http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/04/21/the_bathroom_battle_right_vs_wrong_has_been_replaced_by_us_vs_themThe Bathroom Battle: Right vs. Wrong Has Been Replaced by Us vs. Them
April 21, 2016
Listen to it Button
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mark in Detroit as we start on the phones. Great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I just have a question about the bathroom situation. Why, if we can let anybody into any bathroom now, why do we have separate bathrooms for male and female? Are we gonna go to just one common? Where are we going with this?
RUSH: Are you being facetious, rhetorical, or do you actually expect an answer to this?
CALLER: I'm being a little facetious because I think it's kind of ridiculous what they're doing.
RUSH: See, it is. But we have to ask ourselves, how did we get here? See, this is what is fascinating. I'm gonna get into this in detail in the monologue segment of the next hour. You don't have to go back very many years, one year, maybe two years, and the very idea of this would have been overwhelmingly rejected, laughed at, or angrily opposed by 95% of the population. It wouldn't have stood a chance.
We have men's and women's restrooms for a reason, just like we've always had marriage, and it's always been defined as a specific thing for reasons. And they're time-honored and time-tested reasons. They were not the result of people who had power lauding that over other people. These are processes and behavioral patterns that established over the millennia as proper, just, moral, correct, sensible, you name it. Now all of a sudden that gets thrown out, and it's all up to how somebody feels about themselves at a particular moment in time as to which bathroom they want to use, and with who.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: So if you want to use, assume you're 35, 40, doesn't matter, and you're on a playground somewhere and you see a five-year-old girl and you want to take her to the bathroom, we're not supposed to say a word about that today because you're exercising your freedom of choice. You're presenting and feeling like a woman that day, so that's none of our business and we're not supposed to say anything. So states say this is outrageous, this is ridiculous, and they have written legislation to stop it, and, lo and behold, major institutions in corporate America are now promising and threatening boycotts to pull out of these states, and the people writing this legislation be called bigots and sexists and racists.
How in the hell did this happen? When things like this happen, we're not in the middle of culture war; this is the sign we have lost it. We are losing it. So your simple question, why did we have men's rooms and ladies' rooms, why haven't we always had unisex from the beginning? Well, the answers to that have to be that we had a patriarchal society that discriminated against women, or whatever convoluted answer they would come up with, but the key to understanding this, folks, in my humble estimation, is that it's not about right versus wrong anymore. It can't be or we wouldn't be losing these things.
Right versus wrong, the left has been clever in eliminating that, right versus wrong, as a determinant in behavior. And what it's been replaced by is us versus them. Us versus them. And the "us" are the oppressed, grievance-filled minorities who feel like they have been denied liberty, freedom, whatever they think they've been denied by these evil majorities. We are the villain. And that's the battle now.
But we don't know that. We still think it's right and wrong so we're sitting here incredulous that all of this behavior any normal person would see is wrong, is not being looked at that way by the leftist culture warriors. This is us versus them, and they are winning, and it's payback, it's a whole bunch of stuff. More on this when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to stay focused on this LGBT thing because it is an indication of the culture war that we are in, and in some people's minds we've already lost it and we just don't know it. We on the right continue to fight it as though it's still a war being waged. When, in fact, the left won it a long time ago, theoretically, in the eyes of many. I'll tell you what prompted this was a piece I found on The Federalist website today, the title of which is "The Intellectual Case for Trump --
"Trump Is the Culture Warrior We Need." Now, this was posted, obviously, before Trump's statements this morning on NBC where he essentially advocated LGBTs being able to use whatever bathroom they want, and expressing criticism of states like North Carolina and Georgia for doing what they did because it's making it hard for businesses to operate.
But to me, this is graphic. You don't have to go back very far -- I mean, a year, certainly five years -- and the whole idea of anybody being able to use any restroom they want and be applauded for it (and not having any ability to speak out against it) was unheard of. But it's just one of many things, folks, that illustrate what many believe to be the cultural decay. Others believe it's cultural evolution. But we have redefined marriage.
originalAfter how many thousands of years, the definition of marriage is out the window now, to accommodate a tiny percentage of the population. We're not accommodating; we're actively changing how a substantive institution is defined, and it's happened essentially overnight. And any opposition to it is shouted down and ridiculed. So this piece... I can give you other examples, too, other than gay marriage. There's any number of things that people just look at and can't comprehend it. It doesn't make any sense, within the framework of right versus wrong.
And, see, I don't think the culture war has been about right versus wrong for a long time. And people haven't figured that out. They continue to fight it on a moral or a morality battlefield, but that's not it at all. In fact, obliterating morality has been what the culture war is all about, not asserting it and not having it triumph. The whole point of the culture war is an us-versus-them framework now, and the "us" is all of the disparate minorities of the world versus the "them," which is people they claim to be the oppressive majority.
And the whole point of the us-versus-them battle has been to obliterate the whole notion of morality. Just wipe it out, on the belief that nobody has the right to define it. Nobody can write laws that are based on morality and have them apply to everybody, because your morality may differ from mine, and there isn't any universal morality; there isn't any universal right and wrong. And the culture warriors believe that there is universal right and wrong only because the majorities have had the tyrannical power to use right and wrong as ways to oppress people
That the whole concept of right and wrong are nothing more than political power movements. And they always found themselves on the minority or losing side of these. So something as simple as morality and right and wrong has now become politicized, and therefore illegitimate, 'cause you don't have the right to tell somebody what's right and wrong. You don't have the right to define morality -- and if you do, then you're a problem. You're the problem.
You're the oppressive, old fogy, fuddy-duddy problem.
originalMeanwhile, you think you're just standing up for what's right and justice and wholesome and good, and their whole objective has been just to erase all of that. So this piece that I came across is by somebody I've never heard of. I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, Mytheos Holt. M-y-t-h-e-o-s. Mytheos Holt. It's a long piece, and, folks, it's above my pay grade, frankly. I had to spend a lot of time today trying to weed through this, 'cause it's got a lot of terms in it that I don't use and understand, like "postmodernist frictionism" and "transgressive free speech" and "Prometheanism" and "Nietzscheism."
I know who Nietzsche is, but application of this stuff is beyond me. But the opening couple of paragraphs will suffice here in helping me, then, to explain. His whole point is that we've lost the culture war, those of us on the right. We lost the culture war. We lost it a long time ago; we don't know it. We're still fighting it as though the outcome is still up for grabs; we could still win it. His point is we lost it long ago because we've never understood exactly what it was about, and it's Mr. Holt's belief that Trump is the only guy who can reverse it.
Donald Trump is the only guy that can come along -- because of his ability to get away with violating political correctness, his ability to say things nobody else could say, his ability to call a spade a spade or do whatever it is he does -- and get away with it and triumph over it and prosper at the same time. That's why this guy thinks that Trump is the one guy who can actually reverse the direction of the culture war. Again, this was written before Trump's statements of support for LGBT bathroom usage as they desire. Here's how the piece begins:
"A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage.
"An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other time in the modern era. But in Trump’s case, these supposedly disqualifying positions and attributes have proven to be the basis for unexpected success. Why? In part, it is because he corrects massive ideological failures by the Right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the Left, eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal order to exist."
Let me read that again because that's a good example of how this gets into the weeds. Why has Trump survived what would disqualify others? It's because he corrects massive ideological failures by the right. He corrects massive failures of conservatism which have enabled the left to overreach and totally obliterate the social and cultural basis that defined Western civilization. That's his premise. Conservatism has failed to stop the left. There's nobody alive as a conservative that could do it; they've tried.
largeTrump comes along as a nonideological blunt to the left and their cultural war advance. "For decades, the institutional right --" i.e., conservatism as you and I know it "-- has ceded American culture to the left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination. ... The cause of this is partially a denial of how swiftly the culture has moved left, leaving the institutional right under the false impression it is still fighting the culture war of the 90’s and early 2000s.
"The right’s obsession with 90’s-era battles over sex, drugs, and rock and roll is more than just an anachronism: it represents a self-inflicted wound that ignored how the left used the culture to repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society. We now know the left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse."
Meaning we've lost the culture war. The right doesn't know it and continues to fight it on outdated, old-fashioned terms and turf. Trump, whether he knows it or not, comes along and is able to fight back against whatever this destructive nature of the left is by stopping it and thwarting it with all kinds of politically incorrect statements and gets away with it. Whether Trump knows he's doing it or not, that's this guy's theory. If you continue to read this, it gets more and more esoteric and I'm not gonna burden you with this. It's a good place.
I'm gonna summarize it for you instead. I read this because it was sent to me by somebody who thought that it was interesting. And what this piece further delves into is the premise that the left has actually won the culture war by turning the free market against the right. Now, how does that manifest itself, free market, how does the left turn free market against the right? Well, that could be summed up by reminding you of what happens when a pizzeria says they wouldn't serve a gay wedding reception. Or what happens when a little bakery, a mom-and-pop bakery says they wouldn't bake a cake for a gay wedding because of religious principles.
The left comes in, co-ops the free market from the right and turns it back against them, is what this guy means. In other words, the left used what the right thinks is its primary defense: free market, freedom, Constitution, religious freedom, First Amendment, and turned it right back on everybody, and nobody knew how to react to it. People were bullied. People were cowed into silence by virtue of fear. And corporations, long thought to be definitions of the free market, joined the left, rather than defend concept of freedom.
So the concept of freedom fades away, becomes meaningless, replaced by grievance industries demanding tolerance as the new freedom. Now, I have tried to make the point over the course of many years here that these battles that we face -- culture, political -- that they're no longer rational. None of this LGBT stuff is rational. Not a single thing happening is rational. It's all irrational. None of it makes any sense. It's got everybody scratching their heads, but they don't know how to stop it. They don't know how to oppose it. Anybody who tries is shouted down, targeted for destruction or what have you, on Twitter.
originalIt's become us versus them. It's tribal. We are stunned. How many of you, how many of you are literally shocked and stunned that logical arguments do not persuade people anymore? How many of you have found yourself in an argument with people and you're using logic, inescapable logic? As far as you're concerned, there's no question the difference in right and wrong in terms of whatever it is you're discussing. And it doesn't persuade anybody. And you end up at your wits' end over this. The problem, you see, is that the left has shifted this entire culture battle or culture war from right versus wrong to us versus them. There isn't any right versus wrong.
The only way they can win this war is by obliterating the concepts of right versus wrong, 'cause they are wrong, and they know it, and they don't want to be thought of that way. So they just obliterate the whole concept of right versus wrong, and it gets replaced by something we could call us versus them, where it becomes more important to be on the right side of an issue, quote, the correct side, the popular side of any issue than it is to be right, as in correct. And this piece by Mr. Holt explores how the left has done this by transforming itself from being totally outside capitalism to becoming totally corporatist in the crony sense.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, now, look, I'm not sure that I buy what this guy's saying, but I just want to sum up what his point is. I've never heard of the author before, Mytheos Holt at TheFederalist.com. But his point is that the right, conservatism, is stuck fighting culture wars that we lost 20 years ago, and we don't know how to stop the left. We don't know how to make the alliances necessary to break the left's hold on culture. So we keep losing it because we're still fighting right versus wrong when they're us versus them and we're them and we're not hip and we're not cool, nobody wants to be us. I mean, how else can you explain -- look at Planned Parenthood. It's applauded for chopping up babies and selling the parts. People will not even condemn that.
How do you explain that? That can't be taking place in a right-versus-wrong paradigm. There's no way right versus wrong matters. If Planned Parenthood can survive being exposed as behaving as they do, if they can survive and thrive and people send 'em even more money, then we're not in a right versus wrong circumstance anymore. If Planned Parenthood survives that and grows, then what must we look at this as? Us versus them. And this whole story at The Federalist is an argument that it's gonna take somebody like Trump who can battle the media and the left and its culture toe-to-toe and draw support from the masses in society who hate what the left has done but are afraid to say so themselves.
They hate what the left is doing, this is the guy's theory. Masses of people hate what's happening to the culture, but they don't know anybody on their side capable of stopping it. Here comes Trump; it looks like he can. So they happily sign up. And they don't care about any deficiencies. This guy's theory, I say, I don't know if I buy the whole thing, but I wanted to take the time to explain it to you 'cause I do think there's some salient aspects, such as, sadly true that right versus wrong doesn't matter, but it does explain a lot.
END TRANSCRIPT
