RUSH: Before we get to the news of the day, a refresher if you didn’t see Fox & Friends this morning. I appeared yet again at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning to announce the most incredible thing. The Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt — and for those of you watching on the Dittocam, let me pull it out here and hold it up real quick. You know what we found out over the weekend, by the way? A bootlegger, a knockoff had pirated all of our fan photos from our website, my website logo, and the shirt itself, and they were selling the shirt, but they were charging people $1,500 for it. They were fraudulently charging. They were not advertising. Nowhere on their website did $1,500 appear. They were charging people that. We were on it pretty quickly when we found out about it.
But this is the Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt. This started on July 8th. We actually made it available on July 8th, and we would have been thrilled if we would have reached 50,000 shirts sold. We partnered with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which is a charity that provides for the families of 9/11 victims, first responders to 9/11 and the United States military overall and in general. The proceeds from the sale go to the foundation.
This was never a profit pursuit for us. We would never take a profit when we are donating proceeds to a charity. So we would have been thrilled with 50,000 shirts sold. We were able to up the donation today to $3 million. One week ago it was one million and a half dollars, then we upped it by $500,000. And now the total — and counting, by the way, $3 million to Tunnel to Towers Foundation and counting.
It’s gone so far beyond anybody’s expectations. We are so gratified and heart warmed over all of this. We’re gonna be working for a long time to fulfill all of these orders. We have bought out every shirt of this fabric and style in size XL in this country. We own them all. We have had to buy them all and stock them up. We continue to fulfill like mad here.
And, of course, it all stems from the Nike decision to not sell their Betsy Ross shoes that they announced over the Fourth of July weekend because Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like the flag, because Colin Kaepernick is offended by the first American flag that Betsy Ross made. Well, Betsy Ross never did anything to anybody. We don’t sit here and take kindly to the country being needlessly, erroneously criticized and ripped to shreds, or our founders or Betsy Ross or the great American flag. And so this started as a way for people to push back. And it has mushroomed and ballooned.
We could not be happier to announce that three million dollars — folks, this is a $27 item that enough of them have been sold that we can send $3 million and counting to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. I don’t know how to accurately characterize — every day we have the same reaction. We had multiple, multiple thousands of orders that piled in over the weekend without a single mention of it anywhere, other than its constant presence at my website at RushLimbaugh.com, which again reminds me of all of the knockoffs.
Now, we’re trying to get them to cease and desist as quickly as we can. And most of them are being cooperative. Some of them aren’t, but most of them are. But it still remains the same. The only place to get the authentic Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt is at my website, RushLimbaugh.com. When you get there, go to the “Store” tab. Just find a link on the website home page for the store. And you’ll be taken right there. That is the only place where your purchase of the shirt ends up benefiting the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.
There are no other legitimate sales websites or locations, only ours is legit. But, you know, what happens, you really can’t blame people. They go to Google, and they search it, and Google is sending them to these knockoff places. Google search is returning a bunch of these knockoff places, which are doing their best to make themselves look like RushLimbaugh.com, with either the link, or the title of their store, or what have you. But if you pay very close attention to any search return that Google gets or provides, if you take a look at the actual URL you’ll find that you’re not being sent to RushLimbaugh.com. Most people don’t take the time. They just see the blue link, they click on it, they think the first one returned would be RushLimbaugh.com. So they hit on it and go.
So we’re continuing with this. We have potential additional plans here as this continues to build and build and build. And it is remarkable. I said on Fox today that if the charity beneficiary here happened to be a left-wing charity, I would be all over the Drive-By Media. This effort would be acknowledged for the size and the scope and the compassion and the love that it is all over Drive-By Media.
They are totally ignoring this. By the way, that’s not disappointing ’cause I’m not surprised. I didn’t expect — and we’re not doing it for that anyway. But you can read Page Six in the New York Post and you can see that some left-wing entertainer took his staff to lunch for Christmas. And it’ll make a big story and the guy will be getting all kinds of publicity of what a great boss he is, how much compassion he’s got because he took 50 employees to lunch and picked up the bill.
So if you’re on the left, if you’re a good liberal in standing and you do this kind of stuff — and it’s minuscule compared to this — then they call attention to it. It’s an example of the bifurcated culture that we have and the bifurcated media. But more importantly, note that an effort to raise awareness for a 9/11-related charity and an effort that promotes against an all-out assault, the original American flag and its designer, Betsy Ross, gets ignored by United States mainstream media.
So $3 million to the charity announced today and counting. You know, I’ll be honest. Every time we announce a new number, I figure that’s gonna be it. When we got to a million, that was way beyond our expectations. We had no idea. We thought 50,000 shirts, honestly. That was the original goal. And it just kept going and going and going and once we got to a million-dollar donation, it can’t get much more than this. Then the next couple days it was a million and a half, then another week later it’s two million, today now it’s three.
We started July 8th. This is the 29th. So it’s three weeks to the day, 21 days, $3 million raised for charity. That’s the net, folks, that’s not the gross. The gross, I’m not giving you the gross. You would not believe the gross number here. We do have expenses. The shirts have a wholesale cost. We have a fulfillment staff that’s working about 18 hours a day, it’s about 30 to 40 people. And they’re working weekends.
If you’re wondering where your shirt is, be patient. We are working as quickly as we can to get ’em out. And everybody involved in this, the vendor has broomed everything else he’s printing on shirts and his presses are running our shirt exclusively. We get deliveries in the thousands every day to try to keep up with this.
So a heartfelt thanks. Again, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation will be able to retire some more mortgages of fallen heroes. That will make local news wherever that happens, and when that local news is made the local media will claim it came from a donation from Rush Limbaugh. But it’s not a donation from me. It’s a donation from all of you. And we had a caller last week saying: The reason they’re saying it’s a donation from you is ’cause they don’t want to credit your audience. They don’t want to credit your audience as being decent Americans. Your audience is like every other right-wing audience they characterize as a bunch of dumb, lug head bigots and homophobes and so forth.
And so they don’t want to portray it as having come from you. But just so everybody knows, we’re just a pass-through here for your T-shirt purchase ending up at Tunnel to Towers. The shirt itself is a classic. It looks like a T-shirt, doesn’t feel like one. After you wash it 10 times, it looks like it’s brand-new. Looks like it’s been dry cleaned. We found this great T-shirt material, fabric and so forth. And, as I say, there’s a finite supply until the people that make this shirt start manufacturing some blank ones.
As I say, we purchased every XL in this shirt, blank. We’ve got ’em sitting in the warehouse ready. Well, they’re actually up at the vendor. They’re waiting to be printed. But every darn one of them. So that’s that. I wanted to start and thank everybody again and let you in on just the overwhelming success that this is, all made possible by you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: If you’re just joining us today, a monumental achievement. We have now raised $3 million for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, something that started with, well — if we had sold 50,000 T-shirts, that would have been, to us, that would have been through the roof. Well, we’re over seven times that amount now, and we have upped the donation, announced it today, $3 million in three weeks.
That’s a net number, folks. The proceeds of the sale of these shirts, a $27 item, in three weeks has generated a donation to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation for $3 million. And there’s no sign it’s stopping. We had a multiple thousand order weekend with no mentions. We’ve had over 12,000 orders so far — probably it’s more than that. That’s old news. We’ve purchased every existing, of this particular design and fabric shirt, we now have every XL in the country.
The vendor is practically running 24/7 to get the shirts printed. We’re working 18 hours a day fulfilling orders and getting them out. And, you know, we have to spend time contacting people, they put their address on one line, the address is wrong, we have to get back in touch with them. It’s a monumental project. It is filled with so much love and excitement however that this has gone the way — the Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt at RushLimbaugh.com. Just find the “Store” tab. Everything is explained there.
Beware of the knockoffs. We found one over the weekend that literally had pirated graphics and photos from my website and was using them. My graphics of logos and so forth. And they basically attempted to construct a totally fake website. Google was sending people there. And people that tried to buy a shirt at that knockoff bootleg site were being charged $1,500 on their credit card.
Now, we’ve moved in to shut ’em down. One of the problems is people going to Google and they’re searching “Rush Limbaugh, Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt,” and Google is returning a bunch of bootlegs first in their search results. You gotta be real careful here, folks. There’s only one legitimate place to get the only legitimate shirt that’s gonna result in the proceeds going to Tunnel to Towers Foundation. That is my store at RushLimbaugh.com. If you go to the RushLimbaugh.com, you’ll find the “Store” tab at the top of the home page and just click on that.
I don’t want to jump the gun on anything here, but we’re working on additional ideas if this demand keeps up, and there’s no sign that it’s slowing down. It’s such a wonderful thing to be part of. It’s so great to know so many people in this audience are so responsive. But we’ve known this over the years. We’ve seen it in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. We’ve seen it for so many different charitable endeavors, and it’s just a great thing how all of you come through in this audience. It never, ever, has not been the case.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Sue in Glendale, Arizona. It’s great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you so much. Proud to have contributed to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation dittos via the Betsy Ross T-shirt.
RUSH: God bless you. Thank you so much. I’m glad you got to share the experience.
CALLER: I was wearing my shirt this weekend and ran into my congresswoman in a restaurant. I complimented her on what she did at the committee hearings the other day.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: She’s Debbie Lesko from Arizona.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, she was good.
CALLER: She really kicked butt. And she thanked me very graciously and then looked at my flag T-shirt and said, “What is this?” I said, “Obviously, I’m a conservative.” And she said something kinda like, “Well, good for you.” She was gracious. And, as she left the restaurant she stopped at my table and said, “It was a pleasure meeting you.” It just totally made my day. And my husband was wary about me wearing that out in public because of, you know, the anti-Trump stuff and all that, but I figured that I would counter with “I’m tired of the Democrats’ War on Women –”
RUSH: Good for you. Hey, it’s pretty brave to wave something out there with my signature right there smack-dab on the front of it.
CALLER: Exactly. But I figured the Democrats are the ones who are attacking Betsy Ross and the other founding women of this country, even though these women knew they would not be able to vote. But they were still for breaking with Britain. They wanted independence.
RUSH: It’s great to hear from you, and I’m glad that you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have bought one of those T-shirts. By the way, I’ve got very few seconds here, but it’s a really cool shirt. The shirt itself, forget the design, I’m just talking about the quality, the fabric of that shirt is to die for, am I right?
REPORTER: Yes. I hate polyester, but this is like a microfiber.
RUSH: Microfiber is right, and it’s gonna look just as great after you’ve washed it 10 or 15 times as it does now. Anyway, Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt at RushLimbaugh.com. We’ve upped the donation to the charity, Tunnel to Towers, today to $3 million. Folks, gotta take a break. Be right back.