Sports journalist and “Fearless” podcast host Jason Whitlock spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2021 Restoration Weekend, held Nov. 11th-14th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He addressed the need for us to understand the stakes of the political and cultural game we’re in, to decipher who our opponents are, to get a winning game plan in place, and to get our best player off the bench.
Don’t miss this vital presentation in the video below. A transcript follows.
Jason Whitlock: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to speak to you guys. I got to meet quite a few of you out in the hallway here before the lunch. And I hope I do a good job because normally, I give a speech that I’ve already given before, but this one, I tailored this one specific. I want to — I’m trying to take my message to a new level and so this will be the first time I’ve delivered my message the way that I’m going to do today, and I hope I don’t blow it. But I want to give you guys a little bit more background information on me because I think, I hope, that it will help you understand my perspective and things that I’m going to say a little bit later in this speech.
I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Joyce and Jimmy Whitlock. My parents divorced when I was about 5 years old and my dad did not graduate high school; my mother was a factory worker. I grew up poor. When my parents divorced, me and my brother lived with my mother; we lived in a very, very small apartment in Indianapolis in the ghetto. It was an awesome experience. And that’s one thing I think a lot of people don’t realize is when you’re kids, you don’t really know that you’re poor. Long as you got something to eat and you got friends or whatever, it can be a good experience.
Later on in life, when our apartment got broken into, my mother took a second job and moved us out to a working class suburb, and it was a great experience for me. It was a much better school system, great athletic programs and I became a really good high school football player and college prospect. And my team won a state championship and was nationally ranked. But more important than that, we moved out to this working class suburb and it’s predominantly white.
But in 8th grade, they started busing in Black kids from the inner city out to my school system. And I was seen as the glue in bringing the Black and the white kids together. I was an athlete, I was very popular. And it ignited in me a passion for racial harmony, and through sports and through just trying to explain to people there’s common ground, and it’s a passion that has never left me.
My senior year of high school, my mother, a factory worker for Western Electric, her plant closes. She moves to Kansas City, Missouri, I moved in with my dad, who at this time, had gotten in trouble with the IRS for back taxes. And me and my dad, my senior year of high school, lived in a 1-bedroom, 400 square foot apartment in the ghetto. I loved it, it was a great experience. And I provide that background to say I am the American dream. I came from nothing.
And I was not particularly the greatest high school student. And so the only people looking for me to come to a college campus were football coaches and football got me a scholarship to Ball State University and changed my whole outlook and perspective on life, or change — yes, it changed it quite a bit. And so football has had a great influence on me.
The other thing that’s had a great influence on me is my grandmother. She’s passed, my mom’s mom, but she got me involved with 25th Street Baptist Church when I was 4 or 5 years old. And there are 2 things that have influenced me throughout the course of my life — I’m now 54 years old — football and Christianity, and that has made my world view defined as conservative. And I say that — I’ll just add a bit of clarity because this frustrates people, it frustrates my parents, frustrates everybody that knows me. I’ve never voted. I’ve never been interested in politics, but I have been interested in Jesus and a conservative worldview because that’s how I was raised. That’s what got me ahead.
And so I think I’ve added enough context around what I’m about to say and give you a little bit of my background. Football and the church have influenced me the most and I come from nothing. And I’ve achieved a great deal and have made a lot of money by most standards and done a lot of great things for my family. The American dream is possible for each and every one of us if we show up and put some work in.
I give you the football and the sports background because my speech today is built around sports and the way the coaches lead, and trying to understand what’s going on here in America. We’re in a huge game event, boxing match, whatever. And you have to understand, as competitors in this event, you got to understand what the stakes are, you got to know who your opponent is. You got to have a scouting report, you got to know where you’re playing the game, and then you got to have a game plan, how to win the game.
And so what I would like to say, or what I’ve been saying recently, is we’re in a heavyweight championship bout. Who’s going to be the heavyweight title, who’s going to be Muhammad Ali, who’s going to be the dominant force in the world, those are the stakes. And I think a lot of people don’t understand the stakes or misread, oh, like they’re just trying to slightly influence America. No, they’re trying to remake America and we need to come to grips with that, that they’re trying to overthrow our Constitution.
The reason why they keep saying that from the 1619 Project to every piece of liberal media propaganda, it’s all designed to argue that America is a failure, and that the Constitution needs to be completely rewritten because the people that wrote it, or they’re just — all they were, were a bunch of racist bigots and they set up a system that’s unfair for Black people and women and everybody else. The stakes are enormous, they want to rewrite the Constitution. They want to overthrow our system of governance. They want us to be like China. They want us to embrace a communist system of government.
So we’re in the fight of our life. I don’t — I’ve only lived 54 years, some of you have lived longer. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a fight like this here in America. And I don’t know if you guys — you’re here, you’re prone to believe what I’m saying, but there’s a great, mass of Americans (indiscernible) it’s just change we can believe in. It’s a total remaking and people like me in this new world that they’re planning, you will not have my narrative. You will not come from nothing and ascend all the way to the top. That’s why I’m objecting very loudly.
So once we identify what the stakes are, and we have, then you have — the coach will stand up and tell you, well, who’s the opponent? And it’s easy to say and think — and there’s truth to it — that China’s the opponent. But I don’t believe that, in terms of I don’t believe that if we were doing things right here, we could — we’d knock China over; China’s no real threat to us. It’s our enemies from within who our opponents are. We’re being sold out by people here in America.
And so our opponent is a group that I call the 49ers and so I’m — and I went from heavyweight — I’m going to football now. We’re dealing with the 49ers and the 49ers are big tech in Northern California. And I use the term 49ers intentionally because I think a lot of people are unaware of the history of Northern California and where the 49ers nickname comes from. In 1848 or so, gold was discovered in Northern California, which sparked the California Gold Rush of 1849.
The Gold Rush and the greed of the Gold Rush dramatically changed Northern California. It went from being nothing to a place where men all across this country left their families and their wives and went to the Bay Area, docked their boats at the Bay Area, set up cities in San Francisco, Sacramento and the rest of Northern California. And you don’t have to take my word for it, go look it up, they brag about it. It’s been written about, it’s been talked about.
During the Gold Rush of 1849 and throughout that period of history, it’s about a 7 year, 8 year window of the Gold Rush, I believe 93% of San Francisco was men. You’re in a city where 93% of the people are men, what’s going to happen? Cross-dressing, homosexuality, sexual dysphoria. These values established in Northern California during the Gold Rush, sexual dysphoria, sexual immorality, sexual identity issues, established during the Gold Rush, combined with greed.
The people that made the most money during the Gold Rush weren’t the miners. It was the business people who exploited the miners. Sell a guy, an ax for 3 times its value, 5 times its value, that’s who got rich; sell them jeans like Levi Strauss did at an overpriced price, that’s how you became rich. Greed and sexual immorality descended upon Northern California. It’s never left. Through big tech, through their social media apps, through their control of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, they’re imposing their values on the rest of America. That’s what’s happening. That’s who our opponent is, it’s the 49ers.
We have to understand who our opponent is if we’re going to win this fight. And certainly we have a problem with China; certainly we have problems elsewhere, but big tech and the big tech billionaires that are being — through a lot of fraudulence and corruption, who are becoming billionaires overnight, and then they come in and money-whip our politicians and totally corrupt this entire country. If we don’t stand up and engage in a fight with big tech and Northern California.
And if we don’t recognize — because again, 54 years, and I’ve been in the media since 1990, I’ve watched the entire media industry go from catering to New York and New York liberals, that’s a completely different liberal than a San Francisco liberal, completely different. And that’s why the media has changed on a diamond, become like, well, man, I know we used to cater to New York liberals, but this is a whole different animal. It is San Francisco, the Bay Area, that’s where the Black Panther party started. That’s a revolutionary liberal in San Francisco.
That’s why I say they’re not here for a little bit of change; they’re here for the ultimate change, they’re here for revolution. They were founded — grounded, the Black Panther party, Marxism, communism, the Bay Area. Know your opponent, their control of big tech. Once you establish this is the opponent, the coach then says, well, here’s our scouting report on the opponent. Here’s the system that they like to use in order to win games.
And so we’re all sitting here, they want to race-bait offense. They’re offense is built around racial division, defining their opponents as all racists, so that no one has to hear you. I don’t like to hear “You’re racist.” Anything that comes out of your mouth, you’ve already been defined as someone who no one should pay attention to, and then you’re on the defensive, you can never play off offense.
They’re running a brilliant offense. And it’s because it’s big tech and what we don’t recognize, that they have all the information and data on all of us. They know what we search in Google; they know who you DM on Facebook. They’ve done all the analysis on what will move and provoke people to change their values, to change their habits. Big tech has the goods on all of us and it’s — I’ll get it, I’m about to get ahead of myself and tell you why I live so transparently, but I’ll save that for later.
But they have an understanding of how to move America, how to move Americans, and how to impose their values because of their relationship with big tech and all the information that they have on us, they understand. And the reason why the 1619 Project and all this other stuff is if you really understand what made America great. I believe there are 2 things that made America great. We started out with Judeo-Christian values and that’s despite whatever racism George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and people of that day had, they were believers and we had a culture based on Christian beliefs. We had a Judeo-Christian culture and so that was one.
The other thing that made us great were Black people and our fight for freedom. Let me explain before you clap. I don’t want to — provoking in the clapping because it’s the right thing to do, I want to give you the explanation. So you take Black people that are slaves and their fight for freedom, and basically calling out our nation’s leader, well, how can you be Christians if you have slaves? That forced this country to live up to the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yes, it was a long, vicious, bloody contentious battle, but eventually, America bowed to our Christian values and provided freedom for Black people.
That quest for freedom that we had all the way up to the 1960s, just kept making America better and better and better, and it made us the freest country on the planet. We had to live up to the promises in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Our Declaration, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, combined with Christian values and combined with the steroid, which Black people were, of forcing America, calling us, hey, these things you wrote, you got to live up to them. We did that and our opponents know that.
They know the central — the primary importance of Black people on our journey here in America. And that’s why they’re using Black people’s journey in America to take down this country. They have completely perverted the African-American journey here in this country. They’ve used it to damn America when it’s actually the greatest explanation of why America’s the greatest country the planet’s ever seen. We go — we’re on — again, if they ever write a new Bible, trust me, America, there’ll be a lot of chapters on us. And it’ll be like, man, look what these people accomplished by sticking to some faith. Look at the freedoms that people won.
And everything was going great all the way right up to 1965. And the left came up with a new game plan. And if you guys remember in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked for Lyndon Johnson, came out with the Moynihan Report and the Moynihan Report in ’65 said this is coming out of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The next step according to Moynihan was like, well, we got to invest in the Black man and we got to invest in the Black family. Go read the report. It’s all there in writing. I’ve read the entire thing.
The media slammed Moynihan and the report as racist. You can’t invest in the Black man, that’s racist. You can’t invest in the Black family, that’s racist. The media sells it, Lyndon Johnson pivots and we go to the Great Society movement and we go to the government is going to — is a better father than the Black man. Let’s invest in women, the LGBT movement, Black women, the whole — let’s invest in the government as daddy. We’ve never recovered from that pivot. They —
And this connects to what I’m about to say a little bit later, but again, in terms of Moynihan’s Report calling for investment in the Black family, investment in the Black man, and that being described as racist, goes to this is where big tech — and big tech wasn’t around then — but this is part of how they’re still operating, using the same game plan. They’ve just perfected it and taken to a new level.
But if they can get you to believe, as Voltaire says, absurdities, they’ll get you to do atrocities. And so it’s an absurd analysis that Moynihan’s Report or Moynihan was racist, but they got us to believe it. And when you look today and see 75% of Black kids born to single mothers, that’s the atrocity that comes from the absurdity of what they sold us and what we bought.
Look at what they’re doing today, January 6, I’m not going to defend the guys on January the 6th, but it wasn’t an insurrection, it was not an insurrection. It was a group of people who responded poorly to a year’s worth of watching on TV as leftists burned down the country and they came up with their response, that was far less violent than anything we saw during the summer of 2020. But the left and the media and big tech and social media have convinced us that January 6 was an insurrection. And now we have people locked in dungeons, in solitary confinement, defined as domestic terrorists for months, basically on trespassing charges. If they get you to believe an absurdity, you will commit atrocities. It’s an atrocity to have these people sitting in dungeons this long.
Last thing, a coach — not the last thing, he’ll get to the game plan. But the next thing the coach is going to talk about where we’re playing the game, the site, and where this war, this battle, is being waged is in our cell phones. They have complete control of our cell phones and we’re all addicted to them, every last one of us, can’t leave home without them. Big tech is through their little dopamine and likes and retweets and if we get a text, we have to respond immediately. They’re in complete —
We’re playing a road game. And that’s why, again, when you play on the road, you better come up with the perfect game plan, and you better execute that thing to the highest level, or you’re going to get slaughtered. Doesn’t matter how immoral the opponent is or inept or whatever, he’s playing at home, you’re playing on the road. Your game plan better be game-tight. Our game plan is horrendous at the moment, and that’s why we’re getting slaughtered.
Our game plan is horrendous because we have our best player on the bench, our best player. And I don’t want to offend anybody, but it’s not Donald Trump. Sorry to tell you that our best player is Jesus Christ. We have sidelined him for some crazy reason. Go look at the history of America and go look what we did with Jesus on our side and wearing our Christian identities on our sleeves, the way we now wear our political identities.
When you, as a Republican or a conservative, you’re free to do a lot of things. When your identity is in Christ, you don’t have all those freedoms. I say that because I have not always worn my Christian identity on my sleeve. I’ve done it here in the last 3 to 4 years because I needed restraints on my behavior. When you tell someone, you tell the world, hey, I’m a Christian, you can’t go to strip clubs, and I used to love to go to strip clubs — when someone says something stupid to you, or offensive to you as a Christian, there’s only a handful of responses I can give.
As a Republican, a conservative, as a heterosexual, I got a whole table of things I can do in response. Jesus Christ, if we don’t get back to that being our primary identity, we’re going to lose America. If you can’t see what happened in Virginia — Glenn Youngkin wore his Christian identity on his sleeve; Winsome Sears wore her Christian identity on her sleeves. That’s why people could hear them. If we went out there as Republicans or as conservatives, they’ve already been given permission to ignore us. We’re all racist or sellouts.
When you cover yourself in Jesus, they have to listen. They — and again, not all because we got a lot of atheist running around in this country right now. But when you start trying to connect the people in this room to their natural allies — because again, you guys are part of a heritage, a lineage of people that helped make America great. But if you want to reconnect with your natural allies, Black people, Black men in particular, the only way for them to hear you is through Jesus Christ.
It’s the only way; it’s the only way we can move this country. We are meant to work together. We can take back this country with the right game plan if we take our best player off the bench, put him back in the game and lead with him. We have to identify politicians who can authentically wear their faith. Those people are our only chance at survival. If we don’t — and I’m not anti-Trump in any way. 2016, I thought he made a lot of sense. I just don’t think for the time that we’re in, I don’t think he can be heard in the way that people need to hear things. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today, Donald Trump will start wearing his faith on his sleeve, develop some, whatever, I’ll be all for it, all for him. But we need leaders who are willing to stand with Jesus if we’re going to survive this.
So that’s my scouting report, game plan, assessment of the opponent. Lucky for us, the solution is easy, I hope it’s easy. It’s not easy, but at least it’s easy to identify. Walking in this environment we have now, where they’re so in control and have so demonized our values, it is very difficult to stand with God in this time.
Your kids are under attack. I was telling somebody before that I was telling Brian Elliott, like I’m glad I don’t have kids because our — your kids are just being radicalized through their cell phones. All the values that you’re trying to place in them are being stripped from them. Twitter and social media is most secular place on the planet. There’s so much pressure on them to —
I was telling Brian, like a friend of mine was — wrote me a note about his daughter. She’s 13 and she was complaining about all the pressure she had to identify as bisexual at 13. And I was, wow, 13, I didn’t have those kind of — we didn’t have those kind of pressures (indiscernible) in this room. But this is what your kids are facing from big tech and these rigged algorithms, and them imposing their values, the 49ers’ values, on the rest of the country.
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