Whitlock: My letter to ‘Breaking Bad’ star Bryan Cranston

Dear Bryan Cranston:

My childhood was great. We lived in the ghetto. Hope and joy filled the tiny apartment I shared with my brother and mother after my parents divorced.

High school was even better. I captained a nationally ranked, undefeated football team. My senior year, I shared a one-bedroom, 400-square-foot apartment with my dad.

I earned a football scholarship to Ball State University. The five years spent on campus comprise many of my fondest memories. I would do those five years over and over again until eternity.

The two decades I spent as a newspaper journalist in Bloomington, Indiana; Rock Hill, South Carolina; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Kansas City, Missouri, were tremendous. I started at the bottom, working part-time for $5 an hour, and became one of the most successful sports writers of my era.

America was great for me from 1967 until about 2012.

I’m black. Both my parents are black. Their parents were black, too.

I’m 55 years old. When I hear former President Donald Trump and his supporters say “make America great again,” I don’t interpret that nostalgia as subtle or overt racism. I hear it as a call for a return to sanity, a return to a time when America at least pretended to judge man by the content of his character.

Bryan, I saw some of your interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace, the exchange where you claimed the slogan “Make America Great Again” is some sort of bigoted dog whistle.

You said, “When I see ‘Make America Great Again,’ my comment is, ‘Do you accept that that could possibly be construed as a racist remark?’”

Chris Wallace should have stopped you right there. Only someone on a 24/7/365 hunt for racism would hear that slogan and think it’s racist in nature. Bill Clinton said the exact same thing in 1991 when he launched his bid to win the White House. Clinton is fondly referred to as the “first black president.”

Clinton was not and is not black. He’s a stereotypical politician, a man unafraid to distort reality for his own benefit. To you, once Trump adopted the slogan, MAGA became a Confederacy code word.

Bryan, you and Bill Clinton are both actors. You feign concern for black people while seducing us with lies. Your statements to Chris Wallace come off as condescending and racist.

You continued: “A lot of people go, ‘How could that be racist, to make America great again?’ I said, ‘So just ask yourself from an African-American experience: When was it ever great in America for the African-American? So if you’re making it great again, it’s not including them.’”

Bryan, as of 2020, roughly one in ten black people living in America migrated from Africa. That’s 10%. In 1980, it was only 3%. So the plight of black people in America is so miserable that real black Africans are choosing to immigrate to this country by choice, not by slave ship.

America is and has been the safest, most prosperous, most opportunity-rich land for black people for the last 60 years. That’s why Africans and other black people from around the globe choose to relocate here. They want what I experienced in the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and 2000s: freedom and opportunity derived from the greatest constitution ever written.

They have no interest in debating whether men have periods or can get pregnant. They want to compete on the most level playing field in the world.

They may not be Christians, but they want what Christianity created.

America stopped being great a decade ago. Social media accelerated American culture’s descent into wokeness and secularism. America turned demonstrably hostile to a biblical worldview and patriarchal leadership. It prioritized victimhood over victory. It stopped pursuing equality of opportunity in favor of equality of outcome.

Equity is the gateway drug to mass corruption. Equity fuels entitlement. It sends people on a search to discover what makes them worthy of special consideration. Equity is at the root of identity politics, gender dysphoria, and racial division. Equity is Utopia’s bible.

Utopia is the left’s favorite nonsensical conspiracy theory. They’re determined to create it around the world.

Bryan, you don’t believe black people can compete in the system George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin designed. You babbled at the beginning of your rant as if America’s Founding Fathers invented slavery. They inherited the planet-long institution and wrote a constitution that made its demise inevitable.

Their foresight and the sacrifice of many others over two centuries made America great. Not perfect. Great.

I lived in that America. I was raised to believe I could accomplish anything I wanted here. My dad didn’t graduate high school. My mom was a factory worker. Union labor and manufacturing jobs made it possible for them to raise two boys who achieved parts of the American dream. My brother joined the Air Force, graduated from college, has been married for over 20 years, and owns a nice home in a nice neighborhood.

Many people want that America back, a country that allows two parents with nothing more than a good work ethic to lift their children to a better life. Life doesn’t get any better than that.

Instead, manufacturing jobs have left this country and America caters to global corporations that favor China and a Marxist worldview. America cares far more about what’s best for elite celebrities than for working-class families.

That frustration is at the root of the MAGA movement. It’s willful ignorance to pretend otherwise.