RUSH: As you know, if you’ve been listening for any time, steady time recently, one of the things that I have remarked upon is a fairly recent, quote, unquote, discovery I’ve made about the left and one of their techniques. I really think — and I really do mean this. I don’t mean to be exaggerating this — when talking about the base Democrat or the base leftist voter, the most politically active, the people that troll websites and leave comments, basically the people that harass others in the political system, they’re not content to just live their lives. They’re so miserable and deranged that they share it. And they try to spread that misery as far and wide as they can.

I really think that what has happened is that the political agenda of the far left, as they constantly articulate it, has created some genuine insanity among their base voters. I mean, some real mental illness. And I think liberalism itself is a quasi mental illness. But I think that the base of the left has been driven almost out of their minds by a constant barrage by the people they trust and believe in, never-ending hate, never-ending anger.

Let’s take the civil rights coalitions. I mean, they’re out shouting, the Jacksons and the Sharptons, you name it, they’re out shouting and they’re claiming and threatening and all this. And they’re fundraising. They’re doing it clearly to raise money and stay in positions of power. But their believers are taking it all to heart, and they’re taking to the streets, and they are killing people, and they are engaging in acts of destruction disguised as the public protest. And I think that this is everywhere. I think college professors, depending on how angry they are when they teach, can end up creating general mental instability.

I think one of the reasons why we’re having such trouble, you and me, in dealing with this is we fashion ourselves as rational, and therefore we, in our own rationality, try to come up with rational ways to talk to them, interact with them, convince them they’re wrong or perhaps even persuade them, and it’s a mistake. Rational and irrational don’t mix. There isn’t anything in common. They really have nothing in common. And I’m not talking about all of them, but it’s a larger number than you would believe, and they’re easily spotted.

Many of them are anonymous, but you can spot them in the things they post on the Internet, the protests they engage in, the action that they take. And I think that the leadership of the left, from college professors to elected officials, to you name it, is creating a genuine mental instability among their followers. They’re creating anger and rage, and they’re doing it every day. They never let up.

Every day the people in charge of the left and its agenda are just enraged at everything. They’re livid. They’re never happy. They never smile. Even leftist comedians now are just livid and filled with rage, and I’m telling you it has had a deleterious effect on followers and people that end up being true believers.

Like I say, Sharpton and Jackson, they’re who they are. I mean, they’re out there doing what they do and Sharpton will go out and say (imitating Sharpton), “Well, we might be knocked down to the canvas by that grand jury, but we’re not gonna stay on the mat. We’re gonna get up and we’re not cut those gloves off. ” Well, that is heard by his followers. He’s just fundraising. You know, he’s just rabble-rousing, keeping his supporters loyal. But they hear it.

You know, Obama says things like “they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun.” People hear this stuff, and they consider it a license. I’m not absolving the leaders of any responsibility for it. I am exempting them from it in innocent. I could be wrong about that. I think they have just as much rage, but they’re users. And I think they’re creating this rage out there on purpose to create this army, constant chaos, constant crisis, one after another. We can’t even take a breathe because by the time we take a breath there’s something new that’s popped up that we can’t understand, it doesn’t make any sense. Nobody stands up against it. Everybody wants to appease it, and we feel like we’re losing control of everything.

I think it’s being done on purpose and it really is a disservice for people for creating in the country, the leftist side of the population, I tell you, you sit down and actually talk to some of these people and it is just impossible. You hear the New York Times wanting war crimes charges against Dick Cheney. War crimes. And they’re dead serious about it. Okay, you have a reader of the New York Times, somebody’s already mentally deranged reading that, all they gotta do is see the magic word “Halliburton” and they are loaded for bear. And these people are everywhere, folks.

They’ve taken over the university. They’ve taken over academies. They’re in the media. And I thought of all this with this next story that I found on Campus Reform. This is another one of these great young conservative websites that is springing up. It’s a new generation of alternate media. Young people who have decided to chronicle some of the outrages on campus, which is brand-new. Everything that happened there was one way, one-sided.

Did you know that at Stanford University they have a dean for religious life? At Stanford University, they have a law school dean, they have a dean of students, they have a dean of this. They have a dean for religious life. Okay. Fine and dandy. Now, what got me on this. We had a couple of callers yesterday who were totally pessimistic. They expressed their sorrow and concern. They think that we’ve gone so far down that there’s no saving the country, and by that they meant as it was.

Everybody knows there’s always going to be an America, but will there be an America of the founding, with those kinds of values. There’s a great story in the Wall Street Journal that’s the counterbalance to this. I think his name is Dan Stevens, and he believes that we are actually not in bad shape at all and that we’re in great shape, and he tries to explain why, and I’ll get to that here before the program ends. ‘Cause it would be a great counterbalance to this story in Campus Reform.

Anyway, the dean for religious life is named Jane Shaw. The Very Reverend Jane Shaw. I have her picture here, and she looks like a dean of religious life. She believes that churches are focusing too much on religion, and they need to change their focus to art. She’s the dean for religious life at Stanford. In a recent interview she said she’s “not very churchy as a person,” yet somehow she qualified as the dean for religious life.

She “advocated that the church welcome people more, without converting them,” and the way to do that is just drop all this religion all the time. It’s not necessary to do religion all the time in the church. The church can do art. The church can do global warming. The church can alert people to climate change. The church can do a lot of public good if it would just drop all the religion.

What does it even mean, “not necessary to do religion”? What do you mean, do religion? What does that even mean? Stop praying? Stop singing? Stop doing sermons? Stop reading the Bible? What does it mean? Oh, by the way, she happens to be an LGBT activist and a lesbian. And she’s the dean of religious life.

Now, it’s stories like this that I’m sure convince the two callers I talked to yesterday that they’re right, that we are so screwed that there’s no coming back. But this kind of infiltration by these mentally ill people who should be offering balance. You know, the academy’s always been a place of openness we are told, openness of ideas and intellectual rigor, and there’s none of that going on, or very little of it anymore. It’s indoctrination, even at the institutions of highest higher learning.

She’s also a Brit. I listened to a little bit. It’s hard to hear. She has an accent, obviously, but she doesn’t seem to have any depth at all. She seems like a totally surface individual. But how does somebody like this end up at Stanford? This is no slouch place. How does somebody like this end up in a position called the dean for religious life.

Try this as a pull quote. “I think the great crisis of our day is climate change and the environment.” Now, to me this is proof of someone who’s not intellectual. She is a priest, by the way, she’s a priest from Harvard and Oxford, and this is what she thinks is the biggest crisis of the day? Climate change and the environment? Well, why does she think that? Because she knows what they are tickets to.

If you gain control of people and you convince them that religion, the religion of God needs to take a backseat because churches are too religious and start getting into art. What does that mean? Well, global warming and climate change. You then convert these people to believing in the earth and the environment as religion. And then it becomes inarguable. Once you invest your faith outside the religion of God, make it the religion of climate change, global warming and the earth, well, then you can’t be converted. It’s your religion. It’s offensive for anybody to even try. It’s your religion. It’s your faith. Nobody can argue with your faith.

“So I rather hope that more people would take that seriously and begin to think and reflect on what they are doing with their own lives and how they can bring some pressure to bear to change things.” This woman ordained as a priest, at the Church of England, which is the equivalent of the Episcopal church in the United States. And to me this is a classic illustration of how this pollution, if you will, or this perversion of our great institutions is taking place with utter, sheer nonsense. And parents are spending whatever it costs, $20,000 a semester or year, to send their kids to this place to be taught this gunk.

We gotta get the religion out of our churches. That’s the problem. There’s just too much religion going on in there, and we need to stop it. We need to replace the religion with social justice in churches. Now, you can say, “Rush, come on, this is a one-off. This is a kook.” See, we used to say that about these people 20 years ago. I’ll admit, running into stories like this 20 years ago, we’d laugh about it, and we would immediately dismiss it as quackery and kookery. And here it is 20 years later, and they have made more inroads into the mainstream than anybody ever thought. And one of the reasons why is everybody thought it was so insane, so stupid, so silly, that all we did was laugh at it. But here they are.

I think it’s just more evidence and another example of what we’re actually dealing with out there. And I guarantee you, this woman is the dean of religious life. You think there’s probably not some anger in the way she tries to reach people, anger about what they arrived at school believing and how they were wrong and how they were being propagandized by their parents and whatever? Just a very unfortunate thing. And all these people making this happen are the epitome of unhappiness in their personal life. Misery, miserable. No matter what they get, they’re never happy.

No matter how much they get, no matter how much they win, it never makes them happy, which keeps them constantly demanding more. And they cast themselves, portray themselves as victims, which means we can’t oppose it. That makes us mean-spirited and judgmental. They cast themselves as minorities, same thing. So the slow erosion of what we all believe in continues, and the attempted massive takeover at destroying it also goes on at the same time.

But, see, it’s this time of year that my faith in all of this stuff eventually bottoming out and blowing up is at its highest. And I wish I could tell you why. It’s not something tangible that I can point to and say this, this, this, and this are what give me confidence. There are those things, obviously, but many of them are personal. And I would be foolish to deny that they are positive for me, but I do try to imagine how they are positive for the country at large. I would love to be able to tell you how.

I’d love to be able to give you tangible things that you could point to, I could point to, you could grab onto as evidence that I think this stuff is gonna eventually implode on itself. Unfortunately, I can’t. I can just share with you the idea and the firm belief that I do think these people are ultimately going to lose. I don’t know when, and we’re gonna be shocked a lot more in the future at apparent signs — and, by the way, I’m not saying don’t do anything to stop it. There’s nothing automatic. I don’t think that just the forces of good are gonna triumph one day. But I do think they are. Always have.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Anyway, folks, welcome back. I want to share with you this piece. I found it, I was referring to it earlier in the Wall Street Journal, by a guy named Bret Stephens. It’s called the “The Marvel of American Resilience.” Let me just give you a pull quote near the end of the piece so you’ll know where it’s building to. “We are larger than our leaders. We are better than our politics. We are wiser than our culture. We are smarter than our ideas. Enjoy the holiday.”

Now, here’s how it begins. “Imagine an economic historian in the year 2050 talking to her students about the most consequential innovations of the early 21st century — the Model Ts and Wright flyers and Penicillins of our time. What would make her list?” What would make her list? What would be on the list of the most consequential innovations of now, the early 21st century? And there’s not an iPhone on the list, and there’s not an iPad on the list, and there’s not an app on the list.

First thing here would be fracking. “Fracking — shorthand for the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that is making the US the worldÂ’s leading oil and gas producer — would be noted. Surely social media — the bane of autocrats like TurkeyÂ’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of parents like me — would also get a mention. Mobile apps? Check. The emerging science of cancer immunotherapy? Hopefully, with fingers tightly crossed,” that will be on the list in 2050 as a great American initiative and innovation.

“After drawing up this list, our historian would then observe that each innovation had ‘Made in USA’ stamped all over it. How strange, she might say, that so many Americans of the day spent so much of their time bellyaching about the wretched state of their schools, the paralyzed nature of their politics, their mounting fiscal burdens and the predictions of impending decline.

“Perhaps because I grew up as an American living abroad, IÂ’ve always been struck by the disconnect between American achievement and self-perception. To this day I find it slightly amazing that, in the US, I can drink water straight from a tap, that a policeman has never asked me for a ‘contribution,’ that my luggage has never been stolen, that nobody gets kidnapped for ransom, that Mao-esque political purges are conducted only in the editorials of the New York Times. Try saying the same thing about everyday life in Brazil, Russia, India, China or South Africa — the so-called Brics countries once anointed by a Goldman Sachs guru as the economies of the future.” But they’re not; we are.

“But back to our future historian. Why, she might ask her students, did the US dominate its peers when it came to all the really big innovations?” Now, this is where it gets interesting here, folks.

“Fracking would make a good case study. The revolution happened in the U.S. not because of any great advantage in geology — China, Argentina and Algeria each has larger recoverable shale gas reserves. It didnÂ’t happen because AmericaÂ’s big energy companies are uniquely skilled or smart or deep-pocketed: Take a look at ExxonMobil Â’s 2004 Annual Report and youÂ’ll barely find a mention of ‘fracturing’ or ‘horizontal’ drilling.

“Nor, finally, did it happen because enlightened mandarins in the federal bureaucracy and national labs were peering around the corners of the future. … Instead, fracking happened in the US because Americans, almost uniquely in the world, have property rights to the minerals under their yards. And because the federal government wasnÂ’t really paying attention. And because federalism allows states to do their own thing. And because against-the-grain entrepreneurs like George Mitchell and Harold Hamm couldnÂ’t be made to bow to the consensus of experts,” who said this stuff would destroy, would pollute, and wouldn’t work. They did it anyway. “And because our deep capital markets were willing to bet against those experts,” and go with the entrepreneur.

So he’s describing American exceptional here. He’s describing American uniqueness. Property rights made it worthwhile for somebody to tear up their backyard and see what was underneath, and when they learned what was there, to go for it. They owned the property, they had the ability to do it. It doesn’t happen too many other places in the world.

“My Wall Street Journal colleague, Gary Zuckerman, author of The Frackers, ‘When I talk to foreigners, theyÂ’re even more impressed than many Americans by this renaissance. They understand that it only could have happened in America.'” Isn’t it interesting that you have nothing in your newspaper or your daily news digest about any of this? Have you seen what the unemployment rate is in North Dakota? Have you seen the economic output in North Dakota? Have you seen the boom? Do you know that they do not have enough housing yet for all the employees moving there to work? You don’t hear a word about it.

You don’t hear a word about fracking other than how it’s destroying the planet, gonna cause an earthquake, or what have you. But you don’t hear any of the upbeat, positive. Fracking, fracturing is largely to explain the falling oil price. The Saudis are scared to death. Well, wait. Not so much the Saudis, but the rest of OPEC is scared to death, and so they are trying to get the price of oil down to put the frackers out of business. After all, competition, it’s bloody in the free market, folks. It’s designed to be.

And so here’s a guy noting something uniquely, genuinely America that’s happening without government even noticing, much less being involved. It’s happening because of things that are uniquely American. If it can happen here, it can happen in any number of places and usually does. Despite all the bickering, despite all the pessimism, despite all the arguments, the people in North Dakota are not paying attention to any of that. They’ve got fracking going on. I thought it was a fascinating take.

It’s the kind of thing that is much needed. People need a dose of optimism. They need a dose of positive reinforcement. And more than that, people need to hear the evidence that America can be and still is the America they’ve always known. And in parts of the country it is. And if it is in parts of the country, it can be everywhere again, or we can certainly reclaim a lot of ground we have perceived to have lost.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Bret Stephens makes the point that fracking is one thing, one industry. There will be many more. He says: “Innovation depends less on developing specific ideas than it does on creating broad spaces. Autocracies can always cultivate their chess champions, piano prodigies and nuclear engineers; they can always mobilize their top 1% to accomplish some task. The autocratsÂ’ quandary is what to do with the remaining 99%. They have no real answer, other than to administer, dictate and repress.

“A free society that is willing to place millions of small bets on persons unknown and things unseen doesnÂ’t have this problem. Flexibility, not hardness, is its true test of strength. Success is a result of experiment not design. Failure is tolerable to the extent that adaptation is possible. This is the American secret, which we often forget because we canÂ’t imagine it any other way. ItÂ’s why we are slightly shocked to find ourselves coming out ahead — even, or especially, when our presidents are feckless and our policies foolish.” Americans and America still triumphs.

But we often forget it because we’re in the midst of it, and we just expect it because we’re Americans. But this guy was an American growing up overseas, and he didn’t live it. He watched it from afar. He concludes: “We are larger than our leaders. We are better than our politics. We are wiser than our culture. We are smarter than our ideas. Enjoy the holiday.” And have faith in your fellow citizens. Have faith in entrepreneurism. Have faith in freedom, because it is the nature of triumph.

Knowing full well there are all-out assaults on it, but some people pay no attention and just keep exercising their freedom and just keep plugging away. And that’s the lesson for all of us. Just like I always say, “If we’re gonna have a recession, don’t participate. If they’re gonna have a bad down economy, if they’re gonna do this, don’t participate. Live your life, be above it. You can.”