X

How Trump Exposed the Conservative Intelligentsia

by Rush Limbaugh - Nov 5,2019

RUSH: This is Beaver Springs, Pennsylvania. Joanne, great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, I’m so excited to talk to you. I’m a stay-at-home mommy of five, and you are my voice of sanity during the day. I just wanted to say that I’m a conservative; my husband’s a conservative. We didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. We thought he would be a complete phony and fraud. But we’re sick and tired of the media portraying him as losing balanced people. He has proven himself to be, in our opinion, one of the best presidents for religious freedom, and we are proudly gonna vote for him in 2020. So, if anything, he is gaining ground. He is not losing ground.

RUSH: So he wasn’t conservative enough in 2016. Is he conservative enough now, or you’re not even looking at it that way?

CALLER: Actually, he said he was conservative, but we did not believe him. We’re like, there’s no way this guy, once he gets in, is actually going to hold to his principles and values. And he’s proven himself. What he said that he was gonna do, he’s done.

RUSH: Okay. I understand that. I understand that. You were GOP purists, like a lot of people were, and we were told that there were only two or three real conservatives in the 16 running, and we’re gonna be loyal to conservatism. So that meant Ted Cruz as number one in the list of others, and Donald Trump portrayed, came down the escalator and said some strange things to people and so forth.

But see, this is the key. She is now all-in, completely all-in. And why? ‘Cause the labels don’t matter anymore. She’s all-in because real life has happened. Circumstances have happened, her original fears have been allayed, and she’s got the lay of the land now. Joanne, thanks for the call. Beaver Springs, Pennsylvania, is where she called from.

Okay. This piece I was referring to earlier is by Greg Jones, Human Events: “The Downfall of Conservatism, Inc.” And he hits so many nails on the head here about the complete demise of the conservative elites, that they are abject failures. And by conservative elites he means the magazines and media people filled with conservative intellectuals who are asking you to donate to them on the basis that they were the front lines, they were the guys providing the intellectual heft of conservatism. They were influencing policy makers for conservatism.

And then along comes Trump who articulates better than anybody the problems posed by the left, and these people want no part of it. And then they were exposed. They weren’t really intellectual elites or filled with heft at all. They were purely elites. Here’s a pull quote.

“Before President Trump’s explosive entrance onto the political scene, mainstream conservatism was somewhat tolerated by gatekeepers in the media, academia, and the arts. My heroes were nuisances to America’s increasingly liberal institutions, sure, but no real threat to the progressively progressive status quo. Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society.”

What he means by that is we never got any pushback. These conservative elites never pushed back on liberalism or on the Democrat Party. And all they wanted was acceptance from those people, and those people then proceeded to transform the country into something it was not founded to be, and these people are standing by watching it happen.

“Establishment Republicans have built entire careers out of playing nice,” losing with honor, “and it shows.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me get back to this piece here by Greg Jones at Human Events, because somewhere in this piece… I’ve got it marked up, but it prints out to like seven pages, and I only printed three. Somewhere in here is this great takedown of the Never Trumpers. There have been a couple good ones, but not the one I remember.

“Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society. But Donald J. Trump was a different animal altogether… His frank and straightforward style was intolerable to liberal puppet masters who had spent decades corralling Republicans and forcing them to play nice. Establishment Republicans have built entire careers out of playing nice. And it shows.”

Mitt Romney is one.

Pierre Delecto.

Look what they did in destroying Romney, and he’s still trying to suck up to them! He’s still trying to gain their approval at the expense of his own party. Here’s a pull quote on that: “There are rumors that Romney is seeking to rally Senate Republicans on impeachment. And David French,” who used to be at National Review and who is a real problem. “David French and company continue to [criticize] President Trump’s every action — the guy can’t even brush his teeth without being accused of desecrating America’s most treasured norms and institutions.

“It’s exhausting, and [the Never Trumper] motives are painfully obvious. No ‘conservative’ in their right mind would cede one centimeter of power to the current Democratic Party. There is simply no moral comparison between them and the president — they’ve made it perfectly clear they have no intention of being civil. Perhaps the most extreme political entity in the history of the country, today’s left[,] is proudly socialist, openly hostile to the freedoms granted by the Constitution, devoid of any respect for the miracle of life, and an open threat to our safety and stability.”

How in the hell do you encourage them? How the hell do you side with that? How the hell do you come out against your own team to side with that? “During my two-decades of political education and civic life,” writes Greg Jones, “if I’ve learned anything it’s that principles — not personalities — should define your political identity. If it takes a little coarse language and off-color jokes to secure the future of the [country] and stave off the threats posed by an increasingly radical American left — so be it.”

Hear, hear. I have no problem with it all. The guy starts out by saying that he got going on this by listening to me. “I instantly gravitated toward conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh,” The Factor. “Every morning began, without exception, with a visit to the Drudge Report. … I read National Review and the Weekly Standard, the essays of Ayn Rand, and countless history books. My growing familiarity with the conservative ‘intelligentsia’ exposed me to the political points view ostracized by overwhelmingly liberal professors during graduate school.

“Satisfied with my ideological home, the Bill Kristols and Jonah Goldbergs of the world became my heroes — I would have gladly taken a bullet for Mitt Romney,” Pierre Declecto. “But a decade and a half after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93, another monumental event would soon rattle my worldview and drastically alter my political trajectory. I’m speaking, of course, of the election of Donald Trump.

He was a Democrat, by the way, at one point. “As Donald J. Trump emerged as a viable contender for the Republican nomination, I realized a man I had, on principle, cultivated a loathing for might actually win and serve as the spokesperson for my principles on the national stage. I’ll be honest: the thought of it made me a little sick. But I wasn’t a Democrat for a reason, and ours was not the party of corruption.

“If he won the candidacy, my party had spoken, and that’s who I’d be casting my ballot for,” and then he points out later in the piece, “Democrat or Republican, elites flock together.” Amen. That is a gigantic, undeniable truth — and that explains the Never Trumper conservative intelligentsia siding with the left. They are elites first, in their own minds. They are elites, they are academics, they’re intellectuals.

They are superior to us — and they will side with their fellow radical leftist elitists before acknowledging Donald Trump.


Related Links