{"id":214638,"date":"2016-10-12T16:33:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-12T20:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/172.24.32.11\/daily\/2016\/10\/12\/if_trump_goes_down_we_re_the_disease_the_left_will_attempt_to_eradicate_next\/"},"modified":"2016-10-12T16:33:43","modified_gmt":"2016-10-12T20:33:43","slug":"if_trump_goes_down_we_re_the_disease_the_left_will_attempt_to_eradicate_next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2016\/10\/12\/if_trump_goes_down_we_re_the_disease_the_left_will_attempt_to_eradicate_next\/","title":{"rendered":"If Trump Goes Down, We\u2019re the Disease the Left Will Attempt to Eradicate Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a> <\/p>\n

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RUSH: I mentioned yesterday on this program.  I need to get this out of the way so we can move on to the crux of things today.  I mentioned yesterday that if Hillary and the Democrats win the election, it\u2019s just the beginning.  They are gonna go after everybody who opposes them.<\/p>\n

The objective is going to be the elimination of opposition. Not a level playing field, not a circumstance where free and open debate takes place, but the elimination of opposition.  And I can demonstrate it. I\u2019ll demonstrate that I\u2019m right by virtue of C-SPAN\u2019s Washington Journal today.  The host, Pedro Echevarria is speaking with Politico contributor… Some of you might think it\u2019s Echevarria.  They pronounce it both ways, but it\u2019s actually Echevarria.  Pedro spoke with Politico contributor and author Nicole Hemmer about her new book, “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” and Echevarria says, “When did we see the growth of conservative media?”<\/line><\/p>\n

HEMMER:  The late 1950s and 1960s. But it\u2019s always, in this period, pretty small.  So they disappear historically.  The real shift comes not with the first generation that I write about, but the second generation.  So when Rush Limbaugh, his program goes national in 1988, you have a conservative media that is visible nationally and that is part of a national conversation.  It raises its awareness of conservative media, but it also creates a false memory, I think, for Americans who look back and they say, “Oh, conservative media started in 1988.”  We understand to understand that conservatives have been — been doing this for a long time.<\/line><\/p>\n

RUSH:  Whoa, and that makes it even more important to stamp them out.  We have to understand, conservatives have been around a lot longer than 1988, like a disease.  Conservatives, conservatism? Yeah, yeah! Don\u2019t think that just because the giant plague hit in 1988 that the disease wasn\u2019t around before that, because it was.  You just didn\u2019t see it and you didn\u2019t notice it, but it was there.  Conservatism, the plague, has always been there.  So after that settled in, Echevarria didn\u2019t have much to say coming back, but he did have a question…<\/p>\n

ECHEVARRIA:  You\u2019ve said Rush Limbaugh.  Is he the standard-bearer there as far as radio is concerned?<\/p>\n

HEMMER:  He is, absolutely.  I mean, he\u2019s the one who pioneers this new interactive talk radio format that becomes nationally popular in the early 1990s, and it\u2019s really not until a decade later — until 2000, 2001, 2002 — that you get his cohort Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, all these folks who are modeled after him and create the broad conservative radio universe we have today.<\/line><\/p>\n

RUSH:  So the plague existed, the plague of conservatives. You know, you can trace conservatism back to the founding.  (chuckling)  If you want to know where conservatism began in America, try Convention Hall, Philadelphia, in the mid-1700s.  That\u2019s the original of conservatism in America.  The founding was especially conservative, but she doesn\u2019t know that.  She hasn\u2019t been taught that.  She hasn\u2019t slightest idea.  To her, conservatism is a plague. It\u2019s a disease. It was festering out there!<\/p>\n

The CDC didn\u2019t need to do anything about it, and it didn\u2019t get big until 1988.  And then it became almost an incurable disease that we have to do something about.  She\u2019s now chronicling how it spread — and I owned it from \u201988 until 2000.  She\u2019s leaving Fox News out of this.  Then she says “the cohort of other radio talk show hosts…” It mutated, if you will. This plague of conservatism mutated out there, and all these subdiseases began to spread.  They were modeled after the number one form of the virus.  (That would be me.)<\/p>\n

So then they go to the phones and they get a call from woman named Martha in Texas.  She says, “I want to ask you, in 1986, the FCC removed the truth in reporting law.  That was the year Rush Limbaugh started up.  Did that make a difference in right-wing…?” And they want us to believe that everything is unscripted in these places?  They just happened to get a call from somebody who wants to talk about the FCC removing a “truth-in-reporting law.” <\/p>\n

She\u2019s talking about the Fairness Doctrine, and there\u2019s nothing about truth-in-reporting in the Fairness Doctrine.  The Fairness Doctrine is not an equal-time doctrine. It\u2019s nothing of the sort.  Doesn\u2019t matter.  You don\u2019t need to know the truth.  You need to know an obscured version of the truth.  So that caller asked the question: “Did the REMOVAL…” The REMOVAL, don\u2019t you know, “of truth-in-reporting laws, did that lead to Limbaugh?”<\/line><\/p>\n

HEMMER:  The regulation that you\u2019re talking about was removed in 1987.  It\u2019s called the Fairness Doctrine.  When the Fairness Doctrine gets repealed during the Reagan administration, does it open the door?  I think it opens the door for station owners to feel comfortable picking up the Rush Limbaugh program knowing that they\u2019re not going to get rapped by the government, um, for being unbalanced.<\/p>\n

RUSH:  So you see how conservatism is being portrayed here in this book by a Politico infobabe, a Politico reporterette?  It\u2019s a disease, it\u2019s a plague, and the CDC — in this case, the FCC — made an error in treating it.  They allowed the virus to grow by not enforcing “truth-in-reporting laws,” which enabled our EIB affiliates to skirt the edges of the law by picking up this program.  All of this means, they\u2019re gonna take care of this.  It\u2019s gonna be pretty soon on their agenda, because this is — right here — the location of the primary opposition to the left and the Democrat Party, and they are not going to tolerate any opposition.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: I want to go back to sound bite number three, this contributor on to Politico, this author Nicole Hemmer, with her book “Messengers From the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”  I want to play this last sound bite again.<\/p>\n

Because, remember, her whole premise is that conservatism is a disease, and it was percolating out there prior to 1988.  It was there, but nobody saw it. It wasn\u2019t killing too many people; so there wasn\u2019t a lot of concern with it. But in 1988 it became a plague when this program started.  And in this sound bite, she is answering a question from a caller about “truth-in-reporting laws” and whether or not they served my purposes in starting any program. <\/line><\/p>\n

HEMMER:  The regulation that you\u2019re talking about was removed in 1987.  It\u2019s called the Fairness Doctrine.  When the Fairness Doctrine gets repealed during the Reagan administration, does it open the door?  I think it opens the door for station owners to feel comfortable picking up the Rush Limbaugh program knowing that they\u2019re not going to get rapped by the government, um, for being unbalanced.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Now, stop and think of this.  I want you to think of this in the mind-set here: “[S]tation owners to feel comfortable picking up the Rush Limbaugh program knowing that they\u2019re not going to get rapped by the government…”  Now, it\u2019s not discussed much, but radio and television — terrestrial radio and TV — are governed by the government.  They\u2019re policed, regulated, by the FCC.  And they have operating licenses that have to be renewed every so often (three years, five years), and to get them renewed, you have to have done enough things the FCC says that local ownership should do to warrant the license being reissued. <\/p>\n

So that\u2019s always been part of the deal.  But her attitude here is (summarized), “Yeah, station owners became comfortable picking up the Limbaugh show knowing the government wasn\u2019t gonna do anything to them.”  So the point is it\u2019s perfectly valid, in this woman\u2019s mind, for the government to have all of this power to determine what you get to hear and don\u2019t get to hear.  It\u2019s perfectly valid for the government to sit there and determine who gets to say what and who doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n