RUSH: I want you to imagine the federal government eliminating your private property rights due to the interpretation of political correctness by five people, or a very tiny minority of people. The tiny minority of people are ostensibly, they say, offended by something that you own. Imagine an agency of the federal government, without any proper adjudication before any sort of court, tribunal, or what have you, just comes along and, on their own whim, decides to eliminate your private property rights. Because of interpretation of political correctness, because they’re liberals, because they’re statists and authoritarians and assigned to them that kind of sweeping power.
Imagine the federal government taking away your health insurance and your doctor. That’s what millions of Americans are dealing with, many more millions to come. Imagine the federal government shutting down coal-fired electric plants on a whim in the name of a hoax, global warming. And as a result, driving up your electricity bills to the point that you have to make life-altering changes in your lifestyle to be able to afford them. And about that, I want to issue you another warning, ladies and gentlemen.
I remember back in 1997 when the Sierra Club targeted SUVs as main contributors to global warming. I warned you that there was going to be an all-out assault and increasing amount of momentum aimed at SUVs and their owners and an attempt to stigmatize those people and their vehicles, make them feel guilty and get rid of them. And people said, “Come on, Rush, do you see liberals in virtually everything?”
I said, “In the political realm, yes.”
It didn’t take long before people realized that I was right. So I’m here to issue you another warning. I have here in the Stack of Stuff today a story by a similar type of environmentalist wacko group. They’ve discovered that your cable box is one of the primary biggest users and thus wasters of electricity in the country, and when you combine the hundreds of millions of cable boxes in this country alone, we’re talking about serious global warming. We’re talking about serious use of the electricity, and if it’s produced by coal, that is bad.
So I am here it tell you, June 18th, keep a sharp eye, because your cable box could well become the next SUV, the next target. Don’t doubt me. I’m not making a full-fledged prediction on this right now, just a warning. Imagine the federal government taking away the country’s borders. Imagine the federal government just obliterating them. That’s what the states are battling. We’re all battling a form of tyranny here. It’s what happens when the separation of powers concentrates in one branch of the government; there are no checks and balances.
So you go ahead, you cheer, and a lot of people are, you go ahead and cheer the stripping of trademark rights of the Washington Redskins at your own risk. I know some of you might be saying, “Well, what about the Florida Seminoles?” What about the Runnin’ Rebels? That’s a team mascot name. That probably offends a lot of northerners. The Runnin’ Rebels? How about the Fighting Irish?
I know what you’re saying, “Rush, nobody’s complaining about those.” That’s right, not yet, is the answer. You let them get away with this, and this is not the end of anything. This is not the solution to some cultural problem resulting in the consistent, constant pain of being offended felt by a few people. This will be the beginning — I should say, actually, the continuation of even more all-out assaults on private property rights if they offend anybody that’s enshrouded in political correctness, is a leftist or believes it and simply wants to deny you what is yours.
So you go ahead, you cheer, if you want, the stripping of trademark rights from the Redskins. No one is safe when the protections of a constitutional republic are stripped away. There is no civil society when private property rights and individual rights are crushed at will on a whim by a centralized, coercive government. You take away private property rights and you may as well take away the right to free speech. And that’s exactly what has happened here to the Washington Redskins.
There will be lots of cheering in the news media, in the sports media. Throughout the civil rights coalition there will be all kinds of backslaps and cheers. And they will not be any happier. I want you to note that even if this holds up after all the appeals, and if the Redskins just have to sit there and grin and take it while their private property rights are dismantled, the people responsible for it will not be happy. They never are. They’ll gloat maybe for a while, but they’ll just be angrier and angrier at those things remaining that offend them and will set out to attack them.
Here’s an audio sound bite from CNBC’s Squawk on the Street today, during a report about the patent office canceling the Redskins trademark registration. This is the cohost Simon Hobbs.
HOBBS: There is a question whether federal agencies should have the right to cancel patents that may be valuable to the private sector on a whim. Nobody obviously wants something that’s racist out there, but there is a broader question here of something that is valuable that can be canceled in this way, internally, within a central agency. Surely.
RUSH: Mr. Hobbs… Do I detect a British accent? Am I right, was there a British accent there? (interruption) Okay. Mr. Hobbs, this is the norm now. We are being ruled by whim. This is what I mean when I say the Obama presidency is not over. It’s just getting started. Old Simon Hobbs here is kinda shocked. He can’t believe this happened.
“This is the private sector. It might be offensive as hell, but you just can’t come out there with something valuable like that. It can’t just be canceled internally within a federal agency. Surely!” They just did it, Simon. What you need to note, Simon, is the people who are cheering this. What will happen to the people who decry this is that they are gonna be focused on as racist and sexist, and you know the drill. What really needs to be focused on is the people who praise this.
The people who approved this, the people who applaud this, they are the ones that we need to note. They are the people others need to know about. Snerdley, you and I need to pick some profitable company out there that offends us. Like Google. That name just bugs me. It just offends me. Google? I’m sure I could find others. We could steal their trademark. I mean, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.
It’s not the way to deal with it, I know, but I’m simply making a point.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, I want to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, you can go and look it up on the Quick Hits page at RushLimbaugh.com from January 9th of this year. May I read to you what was posted? Quote, “How the Feds Will Go After the Redskins,” and then the quote from me: “The way the Feds are going to get the Redskins is the federal trademark office, and I’m gonna spend some time on that today.”
I ended up not getting to it that day on January 9th of this year, just back from the traditional two-week break between Christmas and New Year’s. Kathryn and I sometimes go to Hawaii. I remember reading show prep and getting ready for the return to action here at the EIB Network, and I came across that while away. I ended up not getting to it, and I’m going to have to track it down now.
But I just want you to know, and I want it on the record, that we predicted this very thing back on January 9, 2014. Washington Post today: “Redskins Patent Office Decision Cheered by Lawmakers as ‘Landmark Decision’ — Lawmakers cheered a decision by the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the Washington Redskins trademark registration, saying the ruling should finally convince the National Football League to reverse its decision to stick with the name deemed offensive by Native Americans.”
I want to add one thing here before we get to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. This is not the Patent and Trademark Office. This is Barack Obama. One of the things in reporting out of Washington that has happened during this administration… This is executive branch. All this stuff is coming out of the executive branch. All of this, well, tyranny. It’s all coming from the executive branch, and Obama owns the executive branch.
He is the executive branch. But yet it’s never reported that way. It’s never, “The Obama administration today canceled the trademark ownership and registration the Washington Redskins.” No, it’s the Patent and Trademark Office — a nameless, faceless bunch of geeks. Wrong! Barack Obama’s administration did this. Barack Obama’s administration lied to you about keeping your doctor.
Barack Obama’s administration has basically erased the Southern border of the United States and is allowing anybody in. Barack Obama’s administration is doing all of this, and they’re just now getting up to full speed. It’s not the Patent and Trademark Office. That’s just the location of the implementation. The thinking, the intellectual firepower, the desire, the instructions, the orders, the power to do this is coming right out of the White House.
Make no mistake about it. IRS? Obama! Not Lois Lerner. She was just the woman that implemented the desires/demands that come from the White House. This is all executive branch stuff, and it’s never reported that way. “The IRS today said five rogue agents in Cincinnati,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No. The White House. The Obama administration. In a sense, this is landmark.
Has a name ever been criminalized before? Have we ever…? I don’t know. I’m just asking off the top of my head. So in that sense, it may be landmark. But I told you it’s gonna be cheered, and you need to note the people cheering it. Those people deserve to lose their next election, the people cheering this. This is the simple taking of private property rights without any kind of due process whatsoever. Zilch, zero, nada.
It could be any of us that somebody on the left claims to be offended by.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Just one clarifying thing. I don’t need to clarify for myself. I want to clarify your understanding. The Patent and Trademark Office stripping ownership rights of the trademark Washington Redskins from the Washington Redskins does not require them to change their name. It just means they are not the legal owners of the trademark. And if it stands, anybody can market it, anybody can use it, anybody can make money off of it. Theory being this would hurt the ownership of the Redskins and the NFL. They don’t have exclusive ownership rights. They don’t get the profits from the sale of licensed merchandise. That would force Snyder to change the name. That’s the thinking.
This is merely step one. The important point here, the important thing to notice is the utter audacity of the administration simply on a whim utilizing power it does not have, utilizing legal steps it does not have to deny private property rights, on a whim, political correctness. That’s the thing to note. They just decided to do it. And it’s not the Patent and Trademark Office. It is the Obama administration.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, theoretically we could. We could call ourselves “the Redskins EIB Network.” You know, that’s actually something these people better think about. Because if they take away the trademark from the Redskins, it means everybody can use it, anybody who wants to. That means it could be everywhere, which I don’t think is they want. Actually, you know what? They don’t care about that.
They don’t care if Redskins is everywhere. This is just a power play to take it way from the team. That’s all this is. Think about this now. The Patent and Trademark Office has told the Redskins that they no longer own the trademark. Now, they gotta go through the appeals process and all of that here. But they just unilaterally do it, and there is no constitutional authority for this.
But the Obama administration just today told the Washington Redskins they no longer own the trademark because it’s offensive. Now, what that means in practicality reality is that the Redskins don’t own it and therefore don’t have exclusive rights to it. Anybody can use it, and it would spread like wildfire. You’d have car washes open: “Redskins Car Wash!” You’d have casinos opening up probably called “Redskins Casino,” any number of things.
We could call ourselves the EIB Redskins Network. It would be everywhere. And you would think, “Well, that’s not what they want. They want the name taken away, ’cause the name’s offensive.” No, no, no, no, no, no. See, this puts this in perspective. That’s not what this is about at all. This is not about the name being offensive. That’s just what’s stated. Yeah, it might offend a few people, but that’s not what this is about.
This is an abject, total power play. This is the administration illustrating what it can do. It simply… Look, Snyder does not donate to Democrat causes. He might a little to even it out, but Snyder is known, if anything, as a Republican, and he does position himself very stubbornly. “I’m never changing this name,” he said. “Never.” Well, you don’t tell a tyrant “never.” You don’t tell a statist or an authoritarian “never.”
You don’t tell somebody who thinks he has all the power over everybody “never.” So I think this is somewhat personal now, because the end result of this action puts the name “Redskins” everywhere, and you would think that’s not what they want. If you really buy into what they’re doing, you would think they want to wipe out the name so it’s not used by anybody, but this action would result in it everywhere.
So this is nothing more than a classic illustration of who this administration really is. They’ve targeted an enemy and it happens to be Dan Snyder, and maybe secondarily the NFL. But it’s Dan Snyder they’re gunning for here, and they’re not gonna stop. The Regime is not gonna stop until they make him change that name. It’s just flexing of the muscle. This is just pure, raw power on display.
The Regime is telling an owner in the NFL, “Up against me, you are nothing! Up against me, you are powerless. I don’t care how long it takes, I’m stripping that name. I don’t like it. I don’t want you to use it,” and that’s all this is. This is window dressing, because it doesn’t offend a majority of people. I heard it said earlier today by somebody, “Well, what about Fighting Irish?”
The answer to that was, “Well, nobody is saying it offends them. So they can keep it.” Is it that simple? I thought it was if it was offensive, if it was insulting, it goes. Even though they gave the name to themselves, it might still offend some people — and on that basis alone you gotta get rid of it. But no! And then the person said there has to be momentum. Clearly sort of a small mind.
He said, “There has to be momentum and there isn’t any momentum. If there’s momentum for the Fighting Irish, you gotta listen to the momentum.” So that’s where we are. You have low-information people who think if there’s ‘momentum,’ if there’s an increasing number of people making noise and whatnot, you must change it because they are offended.” The Irish are white, the Vikings are white and so forth.
But under this guy’s theory if there is all of a sudden “momentum” to change Fighting Irish then you’ve gotta change the name. It’s that simple, if people are offended. That’s one of those things that insults my intelligence, because there’s not a day that somebody isn’t offended about something. You start making policy based on people being offended (sigh), and you cease to have an orderly society.
You certainly don’t have a democratic republic in any way, shape, manner, or form.
You can’t maintain one when it’s as simple as somebody claiming to be offended. Do we want the weak minded to be in charge of everything? Do we want guys who take a leak sitting down to be in charge of everything? Do we? I don’t think so. But when you look at it that way, it’s clear what this really is, and it isn’t about getting rid of the name Redskins — ’cause if they succeed in this, it’s gonna be everywhere. This is just about taking it away from Dan Snyder.
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