June 9, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I know you're gonna be blown away by this, but we're gonna have to talk about free speech today. | ||
| It would be nice if a week would pass when there wasn't some sort of threat to freedom of speech, but it seems that almost every day there's a new outrage on the horizon aimed at chipping away our right to free expression. | ||
| There are three specific happenings right now that I want to focus on in no particular order. | ||
| First, there's the ongoing saga of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen University in Washington. | ||
| In case you missed our live stream with Brett last week, he's being attacked by being called a racist and a bigot for opposing a day in which white students wouldn't be welcome on campus. | ||
| Brett claimed that the revised day of absence on campus based on racial segregation was not just racist and bigoted, But was the complete reverse of what the day was supposed to stand for. | ||
| Brett has been a progressive and a far lefty his whole life, but even he is not immune to the toxic ideology of leftism, which rates victimhood as virtue and will swallow anyone who dares deviate from its authoritarian rule. | ||
| The campus was closed for a couple days due to threats of violence and even now Brett is getting no backing from the administration, which appears to be bending to the demands of the crazed mob. | ||
| Even worse, mainstream media is basically all but ignoring this story because it so shatters the regressive ideology. | ||
| Mainstream left-leaning outlets don't want to touch this story because they don't want to be tarred the same way Brett has been. | ||
| Thus, almost all the coverage of the Evergreen story has been from right leaning websites. | ||
| Brett has done three live interviews that I know of, one right here, one on Joe Rogan's podcast, and one with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. | ||
| He hasn't been invited on CNN or MSNBC or NPR, and none of those outlets have even written a piece on the story. | ||
| When you hear that trust in mainstream media is at an all time low, it's reasons like ignoring hugely relevant stories that go against their narrative that are part of the reason. | ||
| The next story of the last few days was the outrage over Kathy Griffin's ISIS inspired photos holding up President Trump's decapitated bloody head. | ||
| First off, on the free speech front, I fully support Kathy's right to take these pictures and make art as she sees fit. | ||
| I don't think that these photos are a direct call to violence, which would be a crime, and the pictures should be seen through the lens that she's a comedian and a provocateur, regardless of whether you think the images are in poor taste or just outright awful. | ||
| So while it is 100% in her right to make the images, it's also 100% in CNN's right, as her employer, to fire her if they see fit. | ||
| Interestingly, in this case, it was the right calling for CNN to fire Griffin, and it was the left that was defending her, although they were doing it a bit less than usual. | ||
| While this is a flip on the script of the last few years, it's important to remember it seems people only hold their values when it's easy to do so. | ||
| Just imagine if it had been a conservative comedian like Tim Allen holding up a severed head of President Obama. | ||
| The left would have been demanding his show be cancelled, and the right would have been defending him. | ||
| Ironically, Tim Allen's highly rated show was cancelled a couple weeks ago and many people think that it is at least partially because he's been an outspoken conservative in Hollywood. | ||
| The final story I want to touch on is the outrage over Bill Maher using the n-word on Realtime last Friday. | ||
| I can't even repeat what Bill Maher said, because even just by quoting him I'll end up in hot water, which shows you just how insane the language police have gotten. | ||
| Basically he made a joke using the n-word and all hell broke loose. | ||
| To be clear, he didn't use the n-word to describe anyone in particular or take a racist position. | ||
| It was a line that I suspect was pre-packaged to elicit a reaction from the crowd. | ||
| It not only did elicit a reaction from the live studio audience, but also the bigotier brigade, which immediately began calling for his firing from HBO. | ||
| I even saw comedians that I know calling for him to be fired over a joke. | ||
| This is Bill Maher, who many of you who lean right absolutely hate, and now the left is doing your job of trying to destroy him. | ||
| Sadly, the left has been coming for Bill for a long time, mainly because he isn't afraid of talking about radical Islam, which has set him apart from most on the left. | ||
| HBO took the joke out of repeats of the program and so far has withstood calls to fire him, and Maher even apologized, something he's chastised others for doing in the past. | ||
| Senator Al Franken cancelled an appearance on Real Time for this week, despite being a friend of Bill and of the show for many years. | ||
| I've invited Senator Franken on the show to discuss, but I'm not going to hold my breath. | ||
| So there you have it, a professor bullied off campus by threats of violence for fighting against racism, a comedian fired for a tasteless gag, and another comic under the threat of firing for a joke. | ||
| None of these are threats to the first amendment, which of course as you know is the government coming for your speech. | ||
| But they all add up to the chill factor around freedom of expression that I've been talking about for quite some time. | ||
| If you were a professor, would you be willing to explore a controversial idea with students after what's happened to Brett? | ||
| If you were an artist, would you be willing to paint a controversial painting after what's happened to Kathy? | ||
| And if you were a comic, would you be willing to tell an offensive joke after what's happening to Bill? | ||
| If you answered no to any of those, then you must acknowledge that the threat to free expression is real. | ||
| Don't like Brett? | ||
| Don't take his class. | ||
| Think Cathy is crass? | ||
| Watch something else on New Year's. | ||
| Don't think Bill is funny? | ||
| Change the channel. | ||
| But whatever you do, keep watching the Rubin Report because we've got Jason Whitlock from Fox Sports 1 on the show this week. | ||
| He was in his own outrage-a-palooza last week, with of course calls for him to be fired too, | ||
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but I'll save that for our chat. | |
| Joining me today is the co-host of Speak for Yourself on Fox Sports 1, and a man who has | ||
| no problem speaking for himself, Jason Whitlock. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| I've wanted to be here. | ||
| Big fan of yours, Dave. | ||
| Love what you're doing. | ||
| Thanks, well, I feel the same way. | ||
| We had a strange interaction on DMs on Twitter, where I invited you on the show, not understanding that you actually do live in LA. | ||
| You were here, we could have had you months ago. | ||
| But your timing is good, because at the top of the show, I was talking about people getting in trouble for speech. | ||
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And this is something you've consistently managed to do. | |
| Yeah, I think anybody that, particularly now, previously it used to be celebrated in the media, but now it's pretty much derided. | ||
| Anytime you say anything that doesn't go along with a group thing, people over social media get irate. | ||
| And I've seen my entire industry. | ||
| I'm someone that still considers myself a journalist, although I'm doing broadcasting now. | ||
| But I was a big fan. | ||
| I grew up idolizing Mike Royko at the Chicago Tribune. | ||
| He became a Pulitzer Prize winner, became very successful in this industry because you could not predict his position. | ||
| And he just came across as honest and fair. | ||
| And whether you liked him or not, his position, it came from a real place. | ||
| And I've seen this industry, if Mike Royko were alive today, he would not be successful. | ||
| You have to be populist and preach to a choir to be successful in this industry. | ||
| Isn't that kind of crazy, considering that you're in the sports industry? | ||
| Now, I know you talk a lot about politics, and we're gonna get into a lot of your opinions on things, but you're in the sports biz, which you should be allowed to say what you want, because it's not like you're dealing with abortion on a day-to-day basis, or gun control or things, although a lot of these things have now seeped into the sport conversation. | ||
| But when you started this, did you ever think that you were gonna end up stuck in this place of, You're never afraid to say what you think, but stuck in this place where that would be an issue. | ||
| I'm totally shocked because, again, my goal getting in this business was, oh, I want to be the Mike Roy co-op sports. | ||
| And I just thought, well, that'll be great. | ||
| And that'll make me popular and people will respect the fact that my positions are unpredictable or they're not tied to an agenda. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm completely surprised that this is where we've landed in American media, where, again, original thoughts. | ||
| It's funny because being against the establishment is supposed to be the cool thing, right? | ||
| That's George Carlin. | ||
| That's fight the power. | ||
| That's the history of America, is fight the power. | ||
| And somehow now, that's become not cool in a bizarre way. | ||
| Well, depending on which way you look at it. | ||
| The hashtag resistance people think it's cool at the moment. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know if that's actually the power. | ||
| Right, and here's what will get me in trouble. | ||
| The resistance movement is actually an establishment movement, and they think they're being anti-establishment, but Donald Trump is not the establishment. | ||
| Yeah, so that's what I was getting at. | ||
| He is actually burning down the establishment, and again, this isn't me caping up for Trump, but the entire resistance movement is actually the establishment fighting back against people that are Yeah, so let's unpack that a little bit for the people that don't get it, because I feel the same way. | ||
| Yes, he's the president, but he's not the full establishment when you talk about the media and Hollywood and the groupthink, the things that we're allowed to say. | ||
| That's really the power. | ||
| He's the one that's taken the hatchet to that, right? | ||
| Again, whether you support him or not. | ||
| Without question. | ||
| And the other thing, to label Donald Trump as any type of classic conservative is preposterous. | ||
| He's not a conservative. | ||
| You know, he's a blowhard that was a good TV personality, a successful TV person, and obviously a successful real estate person, but mostly a blowhard. | ||
| And, you know, he doesn't Yeah. | ||
| Are you a conservative? | ||
| Do you consider yourself a conservative? | ||
| than maybe his agenda is to help real estate billionaires or whatever, but I'm not sure it goes much beyond that. | ||
| Yeah, are you a conservative? | ||
| Do you consider yourself a conservative? | ||
| I mean, I know sort of what your politics are, mostly through Twitter and the show, but I'm not sure. | ||
| I think, I don't wanna reject the conservative label, but I've written for the Huffington Post. | ||
| Uh, you know... | ||
| I'm anti-guns. | ||
| I think the Second Amendment is a farce in 2017. | ||
| So you would scrap it altogether? | ||
| Yeah, the Second Amendment's a joke, in my view. | ||
| The right to bear arms and to have a militia, to protect yourself against the government and all, I think made sense back when the Constitution was written. | ||
| But unless we're all going to have access to drones, we really can't protect ourselves against the government. | ||
| How many tanks do you have over your house? | ||
| I don't have any stealth bombers, anything. | ||
| But how do you reconcile that as someone that obviously is a healthy distrust of power? | ||
| Again, I just think guns are unhealthy. | ||
| I think that gun violence, I'm an African-American, and when you look at the statistics about who gun violence really impacts, it's us. | ||
| And so, you know, I just look at the stats and say, you own a gun in your home, you're more likely to shoot a family member, a friend, a loved one, than you are an intruder. | ||
| And again, I get why people like to hunt. | ||
| I'm not against hunting and guns for that reason, but all the handguns that are proliferated and all the semi-automatic weapons and all the stuff people are buying up preparing for the end of the United States of America. | ||
| If the government decides they want to take us out, they'll drone tank stealth us into submission and our guns won't mean as much. | ||
| So you think it's a lost battle anyway with our muskets versus their drones. | ||
| You've talked a bunch about guns and the controversy that it has in the black community. | ||
| Do you think, but what I find interesting is that you do lay out some numbers. | ||
| I've heard you talk about the numbers and the amount of black-on-black crime and all that stuff. | ||
| You get a lot of pushback on that, right? | ||
| Yeah, I just think that as an African American, and keep in mind, Dave, I lost a loved one that I was close to, that I helped raise, spent a lot of summers with me. | ||
| He was a cousin. | ||
| His mom was like a sister to me growing up. | ||
| His name's Anton Butler. | ||
| He was killed, in me and my family's view, because of police misconduct. | ||
| He was tasered to death in the rain, unarmed. | ||
| And so, again, the police have a different narrative. | ||
| And you can go look it up. | ||
| This happened in Indianapolis in 2012. | ||
| I've been touched by police misconduct, paid for the funeral, shed the tears. | ||
| But I don't believe my cousin got in that position because the police are out just to do indiscriminate harm to black people. | ||
| I believe he got in that position because of America's drug war and mass incarceration | ||
| policy, and he was a felon through his involvement with drugs, and that that vulnerability of | ||
| being a felon who had done time put him in a place where he could be subject to police | ||
| misconduct. | ||
| But is police misconduct a real issue as African-Americans? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| The government is already highly motivated to stop police misconduct because it's highly expensive. | ||
| When the police kill someone, harm someone, there are lawsuits and there are settlements with the families, and the government does not want to do that. | ||
| What the government wants done is for poor people Regardless of color, but poor people escorted politely to jail. | ||
| If you escort them politely to jail, you can turn a buck on them. | ||
| You can make a profit. | ||
| The prison industrial complex can eat off of politely escorting people to prison. | ||
| They don't want the police, and there's all kinds of things set up to prevent the police from harming people, and they do it very rarely. | ||
| Social media has convinced us that police are just randomly out killing people, and it's just not true. | ||
| So I saw a video that you did about the social media component of this, that it confuses what the actual stats are, what the actual issues are, things like that. | ||
| You call them cyber, was it cyber humans? | ||
| Cyber humans, yeah. | ||
| Cyber humans. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about cyber humans, because I talk about this idea a lot too, that that online thing is starting to leak into the real world. | ||
| It's not leaked, it's there. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| The media, we're addicted to social media. | ||
| We're addicted to Twitter. | ||
| If you go look at the stats, the overwhelming majority of Americans I have nothing to do with Twitter. | ||
| Nothing! | ||
| It's not a representation of what people actually think in American society. | ||
| The media over-indexes, celebrities over-index, athletes, people that are trying to build brands, and people that are attracted to people that are trying to build brands are the people that are on social media. | ||
| And so, because the media overindulges the social media, and because we use it as wet | ||
| our fingers, "Oh, this is the way the wind's blowing, because Twitter tells me so." | ||
| So if Twitter tells you that the police are indiscriminately just killing black men every | ||
| night, and the media buys into that, they will—the media starts selling, "Oh, unarmed | ||
| black man killed. | ||
| Unarmed black man killed." | ||
| And they'll never address the hundreds and thousands of killings that poor people and | ||
| poor people of color and black people are doing to themselves every day. | ||
| That never gets addressed. | ||
| There's no Twitter feed that's popular that's out there telling you who's getting shot in Chicago every night, every weekend. | ||
| And so there's no hysteria around that. | ||
| They created a hysteria. | ||
| Around when the police make mistakes and or do something evil, which is very rare. | ||
| Policemen don't want to go to jail. | ||
| Not a good experience. | ||
| Policemen don't want to be the targets of the vitriol that goes along with killing anybody. | ||
| Now, are there some bad cops? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But what is our problem as African Americans? | ||
| It's the gun violence we do to ourselves. | ||
| That's what's taking us out and having a real impact. | ||
| And that's what has our communities living in fear. | ||
| I say this all the time. | ||
| Was as black a human being as you could possibly be. | ||
| He could afford to live wherever he wanted. | ||
| He built a new house in the ghetto because he liked being around black people. | ||
| He had a business that he ran in the ghetto because he liked dealing with black people. | ||
| When he put alarms on his business, when he put bars on his business, when he put an alarm on his home, when he carried a .38, Every day that I knew him. | ||
| It wasn't because he was like, Jason, man, these police are out to get me. | ||
| They may break into my home. | ||
| They may break into my... That wasn't it. | ||
| He was worried about the people in his neighborhood and the fear. | ||
| And again, the guy loved black people. | ||
| But the reality of what's going on in our communities, there's not a pervasive fear of the police. | ||
| There's a pervasive fear of ourselves. | ||
| There's so many interesting layers to that because, I mean, just 10 minutes ago we were discussing gun control. | ||
| Now you're describing how your dad had a .38 and it wasn't, yeah, he wasn't using it to stop the government from coming to get him. | ||
| It was to protect his own property and family and all that stuff. | ||
| So is it just a gun issue? | ||
| So I've had a few people on here that have talked about how the policies, often of the Democrats, have left the black community I think that yes I do prescribe to that. | ||
| that have sort of kept them in that position. | ||
| Do you basically prescribe to that? | ||
| I think that, yes, I do prescribe to that. | ||
| This far left progressive ideology, I think, is a shell game. | ||
| It's a trick. | ||
| It's a mirage. | ||
| We tell you we're for black people. | ||
| And again, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week about President Clinton was an expert at making black people feel he felt their pain. | ||
| And he was an expert at creating policies that intensify that pain. | ||
| And so, President Clinton loved us to death, but instituted some mandatory minimum sentencing policies, some anti-drug war policy, or some drug war policies that contributed greatly to mass incarceration, which is crippling black people. | ||
| So is that the issue there, that when you talk about these progressive policies, that they all kind of sound good? | ||
| Sound great. | ||
| It all sounds good. | ||
| We care about black people, we care about gay people, we care about Muslim people, but the policies themselves, when you get down to it, are a lot more complex than just saying we're for all these communities, which is really just some pie-in-the-sky stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I think that Again, let's take Black Lives Matter, and I was saying this in 2015. | ||
| I was like, man, this Black Lives Matter thing sounds so great, but it's poison. | ||
| I didn't know Trump was running for president in 2015 or whatever, but I was like, an atmosphere is being created for a Trump-like person To enter into politics and benefit from Black Lives Matter. | ||
| And I say that because I have a very dear friend in Kansas City who's probably left of Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And he and his wife adopted—brought in their home a half-black, half-white child. | ||
| They have two kids already. | ||
| They adopted a kid who basically needed—you know, they had no place else to go. | ||
| So, again, I'm trying to tell you what kind of people they are. | ||
| And when the situation at the University of Missouri, with the kids protesting, mimicking | ||
| the Black Lives Matter out of St. Louis, and they cost the president at that school his | ||
| job, all based off of "he didn't say this" or microaggressions or whatever it is. | ||
| My friend, hardcore University of Missouri fan, was like, "Whoa, what are we doing here? | ||
| What? | ||
| And he had, I don't want to put him out there, but he had questions about black people and like, hey, well, and I'm telling you, this guy loves everybody. | ||
| He's to the left. | ||
| But the thing that happened in Riverside, Missouri bothered him. | ||
| Not to the point that he's would ever vote for Trump. | ||
| But I was like, whoa, if this bothered him, Oh my God, what are the people that are more moderate or conservative, what are they thinking looking at this? | ||
| And they were thinking, oh, okay, y'all want to do this? | ||
| We're going to head to the ballot box and have a real riot. | ||
| I love the way you frame that example because I think these things are personal and they do come down to those little moments as a human and they don't come down to the Twitter outrage and the media outrage and everyone's tuning out of CNN and all that stuff because I would notice that too when I've talked, I've talked a lot about the college stuff and all that and I get tons of email, people saying, I'm a liberal, but what the hell's happening here? | ||
| What's happening to my guy? | ||
| So when you make it about that personal story, that actually resonates. | ||
| So I know a certain amount of people are gonna be watching this and going, wait a minute, somehow he's, Jason's either selling out black people or he's not acknowledging racism. | ||
| And all that, which is a perfect segue to what got you in hot water last week. | ||
| You were trending on Twitter, which is pretty good. | ||
| Did you know you were trending? | ||
| Yes, I saw that. | ||
| Yeah, you were trending on Twitter. | ||
| So you said something about LeBron James and racism. | ||
| Let's go there and see if we can get you in some more hot water. | ||
| You want to go in more hot water or less hot water? | ||
|
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You want me to get hot? | |
| I like hot water. | ||
| All right, let's turn up the heat. | ||
| So listen, I think LeBron James is well-intentioned. | ||
| I think a lot of what LeBron James does is excellent. | ||
| I think his work in Akron with poor people and the people of his community there is awesome. | ||
| I think that what I'm trying to communicate to us as African Americans is that we have to adopt strategies. | ||
| That actually work in the long term, and even in the short term. | ||
| And wallowing in any way in victimhood, particularly over hurt feelings or name calling. | ||
| Because again, he was called, allegedly on his gate, the worst name in my book you can be called. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But at the end of the day... So someone painted it on the gate outside his house? | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| And again, if you remember, it was removed before the police got there by LeBron's staff. | ||
| By 6.30 in the morning, they had repainted this fence and the police were handed a picture of it. | ||
| I'm not questioning the sincerity of it, I'm just telling you the facts. | ||
| Some people are actually questioning that, but that aside. | ||
| That aside. | ||
| So, again, at the end of the day, that's hurt feelings. | ||
| LeBron's feelings were hurt. | ||
| There was no jeopardy. | ||
| It's a second home. | ||
| They weren't there. | ||
| We don't even know who the assailants were. | ||
| And so I'm saying there was a time when our victimhood And so, you go back to the 1960s, 1950s, when we were denied the right to vote, when we were denied to go into schools, when we were denied where we could sit on a bus, where we couldn't sit in stadiums, when there was Jim Crow segregation on the books. | ||
| True victimhood did move people. | ||
| Like, people would sit back and go, man, that ain't right. | ||
| We gotta fix that. | ||
| That's unfair. | ||
| That's a human being. | ||
| And we're denying them the same rights as everyone else? | ||
| And so, playing up our victimhood at that point, during the Martin Luther King—it was a tremendous strategy, and it worked. | ||
| And it won us rights. | ||
| And so, instead, what I've seen, ever since the death of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, is we as African Americans, first with, and I'm not, I don't want to denigrate Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, I just want to speak factually about them. | ||
| I actually know both of them, have some respect for both of them, but they came in and mimicked Dr. King. | ||
| When Dr. King had won the battle for rights, and that's all America promises you rights. | ||
| America does not promise you your feelings will never be hurt. | ||
| America doesn't promise you that people will never call you a bad name. | ||
| The world doesn't promise you that. | ||
| America's Constitution promises you rights. | ||
| They want us those rights. | ||
| So our next leaders and our next movement had to be about how do we take advantage of these rights we've won? | ||
| Instead, Jesse and I, and most of us as African Americans, we're still mimicking Dr. King and that movement, and think there's some rewards to be won by playing up our victimhood. | ||
| And so, to me, what I would have wanted LeBron James to say in that moment was, Man, this is terrible. | ||
| It's a bad reflection on whoever the idiot is that did that. | ||
| But trust me, I'm going to be fine. | ||
| And as African Americans, we need to understand, I'm so wealthy, I can take care of this. | ||
| There is some real discrimination that goes on, mostly with poor people of color, and mostly with poor people. | ||
| That's where our energies need to be focused. | ||
| The drug war. | ||
| Mass incarceration. | ||
| These issues have real impact. | ||
| We can't get overly emotional when some random white person, that we think is white, can't have that much control over our happiness. | ||
| Do you think we just simply ask too much of our athletes? | ||
| This thing happened, if we go with the official story that happens, this thing happens, we still don't know who did it, but then the media starts talking about it, you say what you say, everyone on ESPN says what they say, and that for LeBron to do what you just asked him to do, it's like he's in the middle of the finals right now, they don't want all these distractions, and it's like he's trying to, his team's down 2-0 as we tape this, he's trying to figure that out, and yet we go to these people, As if they're gods that are going to solve all our problems. | ||
| Great point, and it's another point I agree with in terms of, as I'm saying, the leadership, civil rights leadership, needed to change. | ||
| Our expectation for athletes needed to change coming out of the 1960s. | ||
| Muhammad Ali never had a corporation like Nike. | ||
| Handing him a half billion dollars over the course of time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you had put those puppet strings on Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, some Nabisco or Pepsi or some tobacco company put their hooks into Muhammad Ali for a half billion dollars. | ||
| He would operate completely differently. | ||
| And so our expectations for athletes need to change because their situation has changed. | ||
| There's never going to be another Muhammad Ali. | ||
| No how, no way. | ||
| The financial rewards, and again, I'm someone, Dave, I know you're an atheist. | ||
| I grew up in a small Baptist church. | ||
| I'm a spiritual person and believe in the things taught in the Bible. | ||
| It's very hard for a rich person. | ||
| No matter how great they are, to ever see the Kingdom of God, and the point of that, that's Matthew 19, 24, the point of that is, Probably a little suspicious of the rich. | ||
| They have so many demands on them that they really, it's hard for them to keep it real for the poor and people that are really disadvantaged. | ||
| It's not because they're horrible people. | ||
| It's just the demands on them make it real, real hard. | ||
| And so, LeBron James, Muhammad Ali did well, but the Nation of Islam was in his pocketbook. | ||
| The money in the 1960s wasn't nearly what it is now, and he was denied the right to box for three years, so he was not a super wealthy person. | ||
| He was basically, mostly in the same boat as the great mass of African Americans. | ||
| LeBron James is not, so it's very hard for him to keep it 100% authentic to that group of people. | ||
| Now again, his heart can be there, he can remember what it was like for him when he was poor, but at the end of the day, the demands on him are such, he just can't be Muhammad Ali. | ||
| What I think is most interesting about that is you're not making a judgment call on either one of them as people. | ||
| No. | ||
| You're acknowledging the reality of, you're not saying Muhammad Ali would have acted this way, it's just a reality. | ||
| If someone has a half a billion dollars coming to them, something's gonna change. | ||
| Something's gonna change. | ||
| Doesn't mean you're inherently evil or inherently good, but the ball has moved. | ||
| I think LeBron's a great person. | ||
| I think Muhammad Ali was a great person. | ||
| I think LeBron's doing the best that he can. | ||
| I think he is now surrounded by and associating with some political people. | ||
| And I don't trust political people. | ||
| When he started campaigning for Hillary Clinton, I was like, Show me where Muhammad Ali campaigned for anybody. | ||
| Maybe he did, but certainly not in this pride. | ||
| He fought more for ideas than a candidate or a party. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so when I saw that, I was like, ah. | ||
| And so when I saw his speech last Wednesday, I was like, man, that smells like Bill Clinton. | ||
| That smells like Bill Clinton. | ||
| Make them believe you feel their pain, LeBron. | ||
| That's the best thing you can do in this moment. | ||
| And that's great brand enhancement. | ||
| That's where all these corporations right now want to be. | ||
| We're for equality. | ||
| But don't look at the Vietnamese people. | ||
| We're paying a penny to make these shoes. | ||
| We're for equality, just not in Vietnam. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So Nike makes these shoes that we all have. | ||
| I just did Nike IDs myself, so I've got them. | ||
| Or, you know, a lot of these athletes will... LeBron, for example. | ||
| And again, I'm not judging for this specifically, but you know, he's a Sprite guy. | ||
| He does all those Sprite commercials. | ||
| Would his trainer ever tell him to drink Sprite? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Look, man. | ||
| Yeah, take all that high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| That's good for you, LeBron. | ||
| Get a couple of those in you before the big game. | ||
| Dave, I'm overweight. | ||
| We know what that stuff does to all people, but particularly poor people and particularly African Americans, the soft drink companies. | ||
| You know, got us with diabetes and high blood pressure and everything else. | ||
| But again, I'm not knocking LeBron. | ||
| Make your money, but don't parade around like your actions are about what's best for the poor. | ||
| And again, he may think that if I'm LeBron James and I come out and say, oh, we're all in the same boat. | ||
| And racism. | ||
| My life is terrible because I'm black here in America. | ||
| Or it's tough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| He didn't say terrible. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| And I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| Your life is tough? | ||
| Being an African American here in America with all that money? | ||
| With all that you can do for your family and friends? | ||
| Most people are struggling living paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| LeBron James, I'm not knocking him. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| His best friend, Maverick Carter, Before Maverick Carter, Maverick Carter quit college at like 21, 22 because LeBron made Nike give Maverick a job that paid him in the six figures. | ||
| And that's a dream life. | ||
| That's not, you know, I don't know where on the planet he's going or where in the universe or in the galaxy he's going where things are gonna be much better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that this specific issue of taking athletes and then thinking that they have to represent the whole community or say everything perfectly or all that, | ||
| that this is actually unique to the black community. | ||
| 'Cause I've noticed whenever a black athlete or former athlete speaks out and says something more | ||
| in line of the way you were talking. | ||
| So when Charles Barkley has said some stuff about this, or Stephen A. Smith has said some stuff about this, | ||
| anything that sounds like it leans a little to the right, they get attacked mercilessly. | ||
| I mean, I clicked your name when I saw the trend. | ||
| I clicked it, and there were thousands of people calling for you to be fired, calling you all kinds of words that I'm not gonna say to your face here. | ||
| I mean, really terrible stuff that for any of you guys, or not just athletes, but people that talk about sports, you do anything that's a little bit out of that, and the assault is pretty merciless. | ||
| It's a message to the rest of the media and every other black public figure Don't do it. | ||
| Because most people... I'm uniquely... I'm uniquely... I don't give a F. And so, you know, I told someone this story. | ||
| I told Colin Cowell heard this story the other day about my family. | ||
| We'd have family get-togethers at the holidays. | ||
| And as a five-, six-year-old, seven-year-old kid, I would be preaching to my family about | ||
| what I thought they were doing wrong or what we were doing wrong. | ||
| And I didn't care that it bothered people. | ||
| And so I don't care what people over Twitter say about me. | ||
| But the overwhelming majority of media members and celebrities, they do care. | ||
| Who wants to be bombarded with all that filth and to have people and then sit there and | ||
| say, "Oh, my bosses, my kids, my husband, my wife, my mom and dad may go to my Twitter | ||
| feed and see people saying all this stuff about me." | ||
| (sighs) | ||
| I just better stay away and be quiet because I don't want to subject myself or my family to that. | ||
| It's silencing people. | ||
| It's so people again, what I keep saying about Twitter has made Media, celebrities, and athletes, we're all politicians now. | ||
| And Twitter is our exit polling. | ||
| And everything we say is calculated to think, well, how is this going to land over Twitter? | ||
| Am I going to get crucified for this? | ||
| Someone will call me an Uncle Tom or a sellout. | ||
| And so people don't say what they really think, and then what they do say is Meant to get retweeted and loved over Twitter. | ||
| And the biggest point I keep trying to make is, from Twitter to Instagram to Snapchat to Google to Facebook, this is all coming from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. | ||
| And the values and sensibilities that they have in San Francisco are being pushed on the media and celebrities through social media. | ||
| All right, so I'm glad you brought this up because the first time we had communicated, you messaged me on Twitter and said something to this effect, that the values of the left and the liberals have been shifted from traditionally being in New York, they've shifted to San Francisco. | ||
| So can you explain that a little bit? | ||
| Well, I think if people have been talking about, damn, the media's changed. | ||
| And it has changed. | ||
| New York used to control the media. | ||
| Everybody wanted to work in New York. | ||
| A magazine, newspaper, TV, you just make it to New York. | ||
| And so everything, all the Serious journalism awards came out of New York or, you know, that far east coast. | ||
| And so the traditional New York working class labor liberal was basically the values that were reflected by the media. | ||
| It certainly had a left wing bias. | ||
| But to me, New York liberals are people that are trying to perfect America. | ||
| Hey America, if we just do this and this, we'll be better. | ||
| So this would be like a JFK liberal or a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal? | ||
| Without question. | ||
| Those are my kind of liberals. | ||
| I'll say this and people's heads are going to explode. | ||
| A Donald Trump-like liberal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I know we got our promo now. | |
| But what do you mean by that? | ||
| Let's not gloss over that, because I know you hit on it earlier, but what does that actually mean? | ||
| If you really look at what Donald Trump stands for, he's more in line with JFK than Ronald Reagan, without question. | ||
| He's pro-gay marriage. | ||
| He's a social liberal. | ||
| His friends are diverse. | ||
| As long as you're willing to have a good time, Donald Trump's good with you. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| Did you see that absurd fake outrage when he had all those black business leaders | ||
| in the White House and Kellyanne Conway, I guess she either took the picture | ||
| or someone took the picture, and her foot's on the couch, | ||
| and everyone made it about that, her being disrespectful to the office. | ||
| Meanwhile, he's standing there with a ton of black people who can have tremendous | ||
| and do have tremendous influence to change things, and somehow that's the part that we forget about. | ||
| We're upset about Kellyanne Conway's foot. | ||
| So, my point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| New York media was in control of everything. | ||
| Everyone catered their perspective, point of view, to some degree, to please New York, because everybody wants to make it New York and make it there. | ||
| The advent of social media and the importance of going viral, of being retweeted and liked, of executives basing their decisions on, how many Twitter followers do you have? | ||
| It's become a popularity contest. | ||
| And whoever has the biggest following is the greatest thing in the media. | ||
| And once people figure out, oh man, I can rig Twitter. | ||
| I can buy followers. | ||
| I can buy retweets. | ||
| Say certain things, because again, when you talk about Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the employee base is all coming from San Francisco. | ||
| And to me, San Francisco is a different kind of liberal. | ||
| It's a revolutionary liberal. | ||
| The Black Panther Party is from there. | ||
| It's a liberal that's like, nah, you know what? | ||
| America ain't right. | ||
| We need to start all over from scratch. | ||
| I'm just not someone that wants to start all over from scratch. | ||
| I'm not someone who buys the narrative that America is so bad and so evil that it must be scrapped and started all over again. | ||
| America is incredibly flawed, like everybody else on the planet. | ||
| And America has made really horrible mistakes. | ||
| But America has also done, in my view, more good Than just about everybody else. | ||
| And America, again, overcame slavery and overcame Jim Crow to the point that Oprah could do what she did, President Obama could do what he did, Muhammad Ali could do what he did. | ||
| I can do the little bit that I'm doing. | ||
| And again, it was an ugly fight, but we won some rights and created some opportunities. | ||
| So I'm not for blowing up America. | ||
| I'm for, you know, perfecting and still trying to improve America. | ||
| Yeah, well, I always love talking to someone from a different walk of life that I agree with so much on a philosophical level. | ||
| There's a lot of bad stuff here, of course, but there's a lot of good stuff, and if the opportunity is equal, then that's what true equality is, and that's what we have to always work for, but we've got more here than pretty much anywhere else. | ||
| Well, look, and we're dealing with More diversity than just about anybody else. | ||
| This is really the melting pot. | ||
| And so people are like, oh my god, you know, there's racism here. | ||
| Well, of course there is, because we have more people. | ||
| And again, I say this all the time, I'm not defending racism. | ||
| I'm acknowledging it, and acknowledging the fact that throughout the world's history, it's never not been here. | ||
| It's not going away. | ||
| People's minds will not be perfected on this planet. | ||
| And so we can't control what everyone thinks. | ||
| And it's foolish to try to control and to think that every white person, whoever it was that did this vandalism at LeBron's house, we're probably not gonna fix that person. | ||
| And it's okay. | ||
| In a way, is that the real function of success of a movement? | ||
| That the arc has bent to justice so that we now look at little things And blow them out of proportion. | ||
| So again, it's just as you're saying, you're not defending what the guy wrote on LeBron's gate, of course not, but that is nothing compared to being hung up by a tree or not being able to use the same water fountain or anything. | ||
| So it's a function of success. | ||
| You can't make everything disappear. | ||
| But here's where I think things get dangerous, because I want to be clear, because people run away, well, Whitlock is out here celebrating Trump. | ||
| I really believe that this irresponsible way that we talk about race is why we have a reality TV star sitting in the White House. | ||
| And that's dangerous. | ||
| We shouldn't, the world's most powerful country shouldn't have a reality TV star who's unqualified sitting in the White House. | ||
| But because Of the way we have mishandled the racial discussion in America, it's created an opportunity for someone like Donald Trump, in my view. | ||
| So I'm with you that the trends of all of this are born out of what's happening online. | ||
| I've done a couple videos about it, and I even get caught in it. | ||
| Just this past weekend, on Friday, I tweeted, I'm getting off the grid. | ||
| That's it, I put a little Matrix picture up, I said, I'm off the grid. | ||
| Then, I think it was Saturday, the London attacks happened, and I heard about it, obviously, just from flicking the TV and from friends and whatever, and I immediately had this feeling like I had to get back on there and say something, or I had to share my thoughts or something, and I didn't do it, and I fought every impulse to do it, because I realized, I'm one guy, some people look to me for some information, but If I can't just sit one out, that is a huge problem for us personally. | ||
| So we all have the personal burden of this, too, in a weird way. | ||
| I think without question, what I've done to my Twitter feed is, like, if you don't have a registered phone number or email, I don't see your tweets. | ||
| You can tweet at me, but I just don't see them. | ||
| And I'm trying to only... Do you feel that need, though, that need to... To disconnect, yes, without question. | ||
| But not only this need to disconnect, but the need to comment. | ||
| So something happens, and then you know a certain amount of people are gonna look to you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Even though you're a sports guy, they're gonna look to you and go, well, what happened? | ||
| Do you feel that need? | ||
| I feel it, but here's what I've tried to set up as my precedent, and it's maybe a futile attempt, but my motto with Twitter has always been, judge my columns, enjoy my tweets. | ||
| And so what I'm saying, don't even take this shit serious. | ||
| It's really not. | ||
| Now when I go sit down to write a column, That's what I really believe. | ||
| Twitter is what people think. | ||
| And there is a huge disconnect between what we think and what we believe. | ||
| I think I'm the best looking man on the planet. | ||
| I think that Holly Berry should be beating down my doors to date me. | ||
| Do I really believe that? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| And so, we all think stupid things. | ||
| I mean, we all think inappropriate things. | ||
| We think racist things. | ||
| But do we believe them? | ||
| Your thoughts help develop what you believe. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of the things we think we know are inappropriate, we know have no merit, | ||
| and but everyone reacts to Twitter like it's someone's belief, and it's just not. | ||
| So as a guy that's on cable television, but you obviously intimately get internet culture, | ||
| what do you make of television in general right now? | ||
| Like, not only on the sports side. | ||
| Well, let's talk about the sports side first. | ||
| Like, you know, there's huge problems at ESPN. | ||
| I mean, they just fired, what, like 500 people? | ||
| A ton of on-air people. | ||
| Guys that were legends there for 20, 30 years. | ||
| Fired a hundred people. | ||
| Was it a hundred on-air people, right? | ||
| I think maybe... Yeah, previously, the year before, they dumped three, four hundred people. | ||
| But here recently, it's been about 100. | ||
| But yeah, so they're having major problems, and people are cutting the cord, and we know all that stuff. | ||
| You're on Fox Sports, it's a different situation over there. | ||
| But how does that feel for you, to be in an industry that is just going under so much change, and yet at the same time, you understand the other culture that's killing it? | ||
| I think that, and I've written this in the Wall Street Journal, that ESPN And other media outlets have been so consumed with politics that they forgot how to do business. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And so, and they've been so focused on the political construct rather than innovation and how do we keep our business healthy. | ||
| And I feel horrible for the people that are paying the price for this mistake because if a business, because ESPN's a business, it's not a political machine. | ||
| And the first thing a business has to do is take care of its employees and make sure they have a place to work. | ||
| And they have abandoned that by thinking that progressive ideology is a sound business move. | ||
| And it's just a political agenda. | ||
| It's not a business move. | ||
| If anything, it might be a business move that's the opposite of what their audience wants. | ||
| So it's a reverse business move, actually. | ||
| I think without question, because again, remove politics from it. | ||
| Sports is a conservative culture. | ||
| It's a, coaches come in from Little League on, any problem we got gets solved in this locker room. | ||
| No excuses, I don't care what outsiders are doing, the referee makes a bad call, we move on, we control our destiny. | ||
| We don't care what color you are, what your sexuality is, any of that, can you play? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's a meritocracy. | ||
| And when you start injecting all of these far-left progressive conversations onto a group of people like, oh man, this is inconsistent with what I've been taught in sports. | ||
| This isn't what I expected. | ||
| And so, whether people like it or not, it's easier More appropriate and better business to talk sports from a conservative perspective than it is from a progressive perspective. | ||
| That's just factual. | ||
| You know, it's so funny to me, because when I was in college, I really wanted to be a SportsCenter anchor. | ||
| That's what I wanted to be, and I went to college in the mid-90s, when it was, to me, the heyday of SportsCenter, when Kilbourn was on there, who was the first one, to me, that made it funny, too, which I thought was awesome, and it was the heyday of Dan Patrick and Olbermann, Who have both gone very political in different directions these days. | ||
| So it's funny for me to be sitting across from someone that's in that world that so acknowledges how haywire it's gotten, because SportsCenter used to be fun and funny, and now when I flick it on, it's always political. | ||
| And that has nothing to do with why you watch. | ||
| Sports is the escape, not the vehicle for more of this nonsense. | ||
| And again, people will hear this and say, well Whitlock, Because I am. | ||
| I am for talking about Colin Kaepernick from a traditional sports perspective. | ||
| And so Colin Kaepernick kneels down and protests the flag and police brutality. | ||
| And I'm like, hey man, first of all, this is bad business. | ||
| These kids, young people, aren't even taught the business that they've entered into, sports. | ||
| Let's say you're a football player and you get to actually go study football in college. | ||
| You would understand, like, no, no, no, the reason why you make so much money is because | ||
| Pete Rozelle and the television networks decided to attach football to patriotism and the military. | ||
| That's the way the game is sold. | ||
| John Vicinda's voice, all the highlights have been packaged up, all the respect for the military and the flag. | ||
| They wanted sports fans to feel like the most American thing you can do besides joining the military is sit on your ass and watch football. | ||
| That's America. | ||
| That's why Colin Kaepernick made $14 million, because they were selling that. | ||
| And he just did some bad business. | ||
| Like, whoa, I'm making money because the people here believe they're supporting America and they love it and it's patriotism, and I'm going to choose this place to kneel down and protest America and its brutality. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| Go to the police headquarters and do that. | ||
| I'm not against them protesting. | ||
| Do it at police headquarters. | ||
| When you do it on a football field where all the television networks and the NFL are all in on, we're selling patriotism here. | ||
| It's bad business. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| So you're dealing with it just at a purely realist level. | ||
| I saw a former somewhat colleague of mine did a video kind of bashing you about this. | ||
| And it's like you're just dealing with reality. | ||
| The reality that if people stop buying tickets, if people stop buying jerseys, all of these things, well eventually you might get cut, you might not get the contract, and not everything takes place in between those lines. | ||
| Look, football is a TV show, and so if James Gandolfini in The Sopranos Decided, I'm going to go off script. | ||
| I'm going to become a religious figure on this show. | ||
| I'm not going to be a mafia kingpin. | ||
| They would have fired him and got someone else. | ||
| Because it's a TV show. | ||
| This is the role we want you to play in the NFL. | ||
| This is how we make money. | ||
| This is how we do our TV show. | ||
| He's not playing his role. | ||
| And all the lunatic people that, oh my God, what he did was so courageous. | ||
| None of them are going to put $14 million in Colin Kaepernick's pocket. | ||
| Not one of them. | ||
| Even the ones that might agree with him politically, or agree with what he's fighting for. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so now here he is. | ||
| Begging for it to get back in the NFL. | ||
| Leaking out. | ||
| I won't take a knee anymore. | ||
| He's having to back off of the stance he took. | ||
| And again, look how preposterous it is. | ||
| I'm not going to end the protest until things improve for the better. | ||
| Donald Trump elected president. | ||
| Well, things have improved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not going to protest anymore. | |
| So it's like sort of the perfect storm because it's like, you know, it's the idea of fighting against racism, you're fighting against capitalism, you're fighting against the patriarchy, you're fighting against all these sort of ideas that they've put out there. | ||
| And at the same time, it makes your victimhood thing go off the charts. | ||
| So it's a perfect storm. | ||
| It is, and again, People think I hate Colin Kaepernick, because I've been so critical of him. | ||
| I'm just disappointed. | ||
| I understand what he was trying to accomplish. | ||
| Colin Kaepernick, whether people want to address it or not, or deal with it, they think I'm terrible for going here, but it's just factual. | ||
| He's got an identity issue. | ||
| He's half black, half white. | ||
| Both of his parents never knew his dad. | ||
| His mom gave him up for adoption. | ||
| He's raised by a suburban white family in Milwaukee. | ||
| I don't care who you are, that's going to create some—ooh, in this America that's so racially divided over social media, that's going to create some identity issues for you. | ||
| And Colin Kaepernick's reputation before the protest was horrible with his teammates. | ||
| He was awkward, didn't get along with that many people, and then once he did this thing, He's one of the blackest guys in the history of America. | ||
| Everybody across the league loves him. | ||
| And so he's loving it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But it's bad business for him. | ||
| He would have been better off continuing to create wealth through playing in the NFL and using that wealth to affect real change for the people he says he's concerned about. | ||
| So maybe opening a school or an after-school program or whatever it is. | ||
| A lot of people. | ||
| Jalen Rose, he's a former athlete, former NBA player. | ||
| He's got the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit. | ||
| It's tremendous. | ||
| Again, many of the things LeBron's doing in Akron. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| That's, again, the Muhammad Ali model is done. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| It's not the 1960s anymore. | ||
| There's too much money being made and it's not the right role for athletes. | ||
| They're not political spokesmen. | ||
| Colin Kaepernick won't even come out and talk anymore because there's not enough substance for him to hold a press conference and say anything. | ||
| Everything's all controlled. | ||
| Or he's retweeting what people are saying about him and trying to speak for himself that way. | ||
| He's not... | ||
| He's way out over his skis, man. | ||
| Just way out over his skis. | ||
| It's so interesting, because it brings up so many things about speech and capitalism and democracy and the way we deal with race and all that stuff. | ||
| To circle back a little bit, though, do you remember the moment when you realized that the sports business was being corrupted by this leftist stuff? | ||
| Because I can think of a couple moments, but I'll give you a chance first before I tell you mine. | ||
| Well, a lot of people point to the Caitlyn Jenner thing. | ||
| That's what I was going to say. | ||
| To me, that was the end of it. | ||
| That was where I saw the full-on... Because to give her the SB, again, I have trans friends, I'm totally for the trans community and I want them to be treated equally and with respect and all that stuff, but it became so obviously politicized. | ||
| What was it, the Athlete of the Year, the Lifetime Achievement Award? | ||
| Courage Award. | ||
| Courage Award, it was just like... Over a young woman that was dying of cancer that continued to play basketball, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was just like, this is just silly. | ||
| More than anything else. | ||
| That wasn't my moment. | ||
| Because one, I was, and I don't want to say, because I really have some respect for ESPN and the people that run it, but I'll just say it because it's Thursday. | ||
| I was inside the belly of the beast, you know, and so I saw it more acutely In terms of what I was dealing with my second go around at ESPN. | ||
| And what I saw, again I'm not demonizing anybody, I see a massive corporation that is backed by Disney, another massive corporation. | ||
| Massive corporations in this era are a lot like Congress. | ||
| It's a lot like having something in D.C. | ||
| politics. | ||
| There are so many special interest groups within a massive corporation. | ||
| ESPN has something called Pulse. | ||
| People United to Serve and Lead and Excel. | ||
| It's their black employees group. | ||
| They got something called PRIDE. | ||
| People Respectful of Individual Diversity, Excellence. | ||
| It's their gay special interest group. | ||
| They have a couple other special interest groups. | ||
| And again, when you have special interest groups, It makes decisions very compromised. | ||
| ESPN isn't a startup business that gets to ignore virtually every rule and just do what's right and will deal. | ||
| ESPN's an environment, and most major corporations are, human resource departments are all powerful. | ||
| If you've gathered up some special interest groups, they have a lot of powerful, and it's hard to make The absolute best decision in that environment. | ||
| And so I saw that firsthand, how the special interests and the human resources department had so much influence over what took place that it's like, oh, this organization's handcuffed. | ||
| It can't just do the right thing for its customer base. | ||
| They've got all these agendas at work that put any leader in a tough spot. | ||
| Yeah, and ironically, it's those agendas, as we've been talking about, | ||
| that have sort of led to the destruction of the actual business, which is a crazy position. | ||
| So you're at Fox now, and I talk about the mainstream media all the time and all that, | ||
| and I think there's an idea out there that somehow, when you work at a big corporation, | ||
| that they're telling you everything to say and all that. | ||
| Now, I don't suspect they're telling you what to say at all, but do you find, for yourself, | ||
| just to pretend, as you've talked about, your own rational self-interest as a businessman | ||
| and someone that's putting your stuff out there, do you and Colin ever sit down before you do a show and say, | ||
| well, maybe we shouldn't hit this in this way, or maybe I'm going to go further | ||
| than you wanna go this way, or any of that kind of stuff? | ||
| We have a lot of discussions, Colin and I. Look, race is an area I've been operating in as a media person for my entire career. | ||
| It's what I'm passionate about. | ||
| I have a lot more time to think about these issues than most people. | ||
| It's my area of expertise. | ||
| It's not Collin's area of expertise. | ||
| And so we do talk about that beforehand. | ||
| And, you know, had long discussions about, hey Collin, you know, I'm going to make sure I don't put you in a bad place or some dangerous place that gets You get you involved in some kind of full outrage situation or whatever. | ||
| But we pretty much talk about what we want to talk about. | ||
| And Colin's pretty fearless. | ||
| And so it's funny though, I hear all the time from people, oh you're just saying what Fox wants you to say. | ||
| That's why I'm asking. | ||
| And I'm just like, hey man, I don't think y'all understand the current media culture. | ||
| And the pressures on executives and people running networks now. | ||
| You know, if I'm an executive, I'll speak hypothetically, I want to stay in very safe places. | ||
| And so, if I feel any pressure, that would be the pressure. | ||
| I'm getting zero pressure to be an outspoken, Person who goes against the grain against what Twitter thinks is popular about race. | ||
| No one is No, if anything I get the exact opposite. | ||
| Yeah Preach to the choir but isn't that it's so they they're these very strong competing forces then because if you Want not if you just want the clicks, but if the clicks just exist you you say what you think Now the clicks exist because you're saying stuff | ||
| that's outside of the mainstream. | ||
| Now you've got maybe executives that just wanna keep everything under control, | ||
| but at the same time, they love that conversation. | ||
| Like they hate it in a way because they don't want the heat to come onto them | ||
| or cause any problems for them. | ||
| But so the heat works both ways here. | ||
| I would say, David, though, if you look at where the clicks are, | ||
| the clicks aren't in my perspective. | ||
| If you go the way, again, you've got to remember, Silicon Valley and San Francisco are controlling the cliques and who gets cliques. | ||
| The cliques are in the far left perspective. | ||
| Let's go back two years before Fox News got involved in all the controversy or whatever. | ||
| Based on Twitter and social media, you would think that Chris Hayes had a ten times bigger audience than Bill O'Reilly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Based on social media. | ||
| And so the clicks are in, you know, saying that the police are out here randomly killing black people and America is completely rigged against the black man, you have no chance. | ||
| That's where all the clicks are. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's funny you mention that because I think it's so interesting now that Fox News is struggling that there's such a feeding frenzy around it. | ||
| Fox was crushing everybody, but you're right. | ||
| If you were to just look at retweets, obviously, Chris Hayes is doing a lot better than Bill O'Reilly. | ||
| His account was more of like just a corporate-controlled account. | ||
| So you'd think that their ratings would have been much better, but now there's such a feeding frenzy because they see there's blood in the water around Fox. | ||
| The feeding frenzy is around Trump. | ||
| Anybody can get ratings talking about Trump. | ||
| I've often said, and I stand by this, if you build Any type of media content based around pleasing Twitter, you're building something that's going to fail. | ||
| You're going to get all kinds of clicks, but real people just aren't paying attention to that. | ||
| I started saying this when the Sharknado TV show or movie came out, and all over Twitter, and then the ratings came out and no one watched. | ||
| And I don't want to say this to be disrespectful, I'm not trying to start anything, but someone will see this and they'll think I'm just picking on them, but I wrote a piece after Melissa Harris Perry's show on MSNBC got cancelled, and I was just like, the show was completely built for social media. | ||
| And it never rated. | ||
| No one ever watched. | ||
| And it's a mistake. | ||
| And again, we all are media so obsessed with social media and we think that's reality. | ||
| And I just keep trying to preach to people. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| It's not remotely reality. | ||
| It's not what America thinks. | ||
| If you followed social media, you thought Trump was going to lose the election if you believed in what you were seeing from social media. | ||
| And it's just a false indicator. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So one more for you that I think will sort of tie this all together. | ||
| At the top of the show, I mentioned, and you know I talk about free speech a lot. | ||
| And just in the last week alone, there was the Kathy Griffin thing. | ||
| There was the Bill Maher thing. | ||
| I don't know if you're following this story about Brett Weinstein, the professor up at Evergreen State, who got in a lot of trouble over not being racist. | ||
| So there, of course, they're calling him racist. | ||
| Point being, there's a lot of stuff around free speech. | ||
| Then you got into hot water about LeBron and the gate and all that. | ||
| What do you think of just sort of the general state of free speech? | ||
| Because I've tried to explain to people, these aren't First Amendment issues. | ||
| None of these things have anything to do to do with the government. | ||
| But the chill factor that you started talking about way back when, that this is real, | ||
| and not everybody is as brave as you, where you brush this stuff off. | ||
| But to the average person, how serious do you think this is? | ||
| I think it's very serious. | ||
| I think that, I think it's, as a media person, | ||
| I think it's the biggest issue going. | ||
| Again, there are clearly bigger issues than climate. | ||
| There's, you know, all kinds of issues going on. | ||
| But for me as a media person, the silencing of original thought, the silencing of debate, the fact that people that disagree Can't seem to find a way to disagree respectfully and exchange ideas? | ||
| That if you disagree with someone, they're evil and they must be destroyed? | ||
| That's really troubling to me. | ||
| We're creating a society that will go to a really dangerous place. | ||
| And again, we keep calling Trump the fascist. | ||
| And I don't see the evidence of that. | ||
| I see those of us in the media. | ||
| We're the fascists. | ||
| We're the ones trying to silence people and trying to create the belief that someone we disagree with is better off dead than allowing them a platform. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love finding allies in this space, and it's very obvious to me that you're one, and we need more. | ||
| I mean, that's what I tell my audience all the time. | ||
| I'm just some guy that created a YouTube channel. | ||
| You're some guy that was passionate about sports and started writing about it, and now people care, and that's what we need more of, because we're just two guys saying what we think, you know? | ||
| We need to, I need to, what I felt and why I was attracted to your work and what you're | ||
| doing is like, I gotta support people that are real. | ||
| And regardless of color, regardless of religion, regardless of sexual orientation, if you're | ||
| real, I just gotta support you. | ||
| Because it's just critically, critically important. | ||
| Because the other side has all gathered up, because I believe a lot of things are orchestrated. | ||
| I get, you know, you've even missed the, or we didn't talk about, you know, I got attacked because I defended someone that got in an argument with LeVar Ball, Lonzo Ball's dad. | ||
| And Charlamagne Tha God, who hosts a popular urban hip-hop show in New York, made some Emmett Till analogy to Christine Leahy, who I | ||
| work with, and somehow she's doing... | ||
| And so, and then LeBron James comes back two weeks later or ten days later | ||
| talking about Emmett Till. | ||
| And I don't have any proof of it, but I'm just like, this feels orchestrated. Who, who, who... Christine Leahy | ||
| has a dispute with LeVar Ball, and somehow it has something to do with Emmett | ||
| Till? | ||
| And, and LeVon... LeBron's gate gets vandalized, and somehow it's Emmett Till? And so these | ||
| talking points are being passed around, | ||
| and it's orchestrated to me. | ||
| I do agree, and I always quote Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | ||
| So it's like, you don't have absolute evidence of that, but it's sort of like the fake news meme. | ||
| The day after the election, everybody started talking about, all the mainstream was saying everything is fake news, because they sort of lost control of the narrative. | ||
| So I have no evidence that there was a newsletter going around to the heads of CNN and MSNBC. | ||
| But if you're a thinking person, you at least have to explore that. | ||
| that situation to figure out what we're up against. | ||
| I don't think there's any question that there's an orchestrated movement. | ||
| Look, I felt like what Deadspin from the Gawker Network, they bullied the hell out of ESPN for years. | ||
| And I think smart people was like, hold on, man, the worldwide leader in sports, sports culture is conservative. | ||
| Let's go take on the head of the snake, ESPN, and push them our direction. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| I believe Deadspin pushed, bullied ESPN into becoming progressive. | ||
| And I don't think it's an accident. | ||
| Because once their job was done, they started writing celebratory pieces about how great ESPN is. | ||
| I suspect we're gonna do this again. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| For more on Jason, you can watch him on Speak for Yourself on Fox Sports 1 and send all your hate tweets directly to him. | ||
|
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It's at Whitlock Jason, not at Jason Whitlock. |
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