RUSH: To the audio sound bites we go, and I’m gonna go ahead and use this as a transition. Grab sound bite number six. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a sound bite from C-SPAN Washington Journal today. The guest is the Democratic Socialists of America executive director Maria Svart, S-v-a-r-t, and during the viewer call-in segment a guy from Pennsylvania named Roger says this…

ROGER: Ronald Reagan successfully brainwashed about 45% of the nation’s people with the help of Rush Limbaugh. And if you use keywords like “socialist” and “demagogue,” they right away think “communist,” and they will not vote for you. And if you want to fix this problem you first have to fix the brainwash problem and you slowly fix the brainwash problem by bringing back the equal time laws that Ronald Reagan got rid of.

RUSH: They didn’t get rid of the equal-time laws. You know, people conflate the Fairness Doctrine with the equal-time laws, and they are not alike. They’re nothing alike. They have nothing in common. But idiots like this make the mistake of confusing the two all the time. What Reagan got rid of was the Fairness Doctrine, not the equal-time doctrine. The equal-time doctrine still exists. And, in fact… Are you ready for this? Who is it? Somebody has demanded equal time because of the way they were portrayed on Saturday Night Live.

(interruption) Yeah, yeah, just recently. I’m having a mental block. Somebody has requested equal time — an opponent or somebody — because of the way they got treated on Saturday Night Live. And the theory is that whoever’s doing this, it is a way to get Trump’s appearance canceled. You know, Trump’s appearing on Saturday Night Live someday soon, next couple/three weeks. Maybe in November, first part of November. Oh, I’m having a mental block on who it is. Who was it? They parodied Hillary. They parodied the Democrat debate.

It wasn’t funny. The people on Saturday Night Live just do not know how to make fun of liberals, ’cause they don’t think liberals are funny. They think it’s dead serious. (interruption) Oh, that’s who it is. Yeah, Lessig. Larry Lessig. The professor. The Ivy League professor who’s running for president. He is suing or demanding equal time on Saturday Night Live because other Democrats are being given attention there. Yeah, that’s what it was. Anyway, that’s a bit of a sideshow.

The real point of this sound bite is he says, “Ronald Reagan successfully brainwashed about 45% of the nation’s people with the help of Rush Limbaugh.” Yeah, with the help of Rush Limbaugh. Now, when Ronald Reagan was president from 1980 to 1984, I was working for a Major League Baseball team. From 1984 to 1988, I was indeed working for talk radio, the majority of the time in Sacramento. Nobody had ever heard of me until August of ’88 which is the election year. I mean, I started this national show with two months, three months to go before the election. Reagan had long past been a lame duck.

But such is my power and image and reputation that these people think I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing since the eighties, or since who knows for how long. So I brainwashed America. Well, yeah, “Ronald Reagan successfully brainwashed 45% of the nation with the help of Rush Limbaugh.” That means I was doing it along with him. “If he used keywords like ‘socialist’ and ‘demagogue’ they right away think ‘communist,’ and they will not vote for you. And if you want to fix this problem you first have to fix the brainwash problem, and you slowly fix the brainwash problem by bringing back the equal-time laws that Reagan got.”

Reagan didn’t get rid of equal time. Fairness Doctrine. This guy can’t read Media Matters and get it straight. And then here is the Democratic Socialists of America executive director Maria Svart, S-v-a-r-t. Don’t misunderstand the way I’m saying this. Maria Svart. She followed up the caller with this.

SVART: For the last 40 years the far, far right has really systematically built up institutions to control the discourse. And they’ve really dismantled the public sphere. They’ve really deregulated. And another thing that they’ve done is they’ve flooded the airwaves with their mantra, including how socialism is evil and the government in general is evil and inefficient. And they just repeat it over and over again, ignoring facts, and it really is true that it has an impact on how people engage in politics.

RUSH: You know how many people have died from socialism? Try a hundred million. A conservative estimate. Socialism, communism, totalitarianism, tyranny, you name it. A hundred million easy. But you know, folks, this guy, Roger from Pennsylvania and Maria Svart from the Democratic Socialists of America? If anybody in this country’s been brainwashed, it’s the American left. Sadly, not just the American left. In fact, quite a lot of America was brainwashed. Have you heard…? Do you remember on this program the times…?

If you don’t, I’m gonna tell you. There have been many times that people have called here and asked me, “When did this current liberalism start? Was it Woodrow Wilson?” they ask. “Was it earlier than that? Was it Civil Rights? When did this stuff all happen? When did it start? Was it the sixties? The Students for Democrat Society and the Vietnam War?” And remember my answer has always shocked people. Snerdley, you will remember. My answer is the incarnation of the modern left as you and I know it today is a direct result of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

And I remember the first time I mentioned this, people could not believe that I was thinking straight. “You mean to tell me, Rush, you think the modern era of liberalism began with the assassination of JFK?” Yes, it did. I’ll give you a brief summary of why. We know — the evidence is conclusive — that JFK was killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald. He was not killed by the right wing. He was not killed by extremists in Dallas or in the South or anywhere else in this country. He was killed by a communist with ties to Cuba. Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed socialist and communist.

He had traveled to the Soviet Union; he was disappointed. He was expecting utopia. He was flat-out disappointed with what he found, but it did not persuade him to change his thinking. He remained an ardent communist, and after his disappointment with the discoveries in Moscow, he became an acolyte of the Castro regime in Cuba. He had traveled to Mexico City in an attempt to get to Cuba. But the bottom line is… I don’t know, Warren Commission.

I don’t care about anybody else. But Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger. It was his gun. It was in the sixth floor window of what the Texas School Book Depository. He was nabbed. He was caught. There was no doubt Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, and he was a communist. And what the left did, is they couldn’t permit that. They couldn’t allow that to be popularly accepted and understood. They could not take that chance whatsoever.

So in order to create the Camelot myth and to establish Kennedy as this mythical King Arthur-type character and his administration as Camelot, there was a calculated decision among opinion leaders of the day to blame America for it, to blame American cultural decay, American extremism — John Birch right-wingerism and so forth. And that’s the birth of the modern era of liberalism, blaming America. America got the blame for killing Kennedy, not an avowed communist, because they just couldn’t abide that. There’s substantiation for this, and I’ll bring it to you we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s a great book out there. The guy is at the Manhattan Institute. His name is James Piereson. His book is entitled Shattered Consensus. And there’s a chapter — actually a couple chapters — on the Kennedy assassination. The theme of the book is the partisan divide in this country is greater than ever and may not be solvable, and thus there may have to be a revolution for there to be unity in the country. And his effort is to explain the divide and why it exists, why the hyperpartisanship. And the Kennedy situation and the aftermath is a fundamental aspect or part of his theory, and it is the most amazing thing.

An ardent, full blooded, full-throated communist killed JFK, and the American left power structure of the time — including Earl Warren at the Supreme Court, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, at the time the networks, three network news anchors — just could not deal with it. They couldn’t permit that to be the truth. There was an affection for the Soviet Union at the time. There was an affection for communism. But there was also an opportunity. They saw an opportunity to do what the left does best: Blame America.

Blame America’s right wing. Blame conservatives. Blame cultural matters for taking out the most popular and beloved president ever. And Piereson has written about this in a really fabulous understandable way, and I copied just a couple of excerpts from his book last night just to have on hand for an eventuality on the program when the subject might come up, and, lo and behold, I get here and I get this sound bite in this clown on C-SPAN who thinks that Reagan and I have created and brainwashed the American people. When in fact, it’s the American media and the Democrat Party and the left that brainwashed this whole country after the Kennedy assassination.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just want to read you these two excerpts from the book Shattered Consensus. It’s actually a couple years old. It’s 2013, 2014 era. James Piereson, spelled P-i-e-r-e-s-o-n. “The widespread feeling that the national culture contributed to Kennedy’s death encouraged an attitude of anti-Americanism that became a pronounced aspect of the radical and countercultural movements of the 1960s.” Look, the simple fact of the matter is, for the longest time people would not accept that Oswald was the killer. It was too simple.

The KGB, by the way, was paying all these conspiracy… Not all. The KGB was paying a number of so-called conspiracy authors to write these alternative theories. The American left and Soviet Union, nobody wanted communists to blame for this. If a communist had killed “the most beloved president ever,” what does that say about the left? It would have destroyed the modern-day Democrat Party. They couldn’t allow that to happen. They made a concerted judgment. They made an effort to actually whitewash the assassination of Kennedy and blame people who had nothing to do with it in order to save their own skin.

And their own movement and then proceeded to cover all of that up by coming up with alternate conspiracy theories and an effort to blame right-wingers, gun-control freaks, John Birchers, and, you name it. And that is what gave birth to the modern left today, rooted in America is to blame for everything that’s bad — and the top of the list is, “America killed the most popular president ever.” And by “America” they mean Republicans, conservatives, anybody that’s not liberal. You go to the front page of the New York Times the day after Kennedy was killed. You’ll find two things.

You’ll find a story, “Leftist Oswald Kills Kennedy in Motorcade,” and you got details on his ties to Havana, and then also on the front page you will find an opinion piece by the revered James “Scotty” Reston blaming Dallas and blaming conservatives and extreme right-wingers. And that’s where it began. And then Chet Huntley joined it and Cronkite joined it, and they all joined the fray. Other opinion leaders, editorial writers, op-ed writers picked up the theme, and that’s how you end up with Hollywood people thinking Castro and Che Guevara are the biggest studs in the earth; how they’re big heroes and so forth.

This is one of the things that’s puzzled many people. How in the world can leftists embrace openly the people that killed JFK? Obvious they don’t know. They don’t believe that happened. And it was because of a concerted effort by leftist opinion leaders at the time to create this alternative theory. So… “The widespread feeling that the national culture contributed to Kennedy’s death encouraged an attitude of anti-Americanism that became a pronounced aspect of the radical and countercultural movements of the sixties. This was an outlook that never entirely disappeared from the worldview of the American left.

“Now, by any logic the assassination of a popular president by a communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines. Yet something very close to the opposite happened in the wake of the JFK assassination, and for many of the reasons outlined. Within a few years, radical ideas and revolutionary leaders — Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro among them — enjoyed a greater vogue in the US than at any previous time in our history, converting college students by the thousands to an anti-American, anti-capitalist creed. Soon, those students were taking over campuses and joining protest movements in support of a host of radical and revolutionary causes.

“Socialism and revolution — causes that Kennedy fought against — were the watchwords of the new left that emerged within a few years of his death.” In fact, do you know what LBJ did? LBJ essentially blamed the Kennedy assassination on racism and bigotry and who knows what else, and used the Kennedy assassination as the heartstring tug to pass the Civil Rights Act. Nobody tells you that JFK opposed it as was written at the time. JFK was opposed to the Civil Rights Act. LBJ, after his assassination, turns around and says, “We must do it this for Jack!

“The greatest eulogy we can give Jack Kennedy is the Civil Rights Act.” And even at that, Democrat senators in the South objected to it and had no interest in it, from J. William Fulbright to Strom Thurmond, you name ’em — who was a Democrat at the time. It really is amazing, every time I have mentioned to people that the birthplace of current, modern liberalism as we know it was the Kennedy assassination, they think I’m nuts, because it doesn’t compute. But it does! It makes perfect sense once it’s laid out for you when you understand how the left could not allow that narrative.

They could not sit by and have it known in a communist had killed JFK. So they had to create other assassins. They had to create alternative conspiracy theories. Whatever else anybody did or will come up with, it is fact that Oswald pulled the trigger and killed Kennedy. And if you don’t believe it, it is a sign of how effective the plan has been to get you not to know what really happened. “In just a few years, from 1963 to 1968, the liberal movement — under pressure from this new radicalism — absorbed a skeptical disposition toward the American past and the major institutions of American society.

“It would not be an exaggeration to label this disposition, this new attitude of the New Left, as anti-American. Among those who maintained a foothold in the liberal camp, there was a tendency to accept the left-wing assessments of American society as vulgar, violent, and racist. The radicals and the liberals might differ on style and strategy, but they agreed that real change must come about not through programmatic reforms, but through cultural criticism that leads to a revolution in thought and conduct.

“There is little doubt that the animus that pushed liberals and radicals onto this path had its origins in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, once having accepted the claim that JFK was a victim of the national culture.” And again that was extreme right wingers in Dallas. Have you heard the story in Kennedy was advised not to go? Yeah, you’ve heard that BS, too, right? Kennedy was advised not to go because the Birchers and the right-wingers were gonna kill him — and, lo and behold, and Kennedy bravely said, “Bring ’em on!”

It didn’t happen.

“Once having accepted the claim that JFK was a victim of the national culture, many found it easy to extend that metaphor into other areas of American life, from race and poverty to the treatment of women to the struggle against communism. These were no longer seen as challenges to be met and overcome but as indictments of the nation.” JFK being assassinated by a communist was an unacceptable reality to the leftists of the day who had a lot of affair with the Soviet Union, who had a love affair with communism as utopia, as fairness, as all of these things that they claim that it is.

It’s the birthplace of Che Guevara and Castro becoming heroes, and it was more than likely Castro who engineered, however he did it, the assassination of JFK, with a supporter, Lee Harvey Oswald. There is… You probably know this, but Theodore White, I believe it was, shortly after the assassination and the aftermath, had an interview session with Jackie Kennedy, and it was Jackie Kennedy who created the entire Camelot PR scheme. During the time JFK was alive and in the White House, nobody had ever mentioned the word “Camelot.”

Camelot had never associated itself with anything to do with the Kennedys or the White House. Jackie did that, and she did it very cleverly. By the way, her advisors were opposed to her trying this. They didn’t think that she’d be able to pull it off because it wasn’t real anyway. Their marriage wasn’t Camelot. What was going on in the White House wasn’t Camelot. But she was hell-bent. And one of the things that she told Teddy White in the interviews that she did was, “Oh, yes. The president and I every night…”

This is the true story. “The president and I every night before going to bed, lie in bed listening to the soundtrack of Camelot.” And then she read some of the words of some of the songs, talking about King Arthur and so forth. And that’s how the whole thing began. It was a studied and purposeful public relations creation that survives to this day. The Clintons tried to recapture it, in fact. So for all of these yokels out there calling C-SPAN that think it’s the right wing and conservatism or talk radio that’s brainwashing America?

What really has happened is this country was really severely, dangerously brainwashed after the Kennedy assassination, and it continued for decades. And what’s happening now is an effort to cleanse that brainwashing and to unravel it, and the left has had a lot of success with it. Blaming America. Blaming the culture. Take any incident, any incident that happens in this country today, I don’t care which. Name one. Name the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin thing, Ferguson, Baltimore, a school shooting. Name a thing that happens.

Whose fault is it? “Right wing culture! America! Bigotry! It’s anti-gay, sexist, racism,” what have you. It all… All of this got its energetic birth immediately after the Kennedy assassination, and they had such profound success with it following the Kennedy assassination that it simply became their identity. And in their minds it has stood the test. Well, JFK today would no more identify with the modern-day Democrat Party. He was for Reagan-like tax cuts and any number of other things.