Black Victim To Black Victor With Adam B. Coleman & Chase Geiser | OAP #75
Adam B. Coleman is the Author of “Black Victim To Black Victor“, Op-Ed Writer, Public Speaker, Host of “A Good Faith Space” Twitter Spaces show and the Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.
Adam was born in Detroit but raised in a variety of states throughout America. He writes openly about his personal struggles with fatherlessness, homelessness and masculinity.
He is always questioning the world around him, even if they are uncomfortable questions to ask.
He strongly believes that we should all have the ability to speak freely and is now advocating for people who feel voiceless to be heard.
He is attempting to help change the narrative and the way we discuss cultural narratives by being honest, humble and resolute.
His articles have been published in The New York Post, Newsweek, The Post Millennial, ScoonTV, Free Black Thought & Human Defense Initiative.
It's One American Podcast live with Adam B. Coleman.
What's up, Adam?
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
So I don't know how I came across you on Twitter, the Twitter sphere, but I started following you and looking at your content.
And I just thought that you'd be a really fun person, interesting person to talk to.
It sounds like you have quite the life story.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
And yeah, I guess I'm all over the place.
A lot of people are finding me on Twitter.
It seems to be a decent medium to express yourself to a degree.
You know, they're not completely free speech oriented, but you can at least get some of your message across.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I did pick up a copy of your book, but I haven't had a time to seriously dive in.
I read through it just sort of in a skimming fashion.
But pretty interesting stuff, pretty provocative stuff.
What inspired you to write it?
I would say the events of George Floyd after his death.
It was more so, it's kind of interesting because I think George Floyd is very pivotal.
I think 10 years from now or 50 years from now, we'll look back and see the shift in American politics because of the death of George Floyd, kind of like how we look back at the Vietnam War in the 60s or other cultural revolution kind of situations in the 1960s.
But for me, it was George Floyd, but it was the reaction of George Floyd.
So it wasn't the situation itself.
I felt like the best way of putting it is America was having a panic attack.
It was a panic attack about a situation that was kind of, in my opinion, kind of complicated, unfortunate.
But then it went from that one particular situation to extrapolating it to the existence of Black Americans or specifically Black men in American society, as if we are all George Floyd.
We all have the same danger of George Floyd when that's not true at all.
Even statistically, it's not true.
So for me, it was more so looking at everybody that's kind of around me, friends, family, and they're all just basically overreacting about a particular situation.
That's unfortunate.
But then it's like everybody forgot what their life was like before that moment.
You know, like, for example, I know there are successful Black people who all of a sudden have these like trauma experiences that they need to bring up.
It was just like one big trauma experience that was resurrected.
And some of it was manufactured.
And, you know, it just became a very overly emotional time.
Whereas for me, it wasn't.
You know, and for a period of time, I kind of felt like, am I the only one that feels this way?
And, you know, before the book even came out, I had a very low profile.
I had a Facebook account, friends and family.
I rarely posted.
I kept most of my thoughts to myself.
And I had personal political transformation as well, even just like a personal transformation, just developing into the man I am today.
But I'm pretty much, I'm kind of a private person.
So I keep most things to myself, or at least at the time, I kept most things to myself.
But after this occurred, I felt like I needed to express myself because I had the media speaking for me.
I had the black elite speaking for me.
I had all these other people speaking for me, white liberals, progressives, you name it.
Everybody was speaking for me.
And I didn't feel anywhere close to what they were saying.
And so I saw it after just trying to express myself initially online and like free speech avenues, but then I got encouragement to write more often.
And actually to rewind a little bit, years before, maybe like a year or so before, I wanted to write a book, but I had no idea what to write about.
But it was always something that was kind of on my mind.
And, you know, I started writing and got encouragement from people.
And I said, I think I have something.
And so I just came up with some chapters and just started writing.
It took me about nine months to completion, which was an interesting journey.
to come to that point.
I really didn't tell a whole lot of people what I was doing.
You know, I let some people who were really close to me see certain things I was writing during the process to see, you know, to gauge their opinion, but I pretty much just kept it to myself and then put the book out and just tried to see if anybody wanted to hear what I had to say.
Did the book wind up different than you expected it would be when you started?
Yes.
Part of the reason why it took me nine months, and some people would be like, oh, that's a pretty short period of time for a book, but I felt like I could have finished it earlier.
But part of the reason why is because my voice had changed.
So in my attempt to express myself, you know, I just started writing and writing and writing.
And then it was about maybe three or four months in, I realized like my writing style was getting better and my voice was sounding different.
And, you know, I went back and read the stuff I wrote in the very beginning and I realized how angry I sounded, right?
I was almost like chastising.
I was being shocking and, you know, I was just being very angry.
And that's not.
It was a bad angry.
It was more.
It wasn't like the Hitler angry, you know, Riley in the crowd, you know, pounding the fist.
No, it was more antagonistic.
And that's not my, that's not my normal demeanor.
And actually angry guy.
No, I'm pretty reserved.
Those are always the worst.
I'm reserved until, you know, there's a moment where I need not to be reserved.
But one thing I realized after reading it was basically after consistently writing and researching, it went from like, ah, how could people be so stupid, that kind of mindset, to being like, well, of course, you know, I get it.
I get it now.
So it became more, I guess, like apathetic to the situation.
And so that's why when people read the book, they, I've heard people describe it as like me putting my arm around people's shoulder, right?
Because I understand what's going on and I'm being very personable about it rather than, you know, wagging my finger and saying do better or, you know, you guys are wrong.
I'm not speaking in that particular fashion.
And in many ways, I'm not even necessarily talking about Black people themselves.
I'm talking about the ideology.
I'm talking about the mindset.
So much of what I'm describing is more of the way people think and how they perceive things and not about Black people themselves and not even really diving too much into history or even being ultra-political.
So like I have a chapter talking about government, but it's about the way we view government and what it looks like to live a life surrounded by government where you have no independence.
You know, these particular things, these particular concepts are, you know, abstract of race, right?
So I try my best to weave in and out of talking about race and just talking about mindset and ideas, which is why people of different, different, even national origins, people overseas who have read the book said I was able to relate to it because this was my childhood.
You know, this was what I experienced too.
It's like, exactly, that's the point.
This is not a black exclusive situation that I'm talking about.
You know, everybody has a childhood.
Some of us go through traumas.
Some of us experience neglect.
Single parenthood, you know, there is no race to a bad childhood.
And that's the part that's relatable.
That's really, really interesting.
One of the things that occurs to me when we talk about the George Floyd incident and the outcome and ramifications of it is I don't think anybody knew, at least I didn't as a white dude.
I didn't realize that there was a giant pile of wood just ready to be ignited.
Right.
So, you know, it's like that old expression, overnight success, 20 years in the making, right?
Or it seems like something happens all at once, but really there's so many contributing factors over an extended period of time that made it happen.
Right.
And I guess my question for you is.
Why is it that the George Floyd moment, why did it pop in such a viral way where such a massive number of people were immediate, for better or for worse, were just immediately on the same page about the response, how to respond?
I think there were very key situations that happened.
So obviously the video and the length of the video, the describing of a knee on his neck for an extended period of time is very like shocking.
So there's that in by itself, but the other contributing factors are COVID.
A lot of people were locked in.
And so this became like a rally cry for people to go out, but not only go out, but it was almost like a tension release, you know, for people to be locked up for months and then just explode onto the streets.
The other thing, election year.
I think all of those things really, really contributed into that one particular moment in American history.
And it was just a powder keg because of it.
You know, you had mentioned, you know, is this something that was kind of brewing for a long period of time?
One of the things I kind of describe in the book, I don't really say it like this in the book, but in many ways, Black Americans are kind of groomed to be ultra sensitive when it comes to race, become, they're very racial.
You know, we're a racial people.
You know, it could be in a good way, you know, so you could watch racial humor.
You know, I grew up with black comedians who laughed about being black and then laughed at white people, but it was all fun and jokes, but we're racial.
These aren't necessarily things that the average white person would do, you know, in the same kind of way.
But because of us being racially sensitive about certain situations, sometimes we misread situations.
Sometimes we misunderstand situations.
Sometimes things are racist, right?
But if you grow up being racial, how do you differentiate the situation, right?
You go into a store and someone's rude to you and you're the only black person that's there.
Is it because you're race?
Right.
But these are the questions that we are forced to ask ourselves.
But the other questions that we don't ask ourselves is, well, is this lady just a bitch?
Is she rude to everybody?
Was she rude to the, right?
Was she rude to the person just before you?
Like, you don't know.
You just came into the store.
And so it's that kind of thing that we have to differentiate, you know, and I think even like some of the viral videos that have come out, let's say post-George Floyd, for example, some of them are kind of escalated by the people who believe something is going on, right?
And it builds the tension in the situation and both parties get angry and accusations get thrown and things like that.
So, you know, I think the other part where I was kind of leading into is, you know, the neo-Marxist movement has always been there.
It's been there for a long period of time.
As someone like myself who's been following the culture war for, you know, quite a few years before George Floyd, I would say at least a couple of years before George Floyd, everybody was saying this wouldn't hit the streets.
It's going to stay in universities.
But the DEI industry, you know, has been there for a number of years.
The neo-Marxist movement was there.
It was leaking into the public and people were laughing at it and saying, look at these purple-haired freaks saying all this stuff and using all this jargon, right?
And we didn't take it seriously.
But George Floyd became the legitimization to take on the neo-Marxist movement and have that become the mainstream narrative.
It's the reason why everybody says white supremacy like they say yogurt, right?
It's just part of, it's in our vocabulary now.
We didn't say white supremacy with the same amount of frequency five, six years ago, right?
But now we do, you know, and now we have to say white supremacy as if it's everywhere.
We have to speak in a very particular way, you know, unconscious bias, you know, all these different things.
This is all Marxist jargon.
And so now we have to pretend that it's always been there since George Floyd.
So, you know, I think the neo-Marxist movement has really proliferated because of it.
You know, and one phrase I say is, you know, when presented with an issue, people always want to find a solution.
And then the Marxist movement, the anti-racist movement was the solution that was ready, right?
It was primed and ready.
So they were ready to enter corporations.
They were ready to enter schools.
And in some ways, they were already there.
The DI industry was there for corporations, but it wasn't seen as a widespread adaptation, right?
Certain companies did.
But, you know, I did some research on this and in a number of months, the DEI industry climbed and increased 123% post-George Floyd.
So that tells you that we're concerned about liability issues.
Yes, that's exactly it.
So this idea that I'm working on this for my second book, so that's why I'm like researching this, but the idea that corporations all of a sudden have some moral conscience and they're all of a sudden woke and want to do the right thing is nonsense.
You know, corporations is a conglomerate of people and they make all different types of decisions, but they make decisions based off of liability, costs, benefit analysis, public relations, you name it.
And there's even documentation that shows like part of the reason we take on DEI is for liability.
And not much of what you'll see is for ideology.
So you can look at corporations like Twitter.
Yeah, they're ideological.
It's very obvious.
But you take a look at, I don't know, Pepsi, are they truly ideological?
Or have they just taken on this ready-made solution that covers their ass in case something happens within their company where everybody is hyper-sensitive, hyper-racial, and someone misinterprets something and tries to sue Pepsi or Coca-Cola or whoever.
And then they say, well, listen, we have DEI within our corporation.
We also, all the employees, these questions, we take, you know, bias training.
We do all these things.
You can't say it's our fault, right?
So, you know, I don't really truly believe that most of these companies are ideologues.
I think they're trying to cover their ass in a post-racial, let me rephrase that, in a post-hyper racial society that we're currently living in.
So one of the things that occurs to me, I really like what you're saying about the hypersensitivity.
And, you know, I think you're saying something that I sort of intuitively am like, yes, yes, yes.
But the way that you framed it kind of brings it from that subconscious to conscious, conscious level.
So I appreciate that.
And it occurs to me that the hypersensitivity aspect of race, it seems that it can only occur in a community where race is considered like a top three personal identity feature, right?
So the word identity politics is thrown around quite a bit.
But for example, like if you were to ask me to describe myself just on paper, like if it was a survey or whatever, there's like no fucking way that white would be in the top 10 list, right?
But I imagine, and this could just be speculation, that that drastically shifts if you go to like a minority community, particularly the black community.
Like I bet you there's a lot of black men that would put that like I'm a black man, you know, in the top three, right?
There's nothing wrong with that.
But the point that I'm trying to make is it seems to me very, very dangerous when not so much we perceive others by their race necessarily, but when we perceive ourselves by our own race.
Because if you look at like the third rank, for example, it was just as much an antagonism toward the Jewish race as it was a false glorification or idealization of the Aryan race, right?
And so maybe I'm off base on this, but it seems to me like we really have to figure out how to, as individuals, discover our sense of selves, regardless of our immutable characteristics, like race.
It just seems like such a superficial thing that we've really, really trumped up.
Yes.
And I'll play the devil's advocate.
Some people would say black people were forced into this position to see race, you know, based off of historical events.
And I understand that.
But that doesn't mean that we have to continually live in that particular manner.
You know, one of the problem that one of the problems I have with people who always reference the past is that they equate the present to the past and pretend like nothing has changed in between.
You know, it's like when people say, you know, black people are disproportionately incarcerated today.
That's just like slavery.
Right.
Well, it's like, well, what about the, you know, all the years in between where we weren't disproportionately incarcerated, even when we had legal oppression, right?
So those things matter.
But I think that you're absolutely right.
Ultimately, based on what you're saying, you know, race is a flaw, right?
And I try to, I kind of talk about it a bit in the book, but I talk about it publicly.
Race is a vulnerability, right?
If you know that someone's weak point is their race and they're sensitive to it, you're going to constantly trigger it.
It's the reason why racial pandering actually works in the Black community to a depressing degree.
It's the same reason why, you know, Democrat politicians show up and talk to Al Sharpton at his so-called nonprofit.
And, you know, they all speak in a southern twang all of a sudden.
You know, it's the same reason why Hillary Clinton says she has hot sauce in her bag.
It's the same reason why Hillary Clinton goes to a Baptist church and speaks like, you know, with a southern twang all of a sudden.
It's that kind of pandering towards black people.
It's the signaling or the virtue signaling towards black people that says, I see you, right?
And it's because we are very sensitive about race.
And if someone acknowledges our race, we view them as our friends, right?
So to speak, in a very simplistic way of saying that.
But the people who, you know, know this about us, which I truly believe the Democrat Party sees that about us, is that they know that we see ourselves as Black first and maybe second, right?
They see how important it is for us.
So they're constantly using our vulnerability.
They signal, how you doing, every four years, make promises.
And then after that.
Jack up the oil prices, which disproportionately harm minority communities.
Exactly.
Or they advocate for policies that hurt Black people the most.
Or they say, you know, we care about the education for Black kids.
It's not fair that one of my favorite thing, and actually, I don't even necessarily automatically equate this to Democrats because there are some Democrats who are pro, you know, school choice.
Right.
They just, they're just not very vocal about it.
But progressives, on the other hand, I would say most of them, most of the prominent ones, are not for school choice, right?
But it is the one thing, education is the one thing that can really equalize and put a child on a trajectory towards success.
And the idea that, you know, they'll use like this propaganda that says it's systemic racism that kids, black kids who live on one side of this line, who, you know, pay less, there's less property taxes, they get worse schools.
But the kids on the other side of the line have more property taxes and they have better schools.
So they'll use that propaganda as simplistic as it is, and I can tear it apart to shred.
You know, I can shred it up.
They'll say, school choice is not a good thing.
They're saying, keep them in those crappy neighborhoods.
Keep them in the crappy schools.
Let the government run schools that have been failing for decades in these particular neighborhoods.
Keep them in there.
Do not give them school choice, right?
You know, like Kamala Harris, when pretending, let's pretend like she was actually being serious.
She was criticizing Joe Biden for being against bussing of kids, right?
Yet her getting bussed helped her to accelerate to the position that she is and get a better education.
So it's that kind of thing that they're completely inconsistent on.
And Joe Biden, for decades, was not, he was against it.
You know, he was against school choice.
He was against kids having the opportunity.
If there was room in another school to go to another school and get possibly get a better education, he was against that.
There are cities around this country where they are practicing aspects of school choice and it's helping these kids, right?
Ultimately, I kind of see school choice as a it's like a last band-aid.
If we want to specifically talk about race, it's a band-aid to the real problem that's affecting black Americans.
But at least it's something, right?
It's something that we can do on a public policy level to advocate for more charter schools, right?
And this doesn't mean that every charter school is successful.
Obviously, there are ones that aren't good.
But what we do know is there are public schools that have failed consistently, that kids are graduating illiterate.
This was an article that I was reading.
Granted, it was a little bit old.
I think it was from like 2015, 2016, but it was saying that nearly half of the adults in the city of Detroit are illiterate, right?
Imagine you're someone who's trying to start a business in Detroit and you're saying, I want to do good and try to hire people.
And half the people that you have the possibility of hiring, they can't read and write.
That is a travesty.
And that's the failure of the public school system.
That's not even a race thing.
You know, Detroit is majority black.
Everybody who's in positions of power, school board, they're all black, right?
So this isn't even a race thing at this point.
This is a corruption problem.
This is a government failure problem.
And so my issue is the race part becomes the most simplistic thing, right?
I use race as an entryway to say, actually, race isn't a problem, but if you care so much about race, why are you doing these things that affect the people of the race that you're talking about?
But I know that the real problem is government failure.
I know that the real problem is, you know, not allowing people the choice.
I know that the number one problem is our fractured families, right?
But there is no government policy that you can put into place to keep families together.
There really isn't.
What you have to do is change the culture around it.
So that's one thing I want.
That's actually a good segue because on Martin Luther King Day this year, I was looking at civil rights stuff because it was just everywhere.
And I noticed the stark difference in the appearance of civil rights protesters 1964 and Black Lives Matter protesters 2020, right?
I mean, when you look at those photographs, Martin Luther King, for example, someone you brought up in your book as a person that we idolize yet don't listen to.
And, you know, dressed in Sunday's best.
I mean, everybody looked sharp in the famous pictures of firemen hosing down men and women in suits.
And it was just like, this is such a respectable crowd.
Like that was part of, I think, the aesthetic visceral.
It was like an aesthetic visceral catalyst to see someone who looks so respectable being treated like such an animal, right?
That's like one of the things that's so powerful about the civil rights movement, just historically.
And my question for you, the reason I brought all that up is what changed, man.
Like, where is that community now?
And Sunday's best with like a legitimate, you know, grudge, right?
Like there was some actually like, I can't eat at this restaurant.
Like, what the fuck?
That's racism, right?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's so, and I'm not saying that there aren't legitimate grudges today, but like, why did like, how did the culture like in one generation?
It's like almost inverted.
I don't know in terms of values.
Man, there are so many different directions I could bring this.
So the one thing to kind of realize about the movement, the civil rights movement, is what was Martin Luther King?
He was a pastor, right?
There was a religious element when it came to it.
They met up at churches, you know, which is why churches were bombed, right?
They were meeting places for Black families, right?
There are meeting places for Black activists.
Churches were crucial to the movement, right?
So like you said, Sunday's best.
That's a reference to dressing up for church, to show respect when you enter the house of God.
So it's that ideological framework of nonviolence, peace.
And like you said, for people who didn't live in the South, let's say you lived in the North, and you're like, what's happening down there?
And you watch the news, and you see people standing there were in suits and ties being watered down in hoses.
That's...
That's the, what's the optics?
That's the optics that really worked for them, right?
It wasn't them being aggressive because then people can justify them being watered down because they're being aggressive.
They were just responding to their aggression, but they're standing there peacefully holding hands and they're being attacked.
And so viscerally, that is something that really stands out for people who may not even be aware of what is actually going on.
They didn't have mass media the same way we do today.
So to convey that message, they had to do it in a very careful manner.
So why do they look different ultimately is because they are motivated by two different ideological frameworks.
You had Christianity and today you have neo-Marxism.
These are two opposing ideologies.
You have one aspect, the civil rights movement being led in the churches, supported by families, black male leadership, you name it.
You look at Black Lives.
It is an organization that's ran by Black lesbians.
This is called what it is.
It is not pro-nuclear family.
They explicitly said they want to dismantle the nuclear family.
It is the polar opposite of what the civil rights movement is, which is why it looks so different, right?
marxists are about any means necessary right uh when it comes to the civil rights movement at least that particular movement they were talking about what's that Turn the other cheek.
Yeah, exactly.
Turn the other cheek, which back then some people did not agree with.
They thought it was weak.
It was a weak positioning, right?
Malcolm X initially didn't believe in that.
So, you know, it's that kind of difference.
That's why you see such a juxtaposed position.
There's, I think personally, there's like a love affair when it comes to being militant.
There's, you know, some people have this like, you know, love affair when it comes to the Black Panther Party, you know, this idea of standing up to the man and brandishing guns.
And it was cool.
Yeah.
You know, it was just cool, man.
It was cool.
I get it.
But no, but ultimately to answer your question.
Better or worse.
But to answer your question, that's why it looks different.
They're motivated by two different ideological frameworks.
And so that's why we have two different outcomes and two different ways that they're choosing to move about.
And one last thing I do want to bring up, I truly believe there's a class element to this.
So even if we talk about the leaders of Black Lives Matter, who are they?
They're all college educated women, right?
We can leave out women, but they're all college educated, right?
And to attend college, you have to be of a certain economic status for the most part, right?
So these are at least middle class Black women to upper middle class Black women.
And now today, they're wealthy.
So they're definitely upper class Black women.
You look at all these different professors that pop up, right?
They're not poor.
They're of a upper middle class stature.
You know, it's kind of like, how come all the socialists are rich?
You know, it's that kind of thing.
You're like, there's definitely a class element to this.
So I think sometimes we overlook that.
And I think that's part of the problem with automatically thinking black and poor, because you ignore that there is a class element, even within the black race conversation, right?
And I talk about the black bourgeoisie and the black aristocrats, right?
Those two different levels who are wanting to cry oppression when one time in their life, things didn't go their way.
But the other 100 times, we just ignore those, right?
So they always try to equate themselves as being, we're all one, right?
So like LeBron James, who's damn near a billionaire, me and him have more alike than me and you, supposedly.
But no, that's not true.
LeBron James is a completely different life, despite his skin color.
You know, he's among one of the wealthiest people that have ever existed in human history.
So this idea that me and him have more in common than I do with you is ridiculous.
We don't live anywhere near the same lifestyle, have the same access to things, move around the same type of people.
We can keep going down the list.
And it's that kind of thing where you look at the people who speak up about race.
They are the most successful people, regardless of race, that have ever existed.
Within race, they're the most successful Black people that have ever existed in human history.
So there is a class element, and you're not going to find too many lower class Black people who are leading some sort of social movement today.
They are, for the most part, going to, at bare minimum, be middle class to upper class and beyond.
So I think that's something that's important to kind of highlight.
That's really interesting.
One thing you mentioned really fascinated me.
You basically distinguished between the Christian ideology that backed the civil rights movement in the 60s versus the neo-Marxist ideology that's backing what we're seeing now.
And when you mentioned that, it occurred to me there's something really, there's a really interesting difference between the two ideologies that I want to ask you about or just bring to the table.
Sure.
The first is with the Christian ideology, something I'm familiar with.
You have to choose Christ, right?
Especially in the Baptist community when you actually choose to be baptized, no infant baptism, right?
This is a culture of studying the Bible.
This is a culture of when in a moral riddle or puzzle or predicament, consult the Bible or your preacher, right?
This is a culture of don't respond based off of what your inclination is, but do the right thing instead of the natural thing.
Like turn the other cheek is a perfect example of that.
Everybody wants to hit back, right?
But there's like an ideology that you choose and then and then you submit to it and you obey it because of the morality, the ideology of it, right?
And so I think that's a very interesting difference between the Christian ideology and the neo-Marxist ideology, because I guarantee you, if you pulled anybody aside who was throwing Molotovs during one of these George Floyd protests and you asked them if they were a neo-Marxist, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Right.
You're right.
Like, what's a neo-Marxist, right?
And so that's what's kind of alarming to me about Marxism.
And we kind of touched on this earlier, like Marxism was made for the street.
I mean, it was made for low-income people that were being oppressed by systems, right?
And I think that that's kind of what makes it.
It's got viral baked in, you know?
And it was really naive for us to ever assume that we just stay in academia because the whole thing was designed to spread among an uneducated mass.
And I guess the point that I'm trying to make is, and I don't know, I don't know what we should learn from it, but it seems to me that we're in like a really scary situation in which we have these entire political movements occurring based on ideologies that people have adopted in which they are unaware that they have adopted them.
Like at least the Christians knew they were Christian.
Yeah.
You know, and I, and I don't know what the, I don't know what the solution is, but it seems to me like that, that's a, that's a really dangerous place to be when you have, you know, massive swaths of people kind of getting in line without even understanding what they're in line for.
Yeah.
You know, it kind of reminds me of like Karl Marx, for example.
Karl Marx wasn't, you know, a factory worker, right?
He was basically taken care of, you know, by either his parents or wealthy friends, yet he complained about the class difference and the working people and all this other stuff.
And I see that's why I bring up the class element to these movements today, because I kind of see that very situation.
Wealthy people who are spreading the message of the oppressed working class, but replace working class with race, the oppressed black.
And we need to do something, right?
Not me personally, I'm not shedding any bloodshed.
I'm not going onto the streets to do these things, right?
But the people need to do these things.
They need to do the bidding.
Why?
Because we're oppressed.
I think I understand why people get seduced by the Marxist ideology is because it makes big promises and it puts people in the position to be the savior.
There's a reason why Marvel movies are so successful is because people like superheroes and people, especially kids, you kind of grew up wanted to be a hero.
You want to save people.
You want to help people.
Boys want to be firefighters.
Girls want to be nurses.
Those are positions to help people.
There's nothing wrong with helping people, but there's a difference between helping people and becoming the savior, which is a different type of mentality.
And I think what we've been seeing within the past couple of years is the proliferation of the savior complex.
This idea that certain people need advocacy by other people.
Otherwise, they cannot succeed.
It's so patronizing.
Yes, it's incredibly patronizing.
But they don't see it that way, right?
They're told that they have the privilege.
So they now must speak up for the people who don't have the privilege.
That's the only way that you can change the system, right?
Meanwhile, they're saying you're oppressed.
And you say, I'm not oppressed.
And they're like, you're only saying that because you've been brainwashed by this white supremacy system to believe that you're not, you know, it's like mental gymnastics ultimately to put them back in this position.
Right.
To put them back in the position of being the savior.
So I think there are people who are just naturally narcissistic who love this stuff.
And I think there are people who have good intentions who are seduced by this because like I'll go back to what I said, when presented with a problem, you look for a solution.
And the Marxist solution sounds wonderful, right?
You know, I kind of talked about this before.
I've dived into different avenues, taken in all different types of content.
And there was one very small particular period of time in my life where I kind of like, maybe racism is, you know, plus power, you know, you know, considering, right?
Maybe, yeah, you know, kind of, you just kind of fallen into that listen to, you know, the Tariq Nasheeds and like, oh, let me hear what he has to say.
Maybe he makes a point, you know, but, you know, I did notice in that very short period of time, I had a level of like anger.
And I was like, I don't, I don't like how this feels.
And then I looked at my life, right?
How can I sit here and, you know, try to build some sort of animosity towards other people when so many white people have helped me as well as black people.
And I, and I went back to like, well, people are people, you know, they're fucked up people of all skin colors, right?
And on top of that, you know, my son is mixed.
My son's white and black.
So, you know, for me to view the world or even try to racialize my son, you know, I'm glad I woke up from that.
You know, like I said, this was a period of time where I had a job where I could go on YouTube all day and just take in all different types of content.
And I was like, this is new stuff.
I never heard of this.
Oh, let me consider this.
But, you know, that didn't last too long in my life.
So, yeah, that's ultimately what I want to say.
No, that's a really interesting perspective.
And when you're speaking, you know, it occurred to me based on some of the things that you said, like from a political standpoint, it's almost inverted from the intuitive notion as to which party actually has genuine incentive to solve racial problems.
And what I mean to say is the Democrats have leaned so much on the race issue and class issues that it's gotten to the point where it's clearly a necessary exploitation of whatever problem there may or may not be, whether it's real or not.
It's a necessary exploitation in order to gain and sustain power for the left, right?
They have to campaign on racial issues.
They have to campaign on equality issues, whether it's sex, whether it's race, whether it's sexual orientation.
They really lean on these problems existing in order to propel them to positions of formal authority, right?
And it's funny because the right is sort of accused all the time of either being explicitly racist or just totally apathetic to racism.
Like, all right, I'm not racist, but I don't give a fuck if you're experiencing a problem because you're race.
Like, that's kind of the brand that's been projected onto the right.
And it's funny because we saw this with Trump.
Whether I haven't looked at the policies and the data, so whether it actually manifests, I don't know.
But rhetorically speaking, Trump was always pushing, you know, black unemployment's at record lows.
Like, there was really a concerted, intentional effort for Republicans to associate better outcomes for racial minorities with Republican parties, with the Republican Party, right?
And so it's funny because like the Republicans are scrambling to try to figure out how to help these minorities because they want to pull the rug out from the left.
And then the left is like trying to keep it a problem.
Like, no, it's still a problem.
So it's like, it's like this opposite thing where you have the left that's like, you know, preaching to like try to fight for the rights of, you know, the most vulnerable among us, yet absolutely needing the most vulnerable among us to remain vulnerable.
Yeah, it's, it's definitely, I mean, listen, I wrote a thread on Twitter today talking about how there has been a political shift.
So, you know, Trump is a, is a huge impact on the right.
I think even bigger than, let's say, apolitical people really realize.
He was a huge shift that kind of siphoned the moderates over to his side into adapting into the what I call like the new right.
You know, some people, you know, it's interesting because we throw around the word like conservative, and then some people say, well, what are they trying to conserve?
But if you feel that your country is being attacked culturally, that up is down, down is up, a man is now a woman, a woman's now a man, there is no consistency, you're trying to conserve normality, right?
You're trying to conserve reality.
And so in many ways, you know, the political spectrum has shifted to the left to such a degree where people who just had mainstream liberal thought are now seen as right-wing.
And so now they are trying to conserve traditional liberal principles, right?
Which is why, like, for example, on the right, you always hear them talking about free speech, partly because they're the ones who are being censored.
So you're always going to scream the loudest when you're the one who's being censored.
But that was a left issue.
Yeah, that was a left issue.
And so now that that's why you're seeing this adaptation into the right, because a lot of them are former liberals, you know, a lot of them were moderates or sometimes even apolitical.
But maybe they would call themselves like default Democrats.
So, you know, the walkaway movement is filled with these people of all different shades and colors.
So, you know, there has been a shift and it's been like an adaptation from the left to the right, which is why the right seems more expansive than it was maybe in previous years.
And I could be wrong about this, but that's just kind of how I'm seeing it, how I'm relaying this information.
I don't think, I think what with the right and when it comes to the topic of race, people who are on the right tend to be more individualistic.
Sure.
You know, on the left, yeah, they tend to be more collectivists.
So the topic of race fits more into the collectivist mindset than it does in the individualist mindset.
So it's not that they're like, I don't want to talk about race because it makes me uncomfortable.
It's that they don't see it as nearly as an important situation.
Kind of like if I asked you, tell me about yourself, top 10 qualities, you wouldn't say race.
And, you know, it's that kind of mindset.
It's not the most important thing in the world.
What matters most is your character, how you present yourself, things of that nature.
But for someone who's a collectivist, it is very important with what group they associate themselves with.
And this is not to say that, you know, because we're human beings, we're at some point we identify with some particular group, right?
So even Christians identify with other Christians, right?
So there's, there's nothing necessarily wrong about group identification, right?
But when it comes to the topic of race, race is, you know, as the left likes to put it, it's a social construct that the right doesn't really like too much.
You know, they don't like the topic of race because it doesn't make too much sense to them.
It doesn't make too much sense to cater policy to a specific group of people.
But even within that idea, what is black?
Right.
Is it someone who is mixed?
Is it someone who's black is black?
Is black is black?
What's that song?
Yeah.
You know, it's it, and this is not necessarily me saying this.
I'm just trying to translate for people who are listening.
So, you know, the topic of race is just kind of a weird thing for them to glam over and say, we need to help these specific people rather than they see things on a policy level.
And I'm kind of the same way where I'm like, listen, I get it.
You want to, you want to help people.
If you, you know, just with a human eye, see that, you know, there's black people who are in terrible situations.
That's going to be the easiest thing for you to associate it with.
It's their skin color.
And what I'm saying is you can do both, right?
You can help a lot of black people without even focusing on their race by having good policy, by going back to local governance, by holding people locally more accountable.
And I think one of the bigger issues that we've had is that we've looked at the federal government as our solution to everything.
As soon as something small happens, we just run to the federal government.
George Floyd dies.
Now we need a federal bill about policing.
The crap that's happening in Minneapolis is not happening in bum fuck Idaho, right?
They were protesting in the United Kingdom.
It's not even the same thing.
That's a whole different story.
That's a whole different story.
Seriously, man.
But, you know, it's that kind of thing where they constantly run towards the federal government for everything.
We need to have local governance.
And obviously, there are things that are going to help poor people.
And if statistically, you know, Black Americans are on the poorest side of things, then yeah, they're going to get helped more than other people.
But what I see as a kind of dangerous thing is for the right to say, well, we'll just out identity politics you, you know, just like they like to out, you know, own the libs, you know, that mindset can be kind of funny sometimes, you know, but when it comes to policymaking, it can be just as damaging from both sides.
You know, it's like cancel culture, right?
I mean, I've seen so many people complain about cancel culture and then advocate for Whoopi Goldberg to be fired.
Yeah, that's not being consistent whatsoever.
Come on, like the problem is to cancel culture, like not the people, right?
So yeah, yeah.
So I'm totally with you on that.
And it's something that both the right and the left are guilty of is just hypocrisy.
You know, I guess it's just part of human nature, but I don't know.
If we're conscious of it, I guess, I guess we can overcome it.
Yeah.
Listen, we all do hypocritical things, you know, not me.
Not you, except for you, but you know, we all, to some degree, we do hypocritical things, but that's why it's good to be conscious of certain things and why I advocate for people to be principled.
And, you know, if you are a free speech advocate, then be a free speech advocate.
If you, you know, I don't necessarily like Whoopi Goldberg and the things that she says, but I don't think she should get fired.
Right.
And I understand what she was trying to say, right?
I give her, you know, the benefit of the doubt as to what she was trying to say.
So I get it.
You know, some people aren't, you know, linguists.
You know, they screw up and say things in a weird way and say they use one particular word in the wrong way and people misinterpret it.
It turned into a bigger thing than it actually is.
I'm pretty sure she's aware that the Holocaust, you know, was anti-Jewish.
Right.
Right.
When push comes to shove, maybe she just slipped a little bit in the way she framed it.
Right.
Like I understand she was trying to say this is a human problem or whatever, whatever the hell she was saying.
But I don't think it was anything worth firing at all.
Or let me ask you this.
What do you think of a remake of 12 years a slave movie?
Right.
Did you ever watch the movie 12 years of slave?
I did not.
So it's an amazing movie, true story about a guy, a black guy who was free and then he was abducted by some white racist dudes from the South and then sold into slavery and he was a slave for 12 years before they were able to like figure out that he wasn't really a slave.
Right.
Tragic story.
Anyway, the movie is very explicit, very graphic.
I mean, it's just like to your core.
Like I'm a white dude and I was like crying and it wasn't like I was virtue signal and I was with like my two buddies like let's go see this heard it was good and like at the end we're like crying it was like a moving movie man.
But what if they remade that movie exact same script and the only difference was all the black people were white and all the white people were black?
The point being, like, this was an act of horror from humans to humans, right?
Like, you can take the racial element out of it and get almost closer to what's so unnerving about the whole thing that was slavery.
Like, how could human beings do this to other human beings, right?
And so, I don't know.
I just thought that that would be a really provocative project for somebody to do.
You know, and I think that, you know, it's almost provocative to say, but, you know, the slaves didn't free themselves, right?
Harriet did, damn it.
Well, I mean, there were some people that, you know, Harriet helped.
But I'm saying slavery as an institution wasn't ended by slaves themselves.
You know, there are obviously people who weren't slaves and there are people who look different than the slaves, the African slaves that said this is an immoral act.
And I would argue that they were basing it off of their Christian values, which is why it was baked into the Constitution, as far as saying all men are treated equally, right?
Despite them understanding that there was still going to be slavery for, you know, for that period of time.
But it was growingly, it was becoming more and more popular.
So, but even within that being stated, you know, slavery as an institution existed since, you know, for God knows how long.
Time immemorial.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, so.
Exactly.
So, it's not to say that, well, you know, slavery was all right until it became, you know, too risque.
Until Jesus came and said, don't do that anymore.
Yeah.
But it's to say that, you know, to some way, we're not special, you know, and there are good people of all makes.
And I give some credit to some people, even the people who were participating in this particular system, who did not feel comfortable doing so.
And, you know, as someone who's participated in a particular system that did not feel comfortable doing so, I regret doing it.
And I understand that some of them regretted doing it.
So, you know, I've heard different adaptations talking about the Constitution and how they were hoping that they're in a very near future, that slavery would be abolished.
And this idea that the Civil War was not about slavery at all is also ridiculous.
So, you know, there's a difference in the Constitution between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution was a clause that protected slavery.
It's documented, literally, that it was about slavery by the people who today claim it wasn't.
Yeah.
exactly so you know like i said it wasn't slaves who freed themselves we fought a bloody war within this country to end slavery there was an abolitionist movement that was behind it um so this idea that uh There were no good white people until the 1970s, where they all just had this racial awakening after the civil rights movement or something.
It's kind of ridiculous.
I also think, I think it's easy to demonize the past, right?
Because a lot of the people aren't alive to defend themselves.
And it's easy to simplify the past too.
So I think not even just talking about race, but just about a ton of different things.
We could talk about male-female relationships and marriage.
I've talked to so many people who just think that, you know, basically women were told what to do and grabbed by the hair and forced to do it until the, you know, the women's movement.
I'm like, that's ridiculous, right?
But it's easy to think that, right?
Because you can find a horror story here or there to support that and just ignore all the other loving relationships or the way people just handle things or the way people saw families and things of that nature.
It's easy to think that.
It's easy to glam onto the horror stories.
And much when we talk about race, we talk about the horror stories.
So, you know, if you go to someone and say, you know, the police aren't, you know, systemically racist, they're like, what about George Floyd?
What about Eric Garner?
What about, thanks for naming all the rare horror stories that have existed in our country, right?
The fact that we can name each and every situation is a good thing.
Name one person who died in the Holocaust.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, because it happened to all of them that we lose sight of who happened to.
Because we just think of the, yeah, right.
That's interesting.
I never thought of it.
Like the fact that you can list them makes it kind of undermines the narrative.
That's that's fascinating.
Well, and one thing I wanted to mention too, and I want to be conscientious of your time, but you know, and I don't know how true this is.
I just saw Tim Poole, I don't know, a couple of months ago on his podcast, pulled up a really interesting chart about the divide between the right and the left in terms of radicalism, right?
So extreme right versus extreme left.
And apparently, over the last couple of decades, the right has gone slightly further to the right, but the left has gone disproportionately further to the left, right?
So the majority of contemporary political radicalization that's happening is on the left.
It's happening on the right too, to some extent, but it's manifest on the left.
And I wonder if the cause of that is it seems to me like when a political party, especially if it's myopic or hyper-focused on one or two like huge issues,
and I kind of hinted at this earlier when we were speaking, when those issues are resolved, in order to continue to be relevant and perpetuate power, you almost have to radicalize in order to maintain, like I said, relevance, right?
So for example, if you look at the Third Reich, I don't know why Hitler always comes up, but if you look at the Third Reich, they had to have like, they had to basically just have this radical narrative and propaganda about who the enemy of the Germans were was and who was really responsible for the loss of World War I in 1918.
And, you know, they like really had to push this kind of basically bullshit narrative about whose fault it was in order to perpetuate their own power.
I mean, when Hitler came to power in whatever year it was, 33, one in 40 Germans was actually a member of the Nazi party.
There were 80 million Germans in Germany.
2 million of them voted for Nazis.
And so it's like, it was just like this minority, but it was so radicalized.
And the point I'm trying to make is my fear is as we solve problems, because as many problems as we create, we do solve problems sometimes.
I think gay marriage is an example of a problem that we solved.
We write it wrong there.
Civil rights movement, obviously, slavery, obviously, women's suffrage, as much as I hate it, it's probably the right thing to do.
And so, but my point being, as much, as many problems as we solve, how do we prevent the natural selection, like the radicalization of political movements in order to justify their own existence?
I don't know how you prevent it because I think it's like a natural inclination for people who seek power.
I'll give you an example.
So I have a German friend who lives in Germany.
And she was telling me how when all the refugees came from the Middle East and North Africa and Syria and they started coming at the loads a number of years ago, at its peak, you had tons and tons of people coming in on trains and arriving in all types of ways from other countries.
And so the German government, via Angelo America, said, Germany is open to you.
So everybody flooded in.
And so how do you support all these people?
Well, you have all these nonprofits and you have lawyers, immigration lawyers, you have all these different things.
But what she told me was like, but now these people have found an avenue to make money and support a particular system.
You've now created an industry, right?
And once you create an industry, it's hard to get rid of it.
And so I equate that to like, you had mentioned actually the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement is very specific, at least in my interpretation, it was very specific about getting rid of segregation, right?
And so right, the Civil Rights Act, exactly.
And to have that legislation passed through is a very specific, you know, goal.
But what do you do with that?
Now we're going to sleep the next day.
Oh, fuck.
What are we going to do now?
He's like, all right, everybody, we can go home.
You know, so what do you do with that?
And so I kind of look at, you know, the assassination of King.
All right.
And, you know, that triggered riots and things of that nature.
But then you have, you know, the energy from the riots, you have the energy from post-civil civil rights movement.
And so what do you do with that?
And so you have people like Jesse Jackson who come up and become become some sort of thought leader or at least like race leader.
Right.
And what is, of course, what does he do?
He runs for the Democrat Party and tries to run for presidency at one point.
You know, the very party that was trying to prevent the Civil Rights Act from being passed, but who remembers that?
Longest filibuster in U.S. history.
27 hours?
Yeah.
But, you know, we don't, we don't care about that stuff.
But, you know, ultimately, he took, he took the reins of that particular movement, or at least one of the people who took the reins of that particular movement.
So you had all this energy that was based off of race and a collectivist movement.
And so you accomplished that one big goal.
Now what?
What do you do with it?
And, you know, you create an industry based off of it.
You know, some people have called it the race grievance industry.
I actually kind of came up with a term that is kind of all encompassing what you see with post this neo-Marxist movement called big identity.
You know, we call them big tech.
We have big identity now.
I like it.
We have the ACLU that's part of big identity.
You know, you can name different corporations, part of big identity.
They all make money off the idea that identities, specific identities are being targeted, specific identities are being disenfranchised, oppressed, you name it.
And they all campaign off of that.
Give us money and we'll lead towards equality, whatever equality actually leads to, right?
What does that actually mean?
It doesn't matter.
That's not the point.
So, you know, especially ACLU, the group that advocated for Nazis to have the right to speak freely is now saying that people cannot speak freely because it hurts other people.
So they've become incredibly illiberal, but they become illiberal because it's more profitable to be that today than to be principled.
So, you know, we have a lot of that, you know, these, the taking over of certain movements.
You had mentioned the gay rights movement, you know, to, or at least the gay rights.
Now that the gay people can get married now, now we really need to focus on like trans people.
It's like it gets more and more extreme.
Like, and God bless trans people, like, of course, like equal rights, whatever.
I'm totally cool with that.
But like, nobody was talking about trans issues in 2006 because the gay issue hadn't been solved yet, right?
And it's just like, so the more the more basic problems we solve, the more niche problems we focus on.
so it's like the more radicalized we inherently become yeah yeah and then people pretend that we don't solve the issues you know we do you know we we that's what i'm saying like in at least in american society we have an inclination towards progress so we've at least had an inclination towards progress more so than many of other countries that you'll ever find right um you know we've been
able to put it like this from the start of barack obama's term to the end of barack obama's term he went from saying marriage is between a man and a woman to saying he's okay with gay marriage Yeah, he crossed the threshold.
He crossed the threshold, right?
And that's in an eight-year time span.
So, you know, the idea.
So you try it, right?
Oh, man.
I'm not touching that one.
No, no, no, no, no.
But yeah, the idea that we don't lead towards progress is ridiculous.
We're constantly leading towards progress.
We're constantly doing things and improving things and looking at certain things.
That's why I think it's utterly ridiculous the way we talk about race as if nothing has changed since slavery.
Like you people are out of your goddamn mind if you say that.
And the funniest thing is the ones who are the loudest about it scream oppression and they get in their Mercedes-Benz and drive to their big house.
Right.
So it's, that's why I think many of these people, either they're ideologues who truly believe in what they're saying, just don't see how ridiculous they're saying.
Or I don't like to use the term grifters, but maybe there's some sort of, maybe it's a grift.
It's possible.
You know, like, does Oprah truly believe that white women need to apologize to her?
Or is she just going along with the times where they're just forcing white people to apologize for existing?
I don't know.
Oprah's an interesting one because I don't agree with Oprah very often, but I've never, I've never just intuitively as a human being, taken her for a liar.
Yes, but that's the thing.
It's like, why?
I always ask question, why now?
Right.
Why did, and you, you've probably seen the clip that I'm talking about where she has white people wanting to apologize for their participation in a racist system.
The same racist system that made her a billionaire, they now need to apologize for.
And I'm thinking to myself, Oprah was white women's best friend for fucking like two decades.
Like, what is she talking about?
And she made so much money off of this.
And now in a split second, yeah, America is this racist society.
We need to, everybody needs to apologize.
Everybody needs to read Maya Angelou right now.
Yeah.
Right.
Or Robin D'Angelo.
Read Robert D'Angelo right now.
She's part of the book club.
Damn, Oprah's book club.
Does she even read the books?
There's no way she's reading the books.
I don't know.
She's got, yeah, she's, she's Spark Note in it.
Yeah.
Or she makes her assistant read it.
Yeah.
So what happened?
Tell me what happens.
Wow, that's fascinating.
I really should read that.
Yeah, what happens?
Well, first of all, it's called an autobiography, but it's written by someone else, which is the most confusing shit I've ever heard in my entire life.
Oh, man.
Tell my life story.
Exactly.
I'll make corrections.
You might have to wrap up the last couple chapters without me, though.
Too soon.
Yeah.
Anyway, man, hey, it's been great to have you on the show.
I've really, really appreciated your insight.
Where can people find you?
Yeah, people can go to wrongspeak.net.
That's my website for Rongspeak Publishing.
I'm the founder of it.
I advocate for free speech along with intellectual thought.
So if anybody wants to contribute an article, feel free to contact me through the website.
I'm on Twitter heavily these days.
So at wrong underscore speak.
You can follow me on there.
You can purchase the book from either Rongspeak's website or you can go to Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com.
You can find Black Victim to Black Victor there.
Yeah, I'm on Facebook, Instagram.
You know, just look for Adam B. Coleman.
You'll find me.
I'm pretty accessible.
So, yeah.
Thank you so much for coming on.
It was an honor and a pleasure to have you.
I'm going to end the stream and then we'll do a quick debrief and call the night.
