http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/06/24/brexit_a_revolt_against_the_cronyism_of_the_elites_and_a_cry_for_nationhoodBrexit: A Revolt Against the Cronyism of the Elites -- and a Cry for Nationhood
June 24, 2016
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RUSH: 51.9% of Great Britain voted to skip out of the European Union. That's a bigger number than Americans voted for Obama. And Obama went over there in April and lectured them not to do this. It's been a bad couple of days for Barack Hussein O. The Supreme Court shafts him on immigration. The British vote to leave the European Union. What else happened out there that's not great for Obama? Oh, well. There are three things. I can't remember them.
Anyway, great to have you here, folks, as we wrap up another week of broadcast excellence. The telephone number is 800-282-2882, email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
First thing I want to try to -- my opinions here, using intelligence guided by experience. If you turn on the Drive-By Media today, and it really doesn't matter even if it's the non-Drive-By Media, the basic theme that you're going to see is panic, disbelief, doom and gloom, oh, my God, how stupid are those people in Great Britain, do they know what they've done. No, they can't possibly know what they've done. The idiots.
It's gonna be portrayed as the beginnings of the world economic crisis and plunge, and none of that's accurate. You know, they talk about the stock market was gonna start at minus 500 today, gonna be down 500. Well, okay, let's see where it ends up today, 'cause that's really gonna be the important number, and maybe even not today. I think the great thing that's going on here, the interesting thing is the realization that it's not just happening here in America, that people all over the world are rejecting whatever they think it is.
Now, some people are calling this a left-right split, you know, the right wing rising up and rejecting liberalism. I don't think that's actually what this is in the UK. I think more than anything it's about nationhood. You know, everybody is talking about how it's the end of Great Britain, they can't survive economically. Look at what they get out of the European Union. People have forgotten, the sun used to never set on the British empire. The British empire ruled the world. The idea that the British people are hopelessly lost now is another of these never-ending insults at people who want to be self-reliant.
I think it's natural as it can be that people would reject cronyism, which is what the European Union is, which is what the United States government has become. It has become cronyism, and it's exclusionary. It doesn't include everybody. The old order that the middle class -- we discussed this at length yesterday -- used to trust and believe in is shot.
The old standard philosophies of work hard and try to live the best life you can and there will be a payoff at the end, fewer and fewer people trust it anymore 'cause to them the game is being rigged and it's being rigged by the elites and the people in power to benefit only them at the expense of everybody else. And the one issue that illustrates this better than any other is immigration.
People imbued with common sense cannot understand why, either in Great Britain or in Germany or in the United States, the people that run the show would want to leave the borders wide open and allow the nations to be flooded with people who are not going to end up advancing the nation. They don't understand why the elites and the cronies would leave the borders wide open in such a way as to actually do damage to the nations where this is happening.
It's not racism. It's not sexism. It's not bigotry. All of the things that the elites and their media cohorts are gonna try to chalk this up to, it's not about any of that. It's about a desire to be self-reliant because they just don't trust the people who claim to have all the answers and solutions for all the problems. They don't trust the elites anymore. They don't trust the ruling class. The ruling class has made a mess of pretty much everything.
The middle classes in all of these countries have been very patient. They have invested, they have voted for, and they have supported all of these efforts made by the elites. They have believed what they have said. They believed that these trade deals, for example, were gonna improve life, were gonna raise incomes. They've been patient. They've waited 20, 25 years for the elites' promises to materialize. And they haven't.
And not only have the promises not materialized, situations are deteriorating to the point that, in this country you have 94.7 million people not working. In the European Union, in places like France you've got 14% unemployment, but none of the pain and none of the so-called suffering, none of the obstacles seem to affect the ruling class. None of the challenges, none of the problems seem to impair the elites in any way.
And it's taken a while, but people have finally figured out what Trump is talking about, that things are rigged. And even if they're not specifically able to point out situation by situation, it's inescapable by virtue of living your life that there is a rigged game going on that you're not allowed to play.
So I really think it's important here to be correct as we can in understanding why this happened. And I would love to tell you that I think this is a bunch of people becoming conservatives overnight and rejecting liberalism. Some of that clearly is involved here, but I think a lot of it is simply -- I don't want to say populism, but there's a lot of nationhood going on, a lot of people who simply want their country to be great. And isn't it amazing how that is now under attack?
People that desire a strong nation where they live, somehow that's a negative, somehow we must attack that. We call it populism. We call it nationalism. It's horrible. Nationalism, how do you explain the British empire? How do you explain the United States becoming the world's lone superpower? We didn't do it by joining some group. We didn't do it by having a leech run the show. That's not at all how we attain greatness, and this is what people are finally realizing. There's nothing great in the EU. France wants out, a number of other nations want out.
Now, interestingly, the vote in Scotland was to remain part of the EU. You know why? Because the problems haven't reached that far north in the UK. The immigration problems haven't reached that far north and a number of other problems haven't. They simply haven't experienced the problems. And I also think... I'm not fully informed. I've spent as much time as I can on this. But I think Scotland is hugely dependent -- in a welfare sense -- on the UK and wherever they can get it.
It's not meant to be a slight. I'm just trying to give you an accurate political and economic analysis why people voted the way they did. There's talk here that Scotland may now vote to secede from the United Kingdom, they're so upset about this. But here's another thing to keep in mind, too. It is gonna be rough. This is not a magic, overnight solution where tomorrow is a brighter day. This is the beginning of a process gonna take two years, and it's fraught with many, many pitfalls.
And I'm gonna tell you to look out for this, too. From this point forward, anything that goes wrong -- be it economic, be it cultural, I don't care what it is. Anything that goes wrong -- if there is a rise in the crime rate, if there is an increase in the murder rate, I don't care what it is -- it's gonna be blamed on this vote. It will be blamed on the exit from the European Union. Now, what happens now is we have a two-year process whereby or wherein Great Britain will disentangle itself from the European Union in Brussels.
There will be terms that have to be negotiated here. And, by the way, don't expect the elites to just sit by and let this happen. This two-year process here, this disentangling process, I'm sure the elites are gonna look at it as plenty of opportunities to thwart this whole thing. Many American companies that do business in the UK and use their business in the UK as the starting point or the entry point for business in the European Union at large are now gonna have to decide what they want to do.
If they're doing business with the UK simply as an entree to the European Union at large, do they stay in the UK? Do they abandon it and find some other launching pad, if you will, for business and trade or what have you, within the European Union? You're gonna have up-and-down stock markets, roiling markets. And the doom and gloom pessimists are going to be in full-flower form. They are going to be predicting the absolute worst. They are going to guilt-trip the people that voted to exit.
They're going to try to make it look like this is the worst thing that could ever happen, maybe the worst thing that has happened. Already Alan Greenspan is out there saying this is the worst calamity for the markets since 1987. He thought he would never see it again, he says. And 1987 is when the stock market lost 23% of its value in one day. And he's saying this is the absolute worst that can happen. In point of fact, the opportunity here is immense and the statement is powerful.
This is a nation of people rising up against the ruling class and the elites and -- make no mistake about it -- cronyism. By cronyism, I mean EU leaders in bed with each other and powerful forces within all the member countries to grease the skids for their own existence, to make sure they are protected and taken care of economically at the expense of everybody else. It's exclusionary. It's almost a caste system. You have the upper class -- and this is a big difference from the way it used to be. Even in this country and even in Great Britain, even in the days of aristocracy...
Well, maybe not the aristocracy. Certainly in the post-aristocracy days of Great Britain, the one thing -- and it's true about this country as well -- was the upper class or upper classes were not aloof from the other classes. They socialized together. They intermingled. They intermarried. They went, in many cases, to the same schools. But in recent decades the elites and the upper class and the rich, whatever you want to call them -- both here and around the world, but particularly in the Western European socialist democracies -- have drawn clear lines of demarcation that dare not be crossed.
The elites, the rich, the ruling class have finally made no pretense about it. They act as though they're betters; they treat everybody else as though they are lessers. There are lines of demarcation. There are no intermingling social activities. They don't go to the same schools anymore. They don't go to the same churches. The upper class and the elites are now officially snooty, looking down their noses at everybody else.
And it's reached a point now where people not in that august, small group are not going to take being ignored and impugned and laughed at and used and lied to anymore. It really isn't any more complicated than that. Now, if you want to toss in ideologies at this point and discuss, "Well, how much of this is liberalism?" you could say that much of it is, in terms of the attitudes and the arrogance and condescension.
That's clearly part and parcel of liberalism. But I don't think the people that voted to leave the European Union did so on liberal-conservative grounds. I would love for it to be the case, and that certainly may be an element of it, but there are other things that I think are a little bit more relevant than that. And, of course, it's Open Line Friday, so you're gonna be able to weigh in on this. Be interesting to see what you think about it. We've got a lot to untangle and explain here. We'll get started with all the rest of it right after this.
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RUSH: Welcome back. El Rushbo. Cutting edge, societal evolution. Happy to have you here. Another broadcast week coming to an exciting conclusion.
Make no mistake about it. Look, folks, I'm trying to explain the central thing that causes this is immigration, but the "why" is also fascinating to me because I think this is a teachable moment. I think this is truly, truly momentous, what has happened here. And the elites know how momentous it is. They are in abject panic today. This is the kind of thing they think they are able to control. This is precisely the kind of thing that their power and their cronyism, in their minds, is designed to stop: An uprising of common people.
This is not supposed to happen, and the central issue here is immigration. Up until this flood of refugees and illegal immigrants from war-torn areas of the Middle East... If you want to pinpoint who's really to blame for this (because this is the result of an accumulating series of events), it's
Angela Merkel welcoming 800,000 illegal immigrants, military-aged males from war-torn Syria -- with the news that many of them were ISIS sleepers and so forth -- and bragging about how she needed that many in order to rebuild the German labor force.
That opened everybody's eyes. There were some on the fence about immigration. Immigration is one of these issues that you can be easily guilted. You can be guilt tripped into supporting it. All you have to... Somebody hears that you're opposed to it and they call you a name. They call you a bigot or a xenophobe or a nationalist or a populist or a racist or what have you. And it's designed to intimidate you into shutting up and not expressing your views on this. And for the longest time, those practices worked, and they've worked in the country as well.
But there's always a tipping point.
Angela Merkel was the tipping point, and that just illustrated it. Greece?
It's a series of things.
But the central occurrence, the central seminal event is out-of-control immigration that benefits the elites somehow and is an abject, inarguable detriment to the vast majority of the people who live and get up and go to work every day. Same thing in this country. The elites don't care. They are not responsive to public opinion on this. They instead want to force their own desires on everybody else. And after a while, even the tolerant, even the absorptive, even the patient people of Great Britain had reached their boiling point. And then all these other things that cumulatively occurred before this massive latest round of immigration began, had greater resonance and we got what we got yesterday.
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RUSH: I want to read to you an excerpt here. I've got a story on the Brexit vote from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. (interruption) Are you familiar with the von Mises Institute? (interruption) It's a real place, a bunch of libertarians. (interruption)
You thought the Ludwig von Mises...? (interruption) What do you mean? (interruption) You thought it was like an Onion site? (interruption) No, no, no, no. Ludwig von Mises was a seminal character in economics. I've had my ups and downs with these people over the course of the many years of the program, but I just want to read to you an excerpt from a piece that ran on their website, Mises.org. And it's not M-e-e-s-e-s. It's M-i-s-e-s. A lot people mispronounce it, Ludwig von "Misses," but it's von Mises.
You have to know foreign dialect and the language to understand that.
Here's the pull quote paragraph: "Ultimately, Brexit is not..." These are libertarians for the most part. "Ultimately, Brexit is not a referendum on trade, immigration, or the technical rules promulgated by the (awful) European Parliament. It is a referendum on nationhood, which is a step away from globalism and closer to individual self-determination. Libertarians should view the decentralization and devolution of state power as ever and always a good thing, regardless of the motivations behind such movements.
"Reducing the size and scope of any single (or multinational) state's dominion is decidedly healthy for liberty." Now, very little to quibble with in that philosophical sense, but I disagree with them when they say that "Brexit is not a referendum on trade, immigration, or the technical rules promulgated by the..." I think there are a lot of things, as I say, that will have a cumulative effect on things. But it's this massive open-border policy that brought the whole thing down, that awoke everybody.
Not just in the UK, either. I mean, this is a sentiment. You know, leaving the European Union is something effervescing throughout many nations that are members. But they're right about the nationhood aspect of this. And isn't it... I'm gonna have more on this as the program unfolds, but isn't it fascinating to watch most of the media and most of the leftists decry the whole concept of nationhood, criticize and rip the whole notion that people should even think as members of nations? "That's just so yesterday!" And it isn't.
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