RUSH: I was walking around this morning, folks, as I always do, about a quarter till 12, ten minutes before the program, something like that. I always take a walk outside in the halls here of our vast EIB Southern Command, just to take a look at what I’ve built. As I was walking by the dining room, Dawn and Brian were in there dining on their daily sustenance from TooJays — well, TooJays delivers, and so Dawn starts yelling to me, “Hey, Rush, hey, Rush, you were all over the Today Show today,” and I said what? “There was some fanatical guy on there. Al Roker was interviewing some fanatical guy, and this guy was criticizing Bill Cosby, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas.” So I said, “What did I have to do this?”
DYSON: Sure, because obviously what Mr. Cosby said is not isolated from the history of black response to social distress and social struggle. So there’s been a huge gulf between the have-gots and the have-nots, what I call the Afristocrats, the black Afristocracy, the black professionals, the upper bourgeois black people who have had enormous opportunity and educational access in America and have built wealth and so on, versus what I call the ghettocracy, the people stuck at the bottom. And so his comments represented the bitter edge of a seething warfare that’s been going on in America between those who possess and have and have been privileged and those who don’t, and I think it’s unfair for those who have a bunch of power and a bunch of money to berate, to put down, and to castigate those who have been vulnerable.
RUSH: You know, it is just amazing how the left’s playbook just keeps getting recycled. It was just yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, on this very program, we had sound bites from august black leaders like the Reverend Jackson, the Reverend Sharpton and Calypso Louie. As we listened to these sound bites yesterday, if you listened to them, there is no prosperity in the black community, they’re all still in shackles, they’re all still enslaved in a white plantation somewhere. Now this guy has come along and he’s upset that apparently there are some prosperous blacks. What does he call them? The upper bourgeois black people, the Afristocracy, the black professionals had enormous opportunity, educational access, they’ve built wealth and what are we to believe here? I can’t keep track of it anymore. From day to day this message that the left is putting out is so muddled and so confused, and if I can’t figure it out. What are their targets supposed to do? What are the people on their side supposed to think? On one day, blacks are just — it’s 400 years ago. On another day, there are too many wealthy Afristocracy blacks like Bill Cosby and Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas and they’ve got no right to tell other people how to live, especially if those people are not doing as well economically, if they’re poorer, and any criticism of the way they live is nothing more than a put-down and essentially castigating them.
I’ll tell you what, if I’m a black person in this country and I listen to the news every day, I don’t know what I’m supposed to think of myself. Am I supposed to be downtrodden and enslaved and think of myself as still on the plantation? You know what? I’m supposed to think that, and I’m supposed to also think I should never escape that, because if I escape it then I’m going to be criticized by a whole bunch of other black people, because I’ll obviously be a sellout or an Uncle Tom. So if I’m a black guy I have to say to myself I have no chance in this country with my own people.
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RUSH: Now, we got two more sound bites here from this Michael Dyson guy, who’s out there inventing new words. The afristocracy and the ghettocracy. I’m going to put that word in Wikipedia, so it’ll spread around: the afristocracy and the ghettocracy. You got the afristocracy, which is the Cosbys and the Clarence Thomases and the Condoleezza Rices and the Thomas Sowells, and all the other achieved middle class and upper middle class black people. Then you have the ghettocracy, those who are not achieved and haven’t escaped their slavery, I guess, whatever he’s talking about. The whole thing here, this is baloneyocracy, if you ask me. We’ve got new words from the same old Marxist propaganda. This is just redone Marxism. That’s all this is. If you have to be poor to criticize the poor, then I assume you have to be rich to criticize the rich. So if the rich can’t criticize the poor, I better not hear one more word of criticism from poor people because it’s gotta work in reverse, and I assume if you’re rich you have no reason to subsidize the poor since you can’t even talk about them. Jesse is rich, and Al Sharpton — well, I don’t know how rich Al is.
That’s still a big mystery to me. Reverend Sharpton and money, it really is. But Reverend Jackson is very rich. Of course he doesn’t come in for this criticism. By the way, did you see Bill Clinton has a new girlfriend? Oh, it’s all over the news. Look at the looks I’m getting, I can’t believe you people don’t know about this. No, no, no, that’s Belinda Stronack, the Canadian babe, it’s not her. No, they found a 2300-year-old mummy in Egypt bearing a golden mask and covered in brightly covered images of gods and goddesses, unveiled yesterday at the pyramids complex south of Cairo. Well, yeah they had a 500-year-old mummy they discovered somewhere and Clinton was looking at it and said in a different age he might have asked her out. You remember that, he went ape over a 500-year-old mummy, thought she looked pretty good for being 500. So apparently another one here. Here’s another Michael Dyson cut, ladies and gentlemen. Al Roker, the interviewer says, “Have you had any communications with Mr. Cosby about your disagreement with him?”
RUSH: But as I recall, Cosby did get some agitated response, did he not? It wasn’t as though the black community said, “Hmm, I guess it’s Bill Cosby saying this, we better rethink what we think. We better start retooling our message.” That’s not their reaction. They didn’t bow down and say, “Oooh, Cosby says it. He must be right, we must be wrong.” There was all kinds of opposition to Cosby. But Cosby was right, you know, and I would have been right had I said the same thing. Actually, we’ve all said the same thing over the years that Cosby has said, but what this guy is saying is that we don’t have the right to say it because you have to be from the same group if you’re going to be critical of the group. That’s always been the case. I mean, if you’re going to criticize women, you better be a woman. Well, that’s the one exception, women will go after anybody and criticize them, doesn’t matter. But if you’re white and you’re going to criticize a black, you better not do it. You can only criticize other whites — blacks cannot criticize — well, blacks can criticize whites, too, I forgot about that. There are some exceptions to my rule here. But being right, of course, is secondary to who says it. Now, we have another further delineation. So here’s Bill Cosby, a black guy being critical of certain elements of black culture, but even he as a black guy can’t say it because he’s rich and the people he’s talking about aren’t. That’s the new theory according to Michael Dyson.
One more, Roker says, “A couple Cosby quotes, number one ‘Those names are not African, they don’t know a damn thing about Africa, with names like Shaneka, Shalika, Mohammed, and all that, and all of them are in jail.’ Next one talks about buying friendship, ‘All the child says is gimme, gimme, gimme.’ What’s your reaction to this?
DYSON: Number one, about the names, black people have always been creative in naming their children. Africans name their kids after the days of the week, after conditions of their birth. Black people in 1930s gave their kids names after consumer products, Cremola, Listerine, Hershey Bar. So black naming has always been creative. I’m not worried about Shanekwa and Talekwa, I’m worried about Clarence and Condoleezza who can hurt us in high places of power in America.
RUSH: I’m sorry, I’m not even allowed to laugh at this. I mean, the bottom line is I can’t even laugh. If I laugh at this, you know, I’m crude, rude, insensitive. Well, it is funny, but funny how, Mr. Snerdley? (talking to staff) Well, no, no, look it Mr. Snerdley — Mr. Snerdley’s point (interruption) no, some people are taking this (interruption) Mr. Snerdley, you still don’t get it. Snerdley is sitting there saying, “You know, this is all funny and fine, but nobody is paying attention to this stuff, nobody is out there listening to it.” Well, it was on the Today Show. It still has an audience, somebody heard it, but today with my airing of these audio sound bites, millions of people are actually hearing this. Well, nobody is going to take it seriously, that’s the point, but obviously the guy Dyson is being taken seriously by number of bookers on TV shows to put him on. I think it’s a classic illustration of we’re doing the job the mainstream press used to do. We’re putting this guy up and we’re reacting to it as it should be reacted to, rather than, “Hm-hm, hm-hm, a-ha, hm-hm.” I can just see Al Roker reacting, “Hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hm,” as though, you know, with tacit agreement.
We’re sitting here laughing ourselves silly. This is absolutely ridiculous. Yesterday was absolutely ridiculous. I’m playing this stuff, folks, to show you how utterly irrelevant the left is. They’re utterly irrelevant. Remember, one of the things we do here is we make fun of these people all the time and when they help out as this guy Dyson has done today, I mean, it’s a willing target. It’s just an invitation that’s been extended, and we’re going to jump right on it. Jeff in Memphis as we go to the telephones, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Fine, thank you.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question out there, Jeff. You said you’re a doctor.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: All right, of course. Now, you listen to this stuff, the Million Man March stuff, and all this. What do you think? We’re sitting here talking about it, what do you think the impact of say African-Americans that watch the Today Show — I don’t care where their economic strata is if they’re poor middle class upper class or whatever, from the Afristocracy or the ghettocracy, doesn’t matter to me — what do you think their reaction to this is when they watch this in 2005?
CALLER: Well, I mean for the informed person they could look at this or let’s say listen to this information, and they can say, “Okay, well, perhaps, you know, Cosby should be reprimanded.” Whereas someone like myself and others may look at it and say, “Well, this guy, he’s more so practicing the suppression of opportunities and just–”
RUSH: Well, of course you’re going to have that, but I think the bottom line here is, ladies and gentlemen, that just by virtue of the fact that he’s on television, he is being given weight. See, I think when this guy speaks up or when Cornell West speaks up or Jesse Jackson or Calypso Louie, I think the left substantiates it and validates it by putting it on and by not challenging it. I think the bottom line is the mainstream left believes this stuff, Mr. Snerdley. You said nobody believes it. The mainstream left believes it. It’s not a question of who believes them, it’s a question I’m still trying to inform people here just what’s happening in the mainstream left. So many people are deadly afraid of the mainstream left or the kook-fringe left. They’re afraid of the judge fight, they’re afraid of the Social Security, the left is still winning. The left is bonkers. The left is absolutely wacko. Any opportunity we have to illustrate this we do, yesterday from Calypso Louie or today from Michael Dyson.
This is not the kind of stuff that you build a big, inspirational worldwide national movement. You just don’t. This is fringe kook stuff. This guy is a pseudo-intellectual. He’s out there being paraded. Dyson is a pseudo-intellectual who is now being given the weight and credit as a full-fledged intellectual. You would not have Clarence Thomas treated with this kind of reverence. Probably Condoleezza Rice might not get this kind of reverence on television. And Cosby, of course, they’d probably be deferential to him simply because they’re afraid of him. Cosby is so big that Al Roker, for example, would not want Cosby disliking him, but, you know, everybody has exceptions like that. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Jeff. Thanks much.