JASON: The irony here is just too good not to mention. That is, a federal judge (When was it?) a week ago, struck down California’s three-decade-old ban on so-called assault weapons, saying there’s no such thing as assault weapons. AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle.” It’s ArmaLite, and you people basically in the gun control community don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
So get this. Shortly after he issued his ruling basically confirming the Supreme Court precedent in Heller and McDonald, and Justice Thomas’ admonition that the Second Amendment is not a constitutional orphan — as soon as the judge struck down gun control laws in California — he was getting threatening texts and threatening emails and threats on his life. Now, what’s ironic about this? People are mad because he’s not gun control, so they threaten him!
Well, if that isn’t typical of the liberal left.
That is good news because I will tell you, get to these places like downtown St. Paul, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, LA, New York, Buckhead, Atlanta, Miami, and the only defense you’ve got is your God-given right to self-defense. And they want to take that away. The same people making your community — I’m gonna go out here and say it ’cause you know it’s true: deliberately making your community — less safe, the same media outlets cheerleading this are the same ones who want to take away your God-given right to self-defense.
The Second Amendment does not have an exception to it. If you believe that there is a Bill of Rights incorporated unto the states via the 14th Amendment, as most liberals do, it doesn’t make distinctions. There’s no such thing as selective incorporation. That was a total concoction of activist judges. You either incorporate the Bill of Rights to apply to states or you don’t. They have, and the Second Amendment is not an orphan. It applies.
You can’t take away my right to defend myself, my family, and my property, even if you are defunding the police. I need it all the more so. These people want you to be less safe. They want chaos. This is how revolutions start. They want that. They’ve substituted race and ethnicity for class. They are Marxists, and they have taken control of all of the institutions. The medical authorities, your doctor’s office, you name it.
Everywhere you go is now political to the point of being oppressive, lecturing you on masks and vaccines while you can’t get in to get a different cancer screening. Big Business. What did the BlackRock and Engine No.1 do to ExxonMobil? “You’re not woke enough! You’re not green enough!” Well, let me see here. In the five-year average return on capital, ExxonMobil led the way at almost 8%. Chevron, ConocoPhillips, EOG, Occidental Petroleum, they’re all down below that, and yet, “Well, you could get more money if you went green.”
Hogwash. The private equity crowd has gone green too. They don’t care about your return on investment or return on capital. They care about going green. They’ve been co-opted. Sports have been co-opted. Business, medicine, media, education. Everywhere you go, the institutional corruption and the lies are omnipresent, and so many of them — so many of them — started with climate change and the lie that it is.
Well, I shouldn’t say that, to be fair.
The climate always changes. The lie that it is a catastrophic emergency is something that physicist Steven Koonin — who was an Obama administration official, as I recall — basically disabuses in his book called Unsettled. Everybody ought to read it. Now the word “denier” is being used everywhere to silence people. It started with this, and no one was more on top of it than El Rushbo. He had this to say a few years back.
RUSH: This has been a signature issue on this program for 25 years. Well, actually, it’s been a signature issue for over 30, because it was a signature issue when I was in Sacramento. Back then, you know, climate change had a predecessor. It was the spotted owl and animal rights, and it was all tied to climate change, but it was in the mid-eighties that I first actually heard of this. Five years earlier it was the world’s gonna freeze, that ’79 Newsweek cover. And she’s exactly right. The forecasts have said 10 years, 20 years. None of the forecasts have come true.
Global warming, it stopped warming, so they changed it to climate change. Since they can’t really illustrate massive changes in climate, they modified things and started referring to anything, any weather extreme, as evidence of climate change, be it a flood, which had been happening since Genesis. Talk to Noah about that. Torrential rain. These things are now cited as examples of climate change.
You ask yourself — I ask myself — how in the world can we battle this? I mean, if these people are willing to go to this degree to distort things, if weather extremes that are part of nature from the beginning of time are now evidence of a political belief the left has, how do we push back on this? This has been a primary focus of mine, and I keep trying to invent new ways to avoid the boredom, to avoid predictability, and to avoid the sameness, because to me this issue embodies virtually everything the left needs to establish the end of democracy and impose authoritarianism.
It’s got every ingredient. It’s got every technique that they employ. One issue, if they can bring it home, accomplishes ball game. And that’s why I am so fervently opposed to it, because it can’t be proven, it cannot be established. There is no science that says what’s happening is happening. All they’ve got are computer models.
I have nothing to gain by lying to anybody about this. If I lie about this and create some converts, I’m gonna lose ’em at some point because it’s gonna be discovered that I’ve been lying. I have nothing to gain by making anything up here, nothing whatsoever. There’s no short-term gain that I am seeking here. There’s nothing I’m trying to accomplish with this other than to stop it, for the benefit of people, because I love people.
I hate what liberalism does to people, individuals. And this issue contains every assault the left is making on individual liberty and freedom and an expanding economy. It’s got everything they want that leads to their nirvana, which is a never-ending expansion of government that one day becomes global, the end of borders, the end of nation states. These are sick, sick people. And with money they have co-opted many people who used to be legitimate scientists.
They have invented scientists out of people that wouldn’t know science if it slapped ’em upside the head, like Algore, and they’ve conferred scientific status. Their experts tell us that climate change is so rampant that we’ve only got, what, 30 years left, if we don’t colonize Mars, the human race is gonna go extinct. And I can’t believe that people actually believe it. Stephen Hawking says it, though, smartest man in the world, or joined by Elon Musk or Bill Gates or whoever, it’s insanity. And it just never stops.
You know, there’s also some arrogance-in this how long has the earth been around? Some of you think 10,000 years. Some think millions. Whatever the number — doesn’t matter — who is to say that the climate as it exists during our lifetimes is the norm? How can anybody know that? There has to be a norm in order for there to be warming or cooling. Isn’t it magic that the norm just happens to be when we are alive? Why wasn’t the norm in the preindustrial age? Why wasn’t the norm during one of the glacial ages? Why wasn’t the norm during one of the heat periods? Why is it now? Because it’s convenient, and it makes all of their bogus science seem to work.
JASON: That was El Rushbo at his absolute best, and he couldn’t be more correct. I want you to understand something. Back when there was real journals — “real journalism,” I should say, and it’s been a while (it gets caught in my throat it’s been so long) — there was a guy named H. L. Mencken. He was a famous scribe in Baltimore, and Mencken was distrustful of all politicians, of government. That’s the way journalism should be.
You shouldn’t take the side of the Republicans or the Democrats or any issue. You should be skeptical. Obviously, State-Run Media (led by CNN and MSNBC and the Post and New York Times and all the rest) basically, they’re on their knees. They’re on their knees for government, and they just are hacks. They’re just horrible hacks. They’re not… Look, I hate to say this about people, but it’s true.
They’re not good people. They’re despicable in a number of ways. Mencken, however, said this. Quote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence, clamorous to be led to safety — by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary,” close quote. Keep the population in fear — whether it’s climate change or coronavirus — and then you control them.