RUSH: We’ll start here in my adopted hometown, Sacramento, California. It’s Robbie. Great to have you. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Last week you were talking about why my generation doesn’t have hope. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and it struck me that for thousands of years of human history, for almost all the history of the United States, human beings have understood that we have a choice about how our lives are gonna play out, and we have a way to overcome our backgrounds, if we come out of a rough background.
But a movement has been mounting. You’ve talked about it before, but it’s kind of taboo to talk about, I’ve found. A movement has been mounting throughout probably the nineteenth century, that grew momentum in the twentieth century, and possibly for the first time, it’s been universally accepted in my generation that you’re born with it. You don’t have a choice, you’re born with it.
“Dad was an alcoholic? You’re gonna be an alcoholic. Your mom was a drug addict? you’re gonna be a drug addict. You’ve got bipolar disorder? Oh, you were born with that. Take this medication. By the way, if you ever get off it, you’re gonna commit suicide. It’s what all our statistics tell us,” and it seems to me that psychology and psychiatry and so-called science has been betraying my generation. Why would we have hope? We’re told that we’re born this way; we can’t do anything about it.
RUSH: Robbie?
CALLER: Yes?
RUSH: You’re right. You are more right than you even know. You have hit the nail on the head. Your generation is being told you don’t have any choice. Not only that, your parents, they’re causing the globe to get warm. They’re causing global warming. Your parents are destroying your world — and you are, too, if you’re not doing the right thing. You are exactly right. In this country, because of freedom, you’ve always had a choice.
You can be a bum, you can choose not to work, you can choose to live on whatever you can be given, or you can make your way in life. Your generation is being told you don’t have any choice, because you don’t have any free will. You are predestined to misery and failure, because everybody around you is that — and, as such, you must turn over your life to Democrats or the government or whoever who will protect you and coddle you and walk you through this misery and this maze.
You are so right.
I think she is so right about this. She’s explaining why this fog of depression and pessimism has swept over the Millennial generation is because they are being told that theirs is a life of pre-destiny with no choice whatsoever, and it’s all negative.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Our last caller Robbie was from Sacramento, California. Robbie was right on the money. A big part of the American dream has always been upward mobility. But upward mobility is being mocked because it’s unfair, because not everybody does it. It’s not tolerated. It’s not permitted, because not everybody can. I tell you what, she was so right on the money that I’m jealous. It is rare that a caller… Not caller.
It’s rare that anybody comes up with something that I haven’t thought of myself. But, boy, did she. Her generation… She heard me talk about this massive pessimism that has swept over Millennials and, well, people in general, but young people particularly. The depression, this fog bank of pessimism that seems to be blanketing everybody. And her point was we’re being told we’ve got no choice. If my parents were alcoholics, I’m gonna be one. If my parents are bipolar, I’m gonna be one.
We have no free will.
We can’t make anything of ourselves.
We’re just got no choice. There isn’t any possibility to succeed. We’re hearing how rotten the country is. We’re hearing how unjust and unfair the country is. There’s no chance for us. We keep hearing that the days of each generation doing better than its parents are over (and she’s right). People are inundated with a never-ending stream of pessimism and negativity from the Democrat Party, from the American media — and, let’s face it, probably quite a few people in general.
Because, as we all know, pessimism is easy.
Negativism is easy.
Upward mobility is made fun of, it’s mocked, and now it’s not even made possible. Upward mobility is not even deemed possible. And when it happens, it’s unfair and unjust. There’s gotta be something done about it. The smartest kids in the class? Lower them so as not to humiliate the kids that aren’t doing as well. The left never seeks to elevate people to the highest level. They see people who reach heights greater than the average and bring them down.
There’s a reason for this. As we have said before on this program, unlike Europe and the rest of the world, the US — if left to its own devices, if left alone. If American free market and capitalism were left alone, there would not be a permanent underclass in this country. Permanent. There are always gonna be poor people because people are gonna make the wrong choices. You’re always gonna have people drop out of school.
You’re always gonna have people get pregnant at 15. You’re always gonna have people get drugged up, all kinds of problems. But it isn’t permanent, or hasn’t been. But the Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass, folks. There’s always been an underclass, don’t misunderstand. But it’s never been permanent. You could get out of it. You could make the right choices and get out of it. Do the right things, and you could get out of it.
Today’s Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass, and if they have to they’ll create one. That’s what amnesty is all about, that’s what immigration is all about: A permanent underclass of low-skilled, uneducated, low-expectation people, happy to just be here and be taken care of — and vote Democrat in gratitude. “Gratitude.” That’s the name of the game today, and if this sounds cynical, I’m sorry. It’s your problem because I’m just telling you.
Truth is my problem. The Democrat Party, because they want a permanent underclass, have done everything they can to make sure people that are in the underclass state there. They want to make sure that if you’re in the underclass, you’re stuck there. And of course this carries over to everybody else. Everybody in the underclass must stay there. You don’t get out of it. That has slopped over to everybody else, even people in the lower middle class and the middle class.
Everybody’s told, “You’re stuck right where you are. You cannot improve yourselves. Those days are over,” and it’s not fair, by the way, that some people should improve themselves while you don’t, because the left thinks “fairness” equals equality of outcome. So they convince people that they should turn their lives over to them, and they’ll make it fair for ’em. They’ll make the outcomes equal and nobody will have any more than anybody else, and nobody will be humiliated.
“You won’t be envious or jealous ’cause nobody will have any more, except celebrities. They will. The elites. But that’s okay because you’ll never be one of those, and you know it. ” All of this is relatively new. The United States never was a country that even talked about “class,” because there was mobility throughout our culture. People were moving into and out of various economic classes all the time.
Rich people would lose everything.
People that had nothing would hit it big.
There was all kinds of flux and mobility, and people moving in and out of various levels of economic accomplishment or achievement. Class was never taught in schools. But now you cannot have a class that doesn’t teach class warfare. Now you can’t have an election that doesn’t feature class warfare. Now we have an entire political party and political movement which is devoted to class warfare and creating resentment, pessimism, defeatism, and hatred, among the lower classes.
People in the lower class are told that they’re there because what they used to have has been stolen from them. The people who are whatever you call it — the rich, the achieved, or whatever? They’re thieves, they’re cheats, they’re liars. “That money used to be yours! That prosperity used to be yours,” you’re told, “but they took it.” How? “They got tax cuts in Reagan! Reagan gave ’em tax cuts and that’s how they got your money. They’re a bunch of mean, selfish, greedy rich people. Your money, they have it because of tax cuts.”
The people that hear this and are eager for somebody other than themselves to blame, eat it all up. “That’s right, Mabel! It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. The rich stole everything I had. Reagan did it with tax cuts. That’s why we gotta always oppose tax cuts for the rich. That’s how they keep the money that they took from us.” I ain’t lying, folks. Robbie in Sacramento was exactly right. In school, before the multiculturalists got hold of the curriculum, Christopher Columbus used to be remembered for…
Well, actually not just for discovering America, but because he refused to become a saddle maker like his father and his father before him. It’s one of the things that I was taught about Columbus. It wasn’t just that he bravely set out for what everybody thought was the end of the world, the flat world. He was brave and courageous and all that, but he could have been a saddle maker.
Today, Christopher Columbus is portrayed as a racist, sexist, bigot who introduced racism, sexism, environmental destruction, bigotry, anti-gay attitudes, disease and all that by conquering and polluting what was a pristine paradise where the Indians lived. Columbus came and took everything they’ve got, took everything they had! Now look at what he’s remembered for. Abraham Lincoln was held up on a pedestal.
Lincoln showed that a person could literally come from nothing and become president of the United States. These lessons are not taught today. Young people are taught just the opposite. The hopes and dreams and aspirations of young people today are being stomped on in order to perpetuate the myth that the American dream is dead, that you cannot improve your lot in life. Evil rich people (more than likely Republicans) have taken everything.
So what we’re doing now, is we’re getting it back from ’em. We’re gonna take it from ’em. We’re gonna take what you used to have, even though you don’t remember ever having it, ’cause you never did really have it, but you’re told that you did. They gonna take it from the rich, they’re gonna soak it to ’em, and you sit out there and applaud it. “Right on! You stick it to ’em. You let ’em find out what it’s like.”
This is the kind of hatred, class warfare, and envy that is taught today. The hopes, the dreams, the aspirations of people are suppressed, stomped on, denied, laughed at, made fun of. “We can’t have young people thinking they could move upward!” So we have to mock yuppies. We have to mock the successful. We have to make fun of people who take life seriously. They have to be nerds or something.
We have to make sure that they are viewed in derision, not respect. We have to make sure that the successful are maligned and impugned as thieves, as uncaring, selfish brutes. “You don’t want to be one of those kind of people anyway.” Celebrities and athletes are treated so special because that’s how you live your silly dreams vicariously through them. Go on Facebook and pretend you’re on the red carpet!
Tweet and follow a celebrity and pretend that you live in that world. Turn on E! Entertainment, TMZ, and pretend that that could be you someday. But it never will be, because you can’t be that. Newt Gingrich the other day said, “The Republicans don’t have an alternative to health care. There not a one of them, nobody. They shouldn’t be talking about defunding it. There’s no alternative.” Would somebody…?
I want to get back to base. Would somebody tell me where in the Constitution it says we’re entitled to that? My Constitution doesn’t say anything about me being entitled to health care and certainly it doesn’t say that you have to pay for it. My understanding, when I grew up, was that if you didn’t go to school, if you dropped out, if you didn’t try, if you had babies, if you became an alcoholic, if you basically lived your life like a piece of debris, that your life was gonna be pretty bad.
Because those were choices that you made that were not the best choices; they were poor. And not just me. Most everybody my age growing up was told that. You make those kind of choices, and your life is gonna be really bad. Your life is gonna be really sad. You’re gonna be very disappointed. You’re not gonna amount to anything, if you make those choices. So, don’t do it. Those simple words “don’t do it,” they’re made fun of, they’re mocked.
“Easy for you to say, Limbaugh!”
But if you make certain choices, your life is gonna suck. By the same token, make the right choices and you’ve got a chance. But now the choices don’t even exist. Kids are being told they don’t even have the choice. “So go ahead and have the babies and go ahead and do the drugs and go ahead and have the booze, and go ahead and drop out of school, because over here is food stamps and unemployment for 99 weeks, and over there’s a cell phone, and over there is a flat screen.
“You can watch TV all day long if you want and pretend that you’re A-Rod, or whoever you want to be.” But now the choices don’t even exist in people’s minds. The sad thing is, they do. The sad thing is, these Millennials have just as much choice as you and I did. They have a shrinking economy they have to deal with, but if they could get their minds right and if they were educated and informed properly, they could do things for themselves that would reverse the direction this country’s going.
They could start voting for the right people, or they could at least start not voting for the wrong people. But I would submit that kids today are virtually encouraged to make bad choices because they’re gonna end up in that permanent underclass the Democrat Party needs. Remember, the word is “permanent.” Europe has always had one. We never have, until the modern era of the Democrat Party. We’ve always had an underclass, but it’s never been permanent until now. But it doesn’t have to be over.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me ask you another question related to all this: Why do we give kids condoms? Why have we spent all of these years teaching them how to use them with cucumbers and bananas or whatever? Why have we been obsessed with giving kids condoms? Why, in other words, have we been obsessed with encouraging a behavior that equals a bad choice? Why? And then when people object to it, the left said, “But it’s sex, Rush, and it’s kids, and you can’t stop ’em.
“They’re going to do it. So we need to make it as safe as we can.” Who says you can’t stop it? We never used to have this kind of illegitimacy in this country. We never used to have 73% of the babies born without a father around. It never happened before. Not until you people came along. What do you mean, “we can’t stop it”? What do you mean, “we can’t teach kids who don’t know anything right from wrong because they haven’t been alive long enough”?
The answer always was: “You don’t have the right to determine what’s right and wrong, Rush.” Well, what about good old-fashioned morality that served us for centuries? “It’s your morality, Rush. You can’t impose yours on other people.” So there became no wrong, and there became no right to proclaim wrong. There was only, “Whatever choice the kid wanted to make, we are gonna facilitate it.” So the left has actually participated in young people destroying their lives.
Why are we talking about legalizing drugs, by the way?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This Alex in Pittsburgh. Great to have you. Thank you for waiting. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about my generation, the Millennials, and kind of this defeatist attitude that seems to be almost infecting our whole generation. I’m currently 24. I opened my own small business a year ago. But when I graduated from college, I was faced with kind of that same dilemma that a lot of people are. My generation seems to think that you get a diploma; now you’re gonna get a job, which clearly isn’t the purpose ofa business or anything.
So I was kind of faced with that decision. I had this great opportunity to open my own company, but at the same time, I was looking into all these different entitlements, ’cause you always hear all these things. “You can get this and you can get that.” So I actually took the time to sit down and weigh the risks between opening my own business — and obviously, you know, the chance that it fails within the first year, spending pretty much all the money I’d saved from working — or going out and hunting down these entitlements and seeing what I could get. The difference was not only on the positive impact that would be lost on the community —
RUSH: Now, wait just a second. Wait, wait. Wasn’t there a third option, unless I didn’t hear everything — and don’t worry. We’ll carry you over to the bottom-of-the-hour break, we don’t make it. Your two options were welfare or starting your own business?
CALLER: No, I was kind of being facetious, but, I mean, not necessarily welfare. I was looking into that, because my thought was, “Okay, you have two options: You can work hard and contribute to the economy, or you can leech from the economy.”
RUSH: Okay, got you.
CALLER: So, yeah, I kind of weigh those two options, and what I found was, assuming that you get through for the food stamps and Section 8 and everything, the lifestyle that I would have been able to live compared to the lifestyle that I did live — this was a year ago — was pretty comparable. But the difference is I actually have been working and building toward something. So, yeah, I lived a low standard of life for that year, maybe, but my hopes are that the work I put in now will pay off, and I think that kind of sentiment is just completely lost in my generation.
RUSH: For way too many, it is. But it’s not all their fault. Many of them are told that they can’t do anymore what you’re trying!
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