BRETT: Now, before you step on a plane, you may want to step up on the scale. It’s not just your suitcase that needs to meet weight requirements these days. That’s right. “U.S. Airlines May Start Weighing Passengers at the Gate.” Getting weighed before getting on an airplane after taking off your shoes and belt and jacket. It’s the last move anyone wants to make when running through the airport to catch a flight, right?

Well, this happens outside the U.S., by the way, with a lot of regularity. It’s another invasion, government takeover of your health care. If the TSA knows how much you weigh, the government does too, right? TSA is a government agency. Rush talked about a similar case just a few years ago.

RUSH: Have you heard about this Japanese airline? I mean the news out there, so we got this Japanese airline requiring people to go to the toilet before they get on board to reduce weight so that they can save fuel. They want you to go in and eliminate your waste. Here, I’ve got the story right here. Airline asks passengers to use toilet before boarding so they weigh less and help cut carbon emissions.

The Japanese airline started asking passengers to go to the toilet. “All Nippon Airways claims that empty bladders means lighter passengers, which in turn means lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use.” I’m not making this up, and I’m going to tell you something, I’m looking at a picture of the paint job of an All Nippon Airways jet. Why don’t you strip the paint off the thing? I’ll guarantee you the weight of the paint on your stupid jets weighs far more than the waste yet to be eliminated in the bodies of your passengers. It’s insane, it’s insane out there!

BRETT: It’s wacky, and he’s right. So U.S. airlines may want to start weighing passengers at the gate. Can we at least get a BMI reading too? I mean, just because you’re heavy doesn’t mean you’re fat! It doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy or obese — and, by the way, let’s think about this for a moment.

What are we talking about? What time of year are we gonna be weighing people? Are we gonna be weighing them in the summer when they’re a little more slender or are we gonna be weighing them when they get back from vacation after they’ve been boozing and go carousing and eating everything in sight? I mean, how are we gonna work this out?

And, by the way, is there a sliding scale?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Cicadas! The cicadas are coming. No, I’m serious. Check it out. This is Rush coming up in the next hour. We’re gonna talking about cicadas.

RUSH: Most liberals want to live in a fantasy world of a potential utopia that’s just around the corner and they construct these little cocoons in which they live. And if you come along and poke a hole in it, you are not enlightening them. You are threatening them, and they respond in kind. They’re not rooted in reality.

BRETT: We’ve got plenty more of that straight ahead on the program. (chuckles) It’s gonna be awesome. I’m somebody who is fearful.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: This is an incredible time to be alive for a lot of reasons. It’s also a terrifying time to be alive if you’re somebody who is, say, bug averse. That’s right. Bug averse. Remember when the Drive-By Media got liberals to vote for Biden despite his cognitive decline? Well, now those same Drive-By Media want you to eat bugs.

The Washington Post, Axios, Wired, among other Drive-Bys are all suggesting you go out and eat the brood of cicadas that are expected to come out this summer. It’s not the first time the left has tried to get you to eat the bugs. Let me give you a little background on this before I let you hear from Rush’s analysis.

The cicadas that we’re talking about are Brood X or the brood 10. “For 17 years, the trillions of cicadas known as Brood X have tunneled through dark soil, feeding on sap as they slowly matured. Babies during the George W. Bush years, these long-gestating underground bugs are starting to hatch across the eastern United States, emerging from the earth in astounding numbers.

“Their time above ground is short: three to six weeks,” it can’t be short enough for me, “just long enough to mate and die. As a biological phenomenon, gigantic cicada broods are hard to ignore. They’re like crickets with musical-theater degrees — dramatic, loud…” It is scary.

We are talking about trillions of these bugs on the East Coast. Brood X offers something beyond noise and wonder. It also offers, according to Wired magazine, a source of “free-range, sustainable source of protein.” Hmm! Eating bugs. That just sounds terrific, doesn’t it? Getting’ out there in your backyard and eatin’ some bugs. Once upon a time, Rush talked about Kofi Annan (Remember him?) when he wanted you to eat bugs.

RUSH: Try this. “Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants people to eat more insects because better for the environment and your health. ‘Keeping meat consumption to levels recommended by health authorities would lower emissions and reduce heart disease, cancer, and other diseases,’ Kofi Annan told The Guardian Sunday.

“‘And of course there are alternative sources of protein. For example, raising insects as an animal protein source,’ he said. ‘Insects have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat! They make up part of the diet of two billion people and are commonly eaten in many parts of the world.’ ‘Eating insects is good for the environment and balanced diets.” You think I’m making this up?

This is the former head honcho at the U.N., who is suggesting — again under terms of equality and fairness, egalitarianism, with the added benefits of helping prevent climate change and global warming — eat insects for your protein. What is it with these people? Seriously. What is it with these people?

You hear a story like this… It happens to me, too. You hear a story like this that you think, “A-ha! Finally one of these idiots has overstepped it, and now I can help demonstrate to my liberal buddies just how stupid what they think is, just how crazy what they believe is.” So the next time I run into my liberal buddies, I say, “Did you hear what Kofi Annan said?”

And they’ll say, “Who’s Kofi Annan?” ‘Cause they’re liberals.

And you will say, “‘Who’s Kofi Annan?’ Why, he’s a former Secretary-General United Nations! He used to run the world at the U.N.”

And they’ll go, “Oh, the U.N.? Wow, cool. No, what did he say?”

“He said the best thing that you could do to stop climate change would be to eat insects.”

Well, your liberal buddy is gonna think you’re lying, or that you have misunderstood, or that you are misstating what he said. They will not believe. They will think that you’re lying to them or trying to entrap them. Even if they go on to learn that you’ve told them the truth, they will not permit what they believe to be discredited by you by virtue of some extremist little news item you’ve brought to their attention.

They will come back at you and say, “Well, if you look what he said, he said it’s one of the things that we could do, and he pointed out that poor people have to eat insects. It doesn’t mean you have to eat insects to save the planet. You can. But there are other things that you can do to save the planet — and I do. I drive a hybrid! I make sure that I don’t take a shower for any longer than 90 seconds.”

They’ll come back at you with all of the great things they do to save the planet, and then they’ll turn it around on you, and accuse you of not doing anything because you don’t care. I don’t think you can shame these people. They have to come to these conclusions themselves. And even if what you tell ’em changes their mind, they’re never gonna give you the satisfaction of knowing that you did it. They’re not gonna say, “Wow, is that right? Man, he’s an idiot!”

They’ll find a way… Most of these people don’t change their….. Now, I do have — and it’s been demonstrated. I do have the ability and power to force liberals to see the light and change their minds. Many of them over the years have called here and admitted it, acknowledged it, and even thanked me. But most of them have to do it on their own. Something happens, and they, and they learn it, when there’s a stimulus maybe of something and something said to them.

But I found most of them rigidly positioned, unalterably positioned, rooted in their belief system because their belief system is not really what they believe. Their belief system has been constructed as a way of shielding them from what really is. Most liberals want to live in a fantasy world of a potential utopia that’s just around the corner, and they construct these little cocoons in which they live.

And if you come along and poke a hole in it, you are not enlightening them; you are threatening them, and they respond in kind. They’re not rooted in reality. I mean, who could be…? Who in the world could actually think that it’s a good idea, for example, to ban moms and dads reading to their kids at night because it’s not fair they can while others can’t? I mean what, what must you be? What must you think?

How must you think if you believe something like that’s a good idea? That’s why I say, “Look, the ultimate objective here,” and it’s getting harder and harder every day, “not bring ’em in the fold.” That isn’t gonna happen. What has to happen, they have to be defeated. They have to remain the minority they are, and that’s proving problematic because we don’t have a political party right now that wants to push back against much of this.

BRETT: I’m not eatin’ cicadas. I’m not eating bugs. I know there are cultures who eat bugs. That’s great. That’s what makes the world an amazing place. Everybody’s got a different sort of taste for things. I imagine there are people who were horrified the first time a guy grabbed a lobster out of the ocean or a clam out of the sand and busted it open and ate it.

I imagine that probably worried some people who didn’t know what that was, but this idea that we’re gonna eat cicadas? No. No! To me, if we are down to eating bugs… Here’s the thing. We have overfished the oceans, right? That’s what the progressives always tell you, the environmentalists tell you. We’ve overfished the oceans.

Well, we’ll probably over-bug the forests. We’ll get such a delicious taste for cicadas, we won’t be satisfied. We’ll be down to beetles and we’ll be down to cockroaches and we’ll be down to flies and mosquitoes. We just… We’ll never satiate ourselves enough. This is terrible. I don’t think the American people need to be turned onto this new flavor.

I think this new flavor will be so attractive, we’ll just end up wrecking it, so I think we just let them be. Why don’t we save the cicadas for everybody else? In all reality, I’m not eating a bug. I’m already worried because I’m right here, I’m right here in the Carolinas and I’m telling you: There are gonna be millions of these things everywhere.

And I’m going to probably go find my old snow shovel in my garage and I’m going to shovel my way to my car. I’m going to get in my car and drive. The idea of trillions of bugs flying around and having a bug-becue? I’m not driving around doing it. (chuckles) They’re doing they see pop-up food menus in Washington, D.C., where people are gonna eat bugs?

Not interested.

Zero percent interest there.

I don’t want any of that at all.