RUSH: We’re doing Open Line Friday on Wednesday today. This is my last program, live program this week. Got a best-of show tomorrow. Who did we con into coming here on Friday, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Jason Lewis! We conned Jason Lewis into coming up on Friday to guest host. (laughing)

Now, look, folks. I know this is… I want to be very clear here. I am not obsessed or possessed here of fatalism or negativism. I just read something that triggered me, when I read the line (paraphrased), “If this stuff ever becomes mainstream, then we’re gonna have problems.” I’ve been frustrated for so long that so many haven’t seen what’s coming, that haven’t seen what was in front of our faces and has been on the way to getting us to this point. It needn’t have happened, but it did, because nobody has ever stood up and told basically a bunch of kids to shut up and grow up, or to sit down and grow up.

Instead, we’ve been bending over backwards with political correctness. We haven’t wanted to hurt anybody’s feelings and so forth. We’ve allowed these renegades to totally just destroy the public education system, not to mention much of higher education at the university level and so forth. We’re dangerously closer to this. But it’s interesting. We’ve got a guy. One of the guys waiting to speak on the phone thinks that I’m a little overwrought, that the Nike thing is actually one of the best things that could ever happen in terms of reelecting Trump. Now, we had somebody make this point yesterday in a different way.

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RUSH: McHenry, Illinois, is where it’s from. Bill, great to have you with us, sir. How are you?

CALLER: Very well, Rush. I called actually to try to talk you off the ledge here, but you’ve done it yourself. You walked yourself back. You know what? This is a battle, and three weeks ago we were at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, and —

RUSH: Wait, wait whoa. Hang on just a second. I need to know. Did I really sound like I was on the ledge?

CALLER: Little bit. Little bit. Little bit. You know what?

RUSH: Did you think I was gonna jump?

CALLER: No. No. I still… I reached out and grabbed you to hold you back. The whole idea is this. You know, I’m about your age, maybe a year older. I’ve seen a lot. You’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen things worse in this nation than they are now, but the media is doing its best to keep us at each other’s throats. And they’re losing that battle, because they are going to self-destruct right before our eyes.

RUSH: I’ve heard people saying that they’re gonna self-destruct before our eyes for I don’t know how many years — and there’s CNN self-destructing, and they’re still there. My whole point here… I’m not on a ledge. I’m desperate to get people into the here and now and stop thinking this stuff is down the road!

CALLER: I understand.

RUSH: We are facing it right now, not 10 years from now!

CALLER: I’m not trying to be naive about this. I’m not Pollyanna about it. I’ve seen things happen. You have too. The whole idea is that we’re winning this battle. I think the Betsy Ross flag will be probably front and center stage on every Trump rally from here on out, and to a great degree — and I don’t want to sound naive here. To a great degree, this is gonna really project this gentleman into a second term, and it’s not because we’re gonna sit back and watch it. We’re gonna push him to a second term, with your help and with everyone else’s help on the conservative side. We need to all be engaged in this; I don’t care how old or young we are.

RUSH: Bill, that’s another good point. Let me try to express this in an additional away. I don’t define… My sole judgment, definition of whether we’re winning or losing is not who wins elections. Trump won the last election. Look what they did. He can win the next election. Winning the election is a good thing. I mean, don’t misunderstand. There’s no alternative to it. But take a look at California. California…

I guarantee you, the Democrats in California are telling themselves, “As far as we’re concerned where we are, we don’t care who the president is ’cause it doesn’t matter. We’re gonna turn this state into what we want this country to be and to hell with everybody. There’s nobody here that can stop us, and we’re gonna do it, and it doesn’t matter who the president is,” and they’re right. So winning the next election, of course, is crucial, but it doesn’t stop them. It doesn’t defeat them. It’s gonna take more than winning elections.

CALLER: Well, people are moving out of California. I live in Illinois, very close to the Wisconsin line. A lot of our friends are moving north to Wisconsin to get out of this disaster known as The People’s Republic of Illinois.

RUSH: They haven’t lost enough people to lose electoral votes yet.

CALLER: Well, it depends. I’ve been told, you know, in the census of 2020 we’re gonna lose two seats in the House. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but the bottom line is that we are winning this battle and, you know, I just want to encourage you to keep the positive aspect of it. I know you’re doing that. You’ve been a big factor — you’ve been a huge factor — in what’s been going on for the last 30 years. I started to tell you, we were just at the Reagan library three weeks ago, and I walked out of there rejuvenated.

I walked out of there thinking, you know, this president did so much with his ideas and his convictions without the support — any support — from the press, and yet now we have an opposition. We can push back, you know, thanks to you and thanks to other folks who are doing the conservative bidding. But we have to do it. All of us do, and we can’t… You know, we can’t withdraw from the fray. I’m engaged as much as I possibly can be.

RUSH: I know.

CALLER: I work in academia, Rush. I’m around liberals every day.

RUSH: Well, you’re facing it head on.

CALLER: Well, but —

RUSH: Look, it’s another good point. Reagan was able to dominate and persevere with no assist in the media. It was the three networks, the two newspapers, and CNN — and CNN didn’t get started ’til sometime in the eighties. But there wasn’t even the internet with Reagan. He strictly overcame the mainstream media of the day without any conservative media. He had William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, and then Emmett Tyrrell came along with the American Spectator, but that was pretty much it.

But Reagan was able to do that by going over their heads and appealing directly to the American people with the power of his communication skills and his charisma. My point to you is — and your call is demonstrating the tough challenge I have given myself here, because I’m not on a ledge, yet you think I am. You think I’m at my wits’ end pulling my hair out and about near the end of things, and I’m not. My concern is that not enough people are yet fully aware of what we face.

Remember what triggered me — and I’ll read it to you again. It’s this line: If these protests, and things like Nike “ever takes hold in mainstream American life, we’re in real trouble.” As though it’s not yet a problem, but if this stuff ever get into the mainstream, then we got a real problem. I think we’re confronted by the problem today and have been for years. It’s not any longer something that’s gonna happen if we don’t do something about it. It’s not something that’s destined to become front and center five years from now or 10 years. It’s right now! We are dealing with it right now — and, yeah, I don’t care how big or small it is.

We know it’s not the majority of the country yet. But the mainstream media makes it look every day like it is. And if that keeps up, people are just gonna make the assumption. Look, how many of you believed that Trump just decided to give up on the citizenship question in the census? Snerdley believed it. It’s everywhere! (interruption) “Somebody in the DOJ said it.” Well, we’ve got renegades in the DOJ who are undermining Trump every day, but we don’t stop and think that might be going on here. We just accept what we see at first; then we get corrected. Human nature, you hear it, you see it, you read it, you believe it.

Look, I’m long here in this segment. I gotta go.

Bill, thanks for the call. I appreciate it.

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RUSH: He’s Lisa. Lisa in Highland Beach, Florida, it’s great to have you on Open Line Friday on Wednesday. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, and thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Did I sound like I was on a ledge to you, Lisa?

CALLER: No, Rush. You’re passionate about what you’re doing, and we really appreciate it.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: And it inspires many of us to call you, so that’s why I called.

RUSH: If I’m ever on the ledge I’ll tell you I’m on the ledge and I’ll tell you to get the net.

CALLER: (giggles) Okay. So my point is Nike may have appeased the Colin Kaepernick base, but I believe they’ve waged a War on Women by taking Betsy Ross off of their sneaker. Betsy Ross was an American original. She was rebellious, she was innovative, she convinced George Washington to change the flag. She was paid to sew flags. Later on, she even experienced expulsion from the Quaker congregation due to her eloping. So here is this innovative, rebellious feminist as a symbol of liberation, and I want to know: Where are all the feminists?

RUSH: As I’m going through this, you’re absolutely right. She was an early feminist as they are defined today.

CALLER: Yes! She was great.

RUSH: I made the point yesterday that Nike is essentially being anti-woman here. But nobody’s seeing it that way, other than educated, informed people like you and others in this audience.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: Nobody sees… How many people do you think know who Betsy Ross is? I’m just gonna… The people that go out and buy these sneakers, how many of them do you think even know who Betsy Ross was, much less the Betsy Ross flag?

CALLER: Well, I’ll tell you what. They may do a Google search on her now; so this is great. Maybe this will have an adverse impact on what Nike’s trying to do.

RUSH: Well, that’s true. (chuckles)

CALLER: That’s true.

RUSH: They’re gonna have to do a search to find out what the hubbub’s all about.

CALLER: I hope they do.

RUSH: But do you really think the feminazi union out there is gonna come to blows with Nike or Kaepernick because of the denigration of a popular American woman dating back to our founding? Do you think they’re gonna do that?

CALLER: No, I don’t.

RUSH: Do you think the feminazis are gonna take the side of a feminist from the date of the founding? Ain’t no way.

CALLER: I agree. And here we are, an independent thinker, a role model for young women. She convinced George Washington. She was rebellious. She was a simple of liberation from the earliest days. They won’t stand up for her.

RUSH: Yeah, but the problem was she was probably pro-life — and if that was the case, they don’t care about anything else.

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RUSH: By the way, don’t discount the possibility that this whole Kaepernick, Betsy Ross flag thing and the Nike pulling the shoes… Don’t rule out that this is a gigantic publicity stunt — you can’t rule that out, either — just to get Nike even more notice.

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RUSH: Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is Gabe, and I’m really glad you waited. Hello, sir, and welcome.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s good to be on. So I have two friends who are blatantly and irreverently anti-American. They talk about how much they hate America, how much they hate the things America does, and it really does irk me quite a bit. All this leads to… I’ve developed this opinion that I think that the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, people who raise these children — not all of them. I’m not trying to generalize. But they are responsible for generating this anti-American sentiment.

RUSH: Interesting. How so? You mean by not stopping it when it started in their own kids, just sitting by and letting it happen, or by actively influencing it?

CALLER: Well, you know, you always talk about how in the eighties we started to encourage this culture of losing. America is the greatest nation on earth, we are a nation that wins constantly, and all of that leads to… When you start is to discourage winning, when you start to discourage hard work, getting ahead, then people start to resent all of the institutions that represent that kind of thought.

RUSH: That’s actually quite true. Winning was unfair.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: It wasn’t fair because somebody lost. Any time there were losers, that was an unfair circumstance; we wanted to wipe it out. This is how we got scoreless junior high school softball and football. This is how we got all kinds of youth sports endeavors where we didn’t keep score and sometimes the best team was penalized 20 points before the game started, ’cause (impression), “It just wasn’t fair to win. Winning was humiliating people! We can’t have this.” It fit right in at the time with the culture that the United States, as a superpower, was a destabilizing thing.

You had Reagan back during the eighties with the Soviet Union as his number one military threat and enemy and targeting them from eventual destruction, and the Washington establishment hated that. They didn’t want to get rid of the competing second superpower because they thought it was destabilizing. So United States was — you’re right — portrayed as big and bad, unfairly powerful, and we needed to dial it back. And losing now and then was good ’cause showed the rest of the world that we were not obsessed with hurting them and dominating them, whatever the thought process was. You’re absolutely right about that. Way to go! You’re 19 and you picked that up. That’s terrific.

CALLER: Thank you. Thank you, sir.

RUSH: So you talked about how these buddies of yours when they put their anti-Americanism on display, it irks you?

CALLER: Well, one of them, one of these friends is the child of Indian immigrants, and he talks about revolution. He’s a self-proclaimed Marxist, and I just think if his parents remained in India where they’re from, he would have had a much worse life. He attends a college, a first-rate college. He attends Pomona University, as first rate as that can be called. But, I mean, he wouldn’t have had the opportunities that he has here, and yet he’s just an ingrate.

RUSH: Yeah. That illustrates another characteristic that was… I don’t know that it was exclusively tied to the 1980s because I think it’s timeless in many ways, but there are people who felt guilty. Your buddy was just feeling guilty, became a Marxist. He was guilty. He knew who you said was true. Had he stayed in India, he would have been a prisoner of the caste system — and wherever he was born is wherever he would have ended up. So he gets out of that, comes to the United States, prospers and so forth, and is obsessed with all the people who haven’t.

Therefore, the United States, in his mind, is the instrument of unfairness. If he had to come here to succeed, it must be that the United States has an unfair head up on everybody. So there’s a lot of leftists that are overwhelmed with guilt at their prosperity or success. Even The Oprah has spoken of this. I’ll never forget The Oprah one time was being asked about her journey to success and what it felt like, and she said something that was fascinating to me. She said she was never afraid of success.

Now, I knew what she meant. I don’t think a lot of people did. A lot of people who don’t think they are successful, cannot imagine being afraid of it. They’re seeking it. What in the world is there to be afraid of? But then what happens to a lot of people when they do become, in their own minds — and maybe in the minds of others. If there is a collective sense that somebody has attained success, has become successful, however it’s defined, some people feel immediately guilty about it because other people haven’t pulled it off.

Some become scared to death that it’s not gonna remain so, that they’re gonna lose it — and those are people you really need to feel for. They give it away! They end up sabotaging themselves out of guilt and out of fear that the success they’ve had isn’t gonna last. In some cases, the wealth they’ve acquired isn’t gonna last. There’s an increased fear that they’re gonna lose it, somebody’s gonna steal it, the government’s gonna raise taxes and take it away from ’em. Oprah said, “I wasn’t afraid of any aspect of success,” and that’s a crucial element of ongoing success.

And it doesn’t take much.

You’ve got the American left beating up on successful people. You have the American left beating up on people who want to be successful. That takes a toll after some people hear it. Some people immediately feel guilty, especially if they think they didn’t really have to work hard for it. They’re really susceptible to being talked down, talked out of their accomplishments and their achievements, because it’s not… “You know, it really isn’t genuine. You really didn’t do it on your own. Besides, it’s not fair because not everybody has done it.”

This kind of pressure is constantly applied to people, especially in peer groups. Let me take a brief break. Again, Gabe, thank you. I’m glad you’re out there, man.