#RolandMartinUnfiltered - FBI agents sue Trump DOJ, Judge halts federal employee buyout, Crockett torches Musk

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

2.6.2025 #RolandMartinUnfiltered: FBI agents sue Trump DOJ, Judge halts federal employee buyout, Crockett torches Musk Today, a judge heard a case regarding the Justice Department's decision to publicly release the names of thousands of FBI agents and other personnel who investigated the January 6 insurrection. We'll talk to one of the attorneys representing the FBI agents about the outcome of today's hearing. A federal judge stopped the sweeping buyout offer, giving federal workers an extension until Monday to consider the deal. In tonight's edition of Crockett Chronicles, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett torches Elon Musk, the twice-impeached criminally convicted felon-in-chief, and her GOP colleagues about their fake outrage.  Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayana Pressley tells Iowa's governor her state could save money by eliminating her salary. You don't want to miss that verbal takedown.  We'll discuss what's next for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.  #BlackStarNetwork partner: Fanbasehttps://www.startengine.com/offering/fanbase This Reg A+ offering is made available through StartEngine Primary, LLC, member FINRA/SIPC.  This investment is speculative, illiquid, and involves a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment. You should read the Offering Circular (https://bit.ly/3VDPKjD) and Risks (https://bit.ly/3ZQzHl0) related to this offering before investing. Download the #BlackStarNetwork app on iOS, AppleTV, Android, Android TV, Roku, FireTV, SamsungTV and XBox  http://www.blackstarnetwork.com The #BlackStarNetwork is a news reporting platform covered under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Support this man, Black Media. He makes sure that our stories are told. Thank you for being the voice of Black America, Roller. Stay black. I love y'all. All momentum we have now, we have to keep this going. The video looks phenomenal. See, there's a difference between Black Star Network and Black-owned media and something like CNN. You can't be Black-owned media and be scared. It's time

to be smart. Bring your eyeballs home. You dig? Thank you. Today is Thursday, February 6th, 2025, coming up on Roller Barton on Filter, streaming live on the Black Star Network. Today, a judge heard a case regarding the Justice Department's decision to publicly release the names of thousands of FBI agents and other personnel who investigated the January 6th insurrection.

We'll talk to one of the attorneys representing some of the FBI agents regarding this hearing. Hey, guess what? A Reagan-appointed federal judge stopped the sweeping buyout offer, giving federal workers an extension until Monday to consider the bullshit deal. In tonight's edition of the Crockett Chronicle, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett torches Elon Musk and the twice impeached, criminally convicted felon in chief Donald Trump, as well as her Republican colleagues about their fake outrage. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley gets in the ass of the Iowa Republican governor regarding eliminating DEI.

She's like, you know what? Y'all could have saved more money eliminating your salary. We'll also discuss what's next for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party with a longtime strategist. Are the Democrats fighting the right fight right now? And do they really know what the hell they're doing? Oh, it's time to bring the funk. I'm Roland Martin-Unfiltered on the Blackstar Network, the blackest show in America.

He's got whatever the piss he's on it Whatever it is he's got the scoop, the fact, the fine And when it breaks he's right on time And it's rolling, best believe he's knowing Putting it down from sports to news to politics With entertainment just for kicks He's rolling It's Uncle Gro-Gro-Yah

It's Rolling Martin Rolling with rolling now He's funky, he's fresh, he's real The best you know, he's rolling Martel Martel The stupid people have taken over two blocks from our offices. That's right.

Justice Department lawyers announced on Thursday that they have no immediate plans to publicly release the name of the thousands of FBI agents and other personnel who investigated the white insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021. That's right. They expressed a willingness to reach an agreement preventing them from doing so while litigation related to the matter continues. Now, we told you all what happened. Trump comes in, and he's all about retribution. What does he do? He names the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.,

the lawyer for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Then they've been methodically targeting various agents. They replaced 20 field directors as well. And they are scaring to death people all throughout the FBI. Then, of course,

you have this idiot he wants to put over the FBI, Kash Patel, who is nuts and will tell you what even Republican Chuck Grassley was like. Yeah, we're going to hold off on a vote on his dumb ass before our hearing. Pam Keith is an attorney representing some of the FBI agents who join us right now. And Pam, let's just be real clear here. This is nothing but Donald Trump saying, I'm going to crucify every single FBI agent, assistant, secretary. I don't care if they were involved in any way in investigating me when it came to Mar-a-Lago and the classified documents,

when it came to any of his January 6 thugs, they got to go. That's really what's happening here. I mean, I think that's absolutely our concern, Roland. What the intention behind this order is, is the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the instruction is to gather all this information so that they can identify who was quote-unquote partisan and who was quote-unquote weaponized in investigating the January 6th cases. Because what they're trying to do is shift the narrative to say that nothing bad happened on January 6th.

And all of the investigation was politically motivated because they're trying to turn the good guys into the bad guys and the bad guys into the good guys. And this is a PR point. Donald Trump promised what I call the January 6th convicted felons that he was going to be their ret, that he was going to be their retribution. He was going to be their vengeance. And that's what this exercise is very much about. Sadly,

the DOJ lawyers that we are litigating against are trying to convince the judge that there's no reason to enjoin distribution of this list, of this information, because they have no intent. They don't have any negative information. Well, they can't actually make that representation

when it comes to Donald Trump, the White House, Elon Musk, or anybody else. And that's really what we're fighting for. What's before the judge at the moment is about publishing, disseminating, leaking, releasing this critical information about FBI personnel. It's not just agents. It's, you know, IT people and analysts and all these people that work in that law enforcement process. So it's very, very important that people understand there is nothing, absolutely nothing, benevolent about this process. And that's what people need to understand. And let's just be real clear here for people to understand. It's total retribution. They came in and just started whacking people left and right.

And the only reason they're saying that in court is because they've been getting nailed. They're so stupid, they demanded a list of every person hired by the CIA in the last two years, and they just sent it over in an email, and it was classified names in there. These people are nuts. Right, and Roland, the problem is not just what this does to agents in the moment, personnel in the moment.

It is what this does to the national security of the United States and the capacity to recruit and train agents into the future. You know, nobody wants this job because it's a thankless job. If their personal security and the security of their families is not guaranteed, if it's not a top priority. I will be honest that when we went into court and the judge directly asked opposing counsel, well, you will admit that release of this information would be eminent harm to the FBI personnel. They didn't say, yes, we admit that. They didn't say, yes, we want to protect these people. We only want to do an internal review. Instead, they kind of danced around it. Now, again, I'm not trying to impugn and nefarious intent to those lawyers, but they are hamstrung by what the intention of the administration actually is.

Well, first of all, let's just be real clear. These are the same DOJ lawyers when they went before a Reagan judge when it came to the 14th Amendment and citizenship, where the judge literally was like, how you even got a bar license? He basically, and so what you have is Trump DOJ lawyers, and they know, they know the law.

And they know he's ignorant. But they are so hell-bent on following a despot that they will go into court and just make up legal shit and don't mind the judge smacking them because they are only speaking to an audience of one i don't want to speak for them roland i do go ahead i'm sorry go ahead but what i can say is that what we expect to see from persons who have defended FBI agents for the last 15 years or more in various and sundry circumstances, to not defend those agents in this circumstance is mind-boggling.

To not say that the national security interests of the United States lies in protecting these people. They are desperate for this information. They want Donald Trump to get this information to them. And so it is vital that we do everything we can to protect these people. The theory for gathering the information in the first place was so that DOJ could do a review of who acted in a partisan way or who acted in a weaponized way. But that's not how a chain of command works. A chain of command is such that you follow the orders of the person above you. Everybody was following orders.

And given that they were 1,500 and 0 when it came to getting convictions, I don't think there's even a straight-faced argument here that people were partisan or weaponized, right? What the DOJ and what the Trump administration is trying to do is say that everything that happened on January 6 didn't actually happen. No crimes happened. No criminal behavior happened. No crimes happened. No criminal behavior happened. And DOJ just went on this frolic of just randomly finding people to prosecute. You know and I know that's not true. And when they found people who committed crimes on that day, they followed the evidence,

they gathered that evidence, they presented that evidence to grand juries, to judges, and they got convictions. Donald Trump's efforts to undo that, to assuage his own ego, is being put above the national security interests of the United States of America. That's what should offend everybody. Absolutely. Pam Keith, we appreciate it. Keep us abreast of what happens because, trust me, I think lawyers like you are going to be real busy over the next four years because of the incompetent idiots who are now running the federal government. Thanks a lot. Welcome, Ola. Thanks for having me, folks. One of the things that happened today is Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, he aligned with Democrats and said, you know what? I don't think I'm ready to move forward on a vote for that fool Kash Patel to run the FBI.

Watch. Good morning. Today's markup will be brief. So I'll get right down to business on our agenda. We've got three administrative committee matters and one nomination listed. The minority, as well as myself, has exercised their right and my right under the committee rules to hold over the nomination of Kash Patel to be director of the FBI. So that nomination is held over. All right, then. So we're going to talk about that after the break. We come back with our panel.

And I know they got lots to say about what's going on. You're watching Rolling Mark, non-filtered right here on the Black Star Network. What's up, y'all? Look, Fanbase is more than a platform. It's a movement to empower creators, Blackstar Network. the black community must not only consume tech, we must own it. Discover how equity crowdfunding can serve as a powerful tool for funding black businesses, allowing entrepreneurs to raise capital directly through their community, through the jobs ad. Next on The Black Table with me, Greg Cole.

Democracy in the United States is under siege. On this list of bad actors, it's easy to point out the Donald Trumps, the Mar another factor that trumps them all and resides much closer to many of our homes. His book is Laboratories of Autocracy, a wake-up call from behind the lines. So these state houses get hijacked by the far right. Then they gerrymander. They suppress the opposition, and that allows them to legislate in a way that doesn't reflect the people of that state. David Pepper joins us on the next Black Table,

here on the Black Star Network. On a next A Balanced Life with me, Dr. Jackie, the necessity of believing in things you can't see. It's called faith. It comes in all shapes and sizes and it's powerful. And it's a big part of being able to live a balanced life. The valley I experienced being a cancer survivor was one where my footing was completely unstable. I had no idea what to do. And in that instance of not knowing what to do, I had to rely on faith. That's all next on A Balanced Life, only on Black Star Network.

Coming soon to the Black Star Network. Well, y'all, when you're on that stage, and you're seeing two and three, four generations in the audience, that's got to speak to you about the power of what y'all become oh most definitely i think we were doing our show before our tour before our break and remember i was watching this kid i could not take my eyes off him because he was about right nine or so he's

sitting in the front row with over on the right hand side yes yes yes, yes, yes, yes. I was amazed that this kid knew everything. And I was like tripping to see how many songs this kid actually knew. And he knew them all. And he knew them all. We had to go over there and bring him on stage and take a picture with him, you know, at the end of the show and stuff because it was just that amazing. It was like, this is crazy. You know, the music travels everywhere.

You know, like what Phillip was saying, seeing this young kid, then you see, hear our songs on commercials, cold commercials. Then you have the younger ones that seen or hear our music in animation. Carl Payne pretended to be Roland Martin. Holla! You ain't got to wear black and gold every damn place, okay? Ooh, I'm an alpha, yay.

All right, you're 58 years old. It's over. And you are now watching... Roland Martin, unfiltered, uncut, unplugged, years old. It's over. You are now watching Roland Martin Unfiltered. Uncut, unplugged, and undamn believable. Oh, Chris Spencer just mad he couldn't get in. All right, y'all, let's go to our panel. Man, it's time to bring the funk. Nola Haynes, Dr. Nola Haynes, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Joining us from D.C., Dr. Greg Carr, Department of Afro-American Studies, Howard University out of D.C. Recy Colbert, host of the Recy Colbert Show on Sirius XM Radio out of D.C. And joining us in the studio, Ashley Etienne, former National Coalition Director for the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign. She worked at the Pelosi's office. She worked for Vice President Kamala Harris. She can't keep a job. All right, let's get right to it and go on. So, Cash Patel,

they are holding up his confirmation vote and the bottom line here, Reese, they know his ass crazy. Grassley know it. And they know he lied. So, I think they're going to be like, no, no, no. We got to put your ass back in the

hot seat because you lied last time you were here. Well, he can't get away with being as crazy and unhinged as the white boys. They want to let Elon Musk come in and infiltrate the whole damn government with all kind of foreign entanglements. But you Indian boo, you a little bit too brown to be that crack crack. So finally, an ounce of sanity prevails for a little bit because we do not need a Kash Patel, Pam Bondi tag up team. OK, I'm really actually pissed with Christopher Wray for folding like a little bitch and immediately resigning when he still had time left in his term because we needed somebody in there to have a little bit of resistance.

Get fired. It's okay to get fired if you're standing up for some semblance of a country. But for now, the guy that's in there, he seems to be a little more sane than Kash Patel. So if this is a sign of a doomed nomination, then I will take it and I will be happy for this one small miracle. Yeah, and here's the thing. Pam Bondi, she gets sworn in by the grifter,

Clarence Thomas, Nola, and what is the first thing she does? She goes in and launches an investigation into Jack Smith on January 6th. Grash was probably like, oh, hell no, hold up now. Let's slow this down. You're on mute.

Sorry. See, I didn't even bring up gumbo and your ass on mute. Go ahead. I feel a lot of ways about what's happening to the national security community, including, you know the national security community, including, you know, the intel community, including the diplomacy community at state.

It is a complete decimation of any sort of independent acting. You know, I think about the work, the tireless work that has been done to kind of wash off the stench of J. Edgar Hoover. You know, that lingered around FBI for a long time, and it still does, you know, in many ways. And it took a lot of people moving that agency forward. It took a lot of people, you know, saying that we need to be an independent law enforcement agency separate from one person, you know, who thinks that they are a monarch. And here we are now in another situation

where the president thinks he's a monarch and wanting to activate the FBI to be his private law enforcement agency. And so, it's—what we're seeing across the board, we're seeing loyalists, you know. And I want to make a distinction between being a loyalist and then also saying that I serve at the pleasure of the president. Serving at the pleasure of the president means, you know, there is some sort of governing body that comes to the table and they come up with very sensible sorts of policies and strategies. And then you go out into the world and you make sure that those strategies and policies are incorporated into the work that you do at your agency. Now, what that does not mean is that the president gets to pick up the phone or Elon Musk gets to pick up the phone and tell you what to do.

That is a stark difference. And so right now where we are, you know, across the national security apparatus, there is no independent acting, there is no independent thinking, and everything will be done at the behest of the West Wing in a way that isn't favorable to keeping our country safe. This really is a crisis in terms of national security. And I actually wanted to ask Pam Keith, and maybe I'll ask Greg, you know, what about strict scrutiny? Isn about strict scrutiny? Isn't strict scrutiny about protecting certain people's rights in terms of national security crises? And I'm just very curious about that.

Well, before Greg answers, the answer is no. This is what a federal judge, a Reagan appointee said regarding Donald Trump trying to end birthright citizenship. He said, quote, it has become ever more apparent that to our, y'all know I don't call him POTUS, to our, mm-hmm, that the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goal. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether it be for political or personal gain. And the first judge said, I've been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.

Greg? Yeah, strict scrutiny is, Nola, it's a standard of review that is limited to something called discrete and insular minorities. It goes back to a case, well, one of the bedrocks of it, Caroline Products' case, famous footnote four, where the idea is that there are minorities in the society who, if you pass a law that evokes them or involves them, that law has to meet a higher standard of review, because they are more vulnerable in the society. So you have to apply what they call strict scrutiny. And then the law has to demonstrate that there is a compelling state interest at play.

So for example, segregation, OK, that involves black people. That's a discrete and insular minority. And so does segregation satisfy a compelling state interest? And the answer to that, of course, as we know, as Roland said, is no. So it doesn't apply generally. Now, the 14th Amendment would say, of course, there's due process and equal protection. But that due process has been steadily whittled away by judges, not the plain language of the 14th Amendment, but whittled away. And so, you know, any law professor would tell you or any lawyer would tell you that there's a

difference between substantive due process—they fired me at my job, it was wrong, I filed a complaint, we went through the review—but rather than look at the substance necessarily, the fact that they gave you a hearing satisfies what they would call procedural due process. In other words, we did go through a hearing. Of course, it was a charade. And we got rid of you. Sure. Those judges are reading the interpretation of the Supreme Court—I'm sorry, the Supreme

Court's interpretation of the 14th Amendment. In fact, there's a landmark late 19th century case that kind of reinforces the plain language reading of the 14th Amendment, particularly the second part of that sentence at the beginning, which talks about subject to the jurisdiction thereof. That's really what they're hoping for, to be able to overturn. And I am not at all sure. Finally. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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Add free at Lava for and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

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and the Ad Council. That this current Supreme Court won't take a bite of that apple. I'm absolutely certain that there will be some votes to read it that way. I think the Christian soldier, Samuel Lito, will be lined up to do it. And to quote Laura Victoria Burke in the context of Byron Donaldson, I think the manservant, Clarence Thomas, may be lined up to do that as well. But as far as the FBI is concerned, of course, as a person who has very little sympathy for the FBI but also understands that there is something like—such as national security, and that there are people who go into the bureau for the right reasons. I think all bets are off. I agree with you. I agree with everything that has been said. This is a very real crisis. And even as Kash Patel, as you say, Recy, you know, you're

not white, son. So go ask your friend Vivek Ramaswamy how they treat you when they get finished with you. Brian Dahl didn't even get kicked in the tail. He didn't get close enough to the room to get kicked in the tail. But what Chuck Grassley did today isn't unusual for the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently. I mean, they have been known to do a one-week punt to kind of slow down, even if, you know, but the panel meeting in person was kind of unusual. The Democrats demanded that. So, I mean, I guess we'll see.

If I had to bet, I'd say he's going to get confirmed. But, yeah, at this moment, at least there's some pushback from the Democrats. Actually, the rally is these bad idiots don't care about the law. Here's a perfect example. Go to my iPad, Anthony. That idiot Buck Sexton, I think who used to be a CIA or used to work there or something. He's a right-wing nutcase radio host. This is what he tweets. If you're wondering why so few federal government employees

have taken an eight-month buyout package, remember that most of these civil servants are used to making $100,000 plus a year, doing little to no actual work, great health care and benefits, and a job they believe is guaranteed for life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I actually responded to his tweet. I said, no, stupid. It's because the buyouts are bullshit. They aren't sanctioned by the government, by Congress. There's no money for it.

So you would be an idiot to accept these buyouts. And also, you potentially could lose your pension as a result. But they're too dumb to understand that. What they want is they want to just wreck everything. No, 100%, absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, the White House has a saying now, promises made, promises kept. And what we're seeing right now

is Donald Trump's promise to be a dictator on day one. That's exactly what we're seeing, that he's dismantling the federal government agency by agency. He's purging the FBI, the State Department, the IGs. You know, again, he's allowed Elon Musk to go in and access granny-sensitive information. What does that have to do with cutting government waste? Absolutely nothing.

But the question is, where is that information going? What is he doing with it? But, you know, so for me, it's it's it's that's what it boils down to. Donald Trump is keeping his promise to be a dictator on day one. And I think the mistake that Democrats made, the mistake that we continue to make, not just in the media, but even as pundits, is we don't give Donald Trump enough credit. I mean, his first term, the first place he went to was to the CIA. Why did he go to the CIA and he shat on that, that, you know, the, the wall there, the secret wall there, the CIA, and he attacked the CIA

is because he understands, which is why he's trying to put Kash Patel there, which is why he's trying to put Tulsi Gabbard, who is a compromised individual running our national secrets is because he understands at first he needs to get at these agencies, undermine these agencies that'll come after him, that'll run interference, not just on his grifting, but his other questionable engagements and activities with foreign governments, not just foreign governments and U.S. enemies. So that's really what this is all about. And I think we need to be very clear-eyed about it. We need to not sort of continue to play this game with Donald Trump. We need to lean in on these Republicans from Grassley to others. Grassley used to be a huge proponent of IGs. I think he's holding up Kash Patel probably to get

some answers on the IG situation. But we need to lean on them because we know exactly what Donald Trump's playbook is, and that is to be a dictator day one and really undermine all of the institutions that would stand and run interference on that effort. Yeah, but that's why he attacked the deep state, the deep state. That's also why he kept saying fake news, because what he wants his people to say is, if I don't say it's true, then it's not true. Oh, absolutely. So by attacking the deep state, by attacking media, all these institutions,

he wants to sow seeds of discontent. And Nola, what's the craziest thing here is that when you talk about FBI, CIA, national security, foreign, wait a minute, USAID, foreign women, USAID, you know, foreign investment. These were all hardcore Republican areas. This is where there was the most important thing in the world, standing against Russia. But they are kissing the ass with Trump and Putin. They literally have, I keep telling everybody, there is no such thing as that Republican Party.

It is gone and it ain't coming back. Absolutely. It's replacement theory. It's white fear. These are the things that they have decided to, you know, really craft their priorities, their strategies, their policies. This is the guiding light. It is not about America, you know, being that steward around the world, you know, in terms of foreign aid, foreign assistance. We have retreated from that role. And when I think about, you know, colleagues at USAID, when I think about State Department, when I think about the entire apparatus, I'm exhausted, because so many colleagues are scared. They don't know what

to do. There's so much uncertainty. Last night, I attended a virtual, something called a community table. And most of the folks in the room were USAID and state folks. And it was the young folks. It was the young folks who, you know, had just graduated. They did a fellowship, and now they were off to start their careers. And they were told that, well, actually, no, you're not about to start your career because, you know, everything's being recalled. And so a sector where, you know, I have been talking about this all week, Roland, a sector where the black middle class really was founded. It was really kind of structured around, you know, having that good old federal government job. You know, that's a joke within our community, but that's real. You know what I'm saying? Like that, that really is one of the

things that created the black middle class and they are systematically dismantling the black middle class brick by brick by brick. And, you know, when I say that I get some pushback, you know, from folks like, well, it's not just black people in the federal government. No, but we are really overrepresented in the federal government. And I will stand ten toes down on this. So many policies within the national security space from DOD saying—you know, the secretary of defense saying that diversity is not our strength, that is a slap in the face to a large part of the defense apparatus in this country. They have decided to lean into white supremacy. They have decided to lean into white fear. And it has absolutely nothing to do with governing. It has absolutely nothing to do

with putting America first. We are in a moment where it's Trump over America. I mean, the one thing I want to say, Roland, is I think that Donald Trump, and he doesn't realize this, is really setting a trap for himself. There's going to be a confluence of things happening, right? You'll have the potential of two million federal employees that'll be laid off and unemployed. You know, I've worked in a federal agency. I worked in the Obama White House. And the one thing that's most important in the federal government is continuity. So not having those people being able to execute on federal appropriations, federal programs, et cetera, et cetera, is really going to hit his constituency the hardest.

I mean, the one thing he likes to project is somehow the, you know, people who look like me, black and brown people, are the ones who benefit the most from federal programs. But the reality is, and this is a dirty little secret we never talk about in politics, is it's those ruby red states that are the poorest. Those are the least educated states in the union. They've all been run by Republicans. Those are his constituencies. Those are his voters. And those are going to be the people that are most hurt for him, but the real hurt by his actions. But the real question for me is not just that, but it's how are Democrats going to be able to seize on this opportunity, this trap that actually Trump is actually setting for himself? The reality is, you know, I've got some ideas. We can wait and

talk about that a little later when we get to that subject. But the point is, is are we going to go into these areas and take a play out of Trump's playbook and approach these people directly and say, listen, what do you have to lose? You've been living in the poorest state in the union run by Republicans, right? And you're going to have a situation where you're going to be hurt by this, put a face on that pain and drive local headlines. And that'll start to pressure Republicans. And then you'll start to see some movement to get rid of Elon Musk, to get rid of some of these other billionaire cabinet secretaries. No, they're not gonna do it.

We actually discussed it the last couple of days, Recy, and the thing here is that, so Ashley says it's a Trump that is a trap that Trump will get caught in, but actually what he's done is he's actually laid the trap and the Heritage Foundation has laid the trap for Democrats. So what you have right now is this here. You have Democrats fighting for USAID. The nation hates giving money to foreigners. Okay. And so even though we understand why, we understand the importance of it,

folks are like, oh, what the hell, we ain't giving money to anybody. So now what the MAGA's doing, now they're going through line by, oh, someone just posted USAID spent $8 million on a, this is what they posted, and first of all, let's be real clear, they post lots of lies.

They spent $8 million to study flavored cigarettes for lesbians and gay people. I mean, so then, let's see here. Somebody's throwing out, oh, New York City Teachers Union received $22.4 million in taxpayer funds. And, oh, eight millions went to Politico from the government. And so what they're doing is they're forcing Democrats to defend government workers.

Yeah, that we can't take the bait, though. And what they're doing is they're taking the bait. And I said the last two days, you have to thread the needle. You have to focus on the political impact of that. Yeah, put a face on it. And here's an example. So this is

Congressman Stephen Horsford today trying to do it, but he didn't do it right. Play. Eggs in Nevada are now $9 a carton. The price for a pound of beef could hit $25. And gas, which was going down, could rise back up to $4 a gallon or more. And it won't stop there.

Toys for children. Food on our tables. The technology we rely on. It's all going up. Every Nevadan and every American is right to be alarmed and to feel anxious. This is not functional government. This is not what you voted for. It's government dismemberment.

It's chaos. And so as part of my work in making sure that my constituents' voice are heard, I've launched a special website where my constituents can go and share information about the executive orders that have been implemented and how they're affecting their lives. I want to hear from you. I will listen to your concerns, and I'll work hard to defend your efforts. We are here to meet the actual needs of our constituents and to hold President Trump, his puppet master Musk, and their doge bros accountable for their illegal violations of our laws and the United States Constitution. OK, so that's decent. So here's a perfect example I'm talking about.

USAID, they've now slashed it from 10,000 employees to 290. USAID buys $2 billion worth of products from American farmers. So this is, again, so this is how I see it, Recy. I say, all right, Elon, I would say, okay, co-president Elon Musk and Donald Trump, you wanna slash USAID. All of you farmers in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, you just lost $2 billion. And then I'm gonna go through, oh, and these rural health centers in Georgia, South Carolina, you're not about to get your money. So I understand the communism is from Nevada.

But this is how, to me, you turn and say, yeah, all y'all, this is what you're now about to lose. Now, that's not, I didn't bring up a single USAID federal worker. But what I did say is, here are, y'all who've been complaining, oh, make a mega grade, you want to get paid and wages, they just cost you. The richest man in the world just took $2 billion from you. And then what you say is, congratulations. To me, that's the language that they have to be using in order to break through the show. When they're whacking everything, you losing hospitals. You're losing health centers.

You're losing this. you're losing that. And you got to bring up broke, white, red places and use against them. That's what I mean by how they have to how they have to, frankly, navigate this and how they have to really lay out in those sort of ways to speak to that audience. Thoughts, Recy? Yeah, I mean, I think your line of your narrative is far more compelling than what Congressman Horsford delivered. I think that the whole idea that pointing out that eggs are going to be higher and gas is higher, it's not really landing when people voted out of vitriol. They voted for cruelty and for chaos. So I don't know that that's the most effective

thing, but I think Democrats need to be more imaginative. I mean, talk about your fucking social security is going away. They're going to take away your healthcare, like scare the shit out of people because I'm actually scared about what these unvetted foreign operatives, I'm going to call them that, because they have entanglements with Russian websites and hacker firms, you know, get a little bit more imaginative about what kind of carnage is on the way and lying in wait for us. I mean, I don't want Elon Musk taking over air traffic control. So I think that there needs to be that. But I want to go back to the point about Donald Trump. I was of the mindset that Donald Trump was only running to stay out of jail, and he didn't

really give a damn about governance. But now I'm convinced that Donald Trump is here to do exactly what he's doing. He does not want a functional government. He wants to completely deconstruct the entire federal government so that he alone has power and he can delegate Elon Musk or whoever to do his dirty work. But he does not want a functioning country. He does not want functioning institutions. So it doesn't really matter that breaking all this stuff is going to hurt his constituents

because he's going to be in power at the end of the day. Well, I don't think, Greg, this is about really Trump following through. Remember, in the first time, Fairness Society, all right, what y'all want? You want to pick judges? Okay, going right ahead. Y'all pick judges as long as y'all support me. So he outsources everything. The fact of the matter is we kept saying he is going to enact Project 2025. He comes out.

Oh, no, I don't know what it is. Never heard of it. I don't want to read it. I think I heard some bad stuff in it. And he is executing a playbook. He's basically said to the Heritage Foundation, everybody, here, y'all, don't do what y'all want to do. He just wants the pageantry.

He just wants to be able to be the president, to go to the Super Bowl and stuff along those lines. And so he has, that's why I thought. I think it's worse. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold up, hold up, hold up. This is what I've always maintained even the first time. He is the Trojan horse.

The reason the hardcore right has attached themselves to him, they didn't care about the affairs. They didn't care about him being a tax cheat. They cared nothing because they knew he was the perfect Trojan horse. He's going to let us do whatever. The man was against TikTok until David Yass started giving the money. He's like, hey, now I love it. He's totally transactional. So what he's doing is, I'm going to let y'all do whatever y'all want to do. Go on right ahead because y'all elected me.

Elon, you gave me 300 million and you pimped Twitter for me. Man, go on, do whatever. I don't give a shit. He has no principles, no values, no ethics, no integrity, and so he's letting them run rampant, and that's why they're all in on whatever. That's why the Republicans in the House and Senate ain't saying nothing. Because whatever you want, he's going to give it to you

because he actually doesn't care. But there's some strategy behind that, though, Robert. Grant, aren't you Grant? No, I agree. He was just at the end, right? Greg, I got you, Greg. No, I agree. He was just at the end had to say, I agree wholeheartedly. You know, again, I'm not ambivalent about the short-term harm. I'm very clear about that. But first of all, Greg, let's be real clear.

You've been saying for six years, I forgot the phrase that you use, this settler nation. Oh, yeah. You're like, it's coming to an end. And people are like, oh, Greg, stop it. And it's like, hello? You didn't say stop it. I mean, look, it's a simple reading of history.

The empire has fallen. We're at the end of this one. I didn't know that we might necessarily live to see the complete shutdown. I don't think we will. It'll be a slow decline. But this is accelerating it. And while we are all paying attention

to the Steve Bannon strategy, which is throw everything against the wall, most of these executive orders are not going to not work the paper they're printing on. He didn't read any of them. He's sitting there, which one is this?

Putting his child's signature on it. And that's... Dude, dude, even when he issued the partners, they didn't even, they didn't even, that was like chat GPT. They even realized there was certain language you're supposed to put in it.

It was just like, man, just just print it. Just let me decide. Just print it. No question. You know, I mean, he's enjoying, you know, the Steve Urkel pushing this. And did I do that? I mean, going to the Super Bowl and now Goodell is going to snatch up the end racism at the end zone. And Kendrick Lamar, I'm not quite sure who they and us is at this point, but he's having—he's living his best life. Meanwhile, little Marco, that Muppet, announced on X that he's not going to the G20 meeting in South Africa because South Africa is doing very bad things, you know, expropriating private property.

Well, you know, the rest of the world, Justin Trudeau is having a meeting, I guess it starts today, with the U.K. and calling other countries, like, let's figure a workaround, Scheinbaum in Mexico, Lula in Brazil. I mean, people are, of course, China's sitting over there chuckling the whole time.

I'm saying, while we are focusing on the things that are impacting us domestically, what he is doing, particularly with this USAID, and, you know, Nola's in much better position to talk about this than I am, you know, there's such a thing as soft power. At a time when the world is sick of the United States and has been, quite frankly, nobody ever been in love with the United States. There's been fear of the United States and kiki in people's face, like a lot of people do when they try to whistle past the graveyard. At this point, people are going to start losing their fear and governments forming multilateral agreements and moving beyond.

What this man is accelerating is the breakup of the idea that the United States can bully anybody in the world. And I didn't think that we would see it so quickly, but even Justin Trudeau, who ran his ass down to Miralago like a lapdog, now he's like, yo, UK, let me talk to you. Let me holler at you now. Marco's saying, I'm not going to the G20. The South Africans are like, you fool, this is an international meeting. It's just not because it ain't South Africa. Y'all listening to

Elon Musk, who hasn't canceled any relationship with anybody in any other country. You know why they ain't going to jump on China? Because Elon Musk has too hasn't canceled any relationship with anybody in any other country. You know why they ain't going to jump on China? Because Elon Musk has too much business over there. And meanwhile, the sales of his Teslas are cratering, 59 percent down in Germany, since the Germans are like, oh, you want to support the Nazis and tell us to get over the past? Stop buying Teslas. These people are presiding over the acceleration of the decline of the United States of America. I, for one,

not only will not lose any sleep about it, I think we need to fight, but we also need to be very cognizant that we live in a world, and the world is fighting back now, and Trump is actually helping in that process. You know the hard part. And I think he's deliberately helping. I don't think it's just happening. I don't think it's just a coincidence that, oh, I'm presiding over this.

He's there for that reason, and I think that the sooner that we figure that out and stop acting like this is just some dope, dope, dope, I'm presiding over this. He's there for that reason. And I think that the sooner that we figure that out and stop acting like this is just some dope, dope, dope, goofy-ass, just naive person who's getting ran over, he is here doing what he is supposed to do. Yeah, and that's why, again, I've always believed that he was the Trojan horse. I've always believed that.

And that's why they said we could. The right said we have the perfect person. He actually doesn't want anything from them except to win. And he is going to allow them to do whatever they want. In the reality of Project 2025, this has been the wet dream of the right for 60 plus years. I mean, they have been lying in wait. First of all, they have despised the federal government since Brown versus Board of Education. So they despise the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. So they said, yo, we got to capture that. They really believe that the liberals invading the federal government when the reality is, you made the point about black jobs.

The federal government always represented, even though it wasn't always the case, the place of refuge for black people from Jim Crow. That when city and state laws shut things down, what black people had still was the US Constitution. And they couldn't get around the US Constitution. So even though racist as Woodrow Wilson, racist Frederick, racist FDR, and we can go on and on and on, because those presidents did not access, did not utilize the power,

we still was able to seek redress from the federal government. These conservatives, they hated that. So what you now have is, wait a minute, we can completely destroy, tear down, and remake this system in our own image. And that's why they're letting Elon run roughshod in everything and through the payment system. No, no, we're not going to do that program. We're not going to do that program. And so in many ways, which was really what Greg has been saying for the longest, and it's hard for us to accept this

when to say, well, let's lay back and just watch out to destroy it all, because we also impacted by it. Truth be told, all these broke-ass white folks are really about to be impacted. And it's hard for people to accept this, but sometimes you have to allow destruction to happen for these fools to wake up and go, oh shit, this thing impacts me.

Yes fool, we've been telling you this the entire time. Noah. Nola, you put that damn button on mute again. I'm about to cuss you. No, no. It's a part of the background. It's a strategy. She's got a part cuss you. No, no. It's a party in the background. No, it's a strategy. She's got a party in the background. On, off. If I call your name, Nola,

you see, I gave you a 45 second start. I called your name. You should have hit that damn mute button, Nola. Ooh. All right. All right. It won't happen again. But I am less optimistic about how that loyal 35 percent will respond to the shocks that

are going to happen to the system, that are going to punch them in the gut. They will rationalize their way out of it. I think there is enough data that points to that. And so I'm quite agnostic when it comes to his core 35 percent. They are going to be hurt. Like you mentioned earlier, Roland, you know, I read like the over 2,000 things that were frozen from the first tranche of EOs, the over 70 EOs that were passed like the first night he was in office. And it was rural, rural, rural, rural, rural, farms, farms, farms.

It was so much ag, right? It was so many things that directly impact his base. But just like with health care, you know, the argument with health care, they didn't necessarily care that it could be taken away from them. What they cared about is that the nickname was after the black dude. You know, so in terms of their self-interest and caring about their self-interest over the fear of losing whiteness, I think the fear of losing whiteness is far greater than their actual everyday lives and self-interest. And, you know, to your point

about Trump being a Trojan, I think what Recy said and what you both said, there's accuracy in both statements. Trump is interested in power. I don't know if he's interested in governance. I think he's interested in being seen to be playing the part of governing. And then I also think, yes, there are many leaders around the world, not-so-savory characters and actors, that absolutely see an opportunity in the weakness of his moral fiber. You know, when you think about the office of the presidency, one of the reasons why we are struggling so much is because we have so many norms in place,

which are not codified, they're not laws, is because you think that the person who is sitting in the Oval Office will have a deeper commitment to the country and what all that means. Donald Trump is not that person. And if you are a Viktor Orban, if you are a Putin and, you know, you're seeing those vulnerabilities, especially Putin with his intel background, that's the person you want to play ball with. That's the person that you're going to prop up. That's the person that you're going to support. And I do agree with you, Roland, in terms of, you know, China's been very crafty in the way in which they've played their position, you know, even from the beginning of when—well,

the second time that Russia went into Ukraine, the way in which they've sometimes sided with Russia and then sometimes they've retreated because they wanted to see what this thing was going to look like. They wanted to see what was going to happen. But what is really happening when you are dismantling the professional foreign policy apparatuses of this country, when you are dismantling the intelligence agencies, the law enforcement agencies, you are dismantling the intelligence agencies, the law enforcement agencies, you are leaving us vulnerable to attack. Do you think terrorists, who their bread and butter is cut on the teeth of asymmetrical warfare? This is the perfect time to attack the United

States of America, because we're not looking. Because every five seconds, there's some domestic crap that we're all in our group chats like, girl, did you see this? Oh, my God, I can't believe this. I can't believe this. You know what? They are happy that we are preoccupied. And I really hope that this does not happen. But we are ripe. We are ripe for something horrible to happen to this country beyond the planes falling out the sky, literally. And I noticed that that has seemed to move out of the media very quickly. But we are ripe for attack right now.

Well, first of all, that only moved out the media real quick because all the pilots were white. That's what happened there. To ask this point earlier, and this is the thing where when Nolan was talking about the healthcare piece, this is what I've always said. And I said directly to Obama when he was there, hell, I just said to the Biden-Harris people,

I said to Obama, stop going to suburbs of Ohio, Virginia, and Maryland touting the Affordable Care Act. Go to the brokest, whitest, reddest, sickest places and say, I passed this damn bill for your ass. So what you said earlier is correct. sickest place in the city. I passed this damn bill for your ass. So, what you said earlier is correct. The reports are these

rural health clinics are already feeling the pain because of grants being cut. That's where, whether you are Democrats in Congress, whether your ass is Ken Martin in the DNC, whether you are the state Democratic director, you absolutely

go stand in front of one of those clinics, you invite the local newspaper, the radio folks and television folks, and you say, this is happening because they did it. And then you say, this county voted 80% for Donald Trump, He don't care

about y'all. So it can't be, this cannot be a D.C. conversation. Absolutely. It has to be in Ohio, in Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina. That has to be happening.

And so that's why when I'm looking at the messaging, when I'm watching Chuck Schumer stand in front of a deal, I'm like, no, that ain't it. What? That ain't gonna move. Right. First of all,

Schumer should just not get on the mic. Chuck Schumer. Y'all, put the camera on me. Senator Schumer. Start by saying with all due respect. Senator Schumer, I ain't doing that. Senator Schumer, do me a favor. Just Senator Schumer I ain't doing that Senator Schumer Do me a favor

Just talk on the floor Just talk on the floor This is a moment Where narrative And messaging Is most important Tactics They don't control the house

They don't control the senate The senate tactics Are slow down every nomination Do what Tuberville did. I'm holding everything up. That's all you can do. The House can't do that. So whatever tactics they got, you do that.

But this is a messaging narrative piece where every program that's impacting broke-ass white people, and I'm being real specific, Democrats should be sitting here just twisting that knife. Literally. So, you know I used to run communications for Speaker Pelosi when Donald Trump won, she called me and Obama... She never came here, but go ahead, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, go ahead. And the Obama White House called me back

to run opposition for her. And what I did was I set up an apparatus that achieved exactly what you're talking about. We took the message outside of Washington, went in hyper targeted districts, went into those districts with impact numbers. This is how this policy is going to hurt you. We partner with mayors, governors, local food banks, real people, literally put that entire apparatus together and we ended up winning 40 seats at the midterm

and she became speaker all over again. Now, listen, people have a lot to say about Nancy. You include, you were one of those included. Well, no, no, no. No, my issue with Nancy is she would go do white media. She wouldn't do black media. No, that's true. And you know, I was advocating for her to do black media.

Any black media. But nevertheless, nevertheless, she pulled together that, you know, me working with her, pulled together that apparatus to do that. And so right now, to be completely frank and honest with you, I'm not seeing that same level of energy aggression coming out of House Democrats. All due respect to Hakeem Jeffries, I don't even get any talking points in my inbox. So I'm not even sure what the strategy is or what I should be saying on shows like yours and others. So that's really a problem for me. Which makes no sense.

But can I just add one thing? The reason why this concerns me is not just as he needs the apparatus to sustain itself over not just the midterm but going into the next presidential election, is that Donald Trump is a lame duck. And we think about lame duck in different contexts, but the reason why I mention it now is because I think that's what makes him more dangerous.

Because he could care less about re-election, so he could care less about those red could care less about re-elections, so he could care less about those red states and the people that voted for him. This is why he's running roughshod over absolutely everything, because it's all about him. And if you don't mind, I'd love to quote an urban philosopher, one of my favorite housewives, Sheree Whitfield, who's going to check me, boo.

Like, that's literally the position... You're a doctor, my housewife. I'll let you slide with that, but go ahead. That's literally the position Donald Trump is in right now. And I don't see the Democrats manning and pulling together an aggressive apparatus to check him. See, I asked somebody earlier. I don't know. It was on Blue Sky Twitter. I don't know which one it was. And they suggested that after that ditzy blonde Carolyn Leavitt, after she has heard the White House briefings, Democrats

should have one right behind that. And then, I think the person said, Schumer and Jeffers, I said, no. That's Ken Martin's job. I said, that's Ken Martin's job. I said, so... I would propose Jasmine Crockett.

But this is what I then said. I then said, Ken Martin needs to appoint and pay, he should call Ashley, he should name a national spokesperson. National spokesman, spokeswoman. So now all of a sudden, again, if you're talking about narrative setting, the moment they stand there and do something you like,

that's some bullshit. That's some bullshit. Here's a perfect example. Pull the clip, play it. This is Trump yesterday at the White House at one of them executive signing orders, I think it dealt with transgender, where he flat out lied. He

flat out lied about the dumbest senator in America, Tommy Tuberville and Patrick Mahomes. Listen to this. And Tommy Tuberville, a great coach. You know, his quarterback was named Mahomes. He was a great college coach. And I said, how good was he?

He said, you don't want to know how good. He made me into a great coach. And I said, how good was he? He said, you don't want to know how good. He made me into a great coach. He's a pretty good quarterback, right? Yeah, he was very good. He's a good guy too. Here's the problem. His ass didn't coach Mahomes. That's a straight ass lie. Mahomes got there in 2014, Tuberville left in 2012. But then Tuberville, I'm going to show you how he tried to dance around it. And then we'll talk about another ditzy blonde, Megyn Kelly. But clearly they don't have any fact checkers at her show. I mean, you got 69 million when you got fired from NBC.

You think you can hire some fact checkers? Listen to these two idiots, Megyn Kelly and Tommy Tuberville. Press play. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does.

It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend.

At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Last question. So does this mean, since you used to coach Patrick Mahomes, that you're rooting for the Chiefs at the big game this Sunday? Well, I never even coached him. What happened is I recruited him, and then I left and went to another school. But I've got to be very good friends with him. He's a good— Right there.

He's not just a good— Stop. I don't even play the rest of the bullshit. He lying right there. Patrick Mahomes was asked today at the Super Bowl. He said he never recruited me. I never met him. He didn't get his offer letter from Texas Tech until April 2012.

He was gone. This is one of those now. In the grand scheme of things, is it major? But guess what today is? This week is. It's Super Bowl week. You jump on that. You jump.

Right, right, right. That's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you jump on that. You go, see, the lie in chief is lying about a lie. And then Tuberville backs the lie up. So the man gonna lie.

So what happened? Did he actually have a conversation? Or did he just make it up? And Tuberville, are you gonna... This is one of those things where, again, you jump on it and you pounce on it immediately. And everything can't be with a tweet. I just think that, again, what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a Washington, D.C.-centric focus.

And that's even now even smaller. It's just House, Senate. You have to have something outside of the DC apparatus that's driving it. And then what you then do is, it's not just that, now it's also your independent media outlets, the progressive media outlets. I mean, to Ashley's point, this is absolutely crazy. And I'm curious to know, have they been blowing your email up, trying to book folks on your Sirius XM show? Have they been or have you been trying to call people? Have you been trying to chase down people?

I have not received any solicitations to be on my show. I get all kind of emails from the Virginia legislative caucus, which I don't really care. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. Now, see, I need you to care. No, I mean the Virginia State. I'm talking about the Virginia State. I don't know how I got on that. No, no, no. I need you to care

because my man Don is listening to me. You're getting that stuff. No, no, no. You're getting that stuff because, don't follow me, Don Scott, who's the Speaker of the House, has been far more aggressive in messaging since he took over. Second, they have to hold the House this November for him to continue as Speaker. So put that brother on the show.

Go ahead. Plus he's an alpha. I'm one person who's trying to take in a whole bunch of news. So it's on the list. It's not how I'm going to party. However, I am of the mindset that there should be a response to everything. I personally don't give a damn about who coached Patrick Mahone. However, to the extent that I believe that there should be a response every time any of these people open up their mouth from somebody,

I don't think you have to have one person who responds to everything. I think you need to have one person that's designated to respond to at least another person, a counterperson. So somebody who's responding to Carolyn, oh, ditzy ass. Somebody who's responding to Elon Musk. Somebody who's responding to each of these senators. I think that there needs to be a much more aggressive pushback on everything that they're doing. I'm tired of hearing things like this is a distraction. That's a distraction. There is no distraction. All of it is something that is relevant to somebody. It's not relevant to me who coached Patrick Mahone, but maybe for some people, that's a big deal that he lied. So you have to try to cover all your bases. And the good news is you have a lot of people on the bench who can

compellingly respond to your various target audiences. So I feel like the Democratic Party too often wants to come up with one singular message that's as broad as possible. And then they just end up kind of turning off people because they're not speaking to the individuals or individual demographics and communities. And so stop with the broad-based shit. Find people who can tap into various audiences, this show being one of them. You can tap into your audience like nobody else can. Same with my audience.

And all of us have different groups that we resonate with more. And that's duplicated across all of the progressive media, liberal media, or whatever the situation may be, and then go into some hostile territories as well. So I just, I'm very confused as to why there is no mass galvanization. It just seems like we're pairing up and going and protesting, which is good. I'm glad they're doing that as opposed to just tweeting and putting videos on their Instagram. But there should be way more, way more. And stop waiting for somebody else to tell you your marching orders.

I'm not talking about you, Ashley. I'm talking about in terms of the Democrats in power. Stop waiting for marching orders and get your ass out there and do something. Well, and to Ashley's point, when you talk about how the right operates, I mean, the reality is they drive that. They understand who their supporters are, who are on every cable network, who are on broadcast network, who's on radio, who's in digital media, and they're kicking the information out.

They're actually making folks available. Hey, do you want so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so? We used to do that. And I'm just going to give you a perfect example. out, they're actually making folks available. Hey, do you want so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so? I'm just going to give you a perfect example. This was years ago when I was with Tom Jones Morning Show. That was a project I worked on with ABC Radio. I don't know what the hell it was.

We were trying to work. It was something dealing with one of those wiretap malls. This was post 9-11. And I remember I made one phone call. I made one phone call to the House Republican Caucus. That email got sent to every press secretary of every House member.

Within 10 minutes, I had multiple folk trying to get their boss on this program to get interviewed. I can tell you right now, that don't happen with Democrats. That don't happen with the Congressional Black Caucus. And so it is frustrating. So people have to understand you have a well-oiled media operation because they understand how people consume information. And they fund it. Yes, and they fund it. And I know, Recy, I ain't going to set you off, but you're tired of getting them fundraiser emails. Yeah, I've seen your videos.

But can I just add one thing, Roland? I have a your videos. But can I just add one thing, Rowling? I have a radio show. Urban View does political programming for eight hours a day. There's no reason why it's such a nightmare to schedule people. You have to go back and forth, schedule a million emails, call in. You're right down the street from the Capitol. They can pop in your studio.

They know what time you're on every day. So they need— I'm just saying. But if it's not... It's a extreme circumstance. That only happens... Sometimes you got to step out of it. But that only happens if you consider that to be a priority. And so...

And this is the thing that... And I'm going to say this here, because I just keep saying Democrats operate in analog as opposed to digital. It's a perfect example. 2024, or maybe it was 23, it was last year as well.

Senate Democrats had a black media roundtable. I was there. Okay. So we go. No, no, no. You would start cussing, Ashley. So we go. Carol, my producer, she's communicating No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You about to start cussing Ashley, trust me.

So we go, Carol, my producer, she's communicating with them. They said, yes, you can record it. Now everybody know this is a digital TV show. So when you say you can record it, we thinking video. I show up, roll up, start taking my tripod camera up, white staffer, Mr. Martin, are you about to live stream and video record? Yes. No, there's no video recording.

This is audio only. I said, I'm sorry, this is audio only. We told y'all what, so I sit down. It's 20 senators. Klobuchar leading the meeting, Schumer's to her left, Corey's to her left, Warnock's there. I text Booker and Warnock, said, this is stupid as hell.

I said, what are y'all, I said, this makes no sense. If you gonna be on the record, do video. So we get to ask questions, they get to me, Nola, and I then go, that's your key, Nola, make sure you're not on mute. They get to me, and I say, my first, I say a statement first. I said, I have listened to y'all talk for almost 30 minutes

about how y'all doing these wonderful things for black people and wonderful things for America and how no one really knows. I said, probably it's because you have rules like audio only. I said, do you understand that something that one of you could say could get posted on Instagram, on any platform that could go viral. Now mind you, Corey's laughing because when I went off on the Republican about pro-life on our show in 2022, he had just reposted that, it was two years later, just reposted it and it went viral again. And I said, I can't do nothing with audio.

I gotta go back and make a slideshow to post it. I said, this makes no sense. Y'all, no lie. Schumer leans over and he's talking to Klobuchar and I'm sitting there going, somebody's going to make an executive decision. You know what, Rowley? You're right. Go and record.

No! They went forward with audio only. And I just sat there and I just went, ain't nobody. It was an hour and a half, two hour session. I don't think anybody reported on anything out of that meeting.

That's the dumb stuff I'm talking about. You're operating in a digital world and you are thinking analog. Absolutely. 1,000%. Nola, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, listen, right after the election, Hakeem Jeffries had an event with Liz Cheney, which was interesting. But I remember, you know, one of the first things he said was that Democrats communicate in fine print. And, you know, the audience chuckled and, you know, it was cute for the moment.

But that is the problem. You know, when we're talking about Republicans spent money to advertise on Tubi, y'all. Tubi! Tubi! And if you listen to Christian radio, all you heard all day long was, do you want your daughters going to the bathroom and it might be a man in there it is simple it goes to the heart of people usually scaring the hell out of people but it is these simple messages that connect with people and rolling to your point the reason why it's important in the United States of America to call somebody out on football is because more people care about football, more people care about the Super Bowl than the conversation that we're having right now.

This is kind of like a heartland sort of situation. You call somebody out about lying about football, the thing that most Americans care the most about, you're going to get some sort of reaction. You're going to get some sort of discussion. Since I have been here in D.C., the amount of D.C. conversations that take place that are not rooted in reality on any level is mind-boggling to me. The way in which people communicate here, it's robotic. It's not relatable at all. And so when we're trying to talk about policy, we're trying to talk about why these things matter for you, at the end of the day, what people care about is their own little enclaves, right? Their own little kingdoms

that they've built for themselves and their communities and what's going to happen in that little bubble. They could care less, could care less about the policy speak that goes on in D.C. And whatever table I am sitting at, from my New Orleans hat to my California hat, Dems have got to, it's not just about messaging different. It's not just about messaging different. They have got to understand who they are messaging to. I don't think they understand who they are messaging to. And then the second thing I'll say, and I'll end here, you know, part of the messaging problem is who's doing the messaging.

Right. Everybody in this room was trying to warn people about where we are right now. But very few people were listening. So it is a whole it is a it is a holistic approach about the messaging problem. And I'm really passionate about it. But I'll go ahead and stop there. And I just wanted to weigh in and say this. I think you're absolutely right. We need to really take a play out of Trump's book. And here's the thing is we get so caught up and I hate to challenge you, Roland, from earlier. We get so caught up in what's true and what's not true. We're living in a factless society now. That's where we are right now. Facts don't matter. That's the first objective of Donald Trump's was to undermine the facts. That's exactly what he's been doing over the past eight years.

And he's incredibly successful at it. But to your point, what he's been able to do is he knows his audience better than anybody else. So of course he knows that he probably knows that the senator didn't coach Patrick Mahomes, but that's not what the objective is. The objective was to... No, it don't. He a liar by the lie. But the point is that lies don't matter. No, no, no, no.

Even fact-checking has become politicized. Because that's the problem right there. That's a D.C. phrase. What's that? Facts-checking. Do you know what regular people do? Regular folks say, his ass lying. It took... No, hold on.

His people don't give a damn whether or not he lies. That's what you have to understand. No, no, no. But let me just make one point. But you have to use the language that regular, ordinary people use. They don't care. People don't care whether or not he's telling the truth about a quarterback and a coach. But can I make one point? But his main objective was

to stroke the Mahomes, because they're his supporters. Of course. And all his, so it doesn't really matter. We can quibble about whether it's true or not. No, no, here's what, here's... But the point is, is what I'm saying is, where we're missing it is that Donald Trump incessantly hyper-focuses on speaking to his audience. Right.

He knows his audience. So he's going to take every opportunity to do it. I use, I know very well... Right. ...his former communications director. And he made the point that in the White House, Trump would say something, and their job was to go back and make it true. Right.

And realizing that his people don't really give a damn whether or not it's true or not, long as he's speaking directly to them. But we missed that point. We get all caught up on, you know, the fine print, what's true, what's not, being hyper right, and the reality is like, but you're missing the point. You've got to

speak directly to your key audience. Right. Follow me here. This is what I'm saying. And I am understanding how you counter. And how you counter is, I'm not about to go through the fine print of well, you know,

this is what media does. He misspoke. They use phrases like that. No. this is what media does. He misspoke. They use phrases like that. No, this is what I say. And if I am part of the opposition going against him, y'all, Donald Trump lied. He stood there and lied about Tubboville coaching Mahomes. He didn't coach him. He didn't recruit him.

And Tubboville backed up the lie of the liar. But you know what he lied about? He lied about cutting this. He lied about this. He lied about that. And I am going to use language. But Roland, do you think they don't think he's a liar? No, no, no, they don't.

Everybody knows he's a liar. No, no, no, he don't. Because you know why? Because when he came out of the shoot, everybody, and Greg, we talked about this a numerous times on this show, everybody was afraid to call a lie a lie. Sure. Everybody, they use every

phrase imaginable dancing around it and so they didn't use regular, ordinary language. And what I'm saying is if I'm sitting there, if I'm, look, I'm already telling you right now, if he's having a TV anchor luncheon, like I got invited to three last time, and if I'm sitting in that room, Greg, I'm going to do what I did when his ass came to NABJ.

And I told MSNBC, if his ass start lying and nobody on that stage check the line, y'all going to hear somebody say, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie. And you know what happened? When he was sitting there talking, several times he was like, some guy's over here talking. That was me saying, that's a lie. You can't let the lie just sit there and nobody says anything.

And then what then happens is when you keep saying that's a lie he ain't doing this he lied to you about this here he lied you begin to build on that and then hold on a second you build on that and what then happens is you now get people to go well damn he's telling me the truth right now i'm'm going to go to Greg and come back to you. Greg? Yeah, I'm listening to the conversation that you and Ashley are having, and I think that,

to evoke something you said a minute ago, Nola, that third of the population, that 35%, that is unmeltable for Donald Trump, they not only, I don't think, care about the lie, they embrace the lie. In fact, part of it, it gives them a type of psychic thrill to know that we are supporting

an outright liar. For some of them, it's because they are delusional in their religion, they're religious extremists who look at him as the hand of God, not as the instrument, not the God himself. And for others, I think it is a question of character. These are people not of bad character, but in many ways, I think, not to get theological about it, that's your bailiwick much more than mine, brother, but quite frankly, downright evil. And so for them, our pain and suffering, our anger, our frustration, even our righteous indignation are like vitamins for them.

They enjoy that kind of thing. And so, you know, you look at something like football. I won't be watching one down. I haven't watched since Kaepernick. But, you know, even with the even with the allure of having a black quarterback in the Super Bowl, Jalen Hurts, understanding that the Mahomes family, and Patrick has said that he's excited about having a president. So, you know, I'm going to watch the game, but certainly I hope that Mahomes doesn't get another trophy to lift next to his orange friend with his mama and his wife. But the people in this society, like at the end of the Roman Empire, demand bread and circuses. After all, was it not the crowd who, when offered the chance to save Jesus and pick him over Barabbas, said, give us Barabbas? I mean, we are living at the end of a decadent moment. And as a result, Donald Trump, if nothing else, if nothing else, Donald Trump understands the ethos that he has tapped into.

He is the ethos of irreverence and of white nationalism. We lost Neely Fuller a couple of days ago, Neely Fuller Jr., who in many ways coined this phrase that is often attributed to Francis Cress Wilson. If you don't understand white supremacy, everything else you think you understand will only confuse you. And I think this is, we get frustrated, but they like this kind of thing. They live for it.

Yeah, I think you're right. No, the one thing I would say, I think you're 100% right. Everything you said is absolutely right. But Roland, to get back to your point, I definitely, I don't disagree with you. I think you need to call him out on the lies. But what's important is your previous point and my previous point is you've got to contextualize it. What you have to explain to people is how those lies are impacting and hurting their lives. Why it matters to me

that he's lying about something so significant as our national security, as something so significant as the interest of our allies. That's what you are. Or bread, you know, the cost of bread or lowering costs. I mean, right. He ran. He said he's got a mandate to lower costs. Now he's backing off of that commitment. Right. It's going to be too hard. I can't guarantee you that people won't feel the pain of my tariffs. So you've got to go back into those communities and explain to people why the lie matters in their lives. And I think that's where you have

the combination of an effective message. You can't just leave it at he's a liar because people laugh at that. I think you're absolutely right. I think they enjoy that aspect of it. But why it matters to him is the part that Democrats, why it matters to the individual is the part that Democrats have to get better at. See, I'm going to call

a lie on the Mahomes story, then I'm going to add the other stuff he lied about. I'm going to add, for me, it's not just the football story. And I'm going to tell you right now, you know, the one person, it was interesting, you know, the Democrat caucus

chose Congresswoman Debbie Dingell to be over the policy and communications, whatever the hell that group they have. And his was great. Listen, I've met Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell is real nice. I ain't seen her ass on nobody's show since Congress got back. How are you over the caucuses communications committee and you ain't communicating? Make it make sense.

That literally makes no sense to me. Rollins stop being so right. And the person who lost to her was Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and she been on fire and it's time for the Crockett, and she's been on fire. And then it's time for the Crockett Chronicles. Yes. My sorrow, by the way.

Everybody has something to say. Nah. Nah, I'm a constituent of the Congresswoman. I'm a voter in the 30th District in Texas. That's my homestead there. And yesterday, she had some time. She had some time yesterday and brought a whole lot of receipts yesterday. And so I just want y'all to enjoy the next five minutes. Chair recognizes Miss Crockett. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

It's the faux outrage for me. It's as faux as faux news that I'm hearing because somehow you guys, and when I say you guys, I am referring to my Republican colleagues, pretend as if you are the heroes of the story. But let me remind you who set the house on fire. It was y'all. So let me go ahead and handle these receipts because I know that I always have to have proof

even though I guess our education system is failing us because it seems like facts don't seem to faze people that vote for y'all. But I'm going to do it anyway. So, when we talk about debt, I'd ask for unanimous consent to enter into our record this article that says Donald Trump built a national debt so big,

even before the pandemic, that it'll weigh down the economy for years. Without objection, so ordered. Thank you so much. In fact, it talked about the fact that he ran up our debt almost $8 trillion. It was estimated to be $7.8 trillion at that time. And this is one of the, it's actually the third biggest increase ever under any presidential administration. So I don't understand how y'all gonna play the heroes. I also want to just kind of be clear about some basic level setting of civics, because it seems

like civics is evading us. And listen, Governor, I actually appreciate you. I know that in today's times, for whatever reason, if you got a D or R in front of your name, it has to be all hostile. Listen, I am a former business owner. If I was not sitting in this seat, I would still have my law firm. But, you know, we have rules, right? So I'm not allowed to practice law. I'm not allowed to do a lot of other things because ethics decides that that's not really a good thing to make sure that the American people can trust that I don't have any divided interest. In fact, we do that for people that run our treasury typically. So I'm curious to know if you have

an elected treasurer in your state. And you do. We do. I know you do because I looked him up. And I'm curious to know. So it's my guess that he's the one that actually controls all of the treasury systems that you have, correct? Some of the investments. He controls some of the investments, but also monies that need to be disseminated by the state, that's done by him, correct? Department of Management and the treasurer's office. Okay. And the treasurer's office. Two separate agencies.

Okay. But you have an agency that does that, correct? Yes. Okay. And as you are having this agency do that, these are people that have some sort of ethics that they have to follow, I'm sure. I'm going out on a limb because I don't know how anything works in Iowa. I'm just being honest with you. Yes.

Okay. Here is the deal. I want the American people to understand that Democrats are not against efficiency. In fact, the last time that this country actually ran to the extent that there was a balanced budget and actually there was a surplus, it was a Democrat in the White House. His name was President Clinton. So we are not against this. What we are against is this idea that we will evade the Constitution or we will evade our own constitutional. In fact, it's not even an invasion at this point. It feels as if y'all have just decided that y'all are going to castrate your constitutional duty and hand it over to someone who is unelected. It doesn't matter how many cheerleaders he had on

the field campaigning for him. That doesn't mean that he gets to go in and sit atop any of our agencies. And the fact that we had a vote today and we asked to bring him in because we have a constitutional duty, we all took our oath, and maybe some of y'all just don't take it seriously, but I take it seriously when I take an oath to do a job. And my job is to look out and make sure that we don't have any kings or queens in this country. But it seems like y'all have decided that it's going to be Mr. King and his queen. And y'all can pick which one is which. But either way, I want to also talk about, Governor, I'm curious to know if you know the answers to these questions.

Which party controls the White House? Republican. Which party controls the Senate? Republican. Which party controls the House? Republican. Is that about what the makeup is in Iowa? Yes.

And that has allowed you to be able to get your agenda across, correct? Yes. And you haven't had to bring in somebody to basically usurp any types of norms because you worked through the process, correct? Well, I did executive orders, 2080 agreements, and then went to the legislature as well. It wasn't all of the above. I'm going to reclaim my time because we only have so much time left. I also want to point out that you specifically talked about, did you recently have three national declarations for disasters?

And I want to enter into the record a unanimous consent. Trump moves to abolish FEMA, shift disaster response to states. Without objection. And my final unanimous consent I'd ask says that Mike Johnson's budget plan is at risk of collapse, even though we know that y'all control all three levers of government. So if this is what y'all want to do, then go ahead and clean it up and fix it and just go through the process. And honestly, there's nothing that we will be able to say about it.

And with that, I will yield. Ooh, that wasn't the only person who lit the Iowa governor up. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley also tore into that ass. By the hour, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and his enablers advanced their extremist, anti-equity, un-American agenda, dismantling decades of civil rights progress, upending livelihoods, incomes, and lives, and adversely affecting

something they claim to care about, the G. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner.

It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got Be Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette.

MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Because all data supports that diversity, equity, and inclusion is actually good business. Governor Reynolds, my Republican colleagues invited you here today to promote what they see as a model of governance. Simply put, Republicans' vision of America is to be more like Iowa.

Governor Reynolds, let's learn more about the state. Do you know what percentage of Iowans are white and what percentage are black? I don't know the exact percentages now, but by far a larger percentage of white population. That's correct. Iowa is 90% white and only four and a half percent black. So that is drastically different from the national population. So when Republicans suggest Iowa should be a national model, they are advocating for a government that doesn't reflect our country. So let's talk about what this model of governance actually means in practice.

In Iowa, you signed State Senate Bill 2385 to eliminate more than 80 state boards and commissions, including those representing black Iowans, Latinos, women, people with disabilities, and Asian Pacific Islanders, communities that are marginalized and vulnerable and have fought for decades to have a seat at the table. Now, Republicans call this fiscal responsibility. I just call it erasure. Governor Reynolds, the Iowa Legislative Services Agency conducted a nonpartisan analysis of that bill. Do you know how much money was saved when you eliminated those commissions? Actually, it was not about saving money. It was about putting more resources behind

the Department of Human Rights so that we could actually provide them more resources for minority communities. Reclaiming my time. Let me help you with the math. Roughly $112,000 in your state budget was saved. So that is.001%. Barely a rounding error. So honestly, given your current salary, Iowans would have saved more money just by eliminating your salary. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter the LSA fiscal note into the record.

Without objection to order. In addition to cutting boards and commissions, Iowa started closing government agencies. Now, this is the same thing that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are trying to do at the national level. Now, Governor Reynolds, let's be clear. I have no problem with Iowans, but I do with your leadership. So let's look at the results, shall we? In Iowa, there have been skyrocketing maternal mortality rates. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record this article titled, Iowa's Maternal Death Rates

Rise as Birthing Units Close. Without objection to order. In Iowa, students' test scores have been declining. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record this article titled, Iowa Scores in 50 State Education Rank state education rankings declined from years past. Without objection to order. In Iowa, more kids are going hungry. Is this the kind of government efficiency y'all are talking about? Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record this article titled, Iowa's food pantries hit record high numbers this summer.

Without objection to order. So let's be clear about what Republicans are actually doing. You are making people poorer. You are making people hungrier, more vulnerable, and gutting their civil rights. These attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, they were never about efficiency. They certainly were never about merit. It's just a deliberate, calculated attempt to erase marginalized communities from government while eliminating

essential services for workers, families, and the people that we are actually elected to protect. They want a country for and by millionaires that advances white supremacy. And that is the real agenda. And I will do everything I can to speak truth to power and to stand in the way of that. I yield back. Ooh, Reishi. You know, MAGA real mad with them two sisters. They still mad at Representative Crockett.

Talked about, what did she say? The white boy wasn't commenting on CNN? Oh, she said the people who are crying are mediocre white men. Is that what we're talking about? Right, absolutely. She said white boys. Yeah, she said white boys. And then it was like...

And then she's like, I ain't wasting my time with how y'all feel. Period. And that's the thing. We are not competing for Trump voters. We outnumber Trump voters. Period. Not that's that's the thing. We are not competing for Trump voters. We outnumber Trump voters, period. Not this election, because people stayed home. And so if Democrats ever figured out, let them do them over there. OK, sure. Maybe you could pull off a couple of them talking about how they hospitals are closing.

They're getting chopped off because they ain't got their diabetes medication shit and coal mines is closing down. Sure, maybe you could pull off a couple of them. But the reality is that the numbers are on our side. Half the country does not like Donald Trump. He's never, ever cracked 50 percent favorables in any kind of polling aggregate of his job and his performance. He did not get 50 percent of the vote in the election. And so what Democrats need to do is what we just saw Congresswoman Crockett, Congresswoman Presley do, which is talk to things that resonate with their base and talk to their base in a way

that's authentic and that just doesn't seem like they're all up in the clouds focusing on things that doesn't matter to them. Congress Congressman Presley talked about the receipts. Maternal mortality is up. Test scores is down. Come on. People going hungry. Those are the kinds of things that people actually care about. And so if people can find some damn conviction and find their voice and stop trying to please everybody, everybody ain't going to be with how Jasmine Crockett delivers her message.

So then maybe Debbie Dingle will crawl out somewhere and reach those people. You know what I'm saying? But then you have Robert Garcia, you have Greg Caesar, you have Brian Schatz, you have Chris Murphy, you have, we have a diversity of voices in the Democratic Party, and we happen to have the facts on our side. And so the problem just needs to be of us recognizing that our people, the Democratic base people who vote and people who are disaffected, disillusioned, because they're tired of hearing platitudes and they're tired of hearing people try to get that white woman yoga pants, supposedly cares about abortion, never Trump voter, or the diner in the Midwest, and they want you to talk to them. So the more that we see of Jasmine Crockett,

the more that we see of Congressman Presley, the better off the Democrats are going to be. I just, actually, when we were talking about this, when we were playing, Democrats are still playing by a set of rules that no longer exist. True. Absolutely. That's true. I mean, I, you know,

I remember when I was in the White House the first, during the Obama days, and we were talking about who was going to be the worst Republican to run against for Hillary Clinton. And I said, it's going to be Donald Trump because he has absolutely no shame. And that's absolutely where we are right now.

The other point I made to you when we were listening to the Congresswomen was that we have to, as a party, empower those particular voices. But what I really love about Jasmine, and I've watched her for a long time, and I remember meeting with her when she first was elected, you know, Pelosi used to say this, that power isn't given, power is taken. And she's taken her power. So has Congresswoman Presley. And that's what we have to do is make room for these voices to take their power and to communicate directly to our key constituencies and not muzzle them. Because too often, your point, we try to play an old game, and that is it's got to be this spokesperson. It's got to be to this particular audience rather than taking a step back and say,

OK, who is effectively communicating to our constituencies? The other point I would make, too, is the one thing that Donald Trump has effectively done, where I think we keep falling back on, is he's made very clear that all of those documents from the constitution, the bill, all of these things that sort of are foundational to our nation, he's made clear that those were always, those are just gentlemen's agreements. Again, who's going to check him? Those are all just gentlemen agreements. And I think what we're doing, to your point, Roland, is we're playing by a different game. We're still trying to uphold.

I mean, not that we should not. We definitely should. But I think what we're doing is over-investing in this notion of fairness, of all these principles that were the biggest loser in November. Yeah. I just think Noah and Greg, I'm going to Noah first and Greg, is that the right has made it clear. We don't give a shit about rules.

We don't care about norms. We don't care about the law. We don't give a damn. And so, listen, go to my iPad. Wall Street Journal reported today, Doge Stafford resigns over racist posts. Employee has links to a deleted social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics. Donald Trump fires a white boy, Darren Beatty,

in the first time. They just rehired him in the State Department. That racist SOB tweeted October 2024 that only competent white men should get jobs. That's what he tweeted. And guess what? You know what's real interesting? He ain't get fired.

Rubio ain't pulled it. It's as if folks were like, man, we ain't really gotta say nothing. Rubio ain't pulled it. It's as if folks were like, man, all right, you know, we ain't really got to say nothing. No, you take his ass out. They are playing a nice game. They're playing the rules of boxing where, you know, don't hear the rules, you know, three-minute rounds, a minute break. No. This is where you bust their ass in the head with a two-by-four

and you grab a crane and you grab... It's game on, Nola, and they got to wake the hell up because this is going to be a four-year battle. Absolutely. See? My mute ain't on.

Well, praise the Lord. Listen, yes, you're absolutely right. You know, Dems are procedural, you know, step by step by step, gradual, gradual, gradual, where we are not recognizing that we have been in a war for quite some time.

It's a reality that we absolutely do not face. But as we sit here with some sort of hostile takeover that is literally underway in broad daylight in all of our faces, we have to realize where we are. We have to realize not only where we are, but who we are up against. They don't care about truth. They don't we are up against. They don't care about truth. They don't care about your feelings. They don't care about being called racist. They don't care about being shamed. They don't care about any of that. They want to win what they feel is the soul of America. Their cultural war that they launched buku decades ago, this is for the place that they feel that belongs to them.

This is their manifest destiny, and they are going to die on every hill to protect it. This is the mentality. We have not matched that mentality. We are still trying to do procedures and rules and uphold law, and which I'm all for. You know, I am all for law and order. I mean, like in a real sense, not in our sense, but in a real sense, but at the same time, there needs to be a mentality switch. And we need to understand that we are showing up to this fight with rusty knives and they have lasers. Okay. They have drones and we have bats that are blunt.

You know what I'm saying? Like knives that don't even cut. And we need to understand the strategy because we are on a battlefield and we need to wake up to that reality today, right now. I mean, Greg, here's a perfect example. The right studied the last four years, his four years. And here's what's crazy. I remember Jonathan Swain of Axios wrote a story in 2021 that laid out product 2025, laid out that they studied those four years and they studied what went wrong.

And they were devising a plan of action that they would implement the first day he took over. This is before 2024. So, Democrats literally have known for now four years what was coming down the pipe. Here's the question, and maybe this is part of the problem. Conservatives invested in a robust infrastructure

of think tanks and organizations to lay out an agenda that spoke to their folks and said, this is what we're going to do. And that's actually what they ran on. Do you hear anybody talking about what is a progressive agenda for the 21st century? Do you, I mean, again, this is where the flat-footed part comes in.

And I'm gonna expand this, because we talked about this as well. Black leadership, I literally have no clue what the hell they doing, Greg. It is if black leadership has left the country. No, as if they've left the planet. And black people, and I hear

this wherever I go, and I hear it on social, I hear it everywhere. Black folks like, uh, is there anybody on our side doing anything, planning anything, saying anything, organizing anything? What?

But maybe that's also part of the problem is when we are operating, but we don't have self-funded groups because that also impacts your planning and your agenda for Black America. Yes, sir. We are nearing the end of the second hour of Thursday night here at Roland Martin Unfiltered in a network wholly owned and subsidized by the people that you came out of your mind. And it's been built day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour by the blood, sweat and tears and sacrifice of you, your family, the staff there and all of us who pour in and contribute. That's how we get free. In fact, that is freedom work.

People want to know what freedom looks like. It looks like this conversation right now. The challenge we have is not a challenge of coming up with something new, but rather remembering what works. The debates in the pages of the Journal of Migrant Education in the 1940s and 50s over integration or desegregation and which way it should go, the debates in the black press, on black radio, at black colleges, all prior to the end of apartheid. Now, since the end of apartheid in this country, in the United States, there has been a slow unraveling of that type of institutionally

driven thinking and action. It's an unintended consequence of desegregation. On the other side, the white side, they have been trying, in the words of the labor activist and intellectual Bill Fletcher, to roll back the 20th century, since the 1960s. And in some ways, they want to roll back the 19th as well. They'd like to go back to 1790 if they could. Steve Miller, he's self-hating anyway.

But in order to defeat that, we simply have to remember how to do what we are doing right now. The Democratic Party are soft white nationalists. They are not hard white nationalists like the white nationalist party now, the so-called Republican Party. But when I say they are soft white nurses, I mean that they think that a commitment to the illusion of a norms based society can somehow allow for a stability that will suborn our continuing subjection. And allow us just enough access to allow them to continue business as usual. What do I mean by that? Diversity, equity, inclusion in many ways is a sop to a tiny. Non-white elite. Who want to be part of the manager class and have tricked themselves into thinking somehow that their presence, their participation at the top of that political and sometimes every once in a while economic food chain will somehow translate into some form of benefit for the people who they come from.

History has shown us that that has never been the case. There's always a compradore class. This is where, you know, the socialists and I would think about even folks like Bernie Sanders, Democratic socialists would say that it's class, not race. I would get off the boat with him. And this is where I'm landing it for this reason. And people who think like that for this reason. This has always been a white supremacist project. It's part of a larger 500 year arc of white supremacist projects. You see it crumbling at moments when they fight themselves, World War I, World War II, I mean, the convulsions that take place. And then in those moments, the non-white people of the

world figure out ways to make some progress. We are at another one of those inflection points right now. Black leadership either has to recognize that putting all your eggs in the basket of an ongoing criminal enterprise white supremacist project simply by aligning yourself with soft white nationalists who will sacrifice your ass rather than truly renegotiate the terms of this project is a failed enterprise. It has never worked. The farther we get from the 1960s, the farther our generations get from those who knew that, who entered politics with a clear agenda and who negotiated for a position of strength.

Now we've got people who can talk real good and, you know, raise the critique, but can't build institutions to promote our collective interests. And I'm sorry, Brother Hakeem Jeffries, you seem like a nice guy as a person, but you are so severely overmatched that it is an embarrassment to watch your attempt to balance on the knife's edge of something that you clearly understand, but perhaps don't have the institutional fortification to be able to really try to do something other than hold on to your tenuous position. The hope we have is what we're doing right now.

The hope we have is reconnecting, remembering how we get out of these messes every time we are confronted with them. And there are people doing that work. This conversation right here is part of that work. The conversation across this country in little places and in small places and places that aren't getting federal funding or grants from foundations who are not only doing thinking but organizing, the people who are actually feeding people, who are having the after-school programs, those institutional formations—and I want to say this, Roland, to you while we are here in this space. If anybody has watched the Black Star Network over the arc of the years of its existence,

when they've seen you in North Carolina, in Georgia, when they've seen you in Tennessee, on location in Virginia or Texas, then what you give light to is the fact that there is work going on all over this country. And if these elected officials cannot tap into that and build a true resistance, then perhaps we need to treat them the way politicians should be treated, regardless of how well they speak, as tools of our collective progress rather than any type of hero standing for us. And what I also need is I really need black folk to go back to reading. Absolutely. Greg, you got all those books behind you.

I got books all over my house. On Monday, I recorded an episode with the Brothers From Earn Your Leisure in an air last night. And I had posted something on my Instagram page. He had me as a collaborator. So this sister from San Francisco jumps on

and old Roland Martin is a bootlicker. And then the last person who should be talking about the state of Black America is Boulay Roland Martin. So then I was like, well, I don't

know what you're doing. So then responds, oh, we doing this and we doing that. Then she said, well, you can Google me. I own restaurants in San Francisco. I said, well, that's good because I'm going to be at the All-Star Weekend next week and I'm going to make sure

I do not spend my black dollars at your restaurant. And I said, and I will be sure to tell my friends as well. So she's going on and on. She's talking back and forth. And then I blocked her. But when you block someone on Instagram, it deletes their comments. So then I unblocked her. Then I said, let me real clear.

I will never support what you do. Now, his was interesting. She then comes back and she goes, well, you know, my problem is I don't like your view on politics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm against this. I'm fighting the system. You fighting, you know, you one of them boule Dubois. I'm more Booker T. Washington. And I really started laughing.

I really started laughing. Matter of fact, Terrell, do me a favor. Get that book, get that book out of my backpack. And I started laughing, Greg, and I said, sister, you really need to do some reading. Because see, Greg, here's the problem. The book of Terrell is James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 to 1935.

Now, I told her she needs to read that book. Because, see, here's what silly Negroes like her, who like to play this silly game of, I'm a book OT Washington person versus a Dubois. First and foremost, if you've actually read Dubois, you understand that Dubois believed in black people owning businesses.

Are you doing that on purpose? What? Are you calling him Dubois on purpose? I really need to know. Yes, I am. And I know Greg. I'm calling him WB Dubois. Don't interrupt me while I'm talking. So, this is what I'm saying. So, what I'm tired about these ignorant Negroes, I'm tired about these ignorant

Negroes who have never read is DuBois believed in black economics and black education. The reality is that Booker T. Washington followed the philosophy of the white founder

of Hampton Institute, General Armstrong, who believed in Negroes continuing to farm. Washington, James D. Anderson, lays it out in the book that if you look at the grades, the education of many of those students in Tuskegee, a lot of them were functionally illiterate.

So the mistake that a lot of black folks make is that they think there's this either or between Booker T and W.E.B. DuBois. And what's dumb, Greg, is I'm like, sister, how can you say I'm a Bule W-E-B when I started a business with my own money, which is called, same thing Booker T did. See, that's how silly these people are. And so what ends up happening is,

we have these fake conversations in black America where you with the bar, you with Booker T, you what side you on, all this sort of stuff like that. Without understanding that it was the black parents who sent children to Hampton who fought that white general who said, we do not want our children out there in the fields. We want our children to be doctors and lawyers. But the same folk who keep yelling that because Washington was the greatest student of General Armstrong, what they don't understand is that it was the great white philanthropist who endorsed and raised money

for the Hampton Tuskegee experiment because they only wanted black folk to be laborers and sharecroppers. They did not want them to be owners and doctors and lawyers. So if you're one of those silly Negroes out there who want to say, well, you Boulay Dubois and I'm Booker T, you might want to do a little bit more studying about the forces who were funding Booker T and who were funding Hampton Institute and why they did so, because they didn't want black children to be educated. They only wanted them to be laborers in this American system. And that to me is also why I keep saying a lot of our folk spend more time listening to somebody else say something and they just latch on to it without doing any reading for themselves.

And you better do a lot of reading because this current system, and Greg, I can speak to this and I'm gonna go to the panelists. I want you to go first, is that this current system only wants us to be laborers and not owners. And I keep telling folks, the attack on the civil rights infrastructure is an attack on the economic infrastructure, which is an attack and a plan to defund black America. Greg first, then Reese. I know you have to go Reese, but I'm going to go Greg first. Reese, Nola, Ashley will close us out.

I'll keep mine short, very short. And no, no, I know that's what you what you think. And shortly before he made transition, Dr. Du Bois left a note. It's in the papers in University of Massachusetts archives where he says the way I pronounce my name is D.O.O. dash B.O.I.S-S, Du Bois. In other words, so Du Bois is the Latin pronunciation, but Du Bois would remind people that he would pronounce it Du Bois. And, of course, maybe you can say it's an anglicizer, and we often do that as black folk. So just I know what you're thinking, Nola, but that having been said, I'll keep mine very short. You're absolutely right. I mean, James Anderson's book, I think I agree with you. That's a book that everybody should read.

Chapter two in that book, The Hampton Idea, rolls out everything you just said. This was a war between white people. Even General Oliver Howard, who knew General Armstrong, General Clinton B. Fisk. These are Civil War generals who have a vision for how to plug black people into this ongoing United States project. Howard, Fisk and them took one approach. Armstrong took another approach, initially with Native Americans at Hampton and then for black people. And as you say, his greatest student was Booker T. Washington.

Booker Washington also fell in love in terms of philosophy with a dude that you've talked about before, too, here, Isaiah Montgomery, who founded Mount Bayou, whose father was enslaved by Jefferson Davis's brother, Joe, in Davis Bend, Mississippi. They started an all-Black town, and Isaiah Montgomery was like, we should stay out of politics. We get our land, we get our businesses, and they didn't even let white people live. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

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Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. We live in Mount Bayou. We're going to control that. In fact, that's what Mamie Till spent the night, every day of the trial, when they had the white boys that killed her son on trial. She went back to Mount Bayou and stayed in the mansion of T.R.M. Howard, who was the surgeon there, the Knights and Daughters of Tabor Hospital, they built black self-determination. Book T. Washington was absolutely about black self-determination, but he looked at it in an accommodationist way because he said, we are trapped behind a cotton curtain with these white boys, and I got to play it this way. Anybody who—and then finally, Du Bois and Washington met at Carnegie Hall, of all places.

I think it was 1904. And they resolved that they agreed on virtually everything. Du Bois agreed that most black folk needed to be in the laboring classes, they weren't going to go to college, they needed to get a nominal education, they needed to move forward. And Washington agreed that there needed to be a strata of black folk who were educated, who could lead the race. He tried to hire Du Bois before he took the job at Wilberforce. He tried to hire him at Tuskegee.

I'm saying that to say this is a backdrop. When we read and when we study, we understand that these cartoon caricatures don't work. And so, because we are living in the real world, and it's rarely as simple as black and white. General Clark is saying in some stories there ain't no good guys. Both those men, as well as Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune and all of those women and men were negotiating in a white supremacist society that forced them to make certain choices that were very pragmatic at moments.

And when they took a quantum leap into idealism, they often paid the price. This network, this program, this conversation is indispensable because it leads to the realization that we have to pay strict attention to our history and study and be in conversation and then act. But we can't do that at MSNBC. We can't do that at CNN. We can't do that on national public radio or the public broadcasting system. We can't do that on these various and sundry other white, white facing podcasts from the right to the left. That has to happen in black spaces.

So if you're watching and listening to this conversation now, say, what are we going to do? Well, that's up to you. But the more you know, the better your actions will be. Racing. Racing. Well, that was a whole history lesson. I appreciate you, Dr. Carr and Roland. You know, here's the thing. We need to focus on our citizenship and our humanity, and we should be in the business of affirming both of those things.

And too often, and a lot of this has been funded by republican right-wing chaos agents we are villainized even within our own community i mean people don't like it that i cuss go to hell bitch i don't give a damn i'm gonna still cuss they'll skip out past the whole message they'll skip after me condemning racism sexism you know all kind of injustice kinds of injustice. So when we grow up and we realize that, as Dr. Carr just pointed out, usually when we're on the side of Black humanity and citizenship, we're more together than we are apart. And if we focus on that and then where we differ, okay, you do your thing over here. I do my thing over there. It's all good. We ain't got to all march along the same drum beat to every single action that we do. Then we'll be better off for it.

We have so much unexercised capacity because we're so bogged down in the petty. So I don't know how anybody can credibly believe that Roland Martin, of all people, should not be speaking on the Black community and what we need to do to move forward when you have given people who have a diverse array of opinions a diverse array of solutions and a diverse array of delivery the platform to have these conversations and that's what we all aspire to do here and anybody that ain't with that go to hell do do things your way over there but don't speak on what's happening over here i live tell people all my haters i'm like go have your own shows.

Enjoy yourselves. Have your conversations. Because I don't even talk about y'all. I don't even do videos on them. There's some conservative black folks on my channel. They always doing videos on you. And I don't even talk about them.

I don't know them. I don't follow them. And I tell people all the time, if you think you can do this better, please, by all means, go start your own shit. Period. Nola? Point

blank and period. You know, there was this conversation that was happening a few years ago around respectability politics. And it's something that Recy is always getting at. And it's something that I definitely appreciate. Bye, Recy. Bye, boo.

You know, respectability politics. And to your point, Roland, about how these conversations, how they wind up in these kind of these either or categories, when it's not either or, you know, it's a lot more nuanced. Most people can't sit and recite historical facts, historical detail the way that Dr. Gar can. You know, but in terms of that conversation around respectability politics, people place you in either or category. I bring that up to say this, you know, as an educator, as an academic, as a black woman coming from the deep South, I come from a community in New Orleans where yes, you are going to get married, but what you're going to do is make this stop at college first. It was a very education, education forward community in New Orleans.

And I'm very proud to come out of that community. And so I have a very, you know, different perspective about education. I feel people that work as hard as this country works to keep black people out of education. It must be a reason. So anytime I'm having conversations with people that start the conversation off, well, everybody's not meant for school. I was like, I feel like you've heard that somewhere because I've heard it somewhere. And I'm curious to find out why you think maybe school isn't for you. Right. And the reason why school is, is said not to be for a whole lot of people is because the world doesn't want too many gray cars of the world who's going to talk about where Emmett Till's mama stayed.

And with the occupation of the person who owned the home, what they did to outline that history, to outline that legacy, to empower us to know things. And the one thing that I don't like about the United States school system, first of all, you know, having to pay for private education to get a better education. I don't like that. And secondly, that you really don't learn a lot of this stuff until you get to college, you know, unfortunately. So you have to pay to learn these things, you know, like primary and secondary education is just to kind of give you some basic skills and push you out into the world. But in order for you to learn these things, to dig deep, you have to pay for that higher education. And so I'm just going to end with Roland.

That was a hilarious exchange. I've seen that bifurcation. I can't tell you how many times. And I consider myself a Du Boisian in that I have Du Bois on my syllabus. I advocate for Du Bois in the international relations space, that he was an important thinker and scholar and necessary. So I have a fondness for Du Bois. But I also just want to urge every person out there who's ever heard someone say to them, well, maybe college isn't for you. Think about who said it and why maybe they said it, right? Because what they don't want is too many educated Negroes, too many uppity Negroes.

That's how we are sitting here today, because of that uppity Negro Barack Obama. Don't ever forget that. Well, I laugh at the... I really do laugh at these fools who love talking about bouleay, Boulay, Boulay. One, who have no understanding at all of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity Incorporated,

who have no understanding of the history. Who actually don't understand what they even do, present day. But the reason I also laugh at them is when they try to talk about you, you one of them, Boulay. W.E.B. gave a speech in 1948 at Wilberforce where he called them out. I got it on my phone. That's why these fools ain't even read it. They don't even, they don't even understand. Again,

this is what happens when you just, you hear something and then you start repeating it. You have no context, you have no nuance, you have no idea what the hell you're talking about. But then you wanna act like you just super duper black person. Okay, boo, knock yourself out. Ashley, go ahead. So I wanted to get back to a point you made, Roland, about the lack of black leadership.

And I was just thinking, I said, this might be a little provocative, but I think we... The show called Unfiltered, baby. Go for it. Be good. I think that in this moment, we need to wake up to the realization, maybe even the fact that many of these institutions, from the Democratic Party to the civil rights, current civil rights leadership structure, even Barack Obama and some of our black candidates and elected officials no longer serve us anymore.

And so I think coming out of this next election, so much was revealed, so much over the next four years will continue to be revealed. We're going into the dark, into the unknown. us and that prioritizes us in every sector, every industry, every part of American and global society. See, I think that, so here's what's interesting, because again, the sister who thought she was trying to challenge me, which I thought was hilarious, they love running around, oh, you're a shield for the Democratic Party. Here's what they don't understand. Anybody knows,

they met in 1990, first job I got paid for, Houston Defender. I represent black, my focus was good for black people. But what I understand is when you're studying a political system, you are standing before you going,

what am I being presented with? I'm being presented with in this country on a national level, a two party system. Many local elections are actually nonpartisan. For the longest, the Houston mayoral race was nonpartisan, but it's increasingly become partisan. But the reality is local typically is nonpartisan, but then once you go statewide, national, it becomes partisan. But the reality is, local typically is nonpartisan, but then once you go statewide, national, it becomes partisan. So what black people have always done, and this is

the mistake that, again, uneducated people make. When I say uneducated, I don't mean degrees. I mean folk who just refuse to even pay attention. Black people have always made not the lesser evil, but black people have made decisions based upon, I have a set of things that I want to get done for me and my people. What is the vehicle in which I can get that done? So if I only have two vehicles, I'm trying to get out of town, in which I can get that done. So if I only have two vehicles,

I'm trying to get out of town, I can ride in your red car or your blue car. Now, I would rather have, I would rather drive my black car, but I got to ride with one of these two people. So now I have to decide which is a safer driver versus a crazy-ass driver. Which one is likely to drive me into a ditch

or off the side of a mountain versus someone who is not as crazy but is a safer driver? I did not say a perfect driver, a safer driver. So what black people have done is we've made decisions based upon that. Now, what has happened, and y'all have heard me say this, is the mistake that too many of us have made is that when we vote, we disappear.

We vote and go, did my part, as opposed to as when FDR challenged A. Philip Randolph, Philip, make me do it. So when you hear me say the election is the end of one process and the beginning of another, that's what that means. And so our challenge is, OK, now what do we do? So I never say, well, I'm gonna stay at home to teach you a lesson. Why is that? Because I just guarantee that the person who I don't want has a greater shot at winning. If the person who I don't want

has a greater shot at winning, they now have an opportunity over two or four years to wipe out plans, programs, policy, laws that I find beneficial. Now my job is harder because I now have to defeat them in two, four years and then try to restore what I lost. And so this is when, so this is not even pragmatic politics. It's actually understanding the political process. That's why when I hear people say, I ain't voting against reparations, and I go,

well you do know the people who vote reparations are elected. So I don't know how you're going to get something by not voting when the people, the thing that you want is voted on by, that's just how dumb that is. So we go through these things that we talk, and people say these things literally having no understanding what they've been talking about and so when I sat in the last four years and I literally heard black people tell me man I'm tired of you talking about them judges

and I go you do understand a president can only serve eight years but how long was, Damon Keith died at the age of 95. The man was a federal judge for what, seven, eight presidents? Folks, do y'all understand this? So when you look at politics, you have to look at politics for what it is and then say, what can I get out of this system that speaks to civil rights, civil rights, human rights, it also means I might not be able to get everything that I want. And I actually wasn't expecting to do this, but because she was there, she gonna have to tell some of y'all right now what happened when a lot of black people

and a lot of black leadership didn't understand the political play and actually, actually kind of messed up the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. This is a perfect example of understanding state of mind, state of politics, what you can get today that positions you to get the rest tomorrow as opposed to never getting any of it today

and now leaving you in a worse off position. Roland, can I just say one thing? This whole conversation reminds me of Maynard Jackson's last speech. And the thrust of that speech was about the scared Negro disease. And when I think about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,

me running communications for that, passing that bill in 30 days, we took that bill, put it in the hands of some of these black leaders, the people who you see on television all day that make their money off the backs of black people, and told them, we've got a bill. Now you connect the Capitol with the streets. Let the streets know we got a bill.

Turn their ire on the Republicans in the Senate. Now is the time. They walked away from the bill. The scared Negro disease. So I think the frustration that we... Hold on. They walked away from it because it doesn't have everything I want. We actually gave in the bill had more than what they even asked us for.

And that was the point. We've given you more than what you even asked for. Now, in the Senate, now they were going to strip some stuff out. But the point is the House Democrats were in control and we gave the, the activists more than what they asked for, but they were scared, Roland. They were scared of their own shadow. They were scared to be outflanked by the left. And so, so I say all this to say, I think the frustration that we need to tap into that is real in the black community is this lack of leadership. You and I talk about this all the time.

You cannot point out a black person that's made a million plus dollars that got rich off the Democratic Party. The party has been riding our back. In terms of political operatives, not contracts, not like governmental contracts. You're talking about inside of the party. Absolutely. Right. And I'm talking some real money, like the white boy kind of money, right? Yes. Absolutely. Because the party

rides our back. They can't win without us. But that money is not reinvested in us. And there are some people that have been at the table, they've been at the table for a long time. And it gets back to that Maynard Jackson quote, the scared Negro disease. So I think that is what is pronounced

in the black community right now. I think that is the frustration. I think that is why we're not making progress. And I think that's why these institutions are no longer working for us. So I'm going to close the show out with this here because I love it when people say things. So I posted a video. I did the video the other day talking about why it's important to support to show black on media what we do and how we do it. And so this is no

disrespect to the system. I'm not even going to call her name. I'm not going to show it. But I posted this. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back.

In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban is.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers.

But we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you've got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else. But never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.

I'm not even going to say the social media platform I posted it on. And she said, this is not how you fundraise. This is the traditional call to corporate America and buy black. We need to educate our people on the benefits of charitable giving and how it benefits our personal bottom line financially. I left journalism to fundraise 30 years ago. And I got a kick out of that. And my response to her was, you're actually wrong.

See folks, here's what she doesn't understand. In starting this show, I had a choice. I could have a for-profit model or a non-profit model. I chose the for-profit model because it's actually easier to go from a for-profit to a non-profit as opposed to a non-profit to a for-profit. So I said if the for-profit model doesn't work, we can flip this to a non-profit. That was first. Second of all, I knew, unlike Manny Hassan, who launched Zateo, or David Sirota with the Lever News or whatever,

I wasn't going to have 100 or 200,000 people give me $10 a month or larger contributions to fund this show. I understood that. So now I was now faced with a conundrum. How then do we do this? Thirdly, I did not want to charge a subscription fee because I wanted the content widely available. So I sat down and said, how do we do this? That's how I came up with the concept of the Bring the Funk Fan Club. I actually took the PBS NPR model of pledges

and applied it to this show. But here's what I said, and I appreciate only about 150 or so black people got mad. But I came on the air and said, this is what we're going to do, but I'm not going to send you swag. I'm not going to send you shirts and mugs and tote bags and hats, stuff along those lines. Every dollar's going back into the show.

You know what the audience said? Like in Nehemiah, let us build. They accepted that. See, so what the sister here doesn't understand is the miles actually worked. Because the community has said, we're with you. And I told y'all yesterday these checks came in. And I sat there last night, and I opened about 100 of these.

And I'm going to read this because I was blown away when I opened this letter. Monday, December 9, 2024. Dear Roland, you're the best. Your talent, gift, and service is extremely valuable and a true necessity. There are a few things I would like to run by you as food for thought. I'm rushing to catch the post office because my favorite teller at TD Bank suggested that I make sure you receive the donation before December 20th. I have issued one bank cashier's check. I would have issued one bank cashier's check for $10,000. However, when I stopped by my bank that particular day, there was an issue with the cashier's checks, so I had to

resort to 10 money orders instead. I will email your assistant to have my email forwarded to you. Thank you. Please keep bringing the funk. Stephanie Ingram. This is a sister who I think it's a sister. She could be white, she could be black, who sent in $10,000. I got another letter over here from a person who sent in a dollar.

A fan of Black Star Network, I watch Roller Martin Unfiltered Daily. Thank you so much for your value, service of informing us all. I can't even make out the person's name. I can't, can you make that name out? That bottom, I can't make it out. person's name. I can't, can you make that name out? That bottom? I can't make it out.

I can't make it out. They had two dollars in the envelope. Both of these are as important. One is not bigger than the other. Check might be bigger, but both are valuable. Why am I saying that? Because I'm tired of black people saying we can't. I'm tired of black people saying we can't fund things. I'm tired of some black people saying

that, oh, no, we don't support each other. I'm tired of all of that. Here's what I do know. If you never build it, it's guaranteed not to succeed. If you never start, it's guaranteed never to flourish. We've had 34,000 donors in six years contribute $3 million. Now, y'all might say, that's $500 in a year. Does it fund everything? Nope. But I can tell you what, the months when money was not coming in,

it funded producers, social producers, audio, directors, the rent here. It paid for equipment. So I'm saying all of that is that if you're watching this, and there's more than 7,000 of y'all being on YouTube and a bunch of y'all commenting, if you are along for the free ride, man, that's why y'all keep doing y'all thing.

The conversation that you heard tonight cannot and will not happen in the future if we are not making sure that we're funding. I love the haters who say, man, he always begging. But not one of them haters got a show. They have me commenting on my channel. But not one of them haters got a show. They have me commenting on my channel. What we're talking about here, how do you build or rebuild black America? You have to have communication mediums to get the word out. To Ashley's point, how do you challenge the Democratic Party to make sure that African Americans are getting the millions of contracts when four white agencies handle $600 million in advertising for the Harris-Walls campaign?

How do you make sure in 2028 a black-owned ad agency is one of those four? Because you've got to have a lever to call them out and put pressure on them. Because MSNBC ain't going to do it. Politico, NPR are not going to do it. It only happens in black-owned media. We are not

here today if it wasn't for the black press. And I'm telling y'all right now, the future of black America will be grim if we do not have black-owned media that ain't focused on housewives,

that ain't focused on sports, that's not talking about the Grammys all day, but that is feeding our soul real news and information that is life-affirming. So that's why we want you to support John Brennan Funk Network.

Join us via Cash App. You use the Stripe QR code to do so. This is it right here. If you're listening, go to theblacksuddenetwork.com and see it. If you want to send your check and money order, PO Box 57196, Washington, D.C., 2003-710196, Washington, D.C., 2003-710196.

PayPal, R. Martin Unfiltered. Venmo, RM Unfiltered. Zelle, Roland at RolandSMartin.com. Roland at RolandMartinUnfiltered.com. Be sure to download the Black Star Network app. Apple Phone, Android Phone, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, Samsung Smart TV. Be sure to get a copy of my book, White Fear, How the Browning of America is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds.

Kenan, do me a favor. I need a new graphic. I need you to take Target off of that graphic. If you want to get the version that I read, get it on Audible. And be sure to get our merchandise, a Roland Martin Unfiltered Black Star Network merchandise. Get the shirts. We tried to tell you, FAFO 2025. And don't blame me. I voted for the black woman. Go to rolandmartin.creator-spring.com.

Cura Co. there as well. Go to theblackstarnetwork.com. Don't forget, download Fanbase as well as if you want to invest, go to starkengine.com forward slash Fanbase as well. Folks, that's it. Appreciate it. Nola, Greg, Reesey, Ashley, thanks for coming in. I'll see y'all tomorrow right here on Rolling Modern Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. Holla! Black Star Network is here.

Oh, no punches! I'm real revolutionary right now. Thank you for being the voice of Black America. All momentum we have now, we have to keep this going. The video looks phenomenal. See, there's a difference between Black Star Network

and black-owned media and something like CNN. You can't be black-owned media and be scared. It's time to be smart. Bring your eyeballs home. You dig? I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to

Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We met them at the recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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