- When I answered the
phone, they were like,
"You applied for the job,"
and I'm like, "I did, I did."
Well, let's see where this goes,
but I didn't know nothing
about policing, nothing,
except when I got
arrested when I was eight.
(soft music)
- Hey, I'm Dave Rubin,
and just a quick reminder
to subscribe to the
channel and click the bell
so that you actually see our videos,
a pretty novel idea, I know.
All right, more importantly,
joining me today
is a former Arizona police
officer and now the co-founder
of the Blexit movement, Brandon Tatum.
Welcome to the Rubin Report.
- Hey, thanks for having me,
and I'm excited to be here.
- I'm glad to have you here.
You do realize that your
shirt is gonna trigger
an awful lotta people on the Internet.
- Well, I'm hoping so, I'm hoping so.
(Dave laughs)
I mean, I don't see why.
We live in America, people
should love the flag,
they should love the
concept of America first.
So if they're triggered,
that's their fault.
- You must feel very
comfortable in my studio.
I've got a flag over there.
- Oh, yeah.
Big American flag over
there, Constitution,
Declaration of Independence,
so we're off to a good start.
- Cool, hope so.
- All right, there's a lot of stuff
I want to talk to you about,
and I've wanted to have
you in here for a while.
So first off, for people that know
absolutely nothing about you,
I don't know anything about
your childhood upbringing,
family life, that kind of stuff,
before we get into law enforcement
and Blexit and the rest of it.
- Okay, well, I grew up
in Fort Worth, Texas.
I'm a Texas boy, a Cowboy fan
by default, I like to say.
I mean, they're doing good
this year, so I like 'em.
- [Dave] Yeah, legally you
have to be a Cowboy fan, yeah.
- Yeah, I have to be.
My dad is a Cowboy fan, he
used to work at the stadium,
so I'm, I guess, thrusted
into the atmosphere
of Cowboy nation, but I grew
up in Fort Worth, Texas.
My parents were split my whole life,
all that I can remember,
and it was slightly an adversity, right?
Because we had my dad,
his dad wasn't around,
my mom, her dad wasn't around.
My grandmother uniquely
enough had my mother
at 12 years old.
- Wow.
- She was raped and she had my mom at 12.
So that was kind of the foundational idea
of kinda how me and my brother was raised.
Both really parents were
really good parents.
My dad is a firefighter,
he's actually a chief.
So I grew up in a very diverse background,
'cause we had a lot of my
mom's side of the family
what I would say was
poor, uneducated, poor.
High school graduation
was like going to college
on my mom's side of the family.
A few of my family members
are doing life in prison.
So I come from a diverse
type of a atmosphere.
You have the good, the bad.
My dad did a wonderful job raising us.
We lived with both my mom and dad.
Went to different schools,
private schools, public schools,
but my high school was Dunbar High School,
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School,
named after the famous black
poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
It was violent, man, it was violent.
People pulling guns on each
other in the parking lot,
fights, I mean, people
come off the streets
fighting in the school.
But what it did do, it
presented a atmosphere
where we can excel in athletics.
Like I said, let me go
back to when I was eight,
because that was one of the
pivotal points in my life.
At eight years old, I got
arrested for smoking marijuana.
- At eight years old.
- In a vacant house.
And eight is when I
stopped smoking marijuana.
When I was seven, we
used to smoke marijuana
with my cousins.
- Geeze.
- When I say marijuana for people
that know about smoking weed,
we weren't smoking joints,
we were smoking blunts.
My older cousins would go buy weed,
and then we'll come
together and we'll smoke it.
My parents had no idea what we were doing,
until we got busted that
time when I was eight
and my brother was 10.
- Geeze.
I mean, I can't even imagine
the mind of an
eight-year-old smoking weed.
- My son is nine, he just turned nine,
and I couldn't imagine him picking up weed
and smoking it like we were.
- Geeze.
- We were also-
- Wait, so you busted.
What happened?
- Well, we got busted in a vacant house.
I mean, they came in like a SWAT team.
They pulled guns on us and everything.
They put us in a squad car, we
went to the detention center,
and we initially thought
that they were gonna call
my cousins' parents, because
their parents really...
They didn't care much, man.
We weren't gonna get in trouble.
We were never gonna tell my
dad, it was gonna go away.
But for some reason, they
called Mr. Tatum there,
and my dad is a strong man,
and he came in there like
he was ready to fight.
He came in there, "I'm gonna
kill 'em, I'm gonna kill 'em."
I was telling my brother, I was like,
"I hope they leave us in here, man,
"because we're about to get
the whooping of a lifetime."
But the thing that I love that my dad did,
and it really changed my life,
is that we didn't get a
whooping, he didn't whoop us.
He sat me down, on the ride
home he sat me down and said,
"Look, Brandon, if you
don't act with integrity
"and you don't change your ways,
"you will never play in the NBA."
'Cause at the time I wanted
to be like Michael Jordan.
I mean, that hurt me more
than any whooping could,
and it kinda set me on
a path of feeling like,
you know, I need to do better man.
I love my cousins, but we can't
hang out with them no more
and get intro trouble that'll end up
causing me to lose my future.
- More importantly than anything else,
how are your basketball skills now?
- Oh, trash, I'm trash at
basketball, I hate to say it.
I know stereotypically
I'm supposed to be good.
- Oh, so this was the eight-year-old dream
of being Michael Jordan, right?
- This is the eight-year-old dream.
The dream died when I
couldn't dribble with my left
and I couldn't shoot from the
three-point, that dream died.
- All right, well, I was actually
gonna do some of this stuff later,
but so this obviously
relates to the black family,
and every time anyone talks about this,
if you're white let's say,
well, they're gonna immediately
say you're racist for
even bringing this up,
and yet I hear this
sort of story so often,
that what is happening to the black family
or what has happened in say
the last couple of decades
is sort of the root of the problem here.
Do you think that's fair to say?
- 100%.
- And how did your dad,
how did your dad not succumb to that?
- Well, 100% I think it's
the root of the problems.
When you're a young man, you
growing up with no direction.
Where do you go, who do you look to?
You gotta look to people
that are influential males
in the community and
they didn't have a dad.
So you have kind of a matriculation
of this fatherless home issue going on
and people trying to be fathers
without having examples
of what a real father is,
so now you're going to gang
members and other dudes,
like our cousins, and we didn't have to
'cause we had a strong
dad, which helped us,
but you still wanna be
like your big cousins,
'cause they're cool and it's kinda trendy
what they're doing,
and it leads young men
down the wrong path.
But unfortunately, and I
guess fortunately for me,
my father was a strong man,
and I think that him not
having his dad around
really made him feel like,
"I need to do better."
And my dad obviously had
a little bit of training
being a father because
he had to help take care
of his younger brothers.
And so my dad probably
always had that in him,
but him being a strong man,
him standing on principles,
really saved us, I'm not gonna lie.
My mom is great, my mom was
way more lenient than my dad.
My mom was the cool mom,
you know what I mean?
- Right. (chuckles)
- And I hate to say it, we
kinda took advantage of that.
Me and my brother didn't have
as much respect for my mom
as we did my father.
He was strict, no cussing in the house.
Back in the day we had no cell phones,
he'd pick the phone up while
you're talking to somebody
on the phone and be like,
"It's time to go to bed,"
and hang the phone up on you.
So it was really beneficial,
and if I didn't have my dad,
I would not be here today.
- Why do you think it's so
hard to talk about that?
So for example, my parents
have been married 44 years now
with ups and downs, and good
and bad, and all that stuff,
but they still live in the
house that I grew up in,
and I know that the roots of that
give you some stability in life.
It doesn't make you perfect.
You're still gonna make
mistakes and all those things,
but it gives you some sense
of a consistency in the world.
It's so obviously something
that we should all want
or aspire, not to say you
can't if you don't have that,
you're gonna be awful
or something like that.
But why do you think it's
so hard to talk about this?
- Because when you start to dis,
or people take it as a dis to
the fabric of who they are,
the cultural identity, people
get offended by it, right?
It's hard for humans, for people,
to take responsibility
for their own action.
It's very difficult, so
people like to divert.
In the black community,
culture is what's really
destroying us, right?
I mean, it's culturally
acceptable more now
than it was, I don't know,
in the '40s, '50s, '60s,
for you to be in a single-parent home.
Back in the day, that's unheard of.
Back in the day, having a family structure
was all we depended on
as black people to build.
We understood the value of it.
- It wasn't until I think
late '60s or early '70s,
I think early '70s when that flipped.
- It began to flip, and now
it's cool to be on your own
and do your thing as a young man.
Listen to the music that
most of us listen to.
Banging a few girls here and
there, it make you a man,
you cool, you popular.
You don't have to stay
around with a woman.
You can hit it, have a kid outta wedlock.
Most of the dudes that's rapping,
most of the potential leaders,
are doing the same thing.
So I think we've been set
off on the wrong path,
and when you're confronted
with those issues,
instead of internalizing and say,
"Look, this is our fault, we
need to get back to this."
Why are we not marrying these women
that we're having kids with?
Why are women not having
the expectation to date
and to be with a man who's
stable, who can provide for them?
Not somebody that can provide
for them for one night,
not somebody that can provide
flashiness, but stability.
Also in the culture, stability
is almost viewed upon
like you're acting white.
When I was growing up and
you would do well in school,
people would say, "Well,
you're trying to be
"like the white man."
If you wanna have your
pants like it's supposed to,
tuck your shirt in and say,
"I'm gonna marry women,
"I'm not gonna disrespect women,"
I'm telling you, I don't know how it is
in every high school around the world
in the black community,
but I know how mine was,
and you were getting shunned.
I remember we had some
guys who were virgins
in high school and in college,
I mean, you'd get bullied.
There's something wrong with
you if you're not having sex.
That's cultural, man, and I
feel like if that changed,
we may be able to return back to saying
let's value our women,
let's value relationships.
- It's so interesting the
way the media uses cultural
sort of against everybody.
Do you see just in the
last couple of days,
there was this piece in Vox
about how Andrew Yang should
stop using toxic terms
like math and that people
should become doctors,
because those are associated
with the Asian community,
except those are the things
we should all aspire for
and they're trying to make them toxic.
And that's the reverse of
what you're laying out there.
- Yeah, exactly, and that's
what my goal is in life,
is to give young brothers
a different perspective.
Now don't get me wrong, I
used to be sagging my pants,
I had gold teeth in my mouth,
I got young savage
tattooed across my stomach,
I got my hood tattooed on my forearms,
so I understand what it's
like to be involved in that.
I understand what it's like
to wanna be a part of that culture,
but I also understand
what it's like to change.
It took me finding God
to really take that step
and change in a different direction,
and I realized, man, this
is the way things should be.
We shouldn't be ashamed to be like this.
- When was your spiritual awakening?
- In 2008, I'll never
forget it, I was in college.
I had fun in college my
first couple of years,
but I had a terrible attitude.
We couldn't sit across from each other
because we would have probably never met.
Any time I felt offended by
somebody, I'm ready to fight,
which was the detriment of
my college career in football
because the coaches yell at
me and now I wanna fight 'em.
I didn't know how to
handle my emotions well,
and I didn't care.
Cursed every word outta my mouth,
and a lotta things I
really didn't care about
that I care about now.
Race was very different
to me before I got saved.
I saw black and white very clearly.
I took Africana studies in college,
and there was a period of time
where I hated white people, I did.
I felt so offended by what
they did to my ancestors,
from the things they taught us in college.
- Oh yeah, so I was gonna ask you,
so do you think that was the
intention of the classes,
because this goes across
all the social sciences now.
- You know, I'm not sure back then.
I didn't feel what I feel today.
Back when I went to the classes,
I felt like that they were just teaching,
and of course there's gonna
be a level of bias, right?
If this is your perspective,
you have the freedom
to teach kinda in the direction you want.
I didn't see them
over-propagandizing certain things.
When I go to colleges and speak now,
it is clear that they're
trying to intentionally
brainwash people into
believing a certain thing.
I had a young guy reach out to me,
the books that were
required was a book saying,
it was like anti-white man,
why the black man is being oppressed.
I mean, I didn't have
those books growing up,
or at least being in college.
- Go get a job after you've learned that.
What do you do, what is the purpose of it?
- How can you exist in an environment
where you hate white people,
but you're only 13% of the population?
How can you exist in that environment?
You're gonna find yourself
hating almost everybody you're around.
You're gonna find
yourself screwing yourself
outta opportunities,
because if you're looking
at your boss as the enemy,
are you gonna perform well in your job?
Are you gonna be more
willing to try new things
or go up in the ranks?
Are you gonna have I guess the spirit
for you to visualize
success when all you think
is that you're being
oppressed by the white man?
So some of that was in me growing up.
I grew up in an all-black community.
I never dated a white girl.
It was shunned in my community.
Growing up, you date a white woman,
you're gonna get bullied, you a sellout.
So I had none of that exposure.
Never was really around
white people consistently,
mostly around black people.
Everything in my life was Afro-centric.
I got to college and
my eyes were opened up
to a certain degree because
now everybody's white,
and it's like 35 of us.
You know, it was a little more than that,
but probably about a couple a hundred,
but most of us were athletes.
And so I began to see white people
aren't as evil as I thought they were.
- So they weren't hunting
you down on campus.
- They weren't hunting us down.
You could go eat with white
people and nobody would be...
There would be no controversy.
- So you could.
You were eating with white people.
- Eating with white people.
- Incredible.
- It's probably enough.
(Dave laughing)
But growing up, you
thought there was gonna be
a lotta animosity, like, oh,
they mad, 'cause we in college.
You know, I'm telling
you, this is a real thing
when you're like--
- What was that like though really?
Like it sounds silly,
eating with white people,
no one's hunting you
down, but that transition,
as you were starting to realize it,
to break the old mold of
thinking, how hard is that?
For me, man, I'm a very stubborn person,
but I'm a logical person.
If I can see a logical
example of truth and reality,
then it's easy to convert me.
If you can't show me that,
I'll be stubborn to the day I die.
But it was really eye-opening for me, man,
because I perceived that people
were gonna treat me differently,
I perceived that people
were gonna be shocked
at black folks going to
college and we're successful.
And it wasn't at all,
white people didn't care.
You know what I'm saying?
And then I started to meet white friends,
and I'm like, man, everybody's
essentially the same.
There's like two people in this world,
real people and fake people.
They come in different colors.
And that began to change in me,
and then like I said, when I got saved,
it's like God imparted in my heart
that we're all the same, man.
- So what was that
spiritual wake-up moment?
- Well, it was a lead up to it, right?
I mean, football wasn't going well for me.
I had been going to church growing up.
We were in church, but
church wasn't in us, right?
We got to church and we
leave, we listen to rap music
and doing all that kind of other stuff,
we didn't pray, we didn't read the Bible,
so that's kind of lukewarm
Christian upbringing.
And when I got to college,
things weren't going well.
Then I went, I said,
man, let me try God out.
I was really gonna rule God out.
I said let me see if this is real, man,
because I'm at a point in my life
where it's kind of a turning point.
I wanna figure out who I am,
football is not going well,
I thought it was gonna
be my life moving forward
and it's not happening,
and I'm in a position
where I don't know where to go.
Let me rule this God thing out,
and then I can go from there.
I was having visions and stuff of God,
Jesus visited me in one of
my dreams, like in a vision.
And I went to a church,
I got invited to Emmanuel
Grace Apostolic Church.
I'll never forget that church.
And it just turned my life around.
One day I went up to the front,
I had a friend with me and she
was crying at the altar call.
She's crying and she wanted to find God,
and in my mind, I'm like
I'm gonna take her up there
'cause she's too scared.
Let me take her to get her
someone to pray for her,
'cause they pray for you at the front.
And when I went up there, I
ended up getting prayed for.
And then I found myself getting baptized,
and God really just changed
me, man, completely.
I'm talking about it
was a complete change.
I went from cursing every day to never...
Well, I ain't saying never cursing again,
but a period of time I
never said a curse word.
Now sometimes people make me mad,
I may not say it on the TV,
but sometimes I do curse.
But I didn't curse,
I stopped listening to
rap music completely,
and my perspective of life
just completely changed.
I saw everybody the same.
It was no more black and
white, this racist stuff.
It was like, you know
what, God created us all.
We're all brothers and sisters in God,
and we just have different
melanin in our skin.
- This is kind of a sidebar,
but do you think people can have a shift,
like such a fundamental
shift like that, without God?
Do you think there's a
way that some people can
and some people maybe are more wired
to need belief or something like that?
- Well, I think that
people can have a level,
a shift to a certain level, right?
I think God is the ultimate
shift, because I think it's more
than just what the human I
guess nature can do to change.
The things that changed in me
were supernatural, in my opinion.
I can't explain it, I can't explain how,
I can't explain why it happened.
I just know that the
experience I had at church
and how my mind completely changed.
It was like instantaneous.
When I got baptized and
I went down in the water
and I came up, I remember
telling my friend,
"I just feel lighter, I don't
know what happened to me.
"Something has happened to me."
I didn't read through the Bible,
so I didn't understand the
significance of all of it,
but I understand that I needed to do it,
I understood a parcel of it,
but I didn't understand
the significance of it
until I read the Bible and I said,
"That's what happened to me."
Now I see, and now I understand
that the power of God
can really change you to a level
that you couldn't get to
on your own, in my opinion,
like a endurance sustainable
level, if that makes any sense.
It's like more of an endurance to it,
to the end of time you can
really tap into something
that's just supernatural.
And I see it being so
when you read the Bible.
You read through thousands of years
of hundreds of people having interactions
that never met each other.
Very similar situations,
they never met each other,
they lived in different
dispensations of time,
different parts of different countries,
and they had the same
experience that I had in 2008.
And it just made me feel like
there's something to this.
There's something to it.
- So you have this awakening,
and then you get outta college.
Did you immediately go
into law enforcement?
- No, no, no, 2008, I
had a few more years.
I graduated in 2009, I
left football in 2010,
so I graduated early,
so then my life changed.
My career changed, I was a
good guy on the football team,
I was a leader, things
began to transition for me.
I started getting heavily
into church, things like that.
I would witness on
campus, all of the above.
So with that mentality, that new mindset,
more of a tempered behavior,
I was taking the gold
teeth out of my mouth,
all of the above.
I get to the end of my college career,
NFL draft, I didn't get drafted.
It was heartbreaking, I
mean, I was devastated.
And there were some reasons behind that.
I mean, it'll take me
all day to explain it,
but my career didn't go
the way I wanted it to.
- What percentage were you
looking at that morning?
Were you 90% I'm gonna get drafted?
- I was 100% I was gonna get drafted
because my agent had talked
to the Oakland Raiders
at the time and they said to my agent,
"We're gonna draft him in
the sixth or seventh round.
"He's gonna be the only
safety that we draft."
Because of my athletic ability,
I didn't play much at all
at Arizona, but I was
All-American in high school.
I was one of the top
players in the nation.
I was what you'd consider a freak athlete.
And so because of that athleticism,
even though I didn't play at all,
the Oakland Raiders still was
thinking about drafting me.
They told him they were gonna draft me,
we had a draft party,
it was on my birthday.
- [Dave] (groans) Oh, man.
- I mean, I'd been praying about this,
and I said God is gonna make it happen.
And draft day came, he called me, he said,
"Hey, they're making some changes,
"I don't know what they're doing."
They didn't draft me.
Come to find out they didn't draft me
because the college coach
that they went and talked
to right before the draft,
he bad-mouthed me and
talked really bad about me,
and so my agent told me that
that's why I they passed on me.
They didn't wanna take a chance with me,
given the circumstances.
So I was hurt, man, I was devastated.
But I met a guy.
He was a tremendous
mentor to me, tremendous.
The guy, very successful, millionaire.
I'll give you his first name was John.
I don't know if he's comfortable
with me giving his full name,
but this guy was a
entrepreneur CEO of a major...
It was like a worldwide
company that he owned,
had his own private jet,
all of these things.
And his daughter played volleyball
with me and my son's mom.
I think I can say to go back,
me and her and end up having
a child at some point.
But his daughter played with my son's mom,
and that's how he met me.
And so he mentored me through the process,
and he told me something that was pivotal,
just like my dad telling
me that in the car.
He told me, he said,
"Brandon, you pursue football
"as much as you can with
everything you have,
"and at the moment in which
it's not yielding any results,
"you need to put an X on
the calendar and move on."
And I tried it out for another year,
I said, man, this is not doing anything.
I put a X on the calendar
while I was applying for
the police department.
So let me go back, because
there's some things missing here.
During my college career,
I met a young lady
and we had a kid together.
We weren't married, so we
had a kid outta wedlock,
which was a whole story in and of itself,
because I was in the
church, I was in the choir,
and I had to sit out the choir.
It was a lot of things
that happened in the church
because of this.
I think it's important to say.
So we had a kid and we were having a son,
me and her was on two
different pages, right?
I was into the church, we made a mistake,
but I didn't believe in abortion.
She on the other hand was pro-abortion.
And I remember we had a
conversation about it.
She told me, "Look, I just
wanna see how far along I am,"
and that was our communication.
I went to Planned Parenthood with her.
At the time, I didn't know
what Planned Parenthood was.
I thought it was a little
clinic for women, whatever.
Now I know it's a little bit
of different perspective,
but at the time I didn't know.
I went with her to see
how far along she was.
At the front door of
the facility, she said,
"I want you to know I'm
having an abortion."
And I was hurt, man, I was hurt.
People don't think that men matter
in these women choice
situations, but they do.
That's my child.
- So she was gonna do it regardless--
- She was gonna do it,
she didn't even tell me.
- Regardless of what they were gonna say
related to timing or whatever.
- Right, she didn't tell me nothing.
She had already orchestrated the thing,
but she waited till the
front door to tell me.
I sat in the lobby and I prayed,
and I said, "God, please
don't let her do this.
"Please, this is my son.
"I know we made a
mistake with fornication,
"but I don't believe
in making two mistakes.
"I don't believe in this."
And I prayed in there for
I don't know how long.
I leave, I get back in the car.
Maybe like an hour and a half later,
she comes outta there crying profusely,
and I thought she did it.
And I said, I was hurt, but I said
she just went through a difficult thing,
I'll try to support her emotionally.
She came to the car and
she cried and she cried,
and she goes, "I couldn't do it."
- Wow.
- "I couldn't do it."
I gotta give her kudos 'cause
my son is nine years old now
(Dave chuckles)
So that situation happened,
and I thought it was pertinent
to kinda bring it up.
So fast forward to the
end of my college career,
the football thing, she was pregnant,
and she was getting ready to have our son
or she was close to having
our son at the time.
Then I have to make a decision,
put the X on the calendar for football,
and go to something else
'cause I need something more sustainable.
I apply for everything
in the city of Tucson,
I had a degree, I got hundreds of no's.
One day they called me, and
it was after an argument
that me and her had obviously,
so we had just argued briefly on the phone
about the engagement ring
or something like that,
nothing major, and I tell this story
because it's always funny
to me how this happened.
We had a little argument the night before,
wake up the next morning,
and I get a phone call from
the Tucson Police Department.
And initially I thought she
had called me the police on me,
like she was mad at me.
I'm like, "Why would she
call the police on me
"on a basic argument like this.
"She want me to go to jail?"
But when I answered the
phone, they were like,
"You applied for the job,"
and I'm like, "I did, I did."
Well, let's see where this goes,
but I didn't know nothing
about policing, nothing,
except when I got
arrested when I was eight
and the agenda that you feel
growing up in a black community
feeling like the cops are
always out to get you.
And I did a ride-along,
man, and it changed my life.
Officer Sun Pang changed my
life during that ride-along,
and that kinda set my career up.
- So you become a police officer.
This is sort of a 180, as you just said,
from where you started.
What was the most eye-opening
thing about being an officer?
- It was the idea that I
had no idea what police did,
and I thought I did, right?
Watching "Cops," listening
to people online,
I realized that people that
have never put on a badge
and actually served as a police officer,
they have very limited
understanding of policing, period.
I mean, limited to like
10% of an understanding,
even less than that.
If you know somebody that's a police,
you may have a little
more, but I had no idea.
Completely a different world,
it's completely a different
job than people know about it,
emotionally, legally, the training.
I mean, all of that is
completely different,
and I got a taste of that,
even after all the training,
my first arrest was where I was like
this is is real, man, this is real.
I really have the power to
take somebody's freedom away,
and this is not a role player,
what we call them in the academy
where somebody's faking to be a criminal.
This is a real person with
real emotions, a real life,
and they can really kill you, too.
That was a pivotal point and
an eye-opening point for me.
- What was it like?
Did you ever go back to the old community
and the guys that were giving you the weed
as an eight-year-old,
saw you in your uniform?
- No, growing up in Fort Worth,
I became a police officer in Tucson.
- Right, you weren't, right.
- But there was remnants of that, right?
You had a black community in Tucson
and you arrested people
that looked like people
that you grew up with,
act like people you grew up with,
like my cousins and grandma.
And so dealing with that kinda
give you little flashbacks
of what went on, and I got
to see it from both sides.
All of that horrible stuff
I thought they did to us
when we were in a vacant house,
how they treated us and all that stuff,
I realized that them officers were right.
They did what they was supposed to do,
getting a call of that nature,
not knowing who to expect,
knowing that we die on a day-to-day basis,
from calls simply like that.
That really, you know, really
opened my understanding to it.
- What about racism within
the police department, right?
If you listen to half the media,
police departments are all racist,
they're looking for racist
ways to incarcerate people.
- Yeah, it's the biggest load of crap
I ever heard in my life,
the biggest load of crap.
Police, if people understood
what policing was,
you would understand that it's rare
for a police officer to
be actually a racist.
Now are there racist people
in a police department?
Yes, there's racist
pastors, I mean, come on,
we all know, we all know
that every walk of life,
there's some idiot out there
that's still lingering
to hateful rhetoric.
- But doesn't it drive you crazy
that you have to qualify
it always with that?
It drives me crazy all the time.
Yes, there are homophobes,
there are racists,
there are bad, mean people.
We cannot exterminate all of them.
Thanos could do it,
but basically we can't.
- Yeah, (laughs) we can't,
but some people need to know that,
because watching the media every day,
if you're not a informed person,
you're not a person that's a leader
and you can lead with your own thoughts,
you're a follower, you'll
fall into that stuff.
But it's very difficult to be a racist
on a police department, and
one of the biggest reasons why
is because you can't pick who you serve.
And the least racist people in my opinion
are the white police officers
that work in the black community,
because you put your life on the line
every day for black folks.
You are willing to die for black folks.
You have to visually see
and feel the pain and hurt
in the community when brothers
are getting shot every day.
People don't realize
that police are the ones
gotta put those young
brothers in body bags.
Yeah, I don't care who you are,
when you see a young man
with his brains hanging out
clinging for life, maybe
even pleading for his life,
gurgling in blood, the age of your son,
the age of your nephew, cousin,
somebody that looks like
your mom, your grandmother,
a young baby that's been
shot through the head
from a drive-by, I don't
care what race you are,
man, it messes with you.
And for people to think
that these white officers
are these cruel evil people
that don't have any sense of emotions
or attachment to human life, these people,
the people that are pushing this rhetoric
are evil and liars.
You put these young people
in body bags every day.
You go to their mom, grandmother,
and you look that lady in the face,
trying to hold back your own tears,
because you can only
imagine losing your son.
Some of these women have
lost all of their children
to gang violence, and you
gotta look her in the eye
and you gotta be strong
for her and everybody else,
and say, "I'm sorry, but
he's never coming back."
And that's what people
don't understand happens.
And I also believe that
it's racist, in my opinion,
to make the projection that white officers
are targeting black
people in the community.
One of the main reasons is
that you would have to assume
that all black people are bad.
Think about this for a minute.
If officers are afraid of black people,
that means that all of
them are doing something
that will lead officers
to be afraid of them.
That's not true!
It's only a few dummies that
are destroying the community.
What about our grandma
now who'd been robbed,
they call the police for help.
Some woman had been raped,
they call the police for help.
Officers are seeing another
side of black people
that they don't wanna tell you about,
but they project it so
people can be divided,
and I think that's the biggest thing
that bothers me about it.
- So since you were
probably uniquely positioned
in Arizona as an officer to go
to some of these communities
and talk to some of these people,
do you think you were able to wake up
some young kids that were up to no good
in a way that maybe a white officer
just wouldn't have been able to,
as well intentioned as he might be?
- Yeah, I think young people
and black people in general.
I was considered the black
person whisperer, right?
(Dave laughing)
I'm serious, we would go on calls
and black people would be like,
"Oh, man, eff that, you know
what, I don't wanna talk.
"Man, I want a black officer.
"Man, come on, brother, you
know, tell them that I..."
They go to jail just like they
would with the white officer,
but somehow they feel compassion
because they felt they
can identify with me.
And a lotta times they would listen to me
articulate to them, "Brother,
it ain't what you think it is.
"They didn't pull you
over 'cause you black.
"You think they care about
the color of your skin?
"You got pulled over
'cause you had a suspended
"driver's license or a
suspended registration.
"Stop jumping to that conclusion
"because you are creating a scenario
"of frustration and conflict
that doesn't need to be had.
"A officer just comes over
to you doing a routine,
"what we'd call a routine
traffic stop, and now you hype."
"Oh, you pulled me over 'cause I'm black."
This is what that means to
an officer when you say that,
is that I'm a racist, right?
And I don't have any integrity at all,
and I didn't waste it all these years,
develop and building
what I've established,
and you're telling me that
I'm willing to throw that away
and I have no integrity, I
don't care about my family,
I don't care about my pension or nothing,
because I wanna racially profile you
as if I'm that shallow-minded.
Well, you'd better believe
you're probably about to get a ticket.
And I think people don't understand
that they start the
conversation off very wrong
when they do that.
A lotta officers let it go,
but some officers that
you catch on camera,
sometimes they don't take it lightly.
- Did you also get the
reverse of that though,
where you'd go into these communities
and then they'd see you and be like,
"Well, this guy's the sellout,
why would we talk to him?"
- Yeah, sometimes it would happen.
More often than not,
they felt that they
could identify with me.
One reason why I think God
kinda put an anointing on me
that allowed me to reach people uniquely,
black, white, or whatever,
the fact that I didn't curse
on the job helped me
reach people uniquely,
'cause when the stuff is hitting the fan,
the only person that sounds
as if he has integrity,
not just integrity, but
sounds like he's calm
just because I'm not yelling curse words,
people attract to me.
I felt like God gave me a
gift to communicate as well,
so I was able to communicate with people,
and talk people outta
suicide and all kinda stuff.
- What'd you make of just sorta
how the media treats all of the shootings,
and that certain shootings,
if it's a white cop and a black suspect,
then we treat it a certain way,
if it's a black cop and a white one,
we treat it differently.
A lotta times the same people
who are outraged over it one way,
then the next day it
happens the other way,
then they ignore the story,
the way everyone's playing
this really twisted game
with policing right now.
- There's money in black
people's emotions, right?
We're probably the most emotional people,
or group of people if you
want a group, in the country.
Twice as many white people
have been shot this year
unarmed than black people in America.
Almost every year the case
is that more white people
get shot unarmed than black people,
and white people are not gonna be doing
what black people are doing, right?
I don't see white people protesting.
I remember in New Mexico, they
had a shooting in New Mexico,
the officer shot the guy in the back,
he was mentally ill, shot him in the back.
I thought it was ridiculous
for him to shoot the guy
with the rifle in the back from
such a distance, killed him.
It was a bad shooting.
I think the officer got fired,
they all got in trouble.
White people aren't out here protesting.
Black people for some reason,
I don't know if it's the legacy of slavery
that got us in the mentality
of feeling like we have to defend
and be mob-like on certain occasions,
but we are going to protest,
right, wrong, or indifferent.
The man can pull a gun
and shoot an officer
and he gets shot back, we will protest.
I've seen it with my own eyes.
The media understands that,
so they don't care nothing about nobody.
It's about if it bleeds, it leads, right?
They know the black people
are gonna act the fool,
so they're gonna cover it,
they're gonna showcase it,
they're gonna act like
there's this outrageous rate
of white officers killing black people,
which is not even true at all.
White officers, or you say white officers,
officers in general, you
know places in Philly,
it's 50/50, black and white,
but officers kill more white people,
twice as many white
people, as black people
in shootings where people are armed.
They kill more people
unarmed white than black.
And here's the thing that
people always bring up.
Well, there's more white people.
Police officers don't deal
with every single person
in the population.
They deal with the criminal
element of the population.
If you look at African
Americans in America,
we make up 12%, 13% of the population,
yet we commit over half of
the murders in this country,
over half of the violent
crimes in this country.
So the bulk of criminal activity
is coming from a small...
Let me clarify that.
13% of the population is
a way overblown number.
It's more like 6% or 7% of the population
because when you take out older
people, young people, women,
it's mostly young men between
the age of, I don't know,
16 and 35 are doing the
bulk of these crimes.
So let's 6% is committing
over half of the murders
and violent crimes in this country.
When you look at it like that,
police have an overwhelmingly
higher presence
in the black community dealing
with the criminal element,
yet they shoot more white people
than they shoot black people.
If you look at the
proportionality of numbers,
it's actually a less
likely chance per capita
that you'll get shot as a black man
as opposed to white people in America.
And that to me rules out the idea
of the racist policing in America.
- Do you think it's possible
that we're gonna also,
and maybe we're there already,
gonna have a crisis in
policing where good people,
forget their skin color,
which I would prefer to do all the time,
but good people who are policeman
won't want to work in black communities
because they know it will ultimately
be an unwinnable situation.
You'll either have them
turning on the black officer,
like you, and you're the
sellout and all that,
and the white ones will just be like,
"Well, forget this,
there's no win in this.
"I could be a great officer for 30 years,
"but one weird thing happens
"that gets twisted one way or another
"or edited or whatever,
and my career is over."
So then you're gonna get, I
don't even know how you call it,
like a lower class of qualified
people that are gonna work
in the communities that need it the most.
- Right, and then people are not gonna,
they're not gonna be
proactive in policing.
We've already seen that happen.
I mean, if people are now thinking
that we're gonna get to that point,
you're way behind.
- It's where we're at.
- We're there, we were
there from Ferguson.
People don't realize it.
The crime rate in these
areas are skyrocketing.
Officers, proactive
policing is going down.
Listen, police are responsive, right?
They respond to crimes, right?
If me and you got into an altercation
and I pulled a gun and I shot you,
they're not there before I shoot you,
they come after the fact.
But the greatness of policing,
if it's done properly,
is proactive policing.
Therefore, they've already
had contact with me,
understood that I'm a danger,
I've probably gotten arrested
for crimes I've done before,
before I shoot you.
That is the way you police.
But the reason, I mean,
what they're doing today
is they're killing the spirit
of officers being proactive,
because you go and you see
a guy doing a hand-to-hand,
people without the experience
in law enforcement will say,
"Oh, it's just a hand-to-hand."
No, the hand-to-hand has
killed so many people
in the community with drugs and crime
and all this other stuff, we see that.
We arrest the man hand-to-hand,
we get into a scuffle with him,
now police brutality, we get fired.
An officer sees hand-to-hand and say,
"I'm not gonna care more
than the community does."
Because it takes a lot,
man, for you to risk life,
life and death every day,
putting your family through that,
and at the end of the day,
you wanna get your pension.
And you lose your pension over
something you did correctly,
over something that you
were justified in doing,
but because the community became
outraged, you lose it all.
We saw it in Baltimore.
All you gotta do is look at the stats.
Baltimore, huge reduction,
huge reduction in applicants.
California, huge reduction in applicants.
And we've seen this on the
Tucson Police Department,
and they won't tell the public
because the chief is a crap,
but we had to dumb down the scores
because we didn't have
enough qualified people
to join the police department.
When I was there, you had
to make a 75 or above,
and this is a test that
you can't study for.
You gotta come out the gate
having a basic understanding.
Now I think they put it down to like 40%.
Officers on the department are like...
And I'm gonna tell you this,
any department you can look at the stats,
Tucson is a big example,
when they did this a while ago,
you see officers getting
fired all the time,
officers doing bad stuff, they're
skipping over backgrounds.
It is making policing in
America more dangerous
by the rhetoric that they're
spewing, which is false.
These are lies that they're telling you.
Michael Brown, they still talk about
hands up, don't shoot, lie.
Eric Garner, I will fight to the death
about the justification of use
of force against Eric Garner.
Tamir Rice, all of these
shooting and all of these things,
if you're a police officer,
you understand that these
are justified uses of force.
People conflate the two.
Justified killings is what they call it,
or killing somebody,
versus the justification of use of force.
There's a big difference.
They weren't trying to kill Eric Garner.
The dude was fat,
overweight, heart condition.
You use any force against him,
he's gonna go into cardiac arrest.
He's like a ticking time bomb.
They weren't trying to kill Tamir Rice,
the young kid that they
had to pull the gun on him.
He got put in a bad position,
he used forced against him.
Unfortunately, that one
shot caused his death.
So people begin to conflate the two,
we can never address the real issue
because we're not talking
about real problems.
- Right, and the interesting thing is,
of course you're not
defending the incidences
when there genuinely are bad guys,
but what people always forget about
is that constant threat
that you guys are under,
you just don't know what's
gonna happen on a knife's edge,
whether that guy has a
gun or the other thing.
So sometimes you have to be what would
I guess appear to be visually more careful
than maybe the average
person would want you to be.
- Well, this is what they
teach you in the academy,
and I know this is not popular,
people will probably be
mad at me for saying this,
we get taught in the academy,
and when they said this to me,
I thought it was the most
extreme thing in the world,
and I'm like, "Oh, they're going too far."
What they teach you in
the academy is that you,
and not everywhere, in my academy,
you have to be prepared to kill
every single person you interact with.
You have to be prepared emotionally
to kill every person
that you interact with,
because if you're not, you're gonna die.
You're gonna get killed,
and you're gonna get all
your other buddies killed.
So you have to be able to have the mindset
that at any moment this
person can turn on me,
whether or not they're a kid,
whether or not they're a elderly woman,
because we've seen the
spectrum of officers
getting killed by all kinds of people.
You have to be prepared for that,
and people don't
understand our perspective.
This is not a video game.
You don't get to hit the reset button.
When you die, you die for
real and you're gone forever.
And the unique part of what we see
is that we see people die every day.
We see the last breath.
We see a person pleading for their life.
And in the officer's mind, it's like,
"I don't wanna look like that when I die.
"I don't want my family
to see me like this guy.
"I don't wanna be in my last breath
"not being able to talk
to my son on the phone.
"You need to do the
right thing or I'm gonna,
"if it's me or you, I'm gonna win."
People pose threats all the time, right?
Just think about how many,
I pulled my gun when I was a officer,
I don't know, four or five times a week.
People have guns,
I didn't escape death I
don't know how many times.
People don't see that side.
Every officer has their own
perspective about life, right?
We may go to the same call,
you may have been shot before,
I've never been shot so
I'm grinning behind there,
I'm driving in there, no caution.
That other officer may have
a reflection in the mind of,
"Man, last time I got
shot 'cause I did this.
"Last time I got shot, I seen
the guy pull it from here,
"but I didn't react fast enough."
They get to the call, here
he go, pulling, now he shot.
You get what I'm saying?
- Mm-hmm.
- The moral of the story is
that we do go through a lot,
and if people understood,
they would be able
to see these shootings
in a much clearer light.
- All right, so let's shift
this a little bit to politics,
which will get us to Blexit.
So most of the cities, and
you mentioned Ferguson,
you mentioned Baltimore,
the cities where there are
the most shootings, Chicago,
we can go through the
list of these cities,
people don't seem to want to accept this,
or at least mainstream media
doesn't wanna accept this,
that these are Democrat-run cities.
But I thought Democrats liked black people
more than you mean Republicans.
What's the problem here?
Something's not adding up.
- 'Cause it's not true.
- I can't believe it.
- It's like if the standard
is two plus two is four,
and you see an equation that
said two plus two is three,
it's something wrong there.
(laughing)
It's politically expedient
for them to evade the issue.
And you say, what,
the virtue of having a D behind your name?
No, it's not, it's the policies.
Think about this, who's anti-police?
Democrats, and what are they doing?
They're causing police not to act.
They're causing police to
be the enemy of the people.
People aren't snitching,
they're not cooperating with police,
now crimes aren't being solved.
Those things have issues.
They want you to be on food stamps.
They don't want you to be independent.
They don't want you to go
out and get on your own.
They don't want jobs to
come to your community.
They don't want that.
They need you to need them
so they can win votes.
- When you say they,
are you talking about the--
- Democrat elite.
- You're talking about
the political class.
- Political class.
- 'Cause I believe even for,
I mean, you know enough
about my political evolution,
for as frustrated as I am
with the lefties these days,
most of them I think are just misguided.
I don't think they're bad people.
I don't think they're really trying
to screw over black people
or something like that.
The elite do it and their
easy bumper sticker answer
is give more money to
this community for this.
It sounds good.
Get the police out, police are killing.
It all sounds kinda right,
but I don't think the average
person actually believes that,
but it's breaking through
that layer of craziness.
- It's not the people.
You could even look at this
in a spiritual sense of a pastor, right?
The people, the lay members,
are receiving information
from the pastor in hopes that
he's acting in good faith
to project the gospel, right?
He said he got a degree, you believe him,
you're learning from him.
People in the Democratic Party,
the people, the lay members,
they are listening to these politicians,
hoping that they're telling you
the truth about immigration.
- He said Republicans are all
racists, so it must be right.
(laughing)
- So you're hoping that
they're telling you the truth,
but they're lying to you, and
it's the people at the top.
It's most of these Democratic people
that are running for Congress,
not even every Democratic
person in the House,
there's some people that are
like, they're more reasonable.
But the party line idea,
the party line politics,
is what's destroying people,
and it's almost like this.
Look, I equate slavery and
then the freedom of slaves
to the Democratic Party today,
and this is how I compared it to.
When slaves were on a plantation,
they knew it was wrong,
whatever the case may be, the
slaves didn't wanna be there.
But when they got free, what
did the slave master tell them?
"Oh, wait, wait, wait,
how are you gonna survive
"out there on your own?
"Who's gonna take care of you?
"You gotta have food, we can feed you,
"we'll take care of you,
make sure your safe.
"Stay here in slavery."
And a lotta slaves did,
they felt comfortable.
They didn't wanna go out on their own
and risk the big bad world,
because entrepreneurs, be free.
The Democratic Party's almost
the same similar concept
because black folks need to be free.
We need to understand that
we can be entrepreneurs,
we can be flight attendants,
we can do it all.
They don't want you to go into
this big bad world and fail.
Failure is only a pathway to success.
If you never fail, you
will never be successful.
But they don't want you
to get off the plantation.
They want you to stay
so they can coddle you,
and then, what, our
communities become desolate,
no real spirit of the community,
and then leave.
- And dependent on them,
them being the government.
You know, it's interesting,
'cause everything you just said
is basically what Kanye said
about the mentality of slavery,
and then what happened?
Well, mainstream media said
he should be in a mental
institution, remember that?
- They have to, these
people are working together.
I don't know if it's
people buying the same,
paying money or what,
they're working together
to push an agenda.
I mean, all these things that are run
by some of these Democratic
elites, they have to.
You can't ruin their I
guess reign over the people.
There's a difference between,
and I'm not saying
every Republican, right?
I'm more a Trump Republican, right?
I don't like some of the
people in the Republican Party
and I think they haven't done much
for the black community anyway.
Their outreach has been poor to me.
I never seen none of them.
I never even knew they existed
until I decided to look on the other side.
But when you look at it for what it is,
the people in the Democratic
Party, their focus is on power.
More so in the conservative movement
or in the Republican Party,
their focus is the people more so often.
We want you to be free,
less government, whatever.
The Democrats want power
by any means necessary.
They will support border wall,
they will support strong
immigration reform,
then when it's not advantageous for votes,
they will switch it in
the same conversation
they're having with you and
act like it never happened.
As a person who's new to politics,
just seeing Chuck Schumer
and all of them once just advocate.
Barack Obama deported the most people
in United States history
outta any president.
And then they turn and they cry on TV,
and they make up this stuff.
They tell you if you
come to a port of entry,
you're gonna be separated from
your family, which is a lie.
If you come to a port of
entry and you seek asylum,
you go through a process
for them to verify
your asylum-seeking request.
If you get busted over here
or you're trying to
sneak through the border,
that's when you get separated
'cause now you're going
through a criminal proceeding.
They know that, but
they will never tell you
because they need the
votes, they need power.
Why haven't any of these candidates
been pandering as much to black folks?
Think about this, they're
speaking in Spanish.
(Dave laughing)
They on there talking about
they gonna get every
illegal free healthcare.
They wanna get housing.
Why are they not saying,
"We're gonna fix Chicago--"
- I think I know where
you're going with this.
- "We're gonna fix the school system,"
because we are being replaced.
We're 13% of the population.
How much do our vote really count?
Now the Hispanic community
or even the illegals
that are coming in by the millions,
I don't know, in about 10 years,
they're gonna never need
another black person again
to vote because our vote won't count.
- But not only that,
but if you get 90 some odd
percent of a group's vote,
then you don't have to give them anything.
If you know you're...
And that is the brilliance
of Trump saying,
"Well, what do you have to lose?"
'Cause all right, we're giving this group
I think it's 94% or something
like the year before.
- In some areas, it's 100%.
It's mostly on the 90 percentile.
- Yeah, it's like well, then,
don't worry about those guys,
we got 'em taken care of already.
(snaps fingers)
We got that box checked.
- And what I preach often
is it's not about the
Republican or Democratic Party.
It's about leaving people who
ain't doing nothing for you.
And in many of these
cases in the inner city,
you've been voting for them 40 years.
You're still complaining,
you still ain't got nothing,
you're still blaming people.
Don't blame the Republican white man
because the Republicans
ain't even in your community.
They ain't talking to you,
they're not doing nothing for you.
Blame the people who are
there in your community
perpetuating these things.
Stop voting for them.
I'm not telling you run to the...
Do your research.
But one thing you do know,
you may not know what the Republicans are
because you never gave them a chance.
What you do know is the
Democrats haven't done nothing.
And you're talking about a person
who my whole family's Democrat.
I grew up feeling like I was a Democrat.
And dude, when the truth bomb hits you,
it's like a ton of bricks.
- It's a little weird, right?
- It is.
So we obviously, we swim in
some of the same pools here,
so the first time we
met was about a year ago
at a Turning Point, you
spoke right before me.
And it was one of the few
times that I was like, oh, man,
because you have incredible energy
and the music you went up to
and you were just like
knocking it out of the park,
and then obviously I'm
a little more low key,
so I was like, god, I don't
know if I can follow that.
But it all worked out.
But we go to a lot of the
same events and things.
And I find these people that
are usually Trump supporters,
but certainly people on
the right, they don't care.
People can't, when I talk about it,
they almost can't accept it.
They don't care about race.
They don't care about sexuality.
They don't care about gender.
They don't care about any of these issues.
They're really just saying,
"Let me live," that's it.
But it is hard realizing
that these people aren't bad.
I even, still now years later,
I go to some functions or
something, and I'll be like,
"I can't believe these
aren't the bad guys."
But they're not.
- This is how I was raised.
Republicans are racist white
people, that's how it was.
And now I'm like, Republicans
are like the nicest people
that you know, and I'm not
just saying Republicans,
I'm saying people that are more
on the conservative spectrum.
There's obviously Libertarian in it,
and it's flexible on that
part, already far right.
But I feel like that people
that are around the
conservative side and viewpoint
are the most generous people I've met,
are the most realistic people.
They say, "Well, let's
go by the Constitution.
"Let's go by what's fair."
The other side seems to be more emotional.
It's not about what's
fair, it's what I feel.
If one person have a alt,
let's just say transgender for example,
if a transgender person, one person,
I'm not saying that we
shouldn't acknowledge
a person's feelings 'cause God's mission
is to love everybody, but one person says,
"You know what, I need bathroom,"
they are willing to say,
"Everybody's rights have
to be restructured."
Everybody's feelings are
thrown outta the loop
because one person has a request
that could infringe on everybody else,
but we don't care because
that person deserves
to have this thing.
- And not only that,
we're gonna cut federal funding
from states that don't
behave a certain way
relative to whatever the
flavor of the day is.
- We're gonna punish
you for, I don't know,
.000 some percent of the population.
I don't feel like that's right.
Conservatives will say, "Well, let's see,
"if the person feel like they
want a separate bathroom,
"how can we remedy this
and everybody be happy?
"Maybe they can identify a certain way
"and then use something that
they look like, or maybe not."
- Well, that's the irony.
Trans people have been
using bathrooms for decades.
- I never in my life,
(laughing)
and I guarantee you trans people
have come into the restroom.
- Of course.
(laughing)
- Because they look like...
I've seen trans people,
men that turn into girls.
They got beards and everything.
I'm not checking your crotch area, man.
You come in here, you look like a dude.
Some dudes that are biological dudes,
they look great in our clothes,
they may wear long hair or whatever.
But who cares, dude?
- Nobody cares.
- Just don't be in my stall.
Don't be looking at my stuff
and we ain't got no problem.
And I don't think people do that.
I guarantee you that trans women,
I think that's men to women,
they've been going into the
women's restroom forever
and some of them have a
conscious awareness to say,
"I actually present, I look like a woman
"and people don't even know."
They go right in the restroom
and you feel comfortable.
What would be weird to me
is if you look like a woman,
you got breasts, everything,
and you go in the men's restroom,
I think that would be more awkward and odd
than if you went in the one
that you actually match
the description of.
- And they just wanna flip everything.
A couple of months ago, I was in Sonoma,
I was at a winery, and they
didn't have male and female,
they only had an all gender restroom.
So even where you wash your
hands is the same area.
And this woman came out of the stall,
and it was just obvious to me
that she had just gone number two.
And we're like looking at each other,
and it was like something felt wrong.
You know what I mean?
(laughing)
It was just like why do we have to be
standing here together right now.
Okay, so let's get this to Blexit,
'cause if we go down that path--
- Yeah, it'll be a whole show.
- It'll be a whole other thing.
So I mentioned to you
right before we started,
when I had Candace Owens on originally,
this is now like two plus years ago
when she was just a YouTuber
with 100,000 subscribers.
Her name was Red Pill Black.
I didn't even know her name was Candace
when we first booked her.
I said to my guys, "We
gotta find out her name.
"I don't even know what her name is."
Anyway, I had her in for an hour
and I just knew in that hour
that this girl was going to blow up,
and I'm proud to say that she sat in here
and had a part of that.
We were just at her wedding
a couple of weeks ago.
You co-founded the
Blexit movement with her.
The idea of that, the basic idea being
that black people don't
have to be Democrats.
- True.
- And Candace always says
that it's the least...
She always says, "People
think I'm so controversial,
"but it's the least controversial
thing that you can say
"because you shouldn't
have to vote for a party
"just 'cause of your skin
color, and yet here we are."
- Right, party line is ridiculous.
You vote based on the
values of your community
and what you wanna see changed.
The premise of Blexit,
and I think that people
get too caught up in
the name, Blexit, right?
I know that the name, it means a lot,
obviously, because the
movement is named after...
But the thing is freedom.
When I see Blexit, I see freedom.
When some people see Blexit,
they see, "Oh, you hate the Democrats."
It has really not much to do
with the Democratic Party,
it's more of being free,
having a free mind.
There's something else out there.
For the longest, we feel
like it's only one thing
that we could utilize or access.
We just want people to know,
let me show you the history
of what we've been doing all this time
and it's gotten us nowhere.
Here is another perspective.
Think about this for a minute.
I believe most black
people are conservative.
Most black people are
conservative, believe it or not.
Even black criminals are conservative.
All you gotta do is think
about it for a few seconds.
If you were to sell drugs,
say the drug dealers,
I have some in my family,
cannot confirm or deny it,
they still doing it.
(Dave laughing)
But you have drug dealers selling weed,
name a drug dealer that want
government intervention.
Name a drug dealer that wanna pay taxes
on their drugs.
- Most drug dealers are Libertarian.
- Name a drug dealer that's like,
"Hey, man, you wasn't hustling all week
"and putting your life on the line,
"maybe you were sick that day.
"Let me give all my drug money
and split it with you 'cause it's fair."
(laughing)
It's never gonna happen.
Name a drug dealer that don't have a gun,
that don't want their
right to bear arms, per se,
to protect themselves.
And I know it's a weird analogy,
but I think that it resonates
because in the community
those things are not just
the criminal element of it,
but the conservative ideas.
- Right, so give me a wider example
than just the black people
as the criminal there.
(laughing)
Let's widen that a little bit, right?
Do you mean on social issues also?
- Think about this, the
most religious people
I think per capita is black folks.
We go to church every Sunday.
We shout in charismatic churches.
We'll throw a Scripture
at you in a minute.
We are the most conservative
culturally, in my opinion,
at least growing up we were that way.
My dad didn't let you make excuses.
What do you mean, you want somebody
to hand something to you?
You better work for what you got.
My dad started at 18 years
old at the fire department,
and now he's the chief.
My dad didn't put up with that.
It was unacceptable.
You don't wanna be a coward.
You're a strong man.
These are the things that
grandfathers used to say, too.
And a lotta people in the black community
still have remnants of that.
Grandma is strong.
Grandma used to say,
"It's either hell or jail,
"if you wanna act like that and
sell drugs and be that way."
Black people adhere to that idea,
the structure of self-entrepreneurship,
being an individual.
Think about music, think about culture.
Black people dominate culture
because we've created a unique
idea on our own in many ways.
That is more of the conservative ideal.
We don't wanna be followers.
We don't want people
telling us what to do.
We've always pushed the
envelope as a community.
That's to me more of a conservative idea.
Look at the entrepreneurs
going from drug dealing
to being billionaires,
Jay-Z and all these other
people who took advantage
of saying you can turn your life around
and you can be an entrepreneur
and you can make it as
high as you want to.
Oprah Winfrey, you can keep naming 'em.
I'll tell you one that people
really don't talk about
is Madame C.J. Walker,
who's the first female millionaire
outta any race in the early 1900s.
Millionaire, they got pictures of her
with white people driving her
around in the early 1900s.
So we have always understood
the entrepreneur spirit,
and for some reason, we
believe that the Democrats
are that side instead of the Republicans,
and we've been confused, in my opinion.
So back to Blexit, if we only understood,
I think we would change.
We've seen people change a lot.
- Do you feel it breaking?
- I do.
- 'Cause the other thing I said to you
right before we started
was the day that all the Democrats
started talking about reparations,
I called Candace and I said,
"This is 'cause of you."
She caused such a freaking
split where it needed to happen,
that suddenly the Democrats were like,
"All right, guys, we're
starting to lose you.
"How 'bout some cash?
"Stay with us, here's cold hard cash."
And what's the number?
That's the other thing.
It's like there's never gonna be a number
that's enough, right?
- Yeah, it's because
reparation in and of itself
is the stupidest idea ever,
because how you gonna pay it?
We pay taxes still.
What, they gonna not let us pay taxes?
I'm gonna pay for my own reparations
if I were to get it.
Think about this, how much
money are they gonna give you?
- Well, they'll tell you
that they're gonna take
it from billionaires.
- Yeah, and give you how much though?
$1,000 ain't gonna do nothing.
People will blow that in a weekend.
$10,000 is nothing, 20, 30,000,
generational change,
$100,000 may not be enough.
And then if you don't know anything,
if you're not educated
and don't know anything
about finances, that
$100,000 is gonna last you,
what, I don't know, four months?
I've had a friend, I
think he got $2 million
from a settlement, blew it all,
have nothing to show for it.
- Damn, that's money.
- Just giving somebody money
is not gonna help them at all.
But that's another story.
- But also it never would be enough,
not just the literal amount,
but okay, let's say you gave
every black person $50,000,
just make up a number.
Well, now you're two
generations past that, right?
And if the left just keeps
going off the deep end,
their grandchildren will go,
"Wait, you sold us out for 50 grand?
"That was nothing."
- True.
- It's almost the reverse
of the way human
psychology actually works.
- Right, and then you
know, everybody knows,
when you give a person something,
when you just hand somebody something,
they don't appreciate it as much.
What kind of growth potential...
Give me a better education.
I don't need reparations and money.
Fix these doggone schools
with the money we've already given you.
I mean, it seems like common sense to me.
- Do you think going into 2020,
and you're obviously a Trump guy,
do you think there's gonna be
just a seriously massive
shift in the black vote?
- I think it's gonna be a
shift in the black vote.
I'm not sure how much
the turnout is gonna be,
if that makes sense.
I think a lot of people are
leaving the Democratic Party.
I think that's the biggest threat to them,
is that people may not be
on Trump train yet, right?
Trump is like on a SWAT
team where you have the ram.
The first person bang through the doors,
shards going everywhere, it's chaos,
you're throwing flash bangs in there,
everything is confusing,
and then the people that
come in are smooth after him.
Trump is causing a lot of the ruckus.
I believe that you may see
more of it after Trump.
The residual effect of what he has done,
you'll have more people
actually going to vote
because it is still a scary
moment for black folks
to even say they support Trump.
People like me, what
are you gonna do to me?
I wear Trump stuff all the
time, what are they gonna do?
They're not gonna fight me,
that's not gonna work out well for 'em.
So they don't say stuff
to people like myself,
but if you live in a family or whatever,
it's very difficult.
But what I will say is that when I first
started doing things, about
the same time Candace did,
me and her met when
she was Red Pill Black.
It was like 90/10 maybe black
folks racially on my page,
maybe probably even less than that.
Now it's like 60/40.
There are so many black
people in my inbox,
just flooding my inbox,
saying, "Dude, you woke me up.
"I can't say nothing, my
mama and them would kill me."
Last year, a young black
leader said something,
I had to call a kid's parent on the phone
'cause she didn't want her son to go
'cause it was a conservative thing.
I said, "Ma'am, give that
boy a chance, let him go."
And she ended up letting
him go to the event.
But when he got home, they criticized him.
I helped him get prepared to
have a speech with this dad.
His dad wanted to have
a sit-down with him,
like you know, how to be a man.
His dad wanted him to sit
down and talk about Trump.
It was just the weirdest thing ever,
but I helped him prepare for
it, but it's very difficult.
But if you look at any of the polls,
I'm not a real poll guy 'cause
they say Hillary winning,
and I knew she was gonna
lose, and she lost.
But you can have somewhat of an indication
of what people are thinking,
on the side of saying they're about 20%,
I don't know, Fox did one around 20%,
NAACP did one that people
never talk about around 20%,
and I think Rasmussen around 30%.
- What about that moment
during the State of the Union
when Trump talked about
all-time low black unemployment
and they showed the picture--
- The Black Caucus.
- Of the Congressional Black
Caucus and nobody applauded.
- I don't know how other people felt,
but to me, it really almost
made tears come outta my eyes.
- Yeah, it was disgusting.
- It's like, why do we
hate each other so much?
Why do they hate the progression
of black people so much?
You hate your own people so
much, that's how I see it.
- Well, they wouldn't
need a Caucus much longer.
You know, Chris Rock, cops
need a certain amount of crime,
which I know is probably
a little touchy for you,
but every group--
- But it's true.
- Every group needs a little
something to stay in business,
and they know that they're
gonna go out of business
if actually we stop worrying
about what race people are.
- Right, NAACP, all these
other organizations,
Al Sharpton, all of them
are gonna be unemployed.
- Yeah, what a pleasure that would be.
They're gonna be probably
eating outta the trashcan.
But they need to do these
things, but it hurts people.
It hurts them, and it helps
people that's on my side,
because all I can do is
point to them and say,
"If anything, whether you
disagree, like 'em or not,
"when you say that black people
"are having the expression
of historic low unemployment,
"at least do this."
(Dave laughing)
At least be like...
- Right, can we get a
snap maybe, something?
- You sitting there on your hands when...
Listen, they are not a
representation of our ancestors.
Martin Luther King would be
rolling in his grave so fast,
he'd be catching on fire,
he'd be rolling so hard.
These people are evilness
to our community.
They are dead.
It's almost like in the
Bible, the Pharisees
and all the people who were
the leaders and rulers,
and they were just doing
all this phony stuff
and they didn't care
about the people anymore,
and it was all about them
and all their religious,
all this stuff that don't mean anything.
This is exactly what the black folks
in these high positions are doing.
How dare you help the black
community when we didn't do it?
You know what I'm saying?
How dare you show us up?
It's not about you,
it's about the young people
that need opportunity.
So that was a sickening moment
for me, man, but I'm hoping,
and it's like the house of
cards somebody showed me.
Everybody have their moment
when their card falling
and it all go down.
My moment was when Barack
Obama was trashing the police,
the card fell.
The people's moment is watching
that Congressional Black Caucus
sit on their hands and be like...
Y'all really don't care.
This is a game to y'all.
Card fell, people are switching.
- All right, then as a Trump guy,
I got one more for you to
sorta wrap this all together.
So for all the people that hear you,
that hear so much, your
message is so consistent
with so many things that I talk about,
about identity politics,
frustrated with the Democrats,
what's going on with the
Progressives, all of that,
but there's still a
certain amount of people,
and I think it's a large
amount of people actually,
they see all of it and they go
there's still an aversion to Trump,
to whatever it is that Trump is.
Is there anything you think
Trump could do to change that?
- I mean, he's facing a
double-edged sword, right?
If he's not controversial,
if he's not standing up for himself,
they're not gonna cover him properly
and everybody gonna think he's a monster.
He has to go on Twitter
and be controversial,
he has to draw attention to
himself to a certain degree,
which some people don't like.
But people have to understand
how significant Trump is
in this entire big picture, right?
I don't like everything he does.
I love Trump, man, I'm a Trumpster,
I don't like everything he does.
Sometimes I wish he
wouldn't get into fights
with certain people.
Some people say it's necessary.
Sometimes I'm like, come on, man.
Sometimes when he do some
speeches of whatever,
I wish it was more crisp.
I wish he was more
charismatic in certain cases.
But I see the bigger picture.
I'm looking at the Supreme Court justices.
I'm looking at policies.
I'm looking at him setting a standard
for supporting law
enforcement in this country.
I'm seeing him set
standards that I'm saying,
okay, I'm okay with you not being perfect,
but you are opening up so many
more opportunities and doors
that the next person that come in
may be a little more polished,
but you have saved America in the process.
I don't expect people
to feel like this man,
and nobody does this anyway,
they just wanna an excuse
to be mad at Trump,
the man is not a pastor,
he's not my spiritual leader,
so I'm not looking to him for morality.
Get the doggone job done.
Obama had it all, right?
Shooting basketball, he was charismatic,
he could say and sound
sweet talking people.
- [Dave] Terrible baller, though.
- Yeah, he probably sucked at balling
and probably golf, too.
(Dave laughing)
But he was this cool
dude that could talk good
and he sound polished and he was hip,
and the rappers come to the White House.
But what did you do based
on what we elected you?
Nothing, you almost ruined
our country, in my opinion,
almost set us up for complete failure.
I don't care what you do
in your personal life.
What does the job description say?
Get that done first and then we worry
about everything else second.
I understand people are
gonna be adverse to it,
and that's why I said
earlier when we were talking
that Trump is the battering ram
that's setting up this crescendo effect,
that once he's gone and another person
with the mannerisms and the
behaviors of America first
that can articulate it in
more of a compassionate way,
or more of a personable way, that person,
all of the seeds that Trump planted,
the person is gonna water
'em and they're gonna sprout.
So I understand this is
kind of the way he has to be
to just get the job done.
- It's been a pleasure, man.
I'm so glad we finally did this,
and I have a feeling we will
be out on the road together
at some point.
- We will be.
So thanks for coming in.
- Thanks for having me.
- And for more on Brandon,
you can follow him @TheOfficerTatum.
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