RUSH: So we got the preliminary numbers in, and the ratings for last night’s Epidemic Awards, way down. I’ve seen the preliminaries at minus 16%. Those are the early overnights over last year. And since the early overnights are the major metro areas where most of the delusional leftists live in this country, that does not bode well.
By the time you get out into flyover country and the medium and smaller markets, the number is probably gonna plummet even further. So if you didn’t watch the Oscars last night, you are not alone. Now, let’s stop and think about something here. None of the excuses that the NFL gives for its ratings being down apply here. For example, the NFL says, “Well, you know, we got too much football out there. Thursday nights is just too much.”
And, “Well, we have had a lot of injuries. We didn’t have our stars on the field for many of the teams for most of the season. And there’s too much football out there. Thursday Night Football. And we don’t have our stars on the field.” And they never get around to mentioning Kaepernick and the kneeling and disrespecting the flag and so forth.
But the Oscars, I mean, that’s a once-a-year thing. You can’t say that people are tired, there’s too many awards ceremonies, although, you know what? Award ceremonies are to liberals what the Fourth of July is to Republicans. You ever stop to look at it that way? All of these awards shows is where they get a national stage to trash America. And they make the most of it. And when they do, just like when the NFL had all of these people kneeling and so forth and showing disrespect, what happened to the numbers?
They plummeted. In the NFL they were trending downward anyway even before the kneeling began. And that might just have been cyclical. But the kneeling really iced it and made the drop significant and consistent. Well, Hollywood can’t say that. They can’t say there’s too many award shows. And they don’t even play the anthem at the Oscars, so there’s no way anybody can kneel. They just disrespect America for the whole show.
Except there was one guy, there was one winner last night who praised America. There was one winner last night who thanked America. And he’s a Brit. His name is Gary Oldman and he won the best actor Oscar for Darkest Hour, portraying Winston Churchill.
And I got a note from a friend today who said, “Rush, I agree with you. The Democrat Party is in deep doo-doo. The Democrat Party stands for nothing that it can be honest about. The Democrat Party really has been losing elections in droves since 2010. The Democrat Party lost a presidential race with a can’t-lose candidate to an outsider who’d never been in politics before. The Democrat Party lost the presidency with an entire media industry opposed to the Republican Party candidate.”
Another way of looking at it, the Democrat Party candidate favored, chosen, beloved Hillary Rodham Clinton had the entire, not just American, but worldwide media establishment behind her, and she still lost. And yet my friend says they own everything else. The Democrat Party may be losing left and right, and the Democrat Party may not have a bench. They may not have a clear front-runner for 2020, “But, Rush, they own everything else. They own the media. They own pop culture. They money movies, books, TV shows. They own everything. So the fact that they’re losing left and right, it never appears that way to average, ordinary low-information voters.”
And there may be a point to that. There may be something to be said for it. I didn’t watch the Oscars last night, but I read, you know, during the night, I read some of the jokes. And I have to tell you, I’m long past the point of being mad about it. Been there, done that. It’s like the NFL, folks. When the whole NFL debacle began, I just got sad.
Now, I’m not big into movies and Hollywood like I was the NFL. The NFL was a hobby. I loved it. I liked it. It was something I very, very much enjoyed and I just got sad when they drove me away, or when they allowed politics to creep in and the whole thing got corrupted and it was impossible for the NFL to remain, in my mind, what it had always been. It’s just another area of America, another area of our culture which has now been corrupted and taken over by the left. It just made me sad.
And the Hollywood is much the same way because these people are dumb. They’re just plain dumb. They’re stupid. They’re ignorant. Whatever you want to say. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t know how much influence they have with average, ordinary Americans, but beyond all that the divisions in this country — I played golf yesterday, more about that in a moment, and after the round in the dining room and a guy says, “What do you think about Trump’s tarifs?” I said, “Well, what does this guy want to hear me say?” I said, “I think they’re a big mistake.” He says, “Yeah, right on.” Okay, got that over with.
And we continued talking about things, and then they asked me, “Rush, who do you think the Democrat front-runner is in 2020?” Well, let’s see. And I started going through the names. I said, “Well, there’s the Elizabeth Warren.” “Nah, nobody cares about her,” they said. “Well, Bernie Sanders again.” “Bernie Sanders, no. Come on Rush, Bernie Sanders is 95 years old.”
I said, “You guys had better understand that Bernie Sanders remains the most popular Democrat presidential potential candidate that they have.” Then they said, “What about Biden?” I said, “Biden it wants so bad he can taste it. But Biden is gonna implode at some point during the campaign if he does it. He always does.” So Biden, Fauxcahontas, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Can anybody think of anybody else? Seriously. Can anybody think of anybody else?
Is there anybody else — (interruption) Who? The Castro brothers? You talk about a been there, done that. I mean, how many years have these guys been living on the come? And they haven’t even left home yet. Oh, yeah. Kamala Harris. That’s the one I could — out in certain sectors of the country. Of course she’s gonna be driving them wild.
But the point is, who do they have? There’s nobody. There really is nobody that lights up the country. There’s nobody that excites the country. They’re just in pathetic shape. And I’m not trying to jinx anything here and I’m not by any means overconfident. It’s just that they are not the formidable foe that everybody thinks that they are. It’s other things that present that obstacle, but not the Democrat Party. I mean, they’re the people that get the votes. I mean, people in Hollywood, people in the media, people in the music industry and TV industry.
Oh. Forgot the Oprah. But of course The Oprah has said she’s waiting to hear from God as to whether or not she’s going to run, and The Oprah is a clear reaction to Trump winning. The point of all this is they’ve got nothing, they are just angry as they can be, and the way this country is divided right now makes me sad. I’m being flat-out honest with you. I read some of these comments that these people at the Oscars made last night. They’re just dumb. Beyond being politically leftist and so forth, the things these people think and the things that they say are just dumb.
And I watched Homeland last night. You talk about a show jumping the shark and going off the rails? And I hate saying that! I used to love Homeland, and I know one of the founding creators of that program, Howard Gordon. I don’t know that he’s even involved in it anymore. I’m kind of reluctant to talk about it. I don’t know how many of you are watching and have not seen last night’s episode. But what this season of Homeland is is what the left actually thinks of Donald Trump and what they actually think of conservatives.
And it is the downright scary how stupid it is. It’s downright scary just how plain dumb it is! We are becoming more bifurcated, Balkanized, and divided. There isn’t any overlap, meaning there aren’t any areas in which we have much in common. There isn’t anything that binds us together as Americans, because a significant portion of this country doesn’t even like the country anymore — and it may even be stronger than don’t like it. Some of them literally hate it.
And then there’s a bunch of people that don’t hate or dislike but they join the cacophony of hate and dislike because they think they have to in order to stay relevant. Then you have what’s happening on social media. Facebook and Twitter are literally using algorithms and human decisions to literally wipe conservative content off of their platforms. Twitter and Facebook are intentionally and purposefully doing this, and it’s not gonna be long before…
I’m talking just a few short years. There will not be any conservative content that you’re gonna be able to find on social media — and then it won’t be long after that before it becomes criminalized. It’s being treated in certain social media places now — conservatism is. It’s being treated as something criminal, and I’m reading a lot of conservative websites complain about this, and it’s understandable. They’re upset that Twitter’s doing this to them.
They’re upset that Facebook’s doing this to them, and they’re asking — they’re demanding — that Facebook and Twitter be regulated by the federal government. There’s some conservatives asking for regulation of social media because they’re being aced out, and there’s a part of me that says, “Well, you know, if you’re gonna throw your marbles all in a platform run by liberals, at some point you have to expect something like this to happen.”
I mean, if you’re gonna go on Facebook and use Facebook to build your audience, build your subscriber base, and fund your operation, when Facebook figures out that they’re enriching and making popular a bunch of people they don’t agree with and they start pulling the plug, it’s really not hard to understand. You have a bunch of leftists at Facebook, a bunch of leftists at Twitter, and they don’t like conservatives, quote-unquote, “polluting their platform.”
They’re not the phone company. They don’t have to treat everybody fairly. They’re publicly traded, but there’s nothing mandating them. They can run their business however they want. But Facebook, especially, lured a lot of websites in. A lot of websites get all of their advertising revenue is shared with Facebook, and some of their subscribers, rather than building it on their own. I mean, it’s much easier to grab an existing platform with millions and millions of people already there and then try to make your mark on that platform and get noticed.
I understand the allure to that. Anyway, regardless of all that, the point is that while the Democrat Party is in a gigantic mess — and, folks, do not doubt me. In a political sense, it is. They don’t have star power lined up to run for president. They don’t have even one person that you can say, “Yeah, there’s the go-to. That’s the person waiting to be president. That’s…” They don’t have anybody in their ranks about whom you can look at and say, “They’re presidential. They’re a problem. They could win.”
Yet everywhere about the Democrat Party the American worldwide left appears to be unstoppable and on the march. The media has long ago ceased to be what everybody thinks they are, and the root of it is that there’s just so much plain ignorance and stupidity on the left. It’s the product of bad education, the product of bad parenting, the problem of Soviet communist infiltration for years now finally taking hold on university campi and so forth. And, of course, conservatism itself is not a bulwark. It’s not unified, either.
We’ve got all kinds of fractious behavior and frictional behavior. You’ve got all kinds of animosity and anger and finger pointing on the right as well. The sum total of all this makes me sad. It just makes me sad for the country. It need not be this bad. It could be better, and I always hold out hope that it’s gonna be, that at some point there’s gonna be a bottoming out of some of the rot.
But then when I see a map in San Francisco… They had to create a map of all the public deposits of human feces so that tourists could avoid the neighborhoods, and then they had to do a map of used needles that drug abusers and others have used so people — tourists, residents — could avoid those areas. I see wanton homeless growing in numbers in Los Angeles.
I see all of these liberal enclaves, the whole state of California, liberal cities, and this stupid sanctuary city business. The mayor of Oakland warning illegal aliens when ICE raids are imminent so they can escape the law! The mayor of Oakland essentially shouting, “Five-0! Five-0!” And then you look and you find out that the constitutional rights of American citizens are being eroded and that the left wants to take a whole bunch of them away while granting constitutional rights to people that are not citizens.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Snerdley was begging me during the break to tell him what happened on Homeland. You don’t even watch Homeland! He said, “I know. But what you said about it has me intrigued. Did it jump the shark stupid last night?” Yeah, they did. But, you know, I’m conscious of spoilers for people that haven’t seen it last night, but it’s just stupid. (interruption) Well, I could give a five second warning, I guess. It’s just dumb. You know what the goody bag last night was at the Oscars? The goody bag.
This is what all of the presenters and the people that appear on stage get as a gift. The Oscar goody bag this year contained a key-ring-size pepper spray, a gel pepper spray, two personal body alarms, and a kit to test whether your drink has been drugged — and Harvey Weinstein wasn’t even there! Then they had a sculpture of Harvey Weinstein sitting on a sofa called the casting couch as though it’s a relic of days gone by. Two different kinds of pepper spray, and here’s Jimmy Kimmel describing this — audio sound bite No. 21. Jimmy Kimmel describing a penis free Oscars last night.
KIMMEL: Just look at him. Keeps his hands where you can see them, never says a rude word — and, most, importantly, no penis at all. He is literally a statue of limitations.
RUSH: Now, this was heralded as what Hollywood ought to be. These are the kind of guys that Hollywood needs now after all of these years of… Look, self-contained in its own bubble it’s a funny joke. But when you add the context to it and so forth, these people are just… I think they’re going insane. I really do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Gary Oldman last night, the best actor award for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
OLDMAN: My deepest thanks to the academy and its members for this, oh, this glorious prize. I owe this and so much more to so many. I’ve lived in America for the longest time and I am deeply grateful to her for the loves and the friendships I have made, and the many wonderful gifts it has given me.
RUSH: I think, now, I’m not sure, but I’ve had a number of people tell me that was the only positive reference to America last night. Now, you might say, “So what, Rush. We live in America every day. You don’t have to sing its praises every day.” That’s the point. You have a three-hour-plus awards show and America gets one positive mention, and everything else about America is a joke or a criticism. It’s designed to make people angry at their country. You got one guy that came out there last night evoking and emoting his pride and his gratitude and his thanks for America, which is so politically incorrect.