RUSH: Now, you people who have been lifers here… You don’t even have to be a lifer.
You could be listening here for five years. You know that I don’t do Twitter. Now, we have a Twitter page and sometimes Koko puts some stuff out there on it, but it’s just to promote other things — a Facebook page, maybe our website. But I don’t do Twitter because there’s a SEND button — and, once you hit it, you can’t get it back. Now, Trump loves it, and that’s fine. But I think Twitter, among other things, has destroyed American journalism.
I think Twitter has destroyed our ability to actually know what a majority of Americans think issue to issue, both politically and culturally, and that’s because of the way journalists use it. I think Twitter is a sewer. I think Twitter allows nobodies — and you may think this is gonna sound mean, but I think a lot of people on Twitter know their lives mean nothing, and that’s why they’re there. Everybody wants to matter. (interruption) What? (interruption) What?
What are you saying? (interruption) What did I say? What…? (interruption) Damn straight! They sitting out there anonymous. It’s not a joke that they’re in their pajamas in the basements of their mom’s house. They know they don’t matter, so they get to go on Twitter and pretend that they do, and journalism has made them feel like they do matter — or journalists have.
Twitter is a sewer.
It’s mostly populated by anonymous people, and yet every news story quotes it. I can’t read a news story today that isn’t 80% tweets reprinted. You know what bugs me? You have a news story, and in the opening paragraph they will quote what somebody said in a tweet, and then after that the actual tweet. I have to read it twice. Why? I didn’t want to read it the first time.
I don’t know who those people are. They’re not gonna have one iota shaping my public opinion about anything. And this is how I think Twitter has ruined journalism, or Twitter has allowed journalism to destroy itself. Journalists are notably lazy. It used to be the fax machine. You remember those two skeletal people from a group called Center for Science in the Public Interest?
Those two were emaciated-looking, cadaver-like Michael Jacobson and his — I don’t know — wife, girlfriend, female colleague, whatever. They created this thing calls Center for Science in the Public Interest, and they started dictating what you and can’t eat. These are the people got MSG banned from Chinese food! These are the people who got coconut oil banned from movie theater popcorn.
Two people with a fax machine!
They created a logo, and they started faxing their so-called scientific data about the dangers of everything you eat — and journalists just lapped it up. They didn’t even have to leave the newsroom! “Here we got official news,” and it was just a couple of wackos, liberal wackos who were all of a sudden anointed as true scientific experts. The same thing has happened with climate change.
The same thing is happening here with the coronavirus and the people doing the models, and it’s what has happened with Twitter, is Twitter has become a stand-in or a de facto measure of majority public opinion. Journalists don’t have go out and pound the streets and actually talk to people, do man-on-the-street interviews. Just go to Twitter!
Create some controversial topic, then go to Twitter, see what people are saying about it, find some of the most outrageous are anti-Trump or whatever. Then you reprint ’em. Snerdley, it would be like turning callers to a radio talk show… Can you imagine if journalism today, instead of scouring Twitter, scoured this radio show and reported public opinion based on what the callers to this show were saying — or any show?
It would never happen. Why wouldn’t it happen? (interruption) No, no, no, no. The reason it wouldn’t happen is because they don’t have respect for this show to begin with. They don’t have respect for the people in this audience to begin with. And yet everybody calling at least has a name and they get vetted. They get screened. They are more accredited as source opinion for public opinion than anybody ever would be on Twitter.
They don’t know who these people are. They search for the content, the outrage or what have you. But the fact that Twitter has become a stand-in for de facto majority public opinion has allowed journalism to create this illusion that Twitter is majority public opinion in America. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think they can prove it. How many fake Twitter accounts…?
Look, when I found out how Twitter was involved in an all-out effort to destroy the business of the EIB Network — and I’ve explained it to you — how 10 idiots (10 miserably unhappy former liberal mailmen and college professors) were able to make themselves look like a hundred thousand people who were sending emails to businesses all across the country, claiming they had to stop associating with this show because this show’s racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic.
Ten people! Twitter was a complicit actor in it, helping create the algorithms. When I found out how unreal, how inaccurate, how totally devoid of anything reality based that whole thing was — and those movements are still out there, those efforts, and the vast majority are aimed at us. Now, there are people on the right who use Twitter the same way to go after the left and they will be mad at me.
There are a lot of people on the right who love Twitter because it gives them access to an audience they otherwise wouldn’t have. But, see, I don’t need Twitter to have access to an audience. I have you, and I would much rather have you as my audience than whatever the kind of human debris slithering around in the primordial soup of Twitter.
And I’m holding back here, folks. I’m holding back a little bit on what I really think of all this. But I think it’s a poison. I think it’s a cesspool, and I’m gonna explain why here. Here. Let me go back. This is March 16, 2015, from me on this program…
RUSH ARCHIVE: Twitter has become a cesspool. Twitter is a literal cesspool. Twitter is the place… The question is raised about our culture frequently: Is it really rotting? Is it really deteriorating this fast, or has it always been the way it is, there just was never an Internet where these people could display themselves?
In other words: Have we always had a certain percentage of the population that are reprobates and absolute losers — mean-spirited, trolling, foul mouth jerks — or has Twitter created them? Has the Internet and the anonymity that accompany it created this kind of behavior? It’s a question that nobody really knows the answer to. Has it always been there?
Have people who think this way and act this way always been there, but nobody knew because it was never reported and because there was no outlet for them, but now with Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook and any other number of places you go in social media) anybody can go on and say or do anything? They do. It has become a cesspool.
RUSH: Yeah, by the way, my friends, I am not the only one who believes this now. Next sound bite, please…
Don Lemon: People have been removed from Twitter for far less outrageous behavior. Come on, Jack Dorsey. Make the label bigger, please. Twitter has become a cesspool, Jack Dorsey. Stop hiding behind the First Amendment for profit. Stop doing it! Do the right thing.
RUSH: Yeah, these clowns… See, they want Trump banned from Twitter. Twitter has made a huge miscalculation here by fact-checking Trump.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, let’s get into a little bit of the Twitter stuff as it relates to President Trump. So Trump goes out there and starts tweeting about Jeff Sessions, and then he starts tweeting about Scarborough perhaps being a murderer, which I explained yesterday. Trump is Trump. It’s not hard to understand him. But people make it a major chore. It’s easy to understand Donald Trump if you try. A lot of people just don’t want to.
“Why would he do that, Rush? Why would he call attention to himself that way and start accusing Scarborough of murder?” I don’t know, folks, but have you ever tried to imagine what the last four years or 3-1/2 years have been like for Donald Trump? And don’t tell me, “Well, yeah, but, Rush, he’s president! He’s the most powerful man in the world.
“He ought to know he’s gonna get treatment like that, and he ought to be able to let it roll off his back.” He’s a human being, number one. Number two, he’s very proud of what he did, winning in 2016, as any of us would be. First, he had a deal with Scarborough as a sycophant. Scarborough and Mika would show up at Mar-a-Lago and beg to get in, even though they’re not members.
They’d beg to get in on New Year’s Eve after Trump won the election the preceding November, and they’d want to be seated with Trump at dinner. They’d want to get all the photos taken — and want to put those photos on where? Twitter — and then talk about it on their MSNBC show. And all the while they were hoping promote Trump. They made it look for a while like they were all in favor of him.
Then all of a sudden, Scarborough does a 180 and starts spreading these lies of Trump being a traitor, a Russian agent — you know, the whole collusion lie — and gets guests on his show to spread the lie. None of it was true. And Trump believes that Scarborough knows it’s not true, and yet Scarborough participated in what? Three years of daily, never-ending, libelous, slanderous, false accusations — stealing the election, being a traitor, treasonous behavior, a Russian agent.
So, okay. “Joe, you know what? I think I’m gonna run around saying you murdered that girl. How’s it feel?” “It’s ridiculous. What is Trump…?” Why isn’t anybody saying that it’s ridiculous what has been said about Trump? To this day, the Russian scandal lives in the American media. To this day, the Russian hoax and scandal lives. The Steele dossier lives. That really happened in Adam Schiff’s world, in Pelosi’s world.
It has got to be beyond frustrating. Now I understand. You say, “He’s gotta get past it, Rush. He’s a gotta get past it. If he would simply ignore it, get past it, they’d stop…” No, they won’t. They’re building it up again to try to make it a factor in the 2020 election. So this led to all kinds of people demanding that Twitter get rid of Trump. Twitter is not gonna get rid of Trump because if Twitter got rid of Trump, they’d be getting rid of themselves.
You know, if Trump wanted to, he could take Twitter down with him. If he wanted to do serious, permanent damage to Twitter, Donald Trump could do it. Now, he doesn’t want to do that because Trump loves it. It is his one direct pipeline to the people in this country who are being lied to to this day every day about him and pretty much everything that he’s saying and doing.
So Twitter has slapped a “fact check” on him, and the source for the fact-checkers are CNN. CNN now gets to fact-check Trump, and the first fact check… You know, Trump started tweeting about how mail-in ballots are a pipeline to election fraud — and they are. It has been demonstrated in previous elections that they are, and just for saying that, they get to fact-check Trump and CNN gets to say:
“There is no evidence that mail-in ballots caused any problems with elections’ integrity or cause phrase. This assertion is false,” and Trump is livid about it, and I’ll tell you one reason why. Where were the fact-checkers when Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and John Brennan and James Clapper and James Comey were claiming to have proof that Trump colluded with Russia, and they were tweeting it day in and day out?
They were tweeting unnamed, anonymous sources to back themselves up. So Twitter fact-checks President Trump for suggesting that California’s mail-in ballots will be substantially fraudulent. It’s the first time Twitter has fact-checked anybody, and they did it because a bunch of people were demanding that Jack Dorsey do something about it, and Jack Dorsey didn’t want to get any grief.
So he said, “Okay. We’ll fact-check Trump.” Well, my question points out a problem Twitter has now created for itself. If you’re gonna start fact-checking people, when do you start fact-checking Democrats? When do you unleash CNN on some of these bogus claims made by Schiff or Nadler and Brennan and Clapper and Comey? Because if you want to talk about lying…
You know, Trump’s thoughts on mail-in ballots and vote fraud, you can almost qualify that as opinion. These people were lying purposefully in an attempt to mislead and deceive by trying to convince people they were telling them facts. It was a “fact” that Trump stole the election. It was a “fact” that Trump is a Russian agent. It was a “fact” that Trump worked with Vladimir Putin to steal the election from the so-called rightful winner, Hillary Clinton.
They presented their lies as “facts.” Not a single one of them was fact-checked. And, by the way, there wasn’t anybody on our side running around bellyaching and whining and moaning about it demanding that Jack Dorsey stop it or do something about it — and there damn well should have been. Twitter is poison! This is one of the very reasons that it is poison and a cesspool. It thrives on lies.
It thrives on subhuman character and morality. It promotes and almost validates the absolute worst of humanity, and then when journalists come along and validate it by use tweets as evidence of public opinion… But here’s the thing. There’s one other thing about this. They claim that Trump is out there spreading conspiracy theories, poisoning American culture, poisoning American politics.
You know, I have to tell you. There’s all kinds of evidence that mail-in voting ballots, mail-in ballots do indeed cause fraud. Do you know even NPR did a story on this in April? National Public Radio (our tax dollars at work) where we beg for your donation, “Without your pledge we cannot dust.” And they go off and they do this story on it and they make it crystal clear that mail-in ballots are a great way to cheat in balloting.
But the thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way. And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.
Like during the campaign of 2016, I… Folks, I ran the gamut of emotions on this. When Trump said that he had seen a picture of Ted Cruz’s dad standing next to (laughing) Lee Harvey Oswald, I said, “What the hell is this?” I go to, “He’s gonna have to walk this back. Ted Cruz’s dad had something to do with the assassination of JFK?” (laughing) He never walked it back. But more importantly, he never asserted it himself.
He simply said it was out there and that people ought to know — and with virtually every conspiracy theory that Trump touts, he doesn’t actually tout them himself. He spreads them under the guise, “People need to know about this,” and it’s his way of jamming ’em up. It’s his way of teasing him. It’s his way of getting these conspiracy theories out there.
For example, as a way of illustrating, do you think…? Mr. Snerdley, do you think Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not? (interruption) No, of course he doesn’t care. So why is he tweeting it? Well, because it’s out there. He didn’t make it up. It’s long been out there that this death is that something suspicious about it.
So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames — and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover. But there’s one other thing about this. Marco Rubio has warned Twitter that putting a fact-check label on any Trump tweet — that actually having a fact-checker and then standing behind whatever the fact-checker says — turns Twitter into something that is not.
He says that it’s turning Twitter into publishers. “Sen. Marco Rubio fired a warning shot at Twitter after it appended a fact-check label to President Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting.” Rubio said yesterday “that Twitter ‘should no longer be shielded from liability’ and treated as a publisher if it decides to deviate from its place as a social media forum.
“‘The law still protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers,’ Rubio said.” They’re just sitting there, and they are empty vessels for whatever users decide to fill it up with, that Twitter has no official position. Of course, they do, with their bias and how they censor various things but Twitter in a normal day of operation is just a vessel.
It’s an empty vessel, and its users are who fill it with content. Once they start adding content like this by putting fact-checkers in and then backing the fact-checkers, then they have abandoned this legal position that protects them from liability. Rubio said, “The law still protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers.
“But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law,” meaning you could sue ’em. Right now, you can’t sue Twitter for what anybody says on Twitter. Twitter didn’t say it. They’re just the empty vessel. They’re providing the forum.
But once they get in the content game, and once they start playing and trying to discredit who says what by fact-checking, that then removes the liability shield. Also, when are they gonna start fact-checking Democrats? Do not think that they’re gonna get away with only fact-checking Trump. They may not have thought this through. They may not have thought it out. Surely their lawyers…
It’s gonna be fascinating to watch this all play out.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, let me tell you about this little Pajama Boy at Twitter they have fact-checking Trump. His name is Yoel Roth, Y-o-e-l Roth. He “says on his personal website that he received his PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania by ‘studying privacy and safety on gay social networks.’ ‘These are the kids that are fact-checking the President of the United States,’ remarked Heather Champion, a commentator on social media,” and they are kids.
They are Pajama Boys, social justice warriors. One of Yoel Roth’s tweets, one of his favorite tweets: “I’m just saying we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” So Trump is “a racist tangerine.” He called Mitch McConnell “‘a bag of farts.’ … He boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of ‘developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,’ like the one that led Twitter to slap a new ‘misleading’ warning label on two of President Trump’s tweets concerning mail-in balloting on Tuesday. …
“Roth has previously referred to Trump and his team as ‘ACTUAL NAZIS,’ mocked Trump supporters by saying that ‘we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,’ and called [the Turtle], a ‘personality-free bag of farts.'” Pardon me. I’m quoting, folks. Don’t blame me.
“Last August, Twitter suspended [the Turtle’s] Twitter account…” That’s who’s fact-checking Trump. Okay. “[W]e fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” Tom in Boise, Idaho, I want to squeeze you in. You’re first today. Hello and welcome.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Mega dittos from one of those flyover states.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I think Trump is going to get banned from Twitter eventually. Whether it happens before the election to try and keep him from getting elected, or after out of pure spite, I think it’s gonna happen even if it’s suicidal for Twitter. And I think Trump needs to have a backup plan in place so that he still has that direct pipeline to the people without a media filter. Looking at —
RUSH: He has one.
CALLER: Well, I think he needs to be looking at other social media websites as a backup plan, so that when his Twitter ban does come, he can immediately transition to that new site and then he can get that link out there.
RUSH: I think they’ve got one. I don’t know what it is, but I know they’re not just sitting around not considering your possibility that Twitter would ban him. I’d be surprised. I don’t think Jack Dorsey wants to go there. Once… (chuckling) Once that happens, the whole can of worms and doors get opened. But you’re right.
Even if it would be suicidal, they might well do it. But don’t worry. There’s gonna be a backup plan, just like there’s gonna be a backup plan to the left attempting to shut down his rallies. Anyway, I’m glad, Tom, you got it all in there. You squeezed it in like a broadcast pro. You got it in there in less than the minute you had.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I checked the email during the break. A lot of people say, “Man, I have never heard you go off on anything like you went off on Twitter.” Yes, you have. You’ve heard me go off on the Russian scandal, this collusion thing. You’ve just forgotten ’cause it was so long ago. Can I tell you what the biggest pet peeve I have with Twitter and all of social media is?
Without exception — and this is a classic illustration of how it has corrupted and destroyed journalism. Now (scoffs), journalism did it to themselves first. Do not misunderstand. But Twitter and social media came along and gave journalism a swift kick in the butt toward irrelevance. Okay. So somebody will post a video, say, of me saying something supposedly controversial — and the next thing you know, the media is reporting that Twitter went viral, that Twitter lit up.
So what?
What does it mean that Twitter lit up or that Twitter went viral? Do you realize how many irrelevant people have been created as “influencers,” and who are being paid millions of dollars who do not really have any influence? It’s all because everybody’s playing the game that Twitter is somehow this massive collection of “influencers,” and it just… (sigh) The whole… (interruption) What? What’s…” (interruption)
Snerdley is saying that I would own Twitter if I was on there. (big sigh) You know damn well they wouldn’t permit that to happen at Twitter. This is the whole point! They wouldn’t permit me to, quote-unquote, “own it.” I guarantee you that there would be a mad dash of whoever and whatever to smother whatever I was doing on Twitter, to mischaracterize it or to say that it didn’t go viral.
They’d pronounce me a total failure, that nobody cares what Limbaugh is saying on Twitter. You can’t fool me on this stuff. But this whole idea that Twitter lit up — and it becomes a justification for a news story. And how do they know that Twitter lit up? What does that mean? That 10,000 people on Twitter reacted to something? (interruption)
Yeah, something triggered them, but how many? The reason why…
You know, folks, remember, I’m the mayor of Realville. The reason why this all bothers me is when I started this radio show, there were all kinds of radio shows out there claiming and being claimed by others in the media to be the most listened or the most profitable, and they weren’t. The vast majority of them had very little audience. But it was public relations and buzz and media hype that created this impression.
I know that’s… Look, I’m not naive. I know this has been part of media and how you succeed in it. But I always vowed to myself that I wanted to be the most listened to radio show in the country, legitimately. I wanted it to be able to be proven by the way radio and broadcast entities prove their success — and that, in our business, is ratings. Whether they’re right or wrong, good or bad, that’s the measure, and everybody in it accepts it.
Well, these other shows I’m talking about… It doesn’t matter who they are. One’s dead; one’s almost dead and doesn’t know it. They were said to be highfalutin number one. They weren’t even close! They weren’t even close. And that’s exactly what Twitter does. Twitter makes vast successes out of people that haven’t done anything.
Meanwhile, the people out there who are genuine achievers who have achieved and accomplished a lot get bashed as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who have mind-numbed robots as their audience. Mind-numbed robots is a great description of what’s out there on Twitter. But this whole idea that you can light Twitter up or social media went viral?
Who says? And over what?
So I have a lot of pet peeves about it, because it isn’t real. It isn’t real, and we’re being lied to that it is. It’s being presented to us. The public opinion there, the size of the public opinion, the impact of the public opinion, the power of the public opinion? We’re all being lied to. I mean, put yourself in my shoes. I’m sitting here with the most listened to radio talk show in the country.
And out there, 10 abysmal, miserable, human debris failures have an operation running to make themselves look like a hundred thousand people. And they put out a press release that they have succeeded in getting X-number of sponsors banned. It isn’t true, it never happened, and yet the stories are all over the media that I’m about out of business. And it’s all made up. It’s all lies.
And the media launching it, amplifying it don’t even care if it’s true or not. Now, why am I supposed to sit here and have respect for that? Why am I supposed to like Twitter and other Facebook-type social media who can engage in this kind of thing? Look, I know it’s part of the landscape, but I have chosen not to participate in it and be part of it simply because…
It’s another broadcast reason. If you want to find out what I think, you gotta come here. You can’t go anywhere else. What sense would it make for me to undercut the 600 radio stations carrying this program? If you could find out what I think without listening to this program, I’d be cutting myself out. (interruption) Nah. (laughing) You wouldn’t believe what’s happening here.
Snerdley is trying to talk me into it. “You could tease what you really think. You could hype it. You could do this or that.” Yeah, I suppose I could. But look, my opinion on all this, my reaction to all this is simply (and get mad at me all you want) because I have the utmost respect for you, you in this audience and your intelligence and your ability to understand things.
I’ve been extremely fortunate and happy to establish this relationship, this bond.
We hit a new record at RushLimbaugh.com, members at Rush 24/7. I have been out many days, and we passed a new threshold of membership that we haven’t seen before, and the amount of gratitude I feel for that, I have difficulty expressing it. How many times can I say, “Thank you”? It’s mind-boggling to me. So I’ve got my own ways of getting myself out there — and in ways I want to do it that offer critics the least opportunity to distort what I am saying or what I intend.
(interruption) Well, we never divulge numbers here. (interruption) Oh, you mean the projections? Oh, it’s 44 million.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mr. Snerdley, another quick question for you.
I don’t mean to keep putting you on the spot here. What percentage of the — and I’m not just gonna say “adult population,” because we know that a bunch of crumb crunchers are on Twitter all day and night. What percentage of the population do you think uses Twitter on a daily basis? (interruption) It’s 2%, maybe. I can’t say for sure. I don’t have any confirmed data.
I have read — and I don’t remember where or when — that it is 7%, and that most of Twitter is New York and LA — California and New York, maybe San Francisco. Well, if you believe that, then that explains why Twitter is the sewer that it is. I’m talking about political sewer. I’m talking about an ideological, political sewer. I think about all of the numbers you hear, like, “Twitter went viral. Twitter lit up.”
But we’re gonna talk about 2%, you say 7% of the population reacted to something, and that is viral? That’s stop the presses and write a story about it? So when Twitter goes viral, nobody really has any idea what that means. But I’ll guarantee you what they think. When they’re told that Twitter’s lit up, Twitter went viral, they think the whole country is reacting to whatever it is — I’ll guaran-damn-tee you — when, of course, that isn’t true.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Look at this here, folks, a story from April 2019, New York Post. Headline: “Twitter Does Not Reflect How Most Americans Think: Study.” Somebody went out there and researched it. I know that has to be true, which is why I resent Twitter being held up as a mirror on America. I just refuse to believe it.