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April 29, 2024 - Viva & Barnes
01:55:27
Interview with Robert Patillo - Candidate for Fulton County Superior Court Judge! Viva Frei Live
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Time Text
I'm just going to specify, I made sure that I had permission to play this trailer for Tommy Robinson's new documentary.
I agree.
I like the dubstep.
Hold on, I got to lower my volume here.
Not to make light of the substance, has everybody seen the dubstep remix Pins and Needles?
This kid going, wop, wop, wop, wop, pins and needles.
I love dubstep.
Okay, let's finish this up.
Get the show going.
This is Tommy Robinson's trailer for the new documentary.
Thank you.
There's no audio.
Okay, so picture everything you just saw with wicked dubstep.
Dubstep means like a...
Let me see if he says...
He says, hate me, no drama.
You need to see this for yourself.
All right.
If you didn't hear any audio, that's probably just because I'm an idiot and I forgot that when I try to share screen in StreamYard, for some reason it doesn't share the audio.
And I'm such an idiot that I meant to start yesterday's show or at least play that trailer yesterday.
And I meant to talk about Tommy Robinson's recent court victory coming out of the UK.
And like an idiot, I forgot to do that yesterday.
But that's a fortuitous mistake because what I'm going to do after this podcast interview live stream with Robert Petillo, it's going to be amazing.
I'm going to jump in the car, my home office, and do a short vlog breaking down that decision coming out of the UK.
And Tommy Robinson is coming on tomorrow.
Now...
Everybody, if you don't know that you want to see this stream, you're going to know that you want to see this stream afterwards.
You're going to want to share it.
You're going to snip and clip.
And in as much as one could not think of someone who might be more politically disaligned, I was on with Jenna Ellis and Robert Petito last week.
I was needling Robert a little bit on Twitter after he announced that he was running against Judge Scott McAfee.
And it would be very cowardly to needle someone who's running for office and then I mean, I offered, and he said yes, and anyone who's going to say, Viva, why would you give someone a platform?
First of all, these discussions are amazing, they're important, and they're going to be fantastic.
But I needled him, and then I asked him to come on, and he said yes, and we're going to do it.
It's going to be amazing.
But before we get the healthy dialogue going, we are going to get the healthy field of greens in our bodies, people.
This is the sponsor of the day, and you all know that I don't like doing the sponsor when the guest is here.
I like to do it beforehand.
I had my cup of field of greens.
I had some vegetables for breakfast as well.
But it's a little-known fact, everybody.
You're supposed to have your fruits and veggies.
For a number of reasons, not the least of which is called cancer-fighting foods.
The American Cancer Society discovered diets rich in fruits and veggies may actually lower your risk of cancer.
No medical advice, no legal advice, just basic common sense, antioxidants, people.
Hopefully you hear this and run to the store and get your five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
Most people don't.
If you do or if you don't, get your field of greens.
It's delicious.
Each spoonful of the powder, you mix it into water.
It looks like swamp water, but that's because it's rich in nutrients.
One spoonful has a serving of fruits and vegetables.
You do that twice a day.
You get your antioxidants, you get your power, energy, whatever the things is that come in fruits and vegetables.
It's delicious.
It helps the lungs, kidneys, metabolisms.
Everything about eating fruits and vegetables is good and you should do it.
And it's substitute out unhealthy habits for the healthy Go to Field of Greens.
Container.
If you go, promo code VIVA, fieldofgreens.com.
It brings you to Brickhouse Nutrition.
Promo code VIVA.
You'll get 15% off in free rush.
That thing when they ship you the product.
Free rush shipping.
There we go.
That's the screen right there.
It's beautiful.
And it's delicious.
And it's a good healthy habit.
And you need your fruits and veggies.
Now, from healthy food to healthy dialogue, if you have never met...
Robert Petillo.
You're going to today.
If you follow me on Twitter, TheVivaFry, you might have seen him, or at least me needling him.
Look, Twitter's a fun place, and people shouldn't take it too seriously.
But he's a good man.
We were on Jenna Ellis last week.
We had some vehement disagreements about politics, law, and the state of the world.
But six-minute or eight-minute segments is not enough time to have a meaningful discussion.
Robert, I see you in the back.
Are you good to come in?
Okay, let's do this.
Three, two, one.
Sir, how goes the battle?
Hey, going great.
How are you?
Very good, very good.
Robert, look, as you introduce yourself, 30,000 foot overview, I'm just going to make sure our audio levels are balanced.
For those who have never met you before...
Tell them who you are.
30,000-foot elevator pitch.
All right.
I'm a civil rights lawyer of over 16 years of experience, and I'm practicing here in Fulton County.
I've also worked for Reverend Jesse Jackson, Executive Director of the Rainbow Push Coalition, Peachtree Street Project.
I'm a syndicated talk radio host of People Passion in Politics on News and Talk 1380 WAOK.
I'm running for judge in Fulton County Superior Court against Judge Scott McAfee to try to bring someone's needed change to the Fulton County judicial system.
Dude, that's one hell of a well-polished elevator pitch.
All right.
You got all the essentials in there.
Look, I will not spend too much time on childhood, but I do love it and find it very interesting.
May I ask how old you are?
I am 39 years old for the next four months.
So, you know, I'm slowly moving out of those 30s into those 40s, knees back, everything else hurting.
And now you are, well, I think it got bad after 33, but it gets worse after 44. Yeah, I think so.
11-year increments.
So you are an attorney out of Fulton County, Georgia.
Correct.
And where are you born and raised?
I'm actually born in Atlanta.
I'm a Grady baby from the 80s, as they say.
Raised in Columbus, Georgia.
Moved back to Atlanta for college at Clark Lane University.
Went to law school, University of Chicago and Chicago, Illinois.
Been practicing back here in Atlanta ever since.
All right.
And may I ask what your folks did, what your parents did?
Oh, you know, it's an interesting story.
My dad was born in Harris County, Georgia, actually in the same town that the plantation that owned our ancestors was on.
If you go to LaGrange in Troop County, Georgia, you'll find like Petillo, Georgia, and that's the big plantation that my...
Family was, you know, held in enslavement on.
So he grew up there.
He was born in 1932 during the middle of the Great Depression.
My mom was born in Haiti in the 1950s.
My dad met her there on vacation and they produced me.
My dad was a store owner, shopkeeper, cab driver for over 40 years.
My mom's worked in the textile industries.
We have a big military presence in our family.
My sister's active duty over in Tacoma, Washington.
And I have a sister who's a former Marine and police officer.
So that's interesting.
So your dad's side of the family goes back how many years in America?
Probably to the furthest back we've traced until about 1789.
So just about the founding of the Constitution.
That's actually kind of wild.
Do you have, like, memorabilia that has passed through the generations that's still in the family?
We actually indeed do.
There's a famous story in Georgia about the Petillo brothers, who were the owners of my family.
They were valiant soldiers from the South during the Civil War.
You can look at the history of Harris County, Georgia, and find R.L. Petillo White, who actually was a sacred heart singer and writer of Confederate anthems back during and before the Antebellum period.
So it's an interesting history.
Kind of melding the Patillos who owned us and the Patillos who escaped to freedom.
And so, I mean, historically speaking, did it frequently happen that slaves or escaped slaves would...
Take on, or were they given the last names of the owners?
They were given the last names of the owners.
You know, when they took them from West Africa, now I don't think you found a lot of Petillo's over there.
So they were given those to just establish ownership.
But it's very interesting.
One of my aunts, Anissa Copeland, was born in 1888, so about 20 years after the end of enslavement.
She lived to be 106.
Actually, she taught me how to read and write and arithmetic.
She was a schoolteacher for over 80 years.
But she went to school at Tuskegee Institute.
She knew Booker T. Washington.
B.B. Du Bois.
She was one of the first black women in the South to earn an advanced college degree.
She was an instructor at the University of Chicago, which is part of the reason I went to Chicago for law school, because of her history there in the early part of the 19th century.
So it wasn't long after that period of enslavement that African-American communities were able to come directly out of that into education, into business ownership, into building that new freedom agenda for the community.
That's very...
Okay, so hold on.
Also, Petillo, as an origin of that name, is it...
Italian, Spanish?
Do you know the origin of?
This is interesting.
In theory, the story we've been told wronged up was that it was Italian, specifically Southern Italian.
There's some genealogy of study saying that it was Scottish.
Some say that it is Spanish.
So I think anywhere in the romantic world could be the origin of our ancestors.
That's about where the records break off.
And that's part of the issue of people who are descendants of the enslaved in this country.
There's just a big bright line where kind of our history comes from.
And we don't really know where those things came from before that.
We can't even trace our history back to the Holy Roman Empire.
We kind of have to go from pretty much the 18th or 19th century till now.
And who was it that you said lived to 106?
Was that your grandmother?
No, it was my great-aun, Anissa Copeland.
I actually still have a collection of her books that she kept from when she was an educator.
Books on the Buffalo Soldiers written in 1919.
Books on Black Wall Street, even before it was called that.
Books on...
Political science, economics, those sorts of things that she used as an educator throughout the early part of the 20th century that I was able to kind of read growing up and really got me interested in law and politics.
And she lived, so she's born in 1886.
106 dies in 1992.
You're born in 1984.
1984, so old enough to remember her.
That's kind of a wild, that's got to be a wild.
Yes.
Intersection of memories and life.
Absolutely.
And that was interesting.
Whenever we have these kind of conversations on, well, you know, slavery was so long ago.
Well, my aunt was born.
20 years after slavery, and she was alive until I was, you know, starting elementary school.
So it wasn't really that long ago that we can trace back our ancestor and trace back many of these harms that were done to those communities, but also understand just the amount of growth that it took coming out of that period of time.
Just imagine being alive during that period of time, 20 years after the end of the Civil War, during Reconstruction, knowing people, everyone you grew up with would be formerly enslaved, having those firsthand accounts, firsthand stories, and being able to pass that down to somebody.
everybody my age, my sister's age, who are here alive in the 2020s and going forward.
And what did your father do again?
I don't know if you mentioned that.
He was a store owner.
He was somebody who he had a...
10th grade education, born in 1932 in Harris County, Georgia.
Back when, you know, he kind of just went to school until it was time to start working.
He took up the trades and crafts.
He did construction.
He owned stores.
He drove cabs.
He was a cook.
He did everything it took to get by and raise a family and really set a great basis for me and my sister and my mom here, kind of pushing that 1930s work ethic into the early part of the 21st century.
And now, so you have one sibling, a sister?
I have an older sister who's in the Army.
I have a younger sister and a younger brother.
I have an older, older sister from my dad's previous marriage who's a former Marine.
So we have, I think, five of us all together.
Okay.
Are they from one and the same marriage?
Those are, like, from the same parents?
From the same parents as me, my older sister, my little sister, my little brother.
I have an older, older sister who's...
Long story, she's like four years younger than my mom.
My dad, you know, had a little vacation down in the Caribbean.
I'm glad he did it.
I'm here.
My sister's here.
Everything worked out well.
But yeah, I have a little sister who's quite a bit older.
Okay, very interesting.
No need to pry there any more than that, although I didn't know to pry in the first place.
All right, now growing up, religious, politically speaking, what's the orientation of the family?
What's interesting now, Robert, people are going to say...
You seem like a nice guy, interesting history, and then the second politics is going to get involved in it, that's when it's going to become vitriolic or at the very least ideological, and understandably so, because people are going to say...
Well, people are going to say...
We'll see what they say.
But before we get there...
Religious upbringing?
Politically, what was your family like?
Absolutely.
Very religious upbringing.
I grew up Southern Baptist.
As I said, my father was born in 1932.
My great aunt was born in 1888.
So we've got a good old-time religion, and that's good enough for being Southern Baptist.
Every sacrament, every church.
When they talk about growing up in the church in the South, I remember I grew up in, not the city, but in rural Georgia and Harris County.
We actually lived in a double-wide trailer, which my sister hates talking about, as little kids.
So we very much depended on the church family, community, family, faith.
I actually had a very conservative upbringing.
My father gave to the 700 Club.
We watched Pat Buchanan and the Crystal Cathedral, the Moral Majority, all the times.
And we had a very balanced view.
I mean, my father was very conservative on almost all policy issues, but because of when he grew up, he voted Democrat because of the opposition that conservatives had towards the civil rights, towards voting rights, towards the equal housing amendments, etc.
But he very much supported people on both sides of the aisle, so we had a very moderate political upbringing.
It's very interesting.
I had on, two weeks ago, a man named Dexter Taylor who was actually just convicted in New York State for assembling firearms in his house with lawfully procured kits.
They called them ghost guns, and he was on trial when I interviewed him, got convicted and got swiftly whisked off to Rikers Island.
A 50-some-odd-year-old black man who, when I asked him, I said, well, why is it, I said, you know, from the same framing as the Jewish community, why does the black and Jewish community vote statistically over-representationally?
For Democrats and liberals, despite the fact that some might say they have not, whether or not historically there were issues, at the very least within the last recent memory, they have not served the interests in any useful or productive way of the Black community or the Jewish community.
And Dexter said, look, Viva, that's only the majority of those who vote, majority don't vote.
Black families tend to be at least traditionally religious conservative.
And so that's not a statistical anomaly, but you're only looking at it from The perspective of those who vote.
Is Dexter wrong, or is he right, and that there is a strong, let's say, conservative religious aspect of Black family, Black culture, but that doesn't get represented in terms of voting?
He's exactly correct, but I'll give you the perfect example of how it works with politicians in the African-American community, particularly in the South.
Guns, I've got one, two, three.
Four, five, like six guns around me right now.
They're not allowed to show those.
They have me in the same room that I film in, so I keep some of my guns here.
Some of them may or may not be P-80s or simply kits that have been called ghost guns derisively.
They may or may not exist.
If they do, they fell into a lake during a recent boating trip that happened this morning.
But at the same time...
As African-Americans often say, well, I'm fiscally conservative.
I really do like my money.
I don't like giving any more money to the government than I need to.
I believe in small government.
Black folks especially have not been able to trust the American government pretty much at any point in time in our history, and we want as little government interference in our lives as possible.
You can say, well, I'm pro-life and pro-family.
The idea of these conversations about abortion and gay marriage and transgenderism, etc., they are 20 years behind in the Black community compared to other communities in this country.
This social agenda very much is anachronistic to many people's religious upbringings in the South for African I'm very pro-military.
Many black families became part of the middle class because of military service.
Because your great grandfather served in World War II or your grandfather served in Vietnam, the GI Bill.
Benefits, being able to ascend into the middle class from just having a high school education.
Very strong military families in the black communities.
Pro-law enforcement.
Because you have such high crime in Black communities, most Black people don't believe in defunding police.
They believe in actually having effective policing that will make sure that crime goes down and they can have the same quality of life in their communities at the same time.
And then you'll say all that, and then Marjorie Taylor Greene will hop up and say, we need more white nationalists in this country, and all that gets wiped out.
Because of the history of Black folks in this country, and the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow, the history of lynching, that one singular issue outweighs everything else on the policy agenda.
So I can believe in all those things that the conservative base will believe in, and then somebody will hop on Twitter and say, well, the mayor of Baltimore is the DEI mayor because he did not earn it, and that's why the ship hit the bridge, and you wipe out...
Every single policy agenda that you just put out there.
So at some point in time, Republicans or conservatives are going to have to face that Rubicon moment that the Democrats had in 1960.
It's very nice to hold on to that ditzy crap base.
That ditzy crap base is very comforting.
It's loyal to you.
It takes care of you.
It's there with you.
But if you want to expand the electorate out, if you want to bring in new voices, you have to make the choice between the future and the ditzy crap past, as the Democrats did in the 1960s.
And as long as you're going to keep people like Tommy Tupperville and the conservative movement is going to be very difficult to recruit African-Americans and other groups to join in, even if they agree with you on policy.
Okay, this is very interesting.
It's the hardest thing for me just to wait and let you finish saying it.
I'm taking notes.
I think a lot of people listening to the first half, or not the first half in terms of length, but the first half in terms of where the sentence got cut off and then you went to something else that they're going to disagree with, they're going to say, good, this is wild.
And I hate using these ethnic, We are fiscally conservative.
We are religious.
We are fed up with this progressive bullshit.
But then, and I'm going to say this, what you said about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I'm going to tell you is just a straight up oversimplification, if not an outright misrepresentation.
But I did see some jackasses on the internet saying DEI, the mayor, showing up, you know, very underdressed.
And then they said they blame the voting disaster on that.
Some people are going to say that's an oversimplification.
What we're talking about is diversity being touted over competence.
And that's being reflected in government across America.
But how the hell do you get past that first half in substance?
Policy-wise, you disagree with pretty much everything.
That the Democrat Party and the progressives represent today, it hasn't worked in any meaningful sense.
It's been quite detrimental to the black community.
And yet, because of one, I would say, misrepresented characterization of some person in particular, and I've met Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's not a bad person, but one misrepresentation, you're going to keep voting in those idiots who have basically done nothing but enact policy that has destroyed or decimated the black community.
How do you make that make sense?
Very, very easily.
If you go to Germany right now, you're not going to get many Jews who vote for far-right nationalistic parties.
Something can be so heavy on a community that that outweighs every single other issue.
And when you have a group of Americans, such as African Americans, who were literally enslaved for hundreds of years.
Think about that.
Enslaved for hundreds of years.
Anything that even seems to touch on that is going to be a bright line.
That is the electric track that exists.
So for conservatives, they're going to have to understand that as long as you have people walking around with Confederate flags at rallies, black folks not showing up.
I don't care what I agree with you on.
Go ahead.
Well, I want to say it like this.
And I got too many things that I want to say to this.
But the first thing.
You might be getting, it's a bad analogy, and I don't want to entertain it for too long, but you might be getting Jewish people out in Europe who might be considering voting for the alternative for Deutschland, because they might see at some point that the policies which have been demonized inaccurately might actually be better for social cohesion.
But set aside the imperfect analogy.
You're looking at a summer of love in 2020 that killed more people.
Than any stupid rally with a bunch of masked nincompoops, you know, doing their clumsy marches with the Confederate flag.
In terms of risk for the Black community, I would say the Summer of Love was exponentially worse, more dangerous, and more deadly than any stupid ticker tape parade you see in Florida on an overpass.
And so you're not even comparing apples and oranges.
What you are comparing is your fear of what you've demonized inaccurately to the reality that is killing Black men and young Black people across the country.
You can't make that make sense except with ideological blindness.
Oh, no, you absolutely can.
It's not ideological blindness.
The question is for conservatives.
If you're really saying that I want to diversify the base, I want to bring out and expand the base of the conservative movement so that we can start winning general elections.
Remember, Republicans have won the popular vote.
Twice in the last 35 years.
You had George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2004.
Those are the only times this happened.
As Lindsey Graham said, you're not producing enough old white men fast enough to rebuild the Republican Party if they're not going to expand the base of the people they talk to.
And trying to convince black people that racism doesn't exist is just going to be a non-starter.
And I think it's a lot easier to simply tell the racist, you're not welcoming the conservative movement.
You're not welcoming the Republican Party.
We're not going to use dog whistles.
We're shutting the door behind you.
You show up in the Confederate flag.
You're not allowed inside.
And that allows you to reach out to the actual future of America.
And you'll be amazed how many Black and Latino and female and gay voters will be happy to join the cause.
But that's going to be the bright line issue.
And for some reason, that's the question I have for you.
Why do you think Republicans are holding on to that?
Why do you think they can't simply say, no, you're not welcome here.
Get out of here.
If you're talking about white nationalism, if you're talking about great replacement, if you're talking about you guys, you know, Western civilization, Jews not replace us, et cetera, you're not welcome in this movement.
We're going to be a policy-based party, a policy-based movement, taxes, family values, economic conservatism, as opposed to some of these social dogless issues.
Well, I can answer it because it's not happening.
I want to ask you, who do you think the racists are in the conservative party?
People say Jews will not replace us.
First of all, it's the internet.
People say stupid things.
I haven't seen Marjorie Taylor Greene say that.
I haven't seen any conservative representatives say that.
In fact, what I've seen is, you know, I forget, was it Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden that eulogized the grand night of the KKK at his funeral?
Oh, Robert Burry?
I think it was Biden.
I forget who it was.
But the idea that, you know, you're saying denying racism is a non-starter.
There are some people who say that, Continually picking the scab and saying racism is bad and everything that's ever happened to us because of race makes it even worse and it actually fractures the society even more.
And then you say, like, underrepresentation.
I see...
There's plenty of diversity within the Conservative Party, racial, ethnic, sex, etc.
And the only thing is, whenever a black guy comes in, they call him an Uncle Tom, like Tim Scott.
They say, oh, now you're just doing the bidding of your, they're never going to accept you type thing.
So the wild thing is, once you have these racial blinders, these identity politics blinders on, there's no good one that goes into the party.
So it's sort of like the no true Scotsman.
There's no diversity, except when there's diversity, it's a traitor, a race traitor who joined the party.
Well, I think that's kind of like a chicken and egg situation because, one, Uncle Tom was the hero of the book.
I think that this is the misconception that many people have.
We've never read the book by Harriet Beecher Stone.
No, but they use it as an insult.
It's a racial insult.
Well, the reason was that even though Uncle Tom was the hero in the actual book, when you have the minstrel shows that came thereafter, people like Amos and Andy, who were the blackface performers, they portrayed Uncle Tom as being this servile creature.
So people are referencing the minstrel aspect of it as opposed to this...
That's an aside.
I think the problem becomes that the people who are lifted up to a place of veneration and leadership in the conservative movement often aren't the people who are the most obsequious and servile voices.
What qualification do Diamond and Silk have to speak on Black issues?
What non-profit or civil rights organization do Candace Owens work at where she gets to speak on behalf of Black people?
I think you need to have people who have a connection to the community and then allow them to be spoke people for that community.
As if you had the Jewish community and the spokesperson for them was somebody who played a Jew on television as opposed to the financial community.
Robert, you use bad analogies and then you use outright not analogous.
Diamond and Silk are black.
They're not playing black people.
But this is the paradigm or the paradox, the no true Scotsman.
What right do they...
How can you deny their blackness and their black history and their black life experience to then say, well, they're not the real ones and they don't get to represent other blacks, but I do.
Oh no, I've never claimed to represent any one race or group or anyone else.
My question is, who's the constituency that they represent?
Who are the throngs of people who say, Diamond and Silk, you speak for us.
You are representing our views.
You represent where we are from and what our policy agenda are.
That's what I'm talking about when I say representation.
And when all the voices behind you, the people lifting you up, aren't the people from that actual community, well then that's when you become a pawn of another group.
And when you're not actually empowered to have...
I would say this on both sides of the aisle.
We simply want to have black faces in high places without actually the power to make any social changes.
We see this both in the conservative and the progressive movements that often black votes are left taken for granted or simply used as a tool to get other votes.
And this is why you see such low levels of black voter turnout in many elections, because they simply believe that regardless of who's elected, they will see no concrete changes in their communities.
Well, I mean, having seen what Fannie Willis has done and Tiffany Hanyard, people might say, Well, we're seeing concrete changes, and it's not for the better.
But I want to come back to one thing because I know that, well, it's a very important point.
You see, our experience in America, black Americans, they were enslaved for hundreds of years.
And I was going to stop you there and say, no, actually, they had been enslaved for thousands of years, or at least, you know, close to 2,000 years.
And it wasn't strictly, purely, or even originally an American phenomenon.
It was...
We don't need to get into the broader history, but it was not an American phenomenon.
What was the American and the British phenomenon was ending slavery.
Black Americans had been slaves in America for 200 years, but blacks and the African slave trade had gone on for, I want to say, 2,000 years.
It was Britain and America that fought to end slavery at great cost.
This is the question.
The Jewish community fights with the same question about the Holocaust.
At what point?
Do you say there's no way of righting that historical wrong without creating a present-day wrong?
You know, I find that very interesting because you're almost saying, well, the people who benefited from enslaving people, they should pay absolutely no cost.
There should be no downside for them.
The people who were on the downside of that, it's on their back to simply forgive the people who used to enslave them.
I don't see that as being a reasonable solution.
We can look at what's happened in other countries as allegory for them.
Think about South Africa and the system of apartheid, which existed.
What you had was a Truth and Reconciliation Council.
That was a situation where they actually admitted the things they had done wrong in the past.
They talked about the violence done against certain communities, and they set up a communal apparatus that would have actually cured some of those issues.
I think similarly in America, we have to remember the Reconstruction never actually was completed.
You have the posse comitatus of 1876 and the Hayes-Tilding Compromise in that same election that ended the Reconstruction process.
Prior to the progress being made that was necessary, we have to simply pick up the ball and make much of that legislation that was left by the wayside at the end of that period of time, and then just complete the job going forward.
All these things have already been passed by Congress, researched, and put into place.
We just never completed the process.
I think if we do that here in America, then at that point in time, we can come together and say, well, we've done as much as we can.
We've righted the mean, wrong as possible, and now let's agree that we put these things aside.
But I don't think you can simply say, well...
You know, we enslaved you for a long time.
You guys are okay with that, right?
And then just assume everyone's going to be fine with that.
Well, this is going to be a loaded question, but who freed the slaves?
Like, which nations freed the slaves?
The ones that own slaves.
If you have a bunch of kids locked in your basement, you don't get credit for opening the door eventually.
There's a lot of countries that own slaves that opposed it, and forget about the racial demographics of those countries.
There were a lot of countries that opposed it, and it was Britain and the U.S. at great cost that fought to end it, whereas other countries, thanks to...
The Democrats have reverted to slavery, Libya in particular, real-time slavery that nobody wants to talk about, instead wants to talk about reparations for things that happened hundreds of years ago, that it's not clear there can be any practical, real-time solution without creating further real-time injustice.
But who freed the slaves?
Who freed the slaves?
The people owned slaves.
We have the people who owned human beings and enslaved them for their own purposes, made money off their backs, killed their children, raped their families.
Eventually they freed them.
So yes, you get credit for eventually freeing the people you enslaved.
And they fought nations who wanted to preserve that slave trade, which largely predated their own participation in what is a historical wrong without a justification, without a qualification.
They participated in fighting other nations.
Who wanted to continue this slave trade that had existed for a couple thousand years, give or take?
Absolutely.
And the slave trade still exists, as you said, right now.
You can look at the Horn of East Africa.
You can look at Southeast Asia.
You can look at corporate slavery, where we have corporations that enslave children to build our iPhones and other devices.
So, no, it's not been cleaned from the world.
But I don't think the crimes of others absolves anybody from their own culpability in what has happened.
And you give a couple examples.
I'm not sure about the West Indies one.
I can think of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee up in Canada as to the mistreatment of indigenous people, which is, I think, also, again, not analogous to the slave trade, but I think we can say it's...
It's not equally horrific, it's horrific, and there's no qualification necessary.
There's no struggle at the Olympics.
Nobody wins when we're talking about atrocities against human beings.
Well, no, no, but there certainly is a competition to see who's more entitled to righting the historical wrongs, and we're seeing in real time now how that plays out.
But the truth, if it turns out, however, that the attempt to right these historical wrongs, some are much more historical than others, results in a real-time fracturing of society.
At what point do you have to say, look, do you get to go back to the Roman era to claim for wrongs?
Do you get to go back to the Dark Ages?
Like, how far back do you get to go?
Do the Irish indentured servants get to go back and say, well, now I've got to find the person who enslaved my forefathers and get them to write that wrong?
At what point does society, in order to move forward, have to say, That cannot be undone and that cannot be remedied without creating a current injustice.
Well, I'll give you a couple of examples from around the world on that.
Think about the nation of Israel.
They're saying we get this property as reparation for our enslavement in our diaspora because of what happened 2,000 years ago.
Our people have historically resided in this area, this land.
We would like to have this land back for our people as a form of recompense for what European powers and the Ottomans and others did to our communities.
And we support them in having exactly that because they need to have a homeland for their people to prevent another Holocaust from taking place.
The byproduct of that is you have displaced Palestinians and you have to work toward a two-state solution.
That's not simply to say, well, because the Palestinians will be displaced, we push Israel into the sea.
I don't think that that's...
That's a solution many people would agree with.
Similarly, we cannot simply say because African Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, we're just going to give them nothing primarily because we don't feel like doing it.
It's not hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
As I said, the woman who taught me to read and write was alive 20 years after the institution ended.
She grew up with these people.
She knew these people.
We have pictures with the formerly enslaved.
This isn't something that happened back during the Peloponnesian War.
This isn't something involving Alcibiade.
This is something that happened with my great-aunt and her parents and their family that existed then.
And if you look at the proposals that have been made, we try to make these things entirely too obtuse in these conversations.
You have H.R. 4, which is the Study Commission on Reparations.
John Conyers pushed it for 40 years.
Sheila Jetson has picked it up.
All that people are asking for is to put together a study commission to answer exactly those questions that you were asking.
So if you have a question about those things, then we should pass H.R. 4 so we can actually have a study commission put together recommendations on what can and should be done to help bridge these gaps.
There's nothing wrong with studying something.
For some reason, even the idea of looking into it seemed to be objectionable to individuals.
Well, no, the idea of not looking into it, but the idea of making it a massive political question when it's not clear that there can be any...
Real-time solution without pissing off other people, Irish indentured servants, people who have been the victims of government experimentation.
And I'm not talking COVID, I'm talking beforehand.
The issue is, it does become, you say it's not oppression Olympics or it's not a competition, but it inevitably becomes that and we're seeing it in real time.
Well, if they get that, why don't I get something?
And you see the idea of, you know, they floated the idea of...
A tax exemption for Black Americans who can trace their history to slavery.
That's a no-cost solution, except you're going to get a bunch of very, very, who are equally impoverished white folk for no fault of their own, or who might have historical reasons for their impoverishment, who can say, well, what about me?
And does that do good or bad for a society?
That's the question, but I'm not sure we're going to get to it here.
The other thing is the analogy of, you know, Israel wanting its land back.
Again, it's a very thorny discussion, but it's not going to be the best analogy either because there's obvious implications that are not what black Americans want out of that, which is we want compensation but not a right of return.
So they're not analogous and they actually pose their own problems.
Okay, so hold on.
I don't know how far we can get on this, but when did you get into law?
Listen, because you are a lawyer.
You're practicing.
You're running for the Fulton judge.
You want to unseat Judge McAfee.
And we got to get into like, let's talk about the evils of history.
And now we're going to get into current corruption of government.
When did you become a lawyer?
What's your practice like?
You know, it's interesting.
I started becoming interested in law, as I said, because of my great aunt who taught at Tuskegee University.
She was very involved in policy, law.
She had me read a book by Charles Hamilton Houston.
I read a book she owned back when I was in high school talking about the creation of the lawyers that really challenged the political underpinnings that created the civil rights movement.
So Brown versus the Board of Education, cases on integration, Redlining, etc.
So it gave me a taste for being involved in law.
So I went to undergrad at Clark Lane University.
I majored in political science.
I was active in student groups, active in school protests, as we're seeing now around the country, which led me to...
Focus on labor and employment law and why I went to law school in Chicago.
And then when I came out, that's what I wanted to practice.
Unfortunately, I graduated in 2009 in the middle of the Great Recession.
There were no jobs nowhere for anybody, everybody who's of that particular age.
So I just hung a shingle, became a criminal defense lawyer, and really got a broad-based practice out of that.
Because I think before a judge in particular transitioning to the conversation on the election, we have entirely too many judges in this country that were lifelong prosecutors.
They came up interning in the DA's office.
Their first job was in the DA's office or the Attorney General's office or the Solicitor's office.
And then they moved to the bench thereafter.
And they subview all cases from the perspective of a prosecutor as opposed to the perspective of a defendant.
I've been a criminal defense lawyer, civil rights lawyer, civil litigation lawyer.
I've been a family law lawyer.
I've been a contracts lawyer.
I've done wills, trusts, and estates.
I think you need to have that broad-based legal background.
I understand the ineffectiveness and the broken parts of our criminal justice system.
And this is the part I think people, for some reason, think that I'm going to disagree with them on preemptively.
But remember, coming from a background of a criminal defense attorney, I see many of the things happening to the former president, for example.
I think that those are abuses against the defendant because I'm used to representing defendants versus when you have somebody who's been a prosecutor and they see everything from the state's point of view, from the perspective of somebody who...
I got it.
As you explain your credentials and your upbringing, I have to ask the obvious question.
On the one hand, you know, the complaint is institutionalized racism in America.
And on the other hand, is a black man like yourself who has risen in the ranks, gone to university, gotten a law degree, practiced.
How does one reconcile those two seemingly incompatible affirmations?
We had lawyers before the end of enslavement in America who were African American.
You had store owners.
You had bookkeepers.
You had people who were indeed slave owners themselves who were African Americans.
I have relatives from back in the 1830s who were African Americans who owned slaves themselves.
The brokenness of a system does not stop every single individual from being able to achieve.
It's about leveling the playing field where you won't have to go through such Herculean journeys in order to do so.
So the people's actual natural ability will be what determines success, not their genetic background, family name, access to wealth, etc.
I'll give you an example.
While I was in law school, me and a couple of the other African-American students had a study group, and we studied our tails off for finals.
The day of finals, three or four of my white classmates took a cab to class that morning with our professor, and all the kids who were in the cab with the professor also got the Highest scores in the class.
So when we're talking about the amount of hard work that we were putting in, it's not that we didn't work as hard as our white classmates.
It's just different when someone else is actually giving you the answer to the test because of your access to them, because you live in the same neighborhood, you come from the same families, etc.
So it's always been about leveling the playing field.
It's not about taking opportunity away from anyone else, but simply ensuring that the merit that one person has actually mirrors their ability to excel in life and that people's hard work pays off in their success and outcomes.
You brought it up.
I wasn't going to because it comes off as a very aggressive counterpoint.
There were black slave owners.
Yes.
I've seen it in the chat from the beginning.
How do you go ahead now and reconcile reparations?
Do we have to go back and find the black American families that were black slave owners and demand reparations from black American descendants today?
This is like the logistics that make it a non-starter, but how do you reconcile that?
I mean, black slave owners, why were there black slave owners?
You reconcile this pretty simply.
H.R. 4 is a study commission.
So you pose that as a question to be answered by the study commission, and then we take the recommendations that come out of that.
All the questions that people have would be answered by the actual study commission.
Having a question does not mean we shouldn't look into the question.
That means we should find an answer to it.
It's just saying, well, I don't know what's in the mystery box.
Let's never open it because I have to know what's inside of it.
No, the idea is like, well, let's ask a question and get the government that believes, get the government and activists who are claiming, presupposing, baking into the question that there's institutionalized racism, despite a great much experience that shows to the contrary, and get them to propose a problem to a solution, sorry, propose a solution to a problem that might not exist.
That's what government does.
So I just, the idea, okay, and it was an interesting point that had to bring it up.
But now, you're saying, the...
The idea is, and growing up, my father used to say this as well with a certain last name, and I went to a French university where no one was going to mistake David Freiheit for a French-Canadian student, and I wrote my exams in French, and you might have to work a little harder in order to succeed.
Is that what people typically...
Is that what is meant by institutionalized fill-in-the-blank of whatever discrimination, or the mere fact that you're evidencing and evidence of the fact that whatever institutionalized racism...
Some people lament and say is an impediment.
The access is there, and it might actually be some of the policy that's based on this presupposition of institutionalized racism that actually does more harm than good.
I'll give an example of that.
Redlining.
Redlining is the practice by which certain communities simply would not sell houses to black people.
So if you're creditworthy, if you have the down payment, if you have everything that's necessary to move into a neighborhood that will put your kids in the school district, that will get them to the college, that will get them to the job that they need.
But it's literally illegal for you to live there and illegal for them to sell to you.
Well, that's an example of institutionalized racism.
There's nothing an individual can do to fight back and break through something where, by code of law, they cannot sell you property.
Same thing with racially restricted covenants that kept African Americans out of many predominantly white communities.
This is why there's a black part of town in most cities that maintains until this day.
You can look at criminal justice programs.
African Americans and white people use drugs and almost It's the exact same rate.
But if you look at the incarceration rates around that, you see completely different numbers taking place.
So when we talk about institutionalized racism or systemic racism, people take that for some reason to mean that we're saying every single person in a system is racist or that every aspect of the system is racially motivated.
No, it's simply a question of radiation.
Are we making it harder for certain people based on their race?
And is that the role of government?
I think that if you're going to be conservative in this country, you can't say that the role of government should be to grease the slides for certain people and make it more difficult for others.
And this idea of, well, I'm just going to work a little bit harder.
That comes to the question of how much of a second class citizen you're really.
I'm not willing to take any.
Second class treatment in this country.
I pay my taxes.
My family fought in wars.
We've been in this country for just as long as anyone else.
I don't plan on being anybody's second class citizen to even one percentage of one degree.
This idea that you need to be working twice as hard to get half as far?
No, that's an antiquated system which is meant to keep a servant class in place.
I'm going to fight to have the exact same rights and the exact same benefits as anyone else in this country.
If me and Tucker do the exact same Get the same grades.
Work just as hard.
We should have the same outcomes.
It shouldn't be I have to work twice as hard as Tucker just because that's the good old American work ethic.
And I'm fine with being a little bit second class to him and watching him go further than me based on the same amount of work.
If we're going to have a meritocracy, we need to have a meritocracy.
Well, but the meritocracy means the equal access, not an equal outcome.
But I want to come back to something you said in there.
I'll pick on one of them.
You talked about antiquated laws, which have been remedied.
And someone in the chat said, you know, affirmative action was a form of reparations, which I think there's a decent argument there.
And I'm not sure that it's worked out well, because I think Clarence Thomas's perception of affirmative action has proven to be more prescient in terms of reality than the idealized version of what affirmative action would produce by way of results.
But you talked about over-incarceration of Black Americans.
I mean, and I'm going to ask the question I know the answer to, and I know you know the answer to it.
Who put that law, at least those laws into effect?
Who talked about a nation of super predators?
The same party that those black Americans who vote are voting for at a statistically overrepresented amount?
Democrats.
And you talk about institutionalized racism, about segregation laws, when we are reverting back to that now, when you have your blackout nights and you have your, you know, no whites allowed to certain events because black Americans, in order to fight racism, want safe spaces.
To simplify it to one question, who put those laws into effect, and are you not a part of that very same party now?
You know, it's interesting, because this is something I've found often, that African Americans have, as the insular ethnic group, the issues of our community are associated directly with the state in which we are in, the nation-state being America.
Our fights and battles are with the legal framework around that.
But for some reason, it's always put into a partisan perception.
In the 1930s, African Americans were marching and protesting against the Democratic Party.
You know, you had many Black civil rights leaders who were members of the Republican Party.
That lasted all the way up until the 1950s and 1960s.
When Democrats changed their policies and Republicans changed their policies, Black voters changed and stepped with that.
The same thing happened going forward.
Talking about the legal framework as it exists, you have to think about black voters as being free agents.
Well, we will go to the side that is representing us right now in the current sphere when they are doing so.
This is why we see President Trump getting traction with black voters, because of the First Step Act, because of Opportunity Zones, because of having the African American Council with Daryl Scott and Bruce LaBelle and Ashley Bell in his administration.
So we're willing to listen to the conversation.
If we break it down directly into Republican versus Democrat, that's not the way that African Americans think about it.
We think about it being policy first.
Whoever is putting forward the policies that we need at the current time is who we will support.
And who supported it in the past?
The past is prolonged.
It's about who's going to be working for our communities right now.
And Republicans put forward policies that the African American community believes it was in their benefits.
They will support them right now as opposed to any other group.
I mean, look, I don't know what black America was thinking or how they felt about the Bill Clinton's tough on crime.
The one that Joe Biden drafted.
I don't know how they felt at the time.
Hold on, let me put a pin right there.
You have to remember that it was actually promoted and supported by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
It was called for by members of the black community because in the late 1980s, we were in the grips of the crack cocaine epidemic.
We were in the grips of gang warfare.
If you remember the riots in Los Angeles, we were in the grips of an HIV AIDS epidemic that was eating its way through communities.
And because of this, we saw the It was a deterioration of life in many Black communities, which is why they called on their congressional leadership to do something about crime.
So it was very much an African-American supported and sponsored bill at the time.
Now, the results of that we saw turned into the three strikes in your round, the over-incarceration, the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine differences.
The results of that were not what people wanted to take place and resulted in a generation of over-incarceration.
But at the time, it was supported by those communities.
Well, I'm trying to fact check this in real time because I do recall there being vocal opposition to it at the time.
There was opposition to it, but there were many black leaders in the Congressional Black Caucus that were pushing for it at the same time.
Well, but I mean, I've got to ask the questions.
Were they the race hustlers that we know today who make their money off of creating problems that don't actually solve any problems?
You know, it's interesting because you can find the genesis of those lines of attacks all the way back in Life Magazine in 1956.
Dr. King, saying that these outside agitators and race hustlers who are moving into Albany, Georgia, to create problems where they didn't exist in other places.
In reality, those are just simply attacks that are levied against individuals who are speaking out against the corporate interests and against the manifest interests of the power structure that exists within the United States of America.
In reality, people such as King, who were reviled in their own time when Dr. King was assassinated, his national approval rating was something like 36 percent at the time.
But history proves them to be wrong.
So the same people that we say are race hustlers creating problems out of nowhere right now, more than likely will be venerated by history as being the individuals pushing forward the mark of the moral universe towards justice.
Well, I'm not sure about the ones that I know today who I would qualify as bona fide race hustlers.
I don't think history will be kind to them, but I'm not bold enough to predict the future.
I'm just, you know, bold enough to assess the present.
But the bottom line...
The crack epidemic, you go to the tough on crime bill, so you have the government creating a solution to a problem it caused.
That solution causes an even bigger problem for a generation of black men.
It was Democrats.
It was policy that they now say was wrong and they can do a full 180 and pretend like they never did it, they weren't responsible for it.
And they'll find the solution now when every single time, I'll pick on the Democrats because it is a bit of a Democrat policy, although...
There's a uni-party aspect of this as well.
They're causing problems to purportedly solve a problem to a problem that they caused through prior policy.
This is the vicious cycle of voting for the people who are ruining your lives.
And a lot of people are still doing it, even today, because of the boogeyman of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Confederate flag that doesn't seem to fly anywhere except in their imagination or some overpass in Florida that nobody cares about.
Oh, it's not a boogeyman.
We had Charlie Kirk just last week saying that we need to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
We've had Supreme Court decisions starting with Shelby v.
Holder in 2014 that gutted the voting rights Act of 1965.
We've seen state ballot access laws being created nationwide that have made it more difficult.
It's difficult for African Americans and other groups to vote.
Hold on.
As the philosopher Mos Def once said, you start keeping pace, they start switching up the tempo.
We're seeing a legal apparatus being put in place nationwide that is meant to maintain the electoral balance, which exists currently, because we see the demographic numbers are shifting, and as a result, bills are being put in place to make it more difficult for Black folks to vote.
That's just the reality of things out there, so we can't say it's a boogeyman when these things are being voted on.
I would challenge the idea that there's any bill that's making it more difficult for black Americans to vote whatsoever.
What's the best example you have of a bill that seems to...
If not specifically, tangentially target Black Americans in particular.
The Senate Bill 202 that was passed two years ago in Georgia.
And I'll give you an example on that, just demographically what I'm talking about.
Early part of the 2000s, we saw Democratic governors in the state of Georgia, people like Zell Miller, Roy Barnes, Mark Taylor is the lieutenant governor.
Then we saw the first voter suppression law passed in 1997.
Prior to that, you were able to read a phone bill, a light bill, etc., to be able to vote as identification if you've been at a voting precinct for over a certain period of time.
We started chipping away at that starting in the late 90s and into the early 2000s.
2006, they put in place a voter ID law, which required you to purchase a voter ID in order to be able to vote in the state of Georgia.
That was struck down by the appeals court as being a poll test because you're literally forcing people to pay in order to be...
The legislature came back and reformed that law.
But because of the quote-unquote reforms put in place, we went from having Democratic governors such as Roy Barnes and Zell Miller and Democratic senators like Nunn and others to a place where you did not have a single African American or Democrat elected statewide in the state of Georgia.
From Thurbert Baker and Michael Thurman in 2008, all the way until Raphael Warnock in 2021.
That is what happens when we're talking about voter suppression bills.
At the same time, you had African Americans making up 35% of the population in the state of Georgia, women making up 52% of the population, Latinos making up 21.4% of the population, Asian Americans making up 6% of the population, and Atlanta being one of the largest LGBTQ communities in the country, and our population increasing in those minority demographic numbers.
You saw the number of African American and Democratic officials Plummeting as a result of these laws being passed.
And even today, other than Raphael Warnock, there's not an African-American statewide elected official in the entire state of Georgia.
It has not been so in over a decade.
This is what I'm talking about when I say that we've been passing these bills that make it more difficult for individuals to be able to vote in these elections.
Well, you might have confounded an outcome which is based on participation.
The equality versus equity, which is, you're saying, because it hasn't been reflected, it must therefore be racist.
Or at least targeting Black Americans.
I just quickly Googled up Bill 202.
Georgia's line relief ban.
Birthdate requirements on absentee ballots.
I mean, are these...
Other than the presupposition that it's targeting Black Americans or groups, I can understand the idea of having to pay for a voting ID because that is a disguised tax.
Is the idea of voter ID, in your view, a policy that is racially motivated or tangentially targets African-Americans?
I think there's no question it's tangentially targeting.
And I talk about this, Reverend Jackson has talked about this for the past 40 years, that when we talk about voter suppression, people think it means Bull Connor standing outside of the voting booth with a dog in one hand and a fire hose in the other hand.
That's not what it is in the modern context.
Think about how close many of the state elections were in the last presidential election.
Georgia, 12,000 votes.
Arizona, 10,000 votes.
Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.
If you think about the idea that you only really need to skim off one out of every 100 votes.
Well, then, having a voter ID requirement for people who are unemployed, people who are homeless, people who are elderly and do not drive, well, now you've put a barrier in place.
they may get that one out of every 100 people not to be able to vote.
When you start saying we're not going to have ballot drop boxes to make it easier for people to be able to drop their ballots off.
If you work early in the morning, you work late at night.
Well, then you're skimming off that one out of every 100 votes.
And by being able to do that is how you change the outcome of elections.
If you look at a sweep of the entire U.S. South, look at the demographic numbers of African-Americans in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi.
And then look at the number of statewide elected officials that reflect that.
And you'll see that the numbers ain't math or the math ain't math.
And as Gen Z says, and we know that this has been the result of many of these legislative attacks on the right to vote, particularly since Shelby V. Holder was overturned by a conservative Supreme Court.
Is it racist to ask black Americans to show ID if they want to buy alcohol?
I mean, following the exact same rationale.
Buying alcohol is not a constitutional right.
Buying alcohol is not something that is guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
We don't go to wars overseas to be able to buy alcohol.
We go to wars overseas to defend the United States Constitution and the equal rights of every individual.
And if we're going to start saying that, well, we're going to regulate the vote the same way we regulate alcohol, then we're no longer living in a constitutional republic.
I'm trying to think of an analogy that doesn't have that disanalogous constitutional protection versus even driving a car is not a constitutional right, but mobility is.
I'm trying to think of another example where the idea of having basic requirements for security.
Well, think about it this way.
We're talking about constitutional rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Georgia is a constitutional carry state.
I have an ID to carry all of my firearms and be able to carry them concealed.
However, we just passed law saying you should not need that because your right to self-defense is not even a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
It's a right guaranteed by God himself.
And unless we're going to usurp the power of the almighty, we should not require people to have a piece of paper from the state saying whether or not they can defend themselves.
And the same way we should not put barriers in place to stop people from exercising their Second Amendment rights, to stop them from exercising their First Amendment rights, to stop them from exercising their freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc.
We should not have barriers in place to stop them from affecting their right to vote.
Well, I think you've highlighted the very problem there, is that the same group that is claiming racism, or at least it's a violation, an impediment to a constitutional right to require ID in order to vote, are also the ones saying ID, registration, and limitation of Second Amendment rights.
This leads to the accusation that Democrats actually don't care whatsoever about the Constitution, except in as much as they can weaponize it for their own gain.
So how do you reconcile that any impediment on voting, even if it's 1% because they have to go get an ID, even if the government issues it for free because they might be homeless, versus the restrictions that that very same party wants to put on the Second Amendment, which is in the Constitution?
Are you saying that both political parties might be hypocrites?
Because I think I might agree with you if you're saying both political parties are hypocrites and only believe in principles and much as they support their particular viewpoint and change them around whenever it's convenient to them?
I agree with you completely.
Well, no, I can actually steal, man, why it's not analogous at all, because I would say basic restrictions on voting is not an impediment to a constitutional right.
It's a protection of others.
And then as much as you recognize that skim off one or two of a hundred, and that can throw an election, will open up the floodgates where your margin of fraudulent or coerced or mail-in ballot signature not matching is going to be two to five, maybe to 10%.
Well, then you've thrown off every election.
So the idea is if the argument is, well, One in a hundred who doesn't get to vote can throw an election, so let's open the floodgates to practices where there will be wild abuse, such as not showing any form of ID.
I think the abuse that results from not showing an ID is going to disenfranchise everyone else's right to vote far more than requiring some form of state ID or government ID in order to vote in the first place, if it's only freely given by the state.
Well, this is the issue.
I'm a constitutionalist, as I said.
I grew up reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
I read all the Federalist Papers before I was out of high school.
I didn't have a lot of friends.
I was in marching band and academic decathlon.
So that's just where we started at.
It makes for a cool adult.
It's not cool when you're a kid.
Yeah, yeah.
I went to the prom.
I didn't have a date.
So I actually just happened to see a girl I went to church with.
So we took pictures and pretended we were each other's dates for a couple of minutes.
And then I sat in the corner.
So that's the life of a political nerd.
But to that point, I believe that we should have the same system in place that the founders had in place.
I don't think George Washington had to show ID to be able to vote.
I don't think George Washington had to show ID in order to be able to exercise his freedom of speech.
I don't think you needed ID to own a musket and defend your property.
And similarly, I think that we were able to conduct elections and have confidence in our system from 17...
In 1989, all the way up until 2020, then we probably don't need to be changing that system around because all of a sudden there's a political motivation behind it.
There's been no statistical evidence showing widespread voter fraud in the nature that will change elections.
We've had 20 years of these attempts to restrict voter laws and to push back against the edicts put forward by the voting rights set to 1965.
In reality, we need to be returning to the constitutional system and saying, well, if it was good enough for George Washington, If it was good enough for John Adams, if it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, that's the system we're using to vote and select our presidents now.
I'm going to have to explore the argument of how the voting was done at the time.
I think there might have been other requirements at the time which no one would tolerate today, which might have assured identity.
And that being said...
I don't think anybody would also deny that elections were stolen even back in the day where vote early, vote often was a joke because it was reality.
So the idea of pretending that elections because these voting requirements were not in place were therefore...
Non-fraudulent, I think historically is going to prove to be totally inaccurate, which would further warrant why in order to not disenfranchise millions of voters, some basic requirement might be necessary.
There was one more part to that.
Well, I don't really want to get into whether or not there is no widespread voter fraud evidence.
There has always been, and there's been, I think there's a case that predates 2020 coming out of...
If it's not Georgia, I think it's Georgia, 2018.
There's a challenge coming up there showing some very serious problems, potential problems.
But you raise an interesting argument.
What percentage of people...
But you raise an interesting argument in terms of the requirement or not, the impediment that it creates to get ID.
You haven't dispelled the idea that then requiring ID for...
Black Americans in other contexts would therefore be racist, just not constitutional violations.
So, I mean, is it racist?
Forget whether or not it's unconstitutional.
Is it racist to require Black Americans to show ID to do anything, even if it's not a constitutionally protected act?
Well, I don't think that's a little bit too far abroad.
As I said, I'm a constitutionalist.
The things that I think about and consider are what constitutional rights are protected, ensuring that we are giving every single individual those Eighth Amendment rights, those Bill of Rights protections that are needed.
I think that we can show racial disparities often in homeownership because we require certain things on credit scores that count and other things that don't.
I think we see racial disparities existing in small business applications when it comes to the ability to apply for the loans needed to it.
Well, if you look at venture capital funding, black businesses get something like 0.1% of what other businesses get when it comes to venture capital and being able to expand out ideas into the innovations of the future.
I think there are plenty of places that we can find where there's a racial disparity because of documentation that disadvantages African American communities.
The liquor store concept, you know, I'm a teetotaling Southern Baptist, so that's not my wheelhouse, but when it comes to the Constitution, I think that's where we have to be defending the rights of every individual, because if that document does not have value, that's the only thing that separates us from the wilderness of autocracy and fascism that exists internationally.
The reason America is the shining light on the hill is because we abide by those constitutional principles and say that these laws apply equally to every man.
As long as we believe that, we're still America.
Once we do not, we...
We are no longer the country that our founders intended us to be.
Well, I can't wait for someone to clip that, snip that, and then place it side by side, whatever your future position on Second Amendment restrictions might be.
But I'm not presupposing anything.
And I don't want this all to be...
I hate the fact that these discussions, that the racial aspect of discussions is like more, not required, but now more imposed through outside forces.
When I grew up, I mean, I grew up in Canada.
We never had the same dynamic that exists in America in terms of racial dynamics or racial...
Uh, issues.
Uh, but they certainly have been, you know, made worse since, uh, I think in the last 10 years or so under current administration that focuses on all of these immutable characteristics and not the innate value of individual humans.
And I know we're going to have some more disagreement on other stuff.
Uh, so you practice for, what the heck is the rainbow coalition?
Speaking of, um...
No, I was going to make a joke, but I won't make it.
Speaking of grifters, I'm joking, I'm sorry.
What is the Rainbow Coalition?
Certainly.
After Dr. Ron Luther King came to Chicago, he started Operation Breadbasket, which was the mission to help feed and house underserved individuals on the south side of Chicago.
He gave Reverend Jesse Jackson, who at the time was a 20-something-year-old minister from South Carolina, the mission of taking over that after Dr. King was assassinated.
Operation Bread Basket evolved into two different organizations.
The Rainbow Coalition being a group that meant to bring together disparate aspects of American society into one cohesive tapestry.
So black, white, yellow, red, any color under the rainbow being able to come together and try to solve some of these social issues that existed.
And then also Operation Push, People United to Serve Humanity, which was meant to be the non-profit wing that intended to raise money in order to work on We've
We've seen strong efforts by these groups, such as in 2004 or 2005, when I became active in the organization, we were fighting for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
There was a signing ceremony with President Bush at the White House that Reverend Jackson attended because the Rainbow Post Coalition was instrumental in getting that law pushed through.
We've also seen work in advocacy when it comes to corporate diversity efforts, when it comes to economic empowerment efforts, when it comes to anti-crime and anti-violence efforts.
Reverend Jackson famously slept over in the Chicago projects in order to try to bring gang looties together, marches against gun and drug violence in communities around the country, and putting together the type of economic and social framework that was meant to help bring about the quality of disenfranchised communities.
And working for that organization was a great experience and really did help to shape a lot of the understanding that I have of many of the social issues that exist and also the policy dynamic in it.
One of the things that I've been doing is that I've been doing a lot of the things that I've been doing, It's not enough to just march and protest in the street.
You need to actually have a legislative apparatus and proposed laws in place.
You can actually change those conditions.
It's not enough to complain about the conditions.
You need to have a plan in place to actually change those.
I'm not going to harp on only the bad things, but when we talk about...
I think Jesse Jackson goes down as one of the people that many would arguably think is a race hustler, for right or wrong, and I certainly don't expect you to agree with that.
The Rainbow Coalition has had something of a...
Not an insignificant scandal with respect to the lacrosse lady.
What's her name?
I'm going to have to Google this if it doesn't come up.
Crystal Magnum.
Are you familiar with the scandal of the Push Coalition agreeing to pay her?
This is the woman who made false allegations against the Duke Lacrosse team.
Oh, yeah.
What was it?
2006.
I had to Google this to make sure.
How does one reconcile that type of...
If your goal in life is to...
Not yours, but rather say the Push Coalition at large, is to create racial harmony at the very least or reconcile racial issues.
Having a black woman who makes false rape accusations against a bunch of men nearly ruins their lives, if not ruins their lives.
And then the Push Coalition says we're still going to pay for her tuition, notwithstanding the false rape accusations.
How do you convince anybody that the Push Coalition is not activism for the sake of activism to the detriment of the very people they purport to represent?
You can pick any group or organization and find something that you disagree with and use that as to grab them on to criticize them.
But at the same time, you have to look at these thousands of students.
The Rainbow Push Coalition, through Push It Sell, has paid for scholarships for them to go to college and for them to go to law school.
Housing book allowances have been put forth for students.
They do a yearly HBCU tour for students, particularly in northern schools, to be able to visit schools in the south and apply for the financial aid.
We always talk about in Chicago that are wrapped with gun violence and they're being bereft by drugs, etc.
And they take those students and put them into internship and planning and mentoring programs.
They get them out of those communities and into educational institutions and training programs.
You have to look at the number of elected officials around the country that have been able to take some of their Sample legislation and push it forward into enrolling into legislation that provides for early childhood education, that provides for housing assistance for single mothers.
So you can take all the good the organization has done, and then you can pick out something bad that you disagree with.
But I think, writ large, the 40-year history of the organization pushing forward for social change, both domestically and internationally, and the successes they've had outweigh any negatives that have taken place.
Well, I would say there's a difference between something wrong and something that is so morally reprehensible, if not borderline criminal, that it could be discrediting.
But even if you don't take that, I'll take you at your explanation.
You say, well, take the good and then drop out the bad.
But at the same time, you say, look, the Conservatives have made all of the policies that we like.
Anti-transgenderism, or not anti, I should say, not pushing it on kids.
The Second Amendment, conservative, fiscal conservatives, and yet we're going to throw all that out because we picked the one little thing that we don't like, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Charlie Kirk, whatever he represents in the conservative GOP.
So there's a confirmation bias in terms of accepting the evils that you want to accept while focusing on the ones that you want to focus on in order to disregard the good policy and in order to ignore...
The devastating policy of the very party that you are a party of now for your very community historically.
That was more of a rant than a question.
I did drama also in high school, so I appreciated good soliloquy when necessary.
But at the same time, I think the difference is in the question of whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Charlie Kirk or Tommy Tupperville, etc.
Those are things that can be changed.
You can simply say that, hey, Charlie, Marjorie, Tommy, you're not allowed on this stage.
You're not allowed in this group.
You're not allowed to be part of this conversation if you're going to bring these views that we believe are alienating part of our base.
I think the same thing for non-profit and activist groups, that as the membership of those groups and members of those communities, if there's something that you disagree with that they're doing, then you have every right to not donate to them, not participate in their events and rallies.
Not be supportive of them.
The marketplace of democracy has to be the answer to these things.
And for the things you disagree with, the organization has done, I don't agree with everything they've done throughout their history either.
And I've worked with them for 20 years.
I don't think you're going to get anybody batting 1,000 on some of these issues.
But at the same time, you have to take the good and the bad, and you have to put those together and determine how that determines your view of any group, organization, or individual.
I think writ large, these social rights groups have done far more.
Okay, well, some people will not be satisfied with that answer, but at least that's the answer, or that's your answer.
Now, the question is this, and this might be, I think, the hardest question thus far that I'm going to ask.
You consider yourself to be an activist, I presume.
I mean, it's on your Twitter profile.
Absolutely.
Does an activist become a judge?
I mean, that seems to be antithetical to being a judge.
As a judge, you're supposed to apply the law and not have your activist leanings motivate your decisions, which it necessarily would.
Set aside the fact that some of your activist ideologies are racially based, you're applying for a judge admitting that you're an activist who then...
Not so unpredictably might use your seat as a judge to be an activist and not an adjudicator of the law.
You know who the first activist judge was?
You want to take a guess?
I'm Canadian, so I'm not sure they'll be able to go that far back.
But I can think of current activist judges who I don't think should be sitting on the bench.
Well, we'll start from the beginning.
Supreme Court Justice John Jay, one of the founding fathers, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers.
If you remember in the play Hamilton, they talk about the fact that Hamilton wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, which also had John Jay and Monroe.
These were people who were active in the American Revolution, people who were active in pushing this agenda of American independence, who were active in saying that we need to change the U.S. Constitution from the Articles of Confederation into something that will maintain and supplant the nation.
And that person who was an activist, who wrote down these activist papers in the Federalist, became the father of the Supreme Court, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote about the legitimacy of the court and the conceptualization around the fact that the court does not have troops.
The court does not have enforcement mechanisms.
The only thing that the court has is the legitimacy of the court, the belief in the people that they will be adjudicated by a fair and just system when they enter those, uh, those halls.
This is why lady justice holds a scale and has a blindfold on the, the, The oath and commitment that you take when you swear to be a judge is that you will uphold and defend the Constitution and apply the law fairly in all cases, regardless of...
of the individual involved.
When I say that I'm an activist, that means that I'm active in my community.
I'm active in pushing for social change.
I'm active in when I see things that are wrong, I'm a constitutionalist.
I believe in the infrastructure of this country.
I believe in the bones that we are built upon.
Holding us together as a nation is this concept of the rule of law.
And I tell voters, and I tell anyone who has a question about that, that I will support and defend the Constitution, and every single person who enters that courtroom will have a fair and equal opportunity to exercise their constitutional rights.
And as a defense lawyer, when we come from the defense side of the bar, that every single defendant can know that they are getting a fair shot at defending their innocent, and that the state will have to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's the commitment that we make.
And I think that this idea that someone cannot exist in the world, they have to be in a hyperbaric chamber and only released to become a judge, it's how you end up with bad law and bad lawyering and very strange people in our judiciary.
There's this idea called robitis, where you have judges who have simply been judges their entire life, so they don't have any actual world experience.
They think they're right about everything because they've never had to interact with human beings and actual people.
I think we need judges who are intimately involved in our communities and are That the people understand, that they meet with, that you see in the grocery store, that you see in church, and that those are people who are best able to apply the law equally to every individual.
I will say, I have a, my undergrad before law was in philosophy, and I consider myself decent at picking out flawed arguments or flawed reasoning, because you're saying A and not A at the same time, but very subtly, because what you're saying is...
I won't be an activist on the bench.
I'll uphold the Constitution.
I believe in the Constitution.
And yet the first judge, activist judge, and I don't know this for a fact because I don't have a master's in American history.
The first activist judge was John Jay.
John James or John Jay?
John Jay.
John Jay.
And he believed that the Constitution had to be adapted.
So, I mean, basically what you're saying is...
I'll uphold the Constitution so long as I agree with it, and if my activist side says it needs to be changed in order to fit the changing norms, then I'll actively interpret it in a way that reflects what I think is the change that needs to be.
I wouldn't say that activists need to be in a hyperbaric chamber.
I would, however, say that activism and judiciary are, if they're not mutually incompatible, they're at least, they're not entirely...
They cannot exist in harmony in one and the same, in the same way you cannot be expected to be a journalist and a commentator at the same time.
It's not that they shouldn't exist in the world, but they can't occupy the same positions because their objective is different.
And so, as an activist, you see wrongs and you want to right them.
That's what attorneys, or I would say that's what activist attorneys would do.
But as a judge...
That might be very problematic to a great many people who are going to say, you're going to be adjudicating on cases with your activist, not say blinders, but your activist perspective, and now we know as to what your activism is and what you believe are the underlying issues of society, and that's going to infuse every interpretation of every law or every conflict that you come across.
Well, what we've seen throughout the, if you watch Senate hearings, for example, when you're doing Senate confirmation hearings on most Supreme Court justices and appeals court justices, the standard that individuals are held to is that you take your life experiences and you bring those with you on the bench.
However, they do not color the way that you view and interpret the Constitution and the law.
The trier of fact in a case is normally going to be your jury.
The trier of law is going to be your judge.
The judge's responsibility, as Justice Roberts said during his confirmation, The problem that we have right now in our system, particularly here in Fulkin County, is that lack of objectivity, is that we have too many judges that are simply prosecutors in a robe.
Imagine you as a criminal defendant, not saying you did anything right now.
But let's say that you did do something right now.
And you go into court and you're sitting down at the defense table and the prosecution's questioning you.
And then as soon as the prosecution gets done, the judge from the bench starts questioning you as a prosecutor also.
That's not a fair and equal constitutional system.
That is not a system that the founders intended for us to have.
When I say that I see flaws in the system that need to be fixed, those flaws are that we have to start enforcing the constitutional rights of the individual.
Right now, over 90% of cases in this country...
End in plea deals, not in court cases, not in criminal trials, not where people are actually trying to defend their innocence in court and exercise their constitutional rights.
It's rather just simply a factory by which we can manufacture and we can push people to take these plea deals because they're basically with economics for themselves.
The state gets their money, the defendant gets the case taken care of, and the system kind of creeps along from there.
I think we can have a better system, and what that requires is defendants to be empowered to defend themselves.
Yeah, but then the problem is you get activist judges on a bench who then look at the Constitution and say, yeah, the woman's right to privacy fits under, what was it, due process?
Hold on, got to make sure I get this right.
Yeah, the due process clause covers a woman's right to privacy to have an abortion, which is...
However you feel about abortion, a wildly bastardized interpretation of the Constitution that could only have come from activist judges who were bent on bending the law and not interpreting the law.
And one can reasonably predict that we might be seeing more of that coming out of Georgia if activist judges get elected to the bench, much like we're seeing it sort of on the Supreme Court, on the New York State Court.
I would call Judge Engeron and Judge Merchant activist judges, politically motivated judges.
And that's when I think those two...
Hats that people are well within their rights to wear can't be worn at the same time, or even by the same person in their lifetime, barring some radical change in person.
Well, Angie, this is an issue that I have with the current discourse we're having about our criminal justice system, that people simply pick and choose which judges they believe in and which judges they don't.
So if you're watching MSNBC and Judge Cannon and the Florida case says or does anything, all of a sudden she's a terrible, corrupt judge who is biased and uneven, this, then, the other.
And then if you look at Look at the conservative stations.
They say this is a great decision by a wonderful jurist.
And then if you flip that around as one of the New York cases or something along those lines, the conservative stations say this person is corrupt and the liberal station says it's the opposite.
We have to have cases that are decided right down the middle.
This goes back to the conversation we're having about John Jay and the legitimacy of the court.
Because the reason that our system is better than all the rest in the world is that we have public tribunals.
These things aren't done in a star chamber where you're not presentable for the We have due process.
You have the right to both a notice and a hearing.
So you know when your case is going to be adjudicated and you have the opportunity to represent yourself.
You have the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights and the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.
So you cannot simply have rendition against individuals or put them in Guantanamo in order to have them pay for their sentences.
But when we start breaking down that belief in our system, start breaking down the saying that only people We need to
have a system that as long as a person can be True and honest to our Constitution.
Make that commitment to our flag and to our country.
Make that pledge of allegiance and say that I want to execute my duties fairly and unbiasedly.
That is what's required under our constitutional system.
And that is what promotes the type of tranquility that our founders envisioned us to have.
Not this idea that the only things that are valid are the things that I agree with.
That seems to be more of that kind of 1980s neoliberal, if I don't get my way, I take my ball and go home.
Everybody gets a participation trophy.
Only the things that count are if it goes my way.
We have to have a straight down the mill system.
And that means sometimes you're going to agree with it.
True.
But sometimes it's objectively problematic.
And saying that, well, you know, you can't criticize the Eileen Cannons without...
You cannot defend the Eileen Cannons and then criticize the Judge Murchands.
That blanket statement sort of presupposes that there are no objective truths.
And when one criticizes Judge Eileen Cannon, some might say it's only for law-based reasons, but when someone looks at, say, Judge Engeron, and who's posting on a...
On an alumni website that he controls, posting his links to his decisions and bragging about how he's being tough on Trump, when one looks at Judge Marchand and sees that his daughter's working for a PR firm for Adam Schiff and political action committees, well, there's a difference between criticizing a judge for their judgments in law versus criticizing a judge for their corruption in fact.
And so this idea of saying, well, you can't do one without the other, sort of denying objective morality and objective facts is problematic.
But you talk about courts being public and, you know, we have a good system.
How do you reconcile that?
With gagging defendants left, right, and center and finding somehow an activist judge justifying constitutional violations on a defendant to gag him.
I presume you have to be against the gag orders against Trump.
I think they have to be taken in turn, for example.
Hold on.
Everything in law is going to be on a case-by-case basis.
Because when I announced that I was running in this case, I think I'm probably going to send you some of these screenshots.
The first thing that happened was they took it and all of a sudden it was on Megyn Kelly's Twitter and Steve sat out.
I was needling you a little bit.
You deserve it.
A crazy left-wing liberal.
Activist, push coalition, Jesse Jackson disciple.
As part of Operation Bullpen, was working with the Obamas and the DOJ to replace Judge McAfee.
And the issue was, that's fine being needled on Twitter.
But then cars started showing up in front of my house in the middle of the night, honking the horns at 3 o 'clock in the morning.
We started getting letters in the mail.
We started getting death threats over the telephone.
We had someone follow my wife from the grocery store back home.
And remember, we're a Second Amendment household, so I'm not someone's worried about her, but I'm worried about the paperwork from which she shoots somebody for following her because they saw something on Twitter that said Operation Bullpen was in place.
And so when we're talking about these gag orders, it's one thing to be discussing the The parties in the case.
If you want to talk about the prosecutor, talk about the judge, the jury, the attorneys, oh, we signed up for this.
That's part of the, it's par for the courts for the job.
But when you start bringing in outside individuals, people's daughters and children and on down the line, I think that's someplace where you have to consider that these people can't afford paid security the way that public officials can.
These people didn't volunteer to be part of this life.
These people don't, the same way that When liberal activists started confronting Tucker Carlson and Tommy Lahrens in restaurants and screaming down their families and chasing people, etc., I didn't think that that was appropriate.
When Maxine Waters said, if you see these people, you need to punch them in the face.
I didn't agree with that either.
In fairness to Maxine, she said, get in their face and harass them.
Yeah, get in their face and harass them, etc.
I think we have to start tamping down these conversations about bringing people in and the physical violence that can take place.
Because at the end of the day...
When we start settling these things in the streets through, what did Rudy Giuliani say, bare-knuckle combat or trial by combat in the streets?
Well, then now we're starting to truly descend out of our constitutional system.
So when I say that as a case-by-case basis, we have to ensure that we're protecting and defending other individuals who may not have Secret Service protection and may need to have the anonymity and the security of their family taken into consideration because we would not want a disagreement on Well, let me simplify your answer to point out what I think is not the hypocrisy but the contradiction.
I support them except.
Basically, if people break the law, then I support violating constitutional rights, the right to speak in Trump's defense, as if there's not already laws in place to do that.
Also, as a matter of fact, just to distinguish, this is the...
Classic Democrat or MSM talking point that, you know, bringing in people's family as though the Judge Marchand's daughter is an unwilling participant in politics.
She runs a PR firm, has Adam Schiff and political action committees as clients, is making millions hand over fist, is giving podcasts about how her father believes that Twitter is terrible for politicians.
Speaking of Trump, she's, you know, you can't, it's not just disingenuous, it's just dishonest to pretend that that's like a baron when he was 16. So there's that.
The other thing is, you want to be a prosecutor, you're going to have problems.
I mean, that's the risk.
My best friend's dad, criminal defense attorney, one of the only, I won't say this, I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but you know, a Second Amendment household.
One of the only men that I ever knew that, you know, had a gun when we were growing up.
Because you want to be a defense attorney, you're going to need, this was back when Canada.
Didn't have the same laws it has today.
But you want to be a criminal defense attorney, you're going to be working with shady people.
These are the risks of the job.
When Fannie Willis was sitting there complaining about people going outside her house, oddly enough, before anything related to Trump, it's like, well, A, you want to be a prosecutor?
That's part of the job.
And B, you want to be a corrupt prosecutor?
That's certainly going to be part of the job.
But do I understand your answer is we can gag a defendant if we can claim that people are getting some sort of adverse...
Thank you.
No, as I said, it's a case-by-case, instance-by-instance question about, one, the safety and security of people who aren't involved in the case, but then secondarily, remember this also, often you see gag orders when you have juries that are not sequestered.
When you have a non-sequestered jury, that means juries are able to get outside information from outside the courtroom, so you can gag all parties in a proceeding to prevent them from effectively testifying through the media.
If you're able to talk I wouldn't want the prosecutor doing that.
I wouldn't want the defense attorney doing that.
So in limited circumstances, courts have found that you can have gag orders in those cases.
This is why I'm saying there has to be a case-by-case analysis.
If we take the political hyperbole out of it, I think those are very reasonable things to put in place.
The idea that you're going to have, one, a system in place to protect individuals, but...
Two, a system that will ensure that you're not corrupting the court proceedings.
Yeah, well, I won't try to get the last word if you want to say.
I'll just say most people are going to say case by case is just willy-nilly bullcrap for I can apply what I want to this person and not what I want or what I want to that person as well.
And case by case is exactly how you get Alex Jones defaulted, Donald Trump gagged, Steve Bannon gagged.
Who was it?
It was Steve Bannon or Roger Stone gagged.
And then meanwhile, Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels can go out there and talk up a storm all they want against an active defendant.
Let me ask you some...
Do you have a hard out by any chance?
Yeah, like...
Can we do like five more minutes?
Yeah, sure.
I'll get the hard, the concrete questions.
Would you have yeeted...
Yeeted, you might not know that word.
Would you have booted Fanny Willis from the file?
You know, I'm one of those people that do not criticize sitting judges.
So I'm not going to criticize Judge McAfee for anything that he's done on the court.
Dude, you're running against him.
It's expected to be criticized.
I know.
It is a strange way of running for office, not criticizing the person you're running against.
But Judge McAfee is going to have information the rest of us haven't seen.
He's going to hear testimony the rest of us haven't seen.
He's going to have access to discovery the rest of us haven't seen.
And because of that, I'm not going to second-guess this decision.
But what I will say is that the integrity of our judicial system is paramount in all places, and that we cannot put any individual above the integrity of our judicial system.
And for that reason, it has to be the manifest duty of a judge to ensure that they are doing everything possible to present to the public the best face for the case and the best face for our criminal justice system and to get rid of any appearances of impropriety that may exist.
And because of that, I probably would have done some things in the case differently.
Do you believe that Fannie Willis reflects well on the Georgia justice system?
You know, I tell people this all the time.
There have been way bigger issues in the Georgia criminal justice system than Fannie Willis and Donald Trump, and they existed before this case.
They'll exist long after this case.
The voters in Fulton County aren't going to vote based upon whether or not they support this prosecutor or they support this defendant.
Do you know we've had almost 15 people die in the Fulton County Jail end of last year?
Yeah, because it's a corrupt hellhole that's run by, I say, arguably criminals.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
I would give you a chest bump if we were in the same room.
A virtual fist bump.
Yeah.
You know, we had someone be eaten to death by bed bugs in the jail.
A human being was eaten to death by bedbugs in America.
So I don't spend all of my time as a candidate or thinking about this race thinking about Donald Trump and Fannie Willis.
I think that we have to concentrate on getting the amount of time individuals spend awaiting trial down to something at least humane.
I believe that if you're accused of committing a crime in 2020, let's say, you should expect to be going to trial sometime before 2024 or 2025.
I think that's something reasonable, that you should not have this hanging over your head for the better I think we need to put in place a system where defense attorneys aren't allowed to drag
out cases in order for them to get paid.
A lot of people don't know this.
Those high-paid defense lawyers will continue your case indefinitely until you pay off the totality of your balance for them to go to court.
That should not be allowed.
Everyone else is now waiting in line behind you to line someone's pockets.
We have to get rid of that practice.
We also have to put in place the type of technological innovations that will cut court times down.
Do we all need to pile into a courtroom at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning, or can we do these things over Zoom?
Do we need an entire court staff to write opinions?
We use AI and predictive regenerative models to speed up the system.
I also think we have to get rid of the punitive system that exists around probation and bail.
Because a lot of people, these aren't reasonably calculated conditions that are meant to ensure you return to court or that you pay for your time.
These are traps that they set to keep getting money out of you.
If you're on an ankle monitor, you might be paying $100 a month or $300 a month just to be free.
And if you miss a payment, then guess what?
You're going back to jail.
We might have a...
Condition on your probation that says you can't smoke marijuana.
And so now, whether or not you're on trial or you're convicted of anything marijuana-based, you can have your probation violated for a marijuana test, etc.
We have to modernize our system to actually preserve the rights of individuals, move cases along, and defend the individual against the abuse of the state.
And I think that has to be in the forefront of the voter's mind, as opposed to any one particular case, because everyone else can't stop their lives.
I think when we're talking about our system, when we're talking about fairness, what does the Constitution guarantee?
It guarantees due process.
Due process means what?
Notice that you are notified of what the charges are against you and hearings.
Do you have an opportunity to contest those charges going forward?
I think President Trump has been given every opportunity required by due process.
He will have his day in court.
If he is innocent, I am confident that he will be found not guilty and that he will be able to proceed with his life.
If he is guilty, I believe that the voters of the state of Georgia and the citizens of that state deserve every piece of justice that the Constitution and the laws of the state of Georgia I support trials.
I want people to actually come to a resolution and not simply try to plea cases out, and I look forward to seeing this case go to trial and the proper answer to being put forward.
Well, I mean, you say that people have the right to a defense.
They also have the right to not be maliciously prosecuted.
You say that, you know, you're confident in the system, but this is also the very same system that we're talking about is horribly corrupt in Georgia that lets people get eaten by bedbugs in prison.
And now you're just relying on the non-corruption of that very system when politics might be more of a toxic force than racial prejudice at the time.
And some people might say, what you're saying right now is exactly what many folk back in the 50s would have said.
Well, if he's wrongly accused of rape...
You know, he'll be acquitted in certain rural areas.
I'm going to the racial side on this.
We're like, hey, just accuse a black man of something.
And if he's innocent, he'll get a fair trial.
I mean, in that day and age, it would have been a laughable thing to say then.
And I think it's equally laughable to suggest now that in New York, having seen what we've seen, in D.C., having seen what we've seen, that...
That Donald Trump can get anything more of a fair trial than a black man in Alabama in the 30s could get a fair trial.
Well, if he's accused, he'll get a fair trial.
I mean, I think it's outlandish.
And that's where I think people are going to question judgment to say, well, you know, he'll get his day in court, except now he's getting six months in court or six weeks in court while running as a candidate as if that's not already enough of an injustice.
The problem is that once we start questioning and bringing and saying that the system is invalid, then what part of the system is valid?
Does anyone have to follow any convictions in Fulton County if we just simply say that we disagree with the system?
Does anyone have to follow federal jurisprudence or sentencing guidelines or can you simply say I disagree with them?
I think the system is corrupt.
We have to understand that we are living in a living democracy, a living democracy that we have to each work on every single day.
The reason that we have elections in this country instead of lifelong appointments in particular is because we have the opportunity to vote out a DA if you disagree with the DA, to vote out a judge if you disagree with a judge.
If you look at everything going on in any trial, let's say, and you disagree with the judge or you disagree with the outcome and you say, well, I think that judge is wrong, well, you have an election coming up in Georgia on March 21st, you can vote that person out and vote a new person in.
Same thing with any Yeah, but I don't think you can improve it if you don't acknowledge the problem.
In as much as there was a problem back in the day for racially motivated prosecutions and convictions, we have that very same problem mutatus mutatus today politically.
One last question.
Robert, ordinarily I would end with you.
And we would say our proper goodbyes, but I'll DM you afterwards.
I'll take some of the super chats on Rumble.
January 6th, loaded question.
Do you think the treatment of the January...
For a political party that believes in criminal justice reform, do you support what has been done to the January 6th defendants?
Do you think it's fair?
Do you think it represents justice?
And why?
I think what we've seen is that we've had, I think lumping them all together is an issue for both the left and the right on these things.
Everybody who was at January 6th was not an insurrectionist.
Some people were just there because they were at a rally for the president.
Some people ended up inside of the Capitol because they were just part of a group and they kind of wandered in.
That is a true statement that exists.
I know people that it happened to.
Some people were crazed insurrectionists who were intent on violence and destruction, who broke into the Capitol intentionally to cause damage to those areas, and who deserve criminal penalty.
Both those things can be true concurrently.
The important thing about our constitutional system is the individuals who were accused had the opportunity to go to trial.
They had the opportunity to be represented by attorneys.
They had the opportunity to present the sculpatory evidence in their defense.
They had the opportunity to go before a jury of their peers or to make a plea bargain with the government to come to a conclusion of their case.
And I think that as long as we can ensure those constitutional protections, We have elections.
We have the ability to say, well, we disagree with this line out of being illegal, and we want our federal government to repeal it, to change the way the law operates.
This is the best part about living in an actual living department.
So you would concede, then, if exculpatory evidence was withheld from some of the January 6th defendants, or if their punishments did not meet what had hitherto been standard punishments for similar crimes, then you would take issue with it?
Absolutely.
Okay, well then we agree in principle, and I think you're just wrong in fact.
But I don't want to leave it there as a gotcha.
I do actually sincerely want to thank you for coming on.
You're one of the few...
You're one of the rare...
People who would qualify themselves on that side that are open for not just coming on, period, but for long format where I think truth can be exposed and people can come to well-educated opinions on character.
So, Robert, thank you sincerely for coming on.
Thank you.
And we'll be in touch.
I'll DM you afterwards, but ordinarily I'd end, but go.
Have a good day.
Thank you.
All right.
Sounds good.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that was fantastic.
I'm going to read all of the Rumble rants and then we're going to take this party over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
Oh, I flagged a bunch of questions.
Okay, here we go.
Hocus Pocus out of focus is a rumble rant.
Viva puts up good fights, but he can't fix poopoo.
Poop emoji.
STFU, he's a racehoster.
Why he bristled so much?
I think that was...
I don't know who you're talking about there.
It might have been Jesse Jackson.
We have to be...
Courteous with a guest and respectful with a guest who actually agrees to come on with the right-wing extremists and far-right agitator Viva Frye.
I'm joking for anybody who's going to dare take that out of context.
Let me bring up the rumble rants.
That was fun.
It's an amazing thing.
Long format discussion.
You'll know whose judgment you agree with and whose you don't.
But give Robert the credit that is deserved for sitting down for an hour and 40 minutes and being open to everything.
And the funny thing is, whether or not you vehemently disagree with this politics, whether or not you impute ill-intent or deceit to that disagreement with politics, seems like a genuinely...
Stop it.
I just think there's a lot of logical issues that I said to his face, so I'm not going to say anything that I wouldn't say to his face now that he's not here.
Les absents ont toujours tort, and I'm very sensitive to that.
Those who are not there are always wrong.
But that's it.
You've heard it.
One can fact-check what is relevant to be fact-checked after the fact.
And that was great.
We got Barbary slave-traded slave 1 to 1.25 million Europeans.
And slavery is as old...
I mean, I think they've debunked the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves, but rather skilled labor who might have had to work for food.
I don't know how that works.
But slaves and slavery has existed for a long time.
And especially even specifically African slaves and African slavery has existed for a long time in that part of the world.
The European slave trade was a subset of a practice that had existed for, I think it's close to 2,000 years.
Sean47 says, all I hear is victim, victim.
I had to work twice as hard to get half as far as my brother, who are millionaires, that's life.
Keep the victim narrative and destroy merit will lead to disaster.
Denise Ann Tusa's voting isn't a constitutionally protected right.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say you have the right to vote.
Denise Ann, I know your name, and so I don't think this would be the right to vote constitutional amendment.
Let me see here.
15th Amendment.
Hmm, interesting.
Hold on, I need the chat to help me out with this one.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged.
Okay, so hold on a second.
The passage.
In the five years following the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments were passed to extend civil rights and legal protections to those who had previously been enslaved.
Where does the right to vote come in here?
Hold on one second.
Interpretation.
No, it doesn't...
Hold on.
What does the 15th Amendment say?
Let's just...
Hold on.
You can't say something like that and then have me not know if it's true in real time.
The 15th Amendment.
Let me bring up the text.
Jeez Louise, that's a dissertation.
50th Amendment right to vote not denied by race.
The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2, Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
So Denise Antu, I'm interested.
I'm going to explore that.
But no, it seems that the 15th Amendment says what it says there.
David channeling deep...
Goosefaba.
What is that?
Well done, sir.
Zen master.
What is Goosefaba?
I'm almost nervous to say the word until I know what it is.
Oh, that's from Anger Management.
All right.
Good.
That was fun.
I want to know if everyone found that as fun as I'd.
Let me go to the chat here.
Wannabe.
Okay.
What am I doing here?
Okay, so everybody, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
We're going to have an after-party discussion there.
Hold on.
Link.
Link.
To locals.
And then I got to get in the car and do a Tommy Robinson summary because Tommy Robinson is coming back on tomorrow and it's going to be amazing.
So what I'm going to do, everybody, thank you all for being here.
I hope everyone found that interesting, entertaining, educational, informative.
I kind of want to get Scott McAfee on now, but...
I'm trying to think, like...
No, I'll give my post-mortem over at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
Link to Locals.
Come one more time, people.
And we're going to take the party over there.
So I'm going to end this on YouTube.
YouTube, you know where to meet me if you want to come.
vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
End it on YouTube.
And rumble.
You know where to come.
If you want to come to the after party, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
So make sure all of you Canadians go on vacay in November and come vote.
Okay, great show.
Says Honor 234.
Thanks, Viva.
We'll make a party out of it.
Thanks, Viva.
Says Sanctum.
My retirement is invested in the military complex killing.
Okay, I'm not getting into that politic discussion right now.
The key part of the 15th Amendment is the word citizen.
An illegal alien is not a U.S. citizen, which means they are not allowed to vote in any election.
I'm listening to myself right now.
Smash that like harder, bigots, says Jacob Castro.
Don't make me pee.
I'm going to have to go pee before we do the after party.
Four bucks for a hotel per night.
You might actually be required by law to give McAfee equal time, says Hart and Denizen.
I would love to have McAfee on.
Jeez, I got my questions for McAfee.
I would forget the history of McAfee's life.
I want to dissect that decision to him and ask him the odor of mendacity.
Legally improper.
How much do they pay you, McAfee?
Did they threaten you?
I love, someone said the other day that it was in respect to someone who came with, who made a wild, you know, a decision that was, you know, questionable.
And they said they either paid him a lot or offered him something he didn't want.
Or he offered him something he really didn't want.
And I love that.
It was quite funny.
PolishDog says, PolishDog989 says, Great show, Viva.
Thank you very much.
Has Viva commented on Kristi Noem shotgunning her dog?
I'm curious his thoughts since he loves dogs as much as I do.
Korn Macabre.
I did talk about it briefly yesterday.
Oh, I was going to tease it and bring it over to locals.
Come on over to locals anyhow.
Look, I would never shoot a dog.
Period.
I can imagine circumstances under which it's...
Necessary to shoot a dog.
Someone said, look, a dog got hit by a car and taking it to the vet would be...
Obviously, if you have a gun and you euthanize a mortally wounded animal, that's when you do it.
That's when it's...
As far as alternatives go, you're minimizing the suffering by saying the dog's stuck under a wheel of a car or it's doomed, shoot it and put it out of its misery.
To say you have an aggressive...
I'm not calling that dog a puppy.
It's 14 months old.
You have an aggressive dog and sometimes aggressive dogs...
If you cannot rehome them, or they are just too aggressive that they'd be a liability to rehome, you have to get rid of that dog.
I say, get rid of it.
I make the joke that we had a bull mastiff that we had to euthanize when I was growing up, and it was traumatizing.
It happened the day after the tsunami in 2005.
And a quarter of a million people just died, and our family's sitting there sobbing because we had to put to sleep a bull mastiff who...
The most recent event attacked our neighbor up in the cottage.
Like a kid, like a 12-year-old kid.
And the kid's crying and the dog's getting more into it.
So rehoming a dog like that, even if you could find a drug dealer or a cartel that wanted the dog for protection, I mean, that's a liability.
So sometimes it's necessary to euthanize a hyper-aggressive dog.
Did Christy Noem explore all options of rehoming a hunting dog?
Doesn't sound like it.
Was it such a dire emergency that she had to shoot the dog instead of bringing it to a vet and splurging $100 on a needle that puts it to sleep?
Didn't sound like it.
Did she say that she hated that dog?
I think she said that too.
And did she shoot a goat at the same time?
Anyhow, all that to say, I love animals.
Sometimes an aggressive dog needs to be put down, and if you don't put it down, it's actually irresponsible not to.
You read all those stories of the dogs, have a history of biting people, and then they maul a kid.
And like, well, why didn't you put that dog down?
It happens.
All things being equal, splurge.
Are you guys looking?
What are you looking at here?
Okay.
Splurge and take it to a vet and do it humanely.
A shotgun blast is not the way that I would ever do it.
And that being said, we grew up with an English Mastiff.
That was my first dog.
His father weighed like 240, 250 pounds.
Old farmer had him.
The dog was at his time.
And the farmer would not have been able to move.
As the legend goes, the dog would have been too much to deal with in terms of...
Moving and, I don't know, so the farmer up in Canada, this isn't, you know, America, dug a hole, called the dog over, dog comes over, and he ends the dog's life and rolled it into the ditch.
I don't even know if this ever happened.
I just remember growing up, and this was the story they told us about the parent of our dog.
So that's what I think of it.
You certainly don't go, you would not go around bragging about having done that.
It would be traumatizing, and, you know, so that's it.
I also think it's sabotage.
The only thing I'm glad about is that it might remove Kristi Noem from the potential VP ticket.
From what I understood, she's not the best candidate.
So right now, Tim Scott seems to be falling down the rank, which is good for Trump.
Kristi Noem falling down, which is good for Trump.
And I stick with Vivek Ramaswamy, even though I know a lot of you out there don't trust him.
That's that.
That's what I think of that.
It's not quite nuanced.
I think if you can put a dog down by going to a vet, that's how you do it.
It's not violence.
It's not traumatizing.
And Chrissy Noem sounded like she was taking pride in it and sounded like there were options and sounded like she did not hesitate to also blast the goat at the same time.
King of Biltong, thank you very much.
I gotta go pick up the Biltong today, actually.
GA, good afternoon from Anton's Meat and Eat.
Free shipping with code VIVA for your Biltong.
Speaking of dogs that might need to be euthanized, I'm looking at Pudge rolling around in her bed.
I'm just checking to see if she pooped in there.
On BiltongUSA.com, AntonUSA.com, if you're into carnivore keto or just want some high-protein snacks, try Biltong.
And Anton, thank you for getting that in right at the buzzer because we're ending this and going on over to locals.
Boom!
My boxer died on my couch.
He was 15, hard to move, 165.
Dude, I've never in my life...
Had a dog that died from natural causes in his sleep peacefully.
I've had...
I'm not going to name all their names.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
I've had nine dogs.
And we've had to euthanize all of them at the end of their lives with the exception of that bull mastiff who was a terror.
Never had a dog just die in their sleep.
And it never gets easier to euthanize a dog.
We had one, my favorite dog, because he meant something to me growing up.
Uh-oh.
What's going to happen here?
Winston.
And even he had cancer.
He was eight and a half years old and it wasn't long enough.
And I went to law school and he had deteriorated over a couple months.
I came back the night that we had to do it and he had lost 40 pounds or 30 some odd pounds in like a month, month and a half.
And he was so excited when he saw me, he released himself.
And that's it.
It never gets easier to euthanize a dog.
Babu!
Stupid pug!
Not the pug.
Yeah, the pug.
He was a pug.
Babu!
Right here.
Don't pull over the camera.
If anybody thinks I'm crazy now, you might think I'm even crazier.
Babu is in this bag.
My fat, adopted pug.
He wasn't always fat.
He was a beautiful dog, Babu.
Then he got blind, and then he got fat.
His ashes are a good, I feel like Indiana Jones, say a good.8 of a pound.
What else is in here?
Hold on a second.
Oh, okay.
Well, that doesn't count, actually.
We got...
His chain is in here, so...
Hmm.
Trip down memory lane.
Well, I said I wouldn't cry.
So that's what I think of the dogs.
Okay, here we go.
Bam.
I'll put that back up on the shelf afterwards.
Okay, so we're going to end this on Rumble, and then we're going to go over to VivaBarnesLaw.com.
Okay.
Thank you.
I'm just reading some of the chat here.
Okay, ending on Rumble.
And thank you all for being here.
I hope you enjoyed that.
And even if you didn't enjoy it, I hope you learned something from it.
So peace out, peeps.
See you on Locals, coming right now.
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