RUSH: Now, I want to correct something I said toward the end of the previous hour. I said that Trump is the first president… I actually quoted Roger Kimball at PJ Media saying that Trump with this speech in Poland today, stands a good chance of going down in history as one of America’s great presidents. And he makes the point that what Trump said today, in the specific way Trump said it, is the first time it’s been said by an American president since Ronald Reagan. Now, I think that needs a little qualification, because George W. Bush was profoundly strong in the idea that America represents the solution to the world’s problem as opposed to the popular belief around the world (in worldwide leftist circles) that America is the problem.
They were fleeing what every immigrant flees: bondage, tyranny, repression, poverty, and all those other things associated. What they wanted to become was Americans. Part and parcel of that was freedom, of course, economic liberty. They wanted to become Americans. They did not want to come to America and turn America into the nation they left. Because what was happening in America was unique. There was no other place in the world like it, and they wanted to be part of it, and they lined up and they came in droves.
They tried to get here in all manner of ways, mostly legal. Not all of them were granted entry, and not all of them ended up becoming citizens. But to this day that influx and that desire remains. What has changed is the dissolution, the weakening of the distinct American culture that was the magnet for so many immigrants in the past. That distinct American culture has been under assault. I really trace it back. You know, it’s been under assault since the founding. I mean, there have been people that oppose the founding of this country back in the founding days.
But I really do think that the focus of the anti-Americanism that we are dealing with today gave birth or was birthed in the sixties. Now, I know we had communists throughout the twentieth century, and we had (sigh) communist infiltration of our institutions, like universities and schools and entertainment. But the sixties is where it coalesced. It’s where it codified and became an official movement which captured generations of people, not just a few stragglers here and there that would then someday be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
So it’s really from the sixties onward that this current onslaught against this highly developed American culture has been waged. And it’s been successful. And I’ve always claimed from the early days of this program that at its roots — you know, aside from the overthrow of the concept of America, aside from the socialist or communist desires and the ideology behind the protest movement of the sixties. The cultural aspect contained a fervent need and desire, and that was to redefine what was normal — and I’ve been making this claim since this program began.
When people would call here and ask me to explain this particular movement in the left or that, I would say, “What you’re seeing is a bunch of people seeking to have normalcy or normality redefined so that it includes them.” It was a very strategic movement because it portrayed the American cultural as racist, as bigoted, as homophobic, as discriminatory, and all of this was practiced and studied. This was a calculated assault on American culture by taking what was the vast majority of the thinking and the philosophy and the belief system of our culture and assaulting it.
We must have “inclusiveness,” and all these other buzzword terms that are bandied about. “Diversity.” They are the hallmarks. “Sustainability.” They are the hallmarks, and all of these thoughts, these philosophies are actually aimed at destroying what was the most inclusive country on the face of the earth, what was the most open and free country on the face of the earth. But intensely since the sixties, the entire notion of the United States of America has been under fevered assault. Well, I was glad to see today when I was doing my show prep… I ran into this column by Roger Kimball at PJ Media in which he echoes the idea that one of the things happening today to tear down this country is this quest to redefine what he calls “normality.”
I call it normalcy. But here’s what he says about it. “But whatever happened to normality? The Left has been on a campaign to ruin normality since the 1960s. Their dearest wish was to destroy and hollow out and ridicule the bourgeois virtues of good manners and decorum — even to utter those words sounds odd –” and today sound odd. Good manners is laughed at and made fun of. Decorum? That’s for nerds and the old fashioned. That’s for old fogies. Even to utter the words good manners and decorum sounds odd.
“– so successful has their battle against the language of traditional manners and morals been.” That’s a fundamental aspect of this too. When you are trying to redefine normalcy so that it includes you — who are these people? Anybody that didn’t like to be judged, therefore they didn’t like to be subject to laws. They didn’t like to be subjected to religious beliefs. They didn’t like to be subjected to morality, because all of those areas contained — there must be judgments. And they didn’t want to be judged.
They didn’t want to be found wanting. They didn’t want to be found odd. They didn’t want to be found abnormal. And so they began to portray the virtues of decorum and manners and morals and religion as discriminatory, as bigoted, as exclusionary. And they began to attack the very glue that held together this distinct American culture with the idea of blowing it up.
“Progressives long ago declared war on the normal,” which, again, I have been pointing out since the late eighties. Now progressives “are upset because someone they dislike –” Donald Trump “– has appeared wielding real power in ways they find abnormal?” And this is the great irony. They think Trump is now exactly what we thought of them: oddballs, vulgar, crass, unappreciative, insincere, arrogant, bombastic, all these things that we thought of them and they loved it, now that’s what they think of Trump.
“That list could be very easily extended. The irony, Marcus notes, is suffocating. The Left stood by and applauded as Barack Obama rode roughshod over the Constitution, refusing to enforce laws of which he disapproved, granting waivers to groups he favored, employing the coercive power of the state to reward his friends and punish his enemies. All that was just fine. But suddenly, on January 20, the left rediscovered the Constitution, limits to executive authority, and the value of due process and precedent. It would be merely comical if it were not so patently cynical.
“Just so, the Left spent the last few decades trashing traditional American values. A decent, gentlemanly figure like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush simply earned their contempt. But Trump is different. He is just as indifferent to traditional niceties as they are. Hence their hysteria. And their fear. George W. Bush would seldom respond to Left-wing provocations, never in kind.
“Trump does, regularly, and he pays them back in their own coin, almost. I say ‘almost’ in tribute to Trump’s cleverness. Gertrude Stein once advised the aspiring avant-garde artist to demonstrate that he knew just how far to go in going too far. This Trump has done. The people who hate him prance about with a likeness of his bloody severed head: he merely Tweets about Mika’s oozing wounds following cosmetic surgery.
“Anti-Trumpers destroy property, bash people over the head with metal bicycle locks, and attempt to assassinate the congressional leadership. Trump releases a campy wrestling video making fun of CNN. His followers love it.” His detractors hate it and think he is a big vulgarian.
There now is an LGBT activist writer for The Sporting News who is now demanding that Major League Baseball end its toxic masculinity. This is not The Sporting News that you and I grew up with. An attack on the toxic masculinity of baseball.
The piece also features plaudits for baseball for now doing LGBT night at the ballpark, but then they criticize Major League Baseball teams for having Christian night at the ballpark. That should be banned, Christian night, white night, whatever at the ballpark should be banned. That should not be allowed to happen.
The masculinity that exists in American sports needs to be stopped and stamped out. It’s leading to rape. It’s absurd. And these publications are now being run by people who think this way and hire people who think this way, who then continue this never ending assault on what used to be the bedrocks of what we call the American culture.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I got an interesting couple of emails during the break, and it was some people who disagree with me in my little monologue there about normalcy. One of the points I was making to go back to the beginning of the show, was on what I consider the modern onslaught against normalcy, which was pegged to the 1960s.
I was pointing out that the people leading the charge did not think they fit within the dominant American culture and so they wanted to upend it and redefine what was normal so that they would be considered normal. In their own minds, they were not, and rather than adapt, they got offended and angry and tried to blow up the foundations of that culture so that “normal” would be transferred to them. So people disagreeing with me about this said, “Who are you to say that the American culture from the founding was great?
“Who are you to say that was the best? Who are you to say that, because it was exclusionary! It told certain people they couldn’t do this and that.” The American culture didn’t do that. Western civilization did that from the beginning of time. But here’s the thing. If you disagree, let me just give you a little test. Have you seen the story about the orgy — the gay orgy — at the Vatican? (interruption) “OMG” is right.
You think something like this would have happened with Pope John Paul II? Well, it didn’t. You don’t have to ask could it or would it, because it didn’t. It happened under Pope Francis. But let me get the specifics here, because some of the actual details of this are… (Ooh, and here is this Mark Penn piece. Yeah, I’ve gotta remember to get to that as I go through.) Here it is: “Drug-Fueled Gay Orgy at the Vatican.” But not just anywhere at the Vatican.
It was that location that was specifically targeted for this drug-fueled gay orgy, as it’s reported. “Reports in Italy claim the occupant of the apartment is allegedly the secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, a key aide to the 80-year-old Pope. Coccopalmerio heads the Pontifical Council for Legislative texts and was said to have once recommended his secretary for a promotion to bishop,” the secretary who led the orgy.
“The claims about the police raid last month were made in the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. The flat involved is a short distance from the Vatican itself. According to the paper, neighbours became suspicious before complaining about irregular behaviour of those coming and going at the flat.”
See, we’re not allowed to say that. Who are you to say what is irregular? Who are you to say, Italian newspaper, that a drug-fueled gay orgy is irregular behavior? Who are you? You can’t say that. And that’s what we have been experiencing in America. You go out and you call things like this irregular or abnormal behavior, and they are going to come for you. So this Italian newspaper, I’m sure, is going to be targeted. How dare they be judgmental and call a drug-fueled gay orgy irregular behavior.
And I had some emails during the break accusing me of similar things. So there are questions — (interruption) Straighten what out? No, when I made the point that there was a normalcy and that people who think they didn’t fit tried to overthrow it and reconstitute it, our culture, so that they would be considered normal. I’ve often thought the counterculture and the anti-Western civ people have simply been on a quest to have themselves considered normal, because they’ve always thought that they were looked at as abnormal or irregular.
And here it is, in this Italian newspaper story, a drug-fueled gay orgy in the Vatican is considered irregular behavior, but not to them. “Who are you to say?” their reaction is. No. All I said was that the objective here, in overthrowing the dominant American culture, the objective has been to redefine people as normal because they’ve been saying, “You don’t get to define us. You don’t get to say what’s normal and abnormal. You don’t get to define right and wrong. You don’t get to define morality. Who are you? You don’t get sit in judgment.”
And that’s where religion and faith and morality come in. And they have to be destroyed, too, so that there are no standards, there are no active measurements that can be made to assess what is normal and therefore just and advisable. And yet you can take a look at — well, you can just take a look at life, and you can look at paths that people take, and you can ask which one leads to happiness, contentment, economic security, and which paths don’t.
And it’s not because somebody is decreeing it; it’s because what is is. And that reality is what fueled the counterculture opposition, the refusal to accept that and have that changed. It’s been convoluted, but I have no doubt that that’s what much of this quest started as. It’s become far much more than that now.
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