RUSH: I have been dreading this today, like I dread every such day, but I’m looking at media and I get the impression that there are some that are actually looking forward to this or having — I don’t want to say — fun with it, but I get the impression that there are a lot of people really energized by this. And that, of course, is because they think it’s going to help them mobilize their political agenda. And I’m just sick of it.

I have to tell you, I’m just sick of it. I’m sick every time one of these happens. I mean, the first time of any note was, you know, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing. I wake up, Bill Clinton is blaming me. And from that point on and probably prior to that, from that point on, every time one of these things happens, what do we do? We hear the initial report and we’re just devastated. We hate it. We hate that this is happening to our country.

Then the next thing that happens is we have to hear that we, because of what we believe, because of our religious values, our political values, that we’re responsible for it. So that begins a cycle of people either cross-blaming or defending themselves. And it’s just a never-ending cycle that does not change. And, as such, we never even get close to the root of this, we never get close to it.

We never get close to explaining it, to understanding it. It just is a repeating cycle here that, at the end of it, there’s just ongoing heartbreak added to frustration. The first thing that happens, you know Trump’s gonna get blamed, and Trump gets blamed. I’m convinced that if they could, they would stop Trump’s rallies.

If you read certain tweets and certain messages today, the left is portraying Trump’s rallies as white supremacist rallies where these kinds of shooters are getting this idea to go ahead and do it, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth! There is no white supremacy movement here that is in any way representative of even a tiny minority of the American people. And yet the media, the Democrats try to portray white supremacy as the base of the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s support.

What are you supposed to do with this? Well, you have to refute it, because they’re out there trying to make the case and they’re trying to make the case Trump’s rallies — that’s gonna be coming up. You watch, somebody’s gonna suggest Trump’s rallies not be allowed to happen now because that’s where all this is coming from. Never mind the fact that if you look at the manifesto of the shooter in Dayton you find a total deranged leftist progressive. But I don’t even want to use that.

It’s gotten very frustrating to have to join the pattern on all this. But it’s almost a must. It’s almost a must because of the oppressive — I’ll give you an example. I don’t want to play the sound bite yet. I’m not there yet. But yesterday Mick Mulvaney was on Meet the Press with F. Chuck Todd. I’m just looking for the number here on the roster because I just want to read his question to you.

Here’s Chuck Todd’s question to Mick Mulvaney. “We’ve heard Beto O’Rourke say that the president’s rhetoric is fueling more hate in this country, the president has used, as you well know, words like ‘invasion’ to talk about illegal immigrants. Isn’t this kind of rhetoric and especially in light of what we’ve just seen, isn’t it dangerous?”

So the assumption is that Trump is responsible for this, and Mulvaney, the chief of staff, is there having to refute it, which he did greatly. He did exceedingly well. But it’s just the presumption here that everybody starts, these people like it. They like this for the opportunity it gives them to take another slash and dash at Donald Trump.

And I think that’s what really irritates me more than anything about this is that some people seem to look at this as a political opportunity and are using it for everything they’ve got. Then we have these massive numbers of Democrats demanding that Congress be called back to pass something? It almost reaches an hysteria.

So there we have once again another Democrat tenet, that government must do something, that government is the only institute that can do anything about it, we’ve got to have legislation, we’ve got to have members of Congress come back. There is nothing these people can do that will fix this. There isn’t anything inacting legislation is gonna do. There isn’t any gun control legislation that’s gonna address this.

We have a systemic cultural problem, and not a single piece of legislation will make a damn bit of difference in this. And everybody involved in it knows it. It’s just that the left will do anything, will take the opportunity, the occasion of anything to advance their political agenda, which requires as, point number one, the constant expansion and growth of government.

Is there anything we’ve learned from the past few days of mass shootings? Well, we’ve learned that dangerously unstable, mentally ill people act dangerously, mentally ill-like and unstable. So if we know that we have some dangerously unstable, mentally ill people, if we know this, what is being done at the local level to identify them and stop them?

After the school shooting in Florida we had this. After the movie shooting, it’s the same cycle. It just never ends with nobody even seeming seriously interested in getting to the bottom of this. Like is there a common theme? In all of these shootings, can you find a common theme?

Well, you can’t find a common political theme because the shooters are all over the place — and have you noticed, by the way, that more and more of these shooters have manifestos? Do you know who the first mass murderer was to have a manifesto? (interruption) Well, outside… (interruption) Well, yeah. I’m not talking about Hitler and Stalin, these guys. (interruption) Yeah, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. He had a manifesto. The New York Times published the thing.

So these people that have serious derangement problems have these manifestos. The media prints them. The media’s eager to get their hands on them. But their manifestos are all over the political board. There’s not a common ideological foundation to all of these people. They’re all over the board. And it isn’t guns. I don’t need to repeat the trope here. Trump did it today in his remarks. He said, “The guy pulls the trigger, not the gun. The gun doesn’t shoot itself,” which is perfectly logical, it’s unassailable. And yet Trump is under assault for not doing more to control guns and…

The gun show loophole? What in the world are we talking about? All this talk of closing the gun show loophole? It’s nothing more than the left seeking again to advance their putrid ideology on the backs of a bunch of just — unfortunately — dead people. I just hate it, folks! I have to… I hate it! I hate when these people try this, and they do it at every turn. Trump blamed video games, the internet, social media. I think there’s something to the internet angle of this, but not video games and the like.

I addressed it a little bit last week. When we were talking about Russia collusion and the absence of it, I said, “The real collusion that worries me is Google. Google and Facebook.” When the people that run… Let me put it this way: When the people that run Google and Facebook have the power to manipulate and motivate voters more than elected leaders can do, then we have a problem (and we’re getting there) because that means elected leaders are gonna become subservient to the people that run Google and Facebook.

If Google and Facebook have a better opportunity and are better at mobilizing people, turning them into action — and this (shootings) are action. If these social media titans have the ability to manipulate and to motivate… And Google is out saying that they are going to do everything they can to see to it that Trump loses in 2020.  Google is in bed with the ChiComs.  The ChiComs are telling Google what they can and can’t do in their search results, and Google is saying, “Yes, sir.  Yes, sir.  What else do you want us to do?”

In a protracted battle against the U.S. and the ChiComs, Google has sided with the ChiComs.  But the real point is that when social media people and leaders — CEOs, executives — end up having more perceived power than elected officials in our representative republic, then we have a problem, because that means elected officials are gonna be subordinate, ’cause everybody reacts and responds to power.  I’m gonna develop this more as the program unfolds.  I’m just setting the table here now with some organized, random thoughts.

But as I examine these shootings in the aftermath and as I learn about the people that do them, there’s one thing that does strike me that there may be in common here, and it goes back to a fear that I have often expressed at the outset of the growth of social media. And that expressed fear was the majority of a population easily accepting that their lives are miserable because of what they’re reading about how other lives are lived.  This began as a quest for fame, a quest for likes, a quest for retweets — any example of massive feedback — so that you can become a star, so that you can become famous.

And the quest for fame that I saw was one of the first things that raised red flags for me because I have achieved fame, and it’s not what people think that it is, especially people that have had no experience with it and have no understanding of it.  It isn’t what Entertainment Tonight makes it look like.  It isn’t what all of these entertainment-oriented podcasts, TV shows and the like make fame look like.  It’s not the red carpet life.  But despite even that, if all these people are on social media and everybody is tweeting and Instagramming and Facebooking how exciting their lives are — and they’re lying about it.

Other people are reading about it. Their lives aren’t nearly as exciting. So they get feelings of… Some of them. Not everybody. But some get feelings of inferiority, of irrelevance. They’re living meaningless lives while it seems everybody else is having a blast and having important things happen to them. When in fact, everybody’s lying about their lives on social media, or practically everybody.  And what this has… My concern was that the quest for all of these surface achievements like the pursuit and acquisition of fame — and, believe me, we have it now.

We have people that nobody knows who think that they are nationally famous ’cause they’ve got a YouTube show with X-number of followers.  But when they leave and go outside the universe of YouTube, nobody knows who they are, and they encounter that, and that’s a shock.  They walk out thinking everybody’s gonna know who they are because YouTube’s made ’em a star, and nobody knows who they are.  There’s that, and then there’s the people that never even acquire it but pursue it.

I think all this ultimately leads to the one thing that some of these shooters — that these shooters — may have in common (it’s still an open question) and that is isolation.  If you add in the fact that there are busted-up families, redefinition of what a family is, ongoing arguments over what’s normal and what isn’t normal, and then you throw in the daily absorption on social media of how much fun everybody else is having and how much travel everybody else is doing, how many exciting things and places other people are doing, measured against your own boring, nonconsequential, inconsequential life, what are you gonna end up feeling?

Isolated.

You’re gonna start feeling sorry for yourself.

You may feel angry.

Especially if you have an underlying mental illness to begin with.  Now, granted, I’m not talking about everybody.  But to a certain extent this does affect people.  It’s like, in a way, never getting out of high school and having the symptoms of high school be ongoing and deepen as life goes on.  Rather than leaving high school behind and all of the pain — the growing pains of high school — they stay with you and they intensify.  It leads to social isolation, and then they feel like there’s no place for them.  Social, societal rejection.

You used to be able to turn to religion to find meaning and purpose, but that’s kind of been blown to smithereens now as people have mocked and made fun of that.  So the breakdown of the family and the redefinition of what is a family and the idea that, “Well, you don’t really need a mom and a dad.  That’s old-fashioned.  That’s quaint.  We move on.” I think there are certain things human beings need that thousands of years of societal evolution have accommodated. And in the last number of years, many of those foundational things have been blown up, distorted or destroyed.

I think it’s led to a lot of people feeling unanchored, desiring to get noticed, to be noticed, desiring to be somebody and then noticing how it happens. How is it done? How do you get famous? How do you get noticed? How do you get everybody talking about you?  And in none of this that I’m talking about is there a dominant political ideology.  Now, we could enter that into this equation, and it could be a factor that adds on to some of these other things to make it even worse.

But if all of this that I’ve described is compounded by mental illness and then drugs, and nobody knowing or responding to what the shrinks all say are desperate cries for help, then eventually they’re gonna go out and get the attention they want. They’re gonna go out and do something that gets them noticed. And they know that when that happens, there’s gonna be days and days of coverage of it — and they are gonna be the focus, which is what they’ve always wanted since they first logged into Facebook or Twitter or wherever.

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RUSH: I think we’ve got cultural rot, folks.  We’ve lost social moorings.  There aren’t any guardrails — or they are very, very wide now, allowing for a wide berth on the highway of right and wrong.  I still believe and I have believed for a long time that you just cannot have abortion — the killing of over a million babies a year — and have that not have some impact on the popular perception of the sanctity of life.  I don’t know to what degree it plays a role, but it has to play, in my estimation, a significant role.  And what about social media influence?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Still have lots to see here, folks.  I have barely scratched the surface.  I’ve got all kinds audio sound bites.  I had some great stuff today ready to go before the two shootings happened. So we’ll have to probably broom those for a while.  Maybe later today, certainly later in this week.  But this is just… You know, I don’t want to mislead anyone. This just depresses me, I can’t tell you how much, that this happens in our country. And that the same aftermath, the same predictable political aftermath happens. We have so politicized everything here to our detriment.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I know how you feel, folks.  Look, I felt the same way you do.  You hear about these shootings, and you dread the next day.  You’re heartbroken that it happened.  You wish you had an answer why.  You wish you could stop it.  You wish you could have known these people before they pulled the trigger so you could have talked some sense into ’em.  And you really don’t want to watch the media cover it, because you know what’s gonna happen.  You are gonna get blamed.

People you support are going to get blamed, and you’re fed up with it.  You get fed up with the predictability of it. The Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party spent the whole weekend fundraising, criticizing, blaming.  You don’t even want to have to play the game, but you have to, because you’re under assault.  You get up every day minding your own business.  You’ve got to defend.  The Democrats… I mean, it looks like they are happy when these things happen, and that grates on me.  The media looks like they’re happy, ’cause they think this finally is gonna beat Trump.

“Finally, something’s happened that’s gonna beat Trump!”

So they get all revved up about it. They blame Trump. They blame white people.  They overlook the results of their own words, their own behavior, their own policies.  They overlook a very important fact that these shooters — these kids — have all been indoctrinated by public schools they run!  These kids, these young men have been told what?  That they’re scourging of the planet. They are white men!  They’re white men.  What are they?  They are serial abusers.  Many of them are rapists.  They engage in white supremacy.

They are availing themselves of white privilege.  They are routinely shamed and criticized because they’re white and because they are males.  They then are isolated by technology.  They are presented the illusion of having social interactions, but they never meet anybody they’re talking to — and half the people they’re talking to (if not more) are lying to them about how fun-filled and exciting their own lives are, when it’s really a convention of the miserable.  Their parents have been removed as influencers.

They’ve been told their parents are reprobates. Their parents have destroyed the planet. Their parents are careless. Their parents are this or that.  They’re scared to death over global warming, scared to death over climate change.  There may not even be a reason to live, because there isn’t gonna be a planet in 20 to 30 years.  And then we all act surprised they act like this? And then we blame guns?  Oh, yeah! We blame guns, and then we blame Trump — and, frankly, folks, I am over it!

It does not mean I’m going to shirk my responsibilities of dealing with it, but I am over it.  These people have no idea the poison that they are inflicting in this society with their own hatred — and, man, if you ask me, they own it.  Their daily agenda is the implementation of hatred or the implementation of policy that results from hatred.  These people have — all of them — an uncontrollable, poisoned rage because they lost the 2016 election and have been unable to reverse it and do anything about it.

But they own the school system where these kids are being, quote-unquote, “educated,” and you know I am right when I tell you what boys are being made to think of themselves. “White boys.” They are the problem.  Half of ’em are not even going to college anymore. Just because they’re male, just because they’re white, they’re somehow are privileged? (Snort!) Privileged?  They’ve got nothing.  Then add to that their natural state is that of a predator.  Women are not safe around them.

Stories are written about how they are rapists! And when the stories are proved false and made up, the excuse is, “Well, it may not be true here, but we know it is true anyway.  We know this is who men have become.”  Thank you, feminazis.  So when they act out this way, everybody acts shocked and stunned.  “Oh, my God.  What’s gone on!” It really probably isn’t hard to understand.