Welcome to another episode of Civic Cipher. I am your host, Ramsey's job.
He is Ramsey's job. I am honored and privileged to work with him. I am q war. But I need to say that because I'm pretty lucky to, you know, share the airways with this gentleman as often as I'm allowed to so, And that is just thought I would say that out loud.
I appreciate, thank you. I feel the same way. But for you listening to us, we have another good show in store for you today, not as heavy as some that's a good thing around here, and so stick around. We have a lot to talk about. We are going to be getting you caught up on some stories in
the news. We're just gonna kind of do some quick hits because oftentimes on the show we end up complaining about the lack of time and the plethora of stories that are relevant to black and brown people and marginalized people in this country. And so we're gonna talk about some of the bigger stories that have been in the news cycle. We're also going to spend some time discussing ways that white supremacy harms white people.
Wow.
Yeah, you might think it's not your problem, but it is White supremacy is not good for anybody. No supremacy is good for anybody. We're all here together, okay, So we're definitely going to spend some time talking about that. I do want to welcome a new sponsor to the show. You'll hear a bit more about them a little later. But Thenknown Unknown Fashion House is joining our list of sponsors for the show, so we want to salute them, and again we hear a bit more about them later
on today. But first and foremost, let's discuss some ebony excellence, shall we wi shall So this week's Ebny Excellence is sponsored by Hip Hop Weekly Media, and I'll be reading from that grapejuice dot net all right. Just weeks after making headlines for crushing King of Rock and Roll Elvis Presley's record for most gold certified songs among male vocalist, Chris Brown has logged in the Recording Industry Association of America's history books for planting R and B's flag and
yet another uncharted territory. Believe it or not, only eight acts in the history of recorded music can boast having scored twenty or more multi platinum singles in America over their careers. The RIA qualifies multi platinum as two million or more sold in the United States and writing. Chris, with exactly twenty to his credit, is the only male singer in the group. Among all acts, his placement follows Lil Wayne, Beyonce, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Eminem Drake, and Rihanna.
This means that he unseated Elvis, I think in the third category now, which I think is special because Elvis, for many of you who don't know this, became popular for performing black music, and for Elvis to be the king of rock and roll has often been considered an affront or a whitewashing of what is indeed black history. You know. That's not to say that he wasn't insanely popular or anything like that, but that's like, that's like calling Eminem the King of.
Rapid not to say that he wasn't talented exactly, he.
Was popular talented, That's the word I was trying to say. So absolutely so, this is something that feels definitely like a qualifies for ebony excellence. So out to Chris bra for Breezy. All right, let's get to the news. All right, Like I said, it's not all heavy stuff.
Yeah, it's a it's an entertaining space that we're in sometimes sometimes, you know, and this is definitely one of those weeks.
Yeah. So, first and foremost Fox News. Fox News had to settle with dominion voting systems for seven hundred and eighty seven and a half million dollars, and I.
You had something, I have plenty I want you to finish.
So you know, in the second half of the show, we're going to talk about how white supremacy affects white people. Right, But if you think about it, here's a great example right here. Fox has occupied the far right, conservative me media facet of this country. There's some others, but they're much much smaller than Fox. And ever since Obama was
elected to office, Fox has moved further right. Now, to anybody that can see with their eyes here with their ears and has a thinking brain, we can see that Fox was responding to a facet of this country, or vice versa, that was responded to Obama's blackness, right, not Obama's.
Democratic Party routes, not Obama's politics.
Politics, that's the word I'm trying to say. So that has culminated in this lawsuit is a direct lineage there right now. Again, to folks looking at this, they're just like, Okay, well Fox News had some bad information, they got held accountable, whatever, That's not what we're talking about here. Indeed, Fox News knowingly went on the air with stuff that wasn't credible. They pushed lies about this company, and they push lies about the election.
Now ramses settling. It's not an admission of guilt.
I'm glad you brought that up, because here's what would have happened. Here's how far gone Fox viewers are now. Fox people that watch Fox are never gonna watch Civic Cipher are never going to listen to Civic Cipher.
And if they do, they're going to jump into comments and trash us.
Yeah, and that's okay. Listen, man, we pulled from reputable sources here best you can do, right, and also we subscribe to the actual reality, actual shared reality that it includes all of the facts. But I'm glad you brought that up. So here's what happens no matter what. Here's here's the effects of white supremacy on white people. Okay, we're in this example. Will say that a huge base of Fox's viewership is white folks. Oftentimes their male oftentimes.
Conservative so and then hyperconservative black folks benefit from But that's of such a tiny number, very very tiny. I'm just relative to the audience. It's because it's beneficial to them in some way, not even personal actually believe indeed the things that are being said.
So here's what happens. Dominion biles a suit against Fox News, and they have all the receipts as we now know. Anybody that doesn't watch Fox News knows this. Anybody that does watch Fox News has no idea because Fox hasn't even mentioned this. Right, Dominion has all the receipts that shows that Fox knew that what they were saying was false, went on the air with it anyway because they didn't want to lose their viewership. Right, So they're tangled in.
It's like a snake eating its own tail. Right. So, had that trial played out, then Fox viewers would have assumed, in my estimation, the same way they assumed when all of the court cases that Donald Trump was involved in during the election, lie stuff that he was trying to get off, that all of these judges are somehow corrupt and they're liberal, they're woke, and all this sort of stuff, and that Fox would have not got a fair trial there.
It's political, it's a witch hunt, blah blah blah. So had they gone to court and had to pay as a result of that, that's what their viewers would have taken from it. Fox. However, settling that splits the difference. So they don't have to pay one point six, which is what they were being sued for, but critically they have to pay something, and that paying of something is
an admission. Now, if it was a dollar, if it was five million dollars something, that was just like, you know, not really newsworthy.
It's seven hundred eighty seven million.
Dollars and a half. Don't forget that extra five hundred thousand. So that is not nothing. That's called consequences. Now, is it what we would have liked to have seen.
But we did? I don't know.
Well that's that.
I'm said, that's right, because listen, man, what can we do for y'all to not take all those receipts and show them the people over three quarters of a billion?
Run it all right? Run that?
So, yeah, man, that is the settlement. The settlement amount says more than the receipts would have sure, because you're absolutely right. Their base, which has shown that they cannot be shaken, would have called it all nonsense, all of which hunt all made up, all fakeness exactly.
Now we're going to get to their base. You hang on, So watch this. What we would have wanted I think me and Q are people that are kind of in the media space. You know, we would have wanted some accountability because it's not right to outlight lie to people for ratings. That's not the reason that we're in this space. I know that much. You know, when we tell hard truths, we do it. We'd have to eat crow, We have to apologize if we make a mistake on the show.
We come on the next week and we say it on the same show with the same energy that officer was not wrong officer and read his name. You know, we've done that on the show, right. So it stands the reason that at least we would hold other journalists to that same standard. So we would have hoped that this would have sank that shit, you know what I mean, or change the culture or whatever. We don't mind if
you're a conservative, but don't lie and don't fear monger. Right, you can have your views, you can have your beliefs. But if they're based in a shared reality, then there's the potential to make progress. If they are not, then you are making it harder for us and for your white conservative viewer base, and they just don't know it yet because you're interested in short term profit. But here's another little silver lining in addition to that settlement amount.
Tucker Carlson was fired. Now I mentioned that we would talk about their base, right, Fox's base. Guess what they started calling Fox News after Tucker Carlson was fired woke. It's it's you you never can win with. And I saw this in a mad magazine one time. They said, you can't ever win with a bigot, right, they will. They will bend reality like Neo and the Matrix. It's the wildest thing. So that's intense, mad magazine. Fox being
woke isn't that crazy. So let's let's go. So Tucker Carlson, for those that don't know, is a He's the most popular extreme right media personality.
Are you going to leave out white supremacist? Know? I was waiting for you to throw that.
He is.
I per bigoted?
Yeah, very very like if you want to, if you if you were in the mood to get angry.
Extreme, maga, sensationalist.
But I will say this, in his time slot, Tucker Carlson has been number one the vast majority of the time vast It would be a rare, rare, instant instance
where he would be number two. Now, Tucker Carlson, just so you know, existed in a time slot and in a space where if you take the entire news cable news media landscape and you look at everything that's out there, you have some media companies that lean a little bit more left, some of course, lean a little bit right, and then you have some that are more or less kind of center. In politically speaking, there are a lot of media companies that lean left, couple that are centered,
and really it's just Fox on the right. And so if you take the country's population viewing population, okay, and you assume a fifty to fifty split, which isn't true, but you assume a fifty to fifty split, fifty percent of the people are going to consume media news media that is conservative leaning. Fifty percent is going to consume media that is what I say, conservative leaning, and then
liberal leaning right. You have to then split the fifty percent that's leaning liberal among six news channels news companies, and then the other fifty percent you give it all the Fox. And so this is kind of the phenomenon that has allowed Tucker, Carlson and Fox to take up such so much of the oxygen in that space.
That paints a very synonymous picture with the way that they vote as well the way that they show up right there. They are a monolith. They do show up with a singular voice representing a singular cause in mass and we are splintered in every direction that you can imagine, kind of cannibalizing each other over minuscule issues with very very low impact, while they, you know, swarm behind their movement and collectively support it. That part is kind of admirable.
They are definitely organized, and they have no problem exploiting the gaps and there's no shame, and there is no problem on their end with cheating, rewriting the rules and real time moving the goalpost, anything.
Like that would depend in that part, and I want a.
Blind eye to it. No, let's do it now, come on.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was recently discovered to be accepting gifts or money things that would appear to be bribes from hyper wealthy friends of his. Once upon a time in US history, like when we were teenagers, that would have been like lead the news cycle scandal, Like a Supreme Court justice accepting gifts would have really like flip the country on its head, and people it would have been, you know, blown away. You know, it didn't
even make the ticker. Once upon a time, someone saying just grab them by the you guys know the rest would have instantly disqualified them from consideration to sit in the highest seat in this land. That video came out during his campaign, not after he was present anyone, and then he won. Things like that would have caused his own party to insist that he stepped down. You got to resign, man, This is going to make us look too bad our country. There's a such thing as reaching
new heights. And then there's what's happened to us so divided in extreme and our political beliefs that a very very large chunk of our humanity has just dissolved. You are with us or against us. There is no nuance, There is no middle. So you said that there's some that are center. They're right, it's just they're so far. Fox are so far right that normal rights seems center. Yeah,
and it pulls the left more towards the right too. Yeah. Weird, it's it's what we're going through with our current administration.
Exactly.
All these things that we thought would happen for people who look faint, love, pray, believe like us didn't happen because even the quote unquote left have veered right to center.
So now, uh, this is a great aperture into the effects of white supremacy on white people, because indeed, Fox News has lied to their audience. Fox News under reports stories that they need to know about and or over represents things that excite them right under the guise of being a news or a journalistic you know, enterprise or something like that, and they suffer as a result of it. And I think it's illustrated in their response to the
Tucker Carlson firing because again them calling Fox woke. You know, woke is like this bad word on the right. We've talked about this on the show before, and strangely enough, as you mentioned, woke is what we would consider just kind of center left, and Fox News being called woke goes to show you just how skewed these people's perception of reality has become so again the effects of white supremacy,
they don't necessarily always benefit all white people all the time. Now, some of you could make an argument that some of this is capitalism. We often make that argument here, but I think that this is kind of poking its head here and there. So let's move on to some other stories. Kim Potter, the officer convicted of killing Dante Wright, was released from prison after serving sixteen months of a two year sentence.
The officer convicted, yeah, of killing Dante's dead, correct, Yeah, He's dead forever. And then the jury said, yes, she did it and she was wrong, yep. And then she served sixteen months in.
Prison, and then she's serving arrest on house arrest. She's at home right now. I mean, we don't even have to go in. You know exactly how we feel about that. That can just be the headline. Let's move on something something that you do need to know about. President Biden formally announced his candidacy for president. He's seeking a second term. Terrifying, and so it looks like it's going to be him versus Donald Trump again, because terrify, These are the best
two man. Listen terrifying. Now now Trump is under he's he has to go to court for a rape trial now too. That's that was awesome in the news this week, not just the the finance stuff. What is what is that thing that start mean Daniels stuff. He's also has like a rape trial he's dealing with too, And he's just in the news so much for going to court that it didn't even make headlines. But look it up at Sarah Promis and then little footnote just because of time,
not because it's an actual footnote. Phil Jackson, Phil Jackson is give folks a brief overview of Phil Jackson.
Phil Jackson, for those of you who are not sports fans, was the coach of the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls and then the Shaq and Kobe era Los Angeles Lakers. One of the most one of the winningest coaches in the history of sports, and all of his fame, wealth, and notoriety is tied directly to the success of historically talented black men that Phil Jackson.
He said that he hasn't watched an NBA game since twenty twenty because of BLM logos and slogans, and he thinks games shouldn't be political. Now, I do want to mention that you and I have a much longer conversation about Phil Jackson that can be found on the Black Information Network Daily podcast. I implore you to check it out, and you can find it on any podcast app and it should be one of the recent episodes, depending on
when you're hearing this. But suffice it to say for now that non black people telling Black people how to protest is a slap in the face. Non black people telling Black people how long change should take is a slap in the face. Shout out to James Baldwin for educating us the great ancestor that he is. And I think that it bears mentioning that a person who can be this close to Black people for such a long time for him to still be able to harbor feelings
like this. This, This is the sort of person that looks at a Colin Kaepernick and says he shouldn't be doing that here, not accounting for the fact that Kaepernick and everybody who is black, our whole lives are political, and everybody who doesn't work in sports.
Yeah, through that lens, Yes, our whole lives are political, but that political is a very loaded word when used in that context. You know, political use to describe something that's black. They don't cry no politics when they fly the flag and march out the military say that. They cry political when you say stuff like black lives matter. So let's be clear on what they mean when they say that.
So now you're all caught up.