RUSH: Now, listen to the latest explanation. This was on Fox a little while ago. Jenna Lee, the cohost on Fox, was speaking with an author by the name of Anne Speckhard, who has written something called Talking to Terrorists. I assume it’s a book. Anne Speckhard, author of Talking to Terrorists, was on Fox, and she was talking about how Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have become radicalized. Jenna Lee said, “Dzhokhar, the surviving suspect, has been in our country longer than he was overseas. He’s an American citizen. So what would be the key to radicalizing him if that’s the case? How would he go from the side of lightness to the side of darkness?” And stand by for this explanation.

SPECKHARD: It looks like his brother pulled him along, and someone pulled the brother in. And the way I explain it, I listened to an interview in Russian of his kindergarten teacher, Tamerlan’s teacher, and she said the family was wonderful, they were well educated, good people, but when he came to preschool he had come out of the first Chechen war and she said he was very sensitive to firecrackers and loud noises and she attributed that to war trauma. So I wonder right from the beginning, does Tamerlan have PTSD?

RUSH: There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, Tamerlan Tsarnaev has posttraumatic stress disorder because of bombs while he was in kindergarten in Chechnya. She doesn’t say this conclusively, she’s speculating. So I wonder right from the beginning does Tamerlan have PTSD attributed to the war trauma from when he was a child. It’s a great family, and they were educated, a wonderful family. Yeah, so is bin Laden from a great family, and highly educated, and so was al-Zawaqi or whatever his name, bin Laden’s number two. And the Muslim Brotherhood are well educated, and they all come from wealthy families.

What is it, people have this notion that these terrorists are dirt poor? That’s not the case. Certainly not among the leadership. But note again the question. Dzhokhar, the surviving suspect, he’s been in our country longer than he was overseas. He’s an American citizen. What would be the key to radicalize him? Could he have been radicalized here? Don’t forget the quotes we had from his buddies: Well, yeah, he’s filled with this anti-American stuff, but we hear that all the time here in Cambridge. Isn’t any big deal. Yes, it is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is interesting. Austin, Texas. Chris, thank you for waiting. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, Steelers dittos from Texas.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: You know, I just don’t understand this. You were talking earlier about the degree of education that Tamerlan had, and why is it that — I never hear anybody counter-argue this. Why is it that so many people think that the higher level one has of education, the less they would be susceptible to evil or committing immoral acts or just being evil people? As if education somehow is, you know, the golden grace of God.

RUSH: Well, who is it that thinks that? It’s other educated people.

CALLER: But that’s becoming more mainstream. I hear this in regular, average conversations. “Well, they need more education. If we had more education, that would solve racism. If we had more education, that would solve –” you fill in the blank. Education has nothing to do with this. I think the lack of any kind of spirituality, because you can’t talk about that, but if we don’t talk about spirituality, we don’t talk about God, we’re denying something that is anthropologically true about us, and it aggravates the heck out of me.

RUSH: And the thing that is anthropologically true about us is that we need a belief in God, that we need —

CALLER: That’s correct.

RUSH: — that for our souls and —

CALLER: Not only that, Rush, but also to be an antidote to the evil that’s always going to be lurking, dragging us and tempting us into these acts. Why is it so bad to talk about something that is demonstrably true?

RUSH: Most of the liberal elite that’s highly educated eschews formal religion because they think it’s for the dim-witted.

CALLER: Exactly. And see where all the crimes are committed. Look at Bill Ayers. Look at these guys from Chechnya. Look at, as you were saying —

RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. There’s a share of idiots that commit crimes, too. We’ve got our share of idiots that, when there aren’t any Chicken McNuggets, they call the White House or 911.

CALLER: True, but education is not the key.

RUSH: No, I agree with that. These other people that are educated look at themselves as virtuous, class-act citizens, and they think nobody like me would ever do anything like this. Then you see bin Laden probably has more education than you do. Education defined as time spent in a formal classroom or University, not what you know or not what you’ve been taught, but just exposure to it.

CALLER: But doesn’t that then lead to denial, then immorality comes in and you just, as you said earlier, they define it down.

RUSH: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s denial, but I think it’s also something else. I think it’s contempt for people that aren’t educated to the degree that the people we’re talking about think of themselves, and I think it’s arrogance. I think it’s condescending arrogance on the part of the educated elite who think that people of their stature are not capable of such acts of barbarism, not capable of such depravity and so forth. They have a lofty opinion of themselves. That’s why they don’t understand this. It’s one of the many reasons —

CALLER: When you have those people and they’re in positions of power, the danger is that that corruption breeds, and it goes around and it gets into the mainstream, into high schools, into education, into lower levels of education. And then it becomes the norm, and then people can’t understand where’s the evil coming from, why is it happening? They’re asking all these questions now because they’re in such denial —

RUSH: I know, and that’s when they come up with, “Well, it’s posttraumatic distress disorder. This kid was afraid of firecrackers as a kindergartener. That explains it.” Gotta take a break. I appreciate the call, Chris. Don’t go away, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s a common mistake made when people start thinking about education. They think it equals intelligence. It doesn’t. Education does not correlate to intelligence. It may correlate to knowledge, but what if what you know is wrong? What value is it?