RUSH: I know I’ve asked this question before but I don’t remember the answer. Anybody in there still watching Homeland on Showtime? Did you watch it last night? So I’m not — well, I’m gonna talk about this, and if you haven’t seen it yet you should turn the radio off. I’ll give you ample warning. ‘Cause I’m not gonna wait ’til I think everybody’s watched the finale. Finale was last night. Up or down?

Up? You are kidding me. You’re kidding me. Up? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe it. This just proves how more important than ever my take on this is, because you like it? Ho! She doesn’t like their mocking of the conspiracy kook radio guy. That’s not even the half of it. Okay, so that’s good. That’s good. This means that people do not see what they need to see watching this show.

Now, some of the critics watching Homeland have — there’s a big story at NewsBusters featuring an interview with the cast. What everybody thinks has happened in Homeland is that after six years of naming Islamofascists as the bad guys, that Americans have become the bad guys. And that’s only half the story. That’s only half of what they’ve done on Homeland. This is amazing. And I’ll get to it in due course.

Greetings, my friends, and welcome it is great to have you. Rush Limbaugh here at 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

You know what? It would be unfair. Here I’ve just teased this and then to lay it off. I don’t do that. So I’m gonna talk about it. I’m gonna give you 30 seconds. If you watch Homeland this season, the finale was last night, if you DVR it and haven’t seen it and you don’t want to know what happened and if you don’t want to be told how to think about what happened, then you don’t want to be listening for the next couple of minutes.

I’m gonna give you a countdown from five, and then after that, if you’re still here — I mean, you can complain all you want, but your complaints will fall on deaf ears because you have been warned. Ready? Five, four, three, two, one. If you are still listening and you haven’t seen the Homeland finale, you cannot get mad at me now for spoiler alerting, or for spoiling.

Now, the first, what was it, season six or five last night? Season six. Doesn’t matter. All of the prior seasons of Homeland have focused on militant Islam, militant Islamic terrorism as the dire threat facing the United States. And it has depicted quite accurately the militant Islamic threat, the terrorism threat. It has explored the CIA and its ways of dealing with this, presidents, entire intelligence community.

It has been quite up front about the threat posed and the techniques used and the efforts engaged in to beat it and to stop it. And, along the way, there have been some very nasty stories in the entertainment press about Homeland as being biased and anti-Muslim, just as there were in the tail-end years of the Fox series 24. And 24 was a great show. Everybody loved 24. I think 24 lasted eight years, Kiefer Sutherland. And Howard Gordon, who was one of the producers of 24, is likewise one of the producers of Homeland.

Now, during the 24 series period of time, toward the tail end of it there was a very caustic piece written and published by Jane Mayer in New York Magazine, either New York or The New Yorker, I forget which, in which she essentially blamed 24 for the torture that was occurring at Guantanamo Bay and at Club Gitmo as well as Abu Ghraib in Iraq. She wrote a caustic piece, and it was just one of a few that others had written too about how 24 was horrible because it seemed to sanction torture, and it depicted torture. It was un-American.

And there were even some stories that said 24 was giving the CIA torture ideas. And I remember when the story was being written and Jane Mayer was interviewing people, people at 24 were not that concerned about it because it was press and all press is good. But it ended up doing some limited damage, but it was part of other damage that was going on out there, trying say that the program was biased against militant Islam and it was unfair. You know the drill.

So Homeland starts, and it has the same focus, but it doesn’t focus on a counterterrorism unit. It focuses on the CIA and the bad guys, and it’s quite good. And it does this for five years. Then this season, everything changed. I remember when the first episode aired, I came to the Golden EIB Microphone, I said, “How many of you people watched this last night and are not fuming, spitting mad?” Because Carrie Mathison, the Claire Danes figure, who was the only one who never wavered in the fight against militant Islamic terror — some of the others went soft — she was never anything less than a hundred percent and she now has joined a foundation defending Islamists against attacks, phony allegations of engaging in terrorism.

In other words, she’s gone from trying to capture them and stop acts of terror to defending those who do it, overnight. So what am I watching here. I said I don’t want to prejudge, just the first episode. There was also something else in the first episode. This season began in January, which means that filming was going on all last summer and into the fall, and this season’s Homeland takes place entirely between Election Day and Inauguration Day, of a new president, a woman.

This new president is amazingly Trump-like in that the intelligence community hates her. The intelligence community is trying to undermine her. The intelligence community is working with that kook conspiracy theorist radio, TV guy. The CIA is working with him to plant stories, and they even get it right about all the bots on Twitter, all these things that make it look like hundreds of thousands of people are tweeting when only five or six people are, fake names, they get that right.

But this president is portrayed as a lying cheat trying to capitalize on her dead son who died with valor in Iraq. But it turns out, according to the CIA, that he was a coward running from the fire, he left his buddies to die. It wasn’t true, but they made it all up trying to destroy her. She is anti-intel communities. She doesn’t want anything to do with them. She doesn’t trust them. And they know this, so they have their sights set on destroying her. And last night they tried to assassinate her.

CIA characters in this show for the first five seasons that everybody liked and respected, have turned into exactly what we’re being told the intelligence community thinks of Trump. The parallels here are uncanny because this show this had been written before Trump won the election, and the show had to be filmed before Trump’s transition began, maybe they shot a couple of episodes or edited some, but it’s amazing how prescient this was in terms of the new president winning, an outsider president. This one, however, is a woman, not Trump, but everything else is pretty much the same.

Nobody in the establishment likes her. Nobody in the establishment thinks she knows what she’s doing. Everybody in the establishment thinks she has to be undermined. Her staff is halfway clueless to what’s going on. She’s not clueless to it, but she is not quite sure how to deal with it. Here’s the upshot of it. Show begins with all of these characters now being — well, the prime character being sympathetic to Islamic terrorism and terrorists and defending them, particularly those who may end up being falsely accused. It’s a total 180.

Last night a plot is hatched to assassinate the new president from within, a rogue general working with the CIA. This character that is a conspiracy theorist TV host is working with the CIA to plant lies and falsehoods about her and telling everybody that she’s authoritarian, gonna be a dictator, everybody’s gonna be in dungeons if she’s not stopped. You have no human rights, no freedom, the world will never be the same. Identical, just identical to what stories were about Trump.

The assassination attempt fails, narrowly fails. She barely escapes with the help of the Claire Danes figure, and Peter Quinn, but I haven’t mentioned him yet. He’s an entirely — it would take me too long to mention — one of the primary characters, a CIA Agent who’s been a hero for five years is killed last night in the effort to save the new president from the assassination from within, in her hotel. She has not been inaugurated yet. She’s in her hotel, they take her up to the hotel, they try to assassinate her.

Rogue elements of the CIA, in fact, blew up a building in New York City and tried to blame Islamists for it when in fact it was the CIA that did it. I mean, it’s exactly what the left would like you to believe is happening today. It’s uncanny. At any rate, she survives the assassination attempt, and she sends Carrie Mathison out to tell all of her cabinet heads and advisers that everything’s fine, we’re gonna round up whoever was involved in this and deal with it, but it’s business as usual.

So Carrie goes home, tries to get her kid back. CIA has arranged for her to lose her kid in the process of all this, and so she’s gotta get it back from family services. And this new president, on being inaugurated, sends her own private police force to round up every political enemy and put them in jail. Saul Berenson, prime character all six seasons of Homeland is pulled out of his car at gunpoint and send to the gulag. The president’s cabinet is wrapped up at gunpoint and sent to the gulag.

And the closing shot — well, the second-to-last closing shot is of this new president sitting alone in the Oval Office, a darkened Oval Office, and the camera’s pulling away and she has a sneering smile on her face as she sits there knowing full well that her cops are jailing every political opponent that she had, not just those that tried to assassinate her. That you could understand. But I mean literally everybody, except the TV guy. He survives ’cause that would be a little bit risky.

If you’ve seen stories about this season of Homeland that talk about how the big thing to note here is how it’s gone from proper understanding of militant Islamic terrorism to sympathy, you missed what this is really all about. This show, whether it intended to or not, as I say the filming schedule, they couldn’t have known when they began who was gonna be elected. Now, they obviously knew and maybe could do some edits in a couple of episodes, I don’t know. But to me it is clear Hollywood liberals — and it’s not just in this show. They believe what they believe and they’re putting together programming based on these beliefs, and so this show made it perfectly clear that the new president, which may as well be Trump except in this show she’s a woman, it’s just uncanny.

Everything that you’ve heard that they think Trump’s gonna do — jail his enemies, deny human rights, all this — this president is doing. And the parallels, the intel community hates her and is trying to undermine her just like the intel community hates Trump, trying to undermine him. In this show the new president wins and the intel community gets thrown in jail, which is the big fear the left has. It’s irrational that Trump is some fascist dictator that’s gonna round everybody up who opposes him and put him in jail. But they believe it, folks. This is not just entertainment. They believe this stuff. That’s what makes them who they are.

And they’re starting to make their beliefs, they’re showing up in scripts in these comedies and dramas that show up on TV, and it’s very subtle. I imagine many of you who saw it last night listening to me talk about it, well, I hope you all picked up on it. I hope I’m not the only one that saw what this really is. This is an effort, whether it was intended to or not, but I don’t know how it couldn’t have been, to tell every other liberal, yeah, we did a show here showing exactly what we’re up against here with this new President Trump. He’s gonna put in jail every one of us that doesn’t like him. He could end up working with these conspiracy kooks. You just never know.

And it’s gonna get people scared. I found it to be, given what this show has been, unbelievable. Well, I shave that. It’s not unbelievable. That’s the thing. I mean, it’s entirely, as far as I’m concerned, predictable and understandable. When you know leftists like I do and that they really do believe this stuff that they believe — this insane, lunatic stuff — they believe this stuff. And it’s now showing up in TV shows, which you know, I mean, I don’t know if you get irritated — like I have some people, do you watch the Showtime show called Billions?

It’s about Wall Street and big-time moneymakers, hedge fund guys. And one of the characters is the U.S. attorney, Southern District of Manhattan. When Preet Bharara, the actual U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan, got fired along with the other 92 U.S. attorneys, I had people sending me emails, “Chuck got fired last night! Chuck got fired!” meaning the character in the Showtime show got fired.

I said, “No, the character didn’t get fired because the character doesn’t exist. Preet Bharara got fired.” My point, people take what they see in movies and they make it real life. People see what they see in TV shows and oftentimes I’m sure you’ve heard people, “Remember what Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, remember? That’s exactly what happened.” People relate things in scripted TV to real life. So this show last night, some people are gonna make the connection based on lunacy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, my points are being proven right to my face here in the break. Okay, one more thing about Homeland. This Brett O’Keefe character who has a TV show who is anti the president is not me, folks. I don’t care what you think, it is not me. They’re not trying to caricature me. And I’ve not heard anybody say that except one person on the other side of the glass here, because — well, there is only you in people’s minds. We have senators saying don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh. We have Obama saying don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh. On this show they’re saying don’t listen to whatever this guy’s name is. But it isn’t me. It might be a composite, amalgamation. But, I mean, I don’t even do TV. I don’t even have a TV show.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Jim in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.  Great to have you, Jim.  How you doing, sir?

CALLER:  Rush, Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, dittos, my friend.

RUSH:  Thank you, sir.  I appreciate your calling.

CALLER:  Rush, I have a little bit different take on Homeland.  I think the season was written fully expecting Hillary to be president.  I honestly think it reveals the liberal playbook had she been our president right now.  Imagine for a second that she’s president today.  I would argue those same Soros-backed people that have been protesting Trump all these months would actually be out there masquerading as right-wing conservatives and violently protesting Hillary.  And the reason for that is because they’re out to demonize you even more —

RUSH:  Wait a minute, now, wait.  Hold it a minute.  I disagree with you there.  However, when you say that this was written and produced with the idea that Hillary was gonna win, you’re on to something.  They have this first president, the intel community’s trying to undermine her and everybody’s trying to undermine her, and so she gets revenge by jailing them all, okay, I’ll think about it from that perspective.  You may have a point.

But where I differ from you, I don’t think that Soros and ThinkProgress and all that would fake massive protests against her.  It doesn’t look good no matter what, all to be able to tell a story the protesters are fake.  I think they would present no protests at all.  I think any protests of Hillary in real life would be ignored, and she’d be portrayed as the next Obama, and they would start savaging any opponents to Hillary, including me, whoever, wherever they are, but that’s the only thing I disagree with you.  I don’t think they would have fake protests to the degree we saw them on homeland.

CALLER:  But I think that they anticipated so much uprising against Hillary that they would have done something.  Maybe it would have been organically made by the right itself —

RUSH:  I disagree.  Again, I’m sorry, but they thought she was gonna win in a landslide.  Remember, they lie to themselves.  They love Hillary.  They, therefore, think everybody did.  That’s why they’re still shell-shocked.  Anyway, I’m glad you called, because I appreciate this perspective on this.  I’m gonna have to think further about this.