TODD: I would have loved to have watched the eyes of an NPR reporter grow like to basketball size when Rush employed one of his many valuable life lessons in answering her question of him, and here’s Rush describing that and more.
RUSH: You know, if I could wave a magic wand and change people, it would be don’t worry about what people think of you, particularly people that don’t know you. People that don’t know you, it doesn’t matter what they think. You and what you think of yourself is what matters, and if somebody thinks things about you that aren’t true, forget it. Nothing you can do about it, and it’s a total waste of time to try to change that.
I occasionally get e-mails from people: “Rush, don’t you care what they’re saying about you on X? Why, it’s outrageous what they’re saying about you!” Yeah, sometimes I do, but most of the time I don’t. It happens too much to get worried about it and be affected by it. But I did an NPR interview. One of the questions that the reporter from NPR asked me was, “You use terms like feminazi. You throw these things around. Don’t you worry about it bothering people?” This is the answer that I gave.
RUSH ARCHIVE: The fewest number of words you can use to convey a point, the more power the point has. Now, I understand people are going to be offended, but I’ve had a policy all my life not to worry about offending people because it’s going to happen. It’s a daily part of life. I think way too many people are way too sensitive walking around just waiting to be offended, and I think a bunch of people claiming they’re offended is really an attack on free speech.
It is the root cause of political correctness, which is nothing more than silencing things you don’t want to hear when uttered by others, so, “That offends me! I will not sit here and put up with that!” I don’t grant people that much power to offend me. Things said about me or the things I like… I’m not going to waste time being offended by it. Life’s too short, and it’s just words!
RUSH: Plus, my life is fulfilling. I’m not wallowing in misery, thinking, “Everybody else thinks I’m a dork, because I know I’m a dork,” which is the attitude so many people have. They’re just miserable. They get offended and they run around saying they’re offended, and they try to shut people up because they’re offending them and it’s just because they’ve got nothing else to fulfill their lives! You know, they’re basically empty and meaningless. If you have a fulfilling life and you’re occupied and doing what you like, these things are minor, especially when you know that it comes with the territory.
TODD: So as we enter into this experiment together of asking these absurd questions, making these absurd points in school board meetings, in zoning meetings, at dinner with friends, it’s not a natural dynamic in the world that… Look, there’s a bunch of people you probably don’t like. I try not to hate anybody. I really do. I try really hard to not do that.
There’s people I don’t like as much as others. There’s just people I don’t like. Natural. Natural human equation. What’s not natural is multiplication of the numbers of dislikes on social media, et cetera. We need to be okay being uncomfortable, because we had better start making leftists uncomfortable by asking them questions, forcing them to live in the world that they’re created for us.