RUSH: Don Lemon… I just found this out yesterday. Don Lemon interviewed Gladys Knight. Did you all watch Gladys Knight’s rendition of the national anthem before the Super Bowl? One of the best ever. I mean, no matter how you slice it.

Don Lemon on Friday night asked her if she was sure that she wanted to potentially end her career by doing a respectful performance of the national anthem. I kid you not — on CNN. And she was, in a controlled way, indignant about this question. This woman has three to four times the careers and success that Don Lemon will ever even be able to dream of, and there is no way that however she performs the national anthem could do any damage to the achievements and the success that she has had over the course of her career.

But just that question. And he then proceeded to argue with her when she tried to tell him that, in her own way, he was full of it. Imagine asking Gladys Knight, of Gladys Knight & The Pips, if she was worried about damaging or ruining her career with a respectful performance of the national anthem! Because, you know, Colin Kaepernick might be offended! Anybody doing the national anthem had better not do it respectfully in this day and age! What, and this is supposedly a prime time anchor doing the news on CNN? A full-fledged idiot to boot (sigh) to go along with whatever bias or prejudice he has.

I tell you, the degree of ignorance, lack of knowledge/education, pockmarked throughout our media is stunning. Okay. We do have it here. Let me find it. I tell you, No. 28. Wouldn’t you know I can’t find No. 28? The last one I’ve got is No. 27. Well, I’m told we… Mike, do you have a No. 28? (interruption) Okay, let’s hear it. I hope this is what I just told you, but I’m sure it is, but this one, I … When I read about this, I was mind boggled.

KNIGHT: About what they’re thinking?

LEMON: Yeah.

KNIGHT: People are gonna have their opinions about whatever, and all I can deal with right now is what my heart says, okay? I grew up with the national anthem. We used to sing it in school before school started. We used to say prayers in school before school started, and we just don’t have that anymore. And I’m just hoping that it will be about our country and how we treat each other and being the great country that we are.

RUSH: Well, that was her answer. It was his question that is mind-boggling. She’s bouncing off… You know, Kaepernick has this lawyer, Mark Geragos, who says that performers who sing the national anthem are “crossing an intellectual picket line,” and Lemon wanted to know how she reacted to that. He went on to challenge her for even doing this and potentially damaging her career for this, and she didn’t back down to it at all, and she got pretty piqued at him at one point during all this.

It’s illustrative of where we are in our society. The NFL got cleaned up, and the NFL owes Donald Trump. I mean, that may offend a lot of you, but if Trump had not spoken up about the damage being done to that game, to that business, by virtue of this pregame take-a-knee, protest-the-flag stuff… You want to do that, fine, but don’t do it here. It’s not your business. You don’t own this business. The players do not own it. They may think they are the business, but they don’t own it, and people are not tuning in to watch that. (We’ve been through all this.) They want to escape all that.

Trump calling… If Trump hadn’t called them out, nobody else was going to. The NFL would have cowered just like the Republican Party does, and that would have grown and grown and it would have become the focal point of every season, every game. “Who’s taking a knee?” Networks would have continued to televise the anthem. They would have continued to promote the discord that it would have caused, and we would have had an entirely different NFL season in 2018. But Trump speaking of actually shuts it down.

So these guys like Don Lemon and the rest of these left-wing activists are ticked off that the kneeling and the protesting of the flag was brought to a screeching halt. So now they ask an African-American singer to sing the anthem, and so the hope is that this woman will go defy Trump, that Gladys Knight would go in there and defy Trump and defy the NFL and continue the protests for them. Don Lemon wants to see people take a knee! Don Lemon wants to see people disrespect the flag!

Well, the players stopped doing it this past season, the networks stopped covering it, so everybody’s hoping this will kick up again. So, “Okay, the Super Bowl. Yeah, man, yeah! The Super Bowl.” There were rumors… Get this. The musical quartet that performed at halftime, the Maroon 5? There were rumors all weekend (put out by a hopeful media) that Maroon 5 or one or two of the rappers… They had to recruit some rappers to join Maroon 5 ’cause Maroon 5 can’t carry 15 minutes on their own at the Super Bowl.

So they were hoping, they were hoping that one of these people would take a knee during the performance! So rumors were leaked that that was gonna happen! There were rumors that Gladys Knight was gonna do something, send some kind of signal during the anthem that she was in solidarity with Kaepernick. She didn’t do anything, and nobody took a knee during the halftime. Looking back on it, maybe you wish somebody had so it wouldn’t have been so boring. (interruption) I’m kidding, Dawn. I’m just kidding.? Lighten up in there.

She’s been on edge ever since I started talking (impression) “about Ralph Northam and his post-birth abortions.” Anyway, I was just… (sigh) Maybe it’s a good thing I can still be surprised by the left. There are still lines that they cross. There’s still stupidity that they have not explored. Asking Gladys Knight if she’s willing to risk her career? Can you…? Wha…? To ask that question, you have to honestly believe that a majority of the American people want to see the flag tarnished and they want to see the national anthem disrespected.

To ask her that question, you have to believe that that would be a boon to her career if she dissed the flag of the American people. Now, what must you think of the American people if that’s the case, if that’s what you think Gladys Knight has to do? In order to get a gold star performance here, she has gotta trash the flag, trash the anthem. Well, you must sit there believing that most Americans don’t like the flag, most Americans are fed up with America, most Americans are fed up with this racist-pig country — and you’d be right.

That’s how they think of the country, and they do believe that they are in the majority.

It’s full, flat-out perverted.