RUSH: Willie Brown, the speaker, former speaker of the California assembly, former mayor San Francisco, now columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written a piece in the Chronicle saying this can’t go on. California has to figure a way out. California has to open up. “When people were asked to shelter-in-place they did so in amazing numbers with no plan. But nobody envisioned the shelter in place would last this long.” Yes, they did, Mr. Speaker. Oh, yes, they did, and the vast majority of them are in your party. They sure as hell intended it to last this long, and they intend it to keep lasting longer.

There are still to this day people that do not want this economy reopened. They don’t want the shutdown ended. They don’t want the lockdown ended. I’m reading sports media stories. NFL sports media every day making the case how it’s gonna be impossible to play NFL games this fall, ain’t gonna be possible. People in the sports media are trying to talk everybody into accepting the fact that this economic shutdown and lockdown has no end in sight, as evidenced by, well, the NFL’s not gonna be able to play.

Dr. Fauci says if just four players on a team test positive, you gotta shut down that team for two weeks. Maybe if one player gets sick you can do without that one player. My point is that the psychology of this is being transmitted to the American public on a daily basis in such a way that the very idea of opening up the economy is a death sentence. You can’t do it. You better not look forward to it. It can’t be done. And they are all making the case that it won’t be possible to open up the economy until we can get to the point that nobody’s ever gonna get the virus. Come on? Seriously?

They don’t say it specifically that way, but that’s what they mean. Short of a vaccine, if just one person, if one player gets it, we gotta cancel the season. This is the sports media whose lifeblood is the NFL playing games so that these people have jobs covering what happens in the NFL, and they’re advocating, they’re trying to create the psychological mind-set that it would be insane to open up. And Willie Brown in California is starting to get antsy and itchy over this. And I don’t doubt that he believes that the original shelter-in-place was a very, very limited, temporary thing.

I think a lot of people believed that at the start. And then as time went on and there wasn’t any talk about opening up, and even from the Coronavirus task force at the White House, a month went by, you couldn’t find in that daily briefing, you couldn’t find any discussion of opening up. It was all about the medical progress being made in dealing with the ever increasing number of cases.

Willie Brown says the people who have lost their jobs or fear that they’re likely to lose their jobs, they want California to open. But so far the authorities who have locked this in have yet to figure out how to get us out. The authorities? Who would they be? Well, that would be the governor, Gavin Newsom, and they’d be the various mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles and all the other places in between. Willie Brown says if they don’t figure it out soon the public’s gonna find a way to get out on its own. That’s what’s already happening all over the country.

“In fact,” says Mr. Brown, “some counties and some professions are already opening up and trying to keep businesses from opening with threats of suspending their liquor license or cosmetologist license won’t work. Not on a mass scale.” Then he says this: “The goal of the shutdown was to curb the coronavirus and keep the hospitals from being swamped. We kept the hospitals working. But we have yet to curb the virus, and a vaccine, it’s probably at least a year away. In the meantime, we’re headed over the economic cliff. We’re facing unemployment numbers the likes of which we have never seen before. It looks like we’re gonna be stuck in place until June 1st at least no matter what.” He’s talking about California here.

But he said, “June 1st may also be the boiling point. Like it or not, we may have to trust the public to be as safe as possible with masks and hope for the best until a vaccine is found.” This is a rising, percolating public opinion. You know what? This can’t go on. We cannot stay locked down. I’ve been shouting this for two months. Not to make it about me. I’m sure many of you have too.

Now we have some people arriving at this reality late. But what Brown’s saying here, “Hey, you know what? We can’t do this. This is unsustainable. We’re gonna have to open up. We’re gonna have to trust people to do what they can do to protect themselves.” But that flies in the face of the way the Democrat Party and the American left want to try to manage you, the American people, and also destroy Donald Trump.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Marian as we head to the phones in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Hi. Great to have you here with us. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. On Thursday evening — well, 8 o’clock Thursday night — our governor extended our lockdown ’til June 4th, which, interestingly enough, is two days after our primary.

RUSH: Yeah, I know. (chuckling)

CALLER: The next day — and there was a weekend then — 11 counties wrote up letters. Now, these letters included senators and representatives and county commissioners and things, saying that they were not waiting ’til June 4th to open, that they’re opening this Friday or sooner.

RUSH: So there’s insolence! There’s insolence out there.

CALLER: Oh, yes.

RUSH: Counties are standing up and opposing the governor!

CALLER: Absolutely. Absolutely. One county is, you know, out close to Pittsburgh, but a lot of them are in south-central Pennsylvania here, because he’s kept us on lockdown even though our numbers are way less than 1% of cases, let alone recovery and all that.

RUSH: Right. Right.

CALLER: So people are saying, “Nope! We’re not doing it. We can’t.” Like you’ve been saying, “We can’t keep doing this. We have to open.”

RUSH: Yeah. This is an interesting thing to me, too, because when this lockdown first happened, I was asking myself, “How long is this gonna go on? How long do people intend this to go on? The authorities/the people, how long do they intend this to go on?” And I was suspicious from the get-go, and I started looking at various people at the daily White House briefing, the coronavirus task force.

And I started to pay attention to people in the media, and I got the impression that these people, they’re happy about this, and this is no short-term thing as far as they’re concerned. This is a long-term thing. They started talking about and I was hearing about, “Well, we can’t reopen ’til we get a therapeutic treatment or vaccine or whatever,” and then as it reached three weeks…

I think that was the breaking point. Three weeks and no discussion of opening up? That’s when I began — inside myself — to panic over what we had agreed to do and what the real purpose of it was, because everything — I don’t care what, and it’s a damn shame — is politicized. Everything is politicized. Everything has a political component, including this.

We know the unending, absolutely illegal efforts that have been underway to get rid of Donald Trump – and a virus is not gonna change those people’s minds. It’s gonna make them try to get rid of him even more. So I’ve been suspicious of this whole lockdown/shutdown thing for three weeks, and even now, you don’t find massive numbers of people eager to reopen.