RUSH: Requests are pouring in to replay the ad for Georgia 20. Let’s remember here that this guy, Hodgkinson, he had a diatribe against her as well. He hated her, called her a b-i-itch and any number of other things. And it’s interesting. When you look at his criticisms of Handel, it’s exactly what he’s hearing said and written by other Democrats. The guy was not original. He was a copycat. He was a plagiarist. He was clearly getting his talking points, some would say marching orders, from the people he believes, or believed, I should say, on the left.

And have you seen all of these stories out there talking about how unremarkable the guy was? Exactly my point. He blends in with all the other nutcases on the left and you can’t even spot him. That means they’re all — I mean, way, way, way too many of them may be similarly disposed as this guy. I’ve worried a long time and I have really believed that the left is in the process, Democrats and the media are in the process of turning their base voters into enraged — I overuse the word “lunatics,” but I think they’re mad.

I think they’re living on the edges of psychological health. I mean, how many times can you stand there and be told that Republicans want to take your health care away, want you to starve, want to kick you out of your house, want to push your grandmother over the cliff in her wheelchair. Remember, these people are not critical thinkers. They don’t have the ability to look at these kind of things and sift their way through them. They just look at this stuff and they believe it because their heroes are the ones saying it.

And so they look at Paul Ryan and they see a guy who might actually push an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff. You know, everybody wants to say, “Well, Bernie Sanders, he’s not responsible. Bernie Sanders didn’t do anything.” Bernie Sanders made hay out of this concocted association that Scalise supposedly had with the Klan. Now, this is irresponsible stuff and my problem and point with the left is that they are entirely, totally irresponsible in their criticisms and what they say.

They can’t win on ideas. They cannot enter the arena of ideas and prevail. The only hope they’ve ever had, really, is to eliminate opposition, so they don’t even face any. But they have no desire to debate ideas. They can’t. Their ideas are minority. So the tactics they have are character assassination and image destruction. And that’s what they engage in.

Anybody on the right who comes along who has credibility, who has popularity, who has an ability to be persuasive, they get the long knives out, and they seek to destroy whoever that might be, whether it’s one or 10 people. And they do it so that those people will never, ever have the ability to reach Democrat voters and persuade them or even cause them to question things because they have attacked their credibility. They’ve attacked their honor so that nothing they say is believed. Everything they say is considered suspect.

And it’s been a common ploy that they have been using for much of the time I have been doing this. It’s coming up on 30 years. And you can’t have that protracted amount of time spent destroying people and have it not create hatred and maybe even create unbalanced people.

The Democrats personalize everything, and the way they’ve gone after Republicans, the Republicans are gonna starve your kids. The Republicans are going to take your parents’ Social Security away. The Republicans are destroying your planet. The Republicans are poisoning your water and your air. The Republicans want women barefoot and pregnant in kitchens all over America, and they would prefer if women never were allowed to speak.

They say this stuff. And all of this time, the last 25 years, let’s say, some of it’s been so over the top ridiculous that we made parodies and satire out of it thinking nobody is ever gonna believe this. Little did we know that Democrat base voters were not only believing it, they were absorbing it, they were soaking it in, they were accepting all of it.

And the impact was cumulative because the Democrats kept coming up with new assaults and allegations. Why do you think the Democrats, about a month ago, began to walk back this whole notion of impeachment? They know. They know what they’ve been doing. They know that they’ve created this expectation. One of the reasons they’re so hell-bent on this collusion business is because they know their voters have been made to believe it.

Democrat base voters believe that Donald Trump worked with Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Hillary. They believe it because that’s what they’ve been told. And it’s not just a couple of times. They hear it four or five times an hour. There are hearings in Congress and at the FBI that have been convened to prove it.

If you’re an average Democrat voter and you’re loyal to these people, you don’t question it. You believe it. And everything else they’ve been saying about Trump, taking the country away, doing this or that. No wonder they’re doing plays where Trump is assassinated. The left, the media, the Democrats have scared their voters to death. They’ve made them paranoid and they’ve got them believing all of these allegations.

And it doesn’t matter how many times Comey or Adam Schiff or Dianne Feinstein say, “We don’t have any evidence of collusion. We have never seen any evidence.”
They followed that up by saying, “That just means we need to keep looking harder. We know it’s there. We just need to keep looking harder.” If you’re an average Democrat voter loyal to all this, could you be blamed for believing that the election was stolen from you by Trump and Putin and the only thing that has to happen is proof. But it’s there, because your people are telling you it’s there.

So we got all these investigations, even though we hadn’t found any proof in over a year, and even though there isn’t any proof because it didn’t happen. But try telling them that. So as nothing happens, as they are told that Trump stole the election, that Trump profited from the election, that Trump has secret bank accounts all over the world in the Cayman’s and the Cook Islands. He’s got a bunch of shell corporations that he’s getting rich off of being president, so’s Ivanka, so is Jared, so’s all of his kids.

If you’re told this every day and then you’re told that they’ve got the goods. “We’re gonna get Trump. He’s gonna be impeached. We got the independent counsel now, it’s only a matter of time.” But nothing changes, nothing happens. The only thing that happens is more criticism.

Meanwhile, Trump’s there every day, and he’s having meetings, and he’s traveling around going to the Saudi Arabia summit, meeting with NATO, and he just canceled climate change. I mean, the cumulative psychological effective on these people like Hodgkinson, don’t tell me the Democrats are not responsible for it. They have created the mind-set. They’ve created these monsters out there. And all for what purpose? Because the Democrats refuse to get in the arena of ideas and debate those.

They refuse because they can’t win. And to see how lacking those ideas are, just listen to the insane ramblings of Hodgkinson. Just look at the things that he talks about. Just look at the class warfare, the class envy, the things that he believes. It’s fringe crazy. But he believed it because that’s what he’s been told. The Democrats, therefore, can’t take that stuff in the arena of ideas. They’d be snookered.

So what they have to do is destroy the credibility, the integrity, the honesty, the reputations of every one of their opponents, and that’s what they do. That is what they’re doing now to Trump. They’re trying to destroy Trump and anybody around him as having no decency. He’s got no honor. .He’s got no integrity. He’s a thief, he stole the election. The idea that we have a heated political atmosphere and a growing divide.

And, if you want to assume the Republicans are equally as bad. No, they’re not. The Republicans are a bunch of pansies. They’re always talking about crossing the aisle and working with these people. The Republicans run around when they campaign, “I’m the guy that can cross the aisle. I’m the guy that can reach compromise. I’m the guy that can work with the Democrats. I’m the guy that can show cooperation. I’m the guy that can demonstrate Washington can work.”

The Republicans don’t do what the Democrats do. They don’t even get close to doing what the Democrats do and the media. ‘Cause the media’s actually leading it. But Bernie Sanders, if you go look at what Bernie Sanders says, if you go read what he’s written — I hate to say it this way, I could have the evidence for you here. I had it last week but I threw all that stuff away and didn’t have time to reconstruct it. This guy Hodgkinson was an echo chamber.

Whatever Bernie Sanders said was this guy’s letter to the editor. This guy went on a rant. He went into a sports bar and just started ranting and maybe everybody nervous as hell in there. He made the female bartender nervous. He came across like a sexual predator, and he was angry and deranged, just started on a rant. He wasn’t even teed up. He walked in with this giant chip on his shoulder.

The AP reports that Hodgkinson “took his car to a mechanic one day before the shooting. He wanted the mechanic to verify that his tires would make the trip back to his home in Illinois. But while he was there, he started venting his rage about President Trump.” Crist Dauberman, the mechanic, said, “This man was just so passionate and hateful toward (President Donald) Trump.”

“Among other things, Hodgkinson said Trump had screwed up the country ‘more than anyone in the history of this country.'” He said, “It was more than the average person who had maybe voted for Hillary. This was different. It was deeply rooted to where his whole tone and composure changed. His voice got loud and deep. There was so much anger in it.”

Now, listen to what Bernie Sanders was saying just a few days before Hodgkinson’s outburst at the garage, this mechanic’s place. “Today in the White House we have perhaps the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country, and we also have not to be forgotten extreme right-wing leadership in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.”

Sanders makes that speech on June the 10th. It was reported on in many Drive-By elements on June the 11th and June 12th, one day before Mr. Hodgkinson shot Scalise. The New York Times even noted that particular quote in the opening paragraph of a story immediately after the shooting. So Bernie says, “Today in the White House we have perhaps the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country.”

The day before shooting, Hodgkinson is in a mechanic’s place, and he said Trump has screwed up the country more than anyone in the history of this country, using Bernie Sanders’ exact words. So you can say all you want that Bernie Sanders is not responsible, and I understand people wanting to do that, but this guy Hodgkinson? Bernie Sanders was his writer.

And so was Elizabeth Warren, and so was Pelosi and all of these other media types and Democrats. They were writing the script for this guy. You can see it in his letters to the editor and so forth. He went to that baseball game, the practice, with a list of names, Republican lawmakers’ names. These were potential victims.

Now, the FBI and the media are saying, “We don’t really know why he had a list of names with him. We really are kind of in the dark about that. We’re not really sure.” A person told the AP on Saturday, “Investigators aren’t sure of the significance of the names. They don’t know if it was a list of people he was targeting.” Really? He shoots up a baseball practice, including Scalise, a couple of Capitol Hill cops and some other people. They find a list of other Republican names on him and they don’t know what it means?

So here’s the ad that is running in Georgia, a pro-Handel TV ad paid for by the principled leadership PAC. It’s called Stop the Violent Left.

ANNOUNCER: Now the unhinged left is endorsing and applauding shooting Republicans. When will it stop? It won’t if Jon Ossoff wins on Tuesday because the same unhinged leftists cheering last week’s shooting are all backing Jon Ossoff. And if he wins, they win. Stop them. Stop them now. Stop Jon Ossoff. Stop Nancy Pelosi. Vote Karen Handel for Congress. Vote. Principled Leadership Project PAC paid for this AD and is solely responsible for its content

RUSH: So do you think that’s good or will it backfire? Remember, there’s already 140,000 people that voted. Early voting has set a record here in this with 140,000 early votes in one district. But, I mean: the unhinged left is enforcing and applauding shooting Republicans? When will it stop? It won’t stop if Ossoff wins on Tuesday? I mean, this is a classic ad that the left runs against Mitt Romney hating his dog and all these other awful things.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, here’s a good test case. A story from Mediaite: “In the wake of the horrific shootings at a GOP congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia that left House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in critical condition and wounded four other people, a longtime New Jersey Democratic political strategist responded by introducing the hashtags #HuntRepublicans and #HuntRepublicanCongressmen.”

James Devine is the Democrat strategist. He says “We are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people. Why is it a shock when things turn violent? #HuntRepublicanCongressmen.”

“In an interview with MyCentralNewJersey.com, Devine said, ‘If you want to invite a class war, then you have to expect people to fight back at some point.’ The Democratic strategist also wrote on Facebook that he had ‘little sympathy’ for Scalise because of his lack of support for gun control.”

I don’t care the guy got shot. He kind of had it coming. And other liberals are saying, “Yeah, well, you know, Scalise, he kind of had it coming ’cause he’s so close to the KKK,” which he is not. That’s something that the Obama administration irresponsibly peddled way too often. Josh Earnest. It was 15 or 20 years ago that Scalise had a meeting and David Duke was there. And he didn’t know Duke was gonna be there.

The news got out and there’s been this massive distortion that Scalise is simpatico with the KKK. And Obama’s administration put it out, Bernie Sanders talked about it all the time. Then Scalise gets shot, and the Democrats, “Well, I mean, if you’re gonna hobnob with the KKK you gotta understand you’re playing with fire.”

So this guy, a Democrat strategist #HuntRepublicans, #HuntRepublicanCongressmen. This guy’s been in politics for 35 years, previously worked on campaigns for a couple of nameless Democrats in New Jersey here.

“Devine doubled-down on his lunacy late Thursday afternoon tweeting, ‘I am sorry if my #HuntRepublicanCongressmen hashtag hurt the feelings of any GOP snowflakes but you have not egaged [sic] in civil discourse.'”

#HuntRepublicans! What does that mean? Okay, now, so let’s say some equally imbalanced left-wing loyalist like this lunatic Hodgkinson sees this and goes out and starts shooting Republicans? Are we gonna hold this guy responsible? He’s actually encouraged people to go hunt Republican congressmen. What does that mean? It’s all hypothetical. Could this guy be charged like Michelle Carter was for encouraging this 17 year-year-old to go out there and kill himself?