RUSH: Audio sound bite time. I want to take you back to me, January 27th, 2014, right here behind the Golden EIB Microphone.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You know, it’s fascinating to me, the liberals, it turns out, do hate football. It apparently has been latent and this push in the last two years has brought them to the surface. It’s always been there. Hypermasculinity I would define honestly as patriotism. I think that’s one of the things that bugs ’em about football. But hypermasculinity, to these guys, is just plane old masculinity. Men being men is hypermasculinity. What else do you think hypermasculinity is? It has to be just plain old masculinity. From the standpoint of your average leftist male, masculinity to them is what? It’s not — (interruption) no. No. Masculinity to your average leftist male is not masculinity at all. So therefore genuine masculinity to them is hypermasculinity. This is a game. The only reason people like this game is because they get to watch war. They get to watch hypermasculinity in war, it’s a substitute for watching war, people love violence, want to consume violence.
You know what it’s called? Concussion. Yeah. And it stars Will Smith doing a Nigerian accent. He portrays a Pittsburgh forensic pathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu, who was Pittsburgh UPMC, Medical Center. He is the first doctor to — well, he discovered what is being called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is brain disease brought on by playing football. And you can only discover whether somebody has it in an autopsy. It cannot be diagnosed. It can only be presumed.
He autopsied the former Steeler center Mike Webster and discovered that Webster had all these lesions in his brain and guy concluded that it was because of the lifetime of hits on Webster’s head that caused this. And this movie, starring Will Smith, is all about how this guy is desperately trying to get the NFL to listen to him. And they didn’t want to hear from him, and they didn’t want him to go public, and they didn’t want him saying anything about this ’cause it’s gonna destroy football and so forth.
So the media is all excited, ’cause now we have a movie talking about this brave doctor single-handedly bringing to everybody’s attention this horrible disease brought about by playing football, and we’re finally gonna get down to the nub of it. The trailer is two minutes. We got 20 seconds of the trailer for you here.
SMITH: When I was a boy, heaven was here, and America was here. You could be anything; you could do anything. I am the wrong person to have discovered this.
WOMAN: If you don’t speak for them, who will?
RUSH: That was a woman telling the doctor, “If you don’t speak for them, who will?” He was being encouraged to go public with this discovery of his, that football was killing people. Anyway, you’ve probably seen it. If you watch any TV at all, you’ve probably seen this trailer by now. I saw a great interview today, CNN. In fact, Cookie, you might want to see if you have this. Right before 11 o’clock CNN had former linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons named Chris Draft to discuss this, and, boy, was he great.
He was so well spoken about this, and he made the point that the problem with this movie is that it’s not about now. It’s about a long time ago, and ever since the time this movie is about, all kinds of things have changed to make the game safer, and he detailed some of them. But I told you, I warned you people this was coming, and they’re not gonna let go of it. Just like when the drip, drip, drip happens to Ken Starr or anybody, they don’t stop ’til they get their scalp. I guarantee you, it may go fits and spurts, but they’re gonna continue on this crusade against the brutally of football for whatever purpose just to see if they can do damage to it, big corporation, a lot of money so it’s a big target in that sense.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Chris Draft. Cookie got the sound bite. He’s a former linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons. He was on with Carol Costello on CNN today, and they were talking about this movie, Concussion, and they played the entire trailer. This is Will Smith portraying the Nigerian doctor who discovered the brain damage and disease that comes from years and years of hits to the head.
And she said (hysterical laughter throughout), “You’re a former linebacker. How are you gonna…? How you gonna watch the movie?” She laughs everything she reports. It’s the most amazing thing. I’m just imitating here. (hysterical laughter throughout) “You’re a former linebacker. How are you gonna go watch the movie? Are you concerned? I mean, should the NFL be concerned?”
DRAFT: What’s important is realizing that that movie is not about right now. That movie is really talking about something that happened around 2007, 2006. So a lot has happened since that time. Right now, with training camp just finishing up, NFL players, they don’t even do two-a-days anymore. As we get into the regular season, the amount of actual contact practice has been dramatically decreased, and then, really, just the concussion protocol across the league is drastically changed.
RUSH: He wanted to continue, and I wanted to hear what he had to say, but they ran out of time. They had come out of the 11 o’clock break. But that’s Chris Draft. He’s a former linebacker for the Falcons, and I haven’t heard anybody put it in context and perspective like that. He’s exactly right. This movie coming out now is actually about the way things were long before a bunch of reforms have taken place. When people watch a movie, how many of ’em are gonna be aware of that?
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