Wednesday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh reacted to a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, VA that had resulted in five people hospitalized, including House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
Limbaugh argued the shooter, identified as James T. Hodgkinson of Illinois, was influenced by the media and the Democratic Party stoking hatred and resentment.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
The sad and unfortunate fact is that, as evidenced by the sound bite of me yesterday, I have foreseen this coming.
You can’t continue to enrage people the way the left, and predominantly the media, has been doing. The Democrat Party and the left for years have been feeding this. And particularly since the election of Trump they have virtually assured their supporters that Trump is guilty, guilty of treason. And every congressional hearing is going to provide the proof. Every one. Sessions yesterday, Comey a couple of times, Sally Yates, you name it.
They build up these expectations that Trump is not really the president. He shouldn’t have been. He cheated. He colluded with the Russians. There isn’t any evidence for it, and so every time the left builds up an event where this is going to be established as fact and it blows up in their faces, it creates rising expectations followed immediately by rank disappointment and anger and letdown over the fact that it’s not happening.
And I think these people on the left have been driven to this extreme for quite a while. I have been worried about it for I don’t know how long. And I’ve been telling you so. And we could, if we wanted to, we could scour — well, we have. I could go back and show you tweets, I could read you tweets. I could read you statements made by elected Democrats and others promoting just this kind of behavior, just this kind of behavior. You can find it. If you look at the TV programs and the media personalities that this guy, Hodgkinson, was devoted to, you’ll find out how radicalized he was by left-wing TV and comedy.
Last week Tonight With John Oliver, the Nightly Show on the Comedy Central, Democracy Now, The Ed Show, the Rachel Maddow Show. He apparently loved Rachel Maddow, wanted her to run for president. The Daily Show on Comedy Central, Real Time with Bill Maher. Those are the TV shows that he recommended everybody watch. Clearly, he was radicalized.
Now, I also want to say he probably started off this way. I don’t know that this guy’s ever been a rational, invisible functioning member of a community, but at some point he got radicalized, and if you dig deep you’ll find — we’ve got examples of it to share with you. This guy is the exact personification when I sit here and talk about the lunatic fringe base, the deranged base of the Democrat Party, this is the guy. This is the face. This is the picture. This is what you get when you stoke and fuel hatred, raw hatred and resentment, at some point it’s gonna blow over, because it cannot be contained, this kind of rage and repeated disappointment.
You add climate change probably to this guy’s list of grievances, and I think everybody ought to take a step back and realize this guy is not isolated. This guy is probably typical. Not that there’s going to be rampant shootings, but he just happened to go over the edge and pull the trigger. But he, to me, is exactly what I am unfortunately worried about when I look at the way all of these lies and all these nothingness, nothing burger stories have now been out there for month after month after month.
And you add everything else that the Democrat and the liberal media agenda is. It’s nothing but anger, it’s nothing but rage, it’s nothing but hatred, and it has to have an outlet. And they know it. The fact is, they know it.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.