TODD: Do you remember Henry Winkler? Of course. He’s gotta hate this, the Fonz. I guess he does things now, but I haven’t had a TV in 19 years. How would I know? I do remember the biggest letdown of my life was going to meet Henry Winkler at the auto-boat speed show in Spokane, Washington. We used to go to that every year. It’s a long story.
I was there for two weeks all day. Long story. He was gonna be there, and I was waiting in line, and it was this long corridor. Man, we were gonna meet the Fonz, and I come around the corner then I realize, what? He has like a… like an uncle sweater on. That’s a button-up sweater, and he’s really small. I was looking at the line. I kind of said, “Do we have to stay?”
My dad is like, “We’ve invested three hours of Saturday morning. You are staying, and you’re gonna enjoy meeting Henry Winkler.” I did get a Fonz, you know, signed photo. He signed his name “the Fonz” and I got a picture with him, and he was quite kind. He’s now taking heat for a picture of what looks to me to be a beautiful river trout, but I’m not a fish expert.
He says, “I can’t even express the beauty everywhere on our planet.” He’s holding the fish. The fish has a hook in its mouth. It doesn’t look like he’s gonna eat the fish. But if he were to be snuck up from behind on by a grizzly bear, it would eat him, and it wouldn’t even take a photo, and he wouldn’t think it was beautiful. He’d just think it was tasty as he peels his skin off.
So a bunch of Hollywood types are very upset about this. There is a backlash. On PopCulture.com they have to write this: “The actor, whose net worth is reported to be $40 million…” So because he’s a rich man, it makes it worse that he caught a fish temporarily out of the water and is going to put it back. Now, this fish… If you know river trout, you know they won’t eat bugs.
It’s a moral thing with them.
So I guess in that way, there’s some defense for this so this is an example of something that really, really bugged Rush. I said earlier in the program, I do believe that Rush had an actual PhD-level knowledge of human psychology. I don’t… I think that’s hard to argue with given what he did and accomplished. He also could have been a PhD in sociology, ’cause he was on the cutting edge of societal evolution when he talked about The Offended which is really just the woke of today.
RUSH: A lot of you have been listening a long time, 30 years. There’s a bugaboo of mine that I have been mentioning for almost all of those 30 years, and it’s a group that I dubbed “The Offended,” capital T, capital O, The Offended, and they have bothered me from the very beginning. You could have 99 people in a room and one of them would be offended by what the 99 are doing, and the 99 would have to stop doing it.
And it forever bugged me. Who are these offended? Why, just because they’re offended, does everybody have to kowtow to them? And it started with smoking, then it started with eating certain kinds of foods, then it started with words that people said. And then pretty soon The Offended became the primary group of people implementing political correctness.
They’re a bunch of censors. They’re a bunch of busybodies who figured out that to get what they want, just act offended. Rather than say that they’re a politically organized group, just offended. They’re not even political in their view. They’re just living their lives, and they are offended by various things that happen. And it just bugs me that everybody kowtow to them.
I think this group known as The Offended are actually a very active, purposeful political organization that are camouflaging themselves to make them look like just mentally disturbed. But the bottom line is, why does everybody kowtow to anybody who’s offended without even thinking, “Well, that’s stupid to be offended by that. If that offends you then ignore it.”
But the left, anybody comes along and claims that something offends them, they are immediately given full attention, credibility, and the people who offend them are then challenged to stop whatever they’re doing. And I think it is one of the serious ways in which our culture has been under assault. And what really hit me about it when it first started is something that still bothers me today. There is no pushback against it.
It was this bad. Somebody in an apartment with the windows closed and the air-conditioning on, 300 feet, a football field away from another apartment, also closed with the air-conditioning on, and somebody in that apartment smoking a cigarette, the person in the football field away apartment claiming she could smell that person’s cigarette, secondhand smoke, and it offended her.
And so the town came along and made the guy stop smoking, when there’s no way this woman could have possibly smelled anybody’s cigarette smoke from a football field away in a closed-up apartment. And instead of somebody making that point, they just went to the person smoking the cigarette, “You are disturbing a fellow tenant. You must stop.” This was before there were any bans. Before any public bans on smoking.
This is how they got this stuff going. And I maintain there was no way anybody — a football field’s 300 feet, hundred yards — no way two people in two closed-up apartments could smell anything going on in any of those two apartments. But because one person was offended, why, the other person had to stop what they were doing. And there was no pushback.
The person who was smoking, “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t punish me, please don’t punish me.” Instead of leaving the apartment, going to the other apartment a football field away and blowing smoke through the front door and saying, “Screw you!” Just acquiesced. We’ve been acquiescing to The Offended.
TODD: That’s the Maha.
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