RUSH: As you know, the NFL came out the other day, the Fritz Pollard Alliance, they want to penalize the use of the N-word, 15 yards the first offense, then you get kicked out of the game the second time you use it. Mike Pereira, who is a former head of the officials in the NFL, now at Fox, “They don’t need a new rule. They’ve already got one. There’s a point of emphasis in the league that that kind of language is not tolerated, and it already is subject to penalty. Don’t need a new rule.” Here we go to the Fritz Pollard Alliance. This was this morning on ESPN Radio. John Wooten, who’s chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, was asked, “What would we hope be gained and what purpose served by this penalty in the NFL?”
WOOTEN: What you’re trying to do is to bring back an element of respect of what’s going on in the great game that we have in the National Football League. And that’s totally deteriorated. What really prompted us to make the move was the incident there at the Redskins-Eagles game. You got to make players respect each other and if they’re not going to do it on their own, then you got to put rules into effect.
RUSH: Now, I’ve been wracking my brain, and I haven’t gone back to the Web to look. I don’t know what happened at the Redskins-Eagles game, but I know that the Eagles, a wide receiver named Riley Cooper, who was agitated I think at a concert, not during a game, started calling people the N-word left and right, but I don’t recall what happened in the game between the Redskins and Eagles. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that Mr. Wooten wants to clean up the NFL. It’s totally deteriorated and what’s not stated here is he’s not happy with the current culture.
He doesn’t like the N-word. He doesn’t like — I don’t want to put words in his mouth. But you know what he means. He thinks that the current culture in the NFL lacks respect for the game and for the people who play it. You heard him say it, gotta make players respect each other, and if they’re not gonna do it on their own, you gotta put rules into effect. And then he went further. And this is where he talks about we need to return to the way it was long ago.
WOOTEN: I played in this league back when the racial segregation and turmoil was at its height in the fifties and sixties. I played for the Cleveland Browns. And the thing that Paul Brown did each and every year was say very simply, “We don’t have any black Browns, we don’t have any white Browns; we have Cleveland Browns.” That’s what you gotta make players understand today, that if they are gonna use this N-word, which is the worst, horrible, ugliest word in the history of vocabulary in this country, then you gotta make them responsible for their actions.
RUSH: “I played in this league back when racial segregation and turmoil was at its height in the fifties and sixties, and I played for the Browns, and even then the coach, Paul Brown, said there weren’t white Browns and brown Browns and black Browns; there are Cleveland Browns.” So here is a guy who wants to turn the clock back to the good old fifties and sixties, back when morality was decent and back when people respected each other, and back when there was a sense of decency, guardrails, and there was a sense of morality.
Now, of course in the modern American left, that is antiquated, that’s old-fashioned, that’s not modern, that’s not progressive. You can’t go back to Leave It To Beaver. You can’t go back to the Donna Reed Show. You can’t go back to the Nelson family. That was never real anyway. That was just a bunch of white PR. We can’t go back to that. We must have it wide open. People can do whatever they want, say whatever they want, no guardrails. Anything you want to do is fine, that’s progressive, that’s modernism. Now, normally when you have somebody want to go back to the 50’s, they get tarred and feathered. Mr. Wooten was not finished, however.
WOOTEN: On the field of play, in the locker room, in the cafeteria, wherever it has to do with NFL facilities, the N-word cannot and should not be used. You look at a lot of our young people, black and white, they have no idea what the word really is about. I don’t want anybody telling me that they desensitized it. How can that word ever be a word of endearment? And these are the kind of things that you’ve gotta make players and our young people understand.
RUSH: Ryan Clark of the Steelers over the weekend and yesterday on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, the N-word, said young guys are not gonna stop using it. It’s just their culture. It’s how they were raised. And Mr. Wooten here says, “I don’t care, that word can never be a term of endearment,” but it is. Is it not, within certain… to some people it’s, I won’t go so far as say it’s a compliment, but it’s a term of endearment. “Hey, bro. Hey, what up, bro.” It’s used in that way, and his point is that the young black kids today hearing this term, learning it, don’t really know its roots, don’t really know what it is. And I’m sure — he didn’t say this — I’m sure what bothers him is that it’s horrible and reprehensible and intolerable for some people to use it, but for others it’s perfectly fine. For somebody in his generation it’s never good, it’s never fine, and it never will be.
Michael Wilbon from ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption: the N-word,” this is during mail time last night during the show. They read a letter. Kornheiser: “Should the NFL hand out a 15-yard penalty for using the N-word on the field?” Here’s Wilbon again.
WILBON: You gonna have a league with no black owners and a white commissioner, so middle-age and advanced age white men say to black players mostly, because that’s who we’re talking about, you can’t use the N-word on the field of play or we’re gonna penalize you. I got a massive problem with that. I don’t think it’s gonna happen. I know there are black men of the same age, John Wooten being one of them, who say, no, you have to take this word out of the workplace. I understand that. But I don’t want it enforced like this.
RUSH: Okay, fascinating. John Wooten, black man, played in the fifties and sixties, the Cleveland Browns, doesn’t want the word used. Wilbon understands that, but he doesn’t want the white power structure of the NFL behind the penalty. He doesn’t want that white commissioner, and he doesn’t want the white owners doing it. But they’re not. They haven’t said diddly-squat other than to agree with Wooten. Wooten is the guy, the Fritz Pollard Alliance got this all going.
It is a black organization that’s trying to rid the NFL of this word being used. But Wooten can’t do it on his own, so he needs the NFL to help out with a rules change on the penalties, and the NFL power structure happens to be a bunch of white guys, and while Wilbon understands it, “Hey, I understand John Wooten, have to take the word out of the workplace, I understand that, but I don’t want it enforced like this.” A 15-yard penalty instituted by the white liberal plantation owners that run the NFL. That’s what Wilbon is saying.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more Michael Wilbon. This, again, from “Pardon the Interruption: The N-word” on ESPN. Wilbon continued, after saying that he understands John Wooten, who’s a black guy, doesn’t want the N-word used. But Wilbon, he doesn’t want it enforced with a bunch of white guys being the authority, and then he continued.
WILBON: It is NOT defaming in the context in which I and many others use it every day. Just language! Just talk! I’m not a the child of hip-hop. I use it every day, with somebody else who uses it, and I understand people who don’t want to use it. I respect that. This is difficult. This is complicated, and the NFL, which won’t even stand up… Roger Goodell doesn’t have the guts to stand up and say, “Redskin… Redskin is an offensive name,” so he wants to take (bleep)-er out of play, but he won’t take Redskin out of play? How gutless is that? What kind of signal are you sending?
RUSH: You know, I’m sorry, I can’t keep up. Here’s a guy who wants to use the N-word, wants to reserve for himself the right to use it with his buddies who also use it in ways that they all agree, “It’s just language. It’s not offensive.” He’s not a child of hip hop, by the way. He wants everybody to know that. (paraphrased) “But don’t ever, ever let me hear you say Redskins! Don’t you ever say that word to me!” While he’s out using the N-word with…
(interruption)
What?
(interruption)
Yeah.
(interruption)
Well, but he’s saying he does not want to hear Redskins. “How can they take the N-word out when they won’t take Redskins out?” That’s what he’s saying. He thinks that they’re being discriminated against. Again, go up and grab sound bite number seven, Mike Pereira. This is the NFL official. He’s on Fox Sports now. He’s the rules analyst. He’s a former head honcho of the officials. He was their bus boss. He handed out the grades. He appeared on Fox Sports One’s “Fox Football Daily: The N-word,” and the host of the show said, “Doesn’t the NFL already have some language in place to penalize players for abusive language?”
PEREIRA: If you look at Rule 12 now, it has in there that any “threatening or insulting language or gestures to opponents, officials, teammates,” it is subject to a 15-yard penalty.” So the rule’s there. I don’t think we’ll see a rule change coming specifically, but I do think you will see a point of emphasis coming from this, that the officials, it will be put upon them to really flag any racial slur. Anything that they hear that’s a racial slur, period, will draw a 15-yard penalty. It’s not, to me, a matter of, “Can they legislate it?” With all that’s happened lately, they will legislate it.
RUSH: Now, let me just reiterate something here, folks, ’cause yesterday I revised a prediction that I had made and I want to remind you of it. I have been predicting for a while that the purpose of the left here was to actually destroy NFL football and college football, and I thought the focus on concussions and injuries and suicide and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and barbarism and maiming was that.
Then I saw these two sportswriters apologizing for popularizing the game that maims people and destroys them and is nothing but barbaric. I thought it was all leading to ultimately the demand that the game end because it’s just not something that decent liberals could support or watch, that it just too brutal. It’s just, “Ewww!” and we shouldn’t be cheering it, and we shouldn’t be applauding lifetime injuries — and I’m taking that back. I now do not think that that’s the objective.
Instead, ladies and gentlemen, the left has seen the success they’ve had taking over movies, the music industry, the television industry, and they’ve targeted the NFL as their next industry to take over and popularize and use for the purposes of promoting and propagandizing liberalism. They look at the NFL; they see it is the most popular activity in America. It is the most popular spectator sport, certainly. It is the sport that is the wealthiest. It has the most money; it makes the most money.
There’s the most money in it flowing in and around all the various partners involved. It gets the highest TV ratings when it is on in prime time of anything else on TV. So rather than stamp it out, they want to take over, and they’ve already done this. The month of October is now totally pink in the NFL, for example. It’s breast cancer awareness. But all of this focus on the barbarism and maiming and suicide is all to promote liberalism and what it supposedly represents to people.
(interruption)
Yeah, “health care reform” is not about health care. Health care reform is about controlling people. Well, commandeering or conquering the NFL is about taking something very popular and making it a liberal entity so as to use it as a weapon in popular culture to liberalize and make “progressive” as much of the viewing public of the NFL as they can.
It’s the next Hollywood for liberal domination, and they’re gonna try to make it just as hip as the music industry is. Speaking of which, look at what Jay-Z is doing. Jay-Z is now all over the NFL. He is a licensed agent for the NBA and Major League Baseball. Take a look at something else. Every time an NBA game is on in New York or LA, you see big entertainment stars for music, TV, and movies — and, increasingly, politicians are showing up.
Bill Clinton. Obama has wormed his way into sports big time with his bracket selection. You can’t watch a Super Bowl or a Sunday night game without getting socked with politics from either Bob Costas or an interview with Obama. I mean, there’s no mistaking it. There’s no doubt what’s happening here. There is a liberal encroachment on the game. It’s subtle, and it’s just to make the game and the whole enterprise appear to be part of the progressive movement — and it’s got it all.
It’s got young athletes, sex appeal, huge television exposure, marketing exposure, turning the players into the same kind of celebrities that hip-hop artists are, the same kind of celebrities that other TV stars are. Young demographics are watching, huge opportunities to influence votes. The Regime co-opted a couple of teams to promote Obamacare, the Baltimore Ravens being one of them. You know, liberals own big entertainment, and a lot of them own NFL teams. Jeffrey Lurie of the Eagles is a super progressive. There are a number of them. Steve Tisch, New York Giants.
So I don’t think they’re gonna try stamp it out. I think instead they are going to attempt basically to take it over and to make what happens in football as naturally progressive and liberal as what happens in movies or on television shows. And the people who become stars in the NFL are gonna show up on TV and they’re gonna have the same — As evidence of this, look at, out of nowhere, the big push for the acceptance of gay marriage in the NFL, by two players who were immediately embraced.
Neither of them were big stars at the time, but they were embraced and they were given all kinds of coverage and airtime. Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo — getting his last name wrong. Linebacker for the Ravens. And now there’s, of course, Michael Sam, first announced gay to enter the NFL draft. So it’s clear it’s happening. They don’t want to stamp out the NFL. They don’t want to eliminate it. They want to conquer it. That’s what’s in the process of happening.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I might also point out the National Football League has joined in the bullying of the governor of Arizona. The NFL is warning Arizona that you will lose the 2015 Super Bowl if you don’t veto this same sex bill, whatever it is. Religious freedom bill, right. Well, that’s what some people call it. The NFL is tax-exempt. It gives the government a lot of power over them, and therefore the NFL will find it necessary to kowtow and curry favor with the government. And in this case the government is Obama.
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