PBD Podcast - Bob Woodson | PBD Podcast | Ep. 317
Episode Date: October 19, 2023Bob Woodson Sr. is an American civil rights activist, community development leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center, a non-profit research and demonstration organization that s...upports neighborhood-based initiatives to revitalize low-income communities. Check out The Woodson Center: https://bit.ly/3ZZPTio Follow Bob Woodson on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3tFbbWs Purchase Bob's book "Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers": https://bit.ly/409HXer Purchase Bob's book "Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles": https://bit.ly/409HXer Connect With Experts On Minnect: https://bit.ly/48Yu1Yy Visit our website: https://valuetainment.com/ Subscribe to our channel: http://bit.ly/2aPEwD4 Subscribe to:  @VALUETAINMENT  @vtsoscast  @ValuetainmentComedy  @bizdocpodcast Tom Ellsworth - @bizdocpodcast Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/ Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I
Did you ever think you would make it
I feel I'm so close I could take sweet the theory I know this life meant for me
Yeah, why would you bet on the lieth when we got bet David?
Yeah, why would you bet on the lieth when we got bett David? Value payment, giving values, contagious, this world on your pernores.
We can't no value to hate it.
I'd be running home, you look what I've become.
I'm the one.
You know, it's amazing.
There's so many different issues that's going on right now in the world, in America,
whether it's Israel, Palestine, whether it's Ukraine, Russia, whether it's LGBTQ and schools, whether it's...
There's so many different things we can talk about.
I am interested in people that want to educate and tell the
history and encourage people to be self-reliant, self-help,
stand up for yourself, responsibility, do something about it.
Messages like that, that challenges you.
By the way, those are the messages that are bifurcumst
annoying messages.
That's what my dad told me.
I never liked it.
That's when my drill sergeant told me in the army.
I never liked it.
That's when my boss would tell me to say,
get off your tail, have a better attitude,
be energized, be excited.
You can do something about it.
It was so annoying where you want to say,
but you don't understand the life I live.
You don't understand what my parents went through
with the words. You don't understand what it is to be born
and run and live in a refugee camp.
We stop feeling sorry for yourself
and do something about your life.
That message is absolutely a message we need more of today.
And our guest today has the moral authority
to give that message.
I watched him on Dr. Phil and I just got to tell you,
I'm getting the chills right now just thinking
about the message he gave.
I got so excited about it, I said,
I have to meet this man.
And I talked to Robert, I said,
Robert, let's figure out a way
if we can get this gentleman to come down here
and share us history because he'll say it himself
and it's not hard to find.
He wasn't born in the 80s, not in the 70s,
not in the 60s, not in the 70s, not in the 60s,
not in the 50s.
My dad's 1942.
He wasn't even born in the 40s.
He's born in 1937.
April 8th.
My dad's April 10th.
I like respect a lot of April babies.
And this man's seen it.
He's lived it.
I believe he was, you know, in a good-sized family
when his father died when he was, I want to say, nine years old,
and a lot of different experiences.
So, you know, to properly introduce Mr. Woodson,
is a civil rights activist, community development leader,
author and founder, the president Woodson Center,
a nonprofit research and demonstration organization
that supports a neighborhood-based initiatives
to revitalize low-community, low-income communities.
The Woodson Center has supported a wide range of initiatives to revitalize low-income communities
to give you stats on what they've done.
His program has helped more than 2,600 community groups in 39 states.
And these initiatives have included after-school programs, job training programs, and programs
to reduce crime and violence.
Woodson has also been a vocal critic
of government programs that he believes perpetuate poverty.
He's the author of several books,
a recent one called Red, White, and Black,
Rescuing American History from revisionists
and race hustlers, which we will put in the description below
and in a chat for you to be able to order
with that being said, Mr. Bob Woodson,
it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
No, thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, when I watch you talk and you give the message,
it fires me up.
And by the way, I want the audience to hear this
for us to mentally get into the right message.
So the podcast, Bob, can you play this clip, Rob?
From here's Mr. Bob Woodson on Dr. Phil,
there's an exchange of ideas,
there's some discourse taking place.
And then you say this,
and this goes absolutely viral
all over social media, go ahead and play, Rob.
You dissected, you will find there were about 3,700 freebacks
or only 12,000 slaves. Black slaves, the question is,
do the descendants of those free blacks
who own black slaves, do they pay?
Blacks really benefited more the first hundred years
after slavery, we have in the last 50 years.
I was born in 1937 during the Depression.
Everyone in my small low income black community,
98% of the households had a man and a woman raising children.
Elderly people could walk safely in that community
without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren.
Never heard a gunfire during that time.
Never heard of a child being shot to death in the crib. But there are
50 children today who have been shot and killed in our cities. If you talk about remedies,
we've got to look beyond saying that every solution has to have a winner and a loser.
That blacks can only benefit if whites lose. We have to be to find more than just victims of oppression.
So you have to realize this is a very difficult message
to give to date.
It's not a popular message by academia.
It's not a popular message by mainstream media.
It's not a popular message in a lot of different places.
And some may even say, I've never heard of Mr. Bob Woodson.
So for those who have not heard your story,
obviously I haven't, many people have,
but those who haven't, if you don't mind, actually,
you can go all the way back from being a kid growing up,
wherever you grew up, experiences that led you to believe
in self-help, self-reliance responsibility.
If you don't mind walking through that,
that would be wonderful.
No, well, thanks.
No, as you said, I was born in 1937, right into the Depression.
Loan, family youngest of five children.
My dad was a veteran of the First World War and was injured and really died as a result
of delayed trauma that he experienced, but he died when I was nine,
even my mother with a fifth grade education
and five children to race.
But in this community,
it was low income segregated community,
all blue-collar people,
but we had a loving community.
And there were men who stepped up
and became surrogate fathers to me. All of
the children could read. The segregated schools at the third grade plays were held at night,
so parents could attend. And on a back table, there were lunchpales. That's the level of community that we had in the midst of segregation in the North.
And so it meant that growing up in a situation where you've got challenges within your family,
you have to rely upon your community.
And I did.
There were civic organizations, the Elks.
I could go on a list of organizations when father and son, Banquets, a man would come
by from the lodge
to pick me up and take me to a banquet.
And so there was strong community at that time.
And my friends were more, I understand gangs
because when you have a family like that,
you must rely on your peers.
And I did.
And fortunately, I was blessed with having
the kind of values from that community.
I selected good friends.
One of them, the public may know,
he was Gordon on Sesame Street, Matt Robinson.
Wow.
He was the first black on Sesame Street.
Oh, wow.
That's...
His, he died a few years ago,
and I presided as funeral in Hollywood, but his daughter was Holly
Robinson, the actress.
Married to Rodney Peek, he was the only one who came out.
But the point is that we had a really safe, secure community.
I've never heard a gun fire.
Not all of us were poor.
We had holes in our shoes, but everyone did.
You just got a good piece of cardboard and cut it out. Not all of us for poor, we had holes in our shoes, but everyone did.
You just got a good piece of cardboard and cut it out, put it in.
But as a result of that, I grew up like that.
My friends were year older, and so they graduated from high school.
And I quit school at 17 because you can't grow up in a neighborhood unaffiliated so I went into the military at it even at that time you couldn't grow
unaffiliated what were the gangs back then it wasn't really tough gangs or
You could walk out and let late at night without fear
But you still there were problems got it there were challenges. And so I went into the military
in 1954 to the Air Force where I confronted segregation in Mississippi, but the
Air Force was a place that put this all together. And so I learned camaraderie.
I heard my first southern accent when I was 17. I thought blacks were a majority until I got to basic training.
And my squadron was 80, and it was only eight blacks.
I said, wow, what's going on in this country?
But it was a great experience, and I got out.
But what my mother did was radical
that helped me understand when I was
came home after a year and I came from Florida. I was in the space program.
And I spent my money that I was going to use to go home and I went to my mother's
I need coffee at home. She said you need to get back the best way you can.
It took me three days to hitchhake a thousand miles.
Wow.
But you know, I was angry at her for two months.
But from that day forward, I said,
whenever I go anywhere, I have to have the means to return.
And it developed a very strong sense of knowing
that my destiny is determined by what I do for me under those circumstances.
Now, was mom like that with everybody? All five of you?
Yep.
And what did the other four end up doing?
There were blue collar people. They're all all live successful lives, head families,
raised children. Respect.
Respect. We were in a community, but the
pervasive values and the
commit nothing to do with race.
You know, I keep telling people when
whites were at their worst, we were at our best.
And so, but I became active in the civil
rights movement, but I challenged the
civil rights movement.
I left the movement on the issue of
fourth busing for integration.
I did not believe, I believe the movement on the issue of fourth busing for integration. I did not believe I believe the
opposite of segregation was desegregation, not integration.
And so and but also we led demonstrations for against a pharmaceutical
company when they desegregated that hired nine black PhD chemists.
And we asked these professionals to join us. They refused. And I
realized that it wasn't enough to have the doors of opportunity open,
that you have to have the means to walk through that door.
And the civil rights movement was not interested in that.
And so I left the civil rights movement,
following the death of Dr. King,
and began to work on behalf of all low-income people,
regardless of their racial ethnicity.
And I have, and that's the biggest challenge we face today.
It is not a race problem in America.
When you say that, a lot of people would disagree with you
and they would say, how could you say that?
You know, maybe you're, you're,
maybe it wasn't back then,
but you don't know the America today, you know?
You don't know what's going on with the challenges they're facing and the level of racism
they're experiencing today in a marketplace because maybe you are disconnected, kind of
like how you were when you thought everybody was black until you joined the Army and you
realized that your unit only ate were black.
What do you say to the people that literally 100% disagree with you and they say there
is racism today.
It is a challenging time today.
What do you say to them?
I say look at the evidence.
Look at the evidence.
You know, a lot of people are like the farmer
that came to the creek where it was like,
coming, it was three feet high
and moving it about 20 miles an hour.
And he forced him to mule in it.
They were swept down the creek.
The year later, he came to the sand crossing,
this time it's only six inches.
The mule refuses to go in because the mule had good memory
but poor judgment.
Conditions were not like they were back in segregation
when I was locked up twice in Mississippi.
Conditions have changed, but many of us have,
but again, look at the evidence when whites
were at their worst, we were at our best. As I said, in 1930 to 1940, when segregation
and racism was enshrined in law, blacks had the highest marriage rate of any group in society.
Elderly people could walk safely in those communities without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren.
So let's look at the evidence.
When we refuse access to hotels, we built our own hotels, financed by our own means.
The Wala Haji in Atlanta, the Carverton Calvert Hotel in Florida, the St. Charles in Chicago, the St.
Teresa in New York. I could go on and on when we were denied access to colleges, we built
our own. In fact, our small business formation rate was higher than whites in the 20s, and
that really determines any group's participation in the economy.
It is not what government does for you or what white people do.
In fact, I think those who continue to push this race agenda are Eurocentric.
They assume that the destiny of blacks is determined by what white people do.
That has never been the case.
We close the education gap in the South
between 1920 and 1940.
How do we do it?
Julius Rosenwald, the CEO of Sears,
came together with Booker T. Washington
and he put up $4 million.
The black community matched it with 4.8 million.
We built 5,000 schools to teach X-Laves how to read and write.
And as a consequence of that study
that in between 1920 and 1940,
the education gap in the South between whites
and blacks was three years,
eighth grade for whites, fifth grade for blacks.
Within 20 years, that gap closed within six months.
There were four five high schools
at the turn of the century in New York, Baltimore, Washington,
Atlanta, and New Orleans.
They had used textbooks, overcrowded classrooms, half the budgets of white schools, but every
one of those schools outtested every white school in those cities.
If we were able to close the education gap
between 1920 and 1940, through self-determination and hard work,
if we were able to outtest a white schools in those cities,
then the question is, in those same schools today
in Baltimore, for instance, where
they run by blacks, not a single student could read a grade level or perform a grade level.
And so how can you say that it is racism that is the cause of the present day challenges, when under segregation we achieved.
One other example we gave from our studies.
In 1943, blacks were prohibited
from being naval officers.
Eleanor Roosevelt was swayed her husband to train him,
so they selected 16 black college
educated men for training, the Naval Academy, not the Academy of Naval
Training Center. The Navy says, ah-ha, we are going to give these black cadets
in eight weeks what we give white cadets in 16. So they wash out. When these
brothers found out what the deal was,
they covered the windows in their barracks
and stayed up all night and studied.
And when they were tested, they scored in the 90th percentile.
Wow.
So then they said, well, they cheated.
So they tested them individually.
They scored in the 93rd percentile.
13 of them eventually-
Unbelievable.
13 of them eventually became naval officers. They call them
the Golden 13. You can look at that.
That test, the test scores today has
never been bettered. So again, I
responded people with evidence, the
incarceration rights of rates of blacks from
a turn of the century up to the 60s was under 25%.
Incarceration was under 25%?
Incarceration was under 25%.
Where were we at today?
It shot up to, I think it was like 90,000 blacks were in jail in 1960.
That went up to 900,000. 10,000 blacks were in jail in 1960. That went up to 900,000 over the next 30 years.
Why do you think that is?
What happened?
What changed?
In the 19, again, in our studies, red, white, and black,
we looked at the experiences.
We looked at six major plantations to find out what the
state of marriage was of slaves.
75% of those slaves had a man and a woman raising children.
The nuclear family continued to prosper in the face of segregation for 100 years, but
all of that changed in the 60s with the poverty programs.
Lyndon Johnson?
Yes.
Johnson came in.
And what happened was the social scientists
who were pushing socialism on America,
Howard and Piven at Columbia,
said, if you disconnect work from income,
then school dropout rates will increase drug addiction,
all of those things.
And so what the government did was offer welfare
as an alternative to a man in the house.
We relaxed the rules.
We separated work from income.
And as a consequence, that was supported by the Black Power Movement.
Also, the Women's Movement was anti-man.
And so you have a combination of social policy,
but policy alone wouldn't have done it.
The federal government enticed welfare,
the black to co-on welfare.
Blacks, welfare used to be stigmatized in the black community.
But the federal government began to interpret it as
reparations and from as entitlements.
They withdrew any requirement that you should tell the
paternity of the father, paternity in cases of pregnancy.
All of these, so that more blacks
were, came into the welfare system
in the first five years of the 70s.
And millions flooded into the system
at a time when the unemployment rate was under 4%.
So it is the combination of social policies
plus the civil rights movement morphed into
a raised grievance industry and many of those civil rights leaders became mayors and elected
to public office where 70 and we spent 22 trillion dollars during that period on programs
to aid the poor where 70 cents of every dollar went not to the poor, but those who served the poor.
What percentage of it? 70 percent.
70 percent of the 22 trillion went to the people that served the poor.
They asked which problems are fundable, not which problems are solvable.
So in other words, a friend of mine described way, he's having a cabin built in Wisconsin.
His electrician is a drunk and the carcass is an alcohol,
has one leg.
His value, their value to him is their skill.
But if he was a disability's director,
their value to him would only be the disability.
So we have a situation where we have really created a commodity out of poverty.
And by the way, when you're saying these numbers, what it makes me think about is this.
So why, if you go back 1940s, you know, the only 4% of kids that were born in America are two single mother.
That increased from 4% to 40%.
And the numbers are staggering where it's at today, specifically in 70% in blacks and
different communities.
Why do you think this happened? And you know, if you were to say, well, here's
how we can get away from this, this is how to fix it. So one, why did it happen? How do
we get here? Two, how would you fix it? Well, first of all, we got here because we had
the social policy that incentivized single parents. In other words, I had a young couple. She said that my husband, my husband's a
janitor and I'm a secretary, and he lost his job. She said, I applied for welfare as a
married couple and they refused me. But she said, if I was a single mother, then I can get help.
And so you really provide a distant send of for marriage,
and you wonder why you get it.
You get more of what you reward,
unless of what you punish.
And so over those decades, we have punish single parent households.
The more you work, the more you work, the more, the more you work, the more
the perverse incentives for you. If I work and get a raise, I'm going to get a lose
child care. So that's why we have a system that disincentivizes work and marriage.
And you had certain politicians that would use that,
but they would spin it for votes.
Oh, we're paying poor women to have kids.
You would hear that in political speeches.
I'm gonna change that.
We're paying poor women to have kids.
And it made it sound like that the poor women were the problem.
Right.
That they're just taking advantage of it.
You know, when you go back and what you're talking about, I think it's important to look at Lyndon Johnson.
And remember, when they were saying the great society, it was great society for who?
Because the government was very, very, our government has been actually pretty bad at getting Americans to move and change.
They're pretty good at getting us upset, but they really don't get Americans, if you look
at history, to really move and change.
Our government has never really led.
But our government has been excellent at being a catalyst of where they want us to go
and to let us go.
And to your point, they create this catalyst, you know, what they say with the explosive.
The explosive isn't the problem. It's the catalyst you put in the explosive. So always
to keep those guys separate, government has been the catalyst. And what you're talking
about is what they did is they knew what they were doing. And they knew that these things
would be a catalyst of changing behavior, because they couldn't stand at the pulpit of government
and demand that you change. But they could put things out there and sit back and watch.
And that's what you're saying.
Right, but I also realized that the questions,
what are solutions?
If you say that 70% of those families are raising children
that are not dropping out of school,
it means 30% or not. What we do at the Woodson Center is we go into low income communities.
We go into the homes of the 30% to find out what is going on in those households.
These are people are raising children that are not dropping out of school.
They're not in jail, they're not on drugs.
They're confronted with the same economic circumstances.
But and so the question is, what is it that's going on there?
That's not close.
Success.
So that's why I fall conservatives also,
is that they have been preoccupied
when they come to poverty, but only studying failure.
So Charles Murray and somebody else,
all they do is talk about, okay,
if people are welfare, let's take the way
to perverse incentives, I'm for work requirements,
I'm for drug testing, but you can't stop there.
What we do at the Woodson Center is that
we go look for capacity.
And so many of the people in the 30%,
we need to hold them up and take what's works for
the 30% and expand it to the 70% and that's what we do.
But it's a moral and spiritual crisis and it is not an economic and social crisis.
But policy, be the left the right of center, takes very little into account of restoration,
moral redemption, faith, and many of our groups
who have been able to survive under the worst of stake
is because of their faith.
But the whole issue of faith is not even a factor
in supporting people's restoration.
We have gone into some of the most drug-infested
crime-ridden neighborhoods where there were 53 gang murders in the 5th grade black area in 2 years, 25 years ago in DC.
We supported five young men who were ex-offenders, who came to Christ and became redeemed.
But they had the moral authority and the social trust of their peers. And so they went into these neighborhoods
and brought the leadership of these kids who were doing destructive things. And they
became agents of remoralization of these kids. And it's just like in the marketplace, only
3% of the people are entrepreneurs, they generate 70% of the jobs, right? Well, a lot of these organizations are social entrepreneurs.
It only takes a small number of them.
If you can change them and make them an agent of a restoration,
they can change a whole community.
And we found that to be the case where in this community called Benning Terrace, by just going in and reaching 16 kids
who were leading predators
and changing their values and their attitudes.
How do you do that?
By witnessing to them.
You take some man who has been in jail,
who has been faced all the challenges
from an abuse household and saying,
you are not defined by the worst of what you were.
You and I'm a witness that you don't have to stay there
because you've been there.
Where did the self-help mindset come to you?
Where did the self-help mindset come?
By looking at what we did in the past.
In other words, what I've done by learning
if our people could in a past. In other words, what I've done by learning if our people could
in a face of slavery and discrimination, build families and restore their communities,
then all we've got to do is go back and take the values that served the interests of our
people then and apply them today. In other words, taking old values and apply them to new realities
with the consequence that you can.
But a witness is more powerful than an advocate
and experience will always prevail against an argument.
I debated this with Hawk Newman,
so on YouTube for one hour.
I didn't argue with him. I confronted his proposition with my facts
and saying, if we were able to learn and close education
gap under segregation, why can't we do it today?
And so that's what you have.
But we don't realize the power of somebody
coming to a young man or young woman
who has been engaged in anti-social behavior. Supply them with a mentor that witnesses to
them to say, why don't you use your skill and talents to rebuild the community and not
tear it down?
I want to play this clip to you. Did you ever have any interactions with an LK or Malcolm X?
Yes, I did.
I met Dr. King.
In fact, he came to, I lived,
I did my civil rights work in Westchester, Pennsylvania,
that's the home of Baird Rustin.
And so Rustin would bring Dr. King to town,
to bring the media,
then they would focus on our local issues.
And you met him face to face?
Oh yeah, yeah, I had.
And what was it like when you met Dr. King?
Just a wonderful experience.
He was the one who said that we must reach down
into the deep dark regions of our soul and sign
and ain't got only emancipation proclamation.
Malcolm X said the same thing.
He said, I destiny is never determined
by what an oppressor does or does not do. He said, I destiny is never determined by what an oppressor does or does not do. He
said, I, I, I, destiny is determined by what we do. Frederick Douglass said the same thing.
But, but that, but those messages are being spawned today. They're not, you know, these
are two heroes to two different sects of the African-American community sometimes and
some the same. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's spun in a different way
where it's still coming more from the victimhood mentality.
It's coming more from the entitled mentality,
not coming from the fact that we can stand up
and do something about it.
I want to play this clip to you by Malcolm X.
It's just audio.
The videos and out there, just purely audio.
And I want to get your thoughts on this.
Go ahead and play this.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way. The liberal is more deceitful,
more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who
has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor. And by winning the friendship and support of the Negro,
the White Liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or weapon
in this political football game that is constantly raging
between the White Liberals and the White Conservatives.
The American Negro is nothing but a political football,
and the White Liberals control this ball through tricks
or tokenism, false promises of integration and civil rights. In this game of deceiving
and using the American Negro, the White Liberals have complete cooperation of the Negro Civil
Rights Leader, who sell our people out for a few crumbs
of token recognition, token gains, token progress.
Now, when you hear this, this speech is given in the 60s,
maybe late 50s and 60s, because he died,
I wanna say February of 1965, MLK died, Dr. King died April 4th of 68, right?
So this message is being given at a time where it's like, wait a minute, were white liberals
the same then as they are today?
Have the men at it for this long of a time where even Malcolm X said this?
How do you process what Malcolm X just said in this message?
I totally agree and it's been the foundation of everything that I have done since then.
That's what drove me.
I go further by saying that many of the black elected officials and others commit treason,
treason against their own people by using race to deflect attention away from their own
failures.
In Baltimore, with Freddie Gray was killed,
that's when to deflect attention away
from why our blacks failing in school systems
and in cities run by their own people for the past 50 years.
If racism were the issue, then tell me why are they failing?
But the answer that they give is,
well, the police are agents of white supremacy.
There's always a racial deflection
that prevents them from taking responsibility
or why they are running their systems.
But many of them are hypocrites
because they don't live by the same rules.
Elna Holmes, Norton, Jesse Jackson, June, all of them sent their children to private schools
in Washington while opposing school choice for poor black people.
So you have this contradiction, but race really is being used as a shield and a sword, a shield
to deflect attention away from their failure to address
problems that were promised by the civil rights movement.
How can you manipulate for this long go?
One may ask, you know, how can you minute 2012, 93% of African Americans voted Democrat?
2016, 89% of African Americans voted Democrat.
2020, 87%.
So, 93, 89, 87 voted Democrat. 2020, 87%. So, 93, 89, 87 voted Democrat.
And, you know, Malcolm X said this at the year that he said,
this is 60 something years.
How can you manipulate an entire voting block
and entire community for this many decades?
Because race is a very emotional, deeply emotional issue.
It's like the state of Israel is to Jews, it's an emotional issue, like abortion is to
the right to life. And so it is a deeply, and they know it, and they do
manipulate it that long. But also it's because Republicans have
not been competitive either. When they were, they were successful.
Look at Dick Reardon in in in LA. He was the first
Republican mayor in 35 years. How did he do that? Dick Rearland planted charredably two years before
he harvest politically. He went to the low income Hispanic community and said, what is it that you need
to rebuild your community? And he brought some of his friends to the table, and they built a state-of-the-art facility
so that those communities could engage in after-school activities to teach English.
It was only after he planted chariotably that those liberal democratic leaders embraced
Dick Reader and he became the first Republican mayor
in 35 years and when he got re-elected by 60% of the demographic.
DeSantis in 2018 got elected because of the black vote.
He ran against Gillam, right? Andrew Gillam. Andrew Gillam. But the
Senate is only one by 32,000 votes because 100,000 low income black parents voted
because of his position on choice and education. They voted for him. Even though
Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey was brought into campaign for Gillam, so you
have a hundred thousand blacks voting against Obama and voting against Oprah to elect because
they made a decision based upon the content of the issue.
And not enough Republicans did what the scientists did.
And when they do, I think they will be competitive.
But apathy is what's keeping blacks, also, if you look in some of those
higher crime neighborhoods, in the mayor's race, only 8% to 10% of the people vote.
Because there's such a deep apathy in those communities.
But low income blacks are a sleeping giants.
They're gonna wake up one day soon.
Low income blacks gonna wake up one day.
Wake up and realize how they're being pimped
and how they're being used.
What's the tipping point?
Wouldn't he step in for them to wake up?
There's been six years.
The violence that is you're saying now a lot of unrest,
80% of black Americans poll
do not support defend the police, 80%, but you won't know that by looking at the media.
And so, and 60% of blacks do not believe that racial discrimination is the biggest barrier
to their flourishing.
And so the challenge that we have is to,
and what we're doing at the Woodson Center
is giving voice to those people.
We have about a couple thousand women who
are voices of black mothers united.
These are women moms who lost children to urban violence.
They're coming, the leading cause of death
for black kids is homicide.
And Silicon Valley is suicide with Mount Teenager.
And an Appalachia is prescription drugs.
Well, the Woodson Center brought together representatives
from those three communities.
We call it the mother's consortium.
And it was just common ground there.
We were united.
And so what we must do is we must deratialize race.
But it's not enough to talk about what you're against.
You gotta talk about what you're for.
We should be for the saving of the children's lives.
And so what we're doing at the Wichinson
is mobilizing mothers from those three communities
to come together and say that we must do everything we can
to fill the hole that's in the hearts of our children
that causes them to devalue their life to the point
where they're willing to take their own
or take someone else's.
It's different sides of the same coin.
So did you find out what the reasoning was for homicide, for suicide, and for prescription
drugs?
Yes, emptiness.
Emptiness.
Emptiness.
Emptiness.
Well, you keep telling, when you, the also, when you keep broadcasting to people that they
live in a country that despises them, particularly the low income blacks, that they live in a country that despises them, particularly
the low income blacks.
That you live in a country that despises you like the 1619 project said that racism defines
all whites of villains and victimizers and they're privileged.
That message gets communicated to blacks that perhaps the reason that this is happening
is because they are unworthy. So the message of unworthiness comes from the very
people who are supposed to be social justice warriors and you say to a child
in a white child that you are devalued because you're privileged and you are
no presser. Those are very dangerous
messages that were sending to our children when we're saying to them that they live in
a country that despises them because they're white and derives them because they're black.
That's a very poisonous message. And that's why at
the Woodson Center, we're doing everything we can to mobilize that consensus among the
people suffering the problem. Go ahead Tom. Sir, did you ever come to be acquainted with
the Reverend Evie Hill? I know Evie Hill very well. Yep. And what he did in downtown Los
Santos, just to the open door. It was very interesting.
And I'm sure you know this.
We'll sit for the audience.
The Reverend Evie Hill pointed out that,
every young man, regardless of race,
needs love, discipline, and respect,
starting at age 11 to 18,
for them to mature as young boys,
to here come the hormones,
and to truly mature into young men.
And he warned that in his analysis of the terrible,
what was going on in his backyard,
and for people who don't know Evie Hill,
Church Open Door, it's down there just blocks away
from USC, this great pillar of learning
and South Central Los Angeles,
which has got all the reputations
that the Crips and Bloods went on.
And he pointed out that the gangs perfectly fill the hole that a fatherless home does with love, discipline and respect.
Because in the gang, I will love you and kill for you, and I will defend you with my own
life. Discipline. You will not break our laws or rules or you will be killed. And then respect
comes from negative accomplishments. Here you go. You got to cap one of the other
gang members today so that we can show that you're a man and
you're part of us. And love, discipline, and respect is
needed by young men 11 to 18, and the gangs perfectly filled
the hole. And it's what you're talking about the hole in the
heart and what the Woodson Center is doing. It almost sounds
like the sermon I heard that there's a God-type shaped hole in the heart of every
man, every person, and that you're trying to fill that.
And we have people who, we have models around the country of young men and women who have
stepped up and are being, and we can measure, we can tell you 680 kids from one public housing project, one of the worst in the
country, went on to college.
We have an institution, a Ponywood Day School.
It's a boarding school that was started 115 years ago in Jackson, Mississippi.
They pull from the same demographic as a Baltimore's one.
96% of the kids come there, go on to college
or post-secondary education,
but they're from the same demographic
as the ones who are failing in the public school system.
So we have models of moral and spiritual excellence
that build on the same values,
that challenges how do we resource them
and take them and make them the centerpiece.
For instance, the whole song, Rich Man North, a Richmond by Oliver Anthony,
50 million people responded most of them black to his message.
When you go on internet, you will see that a lot of the black DJs who speak to that population
in the black community resonated with his message.
Yes, he's very popular.
Why do you think?
Because I think there is a deep thirst for virtue.
There's a deep thirst to return to the values that sustained us from the beginning.
But we don't have a vehicle for that desire
to get expressed.
And that's what we're trying to do at the Woodson Center
is to say to people, the millions,
the guilty white people who put a hundred million
into black lives matters,
and then put 50 million into this
center at Boston University, Abraham, Kendi, studying anti-Risbeam. How could they raise 50 million
dollars in a year to study racism? And guilty white corporations give a hundred million to black lives matter, both of those institutions
are frauds.
Why can't we invest that kind of money into institutions within the community like voices
of black mothers united like Pineywood Day School.
So what we're trying to do to say if you get more of what you reward less of what you punish.
So we really need the shift of the focus of our investments in institutions that speak
to the founding values of the country.
I want to talk to you about one of the clips that you did, where you talked about BLM
a couple years ago, Got a lot of eyeballs
and I want to read this article to you from BLM finances under fire on only 33% of donations
given to charities as execs paid millions of dollars. This is an article that I came
out just a couple months ago. Black Lives Matter finances are under scrutiny once again as
tax documents show the nonprofit is on the brink of bankruptcy
the organization in the last year in red while doing out
a dollar and out millions to those close to be on the founders
following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 supporters
donated a staggering $90 million to Black Lives Matter.
This nonprofit ended the fiscal year with $9 million
and deficit. How do you do that?
I don't know.
The federal filings from 2020 to 2022 shows just a third.
$30 million of the 90 million went to other charitable organizations with $22 million going
to expenses.
This includes a $1.6 million, $1.6 million that went into the father of BLM co-founder,
Patrice Colors, for security services,
another 2.1 million to BLM board member, Shalomia powers for consulting.
So this thing had so much momentum that you couldn't watch a basketball game without BLM
being all over the place on the floor.
You couldn't watch a football game.
You couldn't watch anything without this being everywhere and got forbidden if somebody said all lives matter instead of black lives matter, they
would get ousted, they would get how dare you say such a thing like that that
you know all lives matter. One, why do you think got so much momentum and two, you
know now that everybody realizes it was a fraud are these people gonna be held
accountable? What do you think should happen? No, they won't, they won't be held
accountable but again I must say that progressives have a ground game. George Are these people going to be held accountable? What do you think should happen? No, they won't. They won't be held accountable.
But again, I must say that progressives have a ground game.
George Soros knows what you want to do at Ferguson is rent a rioter.
51 of the people rested for rioting in Ferguson.
Only one was from Ferguson.
Soros and other people know that you got to have a ground game. You got
to have a George Floyd. And once you have that, they invest. And I'm saying those of us
who believe in the foundational principles of the country, we must encourage people then to invest in organizations and institutions, civic institutions
that extoll the virtues of the country, you know, like the Pineywood School.
That school should not be struggling for money.
It should be well funded.
The same people who are writing checks to them should be looking for opportunities to write checks
to organizations who support the values that they say they believe in, but they don't do it.
They'll spend $100 million for political campaigns and the amount of money that we invest in
something confers validation on it. The amount of money we spend on something
confirms the validation on it.
Confir-confirers validation.
Just as the left believe that America is racist
and therefore the George Floyds of this world symbolizes
that we need to have symbols on our side,
like the Ponywood School, like these other organizations
that the Woodson Center, Voices of Black Mothers United, we must get people to invest in
organizations that reflect the values of the nation as much as the other side invest,
but it has to do with where we invest.
By the way, if you were to put a name on it or organization on it, specifically more
name and a face, who has used and abused the black vote and the black community the most
over the, you know, past few decades?
I think the congressional black caucus, they stay in power.
They run like almost banana republics.
They get elected to office and they stay.
They have $60 million gets invested by corporations and it buys their silence.
And they are allowing themselves to be used as pawns.
In other words, someone said that whites in slavery
looked at blacks as property and black elect officials
look at low-income blacks as pawns.
Who else?
Who else?
I think all of the so-called civil rights organizations,
the Urban League, NWCP, all of those organizations that fought so-called
for freedom, and they have morphed into a race grievance industry, and they're being
led by their nose by other groups, and allowing the rich tradition of the civil rights movement
to be appropriated for other groups in society.
Maybe this is a question for me.
Coming from a 45 year old,
I can officially say I'm 45 now, I'm 45 year old.
So you hear the story, you watch the documentaries,
you watch the movies, you read the books.
Here's how it was in 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.
I wasn't there during that time to know it.
I came to the States in 1990, November 20th
when I was in Irana, Germany.
So for someone that's been around like yourself,
1937 till today, and you've been watching
what's been happening.
Is this the most divided we've been?
Is this the most divisive we've been?
Is this the darkest we've been? Or has it been like this and it's always been a fight, you know, again, you've seen it
from your own eyes.
What have you noticed happened over the past few decades?
What's been happening over the past few decades is there are people who are genuinely
interested in destroying this country.
Why would they, though, and who are these people? I have no idea why anybody,
the very fact that Europe, like France,
and Germany, and England, and the United States,
are the destination for people from all over the world.
They're trying to get here.
Why are they risking their lives to get here
if what's here is not useful and helpful?
So I really think you got the cynics who are really, who for a reason that I don't know
who want to destroy this country.
But then I think a vast majority of people who are well intended but ill informed. And they are the ones that
we at the Wichensen are trying to migrate by our examples to say to them that the virtues
of the nation that have stood the test of time are also applicable to today. And we are
saying more and more people being recruited from this thinking and being
supportive. So you cannot assume that everybody who's in opposition to this is doing so because
they're ill-willed. You must distinguish between those who are ill-intended and those who
are ill-willed. And there are some people who are ill-w, who really want to see socialism or even communism come
back.
Let's just be very frank about that.
But they are using America's birth defective slavery as a means to demean the country and
only black America can withdraw that moral authority.
Yeah, because what I see right now is everything is, you know, men against women, right?
You know, like the whole, I got a book that's coming out on December 5th, Choose Your
Enemies Wisely.
And I'm going to do the audiobook every time I'm doing the audiobook.
I'm reading the book for like 100 times.
I've written the book, but I'm, we're doing the audiobook today as well.
And as I'm reading this thing, Choose Your Enemies Wisely and you're seeing what's going on. Okay, men versus women. Okay, the enemy of every woman should be men,
because men are taking something away from you, right? It's Christians versus Muslims,
Republicans versus Democrats, Republicans are the enemy, right? It's blacks versus white,
church goals versus non-church goals. It's, you know, straight versus, you know, LGBTQ and we have to
teach LGBTQ yet take God out of school because that's more important. We
shouldn't be imposing God on people on kids, but we should be imposing, you know,
sexuality amongst kids, employer versus employee, being abused and used and
abused by unions, right?
You constantly see this division, parents against kids, dividing kids against parents,
you can do whatever you want to do, you don't have to get your dad's permission,
you don't have to get your mom's permission, of course you do, you have to get that permission.
This desire to want to constantly create a division, there has to be a clear outcome to it. You know, you, one can look at
and say, okay, if it's just pure evil, it's the art of war, you're trying to divide
in conquer. Great. But who is dividing and what do they want to conquer? You know, who
are these people that want to conquer? You mentioned George Soros earlier on what he's doing
with funding of all these protests and how he's figuring out ways
how to pin people against each other.
I wanna know from your perspective,
I know you said, I don't know who it is,
but I kinda wanna go a little bit deeper with this.
Again, for someone that was born in 1937.
This division that's going on,
why would they wanna do this and who do you think
would be behind wanting to divide America the way that they're trying to do?
I'm not so sure that you have to have an answer that in order to change it.
You're not so sure you have to have the answer. If you don't know the enemy,
we have to know the enemy's motives and desires, don't you?
Not necessarily. I think if you mobilize enough people to confront that enemy.
But you don't know who the enemy is.
But you know what the enemy does.
You see examples of it.
When you see people attacking the police,
in our community, we know that there are people
who are saying that we should attack the police.
There was an old brother when the clan,
like 20 members of the clan, came to Washington,
DC, and a rickety old school bus, and 5,000 people tried to kill him.
Report went into the low income area of ward eight in Washington, and at 75 year old black
men, they said, are you going to join the protest? He said, bring the clan down here if they
can get rid of these drug dealers. And that man was stating a reality.
And that is that the drugs and the violence in his community
is much more of a threat to his well-being
than some talk of the clan.
When you begin to mobilize people
to pursue the protection of their interest,
you don't have to know why
someone else is against you. All you have to do is mobilize the people who are
with you and for you and they will stand against anyone trying to knock the door
down to get in. Yeah, I, I, I, it's, I, I, I, you can spend your time in finding out.
And so what do you do when you find out who, who, who, who is it?
Well, but that's how it works.
Don't war when, when, when you're dealing with war and you're dealing with a gang,
you can keep fighting against its gang members.
But then if you go and show strength,
they can take out the gang leader at the top, then everybody else scatters all over the place.
But also in the second world war, for instance, I always say that we understood, right now,
people who are taking that position, they don't have a ground game.
They don't have a ground.
In other words, if a lot of conservatives, if you were fighting the Second World, we would
only have a Navy and an Air Force.
And we would bomb the hell out of Normandy
and wait for Hitler to show up on it.
No, we understood that we've got to go in
and support partisans who are in that
and help them to defeat inside.
We also know we need a marines, we need soldiers.
It's hand-to-hand combat.
And our low-income leaders in these communities,
we have created islands of excellence
where we have stopped the violence.
We don't have to know why the violence is persisting.
All I know is that the young men that we turned around,
we went from 53 murders in a five-square-black area
to zero for 12 years.
Benning terrorists, you're talking about Benning Terrace.
Benning Terrace.
So now, do I have to know why the violent?
No, all I know is what conditions do you need to produce
in order to change and improve it?
That's what we need to do.
And so we've taken what worked in Benning Terrace
and extended it to Milwaukee, to Dallas.
You can export your remedies without knowing
it's precisely in each city why the problem exists.
All you've got to do is concentrate on what is
curing the disease.
It's, it's, it's, what is the, how do we cure snake bite?
We take the venom of the snake to create the antivenom and
That's the approach that we take in these communities. We re we know how to go and create
Peace one one of our groups last summer in one of those violent neighborhoods for 100 days and have a single act of violence
We need to find out how they did that and how can we take that and spread it to a whole neighborhood and to a whole city. So you can push the antivenom, you can
push the cure without knowing precisely why.
Yeah, I think there's different roles different people play.
You're playing the ground role game, ground,
going meeting people, talking to the kids,
to 30% of the community,
successfully even includes finding out who's doing it right.
But then I think long term,
someone has to take out Hitler.
Someone has to take out,
if the drug cartels leader, all the way at the top
is El Chapo or Pablo or whoever,
you gotta go straight to the top.
If you don't, that influence is gonna stick around
until they realize, oh my gosh,
the person that we all follow that leader
until that guy's eliminated, we're like,
we can't, we can coexist, but if take it,
rid of him, what do we do now?
But all of us have roles to play I agree
So I totally you play very important role. I mean, I'm very clear. I got you mine is very pedestrian
Right, it is it is on the ground, but it's super necessary though
But and you gotta have you gotta have credible examples
That your approach works right right. I want to I want to show you this
So I I'm online yesterday and I'm preparing for this year.
I go and look up two articles.
One, I want to see what ACLU says about the problem
of black Americans and then I go look up,
Prager U, okay, I'm sure you're familiar
with both organizations.
So let's go through the ACLU one.
If you can kind of pull that one up first, Rob,
that'd be great. Okay, so go all the way to the top of the article If you can kind of pull that one up first, Rob, that'd be great.
Okay, so go all the way to the top of the article
so we can kind of read what it says.
So here's ACLU, five truths about black history.
If you want to understand the state of race in America,
we need to know our past, particularly the painful parts.
Okay, so to go down now and zoom in on what it says.
Go up, go up, keep going, keep going, keep going.
America was founded on white supremacy.
I mean, this is what ACLU said straight up.
The first slave arrived here in 1619.
I can go back to the 1619 project.
Between 1619 and 1860,
our junior passed more than 130 slaves,
statues to regulate the ownership of black people
in a 1662 law made all children of enslaved mothers,
slaves regardless of the father's race or status,
or that rape by white slave masters couldn't create a free child, a 1667 law codified that
slaves who converted to Christianity were still slaves. A 1669 law allowed slaves to be killed
for resisting authority, right? It could go lower. Let's go to the next one. So this article is
ACLU. Next one, terrorism.
Even if we refuse to acknowledge it, okay, and then explain terrorism on what's going on.
The largest terrorist attack in Oklahoma was not the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
It was down the road. In Tulsa, 1921, the Green Hood neighborhood of Tulsa,
Oklahoma was unique. In the early 20th century, it was referred to the Black Wall Street
and was home to Black and Native Americans who had become wealthy from all discoveries.
And then it goes to saying white residents were disturbed by the grown Black wealth and
sought to impose official segregation measures.
And 2014 also passed a law that forbade anyone from living on a block where more than three
quarters of the pre-existing residents were from another race.
Okay, so let's go a little bit.
If somebody wants to read more, we'll put the link below.
Next.
So keep going, keep going, keep going.
Then we have a war was fought for slavery.
By 1860 America had four million slaves worth a total of three billion
dollars of today's currencies.
Okay, let's go to the next one.
Go to the next one, go to the next one.
Francis Scott Key was an avowed white supremacist. Keep going to the next one. Coventry the next one, go to the next one. Francis Scott, he was a vowed white supremacist.
Keep going to the next one, which is the last one.
Reparations for slavery have already been paid.
Okay, on April 16, 1862, more than eight months
before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation
in Abraham Lincoln signed a bill,
annexed slavery in the District of Columbia,
provided for immediate emancipation of slaves
and compensation to slave owners loyal to the Union of up to $300 for each freed slave
over the next nine months.
The Broad, the Board of Commissioners appointed to administer the Act approved petitions completely
or in part for former owners of Freedom 2989 former slaves.
Lincoln administration paid about a million dollars of slave owners in DC for the loss of
property. If you don't know some of these facts before reading them here, what else don't you know
about the hidden truths of black American history?
Okay, so that's ACLU.
Now, let's go to Prager.
Here's Prager, you says, the top five issues facing black Americans.
Number five, victim mentality.
Okay, not holding someone back from more than seeing himself as a victim.
Why?
Because victim is not responsible for its situation. Everything is someone else's fault.
And a victim sees little chance of improving his life. How can he get ahead if
there's someone holding him back? All this makes him victim. All this makes the
victim unhappy, frustrated, and angry. And then in the bottom it's a so victim
someone, generally a victim status primary center. I can I call it victimology.
Unfortunately many black churches preach the victimology, many black parents pass it on to their children in or city
schools, teach it to their students, and the black media reinforces. And meanwhile, the
NAACP and other black grievance groups fundraise it. Number four, lack of diversity. Blacks
repeatedly demand an honest dialogue on debate about race. But how can there be an honest
dialogue about race between blacks and whites when there is virtually no honest dialogue on debate about race. But how can there be an honest dialogue about race
between blacks and whites when there is virtually no
honest dialogue between blacks and blacks?
It's hypocritical.
And if a black does think whites are ultimately
responsible for black people's problems,
they're labeled a sellout.
And Uncle Tom, a race trader,
I'm sure you've experienced some of that yourself.
Over the years, as long as this type of group thing exists,
race reverence of the Al Sharpton's
Jesse Jackson types will continue to be celebrated
while independent black thinkers,
such as Professor Thomas Saul, Walter Williams,
and yourself will be shown.
Okay, let's go to number three, urban terrorism.
As just about everyone knows,
but few talk about publicly in major black cities,
violent black on black crimes is rampant.
A Department of Justice study from 1980 to 2008 revealed
that blacks accounted for almost half of the nation's homicide victims,
47.4% and more than half of offenders, 52.4,
all while only 13% of Americans population.
Okay, so that's another study we can go to, go to the next one.
Number two, proliferation of baby mamas,
the disintegration of the nuclear family,
which you talked about briefly earlier.
According to Mohin report, he was a senator, I believe,
right, how do you say his last name?
Daniel Patrick Monahan.
Yeah, Monahan.
In 1965, nearly 25% of black children were born
to uned mothers.
The report author, Daniel Patrick said
that this was a disaster in the making.
He of course vilified by so-called black leaders
and their progressive allies, but he was right.
Today out of wedlock, birth rates is nearly 75%.
1965, I think you talked about this earlier,
25% to today, 75%.
Last but not least, is the unquestioning allegiance
to so-called progressive policies, okay?
Unwavering loyalty to progressive liberal policies,
the primary reason why these dire conditions exist.
It both makes them possible and perpetuates them.
It's no coincidence that progressism is the common thread
that binds predominantly black cities
where single parent homes, failing schools, rampant poverty and crime predominant.
I can keep reading this and talking about what's going on in the trouble.
The point I want to make is two very different views of the problem we're facing in America.
One is white supremacist, here's what happened, even this this even that the other one is responsibility do something about it
But here's the problem
How do we get these two groups to either come together and if we can't how do you get the people that are in the middle open
Minded to say trust me
This mindset on this side. It's gonna give you a better life than this mindset on this. I'd want it to be a victim
Again, I think that the the response to Oliver Anthony's song
gives you a hint at that.
There is a deep thirst for virtue.
The very fact that a homeless man in Boston a couple of years
back found a knapsack with $43,000 in it and turned it in.
And with, they was a gold fund me.
And within three days, they raised $93,000 for him.
That meant deep in, and that happened four times,
a black man in Oakland who was homeless,
53 years old, a woman emptied her changed person,
her $15,000 diamond redding bracelet was there.
When she went back five hours later, he said, you're looking for this.
They had a fundraiser for him, $100,000.
That says to me that deep in is a desire to support virtue like that.
And so what we do with is that the way you undermine the moral authority of the ACLU and of these
other groups is to equip the people suffering the problem to speak for themselves.
And they speak for themselves the way the Black mothers United have come together, for
example, you support groups so that now we've got
20 chapters, about 2,000 of these moms
who are having positive interactions,
we were honoring the police and organizing events
with students are being mobilized by the thousands
who speak out against violence.
In other words, you've got to invest in the institutions
within those communities where people are speaking up
for themselves and make them the new heroes.
But again, it's going to take investments.
But conservatives don't invest the way they do.
They'll invest in think tanks
because their children can go there and be in terms.
And we, you know, we have seen to think all you got to do is publish the right policies.
And then people will change.
It's not a rhetorical battle that we're in.
This is a battle for meaning.
This is a battle for meaning. This is a barrier of substance. We must demonstrate to the American
public that the values of this nation have the consequence
of improving the quality of life. And if people can find
content and meaning in their life in a drug-infested
crime-ridden neighborhood, and we highlight that and
celebrate it
and make them the new heroes.
Then they are the ones that we can stand shoulder to shoulder
with and say, we must push back.
But again, it takes investment.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to say this.
I look at, I run multiple companies.
And when you run multiple companies,
then you have multiple C-sweets,
then you have multiple department managers,
general managers, people that are running leaders
and one group will have five employees reporting to them
with 10 on the team, one will have 21, one will have 30,
one will have eight.
And I'll go to one department, I'm like, wow,
everybody here is so enthusiastic.
They come to work so excited.
They want to say, hey, let's show to the company
that we are the best department, right?
We're excited to get stuff done.
And then you go to one department
and I'll talk to one employee, another employee, another employee.
They're all like, well, you know, we're trying
to have better days and you know,
we're gonna see what's gonna happen.
And I'm like, why is everybody talk like they're miserable?
You know, and so like unhappy and victims.
And then you go and talk to the leader at the top.
Well, you know, no one ever gives us credit
and no one ever does this.
I'm like, God it.
So then you go and you look at two coaches.
And as a father, I got four kids.
My youngest son, he's had a lot of different baseball coaches.
And he's currently with a coach that he loves.
He really likes working for this guy.
But this guy busts his butt.
Like, I remember one time, he said something, the coach comes in.
He says, hey, he comes up and say,
Pat, I just wanna tell you,
he's gonna be running the entire practice today.
I'm like, do your thing.
I said, but tell me why,
because he did this, it's not totally get it.
Go for it, I got your back.
So what does the coach do?
He puts them to work, run and run and run and run.
I mean, it's hot outside, run and run and run and run it.
But you know what?
We're going to go back to that coach because he produces winners.
He produces toughness.
He produces a teamwork mentality.
He produces a level of humility.
He produces a level of the game.
It's exciting to want to play for this guy.
We had another coach, we're like, you don't know what you're doing. A-da- ba, ba, ba, everything was just constantly like negative.
This is that and he just kids didn't want to play for him.
So for me, both sides can say whatever they want to say.
But at the end of the day, there's only one way we judge which philosophy is a better
philosophy.
And it's based on the fruits that bears period.
Based on what you produce.
If you produce good citizens that do great things,
you're doing some right.
Times got two girls.
One, I'm got a 1560 on her SAT out of 1600, okay.
She gets to go to whatever school she wants to go to.
She's got a 4.6 GPA at one of the best schools
in the state of Florida,
but I think the best math program in the entire state of Florida.
And she's very, very smart.
So is their youngest daughter.
Guess what?
The parents are doing something right.
The philosophies they're teaching is something right.
So for me, scream off the top of your lungs,
say whatever you wanna say,
if one philosophy is produced on leaders,
the other one is not,
I wanna know what the philosophy of the people
that are produced on leaders. You know right now with the whole palestine challenges taking place. I want to ask you question here
Jews small community 15 million of them right a
Man named Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all of them that was his goal
He wanted to get rid of them
So when you look at the charter of Hamas that says their goal is to eliminate Israel off the face of the earth, Sharia law is the one they want to do. That's their charter. Not the 2071 but the one from 1988.
That was kind of Hitler's charter. I want to get rid of Jews. Okay. He failed. But at the cost of
how many lives? Millions. Six million. Whatever the numbers. We've heard six. We've heard 20. We've
heard eight. Let's say six million lives, right?
So you have Jews and you have slavery.
You have the Holocaust and you have slavery.
Both catastrophic.
We're not sitting here to compare witches worse than the other. I'm not doing that.
Somebody else can go write a book about that and compare it. That is not my specialty.
What I want to what I want to study is as a person who's Armenian, Syrian from Iran, a part of my ethnicity,
community, sometimes they're victims, but you don't understand what happened to us,
you know, the genocide and all this other stuff.
And another side is like, yeah, why don't we go out and do something and make a name
for ourselves.
So for the history, they can show us that we are drivers,
we are leaders, we're gonna make it work.
But one person's like, well, that's why
because if you don't know what we went through
and our answers is what we went through.
So why do you think the mindset of Jews
who have risen in levels of business,
of Hollywood, of so many different places
that made the money, they've done all these things.
What do you think is the difference in a mindset
of two different communities?
I don't know if somebody like yourself
I've even studied that or investigated it
to see what the difference between mindset is,
they both had a very tragic history
what happened to them.
But on the juicide, they've stepped up
and they become leaders in many different sects.
Why do you think that is? Well, the Frederick Douglass had to struggle with this in his book Up from Slavey.
The Frederick Douglass said that the worst time on the plantation was at Christmas,
because slaves were given off from Christmas to New Year's.
But the slave master wanted the slaves to interpret freedom as synonymous with self-indulgence.
So he supplied free rum to the slaves and encouraged them to drink.
And he would often have competition between which slaves could outdrink the other slave
on the Tristan.
He said, so he wanted slaves to interpret freedom as the self-indulgent so that they would get so sick
that they would be happy to surrender to slavery to man as opposed to slavery to run.
Wow.
And some slaves went into that.
But others responded to the same
challenge by taking that time to visit family members on other
foundations. Another one took that time to work so they can earn money to
purchase their freedom. The same exposure, different responses, and I think
that's what we have to understand that we must look at those who chose the more responsible response to circumstance, and you're never defined by your external circumstance.
So we must tell the story of those who did not succumb to the temptation to be what the victimize or wanted us to be. But again, what we teach through examples, and writing the stories of those
who triumphed in the face of slavery. When I talked to young blacks, and I tell them
of stories of people who were born slaves who died millionaires, some of them went back
and purchased a plantation
on which they were slaves and took in
the destitute family of the slave master.
What a story.
Robert Smalls.
He was born in Sumter South Carolina
and he was on a slave on a worship.
And he and six members of his crew,
when the captain went off for dinner,
stole the ship and put on the master's cap
and came through the various, I'm sorry.
As I said, former slave bought his master's house
and served as a collector of the customs,
Robert Smalls.
Wow, what a story.
But not only that, he became wealthy, and because of his, of his heroism turning the
ship over, Smalls was celebrated by Lincoln, and as a consequence, he permitted blacks to
fight in the civil war.
And what after slavery, Robert Smalls was given a commission. He also became a
wealthy businessman, went back and purchased a plantation on which he was a slave. And
his wife, the slave on his wife and children with destitute, he took them in and allowed
her to sleep in her same bedroom because she didn't realize slavery was old.
Wow.
To me, this is an act of radical grace.
And there are other stories of Bitty Mason, a woman who was born in 1818 and walked a thousand
miles behind a wagon with three children, one by the slave master, and then she later went to walk behind a wagon to California where she was freed by the courts, and she was a midwife
and saved money to buy property.
And she died one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles.
She's a founder of the Hamiest women in Los Angeles. She's a
founder of the Hamlet Church out there. Wow.
Eliterate, three children and became a wealthy philanthropist.
Unbelievable.
Elijah McCoy. You don't know that story. Born ofto-slave parents was trained in Canada and came back to become an engineer
and inventor.
But he was given the worst job of the railroads in Chicago, Elijah McCoy, and Elijah McCoy
was given a job of physically oiling the wheels on the trains, right?
And it was dangerous. He invented the machine that would automatically lubricate the machine
and change in the whole industry so they could then travel faster. And that's why people tried
to develop knockoffs and they said, no, we want the real McCoy.
So that's where that expression,
the real McCoy came from,
because they wanted his,
and he had 17 inventions,
he was in the Inventors Hall of Fame.
And so I can go on and on about people
like that, these are the kind of stories
that we tell our young people.
If you ask 100 kids right now,
ages six to 15 about these three names,
how many of them would know?
None of them, that's why what the Woodson Center does
is this curriculum.
We've developed 30 case studies like this
around the country.
And as part of that, they've been downloaded
117,000 times over the past year. So again,
and every state in the union they're being reviewed. Who's writing books about these guys? We are.
You are. You know how WHOQ Penguin has these books for kids that they write and we have like
600 of these at our house. Our kids have written. I've never heard any of these books,
its stories of them being written by WHOHQ.
We're trying to get children's books written from them, but again, we need to invest in these kinds
of things. This is my point. I say to conservatives, and if you get more of what you reward,
less of what, but why aren't we, if you say you're four American values, if you four of these
principles, then why not invest in an independent?
Don't worry about what the other side is doing, invest in the things you believe in.
I agree.
The left does it.
Exactly.
And what's happening in our books, you know, we get worried about, oh, they're revising
history because they're going to make this man and this woman seem more racist, revising
history.
What we also have to keep in mind is there suppressing history.
This does not go with the narrative, so they're not going to talk about a large of McCoy
that says, do you know that everybody's been saying the Romaquay?
Man, that thing is a Romaquay.
And it's always a compliment to quality.
Whether you're tasting chili or you see some product, you said, man, that thing's a
Romaquay.
That works. That was worth my dollar.
People don't even know.
You're talking about a phrase that went with Elijah McCoy, who found a way for the safety
of railroad workers to lubricate trains so they could go faster and there'd be less risk
to the working guy that was responsible for that.
Every time you say that, you're really talking about Elijah McCoy and you don't even know
it.
So what's happening in these history books, it's not just their changing facts.
It's their not letting certain facts and narratives and biographies be a part of it
because it messes with the narrative.
Right, the whole issue of refrigerated trucks.
They're an invented by a black man.
The real McCoy.
Wow.
I could go ahead and tell them.
I'm loving these stories.
I have a pretty great experience.
But in our publications, we have a lot of examples.
All of these aren't our No Woods and Center.
They'll be fine.
Oh, yeah, you can go into it.
Let's make sure we put these links as well.
Yeah, you can study the stories.
In fact, we're trying to do animations on some of these.
Again, I love that.
This is where we need the investment. I love that. We do not these. Again, I love that. This is where we need the investment.
I love that.
We do not have the investment.
I love that.
So you can imagine how many people black people, right?
How many people donated to your organization
last 12 months?
Probably about 8,000.
8,000 people.
But we need to really...
I can tell you right now, right after this,
I'm gonna give you $10,000 donation. So when we're done with this, I'm telling you right now, San
Veil, if you're listening to this immediately afterwards, let's get the information. Let's
send $10,000 to this organization. I love these stories. They inspire me. I love it. I love
I love I would love to have more people here, the, here these stories and read about these
types of stories. I'm only scratching the surface. I can sit here all day and tell you the stories
of a woman.
Her name escapes you right now, but she
walked behind a wagon from the south to Denver
and worked in the mines.
She opened a laundry there to wash the long johns
of miners, right?
And she collected the gold dust from the draining it up.
And she used that to be capitol.
She became one of the wealthiest women in Colorado.
She ended up investing through a white partner.
And she now became one of the wealthiest property owners in the world. She ended up investing through a, with a white partner.
And she now was, started and became one of the wealthiest property owners in Colorado,
not just black, but anyone.
So our young people need to be told, this is the American story.
It is not, America, save was our birth defect.
None of us should be defined by the worst
of what we used to be.
I say this all the time when I'm speaking of
how many you want to be defined by the worst you ever were.
No, in America should not be defined by its birth defect.
This is what we were, but this is what we have the will
to become.
You know, that's the tool.
You just struck something there.
That is the tool of narrative.
If people are paying attention,
the tool of narrative
is to never let you get away something in your past.
Yet we want, and people who are paying attention,
we want to see recidivation rage drop
and celebrate the man and woman that comes out of prison
and becomes something different.
And we say they're not what
they were and we celebrate it and move it forward.
But if you're running a narrative, you need to keep people chained to the birth defect
of history.
That's right.
And the birth defect is a birth defect.
It is.
But we don't define ourselves by that. I mean, there's so many important stories. Some of the people
who were born slave became not just the wealthiest black, but the wealthiest person in that situation.
They own property. We had golf clubs, we had resorts.
And by the way, today, we have some of the best stories
of African-Americans that made it to the top.
So many of them that have had different
difficult lives and they made it all the way to the top.
But we don't tend to focus on those stories.
We want to talk about what the white man did.
We want to talk about how the bookie man is the white man.
The bookie man is Republicans.
The bookie man is this.
And somehow, some way, I don't think that's working anymore because even a lot of people
who are part of that mindset are sitting around saying, I don't know if I fully agree with
what you're doing.
I don't know if these guys are really for us.
I don't know if they're really supporting us.
Tell me what was the story about Coca-Cola
in Project Rainbow?
I don't know if you wanna cap that.
Now this is a Jesse Jackson.
I unpacked that.
There was a book written about Jesse Jackson
Rainbow Push, Shake Down.
And for all of the things that Jesse Jackson
was involved in American Civil Rights,
Rainbow Push, and correct me if you know a different history,
it lost its way.
And it was fueling Jesse Jackson rather than fueling change.
Well, he would go to companies and demand a consulting fee to bring diversity to management.
Well, he went to LA Coke, which was the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in the United States.
Their bottlers were regionally and were owned regionally.
And he went in there and told the president,
who has now passed away,
but I had a personal relationship with him,
and I knew this man.
He said, he came in and said,
well, we need this much money for diversity training
and diversity program that you're gonna pay rainbow push.
And he said, and then, you know,
we'll do a press release and do the stuff together.
And he said, and they played along with it.
And he said, come back in a week.
He comes back a week later and he says,
okay, here's what we're doing.
Remember, this is Riverside, outside Los Angeles.
Okay, the following people, including this large number
of Hispanics and management are going to be laid off, so we can achieve
your diversity goals. And we want you to be right there at
the pulpit with us, at the podium with us, when we make
this press release about what we're going to do and how
we're going to change this. And Jesse Jackson says he
stopped and he said, no, I don't think this is necessary. I
don't think that we need to do this. Because they called
this bluff because they were already highly diverse in that area because
of the tremendous Hispanic population and Asian population.
It was Riverside.
It was already just because they were hiring from the local community, they had the face
and the ethnic mix of the local community.
And Jesse Jackson thought he was not going to the Nidorah Coca-Cola, not a locally owned business that was already
fairly diverse for its time, and they called his bluff on it.
They say, yeah, come on up.
Come on up to the podium and let's announce all these people are getting laid off to do it your way.
No, I think we're good here.
I love them.
Well, the story I remember about Jesse and I was in the movement with all of them was
that every Saturday they would have a call because they were boycotting in house of
bush for lack of management and every, they would be a recording of every Saturday.
All of a sudden Saturday the call stopped.
He never announced, never canceled it. His son got the franchise in Chicago.
He has it to the day.
So when his son got the,
the distributor ship in Chicago,
the protest went away.
Get out of here.
No.
Can you search that?
Are you?
That.
Check it.
There's a book that was written.
Who wrote the book, Shake Down?
Robert, have you read the book?
Yeah, I'm for Wow two of Jackson sons Joseph and Jonathan were granted a lucrative aniser bush
Distributious
Distributorship in Chicago in 1998 this franchise gives the young group Jackson's exclusive rights
To sell 30 to 40 million dollar worth of Budweiser and other products in an area that includes Rigley Field
worth a Budweiser and other products in an area that includes Rigglyfield. I mean, they're endless examples.
Oh my God.
This endless examples are just kind of shakedown.
That's why I say that people like that engage in moral treason because it's using the
condition of your people as the bait and the switch comes when the resources show
up. And you use it to do that.
I mean, even David wrote a book about it. Rob, you just found this here. It's Shakedown
exposed in the real Jesse Jackson. This was written in 2003, five years after he did that
I think it was a 98 or 99. And it became a New York Times best seller,
shakedown, Jesse Jackson.
Does Jesse Jackson still carry the name,
the weight that he did 20, 30, 40 years ago?
I don't think he has for the last 20 years.
For the last 20 years.
But he's more darling of the liberal white press
than he is the black community.
You don't see him in communities.
It's like you don't see shopped and then Ferguson
or any of these other communities, either.
The question for you, the concept of racism,
when I was in the army, man, we all got along.
He didn't matter what it was.
I mean, I'm in South Carolina and whites, blacks,
they would say, I've never met an Iranian before.
You know, you're the first Iranian I've ever met.
I've never met a nose like that before.
We don't have noses like that in America, right?
They would say things like this.
And I'd go to Alabama and we're at a waffle house.
And this waiter, waitress pulls up, and is looking at my nose.
Like, where are you from?
I said, I'm from Iran.
He said, you from Iran?
I said, yeah.
He says, what are you doing in America?
I said, I'm in your army, 101, Sarah Born. I mean, the US Army says, what are you doing in
the US Army? I said, can I be honest with you? Can I trust you? He says, yes. I said, I'm
a spy. I'm taking everything back to Iran. Are you serious? No, man, I'm just in the army.
What are you talking about? But it was so, so easy to play with these guys and mess around with them.
We all got along.
You were white, you're black, you're this, you're that.
We didn't experience any racism while I was in the army.
And today you'll hear saying, well, there's more, you know, racism from whites to blacks,
you know, and that's what's going on.
But someone also say there's more racism going on from blacks towards whites. You know, there's some racism going on on. And but someone also say there's more racism going on from blacks towards whites.
You know, there's some racism going on there
with a level of hate for whites.
Well, you look at the hate crimes.
Yeah.
The majority hate crimes are blacks against Asians and others.
But you see, but these are unpleasant truths.
We can't talk about that.
Whenever I hear in Oakland, California
that there's been an assault on an Asian person,
and you don't hear the race of the victimizer, you know it's black.
Because 60 to 70% of the assaults on Asians have been done by blacks,
but we can't tell the truth on so they just don't mention it.
You see, let me just make this in a very important point.
Whenever you generalize about a group and then try to apply remedies, it always helps
those at the economic top, at the expense of those at the bottom, just like the Me Too
movement generalizes about women.
It was started by a young black woman in Harlem who wanted to have women come together and talk
about abuse.
It was captured by middle class and upper income women and became the Me Too movement.
And as a consequence, it became people caught on the casting couch.
But reality is that Fox did a two-hour documentary
on sexual assault of women in prisons for two hours.
Every one of the victims was black.
Every one of the victimizers was black.
It never generated a single discussion because it did not fit the racial narrative.
You let one white guard assault a single black woman and then it becomes national news.
But as a consequence of us, the low income women in those prisons. In other words, when evil wears a black face,
it does not get challenged.
And so people are really injured in that.
But that's where it started,
but then if it came Harry Weinstein on the casting couch.
And then, so what are the remedies they offer?
Women should be on boards of directors.
More lawyers should be fine.
This only helps educated women. It doesn't help those black women in
prisons that are being abused by black guards. And we don't even discuss it.
It's not a subject of outrage. There's no protest about that. And this is what
I mean that if you constantly look at life through the prism of race, when
evil wears a black face, it escapes detection and addressing.
And people are more injured by that.
Well, are you for history?
You like making history?
Yes, it is.
You're for making history.
So I got a question for you.
So what do you think about the possibilities
if our current president, most popular president of all time, what if he ends up deciding to step down
and we experience making history the first female black president in America, Kamala Harris,
how ecstatic would you be about that monumental moment if that were to happen?
I would be disappointed.
Really?
Why would you be disappointed?
Because she's a disaster.
She doesn't, this would be the worst thing that could happen to this country.
Why is that?
Because she's not competent.
She just...
How did she make it to the top, how did she make it to be in a VP?
Some would say she worked very hard to get to what she's at right now.
She worked at being black, right?
And that's what got her elevated.
No, that shows you the worst of what race grievance looks like.
That he... And anytime new some, the governor of California says,
I'm going to point a black woman, what do you mean you're going to point a black woman?
You're not saying I'm going to point the most confident person.
And to me, it shows you how degraded the whole issue of race has become in America. It's become worse than
in this ever been. I think.
So you wouldn't be ecstatic about Kamala? No, I would not be.
Well, Pat and I both came from California and people that lived in California will tell you
that when she was attorney general, how she abused the three strikes law. And the three strikes law, along with the
determination that if you had two ounces of marijuana or some level, they would say intent
to distribute because of the quantity. And to be tough on crime, you take everybody,
even minor possessions, you put them in prison. And she was very good at that. And she
used to speak that very loudly. And those of us who are in California know that,
that that thriftrikes law has may have been well-intended
at one level, but what it did was it just proportionately,
not just in jail, 14 days jail at county,
disproportionately imprisoned black men in California,
and it perpetuated, and by the way,
when they went to prison, unfortunately, what goes on there is kind of like crime college and then they
come out they're not employable so what do they turn to other criminal
enterprises because it's where it goes but we all see her as incredibly
disingenuous about what she what she did oh you you call yourself a progressive
but you also want to appear tough on crime,
and she'll claim that, well, we did this or that,
and these little programs,
but the programs that she would announce were tokenism.
You know, we're gonna give gym membership cards
once they get out of prison.
Well, they've been lifting weights for five years in prison,
what do you need, you know,
and it was tokenism, and it was pandering,
and it was dancing on both sides of the political line,
depending on who she was speaking to,
for the purpose of electability.
But the real victim in all this were these citizens
who maybe made a mistake, maybe in possession,
but it certainly wasn't distribution,
but they used the three strikes law for electability
and had a devastating impact on the populace.
I just think, again, as a veteran of the civil rights movement, nothing is more disheartening
than this whole notion that social justice today has been defined as for blacks, that
you must dumb down standards to moments of black walks into the door that I gave examples in our books
about the golden 13 where we pursued excellence. We didn't ask Jackie Robinson didn't ask
well because blacks were denied access to baseball that forstrakes on your out if you're black.
Jim Brown and other football players didn't say, well, since Blacks were denied access to the NFL,
that Blacks only have to run eight yards to get a first down.
Can you imagine?
You know, we didn't add, no, we met the standards.
In fact, that, you know, but one thing that I think I'm going to do,
and I've taken this task on, is that if we can just get rid of white guilt
I think the whole country we can can take a sigh of relief and get improved. That's why I have become a
Self-certified racial exorcist
Exorcist racial exorcist, racial exorcist. Yes, sure. So I absolve you from the sins of slavery and Jim Crow.
Wow.
I think I'm a charge of maybe $50 for a certificate.
So I can get a little race.
I want to get in on the race hustle too.
Who knows?
Maybe Anheuser Bush gives you a spot.
Yeah, maybe so.
30 to 40 million yards in my situation to be in. Bob Woodson's can I got a I can't be guilty
raised Bob gave me an absolution from it. Hey, Brenda, what worth if you're listening? Put this
guy in a can. Yeah. Final thoughts here. Are you following any I mean are you following it
closely? What's going on with Israel and Palestine? Yes.
How can we not do that?
What are your thoughts on what's going on?
I mean, obviously, at this point,
activating 2,400 people killed at a hospital.
One side saying is the other.
The other side is you, President Biden going to Israel,
spent in time with Netanyahu,
gives the message what he says to him.
He says, well, we're finding report that's telling us it was them.
It wasn't you and we'll still keep looking into it.
And then from there, Egypt's still not taking anybody
that's coming across from Gaza.
You know, the folks who are supporting people
from Hamas or Palestine are saying,
well, the reason why Egypt is not accepting them
is because they don't want, they know if they leave,
Israel's gonna take over Gaza.
And that's what they don't want them to leave.
They want them to stay.
There's no water.
There's no electricity.
There's no hospital supplies.
There's no foods since last Monday that this is going on in Gaza Strip.
It's pretty much a lockdown of 2.2 million people, the most densely populated place in
the world where 75,000 people live within a mile radius in the Gaza Strip.
And now Iran's come out and saying,
you've crossed the line,
Hezbollah's kind of a whispering saying,
we're ready, whenever you tell us we're ready,
and if people think Hamas is big,
Hamas is only 40,000 members,
ISIS only has 8 to 16,000,
but Hezbollah has 150,000
compared to Israel's 400,000. So if Hezbollah has 150,000 compared to Israel's 400,000.
So if Hezbollah decided to get involved,
anything is possible when they get involved, right?
What do you think about what's going on right now
with the entire situation?
Well, let me preface it by saying,
God bless those who got nothing to say
and got the good sins not to say it.
This is really out of my wheelhouse and beyond my knowledge,
but I do know as a layperson
watching the slaughter of babies and the rape of women by innocent people, I don't know
how anybody could in any way support that the actions of anybody for whatever political
and ideological reasons, just this act of barbarity should, to me,
forever defines what this group is all about
and why they must be resisted.
And so that's about it.
I just, all I know is that I can't believe
that this image of this soldier grabbing this woman
by the hair and snatching her after she's
being raped and pulling into the car that just haunts me to think that human beings
would do that could resort to something like this.
Tom, what's the latest you're hearing?
Because I see Ray Dalio saying the chance of World War III just went up to 50%.
Jamie Diamond, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, just said,
this is the most dangerous times we've lived in decades.
Okay, in decades.
And we're not even thinking about what could happen with China Taiwan,
which that is an inevitable thing that they have to be China maybe doing.
If all of these things is going on at the same time, Tom, I mean, do you have any concerns yourself
as how this could get, or are you pretty optimistic about it?
I'm optimistic that good men can come together
and figure this out, but I'm very concerned at the moment.
I am not a political theologian, but I can look at the dom. I am not a political
theologian, but I can look at the dominoes
here and see that if Iran backs his
bolla and they create another front in the
war, you know China and a little bit of
Russia already are supportive of and
alliances with Iran and it just scares
me because we know the last time
select countries got together as an axis,
and we know how bad and devastating it was
in World War II, the escalation,
and I'm very nervous about it,
and there are leaders, I mean,
JP Morgan has got a lot of political consultants
that work for them because they were working in a global economy and they want to understand investment opportunities globally.
And Jamie Dimon is being very clear without singling out Iran pointing out that we need to
calm down this Gaza situation and figure out what we're gonna do with that, and if that involves Israel with a ground game
and to pull out the evil ones that are there
and to take care of that, okay?
But we can't let this escalate to a second war,
and I think everybody's worried about destabilization
of the energy market and then destabilization
of the regular equity markets.
That's what they're worried about economically.
But on the backside of it,
I honestly worry about geopolitical forces.
And I'm as concerned,
I think I've ever been in my lifetime,
because I can see that one more domino.
And what's the big deal?
Did you just say,
this is the most concerning thing on your life?
Are you really saying that and you fully mean that?
No, I fully mean that.
I remember how I felt.
Look, I remember how I felt when Reagan was elected.
I remember how I felt about global communism.
I remember feeling a sense of relief
when the Berlin Wall came down
and I saw citizens celebrating.
I felt a sense of relief.
Because at that time, whether it was part propaganda or not,
we were worried about this escalation of nuclear capability on both sides.
And we were worried about it only to one crazy man to press the button first. Remember those days we were doing that.
To the initial crisis.
Yeah, and there was two sides that were very clearly defined. The UA, it wasn't Russia, it was the USSR. Before we realized that all these Russian provinces
really wanted out of the deal,
and later we found out they got out
as the first opportunity.
But I was concerned about that.
Wow, we're only one crazy person from a nuclear war.
I remember thinking that in 84.
I remember feeling that.
And now I look at this, this is concerned as I've been
for two reasons.
One is inside Germany and inside the United States,
we know that the recent refugee influx,
that there are bad actors in there.
I mean, you may have seen that there were four
that were caught just in the last week
that were on the terror watch list,
only because they use facial recognition
at one at one float point.
How many others have come through undetected?
So I'm sorry for the long answer,
but I am really concerned and it really worries me
and it seems as you look at it,
if his bola comes in and the domino is Iran
with China behind
them, China is going to be economically opportunistic in the long game.
They're not going to care about a five-year war of three-year war.
They're looking at the aftermath because they're already thinking.
And it's just, it's really worrisome.
It really honestly worries me more so than it did when you seemed that you worried about
one crazy man pushing the button to create nuclear war starting in the 80s.
But you knew that there were two very clearly defined forces there, United States and USSR.
Do you remember those days where that seemed like it was very clear?
Communism versus freedom, the USSR versus the United States, and it seemed like everything
was clear.
There weren't like third and fourth and fifth dominoes that you worried about.
Did you feel that?
Yeah, I remember doing I was in graduate school
when they've Cuban Missile Crisis.
And how intense that felt about the blockade.
Did they want to listen to the generals who say,
Bomber, and taking the measure of the fact that Kennedy did,
and then the very sense of belief when it was a pullback.
But again, you had forces inside of Russia
that were fighting for liberation.
We don't have that in the Arab world.
I don't think the same dynamic.
What a great point.
You hear that?
Inside the USSR, there were forces that were fighting
for their liberation or hoping for it even then. And as soon as it came down, you saw, great point. You hear that? No. Inside the USSR, there were forces that were fighting for
their liberation or hoping for it even then. And as soon as it came down, you saw it. You
back to Stan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, they all ran. Right. And where'd they run? West. Right.
But you don't have that same dynamic. I don't think in the Arab world today, it could
be. I don't know. Well, we're going to see what happens. Obviously, um, unstable times in the Middle East,
hopefully these guys can figure it out.
Um, for us to go and show their face and kind of let
everybody know that we stand with these guys, we stand
with Israel, uh, whether you agree with it or not, it's, it's a
good thing to take place for everyone to kind of realize
if they get to the next level potentially, the US cannot be involved in another war,
which is something a lot of people are not for.
Most people are not for, but I hope these things, these tensions decrease,
and it goes away sooner rather than later because it is the kind of a situation
that can all of a sudden spread like wildfire and get pretty ugly.
Anyways, having said that, it's been an honor having you on.
Rob, let's make sure to put a link to the book, Polo.
Folks, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please go order the book.
And if you do want to contribute towards what they're doing, we're going to put the links
as well below to the Woodson Center.
I've already made my claim.
We're gonna do that right afterwards.
I appreciate you for coming out.
This has been an honor.
I learned so much from listening to you.
And I always judge it like that.
And I've gotten smarter from listening to you.
Thank you.
Appreciate you for coming out.
All right. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Take care everybody.
Have a great weekend.
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