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RUSH: University of South Florida is the next stop on the phones. Michael, thank you, great to have you with us, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. Can you hear?

RUSH: Yeah, I’m here.

CALLER: Sorry, I heard a funny noise over the phone. This is the first time I’ve called so I’m kind of nervous. I… I… Being on a college campus, you know, obviously you know the type of people I’ve been hanging out — I’ve been exposed to, you know? And I’ll tell you one thing, I have never seen this much, like, hatred for Republicans. And generally… Let me just get to my point because that’s what the call screener told me to do. There’s just so much tension now between the two sides. You know, there’s Republicans that really just loathe the Democrats. Let me scratch that: Conservatives that just really loathe liberals, and liberals that really loathe conservatives. And it’s getting more intense than it was in the nineties or beforehand, and it’s growing at an alarming rate. So if things continue like this, like if this tension continues to really mount the way it’s mounting —

RUSH: Yeah, and you’re probably sitting out there all confused because you’ve heard about how bipartisanship was going to be the rule of the day and —

CALLER: Actually, I voted for McCain.

RUSH: Well, I know, but still you heard that with Obama winning, we’re going to be a new era of centrist government —

CALLER: It’s unbelievable.

RUSH: — and bipartisanship and everybody getting along with one another because of the historical nature of his presidency, and all this animosity? It was going to evaporate. You probably heard that.

CALLER: Didn’t believe a word of it, though.

RUSH: Good. I actually… It may be more visible to you, but I don’t think it’s any different than what it’s always been. You’re a college student. Therefore, you can’t remember the way Ronald Reagan was despised, hated, and vilified.

CALLER: I was a baby back then.

RUSH: You were a baby. It was as bad as George W. Bush.

CALLER: Wow.

RUSH: It was as bad. In fact, in some cases, it was worse, because Reagan was able to communicate directly to the American people without the need of the media filtering, and they hated him even more. But the left is who they are. The left, their ideology trumps everything. Now what’s happened with their perceived victory, is you can add arrogance and cockiness to the overall general attitude of never-ending rage, and that’s what you’re seeing.

CALLER: Yeah, and it kind of scares me.

RUSH: Well, keep your radio on. Michael, I’m going to address this in a little bit more detail when we come back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One of the things that Michael, the student from the University of South Florida, who was our previous caller, told Mr. Snerdley off-air is that on his campus the liberals are saying that America won’t be fixed until all Americans are dead. And that’s one of the reasons he called is he’s never seen the partisanship and the anger and the unhappiness be so pointed and so forth. Look, on a college campus, it may be bad. I mean, it is bad. I find it difficult to say that it’s ‘worse’ today than it’s been only because of my knowledge of history. I think back to the days of Nixon. He was despised and hated. It wasn’t so much ideological then, at least on the surface. It didn’t appear to be ideological. But I think with the election of Obama — and you can’t separate the hatred these people had for George W. Bush.

The reason they hated George W. Bush is because they considered his election illegitimate. They thought the election stolen from them in Florida, that he really didn’t win it, and then the things that he did. He couldn’t talk and they thought he was stupid. But you have to understand, Michael: every activist liberal in this country gets up angrier than you can ever remember being in your life, and they live their day that way. They get even angrier after they win. When they win, what they expect you to do is surrender. You are to go to them and say, ‘I give! I give up. I’m going to become one of you.’ Now, let me tell you who you’re dealing with. You’re on a college campus. We had a phone call yesterday from a college student at George Mason University, in the journalism department.

I spent 35 minutes and three segments with this guy to close the program yesterday, and it was highly instructive. He’s a journalism student and he’s gotta do a report on me based on a chapter on me in his textbook. He named the textbook, but I can’t recall it. You know what one of the most common reactions I got from people — I mean in all; people I know, people I don’t know — who heard that, was, ‘You know, it was so great. You treated him like an adult. You treated him like he had his own brain. Do you realize no college professor ever treats their students like they’re adults, or very few of them do?’ Well, I’ve always assumed that anybody listening to this program has a brain. You have to, to understand what happens here. You have to, to keep up with it. But I always have respected the intelligence of people who listen to this program and call it, and want to talk to me.

It’s an interesting thing to follow kids. I was one. I rebelled against all the conventions that I was raised with, pretty much. Now, I didn’t rebel against my parents and try to make their life miserable. But I rebelled against what I thought was a conformity that said, ‘Everybody does this.’ I said, ‘No, everybody doesn’t do that, and I don’t want to be everybody!’ ‘Well, you can’t go anywhere if you don’t go to college.’ ‘Yes, I can. I don’t like school. I hate it! I am in prison when I’m in school. All I do is look out the window and see people who have freedom that I don’t have.’ But my mom and dad lived through the Great Depression. It was the most formative experience of their lives, and my dad, because of what he went through, knew that in his era you didn’t have a chance of getting a job (a decent one) if you didn’t have a college degree.

So his view was that being a responsible parent was to see to it that his two sons went to college, and if they didn’t — and I didn’t, I went one year and I couldn’t handle it. Once they made me take ballroom dance taught by a former drill sergeant in the WACs as a required PE course, I said, ‘This just is not for me,’ because I had known since I was eight what I wanted to do, and all this stuff was standing in my way. So I rebelled. I didn’t rebel against their morality. I didn’t rebel against their authority. I followed their… You know, I minded my manners and that sort of thing. I didn’t burn down buildings. I didn’t become opposite of them with their political ideology and their morality, but I did rebel against conformity. I rebelled against the notion that everybody has to do everything the same. You might say that I rebelled against an establishment.

Now, ‘The Establishment,’ when I was in school, was being protested. And the people protesting The Establishment, when I was going to school, wore tie-dyes and blue jeans and were blowing up bank buildings and they were getting wasted on, you know, whatever substance they can find every night. Somehow they were getting passing grades in college by never showing up. (I was never going to be able to pull that off.) But that was not the point. I wanted to be part of The Establishment they were protesting. So I never wore a pair of blue jeans, and I never wore my hair long, and I never wore tie-dyed T-shirt, and I always tried to make sure that… ‘Cause I wanted to make my place in, quote, unquote, ‘The Establishment,’ I rebelled against the counterculture establishment. I rebelled against people my own age in the little university I went to and wherever else.

You know, no Valentine’s Day ’cause everybody does it. Why do I want to go out and be the same? ‘It’s Valentine’s Day. I gotta give somebody something because this says I should?’ And of course the person on the receiving end expects it, and if you don’t come through, then you’re in trouble. If you do come through, it’s not as sincere as if you just picked your own day. You disagree with me on this, Dawn? See, I’m just… I’m sorry. I’m not, and I never have been, a conformist. I worked for the Royals, Kansas City Royals for five years. The first three, I loved it, because it was a change. I thought I’d failed at radio. I spent first three years there. I grew up wanting to play Major League Baseball like every kid does, but was making $12,000 a year to start and $15,000 a year after the third year. In my thirties now. I said, ‘This isn’t enough,’ and it was corporate. It was very corporately structured.

Plus, I wasn’t on the baseball side, which means I wasn’t going anywhere. It’s a baseball team. I was on the marketing side. But it was five years, and I wouldn’t trade ’em for anything, ’cause I saw aspects of life I would have never seen if I remained behind a glass booth and microphone. I met people I wouldn’t have otherwise met. It all worked out. ‘Do I have any regrets?’ No. I wouldn’t change anything. It’s all led me to where I am. But I had no conformist desires whatsoever. Yeah, I wanted to be in The Establishment. I wanted to stand out even there. I’ve always been an individualist. And I’ve always been an individualist because I’ve always believed I had the freedom to be, and I’ve always believed I’m different. I know I’m different from people, and anybody else honest with themselves knows they’re different, but way too many people want to be like everybody else or they want to be like somebody.

The real trick is liking who you are and being who you are. You have the freedom in this country (for a little while longer, anyway) to do that. You think I’ve lost my place in this whole college thing, but I haven’t. I think, in many ways, there are a lot of kids in high school and going to college who are conformist. They do it because it’s still considered to be the ticket and the track, the ladder that you climb. Others do it ’cause they don’t know what to do. They have no idea what they want to do, so that’s the next phase. Others do it ’cause dad and mom went there and you get a legacy admission into some great university. You go to the football team, whatever. It’s a social thing from a lot of people, keggers and whatever else. And it’s an opportunity to, you know, enjoy as you’re getting a little older without any real responsibility.

You put that off until it’s time, you graduate. But even so, even so, there are still people — and it’s quite normal and natural, I think, for teenagers to rebel against their parents in authority. It’s quite normal. Parents get freaked out about it even though they themselves did it. It’s like John Hinckley. After Hinckley took a shot at Reagan, his dad said, ‘Gosh, we’re so surprised! He was always such a good boy. He never, never got into trouble.’ That should have been your first warning sign. He never got into trouble? This kid’s brooding about something, somewhere. This is not healthy. We found out he’s Watching Taxi Driver day and night and falling in love with Jodie what’s-her-face, Foster, and wanted to impress her because of something that happened in that movie.

So most kids, in their own way, rebel and yet conform. They will conform with their peers, but they don’t want their peers to know that they’re doing what their parents approve of. In order to have your peers think that you’re independent, your peers have to think that you’ve told your parents, ‘Take a trip.’ So they arrive on college campus… This is the real point. They arrive on college campus with the spirit of individuality. They are unique, and they’re there, and they’re going to take the world by storm. Yeah, they’re conforming in a way because college is what you’re supposed to do, but they still arrive (for the most part) as individuals. Then it takes not but a split second and they get into these classes run by liberal professors and professorettes, and all the individualism is gone and they become sheep! They become little liberal marching robots.

They forget all of their spirit of rebellion. They forget all of their spirit of individuality, and they get globbed into some common way of looking at things because they look up to the professor with the same disdain they had for their parents when they left home. I don’t mean this in a negative way. It’s natural thing. Your parents don’t know anything until you’re 30, you know, as Mark Twain said, then they become the smartest people you ever knew. It’s just natural. It’s like a husband and wife. The husband’s always wrong at home. Everywhere else people think he’s brilliant. At home, he’s never right — and the wife, I’m sure, can feel the same way. ‘I can’t talk to my husband about this. I’m always wrong.’ It’s just families. It’s just the way things are. So you have these kids, and they arrive on campus, and they’re full of individuality and full of the individual spirit.

They’re full of the consciousness of SELF, and they’re there to do whatever. They’re going to make — and then it doesn’t take but a week of the first semester, and they are robots. They are total conformists, and it becomes a total return to childhood with the professors becoming the parents. If a person does not leave college as an independent, critical thinker, it was a waste of time — and college as a waste of time under that definition, because you don’t have a lot of independent thinkers coming out of there. You’ve got robots who have been programmed by liberal professors and whoever else that’s gotten hold of them. We all know that college is not about developing the individual. We all know that college is not about preparing individuals to pursue their own happiness with confidence, to have their own unique solutions for the problems that await them.

College is about groupthink, not individual thought. It’s about behaving and thinking as the teacher says, just like you did in elementary school! You go from first grade to high school, you go to college, and you willingly put yourself back in the first grade. Teacher knows everything, and you respect ’em and you look up to ’em — and they’ve got you, and they have squeezed every bit of individuality out of you. Now, I know this. See, I think young people, Michael over there, University of South Florida, you’re dealing with robots. You’re dealing with people whose anger has been built into them or programmed either by their parents and/or their professors or a combination of the two. You’re not talking to individuals. You’re talking to groups of people who don’t differ at all in one thing they think.

You are unique. You are an individual! Do not be intimidated by a bunch of robots who say the world won’t be right until you’re dead. See, young people are the soul mates of true conservatives and individualists. We want ’em to grow. We want you to grow up, to screw up, to get back up, to learn from the screw-up and be the best you can be. We don’t want you to suck up! We want you to grow up. College is about sucking up. That should not be natural for 18- to 22-year-olds. That’s embarrassing, to be suck-ups at 18 to 22? They’re better than that, or they should be. If they were true to their hormones they would be sneaking off to listen to me rather than going to college! No one figures out life from a leftist, indoctrinating college professor. They don’t live life! They’re mad as hell all day, too, at how little money they make, at that they have to talk to stupid little kids like you all day. They should be running the world, and they’re stuck here on some campus!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The thing is here, college professors want to teach the obedient. College professors do not want to deal with independent, thinking adults. I mean they will, but I’ve had so many of them call here, people that disagree with the professor, and they’re worried sick what’s going to happen to them because they disagreed. Professors want obedient children. All these kids, all these kids do the standard rebellion to one degree or another, full of individualism, they are going to take control of the world, they’re going to grab it by the tail, and within a week of the first semester, they’re robots, willingly. And that’s what this poor guy at University of South Florida is facing, mobs and mobs of programmed robots, filled with rage, hatred, irrationality.

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