RUSH: Kathy, Canton, Ohio, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you.
CALLER: This is one of the highlights of my life, but I think I know why you haven’t gotten any seminar callers.
RUSH: Ooh. Well, I’d like to know this, because the president has asked them to do this and I figured we’d be flooded.
CALLER: Well, I think it’s because they’re not up yet.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: I hadn’t thought of that.
CALLER: I mean, really, you start at 12 o’clock. Come on.
RUSH: Yeah, it’s —
CALLER: That’s a little early, don’t you think?
RUSH: Yeah. And in fact 9 a.m. out there on the Left Coast. That’s an excellent point.
CALLER: Ooh. I don’t think they can manage that. Do you have a minute for me to tell you just a little story about my 23-year-old daughter who is a Rush Baby?
RUSH: Sure. By all means.
CALLER: Well, when she went out from under our insurance and was about to go take a job —
RUSH: Mmm-hmm?
CALLER: — that did not offer insurance, she wanted to just go without, and of course you don’t tell a 23 year old what to do, but we did make a suggestion. We said, ‘Why don’t you go and do some research to see about the most inexpensive insurance you could get that would just cover your major medical,’ and she did that and for about $75 a month she’s covered for anything major. The rest of it she plans to take care of on her own.
RUSH: No!
CALLER: Yes. She’s a Rush Baby. Come on. (laughing)
RUSH: She’s going to be hated.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: She’s going to be despised. She’s going to be called insensitive. ‘You mean you are going to pay for it yourself?’ She’s going to be accused of bragging.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: Being out of touch. I hope she’s prepared.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Well, she doesn’t worry about it.
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: I think she takes better care of herself because she knows that if she has to go to the doctor, she’s paying the bill.
RUSH: She probably knows…
CALLER: She doesn’t want to go to doctor.
RUSH: Right, exactly.
CALLER: She wants to spend her money on other things. So I just thought I’d let you know that all of the talk of people cannot get health care, is wrong.
RUSH: It’s a crock.
CALLER: It’s just bogus. Totally bogus.
RUSH: You know it and I know it. All of this is nothing but sob stories. The Democrat Party exists to this day by making this country sound like it’s a gulag —
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: — run by Republicans. There’s no compassion, there’s no warmth. Nobody has any heart, and the only people that have anything have it because they’ve stolen it from the people who really should have it, and sob story after sob story after sob story. Talk about props?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It gets tiring.
RUSH: Very much so. Well, what is your daughter’s name, first name?
CALLER: Her name is Rachel.
RUSH: Where does she live?
CALLER: She lives in Indianapolis.
RUSH: Oh. Well, you tell her that we are proud of you and her, and you said something very interesting: She’s 23 and you can’t tell a 23 year old what to do.
CALLER: (laughing) Not very much. You can give advice.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: She’s almost to that turning point where she’s beginning to ask us for advice.
RUSH: A-ha.
CALLER: So we’re almost there.
RUSH: So it won’t be long before she realizes how smart you really are.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
RUSH: Well, good.
CALLER: She loves you. She listened to you against her will when she was very small. (giggling)
RUSH: A heartwarming story.
CALLER: She loves you now.
RUSH: I’m glad you called. Thank you very much for sharing that with me.
CALLER: Oh, thanks, Rush.
RUSH: Okay. That’s Kathy in Canton. Thanks very much for the call. (shuffling papers) I’m looking for something, here. I had a meeting. We’re talking education here, right? I had a meeting with Dr. Larry Arnn who is the Grand Pooh-Bah of education at Hillsdale College. Now, we’ve talked to you about Hillsdale College a lot on this program. They have 1300 students. They do not take a dime of federal money. Student loans, none of it. They want no finger of the government anywhere involved in their education. They focus on the Constitution. Nobody gets out of there with a 4.0. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘nobody,’ but you can count the number of people who get out of there on a 4.0, probably on two hands. Now, over the course of the next couple weeks we’re going to have actual voices of students as part of the commercial message.
After talking to Dr. Arnn, I’m going to go up there and I’m going to sit in on one of his Constitution classes. They go three hours. He was telling us how they approach education at Hillsdale at this meeting, and he said, ‘Our biggest challenge is to find a way to tell a student they’re wrong when they’re right at Hillsdale.’ Ah, got your attention there! He told this story. He’s big on Plato and Socrates and he’s big on the whole notion that what separates us apart from everybody else is that we can speak, and it is our speaking ability that lends us this notion of reason and thinking, that being able to speak and reason and think are interrelated. And he talks of opening a class on the Constitution.
He told me he called on a student to explain a question that he had posed to her, and it’s like a brain twister question. I don’t remember what the question was, but she aced it. And he said to me, ‘It took me nearly ten minutes to make her feel uncertain.’ It took ten minutes for me to make her lose confidence in her answer. I said, ‘Well, of course, of course! At Hillsdale nobody’s ever right except the professors.’ He smiled and laughed and said, ‘No, that’s not the point. We push ’em. We push ’em even when they’re right. We want them to not quite be sure so they’ll keep pushing and keep pushing to the point that they know they’re right, not because they’ve memorized it or have been taught it but because they’ve arrived at the conclusion themselves.
‘They are thinkers and critical thinkers, and the only way you can push critical thinking is to make them think and to challenge them. And sometimes if they’re right, we’ll tell me ’em they’re wrong. It took me ten minutes to shake this woman.’ It was the toughest challenge, he said, he’s ever had with a student. Now, some of you might say, ‘Boy, this sounds awfully cruel.’ No! This is not cruel at all. This is education as it was meant to be. You know, they have this monthly digest, Imprimis. It’s got a circulation of some 1.8 million. You can get that free just by going to Rush4Hillsdale.com. This is a great, great college. It’s in Michigan. It is a tremendous institution. This woman that he was talking about was an Iraq war veteran who had come back to complete her education, and she was advanced educated anyway.
But he’s really put together a fine institution there, and Imprimis is something they do offer free — and they occasionally do Constitution seminars on the Internet. That’s what they teach: Constitution, morality. Where did all of this come from? Who inspired the Founding Fathers to put all this together? By the time you graduate from this college, you have no doubt about what an American is. You have no confusion about what America is, how it came to be, why it is, why it’s great, and so forth — and you come out proud, and you come out of there supremely confident in yourself. So just go to Rush4Hillsdale.com. Sign up for Imprimis and tool around the website there. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s another thing that Dr. Larry Arnn said to me. They tell the students this all the time: ‘We will give you the F, but we’ll feel terrible about it.’ (laughing) I’ll guarantee you this, there’s no graduate that comes out of Hillsdale College that doesn’t know instinctively that the Drive-By Media is a propaganda machine. That’s the thing that’s not taught enough anywhere — thinking. We just ramrod whatever propaganda, facts, Algore movies we want into kids’ heads these days, and we teach them to react to things in a knee-jerk way, not to think things through and largely because half the teachers teaching today don’t know how to think, either, because they’re a product of the same corrupt institution. Anyway, let me get off of my high horse on this.
Here’s Jared, 21 years old, Columbia, South Carolina. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I was thinking this was supposed to be called flattery Friday, so I don’t want to give you an ego boost or anything like —
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that, I really do.
CALLER: Well, you know, I actually called in one time when I was ten years old. I’ve been listening to your show for a very, very long period of time, eleven years. And I can say that, you know, your last segment about, you know, the youth and thinking for themselves is, I wanted to talk to you about health care a little bit and how, you know, it really doesn’t matter that much at all, because what’s going to happen is in about 15 years, when the Baby Boomer generation, you know, your generation, you know, starts to die, you know, what’s left is my generation. And the sad thing is we don’t think for ourselves. It’s rather horrendous. And, you know, health care is a simple thing —
RUSH: Wait a minute, Jared. Wait just a second. You haven’t heard, the Baby Boomers don’t plan on dying.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: At least half of them, that’s just too unfair.
CALLER: Yeah, you know. I don’t know. Immortality effect or something like that?
RUSH: Yeah, yeah.
CALLER: Well, what I’m thinking is that my generation, we’re very lazy. You know, we’re educated, but what happens is it’s forced fed to us, you know, I guarantee you with your — how many listeners do you have, like 30 million, something like that?
RUSH: Oh, yeah, easy.
CALLER: Well, with a good percentage those listeners, you know, they take what you say, you know, right away, they don’t ever judge whatever you say. The same thing goes with, as you say, the Drive-By Media. And so what happens is, I consider myself a mild anomaly, I get all my world news from very liberal sources, including like NPR and USA Today and I read the New York Times every once in a while when I can get it. But, you know, I listen to you every single day as well. And so what happens I try to create this unbiased realm around myself so I can distinguish what’s right and what’s wrong, and I form my own opinions. When it comes to social issues I’m about as liberal as they come, I’m 21, if I’m not liberal on those things I think I’m stupid but the thing is when it comes to money in terms of government, I’m very anti-big government and as capitalistic as they come. What happens is —
RUSH: Well, you are rare, but actually I think there are probably more people your age that do think for themselves than you realize. I mean the Baby Boomers, I’m one of them but also, you know, the sixties radicals are Baby Boomers. I have nothing in common with that bunch and they’re running the country right now. So your generation is still going to have all kinds of different capabilities and people in there with different ideas and abilities. But young people are particularly easy to manipulate because they’re idealistic. All you have to do is appeal to that, ‘Oh, don’t you think everybody ought to have health care coverage?’ And before you understand the economics, of course, everybody should, who could be against that? And you own ’em. But they’re also very cynical. And they don’t vote quite as often as everybody thinks, which is a great thing for our country.
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RUSH: I want to correct just one thing that Jared said mere moments ago. This audience — I don’t know that he meant to say this — but this audience is not a bunch of mind-numbed robots. You people don’t believe it just because I say it. This audience is among the most thinking media audiences in the country, of that I have no doubt.
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RUSH: We have Hillary from Chicago. Welcome, Hillary. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Very well.
CALLER: Hi. I’m 17, I’m from Chicago. And, you know, I take a lot of AP classes at my school.
RUSH: What’s an AP class?
CALLER: It’s like a college class at high school.
RUSH: Okay, advanced placement?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, okay.
CALLER: And there’s just been a lot of, you know, Marxist stuff going on, and actually yesterday my AP psychology teacher just told blatantly the whole class after an intelligence test that competition stifles creativity.
RUSH: What?
CALLER: Yeah, I know, I’m not kidding you.
RUSH: You had an advanced placement teacher — we were just talking about this yesterday.
CALLER: Yeah, I know. That’s why — you know, it’s teacher’s institute day so I was like, ‘Call in!’
RUSH: Competition stifles creativity?
CALLER: Yeah, word-for-word, that’s what she said.
RUSH: How old is this teacher?
CALLER: She’s like 30.
RUSH: Oh. Jeez. Is she attractive or not?
CALLER: It’s really hard to get good grades in these classes ’cause, you know —
RUSH: Hillary?
CALLER: — you’re thinking one way and they’re like, you know, thinking a completely different direction.
RUSH: I don’t know how you put up with this. Well, you have no choice. That is not just wrong, that is intellectually vacant. That is an utter denial of reality. Has she never watched a football game? Has she never watched any kind of athletic endeavor? It’s all about competition and who can be more creative and full of surprises. Is this woman attractive or not?
CALLER: Yeah, well, she wears a lot of very expensive clothes. I mean she’s very into herself.
RUSH: Who’s she competing with? Hillary, I want you to do me a favor. How often do you see this teacher?
CALLER: Well, I’m going to see her on Monday.
RUSH: Monday. All right.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I want you to do something.
CALLER: Yeah?
RUSH: (laughing) You ready?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You just said she wears all these nice clothes. Does she do that every day?
CALLER: Well, yes. You know, I mean, she also has an iPod and a nice car, you know, like all my other teachers.
RUSH: I want you to just ask her who is she competing with. ‘Why does it matter that you have these nice clothes, who are you trying to be better dressed than?’
CALLER: (laughing) Well, you know, it’s not just her. I mean I actually had an AP environmental class, and, you know, that’s already, you know —
RUSH: You don’t need to tell me what’s going on in there. I already know.
CALLER: Yeah, well, I actually dropped out of it ’cause it was getting too much. And right before I dropped out of it, they made us watch this one video, and I forget which country it was, but they were talking about how they used to be communists and once they went to the free market system, the environment started dying and all the animals were —
RUSH: See, that’s just an abject lie. The dirtiest, most filthy places on the planet are the ones that are the most undeveloped, that have the least amount of capitalism, the least amount of modern technology, that is patently absurd. So you’re being indoctrinated, Hillary.
CALLER: I am being indoctrinated.
RUSH: You’re not even being taught. Where do you want to go to college?
CALLER: Oh, I can’t tell you that because I’m going to be going there.
RUSH: Why? What harm would that do if I knew?
CALLER: Oh, because I’m going into a very creative field.
RUSH: So? Are you afraid that if it’s on this radio program, that they know where you’re going that you might have your admission canceled or something?
CALLER: My mom is doing the ‘don’t say it’ sign.
RUSH: Mom, ‘don’t say it’ sign.
CALLER: (laughing.)
RUSH: What is the ‘don’t say it’ sign, the throat slit?
CALLER: No, not the throat slit. She’s laughing at you now.
RUSH: I’m used to that.
CALLER: Yeah. No, no —
RUSH: Both at and with.
CALLER: — I love you and I listen to you all the time.
RUSH: Well, now I’m really intrigued. You’re gonna go to some creative college and you won’t tell me where because somehow it’s going to jinx it?
CALLER: Yeah, it might jinx it.
RUSH: Oh. So you haven’t been accepted there, is that it?
CALLER: Yeah, I haven’t been accepted yet.
RUSH: Oh, okay. I got it. So you’re afraid, your mom’s afraid if the school is listening and they hear that you want to go there, and I support it, that they won’t let you in?
CALLER: Maybe.
RUSH: Probably. No maybe about it.
CALLER: Tragically.
RUSH: No maybe about it.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay. Well, I’m really curious.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, did I tell you there’s a communist at my school?
RUSH: Just one?
CALLER: Yeah, out and out, he calls everyone comrades.
RUSH: Teacher or student?
CALLER: Student, spreading the word on how wonderful it is.
RUSH: Oh, well that’s nothing. That’s nothing. Start counting the communists on the faculty out there, Hillary, and that will give you the real lay of the land.