were all oriented toward destabilizing Hillary. That’s who they thought was gonna win. Trump wins, and what do the Russians do? They do a 180 and all of a sudden they’re now sponsoring a “Trump’s not my president” rally.
And look at the number of people that showed up for that thing. Now, when it happened, the Drive-By Media, the CNNs and PMSNBCs lied to you, and they told you that this was an outpouring of enraged American citizens who were distraught and angry, ticked off, and they showed up on their own volition because they were so disgusted with Trump that he’d won the election. Well, no. It was a bought-and-paid for rally that the Russians organized. It was not grassroots.
All those women and their vagina hats after the election? That was not grassroots. Now, granted there may be a lot of deranged leftist women who don’t really need a whole lot of advice on getting mad and showing up and protesting. But even those things were bought and paid for, set up, and arranged and organized. All these things are organized. That’s what community organizers do. They organize this kind of public disruption and make it look like it’s grassroots, meaning organic, that individual Americans are outraged and showing up in unison.
And just like the “Trump’s not my president” rally and just like these boycotts, these are not grassroots boycotts. These are sponsored boycotts, and all the pressure being brought to bear on these individual companies is not grassroots. But the reaction to it is, and that’s the dirty little secret. So the American left gins up their bot campaign to flood Delta and United with a so-called legion of complaints, outraged Americans that are no longer gonna fly Delta or United as long as they have deals with the NRA.
Well, that is an organized bunch of computer activity, much of it bots, meaning not real people. But the reaction to it by conservatives and people who are not liberal leftist Democrats? That’s natural. That is organic. That is grassroots. There isn’t anybody organizing these counter-protests. You might have people encouraging them. You might have people tweeting out things, “Oh, yeah? Well, we got just as much mo…”
But there isn’t a professional organization of right-wingers planning these things and hiring and renting buses and driving people to them. But that is what happens on the left. So for the companies involved here… This is why FedEx is holding tight. They know that they are being pressured by a programed campaign that isn’t grassroots. But Delta and United and all of the other companies that have announced they’re terminating their relationships with the NRA, the people they are hearing from angry at that are real, organic, grassroots Americans.
As such, they pose a much greater problem to these businesses than these planned, orchestrated campaigns the left is putting on. And they learn this as time goes on. And that’s why all of this eventually backfires or is gonna start backfiring, because one side of this is fake and ginned up, and the other side of it, the reaction side of it is what’s real. I’m here to tell you that people like you who are reacting to these phony boycott demands are in far greater number, you’re a much larger group of people than the Democrats group demanding that these companies sever ties with the NRA.
And these companies are seeing it. Believe me, folks. I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I’ve seen it happen with advertisers on this program. I don’t want to give away too many details, ’cause it’s best not to expose how it happens so that we don’t give away or techniques for dealing with it, but believe me. Some of these companies, their stock price is gonna go down because of this. I have seen it happen. Some of these companies gonna lose customers, they’re gonna lose subscribers, they’re gonna lose contracts, however they do business.
I’ve seen it happen just among us. You in this audience are so powerful, so much more powerful than you may even know, but I think you do know. I think it’s what makes you valuable. It’s one of the countless reasons I have such appreciation for you. Anyway, the Seton Motley column. He’s got an interesting way of expressing or illustrating and explaining this. “The Left’s Fake Grassroots: The Best Big Money Can Buy — The Left is excellent at faking things.” They have to. “They long ago had to become” good at faking “because Reality [sic] so implicitly contradicts everything for which they stand.
Let’s look at [t]he atrocity shooting at Florida’s Parkland High School…” Look at it. What is it to them? It’s an opportunity! How sick! It’s become an opportunity for them because they as they often say, “Never let a crisis go to waste!” Here’s what they ignore. “The Left ignores the fact that the Left themselves have banned guns from schools…” Guns are already banned! The objective they are demanding happened long ago. They did it! There aren’t any guns in schools. Schools are gun-free zones.
Everything that they are demanding happened. They’ve already made it happen, and look what it causes. “[E]ver since the” left succeeded in getting guns out of schools, “overwhelming majority of mass shootings occur in schools.” They were very proud creating their gun-free zones. Look at the outcome! But the point is they’re out there clamoring for something they’ve already accomplished. If you believe them, they claim to want to get rid of guns. Well, in the schools, they’ve succeeded!
And has it stopped the shootings? No. In fact, they occur in greater frequency. So now the target’s getting rid of the NRA. So ask yourself this. If they’ve already gotten rid of guns in the schools and next they want to get rid of the NRA, how is that gonna change anything that’s happening? The NRA isn’t responsible for any of this. But that doesn’t matter.
The left ignores this fact. Prior to the creation of the gun-free zones that they demanded, guns were ubiquitous at many schools and there were no school shootings. Why do you think they were clamoring to create gun-free zones? ‘Cause there were guns in these schools. There weren’t any shootings, but there were guns there.
So they demand gun-free zones and the law-abiding got rid of their guns. As is always the case, the left targets the law-abiding while asking and demanding for leniency for the perpetrators of crime. Where is the anger at the shooter? Where is even a proportional amount of anger at the shooter?
And if the shooter was bullied and if the shooter was knocked and laughed at and made fun of, who did that to him? You know, the left generally is on the warpath against bullying. And we’re told that bullying was one of many factors that made this shooter crack. Well, who did the bullying? Why isn’t there any anger at the bullying this guy faced? ‘Cause it doesn’t fit the narrative. The left has to, and they are, ignore the fact that prior to all this and during this, four cops showed up during the shooting and failed to enter the school and deal with the shooter.
Now, we’ve got partial explanations for this. One of them, strangely enough, is the PROMISE Program, which demands that perpetrators of various kinds of crime in schools not be pursued in order to get federal grant money. It’s to change the percentages of ethnic populations in prisons. That’s what the PROMISE Program did was simply stop pursuing misdemeanors and even some serious infractions so as to change the percentage of the population by ethnic minority in prisons.
And so if law enforcement in any given area is under constant instruction to avoid criminal activity, do not pursue it, do not charge it, then is it a big stretch when you learn they won’t enter a building where a shooting is taking place? If they’re under orders to ignore various crimes, then maybe it makes some sense they don’t go in there. They’re under orders not to stop some of these. I’m not talking about shootings. It’s misdemeanors. But who knows how they interpret this.
The left ignores the fact that everybody and their mother now 45 times warned government at all levels that there was an insane person out there who was insane. And one of the tipsters said she feared that this guy was actually going to shoot up a school. Forty-five times, ignored, and they’re mad at the NRA? The left has to ignore all of this. They can’t acknowledge any of this. They have to ignore all of this to pursue this crisis, to pursue this objective of blaming the NRA.
So essentially the left ignores all the facts and blames inanimate objects — guns — and then wants to ban them, despite the fact they’ve already done that! They’ve already banned guns from the schools! They’ve succeeded in that and they’re demanding it as though it hasn’t been done. Even though these inanimate objects happen to be the devices used to stop these crimes.
These guns are what stop these shootings, and the left has to ignore that they have succeeded in removing the deterrent from these schools as they chart their course to blame things and organizations that have nothing to do with it. And my point is that more and more people are beginning to see it this way and catch up to ’em.
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RUSH: On the Delta Airlines boycott of the NRA, there are some additional factoids here. The news broke yesterday that Delta was supposed to get a tax break from the Georgia legislature for aviation fuel as soon as today. Now, they had had this before and it was ended, I think, in 2015. But it was a deal that state legislators make with many industries to entice them to stay in the state or to come to the state.
One of the deals that Delta had was an exemption on sales tax for jet fuel (chuckles), which is a lot of money. Delta buys a lot of jet fuel in Georgia. Delta is headquartered and hubbed in Atlanta. So it was a big break to be exempt from sales tax on the purchase of jet fuel. Jet fuel, depending on the day, is not that expensive now compared to what it was years ago. But it’s a significant amount of money, and they were supposed to have that tax break reinstituted as soon as today.
But the lieutenant governor in Georgia sent out a tweet that if Delta was gonna fight the NRA, if Delta was gonna join the Democrats here in this silly boycott of the NRA, then conservatives were gonna fight back, and he killed the sales tax exemption. Delta was denied the sales tax exemption on jet fuel that they were to get starting today. Now the Democrats and the left are going nuts about Republicans doing what the left does all the time.
“Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor Blasts Delta for Cutting Ties with NRA; Warns He Will Block Legislation Favoring Airline.” That’s from Fox News. The Washington Free Beacon: “Georgia Senate Blocks Tax Bill Benefiting Delta Airlines.” This is the kind of pushback that’s beginning to happen now that used to not happen. When these boycotts happened, there was panic and fear and cowering in the corners. “Please don’t do it any more! Don’t do it.” But now people are fighting back.
Oh, really? You want to boycott the NRA? Well, fine, then here’s your exemption on sales tax and stuff it down your throat. Pay full fare, full rate, whatever. This kind of pushback is new. And again I want to remind you that this kind of pushback is more genuine and organic and grassroots than the boycott itself is, which is the result of organized activity by the Democrats using their buddies in tech to create bots and all kinds of things.
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RUSH: Ginger in Tucson. Glad you waited. You’re next up. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Hey. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to say for the last two years I have become politically active I guess in the way that any company that is being criticized for supporting Trump I literally go in and support them. I buy something, even if I don’t need it. I go in, I go on their website, I buy something, I write a letter to the CEO, VP, that’s what I’m doing.
On the other hand, any company that is, you know, like with the NRA, we’re in our late fifties. We both joined the NRA this week, and I don’t think I’m the only person that’s doing that. I just feel like it’s about time — I’ve boycotted — it’s been painful because I mean I boycotted, you know, Starbucks and the NFL and a whole bunch of other types of businesses that are against him, and then on the other hand, I support every business I can possibly support that stands firm.
RUSH: I think you are a sign of what’s happening out there in droves. You joined the NRA. You never would have joined the NRA other than this, more than likely, but there you are responding. And this is happening other than you would ever know by the news.