In the wake of Elon Musk’s indication that he will resign as chief executive officer of the social-media platform Twitter, Nashville-based journalist and sportscaster Jason Whitlock is suggesting himself as an apt replacement.
Musk tweeted out a poll to Twitter users last weekend asking whether they wished him to remain as the website’s CEO or leave the post. The survey garnered 17 million responses, 57.5 percent of whom voted for Musk’s departure. The founder of the auto company Tesla and the spacecraft creator SpaceX acquired Twitter in late October for $44 billion and is expected to remain the platform’s owner while giving up direction of the company to another individual whom he has not yet selected.
Whitlock, the host of the Fearless podcast and a columnist with radio host Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, mentioned his hope to be considered as Twitter’s head in his own Twitter poll that began on Sunday evening and and on a Monday Glenn Beck Program episode he guest hosted.
Am I crazy for thinking I'm the perfect person to run Twitter? I started talking about the problems that plague Twitter 7-8 years ago. Twitter needs a journalist at the top and someone who could not careless about corporate media.
— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) December 19, 2022
“Am I crazy for thinking I’m the perfect person to run Twitter?” Whitlock wrote as a preface to his Twitter survey. “I started talking about the problems that plague Twitter 7-8 years ago. Twitter needs a journalist at the top and someone who could not careless [sic] about corporate media.”
Answerers could respond either “You crazy, Whit”; “You cray cray, Whit”; “You’d b perfect, Big Sexy”; or “I’ll suggest you to Elon.” Those voting for the third or fourth option totaled 75.4 percent of more than 8,200 participants as of late afternoon Monday.
Whitlock, a veteran sports commentator with The Kansas City Star, ESPN, Fox Sports and Outkick, lamented the extent to which the recently released “Twitter files” have shown the company’s prior leadership to have suppressed dissemination of information about Joe Biden’s son Hunter as well as other matters of public concern. This willingness to censor content that has not been discredited, Whitlock averred, bespoke an illiberalism that is unhealthy for public discourse. He said he believes an experienced journalist and committed free-speech advocate like him should take over Twitter to ensure Musk’s vision of free expression comes to fruition.
“I truly feel like I should run Twitter; I honestly believe that,” he declared on Beck’s show. “I’ve said it for seven, eight years that Twitter has a northern-California problem. I identified the issue and started talking about it seven or eight years ago when everybody was asleep and I was trying to tell them, like, hey, this isn’t a ‘liberal’ movement.”
He touted his deep Christian faith as a moral foundation that would allow him to guide the platform ethically and noted he is neither a husband nor a father and therefore does not have family who would be unduly subjected to public venom during any controversies. Musk himself has been married three times and has 10 children. Some Twitter users have recently found their accounts were suspended after they publicly tracked the location of his private jet.
Whitlock has criticized Twitter’s conduct during most of its existence. He blamed for encouraging the leftward drift of American social values, particularly regarding same-sex marriage, citing poll data showing only 40 percent of U.S. citizens supported the policy before Twitter’s 2006 launch.
He ascribed eventual majority support for gay marriage to the platform’s favoritism toward LGBT causes. While Elon Musk is not himself a cultural conservative, Whitlock said he at least recently fostered an openness to diverse viewpoints on Twitter that conservatives can appreciate.
“Twitter has been awful for American culture and it felt like Elon Musk getting involved and putting his personal hand and stamp on Twitter was actually a blessing and something that was taking the country — or at lest social media — in a different, healthier direction,” the host reflected.
As of Monday evening, Musk has not addressed the outcome of his online poll or discussed possible successors.
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Bradley Vasoli is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Jason Whitlock” by Jason Whitlock.
