RUSH: This is from the New York Times. Boy, the New York Times is working overtime this weekend. Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, I, your beloved host, am the reason the El Paso shooting happened? The New York Times has gotten into the montage business. Grab audio sound bite number 1. The New York Times has finally gotten into the montage business, and this is part of a front-page news story on the New York Times website today.

TUCKER CARLSON: (music) We’re being invaded.

SEAN HANNITY: (background noise) The invasion of illegal immigrants.

BORIS EPSHTEYN: The fact of the matter is that this is an attempted invasion of our country.

RUSH ARCHIVE: We have all of these minors from Central America flooding the border.

CARLSON: Multiculturalism isn’t real. This is really destroying one culture and replacing it with a new, a foreign culture.

ART DEL CUETO: This is not migrants coming in to the country. This is nothing short of an invasion.

LAURA INGRAHAM: Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens.

TODD STARNES: This is a government sanctioned invasion of our country.

RUSH ARCHIVE: This is going to encourage a new flood of illegal immigrants to try their luck using the refugee excuse.

RUSH: That montage, ladies and gentlemen, accompanies a story on the New York Times website titled, “How the El Paso Killer Echoed the Incendiary Words of Conservative Media Stars.” And the voices that you heard on the montage were Chatsworth Osborne Jr., Sean Hannity, Boris Epshteyn of Sinclair Media.

You heard me on there twice, so I must be really guilty. Heard me on there twice. Tucson border patrol agent Art Del Cueto. A border patrol agent has been lumped into this media star conspiracy. And then Laura Ingraham of The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News Channel and Todd Starnes of Fox News. Those are the voices you heard in the montage.

And it’s predictable and classic. And remember, this is not something new to me. Bill Clinton blamed me for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. And this was before Fox News. I had just concluded my four-year television show and the websites were just beginning to spring up and conservative talk radio was exploding all across the fruited plain.

Bill Clinton went out and made a speech somewhere. I think it was in Minnesota. It doesn’t matter where. (I don’t need the sound bite, Cookie. Please, I don’t need it. I’ve got more than I can do.) Clinton said that the “angry voices on the” airwaves, “angry voices on the right” caused it. There was only one person he could have been talking about, because I was living rent free in both Clintons’ heads at the time. So we pushed back and pushed back and we demanded that the White House identify and clarify who they were talking about.

Back then… You’ll have a trouble believing this. But back then, people like Chris Matthews were encouraging me. “You can’t let the president of the United States say that about you! That’s the end of your career if he gets away with that. You can’t let that stand. You gotta fight back. You can’t allow that to happen.” It was the same thing when Clinton tried to call me a racist two years earlier at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He said the only reason that I had defended Janet Reno was ’cause she was being attacked by a black guy.

You should have heard the room. The room had the reaction, “Oooh, ahhh,” and went silent, and I had a bunch of people in that room — people who today are in the left-wing, fringe media — come up and say, “You can’t allow that! You cannot let the president of the United States call you racist.” We pushed back in both instances. On the Oklahoma City bombing thing, the White House did not issue an apology. They issued a “clarification” and said they were not talking about talk radio. They were talking about “the Michigan militia short-wave radio network,” which nobody bought. Nobody believed.

So this is not new territory. Now, these are the same people who want to blame us in conservative media for inspiring the shooter in El Paso. They are the same people who totally obliterate the idea that anything in movies or the lyrics of music or video games could be responsible for inciting such behavior by people. “Oh, come on,” they say. “Don’t be serious. It’s just entertainment! You can’t blame this on the movies,” because the movies were a bunch of liberals. “You can’t blame it or rock or rap lyrics. You can’t blame it on video games.”

To this day, they still claim you can’t do that. But when it comes to conservative media, they can do it — and it’s because of the use of the word “invasion.” They even say that it is people like me who are providing the verbiage for President Trump to use, that if it weren’t for people in conservative media like me, that Trump wouldn’t be as radical as he is. Now, they have been bugged and bothered by the success of alternative media since it began. But this is such a blatantly, flailing attempt — a blatant, flailing effort.

These people incite the same kind of violence in their own coverage. If we’re guilty of it, then they are in spades. Of course, they never consider that they could have a role in this. I find it fascinating that we now have… This is the New York Times story: “Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned.” No! The Russian conspiracy hoax, the Russian collusion hoax — the “fact” that Trump was a traitor, the “fact” that Trump didn’t really win in 2016 — that has “poisoned our information system.”

That has tarnished the integrity of our electoral system.

That has created all kinds of rifts and strife within our culture. It is the media that’s dividing people in this country, and we are not on the offense here at all. We are simply defending ourselves and our culture and whatever when others are on the move and on the attack. But we went back. They’re worried about me because I called this invasion a flood. Not only did I use the “invasion” word, I used the word “flood.” So we went back to December 15, 2015. Senator Barack Obama held a joint press conference with Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida at the time, about proposed immigration reform legislation.

Listen…

OBAMA: We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked. We need a guest-worker program to replace the flood of illegals. People will point to the last amnesty program that existed —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait! Hold it just a second! What did I hear him say? He said, “We need a guest-worker program to replace of flood of illegals.” You know, every Democrat used to talk about this the same way we talk about it today. Obama, Chuck Schumer, even Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have both spoken of illegal immigration as something that cannot be tolerated. It is they who have done the gigantic transformation moving far left. Here. Play the sound bite again. It’s worth it from the top. Senator Obama in 2005, just 14 years ago now.

OBAMA: We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked. We need a guest-worker program to replace the flood of illegals.

RUSH: Well!

OBAMA: People will point to the last amnesty program that existed and they’ll indicate it did no good. Uh, it did not work. All it did, uh, was give some people amnesty and then you had new flood of immigrants coming in. I recognize those frustrations.

RUSH: Okay, New York Times. Why didn’t you put him in your montage? I mean, this is long ago. This is 14 years ago. The man who would become the first African-American president was talking about the “flood of illegals” coming in to the country and was advocating that we need to do something to stop it.

Now, to show you the New York Times is the leader in Drive-By news — meaning the New York Times does something and everybody else emulates it — here’s F. Chuck Todd opening Meet the Press yesterday.

TODD: The spokesman for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said he is not yet endorsed any legislation. That’s after pushback for these comments Thursday.

MCCONNELL: But what we can’t do is fail to pass something, you know, by just locking up and failing to pass. That’s acceptable.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The only thing a new law would do would drive a wedge between Trump and his voters and the NRA.

TODD: Red flag laws — which would identify extreme risk individuals and empower family and law enforcement to intervene to temporarily remove their guns — have broad public support. And 89% of Americans, including 84% of Republicans, support background checks at gun shows or other private sales.

RUSH: Even in the show open of Meet the Press, they use an audio sound bite of me, “The only thing a new law would do would drive a wedge between Trump and his voters and the NRA.” Probably true. I don’t think there is a law that can be enacted that’s gonna change any of this. But there are a lot of people who will be made to feel better if a new law is passed, and so that’s why it’s gonna happen. It is gonna happen. There’s gonna be a background check law.

There’s gonna be a red flag law. There’s going to be something passed, folks, because everybody wants to feel better by thinking that they’ve done something. But this is window dressing. It isn’t gonna have one iota’s bit of impact on this because it’s not why this is happening. It isn’t happening because of conservative media. It isn’t happening because of all of these things the left wants to blame.

Let me take a break… (interruption) No, we’re not through with the Epstein stuff. I just thought I would artfully combine the two things — actually, combine three things — the Russia hoax, the Russia collusion, Epstein. Let me just take a poll. How many of you in there…? Show of hands. Is Epstein dead? (interruption) Okay. Three people in there think that Epstein has assumed room temperature. Okay.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So these emails. “Rush, you know, it’s a really serious thing to be accused of being responsible for this, and you seem to be laughing it off.” Folks, like I said, the first time this happened was in 1995. Actually, before that, whenever the White House Correspondents’ dinner was. It might have been ’93 or ’94 — whenever the Waco invasion was, and then the Oklahoma City bombing. And it’s something that happens not frequently, but often.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I appreciate the emails that you have sent that I caught during the first breaks here in the program about not taking this thing in the New York Times today apparently seriously enough.

You know, when I know that there isn’t any truth to it, then that’s the primary reason I’m able to laugh at it. And I know the motivation behind it. Folks, they cannot defeat us on ideas or debates of ideas, in the arena of ideas.

It’s been a constant attempt by the left since I started this program to discredit me, to impugn me. And their purpose has been to make sure I don’t acquire an even larger audience. They are trying to poison the minds of people who don’t listen into never trying the program. That’s the objective of it, and that’s always been the objective.

And if they could get away with destroying all of us, I mean, they clearly would. But every effort that they have launched here has been successfully repelled and beaten back, both in terms of you, the audience, and the business side of the EIB Network. I just don’t have it in me to righteously indignant and “how dare they” because I think this is a flailing attempt, I think it’s a last-gasp attempt.

I think these people are so intellectually vacant and vapid that I don’t even want to seriously credit them by having to seriously defend or react to this outrageous allegation. Read the guy’s manifesto. This guy that shot up in El Paso was by no means a fan of conservative media.

But the thing about this that really needs to be said is that there’s a common component to every bit of liberal criticism of this program, and it’s been this way since day one. It is that you are a mind-numbed bunch of robots, that you are incapable of thinking anything on your own. This is the first way they sought to attack this program. I have some kind of Svengali effect on people and I am able to make them think and do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Until I came along, there was no problem with conservatism in America. ‘Til I came along, it was nothing but a little fringe minority group of people over there and all they did was sit around and complain, but they didn’t have any power. And then this guy Limbaugh comes along and starts building this army of mind-numbed robots. And this is simply an extension of that.

Now we have an obviously deranged lunatic who is just part of the crowd that has been influenced, but only influenced, by conservative media. This guy apparently, according to the New York Times, was immune to being influenced by anybody else, he was incapable of making up his own mind or coming to his own deranged conclusions on his own. And this has been the baseline or foundational attack on me and all of conservative media since it began.

It’s actually an attack on all of you. That you’re dumb, uninformed hicks who don’t know anything and don’t think anything every day until you get marching orders after listening to this program or as a result of listening. This has always been absurd. And I think it’s always been a very weak and very, very telling admission on their part, and that is they hold average people in contempt. Average people are not smart enough to think on their own. They’re not smart enough to live life the right way. They’re not smart enough to make the right decisions, even with their own money.

So I don’t get worked up by it anymore because it’s been a feature of 30 years. But I’ll tell you this. By righteously opposing it and sitting here pounding my fists on the table and acting out is not gonna stop it, either. I just mock it. I just try to make fun of it. And then I welcome other people to the montage. Now they’re adding — you know, it used to just be me. Now they’re throwing a bunch of other people into it because conservative media has expanded and become so big that now their efforts to destroy conservative media go beyond me.

And it just indicates — well, it indicates a lot. It indicates their fear. It tells us much more about them than it does me or any of the other people in their montage. But you know the real irony here is that their criticism is actually what they are trying to accomplish! They are trying to bend and shape public opinion. They are trying to manipulate human behavior. They are trying to do everything they accuse us of doing.

So in that vein, let me ask you a question. After calling Donald Trump a white supremacist, where do the Democrats go from there? It used to be that Trump was a racist, his supporters are racist. That’s lost its impact, because everybody became a racist, and it was said every day. So then came white privilege, and then white nationalism and now white supremacy. What’s next?

You know, as I mentioned on Friday, you know, it was the fifth anniversary of Ferguson. It was the fifth anniversary of the Michael Brown episode. Guess what’s in the news today? Kamala Harris — and I forget the other person — are running around repeating the lie that we just had the anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder. And the Drive-By Media is once again reporting the Michael Brown murder.

Even though it was the Obama DOJ with all kinds of inquests and grand juries and everything which confirmed it was not murder. It was cop self-defense. But that doesn’t matter. They’re out lying through their teeth again today to once again move this idea that everybody that opposes Democrats is a white supremacist. Where do they go from this?

I think all of this is beginning to backfire on them. I think that’s why they’re doubling down. This stuff is not working! It’s not convincing people. And that’s why they have to go even more outrageous and extreme seemingly every week. There are stories, very telling stories. You know, the advertisers or the donors to Donald Trump that Joaquin Castro outed in that newspaper ad in San Antonio, in El Paso, you know what’s happened? And this is also true of the Trump fundraisers that were held over the weekend in Long Island, the Hamptons.

Trump donors are not going away. Trump donors are not abandoning Trump. They are going underground. They are continuing to fundraise, and they are continuing to donate. They’re going underground. Meaning, they are attempting to do what they’re doing invisibly.

It isn’t working! They’re not driving people away from Trump, despite their efforts to make it look like that is happening. A lot of people are doubling down on this. The Democrats do not have a single candidate that anybody has rallied around. The leading candidate on the Democrat side cannot stop stepping in verbal gaffes left and right, continues to make them. It is obvious he could not last in one debate on stage with Trump, Biden couldn’t. I don’t think any of the others could, either.

I don’t think the Democrats, for all this talk about how tough they are, all this talk about how angry they are and loaded for bear, I don’t think they have anybody right now that can hold their own with Trump on a debate stage.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So the polls are saying the Democrats are losing voters with their open-borders, free-everything policy. They really are, folks. It’s backfiring on them. So magically I and other conservative media titans… Well, I’m the titan; they’re the stars. We become villains in the border disaster for the Democrats. It’s how this works.