RUSH: I’ll tell you: This coronavirus is a gigantic teachable moment. It’s teaching everybody a whole lot of things if they would just take the time to learn it — and the biggest thing, the absolute biggest thing that you have the opportunity to learn: How in the world can anybody sane want to keep this economy shut down?
How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented. And yet there are people who want to maintain the circumstances we are in. And it boggles the mind.
It befuddles the mind. It is so counterintuitive to Americanism. We cannot go on. Trump is gonna be announcing his reopening plans, and already Governor Cuomo has announced that he’s gonna get a consultancy group in there to work on competing ideas ’cause he doesn’t want to be bound by whatever Trump’s plans are.
Fine. I’m struggling for ways to break through, to permeate obviously existing great walls of resistance that some people have. Some people, when you start criticizing government, they just tune you out. They’re not interested in it. But this can’t go on! I can’t believe it has gone on this long. I can’t believe… In one way, I can’t believe the American people haven’t arisen in outrage over this yet.
But you know what? It isn’t gonna be long, because the checks they were promised, they’re not immediately forthcoming. For example, if you haven’t gotten your application in for a small business loan, you are SOL, because the bureaucracy — no matter how well-intentioned — simply can’t meet the demand.
So we’ve had announced policies where you were promised money and you’re not gonna get it. What are you gonna do? What are people gonna do? It’s not in human nature to sit and remain boarded up. I’ll tell you what the pro-status-quo people are relying on — and it’s gonna be fascinating to see how long they can prolong this.
They’ve got people convinced that they’re gonna die if they leave home. Is that too bad an exaggeration, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) I’m trying to be as accurate as I can without being over the top. But literally, they’re relying on the fact that you could die. Not that you could get an infection. “You could die if you leave home!
“You could die if you don’t wash your hands all the time.” By the way, I have started doing that. “You could die if you’re not wearing a mask. You could die!” Not you could get infected or you could get sick. “You could die!” That’s an effective means of control. “You could die if you leave home. You could die if you go back to work! You could die if we reopen the economy.”
“You could die if we reopen the subways. You could die if we open Grand Central. You could die.” Except the numbers don’t back it up. When you look at the reported infections and the reported deaths and then you look at the model projections, we started with 2.2 million — what a great way to scare people — then it was a hundred thousand, then it became a hundred thousand to 240,000, then last week was going to be the apocalypse.
And it wasn’t.
And now the modeler who has yet to be right — no personal criticism intended, just factual analysis. The modeler who has yet to be right is gonna revise his numbers downward again today to fewer than 61,000 projected deaths by August. There ought to be a lot more death than this. “Well, no, Rush, because we have been practicing social distancing and we’ve been flattening the curve.”
Let me remind you again about flattening the curve. Flattening the curve had one objective. They were at times honest about it. But not consistently. Flattening the curve — please don’t doubt me on the. I have no desire to mislead anybody, and I really am not helped in any way by being wrong. Flattening the curve had one objective, and that was to prevent massive overruns of our hospitals with coronavirus patients. It was meant to keep you inside so that you wouldn’t become sick, so that you wouldn’t go to the hospital and so that nobody else would, either. So that the hospitals would be pretty much equipped to handle the number of patients who came in with COVID-19.
It was never intended to stop people from getting it. It was never intended to wipe out the virus. In fact, flattening the curve extends the length of time we have to deal with it. Flattening the curve prevents things like people getting infected and developing antibodies and immunity. It prevents that. So now it turns out that 60,000 some odd people were hospitalized so far versus 810,000 people hospitalized for flu in 2018. The upshot is that we are nowhere near stressing our hospital system with COVID-19 patients.
This is not an argument, “Okay. So we can let more people get infected, eh?” No, it’s not. I’m trying to put all this in the hopper to tell you that all of these projections have not even been close to being accurate. Look. We can’t go back and pretend we didn’t she down the economy. We can’t reverse any of this, but it’s time, it is past time to move beyond the mistakes that we’ve made and get it reopened. It simply has to happen. There is no question about it.
We are living in a cataclysmic situation that cannot go on. It has to reopen. People are going to continue to get CV-19 whether we reopen or not. People are going to get the flu whether we reopen or not. People are gonna get the cold whether we reopen or not. People are gonna have heart disease whether we open or not. People are gonna have traffic accidents whether we reopen or not. People are gonna commit suicide whether we reopen or not. People are gonna die from heart disease whether we reopen or not.
People are going to, as I say, continue to be infected by COVID-19 whether we reopen or not. Here’s the thing. The moment we reopen, the day after, the day after the media, the Democrats in the media are gonna be laser focused to find the first death. That first death is gonna be pictured side by side with Donald Trump. And that person’s death is going to be blamed on Donald Trump for reopening the economy. Donald Trump knows this. That will backfire on the mainstream media, except in Democrat circles.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: President Trump at the moment is meeting with American truckers at the White House, calling them the foot soldiers in the war on coronavirus. Folks, I’m sitting here, and literally the more I think about this, the more dumbfounded and befuddled I become. The common sense that is apparently missing with so many people here is mind-boggling to behold.
I know I overuse the term “mind-boggling.” How in the world there can be people stridently — I mean, actively, eagerly — in favor of continuing this government shutdown? We are destroying our country! How is this not alarming to people? How is this not seen? How are people missing that that’s what going on? Why can’t there be some form of compromise?
We can do many things at one time. The idea that we cannot reopen this economy, the idea that there are some people who cannot return to work and start the process of getting things going, the idea that this is a binary thing and we only have two options? Destroy the economy or what? What is the other option? Well, they want to set it up as just that.
You know, lives versus greed, greed versus lives, lives versus money. That’s not what this is. It never has been about that. This is about lives versus lives. We are destroying people’s lives who are continuing to live. We are destroying their lives by shutting down their livelihoods, their opportunity to access their livelihoods, their chances to work.
We are destroying people in a number of different ways. The idea that we’re saving people by destroying the U.S. economy is… It’s a nonstarter. It’s absurd. The idea that we can somehow save people by continuing a policy that destroys the U.S. economy — and it will. Let me tell you something about when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties.
My parents and grandparents’ most formative experience in their lives — in other words, the thing that was the top of the list in the way they raised us, the values they attempted to instill in us — was the Great Depression. My dad was born in 1918; my mom in 1928.
His parents never forgot it.
It shaped everything they did the rest of their lives. They had to put up with a lot of other things too. They had to put up with World War II, Korea. They had to put up with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War threatening to wipe us out and imprison their grandkids. They had a lot on their plate, and the Great Depression was the formative thing because it was so horrible.
People were starving to death. People were committing suicide. Nobody had anything. It was widespread, abject poverty on steroids. There wasn’t anything like the current level of government spending or printing of money to get through it. There was genuine hardship — and it was why my father insisted that I go to college.
Because in the days of the Great Depression and in its aftermath, it was the only hope anybody had of getting a decent job that was career oriented that would pay you enough money to help insulate you, ’cause they thought it was gonna happen again. Once something like that happens, the fear of it happening again is front and center in your mind.
And as parents, they were doing everything they could to shield and protect me and my brother from having to go through it. It was the worst thing in their lives. And that’s where we’re headed, if this goes on. We are headed to Great Depression. All we need is a 30 to 40% contraction in this economy. We’ll hit Great Recession territory first and then depression, if this doesn’t stop — and the idea that there are people advocating for this!
These people need to be stopped, whoever they are and wherever they are. And these people who are only offering a binary choice: Sit in your home and basically watch every economic opportunity around you collapse — but at least you’ll be alive to vote Democrat and be saved by the government — or reopen the economy. Send people out.
The sick stay home. The sick don’t mingle with anybody. If you’re feeling bad, stay at home. The rest, go to work. Take the risk. It’s what life is about. You could die from anything any moment of any day. You could die from crossing the street. I don’t mean to minimize it, but it’s true. You have a greater chance of dying from things before the coronavirus gets you, and nobody’s staying at home for those risks.
But I’ll never forget the fear of the Great Depression my father had. I’d be snarky. “Dad, come on. I wasn’t alive. I don’t care how much you tell me about it, I can’t relate to it. I didn’t experience it.” I was like every kid. “Come on, Dad.” We’re sitting there in our night comfortable home, and we’re driving around. The thought of a Great Depression was the last thing in the world I could even conceive of.
So I’m snarky about it. He said, “Son, you better hope that you never have anything like that happen to you. You better hope you never live through it.” It was that bad for the people who did — and we’re headed for it, and we’ve done it to ourselves. It is not that our economy is falsely created. It’s not that our economy is a house-of-cards sham. It’s not that capitalism doesn’t work.
We are doing this to ourselves — and it’s amazing how quickly. Three years to revive an economy, create roaring circumstances. It took less than two months to wipe it all out. Twenty-two million people filing for unemployment compensation — 22 million — and the idea that there is not an angry outcry from all over the world that this must stop?
That outcry had better happen, because this… We’re beyond now saying this is unsustainable. This is untenable. This is cataclysmic. We’re in the midst of a self-created disaster that we could fix (snap, snap, snap) at the snap of our fingers. We could begin the process of reversing this tomorrow — we could do it May 1st, we could do it April the 30th, we could do it April 21st — and there are forces arrayed against doing that.
Fascinating.
We know who they are.
We know exactly.
We know they’re all Democrats.
We know they are some in the health and medical community.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Erin in Missoula, Montana. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, hello, mega Dittohead and Rush Baby from Missoula, the Berkeley of the northwest.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Well, I just want to build on what you’ve been saying all morning, how absurd this is. You haven’t heard of Montana in the news because we have around 400 cases, some of the least in the country, seven deaths, three from the same elderly care facility. Yet we are shut down until supposedly the end of the month with our Democratic governor who is implying that he’s in no rush to open it up. And my frustration is the numbers don’t justify this. It is absurd and ridiculous.
RUSH: He’s a Democrat, though, so there’s your answer.
CALLER: Exactly. And I’m just like people need to wake up because the data doesn’t justify the means, and I don’t see how more people are not upset about this.
RUSH: They might be. We’re just not hearing from them. I mean, the Drive-By Media’s not breaking down your door to talk to you. The Drive-By Media’s not breaking down doors. The Drive-By Media doesn’t want to hear from people who want to get back up and running. The Drive-By Media, the media and the Democrats are fully on board with the Democrat agenda here and there’s any number of ways of telling you what I think the Democrat agenda is.
I’ll just tell you. They are hoping that coronavirus accomplishes what Robert Mueller and impeachment Adam Schiff failed to do. “What’s that? What are you talking about?” Getting rid of Donald Trump. “Are you kidding me? You think, Mr. Limbaugh, that that’s all the Democrats care about?” I haven’t seen the evidence otherwise. I see these Democrat governors when the talk of opening the economy comes up, “Nope, nope, nope, another two weeks, nope, nope, nope, another month, nope, nope, nope, not even gonna worry about the Constitution, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it.”
I don’t even her them say, “Yeah, you know we need to reopen it, but…” I don’t even hear ’em say that. I hear ’em say, “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” Governor Steve Bullock, perfect case in point, Montana, there aren’t any cases appreciably. “Nope, nope, nope, nope, not gonna reopen.” He knows what will happen to him if he does. Nobody wants to run afoul of the Democrat Party establishment here, to the extent anybody knows who it is.
How in the world — I mean, we talk about every election we hear about, “We gotta elect people that know how to cross the aisle, Rush, know how to cross the aisle, shake hands, they can work with the other side, prove government can work. We gotta show out there, Rush, that we can cooperate.” If this doesn’t promote unity, there isn’t anything that ever will. How in the world you cannot be unified under the premise that the American economy needs to up and running. If you can’t unify, if we can’t unify around that, if there is serious political pressure to maintain six million people losing their jobs every week, if there is political pressure to maintain that, God bless us.