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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH:  This fake news stuff going on out there.  You know what this fake news stuff is?  Just a distraction.  The fake news is the Drive-By Media!  The fake news was all of the polling going into this election.  The fake news is all of the misreporting on Trump.  The reason why there is any fake news is because the mainstream media has lost its credibility.  Do you realize if there was any news entity out there — call it the mainstream media, call it anything. 

If there was a news entity that had credibility and was trustworthy, then fake news would be spotted immediately, and it would not succeed.  But there is no authority anymore.  The Drive-By Media announced that they were getting rid of objectivity.  They announced that they were going partisan.  They did it on the front page of the New York Times in a piece by Jim Rutenberg, and they said they had to abandon the principles of journalism because the possibility of Donald Trump being elected was so outrageous and unacceptable they had to pull out all the stops and do anything they could to defeat him. 

Which meant bye-bye journalism.  Now, I understand that the Drive-Bys have not been practicing real journalism for a long time.  But in the eyes of many, including low-information crowd, they still had credibility.  If the New York Times said it, if CBS, ABC said it, the tendency was to believe it.  That’s gone!  Nobody believes anything they hear anymore.  Nobody trusts anything.  The mainstream media has abandoned the very things which gave it credibility, which provided its authority — its moral authority, everything else.  

As such, there is not a news industry today that has credibility and authority and believability, and that is why this so-called fake news has sprung up and has become so widespread.  And now the fake news is practiced by the mainstream media.  Hillary Clinton was a purveyor of fake news!  Barack Obama originated fake news when they came up with this theory that it was a video responsible for the terrorist attack in Benghazi, and the Drive-By Media picked it up and ran with it — and everybody knew it was untrue! 

From Obama to Hillary on down, they knew it was untrue but they were trying to make people believe it.  Fake news has always been around.  It’s been called satire.  It’s called parody.  We are among the greatest practitioners of it and have been for the entire history of this program.  But everybody wants to get in the act, and so all kinds of people are trying their hand at it now.  The Drive-Bys can raise holy hell, and they can point fingers of blame, but they had better be looking right at themselves, because they are the reason fake news exists.  

They are the reason you can’t tell anymore what’s fake and what isn’t.  But you know what?  Audiences know.  Audiences trust Donald Trump.  You in this audience trust me, and that is something I have always known and never take for granted.  And I make certain that if I engage in what I call parody or satire — and if I do it wrong, and you get the wrong impression — if you’re not laughing at it, if you’re not in the on the joke, then I have to go make it right at some point.  But there’s a lot of news out there. 

There’s no single, industry-wide entity that’s believed anymore.  That’s why fake news.  I mean, how ironic is it?  Grab audio sound bite number one.  Brian Williams.  You remember Brian Williams?  Brian Williams used to be the anchor of the NBC Nightly News until it was found out that he was literally lying and making up stories about the events he had covered and inserting himself in the stories, and telling the audience that he was there when something happened and knew the people involved. 

It was totally exposed as a made-up lie — and NBC, people inside, were actually trying to save him and his job.  He went on an extended leave of absence, and they finally brought him back, and put him on MSNBC in charge of breaking news.  Brian Williams Tuesday night was on his show called The 11th Hour with Brian Williams. Here’s a portion of his report about Trump’s transition team firing the son of national security adviser nominee Mike Flynn for passing on a fake news story on Twitter. 

WILLIAMS:  Another former general in the Trump circle is receiving new attention.  His national adviser designate, Mike Flynn.  Flynn’s son was fired by the Trump transition today for passing on fake news stories via Twitter. But his dad, the retired Army three-star general, has passed on some gems himself.  Here are a few: Clinton is involved with child sex trafficking and as secretly waged war on the Catholic Church — 

RUSH:  Stand by. 

WILLIAMS:  — as well as charges that the president is a jihadi — 

RUSH:  Stand by. 

WILLIAMS:  — who laundered money for Muslim terrorists. 

RUSH:  Listen! 

WILLIAMS:  As we talked about here last night, fake news played a role in this election and continues to find a wide audience. 

RUSH:  Stop the tape!  “Fake news flayed a role in this election and continues to…” For Brian Williams to announce it?  He was fake news!  In fact, he may be the poster child for it.  You know, I’m not comfortable saying this ’cause I know the guy.  I’ve met him in the old days when I went over to MSNBC when they were in Fort Lee and I would make the mistake of appearing over there, and I’d run into him in his office. He was as funny as he could be, could do stand-up if he wanted to. But I’m sorry to say, he’s the poster child for fake news. 

And here he is telling everybody that fake news played a role in this election?  Fake news, my a–. Here, you want some fake news?  “MSNBC Host Falsely Accuses Fox News of Holding Christmas Party at Trump’s Washington Hotel — MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle claimed that Fox News had held its Christmas party at President-elect Donald Trump’s recently opened Washington hotel. There’s just one little problem. [Fox News] hasn’t even had its party yet.” Fox News has not had a Christmas party, and it’s not gonna be at Trump’s hotel.  They just make it up, and that’s what MSNBC does.  

And now Hillary’s out there shooting off her mouth about it as though fake news is why she lost.  

She lost because she’s unappealing as a candidate!  

She lost because she didn’t work hard at it.  

She lost because she has no idea how to relate to average, ordinary Americans.  She called half the country deplorable, and she’s continuing that characterization by virtue of her behavior in the postelection aftermath.  But I’m gonna tell you this, folks.  It redounds to our benefit.  The more the Democrats remain in denial about why they lost, the deeper in doo-doo they’re gonna be and the harder it’s gonna be for them to extricate themselves.  

The longer they lie to themselves about why they lost and why they’ve been losing since 2008, the better off for everybody who’s opposed to them.  There’s a great thing happening out there right now, folks.  Low-information voters and people all over the country are finally seeing — they’re not being told — they are seeing, they are witnessing who and what liberals and liberalism is.  

They are seeing the extremism.  They are witnessing it firsthand.  Nobody’s telling them.  We’ve already done that.  I’ve spent my life here explaining liberalism and defining it to people.  Some believed it, some took it under advisement, some it didn’t matter.  But now this hysteria, this unhinged lunatic behavior, they are demonstrating it to everybody.  And the more they do, the better off everybody is.  

The more people that understand just how unhinged, unrealistic and divorced from reality liberalism is and how damaging, how hurtful that it is, the better everybody is, better off everybody.  Another point that has to be made here, it’s all happening not because commentators are telling people.  It’s not happening because of so-called arbiters of conservatism who’ve been telling people and warning people for decades about the dangers, it’s not because of that.  It’s not because of me.  It’s not because of anybody.  

It’s because of liberals themselves in defeat, unhinged, in denial, incapable of accepting the reasons why they lost.  So now they’re out there in this childlike behavior blaming everything and everybody else, and it’s free and clear for everybody to see just who these people are.  And Hillary Clinton and Obama are leading the charge.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You want to know what fake news is?  Fake news is “hands up, don’t shoot.”  And that fake news lasted for two years coming out of Ferguson, Missouri.  There was no “hands up, don’t shoot.”  It didn’t happen.  You know more fake news?  “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner in New York supposedly choked by policemen.  He didn’t.  He had a heart attack.  There was no “hands up, don’t shoot.”  Michael Brown was not running away from the cop. He wasn’t surrendering. His hands weren’t up, but everybody was lying about it.  

You want fake news?  The left owns fake news!  I’m sorry to get so agitated about it here, but I’m about at my wits’ end on this.  The latest batch of fake news is that the Russians are responsible for Hillary’s loss because they wanted Trump to win so they hacked voting machines.  They have down recounts in three states.  Trump is picking up votes in two of the three states.  The entire recount is fraud.  There was never any fraud that could be measured in terms of any hackery.  

The Russians didn’t have anything to do with it, but the Democrats are telling themselves that’s why they lost, big time fake news.  And CNN has breaking news that Obama has ordered a full review of 2016 election hacking by the Russians.  The news comes from Lisa Monaco who is an adviser to Homeland Security counterterrorism.  

And then there’s this.  “Republicans Ready to Launch Wide-Ranging Probe of Russia, Despite Trump’s Stance.”  What do you think when you hear that headline?  Well, are you still confused?  Well, don’t be.  Because the headline makes it look like “the Republicans in Washington are going to look into this business of the Russians hacking.”  It isn’t the Republicans.  Lindsey Graham and McCain.  Senator Lindsey Graham said he plans to spearhead legislation to hold a series of investigative hearings, and McCain joined him.  That’s it.  The headline, “Republicans Ready to Launch Wide-Ranging Probe.”  

So now Obama’s gonna run around (imitating Obama), “You know what?  The Republicans realize it’s a problem too, ’cause they have decided to join me in this investigation.”  The Republicans haven’t decided to do anything!  A couple of people that wish Trump weren’t president on the Republican side, McCain and Lindsey Graham, are doing this!  It’s fake news!  The fake news is the everyday news you see on any network you choose to listen to or watch or any newspaper you care to open.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You want another example of fake news?  I’m gonna… Folks, this is starting to really irritate me because of the lifespan this stuff is getting.  Fake news… When you rip it apart and you strip it down, fake news is actually that which exposes the fraud that is mainstream news today, and that’s really what they are upset about.  Anything that exposes how they are fraudulently reporting and lying to you, they call “fake news.”  They have lost their moral authority.  They’ve lost their source authority.  They have lost their credibility.  

That’s why any of this is happening, and they know it, and so they are attacking anything other than them as a means of trying to reclaim that authority that they’ve lost.  But remember the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman and the event that ended in the death of Trayvon Martin.  Remember that?  There was a 911 call.  Zimmerman called 911 after the event, and the EMS people — the operators at 911 — are asking him questions, and they’re asking him to describe Trayvon Martin.  So Zimmerman describes various aspects, and then the people on the 911 end of the call ask, “Is he black? Is he white? Is he…?”  

And he says, “No, he’s black.”  

NBC edited that call. They edited the 911 call and omitted Zimmerman being asked to describe Trayvon Martin, and the 911 call that they aired made it look like the first thing Zimmerman said about the guy was that he was black. And that allowed NBC to claim that Zimmerman was a white racist, as a “white Hispanic,” who had killed Trayvon Martin only because he was black.  Fake news par excellence.  Fake news.  It’s no different than when NBC blew up a pickup truck on Dateline NBC to make it look like manufacturers were selling defective vehicles that could blow up on you.  

There is a long history of fake news and lying news and distorted news from the mainstream media, and they’re now being called on it.  They are the ones who announced via our old friend Jim Rutenberg! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.  Front page the New York Times:  We in the media have got to abandon our principles of journalism in order to defeat Donald Trump.  His potential election is such a great threat to America that we have to abandon our principles of fairness and objectivity and truth and do whatever it takes — including use our opinions — to destroy Donald Trump.  

From the moment they did that, they just threw away the primary ingredient they had always been thought to have, and that is objectivity and fairness and not bias, and there’s a lot of people who thought they were nonbiased and fair and all that. Don’t doubt me on that. It’s the low-information voter crowd.  I mean, you wouldn’t believe, folks, the number of young people to whom the New York Times is a Bible.  I could show you stories of 25-year-old, 30-year-old tech people who think the greatest day in their lives is when the New York Times removed the pay wall and became free.  They were so excited, they wrote about it for a week.  

Now, to me, the New York Times is worthless, literally worthless — angrily, literally worthless — to me.  But to them, it’s gospel, and they’ve thrown it away.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Nick calling from Okinawa, Japan.  Hey, Nick, what’s happening?  How are you? 

CALLER:  Merry Christmas, Rush, from Okinawa. 

RUSH:  Thank you.  It’s great to hear from you. 

CALLER:  It’s four a.m. Saturday morning here, and it’s still an honor to speak with you. 

RUSH:  Well, it’s great to have you with us.  I really mean that.  Thank you for calling. 

CALLER:  Yeah, the theme of late has been fake news, and I read a quote from Denzel Washington.  He said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.  If you do read it, you’re misinformed.”  And my concern is that all of this fake news over the years has created a house of cards for these liberals, and it’s all fragile –and since the election, it’s all falling apart.  My concern is for the generation of people, these people who’ve swallowed it all hook, line, and sinker. What are we to do with them?  It’s a whole generation of people out there misinformed. 

RUSH:  Yeah, I know.  We’ve been fighting it for years and years and years. It’s been a feature of American life.  Actually, Nick, in one sense it’s okay because it’s been a feature of media from the beginning of time.  There’s been dishonest media; exaggerating media; lying, distorting media.  It’s always been out there.  That’s one of the things about a free society. That’s one of the prices, and you’re gonna go in cycles, because informed public, uninformed public, uninformed public voting, these are just the things that you deal with, and you constantly try to do your best to educate people, and that’s why we focus on it. That’s why I’m writing these children’s books for young adults and so forth and doing this program.  A lot of people are working on it.  And, on balance, it’s served us. It’s frustrating as it can be, but — 

CALLER:  Yeah.  I engage these people quite often, these liberals, and one on one I have some success. But en masse, they just don’t listen; they’re hostile. 

RUSH:  Totally. 

CALLER:  Yeah. 

RUSH:  Totally.  Hey, look, you’re in Okinawa, but I still want to end is you a new iPhone 7 or 7 Plus.  We can do it, but I need to… (sigh) Your carrier is gonna be a challenge for us.  What carrier do you have? 

CALLER:  I have T-Mobile ’cause when I travel to the [United] States, I use that. 

RUSH:  Oh, T-Mobile! Okay.  So you want a big one or little one? 

CALLER:  The Plus. 

RUSH:  Okay.  Black, what color you want? 

CALLER:  Do you have rose gold? 

RUSH:  Yes, I do.  You’ll have it.

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