RUSH: I was overwhelmed with email reaction to Fox News Sunday yesterday, more than ever. I’m hard-pressed to figure out why. I think it’s probably ’cause I don’t do these things very often and we’re in the midst of massive audience growth and so forth, but I just want to thank everybody. And even those of you who were snarky about the glasses, I love you. I absolutely love you.
“You look like Harry Potter.” You know, every time I go on TV, I prove what it is about TV. The only thing that matters is how you look, and I passed with flying colors yesterday even among the snarkers. By the way, speaking of that, we have decided to put everything that happened on Fox News yesterday with me on the free side at RushLimbaugh.com.
So just to avoid any confusion, all video and the transcripts of yesterday’s Fox News Sunday appearance is on the app and the website on the free side. You do not have to be a paid member to access all of it. All of the video, there’s a lot of video, and of course the transcripts that go along with it. Normally we don’t do this. But it was such a home run yesterday that I decided to make it available on a mass basis.
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RUSH: Now, the Fox News appearance. There are a number of ways I can do this. I could play the sound bites by themselves that we have edited and carved up here, for those of you who did not see. Or there’s another way of doing it. We could play reaction to me by the media as they have aired excerpts and sound bites of my appearance. And that might be the best way to go about this.
I just want to share with you some headlines from print media about my appearance yesterday. From the Huffing and Puffington Post: “Immediately After Interviewing Parkland Students, Fox News Invites Criticism Of Them — ‘Marches aren’t going to solve it,’ conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh said.” It’s amazing. These people quote me accurately and it’s amazing how they don’t understand what I’m saying. And I think it’s genuine. I think they don’t get it.
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RUSH: “Immediately After Interviewing Parkland Students, Fox News Invites Criticism of Them — Rush Limbaugh says marches are not going to solve…” I’ll have details of all this coming up. From Mediaite: “Rush Limbaugh: Student Survivors Bashing the NRA Doesn’t Solve Problem.” That’s not so bad, because there’s no opinion in it and that happens to be accurate. “Rush Limbaugh…” What is this one? Carbonated.TV “Rush Limbaugh Bashes Teen Shooting Survivors for Demanding Gun Control.” I didn’t “bash” anybody. But I can live with it.
Newsweek.com: “Rush Limbaugh Thinks Undocumented Immigrants Should Get Citizenship but Not Vote for 15 to 25 Years.” This is funny. These people had never heard this. These people on the left didn’t know, just like Wallace didn’t quite know what to do yesterday when I announced that. He was kind of silent for, what, a few seconds? It sounded like, oh, the pregnant seconds in there. I did not have a video feed so I could not see Chris or anybody in the Washington studio, but it sounded like there was a pregnant pause in there.
I was stunned at the number of people who haven’t heard the idea and don’t quite even now understand my point. “Wow, did you see that? Limbaugh actually said he’s support amnesty!” Then somebody said, “Yeah, but did you catch that they can’t vote for…? “What! He said that?” “Yeah.” They stopped hearing me after they heard me say I would support amnesty. When they get the rest of it, they don’t know what to do with it.
Politico: “Limbaugh: We Need Concealed Carry in Schools,” which I said. But of course, any headline’s out of context. Washington Examiner: “Limbaugh Defends NRA, Calls Out Students Politicizing Latest Shooting.” I didn’t do that. I didn’t call anybody out. But we’re gonna delve into this in much greater detail than a seven-minute or 12-minute segment yesterday afforded. Finally, Salon.com: “Rush Limbaugh Admits His Immigration Fears Are About Voting, Not Security.”
Subhead: “Limbaugh said he would agree to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants, but they can’t vote for 15 to 25 years.” That is admitting my “immigration fears,” quote, “are about voting, not security”? Something else is not headlined here. I thought it would really tick ’em off, if this did. It was reminding everybody Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass of ill-educated, dependent voters. I guess they were so ticked off at other things I’d said, they didn’t quite have that register. (interruption)
Oh, it is? (interruption) Oh, they…? (interruption) Oh, good, good, good. I thought they were slipping. Okay, if that’s in the story, fine. Here’s the deal, as we set this up. We’re gonna come out and we’re gonna use the sound bite version of replaying my sound bites — the media reaction sound bites — as a way of airing what happened yesterday on Fox, for those of you who didn’t see it or watch it.
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RUSH: We start Saturday morning, Fox & Friends Saturday, and this is something that I had said on Friday. They pick it up and repeat it.
GRIFF JENKINS: Rush Limbaugh weighed in on this, and he said, “Look, maybe this fall through the cracks because the FBI is so focused on other things.” Here’s what Rush Limbaugh had to say about it…
RUSH: Right. So… And then it was the next day that Trump tweeted this, his famous tweet storm. They brought in, though… After this bite, they brought in Tim Clemente, who is a former FBI counterterrorism agent, and after the clip that you just heard, Griff Jenkins said, “So, Mr. Clemente, what do you say to that?”
RUSH: Now, that’s interesting, is it not? Because the president tweeted it out on Sunday, and the media immediately thought that it was over the top and unrealistic, and they started making jokes about, “You mean to tell me that the FBI field office agent — the special agent in charge of the office in Ft. Lauderdale — is working on the Trump investigation?” They wanted to, you know, again portray Trump as just over the top and not really in touch with reality.
That was not my point when I made the comment. I’m just trying to illustrate things in different way; I love using satire, parody, and humor to do it. The truth of the matter is, the FBI can chew gum and walk at the same time. What happened down in Florida with the FBI not following up on this shooter, that’s a whole different set of problems, and I’ll tell you what I think the root of those problems are. A combination of multiculturalism, liberalism, and political correctness has led to government and a whole lot of people being afraid to act on anything that someone might think is profiling or judging.
We can’t judge people anymore! You can’t prejudge anybody, even the bad guys. It’s discriminatory. It is bigoted. And if there’s anything about them that strays from what we call the norm? Then you’re really in trouble, because then you’re picking on a victim who’s a member of a minority. And so it’s… Because there has been so… There have been so many assaults on people using political correctness and profiling that the safe thing to do is to not act and roll the dice.
I mean, there has to be a reason the FBI didn’t do anything with this, beyond the fact that they’re lazy. It’s not that. It’s not that they’re lazy. Is it that they didn’t take it seriously? Is it that they don’t trust the tipsters? Is it that they think the tipsters are a bunch of kooks? With so many people lying through their teeth every day on social media, with so much BS out there every day in the public domain, with the rising reality that our country has a growing population of kooks…
And the knee-jerk reaction is on full display. The knee-jerk reaction is the first words out of anybody’s mouth are either a combination of NRA and gun control or one of the other first. Which is why I made the point yesterday that the next shooter is already out there. The next two or three shooters are already out there. They’ve already got their guns. They’re already widely known by people who know them. Whether it’s firsthand knowledge that whoever these next shooters are are wacko, kooks, deranged or whatever, they still are known.
I don’t know when they’re gonna act, but they are. There’s gonna be another one of these, and then there’s gonna be one after that — and we never, ever do drill down to getting to the answer to it. We never, ever do start talking about what would solve this. Because, again, we are not being honest with ourselves about what is causing this. I could go through the whole scenario all over again. People that want to blame the Second Amendment?
The Second Amendment’s been with us since the founding of the country. I like my analogy to the ’50s. Whenever people wish we could return to what they think was the innocence and the much simpler time of the ’50s… It was the post-World War II boom, and we have an economy that was just exploding after World War II, and the country was on a big upswing. In the culture the perception today looking back on it is that it was very tame, it was moral. There was a definite sense of right and wrong.
There was a concept of shame that attached to people who behaved badly. All of that is out the window. People long for a day of innocence, the days of innocence and more simplicity. But when you do that, you have modern-day leftists mock you and say, “You can’t do that! You can’t turn back the clock. That’s silly. You can’t… Besides, if you did that you would get rid of all the progress that’s been made.” Well, it’s all of the so-called progress that’s been made that has many people wishing for the simplicity of the era, the Ozzie and Harriet days.
But isn’t it interesting that when a mass shooting occurs, who is it that longs for a simpler time? Who is it that starts wringing their hands and talking about how it didn’t used to be this way, and they wish they could go back to a simpler time where this didn’t happen? Well, okay. Then you better start being honest with yourself what happened between whatever time period you want to go back to — ’50s, ’60s whatever. What happened between now and then? Why were there no kids shooting up schools in the 1950s?
There were plenty of guns all over the place.
There were even guns in schools in the ’50s, folks. There were guns everywhere, just like there are today. Per capita was same number. We might not have had 300 million guns then like we do now, but based on the population, the percentages are the same. Why weren’t schools students shooting up schools in the ’50s? Well, you want to be honest about it? How many families in the ’50s were busted up, redefined, single parent? I mean, if you’re not willing to analyze all this, you’re not really willing to get to the solution to this.
These school shootings are the one instance where the perpetrator is never sought, blamed, and the actions of the perp never analyzed seriously to try to find out what we can do to prevent further incidents like this. No. The knee-jerk reaction, go for the NRA, go for gun control. Get the guns.
It’s unrealistic. And I’m not invested one way or the other on the whole gun business, aside from the fact of the Constitution and the Second Amendment. What I know is the American left, the worldwide left, what their dream is is the confiscation of every weapon. And it’s never gonna happen.
And that’s another thing. That’s never gonna happen. I don’t care who, what, when. There will never, ever be what they ultimately want, the total confiscation of every gun in this country. And as long as they’re going to pursue that, they’re never gonna change and get to anything that is useful in terms of solving this.
Their objective is impossible, it is impractical, and it’s totally political, and it’s totally political, and it has nothing to do with this incident that happened last week or any of the incidents that happened prior. And each one of these incidents then permits these people to energize the agenda yet again, under the guise — I mean, every time this happens, they say, “This is it. No more. We’ve had it. We’ve got to do something.” Every one of them. It’s the same thing. It’s like Groundhog’s Day. It’s an endless loop with the same villains and the same solutions and nothing.
Look at bump stocks after Las Vegas. There is not a weapon you can buy where you pull the trigger and it keeps firing. That is an automatic weapon. An AR-15 does not do that. You have to pull the trigger every time you want a bullet fired. The left, the Drive-Bys are out trying to characterize the AR-15 as a semiautomatic weapon, pull the trigger once and a bunch of bullets spray. Not true. That’s why you need a bump stock. And a bump stock is simply a third-party add-on to the stock of a rifle that causes a recoil on your shoulder that makes your finger continually pull the trigger, effecting automatic fire, mimicking it.
The NRA came out and supported getting rid of bump stocks. Nothing has been done. I saw Wayne LaPierre once, who is the grand pooh-bah of the NRA. He was on This Week with David Brinkley. It was a Sunday, and it was during the ’90s. It was the Bill Clinton administration and there had been a mass shooting somewhere. I don’t remember which one.
And Wayne LaPierre said to David Brinkley, who asked the question, I think it was Brinkley, said, “I think the president is comfortable with a certain level of violence.” I saw that and I sat up straight and I said, “I can’t believe that. I can’t wait to see what kind of reaction to that there is.” And there was no outrage.
Wayne LaPierre had just said that the president was okay with a certain level of killing, a certain level of violence, because it advanced the political opportunity. And I thought that there would be mass anger, mass protest, mass outrage over what LaPierre said. There was little bit of it, but nothing like what I expected, and certainly none on the show.
And what he meant was the Democrats like the issue, and they don’t want to solve the issue. Just like they don’t want to solve immigration. They don’t want to do anything. They don’t want to have anything solved this year where Trump gets the credit for it. They want to do nothing but stall and stall and prevent anything, total chaos and make it look like Trump can’t get anything done, that Trump is ineffective, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, that Trump’s out of his league.
Now, meanwhile, the people of this country think the Democrats are devoted to solving issues. They’re devoted to the DREAMers, they’re devoted the kids and stopping the killing. And the Democrats are not interested in stopping anything. The Democrats are not interested in solving anything, especially this election year.
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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, a quick question. And I gotta be very, very, very, very careful with this. In fact, I’m gonna save this. I’m gonna save this for when I get to the sound bites from the early part of the interview with Chris Wallace. It will work better that way.
In the meantime, moments ago on CNN John Berman, one of their anchors, decides to play an audio sound bite of me — well, video, because it’s television. Video sound bite, video portion, excerpt of me on Fox News Sunday yesterday.
BERMAN: I want to play Rush Limbaugh, who was talking about this over the weekend. Let’s listen.
BERMAN: You know, he totally says it’s no more than political posturing for 2018-20. I’m not sure that people like the political posturing on this for the elections. It’s a tough issue for candidates sometimes.
RUSH: Uh, yeah, but it’s tough to disagree with the fact that it’s political posturing. It’s maddening to me. There are solutions. There are things that we can do that we’re not doing. And it’s about time we start being innovative and new rather than this broken record of gun control, NRA, gun control, NRA, Republicans, Trump doesn’t care. It’s time to get rid of that.
It’s our society that has changed from ’50s to the present, ’70s to the present, from 1999 to the present. Guns have not changed. Guns are still what they are. Guns are still who they are. Guns still work the way they’ve always worked. We’ve tried to make it harder to get them. We have background checks. We have all kinds of things designed to weed out the wackos from getting a hold of guns. The wackos still get a hold of guns.
The president even said over the weekend he would be in favor of expanding the whole background check thing. Yep, let’s just add on to what we’ve already done. In the meantime, the children are dying, and there’s not a mechanism in sight to stop it. And it’s just, sadly, completely unrealistic to focus on the elimination of guns. There are 300 million of them out there.
This is why I say all of this is political posturing. It’s an election year. Democrats don’t want anything solved. Not with a Republican in the White House. So nothing’s gonna get done. You had best resign yourself to it. This is totally political. It has become political from the moment it happened and it’s gonna remain political for the rest of the year.
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