RUSH: The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun its own poke into the whole Russian-Trump collusion election story. Fox News: “Russia is engaged in ‘information warfare’ on American soil, and its interference in the 2016 presidential campaign is just one part of a strategy to undermine Western democracies that continues today, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,” who happens to be Richard Burr from North Carolina.

He said, “Unfortunately, you will learn … that these efforts by Russia to discredit the United States and weaken the West are not new. These efforts are, in fact, at the heart of Russian — and previously, the Soviet Union — intelligence efforts.”

This isn’t any news. This is not news at all! Whether Putin is doing it, whether the Soviets did it, they did. Undermining what — In fact, I would suggest to you that call it Putin, call it the Russians, call it the Soviets, call it the communists, whatever it is, the undermining of American democracy is happening at full speed on American college campuses. And that happened to be one of the primary efforts of the Soviet Union was to undermine and infiltrate all aspects of American life, to undermine religion, to undermine and take control of education.

There’s no doubt that they’ve done this. There’s no doubt that they continue to do it. That this is being portrayed as something new and exclusive only to the arrival of Donald Trump on the scene is an insult to our intelligence because this is ongoing. You know what you ought to do? You ought to go back and get some books by Nelson DeMille. I’m gonna have to find the name of this book. How many of you watch the TV show on FX called The Americans? Let me tell you what The Americans is about. It’s said by some critics to be the best show on TV. I think that’s a real stretch, but I still watch it. It’s an intriguing show. It happens to be based in reality.

Do any of you remember the name Anna Chapman from the last five years? A gorgeous, beautiful Russian spy living in New Jersey. She was unmasked as a spy, but she was here, looked American, sounded American. It looked like she had American citizenship, but she was a Russian spy here to undermine whatever, I don’t know what her mission was. And she was sent back to the Soviet Union, Russia, she was deported.

Anyway, the Nelson DeMille book details what was a very famous Soviet operation. And this TV show The Americans is all about. What happened was Soviets would recruit from their own population young men and women, and they would take them to training camps where they would literally learn to become American. These training camps were miniature American towns with a typical American Main Street, a typical American suburbia, a typical American mall experience.

And these Soviet agents learned to totally drop their Russian accent. They learned English flawlessly. They were educated to get American jobs. They were spies. They came and they were dispatched, and they lived in suburban Washington, they lived all over the country. They had kids who ended up being American citizens, because they were born here. Their neighbors never knew that they were Soviet spies.

One of their big objectives was to actually get hired in the government bureaucracy wherever they could, or to recruit other Soviet spies or Americans via blackmail or whatever to learn details of American military operations or what have you. We know that these types of agents existed. We know that they were deployed predominantly during the Reagan years. That’s what this TV show The Americans is all about.

In fact, this show The Americans, I’ve been watching it this season, and I’ve never seen this portrayed. This season happens to focus on the fact the Soviet Union cannot feed its own people, or could not, and we, in humanitarian and strategic ways, ended up selling wheat to the Soviet Union because they couldn’t grow any of their own. Here’s the problem, though. The Soviet Union had a perfect climate for growing wheat. They had everything that we have in terms of natural resources. But their system, communism, slash, socialism, was dead on arrival.

They could not grow food, they could not grow crops, they could not produce. They were a Third World nation. The big department store in Moscow is called Gum, G-u-m. Americans would travel there and come back and say they didn’t believe what they saw. Soviet grocery stores with nothing on the shelves. Four-week-old cold cuts in the butcher department. They could not believe what they were seeing. And this is portrayed accurately on this TV show. The fact that you can’t find anything on the store shelves either at grocery stores or department stores in Moscow.

And one of the elements of this season on this program, they actually have a department in the KGB — and I’m not gonna remember the exact name — but they sent people around to all of the grocery stores making sure that no grocery store had anything more than anybody else. And if the person, the party member that ran a grocery store, say, had more tangerines than another store, they had a unit to investigate how that property of socialism ended up in that store as opposed to some other store. They put people in jail if they ran a store that had more food than any other store. They figured corruption was going on. And they couldn’t have that.

They couldn’t have a series of state-run stores and one of them was sufficiently stocked and none of the others were at all. So the people that ran the stores that operated well, they put in prison. And this is portrayed accurately. Now, I don’t know that the other thing being portrayed here, and that is that powerful forces in the United States poisoned the wheat that was sold to Russia to wipe out the population. And the two agents that live in Arlington in this season of The Americans are tasked with finding out if the wheat is poisoned and by whom and where, which takes them to Oklahoma City and Topeka.

And what’s happening, here’s what you would expect to happen. When I first heard about this is when I read the Nelson DeMille book about it. And the first question I had, I called Nelson, I said, “You’re an expert on this, you’ve written a great novel about it.” I said, “How are they able to keep control over these agents? Okay, they’ve grown up in the Soviet Union, which is just a hellhole. The Soviet Union had nothing, it was miserable. Louis Armstrong could not sing What a Wonderful World and have it be related to anything in reality in the Soviet Union.”

So I said to him, “How in the world, after they’ve educated these agents and they’ve Americanized them, they accepted them to the United States, how do they avoid them defecting, because it is obvious that the United States is robust and a land of plenty and abundance compared to where they’ve come from.” And the answer I got was, “They have been so fully brainwashed, Mr. Limbaugh, that these agents believe that what they see in America is fake and that it’s not like that if they were to leave the Washington area. If they were to travel to St. Louis, it would look just like Moscow, and they believed it.”

And in fact the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union happened when bootleg copies of Dallas and what was the ABC show with John Forsythe and what’s her — Dynasty, when reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, bootlegged editions made it to the underground into the Soviet Union, that gave the lie, that exposed the lie that the Soviet leadership had told its people for decades, that life in the United States was one of misery and prison camps and it was only a matter of time before they imploded.

Reagan knew it, they imploded of their own immorality, but the idea that any of this is new and that it’s exclusively tied to Trump and because of Trump is absurd. As I say, the Soviet Union has been attempting to undermine as much of American traditional values as it can, and I would submit to you that they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in American education. As I said, at Loyola University in Chicago, the university now offers safe spaces where white students can gather and talk about how racist they are.

Loyola University Chicago new campus club exclusively for self-identified white students. In the group, they get to admit their own racist feelings and whine about all the racism that they and their fellow white people are inflicting on the world. Called an “affinity group,” which is the new leftist term for a racially segregated group, the whites-only group is called “Ramblers Analyzing Whiteness.”

In the group, members can examine what it means to be white, they can confess their guilt about their own internationalized racism, internalized racism, and they can begin the journey of operating in solidarity with others and begin to abandon their white privilege. Now, you tell me that the roots of this have anything to do with American values.

Anyway, Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says “The focus of the hearing is on how the Kremlin allegedly used technology to spread disinformation in the U.S. and Europe. Vladimir Putin himself on Thursday dismissed what he called ;endless and groundless’ accusations of Russian meddling. But ranking Democratic member Mark Warner said Putin ordered a ‘deliberate campaign’ to undermine the U.S. election. The Virginia senator said Russian engaged in a disinformation campaign that ‘made effective use of its hacking skills to steal and weaponize information and engage in a coordinated effort to damage a particular candidate and to undermine public confidence –‘”

That is just flat-out BS. Folks, I’m telling you, it is flat-out BS. There is literally no way that that could have led to the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was her own worst enemy. It didn’t take any hacking of any computer to tell people what a worthless candidate she was, how unexciting she was. The Russians weren’t behind the fact nobody bought her book.

The Russians weren’t behind the fact that nobody showed up at her book signings. The Russians weren’t behind the fact that nobody showed up at her campaign appearances. The Russians weren’t behind the fact that everybody showed up at Trump’s. The Russians weren’t behind any of that. Furthermore, if the Russians wanted a guaranteed outcome, they would have wanted Hillary to be president because she would have continued the weak dismantling foreign policy of Barack Obama!

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RUSH: Okay, this TV show The Americans, now, what’s happening on this show, the husband and wife Soviet agent team, they live right across the street from an FBI agent who’s clueless, and their daughter has found out who they are. And the one thing that bugs me about this show is they spend so much time on this daughter who is about ready to have a nervous breakdown, and to me it delays the advancement of the plot, but that’s just me.

In a recent episode, Philip and Elizabeth, the spies that live in Arlington, the Soviets, they go out to Oklahoma and Kansas on their mission to find out who, if anybody, is poisoning the wheat to be sold to the Soviet Union. And Philip is wearing a wig with a cowboy hat as a disguise, and they’re in the cab of a pickup truck, and he says, “All this land out here. You know what this looks like? It looks like home. We have all this. Why can’t we grow enough grain ourselves?” And his wife, Elizabeth, says, “Well, everybody has problems.” And she’s, you know, in denial.

Philip is starting to see that their mission is a waste of time because the Soviet Union’s not worth saving. And in fact one of the characters in this season’s episode is a former Soviet citizen who got out, lives in America, and hates the Soviet Union and just keeps ripping it to them, and they have to keep their cover, and you can see that they get mad about it. He said, “In the Soviet Union we have some great land, some great climate, but the system is broke. They still move food by horse some time, and by the time it gets to where it’s going, it’s rotten! Soviet system stink.” And Philip and Elizabeth seethe with rage at the guy.

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RUSH: Okay, ready for this? We’re now talking about the Senate Intelligence Committee and its examination of the Russians tampering with the election. And remember, the chairman, Richard Burr — the Republican from North Carolina — has acknowledged the Russians try to tamper with everything. Western European democracies, ours. They hack this, they hack that. They’re trying to spread disinformation. So it was time for a Democrat to speak. Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, and you know what he gave and cited as an example of Russian disinformation?

Do you remember the video…? It was 9/11 last year, and Hillary Clinton was, I think, at Ground Zero at the new Freedom Tower. She had to leave early, and she stumbled and nearly fell to the curb and they had to shove her in the back of that van face first. It was patently obvious that she’d had a seizure or some such thing. Mark Warner cited that story as Russian disinformation. When she had her seizure, that the… I mean, it happened. But all that happened was she slipped, that it was Russian disinformation that spread the word that she’d had a seizure.

Well, that’s the… (interrupting) I know, we saw it. We saw the fact she could… They had to have three people carry her out there, prop her up. She did nearly slip off the curb. She was zoned out. Something has happened. She was some kind of a seizure, were making a big deal about it, but Mark Warner cites that as an example. (paraphrased) “All that happened was she slipped. There was nothing to see there. Russian disinformation created the story that she had a seizure.” I mean, you talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel?

As I said, the idea that the Russians colluded… Well, that’s absurd. The idea the Russians hacked the election? It’s absurd. As though it’s something new, something outrageous, something that we’ve never seen before, which is the picture they’re trying to create with this, and it’s just standard operating procedure, and we do it too. May I remind you? We do it out in the open. Barack Hussein O sent a campaign team to Israel to undermine the reelection of Bibi Netanyahu. We interfere in elections in foreign countries all over the place.

Dick Cheney the other day said, “If the Russians did this, this is an act of war.” So right on his tail, here comes Donna Brazile saying it’s an act of war. Well, if that’s true then we have engaged in acts of war, too, because we do it. Not only do we interfere in elections, we actually take out foreign leaders! Remember those days of CIA assassinations of South American dictator thugs like Augusto Pinochet, that everybody supposedly hated.

(interruption)

No, no, no. I’m not defending it. I’m just… Folks, it isn’t this big a deal! But to the low-information crowd, the fact that the Russians tried to tamper with the election and were friends with Trump? You know, they’re trying to make this a much, much, much bigger deal than it is. And if they’re trying to wear people out on it, with me, it’s beginning to work, because I’m getting fed up with this. The whole premise that the Russians colluding and somehow that’s the only reason Trump won? They can’t prove it. There isn’t any evidence, because that didn’t happen.

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RUSH: Oh, boy, by the way: We don’t even have to go to Pinochet to find out about the United States interfering in another country’s activity. Hillary Clinton and Libya? Overthrowing Moammar Khadafy, leading to Benghazi? The idea that it’s only the Russians that interfere? Just imagine: If we had just hacked Khadafy, we wouldn’t have had to overthrow him. Oh, well.