Oct. 27, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:17
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| When I answered the phone, they were like, you applied for the job. | ||
| And I'm like, I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Let's see where this goes. | ||
| But I had no, I know nothing about policing, nothing. | ||
| So when I got arrested, when I was eight. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin, and just a quick reminder to subscribe to the channel and click the bell so that you actually see our videos. | ||
| A pretty novel idea, I know. | ||
| All right, more importantly, joining me today is a former Arizona police officer and now the co-founder of the Blegzit movement, Brandon Tatum. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me, man. | ||
| I'm excited to be here. | ||
| I'm glad to have you here. | ||
| You do realize that your shirt is going to trigger an awful lot of people on the internet. | ||
| Well, I'm hoping so. | ||
| I'm hoping so. | ||
| I mean, I don't see why. | ||
| We live in America. | ||
| People should love the flag. | ||
| They should love the concept of America first. | ||
| So if they're triggered, that's their fault. | ||
| You must feel very comfortable in my studio. | ||
| I've got a flag over there, big American flag over there, Constitution, Declaration of Independence. | ||
| So we're off to a good start. | ||
| All right, there's a lot of stuff I want to talk to you about. | ||
| I've wanted to have you in here for a while. | ||
| So first off, for people that know absolutely nothing about you, I don't know anything about your childhood, upbringing, family life, that kind of stuff, before we get into law enforcement and Blexit and the rest of it. | ||
| Okay, well, I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. | ||
| I'm a Texas boy, a Cowboy fan, by default, I can say. | ||
| I mean, they're doing good this year, so I like them. | ||
| Yeah, legally, you have to be a Cowboy fan. | ||
| Yeah, I have to be. | ||
| My dad is a Cowboy fan. | ||
| You know, he used to work at the stadium, so I'm, I guess, thrusted into the atmosphere of Cowboy Nation. | ||
| So, but I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. | ||
| My parents were split. | ||
| My whole life, all that I can remember, you know, and it was slightly an adversity, right? | ||
| Because we had my dad, his dad wasn't around, my mom, her dad wasn't around. | ||
| My grandmother, uniquely enough, had my mother at 12 years old. | ||
| She was raped and she had my mom at 12, you know, so That was kind of the foundational idea of kind of how me and my brother was raised. | ||
| Both parents are really good parents. | ||
| My dad is a firefighter. | ||
| He's actually a chief. | ||
| So I grew up in a very diverse background, you know, because we had a lot of my mom's side of the family. | ||
| What I would say was poor, uneducated, poor, high school. | ||
| Graduation was like going to college on my mom's side of the family. | ||
| A few of my family members are doing life in prison. | ||
| So I come from a diverse type of atmosphere, you know. | ||
| You have the good, the bad. | ||
| My dad did a wonderful job raising us. | ||
| We lived with both my mom and dad. | ||
| Went to different schools, private schools, public schools. | ||
| But my high school was Dunbar High School. | ||
| Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, named after the famous black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. | ||
| It was violent, man. | ||
| It was violent. | ||
| You know, people pulling guns on each other in the parking lot, fights. | ||
| I mean, people come off the streets fighting in the school. | ||
| But what it did do, it presented an atmosphere where we can excel in athletics. | ||
| And I can say, let me go back to when I was eight, because that was one of the pivotal points in my life. | ||
| At eight years old, I got arrested for smoking marijuana in a vacant house. | ||
| And eight is when I stopped smoking marijuana. | ||
| When I was 7, we used to smoke marijuana with my cousins. | ||
| And when I say marijuana for people that know about smoking weed, we weren't smoking joints. | ||
| We were smoking blunts. | ||
| My older cousins would go buy weed and then we'll come together and we'll smoke it. | ||
| My parents had no idea what we were doing until we got busted that time when I was 8. | ||
| My brother was 10. | ||
| I mean, I can't even imagine the mind of an 8-year-old smoking weed. | ||
| Yeah, my son is 9. | ||
| He just turned 9 and I couldn't imagine him picking up weed and smoking it like we were. | ||
| Wait, so you got busted. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Well, we got busted, vacant house. | ||
| I mean, they came in like the SWAT team. | ||
| They put guns on us and everything. | ||
| And they put us in a squad car, we went to the detention center. | ||
| And we initially thought that they were gonna call my cousin's parents, | ||
| because their parents really was, they didn't care much, man. | ||
| We were gonna get in trouble. | ||
| We were never gonna tell my dad it was gonna go away. | ||
| But for some reason, they called Mr. Tatum there. | ||
| And my dad is a strong man, and he came in there like he was ready to fight. | ||
| You know. | ||
| He came in there, you know, I'm gonna kill him! | ||
| I'm gonna kill him! | ||
| And I was telling my brother, I was like, you know, I hope they leave us in here, man. | ||
| We're about to get the whooping of a lifetime. | ||
| But the thing that I love that my dad did, and it really changed my life, is that we didn't get a whooping. | ||
| He didn't whoop us. | ||
| He set me down. | ||
| We were on a ride home. | ||
| He set me down and said, look, Brandon, if you don't act with integrity and you don't change your ways, you will never play in the NBA. | ||
| Because at the time, I wanted to be like Michael Jordan. | ||
| I mean, that hurt me more than any whooping could. | ||
| And it kind of set me on a path of feeling like, you know, I need to do better, man. | ||
| You know, I love my cousins, but we can't hang out with them no more and get into trouble that'll end up causing me to lose my future. | ||
| More importantly than anything else, how are your basketball skills now? | ||
| I'm trash. | ||
| I'm trash at basketball. | ||
| I hate to say it. | ||
| I know that I'm, stereotypically, I'm supposed to be good. | ||
| Oh, so this was the eight-year-old dream of being a basketball player? | ||
| This was the eight-year-old dream. | ||
| That dream died. | ||
| When I couldn't dribble with my left, and I couldn't shoot from the three-point, that dream died. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| So, all right, well, you know what? | ||
| I was actually gonna do some of this stuff later, but, so this obviously relates to the black family, and every time anyone talks about this, If you're white, let's say, they're gonna immediately say you're racist for even bringing this up, and yet I hear this sort of story so often, that what is happening to the black family, or what has happened in, say, the last couple decades, is sort of the root of the problem here. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say, and how did your dad not succumb to that? | ||
| Well, 100%, I think, is the root of the problems. | ||
| You know, when you're a young man, you've grown up with no direction. | ||
| Where do you go? | ||
| Who do you look to? | ||
| You gotta look to people that are influential, males in the community, and they didn't have a dad. | ||
| So, you have a... | ||
| Kind of a matriculation of this fatherless home issue going on and people trying to be fathers without having examples of what a real father is. | ||
| So now you go into gang members and other dudes like our cousins, you know, and we didn't have to because we had a strong dad which helped us, but you still want to be like your big cousins because they're cool and it's, you know, it's kind of trendy what they're doing and it leads young men down the wrong path. | ||
| But unfortunately, and I guess fortunately for me, my father was a strong man and I think that him not having his dad around really made him feel like, you know, I need to do better. | ||
| And my dad obviously had a little bit of training being a father | ||
| because he had to help take care of his younger brothers. | ||
| And so my dad probably always had that in him. | ||
| But him being a strong man, him standing on principles really saved us. | ||
| I'm not gonna lie. | ||
| You know, my mom is great. | ||
| My mom was way more lenient than my dad. | ||
| You know, my mom was the cool mom. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I hate to say it, we kind of took advantage of that. | ||
| Me and my brother didn't have as much respect for my mom as we did my father. | ||
| He was strict. | ||
| No cussing in the house. | ||
| Back in the day, we had no cell phones. | ||
| You know, he'll pick the phone up while you're talking to somebody on the phone and be like, it's time to go to bed. | ||
| You know, and hang the phone up on you. | ||
| It was really beneficial. | ||
| And if I didn't have my dad, I would not be here today. | ||
| Why do you think it's so hard to talk about that? | ||
| So, for example, my parents have been married 44 years now with ups and downs and good and bad and all that stuff. | ||
| But they still live in the house that I grew up in. | ||
| And I know that the roots of that give you some stability in life. | ||
| It doesn't make you perfect. | ||
| You're still gonna make mistakes and all those things, but it gives you some sense of like a consistency in the world. | ||
| It's so obviously something that we should all want or aspire, not to say you can't. | ||
| If you don't have that, you're gonna be awful or something like that. | ||
| But why do you think it's so hard to talk about this? | ||
| You know it because when you start to diss or people take it as a diss to the fabric of who they are, the cultural identity, people get offended by it, right? | ||
| It's hard for humans, for people to take responsibility for their own action. | ||
| It's very difficult, you know, so people like to divert. | ||
| In the black community, culture is what's really destroying us, right? | ||
| I mean, it's culturally acceptable more now than it was, I don't know, in the 40s, 50s, 60s, for you to be in a single-parent home. | ||
| Back in the day, that's unheard of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Back in the day, having a family structure was all we depended on, as black people, to build. | ||
| We understood the value of it. | ||
| Now- It wasn't until, I think, late 60s, early 70s. | ||
| I think early 70s when that flipped. | ||
| It began to flip, and now it's cool. | ||
| To be on your own and do your thing as a young man. | ||
| Listen to the music that most of us listen to. | ||
| Banging a few girls here and there, it makes you a man. | ||
| You're cool. | ||
| You're popular. | ||
| You don't have to stay around with a woman. | ||
| You can hit it, have a kid out of wedlock. | ||
| Most of the dudes that's rapping, most of the potential leaders are doing the same thing. | ||
| You know, so I think we've been set off on the wrong path, and when you're confronted with those issues, instead of internalizing and saying, look, this is our fault. | ||
| We need to get back to this. | ||
| Why are we not marrying these women that we're having kids with? | ||
| Why are women not having the expectation to date and to be with a man who's stable, who can provide for them? | ||
| Not somebody that can provide for them for one night. | ||
| Not somebody that can provide flashiness, but stability. | ||
| Also in the culture, stability is almost viewed upon like you're acting white. | ||
| When I was growing up and you would do well in school, people would say, well, you're trying to be like the white man. | ||
| You know, if you want to have your pants like it's supposed to, tuck your shirt in and say, you know, I'm going to marry women. | ||
| I'm not going to disrespect women. | ||
| I'm telling you, I don't know how it is in every high school around the world, you know, in the black community, but I know how mine was. | ||
| And you're getting shunned. | ||
| I remember we had some guys who were virgins in high school and in college. | ||
| I mean, you get bullied. | ||
| There's something wrong with you if you're not having sex. | ||
| That's cultural, man. | ||
| And I feel like if that changed, we may be able to return back to saying, let's value our women, let's value relationships. | ||
| It's so interesting the way the media uses culture sort of against everybody. | ||
| Did you see just in the last couple of days, there was this piece in Vox about how Andrew Yang should stop using toxic terms like math and that people should become doctors because those are associated with the Asian community, except, Those are the things we should all aspire for, and they're trying to make them toxic. | ||
| And that's the reverse of what you're laying out there. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that's what my goal is in life, is to give young brothers a different perspective. | ||
| Now, don't get me wrong. | ||
| I used to be sagging my pants. | ||
| I had gold teeth in my mouth. | ||
| I got Young Savage tattooed across my stomach. | ||
| I got my hood tattooed on my forearms. | ||
| You know, so I understand what it's like to be involved in that. | ||
| I understand what it's like to want to be a part of that culture, but I also understand what it's like to change. | ||
| You know, and it took me finding God to really take that step and change in a different direction, and I realized, man, this is the way things should be, and we shouldn't be ashamed to be like this. | ||
| When was your spiritual awakening? | ||
| In 2008. | ||
| I'll never forget it. | ||
| You know, I was in college. | ||
| You know, I had fun in college, you know, my first couple years, but I had a terrible attitude. | ||
| We couldn't sit across from each other because we would have probably never met. | ||
| Anytime I felt offended by somebody, I'm ready to fight. | ||
| Which was the detriment of my college career in football because the coaches yelled at me and now I want to fight them. | ||
| I didn't know how to handle my emotions well and I didn't care. | ||
| Cursed every word out of my mouth, you know, and a lot of things I really didn't care about that I care about now. | ||
| Race was very different to me before I got saved. | ||
| I saw black and white very clearly. | ||
| I took Africana studies in college and there was a period of time where I hated white people. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I felt so offended by what they did to my ancestors. | ||
| From the things they taught us in college. | ||
| Yeah, so I was going to ask you, so do you think that was the intention of the classes? | ||
| Because this goes across all the social sciences. | ||
| You know, I'm not sure back then. | ||
| You know, I didn't feel what I feel today. | ||
| Back when I went to the classes, I felt like that they were just teaching. | ||
| And of course, there's going to be a level of bias, right? | ||
| If this is your perspective, you have the freedom to teach kind of in the direction you want. | ||
| I didn't see them over, you know, propagandizing certain things. | ||
| When I go to colleges and speak now, it is clear that they're trying to intentionally brainwash people into believing a | ||
| certain thing. | ||
| I had a young guy reach out to me. | ||
| The books that were required was a book saying it was like anti-white man, while the black man is being oppressed. | ||
| I mean, I didn't have those books growing up, but... | ||
| Or at least being in college. | ||
| Go get a job after you've learned that. | ||
| What is the purpose of it? | ||
| How can you exist in an environment where you hate white people but you're only 13% of the population? | ||
| How can you exist in that environment? | ||
| You're going to find yourself hating almost everybody you're around. | ||
| You're going to find yourself You know screwing yourself out of opportunities because if you're looking at your boss as the enemy are you going to perform well on your job? | ||
| Are you going to be more willing to try new things or go up in the ranks? | ||
| Are you going to have the I guess the spirit for you to visualize success when all you think is you know that you're being oppressed by the white man? | ||
| So some of that was in me growing up. | ||
| You know, I grew up in an all-black community. | ||
| I never dated a white girl. | ||
| It was shunned in my community. | ||
| Growing up, you date a white woman, you're gonna get bullied. | ||
| You'll sell out. | ||
| You know, so I had none of that exposure. | ||
| Never was really around white people consistently. | ||
| Mostly around black people. | ||
| Everything in my life was Afrocentric. | ||
| I got to college and my eyes were opened up to a certain degree because now everybody's white. | ||
| And it's like, 35 of us, you know, it is a little more than that. | ||
| Probably about a couple hundred, but most of us were athletes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I begin to see like, you know, white people aren't as evil as I thought they were. | ||
| So they weren't hunting you down on campus? | ||
| They weren't hunting us down. | ||
| You could go eat with white people and nobody would be, there would be no controversy. | ||
| You were eating with white people? | ||
| Eating with white people, surprisingly enough. | ||
| But you know, growing up, you thought there was gonna be a lot of animosity. | ||
| You know, like, oh, they're mad because we in college. | ||
| You know, I'm telling you, this is a real thing, where you're like. | ||
| What was that like, though, really? | ||
| Like, it sounds silly, eating with white people, no one's hunting down, but like, that transition, as you were starting to realize it, to break the old mold of thinking, like, how hard is that? | ||
| For me, man, I'm a very stubborn person, but I'm a logical person. | ||
| If I can see a logical example of truth and reality, then it's easier to convert me. | ||
| If you can't show me that, I'll be stubborn until the day I die. | ||
| But it was really eye-opening for me, man, because I perceived that people were going to treat me differently. | ||
| I perceived that people were going to be shocked that black folks were going to college and that we were successful, and it wasn't that at all. | ||
| White people didn't care. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| And then I started to meet all my white friends and I'm like, man, you know, everybody's essentially the same. | ||
| There's like two people in this world, real people and fake people. | ||
| They come in different colors. | ||
| And that began the change in me. | ||
| And then, like I said, when I got saved, it was like, it's like God imparted in my heart that we're all the same, man. | ||
| So what was that, that spiritual wake up moment? | ||
| Well, it was a lead up to it, right? | ||
| I mean, football wasn't going well for me. | ||
| I had been going to church growing up. | ||
| You know, we were in church, but church wasn't in us, right? | ||
| We go to church and we leave. | ||
| We listen to rap music and doing all that kind of other stuff. | ||
| We didn't pray. | ||
| We didn't read the Bible. | ||
| So that's kind of our lukewarm Christian upbringing. | ||
| And when I got to college, things weren't going well. | ||
| Then I went, I said, man, let me try God out. | ||
| I was really going to rule God out. | ||
| I said, let me see if this is real, man. | ||
| Because I'm in a point in my life where it's kind of a turning point, you know? | ||
| I want to figure out who I am. | ||
| Football's not going well. | ||
| I thought it was going to be, you know, my life moving forward and it's not happening. | ||
| And I'm in a position where I don't know where to go. | ||
| Let me rule this God thing out and then I can go from there. | ||
| And I was having visions and dreams and stuff of God. | ||
| Jesus visited me in one of my dreams, like in a vision, and I went to a church. | ||
| I got invited to Emmanuel Grace Apostolic Church. | ||
| I'll never forget that church, and it just turned my life around. | ||
| One day I went up to the front. | ||
| I had a friend with me, and she was crying, you know, at the altar call. | ||
| She's crying, and She wanted to find God and in my mind I'm like, "I'm going | ||
| to take her up there because she's too scared. | ||
| Let me take her to get her something to pray for." | ||
| Because they pray for you at the front. | ||
| And when I went up there, I ended up getting prayed for. | ||
| And then I found myself getting baptized and God really just changed me, man, completely. | ||
| I'm talking about it was a complete change. | ||
| I went from cursing every day to never cursing. | ||
| I didn't say never cursing again, but for a period of time I never said a curse word. | ||
| Now sometimes people make me mad. | ||
| I may not say it on the TV, but sometimes I do curse. | ||
| But I didn't curse. | ||
| I stopped listening to rap music completely, and my perspective of life just completely changed. | ||
| I saw everybody the same. | ||
| It was no more black and white, this racist stuff. | ||
| It was like, you know what? | ||
| God created us all. | ||
| We're all brothers and sisters in God, and We just have different melanin in our skin. | ||
| This is kind of a sidebar but do you think people can have a shift like such a fundamental shift like that without God? | ||
| Do you think there's a way that some people can and some people maybe are more wired to need belief or something like that? | ||
| Well, I think that people can have a level, a shift to a certain level, right? | ||
| I think God is the ultimate shift, right? | ||
| Because I think it's more than just what human, the human, I guess, nature can do to change. | ||
| The things that changed in me were supernatural, in my opinion. | ||
| I can't explain it. | ||
| I can't explain how. | ||
| I can't explain why it happened. | ||
| I just know the experience I had at church and how my mind completely changed. | ||
| It was instantaneous. | ||
| When I got baptized and I went down on water and I came up, I remember telling my friend, I just feel lighter. | ||
| I don't know what happened to me. | ||
| Something has happened to me. | ||
| And I didn't read through the Bible, so I didn't understand the significance of all of it. | ||
| I understand that I needed to do it. | ||
| I understood a parcel of it, but I didn't understand the significance of it until I read the Bible and I said, that's what happened to me. | ||
| Now I see, and now I understand that the power of God can really change you to a level that you couldn't get to on your own, in my opinion. | ||
| Like an endurance, sustainable level, if that makes any sense. | ||
| It's like more of an endurance to it, to where, to the end of time, you can really tap into something that's just supernatural. | ||
| And I see it being so when you read the Bible. | ||
| You read through thousands of years of You know, hundreds of people having interactions that never met each other. | ||
| Very similar situations. | ||
| They never met each other. | ||
| They lived in different dispensations of time, different parts of different countries. | ||
| And they had the same experience that I had in 2008. | ||
| And it just made me feel like there's something to this. | ||
| There's something to it. | ||
| So you have this awakening, and then you get out of college. | ||
| Did you immediately go into law enforcement? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was 2008. | ||
| I had a few more years. | ||
| I graduated in 2009. | ||
| I left football in 2010, so I graduated early. | ||
| So then my life changed. | ||
| My career changed. | ||
| I was a good guy on the football team. | ||
| I was a leader. | ||
| Things began to transition for me. | ||
| I started getting heavily into church, things like that. | ||
| I would witness on campus all of the above. | ||
| So with that new mentality, that new mindset, more of a tempered behavior, I was taking the gold teeth out of my mouth, all of the above. | ||
| I get to the end of my college career, NFL draft, I didn't get drafted. | ||
| It was heartbreaking. | ||
| I mean, I was devastated. | ||
| And there were some reasons behind that. | ||
| I mean, it'll take me all day to explain it, but my career didn't go the way I wanted to. | ||
| What percentage were you looking at that morning? | ||
| Like, were you like, 90% I'm gonna get drafted? | ||
| I was 100% I was gonna get drafted, because my agent had talked to the Oakland Raiders at the time, and they said to my agent, we're gonna draft him in the sixth or seventh round. | ||
| He's gonna be the only safety that we draft. | ||
| Because of my athletic ability. | ||
| I didn't play much at all at Arizona, but I was, All-american in high school. | ||
| I was one of the top players in the nation I was probably I was I was what we considered a freak athlete and so because of the athleticism even though I didn't play at all The Oakland Raiders still was thinking about drafting me. | ||
| They told him they were gonna draft me. | ||
| We had a draft party It was on my birthday. | ||
| Oh, I mean, I've been praying about this and I said God is gonna Make it happen And draft day came, he called me, he said, hey, they making some changes. | ||
| I don't know what they're doing. | ||
| They didn't draft me. | ||
| Come to find out they didn't draft me because the college coach that they went and talked to right before the draft, he bad mouthed me and talked really bad about me. | ||
| And so my agent told me that that's why they passed on me. | ||
| They didn't want to take a chance with me given the circumstances. | ||
| So I was hurt, man. | ||
| I was devastated. | ||
| Um, but I met a guy who's, he was a tremendous mentor to me. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| The guy, very successful millionaire. | ||
| I'll give you his first name was John. | ||
| Um, I don't want to, I don't know if he's comfortable me giving his full name, but this guy was a entrepreneur, CEO of a major world comp. | ||
| Um, it was like a worldwide company that he owned, had his own private jet, all of these things. | ||
| And his daughter played volleyball with me and my son's mom. | ||
| I think I could go back with me and her end up having a child at some point, but he his daughter played with my son's mom and that's how he met me. | ||
| And so he mentored me through the process and he told me something that that was pivotal just like my dad telling me that in the car. | ||
| He told me he said Brandon you pursue football. | ||
| As much as you can, with everything you have, and at the moment in which it's not yielding any results, you need to put an X on the calendar and move on. | ||
| And I tried it out for another year. | ||
| I said, man, this is not doing anything. | ||
| I put an X on the calendar while I was applying for the police department. | ||
| So let me go back because there's some things missing here. | ||
| During my college career, I met a young lady and we had a kid together. | ||
| And we weren't married, so we had a kid out of wedlock, which was a whole story in and of itself. | ||
| Because I was in the church, I was in the choir, and I had to sit out the choir. | ||
| It was a lot of things that happened in the church because of this. | ||
| I think it's important to say. | ||
| So, we had a kid, and we were having a son. | ||
| Me and her was on two different pages, right? | ||
| I was in the church, we made a mistake, but I didn't believe in abortion. | ||
| She, on the other hand, was pro-abortion. | ||
| And I remember we had a conversation about it. | ||
| She told me, look, I just want to see how far along I am. | ||
| And that was our communication. | ||
| I went to Planned Parenthood with her. | ||
| At the time, I didn't know what Planned Parenthood was. | ||
| I thought it was a little clinic for women and whatever. | ||
| Now I know it's a little bit of a different perspective. | ||
| But at the time, I didn't know. | ||
| I went with her to, you know, to see how far along she was. | ||
| At the front door of the facility, she said, I want you to know I'm having an abortion. | ||
| And I was hurt, man, I was hurt. | ||
| People don't think that men matter in these women's choice situations, but they do. | ||
| That's my child. | ||
| So she was gonna do it regardless of what they were gonna say related to timing or whatever. | ||
| Right, she didn't tell me nothing. | ||
| She had already orchestrated the thing, but she waited to the front door to tell me. | ||
| I sat in the lobby and I prayed, and I said, God, please don't let her do this. | ||
| You know, please. | ||
| Like, this is my son. | ||
| I know we made a mistake with fornication, but I don't believe in making two mistakes. | ||
| I don't believe in this. | ||
| And I prayed in there for I don't know how long. | ||
| I leave, get back in the car, maybe like an hour and a half later, she comes out of there crying profusely. | ||
| And I thought she did it. | ||
| And I said, I was hurt, but I said, you know, she just went through a difficult thing. | ||
| I'll try to support her emotionally. | ||
| She came to the car and she cried, she cried, and she go, I couldn't do it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I couldn't do it. | ||
| I got to give her kudos because my son is nine years old now. | ||
| So, that situation happened. | ||
| I thought it was pertinent to kind of bring it up. | ||
| So, fast forward to the end of my college career, the football thing. | ||
| She was pregnant and she was getting ready to have our son, or she was close to having our son at the time. | ||
| Then I had to make a decision, put the X on the calendar for football and go to something else because I needed something more sustainable. | ||
| I applied for everything in the city of Tucson. | ||
| I had a degree. | ||
| I got hundreds of no's. | ||
| One day they called me, and it was after an argument that me and her had, obviously. | ||
| So, we had just argued briefly on the phone about the engagement ring or something like that. | ||
| Nothing major. | ||
| And I tell this story because it's always funny to me how this happened. | ||
| We had a little argument the night before. | ||
| Wake up the next morning and I get a phone call from the Tucson Police Department. | ||
| And initially I thought she had called the police on me. | ||
| Like she was mad at me. | ||
| I'm like, why would she call the police on me on a basic argument like this? | ||
| You want me to go to jail? | ||
| But when I answered the phone, they were like, you applied for the job. | ||
| And I'm like, I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Let's see where this goes. | ||
| But I didn't know nothing about policing, nothing. | ||
| Except when I got arrested when I was eight. | ||
| And the agenda that you feel growing up in the black community, you feel like the cops always have to get you. | ||
| And I did a ride-along, man, and it changed my life. | ||
| Officer Champagne changed my life during that ride-along. | ||
| And that kind of set my career up. | ||
| So you become a police officer. | ||
| This is sort of a 180, as you just said, from where you started. | ||
| What was the most eye-opening thing about being an officer? | ||
| It was the idea that I had no idea what police did, and I thought I did, right? | ||
| Watching cops, listening to people online. | ||
| I realized that people that have never put on a badge and actually served as a police officer, they have very limited understanding of policing, period. | ||
| I mean, limited to like 10% of an understanding, even less than that. | ||
| If you know somebody that's a police, you may have a little more, but I had no idea. | ||
| Completely a different world. | ||
| It's completely a different job than people know about. | ||
| Emotionally, Legally, you know, the training, I mean, all of that is completely different. | ||
| And I got a taste of that, even after all the training, my first arrest was where I was like, this is real, man. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| I really have the power to take somebody's freedom away. | ||
| And this is not a role player, what we call them in the academy, where somebody's faking to be a criminal. | ||
| This is a real person with real emotions, a real life, and they can really kill you too. | ||
| And that was a pivotal point and an eye-opening point for me. | ||
| What was it like? | ||
| Did you ever go back to the old community and the guys that were giving you the weed as an eight-year-old saw you in your uniform? | ||
| No, growing up in Fort Worth, I became a police officer in Tucson. | ||
| But there was remnants of that, right? | ||
| You had a black community in Tucson. | ||
| You arrested people that look like people that you grew up with, act like people you grew up with, like my cousins and grandma, you know? | ||
| And so dealing with that kind of give you a little, you know, flashbacks of what went on. | ||
| And I got to see it from both sides. | ||
| All of that horrible stuff I thought they did to us when we were in a vacant house, how they treated us and all that stuff, I realized that them officers was right. | ||
| They did what they're supposed to do. | ||
| Getting a call of that nature, not knowing who to expect, knowing that we die on a day-to-day basis from calls simply like that. | ||
| And that really, you know, made me really, really open my understanding to it. | ||
| Yeah, what about racism within the police department, right? | ||
| If you listen to half the media, police departments, they're all racist. | ||
| They're looking for racist ways to incarcerate people. | ||
| Yeah, it's the biggest load of crap I ever heard in my life. | ||
| The biggest load of crap. | ||
| Police, if people understood what policing was, you would understand that it's rare for a police officer to be actually a racist. | ||
| Now, are there racist people in the police department? | ||
| Yes, there's racist pastors. | ||
| I mean, come on, we all know. | ||
| We all know that every walk of life, there's some idiot out there that's still lingering to hateful rhetoric. | ||
| Doesn't it drive you crazy that you have to qualify it always with that? | ||
| It drives me crazy all the time. | ||
| Yes, there are homophobes. | ||
| There are racists. | ||
| There are bad, mean people. | ||
| We cannot exterminate all of them. | ||
| Thanos could do it, but basically we can't. | ||
| We can't, but some people need to know that because watching the media every day, if you're not an informed person or you're not a person that's a leader and you can lead with your own thoughts, you're a follower, you'll fall into that stuff. | ||
| But it's very difficult to be a racist on a police department. | ||
| And one of the biggest reasons why is because you can't pick who you serve. | ||
| And the least racist people, in my opinion, are the white police officers that work in the black community. | ||
| Because you put your life on the line every day for black folks. | ||
| You are willing to die for black folks. | ||
| You have to visually see and feel the pain and hurt in the community when brothers getting shot every day. | ||
| People don't realize that police are the ones that have to put those young brothers in body bags. | ||
| I don't care who you are. | ||
| When you see a young man with his brains hanging out, Clinging for life. | ||
| Maybe even pleading for his life. | ||
| Gurgling in blood. | ||
| The age of your son, the age of your nephew, cousin, somebody that looks like your mom, your grandmother, a young baby that's been shot through the head from a drive-by. | ||
| I don't care what race you are, man. | ||
| It messes with you. | ||
| And for people to think that these white officers are these cruel, evil people that don't have any sense of emotions or attachment to human life. | ||
| These people are... The people that are pushing this rhetoric are evil and liars. | ||
| You put these young people in body bags every day. | ||
| You go to their mom, grandmother, and you look that lady in the face, trying to hold back your own tears, because you could only imagine losing your son. | ||
| Some of these women have lost all of their children to gang violence. | ||
| And you gotta look her in the eye, and you gotta be strong for her and everybody else and say, I'm sorry, but he's never coming back. | ||
| And... | ||
| That's what people don't understand happens. | ||
| And I also believe that it's racist, in my opinion, to make the projection that white officers are targeting black people in the community. | ||
| And one of the main reasons is that you would have to assume that all black people are bad. | ||
| Think about this for a minute. | ||
| If officers are afraid of black people, that means that all of them are doing something that will lead officers to be afraid of them. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It's only a few dummies. | ||
| That are destroying the community. | ||
| What about grandma now? | ||
| Who been robbed. | ||
| They call the police for help. | ||
| Some woman have been raped. | ||
| They call the police for help. | ||
| Officers are seeing another side of black people that they don't want to tell you about. | ||
| But they project it so people can be divided. | ||
| And I think that's the biggest thing that bothers me about it. | ||
| So since you were probably uniquely positioned in Arizona as an officer to go to some of these communities and talk to some of these people, do you think you were able to wake up some young kids that were up to no good in a way that maybe a white officer just wouldn't have been able to, as well-intentioned as he might be? | ||
| I think young people and black people in general, You know, I was considered the black person whisperer, right? | ||
| I'm serious. | ||
| Like, we would go on calls, and black people would be like, oh man, F that, you know what? | ||
| I don't want to talk. | ||
| Man, where the black officer at? | ||
| Man, come on, brother, you know, tell them that I ain't. | ||
| They go to jail, just like they would with the white officer, but somehow they felt compassion because they felt they can identify with me. | ||
| And a lot of times, they would listen to me articulate to them, brother, it ain't what you think it is. | ||
| They didn't pull you over because you black. | ||
| You think they care about the color of your skin? | ||
| You got pulled over because you had a suspended driver's license. | ||
| Or your suspended registration. | ||
| Stop jumping to that conclusion because you are creating a scenario of frustration and conflict that doesn't need to be had. | ||
| An officer just comes over to you doing a routine, what we call a routine traffic stop, and now you hype. | ||
| Oh, you put me on because I'm black. | ||
| This is what that means to an officer when you say that, is that I'm a racist, right? | ||
| And I don't have any integrity at all. | ||
| And I didn't waste it all these years Develop and building what I've established and you're telling me that I'm willing to throw that away and I have no integrity, I don't care about my family, I don't care about my pension or nothing because I want to racially profile you. | ||
| As if I'm that shallow-minded. | ||
| Well, you better believe you're probably about to get a ticket. | ||
| And I think people don't understand that they start the conversation off very wrong when they do that. | ||
| A lot of officers let it go. | ||
| But some officers that you catch on camera, sometimes they don't take it lightly. | ||
| Did you also get the reverse of that, though? | ||
| Where you'd go into these communities and then they'd see you and be like, well, this guy's the sellout. | ||
| Why would we talk to him? | ||
| Sometimes it would happen. | ||
| More often than not, they felt that they could identify with me. | ||
| One reason why I think God kind of put an anointing on me that allowed me to reach people uniquely, black, white, or whatever, the fact that I didn't curse on the job helped me reach people uniquely. | ||
| Because when the stuff is hitting the fan, the only person that sounds as if he has integrity, or not just integrity, but sounds like he's calm just because I'm not Yelling curse words, people attract to me. | ||
| I feel like God gave me a gift to communicate as well. | ||
| So I was able to communicate with people and talk people out of suicide and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| What do you make of just sort of how the media treats all of the shootings? | ||
| And that certain shootings, if it's a white cop and a black suspect, then we treat it a certain way. | ||
| If it's a black cop and a white one, we treat it differently. | ||
| A lot of times the same people who are outraged over it one way, then the next day it happens the other way, then they ignore the story. | ||
| The way we're, everyone's playing this really twisted game with policing right now. | ||
| There's money in black people's emotions, right? | ||
| We're probably the most emotional people, a group of people, if you want a group, in the country. | ||
| More, twice as many white people have been shot this year unarmed than black people in America. | ||
| Almost every year the case is that more white people get shot unarmed than black | ||
| people and white people are not going to be doing what black people are doing. | ||
| Right? I don't see white people protesting. I remember New Mexico. | ||
| They had a shooting in New Mexico. The officer shot the guy in the back. | ||
| He was mentally ill, shot him in the back. | ||
| I thought it was ridiculous for him to shoot the guy with the rifle in the back | ||
| from such a distance, killed him. It was a bad shooting. | ||
| I think the officer got fired. They all got in trouble. | ||
| White people aren't out here protesting black people for some reason. | ||
| I don't know if it's the legacy of slavery that got us in the mentality of | ||
| feeling like we have to defend and be mob-like on certain occasions, | ||
| but we are going to protest. | ||
| Right, wrong, or indifferent. | ||
| The man can pull a gun and shoot an officer and then get shot back. | ||
| We will protest. | ||
| I've seen it with my own eyes. | ||
| The media understands that. | ||
| So they don't care nothing about nobody. | ||
| It's about if it bleeds, it leads, right? | ||
| They know the black people are going to act a fool, so they're going to cover it. | ||
| They're going to showcase it. | ||
| They're going to act like there's this outrageous rate of white officers killing black people, which is not even true at all. | ||
| White officers, or you say white officers, officers in general, you know place in Philly is 50-50 black and white. | ||
| But officers kill more white people, twice as many white people, as black people in shootings where people are armed. | ||
| They kill more people unarmed, white than black. | ||
| And here's the thing that people always bring up, well there's more white people. | ||
| Police officers don't deal with every single person in the population. | ||
| They deal with the criminal element of the population. | ||
| If you look at African Americans in America, you know what we make up 12, | ||
| 13% of the population, yet we commit over half of the murders in this country, over | ||
| half of the violent crimes in this country. | ||
| So the bulk of criminal activity is coming from a small, let me clarify that. | ||
| 13% of the population is way overblown number. | ||
| It's more like 6 or 7% of the population because when you take out older people, young people, | ||
| women, it's mostly young men between the age of, I don't know, 16 and 35 that are doing | ||
| the bulk of these crimes. | ||
| So let's say 6% is committing over half of the murders and violent crimes in this country. | ||
| When you look at it like that, police have an overwhelmingly higher presence in the black | ||
| community dealing with the criminal element, yet they shoot more white people than they | ||
| shoot black people. | ||
| If you look at the proportionality of numbers, it's actually a less likely chance per capita | ||
| that you get shot as a black man as opposed to white people in America. | ||
| And that to me rules out the idea of the racist policing in America. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that we're gonna also, and maybe we're there already, gonna | ||
| have a crisis in policing where good people forget their skin color, which I would prefer | ||
| to do all the time, but good people who are policemen won't want to work in black communities | ||
| because they know it will ultimately be an unwinnable situation. | ||
| You'll either have them turning on the black officer like you and you're the sellout and all that, and the white ones will just be like, well forget this, there's no win in this, I could be a great officer We've already seen it happen. | ||
| but one weird thing happens that gets twisted one way or another | ||
| or edited or whatever and my career's over. | ||
| So then you're gonna get a, I don't even know how you call it, | ||
| like a lower class of qualified people that are gonna work in the communities | ||
| that need it the most. | ||
| Right, and then people are not gonna, they're not gonna be proactive in policing. | ||
| We've already seen it happen. | ||
| I mean, if people are now thinking that we're gonna get to that point, | ||
| you're way behind. | ||
| We're there. | ||
| We were there from Ferguson. | ||
| People don't realize it. | ||
| The crime rate in these areas are skyrocketing. | ||
| Officers, proactive policing is going down. | ||
| Listen, police are responsive, right? | ||
| They respond to crimes, right? | ||
| If me and you got into an altercation, I pulled a gun, I shot you, they're not there before I shoot you. | ||
| They come after the fact. | ||
| But, the greatness of policing, if it's done properly, is proactive policing. | ||
| Therefore, they've already had contact with me, understood that I'm a danger, I've probably gotten arrested for crimes I've done before, before I shoot you. | ||
| That is the way you police. | ||
| But the reason, I mean, what they're doing today is they're killing the spirit of officers being proactive. | ||
| Because you go, you see a guy doing a hand-to-hand. | ||
| People without the experience in law enforcement will say, oh, it's just a hand-to-hand. | ||
| No, that hand-to-hand has killed so many people in the community with drugs and crime and all this other stuff. | ||
| We see that. | ||
| We arrest the man hand-to-hand, we get into a scuffle with him. | ||
| Now, police brutality, we get fired. | ||
| Officers seize hand-to-hand and say, I'm not gonna care more than the community does. | ||
| Because It takes a lot, man. | ||
| So for you to risk life and death every day, putting your family through that, and at the end of the day, you want to get your pension. | ||
| And you lose your pension over something you did correctly, over something that you were justified in doing, but because the community became outraged, you lose it all. | ||
| We saw it in Baltimore. | ||
| All you got to do is look at the stats. | ||
| Baltimore, huge reduction. | ||
| Huge reduction in applicants. | ||
| California, huge reduction in applicants. | ||
| And we've seen this on the Tucson Police Department. | ||
| And they won't tell the public because the chief is a piece of crap. | ||
| But we had to dumb down the scores because we didn't have enough qualified people to join the police department. | ||
| When I was there, you had to make a 75 or above. | ||
| And this is a test that you can't study for. | ||
| You gotta come out the gate having a basic understanding. | ||
| Now, I think they put it down to like 40%. | ||
| Officers on the department are like... And I'm gonna tell you this. | ||
| Any department, you can look at the stats. | ||
| Tucson is a big example. | ||
| When they did this a while ago, You see officers getting fired all the time, officers doing bad stuff, they're skipping over backgrounds. | ||
| It is making policing in America more dangerous by the rhetoric that they're spewing, which is false. | ||
| These are lies that they're telling you. | ||
| Michael Brown, they're still talking about hands up, don't shoot. | ||
| Lie. | ||
| Eric Garner, I will fight to the death about the justification of use of force against Eric Garner. | ||
| Tamir Rice, all of these shootings and all these things, if you're a police officer, | ||
| you understand that these are justified uses of force. | ||
| People conflate the two. | ||
| Justified killings is what they call it, or killing somebody versus the justification | ||
| of use of force. | ||
| There's a big difference. | ||
| They weren't trying to kill Eric Garner. | ||
| The dude was fat, overweight, heart condition. | ||
| You use any force against him, he's going to go into cardiac arrest. | ||
| He's like a ticking time bomb. | ||
| They weren't trying to kill Tamir Rice. | ||
| The young kid, that he had to pull the gun on him. | ||
| He got put in a bad position. | ||
| He used force against him. | ||
| Unfortunately, that one shot caused his death. | ||
| So people begin to conflate the two. | ||
| We can never address the real issue because we're not talking about real problems. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the interesting thing is, of course, you're not defending the incidences when there genuinely are bad guys. | ||
| But what people always forget about is that that constant threat, That you guys are under. | ||
| You just don't know what's gonna happen on a knife's edge, whether that guy has a gun or the other thing. | ||
| So sometimes you have to be what would, I guess, appear to be visually more careful than maybe the average person would want you to be. | ||
| Well, this is what I teach you in Academy, and I know this is not popular. | ||
| People would probably be mad at me for saying this. | ||
| We get taught in Academy, and when I first said this to me, I thought it was the most extreme thing in the world. | ||
| I'm like, oh, they're going too far. | ||
| What they teach you in the academy is that you, and not everywhere, in my academy, you have to be prepared to kill every single person you interact with. | ||
| You have to be prepared emotionally to kill every person that you interact with. | ||
| Because if you're not, you're going to die. | ||
| You're going to get killed. | ||
| And you're going to get all your other buddies killed. | ||
| So you have to be able to have the mindset that at any moment this person can turn on me. | ||
| Whether or not they're a kid, whether or not they're an elderly woman, because we've seen the spectrum of officers getting killed by all kinds of people. | ||
| You have to be prepared for that. | ||
| And people don't understand our perspective. | ||
| This is not a video game. | ||
| You don't get to hit the reset button. | ||
| When you die, you die for real and you're gone forever. | ||
| And the unique part of what we see is that we see people die every day. | ||
| We see the last breath. | ||
| We see a person pleading for their life. | ||
| And in the officer's mind, it's like, I don't want to look like that when I die. | ||
| I don't want my family to see me like this guy. | ||
| I don't want to be at my last breath, not being able to talk to my son on the phone. | ||
| You need to do the right thing or I'm going to, if it's me or you, I'm going to win. | ||
| People pose threats all the time, right? | ||
| Just think about how many... I pulled my gun when I was an officer four or five times a week. | ||
| People have guns. | ||
| I didn't escape death, I don't know how many times. | ||
| People don't see that side. | ||
| Every officer has their own perspective about life, right? | ||
| We may go to the same call, you may have been shot before. | ||
| I've never been shot, so I'm green behind the ear, I'm driving in there, no caution. | ||
| That other officer may have a reflection in the mind of, man, last time I got shot, because I did this. | ||
| Last time I got shot, I seen the guy pull it from here, but I didn't react fast enough. | ||
| They get to the call, here he go, pulling, now he's shot. | ||
| You get what I'm saying? | ||
| The moral of the story is that we do go through a lot, and if people understood, they would be able to see these shootings in a much clearer light. | ||
| All right, so let's shift this a little bit to politics, which will get us to Blexit. | ||
| So most of the cities, and you mentioned Ferguson, you mentioned Baltimore, the cities where there are the most shootings, Chicago, we can go through the list of these cities. | ||
| People don't seem to want to accept this, or at least mainstream media doesn't want to accept this, that these are Democrat-run cities. | ||
| But I thought Democrats like black people more than you mean Republicans. | ||
| What's the problem here? | ||
| Something's not adding up. | ||
| Because it's not true. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| It's like if the standard is 2 plus 2 is 4, and you see an equation that says 2 plus 2 is 3, there's something wrong there! | ||
| People are not... It's politically expedient for them to evade the issue. | ||
| And you say, well, the virtue of having a D behind your name is... No, it's not. | ||
| It's the policies. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| Who's anti-police? | ||
| Democrats. | ||
| And what are they doing? | ||
| They're causing police not to act. | ||
| They're causing police to be the enemy of the people. | ||
| People aren't snitching. | ||
| They're not cooperating with police. | ||
| Now crimes aren't being solved. | ||
| Those things have issues. | ||
| They want you to be on full staff. | ||
| They don't want you to be independent. | ||
| They don't want you to go out and get it on your own. | ||
| They don't want jobs to come to your community. | ||
| They don't want that. | ||
| They need you to need them so they can win votes. | ||
| When you say they, are you talking about like the political class? | ||
| Because I believe even for, I mean, you know enough about my political evolution, for as frustrated as I am with the lefties these days, most of them I think are just misguided. | ||
| I don't think they're bad people. | ||
| I don't think they're really trying to screw over black people or something like that. | ||
| The elite do it, and they're easy bumper sticker answers. | ||
| Give more money to this community for this. | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| Get the police out. | ||
| Police are killing. | ||
| It all sounds kinda right, but I don't think the average person actually believes that. | ||
| But it's breaking through that layer of craziness. | ||
| It's not the people, right? | ||
| You can even look at this in a spiritual sense of a pastor. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The people, the lay members, are receiving information from the pastor in hopes that he's acting in good faith to project the gospel. | ||
| Right? | ||
| He said he got a degree. | ||
| You believe him. | ||
| You're learning from him. | ||
| People in the Democratic Party, the people, the lay members, they are listening to these politicians, hoping that they're telling you the truth about immigration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said Republicans are all racist. | |
| So you're hoping that They're telling you the truth, but they're lying to you. | ||
| And it's the people at the top that most of these democratic people that are running for Congress. | ||
| I'm not even every democratic person in the house. | ||
| There's some people that are like, Oh, they're more reasonable. | ||
| But the party line idea, the party line politics is what's destroying people. | ||
| And it's almost like this. | ||
| Look, I think I look at, I equate slavery. | ||
| And then the freedom of slaves to the Democratic Party today. | ||
| And this is how I compare the two. | ||
| When slaves were on a plantation, they knew what's wrong, whatever the case may be. | ||
| The slaves didn't want to be there. | ||
| But when they got free, what did the slave master tell them? | ||
| Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| How are you gonna survive out there on your own? | ||
| Who's gonna take care of you? | ||
| You're gonna have food, we can feed you, we'll take care of you, make sure you're safe. | ||
| Stay here, end slavery. | ||
| And a lot of slaves did. | ||
| They felt comfortable. | ||
| They didn't want to go out on their own and risk the big bad world. | ||
| Become entrepreneurs, be free. | ||
| The Democratic Party is almost the same similar concept because black folks need to be free. | ||
| We need to understand that we can be entrepreneurs. | ||
| We can be flight attendant. | ||
| We can do it all. | ||
| They don't want you to go into this big bad world and fail. | ||
| Failure is only a pathway to success. | ||
| If you never fail, you will never be successful. | ||
| They don't want you to get off the plantation. | ||
| They want you to stay so they can coddle you. | ||
| And then what? | ||
| Our communities become desolate. | ||
| No real spirit of the community. | ||
| And dependent on them, them being the government. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because everything you just said is basically what Kanye said about about the mentality of slavery, and then what happened? | ||
| Well, mainstream media said he should be in a mental institution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Remember that? | |
| They have to. | ||
| These people are working together. | ||
| I don't know if it's people behind the scenes paying money or what. | ||
| They're working together to push an agenda. | ||
| Netflix. | ||
| I mean, all these things that are run by some of these Democratic elites, they have to. | ||
| You can't ruin their, I guess, reign over the people. | ||
| There's a difference between, and I'm not saying every Republican, right? | ||
| I'm more of a Trump Republican, right? | ||
| I don't like so many people in the Republican Party, and I think they haven't done much for the black community anyway. | ||
| Their outreach has been Poor to me. | ||
| I never seen none of them. | ||
| I never even knew they existed until I decided to look on the other side. | ||
| But when you look at it for what it is, the people in the Democratic Party, their focus is on power. | ||
| More so in the conservative movement or in the Republican Party, their focus is the people more so often. | ||
| We want you to be free, less government, whatever. | ||
| The Democrats won't power by any means necessary. | ||
| They will support border wall. | ||
| They will support strong immigration reform. | ||
| Then, when it's not advantageous for votes, they will switch it in the same conversation I have with you and act like it never happened. | ||
| As a person who's new to politics, just seeing Chuck Schumer and all of them once just advocate. | ||
| Barack Obama deported the most people in United States history out of any president. | ||
| And then they turn and they cry on TV. | ||
| And they make up this stuff. | ||
| They tell you if you come to a port of entry, you're going to be separated from your family, which is a lie. | ||
| If you come to a port of entry and you seek asylum, you go through a process for them to verify your asylum seeking request. | ||
| If you get busted over here, or you're trying to sneak through the border, that's when you get separated because now you're going through a criminal proceeding. | ||
| They know that, but they'll never tell you. | ||
| Because they need the votes. | ||
| They need power. | ||
| Why haven't any of these candidates been pandering as much to black folks? | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| They speaking in Spanish. | ||
| They on there talking about they're going to give every illegal free health care. | ||
| They want to get housing. | ||
| Why are they not saying, we're going to fix Chicago? | ||
| I think I know where you're going with this. | ||
| We're going to fix the school system. | ||
| Because we are being replaced. | ||
| We 13% of the population. | ||
| How much do our vote really count? | ||
| Now the Hispanic community or even the legal, legals are coming in by the millions, I don't know, in about 10 years. | ||
| They'll never need another black person again to vote because our vote won't count. | ||
| Well, not only that, but if you get 90 some odd percent of a group's vote, then you don't have to give them anything. | ||
| And that was the brilliance of Trump saying, well, what do you have to lose? | ||
| Because, all right, we're giving this group, I think it's 94% or something like that. | ||
| Some areas it's 100%. | ||
| It's mostly on the 90 percentile. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, well then, don't worry about those guys. | ||
| We got them taken care of already. | ||
| We got that box checked. | ||
| And what I preach often is that it's not about the Republican Democratic Party. | ||
| It's about leaving people who ain't doing nothing for you. | ||
| And in many of these cases in the inner city, you've been voting for them 40 years. | ||
| You still complaining. | ||
| You still ain't got nothing. | ||
| You still blaming people. | ||
| Don't blame the Republican white man because the Republicans ain't even in your community. | ||
| They ain't talking to you. | ||
| They're not doing nothing for you. | ||
| Blame the people who are there in your community perpetuating these things. | ||
| Stop voting for them. | ||
| I'm not telling you to do your research, but one thing you do know. | ||
| You may not know what the Republicans are, because you never gave them a chance. | ||
| What you do know is that Democrats haven't done nothing. | ||
| And you're talking about a person in my whole family, a Democrat. | ||
| I grew up feeling like I was a Democrat. | ||
| And dude, when the truth bomb hits you, it's like a ton of bricks. | ||
| It's a little weird, right? | ||
| So we obviously swim in some of the same pools here. | ||
| So the first time we met was about a year ago at a Turning Point event. | ||
| You spoke right before me. | ||
| And it was one of the few times that I was like, oh man, because you have incredible energy, and the music you went up to, and you're just like knocking it out of the park. | ||
| And then obviously I'm a little more low-key. | ||
| So I was like, ah, I don't know if I can follow that. | ||
| But it all worked out. | ||
| But we go to a lot of the same events and things. | ||
| I find these people that are usually Trump supporters, but certainly people on the right, they don't care. | ||
| People can't, when I talk about it, they almost can't accept it. | ||
| They don't care about race. | ||
| They don't care about sexuality. | ||
| They don't care about gender. | ||
| They don't care about any of these issues. | ||
| They're really just saying, let me live. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But it is hard. | ||
| Like, realizing that these people aren't bad. | ||
| Like, I even still now, years later, I go to some of these, like, some functions or something, and I'll be like, I can't believe these aren't the bad guys. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But they're not. | ||
| This is how I was raised. | ||
| Republicans are racist white people. | ||
| That's how it was. | ||
| And now I'm like... | ||
| Republicans are like the nicest people that you know. | ||
| I'm not just saying Republicans. | ||
| I'm saying people that are more on a conservative spectrum. | ||
| You know, there's obviously Libertarian and it's flexible on that part, all the way to the far right. | ||
| But I feel like the people around the conservative side and viewpoint are the most generous people I've met, are the most realistic people. | ||
| They say, well, let's go by the Constitution. | ||
| Let's go by what's fair. | ||
| The other side seems to be more emotional. | ||
| It's not about what's fair. | ||
| It's not about, it's what I feel. | ||
| If one person have a, and they say, just say transgender for example. | ||
| If a transgender person, one person, not saying that we shouldn't acknowledge a person's feelings because God's mission is to love everybody. | ||
| But one person says, you know what? | ||
| I need a bathroom. | ||
| They are willing to say everybody's rights have to be restructured, everybody's feelings are thrown out of the loop because one person has a request that could infringe on everybody else, but we don't care because that person deserves to have this thing. | ||
| And not only that, we're going to cut federal funding from states that don't behave a certain way relative to whatever the flavor of the day is. | ||
| We're going to punish for, I don't know, .000 some percent of the population. | ||
| I don't feel like that's right. | ||
| Conservatives will say, well, let's see if the person don't, Feel like, you know, they want a separate bathroom. | ||
| How can we remedy this and everybody be happy? | ||
| Maybe they can identify a certain way and then use something that they look like, or maybe not. | ||
| Well, that's the irony. | ||
| Trans people have been using bathrooms for decades. | ||
| I never in my life, and I guarantee you trans people have come into the restroom. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Because they look like... I've seen trans people, men that turn into girls. | ||
| They got beards and everything. | ||
| I'm not checking your crotch area, man. | ||
| You come in here, you look like a dude. | ||
| Some dudes that are biological dudes, they look crazy. | ||
| You know how it goes. | ||
| They may wear long hair or whatever. | ||
| But who cares dude? | ||
| Just don't be in my stall. | ||
| Don't be looking at my stuff and we ain't got no problem. | ||
| And I don't think people do that. | ||
| I guarantee you that trans women, I think that's men to women, They've been going into the women's restroom forever. | ||
| And some of them have a conscious awareness to say, I actually present like I look like a woman. | ||
| People don't even know. | ||
| They go right in the restroom and feel comfortable. | ||
| What would be weird to me is if you look like a woman. | ||
| You got breasts, everything. | ||
| And you go in a men's restroom. | ||
| I think that would be more awkward and odd than if you went in one that you actually matched the description. | ||
| And they just want to flip everything. | ||
| A couple months ago, I was in Sonoma. | ||
| I was at a winery, and they didn't have male and female. | ||
| They only had all-gender restrooms. | ||
| So even where you wash your hands is the same area. | ||
| And this woman came out of the stall, and it was just obvious to me that she had just gone number two. | ||
| And it was like, we're like looking at each other and I, it was just, it was like something felt wrong. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it was just like, why do we have to be standing here together right now? | ||
| So, okay, so let's just get, let's get this to, to Blexit. | ||
| Cause if we go down that, that path, it'll be a whole other thing. | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started that when I had Candace Owens on originally, this is now like two plus years ago, when she was just a YouTuber with 100,000 subscribers. | ||
| Her name was Red Pill Black. | ||
| I didn't even know her name was Candace when we first booked her. | ||
| I said to my guys, we got to find out her name. | ||
| I don't even know what her name is. | ||
| Anyway, I had her in for an hour. | ||
| And I just knew in that hour that this girl was going to blow up. | ||
| And I'm proud to say that she sat in here and had a part of that. | ||
| We were just at her wedding a couple weeks ago. | ||
| You co-founded the Blexit movement with her, the idea that, the basic idea being, that black people don't have to be Democrats. | ||
| And Candace always says that it's the least, she always says, people think I'm so controversial, but it's the least controversial thing that you can say, because you shouldn't have to vote for a party just because of your skin color, and yet here we are. | ||
| Right, party line is, Ridiculous. | ||
| You vote based on the values of your community and what you want to see change. | ||
| And that's kind of what, the premise of Blexit, and I think that people get too caught up in the name, Blexit, right? | ||
| I know that this is, I know that the name is, it means a lot, obviously because the movement is named after, but the thing is freedom. | ||
| When I see Blexit, I see freedom. | ||
| When some people see Blexit, they say, oh, you hate the Democrats. | ||
| It has really not much to do with the Democratic Party. | ||
| It's more of being free, having a free mind. | ||
| There's something else out there. | ||
| We, for the longest, we feel like it's only one thing now that we have, that we can utilize or access. | ||
| We just want people to know, let me show you the history of what we've been doing all this time. | ||
| And it's gotten us nowhere. | ||
| Here is another perspective. | ||
| Think about this for a minute. | ||
| I believe most black people are conservative. | ||
| Most black people are conservative, believe it or not. | ||
| Even black criminals are conservative. | ||
| All you gotta do is think about it for a few seconds. | ||
| If you were to sell drugs, sell drug dealers. | ||
| I have some in my family. | ||
| Cannot confirm or deny if they still doing it. | ||
| But you have drug dealers selling weed. | ||
| Name a drug dealer that want government intervention. | ||
| Name a drug dealer that want to pay taxes on it. | ||
| Most drug dealers are libertarian. | ||
| Name a drug dealer that's like, hey man, you wasn't hustling all week and putting your life on the line. | ||
| Maybe you were sick that day. | ||
| Let me give all my drug money and split it with you because it's fair. | ||
| It's never going to happen. | ||
| Name a drug dealer that don't have a gun, that don't want their right to bear arms, you know, per se, to protect themselves. | ||
| And I know it's a weird analogy, but I think that it resonates because in the community, those things are not just the criminal element of it, but the conservative ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So give me a wider example than just the black people as the criminal there. | ||
| Let's widen that a little bit, right? | ||
| Do you mean on social issues also? | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| The most religious people, I think per capita, is black folks. | ||
| We go to church every Sunday. | ||
| We shout in charismatic churches. | ||
| I mean, we'll throw a scripture at you in a minute. | ||
| We are the most conservative culturally, in my opinion. | ||
| At least growing up we were that way. | ||
| My dad didn't let you make excuses. | ||
| What do you mean you want somebody to hand something to you? | ||
| You better work for what you got. | ||
| My dad started at 18 years old on the fire department and now he's the chief. | ||
| My dad didn't put up with that. | ||
| It's unacceptable. | ||
| You don't want to be a coward. | ||
| You're a strong man. | ||
| These are the things that grandfathers used to say too. | ||
| And a lot of people in the black community still have remnants of that. | ||
| Grandma is strong. | ||
| Grandma used to say, it's either hell or jail if you want to act like that and sell drugs and be that way. | ||
| Black people adhere to that idea. | ||
| The structure of self I say entrepreneurship being an individual. | ||
| Think about music. | ||
| Think about culture. | ||
| Black people dominate culture because we created a unique idea on our own in many ways. | ||
| That is more of a conservative idea. | ||
| We don't want to be followers. | ||
| We don't want people telling us what to do. | ||
| We've always pushed the envelope as a community. | ||
| That's to me more of a conservative idea. | ||
| Look at the entrepreneurs going from drug dealing to being Billionaires! | ||
| Jay-Z and all these other people who took advantage of saying you can turn your life around and you can be an entrepreneur, you can make it as high as you want to. | ||
| Oprah Winfrey, you can keep naming them. | ||
| I'll tell you one that people really don't talk about is Madam C.J. | ||
| Walker, who's the first female millionaire out of any race in the early 1900s. | ||
| Millionaire! | ||
| They got pictures of her with white people driving around in the early 1900s. | ||
| So, we have always understood the entrepreneur spirit. | ||
| And for some reason, we believe that the Democrats are that side instead of the Republicans and we've been confused, in my opinion. | ||
| So back to Blexit, if we only understood I think we will change. | ||
| We've seen people change a lot. | ||
| Do you feel it breaking? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Because the other thing I said to you right before we started was the day that all the Democrats started talking about reparations, I called Candace and I said, this is because of you. | ||
| She caused such a freaking split where it needed to happen that suddenly the Democrats were like, all right guys, we're starting to lose you. | ||
| How about some cash? | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| Here's a whole cohort in cash. | ||
| And what's the number? | ||
| I mean, that's the other thing. | ||
| It's like, there's never gonna be a number that's enough, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's because reparation in and of itself is the stupidest idea ever. | ||
| Because how are you going to pay it? | ||
| We pay taxes still, but they're going to not let us pay taxes? | ||
| I'm going to pay for my own reparations if I were to get it. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| How much money are they going to give you? | ||
| Well, they'll tell you that they're going to take it from billionaires. | ||
| And give you how much, though? | ||
| A thousand dollars ain't going to do nothing. | ||
| People will blow that in a weekend. | ||
| $10,000 is nothing. | ||
| $20,000, $30,000, generational change? | ||
| $100,000 may not be enough. | ||
| And then if you don't know anything, if you're not educated, you don't know anything about finances, your $100,000 is going to last you, what, I don't know, four months? | ||
| I've had a friend that had $2 million from a settlement, blew it all, have nothing to show for it. | ||
| Just giving somebody money is not going to help them at all. | ||
| But that's another story. | ||
| And also, it never would be enough, not just the literal amount, but like, okay, so let's say you gave every black person $50,000. | ||
| Just pick up a number. | ||
| Well, now you're two generations past that, right? | ||
| And if the left just keeps going off the deep end, their grandchildren are gonna go, wait, you sold us out for 50 grand? | ||
| True. | ||
| That was nothing. | ||
| True. | ||
| It's almost the reverse of the way human psychology actually works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, you know, you know, everybody knows when you give a person something, you just hand somebody something, they don't appreciate it as much. | ||
| What kind of growth potential? | ||
| Give me a better education. | ||
| I don't need reparations and money. | ||
| Fix these doggone schools with the money we already giving you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that just seemed like common sense to me. | |
| So do you see, do you think going 2020, and you're obviously a Trump guy, do you think there's gonna be just a seriously massive shift in the black vote? | ||
| I think it's gonna be a shift in the black vote. | ||
| I'm not sure how much the turnout is gonna be, if that makes sense. | ||
| I think a lot of people are leaving the Democratic Party. | ||
| I think that's the biggest threat to them, is that people may not be on Trump train yet, all right? | ||
| Trump is like on a SWAT team where you have the RAM. | ||
| The first person banged through the doors, shards going everywhere. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| You throwing flashbangs in there. | ||
| Everything is confusing. | ||
| And then the people that come in are smooth after him. | ||
| Trump is causing a lot of the ruckus. | ||
| I believe that you may see more of it after Trump. | ||
| The residual effect of what he has done, you'll have more people actually going to vote because it is still a scary moment for black folks to even say they support Trump. | ||
| People like me, you know, what are you going to do to me? | ||
| People, I work on Trump stuff all the time. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| they're not gonna fight me. | ||
| That's not gonna work out well for them. | ||
| So they don't say stuff to people like myself. | ||
| But if you live in a family or whatever, it's very difficult. | ||
| But what I will say is that when I first started doing things | ||
| about the same time Candace did, me and her met when she was red pill black. | ||
| And you know, it was like 90/10 maybe, black folks, a ratio on my page. | ||
| It ain't probably less than that. | ||
| Now it's like 60-40. | ||
| There's so many black people in my inbox, just flooding my inbox, saying, dude, you woke me up. | ||
| I can't say nothing. | ||
| My mama never killed me. | ||
| Last year at Young Black Leadership Summit, I had to call a kid's parent on the phone, because she didn't want her son to go because it was a conservative thing. | ||
| I said, ma'am, give the boy a chance. | ||
| Let him go. | ||
| And she ended up letting him go to the event. | ||
| But when he got home, they criticized him. | ||
| His family didn't want to do it. | ||
| His dad, I helped him get prepared to have a speech with his dad. | ||
| His dad wanted to have a sit down with him. | ||
| Like, you know, how to be a man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| His dad wanted him to sit down and talk about Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was just the weirdest thing ever. | ||
| But I helped him prepare for it. | ||
| But it's very difficult. | ||
| But if you look at any of the polls, you know, like I mean people may I'm not a real poll guy because they say had Hillary winning and I knew she was gonna lose and she lost but you can have somewhat of an indication of what people are thinking. | ||
| I'm on the side of saying that about 20% on a Fox did one around 20% the NAACP did one that people never talk about around 20% and I think Rasmussen around 30% What about that moment during the State of the Union when Trump talked about all-time low black unemployment, and they showed the picture of the Congressional Black Caucus, and nobody applauded? | ||
| I don't know how other people felt, but to me, it really almost made tears come out of my eyes. | ||
| Yeah, it was disgusting. | ||
| Why do we hate each other so much? | ||
| Why do they hate the progression of black people so much? | ||
| You hate your own people so much, and that's how I see it. | ||
| Well, they wouldn't need a caucus much longer. | ||
| You know, Chris Rock, cops need a certain amount of crime, which I know is probably a little touchy for you, but every group needs a little something to stay in business, and they know that they're gonna go out of business if actually we stop worrying about what race people are. | ||
| Right, NAACP, all these other organizations, You know, Al Sharpton, all of them are going to be unemployed. | ||
| They need to do these things, but it hurts people. | ||
| It hurts them, and it helps people that's on my side. | ||
| Because all I can do is point to them and say, if anything, whether you like them or not, when you say that black people are having the expression of historic low unemployment, At least do this. | ||
| At least be like... Right. | ||
| Can we get a snap maybe? | ||
| Something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You sitting there on your hands? | |
| Listen. | ||
| They are not a representation of our ancestors. | ||
| Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave so fast, he'd be catching on fire. | ||
| He'd be rolling so hard. | ||
| These people are evilness to our community. | ||
| They are dead. | ||
| It's almost like in the Bible, the Pharisees and all the people who were the leaders and rulers and they were just doing all this phony stuff and they didn't care about the people anymore and it was all about them and all their religious, all this stuff that don't mean anything. | ||
| This is exactly what the black folks in these high positions are doing. | ||
| How dare you help the black community when we didn't do it? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| How dare you show us up? | ||
| It's not about you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's about the young people that need opportunity. | ||
| So that was a sickening moment for me, man. | ||
| But I'm hoping, and it's like the house of cards somebody showed me. | ||
| Everybody have their moment where that card fall and then it all go down. | ||
| My moment was when Barack Obama was trashing police. | ||
| The card fell. | ||
| People's moment is watching that Congressional Black Caucus sit on their hands and be like, y'all really don't care. | ||
| This is a game to y'all. | ||
| Card fell. | ||
| People are switching. | ||
| All right, so then as a Trump guy, I got one more for you to sort of wrap this all together. | ||
| So for all the people that hear you, that hear so much, I mean, your message is so consistent with so many things that I talk about, about identity politics, frustrated with the Democrats, what's going on with the progressives, all of that, but there's still a certain amount of people, and I think it's a large amount of people, actually, that see all of it, and they go, there's still an aversion to Trump, to whatever it is that Trump is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there anything you think Trump could do to change that? | ||
| I mean, he's facing a double-edged sword, right? | ||
| If he's not controversial, if he's not standing up for himself, they're not gonna cover him properly. | ||
| And then everybody gonna think he's a monster. | ||
| He has to go on Twitter and be controversial. | ||
| He has to draw attention to himself to a certain degree, which some people don't like. | ||
| But people have to understand how significant Trump is in this entire big picture, right? | ||
| I don't like everything he does. | ||
| I love Trump, man. | ||
| I'm a Trumpster. | ||
| I don't like everything he does. | ||
| Sometimes I wish he wouldn't get into fights with certain people. | ||
| Some people say it's necessary. | ||
| Sometimes I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| Sometimes when, you know, he do some speeches and whatever, I wish he was more crisp. | ||
| I wish he was more charismatic in certain cases. | ||
| But I see the bigger picture. | ||
| I'm looking at the Supreme Court justices. | ||
| I'm looking at policies. | ||
| I'm looking at him setting a standard for supporting law enforcement in this country. | ||
| I'm seeing him set standards that I'm saying, okay, I'm okay with you not being perfect, but you are opening up so many more opportunities and doors that the next person that come in may be a little more polished, but you have saved America in the process. | ||
| I don't expect people to feel like this man, and nobody does this anyway. | ||
| They just want an excuse to be mad at Trump. | ||
| The man is not a pastor. | ||
| He's not my spiritual leader. | ||
| So I'm not looking to him for morality. | ||
| Get the doggone job done. | ||
| Obama had it all, right? | ||
| Shooting basketball. | ||
| He was charismatic. | ||
| He could say and sound sweet-talking. | ||
| Terrible bowler, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| He probably sucked at bowling and probably golf, too. | ||
| But he was, you know, he was this cool dude that could talk good and he sound polished and he was hip and the rappers come to the White House. | ||
| But what did you do based on what we elected you? | ||
| Nothing! | ||
| You almost ruined our country in my opinion. | ||
| I almost set us up a complete failure. | ||
| I don't care what you do in your personal life. | ||
| What does the job description say? | ||
| Get that done first and then we worry about everything else second. | ||
| I understand people are going to be adverse to it. | ||
| And that's why I said earlier when we were talking that Trump is the battering ram | ||
| that's setting up this crescendo effect that once he's gone and another person | ||
| with the mannerisms and the behaviors of America first, that can articulate it in more of a compassionate way | ||
| or more of a personable way, that person, all of the seeds that Trump planted, | ||
| that person is going to water them and they're going to sprout. | ||
| And so I understand this is kind of the way he has to be. | ||
| And we'll just get the job done. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, man. | ||
| I'm so glad we finally did this. | ||
| And I have a feeling we will be out on the road together at some point. | ||
| So thanks for coming in. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| And for more on Brandon, you can follow him at TheOfficerTatum. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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