RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites. Last week I had a little fun. Grab audio sound bite number one, because this was last Tuesday. A lot of people were opining, and this was one of the many salient points that I happened to make last week.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Ferguson, Missouri, is attracting a lot of people who — like Obama and Holder — wish they had been alive during the civil rights movement in the sixties, and that’s another thing that’s going on here. This is a flashback; this is an opportunity. Remember, Obama has wistfully spoken of the sixties. He wasn’t around then, but he says he wishes he had been. Well, here’s a chance to relive some history. Here’s a chance to flash forward. Here’s a Back to the Future moment if there ever was one. The sixties civil rights movement all of a sudden is back in full glory … Some of the Ferguson protesters, like the New Black Panthers, are claiming to be the new civil rights movement, which I guess is only natural. The civil rights era is the only period in our nation’s history that’s glorified in the schools these days, and it is.
RUSH: And, by the way, make no mistake, and I don’t know if you observe things the way I do, which is why I share my observations with you. One of the things that I have picked up over the period of time I’ve been doing this program, particularly once I learned the game that sports media is all about, one thing you can’t — if you pay attention to it, and sometimes you don’t even have to pay attention, you’re bludgeoned with it, you can’t get past the fact that, for the most part — there are exceptions, of course — but the single most animating aspect of our culture, of our society that impassioned the sports media, is race.
They are simply obsessed with it. It took me awhile to figure this out. I suffered so many misconceptions about the sports media. I thought they were unaffected. I thought they were purely into sports. Groupies into sports, got a chance to get close to it, write about it. It wasn’t until late in life that I learned they are as big, if not bigger, liberals than their buddies in the news media. And once you learn that, you become sensitized to it. You know how to look at it and how to listen for it. You find out that race is the single biggest, most important thing to these people.
In the cultural aspects, how sports reflects America and where sports is ahead of or behind sociological progression, race is the number one thing. Homosexuality is giving it a run for its money right now, but race is the biggie, and it’s taught. You know, a lot of the sportswriters today are young and they weren’t alive in the sixties, either. They don’t know about the sixties civil rights movement except for what’s taught about it.
My only point here is when I say, as I said in that sound bite from last week, that the civil rights era is the only period in our nation’s history glorified in schools, in a way I’m dead serious. The schools today do not glorify much about American history, because, remember, they’ve got a problem with it. America was founded immorally, unfairly, unjustly, with an original sin, and of course sin can never be absolved, and that is race, slavery, and so forth.
But the civil rights era is where supposedly the nation for the first time in its history came together and did something decent, and that’s the way it’s taught. And that’s why so many young people in the media who were not alive then think they know everything about it. They speak of it and write about it as though they were alive then. They are taught incorrect things about it.
For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required a larger percentage of Republican votes in the Senate to pass than Democrat votes. The Democrats were the segregationists back then. Every Democrat that tried to keep a black kid out of school or tried to hose ’em and put ’em in jail was a Democrat. Every person, Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Bull Connor, they were all Democrats. Well, the civil rights movement’s been rewritten to make all those Democrats modern-day Republicans.
So this situation in Ferguson offered a chance for all of these people who have been taught, but didn’t live through it because they’re too young, have been taught the romanticized version of the civil rights movement. And it is taught as one of the high points, one of the glories of American history. But, you see, even though it was a high point then, even though it was a great thing back then, we have fallen because Republicans have continued to win elections, Republicans continue to be in power. And so it’s an ongoing battle.
This thing in Ferguson, that is one of the attractions of it. It was an opportunity for a bunch of people to either relive it because they had been there and it was a glory day and they want to go back, everybody loves nostalgia. How many times have you had a great time, say a spontaneous party that happened, oh, say on a Saturday. It was so cool you want to do it again. So you schedule another party for the next Saturday, and it never comes off the way it did when it was spontaneous. You can never go back.
That’s what’s happening here with the civil rights movement, in a sense. A lot of people who weren’t alive wish they were and would have been and are trying to relive it with these incidents, and people who were alive then who came of age and maybe established businesses in the race industry, such as the Reverend Jackson, also want to relive it and try to reignite it and have it never, ever go away and never, ever allow it to change, to get better, especially.
And along those lines, look at what I have here. Why, I have a story right here in The Politico: “Under Obama Racial Hope No Change.” They could have written this story last week, two years ago. They could have written this story one year into the Obama presidency. And if they really had guts, they could have predicted this before he even was inaugurated, as did I, your host.
“Six years ago, Barack ObamaÂ’s election was going to usher in a new era of racial understanding. That hasnÂ’t happened,” writes The Politico. I should say “laments” The Politico. “Few, if any, anticipated that the man whose election itself was historic would be in a constant lose-lose situation as president when it came to race.
Let me raise my hand, because I guess I’m one of the “if any.” I anticipated everything, and I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back because with you people, I don’t need to. You’ve been here; you know what happened; you know what was said on this program. You knew it, too, all of you within this audience who understand liberalism, and you knew full well that the election of the first African-American president — let me put it this way. Let’s try a different thought experiment.
Let’s imagine that the first African-American president was Dr. Benjamin Carson. Do you think they would have even written stories about how this will put to bed all racial problems? Hell, no, they wouldn’t have even gotten close to that dream. If Dr. Carson had been elected as the first African-American president, they would have been out there predicting, “Oh, this is a disaster. This is the worst thing that could happen to American blacks. It’s the worst thing that could happen to the civil rights movement. Oh, my God, a conservative, oh, no.” And he would be tarred, feathered, trashed, high-tech lynched, what have you.
There would not have been any pretense that the election of Dr. Carson, or any, Thomas Sowell, pick your poison, any conservative African-American happened to be elected president first. And even if Dr. Carson’s elected after Obama, if he runs, if he happens to be elected president sometime, you’re never gonna get these kinds of stories, filled with hope and change, “Oh, what deep meaning. Oh, this could end forever America’s race problems.” And the thing is, the election of Dr. Carson would have much more meaning in that regard than the election of Obama.
Anyway, it was easy to know, if you know liberals, that the election of Obama, or the first African-American president, was not gonna be allowed to solve anything. It was gonna be used to advance the agenda. They quickly realized no criticism would be allowed. Presidents are criticized all the time. They have to be. They’re the most powerful people in the country. You have to be able to criticize the president. But you can’t without being called a racist. So it was a well-thought-out strategy. I’ve also characterized the news of the day as the daily soap opera. I have a See, I Told You So sound bite here from Gwen Ifill from Meet the Press yesterday you have to hear.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. So the incident in Ferguson, really the point of what I’m saying is that they would love you to think that it’s about the gentle giant, Michael Brown, but it really isn’t, for a lot of these people. I mean, to some it is, obviously, but for many in the media it’s a chance to relive the civil rights movement, yay. For those who weren’t alive, it’s a chance to find out what it was like. In order to understand this you’ve got to know how that era is taught to young people, particularly in journalism schools. That era is so glorified. So here came an opportunity to relive it.
Listen to Gwen Ifill. I mean, she’s on Meet the Press yesterday during the panel discussion, and the fill-in host is Chris Jansing. She said the attorney general went there, and what he had to say, his own personal experience he shared about being a young black man, being stopped, help to calm the fears, but there’s a question that’s still out there about whether the president should do more. Questions raised about the tone of the remarks he made. What do you think is the president’s role in this, Gwen?
IFILL: We like to cover it like a soap opera. More important is watching what’s happening behind it. There’s a new civil rights movement which has sprung up. We’ve been looking backward 50 years for the last couple of months, 50 year signings of bills and laws. These young people in the streets, these young people who created the social media movement around Michael Brown, there’s something which we can’t miss, and what feels different to me than Trayvon Martin, it feels different to me than Rodney King. It feels to me like Americans, not just African-Americans, are picking themselves up and saying, the first pictures we saw out of Ferguson, the kind of response was, “Is that America?” And I think people are saying, “Let’s address that.”
RUSH: Nobody is saying that except you people who write the soap opera. That is amazing. Trayvon Martin, ah, Rodney, it just feels different. We had full-blown riots in LA after Rodney King, full-blown riots for days televised. Somehow this feels different? What the heck? This just feels different? She admits we like to cover it like a soap opera? I mean, admitting, and then the new civil rights movement that sprung up, we like looking backward 50 years? Exactly right. First pictures we saw out of Ferguson, is that America? You can see they’re in love with the event.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I tell you, that Gwen Ifill sound bite from Meet the Press yesterday is just a gem. I mean, just loaded. I mean, yeah, it’s obviously loaded with See, I Told You So’s, but it’s loaded with all kinds of information about just who the Drive-Bys are today. Grab it again. Let’s parse it as we go, and I would ask the broadcast engineer to be quick on the button when I say “stop.” In fact, I’m gonna say “stop” after the first line. Out cue is “opera.” So here we go.
IFILL: We like to cover it like a soap opera.
RUSH: Stop the tape. See? Good job. We like to cover it like a soap opera. Look, folks, I am reaching around my back and patting myself here. Who was it? It was my friend Andrew McCarthy who wrote that the news of the day is nothing more than a soap opera with the Drive-By Media writing the script. It’s not the news anymore. Here she is admitting it. “We like to cover it like a soap opera.”
This is not adding prestige to this. It is not prestigious to admit that you in the Drive-Bys cover stories like this, the death of the gentle giant as a soap opera, and then tell you that the news isn’t about the news anymore. The news isn’t just somebody on scene where you aren’t, learning what happened and telling you, which is what is news. No, no. The news now is the Democrat Party agenda, the leftist agenda. And here she says, more important than the story, more important than the soap opera is —
IFILL: More important is watching what’s happening behind it. There’s a new civil rights movement which has sprung up.
RUSH: Stop the tape! New civil rights movement which has sprung up. I’m reaching behind my left shoulder and patting myself on the back again. They’re admitting it. You don’t even have to take my word for it. New civil rights movement. We’ve been looking backward 50 years for the last couple of months.
IFILL: We’ve been looking backward 50 years for the last couple of months, 50-year signings of bills and laws. These young people in the streets, these young people who created a social media movement around Michael Brown, there’s something which we can’t miss, and what feels different to me than Trayvon Martin, it feels different to me than Rodney King —
RUSH: Stop the tape. It feels different than Trayvon Martin, why? Why does it feel different than Rodney King? Why does it feel different? Because for some reason those two events did not automatically take everybody back to the sixties. I don’t know why, but they didn’t. I mean, it was cops in the Rodney King circumstance, on tape. It was a security guard, first “white Hispanic” in America, George Zimmerman, but somehow those events, no, no, there’s something about this one, you see, something about this one. I wonder what that could be. And here she tells us.
IFILL: It feels to me like Americans, not just African-Americans, are picking themselves up and saying, the first pictures we saw out of Ferguson, the common response was, “Is that America?” And I think people are saying, “Let’s address that.”
RUSH: People are not saying, “Is that America?” People are fed up with that being American. They’re not asking, “Is that America?” Way too many people long ago concluded that it is, and they’re fed up with it.
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