RUSH: This is Gainesville, Florida, and Terry. Great to have you. Glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Rush, good to hear from you. Thank you for taking my call. There’s a lot of talk about reform on law enforcement when the true reform should actually be on the media. The media has a lot of power when it comes to controlling the emotions of the American people.

What happened to George Floyd was wrong. Now, I’m 17 years in law enforcement, but I feel if the media had covered George Floyd’s incident differently, saying that law enforcement using too much force on American people and just included other people that died like Tony Timpa out of Texas, none of this stuff would have happened.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know. In the first place, how are you gonna change the media? How are you gonna punish them for being too emotional?

CALLER: I — I don’t know. That’s beyond me. But I just feel that the media is very corrupt, and they control the way that the American people (garbled) those that rely on it.

RUSH: You’re right. And I’ll tell you, there’s something else that you have swerved into the truth on. I have learned very, very painfully over the course of the many years of doing this program that it is much easier to reinforce or change anybody’s opinion on anything if you do it via their emotions — and I don’t.

I try to change people’s minds with the power of reason, thinking, intellect. Most people are never gonna be open to that. But if you can reach their emotions, you can change their minds. It’s human nature, in a sense. And the media and a bunch of people on the left understand it. They know exactly how to tweak people’s emotions, particularly guilt — a big one. So let me ask you. Are you still there, Terry?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: If they would have done what differently where George Floyd’s concerned, you think it might have been different? Done what differently?

CALLER: If… Because they focused on it being a race thing. And law enforcement, you know, there are more people that have died the same exact way that George Floyd died that were other races, and they didn’t bring any attention to that. I feel that, you know, if they had said that law enforcement, there is people that use too much force — and that’s what this was, is a excessive use of force and there’s no evidence to prove that it was a race issue, which has caused all this disruption —

RUSH: Exactly my point. You don’t need the evidence. You just need to connect with people’s emotions. And that’s exactly what they did. And by the time… Look, the Floyd example may not be the best because I don’t think anybody watching that for eight minutes can be persuaded of anything about it other than what they originally see.

White cop.

Black victim.

No reason for this guy to be dead.

Whether it was racist or not, when the media comes in, there’s already a movement on to play the race card and to divide the country by race. That fit perfectly. I’m like you. I don’t think there was a racial component to it at all, from the cop’s standpoint. I think there was of a bunch of other stuff that’s of reprobate status, but I don’t think it was primarily racist.

It doesn’t matter what I think. Most people who saw it will conclude that it was ’cause the cop was white, the victim was black, and they “know,” quote-unquote, “that the cops are murdering black people every day.” You remember the police union guy…? (They’re not. Don’t misunderstand.) Remember the police union guy in New York who blew up?

He was speaking to the media with some of his membership standing behind him, and he said that he had encountered a thing the other day where young African-American kids are being taught that every day a white cop kills a black kid on the way home from school. They’re taught this. They’re taught that by their parents or in school. He heard about it, and he blew up.

He grabbed his badge, and he held it up, and he said (summarized), “This shield has not been discolored or disflavored by anything that happened in Minneapolis. That simply is not true! That does not happen. It does not happen. African-American kids are not killed every day on the way home from school by white cops.” Well, you ought to see what a bunch of…

Well, you ought to see what a bunch of Islamists believe the Jews do. The same kind of crap is taught about Jews in the Middle East, as, “Every day a black kid is murdered by a white cop on the way home from school.” It’s absurd, but it makes an emotional connection — and if that emotional connection confirms an emotion somebody’s already feeling, then your work is done. You have a convert.

Who’s next? I appreciate the call, Terry. Where we headed next? Steven, looks like, in Los Angeles. Great to question you, and you’re next. Glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m glad I waited too. Listened to you for 28 years. I’m pulling for you. I think you’re sounding great. I think I last spoke to you in 2005.

RUSH: Well, that’s 15 years ago. It seems like yesterday, but it’s 15 years ago.

CALLER: It does seem like yesterday — and so does 1992, actually.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Yeah, just speaking as an LGBTQ person, I’m in favor of the decision. I sort of see it from two ways, sort of an emotional way, as you were talking about, and also from a rational perspective, as far as the law is concerned. It almost seems to be that there’s kind of a lowest — I don’t want to say lowest common denominator, but basically when you’re using pure reason and you say, “Okay, well, is sex and sexual orientation the same thing,” I think that you have to concede that — well, say, for example, you say, well, somebody can have a husband. Another person can’t have a husband. What sex are they? There you have sex coming in to play. Now, I know a lot of people — you know, on the emotional side, if people say, “Well, that just doesn’t seem right, you know, that doesn’t seem -” again on the emotional side, though, there are individuals that have had —

RUSH: That is not what this is about. And, see, that is the point. You are satisfied with it because you agree with it, because it makes some kind of emotional or intellectual connection with you. But that’s not what the case is about. What the case is about is can you take a law passed in 1964 and throw a bunch of things in it that were not in it? Can you include a bunch of behaviors that were not in the law because nobody knew they existed, there was not a political movement based around them.

The Civil Rights Act and Title VII of it in 1964 was about a lot of things; but it wasn’t about gay marriage; it wasn’t about transgenderism; it wasn’t about LGBTQ; it wasn’t about any of it ’cause that didn’t exist. So the question is can a justice of United States Supreme Court just decide to take what is considered to be the norm in the American life in 2020 and just by his own fiat toss it into a law written in 1964 that never even contemplated it? And the answer is “no.” You’ve gotta go through some real hoops to do that.

Now, Justice Scalia came up with a term called textualism. It’s a tough thing to define. And what this case is using is supposedly his definition of textualism to make this legal. And it’s not. They’re bastardizing what Scalia came to know as and popularize as textualism. Adding text to a law that never contemplated it.

Do you realize the precedent this sets? You go back to any law from any prior decade or three decades ago, if you want to include lesbians, gays, transgenders, whatever, in civil rights law, then let’s see the legislation, let’s have it debated, let’s have it voted on, let’s have everything necessary to make that the law. But judges just inventing it and tossing it into pre-existing law, that’s why everybody — this is what conservative justices do not do, except they did. This is what conservative justices do not even contemplate doing, except that they did.

And the one thing for people thinking that, well, you know what? This could help, like you said, the Republican big tent cause, this is gonna convert some LGBTQ people to vote Republican? That’s the whole point. It isn’t. This isn’t gonna change their minds. They’re gonna be sitting there saying, man, are they afraid of us. Holy cow. All we had to do is go harass Kavanaugh, and look what happened. This expanding, giving the left 50%, 70% of what they want has never resulted in the left being converted to conservatism. It just doesn’t happen. And it ought not be the objective.

Beating these people is the objective, not having them join it. What do we have in common with them anyway? That’s the big problem. There isn’t a single organizing principle around which every American can agree, that we are a riven society. There isn’t a single thing that units us. There was in World War II. There was during Vietnam. There isn’t anything. And it’s because the American left today is of no desire to have any part of what we consider important to be a factor in their political affairs or cultural.