RUSH: Here’s Royce in Milan, Illinois, is that right?
CALLER: Yes, it’s in Milan.
RUSH: Milan.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I’ve listened to you since I was a 16-year-old boy, a teenager during the ’91 Gulf War.
RUSH: Why, you only sound like you’re 25 now, so that’s —
CALLER: (laughing).
RUSH: (Laughing).
CALLER: Well, you’ve been an inspiration to me. I’m a pastor, and I have been for over 20 years now. But I want you to know my family and I are praying for you. I’m an avid fan and a student of yours and have been for almost 30 years.
RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. Thank you very, very much.
CALLER: I wanted to talk a little about this coronavirus situation. I understand that there’s some reality to it. I think that’s a given. But I also believe in my heart that it is one of the biggest, most elaborate lies ever told to the world. It is mind-boggling to me how it has crippled our world and crippled our nation and the economy, but I live in a state, Illinois, where our governor is continually moving the goalposts and he’s still saying that churches cannot have any more than 10 in their building.
RUSH: Yeah, J. B. Pritzker.
CALLER: Yes. And I live — well, I can see our local grocery store from my driveway right now, and I could look down there and see a hundred cars in the parking lot. And the marijuana shop is about a mile away, and there are lines of people out there, but I’m told that what I’m doing is nonessential and that I’m in violation of the governor’s order. And so I’ve been very upfront with our local police. I’ve told them whatever we were doing and when we were doing it, and I went down last week or two weeks ago, and I said, “We’re gonna start May the 3rd, and these are the safety precautions we’re putting in place.” And he said, “Technically you’re gonna in violation of the order,” and we started anyway. And I just refuse to live under that oppressiveness that says what they’re doing at the marijuana shop is essential but what I’m doing is not. What they’re doing at Lowe’s and Menard’s and our local —
RUSH: Wait a minute. Let me give you an easy way to understand this. It’s much easier for J. B. Pritzker to rule a bunch of people stoned out of their minds than it is to deal with a bunch of people focused on reality like your flock would be.
CALLER: I agree with that.
RUSH: Make no mistake. I’m not trying to be funny. I know I’m a naturally funny guy. I’m not trying to be funny. You threaten them. Religion threatens these people on the left. It’s why they do their best to stamp it out when they absolutely, authoritatively occupy and run a country.
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RUSH: Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Steven Mnuchin said yesterday that permanent economic damage will occur if this country does not reopen. Yeah, that’s about right. That’s exactly right.
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RUSH: Our last caller — a man of the cloth, a pastor, a minister, a preacher — was very upset that the governor of Illinois is perfectly fine with people showing up in whatever numbers they want to buy marijuana at the marijuana store, and yet limiting the number of people that can show up at his church. You know how bad it is?
The governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, says he will not permit a church to have more than 50 people in it until there’s a vaccine. There may never be a vaccine! You can’t have more than 50 people in a church. Of course, everybody knows you people that go to church, oh, you are human filth, right? You’re unsanitary, you’re dirty, you’re stinky, you’re smelly.
You show up infected with who knows whatever else before you even get to coronavirus. Plus, you’re a bunch of dumb, hayseed hicks to approved left-wingers like J. B. Pritzker. Now, our last caller might like to know this, because Bill Barr… I don’t think we say enough good about Bill Barr, the attorney general. They’re trying…
Do you know that NBC and Chuck Todd have not issued an online admission or apology for what they did to Bill Barr? They just sent out a little tweet saying that they’d made a mistake. There has been no official acknowledgment of what they did, knowingly taking a comment of his out of a quote to make it look like he’s a political hack, and then asking F. Chuck Todd’s guests to respond to Bill Barr that way.
Here’s a piece from the Power Line blog that the minister might be interested in hearing: “In response to the Wuhan coronavirus, Breea Clark, the Democrat mayor of Norman, Oklahoma, locked the city down. When she decided gradually to reopen Norman, the ban on churches and other houses of worship … as well as a general ban on ‘large gatherings’ remained in place,” just like J. B. Pritzker is doing in Illinois.
“Restaurants, retail stores, and salons were allowed to reopen if they adhered to social distancing policies, but regular religious services, even with social distancing, were barred. The Department of Justice advised” the mayor of Norman, Oklahoma, “that, by subjecting religious institutions to restrictions not applicable to secular operations, she risked running afoul of the First Amendment.
“Churches and other religious facilities must be granted the same right to operate as restaurants, retail stores, and salons, said Timothy Downing, the U.S. Attorney for the western district of Oklahoma. As a result of the DOJ’s intervention, Clark reopened the city’s churches in time for Mother’s Day. However, Clark continued to maintain that her original ban on church services was lawful. She said she was backing down only because she didn’t want to fight the feds.”
My point is that Barr is all over this. Barr goes to church. In fact, we learned during the Mueller investigation that Barr and Mueller and their wives go to Bible study. I wondered, “How the hell can Mueller go to church and Bible study and then be doing what he’s doing?” And the answer probably was, he wasn’t maybe even sure what he was doing.
He may be in Joe Biden Land, for all we know.
(interruption)
No, Mueller, I mean — and that’s heavy benefit-of-the-doubt stuff.
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RUSH: Secretary Mnuchin on Sunday said that reopening the economy amid this pandemic has to be done, because if we don’t, permanent economic damage will happen. He was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.
“I think there’s a considerable risk of not reopening. You’re talking about what would be permanent economic damage to the American public. We’re going to reopen in a very thoughtful way that gets people back to work safely, that has them social distance. People will be able to go into stores and some of them will have reservations.” By the way, Cuomo is even saying they’re gonna start opening some stores on the 15th, like three, four days from now.