RUSH: So yesterday on this program I’m minding my own business, I literally was minding my own business. I was executing assigned host duties flawlessly. I had yet to make a mistake, and then out of the blue I get a question from the program observer, the Official Program Observer, Mr. Snerdley. And the question that I got from Mr. Snerdley was, “Are we ever gonna be able to win again?” And I didn’t know what he meant by that. He said, “Well, are we ever gonna win Pennsylvania, are we ever gonna win some of these blue places?”

And I said, “I thought you meant, are we gonna win the culture back, are we going to become dominant and beat back the left and the cultural rot that they bring us.” And that’s when I said, just trying to answer a question — I get asked questions, and I have this fatal flaw, I actually try to answer them. And most people don’t. Most people evade, they get into doublespeak. I answer the questions I’m asked. So Snerdley says, “Do you ever think we’re gonna win?” And I said, “I actually think –” and I’ve referenced this, I have alluded to this a couple times because I’ve seen others allude to this. And I’ve seen quite a few people allude to this over the course of the recent months, maybe six months. I said, “I think we could be trending toward secession.”

Now, that’s not the answer Mr. Snerdley thought he was gonna get. I said, “I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with people that disagree with us? Where’s the overlap?” And you know that I’ve referenced this. How many times have I asked you, what is the overlap? What is it that people on the left, people on the right, is there an overlap? Is there anything we have in common? And it doesn’t look like there is.

How can Make America Great Again be controversial? The fact that Make America Great Again is controversial and riles people up should tell you all you need to know about how much we have in common. And then I mentioned that I have seen, I don’t know how many people, responsible people — I haven’t named any names here, but they’re certainly not hiding behind their comments. I’ve seen it written on Twitter. I’ve seen it written on various blogs — Hot Air, Power Line — how distant and separated, how much more separated our culture is becoming politically.

And I’ve seen people speculate that there cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. That we can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way. And then I reiterated that I know that there’s a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that we’re headed, whether we want to get there or not, secession.

Now, I didn’t advocate for it. I never would advocate for secession. I’m simply repeating what I have heard. Well now that has gone viral, apparently. It has gone viral that I’m advocating for secession. And I want to read something to you here from Frieda Powers. She’s writing at BizPac Review. It’s just a little paragraph. It’s all on this that I just shared with you.

She says, “Though Limbaugh clearly stated he thinks the nation is ‘trending toward secession’ and was not advocating for a split, the left jumped on the remarks to bash him for everything from ‘sedition’ to ‘treason.’ Talk of ‘civil war’ found its way onto Twitter where the phrase was trending, mainly triggered by the ongoing-election battle, but also many on the social media platform accused Limbaugh of saying something he didn’t.”

That is the key. I have been accused — and this is nothing new, either — I’ve been accused of saying something I didn’t say. In this case, I have not, did not, and would not advocate for secession. You people know what I’m about. How many times have I said it? The objective here is a gigantic army of informed voters who win elections, that we have to have political victory, that we have to beat them back politically at the ballot box.

That’s been my entire reason for being here and in the process informing and educating people about what liberalism is and what communism is, and what socialism is so they’ll be properly informed and be able to reject it, which is crucially important right now because more and more people are signing on to it, more and more people think socialism is great, we just haven’t tried it right, done the right people, haven’t had enough money behind it, and all of that.

So, if any of you have been caught up in all this, if you get in a Twitter war and this and that and the other thing, I simply referenced what I have seen other people say about how we are incompatible as currently divided and that secession is something that people are speculating about. I am not advocating it, have not advocated it, never have advocated it, and probably wouldn’t.

In 32 years, that’s not the way I’ve decided to go about handling disagreements with people on the left. I just think they need to be beaten. They need to be defeated. How many times over and over, they need to be defeated? And in more than one election. So, anyway, that’s that. I wanted to get that out of the way and clear it up for anybody who is under any kind of a misunderstanding.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’re having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have here, despite the fact that people on the left for 30 years continue to make things up about me. They continue to put words in my mouth that were never there, that I never said.

I just got a note from my brother. “I’d love to clock these people.” Yeah, we all would, but how do we stop it? This is a case in point. You can’t stop it. There’s no way you can stop it. All you can do, in my case we got the archives to go back and prove them wrong. The real reason this is a big deal is because it’s right here in this headline, at BizPac Review, and there’s all kinds of stories on this. “Rush Limbaugh Hits A Nerve, Believes America Is Likely Heading ‘Toward Secession.'”

Never advocated for it, never promoted it, never said that I think it’s a good thing, never got close to that. Yet that’s what’s all over social media, that I’m leading the movement for it, that I’m in charge of it, that I think it ought to happen and I want to knock the left’s heads all over the country, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it hit a nerve. Why did it hit a nerve? What is it about this that hits a nerve? Mr. Snerdley, why did this hit a nerve? (interruption) Hm-hm. (interruption) That’s exactly right. Because there is a deep division in this country that nobody has a solution for. Nobody has a solution for it.

It’s really no more complicated than this. How do we go about growing our ranks? How do we do it? Those of us on the right, we try to persuade, do we not? We enter into discussions, call them debates, if you will. But throughout the year, even years that there are not elections, we are constantly attempting, like on this program and Fox News and elsewhere, to articulate the superiority of what we believe, ’cause we believe it’s the best for the most.

We believe conservatism, economically, is the best for the most. We believe that conservatism, culturally, is by far the best for the most. But we’re not bullies. We don’t force it on anybody. We’re not intolerant. We do not tell people who disagree with us to shut up. We don’t burn down their businesses. We don’t riot or loot their businesses. We don’t shoot them. We don’t go out and get in their faces, destroy their property, and tell ’em they have to agree with us or else. We don’t tell them they can’t come to various universities and go to school there.

No. We engage in the arena of ideas. It’s where we’ve always been. We engage in the arena of ideas, and we do it in the hopes that we, with consistency and time, will persuade millions of people to join us, to see it our way. Without the use of force, without the power of government behind us, without making any kind of demands, we simply articulate what we believe to be the best, and we come up with ways we hope are pervasive that will cause people to agree with us.

President Trump has had amazing success with this. If you look at his election returns in the 2020 election, look at the support he got from African-Americans. Look at the support he got from Hispanics. He even got an uptick in support from women in certain parts of the country. How’d this happen? Well, he was out doing campaign rallies up to five times a day. And people were watching.

He also, in addition to what he was saying in terms of being persuasive, he had a record. He was actually implementing policies very favorable to those groups. They were made aware of it. So this was, for lack of a better term, this was the art of persuasion. This is how we go about growing our ranks. Now, a lot of people on our side are getting very impatient with this, by the way. They think it’s too slow, that it’s too inefficient, it’s not succeeding with enough people.

How does the left go about it? We’re trying to find areas of commonality here. So how does the left go about growing their ranks? Well, the one thing they don’t do, they don’t enter the arena of ideas with the intention of winning debates or with the intention of persuading people that their view is right. What do they do? They enter the arena of ideas as bullies. And their primary objective is to silence us, not debate us, not to prove that their beliefs are superior. ‘Cause they’re not, and they can’t.

So they bully people into submission. They frighten people. They are intimidating people. At the ballot box, no matter where you go, the left is there to scare you and to frighten you to try to intimidate you into shutting up. They resent the idea that they even have to win elections. They resent the idea that they have to even play in the arena of ideas. That, to them, is something that’s beneath them. So there’s nothing in common about how we even seek to grow our ranks. They’re not interested in being right. They’re not interested in prevailing in any kind of debate. They just want to use force and intimidation and bullying tactics to get people who disagree with them to shut up, to not stand up for what they believe. That’s how they go about it.

So, in these two scenarios, tell me where we have anything in common, other than the objective? But I would say even the objective could be iffy. The left is not really trying to grow its ranks. They don’t think they should have to. The left is interested in ruling. Whether they’re 10% of the population or whether they’re 40%, they want to rule. And they will go about achieving that however they can. But it’s not about entering the arena of ideas to persuade people to join them. If it happens, it’s icing on the cake. But where is there anything in common there, folks? I don’t see it. And that’s just one little area. There’s all kinds of — go issue by issue, go policy by policy, ask yourself what we have in common, and you will not find much overlap.

It used to not be the case. It used to be that, you know, you go back to the forties, World War II, even the sixties with Vietnam, there was something, there was at least something that if America was attacked we came together. That may not be the case now. And that’s why there are people who I hear talking about secession as a natural outgrowth of the rift and the partisanship and the distancing that is occurring between the various ideological theories that are governing American politics today. No more complicated than that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: “Many on the social media platform accused Limbaugh of saying something he didn’t.” That could be something that is one of these things that’s always attached to you as you go through life. “Saying something he didn’t. Limbaugh accused. Limbaugh attacked. Limbaugh attempted to be destroyed by saying something he didn’t.”