RUSH: Speaking of which, ladies and gentlemen, have you seen what happened in France? This little Millennial president has canceled his carbon tax. The middle class protesters have won the day. The yellow vesters have won the day. Grab audio sound bite No. 2. This is Edouard Philippe, who is the prime minister in France, and he delivered a televised address to the nation about the yellow vest riots yesterday and said this.

PHILIPPE: (via translator) The yellow vests love their country. They want their taxes to be decreased and their revenues to increase. This is at the heart of the president’s engagement, and if I did not succeed in expressing this — if the majority had trouble convincing the French people — I see that we need to change something. No tax ought to endanger the nation’s unity. We have heard the demand expressed by all those who have consulted in the past few days. I suspend, for a duration of six months, the tax measures.

RUSH: (laughing) Six months! “We’re gonna suspend the tax for six months, but you better be ready, because we’re gonna slap it back on you again at the beginning of summer when you’re gonna be driving more than you are now. We’re gonna soak you. We’re just gonna delay it for six months.” But the bottom line is you’ve seen all of the video out of France. Remember as I so credulously intoned yesterday: Europe, we are told… We are told Europe’s utopia.

The Europeans have it down pat! The Europeans know how to do life in the twenty-first century. They have trains. They don’t pollute. The Europeans are all in on fixing climate change. The Europeans have multiculturalism down. They’re sophisticated! The Europeans don’t have any rabble that have anything to say about anything. Europe is utopia. And this little guy macaroon (or whatever his name is, Macron) bought into this idea that the whole world…

See, this is what the left does and what the media does. Whatever their issues are, they act like every human being alive agrees with them. So this guy thinks that he was elected to raise taxes to fix climate change. So he goes about it, does it, and holy hell greets him as a result, and he’s stunned! He’s stunned. He thought his approval numbers would skyrocket. Why, after all, the people realize we’ve only got a few years to save earth, and this is a vastly necessary step.

Except when it happens to you! When you’re being blamed and when you’re told, “You have to bear the burden of all the damage you’ve caused in destroying the planet; here’s $7-a-gallon gasoline,” people say, “Whoa! You fix it.” They’re not signing up for it whatsoever. But in this case the French are doing exactly what the global climate change political movement wants done. This little president over there passes a massive tax on carbon, driving the price of gasoline over $7 a gallon.

And, you know, this is still not a big story in the Drive-By Media, especially it isn’t gonna be a big story in the Drive-Bys that the tax has been postponed and rescinded, because this is a forerunner of what they want to do around the world. It’s exactly what they want to do here, starting back in the 1990s. Bill Clinton was the first to propose a carbon tax, seriously, in 1992/1993. It didn’t go anywhere. It routinely comes up. Lot of Republicans sign onto it too. Environmental protection, don’t you know. In fact, this is a New York Times story.

“France will suspend for six months a small tax increase on gasoline and diesel fuel that had been slated for January, in an attempt to quell weeks of protests and rioting by the so-called Yellow Vests movement.” There’s nothing “so-called” about them. That’s who they are. The middle class are required to have these vests in the car case there’s an accident. They put ’em on so they won’t be run down by other motorists. Small tax. Small increase in it. Nothing that’s justifying this kind of reaction.

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RUSH: Philadelphia. This is Westin, and I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome to our program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Good day. How are you?

RUSH: Good. Thank you.

CALLER: I just received your golf shirt. Very nice. Thank you.

RUSH: I’m glad you got one of those.

CALLER: I’m hoping that I win that trip to see you. That would be great.

RUSH: Yeah. We should have that announcement soon, by the way. But I’m glad you got one of the shirts. You’re gonna love that shirt, especially when the heat and humidity come. That’s one of the dry fit shirts, will not hold the sweat. You’re gonna love that shirt.

CALLER: Look forward to wearing it. Well, two things, two things. Just briefly, real quick. It pains me with this stuff with H. W. and W., is that, you know, when Republicans are interviewed by members of the press, they have to fake amnesia, that they can’t remember the unweathering assaults on Reagan, H. W., W., Romney. I mean, they just pretend that it never happened. And that’s what galls me. We all know that the Republicans, no matter who it is, comes under withering, uncivil attack from these people. And yet we pretend it doesn’t happen.

But the point of my call is the Macron stuff, Macron stuff with the yellow jackets and the carbon tax, this is what it’s been all about. It’s been the attack on the middle class. And so you can juxtapose Macron and the yellow jackets with what’s going on with Trump in this country. Trump is the defender of the middle class. And thank God we have him. He’s all that we have. It shows you, you mentioned it many times, the hatred really isn’t for Donald Trump. It’s for his supporters.

RUSH: Damn straight.

CALLER: The great unwashed, the rabble.

RUSH: Damn straight. Trump wouldn’t be there if not for people like you voting. Damn right you are.

CALLER: That’s right. And, you know, we saw that. The night of the election, 9:30, 10:30, or 11:30, they immediately, they couldn’t hold back their attacks. Van Jones, this was a whiteout or something, you know, the angry old white man came out, you know, the people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania who had seen their towns literally disappear and said, “No, we don’t want to get on the welfare wagon that the left’s offering. We want to bring our country back, make it great again and get us working again.” And they said, “Uh, can’t believe these people. They don’t want to sit on their ass and be on the dole.”

RUSH: Wait a minute. That actually is a good point that I want to put an addendum to when you talk about Van Jones. I’d forgotten that, that he did call this a whiteout. Trump’s victory was called a whiteout. And he meant by that, the people they’re trying to take the country away from is — that’s exactly what he means, white male Christians and so forth who also have hunting licenses. That’s the people they are trying to take the country away from because that’s the people, those are the people they think have all the racism, sexism, bigotry and all the problems since the country was founded. They’ve had an unfair length of time running this country, and it’s time they gave it up and Hillary was gonna do it.

And Trump comes along, those people came out of the woodwork and saved their country, in their view, and stopped people on the left. And they were livid. You’re exactly right. Because they could see it in the palm of their hands that they were finally gonna take this country away from the majority, the people who founded it, the people who make it work. And it blew up in their faces.

And you are so right when you talk about the contrast. In France it’s blame the middle class, make ’em pay for climate change. They caused it with all of their lifestyles. And in this country, Trump, the one guy standing up for them continually. He never wavers. Those are good observations you made out there.

CALLER: Rush, I hope to get a chance to golf with you in a couple of months.

RUSH: Well, keep wearing that. What color shirt did you buy, by the way?

CALLER: I got the blue one.

RUSH: There you go. There you go. I’m really honored that you got one, and I know you’re gonna enjoy it. He got it the EIB Store at RushLimbaugh.com, our big, big promotion one week ago.

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RUSH: Ooh! We have a phone call from the South of France. This is Steven. I’m glad to have you on the program, Steven. Thank you for calling. Hello.

CALLER: Mega dittos from the South of France, Rush.

RUSH: Where in the South of France are you, exactly?

CALLER: Exactly, we’re in between the cities of Carcassonne and Narbonne.

RUSH: It’s a beautiful place.

CALLER: We have a guesthouse if you want to come visit.

RUSH: Ah, it is tempting. It is tempting. I love the South of France.

CALLER: That’s not why I called. Okay. I wanted to call about the yellow vest movement here. It really does seem to be a really grassroots movement. There are people who are trying to co-opt it, but it’s still hard for the government to find leaders that they can talk to, and it does seem to be a mixture of people from across the political spectrum, both right and left. And while it started, I think, because of the fuel tax, that was kind of straw that broke the camel’s back. They are all over the place with their demands.

The left element is calling for the redistribution of more wealth. Others are calling for Macron to resign, which won’t happen, but that’s what they’re asking for. And a couple of times here recently you’ve referred to Macron as a true believer with regard to climate change. It seems to me that there are two kinds of true believers. There are the tree huggers that worship the earth and for them it’s a real religion. But I think most of the politicians fall into a separate group of true believers who believe that it’s a great excuse to raise taxes on people. And what I find hard to really understand is how, if carbon is destroying our planet, how does it magically not destroy our planet just because people pay taxes on it?

RUSH: Well, that’s a very intriguing question. We are carbon, by the way, just like we are CO2. You realize, folks, that they say CO2 emissions are what’s creating the greenhouse effect that then causes global warming and now climate change because it stopped warming for 15 years, it becomes a different term.

We exhale CO2. There’s no way to reduce CO2 emissions. But their point of raising taxes on gasoline, say, or diesel is designed to get people to use less of it. They’re trying to make it unaffordable on the belief that doing so will save the climate. I mean, if people travel less and use less fossil fuel, less gasoline, less diesel, less petroleum overall, then there’s less pollution and there’s less CO2. And then there’s less greenhouse effect, and then there’s no global warming, and then we want to reduce the overall climate temperature by one and a half degrees Celsius over hundred years. And this is how we do it.

So theoretically on paper it’s designed to get people to stop using — you know, it’s an old adage: If you want less of something, tax it. If you want more of something, take the tax off of it or reduce the tax. In this case, I think you have to throw all of that out the window. I think Macron is a true believer, but he may just be an opportunist, but I think as a leftist he’s a true believer.

You said that this protest seems to be capturing people from across the spectrum. Yeah, because it was a genuine protest against taxes, and it was a genuine middle class protest, but once the protest starts, a whole bunch of people want to get in on and convert it to their cause, which is why the communists were writing all kinds of graffiti opposing capitalism on walls, when that’s nothing about what this protest is about. You’ve got all these leftist groups trying to co-opt the protest and make it look like theirs so that they can claim credit for it and claim the issue.

But I think the great lesson here for anybody paying attention, this is what they want to do in this country. This is exactly what the climate change advocacy lobby wants to do here. They have been trying to raise taxes on carbon. And when I say we are carbon, human beings are made of carbon. Everything is. The idea, when you start taxing carbon — I mean, if they wanted to, they could tax a percentage of your exhalation every week, every month, every year.

They could tabulate the average human being or the average American’s breathing cycle and how much CO2 is in the average human being’s exhale every day, every week, every month and then start charging a tax on the basis of that because it is that exhale that contains CO2s combined with emissions from fossil fuel usage which is destroying the climate.

So if you human beings… By the way, it’s not an accident that they say that the greatest threat to the planet is human beings. It’s a setup and a prelude for being able to control as much of human behavior as they can. If human behavior is inherently destructive, if this is the case the left can make, if they can convince a bunch of brain-dead people that human life is ultimately the greatest threat to the planet? I mean, for that to succeed, they’re gonna have to eliminate God from as many people’s lives as possible.

We’re all creations of God, and God creates the No. 1 threat to the planet? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, not if you have a loving God. Even if you don’t, it just doesn’t make any sense. But if they can sell this, if they can sell that human life, that human activity is the biggest threat to life — if our living our lives threatens that very life — then they’ll have the ability to control it however they tell you is necessary. They’ll have the ability to tax whatever they want to tax, and that is what they want: Total control over as many people as possible.

This is why I cringe when I read so many young people falling for this. They haven’t the slightest idea what this is really about. They fall for the phony science and fall for all the rest of it — and it’s an intellectual, scientific hoax and fraud. Now, don’t misunderstand. The climate is constantly changing. Don’t misunderstand me on this. I’m just telling you that there’s nothing we do that can affect it. There’s nothing human beings can do to reduce the severity of weather or to increase it. We can’t do anything to stop the creation of weather.

We’re just powerless in this regard! The systems are too complex. We haven’t the slightest understanding of why things happen in the climate other than meteorologically. But to say that human activity is responsible for it is literally absurd. But that’s what they want people to believe, and it’s only people in advanced western democracies and advanced-economic-lifestyle countries causing this. Have you noticed that, too? Only wealthy countries are causing this. So prosperity, progress is the problem. It’s got every ingredient the left needs to advance communism in it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Scott in Atlanta as we head back to the phones. Glad you waited, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Look, I wanted to tell you, you’re even more right than you knew about Macron and about the unfathomable cluelessness of the left. I mean, they think this is about a gas tax. It’s really about the elite establishment versus everybody — the middle class and everybody else who works and who thinks rationally. I hear from a friend who has a brother-in-law over there that the local police in the rural areas, the gendarmerie, are saying to their friends, “Hey, we’re with you.” When that happens, you have the clarion call —

RUSH: Wait. Hang on a minute. I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying the people in France don’t really know what this is about? They think this is about a gas tax?

CALLER: No, it’s more than a gas tax. I’m just saying it’s not just a gas tax. That’s where Macron is wrong. He thinks he can put this away by rescinding the gas tax.

RUSH: Oh! Oh. Oh. Oh. Well, he might eliminate some of the protests, but I think what he’s done is open a bunch of eyes. That’s what you’re saying, really, right?

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: This is the people versus the elite, and it’s going on everywhere — and it happened here. The elites think in terms of left, right, and center, and the people honestly think in terms of us versus the elite. It was the same thing that happened here. I mean, I tell my friends, “How do you explain that 43% of all American women — of all political persuasions, all demographics, all ages — voted for a sexist, homophobic, narcissist, crass, misogynist against the first woman?” They did that because they were that angry at the establishment and at the elites, and that’s what’s going on in France, and it’s happening all over Europe.

RUSH: Well, let me grab the next call because somebody… This dovetails with what you’re saying. Andy in Atlanta.

CALLER: Yes. Rush, I have something complementary to say that so mega dittos from a Christian conservative and Reagan Republican from Georgia.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I agree completely with what’s being said. But I think what’s not being said — and I’ve learned this from the critical thinking that the EIB has taught me — is that no one’s saying that… Here’s my theory. If it weren’t for the genteel, sophisticated elite Republicans that we’ve had like George Bush 41 and George Bush 43 — who didn’t fight back when they were saying, “Bush lied and people died,” and comparing him to Hitler — and weak candidates like McCain and Romney and then see how the Democrats behaved with Bubba and Monica and then Obama with his elitist, you know…? And how he was —

RUSH: Let me jump in on here because we’re running out of time and I know where you’re going. He’s saying it’s the genteel, gentlemanliness of McCain, Romney, and the Bushes that gave us Trump, because those people didn’t fight back — and why didn’t they fight back? They wanted media approval, in many cases. The Bushes are a different thing, but Romney and McCain, they wanted media approval, and they got it!

Look what it got us.

Look what it got them.

The only good Republican, as far as the Democrats and the media are concerned, are Republicans that lose.