RUSH: I just want to give you Kaepernick in his own words. And, folks, you may think I’m overdoing this, but I’m not. Just like in climate change, much — in fact, maybe everything the left holds dear and wants to achieve is wrapped up in that one issue. If they get it, it’s major, major damage. This NFL thing is not quite that comprehensive. But this is huge. This is an all-out assault on the American national pastime, is what this is.

And it’s frustrating as all get out for me to see the people that run the game go along with it because they think everybody in the country is a bunch of snowflake liberal wusses. They think the country’s gone over to whatever it is that progressivism is, and it hasn’t. They’re making tactical marketing mistakes. They’re making very big mistakes in judging who their audience is. And they’re helping this plan to damage the NFL, they’re helping it along, and it frustrates the hell out of me because I love it. And I wish it would stop.

“I wish it would stop.” That doesn’t work. You have to beat it back. And in my own small, little way it’s what I’m trying to do here. Colin Kaepernick, his own words — all this started a year ago. Why is it, by the way, that the United States media stops everything and wants to make a hero out of people that talk this way? Why does the American media want to make heroes, unassailable heroes out of malcontents?

We’re not putting people in jail in this country illegally. We’re not starving them. We’re not doing what happens in tyranny, authoritarian dictatorships. Why do we have to be treated as though we live in a place like that? We don’t. It’s the greatest place on earth. Why do malcontents who have a personal grievance and then blow it up into something that’s irrelevant to the problem they’re having, Kaepernick can’t get hired ’cause he can’t play. It’s no more complicated than that.

And the sports media, everybody, “You must hire Kaepernick to show that America is just and fair.” Why? He can’t play. For crying out loud, media, if he could play, he would be starting somewhere. NFL teams are as competitive as any of the entities in the country. If they thought the guy could help them win, he would be there, unless because now hiring Kaepernick would be one of the biggest mistakes anybody could make because it is clear the Kaepernick-led anti-NFL protests aren’t working.

They are not growing the game. The American people don’t think the NFL is an unfair, unjust, and illegitimate entity or place. They revere it. They look up to it. They love it. Everybody’d love to be in the NFL one way or the other. And they don’t understand malcontents who want to take a grievance they have against a country and turn it into harm for the industry that made them wealthy, or gave them a chance at it.

Here’s what Kaepernick said. “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.”

I will guarantee you that’s about Ferguson. I will guarantee you that’s “hands up, don’t shoot,” and that’s Baltimore and all these other places the media lied to everybody about what was going on. He believes it ’cause he trusts the Drive-By Media. “There are bodies in the street –” Mr. Kaepernick, I’m getting tired of pointing out, go to Chicago if you’re worried about bodies in the street. And it isn’t the cops killing people there.

But now the players are saying, as these protests are fizzling and not working, “We’re not protesting the flag. We’re linking arms for unity.” Unity against what? What do you mean, unity? “Well, we’re linking arms for diversity.” Diversity? You got plenty of it. The league’s 75% minority. How about that? The league is 75% minority. Run the numbers on that. Seventy-five percent of the players in the NFL are African-American.

Diversity? By the left’s definition of diversity, the NFL ought to be a model organization, no problems whatsoever, because they keep telling us that the strength of America and the value of America is found in her diversity. Well, the NFL, 75% African-American, as far as the left looks at it, you can’t get most of favorably diverse than that, so what’s the grievance?

The grievance isn’t the NFL. The grievance is an opportunity to bash America by forces on the left which are populated in the Drive-By Media and every other institution in this country. Well, most of them. And that’s what’s happening, what’s occurring. “Well, we’re not protesting the flag.”

“You aren’t? You’re taking the knee during the anthem. You’re not protesting the flag?”

“No, no, no. We’re linking arms for unity and solidarity and togetherness and so forth.” Anyway, it flips me off, I’m just telling you.