RUSH: The first thing I do when I roll out of bed, literally the first thing I do, I grab my iPhone. I have a whole system of programs set up that informs me of things I’m interested in that happened overnight, after I went to bed or even before I went to bed that I didn’t know about. And today the first couple things I saw almost made me want to put up my hands in frustration and say, “Just what the hell are we doing? What is the point?”

And it was the fact that two late-night comedy shows, Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert, went on rants about net neutrality last night, thereby submitting another level of proof that all it is is yet another phony, left-wing, expand-the-government idea. All it is is the next Obamacare. All it is is the next climate change. All it is is the next Democrat fraud.

And then I got to thinking how sad it is that liberalism has now corrupted late-night comedy. Some people like those late night comedy shows. When I was growing up, Johnny Carson, you know, you try to keep the TV lights low so your parents wouldn’t know you were watching. And then as I grew older I didn’t have to hide the fact I was watching it. And then Letterman came along and I watched that. But in the last number of years — and I always try to guard against it. Maybe it’s just I’m getting older and those shows are made for young demographics, and I’m not in the demographic anymore.

I always try to avoid the old fuddy-duddy position. When I was growing up I always promised myself I was not gonna become one of those old fuddy-duddies that thought everything about modern times was an absolute disaster. And I was always gonna do what I could to stay young at heart. That I was never not gonna abandon the Beatles and go back to Sinatra. My parents never adapted. They like what they like.

And I’m finding people my age, you know what their most favorite radio stations are? Stations that play the sixties, the oldies from a happier time gone by. And I’ve since learned because of the business I’m in that if you are not in the 18 to 49 demographic, nobody cares about you. When you hit 50 and older advertisers abandon you. They don’t care because they don’t think they can change your mind. But until then, you are fair game.

So anything the 18 to 49 demographic is doing is considered hip and interesting, and we need to keep our eyes on it, but once you hit 50, nobody cares. I vowed I was not gonna play. I was not gonna become irrelevant at 50. And of course now I’m 66, and I am not irrelevant. I am as and more relevant than ever. But it’s a daily fight. It’s a daily battle. And of course it’s an ongoing battle not to succumb to the negativity that’s out there. Nobody wants to hear it. I certainly don’t like rolling out of bed and seeing it.

But it just hit me today. Do you ever stop to think — because net neutrality, folks, is an entire fraud. It’s as fraudulent and hoax oriented as climate change. You do everything you can to prove it to people, and when you run out of proof, you simply say, “Okay, look, what’s the difference in climate change and net neutrality?” To these people, not a thing. It means one thing. It means the government controlling and regulating as much as it can get its hands on.

These lamebrains talking about net neutrality being the end of the internet do not know what they’re talking about. Net neutrality, the Obama rules, are only two years old. But it doesn’t matter. You ever stop to consider how much fraud we are hit with each day that is presented as news, that is presented as news hidden in entertainment, presented as information and cumulatively how negative it all is? And the cumulative impact that it has on people who absorb this stuff on a daily basis, if you want to understand the rage that is occurring all over our country, you have to only look at where people are going to find out what they are learning.

And the left in this country today is in a constant state of rage, so much so that late-night comedy isn’t funny anymore. It’s just the latest platform for deranged, delusional, left-wing liberalism. And it isn’t healthy. This constant dose of fraud that is always negative, that is piled on top of itself day after day after day, it takes a concerted effort to avoid being affected by it.

And even with the greatest efforts you can muster, you cannot avoid totally being affected by it. There’s so much of it, and it’s so all around us, it’s so constant and encompassing that you can’t ignore all of it, and thus you can’t avoid being affected by some of it. You know, there’s a story, I can’t remember who told me this. I was just reminded of it by my old buddy Andy McCarthy. We’ve been chatting about this.

Robert Bork had a story about watching the Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill hearings at the faculty lounge at Yale. And there was a colleague of his in there, a friend, people think it might have been Irving Kristol, but it doesn’t matter who it was. So Bork is sitting there watching the Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill hearings, and a guy walks up to him, “What do you think you’re looking at, Judge? What are you are witnessing here?”

And Bork said, “We are looking at the end of civilization.” And the guest said, after handing him a martini in the faculty lounge, hands Bork a martini, the guest says, “Well, yeah, we are, but it’ll take a long time, and it’s still possible to live well.” So even though the left has embarked on a course to transform and destroy our great country as we know it, it is going to take them awhile if they succeed.

We’re here to do what we can to see that they don’t, but that it is still possible to live well at the same time. But you’re gonna have avoid some of this stuff. I mean, for crying out loud, I’ve been on the net neutrality hobby horse here for this week, and I’m not gonna spend any time on it here again in terms of telling you what it is. All I want, for those of you on the fence about it — in fact, I’ll tell you this. This is the best way to illustrate how this stuff works.

I have a friend, a professional athlete. You’d all know his name. This guy, unbeknownst to me when I found out he was a listener… Unbeknownst to me, this guy is a bigger right-winger than any of us, but he’s not public about it. If I told you who it was, you’d be shocked. Well, I don’t know that you’d be shocked. You’d be surprised only because you don’t know. There’s nothing that this guy does that would indicate to you that he is one of us. So I get a note from him about a month ago, and he’s in a knock-down-drag-out with a stepson over net neutrality and he’s asking me for assistance.

So I reply to his questions, and he was getting sucked in himself by his stepson, by what his stepson was saying. His stepson was literally relaying every liberal bromide about this, and he was getting sucked in because he didn’t understand why some of these major internet service providers would be for it if it penalized them. I gave him an analogy. It’s kind of like what Rubio and these senators are doing. Have you noticed that Rubio came out yesterday and said he’s a “no” vote on tax cuts until they do something more with the child tax credit for poor kids or whatever?

Now, I know Senator Rubio, and I admire him, but I’m just gonna tell you what this is. He’s gonna vote for this. He’s not gonna vote against it. There’s a lot of attention being focused on it right now, and there is not one of these senators that wants to be the reason this thing doesn’t pass. But they’re using the opportunity of all of the attention to insert themselves in the story in a way that makes it look like they are holding out for a better deal for certain elements of their constituency. It’s a common practice. Politicians do it all the time.

“I can’t vote for this bill the way it’s currently written.” He’s gonna vote for it, as are most of these others. It’s just an opportunity now to have attention called to himself, particularly caring about poor kids. I’m not being critical. I’m telling you how this works. So when it comes down to major ISPs claiming they’re for net neutrality, what would you do? If you’re a major ISP, if you’re a cable provider and your young customers hate your guts because you charge them money — and if you think your young customers love net neutrality — what sweat is it off your back to say you support net neutrality, too?

When you know it’s not going to pass, when you know the FCC’s gonna get rid of it, what harm is it to you siding with your young customers (who hate you) and trying to change their minds? And I told my buddy, I said, “This is exactly what’s happening. It’s no different than an automobile company or General Electric signing on for climate change. It’s no different than Nabisco selling green Oreos to relate to climate change. ‘Keep everything green!’ It’s nothing more than marketing.

“They’re trying not to antagonize their customers who already hate them.” But,” I said to my buddy, “how in the world are you being fooled by this? Look at the people promoting it and look at everything they promote, and tell me how they’re promoting this any differently than they promote climate change.” With that, finally, the light went on, and he said, “You’re right! It’s not about the specifics. The specifics are what lured me in here. It’s about what the ultimate aim is: Putting government in charge of the internet for the exact opposite reason they claim.”

I watched… I read these little tech blogs, and my heart goes out to these young kids. They’re so wrong. They are so desperately wrong. They have been ginned up to hate everybody that provides them internet service. They hate them for a host of reasons, and they think the end of net neutrality means that evil internet service providers are going to start throttling their speeds, denying them service, slowing them down in favor of rich customers who will pay more. Let me give you a hint: That’s the way the market operates in virtually every aspect.

And they love this FedEx example. “Well, you know, Amazon, FedEx all packages are treated the same.” (chuckling) No, they’re not. You can order a package delivered in a week. You can have it ordered by 8:30 the next day. You can order, if you want to pay for it, a faster delivery speed. The internet is no different. But while these guys are worrying… “Throttling” is when the company slows down your connection speed, and they do it to save data. But these guys think they’re doing it to cheat them. The thing is, that’s been happening the past two years under the rules of net neutrality!

You know, I encounter every day in preparing this program mountains of ignorance coupled with stupidity in some cases, and it’s just frustrating to me, the ill-education and the maleducation that is the happening here. And no matter what the issue the left pushes, it is all about denying the population of our country expanded liberty and freedom in place of the government regulating more and more behavior of people, wherever they are, including on the internet. And then these young people glom right onto it and think it’s the greatest thing in the world and if it doesn’t happen, they’re going to lose their internet.

This is what they’ve been told, and they believe it. And of course, for the first 15/20 years of the internet when there was no net neutrality is when it expanded and grew to be this great resource that it is. All of this is in utter defiance of common sense. So I get out of bed and I see that the late-night comedian, Jimmy Kimmel — who has now become the nation’s expert in health care for children — and now that idiot Colbert and probably that idiot, John Oliver, at HBO.

All of them now. Climate change is no different than net neutrality. And then yesterday, don’t forget a brain — a one-of-a-kind brain, an intelligence so rare we never encounter it — Sandra Fluke worried to death that net neutrality, eliminating net neutrality would all of a sudden make it impossible for women to get abortions. Do you know why? Because net neutrality would lead to the elimination of how-to-get-an-abortion instructions on the internet.

A bunch of right-wingers are gonna come along and simply erase and clog up the Planned Parenthood site or whatever, and women who want to get abortions would not, starting today, be able to find out where to go or how to do it. What utter stupidity. It’s the kind of stupidity that makes me fear for the country, and it makes me so grateful at the same time to have people like you in my audience. I cannot tell you how appreciative I am.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Cookie went out and found Jimmy Kimmel last night. The worst thing that happened to Jimmy Kimmel, you know, his ratings are down 30%, ever since he started this health care business on his kid. The reason why is because he’s become — you know who’s feeding him all it is stuff is Chuck Schumer’s office.

He has become the late-night connection for the Senate Democrat leader, Chuck Schumer. That’s who provides Kimmel his talking points and his opinions and the way to talk about health care as it relates to his son with the heart defect. And, of course, this is very, very cheap when you take somebody who doesn’t know anything about health care and they get a sick child and then the emotion that is involved in taking the child to the hospital, getting treatment, hoping the child lives, when that becomes, that one emotional experience — This is why legislation is not written during times of emotion. This is why trials are not involved. Everything is done too avoid emotion.

Emotion clouds everything. One case, one person, one family’s experience cannot define, cannot establish policy for a national system of health care. But that’s what’s happened. Kimmel’s example has become, by design, the Democrat Party saw it, they made a connection — I’m not making it up. Schumer’s office, maybe others, provide Kimmel his talking points. And since they thought it went so well with health care, now they’re feeding Kimmel the same on net neutrality.

Kimmel doesn’t know anything about net neutrality and probably in the normal course of things doesn’t care about it. But he’s been made to care about it, and his experience with all the attention he got, which was very positive and heartwarming with the example of his sick child, has propelled him now to a new area, and he’s no longer a late-night comedian; he’s much, much more.

And it just ought to tell you something, that when a guy goes from supporting Obamacare to supporting climate change to supporting net neutrality, it ought to tell you the issues don’t matter. There’s one thing that glues all of these things together. And it is the growth of government. It is the idea that nobody can live their life the proper way without government telling them what they can and can’t do.

And of course the people in the government regulating this couldn’t do this on their own. There’s nobody in government who could have created the internet. There’s nobody in the government who could have written software for the internet. There’s not a person in the government, in the bureaucracy who could do anything contributory to the American health care system.

But it’s amazing how all these nonexperienced, nonprofessional politicians who’ve never had real life experience become the experts in people’s mind, and the people who actually build these businesses become the enemy. And the Democrats have parlayed that into an overall hatred of corporations, a hated of the private sector of the economy and a love and devotion that the only element out there making it fair and making it possible to live without being harmed is the United States government, and particularly liberal Democrats in the United States government.

So here is Jimmy Kimmel last night during his monologue on what is supposed to be a late-night comedy show speaking about the FCC vote to end net neutrality.

KIMMEL: The FCC did something absolutely despicable today. They voted to put an end to net neutrality. Now, this is the rule that says everyone gets equal access to the internet, a big company or somebody selling crocheted owls from their house in the Midwest.

Now, as long as they tell us they’re doing it now, internet service providers will be allowed to slow down or block web traffic to any website or streaming service they like, which benefits the big telecom companies and does the opposite for all of us. They did this even though 83% of Americans support net neutrality and two million of the people who supposedly wrote to the FCC to oppose net neutrality were bogus, many of them turned out to be dead people. Someone stole the identities of dead people to help push this through.

So now we have to hope Congress agrees to vote on and reverse it. But I just want to say, thank you, President Trump. Thanks to you and this jackhole you appointed to run the FCC, (laughter) big corporations are about to take full control of the internet. So Merry Christmas, everybody.

RUSH: How many laughs did you hear in that monologue? Did you hear anybody laughing? How many people you hear applaud in that monologue? This is not why they watch this show. By the same token, if you turn on Nightline and whoever’s hosting it starts doing a joke routine for the first ten minutes, you’re not gonna watch that. That’s not why you tune in. That’s what’s so special about this show, we do both, irreverent humor and serious discussion, credibility on both sides. But it’s very rare people can do it. Kimmel can’t do it, and neither can Colbert.

But that doesn’t matter because they’re getting oodles of love and support from political areas, politicians and so forth. And they’ve now become self-professed experts. And what Kimmel said here is simply not true. I’m not gonna parse this sentence by sentence. I’ve already done that. He’s just ignorantly wrong here. He’s repeating things he’s been told about how the little guy is gonna be slowed down and the big guy isn’t and these evil corporations can deny use of — what sense does it make for these people to harm their customers?

What sense does it make for them to make your internet service slow down so much that you get mad at ’em and look for alternatives? What sense does that make? Anyway, Ajit Pai was on Fox this morning, Fox & Friends. Steve Doocy spoke with him. He said, “Exciting day there yesterday at the FCC.” Oh, by the way, this business about all the fake dead people commenting on the net neutrality rules. Folks, the bots were from the opponents!

All of the comments, the reason Pai and everybody ignored them is because most of them were fake, as are most of these people claiming they’re never gonna support an advertiser. They’re fake. We’re surrounded by so much fraud, it’s impossible to know what’s real anymore on your own. You have to have somebody you trust tell you what’s fake or fraudulent or maybe you trust yourself. But even then you’re gonna have doubts. Anyway, here’s Pai, and Doocy said, “Why is Jimmy Kimmel wrong about this?”

PAI: He’s getting everything wrong about it. The free and open internet we had prior to 2015 is the one we’re going to have going forward and that kind of name-calling hysteria is disappointing, but it’s not surprising. Those who’ve said that internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong starting this morning as people send emails, check on their Twitter accounts, post on Facebook and the like. We have a free and open internet going forward, and the FCC and the FTC going forward are going to make sure that happens.

RUSH: That’s right. They’re not ending regulation. They’re transferring some of it to the Federal Trade Corporation, which means if anybody has a beef, they go there, but this point is being overlooked. I would venture to say, I’m gonna take a wild guess here that 80% or more of the American people have no idea that the last two years we have been living under Obama net neutrality rules. They don’t even know what it is.

So when you tell ’em, well, prior to two years ago, were you unhappy with the internet? “No, I loved it.” Why’d you love it? “Well, I just loved it. It was there, I could do anything I want. I hated my provider.” Yeah, you hated your provider ten years ago, didn’t you? You hated your provider five years ago. You hated your provider the day you signed up with the provider because you’ve been told the providers are out to get you. But in those 10 to 15 years before net neutrality rules, did you ever feel like you were being shut out?

Did you ever feel like you couldn’t get your point of view across? Were you having trouble finding points of view you wanted? No! There was more speech, there were more opinions, there was more places to go to find out things that we have ever had in history. And here comes Obama, and let me tell you the real reason they put net neutrality in. All of this other stuff’s a smoke screen. They put net neutrality in to make sure the internet didn’t become the next talk radio and Fox News. They can’t beat talk radio, and they can’t shut down Fox News. They want to control content. They want to control opinion. And the internet had way too much conservatism, too easily accessed.

Obama’s net neutrality rules put the government in charge of being the referee. “You know what? Yes, we have a liberal site here, but they got five conservative sites over there. This is not neutral. This is not equal. Way too much conservatism on the internet. Way too many conservative blogs.” This is what they were hoping to use it for. All this business about your internet service provider slowing down your speeds, throttling your speeds or whatever, that’s the way they hooked you in.

What they were really gonna do with this — and it was intended to continue with Hillary after she won — they were gonna slowly but surely, like with Obamacare, start to exert control over the content of the internet because they were hell-bent on the internet not becoming the next talk radio, Fox News. When they didn’t have control over it for those first 15 years, you couldn’t miss an opinion on anything. You wanted to know the answer to anything, you could get it.

You wanted an opinion on that story or that story? You could get 15,000 opinions if you wanted. There was no problem. There was no discrimination. There was no lack of equality. It’s like everything else. If you have a website, it’s up to you to figure out how to draw eyeballs. It’s up to you to figure out how to draw attention. If other websites do better than yours, it’s not the fault of the network. It’s not the fault of the market. It’s not because somebody’s being unfair.

And just because somebody’s website has more traffic than yours doesn’t mean we need the government regulating all of it so that your website’s treated more fairly. This is all such a crock! So if you had no problem with the internet from, say, 1995 up ’til 2015, then you ought to have no fear. The problem with the last two years of net neutrality is that they didn’t really get going. I mean, it was… Folks, they were gonna have to do this slow. If they would have overnight implemented their intentions, there would have been massive outrage.

Because it would have been the government denying access to certain websites based on, “They’ve got enough traffic as it is. They don’t need any more.” They would have been directing traffic. They would have been determining who gets what, where. That’s what they wanted control of it for! They’re liberals! They’re not interested in openness, neutrality, fairness. They are interested in control. Jimmy Kimmel will never understand this. I don’t care… We can have the smartest professors in the world lecturing him for a year and he wouldn’t get it because his mind isn’t open enough, nor any of the rest of these clowns.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Pete from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to get a call in here in the first hour. Pete, how are you, sir?

CALLER: Very good. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir. You bet.

CALLER: What an honor to speak with you.

RUSH: I appreciate that. Same here.

CALLER: Well, I was telling Snerdley that my son is a junior in high school and comes home all the time with information that is just fed to him. So, net neutrality, for instance, how he comes home and he tells me about this stuff. Every day I make it a point to be in my car so I can listen to your show because without you, I would not be able to tell him the truth and have him think about all these things that he’s hearing. Without you, I would not be able to stay a step ahead of what he is learning in our public schools, and it’s just terrible. So I just wanted to thank you, because the stuff that they spew out to these kids — and they believe everything their teachers tell ’em.

RUSH: I know. I know they do. Look, I appreciate your comments there, and I sincerely understand and I do appreciate it. It’s one of the reasons why I take what I do so seriously. I know that what you say the true. But ask yourself this question: When listening to you tell this story… Your kid… Your 16-year-old, you say?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: He comes home and the teacher has just beat him up over … net neutrality?

CALLER: Or global warming.

RUSH: Right. Take your pick. What is any of that…? What course? What course is this net neutrality tirade taught?

CALLER: Government. (laughing)

RUSH: Well, that makes some sense. If it were phys ed or Art Appreciation 101, it would be a different story. But even so, this is just current events disguised as government or history or politics, and it’s being used to propagandize kids. Well, thank goodness you’re there, sir. I appreciate it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no, no, no. That’s not right. That is not right. I was just asked about Netflix, a net neutrality question. Since everybody loves Netflix, let me use an example. Let’s say… I don’t know. Let’s say Comcast. Comcast provides mobile service, wireless internet and Wi-Fi for your home. Let’s say that Comcast began a promotion to offer free Netflix streaming. Obama’s net neutrality would not permit it. Unfair! Non-Comcast customers couldn’t access it; therefore it wouldn’t be permitted. There’s your net neutrality.

But if Comcast wants to make the deal with Netflix and if they want to offer that as an introductory thing — no Netflix subscription ever, for three months or what have you — the Obama administration would have shut that down and stopped all kinds of competitive pricing. It would have been a disaster. Look, all you have to look at is who is promoting this. It’s the same climate change crowd. It’s the same Obamacare crowd. What it is should not even be a factor. Who’s promoting it should be all you need to know to oppose it.