Identity politics and group mentality is driving the left today, says David Limbaugh, author of the new book, “Guilty By Reason of Insanity.”
“You can’t watch an award show without these people obsessing on race, gender, sexual orientation,” Limbaugh says. “That’s all they care about. And that they even wrap that into their Marxist economic idea that it’s all related to oppression and oppressed and oppressor and victim and victimizer. It’s really a negative, sad way to look at the world. And yet that is what drives leftism today.”
Read the lightly edited interview, posted below, or listen on the podcast:
We also cover the following stories:
- President Donald Trump has pardoned this year’s turkeys.
- A new study shows a surprising number of deaths among Americans aged 25 to 64.
- Robert De Niro criticizes Trump as a “fake president.”
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Rachel del Guidice: We’re joined today on The Daily Signal Podcast by David Limbaugh. He’s a lawyer and a No. 1 bestselling author who just published a new book—it’s called “Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win.” David, thank you so much for being with us today.
David Limbaugh: Thank you for having me.
del Guidice: So, you just published this book. Can you start off by telling us about why you decided to write it? Just a little bit of the background when you started putting pen to paper.
Limbaugh: I wrote five political books and then I wrote four Christian-themed books, and I was getting ready to complete the Christian set when my publisher asked me if I would go back to politics for this book because of the urgency of some of the political issues that we’re facing now and the existential threats that we face in our culture. And so I agreed to do that and I researched it and wrote it to really address some of the threats.
I do believe we say how crazy the extreme left has become, [how] out in the open they are, and how important it is for us to fight back—those of us who disagree with their worldview and their prescribed solutions.
del Guidice: You opened the book, and you alluded to this in the beginning, but you talk about this threat from within. What is that and do you think mainstream Americans are aware of this threat?
Limbaugh: I think they’re increasingly aware, but what it is, as I said, [is] a completely different worldview, a different vision for America. It used to be said that each of the political parties agree on a common set of goals, but just disagree on how to get there. I never really did buy into that, but it is manifestly false now.
The left stands for socialism on the economic front. They’re anti-capitalism, two sides of the same coin. They believe in forced equal outcome rather than equal opportunity.
They believe in and do practice identity politics. Instead of treating people with a color blind dye and honoring Martin Luther King’s maxim that we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, they now demand that we look at everybody according to their external qualities, race, gender, class, whatever. We reject that.
So they have a fundamentally different vision for America. And it also, of course, transcends the political and race and identity politics issues. But that also goes to the social issues such as abortion.
Now, the left is now full-throated and because of abortion on demand through the point of birth and now beyond, full-blown and fantasize, beyond partial birth abortion.
And they’re not only not apologizing for it and doing it grudgingly claiming they want to make it rare—which was always a lie because if an unborn baby is just a clump of cells, there was no reason to make it rare—but now they admit that it’s alive and still advocate killing the baby in the womb anyway and celebrate and glorify what they’re doing.
It’s a horror show. It’s a level of evil that we haven’t seen in this country ever. A celebration of evil by advocates wearing “Shout Your Abortion” on their T-shirts.
Professors going around to colleges talking about the moral good that comes from abortion. Lighting up buildings in New York with ghoulish pink to celebrate the passage of an abortion bill.
So another one, open borders. The left is absolutely lawless when it comes to our borders.
They don’t, I don’t think, even approve anymore necessarily of the concept of a nation state and they certainly reject America as founded and they have bitter resentment against America to the point where they flood borders, give illegal immigrants sanctuary in these various cities.
They want to abolish [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], the very enforcement arm that would protect our borders and they want to give welfare and health care benefits to illegal [immigrants], and they place them above people already in the country, especially at a time when we are in serious national debt.
I could go on and on and on, but there are differences in authoritarianism and tolerance, which they claim we are guilty of and they are. There are so many differences that we don’t look anything alike in terms of how we view the world. And if the left prevails in this country, they will bequeath my kids and grandkids, which I don’t have yet, an America unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers and even to our parents for that matter.
del Guidice: You were mentioning illegal immigration and in the book you talk about how the left is trying to abolish America through illegal immigration, and you detailed some of the ways they’re trying to do that through giving illegals free health care. There’s a multitude of other ways.
Why do you think that this is something … [that the left is] coming at from a more compassionate angle, but they’re undermining this country that’s so great by trying to do that in this process? So why do you think they never recognize that?
Limbaugh: Well, I don’t give them as much credit as you do for their profess good intention because they don’t have any concern for the people that this is harming. And we see it every day with their advocacy of open borders, and it makes no sense. No nation, no self-respecting nation, no self-loving nation has ever survived if it doesn’t regulate its borders.
Those of us who believe in American sovereignty and American exceptionalism and that America was founded on a unique idea, grounded in liberty, believe that we ought to encourage people that do come in to learn our Constitution, to learn civics like they do in the naturalization process, to learn to appreciate and love America, to become patriots instead of becoming unassimilated, balkanized groups that are resentful of America.
And why do I think the Democrats want to do what they’re doing? Because as part of the same MO with our identity politics, they want to divide people on the basis of race, religion, color, nationality, ethnicity. Because by dividing people and alienating people, you secure votes.
And they have taught immigrants coming in, they have taught parties falsely that conservatives are racist, that were uncompassionate, so that when their ideas on substantive policy fail, they resort to these calls, these slanders of racism, and they automatically have millions of voters.
And so they want to flood the borders, not just because they disrespect national sovereignty, but because they have a bunch of millions more of Democratic voters guaranteed.
It is very cynical, but it is very obvious. That’s why they favor amnesty and it’s too obvious even to debate, yet we’re going to hear denial, and that’s just what you deal with. The Democrats, “Our end justifies the means.” They’re not about the rule of law. They’re not about fairness or process. They are just about winning votes and getting power.
The perfect example of that, before I finish this point, is their cynical opposition to voter ID laws. It is so patronizing and insulting to suggest that minorities, particularly blacks, can’t be expected to produce their ID, to show proof of who they say they are in order to vote. They claim that that’s somehow voter suppression. So if they will do that and they will allow borders to be unprotected and provide sanctuary cities and abolish ICE, they’ll do pretty much anything.
del Guidice: You devote a whole chapter in your book to what you call the “victim hierarchy”—talking about how Americans today are always getting offended. They’re feeling cheated from one right or another right, or something that they think is entitled to them. Where do you think that this victim hierarchy stems from?
Limbaugh: Well, I think it’s from the leftist mentality, which says, again, “We ought to look at people on the basis of their external qualities that are race, gender, color, and the rest. And we should do it through a prism of intersectionality.” And that is this leftist, cockeyed theory that says we must view people in terms of their privilege, historical privilege, and their oppression, not as individuals, but as groups so that some people have multiple oppressions.
So it’s no longer enough just to look at the plight of a black person and say he’s been oppressed and therefore he should be entitled to more protection than [whites] legally and socially and culturally.
Now you have to look beyond that and say, “What is the intersection of the most implicity of oppression he or she has endured?” That’s it. A black woman has experienced oppression both as a woman and as a black. Therefore, she is entitled to more protection than a black man or a white woman … .
Now, a transgender black woman, boy, you’re really getting some oppression there, or a homosexual black woman, a lesbian. So they really do this bean counting. It’s almost embarrassing to see what external qualities people have, and then I say that they’re entitled to more protection.
What’s really discouraging about this mindset is they look at a critical race theory, which says that racism is systemic. That by virtue of my skin color, I’m automatically racist.
You don’t look at the content of my character, you don’t look at my heart, you don’t look at my conduct. You look at my skin color and especially if I’m a political conservative, I can’t possibly be someone who is not a racist and who can possibly understand what oppression other people have gone through and therefore I can’t even speak for them if I’m in these certain categories. And so this is what’s happening.
We’re also seeing it on the idea of patriarchy. The man dominated the woman throughout history. Therefore, men automatically oppress women, and don’t fall for any of this idea that women can have equal rights, because no matter what you legislate, they’re always going to be oppressed.
And this is convenient for the left because they’ve always got classes of victims and classes of victimizers. They’ve always got people that they can demonize and people that they can protect. I think it’s a level of evil that is related to spiritual warfare because there is no way that we can ever come out from under these allegations. They’re built-in, guaranteed blights on America that we can’t atone for, and that’s really their attitude.
And you’ll notice it and everything they talk about. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t watch a show. You can’t watch an award show without these people obsessing on race, gender, sexual orientation. That’s all they care about. And that they even wrap that into their Marxist economic idea that it’s all related to oppression and oppressed and oppressor and victim and victimizer. It’s really a negative, sad way to look at the world. And yet that is what drives leftism today.
del Guidice: Something that’s no secret in American politics today is the fact that … socialism and, I guess, socialist policies [are] being painted as something that’s very great. A good example of this is [Sen.] Bernie Sanders who pushes “Medicare for All” unabashedly and a freshman from New York, [Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she’s jumped on that bandwagon, pushing Medicare for All.
Why do you think this is happening? And why do they never look at other countries who have adopted similar systems of Medicare for All and they’re actually failing … they’re not serving the people of these countries?
Limbaugh: Well, it’s endemic to the socialist mindset to think this is utopian mindset. Socialists throughout the 20th century believe that socialism, Marxism will work, it just hasn’t been tried by the right people. So that when Stalin failed and with tyrannical, he’d just deviated from Marx and Lenin. When Castro didn’t do well, he deviated.
However, the left lied about Castro, they glorified him. … They don’t even admit these. The Venezuelan Marxism system is negative. … [former President Barack] Obama glorified Castro when he died.
The left always believe that their ideas, their utopian ideas are valid and superior and so it’s no surprise that they’re now going for full-blown socialized medicine.
Obama, by the way, before he implemented Obamacare and rammed it down our throats, was unpaid even before he ran for president, saying, “We’re going to be patient. This is going to be incremental. It may take us 15 years before we get there.”
And … it’s like the … strategy where you build in failure—you introduce some government into a system, totally screw it up, and then blame capitalism and then offer the solution of more government involvement, more socialism.
That’s where we are now. These people are full-blown socialists. You might as well call them Marxist. And how ridiculous it is.
Medicare for All might cost what? $30, $40, $50 trillion? And [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren says that she can pay for it by a tax on billionaires. And yet any economist, … any person who has access to figures and can count and multiply and divide will tell you that … by confiscating all of the wealth, not just part of the wealth of all the billionaires in the United States, you couldn’t run that cockamamie system for two years, much less fund it at all. And so that’s what they’re doing.
At least Bernie Sanders admits that you can’t fund it without taxing the middle class. Elizabeth Warren denies that she would tax the middle class unless she’s recently recanted on that. And so, you’ve just destroyed the economy for the crazy idea that you’re going to provide coverage for everybody.
And by the way, providing health care coverage for everybody doesn’t mean good health care. It might not mean health care at all.
It means on paper you’re going to cover everybody, but in reality you reduce quality, you reduce choice, and you increase the price, you increase scarcity, you increase waiting lines, and overall health care goes to hell. Like it has in every other system with socialized medicine, not withstanding the propaganda that we hear about socialized medicine and other countries.
del Guidice: David, another point you raised in your book is how the left is so obsessed with race while becoming more and more anti-Semitic and we’ve seen this most recently with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan who supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement where she’s decried the racist policies of the government and the state of Israel. Would you say the left is essentially contradicting themselves here?
Limbaugh: Well, first place, I don’t buy their professions that they’re race cops. I believe they’re racist in there. I’m not saying individual racist, but their ideology is racist because they focus on race.
When all you do is focus on race and pay for nice minorities and treat minorities as if they’re not of equal dignity as made in God’s image, then you are treating them essentially as inferior.
If you want to perpetuate their economic dependence on government, then you are perpetuating the idea that they can’t help themselves and you don’t believe they’re equal.
So at the root of it, I don’t believe they are egalitarians as they professed to be. But let’s assume, let’s take them at their word that they are, then why are they as anti-Israel as they are? Why are they and many of them anti-Semitic? And we see that in the Women’s March movement.
There was a strong strain of anti-Semitism in the Women’s March. These people support anti-Semitic organizations. And I know that it’s not politic to say that being anti-Israel is anti-Semitic, but as a practical matter it is. Because … you would have no reason to be anti-Israel unless you put the Palestinian cause on equal moral footing with Israel.
Israel, the only democracy in the middle East, the only nation that is not trying to exterminate its Arab neighbors, and yet all of its neighbors believe in exterminating it. Now, some of them have tamped down their vocal criticism of Israel, but all the terrorist groups and the Palestinians full-blown advocate the extermination of Israel.
So when you support that BDS movement, you can’t tell me that that doesn’t ultimately stem from … an anti-Semitic policy. And there’s another strain here. Why is the left becoming so anti-Semitic? I think there’s a connection.
It’s just a theory. I can’t prove it other than anecdotally. But the left is egregiously … anti-capitalist. Jews are seen by the left, by anti-Semites as the ultimate capitalist. And that’s why you see Tlaib or [Rep. Ilhan] Omar, whoever it was [that] said, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” when she was accused of saying something negative about Jews. In other words, the dollars. They associate capitalism with Jews.
By the way, that’s what Hitler, didn’t he? Now, I’m not accusing them of being Hitler. I’m just saying that’s the ideological strain that underlies some of this stuff. Jews are the super-capitalists, therefore, Jews are evil. I just wish secular Jews who predominantly support the Democratic Party would realize that they are not their friends in the end.
del Guidice: So, given everything we’ve discussed and all of the problems that we see in our American political society, what steps would you encourage Americans to take to secure our nation and preserve the future for their children and grandchildren?
Limbaugh: Well, I would encourage them to preserve the courage of their convictions and to get in this arena and fight because America’s future, our kids’ and grandkids’ and their kids’ future depends on preserving the American idea, American liberty grounded in our founding documents, which guarantee limited government and the attack on which diminishes our liberty.
And so I would say that they need to arm themselves with the facts and the philosophical underpinnings that drive the left-warped ideology on things from … capitalism to abortion to immigration.
We need to help educate young people, especially millennials who have fallen into the seductive crap that socialism is compassionate and start to judge on the basis of the results of their programs rather than their professed good intention and look at the history of socialism, which is enslaved and impoverished, which is responsible for killing 100 million people in the 20th century, the Marxist and socialist regimes.
And the purpose of my book, one of the purposes of my book, is to call people to arms, to realize we’re in the fight for our life as Americans and to provide them intellectual and moral ammunition to take this war of words out. To take this war of words and get in a fight. …
I’ll give you an illustration before I finish this. Just this week Chick-fil-A, which has been stalwart and standing up for Christian ideals, and which has not been anti-gay, just opposes same-sex marriage, at least Dan Cathy the CEO did.
Now they’ve expanded beyond the … Southeastern United States, they have come under increasing brutal, savage attacks by the left by the LBGTQ activists.
And so they’ve now announced they’ve cowered and capitulated and said … they will no longer contribute to the Christian charities, Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army, which anyone could acknowledge are … great Christ-promoting organizations, winning souls for Christ. And now Chick-fil-A, despite all the good it’s done … despite all the courage it has shown, has now cowered.
This is an example of how relentless the left is, how unfair it is, how it will demonize people and bludgeon them verbally and otherwise into submission. And it’s a lesson of what not to do.
So I would call people to do the opposite of what Chick-fil-A has now done and stand up against this leftist, PC, totalitarian, tyrannical bullying, and fight for what we believe in. Unless you really don’t believe in it, unless you don’t really care what kind of America you bequeath your kids, because it is that serious.
It’s an existential struggle and we’ll see how it turns out. But one thing you can be sure is that the left never rest, 24/7 they’re on the job. We have to meet them with equal force.
del Guidice: We’ve been talking with David Limbaugh. He’s the author of the new book “Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win.” David, thank you so much for being with us today.
Limbaugh: Thanks for having me.