BRETT: People are starting to push back. You’re seeing it a lot of different ways. Those poll numbers that came out over the weekend on President Biden’s approvals, not looking so good. He’s barely getting credit for covid. On everything else, people are just not feeling the unity that he vowed just about a hundred days ago. He’ll speak to a joint session of Congress coming up here in the next couple of days.
Wednesday night is gonna be the address to the joint session of Congress. He’ll make his way over there to the Capitol through the razor wire and the fencing and the stanchions and all that to give a speech, laying out his plan to moving forward for the future. That future involves a lot of regulation. It involves a lot of taxation.
Those Jim Crow laws that expanded voting dates, days, that expanded opportunities to participate in the democratic process in our constitutional republic. But it was President Biden who said that these were Jim Crow era laws. Stacey Abrams was encouraging him to do it. So Rob Manfred said (paraphrased), “You know what? This is getting a little too hot. We wanted to celebrate the life of Hank Aaron as the central piece of the All-Star weekend in Atlanta.
“But we’ve got politics breaking out, and so we’re just gonna pull the game from Atlanta. We’re gonna put it over in Colorado,” which has more restrictive voting than Georgia and has a smaller population of African-Americans than Georgia. “Job Creators Network Foundation President Elaine Parker said on this week’s broadcast of Fox & Friends Weekend’ that her organization was calling out Major League Baseball for moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta over their objections to a new voting law with a Times Square billboard,” right there in New York City.
“Parker said, ‘The commissioner clearly has all strikes and no balls. That is why we put up this billboard in Time Square.'” That’s her quote to Fox & Friends. “She added, ‘In Atlanta, you mentioned 51%, there are nine times black-owned businesses in Atlanta than in Denver. As much as they are following all of this misinformation and perpetuating all of these lies, they’re actually hurting the very people they claim to be helping'” in those communities.
Well, politics is a dangerous game, especially when you’re involved, when you’re involved in the business of sports. So I wanted you to hear this, because in this clip Rush talked about how pro sports leagues jump on the covid bandwagon in order make themselves look caring and compassionate.
It’s the same with Georgia, Major League Baseball. They’re doing this because they want people to feel like Georgia is not doing what they should be doing. “We’re gonna pressure Georgia! We’re unhappy with it.” Well, Rush called it “wimp politics” with good reason.
RUSH: More and more NFL teams are closing. You know what this has become? This is a PR bandwagon. “Oops! We better close our facilities so that the public thinks we care.” It’s like companies jumping on the climate change train to make customers think they care, because companies are making the mistake of assuming that everybody believes in climate change.
They’re not. Advertising itself, to me, particularly television advertising, is nowhere near as creative and innovative as it used to be, and do you know why that is? It’s because they’ve stopped deciding for themselves, stopped trying to figure out for themselves where culture is and they’re depending on the media. So they think everybody believes in climate change so they glom onto climate change this and that.
A company will be “going green,” announcing climate change promotions or whatever, putting polar bears in TV commercials and so forth. I’ll guarantee you what’s happening here. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the NBA cancels or suspends its season. Well, the NHL can’t be left off. The NHL can’t appear to be irresponsible, so they cancel.
Now here comes the NFL. The NFL doesn’t start playing ’til September — well, preseason games in August — but they can’t appear to be insensitive and left out. So they’re closing whatever they’ve got to close, which is nothing. Nobody goes to the NFL facilities except team executives. So they’re shutting those down.
Now Major League Baseball’s gonna have to do something because their season starts next month. We’ve literally become a culture of a bunch of followers.
You have to look far and wide to find any courageous leaders anymore. It’s a sad, sad thing, and it’s because of the politicization of so much and it’s because of the dominance of wimp politics — which is liberalism — that is infecting everything. A bunch of wimps disguised as compassionate, concerned, sensitive people is wimpifying practically everything they can get their political hands on.
Everybody’s relying on the media’s portrayal of this country every day to be representative of the national attitude on everything. That’s why they think everybody hates Trump! They are convinced everybody hates Trump.
They’re convinced that everybody thinks Trump is an idiot and a buffoon, and that’s not what the majority of Americans think. (interruption) No, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how you deemphasize the media. It’s a question people have had for as long as we’ve been alive.
Well, one of the big problems is the media is not being hurt by having no audience. CNN literally, in another time, another world, would be out of business. They would have had to shut down. They’ve got no viewers, they’ve got no advertising revenue. But they’re part of a conglomerate where they can act as the loss leader. They can use the profits of other areas of the corporation that owns them to stay afloat, whereas a standalone they’d have been bankrupt and shut down months, years ago!
BRETT: Two hugely important points that Rush raises there. The perils of getting political when you are a sports franchise or you are a league. It is perilous. You’ve seen it time and time again. The ratings that were down for the NFL with the kneeling. The ratings that were down for the NBA season. They’ve been very, very weak this year as well as the period in the bubble.
People just didn’t feel like tuning in. You had baseball delay itself. You had hockey delay itself to an extend. You had NASCAR delay itself. You’re driving around in a car by yourself. But I get it. There’s pit crews, so you’ve got all these people that are working in super close proximity. I understand that initial concern, and we’re starting to see all these sports obviously come back in a better way.
(laughs) So you’re not getting enough oxygen and it just, boom! There you go. You’re down at the finish line. But the press will try to create this impression that it’s the most important thing you can do is to make your daughter who’s running track wear a mask. They’re also tell you that everybody thinks Biden is doing a great job, until we saw those poll numbers.
And the only bit of daylight for President Biden on his poll approvals — barely a hundred days in — is the covid rollout (laughs), the vaccination rollout, the way he’s handled covid. Let’s be honest. How do you think Joe Biden would be performing if it were right now April 26th of 2020? I mean, he would have been talking about many long, dark winters in front of us where we will have to wear masks for eternity.
This is a guy who’s able to kind of put some things together and say, “We’ll vaccinate a hundred million people. Now we vaccinated 200 million people,” whatever that number is. But he’s not really a big policy driver. I’ve gone through the list earlier in the program. So you have in the case of the media creating this impression that you must move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta!
CNN was advocating that. CNN is in Atlanta, and they’re telling you, “We gotta move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta! It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen is to have that game in Atlanta.” Why? The media told you when the Texas Rangers filled the stadium three weeks ago that it was gonna be a superspreader event and that thousands of people were going to die.
Did you see any reporting on a Superspreader event at the Texas Rangers game? They’re literally always wrong. They never get it right, and that’s the thing Rush understood better than anybody in the world, that these folks in the media always get it wrong, and they’re never held to account for how wrong they got it. And when you point it out, they try to cancel you. They can’t take the heat. They are among the flakiest people going.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BRETT: You know, the anniversary of Rick Monday saving the American flag — Rush loved this story — was 45 years ago yesterday. At Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, during a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Dodgers, Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved the flag from two protesters trying to set it on fire on the field.
RUSH: You know, folks, let me tell you something. I got a message from George Brett last night, and you know what it was? His message said, “Boy, have things really changed,” and it was a video of Rick Monday saving the flag from an anti-America protester at Dodger Stadium in… I think it was at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Rick Monday became an overnight national hero because he saved the American flag. He ran out there and he picked it up and saved the flag, and he was heralded, and he was loved.
BRETT: He was a hero. He was an absolute hero for doing that, at a time when things were a little bit — well, let’s be honest, a little bit — tense. Vin Scully, play-by-play, April 25th, 1976, of Rick Monday saving the flag.
SCULLY: (crowd noise) I’m not sure what he’s doing out there. It looks like he’s gonna burn a flag —
CROWD: (cheers)
SCULLY: — and Rick Monday arrives and takes it away from him, as Monday… I think the guy was gonna set fire to the American flag! Can you imagine that? Well, they better lose him in a hurry — and Monday, when he realized what he was gonna do, raced over and took the flag away from him.
BRETT: That’s how you act like a patriot. It is. I’ve watched all these demonstrations and protests throughout years. It’s rare that you see somebody get involved and attempt to rescue the American flag from being torched, and this isn’t a discussion about, “Do you have a right to burn an American flag? Should you burn an American flag?” you know, the sort of stuff that law professors like to kick around with the law students.
I’m just talking about your good, old-fashioned rock-ribbed kind of feeling where you say, “You know what?” That’s the American flag, and I’m gonna step in and save it from being burned. Fascinate, the left burns so many American flags these days that it’s almost become just a blur of these things. My gosh, 300-plus nights in Portland, and Ted Wheeler is now trying to say, “I need you guys to help me! I need you to help me. Tell me who these guys are that are ripping Portland apart.”
Sorry, Ted.
You’re about a year too late to try to win any supporters over in that community. But, you know, you look at the situation with sports in general. We’ve been talking a lot about sports this program, the idea of moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, putting it in Colorado; the anniversary yesterday of the attempted burning of the American flag, Rick Monday, a hero saving that flag at Dodger Stadium.
There are 330 million people in this country.
We should be feeling that way.
We should love our country, seek to improve it where necessary but never stop loving it. That’s a challenge. I heard Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend saying that he’s tired of President Biden running it down all the time. A president’s words mean something, and when you run the country down or you imply that this nation is somehow a failed nation and not living up to its promises, that carries a profound amount of weight. See my earlier commentary about what it is that Xi Jinping is looking to pull off.
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