JASON: It’s my honor to be your guide today as we get the wit and wisdom of El Rushbo throughout the program and a very, very big problem in Minnesota. You know, there is one advantage in Minnesota. You get to see all sorts of things. For instance, if you live in our great state and you happen to run into a robbery in progress at your local Walmart, a protest may just break out.

You never know. It’s a little bit like John Boehner and his new book. You hear that? The former beleaguered Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has got a new book out called On the House: A Washington Memoir. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine this morning about this and he’s very upset because Boehner is going on all these liberal shows, which is something Democrats rarely do.

But Republicans love to validate their enemies. He’s going on these liberal shows, and my buddy goes, “Hey, what is with this guy? He’s always so bitter. He sees the glass half empty,” and I had to correct him. I said, “No, no, no. If you know John Boehner like I know John Boehner, the glass is pretty much half full all the time, if you get my drift. I’m just saying.”

1-800-282-2882.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. And here we are a year later, nearly, from the George Floyd situation, and here we go again. Protests all over Minnesota yesterday and all over the country. USA Today reports that 40 arrests were made last night in Brooklyn Center here, a suburb just outside of Minneapolis — it’s really part of Minneapolis; it’s part of that “urban core,” if you will — and then all over the country.

I mean, you’ve got it in LA, in New York, and they’re all seeing another crisis, and they do not want to let it go to waste. This is our chance to finish off the police once and for all. You know, we tried to defund them. We tried to reimagine them. We tried to declare that anyone who calls a policeman or woman for help is engaged in “white privilege.”

We did everything we could, but it just wasn’t quite enough. It seems that people still want the police. In fact, my old friend Dr. John Lott as well as Heather Mac Donald — people that have actually looked into the criminal justice statistics — show that black folks are nine percentage points more likely to call the police, more likely to report violent crimes committed against them to the police than white folks.

I bet you never heard that on CNN or MSNBC, right? Because the narrative must continue, and the narrative in this latest case is simply this: The police are gunning for minorities. I mean, it’s not as though they’re putting their lives at risk to protect minority communities. No, no, no, no. That’s not it, right? Well, of course that’s it.

The easiest thing for a cop to do is not police, and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. If you tell policemen and women that they can’t chase a suspect if the suspect tries to get away in a car — they can’t restrain a grown adult who is high on drugs, can’t restrain them, can’t do what you’re trained do in some cases — then they won’t.

And then there will be no policing and people will be able to do exactly what they want, and we will have a true Wild West scenario, something that gun control advocates always said would happen if people defended themselves. How ironic. The people that want the Wild West scenario are the liberal gun control left because they live in gated communities.

They’ve got security guards. What do they care if they put you at risk? So the narrative continues here, and it’s so distressing because it’s putting the country at risk. And the people who are putting the country at risk, quite frankly, aren’t the protesters. They’re not even the criminals, in many cases. It is the political leaders who keep lying to the American people and the media folks who keep regurgitating the lies.

Here you have the Brooklyn Center city manager fired last evening because he disagreed with the liberal mayor’s assertion that the police officer, a lady — and anyone who criticizes this police officer is obviously misogynist, sexist, hates women. Let’s just get that right out there right now. If you dare to criticize this female officer, by definition, you are a sexist.

That’s exactly the way the left operates. So this woman mistakenly grabs her gun instead of the Taser — so she says, so the police department says — and the city manager says (summarized), “I give her the benefit of the doubt. You can say it was a mistake, you can say it was bad training, you can say it was incompetence, you can say anything else. But it’s not prime fascia evidence of racism.

“The guy had an outstanding warrant. They found expired tags. He had an outstanding warrant. They did their job. They made a mistake. So why would you fire this police officer before the facts are in?” For that, the Brooklyn Center city manager was canceled. He was fired. This is how it operates in Minnesota. This is Minnesota’s gift to the United States.

What we’re seeing here is lawlessness on one side and a lockdown, covid restriction for law-abiding on the other. It is total, absolute control. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there’s few people more corrupt than the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, who when he refused to protect the citizens of Minneapolis a year ago said, “It was my decision not to engage.”

That meant not to quell the riots. There was Tim Walz: “Not to engage.” Well, he was at it again yesterday when he said “another black life lost at the hands of law enforcement.” Why would anybody want to be a cop, seriously? Why would anybody want to do this? So now here’s his latest. If you want to know what the hell’s wrong with Minnesota, listen to Governor Tim Walz.

WALZ: The next thing that we can do is, we can stop pretending that this is just the natural order of the universe and things happen this way. I’m gonna demand that the legislature finally hold some hearings on some of these reforms, as I said, that have passed in other states and have proven to make a difference — things that we know that would reduce the chance of a routine traffic stop escalating into a loss of life. There are things that can be done. There are proposals that are out there. There’s proven remedies that can be put into place.

JASON: You mean like the Tim Scott police reform bill that would have had restraints on some of these chokeholds (not that a chokehold was in play yesterday), that would have collected data on policing in urban communities? It would have done everything that they want except one thing: Hold policemen and women personally liable. That’s what Walz wants to do, and the anti-police left.

They want to make certain that a cop can not only be prosecuted but then all of their assets taken away, their pension, their house, everything else. It’s called undoing qualified immunity. Now, this, they say, is only fair, right? How about $27 million for the family of George Floyd? You telling me that’s not enough? You gotta go after the cops’ personal assets too?

But none of it compares to St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter. Now, this guy’s a real hack as well. Trust me. I’ve had to work with him (or tried). It didn’t work too well because he’s just a charlatan, and Carter — talk about fanning the flames — is actually calling for “street vengeance” in the wake of this! I remember I had a staffer when was running for the Senate.

This was after I served in the House when I was running for the Senate last year. I had a staffer who lived in St. Paul during the riots. St. Paul, now, that’s a ways from Minneapolis, folks. That staffer had to be evacuated, the riots were so out of control in St. Paul — and Melvin Carter didn’t do jack. Here’s what he said, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, yesterday.

CARTER: We have to ask ourselves, “Why? How does this keep happening over and over again in America, in the world, in Minnesota?” We have to know that the First Law of Motion is that object in motion will remain in motion until some force stops it from happening, and so when we recognize this strong, horrific trend that keeps happening over and over and over again.

We have to know that Daunte Wright will not be the last name, will not be the last hashtag on this list until and unless we take decisive and urgent action to ensure that he is. We’re watching. The world is watching the Chauvin trial. The world will watch this process, and the world will ask if there’s justice. But let me tell you, someone landing in jail for their deaths may be a starting point, but it’s not justice.

JASON: What in the hell does that threat mean? Are you kidding me? (impression) “We’re watching the Chauvin trial. If we don’t get a total, 100% guilty, death penalty, you name it, there will be more bloodshed, more riots. Oh, and, by the way, we can send these people to jail, life imprisonment. But that won’t be justice enough!” What, do you want somebody to knock ’em off in jail?

Is that it, Melvin? Let me tell you about the First Law of Motion. The First Law of Motion is if a cop stops you don’t get in your car and drive away. That’s the First Law of Motion. This is out of control! These people aren’t interested in letting the wheels of justice work.

They want mob rule, and they want it now, even though the Washington Post’s own database shows that police had fatally shot 14 unarmed black victims as well as 25 unarmed whites in 2019. What, a black person gets shot every day? 14 in 2019. Another thing the media won’t tell you. Rush commented on this not long ago, and here’s what he had to say.

RUSH: In Liberalville, in America today, the cops are guilty, the cops are the problem — just like in American foreign policy, the United States is the problem, not the solution. The cops are the problem; they’re not the solution. Black Lives Matter exists on the premise that cops are white racist pigs murdering random, innocent African-Americans. And there isn’t a liberal politician in this country that doesn’t join that refrain.

But if you understand liberalism, if you just listen to these people. What more do you have to hear them go after all these so-called murdering cops who randomly murder innocent African-Americans, it’s not gonna take long if there’s no pushback to that before citizens are gonna get the idea that the cops are the problem and that the people that run cities and states are also gonna see the cops as a problem.

You have your average New York City crime ridden neighborhood, you throw a cop in there, and that’s what destabilizes the neighborhood as far as De Blasio and people who think like him. Leave the neighborhood alone. Those people have their own culture, they have their own life, the crime they’re committing against each other, screw you.

De Blasio even talks about raising his son to be afraid of the cops. And he’s the mayor. His wife is African-American, so his son is a person of color, and he often tells people how he has to talk to his kid to be on the lookout for the cops, be on the lookout for the people that might intend him harm. They spread this myth. They spread this. They amplify it. They make it much worse than it ever is. So, to me, it’s really sad. These people, I’ll tell you, their jobs are tough enough. Law enforcement, military, they’re jobs are tough enough without people that employ them or are their bosses coming along and portraying them as the problem.

JASON: All right. Stick around, gang. More coming right up.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JASON: Welcome back. You have riots, will travel. I am talk show host formerly known as Congressman Jason Lewis. We are broadcasting live from Minnesota (ironically enough on this day), filling in for the great Rush Limbaugh on the Rush Limbaugh program. We’re all filling in for Rush these days as we continue with the great memories from El Rushbo and playing the clips and the sound bites.

The wit and wisdom of Rush is more applicable today than almost at any time because everything he said… This is the thing about society and politics: There really are no new issues. There are just different carnations of the same things: Freedom versus tyranny, law and order versus chaos without law and order. You know, nothing ever changes, and that’s why all these clips we play from Rush are so on point, as they say.

In Minnesota right now, that sort of wisdom is needed because I will tell you — and politicians (even ex-politicians) aren’t supposed to say this, but I will tell you — I think the Twin Cities are lost. In the span of a term in the House and then a statewide campaign for the U.S. Senate last year, I must have talked to more movers and shakers than most people do in a lifetime in Minnesota.

I did it in a couple of years, and I cannot tell you — and it really doesn’t matter, folks. That’s why Minnesota is a microcosm of the country. It doesn’t matter whether it’s New York or LA. Why do you think home prices are skyrocketing in Arizona and Florida and Texas? People are leaving the urban core that have been destroyed by liberalism in record numbers, and the people I’ve spoken with over the last few years are leaving in record number.

They may have a home in Naples in the winter. Now it’s their permanent home. The exodus from the urban core is why you have this political bifurcation between the rural Republican America and the urban core socialist that’s getting ever more radical, because the only people left are people who are absolutely nuts. We’ve got politicians in Minnesota who are living proof we haven’t won the War on Drugs.

This place is going bonkers. The question is, “Will the whole state go?” Because the urban core is gone. And it was gone basically because of two fundamental things that have happened in the last 50 years. One, LBJ’s Great Society and the welfare magnet that Minneapolis and St. Paul have become which has destroyed the incentive to work, to stay together as families, to obey the law.

And, two, thanks to Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities — the VOLAGs, as they are called. These are the agencies that settle refugees. Minnesota decided to take unlimited numbers of refugees without regard to assimilation. The net effect of these two things — $25 trillion in welfare nationwide over the last 50 years — resulted in what?

Not one drop in the poverty rate and an illegitimacy rate that’s 80% in the minority community and 40% for everyone. It has demonstrably failed. That has devastated the urban core in America. You add in the massive numbers of illegal as well as legal refugees that have changed the complexion of entire nation. You want to know why Ilhan Omar is the representative from Minnesota? I just told you, and it’s a place my mother — who was born in north Minneapolis — would not recognize.

Rush commented on this, and he hit it spot-on.

RUSH: Take a look at what Democrat social programs have done. Take a look at havoc and the destruction among the people they have targeted as “beneficiaries.” Don’t take it from me. Take it from several black Americans.

American welfare plans, the welfare state has largely destroyed the black family. There’s nothing wrong with the black culture. It’s the fact that the Democrat Party has sought to make them entirely dependent, and so they became de facto fathers, to mothers with no husbands around. That didn’t matter. The government will provide what the father should be, and the father was content to run around and not have to accept the responsibility.

This happens, by the way, throughout all races. But this is something that the Democrat legislation actually brought about, and it’s headed for all of us now because they don’t care what pain and suffering they’ve caused poor black people in this country. All they care about is that they are forever dependent on them. There’s not love in that and there’s no compassion in that. It’s the exact opposite. There is contempt and resentment and a total lack of caring about their general welfare.

And it’s not just minority communities. It’s all of us who are now targeted in much the same way, and that’s why we fear. We fear for the country. We fear for the people. You know, I’ve said it throughout my entire career: We conservatives love people. We want the best for everybody! We want a country where anybody who wants to be the best they can be can go for it. We don’t want a country where people think that there’s no hope, that there’s no chance, that the only thing going for them is maybe somebody in government cares about them. That is reprehensible to us. That is an attack on human dignity and humanity itself, under the guise of compassion.

JASON: It sure is, Rush, and that’s exactly what’s happened in the state of Minnesota, primarily Minneapolis and St. Paul. But I could be talking about Orange County. I could be talking about New York City, Detroit. It doesn’t matter. We devastated the inner city — the left has — deliberately.

You know what no one’s asking, especially in the despicable press these days? It is why is there so much crime in these areas? Why are police always there? They go where the crime is. What has happened to these neighborhoods? Why don’t we ask that question? Why is this happening there? We just answered it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JASON: You know, my old buddy Dr. John Lott, who was… Well, that’s his job. He was on the — what was it — U.S. sentencing commission, I think, for a couple of years, and he’s been a criminologist, statistician looking at this stuff. He and Heather Mac Donald have put together a plethora of data on policing in urban America and whether or not it’s discriminatory, and the data simply isn’t there.

I’m not trying to reach into the mind of anybody, but I can just tell you the data is not there. I mentioned this earlier, and the people I toured after the riots last year in my run for the Senate, they want more policing in the urban areas, in the dangerous areas, in north and south Minneapolis, or in Watts, or in Bedford-Stuy, wherever it may be.

They want more, not less. Black folks are nine percentage points more likely to report a crime. And, as I mentioned, the Washington Post’s own database showed 14 unarmed black victims in 2019 fatally shot by police, 25 unarmed whites fatally shot. A bit disproportionate, but nowhere near this crisis they’re making it out to be.

But that hasn’t stopped our old friend — our friend who’s got this penchant for MF-ers, Rashida Tlaib — in Michigan. What has gone on in Michigan? The water crisis in Flint sort of spread and throughout the whole state that they would elect a Tlaib or this out of control, dictatorial governor? Here’s what Tlaib tweets about this incident this week.

“It wasn’t an accident. Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist. Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence. Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence. I am done with those who condone government funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.” She’s crazy.

Rush talked with Heather Mac Donald on this sort of policing issue a while ago — and this quote, you’ve got to listen to.

RUSH: “The War on Cops,” which will help you find it, that’s really all you need. The full title is “How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everybody Less Safe.” I don’t want to steal your thunder, but I want to review some of the things that you said yesterday. I went back to the transcript of the interview. Let me run through some of these things before you elaborate.

You said you could end all police shootings tomorrow, both lethal and nonlethal and justified and unjustified, and it would have a negligible effect on the astronomical rate at which blacks die by shootings. And then there was this: The Justice Department under Obama came out with a report in March of 2015, that found that black and Hispanic officers were actually far more likely to shoot unarmed black suspects under what’s known as threat misperception. That is the false belief that the suspect is armed. That happens much more than with white officers, who are less likely to engage in that type of threat misperception.

Then there was a study by the New York Police Department. The former acting director of the National Institute of Justice found that black officers in the New York Police Department were 3.3 times more likely to use their guns at shooting scenes than white officers. So, A, officers are more hesitant about shooting armed black suspects than armed white suspects to the point where now there’s a risk that officers are hesitating so long that they may put their own lives at risk. The Black Lives Matter, that is all about white officers attacking blacks, is simply not true. That’s the bottom line here. Everything everybody believes isn’t true.

MAC DONALD: Well, Rush, President Obama lied to the nation last night, and he embraced the Black Lives Matter myth that there is a racist war by white officers against black civilians in this country. And we see the results. In fact, there’s no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that Black Lives Matter than the police. Proactive policing has saved tens of thousands of minority lives since the mid-1990s.

RUSH: The sickening thing to me about this, nobody likes seeing this. My contention is that we have a political party that’s seeking to benefit from all of this. A political party, the Democrats, are seeking to advance their agenda with every one of these unfortunate incidents. And if that is the case it isn’t going to stop.

MAC DONALD: Well, it’s politics and it’s also ideology. There’s an ideology that’s taken hold of universities, that has taken hold of elite establishments, that is committed to the myth of endemic white racism. And you’re right, there have been bad shootings, police shootings. The Walter Scott shooting in North Charleston was very bad. The Laquan McDonald shooting in Chicago. These were appalling incidents of police negligence and likely criminality. But those are not representative of this nation’s police forces. They are more professional than ever before and they are dedicated to saving black lives.

RUSH: Heather, let me stop you there because these are assertions that you’re making that you have backed up with research. You’re not just pontificating here off the cuff. By the way, Heather Mac Donald’s our guest here, The War on Cops is her new book. Everything you just said has been backed up by research you conducted.

MAC DONALD: Well, let’s look at some of the numbers. I know numbers are sometimes tough over the radio, but a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are the results of police killings than black homicide deaths. That is, 12 percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers. Four percent of all blacks, homicide victims, are killed by police officers. So if we’re going to have an Anti-Cop Lives Matter movement it would make more sense to call it White and Hispanic Lives Matter.

The fact is that over 6,000 blacks die of homicide each year. That is more than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population. And the reason they are dying of homicide at a rate six times higher than whites and Hispanics combined is because they commit homicide at eight times the rate higher than whites and Hispanics combined. And that type of crime disparity means that when the police are trying to save lives, they are in minority neighborhoods confronting people engaged in drive-by shootings, killing children.

RUSH: Heather, you’ve just alluded to something that’s highly politically incorrect. You’ve just given numbers, hard evidence, on what is called black-on-black crime. You’re not supposed to mention that during incidents like this because the only thing you’re supposed to talk about, Heather, is how vicious racist white cops are hunting down innocent black men in neighborhoods. That’s the narrative. That’s what inner-city youths are being taught. That’s what they’re being told.

MAC DONALD: Rush, here’s another very politically incorrect fact, and I don’t want to racialize policing, people should not. But if we’re going to talk about race and policing, let’s talk about cop killings. Over the last decade, black males made up 40 percent of all cop killers, even though they’re six percent of the population. It turns out, Rush, that a police officer is 18-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is likely to be killed by a police officer.

JASON: You know the interesting thing that Heather Mac Donald was talking with El Rushbo there mentioned was the massive amounts of black-on-black crime. And if you don’t think it’s true, just take a look at a weekend in Chicago, a weekend in north Minneapolis, south Minneapolis, a weekend in South Central. You know what I’m talking about.

Everybody knows it except the media will not report it. More blacks die in a weekend or a bad month in Chicago than at the hands of police. We know that to be true, but we don’t report on it because that’s not the narrative. Because that goes to the point I was asking earlier. Why are the police present in those communities, omnipresent?

Because they’re trying to do the job and police the communities to be safer. Rashida Tlaib says, “No more policing,” and that’s really what all of them are after from Omar to Walz, Tina Smith, Schumer, Pelosi, you name it. They just don’t like cops, and to say that means that you’re going to let the lawless run these neighborhoods, which is the most racist thing you could possibly do.

That’s what they’re really all about. So they blame the cops. It wasn’t… I talked about Melvin Carter, the mayor — the derelict mayor — of St. Paul which is becoming ever more dangerous under his tenure, and he was saying, “Well, it won’t be justice until somebody paid the ultimate price in prison.” It was a bizarre quote. Right?

I want you to listen to this. The Minneapolis police union chief — a guy by the name of Kroll — is a friend of mine. I don’t know him well, but we got to know each other through politics, right? He lives outsides the city. A BLM protest showed up at his house in this… It’s actually a way-out suburb, if you will, and here’s what the leader said.

Quote, “You think we give an expletive about burning this town down?” and he scared the neighbors on this guy’s street. The daughters of the governor, Tim Walz, and Representative Omar were tweeting out support for their quote, “revolutionary comrade.” The guy that yelled that, threatened to burn the town down where the Minneapolis union chief lives (here’s Minnesota for you) is now Representative John Thompson in the Minnesota statehouse.