RUSH: Hey, Mike, grab audio sound bite No. 1. Just No. 1 for right now. Great to have you with us here today, folks. It’s your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, doing the job of the Drive-By Media, the job they haven’t done at all in many, many moons, if they ever did. Regardless, I am America’s Truth Detector.

I want to take you back a little over a year ago, Fox News Sunday, my annual February appearance with Chris Wallace. It was February 19th, 2017, Chris Wallace had just discovered a term that he was not sure was helpful or useful and asked me about it.

WALLACE: You also use a phrase, which I have to say that I only heard for the first time in the last couple of weeks, the deep state. And that’s the notion that there’s an Obama shadow government embedded in the bureaucracy that is working against this new president. I think some folks are gonna think that’s right on and some folks will think it’s awfully conspiratorial.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Well, I would love to claim credit for that, but actually I think a reporter by the name of Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept who has got a relationship with what’s-his-name, Assange, I think he actually coined the term, and I think it works.

RUSH: He did coin the term, but it was popularized, amplified, and promoted here. And it became part of the daily lexicon. And, by the way, Wallace aptly described it there. The deep state is the administrative state, if you will, and referred to specifically here, it is intelligence officials, both current and former. It is investigators of the various agencies. The Federal Reserve has investigators. The FBI has investigators. It is that cabal of people, many of them career civil servants, some of them Obama and even dating back to Clinton appointees.

And there wasn’t any doubt that the deep state was organizing this — you know what the deep state did? The deep state actually ended up promoting the lie and the fictitious story spun by Christopher Steele in his dossier. And they were the ones that were leaking incessantly to the media. Everybody knows who the deep state is now. What the news about them today is, there is a poll from Monmouth University.

Monmouth University’s considered a big deal. They are a polling data unit that has lots and lots of credibility. They just took a poll, and they found — are you ready for this? — 74% of the American people believe in a deep state when it is described as a collection of unelected officials running policy. Twenty-one percent said they do not believe that this kind of group exists.

The poll notes that more than seven out of 10 Americans polled in each political group — Republican, Democrat, and independent — believe there is a deep state. Thirty-one percent of Republicans, 33% of independents say they believe the deep state definitely exists. 19% of Democrats even believe it. Pollsters also found that a majority of those polled, 63%, said they were not familiar with the term “deep state.”

However, 13% said they were very familiar, blah, blah, blah. The polling director, Patrick Murray, said, “We usually expect opinions on the operation of government to shift depending on which party is in charge, but there’s an ominous feeling by Democrats and Republicans alike that a deep state of unelected operatives are pulling the levers of power.” They are. It may not be entirely contract to say what’s new about it, but it is relatively new.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Mo is in Middletown, New York. Mo, you’re next on the phones. I appreciate your waiting. How you doing?

CALLER: Good, Rush. This is my question. We’ve been talking about the deep state now for a while like it’s somewhat brand-new. In terms of magnitude, though, I think that recently we’ve just begun to see how deep this is. But I was wondering: How wide is it? We’re talking about the federal level. How about the state and local levels as well?

RUSH: Uh, give me specifics of what you’re thinking.

CALLER: Well, we’re talking about all these interconnecting… It’s interesting to me that what’s happening has happened the first time, the second time. This is a well-oiled machine.

RUSH: Right. Well, but what do you mean? How…? What are you thinking the state’s being involved here?

CALLER: Well, we’re looking only at the federal level because that’s what has become apparent to us.

RUSH: Right. Okay. Does Georgia have a Georgia Intelligence Agency?

CALLER: No, but they do have a state official that also has information to people’s lives and their doings and all that kind of thing as well.

RUSH: Oh, I see. Well, I have no doubt that the deep state has tentacles far and wide I don’t know beyond Washington. I mean, the deep state probably has tentacles into the European Union and whatever they would consider their allies in the globalist (ahem) community. But here’s the thing. He makes a good point. The deep state just didn’t all of a sudden decide to organize itself here with Trump’s election. The deep state, the administrative state has been out there for… (chuckles) I don’t know. How far back does it go?

When did the bureaucracies realize that they could start writing regulations that would mandate compliance by individual citizens that never became law passed by the representatives of the people? When did the bureaucrats realize — say at EPA or FDA — that they could simply write some regulations on where you can build a house or you can’t? Or where you can do this? I mean, if you’ve got a little puddle of water in your backyard, EPA could come in there and tell you that you have no right to build on your backyard or do anything back there because it’s a protect area ’cause it might, you know, be a swamp.

So the deep state has existed in the form of having regulatory power over practically every walk of life, and we don’t know who they are, and the stuff they do never gets passed into law by virtue of congressional action or legislation. The more they got away with, the more they were doing. By the way, this is an unsung success story of the Trump administration. They are rolling back so many of these regulations that you’ll only know about it when you’re no longer bound by them. But it’s a phenomenal reduction in regulations that Trump and his administration have succeeded in unwinding and ending.

But I think… You can think of the deep state as the intelligence community. Look, I caught heat the first time I mentioned this. But you put things in context as you learn. So we now learn what the deep state’s been doing: Literally flooding the media with lies about Trump colluding with Russia. They have been lies! There’s no evidence. There aren’t even named sources. Every source still is anonymous. Even Christopher Steele’s sources are anonymous!

Christopher Steele’s the only one mentioned and his sources haven’t been corroborated in that stupid dossier. Okay, fine. So we learn that the deep state intelligence people have succeeded in making the media a bunch of pansies who are simply stenographers and writing whatever they’re told. Well, we have it on good authority that a lot of people in the deep state hated George W. Bush after the Florida recount. A lot of people in Washington think that George Bush was illegitimately elected because that recount was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court on the verge of Algore winning.

They were probably fuming back then just so much as they’re fuming over Trump winning. Fast forward a couple of years and the worldwide intelligence community insures everybody Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. The CIA, the DIA, MI6, Pakistani intel, you name it. Colin Powell was up there at the United Nations presenting the case with satellite photos showing installations of weapons of mass destruction! There weren’t any. Back then, everybody just chalked it up to a massive mistake.

It was a well-intentioned massive mistake, because Saddam himself been bragging about it. I mean, he had used nerve gas on the Kurds, and so, yeah! It was easy to think that he had weapons of mass destruction. He had none. Did they know that? Was this simply an attempt to embarrass Bush? Back then that question would never have been raised. But now after learning what we know, it’s almost a logical question to ask, no matter how mad they get at you if you do.