RUSH: Jim in Naperville, Illinois.  I’m glad you called.  You’re up first today.  It’s an awesome responsibility to be the first caller.  I mean, you set the tone for everybody that follows.

CALLER:  Maha Rushie, I hope I can rise to the occasion.  I’m paying towards a lifetime membership with the NRA.  You pay $25 a month.  I do not have a firearm. I don’t own a firearm.  I don’t have a FOID card, a Firearm Owners Identification card. Yet.  I hope to soon. I’m trying to raise money for it.  In that, I am interested in the Dick’s Sporting Goods position.  I’ve called them today and had a very pleasant conversation with one of their managers to let them know that I will not be going to Dick’s because of the position that they’ve taken against the Second Amendment, in my mind.

Now, they’re free to do it, to sell whatever they want to whoever they want, but I have the same freedom to go to someone else if they’re gonna limit the age and the type of firearm that they’re gonna sell. I have teenage children that I’m worried about their Second Amendment rights first, and that’s why I have a membership in the NRA first. Because without that, without protecting our Second Amendment rights, you’re not gonna be able to buy the gun when the time comes.  So I don’t appreciate them raising their age to 21 and restricting the type of firearm and ammunition that they could sell.

RUSH:  Well, this is a classic… By the way, when did you join the NRA?

CALLER:  About a year ago.

RUSH:  But you don’t have a gun, and you don’t intend to any time real soon. But you wanted to join anyway because of the work they do protecting the civil liberties involved with the Second Amendment, right?

CALLER:  Absolutely.

RUSH:  Okay.  Well, let’s go to the Dick’s Sporting Goods guy.  The CEO there’s Ed Stack, and he was on Good Morning America today with George Stephanopoulos to talk about Dick’s Sporting Goods’ decision to stop selling “assault-style rifles” and to limit the age of buyers to 21.  Stephanopoulos said, “Dick’s will no longer sell assault-style rifles, no longer sell firearms to anyone under 21, and no longer sell high capacity magazines. This is a dramatic move. Why are you” making this move at Dick’s?

STACK: (whispering) We were so disturbed and saddened by what happened, we felt we really needed to do something, and so, uh, we decided not to sell these assault weapons any longer in any of our stores and the other things we talked about.  He bought, uh, a shotgun from us back, uh, in November, and it wasn’t the gun nor was it the to a gun that he used in the shooting but when that happened we realized that the system… Uh, and we did everything by the book.  We did everything that the law required and still he was able to buy a gun.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah.

STACK: When we looked at that we said, “The systems that are in place across the board just aren’t effective enough to keep us from selling someone a gun like that,” and so we’ve decided, uh, that w-w-we’re not gonna the assault-type rifles.

RUSH:  Okay.  Mr. Stack, I hope this gets back to you.  When you talk about you did everything that the law required and still the shooter was able to get a gun from Dick’s Sporting Goods — when you looked at that, you said, “The systems that are placed across the board just aren’t effective enough to keep us from selling someone a gun like that.”  This guy’s upset that this shooter was able to pass a background check.

Now, do you think that CEO Ed Stack of Dick’s Sporting Goods understands why?  Do you think he has the slightest idea why Nikolas Cruz was not caught in his background check?  Do you think he has ever heard of the PROMISE Program?  Do you think the CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods has ever heard of the Obama-Eric Holder program that paid local police departments and sheriff’s departments and schools not to report crime, arrest crime committed by, well, pretty much anybody! Felonies, misdemeanors in the youth area of age when they’re young.

Do you think this guy understands that the reason for this was the Obama-Holder belief and the general belief held by the American left that the prison populations have a very high percentage of minorities and African-Americans? Obama and Holder believe that’s because of racism and bigotry, that a lot of innocent people have been incarcerated because America is an injustice, America is immoral.

So they passed this thing calls the PROMISE Program, and it basically exempts young people who’ve committed crime. They’re not apprehended, they’re not arrested, so that they don’t end up as a statistic involving prison or jail.  This is designed to lower the percentage of minorities and African-Americans.  But the reason it works is the sheriff, the local police, the school boards were all given grant money to make sure this policy was adhered to.

So the reason that Dick’s Sporting Goods was unable to deny this guy his purchase is because this guy — in all of these warnings and in all of this instances that people knew he was gonna crack — wasn’t in the background check system because he had not been recorded as such.  He’s not been arrested. He had not been dealt with.  Do you think the CEO at Dick’s Sporting Goods understands that, or is he just trying to get in on what he thinks is a wave of popular opinion that he’s trying to take advantage of and maybe misreading it a little bit?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to the phones to Philadelphia.  This is Westin, and I’m glad you waited.  Great to have you with us, Westin.  How are you?

CALLER:  Rush, how are you doing?

RUSH:  Good, good, good. Thank you.

CALLER:  The students, the student victims. They are, of course, the disciples of the 9/11 widows, “the Jersey Girls,” who came out in 2004 and supported Kerry.

RUSH:  Oh, yeah!

CALLER:  You know, it’s their game.

RUSH:  Oh, yeah!  I had forgotten about “the Jersey Girls.”

CALLER:  Oh, yeah.  You couldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole.  They were —

RUSH:  And they were everywhere.

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: They had lost their spouses and — that’s right — they were untouchable.  You couldn’t criticize anything.  Same trick.

CALLER:  Yep.  And, you know, Rush, addressing what you’ve been discussing, you know, what they’re doing to Trump is really what they’ve been doing to citizens and businesses of America for the last 10 years. The way left is controlling things to a great extent now is by job security.  “If you don’t toe the line, you’re going to lose your job or we’re going to hurt your business,” and they’re doing the same thing to Trump.  “You didn’t toe the line.  We’re gonna do whatever it is to take your job away.”

Now, Trump, of course, being one of the bravest men I’ve ever seen in my life, he’s exhibit be the moral, civic, and political fortitude.  He’s not exhibit be the moral, civic, and political cowardice as the NRA rightly stated that we’re seeing in so many CEOs, so many politicians, and perhaps even from Jeff Sessions.  I mean, the left’s tactics… This is fascism.  Now, they might not own the businesses, but they certainly are controlling them, aren’t they?  And they’re controlling many of us.  I mean, I’m an airline pilot —

RUSH:  Let me tell you something.  You know, you’ve kind of hit a soft spot or red flag — a hot button of mine, actually — because this is something that has bothered me for practically the entire time that I have been doing this program.  I would love to give firsthand examples of what I’m talking about. But in the process of doing that, I’d expose some of our strategy of dealing with it which I don’t want to do. So I’m kind of conflicted.  But I know exactly what you’re talking about.  When you refer… You call it the cowardice of CEOs.

What he’s talking about is like this guy at Dick’s Sporting Goods or at Delta or United. At the first sign of what looks like massive public outrage at the NRA, they immediately sever ties with the NRA and very publicly announce it — as though they want accolades — instead of standing up to these people, ’cause these people are frauds.  They are not who they say they are.  They are not the average, ordinary American citizen!  What they do is made to look like the public is reacting in outrage at the NRA.  It isn’t.

It’s a bunch of left-wing community organizers and their members, and it is totally organized.  None of it’s organic or very little of it.  It’s not grassroots.  It’s made to look like that, and the media doesn’t expose it.  So these guys… I’ve seen it! I’ve seen it for the entire time I’ve been doing this program.  I’ve seen the cowardice — and in some cases, it isn’t cowardice.  In some cases, it’s just, “I don’t care. I didn’t take this job to fight with certain elements of the public,” and I would tell ’em, “That’s what they know.  They know you’re not gonna fight ’em.

“They can roll you any time they want.” As much and as greatly as we have exposed it… In fact, I’ll tell you a little story, just to show you. I hope this conveys some of the frustration.  I’m at dinner one night with some really good friends — I mean, people that know me and know about my business and how it operates and some of the challenges.  There were a couple of people at this particular dinner who are not in the immediate circle. I mean, I knew them.  They were not strangers.  But they didn’t know enough to be fully informed.

So they started asking me questions about various controversies I’ve been involved in, and I explained to them the Stop Rush movement.  And I explained to them how we find out that it was 10 people — and we found the people! We have their addresses. We know where they are.  We know the algorithms they are using.  We know who and what departments at Twitter they coordinated with.  We found out how they do it all.  There are 10 people that were able to make themselves look like thousands.

With a combination of algorithms and identity theft, they were able to make themselves the look like tens of thousands of people, and they were primarily attacking… Well, this is what I don’t want to tell you.  But they were attacking people who had no idea what was happening.  They were attacking advertisers, sponsors who had no idea what was happening.  They thought it was real.  So we did the research, and we found out who these 10 people are. They’re all retired, and they’re all elderly, and most of them are female, and two or three of them are retired college professors.

And they do it from home. And it’s all they do. They sit around all day long on the computer and try to gum up the American political system by making themselves look like they are 50 to a hundred thousand people when they are 10. So I’m explaining all this. And one of my friends who knows all this says to me, “So what does matter? What’s the big deal? How does it help you? So you learned this. Big deal. What’d you do with it?”

I said, “What did we do with it? We took it as a giant spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation to every damned advertiser to show them graphically and with statistics exactly how this was working.” It was even hard to understand why we would go to the trouble of finding this out instead of just deal with it, is my point. One of my good friends, “Just deal with it. It’s part of your cost of doing business.” No, it’s not part of the cost of doing business. We can’t deal with it. We’ve gotta shut it down. We went to the expense and the trouble to find out who these people are.

But the point was we collected the data and were able to present to anybody, advertiser or not, we were able to present the evidence of who these people are. The reason we did it was to give these CEOs and businesspeople we were talking to evidence that they could safely and securely ignore it, because it wasn’t massive and it wasn’t real.

These people, in some cases, were getting threatening letters, “I am never, ever again, I’m a longtime customer of your business, but I am never, ever again going to patronize your business, and I’m gonna tell all of my friends to not do the same thing if you don’t get rid of Rush Limbaugh.” And we find out that 90% of the emails and tweets that came were from out of state. They weren’t even customers. They weren’t even from the location where the business was. The whole thing was fake.

And I guarantee you that all this garbage against the NRA is made up of the same kind of system. Its origins are Media Matters for America. That’s where this stuff started, and it’s become a way of doing business. And they get away because the media does not expose them. They get away with being assumed or portrayed as average, ordinary Americans.

So like the Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO, I guarantee you he doesn’t know what I just told you. He thinks more than likely that there is a gigantic outrage among a majority of the American people, and for the sake of his business, he had better get in front of it and let them know that he agrees with them. He doesn’t know that he’s being bombarded by bots. And in his case I don’t even know if could be demonstrated to him, if it could be proven, “Hey, man, you’re falling for a trick.” I don’t know if he would change his mind because nobody wants to admit they’ve been fooled like this.

But my frustration is that this has succeeded for years despite it having been exposed. They succeeded. This is what got O’Reilly, folks. I sat here and I said, “This does not have to work.” But there were some people, “No, no, we got it, we got it, don’t worry.” Hannity beat it back successfully. And finally there are some people now institutionally doing it. But it frosts me to see it continue to work.

I know, and more and more people know, exactly what this is and how literally phony and fake it is. Ask yourself this. Every time something like this comes up that advances the leftist agenda, there is a national outpouring, there’s a national outrage of tweets and Facebook posts and emails? And the American people are doing nothing but getting mad all day, every day, and sending off all these notes to CEOs and businesses? That’s a caca. It isn’t happening. But it’s made to look like it is. Anyway, I told you the guy hit a hot button.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: From Michelle Malkin’s website, Twitchy. How would you describe Twitchy to people that don’t know what it is? Come on. Come on. Come on. It’s a twit aggregator. She goes out there and finds all these other stupid ass tweets and puts ’em in some kind of meaningful order so people can understand the total, rank BS that’s being spewed out there.

It’s a great service. It spares you the trouble of having to find all that rotgut crap that people like Ruffalo and Cuban and these other lamebrains out there tweet. So Michelle Malkin’s bunch does it, and you can just go read her website to find out what these lamebrains have been saying.

Anyway, it turns out the big announcement from Dick’s Sporting Goods that will no longer sell assault style rifles is not actually big news. You see, Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling assault style rifles — whatever that means, by the way — after Sandy Hook. Well, that’s six years ago. Dick’s is getting lots of publicity for this, but they haven’t sold these kinds of guns in their main stores for over six years.

The announcement today expanded the company policy to the company’s smaller Field & Stream chain of stores. They’ve been selling them in a smaller chain they own, but not in the main stores. So it’s not as big a deal as it’s being reported by CNN and the rest in the Drive-By Media. And they got a lot of attention for this the last time they did it, too. And after the last time when they announced this then they immediately started selling the AR-15 in their smaller chain without any fanfare.

So from the big chain they took out these so-called — what is an assault rifle? You know, we use these terms, they get bandied about and people end up thinking an assault rifle is a machine gun. And machine guns have been illegal, except for the Mafia, since 1934. If you’re in the Mafia, you own a machine gun, pretty much go have at it, nobody’s gonna try — seriously, they’ve been illegal since 1934. Weapons of war, like they call, you know, F-16 a warplane.

At any rate, again, it’s just more phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roller PR. Basically nothing new to see here except for the CEO of Dick’s all over TV announcing some policy that’s actually been in place for six years.