KEN: One of the problems we have is not just the news media, but the public education system. You may remember two months ago Harold Ford, a former U.S. congressman, a guest on Fox News, in the background when he was giving commentary, over his fireplace, in his home, was a picture of Mao. Not a peep about it in the news media for the most part.

So we need to spend some time explaining to our young people what makes America great and why we must protect it.

RUSH: Okay. Folks, let me get (for me on a Friday) a little serious here for a moment. I’ve had conversations in recent days, weeks, with liberals. Every time I mention this to you, I get, “Why are you hanging around them?” Well, you can’t avoid ’em, and I’m not afraid of them. I like engaging them sometimes, because these people, many of them are just following a script.

They’ve got their template, their narrative, and life is very compartmentalized and if something doesn’t fit the little cocoon that they’ve woven for themselves to live in… If you can penetrate that cocoon, you can blow ’em up, you can cause them all kinds of problems. The mind starts working. So I asked them a question.

I said, “Have you ever stopped and asked yourself — because you guys, you’re so mad at this country, you think the world hates this country, and you think this country is so corrupt — have you ever stopped and asked yourself this question: How, in less than 250 years, has the American population built the most prosperous, the most powerful, the most advanced civilization ever?”

The Europeans have been around thousands of years longer than we have — the Asians much longer than that — and yet we run rings around every one of them, and everybody else, too. It’s not even close. It’s not a contest in any way that you want to measure. “So how can it be,” I asked them, “that less than 300 million Americans can rule the world as it never has been ruled before, in less than 250 years of existence?

“Have you ever really stopped to ask yourself this question?” They think that the world hates us, which is not true. They buy totally into the media and Democrat Party Drive-By template. I kept telling them, “I’m not arguing with you. I’m asking for your opinion. I want you to think about something. I’m not trying to be confrontational.” They think everything is confrontational.

So I stated it again. I said, “The rest of the world, all of it, has been around — for crying out loud, in terms of nation states — thousands of years much longer than we have. The United States is less than 300 years old.” It took me five times. ‘the United States is less than 300 years old. No population of people in any country has ever approached our economic prosperity in wealth, our power.

No nation in the history of civilization has so dominated the world for good, as has the United States of America. We have liberated over a hundred million people from bondage and slavery. We feed the world. We clothe the world. We provide disaster relief in all circumstances to friend and foe alike. We’re the only nation on earth that can.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how in human history this came about? What makes this possible? So I finally got an answer, and the answer was, “Well, I think we were founded on principles that are based on freedom and enlightenment, for one thing.” I said, “Hot damn! Progress!” I was stunned. I did not think… You know what I thought?

I thought if we started talking about the founding, I thought we were going to get stories about how our founders were a bunch of racists, slave-owners, atheists, and agnostics and so forth. I thought I’d get the usual PC, multicultural tripe that is being taught out there now, but I did not. And then the liberal I was talking to said, “Well, but the principles of this country are greater than the men that wrote them down.”

I said, “Whew. Okay, we’re getting close now to what I originally thought.” So I was getting a little bit depressed now. I got an answer that was fairly close to being accurate, but then the answer had to be qualified by saying that the people who wrote the principles down, eh, not that big a deal. So I said, “Really? It’s interesting that you say that.”

I said, “You know, what happened in Philadelphia in 1776 was a miracle. Divine inspiration had to have been there. The principles may be bigger than the men who wrote ’em down, but they did write them, and they were not racists, and they were not bigots, and whatever else the PC crowd teaches today.” I then further pointed out — and this is when I started taking giant strides.

I said, “Our founding principles, which you just proclaimed great, were not ‘liberal,’ as defined by today’s liberalism. Today’s liberals are not tolerant. They are not interested in freedom. They do not believe in God. They want God out of as much of our culture as possible.” “Well, God wasn’t part of the founding of this country!” I started getting a knee-jerk reaction.

I said, “Really? Have you read the Declaration of Independence? “One nation under God…Creator. Heard the Pledge of Allegiance? Clearly the founders of this country believed in God and believed that we were all created and that we were all created equal. ‘Certain unalienable rights, among them, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.’ Life, liberty, pursuit, these words mean things.

“You say that the principles are bigger than the people that wrote ’em down, but it took people to write them down. Where did they get the inspiration? Where did they get the intelligence? They were great people that put this country together, a country that stood the test of time like no other country in the history of civilization. Today’s liberals are none of the Founding Fathers. Today’s liberals are not capitalists as constituted today. They are socialists.”

“Well, I agree with you about some of this stuff.”

“Well, you should agree with me about all of it, because I’m right, and the future of our country depends on maintaining the institutions and traditions that built this country, and in order to preserve these traditions and institutions, we’ve got to understand their origin. We must admit and be honest about what they are. Today’s liberals do, and they are trying to tear them down.

Today’s liberals want to tear down these traditions and institutions and then remake the country in their own image. So the liberals that I was talking to started talking about Republicans and Democrats. I said, “Will you forget Republicans and Democrats for a second? Who said anything about Republicans and Democrats? You people have got to stop acting knee-jerk!

“You gotta start listening to what I’m saying and reacting to that. I’m talking about conservatives and liberals; I’m talking about traditionalists versus secularists. I’m talking about people who hate the way America is today, versus people who love it and want to preserve it. You gotta get out of your head the idea that I am attacking you.”

I told them, “We all have the same wish. We all have the same desire, all liberals, all us conservatives. We want to preserve the country. We want America to remain America, and we want to leave it for our descendants as we inherited it from our forbearers. Our arguments are about how to do it,” and in the argument phase here, we actually learn that perhaps we don’t want the same thing in terms of preserving the traditions and institutions.

Because today’s liberals and socialists do want to tear ’em down. They have been imbued with guilt over prosperity. “It’s not fair we have so much. It’s not fair because we haven’t done it through any greatness of our own, Mr. Limbaugh. We’ve stolen it! We’ve stolen all the oil from these countries around the world. We’ve stolen their diamonds. We’ve stolen this, and then we waste all of the resources.” This is what they’ve been taught.

I said, “No, you’ve got it totally backwards. The problem with the world is not America. The problem with the world is the lack of equal distribution of capitalism, and it’s just that simple. What it is that makes this country unique from any other set of population centers, countries, nations, whatever you want to call “em, is two things.

A: Our founding documents — and what’s in the founding documents? The documented recognition that we are all created by God and that we all have certain inalienable rights. That means it’s part of our yearning spirit. It’s part of our creation. That is liberty, a yearning to be free. We don’t want to be bound up. We don’t want to be shut up. We don’t want to be constrained.

“We are human beings. We’re explorers. We’re researchers. We’re pioneers. We don’t want to be caged,” and they understood this. “‘Pursuit of happiness.’ Life is to be maximized and pursued in its full, and people are to get as much out of it as they are able, and they can’t do it with shackles around their ankles.

“They can’t do it with governments that hold them in contempt. They can’t do it with leaders that think they have no brains. People are going to be constrained by people who think they have no ability to do things; so they’re going to want to do everything for them. The right to life. We’re all created equal. Right to life.

“Those definitions of our creation and our freedom are what set us apart from virtually every nation on the face of the earth.” I don’t know if you know this or not. Nothing against the Brits, they don’t even have a constitution. They do not have one. The European Union, they’re trying to write one, but it’s a bunch of commie libs. It’s a disaster. It’s nothing but a PC manual and digest, and that is how we’ve stood the test of time. It is those three things that are under assault by today’s left.

The right to life, the pursuit of happiness.

KEN: Amazing. That was a great line, by the way, “Nothing against the Brits, but they don’t even have a constitution.” That just… I love that stuff.