by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, December 2018
"There isn't a conviction I hold that makes liberals livid more quickly than this one: America is the greatest country on earth and in history, still abounding with untapped opportunity for ordinary citizens ... I want only the best for everyone -- not, by the way, as defined by me, but as people define it for themselves," -- me, See, I Told You So, 1993
"The President and all of us have been labeled by Democrats and the media as 'divisive'. Divisive? Democrats haven't even accepted that they lost the election in 2016! ... We get all these labels thrown at us. But we love our country and we want the best for everybody in it ... We want everybody to experience the American dream .. Donald Trump wants America to be great again -- it's not a slogan, it is an objective." -- me, introducing President Trump at the Cape Girardeau, MO MAGA rally, 11/5/18
I have had the same view of America my whole life, and I have publicly expressed it for over 30 years. I have extolled the virtues of our exceptional country, its unique history, its wonderful traditions and institutions, its miraculous Constitutional foundation. I have celebrated liberty's blessings, the greatest of which is the human mind set free to dream, create, and triumph over obstacles.
That hopeful, optimistic, energizing, and inspiring message is demonstrably true -- I have lived it myself -- and yet it is despised by the Left.
They call it "hate". They call us haters. They smear us as racists, white supremacists, bigot, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and every other vile name in their book of lies. The fact is, we infuriate them because we dissent from their blame-America-first agenda and their mission to tear down, "fundamentally transform", America as founded.
No Bridge.
Recently, a caller told me he thought our politics
and our society were "coming to a crossroads". He asked, "Rush, how do you
see us bridging the gap between liberals and conservative, and actually
getting something done?"
After all these years behind the Golden EIB Microphone, it pains me when I have failed to communicate something. Because I have also been clear: there is no way to bridge the gap. Zip, zero, nada. The caller's question assumes compromise is possible. It isn't.
As I've said many times, where is the compromise between right and wrong? Where is the compromise between good and evil? If I believe in freedom, free market capitalism, traditional morality, where is there any area of compromise with tyranny, socialism, and moral relativism? It doesn't exist. No, we're here to defeat them. We're here to lawfully stand in the way of their agenda succeeding.
When it comes to "bridging the gap", the political landscape is littered with the carcasses of half-built bridges, thanks to establishment Republicans vowing to "reach across the aisle". All the construction was done from the GOP side. Liberals never compromise to join us in order to advance a conservative cause. Liberals never allow their agenda to be watered down. They demand total fealty to full-fledged liberalism at all times.
Their radical priorities aren't even in the same universe as ours: socialism, gun confiscation, Medicare-for-All, open borders with unchecked illegal immigration and non-assimilation, getting rid of ICE, pulling back of law enforcement and traditional social standards so you get unfettered crime, rampant drug use, homelessness, and people defecating in the streets in Democrat-run cities. And that's just a sampling. They want to trample on civil liberties, end due process, silence conservatives, intimidate any opposition, and remove God from the public square. The Constitution is an obstacle to them; it's sacrosanct to me. I don't compromise on the Bible. And I don't compromise on the Constitution.
Time to face facts. The country as founded -- our culture, our economy, our future -- is under assault. Western civilization is under attack from within, bought and paid for by the Democrat Party, their donors, and their comrades-in-arms. It is nut-cracking time, folks.
Obama Factor.
One of the Left's tactics is to blame President
Trump for the divisiveness. The relentless narrative is, "Donald Trump and
his mean-spiritedness and vulgarity are just ripping America to shreds,
destroying all the healing work done by Barack Obama, the brilliant,
post-partisan, post-racial, Unifier-in-Chief." Gag me.
Millennials in particular have been grossly misled about the eight years of Obama. The truth is, Obama never saw a polarizing radical leftist cause or figure he didn't embrace: Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for starters. He invited Black Lives Matter to the White House, backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, supported the extremist mullahs in Iran, and gave them the green light to develop nuclear weapons. Mistrust and animosity between racial groups soared under Obama, after decades of declining tensions.
Obama had zero interest in solving political or racial divisions; there was too much power to be accrued. One of the objectives of the Obama Regime was to keep our country divided by putting people in groups, and then pitting them against each other -- with government presented as the only solution. To be run solely by Democrats.
The Left got away with the Obama-as-unifier lie because Republicans were terrified to oppose the first African American President. Any conservative who disagreed with Obama on policy was called a racist. That ended any real political pushback, and created an illusion of unity -- though it was non-existent. So now young people, who were never aware of the disunity that Obama sponsored, see all this supposed disunity with Trump, and they think it's new. They mistakenly believe the country has never been this divided.
Viewpoint Suppression.
It doesn't help that their only news
sources are left-leaning outlets. Liberal media bias has been going on for
decades, but now there's an added dimension: online algorithms. Google
search results put the President and conservatives in the most negative light
possible. CNN and the other drive-bys display prominently at the top of the
search results, while conservative media is basically shut out. The Big Tech
platforms are suppressing right-leaning views, controlling what the public
can and cannot see. Social media isn't some vibrant smorgasbord of ideas
where people get to debate and expand their minds. If you're a conservative,
you're banned outright or "shadow-banned", meaning your social media postings
are blocked without your knowledge. A massive effort is being undertaken
to simply eliminate conservatism from the discussion.
Leftist applaud this. They do not want debate: they want to eradicate any opposition. They don't want a level playing field. They don't want us on the field at all.
Control.
Conservatives believe in self-reliance; we know people
are happiest when they support themselves and are in control of their own
destinies. We want government to guarantee every citizen's personal liberty;
we do not want to use government to further our whims. If a conservative
doesn't like broccoli, for instance, he or she isn't going to demand broccoli
be outlawed. The Left does exactly that. Liberals don't approve of plastic
straws, boom, waiters are threatened with jail time if they hand a straw to
a customer.
Nanny-state liberals want the most powerful enforcer, the government, controlling every aspect of our lives. We are content to live and let live, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence -- enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are on a mission to deny those things to conservatives.
Their ideal is top-down Soviet central planning. Democrats embrace socialism, despite evidence that just a few years of socialism has turned once-prosperous Venezuela into today's hellhole, where the starving population is reduced to eating rats off the streets. To deliberately choose that kind of misery and failure over the prosperity arising from the most successful economic system in world history, American free-market capitalism, is the result of minds being poisoned by liberal mal-education and indoctrination.
Identity Politics.
Intersectionality, the Left's primal
identity-politics doctrine, is fundamentally divisive. If you claim that
everyone is a member of a victimized group except white, Christian,
heterosexual males, and that the white-patriarchy-oppressors' racism
permeates or intersects every aspect of society, the only result possible
is societal divide. This kind of tribalism or identity politics is the
easiest way to foster violence with angry mobs.
Once you've succeeded in making somebody a victim, that's all they are. They surrender control over their lives and their futures. They become perpetual, put-upon, taken-advantage-of, used, bullied people. They lose their self-esteem, and are ready to be used as pawns of the Left.
Under liberalism, the day is coming -- it's already here, to a large extent -- when only women can represent women, only African Americans can represent African Americans, only gays can represent gays, and so on. There's no hope of unity when identity politics is the reason to elect politicians rather than competence. There can be no way people can come together after having been divided on the basis of our surface physical differences.
Lenin and the communists wanted to divide society by class, Hitler and the Nazis wanted to divide society by race and ethnicity. Today the American Left wants to divide us by race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and 62 genders.
* * *
The stakes couldn't be higher. If America is to reclaim its governing philosphy of e pluribus unum, "out of many, one" -- emphasis on the "one" -- liberals cannot continue to acquire power. We have to push them back, and we must defeat them. Again.
We're not in a debate with the Left over how to make America better. That doesn't interest them at all. No, we're fighting them to the finish, because defeating the Left is the only way to save America as founded, period. Do not doubt me.
-- Rush Limbaugh