RUSH: Now, look, I’m gonna move on from this 1619 business. I’m not kidding. I hate talking about the New York Times. I hate citing things from the New York Times, because they’re not news anymore! And I resent the fact that they’re so damned important. They’re not news anymore. They’ve lost, they’re gone. There is no journalism in Drive-By Media today.

I mean, real journalism. Journalism at its root is telling people what happens someplace. What’s going on there that people not there to see themselves. You boil it down to its bare essence, and that’s what it is. And you do that without bias and you do that with as much objectivity as you can master. Of course, we know that doesn’t exist anymore.

But now the New York Times has evolved a project to reframe America’s founding to blow up the history of America and to basically lead an effort to convince Americans that their country is not great, that it is not exceptional because everything that has happened that is good in this country has happened on the backs of slaves.

Now, when I get into things like this, I always get emails from people who try to give me information to rebut the premise I’m making. So if we’re talking about slavery and America, whenever I bring this up, I get email, “Hey, Rush, there’s still slavery in Africa.” Let me take a brief point here, and then I got another one here. “Is this true of the founding of Canada, Rush? They only got rid of slavery a couple decades before us. How about Cuba and Mexico and all the rest of the nations in the western hemisphere? Have you ever looked at the slave trade map and seen Brazil?”

That’s not the point, folks. To deal with it this way is to accept the premise. We’re gonna accept the premise of the New York Times that slavery was what built America, that there is no legitimacy to our country. And so the way we’re gonna defend it, “Well, if you think we’re bad, look what happened in Brazil. Or if you think we’re bad, look at when the Canadians only got rid of it.”

All of this kind of thinking is why we keep losing this issue. We have to stop accepting the premise. The New York Times is insane, is the premise. The New York Times is off its rocker. Whatever vernacular you want to use. The New York Times has become dangerous. America was not founded in 1619! It’s not debatable. It’s not arguable! The greatness of the United States was not built on slavery!

We got rid of slavery over a century ago, 18 some odd. It’s gone! There is no slavery in America today. The idea that everything — what happens to the civil rights bill, all the civil rights legislation that has been written to try to make amends, to try to address all the grievances. Is all of that stuff meaningless? Yes, according to the New York Times and the American left today. None of it counts! None of it counts, no fix is permissible, no fix deserves any credit, no correction, nothing. No improvement, no positive change, because we can’t erase the fact that there was slavery in America.

This is their premise to disqualify America as exceptional, to disqualify America as great, and to give them the entree into transforming — basically destroying it. This is what we’re up against. We’re not into a debate over, “Well, if you think we’re bad, try and see it’s worse elsewhere.” I don’t even want to get close to accepting their premise here!

If we’re gonna win a public argument about this, we have to use ridicule of the premise. The premise that America was founded in 1619? The premise that when slavery was brought to North America, there wasn’t even a United States in 1619. We’re gonna build a premise that everything that happened after — all the good that happened after that — let me tell you, the other way of going about this, if everything about the United States today was built on slavery, then what was wrong with it? Rhetorical question.

Rhetorical question. What’s wrong with the United States. Are we not the greatest nation on earth? Are we not the most prosperous nation on earth? Are we not the richest nation on earth? And now they want to come along and tell us the only reason that happened is because of slavery? I know this is gonna be twisted and bent all out of shape, but the point is this is one of the most ridiculous premises I have ever heard in my life. And it doesn’t deserve any acceptance in terms of finding an argument against it. That’s where we on the right end up losing so many of these arguments anyway. They set the premise on everything because they’re obviously advancing, they’re on offense.

So they set premise that we’re having a recession. What do we do? Instead of ripping them to shreds as unqualified and a bunch of fake news specialists, we start debating economic statistics. And then we try to point out how their economists are nothing but a bunch of left-wing hacks, rather than just blow their premise to smithereens.

Look at the Democrat campaign. Everything that you hear from these people is outrageously absurd. They do not need to be engaged. These people do not want to debate us anyway. That’s not the point. They’re out trying, with all of this talk of slavery, we’re all now, not just America, but if the New York Times persists with this, every American today is tainted by it and every American is thus unjust and immoral and has a price to pay.

I think this desperation is such that it doesn’t even deserve one ounce of acceptance and debate with an attempt to refute it. Not accepting their premise. You can blow the hell out of their facts. The founding of America was 1619; American greatness today, everything about America is built on slavery. The New York Times sent out a tweet six days ago warning of this, promising that this was what was coming in the newspaper.

It was a tweet from Mara Gay. On August 13th. “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

So we think, “Okay. Okay. Well, if they’re gonna say that, we have to devise, uh, some debate points, and we have to be able to meet them on the playing field here and refute their claims.” Wrong way to go. You let them get away with the idea their premise has merit and you can forget it. Because you can’t ever say there wasn’t slavery in America. They want to say that slavery is responsible for everything good that has happened in America! Imagine that! Slavery.

And so therefore they want to disqualify everything that’s good in the minds of as many Americans as they can. And they hope to win the presidency on this. God help us if they ever do. They will have a license to rip this country apart like it’s never been ripped apart, under the premise that it’s being finally, finally fixed! By being disbanded.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Paul in Royse City, Texas. Great to have you.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. I’ve been with you from the beginning, man.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I think the thing that ties all this racial stuff together, the slavery and calling us all racists and all the leftist talking heads pressing all that… I think they are scared to death of losing part of the black vote. I think… We’ve always gotten about 10% of the black vote. But now that so many people have jobs compared to Obama’s time — the new normal with no jobs — I think if the right got 20% of the black vote, the Democrats couldn’t win an election. And it’s the economy. Like Carville said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

RUSH: There’s no question that this is a factor — and last week, you know, while the Drive-Bys were happily reporting Trump’s approval number down in the latest stupid-ass poll of theirs, the same poll showed that Trump’s approval with African-Americans and Hispanics was 51%. I will guarantee you that number scares the daylights off these people. This is also a good point. Look, it’s not the only reason that the Times is pushing this. Getting rid of America as founded is a real objective, folks. It’s also an attempt to save the Democrats with the black vote, yes.

But don’t discount what the large objective here of eternal damage to America, as founded, really is in all of this.