Jason Whitlock on Kanye: If You Say Trump Has A Good Idea, You Get Kicked Out Of The Black Race
Sports journalist Jason Whitlock explains why Kanye's tweet about President Trump was one of the best tweets of all time in a Tuesday appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/05/08/jason_whitlock_on_kanye_if_you_say_trump_has_a_good_idea_you_get_kicked_out_of_the_black_race.html
[transcript of video]
JASON WHITLOCK: I think what Kanye is trying to do open black America's mind to the fact that perhaps we have chosen a bad strategy by swallowing all of the Democratic party and liberalism whole. I say in my column in The Wall Street Journal that in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement in the 1960s Democrats marketed to us liberalism as the solution to all of our problems and liberalism now is like the cigarette. It's been marketed to us the same as cigarettes -- fashionable, sophisticated, it's supposed to be liberating but I think it needs a Surgeon General's warning, hazardous to your family and all the values you were taught as a child.
I think us as African-Americans, we have to examine why are we the only ethnic group that has gone in wholly with one political party? No one has to compete for our votes. We are chained to an ideology that just isn't working over the last 50, 60 years. Liberalism, the swallowing of it whole. Our families have been destroyed. Our children lost and confused. Our black men incarcerated and emasculated and we've moved away from the traditional values that have always defined us. I think we've made a mistake.
TUCKER CARLSON: The thing about politics is if you give your vote away for free you don't get anything in return. And so maybe the hysterical reactions to the Kanye West tweet is the reaction of a party that knows that once people figure that out it's got a major problem on its hands, so you need to tamp down any independent thought immediately or else it can get out of control.
WHITLOCK: And it's being tamped down as viciously as anything I've ever seen. When they call in the great writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, basically I call him the overseer of black thought. Basically he is there to keep everyone in line with the groupthink that the only solution is liberalism for black America's problems.
If that were the case our problems would be being solved much faster because 90, 95% of us are afraid to even admit that we have conservative values and we have been sold -- we've moved away from our church. We've been the most religious people in America for years, hundreds of years and we're moving more secular. We're moving away from the church. Our religion now is liberalism and the Democratic party is our church and it's just not working for us.
CARLSON: So if Kanye West, who is not just one of those popular black Americans, but one of those popular Americans just across the board, if he doesn't stand a chance of just raising this question because it's a totally valid question, then who does?
WHITLOCK: Well, actually he does stand a chance because when someone like Kanye speaks out, he creates space for others to speak out because anybody that has said -- Tucker, I am a non-voter.
I don't really like politics much at all, but if you just say I think Trump has a good idea here, you get kicked out of the black race. Kanye is saying I don't agree with everything Trump believes in. Kanye, I'm sure, disagrees with Trump and the Republican party and conservatives on a lot of issues but he's not willing to cast someone out of the human race just because he disagrees with him. If I cast everybody out that I disagreed with I would have no one.