RUSH: Now, I happened to watch the other night… I was channel surfing around. I don’t channel surf much. I was channel surfing around and I came across this show I’d never seen called Chicago Med, and it’s by Dick Wolf — you know, the Law & Order, Law & Order SVU, Chicago PD, Chicago Fire. And the reason I stopped when I came across it was that there’s a patient in the hospital who wanted his left arm amputated because he didn’t feel like it was part of his body.

And he was doing everything he could. He’d tried to amputate it himself; that’s why he was in the hospital. Of course they brought in the hospital psychiatrist to try to talk to the guy and explain what was going on, and they diagnosed him with some disease called Body Integrity Identity Disorder or some such thing. Apparently it was an official disease, and they started working with the guy in a psychological therapeutic way to try to condition him to not look at his arm, his left arm as not a part of his body.

But the guy, the character, was just… I mean, neurotic. He’s sick; he was angry. “You gotta cut it off! You gotta cut it off! It’s not me! It’s not me! Look, it’s not my arm; it’s not my arm.” And they wouldn’t do it, of course. So they try all their medicines and they try their counseling sessions and the guy eventually makes his own makeshift tourniquet under his robe and causes gangrene, and they have to amputate his arm. And the guy is happy as he can be. He’s a totally changed patient. He’s content, he’s happy, because this foreign…

This thing that everybody said was his left arm that was not, it was finally gone and he was relieved. He was happy. He wasn’t scared anymore, wasn’t threatened. My point is this — and I’m not advocating any of this. But just the way this was written, the shrink, the psychiatrist in the hospital said, “You know what? I blew this.” And the physician said, “What do you mean you blew this? We’ve got a guy who’s mentally disturbed. You didn’t blow anything.”

“I didn’t take the time to really understand his desperation. I thought I could treat this with traditional techniques, but I didn’t take the time to really understand that his desperation and fear — however irrational to us — were real.” Well, I said, “Hot damn! That’s a pretty close analogy to the way voters supporting anti-establishment candidates are looked at. They’re just kind of kooky, they’re little nuts, they’re a little crazy — and to the point now they’re being insulted.

I mean, you have people writing pieces at various places (even some conservative blogs) saying, “Yeah, you middle class, you white people are all mad? You deserve to die! You know, you deserve to fail. You’re sitting out there blaming everybody else for your problems; you deserve to fail. You’re sitting there pining for industries that no longer exist. You haven’t modernized.” They’re being blamed for all this. Their support for Trump, they’re being blamed for, for being losers.

I think the same thing that was caricatured in this TV show — portrayed in this TV show — is happening here. I think a lot of people look at Trump’s supporters and frankly, some of them, you know, they’re saying crazy things on Twitter. But a lot of ’em don’t do that, and I think some in the establishment and in the establishment media really haven’t taken the time to think, ’cause they don’t see the country in crisis. Like this e-mail I got from this Trump guy who was just devastated over this Colorado thing.

He says, “You gotta understand why we support Trump. We all have one thing in common. If there is a scintilla of a chance of saving our country, Trump’s it. There isn’t anybody else — and it’s a very small chance. But it’s the last chance. If Trump can’t pull it off, it’s over.” I’m reading from an e-mail I got from a friend of mine that’s a Trumpist, who does not play games on Twitter and insult people or any of that. But he genuinely believes this is it, and a lot of them do.

The point is, whether they’re right or wrong, the establishment doesn’t see anything anywhere near like that. They don’t see student loan debt. They don’t see college education being worthless. They don’t see the country in crisis. They don’t see the national debt as something that may be an immovable impediment to their kids’ and grandkids’ future. They just don’t see it. So they mock people who do and make fun of them, and it’s driving more and more people away from them.

This arrogant condescension is not the way to deal with this.

Anyway, I gotta take a break ’cause I’m out of time.