Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 24, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:54

Jason Whitlock | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 7

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	And I got a football scholarship that basically changed the course of my life.
	took me out of that one bedroom apartment in the hood, put me on a college campus, and started my career as a journalist.
	So here we are.
	It's the Sunday special.
	My special guest today is Jason Whitlock.
	He is the host of Fox Sports 1's Speak for Yourself.
	And we have a lot to get to today.
	Obviously, sports has been in the news in a major way, and Jason's a really unique thinker.
	We're going to talk to him for the full hour, as Larry King would put it.
	But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at ZipRecruiter.
	So, hiring is challenging, but there's one place you can go where hiring is simple and fast and smart.
	It's a place where growing businesses connect to qualified candidates.
	That place is ZipRecruiter.com and use the slash Ben Guess because they get a special deal.
	ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there.
	With their powerful matching technology, ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invite them to apply to your job.
	And as the applications come in, ZipRecruiter analyzes each one.
	They spotlight the top candidates so you never miss a great match.
	ZipRecruiter is so effective, 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day, which should be of little comfort to the people in this room.
	I mean, I can fire them all tomorrow and just ZipRecruiter will make it that much better.
	With results like that, it's no wonder ZipRecruiter is the highest rated hiring site in America.
	And right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash BenGuest, because I have a guest.
	That's ziprecruiter.com slash BenGuest, B-E-N-G-U-E-S-T, ziprecruiter.com slash BenGuest.
	It is the smartest way to hire.
	And as I say, You're going to want to try it because it makes sure that you get the best candidates.
	It also ensures that you are the person who has the most control over those candidates.
	You'll make your company better.
	Check it out.
	ZipRecruiter.com slash Ben Guest to let them know we sent you and to try it out for free.
	Alrighty, so Jason Whitlock, thanks so much for coming in.
	I really appreciate it.
	It's an honor to be here.
	Really appreciate it.
	It's a pleasure to see you.
	So, Jason, for folks who don't know and who are listening, Jason, I'm just going to get this right out, you're black.
	So if you're listening and you couldn't tell, Jason is a black man.
	And that means that because he does not subscribe to the sort of leftist party platform on a bunch of issues that we're going to be talking about, Jason is the preeminent sports journalist among Uncle Tom.
	Is that the language they typically use about you?
	That would be accurate over Twitter and social media.
	I don't know if my mom and family would agree with that.
	So let's get into it.
	Let's start there.
	Let's start with, you know, what your upbringing is, and then we'll get into politics and sports, because obviously that intersection is becoming incredibly, incredibly popular and powerful right now.
	So where do you come from?
	What's your background?
	I'm from Indianapolis, Indiana.
	My parents, my dad was a high school dropout, joined the army, came back and became an entrepreneur in the inner city.
	My mom, high school graduate, factory worker.
	They divorced when I was young, four or five years old.
	I have an older brother.
	And so me and my brother moved.
	We lived with my mom initially.
	Start out in the hood.
	My mom, our apartment gets broken into when me and my brother on a weekend trip visiting with my dad and his new wife.
	And my mom didn't tell us at the time, but she was at home when someone broke into our apartment.
	uh, climb through the window and she just happened to wake up and walk in the kitchen and the guys in the, in the window, she takes a second job and moves us to a working class neighborhood.
	And that kind of started changing the direction of our life.
	My senior year of high school though, my mom had, because of her job, transferred to Kansas city, Missouri.
	I move in with my dad.
	And at this time my dad is flat on his butt, uh, Me and my dad lived in a 400-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment my senior year of high school.
	I stayed in there because I was an excellent high school football player, and I got a football scholarship that basically changed the course of my life.
	Took me out of that one-bedroom apartment in the hood, put me on a college campus, and started my career as a journalist.
	So how did that work?
	Which college did you go to and how did you actually get into the sports journalism side of things as opposed to just playing?
	Ball State University was where I got the football scholarship, about an hour north of Indianapolis.
	The journalism thing came because when I was a kid, my dad's a huge newspaper reader and huge pacer fan.
	I was a huge pacer fan, and so I started following the pacers in the newspaper every day.
	And one day, I ran across a column from Mike Royko outside of the sports section.
	And I instantly fell in love with Mike Royko.
	And so that started my passion for newspaper beyond just the sports section.
	And so when I get to college, originally, I'm signed up to be an accounting major.
	I get in a math class and say, accounting's not for me.
	And a friend said, Jason, you read the newspaper every day.
	You should be a journalist.
	And my mind immediately went, oh man, I want to be like Mike.
	And not Jordan, but I want to be like Mike Royko.
	And ever since then, that was my passion.
	I switched my major to journalism and I wanted to be the Mike Royko of sports.
	That's amazing.
	So how did you get your first job?
	Where did you go from there?
	Interesting.
	I played football at Ball State, and I socialized at Ball State, and I occasionally studied to be the next Mike Royko.
	So I wasn't really qualified for a full-time job when I graduated from Ball State.
	I played football.
	I hadn't done internships like kids did during my era.
	And so I got a part-time job in Bloomington, Indiana, at $5 an hour, covering high school sports in Bloomington, Indiana, where Indiana University is.
	And I tell young people this, one of the reasons I was able to take that job at $5 an hour is because I had no responsibility.
	I didn't have a kid.
	I wasn't married.
	There was no responsibility I had, so I could start at the very bottom for very little money.
	I lived in a one-room efficiency.
	And I just worked really, really hard from there to move up.
	And I ended up, I did that for a year.
	Then I got a job at the Charlotte Observer covering high school sports.
	And I think I got that job for $403 a week.
	Again, not a lot of money, but I was passionate.
	Did that for about 18 months.
	And then I got a job at the Ann Arbor News in Ann Arbor, Michigan covering the Fab Five basketball team.
	And that pretty much launched my career.
	Covered Michigan football and basketball for those two years, and then got a column writing job in 1994 at the Kansas City Star, and that's when I got to start trying to be the Mike Roy Coe of sports.
	And that's where I first saw you.
	So I first engaged with your material because I used to get up really early in the morning with my dad on Sunday mornings, and we'd hop in the den, and before any of my sisters were awake, and we'd turn on Sports Reporters on ESPN, and you were a frequent guest on Sports Reporters, one of my favorite guests on Sports Reporters.
	And there it was that I first saw that you had a different political perspective and a different worldview.
	So let's talk a little bit about what shaped your worldview, because before we get to what your worldview is and all the ways in which this distinguishes you and why you've taken so much flack for that worldview, What do you think your biggest influences were in terms of worldview?
	Because you're not really an overtly political guy per se.
	No, my biggest influences are my grandmother.
	Mama Lovey was my mom's mom.
	She's the greatest human being that's ever existed.
	She put a religious foundation in me, my brother, my mother, my aunt, everybody.
	And so I grew up in a little small church in Indianapolis that my mother took us to every Sunday.
	It was my grandmother's church.
	So that's probably the most critical piece of what was put in me.
	And then I would say the second piece is just my parents.
	In terms of my dad, again, he didn't graduate high school, but he joined the Army after he got in a little bit of trouble.
	And then when he came back, that's when he got married to my mom and all that.
	My dad became an entrepreneur because he worked at the Chrysler Motor Company Foundation and he's reading the autobiography of Malcolm X on his lunch break and his supervisor and a couple of coworkers ridiculed and or complained about him reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. And my dad was like, man, I ain't gonna work nowhere where they telling me what I can read.
	And so he started a barbershop.
	And then eventually he started a small nightclub, a Black Cheers in the ghetto, because he said, I don't want to work for people.
	I want to be my own boss.
	And my dad worked at his bar.
	Eventually he owned another one called the Masterpiece Lounge.
	And he worked at that until his death.
	He built a brand new home in the black community.
	He carved out happiness for himself here in America.
	through his own entrepreneurial spirit and what fit his lifestyle.
	He lived in a black community, he had a business in a black community.
	His existence was black and relatively happy here in America.
	My mother, again, factory worker, took a second job to put me and my brother in a safer environment.
	Went to work every day, one of the most amazing work ethics you'll ever see in any human being, but particularly a woman at that time.
	And so, Me and my brother, we just value going to work every day and showing up and being reliable because that's what our parents were.
	And so those two things and then journalistically just becoming a Mike Royco fan where I read his books and things like that, that kind of shaped my worldview.
	Mike Royco was not someone that I agreed with.
	Maybe 50% of the time I agreed with his point of view, but I always thought he was coming from a very honest, real perspective that fit his upbringing.
	And I just enjoyed it.
	And so when I moved into journalism, I just kept thinking about Mike Royko, and it's not Whether I agree or disagree with you, are you coming from a real place is what I value the most.
	Are you being authentic to your upbringing?
	And so I just think those three things are probably, because right now to this day, I can't tell you what Michael Royco was politically.
	I don't know.
	I truly don't know.
	He's a Democrat, yeah.
	I know he was very critical of Mayor Daley and the political machine there in Chicago, but I don't know who he voted for.
	Maybe I'm an idiot, but I read a lot of his columns, I own a lot of his books, but I don't know.
	For me, I think where we'll probably go next is I'm kind of apolitical.
	I don't like politics.
	I've never voted.
	Troubles my parents.
	Troubles everybody that knows me.
	But I just can't stand politics, and I'm skeptical of politicians, their authenticity.
	But also, just as a journalist, I recognized early on, I don't want anybody to judge me based on my politics.
	And so I stay out of it for the most part.
	And so that's why I've never voted.
	And I also think that if you're listening, if you're tying all the pieces together, I just have a working class point of view.
	I think there's a lot of people that get involved in the media and think and try to pretend like They're representing the point of view of the underclass, or the lower class, or the working class, and they're really just representing the views of the elite.
	So many, and this particularly I think is acute with black journalists, so many of them actually come from the upper class.
	That they don't really know how to represent people from the lower class or from the ghetto or the disadvantaged.
	They don't know how, and so what they're really representing are elitist views and what works for black people of privilege.
	And my values all come from a very working class.
	My father's bar was just working class people.
	Obviously, my parents, working class people.
	My grandmother, you know, worked at RCA, just a working class person.
	So that's what shaped my views.
	And that ethic of personal responsibility seems to be the one kind of uniting moral value that you tend to espouse, and that brings you into conflict with a lot of the politics that have been infused in sports.
	I want to jump into that a little bit.
	Let me stop because I left off a big one.
	A very big one.
	Football has shaped my values.
	And sports have shaped my values.
	And if you understand anything that's preached in sports, in any team environment, if there's a problem on the team, don't look outside the locker room.
	Every coach preaches this.
	We must fix our problems right here within this locker room.
	Don't blame the refs.
	Don't blame fans for not showing up.
	Don't blame the other team.
	They cheated or whatever.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Right here, we're going to fix our problems right here.
	And I just believe in that.
	So in the last couple of years, that perspective has come back to both make you more prominent and also bite you in the sense that Colin Kaepernick obviously made big headlines with his kneeling on the sidelines routine during the national anthem.
	And this obviously has become a cause celeb now for a lot of folks on the political left.
	And obviously, President Trump likes to talk about it a lot.
	And it's become this very divisive issue.
	You took the perspective that Kaepernick shouldn't be doing that.
	And why do you think that is?
	Because it seems like there are a few different aspects to that.
	There's the police brutality aspect.
	There's the national anthem aspect.
	Where is that coming from?
	Well, I'll just, and I don't want to denigrate Colin Kaepernick, but he didn't come from where I came from.
	And he was adopted by a white suburban family.
	He is of mixed race.
	I'm not denigrating any of that.
	I just, it just fits into my point of view that he comes from a privileged background, whether he acknowledges it or not.
	And his worldview is privileged, and he thinks he's helping disadvantaged and or poor black people with what he's doing, and he's actually not.
	He created a conversation about the national anthem.
	Because nothing he did was strategic.
	Again, he thinks you can affect change with emotion or with some symbolic act that's not well thought out.
	He doesn't understand that Martin Luther King and the people of the Civil Rights Movement That was a very strategic, executed plan.
	Rosa Parks wasn't the first person to not give up her seat on the bus.
	Another woman who had an illegitimate child did it first, but they understood that didn't work well politically, so let's have Rosa do it.
	And that will start the bus strike.
	So I just think Kaepernick has done something that's unplanned.
	He started a conversation about the National Anthem, not about the issues he's saying he's trying to address.
	And I think it's because he just doesn't know what he doesn't know.
	And I see social media feeding his lack of knowledge.
	And anybody that tries to step in and say, hey, Colin, you're making a mistake here.
	Colin, there's a better way.
	If you want to address these issues, there's a better way.
	Anybody that does that gets shouted down as an Uncle Tom or a coon or someone who doesn't have the interest of black people, when actually we're just trying to say, hey, Kaepernick, what you've done isn't effective.
	There's a better way.
	And perhaps because anybody that knows Colin Kaepernick, he's not equipped to carry this conversation.
	That's why he avoids interviews.
	He doesn't want to be cross-examined because he'll fall apart because he doesn't understand these issues.
	And so anybody like me who raises a hand and says, well, hold on, Colin and your supporters, I've actually had a very close relative killed by police brutality.
	May 2012, Anton Butler, cousin that I helped raise, I paid for his funeral, I shed real tears, killed in Indianapolis.
	I understand how this happens, and it's not really about police brutality, because they don't understand that America is a capitalistic society.
	There's no money to be made through police brutality.
	That costs the government money.
	Lots of money.
	There's always a settlement with the family.
	Millions of dollars.
	The government is already very motivated to stop police brutality because it's not cost-effective.
	Mass incarceration is actually a money-making industry.
	And so what I've tried to explain to black people was like, let's say you want to go conspiratorial.
	What the government or business interests actually have is interest in people being politely escorted to prison so they can make money.
	You know, they got beds to fill and cells and the private penitentiary.
	They don't need dead people.
	There's no money to be made.
	That's a money loser.
	And so your argument falls apart.
	And so if you really understand what makes poor people or anybody vulnerable to the police, It's the mass incarceration issue, but it's also just a society with as many guns as we have.
	This is going to happen.
	So I want to talk to you about that in just one second, because there's a bunch of issues to unpack.
	First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
	Look, you know you need life insurance, right?
	You just haven't gotten around to it.
	But by the time you get around to it, you're already going to be dead.
	And then you're screwed because you don't have life insurance.
	So if anything were to happen, it's important that your loved ones are taken care of.
	And that's why PolicyGenius exists.
	They've made comparing and buying life insurance really easy.
	They took the whole shopping process online.
	In five minutes, you can compare quotes from over 15 life insurance providers.
	And when you compare quotes, you save money.
	It's that simple.
	PolicyGenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance.
	They've placed over $20 billion in coverage.
	And they don't just insure life, they do everything else.
	They can compare health insurance and disability insurance and pet insurance and renter's insurance.
	If you've been putting off getting life insurance, there's no reason to put it off any longer.
	I know you're going to go out on the lake this summer and you might get killed in a boating accident.
	I'm not saying that's going to happen to you, but if it were to do that, if you were to die in a boating accident, Make sure that your family is at least taken care of, you idiot.
	So go to policygenius.com, get quotes, apply in minutes.
	It is that easy.
	And you can do it right now.
	And you should, because their rates are their lowest in 20 years.
	It's policygenius.com.
	It is indeed the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
	Go over to policygenius.com.
	Check it out.
	I promise it's really simple and it's really easy and you're going to be able to use it.
	You're going to be able to get the best rate.
	Again, there is no excuse for you not to do this, right?
	As a father of two, I promise you that I've got life insurance for my kids.
	My wife has life insurance as well.
	You should do exactly the same thing.
	So go over to policygenius.com.
	And again, the search doesn't take a lot of time.
	It doesn't take a lot of effort.
	So check it out.
	Policygenius.com.
	Again, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
	Okay.
	Let's talk about various factors that are playing into some of the stuff that Kaepernick is protesting about.
	The supposed police brutality or disproportionate shootings of black people by the police.
	I've spoken about this many times.
	The statistics just do not support the idea that black folks are being disproportionately shot by the police.
	In fact, Roland Fryer did a study from Harvard University.
	He found that, in fact, black people were being statistically undershot by the police, if that's the case.
	In the in the kind of pantheon of issues that are being experienced by the black community in terms of internal violence and conflicts with the police, my suggestion has always been that if you are going to solve these issues, you have to come at it from the perspective of what you as an individual can do.
	And from where I sit, it looks to me like in any community, black, white or green, single motherhood and criminal decisions are going to be your leading causes of getting in trouble with the police.
	And one usually leads to the other.
	You know, single motherhood is disproportionately associated with high rates of crime, high rates of poverty, and people who are not making criminal decisions tend to have very, far less of a chance to have a run-in with the police.
	And then I want to talk about your perspective on guns.
	So first I want to get your thoughts on that.
	I think you could just stop at single motherhood.
	I don't think you need to go any further than that.
	Because what I explain to people all the time, the first policeman that a child should deal with, and is supposed to deal with, are his two parents.
	They're supposed to police their children.
	And so, if you find yourself in a culture where there aren't two policemen called mom and dad, and your children are running out unsupervised into America, And now you're, oh, these policemen who didn't sign up to be their parents aren't treating them the way we want them to be treated.
	Well, the first abuse is the lack of parenting.
	That's the issue.
	And so we have a culture as African Americans where single motherhood is It's prevalent.
	It's 75% of our kids.
	And a repercussion of that is going to be our kids are unsupervised and we're asking other people who aren't their parents to supervise them.
	Don't be shocked when there's abuse.
	And so when I watched the riots in Baltimore and in Ferguson, all I kept thinking about, look at all these young people.
	Who has time to, one, be out in the streets like this, but where are the parents?
	And I'm so upset with the media because It's such an obvious issue that has to be addressed.
	And if we want, as black people, to move forward, and if we want our society to move forward with black people, we have to address this issue.
	The destruction of the family is causing much of this chaos, and then to your point, This narrative that the police are just out here indiscriminately killing black men, it's just bogus and BS, Ben.
	It doesn't factually hold up to statistics.
	There are plenty of examples of the police wrongly killing white people that the media never addresses or never touches because it seems to me they want us racially divided and at each other's throats.
	It drives ratings, it drives emotion, and people tune in to watch.
	But it's just not even remotely true.
	I've seen the videos of other races.
	And so police sometimes act inappropriately.
	I'm not making any excuses for them.
	But again, when you're in a society as heavily armed as ours, and so many messages are sent to you about how dangerous it is in these poor communities or whatever, It's going to lead to mistakes happening.
	And we can't then demonize all police because some have made mistakes, some do have evil hearts and act inappropriately.
	We can't demonize them all.
	It's just, it's just wrong.
	And there's a book by Jane Levy over at the LA Times for a book called Ghetto Side.
	And her suggestion was that one of the biggest problems that the black community is having in terms of elevated rates of crime, is that historically, there's been under-policing in the black community, that the white community said to the black community, take care of yourselves, right?
	We're not going to put our cops in there and put them in danger.
	You guys take care of yourselves.
	And so what that led to was gangs who were going to protect their members and who were going to fight other members.
	And what we really need at this point is more of a police presence What you need is a lowering of the crime rate, and then there just won't be as many run-ins with the police.
	Because virtually every ethnic group in the United States at one point or another has had high crime rates in the United States, and they've had elevated run-ins with the police as a result.
	The Italian community in the United States in the early 20th century is a great example of this, where they had elevated crime rates to the point where there were protests about why Italian people were constantly being portrayed as criminals on television and all of this.
	Crime rates went down.
	Same thing was true of the Irish and the Germans.
	It was true early on of the Jews even.
	And then the crime rates went down and then the run-ins with the police stopped.
	So the real question, I guess, is why do you think it is that people who are prominent in culture and in the black community have not taken more of a perspective just saying, okay, well, let's get our own house in order and then we can talk about supposedly brutal problem that's happening.
	I'm not saying they can't be tackled simultaneously, but it seems like the amount of focus is 95% on terrible policing and 5% on actual societal problems.
	I blame the media for not allowing people on with common sense to give them a platform.
	And it's just like we're irresponsible.
	I get that.
	And I have mixed feelings about Al Sharpton.
	I've been critical of Al Sharpton in the past.
	And much of that criticism stands the test of time.
	I don't back away from any of it.
	But I have some modicum of respect for Al Sharpton.
	But I think it's wrong that we've given him this elevated platform on television and treat him as the spokesman for black America.
	I just don't think he's earned that.
	And I think he shot his credibility with Tawana Brawley and other things that a responsible media would say.
	You know what?
	We'll have to find a different voice than Al Sharpton.
	And so, I think the same thing with Atanahisi Coates, is we've anointed him as the spokesman for Black America, and he keeps singing the same note over and over and over again, Black people, anything that happens to you, you're not responsible for.
	There's these magical white people that are in control of your lives.
	And basically, Ta-Nehisi Coates, if you understand his point of view, he's basically arguing white people are God.
	We should worship them and get on our knees and beg and pray for them to come save us.
	I just don't believe in that.
	And most rational people, I don't think, believe in that.
	You have to take ownership of your own destiny and life.
	And America has a track record that if you're willing to do that, You'll find some success here.
	There's just too many examples of it.
	And I'm not talking about, and I don't want to elevate, but I'm not talking about on my level.
	I'm just looking at my father, who didn't graduate from high school, who went to the army, Who started a couple of small businesses and managed to take care of himself and find happiness here in America with his friends.
	His father was married two or three different times.
	Good looking guy.
	He had a good life.
	He enjoyed his life.
	You can do that here in America, and we're telling people just the opposite, and it's just wrong.
	So let's talk about the infusion of politics into sports, because you start off as a sports columnist, like writing about sports, and yet now, a lot of your fame, a lot of your notoriety is based around your political viewpoint, because so much of sports has now been infused with politics.
	Has that changed over time?
	Maybe I'm too young to remember it, but it seems like when I was a kid, there wasn't quite as much of it as there is now, this kind of complete merger of politics and sports.
	I think, Ben, if you were young, and so when you say, like, oh, I enjoyed you on the Sports Report, and I followed your work at the Kansas City Star, I don't know if you actually remember, I was already delving into these issues when I was in Kansas City and lacing a lot of my conversation using sports to talk about the rest of society, and that's probably what captured your attention.
	To me, what has happened is the left has had a well-orchestrated plan to change sports culture.
	And it's just all coming to fruition and becoming obvious now, because I think the left figured out that, like, sports plays a very critical role in American society.
	You go back and understand, Jackie Robinson in 1947 was a head of the Civil Rights Movement and actually inspired the Civil Rights Movement.
	Jesse Owens was the first black man to be celebrated as a national hero in America.
	When he goes to Berlin and wins, he's the first time America was like, hey, a black man.
	At Joe Louis and Dr. Mellon.
	Yes.
	And so those are critical moments that open doors for black people.
	And I think the left
	Coming off of the Muhammad Ali era started putting pieces in place Well, we have if we can influence sports culture and move it left We can move the rest of society to the left and that's what I think we're seeing right now coming to full fruition a lot of people a lot of sports writers and other people have this strong left-wing point of view and Want to turn everything into a racial issue
	And I'm watching them right now try to tear down the NFL.
	Because the NFL...
	is the biggest representation for the left of toxic masculinity.
	Nothing could be more toxically masculine than football.
	And that's why they're trying to tear it down.
	And Colin Kaepernick is just a Trojan horse, a pawn that they're using to bait black athletes and black sports fans into having a problem with the NFL.
	They're painting the NFL As this racist institution, and I'm sitting there going, oh my, there's no institution that has created more black millionaires than the NFL.
	And we think it's racist.
	And we think it's evil.
	And then just remove the NFL, just football.
	Again, I'm from a one-bedroom, 400-square-foot apartment, me and my dad, and football came and took me out of that and put me on a college campus.
	They do this for black kids all over the country, whether it's Division II, Division I, whatever.
	And we're attacking football and acting like football is this racist institution.
	And before this show, I asked these guys I was talking to out in the lobby, I was like, does Hollywood come to the ghetto and get Jason Whitlock?
	Oh, we want you to be the star of a television show.
	Let me get you at 18 and move you to this theater school.
	That's not what they do.
	They pick from the elite.
	And so, as black people, I'm just begging us to understand, what are we doing here?
	Are we really analyzing the institutions that have been beneficial to us and actually helped the poor?
	Or are we caught up in some emotional play and being tricked and hoodwinked into attacking the very things that have been beneficial to us?
	So in just a second, I want to talk about the hijacking of ESPN and Sports Illustrated and so much of other sports media for this particular point of view.
	First, I need to say thank you to our sponsors over at Indochino.
	So Jason Whitlock is a good-looking dude who's wearing a nice suit.
	But even Jason Whitlock would look great in an Indochino suit.
	Indochino is the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company, and they've been featured in major publications including GQ, Forbes, Fast Company.
	Custom-made-to-order stuff, right?
	They make suits and shirts made to your exact measurements for a great fit.
	And guys love the wide selection of high-quality fabrics, the option to personalize all the details, including lapel, lining, monogram.
	Here's how it works.
	You go to a showroom or you shop online at Indochino.com and you pick your fabric, you choose your customizations, you submit the measurements, and then you just wait for the custom suit to arrive in just a few weeks.
	And this week, my listeners can get any premium Indochino suit for just $379 at Indochino.com when you enter BenGuest at checkout, because I have a guest.
	That is 50% off the regular price for a made-to-measure premium suit.
	The process, by the way, is just awesome.
	I went to the Beverly Hills store.
	And I checked out all the fabrics.
	I got to pick out what the lapels look like.
	It's a really nice suit.
	I got it with a nice vest and it fit perfectly.
	Shipping is free.
	And if it doesn't fit perfectly, then they'll make it right for you.
	It's Indochino.com.
	Promo code BENGUS for any premium suit for just $379 and free shipping.
	Great deal for a suit that will fit you better than anything off the rack ever would.
	Okay, so Jason, let's talk about The sports media and exactly how it is that they've been facilitating the infiltration of politics into sports.
	So when I was growing up, I subscribed to Sports Illustrated from basically the time I was 12 to maybe the time I was 27.
	So 15 years of my life.
	And every morning I'd wake up and I'd run into the den to watch SportsCenter because this was the communal space.
	This was the thing you could talk about with anybody at the water cooler.
	You may not agree on politics, you may not agree on church, you may not agree on life, but you can at least talk about what happened in the basketball game last night.
	And now I flip on ESPN, and from soup to nuts, the entire thing is MSNBC with footballs.
	It is just wild left-wing perspectives over and over and over.
	Anybody who attempts to buck those left-wing perspectives, if you're Chris Broussard, you're immediately outed and thrown out of town.
	If you're you, then you're called an Uncle Tom by a lot of other folks.
	If you're somebody who works at ESPN, Even representing mildly right-wing perspective, this is considered absolutely outrageous and out of bounds.
	I remember I cancelled my Sports Illustrated subscription when they finally put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, and I thought to myself, listen, Caitlyn Jenner is, you know, a sentient human being, can do whatever Caitlyn Jenner wants to do with his life, and I believe Caitlyn Jenner's a man because biologically he's a man, but Caitlyn Jenner was last athletically relevant when I was not born.
	I was born in 1984.
	Caitlyn Jenner was not athletically relevant when I was born.
	And now I've got Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of a sports magazine having nothing to do with sports, but just about Caitlyn Jenner.
	I feel like I'm being programmed here.
	I feel like there's an attempt to take the things I love and then infuse them with a certain level of messaging with which I radically disagree.
	Number one, do you think that's true?
	And number two, why do you think that sports media have been so eager to go along with all of this when it seemed like their boom era is when they were actually focusing on sports, not when they were focusing as much on politics?
	I don't know if they were eagerly doing this.
	They've been bullied.
	And this is why I say this is an orchestrated strategic plan to move sports to the left.
	I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago, a year and a half ago, about Deadspin and Gawker.
	And they're just beating on ESPN for years.
	They bullied their executives, wrote exposés, embarrassing their executives.
	They just, in every way possible, Deadspin just attacked ESPN like a pit bull.
	And the attack was all about moving them politically left.
	And so there became such a pervasive fear of Deadspin, of Deadspin criticizing some ESPN decision.
	And John Skipper, who was the president at that time, and the executives under him, they had these rabbit ears, and their skin was so thin, and they were so tired of the abuse, That they started catering their decision and their point of view to please Deadspin.
	It sounds crazy that a little blog could have that much power.
	But I watched it in real time.
	I worked at ESPN two separate times.
	The first year, a guy named George Bodenheimer and Mark Shapiro were in charge.
	And then the second time, John Skipper was in charge.
	And they're like two different eras.
	One was, I think, from You know, 2002 maybe to 2007.
	And in that era, you were allowed to be free-thinking and have whatever point of view you wanted.
	And then Deadspin came in and executed this 10-year attack on ESPN.
	And voila, we have what we have now.
	It's why Curt Schilling gets fired, because they don't want to deal with the attack from Deadspin and the attack from social media and Twitter.
	And so they've The entire media though, Ben, this isn't just an ESPN thing.
	I've been trying to explain to people that The cultural and moral center of America, to me, used to be New York, you could argue.
	And certainly, journalistically, that was the center, New York.
	It's now San Francisco, because of the social media companies and the tech industry.
	Everything now is catered, how's it going to land on social media?
	How's Facebook going to respond?
	How's Twitter going to respond?
	How's Google going to respond?
	And so all of America is being reprogrammed to San Francisco values.
	These are Silicon Valley based companies with Northern California values that are being imposed on the rest of America.
	And so the media used to have a liberal, traditional liberal slant out of New York.
	Now it has a very radicalized, extreme, liberal slant coming out of San Francisco and Northern California.
	And so ESPN has just been swept up in all of that, from the attacks of Gawker to everybody being interested in clickbait and how things land.
	Without Twitter, Black Lives Matter couldn't exist.
	It couldn't exist.
	No one would buy that narrative.
	Because, again, the stats speak for themselves.
	Let's say 700 people get killed by the police this year.
	I think, statistically, 400 or 500 of them are going to be white people.
	200 or 300 of them are going to be black people.
	I don't know if my math is right.
	Unarmed black people killed by the police last year was under 20.
	Yes.
	Only on Twitter could that false narrative exist.
	And it's because if you say something really extreme and left-wing, and say, oh, the police force, the whole thing's just racism, that'll get retweeted and liked.
	And share it all over social Twitter and social media.
	And the media is addicted to that.
	Going viral became the biggest thing in the world.
	And the easiest way to go viral is to say something very radicalized and left-wing.
	Be Lina Dunham.
	On Twitter, and you're sure to get five million Twitter followers.
	So how do you think the sports media pull out of this?
	Or do they pull out of this?
	Because right now everybody's cutting the cord on ESPN.
	ESPN is just nosediving.
	I mean, they've had a serious problem with people not watching their stuff anymore.
	And it seems like they're doubling down on the worst strategy humanly possible, which is to add just more extraordinarily polarizing content with nobody to even counter the other side.
	Mike did cut.
	loses his job over there because Mike Ditka happens to be slightly right of center.
	But you've got everybody over there who's wildly to the left.
	No, they just rehired Keith Overman.
	Oh, exactly.
	So I think the market is starting to speak, And I think that their brand has been damaged because if you understand who sports fans are, they tend to lean a bit more conservative.
	And so they've irritated the largest segment of the.
	And so let's say you're a sports fan, but you're not really political.
	But if you understand the values taught in sports, they're not political, but they are conservative, the values taught in sports.
	Again, I go back to what I said earlier.
	We fix the problems from inside this locker room.
	We don't blame outsiders.
	You know, it's a pull yourself up by the bootstraps It's also a meritocracy.
	You're not getting on the field if you can't play.
	Yes.
	And so I think even if you're not political, you're kind of like, well, hold on.
	Where's all this victimhood coming from?
	LeBron James is now on TV and at press conferences saying, oh my God.
	And I do want to mock it because it was silly.
	LeBron James on TV, he compared someone allegedly riding on a gate of his $20 million mansion in Brentwood, someone allegedly rode on his garage gate, the N-word.
	And he analogized that to Emmett Till and Emmett Till's mother sharing the pain of Emmett Till being lynched and assassinated.
	He analogized that to him having the N-word written on his $20 million mansion out here in Brentwood when he's living at the time in Akron.
	So a home that he's not in allegedly has the N-word written on it.
	We never see a picture of it.
	He says it was on there in the morning, then his staff cleaned it up.
	He never saw it.
	His kids weren't there.
	There was no danger.
	He analogized it to Emmett Till.
	And so I'm just a sports fan.
	People with common sense are like, How?
	You're living one of the greatest, wealthiest, privileged lives in the history of America.
	You gotta put him in the top 1,000, I think.
	I mean, he's worth about a half billion.
	He's celebrated all over the planet.
	Anywhere he goes, they rush him in to get seated and gets preferential treatment.
	And he's on TV.
	Yeah, if it could happen to me, if someone could write the N-word on my—it could happen.
	It just doesn't ring true.
	And I think most sports fans are like, this is bad.
	Now LeBron James is a victim?
	So here's one of my theories about what ESPN is doing.
	So I wrote about this in terms of demographics.
	So as you say, the sports fan seems to be Slightly to the right because it's a more male audience than female audience for sports.
	And so if you were to take a broad demographic of males versus females, males versus females tend to be more right wing just as a general rule.
	But the way that they're programming on channels like ESPN is they are basically not covering baseball at all.
	They cut baseball tonight.
	They're not programming hockey virtually at all.
	They program a lot of the NFL and a lot of the NBA.
	And the reason for that, I think, is because when you look at the studies, what the studies tend to show is that minority audiences are spending more hours a day watching ESPN.
	And they also happen to like basketball more than they like baseball or more than they like hockey.
	And so it's as though ESPN has decided to instead of broadcasting and go for the broadest possible audience, they've decided to narrow cast and double down on a certain segment of the audience that they are going to.
	And once you do that, it's sort of a vicious circle in the sense that you have to cater politically to the audience that you've already brought to the party.
	So you've already said to a lot of white folks who like hockey and baseball, we're not interested in catering to you.
	You don't watch as much TV.
	I think you're right.
	who watch a lot of TV.
	So we're going to cater to that group.
	And those people tend to be more to the left.
	And so it's sort of this spiral.
	But the problem is that that's always going to be a smaller and smaller number of people that you're catering to, as opposed to a broader and broader number of people that you're catering to.
	I think you're right.
	The only place I would push back is, I think black people are being programmed and pushed farther and farther to the left.
	It's If you understand anything about the history of African Americans in this country, we have been the most religious people in the country.
	Our values are naturally conservative, the things that we believe in.
	We're not pro-abortion.
	But we have been pushed by the media farther left than our values say we should go.
	We've chosen politics over our belief in God.
	I talk with my mother about this all the time.
	She is, and again, I'm a non-voter.
	My mother's worked for the Democratic Party, loves Barack Obama, probably give me up for adoption to be Barack's mother.
	And I say to her all the time, I was like, where's the God?
	I ask all the time.
	These policies and things, where's the God in any of this?
	This is what Mama Lovey, your mama, this is what we stand on.
	The Democratic Party has become so secular, and the left movement has become so secular, and where they're pushing blacks away from religion and against all the values we were brought up with.
	How does this stand to the test of time?
	When you're going to, because I pay for her to go to these Bible studies, she likes to go to it all.
	She's a very religious person.
	How does any of this jibe with what you're learning and all this other stuff?
	And so, I think They are, I think you're right, they are catering to the basketball and football crowd.
	They are catering to a people of color crowd.
	But I also think they're pushing a political point of view on them as well.
	Because when I look at the Colin Kaepernick thing, they have billions of dollars invested in the NFL.
	And as a company, you're supporting this Kaepernick thing that's sowing all this bad blood towards the NFL?
	That's not good business.
	That's pushing a political ideology down the throats of your viewers, and it's just wrong.
	So I want to talk to you in a second about the White House and its controversy with the Philadelphia Eagles and all of this.
	First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at MVMT.
	So, you've heard me talk about MVMT, right?
	This watch right here.
	This is a MVMT watch.
	You know those two college dropouts that started their own watch company?
	Well, the company has now grown like crazy with almost 2 million watches sold in 160 plus countries, and they continue to revolutionize fashion on the belief that style should not be extraordinarily expensive.
	I don't know if you've checked out their site lately.
	They've doubled the number of watch styles, and they are still expanding.
	And movement watches are all about looking good, keeping it simple.
	Movement watches don't tell you how many steps you've taken.
	They don't blow your wrist up with text messages.
	It tells the time.
	That's what it does.
	And it looks great.
	It looks really spare and awesome.
	Movement watches start at just $95 at a department store.
	You're looking at like $400 to $500.
	And movement figured out that by selling online, they could actually cut out the middleman and save you a bunch of money, providing the best possible price.
	It's got the classic design and the quality construction style minimalism, as I say.
	This one right here, this here is a movement watch.
	I have another one at home.
	My wife has a movement watch.
	My mom has a movement watch.
	I got her for Mother's Day.
	Get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to mvmt.com slash benguess.
	That's mvmt.com slash benguess, because I have a guest.
	See why mvmt, right?
	mvmt.com, see why movement keeps growing.
	Check out their expanding collection again.
	Go to mvmt.com slash benguess.com.
	That's mvmt.com slash Ben Guest and join the movement.
	Okay, so let's talk briefly about the situation with the White House.
	President Trump obviously goes at it with the Philadelphia Eagles.
	My opinion on this is that President Trump feels like he can make hay while the sun shines off of this controversy.
	This controversy is good for him politically.
	And there are certain members of the Philadelphia Eagles who feel that they're going to win this culture war.
	And so we now have two sides thinking they're going to win the culture war.
	And the only people who lose are the people who like football and the people who like the national anthem.
	And it seems like, to your not liking politics point, I'm not sure I've ever disliked politics quite as much as I do when I see situations like this.
	Because it seems like if people don't want to show up to the White House, that's their prerogative.
	Tim Thomas didn't want to show up when Barack Obama was president.
	I didn't think that was a big deal.
	And by the same token, President Trump implying that every member who didn't want to show up didn't like the national anthem seemed like that was just not true.
	What was your take on the whole kind of blow up?
	I think that as black people, we're way too caught up in Trump.
	I think that, you know, I spoke at my church I grew up in, my mom's church, my grandmom's church, Mother's Day weekend, I went home, and my message to the congregation was, who are we worshiping, Trump or God?
	And if you wake up in the morning and turn on MSNBC or CNN to monitor what Trump did last night or this morning, and then you go to bed thinking about or watching TV monitoring Trump, how much time are you spending monitoring God versus Trump?
	And is Trump your God?
	Because if all your conversations are, Trump did this or Trump did that, and I, because I'm questioning my mother, I was like, Mom, I've been here four days.
	Every time you get on the phone, you're talking about Trump.
	I go, your focus is on Trump.
	And I'm just like, I think this is inappropriate.
	Let's focus on God and the good things that are happening.
	Mama, you're living in a condo that's paid for, a house that I bought.
	You're living a life that your mother would have dreamed of living in her golden years.
	You're living it.
	How can you be focused on so much negativity?
	How can your conversation be so negative when things are going so good and God has blessed you so well?
	And so, I look at the football players and I see an emotional response to Trump.
	Trump is an entertainer.
	a goofball.
	He's our president and I respect him as our president, but I don't have to respond emotionally to everything he does.
	If he tweets out something about me that I don't, I don't have to respond to that.
	I, and this is my problem with football players.
	The NFL has provided them an opportunity to make great wealth, help themselves, help them families.
	You have a short window to make this money.
	Don't let Trump talk you into doing things that are hurting your game, that is irritating a good percentage of your fan base.
	The national anthem, bickering with the president, these guys They're out of their element trying to carry on a debate with the president.
	And that's not me trying to belittle them, but they have a short window to make a lot of money that they can use to support the causes that they want to engage in.
	And so I say to him all the time, or try to say to him, I was like, make the money, take the money and support the cause you want.
	Don't get caught up in a bickering with President Trump.
	That's what he does.
	All the time.
	He loves it.
	You're playing into his hands.
	Don't be emotional, be logical.
	And think about what works for you in the long run.
	And so, And then, you're Malcolm Jenkins, the safety for the Philadelphia Eagles, and you seem to be really involved in this movement and have more substantive thoughts.
	If that's the case, I'd never back away from a chance to engage with someone I disagree with.
	And if you have access to the president, regardless of who he is, I would have went to the White House and engaged with this man and disagreed with him.
	is for lack of a better word as it relates to athletes, he's a bit of a groupie.
	He loves them.
	He would have engaged with them and debated.
	That's Kim Kardashian comes in and gets someone released from prison.
	He loves it!
	This is who, so he had, Malcolm Jenkins, these guys have a chance to go engage with the president and we're so caught up in this resistance movement.
	I'm like, do we understand history?
	Do we think Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Went to the same church and lived in the same neighborhood and socialized in the same circles.
	Do we not know who Lyndon Johnson was and the language he used?
	And again, we can write it all.
	Well, that's how they talked in the 60s.
	But it was a very racist language.
	Martin Luther King engaged with people he disagreed with and changed them.
	And so the message I gave to my mother's church Was, and I keep trying to say, if you think Trump represents hate, You think more hate or hate towards him is going to cure it?
	Doesn't the Bible teach us?
	Hasn't life taught us only love can conquer hate?
	Only love will work in terms of hate plus hate multiplies hate.
	Love is the only solution.
	And so we would be better off trying to inject President Trump with love.
	Rather than hate.
	And so that would be my message to the Eagles or anybody.
	If you really understand, you're gonna catch more flies with honey.
	It's just, it's an improper approach that seems emotional, seems immature, and just is ineffective.
	So these are all, I mean I agree with a hell of a lot of what you're saying.
	A lot of people who are on the left obviously don't, a lot of black folks don't agree with what you're saying.
	How do you deal with the blowback you've gotten over the years?
	Because you've gotten a tremendous amount of blowback.
	About a thousand hit pieces on you have been written.
	These 10,000-word hit pieces about why you're an Uncle Tom and why you don't believe the right way and why you're a sellout and all this.
	How do you deal with that on a personal level?
	I just, I go back to Mama Lovey and the church I grew up in.
	And if God's on your side, I really don't care.
	And so, I have a great family that loves me and supports me.
	I have great friends who love and support me.
	That these random people that don't know me, I really don't care.
	And I'm not doing anything all that courageous, but I really do believe the things that I was taught in church.
	And so I go, if they would kill and crucify Jesus, 10,000 word hippies on me?
	I'm getting off easy.
	And so it really just rolls off my back.
	So do you think things are going to get better or worse from here?
	Because I think that there is a new conversation that's starting from people of all political stripes sort of getting very tired of the sort of identity politics that are happening right now.
	The attempts to label each other, if we disagree, then you're an Uncle Tom or I'm a racist and it doesn't matter what we actually are, how we personally interact, this intersectional politics where identity matters more than perspective.
	Are you hopeful for the future?
	or do you think things are gonna continue to deteriorate the way things are going right now?
	I'm hopeful because we've dealt with worse in this country.
	And I just rely on my faith, for one.
	But also, I see signs.
	I think when Kanye West, for whatever we may think about him, when he goes out on that limb and says, hey man, let's think a little more independently, let's not Let's not demonize the president totally.
	Let's not demonize people totally.
	Let's think.
	Let's try to get beyond our surface-level emotions and feelings.
	I mean, he's a tastemaker, for lack of a better word.
	I think that my black friends and the people I interact with on a daily basis, I think there's more and more understanding of where I'm coming from.
	And but just also I see more and more understanding of the failure of being wedded to one political ideology.
	And I think that the understand I was telling people four years ago.
	Hey, look, Black Lives Matter is not what you think.
	You think it's a pro-black movement.
	It's not.
	It's funded by communists, and it's a disruptor.
	And I've tried to explain to people, it's just like, Black Lives Matter to me was Trump's running mate.
	That more than almost anything that I can point to, Black Lives Matter helped Trump get elected.
	And I try to explain, and people are now starting to get that and understand it.
	And so, yeah, I am hopeful that there's an awakening because I think, look, if the unemployment rate keeps coming down and just the facts, I'll say this, when President Obama got elected, I had a conservative white female friend who used to make all these dramatic predictions about what was going to happen when president, and I would just be calling BS on all of it.
	Oh my God, terrorists are going to attack.
	I was like, are you kidding me?
	And none of it came true.
	And a lot of her most biggest fears never came true under president.
	And I think The same thing's gonna happen with President Trump.
	That a lot of these biggish, outlandish fears that people have just aren't gonna come true.
	And that's not me saying that President Trump is going to be a great president.
	I don't think, you know, I don't think it's healthy to have a reality TV star as the president, and someone who tweets like that.
	I don't think that's a good thing.
	But I don't think the worst fears are going to come true, and people are just going to have to deal with the reality.
	Because, listen, I've tried to, and I don't want to come off, I don't want to, I don't care how it lands.
	I said to my mother back early on with the Trump thing, and just keeping it a thousand percent real with her, I was like, How is Trump and some of his abrasive, outlandish statements and particularly his sexual impriority, how's that any different than your brother, Uncle John, who we love, I worship?
	How's he any different?
	That's the Uncle John.
	Uncle John and President Trump would have been drinking buddies and out chasing it together, right?
	So I just can't go there.
	I just can't.
	I can't.
	I know people that I think the same way as Trump, but they're black.
	They're outlandish.
	They're over the top.
	A lot of things they say are stupid, but they're good people.
	And my dad, and God rest his soul, my dad was prejudiced.
	He did not like white people.
	But you know what trumped his bigotry?
	He wanted to be a good person.
	So anybody that came into his bar, any person he encountered, he met them with respect.
	And I saw a guy that would, you know, upset because awful things happened to my dad along racial lines as a kid that made him very bitter.
	But I never saw him mistreat anyone.
	Ever.
	Because that was more important than whatever bigotry he held within him.
	And I try to explain to people that I know a lot of people with inappropriate thoughts and ideas.
	But not all of those, they don't control all their behavior.
	There's other things they have that may trump their bigotry or whatever.
	Being a good person, being religious, wanting to be right with God.
	can trump a lot of the stupid thoughts we have and that's why when I hear people try to disavow religion or beat up religion or whatever and look the church clearly isn't perfect and has made a lot of mistakes but I've just seen too much and know too much and know when my parents divorced and my mother's single mother in the 70s raising two black boys I know what God and the church did for her to get her through.
	And so, yeah, I'm hopeful.
	Well, Jason Whitlock, thank you so much for stopping by.
	It really is a pleasure to have you here.
	And I'm so glad that we could bring you to our audience, which may not have heard a lot of your stuff.
	You check Jason Whitlock out over at Fox Sports 1.
	He's just awesome.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Thank you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show's Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

▲