JASON: Governor DeSantis is showing the way. Kim Reynolds of Iowa is showing the way. There are a number of governors that will provide us with a solution out of this chaos, this chaos of kowtowing to China, of absolute open borders, of no law and order where our major cities are out of control, and the most serious of all, perhaps, is the absolute demand for societal conformity when it comes to what you think. Remember, free speech is nothing more than an expression, a manifestation of your thoughts.

So, when they censor you, when the media censors you, when they take you out of context, which is what they do, when they misrepresent your statements or your ideas and place you in a false light, which they did to me in every campaign, they did to Trump, they do to most Republicans, above and beyond a form of defamation, it is an assault on freedom of thought. And if you don’t have the freedom to think, the views you have, to hold the views you have, you’re not free, and it’s the end of the republic, the end of the American experiment. And sad to say there is a considerable constituency out there for just that.

They place their power above your freedom. They place equity above the rule of law. I’m trying to do this diplomatically and say, well, you know, reasonable people can disagree. But you can’t disagree — or you can’t reason with people who are so disagreeable as to be tyrants. And, unfortunately, that’s what the opposition has become, tyrannical. To show you how far it’s gone, by the way — I’m gonna tease you with this, and I’ll tell you later, later in the hour who said this. But I want you to see if you can guess who said this. “I know very well that the idea of being ‘color blind’ is out of fashion, that MLK’s vision of character over skin color is considered to be naive. But that vision surely made our society better. I’m not sure the modern vision of ‘race consciousness’ is making things better” Who do you think said that? Well, stay tuned. It will definitely surprise you. Won’t surprise me, but it’ll surprise you.

Now, when I talk about freedom of thought — and I say the states must solve this now — you’ve got governors like Reynolds in Iowa and DeSantis in Florida and a few others, right, that are taking on censorship. Governor Ron DeSantis signed finally, finally, a free speech bill holding Big Tech accountable. First governor to do it. First of its kind in the United States. Basically a state-run Section 230 repeal that allows individuals to sue Big Tech for unfair and deceptive trade practices.

And now this is where it can really, really get interesting. Whether it’s Big Media or Big Tech, they are violating consumer trade laws or consumerism laws, if you will. They are basically saying they’re something they’re not. It’s consumer fraud. Big Tech — or Big Media — says they report the truth. They don’t. They lie, routinely. Big Tech says they’re a neutral platform. No, they censor routinely. That is an unfair and deceptive trade practice. That is consumer fraud. That’s where the angle is, whether it’s Florida or Minnesota.

And now people who are deplatformed — for instance, by saying the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan — if they’re censored, they can sue. If politicians are deplatformed, they can sue. This thing’s gonna hold up. Big Tech is different from other corporations. They are common carriers. Imagine if your utility company decided to charge you double because you’re a conservative. Hey, free market business, they can do whatever they want. That’s what The Cato Institute would say. That’s what the Lincoln Project would say. That’s who the private equity crowd would say. Hey, they’re business. It’s not government. No. They’re a monopoly that get carve-outs from business, that gets propped up from government.

Historically, there’s been a ton of regulation of common carriers and public utilities. And that’s what Big Tech is. A private monopoly does not have the right to turn away customers. And the social media giants are just that. Unless you think that Con Edison or, you know, your utility company wherever you live can simply say, we don’t like conservatives. We’re not gonna send you gas this month. It’s free market, right? No, it’s not. And so finally DeSantis gets real on this, and it must happen. We’ve gotta start pushing back, instead of saying, “I’m going to rise above this. Just because they do it doesn’t mean we need to do it” while you bet the hell beat out of you.

Rush talked about this last July on social media censorship. Roll audio 16.

RUSH: I came across a story at American Greatness by Adam Mill. And the headline: “If Social Media Wants to Play Doctor, They Should Prepare To Be Sued for Malpractice – Most people understand that the constitutional guarantee of free speech does not include falsely yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. A panicked mob can crush or trample weak and vulnerable people as the instinct to survive overtakes common decency. This maxim came to mind when Breitbart announced that Twitter and Facebook censored a press conference by actual doctors describing their life-saving lessons learned from treating actual COVID-19 patients.”

This is the Dr. Stella Immanuel press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court, and Twitter banned it. They censored it.

“Among the lessons discussed was the prophylactic use of a combination of hydroxychloroquine and other inexpensive therapies that seem to stop the dreaded disease from advancing to its deadly second phase. One doctor said she treated over 300 COVID-19 patients using the therapy. These patients included vulnerable patients with diabetes, heart conditions, and advanced age. She proudly announced she had not lost a single patient with the early intervention of this therapy. Additionally, COVID-19 failed to infect any member of her staff taking the therapy as a prophylactic measure. She warned that the misinformation about these therapies was causing people to die needlessly.” Well, of course this is Stella Immanuel.

“Another doctor spoke to the opening of schools. Young people, he said, are able to tolerate the virus very well. Opening schools poses little or no risk to children when compared to leaving them at home. Children are very unlikely to spread the disease to each other. And, astonishingly, a contract trace study revealed no example of a student infecting a teacher in the entire world.”

Did you know that, by the way? Astonishingly, a contract trace study involved no example of a student infecting a teacher in the entire world. So what Mr. Mill here is getting at, it’s my question, who the hell at Twitter is the medical expert that can contradict an entire gaggle of doctors wearing their official white lab coats on the steps of the Supreme Court, who is it?

“Social media censorship of medical opinions is far more dangerous than the usual censorship of conservative political opinion. By censoring doctors, they’re offering their own medical opinion to the public-that these cures won’t work-and suggesting that it’s ‘dangerous’ to let patients (or other doctors!) hear the advice.”

Censorship of doctors, censorship of medical news, censorship of medical opinion. That’s exactly what this was. But it wasn’t. It was political censorship. Twitter, I think they’ve been caught out. And we’re trying to alert as many people as possible to how this is happening. They censored a medical opinion of a bunch of doctors because they are censoring conservatism, and they figured that this was part of conservatism. Of course, anything that they disagree with is hate speech. Anything they think is hate speech, that’s how they’re able to censor it or suppress it.

Here’s another pull quote. “So not only is Twitter, which is not a medical provider,” by the way. If you contract any kind of disease, you don’t go to Twitter to go to the doctor. You don’t go to Twitter for a medical opinion. Some lunatics might, actually, to stop to think about it. But you shouldn’t. “So not only is Twitter, which is not a medical provider, claiming that these [real] doctors are wrong, Twitter is saying that patients following this advice could be at greater health risk.

“This is medical advice Twitter is offering to the general public.” It is medical advice they are censoring. It is medical advice they are denying the American people a right to see. “And if anyone dies as a result of this censorship, these social media giants will be responsible.” In other words, if Dr. Stella Immanuel and Dr. Risch from Yale (the epidemiologist) and all of the others who believe in hydroxychloroquine…

If Twitter succeeds in burying their medical opinion — and people die because a proper medical opinion was denied them because Twitter censored it — well, that’s big time responsibility. “Social media should not be restricting legitimate medical policy debate on its platforms. It should not be permitting fearmongering while censoring advice from licensed doctors who actually have some demonstrated experience and claim success in fighting the disease.”

Twitter is essentially accusing them of lying, accusing them of being wrong, accusing them of malpractice, because you’re not allowed to see what these particular doctors have to say. Twitter will not permit it. Twitter will censor them — and you, if you attempt to spread it. “A doctor who did this could be sued for malpractice. Why should [Twitter and Facebook] be immune from the same consequences?”

Damn right. Hell, yes. A profoundly important question.

JASON: Amen to that. And what they’re talking about, of course, is being able to take away the immunity that Big Media, social media, I should say – these Big Tech giants for censoring people because they can’t be sued, they can’t be sued for a whole host of things, including defamatory statements by their users, like a common publisher could. So they got a carve-out under Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Republicans refuse to take away; so they’re feeding the hand that bites them. Is that right? That’s not right.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JASON: Someone you may recognize had something interesting to see about critical race theory, as more than a dozen states now want to ban this toxic indoctrination of our kids to hate all things America, to basically say that some colors are good and some colors are bad. Sort of like the New York Times’ 1619 Project, you know, pursuant to our last call, this is not about justice. It’s not about a more coherent or cohesive society. It’s about fomenting a revolution. That’s what Marxism was about. It’s what Khrushchev meant when he said we will bury you, won’t have to fire a shot, America will fall from within. It’s all about this revolutionary zeal that causes chaos in the streets, pits one person against another, and makes certain that you destroy the old construct.

You deconstruct America, the Constitution. It was all bad, based on white privilege and all these horrible people. Even though 600,000 Americans died to make it a more just society in the Civil War, we fought a civil rights revolution in the sixties, we have made more strides towards equality than any nation on the face of the earth. None of that matters if you want a revolution. And that’s what I say when you say — when I say they substitute race for class, Marx used class to do this, fomenting class warfare.

Now they’re using race. So who do you think said — this is a beautiful thing — that political correctness is, quote, “Morality policing is making things worse? Race relations seem to be in the middle of a two-steps-back movement. I grew up in a time when there was zero political correctness, but now I am simply saying we should check our strategy to see if we are not getting the results we want. I don’t know what the solution is, but I suspect that over sensitizing people to arbitrary characteristics like skin color may be doing more harm. Being ‘color blind’ may be out of fashion, but surely that made our society better. ” Quote, “I’m not sure the modern version of race consciousness is making things better. Just remember who benefits from the divide-and-conquer paradigm. It ain’t us, that’s for sure.”

Had to be Rush, right some other conservative? No. Sean Ono Lennon. You know your movement is jumped the shark when an ex-Beatles son, a biracial son, says you’re full of it. Of course he’s getting it on Twitter now on social media, but he’s not far from what his dad used to do. His dad used to be — John Lennon, I remember — the song “Revolution”, was a mock, a mockery of the sixties protesters. “When you talk about destruction, you can count me out.” John Lennon once said, “These left-wing people talking about giving power to the peoples. That’s nonsense. The people have the power.

The way of revolution doesn’t justify the ends, the violent way of revolution. If you want to change the system, change the system. It’s no good shooting people.” I mean, he was a contrarian more than anything else, but the point is, you gotta be really off the charts when an ex-Beatle’s son starts saying, “What the hell are you talking about,” right?

And that’s what critical race theory is. And that’s why it’s destroying education, and that’s why we need to take our schools back. And if we don’t do that, we’re never gonna solve this problem. Rush talked about what your kids are being taught all the way back in 2013.

RUSH: From Fox News: “A school district in Wisconsin said they will review a high school diversity class that exposed students to radical leftist thinkers and promoted a critical race theory that alleges white people are oppressors.”

“The ‘American Diversity’ class was taught to students at Delavan-Darien High School in Wisconsin.” And one of the parents reported to Fox News that it was a white privilege class. That’s what the class was basically oriented toward, white privilege. “‘They’re teaching white guilt,’ one parent told Fox News. ‘They’re dividing the students. They’re saying to non-whites, “You have been oppressed and you’re still being oppressed.”

“The parent, who asked not to be identified, has an 18-year-old son who was enrolled in the class and became alarmed after she looked at some of the handouts provided to the students. ‘I felt it was indoctrination,’ she said. ‘This is a radical left agenda and ideology that is now embedded in our school.'” It is, and has been for a while. It’s called the multicultural curriculum, and the multicultural curriculum teaches this. The multicultural curriculum is 25 or 30 years old, if not older than that, and it teaches anti-Western civilization. It teaches that white European settlers came here and started causing all the trouble. White Europeans brought with them racism, sexism, environmental destruction, homophobia, all of that. That is taught.

What’s happened here is a parent just caught on to it. And I think what happened is the reason the parent caught onto it is because they brought it out from behind the curtain. This has been taught for a long time. Now they’re just being up front and honest, the teacher is, about what is being taught rather than subtly indoctrinating the kids.

They’re just being up front and honest about what they’re teaching and what it is. And they’re calling it white privilege, and they’re calling it oppression and they’re saying it still exists and that there’s segregation, and they divide the class up that way.

“The parent said the students were taught ‘if you’re white, you’re oppressing. If you’re non white, you’ve been a victim.'” Yeah. Isn’t that liberalism today? I don’t mean to sound know-it-all. I’m just saying it’s not a surprise to me. In fact, I’m a little bit encouraged that a parent finally sees what’s going on, and called attention to it.

JASON: Those of us on the Republican right — if you want to label it that, but I think most Americans, most people in most neighborhoods are loath to tackle because it’s so divisive. And the left knows that.