Bob Woodson Sr. is an American civil rights activist, community development leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center, a non-profit research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to revitalize low-income communities.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Yeah, why would you bet on Goliath when we got Bet David?
Valuetainment, giving value is contagious.
Entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters.
How they run, homie?
Look what I become.
You know, it's amazing.
There's so many different issues that's going on right now in the world, in America, whether it's Israel, Palestine, whether it's Ukraine, Russia, whether it's LGBTQ in schools, whether it's, there's so many different things we can talk about.
I am interested in people that want to educate and tell the history and encourage people to be self-reliant, self-help, stand up for yourself, responsibility, do something about it.
Messages like that, that challenges you.
By the way, those are the messages that are by far the most annoying messages.
That's what my dad told me.
I never liked it.
That's what my drill sergeant told me in the Army.
I never liked it.
That's what my boss would tell me to say, get off your tail, have a better attitude, be energized, be excited.
You can do something about it.
It was so annoying where you want to say, but you don't understand the life I lived.
You don't understand why my parents went through a divorce.
You don't understand what it is to be born in Iran and live in a refugee camp.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something about your life.
That message is absolutely a message we need more of today.
And our guest today has the moral authority to give that message.
I watched him on Dr. Phil.
And I just got to tell you, I'm getting the chills right now just thinking about the message he gave.
I got so excited about it.
I said, I have to meet this man.
And I talked to Robert.
I said, Robert, let's figure out a way if we can get this gentleman to come down here and share us history because he'll say it himself and it's not hard to find.
He wasn't born in the 80s, not in the 70s, not in the 60s, not in the 50s.
My dad's 1942.
He wasn't even born in the 40s.
He's born 1937, April 8th.
My dad's April 10th.
I like, respect a lot of April babies.
And this man's seen it.
He's lived it.
I believe he was in a good-sized family when his father died when he was, I want to say, nine years old, and a lot of different experiences.
So, you know, to properly introduce Mr. Woodson is a civil rights activist, community development leader, author, and founder of the president of Woodson Center, a nonprofit research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to revitalize low-community, low-income communities.
The Woodson Center has supported a wide range of initiatives to revitalize low-income communities to give you stats on what they've done.
His program has helped more than 2,600 community groups in 39 states.
And these initiatives have included after-school programs, job training programs, and programs to reduce crime and violence.
Woodson has also been a vocal critic of government programs that he believes perpetuate poverty.
He's the author of several books, a recent one called Red, White, and Black, Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers, which we will put in the description below and in a chat for you to be able to order.
With that being said, Mr. Bob Woodson, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, when I watch you watch you talk and you give the message, it fires me up.
And by the way, I want the audience to hear this for us to mentally get into the right message.
So the podcast, Bob, can you play this clip, Rob, from here's Mr. Bob Woodson on Dr. Phil.
There's an exchange of ideas.
There's some discourse taking place.
And then you say this, and this goes absolutely viral all over social media.
Go ahead and play it, Rob.
Dissect it, you will find there were about 3,700 free blacks who owned 12,000 slaves black slaves.
The question is, do the descendants of those free blacks who owned black slaves, do they pay?
Blacks really uh, benefited more the first hundred years after slavery we have in the last 50 years.
I was born in 1937, during the depression.
Everyone in my small low-income black community 98% of the households have a man and a woman raising children.
Elderly people could walk safely in that community without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren.
Never heard a gunfire during that time.
Never heard of a child being shot to death in the crib.
But there are 50 children today who have been shot and killed in our cities.
If you're talking about remedies, we've got to look beyond saying that every solution has to have a winner and a loser.
That blacks can only benefit if whites lose.
We have to be defined more than just victims of oppression.
So you have to realize this is a very difficult message to give today.
It's not a popular message by academia.
It's not a popular message by mainstream media.
It's not a popular message in a lot of different places.
And some may even say, I've never heard of Mr. Bob Woodson.
So for those who have not heard your story, obviously I haven't, many people have, but those who haven't, if you don't mind, actually, you can go all the way back from being a kid growing up, wherever you grew up, experiences that led you to believe in self-help, self-reliance, responsibility.
If you don't mind walking through that, that would be wonderful.
No, well, thanks.
No, as you said, I was born in 1937, right into the Depression.
Low-end, family, youngest of five children.
My dad was a veteran of the First World War and was injured and really died as a result of delayed trauma that he experienced.
But he died when I was nine, leaving my mother with a fifth grade education and five children to raise.
But in this community, it was a low-income, segregated community, all blue-collar people, but we had a loving community.
And there were men who stepped up and became surrogate fathers to me.
All of the children could read.
The segregated schools at the third grade plays were held at night so parents could attend.
And on the back table, there were lunch pails.
That's the level of community that we had in the midst of segregation in the North.
And so it meant that growing up in a situation where you've got challenges within your family, you have to rely upon your community.
And I did.
There were civic organizations, the Elks.
I could go on the list of organizations when father and son banquets.
A man would come by from the lodge to pick me up and take me to a banquet.
And so there was strong community at that time.
And my friends were more, I understand gangs because when you have a family like that, you must rely on your peers.
And I did.
And fortunately, I was blessed with having the kind of values from that community.
I selected good friends.
One of them, the public may know, he was Gordon on Sesame Street, Matt Robinson.
Wow.
He was the first black on Sesame Street.
Oh, wow.
That's his, he died a few years ago, and I presided at his funeral in Hollywood.
But his daughter is Holly Robinson, the actress, married to Rodney Peake.
He was the only one who.
But the point is that we had a really safe, secure community.
Never heard a gun fire.
All of us were poor.
We had holes in our shoes, but everyone did.
You just got a good piece of cardboard and cut it out and put it in.
But as a result of that, I grew up like that.
My friends were a year older, and so they graduated from high school.
And I quit school at 17 because you can't grow up in a neighborhood unaffiliated.
So I went into the military.
Even at that time, you couldn't grow up unaffiliated.
What were the gangs back then?
It wasn't really tough gangs or you could walk out late at night without fear.
But you still, there were problems, but there were challenges.
And so I went into the military in 1954 to the Air Force where I confronted segregation in Mississippi.
But the Air Force was a place that put this all together.
And so I learned camaraderie.
I heard my first Southern accent when I was 17.
I thought blacks were a majority until I got to basic training.
And my squadron was 80, and it was only eight blacks.
I said, wow, what's going on in this country?
But it was a great experience.
And I got out.
But, you know, what my mother did was radical that helped me understand.
When I came home after a year, and I came from Florida, I was in the space program.
And I spent my money that I was going to use to go home.
And I went to my mother and said, I need coffee at home.
She said, you need to get back the best way you can.
It took me three days to hitchhik a thousand miles.
Wow.
But, you know, I was angry at her for two months.
But from that day forward, I said, whenever I go anywhere, I have to have the means to return.
And it developed a very strong sense of knowing that my destiny is determined by what I do for me under those circumstances.
Now, was mom like that with everybody, all five of you?
Yep.
And what did the other four end up doing?
They were blue-collar people.
They all lived successful lives, had families, raised children.
Respond.
We were in a community, but the value, the pervasive values under this community, nothing to do with race.
You know, I keep telling people when whites were at their worst, we were at our best.
And so, but I became active in the civil rights movement, but I challenged the civil rights movement.
I left the movement on the issue of fourth busing for integration.
I did not believe, I believe the opposite of segregation was desegregation, not integration.
But also, we led demonstrations for against a pharmaceutical company when they desegregated.
They hired nine black PhD chemists, and we asked these professionals to join us.
They refused, and I realized that it wasn't enough to have the doors of opportunity open, that you have to have the means to walk through that door.
And the civil rights movement was not interested in that.
And so I left the civil rights movement following the death of Dr. King and began to work on behalf of all low-income people, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
And I have, and that's the biggest challenge we face today.
It is not a race problem in America.
When you say that, a lot of people would disagree with you, and they would say, how could you say that?
You know, maybe it wasn't back then, but you don't know the America today.
You don't know what's going on with the challenges they're facing and the level of racism they're experiencing today in the marketplace because maybe you are disconnected, kind of like how you were when you thought everybody was black until you joined the army and you realized that your unit, only eight were black.
What do you say to the people that literally 100% disagree with you and they say there is racism today?
It is a challenging time today.
What do you say to them?
I say, look at the evidence.
Look at the evidence.
You know, a lot of people are like the farmer that came to the creek when it was like coming, it was three feet high and moving at about 20 miles an hour and he forced the mule in and it was swept down the creek.
A year later, he came to the same crossing.
This time it's only six inches.
The mule refuses to go in because the mule had good memory but poor judgment.
Conditions were not like they were back in segregation when I was locked up twice in Mississippi.
The conditions have changed, but many of us have, but again, look at the evidence.
When whites were at their worst, we were at our best.
As I said, in 1930 to 1940, when segregation and racism was enshrined in law, blacks had the highest marriage rate of any group in society.
Elderly people could walk safely in those communities without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren.
So let's look at the evidence.
When we refused access to hotels, we built our own hotels financed by our own means.
The Walahaji in Atlanta, the Carvert and Calvert Hotel in Florida, the St. Charles in Chicago, the St. Teresa in New York.
I could go on and on.
When we were denied access to colleges, we built our own.
And in fact, our small business formation rate was higher than whites in the 20s, and that really determines any group's participation in the economy.
It is not what government does for you or what white people do.
In fact, I think those who continue to push this race agenda are Eurocentric.
They assume that the destiny of blacks is determined by what white people do.
That has never been the case.
We closed the education gap in the South between 1920 and 1940.
How do we do it?
Julius Rosenwald, the CEO of Sears, came together with Booker T. Washington and he put up $4 million.
The black community matched it with $4.8 million.
We built 5,000 schools to teach ex-slaves how to read and write.
And as a consequence of that study, between 1920 and 1940, the education gap in the South between whites and blacks was three years, eighth grade for whites, fifth grade for blacks.
Within 20 years, that gap closed within six months.
There were four, five high schools at the turn of the century in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta, and New Orleans.
They had used textbooks, overcrowded classrooms, half the budgets of white schools.
But every one of those schools out-tested every white school in those cities.
If we were able to close the education gap between 1920 and 1940 through self-determination and hard work, if we were able to out-test white schools in those cities, then the question is, in those same schools today in Baltimore, for instance, where they're run by blacks, not a single student could read at grade level or perform at grade level.
And so how can you say that it is racism that is the cause of the present day challenges when under segregation, we achieved.
One other example we gave from our studies, in 1943, blacks were prohibited from being naval officers.
Eleanor Roosevelt was, persuaded her husband to train them.
So they selected 16 black college-educated men for training, the Naval Academy, not the Academy, Naval Training Center.
The Navy says, aha, we're going to give these black cadets in eight weeks what we give white cadets in 16 so they wash out.
When these brothers found out what the deal was, they covered the windows in their barracks and stayed up all night and studied.
And when they were tested, they scored in the 90th percentile.
Wow.
So then they said, well, they cheated.
So they tested them individually.
They scored in the 93rd percentile.
13 of them eventually 13 of them eventually became naval officers.
They call them the golden 13.
You can Google this.
That test, the test scores today has never been better.
So again, I respond to people with evidence.
The incarceration rates of blacks from the turn of the century up to the 60s was under 25%.
Incarceration was a lot of people.
It costed under 25%.
It shot up to, I think it was like 90,000 blacks were in jail in 1960.
That went up to 900,000 over the next 30 years.
Why do you think that is?
What happened?
What changed?
In the 19, again, in our studies, red, white, and black, we looked at the experiences.
We looked at six major plantations to find out what the state of marriage was of slaves.
75% of those slaves had a man or woman raising children.
The nuclear family continued to prosper in the face of segregation for 100 years, but all of that changed in the 60s with the poverty programs.
Lyndon Johnson?
Yes.
Johnson came in, and what happened was the social scientists who were pushing socialism on America, Cloud and Piven at Columbia, said if you disconnect work from income, then school dropout rates will increase, drug addiction, all of those things.
And so what the government did was offer welfare as an alternative to a man in a house.
We relaxed the rules.
We separated work from income.
And as a consequence, that was supported by the black power movement.
Also, the women's movement was anti-man.
And so you have a combination of social policy, but policy alone wouldn't have done it.
The federal government enticed blacks to co-own welfare.
Blacks, welfare used to be stigmatized in the black community.
But the federal government began to interpret it as reparations and as entitlements.
They withdrew any requirement that you should tell the paternity of the father, paternity in cases of pregnancy.
All of these, so that more blacks came into the welfare system in the first five years of the 70s.
Then millions flooded into the system at a time when the unemployment rate was under 4%.
So it is a combination of social policies, plus the civil rights movement morphed into a race grievance industry, and many of those civil rights leaders became mayors and elected to public office.
Where 70, and we spent 22 trillion dollars during that period on programs to aid the poor, where 70 cents of every dollar went not to the poor but those who serve the poor.
What percentage of it 70 percent?
70 percent of the 22 trillion went to the people that serve the poor poor.
They ask which problems are are fundable, not which problems are solvable.
So, in other words, a friend of mine described it this way, he's having a cabin built in Wisconsin.
His electrician is a drunk and the carpenter is an alcohol is has one leg.
His value, their value to him is their skill, but if he was a disabilities uh director, their value to him would only be the disability.
So we have a situation where we have really created a commodity out of poverty.
And and, by the way, when you're saying these numbers, what it makes me think about is this, so why, if you go back 1940s, you know the?
Uh, only 4 percent of kids that were born in America are to a single mother.
Okay, that increased from 4 percent to 40 percent right, okay?
And the numbers are staggering.
Where it's at today specifically, 70 percent in blacks and different in you know different communities.
Why do you think this happened?
And you know it.
If you were to say, well, here's how we can get away from this, this is how to fix it.
So one, why did it happen?
How did we get here?
Two, how would you fix it?
Well, first of all, we.
We got here because we, we had the social policy that that incentivized single parents.
In other words I, I had a young, uh couple.
She said that um my, my husband, i'm a jan, my husband's a janitor and i'm a secretary, and he lost his job.
She said, I applied for welfare as a married couple and they refused me.
But she said, if if, but if I was a single mother, then I can get help, and so so you really provide a disincentive for marriage.
And you wonder why you get it.
You get more of what you reward and less of what you punish, and so, over the over those decades we have, we have punished single parent households.
The more you work, the more you're.
In other words, the more you work uh, the more the perverse incentives for you.
If I work and get a raise, i'm going to get uh, lose child care.
So that's why we have a system that disincentivizes work and marriage.
You had certain politicians that would use that, but they would spin it for votes.
Oh, we're paying poor women to have kids.
You would hear that in political speeches.
I'm going to change that.
We're paying poor women to have kids.
And it made it sound like that the poor women were the problem.
That they're just taking advantage of it.
You know, when you go back and what you're talking about, I think it's important to look at Lyndon Johnson.
And remember, when they were saying the great society, it was great society for who?
Because the government was very, very – our government has been actually pretty bad at getting Americans to move and change.
They're pretty good at getting us upset, but they really don't get Americans, if you look at history, to really move and change.
Our government has never really led.
But our government has been excellent at being a catalyst of where they want us to go and to let us go.
And to your point, they create this catalyst.
You know, what do they say with explosive?
The explosive isn't the problem.
It's the catalyst you put in the explosive.
So always keep those guys separate.
Government has been the catalyst.
And what you're talking about is what they did, is they knew what they were doing.
And they knew that these things would be a catalyst of changing behavior because they couldn't stand at the pulpit of government and demand that you change, but they could put things out there and sit back and watch.
And that's what you're saying.
Right.
But I also realize that the question is, what are solutions?
If you say that 70% of those families are raising children that are not dropping out of school, it means 30% are not.
What we do at the Woodson Center is we go into low-income communities and we go into the homes of the 30% to find out what is going on in those households.
These are people who are raising children that are not dropping out of school.
They're not in jail.
They're not on drugs.
They are confronted with the same economic circumstances.
And so the question is, what is it that's going on there?
That's the only thing that's closed.
So that's why I fall conservatives also, is that they have been preoccupied when it comes to poverty, but only studying failure.
So Charles Murray and some of the others, all they do is talk about, okay, if people aren't welfare, let's take away the perverse incentives.
I'm for work requirements.
I'm for drug testing.
But you can't stop there.
What we do at the Woodson Center is that we go look for capacity.
And so many of the people in the 30%, we need to hold them up and take what works for the 30% and expand it to the 70%.
And that's what we do.
But it's a moral and spiritual crisis.
And it is not an economic and social crisis.
But policy, be the left or right of center, takes very little into account of restoration, moral redemption, faith.
And many of our groups who have been able to survive under the worst of stakeholders is because of their faith.
But the whole issue of faith is not even a factor in supporting people's restoration.
We have gone into some of the most drug-infested, crime-ridden neighborhoods where there were 53 gang murders in the five-square block area in two years, 25 years ago, in D.C.
We supported five young men who were ex-offenders who came to Christ and became redeemed.
But they had the moral authority and the social trust of their peers.
And so they went into these neighborhoods and brought the leadership of these kids who were doing destructive things.
And they became agents of remoralization of these kids.
And it's just like in the marketplace, only 3% of the people are entrepreneurs.
They generate 70% of the jobs, right?
Well, a lot of these organizations are social entrepreneurs.
It only takes a small number of them if you can change them and make them an agents of restoration.
They can change the whole community.
And we found that to be the case in this community called Benning Terrace by just going in and reaching 16 kids who were leading predators and changing their values and their attitudes.
How do you do that?
By witnessing to them.
You take some man who has been in jail, who has been, faced all the challenges from an abused household and saying, you are not defined by the worst of what you were.
And I'm a witness that you don't have to stay there because you've been there.
Where did this self-help mindset come to you?
Where did this self-help mindset come from?
By looking at what we did in the past.
In other words, what I've done by learning if our people could, in the face of slavery and discrimination, build families and restore their communities, then all we've got to do is go back and take the values that served the interests of our people then and apply them today.
In other words, taking old values and apply them to new realities with the consequence that you can.
But a witness is more powerful than an advocate.
And experience will always prevail against an argument.
I debated this with Hawk Newman.
It's on YouTube for one hour.
I didn't argue with him.
I confronted his proposition with my facts and saying, if we were able to learn and close the education gap under segregation, why can't we do it today?
And so that's what you have.
But we don't realize the power of somebody coming to a young man or young woman who has been engaged in antisocial behavior.
Supply them with a mentor that witnesses to them to say, why don't you use your skill and talents to rebuild the community and not tear it down?
I want to play this clip to you.
Did you ever have any interactions with MLK or Malcolm X?
Yes, I did.
I met Dr. King.
In fact, he came to, I lived, I did my civil rights work in Westchester, Pennsylvania.
That's the home of Baird Rustin.
And so Rustin would bring Dr. King to town to bring the media.
Then they would focus on our local issues.
And you met him face to face?
Oh, yeah.
And what was it like when you met Dr. King?
Just a wonderful experience.
He was the one who said that we must reach down into the deep, dark regions of our soul and sign and ink our own emancipation proclamation.
Malcolm X said the same thing.
He said, our destiny is never determined by what an oppressor does or does not do.
He said, our destiny is determined by what we do.
Frederick Douglass said the same thing.
But those messages are being spun today.
They're not, you know, these are two heroes to two different sects of the African-American community sometimes, and some the same.
But it's spun in a different way where it's still coming more from the victimhood mentality.
It's coming more from the entitled mentality, not coming from the fact that we can stand up and do something about it.
I want to play this clip to you by Malcolm X.
It's just audio.
The video isn't out there.
It's just purely audio.
And I want to get your thoughts on this.
Go ahead and play this.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way.
The liberal is more deceitful, more hypocritical than the conservative.
Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor.
And by winning the friendship and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or a weapon in this political football game that is constantly raging between the white liberals and the white conservatives.
The American Negro is nothing but a political football.
And the white liberals control this ball through tricks or tokenism, false promises of integration and civil rights.
In this game of deceiving and using the American Negro, the white liberals have complete cooperation of the Negro civil rights leader who sell our people out for a few crumbs of token recognition, token gains, token progress.
Now, when you hear this, this speech is given in the 60s, maybe late 50s and 60s, because he died, I want to say, February of 1965, MLK died, Dr. King died April 4th of 68, right?
So this message is being given at a time where it's like, wait a minute, were white liberals the same then as they are today?
Have they been at it for this long of a time?
Where even Malcolm X said this?
How do you process what Malcolm X just said in this message?
I totally agree, and it's been the foundation of everything that I have done since then.
That's what drove me.
I go further by saying that many of the black elected officials and others commit treason, treason against their own people by using race to deflect attention away from their own failures.
In Baltimore, when Freddie Gray was killed, that's when, to deflect attention away, when why are blacks failing in school systems and in cities run by their own people for the past 50 years?
If racism were the issue, then tell me why are they failing?
But the answer that they give is, well, the police are agents of white supremacy.
There's always a racial deflection that prevents them from taking responsibility of why they are running their systems.
But many of them are hypocrites because they don't live by the same rules.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, Jesse Jackson Jr., all of them sent their children to private schools in Washington while opposing school choice for poor black people.
So you have this contradiction, but race really is being used as a shield and a sword, a shield to deflect attention away from their failure to address problems that were promised by the civil rights movement.
How can you manipulate for this long though?
One may ask, you know, how can you manipulate 2012, 93% of African Americans voted Democrat.
2016, 89% of African Americans voted Democrat.
2020, 87%.
So 93, 89, 87 voted Democrat.
You know, Malcolm X said this at the year that he said, this is 60 something years.
How can you manipulate an entire voting bloc, an entire community for this many decades?
Because race is a very emotional, deeply emotional issue.
It's like the state of Israel is to Jews.
It's an emotional issue like abortion is to the right to life.
And so it is a deeply, and they know it, and they do manipulate it that long.
But also it's because Republicans have not been competitive either.
When they were, they were successful.
Look at Dick Riordan in LA.
He was the first Republican mayor in 35 years.
How did he do that?
Dick Riordan planted charitably two years before he harvested politically.
He went to the low-income Hispanic community and said, what is it that you need to rebuild your community?
And he brought some of his friends to the table and they built a state-of-the-art facility so that those communities could engage in after-school activities to teach English.
It was only after he planted charitably that those liberal Democratic leaders embraced Dick Reardon and he became the first Republican mayor in 35 years.
And when he got reelected by 60% of the demographic, DeSantis in 2018 got elected because of the black vote.
He ran against Gillum, right?
Andrew Gillum.
Andrew Gillum.
But DeSantis only won by 32,000 votes because 100,000 low-income black parents voted because of his position on choice and education.
They voted for him, even though Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey was brought in to campaign for Gillum.
So you have 100,000 blacks voting against Obama and voting against Oprah to elect because they made a decision based upon the content of the issue.
And not enough Republicans did what DeSantis did.
And when they do, I think they will be competitive.
But apathy is what's keeping blacks.
Also, if you look in some of those high crime neighborhoods, in the mayor's race, only 8% to 10% of the people vote because there's such deep apathy in those communities.
But low-income blacks are sleeping giants.
They're going to wake up one day soon.
Low-income blacks are going to wake up one day.
Wake up and realize how they're being pimped and how they're being used.
What's the tipping point?
What needs to happen for them to wake up?
The violence that you're seeing now, a lot of unrest.
80% of black Americans poll do not support defend the police.
80%.
But you won't know that by looking at the media.
And 60% of blacks do not believe that racial discrimination is the biggest barrier to their flourishing.
And so the challenge that we have is to, and what we're doing at the Woodson Center is giving voice to those people.
We have about a couple thousand women who are voices of Black Mothers United.
These are women, moms who lost children to urban violence.
They're coming, the leading cause of death for black kids is Somerside.
In Silicon Valley is suicide among teenagers.
And in Appalachia is prescription drugs.
Well, the Woodson Center brought together representatives from those three communities.
We call it the Mothers Consortium.
And it was just common ground there.
We were united.
And so what we must do is we must deracialize race.
But it's not enough to talk about what you're against.
You've got to talk about what you're for.
We should be for the saving of our children's lives.
And so what we're doing at the Woodson Center is mobilizing mothers from those three communities to come together and say that we must do everything we can to fill the hole that's in the hearts of our children that causes them to devalue their life to the point where they're willing to take their own or take someone else's.
It's different sides of the same coin.
So did you find out what the reasoning was for homicide, for suicide, and for prescription drugs?
Like, what's the reason they're blunting?
Emptiness.
When you keep telling, also, when you keep broadcasting to people that they live in a country that despises them, particularly the low-income blacks, that you live in a country that despises you, like the 1619 project said, that racism defines all whites are villains and victimizers and they're privileged.
That message gets communicated to blacks that perhaps the reason that this is happening is because they are unworthy.
So the message of unworthiness comes from the very people who are supposed to be social justice warriors.
And you say to a child, a white child, that you're devalued because you're privileged and you are an oppressor.
Those are very dangerous messages that we're sending to our children when we keep saying to them that they live in a country that despises them because they're white and derides them because they're black.
I mean, that's a very poisonous message.
And that's why at the Woodson Center, we're doing everything we can to mobilize that consensus among the people suffering the problem.
Go ahead, Tom.
Sir, did you ever come to be acquainted with the Reverend E.V. Hill?
I know E.V. Hill very well.
Yep, and what he did in downtown Los Angeles, Church of the Open Door?
It was very interesting.
And I'm sure you know this, but I'll say it for the audience.
The Reverend E.V. Hill pointed out that every young man, regardless of race, needs love, discipline, and respect starting at age 11 to 18 for them to mature as young boys, to here come the hormones, and to truly mature into young men.
And he warned that in his analysis of the terrible, what was going on in his backyard, and for people who don't know E.V. Hill, Church of the Open Door, it's down there just blocks away from USC, this great pillar of learning, and South Central Los Angeles, which has got all the reputations, but the Crips and Bloods went on.
And he pointed out that the gangs perfectly fill the hole that a fatherless home does with love, discipline, and respect.
Because in the gang, I will love you and kill for you, and I will defend you with my own life.
Discipline.
You will not break our laws or rules or you will be killed.
And then respect comes from negative accomplishments.
Here you go.
You got to cap one of the other gang members today so that we can show that you're a man and you're part of us.
And love, discipline, and respect is needed by young men 11 to 18, and the gangs perfectly filled the hole.
And it's what you're talking about, the hole in the heart, and what the Woodson Center is doing.
It almost sounds like the sermon I heard that there's a God-shaped hole in the heart of every man, every person, and that you're trying to fill that.
And we have people who have models around the country of young men and women who have stepped up and are being.
And we can measure.
We can tell you 680 kids from one public housing project, one of the worst in the country, went on to college.
We have an institution, Pineywood Day School.
It's a boarding school that was started 115 years ago in Jackson, Mississippi.
They pull from the same demographic as a Baltimore school.
96% of the kids come there, go on to college or post-secondary education, but they're from the same demographic as the ones who are failing in the public school system.
So we have models of moral and spiritual excellence that builds on the same values.
The challenge is how do we resource them and take them and make them the centerpiece.
For instance, the whole song, Rich Man North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony, 50 million people responded, most of them black, to his message.
When you go on the internet, you will see that a lot of the black DJs to speak to that population in the black community resonated with his message.
Yes, he's very popular.
Why do you think?
Because I think there is a quest, a deep thirst for virtue.
There's a deep thirst to return to the values that sustained us from the beginning.
But we don't have a vehicle for that desire to get expressed.
And that's what we're trying to do at the Woodson Center is to say to people, the millions, the guilty white people who put $100 million into Black Lives Matter and then put $50 million into this center at Boston University, Abraham Kindy, studying anti-rice basis.
How could they raise $50 million in a year to study racism and guilty white corporations give $100 million to Black Lives Matter?
Both of those institutions are frauds.
Why can't we invest that kind of money into institutions within the community like Voices of Black Mothers United, like Pineywood Day School?
So what we're trying to do to say, you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish.
So we really need the shift the focus of our investments in institutions that speak to the founding values of the country.
I want to talk to you about one of the clips that you did where you talked about BLM a couple years ago got a lot of eyeballs.
And I want to read this article to you from BLM Finances Under Fire.
Only 33% of donations given to charities as execs paid millions of dollars.
This is an article that came out just a couple months ago.
Black Lives Matter finances are under scrutiny once again as tax documents show the nonprofit is on the brink of bankruptcy.
The organization ended last year in red while doling out millions to those close to BLM founders.
Following the murder of George Freud in 2020, supporters donated a staggering $90 million to Black Lives Matter.
This nonprofit ended the fiscal year with $9 million in deficit.
How do you do that?
I don't know.
The federal filings from 2020 to 2022 shows just a third, $30 million of the $90 million went to other charitable organizations with $22 million going to expenses.
This includes a $1.6 million that went into the father of BLM co-founder, Patrice Cullers, for security services, another $2.1 million to BLM board member Shalomia Bowers for consulting.
So this thing had so much momentum that you couldn't watch a basketball game without BLM being all over the place on the floor.
You couldn't watch a football game.
You couldn't watch anything without this being everywhere.
And God forbid, if somebody said all lives matter instead of Black Lives Matter, they would get ousted.
They would get, how dare you say such a thing like that, that, you know, all lives matter.
One, why do you think it got so much momentum?
And two, you know, now that everybody realizes it was a fraud, are these people going to be held accountable?
What do you think should happen to them?
No, they won't be held accountable.
But again, I must say that progressives have a ground game.
George Soros knows he knows what you want to do with Ferguson is rent a rioter.
51 of the people arrested for rioting in Ferguson, only one was from Ferguson.
Soros and other people know that you got to have a ground game.
You got to have a George Floyd.
And once you have that, they invest.
And I'm saying those of us who believe in the foundational principles of the country, We must encourage people then to invest in organizations and institutions, civic institutions that extol the virtues of the country, you know, like the Pineywood School.
That school should not be struggling for money.
It should be well-funded.
The same people who are writing checks for them should be looking for opportunities to write checks to organizations who support the values that they say they believe in, but they don't do it.
They'll spend $100 million for political campaigns, and the amount of money that we invest in something confers validation on it.
The amount of money we spend on something confirms the validation.
Confers validation.
Just as the left believe that America is racist and therefore the George Floyds of this world symbolizes that we need to have symbols on our side, like the Pineywood School, like these other organizations that the Woodson Center, Voices of Black Mothers United.
We must get people to invest in organizations that reflect the values of the nation as much as the other side invests.
But it has to do with where we invest.
By the way, if you were to put a name on it or organization on it, specifically more name in a face, who has used and abused the black vote and the black community the most over the past few decades?
I think the Congressional Black Caucus.
They stay in power.
They run like almost banana republics.
They get elected to office and they stay.
They have $60 million, gets invested by corporations and advised their silence.
And they're allowing themselves to be used as pawns.
In other words, someone said that whites in slavery looked at blacks as property.
And black elect officials look at low-income blacks as pawns.
Who else?
Who else?
I think all of the so-called civil rights organizations, the Urban League, NAACP, all of those organizations that fought so-called for freedom, and they have morphed into a race grievance industry, and they're being led by their nose by other groups and allowing the rich tradition of the civil rights movement to be appropriated for other groups in society.
Maybe this is a question for me, coming from a 45-year-old.
Okay, I can officially say I'm 45 now.
Okay, 45-year-old.
So you hear the story, you watch the documentaries, you watch the movies, you read the books.
Here's how it was in 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.
I wasn't there during that time to know it.
I came to the States in 1990, November 20th, when I was in Iran and Germany.
So for someone that's been around like yourself, 1937 till today, and you've been watching what's been happening, is this the most divided we've been?
Is this the most divisive we've been?
Is this the darkest we've been?
Or has it been like this and it's always been a fight?
You know, again, you've seen it from your own eyes.
What have you noticed happened over the past few decades?
What's been happening over the past few decades is there are people who are generally interested in destroying this country.
Why would they, though?
And who are these people?
I have no idea why anybody, the very fact that Europe, like France and Germany and England and the United States, are the destination for people from all over the world.
They're trying to get here.
Why are they risking their lives to get here if what's here is not useful and helpful?
So I really think you got the cynics who are really, who, for whatever reason that I don't know, who want to destroy this country.
But then I think a vast majority of people who are well-intended but ill-informed.
And they are the ones that we at the Woodson Center are trying to migrate by our examples to say to them that the virtues of the nation that have stood the test of time are also applicable to today.
And we are seeing more and more people being recruited from this thinking and being supportive.
So you cannot assume that everybody who's in opposition to this is doing so because they're ill-willed.
You must distinguish between those who are ill-intended and those who are ill-will.
And there are some people who are ill-will who really want to see socialism or even communism come back.
Let's just be very frank about that.
But they are using America's birth defect of slavery as a means to demean the country, and only black America can withdraw that moral authority.
Yeah, because what I see right now is everything is, you know, men against women.
Right.
Right?
You know, like the whole, I got a book that's coming out on December 5th, Choose Your Enemies Wisely.
And I'm going to do the audiobook.
Every time I'm doing the audio book, I'm reading the book for like 100 times because I've written the book, but we're doing the audiobook today as well.
And as I'm reading this thing, choose your enemies wisely, and you're seeing what's going on, okay?
Men versus women.
The enemy of every woman should be men because men are taking something away from you, right?
It's Christians versus Muslims, Republicans versus Democrats.
Republicans are the enemy, right?
It's blacks versus white, church goers versus non-church goers.
It's, you know, straight versus, you know, LGBTQ.
And we have to teach LGBTQ, yet take God out of school, because that's more important.
We shouldn't be imposing God on P on kids, but we should be imposing, you know, sexuality amongst kids, employer versus employee, being abused and used and abused by unions, right?
You constantly see this division, parents against kids, dividing kids against parents.
You can do whatever you want to do, and you don't have to get your dad's permission.
You don't have to get your mom's permission.
Of course you do.
You have to get that permission.
This desire to want to constantly create a division, there has to be a clear outcome to it.
You know, one can look at it and say, okay, if it's just pure evil, it's the art of war.
You're trying to divide and conquer.
Great.
But who is dividing and what do they want to conquer?
You know, who are these people that want to conquer?
You mentioned George Soros earlier on what he's doing with funding of all these protests and how he's figuring out ways how to pin people against each other.
I want to know, from your perspective, I know you said, I don't know who it is, but I kind of want to go a little bit deeper with this.
Again, for someone that was born in 1937, this division that's going on, why would they want to do this?
And who do you think would be behind wanting to divide America the way that they're trying to do?
I'm not so sure that you have to have an answer to that in order to change it.
You're not so sure you have to have the answer.
If you don't know the enemy.
But you have to know the enemy's motives and desires, don't you?
Not necessarily.
I think if you mobilize enough people to confront that enemy.
Well, you don't know who the enemy is.
But you know what the enemy does.
You see examples of it.
When you see people attacking the police, in our community, we know that there are people who are saying that we should attack the police.
There was an old brother when the Klan, like 20 members of the Klan came to Washington, D.C. in a rickety old school bus and 5,000 people tried to kill him.
Reporter went into the low-income area of Ward 8 in Washington, and a 75-year-old black man, they said, are you going to join the protest?
He said, bring the Klan down here if they can get rid of these drug dealers.
And that man was stating a reality, and that is that the drugs and the violence in his community is much more of a threat to his well-being than some talk of the Klan.
When you begin to mobilize people to pursue the protection of their interest, you don't have to know why someone else is against you.
All you have to do is mobilize the people who are with you and for you, and they will stand against anyone trying to knock the door down to get in.
Yeah, I it's I mean, you can spend your time in finding out.
And so, what do you do when you find out who's well?
But that's how it works, though, in war.
When you're dealing with war and you're dealing with a gang, you can keep fighting against its gang members.
But then, if you go and show strength, they can take out the gang leader at the top, then everybody else scatters all over the place.
But also, in the Second World War, for instance, I always say that we understood right now, people who are taking that position, they don't have a ground game.
They don't have a ground game.
In other words, if a lot of conservatives, if you were fighting the Second World, we would only have a Navy and an Air Force.
And we would bomb the hell out of Normandy and wait for Hitler to show up on there.
No, we understood that we've got to go in and support partisans who are in that and help them to defeat inside.
We also know we need Marines.
We need soldiers.
It's hand-to-hand combat.
And our low-income leaders in these communities, we have created islands of excellence where we have stopped the violence.
We don't have to know why the violence is persisting.
All I know is that the young men that we turned around, we went from 53 murders in a five-square block area to zero for 12 years.
Benning terrorists, you're saying.
Huh?
You're talking about Benning Terrorist.
Benning Terrorists.
So now, do I have to know why the violence?
No.
All I know is what conditions do you need to produce in order to change and improve it.
That's what we need to do.
And so we've taken what worked in Benning Terrorists and extended it to Milwaukee, to Dallas.
You can export your remedies without knowing precisely in each city why the problem exists.
All you've got to do is concentrate on what is curing the disease.
How do we cure snakebite?
We take the venom of the snake to create the anti-venom.
And that's the approach that we take in these communities.
We know how to go and create peace.
One of our groups last summer in one of the most violent neighborhoods for 100 days didn't have a single act of violence.
We need to find out how they did that and how can we take that and spread it to a whole neighborhood and to a whole city.
So you can push the anti-venom, you can push the cure without knowing precisely why.
Yeah, I think there's different roles different people play.
You're playing the ground role game, ground, you know, going meeting people, talking to the kids, the 30% of community, successfully includes finding out who's doing it right.
But then I think long term, someone has to take out Hitler.
Someone has to take out, you know, if the drug cartel's leader all the way at the top is El Chapo or Pablo or whoever, you got to go straight to the top.
If you don't, that influence is going to stick around until they realize, oh my gosh, the person that we all follow, that leader, until that guy is eliminated, we're like, we can't, we can coexist, but if they get rid of him, what do we do now?
But all of us have roles to play.
I agree.
I totally get it.
You play a very important role.
I mean, I'm very clear.
I got you.
But mine is very pedestrian.
It is on the ground.
But it's super necessary, though.
And you got to have credible examples that your approach works.
Right.
Right.
I want to show you this.
I'm online yesterday, and I'm preparing for this year.
I go and look up two articles.
One, I want to see what ACLU says about the problem of black Americans, and then I go look up PragerU.
Okay, I'm sure you're familiar with both organizations.
So let's go through the ACLU one.
If you can kind of pull that one up first, Rob, that'd be great.
Okay.
So go all the way to the top of the article so we can kind of read what it says.
So here's ACLU, five truths about black history.
If you want to understand the state of race in America, we need to know our past, particularly the painful parts.
Okay, so to go down now and zoom in on what it says.
Go up, go up, go, keep going, keep going, keep going.
America was founded on white supremacy.
I mean, this is what ACLU says straight up.
The first slave arrived here in 1619.
Again, going back to the 1619 project, between 1619 and 1860, Virginia passed more than 130 slave statutes to regulate the ownership of black people.
A 1662 law made all children of enslaved mothers slaves, regardless of the father's race or status, or that rape by white slave masters could create a free child.
A 1667 law codified, codified that slaves who converted to Christianity were still slaves.
A 1669 law allowed slaves to be killed for resisting authority, right?
Okay, go lore.
Let's go to the next one.
So this article is ACLU.
Next one, terrorism.
Even if we refuse to acknowledge it, okay?
And it explains terrorism on what's going on.
The largest terrorist attack in Oklahoma was not the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
It was down the road in Tulsa, 1921.
The Greenhood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma was unique.
In the early 20th century, it was referred to as Black Wall Street and was home to black and Native Americans who had become wealthy from old discoveries.
And then it goes to saying white residents were disturbed by the growing black wealth and sought to impose official segregation measures.
In 2014, Tulsa passed a law that forbade anyone from living on a block where more than three-quarters of the pre-existent residents We're from another race.
Okay, so let's go a little bit.
If somebody wants to read more, we'll put the link below.
Next.
So keep going, keep going, keep going.
Then we have a war was fought for slavery.
By 1860, America had 4 million slaves worth a total of $3 billion of today's currencies.
Okay, let's go to the next one.
Going to the next one.
Go to the next one.
Francis Scott Key was an avowed white supremacist.
Keep going to the next one, which is the last one.
Reparations for slavery have already been paid.
Okay.
On April 16, 1862, more than eight months before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia provided for immediate emancipation of slaves and compensation to slave owners loyal to the union of up to $300 for each freed slave.
Over the next nine months, the broad, the board of commissioners appointed to administer the act approved petitions completely or in part for former owners of freedom, 2989 former slaves.
Lincoln administration paid about a million dollars to slave owners in D.C. for the loss of property.
If you don't know some of these facts, before reading them here, what else don't you know about the hidden truths of black American history?
Okay, so that's ACLU.
Now let's go to Prager.
Here's what Prager used says.
The top five issues facing black Americans.
Number five, victim mentality.
Okay.
Not holding someone back from more than seeing himself as a victim.
Why?
Because a victim is not responsible for his situation.
Everything is someone else's fault.
And a victim sees little chance of improving his life.
How can he get ahead if there's someone holding him back?
All this makes him victim.
All this makes the victim unhappy, frustrated, and angry.
And then in the bottom, it says, so victims of victim status primary center.
I call it victimology.
Unfortunately, many black churches preach the victimology.
Many black parents pass it on to their children.
Inner city schools teach it to their students.
And the black media reinforces them.
Meanwhile, the NAACP and other black grievance groups fundraise it.
Number four, lack of diversity.
Blacks repeatedly demand an honest dialogue on debate about race.
But how can there be an honest dialogue about race between blacks and whites when there is virtually no honest dialogue between blacks and blacks?
It's hypocritical.
And if a black does think whites are ultimately responsible for black people's problems, they're labeled a sellout.
And Uncle Tom, a race trader.
I'm sure you've experienced some of that yourself over the years.
As long as this type of group thing exists, race reverence of the Al Sharpton's Jesse Jackson types will continue to be celebrated while independent black thinkers such as Professor Thomas Soul, Walter Williams, and yourself will be shunned.
Okay, let's go to number three.
Urban terrorism.
As just about everyone knows, but few talk about publicly in major black cities, violent black-on-black crimes is rampant.
A Department of Justice study from 1980 to 2008 revealed that blacks accounted for almost half of the nation's homicide victims, 47.4.4%, and more than half of offenders, 52.4%, all while only 13% of Americans' population.
Okay, so that's another study.
We can go to go to the next one.
Number two, proliferation of baby bombers, the disintegration of the nuclear family, which you talked about briefly earlier.
According to Mohian report, he was a senator, I believe, right, Tom?
How do you say his last name?
Daniel Patrick Monaghan.
Yeah, Monahan.
In 1965, nearly 25% of black children were born to unwed mothers.
The report author, Daniel Patrick, said that this was a disaster in the making.
He, of course, vilified by so-called black leaders and their progressive allies, but he was right.
Today, out of wedlock, birth rates is nearly 75%.
1965, I think you talked about this earlier, 25% to today, 75%.
Last but not least, is the unquestioning allegiance to so-called progressive policies.
Okay?
Unwavering loyalty to progressive liberal policies is the primary reason why these dire conditions exist.
It both makes them possible and perpetuates them.
It's no coincidence that progressism is the common thread that binds predominantly black cities where single-parent homes, failing schools, rampant poverty, and crime predominate.
I can keep reading this and talking about what's going on in Detroit.
The point I want to make is two very different views of the problem we're facing in America.
One is, you know, white supremacist, here's what happened, even this, even that.
The other one is responsibility, do something about it, but here's the problem.
How do we get these two groups to either come together, and if we can't, how do you get the people that are in the middle open-minded to say, trust me, this mindset on this side, it's going to give you a better life than this mindset on this side wanting to be a victim.
Again, I think that the response to Oliver Anthony's song gives you a hint at that.
There is a thirst, a deep thirst for virtue.
The very fact that a homeless man in Boston a couple of years back found a knapsack with $43,000 in it and turned it in.
And there was a GoFundMe.
And within three days, they raised $93,000 for him.
That meant deep in, and that happened four times.
A black man in Oakland who was homeless, 53 years old, a woman emptied her change purse and her $15,000 diamond wedding bracelet was there.
When she went back five hours later, he said, are you looking for this?
They had a fundraiser for him, $100,000.
That says to me that deep is a desire to support virtue like that.
And so what we do is that the way you undermine the moral authority of the ACLU and these other groups is to equip the people suffering the problem to speak for themselves.
And they speak for themselves the way the Black Mothers United have come together, for example.
You support groups so that now we've got 20 chapters about 2,000 of these moms who are having positive interactions.
We were honoring the police and organizing events with students are being mobilized by the thousands to speak out against violence.
In other words, you've got to invest in the institutions within those communities where people are speaking up for themselves and make them the new heroes.
But again, it's going to take investment.
But conservatives don't invest the way they do.
They'll invest in think tanks because their children can go there and be interns.
And we seem to think all you got to do is publish the right policies and then people will change.
It's not a rhetorical battle that we're in.
This is a battle for meaning.
This is a battery of substance.
We must demonstrate to the American public that the values of this nation have the consequence of improving the quality of life.
And if people can find content and meaning in their life in a drug-infested, crime-ridden neighborhood, and we highlight that and celebrate it and make them the new heroes, then they are the ones that we can stand shoulder to shoulder with and say, we must push back.
But again, it takes investment.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting you say this.
I look at, I run multiple companies.
And when you run multiple companies, then you have multiple C-suites, then you have multiple department managers, general managers, people that are running leaders, and one group will have five employees reporting to them with 10 on the team.
One will have 20, one will have 30, one will have eight.
And I'll go to one department.
I'm like, wow, everybody here is so enthusiastic.
They come to work so excited.
They want to say, hey, let's show to the company that we are the best department, right?
We're excited to get stuff done.
And then you go to one department and I'll talk to one employee, another employee, another employee.
They're all like, well, how's it going?
Well, you know, we're trying to, I've had better days.
And, you know, we're going to see what's going to happen.
And I'm like, why is everybody talk like they're miserable?
You know, and so like unhappy and victims.
And then you go and talk to the leader at the top.
Well, you know, no one ever gives us credit and no one ever does this.
I'm like, got it.
So then you go and you look at two coaches.
And as a father, I got four kids.
My youngest son, he's had a lot of different baseball coaches.
Okay.
And he's currently with a coach that he loves.
He really likes working for this guy.
But this guy busts his butt.
Like, I remember one time he said something.
The coach comes in.
He says, hey, he comes to me and says, hey, Pat, I just want to tell you, he's going to be running the entire practice today.
I'm like, do your thing.
I said, but tell me why.
Because he did this.
I said, no, totally get it.
Go for it.
I got your back.
So what does the coach do?
He puts him to work, running, running, running, running.
I mean, it's hot outside, running, But you know what?
We're going to go back to that coach because he produces winners.
He produces toughness.
He produces a teamwork mentality.
He produces a level of humility.
He produces the love of the game.
It's exciting to want to play for this guy.
We had another coach who's like, you don't know what you're doing.
Everything was just constantly like negative.
This, this, that.
And he just, kids didn't want to play for him.
So for me, both sides can say whatever they want to say.
But at the end of the day, there's only one way we judge which philosophy is a better philosophy.
And it's based on the fruits it bears, period.
Based on what you produce.
If you produce good citizens that do great things, you're doing some right.
Tom's got two girls.
One of them got a 1560 on her SAT out of 1600.
Okay.
She gets to go to whatever school she wants to go to.
She's got a 4.6 GPA at one of the best schools in the state of Florida, what I think the best math program in the entire state of Florida.
And she's very, very smart.
So is their youngest daughter.
Guess what?
The parents are doing something right.
The philosophies they're teaching is something right.
So for me, scream off the top of your lungs.
Say whatever you want to say.
If one philosophy is produced on leaders, the other one is not.
I want to know what the philosophy of the people that are produced on leaders.
You know, right now with the whole Israel-Palestine challenge is taking place, I want to ask you a question here.
Jews, small community, 15 million of them, right?
A man named Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all of them.
That was his goal.
He wanted to get rid of them.
So when you look at the charter of Hamas that says their goal is to eliminate Israel off the face of the earth, Sharia law, is that what they want to do?
We're not sitting here to compare which is worse than the other.
I'm not doing that.
Somebody else can go write a book about that and compare it.
That is not my specialty.
What I want to study is, as a person who's Armenian, Assyrian from Iran, a part of my ethnicity community, sometimes they're victims, but you don't understand what happened to us, you know, the genocide and all this other stuff.
And another set is like, yeah, why don't we go out there and do something and make a name for ourselves?
So for the history, they're going to show us that we are drivers, we are leaders, we're going to make it work.
But one person's like, well, that's why, because you don't know what we went through and our ancestors, what we went through.
So why do you think the mindset of Jews who have risen in levels of business, of Hollywood, of so many different places, they've made the money, they've done all these things.
What do you think is the difference in the mindset of two different communities?
I don't know if somebody like yourself have even studied that or investigated it to see what the difference between mindset is.
They've both had a very tragic history, what happened to them.
But on the Jew side, they've stepped up and they've become leaders in many different sects.
Why do you think that is?
Well, Frederick Douglass had to struggle with this in his book, Up from Slavery.
Frederick Douglass said that the worst time on the plantation was at Christmas because slaves were given off from Christmas to New Year's.
But the slave master wanted the slaves to interpret freedom as synonymous with self-indulgence.
So he supplied free rum to the slaves and encouraged them to drink.
And he would often have competition between which slaves could outdrink the other slave owners.
Interesting.
He said, so he wanted slaves to interpret freedom as self-indulgence so that they would get so sick that they would be happy to surrender to slavery to man as opposed to slavery to rum.
Wow.
And some slaves fought into that.
But others responded to the same challenge by taking that time to visit family members on other plantations.
Another one took that time to work so they can earn money to purchase their freedom.
The same exposure, different responses.
And I think that's what we have to understand, that we must look at those who chose the more responsible response to circumstance, and you're never defined by your external circumstance.
So we must tell the story of those who did not succumb to the temptation to be what the victimizer wanted us to be.
But again, what we teach through examples and writing the stories of those who triumphed in the face of slavery, when I talk to young blacks and I tell them of stories of people who were born slaves who died millionaires, some of them went back and purchased a plantation on which they were slaves and took in the destitute family of the slave master.
What a story.
Robert Smalls.
He was born in Sumter, South Carolina.
And he was on a slave, on a warship.
And he and six members of his crew, when the captain went off for dinner, stole the ship and put on the master's cap and came through the various former slave bought his master's house and served as a collector of the customs, Robert Smalls.
Right.
Wow, what a story.
But not only that, he became wealthy and because of his heroism turning the ship over, Smalls was celebrated by Lincoln, and as a consequence, he permitted blacks to fight in the Civil War.
But after slavery, Robert Smalls was given a commission.
He also became a wealthy businessman, went back and purchased a plantation on which he was a slave.
And his wife, the slave owner's wife and children were destitute.
He took them in and allowed her to sleep in her same bedroom because she didn't realize slavery was over.
Wow.
To me, this is an act of radical grace.
And there are other stories of Biddy Mason, a woman who was born in 1818 and walked a thousand miles behind a wagon with three children, one by the slave master, and then she later went to walk behind the wagon to California, where she was freed by the courts.
And she was a midwife and saved money to buy property.
And she died, one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles.
She's a founder of the AME Church out there.
Wow.
Illiterate, free children, and became a wealthy philanthropist.
Unbelievable.
And Elijah McCoy, you don't know that story.
Born of fugitive slave parents, was trained in Canada and came back to become an engineer, an inventor.
But he was given the worst job of the railroads in Chicago, Elijah McCoy.
And Elijah McCoy was given a job of physically oiling the wheels on the trains, right?
And it was dangerous.
He invented the machine that would automatically lubricate the machine and change in the whole industry so they could then travel faster.
And that's why people tried to develop knockoffs and they said, no, we want the real McCoy.
So that's where that expression, the real McCoy, came from, because they wanted his.
He had 17 inventions.
He was in the Inventors Hall of Fame.
And so I can go on and on about people like that.
These are the kind of stories that we tell our young people.
If you ask 100 kids right now, ages 6 to 15, about these three names, how many of them would know him?
None of them.
That's why what the Woodson Center has done with his curriculum, we've developed 30 case studies like this around the country.
And as part of our, they've been downloaded 117,000 times over the past year.
So again, in every state in the union, they're being reviewed.
Who's writing books about these guys?
We are.
You are?
You know how HuHQ Penguin has these books for kids that they write and we have like 600 of these at our house.
Our kids have read.
I've never heard any of these books, stories of them being written by HuHQ.
We're trying to get children's books written from them.
But again, we need to invest in these kinds of things.
This is my point.
I say to conservatives, if you get more of what you reward and less of what, but why aren't we, if you say you're for American values, if you're for these principles, then why not invest in them, damn it?
Don't whine about what the other side is doing.
Invest in the things you believe in.
I agree.
The left does it.
Exactly.
And what's happening in our books, you know, we get worried about, oh, they're revising history because they're going to make this man and this woman seem more racist, revising history.
What we also have to keep in mind is they're suppressing history.
This does not go with the narrative.
So they're not going to talk about Elijah McCoy that says, do you know that everybody's been saying the Roe McCoy man?
That thing is a Real McCoy.
And it's always a compliment to quality.
You know, whether you're tasting chili or you see some product, you said, man, that thing's a real McCoy.
That works.
That was worth my dollar.
People don't even know.
You're talking about a phrase that went with Elijah McCoy, who found a way for the safety of railroad workers to lubricate trains so they could go faster and there'd be less risk to the working guy that was responsible for that.
Every time you say that, you're really talking about Elijah McCoy and you don't even know it.
So what's happening in these history books, it's not just they're changing facts, it's they're not letting certain facts and narratives and biographies be a part of it because it's because it messes with the narrative.
Right, the whole issue of refrigerated trucks that were invented by a black man.
The real McCoy.
Wow.
Go ahead.
I'm loving these.
Refrigerated trucks, but in our publications, we have a lot of examples.
All of these are the Woodson Center that we're going to do.
You can go and make sure we put these links as well.
Yeah, you can study the story.
In fact, we're trying to do animations on some of these.
Again, I love that.
This is where we need the investment.
I love that.
We do not have the investment.
I love that.
So you can imagine how many people black women.
How many people donated to your organization last 12 months?
Probably about 8,000.
8,000 people.
But we need to really.
I can tell you right now, right after this, I'm going to give you a $10,000 donation.
So whenever we're done with this, I'm telling you right now, Sambel, if you're listening to this, immediately afterwards, let's get the information.
Let's send $10,000 to this organization.
I love these stories.
They inspire me.
I love it.
I would love to have more people hear these stories and read about these types of stories.
I'm only scratching the surface.
I can sit here all day and tell you the stories of a woman.
Her name escapes you right now, but she walked behind a wagon from the south to Denver and worked in the mines.
She opened a laundry there to wash the long johns of miners, right?
And she collected the gold dust from the draining it up, and she used that to be capital.
She became one of the wealthiest women, one of the wealthiest women in Colorado.
She ended up investing through with a white partner, and she now started and became one of the wealthiest property owners in Colorado, not just black, but anyone.
So our young people need to be told this is the American story.
It is not, America, slave was our birth defect.
None of us should be defined by the worst of what we used to be.
I say this all the time when I'm speaking, how many of you want to be defined by the worst you ever were?
No, and America should not be defined by its birth defect.
This is what we were, but this is what we have the will to become.
Yeah, that's the tool.
You just struck something there.
That is the tool of narrative, if people are paying attention.
The tool of narrative is to never let you get away something in your past.
Yet we want, and people who are paying attention, we want to see recidivation rates drop and celebrate the man and woman that comes out of prison and becomes something different.
And we say they're not what they were and we celebrate it and move it forward.
But if you're running a narrative, you need to keep people chained to the birth defect of history.
That's right.
And a birth defect is a birth defect.
It is.
But we don't define ourselves by that.
I mean, there's so many important stories.
Some of the people who were born slave became not just the wealthiest black, but the wealthiest person in that situation.
They owned property.
We had golf clubs.
We had resorts.
And by the way, today, we have some of the best stories of African Americans that made it to the top.
So many of them that have had different difficult lives and they made it all the way to the top.
But we don't tend to focus on those stories.
You know, we want to talk about what the white man did.
We want to talk about how the boogeyman is the white man.
The boogeyman is Republicans.
The boogeyman is this.
And somehow, some way, I don't think that's working anymore because even a lot of people who were part of that mindset are sitting around saying, I don't know if I fully agree with what you're doing.
I don't know if these guys are really for us.
I don't know if they're really supporting us.
Tom, what was the story about Coca-Cola and Project Rainbow?
I don't know if you want to uncap that.
No, this was Jesse Jackson.
Unpack that.
There was a book written about Jesse Jackson, Rainbow Push, Shakedown.
And for all of the things that Jesse Jackson was involved in, American civil rights, Rainbow Push, and correct me if you know a different history, lost its way.
And it was fueling Jesse Jackson rather than fueling change.
Well, he would go to companies and demand a consulting fee to bring diversity to management.
Well, he went to LA Coke, which was the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in the United States.
Their bottlers were regionally and were owned regionally.
And he went in there and told the president, who has now passed away, but I had a personal relationship with him, and I knew this man.
He said, he came in and said, well, we need this much money for diversity training and a diversity program that you're going to pay Rainbow Push.
And he said, and then, you know, we'll do a press release and do this stuff together.
And he said, and they played along with it.
And they said, come back in a week.
He comes back a week later and he says, okay, here's what we're doing.
Remember it.
This is Riverside outside of Los Angeles.
Okay, the following people, including this large number of Hispanics and management, are going to be laid off so we can achieve your diversity goals.
And we want you to be right there at the pulpit with us, at the podium with us, when we make this press release about what we're going to do and how we're going to change this.
And Jesse Jackson, he says, he stopped and he said, no, I don't think this is necessary.
I don't think that we need to do this.
Because they called this bluff because they were already highly diverse in that area because of the tremendous Hispanic population and Asian population.
It was Riverside.
And it was already just because they were hiring from the local community, they had the face and the ethnic mix of the local community.
And Jesse Jackson thought he was knocking on the door of Coca-Cola, not a locally owned business that was already fairly diverse for its time.
And they called this bluff on it.
They say, yeah, come on up.
Come on up to the podium and let's announce all these people are getting laid off to do it your way.
No, I think we're good here.
I love that.
Well, the story I remember about Jesse, and I was in the movement with all of them, was that every Saturday they would have a call because they were boycotting Anheuser-Busch for lack of management and whatnot.
And they would be recording every Saturday.
All of a sudden, Saturday, the call stopped.
He never announced, never canceled it.
His son got the franchise in Chicago.
He has it to the day.
So when his son got the distributorship in Chicago, the protest went away.
Get out of here.
No.
Can you search that?
Check it.
There's a book that was written.
Who wrote the book, Shakedown, Robert?
Have you read the book?
Two of Jackson's sons, Joseph and Jonathan, were granted a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago in 1998.
This franchise gives the younger Jacksons exclusive rights to sell $30 to $40 million worth of Budweiser and other products in an area that includes Wrigley Field.
I mean, there are endless examples.
Oh, my God.
There's endless examples of this kind of shakedown.
That's why I say that people like that engage in moral treason because it's using the condition of your people as the bait.
And the switch comes when the resources show up.
And you use it to do that.
I mean, they even wrote a book about it.
Rob, you just found this here.
Shakedown, Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson.
This was written in 2003, five years after he did that.
I think it was in 98 or 99.
And it became a New York Times bestseller, Shakedown, Jesse Jackson.
Does Jesse Jackson still carry the name the weight that he did 20, 30, 40 years ago?
I don't think he has for the last 20 years.
For the last 20 years.
Again, but he's more a darling of the liberal white press than he is the black community.
You don't see him in communities.
It's like you don't see Sharplin in Ferguson or any of these other communities either.
A question for you.
The concept of racism, when I was in the Army, man, we all got along.
It didn't matter what it was.
I mean, I'm in South Carolina, and, you know, whites, blacks, they would say, I've never met an Iranian before.
You know, you're the first Iranian I've ever met.
I've never met a nose like that before.
We don't have noses like that in America, right?
They would say things like this.
And I'd go to Alabama and we're at a waffle house and this waiter, waitress pulls up, waiter pulls up and is looking at my nose like, well, where are you from?
I said, I'm from Iran.
He said, you're from Iran?
I said, yeah.
He says, what do you do in America?
I said, I'm in your army, 101st Airborne.
I'm in the U.S. Army.
He says, what are you doing in the U.S. Army?
I said, can I be honest with you?
Can I trust you?
He says, yes.
I said, I'm a spy.
I'm taking everything back to Iran.
Are you serious?
No, man.
I'm just in the Army.
What are you talking about?
But it was so, so easy to play with these guys and mess around with them.
We didn't experience any racism while I was in the army.
And today you'll hear saying, well, there's more racism from whites to blacks, and that's what's going on.
But some will also say there's more racism going on from blacks towards whites.
There's some racism going on there with a level of hate for whites.
Well, you look at the hate crimes.
The majority of hate crimes are blacks against Asians and others.
But you see, but these are unpleasant truths.
We can't talk about that.
Whenever I hear in Oakland, California, that there's been an assault on an Asian person and you don't hear the race of the victimizer, you know it's black.
Because 60 to 70 percent of the assaults on Asians have been done by blacks.
But we can't tell the truth on, so they just don't mention it.
And you see, what, let me just make this a very important point.
Whenever you generalize about a group and then try to apply remedies, it always helps those at the economic top at the expense of those at the bottom.
Just like the Me Too movement generalizes about women.
It was started by a young black woman in Harlem who wanted to have women come together and talk about abuse.
It was captured by middle-class and upper-income women and became the Me Too movement.
And as a consequence, it became people caught On the casting couch.
But reality is that Fox did a two-hour documentary on sexual assault of women in prisons.
For two hours, every one of the victims was black.
Every one of the victimizers was black.
It never generated a single discussion because it did not fit the racial narrative.
You let one white guard assault a single black woman, and then it becomes national news.
But as a consequence of us, the low-income women in those prisons, in other words, when evil wears a black face, it does not get challenged.
And so people are really injured in that.
But that's where it started.
But then it became Harry Weinstein on the casting couch.
And then, so what are the remedies they offer?
Women should be on boards of directors.
More lawyers should be fired.
This only helps educated women.
It doesn't help those black women in prisons that are being abused by black guards.
And we don't even discuss it.
It's not a subject of outrage.
There's no protest about that.
And this is what I mean: that if you constantly look at life through the prism of race, when evil wears a black face, it escapes detection and addressing.
And people are more injured by that.
Are you for history?
You like making history?
Are you for making history?
So I got a question for you.
So what do you think about the possibilities if our current president, most popular president of all time, what if he ends up deciding to step down and we experience making history, the first female black president in America, Kamala Harris?
How ecstatic would you be about that monumental moment if that were to happen?
I would be disappointed.
Really?
Why would you be disappointed?
Because she's a disaster.
This would be the worst thing that could happen to this country.
Why is that?
Because she's not competent.
She's just.
How did she make it to the top, though?
How did she make it to being a VP?
Some would say she worked very hard to get to where she's at right now.
She worked at being black, right?
And that's what got her elevated.
No, I just, that shows you the worst of what race grievance looks like.
And any time Newsom, the governor of California, says, I'm going to appoint a black woman.
What is that?
What do you mean?
You're going to appoint a black woman?
You're not saying I'm going to appoint the most competent person.
And to me, it shows you how degraded the whole issue of race has become in America.
It's become worse than it's ever been, I think.
So you wouldn't be ecstatic about Kamala.
No, I would not be.
Well, Pat and I both came from California, and people that lived in California will tell you that when she was Attorney General, how she abused the Three Strikes Law.
And the Three Strikes Law, along with the determination that if you had two ounces of marijuana or some level, they would say intent to distribute because of the quantity.
And to be tough on crime, you take everybody, even minor possessions, you put them in prison.
And she was very good at that.
And she used to speak that very loudly.
And those of us who are in California know that that three strikes law may have been well intended at one level, but what it did was it disproportionately, not just in jail, 14 days jail at county, disproportionately imprisoned black men in California.
And it perpetuated, and by the way, when they went to prison, unfortunately, what goes on there is kind of like crime college.
And then they come out, they're not employable, so what do they turn to?
Other criminal enterprises, because it's where it goes.
But we all see her as incredibly disingenuous about what she did.
Oh, you call yourself a progressive, but you also want to appear tough on crime.
And she'll claim that, well, we did this or that and these little programs.
But the programs that she would announce were tokenism.
You know, we're going to give gym membership cards once they get out of prison.
Well, they've been lifting weights for five years in prison.
And it was tokenism and it was pandering and it was dancing on both sides of the political line, depending on who she was speaking to, for the purpose of electability.
But the real victim in all this were these citizens who maybe made a mistake, maybe were in possession, but it certainly wasn't distribution.
But they used the three strikes law for electability and had a devastating impact on the populace.
Yeah, I just think, again, as a veteran of the civil rights movement, nothing is more disheartening than this whole notion that social justice today has been defined for blacks, that you must dumb down standards the moments a black walks into the door.
That I gave examples in our books about the Golden 13, where we pursued excellence.
We didn't ask, Jackie Robinson didn't ask, well, because blacks were denied access to baseball, that four strikes and you're out if you're black.
Jim Brown and other football players didn't say, well, since blacks were denied access to the NFL, that blacks only have to run eight yards to get a first down.
Can you imagine?
You know, we didn't ask.
No, we've met the standards.
In fact, you know.
But one thing that I think I'm going to do, and I've taken this task on, is that if we can just get rid of white guilt, I think the whole country can take a sigh of relief and get improved.
That's why I have become a self-certified racial exorcist.
Exorcist, racial exorcist.
Racial exorcist.
So I absolve you from the sins of slavery and Jim Crow.
Wow.
I'm thinking about charging maybe $50 for a certificate so I can get a little race hustle.
Yeah, I want to get in on the race hustle too.
Who knows?
Maybe Anheuser-Busch gives you a spot where you're going to be able to do it.
Yeah, maybe so.
You know, 30 to 40 million a year.
It's a nice situation to be in.
Bob Woodson can, I got a, I can't be guilty of race.
Bob gave me an absolution from it.
Hey, Brendan Whitworth, if you're listening, put this guy on a can.
Final thoughts here.
Are you following any?
I mean, are you following it closely what's going on with Israel and Palestine?
Yes.
How can we not do that?
What are your thoughts on what's going on?
I mean, obviously, at this point, activating 2,400 people killed at a hospital, one side saying it's the other, the other side it's you.
President Biden going to Israel, spending time with Netanyahu, gives the message, what he says to him.
He says, well, we're finding a report that's telling us it was them, it wasn't you, and we'll still keep looking into it.
And then from there, Egypt's still not taking anybody that's coming across from Gaza.
You know, the folks who are supporting people from Hamas or Palestine are said, well, the reason why Egypt is not accepting them is because they don't want, they know if they leave, Israel is going to take over Gaza, and that's why they don't want them to leave.
They want them to stay.
There's no water, there's no electricity, there's no hospital supplies, there's no food since last Monday that this is going on in Gaza Strip.
It's pretty much a lockdown of 2.2 million people, the most dense, densely populated place in the world where 75,000 people live within a mile radius in the Gaza Strip.
And now Iran's come out and saying you've crossed the line.
Hezbollah is kind of whispering, saying we're ready whenever you tell us we're ready.
And if people think Hamas is big, Hamas has only 40,000 members.
ISIS only has 8,000 to 16,000.
But Hezbollah has 150,000 compared to Israel's 400,000.
So if Hezbollah decided to get involved, anything is possible when they get involved, right?
What do you think about what's going on right now with the entire situation?
Well, you know, let me preface it by saying, God bless those who got nothing to say and got the good sense not to say it.
This is really out of my wheelhouse and beyond my knowledge, but I do know as a layperson watching the slaughter of babies and the rape of women by innocent people, I don't know how anybody could in any way support the actions of anybody for whatever political, ideological reasons.
This act of barbarity should, to me, forever define what this group is all about and why they must be resisted.
And so that's about it.
I just, all I know is that I can't believe this image of this soldier grabbing this woman by the hair and snatching her after she's being raped and pulling into the car.
It just haunts me to think that human beings would do, that could resort to something like this, man.
Tom, what's the latest you're hearing?
Because I see Ray Dalio saying the chance of World War III just went up to 50%.
Jamie Diamond, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, just said this is the most dangerous times we've lived in decades, okay, in decades.
And we're not even thinking about what could happen with China-Taiwan, which that is an inevitable thing that they have to be, China may be doing.
If all of these things is going on at the same time, Tom, I mean, do you have any concerns yourself as how this could get, or are you pretty optimistic about it?
I'm optimistic that good men can come together and figure this out, but I'm very concerned at the moment.
I am not a political theologian, but I can look at the dominoes here and see that if Iran backs Hezbollah and they create another front in the war, you know China and a little bit of Russia already are supportive of an alliances with Iran.
And it just scares me because we know the last time select countries got together as an axis.
And we know how bad and devastating that was in World War II, the escalation.
And I'm very nervous about it.
And there are leaders.
I mean, JPMorgan has got a lot of political consultants that work for them because they're working in a global economy and they want to understand investment opportunities globally.
And Jamie Dimon is being very clear without singling out Iran, pointing out that we need to calm down this Gaza situation and figure out what we're going to do with that.
And if it involves Israel with a ground game and to pull out the evil ones that are there and to take care of that, okay.
But we can't let this escalate to a second war.
And I think everybody's worried about destabilization of the energy market and then destabilization of the regular equity markets.
That's what they're worried about economically.
But on the back side of it, I honestly worry about geopolitical forces.
And I'm as concerned I think I've ever been in my lifetime because I can see that one more domino.
Did you just say this is the most concerned you've been on your life?
Are you really saying that and you fully mean it?
No, I fully mean that.
I remember how I felt.
Look, I remember how I felt when Reagan was elected.
I remember how I felt about global communism.
I remember feeling a sense of relief when the Berlin Wall came down and I saw citizens celebrating.
I felt a sense of relief.
Because remember, at that time, whether it was part propaganda or not, we were worried about this escalation of nuclear capability on both sides.
And we were worried about it, it only took one crazy man to press the button first.
Remember those days?
We worried about the Cuban missile crisis.
Yeah, and there were two sides that were very clearly defined.
It wasn't Russia, it was the USSR before we realized that all these Russian provinces really wanted out of the deal.
And later we found out they got out at the first opportunity.
But I was concerned about that.
Wow, we're only one crazy person from a nuclear war.
I remember thinking that in 84.
I remember feeling that.
And now I look at this.
This is as concerned as I've been for two reasons.
One is inside Germany and inside the United States, we know that the recent refugee influx, that there are bad actors in there.
I mean, you may have seen that there were four that were caught just in the last week that were on the terror watch list, only because they used facial recognition at one flow point.
How many others have come through undetected?
So I'm sorry for the long answer, but I am really concerned and it really worries me.
And it seems, as you look at it, if Hezbollah comes in and the domino is Iran with China behind them, China is going to be economically opportunistic in the long game.
They're not going to care about a five-year war, a three-year war.
They're looking at the aftermath because they're already thinking.
And it's just, it's really worrisome.
It really honestly worries me more so than it did when you seemed that you worried about one crazy man pushing the button to create nuclear war starting in the 80s.
But you knew that there were two very clearly defined forces there.
It was the United States and the USSR.
Do you remember those days where that seemed like it was very clear?
Communism versus freedom, the USSR versus the United States.
And it seemed like everything was clear.
There weren't like third and fourth and fifth dominoes that you worried about.
Did you feel that way?
Yeah, I remember when I was in graduate school when the Cuban missile crisis and how intense that felt about the blockade.
You know, did they want to listen to the generals who say bomb, you know, and taking the measured effect that Kennedy did, and then the real sense of relief when there was a pullback.
But again, that you had forces inside of Russia that were fighting for liberation.
We don't have that in the Arab world, I don't think.
The same dynamic.
What a great point.
You hear that?
No.
Inside the USSR, there were forces that were fighting for their liberation or hoping for it even then.
And as soon as it came down, you saw Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, they all ran.
And where'd they run?
West.
Right.
But you don't have that same dynamic, I don't think, in the Arab world today.
It could be.
I don't know.
Well, we're going to see what happens.
Obviously, unstable times in the Middle East.
Hopefully, these guys can figure it out for the U.S. to go and show their face and kind of let everybody know that we stand with these guys, we stand with Israel.
whether you agree with it or not, it's a good thing to take place for everyone to kind of realize if they get to the next level, potentially the U.S. cannot be involved in another war, which is something a lot of people are not for.
Most people are not for.
But I hope these things, these tensions decrease and it goes away sooner rather than later because it is the kind of a situation that can all of a sudden spread like wildfire and get pretty ugly.
Anyways, having said that, it's been an honor having you on.
Rob, let's make sure to put the link to the book below, folks.
If you've enjoyed the podcast, please go order the book.
And if you do want to contribute towards what they're doing, we're going to put the links as well below to the Woodson Center.
I've already made my claim.
We're going to do that right afterwards.
I appreciate you for coming out.
This has been an honor.
I learned so much from listening to you, and I always judge it like that.
