Last week I shared one of the boldest campaign ads I’ve ever seen. When I first saw it, I knew I had to interview Jerone Davison, who’s running for the Republican nomination for Arizona’s 4th congressional district.
Davison was born in Picayune, Miss., and later moved to California and Arizona. He became a Christian at 17 and played college football at Arizona State University and for the Oakland Raiders in the NFL.
“He stands firm on upholding America’s freedoms such as the 1st Amendment, by introducing the Internet Bill of Rights, and 2nd Amendment which is demonstrated in his newest campaign ad,” reads his campaign bio.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Davison on Thursday, and here’s my interview with him.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Chris Queen: What prompted you to decide to run for Congress?
Jerone Davison: Well, I just saw the spiritual condition of the country and felt really concerned. And then that concern grew into fear. And I said, “Well, I got a pretty good chance of reaching out to the community, to churches, getting people who are affiliated with local sports, and maybe I can get them to help me.”
And with that help, I believe I can get into Congress and make a difference for the people. I believe that there’s a great danger in this country. And that danger is domestic more than it is foreign. We have a party that’s in office right now that is really selling us out to the globalists, to the CCP. And, from what I’ve seen, we’re pretty much in their clutches. So out of concern for my fellow Americans and for my fellow Arizonans, I’m gonna do it.
CQ: You’re a believer in Jesus and a pastor and a speaker. How does your faith inform your politics?
JD: Oh, basically my faith is personal for me. And I know that my faith is not going to enforce laws, but I do want to vote in three ways. It’s three things that are going to determine the way I vote. Is it constitutional? Is it moral? And is it the will of the people? So basically, that’s how I’m going to vote, but I really feel like my faith, it helps me love people. It helps me understand people better. It helps me want to show the love of God to the entire country. And so that’s how my faith basically helped form my policy and my view of people.
CQ: How did playing college and professional football prepare you to enter the world of politics?
JD: Well, they tell me that politics is one of the toughest things you can do, and I played in one of the roughest gladiator sports in the world. That’s not only college football and high school, but I played in the NFL and I was one of the toughest men on the field. The American fullback in the NFL has to be one of the toughest men on the field, and it also prepared me for politics because, as a fullback, you don’t get glory. The running backs get the glory.
And so as a fullback I did all the blocking, but the running back got all the glory, all the press, and all the interviews after practice, and I was just over there, pulling my shoulder pads off and all my dirty stuff and going home. No attention for me. And so, my job as a congressman would be to not draw attention to myself but to draw attention to the needs of my congressional district, which is District 4 in Tempe, Mesa, Ahwatukee, and Chandler. And I’m going to focus on the needs of our people. We want a secure border, we want to make sure that drugs like fentanyl aren’t coming in, and we want to make sure that we are obeying the laws in the land. And so that’s what I’m looking forward to.
CQ: What are the most unique issues that your district faces?
JD: Yeah, I was just alluding to that. Arizona has one of the open borders into the country, and that is a very dangerous position. It can be glorious because we have a lot of stuff coming in. We have a lot of food and distribution, a lot of wonderful stuff coming in. We want that to come through our border gates. We want that to come through in the proper way.
But the dangerous people who are gangsters and drug dealers and sex traffickers, all types of criminals and gang members come into Arizona, and they spread abroad as they go throughout America. This is really a national security problem. And when these people come in, the government now is subsidizing their housing.
And that’s happened here in Arizona; housing and rent have become a major, major issue. People went from paying $1,200 a month to $1,600 a month and to $2,000 a month, and it’s going up because the landlords can see that the government is paying these rents and it doesn’t matter how much they want to charge. The government is going to pay it, but the citizens now have to go out and work hard to make sure that we can keep up with the rising costs of housing. And so that’s a major problem. Another one of the unique problems here in Arizona is fentanyl and sex trafficking. I think that’s coupled with the other problems because it’s an open border issue.
Water is becoming a problem here. We want to solve our water issues here because we’re drying out; I mean, we’re in a drought and low on water. It’s a major issue. I hear the people who are in the gubernatorial race, and that is one of the top questions that come up in those gubernatorial questions and debates. So I would say that we need to tap into a consistent water source and that would be South Dakota. I believe we can run a pipeline from South Dakota here into Arizona, and that will solve all of our water problems. And we will also need to stop giving all of this water to California while they’re running water right back out into the ocean; that’s just a waste. And they’re draining Arizona of one of the most precious resources we have, which is water. And that’s how I would solve it. I would cut off the amount that California gets and also tap into South Dakota.
CQ: Let’s talk about your ads. You released an ad about tech censorship. Why is that issue important to you, and what would you like to see Congress do about big tech?
JD: Oh, yeah. It’s a free speech concern. We went from the public square being the movie theater and the grocery store. That was the old, antiquated public square, and we still have it, but most of us live our lives on the internet. We’re building everything now for the internet. We have smart homes. We have smart refrigerators, we have smart cars, and smart wallets; I mean everything is going to be connected to the internet, and we want to make sure that we have the same constitutional rights connected to that cyberspace that we have in everyday life.
And so we’ve found out through Twitter, through Facebook, YouTube, and Google, that if they don’t like your speech, or your right to speak and the type of things that you’re speaking, then they can kick you off these platforms. So my thing in Congress is that I’m running on a unique bill, and it’s the Internet Bill of Rights. And this Internet Bill of Rights is going to come with three different distinctions.
Number one, we’re going to stop censorship. Number two, we’re going to stop tech companies from collecting the data that they’re getting from us even now; as we’re speaking, our phones are collecting data right now, and our computers are collecting data. That data is being sold to the marketing companies and placed into an algorithm. This algorithm needs all this data to get smarter and smarter, and now this is the largest commodity in the world. It’s more precious than gold, more precious than silver, more precious than oil.
Data is the big commodity now, and most Americans and people around the world don’t realize that the actions that they’re doing on their computer, the speech-to-text, the searches on Google, are collecting data for marketing companies, and these companies are making a lot of money on it. So the next extension to that is that I would want them to stop stealing it and start paying you for the data that you’re generating from the activities that you’re doing. You need to be paid for that because that’s your activity. You’ve taken the time to do it. It’s been your energy, your thoughts. And so they should pay you or give you the option to opt out so they can no longer collect your data.
And also, finally, the final leg of my internet bill of rights would be to protect the sovereignty of the mind. I want to protect your mind because these new emerging technologies are very intelligent, and one of the things that they did in the last COVID bill was that they slid a provision in there that would make the car companies put in this new technology that reads your mind and reads your emotions. So that would be illegal. Because your brain should be sovereign territory.
According to my Internet Bill of Rights, I want to protect your brain because these technologies have no right to go into your sovereign space. We saw the government try to label our bodies as government property when they forced the inoculation and tried to force us all to get shots, and they’re pretty much telling us that our bodies are not sovereign anymore, that they belong to the government. And the government has the right to inoculate whomever it wants. Well, my internet bill of rights is going to stop them from going into our minds and searching our minds. All right, so it’s very important that we do that.
CQ: Your “Make Rifles Great Again” ad has made a big splash.
Where did the idea for that ad come from?
JD: The idea for the ad came from my campaign manager, and he’s had it in his pocket for a couple of years. He just needed the right person to be able to pull it off, the right person to have the boldness and the courage to do it. I mean, that ad would not get any play without the right person to do it. So that person was me, and when he cast the idea to me, I said yes right away. Because I feel like if the left is going to continue to push the race issue, well, then let’s go ahead and let’s go into it headlong. Let’s go right into it, but let’s do it from the proper perspective. Let’s put race relations right where they belong and put the KKK and the white supremacists where they belong. And that is on the Democrat Party, right?
And so I mean, we all understand that history. It’s the Democrats who are trying right now to remove all the statues, all the historical statues, and through platforms like Google, they’re trying to rewrite history. And it’s important that we fight to keep these statues so that our children and grandchildren could see how far we’ve come as a country. We’re not in the slavery days, but if you listen to the Democrats, it seems like we’re still in the slavery days. They act like a black man can’t come out of his house without getting arrested. Well, it’s not true. America has become a wonderful and exciting country. Yes, we’ve had our history, just as every country in this world has had. But look how far we’ve come.
CQ: How do you want to help preserve gun rights for Arizonans and Americans everywhere?
JD: I feel like we really need to protect everybody’s right to bear arms. Speaking historically for minorities, the KKK was developed by the Democratic Party to stop black people from using the Second Amendment and from voting. So they used these terroristic types of tactics on the black community and the white people who tried to assist these people by calling them names, attacking them, and lynching them too. So blacks were not the only people who were lynched in this country, but the whites were lynched as well. So that’s one reason I want to protect the Second Amendment.
The president of the United States recently said — I think about as recently as two weeks ago — that white supremacy is the greatest threat in America. Well, what do you think that does for a black man like me? I need to start warning every one of my black family members and friends and constituents and neighbors and everybody to arm themselves because of this high threat of white supremacy. But they started attacking me because of that and trying to say that nobody needs an AR. Well, hey, you just said white supremacy is the greatest threat in this in this country. And I want to make sure that as a black man, I have a gun.
But I do want to tell my white brothers and sisters that we are all family, we’re all one, and when we have an open border and we have military-aged men crossing that border, and we don’t know who they are and where they’re coming from and what they’re doing, I think it’s time to pick up your arms and make sure that you are prepared.
CQ: How have people in your district responded to your campaign?
JD: Oh, it’s been overwhelming, man. I’ve been getting a lot of calls. Everybody’s excited and everybody’s telling their neighbors and friends in the district to vote for Jerone Davis for Congress. Everybody’s like, “This dude has a brass pair. This dude has got what it takes to get in Congress and to say what we need to say without being afraid. He’s going to be bold.” And so people have this sense of, “Okay, Jerone is a warrior. He’ll go in and fight for us.” So that ad showed them another side of me: that I’m not just a rah-rah motivational speaker, but I really mean what I say. It’s been really, really greatly received. So I’ve gotten a lot of attention there. I think it shot me so far past my opponents that the door is closing on the primary.
CQ: If you’re elected, what will your top priorities be for your first term?
JD: Oh, absolutely, brother. Thank you so much for that question. The number one priority is that we want to close that border. I mean, before we can deal with anything else, we want to close the border, and then number two, I want to file a lawsuit against the January 6 Committee. It’s an uncontested and unconstitutional board. And then I want to file a lawsuit against the jail that’s housing these American prisoners without a charge. And so I would have the jurisprudence to do that because I would be a congressman. Those would be top priorities for me, and then we also want to impeach Joe Biden because of his crimes of not protecting America and lying to the American people, so we’ve got to get him out of office.
CQ: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
JD: Well, I do love God, and I love you, and I believe that we can recover. I believe this country can recover. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff happening. But I want you to know that with God, all things are possible, and I want you to know that we’re getting ready to come together and restore this country, and once we restore it, I want you and your children and your families to always remember this time. Always remember how close we’ve come to losing in our country. But God showed us His graceful hand when He overturned Roe v. Wade. And I believe that that was a great sign from God that He’s still with us, if only we put faith in Him, look to Him, and trust Him.
As we get ourselves together, go out and vote, knock on doors, make phone calls, donate to people like me and help my campaign, and help good people like me get into Congress so that we can help restore America. What is America founded on? Faith, family, and freedom. These are the things that make America so wonderful and so great to be in. Let’s not lose it, folks. Let’s not sit back and say, “Well, because they’re taking elections, our votes don’t count.” No, no, no. Just take that thing and bless it. Pray over it, and support Jerone Davis for Congress. I know I’m here in Arizona, and I’m not in your state. But you can do a job by sharing my information, by going to jeroneforcongress.com. Tell people in my area, people that you know, have family members, co-workers, and anybody that you’ve met here in my district. Tell them to support this candidate and help me get in office. You will not be disappointed. I promise you that I will never turn my back on the American people.
If you’re interested in donating to Davison’s campaign, click here.
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