RUSH: Have I mentioned lately how much I admire the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis? Details coming up, but he has launched “an ambitious crackdown on Big Tech.” Somebody with the guts to do it. He’s somebody also not closing down his state because of the COVID virus.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, Ron DeSantis. This guy has got what we call an iron-enforced spine, the governor of Florida. “In a 45-minute speech, the governor [of Florida, Ron DeSantis] identified Big Tech companies as the leading threat to American democracy and freedom of expression today, and pledged that Florida Republicans would take action.

“[He] accused the tech giants of ‘clear viewpoint discrimination,’ highlighting the censorship of Donald Trump and the removal of Parler from the internet and Apple and Google-controlled app stores. ‘The core issue here is this: are consumers going to have the choice to consume the information they choose, or are oligarchs in Silicon Valley going to make those choices for us?

“No group of people should exercise such power, especially not tech billionaires in Northern California,'” and, man, oh, man is that right. Tell me: Where else do you hear anybody speaking out like this — in government? Yeah, you have some op-ed writers, some other people speaking out on this, but this? You don’t hear elected officials so much. Some members of Congress do.

I’m looking for a piece that I have. Here it is. I found it. Miranda Devine in the New York Post today has a great piece on the same subject, and that is these tech oligarchs literally running the news business, running the opinion business. They’re running the information business in America. Now, we’re watching… Let me just tell you: We are watching the de facto merger of media and social media and state — government — the merger of giant corporations and state.

This is when Democrats control Washington. The propaganda arm of the Democrat Party has never been more powerful than today, and don’t forget that they’ve got Antifa and Black Lives Matter soldiers as their military arm. Republicans who do not cave to the extraordinary pressure exerted on them in Washington today… Do you know who they are?

They’re tomorrow’s leaders. Republicans who do not cave to all of this are tomorrow’s leaders. Trump is the model going forward. Yes siree, my friends. Donald Trump is the model. You find something interesting? It was just made aware to me… I got a note from somebody who said, “You know it’s been two weeks we haven’t heard from Trump at all?

“Two weeks! That hasn’t happened in four years. Two weeks. In these same two weeks we’ve heard nothing but ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’ from the Democrats and the media,” and I had the same observation today. I was watching CNN, and they were doing a story about how compensate the Trump team was last December in the Oval Office.

I said to myself, “Is it so bad that there’s no news, that the only story you’ve got is what a rotten guy Trump was last December?” It was a story about how “conspiracy theories” were the dominant subject in a knock-down-drag-out conversation/discussion in the Oval Office in the middle of December. I’m saying, “You know, we’ve got a brand-new president.

“We’ve got all kinds of stuff happening. We’ve got the impeachment coming up and all you guys is the CNN can do is a long, drag-out story on Donald Trump’s December? He’s gone! He’s no longer president. It doesn’t matter,” and yet it does, apparently, to them. They are not going to let up on the gas pedal, folks.

They’re gonna continue whatever they think they have to do to destroy the guy, to impugn the guy, to ruin the guy, his family, supporters. They’re not gonna let up on the gas. Just amazing. So here’s Miranda Devine, and “Facebook’s Squad of Thought Police” is her piece. She says, “When you see him speak, it’s hard to believe that such a gormless geek as Mark Zuckerberg may be the most powerful person in the free world.

“But socially inept tech oligarchs now wield unprecedented power to censor political thought and speech and are transforming America into an authoritarian surveillance state. For now,” and that’s the key in that sentence. “For now, it is conservatives they are silencing and demonizing, in partnership with the Democratic Party.” For now.

But after a while when they think they think that they’ve finished that, they’re gonna move on to whoever else is insolent, and they’re gonna begin to demonize and silence that group. Who will it be? We don’t know. But they’re not going to stop exercising this power they have simply by vanquishing conservatives. This kind of power, you have fun using, and they’re gonna be doing it day in and day out.

“We already know Silicon Valley leans left… But the partisan power of Big Tech was laid bare this month when they acted in concert to censor Donald Trump and many of his 74 million voters, and then crushed free speech competitor Parler.

Now Facebook has turbo-charged its woke corporate agenda with a new ‘vice president of civil rights’ — an Obama administration alumnus obsessed with systemic police racism — and a global ‘oversight board’ of retired politicians and human-rights activists paid to rubber-stamp [Facebook’s] crackdown on conservatives, a.k.a. ‘domestic terrorists.'”

So Facebook has hired a new squad of thought police aimed at conservatives, “for now.” For now. Trump is the model going forward. He hasn’t spoken… Two weeks, he has not said a word. The Democrats have done nothing but talk about Trump. I think they’ve been trying to get Trump to react.

They’ve been trying to get Trump to say something in response to what they’re doing. He has not taken the bait. But they can’t forget him. They can’t. They’re not gonna ever be able to forget him. The media, CNN, will never see the day where they do not lead with a story on the Trump administration, even if it’s three years from now.