Untitled Episode

In this episode,  Elaine discusses the raid on the Black Panther Apartments, Current News, How the Black Panther Party used elections as an organizing tool for revolutionary change and juvenile justice by way of the story of Michael "Little B" Lewis.

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SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Elaine Brown's podcast, Still a Revolutionary. I am your moderator, Africa Busado. I want to talk about some current news and things that are going on, and specifically as it relates to you, Elaine. There was an assault on the apartment building that you built, 80-unit affordable housing just recently. Can you talk to us about that?

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Yeah, well, it's called the Black Panther apartment since in West Oakland. It's 79 units of housing, all affordable. We completed construction in July of 2024, and the building is completely filled. We had over 7,000 applicants because people need housing and they need affordability. And we have very low in people with what is called very low and extremely low incomes in the building. And on May the 21st, approximately 20 pigs of the, I'm sorry, oh, that's right, police, huh, from the San Francisco Police Department, making note that we our building is located in Oakland, West Oakland, which is, it used to be the Hood, but it's hardly worthy of even being the Hood. It's more like an abandoned area that used to be thriving, once called Harlem West. And we are, we are uh reinstituting and resurrecting the spirit of uh 7th Street and so forth. But in any case, over 20 cops from the San Francisco police came to our door unmarked, uh, without uniforms, um, and demanding entrance, uh, claiming they had a search warrant. They would not produce the search warrant. They were not allowed in, so they busted in the door with uh hammers and uh sledgehammer and uh battering, battering ram and all of this, uh, the way they have always done. Uh, this is actually not that new when you really think about it. And so we had the police, they came in unmarked cars, and they came with a warrant that eventually we saw that stated they were looking for a uh uh an item from a robbery that took place in March of this year, this being May, in San Francisco, namely a yellow metal chain. This for this they busted through our door. So, what we are we're suing, of course, the city of San Francisco, including the police department and so forth. But right now, we have just asked the question: why were the San Francisco police in Oakland? Did they get help from the Oakland PD? Well, they certainly did, and we're gonna bring that out in our lawsuit. But what makes me saddest of all, and we can go back and get into this, uh Africa, but right now, what really makes me sad is that the Negroes sitting on the City Council of Oakland have not said a mumbling word about the outrage of this violent assault on a very vulnerable group of people. Not only do we have a number of people in the building who were not born in the United States, and I don't know their immigrant status, and I don't ask. They thought Ice was at the door because these people threw on vests over top of their uh over top of their uh regular street clothes, and the back of the vest said police. They threw our one of our security people up against the wall and handcuffed him, gave them a false charge that we had to go to court for, then they dropped the charge, so forth. So, where are the black voices that we elected, some of whom like to say they are anti-terror, anti-police terror? What more terroristic can you get than people breaking down your door? They broke through our glass door, destroyed our building, we had to put up wood and so forth. We replaced the door, but and the glass, but we're still dealing with that. Um, and we are filing a lawsuit, but I think it harks back to the time of the Black Panther Party when we were used to police coming to our door. The real question this time is where was the threat? What were they looking for? You you kicked in our door to find a chain, and then they went to one of the apartments. And fortunately, our courageous um uh manager of our building, uh, Misty Cross, she wasn't gonna let them go up on the elevator by themselves. She forced herself on the elevator. We went to the man's apartment that they wanted to search to make sure he wasn't gonna be injured because they might kick in his door. And so we finally find that they came out of our building after all this with a paper bag, with a pair of shoes, and a jacket that they say was evidence of a robbery. And the robbery suspect was an 18-year-old brother who was supposed to be graduating from high school uh within the next several days. He was arrested. He wasn't at the building, he was he was visiting as he does, and he was outside. They arrested him, charged him with robbery, um, even though he does live at another address in another city. So what black people have to know is that this ain't over. These people don't intend for us to even have something that we build ourselves. It this building was an $80 million project. We have a lot of people who are formerly incarcerated, a lot of people from the street, people coming out of shelters, mostly black. So, what does that tell us? You don't even want us to have decent housing, we're not gonna accept it. We will fight that.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Wow. So if I'm hearing you correctly, the San Francisco Police Department came into Oakland to bust into your building to in search of uh of a yellow chain uh of someone that they already had arrested down the street and smashed open the building, uh, smashed open the front door. It I can't help but but say this feels like COINTELPRO. It sounds like the old days. Like I it's to me, there definitely is some significance behind the fact that this is called the Black Panther. You just named the location of this place. Like, what do you think about that? Does it feel familiar to you?

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Well, of course, I said that. Of course it's familiar, you know. But the police haven't changed at all. It's that we have changed. The question is, what are we doing? And so if we do anything, because we've laid down, just like the city council, all these Negroes on the city council just sitting there holding their hands. I beg them to issue a resolution denouncing the raid on a building. Nobody came out there, there was no gunfire. I don't know what they would have done. There was nothing. This wasn't a political operation. This is where people live. So we have to ask ourselves. So, yeah, that feels like something from the past, but the current group of people that are sitting in office haven't actually said anything. Now, the mayor, a black woman named Barbara Lee, who was our congresswoman for many, many years, did say she was disturbed by it and has tried to say that she's going to have a police, Oakland police investigation, but that has been a fiasco. But I don't want to get into the weeds of this tonight, today. I just wanted that people to be aware who are looking at this, that here is a building built for black people to have decent housing, low income, low rents, and here the police come under some the guise of looking for a chain, and you're gonna break down our door and break down our windows. Now, the only thing we can do right at this moment is what we are doing, and that is to sue the uh police in the city of San Francisco, and we'll probably include the city of Oakland too, because on the down low they were a participants in this. But here's the thing: I believe in the tenets that we put forward in the Black Panther Party, where every act of aggression against us has to suffer a consequence. We're not finished.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Oh, that's right. Well, yeah, we're gonna stay tuned uh to that to this story because it's awful. And an assault, as far as I'm concerned, an assault on the Black Panther apartments is an assault on all of us, and we all should care. Um, let me ask you this. This morning I saw in the news that uh Lindsey Graham has gone to the upper room, or maybe the lower room. What you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Uh little Lindsey Graham out of a senator out of South Carolina, one of the most vicious races that has ever been in the United States Congress. Uh, he's a state, he was a senator. Um I can't even comment on him, but all I can say is I think of Lindsey Graham, and I know uh you got there in Kentucky uh Mitch McConnell with one foot in the grave. And all I can say is, quoting Malcolm X, the chickens look like the chickens are coming home to roost. I ain't got nothing else to say about little Lindsey Graham.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Um I want to get into the work that the Black Panther Party did in Oakland in terms of organizing political power. Um, you guys um organized around uh electing the very first mayor. You yourself ran for city council, Bobby Seal ran for mayor. Um, I want to talk about like how how did that come to be? Like, what was Huey's um sort of instruction on moving you guys in that direction?

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Well, the question is to how are we organizing for the goal of revolutionary change? Because that was our goal. And revolutionary change meant for us the liberation of black people, and we had to recognize that black people remained and oppressed people in the United States of America from day one in the 1600s to that very day that we first ran for a political, that is to say, electoral politics, because that isn't necessarily the only form of political activity. And so the Black Panther Party under Huey's leadership decided that we should run Bobby Seal, who was the chairman of the party, for mayor of Oakland. And then I ran with Bobby for a seat on the city council because black people were, from one, uh becoming afraid of our guns. You know, they we had we carried guns and we meant to carry guns. We had fights with the police. The one of the biggest ones coming out of the chapter I was a part of in Los Angeles, where you had over 300 SWAT team members assault our office there uh with 11 people in it, nine brothers, two sisters, and they fought for five and a half hours and didn't die. And I mean, it was a firefight, as was called a mini Vietnam. It was so serious. So we didn't uh we we meant to defend ourselves, and we meant that we had the right of self-defense and always had the right of self-defense and retained that right even when we ran for office. So the question is, was it a strategy? And that's what it was. It was a strategy to organize black people in Oakland. At that time in West Oakland, you had over 70% of the population was black. In the city of Oakland, oh almost 49 or even 50% of the city was black. But the city had never had an elected official since it was founded in 1852, black elected official since it was founded in 1852, and had very few blacks, if any, operating in any government capacity. So we didn't have the benefit, if you want to say that, of operating the government that was in charge of our lives. And Huey had always uh postulated that the only real government black people knew were the police. We didn't know who the mayor was anyway, or what the mayor did, even though these things affected our everyday lives. They passed a law that said this next thing you know, you're violating the law, especially if you're black. And even if you didn't do it, uh you're gonna be uh charged with something. So we can talk about the history of policing and blacks for a very long time. But suffice it to say, so we had to move from the government being something that was on the street to the government that operates all of the machinery that the capitalists want them to operate. Now I want to just say one more thing about that. You know, we talk about the capitalists. Let's look at us, let's say a store like Target. Now you got armed guards in Target and they got police that they can call from around the corner. So you go into Target and you steal some diapers because you don't have money, and diapers cost a lot of money. And you get caught stealing, but you try to run, you can get killed by the police for stealing some diapers from Target. Now, I can't make this stuff up because I can use the case of a sister that was killed from in a Home Depot outside of a Home Depot because she was here in the Oakland area, because she uh had um was was alleged to have stolen a knife. By the time they finished, she had stolen a knife and she had a gun and she was like Superwoman, and they mowed her down with automatic rifles, shot her in the back while she was running away from them, the police. So whose police are they? They're not our police to protect and serve. Are you kidding? They're there to protect the interests of the capitalists that run our lives, and the government is there to serve the interests, but we don't know that. So part of being educated and being conscious is to understand how your oppression plays itself out. Now we know we don't have housing, we know we don't have jobs, we know we don't have good health care and good health outcomes. We know we have low, we have low education levels, we have no money, we're poor, so forth. We're living at the bottom of life, but we don't even know what the system is that has put this, put this into place. We know we were slaves, and then after slavery was purportedly over, not gonna talk about Juneteens and Coon teens because they're the same. Negroes celebrating freedom. Pathetic. Now, from 1865, when a civil war was over and the 13th Amendment prohibiting uh involuntary uh servitude was passed. What happened to us from 1865 forward? Well, we know we didn't get our little 40 acres that uh General Sherman had allocated, that lasted all about six months. That is the idea then. Few people actually got it, they took that away quickly, they being the government. At that time, President Johnson, who was had not even gone to school and could not really read, but I digress. So here we have a situation where what has happened with us from 1865 forward, were we given any compensation for all those years of free labor? Absolutely not. We're still begging for reparations now. Were we given any even acknowledgement of the crime of slavery and the brutality that was perpetrated against us for all those years now? We'll just let go, do what you can do. And we were a minority, a powerless minority with no guns, no place, no land, no place to be, wandering around, mostly in the southern states where we had been enslaved. So when you look at that and you get up to 1966 when the Black Panther Party was formed, and you get into the struggle for the civil rights that took place before that, and so we ended up with the 1964 Voting Rights Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But where did that leave us? It left us in the same condition we were in just about when we were set free.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

So Huey Newton said, we've got to get our people to be participants in their own freedom. We are not going, we're not the we we want to we consider ourselves to be vanguards of the revolution. Now, what did that mean? It meant that we were going to create the conditions that would organize the people, get the people ready for revolutionary change. What did that mean? It's another conversation. But masses of black people were still oppressed and mentally, not only, not only physically and economically in all the other ways, but also mentally. We believed, we accepted our for so we had little things that we did to get little civil rights and all this, but we weren't ready to challenge the fundamental system and hit it hard. So we have to be organized because we're a minority, and we have to be organized. And so Huey stated that look, the simplest form of political activity is to vote yes or no. That's it. You ain't got to think, it's either yes or no. And so he said, So we're going to run Bobby Silly Lane Brown for office, and we did. I can't tell you how black people, how happy they were, said, we get ready to have a black mayor. That's all they saw. Good God almighty. We get ready to have a black mayor who is a black panther, even better. And so we changed our clothes so people wouldn't see us as a combat outfit, a combat organization. And Bobby Seal put on a suit and tie, and I put on little skirts and things, and we ran for office, and the majority of our people were thrilled, but it brought out, of course, a lot of white people, and so we only came away with about 44, 45 percent of the vote.

unknown 19:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

But remember, you've got a city of around what, 400,000, something like that. So I'll take 45 to 50 percent of that. That's more people that we had that supported us in that one election than we did all the years before that. Wow. To get that right.

unknown 19:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

So these people, those people, uh now constituents of the Black Panther Party, not the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, not the racist white Peckerwood Cracker Party, but the Black Panther Party. They voted for the Panther. They didn't do no much else, but they voted for the Panther. They actively went out because that wasn't a time when you could do uh mail in ballots and all that. You had to actually actively go out that one day and have five days, all that, one day and vote, and you voted for the Panther.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

And that's a couple hundred thousand people. So we knew that that was a victory, but you have to keep it going. That's why we ran for office, because we knew that that was a tool to organize our people into one thing. If nothing else, we all agree on one thing, and we support the Black Panther Party. Good God am I. This is a party that says we want revolutionary change. This is not a party that says, I want to put a Negro in office. This is a party that wants revolutionary change. So when you vote for the Panther, that's a different, different vote, and that's what happened. And then Bobby and I didn't win, but we won all of what I just said. And then we went on to uh, I ran for office the second time alone. Uh, I this was a citywide vote, unlike today, where people vote in a district and only the district votes for the person. But I had to run citywide, which brought in all the white people, but I still took 49% of the vote, which gave me a base that was much bigger.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

So we had a base now. And by this time, we were talking about a base of operations, which, as I said, we meant a base of revolution. And so the third time we got involved in the electoral political. Was when we ran Lionel Wilson for mayor of Oakland, and he became the first black mayor of a city that had been founded in 1852.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

So you've mentioned revolutionary change and revolution. And for people who don't know, who don't understand, can you just really define revolution? Um that's been asked a lot, even here on social media. What is revolution?

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Well, the word is pretty self-defining. Uh it means a turning over, a complete turning over. So just as a word, that's what it means. What we mean in the state in this situation is we can look at uh the various uh countries in the last, say, hundred years or so that have been involved in um revolutionary change starting with the Russian Revolution in 1917, and we see that they threw the czar out and created an entire new society that was run by the Communist Party because they were against the Tsar and the royalty and all of that. The Chinese did it in China under the leadership of Mao Zhetong, and various African liberation organizations formed. And they all, by this time the Black Panther Party came into being, uh, they all were talking about an anti-capitalist, pro-communist, egalitarian social construct. So that means we want to completely overthrow, undermine, destroy the existing set of government and corporate ownership and rich people getting richer and poor people getting poorer, all that has to go. Because in order for us to be free, there has to be systemic change. It can't be, well, we're gonna have prison reform, and that's gonna change education, finances, money, banking, so forth. No, it's not. Even if you could have prison reform uh of any meaningful reform, um you can't have we we struggled to integrate the schools of America from the 1954 decision, Brown be bored. And what did we get? We have the same system in place, still segregated, but more importantly, segregation means the black schools get no money. So we spent since 1954 to today and have no real change in education because the fundamental system is in place. And people go, well, what's the system? Well, you have a government, three prongs to it, president, congress, judiciary. They make the rules, but these rules are made to satisfy the interests of the rich. But they're certainly not made for us. We don't want to have affordable housing. We don't want to have free medical care. They're talking about insurance, low in insurance. I don't care about paying insurance anything. Why can't I have free medical care if I don't have any money? If I don't have any money and I got cancer, I can just kiss my ass goodbye. That's the reality in America. Do we just want to go spend the next 50, 75 years that we've done trying to reform the American medical society? This is too big. These things are in place, they're institutionalized. So if you want change, Obama's not your change. Obama is as much of a bootlegger as Tim Scott. He just looks better and you like him more because he ain't too dark. That's how Negroes think. Yes, because I ask people all the time, if Obama looked like Clarence Thomas, would you really have voted for him? People get nervous when you say something like that, but I'll digress on the color question. I don't want to go down that path yet. But the point is, you have our people, our people living in abject poverty. We have the in Oakland, we have the largest percentage of the people living on the street are black men. Now, somebody can say, well, they're lazy, they're stupid, they're this. So I say, either you think it's something wrong with black men, or you think there's something wrong with the system under which we are living, the scheme of things. How you have to pay for food, how you have to pay for this, how you can't get a job, how your education is no good, how you're gonna go to prison for anything and everything. You ain't got nowhere to live, all kinds of reasons. Well, why not? We have examples of people that have made money. Well, we do that no matter what, they worked hard, these people are not working hard. That's how we start thinking. So we're trying to change the mindset by talking about you cannot be free if you are not self-determining, if you can't defend, if you can't decide what happens in your life, if the lights go out in your house, you ain't got nothing to say, but I hope I paid the bill. You're not in control of the PG and the E's and all these big electrical systems that bring us electricity. If you don't have the money to put gasoline in your car, you just won't have a car. You'll be a walking Negro. If you don't have money to buy food from the McDonald's to the safeways to the big grocery store, we don't even know where all this food comes from. We have to buy it though. And if you ain't got no money, you will be a starving Negro. You could be complaining all you want to, but you won't have any food. So we know that a price tag is on the head of everybody. And you got to do some kind of work at a low-level income, spending all this time fighting for the union, fighting for a little teeny job. All this is a system that is in place. And you can't undo it piece by piece because it's interconnected. The education system is connected to the number of people going to prison. Most of the people in prison don't have a high school diploma. Now, what does that mean? It means they couldn't get a job, they couldn't get here, you had to do something desperate, blah, blah, it goes on. The point I'm making is if you're not seeking revolutionary change, if you don't understand that the capitalist structure that was built on the blood on the back of the African slaves when we built up the tobacco farms in Virginia, the cotton in Alabama and Georgia, the sugar plantations in Louisiana, the rice plantations in South Carolina, when you don't understand that we built this capitalist system, and now you say we want to benefit. No, we're not gonna benefit from it because this is what oppressed us. Let's not be stupid. So revolutionary change is the only kind of change. This whole thing got to go, and something new has to come into play. But how can I get, or you get, or any of us get, our people to organize unless we have strategies forganize, organizing us around our interests and not around getting a job, so-and-so went to school. Oh, this is the first person graduated from college in our in our family, and they can't even get a job. And if they miss a job working for some low-level job, or else they when they finally rise up and they get on the uh some Fortune magazine article about this the first Negro to be uh the corporate head of Hoobie Buddhism, you know, because that's where you are, who beat Negro, and you in you're in uh human resource or community relations, because that's what you're gonna do. Make sure you don't come up and start messing with your DEI came and went. We actually thought that was worth something. We fought for them to accept us. Please, Master, let me have a job. I want to sit at the table. I don't just want your crumbs. I actually want to seat at the table. I want to continue to oppress our my people just like you do. So we have to decide do we want to be free or are we all right? Being that uh we went from slavery, from a slave uh community, a slave people, enslaved people to a criminalized people ever since 1865.

unknown 30:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

And we still are criminalized. And who does that? The laws change. Three strikes law, we could talk about that and some.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Um, because it definitely brought to mind uh, you know, the three strikes clause that uh that arrested so many people that imprisoned so many people. Uh it it removed their right to to vote, it removed their right to get a job and so many other things. And then even the the black people who we who so-called are were our people that that supported it. Like, what it what are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Well, it's not the right to anything, because we have never had anybody. I don't know why we keep on thinking we have rights in America. It just cracks me up. We like, I have the right to say what I want to say. No, you don't, Negro. You do not have that right. You think that the rights in America, as they're spelled out in different laws, have something to do with you. But they don't. It never was, we were never part of this operation here, other than to develop all of its basic economy for free. And then we were useless to them, except now perhaps as a small as a consumer base. However, the Three Strikes Crime Bill, which isn't what the name of it, which came to be known as that, was was authored by or was promoted by or was uh originated by or put on the table by that Arkansas cracker Bill Clinton. Every Negroes love Bill Clinton. They like, he's like a black man, because he eats watermelon or some shit like this, excuse me. So Bill Clinton realizes that uh that the Republican, he's faced with a Republican majority in the Congress or whatever. So he's gonna out Republicans and Republicans, but I'm not giving him any excuses for his racist behavior coming out of Arkansas, because that's who he really is, a poor ass white boy from Arkansas. And so Bill Clinton comes up with this omnibus amendment to the omnibus crime bill, and the basic tenet was that we are going to make sure that you are not going to be continue to be a repeat offender. We are sick of these repeat offenders. We want them locked up forever. You've been in prison once, you've been in prison twice, the third time, you're out. We're giving you life. And we're going to extend that to children. The whole juvenile justice system is getting ready to be torn down by the 1994 omnibus crime bill known as the Three Strikes Crime Bill. And so Clinton has to sell this to Negroes, although it's not that hard since black people thought he was on TV with Arsenio Hall. I'm not going to speak about Arsenio. Too pathetic. He's on TV with Arsenio and he plays a saxophone. Jesus Christ, he plays a saxophone and he loves watermelon. He's black. That's how we think. Or how we came to think. We just want some white man to love us. And so here comes Bill Clinton and he goes to some church. As a matter of fact, I do believe it was a church in Memphis where Dr. King spoke. The audacity opens up the speech by saying, I want to thank Bishop Hoobie Boo for the great barbecue that he made. It was great. Oh, and the audience is like, whoo, Master, that is just, yes, Bishop So-and-so really does a great barbecue, doesn't he? This is the way it went. Look it up. He said, But I want to ask you a question. What if Martin Luther King was standing by my side today? What do you think he would say? The audacity of this racist to even imagine that he should be in the same plane, the same space with Dr. King. With audacity. But what do you think Dr. King would say if he were alive today, this is 1994? I think, because he, Bill Clinton, is going to now tell us what a black man named Dr. King would say. I think he'd say that, look, I died for your freedom and look what you've done with it. And the black people in the church people said, Lord, have mercy. Massed done told us we done done wrong. We done messed up freedom. So I'm thinking to myself, I was around when Dr. King was killed. And I remember him saying before he was killed that we were not free. And then he was killed. And the next day or so, I joined the Black Panther Party because Dr. King was killed. We weren't free. We all said we weren't free. The only thing we said about Dr. King's death was nonviolence is dead. Nonviolence is dead. That's what we said. So I had to say to myself, when is it that we were free that we messed up freedom? I missed that. I must have slept through freedom. And we messed it up somewhere between April the 4th of 1968 and the time that Bobby Hutton was killed, April the 6th of 1968, by the police. And the next day or so when I joined the Black Panther Party, somewhere in there, we must have been free, and now we're not. And what is his definition of how we messed up freedom? We messed up freedom by committing all these crimes in the hood. Look at all these boys wearing these sagging pants and gold teeth, gangster rapping. This is the problem with black America. This is why you don't have no money. This is why you don't have anything. These bad boys, and we're gonna have to lock them up. And he went to the Congress, and the Republicans didn't want him to have this because they wanted it. And he went there and he got the votes of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he was able to pass this bill under his banner. And he says later on, if it hadn't been for Kwaisi Mpume, imagine this nigga walking around the name of Kwaisi Mpume and being such a bootlicker. If it hadn't been for Kwaisi Mpume and the Congressional Black Caucus, we could have never put this bill through. Now, what are the consequences? Ain't no losing no voting right. That's nothing. You are in prison. Who are the most of the people that went to prison? Well, gee, let me think. Was it black people? Was it black people?

SPEAKER_03 37:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

The prison population in America doubled in the next 10 years, and the majority were black men that went into prison. Here in California, we have 5% black population, and we have 47% black prison population. What's wrong with that number? So what's wrong with it is we're criminals. Don't you get it? We're criminals. And we need to be locked up forever. Wow. And this state and all the other states in the union passed their own little three strikes version. And more importantly, or as importantly, one of the aspects of that bill was to extend the application of these laws to children. I don't have to tell you how many young black boys have gone to prison because of Bill Clinton that Negroes like to talk about. They love so much.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

Yeah, and that leads me uh to the next question because uh you worked tirelessly for many years to help a young, at the time, young child, Michael Little B Lewis, um, to to finally be freed from prison where he served 20 years, 20 plus years for a crime that he did not commit. He was 13 years old. Um it inspired you to write a book called The Condemnation of Little B. And so I can't help but feel like you know what happened to him came from uh this whole crime bill. Um can you talk to us about Michael B's story, uh, Little B's story, and and and how you became a part of that?

SPEAKER_01 39:46

Well, his story, and I'm so glad you asked me about this because uh Michael Lewis is just, you know, as I said in my book, as you mentioned, he's not uh one in a million, he's one of millions. He's not unusual at all. That's what makes it so painful. But at the time in the state of Georgia, where I was living, he was arrested in 1997, the year after the Olympics, and Atlanta was still trying to prove it was crime-free or something. A black district attorney was elected, the first black district attorney in the entire state, uh, a real bootlicker named Paul Howard. And Paul Howard came into office around the same time that Michael Lewis or Little B was arrested in January of 1997 for the murder of a guy who was so irrelevant that we didn't even know he was dead until they arrested Lil B, because that was the case. The case wasn't really the guy, the murder victim, but the but the boy that they arrested. Uh headlines, I'm talking about the front page, color photos of the boy. You know how they don't normally uh print a photograph of a juvenile, they didn't have any problem printing Lil B's photograph in full color. This thug, quote unquote thug. And from that point for the next month, all these black people in Atlanta, supposedly black Mecca, which is a joke in and of itself. Black Mecca denounced this boy one way or another in barbershops and in, and but mostly in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, they dragged out every Negro they could find to write an article against Lil V. Yes, this is the reason we don't have anything. He needs to go to prison. So finally, Paul Howard, the first black district attorney in the state of Georgia, gets up and says, We're charging him as an adult. I would seek the death penalty, but it's not available to me because of his age, but he will be tried as an adult. And that was one of the first cases in Fulton County. The white man wouldn't even use the bill, the legislation had existed for several years. But the white man who had been the previous DA named charge children, but Paul Howard said, I'm gonna make an example and I'm gonna let Master know that I will do for him what he won't even do for himself. I'm gonna get rid of these niggas. And everybody in Atlanta that was black, the mayor of Atlanta, later arrested for avoiding taxes, but they not arrested for the beatings of his wife that he did regularly. Uh Bill Campbell called Michael an evil in the city. He was everything in the world that you could think of that was terrible. And this was why black people had to get together and get rid of this internecine community crime, the way we do today with these violence prevention bullshit programs like we have here in Oakland, where it's a snitch program. And so Michael is like the pariah of every single good, hardworking black person. He's the reason we don't have what we should have, and he's got to go to prison. That's the first month they had an article every single day. I went crazy. I said, I can't sit here and have the background I have and do nothing. So I went to see about this boy and see what I could do. I didn't know if I could do anything. But I also felt, you know, I'm a bad bitch. I ought to be able to help a little boy. But the case that ain't nothing to me. Good out of my, where was I? And uh I finally got involved with this case when I finally found the lawyers that were working on his case because it was a complicated arrangement. They didn't have the regular public defender because he was a kid, and it goes on and on, whatever, suffice it to say. I ran into one person, a young sister named Patrice now Patrice Fulcher. And she talked about him like he was a child and a beautiful black boy. And she was gonna fight for him. And she's the first person I heard of or heard that said one decent thing about this child. So we said, all right, well, let's do what we can do. I got an article published, blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, he went to court. Every drug boy in the world got their case erased by testifying against him. People that he knew. He had been on the street since 11, been in foster care, been abused. Mother on crack. Lived like a dog in the street for two years by himself. Sold a few drugs, slug, you know, slinging a little bit of dope here or there. And then gets arrested for a murder he did not commit. And we know he didn't commit it. And people say, Well, you just, you're just a liberal that believes him. Well, don't call me a liberal, please. That's insulting. You know, but the point is, his I'll give you an example. The four-person of the jury worked for CNN. Now, what kind of how you'll be on the jury and you're in the news business? Oh, do you know when you're just not influenced by all the stuff you see every day, blah, blah, blah. And it didn't take them but a minute. But the main witness was a dope boy named Big E, who was a friend of Michael's brother, J Boy, who was also involved in letting everybody think that Michael was a killer, thinking that he might just do juvenile time. They they didn't care that it was he was being tried as an adult. And once they figured it out with their stupid selves, they didn't bother. Everybody that had a case, everybody just about that. Nothing but dope sales. Everybody that had a little case testified against this boy. People that he knew, Chuck Boy and Tom, Tom and Nell. It was horrible. And it didn't take the jury but a minute to convict him and sentence him to life in prison. And at that time, life in prison was 14 years. And here comes Paul Howard, a Morehouse man. Imagine. He's the good Negro. He gets up on this up on the press in front of the cameras and says, Well, he's doing, we're gonna do a minimum, a mandatory minimum of 14, maximum mandatory minimum of 14 years, and I'm gonna be at the pro board to make sure he does 14 more. Good god.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

And he did 27 years in prison. And I was with him every single day, every single month. It was 27 years. So he became like a son to me, and I became like a mother to him. And he's out at 41 years old. He's now older than that, he's 43. He works with me uh from time to time, and he lives here in Oakland, and he's trying to build a life for himself. But 27 years in prison. But the real issue, or not the real issue, is I organized a group called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice. And in the Fulton County area, the basic area where Atlanta is, Fulton County, DeCab County, we had over 300 and some mothers, all black, that had sons that have been tried and convicted as adults and they were doing big time. One boy did 10 years solid for a $27 robbery, no gun, no weapon. So many cases. And that's thanks to the three strikes crime bill of Bill Clinton. And we haven't overturned that yet. And now we want to enhance it because here in Oakland, you've got a bunch of black people walking around talking about they're worried about their car being bit, they're worrying about this. We have to have an intervention program where we prevent crime. Now, this assumes that black people are criminals and you're gonna prevent them from being criminals. Imagine how ridiculous this is. So we have to come to some consciousness. Is this how we want to live forever? I don't think so. I know I don't. So I'm gonna continue to do what I do no matter how old and tired I might become.

SPEAKER_00 48:15

Well, I tell you what, to invest all those years in making sure that uh Michael Little B came home is just remarkable. And so it makes me think about juvenile justice and how important of an issue that it is. And it and it and yes, it comes from the crime bill. It it begs to open conversations about recidiv recidivism and such. And you've had people like Hakeem Jeffries and such that speak on these sort of things. What would you say to these leaders, these so-called leaders, uh that want to be tough on crime or believe in some sort of uh of rehabilitation or through just throwing people in jail?

SPEAKER_01 49:05

I don't know that Hakim Jeffrey's come from that place. He's just so busy uh being a supporter of the Zionist agenda because he has all that money coming in from APAC. But uh better than that is Wesley Bell. And I have to spend a minute on Wesley Bell because Wesley Bell tries to pretend he's a brother, got the little dreadlocks style, coming out of Ferguson, Missouri. And he comes out of that experience when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, and uh he was a part of that wave of young people that were had the big protests in Ferguson. Everybody talks about as though Ferguson was a place where that's where you got to cut your teeth and do those protests, whose streets, our streets, all that. All that to protest the murder of Brother Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, a very small city, by the way, within the middle of St. Louis. But ultimately, Wesley Bell goes on to become an elected official. I can't remember if he was a state representative or city representative, because he's like a young brother that was all sort of part of this is fuzzy. And then he becomes the district attorney of that county that includes Ferguson and St. Louis. Now, at this point, we just know this brother is gonna charge these police with the murder of Michael Brown. But he says he couldn't find any real evidence to make a charge like that against this white boy.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 50:47

Imagine, this is Wesley. Then the next thing we know, he's running for Congress against Corey Bush, the sister that was there, but she's back running against him now, who is a progressive left-leaning sister who was a part of the whole Ferguson movement. And he's run, he ran against her and unseated her because he had all this APAC money like Hakeem Jeffrey's. And now he's trying to make sure, they try to make sure Corey Bush don't come back. But she said, oh no, it's not gonna go down that easy because I'm running and I'm not playing. And that's the thing about it. We got all these people when we talk about the use of the ballot, or we talk about our vote. We had this boat and we wanted to use it so we could put people in office that would represent our interest, not represent our color, per se. You don't get away with that. We got a lot of boot-licking niggas. And Hakim Jeffries is particularly funny to me. And now I'm gonna get into some local people, but Hakim Jeffries, here's a guy that's deeply entrenched with the Zionist movement through APAC. They're giving him a lot of money. So you know he's definitely not gonna be saying anything against Israel later for the Palestinians. We don't care nothing about them. Definitely don't care about Iran, right? And as to paraphrase the 60s, ain't no Iranian call me nigga. Why am I worried about why are we in Iran? I'm not, ain't no weed master. Right, I'm not in Iranian enemy of my enemy. Now, Hakeem Jeffries is particularly funny because his uncle, Leonard Jeffries, is one of the most quote, anti-Semitic brothers out there. He was, he was so bad, he brought a guy named Khaled Muhammad to his school to speak. And Khalid Muhammad was said so many anti-Jewish things that he had been a member of the nation. Farrakhan had to get rid of him. That's how bad it was. And I'm trying to figure out why these Zionists that support Hakeem Jeffries don't know about Leonard Jeffries, his uncle, who is like anti-Israel and every other thing Jewish. I just want to make that known. So just in case somebody's looking, don't take for your money. You have to support your cause. But then right here in Oakland, here Bobby Sill and I kicked open the door and finally pushed Lionel through the door, Lionel Wilson. And what do we have now? Did I say that nobody on the city council said a mumbling word about the assault on the Black Panther apartment building on May the 21st? Because if I didn't, may I repeat myself. And that includes and especially their sister, quote unquote, who represents our district, Carol Fife. She hasn't even said anything, and she likes to run around calling herself a revolutionary, running around some kind of way, finding some way to pretend she has something to do with the Black Panthers, when she's certainly not even old enough or anything else, but more importantly, because she's friendly with this one or that one. And then she also is involved in the police anti-terror movement. Not one of those black people, not one of those tough talking sisters or brothers, even said a mumbling word on an Instagram message. And the worst part was I got a call asking me how we were doing from a Chinese representative, from an Indian woman, and one other black woman. But some of the louder voices on the council that called themselves serving the interests of black people, like Carol Pfeiff and Ken Houston and Kevin Jenkins, these people didn't even have the courtesy to issue a statement or try when I asked them, would you pass a resolution denouncing that police assault? Didn't do it. It's not a surprise, it's just I'm making note. When the rule is called, I make note that you didn't stand up for your people. Matter of fact, you stood down. Matter of fact, if you wasn't with me, you was against me. Matter of fact, if you was against me, you're with the police. And that's what I think of you. You're with the police.

SPEAKER_00 55:38

And so it seems like Carol Fife and as well as Wesley Bale and others, these politicians that represent coming in through these movements, because I do believe you had mentioned to me before that, you know, she got into office co-opting uh an entire movement happening, an important movement that was happening for housing. And so it's so many people like that that are co-opting the movement. They use it for political momentum. Like, what do we do as a community? How do we identify those people and and and how do we like get that out of here? Because at the end of the day, we find out that they're not, they're not with us, they're not on our side, they're just using our struggle. You might want to talk about the ballot or the bullet, you see.

SPEAKER_01 56:27

So the issue is once people know the truth, so we have a duty to raise consciousness, to educate. That's what I'm trying to do with this podcast. I want people to listen to this, start an argument, a debate, question what I'm saying, look into it, find out if it's the truth, blah, blah. And then we have to make a decision on whether or not we want to vote for these people. The other thing is we have to make a decision to vote. We've reached a point now where voting is so irrelevant because we realize that it's all the same thing. And we say things like, Well, the Democrats don't do anything for us. Hey, you're absolutely right. The Democrats are just the same. Back in the day, we used to call them the Dixiecrats, and because they were the Southern racist that the Republicans now have become in terms of just the general theme and imagery. But there's nothing in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party for us. We know that. So we might have to get together and run people for office, but those people can't be bullshitters, excuse my language, coming with some small agenda, coming with a personal agenda. So that's part of organizing. That's part of saying, all right, where do we go from here? What are we going to do? We can use the power of the ballot in certain circumstances where we have an opportunity and where it matters. Now, it doesn't matter if we vote for Trump or not. We have 13% of the population. Ain't nobody black voted for Trump except for Tim Scott and other Negroes like that. Clarence Thomas, this broad Ursula, I gotta talk about that later.

SPEAKER_00 58:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

That's the DA of Alameda County. Uh, all these kinds of people, they may have voted for Trump, but you don't have any significant number of blacks who voted for Trump. The majority of blacks voted for Kamala Harris and so forth and so on, just like we voted for Obama. We just wanted to see somebody even looked like they wanted to be black or thought for about 10 seconds, but we didn't look into Kamala Harris because if we had, we'd have known something more about her that she had nothing to do with doing anything for black people. Period. As they say, period. So we have to decide, okay, this person is running for office. We have to be coming out and questioning them when they're on these little platforms. We have to come out the bowels of the hood and act like we actually matter. Even though we have had that slogan around, there was no real movement around that. But let's, does it matter? We just challenging white people. I remember when these Black Lives Matter people went up to Hillary Clinton talking about how do you feel about black people? What the hell difference did it make? What you she said, well, what difference does it make? It only matters what I'm gonna do for you. Now somebody should have smacked her right then and there. You know, those people aren't gonna do that. So they just said, Well, I'm good, like the one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement as existed in the ether world, said, Well, I'm not for her, but I'm going to vote for Hillary. Well, hey, where's that going? That kind of thing. So we can use our vote in certain circumstances, especially local elections, so that the Wesley Bells couldn't have got out of Ferguson with that FBS. You decided you had the position of the DA, and you couldn't find anything to prosecute the pig that killed Michael Brown for real. Now that reminds me of our local DA, and I have to say something, Ursula Jones-Dixon. She was a part of the cabal that out ousted the only black district attorney that actually talked about black people, Pamela Price, in a meaningful way and with a meaningful agenda. I would have never supported a DA. I would never imagine I would ever support a DA until Pamela Price. And Pamela Price had an agenda, and one of her agenda items was to not prosecute any more children, meaning people under 18 years old, as adults. She had another agenda item where she formed a section of the DA's office to go into all the past cases of police shootings and brutality against people in the community. And the third thing was that she wasn't going to give people unusual exceptional sentences by gang enhancement. You see, with gang enhancement, for example, if I go out and I bip your car and your window gets out, and you find so they find me and they find out I bipped your car. Well, maybe I'm gonna do six months in jail, which is already too much for bipping. They just make me pay it back or something. But if I give you, say, well, you were a member of a gang, you did this a part of your gang, you say, Well, I wasn't a member of a gang. That's too bad. I said you're in a gang. I'm the DA. And I'm gonna add to your sentence, drum roll, 10 years. Wow. Or maybe more. Wow. That's what gang enhancement sentencing is about. So Pamela was against that. She wasn't gonna try children as adults, and she was opening up old cases of police violence and murder of people in the community. Well, it didn't take them but a minute to organize a whole group of people, rich people from the hills and everywhere else, and formed a recall committee and got rid of Pamela. So during the time that she was ousted, and once she was ousted, the county board of supervisors, the so-called governing body, had to select a person to fill her spot because there was no one in place. So they had to hurry up and put a DA in place. So what did they do? They had maybe seven or eight candidates. All the candidates were black, by the way. Now, before this, we never had a black DA. Before Pamela Price, no black DA. Not since 1852, no black DA. Pamela Price was elected. So, but now you got like eight or nine black people vying for this to get the board to uh put them in place. So they ultimately select this Ursula Jones Dixon fraud. Now she's so much of a house Negro that she had the support of Tom Orloff, the one of the previous district attorneys who made a career of prosecuting the Black Fantasy Party, and not very successfully, by the way. After him came Nancy O'Malley, who was his protege. And Nancy O'Malley absolutely refused to reopen the Oscar Grant case, among many other police cases that she didn't want to have anything to do with murder cases. And before Tom, before that was after Tom Orland, before him was a guy named Lowell Jensen. And Lowell Jensen was spent his career trying to prosecute Huey P. Newton unsuccessfully. And those three white people, there's a photo of her with the three of them hugging her. It's so embarrassing. To the point where Howard Moore, the Greek attorney Howard Moore, who, among other things, was the attorney for the SNCC organization and for Angela Davis. Howard Moore said Ursula Jones Nixon is Clarence Thomas in Lipstick. I started stealing for myself, but I can't see it.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:12

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:13

I just can't do it. That's a great statement. This is what we have in office. So now she's the incumbent. So Pamela tries to run again, but ain't no way in hell Pamela can win against a woman because a woman is incumbent. And every NAAC Negro organization, black women organized for political action, you should have seen the groups of blacks that supported Ursula Chown's Dixon, not counting all the white organizations and the Democratic Party and the Hoobie-Boo, everybody else. They all supported her. Why? Because she and what did she do in the times in the interim where she was just the appointed DA, dismantled the police unit, the police investigative unit, reinstated the child, uh trying children as adults, and already had six children, more than had been done uh in the last years before her, in a matter of a year and a half, and it definitely reinstated gang enhancements. She did that in the first, she was in office a year and a half before they had to have an election. And that's what she did.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

Imagine. Wow. So it just makes me think about, you know, we're talking about voting and doing research to put in the right people, uh, and and making sure, like a lot of people, we're so all over the place about what what are the issues. I I would like to ask you, what what are the what are the issues that the black community, that black Americans should be concerned about? Um and and then I also want to touch on gerrymandering, but like what are the issues? Like juvenile justice is absolutely important, housing uh is absolutely important. Absolutely important. But what would you say, especially coming out of Oakland, what would you say it are the issues that we should collectively be on the same page about?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

Well, first of all, in order for you to say anything to understand the problem, you have to at least know how to articulate and say what is the problem. Now, you don't have to know everything, but if you're not concerned about the black community, like people like Henry Lewis Gates, then you won't concern yourself with any of this. But statistics will tell you what the issues are. Now, what's the most fundamental thing you have to have to live in America? Money. Yeah. We ain't got to be stupid. This ain't no mystery. If you don't have any money, you won't have any place to live. As I said, you won't be able to get health care, you won't have any food, blah, blah, blah. So money actually determines your ability to survive and navigate your the the all of the life in the United States of America. If you don't have money, you can kiss your ass goodbye. Now that's just the way it is. Now the manifestations of it are everywhere. One, we are, we're actually not the poorest people. The Native Americans are literally poorer, but they're so small as pathetic. They wipe them out so much. But we're among the poorest in America. Now, we have the highest cancer death rate for prostate cancer, cancer death rate for cervical cancer and breast cancer. Now, we as I said, we can say, well, it must be something wrong with black men's prostates. And people say, well, they're not getting early detection. Stuff like this. It just makes me fall out. Well, let me think. I'm out here living on the street, or I got a family and I barely making it. Prostate cancer testing is like the last thing on my agenda for the day. I'm trying to get through the day. I don't have my own doctor. Now I've got Obamacare that I can go to some hospital and get this, but I ain't got no transportation. It goes on. Why? Because I don't have any money. We are dying of breast cancer and cervical cancer. Uh black women have the highest maternal mortality rate, and black children the highest infant mortality rate. What's wrong with us? Something must be wrong. We have the highest incarceration rate. We have the lowest home ownership. We have the lowest educational attainment level. Must be something wrong with us. People come from all over the world and they do well in America. What's wrong with black people in America? That's the kind of question we even ask ourselves. Now, if we think there's something wrong with us, then we'll do something like crime intervention because we think we're criminals. As though that is an actual intelligent scientific statement. So what I'm saying is, you already know what's wrong. These are mere manifestations of the fundamental relationship that we have with America and have always had. Now we can't talk about the people that have a lot of money. People say, well, look at their success. And we can get into the little debates on that. But the bottom line is the masses of our people are struggling every day at the lowest level. We're living at the bottom of life in America. And so we have to decide: can we just, as I say, can we just fix the juvenile justice system? What are you talking about? Look at the entire so-called criminal justice system. It's insane. It is geared to make sure, just like it was when we came out of so-called slavery. Well, when we allegedly came out of slavery, when the black codes were passed, there were crimes that black people were only guilty of, like vagrancy. So you and I both know when Billy Bob goes to the school or the little church and kills up 25 children, they say, oh my God, what happened to Billy Bob?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

He was he was just a good boy that I don't know what happened. Oh, he was always quiet. He was a nice guy. Now here come Dante. He done bipped the window. This is the problem. These thugs, these gangsters, we got to stop them. We don't want to give them a job. And we don't want to help them to find a way to have their own money through a business. We don't want to do anything. We want them to go away. And in California, we're willing to pay as much as 150,000 years for one prisoner per year. Rather than put 150,000 into uh the education of a child or the support for a child. And by the time you get to third grade and you can't read, you cook just about. So you're living out your life on the street, you're dropping out of school, you can't read by the ninth grade, and then you can't therefore apply for a job, and it goes on, and you don't want one because by now there's nothing, and there's not even a good dope thing to get into anymore. You know what I'm saying? It ain't no money like back in the day. That day is over. You gotta be Elon Musk to get that free money. But anyway, the point I'm making is we have so many issues that anything you want to do, however, you have to approach the issue as you understand that it is a problem and that it can only be addressed in the context of everything else. It's like people that go on, what I always say, go under the bridge and give somebody a sandwich, as if this is addressing a problem. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:25

I mean, really, and they think, well, I I go in, you know, every day I go into I feed the homeless, really. Have you thought about the fact that they're homeless? You know what I'm saying? You give them a sandwich, really. Or you're gonna you're gonna organize young people to be organizers and you're gonna get nonprofit money for that. Form all these little bullshit nonprofit organizations that do nothing but sit around and talk to each other and pretend they got some kind of black thing, celebrate. We got so many festivals. We had a lake festival going on here, not today, what's going on? We had it Juneteenth, all these different festivals, and the Negroes celebrating the 4th of July. Right. I believe I would really have to kill a person if I saw a winning with a flag. I really would. And we have this notion that, well, this is our country too, really. Yeah. How is it your country? And what way is it your country? You ain't got no land here. They took away your language, you don't even know what it was. Took away your name, took away your song, your dance, your whole culture. We invented ourselves generation upon generation. We survived, we're brilliant. We probably, as Huey Newton said, we may have evolved to become a superior people, but we definitely don't have a country. Right. Right. And if you think this is your country, we're gonna have to take you to some type of mental health place where you can begin to discuss reality versus fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:57

Yeah, I think there's there's a lot of people that um, like in terms of black folks, that really don't know what we should feel when we we look at ourselves against the global landscape, right? I know that the the Panther Party was against the Vietnam War. Um, and but as it relates to Iran and uh Israel and things happened in Africa, like what is what is our connection to the broader global picture, uh politically and otherwise?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:37

Now the same enemy.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

The United States of America, also known as an empire. It's the only empire that ever really existed because the Roman Empire was in a confined place because they didn't know the rest of the world. So Rome was whatever it was, it controlled the Roman Empire. Then it became the Roman Catholic Church that nobody seems to notice. But anyway, so they have, you know, they had what they had, but they didn't have the known world, okay, because the world wasn't known per se. But this country is pretty much in control of everything. Now, I look at Venezuela and uh uh Iran as two examples. Now, what what do they have in common? Well, they got two things. The United States hates them, and they have oil. Like Moamar Gaddafi had oil before Obama and Hillary Clinton killed him. So they represent one, some money that we want, that meaning America wants, and they represent a problem because they don't want to be friendly, because they have their own country. Now, when it comes to Iran, we have forgotten the whole connection that we directly have with Iran. What is it? Well, let's just go back to the era of Jimmy Carter, and the Shah of Iran was run out of Iran because he was stealing from the people, selling oil to the United States, and the U.S. just loved him. So the theory was he had cancer or something, he was in the United States. So the Iranian students and real intellectuals and others got together and said, we are taking over the American embassy, and you will get we'll release these people when you send the Shah back here. In the meantime, they had a spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in Paris. So they said, we want to have a uh, we want to have a uh, we have to take over this embassy. And they took it over for what, almost a year, if not more. And Carter was desperate because he was running for office, and Ronald Reagan was in the wing saying, you know, I'm running against Carter. Carter can't resolve this problem. These people are controlled of all these American workers at the embassy. This is embarrassing. And everybody's like, down with Carter. Carter said, Well, I gotta make a move. So he sends a bunch of Black Hawk helicopters into where the embassy is, and they fail, they get shot down. But in the meantime, the revolutionaries, we could say that the people who are taking over the embassy, they bring back the Ayatollah. And this is all happening so fast, it'll make your head spin. And the Ayatollah uh betrays them because they were not going to have an Islamic state. They were gonna have a just a uh secular state, but with a spiritual leader who would be in the Ayatollah. But they flipped it into a very hardcore Islamic state. But in the meantime, the Ayatollah is in a deal with Ronald Reagan to buy guns from America, and Ronald Reagan is selling guns, he becomes the president to the goddamn Ayatollah, the very architect of the existing scheme. And what does he do with the money he gets from the Ayatollah for the guns he sold? Uh, you ask. Well, I'll answer your question. He finances a group called the Contras, who were trying to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, because the Sandinistas had taken over left-wing hardcore communist Sandinistas had taken over Nicaragua, and these people formed something called the Contras. And they were ousted and they were living in Honduras or wherever they were living. Now, I'm getting to us now in a minute. A very direct, very direct relationship. And the Contras needed money, but the United States Congress said we're not financing these rogue people anymore. But Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and a couple of other people, so they started filtering money to the Contras. And they said, we gotta get some more money for these people. And they said, Well, hell, I know what we can do. I know what we can do. We're here in Honduras. You got all this cocaine in Colombia and Bolivia and so forth. We could sell this cocaine to finance, further finance the Contras. You have to Iran Contra hearings if you look it up. And where does that money go? Ain't nobody buying cocaine. Black people smoking weed. Cocaine is the drug of the rich and famous, except when it becomes available at a low, low, low rate. And all you have to do is find a consumer base. And so we get to the city of Los Angeles, Oakland too, all these Hondurans who are really Contras, they got all this cocaine, they can sell it, but it ain't selling fast enough, so you got to find a way to cook it, cook it, cook it so you can sell it because people get hooked on it faster and faster and faster. And now it's crack. This came from Iran Contra. This came from the Americas' support and involvement in the very scheme that they're now calling the devil. So what worse could have happened to us since slavery than the total immersion of black communities with cocaine? Whether it's crack, free basin, doesn't matter, it's cocaine. We ain't got no ships. Last ship we had was Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line and never sailed. We don't go down to Columbia, we ain't got no planes, we ain't got nothing. How did this shit get in Miami and LA and all over America into the black community? Let's just think about it. Contact the CIA, and maybe you'll understand why we should be angry about just about everything. How you can see these white European Jews coming into Palestine where Jews had already lived, as well as others, Arabs, Jews, whoever, for years, thousands of years, forming gangs supported by the CIA, supported by the British, because you don't want all those Jews in America, and they're looking for a home that is their home, and the Bible somewhere says the Balfour Declaration says they have a biblical right to have that land, and they oust and destroyed the Palestinians. Now the Black Panther Party said we are on common ground with the Palestinian people, the PLO, the PFLP, and so forth. And I remain on common ground. Now we are watching thousands and thousands and thousands of Palestinians being wiped out and not realizing that we are all connected to this empire. And that enemy of my enemy is my friend. And we need friends because we're a minority. I need to know that the Palestinians are my friend because they got a lot more than we do. They have land, even if it is crushed up and destroyed, just about. Still living like slaves on the cotton farm. They are. And so these people have common ground with us. They are our brothers and sisters in struggle. And we need to all find a way to be united, but we have to first unite black people in the main so that we don't elect these simpletons who are there, as you say, who co-op our name and then move in and benefit what we call left opportunists. Left opportunists. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:30

Yeah. Wow. This has been great, Elaine. Uh, I think you you put it down, you put down some good information. It's a lot that people can take away from this. Um, you know, we've we've got to organize. That's the takeaway. We've got to organize and we got to find out like what we got to analyze this thing correctly about what our issues are. Um, guys, this was another episode. Tune in for episode three. Uh, and we're gonna go deeper into some other things. And uh, y'all know Elaine, like don't be out here acting crazy because she gon' she gonna get you. And so until next time, all power to the people. All power to the people.