TODD: I want you to hear what I think puts the biggest lie in the world to what the media tries to do to Rush, trying to call Rush a racist. I think Rush was the opposite of that. Rush was a man who wanted everybody to succeed and have a chance to succeed. So I want you to just… This is a blissfully long bit of the Maha, and I want you to listen here, okay, to Rush speak of his pain he felt at seeing the Democrat Party damage the prospects of black people and immigrants with the Democrats’ constant insistence that these people couldn’t thrive in America without Big Government.

RUSH: You people know the truth, and you are whom I care about. You in this audience know exactly what happens on this program and what doesn’t, and you know what I am and what I’m not, despite what the Drive-Bys say. Where to start with this? Shortly after becoming attorney general, maybe during his confirmation hearings, Eric Holder said the United States is a nation of cowards on the subject of race, that we desperately need to have a huge national conversation about it, but that people are afraid to, people will not engage in it.

And that’s not true. We never stop talking about race.

When you get down to it, the left does not want to have a conversation on race. That’s code language. Saying, “We need a national conversation on race,” means, “We need to stop opposing the objectives of the civil rights coalitions in this country,” and what is meant by “we need to have a conversation about it,” what that really means is that the people who disagree with us on this need to be silenced.

That’s how you finish the conversation is just by eliminating opposition to the agenda of the civil rights coalition, which you might think, “Civil rights? What could be wrong with that?” Nothing is wrong with it, but that’s not what civil rights coalitions are about. Well, anyway, I’ve never shied away from it, because I frankly think it’s something we do need to overcome.

I think we do need to get past it. I think it is weighing our culture down. It’s weighing our society down unnecessarily. And the biggest damage that’s being done is to African-Americans themselves in this whole thing. This is where I’ve gotta start being very careful, because it’s undeniably true, and I could give you illustrations of what I mean.

Which, easily taken out of context, could be plastered all over the nation’s newspapers and cable news networks in an effort once again to portray me as something that I’m not. In fact, quite the opposite. The bottom line for me is that it depresses me. You know, I’m an American. I love this country. I know what is possible in this country for everybody.

I see immigrants from various parts of the world coming into this country and just doing gangbusters. I see people natively born in this country doing gangbusters. I know it’s still possible. I know that it’s likely, if certain steps are taken. I know that the American dream is alive and well. It’s sad that so many people have given up on it, but it’s because of the way they’ve been conditioned. It’s the way they’re influenced. It’s the way they’re taught.

The sad thing about all this is that there’s a beneficiary to this. There’s a beneficiary to economic stagnation among our minority communities, and that beneficiary is the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party benefits from people being unable to provide for themselves. The Democrat Party benefits from people believing that the rest of the country’s out to get ’em.

The Democrat Party benefits from all of this strife. The Democrat Party benefits from economic stagnation. The Democrat Party benefits from the fear and the bullying. And it breaks my heart, folks, because it’s so unnecessary. It’s not cliched to refer to the U.S. as a land of opportunity. It always has been, still is. There are steps one needs to take in order to access it.

It just doesn’t come knocking. Well, maybe once in your life it will. You have to know to open the door when that happens, but for the most part the recipe is pretty much the same: hard work, dedication, desire, preparation, study, passion. Those things are still required, and if they’re present, you can write your ticket. Not to say it’s easy. Not to say there won’t be setbacks.

We all suffer them. We all suffer some form of discrimination. We all have obstacles out there in our way. Many of them we put in our way ourselves. Many of the obstacles that we face are self-imposed. But others aren’t. You go back to the campaign of 2007 and 2008, I’m convinced that a huge number of Americans voted for Barack Obama hoping that in so doing his victory would be a giant step at progress, a giant forward step in demonstrating the folly that this is still a racist, slave-based nation.

Which, sadly, young people are still taught in some of our worst public schools. People had a lot of hope. The hope and change, the hope in hope and change was that. There was no other reason to vote for Obama. Nobody knew who he was. The press hadn’t really vetted him. He was young. He was articulate. He was an open canvas. People hated the current regime, Bush, Iraq.

Anybody saying they’re gonna do things different would have benefited from it. You had the added benefit of Obama being African-American. Man, what would that say about America, the American people elect a black president, that has to say, that has to mean we’re not a racist country, not like they tell us we are. So many people were desperately hoping that that would have been the outcome.

And it would have been had it not been for the people that do not benefit from that. There are people that do not benefit from the country moving forward on race. There are people who profit on the basis of the country never improving, or never changing — and those are the people that largely hold us back.

So to step forward a couple of years, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama are now into their sixth year as president and first lady. Being elected president of this country is not an accident. It requires certain steps. It means a lot of specific good things. It’s not something you happenstance into. It’s not something that happens to you when you look the other way.

You have to go out and ask people to vote for you, and they have to do it. And that’s what Obama did, and he won. And how you cannot look at that as a positive, if you’re the Obamas, is beyond me. That’s the first thing I don’t understand. I understand roots, history, and all that. What I don’t understand is an apparent desire not to escape it. We all have a past.

I mean, that would be like saying that nobody in Germany who has genealogical traces to members of the Nazi party back in the 1940s can ever be thought of as anything but that. Why would you forever want those people to be attached to that past instead of escaping it, when they weren’t alive, had nothing to do with it, whatever was going on in the 1940s; they’re just descendants of people who were.

The problem here is that race is being — I think it’s a cover. I think it’s being used as a cover, as an excuse, when it has so much more potential than that, is my only complaint. Why would they not seek to be inspiring? And I don’t mean by promising more government money and more government programs. I’m talking about personally inspiring.

The simple act of telling people they can be better than they think they can. The simple act of telling people, “Yeah, it’s hard, but you can become what you want to become.” The problem is, a political party benefits if more and more people do not look at their lives that way.

If more and more people think they don’t have a chance, that the deck is stacked against them for whatever reason, that political party thinks it’s going to score big by creating dependency in those people and they’re successful, and they’re right. That’s what’s so dehumanizing and dignity destroying about it.

TODD: The Maha. I went to work in D.C. just after Obama was elected, and I went jogging one night early in the evening. So it was still kind of afternoon. In Lafayette Square across from the White House, facing the White House, there was a black family — father, mother, three kids — and Lafayette Square, you know, has a long history related to race.

This father said to his kids, “A black man is president, and you can be, too,” and I just stopped, and just took off my headphones. I just wanted to absorb these children. Barack Obama stole that joy. He went into the White House and instead of saying, “See?” or raising the voices like we did yesterday, the African-American CEO — and you’ll hear from another great African-American female caller who called Rush.

Instead of raising that and saying, “Look what we can do. Yeah, there’s racists, and it’s a minority of people,” Barack Obama just went back to his Alinsky trick: “Pick a target; isolate it. Cut off from its support base. Go after people, not institutions, ’cause people hurt sooner than institutions.” So they went at Rush, who beat ’em, and won the Medal of Freedom — or not won. He received it from President Trump.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: So it is rumored now that Colin Kaepernick may be a replacement for Russell Wilson should Russ leave the Seattle Seahawks. I’ll say only this: I heard the coach of the Seahawks, Pete, say that he thinks Kaepernick could contribute there. I’ll say this about his political activities, then I want you to hear what Rush has to say about it or had to say about.

Isn’t it hard? I said what Rush “has to say.” It still hasn’t landed on to me what Rush has said about it. I had Michael Bennett on my radio program on KTTH in Seattle and I said to him — and Michael Bennett was a Seahawk, and played with Russell and knew Kaepernick. Bennett has proven himself to be sort of a guy who wants to kind of merchandise racial grievance.

I said to him, “Here’s my problem with Colin Kaepernick: He didn’t say anything. He took a knee, and people can paint on that whatever they want. I know what I painted. I think it turned out to be pretty accurate.” So taking a knee is just to provocative. That’s all. People can paint what they wanted, and I think they were right what we painted.

On the other hand, Colin Kaepernick wore “Cops are Pigs” socks and the faces of South American dictators are T-shirts. That speech, Rush wouldn’t have gotten very far if the program involved taking a knee with silence. That’s not bravery. Speaking ideas is bravery. That’s one of the things we can do to carry on the great tradition of Rush Limbaugh is to be the truth-tellers.

I have to stop watching because the NFL basically showed me, “We don’t want you to watch football.” Rush loved the game of football. It makes tremendous sense. It’s a game of still and power. It’s kind of the ultimate meritocracy, excessive focus on hard work that overcomes raw talent, even the most amazing raw talent, and it’s a strategic game. The people who do great work in that are also great thinkers.

Rush though did not appreciate Kaepernick’s approach to start people to thinking.

RUSH: You see Colin Kaepernick over the weekend trash the United States on Un-Thanksgiving Day? I thought this guy’s only complaint was police brutality. I thought that’s the only thing about it, thought that’s why he was taking a knee. This guy doesn’t want a job in the NFL. He’s making sure he does not get hired.

He wants to be a martyr. Un-Thanksgiving Day? Wonder why he hasn’t been contacted by NFL teams to take on the most important leadership role on a football team. If anybody thinks he was just protesting police violence when he kneeled needs to think again. He was protesting the country. And he continues to do so.

TODD: I haven’t checked, but I guarantee you the Seattle media is all over this. “If you don’t hire Kaepernick, you’re a racist, Pete!” That’s going on now.