Calls media.

I actually remember this era of my life pretty vividly because it felt like a betrayal.

Any follower of this pod or my career over the years know that you know I came from church, came from the hood.

But I came from church.

And I've talked about my soare into just white evangelicalism.

And it was from a position of just like I don't come from the Bible Belt, I did not know that we were not speaking the same language.

I thought when you said affect culture, you meant the same way I did, like Martin Luther King and the beloved community and serving the poor and standing with the marginalized.

I said this being very aware that pastors in America were chaplains on slave ships.

I knew that they would oftentimes at the end of church service go had a Sunday picnic and would lynch my ancestors.

So you telling me these people are Christian, As far as I concerned, that don't mean nothing.

There was certain things that just I knew was a conversation stopper, like I don't there's not a gospel I want to hear about out of the mouth of a person who would lynch my ancestors.

I just there's not many words you can say to me that said I thought we was in a place where our relationships, our cultural communications, the sense of trust that I might have built over, you know, years of being a trusted voice, would mean that the day that Mike Brown was murdered, but I can even go before that, the day Oscar Grant was murdered, I thought maybe the response of the American sort of white evangelical church as a whole was a fractal of the fact that, you know, maybe they just don't know, Maybe they don't know enough people like me.

Maybe I can be a cultural translator to these people.

Maybe I can be an example of somebody who knows the Bible, you can articulate well positions of the Christian faith, who knows history, clearly I know what I'm talking about, who understands politics but comes from a different perspective.

Maybe you just need a different perspective, only to find out that no, you don't want a different perspective.

You think exactly what you want to think.

And for me, that era was my first follower purge.

That's when the gig stopped coming and I started realizing that, like you know, I hate to use this term, but I'm like, oh, this space ain't safe for me.

And we were sitting down and having great meals together.

I thought you, I thought I was making in roads.

Turns out, although we might be using the same words, we not speaking the same language.

And I remember thinking, every time a young black black man or black woman was murdered in the streets by a racist cop or an unfair system, that on Sunday morning, your church and my church would be saying very different things.

And I did not realize this would happen again to me.

And the feeling I felt then was the feeling I feel now.

The day that the Governor of Utah actually fixed his mouth to say he was praying with all his heart that this shooter would not be one of them, that the shooter would have come from another state or another country.

Boy, I don't know if he knows how prophetic that statement was.

Tap in with.

I think once again, it's I'm finding myself faced with the reality that, like the Black Church, remains the moral compass of the country.

Now.

I say that as a pretty hyperbolic statement, because the Black Church, my lord, y'all.

Gotta stop being so homophobic man nigga.

Like y'all gotta stop, like y'all really gotta chill with all that you don't say it.

So please, I am not gonna leave my.

Queer brothers and sisters, Hagen because my nigga, I feel you.

So I'm not saying this is some sort of free past for you know, the black and the urban church.

Nigga, we got our problems.

But I am saying this when things like the death of a black or brown person, bodies being snatched, another innocent life being taken in Gaza, I know, and now adding the death of Charlie Kirk.

I know your church and my mama's church are saying very different things because in the African American church on Sunday mornings, you heard a quote like this like Pastor Howard John Wesley out in a Alfred Street Baptist Church.

Now, again, this ain't a code sign and everything they do, but I need you to listen to this.

There is nowhere in a Bible where we are taught to honor evil.

And how you die does not redeem how you lived.

You do not become a hero in death when you are a weapon of the enemy in your life.

Why are we saying that.

Because we watch a person who white church, evangelical church venerated speak in the ways for which anybody that listened to this politics podcast knows exactly the way that that man spoke.

He is speaking about that nuance that I tried to talk about earlier this week, this complication of saying, listen, I understand that people are complicated, but just because you proclaim to believe a particular position, but the fruit of your actions has subjugated an entire group of people, specifically my own people, purposefully, it is very difficult for me to just forget all those things again.

Like I said earlier this week, James Dobson, a leader of Focused on the Family, Yeah, he blamed Sandy hook on the fact that we legalize the gay marriage.

You can miss me with that.

But also I think these statements that he brought up, it brings up the profundity of the statement that the governor of Utah said, which is, I was praying it wasn't us.

What a metaphor for America.

You was praying it wasn't you.

Wasn't it You ain't ever the problem?

Are you?

It's never us?

Right?

Oh, you'd rather burn history books.

You'd rather end the sixteen nineteen project.

You'd rather end all DEI programs than to admit that maybe the problem is you, to which I know some detractors would look at me and say, well, what about crimes in Chicago?

What about black on black crime?

Well, did anybody call it an assassination of Charlie Kirk White on white crime?

No, because it sounds ridiculous, just as ridiculous as it is to say about black on black crime now.

But speaking of black crime or crime within our institutions or in our neighborhoods, there's already an episode coming up where I interviewed the homeboy thiszle It's going to be on that it can happen here feed.

But it's almost as if you're not aware of any of the anti violence, the anti gang interventions of which I am a product of after school programs designed for us to take care of free and reduced lunch program the things for which we have done to uplift our own communities.

This week had the East LA Parade, which was a book fair, a job fair, and also a health and wellness thing that was only on East LA on the West side in Inglewood.

They did a Black Wellness seminar which was about black entrepreneur entrepreneurship, a black wellness, black education, black tutoring.

We've been doing our best.

But we're also very aware when there are things that are out of our control and out of our hands.

See that's the difference between your pulpit and my pulpit.

The clip that made me start paying attention to Charlie Kirk, of which I did very often because I do a politics podcast, was his clip about this debate he was having in real life to mass incarceration and that the criminal justice system is racist in its nature.

He brought up a statistic that said Black people make up thirteen percent higher percentage of the prison population in America, thirteen percent higher than anybody else, as to say that we commit that many more crimes than everybody else.

But Charlie is smarter than that.

Charlie knows that that is not what that statistic proofs.

What that statistic proofs is that black people are incarcerated thirteen percent more.

It means that we're convicted and sentenced thirteen percent more.

That's very different than committing crimes because the truth is we commit just about the same amount of crimes in relation to our population than every other people group.

There's considerably more, or if you're gonna do the numbers, we're all considerably more crime committed by white people.

Why because there's just more white people, that's how numbers work.

But in percentage to our population, we commit the same amount as everybody else.

And you know why a lot of crime is black on black in relation to black people, because.

We live together.

That's who's next to you.

No, why most crime white people's a given against other white people because they live together.

These are not hard things to understand unless you are making a bad faith argument, unless you are purposefully trying to win an argument with a person that you believe doesn't understand statistics, or you're not as fucking smart as everyone thinks you are because you don't understand statistics.

I apologize for getting angry right there, but I truly don't believe that.

I truly believe, just like his whole thing about trans people in mass shootings, he understands exactly what he's doing.

But to say that out loud would be to admit that the problem is one of yours.

Oh man, that Governor of Utah, you set a mouthful, buddy.

You don't never want to admit it your problem.

You don't ever want to admit the problem is you.

Oh he was a leftist Antifa person.

You know all that all that information about a bullet having die Fascists inscribed on the bullet.

You know that was false.

Right, it's been disproved.

You know the groper is No four chan is?

Know what eight chan is.

You don't ever want to admit the problem is you, do you?

It ain't never your baby, is it?

He was praying the problem.

He was praying it with somebody from another country.

Huh.

Just like your job, just like your unemployment, right, just like the crime in your neighborhood.

It's the immigrants, ain't it.

Yeah, buddy, just like your precious little president.

Right.

He ain't on that Epstein list.

He was a he was a under cover agent.

Oh yeah, problem may never you is it?

I get it, though, I get it.

Wrote a poem about it.

It's a fear of extinction.

You don't want to wipe out everybody believes in self preservation.

So the poem today, it's a poem called almost Part one.

It's really understanding why you don't ever want to admit the problem is you.

You fear extinction, which is what you think.

Uh.

The great replacement theory is right that you're gonna get replaced.

But sir, we are not your problem.

You your problem.

When I was younger, my biggest fear was David White Boy bung tnc surf designs.

The whole nine Well.

I didn't fear him.

Bullies come and go, phades requested and happily obliged.

I feared what I didn't understand about him.

Of course, this type of self reflection is only seen in a rear view mirror, where, of course objects of childhood trauma are closer than they appear.

Hence this poem wasn't pinned until now.

I didn't understand I understand why all this was so important to him.

I don't understand how obsession and repulsion can exist in the same body.

Why do you.

Love and hate black people?

Why am I so consequential?

I now think he feared extinction.

I think his violence was a trade passed down from his Neanderthal daddy, where all actions were just an attempt to slow down atrophy.

As if God is not one of the funniest people.

See slowing down atrophy only accelerates it.

I'm not your problem, David.

You are your problem.

Of course, I have no idea what happened to David, although I do think his fear of extinction in some ways came to be.

See bullies are.

An eighties trope, and nerds are billionaires creating robots that will exact their revenge on the very people that radicalize them.

See slowing down atrophy only accelerates it.

But I don't think it's a full extinction, because he did pass down a trade to me.

See I fear extinction too, but not in the same ways.

I understand all things come to an end, and an end is just a new beginning.

I understand collective identity what I fear.

It's all most, the only thing I ever ran from.

It's all most