JASON: Imagine for a moment that — oh, I don’t know — Vladimir Putin had a lab and was fiddling around with, oh, viruses. And at his lab, bats were hanging off the hats of these scientists working, and when they found out that they engineered a super virus and they unleashed it — or just incompetently it escaped the lab — they said, “Hey, what, bats? No bats here,” and there’s a picture that showed up that showed a bat hanging from the hat of a scientist.

Can you imagine what the press would do?

Can you imagine?

They would be clamoring along with, you know, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Ben Sasse, Liz Cheney — all the war hawks, they would be clamoring — for a nuclear strike. Well, okay, maybe not a nuclear strike, but some sort of strike against Russia. And yet, with what could be described as an act of war — China fiddling with this virus, the gain-of-function research (that, yes, however indirectly we funded; thank you, Dr. Fauci) that’s not an issue.

It’s all Vladimir Putin. It’s unbelievable. In fact, it’s so over the top that you can’t even convince these late-night comedians of reality anymore. Now, thanks to Jon Stewart, some folks are trying. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, right? Stewart was on Stephen Colbert.

I don’t think I’ve watched that show ever, so I can’t tell you what it’s like other than Colbert is more a Democrat than he is a comedian, right? But Stewart (you gotta give him credit) is seeing things for what they are. Of course this was a Wuhan virus! Well, you don’t have to take it from my mouth. Take it from Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert.

COLBERT: There’s a chance that this was created in a lab. There’s an investigation.

STEWART: A chance?

COLBERT: Perhaps don’t know.

STEWART: “There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do?” “Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.”

CROWD: (smattering of nervous laughter)

STEWART: The disease is the same name as the lab!

CROWD: (more laughter)

STEWART: That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?

COLBERT: (sputtering) I… I…

STEWART: And then the actual scientists are like, “So wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab? How did this happen?” And they’re like, “Hmmm. A pangolin kissed a turtle? Hmm?”

CROWD: (loud laughing)

STEWART: And you’re like, “No. I…” If —

CROWD: (laughing)

COLBERT: (sputtering) But wait a second.

STEWART: If the name of your lab —

COLBERT: Wait —

STEWART: But can you look at the name.

CROWD: (laughing)

STEWART: Look at the name!

CROWD: (laughing)

STEWART: Can I…? Let me see your business card. Show me your business card! Oh. ‘I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan.'” Oh, ’cause there’s a coronavirus loose in Wuhan.

COLBERT: That could very well be, and Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and NIH have said, like, it should definitely be investigated —

STEWART: Don’t stop with the logic and people and things.

CROWD: (laughing)

COLBERT: No —

STEWART: The name of the disease —

CROWD: (laughing)

COLBERT: Wait a second. Wait a second.

STEWART: — is on the building.

CROWD: (laughing)

STEWART: The only coronavirus we have is in Wuhan —

CROWD: (laughing)

COLBERT: Y-yes.

STEWART: — where they have a lab called… What’s the lab called again, Stephen?

COLBERT: The Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Lab.

STEWART: I believe that’s the case.

COLBERT: Uh-huh. And how long have you worked for Senator Ron Johnson?

JASON: Turns out Ron Johnson was right. He’s been right all along. And Stephen Colbert just cannot stomach that because his number one job is to get Democrats elected. Comedy comes second, as though he… You know, I don’t know that he was ever that funny, but some people say so. But he was always just a hack. He’s just an angry, juvenile, screaming-at-the-Trump inauguration hack, and nobody saw this more…

You know, I grew up in the era of real late-night comedians and primarily Johnny Carson. Now, Carson was a liberal. You could tell once in a while, but it was never overt, and you couldn’t tell. He would make as many jokes about Jimmy Carter as he would about Reagan.

Same was true of Saturday Night Live in its earlier incarnation. Same was true of Jay Leno. Now they’ve gone off the deep end, and they’re not funny. They’re just lecturing, and nobody saw this more clearly than Rush did. In fact, he made a point about the worst of them all, Jimmy Kimmel is just a despicable little brat.

RUSH: Here is David in Dallas, as we stick with the phones. How you doing, David?

CALLER: I’m doing good. Dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’d like to know how is it possible for someone like Jimmy Kimmel, freaking Jimmy Kimmel, go from girls on trampolines to the moral voice on the left.

RUSH: Let me just — I’m gonna get in deep doo-doo here. You have to understand something about these late-night comedians. They have a staff of writers that may number from 10 to 20. So whatever Kimmel is uttering every night when it comes to jokes, he may not even have written it. I mean, you just don’t know. Now, it ends up in his name, but there are — like this show doesn’t have any writers. Never have had. But Johnny Carson had writers. They all do. Letterman had 25 of ’em. They work all day putting together a five- to eight-minute monologue. What you’re really asking is, why do people grant him any credibility when he makes massive shifts like this?

CALLER: Exactly. Why is he even considered as an authority? That’s beyond my understanding.

RUSH: He’s actually not, but the people who agree with what he is saying grant him that status because they want to hear it. And they don’t really care who says it. The fact that Kimmel is saying it means they’re gonna bond with him and support him. But to people that don’t agree with Kimmel, he’s not an authority to anybody. He’s a hack. Jimmy Kimmel has demonstrated by virtue of his career that when it comes to political thinking, he doesn’t really have any original thought.

CALLER: Exactly. Yeah.

RUSH: So his bleating on health care and now Trump, believe me, it has been established that he has a lot of assistance from the staff of Senator Schumer. They send him talking points and other political things to say about Trump and about health care. And he just repeats it.

CALLER: Is it just money? He just wants money?

RUSH: What do you mean, is it just money? He just wants money? No.

CALLER: Does he just want to get paid?

RUSH: Okay. You’re asking so many different things here. I’m not criticizing, but you’re asking a lot of different questions. You’re asking about how could he do this with credibility. You’re asking why is he doing it, why did he go from trying to be a comedian telling jokes to trying to be taken seriously as a political commentator. I mean, every one of your questions has a different answer.

CALLER: I guess my real question is, I understood Jimmy Kimmel to be a Republican, a man’s man, 15 years ago. How can he go from a man’s man —

RUSH: Because The Man Show?

CALLER: Yeah, The Man Show.

RUSH: Because of The Man Show you thought was a Republican?

CALLER: Because of The Man Show.

RUSH: He was on with Adam Carolla, who is a conservative.

CALLER: Right. I had no clue that he was a liberal whatsoever.

RUSH: Well, it happened. And, you know, there’s this thing called — and I’m not being facetious — there is this very well tested theorem. It’s called O’Sullivan’s Law. And it is this. Any person or group which is not actively conservative every day will become liberal. Meaning, liberalism is the natural default position for unthinking people, for emotional people it’s the default.

Conservatism, on the other hand, I don’t want to be misunderstood here, but it’s a mental, it’s an intellectual pursuit. You may live your life as a conservative, and you may vote as a conservative, but you may not be able to explain why. Liberals don’t have to explain why. All they have to do is say they care or notice suffering or discrimination, victims or what have you, and they’re automatically feted with great compliments for courage and sensitivity. But nothing they ever propose fixes anything. All they do is further mess things up.

So Kimmel going from The Man Show to where he is now, it could be as seductive as one thing, okay. So his kid ends up with a medical condition, goes to the hospital, discovers some things there ask and decides to come out and tell the story. And the Schumer office heard it and got in touch with him, and now Kimmel can be taken seriously for once instead of just being a jokester. And believe me, actors and comedians crave to be taken seriously.

JASON: And that’s why they call it the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. I will give you a little additional thought — and that was in addition to O’Sullivan’s Law, that liberal is the default position. It’s a little bit like groupthink, conformity. What’s so ironic about this is that the arts, the creative class, are supposed to be nonconformists.

They’re the biggest conformists under the sun. “Which way is the wind blowing? What does everybody say? That’s where I’m going!” Another word for that is cowardice. That’s why you don’t have very many leaders in the world. But Jefferson himself pinpointed it so many years ago when he said, “The natural inclination of things is for liberty to yield and government to grow.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what T.J. said, and he was right.