RUSH: Oh, no, no, no, no. It’s very frustrating because we’re now immersed in many circumstances and situations where the last thing that anybody wants to hear are facts. The last thing anybody wants to contemplate is the real truth about something. Instead, everybody wants to live in illusions and advanced political agendas.

Greetings, folks. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

So much to say about this, and I sit here in full knowledge that were I to open up and share with you my genuine, real thoughts about what’s going on in this country, I’d be brought up on charges. I think we’re looking at all the wrong places to solve all of these problems.

Remember, folks, during the presidential campaign, I said, “Twenty-five years ago we were warning about what was going to happen if X kept happening and Y kept happening and if we didn’t stop Z.” Well, now, we’re there. We’re no longer talking about what will happen unless we do something about it. We’re living it. We’re living the collapse. We’re living the implosion of our culture and our society. Politically, morally, religiously, you name it, and it all stems from the fact that no one is allowed to have values. Values are judgmental. You have no right to impose values on people.

So we’ve gotten to the point where nothing is really wrong. There are just explanations for it. And in practically every instance, the explanation and the proposed cure is nothing more than the advancement of a particular political belief or ideology. In this case, liberalism. But before we get into this in great detail, there’s something I need to get squared here. And I don’t think it’s nitpicking to do this. As we got information here on Friday afternoon to tell you what was happening, we passed it along. And it turns out that it was all wrong. It was all wrong, in the substantive sense.

It’s stunning, folks, how wrong everything we were initially told was. And I believe that also pinpoints or highlights a problem that we have in our culture, because people only believe what they’re told, and if they’re told a bunch of crap repeatedly day in and day out, that’s what they’re going to end up believing, particularly low-information people. But almost all of the early news reports on the Sandy Hook shooting turned out to be wrong. Almost everything that I passed on to you from the Drive-By Media on Friday turned out to be wrong. The shooter’s name was wrong, his age was wrong, who he shot was wrong, where he shot was wrong. His mother did not work at the school. She did not teach kindergarten. She was not shot at the school, for example.

The shooter was not 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The father was not shot. None of this that we were told turned out to be remotely true. There was no second shooter. We were told that there was a second shooter perhaps involved. Now all of these things were reported by — well, I don’t even want to pick one. They all reported it, CBS, NBC, ABC, and we were told with many of these items that all of it had been confirmed by authorities. CBS News confirms, ABC News confirms, NBC News confirms. Now, we try to be on the cutting edge here at the EIB Network. We try to be the firstest with the mostest, but if I got a fraction of the things wrong that the Drive-By Media gets wrong whenever there is breaking news like this, I would never hear the end of it. And nobody would be trying to make excuses for me, either, were I to have been so blatantly, consistently wrong about this. Nobody would be trying to make excuses. They would simply be pointing fingers of blame.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s completely acceptable, even expected, from our media guardians in their quest to be first and their desire to get it right. And you know why all of this stuff is wrong? All of this stuff is wrong because the first thing that happens when a disaster like this hits is excitement. Not pain. Not tears. Excitement at the opportunity to advance whatever political agenda fits into the event. In this case, it happens to be gun control. So that became the overriding, informing characteristic of this story. And therefore, every bit of news that they wanted to believe was true. To make the gun look like it was the enemy here, that’s what became reported news.

They were in such a hurry to sensationalize the news, again, because they wanted to advance their agenda, that the basic rules of journalism got thrown out, like two sources or three sources, just went out the window. It’s the same Drive-By Media that says they didn’t want to rush into covering the attack in Benghazi, which killed four Americans. They didn’t want to be rushed into that ’til they had all the facts, and they still don’t have all the facts. So they still don’t want to rush into covering that. And the person who has all the facts who could testify isn’t going to ’cause she fell down, had a concussion the other day and will no longer be secretary of state when the hearings take place.

Fast and Furious, same thing. No desire, no rush, no interest whatsoever. Had Fast and Furious manifested itself the way it was intended to, they woulda covered that story the same way they covered Sandy Hook, because that was the objective of Fast and Furious. The express purpose of Fast and Furious was to create throughout this country the exact emotions and energy that the story, the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School created. That was the design of Fast and Furious.

So you’re sitting down and you’re watching Sunday Night Football last night because you want to escape from all this, and then you hear Al Michaels say (paraphrasing), “Oh, by the way, the president’s gonna speak and we’re going to be abandoning the coverage here for a while. You can watch us over at our sports channel or at CNBC, but the president, he’s in Connecticut and he’s gonna be speaking.” Then the president shows up, says we’re not doing enough, we have to change. And he correctly pointed out that since he’s been president it’s the fourth time that we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings. Fourth time, that’s right, four mass shootings. Still nowhere near the record.

The record for mass killings was in 1929. John Fund has a great piece — I’ll get to it later today — on statistics. People aren’t gonna want to hear about this. They’re not gonna care about it, it won’t matter, but I’m still gonna pass ’em on to you. Mass shootings are actually down in this country compared to years past. There were a lot of them in the fifties. There were a lot of them in the twenties and thirties. But it doesn’t matter because this one happened and it was bad, and we were not alive in 1929 so who cares. A lot of people weren’t alive in the fifties, so who cares. It’s just bad now, and there’s an agenda to be advanced.

But, you know, there’s a fascinating thing that’s happening out there, folks. A lot of young people are spending a lot of time on the World Wide Web. I came across a post last night at, of all places, Gawker.com. Gawker.com is a… is a… Basically it’s a militant homosexual site, entertainment. Not militant. It’s a gay site, and they posted something last night that had Facebook and Twitter abuzz.

It was a post by a woman named Liza Long, and she said, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” and she’s got a child that she is scared to death is going to do this one day. It prints out to four pages. She describes how this son of hers, who’s 13, threatens to kill her all the time. He threatens to kill himself. She has had to take him to mental hospitals. She claims all this talk about guns is not the problem here.

We’ve got a mental illness problem in this country that nobody wants to deal with because they don’t want to really admit it. They don’t want to get to the bottom of finding out why. Because when you find out why we’ve got all this mental illness, then you’ve gotta start looking at the way that we have determined we’re gonna control little boys who are too rambunctious. We have a lot of agendas are at play here.

There’s a lot of political correctness and conventional wisdom that nobody wants to upset. Because during all of the ADD, AD/HD, and all this stuff, everybody thought they were doing good things. They thought they were doing wonderful things. They thought they were being really progressive and forward thinking and advancing and, you know, chickifying the society and turning boys out of natural activities that they engage in, which turns them to video games and so forth.

You throw mental illness on top of this, and it doesn’t matter what your gun laws are. And this is the point that this woman makes in the post at Gawker. And I’m telling you, it attracted a lot of attention. I got the impression after looking at some of the tweets and the Facebook postings after this that the left may be missing the mark here in their can’t-help-themselves, mass movement toward gun control. We’ll see.

It seems like everybody is caving on everything these days, because it’s just easier than to stand up and fight for it. Boehner is gonna go ahead and agree to raising rates on the rich, which — which I’m just gonna tell you — doesn’t surprise me. In addition to that, let’s punt the debt limit for a year. Let’s take away whatever leverage we’ve got and do that. So there’s a lot of things that have a lot of people scratching their heads.

We cannot deny that all around us the institutions and traditions which used to provide the guardrails for our culture and society have been corrupted, and those guardrails aren’t there anymore. They were torn down, actually, a long time ago. They are erected temporarily in certain places. Now we find out, by the way, that the shooter’s mother… You know, if you tell the truth about this — or if you repeat the facts on this and then extrapolate and begin to analyze — you get yourself into big trouble, too.

Let me find it. Here. Let me give you the UK Daily Mail. As usual, the foreign press has the story. Nancy Lanza… By the way, this, too. John Hinderaker at PowerLine has really done a great job of chronicling, detail by detail, everything the media got wrong. I’ll go through that for you in just a second. But turns out that Adam Lanza’s mother believed that the economy was on the verge of collapse as was the world. She was a survivalist.

She stockpiled food and water and guns, and she apparently… I don’t know if we can believe any of this. This is the problem. I don’t know what to believe now. This is the UK Daily Mail. She taught her son survival skills; warned him of what was coming. I’m gonna tell you, you can’t take… If you’re going to assess where we are as a culture, where we are as a society, you can’t take the state of the economy out of the equation.

It’s in bad shape. Whether you’re talking about survivalists or not, you simply can’t take the state of the economy out of the equation. It has a lot of people scared to death. People are scared to death that the basics aren’t going to be there. Food, water, what have you. They’re scared to death that the institutions and traditions that are there to protect them, can’t. Did you see all the stories?

You remember all the stories, if they were true (hell, who knows?), before the election and after the election about gun sales really rising/ratcheting up? People were buying guns left and right before the election, particularly after the election. By the way, this woman was not poor. I mean, her husband makes over a million a year, divorced husband. He gives her $350,000 a year. She lives in a nice house. She was not poor. This is an upper-middle class, white family from which this young man came.