RUSH: So many blue state governors continue to make so many mistakes, led by Cuomo, led by Gavin Newsom. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna keep going back and forth? We’re gonna open up and then we’re gonna shut down a little bit, then we’re gonna open back up, then we’re gonna shut down. Do you realize this is gonna be a cycle in California at least until November 3rd or at least until there’s a vaccine? We can’t live this way. We can’t do this. This is not who we are.

There’s been something, folks, that has been bothering me since this whole COVID-19 thing began. You know what it is? I finally done figured it out out there. We’re not acting at all like Americans. Some of us are, don’t misunderstand. But we’re not cowards. We don’t retreat. We don’t find the nearest corner to curl up in and cower away from things. We don’t look for excuses for inaction. We don’t look for excuses for status quo failure.

We’re Americans. We beat back every enemy we have faced. And we have been fearless in confronting every enemy we have faced, in large part, because every enemy has come after us. Every enemy. I don’t care if you want to talk about Hitler in World War II, the Japanese in World War II, the so-called Korean Conflict, whatever it is we came together and triumphed. This is missing.

And I came across a fascinating survey, a little research survey when I was perusing the Conservative Review. It’s a great, great, great conservative magazine. And it’s edited by Daniel Horowitz. And listen to this. I’m gonna give you some details on this and have some comments on it. “New Study: Millennials Think Their Risk From COVID-19 Is Exponentially More Than the True Threat,” it really is. Millennials as a group, as a monolithic group, it’s amazing, are sitting out there thinking that their threat, their risk from COVID-19 is much greater than it actually is.

We don’t need to flatten the curve. We need to flatten the fear. And this is new. We’ve never had an entire generation paralyzed in fear and with that paralysis rooted in comfort. I don’t know how many of you have children who are Millennials, but you know what I’ll bet if you do? I will bet you that your Millennial children — who are obviously adults by now — well, 18 to 34 is still the rough demographic range for the Millennial generation. So for the most part we’ll call them adults. And the fact of the matter is, they are, I’ll bet you, far more terrified of this than you are.

Regardless of how terrified you are, I will guarantee you the odds are that your Millennial children are much more afraid of it, much more terrified than you are. It’s almost like, folks, an entire generation needs, wants a reason to fail or to not have to move on, or to not have to tackle something difficult.

It’s almost like being made a victim. When you are made a victim, you automatically have an excuse for not doing anything, because nothing is your fault. By definition, a victim is somebody to whom extraneous external events have conspired against you. You have no control over it. So you’re a victim of, say, white supremacy. You are a victim of systemic racism. You’re a victim of things you can’t even define. You are a victim of white males. You’re a victim of not having enough money, whatever it is.

By definition, you now have an excuse to do diddly-squat. And, as an added bonus, it’s not your fault. Now you have a political party willing to capitalize on you being a victim. They’ll come along and say, “You’re right. You are a victim. You’re helpless. There’s nothing you can do. You’re a victim of Republicans. You’re a victim of conservatives. You’re a victim of whoever. You’re a victim of evil corporations. But we can save you.

“And how are we gonna save you? We’re not gonna save you. We’re gonna make you think that we’re gonna punish the people who are mistreating you. But we’re not even gonna do that. We’re just gonna give you a bunch of lip service, and we’re gonna make you comfortable in your inaction. We’re gonna make you comfortable in your lack of achievement and accomplishment because we’re gonna tell you it ain’t your fault. You’re a victim.”

This is not America. We’d-a never gotten this far if we had ever had a single generation that sought refuge and comfort in the idea that they’re a bunch of victims. We’d-a never gotten to this point. We would have never become a superpower. All it would have taken is one generation at the right time. It’s like they want to be scared. They want to be frightened because of the opportunity it presents, the excuse or excuses the fear provides.

And what do they do? They turn to their technodevices. They turn to the iPhone. They turn to the iPad. If they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ll turn on some other brand-name cell phone, and they’ll start scanning for headlines designed to scare them even more. And those headlines are readily available. You can find scare headlines anywhere, no matter where you go. In fact, they are so abundant that you can’t avoid them.

COVID-19 is the biggest cop-out ever for people who have decided they don’t really want to live their lives. And that’s what this really boils down to, and that’s what’s so disappointing about this. They really don’t want to live their lives. It’s too scary. The risks are too great. They are clinging to reasons to fail instead of fighting for reasons to succeed. Instead of finding ways to overcome, instead of finding ways to beat it back, they’re succumbing to it. They’re letting it win.

They’re letting politicians win who have no desire to actually make their lives better, because all the politicians want to do is get rid of Donald Trump. And they are counting on these Millennials to show up on November 3rd and do that. Now, it’s not entirely the fault of the Millennial generation.

And, by the way, they’re not alone, because there are younger generations than the Millennials, and they’re almost in the same boat, but the Millennials are the generation where this appears to be total. I know there are exceptions, and many of the exceptions are in this audience. And one of the factors here is their inability to discern information. They simply believe the rotgut lies presented to them daily in the Drive-By Media Democrat media. They just believe it, partly because they want to.

There is comfort in believing you are powerless. Man, the freedom that exists in that circumstance. If you’re powerless, why, there’s nothing you can do. If you are powerless, you are a victim. But the problem with that is in America you need not be powerless, and you certainly need not be a victim.

So here’s some details on the study from Conservative Review. Actually they didn’t do the study, they’re just reporting on it. “There is no vaccine, effective treatment, or herd immunity for the virus of panic and fear sown by the media that is propagated straight to people’s brains from their smartphones. And unlike with coronavirus, the young are more seriously afflicted with this intractable disease than seniors, according to a new study.

“Four researchers published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research studying people’s perceived personal health risks associated with COVID-19. The most striking result of their survey of 1,500 Americans from May 6 to May 13 is that the younger the age of the respondent, the more the individual seemed concerned about the virus being deadly to them – the exact inverse of the true threat assessment of the virus.”

The younger you are, the greater the odds it won’t affect you. But the Millennials believe the exact opposite. “It is reflective -” this is Horowitz writing here “It’s reflective of a generation that is inundated with Apple, Google, and Yahoo’s sensational news headlines on their phones and, unlike their parents and grandparents, have no minds of their own to decipher the information and interpret it with the proper context.”

They just believe it. There is no alternative. To Yahoo News, to Google News, even, you know, the Apple News app — I don’t know if you use it, if you have an iPhone or an iPad, but there’s an Apple News app. And it may as well be CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, even though New York Times just bowed out. They weren’t making any money with it.

But the main reason the Times bowed out is they didn’t have any control over the subscribers. And if you’re the New York Times and you’re available on Apple News or anywhere else and you subscribe to the New York Times on Apple News, Apple gets to keep the information about you, not the New York Times. The New York Times said, “That’s crazy. We want to know who our subscribers are and we want to have direct access.” So the New York Times bumped out. But it doesn’t matter. The headlines and the news stories are still the same. And to these people, there is no conservative media alternative. Even if they grew up listening to this program with their parents.

“When asked by the four researchers,” who are from Harvard and Oxford, “out of ‘1,000 people very similar to you’ how many would die from COVID-19 over the next nine weeks, the median estimated guess by respondents aged 18-34 was 20, or 2%. In other words, the average Millennial thought that 2% of everyone like them would die within nine weeks from the virus.”

Everybody. I mean, even people that don’t have it, they’re gonna get it, they’re gonna die. “In contrast, the respondents aged 70 years or older, which is exponentially more at risk, asses their risk of dying at about 1%,” if they get it. “According to the CDC, there have been 944 COVID-19 deaths among those aged 15-34. And that is with a liberal definition of a COVID death that has included young people who died of alcohol poisoning, gunshots, and drug overdoses.” You have heard the horror stories that if somebody dies of a gunshot, but they’ve got a trace of COVID-19, the cause of death is listed as COVID-19.

There is so much bias in elevating the number of cases. And there is a story today from Fox 35 in Florida, Orlando. Fox 35 Orlando. Errors found. Florida’s positivity rate is skewed. Fox 35 went through COVID-19 test reports, found that many clinics are reporting 100 percent positivity. Many clinics. Orlando Health is one example. They admit that their number is wrong. They have a number. They’re reporting 98% positive. The real number is 9.4% positive. They’re simply eliminating the decimal point and adding four points to it. That’s a huge difference. Ninety-eight percent positive. No, no, no, it’s actually 9.4.

That’s just one place. Countless labs are reporting 100 percent positivity. That’s not possible. Which means every single person’s testing positive throughout Florida. That’s not possible. Now, the nstory here does not allude that there is anything going on here. You have to conclude that yourself. Which, of course, we will. We will happily conclude that something ain’t right here.

We got a Republican governor here that they hate. We have a state that Biden certainly needs to win. We have one of the most effective governors in the country who happens to be a close associate of Trump. I mean, it’s a recipe for corruption. So we don’t even know these numbers in Florida are accurate, and yet nobody’s questioning them. They’re just locking down, they’re shutting down, they’re reviving old shutdown theories and policies and putting them back in place. And Gavin Newsom’s doing the same thing out in California.

Consider the top cause of death for young people. (interruption) Well, yeah, but I gotta take a break. I just saw the clock. Hang on my friends. We’re coming right back. This is not who we are, folks. We are not a nation of victims. Not entire generations of us. This is not how we have become who we are. This is not how we have stayed who we are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This isn’t who we are, folks, this cowering and fearful and almost giving up in the face of this enemy, COVID-19. We’ve not ever done anything like this before. So much of the way we are dealing with this is unprecedented. And it’s un-American.

It’s nothing compared to the way we have overcome enemies and obstacles in our past. It’s fearful. It is turning people into victims, which is making them feel like they have no blame, they can stop living, they can stop having to accomplish or even try hard things because there’s this deadly thing out there that might kill them. This is not who we are.

And I’ll tell you, I really believe — you know, we talk about the election “the most important in our lifetimes.” I’m tired of hearing that because I’ve heard it for every election my whole life, at least the last 30 years, and I think, true or not, this one really is crucial because of what the stakes are. This is not just where the Republicans or Democrats are gonna trade power again or maybe the Republicans are gonna hold on to it. This is about what this country is going to be.

COVID-19 is too convenient an excuse for a generation of people to just punt. We don’t do this. We are Americans. In the Spanish flu, ’17, ’18, ’19, 1917, much death. Do you know that there was not one mention of it by the president of the United States at the time, Woodrow Wilson? Never talked about it. There was no national policy to deal with it. There was no shutdown. There was just, “Hey, go outside, get some fresh air, stand in the sun as long as you can, get some vitamin D, feel better.”

It had numerous waves to it. It coincided with World War I, which is what Woodrow Wilson’s concern was. Soldiers going off to war arguably spread one of the waves. But there was no “woe is us.” It was just the next in a long line of things that happened to people that they dealt with, like the Donner party. You’ve heard of the Donner party. Maybe some of you haven’t.

The Donner party, the Donner family and a bunch of travelers trying to get to California over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They made the mistake of trying to make the trip in the middle of winter. We’re talking the Lake Tahoe region. They get to the peak. It was so bad that they had to turn to cannibalism to survive. That’s what’s noteworthy about the Donner party.

If you read the diaries written by the leaders of the Donner party, the only reference to how cold it was was one sentence: “It was a particularly tough winter.” It’s just what was. They didn’t complain about it because there was nothing they could do. They had to adapt. This is what’s missing. There seems to be no concept of adaptation. There seems to be no understanding in the Millennial generation that we can adapt to this and that we’re gonna have to. Because there’s nothing stopping it right now.

We don’t have a vaccine. We don’t have therapeutics. We can’t shut down bars and restaurants every two months for a couple of weeks for the next three years. We can’t do this cycle that we’re doing. This cycle that we’re doing is not stopping anything; it’s not saving anybody; it’s not preventing the spread. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of shock, scary numbers in the media.

Life has to go on. Life is to be lived. It’s not meant to be spent cowering and curled up in the corner in fear. It’s not meant to be spent as a victim. Your life is worth more than simply saying, “There is nothing I can do about it. I have an excuse for not even trying.” But this is exactly where we are. And it’s not who we are.

And I believe this should become one of the themes that the president adopts as he adapts to what’s necessary going forward in his presidential campaign, a national address to the – heck, I’ll do it, a national address to the country telling the people of this country the truth of this, who we are, how we got here, not here with the virus, here as a superpower.

We need to contradict all of this tripe and meaningless BS that Black Lives Matter and Antifa and Occupy Wall Street are trying to spread. People need to be told the inspirational, uplifting truth about who they are, about their inheritance as an American citizen and their responsibility as an American citizen.

We can’t go forward if we have an entire generation that wants a reason to fail or wants an excuse not to have to move on or wants an excuse not to have to leave home. We can’t move forward with an entire generation that wants to be scared because right now, sadly, being scared in America is rewarded. “Oh, you’re so scared, oh, I’m so sorry, how can we help? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of the virus, and I’m afraid I’m gonna die and afraid -” Well, see, yeah, you’re right to be. Republicans are doing this to you. Conservatives are doing this. You’re right to be afraid. Donald Trump is the reason you’re afraid. Just tell us. That’s what it is. “Yeah, I don’t like orange people.” “Right. So you’re afraid of Donald Trump.”

We can’t move on. We can’t get past this if we have an entire generation that’s literally locked down and frozen. We can’t let something like a virus become the biggest cop-out ever for not living your life. Life is for doing. Life is for living. And to come up with excuses not to have to do it.

Look, life is hard. And sometimes you make it harder by making wrong choices. But life is also precious. We all only get one. Very few people realize the profundity of that. There’s only one. And we get a shot at it every day. We get a shot at it. If we goof up one day, we have a chance to fix it the next if we can set ourselves aside long enough.

It’s another thing. Most of life is about much more than you or me. Life is about things much larger than yourself, and the sooner you learn that in your life, the much better off you’re gonna be. If you’re unable to escape this prison where you are the center of the universe and your feelings and your thoughts, then you are never gonna get close to maximizing your potential.

And it is possible to maximize your potential with the flu out there, with the virus out there. It is possible to do it. Look around. There are people doing it. There are people living their lives. There are other people cowering in the corners and huddling in fear and saying, “Oh, my goodness, I have an excuse not to try because I’m already a victim.”

Now, back to this survey just to close the loop on this. Again, this from Conservative Review, the magazine, Daniel Horowitz. Let me give you the previous paragraph first just to keep it in context here.

“According to the CDC, there have been 944 COVID-19 deaths among those aged 15-34. And that is with a liberal definition of a COVID death.” You know, a lot of people are said to have died of COVID-19, but really didn’t. That’s another story. “Now consider the top causes of death for youngsters, courtesy of a table published by Avik Roy last month,” a well-known think tank researcher. Now, keep in mind, 944 people have died. At most, 944 people between the age of 15 and 34 died from COVID-19.

Now consider the top causes of death for young people. “In 2016, there were 37,879 deaths,” almost 38,000, “by unintentional injury among those 18-34, which obviously is very much influenced by car accidents. That is 40 times the number of deaths from the virus.”

There were almost 11,000 deaths in 2016 chalked up to homicide. That would be murder. That is 11 times greater than the number of people dead from COVID-19. So why the fear over COVID-19, 944 versus 38,000 deaths by unintentional injury, 11,000 deaths by murder.

“The answer is very simple. People’s phones are not blowing up with news of people dying in car crashes every second.” They could. But the news is not reporting it because it’s accepted. And people get in cars every day, knowing full well what these numbers are. And they’re not scared.

“Smartphones and the information that pings their users are like the Bible for this generation of American youth.” I’m not kidding you. Their devices are like air and water. They can’t do without them. They’re exposed to them. They’re devoted to them. And look at what their devices are telling them.

“The same source of their anxiety over catching the virus is the same source that made them temporarily suspend that anxiety to protest in the streets in large crowds.” They risked the virus because they were told protesting is worth the risk. So whatever the media tells them, it’s like their Bible is authorizing them to behave in certain ways.

“They are the same people who believe black youth are more likely to be killed by police than by gang members.” But it is the exact opposite. Black youth are far more likely to be killed by gang members in the hood, in the neighborhood, than by the cops.

“For Millennials, the media is like a game of Simon Says. It’s an amazing contrast from the youth of the 1960s who wore T-shirts saying, ‘Question authority.’” Our generation, the Millennials, are fighting for everybody to conform to authority.

“This disproportionate degree of panic and fear sown by herd mentality and magnified by technology is not cost-free. When you have young people thinking their risk of dying is thousands of times greater than the actual threat, they can resort to extreme behavior that is more dangerous than the virus. Perhaps this is why drug overdoses are spiking in some states.”

But the bottom line is, we cannot survive as a nation with an entire generation or generation and a half copping out, admitting that they’re scared and taking comfort in the fear that it offers them reasons and excuses not to even try to live their lives.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Matt in Franklin, Tennessee. I’m glad you waited, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yeah. Hey, Rush. This is a great honor.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Early in the pandemic I would see people comparing this to wartime. But instead of being sent to war like our grandparents we’re simply being asked to sit on our coach and wait it out, we should be able to do that right?

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: I was intrigued by this parallel, but something didn’t seem quite right about it to me. The more I thought about it I realized it was completely backwards. You see, in a time of war, what does our president do? He sends our best, strongest, greatest young people out to fight for our country knowing that some of them are gonna lose their lives, but it’s for the greater good of our country, and this premise is accepted by everybody. So if this is essentially a wartime, I would argue that we should similarly expect to face the opponent head on with the understanding that we’re gonna lose some lives for the greater good of this country.

RUSH: Well, now, in the case of the United States military you have people volunteering fully aware that they may end up in the middle of declared hostilities, they sign up knowing what they’re heading for. Do we have such a similar, quote, unquote, force standing by awaiting a pandemic and who are thus ready to be deployed to go out and get sick so people can study the virus in them and maybe come up with a cure?

CALLER: Well, that’s a good point. I would argue that we — I mean, we have to, right?

RUSH: So who, then, among us gets that duty?

CALLER: I guess all of us.

RUSH: No. You’re actually asking a really good question. We have to keep the economy going, right? We can’t shut it down. We should never have locked it down. We can’t relock it. It would be the biggest mistake. We know group of people that is the healthiest, the least likely to get the virus. We know who they are demographically. Let them live their lives. Let them go to work. Let them go to school. Let them own their businesses.

We know, consequently, the most at-risk. We know who they are. We shelter them, we keep them sequestered and quarantined. We can do this without making it sound like we’re sending guinea pigs off to war. There are people statistically who we know are not gonna get this disease or suffer from it if they do. It’s great, great question, actually.