Rush Limbaugh: “Well, where are all the people with guns” to “push back” against the left?

Limbaugh: “It’s not an advocacy for an armed anything. I’m just pointing out, you wonder why you feel abandoned? I’m trying to explain it to you.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the June 15, 2020, edition of Premiere Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I also received emails. This is gonna make some of you mad out there — and I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m not trying to. I’m getting emails from people who are Christian who are going to church and their pastors are telling them, “We gotta own up to this. We gotta pay reparations and we gotta admit that we’ve been guilty of white supremacy. We’ve been guilty of white privilege,” and they are livid.

They don’t think they have been. They’re Christians. They are religious people. They think they are the epitome of charitable. They don’t like being dumped on — but their pastors are doing it. Some of them; not all. All that is, is the path of least resistance — and I understand that, too, because these people don’t just shout words at you. They’re threatening to beat you up. They’re threatening to beat you upside the head and do whatever other kind of physical damage to you they can.

Think about this — and by the way, I’ve had a lot of people mention this to me. This is never going to work, but I’m going to mention it to you. “Rush, if armed right-wingers took over six square blocks of a city, think about how that would be covered by the media.”

We know how it’d be covered by the media. It isn’t going to change anybody’s perception of what’s happening now. How many of you think that a majority of Americans are OK with this thing now called “CHOP”? How many of you think that, “Hey, that’s fine. If they want to do that and if the mayor’s fine with it, that’s cool”?

You know what alarms me more than anything about any of this, folks? I’ll be flat-out honest with you, what alarms me about — and it’s bothered me for most of the years I’ve been doing this program. There is yet to be any pushback on this. And by pushback, I mean average, ordinary citizens who are being affected by this stuff, are just letting it happen. They’re not pushing back against it. And so they are ceding — C-E-D-I-N-G — they are ceding territory to these people, and everybody watches that happen. If there’s no pushback, then you’re going to feel alone.

And I, frankly, I’ve been waiting for 30 years, 25 years for there to be pushback. Not only is there not pushback, there isn't — the few who do push back don’t get defended by very many people. I have made it a point — and I’m not trying to make this about me, I’m trying to be illustrative here.

I have made it a point whenever anybody on my side decides to try to push back against the Democrats, against the left, against the media — and when they get assaulted and attacked, I am right in there defending them, whether I know them or not.

...

I can’t tell you the number of blogs I’ve read over the years. I’m not going to name them, because I’m not trying to shame them. I’m just being illustrative again. I’ve read people bravely write, “You let them try that” — like about something that’s happening — “You let them try that. Who’s got all the guns in this country? We’ve got all the guns. They don’t — they don’t even like guns.” Well, where are all the people with guns?

I know they’ve got them. I know, I mean, gun sales are going like — where are they? They’re not pushing back. If there’s no pushback, then — and if the pushback isn’t seen, then people are going to get dispirited and think that nobody cares about this assault on the country.

And this assault on the country is a full-court press to change it, under the premise that America cannot be fixed — America can’t be corrected, America can’t be redeemed because our problems are original sin, they were baked in by the Founding Fathers, they cannot be fixed. Therefore, the Constitution, the country needs to be disbanded — thrown away — and started over with these people writing the Constitution.

Now, I did get somebody writing about that who agrees with me. Andrew Sullivan had a piece that I saw over the weekend, making the point that that is exactly what’s happening.

I’ve told you for years, when I saw -- first saw Black Lives Matter and then Occupy Wall Street and recognized what’s going on, the whole point is that there’s no way anything that we will do that’s oriented toward solving, resolving, fixing one of these original problems will ever be accepted as such because it isn’t the objective.

The objective is not to fix what went wrong in slavery and pay reparations. The objective is not to go back and correct whatever happened in the early days of the country and fix it. The objective, my friends, is for these people to totally tear down and tear apart the country and transform it into something it was not intended to be.

Limbaugh returned to the topic later in the show:

From the June 15, 2020, edition of Premiere Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): OK, so this is how it works, now the staff is all paranoid. I go to walk it back, I got to walk back what I just said because, “You really want to leave it out there that you expect people with guns to pick up their arms and go shooting these people?”

I never said that. All I did was point out that we’ve got all these braggarts out there, writing at all these blogs that they’ve got all the guns. “And if there’s ever any attempt to take over the country, guess who’s going to win it, because the puke liberals are too scared to have guns, and we’ve got the guns.”

So I said, where are they? Where are these braggarts who said they had the ability to stop this stuff? They’re not showing up. It’s not an advocacy for an armed anything. I’m just pointing out, you wonder why you feel abandoned? I’m trying to explain it to you.

The reason why you feel alone is somewhat understandable, because you don’t see any pushback.

And I’m not talking about armed pushback. That would be cut down. These cities would reconstitute their police forces faster than you can say “McDonald’s.” So — but the point is, is that there’s a reason if you’re feeling down in the dumps and depressed, it’s because there isn’t any pushback. It makes perfect sense why you would think you’re the only one that sees what’s going on.