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RUSH: The NFL opened last night.  This is not about Brandon Marshall taking a knee during the national anthem.  This is gonna become a tired, worn-out story before long.  You might have heard the Seattle Seahawks are planning a team protest on Sunday. (interruption) You didn’t hear this?  Doug Baldwin and the Seahawks players and a couple of other Seahawks players said they were toying with the idea of a total team protest against the national anthem on Sunday, which just happens to be the 15th anniversary to the day of 9/11.

Now, supposedly they’ve changed their minds about this, they say. The latest update about this is they’re not gonna do that, but they were pondering it. We’ve also learned that the Seahawks have a couple people, a player and a coach who are 9/11 truthers, who believe the government flew the planes into the World Trade Center, and one of the people who believes it is the head coach, and got into an argument with a retired military man some years ago about this.

People are now saying maybe — maybe — the head coach was just joking. Maybe he’s really not a 9/11 truther.  But one of the players is, and the other players want to go along with this social injustice and all this.  Anything could still happen.  One of the things they like to do is… Brandon Marshall last night of the Broncos, nobody knew it was gonna happen. Come out sing the national anthem, the camera focuses on both teams and there’s number 54 for the Broncos taking a knee.  And nobody knew it was gonna happen.

So the Seahawks could surprise me.  We’ll just have to wait and see.  One of the late games on Sunday is a home game in Seattle.  Well, the big story the NFL game last night, get… I don’t know how to do the See, I Told You So on this, because I can’t pinpoint in my memory exactly when something happened that made me realize the game of football is now been corrupted by the left.  It’s recently.  It’s in the past three to four years.  Last night is an illustration of what I’m talking about.

The quarterback for the Carolina Panthers is Cam Newton.  He’s a big guy.  He’s 250 pounds.  That’s huge for a quarterback.  It’s huge for a running back! It’s huge for a fullback. Somebody’s gonna carry the ball.  He is tough to bring down.  Last night Cam Newton was hit in the head by mean players on the Broncos, four or five times, helmet-to-helmet strikes — which, in the NFL, are no longer allowed.  You can’t go helmet-to-helmet on anybody, particularly defenseless player, but you just can’t do it.

They’re trying to prevent as many concussions from taking place as they can, as they make efforts to make this game of violent collisions safer.  Football is not a contact sport.  Basketball is a contact sport.  Football is a collision sport, violent collision sport.  If you play in the offensive line or the defensive line, you and I couldn’t last one play there, folks.  The average human being would be on injured reserve for your career after one play.  It’s like being in a car wreck without the car every play.

I mean, these are really tough people that play this game.  And not everybody can.  There’s only 1600 ’em that are qualified to play in the National Football League, so the league is doing everything it can to pay attention to safety. Concussions. They made a movie about it regaling some doctor in Pittsburgh who had discovered the noted disease CTE, which can only be diagnosed in an autopsy.  Anyway, Cam Newton. The hits were questionable last night.  Only one of them was called as a penalty.

However, the penalty was negated because in the same play Cam Newton was accused… I’m sorry.  “Accused.”  Football is not in a court of law. Cam Newton was penalized for intentional grounding.  So those penalties offset, which in the NFL means it’s as though neither happened; just replay the down.  But it really is strange that an illegal hit to the head which leaves the quarterback woozy can be offset by an intentional grounding penalty, but that’s what happened.  Here’s the upshot of it.  Well, Mediaite…

This is not from a sports page.  Not any sports page that you would recognize.  This comes from Mediaite.  “NFL Under Fire for Violent Hits Taken by Cam Newton in Season Opener — The NFL is drawing criticism from fans, from pundits, and even several players over its handling of the multiple vicious hits to the head taken by Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton in Thursday night’s season opener.”  When was the last time can you ever recall seeing the day after any football game, a news story about the viciousness, about the violence?

About how, “This can’t be allowed to go on! We gotta step in and stop this. This is outrageous. This is impermissible!”  Have you ever seen anything like this in postgame reporting outside of sports media?  “Perhaps the worst…” I’m reading from Mediaite.  Nothing against Mediaite.  Don’t misunderstand here.  This is cultural, folks.  The game of football is never gonna be the same.  This game is gonna be reviewed play-by-play within the context of our culture, social justice, political correctness. You wait. Every play…

Lawsuits are not far.  It is gonna totally change the way you watch the game, the way it’s reported, and the way it’s played.  “Perhaps the worst of the repeated shots came during the Panthers’ final drive, when Denver Broncos safety Darian Stewart launched himself into Newton headfirst, making helmet-to-helmet contact.  Newton was facedown in the Denver turf, unable to move for several seconds before slowly getting to his feet and finishing the drive.

“That play resulted in a penalty against Denver, but other violent shots did not — much to the dismay of Panthers tight end Greg Olsen. We’ve got to treat Cam like a quarterback,’ Olsen told CBS Sports. ‘I know he’s the biggest guy on the field, but he’s still a quarterback.’ …

Fans and critics were up in arms over the fact that Newton was allowed to continue playing after all the hits and not removed from the game as part of the NFL’s concussion protocol.”  You realize what’s happening here?

I’m making no comment on it.  I’m just bringing it to your attention.  I’m telling you.  So what happened is, the NFL has this concussion protocol. Anybody… They’ve got spotters in the press box that are not tied to any team.  They got neurologists. They got doctors. They’ve got all kinds of people out there making sure that if a player even appears to have gotten a concussion, they yank him out there and they give him the concussion tests and if he fails they don’t put him back in there; he’s done for the day.

And they’re upset that that didn’t happen to Cam Newton ’cause there were clearly a bunch of different times he could have very easily had a concussion, and nobody made a move to help him — the spotters up in the press box, the doctors, the neurologists, nobody — and it says right here: Fans, critics, pundits, reporters up in arms over the fact that Newton was allowed to continue playing after the hits.  What do you expect?  It’s the final drive. The Panthers are down four. They need to get into field goal range.

It’s the opening game. They lost to the Broncos in the Super Bowl.  Can you imagine being the person to take the Panthers’ starting quarterback out of the game in that circumstance?  It isn’t gonna happen.  Nobody wants that, just like Comey didn’t want to be known as the guy that took out Hillary because of the FBI thing.  Nobody’s gonna step in here.  But now this is a huge news story. It’s bigger than who won or who lost.  It’s bigger than the guy that took a knee during the national anthem.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just want to add one thing to ’em.  I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen here.  In addition to all of this hand-wringing over every play now — you ought to see the social media on this. You ought to see the tweets on this by sportswriters outraged. Somebody needs to be suspended. The NFL needs to stop the game and throw some people out.  It’s just incredible.

I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. Quarterbacks are now gonna be taken out. There will be teams that will decide it’s worth it to get a 15-yard penalty and maybe, maybe get kicked out of the game for an illegal helmet-to-helmet hit if it gets the opposing quarterback taken out of the game.

Imagine this scenario.  Pick any two teams you want.  Pick a team that has a really — I mean, one of the best quarterbacks in the league.  And it’s a very meaningful game.  The other team’s coach, “You know what, we gotta get the quarterback outta the game,” and the simplest way to do it you assign a bunch of defensive players helmet-to-helmet.  No bounty, no bounty, just helmet-to-helmet hit cause the concussion protocol to be implemented and the starting quarterback have to be taken out of the game.

This is going to increase head shots.  Head shots are going to become a strategic part of the game.  And when this starts happening, you’re gonna really see the sportswriter community explode. You’re gonna see Twitter and social media and the rest of the media and everybody else wringing their hands. I don’t want to predict when this is gonna actually happen, but it’s not far down the line where you’re going to be looking at football and remembering it the way it used to be.  And you’re going to be longing for it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Robert in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.  Great to have you on the program, sir.  Hello.

CALLER:  Rush, thank you, sir.  First let me say I am grateful every single day that God gave you talent, because you know what to do with it.  My comment is I was in the Pentagon on 9/11.  My office was 100 feet from the point of impact.  You remember the iconic flag picture draped over the —

RUSH:  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait just a minute.  Before you go further, we need to explain something to people.  When I say that there’s a Seahawks player and a coach that are 9/11 truthers, part of that is believing that nothing happened to the Pentagon, that no plane hit! “There’s no evidence that a plane hit the Pentagon — no residues, no nothing,” and there are people that actually believe that plane didn’t hit the Pentagon.  You couldn’t have been in your office at the time if it’s only a hundred feet away from the impact.

CALLER:  Well, Rush, if you would like to talk to my dead friends who perished that day, it might change his mind, but —

RUSH:  Oh, no. They think something happened. They think the Pentagon blew it up itself, or that “the government” did. They just don’t think that a plane hit it.  I’m… Don’t misunderstand.  I think it’s —

CALLER:  Oh, yeah.

RUSH:  I’m just saying people hold this belief, like the government flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

CALLER:  Well, as I’m sure you and I would agree, that’s just simply hogwash.  And for those who were around the Pentagon and inside it, they now know the truth.  But I guess my comment was, if Mr. Kaepernick had been standing next to me on that day at that moment, would he view our national anthem any differently?  Now, I know we’ll never know the answer to that because it’s a hypothetical question. But our national anthem, Rush, stands for a pathway to equality as our flag does.  And it appears to me that Mr. Kaepernick does not want to follow that pathway to equality.  Our country was not perfect when it was born —

RUSH:  Well, now, wait.  Let me make one stipulation as far as what these people claim.

CALLER:  Sure.

RUSH:  The people that are sitting down and are taking a knee and their supporters are specifically claiming that it is the flag that gives them the right to sit down, to take a knee, to dissent — that that is the meaning of the flag, that patriotism does not mean required support for a country.  Patriotism can be principled dissent from a country if it’s doing things that you disagree with.  And the flag permits this.  This is how they’re explaining it and rationalizing it.

CALLER:  I understand their point.  I don’t know that I necessarily agree with it because I think that there is a reverence that we give to those who created this nation and that flag.

RUSH:  That’s true. There’s another question needs to be asked about this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, on this 9/11 truth stuff, there are two elements to it.  The World Trade Center, nobody’s denying the planes hit.  The 9/11 truthers believe that planes hitting high up in the building as they did are not enough to bring the buildings down.  They believe the planes being flown into the building was done on purpose and then there were charges and dynamite, whatever it was, strategically placed inside each building that were then detonated after the planes hit to bring the buildings down.

They can’t tell you why — well, maybe some of them can.  But they can’t deny the planes hit because there’s video of that, but some of them do dispute who was flying the planes, believe it or not.  I mean, the 9/11 conspiracies are all over the place.  They have various bits of evidence, claimed evidence, like certain people getting out of town the day before ’cause they knew what was gonna happen, this kind of stuff.

Now, in the Pentagon, since all there is, is a flash photo of the explosion, there’s no pictures such as there were of the trade center towers of the plane actually hitting, there’s just the testimony of the people on the ground. There’s no question something happened there. The 9/11 truthers believe that it wasn’t a plane.  They’ll claim to you that there’s no evidence.

Look at this.  I just happen to be talking about this and Fox is showing videotape of the towers blazing. If you’re watching it by any chance, the truthers believe that just because the planes hit the top of the buildings there’s no way that would bring down those two buildings, that something else had to happen.  And then of course the government wanted it because the government wanted the people conditioned to go to war, all of this.

Now, the Pentagon truthers — and the reason this has even come up is because there’s a couple of people in the Seattle Seahawks who happen to be 9/11 truthers, and they are planning, or were, to boycott the national anthem in the opening game on Sunday in Seattle.  Supposedly an update’s come down the pike, they’re not gonna do that, so they say.  So this has given rise to all of this discussion.

Now, our last caller, clearly a lot of people believe that when you hear the national anthem, see the flag, you stand up because it is to honor America. In fact, many public address announcers ask you to stand and honor America while the playing of the national anthem.  Now, the people that are sitting down or taking a knee, let me just remind you what Kaepernick said, Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49’ers.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.  To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Now, I don’t detect a freedom of speech issue in that statement, but what’s happening, people in defending Kaepernick, this is classic. I’ll never forget.  You all remember back in the early nineties, it might even have been the late eighties, a huge public debate that might even involve Supreme Court over flag burning. There was a crowd that was all for it, that if you believed in America you have to permit people to burn the flag.  That’s what the flag stands for. The flag, they said, stands for your freedom to burn it, to rip it to shreds, to sit on it, to flush it, whatever.  That’s exactly what this country means.  You have your freedom to dissent and you can express this in nonviolent ways, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And people are today in justifying the actions of Kaepernick and now Doug Baldwin, the Seahawks player.  The Broncos player last night was Brandon Marshall, number 54, an outside linebacker sat down, or took a knee.  And people are saying, “Well, that’s what flag means.  That’s what the flag stands for.  The flag means that you can dissent.”  And this has given rise to the predictable subject matter of patriotism and what does it mean.

So many people on the left want to define patriotism as dissenting.  In fact, Hillary Clinton did.  You remember that screeching, squawking sound bite we have of her where she’s literally screaming?  It’s from 2008, it is in New Hampshire, part of the presidential campaign (imitating Hillary).  Okay, fine.  So patriotism’s to the left means being able to criticize the country, burn the flag, what have you.

I understand that.  I just wonder, where does it end?  At some point does it become patriotic to destroy the country?  How far does that definition of patriotism extend?  And some people say, “Well, yeah, it does, Rush. When Thomas Jefferson said at some point revolutions need new blood. At some point, to guarantee freedom, you gotta spill some blood.  At some point it might be necessary for future populations of the country to overthrow the government and that the flag stands for your right to do that.”

I understand all that intellectually.  But I also intellectually understand the left, and in my mind, their changes they want to make to this country are not improvements at all.  They don’t like it and they want to tear it down and rebuild it into something that it was never intended to be.  Now, does patriotism, do they have the freedom to do that?  I guess they do.  They have the freedom to try.  But to sit around and applaud it and to honor it, I don’t know.  I remember getting into knock-down, drag-outs with friends over the flag burning thing, and my take on it was, yeah, you might be persuasive in that it’s entirely legal and ought not be punishable.  But where does it end?

I’ve always wanted to know about the motivations of people.  I admittedly have a love for this country, and I’m very frustrated at people that don’t. But I know that they exist and I know what their grievances are.  I just disagree profoundly with them.  And I think the reasons they feel the way they feel, while they may think they’re legit, I think they’re immature and childish.  If their ideas were to improve things, that would be one thing, but I don’t see much of this leftist dissent as ending up improving things.  That’s where I’ve always come down on this.

But we’re clearly in the midst of a roiling debate over the very existence, foundation, structure of this country and what America is going to be, and there’s a whole crowd of people, I don’t know how big it is, we’ll find out, that believes most of this country is unjust, that most of this country, that any aspect of this country that you can trace to the founding, is immoral. That any aspect of America today that you can trace to the founding is unjust and needs to be stripped. And of course I have a completely different view.

I think the things that happened that resulted in the founding of this country are miraculous.  And even though I intellectually understand the people that have grievances, emotionally I don’t.  It’s a real sore spot and it’s been a constant source of concern of mine ’cause I don’t know where else in the world that you could live that you would be afforded with the freedom, the opportunity. Even if you want to talk about things like equality, if that’s a number one thing to you or nondiscrimination, I don’t care where you go, there’s no better place on earth.

We are the luckiest people that have ever lived on this planet.  And all it takes is a little perspective to realize that and then a mature admission that nothing’s perfect.  But one of the fallacies of the left is they believe that humanity is in its own existence imperfect, flawed, but that can be perfected, humanity can be perfected, but only with the power of a massive central government enforcing things, such as behavior and belief, on people. And in that way you make people perfect, even if you have to force them to do things against their nature and against their will.

If you want to create this utopia, this perfect place, since there’s gonna be natural opposition, you have to stamp that out and you have to have a massive command-and-control central authority which quote/unquote “understands this desire for perfection, understands what the perfection is and then how to implement it,” which, of course, is totally fallacious.  It simply isn’t possible.  There isn’t the perfect, and there’s no way to enforce it.

It’s been tried I don’t know how many times.  It’s failed miserably each time it’s tried.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  And we figure back to the phones, Clover, South Carolina.  Stewart, welcome to the program, sir.  Hello.

CALLER:  Hello.  Thanks for taking my call.  I’ll try and be brief and concise here.  But my calls about a lot of what you’ve been talking about, just everything around this false narrative of cops shooting unarmed blacks.  It’s just not true.  We know that.  The stats show that they’re not using lethal force against blacks more so than whites, and even if it were true, the question —

RUSH:  By the way, let me just intercede because a lot of people (shouts), “What do you mean it’s not true? You’re letting him get away with that?”  DOJ, Department of Justice, statistics, folks. The caller is right.

CALLER:  Right.

RUSH:  There is no proportionally greater number of them. The whole thing is so vastly made up that it’s near criminal itself the way this whole belief has spread. Unarmed innocent blacks are not being wantonly murdered by the cops in this country.  It just isn’t the case.

CALLER:  Exactly.

RUSH:  Now, they are being murdered by other blacks in fair greater numbers, but we’re not supposed to talk about that.  That’s a whole other subject and you’re not qualified because you’re not black so you can’t talk about that.  But, anyway, I just don’t want people to think that I’m letting you run off the rails here uncorrected because the DOJ stats back him up.  Now, what’s your point?

CALLER:  Well, even if it were true, the question would be if it were justifiable.  I mean, if an unarmed person tries to arm himself by taking a cop’s gun, that cop is justified in using lethal force.  But regardless, I believe this whole false narrative was started and has been perpetuated by a fear of the left. They’re worried that Hillary is not gonna get the votes that Obama got, especially in the context that Obama has done nothing for the African-American society and everything has gotten worse under him.  I think they’ve started and perpetuated this whole meme.

RUSH:  Wait a minute.  Just want to make sure.  Are you saying that Kaepernick sitting down during the anthem is because Hillary’s sitting down during the anthem and they’re worried?

CALLER:  No, I think Kaepernick sitting down is his belief of this false narrative and it’s now causing him to denounce the whole country.  He’s sitting down so the anthem and the flag and he now believes this.

RUSH:  Oh, I got you.

CALLER:  It’s something you mentioned recently about the cops that were killed in Dallas, he said something to the effect of these people really believe that cops are out there hunting them down, it might drive them to go commit some atrocity like that.  And now you’ve got people that really believe this that are… It’s just a dangerous false narrative, and it’s flooding through social media like wildfire, and it’s causing a whole group of people among the sports fandom that may not be in the daily news or politics or anything like that, and they just get their news from social media.  Now they see this high visibility sports star that’s taken this —

RUSH:  I got it.  Got you.  It’s like the whole false story of Ferguson, “hands up, don’t shoot.”  It didn’t happen.  It literally didn’t happen — and no less than the Department of Justice, Obama’s own DOJ, has said it didn’t happen.  But yet Colin Kaepernick, who knows what he knows? He might think it does happen, or did happen.  He might think it’s all a lie when people deny it.  So the caller’s point is that people are believing a bunch of myths.

They’re getting angry about it as though it were true, and they’re taking action based on it.  This is inciting social media and all of it’s based on things that aren’t true, which is dangerous.  All of that is true.  But there are people promoting this who know it isn’t true.  People you never hear of behind the scenes — people like George Soros and others funding it — they know it isn’t true.  They don’t care.  They want the chaos.  They want the anger and what have you.

Back in just a second.

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