In this episode Erik Fleming interviews Dr. Stacey Patton about her new book Strung Up, exploring the lynching of Black children in American history, how white communities socialized cruelty across generations, and the lasting impact on families and society.
They discuss archival research, links between corporal punishment and public violence, the psychological effects on both Black and white children, and why memory, courage, and resistance matter for today’s politics and healing.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Eric Fleming, host of A Moment with Eric Fleming, the podcast of our time.
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00:02:00 --> 00:02:05 Hello and welcome to another moment with Eric Fleming. I am your host, Eric Fleming.
00:02:06 --> 00:02:10 So today we have Dr. Stacey Patton.
00:02:11 --> 00:02:17 Dr. Stacey Patton is a journalist and a college professor, but she's also an
00:02:17 --> 00:02:25 author and she has written this book called Strung Up, which talks about the
00:02:25 --> 00:02:26 lynching of black children.
00:02:27 --> 00:02:32 But it's not your typical book. It is about lynching in America.
00:02:32 --> 00:02:38 And it goes into such great detail, and we'll get into that in the interview,
00:02:39 --> 00:02:41 about the pathology and.
00:02:42 --> 00:02:48 You know, and the impacts that it had, not only on the families of those black
00:02:48 --> 00:02:53 children, but on the white children as well that witnessed those lynchings.
00:02:54 --> 00:02:59 So it's a real, real intense discussion, and I hope that you enjoy the interview.
00:03:00 --> 00:03:09 Real quick, go to momenteric.com, www.momenteric.com, to keep track of our latest
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00:03:35 --> 00:03:43 We're getting to the homestretch in the elections, and we're adjusting schedules to get guests.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:49 Next week, it's going to be kind of an abbreviated show, which some of y'all are like, great.
00:03:49 --> 00:03:53 No, but it's going to be an abbreviated show because I really had not planned
00:03:53 --> 00:04:02 on doing anything because it's homecoming for Jackson State, but I've got a guest that,
00:04:03 --> 00:04:07 Yeah, that's the plan. So we will have a show next week.
00:04:09 --> 00:04:15 But I just appreciate y'all listening and supporting the podcast the way that you do.
00:04:15 --> 00:04:23 I appreciate the people who have taken time to listen to it, to consider awards.
00:04:23 --> 00:04:27 I really appreciate the high quality of people that have agreed to come on the
00:04:27 --> 00:04:33 podcast and talk about either their literary work or the work they're doing in the community.
00:04:33 --> 00:04:39 And all that stuff, yeah, this has been a real treat, and we're going to keep
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00:04:41 --> 00:04:44 All right, speaking about keeping it going, let's go ahead and get this show
00:04:44 --> 00:04:48 started, and as always, we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.
00:04:56 --> 00:05:01 Thanks, Eric. President Trump stated he is considering an FBI investigation
00:05:01 --> 00:05:06 into the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells following a Mississippi grand jury's
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 refusal to indict anyone.
00:05:08 --> 00:05:14 Former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay won the Nobel Peace Prize for her
00:05:14 --> 00:05:20 work promoting peace, international law, and chairing a commission investigating genocide in Gaza.
00:05:20 --> 00:05:25 The Trump administration imposed expanded sanctions against the International
00:05:25 --> 00:05:29 Criminal Court, triggering sharp condemnation from the court.
00:05:29 --> 00:05:33 U.S. immigration officials defended ICE agents who shot a man,
00:05:33 --> 00:05:38 identified as Oscar Burgall, in a car with his child present in New York City,
00:05:38 --> 00:05:41 blaming the suspect for endangering lives.
00:05:41 --> 00:05:46 President Trump approved the execution by firing squad of former Army Major
00:05:46 --> 00:05:52 Nidal Hassan, set for December 3 at Fort Hood, for his 2009 mass shooting.
00:05:53 --> 00:05:57 President Trump launched a second inquiry and ordered a White House hearing
00:05:57 --> 00:06:02 into allegations Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook made false mortgage application statements.
00:06:03 --> 00:06:08 The FBI arrested California resident Wanying Zhang at Los Angeles International
00:06:08 --> 00:06:14 Airport for allegedly spying on the son of Taiwan's president on behalf of Chinese officials.
00:06:14 --> 00:06:20 The FBI also arrested 18-year-old Sheikh Dunn Abdullahi Mohammed for plotting
00:06:20 --> 00:06:25 an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at the Mall of America after purchasing an AK-47
00:06:25 --> 00:06:27 from an undercover agent.
00:06:28 --> 00:06:32 President Trump announced the end of taxpayer-funded television ads featuring
00:06:32 --> 00:06:37 him following bipartisan criticism and potential propaganda violations.
00:06:38 --> 00:06:43 Three black University of South Alabama students were arrested and later released
00:06:43 --> 00:06:47 over social media posts allegedly threatening President Trump.
00:06:47 --> 00:06:52 President Trump appointed Truth Social communications advisor Katie Zachariah
00:06:52 --> 00:06:56 as the new White House press secretary to replace Carolyn Leavitt.
00:06:56 --> 00:07:03 And Pennsylvania reported 1 measles cases and five related deaths.
00:07:03 --> 00:07:07 I am Grace Gee, and this has been a Moment of News.
00:07:13 --> 00:07:17 All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news. And now it's time for
00:07:17 --> 00:07:20 my guest, Dr. Stacey Patton.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:25 Stacey Patton, Ph.D., is an award-winning journalist, author,
00:07:25 --> 00:07:29 college professor, historian, and nationally recognized child advocate.
00:07:29 --> 00:07:35 Her scholarship and advocacy challenged corporal punishment in homes and schools,
00:07:35 --> 00:07:40 and examined the historical relationship among childhood, race, violence, and power.
00:07:41 --> 00:07:45 Patton's writing has appeared in New York Times, The Washington Post,
00:07:45 --> 00:07:51 Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, News One, and other national outlets.
00:07:51 --> 00:07:54 She is the author of several books, including Spare the Kids,
00:07:55 --> 00:07:59 Why Whooping Children Won't Save Black America, and most recently,
00:07:59 --> 00:08:03 Strung Up, How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.
00:08:04 --> 00:08:09 So today's discussion, we'll be talking about strung up how white America learned
00:08:09 --> 00:08:11 to lynch black children during the interview.
00:08:11 --> 00:08:15 So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a
00:08:15 --> 00:08:19 guest on this podcast, Dr. Stacey Patton.
00:08:30 --> 00:08:35 All right. Dr. Stacey Patton, how are you doing, ma'am? You doing good?
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 I'm doing well. Thank you so
00:08:37 --> 00:08:42 much, Eric. I appreciate you for having me on conversation with you today.
00:08:42 --> 00:08:46 Well, I am honored to have you. It's like I get the newsletter from Speak Out,
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 and they're always saying, Dr. Stacey Patton is going to be speaking here,
00:08:50 --> 00:08:54 and she's going to be talking about this. So I'm really, really honored to have
00:08:54 --> 00:08:56 somebody of your caliber on the podcast.
00:08:57 --> 00:09:02 So what I like to do, we're going to talk about this book that you wrote called Strung Up.
00:09:03 --> 00:09:07 And it is a very scholarly book.
00:09:10 --> 00:09:16 I was really, really impressed with the way that you went about it and even
00:09:16 --> 00:09:18 how you even opened the book up.
00:09:18 --> 00:09:24 So a lot of my questions are going to be based off of just kind of like what
00:09:24 --> 00:09:28 your thought process was and putting this together and some of the issues that
00:09:28 --> 00:09:30 you wanted to address in the book.
00:09:30 --> 00:09:33 But before I do that, I do a couple of icebreakers.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:37 So the first icebreaker is a quote I want you to respond to.
00:09:38 --> 00:09:41 And the quote is, silence will not save us.
00:09:44 --> 00:09:46 Audre Lorde. That's correct.
00:09:48 --> 00:09:57 So, I think when I hear that quote, I think that she's talking about silence
00:09:57 --> 00:10:02 is how atrocities become traditions.
00:10:03 --> 00:10:08 It becomes complicity. People think that being quiet, staying in their place,
00:10:08 --> 00:10:11 staying in their lane will keep them safe.
00:10:11 --> 00:10:16 But it's how violence and all kinds of other silly logics become culture.
00:10:16 --> 00:10:24 It's how generations of people teach the next that certain lives are disposable.
00:10:24 --> 00:10:29 And that is precisely what my book, Strung Up, tries to expose.
00:10:29 --> 00:10:35 So America did not sustain, you know, its centuries of racial terror simply
00:10:35 --> 00:10:39 because some few fringe white people were violent.
00:10:39 --> 00:10:44 It sustained that terror because millions of other people watched,
00:10:44 --> 00:10:47 rationalized, normalized, and they remained silent.
00:10:47 --> 00:10:52 Yeah. All right. So the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.
00:10:52 --> 00:10:56 Okay. So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20.
00:10:56 --> 00:10:58 Six. All right.
00:10:59 --> 00:11:05 What do you think is the worst or best thing this, the previous,
00:11:05 --> 00:11:06 well, let me rephrase it.
00:11:07 --> 00:11:12 What do you think was the worst or best thing the previous administration did?
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 This is Biden's administration. Yes. Hmm.
00:11:17 --> 00:11:25 So I think that one of the most consequential things that Joe Biden did was
00:11:25 --> 00:11:29 to try to invest in American infrastructure.
00:11:29 --> 00:11:35 So that includes communities that have been neglected for generations.
00:11:36 --> 00:11:43 So I'm thinking of, say, the American Rescue Plan, which provided substantial
00:11:43 --> 00:11:47 relief for families and individuals during the pandemic.
00:11:48 --> 00:11:51 This was a huge crisis, you know, once-in-a-century crisis.
00:11:52 --> 00:11:56 But I also feel like we can't discuss his legacy without talking about Gaza.
00:11:57 --> 00:12:04 His administration continued providing military support to Israel while Palestinian
00:12:04 --> 00:12:11 civilians were being killed by the thousands and being displaced on a devastating scale.
00:12:11 --> 00:12:19 And so I think that raises some profound moral questions about whose lives American
00:12:19 --> 00:12:23 foreign policy values and protects.
00:12:24 --> 00:12:30 Yeah. I think it's interesting that, since you brought that up,
00:12:30 --> 00:12:35 that the lady who won the Nobel Prize was the, I think she was the chair?
00:12:35 --> 00:12:40 Or she had something to do with the determination in the International Criminal
00:12:40 --> 00:12:43 Court that what was happening in Gaza was a genocide.
00:12:45 --> 00:12:52 And the current administration decided to sanction the court the day after she got the Nobel Prize.
00:12:55 --> 00:12:56 I think it's interesting that.
00:12:59 --> 00:13:05 Maybe that's another book you're going to dive into, but it's just how we respond
00:13:05 --> 00:13:09 to genocide. And based on where you were going with this book,
00:13:09 --> 00:13:11 it seems like it's kind of something that.
00:13:12 --> 00:13:15 Maybe that's an extreme statement to say, but it's something that's kind of
00:13:15 --> 00:13:21 inbred. But we'll get into that more in the discussion and how we respond to,
00:13:21 --> 00:13:24 seeing violence or how we politicize it even.
00:13:25 --> 00:13:29 But why did you decide to write this book and how much of a struggle was it to write?
00:13:30 --> 00:13:35 Well, I always tell people that I started writing this book when I was a child,
00:13:35 --> 00:13:40 before I even know what history telling was, before I,
00:13:41 --> 00:13:47 knew what an archive was, before I knew what racism or lynching or Jim Crow was.
00:13:47 --> 00:13:52 I am an adoptee, so I have an adoptive family and a family of origin,
00:13:52 --> 00:13:56 my biological relatives, and both families were touched by lynching.
00:13:56 --> 00:14:03 I grew up as a girl child in the 1980s and 1990s. I was not baptized by the
00:14:03 --> 00:14:09 fire of the civil rights movement, but I lived in the echoes of that history.
00:14:09 --> 00:14:14 And I grew up hearing the adults sort of whisper about these crimes, these murders.
00:14:15 --> 00:14:17 And I watched the trauma.
00:14:19 --> 00:14:20 I endured the trauma,
00:14:21 --> 00:14:27 parenting practices that were informed by terror and trauma and grief and loss.
00:14:27 --> 00:14:34 And so when I tried to question adults about, you know, these losses and,
00:14:34 --> 00:14:35 you know, this violence.
00:14:36 --> 00:14:41 Sometimes I would be shut down, stay in a child's place, don't ask questions,
00:14:41 --> 00:14:42 we don't talk about that.
00:14:43 --> 00:14:49 And these were adults who wanted to try to protect those children from that terror.
00:14:49 --> 00:14:55 And also these adults and all of their grief and trauma didn't always have words
00:14:55 --> 00:14:58 to wrap around those old wounds.
00:14:58 --> 00:15:03 But the silence troubled me. I was a very curious kid and I always had lots of questions.
00:15:03 --> 00:15:07 And when people shut me down or told me to stay in a child's place or don't
00:15:07 --> 00:15:10 ask those questions, I got even more curious.
00:15:10 --> 00:15:14 For me, I sort of intuitively knew that there were stories there.
00:15:14 --> 00:15:20 There were things I wasn't supposed to know. And then when I got to graduate school,
00:15:21 --> 00:15:26 Rutgers University, I knew that I wanted to do my dissertation research on the
00:15:26 --> 00:15:28 treatment of Black children historically,
00:15:28 --> 00:15:33 because there was another set of silences around Black children.
00:15:33 --> 00:15:35 It was a scholarly silence.
00:15:35 --> 00:15:42 Black children were rarely written about at that time, nor were the lynchings
00:15:42 --> 00:15:46 of Black children acknowledged with a sustained attention.
00:15:46 --> 00:15:53 They were mostly footnoted or pushed to the margins, given passing mention in
00:15:54 --> 00:15:58 what was happening to Black men primarily as lynching victims.
00:15:59 --> 00:16:04 So I wrote Strung Up because I was tired of reading histories of lynching that told us.
00:16:05 --> 00:16:09 Everything about what happened to Black bodies, but not nearly enough about
00:16:09 --> 00:16:11 what was happening inside white people's minds.
00:16:12 --> 00:16:16 I wanted to understand how a society could look at a Black child,
00:16:17 --> 00:16:22 recognize the child's size and vulnerability and innocence, and still,
00:16:23 --> 00:16:28 you know, decide that the child deserved to be destroyed.
00:16:28 --> 00:16:34 And what did, you know, white people have to believe about Black children to
00:16:34 --> 00:16:37 make that possible? That was my big driving question.
00:16:38 --> 00:16:42 What were they teaching their own children when they brought them to lynchings
00:16:43 --> 00:16:49 and allowed them to participate and turned racial terror into family entertainment?
00:16:50 --> 00:16:56 And the deeper I dug, the more I realized that lynching wasn't just about destroying Black lives.
00:16:56 --> 00:17:01 It was also about constructing white people's identities. And so I wanted to
00:17:01 --> 00:17:06 shift the historical gaze away from the Black body, hanging from the tree or
00:17:06 --> 00:17:11 a bridge or a light post, and toward the white faces in the crowd.
00:17:11 --> 00:17:17 Because until we understand how cruelty was taught, celebrated,
00:17:17 --> 00:17:22 and passed down through generations, we'll never fully understand why racial
00:17:22 --> 00:17:25 violence continues to haunt this country today.
00:17:25 --> 00:17:33 Yeah, I was thinking when Billie Holiday sang that song, Strange Fruit, and.
00:17:34 --> 00:17:38 In essence, we've always had to gaze toward the strange fruit,
00:17:38 --> 00:17:44 but not how that tree that produced that fruit was cultivated. And.
00:17:46 --> 00:17:50 That is, it's simple, but it's novel.
00:17:50 --> 00:17:56 Because until I read your book, you know, it was like, I didn't really care.
00:17:56 --> 00:17:59 You know, all I was dealing with was the fact that Black folks were getting
00:17:59 --> 00:18:02 killed in the history of my people.
00:18:02 --> 00:18:07 But you know it's it makes sense always especially being a student of history
00:18:07 --> 00:18:14 myself you gotta understand what the roots are how it got to this point and and,
00:18:14 --> 00:18:19 you know I'm not a professional book reviewer and all that but I think you you
00:18:19 --> 00:18:25 did a marvelous job and and at least creating some framework so.
00:18:26 --> 00:18:31 My next question, I want to, a lot of these questions, I'm going to pick your brain, Doc.
00:18:31 --> 00:18:38 I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not, you know, I really want the listeners
00:18:38 --> 00:18:43 to understand how you went about this approach.
00:18:43 --> 00:18:48 So my next question is, did you debate using the Reginald Marsh drawing for
00:18:48 --> 00:18:52 the cover instead of the photo of the mock lynching at Camp Zachary Taylor?
00:18:52 --> 00:18:56 At first, I thought about using that Reginald Marsh drawing.
00:18:56 --> 00:18:58 Let me just describe it for your listeners.
00:18:59 --> 00:19:04 So I was in the Moreland Spengarn Research Center at Howard University.
00:19:04 --> 00:19:11 Spengarn has the largest repository of archival materials on the Black diaspora.
00:19:11 --> 00:19:17 And so I was going through the NAACP lynching files that they have there,
00:19:17 --> 00:19:22 and I stumbled across a Manila folder with this drawing in it.
00:19:22 --> 00:19:24 That's all that was in the folder.
00:19:24 --> 00:19:29 And it is a drawing by a white artist.
00:19:29 --> 00:19:33 He was born in France, and his name was Reginald Marsh.
00:19:34 --> 00:19:41 And so you see these ghoulish-looking white people gathered in a circle while
00:19:41 --> 00:19:47 they're watching some Black person being lynched and burned off the frame.
00:19:47 --> 00:19:48 You don't actually see the body.
00:19:48 --> 00:19:53 And in the center of this drawing there's an older woman it could be the child's
00:19:53 --> 00:19:59 mother her grandmother a community elder holding this little girl up on her
00:19:59 --> 00:20:02 shoulders so that she can see what's happening,
00:20:03 --> 00:20:08 and the little girl is just very calm she's sitting there with her finger under her chin.
00:20:09 --> 00:20:17 And the caption reads, this is her first lynching. And that caption absolutely turned my stomach.
00:20:17 --> 00:20:22 First basically says, this is going to happen again.
00:20:23 --> 00:20:27 She's going to see it again. This is a rite of passage. This is ordinary. This is what we do.
00:20:28 --> 00:20:31 But what troubled me especially was her posture.
00:20:32 --> 00:20:36 She's just calm. She's not wincing. She's not turning away.
00:20:36 --> 00:20:38 And that really disturbed me
00:20:38 --> 00:20:43 because that's not a normal reaction that a child should have to a murder.
00:20:44 --> 00:20:52 And so it opened all kinds of questions for me about the psychological destruction
00:20:52 --> 00:20:54 of white children who were brought to these events.
00:20:55 --> 00:21:01 So at first I thought that was going to be the cover of the book.
00:21:01 --> 00:21:08 But then Philip Merrill, who is an archivist of sorts, he and his wife collect.
00:21:09 --> 00:21:14 Old black emphymera, emphymera, I'm sorry, and vintage stuff,
00:21:14 --> 00:21:17 newspapers, books, documents, pictures.
00:21:17 --> 00:21:21 And he reached out to me, this was during COVID, and he said,
00:21:21 --> 00:21:23 I know you're working on a book about child lynchings.
00:21:24 --> 00:21:26 I have something you need to see.
00:21:26 --> 00:21:31 And he showed me the photo that became the cover of this book.
00:21:31 --> 00:21:37 And once I saw that this was a real child versus a drawing, because people could
00:21:37 --> 00:21:39 effectively argue, well, Reginald Marsh's
00:21:39 --> 00:21:43 drawing is, that's from his own imagination. It's not a real child.
00:21:44 --> 00:21:50 And so having a photograph of a little black boy who was probably somewhere between eight,
00:21:51 --> 00:21:56 and 10 years old max, standing on the gallows at a military base,
00:21:56 --> 00:22:01 Camp Zachary Taylor, which was in Louisville, Kentucky during World War I.
00:22:01 --> 00:22:08 He's standing there on the gallows, surrounded by these white soldiers for a mock lynching.
00:22:08 --> 00:22:15 And I counted all those hands on the rope. There's six hands on the rope.
00:22:15 --> 00:22:21 It doesn't take that much, that many hands, that much strength to string up a little Black boy.
00:22:22 --> 00:22:28 And so that cover said everything that this book was trying to say about the
00:22:28 --> 00:22:31 complicity, the culture, the families, the religion.
00:22:32 --> 00:22:37 The whole cultural production that produced that scene.
00:22:38 --> 00:22:42 Yeah. And then the other part of that image that I felt kind of tied in what
00:22:42 --> 00:22:46 you were saying was there is a soldier who actually looks like he's either reading
00:22:47 --> 00:22:49 from a manual or reciting from a manual.
00:22:49 --> 00:22:55 So it's almost like it's a class that they're teaching how to do this lynching.
00:22:55 --> 00:22:58 And yeah, it was powerful. But,
00:22:59 --> 00:23:04 I wanted to ask you about that because that Reginald Morris drawing drew a lot
00:23:04 --> 00:23:10 of criticism and a lot of attention during the time that it was initially out.
00:23:10 --> 00:23:14 But not, as you point out, not enough to stop the lynchings.
00:23:15 --> 00:23:20 But it did draw some conversation. Many people like to be descriptive about
00:23:20 --> 00:23:24 violence in America using terms like black-on-black crime, for example.
00:23:24 --> 00:23:29 Why do you think it is hard for America to be as descriptive or even acknowledge,
00:23:30 --> 00:23:33 its history of lynching and capital punishment as violent?
00:23:36 --> 00:23:47 Because America is driven by this narrative of exceptionalism that we somehow threw off our medieval,
00:23:48 --> 00:23:54 European inheritances and traditions and became something unique and new.
00:23:55 --> 00:24:00 But I think the phrase, the Black-on-Black crime itself is quite revealing.
00:24:01 --> 00:24:07 So we don't routinely talk about white-on-white crime, even though most violent
00:24:07 --> 00:24:12 crime occurs between people who know each other, who live in the same community,
00:24:12 --> 00:24:14 so there's close proximity.
00:24:14 --> 00:24:19 But when Black folks commit violence, suddenly race becomes the explanation.
00:24:20 --> 00:24:24 When white people commit violence, we look toward individual motives.
00:24:25 --> 00:24:30 Or things like mental health or some other type of humanizing explanations.
00:24:31 --> 00:24:36 And that's precisely why, you know, America has such difficulty confronting
00:24:36 --> 00:24:37 the history of lynching.
00:24:38 --> 00:24:44 Lynching, you know, wasn't simply violence committed by individual white people.
00:24:44 --> 00:24:47 It was collective. It was organized.
00:24:48 --> 00:24:53 Racial violence, it was racial violence that entire communities participated
00:24:53 --> 00:24:56 in and celebrated and defended.
00:24:57 --> 00:25:02 You know, you had sheriffs, judges, ministers, teachers, journalists,
00:25:02 --> 00:25:06 mothers, fathers, children, they were all involved.
00:25:06 --> 00:25:13 And to acknowledge that history honestly would mean admitting that racial violence
00:25:13 --> 00:25:17 wasn't some kind of deviation from American civilization.
00:25:18 --> 00:25:26 It was part of how that civilization, how democracy was built and maintained in this country.
00:25:26 --> 00:25:31 And Black-on-Black crime is not a system of racial domination.
00:25:32 --> 00:25:39 Lynching was. It was violence that was designed to terrorize an entire population of people,
00:25:40 --> 00:25:48 to maintain white supremacy and to teach future generations whose power and
00:25:48 --> 00:25:52 whose lives were valued and whose lives were disposable.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:58 And so I think America finds it much easier to pathologize Black communities
00:25:58 --> 00:26:02 than to examine the historical production of white violence.
00:26:02 --> 00:26:08 And that's exactly the kind of conversation that Strung Up is demanding that we have.
00:26:08 --> 00:26:14 Yeah, I would say that the pathology,
00:26:14 --> 00:26:19 as you will, about black on black crime is still a derivative of,
00:26:20 --> 00:26:26 the systemic racism that goes on in the country, because not only in that descriptive
00:26:26 --> 00:26:29 part, but also as far as the conditions in which,
00:26:30 --> 00:26:34 you know, a community turns on each other.
00:26:34 --> 00:26:39 And you know it's human nature for people which is one of the things you stress
00:26:39 --> 00:26:42 it's human nature for people to
00:26:42 --> 00:26:48 have anger or violence or whatever is now restricted to a race but I think.
00:26:50 --> 00:26:54 When we deal with Black-on-Black crime or we deal with crime in the Black community,
00:26:55 --> 00:26:56 especially violent crime.
00:26:59 --> 00:27:06 It's definitely part of the system that we are in that is trying to eradicate
00:27:06 --> 00:27:08 Black bodies in whatever form.
00:27:08 --> 00:27:14 And if it's more convenient for Black people to take out other Black people,
00:27:14 --> 00:27:18 that's a victory for those who want to maintain white supremacy.
00:27:19 --> 00:27:22 That's just, you know, I don't have a PhD or nothing. I'm just an old politician,
00:27:22 --> 00:27:25 but that's just kind of the way I feel about it.
00:27:25 --> 00:27:31 No, I think you're absolutely correct. So, you know, again, what people are
00:27:31 --> 00:27:38 out here calling Black-on-Black crime can't be separated from the history of systemic racism.
00:27:39 --> 00:27:45 So when you concentrate things like poverty and underfunded schools,
00:27:45 --> 00:27:51 when you destroy economic opportunities for people, when you destabilize,
00:27:51 --> 00:27:57 families through mass incarceration, when you confine people to neighborhoods
00:27:57 --> 00:28:00 that have systemically been denied.
00:28:00 --> 00:28:09 Resources, you create the conditions in which violence is more likely to occur.
00:28:09 --> 00:28:16 And then America had the audacity to point to that violence as evidence that
00:28:16 --> 00:28:21 something is inherently wrong with Black people, rather than examining the conditions
00:28:21 --> 00:28:24 that this country deliberately created.
00:28:24 --> 00:28:30 So you can't manufacture conditions for social dysfunction and then blame the
00:28:30 --> 00:28:34 people trapped inside those conditions for the dysfunction.
00:28:35 --> 00:28:40 And that's one of, again, a connection that I try to make in Strong Up because
00:28:40 --> 00:28:44 lynching was designed not only to kill individual Black people,
00:28:44 --> 00:28:48 but to terrorize and destabilize entire,
00:28:49 --> 00:28:52 communities, to destroy their institutions,
00:28:52 --> 00:28:56 their banks, their stores, their businesses, their farming,
00:28:56 --> 00:29:04 you know, to suppress their economic independence and to enforce racial subordination.
00:29:04 --> 00:29:10 So we got to stop treating violence within Black communities as though it emerged
00:29:10 --> 00:29:12 in some kind of historical vacuum.
00:29:12 --> 00:29:17 The question isn't simply why violence occurs in Black communities.
00:29:17 --> 00:29:24 I think the question is what happens to communities after generations of organized
00:29:24 --> 00:29:27 violence have been inflicted upon them.
00:29:28 --> 00:29:32 Yeah. So that segues in this question. And in the book you write,
00:29:32 --> 00:29:35 the goal of lynching wasn't just to destroy the black body.
00:29:35 --> 00:29:39 It was to break the child who survived it. But it didn't always break them.
00:29:40 --> 00:29:42 That's why whiteness tries to catch us young.
00:29:43 --> 00:29:48 Because if it can rupture a black child, it can dismantle an entire community.
00:29:49 --> 00:29:54 Yes, you want to expound on that even further. I think you were touching on
00:29:54 --> 00:29:57 it before I asked that question, but kind of dive into that a little more.
00:29:58 --> 00:30:00 Yes. So...
00:30:01 --> 00:30:08 Lynching, again, wasn't just about killing an individual person who was hanging
00:30:08 --> 00:30:12 from a tree or bridge or some other public space.
00:30:13 --> 00:30:20 It was about psychologically destroying the people who survived to witness it.
00:30:21 --> 00:30:26 And children were especially vulnerable to that kind of terror because their
00:30:26 --> 00:30:29 brains and their nervous systems were under construction.
00:30:30 --> 00:30:34 And that's what made it so evil to bring children whose brains,
00:30:35 --> 00:30:40 did not yet have the cognitive capacity to recognize that what they were seeing
00:30:40 --> 00:30:45 was communal homicide, that it was lynching, that it was something evil and morally wrong.
00:30:46 --> 00:30:50 So think about what happens when, let's say, a Black child,
00:30:51 --> 00:30:57 sees a father or mother or brother, a neighbor lynched, that child learns that,
00:30:58 --> 00:31:05 the adults who are supposed to protect them are themselves powerless against white violence.
00:31:06 --> 00:31:11 They learn that their own bodies are not safe, that their communities can be
00:31:11 --> 00:31:18 invaded, that the law isn't necessarily going to offer any kind of protection.
00:31:18 --> 00:31:22 So the goal was not just simply to kill a Black person.
00:31:22 --> 00:31:30 It was to terrorize an entire generation into submission and to send the message,
00:31:30 --> 00:31:34 particularly to Black adults in communities when Black children were lynched, that.
00:31:35 --> 00:31:38 We can steal your future and you can't do anything about it.
00:31:39 --> 00:31:44 And childhood is where that kind of terror has,
00:31:45 --> 00:31:49 especially profound consequences because children, as I said,
00:31:49 --> 00:31:54 are still developing their sense of identity, safety, belonging,
00:31:55 --> 00:31:56 and possibility in the world.
00:31:57 --> 00:31:59 But here's another side of the story.
00:32:00 --> 00:32:05 While Black children were being taught to fear white power.
00:32:05 --> 00:32:08 White children were being taught to exercise it.
00:32:09 --> 00:32:14 So one group of children is being terrorized. Another is being socialized into,
00:32:15 --> 00:32:18 believing that domination is their birthright.
00:32:19 --> 00:32:24 And that's how white supremacy reproduces itself across generations.
00:32:25 --> 00:32:30 We have 60, 70 years worth of what we call historiography, books that have been
00:32:30 --> 00:32:35 written on the history of lynching and given us all kinds of explanations for
00:32:35 --> 00:32:38 why this type of racialized violence.
00:32:40 --> 00:32:44 Snuffed out the lives of thousands of people and had such long generational
00:32:44 --> 00:32:48 staying power. We've been told, you know, it was a racial terror tactic to keep
00:32:48 --> 00:32:54 Black people from voting, to keep Black people from becoming economic competitors.
00:32:54 --> 00:33:00 There was all this sexual hysteria around Black men and white women and girls,
00:33:00 --> 00:33:02 but people are children first.
00:33:03 --> 00:33:07 And so you don't get people who show up at a lynching to participate,
00:33:07 --> 00:33:12 to normalize, to cheer, to say nothing unless you destroy the child first.
00:33:13 --> 00:33:18 So lynchings attack Black childhood while weaponizing white childhood.
00:33:18 --> 00:33:23 And when you traumatize children, you don't simply, you know, just harm individuals.
00:33:23 --> 00:33:30 You threaten the emotional and psychological and the social foundations of entire communities.
00:33:31 --> 00:33:35 So is that how white supremacy destroys all American children?
00:33:36 --> 00:33:43 Yes, there's no child-friendly version of white supremacy. Yeah, yeah.
00:33:43 --> 00:33:48 Is the word testimony a fair representation of strung up?
00:33:49 --> 00:33:54 Say more about what you mean. So when I say testimony, it's like the way that
00:33:54 --> 00:33:58 you start off the book, you talk about your biological grandfather,
00:33:58 --> 00:34:05 and then you delve into stories about children who have been lynched and all that.
00:34:05 --> 00:34:08 So do you feel that your book...
00:34:09 --> 00:34:15 Is a testimony to the atrocities of lynching, as well as being a narrative,
00:34:16 --> 00:34:17 what's the term I want to use?
00:34:18 --> 00:34:24 Dissertation about the history of lynching from Europe all the way to now.
00:34:25 --> 00:34:33 Yes, I think testimony is, you know, a powerful word that you can use to describe, strung up.
00:34:34 --> 00:34:36 But I think I will go a bit further.
00:34:37 --> 00:34:44 I would say that this book is both a historical testimony, but also an indictment.
00:34:45 --> 00:34:51 So I begin with my grandfather's murder in 1969. He was shot,
00:34:52 --> 00:34:58 beaten, hogtied, and thrown in the swamps by white men who were never prosecuted.
00:34:59 --> 00:35:05 So I began there because, you know, even as a scholar, this history was not
00:35:05 --> 00:35:06 abstract to me, was real.
00:35:07 --> 00:35:10 And it is a history that lives in families.
00:35:11 --> 00:35:18 It lives in memory and the stories that get passed from one generation to the next.
00:35:18 --> 00:35:25 And then I bring readers into the lives of individual Black children whose names
00:35:25 --> 00:35:30 and experiences and suffering have too often, as I said before,
00:35:30 --> 00:35:33 been erased from the historical record.
00:35:33 --> 00:35:38 But Strung Up is a work of rigorous historical scholarship.
00:35:38 --> 00:35:45 It took me over 10 years to write this book, and it grows out of my dissertation
00:35:45 --> 00:35:49 that I started and completed when I was at Rutgers University.
00:35:49 --> 00:35:53 So it's grounded in more than a decade of archival research,
00:35:53 --> 00:35:56 and it brings history into conversation with.
00:35:57 --> 00:36:03 Developmental psychology, with neuroscience, with childhood studies,
00:36:03 --> 00:36:05 and the study of racial violence.
00:36:05 --> 00:36:09 So I would describe it as a work of,
00:36:09 --> 00:36:17 narrative history and a testimony to the atrocities of lynching and an intellectual,
00:36:17 --> 00:36:22 indictment of the society that made all of those atrocities possible.
00:36:22 --> 00:36:27 So I'm not simply just, you know, kind of bearing witness to what was done,
00:36:28 --> 00:36:32 you know, to Black children. I'm asking what happened to white children who
00:36:32 --> 00:36:35 were taught to participate in all of this.
00:36:35 --> 00:36:40 Because the children who were murdered tell us something about the victims of
00:36:40 --> 00:36:44 white supremacy, but the children who were taught to enjoy those murders tell
00:36:44 --> 00:36:47 us something about this country's future.
00:36:48 --> 00:36:52 Is there a correlation between corporal punishment and lynching?
00:36:53 --> 00:36:58 Say more about why you're asking that question. Well, I know that you have been
00:36:58 --> 00:37:00 an advocate about child development.
00:37:00 --> 00:37:06 And one of the things that you have really stressed is that Black families need
00:37:06 --> 00:37:08 to get away from corporal punishment.
00:37:09 --> 00:37:15 And you made, I can't remember where I saw it in the book, but it was,
00:37:16 --> 00:37:23 you were making a point when you were talking about the European culture and how they basically,
00:37:24 --> 00:37:29 whether it's through punishment or through fairy tales, they want children to
00:37:29 --> 00:37:32 be obedient and they want them to be silent.
00:37:32 --> 00:37:42 And so, do you think that origin is a connection to how, you know, lynching happens?
00:37:42 --> 00:37:47 Is it not only like you said, well, I guess the word would be justified,
00:37:48 --> 00:37:52 right? It justifies it in the mind. It conditions people to understand this
00:37:52 --> 00:37:56 is a part of, if you're not obedient, this is what happens.
00:37:57 --> 00:37:59 Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:38:00 --> 00:38:03 So, yes, to your question. And,
00:38:04 --> 00:38:12 I think this is one of the central arguments in Strung Up, that to understand
00:38:12 --> 00:38:16 the lynching of Black bodies, the lynching of Black children,
00:38:17 --> 00:38:25 in Jim Crow America, we have to look at the history of white body violence in Europe.
00:38:26 --> 00:38:31 We have to look at the history of corporal punishment, spectacle violence,
00:38:32 --> 00:38:38 public executions, people being drawn and quartered, witches being burned alive,
00:38:38 --> 00:38:42 the hanging of children, the beating, the ritualistic beating of children,
00:38:43 --> 00:38:46 under the guise of religion and,
00:38:47 --> 00:38:51 teaching children and socializing children into obedience.
00:38:51 --> 00:38:56 So we have to look at all of these punishment practices in Europe to understand
00:38:56 --> 00:39:00 the culture of violence that Europeans brought to America.
00:39:01 --> 00:39:09 For centuries, European societies treated the beating of children as a kind of moral obligation.
00:39:10 --> 00:39:16 So children were considered in the European framework inherently sinful.
00:39:16 --> 00:39:20 So you've got to beat the devil out of them or, you know, this idea that people
00:39:20 --> 00:39:23 are, you know, human beings are born in sin.
00:39:23 --> 00:39:29 Those are not African and indigenous ideas about how you come into the world
00:39:29 --> 00:39:30 or the nature of children.
00:39:31 --> 00:39:37 So they consider kids sinful and disobedient and need of correction.
00:39:37 --> 00:39:44 Religious teachings reinforce this belief that pain was necessary to produce
00:39:45 --> 00:39:47 obedience and moral instruction.
00:39:47 --> 00:39:50 You didn't reason with children. You didn't talk with children.
00:39:50 --> 00:39:52 You just, you beat the devil out of them.
00:39:53 --> 00:39:58 So think about what that does to a child's developing mind when you hit them.
00:39:59 --> 00:40:04 When you teach children that love and violence are compatible,
00:40:04 --> 00:40:13 that authority has the right to inflict pain, that obedience must be secured
00:40:13 --> 00:40:16 through coercion and fear.
00:40:17 --> 00:40:21 You're teaching them a particular kind of relationship to power.
00:40:22 --> 00:40:26 Those children grow up. They become parents.
00:40:26 --> 00:40:32 They become teachers and ministers and police officers and political leaders.
00:40:32 --> 00:40:38 And some of them carry those lessons into the institutions that they control.
00:40:38 --> 00:40:42 Now, consider lynching in America.
00:40:42 --> 00:40:48 So white supremacy operated through a similar authoritarian logic.
00:40:49 --> 00:40:52 Black people were expected to obey white authority.
00:40:53 --> 00:40:58 To not question it, to submit, to be obedient.
00:40:58 --> 00:41:05 And those who challenge the racial hierarchy could be subjected to spectacular violence.
00:41:06 --> 00:41:14 That, you know, the white child who was, say, beaten into obedience at home,
00:41:15 --> 00:41:20 could then grow up in a society that taught him that he had the right to demand
00:41:20 --> 00:41:23 obedience from Black people through violence.
00:41:24 --> 00:41:32 Think about Carmelo Anthony and the white youth teenager who felt entitled to
00:41:32 --> 00:41:38 try to make this Black boy obey, to get in his place.
00:41:38 --> 00:41:45 So I'm not suggesting that every child who experiences corporal punishment becomes violent,
00:41:45 --> 00:41:51 but the historical connection is definitely important because European traditions
00:41:51 --> 00:41:54 of authoritarian child-rearing help to
00:41:54 --> 00:42:02 normalize the idea that physical suffering could be righteous and corrective and necessary.
00:42:03 --> 00:42:09 And so you got to ask, you know, what happens when a culture teaches its children to,
00:42:09 --> 00:42:16 to submit to violence from those above them and then gives them racial permission
00:42:16 --> 00:42:22 to inflict the violence on people that are considered beneath them? Yeah, well.
00:42:24 --> 00:42:29 Doc, a lot I can say is I wish you were around when I was growing up because
00:42:30 --> 00:42:34 me and my friends, we, you know, we, you know, being intellectual adults,
00:42:34 --> 00:42:35 we'll say corporal punishment.
00:42:36 --> 00:42:39 My dad whooped my ass. That is the bottom line. He just beat the hell out of me.
00:42:40 --> 00:42:49 And, you know, and then I'm grateful that I didn't pass that on on my child. Right.
00:42:49 --> 00:42:55 I didn't I didn't inflict that kind. I think the worst I ever did was his mom
00:42:55 --> 00:42:58 had a little pink comb when he was a baby. And so if he did something,
00:42:58 --> 00:43:00 she'd tap him on the leg and all that.
00:43:00 --> 00:43:04 So I bought me the same kind of pink comb at the beauty store.
00:43:04 --> 00:43:07 So when he was with me, I had the little comb. So all I had to do was just show it.
00:43:07 --> 00:43:10 And he said, okay, he got one of those combs too.
00:43:11 --> 00:43:19 But, you know, to the extent of just like, you know, grabbing the biggest piece
00:43:19 --> 00:43:21 of leather you can and just whooping them down.
00:43:21 --> 00:43:26 Like my dad did me, I didn't do that. But, you know, and then in the black community,
00:43:26 --> 00:43:29 we kind of look at that as, well, that's tradition.
00:43:29 --> 00:43:32 You know what I'm saying? That's just, you know, that's the way it is.
00:43:32 --> 00:43:38 And then a lot of us in our generation kind of said, yeah, I don't know if we want to do that.
00:43:38 --> 00:43:43 I don't know what it is about us Gen X folks, but that was just kind of the
00:43:43 --> 00:43:49 direction we went. And it seems like that that was a positive thing to do.
00:43:50 --> 00:43:54 But then a lot of people should. Let me say this. All right.
00:43:55 --> 00:44:00 So I always say that whipping a Black child is one of the whitest things you
00:44:00 --> 00:44:07 can do to destroy a Black child physiologically, spiritually, emotionally.
00:44:08 --> 00:44:15 That is not us. When we look at our pre-colonial ways of being in kinship with
00:44:15 --> 00:44:19 our children, this type of ritualistic violence did not exist.
00:44:19 --> 00:44:25 This is a gift, and I say that facetiously, of colonialism and slavery.
00:44:26 --> 00:44:32 And so when I say it is one of the whitest things you can do to your Black child,
00:44:32 --> 00:44:34 I'm not talking about white skin.
00:44:35 --> 00:44:41 I'm talking about a historical system of power that made violence against Black
00:44:41 --> 00:44:46 bodies a legitimate way to demand obedience and to teach.
00:44:46 --> 00:44:53 Think about it. During slavery, the whip was the primary instrument of white supremacy.
00:44:53 --> 00:44:59 It was used to humiliate, to terrorize, to control, to break Black folks into submission.
00:44:59 --> 00:45:04 A slaveholder's message was quite simple. Your body does not belong to you.
00:45:05 --> 00:45:10 Your pain is mine to inflict and your obedience is mine to demand.
00:45:11 --> 00:45:15 So when we whip Black children today, and we are still whipping Black children,
00:45:16 --> 00:45:20 Black children still have, you know, yes, you're right.
00:45:21 --> 00:45:25 There are people who are starting to move away from that. And,
00:45:25 --> 00:45:31 when you look at national surveys on corporal punishment, you see more and more
00:45:31 --> 00:45:37 parents moving away from that type of parenting practice because we've got.
00:45:38 --> 00:45:42 More than 60 years worth of medical science literature that shows this is harmful
00:45:42 --> 00:45:49 for children's bodies, their brain development, their nervous system, their immune system.
00:45:49 --> 00:45:56 So there is some movement away, but Black children still suffer the highest rates of child abuse.
00:45:56 --> 00:46:02 And our child abuse fatality rates is at a historic high. They're as high as they've ever been.
00:46:02 --> 00:46:08 So we can't think that, you know, Gen Xers and millennials are completely abandoning
00:46:08 --> 00:46:10 these practices because they're not.
00:46:10 --> 00:46:16 But when we whip Black children today, and people still call it love and discipline,
00:46:17 --> 00:46:23 we risk reproducing the same logic of domination inside of our own homes.
00:46:24 --> 00:46:29 And this is what troubles me the most, Eric, is we tell Black children that
00:46:29 --> 00:46:32 the police have no right to brutalize them,
00:46:32 --> 00:46:38 that white people have no right to violate their bodies, that the world must
00:46:38 --> 00:46:40 respect their humanity.
00:46:40 --> 00:46:46 But then we turn around and teach them that the people who love them the most,
00:46:47 --> 00:46:52 have the right to hurt them. So my violence is the good kind.
00:46:53 --> 00:46:57 I think that's a profound contradiction. Now, I understand why corporal punishment
00:46:57 --> 00:47:00 became normalized in Black families.
00:47:00 --> 00:47:05 I understand the historical fear that a child's disobedience,
00:47:05 --> 00:47:09 especially in a racist society, could cost them their life. I get that.
00:47:10 --> 00:47:16 But we have to distinguish the intention to protect a child from the impact of hurting that child.
00:47:17 --> 00:47:25 The whip, the slave master's whip, was never an instrument of Black liberation.
00:47:26 --> 00:47:31 It was an instrument of Black submission and oppression.
00:47:31 --> 00:47:39 And I refuse to believe that we can beat freedom, dignity, and self-respect
00:47:39 --> 00:47:42 or liberation into a Black child.
00:47:43 --> 00:47:50 If white supremacy has spent centuries teaching Black children that their bodies
00:47:50 --> 00:47:56 are available for punishment, then one of the most radical things we can do is teach them,
00:47:57 --> 00:47:59 that their bodies belong to them.
00:47:59 --> 00:48:04 Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. Again, I wish you had talked to my dad,
00:48:04 --> 00:48:10 but anyway, let's go on. Let's get to, do you think our current political climate
00:48:10 --> 00:48:14 has been shaped by the epigenetic inheritance of trauma?
00:48:15 --> 00:48:21 Again, ask me why you're asking that question. So based on reading your book, um.
00:48:22 --> 00:48:34 There's to me, there's there's a connection between instilling a lack of empathy into white children.
00:48:35 --> 00:48:40 And I and one of the things that we have always been critical about this administration,
00:48:40 --> 00:48:46 is the lack of empathy or the appearance of a lack of empathy.
00:48:47 --> 00:48:52 And I think the way the political dynamics are shaping up in America now is
00:48:52 --> 00:48:57 that you have these incredible candidates on the Democratic side who come from
00:48:57 --> 00:48:59 all these different backgrounds.
00:48:59 --> 00:49:03 And when they talk about affordability, they're talking about.
00:49:04 --> 00:49:07 I understand that you are struggling.
00:49:07 --> 00:49:12 If you elect me, I'm going to do my best to alleviate that struggling.
00:49:13 --> 00:49:19 Whereas the Republicans have been depicted as these people that's like, everything is fine.
00:49:19 --> 00:49:22 The president is great. The country is hot.
00:49:22 --> 00:49:28 You're not struggling. So it's like, elect us to keep everything the way it is.
00:49:29 --> 00:49:35 So you talk about epigenetics one of my favorite terms and a lot of people don't
00:49:35 --> 00:49:37 know what that means it means that,
00:49:38 --> 00:49:43 basically your environment can get under your skin so all kinds of trauma,
00:49:44 --> 00:49:51 traumatic experiences and it can change the way your genes express themselves
00:49:51 --> 00:49:55 if you can your brain makes certain adaptations to your environment and you can,
00:49:55 --> 00:50:00 transfer you could transmit those adaptations across generations.
00:50:01 --> 00:50:06 So you think about a pregnant woman, three people share that pregnancy,
00:50:06 --> 00:50:12 the woman who is pregnant, the child developing in utero, and that unborn child's
00:50:12 --> 00:50:14 child who's there as a cell.
00:50:15 --> 00:50:21 So, yes, I think we have to seriously examine the possibility that our current,
00:50:21 --> 00:50:23 political climate reflects,
00:50:24 --> 00:50:31 centuries of inherited patterns of violence,
00:50:31 --> 00:50:41 of fear, authoritarianism, emotional conditioning within white American society.
00:50:42 --> 00:50:48 And I need to be careful about the science here So epigenetics,
00:50:49 --> 00:50:54 again, studies how environmental experiences can affect your gene expression, right?
00:50:54 --> 00:51:01 So we know that chronic stress and trauma can alter people's stress response
00:51:01 --> 00:51:06 system So how they respond to problems or people who are different or people
00:51:06 --> 00:51:09 who they're taught to fear,
00:51:10 --> 00:51:13 We have not established scientifically information.
00:51:15 --> 00:51:22 What we haven't established scientifically is that cruelty, racism,
00:51:22 --> 00:51:28 or an absence of empathy gets genetically transmitted from one generation to the next.
00:51:29 --> 00:51:35 There's no studies that have established that. But think about what happened
00:51:35 --> 00:51:38 to generations of white children in Europe.
00:51:39 --> 00:51:44 So they were beaten into obedience. they were raised in authoritarian religious
00:51:44 --> 00:51:51 cultures that taught them to fear punishment, to suppress their emotions, to submit to power.
00:51:52 --> 00:51:57 For at least 2 years of recorded history that we have, they witnessed public
00:51:57 --> 00:52:02 executions and torture and spectacles of human suffering.
00:52:02 --> 00:52:07 And those children grew into adults who raised other children.
00:52:08 --> 00:52:13 And when Europeans colonized America, their bodies, their psychology,
00:52:13 --> 00:52:21 their cultural traditions, they were perfectly primed to become people who would colonize the world,
00:52:21 --> 00:52:25 who would dispossess indigenous people, who could enslave millions,
00:52:26 --> 00:52:28 who could lynch thousands.
00:52:28 --> 00:52:31 They had the psychological framework to do that.
00:52:32 --> 00:52:41 They bought those traditions of punishment and domination with them. Now.
00:52:42 --> 00:52:47 Think about the developing nervous system, right? So children who experience
00:52:47 --> 00:52:51 chronic fear can become hypervigilant.
00:52:51 --> 00:52:59 They can become emotionally dysregulated, more reactive to perceived threats.
00:52:59 --> 00:53:06 So some might learn to suppress empathy as a means of psychological survival.
00:53:07 --> 00:53:12 Others may identify with the very authority that hurt them.
00:53:12 --> 00:53:18 So that's like kids who still have strong attachments to their abusive families
00:53:18 --> 00:53:22 because attachment is non-negotiable with children. They need to attach to their
00:53:22 --> 00:53:27 caregivers to ensure their survival.
00:53:27 --> 00:53:33 So we should ask whether those lessons help explain the political culture that
00:53:33 --> 00:53:36 we see today. And I think Absolutely, they do.
00:53:37 --> 00:53:41 Let's go back to January 6th to the famous insurrection, right?
00:53:42 --> 00:53:47 So people showed up, they stormed, white folks stormed the Capitol.
00:53:47 --> 00:53:52 They erected a gallows. They bought a guillotine. Like, how do you know how
00:53:52 --> 00:53:54 to do that in this century, right?
00:53:55 --> 00:54:00 They chanted about hanging the vice president. They wanted to lynch the vice president.
00:54:01 --> 00:54:07 And that wasn't just some kind of political disagreement. It was an expression of political rage.
00:54:08 --> 00:54:14 It was an expression of political rage in which the threat of public violence
00:54:14 --> 00:54:17 became a tool for asserting power.
00:54:18 --> 00:54:24 And look at the cruelty that has been, you know, normalized in political rhetoric.
00:54:25 --> 00:54:29 You know, the humiliation of vulnerable people, the celebration of punishment,
00:54:30 --> 00:54:35 the portrayal of, you know, empathy as like as weakness.
00:54:36 --> 00:54:43 Right. So I believe we need to investigate how centuries of authoritarian child rearing,
00:54:43 --> 00:54:50 and racial domination and public violence shape the emotional culture that America
00:54:50 --> 00:54:51 continues to inherit today.
00:54:52 --> 00:54:56 Yeah. All right. And I appreciate your time.
00:54:57 --> 00:55:02 I have a couple more questions I want to ask. How does courage,
00:55:02 --> 00:55:08 memory, audacity, and resistance play a major role in the Black American experience?
00:55:09 --> 00:55:14 Okay, that was a lot packed in there. Can you say that again? So courage. Memory.
00:55:14 --> 00:55:17 Uh-huh. Audacity and resistance.
00:55:18 --> 00:55:23 And resistance play a role in what was the rest of that? The Black American experience.
00:55:24 --> 00:55:29 Well, those are all the components that have kept us alive, right?
00:55:30 --> 00:55:33 You know, some people would look at.
00:55:36 --> 00:55:44 The Black American story as just this ongoing narrative about suffering and victimization, right?
00:55:44 --> 00:55:51 But I think what you just named are pillars of the Black American story.
00:55:51 --> 00:55:57 Core pillars. And I would argue that you can't understand Black survival.
00:55:59 --> 00:56:02 Without understanding how those four things work together.
00:56:03 --> 00:56:11 So if I can remember correctly, memory. So memory tells us what happened, right?
00:56:11 --> 00:56:16 It doesn't allow us to forget because denial and forgetting is how horrible
00:56:16 --> 00:56:18 things, horrible history repeats itself.
00:56:19 --> 00:56:25 Courage. Courage allows us to confront it, to confront it all, right?
00:56:26 --> 00:56:32 I think the third one was audacity. So audacity gives us, you know,
00:56:32 --> 00:56:37 permission to imagine something beyond all of this.
00:56:38 --> 00:56:42 And we really need to be audacious in this political moment while there's all
00:56:42 --> 00:56:46 of this conversation about saving democracy.
00:56:46 --> 00:56:50 I don't think Black people should be participating in that project,
00:56:51 --> 00:56:56 because if you really understand the history of democracy, you'll understand
00:56:56 --> 00:57:02 that democracy is not some pure form of government in which Black people were temporarily excluded.
00:57:03 --> 00:57:09 You know, our enslavement, extraction, abuse, dehumanization,
00:57:09 --> 00:57:14 murders provide the framework for democracy.
00:57:14 --> 00:57:20 So Black people need to have the audacity to, you know, imagine a different
00:57:20 --> 00:57:24 kind of future without this form of government.
00:57:24 --> 00:57:27 You need to be thinking post-empire, right?
00:57:28 --> 00:57:30 And I think the last one was resistance.
00:57:31 --> 00:57:37 Resistance is how we fight to make that imagination real.
00:57:38 --> 00:57:44 I mean, just look at our history. We've done those four pillars that you've named before.
00:57:44 --> 00:57:50 Think about the audacity of enslaved people who learned how to read when literacy
00:57:50 --> 00:57:52 could get them beaten or killed.
00:57:53 --> 00:57:59 Think about Black mothers and fathers who had the audacity to keep bringing
00:57:59 --> 00:58:05 life into this world. You know, W.E.B. Du Bois asked this famous ethical question,
00:58:05 --> 00:58:07 ought children be born to us?
00:58:08 --> 00:58:13 Do we have any right to make human souls face what we must face?
00:58:13 --> 00:58:17 And we've been answering his question ever since.
00:58:17 --> 00:58:23 We raised children to believe that they deserve freedom in a country that,
00:58:24 --> 00:58:27 you know, historically insisted that our children were property.
00:58:27 --> 00:58:33 Think about the courage of Ida B. Wells, who investigated lynchings.
00:58:34 --> 00:58:40 And when telling the truth could cost her her life's audacity.
00:58:41 --> 00:58:45 And I think about all the people that I write about in Strung Up,
00:58:46 --> 00:58:52 the children whose lives were snatched from the future, the families that mourned
00:58:52 --> 00:58:57 them, the communities that, you know, snuck children outside.
00:58:57 --> 00:59:04 Time to save their lives, that refused to let their names disappear from the historical record.
00:59:05 --> 00:59:11 I think about Fred Moore from Assumption Parish in Louisiana, whose parents,
00:59:11 --> 00:59:17 fled Louisiana after their teenage son was lynched and went to federal court
00:59:17 --> 00:59:20 and sued, won the first ever lawsuit,
00:59:20 --> 00:59:23 to get simple justice for their murdered child.
00:59:24 --> 00:59:30 So remembering them is itself an act of resistance because white supremacy depends,
00:59:31 --> 00:59:34 not only on violence, but also on forgetting.
00:59:35 --> 00:59:39 Black history is not simply a story of suffering.
00:59:40 --> 00:59:44 It's a history of people who refuse to surrender their humanity,
00:59:44 --> 00:59:49 even when the most powerful institutions in this country were organized and
00:59:49 --> 00:59:52 are still organized to destroy it.
00:59:53 --> 01:00:00 I think, Eric, there is something extraordinarily audacious about a people who
01:00:00 --> 01:00:02 survived the Middle Passage,
01:00:03 --> 01:00:12 who survived slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, segregation, and generations of state
01:00:12 --> 01:00:17 violence and still produced all kinds of genius.
01:00:18 --> 01:00:24 They still produced intellectual traditions, universities, HBCUs.
01:00:25 --> 01:00:32 Literature, music, political moments, and visions of liberation that not only
01:00:32 --> 01:00:35 just transformed the United States, but the world.
01:00:36 --> 01:00:42 Black Americans have never had the luxury of waiting around for America to develop a conscience.
01:00:43 --> 01:00:48 We had to become the conscience that America kept trying to silence.
01:00:48 --> 01:00:54 And that's why I decided to write Strung Up, because memory without those pillars,
01:00:55 --> 01:00:58 without courage, just becomes nostalgia.
01:00:58 --> 01:01:02 Courage without resistance is just, you know, a whole bunch of performance.
01:01:03 --> 01:01:10 Resistance without audacity, if you don't have that, you can't imagine a future
01:01:10 --> 01:01:14 beyond the conditions that we're fighting. Yeah.
01:01:15 --> 01:01:18 All right. I was going to ask you this question. You kind of answered it.
01:01:19 --> 01:01:23 So I'm going to skip that one and just go to the closing challenge,
01:01:23 --> 01:01:25 which is finish this sentence.
01:01:26 --> 01:01:27 I have hope because.
01:01:30 --> 01:01:36 I struggle with it because sometimes my cynicism pushes hope out the way.
01:01:36 --> 01:01:43 Because as a historian, I don't always believe that the archives owe us hope.
01:01:43 --> 01:01:47 I don't believe that dead children owe us hope.
01:01:47 --> 01:01:50 You know, we owe them responsibility.
01:01:51 --> 01:01:57 But I have hope because Black people have spent centuries surviving things that
01:01:57 --> 01:01:59 were designed to destroy us.
01:01:59 --> 01:02:05 And yet we're still here because our ancestors imagined freedom when there was
01:02:05 --> 01:02:09 no evidence that freedom was even possible.
01:02:10 --> 01:02:17 I think that every generation has produced people who are courageous enough
01:02:17 --> 01:02:21 to resist, audacious enough to dream.
01:02:22 --> 01:02:29 And determined to fight for a future that they might never live to see.
01:02:29 --> 01:02:33 And so I have hope. I know this is like a run-on sentence,
01:02:34 --> 01:02:40 but I have hope not because I believe America will suddenly develop a conscience,
01:02:40 --> 01:02:45 but because Black people have never waited for America to find one. Yeah.
01:02:46 --> 01:02:52 Well, Dr. Stacey Patton, first of all, I want to thank you for writing the book.
01:02:52 --> 01:02:56 I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. And I also want to thank you
01:02:56 --> 01:03:01 for taking me back to my days at Jackson State University, where I would ask
01:03:01 --> 01:03:05 a question of a professor and professor, Fleming, where are you going with that?
01:03:08 --> 01:03:11 I was like, I said, oh, wow, I'm in class again. This is great.
01:03:13 --> 01:03:17 But I greatly appreciate the time. If people want to reach out to you,
01:03:17 --> 01:03:19 if people want to get the book, how can they do that?
01:03:20 --> 01:03:24 So Strung Up, How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children,
01:03:24 --> 01:03:27 that is the book. It just came out this week.
01:03:28 --> 01:03:35 It is at all major booksellers, bookshop.org, Amazon, Beacon Press.
01:03:35 --> 01:03:38 So you can find it just about everywhere.
01:03:38 --> 01:03:46 And they can follow me on Facebook at Stacey Patton or on Substack, Dr. Stacey Patton.
01:03:46 --> 01:03:50 All right. Well, Dr. Patton, again, I enjoyed this conversation.
01:03:51 --> 01:03:56 I had to cut out some questions because I could talk to you for a long time.
01:03:56 --> 01:03:58 But again, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.
01:03:59 --> 01:04:04 And thank you so much for having me and for having the courage to have this conversation.
01:04:05 --> 01:04:08 Yes, ma'am. All right, guys, we're going to catch y'all on the other.
01:04:30 --> 01:04:36 All right, we are back. So I want to thank Dr. Stacey Patton for coming on the podcast.
01:04:36 --> 01:04:40 Please go and get this book Strung Up. It is incredible.
01:04:41 --> 01:04:47 Because like we said, it's not just a chronology of events.
01:04:50 --> 01:04:57 It is really a narrative dissertation on the mindset of why,
01:04:58 --> 01:05:06 people are conditioned or were conditioned to see black children being killed
01:05:06 --> 01:05:08 in such a brutal and atrocious way.
01:05:09 --> 01:05:16 And to some degree what we're seeing now with, you know, anything from Trayvon
01:05:16 --> 01:05:19 Martin to Timur Rice, to Michael Brown,
01:05:20 --> 01:05:25 you know, the list goes on and on about children being killed.
01:05:26 --> 01:05:31 I can't remember the young brother's name in Chicago, but he was only like, I think, 16. You know.
01:05:34 --> 01:05:35 It's...
01:05:36 --> 01:05:41 It's a very, very powerful book, and I suggest that everybody go get it.
01:05:41 --> 01:05:44 Dr. Padden is an incredible mind. Like I said in the interview,
01:05:44 --> 01:05:46 I felt like I was back in class.
01:05:47 --> 01:05:51 The way she was asking me to explain the questions, what my mindset was in asking
01:05:51 --> 01:05:53 a question, I thought that was great.
01:05:54 --> 01:06:00 But, you know, I think it's timely because we're talking about executions in
01:06:00 --> 01:06:04 the United States in the name of justice. And you heard me go on my rant about
01:06:04 --> 01:06:06 the death penalty last episode.
01:06:07 --> 01:06:13 By the way, the young lady who they botched twice in Tennessee,
01:06:13 --> 01:06:15 she is literally out of the hospital now.
01:06:16 --> 01:06:21 She had been unconscious in ICU, but she was released from the hospital.
01:06:22 --> 01:06:23 So she's going back to jail.
01:06:24 --> 01:06:29 And I want to say Pine, Christine Pine, if I'm saying her name wrong, y'all correct me.
01:06:30 --> 01:06:33 But the young lady, Pine or Pike, something like that.
01:06:33 --> 01:06:36 Anyway, she's out of the hospital,
01:06:37 --> 01:06:43 and the same day that she was released from the hospital, we get the word that,
01:06:44 --> 01:06:55 Nadal Hassan, who was the Army major who killed 12 people at Fort Hood and wounded 32 others,
01:06:56 --> 01:06:58 he was sentenced to death.
01:06:59 --> 01:07:04 And they want to do the firing squad for him. And then Pete Hegseff went as
01:07:04 --> 01:07:07 far as to say, yeah, we're going to live stream it, right?
01:07:07 --> 01:07:11 And I just talked to you last week about how in Saudi Arabia they literally
01:07:11 --> 01:07:15 have, it's like a national holiday when they execute somebody there.
01:07:15 --> 01:07:19 So I guess Hegseff wants to do the same thing. I guess none of the networks
01:07:19 --> 01:07:21 are going to broadcast it, so he wants to live stream it.
01:07:23 --> 01:07:26 And fortunately, there have been some people who are like, yeah,
01:07:27 --> 01:07:30 probably not. You probably don't want to do that. Right.
01:07:30 --> 01:07:35 But that ties into the discussion we were having in the mindset.
01:07:36 --> 01:07:46 Of the violent mindset that you equate punishment with maintaining white supremacy,
01:07:46 --> 01:07:48 maintaining control. Right.
01:07:48 --> 01:07:52 I mean, it just it just looped in perfectly. And then I was about to go down
01:07:52 --> 01:07:58 a rabbit hole, but I pulled myself out when I was talking about Navi Pillay,
01:07:59 --> 01:08:02 who is one of the judges, I guess, in international criminal court.
01:08:03 --> 01:08:08 She received the Nobel Peace Prize for years of work, but primarily she was
01:08:08 --> 01:08:11 Nelson Mandela's attorney at one point.
01:08:12 --> 01:08:20 And she was basically part of the group in the court that decided that what
01:08:20 --> 01:08:26 Israel was doing to the Palestinians in Gaza was equivalent to genocide.
01:08:27 --> 01:08:29 Which led to arrest warrants for Netanyahu.
01:08:30 --> 01:08:36 And in retaliation for her getting the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States
01:08:36 --> 01:08:39 government has decided they're going to sanction the International Criminal
01:08:39 --> 01:08:43 Court, which kind of explains because there were some people I wanted to come on.
01:08:43 --> 01:08:51 And I'm glad Sister Rob kind of did it in her capacity as working with the court.
01:08:51 --> 01:08:55 But, you know, there were some people that have been pushing for the International
01:08:55 --> 01:08:59 Supreme, I mean, criminal court for us because we signed a Rome Statute.
01:09:00 --> 01:09:04 You heard Professor Rob talk about that, refer to that.
01:09:06 --> 01:09:10 And the Rome Statute created that, I guess, in the early 2000s,
01:09:10 --> 01:09:13 maybe 2002, something like that. Well, we...
01:09:14 --> 01:09:18 We agreed to the treaty, but then we didn't sign off on the court.
01:09:18 --> 01:09:20 So we're not a part of that.
01:09:20 --> 01:09:27 So, you know, the United States, because we don't recognize it,
01:09:27 --> 01:09:33 you know, it's hard to enforce if they say we committed a war crime. Right.
01:09:34 --> 01:09:41 But Israel signed off on it. So now they're subject to the ruling of the court.
01:09:43 --> 01:09:50 And, you know, so, you know, I guess, you know, that's the only court,
01:09:50 --> 01:09:56 because of all this time that has happened, this decision happened a year or two ago, right?
01:09:57 --> 01:10:02 And, you know, when South Africa petitioned the International Criminal Court,
01:10:03 --> 01:10:07 against Israel, you know, that decision has been made.
01:10:08 --> 01:10:11 And that's why it's been a discussion in the United States, you know,
01:10:11 --> 01:10:14 for politicians to actually call it a genocide, because that's what the International
01:10:14 --> 01:10:16 Criminal Court said it was, right?
01:10:19 --> 01:10:24 So anyway, Ms. Pillay gets the award, and then all of a sudden now we're going
01:10:24 --> 01:10:27 to sanction the International Criminal Court.
01:10:28 --> 01:10:33 So what the sanction would mean is that if you are doing business with the court,
01:10:33 --> 01:10:39 say you're Staples or Office Depot, and you supply office supplies to the International
01:10:39 --> 01:10:42 Criminal Court, you can be sanctioned for that.
01:10:43 --> 01:10:46 Now, there's supposed to be like a 30-day window in there.
01:10:47 --> 01:10:54 So, you know, if you just made a transaction with them or a business deal,
01:10:54 --> 01:10:59 you got 30 days to finish up your business or to cancel whatever agreement you
01:10:59 --> 01:11:01 got or whatever, or the United States is going to,
01:11:02 --> 01:11:07 punish you economically for doing business with the International Criminal Court.
01:11:07 --> 01:11:12 That's pretty much all they can do is punish the people who are doing business
01:11:12 --> 01:11:17 with them, which means the National Criminal Court will use other countries,
01:11:18 --> 01:11:23 to get their supplies from instead of the United States.
01:11:23 --> 01:11:29 So if you're a U.S. company that does business in the National Criminal Court,
01:11:30 --> 01:11:34 then according to the Trump administration, you're going to be in trouble, right? Right.
01:11:36 --> 01:11:41 And I guess any business outside the United States, I don't know,
01:11:41 --> 01:11:43 they're not going to be able to do business in the United States? I don't know.
01:11:44 --> 01:11:48 It's just petty and stupid.
01:11:49 --> 01:11:55 And it seems like you have bigger fish to fry than being mad because for yet
01:11:55 --> 01:12:00 another year you did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. It went to somebody who deserved it, right?
01:12:02 --> 01:12:07 And I guess since there's no FIFA World Cup coming up, you're not going to get
01:12:07 --> 01:12:12 another FIFA prize, Mr. President. But, I mean, it is what it is.
01:12:12 --> 01:12:15 You know, you got half of your Congress is out for the election.
01:12:17 --> 01:12:19 The other half is not really doing much of anything.
01:12:21 --> 01:12:26 And gas prices are still high and food prices are still high.
01:12:27 --> 01:12:30 And people are making determinations about whether they're going to take care
01:12:30 --> 01:12:34 of their health or pay rent.
01:12:35 --> 01:12:39 So, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Mr. President. Sanction the International Criminal
01:12:39 --> 01:12:42 Court. That will solve all of our problems.
01:12:43 --> 01:12:46 And I hope your ego feels better because of that.
01:12:49 --> 01:12:56 But to be honest, I really don't care about the president's ego because he got
01:12:56 --> 01:13:02 on stage and called Letitia James a dog.
01:13:03 --> 01:13:09 Now you say, Eric, he has done that to all sorts of women, right?
01:13:09 --> 01:13:14 You know, he's called white women, piggy and, you know, stupid and all this
01:13:14 --> 01:13:20 other stuff. But it's like, You are 24 days, well, at that time.
01:13:20 --> 01:13:22 He was 24 days away from the election.
01:13:22 --> 01:13:26 You're literally less than a month away from the election.
01:13:26 --> 01:13:32 You're trying to say you want your name on the ballot, meaning you want people,
01:13:32 --> 01:13:38 when they vote, they're voting, even though you're not officially running,
01:13:38 --> 01:13:41 you want them to vote for the candidates that support you.
01:13:41 --> 01:13:45 You want them to vote Republican. Act like you're on the ballot. That's what you said.
01:13:47 --> 01:13:52 And I assume, because you seem to be proud of the fact that you had gotten a
01:13:52 --> 01:13:55 lot of black votes compared to other Republican presidential candidates in the
01:13:55 --> 01:13:59 past, that you want to continue to get black votes.
01:14:00 --> 01:14:06 Here's a trick. Stop calling black women dogs. How about that? Stop doing that.
01:14:07 --> 01:14:14 Stop being obstinate. Stop being an asshole. Can you do that for three?
01:14:15 --> 01:14:18 That's the only political advice I can give you, Mr. President.
01:14:19 --> 01:14:23 For the next couple of weeks, can you just stop being an asshole and act like the president?
01:14:24 --> 01:14:26 Act like you give a shit about the people here.
01:14:26 --> 01:14:32 If you want Republicans to have a chance, can you just stop being an ass for a couple of weeks?
01:14:33 --> 01:14:35 Is it possible? Is it in your DNA?
01:14:36 --> 01:14:40 Or as the term we used in the interview, your epigenetics. Is it possible?
01:14:41 --> 01:14:48 Or do you even give a shit about the people that are running under your banner? Right?
01:14:50 --> 01:14:53 Because it's pretty obvious you don't give a damn about any of us.
01:14:54 --> 01:14:58 You know, you only care about the people who are, quote unquote, loyal to you.
01:14:59 --> 01:15:02 So, you know, for those people that keep going to rallies and think that's okay,
01:15:02 --> 01:15:05 that's humorous and all that stuff, that's fine.
01:15:06 --> 01:15:10 But when people treat you a certain way, then you just going to have to suck that up.
01:15:11 --> 01:15:18 Because I'm sure if you go to New York wearing that MAGA hat or whatever and
01:15:18 --> 01:15:21 talking to it, yeah, you got the right for free speech. You got the right to
01:15:21 --> 01:15:24 express yourself, but so do those New Yorkers.
01:15:24 --> 01:15:29 And Leticia James' name has come up because she's been assigned to find out,
01:15:30 --> 01:15:36 what happened to that young woman in Cornell that got gang raped by a fraternity.
01:15:36 --> 01:15:42 Now, the university has banned a fraternity from the campus and all that stuff.
01:15:43 --> 01:15:49 And we're finding out from another case that happened at LSU that universities
01:15:49 --> 01:15:52 are not obligated to file criminal complaints on your behalf.
01:15:53 --> 01:15:57 So, young ladies, if something happens to you on a college campus,
01:15:58 --> 01:16:04 you don't just go to the campus police, whether they are sanctioned by the state or not.
01:16:05 --> 01:16:11 Don't just go to the campus police. Go to the police that has jurisdiction in
01:16:11 --> 01:16:17 the city or county that your college is in and file charges.
01:16:18 --> 01:16:22 Because that's the situation it was like. And then the reason why Letitia James
01:16:22 --> 01:16:28 was called in by the governor, Governor Hochul, was because the previous district
01:16:28 --> 01:16:31 attorney or prosecutor in that county where Cornell is,
01:16:32 --> 01:16:33 which is, I think, Ithaca, New York.
01:16:36 --> 01:16:40 Didn't do anything with the case when it was first brought to their attention.
01:16:41 --> 01:16:46 Wasn't enough. And I've heard some attorneys, and leave Sonny Holston alone,
01:16:46 --> 01:16:53 all Sonny Holston did was just kind of lay out why the attorneys may not have done their job.
01:16:54 --> 01:16:57 She was basically trying to keep them from getting impeached.
01:16:57 --> 01:17:02 It wasn't that she was defending the Cornell people, the young men who raped this woman.
01:17:03 --> 01:17:08 She was not doing that. She was basically defending the DA's office in their
01:17:08 --> 01:17:12 county, just going through the process of why they didn't push it to a grand
01:17:12 --> 01:17:17 jury and all that time. Sonny Halston has done law a lot longer than she's done television.
01:17:17 --> 01:17:20 So lay off of the system, right?
01:17:21 --> 01:17:28 And I can't tell people how to, you know, give knowledge, but she has knowledge
01:17:28 --> 01:17:31 in that situation. She has prosecuted sex crimes.
01:17:32 --> 01:17:37 So all she was trying to do was just lay out what that office was going through
01:17:38 --> 01:17:41 and why those guys are not in jail at this particular. That's all she was trying to do.
01:17:42 --> 01:17:45 She wasn't trying to defend them and she doesn't need me to defend her.
01:17:45 --> 01:17:47 But for those who are listening who are feeling some kind of way.
01:17:49 --> 01:17:53 It's okay. Sonny is not on the side of the rapist.
01:17:54 --> 01:17:57 The president, on the other hand, has him explaining to do.
01:17:57 --> 01:18:05 Not only did he say, I feel bad for those guys, right? I feel bad for those fraternity guys.
01:18:06 --> 01:18:10 But then he calls the state attorney general who has been asked to be a special
01:18:10 --> 01:18:13 prosecutor to find out what really happened.
01:18:13 --> 01:18:17 And if criminal charges need to be press. He calls her a dog.
01:18:18 --> 01:18:26 Mind you, it's the same state in which he was adjudicated as a sexual offender.
01:18:27 --> 01:18:33 And he still has got to pay money to this woman, E. Jean Carroll, for what he did to her.
01:18:34 --> 01:18:38 So you can say birds of a feather or whatever, that's fine. Just understand
01:18:39 --> 01:18:42 who's saying what and what their motivation is, right?
01:18:43 --> 01:18:49 But again, it gets back to my whole thing. If you want Republicans to have a chance,
01:18:50 --> 01:18:56 then just stop for a couple days, just a couple, stop being a complete asshole
01:18:57 --> 01:18:59 because that's what people are tired of.
01:19:00 --> 01:19:05 They are tired of looking at a president that doesn't give a damn about them,
01:19:06 --> 01:19:08 or at least acts like he doesn't, right?
01:19:09 --> 01:19:13 He can say, oh, I love America. It is great. We can have UFC.
01:19:15 --> 01:19:21 Formula One races in downtown D.C., and you've got fireworks and all this other
01:19:21 --> 01:19:23 fun stuff going on, concerts, the whole not.
01:19:24 --> 01:19:27 But you don't give a shit about the Constitution. The whole reason why we're
01:19:27 --> 01:19:31 celebrating is the fact that we wrote a document saying to an empire,
01:19:32 --> 01:19:35 we don't want to be a part of it anymore. We want to be Americans.
01:19:35 --> 01:19:42 We want to be our own separate nation, independent of the British Empire.
01:19:43 --> 01:19:47 And subsequently, years later, after we fought that army of that empire and
01:19:47 --> 01:19:52 defeated them, then we came up with a constitution, which you take an oath,
01:19:52 --> 01:19:54 Mr. President, to uphold.
01:19:54 --> 01:19:58 There's 35 words you say, and in those 35 words, you say that you're going to
01:19:58 --> 01:19:59 uphold the constitution.
01:20:00 --> 01:20:02 And you have done everything in your two terms.
01:20:04 --> 01:20:09 In your actions that say otherwise. The first term, you had some people that
01:20:09 --> 01:20:10 had the courage to tell you no.
01:20:11 --> 01:20:18 This time, you do not. And that has been an ultimate disaster to the people of the United States.
01:20:19 --> 01:20:25 It's been a disaster as far as affordability, which you somehow think that's a hoax.
01:20:25 --> 01:20:28 People are struggling to pay gas, but that's not real to you.
01:20:29 --> 01:20:32 People are struggling to buy food, but that's not real to you.
01:20:32 --> 01:20:35 People are struggling to get health care, but that's not real to you,
01:20:35 --> 01:20:38 right? That's a hoax to you.
01:20:39 --> 01:20:43 And I guess it would be a hoax if every day I'm making money off crypto or wherever
01:20:43 --> 01:20:46 other investments you got and your kids are making money and all that, that's great.
01:20:47 --> 01:20:50 Which, by the way, why was Hunter Biden a problem?
01:20:51 --> 01:20:53 Is it because he didn't ask for enough money?
01:20:55 --> 01:20:59 I guess he only got a million dollars to sit on that board in Ukraine or whatever,
01:20:59 --> 01:21:00 barista, whatever it is.
01:21:01 --> 01:21:04 Did he not ask for enough money? Was that the insulting thing?
01:21:04 --> 01:21:08 Because your children are doing the exact same thing you accused Hunter of doing,
01:21:08 --> 01:21:10 and they're making billions of dollars doing it.
01:21:11 --> 01:21:13 Your son-in-law's even in on a game. He's not even a blood relative.
01:21:13 --> 01:21:15 He married into the family. He's making money.
01:21:16 --> 01:21:22 But you had a problem with Hunter Biden, so is the issue. Your name is not Trump. Baron Trump.
01:21:24 --> 01:21:28 He's just going to college making money, which, by the way, I found out you're
01:21:28 --> 01:21:30 going after Harvard because they didn't let him in.
01:21:31 --> 01:21:33 Right. Wow.
01:21:35 --> 01:21:39 You know, is that the problem that Hunter didn't ask for enough money or he
01:21:39 --> 01:21:43 didn't get enough money or he's not a Trump? So it's OK.
01:21:44 --> 01:21:48 I'm just trying to figure out why you and your Republican friends made a big deal about him.
01:21:49 --> 01:21:52 And which is another reason why the American people are frustrated with the
01:21:52 --> 01:21:57 Republicans, because you said, no, that was wrong for Biden to use his daddy's
01:21:57 --> 01:21:59 name to get that board position.
01:22:00 --> 01:22:06 Right. But you say absolutely nothing about the president sitting in office
01:22:06 --> 01:22:11 right now making money and his family's making money at the same time.
01:22:11 --> 01:22:15 He didn't say nothing when he bought the old post office during the first term
01:22:15 --> 01:22:19 and turned into a hotel where every person that wanted to meet with the president
01:22:19 --> 01:22:21 had to stay at. He didn't say nothing then.
01:22:22 --> 01:22:26 But we elected Joe Biden and we figured, OK, we're turning the corner.
01:22:26 --> 01:22:32 Then we put the vice president up to run. And then y'all went back to the guy,
01:22:33 --> 01:22:34 that was doing the corrupt stuff.
01:22:35 --> 01:22:38 And now he has no filter whatsoever.
01:22:39 --> 01:22:43 So people are mad at you all, Republicans, for not standing up to the guy while
01:22:43 --> 01:22:45 he's been doing all the dirt.
01:22:46 --> 01:22:51 That's why you can spend $325 million in Texas and still get your brains beat out.
01:22:51 --> 01:22:57 Because not only do you have that stink on you, but the fact that you put up
01:22:57 --> 01:23:00 the worst possible person to run for the United States Senate.
01:23:00 --> 01:23:03 You had that position already. You had a U.S. senator there.
01:23:03 --> 01:23:07 He wanted to stay. And y'all ran him out.
01:23:07 --> 01:23:13 Not that I was in love with that guy, but you ran him out to put the worst possible
01:23:13 --> 01:23:15 candidate of all the candidates.
01:23:16 --> 01:23:19 And that's saying something because you got Mike Rogers in Michigan and you
01:23:19 --> 01:23:21 got Mike Collins in Georgia.
01:23:22 --> 01:23:23 Ken Paxson is worse than them.
01:23:25 --> 01:23:28 And you can spend all that. He's going to get his brains beat up.
01:23:29 --> 01:23:33 Guaranteed. And you're still putting money in there. $325 million down the toilet.
01:23:34 --> 01:23:40 Meanwhile, the guy in Kansas is in trouble. Meanwhile, the guy in Alaska is in trouble.
01:23:41 --> 01:23:43 Meanwhile, the lady in Mississippi is in trouble.
01:23:44 --> 01:23:48 Right? The national news is now interviewing the Democratic nominee for the
01:23:48 --> 01:23:50 U.S. Senate in Mississippi.
01:23:51 --> 01:23:57 That's how bad it's gotten for y'all. Nothing is a lot for you all because you
01:23:57 --> 01:24:02 did not do anything to stand up to your president and defend the American people.
01:24:03 --> 01:24:08 Now, in districts that may be incredibly gerrymandered where there's no chance
01:24:08 --> 01:24:12 for a Democrat to get elected, you'll have some seats in the House.
01:24:13 --> 01:24:16 But you're not going to be in the majority. They asked Mike Johnson,
01:24:16 --> 01:24:19 the worst speaker of the House in the history of the United States.
01:24:21 --> 01:24:24 If y'all lose, if you lose the house, whose fault is it?
01:24:25 --> 01:24:29 Oh, well, will you take responsibility for it? Well, you know,
01:24:29 --> 01:24:31 it's just people have been lied to.
01:24:32 --> 01:24:37 Really? So when they went to the grocery store and saw that their cereal went
01:24:37 --> 01:24:42 up from $2.50 a box to $4 a box, that was a lie to them?
01:24:43 --> 01:24:47 When they saw that gas was at $2.50 a gallon, now it's shot up to $4.
01:24:48 --> 01:24:52 In some cases, in some states, $6. That was a lie.
01:24:53 --> 01:25:01 Right. When you cut all those people out of the what you call the Obamacare,
01:25:01 --> 01:25:05 the Affordable Care Act protection, that was a lot of them.
01:25:05 --> 01:25:08 Now you want to give them ninety dollars.
01:25:10 --> 01:25:11 Cover their expenses.
01:25:13 --> 01:25:18 That was a lie. Seemed pretty factual to me because that's actually what's happening.
01:25:18 --> 01:25:22 When you decided to put a tariff on every country in the world,
01:25:22 --> 01:25:25 even countries that don't even have people, they got penguins.
01:25:26 --> 01:25:32 You didn't think that was going to affect the price of clothes and electronics in America?
01:25:33 --> 01:25:37 People are scraping together money right now to go to a movie,
01:25:37 --> 01:25:44 to go to a ballgame just because they want to get away or pay for some streaming service.
01:25:44 --> 01:25:50 They're trying to adjust their budgets because they need an escape from the
01:25:50 --> 01:25:55 day-to-day pain. And by the way, they're working their butts off.
01:25:56 --> 01:26:00 The people that have jobs are working their butts off, but they're not getting any pay raises.
01:26:01 --> 01:26:04 And whatever pay raises they're getting, it's not matching the rate of inflation,
01:26:04 --> 01:26:08 which is about three and a half percent.
01:26:09 --> 01:26:12 If we talked about that last episode, it should be at two or below.
01:26:13 --> 01:26:17 If you want people to start thriving, if you want the economy to grow,
01:26:18 --> 01:26:21 right? But you're wondering why.
01:26:22 --> 01:26:25 I will be surprised if any Republican wins.
01:26:26 --> 01:26:29 That would be my surprise. And then some folks were saying, well,
01:26:29 --> 01:26:33 the girl in Minnesota was in trouble. Then they ran a poll and showed that this
01:26:33 --> 01:26:40 Flanagan and she's beating her like by 10 points, 52-42.
01:26:41 --> 01:26:47 So yeah, that myth that Minnesota's in play because of the Somali daycare fraud
01:26:47 --> 01:26:51 crisis that this little YouTube guy created, right?
01:26:52 --> 01:26:58 True, there's been some fraud there and Tim Walsh laid himself on the sword,
01:26:59 --> 01:27:02 and said, I won't run for a third term because of that. We could have done a
01:27:02 --> 01:27:04 better job in monitoring that. I.
01:27:05 --> 01:27:10 If black people are not saying I'm voting Republican, then that fraud thing
01:27:10 --> 01:27:13 is overblown because most of the children that they're going to be at those
01:27:13 --> 01:27:19 daycares are going to be black children because those are the daycares they can afford.
01:27:20 --> 01:27:25 I mean, it's real talk. So if black folks are not out in the street saying get
01:27:25 --> 01:27:29 rid of the Democrats, the Democrats are going to beat the brakes off of folks in Minnesota,
01:27:30 --> 01:27:35 because outside of the Twin Cities, You got farmers who are struggling.
01:27:37 --> 01:27:42 In Arkansas, there's a woman who had to sell her farm that had been in her family
01:27:42 --> 01:27:44 for generations. She had to sell it.
01:27:45 --> 01:27:50 And she's running for the U.S. Senate. So Tom Cotton, you would think he would
01:27:50 --> 01:27:52 be sensitive to agriculture, right?
01:27:53 --> 01:27:57 He's in trouble. And she took the positive route. Some people say,
01:27:57 --> 01:27:59 well, I don't know if I'd run for office.
01:27:59 --> 01:28:02 There are contemporaries of hers that are no longer with us.
01:28:03 --> 01:28:04 They committed suicide.
01:28:05 --> 01:28:10 That's how serious this is. And Mr. President, you can call it a hoax all you
01:28:10 --> 01:28:13 want to, but tell it to the families of those who lost their loved ones because
01:28:13 --> 01:28:15 they were about to lose their farm.
01:28:16 --> 01:28:20 Talk about that to them, to their face, and see what kind of response.
01:28:20 --> 01:28:22 You thought you had some hecklers at your last rally.
01:28:23 --> 01:28:27 Ladies and gentlemen, enough of this foolishness.
01:28:28 --> 01:28:32 If you are a state that has early voting, if the early voting hasn't already
01:28:32 --> 01:28:36 started, get ready for it to come up within the next week or so.
01:28:36 --> 01:28:39 Early voting here in Georgia starts next week.
01:28:39 --> 01:28:44 Get to get to your early voting place as possible. If you're in a state where
01:28:44 --> 01:28:49 you rely strictly on mail in ballots, as soon as you get your ballot, fill it out, mail it in.
01:28:51 --> 01:28:57 This election tamper-proof from the desperate folks on the other side, the Republican side.
01:28:58 --> 01:29:03 So if the National Guard or the FBI or anybody else shows up trying to intimidate
01:29:03 --> 01:29:08 people from voting, everybody will have already voted by Election Day because
01:29:08 --> 01:29:10 they can't intimidate you during early voting.
01:29:11 --> 01:29:14 They don't have the manpower, the resources to spare to do that.
01:29:15 --> 01:29:20 Their only hope is to terrorize people that wait till Election Day to vote.
01:29:21 --> 01:29:25 And if they do, stand 10 toes down and go in there and vote anyway.
01:29:26 --> 01:29:27 And vote them jokers out.
01:29:28 --> 01:29:33 Put a Congress in there that'll shut off these folks' money until they do right.
01:29:34 --> 01:29:38 Because that's what Congress can do. Beside past laws, they appropriate money.
01:29:38 --> 01:29:42 If you shut off it and they love money, they love it.
01:29:43 --> 01:29:47 They love money. They don't care what the Bible says. They don't care what St.
01:29:47 --> 01:29:50 Augustine says. They love it. They love money.
01:29:51 --> 01:29:53 You cut their money off, they'll get their act together.
01:29:54 --> 01:29:57 But you got to have a Congress elected to do that.
01:29:58 --> 01:30:03 You got to have a majority in the Senate, and you got to have an overwhelming majority in the House.
01:30:04 --> 01:30:10 Cut their money off. They'll act right. They'll make sure them body cameras are on those ICE agents.
01:30:12 --> 01:30:19 Stop prosecuting people from 1973. They literally want to prosecute people who
01:30:19 --> 01:30:24 are dead because Richard Nixon, they say, got a bad rap.
01:30:25 --> 01:30:29 I don't know. He might want to go after 3M because they're the ones who made
01:30:29 --> 01:30:32 the tapes that Nixon recorded on, right?
01:30:33 --> 01:30:35 3M? The audio tapes?
01:30:36 --> 01:30:39 That's what put Nixon in trouble. His own mouth.
01:30:40 --> 01:30:43 It was a slam dunk for the prosecutors. They didn't even have to go to trial
01:30:43 --> 01:30:48 that his other Republican colleagues said, Mr. President, you need to resign. That's what happened.
01:30:49 --> 01:30:54 And I was a child, and I know that's the facts. But these grown folks don't
01:30:54 --> 01:30:55 seem to understand that.
01:30:56 --> 01:31:00 So now they want to dig up the bones of dead people and prosecute them.
01:31:00 --> 01:31:07 Insanity, pettiness, foolishness. The American people are tired of that.
01:31:10 --> 01:31:14 You're going to have two preachers in the United States Senate because of the
01:31:14 --> 01:31:19 foolishness of the Republican Party, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Warnock.
01:31:20 --> 01:31:24 You're going to have farmers elected to the U.S. Senate. You're going to have
01:31:24 --> 01:31:27 lawyers. You're going to have doctors. You're going to have medical doctors
01:31:27 --> 01:31:31 because of the foolishness the RFK is doing. Now you're going to have real medical
01:31:31 --> 01:31:33 doctors in the United States Senate, not Mr. Cassidy.
01:31:34 --> 01:31:37 Because Mr. Cassidy, if you were a real doctor, you never would have voted for
01:31:37 --> 01:31:39 RFK. I don't care what the president said.
01:31:40 --> 01:31:44 You know health. You went to medical school. You were a practicing doctor.
01:31:44 --> 01:31:46 Same with Marshall in Kansas.
01:31:47 --> 01:31:51 No way. If I took the Hippocratic oath, there's no way I could vote for Robert
01:31:51 --> 01:31:54 F. Kennedy to be over health and human services.
01:31:54 --> 01:31:56 Damn my political future.
01:31:57 --> 01:31:58 I'm a doctor by training.
01:32:00 --> 01:32:05 Politics was my public service. My ultimate service to the community is to be
01:32:05 --> 01:32:10 a doctor, and there's no way in good conscience I could vote for somebody like him, who's crazy.
01:32:11 --> 01:32:19 He let the President of the United States threaten to tear down his uncle's memorial to his face.
01:32:20 --> 01:32:27 Foolishness is over. November the 3rd. First Tuesday in November in 2026.
01:32:28 --> 01:32:30 The foolishness is over. This is for good now.
01:32:31 --> 01:32:35 This is not about ideology and all that stuff.
01:32:36 --> 01:32:40 It's about preserving America.
01:32:42 --> 01:32:48 And, you know, a comment was made about saving democracy. Let me say this from my end.
01:32:49 --> 01:32:52 As somebody that went through the democratic process to get elected.
01:32:53 --> 01:32:59 We can develop a better system. We can develop better priorities.
01:33:00 --> 01:33:05 But if you understand it, you know the history of this country.
01:33:05 --> 01:33:11 When black people were running the South, the greatest years of progress the
01:33:11 --> 01:33:15 South ever had without enslaving other human beings.
01:33:16 --> 01:33:21 The reason why public schools caught on fire in the United States is because
01:33:21 --> 01:33:28 black folks in the South made it a constitutional right for kids in their states
01:33:28 --> 01:33:30 to get public education.
01:33:31 --> 01:33:37 And now it's the norm in this country because also in that discussion of,
01:33:38 --> 01:33:43 mentioned that we're the conscience of this nation. And that's why they don't like to hear from us.
01:33:43 --> 01:33:47 But we're the conscience of the nation, especially black women,
01:33:48 --> 01:33:50 which goes all the way back to my point.
01:33:51 --> 01:33:55 If you want black folks to vote for you, stop calling their women dogs.
01:33:56 --> 01:34:01 Stop disrespecting black women. Stop disrespecting women. Stop disrespecting Americans.
01:34:02 --> 01:34:09 Period. The audaciousness, the unmitigated gall for P.
01:34:09 --> 01:34:14 Hegseth to step on the boat, the USS Abraham Lincoln, after he just left them
01:34:14 --> 01:34:21 out there and then had the nerve to say, okay, we're going to have a calisthenics challenge? Really?
01:34:22 --> 01:34:28 And even through all the stuff that they've been through, they still outperformed,
01:34:28 --> 01:34:31 the Secretary of Defense on his own challenge.
01:34:32 --> 01:34:37 Because they were built for that. Don't need to take advantage of them.
01:34:37 --> 01:34:38 They were built for that.
01:34:39 --> 01:34:44 And I can't think of no better way to show their disapproval of the secretary
01:34:45 --> 01:34:48 than to show him up in his own calisthenics challenge.
01:34:48 --> 01:34:53 I think that was great. I salute each and every sailor that.
01:34:54 --> 01:35:00 Accepted the challenge and put him to shame after he abandoned you for months,
01:35:01 --> 01:35:04 no port call for months. That's insanity.
01:35:05 --> 01:35:10 That's foolishness. And the American people are tired of it. They are.
01:35:11 --> 01:35:16 Even people who I would never want to be seen in public with,
01:35:16 --> 01:35:22 but God knows fate is tricky. They get it.
01:35:22 --> 01:35:26 When they're getting on their podcast and saying the only people that are saying
01:35:26 --> 01:35:29 the things that American people need to hear are the Democrats.
01:35:30 --> 01:35:37 Supported the president in the previous election, people are tired of the foolishness.
01:35:38 --> 01:35:43 Now, usually what happens is the American people have their say in the midterms.
01:35:43 --> 01:35:47 They elected Congress. They want to finish out that particular president's term.
01:35:47 --> 01:35:54 And that president kind of either shuts it down or does better, right?
01:35:54 --> 01:35:57 They're going down a bad path. They should just stop. If they.
01:35:59 --> 01:36:04 Some progress to happen, they get some help. And it's usually from some unlikely
01:36:04 --> 01:36:08 sources, but the people remember that they voted for that president.
01:36:09 --> 01:36:13 So now what's going to happen is that the American people are just going to
01:36:13 --> 01:36:15 shut this Trump administration down.
01:36:16 --> 01:36:21 And either they conform or they're just going to fade into oblivion.
01:36:22 --> 01:36:29 Let me tell you how bad it is. Donald Trump said, I want my face on Mount Rushmore.
01:36:30 --> 01:36:35 Folks that the geologists at Mount Rushmore said that if we put your face on
01:36:35 --> 01:36:37 Mount Rushmore, the whole mountain will crumble.
01:36:38 --> 01:36:41 That's not a political statement. That's just facts.
01:36:42 --> 01:36:48 But it would be indicative of what this man and this administration has done
01:36:48 --> 01:36:55 to the country, the pride, the bravado, his ego.
01:36:55 --> 01:36:57 He's put that before all of us.
01:36:58 --> 01:37:00 And it's time to send him a message.
01:37:01 --> 01:37:05 And the most peaceful way, the most constructive way to do that,
01:37:06 --> 01:37:11 is to vote everybody that has kissed his butt, everybody that has been silent
01:37:11 --> 01:37:18 of his foolishness, everybody that has allowed or been complicit in his corruption. Send them all home.
01:37:18 --> 01:37:23 It's time out for the conspiracy theorists. It's time out for the kooks and the crazies.
01:37:24 --> 01:37:28 It's time for the folks that belong in Arkham Asylum to go back in.
01:37:29 --> 01:37:33 The American people, government is not entertainment.
01:37:33 --> 01:37:38 Government is supposed to be boring because all they're supposed to be doing is looking out for us.
01:37:39 --> 01:37:42 It's not supposed to be exciting. Campaigns can be exciting,
01:37:42 --> 01:37:44 but governing, not so much.
01:37:46 --> 01:37:49 Is a debate about whether we're going to do this or do that.
01:37:50 --> 01:37:59 Not how much money the president made today. Not what constitutional violation he's enacted.
01:38:00 --> 01:38:03 It's supposed to be boring because they're supposed to be looking out for us.
01:38:03 --> 01:38:08 While we're working in our jobs and living our lives, the people we elect to
01:38:08 --> 01:38:10 handle the business are handling the business.
01:38:11 --> 01:38:15 And every now and then they'll say, hey, look, we need your input on this, okay?
01:38:16 --> 01:38:18 Or hey, are y'all really thinking about doing that?
01:38:21 --> 01:38:25 Let me express some concerns about it. Let me give you my two cents.
01:38:26 --> 01:38:27 That's not supposed to work.
01:38:28 --> 01:38:32 We're not trying to see politicians on the cover of People Magazine and Us Magazine
01:38:32 --> 01:38:37 and GQ Magazine and Sports Illustrated Magazine and, you know,
01:38:38 --> 01:38:41 Time Newsweek. Okay, because you're the president. We get that.
01:38:42 --> 01:38:46 But everything else? No. We don't want to see your name in variety.
01:38:47 --> 01:38:54 Now that it has something to do like the merger with Paramount and Warner Brothers,
01:38:55 --> 01:38:56 because the government has to prove that.
01:38:57 --> 01:39:03 But all those other foolishness, we don't need to be live streaming executions.
01:39:04 --> 01:39:08 We should have executions, but if we're going to have them, we don't need to live stream that.
01:39:09 --> 01:39:13 We'll take your word for it that you did your job because that's what we elected people to do.
01:39:14 --> 01:39:19 That's it. We want to see what's going on in Congress. C-SPAN is free.
01:39:20 --> 01:39:24 We don't need to see foolishness on the national news every day.
01:39:25 --> 01:39:30 We need people to be engaged, not only in the electorate, but we need people
01:39:30 --> 01:39:33 to be engaged that are elected.
01:39:34 --> 01:39:40 If your job description for a communications director is longer than the job
01:39:40 --> 01:39:45 description for a legislative policy director, You don't need to be in Congress.
01:39:46 --> 01:39:48 It's time out for foolishness.
01:39:49 --> 01:39:51 And black people, please vote.
01:39:52 --> 01:39:55 You know, I'm encouraging every American to vote, but black people vote.
01:39:58 --> 01:40:00 Well, my vote don't count. Well, it won't count if you don't vote.
01:40:01 --> 01:40:03 That'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:40:04 --> 01:40:09 Well, my guy didn't win last time. Okay. You root for a sports team.
01:40:09 --> 01:40:12 Some of y'all root for sports teams that haven't won a game in years.
01:40:13 --> 01:40:16 Some of you root for sports teams that haven't won a championship in years.
01:40:16 --> 01:40:17 But you still root for them.
01:40:17 --> 01:40:21 You'll still watch the games. You'll still go to the game if you've got time
01:40:21 --> 01:40:24 and money. Do the same with your voting.
01:40:25 --> 01:40:29 At all levels. The local level. State level.
01:40:30 --> 01:40:34 Skip the county. County level. And at the federal level, vote.
01:40:35 --> 01:40:38 Takes five minutes of your time, especially if you do early voting.
01:40:39 --> 01:40:42 If you wait till election day, set aside an hour.
01:40:43 --> 01:40:47 You'll sit and watch a football game for two, baseball game for two,
01:40:47 --> 01:40:49 basketball game for an hour and a half.
01:40:50 --> 01:40:52 Set aside some time to vote.
01:40:53 --> 01:40:56 Because, see, if you hit a pothole on the way to the game, you're going to be mad.
01:40:57 --> 01:41:02 The traffic lights are not working. When you're on the way to the game or to
01:41:02 --> 01:41:05 the bar, you're going to be mad. That's government.
01:41:06 --> 01:41:10 If you're disabled and somebody didn't pull into the disabled parking space,
01:41:11 --> 01:41:13 you're going to be mad. But that's government.
01:41:14 --> 01:41:18 But so are gas prices, so are food prices, everything.
01:41:19 --> 01:41:22 The government is involved in everything, including sports.
01:41:23 --> 01:41:26 They literally have a bill that they're waiting for the House to come back in
01:41:26 --> 01:41:32 to vote on to deal with college sports that passed a Senate that will impact,
01:41:32 --> 01:41:35 your favorite college team one way or the other.
01:41:36 --> 01:41:39 If you're cool with that, go and support the people that voted for that.
01:41:40 --> 01:41:43 If you're against that, vote against the people that voted for that.
01:41:44 --> 01:41:49 But vote. It's important. Because again, that's the only way we can stop the
01:41:49 --> 01:41:54 foolishness. It's the only way we can attempt to get back to normal.
01:41:56 --> 01:41:59 All right, guys. That's all I got. Thank y'all for listening. Till next time.