RUSH: Larry in East Islip, New York, you’re next on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hello, Rush Limbaugh. How are you today?
RUSH: I’m doing well. Doing well. Thank you very much for calling.
CALLER: Good. I was listening to you on the app, on the Rush Limbaugh app last night after my shift behind the bar, and I heard you talking about Twitter. I wanted to let you know there is a group of us on Twitter who have carved out a niche or bypassed the typical Twitter liberalism and, you know, we call ourselves — we get on Trump trains or there’s people that call themselves red pills or walk away.
And it’s been very effective in getting the news out and getting the word out that there are so many like-minded people like us all over the country. Even though Twitter does a lot of stuff to hinder us, we still manage to get around and get our president’s word out. They retweet some of your stuff, Sean Hannity’s stuff, everyone else, and it’s very efficient. Sometimes before your show even starts I can get a good grasp of what’s gonna happen on your show.
RUSH: No, you can’t.
CALLER: And I still need — of course I still need your input.
RUSH: Well, there you go. Nobody knows what’s gonna be on this show before it starts because I don’t even know until it starts. Now, look. So are you calling to offer a slight disagreement with what I said about Twitter yesterday?
CALLER: I can’t disagree with the numbers. I’m not sure if the Pew stats are accurate, but there is a group of us that have bypassed. I to Twitter and look at Trump’s tweets, I retweet his stuff and then I go to my feed. See, we follow each other. It’s not about a follow or contest. I follow about 30,000 people, and I have about 30,000 followers. So it’s not people trying to get — it’s not a follower contest. It’s about a bunch of people banding together, they call us MAGA patriots, and it’s been very effective in boosting my morale.
RUSH: Okay, so you’re measuring the effectiveness by boosting your morale?
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: How else are you measuring effectiveness?
CALLER: Well, also by the accuracy of what’s reported and what some of these people say on Twitter. ‘Cause I just don’t take everything at face value. I will, you know, verify things. A lot of it’s just retweeting articles and stuff but, you know, some of the opinions are wrong or facts, statements of facts may be wrong. But in general they’re people that are all Americans, pro-Constitution —
RUSH: For instance, do you know how many people all of this activity is reaching and if these people are changing their minds?
CALLER: Well, I know that there are a lot of people who claim to be former Democrats that I follow. So there are some people that have had their minds changed. And they call themselves walkaways.
RUSH: Walkaways.
CALLER: Walkaway from the Democrat Party.
RUSH: Yeah, walkaway from the Democrat Party. Okay. Well, look. Obviously people have called me over the years, “How do you stay so confident, Rush, how do you stay so optimistic?” And my answer, ’cause I’ve got this microphone here every day, and I have the ability to, within any 15-minute sweep, there are now probably, six and a half, seven million people listening, and over the course of a program, 12 million.
And then over the course of a week, the weekly cume and the way radio ratings are measured — we’re not really supposed to go into this in great detail — but we’re up now close to 30 million people in a week.
So I tell myself I’m reaching a lot of people here. I got an opportunity, I’m getting it off my chest, I don’t have to walk around with it all bottled up. You’re essentially saying the same thing. This is making you feel better simply because you’re doing it, you’ve got your 30,000 followers out there, and your retweets.
And I understand that. You’re not bottling it up and frustrated that nobody can hear what you think about it and you think the people you’re saying things to don’t know it otherwise. And so you feel like you’re educating and informing people.
My comment on Twitter is much more broad-based. I think it’s a sewer. I think it’s an absolute repository for human debris, and it is used as such by the Drive-By Media and the people that run Twitter are doing their level best to make sure people like you don’t reach anybody of any significance.
They’re doing their best to mischaracterize and impugn the honor and integrity of conservatives and conservative sites, conservative networks, conservative anything. But it’s primarily the way Twitter has come to be used as a so-called source authority by the Drive-By Media.
For example, I stop paying attention to any news story when at any point in hearing it or reading it I see “and the internet blew up.” Okay. That makes it all artificial. The internet, Twitter blew up. How do — okay. Twitter blew up. That is a stand-in for America blew up, America’s outraged. And it isn’t the case. If Twitter blows up about something, it does not mean America blew up.
So they run a story saying, “Trump was driving his golf cart the other day and saw a little lizard and ran over it.” They run that story. “Twitter blew up.” They want you to believe that the country is outraged that Trump ran over a lizard on the golf course when most of America doesn’t even know it, but they convey Twitter reaction to equal the reaction of the American people, the majority of the American people. And it just isn’t the case.
But the effort is designed to make consumers of news think that a majority of people are reacting in ways that the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party would support, and it’s designed to depress people, to dispirit people, to make them think they’re in the minority, to make them think they’re losing their country, losing control of their country, that the wackos are taking over. And it’s all a mirage.
I’m not denying the wackos are out there. And I’m not denying that they’re in significant numbers. But the internet blowing up is not a guaranteed stand-in for majority public opinion. And that is how it’s presented.
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