Strung Up Featuring Dr. Stacey Patton

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The following program is hosted by the NVG Podcast Network.
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Hello and welcome to another moment with Eric Fleming. I am your host, Eric Fleming.
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So today we have Dr. Stacey Patton.
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Dr. Stacey Patton is a journalist and a college professor, but she's also an
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author and she has written this book called Strung Up, which talks about the
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lynching of black children.
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But it's not your typical book. It is about lynching in America.
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And it goes into such great detail, and we'll get into that in the interview,
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about the pathology and.
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You know, and the impacts that it had, not only on the families of those black
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children, but on the white children as well that witnessed those lynchings.
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So it's a real, real intense discussion, and I hope that you enjoy the interview.
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Real quick, go to momenteric.com, www.momenteric.com, to keep track of our latest
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You know, you'll see on the website now that it's recognized,
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this podcast has been recognized three times, been nominated for a Black Podcasting Award.
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but financially, whatever you can do to keep this podcast going.
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We're getting to the homestretch in the elections, and we're adjusting schedules to get guests.
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Next week, it's going to be kind of an abbreviated show, which some of y'all are like, great.
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No, but it's going to be an abbreviated show because I really had not planned
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on doing anything because it's homecoming for Jackson State, but I've got a guest that,
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Yeah, that's the plan. So we will have a show next week.
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But I just appreciate y'all listening and supporting the podcast the way that you do.
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I really appreciate the high quality of people that have agreed to come on the
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podcast and talk about either their literary work or the work they're doing in the community.
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And all that stuff, yeah, this has been a real treat, and we're going to keep
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this thing going as long as we can.
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All right, speaking about keeping it going, let's go ahead and get this show
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started, and as always, we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.
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Thanks, Eric. President Trump stated he is considering an FBI investigation
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into the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells following a Mississippi grand jury's
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refusal to indict anyone.
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Former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay won the Nobel Peace Prize for her
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work promoting peace, international law, and chairing a commission investigating genocide in Gaza.
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The Trump administration imposed expanded sanctions against the International
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Criminal Court, triggering sharp condemnation from the court.
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U.S. immigration officials defended ICE agents who shot a man,
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identified as Oscar Burgall, in a car with his child present in New York City,
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blaming the suspect for endangering lives.
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President Trump approved the execution by firing squad of former Army Major
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Nidal Hassan, set for December 3 at Fort Hood, for his 2009 mass shooting.
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President Trump launched a second inquiry and ordered a White House hearing
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into allegations Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook made false mortgage application statements.
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The FBI arrested California resident Wanying Zhang at Los Angeles International
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Airport for allegedly spying on the son of Taiwan's president on behalf of Chinese officials.
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The FBI also arrested 18-year-old Sheikh Dunn Abdullahi Mohammed for plotting
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an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at the Mall of America after purchasing an AK-47
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from an undercover agent.
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President Trump announced the end of taxpayer-funded television ads featuring
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him following bipartisan criticism and potential propaganda violations.
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Three black University of South Alabama students were arrested and later released
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over social media posts allegedly threatening President Trump.
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President Trump appointed Truth Social communications advisor Katie Zachariah
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as the new White House press secretary to replace Carolyn Leavitt.
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And Pennsylvania reported 1,078 measles cases and five related deaths.
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I am Grace Gee, and this has been a Moment of News.
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All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news. And now it's time for
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my guest, Dr. Stacey Patton.
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Stacey Patton, Ph.D., is an award-winning journalist, author,
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college professor, historian, and nationally recognized child advocate.
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Her scholarship and advocacy challenged corporal punishment in homes and schools,
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and examined the historical relationship among childhood, race, violence, and power.
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Patton's writing has appeared in New York Times, The Washington Post,
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Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, News One, and other national outlets.
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She is the author of several books, including Spare the Kids,
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Why Whooping Children Won't Save Black America, and most recently,
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Strung Up, How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.
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So today's discussion, we'll be talking about strung up how white America learned
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to lynch black children during the interview.
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So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a
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guest on this podcast, Dr. Stacey Patton.
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All right. Dr. Stacey Patton, how are you doing, ma'am? You doing good?
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I'm doing well. Thank you so
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much, Eric. I appreciate you for having me on conversation with you today.
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Well, I am honored to have you. It's like I get the newsletter from Speak Out,
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and they're always saying, Dr. Stacey Patton is going to be speaking here,
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and she's going to be talking about this. So I'm really, really honored to have
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somebody of your caliber on the podcast.
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So what I like to do, we're going to talk about this book that you wrote called Strung Up.
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And it is a very scholarly book.
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I was really, really impressed with the way that you went about it and even
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how you even opened the book up.
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So a lot of my questions are going to be based off of just kind of like what
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your thought process was and putting this together and some of the issues that
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you wanted to address in the book.
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But before I do that, I do a couple of icebreakers.
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So the first icebreaker is a quote I want you to respond to.
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And the quote is, silence will not save us.
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Audre Lorde. That's correct.
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So, I think when I hear that quote, I think that she's talking about silence
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is how atrocities become traditions.
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It becomes complicity. People think that being quiet, staying in their place,
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staying in their lane will keep them safe.
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But it's how violence and all kinds of other silly logics become culture.
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It's how generations of people teach the next that certain lives are disposable.
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And that is precisely what my book, Strung Up, tries to expose.
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So America did not sustain, you know, its centuries of racial terror simply
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because some few fringe white people were violent.
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It sustained that terror because millions of other people watched,
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rationalized, normalized, and they remained silent.
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Yeah. All right. So the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.
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Okay. So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20.
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Six. All right.
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What do you think is the worst or best thing this, the previous,
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well, let me rephrase it.
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What do you think was the worst or best thing the previous administration did?
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This is Biden's administration. Yes. Hmm.
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So I think that one of the most consequential things that Joe Biden did was
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to try to invest in American infrastructure.
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So that includes communities that have been neglected for generations.
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So I'm thinking of, say, the American Rescue Plan, which provided substantial
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relief for families and individuals during the pandemic.
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This was a huge crisis, you know, once-in-a-century crisis.
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But I also feel like we can't discuss his legacy without talking about Gaza.
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His administration continued providing military support to Israel while Palestinian
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civilians were being killed by the thousands and being displaced on a devastating scale.
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And so I think that raises some profound moral questions about whose lives American
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foreign policy values and protects.
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Yeah. I think it's interesting that, since you brought that up,
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that the lady who won the Nobel Prize was the, I think she was the chair?
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Or she had something to do with the determination in the International Criminal
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Court that what was happening in Gaza was a genocide.
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And the current administration decided to sanction the court the day after she got the Nobel Prize.
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I think it's interesting that.
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Maybe that's another book you're going to dive into, but it's just how we respond
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to genocide. And based on where you were going with this book,
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it seems like it's kind of something that.
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Maybe that's an extreme statement to say, but it's something that's kind of
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inbred. But we'll get into that more in the discussion and how we respond to,
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seeing violence or how we politicize it even.
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But why did you decide to write this book and how much of a struggle was it to write?
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Well, I always tell people that I started writing this book when I was a child,
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before I even know what history telling was, before I,
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knew what an archive was, before I knew what racism or lynching or Jim Crow was.
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I am an adoptee, so I have an adoptive family and a family of origin,
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my biological relatives, and both families were touched by lynching.
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I grew up as a girl child in the 1980s and 1990s. I was not baptized by the
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fire of the civil rights movement, but I lived in the echoes of that history.
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And I grew up hearing the adults sort of whisper about these crimes, these murders.
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And I watched the trauma.
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I endured the trauma,
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parenting practices that were informed by terror and trauma and grief and loss.
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And so when I tried to question adults about, you know, these losses and,
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you know, this violence.
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Sometimes I would be shut down, stay in a child's place, don't ask questions,
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we don't talk about that.
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And these were adults who wanted to try to protect those children from that terror.
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And also these adults and all of their grief and trauma didn't always have words
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to wrap around those old wounds.
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But the silence troubled me. I was a very curious kid and I always had lots of questions.
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And when people shut me down or told me to stay in a child's place or don't
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ask those questions, I got even more curious.
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For me, I sort of intuitively knew that there were stories there.
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There were things I wasn't supposed to know. And then when I got to graduate school,
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Rutgers University, I knew that I wanted to do my dissertation research on the
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treatment of Black children historically,
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because there was another set of silences around Black children.
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It was a scholarly silence.
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Black children were rarely written about at that time, nor were the lynchings
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of Black children acknowledged with a sustained attention.
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They were mostly footnoted or pushed to the margins, given passing mention in
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what was happening to Black men primarily as lynching victims.
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So I wrote Strung Up because I was tired of reading histories of lynching that told us.
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Everything about what happened to Black bodies, but not nearly enough about
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what was happening inside white people's minds.
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I wanted to understand how a society could look at a Black child,
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recognize the child's size and vulnerability and innocence, and still,
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you know, decide that the child deserved to be destroyed.
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And what did, you know, white people have to believe about Black children to
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make that possible? That was my big driving question.
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What were they teaching their own children when they brought them to lynchings
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and allowed them to participate and turned racial terror into family entertainment?
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And the deeper I dug, the more I realized that lynching wasn't just about destroying Black lives.
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It was also about constructing white people's identities. And so I wanted to
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shift the historical gaze away from the Black body, hanging from the tree or
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a bridge or a light post, and toward the white faces in the crowd.
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Because until we understand how cruelty was taught, celebrated,
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and passed down through generations, we'll never fully understand why racial
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violence continues to haunt this country today.
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Yeah, I was thinking when Billie Holiday sang that song, Strange Fruit, and.
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In essence, we've always had to gaze toward the strange fruit,
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but not how that tree that produced that fruit was cultivated. And.
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That is, it's simple, but it's novel.
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Because until I read your book, you know, it was like, I didn't really care.
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You know, all I was dealing with was the fact that Black folks were getting
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killed in the history of my people.
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But you know it's it makes sense always especially being a student of history
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myself you gotta understand what the roots are how it got to this point and and,
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you know I'm not a professional book reviewer and all that but I think you you
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did a marvelous job and and at least creating some framework so.
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My next question, I want to, a lot of these questions, I'm going to pick your brain, Doc.
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I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not, you know, I really want the listeners
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to understand how you went about this approach.
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So my next question is, did you debate using the Reginald Marsh drawing for
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the cover instead of the photo of the mock lynching at Camp Zachary Taylor?
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At first, I thought about using that Reginald Marsh drawing.
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Let me just describe it for your listeners.
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So I was in the Moreland Spengarn Research Center at Howard University.
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Spengarn has the largest repository of archival materials on the Black diaspora.
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And so I was going through the NAACP lynching files that they have there,
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and I stumbled across a Manila folder with this drawing in it.
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That's all that was in the folder.
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And it is a drawing by a white artist.
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He was born in France, and his name was Reginald Marsh.
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And so you see these ghoulish-looking white people gathered in a circle while
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they're watching some Black person being lynched and burned off the frame.
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You don't actually see the body.
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And in the center of this drawing there's an older woman it could be the child's
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mother her grandmother a community elder holding this little girl up on her
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shoulders so that she can see what's happening,
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and the little girl is just very calm she's sitting there with her finger under her chin.
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And the caption reads, this is her first lynching. And that caption absolutely turned my stomach.
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First basically says, this is going to happen again.
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She's going to see it again. This is a rite of passage. This is ordinary. This is what we do.
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But what troubled me especially was her posture.
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She's just calm. She's not wincing. She's not turning away.
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And that really disturbed me
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because that's not a normal reaction that a child should have to a murder.
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And so it opened all kinds of questions for me about the psychological destruction
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of white children who were brought to these events.
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So at first I thought that was going to be the cover of the book.
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But then Philip Merrill, who is an archivist of sorts, he and his wife collect.
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Old black emphymera, emphymera, I'm sorry, and vintage stuff,
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newspapers, books, documents, pictures.
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And he reached out to me, this was during COVID, and he said,
00:21:21.255 --> 00:21:23.888
I know you're working on a book about child lynchings.
00:21:24.260 --> 00:21:26.007
I have something you need to see.
00:21:26.581 --> 00:21:31.062
And he showed me the photo that became the cover of this book.
00:21:31.753 --> 00:21:37.105
And once I saw that this was a real child versus a drawing, because people could
00:21:37.105 --> 00:21:39.445
effectively argue, well, Reginald Marsh's
00:21:39.445 --> 00:21:43.798
drawing is, that's from his own imagination. It's not a real child.
00:21:44.170 --> 00:21:50.452
And so having a photograph of a little black boy who was probably somewhere between eight,
00:21:51.092 --> 00:21:56.655
and 10 years old max, standing on the gallows at a military base,
00:21:56.655 --> 00:22:01.353
Camp Zachary Taylor, which was in Louisville, Kentucky during World War I.
00:22:01.904 --> 00:22:08.151
He's standing there on the gallows, surrounded by these white soldiers for a mock lynching.
00:22:08.650 --> 00:22:15.025
And I counted all those hands on the rope. There's six hands on the rope.
00:22:15.025 --> 00:22:21.571
It doesn't take that much, that many hands, that much strength to string up a little Black boy.
00:22:22.081 --> 00:22:28.075
And so that cover said everything that this book was trying to say about the
00:22:28.075 --> 00:22:31.531
complicity, the culture, the families, the religion.
00:22:32.755 --> 00:22:37.388
The whole cultural production that produced that scene.
00:22:38.098 --> 00:22:42.577
Yeah. And then the other part of that image that I felt kind of tied in what
00:22:42.577 --> 00:22:46.974
you were saying was there is a soldier who actually looks like he's either reading
00:22:47.403 --> 00:22:49.827
from a manual or reciting from a manual.
00:22:49.827 --> 00:22:55.097
So it's almost like it's a class that they're teaching how to do this lynching.
00:22:55.097 --> 00:22:58.113
And yeah, it was powerful. But,
00:22:59.437 --> 00:23:04.787
I wanted to ask you about that because that Reginald Morris drawing drew a lot
00:23:04.787 --> 00:23:10.257
of criticism and a lot of attention during the time that it was initially out.
00:23:10.877 --> 00:23:14.865
But not, as you point out, not enough to stop the lynchings.
00:23:15.393 --> 00:23:20.467
But it did draw some conversation. Many people like to be descriptive about
00:23:20.467 --> 00:23:24.228
violence in America using terms like black-on-black crime, for example.
00:23:24.663 --> 00:23:29.579
Why do you think it is hard for America to be as descriptive or even acknowledge,
00:23:30.032 --> 00:23:33.991
its history of lynching and capital punishment as violent?
00:23:36.215 --> 00:23:47.477
Because America is driven by this narrative of exceptionalism that we somehow threw off our medieval,
00:23:48.277 --> 00:23:54.449
European inheritances and traditions and became something unique and new.
00:23:55.561 --> 00:24:00.861
But I think the phrase, the Black-on-Black crime itself is quite revealing.
00:24:01.424 --> 00:24:07.002
So we don't routinely talk about white-on-white crime, even though most violent
00:24:07.002 --> 00:24:12.592
crime occurs between people who know each other, who live in the same community,
00:24:12.592 --> 00:24:14.146
so there's close proximity.
00:24:14.721 --> 00:24:19.991
But when Black folks commit violence, suddenly race becomes the explanation.
00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:24.912
When white people commit violence, we look toward individual motives.
00:24:25.394 --> 00:24:30.688
Or things like mental health or some other type of humanizing explanations.
00:24:31.315 --> 00:24:36.322
And that's precisely why, you know, America has such difficulty confronting
00:24:36.322 --> 00:24:37.532
the history of lynching.
00:24:38.020 --> 00:24:44.372
Lynching, you know, wasn't simply violence committed by individual white people.
00:24:44.372 --> 00:24:47.849
It was collective. It was organized.
00:24:48.111 --> 00:24:53.922
Racial violence, it was racial violence that entire communities participated
00:24:53.922 --> 00:24:56.249
in and celebrated and defended.
00:24:57.132 --> 00:25:02.577
You know, you had sheriffs, judges, ministers, teachers, journalists,
00:25:02.913 --> 00:25:06.069
mothers, fathers, children, they were all involved.
00:25:06.609 --> 00:25:13.412
And to acknowledge that history honestly would mean admitting that racial violence
00:25:13.412 --> 00:25:17.817
wasn't some kind of deviation from American civilization.
00:25:18.859 --> 00:25:26.074
It was part of how that civilization, how democracy was built and maintained in this country.
00:25:26.770 --> 00:25:31.705
And Black-on-Black crime is not a system of racial domination.
00:25:32.528 --> 00:25:39.602
Lynching was. It was violence that was designed to terrorize an entire population of people,
00:25:40.287 --> 00:25:48.270
to maintain white supremacy and to teach future generations whose power and
00:25:48.270 --> 00:25:52.455
whose lives were valued and whose lives were disposable.
00:25:52.693 --> 00:25:58.572
And so I think America finds it much easier to pathologize Black communities
00:25:58.943 --> 00:26:02.820
than to examine the historical production of white violence.
00:26:02.820 --> 00:26:08.352
And that's exactly the kind of conversation that Strung Up is demanding that we have.
00:26:08.596 --> 00:26:14.170
Yeah, I would say that the pathology,
00:26:14.170 --> 00:26:19.459
as you will, about black on black crime is still a derivative of,
00:26:20.273 --> 00:26:26.480
the systemic racism that goes on in the country, because not only in that descriptive
00:26:26.480 --> 00:26:29.881
part, but also as far as the conditions in which,
00:26:30.630 --> 00:26:34.198
you know, a community turns on each other.
00:26:34.778 --> 00:26:39.920
And you know it's human nature for people which is one of the things you stress
00:26:39.920 --> 00:26:42.290
it's human nature for people to
00:26:42.290 --> 00:26:48.495
have anger or violence or whatever is now restricted to a race but I think.
00:26:50.385 --> 00:26:54.686
When we deal with Black-on-Black crime or we deal with crime in the Black community,
00:26:55.395 --> 00:26:56.828
especially violent crime.
00:26:59.127 --> 00:27:06.307
It's definitely part of the system that we are in that is trying to eradicate
00:27:06.307 --> 00:27:08.957
Black bodies in whatever form.
00:27:08.957 --> 00:27:14.087
And if it's more convenient for Black people to take out other Black people,
00:27:14.087 --> 00:27:18.635
that's a victory for those who want to maintain white supremacy.
00:27:19.111 --> 00:27:22.987
That's just, you know, I don't have a PhD or nothing. I'm just an old politician,
00:27:22.987 --> 00:27:25.346
but that's just kind of the way I feel about it.
00:27:25.816 --> 00:27:31.677
No, I think you're absolutely correct. So, you know, again, what people are
00:27:31.677 --> 00:27:38.796
out here calling Black-on-Black crime can't be separated from the history of systemic racism.
00:27:39.405 --> 00:27:45.737
So when you concentrate things like poverty and underfunded schools,
00:27:45.958 --> 00:27:51.174
when you destroy economic opportunities for people, when you destabilize,
00:27:51.794 --> 00:27:57.617
families through mass incarceration, when you confine people to neighborhoods
00:27:57.617 --> 00:28:00.246
that have systemically been denied.
00:28:00.954 --> 00:28:09.410
Resources, you create the conditions in which violence is more likely to occur.
00:28:09.840 --> 00:28:16.617
And then America had the audacity to point to that violence as evidence that
00:28:16.617 --> 00:28:21.697
something is inherently wrong with Black people, rather than examining the conditions
00:28:21.697 --> 00:28:24.797
that this country deliberately created.
00:28:24.797 --> 00:28:30.327
So you can't manufacture conditions for social dysfunction and then blame the
00:28:30.327 --> 00:28:34.266
people trapped inside those conditions for the dysfunction.
00:28:35.055 --> 00:28:40.303
And that's one of, again, a connection that I try to make in Strong Up because
00:28:40.303 --> 00:28:44.983
lynching was designed not only to kill individual Black people,
00:28:44.983 --> 00:28:48.835
but to terrorize and destabilize entire,
00:28:49.484 --> 00:28:52.118
communities, to destroy their institutions,
00:28:52.687 --> 00:28:56.065
their banks, their stores, their businesses, their farming,
00:28:56.854 --> 00:29:04.123
you know, to suppress their economic independence and to enforce racial subordination.
00:29:04.123 --> 00:29:10.443
So we got to stop treating violence within Black communities as though it emerged
00:29:10.443 --> 00:29:12.514
in some kind of historical vacuum.
00:29:12.897 --> 00:29:17.211
The question isn't simply why violence occurs in Black communities.
00:29:17.565 --> 00:29:24.453
I think the question is what happens to communities after generations of organized
00:29:24.453 --> 00:29:27.647
violence have been inflicted upon them.
00:29:28.324 --> 00:29:32.123
Yeah. So that segues in this question. And in the book you write,
00:29:32.123 --> 00:29:35.418
the goal of lynching wasn't just to destroy the black body.
00:29:35.946 --> 00:29:39.748
It was to break the child who survived it. But it didn't always break them.
00:29:40.265 --> 00:29:42.779
That's why whiteness tries to catch us young.
00:29:43.330 --> 00:29:48.640
Because if it can rupture a black child, it can dismantle an entire community.
00:29:49.740 --> 00:29:54.333
Yes, you want to expound on that even further. I think you were touching on
00:29:54.333 --> 00:29:57.733
it before I asked that question, but kind of dive into that a little more.
00:29:58.593 --> 00:30:00.161
Yes. So...
00:30:01.249 --> 00:30:08.140
Lynching, again, wasn't just about killing an individual person who was hanging
00:30:08.140 --> 00:30:12.355
from a tree or bridge or some other public space.
00:30:13.138 --> 00:30:20.401
It was about psychologically destroying the people who survived to witness it.
00:30:21.402 --> 00:30:26.080
And children were especially vulnerable to that kind of terror because their
00:30:26.080 --> 00:30:29.736
brains and their nervous systems were under construction.
00:30:30.456 --> 00:30:34.500
And that's what made it so evil to bring children whose brains,
00:30:35.060 --> 00:30:40.400
did not yet have the cognitive capacity to recognize that what they were seeing
00:30:40.400 --> 00:30:45.484
was communal homicide, that it was lynching, that it was something evil and morally wrong.
00:30:46.053 --> 00:30:50.302
So think about what happens when, let's say, a Black child,
00:30:51.145 --> 00:30:57.884
sees a father or mother or brother, a neighbor lynched, that child learns that,
00:30:58.508 --> 00:31:05.381
the adults who are supposed to protect them are themselves powerless against white violence.
00:31:06.159 --> 00:31:11.392
They learn that their own bodies are not safe, that their communities can be
00:31:11.508 --> 00:31:18.133
invaded, that the law isn't necessarily going to offer any kind of protection.
00:31:18.133 --> 00:31:22.873
So the goal was not just simply to kill a Black person.
00:31:22.873 --> 00:31:30.513
It was to terrorize an entire generation into submission and to send the message,
00:31:30.513 --> 00:31:34.393
particularly to Black adults in communities when Black children were lynched, that.
00:31:35.253 --> 00:31:38.677
We can steal your future and you can't do anything about it.
00:31:39.307 --> 00:31:44.295
And childhood is where that kind of terror has,
00:31:45.033 --> 00:31:49.073
especially profound consequences because children, as I said,
00:31:49.073 --> 00:31:54.894
are still developing their sense of identity, safety, belonging,
00:31:55.022 --> 00:31:56.862
and possibility in the world.
00:31:57.466 --> 00:31:59.701
But here's another side of the story.
00:32:00.713 --> 00:32:05.491
While Black children were being taught to fear white power.
00:32:05.602 --> 00:32:08.899
White children were being taught to exercise it.
00:32:09.537 --> 00:32:14.358
So one group of children is being terrorized. Another is being socialized into,
00:32:15.493 --> 00:32:18.932
believing that domination is their birthright.
00:32:19.513 --> 00:32:24.826
And that's how white supremacy reproduces itself across generations.
00:32:25.279 --> 00:32:30.993
We have 60, 70 years worth of what we call historiography, books that have been
00:32:30.993 --> 00:32:35.923
written on the history of lynching and given us all kinds of explanations for
00:32:35.923 --> 00:32:38.738
why this type of racialized violence.
00:32:40.305 --> 00:32:44.005
Snuffed out the lives of thousands of people and had such long generational
00:32:44.005 --> 00:32:48.445
staying power. We've been told, you know, it was a racial terror tactic to keep
00:32:48.445 --> 00:32:54.377
Black people from voting, to keep Black people from becoming economic competitors.
00:32:54.951 --> 00:33:00.565
There was all this sexual hysteria around Black men and white women and girls,
00:33:00.919 --> 00:33:02.602
but people are children first.
00:33:03.142 --> 00:33:07.865
And so you don't get people who show up at a lynching to participate,
00:33:07.865 --> 00:33:12.726
to normalize, to cheer, to say nothing unless you destroy the child first.
00:33:13.167 --> 00:33:18.085
So lynchings attack Black childhood while weaponizing white childhood.
00:33:18.085 --> 00:33:23.344
And when you traumatize children, you don't simply, you know, just harm individuals.
00:33:23.675 --> 00:33:30.623
You threaten the emotional and psychological and the social foundations of entire communities.
00:33:31.252 --> 00:33:35.747
So is that how white supremacy destroys all American children?
00:33:36.559 --> 00:33:43.046
Yes, there's no child-friendly version of white supremacy. Yeah, yeah.
00:33:43.961 --> 00:33:48.326
Is the word testimony a fair representation of strung up?
00:33:49.328 --> 00:33:54.715
Say more about what you mean. So when I say testimony, it's like the way that
00:33:54.715 --> 00:33:58.453
you start off the book, you talk about your biological grandfather,
00:33:58.953 --> 00:34:05.695
and then you delve into stories about children who have been lynched and all that.
00:34:05.695 --> 00:34:08.591
So do you feel that your book...
00:34:09.670 --> 00:34:15.846
Is a testimony to the atrocities of lynching, as well as being a narrative,
00:34:16.604 --> 00:34:17.980
what's the term I want to use?
00:34:18.433 --> 00:34:24.759
Dissertation about the history of lynching from Europe all the way to now.
00:34:25.785 --> 00:34:33.562
Yes, I think testimony is, you know, a powerful word that you can use to describe, strung up.
00:34:34.188 --> 00:34:36.992
But I think I will go a bit further.
00:34:37.703 --> 00:34:44.959
I would say that this book is both a historical testimony, but also an indictment.
00:34:45.586 --> 00:34:51.559
So I begin with my grandfather's murder in 1969. He was shot,
00:34:52.104 --> 00:34:58.402
beaten, hogtied, and thrown in the swamps by white men who were never prosecuted.
00:34:59.243 --> 00:35:05.118
So I began there because, you know, even as a scholar, this history was not
00:35:05.118 --> 00:35:06.750
abstract to me, was real.
00:35:07.066 --> 00:35:10.655
And it is a history that lives in families.
00:35:11.126 --> 00:35:18.409
It lives in memory and the stories that get passed from one generation to the next.
00:35:18.995 --> 00:35:25.158
And then I bring readers into the lives of individual Black children whose names
00:35:25.158 --> 00:35:30.414
and experiences and suffering have too often, as I said before,
00:35:30.722 --> 00:35:33.044
been erased from the historical record.
00:35:33.630 --> 00:35:38.828
But Strung Up is a work of rigorous historical scholarship.
00:35:38.828 --> 00:35:45.206
It took me over 10 years to write this book, and it grows out of my dissertation
00:35:45.630 --> 00:35:49.380
that I started and completed when I was at Rutgers University.
00:35:49.797 --> 00:35:53.088
So it's grounded in more than a decade of archival research,
00:35:53.088 --> 00:35:56.838
and it brings history into conversation with.
00:35:57.644 --> 00:36:03.159
Developmental psychology, with neuroscience, with childhood studies,
00:36:03.466 --> 00:36:05.418
and the study of racial violence.
00:36:05.418 --> 00:36:09.078
So I would describe it as a work of,
00:36:09.848 --> 00:36:17.047
narrative history and a testimony to the atrocities of lynching and an intellectual,
00:36:17.540 --> 00:36:22.304
indictment of the society that made all of those atrocities possible.
00:36:22.856 --> 00:36:27.856
So I'm not simply just, you know, kind of bearing witness to what was done,
00:36:28.360 --> 00:36:32.548
you know, to Black children. I'm asking what happened to white children who
00:36:32.548 --> 00:36:35.408
were taught to participate in all of this.
00:36:35.725 --> 00:36:40.468
Because the children who were murdered tell us something about the victims of
00:36:40.468 --> 00:36:44.828
white supremacy, but the children who were taught to enjoy those murders tell
00:36:44.828 --> 00:36:47.748
us something about this country's future.
00:36:48.535 --> 00:36:52.145
Is there a correlation between corporal punishment and lynching?
00:36:53.220 --> 00:36:58.587
Say more about why you're asking that question. Well, I know that you have been
00:36:58.587 --> 00:37:00.597
an advocate about child development.
00:37:00.597 --> 00:37:06.357
And one of the things that you have really stressed is that Black families need
00:37:06.357 --> 00:37:08.942
to get away from corporal punishment.
00:37:09.406 --> 00:37:15.126
And you made, I can't remember where I saw it in the book, but it was,
00:37:16.137 --> 00:37:23.589
you were making a point when you were talking about the European culture and how they basically,
00:37:24.111 --> 00:37:29.207
whether it's through punishment or through fairy tales, they want children to
00:37:29.207 --> 00:37:32.372
be obedient and they want them to be silent.
00:37:32.991 --> 00:37:42.557
And so, do you think that origin is a connection to how, you know, lynching happens?
00:37:42.557 --> 00:37:47.517
Is it not only like you said, well, I guess the word would be justified,
00:37:48.045 --> 00:37:52.597
right? It justifies it in the mind. It conditions people to understand this
00:37:52.597 --> 00:37:56.956
is a part of, if you're not obedient, this is what happens.
00:37:57.649 --> 00:37:59.261
Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:38:00.323 --> 00:38:03.987
So, yes, to your question. And,
00:38:04.503 --> 00:38:12.469
I think this is one of the central arguments in Strung Up, that to understand
00:38:12.469 --> 00:38:16.571
the lynching of Black bodies, the lynching of Black children,
00:38:17.128 --> 00:38:25.939
in Jim Crow America, we have to look at the history of white body violence in Europe.
00:38:26.357 --> 00:38:31.657
We have to look at the history of corporal punishment, spectacle violence,
00:38:32.086 --> 00:38:38.344
public executions, people being drawn and quartered, witches being burned alive,
00:38:38.750 --> 00:38:42.910
the hanging of children, the beating, the ritualistic beating of children,
00:38:43.728 --> 00:38:46.386
under the guise of religion and,
00:38:47.289 --> 00:38:51.304
teaching children and socializing children into obedience.
00:38:51.937 --> 00:38:56.419
So we have to look at all of these punishment practices in Europe to understand
00:38:56.419 --> 00:39:00.655
the culture of violence that Europeans brought to America.
00:39:01.728 --> 00:39:09.664
For centuries, European societies treated the beating of children as a kind of moral obligation.
00:39:10.012 --> 00:39:16.504
So children were considered in the European framework inherently sinful.
00:39:16.504 --> 00:39:20.534
So you've got to beat the devil out of them or, you know, this idea that people
00:39:20.534 --> 00:39:23.158
are, you know, human beings are born in sin.
00:39:23.298 --> 00:39:29.224
Those are not African and indigenous ideas about how you come into the world
00:39:29.224 --> 00:39:30.954
or the nature of children.
00:39:31.666 --> 00:39:37.152
So they consider kids sinful and disobedient and need of correction.
00:39:37.552 --> 00:39:44.764
Religious teachings reinforce this belief that pain was necessary to produce
00:39:45.129 --> 00:39:47.504
obedience and moral instruction.
00:39:47.504 --> 00:39:50.734
You didn't reason with children. You didn't talk with children.
00:39:50.734 --> 00:39:52.831
You just, you beat the devil out of them.
00:39:53.226 --> 00:39:58.874
So think about what that does to a child's developing mind when you hit them.
00:39:59.269 --> 00:40:04.279
When you teach children that love and violence are compatible,
00:40:04.848 --> 00:40:13.534
that authority has the right to inflict pain, that obedience must be secured
00:40:13.534 --> 00:40:16.642
through coercion and fear.
00:40:17.036 --> 00:40:21.350
You're teaching them a particular kind of relationship to power.
00:40:22.071 --> 00:40:26.372
Those children grow up. They become parents.
00:40:26.674 --> 00:40:32.050
They become teachers and ministers and police officers and political leaders.
00:40:32.369 --> 00:40:38.284
And some of them carry those lessons into the institutions that they control.
00:40:38.969 --> 00:40:42.212
Now, consider lynching in America.
00:40:42.835 --> 00:40:48.522
So white supremacy operated through a similar authoritarian logic.
00:40:49.399 --> 00:40:52.937
Black people were expected to obey white authority.
00:40:53.979 --> 00:40:58.316
To not question it, to submit, to be obedient.
00:40:58.541 --> 00:41:05.799
And those who challenge the racial hierarchy could be subjected to spectacular violence.
00:41:06.788 --> 00:41:14.933
That, you know, the white child who was, say, beaten into obedience at home,
00:41:15.629 --> 00:41:20.157
could then grow up in a society that taught him that he had the right to demand
00:41:20.541 --> 00:41:23.855
obedience from Black people through violence.
00:41:24.749 --> 00:41:32.922
Think about Carmelo Anthony and the white youth teenager who felt entitled to
00:41:32.922 --> 00:41:38.173
try to make this Black boy obey, to get in his place.
00:41:38.713 --> 00:41:45.266
So I'm not suggesting that every child who experiences corporal punishment becomes violent,
00:41:45.806 --> 00:41:51.342
but the historical connection is definitely important because European traditions
00:41:51.342 --> 00:41:54.333
of authoritarian child-rearing help to
00:41:54.757 --> 00:42:02.802
normalize the idea that physical suffering could be righteous and corrective and necessary.
00:42:03.103 --> 00:42:09.228
And so you got to ask, you know, what happens when a culture teaches its children to,
00:42:09.919 --> 00:42:16.003
to submit to violence from those above them and then gives them racial permission
00:42:16.368 --> 00:42:22.832
to inflict the violence on people that are considered beneath them? Yeah, well.
00:42:24.085 --> 00:42:29.739
Doc, a lot I can say is I wish you were around when I was growing up because
00:42:30.012 --> 00:42:34.625
me and my friends, we, you know, we, you know, being intellectual adults,
00:42:34.625 --> 00:42:35.735
we'll say corporal punishment.
00:42:36.115 --> 00:42:39.606
My dad whooped my ass. That is the bottom line. He just beat the hell out of me.
00:42:40.220 --> 00:42:49.141
And, you know, and then I'm grateful that I didn't pass that on on my child. Right.
00:42:49.600 --> 00:42:55.135
I didn't I didn't inflict that kind. I think the worst I ever did was his mom
00:42:55.135 --> 00:42:58.845
had a little pink comb when he was a baby. And so if he did something,
00:42:58.845 --> 00:43:00.351
she'd tap him on the leg and all that.
00:43:00.734 --> 00:43:04.195
So I bought me the same kind of pink comb at the beauty store.
00:43:04.195 --> 00:43:07.295
So when he was with me, I had the little comb. So all I had to do was just show it.
00:43:07.315 --> 00:43:10.864
And he said, okay, he got one of those combs too.
00:43:11.392 --> 00:43:19.055
But, you know, to the extent of just like, you know, grabbing the biggest piece
00:43:19.055 --> 00:43:21.175
of leather you can and just whooping them down.
00:43:21.175 --> 00:43:26.955
Like my dad did me, I didn't do that. But, you know, and then in the black community,
00:43:26.955 --> 00:43:29.043
we kind of look at that as, well, that's tradition.
00:43:29.559 --> 00:43:32.245
You know what I'm saying? That's just, you know, that's the way it is.
00:43:32.245 --> 00:43:38.299
And then a lot of us in our generation kind of said, yeah, I don't know if we want to do that.
00:43:38.897 --> 00:43:43.845
I don't know what it is about us Gen X folks, but that was just kind of the
00:43:43.845 --> 00:43:49.721
direction we went. And it seems like that that was a positive thing to do.
00:43:50.806 --> 00:43:54.474
But then a lot of people should. Let me say this. All right.
00:43:55.104 --> 00:44:00.813
So I always say that whipping a Black child is one of the whitest things you
00:44:00.813 --> 00:44:07.867
can do to destroy a Black child physiologically, spiritually, emotionally.
00:44:08.703 --> 00:44:15.143
That is not us. When we look at our pre-colonial ways of being in kinship with
00:44:15.143 --> 00:44:19.587
our children, this type of ritualistic violence did not exist.
00:44:19.866 --> 00:44:25.241
This is a gift, and I say that facetiously, of colonialism and slavery.
00:44:26.116 --> 00:44:32.146
And so when I say it is one of the whitest things you can do to your Black child,
00:44:32.686 --> 00:44:34.468
I'm not talking about white skin.
00:44:35.134 --> 00:44:41.202
I'm talking about a historical system of power that made violence against Black
00:44:41.202 --> 00:44:46.280
bodies a legitimate way to demand obedience and to teach.
00:44:46.929 --> 00:44:53.077
Think about it. During slavery, the whip was the primary instrument of white supremacy.
00:44:53.773 --> 00:44:59.566
It was used to humiliate, to terrorize, to control, to break Black folks into submission.
00:44:59.839 --> 00:45:04.837
A slaveholder's message was quite simple. Your body does not belong to you.
00:45:05.290 --> 00:45:10.792
Your pain is mine to inflict and your obedience is mine to demand.
00:45:11.688 --> 00:45:15.849
So when we whip Black children today, and we are still whipping Black children,
00:45:16.238 --> 00:45:20.252
Black children still have, you know, yes, you're right.
00:45:21.487 --> 00:45:25.172
There are people who are starting to move away from that. And,
00:45:25.772 --> 00:45:31.992
when you look at national surveys on corporal punishment, you see more and more
00:45:31.992 --> 00:45:37.016
parents moving away from that type of parenting practice because we've got.
00:45:38.272 --> 00:45:42.662
More than 60 years worth of medical science literature that shows this is harmful
00:45:42.662 --> 00:45:49.102
for children's bodies, their brain development, their nervous system, their immune system.
00:45:49.102 --> 00:45:56.176
So there is some movement away, but Black children still suffer the highest rates of child abuse.
00:45:56.664 --> 00:46:02.086
And our child abuse fatality rates is at a historic high. They're as high as they've ever been.
00:46:02.699 --> 00:46:08.322
So we can't think that, you know, Gen Xers and millennials are completely abandoning
00:46:08.322 --> 00:46:10.136
these practices because they're not.
00:46:10.417 --> 00:46:16.357
But when we whip Black children today, and people still call it love and discipline,
00:46:17.052 --> 00:46:23.791
we risk reproducing the same logic of domination inside of our own homes.
00:46:24.824 --> 00:46:29.614
And this is what troubles me the most, Eric, is we tell Black children that
00:46:29.614 --> 00:46:32.045
the police have no right to brutalize them,
00:46:32.798 --> 00:46:38.414
that white people have no right to violate their bodies, that the world must
00:46:38.414 --> 00:46:40.282
respect their humanity.
00:46:40.590 --> 00:46:46.743
But then we turn around and teach them that the people who love them the most,
00:46:47.390 --> 00:46:52.423
have the right to hurt them. So my violence is the good kind.
00:46:53.010 --> 00:46:57.794
I think that's a profound contradiction. Now, I understand why corporal punishment
00:46:57.794 --> 00:47:00.045
became normalized in Black families.
00:47:00.562 --> 00:47:05.674
I understand the historical fear that a child's disobedience,
00:47:05.674 --> 00:47:09.957
especially in a racist society, could cost them their life. I get that.
00:47:10.415 --> 00:47:16.900
But we have to distinguish the intention to protect a child from the impact of hurting that child.
00:47:17.631 --> 00:47:25.172
The whip, the slave master's whip, was never an instrument of Black liberation.
00:47:26.425 --> 00:47:31.487
It was an instrument of Black submission and oppression.
00:47:31.725 --> 00:47:39.254
And I refuse to believe that we can beat freedom, dignity, and self-respect
00:47:39.254 --> 00:47:42.381
or liberation into a Black child.
00:47:43.589 --> 00:47:50.254
If white supremacy has spent centuries teaching Black children that their bodies
00:47:50.254 --> 00:47:56.696
are available for punishment, then one of the most radical things we can do is teach them,
00:47:57.167 --> 00:47:59.076
that their bodies belong to them.
00:47:59.808 --> 00:48:04.884
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. Again, I wish you had talked to my dad,
00:48:04.884 --> 00:48:10.124
but anyway, let's go on. Let's get to, do you think our current political climate
00:48:10.124 --> 00:48:14.449
has been shaped by the epigenetic inheritance of trauma?
00:48:15.471 --> 00:48:21.023
Again, ask me why you're asking that question. So based on reading your book, um.
00:48:22.559 --> 00:48:34.519
There's to me, there's there's a connection between instilling a lack of empathy into white children.
00:48:35.183 --> 00:48:40.083
And I and one of the things that we have always been critical about this administration,
00:48:40.714 --> 00:48:46.435
is the lack of empathy or the appearance of a lack of empathy.
00:48:47.410 --> 00:48:52.703
And I think the way the political dynamics are shaping up in America now is
00:48:52.703 --> 00:48:57.533
that you have these incredible candidates on the Democratic side who come from
00:48:57.533 --> 00:48:59.044
all these different backgrounds.
00:48:59.655 --> 00:49:03.033
And when they talk about affordability, they're talking about.
00:49:04.533 --> 00:49:07.282
I understand that you are struggling.
00:49:07.404 --> 00:49:12.495
If you elect me, I'm going to do my best to alleviate that struggling.
00:49:13.163 --> 00:49:19.264
Whereas the Republicans have been depicted as these people that's like, everything is fine.
00:49:19.554 --> 00:49:22.300
The president is great. The country is hot.
00:49:22.974 --> 00:49:28.800
You're not struggling. So it's like, elect us to keep everything the way it is.
00:49:29.836 --> 00:49:35.643
So you talk about epigenetics one of my favorite terms and a lot of people don't
00:49:35.643 --> 00:49:37.516
know what that means it means that,
00:49:38.189 --> 00:49:43.433
basically your environment can get under your skin so all kinds of trauma,
00:49:44.093 --> 00:49:51.113
traumatic experiences and it can change the way your genes express themselves
00:49:51.113 --> 00:49:55.430
if you can your brain makes certain adaptations to your environment and you can,
00:49:55.964 --> 00:50:00.951
transfer you could transmit those adaptations across generations.
00:50:01.713 --> 00:50:06.363
So you think about a pregnant woman, three people share that pregnancy,
00:50:06.363 --> 00:50:12.323
the woman who is pregnant, the child developing in utero, and that unborn child's
00:50:12.323 --> 00:50:14.029
child who's there as a cell.
00:50:15.074 --> 00:50:21.094
So, yes, I think we have to seriously examine the possibility that our current,
00:50:21.593 --> 00:50:23.695
political climate reflects,
00:50:24.334 --> 00:50:31.039
centuries of inherited patterns of violence,
00:50:31.921 --> 00:50:41.514
of fear, authoritarianism, emotional conditioning within white American society.
00:50:42.256 --> 00:50:48.463
And I need to be careful about the science here So epigenetics,
00:50:49.330 --> 00:50:54.401
again, studies how environmental experiences can affect your gene expression, right?
00:50:54.755 --> 00:51:01.770
So we know that chronic stress and trauma can alter people's stress response
00:51:01.770 --> 00:51:06.920
system So how they respond to problems or people who are different or people
00:51:06.920 --> 00:51:09.201
who they're taught to fear,
00:51:10.091 --> 00:51:13.626
We have not established scientifically information.
00:51:15.896 --> 00:51:22.700
What we haven't established scientifically is that cruelty, racism,
00:51:22.700 --> 00:51:28.980
or an absence of empathy gets genetically transmitted from one generation to the next.
00:51:29.640 --> 00:51:35.380
There's no studies that have established that. But think about what happened
00:51:35.380 --> 00:51:38.455
to generations of white children in Europe.
00:51:39.157 --> 00:51:44.300
So they were beaten into obedience. they were raised in authoritarian religious
00:51:44.300 --> 00:51:51.528
cultures that taught them to fear punishment, to suppress their emotions, to submit to power.
00:51:52.360 --> 00:51:57.250
For at least 2,000 years of recorded history that we have, they witnessed public
00:51:57.250 --> 00:52:02.074
executions and torture and spectacles of human suffering.
00:52:02.574 --> 00:52:07.583
And those children grew into adults who raised other children.
00:52:08.512 --> 00:52:13.910
And when Europeans colonized America, their bodies, their psychology,
00:52:13.910 --> 00:52:21.254
their cultural traditions, they were perfectly primed to become people who would colonize the world,
00:52:21.887 --> 00:52:25.875
who would dispossess indigenous people, who could enslave millions,
00:52:26.159 --> 00:52:28.040
who could lynch thousands.
00:52:28.371 --> 00:52:31.482
They had the psychological framework to do that.
00:52:32.173 --> 00:52:41.048
They bought those traditions of punishment and domination with them. Now.
00:52:42.293 --> 00:52:47.042
Think about the developing nervous system, right? So children who experience
00:52:47.413 --> 00:52:51.189
chronic fear can become hypervigilant.
00:52:51.572 --> 00:52:59.053
They can become emotionally dysregulated, more reactive to perceived threats.
00:52:59.355 --> 00:53:06.745
So some might learn to suppress empathy as a means of psychological survival.
00:53:07.197 --> 00:53:12.555
Others may identify with the very authority that hurt them.
00:53:12.555 --> 00:53:18.384
So that's like kids who still have strong attachments to their abusive families
00:53:18.582 --> 00:53:22.805
because attachment is non-negotiable with children. They need to attach to their
00:53:22.805 --> 00:53:27.194
caregivers to ensure their survival.
00:53:27.513 --> 00:53:33.775
So we should ask whether those lessons help explain the political culture that
00:53:33.775 --> 00:53:36.906
we see today. And I think Absolutely, they do.
00:53:37.452 --> 00:53:41.533
Let's go back to January 6th to the famous insurrection, right?
00:53:42.014 --> 00:53:47.146
So people showed up, they stormed, white folks stormed the Capitol.
00:53:47.975 --> 00:53:52.405
They erected a gallows. They bought a guillotine. Like, how do you know how
00:53:52.405 --> 00:53:54.474
to do that in this century, right?
00:53:55.101 --> 00:54:00.099
They chanted about hanging the vice president. They wanted to lynch the vice president.
00:54:01.098 --> 00:54:07.762
And that wasn't just some kind of political disagreement. It was an expression of political rage.
00:54:08.284 --> 00:54:14.255
It was an expression of political rage in which the threat of public violence
00:54:14.255 --> 00:54:17.359
became a tool for asserting power.
00:54:18.043 --> 00:54:24.132
And look at the cruelty that has been, you know, normalized in political rhetoric.
00:54:25.130 --> 00:54:29.861
You know, the humiliation of vulnerable people, the celebration of punishment,
00:54:30.337 --> 00:54:35.552
the portrayal of, you know, empathy as like as weakness.
00:54:36.046 --> 00:54:43.164
Right. So I believe we need to investigate how centuries of authoritarian child rearing,
00:54:43.995 --> 00:54:50.055
and racial domination and public violence shape the emotional culture that America
00:54:50.055 --> 00:54:51.764
continues to inherit today.
00:54:52.264 --> 00:54:56.350
Yeah. All right. And I appreciate your time.
00:54:57.555 --> 00:55:02.335
I have a couple more questions I want to ask. How does courage,
00:55:02.335 --> 00:55:08.275
memory, audacity, and resistance play a major role in the Black American experience?
00:55:09.187 --> 00:55:14.011
Okay, that was a lot packed in there. Can you say that again? So courage. Memory.
00:55:14.603 --> 00:55:17.372
Uh-huh. Audacity and resistance.
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:23.393
And resistance play a role in what was the rest of that? The Black American experience.
00:55:24.283 --> 00:55:29.568
Well, those are all the components that have kept us alive, right?
00:55:30.332 --> 00:55:33.995
You know, some people would look at.
00:55:36.575 --> 00:55:44.117
The Black American story as just this ongoing narrative about suffering and victimization, right?
00:55:44.663 --> 00:55:51.033
But I think what you just named are pillars of the Black American story.
00:55:51.979 --> 00:55:57.826
Core pillars. And I would argue that you can't understand Black survival.
00:55:59.492 --> 00:56:02.661
Without understanding how those four things work together.
00:56:03.898 --> 00:56:11.003
So if I can remember correctly, memory. So memory tells us what happened, right?
00:56:11.648 --> 00:56:16.225
It doesn't allow us to forget because denial and forgetting is how horrible
00:56:16.225 --> 00:56:18.439
things, horrible history repeats itself.
00:56:19.512 --> 00:56:25.555
Courage. Courage allows us to confront it, to confront it all, right?
00:56:26.401 --> 00:56:32.355
I think the third one was audacity. So audacity gives us, you know,
00:56:32.655 --> 00:56:37.095
permission to imagine something beyond all of this.
00:56:38.152 --> 00:56:42.805
And we really need to be audacious in this political moment while there's all
00:56:42.805 --> 00:56:46.737
of this conversation about saving democracy.
00:56:46.946 --> 00:56:50.829
I don't think Black people should be participating in that project,
00:56:51.363 --> 00:56:56.275
because if you really understand the history of democracy, you'll understand
00:56:56.275 --> 00:57:02.694
that democracy is not some pure form of government in which Black people were temporarily excluded.
00:57:03.779 --> 00:57:09.016
You know, our enslavement, extraction, abuse, dehumanization,
00:57:09.166 --> 00:57:14.055
murders provide the framework for democracy.
00:57:14.502 --> 00:57:20.955
So Black people need to have the audacity to, you know, imagine a different
00:57:20.955 --> 00:57:24.469
kind of future without this form of government.
00:57:24.672 --> 00:57:27.256
You need to be thinking post-empire, right?
00:57:28.091 --> 00:57:30.918
And I think the last one was resistance.
00:57:31.956 --> 00:57:37.297
Resistance is how we fight to make that imagination real.
00:57:38.605 --> 00:57:44.357
I mean, just look at our history. We've done those four pillars that you've named before.
00:57:44.949 --> 00:57:50.492
Think about the audacity of enslaved people who learned how to read when literacy
00:57:50.492 --> 00:57:52.989
could get them beaten or killed.
00:57:53.558 --> 00:57:59.062
Think about Black mothers and fathers who had the audacity to keep bringing
00:57:59.062 --> 00:58:05.184
life into this world. You know, W.E.B. Du Bois asked this famous ethical question,
00:58:05.915 --> 00:58:07.907
ought children be born to us?
00:58:08.406 --> 00:58:13.422
Do we have any right to make human souls face what we must face?
00:58:13.422 --> 00:58:17.270
And we've been answering his question ever since.
00:58:17.821 --> 00:58:23.871
We raised children to believe that they deserve freedom in a country that,
00:58:24.370 --> 00:58:27.458
you know, historically insisted that our children were property.
00:58:27.835 --> 00:58:33.850
Think about the courage of Ida B. Wells, who investigated lynchings.
00:58:34.972 --> 00:58:40.536
And when telling the truth could cost her her life's audacity.
00:58:41.264 --> 00:58:45.548
And I think about all the people that I write about in Strung Up,
00:58:46.149 --> 00:58:52.412
the children whose lives were snatched from the future, the families that mourned
00:58:52.412 --> 00:58:57.512
them, the communities that, you know, snuck children outside.
00:58:57.512 --> 00:59:04.665
Time to save their lives, that refused to let their names disappear from the historical record.
00:59:05.008 --> 00:59:11.120
I think about Fred Moore from Assumption Parish in Louisiana, whose parents,
00:59:11.672 --> 00:59:17.802
fled Louisiana after their teenage son was lynched and went to federal court
00:59:17.802 --> 00:59:20.403
and sued, won the first ever lawsuit,
00:59:20.999 --> 00:59:23.577
to get simple justice for their murdered child.
00:59:24.210 --> 00:59:30.817
So remembering them is itself an act of resistance because white supremacy depends,
00:59:31.368 --> 00:59:34.509
not only on violence, but also on forgetting.
00:59:35.288 --> 00:59:39.139
Black history is not simply a story of suffering.
00:59:40.059 --> 00:59:44.749
It's a history of people who refuse to surrender their humanity,
00:59:44.749 --> 00:59:49.749
even when the most powerful institutions in this country were organized and
00:59:49.749 --> 00:59:52.491
are still organized to destroy it.
00:59:53.131 --> 01:00:00.759
I think, Eric, there is something extraordinarily audacious about a people who
01:00:00.759 --> 01:00:02.740
survived the Middle Passage,
01:00:03.463 --> 01:00:12.029
who survived slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, segregation, and generations of state
01:00:12.029 --> 01:00:17.340
violence and still produced all kinds of genius.
01:00:18.031 --> 01:00:24.545
They still produced intellectual traditions, universities, HBCUs.
01:00:25.677 --> 01:00:32.189
Literature, music, political moments, and visions of liberation that not only
01:00:32.189 --> 01:00:35.955
just transformed the United States, but the world.
01:00:36.591 --> 01:00:42.703
Black Americans have never had the luxury of waiting around for America to develop a conscience.
01:00:43.139 --> 01:00:48.241
We had to become the conscience that America kept trying to silence.
01:00:48.723 --> 01:00:54.615
And that's why I decided to write Strung Up, because memory without those pillars,
01:00:55.062 --> 01:00:58.464
without courage, just becomes nostalgia.
01:00:58.725 --> 01:01:02.607
Courage without resistance is just, you know, a whole bunch of performance.
01:01:03.495 --> 01:01:10.269
Resistance without audacity, if you don't have that, you can't imagine a future
01:01:10.269 --> 01:01:14.446
beyond the conditions that we're fighting. Yeah.
01:01:15.781 --> 01:01:18.980
All right. I was going to ask you this question. You kind of answered it.
01:01:19.580 --> 01:01:23.249
So I'm going to skip that one and just go to the closing challenge,
01:01:23.921 --> 01:01:25.632
which is finish this sentence.
01:01:26.104 --> 01:01:27.775
I have hope because.
01:01:30.589 --> 01:01:36.543
I struggle with it because sometimes my cynicism pushes hope out the way.
01:01:36.543 --> 01:01:43.010
Because as a historian, I don't always believe that the archives owe us hope.
01:01:43.388 --> 01:01:47.097
I don't believe that dead children owe us hope.
01:01:47.907 --> 01:01:50.432
You know, we owe them responsibility.
01:01:51.268 --> 01:01:57.393
But I have hope because Black people have spent centuries surviving things that
01:01:57.393 --> 01:01:59.302
were designed to destroy us.
01:01:59.939 --> 01:02:05.603
And yet we're still here because our ancestors imagined freedom when there was
01:02:05.603 --> 01:02:09.293
no evidence that freedom was even possible.
01:02:10.288 --> 01:02:17.233
I think that every generation has produced people who are courageous enough
01:02:17.233 --> 01:02:21.152
to resist, audacious enough to dream.
01:02:22.375 --> 01:02:29.007
And determined to fight for a future that they might never live to see.
01:02:29.493 --> 01:02:33.690
And so I have hope. I know this is like a run-on sentence,
01:02:34.265 --> 01:02:40.050
but I have hope not because I believe America will suddenly develop a conscience,
01:02:40.050 --> 01:02:45.566
but because Black people have never waited for America to find one. Yeah.
01:02:46.621 --> 01:02:52.118
Well, Dr. Stacey Patton, first of all, I want to thank you for writing the book.
01:02:52.733 --> 01:02:56.750
I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. And I also want to thank you
01:02:56.750 --> 01:03:01.230
for taking me back to my days at Jackson State University, where I would ask
01:03:01.230 --> 01:03:05.910
a question of a professor and professor, Fleming, where are you going with that?
01:03:08.070 --> 01:03:11.850
I was like, I said, oh, wow, I'm in class again. This is great.
01:03:13.510 --> 01:03:17.560
But I greatly appreciate the time. If people want to reach out to you,
01:03:17.560 --> 01:03:19.708
if people want to get the book, how can they do that?
01:03:20.484 --> 01:03:24.860
So Strung Up, How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children,
01:03:24.860 --> 01:03:27.592
that is the book. It just came out this week.
01:03:28.085 --> 01:03:35.650
It is at all major booksellers, bookshop.org, Amazon, Beacon Press.
01:03:35.650 --> 01:03:38.229
So you can find it just about everywhere.
01:03:38.752 --> 01:03:46.125
And they can follow me on Facebook at Stacey Patton or on Substack, Dr. Stacey Patton.
01:03:46.816 --> 01:03:50.721
All right. Well, Dr. Patton, again, I enjoyed this conversation.
01:03:51.063 --> 01:03:56.620
I had to cut out some questions because I could talk to you for a long time.
01:03:56.620 --> 01:03:58.755
But again, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.
01:03:59.691 --> 01:04:04.817
And thank you so much for having me and for having the courage to have this conversation.
01:04:05.316 --> 01:04:08.061
Yes, ma'am. All right, guys, we're going to catch y'all on the other.
01:04:30.083 --> 01:04:36.150
All right, we are back. So I want to thank Dr. Stacey Patton for coming on the podcast.
01:04:36.930 --> 01:04:40.802
Please go and get this book Strung Up. It is incredible.
01:04:41.677 --> 01:04:47.983
Because like we said, it's not just a chronology of events.
01:04:50.520 --> 01:04:57.382
It is really a narrative dissertation on the mindset of why,
01:04:58.347 --> 01:05:06.328
people are conditioned or were conditioned to see black children being killed
01:05:06.328 --> 01:05:08.603
in such a brutal and atrocious way.
01:05:09.470 --> 01:05:16.028
And to some degree what we're seeing now with, you know, anything from Trayvon
01:05:16.028 --> 01:05:19.935
Martin to Timur Rice, to Michael Brown,
01:05:20.839 --> 01:05:25.279
you know, the list goes on and on about children being killed.
01:05:26.092 --> 01:05:31.978
I can't remember the young brother's name in Chicago, but he was only like, I think, 16. You know.
01:05:34.500 --> 01:05:35.052
It's...
01:05:36.588 --> 01:05:41.427
It's a very, very powerful book, and I suggest that everybody go get it.
01:05:41.631 --> 01:05:44.566
Dr. Padden is an incredible mind. Like I said in the interview,
01:05:44.566 --> 01:05:46.227
I felt like I was back in class.
01:05:47.590 --> 01:05:51.556
The way she was asking me to explain the questions, what my mindset was in asking
01:05:51.556 --> 01:05:53.087
a question, I thought that was great.
01:05:54.221 --> 01:06:00.506
But, you know, I think it's timely because we're talking about executions in
01:06:00.506 --> 01:06:04.756
the United States in the name of justice. And you heard me go on my rant about
01:06:04.756 --> 01:06:06.417
the death penalty last episode.
01:06:07.148 --> 01:06:13.846
By the way, the young lady who they botched twice in Tennessee,
01:06:13.846 --> 01:06:15.784
she is literally out of the hospital now.
01:06:16.678 --> 01:06:21.774
She had been unconscious in ICU, but she was released from the hospital.
01:06:22.076 --> 01:06:23.678
So she's going back to jail.
01:06:24.497 --> 01:06:29.153
And I want to say Pine, Christine Pine, if I'm saying her name wrong, y'all correct me.
01:06:30.122 --> 01:06:33.606
But the young lady, Pine or Pike, something like that.
01:06:33.606 --> 01:06:36.730
Anyway, she's out of the hospital,
01:06:37.343 --> 01:06:43.729
and the same day that she was released from the hospital, we get the word that,
01:06:44.983 --> 01:06:55.320
Nadal Hassan, who was the Army major who killed 12 people at Fort Hood and wounded 32 others,
01:06:56.209 --> 01:06:58.448
he was sentenced to death.
01:06:59.894 --> 01:07:04.056
And they want to do the firing squad for him. And then Pete Hegseff went as
01:07:04.056 --> 01:07:07.187
far as to say, yeah, we're going to live stream it, right?
01:07:07.977 --> 01:07:11.756
And I just talked to you last week about how in Saudi Arabia they literally
01:07:11.756 --> 01:07:15.048
have, it's like a national holiday when they execute somebody there.
01:07:15.768 --> 01:07:19.226
So I guess Hegseff wants to do the same thing. I guess none of the networks
01:07:19.226 --> 01:07:21.776
are going to broadcast it, so he wants to live stream it.
01:07:23.516 --> 01:07:26.889
And fortunately, there have been some people who are like, yeah,
01:07:27.641 --> 01:07:30.331
probably not. You probably don't want to do that. Right.
01:07:30.949 --> 01:07:35.116
But that ties into the discussion we were having in the mindset.
01:07:36.520 --> 01:07:46.081
Of the violent mindset that you equate punishment with maintaining white supremacy,
01:07:46.081 --> 01:07:48.120
maintaining control. Right.
01:07:48.974 --> 01:07:52.591
I mean, it just it just looped in perfectly. And then I was about to go down
01:07:52.591 --> 01:07:58.285
a rabbit hole, but I pulled myself out when I was talking about Navi Pillay,
01:07:59.173 --> 01:08:02.872
who is one of the judges, I guess, in international criminal court.
01:08:03.370 --> 01:08:08.931
She received the Nobel Peace Prize for years of work, but primarily she was
01:08:08.931 --> 01:08:11.808
Nelson Mandela's attorney at one point.
01:08:12.608 --> 01:08:20.401
And she was basically part of the group in the court that decided that what
01:08:20.401 --> 01:08:26.010
Israel was doing to the Palestinians in Gaza was equivalent to genocide.
01:08:27.182 --> 01:08:29.981
Which led to arrest warrants for Netanyahu.
01:08:30.301 --> 01:08:36.411
And in retaliation for her getting the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States
01:08:36.411 --> 01:08:39.431
government has decided they're going to sanction the International Criminal
01:08:39.431 --> 01:08:43.721
Court, which kind of explains because there were some people I wanted to come on.
01:08:43.721 --> 01:08:51.371
And I'm glad Sister Rob kind of did it in her capacity as working with the court.
01:08:51.371 --> 01:08:55.601
But, you know, there were some people that have been pushing for the International
01:08:55.601 --> 01:08:59.874
Supreme, I mean, criminal court for us because we signed a Rome Statute.
01:09:00.280 --> 01:09:04.971
You heard Professor Rob talk about that, refer to that.
01:09:06.028 --> 01:09:10.081
And the Rome Statute created that, I guess, in the early 2000s,
01:09:10.081 --> 01:09:13.098
maybe 2002, something like that. Well, we...
01:09:14.742 --> 01:09:18.155
We agreed to the treaty, but then we didn't sign off on the court.
01:09:18.830 --> 01:09:20.026
So we're not a part of that.
01:09:20.908 --> 01:09:27.468
So, you know, the United States, because we don't recognize it,
01:09:27.915 --> 01:09:33.076
you know, it's hard to enforce if they say we committed a war crime. Right.
01:09:34.283 --> 01:09:41.703
But Israel signed off on it. So now they're subject to the ruling of the court.
01:09:43.076 --> 01:09:50.127
And, you know, so, you know, I guess, you know, that's the only court,
01:09:50.453 --> 01:09:56.693
because of all this time that has happened, this decision happened a year or two ago, right?
01:09:57.990 --> 01:10:02.879
And, you know, when South Africa petitioned the International Criminal Court,
01:10:03.442 --> 01:10:07.755
against Israel, you know, that decision has been made.
01:10:08.172 --> 01:10:11.553
And that's why it's been a discussion in the United States, you know,
01:10:11.553 --> 01:10:14.683
for politicians to actually call it a genocide, because that's what the International
01:10:14.683 --> 01:10:16.504
Criminal Court said it was, right?
01:10:19.272 --> 01:10:24.582
So anyway, Ms. Pillay gets the award, and then all of a sudden now we're going
01:10:24.582 --> 01:10:27.377
to sanction the International Criminal Court.
01:10:28.632 --> 01:10:33.177
So what the sanction would mean is that if you are doing business with the court,
01:10:33.831 --> 01:10:39.872
say you're Staples or Office Depot, and you supply office supplies to the International
01:10:39.872 --> 01:10:42.235
Criminal Court, you can be sanctioned for that.
01:10:43.507 --> 01:10:46.525
Now, there's supposed to be like a 30-day window in there.
01:10:47.359 --> 01:10:54.252
So, you know, if you just made a transaction with them or a business deal,
01:10:54.252 --> 01:10:59.022
you got 30 days to finish up your business or to cancel whatever agreement you
01:10:59.022 --> 01:11:01.633
got or whatever, or the United States is going to,
01:11:02.910 --> 01:11:07.262
punish you economically for doing business with the International Criminal Court.
01:11:07.262 --> 01:11:12.542
That's pretty much all they can do is punish the people who are doing business
01:11:12.542 --> 01:11:17.723
with them, which means the National Criminal Court will use other countries,
01:11:18.942 --> 01:11:23.532
to get their supplies from instead of the United States.
01:11:23.532 --> 01:11:29.381
So if you're a U.S. company that does business in the National Criminal Court,
01:11:30.034 --> 01:11:34.609
then according to the Trump administration, you're going to be in trouble, right? Right.
01:11:36.409 --> 01:11:41.381
And I guess any business outside the United States, I don't know,
01:11:41.381 --> 01:11:43.760
they're not going to be able to do business in the United States? I don't know.
01:11:44.921 --> 01:11:48.432
It's just petty and stupid.
01:11:49.137 --> 01:11:55.141
And it seems like you have bigger fish to fry than being mad because for yet
01:11:55.141 --> 01:12:00.823
another year you did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. It went to somebody who deserved it, right?
01:12:02.384 --> 01:12:07.131
And I guess since there's no FIFA World Cup coming up, you're not going to get
01:12:07.131 --> 01:12:12.211
another FIFA prize, Mr. President. But, I mean, it is what it is.
01:12:12.843 --> 01:12:15.983
You know, you got half of your Congress is out for the election.
01:12:17.562 --> 01:12:19.972
The other half is not really doing much of anything.
01:12:21.886 --> 01:12:26.202
And gas prices are still high and food prices are still high.
01:12:27.015 --> 01:12:30.941
And people are making determinations about whether they're going to take care
01:12:30.941 --> 01:12:34.579
of their health or pay rent.
01:12:35.430 --> 01:12:39.291
So, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Mr. President. Sanction the International Criminal
01:12:39.291 --> 01:12:42.101
Court. That will solve all of our problems.
01:12:43.482 --> 01:12:46.576
And I hope your ego feels better because of that.
01:12:49.076 --> 01:12:56.781
But to be honest, I really don't care about the president's ego because he got
01:12:56.781 --> 01:13:02.595
on stage and called Letitia James a dog.
01:13:03.740 --> 01:13:09.671
Now you say, Eric, he has done that to all sorts of women, right?
01:13:09.671 --> 01:13:14.621
You know, he's called white women, piggy and, you know, stupid and all this
01:13:14.621 --> 01:13:20.271
other stuff. But it's like, You are 24 days, well, at that time.
01:13:20.271 --> 01:13:22.099
He was 24 days away from the election.
01:13:22.889 --> 01:13:26.112
You're literally less than a month away from the election.
01:13:26.840 --> 01:13:32.389
You're trying to say you want your name on the ballot, meaning you want people,
01:13:32.518 --> 01:13:38.171
when they vote, they're voting, even though you're not officially running,
01:13:38.171 --> 01:13:41.281
you want them to vote for the candidates that support you.
01:13:41.281 --> 01:13:45.420
You want them to vote Republican. Act like you're on the ballot. That's what you said.
01:13:47.191 --> 01:13:52.074
And I assume, because you seem to be proud of the fact that you had gotten a
01:13:52.074 --> 01:13:55.724
lot of black votes compared to other Republican presidential candidates in the
01:13:55.724 --> 01:13:59.927
past, that you want to continue to get black votes.
01:14:00.212 --> 01:14:06.863
Here's a trick. Stop calling black women dogs. How about that? Stop doing that.
01:14:07.684 --> 01:14:14.771
Stop being obstinate. Stop being an asshole. Can you do that for three?
01:14:15.805 --> 01:14:18.661
That's the only political advice I can give you, Mr. President.
01:14:19.060 --> 01:14:23.606
For the next couple of weeks, can you just stop being an asshole and act like the president?
01:14:24.245 --> 01:14:26.253
Act like you give a shit about the people here.
01:14:26.894 --> 01:14:32.954
If you want Republicans to have a chance, can you just stop being an ass for a couple of weeks?
01:14:33.685 --> 01:14:35.915
Is it possible? Is it in your DNA?
01:14:36.722 --> 01:14:40.546
Or as the term we used in the interview, your epigenetics. Is it possible?
01:14:41.789 --> 01:14:48.183
Or do you even give a shit about the people that are running under your banner? Right?
01:14:50.600 --> 01:14:53.317
Because it's pretty obvious you don't give a damn about any of us.
01:14:54.369 --> 01:14:58.236
You know, you only care about the people who are, quote unquote, loyal to you.
01:14:59.416 --> 01:15:02.935
So, you know, for those people that keep going to rallies and think that's okay,
01:15:02.935 --> 01:15:05.337
that's humorous and all that stuff, that's fine.
01:15:06.176 --> 01:15:10.588
But when people treat you a certain way, then you just going to have to suck that up.
01:15:11.347 --> 01:15:18.415
Because I'm sure if you go to New York wearing that MAGA hat or whatever and
01:15:18.415 --> 01:15:21.475
talking to it, yeah, you got the right for free speech. You got the right to
01:15:21.475 --> 01:15:24.386
express yourself, but so do those New Yorkers.
01:15:24.996 --> 01:15:29.645
And Leticia James' name has come up because she's been assigned to find out,
01:15:30.133 --> 01:15:36.115
what happened to that young woman in Cornell that got gang raped by a fraternity.
01:15:36.225 --> 01:15:42.623
Now, the university has banned a fraternity from the campus and all that stuff.
01:15:43.243 --> 01:15:49.285
And we're finding out from another case that happened at LSU that universities
01:15:49.285 --> 01:15:52.934
are not obligated to file criminal complaints on your behalf.
01:15:53.671 --> 01:15:57.769
So, young ladies, if something happens to you on a college campus,
01:15:58.699 --> 01:16:04.155
you don't just go to the campus police, whether they are sanctioned by the state or not.
01:16:05.745 --> 01:16:11.215
Don't just go to the campus police. Go to the police that has jurisdiction in
01:16:11.215 --> 01:16:17.113
the city or county that your college is in and file charges.
01:16:18.355 --> 01:16:22.985
Because that's the situation it was like. And then the reason why Letitia James
01:16:22.985 --> 01:16:28.185
was called in by the governor, Governor Hochul, was because the previous district
01:16:28.185 --> 01:16:31.246
attorney or prosecutor in that county where Cornell is,
01:16:32.163 --> 01:16:33.911
which is, I think, Ithaca, New York.
01:16:36.236 --> 01:16:40.684
Didn't do anything with the case when it was first brought to their attention.
01:16:41.776 --> 01:16:46.756
Wasn't enough. And I've heard some attorneys, and leave Sonny Holston alone,
01:16:46.756 --> 01:16:53.569
all Sonny Holston did was just kind of lay out why the attorneys may not have done their job.
01:16:54.478 --> 01:16:57.106
She was basically trying to keep them from getting impeached.
01:16:57.106 --> 01:17:02.696
It wasn't that she was defending the Cornell people, the young men who raped this woman.
01:17:03.016 --> 01:17:08.296
She was not doing that. She was basically defending the DA's office in their
01:17:08.296 --> 01:17:12.376
county, just going through the process of why they didn't push it to a grand
01:17:12.376 --> 01:17:17.303
jury and all that time. Sonny Halston has done law a lot longer than she's done television.
01:17:17.929 --> 01:17:20.363
So lay off of the system, right?
01:17:21.202 --> 01:17:28.326
And I can't tell people how to, you know, give knowledge, but she has knowledge
01:17:28.326 --> 01:17:31.493
in that situation. She has prosecuted sex crimes.
01:17:32.813 --> 01:17:37.779
So all she was trying to do was just lay out what that office was going through
01:17:38.115 --> 01:17:41.680
and why those guys are not in jail at this particular. That's all she was trying to do.
01:17:42.115 --> 01:17:45.126
She wasn't trying to defend them and she doesn't need me to defend her.
01:17:45.126 --> 01:17:47.909
But for those who are listening who are feeling some kind of way.
01:17:49.623 --> 01:17:53.357
It's okay. Sonny is not on the side of the rapist.
01:17:54.227 --> 01:17:57.165
The president, on the other hand, has him explaining to do.
01:17:57.850 --> 01:18:05.515
Not only did he say, I feel bad for those guys, right? I feel bad for those fraternity guys.
01:18:06.194 --> 01:18:10.953
But then he calls the state attorney general who has been asked to be a special
01:18:10.953 --> 01:18:13.121
prosecutor to find out what really happened.
01:18:13.749 --> 01:18:17.761
And if criminal charges need to be press. He calls her a dog.
01:18:18.851 --> 01:18:26.583
Mind you, it's the same state in which he was adjudicated as a sexual offender.
01:18:27.584 --> 01:18:33.227
And he still has got to pay money to this woman, E. Jean Carroll, for what he did to her.
01:18:34.387 --> 01:18:38.963
So you can say birds of a feather or whatever, that's fine. Just understand
01:18:39.363 --> 01:18:42.846
who's saying what and what their motivation is, right?
01:18:43.656 --> 01:18:49.774
But again, it gets back to my whole thing. If you want Republicans to have a chance,
01:18:50.519 --> 01:18:56.666
then just stop for a couple days, just a couple, stop being a complete asshole
01:18:57.021 --> 01:18:59.279
because that's what people are tired of.
01:19:00.227 --> 01:19:05.655
They are tired of looking at a president that doesn't give a damn about them,
01:19:06.218 --> 01:19:08.829
or at least acts like he doesn't, right?
01:19:09.493 --> 01:19:13.273
He can say, oh, I love America. It is great. We can have UFC.
01:19:15.684 --> 01:19:21.364
Formula One races in downtown D.C., and you've got fireworks and all this other
01:19:21.364 --> 01:19:23.906
fun stuff going on, concerts, the whole not.
01:19:24.769 --> 01:19:27.484
But you don't give a shit about the Constitution. The whole reason why we're
01:19:27.484 --> 01:19:31.967
celebrating is the fact that we wrote a document saying to an empire,
01:19:32.577 --> 01:19:35.183
we don't want to be a part of it anymore. We want to be Americans.
01:19:35.897 --> 01:19:42.099
We want to be our own separate nation, independent of the British Empire.
01:19:43.015 --> 01:19:47.494
And subsequently, years later, after we fought that army of that empire and
01:19:47.494 --> 01:19:52.744
defeated them, then we came up with a constitution, which you take an oath,
01:19:52.744 --> 01:19:54.184
Mr. President, to uphold.
01:19:54.788 --> 01:19:58.314
There's 35 words you say, and in those 35 words, you say that you're going to
01:19:58.314 --> 01:19:59.477
uphold the constitution.
01:20:00.279 --> 01:20:02.839
And you have done everything in your two terms.
01:20:04.539 --> 01:20:09.139
In your actions that say otherwise. The first term, you had some people that
01:20:09.139 --> 01:20:10.477
had the courage to tell you no.
01:20:11.352 --> 01:20:18.567
This time, you do not. And that has been an ultimate disaster to the people of the United States.
01:20:19.617 --> 01:20:25.121
It's been a disaster as far as affordability, which you somehow think that's a hoax.
01:20:25.958 --> 01:20:28.734
People are struggling to pay gas, but that's not real to you.
01:20:29.412 --> 01:20:32.002
People are struggling to buy food, but that's not real to you.
01:20:32.390 --> 01:20:35.321
People are struggling to get health care, but that's not real to you,
01:20:35.972 --> 01:20:38.466
right? That's a hoax to you.
01:20:39.231 --> 01:20:43.599
And I guess it would be a hoax if every day I'm making money off crypto or wherever
01:20:43.599 --> 01:20:46.785
other investments you got and your kids are making money and all that, that's great.
01:20:47.173 --> 01:20:50.796
Which, by the way, why was Hunter Biden a problem?
01:20:51.869 --> 01:20:53.865
Is it because he didn't ask for enough money?
01:20:55.099 --> 01:20:59.389
I guess he only got a million dollars to sit on that board in Ukraine or whatever,
01:20:59.389 --> 01:21:00.547
barista, whatever it is.
01:21:01.551 --> 01:21:04.519
Did he not ask for enough money? Was that the insulting thing?
01:21:04.519 --> 01:21:08.179
Because your children are doing the exact same thing you accused Hunter of doing,
01:21:08.179 --> 01:21:10.230
and they're making billions of dollars doing it.
01:21:11.021 --> 01:21:13.939
Your son-in-law's even in on a game. He's not even a blood relative.
01:21:13.939 --> 01:21:15.938
He married into the family. He's making money.
01:21:16.639 --> 01:21:22.270
But you had a problem with Hunter Biden, so is the issue. Your name is not Trump. Baron Trump.
01:21:24.138 --> 01:21:28.321
He's just going to college making money, which, by the way, I found out you're
01:21:28.642 --> 01:21:30.882
going after Harvard because they didn't let him in.
01:21:31.875 --> 01:21:33.518
Right. Wow.
01:21:35.040 --> 01:21:39.458
You know, is that the problem that Hunter didn't ask for enough money or he
01:21:39.458 --> 01:21:43.018
didn't get enough money or he's not a Trump? So it's OK.
01:21:44.166 --> 01:21:48.849
I'm just trying to figure out why you and your Republican friends made a big deal about him.
01:21:49.620 --> 01:21:52.508
And which is another reason why the American people are frustrated with the
01:21:52.508 --> 01:21:57.368
Republicans, because you said, no, that was wrong for Biden to use his daddy's
01:21:57.368 --> 01:21:59.594
name to get that board position.
01:22:00.616 --> 01:22:06.418
Right. But you say absolutely nothing about the president sitting in office
01:22:06.418 --> 01:22:11.103
right now making money and his family's making money at the same time.
01:22:11.487 --> 01:22:15.718
He didn't say nothing when he bought the old post office during the first term
01:22:15.718 --> 01:22:19.488
and turned into a hotel where every person that wanted to meet with the president
01:22:19.488 --> 01:22:21.861
had to stay at. He didn't say nothing then.
01:22:22.797 --> 01:22:26.148
But we elected Joe Biden and we figured, OK, we're turning the corner.
01:22:26.915 --> 01:22:32.302
Then we put the vice president up to run. And then y'all went back to the guy,
01:22:33.072 --> 01:22:34.489
that was doing the corrupt stuff.
01:22:35.531 --> 01:22:38.225
And now he has no filter whatsoever.
01:22:39.532 --> 01:22:43.972
So people are mad at you all, Republicans, for not standing up to the guy while
01:22:43.972 --> 01:22:45.229
he's been doing all the dirt.
01:22:46.381 --> 01:22:51.176
That's why you can spend $325 million in Texas and still get your brains beat out.
01:22:51.849 --> 01:22:57.262
Because not only do you have that stink on you, but the fact that you put up
01:22:57.262 --> 01:23:00.156
the worst possible person to run for the United States Senate.
01:23:00.955 --> 01:23:03.932
You had that position already. You had a U.S. senator there.
01:23:03.932 --> 01:23:07.168
He wanted to stay. And y'all ran him out.
01:23:07.786 --> 01:23:13.492
Not that I was in love with that guy, but you ran him out to put the worst possible
01:23:13.492 --> 01:23:15.590
candidate of all the candidates.
01:23:16.112 --> 01:23:19.822
And that's saying something because you got Mike Rogers in Michigan and you
01:23:19.822 --> 01:23:21.656
got Mike Collins in Georgia.
01:23:22.287 --> 01:23:23.749
Ken Paxson is worse than them.
01:23:25.561 --> 01:23:28.375
And you can spend all that. He's going to get his brains beat up.
01:23:29.120 --> 01:23:33.669
Guaranteed. And you're still putting money in there. $325 million down the toilet.
01:23:34.568 --> 01:23:40.356
Meanwhile, the guy in Kansas is in trouble. Meanwhile, the guy in Alaska is in trouble.
01:23:41.040 --> 01:23:43.164
Meanwhile, the lady in Mississippi is in trouble.
01:23:44.499 --> 01:23:48.792
Right? The national news is now interviewing the Democratic nominee for the
01:23:48.792 --> 01:23:50.693
U.S. Senate in Mississippi.
01:23:51.639 --> 01:23:57.184
That's how bad it's gotten for y'all. Nothing is a lot for you all because you
01:23:57.451 --> 01:24:02.705
did not do anything to stand up to your president and defend the American people.
01:24:03.686 --> 01:24:08.942
Now, in districts that may be incredibly gerrymandered where there's no chance
01:24:08.942 --> 01:24:12.684
for a Democrat to get elected, you'll have some seats in the House.
01:24:13.473 --> 01:24:16.992
But you're not going to be in the majority. They asked Mike Johnson,
01:24:16.992 --> 01:24:19.661
the worst speaker of the House in the history of the United States.
01:24:21.231 --> 01:24:24.702
If y'all lose, if you lose the house, whose fault is it?
01:24:25.581 --> 01:24:29.491
Oh, well, will you take responsibility for it? Well, you know,
01:24:29.491 --> 01:24:31.921
it's just people have been lied to.
01:24:32.896 --> 01:24:37.341
Really? So when they went to the grocery store and saw that their cereal went
01:24:37.341 --> 01:24:42.694
up from $2.50 a box to $4 a box, that was a lie to them?
01:24:43.734 --> 01:24:47.913
When they saw that gas was at $2.50 a gallon, now it's shot up to $4.
01:24:48.558 --> 01:24:52.714
In some cases, in some states, $6. That was a lie.
01:24:53.499 --> 01:25:01.148
Right. When you cut all those people out of the what you call the Obamacare,
01:25:01.790 --> 01:25:05.237
the Affordable Care Act protection, that was a lot of them.
01:25:05.873 --> 01:25:08.530
Now you want to give them ninety dollars.
01:25:10.032 --> 01:25:11.270
Cover their expenses.
01:25:13.922 --> 01:25:18.592
That was a lie. Seemed pretty factual to me because that's actually what's happening.
01:25:18.592 --> 01:25:22.292
When you decided to put a tariff on every country in the world,
01:25:22.292 --> 01:25:25.955
even countries that don't even have people, they got penguins.
01:25:26.998 --> 01:25:32.408
You didn't think that was going to affect the price of clothes and electronics in America?
01:25:33.470 --> 01:25:37.232
People are scraping together money right now to go to a movie,
01:25:37.956 --> 01:25:44.564
to go to a ballgame just because they want to get away or pay for some streaming service.
01:25:44.732 --> 01:25:50.312
They're trying to adjust their budgets because they need an escape from the
01:25:50.312 --> 01:25:55.421
day-to-day pain. And by the way, they're working their butts off.
01:25:56.304 --> 01:26:00.402
The people that have jobs are working their butts off, but they're not getting any pay raises.
01:26:01.333 --> 01:26:04.717
And whatever pay raises they're getting, it's not matching the rate of inflation,
01:26:04.973 --> 01:26:08.067
which is about three and a half percent.
01:26:09.277 --> 01:26:12.911
If we talked about that last episode, it should be at two or below.
01:26:13.828 --> 01:26:17.324
If you want people to start thriving, if you want the economy to grow,
01:26:18.314 --> 01:26:21.053
right? But you're wondering why.
01:26:22.046 --> 01:26:25.877
I will be surprised if any Republican wins.
01:26:26.731 --> 01:26:29.292
That would be my surprise. And then some folks were saying, well,
01:26:29.292 --> 01:26:33.622
the girl in Minnesota was in trouble. Then they ran a poll and showed that this
01:26:33.622 --> 01:26:40.375
Flanagan and she's beating her like by 10 points, 52-42.
01:26:41.352 --> 01:26:47.262
So yeah, that myth that Minnesota's in play because of the Somali daycare fraud
01:26:47.262 --> 01:26:51.717
crisis that this little YouTube guy created, right?
01:26:52.882 --> 01:26:58.716
True, there's been some fraud there and Tim Walsh laid himself on the sword,
01:26:59.279 --> 01:27:02.622
and said, I won't run for a third term because of that. We could have done a
01:27:02.622 --> 01:27:04.172
better job in monitoring that. I.
01:27:05.981 --> 01:27:10.361
If black people are not saying I'm voting Republican, then that fraud thing
01:27:10.361 --> 01:27:13.851
is overblown because most of the children that they're going to be at those
01:27:13.851 --> 01:27:19.175
daycares are going to be black children because those are the daycares they can afford.
01:27:20.288 --> 01:27:25.081
I mean, it's real talk. So if black folks are not out in the street saying get
01:27:25.081 --> 01:27:29.180
rid of the Democrats, the Democrats are going to beat the brakes off of folks in Minnesota,
01:27:30.438 --> 01:27:35.837
because outside of the Twin Cities, You got farmers who are struggling.
01:27:37.247 --> 01:27:42.721
In Arkansas, there's a woman who had to sell her farm that had been in her family
01:27:42.721 --> 01:27:44.673
for generations. She had to sell it.
01:27:45.758 --> 01:27:50.741
And she's running for the U.S. Senate. So Tom Cotton, you would think he would
01:27:50.741 --> 01:27:52.144
be sensitive to agriculture, right?
01:27:53.639 --> 01:27:57.751
He's in trouble. And she took the positive route. Some people say,
01:27:57.751 --> 01:27:59.154
well, I don't know if I'd run for office.
01:27:59.763 --> 01:28:02.682
There are contemporaries of hers that are no longer with us.
01:28:03.129 --> 01:28:04.523
They committed suicide.
01:28:05.564 --> 01:28:10.261
That's how serious this is. And Mr. President, you can call it a hoax all you
01:28:10.261 --> 01:28:13.671
want to, but tell it to the families of those who lost their loved ones because
01:28:13.671 --> 01:28:15.245
they were about to lose their farm.
01:28:16.287 --> 01:28:20.271
Talk about that to them, to their face, and see what kind of response.
01:28:20.271 --> 01:28:22.754
You thought you had some hecklers at your last rally.
01:28:23.721 --> 01:28:27.927
Ladies and gentlemen, enough of this foolishness.
01:28:28.981 --> 01:28:32.611
If you are a state that has early voting, if the early voting hasn't already
01:28:32.611 --> 01:28:36.568
started, get ready for it to come up within the next week or so.
01:28:36.985 --> 01:28:39.018
Early voting here in Georgia starts next week.
01:28:39.707 --> 01:28:44.001
Get to get to your early voting place as possible. If you're in a state where
01:28:44.001 --> 01:28:49.361
you rely strictly on mail in ballots, as soon as you get your ballot, fill it out, mail it in.
01:28:51.641 --> 01:28:57.937
This election tamper-proof from the desperate folks on the other side, the Republican side.
01:28:58.817 --> 01:29:03.151
So if the National Guard or the FBI or anybody else shows up trying to intimidate
01:29:03.151 --> 01:29:08.941
people from voting, everybody will have already voted by Election Day because
01:29:08.941 --> 01:29:10.817
they can't intimidate you during early voting.
01:29:11.421 --> 01:29:14.445
They don't have the manpower, the resources to spare to do that.
01:29:15.761 --> 01:29:20.398
Their only hope is to terrorize people that wait till Election Day to vote.
01:29:21.167 --> 01:29:25.724
And if they do, stand 10 toes down and go in there and vote anyway.
01:29:26.172 --> 01:29:27.525
And vote them jokers out.
01:29:28.479 --> 01:29:33.404
Put a Congress in there that'll shut off these folks' money until they do right.
01:29:34.103 --> 01:29:38.405
Because that's what Congress can do. Beside past laws, they appropriate money.
01:29:38.980 --> 01:29:42.971
If you shut off it and they love money, they love it.
01:29:43.503 --> 01:29:47.171
They love money. They don't care what the Bible says. They don't care what St.
01:29:47.171 --> 01:29:50.282
Augustine says. They love it. They love money.
01:29:51.019 --> 01:29:53.614
You cut their money off, they'll get their act together.
01:29:54.354 --> 01:29:57.483
But you got to have a Congress elected to do that.
01:29:58.645 --> 01:30:03.801
You got to have a majority in the Senate, and you got to have an overwhelming majority in the House.
01:30:04.853 --> 01:30:10.549
Cut their money off. They'll act right. They'll make sure them body cameras are on those ICE agents.
01:30:12.679 --> 01:30:19.039
Stop prosecuting people from 1973. They literally want to prosecute people who
01:30:19.039 --> 01:30:24.126
are dead because Richard Nixon, they say, got a bad rap.
01:30:25.281 --> 01:30:29.969
I don't know. He might want to go after 3M because they're the ones who made
01:30:29.969 --> 01:30:32.979
the tapes that Nixon recorded on, right?
01:30:33.659 --> 01:30:35.741
3M? The audio tapes?
01:30:36.621 --> 01:30:39.339
That's what put Nixon in trouble. His own mouth.
01:30:40.341 --> 01:30:43.469
It was a slam dunk for the prosecutors. They didn't even have to go to trial
01:30:43.469 --> 01:30:48.537
that his other Republican colleagues said, Mr. President, you need to resign. That's what happened.
01:30:49.230 --> 01:30:54.709
And I was a child, and I know that's the facts. But these grown folks don't
01:30:54.709 --> 01:30:55.627
seem to understand that.
01:30:56.532 --> 01:31:00.259
So now they want to dig up the bones of dead people and prosecute them.
01:31:00.934 --> 01:31:07.344
Insanity, pettiness, foolishness. The American people are tired of that.
01:31:10.259 --> 01:31:14.459
You're going to have two preachers in the United States Senate because of the
01:31:14.459 --> 01:31:19.478
foolishness of the Republican Party, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Warnock.
01:31:20.438 --> 01:31:24.357
You're going to have farmers elected to the U.S. Senate. You're going to have
01:31:24.589 --> 01:31:27.349
lawyers. You're going to have doctors. You're going to have medical doctors
01:31:27.349 --> 01:31:31.059
because of the foolishness the RFK is doing. Now you're going to have real medical
01:31:31.059 --> 01:31:33.848
doctors in the United States Senate, not Mr. Cassidy.
01:31:34.679 --> 01:31:37.249
Because Mr. Cassidy, if you were a real doctor, you never would have voted for
01:31:37.249 --> 01:31:39.566
RFK. I don't care what the president said.
01:31:40.281 --> 01:31:44.415
You know health. You went to medical school. You were a practicing doctor.
01:31:44.548 --> 01:31:46.620
Same with Marshall in Kansas.
01:31:47.683 --> 01:31:51.919
No way. If I took the Hippocratic oath, there's no way I could vote for Robert
01:31:51.919 --> 01:31:54.161
F. Kennedy to be over health and human services.
01:31:54.991 --> 01:31:56.362
Damn my political future.
01:31:57.300 --> 01:31:58.948
I'm a doctor by training.
01:32:00.301 --> 01:32:05.221
Politics was my public service. My ultimate service to the community is to be
01:32:05.221 --> 01:32:10.548
a doctor, and there's no way in good conscience I could vote for somebody like him, who's crazy.
01:32:11.521 --> 01:32:19.259
He let the President of the United States threaten to tear down his uncle's memorial to his face.
01:32:20.288 --> 01:32:27.276
Foolishness is over. November the 3rd. First Tuesday in November in 2026.
01:32:28.132 --> 01:32:30.349
The foolishness is over. This is for good now.
01:32:31.343 --> 01:32:35.645
This is not about ideology and all that stuff.
01:32:36.478 --> 01:32:40.540
It's about preserving America.
01:32:42.309 --> 01:32:48.523
And, you know, a comment was made about saving democracy. Let me say this from my end.
01:32:49.426 --> 01:32:52.990
As somebody that went through the democratic process to get elected.
01:32:53.953 --> 01:32:59.366
We can develop a better system. We can develop better priorities.
01:33:00.497 --> 01:33:05.100
But if you understand it, you know the history of this country.
01:33:05.819 --> 01:33:11.491
When black people were running the South, the greatest years of progress the
01:33:11.491 --> 01:33:15.431
South ever had without enslaving other human beings.
01:33:16.606 --> 01:33:21.431
The reason why public schools caught on fire in the United States is because
01:33:21.431 --> 01:33:28.981
black folks in the South made it a constitutional right for kids in their states
01:33:28.981 --> 01:33:30.065
to get public education.
01:33:31.065 --> 01:33:37.681
And now it's the norm in this country because also in that discussion of,
01:33:38.669 --> 01:33:43.362
mentioned that we're the conscience of this nation. And that's why they don't like to hear from us.
01:33:43.786 --> 01:33:47.746
But we're the conscience of the nation, especially black women,
01:33:48.616 --> 01:33:50.648
which goes all the way back to my point.
01:33:51.782 --> 01:33:55.602
If you want black folks to vote for you, stop calling their women dogs.
01:33:56.043 --> 01:34:01.790
Stop disrespecting black women. Stop disrespecting women. Stop disrespecting Americans.
01:34:02.815 --> 01:34:09.389
Period. The audaciousness, the unmitigated gall for P.
01:34:09.389 --> 01:34:14.999
Hegseth to step on the boat, the USS Abraham Lincoln, after he just left them
01:34:14.999 --> 01:34:21.698
out there and then had the nerve to say, okay, we're going to have a calisthenics challenge? Really?
01:34:22.676 --> 01:34:28.046
And even through all the stuff that they've been through, they still outperformed,
01:34:28.644 --> 01:34:31.297
the Secretary of Defense on his own challenge.
01:34:32.324 --> 01:34:37.138
Because they were built for that. Don't need to take advantage of them.
01:34:37.728 --> 01:34:38.698
They were built for that.
01:34:39.492 --> 01:34:44.833
And I can't think of no better way to show their disapproval of the secretary
01:34:45.070 --> 01:34:48.102
than to show him up in his own calisthenics challenge.
01:34:48.386 --> 01:34:53.139
I think that was great. I salute each and every sailor that.
01:34:54.429 --> 01:35:00.524
Accepted the challenge and put him to shame after he abandoned you for months,
01:35:01.581 --> 01:35:04.885
no port call for months. That's insanity.
01:35:05.803 --> 01:35:10.898
That's foolishness. And the American people are tired of it. They are.
01:35:11.912 --> 01:35:16.119
Even people who I would never want to be seen in public with,
01:35:16.119 --> 01:35:22.210
but God knows fate is tricky. They get it.
01:35:22.866 --> 01:35:26.329
When they're getting on their podcast and saying the only people that are saying
01:35:26.329 --> 01:35:29.032
the things that American people need to hear are the Democrats.
01:35:30.756 --> 01:35:37.370
Supported the president in the previous election, people are tired of the foolishness.
01:35:38.074 --> 01:35:43.596
Now, usually what happens is the American people have their say in the midterms.
01:35:43.896 --> 01:35:47.408
They elected Congress. They want to finish out that particular president's term.
01:35:47.878 --> 01:35:54.137
And that president kind of either shuts it down or does better, right?
01:35:54.801 --> 01:35:57.576
They're going down a bad path. They should just stop. If they.
01:35:59.501 --> 01:36:04.601
Some progress to happen, they get some help. And it's usually from some unlikely
01:36:04.601 --> 01:36:08.773
sources, but the people remember that they voted for that president.
01:36:09.760 --> 01:36:13.731
So now what's going to happen is that the American people are just going to
01:36:13.731 --> 01:36:15.654
shut this Trump administration down.
01:36:16.621 --> 01:36:21.951
And either they conform or they're just going to fade into oblivion.
01:36:22.960 --> 01:36:29.917
Let me tell you how bad it is. Donald Trump said, I want my face on Mount Rushmore.
01:36:30.924 --> 01:36:35.151
Folks that the geologists at Mount Rushmore said that if we put your face on
01:36:35.151 --> 01:36:37.501
Mount Rushmore, the whole mountain will crumble.
01:36:38.476 --> 01:36:41.332
That's not a political statement. That's just facts.
01:36:42.440 --> 01:36:48.511
But it would be indicative of what this man and this administration has done
01:36:48.511 --> 01:36:55.056
to the country, the pride, the bravado, his ego.
01:36:55.772 --> 01:36:57.671
He's put that before all of us.
01:36:58.610 --> 01:37:00.259
And it's time to send him a message.
01:37:01.309 --> 01:37:05.679
And the most peaceful way, the most constructive way to do that,
01:37:06.266 --> 01:37:11.371
is to vote everybody that has kissed his butt, everybody that has been silent
01:37:11.371 --> 01:37:18.078
of his foolishness, everybody that has allowed or been complicit in his corruption. Send them all home.
01:37:18.890 --> 01:37:23.638
It's time out for the conspiracy theorists. It's time out for the kooks and the crazies.
01:37:24.317 --> 01:37:28.642
It's time for the folks that belong in Arkham Asylum to go back in.
01:37:29.678 --> 01:37:33.242
The American people, government is not entertainment.
01:37:33.684 --> 01:37:38.440
Government is supposed to be boring because all they're supposed to be doing is looking out for us.
01:37:39.317 --> 01:37:42.671
It's not supposed to be exciting. Campaigns can be exciting,
01:37:42.671 --> 01:37:44.563
but governing, not so much.
01:37:46.559 --> 01:37:49.945
Is a debate about whether we're going to do this or do that.
01:37:50.933 --> 01:37:59.318
Not how much money the president made today. Not what constitutional violation he's enacted.
01:38:00.308 --> 01:38:03.361
It's supposed to be boring because they're supposed to be looking out for us.
01:38:03.507 --> 01:38:08.779
While we're working in our jobs and living our lives, the people we elect to
01:38:08.779 --> 01:38:10.978
handle the business are handling the business.
01:38:11.545 --> 01:38:15.307
And every now and then they'll say, hey, look, we need your input on this, okay?
01:38:16.393 --> 01:38:18.605
Or hey, are y'all really thinking about doing that?
01:38:21.599 --> 01:38:25.515
Let me express some concerns about it. Let me give you my two cents.
01:38:26.294 --> 01:38:27.101
That's not supposed to work.
01:38:28.178 --> 01:38:32.764
We're not trying to see politicians on the cover of People Magazine and Us Magazine
01:38:32.764 --> 01:38:37.227
and GQ Magazine and Sports Illustrated Magazine and, you know,
01:38:38.083 --> 01:38:41.165
Time Newsweek. Okay, because you're the president. We get that.
01:38:42.093 --> 01:38:46.964
But everything else? No. We don't want to see your name in variety.
01:38:47.852 --> 01:38:54.701
Now that it has something to do like the merger with Paramount and Warner Brothers,
01:38:55.433 --> 01:38:56.896
because the government has to prove that.
01:38:57.875 --> 01:39:03.866
But all those other foolishness, we don't need to be live streaming executions.
01:39:04.670 --> 01:39:08.223
We should have executions, but if we're going to have them, we don't need to live stream that.
01:39:09.085 --> 01:39:13.735
We'll take your word for it that you did your job because that's what we elected people to do.
01:39:14.707 --> 01:39:19.217
That's it. We want to see what's going on in Congress. C-SPAN is free.
01:39:20.266 --> 01:39:24.148
We don't need to see foolishness on the national news every day.
01:39:25.202 --> 01:39:30.884
We need people to be engaged, not only in the electorate, but we need people
01:39:30.884 --> 01:39:33.655
to be engaged that are elected.
01:39:34.826 --> 01:39:40.804
If your job description for a communications director is longer than the job
01:39:40.804 --> 01:39:45.620
description for a legislative policy director, You don't need to be in Congress.
01:39:46.688 --> 01:39:48.343
It's time out for foolishness.
01:39:49.457 --> 01:39:51.749
And black people, please vote.
01:39:52.630 --> 01:39:55.858
You know, I'm encouraging every American to vote, but black people vote.
01:39:58.205 --> 01:40:00.750
Well, my vote don't count. Well, it won't count if you don't vote.
01:40:01.673 --> 01:40:03.368
That'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:40:04.565 --> 01:40:09.095
Well, my guy didn't win last time. Okay. You root for a sports team.
01:40:09.095 --> 01:40:12.356
Some of y'all root for sports teams that haven't won a game in years.
01:40:13.343 --> 01:40:16.145
Some of you root for sports teams that haven't won a championship in years.
01:40:16.145 --> 01:40:17.302
But you still root for them.
01:40:17.825 --> 01:40:21.515
You'll still watch the games. You'll still go to the game if you've got time
01:40:21.515 --> 01:40:24.096
and money. Do the same with your voting.
01:40:25.213 --> 01:40:29.133
At all levels. The local level. State level.
01:40:30.204 --> 01:40:34.443
Skip the county. County level. And at the federal level, vote.
01:40:35.362 --> 01:40:38.956
Takes five minutes of your time, especially if you do early voting.
01:40:39.804 --> 01:40:42.905
If you wait till election day, set aside an hour.
01:40:43.914 --> 01:40:47.604
You'll sit and watch a football game for two, baseball game for two,
01:40:47.882 --> 01:40:49.902
basketball game for an hour and a half.
01:40:50.851 --> 01:40:52.268
Set aside some time to vote.
01:40:53.244 --> 01:40:56.680
Because, see, if you hit a pothole on the way to the game, you're going to be mad.
01:40:57.747 --> 01:41:02.225
The traffic lights are not working. When you're on the way to the game or to
01:41:02.225 --> 01:41:05.326
the bar, you're going to be mad. That's government.
01:41:06.267 --> 01:41:10.701
If you're disabled and somebody didn't pull into the disabled parking space,
01:41:11.656 --> 01:41:13.671
you're going to be mad. But that's government.
01:41:14.740 --> 01:41:18.996
But so are gas prices, so are food prices, everything.
01:41:19.706 --> 01:41:22.760
The government is involved in everything, including sports.
01:41:23.752 --> 01:41:26.665
They literally have a bill that they're waiting for the House to come back in
01:41:26.665 --> 01:41:32.324
to vote on to deal with college sports that passed a Senate that will impact,
01:41:32.858 --> 01:41:35.615
your favorite college team one way or the other.
01:41:36.495 --> 01:41:39.712
If you're cool with that, go and support the people that voted for that.
01:41:40.304 --> 01:41:43.451
If you're against that, vote against the people that voted for that.
01:41:44.573 --> 01:41:49.335
But vote. It's important. Because again, that's the only way we can stop the
01:41:49.335 --> 01:41:54.647
foolishness. It's the only way we can attempt to get back to normal.
01:41:56.168 --> 01:41:59.772
All right, guys. That's all I got. Thank y'all for listening. Till next time.