RUSH: Crazy Bernie, who announced his presidential candidacy yesterday, raised $6 million in 24 hours. Folks, with 20 of these rats seeking this nomination, for one of them to get $6 million in 24 hours, that cannot be ignored.

You know, I have a question for Crazy Bernie. He’s offering free everything. You know that’s the allure to Bernie Sanders, right? Everything is free. And I’m gonna explain why that works here in just a moment. But then after offering everything free, he’s also offering free education, so you can get a job. Why would anybody need a job if everything is free? I’m not trying to make a joke. Why would anybody need to work if everything in life that matters is free?

He’s promising universal basic income. He’s promising free health care, free Medicare, free this, free that, he’s promised free education, free job training. Why would anybody need to go school to learn anything? Why would anybody need a job? Well, Crazy Bernie understands that he’s an old white guy. And he understands that on the American left being an old white guy is still a problem. No matter how great a communist this guy is, he’s still a white guy, and he’s old. And that’s a potential negative. So last night on The Young Turks podcast, Crazy Bernie had this to say about his potential vice presidential running mate.

SANDERS: We would look for somebody who is maybe not of the same gender that I am and maybe somebody who might be a couple of years younger than me and somebody who can take the progressive banner.

RUSH: All right. Now, “not of the same gender.” What does that mean? You’d think woman, but, no, because in America today there’s trans, there’s all kinds of potential genders out there. (interruption) Well, you’re getting ahead of me here! And then he says well maybe somebody that might be a couple years younger than I am, which is almost everybody, and somebody who can take the progressive banner. That’s almost any Democrat. I think he has one person in mind. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez! That’s what he thinks his silver bullet is! And I hope and pray — I think — I hope and pray that he does pick her! Although, folks, she is the biggest dunce.

You know, it’s actually a shame how uneducated this woman is. She is a living example of what has gone wrong in the American education system. She is a living example of what has gone wrong in child-rearing among her parents’ generation. She is a walking billboard for all that is wrong about education and child-rearing in America today. And she’s not alone. And I look at all these young people who are — do not doubt me — they are scared to death over climate change. They really are. I’m not saying this for effect, and I’m not exaggerating it. They are fully believing that the earth will not support human life in 30 to 40 years. Scared to death. They have been fully indoctrinated, maleducated, ill-educated, whatever the term is.

Now, there is a billboard that went up today in the middle of Times Square. The billboard was put up by somebody called the Job Creators Network. The Job Creators Network, the leading member of this network is Bernie Marcus, who is one of the co-founders of the Home Depot. Arthur Blank, the owner of the Atlanta Falcons, was his buddy. Ken Langone was also one of the co-founders of the Home Depot.

These are all very successful — I don’t know about Blank, but Bernie Marcus and Langone are prominent Republicans. They’re swamp Republicans. Not quite RINOs. But they’re not conservative like — well, Bernie is, Bernie Marcus may be, but they’re good guys, and they came up from nothing, and they built Home Depot from nothing.

And they believe in the old route to success that America always was, the old rules of work hard, have ambition, bust your ass and you’ll get where you want to go, if you find out what you love and so forth. Nothing is guaranteed. And they put this billboard up in Times Square. I’m gonna read it to you. I didn’t have time to take a screenshot to put it on the Dittocam. But we’ll get it up for you at RushLimbaugh.com.

“25,000 Lost NYC Jobs. $4 Billion in Lost Wages. $12 Billion in Lost Economic Activity for NY. Thanks For Nothing, AOC.” This is a billboard chastising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her abject ignorance in rejecting the Amazon deal. Now, I want to walk through this again so that you will know in simple terms the degree of her ignorance and maybe more. And I want to tell you up front the reason why people like Cortez and other Millennial leftist activists opposed Amazon coming to Long Island City. The average salary — not average. It’s gonna — well, it may be. There were 25,000 jobs, and they were gonna be in the range of $150,000 a year. And that’s why the jobs were opposed.

Why would these people oppose jobs that were gonna pay $150,000 a year? They said that paying people that much money will cause a distortion in the standard of living. It will raise rents so that most people couldn’t afford. It would raise housing prices so that most people couldn’t afford. It would raise transportation prices. In other words, they are against people earning a decent amount of money because of the negative impact it will have on the community.

And they cite Silicon Valley. They said look at all of the wealth in Silicon Valley. It’s destroyed the rent prices and real estate in San Francisco and surrounding areas. Because the people in Silicon Valley make too much money. So rents rise because the people in Silicon Valley could afford to pay them, whereas other Millennials can’t.

And so this is used as justification for eliminating high — These people do not understand that it is liberalism causing these vast variations and disparities and inequities in the cost of living and rising real estate. But it’s even worse than that. It comes down to abject economic ignorance. And I want to remind you that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics from Boston University.

Here was the Amazon deal. Now, part of this is due to the fact that Andrew Cuomo is a horrible salesman. The deal was that Amazon would agree to locate a headquarters in Long Island City and would be given $3 billion in tax breaks over ten years in exchange for deciding to build their headquarters there. The news was out there that Amazon was actually gonna be paying $27 billion in taxes over the 10 years. The three billion was the break. It was the reduction.

They were gonna… I think they were gonna pay $30 billion with a $3 billion tax break; so their total tax bill over 10 years would be $27 billion.  But Cortez didn’t know that.  She had no idea.  All Cortez and her band of merry Millennials knew — all they thought — was that New York was paying Amazon $3 billion to locate there.  Part of this is media because there’s likewise stupidity in the media.  Same people, same age, same level of ignorance.  They reported that Amazon was getting $3 billion, ’cause they all have an anti-corporation bias.

Even if run by a rich lib, corporations are automatically suspects and evil, and so Cuomo failed (and Bill de Blasio, the mayor, failed) to say, “That’s $27 billion we’re gonna get here!” Cortez and the media thought that the state and city were paying Amazon $3 billion.  So on that basis, they forced Amazon out.  They created protests.  They made it clear that they were not gonna sit there and accept this.  They were gonna raise hell and they’re gonna make sure that Amazon regretted the move.

So Bezos said, “Screw this,” and pulled out, and went down to Virginia, where he’s got a much more favorable deal and a less expensive construction project and all that.  Then Cortez — in her searing brilliance — announced that it was such a success that they could now take this $3 billion and invest it themselves!  They could invest it in infrastructure.  They could invest it in education.  They could invest it in the subway system.  They could spend it.

What she doesn’t know is, there isn’t any $3 billion.  She does not know that New York was not going to pay Amazon $3 billion.  She does not know that she just cost her state $27 billion and her city, her district.  She just didn’t know.  She literally believed that Amazon was gonna be paid $3 billion to build a building in a headquarters in Long Island City, and when she turned it back and when she defeated it, she said, “Now look! We can use that $3 billion!”

There isn’t $3 billion, Alexandria.  There’s not $3 billion. There’s not a dime if Amazon doesn’t show up.  If Amazon isn’t paying any taxes, there isn’t $3 billion, there isn’t $1 billion, there isn’t $1.  It actually took… It took Chuck Todd about five minutes to figure this out!  He was interviewing de Blasio on this on Meet the Press this past Sunday. It took Chuck Todd even awhile to figure this out.  These people are so uneducated.  They just do not know basics.

Cuomo has no idea how to sell this.  How doesn’t get the point that people in New York think the state and the city are gonna pay Amazon $3 billion to locate there?  Well, part of that is the media trying to kill the deal, not reporting the truth.  But some of these people involved in it… Here you’ve got a newly elected member of Congress who now Bernie Sanders clearly hopes is his vice presidential running mate.

It is stunning.  This used to be… This kind of deal used to be the way the Democrat Party ingratiated itself to blue-collar workers all the way down to the unemployment line!  This is how the Democrat Party built its base!  This is how the Democrat Party became known as the party of the little guy! By creating jobs for them, high-paying jobs and this kind of thing.

And here comes this modern-day new brand of Democrat just obliterating the whole process under the guise that Amazon showing up is going to destroy life as they know it because people are gonna earn too much money!  Who in the world wants to live under leadership that thinks earning $150,000 a year is too much money and will destroy a community?  For crying out loud!  It’s unbelievable!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  As always, the problem is that there are 3.1 million Twitter followers of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who think that she’s Superwoman, smartest woman on earth.  I don’t know that we’ve ever had, in my lifetime, this degree of ignorance and stupidity among the educated classes.  It really is heart stopping.  But I don’t have time to stop my heart.  That would not be good.  So let’s head to South Bend, Indiana.  This is Wanda.  I’m glad you called.  Great to have you on the program.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Last week you said that Alexandria Cortez is like the adult version of this everybody’s wonderful and everybody gets a trophy.  I was thinking about that, and it’s true.  I see this generation as just drowning in a self-esteem that isn’t real, because we’ve rewarded just simple participation. We’ve rewarded kids just for showing up.  I have four boys in this generation; so I know.  The real achievement that builds true self-esteem necessitates hardship and trying and failing. So when we reward kids just for showing up, I think we actually dumb them down. They don’t learn how —

RUSH:  Oh, I agree.

CALLER:  Yeah.  They don’t learn how to think critically.  I think they’re stunted character-wise.  They don’t learn wisdom through life experience.  And then we send them off to the state universities.  My third son is a second-year student in a state university, and last semester he had a self-avowed Marxist professor who had a full-fledged meltdown one day when she was teaching them about how “white males” own the majority of the wealth in the world.  So, if they go into these classrooms and they haven’t learned to think, they don’t have the character, the wisdom, the life experience —

RUSH:  Well, it’s not… You mentioned wisdom.  You’re right about all that.  It’s not just that, though.  It is that they are also taught to resent people from whom they could learn things. They are taught to resent people who have more life experiences, who have more wisdom or advice to offer.  I got a great piece here:  “Socialism as a Millennial Religion.”  Let me read a couple of pull quotes here.

“Think of all the traits and characteristics, most of them negative, associated with the Millennials in the popular mind. They are said to be unrealistic and have both the inflated expectations of life and the inflated perceptions of selves. They think the world owes them a living — a good one too — though without necessary too much effort.” They don’t think they have to work very hard for it. “Things came very easily to them when they were growing up; when that suddenly stops — when the reality finally intrudes — they get angry, frustrated, lost: the world is deeply unfair and is conspiring against them.

“They are narcissistic, self-possessed and self-obsessed. They expect instant rewards and instant gratification. Having been told their whole lives how special they are, they tend to be over-sensitive and find it difficult to cope with criticism or obstacles.” Some of them “[a]re lazy, flighty and easily distracted. Remember: these are all generalizations, but stereotypes stick because they ring true.  So, no, no surprises here. Their collective personality makes the Millennials unusually suited for the flirtation with socialism.

“They are a great match; if this was Tinder, Marx would be getting super liked all the time,” and the point this person is making here is that they have grown up sheltered, protected, infused with an unearned self-esteem, and, at some point, they leave those confines, and then they discover that there’s nobody providing those things.  They have to provide some of the stuff themselves, and they don’t know how.  And just the existence of the stress — the fact that there is now stress — is unfair, it’s unjust. So any appeal for sameness and equality and a painless existence is automatically gonna work on them.

It’s deeper than that, but that’s the upshot.

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RUSH: Here is Mark in Monroe, New York. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Yes, sir. Hi. How are you? Mega dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Hey, I think your points about Ocasio-Cortez are right on. It’s a sad commentary that her education, specifically, but maybe Millennials in general, you know, and her upbringing that she doesn’t even understand how tax incentives work. But what I wanted to say is her ignorance is willful ignorance because the view she’s espousing or her point of view on this issue fits with her worldview, which is that it’s wrong for some people to have more than others do and to rise up the socioeconomic ladder. I think that sadly fits with the previous excerpt you read about Millennials, how they expect to have their success handed to them. But when an opportunity like this in New York comes along that will allow many to succeed, they all fail because it’s not acceptable because it will move some people up the socioeconomic ladder, but not others.

RUSH: Right. And it will harm those that are not moved up. It will make things more expensive for them, so we can’t have anybody doing any better than anybody else.

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: Exactly right. You know, you’re really right about something else. They think it’s wrong for people to have money, real money, period. There’s something sinful about having a lot of money in the first place.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: That actually is a great way of explaining their opposition to a company like Amazon coming in with 25,000 jobs that are gonna pay around 150 grand, these people oppose it because of how much more expensive they think things are gonna get because of that. It’s not fair that those people should be doing well. But the thing about the Millennials that I want to add to this that makes this crucial, it’s about child-rearing. And I’ll first admit I haven’t done it, so I could be all wet. I could be all wrong. It’s easy for somebody like me to look at the way other people do things and disapprove. I understand this, so I add caveats to this by saying I may not know what I’m talking about.

But I think it is almost child abuse to create belief systems in kids that they’ve accomplished things when they haven’t, that they’re special simply because they exist, and at any time those circumstances don’t exist, something’s wrong, not with them, but with everybody else. That’s what’s the ticket to socialism. When they are shielded and protected, when their parents become their friends rather than mentors and disciplinarians, eventually these shielded, protected kids are going to encounter obstacles. They’re going to encounter things that have to be overcome.

They’re gonna encounter adversity. And, if they’ve never been made to deal with it, if they’ve always been shielded, if any adversity has been presented to them as unfairness or racism or sexism or bigotry, they’re not gonna know how to deal with it. That is what makes them susceptible to pitches like Crazy Bernie’s and all the rest of these Democrats, where everything’s gonna be free and everybody’s gonna be nice and everybody’s gonna be the same and everybody’s gonna be respected. And there won’t be anybody yelling and there won’t be anybody making fun of anybody and there won’t be anybody laughing at other people, none of this.

Well, that’s not the world, that’s not life, and if they’re not equipped and not prepared for it. Hello, victimhood the moment they leave home. And once they become part of the victimology class, then they have surrendered control over their own future, over their own existence, and they then become totally dependent on the people promising to provide or take care of whatever. You know, Santa Claus is hard to say “no” to. And people promising utopia.

There has to be a reason socialism is demonstrable failure every time it’s ever been tried. It’s a demonstrable failure wherever you want to look in practice right now in the world, and yet it remains this overwhelming, attractive, alluring thing. Why? And I think it has to do with immaturity and shelter from adversity.

And, man, when we take successful people and target them and use them as examples of what not to be, when we challenge the legitimacy of successful people by accusing them of stealing it or tricking people out of it or coming by it in some unfair way, rather than inspiring people to be better than they can be, we’re doing great damage to our own society and culture.

And we are there now. I don’t know what percentage of Millennials — there are exceptions to everything. The whole generation’s not this way, obviously. We get calls from a bunch of Millennials who agree with the characterization and share with us how they’ve avoided it and the problems that they encounter by not falling in line with their peers on this kind of thing.

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RUSH: Craig in the Beltway, Washington.  Great to have you, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  It’s an honor, sir.  Thank you for having me.  Rush, I’m gonna suggest that there’s a link between AOC’s ignorance on this whole thing with taxes and de Blasio’s inability to sell it, and that’s the fact that they both think it’s the government’s money to start with.  That’s the way they’ve been brought up, that’s the way they’ve been running governments, and they don’t view it as Amazon keeping $3 billion of their own money.  They view it as, “Hey, that $30 billion was ours to start with and we’re giving three of it back.”

RUSH:  You know, that’s exactly right.  No, no.  From a state of mind, from a political belief system, all money is government’s — and what you end up with is what government decides to let you have or keep.  That is… I’m glad you reminded me.  That is fundamental in their belief about government being the center of everything.  All money is government’s, and what you end up with is through the good graces and compassion of your government leaders.