RUSH: Here is Tara in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Tara, I’m glad you called. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Third-time caller, first time I spoke with you was in 1990 or ’91, so it’s been a while.

RUSH: No, just yesterday.

CALLER: Let me give my best wishes please to Punkin. I’m so glad to hear she’s gonna be okay.

RUSH: This is an amazing — the cat is 16 years old.

CALLER: We’ve had an 18-year-old one, so we’re cat people.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I know how special they are. But Snerdley told me to get right to my point. I didn’t know if you had heard this guy Sunday morning with Fareed Zakaria. He was on his show talking about banning all college football. He wants to do away with college football. Well, if you do away with college football you’re gonna do away with the NFL and that’s what you’ve been saying now for a while. I mean, you’ve always said nobody’s gonna believe that. Nobody’s gonna think they can do away with football, but this guy was really clever in the way he equated football players with dogs that are used in dogfights. And he said that he couldn’t believe all the outrage when Michael Vick was convicted of the dogfighting, everyone, you know, was up in arms ’cause we’re all against dogfighting, obviously, but he said he couldn’t believe that no one realized that Michael Vick himself was being used as a dog in a dogfight because football players are the same as dogs, being used —

RUSH: You know, I’m gonna tell you something, Tara. I have been waiting, I did not know this happened. It hasn’t been widely reported. I didn’t see it, but I have been waiting for something like this to happen. Once the racial component of this enters the fray —

CALLER: Well, and also people who love football and who also love animals are gonna say, “Oh, well, wait a minute, you know, we don’t want to mistreat our animals. So we don’t want to mistreat our football players.” So using that kind of logic, there are people who would think this is stupid to say to get rid of football, they’re gonna say, “Oh, well, wait a minute, maybe it is that bad.”

RUSH: Well, possibly. I think there’s a different path that this takes. Do you remember this guy’s name, by the way?

CALLER: No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I do not remember his name.

RUSH: Snerdley just told me it was Malcolm Gladwell.

CALLER: That’s it. That’s it.

RUSH: Well, Malcolm Gladwell is not insignificant. Malcolm Gladwell is an eminent author. He has a book called “Outliers,” and it was a best-seller. Malcolm Gladwell might be a radical, but he’s not some Looney Tunes character out there that nobody has ever heard of. I may be confusing him with somebody. There’s a guy who wrote a book in which he discovered that the profoundly upper echelon of successful people work at least 10,000 hours at their craft, be they athletes or anybody else, and I’m thinking it was Malcolm Gladwell who wrote that book, but I’m not sure. I could be confusing him with somebody else. But I do know who Gladwell is and I do know he wrote the book “Outliers.”

Let me tell you how this is gonna happen. What he was saying is akin to this. You have this game of football and it’s gladiators, and it’s barbaric. And just as you have dogfights, I mean, dogs, you know, they’re just being used, just like cockfighting, dogfighting, just used to entertain a bunch of brute, barbaric human beings, and it’s a shame, and it’s barbaric that we should allow this kind of savagery for our entertainment. So this guy Gladwell goes on Fareed Zakaria and compares football to that. Where this is leading, Tara, the majority of players in the NFL are African-American.

I can tell you where this is headed. Since Gladwell has now made this comparison, if you’re right, if you’ve interpreted him correctly — and I didn’t see this — but if he talked about Vick and Vick was sent to prison for dogfighting and the irony is that Vick is in his own dogfight, that the NFL essentially uses human beings in the equivalent act of dogfighting and they charge a lot of money to see it. Then what’s gonna happen next is somebody is going to say, “Well, now, wait a minute, the majority of players in the NFL are black, and all the owners are white, and look what happens to these players. They get concussions. Their bodies are mangled for the rest of their lives. Some of them end up with dementia. Some of them die early. What are we doing to our players? How can we be this inhumane?” And then add to it that it’s a bunch of rich white guys who own the teams and are hiring a bunch of black men to do this, to entertain, just like at the old Colosseum of Rome.

This is on tap to happen now. Mark my words. Once this guy starts comparing college football and the NFL to dogfighting or cockfighting, it’s not long before we hear that the players, no matter how highly they’re paid, no matter how well compensated they are, they’re still being exploited for the entertainment of a bunch of lazy people sitting in air-conditioned comfort, reveling in this pain and suffering, reveling in these hard hits, reveling in the destruction that is taking place before their very eyes and applauding. This is next to happen. This effort to inflict damage on the NFL is an attack on capitalism and capitalists and so forth. And so this is not far away now that Gladwell has crossed this barrier.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. It was Malcolm Gladwell. He is the author of “Outliers,” and it is “Outliers” that has the 10,000-hour rule, that nobody gets good at anything until they put in at least 10,000 hours at it. We’ve got the sound bites for this. We’ll get them tomorrow. We have the Fareed Zakaria show and the dogfighting comparison to Vick and all the rest of this stuff, so we’ll get to that tomorrow. My instincts, do not doubt me on this, folks. It’s a long way to go before this all happens, but the trend has begun, and the trend line is obvious. It’s gonna happen.