Sports columnist Jason Whitlock said Democrats and the media are using the shootings and deaths of black men such as George Floyd to raise funds.
“The media and Democratic politicians have spun these rare occurrences into a fundraising/political campaign and clickbait machine titled Black Lives Matter,” Whitlock wrote in a post on Outkick on Tuesday.
He argued in his post, titled “Whitlock: I Have Not Changed; The Wire Foreshadowed Fall of Truth, Our Freedoms and This Country,” that black people and police are political “pawns” in the hands of politicians.
“Working-class police and poor black people are pawns in a political game being played by politicians and the media. It’s repulsive. It’s a threat to our way of living and freedoms we’ve grown to take for granted. A large segment of Americans have justifiably given up on politicians and view the media as enemies of the people,” he said.
“I don’t blame them. Racial tension in this country is bubbling toward Civil War levels because a tiny handful of criminal suspects have refused to comply with police instructions and an even smaller handful of police have responded with excessive deadly force,” he continued.
“Until the media follow and report the truth, many Americans will continue to look for presidential candidates willing to call out the liars above all else,” he wrote.
Whitlock’s piece defended that he has not “evolved” in his political stances amid criticism from some in the media, but his worldview has “sharpened.”
“My previous work does not contradict my work today,” he said. “Great journalism follows the truth wherever it leads. The truth does not have a political point of view or political party. It’s why I reject politics, the distorter of truth.”
He added that in 2008, “Sarah Palin’s substance-less bid for the vice presidency repulsed” him. However, he said that his more supportive views of President Trump in 2020 don’t make him sexist or mean that he’s in some way changed.
“Circumstances have changed. Political corruption and media malfeasance elected Donald Trump president,” he wrote. “His rise is a consequence of the media’s abandonment of truth. Constitutional democracies cannot function properly without the aid of a free press exploring and exposing truth.”
Whitlock has also previously voiced his criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement, calling the group the “antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement.”
