RUSH: There’s a little story here, headline: “Today I Gave My Dad a Choice: Trump or His Grandkids and His Son.” Remember we had a discussion over how Donald Trump and support for Trump is breaking up families and how children are blackmailing their parents, saying:

“If you want to see your grandkids — if you want your grandkids to be part of your life, if you want to be part of their life — you gotta renounce your support for Trump.” Remember that? The story was by a guy named Leo Guinan. Leo Guinan wrote the story in a publication called Medium, and it was a piece of sheer emotional blackmail and is a glaring example of how the left is using emotional blackmail on their parents.

We’ve talked about this for a while. I’ve shared with you a number of people who are my age who now have grandkids, and they are afraid to say one positive thing about Donald Trump in the presence of their 30-year-old children for fear that their 30-year-old children will deny them the chance to be a part of their grandkids’ life, and so my friends who are my age do not dare say a word about Donald Trump.

Some of them don’t even say a word about me. Some of them have been forced to renounce me and the EIB Network. That’s how deep the emotional blackmail is. So, anyway, Mr. Guinan writes this piece, “Today I Gave My Dad a Choice: Trump or His Grandkids and His Son — Today I found out my dad put a Trump sign in his yard, and I got [p—-d] off. Really [p—-d] off and I sent him and my mom a text message.

“This is what it said: ‘Due to the signs in the yard, the kids and I will not be down. The current occupant of the White House is preaching hate and violence, endangering the lives and safety of many of my friends. This is not acceptable to me at all. There is a complete disregard for women, minorities, science, ethics, and morality.” Remember we tore this down. We unpacked all this.

“‘Please consider if you support Trump that much. Because I hate him that much. I wanted to be upfront and honest about my feelings,'” and screw you if you don’t renounce Trump and take those signs out of the yard. “At this point, it is not acceptable to me. You can vote for whom you wish. But I can choose who I surround myself with. I love my dad, but I can’t be around him until he understands how vital I believe this election to be and what is truly at stake. It is not easy.

“But it was necessary. Now to see what fallout occurs.” So here’s this guy, Leo Guinan, and he’s talking about how Trump has total disregard for women, and I pointed out there are more women in the Trump administration in positions of genuine influence and power and relevance than ever were in the Obama administration or any other Democrat, or Clinton administration, to boot.

Minorities? Trump has done more… Look at the African-American unemployment rate pre-COVID. Trump has done more for minorities in this country than you can shake a stick at. Science? That’s all about climate change. Ethics, morality, all this? Anyway, there’s an update to the story. Mr. Snerdley found this. It’s at BizPac Review, it’s not at Medium, and the headline is:

“‘I screwed up’: Man’s ultimatum to parents over Trump signs backfires, and now he’s sorry,” and if you read not very far into the story, you find this: “The writer, who described himself as being ‘toward the liberal end of the spectrum’…” Toward the liberal end? Toward the liberal end of…? He can’t even admit what he is!

He “described himself as being ‘toward the liberal end of the spectrum,’ noted that he realized the irony of the situation when he found himself the topic of discussion on the Rush Limbaugh Show.” Let me tell you: It’s the Rush Limbaugh Show that caused whatever change of mind this guy had. Nobody else was talking about this. That’s why this program equals: cutting edge of societal evolution.

This guy, Leo Guinan, “who asked his parents with ‘hands shaking’ and ‘tears in eyes’ to remove a pro-Trump sign in their yard came back with an apology after his rant backfired. Writer Leo Guinan penned a personal recounting of the lessons he learned after giving his family an ultimatum on their display of support for President Trump, explaining in a follow-up entry … this week that although he ‘wanted to trigger a response’ with his initial piece, he wanted his apology to ‘go viral’ as well,” meaning this is the apology.

He didn’t mean to do this. He didn’t mean to talk to his parents this way. So, anyway, what’s the point here? Well, there are many, many points here. One is: If you’re a leftist, be really careful if I find out about what you’re doing and tend to go public with it, ’cause then you’re gonna be embarrassed when the whole country (chuckles) finds out how cockamamie you are.

But then he’s had to backtrack and apologize, meaning his parents didn’t have to change. They didn’t have to remove the Trump sign and this guy caved and is gonna make sure that the grandparents are allowed to see the grandkids. So this is a lesson for you out there, you parents who are being emotionally blackmailed by your 25- or 30-year-old kids. Tell ’em to go pound sand! You should have been doing that all their lives anyway.

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RUSH: By the way, Mr. Guinan, Leo Guinan wrote here that, you know, who am I to wield that kind of power over anyone’s behavior? Who am I to tell my dad he can’t see his grandkids if he’s got a Trump sign? Who am I? I can’t do that. I apologize to my dad in person. I screwed up with it. I own that. I’m okay with making mistakes ’cause that’s the best way to learn. So I screwed up in a big way, and I’m gonna apologize in a big way. This program made all that happen, I tell you.

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RUSH: This is Nan in The Villages, Florida. It’s great to have you. I’m glad you called. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call. We pray for you every day. Okay. You have lit a fire under me. These spineless parents and grandparents that will succumb to threats from their kids about not seeing their grandkids, whatever, if that was my kid, I’d say, “Fine, you’re out of everything. You’re not getting a dime. Grandkids will get everything.” I’m so tired of people —

RUSH: Well, you know what would happen, they’d just steal it from the grandkids.

CALLER: No, I’d make sure that didn’t happen. I’m a smart conservative woman. I love President Trump. I’m in a Trump rally today at The Villages. We’re expecting over a thousand golf carts. And, you know what? I’m not gonna be bullied. And thank God for people like you. And, you know, we need to rise up and stop being these little timid — I don’t wear a mask, you know, and I’m a good person. You know, I help my neighbors.

RUSH: Damn straight you are. Absolutely. There’s no reason —

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: — people like you need to run around thinking there’s something wrong with you.

CALLER: There’s not a darn thing wrong with me, Rush, not a darn thing. I love my country. I love my president. I love my family. And there are so many more people —

RUSH: And you love the EIB Network.

CALLER: I do. And I love you. And just to let you know, my little grandson had a Skype call with a librarian in his homeschool. They said, “What are you reading?” And he brought out his Rush Limbaugh books that you wrote for kids. He read every one of those books and it took him less than three weeks.

RUSH: What, is that the Rush Revere books?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: How old is he now?

CALLER: He is 8.

RUSH: Well, you know what?

CALLER: He’s 8 years old.

RUSH: I’ll tell you what, Nan, I want you to hang on. Mr. Snerdley’s gonna pick the phone up here and get a shipping address for you, ’cause we want to send your grandson some stuff from the Revere neighborhood, from the Revere neighborhood of the whole operation here ’cause we got some really cool stuff that goes great with the books. And we’re more than happy to do it. And you certainly deserve it.

I want to react to something she said. I have to preface this by reminding everybody that I do not have children. So I may be all wet here. But I do not have that emotional tie in my life. And I understand what it is. I understand how deep and strong the emotional bond is. But I have to tell you, as an observer, I have been, let’s just say curious, at the way child rearing has occurred in certainly the last generation, 25 years, and maybe even longer than that.

And, you know, you can see it in the pop culture. You can see how child rearing, the raising of children, if you will, for those of you in Rio Linda, you can see how it has evolved in our culture by watching the various ways it’s portrayed on TV. I’ll give you an example. Occasionally I will watch a program called Law & Order SVU. This program has been on the air for like 20 years, and they’ve yet to run out of storylines, and it’s about sexual crimes in Manhattan.

It stars Mariska Hargitay or Hargitay, who’s the daughter of Jayne Mansfield, if you know who that was. Anyway, she has become a mom at age 80. I’m exaggerating. She’s become a mom, I think, via adoption. I don’t know. But I’m not exaggerating much when I tell you that she’d be sitting in her office at the police headquarters, and her phone will ring, and it’ll be the school where her son Noah is.

And the school will tell her, “Noah is crying. You have to do something.” And she will stop what she’s doing, she will leave the office to go because her son is crying. “Noah’s really upset. He’s crying.” And then the way they portray it when she gets to the school. “What’s wrong, Noah?”

“I hate you, Mommy. I want my real mom.” And she goes sulking away in the bathroom. “My kid hates me. Oh, my God.” I compare all this to the way my brother and I were raised, which is my nearest mode of comparison. And I’ll tell you something, folks. Every parent, every set of parents does it their own way, and there’s no school you go to, there’s no manual, everybody does it their own way, but I really think that that we’ve lost control here.

I think Nan from The Villages is right. I think it’s completely out of phase. When I hear people my age, 68 to 70, literally say that they don’t dare talk about their support for Trump or they will not be allowed to see their grandkids, the first thing I ask myself is, “Did you ever discipline your kids when they were growing up?” I don’t understand it.

But it seems like the kids, who by definition, can’t possibly know what the parents know. Now, that’s not true. I mean, parents can be surpassed by their kids in just in book learning. Like the great Louis Armstrong song, what a wonderful world, he’s talking about a baby just born and he says in the lyric line of the song “he’ll learn much more than I’ve ever known.” That’s of course true, as we continue to chart knowledge.

But I’m just talking about life experiences. Somebody 40 years old is gonna have many more life experiences and thus much more wisdom than somebody 15. And yet we’re letting the 15-year-olds tell us what’s gonna happen and how we have to behave. And I can’t relate to it. If I had tried that with my parents, it would not have flown.

Like I’ve mentioned, my father, who was brilliant and could express his intelligence — I mean, there was no doubt that he was — there was just no way he was going to let some 15-year-old high school punk tell him something about life. He might be polite hearing it, don’t misunderstand. But he was not going to actually consider that the 15-year-old might know more than he did. And by the way, this is not an arrogance thing. It’s about raising kids properly and imparting your knowledge to them and your wisdom in ways that help them and all that. And the whole concept of tough love, there’s a place for it even with child rearing. And that’s what I think has vanished a lot.

So we have Nan here from The Villages saying if my kids try to tell me that I can’t see my grandkids, fine. They’re out of the will. I don’t care, they’re out of the will. I’m not gonna sit there and just cower in fear, particularly about my political — particularly when I know more than they do about what’s good for this country. They can’t possibly know what’s good for this country if they’re supporting Democrats. They can’t possibly know it. That’s the way I’d look at it.

If my kid were aiming or leaning left, I’d been so scared and I would take them aside, “You can’t possibly know what’s best for this country if that’s what you think.” I’d tell ’em that. Flat-out. “Oh, you think you would, Rush, but when you have your own kids, you wouldn’t talk to them that way.” I’d have to say, okay. Maybe. I don’t know. Since I don’t have that emotional bond, it’s hard for me to actually claim what I would do. But I’m honestly telling you that that’s what I would — if I’m minding my own business one day and I have a kid, and the kid comes home, “I think I’m really gonna vote for Biden.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I hate Trump, I don’t like Trump’s tweeting.” I would ask myself, how the hell did it even get to this point? Is my kid not listening to me? Is my kid rebelling against me, and is that why the kid is — you know, I’d get to the bottom of it. I’d want to know, okay, why? What in the world, when did you lose your mind, Son? Tell me. At what point did all this crap on the left start looking good to you? Where did I go wrong? However I would play it.

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Now, here’s an example of an email that I got from an audience member, disgruntled parent. “Dear Mr. Limbaugh: You sure do claim to know a lot about something you admit you don’t know anything about, and that is parenthood.” Hey, you know what? Let me just tell you: You don’t have to have done something to be knowledgeable of it.

Like, there were attempts way back in the late eighties to get people like me to stop talking about the defense budget, ’cause we had never served in the military. “You can’t… You’re not qualified!” Well, wait a minute. I don’t have to have served in the military to be able to be conversant and knowledgeable about the defense budget, and I don’t have to be a parent to know when a good job is being done and a bad job is being done.

But this is the way our society has also evolved. Disqualify opinions you don’t like if you can by suggesting the person with the opinion isn’t qualified to have it. So, anyway. “Dear Mr. Limbaugh: We had dinner with friends recently. They’re very conservative. They have a 24-year-old daughter who was home recently from wherever she’s off to, and they were just devastated, Mr. Limbaugh.

“Because their darling 24-year-old daughter accused them of being racists. There were two reasons why” their darling 24-year-old daughter accused of being racist. “One, they had sent her to a private school. The second reason that their darling 24-year-old daughter accused ’em of being racist was, they bought a house in a neighborhood where there were very few black families.

“So, Mr. Limbaugh, because they wanted their darling 24-year-old daughter to be protected and because they wanted her to be well educated, in her mind, they are racists. On the other hand, Mr. Limbaugh, their son is 26 years old, and he’s a total Trump supporter. He listens to you every day. So tell me, sir, how is that a parenting issue, you bloated bigot?”

Wait a minute. I’m not bloated anymore — and besides, the perfume on your email reeks, if you must know. “I am telling you, Mr. Limbaugh, there is a war on for the minds of young people.” I know this! I’m the one telling everybody about this war. White, college-educated women are the foils. They are the ones that are the front-line marchers for Black Lives Matter, for example.

I know what’s going on here.

“Mr. Limbaugh, there has always been this war in my lifetime.” I know. I know. The modern era of feminism kicks off in the late sixties. I know all about this. I know how it has torn families apart. It’s torn our culture apart. You know, feminism — the militant feminism — has done more to wreck our culture and society. It’d be difficult to find something that has been just as damaging.

I’m sure there is, but off the top of my head… I guess you could probably take pretty much any front-facing left-wing issue and say the same thing about it. But, man, militant feminism has just destroyed so much. It’s made so many people not happy. It has been so filled with false promises of contentment and happiness and fulfillment. It’s just been a disaster.

It’s got people acting. It’s got people not knowing who they’re supposed to be, got people questioning who they really are. And one of the greatest things in life is knowing who you are and liking yourself. That’s one of the greatest things that can ever happen to you. Do you know how many people don’t like themselves? They’re either too fat, they don’t think they’re smart enough, they don’t have good hair, whatever.

It’s amazing. When somebody actually likes or loves themself, it’s such a blessing, and feminism has made it so difficult (sigh) to like yourself if you’re a woman, it’s a shame, and it’s confused men out the wazoo to boot. You had people like Gloria Steinem and Eleanor “Squeal” and all these others. Molly Yard: “I am outraged! I am…” These people have been battling for the minds of young women for 50 or more years now, 60.

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RUSH: This is Diane in, um… Vermont. I need to put my glasses on to read the name. Lunenburg, Vermont. Well, I’ve never heard of it, so it didn’t look familiar to me. Anyway, how are you out there, Diane?

CALLER: I’m great, Rush. How are you doing?

RUSH: Fine and dandy. Thank you.

CALLER: Great. Quick shout-out to my husband, Jim, for turning me on to you back in the early nineties in Sacramento. My point is, I was trying to answer the question that you asked earlier: When did parenting go awry and when did we start changing our style?

And you’re right that it is a progression. But my grandmother had told me that — I’m 61. She was a child of the Depression. And it was very hard on children then. It kind of scarred them. They never forgot it. I’ve spoken to a lot of older people since about it, and they agree. So they were a little lighter on their kids. And, you know, because they remembered how bad it was to be a kid then and swore they would never do it to theirs —

RUSH: Let me tell you. That’s a good observation. I know what you mean when you say that they were hard on the kids in the Depression. You had to be. They had to grow up fast. They had to learn that there were things larger than themselves. And they had to learn that real fast, especially during the Depression. That’s when my parents grew up.

CALLER: And from that spawned my belief as a homeschool parent — we yanked them both out in fifth and sixth grade at different times for different reasons — but people would always talk about raising children. You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults. You know, yes, you want ’em to be kids, but at the same time —

RUSH: Oh, isn’t that clever. I’m a sucker for philosophy things like that. You’re not raising kids, you’re raising adults. It’s true. You’re trying to teach ’em how to be adults. It’s exactly right.

CALLER: There is some sanity in the state of Vermont, and we had a big Tea Party group here. And a shoutout to all of them. They’ll know who I am and I know who they are. So, anyway, Rush, love ya.

RUSH: I appreciate that. Diane, thanks for the call out there. I deeply appreciate it. Gotta go. Time is just marching on here. It’s racing by. We still got plenty of it, though, so be right back.

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RUSH: Eric in Duluth, Minnesota. We’ll give you a try. How you doing?

CALLER: Good. Thank you. How are you doing?

RUSH: I’m doing fine. Thanks.

CALLER: Good. Good. I just had kind of a theory I was gonna run by you. I have three young children — 1, 2, and 7 — and I kind of came up with something the other day. I think all children are naturally born liberal. They are, uh… They think so everything’s entitled to ’em, everything’s handed to ’em. If they don’t hear what they want, they throw a fit. If they still don’t get what they want, they hit, kick, and throw stuff.

RUSH: Well, I don’t think they’re naturally born liberal. I think in their early stages of life, they can’t take care of themselves, and so everything has to be given to them, and they then come to expect it. It’s no different than you can create welfare recipients out of any animal you want. Your dog is probably a big believer in welfare — or your cat.

These outfits that run “feed the fish” operations, they create welfare recipients out of the dolphins. They get fed by virtue of people driving up to ’em in boats and throwing food. So humans say (clapping), “Oh, isn’t that cute. Look at Flipper eating. It’s so cute.” That’s why parenting becomes important, because, yeah, the kids… I don’t think they’re naturally born liberal.

I think they’re created, because they can’t take care of themselves. You wouldn’t expect them to. You wouldn’t say to your 2-year-old who can’t walk yet, “Come on! Get out of the crib, you loser, you joker. Get out of the crib and start walking or else.” You wouldn’t do that. “Here, eat this yuck-o — this apple sauce garbage that your mother and I wouldn’t touch.

“You eat this! You eat it.” We wouldn’t treat ’em that way. “Here Little Johnny, what else can we get you Little Johnny? Oh, Johnny, you’re so cute. Look at Little Johnny throw up all over mommy’s new bra! Isn’t that just jolly?” What’s Johnny gonna do? If throwing up over mommy’s new bra gets him more apple sauce, what’s he gonna do?

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RUSH: Anna in Grand Junction, Colorado, I’m glad you waited. Great to have you here with us. Hi.

CALLER: Hello. Hey, I have a theory about why Millennial kids are able to hold their visitations, to limit or deny grandparents in this day and age to see the kids.

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: I’m a Baby Boomer myself. There were three kids in my family. I have two Millennials myself right now and can see the grandkids. But looking back at my parents and grandparents, they had, like, eight and nine and 12 kids in a family. Grandkids ran amok. They were everywhere. But I have friends now who all they’ve got are grand dogs sometimes. I’m babysitting the grand dog. So when you’re lucky enough to get a human grandkid and only one out of your one or two children that you had yourself, you feel like you’ve got to kowtow to the request of taking your Trump sign down —

RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why? Why, whether there’s 12 running around or two of them, why does having only two make you think you’ve gotta kowtow to their demands?

CALLER: Well, because there’s plenty of other grandkids to go around and spoil, let the other ones figure out what they’re missing when grandma and grandpa have got a passel full to watch and take care of already. I feel like having a limited number, like one, that grandparents are gonna do just about anything to see that one, whereas if they had eight or nine or —

RUSH: Okay. Okay. Okay. I finally – I’m a little thick headed here. With 12 grandkids, the odds are you’re gonna see more of them than you’ll even want to. Because the parents are gonna want to do everything they can to off-load ’em on you. But with only one or two grandkids, you’re gonna have to fight to get their attention or to even see them, ’cause mom and dad are not gonna be that eager to off-load them ’cause they’re not gonna be that big a hassle, at least not as big as hassle as 10 or 12 of them. Oh, gee, five or six. Okay. So that makes a little sense. I’m glad you called.