Gary Sheffield Jr. dismisses COVID vaccine mandates, arguing they don’t prevent infection or transmission, and predicts leagues like the NHL will eventually allow unvaccinated players to avoid restrictions. He criticizes Biden’s debt plan as ineffective, citing billionaires like Jeff Bezos paying minimal taxes, and warns policies may lead to totalitarianism. Sheffield Jr. also attacks media narratives on border security, calling Joy Reid and Chris Cuomo’s claims racist propaganda, and defends Nikki Minaj against perceived silencing for questioning progressive orthodoxy. His broader point: mainstream media distorts reality while elites exploit minorities’ voices only when convenient, undermining trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Every player, every person in this world is going to make their own decision for themselves.
I would like an explanation to, you know, people with vaccines, why are they still getting COVID?
I would start with, I've had COVID in the past, and so our understanding of antibodies, of natural immunity, has changed a great deal from the onset of the pandemic and is still evolving.
Only we can only presume that you're not joining us right now because of vaccination.
I'm curious, is that accurate?
And if so, do you expect to be either vaccinated or compliant in time by the time you guys come back from LA after that postseason game, after the preseason game?
Yeah, no, Brian, I appreciate your questions, bro.
Honestly, I like to keep that stuff private, man.
I'm a human being first.
And obviously, living in this public sphere, there's just a lot of questions about what's going on in the world of Kyrie.
And I think I just would love to just keep that private and handle it the right way with my team.
So everybody, is everybody in here vax?
I would assume, right?
So you all can still get COVID, right?
We're less likely to die or go to the hospital.
Okay, but you can still get COVID.
Right.
So, and you can still pass it along with the vax, right?
I'm just asking the question.
What's the reason for not just explaining what you believe?
Because it's none of your business.
That's what it comes down to.
You know, I don't ask you guys what your beliefs are.
I don't ask you guys what you think is right or wrong.
You know, we're different people.
I understand that the vaccine would help if you catch COVID and you'll be able to have less symptoms from contracting it.
But with me having COVID in the past and having antibodies with my current age group and fitness, physical fitness level, it's not necessarily a fear of mine.
Taking the vaccine, like I said, it would decrease my chances of having a severe reaction, but it does open me up to the albeit rare chance, but the possibility of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine itself.
Gary Sheffield Jr. is a commentator and writer for Outkick.com.
He appears on a ton of popular sports podcasts and shows.
And now on Rebel News, Gary, how are you doing today?
Thanks for joining me.
I'm good, man.
How about yourself?
I'm doing well.
Always a good time to talk to you.
I want to jump right into it with the NBA player, for those who don't know, from the Golden State Warriors, Andrew Wiggin.
He's a Wiggins.
He's a Canadian guy.
He's refusing to take the vaccine.
I believe his quote was, I'll only take it if I'm forced to.
What are your thoughts on that?
Are you hearing anything from inside the league about what the team plans to do?
Well, I would assume the team is probably going to maybe not look to trade him over the vaccine, but at least consider it.
And that's the thing is he said, until I'm forced to, I'm not going to get the vaccine.
The problem is, is he's going to be berated until he gets vaccinated.
And that's the same reality that the average person's going to live.
You're going to live that same reality.
You're going to be chastised by your bosses.
And that's essentially what's happening to him.
And whether or not you're worth $200 million or you're worth $40K a year, you're still going to be attacked for your freedom of choice and utilizing that to not get vaccinated.
So I feel bad for him as much as I wish I was in his position financially.
But ultimately, he's in the same spot as us.
He's still fighting for his freedoms.
And it lets you know that Andrew Wiggins never would have been vaccinated in large part because he's in shape and he's not going to get sick from COVID.
Yeah, and I believe the San Francisco rules are any indoor events require vaccination.
So it does put the team in a really difficult position of what they have to do.
They either have to give him an exemption or they have to look at trading him, which is a crazy thing to think about.
Now, I spoke to you recently about NFL players Cole Beasley, Isaiah McKenzie, and also there's a few NHL players as well, Tyler Bertuzzi, Zach Ronaldo, and Archibald.
They're all refusing to get vaccinated.
Some of them won't be able to play in Canadian games for this.
How do you think this plays out in the major sports leagues?
Do you think they, if more people come out, they're going to drop these mandates, or do you think they're just going to start handing out exemptions based on whatever?
Or how do you think this plays out?
To me, this is going to take time.
It's actually, we're going to need the boosters to show up and players to say, well, what exactly is the benefit for me to actually get vaccinated?
You're going to see these leagues like the NHL.
The NHL is perfect.
It's going to get to 100% in that league.
And what they're going to see is that protocols are not going to loosen.
They're going to say initially that, yeah, we're going to give them more freedoms, but you're going to see positive tests and they're going to all continue on.
They're going to talk about new variants.
And eventually those players are going to catch on and those numbers are going to drop.
They're not going to get to 100% with the Delta variant and all the booster shots.
They're just not going to do it because half the league is going to say, I thought I got vaccinated, so this will end.
And what people realize is that this doesn't end with your compliance.
That's when you're going to start seeing pushback.
And that's when the league is going to start going towards normalcy again.
So, in the short term, do you think that these players cave?
I mean, I know you hope that they don't, but for three young guys, one of them got sent down to the minors because of this.
Tyler Bertuzzi, okay, he's not a top-line player.
I don't think Archibald is moving the needle a huge amount.
Do you expect them to cave?
Do you expect them to get demoted?
How do you feel about that?
It depends on the league.
NHL, I expect them to cave.
When 98% of your league is vaccinated, and it really just depends on the individuals and leadership in that league.
And then the NFL, which is predominantly the audience is conservative.
It's just there.
You have a lot of conservative NFL players as well.
And you see that in baseball too.
Those leagues eventually are just going to, the players are just going to wake up.
Whips at the Border00:13:29
It's going to take time.
And I do expect them to fold.
And that's unfortunate.
But the elite usually fold before the middle class.
It's just, that's how it is.
Yeah.
And you mentioned baseball.
A lot of guys from communist countries in there.
I remember, I think it was JD Martinez who spoke out a couple of years ago against all the stuff that was going on.
And now to have all this stuff happening when you got guys from Cuba and Venezuela and they're really good players in the league.
I think that does help in stopping it.
I want to move over to your wonderful president, Joe Biden.
He had some interesting views on how to eliminate the debt that's happening because of COVID and all the spending.
I'll let him speak for himself here, as wonderful as it's going to be.
Let's play that, guys.
It is zero price tag on the debt.
We're paying.
We're going to pay for everything we spend.
So it's not, you know, people understandably.
Well, you know, it started off at $6 trillion.
Now it's $3.5 trillion.
Now it's going to be 2.9.
It's going to be zero.
Zero.
Because in that plan that I put forward, and I said from the outset, I said, I'm running to change the dynamic of how the economy grows.
I'm tired of trickle down.
The trillionaires and billionaires are doing very, very well.
You all know.
You've all reported it.
We're paying for everything we spend by taxing people more.
It sounds like even though this is the tax plan that he made, and then he made the billionaires and the trillionaires richer.
Does anything make any of this make sense to you, Gary?
No, and it doesn't make sense to him either.
Here's the thing: taxes.
And most people watching this show, they already know this.
Taxes actually don't work for the rich because they, for the most part, aren't making salaries.
They're not making these type of wages to be taxed on.
They're making the passive incomes.
And a lot of them, like you'll see Jeff Bezos, who's making $100,000 a year with Amazon, that's what he's being taxed on.
That is really what AOC is fighting for.
You're talking about people like Jeff Bezos, like the Facebook CEO.
They're not going to be taxed.
So really, Joe Biden's just sitting here wasting his time and he's exciting college students.
That's really the point is young students are going to look at this and say, who are more broke than ever, by the way?
They're looking at this and saying, well, this is providing us hope.
This is exciting because maybe we're not the problem.
Our laziness and our political choices are not affecting us.
But what they're going to realize is that pointing up at the rich people and people more successful than you and claiming that their tax bracket is the reason that you're unsuccessful, that's they're going to realize eventually it's an excuse.
And they're going to realize that once we look like Australia and we're completely totalitarian and really just socialist.
So it's really sad.
And I see a lot of people my age, I'm 27 now.
A lot of people are just ignorant.
They just are and very emotional.
So he's really trying to play the strings of emotion.
And for us conservatives, it doesn't work.
Gary, you've been around the league, particularly baseball for a long time.
You grew up in it, of course.
How much of this rubs off on the players when they're thinking about their taxes and saving money and everything and where they play?
I mean, are players really thinking about the tax brackets in states that they're going to play in?
100%.
It's actually a huge factor.
And agents look at this first and foremost.
And it doesn't take a liberal or a conservative to have this point of view.
Nobody wants to give away their money.
That's just the way it is.
Despite what rich people, all these movie stars want to say about please join my family foundation and we're going to do all this to do everything we can.
They still want to keep as much money as they can.
They want to buy everything that they want to buy.
And we're always looking to make another dollar.
That's the way business works.
Everybody wants more.
That's not exclusive to rich people or poor people.
It's everybody.
So anytime I look at it and I say, well, you have a choice of whether or not you want to play in New York or you can play in Texas or you can play in Florida.
You're going to pay zero taxes income.
Okay.
Easy choice.
How could you not?
I mean, that's the reason you see people immigrating anyways, straight to Florida, out of New York, and all the places with high tax brackets.
That's where everyone's leaving.
Yeah.
And I noticed that in hockey too, which it always comes back to for me, of course, as a Canadian.
A lot of the better players as they get older, like Roberto Luongo moving to Florida, all of a sudden your huge contract.
You're making even more in your Twilight seasons by playing in Florida.
Now, sticking with Biden, his approval rating is the lowest it's ever been.
I actually spoke to a Black Lives Matter leader the other day who's saying that the approval with Biden among black people is the lowest it's ever been because of vaccine mandates.
You're down there in Arizona.
How are you feeling about Biden's job on the border and the economy?
Maybe if we can stick with the border, since you're on a border state, how are you feeling about his handling of this?
Well, it's frustrating because he's undervaluing my vote.
And no matter what the audits say, if they eventually say that the ballots and everything was the way it was supposed to be, it lets me know that people are entering this country who feel differently than the way Arizonans have felt for years.
And Arizona, the way it was being run, was great.
That's the reason everybody was moving here.
And so now that I see the way that it's going at the border, I realize that my vote just means far less.
Everything that's happening just makes me less valuable.
The longer we go, I become less valuable.
And I'm always going to fight against that.
So obviously, anybody who's lived here for over five or 10 years is very frustrated.
Now, speaking on the border, I want to show a video that happened recently about the Haitian illegal migrants coming to the border, getting rounded up by Border Patrol.
And your and my favorite analyst, Joy Reed, had something to say about this.
Let's go ahead and play this clip, please.
And very quickly, you know, I know that, you know, funding for the government begins in the House.
Should we be looking at the budget of Department of Homeland Security?
Because I was not aware that WIPs, which come from the slave era, a slavery era, were part of the package that we issue to any sort of law enforcement or government sanctioned personnel.
Were you aware that that was being issued to people?
People had that kind of equipment on them that they could use.
They're being issued whips, Gary.
Can you believe it?
Chris Cuomo at CNN said that, also said that this looks like slavery.
They're confusing the reins on horses with whips.
Gary, why do you think that these pundits are so quick to be like, this is slavery regarding illegal immigration?
Well, for one, we have to give them credit.
They don't know what reins on a horse actually look like, okay?
Because they don't actually get their hands dirty and do work.
That's for the blue-collar people in this country.
So let's get that out of the way.
They don't actually understand these things.
It's just a new talking point every week.
First, it was kids in the cages, right?
Everybody was up in arms of the kids in the cages.
What are we going to do to save these poor children leaving Mexico?
What are we going to do?
Then Donald Trump's out of office.
How many times have you heard kids in the cages?
I haven't seen a trend one time yet.
Now all of a sudden we're talking about cracking whips.
Oh, that's a big improvement.
And that's what a lot of people in downtown LA are doing.
They're moving under the bridges.
It's a great life down there.
So what I'm trying to understand is that we're consistently moving the, no matter what we do, we move the goalposts and we start caring about one thing.
If we're talking about audits, it's the next thing.
We're going to talk about whips at the border.
What I care about is the results.
I don't care about optics or pictures.
I don't care about any of that.
They actually wanted us to care, Americans to care about these pictures of whips.
I don't care.
I care about how many people illegally crossed the border and how many people did we protect from crossing the border.
And those are the only numbers that should matter to any American.
And right now they don't.
Half the country cares about optics.
The other cares about results.
Yeah, and a lot of stuff is just misplaced with the argument.
Like you said, it went from children's in cages, but they're not in cages now.
We're putting them under bridges.
And I think something that's also lost in them is a lot of border security agents are Hispanic Americans because they can speak Spanish and they might have had relatives who are illegal immigrants or they have relatives that are legal immigrants and then they know the process and how difficult it can be or they're familiar with it.
And I think a lot of that gets lost.
And they also call for not being able to use horses because they say it looks bad.
They were speaking with the guy in charge there and they're saying they can't be hurting the people and using their horses as weapons.
But you were the guys who wanted more stuff like this.
They didn't want a wall.
They wanted more people actually patrolling the border.
And now that they're getting that, it's become this racist trope of we can't identify what tools are needed for a horse.
So we're calling it racist.
Now, it really gets sad when it's going to this back and forth, like you said, where nothing actually gets done.
We're just complaining about the process in which we've actually been championing for the last five years, but now we don't like how it looks because we just care about the optics of it.
I could go on and on all day about that, but I think something needs to be said for the fact that it doesn't matter about the tripe of the people traveling there.
It doesn't matter how dangerous it is.
It doesn't matter the situation they're putting their children in.
As long as we're getting them in the country, who cares about what happens after that or who cares about what happens at the border?
We should just let them all in.
I think it's a crazy situation.
Big segue here to Nikki Minaj, I think.
Very different topic.
But I wanted to get this in with you because it's hard for me to find somebody that I see eye to eye on so many diverse topics as such as this.
She's getting rolled over by the mainstream media.
I think she might be still suspended from Twitter or she's silent on there right now.
She was daring to share her story about a cousin.
She even called Joy Reed, as we just saw, homophobic for her past blog posts.
Do you think there's merit to what Mickey Minaj's message has been?
One, about just, you know, researching before you make this decision.
And two, about this mainstream media thing where we're supposed to be hyping up black women and minority women all day, every day.
But as soon as they step out of line, we're turning on them immediately.
Well, here's the real conclusion.
Black women, women in general, any minority, any person, you are useless to Democrats.
It doesn't matter who you are.
It does not matter what color you are.
All that matters is that you draw the same conclusion that they draw and you're going to play by the same rules that they play.
And right now, those rules are do exactly as you're told, question nobody.
And Nikki Minaj did not even come out and say, you need to come to the same conclusion I did.
I feel scared.
I'm terrified.
That's essentially what she was letting us know.
And that she was at the very least thinking about the process, right?
Thinking about the process of getting vaccinated.
She didn't tell us what to do at all.
Anybody in human history that's ever said, hey, this is my process.
And I hope you consider my process, but your process is okay.
That person's the good guy.
It's never been different in all of time.
Nobody has ever said, hey, whatever your freedom of choice is, that's okay.
When has that ever been an issue in human history?
Anyone else that's insisting that, well, I don't care what Nikki Minaj says or I don't care what LeBron James says, we do care what they say.
That's the thing.
We do care what they say, but we're trying to control them to think what we say.
We want them to echo everything we say and turn this whole thing into a bunch of propaganda where somebody with 60 million followers can say what we say.
But the thing about Nikki Minaj, I like when she talks about politics like this.
I do, because she's a regular person just like I am.
And so people in the media are so angry at Nikki Minaj because they don't actually care about black people.
If they actually cared about black people, they would listen to all of them, but they only listen to a select few and that should tell you everything you need to know.
You know, I was going to close on that, but I want to ask you, and it's the same question I asked the leader of BLM New York the other day.
Do you trust any of these progressive politicians who are constantly touting, you know, minorities, we need to uplift them.
We love Black lives so much.
We need to change the system to benefit them.
Do you buy any of that?
Or is that on the other side an indication that they're less likely to support you?
Well, when Donald Trump had the United States and Black ownership in total, Black ownership and just Black revenue, ownership in real estate, all these numbers were up, ownership and stocks.
When all those numbers objectively were up, how many of these progressive people who are pro-Black pointed to those numbers and said, I like what I see.
And anytime you see those politicians and they're silent when you're successful as a Black man and as a Black woman in America, you know who's on your side.
They want to talk about successful black people and say, oh, you're an anomaly.
So this isn't actually a success story.
Those people are your enemy.
Successful Black Ownership Matters00:00:51
And that's to me, that's very simple.
When Donald Trump was in office, I knew black people were doing better than that they've done in the last 50 years.
And the fact that progressives were not happy, I knew that they weren't real progressives and they're wasting my time.
All right, Gary, I appreciate you coming on.
It's always great to talk to you.
Outkick.com, read his articles there and go follow him on Twitter.
I love your Twitter.
I'll always tell you this, my dude.
Keep tweeting about my Blue Jays.
Hilarious spin on everything.
I don't know.
I just like looking at your Twitter while I'm watching a baseball game.
Thanks a lot.
Any final words for Canada?
No, hopefully they start doing things the way we do them.
Because I know personally, I know a lot of Canadians that come down here for the winter and hopefully they come down for the summer too and start voting like us.