RUSH: This is from a website called Intellectual Takeout.  Our show prep knows no bounds here.  Once we determine that something is not fake or satire, we’ll go with it. 

“College Kids Can’t Discern Between Fact & Opinion.” That’s exactly right, and that’s how they’ve been taught.  And it’s not just recent students.  I think many in the media today don’t know the difference between fact and opinion.  In many cases, opinion can be fact if it’s the right opinion.  If you can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact, then you are incapable of critical thinking, critical speech, critical writing, because that’s not taught anymore.  No one’s taught to have critical, logical thinking. 

You know why? 

Logical thinking is going to produce opinions that some are gonna call racist or sexist or bigoted or homophobic.  You’re not permitted to be any of that, which means you have to throw logic out half the time and instead adopt whatever the politically correct view of something is — which, by definition, is not fact.  It’s a huge problem.  You can’t get through to people who are not capable of reasoning.  Being incapable of reasoning is the equivalent of having a closed mind, which is one thing.  But when the people with closed minds think they’re the ones with open minds, the problem is compounded. 

We are not teaching critical, logical thinking.  We’re teaching obedience to the leftist agenda.  We are programming and indoctrinating and propagandizing students, and we are purposely instructing them not to think on their own.  That becomes punishable.  That means varying and steering away from the ordained, and you are not permitted to do this.  You must remain a true follower.  And this might be going on for so long, you can’t get through to people.  You can’t reason with them.  They can hear the facts that you ought to…

You can present to them with total truth things that destroy everything they believe, and it won’t get through.  It becomes a threat.  They’ve been taught to have closed minds — and, such, what you say doesn’t do anything but panic them.  And then they want nothing to do with you.  And then, if it gets really bad, they try to shut you up or have the institutions at the university shut you up.  Whatever, you’re becoming a threat. You’re saying things that they’re not permitted to think that they’ve been told are whatever, and you’re the problem. 

Here’s the way the story begins: “By this point in the year, most high school seniors have walked across the stage and grabbed their diploma. Many parents sit proudly by during this process, sniffing back tears and saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re ready to move on to college!'” Other parents are saying, “I thought the day would never come! The kid’s leaving! Thank God” It takes all kinds. “The unfortunate fact of the matter is, [graduates] may not be as ready as the parents, teachers, or even students themselves think” they are. They may not even be close, despite the fact they got a diploma!

“That’s one of the findings from a National Curriculum Survey released by the ACT.  As the ACT explains, the survey serves ‘to ask educators about what they teach (or don’t teach) in their courses and how important they feel various topics in their discipline are for students to be successful in these and future courses.’ The section on English Language Arts is particularly interesting. ACT asked teachers in the fields of English, history, and other social sciences to name the reading skills that are most important to a student’s success in class.

“An overwhelming number of K-12 and college instructors listed the following five areas as most important: Determining central ideas.  Identify important details.  Drawing conclusions and make inferences.  Evaluating evidence and/or support for an author’s claims.  Distinguishing among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment.  But as many college instructors were quick to discover, many high school graduates were ill-prepared…” They had no idea what any of that was. “Most startling was the fact that only 18% of college instructors rated their first-year students as well-prepared in the area of ‘distinguishing among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment.'” 

That is a problem. 

And that is on purpose. 

That is the result of the leftists’ control of public education, creating mind-numbed, dumbed-down propaganda receptacles.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay.  We’re gonna start on the phones with Fred in Syracuse.  I’m glad you called, sir.  Great to have you with us.  Hello.

CALLER:  Thank you so much.  It’s an honor to speak with you, Rush.

RUSH:  Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: (garbled cell connection) So I’m 24, and recently got into politics.  Before that, in high school, I had no care about it.  I’ve been listening to you for about two years, and I strongly believe in what you say.  So the thing going on right now — and what I believe is why Muslims are getting so offended — is because we’re classifying ISIS and the terrorist attacks as jihad and Islamic religion.  I do believe if we were to stick to ISIS and not put them into the group of a religion, it would not only satisfy the Muslims, but it would also make a lot of the other people satisfied.  But I want to ask you, if… Someone explained this to me.  Sorry, I’m nervous here, but someone explained this to me.  If there’s a group of farmers, and farmers started attacking random people and started attacking random lots, would the farmers that were innocent not be…? You would think…? (garbled)

RUSH:  I think a cell phone connection problem.  Well, where to start with this.  Look… (interruption) Fred’s line dropped?  That was his name?  Fred?  You took his name down.  Okay.  Fred, I trust you’re still out there.  You’re a very nice young man.  You’re 24 years old, and it is an opportunity. You have presented me a golden opportunity to react to and explain the answers I have to your observations and questions.  You said you’re 24.  I’ve only got 45 seconds here, Fred, so I’m vamping here. 

I can’t say everything I want to say in 45 seconds, but I can set it up. Uh, Fred? They are not attacking us because of anything to do with what we say about them.  The fact that you think so betrays your age.  It’s quite understandable.  You’ve been raised among people who are righteously indignity or care very much about what people think of.  These people couldn’t care less about any of that!  It’s not about that, and your farmer example is easily used here to explain even further.  So don’t go away here, Fred.  It may not be nice, but it’s coming.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  I’m gonna take this little time answering this question because I think it be easy to say, “No, you’re wrong. They don’t hate us because of what we say about them.” But I think it’s an opportunity.  Fred was 24 years old.  He’s been listening for two years.  Prior to that, he was apolitical.  He didn’t care about it through high school, parts of college. He said that it wasn’t anything that interested him.  I don’t know why; I didn’t ask him. There wasn’t much time.  I could guess that there’s too much conflict and no resolutions, and he got tired of that.

I think it’s what most people find problematic with politics; there’s no solution.  It’s ongoing, never-ending arguments, name-calling, finger pointing, and nobody ever ends up agreeing on anything.  And even when the Republicans try to agree with the Democrats, they still are hated! But now he’s 24, now he’s getting into it.  Something happened, he caught this program, and now he is really into it.  He heard Obama’s speech. “Maybe it makes sense,” he said. “Maybe if we stop calling them names, maybe they won’t dislike us as much.”

And he gave an analogy.  You know, what if a bunch of renegade farmers are running around committing crimes and we started castigating all farmers as a bunch of extremists.  Well, in that analogy, the people conducting the acts of terror are not the ones supposedly offended by being called names.  They continue to live peacefully and so forth.  They may be steaming and burning.  But, look, I don’t want people get distracted by that.  Bottom line, Fred: I know that because of your age you have been raised to believe that..

Because you’ve experienced it. People getting mad, wanting revenge, end up hating people because of name-calling or bullying or some other such thing. You’re projecting, and you’re assuming that we’re all people, all human beings. There’s no difference, and we’re calling them names.  We got people on the radio, we got in politics, and we’re calling these people names! Of course they’re gonna get mad.  And some of the unstable ones out there are actually attacking us ’cause we’re calling them names, and if we just stopped calling ’em names then everything would be okay. 

You’re projecting the way you would act, maybe, or the way you’ve been taught people will react, or maybe what you’ve seen, but you’re projecting your own personal worldview onto people that you don’t understand.  And the fact is that it’s not just us.  Militant Islamists are on the march around the world, Fred.  And it is because their religious beliefs tell them that infidels are not to be tolerated, and we are infidels.  We are a Judeo-Christian country as we were founded, and, as such, we’re nonbelievers.  We’re nonbelievers in the teachings of Mohammed. 

We are forever enemies because of that. 

If we changed our attitudes and started complimenting them and talking about how nice they are, it wouldn’t change a thing about them.  It wouldn’t make ISIS go away; wouldn’t make Al-Qaeda go away; it wouldn’t make Hezbollah go away; it wouldn’t make Hamas go away; it wouldn’t make the Palestinian Authority go away.  They exist… It’s just like the race industry, Fred.  If racism actually did end tomorrow, the race industry wouldn’t accept it and permit it; there’s too much money to be made; there’s too much fame to be acquired. 

There is much to be gained by having an enemy and being representative for The Victims.  It’s a serious overall problem.  But in the main here, just the concentrated answer to your question, if you want to find out why we are being attacked, it is in the Koran.  And it has nothing to do with insulting them.  It has nothing to do with calling them names.  It has nothing to do with anything to do with that.  Now, folks, the reason I wanted to take time with this is because I’m sure that if you’re 18-24, in that range, that’s what life has become. 

“Stop calling people names, stop insulting them, and they’ll stop bullying you,” or they’ll be nice to you or what have you, and you the end up projecting that belief on every other population, group throughout the world.  And the thing is, there are ideological things to learn about militant Islamists.  Sharia law is what it is, Fred.  Sharia law is every bit as important to them as the Constitution is to us.  And it doesn’t matter if we never called ’em another name, if we don’t accept Sharia, well, they’re never gonna go away until we do. 

Thomas Jefferson was the first of our founders to write about this.  We’ve been dealing with this since the Barbary pirates way back in the 1800s — well, the eighteenth century.  I think what I mentioned a moment ago about young people not being able to distinguish between fact and opinion, I have just presented fact.  If he thinks it’s my opinion… “Well, you know what you’re talking about. That’s your opinion. That’s just not that’s not the way world works.”  I’m not saying it’s his attitude, but the odds of getting through to people are becoming smaller and smaller, particularly in something like this. 

And it doesn’t help, by the way, after 9/11 when the State Department convenes a seminar, “Why do they hate us?” I mean, when so many Americans are running around, you can’t really blame Fred in a sense, he sees Orlando happen, and reads the New York Times or hears about it conservatives get blames or gun control gets blamed or bullies get blamed, Christians get blamed.  The answer is, “Well, stop saying bad things about ’em, and it’ll be okay.” Fred, how many people do you think voted for Obama thinking that if he was elected it would demonstrate to the world we’re no longer racists and it would end racial strife? 

And all it’s done is got worse since Obama was elected.  Fred, the bottom line is this: When talking about geopolitics, talking about national security, we have enemies that we have to deal with, and they’re going to have to be defeated, or we are.  It doesn’t come down to not calling them names.  It doesn’t come down to being polite.  It doesn’t come down to any of that.  It is far deeper and much, much more grave than something simple as changing the way you talk about people.  They’re not doing anything because they feel insulted. 

They’re following the edicts and the instructions of their religion, pure and simple. 

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Nathan, Appleton, Wisconsin.  What a great place this is.  Appleton, Wisconsin.  It’s where visiting teams stay when they go in to play the Packers.  It’s where I got EIB 1 outfitted.  This is a great, great place.  How are you doing?

CALLER:  Good.  This is… “Mega dittos,” first off.  This is quite an honor.

RUSH:  Thank you very much.

CALLER:  I think the first time I remember hearing you on the radio is probably eight years old.  I’m 29 next week, so —

RUSH:  You’re 29 next week?

CALLER:  Yes, sir.

RUSH:  Wow.  I don’t remember what that was like.

CALLER:  I just wanted to comment on something one of your previous callers said about if we spoke better about radical Islamists, that they would, you know, not hate us as much.

RUSH:  Yeah, if we stopped insulting them, that they wouldn’t attack us.

CALLER:  I think — and I don’t know if I want to blame him.  Excuse me.  I think he’s been brainwashed since, as you put it, school, with how they put it in the textbooks as how we should treat our enemies.

RUSH:  Well, I agree with you.  I think he was perfectly well-intentioned.  I think that’s what convolution is taught, and that’s why I say he was projecting the way he has been taught solve problems onto this situation.  And, see, the assumption is that we’re all angels at heart. We’re all good people —

CALLER:  Exactly. That’s a problem because —

RUSH:  — and if we just treat everybody with mutual respect and love, then there will be no problems in the world.  And I think, you know, it’s idealism on steroids.

CALLER:  And the Millennials in this culture just don’t understand.  They think everything can be solved with peace and love.  But, you know, radical jihadists don’t want compassion.

RUSH:  Not peace and love.  The Millennials think you can solve problems with doctors, nurses, clean water, nice words, and all this wonderful stuff.

CALLER:  That as well.  But they don’t understand that they have their own on agenda, and they’re not gonna conform to our agenda.  And, you know, talking nicer about them, they don’t care how we talk about them ’cause they’re gonna do what they want to do anyway.

RUSH:  Do you want to ruin a Millennial’s day?  If you ever get agitated at one, if a Millennial really just… If you can’t walk away and what they’re saying to you is frustrating you to no end and they’re saying stuff like we’re talking about, you just have to respect ’em… Like Hillary said about them: “We must have empathy for our enemies.” Millennials go, “Yes!  Yes!  Right.  Empathy!  We must understand why they’re angry at us. Yes, empathy for our enemies!”  Hillary Clinton said that.  I’ll tell you what you do out there, Nathan. 

Next time you have an exchange like that with a Millennial… You are a Millennial.  Somehow you escaped the bonds.  Just tell ’em one of the Undeniable Truths of Life: “Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.”  They will shriek. They will think you’re a warmonger. They’ll think you’re horrible and terrible. But you can’t lose this argument.  All you have to have is a knowledge of history.  Explain why anything in this world has happened, and you will find at some stage somebody was aggressively using force to get what they wanted. 

It’s inarguable.

There are any number of examples you can cite.  And then, whenever any of these events have happened, what has been the solution?  The aggressive use of even more force in response.  You can’t lose the argument if you know any history.  All you gotta do is start citing war after war after war, and then you have to tell ’em, “We’re in one now.”  That’s what they don’t want to admit.