RUSH: I guess there was a segment on CNN over the weekend, and a guy named Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal was on blaming me for the fact that Trump exists, blaming me for not taking Trump out. Now, I have a question to ask based on that. Look, does the Wall Street Journal really want to admit that it is powerless to influence thinking in this country? The Wall Street Journal’s been for open borders!
The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been pro-amnesty for as long as the subject has been around. They are anti-Trump, and they have said so. Why isn’t that enough? How come it always comes down to me? I thought the Wall Street Journal was an opinion news for the editorial page had all kinds of power and lots of influence. Big-money people read that. But isn’t it fascinating that what the Journal is doing itself somehow is not enough to stop Trump, that if I don’t do it, it won’t be done? It’s kind of an interesting admission.
At any rate, more on that, and there’s lots of stuff like that yet to come here, folks. I have news from the weekend to get to and stuff that happened yesterday to get to. Now, for those of you that are aware of what Romney has done… You know, Romney with his speech trying to convince Trump voters they’re making a mistake and to abandon Trump. I mean, everybody knows, including Romney, that isn’t gonna work. All that’s gonna do is solidify Trump’s support. So the question is: Why do it?
And the “why do it” is to set up circumstances where there might be an open convention and then Romney can set himself up as the fusion candidate to save the day and to end the chaos. I can imagine Romney wants another go. I can imagine Romney’s looking back at the 2012 campaign and is aware of the mistakes that he made and that if he hadn’t made them, he might be in the Oval Office today. So I can understand wanting another shot at it. And I can understand trying to massage and maneuver things so that you have a shot at it, even though you haven’t participated in the primaries; you haven’t been in the arena in this campaign.
And we will talk about that, too, as the program unfolds. But it’s not just Romney. Folks, there’s a place in Georgia called Sea Island. There’s been a G7 economic meeting there. It’s a very ritzy and tony place. It was originally built as a golf course development for well-to-do, upper crust people. Nothing wrong with that. The first edition of it didn’t make it. It went close to bankrupt and it had some emergency buyers. Three partners, I believe, came in with a total of $212 million and rebuilt it, and now it’s really something.
It’s the coast of Georgia and you have to be going there to get there, and it’s a five star place. Well, it hosted what was to have been private confab recently, a very secret meeting sponsored by a think tank in Washington known as AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. Now, AEI is a think tank. They’re people that sit there and think. And it’s got leftist thinkers and it’s got centrist thinkers and it’s got some right-wing thinkers. Its chairman is Arthur Burns, someone who has recently been trying to redefine what conservatism is, much the same way that Republican establishment has been trying to redefine conservatism.
It’s not what you and I consider it to be. Anyway, they have an annual meeting called a world forum, like the World Economic Forum. The World Forum, AEI’s World Forum. It’s kind of like their own version of Davos, the World Economic Forum. At this one, “[d]escribed unimaginatively but accurately as ‘opulent,’ Sea Island, Georgia, hosted a gaggle of Republican leaders and tech CEOs for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum. Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend…
“The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended,” and other tech big wigs were there. “So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Senators Tom Cotton (Arkansas), Cory Gardner (Colorado), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Nebraska),” were all in attendance.
The main topic again: “How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.”
No Drive-By, like no media CEOs, no media reporters, no big-time anchors. I mean, you know, when Allen & Company does their thing out at Sun Valley, they always have at least Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose there. They didn’t even make the cut for this thing. And Rove’s presentation zeroed in on the fact that even people that like Trump don’t consider him “presidential” and “somebody that their children should look up to. … Sources familiar…” And the meeting, by the way, has now been widely reported, but the news of the meeting was broken on the Huffing and Puffington Post. They were the first to report it.
“Sources familiar with the meeting — who requested anonymity because the forum is off the record — said that much of the conversation around Trump centered on ‘how this happened, rather than how are we going to stop him…'” In other words, it was a circle, and they were sitting around the circle, and they were all telling each other or asking each other, “How the hell did this happen?” And it’s an understandable thing. They think they run the world. They think they control these things. And out of the blue comes the Trumpster.
So they were in this circle trying to explain to each other how it happened, and then they did eventually get into what they can do to stop Donald Trump. Oh, I take it back. Pardon me for a moment. (clearing throat) I did make an error. There was indeed a media person there. I forgot. It was… (long pause) Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard.
“A specter was haunting the World Forum — the specter of Donald Trump,’ [Bill] Kristol wrote in an emailed report from the conference, borrowing the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. ‘There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he’s done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated.’ The key task now, wrote Kristol, to once again paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him.
“In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing, brow-furrowing, and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president,” according to the people at this super-secret meeting. They have decided Trump should not be president. They met to explain to each other how it happened first and then to share with each other ideas on how to stop Trump.
Now, clearly, given the names, you would think the largest percentage here would have been Republicans, but when you look at the Google guys and the Apple CEO and Sean Parker, there’s all kinds of leftists at this thing, too. I guess they know how to cross the aisle at the Republican establishment, know how to bring the tech guys in. Clearly the tech guys were there to offer some tech suggestions on stopping Trump.
And again a highlight of the gathering was a presentation by Karl Rove about focus group findings on Trump, greatest weakness, doesn’t look presidential, is not somebody their children should look up to. Rove’s research on Trump’s supporters says they also see Trump as somebody who can be erratic and should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear trigger. This sounds exactly like what these people said about Ronald Reagan. It’s uncanny! The same kind of people, not these same people obviously, same kind of people with the same exact kind of thing. We don’t want to have Reagan anywhere near the nuclear button.
By the way, back to Romney for a second before I go to the break, another point that I made on the Fox News Sunday program. Romney’s father, George Romney, did this identical thing to Barry Goldwater in 1964. George Romney was part of a cabal of Republican establishment types appalled at conservatism, scared to death, angry, afraid to death of Goldwater. They just could not stand that he was gonna be the nominee, and George Romney went out and campaigned and did as much as he could to undermine the Goldwater campaign.
Now, the mistake here, those people back then thought that they were doing and did do a great thing when they undermined, and they did undermine the Goldwater campaign. Well, Goldwater was not gonna win. Nobody was gonna beat LBJ coming off the JFK assassination. But they did undermine Goldwater, and in their view, in their short minded view, they succeeded, they stopped conservatism in its tracks. But they forgot that Reagan gave that great speech, A Time for Choosing, and it was the Goldwater emergence and, yeah, defeat that created the modern-day conservative political movement. There was a conservative ideological movement that had been begun by William F. Buckley, but now it became a political and electable movement begun with Goldwater’s loss but signaled and heralded by Reagan’s speech. And had not there been a Goldwater, there would not have been a Reagan in 1980 or 1976.
But these guys, Mitt Romney, George, they’re out there telling themselves what successful thing they did back in 1964. That remains their frame of reference for conservatism. Conservative candidate, conservative nominee equals landslide loss. They don’t see 49-state landslide victory twice by Reagan. They were opposed to conservatism in 1964. They were opposed to an outsider trying to get in their establishment tent in 1964. And the son of George Romney, Mitt Romney, tries the same thing last week to keep a new outsider from getting inside the establishment tent. And now this super-secret meeting.
You know, I think news of this meeting, depending how widespread it gets, could actually affect voting today, ’cause this is the kind of stuff, if people are wavering away from Trump for whatever reason, hearing this could send ’em right back in a lickety-split second if they find out.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I tell you what the Huffing and Puffington Post did, they went to the FAA and they tracked — you can track, through various apps and websites, incoming and outgoing traffic at airports. And they tracked FAA records available at FlightAware.com, which is a great app tracking your airline flight, mapping it out, where it is, and so forth.
Anyway, “A fleet of private jets flew into and out of two small airports near Sea Island this weekend. Fifty-four planes flew out of the airport on St. Simons Island, Georgia, on Sunday — nearly four times as many as departed from the airport the previous Sunday.” They went to San Jose, California. They went to the state of the Washington. They went to New York. They knew where they went. It’s how they confirmed who was there at this meeting.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’ll tell you something else about this super-secret American Enterprise Institute forum at Sea Island, Georgia. You got all these tech CEOs and all these left-wing inventors and tech people with these Republicans? That’s crony capitalism right in front of your face, or crony socialism, maybe, whatever. More detail coming up.
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RUSH: Why is Donald Trump causing what he’s causing? Why is there so much rabid interest in Donald Trump? We know the answer to that. He’s perceived as anti-establishment. He’s perceived as somebody who’s an outsider that is just going to represent the interests of people who have been lied to, ignored, whose life circumstances have been made worse by people in the establishment running as much as they can run. And, folks, there isn’t any question about that. We’re really down to it here. In describing the divide that exists between the ruling class…
I don’t care what term you come up for them — the elites, the establishment, the ruling class — they consider themselves to be our betters. They do think of themselves a cut above us in education, in training, in breeding. I’m not kidding about that. Breeding. Better families, better bloodlines. Ivy League or similar education. They do consider themselves better — and, as such, smarter, much more competent. We who are not permitted in that club are rubes.
There might not be active dislike. It’s just there’s a contempt. We just don’t know what they do, and we can’t learn what they’ve learned, and we simply will not make the choices that must be made, as they view it. So more and more control is sought over daily American life. But look what they’ve done, these “betters,” under the guise of fixing things that have gone wrong, fixing things they broke in the first place. We’re $19 trillion in debt with them in charge. We have one after another failing entitlement program, starting with Social Security, and Medicare, and Medicaid, then Obamacare.
I think, however, it’s a much more powerful thing to point out what they have done to the college education, than to continue to harp on welfare, because that’s almost become cliched and can easily be misconstrued into an attack on the poor, which we do not do. And by “we,” I mean all of us people in this audience, fellow Americans. I know nobody who makes fun of or wishes the poor on the poor. There’s nothing to that at all. But here’s the point. In America, there has always been this reality — it wasn’t just a concept, it was a reality — that whatever class differences existed were not exclusionary.
You could be born poor and end up in the top 1%. Not everybody did, but you could. You could be born in the fourth quintile. You could be born in the lower middle class, middle class, and work your way up. Now, since the Great Depression the number one requirement to pulling something like that off has been a college education. This is what we’ve been told — and, for the most part, it really cannot be denied. It’s become and it has always been a major requirement.
Whether it’s actually used to limit the number of applicants that have to be interviewed or whatever, the importance of a college degree cannot be denied, in terms of advancement. For those who didn’t go to college, there were vocational schools where people could earn a living being construction workers or mechanics or manufacturing line workers or whatever. But in any case, there was a way up. That’s what you want to boil it down the American dream was not just owning a house. It was the opportunity to improve yourself.
Unlike anywhere else in the world where whatever you’re born to, that’s your life. Not here. But look at what our betters have done, under the guise of being smarter and brighter. They have botched everything. They’ve screwed up the health care system now. They have turned the greatest health care system in the world into something that is inaccessible for a large number of people. They run the banks, right? What are the interest rates? Zero percent. What’s that cost the banks? Nothing. Well, how does it help you?
For the longest time, these people have been the ones telling us to save our money. They’ve been chiding us if we don’t, publicly chiding us for not saving for a rainy day, right? The news stories are predictable once, twice, three times a year. These people wring their hands over the fact that the saving rate is too low; it’s gonna put additional pressure on entitlements when people retire. No matter what we do, we’re screwing up! We’re eating the wrong things. We’re drinking the wrong things and too much of the wrong things.
So all of these things have to be controlled on the premise that we don’t know what we’re doing. They know what they’re doing. Well, this one ticket out for everybody — as it was portrayed and as it has been sold and explained to people — was a college education. Look at what they’ve done to that. Oh, yeah, it’s still available. It costs an arm and a leg, but it has become an impediment to climbing the ladder of success. The debt that the vast majority of college graduates incur acquiring their degrees makes it impossible to do anything but stay even for a while. They’ve got to pay back the loans.
And many people have student loan debt that’s in six figures. But it doesn’t take a six-figure student loan debt to make it cumbersome and to make it an impediment and actually act like a ball and chain in slowing you down. And yet that’s the big ticket out. That’s what they’ve sold it. Everybody’s bought it, everybody’s believed it, everybody has signed on to it. It has become a cultural given that you’re nothing if you don’t go to college. “Well, you just don’t have anywhere near the chance if you don’t go to college.”
So they’ve sold that myth. Who runs colleges and universities? They do. Whenever there is talk of consumers being ripped off with rising costs, how come universities never are mentioned? Big Oil is always targeted, Big Pharmaceutical’s always targeted, Big Box Retailer is always targeted, Big Auto is always targeted, but Big School isn’t. “No, no! We’ll handle the Big School expenses. We’ll loan you the money.” My point is, forget conspiracies: They’ve just botched it, folks. They have not fixed anything.
They’ve made it actually tougher to climb the ladder of success. These are the people in charge of all these things. These are the people. These are the people that have always said they know better. It’s no… Trump has been coming. It’s been in the cards for years. We didn’t know who it was gonna be, but this was going to happen. At some point there was going to be a revolt against this because after enough time passes enough people have been demonstrably negatively impacted by all this to keep it a secret. They’re going to figure it out, which they have.
It doesn’t hurt that the Republican Party came along in the last two midterm elections and promised to stop all this and turn the ship around, start sailing in the right direction. Didn’t happen. Voters believed them, invested in it. The evidence isn’t theoretical; it’s real. Where does all this lead? Here’s the danger. See, the danger is that the betters, elites, the ruling class, whatever you want to call ’em — the establishment — everything they have done has been designed to affect a number of things, but among them public opinion.
They have. They have made it look like they are aware we are in a democracy. People vote, and the winners triumph and implement what they believe. And yet all the time this is going on, the ruling class and establishment has been setting itself up to survive and thrive no matter who wins elections. And at some point down the road, this is what always happens. The ruling class is going to say, “Why are we even go through this charade of elections? Why are we even wasting our time?” And this is how democracies end. This is how republics fall to the wayside.
The ruling class finally tires of going through the motions of pretending public opinion matters, winning public opinion matters, they get tired of it, and they realize it’s a wasted exercise. It’s necessary in order to get the power and keep the power for a while, but after a while, you don’t even need the elections because no matter what happens in elections you still run the show and still do what you want to do.
And that’s why there’s Trump. Somebody has come along and has convinced a lot of people here that he’s the agent of change that can stop all of this. It’s quite natural that the establishment would not want any part of this. It’s quite natural that the people who have considered themselves our betters by virtue of breeding and intelligence and education and position, they’re not just gonna sit by and let an election take it all away from them.
For those of you who play golf, let me give you an analogy. Let’s say you live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and you are a member of the Oshkosh Country Club, and you have people who’ve wanted to become members at Augusta National for 50 years but Augusta National won’t give you the time of day and you finally said, “You know what? We’re just gonna take over. We’re just gonna move there and we’re just gonna take over Augusta.” Do you think the members of Augusta National are just gonna sit there and let Oshkosh Country Club take over? No way. It’s not how it happens, so now clearly they are organizing to try to stop Trump.
Now, they’re doing it within the confines of the electoral process, which means they still consider that to be relevant. But if they have to, they will act outside the electoral process to stop Trump by taking over the convention and making sure that whatever the expressed will of voters is not reflected when the convention is over. That’s what I mean by outside the political system. And make no mistake that this is being planned right now.
Now, a couple things that you might think are not related, but they are. A story here from Breitbart News: “Facebook Suspends FrackNation Page For Telling The Truth About Fracking.” There’s a fracking trial going on in Pennsylvania. It’s not going well for the left. They’re losing it. Facebook has shut down the page of pro-frackers. I am not kidding.
By the way, a little side note, Hillary Clinton, she may have stepped in it last night and nobody knows it yet. In that little thing they did with Fox News, Hillary Clinton came out against fracking in Ohio and, what, Pennsylvania? Two states the Democrats need? I mean, it’s one thing to be against coal in these Southern hick states, but the Democrats really never came after coal in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Hillary, whether she knew what she did, came out against fracking. Fracking is why Ohio has booming economy. And here’s Hillary Clinton telling ’em she’s gonna shut it down. Believe me, it’s gonna come back and bite her.
And the same thing in Michigan here, folks, the same thing in Pennsylvania, whatever, but my point about social media is this. Let’s go back to this secret confab that took place at Sea Island, Georgia, over the weekend. You had all kinds of tech CEOs from Silicon Valley: Tim Cook from Apple; Larry Page, Google; Sean Parker, Napster and Facebook. You had Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX. You had Mitch McConnell. You had Karl Rove. You had Paul Ryan. You had numerous Republican senators and congressmen. You know who wasn’t there? The Drive-Bys. Now, wait.
Other than Bill Kristol there were no media people there. Don’t laugh. What this means is, if the tech people are there, Facebook, Google, if they are there, what that tells me is that social media is usurping the role of traditional Drive-By Media. And take a look at this story in Breitbart about Facebook simply suspending a pro-fracking page based on what’s happening in Pennsylvania in fracking. There’s a trial against it, and it’s not going well for the left, for Hillary, the Democrats, the people who oppose fracking under climate change.
They don’t want any oil at all. It’s gotta be totally solar, renewable, wind, what have you. Anything that makes oil, fossil fuels cheaper and more plentiful, they oppose it. Fracking does that. The anti-fracking forces are losing. Facebook has shut down the pro-fracking page. In other words, don’t even need the media to do stories anti-fracking, because the actions on social media now just shut down access, just shut down free speech on social media of the people you don’t like. And in this case, the pro-fracking people have been silenced and shut down and shut up on Facebook.
They’re working hand in hand with the Democrat Party on anti-fracking and they don’t need one Drive-By reporter there to accomplish this. They’re not even worried about the media shutting down public opinion or shaping it. They’re using social media to silence it. So don’t think that wasn’t on this agenda of this super-secret thing that happened at Sea Island, Georgia, this past weekend.
And this, I think, is a great indication of how they might end up using social media to harm, damage, what have you, Trump and then Cruz. If they succeed in taking Trump out, then they’re gonna focus on Cruz until they get the lap person, the lackey that they want in there. No doubt that’s their objective in mind.
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RUSH: One minor but important correction on the super-secret confab at Sea Island, Georgia. I said there were no Drive-Bys there, and there were. Arthur Sulzberger III, the Little Pinch who runs the New York Times was there. None of his reporters, but he was there. And of course Little Pinch, the New York Times, folks, is part of the establishment, obviously. And Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, I just learned that the pro-fracking page has been put back up at Facebook, so the Facebook attempted censorship of pro-fracking forces failed, and both sides of the fracking discussion regarding a trial going on in Pennsylvania are now back up. The story I have on this is from Breitbart. Admittedly it’s from yesterday, last night. “Facebook Suspends FrackNation Page for Telling the Truth About Fracking.” There’s a fracking trial and the left is losing it, and Facebook shut down the pro-fracking pages for comments and what have you, whatever you do there at Facebook.
But the forces overwhelmed Facebook censors, and it’s back up now. So that’s good. And it’s a microcosm of what’s happening. In the old days the people who had been shut down or shut out would just have to deal with it. They really wouldn’t have any mechanism to overcome the (in this case) censorship. But they are so large in numbers. I actually should say “we.” We are so many now, our numbers are so huge. I think it’s the left that is the minority. I think it is establishment thinking, ruling class thinking that’s the minority.
That’s another thing that’s frustrating about it for a lot of people, is that we’re actually being governed or ruled, if you will, by a minority of thought. But make no mistake. Social media is being used by the left to censor anything they don’t want to hear or see. Now, the fracking attempt was beat back. But it’s happening throughout Twitter. And look at all these websites that are now prohibiting and eliminating comments. The LA Times, for example, has announced that… It’s not that recent; it’s past few months.
The Los Angeles Times announced that they are no longer going to permit letters to the editor or comments on their website from people who are anti-global warming. They’re just not gonna permit it. So the point here is that social media is overtaking the Drive-By Media in terms of where people who want to influence public opinion go. Now, don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying the Drive-Bys are history. Don’t… It’s still in an evolutionary phase. The social media aspect of it is relatively new. But I’m making the point because look who was at this meeting.
You know, there was a similar meeting in 1957 at Sea Island, Georgia. And it was called The Kingmakers. That’s what the group was called then. The political and media and corporate elite of the day met for the same express purposes back in 1957. Phyllis Schlafly writes about it in her biography or one of her books, and it had the same objective. It’s always… But, you know, back then it wasn’t known to exist the way it’s known to exist today, and back then when the elites got together, everybody wanted to be there.
It was a, “Oh, wow, these are the real powerful people,” and people trusted them, obviously. Some did. It’s a massively changing landscape. Now, we’re in the middle of landscape changing. So I don’t want anybody to knee-jerking me here again on this and think I’ve said the Drive-Bys are finished. They’re not. It’s just social media has developed and involved into another quiver in the ammo bag, if you will. And censorship is the objective of the new left.
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