Why Do Liberals Think the Way They Do?

RUSH: Gary in Acton, Massachusetts much the hello, sir.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. I wanted to offer a hypothesis about why the left is so hostile to traditional religion.
RUSH: Go ahead.
CALLER: The left has prospered controlling information flows, primarily through the old media and the government schools. Traditional religion doesn’t pass through those filters which makes it very difficult to spin or to fit into a template. If you want to coin a phrase (cell breaks up).
RUSH: No, you’re absolutely right, and I think this was never brought to the forefront in more vivid terms than during the funeral week of Pope John Paul II. Would you look at the abject fear that was throughout the leftist secular community in this country over the outpouring of love and adoration around the world for that man — and what I found just delicious about it was that that outpouring of love and devotion, that tribute, was brought to the world via the cameras of the secular left. They were looking through their lens finders and they were seeing their version of hell, and their lens finders and their cameras were bringing to the world the truth of a large body of people on this planet. And I said then, “You know, it became crystal clear to me. The Catholic Church is a competing Supreme Court to the American secular left. The pope is a chief justice they can’t control, and the Catholic Church and all of Christianity is a court that they can’t pack and they can’t infiltrate and they can’t change. Yet they keep trying.” The pope dies, what’s the focus of the mainstream media and the American left all week? “What’s the church going to do to modernize to let us become members? Or, “What’s the church going to do to modernize to become more liberal so that we will like them?” It’s not the church’s mission. So they look at modern religion as a competitor. It’s a threat, folks. It is a threat because it can’t be controlled and it can’t be changed. It can’t be reordered. I mean, these are all examples. These are all examples of who the left is, but explaining the “Why?” That’s probably going to escape me my whole life. Intellectually, it will escape me.
Now, you can say, “Okay, you have two worldviews, capitalism versus socialism, slash communism,” and the American left looks at socialism/communism and says, “You know, we want to cast our lot with that.” You look around the world where that lot has been tried and you see utter misery. You see murder, mass killing, walls built around countries to keep people in. You see economic disparity like you’ve never seen. You see poverty. You see environmental destruction like nowhere else in the world, in communist/socialist countries. You see unemployment; you see no initiative. You see absolutely no vitality whatsoever — and yet you still see that as the dream when you have this other example, capitalist America — right in your backyard, probably making you very affluent as a liberal — and yet you look at this the rest of the world where socialism and communism rules and you see a greater opportunity. So what is it that causes that vision to occur?
“Well, there’s a better way, Rush. It can be better for everybody.”

Well, you know, that’s Utopianism. That’s just fantasy, and maybe they’re all fanaticizing. Maybe they’re unable to deal with the hard, cold realities of the human existence. They’re unable to deal with the hard, cold realities of life. I mean, folks, it gets absurd. Here: How much money…? I want to add it up. I want a research project for somebody on my staff because Bush and Blair have just come up with another 600-plus million? Six-hundred-some-odd million, okay, to Africa — and Blair says, “We gotta do this,” and Bush says, “We gotta do this.” Now, I want to know how many billions this country in foreign aid through the UN, whatever other agencies, have been sent to that country, or anywhere else. It’s not folks in Africa per se but Africa is the focus today because Bush and Blair are going to send a bunch of money over there. Sending money over there is not the answer — and, in fact, the left today is making fun of the amount. “Oh, it’s too small. It won’t matter,” and then they come out and say, “That’s less per capita than what the Netherlands sends.” No matter what we do it isn’t good enough. No matter what how much we do it isn’t good enough. The left is in such a contradictory position. They used to always stand for freedom from oppression.
They used to always stand for human rights, and yet they are perfectly content for Saddam Hussein to remain in power: raping, murdering to the tune of three to 500,000 people because they hate George Bush so much. Intellectually it is inexplicable. I can’t understand it. Emotionally you can, and then for those people who have these convoluted views, and no matter what news this countries makes they always see the bad side of it, the negative side of it, they’re always quick to criticize this country. This country is first to the blame list for them. You just have to wonder, where does this come from? And these are people that are very affluent themselves. I know there’s guilt associated with all this. There’s a whole lot of psychological explanations for this, but intellectual, I just can’t see them. There is so much contradiction. There’s so much hypocrisy. There is so much, like I say, redefining terms. A “minority” used to be a loser when the Republicans were the minority. Now the minority is the winner. The minority rights constantly redefining terms so that they remain in their own minds the majority and the ones with primacy, superiority. Jeff in Detroit, welcome to the program, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Ah, Rush, great to be with you. It’s quite an honor. I appreciate taking the call.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: A couple of points real quick. You know, I hear that caller earlier come in and talk about the liberal values, and I couldn’t have been more happy. Finally somebody said everything and he want for one thing, socialist, and you picked that up so I appreciate that. But the one myth I want to dispel with is that, you know, conservatives aren’t for the environment. That is the biggest lie and propaganda piece that’s been perpetrated to people. We just try to take a sensible look at things and say, “Hey, can we operate sustainably? Can we do things in conjunction with our environment, and…”
RUSH: Now, wait.
CALLER: — you know, use a little sensibility, I guess.
RUSH: See, but you’re missing the point. They don’t actually believe — well, you have some liberals do, but I mean the liberals that are in charge of coming up with these arguments and these terms, the idea of presenting conservatives and Republicans as anti-environment is mainly and merely a strategy. What they try to do is inculcate fear and crisis. You know, they’re results oriented. There’s an editorial today in the Washington Post about the marijuana decision, and they get it all right but they have no idea why they’re right. I may spend some time analyzing their position for you on it but I refuse to believe that they actually believe all these things. They say them. Now, some of the rank and file and some of the fringe kooks that have become the mainstream do believe it, but not all of them do. Nobody is monolithic. No one group is monolithic with the same set of values and views and opinions that you can attach from person to person to person within that group. But I think their strategy in describing one thing conservatives are racists, sexist, bigot, homophobes. That is clich? that has resulted from a time-honored technique of discrediting opponents because the left cannot beat opponents in the arena of ideas. The left cannot win intellectual arguments. So all they can do is discredit the people on the right who are making opposing arguments, and in the process they hope to shape the minds of those not paying close attention, and as you know as a conservative it’s worked from a time over the years. How many of you have run into people and you’ve announced you’re conservative and they think you hate everything. They think you hate everybody. It’s just a means of discrediting because they can’t win the argument. But they are starting to lose the argument now precisely because they can’t make it. I’ve said this over and over again. I think they got lulled into a false sense of security.
For 50 years they ran the show and they had the mainstream media never challenging them but merely amplifying and echoing what they said. We on the other hand, those same 50 years, trying to gain prominence, gain a foothold and eventually become the majority. We had to learn to express our views, explain to people in a persuasive way what we believed and at the same time we’re being challenged and impugned and laughed at, mischaracterized by the left and the media, and yet we forged ahead. After 50 years we’ve gotten damn good at telling people why we think what we think. The left hasn’t. The left can’t tell anybody why they think what they think. All they can do is discredit us and try to scare people into thinking we somehow mean harm to them. They can’t explain their positions. All they can do is articulate them. That’s why they’re losing elections. I mean none of this is particularly upsetting to me but it is an interesting intellectual exercise to try to explain them, and I defy anybody to be able to do it. I mean you can come up with examples. But to give me a reason why a 35-year-old human being in America living a prosperous life hates this country and accuses this country first, assumes this country is the enemy, I defy you to give me an intellectual explanation that I will accept. There isn’t one. There are only psychological and emotional reasons and they make no sense whatsoever. You can go nuts trying to understand it. It’s best to laugh at it and understand that it all means they’re losing. No matter where you look they’re losing. No matter where you look, other than their strongholds. But even in their strongholds there’s some trouble because there’s some defectors. Some liberals can’t abide it anymore. We’ve had their columns on this program. They can’t abide the intellectual hypocrisy. They can’t abide the dishonesty. They can no longer associate themselves with it. They can’t explain it themselves, and they’d rather not.
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