RUSH: Let me ask a question. Just to ponder a thought. What’s normal? How do we define normal? I mean, you might go to the dictionary and you might look up the word and find a definition for it. But how do you define it? What is normal? And how did normal come to be?

To me, this is a question at the root of our cultural and societal desecration, degradation, corruption, what have you. For example, is it normal what we in say 1960, 1980, any time in the past or today — well, not today. That’s the point. Is normal the result of centuries of human behavior, societal evolution, in free societies? Is what’s normal defined by how a majority of human beings have chosen to organize themselves for the best and betterment of all?

For example, who decided that marriage was between a man and woman? Well, the Bible of course, religion, descends from there, and marriages, many of them take place in the eyes of God. But aside from that, it wasn’t just because it was decreed. It worked. Years and years, decades, centuries and centuries marriage was a specific thing.

Was that because people were discriminating? Was it because people were bigoted? Was it because people were mean? Was it because people were exclusionary? Was it because people wanted to humiliate and embarrass others? I contend it’s none of that. It’s just the best way for men and women to live together who especially are going to have kids — you know, the old nuclear family thing.

Now, I’m not trying to erase the biblical and religious foundation of this thing, of this stuff. But you have to understand there are a lot of people that believe in marriage that are not Christian, they don’t have a Judeo-Christian view of things, so I’m trying to expand it just beyond that. My point is that whatever we have decided or defined as normal has not been because some powerful government decreed that it was or some legislative body or court decreed that it was, but rather human behavior determined what’s normal.

And I don’t mean to focus on marriage, but marriage is one of the things now where it’s no longer what it used to be. It’s been blown to smithereens in some people’s view. In other people’s view it’s been expanded, and it’s now not exclusionary, and it’s not discriminatory. But were these previous things discriminatory?

Was the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman, was that designed to discriminate against people who didn’t know whether they were men or women? Or discriminate against people who love people of the same sex? No! Discrimination nothing to do with it. It had to do with that which seemed to make the most sense to everybody because of a time and true, time-honored, tested way of living.

Now, all of those things that used to be considered normal really bothered a lot of people who didn’t think they fit in with it. And so thought it was exclusionary. They thought it was discriminatory. They thought the normal were a bunch of superiorists and intolerant people who didn’t want to let them be normal, and they didn’t like thinking they were abnormal, so they began a quest to have the way they lived and wanted to live to also be declared normal, and this led to an eruption.

Now, nobody put it in these terms. Nobody dared talk about normal and abnormal because that itself implied discrimination, superiority, and so forth. But I’ll tell you that everybody thought about it in those terms. And it’s not just in marriage. It’s in any number of societal arrangements that normal, what was normal for God knows how long has been blown to smithereens now. And now we don’t know what’s normal.

You have to navigate all this on defense every day of your life. You’ve gotta navigate all of these new social structures that have now been infused with angry political motivations and objectives. It’s led the people who have always defined normal a certain way afraid to even say so and in many quays afraid to even live so. And now the things that were always considered abnormal are now celebrated, and the acceptance of the abnormal is now said to be enlightened.

And so I think there are people’s heads spinning all over this country who are trying to fit in, try not to be discriminatory, but they still think that a lot of what’s going on is destructive not based on politics and not based on ideology; based on all of those centuries of human living that ended up devising, evolving mechanisms, institutions whereby people lived and arranged themselves in ways to promote the betterment for everybody.

But obviously there were those left out in those arrangements. And they have now decided “to hell with that.” They have now said that those previous arrangements, these institutions which I believe evolved for better purposes with better instincts, with no discrimination or intimidation intended whatsoever — people getting married decades ago were not doing it smiling that other people couldn’t. It didn’t matter. It’s just that’s the next phase of your life. You met somebody, you fall in love, you get married, you have kids. A lot of people did it because it was rote. It was the next thing to do. It was a pattern.

But it wasn’t done to exclude. It wasn’t done with discrimination in mind. It wasn’t done with mean-spiritedness. But now with the explosion of what used to be normal to accommodate all those things in the past that weren’t, now everybody’s being accused of discriminating or being bigoted in their adherence to these previous institutions. And this has led to a culture war. I’m really giving just the basics here. It’s led to a culture war that we have been waging for 25 or 30 years or maybe longer, and it shows no signs of abating or getting worse. And it’s being exacerbated by many factors.

And as these rapid, massive changes occur, there are some who aren’t able to adapt, who aren’t able to peacefully coexist with it. They end up feeling isolated, they end up feeling rejected, just their heads are spinning. Now, all around them because of social media, they think everybody else is just having a ball, is just having a blast. Hell, people think that anyway without social media.

You add social media to it where a lot of people go on these social sites and lie about what a great time they’re having every day and every night, and it adds up to this one thing I think all these shooters have in common: that’s rejection. Invisibility. They don’t like it. They don’t like being rejected. They don’t like the perception of being rejected, and they certainly don’t like being invisible. But everybody gets rejected. It’s a way of life. Everyone’s rejected, rejected countless times a week. You’re rejected applying for a job.

Remember Woody Allen’s great quote: The only difference in the old days and the days when he had a lot of money was being rejected by a higher class of woman. Everybody gets rejected by somebody, someday, everywhere. Some people develop coping mechanisms, it becomes part of life, you deal with it, you mature, and you move on. Others haven’t.

Then in all of this, let’s bring in the political opportunists who — rather than try to really understand this — just want to come in here and blame every political opponent that they would like to wipe out, and see incidents like this as a mechanism that would allow them to do so.  And so nothing ever, ever gets done.  We talk all around the surface, the edges of this thing, like gun control, gun show loophole, all this meaningful, irrelevant stuff.  Now, social media. What about social media’s influence in all of this?

Well, we are told by the people — the political opportunists — here that it is the words of Donald Trump (or in 1995, my words) or the words of some Republican or conservative that is inspiring these people to go get guns.  “So we need to have control on these words! We need to be able to shut down Donald Trump.  We need to be able to shut down Donald Trump’s rallies.  We need to shut down Fox News. We need to shut down talk radio,” blah, blah. It goes on.  But aren’t the very same people advocating for the censorship of those who say things they don’t like, using the same techniques they decry?

Are these people not lying through their teeth?  You tell me that all of these years of the leftists in this country telling anybody who will listen that there isn’t gonna be a habitable planet in 20 years, 10 years, 15…? You think that doesn’t affect people?  You think that doesn’t scare the hell out of young people, that the planet’s gonna be destroyed, the climate is gonna be destroyed?  These people have been at this for 30 years.  They have been trying to scare people into voting Democrat for I don’t know how long, and it got to such extremes that now these people really do believe that there will not be a habitable planet in, whatever, 12 years, 20, 25, 50, you name it.

I maintain that to somebody who’s really unmoored and not attached and not secure, that can scare the ever-living hell out of them — and I know people who are deathly afraid!  They are young people, and they’re running around scared. They’ve bought into this and they’re scared to death.  Now, what’s the difference?  Why are they leftists allowed to openly scare the bejeezus out of people with one lie after another?  Why is that not considered as incendiary?  Why is it not considered that that could be responsible?

If we’re gonna talk about the words and the phrases and the things that people hear that could be motivating them to go out and mass kill, what about things like that?  Why does the left get total immunity on this?  This is why I keep emphasizing what we conservatives believe. We love everybody.  We want the best for everybody.  We believe in the beauty of human potential in a free society like the United States of America, and the only thing we’re trying to frighten people of is liberalism, which is something that can be voted out.

We’re not trying to scare people to the point that if they don’t do what we want them to do, they’re going to die.  That’s the special province of the left.  Take a look at all the things the left says are gonna kill people.  Every corporation.  Right now, the pharmaceuticals and the health department or the health agency company.  Oh! Big Oil.  Oh, yes!  We gotta shut down coal.  Coal is gonna kill the planet.  I’m telling you, folks, this stuff has to have an impact on the already very fragilely balanced — and in the case of the Dayton shooter, it looks like it did.