X

The Media Has Abandoned the Arena of Ideas

by Rush Limbaugh - Feb 15,2017

RUSH: West Palm Beach. Gina, great to have you on the program. Welcome.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Nice talking to you.

RUSH: Same here.

CALLER: I’ve been calling for a long time. First time I’ve ever got in.

RUSH: Well, I’m glad you did.

CALLER: So I want to make a point that all throughout the campaign and the election, nobody ever brought up Podesta’s ties with the Russian government, the fact that he is involved in consulting deals on wind, et cetera, making 30 to $40 million a year. Nobody ever once brought up Clinton’s ties to the Russian government and her Iranian deals. That never got brought up. Yet any little thing that Trump’s campaign did or even talked about, it gets blown out of proportion. I’m sick to my stomach over what’s happening in this country. The media is roadblocking Trump and his administration every which way possible. And not that anything is illegal or illegitimate; it’s just they’re digging and digging and roadblocks, and —

RUSH: No, no, no, no, no! Now, wait a minute, Gina. Just a second here. There is a whole lot of illegality going on. All of this leaking is illegal! Every damn bit of it’s illegal. The procuring of the information that is being leaked is illegal. There are a lot of people engaged in criminal behavior in order to bring these leaks to Drive-By Media.

CALLER: Well, I’m on the Trump administration side. We’re digging up a 200-year-old law that has never once been enforced, and they’re trying to wiggle and weave and take a fine line and try to —

RUSH: What, are you talking about the Logan Act?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Okay. The Logan Act has never been prosecuted. Nobody’s ever been prosecuted under it, and they’re hanging their hats on it, or trying to.

CALLER: They’re trying to. But I’m sure he’d know what was actually said or what wasn’t. You know, like you said, we’re getting excerpts. What does this do to Trump? It takes up time. He hasn’t been able to issue another executive order on the illegal immigrant ban. He can’t do tax reform. He can’t do… We can’t take our Supreme Court nominee and —

RUSH: Wait, wait. Let me ask you a question. Are you getting close to getting frustrated and abandoning Trump?

CALLER: Absolutely not!

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: One hundred percent! I am —

RUSH: Yeah, I knew that.

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: I just wanted to make sure.

CALLER: I am absolutely beginning to abandon all government almost. I mean, we have got McCain. We’ve got Lindsey Graham. We have all these people working against the American people.

RUSH: This is my point. Gina, thank you so much for calling because you’ve helped me to come up with another point. I started the program here by pointing out to you — and I did this for a reason, folks. I wasn’t just, you know, being sentimental. The way I do this job is I come here every day… I’ve earned this microphone. No one gave this to me. I’ve earned this microphone. I use it each day to enter the arena of ideas, and do whatever I can to persuade you to agree with me. I mean, that’s what I’m doing here. I passionately care about things.

I mean, there are many things going on here. I’m trying to attract a crowd, hold a crowd and all that. But when it comes to this kind of stuff, I’m trying to persuade people. I make no bones about it! But that’s all I can do. You still are free to vote. There’s no power over you I have. I don’t even contemplate having power. And that used to be what the media did, too. The media used to work in the arena of ideas. The media used to present the news, and you would read the news, and you would learn what you learned from it.

But that hasn’t been the case for the longest time. The media is no longer… Well, they’re trying to persuade, but now the media has even abandoned the arena of ideas and they’ve joined with a political party, and the media is not about the arena of ideas. The media is not about persuading. The media is about overcoming the will of the people. The media has joined forces with the Democrat Party, members of the Democrat Party, and the extreme radical left in the United States to advance the extreme radical leftist agenda. I don’t have that kind of power.

I don’t seek to use this microphone or this program to unseat elected officials, other than at the election. But the media has joined forces with unelected bureaucrats who are actively engaged in attempting to unseat members of the Trump administration, and Trump, in an effort to undermine a free-and-fair election in the United States last November. That is big, if you ask me, and it’s an area in which I am not competing. I wouldn’t know the first thing about it. I wouldn’t… It wouldn’t even have crossed my mind.

But that’s who the media is now. They’re not about news. They’re not about persuading people and then letting an election decide what happens. We’re a representative republic. The media has joined forces with people who hold in contempt the expressed opinion of the people of the United States and do their best to thwart it and object to it, roll it back, undermine it. However you want to describe it. Well, in the midst of all this we have these Trump supporters. And one thing holds true: The media hasn’t learned it, and I doubt that they ever will, because of their own arrogance and hubris.

You just heard Gina.

She knows what’s going on.

She’s followed every bit of this, just as you have. She knows everything they’re saying about Mike Flynn. She knows everything they’re saying about Trump. She knows everything they’re saying about Trump colluding with the Russians. She knows every lie they’re telling, and guess what? It hasn’t moved her an inch. She is just as glued and wedded to Donald Trump as she was at any time during the campaign. They have not succeeded in driving a wedge between Trump and his supporters and his voters no matter what, and they will continue to fail because they have nothing to do with Trump’s success.

They have been trying to undermine Donald Trump from the moment he got into the race, and he has triumphed over them at every turn — and they can’t stand that, either. And they’ve realized they alone don’t have the power to get rid of Trump. So now it’s join forces with the deep state, the sabotage going on with the Obama army that is working in quiet and invisibility within the shadow government, if you will. And even that is not distancing Trump’s supporters from him. They know full well what’s happening, and they’re infuriated by it, and they’re furious.

Now, there is some frustration.

You heard it.

That’s why I said I think the recipe for Trump or the solution here is to double down on the domestic agenda. There’s nothing stopping him. All this Flynn stop within they can’t stop him from rolling up sleeves and moving faster on Obamacare and tax cuts. Get it done. Start on it. Executive orders, legislation, whatever it takes. And do it quick before the Republicans have a chance to join the deep state. ‘Cause, do not doubt me. This isn’t Republican versus Democrat. This is not right versus left right now. This is not conservative versus populist. This is globalist, America-is-not-first establishment versus those of us who believe America is first. This is an establishment/anti-establishment fight that’s going on.

And the people in the establishment come from both parties.

They work in all of the bureaucracies. They are elected and unelected. One of the famous ones is Lois Lerner at the IRS, totally unelected, refusing to grant tax-exempt status to Tea Party organizations for purposes of fundraising during a campaign. That’s the shadow government. That’s Obama sabotaging the will of the people. That’s the Democrat Party dealing with the fact that they can’t win at the ballot box in national elections. That’s how the Democrat Party deals with the fact that they have continued to lose seats and elections since Obama became president.

So it’s not right, left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican. I mean, it is in certain things, but what we have here is the establishment — and this is all predicted — circling the wagons, doing everything they can, because Trump started out doing everything he said he was gonna do. We got the executive order on immigration, we had this, we had that, he came out of the gates like Secretariat and they said, whoa! Whoa ho-ho!

So they went and got a judge in Seattle, said, “You can’t do that!” Then they found the libs in the Ninth Circus to back up the judge. “You can’t do that!” Besides, the case hasn’t even been heard yet! They just told the president he can’t do it ’cause they don’t like him. That’s who they are. That’s not America. Whatever you think Flynn did, the people trying to stop Flynn, the people trying to stop Trump, they pose a greater threat to what you think this country is that than anything Donald Trump has in mind.

Donald Trump doesn’t pose a single threat to the greatness of America. You might have some people that disagree with populism and anti-globalism and so forth, but Donald Trump has no desire to undermine America. They do. Donald Trump has no design to transform America. Donald Trump doesn’t think America is second-rate. Donald Trump doesn’t think America’s guilty. Donald Trump doesn’t think America owes people things. Donald Trump doesn’t think that the borders are to be wide open so that anybody who wants here can come here because we’ve screwed them at some time in the past.

Donald Trump doesn’t believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact. They do. That’s what this fight is. It just so happens that most of the Democrats happen to be aligned with the “America is the problem in the world” side. And most of the pro-Trumpers happen to believe that America is the solution to the problems in the world. The globalists, the establishment, they think America isn’t particularly exceptional and should be no different than any other state in the world, subject to whatever a global authority might say, the United Nations, for example. Donald Trump doesn’t think that, nor do we.

This is a huge, huge fight. This is the one chance, in many of our lifetimes this is it, this is the only chance, the best chance we’re gonna have to roll this stuff back. But at the same time the people on the opposite side of this know full well that this is the last chance we might have, and they’ve got to destroy us, they’ve got to keep this from happening. They know full well that if they can beat this back, that they will succeed in transforming America and that there will not be any serious threats down the road, even though they can’t win elections.

Stop and think about that. The people that can’t win elections, outside of Barack Obama, the people on the Democrat side who cannot win elections, who do not have the votes to stop Donald Trump at all in a constitutional sense, have to now behave outside the Constitution in order to stop the duly elected president of the United States about whom they can produce no evidence that his election was fraudulent.


Related Links