RUSH: Brian in Nebraska. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Mega corn belt dittos from America’s heartland, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: First-time caller, longtime listener.
RUSH: Appreciate you being out there, sir.
CALLER: I consider myself a student of history, Rush, as well as a graduate student of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. And there’s one thing I want to talk about today, it’s been bothering me for quite a while, the Occupy Wall Street movement, to me, seems very analogous to the unrest that we saw in the streets of Weimar, Germany in the twenties. The things that they’re asking for are the same. The people that they are blaming are the same, and I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
RUSH: Well, I think you could probably go back to a number of different points in history and find commonality or similarity ’cause leftists are leftists, regardless of the era, regardless of the decade, the millennium, century, leftists are leftists. And uneducated, people are uneducated people at whatever point in time that you want to talk about. Intellectually I try to understand this. And that, of course, is very frustrating ’cause a lot of this with these people is emotion. But I don’t understand them intellectually. I have nothing in common with them, nothing, other than the frustration and anger over the fact that things aren’t working. But their reasons for being mad are as far away from mine as they could be.
See, I think these people are protesting the wrong people. They’re protesting the wrong thing just based on what they say they want. Just based on what they say has them angry. Wall Street has not done to them what they think has happened to them. Government has. You know what has really failed most of these people is the education system. That’s where they ought to be protesting. If this thing were intellectually honest they would be protesting every college that every one of them went to because that’s where they have been failed. That’s where they have been misguided, that’s where they’ve been ill- or maleducated or not educated at all. This is where their minds have been propagandized and poisoned. They’re blaming the wrong people, first and foremost. They have no sense of personal responsibility or stake in this at all.
The second thing is they’re not going to get anything that they want going about it the way they’re going about it. So intellectually I have no way to relate to it. Intellectually I have nothing whatsoever, not a smidgen in common with them. But one important thing about your asking about the Weimar Republic, it was a republic. The people in the streets were protesting a republic, and they wanted a different system. They hated representative government back in the twenties, the people you’re asking me about. They were not protesting oppression. They were protesting freedom, essentially. And I actually think that there’s an element of that in this group. They wouldn’t understand it. They think that what they’re about is total freedom, when it’s not.
These people are begging to be controlled. These people are begging for everybody to be controlled. They’re begging for everybody to lose as much economic freedom as can be taken away from them while they think that they’re demanding and protesting for just the exact opposite. But the people in the streets in Germany blamed Wall Street bankers. That’s why you think there’s similarities, and you’re right, there are. And to that extent history repeats. It’s also clear we don’t learn from it.
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RUSH: Michael, my adopted hometown of Sacramento, welcome to the program. Hi.
CALLER: Huh. How’s it going, Rush?
RUSH: Good. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I just wanted to comment on the fact that, you know, this whole Occupy Wall Street thing, they’re pretty much delusional and their pursuits of what they’re looking for. I mean what they want is they want a form of communism where essentially the ideal is that people voluntarily give up their wealth, because it’s for the good of the people.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But you can’t mandate that via government instrument. It’s never gonna work out. They’ve already tried it, you know, in Russia, they tried it in China, it’s not gonna work.
RUSH: That doesn’t matter to them.
CALLER: Exactly. Exactly. See, they’re completely shortsighted. They don’t understand the implications of what they’re doing. They’re actually just making a ruckus and it’s hurting businesses around them, and, again, it’s not helping towards the cause. The cause is that people voluntarily, you know, give up their wealth and give it to the good of the people or whatever, but that’s not gonna work.
RUSH: No, but I also don’t think that some of them would just be satisfied for wealthy people to voluntarily give it up. I think some of these people are all for violence to take it away from them, I don’t know how many. AP has a poll out, AP-GfK, 37% of the public back the protests. Most Americans say that the protests are making ’em mad. So you Democrats, you go ahead, you own it, you latch onto it and you tell us it’s you and they’re yours and you support it, because it’s a minority movement. I don’t even believe the 37%, I don’t believe that.