RUSH: In fact, I got a story in the Stack today. This is so great. Somebody has actually finally figured this out and written a story on how if you want to find happiness and laughs and smiles and people enjoying themselves in America today, you have to hang around conservatives because you are not gonna find any happy leftists.

You’re not gonna find smiling leftists. You’re not gonna find laughing leftists. You’re gonna find people that are constantly enraged, constantly out of sorts, constantly angry, constantly unhappy, and trying to spread all of that to everybody else. And it is true! And it is having a deleterious effect on all of us at large. And a lot of those people who are deranged and maladjusted and unhappy lurk anonymously on Twitter. Let’s look at this situation here with the Covington Catholic school kids. Why is this even a controversy?

Twitter!

We’ve even got the head of the Black Israelite group who’s now admitting that they started the whole thing. Let’s see. Who is this guy? Yeah. The Black Israelite from Brooklyn sparked the whole thing. He calls himself… What does he call himself? Chief Ephraim. He’s admitted to the New York Post that he… He did this yesterday. He admitted that they touched off the confrontation by viciously berating the high school students from Covington. Well, he claims the Word of God started it all because he thinks that’s what his group is, the Word of God.

The New York Post article points out that the Israelites here, the Black Israelites, were “caught on video verbally attacking both the Native American activists and the students from Covington Catholic High School for more than an hour.” Do you realize the Black Israelites were hurling all kinds of vicious and vile rhetoric at these kids for more than an hour before Nathan Phillips (who continues to lie about having served in Vietnam) showed up with his war drum and began chanting and beating on it?

In fact, the Black Israelites were attacking the Indians before they turned their sights on the kids. Yet Nathan Phillips is out saying the kids started it all and attacked him and that they were hurling vile racial epithets at the Black Israelites. Anyway, why does any of this rise to the level that it has? It’s because of Twitter, and what is Twitter? Folks, I think this is a crucial point here. I have long held this view. I have oftentimes shared this view with you. Journalism has gotten incredibly lazy, and it’s not new.

When the fax machine came out, the fax machine replaced shoe leather reporting and sourcing. Then the internet hits and it becomes even easier. You don’t have to leave the office. You don’t have to leave your computer-type keyboard. All you have to do is search on the internet, find a source for whatever you want, get a quote, put it in there, and act like you’ve reported it deeply. Twitter has now replaced all of that. In fact, you can’t find a news story that does not have Twitter reaction in it!

And who are these people on Twitter? They’re anonymous. Nobody knows who they are. They have names, usernames. You can’t tell who they are, and yet they are given weight that is the equivalent to a credible, provable, documented, expert sourcing. And they’re nothing but a bunch of ragtag, unhappy, militant, invisible and anonymous kids in their pajamas and whoever knows — retired professors and so forth — and they’re simply out there. They’re affecting the Academy Award nominations. When I say “they,” we don’t know who “they” are.

And they would be anonymous. They would not be relevant to anything if the media hadn’t decided to hype Twitter and to use Twitter as credible source substitution, and the reason is simple: The media has become a left-wing mob on its own. Twitter is a left-wing mob. It’s not hard to find similar left-wing mob opinion and psychology on Twitter. So if you go into a story like the Covington kids story and you see this kid smirking (in your mind) and smiling and wearing a MAGA hat, it triggers everything that you hate.

You hate the nuclear family. You hate Christianity’s role and the founding of and the definition of its culture and society. You hate white people. You hate what you think is white privilege. You hate everything that has, for decades, defined normal in America. You hate it. You’re a left-wing journalist, you’re a left-wing activist, you’re a minority, you’re a feminazi. You hate everything that used to be defined as normal in America. Mom and dad, 2.8 kids, picket fence, little dog in the backyard, two cars in the garage, barbecues on Friday and Saturday. You hate that.

You hate church on Sunday. You hate Bible study Sunday night. You hate Sunday school on Sunday morning. You hate the Boy Scouts. You hate Little League. You hate anything involving heterosexuality. You hate anything that used to be the definition of normal and well-adjusted and happy and content. You resent all of that because that normalcy is what led to people improving their lives. Those were the people that got hired — those were the people that got promoted — because they were reliable. They were trustworthy.

You knew their value base, you trusted it, you wanted it in your organization. So all of that has been under assault in our culture war for over 40 years. And if you want to go back even further, you can say that the civil rights movement was related to it in a way. But it has totally become the objective of the left to overthrow everything that used to be considered normal in America. These kids are the epitome! The Covington kids are the epitome of what used to be normal. They’re smiling. They’re happy. They’re in Washington celebrating life, not abortion.

They are Catholics. (That’s not good.) They’re wearing Trump hats. (That’s the big trigger.) And then, of course, they’re confronted by two groups who have never been considered normal: The Native American radicals and the Black Israelite radicals. Who does the media side with instinctively? The Native American, lying Indian chief and — over here — the Black Israelites. Why? (sniveling) “Because they’re not normal! America’s never allowed them to be normal. They’ve always been minorities. They’ve always been radical.”

Well, they’re not normal, as it used to be defined in America. So they naturally become the objects of sympathy and support for the media, and the kids become the diabolical enemy because they represent the normal that these other people don’t think they can ever achieve. Really, I don’t think any of this is any more complicated than trying to redefine what normal is in America because of the deep resentment for what was normal. So we now have the media championing a bunch of ragtag Black Israelite, profane protesters doing whatever the hell that isn’t any good for anybody.

And then, by the same token, it’s natural that they would side with the minority, the Native Americans, ’cause, after all, before any of what you used to call normal in America could happen, we had to kick the Indians out of their tepees and put ’em on reservations! So we were evil, SOB Europeans, and these kids are the focal point of all this rage and hatred. The objective of the culture war is to render them and their families and their stupid school and their Catholic Church as the racist bigots that we know they are because we resent the hell out of the fact that that’s what used to be normal in America — and it’s never gonna be.

We’re gonna redefine, we’re gonna reshape, we’re gonna reorient America so that those people never, ever get to run this place again. They’re gonna learn to find out what it’s like to be a minority, to be pursued, to be this and that. (This is the nature of the culture war that we face.) So in the midst of this, here comes Twitter! A bunch of anonymous, untraceable… We can’t possibly know who these people are. We don’t know what they do. All we do is — if we’re journalists — we come up with a story. We see the kids from the high school, and we immediately hate them.

We hate the MAGA hat, we hate everything they stand for — and all we gotta do is go to Twitter and find like-minded hate for a bunch of anonymous dingbats that we don’t even know, and we elevate them to essentially the referees in American society. We elevate them to the people making the value judgment. We don’t even know who they are! Twitter needs to be forgotten or shut down or ignored, because if it isn’t, we’re gonna continue to get — in terms of mainstream media — an entirely bastardized view of what America is and who Americans are.

Because I maintain to you that the people on Twitter — anonymous usernames we don’t know, being promoted and cited as source authorities by the Drive-By Media — are not happy, they’re not content, and they’re not focused on doing what’s right or what’s good. They have a political agenda. They’re part of the left’s army, and that’s why they’re used. But it’s a problem because all the kids want to be on Twitter. It’s how you get famous. It’s how you get likes. It’s how you get follows. It’s how you become a star. It’s how you get audience. It’s how you (sigh) act like somebody big and important when you’re sitting there in three-day-old underwear ’cause the washing machine’s broken down on the back porch.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I checked the email during the break. “Rush, I can’t believe you’re letting the media off the hook and blaming Twitter.” I’m not letting the media off the hook. Let me try again. Frank Sinatra, 1987 (singing): “Let me try again.” The media is, of course, the prime mover. They run the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party is radical leftist activism. What Twitter permits… The media thinks what they think. I mean, the media looks at the picture of the kids and they don’t need anybody to tell ’em what to think.

They immediately see what they hate, what used to be normal in America: White, smiling, fresh-faced, happy religious kids at a pro-life rally wearing a MAGA hat. It’s instant hate! But the media need sources. The media needs ways to make it look like all of America sees them that way. Where they go for that? Twitter! You don’t have to go… You find a bunch of anonymous jackasses on Twitter who think actually what you think, and you quote ’em, and then you say, “Twitter has blown up!” meaning America has blown up, hating the kids.

That’s how they do it.

It’s a bunch of lies.

None of it’s true.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Twitter has become a stand-in for national opinion polls, and you don’t even have to take the poll anymore. You don’t even have to go through the motion of trying to make people believe your poll is scientific and accurate. You just say, “Twitter has blown up.” How many times do you hear that? We hear it a lot. “Oh, Twitter’s blowing up!” A news story, some news story on TV, “Oh, Twitter’s blowing up.”

What the hell does that mean? What does it mean that Twitter has blown up? It means that the media has found a bunch of tweets that make the case as a substitute for overwhelming public opinion all across the country that the media’s angle on a story is right. It’s one of the big… It’s a hoax, when you get right down to it! It’s a fraud being perpetrated on everybody. We don’t know who these tweeters are other than they’re common, ordinary, average, everyday people who do not know anything other than their perverted opinions on things.

Which are then automatically granted expert status by the media only too happy to publish and repeat the tweets because the tweets happen to say exactly what the media wants to say but can’t as journalists because, as you know, journalists can’t put opinion in stories. So the tweets are the perfect stand-in. And using these tweets and saying, “Twitter has blown up,” means America has blown up. “Twitter has blown up over these Catholic kids being mean to the Indian chief!” Translation: “America hates these kids exactly as they should be hated,” and that becomes the soap opera script.

That becomes the narrative. Twitter is even having an impact… Not that I care about this, other than the import of it. Twitter has determined who are the nominations are for Academy Awards. All it takes is for somebody to review… There’s a movie out there called The Green Book, and it’s about some New York… It’s a true story about some New York mob guy named Tony Lip driving a black pianist named Don Shirley through the racist South in the 1960s. The author of the story is a grandson or a relative of Tony Lip. So it’s told from his angle.

And the movie portrays these guys. Don Shirley is played by Mahershala Ali — an up-and-coming actor out there, by the way — and he’s driving around in the backseat of this ’57 Chevy, whatever car they’re in. I haven’t seen the movie. I’m telling you this because of what I’ve seen written about it. Viggo Mortensen plays Tony Lip, and he’s driving this guy around, and he ends up he’s a bodyguard. A white guy is the bodyguard for the black pianist, who happens to know Bobby Kennedy.

They get thrown in jail and he calls Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy gets ’em out. Anyway, Twitter is reacting to a review of the movie, praising the Tony Lip angle of this movie. Twitter has destroyed, it is said, some of the chances the movie has for Oscar success because Twitter “blew up” over the fact that the movie is racist and bigoted. Nobody knows who these Twitter people are, whether they’re legitimate movie fans or if they have even seen the movie. But they’re not a collection of Rex Reeds and professional movie critics out there.

But Twitter “blew up” over a review in the Oshkosh Gazette over the movie, The Green Book. The Green Book, by the way, was a private publication for black people to show them where in the South they could go to eat and drink safely, during the days when the Democrats ran the South, the Bull Connors of the day. When the Democrats were practicing virulent racism with dogs and fire hoses, The Green Book was a private little publication that showed blacks where they could go without being harassed and sit at the counter and eat and so forth.

So there’s a review of the movie, and it praises Tony Lip, the white guy. It doesn’t praise the black guy, Mahershala Ali. So Twitter goes nuts over the inherent racism of a movie making a white guy look good, and now the Academy is said to be afraid to duly honor and recognize the movie. Now, what kind of garbage is this? This is exactly how the Drive-By Media is using Twitter in every instance to move along their agenda. But Twitter is made up of people who obviously have problems, No. 1.

They relish being anonymous. They don’t have the guts to be public. If we knew who they were, they couldn’t get a shot on TV as an analyst or anything. They couldn’t qualify as opinion leaders. They couldn’t create their own audiences if it was left to them. But if they say the right things that the media loves and appreciates and wants to promote, then the media picks them from obscurity and then says, “Twitter has blown up,” meaning America has blown up — and we’re all sitting around here saying, “When did we lose our country?”

And we haven’t lost our country! They’re just making it look like we have because a bunch of mentally unbalanced, bored people on Twitter have the courage to be vain, profane, vile because they’re anonymous. Which is also having its own deleterious effect on discourse in culture throughout our society at large. It’s just another thing that you have to keep an eye on, another thing that you have to make sure you don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to. Next time you hear, “Twitter has blown up,” make sure you remember what Twitter is and who it is that’s blowing up.

They’re not even people you would invite to your house. “What about all the famous people?” I’m not talking about the famous people. That’s not what the media uses. The media uses people you never heard of, and they do it over and over. But they have become replacements for public opinion, polling data. They’ve become replacements for sources — credible sources — in news story after news story.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Joe in Detroit. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hi.

CALLER: (static, muffled speakerphone) Hi, Rush. I agree with your theory on Twitter. It is out of control. But President Trump is the worst offender. He sets the tone with vicious mockery, chronic lies, unnecessary bullying, and personal insults. His tweets are like graffiti on the restroom wall. Please ask him to stop.

RUSH: That’s a great, great script you got out there, Joe. Well written. You read that well. You know, you could be an actor like Nathan Phillips. You know that guy stars in TV commercials about the legalization of marijuana? I just got the story. No, seriously. Seriously, Joe. I get your point. A lot of people even on our side… I can’t tell you the number of people who call me on the Republican side. Like over Thanksgiving, I got at least four e-mails, “Rush, what are you doing?” It was Thursday afternoon, Friday afternoon.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna go play golf.”

“Stop by Mar-a-Lago and tell Trump to stop tweeting!”

These are people on our side, and I replied to every one of them. “No way. I don’t want him to stop tweeting. It’s the only way his side of things ever gets out because he’s alone. He doesn’t have a party defending him or backing him up.” I understand the left loves to blame other people for their own deficiencies and for their own problems, and especially for their own unhappiness. But Donald Trump doesn’t set the Twitter tone I’m talking about. Donald Trump doesn’t start anything — and this is such a key point.

Donald Trump doesn’t tweet until somebody hits him, until somebody lies about him, until somebody lies about his policy or about his family. If somebody hits him, he’s gonna hit back — and you know it’s him! He’s not anonymous, and we know he’s not in his underwear, and we know that he’s not some sociopath that can only exist in an anonymous state who would crumble in a group of five people. Trump doesn’t start anything. But even if you wanted to say he does, Trump isn’t profane, he isn’t vicious, he doesn’t lie about people.

He doesn’t do the stuff I’m talking about on Twitter that the media uses from these anonymous people that we don’t know who they are. The vile, disgusting, steeped-in-racist-hatred crap that is common? Trump doesn’t engage in any of that.