RUSH: Looky here. Here is Fox News now playing Ashton Kutcher’s comments when he was receiving the Teen Choice Awards Sunday night. Now, let me go back to that because it fits right in here. Here’s Ashton Kutcher who said a number of things in his acceptance for his award on Sunday night, Teen Choice Awards, and among the things he said was that there was never a job he had that he was better than. I spent an hour analyzing and really hyping and supporting the comments that he made.
Now it’s all over the place. Fox is doing it with guest analysts and so forth. The Hollywood Reporter (Paul Bond) did a story on it. A number of people are trying to figure out why I said it. They think I would hate Ashton Kutcher. They can’t believe that I said good things about an actor. It’s amazing. Ashton Kutcher is not a Millennial, but he’s close to it. Apparently, he never believed that he didn’t have any choices.
There’s a fascinating story, ladies and gentlemen, in the Wall Street Journal today that dovetails with precisely what I’m talking about. “Troubled teens make more successful entrepreneurs.” And let me just give you this, in a nutshell. It’s a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. These are the people who decide when we are in a recession or not. That’s who they are. The National Bureau of Economic Research.
They have found, through exhaustive research and study, that kids who engage in risky behavior, even if it’s illegal, go on to become entrepreneurs even more often than kids who play by the rules. Now, this story is ripe for being misunderstood. The story is not urging destructive behavior. This story is talking about kids who do not accept that they have no choices. This story’s talking about kids who don’t accept that their lot in life is predetermined.
These are kids that get in trouble because they behave outside the norms of the formulas of today that have been set up. This story goes on to show that those teenagers end up, more often than not, becoming successful entrepreneurs. Here’s an excerpt from the piece: “Of course, you have to be smart. But itÂ’s a unique combination of breaking rules and being smart that helps you become an entrepreneur.” That’s precisely what Steve Jobs was talking about.
I am convinced that portraying Jobs in this movie Jobs, that opens today, had a profound impact on Ashton Kutcher. I don’t think there’s any question that it did, because that describes Jobs. By the way, they sent me a closed-caption copy of this movie. Kathryn is not around. She’s out of town. She said, “Wait. I want to watch that with you.” So I just watched enough of it to be able to tell you that, in my estimation, it covers not the full life of Steve Jobs.
It starts from the founding days of Apple up through being fired by John Sculley, who Jobs brought in from Pepsi to run the place. I think it does a pretty good job in the way it tries depicting Jobs. If you don’t know anything about Jobs, or if you’re confused about him, this might be a good movie for you to watch and start getting a basic understanding of it. Clearly, Ashton Kutcher was affected by it, by playing Jobs, by learning about the guy in order to play him in this movie, which opens today.
Now, if you are a student of Jobs? I think this movie has an impossible task, with certain members of the audience. Steve Jobs is a hero to so many people, and they’re people that know more about Steve Jobs than he knew about himself. There are people that are so devoted to Jobs that they know more about him than he does. He’s forgotten things, or he forgot about things, and I don’t think any movie can satisfy these people, ’cause you can’t cram into two hours or whatever this is, the Steve Jobs story.
So there are gonna be some people who just have devoted every waking moment to learning everything they can about Steve Jobs who are gonna think that the movie doesn’t tell what they want people to know about him. But if you have a peripheral knowledge and a curiosity, this would be great flick for you to get a flavor of the guy. Critics and people who know say that you could read all kinds of opinions, but basically that Kutcher did a good job in capturing a number of the mannerisms and speech patterns and personality of Steve Jobs.
But I find it fascinating now. A couple of days ago we spent an hour on this, and Snerdley said, “Oh, yeah, it’s viral now. Everybody is analyzing Ashton Kutcher’s remarks.” (interruption) The audio of what do we have? (interruption) Oh. Well, we’ve already played the audio of Kutcher. I thought there was new audio. Thanks very much, but we played the audio earlier. See, this is what I mean, folks, when I tell you I’m on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
The Hollywood Reporter piece on me is viral, too. But, see, I read the Hollywood Reporter piece, and they were having trouble. They think I hate everybody in Hollywood. They couldn’t believe I was praising Ashton Kutcher. You just read that, and you see they were flummoxed. That’s why I said, “It’s amazing, the people who do not listen to this program who think they know who I am, what I am, and what happens here.” I know how it happens.
I mean, I know the power of the media to influence. I understand all of that. It still, though, amazes me. You can still get a radio anywhere and listen. It’s not as though you need a password and a decoder ring to listen to the program. It’s not as though only certainly liberal critics can listen and tell people what they heard here. But it also tells me that there’s a whole audience of people that doesn’t know how the left operates today.
They do not understand that the left has, as a purpose, the discrediting, the impugning, the destruction of people that disagree with ’em. They think they’re getting objective analysis of what happens on this program. When they’re not. So these people writing these stories about my reaction to Kutcher literally are confused, because it goes so against what they think happens on this program.
I know you people run into this. You listen to it frequently, every day. You encounter people who don’t, and you can’t believe what they do not understand and what they misunderstand. The reason is, it’s so easy to listen to this program and figure out what happens here. Yet people think they know all about it without having to do that. At any rate, that’s it. I pretty much said what I wanted to say about all of this.
It’s criminal what’s being done to young people today, the mind-set that’s being created for them — they don’t have a chance, they don’t have a choice, they don’t have a future. So many things predestine a life of misery for them — and it’s all because of liberalism. It’s all because a political party needs a political underclass of dependents voting for them. In an extreme manner, it’s a crime against humanity, what the left is doing to people. They’re destroying their lives. They’re taking their future away from ’em.
They’re perpetually depressing them.
They’re just overwhelming them with hopelessness and misery, all for their own benefit.
The human potential that these people are killing is a very serious problem.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hang on a minute. I’m reading the transcript of a sound bite I just got. Kutcher speech at (muttering). Yeah. Have sound bite number 20 standing by. I think this is instructive. I mentioned a few moments ago that I looked up on Fox and I saw, “Wow, they’re doing a segment on Ashton Kutcher and his speech.” By the way, Snerdley, I got a note from a friend who explained why the Hollywood Reporter had such trouble.
You know, this makes a lot of sense. The Hollywood Reporter is stunned that I was complimentary toward Ashton Kutcher, and they don’t quite know what to do with it. They wrote about it accurately, but they’re just… You can read, they’re just on the verge of snark, right? I mean, it wouldn’t take much. One sentence, and they could have been full-fledged snark. But they didn’t. They gave it a fair treatment.
This note I got said, “Rush, the problem is real simple. You are a person of ideas, and they don’t know that, and they’re not about ideas; they are about personalities.” Boy, is that ever right. I think it explains the line of demarcation on a number of things. The entire entertainment media is totally devoted to personalities. It doesn’t matter what they say, just that they’re stars. Therefore, they idolize and worship ’em, and that’s it.
It starts and ends with that. But I am not into worshiping personality, cult or otherwise. I’m a person of ideas. They don’t know that, because they’re not. The theory being that one of the reasons that they don’t understand me is they don’t understand the idea that somebody’s about ideas, no matter who says them. If they’re good, they’re good. I thought it was an interesting point. Anyway, Fox does this story.
Everybody is now replaying Ashton Kutcher’s comments upon getting an award at the Teen Choice Awards on Sunday, that I spent an hour analyzing and praising. So now everybody is doing it. That’s called cutting edge. Cookie just sent me a sound bite from one of the libs talking about this on Fox. The fill-in host Gregg Jarrett was speaking with former Clinton pollster Bernard Whitman. They’re discussing Ashton Kutcher’s speech at the Teen Choice Awards, and the fill-in host Gregg Jarrett said, “One could argue that it is contrary to the entitlement mentality that is sometimes championed by liberals and Democrats,” what Kutcher was saying.
WHITMAN: I think Kutcher’s speech was a powerful endorsement of personal responsibility, hard work, and the American dream. And the idea that those values are somehow — conservatives have a lock on those values isn’t just absurd. It’s actually plain offensive. And with respect to his definition of being sexy, sexy being smart, I totally agree. And you know what’s not smart is waging a war on science which conservatives seem obsessed with doing, claiming that we’re not responsible for climate change —
JARRETT: Yeah!
WHITMAN: — believing that women will shut down pregnancies after rape and thinking that gays can be cured. None of that is smart.
RUSH: They just can’t help themselves. They literally just can’t help themselves. Who brought any of that up? Anyway, liberalism does not stand for personal responsibility. It’s just the exact opposite. Liberalism is about you don’t have any personal responsibility. You don’t. You’re not responsible for what you do. They’re defensive about this. This is why I think they sent somebody out to try to claim ownership of what Kutcher said.
They’re very, very troubled, in other words, that I, El Rushbo, would be praising somebody they think they own.