BRETT: Could you imagine what would happen if we had listened to the environmentalists? Think about all the aspects of life that they’ve sought to control, and can you imagine what it would have been like if we had paid attention, did exactly what they wanted, only to have…? Well, we’ll talk about that in a couple of moments.

As no doubt you know, the Census Bureau’s releasing a bunch of data based on the most recent census conducted in the United States, and this fascinating piece is Terry Jeffrey writing over at CNS News: “Only 5% of the Americans who worked in 2019 got to work using public transportation, according to a newly released study from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“By contrast, 84.8% got to work in a car, truck or van that was not operated by the government,” and, by the way, “75.9% were driving alone when they did so.” You know and I know: “The use of public transit for commuting was heavily concentrated in the New York metropolitan area.

“In fact, the number of workers who commuted by public transit in the New York metro area in 2019 was more than five times larger than its nearest competitor — the Chicago metro area.” So we know that public transportation is important in tightly compacted areas, right? We know that that’s the case.

But for so many millions of you in this audience, well, that doesn’t quite fit your bill. Public transportation is a part of the left’s great formula to reconstruct this country and have more control over our lives. Except in certain blue areas, people reject it overwhelmingly.

Chicago and New York. Can you imagine how bad the coronavirus pandemic might have been had we listened to the left and had public transit in place for the majority of the country? Rush talked about this and asked, “What if we had done what the environmentalists told us?”

RUSH: My friends, I want to run something by you here. Is it not fortunate that we have not had to deal with the implementation of radical environmentalism policy like the Green New Deal? Do you realize how fortunate we are during this? All of these radical environmentalist wackos like out in San Francisco (where this all started), tried to tell us that disposable cups were bad, that we had to reuse bags over and over again in the grocery store.

They told us that plastic and paper grocery bags were bad. But it turns out that reusable bags contain germs and viruses, and now reusable bags are being banned! It was never a brilliant idea. It was thought, “Well, we’ve gotta save the environment. We’ve gotta reuse as much as we can.” Reusing just spreads germs. It spreads the virus. They told us public transportation was the way to go. “Get on public transportation!”

Now buses and subways are seen as places where you go to get sick. In fact, when you start comparing New York to California and why there are so many more cases in New York than California, one of the quick answers you get is, “Well, there isn’t any mass transit to speak of in California,” certainly not in Los Angeles. They’ve got BART in San Francisco.

But nothing to compare with the subway system and the buses of New York City. They told us that driving our own cars? Bad idea. They told us that living in the suburbs which… Do you know what living in suburbia is? It’s an early form of social distancing, is it not? It’s an early form of people trying to get away from jam-packed cities and crowds — and when people did that, what did the left say?

The left immediately began to crucify ’em and criticize them as racists and bigots and elitists and unwilling to spend time among people they thought were less than they. They told us we should live on top of each other in densely populated cities — forget suburbia — and to take mass transit. They told us fossil fuels were bad. They told us we were destroying the climate, destroying the planet with fossil fuels.

They told us to turn the economy and our way of life over to them — the Green New Deal — and now look. Now look. We are shut down, and we just all need to be reminded: While we are all forced by the government to stay at home, do you realize how fortunate we are and how nice it is that we have all the things that run on electricity?

It enables us to stay connected. These are things that the Green New Deal types and environmentalist wackos have attempted to eliminate from our society and culture. In other words, we are able to live. We are able to keep climate control running. We are able to keep the internet up and running, we are able to keep our television sets and everything else that requires electricity.

We’re able to keep it up and running because of what? Fossil fuels. Your computer, your TV, your phone, your iPad, your heat, your air-conditioning, your lights, your stove, your coffee maker, your refrigerator, your washer and dryer, your dishwasher, every bit of it. If this were a weather emergency, you wouldn’t have access to any of it, and you wouldn’t have lights.

Even in the midst of this massive shutdown of the U.S. economy, there still is a modicum of freedom out there, and it is brought to you by the free flow of oil at market prices. It is brought to you by the plentiful supply of fossil fuels, aided and abetted by new techniques in getting it, among them fracking. All things the American left and their allies in the Democrat Party have attempted to damage, diminish — in some cases, shut down.

If you depended on a wind farm or solar panels, you might get an hour and a half to two hours a day out of usage of these devices. Natural gas, coal, oil to the rescue. Natural gas, coal, and oil are sustaining a shut-down nation. And we are finding out just how crucially important they are. We’re finding out how crucially important a lot of industries the left makes fun of are.

Like farming, trucking, distribution, things that people just take for granted that are going to happen. Now people are praying and begging that there are no interruptions to these elements of the supply chain. The lesson is don’t listen to the left in the first place.

BRETT: Rush was spot on on so many levels with that analysis, and we only have to look to the beginning of this year to understand what happened. Do we remember the terrible ice storm in Texas, where the windmills/turbines weren’t turning? We only have to look at the very first thing that Joe Biden did as president, effectively dismantling the Keystone XL pipeline and sidelining 100,000 people out of that job.

It’s having a negative impact on energy prices. Your gas prices went up. It doesn’t matter where you live, your gas prices went up. In that transition time from Trump to Biden, your prices went up. You look at any of these examples, and it’s true. Can you imagine if you’re trying to rely on that much power coming out of the grid when you haven’t built nuclear power plants?

When you haven’t built additional capacity, and everybody A’s at home Zooming and the kids are all learning at home and now suddenly there’s a winter storm and there’s all this kind of stuff? And as for mass transit. Excuse me? Are we back on the infrastructure conversation again yet, Mr. President Biden?

‘Cause I know you were on the infrastructure thing for about three or four days, and then you decided you were gonna pivot off of the infrastructure thing. But, you know, he’s Amtrak Joe. He loves the trains, oh, he loves trains. Trains are cool. Trains are neat. Trains are wonderful.

Ask the people of California how well the hundred billion-dollar Jerry Brown boondoggle went with high-speed rail in the state of California. You don’t have high-speed rail available in the state of California because you don’t have the tracks. And it’s faster to fly from San Diego or from Los Angeles to San Francisco than it is to take a train.

Oh, it’s wonderful to have mass transit as an option in Boston, in Washington, in New York, in Chicago. Sure, it’s terrific. But once you get further and further out, it gets less and less convenient. And, oh, by the way, more and more expensive. There is a market to be had there. And yet Joe Biden, president of the United States…

“Amtrak Joe,” he was known as. You know, he believes that what we need is more rail lines running all over the United States, just increase the routes. I gotta tell you something. I actually rode Amtrak from Boston to west Texas. I did it when I was in college. I didn’t have a sleeper car. I rode coach for the 4-1/2 or five days on that trip.

I vowed no matter what I would obtain a motor vehicle and make that drive all day, every day, rather than making the 197 stops or whatever it was, 24/7, to make that trip. Trains are a part of American history. They move so much when it comes to our freight around the country and are wonderful in that regard, but they are inefficient when it comes to taking you here to there.

There’s a reason why airplanes are preferable. There’s been reason why driving your car is preferable — and, oh, by the way, to go back to the beginning of Rush’s analysis, you’re talking about pandemic hot spots! Well, what about the dictates of the left, the covid commandments?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Sad news coming earlier this morning as we found out about the passing of Prince Philip, aged 99. The queen of England — Her Royal Majesty, the queen of England — expressing deep sorrow as her beloved husband, the Duke of Edinboro, died at Windsor Castle earlier today. And, you know, it’s really an incredible thing to look at.

Whether or not you like the monarchy or you respect it or it’s important to you, the grand tradition is obviously present in the world today. But it’s also important to remember that Prince Philip — and, of course, the queen — are both World War II veterans. They served to defeat that great evil in Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan. We should remember that.

These were World War II-generation folks from the Greatest Generation who did what they had to do to help try to save this planet from the ugliest imagery of fascism and imperial Japanese militarism as anything else that’s out there. Sadly, and unfortunately, James Delingpole is a great writer who does stuff over at Breitbart. He noted that Prince William has been calling for The Great Reset.

You remember this notion of The Great Reset, this idea that, well, in the wake of what’s happening with the coronavirus, we’ll get out there and we’ll remake the world. We’ll change the world. We’ll change the way we do our economy. The word “reset,” by the way, is intimately bound with the New World Order proposals by Klaus Schwab over at the World Economic Forum.

The Green New Deal is part of this, the idea that you’re not gonna own my property. You’re just gonna live in government-provided housing all that sort of stuff is part of this plans that comes out of the World Economic Forum. They call it a sustainable society in which you own nothing, and you’ll be happy and Prince William has actually endorsed the notion of The Great Reset. Know, it brings to mind a question. How is it that Millennials reject what they’ve been bequeathed? Rush talked about this.

RUSH: Here’s the headline, Business Insider: “Millennials Don’t Care About Owning Anything, and it’s Destroying Traditional Retail.” And, you know, folks, until I saw the headline, ’til I read the story, this is something I knew in a associative way. You know, pick up an observation reading a story, such as Millennials don’t want to buy cars. They’re the first generation that couldn’t care less about cars. All they care about is mass transit.

Okay, you read that, chuck it away, think this is a bunch of creeps, idiots, small pocket of the Millennials, doesn’t represent anything. And then you find out they don’t want to own homes. They don’t have the money. So it turns out there’s much more to this than just random examples. That’s exactly the profile of voter Democrats seek. People unhappy, hopeless, helpless, no positive things in the future in their minds, and those people are ripe, it is felt, to be able to turn to government for solutions to problems they have, economic benefits, what have you.

So I understand that, and I understand that the Millennials are coming up on becoming as self-absorbed as my generation is, the Baby Boomers. But you can’t blame ’em ’cause everybody’s talking about ’em and everybody’s focused on ’em and everybody’s either criticizing ’em or praising ’em or what have you. And they’ve been told they’re very important, they’ve been told they’re the future of the country, so I get all that. I think in the Millennials we have maybe — I could be wrong about this, too — we have maybe the first thoroughly corrupted, in terms of education generation in the country’s history.

I mean, this generation has been exposed from kindergarten, preschool, to full-fledged liberalism, from the time they’ve been able to talk. They have seen it on Saturday morning cartoon shows and absorbed it. They’ve been taught about climate change, all this crap, gay rights, since kindergarten. Their entire lives they have been propagandized, they have been indoctrinated. And so tracking their movements and their attitudes is interesting.

“The tendency of Millennials to rent instead of buy is turning the retail industry upside down. Jilian Mincer of Reuters reports. ‘These behaviors have propelled businesses such as car rental service Zipcar, taxi service Uber and home rental site Airbnb.’ And the trend is extending into clothing. Renting has also spread to the music and hospitality industries with companies like Spotify and Airbnb, Ehlers writes.

“‘Never mind buying a second home when you can rent a chateau in France on Airbnb for $200. Why hire a chauffeur when they don’t come with an app that tracks their relative location to yours, like Uber?’ she says. ‘Even owning the latest album of your favorite band feels a lot less appealing when you can stream it immediately on and offline with a Spotify pro membership, without taking up any space on your hard drive.'”

It goes on to talk about how the current generation of Millennials simply doesn’t want to own anything. They’re transient. They don’t want to put down roots anywhere. They don’t want to be tied to anything. But the bottom line of it is, it is affecting the rest of the economy. It is affecting retail. Don’t know how much yet. So the question goes back to, all right, is this the generation that is going to size things up as they mature and reject it all?

And it’s way too soon to say, but it doesn’t appear they’re prepared to reject the Democrat Party, which is the primary reason they are in these dire economic straits. But that never occurs to them. I mean, it does to some. They’re not monolithic. No group of people or generation is. But the ones making news, the ones being written about, they don’t see the Democrat Party as the problem.

They see the Republican Party as the problem but not in the sense you do. They think the Republican Party is just a bunch of idiots, just a bunch of jerks. It starts and ends there. And they think the Democrat Party is filled with people trying so hard to make everybody happy and everybody equal and, that’s another thing, this push for equality.

“The younger generation is increasingly ‘looking for less expensive alternatives to ownership,’ Doug Stephens, author of the blog Retail Prophet, writes. ‘Why do retail brands depend so heavily on dispersed outlet locations to unload this season’s collections when they could rent them?’ Millennials, defined as 18- to 34-year-olds, are increasingly living in small, urban apartments rather than sprawling suburban houses.

“As a result, they don’t have room for as many goods. On top of that, younger people have discriminating taste as a result of exposure to online reviews.” And so there’s a lot of sharing going on and not much ownership, which is a problem for people who sell things.

BRETT: It is a changing economy, no doubt, in regards to the way Millennials are shopping.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Let’s jump back out on the phones and say hello to David in Burley, Idaho. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show, sir.

CALLER: Well, thank you. It’s kind of an honor. I’ve been listening to Rush since I was in high school, 20-some years.

BRETT: Wow.

CALLER: It’s the first time I’ve been able to get on.

BRETT: Happy you did it. What’s on your mind?

CALLER: (crosstalk)

BRETT: Well, that’s awesome. Awesome.

CALLER: Well, I just wanted to comment on the public transportation issue that you were speaking about earlier.

BRETT: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I lived for years out in the Seattle area. Public transportation was a big thing there. Even in the small logging community I lived in, it was government force, it was union ran —

BRETT: Mmm-hmm.

CALLER: — and I moved out here to the middle of southern Idaho, and there is no public transportation other than in Boise or Idaho Falls where the colleges are.

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: It’s so far from anywhere to anywhere here. It’s a 45 minute drive, whenever we say we’re going to town we plan on an hour to get there.

BRETT: Wow.

CALLER: Public transportation just isn’t practical —

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: — for this lifestyle out here in rural America. We all drive pickup trucks and SUVs and —

BRETT: Way to go.

CALLER: — and we have big families.

BRETT: And you have weather! (chuckles) You have weather to contend with, too, which can lead to delays as well, obviously.

CALLER: Oh, yes, typical winter here the interstate will be shut down for a day or two.

BRETT: That’s right. (laughing) No buses.

CALLER: No buses. It’s just impassable. And we’ve had a blue wave try to move into the state from the West Coast —

BRETT: Right.

CALLER: — and they tried to force in to our lifestyle, that of the West Coast.

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: And of course, the proposed raise in taxes to support these programs and things like that, and they don’t work. It’s not practical. It doesn’t. You go to either coast and I can see in the population centers —

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: — having public transportation, but not here.

BRETT: Well, now you know what’s gonna happen? Now, you know what’s gonna happen, now, right, David? You know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna have these people come in from California. You know, they’re living up in San Francisco or down in LA. They’re gonna come up there to that beautiful part of Idaho.

And they’re gonna decide you need public transportation. Even though none of them will ride it, they’re gonna say you have to build this had thing and, “If you build it, they will come,” like the old baseball movie, you know? (laughing) It’s ridiculous. But watch those tax rates! Keep those tax rates low. Don’t let them get an inch ’cause they’ll take a country mile.

CALLER: And, you know, the other thing, there are two things that you touched on that I was listening to while waiting.

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: One is the solar and the wind energy.

BRETT: Yes, sir.

CALLER: Wind energy here has been a big thing, and it’s another boondoggle. We call it “the red-light district.”

BRETT: (laughing)

CALLER: And if it weren’t for government subsidies, there would be no wind energy. And the wind doesn’t blow, they don’t go, and we see them all over the place out here spread out across the desert. Solar is the same way.

BRETT: Sure.

CALLER: It’s crazy. I believe in alternative forms, but not government subsidized or mandated.

BRETT: Absolutely. And you have to be practically, and that’s the important thing. David, that was a dynamite debut appearance on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and I would invite you personally — as somebody who once screened the calls — to call back again. A great perspective on the boondoggle of both public transportation and government-mandated energy.