RUSH: Now, yesterday the New York Times runs this exhaustive piece claiming they went back through five years of show transcripts (probably aiming for a Pulitzer Prize), claiming that the verbiage uttered by the El Paso shooter is very similar to that which you hear on conservative media, naming me with some other people. By the way, James Taranto is the op-ed page editor of the Wall Street Journal, and he asked me last night if I’d like to write an op-ed reacting to it, because, you know, this all started blaming me for this stuff back in 1995 with Bill Clinton blaming me for the Oklahoma City bombing.

I thanked him for the opportunity. I just don’t have time, really. I’m so swamped right now with things; I just don’t have time to do it well. Writing does not come naturally to me. I have to sit down. You know, I correct my mistakes as I go, and my train of thought gets interrupted, and I just don’t have time to do it. I thought about sending back, “I don’t need an op-ed. I could do it in four words: “The New York Times sucks.” But, I said, “I doubt that they’ll publish this.” Anyway, my point is, here these people at the New York Times don’t listen to this program.

Nobody there listens to this program. Nobody anywhere in the Drive-By Media listens to this program. Yet look at what they say about it and what they say about me. This guy at the New York Times who sounds like a Pajama Boy goes back and says (impression), “Yes, we examined five years of transcripts of the Rush Limbaugh Show and Fox News and so forth and we were stunned by the similarity in rhetoric from the manifesto from El Paso and conservative media.” They don’t listen! They go back and search transcripts and they take things out of context. But it’s because they’ve already got the story written.

They have been trying to blame this program. Remember Brian Ross when there was a movie shooting in Colorado? Brian Ross, the first thing he did after the identity of the shooter was learned was go look at the membership roster for various Tea Party organizations in Colorado to see if the shooter may have been a member — and, lo and behold, there was a name on a Tea Party membership roster on the website that was the same as the shooter’s name. So Brian Ross goes on ABC with breaking news, “It could well be! We’re tracking it down!

“It could well be the shooter is a member of the right-wing Tea Party organization.” So whenever one of these happens, the first thing these people think of is, “How can we link this to our political opponents? How can we politicize this?” So then they start out on their efforts to do so, and the purpose of this is to prevent us from having significant audience growth. They are trying to poison the minds of people that don’t listen so that they never will. They’re trying to do all other kinds of damage. But the point is, they don’t listen!

So then this Fredo thing happens last night and they’re all scratching their heads. “What is this? Where did this come from?” They haven’t the slightest idea. It’s literally hilarious to read the tweets and the comments in the tweets and the retweets and all these people asking, “Where did this come from? How did this get started?” These are the Drive-By Media! And yet I want you to listen to audio sound bite number 10 here. This is a montage of Drive-By Media types in Washington who want to do something — (impression) “Weve gotta do something about gun control! — “but they’re worried that a guy on the radio can stop it and shut it down.

A.B. STODDARD: The NRA, they still have the ability, with the help of Rush Limbaugh, to tell their members that even a low-grade — not universal, not strong — background check is the beginning of a slippery slope; it’s a giant gun grab. You have Rush Limbaugh go on the air and say, “Don’t fall for this trap!”

ROBERT COSTA: Listen to Rush Limbaugh’s show on Friday. He spent hours telling this White House behind the scenes, “Don’t move an inch. We’re not gonna give anything!”

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Is he more afraid of the NRA and Rush Limbaugh, or the majority of the American people?

ADRIENNE ELROD: Rush Limbaugh and his base.

RUSH: I don’t think these people listen. They went back and checked the website or a transcript or some such thing and took it out of context. But it doesn’t matter. Somebody they don’t listen to, somebody that they don’t even take the time to dig into, somebody that they just basically try to caricature, now comes along… They don’t have any idea who’s responsible for this Fredo business. But now all of a sudden, I’m the guy that’s gonna shut down gun control. I’m the guy! I’m the guy who’s gonna make sure Trump doesn’t do it.

I’m the guy that’s gonna make sure the NRA doesn’t let Trump do it. I’m the guy that’s gonna make sure that Lindsey Graham doesn’t talk Trump into doing it. And they don’t even listen! My point here is that I have just become for these people a very convenient… What is the word I’m looking for? I’m the villain. I’m the demon they can pop up and just say, “Rush Limbaugh,” and that’s supposed to trigger their audience into thinking it’s horrible. Now, I’ll tell you this about this whole gun control business. I was talking to some people last night about this.

This overwhelming urge to do something. “We’ve gotta do something!” There isn’t anything legislation can do that’s going to prevent these shootings from happening. We can go through the list of things that is at the root of this, and there are many of them leading to our cultural divide. Look, folks, I’ve got a story in the Stack… In fact, rather than paraphrase it, let me find this because I’m gonna add this to the list of things that are happening in our cultural breakdown. Laurence Tribe tweeting about abortion is one of the most incredible things.

(paraphrased) “Abortion is a tool of white supremacists to maintain a white majority.” That’s the purpose? Abortion is…? We are opposed to abortion! Forty percent of abortions are of African-American babies! We’re opposed to it! Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor, is out claiming we’re pushing this because we want to maintain an advantage? My God, this guy’s teaching law at Harvard or has. “Drag Queen Teaches Toddlers How to ‘Twerk’ at Library Story Time — In case you were under the impression that Drag Queen Story Hour was some sweet event where guys in dresses read cute stories to little children and then everyone goes home, think again.

“Videos keep surfacing of drag queens doing stripteases, rolling around on the floor with children, and now… twerking. Oh yes, twerking. In case you don’t know what twerking is, there’s an entire genre on YouTube that will enlighten you (or sully your soul with degeneracy, to be more accurate). Twerking,” if you don’t know, “is the simulation of sex in dance form.” This is being taught to 4- and 5-year-olds in the library. Libraries are welcoming in drag queens and transgenders to inculcate little kids with this aspect of our culture.

Now, you wonder why people end up screwed up and messed up? There isn’t any amount of gun legislation that is going to correct for implanted cultural errors like this! Then you add other things to it with no father figure at home, no male figure in some kid’s life that he can admire because men are now predators and brutes and barbarians — and have been, according to the feminazis, for a while. But my overall point about this is that an issue like this, you don’t give the Democrats anything. You don’t give them a thing for any reason whatsoever.

You cannot buy their good fortunes. You cannot buy their good intentions. You cannot buy their love. You cannot buy their acceptance. You can’t buy anything. You can’t buy the media loving you. You can’t purchase the media leaving you alone if you’re a conservative. If anybody calls me and asks me my advice on this, I say, “Don’t give the Democrats anything! Do not give an inch.” They’re on the verge of imploding in this campaign. Their own voters in Iowa are telling people like Kamala Harris, “This Medicare plan of yours is crazy!

“Don’t mess with our health care system. I like it. How are you gonna pay for this?” She doesn’t have an answer. Bernie Sanders now is accusing the Washington Post of being involved in a conspiracy to destroy him. The Washington Post is responding that Crazy Bernie’s crazy. There are numerous stories in the stacks today about the increasing number of gaffes that Biden is making, and it’s bad for the party because the field is so big still that there’s no way to punish Biden for this.

There’s no way anybody can gain any ground on Biden, so his gaffes are not hurting him at this point, which is not good. Biden needs to be dispatched and sent away. Biden can’t beat Trump. There is no way under the sun Biden can beat Trump, and if they’re not able to beat Biden in the primaries, they’re finished, they’re sunk — and they will a know it. So I would not give them anything, because there’s nothing the Democrats want that is going to be good for us. There’s nothing the left wants when it comes to guns that’s gonna be good for us.

Even this red flag business. Do you realize Trump tweeted that Fredo Cuomo would now…? If red flags were in place, that Fredo could now be potentially denied the purchase of a gun because of that out-of-control rant. But, folks, all the Democrats want is one opening. If you give them the opportunity by virtue of a new law to take away somebody’s gun, then that’s just the beginning. That’s all they want. Give ’em a red flag law where they can go identify some nutcase and take his gun away from him and they are gonna be throwing a party that night.

Because they know that next year, they can ask for more people’s guns to be given up and then after that more people’s guns — and before long, they’re gonna have every gun from every law-abiding citizen taken away from ’em. That’s what they want. Do not give the Democrats a thing on this. There’s nothing to be gained by giving the Democrats a thing on anything to do with gun control or guns, period, because of what we know their ultimate objective is. Their ultimate objective is to erase the Second Amendment, and there’s no compromise with that.

None.

Zip, zero, nada.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m gonna replay audio sound bite number 10. I was reading a transcript here, number 10, and I saw something that zoomed by me when I heard it. So I want to point it out to you.

The New York Times is out there claiming that I and other conservative media inspired the El Paso shooter. Frankly, folks, it’s tiresome. I, for 30 years, have been dealing with this character assassination and so forth. One thing I’ve learned is that to take it seriously, go point by point refutation is almost to acknowledge that they have a point.

So I don’t even want to acknowledge it. It’s just absurd. It’s intellectually lazy. It’s vapid. It’s nothing more than media partisanship. It’s stupid! It is absolutely lazy. And all it is is an attempt to politicize a tragedy because these people don’t have the mechanism or the means to win in a debate in the arena of ideas, so all they can do is try to slander and libel and damage the credibility of people they consider to be threats. I am such a person.

I can’t think of a word other than those I’ve already used to describe how really lazy, just intellectually lazy, that these people think they are journalists. Exact opposite. Rigorous journalists digging for the facts, and all they are is simply repeating a bunch of policy statements faxed to them under the guise of news.

But one of the things that they said they found is that I used the word “flood,” that these illegals are “flooding” and there is an invasion, and that this is what the El Paso shooter used. You can read this guy’s manifesto. You can clearly find that this guy was a devoted leftist.

But, anyway, I want to give you an example of how the media even pointing this out, this isn’t gonna change a thing. This is Obama December 15th, 2005, Senator Barack Obama, joint press conference, Senator Mel Martinez, Florida, Republican, they were talking about immigration reform legislation then.

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: That’s enough. Here’s Obama using the word “flood.” Here’s Obama stating — and he’s not alone. Every Democrat before Trump became president at one time or another spoke of illegal immigration the way we consistently do. They used to speak that way too when it was politically opportunistic for them to do so. Now they have abandoned that. You can’t even count on these people to be serious in the things they say because everything is political to them.

Now, the sound bite that I just noticed something here, this is the media montage, even though these people have no idea where the Fredo nickname began, i.e., right here, they claim that I, El Rushbo, single-handedly can stop any gun control legislation because of my power over Trump and the Republicans in Washington.

A.B. STODDARD: The NRA, they still have the ability, with the help of Rush Limbaugh, to tell their members that even a low-grade — not universal, not strong — background check is the beginning of a slippery slope; it’s a giant gun grab. You have Rush Limbaugh go on the air and say, “Don’t fall for this trap!”

ROBERT COSTA: Listen to Rush Limbaugh’s show on Friday. He spent hours telling this White House behind the scenes, “Don’t move an inch. We’re not gonna give anything!”

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Is he more afraid of the NRA and Rush Limbaugh, or the majority of the American people?

ADRIENNE ELROD: Rush Limbaugh and his base.

RUSH: All right, now, what I want to focus on here is Robert Costa — he’s in the middle of this bite — used to be a writer at National Review. Then the Washington Post said, you know what? This guy may be one of us. So he went to work for the Washington Post, Robert Costa. He’s the guy who said, “Listen to Rush Limbaugh’s show on Friday. He spent hours telling this White House behind the scenes, ‘Don’t move an inch. We’re not gonna give anything!'”

RUSH: I’m on 620 radio stations blanketing 300 million Americans. What in the world about this show is behind the scenes? Hmm? What the hell does that even mean? “Rush Limbaugh telling this White House behind the scenes, ‘Don’t move -‘” I think it was very public what happened on this show Friday as every show is.

But you see, this is how they make it sound sinister. Rush Limbaugh behind the scenes telling this White House — behind the scenes? The one thing that they can’t come to grips with, this show is out front, up front, and loud. Not hidden or behind anything.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I keep going back to this montage that Cookie put together, the Drive-By Media worried that I somehow will stop Washington from doing something on guns. “We’ve gotta do something.” This overwhelming need to do something. And I understand it, folks, I really do. These are tragedies that happen, and they think there’s gotta be a way to stop this, there’s gotta be a way to prevent this. And somebody in power needs to do something.

So what happens? Politicians hear this, and they come up with something to do that will not make one iota’s worth of difference. But they’ll be able to say they did something. And then everybody will be happy. “Okay. We’ve done something.” When not a thing will have been done about it because we’re not even serious about finding out why.

One of these events happens, and immediately, because of the demands of the left, we have to get drawn into a subject of guns. And when you say something sensible, something that is irrefutable, “Guns don’t kill people. People do,” they mock you and laugh at you and claim that you’re not serious, that you’re just uttering a cliche.

It’s kind of like, “Abstinence works every time it’s tried” when it comes to preventing pregnancy. It hasn’t failed yet. Abstinence works every time. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t do it. But to say that is simplistic, and it’s not realistic, and it’s cliche.

So we can’t even be semiserious when talking about guns. We have to do something. We’ve got to do something. And it overcomes everybody. It overcomes Republican presidents, it overcomes Republican members of Congress, “We gotta do something.” We gotta show the American people that we’re doing something. And whatever the something is, we gotta do it.

Now, the left has a specific objective when you start talking about doing things. We’ve got background checks out the wazoo. This montage that I’ve been playing shows that the Drive-By Media doesn’t seem to know that we already have very stringent universal background checks for guns. And practically all of the recent shooters have passed them.

And I can give you even greater examples. The kid that shot up the school in Parkland, Florida, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school, this kid was identified however many number of times as a potential threat. If we’d had a Red Flag law they could have gotten the guy off the street, but we already had something like Red Flag laws. We had ways to apprehend the kid and put him behind bars. There were laws on the books.

You know why we didn’t? Dare I remind you. Barack Obama. There was a guy from Chicago named Robert Runcie, famous school administrator, and he had put together a program that was sanctioned by Obama. The short version of the story is Obama believed that there were too many African-Americans, too many people of color incarcerated. The percentages were way out of whack according to population. Forty percent of prisoners were black, male population, African-American population is like 8 or 9 percent. That’s not fair!

So when guys like this shooter came along, we didn’t apprehend ’em and we didn’t put ’em behind bars so as not to monkey with or play around with the statistics. So the guy’s free. He was identified all of those times, a bunch of times before he actually stormed into the school. When he finally did it, it was not a surprise to anybody.

We’ve already got the mechanisms in place to do a lot more than we’re doing. We just can’t do them because of political correctness or other government policies. We’ve got background checks out the wazoo. Now when you hear these Drive-By Media people on TV talking about the need for increased background checks, let me tell you what they really want, folks. They want just one thing. It could be the tiniest thing in the world.

All it will take is for a law to be passed that will allow the government to take away somebody’s guns for the sake of what the left ultimately wants, it doesn’t matter whose. If we pass a law saying that if you are a legitimately mentally impaired person, you’re not allowed to have a gun. Okay, well, there are some mentally impaired people out there who have them. So a new law which will allow us to go get their guns. It’s over.

You let that happen and it’s over because now we’ve got the pretense. Now we have the premise that the government can take away a gun because of arbitrary assessment that you are incapable of owning one. And that’s all they will need. And they will spend the rest of your life and their kids’ lives and every other life you can fathom until they find a way to get everybody’s guns.

When they talk about background checks, what they really want is some way to go get somebody’s gun who already has one. We’ve already got so many restrictions to getting guns now in terms of background checks, any number of things. We have so many redundant laws that adding another one is just going to do one thing. It’s going to look like we have done something, when we really haven’t done anything at all.

But if you listen to the Drive-By Media, you would think we don’t have background checks. What you should realize is that apparently they don’t accomplish much. All the recent shooters have passed them. Have you heard people say after these events, “Every gun the guy had was legal.” I’m sure you have. What has that caused to happen? “Well, then we need to do something more. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to have guns.” And there’s universal agreement.

Yeah, wackos shouldn’t have guns. Who gets to define wacko? To the American left, all of us who are conservatives are wacko. We’re all racists, we’re all bigots, we’re all hatemongers. They have been setting this up for a while now, folks. It won’t be long before they will be able to say or will try to say that we’re all mentally unbalanced because of the racism and bigotry, the white supremacy and so forth.

You gotta be really, really careful. You don’t give these people an inch, especially when they are demanding it. The time to talk to them about this is when no crisis is happening. But we don’t talk about this until there is an incident, and there have always been incidents. Richard Speck shot a bunch of nurses. We’ve had the Columbine shootings. These are not things that have never happened before. They have.

There are fewer of them so far in the Trump administration than there were during the Obama administration. We don’t talk about that because we’re not allowed to recall anything negative that happened when Obama was in the White House, because nothing negative did, as far as they are concerned.

So we lose all sense of proportion, we lose all sense of rationality, and it gets replaced by this emotional demand that we all do something. And ultimately if it’s never the shooter’s fault, if it’s somebody in the media’s fault, then what’s that gonna permit them to do someday? They’ve been looking for every which way they can to get rid of talk radio — me, you name it, Fox News. You think it’s an idle, lazy charge to claim that conservative media is responsible for these instances?

It’s purposeful, it is strategic, and they’re gonna keep hammering it long enough and consistently enough until they think and hope more and more people will agree to it and end up supporting something being done about it. Which is why I don’t want to give them anything. I don’t want to give them a single thing above what we already have. If we have an idea that’s good on our own, fine, push it, go for it. Not theirs.

Folks, there shouldn’t even be two seconds of thought about this. The American left today poses the greatest threat to the ongoing existence of the United States of America as we’ve all known it than anything that we have seen in our lifetimes. We’re clearly dealing with an irrational, lunatic bunch of people. And they are taking over the Democrat – the argument, is the Democrat Party taking over the lunatic base or is the lunatic base taking over the Democrat Party? But I would maintain you that the Democrat Party is being run by the Twitter sewer. And that’s who the Democrat presidential candidates react to and respond to and try to keep happy.

“The NRA, they still have the ability with the help of Rush Limbaugh to tell their members that even a low grade — not universal, not strong — background check is the beginning of a slippery slope.” Well, we got background checks. That’s A.B. Stoddard, she’s talking like we don’t have any background checks. We do.

The facts and the truth of this don’t matter. The Democrats have a political objective. It’s to eliminate the Second Amendment. So whatever can be done to advance that. I don’t even think they’re really that upset over these incidents. If you ask me, they find a way, they come alive, they seem energized by these events because it gives them new fuel for their agenda. It’s almost kind of sick.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is David in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome, sir. It’s great to have you here with us.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. Let me disagree with you just a little bit. I am for compromise with the Democrats if it is compromise and not surrender. What I mean by that is if we’re gonna have background checks and they want to have “meaningful background checks,” my point is this: Then let’s make ’em meaningful where I get to bypass the National Firearms Act or I get to go on an airplane or go into schools with my firearm or I can go into federal and state buildings. If it’s gonna be “meaningful,” let it mean something where I’m giving up something but I’m also gaining something.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Hold it. I’m not sure I understood. You want to…? You lost me when you said you want to get on an airplane with a gun. What do you…?

CALLER: Sure. Sure. Democrats say they want “meaningful background checks.” In other words, “These people are completely vetted and we know who they are.” Ultimately what they’re trying to do is prevent anyone from having a gun. But if you’re gonna vet me and you’re gonna say it’s “a meaningful background check,” and I have to go through all your processes and fees —

RUSH: Oh.

CALLER: — then let it have some meaning to it, where if I want to travel with a gun, let me have a gun! Let it have meaning!

RUSH: Let me see if I understand. To you, a “meaningful background check” would be that you would be authorized — as a really solid guy — to be trusted with a gun on an airplane or a school ground or whatever. That would be meaningful to you. If you’re authorized as a responsible person to carry, you should be allowed to.

CALLER: Absolutely. (garbled cell)

RUSH: I can guarantee you that the Democrat Party will never define “meaningful” in the way you have.

CALLER: That’s compromise. Otherwise, if we do it their way, it’s surrender. That’s all they want us to do is surrender versus compromise.

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: Let ’em come to the table, let ’em work with us, and we can have true compromise.

RUSH: I know what this guy is saying. You’re very crafty. I have to credit you, you’re very crafty. Whereas I come in and throw down the gauntlet and say, “Screw you! We’re not giving you anything!” What ol’ Dave here wants to do is make it look like we’re willing to talk. “You want meaningful? Here’s what meaningful is to me. You give me a background check and you will find that I’m a solid citizen — I’m an okay guy, I’m a good husband, I’m a good father — and I should be allowed to have a gun wherever I go.”

And then the Democrats reject it, “No way, man! We’re try to take your gone away from you!” And then we can say, “We tried. We negotiated. We tried for meaningful background checks but look what the Democrats did.” Look, I understand that, and I think that’s what Trump’s policy actually is, is to enter into these things so that the Democrats demonstrate who they really are — and there is value in that. I’ll admit.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jerry in Atlanta, great to have you on the program, sir. You’re up next. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I appreciate you taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Real quickly, I am gonna say here’s why I do not want to reach across the aisle regarding compromise and gun legislation. I say that because recently we heard the term that we need, quote, “an assault weapon ban.” Now, if I’m in court and I’ve been assaulted by someone, unusually the first question is gonna be, “Well, what was the assault weapon?” It could be a baseball bat, it could be a golf club, it could be a hammer. It could be, quote, “anything,” an assault weapon, and all these liberals have to do is once they get the term, quote, “assault weapon” banned. They can go find some activist judge and he could determine, or she could determine, “Hey, you know what? That little handgun was, quote, ‘an assault weapon;’ therefore it is banned.” And so that term can be used very, very loosely, and it goes back to the previous caller mentioned about, quote, “meaningful background check.” It’s all in the terminology. And you find a judge that interprets it the way they want to interpret it.

RUSH: You’re right. The term “assault weapon” is… People think it means like AK-47 or automatic weapon. If they had their druthers… I mean, every weapon can be an assault weapon like you say, even a baseball bat. But you’re right, just looking for any little opening. It just takes the first one where they’re allowed to go get somebody’s gun and then, folks, Katie, bar the door.