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Host Dave Rubin sat down with NBA player Jonathan Isaac during the National Conservatism Conference in Florida to discuss the price he has paid for his stance against mandatory vaccination at sporting events and the consequences of going against woke culture.
The basketball player describes as “crazy” the situation he experienced last year, after what happened with George Floyd and the violent demonstrations of Black Lives Matter. Many NBA players decided to kneel during the national anthem in protest.
The young athlete believes that wearing a t-shirt or kneeling during the national anthem “does not go hand in hand” with supporting “black lives,” nor does it align with his religious views.
But that wasn’t the only incident that brought Jonathan Isaac to the forefront of the debate. Recently, the basketball player gave a press conference in which he explained the reasons why he had decided not to be vaccinated against Covid-19, one of the reasons being that he had already contracted and overcome the virus, so that today he has natural antibodies.
The athlete claims to have faced all the “hysteria and madness” after the publication of an article in Rolling Stone, in which journalist Matt Sullivan included him in an anti-vaccine group in the NBA and associated him with Donald Trump.
Jonathan Isaac’s stance on philosophy, beliefs, and freedom
When Rubin first contacted Jonathan Isaac via Twitter, he was struck by the athlete’s admiration for Jordan Peterson’s work. In that regard, Isaac says he discovered Peterson in the midst of a controversy over a bill in Canadá concerning “gender identity” that threatened to elevate to hate crime status the refusal to use alternative pronouns at the request of LGBT individuals.
“I just started to get into it and just learn. Again, not from a right-left perspective, or a conservative-liberal perspective, but from a strictly philosophical perspective about how we, as people, go about living together and create what are the best grounds to create a free society for people to navigate and grow and be free,” he said.
Additionally, during his conversation with Rubin, Isaac describes how conservatives can push for a freer society, while building more outreach to the black community.
In touching on the topic, Isaac proposed a middle ground in which the history of racism is discussed without leaving aside the social and economic progress that has allowed the black community to move forward and build a path of freedom and self-improvement.
At Isaac’s rational stance, Rubin jocularly rebuked him and said, “You know you’ll be a white supremacist by the time the night is through?” to which the basketball player responded, “that only shows that it [white supremacism] doesn’t mean anything and and it takes away from the word and what it really is, and how terrible that thing is to call everybody that.”
“I think there’s a way to articulate “I think there is a way to articulate what I just said to people of color and miniorities in a way that they can jump on board as they look around and see that it’s not really somebody who may profess that they have their best interest at heart but don’t. And so, if the message is able to be tailored and handled the right way, I think there is a way forward,” he added.
Jonathan Isaac is working on a book to be titled Why Stand, in which he describes the importance of standing up to defend one’s convictions.
