A former NFL star nominated by President Donald Trump to a federal commission for kids says he believes schools should bring back corporal punishment to stop young criminals from “terrorizing” America’s streets.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard to deal with “uncontrollable” crime in Washington, D.C., Jack Brewer—an ex-pro football safety who served on the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys—used a TV appearance to call for the return of paddling in America’s classrooms.
Speaking Wednesday on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, Brewer said: “Schools have to start back disciplining kids.
“They took the paddle out of the school and everything collapsed. We got to get the paddle back.”
As of 2024, according to the National Education Association, 17 states allow corporal punishment in public schools, and it is still practiced in dozens of districts—despite calls for it to be outlawed.
Black students are four times more likely than white students to experience this type of punishment. But Brewer, who is Black, said: “Listen, corporal punishment is the only way.”
Brewer played for the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants before injury in 2007 forced him to retire.
Having subsequently had a successful business career and launched the Jack Brewer Foundation—which provides “educational opportunities and economic development to underprivileged” people, including children, while “spreading the word of God”—Brewer was invited on to Fox News this week to give his take.
The 46-year-old Texan—nominated by Trump in 2020 to serve for four years on the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys, a body created by Congress that sits under the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—said: “When you have a knucklehead kid that’s willing to rob you or me at gunpoint with a car full of kids or anyone else...
“You see, these things don’t happen in states like Florida. You know why? Because if you carjack me, I’m liable to shoot you no matter what your age is. And that happens in red states.
“But when you take the Second Amendment away from so many citizens in these liberal cities, they can’t protect themselves. And so now these kids... they’re emboldened by the culture, by the music that they listen to, by the movies that they watch, by the culture that they take into their spirit.”
He went on: “None of these kids go to church on Sunday morning. These kids don’t have a fear of God. These kids don’t think about heaven and hell. And that’s the problem in our nation.
“We’ve let these liberals get, go, so deep into removing God from schools. Now these kids don’t have spirituality. We’ve got to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools.
“We got to get the fear of God back into the children of America, particularly the young Black boys that look just like me and my son... 71 percent of these kids are born without a father in the home.”
Brewer finished his diatribe with his most incendiary statement of all: “Every Black man in America should, should feel despicable about the reality that our culture right now is terrorizing the streets of America.”
It’s not the first time Brewer has urged “paddle and prayer.” In 2022, he told Congress that gun violence wouldn’t end until schools brought both back, and in 2020, he told Fox News he was “calling to bring the paddle back.”
The Daily Beast contacted both the White House and the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys for comment on Brewer’s remarks.
