RUSH: Here’s Asher in Des Moines, Iowa. Asher, thank you for waiting. Hi. How are you?
CALLER: I’m well, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Good, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: Question is, how can Bernie justify being a millionaire and make 500 grand a year on books? I mean, isn’t he only a political celebrity because of the voters from Vermont? He didn’t build that. I mean, shouldn’t he be giving the money back to them?
The Sanders family net worth is a little north of a million bucks, folks, but — look. On all this, nobody is saying Crazy Bernie, you’re a hypocrite for making the money. What we’re saying is Crazy Bernie, where is your self-pay 70% tax rate on all this? You’re saying that having this kind of money is immoral. You say that having this amount of money or more is harmful to America, that it’s unfair, that it needs to be redistributed.
So where is your check to the IRS for 70% of whatever it is you have? Or maybe even 90. You know, you add what Cortez and some of these other lunatics are saying and they’re talking about 90%.
The point is that these people are typical. They create a bunch of rules and promptly exempt themselves on the basis, “Well, you know, the leaders have to be self-sufficient. The leaders have to be able to able to be mobile and move around. That’s why we’ll still be flying our jets while you’re on the mule. We have to be able to lead the cause and travel the world, which is why we’ll be flying our jets and you’re gonna be in a wagon train or whatever.”
They always do. They always do. I was on the golf course over the weekend, and we were talking about this puzzlement that we all have of what is the lure to every young generation? It’s almost inescapable, the lure of socialism. What is it? And an interesting theory was put forward.
Somebody said, “Rush, when you and I were growing up, there was a living embodiment of the disaster of socialism and communism, and it was called the Soviet Union.” Well, young people today do not have a Soviet Union. There isn’t an example of failed socialism, communism, as prevalent as the Soviet Union was for us. The Soviet Union was a 50- to 70-year existence, a 50- to 70-year teachable moment.
All we’ve got now is Venezuela and Venezuela’s not big enough, not powerful enough, never has been a threat to the United States. It’s some little tinhorn down there. And it’s not enough, its abject failure in socialism is documented, it’s a hundred percent true, but it’s not big enough to convince young people. They look at it and say, “Well, it’s the wrong people running it, didn’t have enough money, depended on oil too long,” or whatever. They can come up with any kind of excuse.
Do you know what the closest — and I’m gonna maybe step in it here — do you know what the closest example today we have to the abject disaster we think is awaiting us, what’s the closest example? And I’m not talking about China because that will never work. People’s tech gear comes from China. And don’t say North Korea because nobody takes them seriously, little pot-bellied dictator.
And it’s not that big an exhibit yet. But it’s getting there. What is the nearest example we have of the eventual implosion? California. Now, Europe, as a whole, yeah, but, see, the news coming out of Europe is not truthful enough. Europe is not being reported on as failing. Europe’s not being reported on as imploding. It’s not being reported on as being overrun by immigrants.
The Republican Party used to be dominant in that state. It’s gone, and for one reason: illegal immigration and the rise of the radical, uber-left. Do you know in the California assembly there are seven Republicans? What must that be like for them? They are looked at as a total joke by the Democrats in the assembly. They’re probably not invited to any meetings. They’re probably not on any committees, and if they are, they’re for comic relief.
California is all these sanctuary cities. California is, aside from the coastal areas, California is a state that is close to abject poverty. The divide, the income gap, the wage gap, the wealth gap in California is stark! The people who live inland in the valleys and live up north and in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada can’t compare to the wealth in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, San Francisco on the way up and then you go down to San Diego for a little bit.
But it has clearly got the ingredients of a state that is at some point not going to be able to sustain itself. But it doesn’t look like that now. Let me give you an example, albeit a small example. Where is this? In fact, I’ve got two. But let me find the one in California. This involves police cars. What did I do with this? Oh, there’s a great Norman Podhoretz thing — where is this? Don’t tell me I put it in a different Stack.
Anyway, in Laguna Beach, California, there is a huge controversy about police. The police department is actually putting the words “police” on their police cars, and residents are livid. They’re claiming it’s inciting violence that is anti-immigrant, that it is intimidating to people who might have broken the law in the past.
I even saw a story on one of my tech blogs the other day that $300,000 a year in the Bay Area is not enough to get by. Now, everything’s relative, but I’m saying this is already something people out there believe.
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RUSH: By the way, coming up in the next issue of The Limbaugh Letter, we have a story, “Seven Steps to Overthrow America. The Left’s California Model.” I wasn’t just grabbing this stuff out of the air, folks. California is going to become the model that we used to use the Soviet Union as to teach people about the dangers to freedom and equality and economic prosperity that the Soviet Union was used as. By the way, how do you measure equality and freedom? That’s a whole different subject for another time.
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RUSH: Here’s Robert in Julian, California. Hi. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Glad to be on your show.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m living in it. You said it 100 percent correct. This is the new example for failed socialism. California is definitely it.
RUSH: Well, not yet.
CALLER: The people out here are crazy. Oh, it’s bad. I’m already there. It’s not good.
RUSH: Oh, I know.
CALLER: Everything is given to everybody and they bill the people that are actually working for everything that’s given away.
RUSH: I know. And the taxes are going up and the things being taxed are going up and the state’s been overrun. You can’t afford to live where you work, all that. But it’s not there yet. It’s trending. It’s a one party state with a declining Republican Party. But it’s not yet — to you who live there it is, but to a Millennial in Illinois California, “Hollywood, Hollywood, Silicon Valley.” It’s not yet. It’s going to be.
We had that. There was no magic allure to socialism. We did have the sixties and the leftist radicals who hated America and actually were enthralled with the idea of a Castro, Che Guevara, Soviet Union, because they were jealous of the power. But young people today, there is no equivalent of the Soviet Union. Venezuela doesn’t work, the ChiComs don’t work for it because the face of China is not what the face of the Soviet Union was.
My only point was that California is trending in a direction that will someday be an example of the failures of socialism and liberalism for one and all to see. Look. It’s beginning now. People are leaving the state. Not in droves, but it’s been a trickle, and it’s continuing. But it isn’t there yet. For those of you who live there and understand, yeah, it is, but for people outside of California looking at it as the land of fruit and opportunity and hope, it still is that. It’s gonna be a while.
That was my only point is that young people today don’t have a living example of the horror. So it’s left to their imaginations to dream of this utopia that they are going to build and create even though it hasn’t ever been done. It hasn’t been done because they haven’t been alive when it has been tried, but now they are alive and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar are going to lead the way over the carcasses of brontosauruses like Schumer and Pelosi and take your pick of the rest of them.