RUSH: Lana in Greeley, Colorado, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Yes. Hello, Edward.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Historically, what nations have managed to pull themselves back from the brink of internal self-destruction? I don’t think we’re there yet, but we seem to be sliding in the wrong direction. What did it take, and what can we learn from them, historically?
RUSH: Well, I don’t know that we’ve
CALLER: Well, yeah, that’s what I meant.
RUSH: The rise and fall of the Roman Empire. They didn’t see what was coming and they couldn’t save themselves. It happened to the Greeks.
CALLER: The only thing that gives me comfort, is it took Rome quite a long time to fall.
RUSH: Yes, it did. In terms of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, there’s a huge series of books about it, massive, massive volumes, and the history on this is very extensive and complicated. It would be impossible to simplify. Suffice it to say that most people, with their limited historically perspective, believe that Rome — the Roman civilization — was destroyed from within, the debauchery, perversion, the general lack of any kind of surviving morality, a court system for justice right and wrong and power run amuck and so forth. That’s what most people believe. It would be difficult I think to compare Ancient Rome to the United States case by case. One of the reasons why, is I simply don’t know if there were people in the Roman society in a political sense that wanted to bring about the destruction of Rome as it existed for the express purpose of reordering it in such a way that would have made it less grandiose and less powerful than it was. In this country, that’s what we face. I’m not talking about the rank and file. There are a bunch of people that are participating, just for the sake of discussion here, in a series of activities that are bringing about a crumbling of the moral code, a dilution of the sense of right and wrong and all that.
CALLER: That’s what I’m referring to then.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: The controls will happen if global warming people get their way.
RUSH: Well, see, I was going to go a different way with that. This group compromises at least, and maybe more, subdivisions. At least two primary groups. The one group is the leadership group, and they are actively seeking the destruction of the United States as it exists. They don’t like capitalism. They don’t like free elections. (They lose them.) They are attempting to insulate their ideology from election results, by putting activists in courts and on the bench, the Supreme Court, federal judge, appellate judge, these sorts of things. They are populating the bureaucracies of government with career people who will be there regardless who wins elections, and they are not willing to risk elections. They’re trying to insulate themselves from the voice of the people, so to speak, to continue to try to remake America in their own image. What is it about America they don’t like? What they don’t like is this sense of inequality, the so-called income gap, the wage gap, the wealth gap, the discrimination, the unfairness, the fact that some people are better than others. You can see this in every walk of life. You can see it in the school system. You can see it in government. You can see it legislation that elected Democrats propose. That’s the leadership group. The other side — and that would include people that are trying to use global warming or any other environmental issue as a means of destroying capitalism. You’re very perceptive if you recognize that, because global warming is simply the latest acid rain. It’s simply the latest. It’s no different than the Soviet nuclear threat back in the seventies and eighties. We all had to live in perpetual fear that we were going to be destroyed primarily because of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was irresponsible, he was going to put his finger on the button and wipe out the Russians, going to cause massive retaliation and we’re all vaporized.
CALLER: Well, that could go back to the fifties. I remember the fifties.
RUSH: Well, exactly. But the point of this was to keep the American people frightened and scared and thinking that they were responsible for this chaos and for this looming destruction. Global warming is just the latest issue. I’ve always said the militant environmental movement is the new home for displaced communists once the Soviet Union fell by the wayside, as it was known then. It may be making a comeback under Putin under a different name, but we’ll talk about that in due course. But it has all of the elements. The elements are: ‘We’re destroying the planet. We’ve got a limited amount of time to save it. We are responsible for it. We need to pay higher taxes. We need bigger and stronger government to fix these problems that we are causing. The Chinese are not causing the problems. The Indians are not causing the problems. The poor in the Third World are not causing the problems. Castro is not causing the problems. Hugo Chavez is not causing them. It’s the United States. The focus of the world, via the UN, is on us and reordering our way of life.
We’re too big. We’re too big a superpower. We mistreat. We discriminate. We oppress peoples of the world with our imperialism. All of this stuff. Now, the other group is the sad sacks who believe it. They are not activists. They’re just average citizens. For whatever psychological reasons, they buy into this. In the first group I was talking about — you’re worried about the moral decay and the vanishing line that demarks right versus wrong — there are a lot of people who are not activists in this, but they’d love to go through life not being judged. They’d love to be able to do whatever they want to do and not have one light of judgment rain down on them. These are people, by the way, that don’t believe in God, otherwise they couldn’t possibly live in an existence where they think they could escape it. (Judgment, that is.) So they’re just the serfs and they serve the leadership well. They soak up all this stuff and they end up living it, and then some of them actually join activist movements and protests designed to bring about through government or force, these various changes. You could list all these social upheavals that are underway right now.
CALLER: What turns it around?
RUSH: I think what turns it around is younger generations. In this country — and I don’t know how long this country is going to last. I have a feeling, though, it’s going to outlast Rome. It’s going to outlast all of these societies because what I think happens, I think it has happened over the course of our existence, and I think it’ll happen again — at some point the children of these generations that you and I are talking about that are participating in what you and I would describe as the decay or the destruction, are going to grow up and not want to live like that. They’re not going to find anything attractive about it. Imagine the generation, the first generation that grows up and is told, ‘By the way, the chance to earn the American dream is officially ended. It will not be allowed anymore because we have found out that achieving the American dream was possible for only a few. Too many were left out, and so we’re going to have outcome based results in earnings and wages and jobs and so forth, and now you’re going to be assigned…’ The first generation that grows up and is told that or is made aware of it, as they look out on the horizon and see the evidence of what’s possible in this country, they’re going to revolt against it. I think these things are cyclical. The key to it all, the key to my prediction manifesting itself, is freedom, and that’s why I look at global warming as an assault on freedom, and what’s especially hideous about it is that it is so seductive that it convinces average, ordinary Americans to give up their freedom.
CALLER: Well, and you have the school system and parents not being parents to counter that.
RUSH: Well, see, that’s another thing. The school system is another area, the public education system and the university system is where leftists and liberals are attempting to insulate themselves from election results because they run these factories that produce, interact and indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush. To me freedom is the key. The right to own private property is as important, if not more so, than the right to free speech, because if an individual can’t own property, by definition who’s going to own it? The government.
CALLER: Does this come back to, ‘I get to have some of my own toys?’ I mean, is that how you reach them?
RUSH: You mean the kids?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Now, I don’t have kids.
CALLER: Well, like when they took away the LEGOs in the classroom because that was property. ‘Oh, gee, what’s happening?’ I’ll let you talk.
RUSH: They didn’t take away because it was property. It’s because it was teaching a lesson on property ownership that was bad.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Now, see, I don’t know what the parents of those kids, I don’t know what the reaction to that was. I think there was a hullabaloo about it out there, but these things, they happen slowly, and the encroachment is gradual. But I remain optimistic predominantly because there is this new media now, call it alternative or what have you, that’s fighting this never ending, incessant leftist propaganda. I don’t care, even though they won the election last time around, their job is much more difficult today that it used to be. You nailed another problem, though, and that is parents who turn the raising of their kids over to the schools, because —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — they don’t want to mess with it. Like in my day, the school, the teachers were never wrong. I came home and complained about what a teacher said, my dad said, ‘The teacher is obviously right.’ You know, respect for authority. Today, let a teacher look wrong at a kid and the parents show up and they want to get the teacher fired, and demand, ‘How the hell can you do this?’ and so forth. Get this. If the school says, ‘You have to come watch Gore’s movie with your kid or your kid might suffer grade degradation,’ parents go!
CALLER: Oooh, grade degradation, yeah.
RUSH: Grade consequences. ‘If you don’t come watch this, too, your kid may not get as good a grade in my class, otherwise the kid would,’ and the parents go do it? I mean, the schools win. I don’t think we’re on the brink of destruction or collapse from within. Every generation, from the founding of this country, has thought it’s in the last days, every generation’s had people who think, ‘Oh, it’s never been worse. Ah, we’re going to hell in a handbasket.’ I don’t think that the depravity of human behavior is any different today or any greater than it’s ever been. We just know more about it because of media, and there’s more media and there’s more movies and they’re depicting this stuff. But if somebody wants to tell me, I just refuse to believe that the kind of debauchery or perversion or whatever that we see chronicled in television and movies is something new and didn’t happen in the fifties with Ward Cleaver. Let me tell you what Ward and June were doing their with their neighbors. Everybody thinks that it was clean and pure as the wind-driven snow back then, and it’s never been clean and pure as the wind-driven snow since Adam and Eve. You’ve always had this kind of behavior but somehow in this country we’ve always risen above it. Look it’s this simple (I’m way long in this segment and I’ve gotta take a break) when it’s time to panic, I’ll tell you.