RUSH: You know, this guy that’s the governor of New York, I’m gonna tell you, I am about fed up with this ongoing conventional wisdom that liberal Democrats are morally superior, intellectually superior. My God. Folks, these people are destroying us with their intellectual and moral superiority because they possess neither.

Guess what Cuomo just announced yesterday and he’s shocked and stunned at this? Are you ready? Sixty-six percent — and, remember, New York is the epicenter. And you know what else we’ve learned? We’ve learned that the majority of the spread of the virus is due to people living in New York leaving. It’s stunning. Wait ’til you hear the stats I have coming.

You know over half of American counties have not had a single COVID-19 death? Over half of American counties. A small number of American counties account for the vast majority of COVID-19 cases and deaths. And at the top of the list is New York, where they’ve been praising this guy, setting him up as the fallback to Biden, the savior of the Democrat Party.

Folks, these people are so — you know, “stupid’s” not the word, although it may be. Have you known people who, thought they were brilliant, thought they were the cat’s meow, thought they were superior to everybody in all kinds of different ways? In truth, they’re nowhere near it, and yet they have that image about them, they have that reputation because it’s been built and fostered around them.

Andrew Cuomo is one of the biggest empty suits running around in American politics today, benefiting, of course, from the pedigree of his father, Mario “The Pious,” another morally superior guy to everybody else. Sixty-six percent of New York state coronavirus hospitalizations are people who stayed at home. They were not essential workers. They did not leave their homes. They got sick in their homes. They were quarantined. They were locked down. They got sick in their homes and then went to the hospital.

So do lockdowns even work? Was the lockdown even necessary? If 66% of coronavirus hospitalizations in the epicenter are people who stayed at home and were not essential workers, what was the point? And Cuomo’s (imitation), “Oh, I was really surprised. I was shocked when I saw these numbers.” What do you mean, shocked? None of this ought to surprise anybody. Common sense is being stood upside down and on its head.

That’s right. “A study of hospitals last week found that of 1,000 patients –” it’s an average “– 66% were people that stayed at home.” Now, how do you explain that, folks? “Seventy-three percent of the new hospitalizations were people aged 51 and over and 96% had underlying health conditions. Most were in Manhattan, 21%, but 18% of the new hospitalizations were in Long Island. In New York City, 90% of those who answered said they had not been taking public transport. Cuomo said it showed that the new infections were down to ‘personal behavior’ like not wearing masks or not hand washing enough.”

So it’s your fault. It’s never their fault. They never do anything wrong. They never get anything wrong. They never overreact. It’s your fault. This seriously prompts the question of whether lockdowns even work or whether they are necessary if 66% of coronavirus hospitalizations are people who stayed at home. Despite all this, deaths, hospitalizations, intubations, the numbers here all down.

But New York state will remain in lockdown until May 15th. And what do you bet he extends it in another two-week interval like he has been doing? “Well, you know, we gotta go to the end of the month now. We’re on the verge, we’re on the verge of beating this sucker, but we need another two weeks.” Then when the end of May comes, do the same thing. And the lemmings in New York will go along with it ’cause it’s their fault. Cuomo’s out there telling them it’s their fault.

Andrew Cuomo said that he is vindicated by the states that are seeing numbers continues to rise in this reopening. Oh, that’s how he’s looking at it? It’s us versus them. There are now 19,877 deaths in New York. This is, I guess, information about 18 hours old, 19,877 deaths in New York state, 321,000 cases. Across the country more than one million cases, 72,000 deaths.

And, you know, here’s the story from the New York Times on travel: “Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks — New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city,” and took with them outbreaks all over the country.

“The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast.”

The bottom line of the article is that the spread of the Wuhan virus in America can be directly said to have occurred on nonaction from Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio. Not Trump. Trump’s got nothing to do with this, other than trying to give ’em all the hospital beds they said they needed, sending ’em a Navy hospital ship. Oh. You know the bunch that built the hospital beds in Central Park, Samaritan’s Purse? They volunteered. And Cuomo wants income tax payments from ’em.

You know why? And they’ve been kicked out, by the way. You know why? ‘Cause Samaritan’s Purse, a religious organization, doesn’t believe in gay marriage. So Andrew Cuomo has kicked them out of the state and is now gonna start charging them state income tax for the days they helped him out in Central Park with the hospital beds there, even while they were volunteering. Donald Trump had nothing to do with this. A lot of people in New York have second homes, places like here, Florida, Louisiana, other places, they start spreading — it’s like they take their politics with them.

They get tired of the policies they create. They get tired of high taxes. They get tired of really rotten public services. So what do they do? They move. They move to North Carolina. They move to Louisiana. They move to Kentucky, Texas, Florida — no-income-tax states — and then what do they do? They corrupt those states with their ideology, their liberalism and whatever else.

And they’ve done the same thing with the virus. I think it’s amazing that Florida has not had a bigger problem with seasoned citizens than they had, given this. So where are we on this? Folks, it’s just… We have Andrew Cuomo, who rejected Trump’s quarantine idea. He rejected it. He jammed nursing homes full of COVID-19 patients.

We had that story yesterday. This is all on him. These COVID-19 patients are really subjected to greater likelihood of contracting the virus and being killed by it in nursing homes. Where did Cuomo put ’em? He flooded the nursing homes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I checked the email again during the break. “Rush, I can’t believe how hard you’re hitting Andrew Cuomo. What in the world…? We should be coming together in this time, Rush! What are you doing?”

Folks, do you realize…? What am I doing? Um… (pause) We have sat by under what turned out to be — I think — a lying, false premise that a shutdown would be relatively short in order to get our arms around the virus and stop the spread. Do you realize that there are Democrats who are still advocating for this shutdown to not end, for it to go on in perpetuity?

That there are people attempting to shame…? Like, if you want to get back to work and start providing for yourself and your family — if you want to hold on to your career, your job, your life — you’re being virtue shamed. You’re being attacked as somebody who doesn’t care about life.

You’re being called a quasi-murderer by a bunch of people who think they are morally superior to everybody — the political correctness crowd, the people who were behind the Trump-Russia collusion scandal, the people that behind all of this phoniness designed to get rid of Donald Trump. What am I doing to Andrew Cuomo?

I’ve had nothing to do with this shutdown other than opposing it. I’ve had nothing to do with it other than trying to get people back up to some common-sense speed. (laughing) We can’t do both? We can’t protect ourselves and guard against the spread of the virus and have our jobs and our economy functioning at the same time?

Since when!

It’s outrageous what these people have done and are continuing to do. And I know there’s all this talk about how we’re gonna V-shaped recovery, meaning we had a very steep — on the left side of the V — plunge in economic activity. But then when it opens back up, we’re gonna see the other side of the V shooting up at the same angle, meaning a quick rebound.

It’s not gonna happen that way, because people have been scared to death about leaving their homes. People have been scared to death about running around. The safest place to be in America is outside, and that’s where people have been told to avoid. The safest place is outside running around by yourself in a park or on a golf course or whatever.

It’s one of the safest places you could be — and you can’t go there still, in many parts of the country. But as to Cuomo, let’s just review here. Let’s look at all the areas that he was wrong. The reason this matters… It’s not personal. I couldn’t care if it’s Andrew Cuomo, Fred Slobodnik. It doesn’t matter who we’re talking about.

We’re talking about liberal Democrats who are praised to the heap as brilliant and compassionate, and they pose a great threat to this country and to us. They are not properly reported on, they’re not properly analyzed. Their skills, their talents — when found deficient — are lied about and glossed over.

Instead, we’re told about what a reprobate and a damaging, dangerous guy Trump is when he remains our only hope in the elected class. Andrew Cuomo was wrong. He downplayed the virus until the middle of March, six weeks after Trump’s travel ban in China.

Yeah, Cuomo was part of the crowd running around calling Trump a racist and a xenophobe. This is the guy who allowed the subways to run without any kind of cleaning or disinfectant. The homeless were living in them and using them as bathrooms and toilets, and Cuomo said, “Well, they’ve gotta run because our essential workers need ’em to get to work.”

And then, when Cuomo discovered that you can disinfect a subway car with ultraviolet light? This is two weeks after they tried to destroy Donald Trump for pointing out that ultraviolet light works disinfecting the virus on various surfaces. Cuomo’s a genius? Trump is a dangerous idiot? He’s the guy that sent the sick to nursing homes, which sealed their fate in many cases!

He claimed he didn’t have enough ventilators. You wonder why Trump talks about ventilators all the time? It’s ’cause Andrew Cuomo was complaining about not having enough! A bunch of Democrat governors were out there complaining, “We don’t have enough ventilators! The federal government’s letting us down. Can’t get enough ventilators!”

Trump is trying to tell everybody, “They had every ventilator they needed, and they had a surplus. We made sure they had every ventilator they needed. They didn’t need nearly as many.” Cuomo was saying, “We need 40,000 ventilators!” They didn’t need any more than 400, I think the number was.

The reason why this bothers me is because these people are at the center, the focal point of the incompetence that has produced the current status quo, the circumstances we’re all living in — and they’re being praised to the hilt. They’re being heralded as the best and brightest among us.

And the people that want to reverse this trend — get going, rebuild this country, get the economy back up and running, let people’s lives have meaning again — we’re the ones being accused of having no heart, no compassion, not care about whether people die. It’s the exact opposite. Good Lord.

Why isn’t it said that some of these Democrat governors apparently don’t care about people who live and die? ‘Cause if you look at the death numbers in their states, they’re kind of high. We had the other day: Blue states have the highest death rates. Your chances of dying from this virus are greater in a blue state than a red state.

Snerdley says, “You’re gonna really catch hell for that.” I haven’t yet. (interruption) Well, because I was quoting statistics and facts from the American Spectator. But why do these people get a pass? Why are these Democrats presiding over the vast majority of cases of death, why are they getting a pass?

Why are we being told how great and heartfelt and compassionate their actions are? And over here Donald Trump, who’s tried to give every one of these governors everything they said they’ve needed — and he’s right. In private phone calls, they thank him for doing whatever he’s doing for them. Publicly, they go out and rip him to shreds on ventilators or N95 masks or whatever the heck it is.

And he’s moved a massive federal bureaucracy as rapidly as possible to try to help these governors because he’s trying to help people. Donald Trump… I don’t know this. I’m just gonna use intelligence guided by experience. I think Donald Trump is devastated over what’s happened here. I think he’s devastated about every aspect of it.

I think he’s devastated over what has happened to the people who’ve gotten sick. I think he’s devastated by the number of deaths. I think he’s ripped apart by it. He was riding high. He had beaten back every attempt to sideline him, to destroy him. He had enacted policies that caused an economic rebirth in this country the likes of which most people alive today have never seen.

That’s how great and roaring the economy was — and here we are, in seven weeks, kaput. He’s gotta be devastated by this. Because he does care. Why would a guy want a great, roaring economy anyway if he didn’t care about people? Who is the economy if it isn’t people? The American economy is nothing more than the American existence.

But if you listen to the liberal Democrats and these moral superiorists, they’ll try to tell you (sniveling) “that economic activity is greed (sniff) and that it’s selfishness (sniff) and that it equals death (sniff) and it’s destroying the planet using fossil fuels (sniff) and it’s not renewable, it’s not sustainable.” These people are absolutely, dangerously, insanely stupid!

The American economy is simply the outright illustration of the superiority of American freedom and American enterprise. The U.S. economy is the expression of American exceptionalism. The American economy is the evidence each and every day of the great opportunity that exists for everybody in this country that wants to work hard to try to access it.

The American economy is also evidence of failure. People have tried hard and haven’t made it. They bounce back and they try again. The American economy is the epitome — it’s the expression, it’s the day-to-day essence — of American liberty and freedom as enshrined in our constitution. It is not the focus of evil in the modern world!

It is not something that exists purely for the profit of the 1%. And anybody who is interested in a roaring, expanding, great economy — by definition — has to love people, has to want the best for people. And, on the other hand, a bunch of people willing to have this economy shut down interminably, watching people losing their livelihoods?

And then their lives and their jobs and then their careers and who knows whatever else? Those are the people that don’t care about people. Those are the people that don’t have one bit of empathy or compassion. If they’re willing to sit there and actually advocate and sponsor and promote the policies that have taken us to where we are today vis-a-vis the economic lockdown and shutdown, you can’t tell me those people love people.

Those people have anything but love. They have revenge, they have vengeance, they have anger. They’re looking to get even with somebody. These are people on the left, the Democrat Party, their objective is to punish the successful and to punish those who use freedom to maximize their own standing, wealth, opportunity, what have you, in this country.

It’s the exact opposite of the way they are reported, and I have about had it with this idea that the people advocating never-ending destruction and pain for people… The economy being shut down is destroying people, livelihoods and lives! They do not love people, and they do not have any kind of exclusive on this so-called compassion.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, whether it sounds fair or not, if you take away just three states, just take away three states, and the U.S. virus epidemic is a completely different story, with one of the smallest numbers of deaths per million population of any major nation in the world. Now, I know, that’s just an item of illustration. We can’t do it because they happened.

I’m just telling you, this idea that we have to destroy this country, which is what we are in the process of doing. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts as of today account for 52% of the deaths and make up about 11% of the population. We have this coronavirus. It’s largely in three states that together are the top three in case numbers, deaths, and deaths per million population. Reason? Well, population density, dirty subways, and mass transit, apartment living, shipping a bunch of old people off to nursing homes, disastrous state policies.

Let me grab a call here quickly. I always try in the first hour to get a call started. And this is John, upstate New York. Great to have you, sir. Testing one, two, three. John, are you there? It doesn’t sound like the phone’s even working. Let me try — let’s see. You know what? Screw it.

Let me build on what I just said. I referenced these numbers a moment ago. Over half of U.S. counties — let’s add on now to the fact that you take away just three states and we’ve got an entirely different story here. Over half of U.S. counties have had no coronavirus deaths. All states have reported cases. The distribution of the cases and deaths has remained heavily concentrated in three states. As of May the 4th, just 10 states account for 70% of all cases. Three states account for 52%. May 4th is just three days ago. Just 10 states account for 70% of all cases and 77% of all deaths.

Together, New York and New Jersey alone account for 38% of all cases and 48% of all deaths. And we’re assuming the death numbers and the case numbers are accurate. We don’t even know that, to be honest with you, but we’ll go by this. So another way of looking at this, as of May 4th, nearly half of all coronavirus deaths have occurred in two states, New York and New Jersey. Five states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, California — account for 54% of all confirmed cases in the U.S., 61% of all deaths.

So when can we reopen? Do you realize we still have 10 states that are shut down, and some of them are proudly proclaiming they’re gonna stay shut down until July? The 30 counties with the most COVID-19 cases account for 50% of all cases in the country, 57% of all deaths. Of those 30 counties, 24 are in the northeast corridor between Philadelphia and Boston. It would include, obviously, New York, which, interestingly, serves as the passageway by a commuter railway system that runs right through where? Manhattan.