RUSH: Here’s John in San Diego. I’m glad you called, sir. You’re up first today. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, good morning, Rush. Really quick, this whole thing blew up in their face, and it’s gonna be interesting to see how they go forward with their, you know, future attacks in this regard. But really quick: How is the left gonna use this to their advantage? They always seem to, you know, take advantage of groups and people and situations and emergencies, you know, Rahm Emanuel style, and —

RUSH: You just heard from Maxine Waters. It’s Trump’s fault! Trump has upset the balance of equality and contentment, and he’s driving people crazy —

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: — and that’s because he’s a creep, he’s an ogre, he’s a rogue, he lies all the time, he’s a Russian agent. Don Lemon! Don Lemon, right here: It’s “not his fault” that he “lost the fight in the court of public opinion.” Don Lemon, CNN: “It’s not [Smollett’s] fault” that he “lost the fight in the court of public opinion,” because public opinion is made up of a bunch of racist pigs and Trump voters.

CALLER: A dog has fleas and it’s Trump’s fault. You know, sooner or later… This is really becoming apparent of what the left is all about going forward, and I’m just curious to see how, you know, the campaigns on the left are gonna use this, you know, like Elizabeth Warren seems to use things to her advantage. I’m thinking this is gonna really, you know, expose ’em for what they are. I’d also like to know about the Booker-Harris connection to certain phone calls that are — How would you say? — not being released. That would be really interesting — and thanks for taking my call, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: You bet. You talk about Booker and Harris and their anti-lynching law. I didn’t know that lynching was still legal, did you? Is lynching still legal? Why do we need an anti-lynching law? I thought it’s been illegal for like a couple hundred years. Maybe people have forgotten. You know, look, I understand. Folks, I understand how you’re curious about how the Democrats are gonna use this, and I can give you any number of wild guesses as to how they will try to turn things like this in their favor.

My guess is this one, they’re gonna try to forget — and we’re still two years away. There’s so much that’s gonna happen that we can’t predict, that this is gonna fade away to nothing. It’s gonna fade away to nothing so deeply that even using it as a reminder… I mean, if you try to dredge up the Trayvon Martin story today, do you think you could convince one person not to vote Democrat by using it?

“I heard about that before. Yeah, I remember Trayvon Martin. I remember that. Wasn’t that Obama’s son? Wasn’t that what he said? Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Ancient history. People forget. Not persuasive.

The question for me always comes down to: Is our side going to be ready for whatever they do? Is our side? From the Trump campaign to other Republicans and conservatives running for office to campaign strategerists and consultants, is our side going to be ready for whatever they do on the left? That’s the question, isn’t it? How many Never Trumpers are gonna rejoin the effort? I don’t think any! I know the Never Trumpers are gonna stay joined with the Democrats to try to get rid of Trump in 2020.

I think there’s still plenty of dummkopfs on our side who do not see any of this that’s happening as a genuine crisis facing America, and so my question always is: Is our side going to be ready? Let me put it to you this way. You know, Donald Trump every day — every day, multiple times a day — tweets and pushes back against all the lies, all the garbage, all the drivel that the media pumps out, that the Democrats pump out.

He’s the only one who does. What if Trump’s not around? What if there is no Trump? Who’s gonna do this? Don’t say me, because conservative media’s been doing it for years and years and years, but we’re not running for office, and we’re not in office. We’re not covered as though we’re running the country. Of course, I am now. But still. Who’s gonna carry that mantle?

Will our side be ready for what they do? There’s gonna be ballot harvesting. We heard a little bit about that. That’s how the Democrats actually won five Republican districts in Orange County, with ballot harvesting. Are we going to be ready for everything they do? And everything they do… You know, trying to figure that out, like, how will they use this? That’s all part of actually determining how we are gonna be ready for it.

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RUSH: So what will the Democrats do? How will they use this in 2020? Folks, have you ever heard of the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam? Have you ever heard of him? Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor? Have you ever heard of him? They’ll bury it. They’ll forget about it. “Jussie who? Ah, I don’t know who you’re talking about. Ralph Northam? What did he do? I haven’t seen the media talk about Ralph Northam. What? What? What? I forget what that was.”

That’s what’s gonna happen here.

Jussie Smollett will cease to exist for a while, as will this sordid tale.

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RUSH: Here is Bill in Conover, North Carolina. Great to have you, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Maha Rushie. Thank you for taking my call, sir. My comment is this whole Smollett thing is obviously such a clumsy attempt on his part to cover up his racism. He assumes that because he’s a black man and the sheriff’s superintendent or whatever is a black man, that nobody’s gonna take the investigation seriously.

RUSH: Do you think he was aware that the police superintendent of Chicago — African-American. You think it was a factor in his decision to do this?

CALLER: I believe so, yes. I believe totally.

RUSH: Well, could be.

CALLER: That’s just how arrogant they are.

RUSH: Well, I don’t dispute that. I have — it’s not that different a theory. But it goes something like this. If you look at what the police superintendent said Smollett was after, he wanted a raise. He wanted more money, and he wanted more camera time. He wanted more scenes on the show. He had sent a letter calling him a black slang term for a gay person with crushed aspirin in there that’s supposed to look like a poisonous substance. That didn’t get anybody’s attention on the show. The show didn’t publicize it. The show didn’t use it to promote him. “Man, this guy must be hot, hate mail like that.” That’s what that was designed to do, and it failed. The show didn’t do anything with it. They didn’t call the media, nothing, so he got ticked off. And he said, “Okay, I gotta pull out all the stops here.”

I don’t think that Jussie Smollett ever thought that anybody would doubt him because of the way he watches and consumes news. He has seen the people in Ferguson get away with it, people in Baltimore get away with it… He knows the media is gonna soak it all up. They’re gonna believe everything. He doesn’t think it’s gonna go far. He thinks the show is gonna feel so sorry, and he thinks the show, the people that produce the show, Empire, are gonna be so dazzled and impressed that they’ve got a bigger star on their hands than they ever knew, that he’s gonna get his money and he’s gonna get more scenes.

He never thought that the cops would actually pursue this. Or maybe he did. And maybe he thought he’d get away with it. It’s hard to tell. But the thing that argues for the fact that he really, really intended this to happen was that he attempted to find a camera, a community TV camera where this attack would be on video.

And I have to remind everybody again, if he had succeeded at that, if there had been, before today’s press conference by the police superintendent in Chicago, if there had been video that was on a continuous loop on every cable network for the past four days of this guy getting beat up by these two guys wearing MAGA hats, can you imagine the further damage that might have happened and occurred all over this country in reaction to that?

We really dodged a bullet that this guy chose a camera that was not aimed right. Or maybe he did choose the camera that was aimed right, that wasn’t gonna videotape this, because maybe he didn’t expect anybody to doubt him. Maybe he didn’t think — look. The guy’s a kid. He obviously, I don’t believe, thought that anybody would take it as far as they did. He wasn’t thinking it through that way. He was simply seeing his objective of getting a raise and a more prominent role on the TV show. And this was simply a way to raise his profile. It was a signal, it was a way to tell the producers that he’s much bigger on this show than they think.

It wasn’t Terrence Howard that got attacked. It wasn’t Taraji P. Henson. It wasn’t any of the other actors. It was Jussie. This has “notice me” all over it. But I think there is an element of he thought he’d get away with it because he’s African-American, gay, and Democrat.

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RUSH: Let’s stick with the phones. Rochester, Michigan. Mike, you’re next. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Hey, I have a question and a comment. And I’d like to get your commentary on it.

RUSH: Certainly. Certainly.

CALLER: My question is, how long do you think it might be before Democratic ties to this whole Smollett hoax are uncovered? To me, “I wanted a raise,” sounds completely spurious. It reminds me of the Benghazi video excuse. I think “I wanted a raise” is a sham and a misdirection. To me this thing that he did I believe to be an actual hate crime against President Trump. They put on MAGA hats, clearly giving their message of who they’re going after, and they committed a hate crime against the president. I’d like to see them prosecuted for a hate crime.

RUSH: I’m glad you mentioned that, because I observed yesterday, if we’re talking about hate crimes, how many of them are there every week that are aimed at Donald Trump? I mean, how much of the media coverage aimed at Trump is actually a hate crime based on the way the left has defined hate crimes and set them up? I think you’re right about this business. I think the raise is a way of avoiding a more serious charge or prosecution. So I agree with you about that.

But it will be interesting to see what he is charged with. We only know I think of one charge and that’s filing a false police report. But, you know, this guy, he scratched his own face. He defaced himself. That is a crime. You know what else is a crime? That letter. That letter. He used the postal service. That is mail fraud. Do you know what the penalty for that is? That’s five to 10 years. That’s a federal crime.

I don’t know if the Robert Mueller investigation will take time to charge Jussie Smollett — I’m making a joke — but he is in violation of a serious federal statute here by using the postal service to conduct fraud. And he’s admitted he wants a raise, so he’s doing this for money. That has an extensive jail time component to it, five to 10 years.

This guy, if he’s fully charged with everything that he did, could be looking at a long time in jail. Therefore, the claim that he just wanted a raise, I think you’re probably right, try to reduce the perception of the seriousness of what he was involved in.

Kelly in Broward County in Florida thinks the same thing. How are you doing? Welcome.

CALLER: I’m great. Thanks, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. Great honor, been listening my whole life since my dad picked me up with you when I was in high school, probably when you first started in the eighties. And I’ve been listening ever since.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate you, you’re a lifer, and I can’t ask for more than that. Thank you.

CALLER: The previous caller took my point exactly that I don’t buy his motivation being he wanted a raise. It’s pretty lame. I think that’s something they came up with in the couple of days that they hid from the police. I think that just like you said, it’s an avoidance for being charged with a hate crime. Because if you look at his Twitter account he was totally raging against Trump.

RUSH: Yeah. You know what else? He also has a record. I think there is lying to cops in a DUI investigation —

CALLER: I think I read that he told them he was his younger brother, so he lied about who he was.

RUSH: Right. He’s got a record of lying to the cops. He’s not an innocent young thang out there who just been caught up in the rigors of the political system. He’s a player and he’s very active here. Do you think that he was actually engaging with intent in a hate crime? Do you think this was actually aimed, not at raising his profile on the TV show, but actually aimed at damaging Trump?

CALLER: I think it’s both. I think he, you know, wanted to raise his profile as well as do as much damage as he could.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: On a bigger scale —

RUSH: Let’s go back to the previous caller that you say stole some of your thunder. If that’s true, if the part of this that he really was targeting Trump to do damage to Trump, then are there, as yet undiscovered, links to the Democrat Party in this?

CALLER: Oh, I don’t know about that. I think it was so poorly executed. It didn’t seem very smart, so I don’t even know that there’s any real brains behind it. Not that there are really any brains in that political party to begin with. But I think that if there were bigger honchos behind it, it would have been a little bit more smartly executed.

RUSH: Well, it’s obvious that he was confident he would not be closely examined. He paid his collaborators with a check. I mean, that’s like paying a prostitute with a check. You’re waiting to be discovered. I don’t think he had any frontal fear that he was going to be exposed here. What it was, he lied about how he was in a DUI. He signed a false name to his ticket and summons, and he got two years probation and a fine. That is the previous offense. So he’s got a record. He’s got a track record. He has a behavioral pattern here. I appreciate the call, Kelly. Thank you.

Nancy’s next in Greenville, South Carolina. Hi.

CALLER: Hello, Rush.

RUSH: Yeah, hi. How are you?

CALLER: Good. How are you? I have a problem wrong with calling him a kid. He’s 36 years old. Why do we continue to call 36-year-olds children?

RUSH: Well, because they are in this day and age. But I get your point. He looks like a kid on TV. He looks young. But 36-year-olds today, many of them still live at home. They’re treated like kids. I’m not trying to sabotage your point. Your point is that calling him a kid is another level of excusing the behavior.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: That’s unwarranted.

CALLER: It’s exhausting. I have a brother that’s 54 and continues to treat himself as a child. We have got to stop treating these people as children and as adults.

RUSH: Well, he clearly — you know, whatever else he was doing, I still believe — I’m not discounting this hate crime business. In fact, I’m gonna predict something to you here, that after the media and these celebrities and these presidential candidates collect themselves — remember, this police superintendent has just ripped them a new one and plastered them up one wall and down the other for falling for this thing. He has embarrassed them and chastised them. So now they’re in the process of regrouping, and they’ve gotta come up with a way of, quote, unquote, credibly justifying their rush to judgment on this.

And I can pretty much tell you what it’s gonna be. “In this climate created by Donald Trump –” and they’ll talk about what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, when Donald Trump refused to criticize a bunch of white racists in that whole confab there, Donald Trump has created this atmosphere where people are so enraged, and they are so out of sorts and they’re acting so abnormally, that we’ve got to do something about Donald Trump. Maxine Waters has already laid the groundwork for this one.

So it won’t be long before, “Poor Jussie! He just got caught up like we all are in the damage Donald Trump is doing to blacks and homosexuals and transgenders,” and you go down the list of the favored victims of the Democrat Party and all the damage Trump is causing, “and some of them are just losing their minds temporarily, and some of them are just losing self-control — and it’s unfortunate. But this is another reason why we must get rid of Donald Trump.”

This is the way this is gonna happen. They’ll find ways to try to rehab Smollett or at least lessen the damage, because, look, if it’s left to stand as it is, Smollett has spread the damage all over the American left and the Democrat Party. They have to try to limit that. It’s no different than when Dan Rather got caught making up the story about George W. Bush and the National Guard in Texas. Well, when the story was exposed as entirely made up, what happened?

Leading anchors Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings created a new journalism award to present to Dan Rather at a massive gala dinner in New York, because they had to circle the wagons to save “the news.” They had to save “journalism.” They couldn’t let what Rather did — the stink of what Rather did — attach itself to them, and the only way to do that was to counter all this by acting like Rather didn’t do anything wrong.

In fact, Rather was so courageous and so great, he lost his job for the cause, and we need to give him a brand-new award. Now, not predicting they’ll do that with Smollett, but they have to cover their tracks. They have to somehow keep this from attaching itself to them going forward, and the way to do that is to find numerous ways of blaming Trump for it — and once those strategies are developed, then the media will take over and start running the narrative for as long as it takes to create that narrative as the dominant narrative in the minds of the news-consuming public.

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RUSH: Jussie Smollett. Do you know that he is half white? It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just telling you. He’s half white. His father was Jewish from Russia. So Smollett is a black Russian. So where is the outrage at Russians meddling in our crime in Chicago? Hmm?