RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, would you be surprised to learn that many think, not all, but there are some who blame me for the country being where it is right now? I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a printed copy of a piece in the New York Times from yesterday by a woman by the name of Michelle Goldberg. It is entitled, “Don’t Believe the Liberal FBI.” Don’t let the headline confuse you. This is a prerelease memo piece.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, the American right set about undermining trust in the mainstream media, which it saw as dangerously infected with liberal assumptions. Later, in debates over evolution and the environment, some on the right attacked the validity of modern science. By the turn of the millennium,” i.e., the year 2000, for those of you in Rio Linda. We’re not talking about a Star Wars spaceship. “By the turn of the millennium, it was an article of faith among conservative ideologues that whole realms of human expertise were in fact intricate structures of propaganda that trapped the unwary in a matrix of deceit.”
In other words, starting in the sixties and seventies, we on the right began lying about everything — science, the environment, the media — and by the time we got to 2000, it’d become “an article of faith among conservative ideologues that whole realms of human expertise were” a bunch of BS. Next paragraph: “In an invaluable,” in an important…” Don’t you love the way intellectuals write about each other? The indispensable such-and-such! The invaluable such-and-such! The irreplaceable such-and-such!
“In an invaluable 2017 Vox essay titled ‘Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,’ David Roberts quoted a 2009 Rush Limbaugh [remark]: ‘Science has been corrupted.'” This is a quote; It’s accurate, I think. “‘Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!'” close quote. Next sentence by Michelle Goldberg: “With Trump, this ethos [of Rush Limbaugh] reached the White House. And now, to protect Trump, the right has expanded its war on empiricism to that most conservative of institutions, the FBI.”
So it is my fault that the Trumpster is in the White House, because in her view, I set the table for making a campaign like his appeal to a majority of Americans. And, by the way, if you don’t know what this word is — “the right has expanded its war on empiricism” — the root there is empirical truth, empirical evidence. Meaning not anecdotal, but scientific, unarguable, ontologically certitude, evidence. I helped corrupt the certainty of environment news, the certainty of evolutionary news, the certainty of a free-and-open media, blah, blah, blah. It’s my fault, folks! It had to happen sometime amidst all of this.