RUSH: Well, well, well. I certainly hope everybody watching, if you are watching, this disgrace CNN put on last night, trying to call that a town hall: I hope if you watched that, you see what I’m talking about. I hope you saw, I hope you noted how the last thing that was about last night was the safety of children. It had nothing to do with what was going on last night.
Anyway, greetings, folks. As always, great to have you with us, and thank you for joining us. Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, Rush Limbaugh here at 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
The media just cannot stop fawning over the courage and the high moral standing of the Parkland students, those who rushed the stage last night at the CNN so-called town hall and told NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch that they wished she would burn, meaning literally burn or burn in hell. It wasn’t just Parkland students in this crowd last night. I think there were about 5,000 people there. And the moderator, Jake Tapper, didn’t do very much at all to keep the thing civil and to keep it going.
Dana Loesch and Marco Rubio basically showed up to be thrown to the lions, is what happened last night. There was no appreciation shown. You can’t reach across the aisle to these people, folks. You cannot. It’s just not possible. They’re not there for that. Those people in that crowd last night were not there for any kind of understanding. They were not there for any kind of agreement. They were not there to cross the aisle, compromise, any of that.
They weren’t there to learn anything, and they weren’t there to get to the bottom of what happened. They weren’t there to protect the lives of children. That’s not what this thing was about last night. This thing was a vehicle for frustrated leftists to once again vent their hatred and vent their outrage over the fact that they were rejected at the ballot box in November of 2016. If you were one of them, you’d be mad too. Everything they believe in bombs, blows up, and doesn’t work, from Obama administration policies to ways they want to make children safer.
I mean, if you boil it all down, the government cannot protect your kids at school. It’s the government in charge of it. It’s either a state government, elements of the national government, certainly elements of local government, they can’t keep your kids safe. There have been no changes in techniques, stratagems to keep kids safe since Columbine. There is no changes. All there has ever been is an outraged, petulant, childish cry and demand and a spewing of hatred for the NRA.
Meanwhile, actually stopping these events, discussing ways to prevent and stop these events is met with jeering and allegations of racism and bigotry, the usual insults that the left begins to shout. They are vacant intellectually. They are vacant in terms of ideas. And they are governed entirely by a continuing and building rage and hatred for anything that is in opposition to what they claim to believe.
It was reported, was it not, early on that this perp, Nikolas Cruz, was bullied in this school. Is that true, Mr. Snerdley? Have you read that that’s one of the feature — (interruption) You read that he was the bully. That Nikolas Cruz was not necessarily bullied, that bullying Nikolas Cruz had nothing to do with turning him to the monster that he — that he was the bully, that he was the aggressor.
You sure you haven’t seen anywhere that he was bullied? Do that. Double-check for me. Find out. It shouldn’t be difficult to keyword search at DuckDuckGo if you don’t want your search to be tracked, or Google if you want Silicon Valley to know what you’re thinking and doing. In your search term just put Nikolas Cruz and “bullying,” see what you get, see what happens. We’ll get into this in more detail, but it was exactly what I thought this event was gonna be. It’s exactly what I predicted that it was going to be.
Look, I’m not being lazy and copping out by saying, “Hey, I told you it was gonna be that way.” That’s not the point. The point is anybody could tell what this was gonna be from the moment CNN puts their countdown clock up there. It didn’t take long for anybody to realize what was really the purpose of this so-called town hall last night. And I asked the question, what’s the point of showing up?
And I know the Republicans will say, “Rush, we have to show up. We can’t live in a vacuum. We gotta show up. We gotta reach them. We gotta reach across the aisle. We got to try to make them understand.” This is not the place to do it. An event sponsored by and moderated by CNN is not the place to do this. It’s a setup. It always will be a setup. There is never a circumstance where it is otherwise. It’s always a setup for the Republicans, slash, conservatives who were there.
So Mr. Snerdley’s search is proving fruitful. ‘Cause I thought I had seen this. Can you give me a source for what you’re typing up there? Miami Herald: Nikolas Cruz was mocked, he was ridiculed, and he was bullied. He was ostracized for his odd behavior.
Now, granted this is not reported frequently, because this guy is the villain and reporting on him as a victim of being bullied makes him a victim, obviously we can’t have that. But I just have to observe that there you have it right smack-dab in the middle of the Miami Herald, he was mocked, he was ridiculed, he was bullied, ostracized for his odd behavior. Could we say, could we throw in the mix that that might be one of the reasons why he flipped out? Could we say that?
Well, it is said about others quite frequently. They were bullied, they were mocked, they were laughed at, they were made fun of. If we say that and if we point that out, then upon whom does that fall, who did the bullying? Who was doing the mocking? Who was doing the ridiculing? And who was doing the laughing? Who was unmercifully making fun of Nikolas Cruz?
I will leave it to you to answer the question, and then fill in the blanks. Because the leftist advocates here are solely focused on the NRA and want you to blame them and the gun. I am amazed. I really am, at how little anger there is at the shooter. Look at the venom for Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch last night. Look at the literal, raw, almost out of control hatred for two people that had nothing to do with it.
Except in the eyes of the media and some of the attendees last night, they had everything to do with it because one of them’s a spokesbabe for the NRA and the other one takes money from the NRA. So in that convoluted world, it makes them responsible. In fact, not only is there no anger aimed at Nikolas Cruz, there is some sympathy! See, this is part of the way this is done. There can be only one villain here, and it has… Well, two villains: The NRA and the guns.
And then, of course, the subsets consisting of people accused of supporting the NRA and accepting money from the NRA. Why is there not much anger at the guy who actually murdered 17 students? But the level of outrage… I’ll tell you something else. At this rally last night — and that’s what it was. It was a rally. It was not a town hall. All 5,000 people there last night were not students. The entire student body at the Parkland high school was not there. Some were there. So I wonder how it was staffed — and, yes, the audience was staffed.
I wonder how it was assembled and put together. But regardless of whatever it was, it was a setup. Now, contrast that with the meeting in the White House yesterday afternoon that President Trump decided to televise in its entirety. That was something that we haven’t seen before. It was an actual… It was heralded and promoted and advertised as a listening event, and that’s exactly what the president did. He sat there and listened, and he listened to points of view from all over the place.
And even those who were enraged and angry and still upset over what happened still thanked the president for hosting the meeting, thanked the president for his leadership. That meeting in the White House yesterday had to further enrage and anger the media and the left watching it, because they wanted the people in that meeting to be universally opposed to Trump and engaged in the same kind of hatred that CNN put on last night.
They wanted to see that. They did it in the state dining room of the White House. But that is not what happened. They tell us Donald Trump is unstable. They tell us that Donald Trump is erratic, that Donald Trump is unpredictable, that Donald Trump is uncontrollable, that Donald Trump is a ticking time bomb — whatever it is they use to describe a volatile, out-of-control personality — and yet what did everybody see? We saw a calm, respectful president of the United States who genuinely seemed engaged in problem solving.
We saw an adult.
And, you know, I saw there was an interview after event. I was watching it. I think it was CNN, actually. They had some guest on there who said, “You know, we haven’t seen anything like this in the White House in 10, 15 years. We haven’t seen anything like this.” He was complimentary about it. I said, “Wait a minute. We saw this all kinds of times when Obama… I mean, Obama did these kinds of things all the time.” Except, you know, when Obama did a jobs summit, a summit on the stimulus bill — the summit here, summit there — every one of them was about Obama.
I found it interesting this guest did not that remember Obama did a bunch of these kinds of meetings in the White House. Remember the meetings Obama was famous for? I remember Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times attended the one on jobs. Obama did a jobs summit. It might have been in the state dining room as well. Obama had bunch of people. He assigned them into groups of four, and then sent each group to a corner of the room where they were to meet, come up with solutions, and then return to the center of the room at 5 p.m. to report to Obama — at which time, Obama announced the problems solved.
I got the biggest kick out of that because it was classic liberalism. Don’t solve anything. Just talk about it! Get people who are allegedly the smartest people ever in the room, have them sit there and talk about things, and announce their conclusions with Obama as headmaster accepting the recommendations at the end of the meeting at 5 p.m. Problem solved! The media talked about how it was the most wonderful thing. After every one of them, the media was practically in permanent orgasm on the days that Obama did these things.
Yet there’s a guest on CNN saying, “We haven’t seen anything like this in the White House in 10 or 15 years, maybe longer.” CNN last night was a facilitator of and a promoter of rage, anger and deranged, unhinged, barely civil behavior. There was no intention on the part of anybody in that room to listen to anybody who was not on the same page. If you watched the Trump meeting in the White House, it felt like a conversation, and every person that spoke was treated with respect and was not derided, was not mocked, was not laughed at, was not made fun of.
Many were applauded. It was real. It wasn’t scripted. It was real and it was genuine, and you could tell that the people who were there participating knew it was real. They knew that they weren’t props. None of them acted offended. None of them insulted Trump by rote. And there were a lot of Parkland students there. Not all of them are supporters of Trump, but every one of them was respectful. You didn’t see any respect at all last night on CNN.
I’m sure that hard-left viewers — socialists, communists, Democrats — were probably thrilled with what happened on CNN last night. But nothing was accomplished. Ah! I take it back. A lot was accomplished. The NRA was bashed. The career of Marco Rubio was bashed. Republicans and conservatives were bashed, were insulted, were the targets of a barely controllable rage. But in terms of having anything meaningful toward a solution, the CNN event may as well not have even happened.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Gordon in Tulsa. Great to have you. You are up first on the EIB Network. Hi, Gordon.
CALLER: Good morning. Good afternoon. I think you’re wrong about what’s behind the left and their opposition to doing anything about the shootings in the schools.
RUSH: You think I’m wrong about what’s behind the left and their opposition to doing anything about fixing shootings in the schools. Where am I wrong about this.
CALLER: I think the left is very cold-bloodedly decided to allow children to be killed in schools to help further them to their goal of gun control.
RUSH: Why are you concluding that, Gordon? What is it that makes you — I mean, that’s a pretty, pretty volatile charge. Now, Wayne LaPierre came close to what you’re saying in an appearance in the year 2000 on This Week with Sam and Cokie, where he said Bill Clinton is comfortable with a certain level of violence and killing. You’re pretty much saying the same thing. You’re saying they’re comfortable with a certain level of student death to advance their agenda.
CALLER: Yes, sir. The useful fools may not realize this. The leadership, the high level, are not stupid. They didn’t get there by being dumb. They realize that all of the laws that they keep talking about will do nothing to prevent school shootings like that. Not just schools, but the mass shootings.
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. Hold it. Gordon, that’s a great place to stop and start digging. What Gordon said was they realize — he’s talking about the Democrats. He’s talking about the left. He’s talking about the media, whoever, the NRA opponents. He’s talking about people who realize that all of the suggestions and demands they are making will do nothing to save lives that’s what he’s saying. That’s why he thinks that they are comfortable with a certain level of killing, because it gives them an ongoing issue.
Well, now, folks, stop and think. Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to this, stop and think about something. I want to repeat it. Columbine was the first such mass shooting, and there hasn’t been a single substantive change in the way schools are patrolled, policed, protected, guarded, you name it, there hasn’t been a substantive, single change. And yet after every one of these shootings we get the same exact, rote list of demands and complaints. And they all focus on getting rid of guns.
And last night somebody in that CNN crowd went public very loudly with what the real ultimate objective is and that’s the confiscation of all weapons currently out there in the country. That’s the objective. But ask yourself, why hasn’t something been done? Since Columbine, why hasn’t there been anything done that would stop one of these events after they begin? Why hasn’t anything been done to prevent these from happening again? In this case, let me run through what happened here.
Deputies were called to Nikolas Cruz’s house 39 times. He was suspended from school. The FBI was specifically warned about the shooter just that month. He had guns. He had disturbing Instagram photos. He had made it public that he wanted to kill people. And he very proudly stated that he wanted to be a professional school shooter, as though it is something to aspire to. And nothing was done. And every one of these mass shooters has similar type behavior that was well known before the shooter began pulling the trigger.
And as I have pointed out, the next shooter is already out there and already has his gun and is exhibiting the same kind of behavior that should be serving as a warning. What’d the audience do last night? The audience booed Marco Rubio. The audience booed Dana Loesch. The audience reportedly suggested that Dana Loesch burn. What did they have to do with it? Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch had literally nothing to do with the event at the high school.
Now, in one sense, this is what indoctrination looks like. This is what a lifetime of propagandizing and indoctrination in the schools looks like. But looked at in an additional way, this is one of the greatest illustrations that not a single thing has been done since Columbine to change. Why not? I mean, it’s been that said we put armed security in jewelry stores. Now diamonds are more important than our kids.
So why is it that nothing is done? Is this incompetence? Why is nothing done? Columbine happened a long time ago. There have been many similar such events since. After every one of them, the same cacophony of baseless, empty charges that have nothing to do with it.
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RUSH: It really is striking when you think of it this way. Not a single thing has changed, including the reactionary rhetoric of the media and the Democrats after every incidence of killing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, I want to show you how this works. I want to take you here in the next audio sound bite to something that happened early on in the CNN so-called town hall. This was not a town hall. This comment that you’re going to hear is from a student. This student was near the beginning of the program, so it was not enough time for passions to have risen because of the nature of the event, because of the comments that had been said. This was early on.
I know passions were already at a fever pitch, don’t misunderstand. I firmly believe that what you’re going to hear was a rehearsed, scripted comment. I don’t know who wrote it. The student may have written it himself. I’m not making a big deal out of who wrote it. My point is it was not a spontaneous question. It’s scripted. And it was done on purpose because, as you will see — and it was directed at Marco Rubio. And as you will see, it is the exact kind of…
It’s why Rubio and Republicans should not go, because there is no way that Rubio could respond to this in ways that the circumstance demanded. Rubio had to stand there and take this. Rubio had to stand there and either try to smile about it or appear nonplussed. But it is a deeply personal, insulting, irrational — designed to be-over-the-top extremist — comment to stir up rabid anger and rage. This comment is a typical comment making it impossible to communicate with these people, to compromise with them, to reach across the aisle, to shake hands and even work together with them.
You just can’t, and this is by design. If Rubio responds to this in the way you or I would, then the news today becomes how Rubio was disrespectful and mean to young students. It’s audio sound bite No. 19. It’s Cameron Kasky, who I am told has become a favorite of the media in go-to interviews and comments on the shooting. He’s a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Again, this is at the beginning, relatively near the beginning of the town hall.
KASKY: Senator Rubio, it’s hard to look at you and not look down the barrel of an AR-15 and not look at Nikolas Cruz. But the point is, you’re here. And there are some people who are not. This is about people who are for making a difference to save us and people who are against it and prefer money. So, Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?
CROWD: (cheers)
RUSH: Now, this is the beginning of this sordid, despicable affair. It is a student who has survived a shooting, and he opens by saying, “Senator Rubio, it’s hard to look at you and not see the barrel of an AR-15 looking down on me.” In other words (summarized), “Senator Rubio, when I look at you, I see a murdering assault weapon. That’s all I see when you look at you, Senator Rubio! It’s hard to look at you and not look down the barrel of an AR-15 and not look at Nikolas Cruz. Senator Rubio, you look like you remind me of the assassin.
“But you’re not. You’re here. And there are some people, my classmates, who aren’t.” Now, Rubio can’t respond to this, by design. If Rubio responds to this in any way, in calling out this child, what do you think the reaction he’s going to get from the media is? Because, see, the kids are protected now. They’re victims, and they have free rein on their emotions — what they’re feeling, what they’re saying — and we just have to deal with it because they’ve been through trauma.
They’ve been targeted. So Senator Rubio has to sit there — and then after that insult, then we get this, “Have you beat your wife lately? Have you stopped beating your wife? Can you promise us that you will never take another donation from the NRA?” Somebody wrote that. I’m not making an allegation here. My point is that’s not a spontaneous question. It is a question that has a specific purpose or two, and the first purpose is to castigate and smear Rubio while making it impossible for him to react to it.
This is why I say, I don’t know why these people show up.
Do you think there’s any answer Rubio could have had that would have built a bridge to that student and maybe corrected or changed the misunderstanding the student has of Marco Rubio? (interruption) No. Exactly right, Mr. Snerdley. No. (interruption) But what? (interruption) “Can’t do it.” That’s my whole point. If Rubio had called that kid out as disrespectful or missing the point… They were hoping. That’s what the question was designed for! That question was designed to get Rubio to lose his composure and attack that kid.
That’s what that question was designed to do.
Rubio should be given a medal for keeping his cool. That was designed specifically. Rubio was just called the assassin. Rubio was just told that he reminds the student of the shooter with the AR-15. (interruption) Hmm? (interruption) I don’t know what I would do. Well, it’s hard to say what I would do because I can tell you right now I would never accept the invitation to go to one of these things, precisely because of this. Now, Rubio probably… Look, he’s a senator. It’s an event in Florida; they invited him. How does he not go?
I’m sure he felt like he had to go. But then this event last night just descended into the murk from there. Let’s jump back here. Here’s Dana… By the way, I apologize. I’ve been mispronouncing her name. Snerdley finally had it. He said it’s “lash.” I said, “How do you get ‘lash’ out of the way it’s spelled?” See, I read closed-captioning on TV. I don’t have the audio up very much and so I don’t hear name pronounced.
It’s not purposeful here. I just hadn’t heard the name pronounced. This is at the town hall again tonight, called, “Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action.” They weren’t demanding action. So Dana Loesch, the NRA spokesperson, was speaking about getting states to better participate in the background check system, and she was interrupted by three hecklers.
LOESCH: We have three lawmakers on this stage, and only one of them hinted at reinforcing the background check system. It is only as good as the records submitted to it. Only one of them even got anywhere close to mentioning that.
HECKLERS: Murderer!
LOESCH: We have to have more than 38 states submit records. That’s No. 1.
HECKLERS: Murderer!
LOESCH: No. 2, we have to develop better protocol to follow up on red flags. This indiv… This — this monster carrying bullets to school, carrying knives to school, assaulting students, assaulting his parents, 39 visitors in the past year?
RUSH: Were you able to hear what the hecklers were shouting? They were calling her a murderer. “You murderer! You murderer!” She didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t kill anybody. Never has. But here the students have been made into permanent victims, so we can’t… We’re not allowed, we’re not permitted to comment on the students. The students are traumatized. The students are already suffering PTSD. The students are emotionally distraught. They’re scared to leave their homes.
And the NRA did that. The NRA did that. The guns did that. Now, what she was talking about here on the background system check — this, by the way, proves that this whole event last night was a total sham. She actually shows up and is talking substance to these people about trying to improve an aspect of existing systems to make sure bad people don’t get guns. And she’s talking about the background check system, and she’s pointing out that the background check system is only as good as the data that has been entered into it. Garbage in, garbage out.
You can have all the background checks you want, but if the system containing the information on people is incomplete, it isn’t gonna be worth anything. She pointed out only one of the politicians on that stage even talked about this. She said we have to have more than 38 states submit records. Meaning, we have 50 states in the nation — 57 if you live in Obama’s world, we have 50 states — only 38 states have even submitted information on people to the background check system.
So if anybody in one of those 12 states that has not submitted records goes to get a gun, there’s no information on those people to even do a background check. And the point that she was making is that these states are not even stepping up and trying to provide the information. Everybody demands bigger and better and longer background checks, and yet nobody seems concerned that there are 12 states that haven’t even submitted any data for the background check system.
And she’s trying to tell these students, because ostensibly everybody there last night is there to talk about how we can prevent this, how can we do better, and that’s not what the event was, as you now know, if you didn’t before it started.
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RUSH: Let’s stick with the sound bites here. Dana Loesch here again at the town hall. In this bite she is talking about a woman who wished for a gun for protection, a woman who at one time had been raped, wished she’d had a gun. And during her comments she’s interrupted and booed again by the little angels from the school.
LOESCH: You’ve had a previous town hall where you spoke with a young woman named Kim Corban, who was a college student who was brutally raped in her dorm, and she was under the age of 21. And one of the things that she speaks out about loudly now is how she wished she would have the ability to be able to have some sort — a shotgun, whatever it was, to be able to defend herself.
RUSH: Now, we edited there, but the jeers and the hoots and the booing continued. Look, this event was the Wellstone memorial. Not quite on steroids. That’s why I played the audio sound bites of the Wellstone memorial yesterday as a precursor to what could have happened in the event last night.
Here’s another sound bite. This is number 18. This is another student talking to Rubio. You know, the first student says, “Senator Rubio, I look at you and I see an AR15 pointed right at me. And I see the shooter, and I don’t feel safe with you here.” The next speaker, this is a father of a student, Fred Gutenberg, whose daughter Jamie was killed in the attack.
GUTTENBERG: I’m a brutally honest person so I’m just going to say it up front.
RUBIO: Yes, sir.
GUTTENBERG: When I like you, you know it. And when I’m pissed at you, you know it. Your comments this week and those of our president have been pathetically weak. (cheers/applause) So you and I are now eye-to-eye, ’cause I want to like you. Look at me and tell me: guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in this school this week. And look at me and tell me you accept it and you will work with us to do something about guns.
RUSH: Right. So now if you are Rubio, what do you do with that? That’s why this event was not anywhere near what it was portrayed to be. It was an opportunity for a raging room of leftists to vent their anger and rage and hatred at people who literally have nothing to do with what happened. CNN assembles a group of protected victims, and you cannot lash out at them. You cannot react to them. You cannot react when they insult you, when they get something egregiously wrong. You have to sit there and swallow it, and preferably with a smile on your face.
But the last thing you can do is engage and argue and dispute. You can’t do it. So the event’s not what it was said to be. It was predictable what it was going to be. But again, there weren’t any solutions last night. We didn’t get an inch closer to preventing the next one. We didn’t get an inch closer to stopping the next one when it begins. Not a step closer. I mean, not a step. We haven’t taken a step closer to solution or prevention since Columbine.