BRETT: Looking at the biggest applause line of Trump’s CPAC speech yesterday… There were many. There were huge, huge applause lines aplenty with the different topics and challenges that President Trump was placing out there for the audience on that Sunday afternoon speech. But it was most of all felt when he said the Republican Party is the party of love. Go ahead.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: The future of the Republican Party is as a party that defends the social, economic, and cultural interests and values of working American families of every race, color, and creed. That’s why the party is growing so rapidly and is becoming a different party. And it’s becoming a party of love. You have to see outside the streets. I mean, there’s such love. The flag. (cheers) Amazing.

BRETT: Now, for those of you who listen to Rush Limbaugh, who love Rush Limbaugh — who have been around this program, for many, many, many, many, many, many years — you know that Rush has been saying this for decades. Like this instance way back in 2007 talking about how much conservatives love people.

RUSH: The idea that Republicans are running around harboring or conservatives running around harboring all kinds of hate is disturbed. In fact, it’s just the opposite. We love people. We love our country. We want the country we love to be great, to be the best it can be.

We want it to maintain the greatness that we inherited when we were born in this country, and we conservatives know that for this country to remain the greatest collection of human beings in a free society in the history of human civilization, that we need great people, we need free people, we need people motivated and inspired to be the best they can be, to do that which their passion and desire leads them to.

We don’t look at people and say, “Ah, they can’t do it.” What, are you kidding? We don’t look at people with contempt. We don’t look at average people and say, “They can’t do it without my help.” Liberals do. Liberals look at people, and they have this contempt. All of the hatred and all of the bigotry — most of it that I see in this society — happens to come from people on the left.

It’s like an alternative universe. We want people to be self-sufficient. We want them to realize their potential. We want them to be able to share values with their families, children and grandchildren so that the whole thing is perpetuated. The left only wants to perpetuate their power over people in addition to control over people.

BRETT: Rush is so right there; so right, and I heard him say it so many times when I was sitting across the glass from him and down the line from him, the EIB Network. Progressives, liberals, they look at everything in life as a zero-sum game. One of the great feelings that I always had being around Rush on a day-to-day basis was the inspiration that you got, the feeling that you can go and do it.

All you have to do is just go do it. All you have to do is just go do it. Early on in my career, I decided that I was gonna drive around high-end neighborhoods and look at big houses and look at fancy cars — you know, wealthier neighborhoods, right? — and I always used that as motivating to work harder, to say, “Okay. I can work harder.

“I can build a better mousetrap. I can come up with something that’s going to be marketable and remunerated accordingly.” Now, there are people who will take their kids into those same neighborhoods and go, “Look at this. These are all rich people who got all their money stealing from poor people and the working class.”

The dirty little secret is with the zero-sum game is the fact that rich people don’t get rich by stealing money from poor people, ’cause poor people don’t have money, not in that regard. Rich people get rich because they start businesses, they create opportunities, they invest in businesses, they buy houses. They do things like that that appreciate.

But they don’t all start off rich. This is the great fallacy. So what happens with the zero-sum game is, you have to vilify wealthy people. You have to vilify successful people, have to say, “All those people that did these things? They all stole it. They all did it by sticking it to the little guy. That’s what they all did.

“We all know that. That’s how they do this sort of stuff.” That’s not the case. The very fact that we are born in the United States or have the opportunity to emigrate to the United States legally and to live here and to work here and to exist in this country, puts us ahead of 99.999% of any of the folks that have ever been born.

To be alive in this time with this opportunity is a remarkable act of a miracle taking place. We have never been more mobile. We have never been more able to reach out and connect with people. Think about the pandemic and what it did to our economy and think about — as President Trump said yesterday during his address — the fact that we built the economy back up.

Then we took the hit from the CCP virus, and then we had to build the economy back up again, and we did. We did. Millions of people, billions of people would give anything to get into United States. And a large, large percentage of those people would do anything to get into United States who work, to have the opportunity to toil in a market economy where they may come up with something that people then want to buy.

Have any doubts? Look at the Big Tech bosses before they were Big Tech bosses. Look at Steve Jobs, a person that Rush routinely talked about the importance of his contribution to society. The secret of Steve Jobs wasn’t just that he was a visionary. It wasn’t just that he was a visionary who understood that you could create something where people said, “Okay. I’m gonna create a need for the product I make, I’m offering out there.

“I’m not just creating a product. I’m gonna create a need for it so that people need it. They need the phone in their pocket. They need the tablet in their bag. They need to be able to do their work that way.” So what happens is, progressives, because they’re class warriors at their heart, they want to tear down rich people.

They want to tear down successful people. They want to tear down that group. They then think, “Well, conservatives hate everybody.” Conservatives do not hate everybody. Conservatives get excited and enthused when they talk to people who have big, grand ideas and plans. The very foundation of what America was are the values enshrined in a conservative message.

Striving, failing — picking yourself up, dusting yourself off — and going at it again. Going out and killing it every day, dragging it home and cooking it, whatever it is. But it’s about resilience. That’s what I think is the most important value, in addition to patriotism and love of country and respect of the Constitution, but it’s the resiliency of the American people.

Resiliency is native to your soul. It’s native to who you are. It’s native to who we are. You have to be taught to have a diminished expectation, as Rush has said thousands of times. You have to be taught to fail, to expect failure. You have to be taught to be demoralized. We take a small child, a child’s gonna be optimistic.

That child is gonna want to climb to the higher rung on the ladder, to climb to the higher rung on the slide in the park, to try to go run further and further away from mom and dad. That’s the yearning of freedom living in real time. So this idea that conservatives sit around and they want to stick it to poor people, they want to stick it to people?

That is the absolute, 100% opposite reality. The more people that do well, the better we all do. Going to be that neighborhood you was talking about where you drive through with the fancy houses and you take a look around at what’s out there and you say to yours, “Well, these people didn’t get successful stealing from the poor.

“They came up with something people wanted to purchase,” and it’s doing that that they realize that we all have that opportunity. We may not have the same outcome, but we have that opportunity and the idea that people are free to do that is the ultimate expression of love.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: One of the top issues — and this was according to the straw poll. I think it was Issue 1 or 2 — I think it was Issue 1, though — is the idea of election integrity, safeguards. Protecting our elections is a vitally important thing, and it’s obviously been a topic of conversation between November the 3rd and even before that.

Before that you had a large number of local and state officials deciding they were going to single-handedly or in a collection change the way we were voting in a number of different states. Well, President Trump, former President Trump gets there on the stage last night, and he’s talking about the importance of election integrity. Here’s what he said about that.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: We need election integrity and election reform immediately. Republicans should be the party of honest elections that can give you everyone confidence in the future of our country. Without honest elections, who has confidence? Who has confidence?

BRETT: “Who has confidence?” Now, look, this is something that Rush has mentioned and does mention every election cycle — although this past year with COVID restrictions, it became even more problematic — the introduction of mail-in voting. Rush often said the end goal was to completely eliminate elections.

But he also said that we need to be hypervigilant. Because many people have bought into the Democrat ideology, especially with all the indoctrination going on in schools. But let’s revisit that sentiment from Rush Limbaugh on the idea of election integrity.

RUSH: We have a serious problem here. But the idea that the American people didn’t know what they were doing and in two years are gonna be running to the ballot box to reverse their decision because they had no idea they were electing a bunch of communists, what do you think just happened in Georgia?

“We’re gonna sweep ’em in 2022, baby. That’s right.” I mean, why didn’t we sweep ’em in Georgia last week? Georgia’s been a red state for I don’t know how long. What the hell happened? “Oh, we’ll get ’em in 2022, Rush, you’ll see.” Folks, remember my admonition, the Democrats, if they could, if they could, would eliminate elections? What if they effectively have? I mean, we still have them, but what if they’re irrelevant?

The only thing — you ask me, what can the American people do — wake the hell up, those who haven’t. And understand what we’re up against, because I still think we have the ability to outnumber these people. I still think we do. But I think we’ve got way too much — I don’t know — blindness or ignorance, and perhaps it’s worse than that. Maybe people have gone over to the Democrat Party side knowingly and purposely ’cause they believe in it. Who the hell knows!

BRETT: I oftentimes think back to Rush talking about his adopted hometown of Sacramento, California, right? Remember? He would talk about that all the time. And in California you’re talking about a primo, primo example of what happens when you end up with essentially one-party rule. You end up with complete top-to-bottom control of Democrats in the state.

In fact, you can add up independents, and you can add up Republicans, and you still don’t come up anywhere near where you need to be with Democrats in the state. And yet it’s interesting because to look at a state like, say, California, you learn something about California very quickly. And that is (chuckling) that there were more Trump voters in California than in any other State of the Union.

Think about that, right? It’s California. What do you mean? Well, it’s a huge state. It’s a massive state. It’s a state that I left, that I left for the Carolinas in February of 2020. And I’m gonna share with you a very quick story about this because it’s important. It’s the sort of thing we’re talking about in terms of shenanigans.

When I left the state of California and I moved to my new state, I had to register my vehicle. I registered my vehicle and I had to take a proof of the registration and send it back to the state of California to inform them at the DMV that my vehicle was no longer in the state of California.

I went round and round with them with letters and phone calls and finally they acknowledged the fact that the vehicle was no longer in the state of California; it was with me out in the Carolinas. So in October, I received a ballot mailed to my address in the Carolina I live in.

That ballot showed up addressed to my home address from the California Department of Motor Vehicle’s database. It had to have come from there. It was the only database that possibly would have had my new address — and it was a mail-in ballot to vote in San Diego, California. So they mailed me a ballot in a state not California for me to vote in an election in San Diego.

They obviously pulled the information from the database of the DMV, which meant everything was just automated. Everything was just shot out to whatever address they could get it to — and because I had updated my address ’cause I had to show proof that I had removed my vehicle from the state, it went to my new address printed out.

It wasn’t forwarded. It was printed out right there, boom, on the envelope. And it was an incredible thing. But now think about that magnified across all the states that were doing this and across the state of California, which also happens to have millions of people who were carrying driver’s licenses that are not authorized to vote.

How many of them might have gotten ballots? Probably a fair number. When you just go to mass-mailout ballots, you’re asking for trouble. It’s terrible to think that that’s how you’re gonna run the most sacred obligation you have in a constitutional republic, and that is the voting franchise.

We’re just gonna shotgun ballots out? Could you imagine a credit card company or some other provider like that, sending out blank checks to every address in the state and saying, “Hey, if you’re eligible for this offer, go ahead and deposit the check.” The company would go bankrupt. The problem with the franchise of voting being treated in this way is that every vote that’s not authorized…

Every vote that’s not a legal vote devalues the votes that have been submitted by that factor — by a vote, by 10 votes, by a hundred votes, by a thousand votes. It’s not in any way, shape, or form beyond the pale of consideration to look at this and say, “Ah, you know, it’s just one here and one there.” You hear this all the time.

You hear this all the time whenever you see people like Jim Acosta at CNN get asked, “Well, what do you think about voter fraud? Do you think there’s voter fraud?” “Well, some happened, but it’s not enough to sway the election.” Okay. None should happen. We ought to be aiming for none. You want to get down to zero COVID cases?

We ought to be getting down to zero fraudulent votes that have been cast. We ought to ensure we have election integrity. Maybe we gotta use block chains so that everybody can verify who it is that they are when they’re voting at the time and we’re not mailing ballots to people randomly.

I know. It’s an old-fashioned notion, the idea of a secure election. But it’s one that we have got to hold onto, because if we do not hold on to this notion, we will lose our republic. And that’s not something I want to give up on. And I know that’s not something that you want to give up on, either.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: You know, Republicans for a long time, they were sort of the treated like lovable losers by the Democrats, right? You had this reality that set in that, “Oh, well, the Republicans they’re gonna run as moderates and they’re gonna be moderate and everything’s gonna be great and it’s gonna be fine, ’cause we’ll all get together.

“We’ll all be John McCain. We’ll all be these folks. We’re gonna play the game and get along.” Certainly, you heard former President Trump equal out these squishes last night during the speech at CPAC. No doubt you heard that, but Rush spoke about the Republican loser mentality back on May 9th of 2017, and it’s well worth remembering what Rush was talking about then.

RUSH: It is a phenomenon. The Republicans win and they almost sometimes act ashamed of it or guilty of it. Here’s one explanation, and I think it’s got some validity to it. It doesn’t explain it all, and it’s an analogy. The Republicans… Let’s look at the House of Representatives.

For 40 years prior to 1994… So you’d have to go back to 1954. From 1954 to 1994, the Democrat Party controlled the House of Representatives. The Republicans won with Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America in the ’94 campaign. One of my theories is that after 40 years of losing — and, believe me, they weren’t just defeated. In some cases, the Republicans barely were able to scratch 130 members together out of 435 in the House. They were mincemeat.

The Democrats, in many sessions of Congress, didn’t even let them into meetings. The Democrats said, “Look, why are you even showing up? You can’t stop us. We don’t care what you have to think. Go play golf.” The leader of the Republicans for many of these years, not all, was a guy named Bob Michel. He was the ranking Republican in the House. He was from Illinois, Peoria. He, after a while, seemed to be satisfied with being the ranking Republican. He was the leader of the losers.

It had its power base. It had its prestige. He was the leader. You could not say that they were the minority because of him, because he was from Peoria. He never ran nationally. So the Republicans began to accept that they were losers. They began to accept that. Forty years of it, for crying out loud — and then one day, they won. I know this is going back to nineties.

After 40 years of being not just a loser, but an invisible, made fun of, not even taken serious loser, and the next day you’re the winner? Psychologically, how do you make that transition? How do you go from being irrelevant, laughed at, and mocked to overnight becoming the center of power. When you have no experience with it; you never expected that it would happen. And, like, I spoke to the freshman class in 1994. I was made an honorary member of that class, and they had their orientation at Camden Yards.

I went and spoke to ’em, and I said, “Here’s what you people have got to remember.” Remember, now, this was the freshman orientation. It was not the whole House. It was just the freshman class. It was like 56 of ’em, I think. It was a huge number of ’em. I said, “You’ve got to remember, the media is not going to start treating you as winners. They’re not gonna start treating you as the people running the show.

“They’re going to be angry at you that you had the audacity to win, and they’re always gonna be going to Democrats for reaction to what you’re doing. You’re not gonna get a fair shake. They don’t like you. They resent you winning. They’re not gonna treat you as winners. Do not fall for any of these female reporters batting their eyes, wanting to do profiles. All they want to do is get the Democrats back in power.”

There was a press contingent, and a couple of female reporters — one from the Washington Post and one from the New York Times — came up to me after my speech, “Do you really mean all that BS you just said?” “Hell, yes, I meant it!” I’d already taken my seat back at the table. “Do you really mean that?” “Hell, yes, I mean it! I just hope they heard it! ‘Cause it was damn well true.”

BRETT: It was true. He was a hundred percent right — and isn’t that interesting to take a look at the incoming that President Trump took beginning in 2017 in an unrelenting series of assaults going at President Trump for four years. It was Russia; it was this; it was Flynn; it was that; it was your tone. “Your tone is ugly! Your tone does he work.”

And what is that aimed at? That was aimed added getting President Trump to change his style. He didn’t change it. That is aimed at getting the allies of the president in the House, in the Senate to change their style, to try to shame them. The reality is — and this has to get repeated time and time again. This clip from Rush ought to be on constant repeat for people who are looking to run for office.

Because when you get there, they’re not gonna recognize you. They’re not gonna say, “You’re legit.” They’re gonna say, “It was illegitimate! It wasn’t right. It was an anomaly. You tricked the people. You did some other kind of chicanery.” That’s what they’re going to do. “You’re not a legitimate representative of the American people,” all that stuff.

You have to look way past that and say, “You know what? I got power. Let’s go. I got power; we’re gonna make the change.” President Trump said that last night. He said, “Look, take the power, make the change, and let’s go.” That’s what he was going to do. That’s what he did. And that’s important to remember. Winning has to become a mind-set that you work every single day. If you give an inch to the swamp, you’re gonna get swamped.