In this installment, Jordan sits down with Brandi Collins-Dexter, author of Black Skinhead and host of the Bring Receipts podcast, for a riveting conversation about Ye, feminism, and the relationship between the Democratic party and Black Americans.
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and George. | ||
| Knowledge. | ||
| Fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
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unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Jordan, unfortunately alone without my co-host today. | ||
| However, I am joined by Brandi Collins-Dexter, the author of Black Skinhead, the host of the Bring Receipts podcast, founding director of Color of Change, other incredible accomplishments, and I'm a Clown. | ||
| So thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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unidentified
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I'm not a founding director, I have to say. | |
| All good. | ||
| No misinformation, right? | ||
| But yes, I was senior campaign director and kind of founded our media justice department. | ||
| My mistake. | ||
| All good. | ||
| I apologize for that. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| So the reason that I reached out and the reason that I wanted to talk to you is actually I... | ||
| I had read Black Skinhead quite some time ago, but I had followed up, I can't remember why, but I had followed up on your coverage of COVID disinformation, specifically in the Black community. | ||
| I was hoping that you would be able to better describe the nodes wherein that is best expressed, if that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, what do you think is the first, like, major starting point for disinformation? | ||
| So, I mean, I think that... | ||
| So, a couple of things. | ||
| Like, I think there's, you know, the different categories. | ||
| So, like, misinformation, unintentionally shared, inaccurate, or out of context. | ||
| And then there's disinformation, which is intentional, you know, creation of campaigns to forward a certain narrative. | ||
| And so I think one of the big pieces of this is that I don't, I think most people, Black and any other community. | ||
| Share misinformation at some point. | ||
| I know I've definitely shared misinformation. | ||
| It's really easy, too, in the kind of information economy we live in. | ||
| But this idea of disinformation and how intentional, hostile narratives are planted for often like... | ||
| Political brand damage or sort of financial ends is something that, you know, we see a lot of across different communities. | ||
| I think one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that because of the way that internet research studies, which is a lot of what I do, is often disconnected from community-based research and organizing, we actually... | ||
| We don't have a lot of data on how disinformation may drive. | ||
| Political activity, per se. | ||
| And so we've got a lot of correlations and not necessarily causation. | ||
| But one of the things with the Canary in the Coal Mine report, which was looking at the early days of misinformation around COVID, I, at that time, was working at Color of Change, which is a racial justice advocacy organization. | ||
| And we had been in a lot of conversations with tech companies. | ||
| And I started to notice that there were these narratives popping up that Black people couldn't get COVID. | ||
| And the initial, you know, different categories that we saw were, you know, one example was that COVID comes from 5G and because Black people don't have a lot of Black 5G in our communities. | ||
| We weren't susceptible that, you know, melanin kept, you know, black people protected, all sorts of stuff around Bill Gates' conspiracism. | ||
| And so we actually documented some of this at Color of Change and sent it to Twitter. | ||
| And this was like February of 2020 about? | ||
| And they didn't take any action to deal with anything online. | ||
| They said that they didn't see it was a problem. | ||
| That's gotten better now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shocking, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think to me, like, so I started this report because, one, I wanted to document this because we knew that that was not true and that was a really dangerous narrative that was putting people in danger and that Black people have certain amount of disproportionate pre-existing conditions that actually make us more susceptible. | ||
| And one of the layers that I uncovered around that was a story around Media failures, essentially. | ||
| And that the gap in story is what allows conspiracism to fill it. | ||
| And so in the early days of reporting of COVID, there wasn't many articles that were talking about the race of people or even placing them in neighborhoods. | ||
| And so what we found out later is that actually a lot of the early deaths in the U.S. were Black people, but those numbers weren't being reported. | ||
| And because of the lack of Black-owned And controlled media within communities, a newspaper like maybe Chicago Defender back in the day that would have been doing that work, they're not able to do that same work anymore. | ||
| So people are going online for information and it was spreading really rapidly and you had really public figures that were putting out, in some cases, misinformation and in some cases with folks like Candace Owens, what I believe was intentional disinformation. | ||
| And so that's how we wanted to kind of like... | ||
| Talk about that space. | ||
| And so for me, when I think about what happens with Black communities, is that oftentimes our stories are not told holistically in certain mainstream media outlets. | ||
| We're losing local owned and controlled newspapers, which is happening across the board, across different groups, right? | ||
| And because that... | ||
| Gap is there. | ||
| People are choosing different, like, broadcasters and spaces to go to collect information. | ||
| And that's where you see a lot of disinfo spread. | ||
| And so now, part of what we saw was, like, a flip from Black people can't get COVID to, you know, conspiracism around Black genocide and that Black people were being, you know, targeted as part of... | ||
| A race-specific bioweapon, if you will. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or you see, you know, kind of in political discourse, a lot of stuff around like, you know, how a black genocide is happening in all these different ways through different political figures. | ||
| And I want to say this, too. | ||
| Like, one, I love conspiracies. | ||
| First of all, so let me start there. | ||
| But also, when I think of conspiracies... | ||
| I think of them as some ways an untold story or an unproven story. | ||
| And so in some instances, I think that there are things that have a kernel of truth to them, but they haven't been legitimized. | ||
| And in some cases, we're just talking like batshit crazy things, right? | ||
| And so how do you parse through that? | ||
| And then how communities are taking that in? | ||
| And then how they're responding either politically in public safety mechanisms and all of these other ways. | ||
| And so that's a lot of the work that I think about and I do. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, and I wanted to, I mean, the thing that I followed up on, or I want to follow up on with that is, I've spoken to many disinformation experts and researchers, people who've gone undercover and all of those things, and the underarcing theme, I say under on purpose, is that kind of goes unspoken, is that most of these conspiracy theories... | ||
| have a kernel of truth yes and in general in general that kernel of truth comes down to something the united states government did to black people yes and so and so what i found and i still find so uh i suppose compelling and obviously is the largest challenge is that with Other conspiracy theories, you know, if you're talking to somebody, you can say, oh, that's ridiculous. | ||
| They don't do that. | ||
| But for a lot of black people, you have to say, they don't do that anymore. | ||
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unidentified
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Right? | |
| So that's a unique challenge in terms of fighting disinformation. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, no, for sure. | ||
| I mean, I think, so the data is mixed on Black people and belief in conspiracism. | ||
| And oddly, most of the research that I've found that's really delved into this in a meaningful way comes from the 80s and 90s, which I think is interesting in and of itself. | ||
| But there's been a couple of research findings that have suggested at times that people that are, that Black people that are, you know, more educated and more politically connected are actually kind of more inclined to believe certain political theories. | ||
| And again, that's like one or two studies. | ||
| That's not a full thing. | ||
| But I definitely put myself into the category. | ||
| It's like, when you know kind of the shit that... | ||
| Government has done, you know, it makes it a lot easier to believe certain things. | ||
| Now, what does believing it actually mean? | ||
| And how does that destabilize institutions? | ||
| And what is, like, institutional responses? | ||
| I think that's kind of the trouble point. | ||
| And I think in the field of disinformation... | ||
| Part of what I think some of the failures have been is that it becomes a conversation solely about the tech or the information itself and not the ways in which government or certain institutions have failed communities. | ||
| So going back to the COVID example, one of the early things that was being said was that Black people were under-vaccinated because they didn't trust getting vaccinated because of things that had happened like the Tuskegee Erics. | ||
| Sorry, not Tuskegee Air Experiment, but the Tuskegee Air Experiment. | ||
| Yeah, when they put them in planes, right? | ||
| Yeah, when they shot them up in planes to the moon, and nobody documented that black people were the first ones on the moon, didn't you know? | ||
| That's why they had to fake it later. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because black people get there first, you know? | ||
| You can't have that. | ||
| But like, for example, in Chicago, one of the things that was kind of discovered is a lot of the early vaccination sites, Weren't even on the south or west side or in black communities, or they were kind of only open during the day where working people didn't have a chance to go there, or people weren't getting that information. | ||
| And a lot of people, one of the things that we kind of saw was like, next door would post up, hey, you can get vaccinated here. | ||
| And then people that were on next door, typically like sort of middle class urbanites, would then go rush to those sites and get shots. | ||
| And so there were a lot of practical reasons why people weren't getting vaccinated other than just not. | ||
| And when you don't tell that part of the story or confront that part of the story of government failure and some of the actions of Mayor Lightfoot at that time, then it leaves people almost like gaslit in a way and even more inclined to give in to the sort of conspiratorial mindset. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's the twin truths of this conspiracy isn't true. | ||
| This conspiracy is true. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Listen, you can trust the government, but you can't trust the government! | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| Or, like, this thing happened, but maybe why it happened is not because there's, like, you know, lizards crawling the earth. | ||
| Maybe there's another reason for it. | ||
| And that kind of gets, again, to a deeper layer of, well... | ||
| The narrative that is built up around not getting vaccinated being because of distrust, which is also somewhat infantilizing. | ||
| They can't get over it. | ||
| There's definitely a ton of they can't blank about that. | ||
| Is that that helps overlay the fact that it is the economic injustice that leads to the very distrust that continues the cycle that then they create again. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, often economic distress also kind of like bread and butter racism, like not directly related, but I think there was a recent report that came out that was talking about still with mortgages and who's given. | ||
| You know, access to certain loans at a favorable rate still breaks down along... | ||
| Race lines, but not necessarily class lines. | ||
| So black people that make more money are still less likely to get sort of like favorable loans for housing. | ||
| The Navy, federal thing? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That made me want to start fires. | ||
| I wanted to start fires. | ||
| How do you not start fires after reading that, right? | ||
| It's kind of like, it's sort of mind-numbing sometimes. | ||
| And that's why it's like so important to... | ||
| Have, you know, media spaces, alternative media places where people can like not just make sense of what's happening around them, but, you know, kind of build an agenda or power to counter some of these systemic inequities. | ||
| But it's hard to like not do the work to fix the systems and then just be like, oh, but we're going to pour like millions of dollars into studying disinformation and then finger wave at people based on, you know, perceptions around. | ||
| Perceptions of an increase in black male conservatism and saying that it's because of the disinformation and not because of maybe some other underlying frustrations. | ||
| That is a great, great transition into your book. | ||
| See how I did that? | ||
| I don't know if it gets much better than that. | ||
| That's pretty fucking solid. | ||
| So, Black Skinhead is the title of your book, taken from the track, what? | ||
|
unidentified
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Track four? | |
| Ooh, are you that good? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I want to say it might have been during four. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| Yes, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Could you... | |
| Well, in the book, which was written in 2021, I assume the definition of Black Skinhead was written in 2021. | ||
| It was actually written before that. | ||
| It was actually... | ||
| I started doing the research for what became Black Skinhead in 2019, and it was right around... | ||
| I'd already been studying online Black political discourse. | ||
| I'd already seen some of the stuff with Kanye, obviously. | ||
| But I think it was right around the time that he did the visit to the White House with Trump and tried to make sense of some of that. | ||
| And I was thinking about this and I was listening to, I don't know, a lot of his music for whatever reason. | ||
| And Black Skin had just kept coming to me as a perfect concept to define some of the phenomenon. | ||
| And so a lot of the book was actually written itself in... | ||
| Mid-2020 through like 2021 and then got released and came into print in 2022 and the same week the book dropped was when Kanye did the White Lives Matters fashion show. | ||
| So I was like, oh cool, that's dope. | ||
| Well, that's what I was wondering. | ||
| Has your definition and your relationship to the words black skin had changed? | ||
| No, I think in a lot of ways it's actually been... | ||
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unidentified
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Reinforced. | |
| Reinforced. | ||
| And so when I use the definition of black skinhead, what I'm talking about is a certain amount of political homelessness and isolation that brings together maybe estranged bedfellows around the idea of grievance and often with a sort of underpinning of economic loss. | ||
| And so when you don't have those spaces to go to to make sense of what you're seeing or even be confronted on some of the things that you're seeing and you're kind of just like left out there where you go. | ||
| And so Kanye to me in a lot of ways is like a quintessential Black skinhead because I think he is somebody that operates in a lot of like... | ||
| Political and community isolation. | ||
| And you can tell that by the way in which some of his ideas have developed and redeveloped and who has become his community or his people with folks like Nick Fuentes and Milo and Candace Owens and others. | ||
| And so that idea, it's not one that's... | ||
| That definition is not one that's meant to describe Black conservatives, per se. | ||
| There's a lot of Black conservatives and even MAGA people that I interviewed that I wouldn't define as Black skinheads, and there's a lot of leftists that I would define, and even myself included. | ||
| I think that I have a certain amount of, at times, a feeling of political homelessness, but it's like, what is the kind of late-stage version of that when you're almost to the point where you can't be brought back? | ||
| And I think everything that... | ||
| What happened the week, months, and years following the release of the book to me reinforces what that means. | ||
| And I think to me it would be... | ||
| I love talking about Kanye. | ||
| I want to talk about Kanye, but I think in a lot of ways the book is using Kanye as an example. | ||
| But I think every day we see a lot of people that feel disillusioned, a political homelessness, and are looking for something and are being anchored to grievance. | ||
| And you see that playing out in a number of ways, whether that's like rising school shootings or a number of other things, like increase of deaths of despair from Black youth and the age of first attempt has dropped significantly. | ||
| I think all of that is kind of signs of what we're seeing. | ||
| Yeah, when you, I mean, you obviously, as you said, you interview a lot of young black conservatives. | ||
| Speaking specifically of Rain, who you mentioned, I found that so fascinating because that was maybe the most real politic view I've ever heard from a teenager that was essentially boiled down to, have you looked outside money equals civil rights? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I'm wondering, what is there to offer to that person from the Democratic side, you know, from the left? | ||
| What do you have to offer to a person who is that practical about the United States? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I think that's, I mean, it's an interesting thing. | ||
| Because that's kind of two different questions. | ||
| So it's kind of like, what does the Democratic Party have to offer something like that versus what does the left have to offer something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| Obviously, those are two very different things. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know. | |
| I got you. | ||
| But I think part of the reason why that came up for me is because I was listening to... | ||
| I was going back to listen to some different interviews of Kanye to freshen up for this interview. | ||
| And I heard someone speculate that had a Marxist gotten to him as opposed to someone like a Candace Owens, that the direction that he goes in might be slightly different. | ||
| And I'm not sure I totally buy into that. | ||
| But I think that there's a lot to offer about a value proposition that we can all expect a certain minimal quality standard of life and ability. | ||
| To thrive in community and the ability to have our own autonomy in different ways through meaningful governance and social projects and proof of concept. | ||
| But now I think since we've kind of moved away from a lot of New Deal era policies, we haven't seen that play out. | ||
| The government and the Democratic Party hasn't played that role or offered that value proposition. | ||
| So I don't think at this point in time, There's anything the Democratic Party can offer someone like that. | ||
| But what I do think is interesting about him is, and I'll say this for folks that haven't read it, so I introduced Rain in a chapter where I talk about- I'll say this. | ||
| Read it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Read it. | ||
| Please read it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Read the book. | |
| Read it. | ||
| Leave a review. | ||
| Or don't read it and leave a review as long as it's five star. | ||
| But like, you know, he was like my- I talked to like a group at that time of 10- Black MAGA people that were ranging in age range was the youngest. | ||
| So he was like 18 or 20. And then the oldest was like in their 50s. | ||
| And he was the only one, maybe Lisa, who I talk about at a different point, that I would consider a black skinhead. | ||
| And there were people in there that was like, we think the Republican Party has something to offer black people. | ||
| And if Trump brings people in, that's cool. | ||
| But the thing about MAGA and the thing also about skinheads is that they're not tethered to party. | ||
| They're kind of like who is a candidate, maybe a cult of personality figure or something that's offering something to them. | ||
| So I think if he were presented with, part of what I heard in some of what he was saying is that he could get down with a leftist. | ||
| He's not a guaranteed vote for the Republican Party. | ||
| But right now, the slate of candidates that are being put in front of him from the local to national level. | ||
| Are not offering anything. | ||
| And I think that's really alarming because I think there's a lot of young voters that feel that way. | ||
| And especially in the black community, part of why I think this. | ||
| Part of why I'm delving into this is that I don't think that this quote-unquote phenomenon or theory is exclusive to Black people. | ||
| But because Black people are such a large voting bloc for so long, you can see the cracks. | ||
| It's almost like putting it, you can put this under a microscope more easily with that voting bloc. | ||
| And I think there are a lot of young voters that do not feel like their parents' politic or their grandparents' politic or the Democratic Party is a space for them. | ||
| They will not vote for them. | ||
| Or they will not vote at all. | ||
| And I think even more with things that are happening around Palestine, I think that's also opening up this wedge in that space. | ||
| So I don't fully know what the party, especially when you think about money and politics, necessarily has to offer someone like that. | ||
| But I do think that there's an energy around political organizing that in my most optimistic state, I would like to think could help us get to a different place. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| What do you think, actually? | ||
| About what? | ||
| About, I mean, what does, you know, the Democratic Party or the left have to offer someone like Rain? | ||
| Or anyone? | ||
| You know, I would say that if I was going to trace the history, especially using, you know, your book, and frankly, you know, Maybe the simplest guiding light to me is always going to be Whitey's on the moon, frankly. | ||
| Just like, can I ask you a question? | ||
| Is Whitey on the moon? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are rats still biting Nell? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Then we fucked up. | ||
| The end. | ||
| If you haven't changed anything since then, then the Democratic Party has essentially, in that time period... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And now it's like, well, it looks like they're going to fucking kill us anyways. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you guys failed. | ||
| So now we have new ideas, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What I think is so interesting about it is that in a way you're kind of... | ||
| Documenting almost a new flowering of a hundred schools in 300 BC in China, you know? | ||
| There are all these different thought processes going on geared towards finding a way to unite people. | ||
| Yes, and all of it is segregated. | ||
| And that's kind of the difference. | ||
| That's one of the differences between in the past you could engage in like a... | ||
| Business, church space, or news publication, if you look at old editions of Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, others, you have all of these different political identities going back and forth with each other. | ||
| Galvanizing this around this idea of racial egalitarianism. | ||
| So in the book, and again, I didn't mention this, but the book is essays, which I really like because you can kind of come, you don't have to read it from front to back. | ||
| You can pop into what you want to. | ||
| But one of the places that I start is outline what has traditionally been seen as like... | ||
| The wide range of Black political identity. | ||
| And Black conservatism is definitely not a new thing. | ||
| But what Rain is kind of exhibiting, which is more libertarian politic, is something that in some ways, you know, folks like Thomas Sowell notwithstanding. | ||
| A little bit of a new thing. | ||
| And kind of what it speaks to is he's not somebody that's the family values guy necessarily or getting into some of the certain types of cultural war fights. | ||
| He's like, it's money. | ||
| Government hasn't proven anything to us. | ||
| So what do we need government for? | ||
| And I think that that growing sentiment that government hasn't proven its value proposition, I think it's a real challenge for leftist politics. | ||
| If you can't figure out a way to make people understand what government can do for us, why would people necessarily choose big government over no government? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I think what people aren't I mean, you know the The different schools that people are kind of grouping themselves around. | ||
| You have the Marxists, you have the MAGA pokes, you have all of these things. | ||
| I think what I find fascinating, though, is that ultimately the goal of all of them is to create unity among all of them. | ||
| In a kind of strange, even insane way, the young black conservatives support a white nationalist regime because they'll bring in all the black people together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, which is kind of an interesting thing that I would say puts rain on the borderline, I would say the black... | ||
| Skinhead spectrum, like, he's the closest thing to it, but I think in somebody like a Kanye, like, I don't, he uses the language of... | ||
| Black, you know, autonomy and all of these things. | ||
| But when you listen to what he actually says, what his grievances are around, some of the conspiracism he, like, names, it's actually, it has nothing to do with, like, uplifting Black people. | ||
| It's about his, like, kind of personal grievances and his gripes with Nike, Adidas, you know, Kim Kardashian, like, all of these people. | ||
| And so that's, to me, that's what I call, like, the kind of late stage when you're not even thinking about what will be the, Best pathway to black collective, you know, improvement autonomy or whatever, but you're just out for yourself. | ||
| And I think those are some of the trends that alarm me more. | ||
| Yeah, the... | ||
| So, do you believe that that kind of idea of I'm out for myself, that kind of... | ||
| That brain didn't quite express, but didn't quite not express. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think that's on the uptick? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think part of it is... | ||
| Compared to what, though? | ||
| Compared to when? | ||
| Or, you know? | ||
| Well, I would say definitely with... | ||
| When you talk about Black voters, one of the things I talk about in there is that the Black vote traditionally has been driven by this concept of linked fate. | ||
| And so it's this idea that I'm not seeing my vote as an individual vote. | ||
| It's more tied to what the collective power brings to it, which is part of how you get a Democratic voter. | ||
| A block like you have because there was a calculus made at a certain point in time that, you know, consolidating votes into the Democratic Party could actually do more to, like, improve things for folks than not. | ||
| But I think, like, you know, what we're seeing now, what data from, like, Pew and others is showing is that... | ||
| This concept of link fate among younger Black people is going down. | ||
| They're less likely to learn Black history or something that creates this shared identity or shared fate through family and more likely to learn it online. | ||
| And then when you go on and you think about what content gets... | ||
| Optimize and algorithmically, you know, widespread. | ||
| It's often not necessarily content about, you know, by or for, you know, necessarily Black people. | ||
| It's like PragerU. | ||
| It's like, you know, some of these other places. | ||
| And so I think that idea of a vote meaning something for the collective, I think that's something that's, you know, starting to shift in little ways. | ||
| And I think broadly... | ||
| I think people are starting to think more about their vote, less about what does that mean for the collective versus more self-interest. | ||
| And again, that's not necessarily directly new. | ||
| There's always versions of that. | ||
| But I think more and more as certain people feel like even now. | ||
| If I vote for Biden but my material conditions don't change, then what is the point for voting for Biden? | ||
| I might as well either vote for someone else like Cornel West or not vote, opt out, which is where voter depression comes in. | ||
| And so I think that's some of... | ||
| And I will say this, I think, I haven't looked at the most recent data, but I do think there's something about the long-tail effect of COVID and existing in isolation for so long for so many people that does drive a certain amount of self-interest that you see, not just in the political realm, but things like I've seen data about how crashes have gone up and the way that people drive on highways. | ||
| And there's like... | ||
| All of these different signs of ways in which people are not thinking about the community good. | ||
| We're slightly more solipsistic as a whole because we've spent the past two years looking at everybody through a screen. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, and again, I haven't seen some of the most recent data about that, but I know certainly I feel that and I've seen some data around it. | ||
| And I think I even act more in a lot of ways self-interested coming out of COVID. | ||
| There's a lot of things I give less of a shit about for me. | ||
| I mean, I wonder so much if it's that or if it's so much like we're really discovering the limits of what it is we can do. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Ultimately, we can say, you know, the vote makes my material conditions change or anything like that, but... | ||
| The more we look out at what we can materially change, the more we can influence things, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You do your best, you vote your ass off, and then John Fetterman shows up and goes, I'm not a progressive anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you're like, alright, that one's new. | |
| We were all laughing about George Santos, but this guy's way fucking worse, and it's not funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| Yeah, no, I mean, that's real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in that sense, how is it possible to sell somebody on voting? | ||
| I don't say that it's... | ||
| Let me try and put it this way, because I'm not one of those people who's like, don't vote, man, it's stupid, that's dumb, or anything like that. | ||
| But I'm also going to look somebody in the eye and tell them, you should vote, and I'm not going to believe it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, it's funny because I was telling somebody the other day that this is kind of this upcoming election is the first time where I'm really kind of like having to really think about, you know, whether or not I want to vote at the top of the ticket. | ||
| And I think there's been times where I've been uneasy. | ||
| Certainly I talk about that in the book, but it's like ultimately you do your due diligence and you do the thing and also... | ||
| In 2020, there was a lot of things that happened around protests in the street and things that made those lines much more clear between Biden and Trump at the time. | ||
| And not that I would ever vote for... | ||
| I would go left, I wouldn't go right. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| But I think, to me, there's a couple of elements to here. | ||
| There's a lot of energy politically out there. | ||
| And I think, to me... | ||
| Whittling down the ability to be politically powerful to whether or not you vote, I think is not the best answer. | ||
| I think there's a lot of ways to harness some of that energy and really productive ways that can shift culture, shift economies, shift the stakes in a way that can kind of move politics in a lot of ways. | ||
| Cultural change precedes political change, right? | ||
| So you can shift the cultures. | ||
| I mean, I think that's something that shouldn't be... | ||
| It's disregarded and that should be activated. | ||
| And I think in terms of voting, I mean, can we repeal Citizens United? | ||
| I think that it feels challenging, but I will say this to Biden's credit. | ||
| I think there's a lot of ways in which he has not shown up well for certain types of voters, including my... | ||
| You know, me as a sort of self-identified leftist. | ||
| And there's some things that he actually has been good on, which I would say I would name as antitrust. | ||
| I think he's actually been quite good on antitrust and some of these other issues. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, some of those fights are some of the most important fights that we can engage in and win. | ||
| And the other thing I'll say is like, we should not, whether or not you vote the top of the ticket. | ||
| Versus whether or not you vote locally or in different ways where there are, you know, more ways to apply a certain amount of pressure to political figures. | ||
| I still think it's a worthy endeavor to, like, all the things you can vote for, like, you know, Baltimore just legalized, you know, marijuana this past year. | ||
| You don't vote. | ||
| You don't get a say in that. | ||
| And so there's different things. | ||
| School boards. | ||
| There's a lot of, like... | ||
| District attorneys, there are a lot of really important high-stakes fights that are happening at the local level where you can actually see the change more profoundly. | ||
| That is another thing that I found kind of interesting in some of those Black MAGA conversations, that idea of like... | ||
| Well, I mean, the local Republican Party is up for grabs. | ||
| We can just steal it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that I find such a great and fascinating idea. | ||
| Can you just show up and steal a political party and just say, I'm Republican, and then do whatever the fuck you want? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because if you look at the Democratic Party, it feels like that's what they've done the whole time. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, why? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| And even going back specifically to Black voters, there's a lot of interesting data that says that if you ask Black voters what policies they support, they actually support more left policies than may be indicated. | ||
| There's a lot of assumptions about Black conservatism. | ||
| But one of the things that Leah Wright-Rigueur writes about in The Loneliness of the Black Republican, which was one of my source materials, is that the actual modern Black conservative strand of voting is like the legacy of Black voters leaving the Republican Party and essentially hijacking the Democratic Party. | ||
| And that was really interesting when I heard and sat and thought about it. | ||
| And there's a lot of different examples, even like this appeal to... | ||
| Whatever, the Lincoln Republican or this invisible, movable middle that I feel highly skeptical of. | ||
| There's a lot of examples of conservatives hijacking the Democratic Party. | ||
| So what would it look like to attempt to hijack the Republican Party? | ||
| I have no freaking idea, to be honest. | ||
| And the people that were proposing that are not necessarily the people that I would want to. | ||
| To vote for. | ||
| It's also interesting to me, though, that a lot of those folks were based in Chicago. | ||
| And so I didn't fully get into it in the book because I didn't want to make it a fully Chicago-focused book. | ||
| But when you look at the history of the Democratic Party in Chicago, there's no Republican. | ||
| I don't know how many, but I don't think there's very many, if any, Republican aldermen or anything like that. | ||
| And so the idea that... | ||
| Black people in Chicago or Gary or some of these other places where these folks are from are like, hey, the Republican Party could be up for grabs and then we could shift politics in that level. | ||
| There's something about that that feels both scary and interesting to me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| More scary than interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it is so much like... | |
| Asking yourself the question over and over and over again, you know, can we make change from inside? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, you're going to make compromises when you make change from inside anyway. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's just a matter of if you try and make change from inside the Republican Party, the number of compromises you make goes through the goddamn roof, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like a cost-benefit thing, maybe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, for like, you know, unless you truly are like a sort of conservative or Republican. | ||
| The interesting thing about it to me, though, too, is that right now or for a long time, I think that's shifting in a lot of ways with national politics in particular. | ||
| you have one party that doesn't feel like it has to negotiate with a group at all. | ||
| They see that as a last vote. | ||
| And when you, and then one party that is kind of like, what are you going to do? | ||
| Like you, you don't have anywhere to go. | ||
| So if you shake up politics in that way, where like the Republican party has to somewhat like negotiate for a black vote. | ||
| And then the democratic party has to like sort of actively lobby for a black vote beyond like a finger wagging and vote blue, no matter who. | ||
| That is interesting. | ||
| I mean, I'd rather see that haggling going on, you know, maybe further left end of the spectrum. | ||
| But I do think it sort of changes the calculus and the stance that certain decision makers can take if they have to rely on your vote to win. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I find it so interesting because it works way better one way. | ||
| If you can trace slave owners over the years through the words they won't say, and then now we back. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They haven't changed their thoughts on anything. | ||
| So plenty of those people have been in the Democratic Party for the longest time, right? | ||
| So they can infiltrate us and we're like, yeah, because you're not murdering people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| But if we try and infiltrate them, then it's like, well, now I got to murder some people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sucks. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, even like, I mean, slightly different example, but even like the whole conversation around Donald Trump versus Ron DeSantis is kind of wild to me because like, I think people are like, oh, he's more, there's like this. | ||
| idea that he's, like, more palatable or that he's a return to normal. | ||
| I'm like, the man was, like, wasn't he, like, a torturer in Guantanamo Bay? | ||
| Like, I mean, he is not, like, he's not, and what he's doing in Florida, like, this is not a good dude just because he's more... | ||
| Coded, sort of, not even that coded, but because he's more polite about what he says or who he says it to or who he's willing to piss off, that somehow feels like a return to normal because we're focused more on the civility of discourse than the civility of policymaking and, like, what we need to do to create a society that actually feels stable. | ||
| So, yeah, no, I mean, it's extremely interesting. | ||
| The MAGA offers rain, if that makes sense. | ||
| The MAGA looks at Trump and Ron DeSantis and says, Ron DeSantis is weak. | ||
| We will not reward them. | ||
| And that is an attractive thing. | ||
| That is an attractive thing because isn't what we really want out of the Democratic Party consequences for the shitty job they've done? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah, and he speaks in the language of populism. | ||
| And, I mean, I think one of the things going back to the moment where Kanye comes to the White House and has this, like, conversation with Trump and the things that they're talking about around, like, criminal justice, and I think they were talking about, like, I can't remember if it was Larry Hoover or Jeff Ford, but, like, some of those things. | ||
| He's done some signaling to, like, certain Black communities. | ||
| And what's also, I think, interesting... | ||
| about him is the more I've been doing this project I'm working on about the history of Chicago kind of politics and the implications for now is I don't think I realized that Verdolak and this is getting way deep but Ed Burke who's on trial now I didn't realize how many people from the old Democratic Machine in Chicago. | ||
| We're actually have been working with Trump for a long time. | ||
| And there's something about the some of his but when I've heard that there was something about his language and the way that he speaks and like what that signals to a wide group of people that feels very familiar to me. | ||
| And there's a certain amount of he is a party unto himself. | ||
| Like a lot of people are not necessarily going to vote red no matter who. | ||
| It has to be Trump as a speaker. | ||
| And so the way in which he's able to move these kind of like networked factions or strange bedfellows or skinheads have it is very interesting to watch. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, again, I think he's the only one offering what so many people have been denied for our entire lives, which is... | ||
| If not consequences, if I can't get legal consequences, if I can't get electoral consequences, well, this motherfucker is going to provide retribution. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is part of what people are looking at now, I think, whenever they say, well, I've made all the compromises I can, I'm not going to do it again. | ||
| Biden, if Trump hangs everybody in the Democratic Party, you shouldn't have done it. | ||
| It's on you. | ||
| And he wants to bring chaos. | ||
| And I think when people feel like the status quo is not working, they want chaos. | ||
| They want something different. | ||
| They want something shaken up. | ||
| My cousin, who was actually in this MAGA group, she was, but didn't speak because she said they were too, she's more radical than them, but she's QAnon. | ||
| She was out January 6th. | ||
| And you wouldn't necessarily think that a Black woman would feel at home in a MAGA space, but there's something about the way in which she feels like worn down and let. | ||
| Down by life in a lot of systems that makes that feel like it's a space for her. | ||
| And she's on meetings every week with them, like, smoking weed, tie-dyeing her t-shirts, and trying to raise money for the MAGA movement. | ||
| And I think when you think of if that kind of person can find this attractive, you know, there's a lot of ways in which he can feel appealing to, like, an odd group of people. | ||
| people and drive political motivations in a way that I don't think that either party fully knows what to do or grapple with. | ||
| But then there's like the people that are going to vote for him and then the people that don't like him, but will vote for him anyway. | ||
| And to me, some of that feels real scarier. | ||
| Like, you know, this is bad doing like bad things that should be Yeah, that's just extortion. | ||
| Pack it in, then. | ||
| Why not have an actual dictator if we're just going to do that? | ||
| I mean, you know. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Let's revisit this conversation in 2035 when he's still in office. | ||
| You know, I'm wondering just... | ||
| I'm wondering just how long these people are going to live. | ||
| I'm not talking about any kind of violent things happening to them. | ||
| I'm just wondering how long people live these days. | ||
| I mean, I don't know, but I think that's the other kind of uncomfortable truth about the history of the world. | ||
| I don't know that there's many examples of radical change without violence. | ||
| And so trying to kind of... | ||
| I think that we're not heading off a lot of what I foresee as violent conflicts or even this idea of a civil war, which I frankly think that we're already in to a certain extent. | ||
| We just don't know it. | ||
| I think that the only way that some of this ends is through some really rough stuff happening, unfortunately, that forces things to a head. | ||
| That's the thing that I don't think that the people that are trying to do civility in Congress are really fully prepared for. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder all too often if this is exactly the same amount of political violence that the United States has always had. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If less. | |
| Same way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, at any point in time, I think a lot of our history and a lot of our shared understanding of the United States is obfuscating all the things that have made the United States the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Totally. | ||
| In order to keep us going. | ||
| Like, as long as we have a shared lie, this rickety-ass machine will keep rolling along. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which goes back to, yeah, I know our earlier thing about conspiracies, and when you know that some of these things have happened, then it makes a lot more things believable. | ||
| Sure, and it's, I mean, conspiracy theories are comforting on so many levels for different people for different reasons, I think. | ||
| The easiest and the simplest one. | ||
| Is not conspiracy theories are comforting for people because the world is ordering or whatever. | ||
| It's because it makes people feel really uncomfortable when you have to really stop and think about the FBI murdered Fred Hampton. | ||
| It makes you really uncomfortable. | ||
| To the point where you have to stop and you have to wrestle with, I'm going to sit here and do nothing about this, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But a conspiracy theory. | ||
| A conspiracy theory is shadowy billionaires, and there's nothing to be concerned about there, because it's either not true, or there's nothing I can do about it anyways, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you like conspiracy theories? | ||
| Do you have, like, any, like, conspiracy theories? | ||
| Do I like conspiracy theories? | ||
| Or, like, a conspiracy theory that you sort of are like, I can actually believe this, even though I know it's a conspiracy theory? | ||
| I, I mean... | ||
| My conspiracy theory is probably different from everybody else's. | ||
| And it's just very simply, I think that John Wilkes Booth and the Know Nothing Party performed the most successful political assassination in the history of the world. | ||
| By killing Lincoln, they effectively ended Reconstruction and put the country where we are now. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| I would say that the biggest conspiracy is people trying to hide the fact that political assassination was the absolute most successful thing that the right has ever done. | ||
| I thought that about Garfield, actually, but yeah, that's fair. | ||
| James Garfield or the cat? | ||
| Both. | ||
| Did you see what they did to that cat? | ||
| No! | ||
| Again with the assassinations! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's interesting. | ||
| Actually, on my podcast, Bring Receipts, we did an episode. | ||
| My friend and I basically debate unpopular opinions about pop culture or super random things, and we kind of tie it back to an investigation about where does this come from, and we did one about... | ||
| The national anthem. | ||
| I think it was called Star Spangled Bangers. | ||
| But in thinking about how even the original Francis Scott Key song originally had racist lyrics and was not accepted. | ||
| The different ways in which Confederate nostalgia and softening and reframing of history has worked its way into mainstream. | ||
| I totally get you on that. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| I think ultimately that is kind of... | ||
| That's the smart one. | ||
| Well, if we talk about America's been in a civil war, or we're in a civil war secretly right now, or it's all underneath the... | ||
| I mean, I don't know if it ever ended. | ||
| You can't end a civil war on an assassination, right? | ||
| That's what starts a war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think that's a good point. | ||
| I feel really basic with mine. | ||
| Well, that's not what I was hoping for. | ||
| No, I mean, I think that's a really important thing to think about. | ||
| And I think the way in which even we talk about things like the school board fights or curricula or critical race theory, in the way that term's been repackaged, there's a lot of we've been here before. | ||
| This is the same fight that was had over kind of like... | ||
| Catholic schools and, you know, through an anti-immigrant slant and, like, what went into the curriculum in the 1920s and, like, you know, there's been a lot of iterations of this fight and there's a lot of ways in which, you know, people have, you know, formed this kind of, like, union consensus that didn't actually leave a complete union or left a lot of people out of the idea of what makes. | ||
| You know, a union or what makes the United States. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, you know, you've got a new investigative piece that you're working on for a new show about the 80s. | ||
| And one thing that you referenced specifically was the satanic panic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the way that that's... | ||
| It is fascinating to think about the satanic panic now because it seems like it lasted so long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, now we have so many satanic panics, but they last a day, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or alternatively, maybe it never stopped. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| That's my question for you. | ||
| What's your favorite thing Satan does? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My favorite thing Satan does? | |
| I mean, he makes for interesting art. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it is kind of the thing that's convincing the world that Satan is an enemy and not the everyday people walking amongst us. | ||
| That's what you're a fan of? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan. | |
| Deception on a massive species-wide scale, that's what you're into? | ||
| It's fascinating to see how he does it. | ||
| Well, actually, so this is going to be kind of like, this is going to circle back. | ||
| But like, when I talk to people, like when I talk to classrooms and stuff around like the history of conspiracies, one of the examples I give is Robert Johnson. | ||
| So, blues musician. | ||
| Um, that is considered, you know, one of the pioneers of rock, um, and died early. | ||
| And there's a lot of, but, but like, he was kind of like a mid musician and then he disappeared for a while and then he comes back and he's this great. | ||
| Oh, he's the guy who sold his soul to the devil. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that's the conspiracy, that he went and he sold his soul at the crossroads to the devil, and then he became this immaculate musician, and then he had to pay the cost by dying too soon. | ||
| So it's like this conspiracy about this deal with the devil that's kind of really interesting to unpack, because one... | ||
| He practiced really hard and white people didn't like that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But part of what allows the conspiracy to live is that it was kind of this everyday working class black man who lived and died in a way that would have gone unnoticed by a lot of media of the day and spent a lot of time in Mississippi where black newspapers weren't really allowed, were kind of like burned down. | ||
| So where there would have been documentation of his life, interviews, him talking about, oh, I practiced really hard or I went with these musicians. | ||
| None of that's there. | ||
| So we're left with these kind of like artifacts. | ||
| And then what are we filling in with? | ||
| It must have been the devil. | ||
| Like, I think that's kind of like the interesting ways in which, you know, the devil and Satan kind of like come into play in all of these different ways. | ||
| But yeah, also like the traditional satanic panic and how that was used to go after Procter& Gamble. | ||
| Also interesting. | ||
| Yeah, we talk a lot about the wet cement. | ||
| After an event happens, Alex Jones' most powerful tool is the wet cement. | ||
| There's not enough information. | ||
| The media hasn't gotten everything right yet. | ||
| And as long as he gets his stamp in there, then that is going to stay there. | ||
| That's the power of the wet cement, is it doesn't matter what happens the next day. | ||
| The stamp is there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what I find so interesting about that story is that that cement never dried. | ||
| No. | ||
| And because that history is lost and oftentimes suppressed, that's the idea, is that the cement never dries. | ||
| And we can always rewrite over and always steal something else from this man's effort, from this man's legacy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is the thing that, you know... | ||
| You described earlier about being online and losing that shared identity due to the algorithm, you know, just pushing PragerU in front of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's how you find out about, you know, Frederick Douglass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That is about the worst thing I could imagine. | ||
| It's that and finding out about... | ||
| Martin Luther King Jr. through the, what is it, the John Birch Society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not the way to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I suppose the only thing that we haven't talked about yet is, I mean, Kanye, really. | ||
| So when Kanye went on Infowars, I assume you watched with trepidation. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be a good way to put it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does it feel? | ||
| Because for me, it recontextualized the past in a very instantaneous way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm interested to know how you reacted to that. | ||
| So I think, one, there was a lot of things that kind of locked into place for me. | ||
| So one of the things that I talk about in the book is I recount when Kanye went to TMZ and said slavery was a choice and got into a back and forth with Van Lathan. | ||
| And I mention in the book that it was edited, but this is the read on it based on surface level. | ||
| And then we kind of find out around the time that... | ||
| My book dropped was that the reason why it was edited is because he was saying this wild anti-Semitic stuff, right? | ||
| And all of that was edited out in a lot of ways to protect him. | ||
| And so there's all of these ways in which a lot of different media networks have this kind of awareness of certain things that he was saying and left that out of his story. | ||
| But if you look at the company he's keeping, he shows up to TMZ with Candace Owens. | ||
| Long been trafficking in anti-Semitism. | ||
| So it's kind of like, oh, that locks into place in a different way now. | ||
| And then you kind of see him have this mask-off moment where he shows up with Nick Fuentes, who has always been... | ||
| I knew that Nick... | ||
| Quintez was always a Kanye fanboy. | ||
| He's talked about in the past how Kanye was in some ways his gateway to Thomas Sowell. | ||
| I think on January 6th and in different times he's used remixes of Kanye's music on his broadcast or whatever. | ||
| I knew that he was a Kanye fan and in a lot of ways it seemed sort of inevitable. | ||
| That those roles, that those worlds would come together because as Kanye is kind of like losing community, credibility, like people that can kind of check him in a certain way, he's going to be drawn to kind of like the sick of ants or the people that still demonstrate a certain amount of love or loyalty to him in a similar way to Trump. | ||
| And it was also very clear that even in his support of Trump, again, he's talking more about himself. | ||
| He always sees himself. | ||
| As the president or as the center. | ||
| And like Trump is an example of turning things upside down, which is almost proof of concept that he himself can do it. | ||
| But it was never about him being like a Trump supporter. | ||
| It was about how can I wield this energy, you know, for myself. | ||
| So seeing those roles come together, seeing him talk about some of the... | ||
| That he was delving into. | ||
| And then seeing Alex Jones kind of play the straight man role was a little bit of an interesting dynamic. | ||
| And him being like, oh, well, shit, where are we going? | ||
| But that felt kind of interesting to me. | ||
| But it all of a sudden made sense. | ||
| All of the different kind of like... | ||
| Artifacts or drops of things that he said and how it all came together. | ||
| I think one of the things that I did not necessarily, that I feel like is worth noting about that is that at the time, a lot of his anti-Semitism and still was ascribed to like... | ||
| A history of Black people being anti-Semitic. | ||
| And particularly that's coming together around the same time that Kyrie Irving is saying anti-Semitic stuff. | ||
| So those things get kind of like conflated. | ||
| But what I heard in his... | ||
| The type... | ||
| Two famous Black people were anti-Semitic, so obviously all Black people are sliding towards, you know, like, what are you people talking about? | ||
| But I'm going to be honest, like, I mean, I think there is a history between Black and Jewish communities in America that have bred certain moments in a way that felt familiar in what Kyrie was saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, like, Kanye on the whole, like... | |
| Hitler tip. | ||
| That is actually not like a comment. | ||
| That was not a thing that felt familiar to me. | ||
| And it cued me instantly to, oh, you can tell where he's been on 4chan. | ||
| You can tell what he's been reading. | ||
| You can tell what type of content he's consuming and who he's surrounding himself with. | ||
| Because the conspiracies that he's going off on aren't kind of like... | ||
| For lack of a better turn of phrase at this moment, a bread and butter thing that felt familiar about the ways in which some Black people talk about power in their relationship to the Jewish American community. | ||
| What he was talking about felt like, oh, this is what I hear or this is what I see when I'm looking at all these neo-Nazi memes, like the stuff that he's talking about here. | ||
| Is, like, these, like, sort of global conspiracisms that fuel a lot of these, like, alt-right things. | ||
| And so, like, hearing him and seeing him, and then seeing the response to him from Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and even Gavin McGinnis, who, like, brought him on his show to do a, like, Let Me Talk Kanye out of being. | ||
| Sure, they all wanted to explain it. | ||
| They all wanted their little cash out of the Kanye machine at that point. | ||
| I didn't get a chance to listen. | ||
| I'm assuming you guys definitely covered that episode and get a chance to listen to it. | ||
| It was a long one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What were you thinking as you were listening to it? | |
| First off, I don't know if we're going to agree on this, but Jesus is King was absolute trash. | ||
| I hated that album. | ||
| It was absolute trash. | ||
| There's one good track on it, but otherwise it is... | ||
| Fucking garbage. | ||
| Wait, what is the salvageable track? | ||
| Because I may agree with you based on what you say. | ||
| Because I follow God, I actually really like. | ||
| But I am in agreement that the rest of it is trash. | ||
| Yeah, no, it is very, very good. | ||
| And since then, everything he's made has been very, very bad. | ||
| Even with Nas. | ||
| See what happens when you lose community? | ||
| Yeah, when you lose your community, you start making... | ||
| Well, see, that's the thing that I started thinking, is because I was... | ||
| For this, I went back and started listening to a bunch of old Kanye. | ||
| And when was the last time you listened to B? | ||
| Commons album. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| You know, I listen to songs... | ||
| I always have chaotic, you know... | ||
| Mixed list. | ||
| So I still listen to songs from it. | ||
| I haven't listened to it as a whole piece in a long time. | ||
| Well, I listened to They Say earlier today. | ||
| Kanye's verse. | ||
| And in fact, I want to say, I think that whole album, after listening to it from Start to Finish Again today, foreshadows where we are. | ||
| And I'm looking forward to 2025 whenever a bunch of writers do the 20-year retrospective and they all agree that it told the future of everything that was going to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'll be fun for me. | |
| Personally. | ||
| But Kanye's verse on They Say is the best advice anyone could ever give Kanye. | ||
| Remind me of it. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| I mean, it is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shoot. | |
| Now I need to go back and listen. | ||
| Yeah, you do. | ||
| It is basically, you know, when you're black and famous and rich, people will drive you crazy and you'll lose your mind and you'll etc. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| And then Etc. | ||
| happened to Kanye. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it is really, really fascinating. | ||
| And also, man, there's never a bad time to listen to that album. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I find it interesting you brought up B, or an album that wasn't his, as opposed to a lot of people talking about... | ||
| Are you still there? | ||
| Yeah, I'm still here. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| You got something pop up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my husband started calling me on my phone. | |
| But as opposed to like My Dark Twisted Fantasy or Yeezus or even some of like Cruel Summer or some of those, it's interesting that you pointed to because that is this like really particular moment in time, right? | ||
| Because that was the one that was developed right around the time of Obama, right? | ||
| No, that was 2005. | ||
| So that was shortly after Or that would have been developed concurrently with George Bush doesn't care about black people. | ||
| Ah, okay, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| And what I find so fascinating about that is that it is kind of a timeline for Kanye early on of in response to negative attention, he does his best work. | ||
| Yeah, because that's also right after then Hurricane Katrina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah, or around the time. | ||
| Beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy is right after, and then Jesus, you know, and then Life of Pablo is fantastic, but, you know, 50% of it is fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But wait, what's the common album that has, um, it's not B, the one that he did. | ||
| Like Water for Chocolate? | ||
| No, the one where he did the video with Obama, or the people. | ||
| That wasn't B? | ||
| Was that B? | ||
| Oh, you're right! | ||
| I was thinking when Obama became president. | ||
| You're right, yeah. | ||
| Holy cow. | ||
| See? | ||
| Everything is in there. | ||
| Everything is in that album. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The future is in B. Holy shit. | |
| We figured it all out. | ||
| Yeah, I know, right? | ||
| And putting that in the context of where black people are at politically, in terms of disillusionment with political systems, after Hurricane Katrina, it kind of hits this low. | ||
| Where there's a lot of data that says that the numbers of Black people that think that racial equity will be achieved in their lifetime or in several lifetimes, it drops at the lowest that it's been in a while. | ||
| And then you see the emergence of Obama as this figure, and there's this hopefulness and possibility of something new, and that's juxtaposed against the rise of new media technology and all of these different ways in which you can experiment. | ||
| With different, you know, sounds and ways of communicating with audiences. | ||
| And so that's so interesting to hear you say that. | ||
| Now I want to go back and listen to it. | ||
| Oh, you have to. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| I mean, it is... | ||
| If you want another conspiracy theory from me, it is that Osama was really just trying to distract from how much great music was released on September 11th. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because you got the blueprint, you know, you've got... | |
| The Yeah Yeah Yeah's first album. | ||
| I don't know, but fuck it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Phrenology was released all day. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, was it? | |
| Phrenology was not released until September 11th. | ||
| That's so wild you said that, because the only album that was coming to mind was Mariah Carey's Glitter. | ||
| And I was like, that was what he was trying to distract us from? | ||
| Could have been. | ||
| Could have been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe he was trying to distract us from how bad he was. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that could be. | |
| Yeah, it is fascinating to, you know, see just that weird kind of coincidence of Kanye exploding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To use the wrong word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that era, like I actually had so, I had so much, by the time I got done with my book, the editor was like, you actually have enough material for three books because it was so much. | ||
| But one of the essays that I wrote that got cut was called I Can Make You a Celebrity Overnight. | ||
| And it talks about like this era of this particular period of, yeah. | ||
| Of, like, Rise of Kanye as a producer. | ||
| This, like, sort of national slash global platforming of all of these, like, known Chicago artists like Common, Twista, and others. | ||
| And that juxtaposed against the rise of, like, the cam girl in sex tapes in a different... | ||
| Relationship to Celebrity. | ||
| And I actually really liked that chapter, but it didn't make the cut, unfortunately. | ||
| Oh, well, give me that one. | ||
| I'll take that one. | ||
| That sounds really good. | ||
| I mean, we didn't even talk about the incredibly sex-positive points of view from the OnlyFans that you interviewed. | ||
| I mean, we're already at two-plus hours or something like that. | ||
| Are we? | ||
| We have like an hour and 11 minutes. | ||
| I've seen some of your, I've listened to some of your podcasts. | ||
| I know you go for like two hours, 30 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We could keep it. | |
| No, you have not listened to our show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's incredibly embarrassing. | |
| No, I love it because that's, I mean, it's just, especially the way that you dissect like these different pieces of, you know, Alec Jones stuff. | ||
| Because usually when I'm, you know, listening to it for research purposes, I'm either just kind of. | ||
| Listening to it by myself and documenting and noting things, but I'm not necessarily breaking it out and having a discussion around certain things. | ||
| Obviously, you know this. | ||
| you catch a lot of stuff around it that's interesting. | ||
| But yeah, we're only an hour and we're good. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| You know, that's a good question. | ||
| I imagine when we did the Endgame documentary, and so we wound up recording a nine-hour straight or something. | ||
| Covering, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| With a 10-minute break for pizza in between. | ||
| And we released it in chunks over a week. | ||
| And I really wonder how many people would have tried to listen to the whole thing in one sitting. | ||
| Marathon. | ||
| Now I'm going to go back. | ||
| I'm going to try to do that. | ||
| It's like how people try to watch all of the Star Wars. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We're thinking about doing something like that again, but it's harder when you get older. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| So then, yes, let's do that. | ||
| I do want to talk about sex positivity and the way that creates friction there, too. | ||
| Because that is another aspect of black conservatism that is almost separate from the political, in a way. | ||
| That's mostly in the religious, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, to take it kind of back to what I mentioned earlier, I start the book, one of the early essays talks about the different categories of Black political identity. | ||
| And if I were to, like, I had, I did do some rewrites, but I wasn't fully allowed to do, like... | ||
| You know, large rewrites, but I think I didn't do a good job of communicating that each essay is meant to represent a facet of that, of the different, like, spectrum of Black political identity. | ||
| So I have, like, my Black conservatives, I have, like, you know, my Black Marxists, and then there was... | ||
| I'm not allowed to say it like that, by the way. | ||
| I'm not allowed to... | ||
| I have my... | ||
| By who? | ||
| I have my Black conservatives. | ||
| I don't think I'm going to say it like that. | ||
| I mean, that's fine. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I'm not going to be one of those people that tries to get permission and then have a bunch of people online be like, no, bitch. | ||
| So one of the categories in there, and this is based off of Dr. Michael Dawson's research, who's at University of Chicago and has done a bunch of studies around black political identity. | ||
| One of them was the black feminist category as its own unique politics. | ||
| And I kind of grappled with that for a while and almost instinctively pushed back against it. | ||
| And I was kind of like, why isn't there a Black manosphere category? | ||
| But I was trying to capture what it means to have a Black feminist politic and then to interview somebody who represented that. | ||
| So just also for folks that haven't read it, I interviewed... | ||
| Like 50-plus Black voters between the ages of 18 to 108 of every different political identity and then did a bunch of other research. | ||
| And so Lotus Lane is a porn actress, a black queer porn actress from the Bay Area that I wanted to talk to as a representation of what are the kind of like modern black feminist fights. | ||
| I knew I wanted to talk to a sex worker. | ||
| I went on to Twitter and was like, are there any sex workers that are willing to talk to me? | ||
| And I got a lot of DMs from people that are like... | ||
| I'm not going to talk to you on record, but here's some different folks you could talk to, and none of those interviews panned out. | ||
| And so I was like, okay, I'm just going to shoot my shot with a couple of my favorite porn actresses. | ||
| And OnlyFans were where they are. | ||
| So Lotus Lane and another one were on OnlyFans. | ||
| And so I went on to OnlyFans, but I didn't actually know how it worked. | ||
| I didn't know it was quite so dynamic. | ||
| I thought it's like you leave someone a message. | ||
| I didn't realize it was going to be like real time, a bunch of stuff sent. | ||
| So I get on, I pay. | ||
| She's sending a bunch of content, and then in the middle of that, I send this long, rambly message that was like, I want to interview you for this. | ||
| And she didn't respond for a while, and she told me later she thought it was spam. | ||
| I also didn't... | ||
| I left some words out, so instead of being like, I don't want to make this weird for you, I actually said to her, I'd love to make this weird for you. | ||
| So there was a bunch of weird stuff in there, but despite that... | ||
| You're like a gonzo journalist in a strip club in the 70s. | ||
| It was so... | ||
| I understand this is awkward for both of us right now. | ||
| Here's a dollar, but also let's talk serious. | ||
| Which is actually my inspiration because a lot of my primary source material for the book were old Playboy archives. | ||
| It was weird because I was like, oh, actually these articles are great and these are some of the most amazing journalists like James Baldwin and like all of these other people. | ||
| And so I was kind of in a little ways trying to do that. | ||
| So I reach out to her. | ||
| She gets back to me. | ||
| And what she talks about, like, one, she talks about the experience of being a porn actress, and I talk about this in 20 Questions with Lotus Lane, what it means to be a sort of, like, black sex worker and how that's seen publicly and how a lot of sex workers are on the forefront of technology. | ||
| And there's this process of, like, making technology viable to the masses and then being displaced from it. | ||
| And there's a lot of... | ||
| So stuff around how sex workers can and have historically been a vital part of different economies in different communities. | ||
| And so I was able, she got back to me, I was able to interview her, but it really made me think about the way in which, one, the way in which we stigmatize sex work and who benefits from that. | ||
| Also, the way in which... | ||
| The idea of protecting sex workers is often wielded or protecting. | ||
| It's not protecting sex workers. | ||
| It's like protect our girls. | ||
| Or there's always this idea that we have to protect women from something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Once again, infantilizing a group as unable to make its own decisions. | |
| Yes. | ||
| And oftentimes the face of that is white women. | ||
| But then the policies that get put into place are not actually around protecting. | ||
| Those folks, it's about incarcerating and it's about criminalizing and subjecting a lot of vulnerable communities to a lot of abuse from law enforcement, from Johns, from all of these spaces. | ||
| And because often there's this underlying conservatism in America and then also within the Black community, we don't see those fights around things like, I don't know if you guys have talked about, you know, But we don't see some of those fights that are opportunities to either legalize sex work or actually make it truly safe for people. | ||
| Like we don't show up often for those fights. | ||
| And so that kind of like black feminist politic was part of taking on some of these different dirty fights that are not seen as respectable, but are actually really important for us from both an economic criminal justice and tech justice standpoint. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree, just based almost entirely on the fact that if I go back through... | ||
| History, I can't find a group that didn't exclude black feminists. | ||
| You know, like, first wave feminism, woo, not a fan. | ||
| Second wave feminism, still not fans, you know? | ||
| And then you have religious communities, which were always a high source, and any queer activists that popped up were roundly, yeah. | ||
| So that's probably one of the most isolated groups ever. | ||
| On so many levels and abused by so many systems. | ||
| And then it's like, when we say Black Lives Matter, what does that mean? | ||
| Because oftentimes, like even in the summer of 2020, it was interesting to see there was a lot of conversation about police killings that were happening and a lot less conversation about the number of like... | ||
| Black trans women that were also murdered that summer, the number of, like, sex workers. | ||
| It was, like, we had to identify who felt like, in some ways, an ideal symbol to organize around, and that's not everybody. | ||
| In a lot of the spaces I organize in, there was a lot of, you know, organizing about that stuff, and then even, you know. | ||
| Conversations around Breonna Taylor and others, which was uplifted by the WNBA that summer. | ||
| But I think when we have these different conversations, when I was at Color of Change, one of the campaigns that I ran was around R. Kelly. | ||
| And so Color of Change is a racial justice advocacy organization, and we run these like sort of corporate accountability campaigns. | ||
| And we decided, my team decided to run this campaign around getting R. Kelly dropped by RCA. | ||
| And we were working with Lifetime on Surviving R. Kelly, which hadn't come out yet. | ||
| And when we first started doing that campaign... | ||
| We got a lot of pushback, really shocking amount of pushback from our members. | ||
| We had, at that time, 1 million members. | ||
| I think now it's like 7 million. | ||
| But around, you know, these girls are making that choice. | ||
| Like, there was no nuanced conversation or, you know, important conversation about the levels of sex abuse and grooming and all of these other things that were happening. | ||
| It was only after that came out with Surviving R. Kelly that we could even be... | ||
| I began to move the needle on some of those conversations. | ||
| And again, it just reminds me how thoroughly unprotected so many members of our community, whether it's Black women, whether it's queer, trans folks, whether it's class lines, there are just so many people that are left vulnerable every day. | ||
| And what does it actually mean to show up? | ||
| For those communities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, if you hear that response, how is that different from a micro version of slavery is a choice? | ||
| All those women, that's slavery is a choice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the same words. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That you condemn from other lips. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it's a duality of one unpacking. | ||
| How much of that is a choice? | ||
| But then also, if it is a choice, it should be a choice. | ||
| It should be seen as a protective. | ||
| You're like, in the case of Lotus Lane, she didn't get into porn until she was in her 30s. | ||
| And one of the things that she said was she was growing up, had kind of loved sex, she had her kids, and she felt like this was a thing that she wanted to do, and that she would be almost dishonest if she didn't protect. | ||
| Pursue something that felt like it was like her dream or her bucket list. | ||
| How could she then tell her kids to pursue their dreams? | ||
| And I mean, you know, for some people it would be like, your dream is to be, you know, important. | ||
| But I mean, I think, you know, to respect that as a choice in a field that should be protection, that deserves protection, that should, you know, not... | ||
| Have to allow, you know, rape, sexual abuse and some of the things that happen even online in the ways that Black women are depicted in porn or even the names of porn. | ||
| She talked a little bit about how a lot of videos will circulate and she thinks she did this like romantic sex scene and her name is in it and it's prominent and then it gets recycled on Pornhub or like some other places and it's like... | ||
| Black bitch takes it in the face. | ||
| Her name's not on it. | ||
| She gets none of that money. | ||
| So it's like, how do we talk about these different things as a certain level of work that needs to be protected and should be a choice? | ||
| And if it is a choice, it's respected. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's such an interesting point of view on that of, I want to do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was listening to Jessie Ware's most recent album, and there is a point at which one of her lyrics is, pleasure is a right. | ||
| And the more I thought about that, the more of a transgressive statement that truly is. | ||
| If you stop and think about the idea of pleasure being a right, most of our rights are actively devoid of pleasure. | ||
| And most of our laws are trying to destroy pleasure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So reading these interviews with, you know, reading interviews like the one that you gave with Lotus Lane, it's always interesting to see that both, like, the amount of effort demanded of her. | ||
| The amount of effort that is beyond, you know, the physical transformations that often porn stars are expected alone, she's expected on top of that to never have a chipped nail, you know? | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| That concept is so fucking cruel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| She talks about that. | ||
| And yet that's her dream and she follows through with it. | ||
| That's a powerful, you know, pleasure is a right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You gotta work yourself for it. | ||
| I mean, and hey, like, even if you get your dream job, like, nobody wants to... | ||
| Very few people want to do that job every day. | ||
| Sometimes you get tired of doing your dream job, right? | ||
| But we actually had a whole bunch of stuff that didn't make it in. | ||
| But we had this funny conversation about deepfake videos because she was kind of like, you know, if I could trademark my image and I did deepfake videos and I got money off of that, hey, I wouldn't mind not doing the work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| If you can create fiction indistinguishable from reality, at that point, let's all just hang out and have a good time. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Except not in the, what is that weird metaverse thing. | ||
| Oh yeah, no. | ||
| No, that's no good. | ||
| I wouldn't mess with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah, I keep thinking... | ||
| Sorry to go back further a little bit about that, you know, R. Kelly, about all of that is one of the things about My Dark Twisted Fantasy. | ||
| One of those lyrics that stuck with me is not so much anything other than, at the end of the day, goddammit, I'm killing this shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when I listened to that the first time, that was a bad... | ||
| Fuck yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| And then whenever I listened to the interview of Kanye on Infowars, it was very much that same thing that you have to constantly realize is that that is why they get away with this shit, you know? | ||
| Because at the end of the day, you don't care. | ||
| You care about, he's killing it, you know? | ||
| My Dark Twisted Fantasy is a fucking killer album. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the same way that people are like, fuck it. | |
| Beat it crazy good. | ||
| What do you want from me? | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think it is kind of interesting to think about in a couple ways. | ||
| So, I mean, I think when he did My Dark Twisted Fantasy, it was right after, which I talk about in the book. | ||
| He had the moment with Taylor Swift on stage. | ||
| God, I hate Taylor Swift so much. | ||
| Yeah, me too, to be honest. | ||
| But where he gets up and an interesting part about it, he's kind of defending the merits of single ladies, which I can't say I love that video either. | ||
| But he gets up and he has all of this condemnation, this new president. | ||
| Obama, who in a lot of ways he was almost creating the soundtrack to and giving Obama a lot of cool credibility through the commons, the people in all of this stuff. | ||
| Then he calls him a jackass, and he has this moment where he feels like he lost his community, and then he goes to this island and makes My Dark Twisted Fantasy, and all of his community comes around him. | ||
| All of the new artists he had been talking to, they come and they hold him down, and he makes what a lot of people consider to be one of his greatest albums. | ||
| I'd be curious about yours, but then I juxtapose that with... | ||
| That's one of the greatest albums of all time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But then you juxtapose that, and when he's talking about it, there is a little bit of like... | ||
| False-hyping himself up. | ||
| It's like, I have to present this because, you know, I need to feel this, but I'm at my lowest point. | ||
| But when I see him on Alex Jones sitting there with Fuentes, with a kid, it's like, what are you doing, bro? | ||
| You're, like, in your 40s and you're hanging out with this, like, kid that, like, picks his nose and is kind of like a loser, but, like... | ||
| And that's your people? | ||
| It's just like I'm sitting and Alex Jones is looking like the reasonable one while he's sitting there also kind of proud that you're doing his work for him in a lot of ways. | ||
| That felt like the loneliest, most isolating moment to me. | ||
| And I think if he was like, at the end of the day, I'm killing this, it just wouldn't be believable. | ||
| And I think that's part of the reason why so much of his art has not just gone down creatively. | ||
| who's willing to engage with it. | ||
| It's like, you, these seem like cries of desperation. | ||
| It doesn't seem like anymore. | ||
| You're passionate about something. | ||
| You're building up your community. | ||
| Like you're, you're, you're trying to do this. | ||
| You're giving everything for your art. | ||
| You, you're reading like this really bitter man that has now this twisted perception of your relationship with your mother that has put this like weird, You know, stuff around Kim Kardashian, which isn't... | ||
| You're talking about... | ||
| I'm not sure if he gets into it in Alex Jones or somewhere else. | ||
| You're talking all of this stuff around porn and the Jews creating porn and all of this wild stuff. | ||
| Then it turns out later that it comes out that you're showing porn to people in your workplace. | ||
| It's just so cheap and really hard in a lot of ways to watch. | ||
| And he seems, again, not to... | ||
| I understand why people don't want to mess with him and I don't like when people use mental illness as an excuse for certain actions because I think people can be mentally ill and it doesn't necessarily mean that they do certain things but he just comes off as so unhinged and not tethered to the real world in any meaningful way and that feels so | ||
| different from his It is hard to think of the guy who made Blood on the Leaves now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, like... | ||
| Although that too plays around in Black Genocide theories, but yeah. | ||
| No, no, I mean, that guy now shouldn't be allowed to touch that song, you know? | ||
| But the guy back then, that's one of the... | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| He's the only guy who could touch that song back then, you know? | ||
| Those horns were the only thing that could ever, you know, everybody else would have treated that... | ||
| or with such a slowed down beat or anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Only Kanye would be like, this song should be in your face. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It should be breaking your eardrums, this song, you know? | |
| And then it makes it even harder. | ||
| Because you still see glimpses of that. | ||
| I didn't realize that he worked on Industry Baby by Lil Nas X. And again, it's hard to parse out who does what. | ||
| But when you listen to Industry Baby and then I found out that he worked on it, I was like... | ||
| Oh, that's that glimpse of what made me fall in love with him musically. | ||
| It still feels like it's there, and it's so painful that it's whatever dark place you're in that you can't get out of that's so trash. | ||
| We still see those glimpses of greatness, but it's so buried under all of this trash stuff. | ||
| Did you read his new autobiography? | ||
| Sly and the Family Stone. | ||
| Have you read that yet? | ||
| I bought it. | ||
| I haven't read it yet. | ||
| I bought it. | ||
| I haven't read it yet. | ||
| You know, I was thinking about that in the context of, like, what happens if Twitter exists in 1981? | ||
| What happens when I have officially run out of ideas? | ||
| I am the preeminent musical genius of my time, and now I'm out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got nothing else to contribute. | ||
| I just made Jesus is king. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What happens there? | ||
| You know, he gets to disappear only to be discovered every time somebody's like, well, I wonder how he's doing. | ||
| Still drugs. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I wonder, what is the difference? | ||
| You know, I can read his autobiography without judgment. | ||
| Despite, you know for a fact that during that time period, that dude said some crazy shit, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, it's interesting to think about because, excuse me, because Kanye, he's one of the few celebrities that had achieved a certain amount of fame pre and post internet and also a lot of... | ||
| What the making of Kanye has been in the modern era is because of his relationship and experience with media. | ||
| So the Taylor Swift moment becomes one of the first major water cooler moments of Twitter. | ||
| He's making the news and he's redefining. | ||
| That's part of what I was talking about in the lost essay, I Can Make You a Celebrity Overnight. | ||
| He's part of that. | ||
| Remaking the idea of what a celebrity could and should be. | ||
| And so that vulnerability was a premium for him until it wasn't. | ||
| And so it's almost hard to... | ||
| Part of me almost wonders, could Kanye have lasted this long as a relevant figure without... | ||
| You know, social media and what are kind of some of the pros and cons to that. | ||
| But his relationship to technology is really interesting. | ||
| He grew up like a middle class kid. | ||
| He had a computer in the 80s at a time where computers cost like $4,000. | ||
| He lived with his mom in Asia. | ||
| So he's always been on the kind of like cutting edge of tech. | ||
| And part of his persona has always been a depth of staying. | ||
| Just ahead of the tack to wield it powerfully. | ||
| So it's almost hard to disconnect his legacy from that, for better or worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| You just... | ||
|
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What? | |
| I mean... | ||
|
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Is it just that you gotta die before you go crazy? | |
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's either before you go crazy or before you start making shitty stuff and that's then all that we, like, remember. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You gotta tap out before Jesus is king. | ||
| That applies to just about every situation you can think of, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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You gotta tap out before Jesus is king. | |
| I think as far as a place to end an interview goes, it doesn't get much better than that, right? | ||
| Yeah, yep. | ||
| Brandy, thank you so much. | ||
| This has been an absolute delight of a time. | ||
| Again, Black Skinhead podcast is Bring Receipts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then look for the upcoming podcast that you'll be releasing. | ||
| Yes, that's going to come out later. | ||
| It's called Killing Harold Washington. | ||
| And it's about some of the conspiracy involving, you know, local mayor and whether or not he was assassinated. | ||
| But that's going to come out in fall of 2024 around the DNC, which is in Chicago. | ||
| So look for that. | ||
| And if you're on Blue Sky, Brandy CD. | ||
| Also, I should mention, so my softback comes out in early January and there's some updates in there. | ||
| So if folks are thinking about the book, please buy. | ||
| Please support. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| Hopefully we'll have you back on whenever that's released. | ||
| Yes, a nine-hour marathon. | ||
| Get at me. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |