RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day. Kristy in Ft. Lauderdale. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, this is the biggest honor of my life.
RUSH: Aren’t you sweet.
CALLER: Ach! Well, I’m on a road trip with my family, my father and mother and my nine- and 10-year-old, and I’m afraid all of them are gonna try to grab the phone from me because the girls love Rush Revere so much —
RUSH: Oh! (laughing)
CALLER: — and my parents are such proud supporters of yours, and we all just love you.
RUSH: Where you headed?
CALLER: We’re headed to Ponte Vedra, between Jacksonville and St. Augustine.
RUSH: Oh, yes, yes, yes. They just had the Players Championship up there. Exactly right.
CALLER: Yes, they did. The reason I’m calling in is I happened to hear President Trump’s speech to the Coast Guard, his commencement speech, and something he said stopped me in my tracks. He said to these graduates, “You have the greatest gift, because upon graduating, you know exactly what you’re doing with your life, and you have a job, and it’s a public service. You’re protecting the United States of America.” I get choked up even thinking about what he said, and I think of these Millennials and these other commencement speeches I’ve seen clips of where they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
“Socialism is the greatest thing on earth!” and they have no focus, and God rest his soul, your dear friend said something you played back about an hour ago. Libs, they don’t know where they came from and they don’t know where they’re going. And he summed up perfectly, I think, what I was trying to point out to you today. And the gentleman who called before who said he wished that Trump would come out with some sort of address to the nation, I think he achieved that during his speech. Do you, Rush?
RUSH: Well, yeah, except that you don’t know how many people heard it. It was a daytime speech. Fox, I think, carried a lot of it; CNN excerpts. None of it appeared in prime time, so you’d have to see it somewhere on social media, which, by the way, I am evolving a theory on social media I’ll share with you at some point. It’s not relevant now.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: The bottom line is, I don’t think that it is widespread and powerful as everybody thinks. I think we’re being kind of scammed by it, in a way, simply by virtue of my own experiences with it. I don’t know how many real people are in social media versus how many bots —
CALLER: Hmm!
RUSH: — how many things circulating there are actually created by robots and not real people. And I think all this is being run and sponsored by leftist organizations from Google, to Facebook, to retired college professors, and whatever, and it’s also being used to dispirit people like you. No matter where you go on social media, you’re outnumbered, right?
CALLER: I don’t even go on it anymore because of that.
RUSH: Exactly. And I’m telling you, I think a lot of it — don’t know what percentage — is fake, phony, made up, and doesn’t actually represent the opinions of real human beings. I think a lot of it’s botnets.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: But, anyway, that’s where this speech would have to be seen.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I agree with you that it was a great speech and inspiring and so forth, no question about it.
CALLER: I have to say, my two little girls’ names or their going to never forgive me. Madden and Ryan. They love your books so much. We read them every night and they were gifts from my mom and dad. And you are such an inspiration to me. I’m in my forties, and hopefully this generation that I’m raising two little Americans, proud Americans, will help pave the way.
RUSH: How old are they?
CALLER: Nine and 10.
RUSH: Nine and 10. I mean, right there, right in the crosshairs of the demo that we’re seeking.
CALLER: I know. I know, and it’s a scary time for them. I worry about their future in this country. But thank God your voice is so strong and so loud.
RUSH: When are you gonna be back home? When are you gonna be back home?
CALLER: On Sunday.
RUSH: Sunday. Is home Ft. Lauderdale or somewhere else?
CALLER: Ft. Lauderdale, yes. (chuckling)
RUSH: (chuckling) Well, I tell you what. You hang on, because we’ve got a whole little package of goodies that we send to young people who love the characters in Rush Revere, the Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans, including Liberty dolls — they’re really cool things — and a whole bunch of stuff. Have they read all the books?
CALLER: Yes, they have. My father’s made sure of that.
RUSH: Okay, cool. Well, we might send some audio versions so they can relive them in another way. So don’t hang up so we can get your address in Ft. Lauderdale, so we have the stuff there after you get back home from wherever your road trip’s taking you beyond Ponte Vedra. But I thank you very much, Kristy, very much.
You know, I mentioned this yesterday and I didn’t have time to do it, and I might try to make time today, either today or tomorrow. It’s the thing about Penelope Trunk, the commencement speech that she gives, as opposed to the garbage that college graduates today hear. The reason this appeals at me is because it’s right up my alley. You know, I used to do a commencement speech every year here on the radio, and its focus was to take every premise of your standard, boilerplate, cliched commencement address…
Such as, “You are the future of our country! The weight of the world is on your shoulders. The world is waiting for you to make your mark,” ’cause none of that’s true. The world is not waiting for you, the weight of the world is not yet on your shoulders, and you haven’t done anything to distinguish yourself yet. You have no idea… Especially graduates today have no idea what they’re entering. They have no I because they are not being prepared for it at all. They think… Because they’ve been in college where everything is devoted to — in a socialistic ritual — equality and fairness and sustainability, they think the world is this.
Or if it isn’t, that they are Social Justice Warriors who can fix it simply by showing up and demanding it. They haven’t the slightest idea of the world they are soon to enter, and this piece by Penelope Trunk is intriguing in that regard. So I’ll take a look at all the stuff I have here and make editorial decisions in terms of the importance of various items and decide whether to get to them. I’ve got a piece here at Salon.com that is literally hilarious, but to them it’s scary. They’re scared to death writing this. It’s about a new conservative fundraising group (Gasp!) and the threat being supposed by another conservative fundraising group.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m now told that Penelope Trunk does not do commencement speeches. This stuff is just on her blog. So if you’re looking for speeches in searches, it’s not speeches; it’s blog posts. At any rate.