RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a trend that is taking a new form, a new direction. But it’s an old trend. And it’s spotlighted here in this story from a website called WattsUpWithThat. The headline here: “U.S. Government Declines to Attend Zuckerberg’s Green PR Stunt — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently had to visit Glacier National Park by himself last Sunday, after the U.S. government reversed a decision to send a climate scientist to attend his presence. ‘Trump administration pulled top climate expert from Mark Zuckerberg’s national park visit. A climate change expert at the United States Geological Survey was set to join Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Montana last weekend to discuss the impact of global warming at Glacier National Park –‘”

Here’s what’s going on. Don’t doubt me on this. It’s a relatively new trend in the direction that it’s going. Zuckerberg is headlining it, and it’s causing people to think Zuckerberg is running for president. What Zuckerberg is doing, Zuckerberg lives out in Silicon Valley, by way of Harvard.

But over the past month or so Zuckerberg has secretly and privately fled the privacy and security of his compound and has shown up unannounced at state fairs in the upper Midwest or knocking on doors of average, ordinary Americans in suburban Minnesota, Chicago. And ostensibly he’s doing this because, as the founder and CEO of Facebook, he’s got to know how people are thinking and what’s important to them. He’s got to venture out there, and he wants to do it privately with no lead time so people don’t know that he’s coming, so that people don’t artificially prepare for his arrival.

He wants to meet them au natural. He wants to meet them on their own terms. And this is causing people to speculate that Zuckerberg is preparing a presidential run himself. But Zuckerberg is not the only guy doing this. What leftists do — the media does it, too — they leave the safety of their homes and businesses in secure enclaves surrounded by leftists, and they venture out into the foreign lands of middle America. Very crucial. They flee what they know. They flee their friends.

They abandon all of their familiar, safe surroundings, and they take this giant risk of going out into flyover country in an effort to discover why people there do what they do. Why did people in Ohio and Pennsylvania, West Virginia, why did they vote for Trump? It’s disguised as why do they like or dislike Facebook. What it really is is to try to figure out why Trump is president. And they are portrayed — it’s almost comical. They’re portrayed as brave explorers, a modern era of Lewis and Clark.

Lewis and Clark after the Louisiana Purchase struck out, they went all over the western part of the United States where nobody had ever been before, other than the Indians and Native Americans to find out what was out there. Well, this is akin to what’s happening now. Zuckerberg and his leftist buddies venture into the Midwest. They go out there in flyover country and they take great risks, they engage in great bravery to try to find out who these rubes that live there are! To try to understand why these knuckleheads would vote for somebody like Donald Trump. Very, very brave explorers.

Now, years ago this trend manifested in different ways. It was popularized by Madonna. Madonna would go to a country in Africa and adopt a couple of kids. And this led to several other Hollywood actresses saying, “You know what? I like sex, but I don’t want to get pregnant. I don’t want to deal with that. Don’t want the guy hanging around.” So they venture off to these places and they adopt babies, minority babies from very poor countries.

And it’s almost like they’re accessorizing with jewelry. It became, after Madonna did it, it became the hip thing, had to go adopt one of these poor babies, minority babies, preferably from Africa. Now that’s been replaced by brave explorers leaving the safe confines of Silicon Valley and New York and venturing into the unknown territories of flyover country and the great upper Midwest to find out why people are there so stupid!