W³P Lives: 06/15/20

Monday, June 15, 2020

Obama-Era Political Surveillance – Were Black Files Created?

I’m reposting a prior research outline below because something odd is happening in the background of this story. I’m not sure what it is, but there are small -seemingly disconnected- issues surfacing, that might tie back to this much bigger and purposefully avoided story. I have learned to trust my instincts on this.

♦One – The FISA reauthorization legislation was dropped by Nancy Pelosi and all media conversation immediately vaporized.
♦Two – Crowdstrike is very concerned about this story every time it surfaces.
♦Three – If you understand the scale and scope of surveillance… does that explain the behavior of some people today [legislative (politicians), judiciary (judges), Pentagon (military)].

Are black files being used in 2020?

With the release of recent transcripts and the declassification of material from within the IG report on the Carter Page FISA, there is a common misconception about how the intelligence apparatus began investigating the Trump campaign. In this outline we hope to provide some deep source material that will explain the origin, and specifically why the those inside the Intelligence Community began using Confidential Human Sources.

During the time-frame of December 2015 through April 2016 the NSA database was being exploited by contractors within the intelligence community doing unauthorized searches.

On March 9, 2016, oversight personnel doing a review of FBI system access were alerted to thousands of unauthorized search queries of specific U.S. persons within the NSA database.

NSA Director Mike Rogers was made aware.

Subsequently NSA Director Rogers initiated a full compliance review of the system to identify who was doing the searches; & what searches were being conducted.

On April 18, 2016, following the preliminary audit results, Director Rogers shut down all FBI contractor access to the database after he learned FISA-702 “about”(17) and “to/from”(16) search queries were being done without authorization. Thus begins the first discovery of a much bigger background story.

When you compile the timeline with the people involved; and the specific wording of the resulting review, which was then delivered to the FISA court; and overlay the activity that was taking place in the GOP primary; what we discover is a process where the metadata collected by the NSA was being searched for political opposition research and surveillance.

Additionally, tens-of-thousands of searches were identified by the FISA court as likely extending much further than the compliance review period: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of the non compliant queries since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 period coincided with an unusually high error rate”.

In short, during the Obama administration the NSA database was continually used to conduct surveillance. This is the critical point that leads to understanding the origin of “Spygate”, as it unfolded in the Spring and Summer of 2016.

It was the discovery of the database exploitation and the removal of access as a surveillance tool that created their initial problem. Here’s how we can tell.

Initially in December 2015 there were 17 GOP candidates and all needed to be researched.

However, when Donald Trump won New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina the field was significantly whittled. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Carson remained.

On Super Tuesday, March 2, 2016, Donald Trump won seven states (VT, AR, VA, GA, AL, TN, MA) it was then clear that Trump was the GOP frontrunner with momentum to become the presumptive nominee. On March 5th, Trump won Kentucky and Louisiana; and on March 8th Trump won Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii.

The next day, March 9th, NSA security alerts warned internal oversight personnel that something sketchy was going on.

This timing is not coincidental. As FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer later wrote in her report, “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” Put another way: attributes belonging to a specific individual(s) were being targeted and queried, unlawfully. Given what was later discovered, it seems obvious the primary search target, over multiple date ranges, was Donald Trump.

There were tens-of-thousands of unauthorized search queries; and as Judge Collyer stated in her report, there is no reason to believe the 85% non compliant rate was any different from the abuse of the NSA database going back to 2012.

As you will see below the NSA database was how political surveillance was being conducted during Obama’s second term in office. However, when the system was flagged, and when NSA Director Mike Rogers shut down “contractor” access to the system, the system users needed to develop another way to get access.

Mike Rogers shuts down access on April 18, 2016. On April 19, 2016, Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby visits the White House. Immediately thereafter, the DNC and Clinton campaign contract Fusion GPS… who then hire Christopher Steele.

Knowing it was federal “contractors”, outside government with access to the system, doing the unauthorized searches, the question becomes: who were the contractors?

The possibilities are quite vast. Essentially anyone the FBI or intelligence apparatus was using could have participated. Crowdstrike was a known FBI contractor; they were also contracted by the DNC. Shawn Henry was the former head of the FBI office in DC and is now the head of Crowdstrike; a rather dubious contractor for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic company.

James Comey’s special friend Daniel Richman was an unpaid FBI “special employee” with security access to the database. Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion-GPS on the Trump project in November 2015 and she was a CIA contractor; and it’s entirely likely Glenn Simpson or people within his Fusion-GPS network were also contractors for the intelligence community.

Remember the Sharyl Attkisson computer intrusions? It’s all part of this same network; Attkisson even names Shawn Henry as a defendant in her ongoing lawsuit.

All of the aforementioned names, and so many more, held a political agenda in 2016.

It seems likely if the NSA flags were never triggered then the contracted system users would have continued exploiting the NSA database for political opposition research; which would then be funneled to the Clinton team. However, once the unauthorized flags were triggered, the system users (including those inside the official intelligence apparatus) needed to find another back-door to continue… Again, the timing becomes transparent.

Immediately after NSA flags were raised March 9th; the same intelligence agencies began using confidential human sources (CHS’s) to run into the Trump campaign. By activating intelligence assets like Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper the IC (CIA, FBI) and system users had now created an authorized way to continue the same political surveillance operations.

When Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort on March 28, 2016, it was a perfect scenario for those doing the surveillance. Manafort was a known entity to the FBI and was previously under investigation. Paul Manafort’s entry into the Trump orbit was perfect for Glenn Simpson to sell his prior research on Manafort as a Trump-Russia collusion script two weeks later.

The shift from “unauthorized exploitation of the NSA database” to legally authorized exploitation of the NSA database was now in place. This was how they continued the political surveillance. This is the confluence of events that originated “spygate”, or what officially blossomed into the FBI investigation known as “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31.

If the NSA flags were never raised; and if Director Rogers had never initiated the compliance audit; and if the political contractors were never blocked from access to the database; they would never have needed to create a legal back-door, a justification to retain the surveillance. The political operatives/contractors would have just continued the targeted metadata exploitation.

Once they created the surveillance door, Fusion-GPS was then needed to get the FBI known commodity of Chris Steele activated as a pipeline. Into that pipeline all system users pushed opposition research. However, one mistake from the NSA database extraction during an “about” query shows up as a New Yorker named Michael Cohen in Prague.

That misinterpreted data from a FISA-702 “about query” is then piped to Steele and turns up inside the dossier; it was the wrong Michael Cohen. It wasn’t Trump’s lawyer, it was an art dealer from New York City with the same name; the same “identifier”.

A DEEP DIVE – How Did It Work?

Start by reviewing the established record from the 99-page FISC opinionrendered by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer on April 26, 2017. Review the details within the FISC opinion.

I would strongly urge everyone to read the FISC report (full pdf below) because Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had an “institutional lack of candor” in responses to the FISA court. In essence, the Obama administration was continually lying to the FISA court about their activity, and the rate of fourth amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons’ private information for multiple years.

Unfortunately, due to intelligence terminology Judge Collyer’s brief and ruling is not an easy read for anyone unfamiliar with the FISA processes. That complexity also helps the media avoid discussing it; and as a result most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the Obama-era surveillance issues. So we’ll try to break down the language.

View this document on Scribd

For the sake of brevity and common understanding CTH will highlight the most pertinent segments showing just how systemic and troublesome the unlawful electronic surveillance was.

Early in 2016 NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) “About” queries using the FBI/NSA database that holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.

The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.

While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option, and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016 (keep these dates in mind).

Here are some significant segments:

The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results. Later on, the FBI said all of the exported material was deleted.

Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.

♦ FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (“702”); and the “16” is a check box to initiate a search based on “To and From“. Example, if you put in a date and a phone number and check “16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.

♦ FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702); and the “17” is a check box to initiate a search based on everything “About” the search qualifier. Example, if you put a date and a phone number and check “17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date parameters.

And that’s just from a phone number.

Search an ip address “about” and read all data into that server; put in an email address and gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about) and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real time. Search a credit card number and get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records etc. Just about anything and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic ‘identifier’.

The search parameter is only limited by the originating field filled out. Names, places, numbers, addresses, etc. By using the “About” parameter there may be thousands or millions of returns. Imagine if you put “@realdonaldtrump” into the search parameter? You could extract all following accounts who interacted on Twitter, or Facebook etc. You are only limited by your imagination and the scale of the electronic connectivity.

As you can see below, on March 9th, 2016, internal auditors noted the FBI was sharing “raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information”.

In plain English the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy; and database access was from the FBI network:

But what’s the scale here? This is where the story really lies.

How this all comes together in 2019/2020

Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring everything by exploiting the FISA database.

However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.

That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, were so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.

The Steele Dossier, an outcome of the Fusion contract, contains two purposes: (1) the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation (protect Obama); and (2) facilitate the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign (assist Clinton).

An insurance policy would be needed. The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.

The Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion-GPS gave them that justification and evidence for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier.

Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier was so important; without it, the FBI would not have a tool that Mueller needed to continue the investigation of President Trump. In essence by renewing the FISA application, despite them knowing the underlying dossier was junk, the FBI was keeping the surveillance gateway open for Team Mueller to exploit later on.

Was the Peter Strzok created “EC” that initiated Crossfire Hurricane really just a massive effort to cover-up the Obama-era surveillance network? {Go Deep} Is that underlying surveillance network the real threat explaining why Michael Flynn had to be removed?

In this video Rogers explains how he was notified of what was happening and what he did after the notification.

Limbaugh: You Feel Alone Because You’re Not Seeing Any Pushback

Transcript of the Rush Limbaugh Show 6/15/2020

RUSH: Say, folks, try to calm down, will you? Just try to calm down. I’m gonna do my best to make people calm down, but I’m being overwhelmed with defeatist and fatalistic emails to the point that I said, “What’s the point of coming back?” I understand it, and it’s frustrating. I will try to give you an alternative way to look at this, which I’ve been doing for 30 years, but I have to do it each and every day, such is the power of the Drive-By Media.
Anyway, great to be back, folks. Thank you for your patience. The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
Let me just share with you — oh. Before that, these clowns running this stupid zone in Seattle have changed the name. It’s not CHAZ. They got rid of CHAZ. CHAZ was the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Sounds like an auto parts store. Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It’s now the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. CHOP. Exactly right. CHOP. Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
I guess Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, not enough members know what that means and so they had to name it after what they’re doing in order to keep the ranks loyal. “Hey, man, we’re not doing autonomous, we’re protesting here.” Oh, okay. So they’ve named it CHOP now, which is also what happens to cars that they steal, which is not the only thing they’re stealing out there.
Okay. Let me share with you a couple of emails. “Dear Rush: I have many friends who are dispirited and feel hopeless about Trump’s reelection. They’re all watching too damn much news on television. They are overwhelmed with indoctrinating newscasts. Yet they fully realize the Democrat Party has gone insane. But they can’t seem to turn it off like you’ve advised them to do. They can’t turn it off, and it’s demoralizing them like I’ve never seen or heard before. And they can’t make the connection that if they know the Democrats are insane, then like half or more of the country knows the Democrats are insane.”
Look. This is a unique phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that I have noticed over the course almost of the entirety that I’ve been doing this show. The best way to illustrate is I get a phone call from somebody who will point out an outrageous example of media bias anywhere — CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, whatever — and they will think they’re the only person that saw it. And therefore they gotta tell me about it so that I tell everybody else. They are the only person that saw it.
In other examples, they’re the only person that figured out it was biased. Everybody else is getting fooled by it. And I’ve tried to make the claim, you’re not alone. Whatever you think you’re the only one seeing, trust me, you’re not by any stretch of the imagination the only one seeing it. Talking about the rampant, whatever you want to call it, unfairness, bias, activism, whatever it is that you’re noting that’s dispiriting you and making you mad in the media, everybody’s noticing it.
The problem is that everybody thinks nobody else is noticing it and that they’re getting away with it. And one of the reasons you think they’re getting away with it is because they keep doing it. Logic says that if it weren’t working, they would stop doing it, but since they keep doing it, you think it must be working.
No. Folks, there’s no journalism happening here. You’re watching pure 100 percent extremist activism when you think you’re watching the news, when you think you’re watching the media. It’s a tough thing, I know. Before I missed last week, one of the points I was making was to me that all of this — and it still remains the case, that everything you’re watching is Democrat Party failure. Who is mad? Who’s blowing up cities? Who’s running the cities? The Democrats.
Democrats who live in these cities are mad at the Democrats who run these cities because the Democrats who run these cities are not fixing anything. The Democrats run the police forces. Most of the police chiefs in these cities are black. Most of the assistant chiefs are black. Many of the mayors are black in some of these blue states and blue cities. Why are there problems? These people have promised to fix it all, they haven’t fixed anything.
The worst place a Democrat can be is in a Democrat-run city or Democrat-run state. Now, to me, it is patently obvious that the Democrats are one false promise after another, that they cannot fix what they promised to fix, that they haven’t fixed what they’ve promised to fix in 50 years. And so what they’ve become experts in is off-loading the perception of the problem to Republicans, to you, to me. It’s our fault. It’s our problem. And why? Because of white supremacy. There isn’t any white supremacy, 82% of the people that immigrate to this country are people of color. How can that happen in a country that is white supremacist? It simply can’t.
There are other countless examples. I mean, if I wanted to, I could point out Oprah, the wealthiest and most popular television personality in America. How can that happen in white supremacist America? “Rush, you can’t say that.” Yes, I can because the black population is 13%. It’s not enough to make Oprah a billionaire. It’s not enough to give her number one audience ratings for however many years she did her show. She needed the white audience for that to happen. She needed white business partners and a white audience for her to become a billionaire.
That doesn’t happen in a white supremacist country. But this is now being spread around and everybody’s believing it. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame. Because people are being guilted into feeling guilty, and it isn’t gonna change anything. It’s not gonna improve things that people think have been broken by white supremacy or white privilege. White privilege is a failed concept. White privilege is exemplified best by who? Elite, white liberals. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston. Where do they live? They live in communities by themselves.
The real white supremacy and the real white privilege is not found in the American middle class, which is being blamed for it every day here. The real white privilege in this country is being practiced every day by white American liberals who refuse to send their kids to public schools or where African-American kids are going. No way, ain’t gonna do it Jose, not gonna send my kids to those dilapidated schools. Those are for other people.
It’s not the white middle class. The white middle class doesn’t have the power to do 90% of what they’re being accused of doing. But white, rich liberals who run all of these blue states and cities where all of these problems are taking place — how in the world can any of this be an argument for the Democrat Party in a sane world? “But, Rush, but, Rush, what about defunding the police?”
Yeah. Oh, now you notice that the Democrats are running around saying, “Nobody wants to defund the police.” The hell they don’t! They do want to defund the cops! They got caught. You can’t win a national election defunding the cops, but they do indeed want to do this because they are doing it in certain of these places.
And again, it is rich, white, privileged liberals who are going to make that happen because they are pandering. But I’ll guarantee you this: Whatever they do with the police department and funding will not impact negatively their security or their safety. It never does. They have their own security. They have their own police force.
It may not be called a police force, but they have their own ways of protecting themselves, primarily where they choose to live and work. So I understand the — (sigh) I don’t know — panic. There are all kinds of contraindications. There are all of these contraindications out there that this is not a majority opinion. But I’ll tell you something before I move on to those as examples.
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 are the epitome of charitable. They don’t like being dumped on like this. 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 gonna 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 gonna change anybody’s perception of what’s happening now. How many of you think that a majority of Americans are okay can 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, and it’s bothered me for most of the years I’ve been doing this program. There has 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. So they are ceding — c-e-d-i-n-g, they are ceding — territory to these people, and everybody watches that happen.
When there’s no pushback, you’re gonna feel alone. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for 30 years, 25 years for there to be pushback. Not only is there not pushback, 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. The first person I did that for was Clarence Thomas when they tried to destroy him after he was nominated to be associate justice on the Supreme Court by George H. W. Bush.
I didn’t know Clarence Thomas; I never met him. But I knew who was going after him and trying to destroy him, and I knew that they should not get away with it after what they’d done to Robert Bork — who I did know, and who was not anything like how he had been characterized. But the Bush administration didn’t even push back against Thomas.
The Reagan administration didn’t push back against Bork. They didn’t know what to do. There’s never any pushback, and there needs to be pushback. There needs to be, ‘We’re not gonna put up with this!” There needs to be an intolerance to this kind of takeover of our civil society. But there isn’t. I can’t tell you the number of blogs I’ve read over the years…
I’m not gonna name ’em ’cause I’m not trying to shame ’em. I’m just being illustrative again. I’ve read people bravely write, “You let ’em try that,” like about something that’s happening. “You let ’em 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? (interruption) I know they’ve got ’em. I know…
I mean, gun sales are going like crazy. Where are they? They’re not pushing back. If there’s no pushback, 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 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.
And they are hoping to be successful here by convincing you that it’s not worth stopping them because you’re in the minority and there aren’t enough of you anyway, and the proof is you never see any pushback. You never see anybody responding, so you must be in the minority. You must be one of 10 people who doesn’t care what’s happened to your country.
And 10 people can’t stop this army that you see every day on TV. They think it’s perfectly fine to go to a Black Lives Matter rally in Brooklyn with tens of thousands of people, but don’t you dare go to a Trump rally. You’re gonna be spreading the coronavirus if you go to a Trump rally. But the Black Lives Matter rallies and Occupy Wall Street, “Oh, no, no! We’re not gonna spread any viruses there.
“You can go to all these anti-American rallies you want, and there won’t even be a virus there. But you go to a Trump rally, and you’re guilty of murder.” Anyway, I gotta take a break. There’s another letter, an email I got from a listener that I want to share with you in the same vein. And then we’ll unpack some of the news that’s happened. Your phone calls are coming up. So hang on. Don’t go away.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. So this is how it works. Now the staff is all paranoid. I gotta walk it back. I gotta walk back what I just said because, “You really want to leave it out there 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 gonna 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 it 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. I’m not talking about armed pushback. That would be cut down. These cities would constitute their police forces faster than you can say McDonald’s. But the point 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.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, there’s something you have to understand about all of this. Whatever you call it — Black Lives Matter, CHOP, CHAZ, Occupy Wall Street, whatever these left-wing malcontent groups are — this is cultural as opposed to political. Now, it may be a fine line. But the battles and the controversies in which we find ourselves are cultural trying to force and intimidate changing modes of behavior.
They are not trying to imprint an ideology on people. They are attempting to use intimidation to force you to think and behave and speak in ways they demand. Because if you don’t you will be under their knife, their gun, their guillotine, whatever. You will be subject to their punishment. This is right out of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-tung.
Now, when I say, “It isn’t political,” it may be tough to separate the two because there is a political tie-in. It’s to the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party is in favor of all of this happening. The Democrat Party sees untold benefits to all of this happening, and this is what you’ve all got to realize. The Democrat Party sees mountainous victory in this country being riven, roiled, and torn apart.
The Democrat Party would not even object if the Constitution were thrown away and rewritten. The Democrat Party will do anything to get rid of Donald Trump. They’ll fix whatever happens in that process later. But because the Democrat Party is encouraging this, people think, “A-ha, it’s got a political tie-in.” To that extent, it does. But it really is…
In terms of the reason why there is no pushback, it’s a cultural phenomenon happening here. And when you talk about no pushback, where’s the first place you would expect to see some? Well, for me it would be elected Republicans somewhere, either in Washington or in Minnesota or in the state of Washington. “But, Rush! But, Rush! They’re so outnumbered.”
So? If there is no pushback from elected political leaders, then where is the inspiration for others? Most people are not leaders. This is not a criticism. Most people are followers. Leaders are very rare, and right now there doesn’t seem to be — or there don’t seem to be — very many that we can point to and say, “Yeah!” Trump is it. Trump is it — and, of course, more on him later as the program unfolds.
Now, let me get to the second email that I have been promising and teasing you about. “Dear, Rush: I cannot tell you how many people are terrified that we are losing voices. Tucker Carlson is being boycotted by sponsors on Fox. So many people we used to be able to count on have now gone over to the dark side. The Never Trumpers seem especially energized.
“There are defections at the Fox News Channel. There now seems to be outright hatred for Trump among some of the people there.” Names are mentioned here, but I’m not gonna get into the distraction of naming name. It’s enough to acknowledge that it’s happening and that people are noticing it, and when they notice that — when they notice that previous allies have now not just become neutral but they’ve become anti-Trump — that’s dispiriting as well.
Well, the thing about things like this is whether there is direct confrontational, in-their-faces pushback or not, you can find evidence of pushback. Let me give you some examples of it — and, by the way, it’s not organized. It doesn’t have a leader. These examples I’m gonna give you do not represent a movement that you can join. It’s kind of like the Tea Party.
If it appeals to you, you go out and do it on your own — and I’m telling you that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are. May was a record month for gun sales. Over 1.7 million. That didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in the midst of all of this being ginned up. HBO. HBO decides to come out and say, “You know what? We’re gonna really virtue signal you!
“We’re gonna really show you how much better than you we are. We’re gonna show you how much more we care. We are not going to air Gone With the Wind anymore,” and, by the way, as Democrats, I can understand why. That’s the Democrat Party of the Civil War. That’s what Gone With the Wind portrays. It portrays the Democrat Party running the Confederacy in the days of the Civil War.
(interruption) What? (interruption) You don’t agree with that? (interruption) So stupid to think what? (interruption) No, it’s not stupid at all! It’s called virtue signaling. It’s how they show they’re better than everybody. It’s how they keep BLM from tearing down their office building. It’s how they keep all these college kids and all these virtue signalers out there from destroying them. It’s about how… It’s cowardice.
It’s getting their business out of the way before anybody demands they do. So they get points for caring. But Gone With the Wind is exactly… If you want to know what the antebellum South was like, if you want to know what racism was all about, just watch Gone With the Wind. That’s the Democrats. The Confederacy is the Democrat Party — and, by the way, that Confederacy was alive and well all the way through the sixties.
Joe Biden was praising them and complimenting them when he first arrived in the United States Senate. Well, anyway, HBO can’t ban Gone With the Wind. All they can do is say, “We’re not gonna stream it.” But guess what? It’s now number one in Amazon DVD sales. Why do you think that is? Is it because a lot of people never heard of it and think, “Wow, what’s this all about? I’ve gotta go rent it and buy it to find out what it’s all about.”
No. It’s not that. It’s a number of things, but it’s not that. One of the things it might be is people saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I better go buy it. HBO’s not gonna allow it to be aired anymore. I better go buy it if I want to see it.” There could be some of that. But no. I know it’s pushback! I think it’s full-fledged pushback. I think 1.7 million gun sales is pushback.
Do you know how many people have signed up for the Trump rally in Tulsa on Saturday night? Right now, the active number is 800,000. The arena where Trump is gonna be speaking (where, by the way, the coronavirus is gonna spread to everybody) is 20,000. The coronavirus is not gonna spread to anything Andrew Cuomo organizes like a nursing home or a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn.
The coronavirus, it knows to avoid Democrat protests.
It knows to avoid Democrat gatherings.
But it also knows when Trump is doing a rally and the virus automatically is gonna show up there. It’s what the media’s telling us. Pre-sign-up requests for Trump’s Tulsa rally have exceeded 800,000, and everybody signing up knows that the capacity of the arena is 20,000. So why is that happening? Do not doubt me. The Trump base, despite…
I’m sure you’ve seen stories where a Trump voter is so embarrassed now, can’t possibly believe he (or she) ever voted for Trump and isn’t gonna do it again. I’m sure you’re starting to see these, and they’re designed to make you think that Trump is losing his base, and once that happens, it’s over. But then you say 800,000 people sign up and 780,000 of ’em know they’re not gonna get in.
That is a statement being made. The Trump campaign also raised a hell of a lot of money, $14 million in one day for Trump’s birthday. Fourteen million in one day. And I don’t know about where you live, but on the waterways of South Florida, even up to Jacksonville, there were thousands of people on their boats out there. It was the most crowded boat situation I’ve ever seen. People celebrating’s Trump’s birthday pushing back against all of the stupid, mean-spirited stuff people had said after Trump’s West Point speech, which was fabulous. It’s why I linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com over the weekend because nobody saw it.
Fox News carried it. None of the other networks did. That speech that Trump gave at West Point contains elements that he ought to recite in every public speeches he makes, every press conference. I’m not talking about doing a 25-minute speech. It contained elements, themes that Trump should continue to utter and stand for and stand behind. That speech took me back to Trump 2015, Trump 2016. This is what Trump has to do. Trump has to reignite the excitement of 2015, 2016.
And he’s got a perfect entree for it. He is up against people. In 2015, a lot of voters didn’t know per se that the Democrat Party was actually interested in destroying America, as founded. That is an abundant truth today. That is a hell of a thing to run against. Most Americans don’t believe their country sucks. Most Americans don’t want to believe their country sucks. Most Americans don’t believe their country is fatally flawed from the get-go.
What most Americans believe is that this is the greatest country that’s ever been formed, that it is not perfect, that it can be improved and has been since the day it was founded. America is improved. We got rid of slavery. We got rid of the women’s suffrage issue. There’s a number of things. And the Constitution was written so as to provide an avenue for some of these flaws to be addressed later.
The Founding Fathers knew what they had to do to get this nation founded. They knew what they had to do to break away from Great Britain. They did it. They left a trail in the Constitution for fixing, repairing, perfecting, correcting some of the flaws that were there at the founding. And they did. And those flaws in many cases have been addressed. They have been fixed. They’ve been eliminated. They have been perfected, improved. And it’s an ongoing process.
What most Americans know is that we’re up against forces in this country who want this country destroyed, who want it torn apart, who do not want it built on or improved on. That there are now people actively in this country who think that it was flawed from the beginning irreparably so and have joined a movement that is designed to destroy it. That shouldn’t be too hard to run against because most Americans do not think that about their country. Most Americans do not think that America is so deeply flawed that it is worth cashiering and starting over.
They elected Trump. They sure as heck did. They elected Trump to save it. And that was just four years ago. My point is that these — here’s another example. And I’ve talked about this, the real estate listings and sales for suburban and rural homes outside Manhattan, outside Minneapolis. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t know yet what he’s done to his city. He doesn’t know yet what this virus and the way he’s dealt with it has done to his city. What people have learned is they don’t have to live there to work there anymore. They don’t have to go there to work there anymore. They don’t have to pay exorbitant rents or prices or put up with madcap taxation in order to have a job in New York or Minnesota or anywhere else.
And if you don’t have to pay those rents, you don’t have to pay those real estate prices, you don’t have to pay those taxes, why would you? And more and more people are figuring this out. Twenty percent of Minneapolis’s real estate listings came after the rioting. People want out of there. Who runs it? Who is running these places? Democrats. In some cases, African-American. You got police chief, mayor. (interruption) No. My point is they have promised to fix this stuff for 50 years. They haven’t even made one step toward progress. Not one in all these years.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I want to go back very briefly to the comments made in the previous scorching hour — I mean, it was a scorching broadcast hour last hour — about the concept of pushback, and I specifically mentioned see that because it’s a place where something truly outrageous is happening. But it is a liberal enclave and there probably aren’t enough conservatives there to push back anyway, and to think they could do so safely.
But there’s an even larger question, and it’s the other side of pushback, and let me see if I can phrase it. And Trump, by the way, is the only person who is thinking about pushback and the only person who is actively engaged in it over the course of the last four years. He has to decide: Where’s the tipping point for this stuff?
For example, could it be that it is smarter to just let these blue state governors like that palooka, Jay Inslee, and these mayors like the half-wit, Jenny Durkan…? Man! Is it smarter to just let them do this and let what they’re doing be noted, be seen? Is it worth it for the stuff…? Look at it as a stew. Look at this area formally known as CHAZ, now it’s CHOP.
Is it perhaps more sensible to just let this thing go on and pollute itself and essentially stew in its own juice — getting worse by the day — just to illustrate what happens when they get their wish? In other words — I’ve asked this question before — at what point does it become productive for people to see what happens when liberals run the show?
Now, I’m a little frustrated because I think people should have seen this 25 years ago and 20 years ago and 15 and 10 and last year. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to me that we are witnessing — with all of these protests and all of this rancor, all of this anger, all of this unhappiness. It’s all on the Democrat Party. It’s in their states where they have promised people that this kind of stuff is not gonna happen, where all of this stuff is happening, where it’s failing.
They’ve promised people a veritable utopia. They’ve promised them that they’re gonna get even with the racists and the bigots and the sexists and the homophobes. But they’re not. The racists, sexist, bigot, homophobes are still apparently running the show. These police departments are run by, populated by Democrats. The police chiefs in many of these cities are African-Americans. They have been in charge.
At what point does this become self-evident to people that all of these problems and all of these messes can be traced back to the Democrat Party? I don’t think it is self-evident because of the media. That’s why I spent so much time pointing it out. I don’t think it is self-evident. The media is out there never once criticizing, ripping or blaming Democrats.
They’re being as hypocritical as they’ve ever been trying to blame it on you, me, Trump, us, you name it. So, anyway, Trump has to balance this stuff because, you know, he said originally that if they didn’t fix it, he was gonna send federal troops in there. Well, let me ask you a salient question. There are now… What’s the latest? There are 12 or more retired generals who have trashed Trump in concert for what happened in Lafayette Park.
They’re all out there saying, “If I’da known, I wouldn’t have gone. I think it was outrageous. I shouldn’t have been used that way. That was politicizing the military. I can’t believe that I did it. I think this is reprobate behavior.” They’re all out there trying to distance themselves, and the military was not used.
It was the park police! That’s federal, but it was the park police. So what would happen if Trump, say, ordered a National Guard unit to go in there and restore order in CHAZ/CHOP? Do you think they’d go, or not? I mean, do we want the American military in open defiance of Trump? You know he’s gotta be thinking about this.
Given the politics of all of this that they started, so forth. So it’s still dicey. And I still think that it makes sense just to let these people create their messes and their problems. I mean, even in Atlanta, crying out loud here. Now, we have a Republican governor, but we’ve got a Democrat mayor, African-American. African-American police chief. And all I know is — and it’s something that has befuddled me and interested me at the same time.
The Democrat Party — folks, this is not an exaggeration. They have been promising for 50 years to fix. And that’s how they end up taking the black vote and minority votes for granted because they don’t have to fix these things. They don’t have to solve anything because these minorities are gonna continue to vote for them no matter what. And so they don’t fix them.
But beyond that, it is also transparently, abundantly obvious what happens when Democrats alone run a city or run a state. It is not arguable. The media wants to call these things festivals, and they do. Fine and dandy.

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/06/15/you-feel-alone-because-youre-not-seeing-any-pushback/