RUSH: Grab audio sound bites No. 13 and No. 14 here. April 30th, 2013, in Beverly Hills. This is at the Milken Institute 2013 Global Conference… I, of course, have spoken and appeared at the Milken Institute Global Conference. I was on a panel with Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco, the great legislator of the California assembly. He was there when I was in Sacramento. And Harold Ford Jr. And of course I was the only person who thought what I thought. I was the only person saying what I said, and it was about Obama and what I thought of his policies at the time. But they hold this thing every March, and it’s usually at the…white hotel. It’s the Beverly Hilton.
It’s where Whitney Houston died. Merv Griffin used to own the place. So I flew out there and I appeared. Anyway, this is where it was. Jim Messina, who is the Obama 2012 campaign manager, is talking about the campaign’s use of data. Of course, they’re bragging about it. They’re the smartest people in the room. These people are brilliant! They have gotten Obama elected in 2008, they did it again in 2012, and Jim Messina is there to brag and brag and brag about how they own social media.
MESSINA: We decided on the first day of the campaign to use data across department, uhh, because it was obviously the best avenue to the truth. And we ended up using data to inform almost every major decision we did in the campaign. And we had a singular goal to run a personalized campaign where you got a different campaign than you did, uh, all based on our ability to move you and persuade you to vote and support Barack Obama. And there’s 332 electoral votes that shows it worked.
RUSH: So they are bragging about it, 332 electoral votes, and they think that social media did it. You know, Jim Geraghty, our old buddy at National Review, he raised a great question about all this. Let me ask all of you sitting across the glass and all of you here in this esteemed audience. Brian, Dawn, and Mr. Snerdley, let’s just for the sake of it say that you’re on social media, that you’re using Twitter and Facebook, and you get one of these ads. And this ad is trying to persuade you to vote for Hillary in 2016. Is such an ad gonna work on you?
Three people are shaking their heads in there. The point being just how effective is this stuff anyway? There’s a dangerous downside to this that’s gonna lead to the government regulating even more of what you and I are able to know and access. Because that’s happening here is that the American people are being portrayed as a bunch of pure idiots, literal dolts, and they’re all out there playing around on social media. And they’re telling each other lies about how great their lives are and they’re bragging about this and bragging about that.
And here comes this Messina guy, and he says (paraphrasing), “Yeah, our campaign on social media garnered 332 electorate votes.” What they’re trying to say is that their brilliant campaign, their brilliant use of social media made people vote a certain way. And I ask you to go do the same thing. Talk to your friends who you know were just dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters and you ask ’em if there would have been any ad that they saw — Facebook, Twitter, wherever — that would have changed their mind and made ’em vote for Hillary.
And I’ll guarantee you out of every 10 you’re not gonna have more than nine people tell you you’re full of it. It may even be a smaller ratio than that. The dangerous thing here is you got guys like Messina and all these other people that are bragging about Obama’s brilliant campaign like the New York Times wrote about in 2013, making it look like they were Svengalis, they were brilliant, and they had the unique ability to generate all of those votes.
Well, the same thing applies if you now move on to Trump. So what’s gonna be said? Here you had a bunch of disaffected Americans unhappy about this or that, and Trump’s slick use of social media was able to convince those people to vote for a reprobate and a pig and so forth. And then the next thing they’re gonna say is, “We need more regulation of media. We need more regulation of what people are exposed to, because look at the dangers here. A bunch of lying, phony advertising convinced a bunch of to vote for Trump,” when it didn’t happen.
When lying, phony advertising makes people vote for Obama, it’s wonderful, it’s a great plan, it’s brilliance in action, it’s genius. When this stuff is said to be responsible for Trump getting votes, then that’s a big red flag and very dangerous. And that’s what they’re setting up here, when in truth, the impact of political advertising in reinforcing positive reactions has not been documented.
Why do you think all advertising’s negative in politics? What they’re trying to do is not get you to vote for their candidate. They’re trying to get you to vote against the one that’s running against their candidate. That’s what October Surprise is about. Just like if you’re 30 to 50 years old, they’re not gonna change your mind over what kind of beer you buy. You’ve already made that decision. You have your favorite beer, you might experiment, but if you’re a Bud man at 35, you’re a Bud man.
That’s why all this advertising is aimed at teenagers that haven’t made up their minds on this stuff yet. They’re not gonna get you to change your mind unless they ran a campaign saying, “X beer is going to give you syphilis.” Then you will stop buying it. But the idea that proactive, positive advertising, that doesn’t move anything. That’s why negative advertising is used and why it works. But be very wary of what we’re headed for here.
Because social media is now going to be said to have been a predominant reason why Trump got elected. We’re gonna have to regulate it. It isn’t safe. People aren’t smart enough to know when they’re being lied to. Blah, blah, blah.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to transition back to this whole Facebook scandal and the idea of Big Data being used to ostensibly brainwash people. And I want to reiterate a warning here, folks. ‘Cause what I think is coming is very easy to see. When Obama and the Democrats have Facebook and Google satellite offices in the West Wing, and when Obama and the Democrats use Google and Facebook to literally dominate social media and Hoover up all that data…
Remember we had a woman yesterday worked on the Obama reelect campaign from 2011 to 2012 bragging that they had access to every bit of data on Facebook and that Facebook essentially gave it to them, and then Obama wins and he’s called a genius. At the same time, there’s nothing negative said about all of those users — Facebook and Twitter users — that vote for Obama. But if you look at the Cambridge Analytica/Trump side of this, not only is there no genius here, what we have may be criminality.
We have criminality on the part of Cambridge Analytica. But we also have a fallen hero, Mark Zuckerberg, who has failed to hold onto the exclusivity of Facebook as the property of the Democrat Party and the American left So Zuckerberg is in deep, deep doo-doo. And there’s another component. Another component is that the people who voted for Trump are a bunch of idiots. They are mind-numbed robots, they’re not very bright, and social media was used to misinform them, to lie to them — and they bought it.
Obama users? Obama voters? Brilliant. Obama and the Democrats using social media? Brilliant. Obama voters? Also brilliant. On the other side, and what Trump and Cambridge Analytica did pales in comparison to the amount of data that Obama got from both Facebook and Google. But over here you have criminality, but the big thing is, “Trump voters are idiots. They’re not smart enough to see that they were tricked. They were not smart enough to see that they were being manipulated!
“They were not smart enough to see that they were being lied to by the Mercers and by Trump and by all of these people that were hijacking the Democrats’ property: Facebook and social media.” Which I think is going to lead to calls to regulate this stuff on the basis the American people are too stood up to recognize the truth, too stupid to realize when they’re being lied to. And as such, their stupidity and how easily they were manipulated led to Trump winning.
And, of course, this is unacceptable.
So you watch. Keep a sharp eye out for this.
But there are other things that I want to reinforce from yesterday and then build on. I want to go back to Jim Messina. We’re gonna do sound bites 13 and 14 again. We didn’t get to 14. Jim Messina in April, 2013, the Milken Institute Global Conference. Obama has won reelection. Jim Messina was the campaign manager, and he’s talking about their use of data, social media data, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, bragging about it. Here’s the first of two…
MESSINA: We decided on the first day of the campaign to use data across department, uhh, because it was obviously the best avenue to the truth. And we ended up using data to inform almost every major decision we did in the campaign. And we had a singular goal to run a personalized campaign where you got a different campaign than you did, uh, all based on our ability to move you and persuade you to vote and support Barack Obama. And there’s 332 electoral votes that shows it worked.
RUSH: Okay. So they got 332 electoral votes because they used social media. Their voters are not stupid. Their voters are enlightened! So, you see, they used social media to properly inform their voters; their voters did the right thing with it. It’s all good. It’s wonderful. It’s genius. And all these people involved are the new wave. Messina continued. He wasn’t finished. One more bite here…
MESSINA: We built this thing called targeted sharing. It allowed us to use Facebook to persuade people. We spent a billion dollars to figure out a simple truth: What your friends and family and neighbors say is more important to your consumer decisions and your political decisions than anything else, because you’re getting so much data thrown at you. So the final six days of the campaign, six million people logged on to Facebook through BarackObama.com and they saw a 20-second Michelle Obama video (’cause everyone loves Michelle Obama) and at the end of the 20 seconds, we had matched our data with their data. And we gave them five of their best friends who are undecided voters and said, “Click here to send them a video, click here to end is them information of those people.” Seventy-eight percent of them voted for Barack Obama.
RUSH: Genius, right? Which is exactly what Bridge did. They just went about getting the data a different way. They hired this guy to tell Facebook users that he was conducting a psychological survey and then asked, “Would you mind if we used your friends?” And these people said, “Sure.” So 50,000 people responding to them led to 270,000 people getting the Cambridge Analytica data, and that led to 50 million getting it once the geometric progression of all this happened.
It’s the same thing that Messina’s bragging about here, the exact same thing: Getting unwitting friends logged on to have all of a sudden start receiving this pro-Obama stuff when they didn’t sign up for it. But when they do it it’s genius. Cambridge Analytica does it? “It’s a problem, it’s a crime, and we need an investigation.” And the only reason it’s a crime is because Trump used it effectively. In fact, Cambridge Analytica didn’t even do that much to help Trump.
They were in business doing work for Cruz, primarily. But that takes me into the weeds where I don’t want to go. I have some observations I want to share with you. Has anybody in the Drive-By Media gone to Barack Obama and ask him to comment about his campaign’s exploitation of data that has been harvested from Facebook users?
Because I’ll tell you the Drive-Bys all over everywhere trying to get people on the Cambridge Analytica team — whistleblowers, what have you — to comment on how they exploited users. Is anybody asking Obama or Jim Messina here or the babe that we had yesterday? Are they being asked about the exploitation of users and data? Is there something wrong? Is there something shocking or unethical about what’s being called “Data-Harvesting Scandal” than Barack Obama, who launched the practice, he should be asked to comment about this.
If data harvesting is a scandal, then go after the originator, go after the people that are bragging about it right now and ask them about it. We know what people who work for Obama think, but what does he think? People that work for Obama think they’re geniuses, think he’s a genius, Michelle (My Belle) Obama, they’re all bragging about what they did here.
Do Facebook users actually understand what is done with their personal information, Mr. President? You think Facebook users knew what you were doing with their data? Do you care, Mr. President, what Facebook was doing with their data, what you were doing with the data? Do you, Mr. President, think giving permission to access Facebook friends is the right thing to do? Do friends give their consent?
The way Messina talks, friends were just innocent bystanders. They weren’t giving consent or not. They one day started getting messages with videos about Michelle (My Belle) Obama. Do you think they’re being exploited? What would Obama say? I don’t have any idea what Obama would say. Maybe he would say he did what he did because he’s the one Facebook users were waiting for. Who knows.
Does anybody remember the name Jonathan Gruber? Jonathan Gruber was the architect of Obamacare, after Romney, of course. Do you remember what Jonathan Gruber did? Jonathan Gruber was gloating a couple years after Obamacare went into law. He was gloating and bragging about the scam, just like Messina and just like the liberals and the media are bragging about the way Obama used social media.
Gruber said, “It’s a very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter that we were able to parlay into support for Obamacare.” And what he meant was, we were able to lie to them and they didn’t know enough to know we were lying. So when we told them they could keep their doctor, they ate it up. We when we told them if they like their plan they could keep it, they ate it up. We lied to them and they didn’t know enough to know we were lying to them. And Gruber was giving himself a pat on the back when he said this stuff.
I think by virtue of Gruber’s comments and what we know about liberal Democrats and Hillary, in addition, I think these people on the left see Americans as fools and hicks and suckers, particularly those in red state America. But it’s amazing to me how they get away with all of this and are hoisted up as geniuses. And people have figured out the new high-tech way of using and manipulating voter data, which really isn’t new.
You remember Richard Viguerie? Does the name ring a bell? What was Richard Viguerie’s claim to fame, Mr. Snerdley? Richard Viguerie was the direct mail king. Richard Viguerie figured out how to use, and so did Karl Rove. Karl Rove put himself on the Republican map by being able to target direct mail to the right people. You drive through a neighborhood and you see a guy that’s got a concrete birdbath in the front yard, or this or that, you figure the guy’s a do-it-yourselfer. So you direct mail him in ways that appeal to him to get him to vote for your guy.
I mean, this stuff has been done for eons! It’s been done for ages. It’s just before there was the internet and Facebook, they had to use the postal service to reach people. But what’s going on here is nothing new, and they’re trying to scandalize this. They’re trying to scandalize it and they’re going to try to regulate it, all because they think you’re stupid and you’re an idiot and you fell for all of these social media attempts to get you to vote for Trump. See, you’re not bright enough. If you were really smart you would have seen the light, you wouldn’t have even voted for Trump.
The fact that you did and the fact that you maintain your support for Trump proves that you’re a fool, and our nation cannot survive if we leave it up to the fools. This is what Hillary thinks. This is what the establishment thinks. We can’t let you fools run things. We can’t let you have any real power. You have to be regulated. You’re too stupid, too uneducated, too unsophisticated to live your life the way we think you should and end up voting for us.
Now, Facebook’s out there, of course, you can’t find Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg’s nowhere to be found.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A story from the Los Angeles Times June 25th, 2006. “The GOP Knows You Don’t Like Anchovies.” Now, this is about the data breach. Well, it wasn’t a data breach. This is about this whole Facebook scandal with Cambridge Analytica. And the media is doing its best to tell you that what has happened here has never happened before, it’s unique, it’s corruption, it’s the Trump team stealing and hacking data from Facebook.
And you know how Facebook’s playing this now? Facebook has decided that they’re going to play this as a victim. They have been victimized. Their data has been stolen. Their data has been hijacked. And I don’t know how far they’re gonna get with it, but that’s what they’re trying. Never mind the fact that they willingly gave all of this data to the Obama campaign in 2012. And Google has been right in there at the same time giving Obama and the Democrats whatever data they want.
But now Facebook’s playing this off as though they are a victim. Well, the point of the LA Times story, “The GOP Knows You Don’t Like Anchovies,” in the old days, the way people learned about you was from magazine subscriptions. Magazines would sell their list of subscribers to anybody who wanted it. I remember when we started The Limbaugh Letter — and I was new to the publishing business. And it wasn’t long — you know, we raced off to a hundred thousand subscribers inside of three months when The Limbaugh Letter hit back in I think was ’92 or ’93, the era of Limbaugh.
And the requests for our mailing lists started pouring in. We got ’em from the Republican National Committee, we’re getting ’em from everywhere. And my partners would come to me, and it was money. It was tempting because it was a lot of money, they would negotiate X-amount per subscriber. And I thought about it and I said, “You know what? We’re not selling it.”
“You’re what?”
I said, “We’re not selling it. The last thing I want is for people that subscribe to my newsletter start being barraged with junk from politicians, political parties, or whoever else we would sell this to.”
And man, my partners did not like it. They thought I was foolish! Rejecting money — we had built up the list obviously for our subscribers. So I turned it into a selling point. I would tell people when I pitched the newsletter — we’re again back in the 1992, 1993 period. I told people, “And rest assured, you will not end up on a mailing list.” I thought it was a big selling point to increase our subscriptions.
But the point is that it was a common practice. TIME magazine, Newsweek back then had gazillions of readers. And everybody was selling their subscription list, their mailing list. And this is how people were discovered. This is how your interests were learned by people. And a story here in the LA Times in 2006, which is 12 years ago, is all about how magazine subscriptions and direct mail did the identical thing that social media data is accomplishing today.
And back in 2006, you know, we’re in the middle of the second term of George W. Bush, and the media hates him, they despise him, and the purpose of this story is to scare everybody into thinking the Republican Party is learning everything about you.
“Some of the GOP advantages are recent developments, such as the database called Voter Vault, which was used to precision in the San Diego County special election. The program allows ground-level party activists to track voters by personal hobbies, professional interests, geography — even by their favorite brands of toothpaste and soda and which gym they belong to.
“Both parties can identify voters by precinct, address, party affiliation and, often, their views on hot-button issues. Democrats also use marketing data, but Voter Vault includes far more information culled from marketing sources — including retailers, magazine subscription services, even auto dealers — giving Republicans a high-tech edge in the kind of grass-roots politics that has long been the touchstone of Democratic activists.”
Another pull quote. “The database was honed and expanded after the 2000 election recount, when strategists such as Rove and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman vowed that they would never again permit Democrats to outperform the GOP in a national campaign.”
Now, the point being, there’s nothing new in what Cambridge Analytica did, nothing new in what Obama was doing, nothing new in voter information data being siphoned, gleaned, learned. It’s just being modernized as to how it’s collected and how it’s used. But the idea that political parties and advertisers and companies have been seeking the data, that’s as old as the fact that there is data.