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RUSH: Jim Harbaugh is the coach of the Michigan Wolverines just having left the San Francisco 49ers. He was on Real Sports last night with Bryant Gumbel. You see, it’s time to go after Jim Harbaugh. Jim Harbaugh left the 49ers in a cloud of controversy. The management of the 49ers said he was out of control, too domineering, too hectic, too frantic, too frenetic, too uncooperative, just didn’t meld well with others. The players that played for Harbaugh said that was really kind of a bunch of gunk, but it is what it is.

Then Harbaugh goes to the University of Michigan, which is his alma mater — he played there, was a star quarterback in Michigan — and has done what he’s always done. Wherever he’s gone, he’s united things, he’s uplifted things, and he’s in the process of rebuilding that program. Harbaugh is apparently of a political or ideological persuasion that is not acceptable to many in the sports Drive-By Media, as evidenced by the discovery of some players, the 49ers, who are now echoing what management said about Harbaugh, long after he’s gone, after he’s arrived at Michigan.

So here comes HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to get to the bottom of it, and of all the things that Coach Harbaugh said, of the things he could have said that would have resulted in a bull’s-eye being painted on his back, it was this. He’s being profiled by Andrea Kremer for HBO’s Real Sports. This goes by real fast here, folks. It’s 11 seconds in three…two… one.


HARBAUGH: I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.

RUSH: Oh, no! Oh, whatever else he thinks, that’s not what football is today. Football’s not a bastion for toughness. It’s not a bastion of anything uplifting or good for men or anybody else. Football is brutality. Football is career-ending, life-threatening injury just by stepping on the field. Football is concussions. Football is CTE. Football is potential post-career suicide. Football is maybe too dangerous to play, and here comes Harbaugh, that says a lot about him. It’s 11 seconds, and we know a lot about Jim Harbaugh.

A lot of people that didn’t know Harbaugh, didn’t know a thing about Harbaugh know now who he is. I mean, can you imagine the Millennial reaction to this? I mean, we are living in a culture that is attacking “patriarchy.” The culture in America today as zeroed in, and it’s been going on and it’s been building since the modern era of the feminazis began, since the late sixties and early seventies.

It’s been building now to attacking patriarchy, to attacking male-dominated anything, to attacking men as, in their natural state, predators and brutes and unsophisticated, dangerous beings around whom women have to be very careful, especially where? College campuses! And where happens to be Harbaugh? On a big college campus. And what did he say? “I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.”

What do you think of that, folks? Especially you guys, but not just guys. Everybody. That to me, those 11 seconds, perfectly define who Jim Harbaugh is, and they give us a great indicator how they view things in this country, if you’re gonna run around and say, “It’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males”? The last bastion. He probably would include the military in there as well, but he’s talking obviously things that are here in what we call the private sector.

So let’s jump forward here to audio sound bite number 18. This is Bryant Gumbel and Andrea Kremer reacting. Gumbel here is kind of mocking Harbaugh as a Neanderthal.


GUMBEL: Andrea, I want to make sure I get this right. Football, “the last bastion of hope for toughness in America … in males”? Not exactly a quote for the Age of Enlightenment.

KREMER: This is how he feels! This is who Jim Harbaugh is. This — this marks him. This is exactly who he is.

GUMBLEL: (chortling)

RUSH: “Not exactly a quote for the Age of Enlightenment.” So ladies and gentlemen, here we have in a grand total of 27 seconds, an A-B, side-by-side contrast of what the “enlightened” and what the leftist elites happen to think about culture, society, strength, fortitude — and what the people who engage in that activity happen to think about it. Now, here’s a former player. Audio sound bite number seven. Alex Boone, who played for Harbaugh at the Fort’iners. This is one of the players they found since Harbaugh left.

BOONE: After a while, you just want to kick his (bleep) He just keeps pushing you and you’re like, “Dude, we got over the mountain. Stop. Let go.” He kind of wore out his welcome. I think he just pushed guys too far. He wanted too much, demanded too much, expected too much. And you’d be like, “This guy might be clinically insane. He’s crazy!”


RUSH: The released that quote, HBO did, I guess earlier this week or over the weekend. Since then, a bunch of other players on the Fort’iners have come out and disagreed with Alex Boone, and say he’s a little bit over the top. But I think this is profound and it’s interesting. I’m glad Jim Harbaugh said what he said, and I’m glad that Gumbel reacted to it the way he did. I think this kind of illumination is good. In other words, Gumbel epitomizes the modern day cultural left.

He simply epitomizes it, and to him, any notion of toughness in men, and a last bastion of hope, and football being representative and an example of toughness in America, is somehow unacceptable! Would John Wayne be put in jail today? Would John Wayne be ridiculed and mocked? Would they say of John Wayne that he was a poor role model and a bad influence for young American men who are simply trying to feel their way along on campus?

That’s a bad choice of words. Men who are simply trying to find their way along on campus. If any of you had a doubt that modern day liberalism features among many of its other qualities and objectives, an all-out assault on manliness, you have evidence of the contrary right here. It clearly is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Kathy in Williamsville, New York, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, how you doing? You know, I’ve been waiting for somebody to bring this up regarding all of the football issues that are going on. You know, I have two kids that are Marines, two out of five of them. And if you went down to Parris Island and took the recruiting class, any recruiting class that was there and asked a show of hands of how many played high school football, probably all of them would go up. Because football teaches you that you can go past your physical limits on any given day; that you can go up against foes that are bigger and stronger and better, and on any given day you can win that and that you never give up. Football teaches you some very, very powerful things about yourself. My daughter is an officer, and she played high school football with the boys, too, and it is that ultimate team experience.

RUSH: What did she learn? What did she learn playing football with the guys?

CALLER: That you just can’t ever give up, that you have to prepare. You have to physically prepare, you have to be mentally strong, you have to be physically strong, and there isn’t any other sport like it. And she played five of them. And football is it. By encouraging people not to let their kids play football, you cut off that feeder stream of very tough individuals that know that they can go out and battle evil and defend their country. I have always felt that right from the beginning, because you look at the other things that are going on in the military, and it’s devastating because —

RUSH: Okay, now, let’s stop right there, because you’ve said some, I think, quite interesting things and some even provocative. One thing you said that I agree with you on — I don’t disagree with much of what you said at all, if any. But one thing you said is really true, and that is that playing football, you will learn that you are capable of much more than you think you are.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: They will push you. A good coach will push you. You will not be allowed to languish. You will not be allowed to find your own level and live there. You will have to pursue the best you can be, or you won’t be there. There are too many people that want to play and will race past you. You do learn how much more you are capable of than otherwise playing football. There are other things that will teach you that, too. It’s not only true in athletics or strength, physical strength.

There’s other things, any number of things you can do. This is why great leaders are great leaders and why motivators are great motivators. They will get more out of you. If you think back… Something I’ve always said is if you think back as an adult to when you were in school, think back who your favorite teacher or your best teacher was, it was probably not somebody you liked, but they got more out of you than you thought you had.

They enabled you to learn more about yourself than you knew. People that are that good at motivating and inspiring are rare. In many cases, you wish it was parents, and in many cases it is, but in a lot of cases it happens outside the family as well — or, in some cases, only. But the reason why we’re talking about this is because I led off the program today with a sound bite from Jim Harbaugh, who was profiled on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO last night, and it’s a quick little 11-second sound bite.

The idea that in a large percentage of the country, what you’re going to hear is highly controversial, is in and of itself stunning to me. What you’re gonna hear Harbaugh say, many in this country are getting their backs up filled with rage and anger and disbelief, and they are threatened by this. Here’s what he said, as it was played on HBO on Tuesday night.

HARBAUGH: I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.

RUSH: That little 11 second bite, if it hasn’t yet, is going to become quite controversial. It already was on that program. Here’s how Bryant Gumbel, the host of the program, reacted to it when he was talking about all of this with Andrea Kremer, who actually was the reporter on the piece.

GUMBEL: Andrea, I want to make sure I get this right. Football, “the last bastion of hope for toughness in America … in males”? Not exactly a quote for the Age of Enlightenment.

KREMER: This is how he feels! This is who Jim Harbaugh is. This — this marks him. This is exactly who he is.

GUMBLEL: (chortling)

RUSH: “This marks him.” Really? This marks him? “Football, the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.” Now, you might translate that and think and say that Harbaugh thinks the country’s male population is being wussified, that the male population is being tamed, the male population is being neutered. Here comes Harbaugh saying, “Yeah, well, we got one last hope: Football. Football is the last bastion of hope for toughness.”

So Harbaugh believes in toughness in men, he believes in toughness in America, he believes in toughness in American men. You damn well want it in your Special Forces, gang. You want it with the Navy SEALs. You want it all over the United States military. You want manliness, you want toughness, you want bravery, you want courage. Yet that’s controversial today, in the Age of Enlightenment, as spewed there by Bryant Gumbel. Because in the Age of Enlightenment, football doesn’t have any attributes like this anymore.

No, no, no! Football kills. Football leads to permanent brain damage and football leads to suicide. Football leads to crime. Football leads to a crime rate among people that play in the NFL that is less than the gen pop, the general population. The numbers have been run. It’s just that people who play football are stars and, as such, what they do occurs with greater media scrutiny. So when one of them happens to engage in some sort of questionable behavior, it happens to (in a lot of it people’s minds) speak for the whole sport and everybody that plays it.

But in comparison to the male population large in the country, there is far less criminal behavior and otherwise bad actor behavior than there is in the general population. “I don’t care, Mr. Limbaugh! Football is scary. Football concussions. Have you seen it? It’s brutal, Mr. Limbaugh. It’s just mean.” Right, Mr. New Castrati. Exactly right. And it’s under assault. I did not… I find it fascinating that that little 11-second clip can cause controversy. It’s a great, great, great indication, culturally, of where we are.

I’m glad you called, Kathy. Thanks much.

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