RUSH: We have learned a lot more since we completed the program yesterday about the details behind the scenes that led to the shooting near Roanoke, Virginia, yesterday. I’ve learned a lot more about the shooter and his relationship with people he worked with and people he worked for throughout his career. Bryce Williams is his stage name. And it turns out…

Let me go at this from the standpoint of my experience in the business of broadcasting. I want to take you back to the early 1970s. I left home at age 20 in 1971 for my first job away from home. It was to Pittsburgh. It was actually a suburb station in McKeesport, and I was there for a year and a half, and I got a job actually in the city of Pittsburgh, KQV, which at the time was owned by ABC.

And it was at about that time that the federal government and the FCC began minority hiring requirements on all broadcasters, federal relations governed broadcasting. Broadcasting, you gotta pass certain tests, or did every five years in order to have your license to broadcast renewed by the government on the basis that the airwaves you were using were public, and so they were regulated by the 1934 Communications Act.

And we had the modern era of feminism that had just been born in the late sixties, the Gloria Steinem/Betty Friedan version that has screwed everything up now. I’ll give you an example. I mean, we can give you examples left and right. The story we didn’t give you yesterday about the heroics on the train in France. You know what happened in France? Everybody in that train ran for the hills except some American men.

And what you had in the rescue effort on that train was American maleness. You had American — what used to be universal, worldwide manliness — masculinity on display. Heroics were performed; people were saved. The situation was diffused, while people ran for the tall grass. The people that ran for the tall grass are the people have been indoctrinated by political correctness. Men who are shamed into not being men, men who have been henpecked or whatever into denying their maleness and masculinity on the basis that it is predatory.

And this is the chickification of the country. And in some parts of the world, that has taken place with the rise of feminism. And that’s just a brief aside to illustrate that which I’m speaking about here. The way this manifested itself at radio and TV stations all across the country was, mandates went out from the federal government to owners of broadcast properties, that they had to begin hiring on the basis of quota and not merit.

And what happened in the early stages of this, and what I think it continues to this day, by evidence of what we saw yesterday in Virginia, is one of the end-of-the-road results of this kind of government overreach. It’s mandatory minority hiring. Merit was thrown out in many cases. I saw… My point is, here I saw many qualified men who had been in broadcasting for years and climbing the career ladder in broadcasting (the way you did) lose their jobs, just get fired for no reason other the federal government was mandating that certain number of or percentage of on-air jobs be held by women and African-Americans and what have you.

And it was new. And because it was new, ownership and management was particularly afraid and therefore particularly energetic to be seen following the new federal guidelines, which were actually mandates. As such… You can argue about this. I’m not raising this to argue about the merits of this. I’m raising this to try to give you a timeline to explain some actions that took place yesterday.

So you end up having qualified people summarily fired simply to make room for what were required by government to be minority hires. They had to. It was an early way of looking at diversity demands, if you will. This is not to wring hands over qualified people being fired. I’m not doing it. I’m just telling you that the history. This goes back to the 1970s, the early 1970s. Perhaps prior to that, but I think that’s when it was. I came close to being one of those let go.

At the time Pittsburgh was — and it may still be — a top 15 market. It was a big, big radio market, and programmers… And, by the way, everybody in radio who was around back then is nodding their head in agreement when I talk about this. They know exactly what I’m talking about. There are so many frustrated people that ran radio stations then and still do today. They try to have the best staff they can with the budget they’ve got and then they had to comply with all these government mandated hiring rules.

And they ended up having to put people with no experience whatsoever into jobs, positions that required experience. They were unable… And I’m talking about on air. That’s where these jobs were seen, these mandatory hiring rules could have been demanded for the entire staff of a radio or TV station, but they manifested themselves in on-air positions because those are the ones that were seen. So that’s where the compliance could easily be seen.

And, I mean, I don’t blame the people that got hired. I don’t blame the people that were not qualified. That’s not a rant on them. It is simply what ended up happening is that a lot of people who had no business being in this business got hired. And once they were hired, you couldn’t fire them for any reason. In many cases, you had either hold onto ’em or you had to promote ’em. As time went on, it became a little easier to get rid of them if they were not any good, but you had to replace them with…

You had to keep your percentages in order to satisfy the government license renewal time and any other time as well. So this kind of compliance has been going on since the 1970s. And it has led to a lot of people who are not qualified in this business — and once they’re there, you cannot get rid of them. Well, you can, but you have to replace them with similar characteristic replacements. And we’re not talking about merit here.

Now, at this time is a little different because now 30, 40, 50 years have gone by, and there are plenty of qualified minorities. Back then and for 10-15 years afterward, we were not talking about qualified at all. That was the whole point. That’s why it was such a friction-laden policy. It caused animosity like you can’t believe. Now, the murderer in Virginia had been fired from numerous other TV stations that he would have never been hired at to begin with had he not been a minority.

And I say that, simply because looking at his work career the guy never did make it anywhere. He was just… And, in addition to that, all of this created — and it still does to this day — a victim mentality. You know, I’ve always thought that quotas and affirmative action were ultimately insulting to the supposed beneficiaries. They were stigmatized. If it was known by people that they got the job not because of any particular talent or any particular skill, but because of their gender or their skin color, they were stigmatized.

Just as kids who had an “in” with the owner or the general manager who got hired, who had no business being there. They were stigmatized as well. Anybody who was not qualified who got hired based on something other than merit, stigmatized. And I think the combination of the stigma and the victim status creates a beneath-the-surface seething that effervesces, and in some people it boils over and blows up. This Bryce Williams guy, Vester whatever his name is. (interruption)

That’s right, Vester. Vester Flanagan was hired repeatedly to meet these EEO and affirmative action goals, and he was fired repeatedly. Most likely his incompetence got him fired. But it was also attitude related. When he was fired so many times for these reasons, he couldn’t deal with it, and he went postal. No, let’s not say that. He lost it. He went mental health on everybody while deep in this stigmatized victimhood.

And this is what happens when employment performance standards are lowered or disregarded for the sake of giving people something that everybody knows they’re not competent to do. I listened to people who have hired this guy and worked with him at various stations talk about him, and it was clear that he had no affection — they had no affection for him, and vice-versa — and it was never a pleasant experience for anybody, and he had to be let go at practically every job.

However, they were forced by the government to do all this anyway, to meet employment goals and objectives for diversity and all kinds of things. And particularly if you’re a business regulated by the government. You have to do this posthaste. You cannot play around with it. They hold your future, the government does, in the palm of their hands. And I think this incident that happened in Virginia, which is multifaceted, but it really isn’t that complicated when you get right down to it.

If you’re gonna be honest with yourself, and if everybody looking at this wants to be honest with themselves, what happened here is not really that complicated. The people are. This particular guy. It is a perfect example of what happens every day because of employment requirements that have nothing to do with competence or talent, merit, success building on success. The difference is, most people don’t die. People don’t die most of the time, thank goodness.

The employer just has to swallow the results of their incompetence and grin and bear it and hope everything turns out. The thing about this is it’s really a cruel thing to do to people, to stigmatize them this way. It’s a cruel thing. It’s looked at as, “No, no, Mr. Limbaugh! It’s not cruel. It’s an opportunity.” Yeah, I can see the argument that it’s an opportunity, giving somebody a chance to do something.

But when people who are qualified who’ve been working their whole lives in a particular business or field and had to work their way up and climb the ladder, when they are just summarily dispatched for somebody that has never done it before or has been repeatedly fired but now is hired to meet some federal requirement, I guarantee you there’s friction, and there’s a stigma.

And this is the ultimate insult to the supposed beneficiaries of all of this supposed decency and goodness. All these marvelous good intentions, trying to help the downtrodden, it ends up, in many cases, doing the exact opposite. It’s cruel to be forced to hire people who can’t do the job. It is cruel to be pushed into a job that you can’t do surrounded by people who can do it.

And then if you come to the job already thinking you’re a victim and already thinking you’re stigmatized and as unqualified, I’m telling you, it isn’t a healthy circumstance. That’s why I think the crutch of being a victim is what they all fall back on. It’s a way of blaming everybody else. It’s a way of blaming coworkers. It’s a way of blaming the boss. It’s a way of blaming the management. And what we have here, folks, are victims of liberalism once again. But we’re not supposed to look at it this way.

We’re supposed to see only the good intentions behind these policies.

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RUSH: Okay, so after all of that — which, by the way, is indisputable. Now, it’s different now. I don’t want to be misunderstood. There are qualified minorities now. They’re all over the place. They’ve been in the business awhile. They have begun to climb the ladder; they’ve exhibited talent. All that, that’s fine. But this guy wasn’t. Obviously he wasn’t and he kept making the rounds and he kept getting fired.

He was all ticked off that he didn’t get the job that supposed to get. He had PTSD ’cause he couldn’t get the job he wanted! So he’s relying on victimhood; the world was against him. He was one of these people always looking for trouble, he always was… He would walk around the office waiting for somebody to say anything that he could interpret as racist, to give him an excuse for failure, to give him an excuse for not making it.

And then that would… He’d think he’d heard something; then he would tell himself he heard it, and it would just magnify in his mind to the point that he exploded. And it was known. I mean, everybody that worked with the guy knew he wasn’t right. It’s just… I don’t know. I watched the father of reporter on TV today. I can’t put myself in these people’s shoes like I… It’s so needless. But despite all of this, Ben Shapiro has a great, great take on this at Breitbart.

The headline of his piece: “Black, Gay Reporter Murders Straight, White Journalists — Media Blame the Gun.” Democrats Blame the Gun. Oh, yeah. We have an angry minority (plus add angry homosexual to the mix now), and we’ve been told that we are to recognize certain things when homosexual bias exists. We’re supposed to not notice those things when the situation is reversed. Now we have to blame the gun, now we have to blame gun control, now we need more gun laws, now we’re gonna blame PTSD.

As I say, the media’s conflicted here over where to really place the final blame, so they choose the gun.

That’s the safe way to go.

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RUSH: Now, this Vester Flanagan guy. He also said that the Charleston shooting is what got him. That was the final straw. So he went out and bought a gun a couple days later. He bought the gun legally, by the way. He went out, got the gun, and… Now, who hyped the Charleston incident? What was noteworthy about the Charleston shooting to you? I’m gonna tell you what it was noteworthy to me about it.

You know what I couldn’t believe about that? You know the one thing that stood out about the Charleston shooting to me? I’ve never seen it before or since. The unilateral, immediate forgiveness of the shooter by the families of those victims that were shot in that church. I could not… I was so moved by that, I commented on it at the time. They were deeply Christian, and they did not…

None of the people inside that church and their families, not one of them sought to turn that event into some political circus. They tried to tamp it down. They offered forgiveness for the shooter. They did it in the Christian way. People not Christian will not understand it. It will not make any sense to them. And you could tell when it happened that that reaction… I mean, you should have seen it.

If you remember this, many in the Drive-By could not believe it, and there are guests on the nighttime cable saying, “I couldn’t do it. Forgive? I never heard anything like it. I don’t understand Christianity.” They did. That was part of the making peace with the whole thing. That was giving it all to God, putting trust in God. That’s what they chose to do as their means of coping, dealing with it. So who hyped it? Who hyped it?

The Drive-By Media hyped it. They would not let it go. The race hustler hyped that incident, and we had to pull down the Confederate flag. We had to have this whole dog and pony show. The Confederate flag caused all this. Meanwhile, the families of the victims couldn’t be found. They were privately dealing with this, their grief, in their religious way. But the Drive-By Media, the media itself?

I mean, they whipped up the racist angle to the Charleston shooting to the point this guy admitted that what happened there is what set him off. He might not have heard, because so little was made of it. The families of the victims immediately offering forgiveness — and even, to an extent, an understanding. Now, according to the UK Mirror, we get more journalism/truth about what happens in this country than we do in our own media.

According to the UK Mirror, Vester Flanagan’s apartment’s full of “unwashed sex toys, gay porn and cat feces.” Clearly we have somebody here that was unbalanced. It’s a sad, sad case situation. And I dare say… I’m speculating, but reading between the lines, people that work with the guy knew it. Nothing they could do about it. Any attempt to help him by suggesting that he seek some kind of therapy or help for mental disease, can you imagine what he would have done with that?

He’d have run off and talked about discrimination, bias, and whatever. So everybody’s hands were tied, again because of the stigma and because of the victim stats and because of the federal government’s power over these properties by virtue of their being regulated. But he saw the media raising hell and the Confederate flag being pulled down, so he wants in on some of that action. They got him all revved up and ready to go.

Here’s Russ in Cincinnati as we have some people want to weigh in on this on the phone, so we’ll do that and get into the latest political news in due course. Russ, I’m glad you called. Great to have you on the program. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Thank you. Glad to be here.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Longtime listener. I was smiling to myself, as you recounted some of the statements about the journalists and a career in journalism and the people that you have seen and run into, because it was the same for me. I was very fortunate. I became a news anchor when I was 21 years old, in a small market. It was ’95 I think at the time. But then I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, which is, you know, at that time a top 40 market.

I was amazed at the amount of bias. I don’t know that I was sophisticated enough to know what it really was, but I saw people — quote “people” — that I talked to. I saw parts of stories that I had followed that had nothing to do with what I had seen. I was anchoring and was told at one point that I now had to do co-anchor — her name was Bunny — and that she was gonna be my co-anchor. Apparently she had just graduated from some fine girls’ school but, you know, hadn’t ever worked in a radio station. She may have done an internship. Then I was dealing… We had a perfectly good white sportscaster who —

RUSH: Was this TV or radio you’re talking about here, now?

CALLER: This is TV.

RUSH: TV. So you had to have a co-anchor that had never done it before?

CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. She did it on a class project or something, but after I got to know her, I asked her. I said, “Jen, how many times have you done this? Have you? Did you ever?” ’cause she didn’t know some of the basics. She didn’t know how to write a script. She didn’t know how to produce the news to tell the people in the booth what to do next, to write out the script. It was amazing. And she never went out to cover a story. In fact, they did a feature on her when she came because she was going to be the first white, full-time female anchor in Louisville at the time. Now, we’re going back to the early seventies.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And one of the lines from the article was, “And once Carson and Dean were off the air, she went out to dinner with me so I could get to know her better, and the somewhat portly Dean stayed back and prepared the 11 o’clock news.” So I knew right away, I was no longer the star of the show. The sports guy wasn’t too bad. He was a nice guy. But he was very difficult to understand and when he got nervous he couldn’t be understood and obviously —

RUSH: See the bottom line here? What we have here is a living, breathing example of this. I lived through it. Always was in radio. It did not happen to me, I want to stress. I saw it happen to others. It did not happen, but I saw it. It was discussed constantly. It created bitterness, created anger. There were some people… A lot of people were apolitical, didn’t understand it. “What do you mean, EEOC? What do you mean affirmative action? What do you mean diversity?”

They didn’t understand. I don’t think “diversity” was a term back then. But they didn’t understand it. Their whole experience had been, “Work hard, get good, get as good as you can, get noticed, get lucky, get hired.” And then after you get hired, work your butt off and try to climb the ladder; go to a bigger market. All of a sudden, they get thrown out for somebody that’s never done it before because they happen to be not a man, and they didn’t understand it.

My only point is that this stuff is alive and well today, but it has created a circumstance where people who are in the business have no business being there. The only thing they’re gonna do is fail and get fired and then get angry and be stigmatized and fall back on victimhood status. And if they’re not there mentally, and if their fires of anger are stoked by external sources, such as the Drive-By Media and whoever knows whatever else, and they’re not all there, then you have potential like this.

My only point in this, folks, is there are explanations for this. Whether people want to face it or not is another thing, but it is not the gun. It is not the Second Amendment. It had nothing to do with it. The guy got his gun legally. It has nothing to do with it. The gun’s an inanimate object. This was this guy who went and got the gun for a specific reason and pulled trigger on specific people for a specific reason.

You could have had all kinds of gun control in the world, you could have gotten rid of the Second Amendment, and this guy would have found a way to do what he did, because he was the problem. And since in this country people are never responsible for what they do, they are the product of their environments or whatever, I’m trying to tell you how this guy was made into what he is. He wanted to be something. He wasn’t good enough to be it.

But he got hired nevertheless because it was the safest thing to do or safer thing to do it all these places where he worked. It was just… It wasn’t worth it. And then the day came where they had no choice but than to get rid of him, and that just makes him even angrier. And he chalks that up to bias. He chalks it up to racism or unfairness or whatever. He turns on the TV, and he sees he’s validated in thinking that.

And every time there’s an incident of crime where race is involved, this guy turns on the TV and he sees that his anger in his own mind is validated, that the world is stacked against him. He doesn’t have a chance no matter what. He’s better than anybody else around, but they never give him a chance. Then he has to listen to all these people make fun of him on the staff, supposed racists. It just builds and builds and builds. Not the gun.

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RUSH: The views expressed by the host on this program are documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time. No, no! It’s 99 point… We’ve gone up. Dawn, while you were gone, we hit 99.8%. It’s been over a year and a half since we heard from the opinion auditing firm, the Sullivan Group, and a surprise audit came in, and they have now documented it. Actually, it’s a year and a half since the last audit. But it’s been like three years stuck at 99.737%, and I’m now documented to be almost always right 99.8% of the time.

I mentioned Ben Shapiro’s piece at Breitbart. This day this story: “Black, Gay Reporter Murders Straight, White Journalists — Media Blame the Gun.” Now, the reason for that is, if this were the exact opposite — if it were a straight white journalist who had murdered a black gay reporter — that would be the headline. That would be the angle. That would be the automatic narrative, that the Drive-By Media would be using to report this story.

But since it’s in a way that they don’t want anybody to think is possible to happen, this story has to be about the gun. This shooting, this incident, has to be about the gun and gun control. Here’s a pull quote from the piece. It’s an opinion piece, obviously, by Ben Shapiro. “Teaching Americans that they aren’t victims would be a great way of battling evil — most victims aren’t evil, but virtually all evil people think they are victims, and thus justify their violence.

“But teaching Americans that they arenÂ’t victims would undercut the Democratic message that all minorities are victims, and thus require bigger government. And that message, and its attendant political success, must take precedence over the building of a more inclusive, more understanding country.” What he’s saying here is that the Democrat Party agenda first, last, and always, whatever… I got… I’ll tell you a little story. I was out in California over the weekend, my little time away, and I played golf with some friends.

One of them said, “Have you heard that podcast Serial?” I said, “The thing that ran on NPR?” “Yeah, yeah, it was great.” I said, “No, I didn’t.” “Why not?” “Because it’s NPR.” “Come on. Are you serious you’re not gonna…?” “That’s right.” I said, “There’s politics in everything. I am not gonna expose myself to the stuff that they use to entrap people.” I could not make this guy understand that there’s an agenda, a political agenda to everything the left does.

This has been one of my quests, by the way. It has been one of my objectives to get as many people as possible to understand that everything they see is political. Some of it’s well disguised, but everything is to advance the Democrat Party agenda one way or the other, particularly if it’s in the pop culture. That’s where some of the most deadly liberalism is found. It’s well hidden, and it is camouflaged. The whole… It’s not quite to the level of subliminal because you can point it out to people if you know how to spot it.

But the open resistance that I met? Nah, nah. People don’t want to think that. They don’t want to think that they’re being fooled by something, number one, that they just think is entertainment. But it’s the Democrat agenda first, Democrat agenda last, Democrat agenda always, and part of the Democrat agenda is making as many people as possible think they’re victims. And victims of what? A racist, capitalist America. If they can pull that off, then that’s a success.

Plus the beauty from the Democrats of at some point making people think they’re victims is they’re not responsible. It’s always somebody else’s fault! Therefore, they’ve got enemies. And here come liberal Democrat politicians understanding the plight they’re in and offering to go fix it, get even with those people that are doing these horrible things to ’em. Not hiring them, or making fun of them, or whatever it is.

And they’re gonna get even with these powerful forces (usually on the right, usually Republicans), and so they want as many people victimized as possible. So if you teach Americans that they aren’t victims, you tell people that there’s more self-determination their life than they ever thought and they have much more control over the outcome of their life? You start teaching them that? You start telling people they can be better than they are, that they’re capable of much more than they think?

And that there isn’t a whole deck stacked against ’em, no more than against anybody else, that everybody else has obstacles to overcome, so go and attack them. You teach Americans to do that, you would undercut the entire Democrat Party message. The Democrat Party message is, “The deck is so stacked against you that you can’t overcome all that without us, and what will we do? We will get those obstacles out of your way, and if we fail to get them out of the way, we will punish them!

“We will raise their taxes or whatever. We’ll take their health care away from, whatever.” And you can also count on the fact that whatever the Democrats promise to do, it will never end up helping you. They will tell you to feel better when your enemies get punished or what have you, but you never end up doing better. You remain victims permanently, and you remember to blame everybody else permanently.

There’s an added side benefit, too. The more people can be made to think they’re victims, the bigger government must become in order to deal with all the injustice and all the unfairness. And that will take precedence over anything, including in this story. Therefore, “This poor guy? He’s a victim of PTSD, of unfair bosses or what have you, and he finally reached his wits’ end when he saw what happened to Charleston! He went out and did it. He’s not responsible. It’s somebody else’s fault — plus the gun.”

And we don’t fix any of this until we get rid of all of that, which is one of the many things conservatism’s devoted to.

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RUSH: This is Michael in Cleveland. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I wanted to point out an observation that I noticed about the hypocrisy and racism the mainstream media and Hillary Clinton. Now, I’m not a Black Lives Matter supporter. But if I were them, I would be up in arms, because black people are being killed by guns every day. You don’t hear anything from Hillary Clinton. You don’t hear anything from the mainstream media. But two white people get killed, and all of a sudden it’s, “Gun control, gun control, gun control.” And I just wanted to point that out. I think the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

RUSH: Well, you know, it’s fascinating. That’s a fascinating take on this. Actually, just in Chicago alone. The difference is, Michael, that that is black-on-black crime, and since that is something that they don’t want to comment on, you don’t even mention it. When I say “you,” meaning the media.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: They just leave that alone ’cause that, again, doesn’t advance the Democrat Party agenda. It doesn’t advance the leftist agenda. But you’re absolutely right. Here you have black people victimized, murdered, black-on-black crime far more than they are being killed by interracial crime, and nothing. And yet here comes two white reporters, and that’s all the media can talk about. Now, they’re conflicted here. I guarantee you they’re conflicted.

And the conflict is, the shooter is black; you have the reporters who are journalists, but they’re white. I mean, this is a terrible conflict for the media in terms of finding the real victim and finding the real culprit. Ideally here, this would be the other way around, and it’d be easy to find if the shooter were white. Then the media would be having a heyday with this in a totally different way in which they are.

But the fact that the shooter is gay, that’s another problem for them. So they have to downplay that. So you won’t see any stories about, say, the rainbow flag not being flown anywhere, like you did with the Confederate flag after South Carolina. You won’t see any mention of that. And your point is that if you were African-American in this country, and you’d see all of the African-American crime, crime against them taking place and no news about it compared to this, yeah, you could get quite upset about it.

“Why don’t they care this much about us?”

Except they do, when it fits, such as Ferguson, or such as Baltimore. You see, it just depends. The pieces in this particular puzzle do not fit to actually move the agenda forward.