It’s one of these pieces that every sentence of it you’re going, “Yep, right on.” Every sentence just exactly what I think, I just never put into these kinds of words.  The whole piece.  Professor Codevilla eventually made a book out of this, for which I was asked to contribute a foreword, which I graciously did, eagerly so.  This is the entire political establishment around the world, the Drive-By Media, all of the smart people have just this weekend been awakened by the Brexit vote.

Again, one of the themes of the whole Stack I have today is how shocked, how stunned the establishment, the ruling class around the world was at this vote.  They really didn’t have any idea.  So in advance of getting into that and setting it up, I want to read — I spent 25 minutes on this.  I’m not gonna do the whole thing.  This about two and a half minutes, maybe 2:45, again from July 19th, 2010.

RUSH ARCHIVE:  We, in what Mr. Codevilla calls, the country class, meaning not the hick class, but the country, we are the country. The ruling class is a minority, and I have touched on this. We are being ruled, i.e., governed by a minority. Less than 10, 15% of Americans agree with the thought process, the philosophies, the goals and objectives of the ruling class. And we in the country class, we believe in merit. We rise or fall based on merit. We believe that a good GPA is what’s necessary to get you into college.

We believe that performing well on the job is how you get promoted and how you get paid well. Not true in the ruling class. In fact, that is looked down upon. It’s sort of like the old money versus new money business. The old money, inherited from robber barons of the past, great wealth. The people who inherited it don’t do anything for it, but it has great lineage. People who have earned great wealth rather than having inherited it are shunned by the old-money people because it’s working class to have earned money.

It’s just not done. It’s considered gauche, it’s considered filthy. And it’s much the same way with merit throughout the ruling class. You don’t have to be the best. In fact, if you do the right things and say the right things, you can be an abject failure meritocracy-wise and still be promoted.

This resonated with me in so many ways. I grew up wanting to be in radio, and when I moved to New York in 1988 my objective was to become the most listened to person on radio. Not top five, not top ten, but the most listened to. And I did it. It didn’t count for anything with those people. And yet there are people who never have had any audience, who still don’t have any audience, who are widely accepted members of the ruling class, who are considered very powerful simply because they walk the walk, they talk the talk, they kiss the right rear ends and do all of this.

But the point is these people are a minority, and they have no relationship to the rest of us in the country class. And somehow we are now being ruled by these people. We’re not being governed. We’re being ruled by them. And they have certain beliefs right now. Among them is that the United States is the problem in the world. Among them is that those of us not in the ruling class haven’t the smarts, haven’t the ability to know what’s best for ourselves. They have to do it for us.

RUSH:  I take it back.  I misunderstood what this was.  I read the headline here in my own transcript.  I thought I was gonna be reading from Codevilla.  It wasn’t.  It was the way I set it up.  This is the monologue I started before reading from Codevilla’s piece in the American Spectator back in July of 2010.  And that went on for a while before I even got around to reading it.  It resonated. I could do my own monologue on this piece that he did that was every bit as long as the piece that he wrote.  It was that powerful.  It was that right on the money. (interruption) It’s the same thing.  I know it’s exactly the same thing.  Brexit is the same thing.

Well, it’s not just Brexit.  Brexit is just the latest example of what we are all up against when we consider ourselves to be the country class.  That’s Codevilla’s term, by the way, versus the ruling class. Elites versus commoners, the establishment versus nonestablishment, what have you.  And it’s like anything else.  Now that it’s been discovered and has — well, not “discovered” is the wrong term — now that it has been illuminated, there’s a parallel.

Back when this program started in 1988 — I’m going to be brazenly honest here, folks — well, I always am, but, I mean, I’m gonna say something here that I haven’t said very often.  I’ve said it before, but not very often.  In 1988, everything was fine.  There were three networks:  ABC, NBC, CBS.  There was PBS over there, too.  There was one cable news network, and that was CNN.  And that was it.  That was the broadcast media.

You add to that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today, and all the other big city dailies, and that was the media.  And every bit of it was left wing.  The one exception was the Washington Times.  National Review magazine.  But, I mean, these paled in comparison to this monolith.  It was all leftist, it was all liberal, but they never said so.  They were just what was.  They were the media.

Now, everybody knew the media was left and everybody talked about liberal media.  Don’t misunderstand.  My point is that they themselves always denied it, said they were objective, said they were fair.  There was no liberal media.  There’s no bias.  You’re just a bunch of conservative crackpots or however they decided to characterize it.  The point is, in 1988 there wasn’t any national alternative media.  Then my program started in August, and in a few short years there were other first local conservative shows, and then a couple of my guest hosts got their own national conservative talk shows.

And about the early nineties, the internet exploded, with websites to be followed by blogs and a rash of new websites that were decidedly conservative/libertarian, but alternative.  And then in 1996, Fox News came along.  So some nine years after I started, Fox News came.  Then MSNBC got going.  And so we had an alternative media.  And my point is that with the invention, discovery, appearance of an alternative media, the existing left-wing or dominant media/mainstream media all of a sudden began to acknowledge who and what they were and entered into an open competition with us this happen.

They began losing audience, obviously.  It became bifurcated.  They began shedding advertiser dollars because some advertisers fled and joined the New Media.  They all of a sudden had to compete, whereas before they had a monopoly.  They were it.  If you wanted news, you got one interpretation.  If you didn’t see CBS, doesn’t matter. Watch NBC.  If you missed that, doesn’t matter. Watch ABC.  If you missed that, no big deal. The New York Times and Washington Post will catch you up.

The point is, it was all the same, not only what they reported and covered, but what they didn’t.  All of that changed.  And I think it ushered in a new partisanship that was made possible, not by us, but by the left responding to us.  The media entered the battle.  And, as such, became even more left wing, became even more biased, became even more partisan.  But beyond all of that, they dropped the illusion that they were objective.  And they came to join us in open battle against us.  Well, I think…

And this has created its own new kind of partisanship; it’s undeniable.  Same thing now that’s happened with the ruling class. For the longest time, they were there. They’ve always been there. They have always been the establishment. It’s always been a bunch of elites. It’s always been a bunch of people that probably were no the best at what they did, but they went to the right schools, they had the right family lineage, they came from old money, which made them special.

And they’ve all been trained by the various educations they’d had to join government at various levels and to maintain the unique position of power that the elites and the establishment had, even though they were a decided minority in terms of numbers.  Well, now Codevilla’s piece came along seven years ago, and we’ve had a couple of midterm elections where the Republicans won in landslides where the Republican Party pretended it didn’t happen.

And all of a sudden just as there was an actual admission that there was a left-wing media, now the establishment is admitting who they are and what they are. And they’re openly flaunting who they are and what they are. And they have joined us in battle mocking us, ridiculing us.  It’s almost a repeat of what happened with the advent of conservative alternative media, what that did to the mainstream media.  Now the elites and the establishment, however you want to characterize them, have begun to behave in way almost identical to way the Drive-By Media did when it was exposed.

And that is to engage in battle to destroy us, to defeat us, in addition to whatever else they’re doing.  And this is where we find ourselves now.  Now, that’s a very, very shortened version of all that’s transpired in a whole number of years.  But it’s why we have Trump.  It’s why 16 other establishment-type candidates — or 15. There was one other outsider in there who didn’t make any ground.  It’s why the Republican Party is having all kinds of problems, and why George Will has quit the Republican Party.

It’s because the… Well, that’s its own story.  Yeah.  But still, it’s a result of the establishment not having anymore 100% unadulterated power over all of this.  They now have to fight for it every day, and they don’t like it.  It’s beneath them to have to compete.  It’s beneath them to have to compete.  It’s beneath them. And the Brexit vote comes along and the Trump candidacy, and all these things are illustrating in many ways just how out of touch and unconcerned about it the elites are.

These are the people that were at one time considered the best and the brightest, and people looked up to ’em and respected ’em and trusted ’em. They trusted ’em to run the college education program, trusted ’em to run the student loan program, trusted ’em to run the banks, trusted ’em to run real estate and housing, trusted them to run the institutions that defined our greatness. And they’ve done nothing but botch it.

In the old days when they botched it, it was just chalked it up as something unfortunate.  Now people have a great sense of awareness of this divide that exists: Ruling class/country class. It’s just like the divide that exists between standard, old-fashioned media and alternative media.  And it’s led to incessant partisanship.  Not bad in and of itself, don’t misunderstand.  I’m not saying that critically.  They do.  I don’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Now, the point is that the media now has to fight with us to win, and the establishment now has to fight with us to win.  They used to not have to do this.  They had monopolies. They ran it. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it. They had such power, the establishment did, that they could prevent uprisings from starting before anybody knew they were even brewing.  But they can’t any longer, and they’re scared and they’re mad. And these are the kind of people, folks, that are where they are not because of merit.

If they lose it, they can’t embark on a plan to regain it, because the memberships they have… Like, in the establishment, the network, the clubs are all the result of having the right last name, the right pedigree, any number of things like that.  It has nothing to do with merit.  So they lose it.  How do they get it back?  This is why in their minds, they’ll have nothing.  It’s a strange world.  I wouldn’t… Myself, I wouldn’t be comfortable in a world where merit was not a determining factor.  I just… I don’t know that I would ever feel whole.

If I were part of that club and was is there for things that had nothing to do with me particularly — I mean, I had not really done anything to earn it, in the traditional sense of earning — I don’t know how I could — I’d never think it was real.  I would always think it could be snatched away from me if it wasn’t based on any kind of substance.  And I think that’s where they are now.  And they’re not gonna let it go.

This Brexit vote. We’ll get to this Stack. They’re hell-bent on redoing the vote or just ignoring it or discrediting it somehow.  And I hope the “leave” crowd understands what they’re up against.  Because it still just isn’t gonna happen.  There’s already mumblings now that there’s so much guilt on the “leave” side, “Maybe, you know, we might have been a little hasty.  Not sure we really want to do this.”  You can even see those kinds of stories out there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Fargo, North Dakota.  This is Dan, you’re next, sir.  Welcome.

CALLER:  Hey, Rush.  Thanks for having me on.

RUSH:  Yeah.  You bet.

CALLER:  So I just wanted to touch on a point here that has a lot of aspects to it so I’ll try to stay concise, but it seems to me that when the country was founded and the Constitution was drafted, there was a general more homogeneous outlook on the vision for this nation. Whereas today the nation is, for better or worse, full of far more diverse values and perspectives that create a sense of discord among the populace.  And it seems to me that the elites and the ruling class, as you call them, actually feed off of that sense of discord, as we vote them more power day by day. So it was kind of a breath of fresh air the other day to see the Brexit vote and see that there was an entire nation, or at least 50% of a nation that’s willing to step away from a centralized power like it did.

RUSH:  Wait, wait, wait whoa, whoa, whoa.  Wait a minute, now.  Boy, you got a gold mine of good points here.  In the first place, the Brits did not renounce socialism.  The Brits are still socialist.  They didn’t renounce that.  I made a point last Friday of saying, even though we would love to see this as a rejection of liberalism, we can’t lie to ourselves.

What this was was a bunch of people saying, “We are not going to stop being Great Britain.  We are going to hold onto our nation.  We love being British.  We love that there is a Great Britain, and we’re not gonna let it be dissolved.  We’re not gonna let it be overrun by out-of-control immigration by people in charge of not caring what happens to British people.  We’re not gonna let ourselves be subjected to a bunch of people ruling us, who don’t care that there is a Britain or a Germany or a France or whatever.  We’re not gonna be run by a bunch of people who don’t believe in nations.”

This was nationhood.  This was nationalism speaking up, piping up.  This is a bunch of people fed up like here with immigration, fed up with the attempted abolition of nationhood, which is what the EU is all about.  The EU — I don’t know, folks, if you have traveled over there, but once you enter the EU, that’s the last time you have to use your passport.  You enter the EU in France, you can go anywhere. You don’t have to show your passport. You go to Great Britain, you don’t need to show your passport, you go to Germany, because the borders don’t exist.  That’s what they were rising up against, but they did not reject socialism.  That has not happened yet.  Now you had another point, but I’ve gotta wait on that because I’m sadly out of time.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Our last caller, Adam, said that at the founding, the days of the founding we were more homogenous.  Not necessarily so, either.  Not necessarily so.  There were striking similarities between then and today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Just quickly on the idea that things are tougher today. The last caller’s theory was a good theory. That the reason people are turning to all-powerful government is there’s so many factions, there’s so many different people, groups competing for goodies that it takes a central authority to hand ’em all out, to pass ’em all out.  And it’s an interesting theory in and of itself.  The left has succeeded in grouping people.

We are less a nation of individuals today than we are a collection of grievance-related groups.  And the grievance-related groups all think they’re victims of something.  And most of them think they’re victims of white Christians.  It’s just the way it’s been explained and told.  I mean, that’s who founded the country, it is said.  There’s so much ignorance on the founding of this country. There’s so many lies and BS that have been told about it. People like Obama and the left believe that the country was set up by a bunch of rich white Christians specifically to keep themselves in the money and power, in perpetuity, and expressly denied all peoples of color and women and LGBTs to lives of secondary minority status.  And they’ve educated people that’s how the country was founded.

So you’ve had, I don’t know now, two and a half generations have grown up thinking the country’s, at best, flawed, at worst, corrupt, and it’s now time to pay back. It’s time now to get even with those people who have set themselves up to always be in power with all the money.  Rich Christians epitomized by people like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump and George W. Bush and all that.  You get the drill.  I mean, that’s how it manifests itself.

So we have groups, and the groups are made up of what they think are minorities, and they’re all victims of something. Victims of powerful forces that are standing in their way of happiness, standing in their way of a good time, standing in their way of economic security, standing in their way of something.  So the theory goes that with this much division and this many people unhappy with grievances that they’re unable to address themselves, they’re unable to overcome these obstacles, they’re unable to overcome this powerful majority that’s denying them everything, that they’ve all turned to government two-day two things:  Punish the majority and take everything away from ’em and then give it to the victims.

And the guy’s point was when you have this much division, when you have this much unhappiness, this much despair, people are naturally gonna turn to government, not themselves in order to make things fair and be economically equal and what have you.  Whereas, he said, in the days of the founding you didn’t so much have this much division.  There aren’t all these grievances. And folks, it’s something that’s misunderstood about our early days.

As vicious as you think the media is today — and it is — it was no better back then.  And some would tell you that it was worse.  Some would tell it was viciously worse. The pamphleteers and the — there were a lot of people that called themselves media back then that weren’t, just as today there are people who do the same.  But, I mean, the personal insults and the personal attacks in national politics were vicious.  It’s never been sweetness and light.  It’s never been hunky-dory.

And, a case could be made, even though they didn’t do polling back then, a case could be made that at the time of the Revolutionary War a majority of Americans opposed it.  A majority of Americans even back then didn’t want to get rid of that big teat from Great Britain.  They didn’t want to take the risk of fending for themselves.  So we were not homogenous.  I mean, to even get the 13 colonies to agree to form the United States, there had been all kinds of accommodations made with the Southern colonies on slavery.  Otherwise there would have not been a union.

You go back, you read John Adams and you read some of the early founders, that ripped ’em a new one.  The whole slavery issue and what they had to do to found the country tore ’em apart.  So what they did when they wrote the Constitution, they built in what they hoped would be the mechanisms by which the words of the Declaration and the Constitution would apply to everybody.  And it was brilliant in that regard.  The people that founded the country and what they put together, what they made, the United States of America, is nothing like it’s being taught today.  It was truly brilliant.  It was magical.  It was miraculous.

It was well-intentioned and it was among the greatest feats in human history.  And those who’ve studied it have that kind of reverence for it, which is why it’s so painful to watch all of these groups that run around and don’t even know what they’re talking about, whine, moan, complain about unfairness and so forth.  The fact is that it was a struggle to unify this nation.  It was a struggle to declare independence.  It was a struggle to fight the Revolutionary War.  It was almost lost on several occasions.  It was never homogenous.

Now, you didn’t have divisions along the lines of immigration, but you stop and think of the Louisiana Purchase and then the nation moved west.  You ever wondered, you watch these movies of the Old West and Judge Roy Bean and all these guys, it was going on at the same time on the East Coast, people were running around in kneesocks and britches and tricornered hats and so forth.  How did those two things go together?  Well, they did.  The cavalry was running around as the national police force, capturing Indians and so forth and putting them on reservations.

There were all kinds of factions. There were all kinds of different groups of people being swept up into this new place called America, whether they liked it or not.  Then states came along and ratified statehood and all their diverse populations joined.  So, no, it’s never been a cakewalk and we’ve never, ever been totally unified.  We never, ever will be.  It’s a constant, ongoing struggle, and that’s what politics is.  It’s not how we manage or affairs but it’s the quest for power that will define what kind of country we have and that’s why you hope you have representatives of your point of view willing to actually fight for it, which a lot of Republicans haven’t felt for a while.

The Democrats never stop fighting, just like the old communists, they never go away.  They never give up, never accept defeat, and just like the Brexit clowns over the European Union, by no means have they conceded defeat.  They’re gonna lash out. They’re gonna try to punish the Brits.  There’s a faction even now that wants to kick Britain out of the EU today.  Screw this “two years” business.  You want out?  Fine.  Get the hell out.  We can’t wait to punish your ass for leaving us like this.

They can’t wait to do it.  All kinds of different attitudes about it now.