RUSH: How was your weekend, folks? Everything okay, or were you one of the people disguised as empty seats at an NFL game? Did you see some of these photos at some of these stadiums? Jacksonville? Houston? Man. Now the networks are not televising the anthem. ESPN and who was it? ESPN and Fox are not gonna televise the anthem. That’s only gonna tick off the players.

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RUSH: Last night NBC Sunday Night Football. It’s the game between the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos. Al Michaels talking about how surprised he was at how well the Giants were playing, 17-3 in the third quarter.

MICHAELS: Let’s face it. The Giants are coming off a worse week than Harvey Weinstein —

COLLINSWORTH: (chuckles)

MICHAELS: — and they’re up by 14 points.

COLLINSWORTH: (pause) Only my LA guy comes up with that one.

MICHAELS: Well, you know.

COLLINSWORTH: There you go.

MICHAELS: (chuckling) All you have to do is read the papers.

COLLINSWORTH: (chuckling)

MICHAELS: Any paper.

RUSH: Well, you can imagine what happened. What happened illustrates something that I have thought for a long time and have said so to one degree or another. Twitter is a sewer. Twitter is a repository for the demented and the unhinged. They’re primarily liberals. They are just reprobates. The problem with Twitter is that the Drive-By Media now uses Twitter as a news source. Why? It would be no different than trying to say the callers for any radio talk show happen to be a source and have a reporter assigned to listen to talk shows and take what callers say and make major news out of it. That’s what happens with Twitter.

Now, I happen to know because of things involved with me. We have done, I mean, so much research on Twitter. There was a Stop Rush movement, for example, that was flooding advertisers with bogus threat letters. We found out that it was 10 people using an algorithm that made them appear to be like thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Ten people! Retired college professors, retired librarians, most of them over 50, semiretired or retired, nothing else to do — and they’re just deranged, unhinged leftist I wasn’t. And they can determine… Because the Drive-Bys have accredited that sewer as a primary news source. So Michaels makes this joke and Twitter blows up, and it wasn’t that long until the next sound bite occurred.

MICHAELS: Sorry I made a reference earlier before. I tried to be a little flip about somebody obviously very much in the news all over the country. It was not meant in that manner. So, my apologies, and we’ll just leave it at that

RUSH: He was forced to apologize over this. How many of you think the joke was harmless? How many…? Wait a second. Wait a second. I looked at some of the sports Drive-Bys, and they are uniform. You talk about robots. Sports Drive-Bys Yahoo, from Sports Illustrated, from ESPN, you name it. “Sexual harassment and sexual abuse and rape are not a laughing matter, and it would seem someone like Al Michaels — ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ — should have learned this years ago. These are not laughing matters!” Now, how many people do you think heard Michaels say that last night had a, “Oh, my God! Oh-ho-ho! He’s laughing at…? Oh, ho! Oh my God! Oh my God,” and had a vapor nervous breakdown? I think so much of this Twitter stuff is bogusly artificial. But it’s news source now.

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RUSH: Seriously, you know what Twitter is? Twitter is a cacophony of crap. How in the world did Twitter ever evolve into becoming a news source for supposed mainstream media people? Well, let me tell you how: Because liberals dominate it. They dominate it with bots. The simple explanation of a bot is exactly what I just explained to you. You take an algorithm, you have two or three people, 10 people writing tweets. And those tweets then get sent out by what appears to be thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and the Drive-Bys look at it, “Whoa! Twitter is blowing up!” and they think the nation is outraged.

So the Drive-By Media takes a look at what happens on Twitter — a cacophony of crap populated by leftists and their bots — for this express purpose. The media then tunes in, sees what’s there, and makes a news story out of it, and it is phony, and it’s designed as kind of an insta-poll on public opinion with Twitter as the respondent universe. Well, the only problem with it is that none of it’s scientific and nobody knows what’s real and what’s from bots, and nobody knows who the people really are that are offering all this supposed mock outrage.

But given what the outrage is about, you can guarantee that it’s the left who has decided to hijack Twitter and use it as a phony representation of public opinion. Didn’t Twitter have Trump losing the presidency in great numbers? Didn’t Twitter make it look like Trump was losing supporters left and right? Wasn’t it Twitter that made everybody think the Access Hollywood NBC tape with Trump on it meant disaster and doom? So the Drive-Bys look at Twitter as a source authority for public opinion.

Just like their real polls that they take, they lie to themselves about what public opinion is, and then they run with it, and they are new routinely shocked and dismayed when election results or approval numbers or whatever don’t match what they see in their universe. It’s just amazing. And it’s… You look at the late-night comedians now. Late-night comedians are claiming they can’t joke about Weinstein because you can’t joke about sex harassment. You can’t joke about things like this that happen to women. No, you can’t!

Except you can if Donald Trump happens to be involved. You can if Clarence Thomas happened to be involved. You can make jokes if people like Bob Packwood are involved. The only time you can’t make jokes is when the subject is a top Democrat donor, fundraiser, and supporter pervert. And then those people say, “No, it’s too shocking! It’s too traumatic. We cannot talk about this.” Saturday Night Live once again skirted past the issue of Harvey Weinstein on Saturday night.

I mean, to me the phoniness of Twitter is obvious if you just look at the their trending tweets. They are seldom anything that real-life people give a rat’s rear end about. You know what the top tweets trending right now on Twitter are? I checked during the break, and I had to have help ’cause I don’t tweet so I don’t know where to go to find this. I was directed this. The top tweets trending on Twitter right now are the “New Black Panther,” something called “Monday Motivation,” and “National Boss Day.” Really?

Those are the three top-trending items on Twitter? Is it any wonder Twitter cannot make any money? Stop and think of this, folks. In the media business, the coin of the realm is bodies, eyeballs, clicks, hits, audience. You name it. The more you have, the more revenue you should be able to create via the sale of advertising. They can’t monetize Twitter, and Twitter is derided free of charge by the Drive-By Media how many times a day?

How many times are you reading a news story and you’ll see somewhere in it what somebody, usually famous, said on Twitter? It has encouraged and added to the laziness of journalism in general. Now they don’t even have to call somebody to find out what they think. Just go to a Twitter feed and find out something that looks juicy (whether it’s somebody you know or not) and then print it and say, “This is that we say happening in America,” or “This is what America thinks,” or, “This is what Twitter thinks,” which is supposed to represent what America thinks.

How did this happen? How did Twitter become a primary source authority for the Drive-By Media? The answer to that is simple; it’s easy: It’s liberal. It’s a bunch of leftists, or there’s enough of that there — ’cause I know there’s some conservatives who use Twitter. My brother is one. But even he has dialed his usage back because you end up dealing with robots, computer bots. You think you’re arguing with real people and you’re not. It’s phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roller time.

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RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s so much I want to get to. Somebody just said, “What about the Packers hiring Kaepernick? Do you think they should?” (snorts) Every Drive-By sports… The sports Drive-Bys are urging the Packers. “They’ve gotta call Kaepernick now! They’ve gotta!” Kaepernick just filed a grievance against the NFL. Call Kaepernick? It’s a death wish! The Packers call Kaepernick? Of all teams, the Packers? It’s bad enough they lost Aaron Rodgers. Call Kaepernick? The insult to the Packer fan base that would be?

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RUSH: Trump ended the presser, pretty much ended it hammering the NFL again. Doubling down, tripling down on the NFL. I got a whole — not a whole; I have a couple things about this whole NFL thing here that I had hoped to get to today, but once again live events have gotten in the way.

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RUSH: We are hustling to get Trump’s NFL comments because he also creamed Hillary at the same time. Let me ask you a question. Do you agree or disagree with the following sentence: The president hijacked the national anthem protest and made it a monumental thing. Do you agree that the president hijacked the anthem protest? I’ll tell you, no, you don’t. I’m telling you, you don’t agree with that.

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RUSH: Okay, here we go. Sound bite number 34. We’re gonna have to hustle here, folks. Here’s Trump presser this afternoon.

THE PRESIDENT: I hope Hillary runs. Is she going to run? I hope! Hillary, please run again. There’s plenty of time to do knees, and there’s plenty of time to do lots of other things. But when you take a knee —

REPORTER: (unintelligible)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s why she lost the election. I mean, honestly, it’s that thinking… That is the reason she lost the election. When you go down and take a knee or any other way, you’re sitting essentially for our great national anthem. You’re disrespecting our flag, and you’re disrespecting our country. And the NFL should have suspended some of these players for one game. Not fire ’em, suspended ’em for one game. And then if they did it again, it could have been two games and three games and then for the season. You wouldn’t people disrespecting our country right now. …

REPORTERS: (clamoring)

THE PRESIDENT: And if Hillary Clinton actually made the statement that in a forum — sitting down during the playing of our great national anthem is not disrespectful — then I fully understand why she didn’t win.

RUSH: See, Hillary’s out there ripping Trump for all this stuff he’s doing with the NFL and he’s explaining to these Nimrods in the media why she lost — and why they are losing, by extension. You take a knee, you’re disrespecting. He’s tripling down on this stuff here. He’s not backing away. He’s keeping the pressure on. Trump did not “hijack” the anthem protest! Who says the people protesting the anthem get to do it with no consequences? I’ll tell you who says it:

The sports media, the news media, and leftists in general think that whatever protest against America is taking place is perfectly lawful, perfectly legal, makes perfect sense, and nobody has a right to dissent against that. Trump didn’t hijack anything! The players did! The players hijacked the anthem! It’s not Trump that hijacked anything. It’s just the exact opposite. The players have hijacked the game. The players have hijacked the anthem and the opening ceremonies.

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RUSH: The NFL has a day and a half of meetings starting tomorrow. One of the things I want to talk about tomorrow is some of the proposals that are gonna be made to bring the players in with the league and have a coordinated effort so that they can coordinate their protest and maybe have a miniature version of the pink month of October. The things they’re thinking of doing are gonna only make it worse. I can’t believe it — and yet I do.