Bomani Jones
speaker
433 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Dec
Bomani Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Because you're already going uphill when you're trying to make that point to anybody at all. It's not worth it to make that point unless you're sure. Like to me, you can't just be guessing. You got to have a really, really strong case rather than just a correlation. And I thought with Shador, what a lot of that was simply was a correlation. And then the...
The the argument I saw from people and again, there's a track record of this. They wanted to tame the outspoken black man. I'm like, he's not outspoken. He's obnoxious. Those are two different things. So, like, I think the Internet gets us with a lot of conflation of terms and people get really charged up and they have to be on the side and everything else.
And I'm not going to play that game with people. Like, I feel like I've earned the respect that you're going to listen to me regardless of whether or not I agree with you.
So what I think is interesting about that, and it doesn't happen so much anymore, but I noticed that I was getting a heavy push from the algorithm. Whenever he would go on anything or talk about any politics, like there are engagement farming accounts that put up stuff that Stephen A. says on his podcast and everything else. I am...
I think part of what happens when we start talking about running for president now is people start talking about candidates for president in the context of do you think they can win? And the arguments behind whether they should be president. Yeah, but the arguments behind why you think somebody could win. well, how many people know who this person is already? And so forth and so on.
It's all these things that don't have anything to do with your actual ability to govern. But of course, that's reinforced by the person that is actually the president, right? And so Stephen A. is really famous. I think that's the part that gets lost and undersold. He's really famous, and running for president is effectively a television contest.
Now, I am going to read something to you that I found in a book that I was reading just the other day.
It just so happened that I was talking to somebody about this because I was reading this Neil Postman book about education that I kind of had to stop reading because I realized that it was more technically about education as a doctrine, like as a study. as opposed to education as just the general idea.
But the point they make, if I can't find the exact phrasing, but the point they make is after a certain point where the media gets too big and the media is controlled by a certain number of people, like television was the argument they were making, right? That...
It's going to reach a point where a prerequisite for running for president is that you are a famous person, that you have a career already as a celebrity.
Well, it's a fair question. The fact that Stephen A. Smith thing has gotten as far as it has. Look, let me tell you this. There's a story running very soon in the New York Times, and I know this because they interviewed me for it, about the idea of Stephen A. Smith being president. And it's not in the sports media section. Right. Like it was by a writer.
No, I don't know anybody who has said that. I don't. I appreciate the fact that Stephen A. appreciates that this is ridiculous, right? Do you think he does? Do you think he does? He has said at every turn that the idea that someone wants me to be president is an indictment primarily of the Democrats. That's what he does.
He wills that into existence. But these polling, but these polls have willed that into existence. The people that put his name on the paperwork, Cuomo and Bill O'Reilly doing, wow, what a salad. Those three guys doing like town halls and stuff like that. Now, to be fair to Stephen A, what Stephen A will tell you is that he's done political commentary on television for a very long time.
which again is true, but so have I, and I'm not going to be the one to run for president. I also think that part of why people are willing to entertain this notion is that right now he has gotten behind a very bipartisan idea, which is banging on the Democrats. Everybody enjoys that, loves that song, right? Like that one has crossed over. It is top 10. Number one with a bullet and right fast.
This is what the book says. It says, as Paul Goodman has pointed out, there are many forms of censorship and one of them is to deny access to loudspeakers to those with dissident ideas or even any ideas. This is easy to do and not necessarily conspiratorial when the loudspeakers are owned and operated by mammoth corporations with enormous investments in their proprietorships.
What we get is an entirely new politics, including the possibility that a major requirement for holding political office be prior success as a show business celebrity. And now to me, where he is talking about television, where it gets wonky is I think the people who truly control that information in that way are Musk. Zuckerberg and the people that control the social media algorithms.
And they can greatly decide who does or doesn't get famous. Like the idea of Stephen A. Smith as president was, I was getting bombarded with it about a month and a half ago and I didn't ask for it.
Well, I mean, I've been doing it for a long time, so I'd like to think that I can, right? Like, I could be wrong, but I think that I can. The reason that I think that I can and the reason I think I do it fairly effectively, and this is a reason that you and I could be as close as we have, I believe, and I think it's very important, is you and I grew up going to rural public schools.
And I think that that's a very important point in terms of your ability to relate to people. We understand what I level is a little bit differently. And we grew up around people who, if they feel like you're talking over your heads, we'll try to fight you. Like you have to learn how to, like how to do this stuff and still talk to them. Right.
So that's like my fundamental belief is that I believe my brother told me something when I first started writing that I'll never forget. And he said, a great argument is not one that a genius cannot refute. It is one that a fool cannot refute.
Showing 61–80 of 433 · page 4 of 22
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