RUSH: Okay, let’s get to Meryl Streep. We’ve got some people on hold who want to weigh in on it as well. It’s a special kind of stupid, and these are people disconnected from reality, folks. This is the key. I think it will help everybody — there’s something fundamental you must understand about progressives. If you hope to understand them, and Meryl Streep illustrates it here.
Last night in Beverly Hills at the Golden Globe awards she was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, and like everybody else in entertainment, there’s a thing guiding them. They make their living pretending to be other people. Which is fine. And, by the way, it’s much harder than people think.
The primary ingredient for a successful actor is one of the hardest things in the world to do. You have to be able to get outside yourself. Meaning you have to be able to strip every ounce of self-consciousness. And do you know how hard that is? Have you ever tried not to think about yourself in whatever circumstance you’re in? Most people are obsessed with themselves even when they think they’re not. They’re obsessed with how they’re sounding, how they look, what they’re thinking. You have to be able to totally eliminate all self-consciousness if you are to ever have a chance at success in the world of acting.
It’s not just mimicry. I mean, you can spot an amateur from a professional right off the bat. You can spot somebody who is doing it for the first time or is not professionally trained or hasn’t been, you can spot the self-consciousness. That’s what you see versus somebody who can actually make you believe that they are the person they’re portraying. And I feel it necessary to mention this because it all is part of the mix here.
At the end of the day these people want to be known for who they are. They want to be known for what they think. They want to be known for the seriousness that they think they bring to life. Look, psychologically there’s much more to it than that, but at the base level here they spend their lives pretending to be other people, and they are desperate to be known for who they are. And then here comes the pressure to be liberal. It’s the world in which they live. It’s the world in which they work. So they perfect the art of even acting that.
They don’t know what they’re saying. They just know it sounds great. They just know it’s gonna work and build bridges to the people important to them. She hasn’t the slightest idea, and if she does, she’s even stupider than I think. She hasn’t the slightest idea that she has just told over half the country to go to hell. She has just — and all the rest of them, too.
You know, Michael Jordan’s smart. Michael Jordan’s a big progressive Democrat, but he never leads with it because he knows Republicans buy Nike products, too. Ditto Tiger Woods. I don’t know what Tiger Woods’ politics are. I think I do, but the point is he doesn’t lead with it. But these people desperate to be known for who they are, desperate to be seen as intelligent like Martin Sheen. So they go out and do these things, and they make statements like Meryl Streep did last night at the Golden Globes.
STREEP: You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. (laughter) Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
RUSH: I actually think this should become a campaign ad every four years. The woman has just insulted everybody who watches football, which is most people in America. It’s the number one watched show in America, and MMA, it’s got its own audience. She may as well throw NASCAR in there because she’s talking about you people, too. She may as well throw in people that go to church on Sunday in a pickup truck with a gun rack on the back because she’s talking about you, too.
She may as well use the word “deplorables” because Hillary Clinton meant all of you, too, and that’s who she had in mind, and it’s the same thing here with Meryl Streep. But the stupidity of this is, you’ve heard the old saw that Trump’s critics take him literally but not seriously and Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally. Meryl Streep, I don’t think that this is an act. I think she really stupidly believes that Donald Trump wants to get rid of everybody who is not a white Christian in this country.
I think she really believes it. Because she knows people who’ve told her that that’s correct, when Trump says whatever he says and then she goes and reads the media that bashes Trump and mischaracterizes it, she believes it, so she really believes that Trump wants to shut down Hollywood, that Trump wants to get rid of anybody foreign and anyplace crawling with outsiders. Donald Trump has never said anything of the sort, and yet she believes it. How can this be? How can somebody who appears to be relatively intelligent be so ignorant? How can somebody be so stupid, so humorously ridiculously stupid as to believe that Hollywood and people there run the risk of being thrown out of the country?
Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. Hollywood crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out. When has Trump ever — do you not know the meaning of the word “illegal,” Mrs. Gummer? That’s here actual married name. Her name is Meryl Gummer. Did you know that? Yeah, her husband’s name is Gummer. Streep, I don’t know if it’s a stage name or a maiden name. Doesn’t matter. That’s her name. Meryl Gummer. Her daughters are all Gummer, they’re all actresses. There’s Mamie Gummer. I forget the other two.
But how can somebody be this dumb? How can somebody be this stupid to believe, based on anything Trump has said, that this is the reality people in Hollywood face. But she’s not the only one. It is astounding what Millennials believe. And why do they believe it? Because they believe the media. Because they believe the New York Times, because they believe people like Paul Krugman. They believe idiots in the media who mischaracterize this stuff and fear monger.
I mean, it is astounding because people like Meryl Streep and others have not been educated to think critically. They are nothing but sponges. They’ve never been taught to think. They are arrogant and condescending and think that what they know is accurate and there is nothing else, and so whatever comes in gets processed. Trump is X, Y, and Z and so whatever he says gotta equal X, Y, and Z and that is racist, sexist, bigot homophobe, what have you. But it defies common sense. And Trump’s never said it and Trump has no desire. He’s not of that mind-set.
Trump is not exclusionary. Trump happens to love America and wants to protect America and wants to do whatever he can to see to it that people that want to harm America are not admitted or are punished if found. Nothing in the world wrong with that. That becomes Trump wants to round everybody up and deport ’em and send ’em home. It’s astounding to me. There’s no common sense even here. If she believes that, has she ever taken a moment to ask herself, “Wait a minute. Is this really what Donald Trump wants to do? Get rid of every foreigner, close down all media, close down Hollywood,” because if she doesn’t believe it, what in the world is she doing saying this stuff? There’s one more sound bite from Ms. Streep.
STREEP: There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart, not because it was good. There’s nothing good about it, but it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
RUSH: Wait a minute. It’d be okay if it was in a movie? If it was in a movie it’d be okay for somebody to mock somebody disabled because it’s just a movie, just make believe, and somebody’s trying to make a point? The thing is, it’s not what he did! And he himself has said for the 100th time — I don’t know if we got a sound bite of Trump responding. It is here somewhere but I can’t find it, but Trump has said a hundred times it’s not what — You know, I have experience with this. Michael J. Fox.
I’m sitting here doing the program, and it’s during a presidential campaign or some Senate campaign year. It might have been 2000. I don’t know if it was midterms or 2000. It had to be midterms. It wasn’t 2012, was it? It could be five years ago. Anyway, Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease, and I’m watching these monitors here during the show, during the program. I got a Dittocam here. I’ve got people watching this program.
Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease, and he used that in a commercial for Claire McCaskill running for the Senate in Missouri. And Michael J. Fox in that ad… I think it was against Jim Talent. I think the Republican was James Talent, and I think the ad had all kinds of defamatory comments about Talent, things he was gonna do to people. And I described the commercial as I saw it so that people could see it the way I did and be able to visualize it the way I did, and that became “mocking people who have Parkinson’s disease.”
Now, not a single person who knows me would ever believe I would make fun of anybody in that regard, and I wasn’t making fun. I wasn’t being critical of the entire concept of that spot. That spot… I don’t care whoever it is: If they have a disease, if they have something about them, if they enter the political process, then… (interruption) That was the point. They used Michael J. Fox try to make him untouchable because of his Parkinson’s disease, and anybody who criticized Michael J. Fox was gonna really get it — and I did.
But I was not making fun of anything or mocking anything, and yet to this day it is a popular Twitter meme that that’s what I did. And they’re doing the same thing on Trump. I saw what Trump did with the reporter. And Trump was not mocking the guy’s disability or any of this. It’s not who Trump is. But it doesn’t matter. Meryl Streep, without even questioning it, believes it, and is almost was reduced to tears over it. And, I’m sorry, I just… I think these people oversell all of this sensitivity. But here’s what you have to understand about progressives and the left.
They don’t believe reality is reality.
Is this fundamental. This is very key. If you want to understand why a Meryl Streep can think what she thinks and say what she says, or any of these other people — I don’t care if they’re actors, if they’re extreme left-wing commentators, if they’re just marchers on the street or what have you. Liberals believe that what you and I call “reality” is actually phony. They call it “a social construct,” meaning we in the majority have created this thing that we call reality, and its purpose is to define other people and to deny them access, equality, fairness, or what have you.
To them, reality is just as phony as anything else, because they believe that a majority has created this thing called reality so they can exclude others and so they can be an oppressive majority over him people. They think that reality is something mandated by a majority for their advantage. Take marriage. Their belief is that marriage is something created by a majority of people to deny freedom and equality to other people. They believe that little girls liking to play with Barbie when they’re growing, that’s not reality.
That is a “construct” that we in the majority have created in order to segregate and exclude others from our reality. Well, if you… I’m the mayor of Realville. I am. I swim in it. I am the champion of the literate, the literal, and reality. They think it’s phony. They think it’s something that we make up to deny them access to whatever it is that we call real, to whatever we call normal, to whatever — and by “we,” they make it “us versus them.” And so they think that since reality is phony, a social construct, that they can change it — and this is where they fall apart. They think they can change reality!
Look at outcome-based education: 2 + 2 = 5 until the kid figures out that it’s 4. So if you are of a mind that there is no reality, that it is the creation of your political enemies… Take whatever… Put in “reality” whatever you think. They don’t believe it’s real. They think we or somebody, some majority, created a set of circumstances that we call real and reality to exclude them. They then set about trying to change reality, and that’s what liberalism is.
Liberalism is the inability to accept what is for what it is, in the misguided belief that it isn’t real, that it’s the creation of an evil majority — and they set about trying to change it. This is why they’re never gonna be happy, because you can’t escape the real! You cannot escape reality, and you can’t change it. Gravity is real; you can’t change it. Take this out as far as it goes, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I gotta take a break here. I wish I didn’t, but I have to.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s squeeze a quick phone call in here. Amy in Colorado Springs. It’s great to hear from you. How you doing?
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I’m great. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: A great honor to talk to you. I’m a Rush Baby. You’re a great conservative mind in our times, so I want to thank you.
RUSH: Thank you. Not just conservative. I mean, just one of the great minds. That’s it.
CALLER: My comment was on Ms. Streep’s comments and the selective moral outrage these people have. She mentioned, you know, President-Elect Trump making fun of a disabled person, and yet there was not one mention of that poor young man in Chicago who was beaten by four people who was mentally disabled, in the soon to be ex-president’s hometown, no less. So, you know, where was the outrage about that? Why doesn’t she say something about that?
RUSH: She probably doesn’t know about it, Amy. I doubt that she knows it happened. Because the mainstream media has white-washed the whole thing. I’ve read the AP. I’ve read the Washington Post. I have seen some news. They’re whitewashing the whole thing. She doesn’t have any idea what it is. If she relies on traditional news source, she doesn’t have any idea — and even if she did know, Amy, the people in that story do not threaten her, because they have no power. We’re dealing with hypocrites. But the thing that… You know, this is what I mean by people not being critical thinkers.
If somebody were to tell Meryl Streep last night after she goes off on Trump for mocking somebody and wanting to throw all these horrible… If somebody said, “Well, what about Mrs. Clinton and the way she described…? What’s your reaction?” “W-w-w-what did Hillary say?” “Well, Hillary called Trump supporters ‘deplorable.'” “Oh, I think she’s exactly right! She’s exactly riiiight.” “Well, you don’t think that’s insulting them?” “Oh, no, no! She’s exactly right. I think she’s exactly right,” and these people Chicago? “That’s a terrible, terrible problem. But, you know, it’s brought about by the police focusing on African-Americans. What would you expect them to do? It’s terrible, terrible what the police are doing.”
These are mind-numbed idiots that you’re trying to assign intelligence to.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So I checked the email. “You can’t just say that Trump wasn’t making fun of the guy and leave it at that. How do you know?” Look, folks, I’m very patient with these kinds of things. I understand that most people in this audience trust me and don’t doubt me, and some of you people new out there and you’re just getting up to speed. There are certain things here that are just common sense, that people with acculturated mannerisms, good manners, just don’t do.
One of the things that the left has done over the course of many years is to stigmatize and to quasi-criminalize, again, what is for many people normal behavior, and it’s all part of the effort by the left to suppress, to sensor, to victimize, to stigmatize people. The left — I’ve gotten blue in the face trying to explain liberals to people. They do everything they can — everybody who is not one of them is an enemy that must be mocked, destroyed, humiliated, whatever. And they are permitted to do anything of the sort that they want.
They’ve tried to sterilize conversation, sterilize behavior, such as on college campus at every step of romance a man must get consent from a woman. First kiss, next kiss, article of clothing might — gotta get consent for every step of the way or else there may be a crime involved. And even when there isn’t a crime involved, you can count on the liberal publication to write that there was, like phony rape stories at the University of Virginia.
What Donald Trump — he has a mannerism. People try to be funny. Some people are naturally funny. Some people aren’t. But everybody tries to be expressive when they’re telling stories or when they’re reacting to things. The left has seen fit to try to stigmatize certain people and call ’em insensitive and mean-spirited and extremist and accuse them of mocking the disabled or making fun of the disadvantaged or what have you, when nine times out of 10 that’s not what’s happening at all. They put everybody on defensive.
What Trump did, he has this behavioral tic that when he is describing something that happened or when he is describing somebody sometimes he throws his arms up and gets a weird look on his face as an expression to try to amplify or illustrate or otherwise enrich the story that he’s telling. He has used this same kind of expression to make fun of himself and people that are not handicapped.
He employed the same flailing his arms — I’m doing it right now — you watch what happens now. Here I am on the Dittocam doing this, and the wrong host on MSNBC could get this and say that I’m talking about some disabled person when I’m doing the same thing Trump did right now. He’s describing a reporter, and he was describing the reporter being all atwitter at some answer Trump had given him. He wasn’t mocking the guy’s disability. I don’t even know if Trump knew the reporter was disabled.
He has this technique, this mechanism, he even uses it against himself, this flailing arms, waving around, and a screwball expression on his face. He did that making fun of himself during an interview with Larry King in 2005, same thing when he imitated a bank president in October of 2015, and he mocked an Army general the same November speech in which he made the original comment about the journalist.
The thing about this, the left knows all this. The left knows everything I’m telling you. They make this stuff up. They seize what they think is an example and an opportunity and they focus on it and the rest of the media chimes in, and before you know it there’s a narrative out there that Trump is insensitive and making fun of the disabled, when he doesn’t. Most people with good manners do not! But because the left thinks they can construct reality, they think they can change reality.
If you understand that that’s what they’re about, then much of what they do is not gonna be acceptable, but it’ll be a little bit more understandable as you watch their machinations as they go through the steps of trying to accomplish whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. These are oddball people and they have some of the worst characteristics of human nature you can imagine. They think they’re the smartest people in the world when in fact they may be the stupidest and they combine that with an arrogant condescension to everybody else.
Here’s somebody else that wants to weigh in on Meryl Streep. This is Terry in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Great to have on you the program. How you doing?
CALLER: I’m great, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine and dandy. Thank you.
CALLER: You know, I have to say, I was watching the Golden Globes just purely for entertainment value last night because there is nothing usually on Sunday nights that I like to watch. Get to Meryl Streep, beautiful send-in for her from Viola Davis. She gets up there and she had to open her mouth. These people are entertainers. What makes them think that we want to know their political views?
RUSH: It’s a good question. There’s another part of the question, too. It’s not what makes them think that we want to know. What makes them think they are effective? Because they ought to have learned after the last 12 or 15 months that they’re not effective. Every effort of theirs that they have made to denigrate Trump didn’t work.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Everything they did to try to help Hillary didn’t work. I mean, they’ve done some really embarrassing things. When I was gone there was this video of these five or six actors, only two of whom are known, urging somebody to do something about Trump, they’re flailing away, but they’re living in this fantasy world —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — where everybody hinges on their very word.
CALLER: Yeah. I don’t get it. Hugh Laurie and Meryl Streep, I used to watch House, I’ve never seen The Night Manager. Meryl Streep, I’ve only seen a few of her movies. George Clooney, not even relevant, don’t care.
RUSH: Well, let me try to help you understand this. Again, it’s a function of, in many cases, the media. Let’s just take a name here, since Meryl Streep’s out there, let’s take Meryl Streep. If you’re Meryl Streep, do you realize there is never, ever even an ounce of negativity written or spoken of you? If you’re Meryl Streep, what do you know? You’re in a movie, it makes millions of dollars, and the producers are all after you to be in their movie, and you’re hot stuff. You are huge, in your own mind.
And then you turn on the entertainment media, and the entertainment media fawn all over you. And liberal Democrat politicians want you in their company, so they invite you to the Kennedy Center, and they give you awards there, and then they invite you for all-night parties at the White House. And they come out to Hollywood to fleece you and your friends of money. You show up and gladly write the check in exchange for them making you think that they really dig you. In other words, your whole life is adulation.
Everybody wants to be Meryl Streep. Everybody wants to know what it’s like to walk the red carpet. Everybody wants to know what it’s like to have people say, “Greatest actress to have ever lived.” Now, if that’s your life, and you have no sense of perspective, in other words, if you believe all of this that you read about yourself, and if in your own business your peers also think you are the Second Coming, what are you gonna believe?
You are gonna believe you are the Second Coming and you’re gonna believe everybody else thinks you are. And so when you go out and do a video or make a speech at the Golden Globes you’re going to think that the vast majority of people are gonna hear what you say and not only agree with you, they’re gonna applaud, and then they’re gonna turn on Trump. Yep. This is the world in which they live.
But you ask, “Why do they put so much emphasis on politics?” It’s because — not to get to simplistic here — they spend their lives pretending to be other people, and they want everybody to know how serious they are, and they want everybody know how smart they are, and they want everybody to know how in touch they are. So politics happens to be, in their minds, the most direct route to add to the resume. Great actress, great this, great whatever, very brilliant and wise and smart to boot, because their lives are spent pretending to be other people.
I’m not deriding that; that is the job. They excel as being people they’re not. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. Other than the naturally sick who are able to do this as a matter of deceit. But the professionals, it’s extremely hard. And after a while, you don’t want to be known for the farm wife you played, and you don’t want to be known for the hooker that you played in the World War II movie. You want to be known as a friend of Hillary Clinton. You want to be known as somebody in the inner circle of Barack Obama.
And so you take the stage where you think everybody’s watching, and you tell all those Nimrods watching — these people that pay to watch your movies, these people that make it possible for you to be you. You think of them watching, and you think about a bunch of idiots they are and now they need to be preached to and now they need to be told what’s what and how they need to have the truth explained to ’em ’cause they’ve been fooled by this ragamuffin guy like Trump. From that standpoint, you can understand it.
What amazes me is how out of touch they really are. As I say, for a year it’s not been hard to figure out they’re on the losing side. It’s been abundantly clear for a year that everything they’ve tried to destroy Trump and to save Hillary blew up in their faces, bombed out royally. They are being rejected by their public in ways they can’t understand and don’t believe, is what’s happening. But they don’t see it.
They’re not capable of seeing it. Because at no point in their lives, other than maybe when they’re just starting out… For somebody like Streep, I mean, every waking hour of every day is nothing but pure adulation, adoration, praise. Groupies here, groupies there, hangers-on there. I mean, you walk around thinking you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread because that’s how everybody treats you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Mr. Snerdley sends me a note here. He says, “Okay, your peers give you an award for your lifetime of work,” which is what the Cecil B. DeMille Award is. It’s an award for your lifetime contributions to movies and the arts and all that circle-jerk stuff. “Isn’t it insulting to put the focus…?” Here you are receiving an award, a lifetime award for your work in the arts. “Isn’t a little insulting to take the time you would usually spend thanking your peers to ignore that and delve into politics instead of showing gratitude to people for honoring your work?”
You see, that’s the kind of question that a person of decency and good manners would ask. And it’s also the kind of behavior that a person with decency and good manners would engage in. Who are these people, Mr. Snerdley? They’re liberals. As such, what are they? They’re political. Everything! They have politicized everything. They’re never happy. Here she is given a lifetime achievement award, and she’s mad. What’s on her mind? What is obviously on her mind last night? Not that she has been given maybe the highest award this group doles out.
No, no, no!
She’s mad, and she’s gotta tell everybody about it, and she’s gotta dump on Trump, and she’s gonna say, “Well, we’re not safe! Trump’s gonna throw us all out, and there’s gonna be nothing left but football and MMA!” It’s highly ungracious. There is no gratitude. But I will guarantee you the people that gave her the award are applauding her, ’cause they think the same thing. And they’re probably happy that she did it, and they don’t feel disrespected at all, ’cause they’re all the same bunch of people. I’m sure she’s getting accolades from the people that gave her the award and other people in the audience out there and the whole — well, not all of it, but the vast majority of the Hollywood community. No doubt in my mind.
Who’s next? Mark in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. Hey, kind of answered my question there. I was wondering in Meryl Streep basically got that award because they knew she’d give a political speech. But because of what you said, I have to ask my the second question, and I hope Mr. Snerdley doesn’t get mad at me. But do you think President Obama has turned the Medal of Freedom award into the participation medal for liberals, after that last batch of ones he gave out?
RUSH: (chuckles) The Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award, right, that you can get. And he did pass that out to a bunch of Meryl Streep types. You look at the last recipients; they’re all Hollywood or entertainer types. And you’re asking yourself, “Well, what are the great contributions here?” See, the world they live in, folks, I must redirect you back to what is a profundity, and that is my point about reality and the fact they don’t believe it. Reality, to them, is something their enemies have created to exclude them.
So they start out enraged and angry and feeling discriminated against because they don’t fit in whatever reality is. So since they don’t fit, it can’t be real. So they set about trying to change it. Challenging it, changing it because it’s something their enemies, political enemies, have constructed to exclude them. A glaring, great example is marriage. “Heterosexual marriage,” don’t you know. The reality of that is that it has itself been a human arrangement for millennia. But to liberals it’s a social construct designed to exclude them, to deny them equality, to deny them equal access and whatever else they want to come up with. To deny them money and benefits or what have you. I think you could probably conjure up even more examples. Well, to these people in Hollywood, Trump won, and so that reality is not real.
The Russians did it or…
It’s been created to exclude them, and by golly they’re gonna…