RUSH: The Drive-By Media wants you to think that this massive stock market plunge is because of the coronavirus. Some of it is, but the vast majority of this has nothing to do with the coronavirus, absolutely nothing to do with the coronavirus. I am here to tell you what the massive market plunge is all about.

Now, I don't know what's gonna bring it to a screeching halt, but something will because this is gonna end as all things end. The coronavirus is being hyped beyond what it is. Rahm Emanuel, right here we have it, "Coronavirus Could Be 'Devastating' for Trump Reelection Bid." Go to the audio sound bite roster. The Drive-By Media is back to weaponizing the coronavirus against the Trump administration, once again claiming this could provide an opening for the Democrats which continues to just outrage me.

I mean, these are the people that claim to have all the compassion, they have all the understanding, they have all of the feelings for people, they're running around, "could be an opening for the Democrats." What does it mean to say that the coronavirus, it could be an opening for the Democrats? It means the suffering of people could be an opening for Democrats. And they're all excited about it. And they're unable to let go of it.

Now, before we get to the coronavirus, in particular the American political situation in specific, let me explain to you what's going on with the stock market and the oil markets. There is in Saudi Arabia -- to me this is fascinating. There's a 31 - he may be 33 years old now - a 33-year-old kid. He is one of the many sons of the current king of Saudi Arabia. Now, the king of Saudi Arabia is one of the many brothers of the founder of Saudi Arabia who goes way, way -- Saudi Arabia is not that old.

As a piece of real estate, it's old as biblical times, but as it's currently structured, Saudi Arabia, it was founded by a guy whose last name is al-Saud. And he had countless sons. He had some brothers out there, too, but he's had countless sons. He had enough sons that for the last 50 years one of them has been king. Now, prior to the current king, the old king was King Abdullah, and King Abdullah did not have any sons. Well, he had sons, but he did not have any that attempted to make end runs around the royal family structure.

So when King Abdullah died, the next son of the founder was King Salman. King Salman himself is 80-some-odd years of age. Don't know how intact he is 'cause we don't know about the inner workings of the Saudi royal family. They're more mysterious than Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. And they've got much more oil than Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have. But, you see, oil is no longer the exclusive province of Saudi Arabia, and therein begins the beginning of the problem faced by the kingdom.

It wasn't that long ago the world depended on them. They could set the price for oil. They ran OPEC. They literally could determine world economies. And everybody was dependent on them, and everybody kissed their rear ends, and everybody did everything they could to be friends. And these guys endowed presidential libraries. I mean, you'd have to go wide and far to find a presidential library in this country not primarily or significantly underwritten by a Saudi king. King Abdullah was a particularly good friend of the Bushes, for example. This is not a criticism. I'm just giving you some background here.

There was a member of the Saudi royal family who was an ambassador to the United States. And his name was Prince Bandar. He lived in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and he became as Americanized as the royal family will allow any of its members to become Americanized. And Prince Bandar bin Sultan used the diplomatic pouch of Saudi Arabia for all sorts of things.

Like did you ever wonder how it was -- I maybe shouldn't divulge -- I'll go ahead and tell you. Do you ever wonder how it is so many Washington power brokers ended up with Cuban cigars? They're in the Saudi diplomatic porch. You can't question what comes in the diplomatic pouch. I mean, folks, these people had it wired. They had it wired. And when oil was the exclusive province of Saudi Arabia, there's always been oil producing countries, but you remember the old saw. All those years, all those presidential campaigns, all these candidates promising to end dependence on Saudi oil, and nobody ever did.

We have had the means to do so for a long time, but we never did it because it would be expensive. To cut to the chase, fracking has done as much to destroy the Saudi exclusivity over oil in the world as anything, and fracking is a distinct American procedure, and it's a way of getting oil out of the ground that heretofore was way too expensive to do. It was not productive. It was not profitable. You could get it, but it would cost you more than you could ever sell refined products for. You couldn't sell gasoline or kerosene, jet fuel for anywhere enough of a profit to make fracking worthwhile.

But as American technology improved and as more and more people got involved -- and, you know, the Dakotas have been revived by shale oil production. A number of states in this country have. It is the fact that we can now get oil from shale rock that has done one of the greatest bits of damage to Saudi Arabia. Now, we're allies with them, so we've not held it over their heads nearly as much as we could have. But we are now a net exporter of fossil fuel energy, a net exporter of natural gas and oil brought about by fracking.

Whenever you have had natural gas, you find oil. Wherever you find oil, you'll find natural gas. Natural gas is a clean fossil fuel. It's not a pollutant. It doesn't create so-called greenhouse gases. It's clean as it can be -- and we own it. We own it! But we've always had an allied relationship with Saudi Arabia. But the Russians have not, and what's happening today with oil is that the new crown prince, this 33-year-old kid who has...

He put his own mother under house arrest! I want you to figure this. Now, follow me on this. Mohammed bin Salman, 31 years old, decides that he's going to become the next king. There are many of his brothers older than he is, further in line, closer in line to the crown than he is. But somehow, Mohammed bin Salman has launched himself above every other rival, including his own brothers. He's now the crown prince, which means he's de facto ruler of the country.

His father, King Salman, still is the figurehead, but has allowed all of this to happen. In fact, in order for Mohammed bin Salman to secure this position he had to put his mother and two of her sisters in house arrest for like three to four months, just sequester them away in one of the palaces (she was essentially in prison) so that she could not run opposition to him in favor of some of her other sons. Stop and think.

Her husband is Mohammed bin Salman's father. Where was he when the kid put the mother under house arrest? He didn't care! This should tell you about women and Saudi Arabian forms of Islam. The mother can be sacked away. Now, granted, it's gonna be a palatial house in which she's in house arrest, but she's under house arrest. She can't leave. She can't interact with the family. She's essentially in prison.

Her son puts her there with two or three of her sisters, and her husband (his dad) either doesn't know or is perfectly fine with it. You and I cannot relate to this. Snerdley, can be could you imagine putting your mom in jail and your dad not caring that you did it? And then can you imagine all of that happening so that you can take from your dad whatever he has and run the show? Well, this is what's happening. But the kid's 31, 33 years old. It's an amazing story.

There's a book coming out (I think being released tomorrow) about all of this. I haven't read it. But all of this fascinates me on a number of levels. Now, Mohammed bin Salman... I'll tell you something else that happened, folks, before I get to what's roiling the markets here. I want you to have as much background as you can. It was either last summer or two summers ago, and I forget which because time flies. One of the ritziest luxury hotels in Saudi Arabia is the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh.

Mohammed bin Salman took it over and used it as a jail! He put his nephews, he put his brothers, he put his uncles in this prison and charged them with corruption. One of them, one of the guys that he put in jail, was... If you remember, after 9/11 there was a Saudi prince -- yeah, Saudi, Abu Dhabi, maybe -- Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin or some such thing. This guy offered $10 million or $15 million or billion to help we build the World Trade Center if we would do something with the Jews -- and, of course, we told the guy to pound sand.

But he's a heavy investor in a lot of American businesses and products. He was a heavy investor in Apple for a time. Mohammed bin Salman put this guy in jail in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and said, "You have gotten what you have by virtue of corruption. You need to give back to the government of Saudi Arabia X number of billions of dollars." The guy was in jail for months before the guy finally said, "Okay, I'll give the money back." A 31-, 33-year-old kid was doing all the this.

When I say "kid," everybody he's doing this to is 20 years older than he is and has been around a lot of longer and supposedly would have roots of power that are much deeper than his. But he's doing all of this with the permission of his father, the king. Well, Mohammed bin Salman decided about three to four years ago that Saudi Arabia was too vulnerable as an oil-only nation. "If the only export and product we had for people to invest in was oil," he said, and he was right about this, "we're too vulnerable.

"Because what happens with the supply when and if that day comes?" And it's hundreds of years from now, by the way. Don't believe anybody who says we're gonna run out of oil next year, next month. We've got so many hundreds of years of oil, 'cause oil continues to be made. A lot of people when they hear "fossil fuels," they think oil is the result of dinosaurs that died years ago and pretty soon we're gonna run out of all those fossils. That's not what fossil fuels are.

It's a big misnomer and something improperly named. Fossil fuels are still being made, and they're made in particular places in the world. Saudi Arabia happens to be where there are most deposits. But so is the United States. Now, Mohammed bin Salman was correct about something. He was correct that the Saudi royal family and Saudi Arabia needed to diversify. So you might remember he went on a world tour shortly after Trump was elected.

Mohammed bin Salman comes to the United States, has massive meetings with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He had massive meetings with tech valley people, Silicon Valley people. He had massive meetings with Hollywood people. He was pitching Saudi Arabia as an investment site for all kinds of things besides oil. He wanted movie studios to be built there. He wanted Silicon Valley to invest in structures, factories, think tanks, you name it, in Saudi Arabia.

This roiled Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia had never westernized like this. They did not believe in westernizing like this, and when Mohammed bin Salman went to meet these guys, he dressed in a pair of jeans and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. He'd maybe wear the headdress, but that was it. He's kind of a short little, chunky guy when you take the robes off of him. But that doesn't matter. He's got whatever hundreds of gazillions of dollars he's got, which speaks.

Well, while it was well thought out, this plan to diversify Saudi Arabia has not materialized. In other words, Hollywood has not built a bunch of studios there yet. Silicon Valley has not built a bunch of factories, think tanks, or -- shall we say -- intellectual education centers there. They may, but they haven't yet. At the same time that Mohammed bin Salman was doing this, he was also authoring regulations that would allow women to drive for the first time in Saudi Arabia.

Remember that? He was allowing women to meet in public without permission of their husbands. He was allowing them to go to lunch together without their husbands or security watchdogs being around. This was all designed specifically to make the Western world think that Saudi Arabia was modernizing, westernizing so as to be more easily seen as a place to invest money. Well, the plans were visionary, and they were wise.

I mean, Saudi Arabia... Everybody needs to diversify. You never want to have all your eggs in one basket, even if it is Saudi Arabia and oil. Because especially with the rise of the United States and fracking, they are not any longer the go-to place in the world if you want oil or to even set the price or the supply. Saudi Arabia used to be able to set the supply, thus demand, and determine the price for oil around the world. They were OPEC.

Well, look, this is the CliffsNotes version of what's happened. Over the weekend and toward the end of late last week, Mohammed bin Salman was triggered. Something set the guy off, and he decided... There was an effort to destroy OPEC a year or so ago that bombed miserably, and it involved... If you remember, the oil market was flooded with supply, and the price of crude came way down. The price of gasoline came way down. You might remember, people were very worried about how the producers were gonna stay in business.

It was thought that this was an attack on fracking, which it was. Fracking still costs more to get oil out of the ground than traditional drilling of wells. Well, now we throw into the picture Russia. Mohammed bin Salman has made the decision -- or the strategic realization has occurred to him -- that if he's really gonna corner the oil market, if he's gonna really do damage, he's got to do damage to Russia. Russia is a massive producer of oil. But Russia's oil infrastructure is old and outdated, and what really is happening here -- the reason why the market's down 1,300 points today -- is oil.

Mohammed bin Salman is flooding the world oil markets with cheap Saudi crude, and his number one target is Russia, and shale oil -- which, to an extent, is the United States. I'm sure that his effort here is not intended to do great damage to us, and I'm sure he's been telling everybody in Washington, "Stick with me on this. Our common enemy is Russia," because Russia in the Middle East is Syria, and Saudi Arabia... Look, it's Mohammed bin Salman that started the war in Yemen, which ended up getting one of their oil depots blown up a few months ago.

Anyway, this is very, very complicated global geopolitics.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, this drop in the oil price is gonna be good for the consumer, folks. This is good news for everybody except for producers. This always happens every time the production price of oil drops. The crude price, the barrel price, everybody panics; the stock market drops. But you watch what happens to your gasoline price coming up this summer going into the election. One more thing about Mohammed bin Salman. This past weekend he actually placed under house arrest one of his father's brothers (who was in line for succession to the crown) and one of his, I think, cousins for plotting a coup against him! They're in jail, and they rank higher...

Well, nobody does since he's crown prince.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Throw that picture up there, Brian. We're talking about Mohammed bin Salman. There he is for those of you watching on the Dittocam. This is the guy who's -- you know, the age, I say 31, 33. Probably 33 by now, but he is not the oldest son of King Salman, but he is the crown prince. He has arranged himself to be the next king of Saudi Arabia.

He is acting already as though he is with his father's full-fledged permission, including putting his own mother under house arrest to make sure she could not run interference against him with her other sons. And his father (doing impression), "Oh, you put mom in jail for -- fine. Way to go, son. I wish I'd thought of that." I don't know how it works, folks. I don't know how this stuff works. We can't relate to it.

But what is happening with the stock market today is 85% this. It is the crown prince of Saudi Arabia declaring open warfare on Russia involving the price of oil and the flow of oil, the free flow of oil at market prices is what this is all about. And the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, he's taking advantage of the fact that they've got more oil than they know what to do with.

He is lowering the price and trying to run people out of the market by making it impossible for them to stay in it. He cannot do damage to us in this regard because we don't need their oil anymore, and that's thanks to who? That's thanks to American capitalism and fracking and people who stuck with that despite all of the environmentalist wackos trying to shut 'em down. Despite all of the left-wing Democrats trying to shut down pipelines and fracking, we are no longer dependent on Saudi Arabia.

So what they do with their supply of oil as it relates to OPEC is something that we have some protection against. It's not that we're totally unaffected by it because it still is the price of oil. But we can satisfy our own needs. We can keep our country running. We can keep our people's automobiles fueled. We can keep our electric cars charged. We can do whatever we want because we have our own independent supply.

Now, Russia's economy is such that they don't produce oil for the same reasons we do. They are a totalitarian regime, and their interest in oil is selling it so that the government will have wealth, so that Putin and his buddies will have wealth, so that his oligarch buddies who are in commodities and chemicals and who need oil will have wealth. It's not for the Russian people.

They do just enough to keep whatever Russian economy or economic activity going as they can, but their interest in it is personal much more than it is here. I'm not trying to say there aren't people with personal interest in oil, but with a capitalist country such as ours, a representative republic such as ours, the people's concerns are predominant because the people of this country determine our economic strength. That's why employment matters; that's why wages matter. The American people's ability to spend money, to engage in commerce is what makes us a superpower. It's what empowers us to have the biggest military in the world, is the wealth of the American people, the wealth of our economy in general.

And the free flow of oil at market prices is one of the most fundamental aspects of the United States as a superpower, as a superpower militarily, as a superpower economically, that we become self-reliant when it comes to oil and natural gas and fossil fuels makes us more immune to these kinds of actions than we have ever been. We're not totally immune. What is happening here is gonna have an impact on producer prices around the world, but the upside to this for us is the damage this could do to Russia.

There's no love lost between Saudi Arabia and Russia, and that's because of Middle Eastern geopolitics and warfare. By the way, Donald Trump is standing aside and letting Mohammed bin Salman wreak all kinds of havoc on his buddies in Russia. I hope the Democrats are noticing this. I hope the Drive-By Media -- I think the Democrats in the media are too stupid -- I don't think any of them even know what I just spent the first half hour of this program telling you.

I don't think they have the slightest clue. They're so busy trying to make the case that this massive market plunge today is because of the coronavirus. And it isn't. This is about oil. And it's about specifically Saudi Arabia's attempt to drive competitors out of the market and Saudi Arabia, by the way, is also trying to shut down OPEC. They're sick and tired. Mohammed bin Salman does not like OPEC. If they're not gonna beat OPEC, then there isn't gonna be one.

OPEC is nations like Venezuela. OPEC, the oil producing and exporting countries, that's what OPEC stands for. And there's a whole bunch of them besides Saudi Arabia, and they're sick and tired of having to defer to them. So it's an effort by the crown prince to essentially reestablish Saudi Arabia as the dominant force in the Middle East where oil is concerned because his efforts to diversify have so far not come to fruition.

By the way, his idea of diversifying was a great idea and trying to get investment in Saudi Arabia from places like Hollywood and Silicon Valley and other industries, it was well thought out. It hasn't happened because the Western world is still not sure that any money they put in Saudi Arabia is gonna end up still being theirs. It's gonna take some time.

This is a young guy, and he's trying to convince people that when he finally does become king, it's gonna be an entirely different situation. That if you're Hollywood and you open a bunch of studios that they're gonna be partners with you, that they're not gonna nationalize you. I mean, the Rockefeller family discovered oil in Saudi Arabia. And at one point it didn't take the Saudis long to figure out, well, to hell with the Rockefellers, we're gonna take it.

So there's now a company called Aramco which is a Saudi oil company. The Rockefellers got their money out of it, don't misunderstand. But if things had not changed, Saudi Arabia would be owned by the Rockefellers today. I'm boiling this down to the essence of terms. So if you're Hollywood, if you're Disney, if you're Warner Brothers or whatever and here comes the crown prince suggesting, "You know what? You should invest in Saudi Arabia. We think you should produce movies and so forth." You think you're gonna do it, but what guarantee do you have that one day some other leader's gonna wake up and say, "You know what? We love this oil company so much or this movie company, we're just gonna nationalize it. We're just gonna take it away from you. What are you gonna do about it?"

And until some time goes by that there's some trust and some notion of stability -- I mean, there's already been two coup attempts against Mohammed bin Salman, and he's not even king yet. He's just the crown prince. Now, he has successfully batted down these coup attempts. One of them was just this past weekend. But his efforts to get foreign investment in there have not yet paid off. They may someday. But since they haven't, he's gotta go back to shoring up their position in oil, which means for right now he's trying to take as many competitors out by lowering the price and forcing them out of business. It's essentially trying to corner the market in oil.

But his target here is not us. His target is Vladimir Putin and the Soviet Union. The benefits to you, the benefits to you and me, gasoline prices, folks, are gonna come down. They may come down as much as 10 to 15 cents a gallon or more, depending on how long this goes on. This is going to have a terrific upside for the consumer, 'cause these people can't stop producing oil. The Saudis can't turn off the spigots. They'd have nothing. They've gotta keep producing income. And ditto Russia.

I mean, look. For all of the environmentalist wackos, this is a world which is governed by and runs on the free flow of oil at market prices. And you're seeing what happens when somebody tries to interrupt the free flow at market prices. Saudi Arabia today is trying to artificially -- well, not artificially, they're doing it. But it's not market forces. They're unilaterally making decisions which are lowering the price and thus disrupting the flow. And this is what happens.

This world, this country, I don't care what anybody in the environmental community says, or what the climate change crowd says, this is a world governed by the free flow of oil at market prices. And when the crude price, the per-barrel price comes down, you the consumer are gonna make out like bandits. You're gonna have lower gasoline prices, you're gonna have lower energy costs everywhere in the economic sector. You're gonna have lower heating oil prices, for those who still use heating oil in the Northeast, for the remainder of this winter and the winter of the next season.

I also think that as weather warms up the coronavirus is gonna spin itself out. The coronavirus is basically attacking the elderly. It's gonna spin itself out despite all of this panic. And these two things combined, the plunge in consumer petroleum prices led by gasoline and the eventual spinning out of the coronavirus, we're gonna see an economic rebound like you can't believe. All of this that we're losing is gonna be made back, I think, in record time.

This article originally appeared on Premiere Networks