RUSH: Here’s Elliott in Wilmette, Illinois, as we head to the phones. It’s great to have you on the program today, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Nervous caller, very nice to speak with you. Thank you.
RUSH: Thank you. You don’t need to be nervous. I know how it is. I’d be nervous talking to me, too, on the radio after you’re sitting there waiting on hold.
CALLER: Yes, but you’re a pro.
RUSH: I know what it’s like. I’ve been there.
CALLER: Ah. My comment is that I’m excited about your new book on account of it takes advantage of an angle that other conservative books so far have not been able to do, that is, rather than targeting people who are interested in learning another side of what’s going on, I feel this focuses on an audience that’s much younger and it encourages the parents to talk to teenage children and stuff about these ideas, which is indirect but quite a direct attack on the monopoly that the left seemed to have on the education so far. I hope this is gonna make an impact. I think we’ll find out that it’s a lot of impact on how much people are discussing these things, not just reading about it and getting another viewpoint.
RUSH: Elliott, you are very shrewd.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: You are very perceptive. That is indeed what excited me about this whole project. Look, when I talk about having done this before, I don’t mean to be dismissive, folks. People were asking me, and some of you had even called, “Why don’t you do another book.” And I said, “Well, I’ve done two. I’ve been there and done that, and a lot of other people have done them. I’ve never just done something because it’s being done and whatever.”
Plus, I didn’t feel it, so it would not have been good — and then, as I said, Kathryn presented this idea to me, and this changed my entire perception of doing a book. I got jazzed because of exactly what Elliott said here. We have the truth of this country not being taught anymore at all levels of education, but especially kindergarten on up. In kindergarten, elementary, middle school, it is not being taught.
Of course you and I believe that the founding of this country is glorious. It’s worthy of being overwhelmingly proud of. It was a great time in world history, and it’s very upsetting and frustrating to know how it’s being distorted. I’ll repeat it to you again. You may know this. I didn’t know this until last week. We had a caller call and talk to us about some movie coming out at Christmastime called Free Birds, and it’s an animated movie.
That’s cartoon, for those of you in Rio Linda. Well, you would know what that is. It’s about two turkeys that go back to the Pilgrims and make the case for no turkeys being served at the original Thanksgiving to spare turkeys and at the same time they make the case about what a bunch of dead beats and worthless SOBs the Pilgrims were, in a movie. It’s been four years in development, a cartoon movie aimed at kids, and this is the same thing to one degree or another that’s been happening in the schools all of these years.
The multiculturalists have gotten hold of the curriculum, and, as you know, the plague of modern civilization were the white Europeans. They came and they brought pestilence. They brought syphilis. They brought horses, which is what enabled everybody to defeat the Indians. They defeated the Indians, and then they bastardized the land, and they turned it into oil fields, and they just brought all this horrible discrimination and racism and sexism and bigotry and homophobia.
The white Europeans that arrived and the Pilgrims were anti-gay marriage and so forth. All this crap is being taught to young skulls full of mush. You and I weren’t taught this, and so what we’ve done is created the caricature Rush Revere, the icon of Two If By Tea. We’ve given him a talking horse who can time travel. The name’s Liberty, and they can go anywhere in American history. They can take their smartphone, and with AirPlay, they can beam American history as it happened back to the classroom.
Once you open up this kind of — I don’t want to say creativity, but this kind of format, you can do anything with it to make it fun, to not make it preachy. And it isn’t preachy. It’s a fun, fun story, and it also happens to be the truth. (interruption) Liberty can’t go anywhere in the future. Liberty can’t go anywhere but American history. That’s it. I mean, that’s the rules that we put in place.
Liberty can go anywhere in American history but can’t go to the future. We’re not gonna mess with that ’cause we’re dealing with correcting what’s wrong about what’s being taught. This book is Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans. Here’s the cover, right there. It’s spent nine days at number one. Not in the pre-order list. Nine days at number one at Amazon.
Now, there is something I’m very embarrassed about. I’m remiss. I didn’t know this. Well, I knew it be with but I didn’t mention it enough times. If you pre-order it hardcover, the price is $10.79. It’s gonna retail for like $19.99. Pre-order for $10.79, versus $19.99 retail when it comes out. So there is a reason to pre-order it. It’s at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, iTunes. But, Elliott, you nailed the point here.
The point is that while it’s aimed at the 10 to 13 group in terms of reading level, it’s for everybody. It is for grandparents and their parents to give to kids, to gift away, and then to discuss and read together or what have you — and, by the way, it’s a real book, 200-plus pages, illustrations. There’s an audio version of it, too. So we’re very proud of it, and, Elliott, I thank you, because you nailed one of the critical reasons why this is so appealing to me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Liz in Phippsburg, Maine. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m an enthusiastic citizen of your benevolent dictatorship.
RUSH: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I believe last week you mentioned that people ask you what they can do besides voting to help change or fix what’s happening to the country.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: I’ve been, in the past and somewhat now, very involved in pushing for charter schools, and it’s something that people can really do in their own communities or in their state, and it could really make a difference in the future to break this grip that the teachers unions have on our regular public schools.
RUSH: Boy, is that ever true.
CALLER: I just believe that unless something is done — and it is the unions. I have two daughters in their late twenties now. They both went to public school in rural Virginia, and there were teachers that I loved and I was good friends with, and I was friends with principals, and even the superintendents. But they both went to different charter high schools in Virginia. It was amazing the difference, and the difference is unions.
RUSH: Well, okay, but what is the real difference? Subject matter?
CALLER: The real difference is, in a charter school the teachers are not in a union, and I told Snerdley that Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking would not be able to teach physics in a normal public high school because they didn’t graduate from teacher college with the teaching credits and credentials. The firing is the main thing. Also, when I get into this argument with people, I say, “If you were given the chore to design a brand-new education system for our country, would you put in it that a teacher could not be fired no matter how terrible they are?”
We even have teachers that have committed felonies in our country or assaulted a student, and sometimes the school district, if it’s small, doesn’t even have enough money to take them to court to get rid of them. So they will give them a letter of recommendation and send them off to another school somewhere in another state. It’s the firing that is one of the main problems. My father, when I was young, was on a school board, and my older sister had a terrible, terrible first grade teacher and it almost turned her off to education and going to school.
RUSH: Well, that’s no big deal. Every teacher did that for me except a couple of ’em.
CALLER: Well, he asked to see her file, and he said it was as thick is a New York City telephone book with complaints and yet there was nothing you could do.
RUSH: Well, all of that’s true.
I tell you, there’s another aspect to public education. By the way, we have to be careful that we do not paint — to use a cliche, here — with too broad a brush. There are some good teachers out there that are trying to combat this, but the unions are clearly the problem. But here’s the problem, in a nutshell, and I don’t even know how many of the rank-and-file teachers are even aware of this. They’re just who they are. They’re products of their own education, and they believe the crap they’ve been taught, and they teach it.
They’ve become activists, but the purpose of union control is curriculum control. The schools have been turned into propaganda reeducation camps. That’s why you can’t fire a teacher, and that’s why teachers unions do not want any review of the teachers. They don’t want any performance-based pay, merit-based pay. They don’t want any review or testing of the teachers to find out how they’re doing or what they know. The powers that be, organizers have known for the longest time that the key is to get hold of education.
They control it, from kindergarten on up all the way up to colleges and universities. You get hold of these young skulls full of mush at very young, impressionable ages, and start teaching them what now is this multicultural curriculum, which basically is that Western Civilization is near criminal. Western Civilization is corrupt, and it’s a lie, and the white Europeans arriving here is what led to all the problems and so forth, that the country is immoral in the way it was structured and founded and all that.
It’s hideous. It’s obscene.
Again, one of the reasons why I have undertaken this effort with this book — Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims — is to correct the basic story of the Pilgrims. It’s been bastardized and distorted, and now it’s taught as something totally untrue in many places. Not everywhere, but in many places. This is why there’s such a rise in homeschooling and charter schools, as you describe. But the left knows exactly what they’re doing, and it’s the same with their control of pop culture and the media.
They’ll never win in what I call a fair fight in the arena of ideas. Where ideas compete against each other, they’ll never win. They can only win if they discredit and destroy competing ideas and the people who hold them, and that’s all they can do. Controlling education, they simply don’t permit anything but what they believe. There is no critical thinking taught. There is no curiosity allowed. It’s outcome-based education. “You can’t humiliate those who don’t do as well.”
It’s really unfortunate.
I’m glad you called, though. That’s great, Liz.
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