RUSH: Here is Marcus in Las Vegas. Hey, Marcus, I’m really glad you waited. How are you doing, sir?

CALLER: Rush, thanks so much. I appreciate it. My wife and I and our daughters pray for you twice daily. Hang in there, my friend. I work the Metropolitan Police Department and my wife works for a major Strip casino, and the month of March —

RUSH: Hey, can I ask you a quick question, Marcus? Marcus, don’t worry about your time. If we go through the break, I’ll hold you over. Are the casinos open?

CALLER: No, not even remotely close. Nothing. It’s completely —

RUSH: Okay. So, your wife is furloughed?

CALLER: Yes. She got let go probably about a month ago —

RUSH: I’m sorry.

CALLER: — and then Wynn shuttered doors and within two days Vegas had completely shut down. The idiot governor here shut everything down and from that point forward literally tens of thousands of people got laid off immediately with no idea when they’re —

RUSH: Now, a lot of people are laughing at me here, Marcus, over my question on the casinos. But the reason I ask it is because the casinos are the last place you can actually be in America, you can smoke, you can drink, you can do any number of things out there so I thought maybe some of them stayed open with, you know, gotta stay far away from everyone. Anyway, I knew that was the case, but —

CALLER: Absolutely. Well, everybody was holding strong until Wynn shut its doors, then MGM shut their doors down shortly thereafter. And it was, you know, just this whole major concern as far as that goes. So I’m working for the police department. I wound up — March is absolutely massive. People don’t realize that’s when most casinos make their money for the year. Now you add the NFL draft. You know, Home Depot comes in with tens of thousands of their employees in March alone, the entire month of March was completely sold out, all the properties were sold out —

RUSH: Right, and you get the NFL draft that was scheduled in April —

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: — at the Bellagio.

CALLER: Exactly. You’ve got that, you’ve got Cirque were filled. The hotels were filled. The restaurants were filled. And then with one executive order, it’s done — not order, but with one thing, it’s done, it’s out. I mean, the entire city shut itself down, and the budget for the city is absolutely gone now as well.

RUSH: Now hang on. Hold your thought, hold your thought right there because I gotta take the break. We’re going to hold you through over the break, just be a couple minutes and be right back and resume your comment on the budgeting, which is what he called about. So hang on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to Marcus in Las Vegas. One hundred and fifty law enforcement officers have been let go out in Vegas, right? You’re one of them.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And the whole community has lost billions. You were gonna be talking something about a budget as it relates to all this.

CALLER: Right. They let us know that the budget’s been decimated because nothing’s open. The only thing that’s open are basically Walmarts and Targets and those type of things. Everything has been basically shut down, so we were let go saying they’re not sure when they’re gonna be able to bring this back, because they’re thinking it could be years before, you know, the Strip opens up again. It provides close to 70% of the revenue for the entire state.

RUSH: You better hope that Dr. Fauci is a gambler.

CALLER: Oh, Rush, it’s so frustrating. I mean, it’s like, why would you bring…? You know, even if you open the economy tomorrow, you know, nobody’s gonna travel to Las Vegas. You got tens of thousands of people that work in these casinos.

RUSH: Hey, Marcus, that’s something that concerns me. They have succeeded… I say “they,” the media. In this whole story, they’ve succeeded in scaring people pretty well. And I wonder how many people, even if they… Even if we get a blanket, wide-open order tomorrow, I wonder how many people would actually brave it.

I think there’s a sufficient… We know that there was all kinds of fear of conservative shadows on college campuses. I mean, there are literally students — they call themselves snowflakes — that are afraid of an opposing point of view. And now they’ve been revved up here into whatever fear they have over the virus. It’s gonna be a major, major stumbling block, I think, whenever there is a reopening.

Can I ask you a personal question?

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: And you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: But this is what scares me. What are you living on? You’ve been furloughed. You’ve been laid off. Your wife too.

CALLER: Luckily, we are big fans of the Rush Limbaugh Show, so we listen. We keep our money. We save it wisely. We invest. We basically have a six-month savings plan set up for ourselves and things like that. We are fiscally conservative, so we try to live in our means and invest and those sort of things.

RUSH: Wow.

CALLER: So, you know, we both are out of a job now and it’s very scary. And like, you know, who’s gonna come back? That’s the problem. Even if the properties open tomorrow but nobody’s flying, why would you bring, you know, thousands of housekeepers back when there’s no room for them to return to?

RUSH: Well, not only that, what are people gonna gamble with?

CALLER: Oh, exactly.

RUSH: Money-wise.

CALLER: All these tens of thousands of people here without anything to do, and no end in sight, and wondering, “When are we gonna get back to work?” It’s absolutely insane. I mean, I think personally it almost kind of seems like a dry run to see how far the government can push ’til the American public starts pushing back.

RUSH: You really think that?

CALLER: You know, deep down inside, it’s scary. I mean, you never know. I mean, it’s like, I agree the right person is in office to bring this country out of this. But, you know, when you look at numbers, Rush. The numbers don’t add up as far as, like, you know, the amount of people that die of a normal flu every year and those sort of things.

I mean, it’s terrifying how one thing can make us give up our rights so quickly. Things that… You know, like you’ve said, three years of gains gone in a matter of a couple, two or three weeks, and we willingly did it to ourselves because of the fear of this virus.

RUSH: And it’s a scary thing. We did do this to ourselves. It took all kinds of things to build this economy in the past three years, and it took a month to destroy it all? We did it to ourselves. You know, you mentioned the flu number. Marcus, thank you very, very much for the call.