RUSH: Bill Gates was on CNN recently with Jake Tapper. The topic was the pandemic, and Bill Gates spoke about how bad the winter wave of the coronavirus outbreak is gonna be and basically said that we need to shut down bars and restaurants. It just needs to happen, and we need to shut ’em down for six months minimum.

So here we have a billionaire telling a reporter at CNN that we need to keep closing down businesses, and nobody says anything. Nobody challenges it. Nobody disagrees. Nobody. Why are we listening to Bill Gates? What in the world has Gates done? Where is his expertise on this? You know, Bill Gates could withstand being shut down for 10 years. But these bars and restaurants, these owners can’t do this! They’d be destroyed. They’d be wiped out.

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RUSH: Which takes me back to this Bill Gates story. Bill Gates was on CNN with Jake Tapper. They were talking about the coronavirus pandemic. Let me get the actual sound bite, the transcripts up. All right. Here we go. This is I guess it’s Sunday morning, State of the Union is the show, Jake Tapper’s the host, talking to Bill Gates about the pandemic. And Tapper says, “There are a lot of governors who oppose bringing back these lockdown orders and forcing businesses to close. What do you think?”

GATES: Bars and restaurants in most of the country will be closed as we go into this wave. And I think, sadly, that’s appropriate. The next four to six months really call on us to do our best because we can see that this will end, and you don’t want, you know, somebody you love to be the last to die of coronavirus.

RUSH: All right. Okay. So we have a billionaire here. As far as you know that’s his only qualification. I don’t know what Bill Gates’ qualification is to determine when we have lockdowns, who gets locked down, for how long do they get locked down. Where is his level of expertise? And where is somebody on this show challenging this? He just gets to run around and say whatever he wants and nobody challenges this. And what is he saying? He says we need to keep closing down businesses.

So when did Gates become the expert in this? Why should anybody be taking advice from him? I know he donates a lot of money. I know he’s got this foundation where he does mosquito nets in Africa and so forth, does a lot of things like that, but I’m reading some bloggers here, the bloggers have checked into him. He’s not a doctor, and Gates is not a researcher. He’s not a professor in any medical field at all. Yet CNN and a bunch of other news networks very often ask for his opinion on health care issues.

But he’s not a medical expert. And they never question his reasoning. He just gets to pontificate and it’s because he’s a billionaire. (interruption) That’s right. It was Neil Cavuto. It was Cavuto who accused Trump of killing people by suggesting hydroxychloroquine. Neil Cavuto. That’s exactly right. I appreciate the reminder.

Anyway here you have Bill Gates all over CNN. Nobody challenging what he says. But Gates is out there ripping into Trump’s executive order that brings his America First stance to coronavirus vaccine distribution. Tapper then asks Gates, “When we gonna get back to a normal life?” The next sound bite here. Tapper says, “President Trump signed an executive order he says prioritizes distribution of the vaccine before it goes to people in other countries. What do you think of that strategy?”

GATES: I think we need to help all of humanity here. The U.S. is benefited from other countries’ work here, and we shouldn’t be entirely selfish in how we go forward. The extreme idea that everybody should die until we have the very last American vaccinated, that’s hardly the appropriate response.

RUSH: Good grief. Nobody is saying this. Nobody is saying that everybody in the world should die so that every last American gets vaccinated. Folks, this is classic. This is a classic illustration of people who are offended by the idea of America First or Make America Great Again. Gates is a globalist, and he believes that the United States is not the good guys. The United States trends toward being the problem.

So here he is suggesting that somebody out there in this world wants to make sure every American’s vaccinated first and the hell with the rest of the world, the hell with the rest of the world, and if some people die so that all Americans may get the vaccine and to hell with — That’s not at all on anybody’s list. It’s not a suggestion that anybody has, and it’s not who we as Americans are. As we have demonstrated over and over again time and time again. When natural disasters have hit, we’re the first on the scene of all nations in the world.

Now, Tapper asked Gates when he thinks we’ll be able to get back to some form of normal life. Gates predicts late summer, late summer we’re gonna get back to normal life. Well, how about the bar and restaurant owners that Gates wants to shut down for six more months? How in the world are they ever going to be able to reopen? They are going to be wiped out. They cannot withstand a six-month shutdown or a six-month lockdown.

These are small business owners. Restaurants and bars are small businesses. They’re never gonna be able to get back to a quote unquote normal life if they are shut down for six months like Bill Gates wants to shut them down. How are they gonna pay the mortgages on their businesses? How are they gonna pay the mortgages on their homes? Now, billionaires don’t have these concerns. Billionaires are not worried about mortgage payments and other bills that have to be paid.

These people that own these bars and restaurants, they just want to stay open, they want their employees working, they do not want six months of a shutdown or lockdown. Gates said the next four to six months really call on us to do our best because we can see that this will end, and you don’t want somebody that you love to be the last to die from coronavirus. Gates actually said, you know, early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccination rates in our country the risk of reintroduction will be there and, of course, the global economy will be slowed down which hurts America economically in a pretty dramatic way.

This is obviously somebody out of touch. I know it’s an accusatory thing to say because, you know, we kind of celebrate billionaires in America. Well, some of us do. Some people equate being a billionaire with being brilliant. And that’s not necessarily the case at all. But, I mean, Bill Gates says more shutdowns needed, six months shutdown, bars and restaurants. That’s the last thing that’s needed. That is the last thing that’s gonna be helpful. Shutdowns don’t advance anything. They just delay the inevitable.

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RUSH: By the way, one more thing on Bill Gates. Ted Cruz makes a really great point. He said that all of the government class — and by that we mean the government employees, political appointees, everybody in the cabinet-level departments. Virtually every government job, every person in a government job is getting paid through these shutdowns. Did you know that?

They tell a bar or restaurant, “We’re locking you down, buddy. You’re killing the country. You’re spreading the virus. You’re spreading disease. So we’re gonna shut you down for six months. We’re gonna wipe you out. We’re gonna put you out of business.” Everybody working for the government gets paid through these shutdowns and lockdowns. All of the teachers are being paid, whether or not there are classes.

All of the Democrat governors with their states shut down, they are getting paid. It is so easy for these people to shut us down as they pay absolutely no price for it. Their lives are unchanged. Same thing with Bill Gates. Bill Gates can stand there and suggest that every bar and restaurant needs to be shut down for six months, and it’s no skin off his back.

Gates thinks it will be next summer before the U.S. is close to returning to normal. “So at what point are the rest of us going to tire of billionaires — whose lives are completely unaffected by lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, and all the rest — telling us good little proles that we just have to wait a few more months?”

That’s former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. Ted Cruz said, “Leftists: a millionaire & a billionaire discuss how they think its ‘appropriate’ to destroy & bankrupt small businesses across America. Tell you what…halt ALL salaries at CNN & Microsoft, stop paying Dem politicians & then let’s see if they think TWO MORE YEARS shutdown is OK.”

That’s Ted Cruz. Hey, if we’re gonna shut down, let’s shut it down. If we’re gonna shut down bars and restaurants, who’ve done nothing here, then let’s shut down CNN. Let’s just do the equivalent of shutting ’em down. Let’s just cancel their salaries. Let’s just cancel every payment they get for working. Same thing at Microsoft. Let’s see how they feel about it. It’s a great response from Ted Cruz.

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RUSH: So I thought that I would do a keyword search. You know, after I saw the Bill Gates interview… Well, I have the audio sound bite. I didn’t actually watch CNN. I didn’t actually watch it. I heard that Gates had appeared with Jake Tapper (a little Joe Biden impersonation there), and here’s Gates advocating that we shut down bars and restaurants for six months.

Folks, I can’t tell you how this irritates me. To try to explain it, I want to go back to March and April when we had the first nationwide shutdown that was put in place by President Trump, because remember they had these computer model projections of two million dead if we did nothing. So they succeeded in getting Trump to shut down the country.

So because of the necessity of seeking treatment, I’m traveling around, and I’m looking at the results of this. I’m seeing a boarded-up country, and I remember coming to the program every day after I had seen this and almost breaking down in tears telling you what I had seen and how it was affecting me. I looked at these shut-down businesses — I don’t care what they were, how large or small — and I saw a lifetime dream being destroyed.

I saw people who had invested who knows how much money. It was just vanishing. It just irritated the heck out of me. “This is not who we are,” I was saying to myself. “We do not run away from things like this. We’ve never shut down the country for a pandemic. We’ve never shut down the country for any reason at all,” and yet here we were — and once it started it was gonna be impossible to put it back together rapidly.

We’re shut down for a month. It went longer than that, two or three months. I’m driving around, I’m looking at this, and it just… It personally was ripping my heart out, and I became an advocate on this program for reopening the country, because it was so unnecessary. We were literally destroying people’s livelihoods, not to mention the amount of debt that we were going into by paying everybody to stay home.

We were paying everybody to shut down for a while. So we’re making it easy for these people. They weren’t actually seeing their dreams vanish yet. So now we’re approaching $30 trillion in debt. It’s just mind-boggling. So here comes Gates, and apparently that wasn’t enough for him. So Gates is demanding that bars and restaurants be shut down for another six months, because we don’t have any hope of normalizing until late 2021 or 2022.

Now, I do not know how Gates is an authority on this, but he apparently is because people treat him as one. So I did this keyword search on bars and restaurants, and I found a fascinating story here from Newsweek. Let’s see… The date here is… I don’t have the date. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Why, it’s just four days ago! (Gasp!) Imagine that. Let me ask you this.

What percentage of new COVID-19 cases in New York do you think are attributable to restaurants and bars? Because these entities are being held up almost as an enemy. When Gates and the rest of these — like Cuomo and the rest of these — people come along and point fingers at bars and restaurants, saying, “You need to shut down!” Well, here is the number. “Restaurants and bars account for less than 2% of new COVID-19 cases in New York.”

It’s 2%, and this is who we’re focusing on? This is who we’re trying to portray as the enemy? Because that’s what this is. “Bars and restaurants, you guys, you gotta shut down ’cause that’s where people gather. That’s where people get together and they don’t wear masks and all.” And despite all of that, “less than 2% of new COVID-19 cases in New York are accounted for by bars and restaurants.

“During a press briefing on Friday, the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that private gatherings account for the vast majority of new statewide cases while less than 2% are coming from bars and restaurants.” The bars and restaurants are being told that they are high risk areas for the virus to spread, yet they accounted for only 1.4% of new cases in New York.

How can this be? So (sigh), once again, we’re being fed a bunch of misinformation. We are being fed a bunch of false enemies and false targets. For what purpose? Why in the world target bars and restaurants? What in the world could Gates’ purpose be?

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RUSH: Here’s John, Eastern Shore in Maryland. Welcome, sir. Glad you waited. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. My prayers go out to you and these days I’m not a very prayful man, but I do pray for you, sir.

RUSH: I thank you very much.

CALLER: My point is this. We have mayors and governors across this country either closing or limiting the hours of bars and restaurants all in the name of science. Where is the science? Where are they getting this science from that says it’s gonna do anything at all?

RUSH: I don’t think it’s about science. I think it’s about destroying capitalism. You can’t get more capitalist than American small business, can you? I mean, that’s the essence of capitalism. The vast majority of jobs in this country are produced by small business, not major, big time corporations. And if you go after the small businesses, if you succeed in shutting them down, then you can bring about the changeover to socialism.

By blaming these bars and restaurants, by blaming American small business for the problems that we’re having with COVID-19, if you succeed in convincing enough Americans that these small businesses are the problem, then you shut them down, you blame small business as it is, that can then be said to be capitalism is the problem, and then the solution will be government. Government will come in and fix whatever happens. Government will make the owners of these businesses whole, we’ll do something, we’ll protect ’em.

But I think the objective here is not science, and it’s not to somehow save people from getting COVID-19. It’s not to stop the spread. It is about promoting globalism and getting rid of American capitalism. This is the obstacle that Donald Trump was. Trump, his campaign, Make America Great Again, was purely rooted in American capitalism. Revitalizing America, bringing jobs back that had been lost because of globalism, and he succeeded in doing it. I mean, more than anybody ever dreamed of.

So now that they think they have gotten rid of Trump, now it’s time to get rid of Trumpism. That means get rid of small business, get rid of capitalism, and get back to the direction we were going under Barack Obama. We were headed toward globalism. By the way, I mentioned Brexit earlier in a brief comment. Look at how long ago Brexit was voted on by the British people. How many years is it? And they still haven’t done it. They still haven’t exited the European Union.

So it’s the same situation here. The Trump four years was rooted in reestablishing America as a singular nation that is the good guy in the world, that American greatness is good for everybody, that America achieving greatness is good for everybody in the world. But this runs counter to what the Washington establishment seeks. In Britain they were able and continue to be able to delay implementing the Brexit vote for at least four years, and they’re gonna succeed probably, and we’ll see how long it takes if they ever do succeed in actually exiting the European Union.

And now look. This is something I think — yes, I did — I predicted this shortly before the election. Trump’s economic miracles are being diminished. All of Trump’s economic successes, all of his economic recovery, all of it is being diminished now by revisionists on the left. Here’s a tweet from John Harwood: “Alone among the 13 presidents since World War Two, Trump will exit the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he started. He will have overseen punier growth in economic output than any of the previous 12.”

Now, this is an out-and-out lie. But this is exactly — they’re gonna end up giving Biden credit for the vaccine. They’re gonna give Biden credit for reviving the U.S. economy. If you go back to the three and a half years of the Trump term before the virus hit, the economic output of this country was at a record high, and it was continuing to grow, and it was all Trump. And now here comes the effort to say, “Yeah, but Trump’s legacy is what happened after the virus hit. The virus is Trump’s fault, and now look. Trump will leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he started. He will have overseen punier growth in economic output than any of the previous 12.”

Now, thinking people understand what the pandemic did to economies all over the world. But here comes the effort to say Trump was a disaster, Trump didn’t accomplish anything. And it was so predictable this was gonna happen. They’re just now beginning it.