RUSH: Thousands more Stand Up for Betsy Ross shirts flying off the shelves today. It’s self-sustaining now. It’s so far beyond expectations, it’s gone so beyond. I mean, we’ve now upped the charitable donation to $2 million to Tunnel to Towers. We’ve grossed an amount of money here that would just – I mean, this would be on the New York Times best-seller list for a year if this T-shirt were a book.
You have to be able to scale up the fulfillment process, the logistics, and the vendor has to be able to get those shirts sent, it has to be run off and printed. I mean, the vendor is running 24/7 on his press. We’re getting shipments of shirts coming in at our loading dock every day, practically. The UPS driver’s not even wearing a uniform since ours is his only stop. It’s taking that long to unload and categorize them, the inventory, all the correct sizes that people want. This has been a massive supply chain achievement here that this has gone so far beyond expectations.
And we couldn’t say, “Wait a minute, folks. Slow down. We can’t handle the volume we’ve got.” We couldn’t do that, so we had to ramp up and get it done. And we’re doing it all ourselves. We’re doing every aspect of this, from the design — well, we farm out to the manufacturer, but I’m talking about from the inventory to the fulfillment. We haven’t farmed any of it out to people that don’t care as much as we do.
And we are pedaling, we are pedaling so fast to get every order fulfilled. And people aren’t just buying one and they’re buying other things in the store as well. And I think the magic here is — it’s gone beyond Nike and Kaepernick. This now stands for and represents just being counted, just standing up and pushing back against all of this criticism of America, coming from people perpetually angry, perpetually their noses out of joint.
People don’t want to dislike their country. We love the country. We want everybody to love it. You know, that’s the real frustrating thing for me personally, I want everybody to love the country. I do. It’s really been great for me. I don’t like to hoard things and keep them from other people. I want everybody to be able to share and experience everything I can.
And I try to make that as possible as I can every day of my life. And the opportunities that we have as Americans are unknown to 90% of the population of the world, even in nations that are free. They can’t compete with the ability, the opportunity, the enshrined nature of our freedom and our human existence, there’s never been a place like this. And it just — well, I’ll be honest. It hurts when I run around and see all this hatred for America.
And I know what it is. I know it’s people that hate this country because it threatens them or because they’re a different political — These are not people that love America and want to improve it. These are people that don’t like it, period, because they think it’s not for everybody, it’s not fair, it’s not equitable, whatever lies they tell themselves.
But they’re perpetually enraged, perpetually angry. There’s nothing infectious about that. I don’t want to be part of a movement that grows because people are angry and filled with rage and hatred over nonsensical things. Whatever disadvantages people face in this country, they are nothing compared to disadvantages and obstacles and adversity around the world.
Everybody has obstacles. Everybody faces discrimination of one form or another. Everybody faces disadvantage, because we’re all different. All of us are capable of different things. Some of us are good at some things. Others of us aren’t good at those things. Some of us aren’t good at very much, but there’s one thing we excel at. We strive to find it, spend our lives doing it in our pursuit of happiness and contentment.
And to be surrounded by people that hate the place, to be surrounded by people that don’t like America, it’s just disappointing before it’s angering. It saddens me before it makes me mad because it’s so unnecessary. Hating America isn’t gonna do anything for America. It’s not gonna do anything for you.
And, in fact, this is the one place if you’ve got some kind of a grievance this is the one place to get it fixed, it’s the one place to address it. This is not the place to hold responsible for it, no matter what our past. Our past is our past. Whatever happened in the past doesn’t happen anymore! The fact that it did happen does not scourge us for the rest of our lives as a nation or as a people.
And here we are in the midst of an economic revival and the nation on a course here where it can be once again restored to its founding, we have people running around irritated about it, mad about it, unhappy about it. That saddens me. All I can think of is so many people missing out on the opportunity for a happy life because they have bought the propaganda or the demagoguery of a bunch of people who are attempting to build a political coalition on grievance and hate and victimhood. And it’s just so unnecessary.
I wish for this proverbial, gigantic slap in the face that would wake everybody up. Everybody putting themselves in this prison that they’re in because they’re constantly enraged or angry. You know, not everybody has a lot of self-confidence. People that don’t, okay. So you’re not feeling so hot about yourself today. It’s not the country’s fault. There’s nothing the country did to make this happen to you. And you can fix it!
But most people don’t want that responsibility. Or a lot of people don’t. They would rather take the easy way out and have the built-in excuse for why things aren’t going great, a bunch of nameless people that they never, ever met did it to ’em. Those old white slave owners that founded the country did it to ’em. What a phony excuse.
So the Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt is simply for people who aren’t buying into this and are a little fed up hearing how rotten their country is. ‘Cause what is a country but its people? Whatever America is is its people, all united or all living under the same principles and guidelines and Constitution. And those who’ve taken the time to study it know how special it is. They know how exceptional it is, and they know how unique it is, and they have a never-ending appreciation for it.
We have a political party that wants to hear one more time from Robert Mueller, go on TV and lie about how Trump colluded with Russia, that the Mueller report says so, when it didn’t and doesn’t. I don’t know about you, folks, I don’t want to be led or governed by people who are constantly angry, constantly enraged, constantly feeling like they’re a victim of something.
Those are not the people you want leading you. You know the people you want leading you? Somebody sent me a note “Rush, it’s all great if you woke up tomorrow and you found out that Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Clarence Thomas were leading the country, but the thing is Thomas Sowell would run away and hide.” That’s the kind of leader you want, somebody that doesn’t want the job, and that’s got a lot of sense to it.
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