RUSH: Republicans/conservatives are identified with small government, reduced government. That means less government spending. That means less government involvement in every aspect of life. Democrats and liberals just the opposite. The more government, the better. No limits on federal spending. And the more poor people, the better, because that equals the more people dependent on government, which is how liberals maintain their power, by essentially being Santa Claus to as many people as they can be. Trump runs for the presidency as a Republican but not a conservative, although he has appointed a more conservative cabinet than any recent Republican president ever has. He’s getting a dose of what liberalism really is.

He’s been surrounded by liberals his whole life as a resident of New York. They’ve been his friends, they have been his business associates, business enemies, business rivals. He’s always gotten along with them because he had to. But now that he’s president he’s getting a whole different side of liberalism. He’s seeing aspects of liberals that he ignored or didn’t even know existed. I remember talking to him about this. One time we were playing golf a long, long time ago, I mean, even before anybody even thought he might be talking about running for president. It was after Obama had been elected, so it would have to be after 2008.

And he’s asking me what I think of various political figures, and all he wanted, “Are they a good guy or bad guy?” He didn’t care why I thought that. He just wanted, “Good guy or bad guy.” And I started trying to explain why some of the people I called bad guys were bad guys. When I got into ideology, he wasn’t interested. The fact they were good guys or bad guys was all that mattered, as he defined the term, meaning decent people. And I quickly picked up on the fact that Donald Trump was not an ideological person.

It’s not a rip. I mean, a lot of people aren’t. I wish more people were. We would have been spared much grief if people understood liberalism and were able to attach — you know, most people this country are angry about a lot of things, and if most people knew that the reason they’re angry is what liberalism has done, well, we’d be in a much better — Can I make a point on this for you? I could make the case that the student loan program is responsible in part for ESPN losing massive amounts of subscribers. Now, you’re probably thinking, “How the hell, Rush? Don’t you know how extreme that is? The student loan program is why ESPN’s shedding a subscribers?” I can make the case, and I can blame it right on liberalism.

If ESPN wants to know why people are canceling they need to blame liberalism. Want me to explain it? Okay. ESPN sports network gets $7 per subscriber from every cable operator in the country. So if you have cable and you have ESPN and your cable company is sending ESPN $7 a month for you and for everyone — Do you realize how much money this is? Nobody gets $7 per subscriber. Nobody’s even close to it. ESPN has lost in just the last year a million subscribers. Multiply seven times one million and we’re talking $7 billion ESPN is down, and that’s just in the last year. And they are losing subscribers monthly at a dangerous rate.

It happens to coincide with two things: the Millennial generation becoming adults and ESPN’s conscious decision to turn their personalities loose and let them be all extreme liberal all the time. Because by doing that they are essentially kissing off half their audience. The people who watch ESPN don’t want to listen to a bunch of liberal claptrap, most of it related to race, all the time. So ESPN is a victim of their own political decisions and Millennials becoming adults cutting the cord and trying to find other ways to watch TV instead of cable.

Now, why are Millennials cutting the cord? They don’t have the money. They simply don’t have the money to spend on cable and this and that and why don’t they? Well, the college graduate liberals, the vast majority of them have 40,000 to $250,000 in student loans, which the federal government under Obama took control of from the banks in this country. And if you look at what’s happened to the education system, the education system in America is not education anymore. It’s indoctrination.

So all of these young Millennial college kids and even the generation prior, have not been educated. They’ve not been taught how to think critically. They have been programmed. They’re walking mind-numbed robots. And they automatically regurgitate and speak and think and write all this liberal claptrap that they’ve absorbed. They haven’t learned anything. They have just been propagandized. And one of the things they’ve been propagandized on is how evil corporations are. They hate corporations.

And guess what? Many Millennials despise cable on general principles. Television to them is not something they ought to have to pay for. They really hate Comcast. They really hate Verizon. I know this because I study them. It’s not rational, but it exists. So I can make the case that the liberal control of all of these things is actually leading to the demise of ESPN. People don’t have the money because they’re not being educated sufficiently to get decent jobs. They’re being graduated with degrees in worthless things, they’re not able to think critically for themselves.

They’re not taught to be self-reliant. That’s a no-no. Self-reliance a bad thing. That’s selfishness, self-reliance is. All of these things are now coming to a head. Did you hear what the former CIA director, Michael Hayden, said about the WikiLeaks dump? He said the biggest problem we’ve got here is the Millennial generation. We can’t hire ’em. Michael Hayden, former CIA, we can’t hire Millennials to work at the CIA because all they want to do is give away the secrets that they’re learning. We can’t hire ’em. Everybody’s dumping on Millennials these days.

But I can tell you this. ESPN is hurling subscribers. And the stories that I’ve seen this week about ESPN about how the next round of layoffs are gonna be on-camera people, the talent, as it’s called will be among the next round of layoffs. Some are gonna be actively fired. Others whose contracts come up for renewal are not gonna be renewed because you can’t take $7 billion out of any company’s operating budget and have it not mean something. With ESPN it’s huge. That’s not the total number. It’s just the latest increment.

But you couple that and how much it costs on cable with student loans, and then there’s food. And all of a sudden Millennials are getting interested in buying cars. It was fascinating. About five, ten years ago the stories were out there that Millennials didn’t care about cars. It was one of the first generations in American history where the young people couldn’t have given a rat’s rear end about cars. They loved things like Uber. Well, now, Uber got its own problems, and Millennials at a late stage in their lives, in terms of when they become adults, are all of a sudden getting interested in buying cars. Cars are expensive. Student loan payments are expensive, and things like cable subscriptions become the first thing that they cut and get rid of.

My point is, you people in this country who are angry about this or that or any number of other things, I could make the case that well over half the things you are mad at have been brought to you by American liberals and the Democrat Party. And yet you think that they are the answer, they are the solution, they are the saviors all because of human rights and all because of civil rights and all because of this social justice stuff that makes you ignore the actual damage liberalism is doing to so many facets of our great country.