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RUSH: You know who has to be the most dumbfounded guy in America right now, right today as we speak? It would be Denny Hastert, the former Republican Speaker of the House. The guy’s out there saying: What in the world was I doing paying blackmail? Hell, I should have done a reality TV show about all this. I’d be in fat city.

Greetings, my friends, and welcome. It’s great to have you here on the EIB Network, Rush Limbaugh, as we just plod on, folks. We are just drudging through it out there making sense as best we can at each and every juncture. Telephone number, if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Okay, we’re gonna get to this Caitlyn Jenner business in just a second. There’s some other stuff going on out there that I want to get to, but I don’t want you to think I’m relegating Caitlyn Jenner to secondary or tertiary status here. It’s the dominant thing and it’s what everybody else is talking about, and I know until you’ve heard what I think about it, you really don’t know what you think about it. I’m just not crazy about getting into it right now. I do think it’s important for people of a certain age — Oh. Sorry for the interruption, but it’s no big deal since I’m interrupting myself.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: One little thing I want to run by you here regarding Caitlyn Jenner. I’m not gonna tell you where this comes from, other than to tell you it’s a Republican blog. Well, yeah, it is. Conservative Republican blog. I just want to run this by you and you tell yourself what you think. “With the momentum from this announcement and affiliation, Caitlyn inadvertently gave the Republican Party something it desperately needs more of — ‘street cred,’ simply put, an understanding sense of humanity.”

Because Bruce Jenner came out as a Republican back in, what, March or April, and we assume that since Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner, that she’s still a Republican. By the way, Snerdley you’re the one, you told me you saw the picture of Caitlyn Jenner on Vanity Fair. She looks just like Jessica Lange?

Yeah, everybody’s picked that up. Everybody. In fact, it’s gotten such wide play they went out and asked Jessica Lange what she thinks about it, and she said, “Where is this being said?” They said, “They’re trending on Twitter.” She said, “What’s Twitter? She had never heard of Twitter and she didn’t obviously know what “trending” on Twitter was. They explained to her, “Caitlyn Jenner is being compared to a younger version of you, that Caitlyn Jenner is just like you and is beautiful.”

She says she was flattered. She was really, really flattered to have that comparison made. So you… (interruption) Snerdley, you’re in the mainstream on this. You saw that picture; you immediately thought of Jessica Lange, and I guess a lot of people did. Anyway, back to this little as-of-now unnamed Republican conservative blog: “With the momentum from this announcement and affiliation, Caitlyn [Jenner] inadvertently gave the Republican Party something it desperately needs more of — ‘street cred,’ simply put, an understanding sense of humanity.

“If the party overall was to warm up to these ‘differences’ and use them as a broader tool to crush problems (not people) that really matter — like insurmountable national and student debt, ever-increasing national security threats and domestic encroachments on Constitutional liberties –Democrats would stand no chance.” The passage here… What this means is that Caitlyn Jenner as a Republican proves to people that the Republican Party is a party that loves humanity, has now acquired and achieved street cred.

And if the Republican Party could do more of this, “warm up to these ‘differences’ and use them as a broader tool to crush problems (not people),” because, as you know, what the Republican Party does is crush people. But if the Republican Party could take this endorsement by Caitlyn Jenner and use it to illustrate they don’t crush people, that they are human after all, that they instead will crush problems, the Democrats wouldn’t stand a chance.

That is a conservative Republican blog.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, a couple other things here before we get into the Caitlyn Jenner stuff. I’m also wondering how many Millennials actually know who Bruce Jenner is. I wonder how many people actually know. Now, maybe some do. Maybe it’s been written about. I remember talking about his 1976 Olympics dominance as a decathlete. At that point in time, winning the decathlon made you the world’s greatest athlete, and he won it going away. It was huge.

Bruce Jenner achieved legitimate fame for serious accomplishments. None of this Kardashian-type fame that he’s been surrounded by, which has to be a factor in some of this. I mean, it just does. Some of the athletic achievements that Bruce Jenner accomplished are just unparalleled. He was bigger than Muhammad Ali back in 1976, folks. He was that big. He was wholesome, Mr. All American, waving the American flag with him on the track. I’ll never forget all of that.

They still do it when they telecast the Olympics. ABC had them back then, and did all these feature profiles of all the athletes that they would tape and prepare months in advance of the actual Olympics themselves. I remember every one of them about Bruce Jenner. Every one of them. I remember particularly one in which they followed him on an average training day, everything he put himself through in preparation for the Olympics.

This particular feature started in the darkness of his bedroom with the alarm clock going off at 4:30. They simulated it, but the alarm clock went off at 4:30. He snaps right out of bed, downed some Wheaties or something, and started on the training and preparation regimen. It was grueling. It was brutal. You know, in 1976 we’re four years out of Watergate. There’s a national funk that’s going on. The Olympics that year were in Montreal.

Bruce Jenner… We were just on the outskirts of electing Jimmy Carter and it was gonna get even worse. For that brief moment, the two-week period during the Olympics, Bruce Jenner had people in this country prouder to be Americans than they had been in years. I just wonder how many people know that about him, as opposed to what they know now. Now you’ve got this obviously Photoshopped, doctored, touched-up cover photo on Vanity Fair.

You know, I tell you, folks, I don?’t know if you remember this. I have to find this from the archives. It was this year, though. There was a story that we found that I thought it was gonna get much bigger play than it did. And now that I look back on it I guess I was mistaken in assuming that it would get big play. The kind of play I thought it would get would be that the period of time quoted in the story I thought would be destroyed.

He’s a ranking neurologist or psychiatrist or psychology, some noted expert in the field of mental health at Johns Hopkins. I can’t remember his name right off the bat. He’s in his sixties, if I remember right. It was a story about transgenderism, and this noted professor, scientist and doctor at Johns Hopkins was lamenting what culture is doing to transgender people. It was his claim — he just came right out and said it — that we’re dealing with mental illness here.

We should not be celebrating this, we should not be lionizing this, we should not be encouraging this. These people have a very serious problem, and they need treatment. They need help, not encouragement. I read the story and I shared it with you here on the program. I’ll tell you what prompted it was my observation that the next push point for the left was going to be transgender people because the gay rights movement had shown such success, had borne such fruit.

Gay marriage is now accepted, it seems, coast to coast, north to south. The gay rights issue is basically no longer a big fight. The Millennial generation particularly embraces gay rights, and so it’s not really a big deal. But the people involved have to have a fight, they have to have a demon. They have to have something they’re pushing against. So transgender people became the new gay people. Now, transgenders are even a smaller percentage of the population than homosexuals are. The homosexual population the country is 2%, at most.


Not all of them are activists. You know, not all of them are politically active. Not all of them get involved in public demonstrations or any of that. The transgender population is even smaller than that. So it became the new push point, if you will, against the so-called dominant culture or what we now know is an attack on mainstream Christianity. Somebody in the Drive-Bys… I even forget the source for this, but I’m gonna find it somewhere in my archives ’cause I talked about it.

Somebody Drive-Bys went and found this guy at Johns Hopkins to say that it’s a mental illness, that we need not be encouraging this, certainly not celebrating it because it’s a sickness and these people really, really need help. I thought that this guy would be destroyed. It turns out this guy was ignored. That story didn’t get any traction anywhere. But the scientist at Johns Hopkins is still there and he still believes all of this stuff.

So it is fascinating to watch what’s happening to our culture, what’s happening to our society, and it’s, for me mixed emotions about it, obviously. I remain fascinated by trying to find the tipping point. Maybe that’s not the best description. I try to go back in our history, our culture history. “Okay, when did this get legs? When did this start being taken seriously? When did this act?” Because none of this stuff happens overnight.

The idea that transgenderism is normal and in fact wonderful, something to be celebrated, is not something that just popped up overnight. It’s been building, as was the gay rights movement and so forth. We have a better handle on where that began. I guess you could say it began when tragedies began to be lumped in with lesbians and gays as in LGBT and became part of the group and they are part of the left and they’re well funded.

They’re wealthy, many of them are, and of course they donate to Democrat candidates and issues. So that’s where its home is. As such, it will be given favorable treatment in the media, and it just grows. It kind of just creeps up on people, or crept up on people. By the time it reaches critical mass, for people that oppose it or bothered by it, it’s too late. It’s already done. The tentacles are already well hooked into mainstream culture.

And you just said, “Okay, move on to the next one,” and it just keeps happening this way. But that’s what fascinates me about this. But find this Johns Hopkins guy. Who was it? It’s Dr. McHugh? That’s who it is?

“Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a ‘mental disorder’ that merits treatment, that sex change is ‘biologically impossible,’ and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.” It was October 2014 that I first saw this and brought it up. So not quite nine months, eight months. “Dr. McHugh, the author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, made his remarks in a recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal…”

That’s where it was. He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It’s where we first saw it. Where he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a disorder of assumption, that is, the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically. Or even some people say, yeah, I’m a female soul in a male body, vice-versa. He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who did have reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people.

So, yeah, October of last year, and I thought this guy would be destroyed. It was in the Wall Street Journal, and from there it would be discovered and discussed in other places and that this guy would then summarily be in the crosshairs. But the strategy was obviously different; they just ignored him. Just leave it alone. The advocates just decided not to even go there, not to even elevate into the mainstream this particular viewpoint, maybe because of the fear of the credibility the guy would bring to it.

But since everything’s politics in America today — and don’t think that it isn’t. Everything is politics. The Democrat Party and the media see to that, folks. I mean, it’s politics that is generating all the support in the media for this. It’s politics that’s generating all of the celebratory characteristics of this story. So then, in that case, you have to ask, who benefits here? And how?

I now take you back to the little blurb I found at a conservative blog, conservative Republican blog. “With the momentum from this announcement and affiliation, Caitlyn inadvertently gave the Republican Party something it desperately needs more of — ‘street cred,’ simply put, an understanding sense of humanity.” Because Caitlyn Jenner has come out as a Republican. So everybody is looking at this the prism of politics, not through the prism of compassion and all that. That’s what they tell you they’re doing, but it’s all political. Never mistake that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Stand by audio sound bite number three. I want to take you back to April 27th on this program. I just want to demonstrate for you how, if you are a regular, habitual listener here, if you make an appointment to be here every day, you are guaranteed to be on the cutting edge of societal evolution.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The gay community has pretty much peaked in terms of protest anger and agitation because they succeeded. Gay marriage is happening, young people seem to be totally in favor of it. If you look at pop culture television, you cannot watch a single TV show where there is not gay affection, gay sex, gay love, it’s common now. But they can’t just go away because the agenda never gets completed. It always has to march on. So what has surfaced to take the place of anger and protest in the gay community? It’s the transgender community.

The transgender community is the gay community of ten years ago. The transgenders, they’ve taken the place of gays who were discriminated against and made fun of and laughed at and so forth. So the transgenders are now occupying the position in the political spectrum where the militant homosexuals occupied ten years ago. Well, that alone should tell you why it’s a big story. This fits everything the media wants to do in terms of turning the culture upside down, redefining what “normal” is, getting revenge against the majority for all of these decades of discrimination and mockery and disapproval and all these religious fanatics judging other people simply because of, quote, “Who they love,” unquote. Bruce Jenner helps to unlock the rage and anger.


RUSH: That is me back on April 27th of this year nailing it, folks. None of that is arguable. Everything in that is right on the money. It’s exactly what’s happening. And don’t forget the point: All of this is political. I’m not saying that Caitlyn Jenner is political; I don’t know. But everybody in the Drive-By Media promoting this, approving of it, celebrating it, it’s all political, because everything is. And the trick is, they get away with making people think it isn’t political.

The Millennials hate politics, and the left runs around and says the Republicans are the ones that do politics. The Republicans are the ones that never agree. The Republicans are always the ones causing problems. The Republicans are the ones that are constantly partisan and bickering and arguing, but we, the Democrats, we don’t do politics. It’s all politics. Everything is about the Democrat agenda.

Last night’s CNN Tonight, Don Lemon spoke with Christine Brennan, sports analyst, talking about Caitlyn Jenner and the cover of Vanity Fair. Don Lemon said, “You know, when I grew up, Bruce Jenner was the male sex symbol. Now this. Now he’s becoming a female sex symbol in today’s issue.”

BRENNAN: Once again, sports is taking us to a place that we need to go as a nation, to have a conversation. Whether it would be terrible things like Ray Rice is domestic violence, steroids, Lance Armstrong, other Olympians, baseball players, or a story like this, sports makes it real, and here we are talking about it. But because he was a sports star, I think it makes it more real for people.

RUSH: See how this works. See, we’re doing a laudable thing. We are now talking about it, and that alone, that alone gives us a gold star. We are talking about it. We are good people. We are courageous people, we are finally talking about it. What are we talking about? What’s the big deal? Of course we’re talking about it; it’s kind of curious. But, no, we’re talking about it because what this reveals, once again, is how discriminatory and mean-spirited the majority in this country has always been.

We’re talking about this because finally another group of discriminated-against, ill-treated, mistreated people are finally able to come out and name their accusers and point to their accusers and shame them. That’s what this is. Folks, it constitutes another in an unending line of assaults on what you have always thought mainstream American culture, morality, whatever, to be.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You don’t feel like an oddball, Snerdley? I think the world has gone crazy. But nobody else that’s going crazy thinks they’re going crazy. That’s what I mean, I feel like an oddball.

Anyway, here’s Andrea in Houston. Andrea, you’re up first. It’s great to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush.

RUSH: Hi, Andrea, how are you?

CALLER: I’d like to thank you first for keeping me sane in a very crazy world.

RUSH: Well, I’m glad that I’m keeping you sane. I’m questioning my own, day to day.

CALLER: I do, too. Last night I posted a question on Facebook. I said, “If someone was born a male and ultimately wants to become a female or vice-versa, and they don’t have Jenner-Kardashian money pay for it, then what is the next step to make health insurance pay? Then what if someone is unhappy with the size of their nose, eyes, et cetera, will health insurance be forced to cover that, too?” Sadly, I did get a response saying that, yes, health insurance should pay for that.

RUSH: Health insurance should pay for what?

CALLER: For transgender surgery.

RUSH: You think so?

CALLER: I don’t think so.

RUSH: I thought you just said you did.

CALLER: No, no, no, no. I said, “Is that the next step, if they can’t afford it, is that what this world is coming to?”

RUSH: Oh, well, it already has in San Francisco. If you want to look at San Francisco as a leading indicator, city employees in San Francisco who want sex-change operations, it is part of their health care package.

CALLER: Oh, my.

RUSH: Or it was. Now, I don’t know if it survived. There were people that opposed it, and it was up for election with a particular member of the board of supervisors or whatever they call them now. I don’t know whether it survived or not. For the longest time, though, sex change surgery, transgender operations were a health care benefit for city employees in San Francisco. They had a name, the addadictomy procedure was one well-known procedure. No, no, your thinking on this is totally understandable. Because it’s discriminatory. “Hey, look, I am a woman,” says a guy, “I’m a woman and it’s not fair. I need surgery to become who I really am, and it’s discriminatory, I can’t afford it.”

Wait. Much of public policy is trending in that direction, so I can see why you would think that it would be possible at some point. The Daily Beast, Andrea, just to tell you, The Daily Beast has a story now that says essentially Obamacare now does cover sex-change operations, already covers it. And you know who’s paying for that, don’t you? You know who’s paying for Obamacare is all our combined taxpayers. So the Daily Beast claims that it’s already the law of the land. But there’s a larger question — well, I don’t know if it’s larger, but there’s another question, too. If you’re born a man and you say you’re a woman, that makes you a woman. Where does this stop?

I don’t know, folks. We’re on dangerous slope here. Want to go back to the audio sound bites, one more from Christine Brennan. By the way, the ESPYs, the CNN version the Academy Awards, Jenner’s the award winner, the Courage Award. The Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Don Lemon speaking with sports analyst Christine Brennan about this whole episode. Lemon said, “Even though Caitlyn has transitioned from her former identity as Bruce Jenner, her first public appearance will be at a sports related event, right?”

BRENNAN: Yes, the ESPY Awards, that she will be receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, an honor that many have received, including Jim Valvano, Robin Roberts, Nelson Mandela, Michael Sam just last year. This really signifies a snapshot, I think, of our culture at this time. And whether these are people who fought cancer, fought equality, whether it be Billie Jean King fighting for women’s rights, Michael Sam fighting for the rights of the gay athlete, it takes us to this place and it’s a snapshot, I believe, of where we are as a country, and sports as a huge part of our culture.

RUSH: I have to go back to the previous the sound bite of hers, I’m not gonna replay it, but she was following it with that comment. “Once again, sports is taking us to a place that we need to go as a nation, to have a conversation. Whether it would be terrible things like Ray Rice is domestic violence, steroids, Lance Armstrong, other Olympians, baseball players, or a story like this, sports makes it real,” and we need to have a conversation.”

What does that mean? You know, when Eric Holder says we need to have a conversation about race, we need to have a conversation about transgender people, the hidden meaning is that we need to stand up and rise up against this discriminatory, bigoted majority who has stigmatized all of these people and made them feel horrible. We need to have a conversation about these bigots. We need to have a conversation about this discrimination that’s taking place by all of these Americans. That’s what it means.

It’s as though there is this giant conspiracy to keep these people hidden, a giant conspiracy among the majority of America to keep these people, transgenders, whatever category you want to refer to it as, keep them hidden, keep them small, deny them their humanity and all of that. Folks, it’s just another way of mounting this onslaught against the majority. This is a direct frontal attack on what the United States has always been, by a bunch of people who don’t like it for whatever reasons.

There’s all kinds of rolled into this. There’s an effort to redefine what “normal” is, because if society has norms, well, not everybody’s in ’em, and if you’re not in the norms, then you are discriminated against and you might be psychologically impacted by this in a negative way. You might be sad, depressed or whatever, and it’s America’s fault, and society’s fault for doing this to you because of these norms. These norms are discriminatory, and they’re rooted in a false, phony morality, you know, all of this. So all of this represents an attack on that to the point now that these old norms, such as marriage, are now considered negative things or oddball things themselves.

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