RUSH: So, we are one day away from the strangest inauguration of a president in our lifetimes. That would be the inauguration of Joe “Plugs” Biden. There’s an interesting story here today from The Federalist: “Trump Set To Leave Office With A Higher Approval Rating Than George W. Bush.”

There was also a survey last week that told the story that Donald Trump’s the most admired man in the country, most admired man in the world, maybe. And everybody looks at that, how in the world can that be? Well, it can, and it was. And now he’s got a higher approval rating than George W. Bush. Trump is leaving office with an approval rating of about 40%. And, as you know, George W. Bush left office with just under 30% of Americans on his side.

What does this tell you? Well, it tells you a number of things, but I think that it is proof that fighting back, defending yourself and, more importantly, defending your base, works. It is a vastly more successful strategy, a vastly more successful way of using your power and maintaining it.

You know, it took the Drive-By Media seven years, almost the entirety of two Bush terms, to get his approval numbers down to the thirties. And they celebrated when they did. We’ve played for you over and over Wolf Blitzer practically having an orgasm multiple times an hour reporting “Breaking news! George W. Bush approval rating in the thirties.” They had been struggling to get there. And they finally pulled it off.

Now, you would think, based on the news coverage this week and just on the overall presentation of events, you would think that Donald Trump was leaving office with no approval, that everybody hates the guy’s guts. And it’s the exact opposite. Now they’re having to say, “Okay. Well, we’re dealing with a cult here.” The Drive-Bys are trying to draw a difference between the 75 million people that voted for Trump — they are a cult — and the oddball kookanons at QAnon.

They are doing everything they can to disparage and to render all of you Trump supporters as not worthy of any attention because you’re not normal. You’re a cult. And, therefore, their efforts to get you to abandon Trump are never gonna work because you’re cultists and it just doesn’t happen. The only way you’ll ever abandon Trump is if Trump abandons you. And they don’t expect that to happen.

Washington Post has a story. “QAnon Adherents Discussed Posing as National Guard to Try to Infiltrate Inauguration, According to FBI Intelligence Briefing.” Really? In a nutshell, we are supposed to believe because of the story in the Washington Post that there’s a real risk that right-wingers are pretending to be National Guard soldiers so they can disrupt Biden’s inauguration.

I told you this yesterday. I told you they’re impugning the National Guard and uniformed military personnel. They are 90% white. That means they’re 90% white supremacists. That means they vote for Trump. Only 20% voted for Biden. It could be a bloodbath, they say. It could be really, really bad. Now, bear in mind that if you believe, for example, that Antifa or Black Lives Matter infiltrates left-wing protests and makes them look horrible and so forth for the purposes of impugning the left, why, that is a conspiracy theory and you have no right to it.

You are engaging in Cucamonga conspiracy theories if you believe that Antifa or Black Lives Matter infiltrates. That’s a conspiracy theory that will get you banned from social media. If you suggested Antifa members might have posed as Trump supporters to disrupt the protests at the Capitol, ah, it’s unthinkable. But it’s the exact opposite if you point out that right wingers are infiltrating the National Guard. And the Washington Post story makes it sound like it’s very easy to do. Really so easy to do. And there could be a bloodbath. Could be horrible out there.

The acting defense secretary — yes, I said “acting.” Do you know why the word “acting” is necessary here? The “acting” defense secretary? Trump for the most part — exceptions, of course — Trump was never allowed to have any of his picks actually confirmed. Some of them were never confirmed. They were simply acting defense secretaries awaiting confirmation?

Anyway, this one, Christopher Miller, said yesterday that there is “no intelligence” whatsoever… “Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said Monday that there is no intelligence to suggest President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration is being targeted by any members of the National Guard.”

But nevertheless, he thought it was a good idea to vet all 25,000 of them anyway, which means poring through their online posts and probably any divorce records (you know, just to be safe). So even though we’ve been told by the Department of Defense that there is no evidence of any uprising within the National Guard, quote, “the Pentagon is deploying 750 active-duty soldiers to Washington for security for the inaugural…”

Which, that’s a long-standing… It’s a violation of a long-standing prohibition against using active duty troops to police American citizens. But they’re gonna do it because the threat is so real; the threat is so high. This is so bogus. It’s just a continuation of what they were doing yesterday. The character assassination of uniformed military personal — which they’ve deployed!

They have called ’em out, they have called ’em up, the National Guard. Now they are impugning and poisoning them. This is the Posse Comitatus Act forbids U.S. military involvement in domestic law enforcement. Now, here’s an observation for you, and I think this is very important to point out. The Washington establishment — the deep state (whatever you want to call it), the swamp (whatever you want to call ’em) — look what they can do.

They can build massive fences around an entire city — in this case, Washington. They can build massive fences, and they can have military personnel, armed military personnel deployed at a moment’s notice. They could have razor wire at the top of the fences that they are able to build over an entire metro area seemingly overnight.

They can bring in massive military and shut down anyone coming in to Washington, D.C. And they can do this in one week or less. But for decades, they failed to protect the southern border in similar fashion. They said it wasn’t possible. They said, “Walls do not work,” while they are in the process of building their own. “Nah, walls don’t work. Walls make our country look bad. We can’t do that!

“This is bad. We want immigrants. We want people flooding our country. We need these people to do jobs Americans won’t do.” We heard all of that. But they can when they want to! They can build a wall around a city size of Washington, D.C. They can deploy 26,000 military personnel, and then impugn them at the same time. But they couldn’t do anything similar to protect the nation at the southern border.

Trump showed that it can be done in two years. Trump showed that a lot of things they say can’t be done could be done, and they hate him for it. Donald Trump showed it. Do not discount the importance of this. Donald Trump… Whether he intended to or not, Donald Trump illustrated to the world that the Washington establishment is incompetent, whether on purpose or not.

Donald Trump did, in two years, construct a wall and other things — rebuilt an economy — on the premise of American greatness, America First. He did all of this, and he made all of the Washington swamp dwellers look either uninformed, incompetent, or incapable. “Well, that’s inexcusable, can’t have that. So we’ve gotta reverse that. Trump needs to be the one need to look like an abject idiot,” and this is what ticks ’em off the most.

He showed them up. He showed them up with a smile on his face every day. The mistake he made was thinking he was going to be rewarded for this. I don’t blame him. To this day, I find it literally outrageous that the concept of making America great again is controversial. I find it just stupefying that the whole notion of America First, Make America Great Again, is what animates a political party, the Democrat Party, into massive opposition.

The concept of putting America first, the concept of American greatness. There’s nothing like that to get them in gear to stop it. But Trump succeeded in it, and the rest of the world saw it. They saw that it is possible to do the Trump agenda. The only thing that stopped it was the pandemic. Trump showed the entire world that an outsider (and this is important) with no corrupt connections to lobbying groups or foreign countries can actually solve massive issues that have plagued this country for years.

It’s precisely that an outsider can do it, an outsider that’s not tied down, not weighted down with corrupt connections to lobbying firms, foreign countries, foreign companies, you name it. In other words, he showed them up every day of his administration. “Can’t have that! This cannot be allowed to stand. We can’t have a guy with orange hair (sputtering) who has never been in our club…

“We can’t have this guy come in and literally reverse every we have been doing for 40 years so now that things work. We can’t allow this, and so this guy’s gotta go and he’s a gotta be destroyed in the process.” Trump showed them, showed ’em up. He showed them to be the purposefully incompetent, lying bunch of corrupt people that they are in the Washington establishment. They met. They go on TV. They have investigations. They pass laws.

They campaign on the problems.But they have not fixed anything in the country in decades, under the premise that, “Well, it really can’t be fixed. They’re so permanently embedded the way they are, all we can do is manage whatever decline stems from all of this.” How about this? This is from TMZ, which is a gossip journalism site. Headline: “Biden’s Inauguration Will Use Pricey Security Company to Secure the Event.”

Folks, it’s getting harder and harder not to be a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not one. I really am not. But what are we faced with here? What’s the left telling us? We don’t have to figure this out. They’re telling us. They do not trust the police. They wanted to defund the police as quick as they could. They don’t trust the military! The military, the National Guard, could be an uprising against Biden.

Secret Service may be part of it. They don’t trust them. So, Plugs and his gang went out and hired a private firm — a private firm — ’cause they can’t trust the people who swear an oath under the Constitution to protect them. Can’t trust them. Now, where do you think the people that these people are hiring come from?

They’re ex-Secret Service.

They are ex-military.

They are ex-National Guard.

This story has been out since the middle of December. “Biden’s Inauguration Will Use Pricey Security Company to Secure the [Inauguration].” This is being done to show the military and others that Biden and his team mean business. Man, oh, man, folks. What they are doing to the image of some of the most wonderful, competent, great people in all of our country.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: What I was gonna say is, “Do you think these 26,000 troops, the National Guard,” and these stories that accompany their deployment…? “Do you think they are there really to protect Joe Biden?” You think that’s why they’re out there? They want you to think that. They want you to think that Donald Trump and his QAnon buddies and all of you cultists have rendered this country maybe unmanageable.

You’ve rendered this country into a state, a circumstance where it may not be able to be protected. That’s what they want you to think. They want you to think that this is all about how Trump and his people have destroyed the norms. But what the real purpose of this is… I mentioned this yesterday, how offensive this is.

They have 26,000 uniformed military personally are there to protect the U.S. Capitol, to protect the president-elect, to make sure that his inauguration happens peacefully and safely — because otherwise, it may not. This is also about the Democrats showing you they can. This is about the Democrats making sure that you get the picture.

They are in charge.

They run the military.

They are the people who now have all of these levers of power at their control, and they are going to use them whenever they see fit, to make sure you don’t get any ideas about not supporting them, about coming up with ways that might weaken their position.

You are supposed to remain docile. If you’re not docile, you’re supposed to get there. You are to believe there is nothing you can do, that you face an insurmountable show of force from the Democrat Party — and they are willing to use it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And look at this, folks. This is from a relatively new website, Epoch Times. Headline: “Federal Prisons Placed Under Full-On Lockdown ‘In Light of Current Events.'” So not only do we have the United States military in the form of 26,000 National Guard troops deployed at the U.S. Capitol to make sure that the inauguration, that the peaceful transition of power takes place, that somehow Donald Trump is thwarted in whatever effort he’s running to make sure Biden doesn’t get inaugurated. Right. That’s what we’re supposed to be really worried about.

And now they’re shutting down prisons. Full-on lockdown “in light of current events,” quote, unquote. I talked about this yesterday, too, but they just keep adding on to this. It makes no sense, unless the fact that all of the National Guard is in the swamp, makes them unable to respond to a prison riot. They’re locking down prisons ’cause they can’t stop a prison riot ’cause they got people normally deployed to that deployed in the Capitol grounds. And we have so many prison riots, you know — this is just — the lengths to which these people on the left are going to create all of these false images — and the false image basically is that you are unstable.

You pose an existential threat to this country. You could go off at any moment. You’ve got bombs secreted away. Who knows what you have planned. They can’t take any chances. They gotta deploy the National Guard. They gotta lock down prisons. They gotta do whatever they can because you Trump cultists, you are insane.

Now, the left is telegraphing that they’re afraid of prisoners, they’re afraid of the police, they’re afraid of National Guard, they are afraid of military and Secret Service, and Trump voters. And we might as well throw truth in there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: To the phones we start in Cleveland. It’s Lucy. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi! I love you, Rush, and I am a conservative and not a feminazi because of you.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. I’ll take that. That’s wonderful.

CALLER: Hey, I’ve seen many an inauguration. I’ve held my nose through some of them. But this is the first one that seems more like a dictatorship taking over and not an inauguration?

RUSH: Why? Why’s that feel to you? Seriously, does it feel that way because of the way people are talking about it or does it look that way?

CALLER: It looks that way. It is the fences, the troops. There is no… You cannot disagree. You cannot protest. I mean, four years ago, people were out in the street protesting as Donald Trump walked down the street. Now you’re allowed to be in a pen with only a hundred other people protesting all by yourself. I mean, that’s not democracy. That isn’t it.

RUSH: You know, there’s that word again, “democracy.” What does that mean to you? There’s no wrong answer. I’m fascinated by people who use the word. I’d like to know what it means to you. You say we’re democracy is being threatened or “that’s not democracy,” whatever the Biden team is doing. What does democracy mean to you? Again, no wrong answer. Don’t get flummoxed.

CALLER: I am the daughter of immigrants who came to this country for a better life, and America was it. America’s where you could have your opinion, where you could agree to disagree, where two opposing sides can come on to a mutual agreement. There is none of that anymore.

RUSH: That’s true. That is true. The left doesn’t care about your opinion anymore.

CALLER: No! No! They just want to crush you into the ground.

RUSH: Exactly.

CALLER: That’s it, and there’s no right way to talk to someone because what you say is crazy. I mean, you try to have a civil conversation with someone and it’s like, “Wow, you’re one of those left-wing kooks or right-wing kooks.” That’s what it is anymore.

RUSH: Yep. She’s right.

CALLER: It’s sad.

RUSH: The left is not interested in entering the arena of ideas. They’re not interested in the challenge of persuading people to agree with them. They’re gonna force you to. They’re gonna force you to agree with them — and if you don’t, then you’re gonna pay a price. But they’re not gonna waste their time trying to persuade you to change your mind.

They don’t think they should have to. If you don’t agree with them, you’re already in trouble, and there’s no way around it. So the democratic principles that people have thought undergird this country and support the Constitution are not worth much right now because there isn’t much democracy happening out there by design, and it’s on purpose.

CALLER: Amen, brother. Amen.

RUSH: I’m glad you called, Lucy. I really appreciate it. We had a caller in the program yesterday and I misjudged, remember, the time that I had with him. I had one minute less than I thought, and his question boiled down to its essence is: What is the stain on the GOP from the Capitol protest on January 6th?

He believes that it is a stain that’s gonna be there for a long time and that we’re gonna have a difficult time erasing it, that the idea that the Republicans, Trumpists, whatever, literally did that, literally engaged in all that is something that he thinks we’re gonna have big, big trouble overcoming. He wanted my thoughts on it. I just wanted you to know I haven’t forgot it; I’m working on it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Richard in Philadelphia. Welcome, sir. I’m glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Good afternoon. You know, your story about the private security agency that Biden is hiring for his security —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: He’s creating essentially a praetorian guard. By definition, a praetorian guard is a private security force that is loyal to the man, not to the country or the Constitution.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And this is a very dangerous step, because the Iranian guard is a praetorian guard of the ayatollah.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And who are his shock troops (unintelligible) a bunch of hoodlums who wear black hoods on their faces.

RUSH: Those would be balaclavas.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yeah. That would be they wear balaclavas.

CALLER: Yeah. I think this is a dangerous line that’s being crossed because now you have armed plus private security of the president. We already know that we can’t trust the National Guard. We can’t trust the Army. We can’t trust the —

RUSH: No. They might be in the back pocket of Trump. There might be some secret plan they’ve got. Yeah. They might have some secret plan here to defend Trump and take out Trump’s opponent. Oh, yeah, it could be really bad so Plugs had to go hire his own.

CALLER: Right. And now he controls the security apparatus, the intelligence apparatus of this country, the FBI. We know the FBI’s loyalties. We know the CIA’s loyalties. So what is next? I am very fearful what’s gonna happen —

RUSH: Wait a minute. You say that, but what are the CIA’s loyalties?

CALLER: Well, the CIA’s loyalties certainly wasn’t — look at John Brennan. Where was his loyalty? What was Clapper’s, where is his loyalty? Do you think his loyalty is to the Constitution? No way, Jose.

RUSH: Nope. And it wasn’t to the president. Nope. It wasn’t. It was —

CALLER: No.

RUSH: — to forces that were attempting to oust the president.

CALLER: And now we know that you can’t trust the National Guard, and they can’t trust the Secret Service —

RUSH: Well, now, wait. That’s what they want the result to be. I don’t know that they’ve achieved it. But that’s certainly what they want. Thanks for the call, Richard. Here’s what he’s talking about. TMZ, a gossip site — and I don’t mean to sound derogatory. I’m just saying the TMZ guys, this is Harvey Levin and his group, and they’re not a run-of-the-mill, standard Drive-By Media outlet. And they have a story, “Biden’s Inauguration Will Use Pricey Security Company to Secure His Inauguration.” Biden’s inauguration, pricey security company services show they mean business.

“TMZ obtained federal procurement docs that show the Secret Service has hired a company called Showcall Security Services to help out with the inauguration in January. The company scored a $7.5 million contract for the job … and it sounds like they’ll be worth every dime of taxpayer money. Turns out, a division of Showcall, named Checkmate, is what’ll be deployed here — and a glance at their specialties shows why they cost a pretty penny. Checkmate boasts ‘temporary deployable security assets’ that create ‘hardened perimeters,’ which can stop vehicle-borne threats and attempted weapons hand-offs of people who get past checkpoints.”

So you are supposed to conclude that the United States military isn’t enough. The National Guard, 26,000 of them, not enough. In order to maintain his own safety Biden had to go out and hire — remember when we hired private security to help out troops in Iraq? They wanted to put those people in jail. Remember? Now they’re hiring them.