Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - Jonathan Majors’s Interview, Wikipedia Plagiarism, and Apologies

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay start today’s episode by bringing back a previous topic to talk about the disappointing update and regrets (02:48). They give their take on the internet’s reaction to Druski's Omega Psi Phi-inspired skit (33:25), and Jonathan Majors’s interview (49:35). They are then joined by Molly White—researcher, writer, and Wikipedia editor—to give us more insight into the Neri Oxman plagiarism accusations (01:30:56). Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith Additional Production: Aleya Zenieris Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Trading derivatives involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Manage your activity with our consumer protection tool. Restrictions apply. See terms at Fandul.com slash predict slash bonus dash offer dash terms. Yo, yo, yo, thought warriors. What is up? Howlern is on. It is I, Van Lathen, Jr.

And it's me, Rachel and Lindsay. All right. Rachel, you're in Houston right now for the Natty Champion game. How are you feeling out there in your kind of cousin town? It's a cousin town for you. Yeah, it's a cousin town. I spent a lot of time in Houston. You know, the weather, it's about a storm here.

Like, they're expecting a monsoon to hit right before the game. game. It's already been raining all day. But it's cool. You know, it would have been better of Texas One, obviously. The energy would have been different. I'm not being biased. Everybody's saying that out here. But there are a lot of Michigan fans, a lot of Washington fans. I haven't really, I work with the foundation, so I've been doing a lot of stuff with teachers and like visited shout out to Milby High School this morning to do something, surprise the students and the educators there. So I haven't really been involved with. with the fandom.

So I will see more of that today. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm back here in Los Angeles. I'm headed to Louisiana in a couple of days. We went to the Laker game last night. Me, Nina Parker, Molly, Kalika.

He's in there. Lakers got a big win, the broad dunk on everyone. Who they play? They played the Clippers. Oh, okay. Lakers Clippers. weren't there. You were missed. Everybody was like, where's you're to? I wasn't invited.

You, nigga, you're in Houston. See what I'm saying? That's a main character syndrome trait. You weren't invited. You're out of town. We all know where you are. I know. And y'all hung out to celebrate Nina's new show

with Kev on stage this weekend. Yeah, yeah. You guys have to watch Friday night vibes. It's Nina Parker, Kev on stage. It's over on the old TBS or is it TBS or TNT? It's TBS. It's TBS.

Formerly hosted by Tiffany Haddish, she's out. Nina, Kev on stage, and it was a celebration that we had. We went out there on Saturday night. Maybe it was Friday night. I can't remember.

It was one of those nights. It was Friday nights. Everybody was there. Great energy, great people. I had a Kulua, a little root beer float. It's interesting. Yeah. Good.

You know what I had it. Yeah. It's okay. It's okay. It's good. The stuff out there was good. We had a fun time. You guys got to watch the show.

Shout out to me. I'll see her again tonight. I need to clear out real quick. Is that okay? Go ahead. Okay. I want to talk about something. All right.

So, maybe like three years ago. So 2020 at this point. Oh, yeah. Three and a half years ago. You guys might have remembered us covering a story here on Higher Learning about a young black lady on Twitter that was having a back and forth. Really, not having a back and forth, being harassed on Twitter by a rapper to live quickly. All right.

I'll tell you why I use the words being harassed very intentionally. me. It's obviously he doesn't think that he was harassing her, but he was. And that's just the fact of the matter. After a certain point, I said as much on the podcast, I thought that it went too far. You know, people get into these Twitter spats, it is what it is. But particularly when you have the bigger platform, when you're powerful, when you, you know, care about people. You say that you care about people, you have to know how much harm you're doing. And he was harassing her at a point on Twitter. It got to that. I get about where it started. We talked about it here on higher learning. And first of all, let me go back into my entire history, just so people know how things got fucked up. It started off that I saw that this was happening. And what I thought was he couldn't see himself.

Happens. Happens to me sometimes. Happens to people. Happens particularly to men. Particularly to men. I'm not going to speak all women, but I just know so many situations where men that I know, my father, my brothers, my friends, they can't see themselves, they can't see what's happening.

Right. And so we call it getting you back on your square. Sometimes, hey, give you a little tight enough. Hey, man, that's too much. It's too much. You're going too far. And that's a privilege that other men are supposed to have with each other. We're supposed to be the ones that are able to say, hey, bro, that's not a good look for you.

You're doing wrong. You're doing harm. me pull you back. Hey man, put your arm around your brother. Let's get out the bar. Let's go. Hey, put your arm around your cousin. Let's get out of here. Let's go. Hey, take a step back before you make a mistake or whatever like that. Suppose it'll be done. And I'd never forget, I did an interview with Jamila Mew on the Red Pill podcast. And she told me during that interview that at certain times

when you see your homeboys, even in situations where you wouldn't think that it would be appropriate to intervene, like if they're not taking care of their kids, like, if they're not showing up for their family. Because I will be honest with you, in Baton Rouge or where I'm from, if you're doing immediate harm, like if you're about to physically attack somebody or if it's going too far in a drive battle

or something like that, you would say to someone if it's that obvious. You'd say to someone, hey, stop that. If it looks like they're about to hurt somebody. But in other situations, you really wouldn't kind of get in somebody's business. I couldn't think about dad doing that. I remember she told me one time she goes, no, but if you want better for the entire community,

then you need to be involved in your friend's lives like that and make sure that you can pull them back to the middle when they're doing wrong. Thankfully, my home boys would never like that. But I took that to hard. So in this situation with Talib and a woman, her name is Amaya on Twitter, I called him. Well, I didn't call them. I texted them at first. And I was like, yo, bro, you know, like,

like breathe. And I thought, being me, being Vang, being somebody that has a lot of charisma and weaponizes his charisma, his ability to talk to people, to get them to see things his way, I was arrogant enough to think that I would be the one to be able to call him and be able to make him see that this is not looking good for him. It's going too far. I couldn't. I couldn't. That was a little bit before we talked about it here on higher learning. I couldn't. And so then we talked about it on higher learning, and I failed Maya in discussing it because I was riding a fence on it. And I'm a notorious fence rider. I'm a notorious fence rider because for me, there's still the, I'm not a fence rider in terms of how I view the world.

But I am one when it comes to relationships. because I'm somebody that understands that I need to be in the room to be able to make a difference. That comes from TMZ, right? Being at TMZ, you understood that you had to be at TMZ in order to make TMZ do things differently. You couldn't do it from outside of the place. So you have to be both inside of TMZ and not of TMZ. So you have to be someone who had what it took to be able to go up to Harvey or Charles. or somebody else and go,

okay, that goes a little bit too far. That's a little bit too much. That's not the way we should do that. That doesn't make any sense. And I have a million examples of stories that we did differently or stories that we didn't do because of that. And to their credit, they listened to me when I was there. So I take that in terms of personal relationships.

I'm the one that's cool enough with you to be able to tell you that I think that what you're doing is wrong. And you can't do that all the time. you can't. It doesn't work all the time. It doesn't work all the time because you'll get a little bit on you, right? It'll rub off on you. Sometimes if you're standing too close to something, it gets on you.

And now the hook is on you or the gook is on you. And now you're not defending or you're not trying to help anymore. You're defending yourself, right? So when I was on here, I, according to Maya, and I invited her on to talk about it because it came back up, I'll tell you how it came back up again. I've heard on to talk about it.

But she didn't want to come on and that makes a lot of sense, right? She's going through a lot. And we should say this, that according to her, the doxing and the harassment and the pain that she's endured since all of this started.

And I won't relitigate that because I didn't do it the first, didn't do it right, the first time. And I doubt that I would be able to do it right now, which is part of the reason why I wanted her to come on there. But it never stopped. She said it's three years later,

and she's still dealing with it, right? So it never stopped. I made a joke about Kat Williams and the light-skinned, funny-faced wife thing. Someone brought up, hey, well, Money Maya had made a similar observation. This is that tweet, not a tweet that she put out. So Money Maya had made a similar observation,

and it led to telequally harassing her and no one listening to her in the entire deal. Maya then made a long series of tweets, not a long series of tweets, a couple of different tweets, where she talked about the fact that I knew that very well because I am his friend. We talked about it on the podcast.

I platformed him, and then I was, spoke of him glowingly, and all of that stuff, basically saying that I knew it because I was culpable and that whatever happened to her. I apologize to mine. After this happened, I called her on the phone and I apologized to her on the phone. People had said that we had talked about it.

People had put it out there that we had talked about it. Then she listened to it. She was displeased about it. And then she called, then I called her and I called her on the phone and I apologized. I told her that I was going to apologize in person. No, not in person. On the podcast, and I didn't. I can't remember why I did, honestly.

I may have put it in the annals of my history in my mind when that happened. But I have no problem to apologize to somebody on the podcast, especially if they were negatively affected by me. There's a couple lessons I've learned from this, particularly now. A couple of lessons. Number one, before I even. get into that before I even get to me. There's some truths here and the truth

happen to say. To Lippewa owes her a public apology. He cannot be held in the regard that he has been held in as a voice for a specific group of people and the pro-black, the pro-community,

the pro-collaborative voice that he is, he cannot be held in voice until he makes it right with his woman. He can't. You cannot look at to live poorly that way until we know that he cares about the safety of this individual black woman. It's impossible. His legacy, in my opinion, is taking a hit. And look, me and him have talked since and it hasn't been about anything like this. It's been about, I don't know, a couple things about Kanye and stuff. We're not best friends, but he's a guy that if something is involved him out, hit him up, oh, you see this, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is this.

Besides all that. He owes her an apology. He owes her, in my opinion, some sort of recompense in some way to empower her and empower her story. And everyone that claims to care about black people has a responsibility in the way that they talk and deal with black people. Right?

That responsibility, you're assigning them to it. when your music is about us, when your persona is about us, when all of these things are about us, right? And I don't even do that. I've given less to Black America than some of these other artists have. But when you give that to them,

you owe them something as well. When they're buying all of that from it. So how about what raps or things that somebody's buying from you is what you're giving them for free? We should be love, protection, and a feeling of safe. He failed in a major way, and the longer it goes without being right,

the being made right, the more holes in the entire thing from him are exposed to me. That's just a reality, right? So it, to me, was harassment, is harassment, the doxing, all of that, took something that started on Twitter, created a victim.

That's what happens to black women every single day. Take a situation and you create a victim. He owes her apology. She should get that apology and she should be made whole in some sort of way from all that. Okay?

Number one. For anything that I've done to not properly address that, I apologize to her right now. In a real, sincere way. I apologize to her right now no holds barred right here. I apologize to her.

Okay. I hope that she hears this, and I hope that anybody else that was sort of on the fence about the way that I felt about that, has what they need in terms of that. And I hope to be better every time that I'm discussing something or coming to somebody's defense or whatever in the future. But there is something that I did, and that's for mine. Seriously, that's for mine.

So for my or anyone that loves support or knows what she's going through, that's for her. That apology. So I want to get that out of work. Now, separate things. I'll tell you what I've learned from this. And I'm being honesty. So I'm looking at some of the replies during the whole thing, right?

And there was one that like just like stood out to me, right? Because everybody is coming on. Like she, when she makes it public, everybody's like, oh, fuck you and all. And they look at me, she's telling her truth, and now they're upset with me, and I get that. That's okay. So when this happens, and this is what I learned about myself,

when this happens, I have to be honest, I regret getting involved in the first place. But I regret getting involved. I regret even hitting him on the text. I should have looked at it and been like, damn, hmm, that's not what I thought I knew and just did what I did. I regret getting involved.

And the reason why I regret getting involved is because I don't think that we're to the point where we can talk each other out of some of the trauma that we have, right? I think everybody has spilled so much blood now that they only want to drink it. and they just want to drink it from somebody else. I legitimately in this situation, I swear on my father, right? I swear on everything I am was legitimately just trying to help.

Like, for real. Like, I legit was just trying to help. I hit him up in private, and then I hit him up, and I tried to address him in public. The thing about me addressing it in the public was I'm trying to not completely undercuture. who he was and who he has been

by the fact that he's fucking, by the fact that he's fucking up. I'm trying to maintain and observe his humanity and all the work that he has done as I see him in a low moment. And I'm doing that from a place of, I keep telling you guys this. I come from a place where somebody steals,

somebody sells some drugs, and then they become that. They become the thief or the drug deal. I watch women and men you love people through that. I watch somebody go, hey, wait till your uncle comes home from prison. Like, you're going to see who he really is. He's not the guy with the street nickname that everybody's saying that he is.

You're going to see who he really is. And then the guy comes home and he just loves on you and protects you and builds you up. The man who just died, my uncle Ray, that we just put in the ground, looked at me when I was 11 and for no reason goes, I don't want to see you out there with them. I don't want to see you out there with them. Like there's something about you. And you need to know that.

You need to know your value and your worth. I see something in you. Now I'm not saying that I'm any different to anybody else, but that man taught me how to value myself. Like he taught me how to look inside of myself and go, man, the things that you see your friends doing, you don't need to do them

because there's another way for you. that's invaluable to me. So many people remember him as a criminal or a drug addict or whatever. I know something different. That experience of dealing with people like that colors the way that I deal with people. It colors the way that I look at people. I told you before, even when I looked at Kanye,

he's fucking up there while and disrespecting my ancestors. The first thing I say to Kanye is I'm like, yo, you're a genius, and I appreciate everything that you've done. But look what you're doing now. That's the way that I do it. That doesn't work now. We're too deep in the shit. That doesn't work.

What people want now are friends and enemies, and that's binary. And I understand that. I understand that there's a fierceness about the position that people feel themselves in now to where you can't at all use any nuance in this. And so I'm not good at that. I'm not good at not using nuance. I'm not good at casting people in a specific role. I'm good at beating you up with my fists and then picking you up off the ground and going,

yo, man, I need to take you to the hospital because you're still a person, even though I have to whip your fucking ass. That's what I'm good at. Like, in that situation, I was literally just trying to help in the way that I know how to help. I'll say this, though, every single time in the past X amount of years that I've tried to do that, I've been the bad guy. I'm not doing it right. I'm being honest here. Now, I get to be honest here too. There are other situations very directly that I could bring up

to where I've made calls on people's behalf, like tried to get people to help, tried to get all the stuff like that, and it all gets turned around and gets blown up into something to where now I'm on Twitter after just having buried my uncle and I have to watch people say,

I can't wait to all of you niggas meet the devil. And you know what my first thought was? I don't need this shit. I'm just being honest. Like, I don't need this. The three years since that has happened and continues to happen to her and happen to live qually,

man, I have buried, I'm just being honest with y'all. I'm serious. I'm on Vibance now. I'm on Adderall. I'm not going to cry. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I have buried my father, my mother's brother,

my father's brother, a childhood friend. I've paid for these people's funerals, not all of them, but I've paid for, I've had to take a different posture in my family. I've had to take a different, like my life has been completely turned upside down. I don't need that shit. I don't need to be abused for not helping right. And so just like everybody else is a person and stuff, like I am one too. So when I'm looking at all of that, I'm like, you know, I'm not, and nobody knows.

Like, I'm not in the right frame of mind to be able to like, this is what I'm trying to say. The activists that you guys love, the people that you guys love, that I've tried to actually protect on this podcast, be it some of the people over at color of change when I dropped the ball there, be it the people at, be it Alicia, or be it the people at Black Lives Matter, or be it, any of these other people that I've always given soft beds to land on. Those people's lives are a living fucking hell. And it is not white people that are making it that way. It is black people. It is black people that have made those people's lives hell that are called them fake grifters, all of that stuff, that those people that are getting fucked over

it's the white supremacists that start the fight and black people that finish it. And I can't be that. Like I legitimately don't have it in me. I'll end up as a news story on one of these blogs somewhere. I can't be that. So what I have to do

and what I will do on the podcast is focused on big systemic problems, big issues that we can always solve. Or I will make another pledge. that if I do get into something that's personal between two people, whether I know the person or whether I do not know the person, I will make my thoughts crystal, water, diamond, clear because the reality is my only intention, my only intention is to help.

And I swear to you, I'm done. Oh, okay, you said a lot. I was thinking about things as you were saying. Here's the thing, Van. You're trying to be to everything to everybody. And you're going to have to learn to compartmentalize that and stop. I, to be very, when I was listening to you talked, and we kind of talked a little bit off mic about the situation that happened three years ago.

And then I hear you saying that Money Maya is still going through it. It just makes me realize in society how we talk about an issue and we move but the people that are involved still are constantly going through it. I totally forgot about that conversation. So I hate that she's even, you know, going through that still to this day. And I am glad that you were able to talk with her. I am glad that you were able to apologize. And I think, and the, the way that you just talked about it was nuance.

And sometimes you're going to get it right and sometimes you're not. And I'm not excusing what happened. I'm just saying there are going to be times where you're, you're, your intentions are to help, and that's all that you see in front of you. And in doing that, somebody doesn't get helped. You're not going to be able to get it right every time. Like, I have to keep telling you that. You can't be everything for every single person. But it also doesn't mean that you can't have these conversations. The way you just talked about it was nuanced. You apologized to her. You've acknowledged it. And you talked about the deeper, deeply rooted issues

into why you felt like you needed to be defensive or why you felt like you needed to save him or how you know him in a different way. And in doing that last time, you neglected Maya's feelings. You just had a nuanced conversation and talked about it in a way where I thought was really interesting

and I thought was inclusive of kind of everybody's side. But at the end of the day, somebody's always going to be on Twitter or Instagram or social media or text or whatever. whatever it will be, that it's going to comment and be upset on what you didn't do or how you did it. And that's just almost like the lane that we've chosen by having such a public form and talking about issues that don't necessarily involve us. It's just going to keep happening. And I feel bad when you're like, it's affecting you to the point where you're so upset where you feel like you can't have these conversations or.

You know, you feel like you have to answer to people that you don't know at all. So this is what I'm saying. Understand what I'm saying. A couple of things. Number one, when we had the conversation originally on the podcast, and I went back and listened to it a bunch of times, right? When we had the conversation originally on the podcast, like I said, he has to be better than this.

He went too far. Everybody can go listen to it. I was, I'm not even going to relitigate that. Whatever. What I'm saying is this. It's not necessarily that. I feel like I have a problem of people having an opinion.

It's not how it is. I only have a problem when I'm trying to help. If I say something, if I say something and you don't like what I say, guys, you have to understand, man. Like, I was on Team Z for nine years.

I remember, like, people would take pictures of my mom and be like, Van's mother is a babble elephant. My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world, right? Like, people would dig up all kinds of shit. People talk so much shit about you. They say things that are not true.

They do. All of that's cool. But if I legitimately care about something, if I'm legitimately moved to the point to where I'm like, yo, I'm going to pick up the phone and make a call, or if I'm legitimately moved to the point to where I'm like, I need to do this and put a relationship in harm's way, like that means I care. That means I'm trying my best. What I can't do, I don't have the bandwidth. And a lot of people do. And I don't have the bandwidth to get fucked up by the white supremacists, the far-right MAGA, whatever, the niggas out here who love rape,

which I'm gonna address on the next podcast or where in person. Some of these guys that don't realize how much they just love, love, denigrating women and denigrating all kinds of other people around them. I don't have the bandwidth to go up against them and have that come for me and to get a mudhole stumped in my ass

when I'm trying to help. Well, just know you're trying to help then. No, so, but listen, though, this is not about me. Like, what this is about to me, though, is like understanding the limits that you have. Like, and the only reason why I'm saying that and the only reason why I'm talking about that

is because everybody in this has a responsibility in terms of the way we're talking to each other. I am not somebody that, needs anyone to be concerned about the way their opinion is going to make me feel. Maya herself was insanely, insanely measured in everything that she said. I didn't agree with everything that she said, but she was insanely measured in everything that she said, insanely measured. And she deserves her apology,

and what she should have is more people who are on her side and are willing to say, hey, this nigger deserves, niggas owes her something now. Now there's a debt owed to me to him and I'm sure you know at some point he'll be pissed off enough for me for me and him to talk about it but

like that has to be made right. What I am saying is y'all really have to be cognizant of the way you talk to people. Because I'm just, I'm trying to let y'all know like people teeter on edges and

sometimes you feel like you're getting better you feel like you're moving on and you know and you get pulled back like you forget how much grief and pain that you're going through like you forget like you put it to the back you feel like okay I'm having a good day

it's cool and then something happens and you get put right back in the same situation I'm like goddamn you want me and all the niggas like me to die well shit that's happening like me and all the people like me are dying. All the latent men, like we're dying off. Would the world be a better place if we die?

Then I'm looking, now all of a sudden I'm looking through pictures of niggas who have passed away. Like, are we bad? Do we need to die? Like, is there something about, like, I'm internalizing that because I'm still working through feelings about all of that stuff. And I don't need that if I was trying to help. That's all I'm saying. If I was, I can lessen that by just pulling myself out of some of those situations. And I think I have to do that like for me.

I have to do that for me until I have a better, until I have a better understanding of what I need to be and who I need to be. Until I've done enough work on myself to understand how I can show up and what the stakes are in terms of when I open my mouth and what I speak and what that means to somebody else. because I wouldn't have thought that what we did on the podcast would have made things worse for her. And they did. So it don't matter what I was trying to do. But the first thing I have to do is do no harm.

That's the first thing. To other people and to myself. And that's all I'm basically saying. I'll go in more in depth next week because I want to wait to everybody's back about kind of what I feel like. I feel like our podcast is going to change a little bit now because of, of, um, I just feel differently.

I think for me, I am, I'm sick of the person that I used to be. Like, there's too much bullshit now for, for me to be okay. And so I, I think I'm feeling, I don't know, in a different way over these last couple of weeks in terms of what the purpose of of my voice is. It's different. It's not the same. All right. That went longer than I thought it was.

I'm sorry. Thank you, Rachel, for giving me the space. Listen, you said you, whenever you say, Van, and I think our audience knows this too, you got something you want to address or, you know, like you need to, you're feeling something. We all give you the space to just let you do your thing.

And I think, and it's always interesting. And I hope it makes you feel a little bit better that you are able to get some things off your chest. And yeah, like we talked about, you know, without getting too into it, about how like we want to do some things in a different way on this podcast. And so, you know, we want to be more involved and we want to be more in touch and we want to be more purposeful about the things that we're going to talk about. I say that as we can talk about some bullshit on this podcast today. Oh, we're going to always do that. I want to be clear. We're always going to do that, but we feel we can do more.

And so that is what you'll get from us as we step into 2024 and beyond. Yep. Challenging everyone to be who you say you are. And that's everyone. That's everyone. That's to live. That's me as well. And the question to me is, who do I say I am?

I'll continue to find that out. All right, big deal with the day. Rachel's ilk Speaking of people Everybody needs to be who they are This is the perfect segue Into this big deal of the day All right, let's do it.

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Ask your doctor about Trimfaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Trimfairoradio.com. Okay, so Druski posted a video. His videos are always very funny and very poignant and very, they're like these observant, almost masterclasses on things that we all know. Just so fucking talented. Like, Druski and all the rest of these guys, man,

Funny Marco, these guys are so fucking talented. It's insane. He posted the video, them old heads that are trying to keep up and stay up now. But he's throwing up the hooks in the video. If you guys don't know what the hooks are, those are the,

that's a little sign that the cues make when they, the cue sign. Rachel, you can throw it up because you're a delta. Throw it up and show the people. Oh! You even did the little, Oh, look at Rachel's talking. Drewski is not a cue,

and this has made some people mad. No. I thought the video was hilarious because we all know that old cue. You know, I got uncles that are accused. I'm not saying they're exactly like that, but there are some similarities. So when I watched it, it was funny.

But at the same time as I watched it, I said, going to get a lot of heat for this. But I feel like if you watch Drewski's content, that's always the feeling that you're going to walk away with. This is really funny, but there's going to be a certain group of people who are not okay with this. But this is what Drusky does. And this is his form of creativity. This is his content that he does. I didn't think it was that big of a deal. Now you're probably saying, okay, well, what if there is a woman that does this same type of content

and she does a skit on deltas. Well, if I find some similarities that are accurate, I'm going to laugh. Now, if Drusky is throwing the hooks up and barking and wearing purple and gold while doing all of this and thinking he can, you know, do the hops and all of that,

outside of it, then we have an issue, which I did see that there is video of Druski throwing up the hooks just randomly. the club. I don't know if the song was on or not. So I don't know. I don't know. Drewski can address that on his own. But I didn't really think that was that big of a deal. And a lot of older cues, it seems like, are upset. Maybe the fact that he called out an actual chapter and affiliated it with the school is what makes people feel particularly upset. But this is just what he does.

I can't take it that seriously. You? What do I care? You throw up. the hooks because you throw up the hooks. When did I throw the hooks up? We're going to get a montage of you. When you talk, you do this. You're like, okay, guys, what we're going to do here is. But look, so it's not a, this is what I'm saying. A couple of these tweets, Druski, when and where did you pledge,

it's not an option to not reply. Come to tampon a few months, Drewski, we'd love to meet you in person. Nah, this ain't it. Delete this. Nick, corny is fucked, but he gets snatched up. He'll know what up. I'll just be honest with you right now. And motherfuckers can say whatever they want.

I think the Divine Nine organizations are ridiculously important. Their story is so important in terms of black history. They just are. And the work they do. The work that they do, the things that they do, the brotherhood and sisterhood that they represent, the structure of them, it's just such an important part of black history.

It is. You cannot go to Southern University. You cannot be from the South. You cannot be hooked into HBCU culture and not believe that black sororities and fraternities are just absolutely vital institutions for so many reasons in the history of Black America, right? Having said that, if you're trying to fight Drewski

over that video, you are a fucking loser. You need to get up and ask yourself what the fuck else you have going on in your life and what it really means to be the person that you want to be in your fucking life I don't give a fuck if you're in college now

I don't give a fuck if you pledged 5, 10 years ago I don't give a fuck if you pledged 20 years ago if you just crossed if you maybe if you just crossed I can give this I can chalk this up to Neo fight exuberation or you know

but if you really want to fight this nigga if you want to fight Drew over that skit, you need to get off the boo-boo. Because that is fucking ridiculous. It goes to me against everything that those organizations are supposed to stand for. If you want to do violence to another black man, because he is doing a skit and playing a character that involves your fraternity. Okay. Are you mad that they're talking about violence?

or are you also talking to the people who are upset? To me, look, if you can be upset, we're upset about stuff all the time, right? We're upset about cultural appropriation and things. We was upset at Ms. Cone Bread a couple of days ago. If somebody would have said, hey, we want to smack the shit out of Miss Cone Bread, or we want to get her fire from her job or anything like that,

you're taking it too far. We can have a conversation about what's proper and improper. Like if you're playing a character, like if that lady was playing a character in a movie, I wouldn't have a problem with that, right? To me that's a little bit less insidious.

But he's obviously playing a character. Playing a character. Yeah. You're taking it too seriously. Yes. Move the fuck on. Please.

But I do understand like the violence totally agree with you. But I do when you talk about it, And you explain, and for people, you know, who aren't as familiar with D9 or, you know, you're not in one of these sororities or fraternities, everybody's process is different. But what you learn, the history part of the process is learning what the people did before you, your founders. That's why we honor our founders so deeply because of what they went through, because of what they built, because of whose shoulders we stand on, because of what they've done across the world internationally. These aren't just

They don't just do work here They do it internationally They have these principles that they stand on And so I get that you might be annoyed Or irritated or even angry At the fact that someone is playing with something That means so much to you I get that

It doesn't do it for me But because it's Druski Because this is what he does If it's somebody else playing around with it this is not necessarily a character they're playing, then I do equally get upset. Can we have a conversation about whether or not it shouldn't mean that much? I mean, I get that it's very important.

Well, of course, you're not going to say that because you didn't do it. I know. But like the NAACP, right? Like other organizations, I get it. Do y'all niggas get mad when people play with SNCC? Do y'all get mad when people play with other people? Like, it's like, I'm just saying, should it, mean that much? Should it mean that much and propel you to anger? I think that that is subjective

because everybody's process is different. And it's not like I pledged in 2005. There was a lot of work that I saw that Delta's did, whether it was mentoring, whether it was with education, whether it was with talking about causes that are affecting the black community within the United States and internationally. I looked up to them. I saw the things that they brought to campus that were for the culture for an audience that doesn't necessarily receive that. I was proud to do that. I admit a lot to me. It's a social club, man.

It's, but see, that's, I expect you to say that. I'm not even going to get mad that you say that. I would just simply say, you don't get it because you weren't a part of it. So I'm not, it's a waste of my time to argue with someone who doesn't get it. So let me ask you a question. If it's all about service and stuff, why they got to beat the shit out of you for you to get into shit? That doesn't happen.

I said everybody's process is different. everybody's process is different. I can't speak to that. Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated as a non-hasing organization. Okay, so look, let me tell you why I say these organizations are so important. Because people might think,

oh, Vance talking out of both sides of his mouth, like, why is it so important? Let me tell you why it's important. It's important because it represents black people having their own stuff and black people establishing for themselves these American standards that they observed,

that they were that they were kept out of. This is black ingenuity. This is like, to me, the very, it's the purest form of, hey, okay, cool. What I think black people should do?

Okay, cool. I can't come in yours. I can't be in yours. All right, we'll have our own. And our own entities will have the same prestige to us as yours do to you. There are very few things

that black people have done in America that have more meaning to them than what white people do when it's the same thing. Like, black people, white people have their stores. We have our stores, but we always want to go to their stores, right? Black people have, uh, like, white people have their thing. We do our thing, but like, we always want to do their things. We always want to go, we have our award shows. They don't mean as much to us as the Oscars or the Golden Globes mean to them. There are very few things that we've innovated, that we've started, like the HBCUs, HBCUs, big deal, huge deal.

We started those, some of them, some of them white people started. We started those, but use Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all of those other things, they still need more. The HBCUs don't mean as much to us, in my opinion, as they should. There's the divine non-s sororities and fraternities. They need more to black people than white sororities and fraternities. Barna, they are one of the few things that actually mean more to black people that black people started. Of course, there's other art and food and stuff like that.

That black people started means more to us than things that white people did. We did our own thing. We started our own stuff. Now, this is for us. I'm not saying that they're not important. I'm saying, though, that the anger that's being directed at Drusky right now has nothing to do with how much work the cues are doing. It has to do with the fact that they have an issue. exclusive social club

that they got their asses kicked to be in and they paid money to be in and they don't like it when someone else has not gotten their ass kicked and paid money in the same way to be in the club and they are doing it and they are fronting like they are in the club.

They went through something to get into the club and they are mad if you did not go through the thing to get into the club that they went into yet you're still doing it. That is true but that doesn't always mean ass beating because there's a lot of history that you have like that's it's it's more than just ass beating and i'm not even saying that that happens that's those are your words not mine these are your words now okay so we just talked

about this now who's playing the middle i'm not i am not a member of omega sci-fi so i cannot speak to what happens with them i get you can only speak about delta sigma theta sorority which is a non-hazing organization what does it mean to be paper that means that you were brought in by an outside chapter. Usually an alumni chapters. So like, I'm Epsilon Beta at University of Texas. Our dean and co-deen were actually on campus,

juniors, seniors, that were a part, like leading the way in our process. Now that we're gone and because there was a line that got in trouble after me, not sure what happened. I was already off campus. But now the Austin alumni chapter

runs it. So that's, so They're in charge of everything. Look. And that is my definition of paper. Look, this is what I'm saying. I get it. I get it. If I see, man, look, a lot of cues out there, man.

Shout out to my man Sloan. There's so many cues out there. My brother, Brian, is a cue. You know, there's so many cues out there. I know so many cues out there. Man, come on, man. Y'all step in. What did what your friends say?

Oh, they weren't fucking with it. They wasn't fucking with it. It's, I mean, just like, I mean, I know there's a situation, man. And it's, I want to do something on it. You got to move on. I want to do something on it. But there was a guy because I'm in a service return. You fight you.

And there was a member of our fraternity that was, that was, that was, he was acting like he was an alpha. And he had all of this alpha paraphernalia. Man. This is embarrassing. You fire you.

You fire you. With you fire you, you, you can pledge you fire you and then go on. It's not divine now. Go on and be, we have people that have deltas, people that are A.K.A.s, people that, all of this other stuff. And so this guy

come from another school, some other plays. And, you know, he'll always have alpha stuff on. He would have alpha stuff on. He would rock the alpha stuff. stuff. He knew their handshake. He knew all of this stuff. It's a wild story. And I remember it, somebody hit me one time. My sister was telling me a story. My sister was like, uh, yeah, it doesn't look like he's actually an alpha. I'm like, that can't be possible. She was telling me, she was like, don't go around in public with him because

you know, if something jumps off with him, you're going to be... Sure. You're going to be encouraged. You're going to want to jump in for him, but he actually did this shit. So if you're with him on the yard or around campus, you're just asking for a fight.

They caught this nigger and they beat the dog shit out of this nigga. I remember, like, that's too... I mean, look, they caught this thing and they beat the dog shit out of him. Stombed him to fuck out. They should have checked him into, like, done a wellness check because that's...

Something's not really. Right. That's a lot. That's a lot. He had, he had alpha jackets. He had this. He had that. I had been in places. I had been in places.

I was in New Orleans with him. I'm neither ever. I was in New Orleans with him when he saw another alpha walk up, did the alpha thing to him, did the whole nine. And they was talking and drinking up. He's an alpha. Yeah, he's too aggressive. Like, that's too much. He said that he was an alpha.

I remember he said he was an album from Florida State. See, you should pick a smaller school. No, that's the white school to pick. You got to pick a like, pick a, pick a, like a white school, right? No, because there's a small line and we all know each other. You know what I mean? Like, that's not okay. You got to pick where they have like either 50 plus people or just some small school.

No one even knows that they have chapters. Wow. Hope that guy's doing well and not wearing any black and gold. Wherever you are. They put it on that nigga ass. Anyway. All right, Jonathan Majors. Good morning, America.

Donnie, we got audio here. Oh, I'm sorry. Donnie's not here. Donny's not here. That's Ashley. Oh, it's Ashley. Hey, Ashley. Donnie took,

Donnie just bounced. Oh, yeah. We got to let you guys know what the fuck happened with Donnie. Donnie said, fuck it. Michigan is in the national championship game. Donnie hit a nigga last night. It was like, yo, I'm going to Houston.

Don't get to fuck. Somebody came through with some tickets for Don't. And Donnie was like, I'm out. I mean, are you, have you hooked up with them since you've been there? No, but I told him you better come get this field pass if Michigan wins. If Michigan wins. Wait, how can you get the field pass if Michigan wins? He don't eat the field pass before.

You're going to give them your field pass. My field pass. Oh, y'all niggering it up. Niggeriff. That's real, so you have a field pass for the game. God damn. That's dope as shit. Thank you.

This is why I needed Texas to win. Well, they didn't. So the first thing that he talked about, he did it with Lindsay Davis. Lizzie Davis, who I love, by the way. Yeah, she's great. They aired it on Good Morning America, but I guess he did it on. They have a long-form interview, like Impact and Nightline. They put it on Hulu.

So they do these long-form interviews. And then, you know, for the big ones, they use them for GMA. You should be doing that. Thank you. That's how I envision you. Thank you. Rachel Lindsay. It's me, Rachel Lindsay.

I sat down with one of the hottest names in football right now. Tua, Tungovar Loire, to ask him, why the fuck can't you win a big game? He sucks. We'll find out why. So Jonathan Majors talked about his reaction to, the verdict. One of the first things he talked about. Here's his way to say.

Your reaction to that verdict. Shock. I was absolutely shocked and afraid. I'm standing there. And the verdict comes down. I say, how is that possible? Based off the evidence,

based off the prosecution's evidence, let alone our evidence. How was that possible? He was shot. Yeah. Yeah. Did you watch the entire thing that was, that happened on the Good Morning America this morning? I did. I did. I mean, I think I saw the whole thing. I saw it in two parts. Two parts. Yeah.

I don't know if the whole thing aired on GMA, but I caught it on caught up with it on YouTube. Yeah. I watched it. I well, let me ask you this. When you found out he was doing an interview, were you shot? Yeah, I was. I was too. It was a little, not that it was quick. Well, I was shocked for a couple of reasons. One, it is quick.

Two, it was ABC. Disney, you know, affiliated with Disney. And we all know that Marvel dropped him. Not affiliation. They fucking owned Disney. Oh, excuse me? Disney owns ABC, yeah. Owned by Disney.

So the fact that Marvel dropped him an hour, if not less, after the verdict came out, it was an interesting choice. But I mean, I guess with one of these, with these type of interviews, when is the right time to do it? But I was very curious as to what he had to say. And I don't know. I think based on what we've said before, and I don't want to say the same things again, I think it makes a lot of sense that he's confused because I do think the verdict is confusing.

I do think it's confusing to say, we don't think that you did this. but we still feel like you physically caused her injuries. Based on the evidence that we've seen, of course, we weren't in trial, we weren't there for every single detail, I thought it would have been an all or nothing and not see them split the baby. So the fact that they split the baby, I can see why you would be confused by that. But in listening to him do this interview, I don't think he was taking into consideration that juries are human beings. and once a jury saw certain text messages, this is very public as well.

Once a jury heard certain recordings by him, they could not separate some of the psychological or emotional things that were happening and some of the evidence that came out from the incident that happened in March of last year. All right. If you didn't think that Jonathan Majors was in any way culpable or had anything to do with or was innocent of what happened between him,

and Grace Jabari prior to this interview. If you left this interview, I think a lot of people probably think that he did. And let me tell you why. It was completely the wrong way to go. It came off wooden, insincere, self-aggrandizing. I just don't understand why you would do it.

The sentencing is still on the table. You sit down, I want everybody to understand all of these celebrities. Like, there's a different era that's out there. The big prestige interview where you sit there and you, without any nuance at all, act like you're about to cry and do all this stuff, that's bad.

And really, to be honest with you, this kind of reeks of the way that this has been handled from the PR situation since this has come out. I do not think that in this issue, Jonathan Majors looked over and went, that girl took my phone. I'm about to beat the shit out of her. I don't think that he did that.

But I do think that this entire thing from his people he has been he's they've comported this they've comported themselves in a way that makes it look like they're too good to actually address the severity of what's going on here of what this actually means it they haven't been able to meet the moment and really deal with the issues that are on the table involving a man of his stature and accusations that were this serious and as i watched him sitting there it felt very performed. It felt performed. It felt very choreographed. It felt, I'm like, I'm not in any way relating or responding to him in a way that makes me think, that's a nigga that's not capable of that. And to me, the self-importance, she asked him about the, play the answer to the Corretta Scott thing, can.

Play that real quick. Through it all, Major's new girlfriend, actress Megan, good has remained by his side, even present for our interview. How would you describe your relationship? She's an angel. She's held me down like a career, you know. I'm so blessed to have her. You know, the relationship is still fresh, but, you know, I think I found her.

Okay, that's not good enough. The substance of that question is not about what you, think the substance of that question is, hey, you didn't say you're trying to do these important things or you said you are that important. You said you are that important. You are doing these things and you need your woman to take stock of that. I'm not going to go back and forth and legislate with this man about how important he is. What I'm going to say is, even as you sit there and you're talking about Coretta, it seems as if you are someone that can't be bothered with all of this.

And that's the wrong way to come off to me. And so I think that this was the wrong form for him to be interviewed. I think it was the wrong tone for the interview. And I also think it might have been

to me, it might have been the most in a way it came off to me like in some Hollywood bullshit. Okay. So

you said when you first started talking that he did this, he was doing all this and he hasn't been sentenced yet. That's a good point. Because the fact that he hasn't been sentenced yet, he was never going to give you what an audience or you yourself or me wanted to get from him. He hasn't been sentenced yet. He has to maintain the exact same presence that he did in trial. I'm not saying he eventually will go into more detail or take responsibility or acknowledge some certain things that people have questions to. But he definitely wasn't going to do that with ABC because a lot of people think that he chose ABC because he wants his job back. So there's no hard feelings with Marvel. But he definitely wasn't going to do it before sentencing.

And I'll be honest, it's hard for me to watch an actor and give an interview in this type of situation. and not think that it's performative. I mean, everything we got is exactly what I was expecting to get in this interview. I wasn't expecting to be wild. I wasn't expecting to get new information. I wasn't expecting him to go into depth on some of the criticism or some of the things that came out. He answered every single question the way that I thought that he would.

I mean, once he sat down and to do this interview, that's exactly that's the only way he could have been before sentencing. Let me simplify this for Jonathan Majors, okay? This is the thing. Let's simplify this for Jonathan Majors.

We'll move on. To me, everything you said was true, then the question is, why not just wait until after sentencing to do it since February? Because when you pointed it out, he is very into himself.

Okay. If you didn't get anything else out of some of those recordings. He has an inflated sense of self. Okay. Look, I think Jonathan Majes should go on and be able to resume his career, be able to work again. I do. I do. I do too. I do. I do too. You know what people want to know from Jonathan Majors? Nigger, is this something wrong with you? That is. What's wrong with you, my nigga?

Is there something wrong with you? Because it's not just about this situation. This situation then was exacerbated by a bunch of other people who have said all kinds of stuff. So the question that people are asking, and this is the central thing that we can't get to the bottom of when we're having all of these things just fucking bumping our gums for no fucking reason and wasting time. That's why I'm interested in now.

It's like, what we can't really have a conversation about is what people want to know, or at least what I want to know. I'm being sincere. I can't say what people want to know. People call other people trash. I hate it when they do that because the only thing you can do with trash is throw it away. That's all you can do.

all you can do with trash is throw it away. I think it's unchristian to call people trash. I think it's unhuman to call people trash. I don't like to do that, right? Only do you can do with trash, throw it away. I don't believe that. But people want to know who's trash and who isn't. That's the binary for me.

What I want to know is whether or not I am perpetuating something I don't want to perpetuate, elevating something I don't want to elevate with my support of a person. And so my central question for people that find themselves in that situation. Nick, is there something wrong with you? Well, he did talk about it.

Nah, not really. He's never going to be able to talk about it in a forum where it's Shakespearean in the way that it is right there. It's wooden. It's artificial in the way that things are. It's like a very special episode of the fucking Cosby show,

a very special episode of growing pains. We're going to sit down and talk about whether or not Mike Siever is on fucking cocaine. Oh my God, everybody watched the episode. We're going to talk to you about drugs. We're going to do this whole thing. A show like The Wire doesn't give you a very special episode about drugs.

They just talk about drugs. So when you leave the show, one show, you know how important it is about drugs. Sitting down with the people talking about Coretta Scott King again. He called Megan Good, Coretta. Stop with the Coretta shit. Okay? Leave her alone. By the way, Corretta.

Greta Scott King, we could make an argument that her life was lived in this small, silent, I don't know what I'm talking about. Well, she's so much more than just the person who stands by her man. And it's almost like you're reducing Coretta to just, I need somebody who just stands by me as I'm being this great man for the culture. Corretta was so much more than that. And it's weird because it's also like, when I ask, niggas, there's something wrong with you, yo, if I'm going back and forth with Kalika and I look at her and go, I need you. you to be like Coretta Scott. What the fuck? That's weird. And so to me, I'm sitting down here and I'm watching it.

I'm like, yo man, why are we out here bricking? We're out here bricking so much. It's a fucking brick. That's a brick. Well, I do just want to acknowledge he did talk about mental health. And I just don't want to take that away. Not in depth, but there was a question that was asked. And he did talk about a history of depression and mental health issues.

that I just want to say, when you say, what's wrong with you? He talks about his temper. He talks about that. He talks about not always being a good person. I just want to say, I'm not taking up for him. That's the conversation. Well, that's not going to happen on GMA. Okay.

Well, to me, I think... You come back on higher learning and we could talk about him. I think that if we're going to get whatever, whatever. If he does or if he doesn't come, I don't, whatever. He ain't coming. No, it's fine. I'm not against Jonathan Majors or anybody else. We already talked about it.

I don't cast people out. But like, man, to fucking talk to us, bro. Like, talk to us. Like, everybody was rooting for you so hard. We're fucking with you.

And nobody, and I'm not one of the people that want to throw you away. But when I get this wooden artificial type of shit, I'm like, yo, is this thing of fucking with me?

Like, I'm, I'm, okay. No, he's not. He's trying to get back into Hollywood.

He's trying to reduce his sentence. And I want him to, I want people. So he's playing the game. Let me tell, let me tell, what I want. I don't even want to say I want him to get back in Hollywood. Let me tell you what I, let me tell you what I want, not that it matters to his life or anybody else. What I want to

know is that people take their ability to do harm seriously. So what I want to know is that Jonathan Majors, Van Lathen, third person, I apologize, Ian, Ryan, all of these people, I want to know that we take our ability to do harm seriously, that we are really looking at at each other and ourselves and doing the work so that we can come out on the other side of it better. Not that we are pretending and acting like we're doing it, that we're actually doing it. In that same fall that I talked about, like, since everything happened and everybody died, man, I committed myself. For a month, I did an intake. I paid like $15,000 and did six hours. I hit a deep, dark depression, suicidal ideation.

Everything that he's talking about, I get it, right? I understand it. But there's a point to where you have to go, okay, how do I want to live? How healthy do I want to be, right? How healthy do I want to be in my life? How healthy do I want to be? And how do I want my health to affect the people around me? And you can't do that by pretending and acting.

So if you're going to do it for real, comport yourself in a way that makes people understand look, and that's got to be some accountability with that. And the accountability is saying the only thing I could have done differently is not been in the car with her. I don't think that's good enough. I don't think that goes quite far enough. That's not me saying that I think that he was... Yeah, I didn't like that.

You know, that's not me saying that, like, I think that he did anything more than what he was convicted for. I'm just saying, bro, this was a watershed moment in your life. life and your career. And with the power that you have, your ability to do harm going forward is going to be pretty significant. You need to be okay. So get to it.

Anyway, something just broke. Can I bring it up and you don't want me to? I don't know. What is it? Daily mail, this is the headline. This just broke. Donald Trump named in the latest Epstein documents. Sarah Ransom says he had sex with many girls in email where she also claimed

pedophile had taped of the ex-examines. President Richard Branson, Prince, Andrew, and Bill Clinton. Okay, so look, I'm going to read it. All right, because it just came out. This is, what, today's the eighth? Today's the eighth. Today's the eighth. All right, so today's the eighth. And so this was put up by a daily mail 1048 Eastern is today.

Jeffrey Epstein kept blackmail videos that show Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Richard Branson having sex with women he supplied them with, according to the latest bomb shells, bombshell claims in newly unsealed court documents. The latest dump of papers made public Monday are emails sent by Epstein victim Sarah Ransom to Daily Mail.com columnist Maureen Callaghan in 2016. And at the time, Callahan worked for the New York Post and was reporting on Epstein. Ransom claimed in those emails that Trump had sex with many girls, including a friend of hers who is not named, who says she also slept with Bill Clinton and virgin billionaire Richard Branson. Funny words there, Daily Mail.

I see what you're doing. She retracted all her claims telling Callahan she wanted to walk away from this, citing fears for her family. In 2019, the New Yorker said Ransom admitting to invading the tapes. It is claimed that Epstein filmed each of these sexual encounters and that the women involved also obtained copies of the tapes. No such footage of this has ever been publicly uncovered. The FBI is now under pressure to release hundreds of items of evidence that was photographed during a raid on Epstein's mansion in 2019, but that was never seized. That is the end of this article.

Does this change anything to you? It's official Trump naming in this situation of a woman who made a claim, then retracted the claim, and then said she lied about it all. Rachel, do you have any thoughts? I mean, I guess I just have to see if more comes out. I mean, it's kind of hard for me to have an opinion on this. She lied. She said, do you have an opinion?

Do we need to do this? I just want to put it out there because what we did say, I'll tell you why I'm putting it out there, we can move on. But I did say on the last podcast that Trump's name had been put on the Epstein list

in any way that alleges that he had sex with anyone. That's true. His name was all putting in an inquiry. And I was wrong about, I correct myself on something else as well. There are mentions of his name in there as I looked through it more

that allege that he, that Jeffrey Epstein will call him for favors. at this point anyone that that's ever done a favor for Jeffrey Epstein not people that Jeffrey Epstein has employed but anyone that's ever done a favor for him because I'm sure he employed a lot of people that weren't around and did what he do even Alan Dershowitz there would be nothing wrong with Alan Dershowitz being Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer if he wasn't specifically alleged that had sex with an

underage girl which Alan Dershowitz denies and there's all kinds of stuff around that the girl later retracted the claim. So, but that was the allegation that was made. I'll just say this. Yes, you mentioned that last podcast. This news that's breaking is something different. But there's no way that Trump didn't know what was going on, whether he participated, whether he was there, he was aware. And to me, that affiliation, that closeness, that knowledge, that knowledge.

is as bad. You think it's bad? You don't like? Okay, let's move on. All right. Look, plagiarism. You wrote a lot of papers. You ever plagiarize anything?

I'm sure I did. Under these, and not because I was big about it. It's just under, with the way we're using plagiarism and the standards that are out there. Maybe I should say the rules. I probably would fall under one of these.

there is a new Salman in the weaponization of plagiarism. We're going to have on Molly White to talk about this specifically as it relates to Wikipedia in a second. William Ackman, Bill Ackman, who's a huge head from manager.

He was part of the movement to get Claudine Gay ousted as president. Leading, you could say. Yeah, leading. Him and Chris Rupert. Him and Chris Rupert at the top of it. Bill Ackman also has been very active in like taking names about people

who we feel like have been either pro-Palestine or critical of Israel as they prosecute their war in Gaza. Remember when this first started, there were people at Harvard and other places, if I remember correctly, NYU as well, that had said things or sent emails or I've been active in chat rooms and colleges. And Bill Ackman was like,

I want to create a list of these people so that we never hire. And he's a huge head fund manager, a billionaire. And so people were like, I don't know if creating lists and doing things of that nature is the best way to have public discourse on that. But he wanted to take names. So anyway, he was all over Claudine Gay. Claudeyne Gay was found to have plagiarized a bunch of different

academic writings of hers throughout the years now look there's even two sides of that Rachel you've seen that

some people are saying that she didn't plagiarosity all right I've talked to a lot of academics even before doing

this podcast that looked at it and said there are instances where things were improperly cited and there are and some of those

instances are are not that big of a deal, but then there are a couple of times to where things that Claudine Gay did meet the standard of academic plagiarism. How? I want you guys to understand this,

and I say this, just so people get the intellectual side of this. That doesn't mean her intention was to steal somebody else's work. One guy actually said, this is tantamount to sloppy writing, rushing through something, or not being as buttoned up on it.

The figure or the idea of Claudine Gay as this intellectual fraud who's passing other people's work off as hers isn't even the thing that they are saying. They're not saying them. The people that looked at the plagiarism. Ackman and Rufo are making it seem.

that way, but that's not even what we're talking about. We're talking about plagiarism from academic standard. I just have to say it before we get into it. Because that standard is also being applied to Bill Atkins' wife, Neri Oxwood, who is an architect and holds a PhD in design computation from MIT, very accomplished lady. Business Insider last week published two different articles that alleged she stole sentences and paragraphs from Wikipedia and from other scholars. The publication also reported several errors in her attributing others work in her dissertation. She apologized for these errors on Thursday and said they involved only a few paragraphs of a 330-page thesis. Now, let's get the timeline of that right. She apologized

after the initial business insider article was published. Then they went back and found more stuff, right? Bill Ackman has responded. unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family. He wrote that he's going to fucking put a case on everybody's asses. He would begin a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty members, the president of MIT who was also at the hearing being grilled by Elise Stefani that got all three of these university presidents in trouble. and he says he wants to save all news organizations

from the trouble doing pleasureism reviews. He then posted like a 5,000 word tweet. Yeah, I quit. I quit. And said that he is going to review the work of reporters at Business Insider. Now, I want to talk about this. Before I talk about it, I want to bring up one thing.

The parent company of Business Insighton, Axel Springer, said this. and I want everybody to pay attention to this. I want everyone to pay attention to what Axel Swemann said. It's going to take a couple of days to review the processes around B.I. stories related to Neri Oxman, an academic and Bill Ackman's wife, even though the facts of the reports have not been disputed.

I should also say that Bill Ackman says that this insider made them aware of one of the things that they were going to be. published on a Friday night and the Jewish tradition of Shabbat then precluded them from being able to respond to it because you're not supposed to use technology and stuff. We've talked about that here on the podcast, right? That's what Rabbi Lamb said. I want to read this one more time from Axel Spring, which is the parent company of businesses. We're going to take a couple days to review the processes around B.I. stories related to Narii Oxman, an academic and Bill Atkins' wife, even though the facts of the report have not been disputed. Rachel, what are your

thought to you? I think it's a shame that they're even having to put out and make this statement, and I think that it shows what happens when somebody has power and money. and threatens because that's what it seems to be like here. I mean, they're flat out saying they're not denying what's in the report. They're just basically coming after them

because they don't like the fact that you came after, or he's coming after you because he doesn't like the fact that you came after his wife. I mean, the fact that this is being done is absolutely ridiculous. This is what I think about.

Okay, so look, this was going to happen and we talked about it before. We talked about the fact that There are new ways to detect plagiarism that didn't exist before, and that those things might be used and, quite frankly, should be used, to go back over everybody's work. Everyone has to, I don't think, okay, let me tell what I mean.

I want everyone to understand this. This is why capitalism won't save it. We fucking cheer whenever there's a new black billion, because it's inspiring. It makes us feel like, there's going to be a point to where we're going to be equal in money, power, and influence to white people, and that a black billionaire, somebody making a billion dollars as a black person is an example of that. So, hey, this person made a billion dollars.

Oh, wow, look where they came from. They made a billion dollars. And that's great. the single most important tool in the oppression of black people is capitalism is now, was, and always will be. Capitalism in this form, the only thing that will beat that

is shared cultural values, group operation, and solidarity. You're going to have to care about something other than money, how much money you have, how much money the next person has, how much money the next person gets after that. Capitalism in America is a tool to buy anything. This guy

just bought the fucking paper like outright. His money and his influence allows him to buy the opinion of Axel Springer. Yeah. They just did exactly what he did. The same

thing and found some shit. The exact same thing. I want you guys to understand this. The only difference in this case is money. They did the exact same thing. They said, okay, by the standards that you are using and that Rufo is using, Claudine Gay is a plagiarist.

Therefore, Claudine Gate is not qualified to be the president of an institution of higher education with the reputation, the standing. the importance in the history of Harvard University, right? Cool. Fine. Your wife is a professor at MIT, one of the world's celebrity academics. David Brad Pitt before Bill Ackman.

That must be a feather in Bill Ackman's cap, right? She writes all the time. She writes papers and D.C.s and all the time. Let's see if the standard that you set and Rufo set applies to her. It didn't have to show anything. It could have not showed anything.

But it did. Did show something. The same shit. She acknowledged that it showed something. And then what does it become? It becomes, hey, this is politically motivated. Hey, this is people coming after me for something else. Hey, the exact same things we said about Claudine Gay.

the only difference between this guy and anybody else is he can make these other people bend the need by threatening their business. That's what money does. And if you think that there's ever going to be a time where we are going to have enough money to be able to make people bend the knee in that same way, you're out of your fucking mind. The only thing that we are going to be able to do to combat money is to affect money through boycott. through civil disobedience, through us controlling our own economics. Because if it's always a situation like this, like a Bill Ackman is going to be able to buy people and make them back off. This is the same thing.

The only thing that's different here is the fact that he's white, he's rich, and the people on the other side of this weren't. Our black billionaires don't do this. they don't use their influence and money to leverage other companies to do stuff on our behalf. Not really, not in any way that I've seen. They're too busy, like making more money selling things to us. So like what I'm saying about this is I looked at this and I'm enraged. I'm enraged by the fact that you guys, it's so funny to me.

Like even on the January 16th, like we watch. the thing about the internet is like we're watching in real time people flip shit around like you know how like years and years and years and years went past and it was like okay well the Native Americans were

these savages that raided these peaceful settlers and would fuck them up and cut their heads off and drink their blood and all of that stuff and then the part that like these people were coming and parking their shit in their front lawn was never discussed because we weren't around. Now we're watching January 6th be turned from what it actually was.

We're watching the Republicans trying to say, we're the winner, so we're going to change the story in front of your face. We're watching Bill Ackman go, I have enough money to change this story in front of your face. Like, I have enough. I have enough of this to just make you look crazy. And before we have to go back and go, okay, well, that's not that happened. We never talk about like the Pequot Master.

We never talk about Christopher Columbus, cutting off people's arms. These are things we didn't really discuss about whether or not we should be looking at these papers. Now it's happening right in front of you. So I'm telling you, you have to pay attention to stuff like this because Claudine Gage has lost her job. And I guarantee you nothing happens to near October. No. I get. Oh, sorry.

Go ahead. No, I'm done. Well, no. Not even just that. It's that the fact that he still doesn't get the similarities in it. He still thinks that there are complete differences. He still thinks that. the editor who of, I think of Business Insider,

the person who wrote the article, is anti-Zionism. So that's what they're motivated by, rather than the fact that, no, there is actual plagiarism, as you pointed out, the exact same thing that you, or standards and rules that you said for Claudine Gay. And not only can he not see it,

he is continuing to hold up a tiki torch and march on to go attack other. educators at MIT and whoever else is in his way, he's not stopping. So it's like he can't even see his, no, no, no, it's different with my wife. It's motivated. You're coming after my wife. Family is off limits. Oh, it's motivated by anti-Zionism. But I'm still going to keep going. Even though you found something on my wife, if it's about me, it's different. But when it's with everybody else, it makes sense. It's just, it's probably motivated by all of that. Yes, hold on.

I'm not saying it's probably this. We would not be having a conversation about Nary Oxman and her academic credentials if not for what happened to Claudia. It's probably motivated by all of that. What we were told, though, you guys, I'm losing my fucking mind. What we were told not two years ago,

not 200 years ago, what we were told last week. Do you understand? Do you understand the game? We weren't told. told this 200, 300, 400. We were told last week, eight days ago before niggas popped bottles and all of that stuff. Shout out to my people at Linden.

We had a great time here. We got drinking to having a whiskey sour. Hold on out. Learn how to make whiskey sours at home. Great. Can't wait to have one. I'm going to make you a whiskey sour. Need it.

Rachel, before I get back on this diet, you know, this is the year of ban on race. You know, people, I hope people understand. Great. I love that. I just, I hope people understand something. This is my motherfucker right here, man. I don't know why. You're mine too.

I don't know why it happened that way. I don't, you know, because the Midnight Boys, me and the Midnight Boys are over here. Let me give Bill Simmons some credit. People don't like when I give credit to white people, but, you know, you have to do it every now and again. Like, the people that I'm surrounded with that I'm surrounded with, that I, I work with here. This is my family, man.

Like, Jomey, Steve, like, fucking Charles, Rachel, Lindsay, Donnie. My ladies are morally corrupt. Ashley, Alleya, Jody, Chelsea.

You know, I'll go to extra mile for fucking Juliet. I'll go to extra mile for Juliet, man. You know, I fuck with Chris fucking around. You know, I'll go to, like, these are my people, man. These are my motherfuckers. And I'm actually falling into the same trap that I did at TMC.

Well, I fell in love with everybody. Don't put them on the same level. They're not. Well, I fell in love with everybody. And then when the shit was over, I was really sad for a while. But not sad that I wasn't there anymore, but just like, Alea. Like, these are my people.

I love my people. But, like, I say this because I want everybody to know that the protection that you have for people and the way that you want to protect people. There's an intellectual consistency that goes along with that. And I am flabbergasted at this one. This turn more than others. This turn more than others has really floored me. I've spent so much time. We're going to bring Molly on in a second looking into the fact that this has to be different in some way. The Neri Oxnick has to be different in some way. It has to be different. because I see why he would want to protect her

because it's the same way I won't want to protect all of you guys. I get it. It has to be different in some kind of way. It's not any different. It's the same thing. As a matter of fact, there are some instances of plate tourism. They're asking me that are worse. And like literally last week it was like, it doesn't matter. And I'll be honest with you, some of my friends out there have told me, I've been on the phone

with you guys and you guys have been like, it doesn't, it doesn't fucking. matter whether or not it was politically motivated from Claudine Gay. The only thing that matters is whether or not she actually plagiarized, right? And I want you all to keep the same energy because the reality is, if not, it's fucking racist. If it matters when, if the political motivation and all of that stuff doesn't matter when you're doing it to Claudey and Gay, but it does matter when you're doing it to Neri Oxman or anybody that's in proximity to Bill Ackman or Chris Rufo or the rest of these people who made themselves target and made this, uh,

somewhat acceptable way to criticize somebody. If it doesn't matter then, the only difference is black and woman. And we just got to be real. Because the motivations didn't matter last week, but they matter this week. The findings mattered last week. They matter this week. It's the same thing. I think you get even more upset too.

Let me just say, I think you get even more upset because you know he's going to get away with it. He will. And he's going to keep going. The fact that it's already gotten to with Axel Springer, he's going to get away with it. The fact that they had to put out a statement that basically, basically is like, as I said, the facts haven't even been disputed by them.

It's already happening. That's what makes it even worse. And we're going to have to continue to watch Bill Ackman put another 5,000 word tweet out there as he continues to go after more people and ignore what was happening in his own home. Yeah, I'm saying, this is all I'm saying, man. It can't be all about money. It can't be all about money. If it's all about money, it's a losing game.

you have to care about the results, the solidarity, and the structures of this because you're watching right now what money do. And even with the, I don't want to bring in anybody else. I'm just saying,

you know, before I go off in another, change it. Yeah, let's bring in Molly White. Let's bring in Molly White. Molly White is a Wikipedia editor. She had a fantastic video

that I watched when I was doing research on this. Molly, thank for joining us on higher learning. I was doing a little research on the various plagiarism. scandals that have been going on. You guys have seen them in the press at large. I feel like we've never talked about plagiarism as much with this many consequences. It's never been as consequential as it has been in the last couple of weeks.

Is that not true? That's absolutely true. I mean, why is plagiarism a part of like current events or like the way that it is now? It's being, it's being forced upon us. But yes, why would we normally talk about it? It's still a relevant discussion. to have, I would guess. And in doing my research

on this, I came upon an incredibly insightful and informative YouTube video by Ms. Molly White, who joins us on Higher Learning today. And the YouTube video dealt specifically with the

Wikipedia side in terms of plagiarism allegations against Nari Axman, who of course you guys know is the the wife of Bill Ackman and some of the

assertions that Bill Ackman made are the questions that he asked during his insanely long Twitter thread. And I just kind of gave us some insight into the world of Wikipedia, what it looks like to plagiarize from Wikipedia

if that's even possible some of the questions that Ackman raised in his tweet. And so I want to have to have Molly on here. I could have you guys all watch the video, which I will, but I want to have Molly on here to maybe give us a little bit of insight into some of the answers to the questions that Atman asked. Hi, Molly. How are you doing? Hi, I'm doing well. So tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into it. Like, what makes you so well-versed on Wikipedia and what it

means to sort to cite Wikipedia and all of that stuff. So I'm a long-time Wikipedia editor. I've been editing Wikipedia for over 15 years now. I spent around six years on what's called the Arbitration Committee, which is kind of like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia. And I've been heavily involved with both, you know, writing articles on the encyclopedia, but also in the more administrative side of things, making sure everything runs smoothly over there.

Why? Because I love it. It's all volunteer. It's not my job or anything like that. But I think it's really, really important to give free access to high quality information to anyone who can access it. You know, anyone with an internet connection can go read Wikipedia and learn something from hopefully a high quality article that they're reading. So pick back on that. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. You talk about access, the public having access to this information. And I'm curious, just in the context of what we're reading. we're talking about with plagiarism in this specific incidents, do academics typically cite Wikipedia? Typically not. They don't typically cite any encyclopedia because generally speaking, you don't want to cite third party or tertiary sources, which are sources that are basically just compiling other people's research, which is what Wikipedia does. Normally, an academic would

cite other academic research or other sort of first or secondary sources, rather than going to sort of a compendium. And then, you know, with Wikipedia specifically, there are some questions about the reliability of Wikipedia and any given Wikipedia article that, you know, Wikipedia itself acknowledges that, you know, when you're creating an encyclopedia that any random person can edit, there is that risk that you'll be reading something and it will be inaccurate. And so that's why a lot of places also additionally worn against citing Wikipedia directly. So her YouTube is Molly White. She's Molly White on YouTube.

The video that I watch, and I'm referencing here, is a Wikipedia explains Wikipedia to Bill Ackman. Why did you feel like you wanted to make that video? What was important about it to you? Well, I got really frustrated when I saw Bill Ackman's tweet that came out after his wife was accused specifically of plagiarizing some passages from Wikipedia, where it felt to me like he was really trying to deflect the conversation from being about plagiarism and about, you know, his motivations in becoming very involved in this recent plagiarism crusade against individuals

like Claudine Gay. And instead to turn it into this sort of just asking questions, sewing doubt into whether or not is even possible to plagiarize from Wikipedia, you know, and asking all these questions that felt to me very disingenuous because it's very easy to look at the answers to these questions. You know, a Google search for is Wikipedia copyrighted will give you the answer to those questions immediately. So he was asking questions that I don't think he actually really cared to know the answer to. I think he just wanted to sort of sow doubt into the allegations against his wife

and try to make things a little bit less awkward, I think, for him and for her. Can you speak to some of, to what's dangerous about, what Bill Ackman is doing? I think it contributes to misinformation around what Wikipedia is. You know, I don't think it's useful to go out there and claim that, oh, it's fine to copy Wikipedia. That's totally legal and ethical and, you know, a reasonable thing for someone to be doing. Or, you know, claiming that it's not plagiarism to copy verbatim without any attribution, something that's more akin to like a dictionary definition. He's been making those claims

recently as well. even though that too is also plagiarism. He's claiming that it's not. So I think it's really misleading to make these types of claims. But I also think more generally weaponizing plagiarism allegations in the way that Bill Ackman has been doing is not a productive way to pursue one's goals. You know, it's clear that Bill Ackman wanted to see Claudine Gay gone from Harvard University, where she was formerly the president. And that was not because he, you know, at least a originally it was not because he believed she wasn't a qualified academic or that her work wasn't any good. It was because he disagreed with her stance on, you know, anti-Semitism on campus and her response to a congressional inquiry. And when he wasn't able to, you know, use his influence and money and power to have her removed, he started sort of going through any means necessary, I think, and was able to grasp on to these plagiarism allegations in pursuit of his goal. And I think, you know, it is disingenuous to do that.

I think that it very much does not sort of achieve the goals that we should be looking for in terms of, you know, in terms of, you know, who is suited to be president of a university and such. So, you know, it felt pretty hypocritical when he now sort of turned around and started to say, well, is it even plagiarism? Is it possible to plagiarize when he was just making, you know, very aggressive? of allegations against Claudine Gay about the same thing. Can you take us through some of the points that you raised in this video in response to Bill Ackman's tweet? I don't want to, because the video is great because it's incredibly academic and even killed. It's not made to me with any slant or any specific point of view.

There are very substantive responses to the things that he said in the tweet. Could you go through a couple of them for us? You got a clear out here, Molly. So Molly Isso. Do whatever one. Like, just go through some of the things that he said. You don't have to go through all of them as in detail because I want people to go watch your video. But whatever you think is pertinent to discuss right now, just take us through a couple of them. Sure.

So Bill Akbin questioned whether it's even possible to prove that someone has plagiarized from Wikipedia, especially when it happened about 15 years ago. He, I think, does not realize that every edit to Wikipedia is saved in detail. so it's actually possible to go look at any Wikipedia article and see what it looked like 15 years ago. And so that was how Business Insider was able to determine that his wife had plagiarized from these Wikipedia articles because they weren't comparing it to today's Wikipedia article. They were comparing it to an article as it existed when she was working on her dissertation. He also asked, is Wikipedia even copyrighted, which version is copyrighted? and I explained that Wikipedia is copyrighted

and that basically any work is copyrighted as soon as it is fixed in time. That's something that was established in law over 100 years ago. And so every edit to Wikipedia is indeed copyrighted. The current version of a page is copyrighted, but so is any older version. And then there were some questions

that were raised more by his followers than by him himself, but around the licensing of Wikipedia content. There were claims that Wikipedia content is public domain, which would mean that you can't actually infringe on the copyright because there is really no copyright to it. That's not the case with Wikipedia. There is a license and it's not public domain. You do have to cite if you use Wikipedia or quote from Wikipedia. And the usage of Wikipedia is not something that's just sort of a free for all. You have to comply with that license. So, you know, I think there was a lot of misinformation going around about Wikipedia.

Last question for me. You know, you talk about the weaponization of plagiarizing that we're seeing committed here by Bill Ackman. And we're seeing its effects. I mean, at this point, business insiders speaking out saying that they're going to do more research into, you know, the information, the investigation and the information that was put out in that. article with someone who has so much money and so much power as Bill Ackman. And in the age of

AI, what do you see happening with plagiarism? Maybe you can even speak to Wikipedia, because I know that's what your YouTube is on. Like, what do you see happening here and how it has continued to be used as a weapon? Well, I think, you know, it's a fact that it's becoming easier to detect plagiarism these days. You know, it was, it was more difficult. before, you know, the internet was as ubiquitous, before Google search was as powerful, to determine if someone had, you know, opened a book and copied down something that they read inside of it. So I think it is accurate that, you know, some people who may have committed plagiarism years ago might be exposed for having done so in the way that we're seeing right now.

I think, you know, there will need to be a conversation about what plagiarism is and, you know, to what extent people need to be punished for it. I think that it's a really complicated topic, honestly. And there are different kinds of plagiarism. There are different degrees of plagiarism. You know, Ackman is currently trying to argue, for example, that plagiarizing a definition isn't as bad as plagiarizing, for example, like a key portion of someone's work, which I actually think is accurate. I think he's, you know, I think that's a reasonable argument to make. But these are, you know, sort of nuanced conversations that we probably should be having outside of the context of this very politicized argument that's really honestly about something else. It's not about plagiarism. That's just

being used as a tool. As for AI, I mean, Ackman has started to make claims now that he wants to use AI to analyze all the work of all academics at MIT and Harvard and everywhere and that that will expose everyone. And that's something I've been seeing recently. Actually, I've had a couple people threaten me saying, I'm going to use AI and go through your work and prove that you're a plagiarist. And it's kind of a weird thing to assume that everyone is plagiarizing. You know, it's like everyone thinks that if, you know, you just look hard enough, you'll, you'll discover that everyone's been committing plagiarism, which is a very strange allegation to be making. But, you know, I think it's true that a lot of people, sometimes inadvertently will copy things from, you know,

something that they were referencing or, you know, they will include a source that they were using and then forget to cite it properly. And, you know, that happens. People are human. You know, that usually what happens in academia when there isn't a huge fuss being made about it in, you know, in a political sense is that, you know, a citation will be corrected, you know, correction will be issued and people will move on. So, you know, I think, I think it's, uh, unfortunate to see plagiarism being weaponized like this just because it doesn't seem to actually advance anyone's goals really. It's just sort of becoming a new tool in the toolbox of people who are campaigning for someone's removal. But, you know, things evolve and, you know, we'll see how it goes from here, I think. Molly, we're going to let you go. Before we do, I want to let you, you know, I see that you're into the blockchain. I see that you're in. to it. I see that you do a little work

around the blockchain. Now, your background is, to tell us about yourself a little bit before I ask you about the blockchain. Like, where you see your researcher, software engineer, writer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based programming and stuff like that.

I'm not a crypto guy by any means, but I watched some of your other videos here. And like what's, where do you come from? Like, what, like, where do you study and stuff? Yeah. So I guess My educational background was in computer science. I have a computer science degree.

I worked in the industry for six years or so. But more recently, I also run a website called Web3 is Going Just Great, which is sort of a satirical name. But I sort of track the ways in which the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry has been honestly doing a lot of harm to very real people, you know, in terms of scams and frauds and, you know, the recent high-profile collapses of, you know, companies like FTX where people lost a ton of money. You know, I have become very concerned with the promotion of cryptocurrency and blockchains as sort of the future of the web and the future of finance when it doesn't seem well suited at all to that type of use case.

So that's actually sort of my primary research in writing is more about crypto and block. chains and also just sort of the technology world in general, tech ethics, things like that. But, you know, I also have this history with Wikipedia. And so sometimes things are in the news and I sort of feel the need to try to set the record straight on factual questions about Wikipedia. Molly, I'll tell you something. I'm very tech dumb. I don't know about it. A new technology comes around and what I do is I get scared. Robots, crypto, all that stuff. AI, AI, which is used in this situation, weaponize AI to do this entire thing. I'd love to have you back, Molly, specifically to answer the question, what is blockchain?

I tried to have this conversation with some people in the parking lot. My brother and them were trying to explain it to me. I don't know that I quite got it. And I like to think that I'm a guy of moderate intelligence. So if you don't mind, we'd love to have you back and talk about this stuff. But I'm encouraging people to go watch this video because in detail, It goes even in further detail, should I say, into some of the claims that Bill Ackman made.

Specifically about Wikipedia, you'll come away smarter from it. And the name of it is, a Wikipedia explains Wikipedia to Bill Ackman. That's Molly White on YouTube. And it just popped up. The algorithm was, I put in Nari Oxman, plagiarism, and the algorithm was kind to you.

It popped right up. So I don't know if you're, if you're, playing the right games over there, but it's good to you. But thank you for joining us on our higher learning today, Molly. Thank you. Thanks for having me. No problem. Bye-bye.

We're going to move on to another one. I do want to say something real quick. There have been 250 bodies found in unmarked graves behind the Mississippi jail. It's 2023. I need Ben Crop on this podcast. The Chicago Crusader reports, the remains were found of a pauper cemetery behind the Hines County, Mississippi Jail. The gravesites were reportedly marked with merely a metal rod and a number.

672 bodies buried in a paupers field covering the years 2008 to 2020, 23. Documents obtained by NBC News presented a list of 215 burials between the years of 2016-20203 where no notification was given to the descendants' families. Some relatives of those found buried behind the jail simply thought that they were missing. they object to having to pay a fee for the removal of their loved ones, remains that are needed for proper burial. So we're rights attorney Ben Crump joining forces with Reverend Housa Heinz, senior pastor of the Christ Tabernacle Church,

the national leader of a New Day Coalition for Equity in Black America to call for an investigation into the causes of 215 deaths. Of course, you guys know that this comes on the heels of a couple of pretty high-profile stories involving people that found out their relatives were buried in other places, only after a long time. Some of these stories involved police interactions, or the police have an interaction with someone. Someone dies, and then they take it when they bury this place, they'll tear their family. I want to stay on this from too long, and I'll tell you why. I want to have been on and want to tell us about it and take us through it and let's know what can be done here.

But I want you guys to be aware of stories like this, even though they're a bummer, Because you guys think it's one way and it's the other way, to quote Marla. You guys think it's one way and it's the other way. Like you feel a way that you matter. Like I go visit my dad, right? For a while my dad didn't have a headstone. Because I didn't know you had to buy it. Did you know that?

Yeah. I didn't know that you had to buy. You muted, Rachel. I didn't know that you had to buy a headstone separate. Yeah. Yeah. the guy comes in and he quotes the price and, you know, it's the

same funeral home that like everybody uses. We all buried in the same place of the slayfetons, Venture Cemetery. I'll tell you about the Confederate in my family. I'll tell you about this? I'll tell you about this? Uh-uh. Oh, man, this is crazy. I did the ancestry DNA. You did?

Well, I did, yeah, I did the ancestry, but I also did the family tree. Okay. So I did the family tree. And in doing the family tree, because there's one white man buried in the Ventress family cemetery there, it's Peter Ventress. That is my great-grandmother's father. My father was raised by his grandparents, my great-grandparents. So his grandfather, his grandfather slash great-grandfather lived in a house with them up to a certain point.

He had to live in a house with them because he had married a black one. and his daughter was my great-grandmother, Big Mama, passed away in 1970-7-year. So he's buried there. He's buried there, and I did some research on it. His father was in the Confederate Army.

And then his brother, his father's brother, was a politician in Mississippi that wrote the bill to start Ole Miss University. And this is this is direct family. This isn't a situation where, you know, we took the slave master's name or something like that.

We have that all over the place. But this is like the family of my great grandma. Like all of these people, I had no clue. We know that there are white ventrances, but I didn't know how so. But I say all that to say that I went and I looked at his grave site. And it says on it, Peter Ventress. And that's a story.

Like I'm looking at all of these people. like Peter Ventress, that's a story. That's who he is. Peter Ventricks tells you something about it. That's the way we're remembering people. That's like human being. That's a story. And that made me want to go look up all this other stuff.

And I looked it up and I found that there's this whole big story. I don't give a fuck. There's white people in there. It is weird that you can trace that shit all the way back to England. And then other places on the family tree just fucking stops. Just kind of shows you what was taken from it. But there's a story there, right? Someone cared enough about your life to tell your story for however long that place is going to be there.

And then I started to think, oh, my shit. shit. My dad, there's no headstone. My dad doesn't have a story. Okay, what story we're going to tell? We're going to put like a fucking deer on there. We're going to say loving father, husband. We're going to put a baseball on there. Like, how big do you want to do it? Now I'm thinking I got to compete with the other people that are buried there. I want to show how much I love my dad by having a fucking huge headstone. He's buried right next to his brother, right below his mom, right next to everybody. My uncle raised up laid down there now. I want to tell this big, huge story. I want to remember him. I want to make sure somebody knows if they're passing by this place, if they're planting flowers out there,

if they're jogging by, if they're planting sugar cane, I want to know, I want to let somebody know that that guy mattered, that somebody loved him, that somebody loved him enough to, like, care how you see him, right? And plus, I want to be able to go there and sit down on there and look at his name and look at the things that he loved. I know you have to do that. So I freaked out when I thought a head song's coming. It's like, no, you got to buy that next to you. Cool. To know that these people don't get that, that they just got deleted.

Their families don't know. Their families don't have the opportunity to make that decision. Their families don't have the opportunity to decide, like, what happens, where it goes. Somebody else made that decision for them. And somebody just went, okay, put them in the ground. Yeah. What? I think about everything that I went through.

It's like, what? Huh? Well, it just shows. It just shows how much, or how the lack of that you don't care, how you value certain people's lives one way and how other people's you literally throw out like trash.

You mark where they lay with a metal rod and a number. You don't do the courtesy of notifying their family. You don't even try. You just have someone dig their grave and dump them in there as if they had no, that they just weren't human beings. And I think that's the most troubling thing of it all. And the fact that once again, here we are in Jackson, Mississippi. You can do a whole thing on Jackson, Mississippi. The fact that it was 2023, they've been working on this story for a while, but 2023 that this came, I guess, national news.

And Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi did not have a policy outlining officers on how to notify families when a loved one died. They just implemented that. What kind of sense does that make? so they can pick and choose who they want to spend time, you know, letting the family know or caring about their life after death. It's wild to me. And the fact that, as you said, some of these stories that have come out involve an off-duty police officer, people, like, hit someone with a car.

You've got people who have been looking for their children. They didn't know that they were dead. They didn't know what happened to them. They had to just assume when all the while they were right there in their backyard, very just dumped to the side by the very police department that they're supposed to trust that's supposed to serve and protect them could care less about them as human beings. It's an insane story. Think about what you're talking about, Rach. Think about what we're talking about with people in Mississippi. And we know, to say the quiet power out loud, I bet you, I bet you.

I can't even speak to it because there are a lot of families because remember, we're talking about. about poor here. Yeah, that's... We're talking about poor here. We're talking about poor. We're talking about black. We're talking about poor. And in America, poor is a race.

They don't want us to believe that. And they don't want the poor people to believe that. The biggest people getting the wool pulled over their eyes, in addition to black people are poor white people. Because they don't realize poor is a race. Poor is a race. As long as you're not a nigger, then you're doing better. I wish that Fred Hampton's way of

looking at the world, man, it took friend from us, it took some of these people from us and it meant so much the Rainbow Coalition and being able to get people on the same page that can actually understand and indict this system for what it really is and what it really means to people, especially in a situation like this,

so important. So it is Mississippi, what are we talking about? We're talking about drinking water, burial rights. We're talking about central tenets of civilized human life here. We're talking about water and remembrance. The rest of y'all are coming to me telling me about all of this shit. We've got to go through all of these things and volleyball,

these political things about telling me about how bad. I'm talking about water and your family's ability to mourn. We're discussing this even still. Talk about it in Flint, talk about it in here, talking about in other places, the ability to walk around, unmolested, without being stopped. Frisk, then killed, to be buried after your dad, to drink water.

To drink water, water, water and being put in the ground. It's crazy. It's crazy. I can't wait to have been on the show. Oh, look, before we move on to this nigga that I want to talk about. No, let's just go. I'll only want to do that story after this. I have a question.

Did you watch the Golden Globes last night? No. All right. I want to say something to somebody right now. It's before we leave, man. Joe Coy, I don't know you. I can't imagine how you're feeling right now. Just take a break.

Why is everybody so hard on him? I mean, I know I didn't watch it. But when I tell you, I've talked to him, he's one of the nicest. Nice man. Nicest people. We got to get these jokes off. He wasn't.

Was it not good? No. Be honest. Okay. I just, I don't know. I really didn't watch it. I just, of course, you know, whenever Taylor's involved, that's all we hear about. Okay, so he had a couple of jokes that were on.

People thought that a couple of jokes might have been sexes. But it's like, not to me. He made a joke, he said, you know, Barbie was this and this and that. Then I guess the punchline is, well, there's also cellulite and bad feet. That's called a character actor. And people thought that that joke was sex. There's a couple of jokes that they thought that they made him sex. But this is what the thing about Joe Quay that really gets to me.

The thing that really gets to me is it's not the fact. that the sexist thing is being used as a cover for the fact that people are piling on because he really had a shitty monologue. It was really bad. Even on stage, even on stage, he was like, some jokes I wrote,

some jokes other people wrote. He said, I got it 10 days ago, which is bad. He was supposed to do that, Joe, you need to take, you know,

good crap, and never blames his tools. And he goes, I just took the gig 10 days ago. You guys spent a perfect monologue, but I don't know, he was making jokes within his monologue. Oh, wow.

What I don't get is like, why do people want to fuck him up so bad? He didn't want to do a bad monologue. You know, I don't know Joe Coy like that. He didn't want to do a bad monologue. It's like, it's like really interesting to me. It's like, maybe it's the space that I'm in. Everybody's kicking his ass. We got to get these jokes off because it was bad.

But like people are like, I'm glad people are seeing where I always saw about Joe Coy, fucking sucks. they're specifically attacking him. Outside of, outside of the monologue. Nica, where do you go? What do you? Okay.

Excuse me. I'm going through some things. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. No, it's true. Here we go. It's true. Nah, I get, I'm just joking. That's true.

Probably want to stay off the old twist. But I will say, but I will say that I thought that that's just something people do with open monologues. Like, as eager as people are to talk about the and what people are wearing and who showed up and who they showed up with, they always are ready to tear down or tear apart whoever's hosting the globes.

I just feel like, or any award show, they're always eager to talk about the jokes. I just feel like that comes with the territory. But I didn't know that it was getting personal and they were coming at him for things outside of the month along. It's like, they're just showing it. It's like, y'all, he fucked up. Can you imagine being jokeway right now?

He fucked up. the biggest opportunity of his life. And it's just like, it don't really matter, right? There's no, it doesn't, it's just a comedy set. I can see if it was important. He made a couple of jokes

that people thought were whatever. I'm looking at all these reactions. Harrison Ford was like non-plus. Selena put her hands in her head. Like, so many people looked so confused. man at what was going on. Man, Joe Coy, bro. You sucked,

but you weren't trying to suck. You know, dust yourself off and try to get everybody's bomb. What a hell of a time to bomb, man. What a hell of a time to bomb. Yeah, you said it's just a comedy set. And I'm like, in front of Hollywood's biggest elite and the world watching. Can you imagine?

It's not just a comedy set. But I want people to imagine getting that shot, getting that chance. When Joe Coy was up there, I was like, oh, shit, they went in a different way. They didn't get, they normally go for somebody that has a little bit, but he's a huge comic, but they normally go for somebody that has a little bit more of a cachet than Joe, right? And he gets up there. They had Gerard Con Michael last year. Oh, that was the one.

Okay. I thought they didn't have a host last year. And then they, you know, was Ricky Jervais for a bunch of years. And then it was. Well, they took time off. Yeah. Right. So like, it's just so, I just, I don't know, I'm like a bleeding heart type of nigger. I just, I feel for him. He fucked it up. Yeah. It's, I mean, if everybody's coming out of him, the way you're saying it, yeah. All right, well, keep your head up, Joe Coy. You don't know. It's a risk. It's a risk you take when you do this, when you do the globes, you host the globes. It's a risk.

What's the biggest time you ever bombed? Do you remember? It's the biggest, it's the biggest opportunity you ever, you ever, you ever fucked up. It's the biggest time you ever bought. I'm not going to bring attention to it. Oh, so we out. We got to go. No, it's not it. No, it's not.

What you're thinking of. It's like, there's something actually happened. Oh, you got to tell me. Oh, you're talking about the Brad Pitt question. Yeah. Okay. You got to go. All right.

Take things, cows, but do not stop learning. Take them off. Don't stop learning. I'm Van Lathan Jr. I'm Rachel and Lindsay. Bye guys.