https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/02/22/democrats-are-losing-the-battle-of-ideas/Democrats Are Losing the Battle of Ideas by Trying to Replicate the Tea Party
Feb 22, 2017
RUSH: Folks, when I’m right, I’m right. (shuffling paper) I just received… There’s a column in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard by Alice B. Lloyd. It’s called, “The Activist’s Dilemma: The More We Shout … The Less They Care?” This piece basically says what my opening monologue says, in its own way. “The more extreme a protest or demonstration, the more media attention it gets,” the more sunlight shines on it. “But the more extreme the protest, the less likely it is the [people] at home will identify with its motivating spirit. This trade-off, between publicity and influence, they call ‘the activist’s dilemma.’ …
“‘[P]articipants presented with extreme anti-Trump protesters responded by reporting greater support for Trump.'” They are hurting themselves. This is exactly what the subject of my opening monologue. By the way, that whole monologue — I have to tell you — I ad-libbed. I had no intention, didn’t know I was gonna say any of that. There was something I saw on TV that got me going on that and I just kept rolling with it, and then somebody just sent me this.
“Extreme protest tactics get on TV but turn off audiences, says social science.” This is “Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School and Stanford’s Robb Willer,” and it only stands to reason. It all goes hand in hand with the fact that not only do protesters not have the ability to keep this fevered emotional pitch up week after week, the audience doesn’t want any of this! This is why I told you… What really got me going on this is people telling me…
I haven’t heard this — I mean, in discussing presidential politics. People are telling me they’re bored with all the attacks on Trump, meaning they were not effective. They weren’t working. They weren’t dispiriting people. They weren’t, because Trump’s fighting back. The Republicans never did, and the activists and the protesters are so over the top on everything, they’re actually boring people, and they’re converting people into Trump supporters.
Yes siree, Bob.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, that CIA agent who wrote that big op-ed over the weekend announcing he was quitting the CIA, and we were all supposed to panic? He was quitting the CIA! He said it wasn’t political. He just couldn’t work for somebody like Donald Trump. He just couldn’t gather intelligence for someone like Donald Trump. He could not analyze intelligence for someone like Donald Trump. He just couldn’t do it, just couldn’t do it. It turns out the guy was a total Clinton hack. He had donated five grand to Hillary’s campaign.
But there are other interesting aspects about this guy. He wasn’t just a Hillary donor. He was a flack for Ben Rhodes. Ben Rhodes, National Security Council. Ben Rhodes was one of the people integral to selling this stupid Iran deal to us, this Iran deal that basically paved the way for the Iranians to get nuclear weapons in 10 years or next year or whenever it is. This CIA agent and Hillary donor worked for the Obama administration for a time, as a spokesman! And he worked primarily for Ben Rhodes within the national security apparatus.
He was spinning for the administration. That’s what spokespeople do. Nothing wrong with that. But this guy wants us to believe he’s this unaffected, down-the-middle, nonpolitical CIA analyst that just can’t abide what’s happening here with Trump. Turns out he’s a Democrat Party hack who’s worked as a spinmeister for the Regime on the Iran deal. See, this is the kind of thing that is happening here and is bringing all of this out into the sunlight because none of it’s working. That’s the bottom line. None of this worked on Reagan, all these protests.
It didn’t — and, by the way, whatever you may think, all of these protests against George W. Bush did not work on Bush. He did not pull us out of Iraq. These protests do not work. And when they don’t work and when there’s evidence that they’re being ignored — in this case by Trump and his administration — they get louder. They get more unhinged, they get screwier, and they become even more noticeable as genuine wackos. And they end up producing the opposite of their intent. And what research has shown, contrary to what you…
Now, there’s one caveat here. These kinds of protests have, depending on who’s doing it, paralyzed Republicans in the House and Senate, and not all of them. But the protests have paralyzed them, and the protests did cause Republicans to go along with Democrats during the Obama administration. I still think the racial component was the primary factor in the Republicans’ refusal to oppose Obama and even stand up, and nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise. So that’s a one-off.
But even from this Weekly Standard piece: The problem is the left can never win this way, and they haven’t. I mean, look at Chicago 1968, similar behavior to this. The Democrats lose the election. To who? (snorts) (chuckles) Nixon! Who they hated. “One takeaway from the activist’s dilemma might be that an ideal political discourse — an open enough exchange of ideas that the best ones win fair and square, for the good of us all — gets lost when ugly behavior makes ordinary people tune out.” And that’s exactly what happened.
The Democrat… The longhaired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking whoever they are, they’ve been flushed out. They’re in public now. They’re in the arena of ideas. They’re not hidden. They’re in the arena of ideas, and they’re losing the battle of ideas, and as they lose the battle — and I the define losing by they’re ineffective — they get even rowdier. They get even raunchier. They go overboard and all this the ends up doing is causing people to town out like I heard for the first time last night: “I’m getting bored with this.” That’s the worst thing in the world that could possibly happen.
I’ll give you some other examples of this. Here’s Trump lashing out at the so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans. He says they’re actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. This is exactly right. Many of these protests, people are being bused in, they’re being paid to go, they are in some cases they’re even pretending to be angry Republicans. Not all of them. I mean, you got some genuine leftist protesters at these Republican town halls. But many of them are pretending to be angry Republicans in their attempt to intimidate the elected Republican conducting the town hall.
And Trump is honestly calling this out. We have not seen this before. So I had a story here from of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle about a town hall protest in California against Republican congressman Tom McClintock. Now the headline of this: “McClintock Gets an Earful at Northern California Town Hall — California Rep. Tom McClintock showed up Tuesday and faced his constituents at a town hall meeting — something many of his fellow Republicans have declined to do …
“About 900 people filled the Mariposa Fairgrounds and Exposition Center to toss pointed questions at the five-term congressman. Such a large crowd was a sign of how the resistance to President Trump has crept into the California’s Republican hinterlands…” That’s BS! The “large crowd” proves the Democrats are busing in people. The large crowd proves that — and in this case, more people than half the entire population of McClintock’s district showed up! They bused in more people than half the population. Now, let me come down later in the story.
“Tuesday was a bit of town hall deja vu for McClintock, who was one of a few sitting politicians at the vanguard of the Tea Party revolution…” Stick with me on this, folks. McClintock “was one of a few sitting politicians at the vanguard of the Tea Party revolution that launched just a few weeks into Obama’s term in early 2009. Then, conservative activists worried the new health care law being crafted at the time would become a government takeover of health care. Much like liberals are doing now, conservative activists flooded town halls around the country and delivered an earful to their representatives.”
Ah, ah, ah. That’s not what happened. Those were not “conservative activists.” That’s what’s noteworthy about the Tea Party and what the left still is in denial about. The Tea Party was not conservative activists. The Tea Party was not made up of people who had ever done anything like this before. They were not bought and paid for. They were not bused in. They were average, ordinary, everyday Americans fed up and scared to death by what Barack Obama was doing and the lack of resistance to it by the Republicans. Pure and simple!
Now, the Democrats, because they use progression, they can’t think outside their own box. So if people show up and start asking questions at a town hall, “It’s got to be an organized protest,” ’cause that’s what they do. In the Democrat world, nothing is left to chance. You don’t call a meeting and hope a bunch of protesters show up. You make sure they’re there. Well, they think everybody does that. The Tea Party was not conservative activists. And to say that they were “activists” is fake news. The Tea Party people had never been active. People there had never been previously involved in politics in their entire lives.
That’s what was so frightening actually the left, it was so organic and so natural, and there wasn’t a single leader to go out and destroy and thus destroy the whole movement. They created Occupy Wall Street. They actually manufactured what they thought the Tea Party was on the left to do battle with it. And then there’s this, in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Tea Party conservatives were able to translate that grassroots energy into flipping the Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. Achieving that same feat will be a daunting challenge for Democrats, who need to turn 24 seats to regain control of the House in 2018,” and that, my friends, in a nutshell, is why the Democrats are organizing these protests.
They somehow think that it will cause them to win a midterm landslide like the Tea Party did. They haven’t the slightest idea what the Tea Party was even now. This demonstrates they have no idea what the Tea Party was. They think they’ve just gotta show up in numbers like they think the Tea Party did and harass Republican members of Congress and — voila! — they are going to win the midterms. You know what this is like? And this goes part and parcel with the fact that all they’re doing is exposing themselves and who they really are. You know what this is like?
Air America.
What did they think they had to do?
All they had to do was go on the radio and start fundraising for liberalism, and that would make them the most listened to radio network in America. That’s all they had to, because they never studied what happened. They thought “funding” was the answer to a successful radio network. They were just clueless, totally clueless. Look at every liberal in the last 30 years the left has decided to put up against this program. They all failed after six months! No one even got close because they don’t know what it is. Now the left is making the same mistakes when it comes to replicating the Tea Party.
They think the Tea Party was an organized protest, so all they’ve gotta do is replicate what the Tea Party did and magic will happen in the 2018 midterms. And what they don’t understand is that in the process of doing all this, they are wide open in as bright a light as you could shine on ’em. They finally are demonstrating who they are. Their radicalism is on full display. Their oddball-ishness is on full display. Their mean-spirited behavior is on full display. And Trump continues to fight back, which forces them to get even more radical, which is slowly starting to reverse their fortunes.
