RUSH: Jim Nantz was on Face the Nation also. Shannon Sharpe was on Face the Nation. There’s all this talk about concussions in football. Jim Nantz, play-by-play man at CBS, made a very important point, a point that’s been made for years on this program.

NANTZ: We were talking about, “Should your children play football?” You have daughters; I have a daughter. Research shows that at the college-level women’s soccer player is 2-1/2 times more likely to suffer a concussion than a college football player. I don’t hear anybody saying right now, “Should we put our daughters in these soccer programs?” The point is this issue spreads well beyond the NFL.

RUSH: You know, that’s exactly right, and we have been on this for ten years. We originated the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign, which was related to concussions in soccer and how dangerous soccer is. We did this because kids are being moved into soccer by parents who are reading and hearing about how dangerous football is, for example. They think soccer is just a bunch of kids running around on the field kicking a little white ball. What harm could there be?

There are injuries galore in soccer, and there are concussions. This statistic — I’ve heard this — says that women soccer players in college are 2-1/2 times more likely to suffer a concussion. To be true, that means that there are far more female soccer player concussions in college than there are male football player concussions. And nobody would believe this when they hear it, but the data is the data. It’s undeniable. I first started hearing about the dangers of soccer more than ten years ago.

We immediately began a campaign here to alert people of the danger because we are interested in that. As a public service, we started Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign, and I was the spokesman. We did PSAs and so people began calling about it, thinking that I didn’t know what I was talking about or I was teasing. They thought I was doing satire, putting them on, and they refused to believe it. It was that skepticism that convinced me it’s even more dangerous than we thought, this game of soccer.

So we put together, over the course of the years, a number of PSAs that to this day we still run during commercial breaks. People who are on hold or who are listening to this program online will occasionally hear this campaign. We have not given it up. We just don’t do it on the air much. But that’s why I want to just play one as an example to show you how on the cutting edge this program is.

BEGIN PSA #1

JOHNNY DONNOVAN: (caring music) And now a word from the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.

LISA: I have played soccer since I was in kindergarten. I think that it has effected me. After soccer games I would feel lightheaded from hitting the soccer ball. I broke my leg playing a soccer game. Two years ago this time I was in physical therapy for eight months with a hip injury. All from soccer.

DONNOVAN: Keep Our Own Kids Safe national celebrity spokesman Rush Limbaugh…

RUSH: We thank God, Lisa, that you are among the fortunate few who have learned in time. But think of the people who have not learned, who don’t know, who are being led down the primrose path. My friends, I think it’s time for serious, drastic action. It is time to ban soccer from television. That, obviously, is encouraging a lot of people to play. Don’t let any of the sponsors that sponsor soccer advertise on TV. Something must be done now. You heard her story.

LISA: It’s not worth risking my body, injuries that I could be stuck with for life! I mean, who knows? I could be… Like, five hundred years (sic) from now I could be, like, a paraplegic! I mean, who knows? It’s not worth it.

DONNOVAN: Join Rush Limbaugh, and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign. Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you. You’ll find them everywhere.

END PSA #1

RUSH: That was an actual caller, ladies and gentlemen, an actual caller to the program who was acknowledging that I was doing great work and was on the right side of this issue, and she wanted to alert others to the risks that she faced. There’s one more that we play where a guy who has obviously suffered brain injury and doesn’t know it, calls. Yeah, here. Play that one. Listen to this…

BEGIN PSA #2

JOHNNY DONNOVAN: (caring music) And now a word from the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.

MAN: I see soccer as not a violent sport, it’s — it’s a symptom of violence, not a cause of violence.

DONNOVAN: Keep Our Own Kids Safe national celebrity spokesman Rush Limbaugh…

RUSH: Are you a paid member of the soccer lobby? There have been people in other endeavors of human activity who have known of inherent risks and have lied about it.

MAN: If anything, your words will serve only to, uh, embolden people’s efforts to spread the — the sport of soccer, and I hope that doesn’t incorporate an increased number of injuries and so on and so forth.

RUSH: Well, me too. I can only bring the information to the people. If anger at me — if anger at me — causes others to get more people into this game, I can’t be held accountable for that.

MAN: I love the game and I played a little bit of football as well and I tell ya: I would never take my chances on the football field.

RUSH: And you took chances that you didn’t even know you were taking on the soccer field, and that’s my point.

MAN: Well, I’ve got a —

RUSH: You didn’t even know because they hid the data from us.

MAN: Yeah. Well, last time I checked I didn’t have any brain — brain damage.

RUSH: Well…

MAN: But I hope I don’t.

RUSH: Oftentimes, victims are the last to know. You should ask your family members if there have been any changes.

DONNOVAN: Join Rush Limbaugh, and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign. Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you. You’ll find them everywhere.

END PSA #2

RUSH: See, right there! Right there is a guy brain damaged and didn’t even know it. He was in utter denial. Mike, do you have the dates on those? I mean, this goes back. Talk about cutting edge stuff. Like I say, we haven’t spent a lot of time on the air but we continue to run these PSAs during commercial breaks online and for people on hold. This has to be 15-year-old stuff. I mean, it’s easily 15 years and maybe 20 years ago we started this. We were really on the cutting edge of this.

You know, everybody talks about football and the dangers. Get this. TIME Magazine, November of last year: “Study: Soccer Players Without Concussions Still Have Brain Changes — A small study of professional soccer players found that even those who have never experienced a concussion still have changes in the white matter of their brains, likely from routine and unprotected headers,” and the soccer ball is not hard. It’s not as hard as a rock, but it’s hard enough to cause brain injury.

All of these people playing the game are clueless, and they’re being lied to. In fact, they’re being told the game is safer than football. Young couples are sending their young skulls full of mush out there to play this game, ostensibly to avoid being hurt. Meanwhile, football is coming under the microscope and soccer is getting away here with hardly any attention at all. Here’s more from the article: “In the study, the researchers compared bran scans of 12 male soccer players from German elite-level soccer clubs who had not experienced a concussion, to brain scans of 11 competitive swimmers who had similarly never experienced repetitive brain trauma.”

In a nutshell: Players who never had concussions, who played soccer, had just as bad brain damage as those who had concussions. So you can get brain damage from soccer without even getting a concussion! They’re not even alleging that in football. You’ve been warned. (interruption) Well, I don’t know if Obama’s imaginary son Trayvon would be allowed to play soccer or not. I don’t know if Obama knows anything about this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to the phones to Decatur, Illinois, Josh. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, buddy. Good to talk to you. Hey, first in the game yesterday, if they just maybe teach ’em how to wear their helmets properly they could save a lot of the concussions. I see more helmets on the field than I think I’ve ever seen.

RUSH: Well, let me tell you something about that. We had a story just last week from some sort of a clinician specialist who made the point that there is no helmet in the world that will ever prevent a concussion because a concussion is the brain slamming into the skull, and there’s no helmet that can stop that from happening. It’s not possible. It’s an illusion if people think they can come up with safer helmets, not for concussions. Now, skull fractures and that kind of thing, yeah, but actual concussions, ’til you can pad the inside of the skull, which a helmet doesn’t do, then it’s all academic.

CALLER: There’s a lot of ways to get concussions. Hillary got one just by falling down the stairs. So, you know, like with Seau, how do you know he didn’t get a concussion from a car accident or ran into a brick wall?

RUSH: Hell, he mighta played soccer in the off-season.

CALLER: There you go.

RUSH: Who knows. With Hillary we do know she wasn’t hanging from chandeliers. That’s Bill. But she did get a concussion slipping and doing something.

CALLER: There are several ways to get one. They just always assume it’s football or it’s the easiest thing to blame it on, I guess.

RUSH: I know. I know. It’s just a vehicle. Football’s a vehicle for empowering central planners and authoritarians. All it is. I appreciate the call.