RUSH: Glenn Harlan Reynolds, who’s a friend and a law professor at the University of Tennessee, has a column out today in USA Today saying that Trump has got… Forget prison or anything else. If Trump doesn’t get a handle on the monopolies that exist now — Facebook, Google, Netflix, and (What’s the other one?) Amazon, the social media titans — that if this is not gotten a handle on, we don’t have a prayer because they have monopolized social media, and, in the process of monopolizing it and mass media, they are excluding anything and everybody conservative.

So Glenn’s piece today is suggesting that Trump needs to do his own version of Teddy Roosevelt and bust ’em up. Teddy Roosevelt busted up the trusts, among them Standard Oil, the Rockefeller family, and J. P. Morgan, who was on the verge (chuckles) of owning the United States financial markets. Do you know back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, when the federal government needed money, they went to J. P. Morgan to borrow it? Before there was a tax code, before there was a tax system, they went to J. P. Morgan to get money. Well, J. P. Morgan was one of the trusts that Teddy Roosevelt busted up.

I’ll tell you, Glenn Reynolds makes a persuasive case in this — and, even if he hadn’t made it, it’s a scary thing. You know, I don’t like monopolies, and I really hate government intervention, but this social media stuff is getting totally out of hand, especially, folks… There’s now polling data. I forget where. I’ll find it just a second. It’s a credible polling unit. Do you know that 42% of the American people believe that the Russians meddled with votes in 2016? This has been one of the most successful hoaxes that has ever been run in politics.

This has been one of the most successful disinformation campaigns ever, the fact that the Russians and Trump colluded to steal the election. There isn’t any evidence! In fact, in announcing the latest series of indictments, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, made it clear that in none of the indictment that Mueller has announced is there any allegation or evidence that a single vote was tampered with! Yet you read newspaper accounts of this or watch cable news accounts, they don’t even mention that that has been acknowledged and admitted by the government.

They continue with the myth that not only did Trump and the Russians collude, but the Russians tampered with vote totals. It did not happen, and yet 42% of the American people believe it largely because of the media — and social media, which is one of the biggest promotional groundswells for that point of view. You talk about misinformation and disinformation? This is profound. There is no evidence that any of this happened!

The evidence that we have indicates that it was Hillary Clinton that colluded with the Russians to create opposition research to destroy Trump campaign! It was the government, the Obama DOJ, that colluded in order to spy on the Trump campaign and then the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency. Nobody knows this, other than you who listen to this program. Stop and think of this. Forty-two percent of the American people believe the Russians tampered with vote totals, i.e., tampered with voting machines!

Now, I still today, I cringe every time I’m watching television news and I see somebody refer to Russian collusion and the elections, ’cause I know it is totally manufactured and make up — and so do these people in the media. Then I have to stop and ask them, do they? Or are they part of the brain-dead bunch that’s bought into it because of the blinding and hate-filled partisanship they have?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now Glenn Reynolds and his USA Today column today. Donald Trump must bust up Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. There’s now an acronym for this, FANG. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. They have become monopolies. But more importantly, they have become monopolies of information. The old Drive-By Media, old mainstream media had a monopoly on the news, and it was a profound monopoly, three networks and all the newspapers.

This is far more dense. The tentacles of this monopoly are woven much more deeply into the grain of our culture and society. And they are every bit as partisan as anything ever has been. They are exclusionary. Anything to the right of Karl Marx is obliterated, is not permitted. It is simply eliminated from Facebook, Google, search results, you name it, and the impact that it is having on our culture is deleterious.

And because they are monopolies, not just financial monopolies, although that’s true, too, Glenn Reynolds here, law professor, University of Tennessee, is suggesting that Trump, if he’s gonna get reelected in 2020, had better start doing a Teddy Roosevelt here and bust ’em up. We’ll explore this after a break.

Facebook, do you remember or are you aware that Friday, last week, the New York Times ran a hit piece on Facebook like nobody’s ever seen. And do you know what the primary offense Facebook committed? They didn’t stop the Russians from meddling. Folks, there wasn’t any. This is the extent to which this hoax has permeated our society.

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RUSH: Glenn Harlan Reynolds: “Donald Trump Must Bust Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google Monopolies Like Teddy Roosevelt.” He starts here by suggesting, mentioning that he just finished reading a book by a law professor Columbia named Tim Wu. It’s on antitrust and the name of the book is “The Curse of Bigness, and my biggest takeaway is that President Donald Trump has an opportunity to follow in former President Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps. …

“Big monopolies aren’t just an economic threat: They’re a political threat. Because they’re largely free of market constraints,” because they don’t have any competition, “they don’t have to put all their energy into making a better product for less money. Instead, they put a lot of their energy into political manipulation to protect their monopoly.” These are people who are uber-leftists. Whether you’re talking Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, they are all uber-leftists, and they are not just setting up their systems here to make money.

They’re setting up their systems to influence public opinion.

Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got married over the weekend. It turns out what we learn is that Chuck Schumer’s daughter works at Facebook. Chuck Schumer’s daughter makes six figures at Facebook. Facebook donated 50 grand to Chuck Schumer’s campaign. That’s just one example. Facebook, Google. Twitter is not part of this, but they ought to be. They’re all part of an online monopoly that controls the flow of information, that controls the flow of opinion, that is openly restrictive to Republican and conservative ideas.

It is punitive toward those ideas. It basically is eliminating them, and there’s nothing anybody can do. Conservatives can appeal, conservatives can ask, conservatives can request, and they are laughed at — and then they’re told that they’re imagining things. “There isn’t any bias! There’s no such thing as bias, there’s no such thing as media bias, and there’s no such thing as Facebook or Google bias. You’re just paranoid.” Yet do a Google search on any subject that involves conservatism and see where they send, see what they’re saying about you.

Facebook’s news digest is a daily contemptible hit piece on conservatism featuring lies and misrepresentations, and they are… They have no competition. They’re buying up the competition. Facebook buys up WhatsApp. Facebook buys up Instagram. They control virtually every aspect of it. Mr. Reynolds’ point here is that in a monopolistic circumstance like this, we are way beyond the concept of fairness and unfairness here. The idea of a free press is being stood on its head here.

There isn’t a free press. These on itself are monopolizing against a free press and eliminating the opinions and thinking and thoughts of well over half the people of this country. They are financially bankrolling Democrat after Democrat after Democrat after leftist cause after leftist cause, from wacko environmentalism to transgenderism to any number of left-wing issues. They are, at the same time, denying such participation to any opposing point of view while being destructive at the same time.

“Wu notes, ‘the more concentrated the industry, the more corrupt we can expect the political process to be,'” and concentrated it is. It’s to the point that if a Facebook employee happens to be a good friend of Brett Kavanaugh and shows up at the Kavanaugh hearings to show support, Facebook employees demand that he be fired. We’re talking about an executive at Facebook was told to stop going or he would lose his job. This is the employees demanding this of management.

Even if the employees were not demanding it of management, management would be so inclined. So Reynolds concludes, “Today, things look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s era,” with Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan. “A few monopolies occupy much of the tech world: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google … They gobble up potential competitors, as Facebook did with WhatsApp and Instagram. One need only look at the recent multicity scramble for Amazon’s second headquarters to see how much power these companies wield:

“Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, nonetheless managed to get the state of New York to build him a helipad,” and to give him a tax break of nearly $70,000 per employee. “[T]hese new tech monsters,” writes Glenn Reynolds, “have a one-two punch that Standard Oil [didn’t have]: Not only do they control immense wealth and important industries, but their fields of operation … give them direct political power that in many ways exceeds that of previous monopolies” of the Teddy Roosevelt era.

This is exactly right.

They should be busted up.

They are monopolies controlling the flow of information.

There’s nothing free about the press or the media in any which way. Let me give you an illustration of this. It’s kind of connected. Last Friday the New York Times did a big hit piece on Facebook. Facebook is being hit by the media for a lot of reasons. The reason Facebook got hit by the New York Times — a five-reporter hit piece! Now supposedly Zuckerberg, the founder, is looking at firing Sheryl Sandberg, who runs the place ’cause he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not old enough yet to be a CEO of something so big, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, either.

But she’s a got a liberal, a good women leftist — you know, “lean in” and this kind of stuff. She fits the bill. Facebook got hit by the New York Times for not doing enough to stop Russian meddling with their website. There wasn’t any! Again, the polling information you shared with you earlier shows that 42% of the American people believe that the Russians actually tampered with votes! That’s what “Russian collusion” has come to mean to 42% of the American people.

So part of the hoax is that the Russians were using Facebook to tamper with votes. You had some weirdo Russian troll farms running ads after the election. They ran ads after the election. They ran a pittance, $100,000 worth of ads. They didn’t run enough ads to affect one smidgen of 1% of anybody. But because Facebook did not deny them, Facebook is being hit by the others in the media for not punishing the Russians. Which means that Facebook actually facilitated Trump’s election, if you believe it.

This is how outrageous this is.

There wasn’t any Russian collusion, and there wasn’t any Russian meddling — and the New York Times does a hit piece on Facebook for allowing the Russians to do what they didn’t do! That’s how pervasive this entire hoax has been. So there’s a reason beyond this that the New York Times and others are going after Zuckerberg and Facebook, and you know what it is? Facebook’s bigger than the New York Times, and Facebook has the chance to steal advertising away from the New York Times and has been.

Facebook and its monopoly is beginning to victimize the New York Times. The New York Times is making up all these bogus reasons why Facebook is a danger because they’re not liberal enough! Because they didn’t do enough to stop the Russians! The Russians didn’t need to be stopped! The Russians didn’t have one thing to do with the 2016 election! And nobody… All Zuckerberg would have to do is stand up and say, “This whole New York Times story is bogus. There wasn’t any Russian meddling that determined the outcome of the election, and we did not facilitate it or make it happen!”

But Zuckerberg can’t because he has got to support the myth too! He’s got to fall right in line along with everybody else on the left that the Russians stole the election, that they were meddling and tampering with votes! This does not let Facebook off the hook; don’t misunderstand. Facebook is now losing subscribers or losing members, supposedly at a record clip. But regardless, this has become untenable, the social media construct of today. The left loves to throw around the word “fairness.” They’re obsessed by it. There isn’t any fairness. There isn’t anything approaching fairness in the social media universe. Busting them up as monopolies is not to facilitate conservatism. It is to help American consumers by providing competition and so forth, which they, these companies are all shutting out by buying them up.

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RUSH: “Researchers Say that Facebook Now Can Cause Depression,” and I totally understand why. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.