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RUSH: Driftwood, Texas. John, nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Dittos from Texas, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: You know, one of the things that struck me early on about this when we started hearing about the shooter was, of course, he railed against women, and he railed against the decadence of our society, but he also railed against ‘rich kids.’ I even heard the term ‘rich white kids’ at one point, and that struck me as odd because there has been an undertone of going after achievers in this country, people who work their tails off, who put themselves through college, and yet they are punished. They are called the evil rich.

RUSH: Amen.

CALLER: And I don’t hear that coming from everyone. That’s not a broad-spectrum argument that’s being made. It’s really focused on just a handful of groups of people who live class envy on a daily basis.

RUSH: Yeah, but who’s responsible for those divisions?

CALLER: Well —

RUSH: Who is directing hatred toward the rich in this country and has been for as long as I’ve been alive?

CALLER: Well, case in point — and I find it very interesting, you can say what you want to about the decadence of our society and about women, but to single out ‘the rich,’ like none of these kids that were shot were —

RUSH: Wait a second.

CALLER: — were kids that put themselves through school.

RUSH: Virginia Tech does have a lacrosse team, and one of the victims was on the lacrosse team. Now, you say single out rich. He didn’t single out rich. That’s what the Drive-Bys focused on. He did single out women! Why don’t the Drive-Bys focus on maybe the feminist movement is creating tumult and chaos between boys and girls? This guy, remember the first thing that we were told about him. The first thing we were told was that his girlfriend broke up with him and that she was the first person he tried to find. He found her, and a counselor was trying to mediate this argument, and then the shooter blew ’em both away. So, yeah, he ranted against women, too, and he ranted against a lot of things, but when he ranted against the rich, guess what? ‘Ooh, template! Template!’ The Drive-By Media hears one thing, ‘Ooh, rich? Bam! We hate the rich, too!’ That’s part of liberal Democrat politics, is stirring up resentment against the rich. Demonization! It’s a specialty of the left. They demonize entire groups of people. They demonize the rich. They demonize majorities of any kind. They demonize business. They demonize Big Oil. They demonize Wal-Mart. They demonize! You look at their enemies list, and you would have to conclude that they are anti-success and anti-capitalist, which I believe they are.

I believe they are threatened by anybody who makes it without some government involvement in their lives or some movement involvement in their lives like the civil rights movement or what have you. These are the people that are full of hate, folks. These are the people that continually demonize the rich, and let me tell you how it manifests itself, not just in this case with this shooter. Whenever there is talk of tax cuts — and how often do we get stories about ‘the wealth gap is widening! The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The middle class is being wiped out.’ How do you think that affects people? Well, when Democrats come along like Clinton or now the current crop of Democrats talking about raising taxes, well, guess what? Everybody’s taxes are going to end up being raised, but the people who have been victimized by this demonization, the middle class and the poor, you raise somebody else’s taxes it isn’t going to make one iota’s difference in their lives! If somebody’s taxes get raised, yippee! It doesn’t improve their lives at all. But there’s this thing — I coined the term in the early nineties — get-even-with-’em-ism.

All it is is that the Democrats on the left go out and tell a majority of Americans, ‘We’re going to make you feel better. We’re going to give you a little revenge! We’re going to really punish these rich guys.’ The thing is, the rich stay rich, don’t they? I wonder why that is? And these people that are being told the rich are getting punished are being lied to. Well, they may be getting punished but it’s not making them less rich, and these tax increases on the rich are not making the middle class wealthier. You know, my mother said, I’m sure you’ve heard this growing up: ‘You better clean your plate; there are starving kids in China.’

One day I finally said to my mother, ‘You mean to tell me, if I eat everything on the plate the kids in China are going to feel better?’

‘Don’t you sass me!’

What else could she say? It’s the same routine they play with the rich. That’s demonization! They are creating hatred for, as you say, achievers, wealthy people, what have you. There’s any number of examples of this, as I went through their enemies list: Wal-Mart, Big Oil, you name it. They can’t wait to foster as much hatred on people as possible and have them share that hatred. They say we’re coarsening the culture? They say we are polluting the airwaves? These are the people that have been doing it for 50 or more years. These are the people that have been creating divisions in this country beyond what they’re even aware of. They want those divisions to occur because the more people on the victimized side of any issue, the more votes Democrats have, theoretically, and that remains the objective for all of these people. Everything they do and say is political, folks. Everything. I have an interesting piece here, and it’s from the Cato organization, a Libertarian group, and the headline is: ‘Are the Rich Really Getting Richer? — ‘The number of U.S. households with a net worth of more than $5 million, excluding their primary residence, surged 23 percent to surpass one million for the first time in 2006, according to a survey released on Tuesday,’ Reuters reports.

 

”The survey by Chicago-based Spectrem Group found that the number of U.S. households with more than $5 million rose from 930,000 in 2005. In 1996, there were only 250,000 U.S. households in the ‘ultra-rich’ category, Spectrem said. … [T]he surge in household growth is underpinned by economic growth in recent years, which has fueled both stock market gains and also the market for private companies. [The study] also ascribed gains to rising real estate valuations and favorable tax policies.’ In the policy analysis ‘Has U.S. Income Inequality Really Increased?’ Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds writes: ‘There are frequent complaints that U.S. income inequality has increased in recent decades. Estimates of rising inequality that are widely cited in the media are often based on federal income tax return data. Those data appear to show that the share of U.S. income going to the top 1 percent (those people with the highest incomes) has increased substantially since the 1970s. … Studies based on tax return data provide highly misleading comparisons of changes to the U.S. income distribution because of dramatic changes in tax rules and tax reporting in recent decades. Aside from stock option windfalls during the late-1990s stock-market boom, there is little evidence of a significant or sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth over the past 20 years.”

In other words, according to an in-depth study of a Libertarian group Cato, it’s all lies. But, it’s lies that are believed! So people think they’re getting poorer, even while we got a booming economy. They think the rich are getting richer, and it’s the rich’s fault. The rich are stealing their money! Who gives us this thought? Who puts this thought in people’s heads? It’s the Democrat Party, the American left, and the Drive-By Media. It’s called demonization. Let me give you a practical example of how this works. Now, normally I would not do this, but I’m going to do this to illustrate a point. I’m going to talk about something personal. In the state of Florida, where I live, there are various proposals before the Florida legislature to do something about property taxes, and one plan would eliminate them. It would just totally eliminate property taxes. It’s a controversy here because we are a state that has a population that lives here half a year but their homestead is not here. Their primary residence is not here but they come in the winter. The ‘snowbirds.’ They’re wealthy people. They’re wealthier than most because they’re able to afford two homes and so property taxes reflect that, and native Floridians are being soaked and saddled with property tax increases, so they think. They’ve come up with a program here called Save Our Homes, which is designed to make property taxes more fair.

The bottom line is people are still upset about it. So there are many proposals, but one of the proposals before the legislature is to eliminate property taxes altogether and to replace it with a two-cent increase in the sales tax which would put the sales tax to 8.5%. Now, you can imagine how this is being demagogued. I have had three newspapers in south Florida call me and want me to react to a fact they’re going to put in their stories, and the fact is this: My property taxes last year were $430,000. The year before that, they were $488,000. My homestead exemption, as does everybody who lives here, allows for only 3% increases every year in the property tax. That was long established before I got here. So the Democrats in the Florida legislature, and I’ve seen this in newspaper stories six times since Sunday, are running stories. The Democrats are out there talking about it, and they’re holding up pictures of my property tax bill they’ve gotten. They’ve printed them out and they’re holding them up for the Drive-By Media, ‘Is it fair that Rush Limbaugh would save $429,000 on his tax bill?’ and they’re using this. Don’t misunderstand here, whatever they end up doing, folks, I am an adult. We’re going to pay the taxes regardless where they collect ’em. The property tax is a punitive tax on the American dream, and it has gotten out of hand in all kinds of places.

But I have not entered the fray! I’m not out there saying, ‘Hey, I want the property tax done away with because…’ I haven’t said anything publicly about it at all! They’ve just gone to the public records, and they found what I pay. There are many people in Florida who pay that much or more, but guess who they’re focusing on? Me, because everybody knows me, and they have created this image of me. I’m hated and despised and all these other rotten things, and so these are the people that create class envy. These are the people that create demonization and demonize people and hatred for achievers and others. So they’re holding up my property tax file and they’re waving it around for the cameras, and they’re using that to drum up support among Democrats in the state to oppose this change in the property tax. Everybody’s property tax would be eliminated, not just mine! Everybody would be eliminated, and it would be replaced by an increase in the sales tax. I don’t even want to argue the merits of both. In one of them, you’ve got a consumption tax. You’re not taxed on what you spend. Food and other things like that are exempt. But of course the usual liberal reaction: ‘It’s going to be the poor and minorities and women hardest hit!’ It’s the same old template gobbledegook and garbage.

Now, I tell you this not for any reason other than to illustrate what our caller was talking about: the demonization of the evil rich and how hatred is worked up to defeat common-sense public policy on that basis, on the basis of dividing people and creating resentment and hatred and dislike. This guy, this shooter, he railed against everybody. He railed against women. He railed against Jesus. He railed against all kinds of things — also the rich. Guess what they focus on? Now, why does this guy hate the rich? He’s somehow found a way to go to four years at Virginia Tech. He’s been in the United States for 14 years. Who is it that made this guy hate the rich? Why, there’s only one answer to this! The Democrat Party, the American left and their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media, routinely portray the rich as a bunch of evil, rotten SOBs who are out to steal everybody else’s money. Wal-Mart’s an example. Big Oil is another. This guy is genuinely angry.

This shooter was genuinely angry. He was angry about women, too, but of course, they didn’t mention that! They glossed right over that. We could easily take what he said and say, ‘Maybe feminism made this guy do it. All he wants is a girlfriend or a wife or something. He’s got some feminist trained woman that’s an absolute b-i-itch on wheels and drove him crazy.’ What if we said that, here? Well, that doesn’t fit the Drive-Bys’ template. But what’s different about saying that than focusing on, ‘The rich made him do it! The evil rich,’ and so forth? So I’m telling you, my point here is that the coarsening of this culture and the creation of hatred from one American to a group of others, is being fostered precisely — not by me, not by Sean Hannity, not by Neal Boortz, not by Mark Levin, not by anybody on talk radio. It is being fostered and has been for decades by the American left, the Democrat Party, and the Drive-By Media.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, if this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich, and all these other things? This guy is a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it’s a liberal that committed this act. Now, the Drive-Bys will read on the website that I’m attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That’s exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen! I’m just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation. I’m just pointing it out. I can tell you from the history of this program, starting way back in the early nineties, when there was any kind of an incident, crime or what have you, that attracted national attention, in the early days of this program, the Drive-By Media went out and they tried to connect the perpetrator to this program! They did everything they could. In fact, it went so far as Bill Clinton blaming me for influencing Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Murrah Building! These are the people sponsoring lies and distortion for the purposes of dividing this country and creating hatred. These are the people that invented this kind of tactic, if you will.

Can you imagine if this guy, the shooter in Virginia Tech, had sent me his package? I’ll tell you what I would have done had he done it. I would have called authorities in Virginia and said, ‘I’m not opening this. Here it is. You want to send somebody up to look at it and get it?’ and I would not have used a moment of it. But they would have learned that he had sent it to me, and you know what the Drive-Bys would be saying today? ‘Ah, it figures! A Limbaugh listener is blowing away the campus!’ They are waiting every day for some event like that to happen, and yet right before our eyes, it is NBC — a respected, valued, highly vaunted, major news network! This guy sent it to them for a reason. He didn’t pick ABC. He didn’t pick me. He didn’t pick CBS. He didn’t pick CNN. He didn’t pick Fox. Where did he send it? NBC — and boy, are they not playing along! They’re airing it more times than this guy pulled the trigger, and they’re out there talking about how tough the decision was. ‘Oh, we agonized and agonized and agonized!’ Really? ‘It was such a tough editorial decision. The public has a right to know!’

Meanwhile, the same people will say to us, ‘Well, we can’t show you videotapes of 9/11. That’s too soon, too traumatic! We can’t traumatize the families of the victims.’ Well, we can traumatize these families and the entire Virginia Tech family? We can’t show Americans being beheaded by Islamofascists in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever it happens. We can’t see it. We can’t see Danny Pearl being murdered, or anybody. We can’t watch it. ‘Oh, the American people couldn’t handle that.’ We can’t even go see a movie, United 93. It was ‘too soon’ for that. ‘The memories are just too traumatic, Mr. Limbaugh. We can’t!’ Let NBC get hold of this stuff, bam! It’s all over the place with saturation coverage, never stopping. Now they’re saying, ‘Well, we’re only doing 10% of our coverage. No more than six minutes an hour.’ Oh, that’s highly restrained! That’s very, very (sigh) very newsworthy. There are just double standards all over the place, folks. I’m telling you, I’m fed up with listening to who it is that’s supposedly coarsening the culture when I watch it on television every day, and I read it on obscure websites every day. These are the people that write books about how to assassinate George W. Bush!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to give you a couple other examples here about this Timothy McVeigh and the Murrah Building. You people who were not with us then, the Clinton administration did try to blame that act on me. Clinton went out there and in his highly acclaimed speech to the people of Oklahoma City, made some reference to this is what happens when people attack their government and so forth and so on, and, of course, we were attacking government spending, government regulation, high taxes and this sort of thing. That’s what he meant, but he was just using it as a political opportunity. We raised hell about it. (Clinton Spokesman Mike) McCurry eventually apologized and said, no, we’re talking about the Michigan militia, shortwave radio. But there was a cover story of TIME Magazine of a fireman holding a baby that had been killed, and in the midst of all this discussion about whether or not I was responsible for this, John Carlson, hosting a talk show in Seattle, got hold of the fireman from Oklahoma City who was on the cover and it turns out that that fireman and all of his buddies at the firehouse listened to me.

The rescuers and the heroes are who listened to me. The people who listened to this program were outraged by what happened! There was no love for Timothy McVeigh anywhere in this country, and the Democrats and the Clinton administration tried to foster it all off on conservatives led by me. The movie Falling Down — there was a movie with Michael Douglas, Falling Down — about a white guy goes nuts being fired for a minority, I think it was, right? And he goes on a shooting rampage. ‘Ah, yeah, this is Limbaugh inspired,’ blah, blah, blah. They’ve been doing this for 18-1/2 years (it will be 19 in August). They’ve been doing this for at least 16 or 17 years, at every turn. If they could find a way to peg the Virginia Tech shooting on me and Hannity and Mark Levin and Neal Boortz, they would do it — and don’t think they haven’t looked, and don’t think they have given up on the possibility. We were ‘angry white men’ for a while after the movie Falling Down came out. We were enraged, angry. All of you hayseed southern hicks, as they think of you in the South, were the angry white men — and you had a ‘temper tantrum’ in 1994 when you elected the Republicans to control the House.

Yeah, my name was in the movie review in the New York Times of Falling Down. I was considered to be an inspiration for that movie. So, I’m telling you, this is nothing new. I just reached a boiling point with this. After all this is happening. After the Imus thing, it’s open season on talk radio by the very people themselves who are responsible for the things they claim are being caused by others, and they’ve been at this a lot longer than I have.

END TRANSCRIPT

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