Native Lampod is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Reason Choice Media. Welcome home, everybody, this is your favorite politics and culture podcast, Native Lampod coming at.
You with episode four.
We are your hosts Angela Rae, Tiffany Cross, and Andrew Gillum. And as you know, we keep it real because what else can you keep?
What's up everybody? What's up you guys?
What's good? What's good?
Everybody? As usual.
I want to give a quick shout out to the Gathering Spot broadcasting live from the Gathering Spot. So thanks, thanks to you guys for partnering with Native Lampodana.
Andrew and tiff I miss you guys. It's been too long. I'm gonna see you in person next week. I'm excited about that.
I was gonna say, let's get together in person time. I think we would flow better when we're in the same room. We can.
Energy send you from here, put hands on it, okay and required.
But here's what we need the people to do in the meantime until we get back together, and that is we want you all to please make sure you are subscribing to Native lampid. You are downloading every single episode and you're reviewing the show.
We can take a hater remark here and there, but we mostly want to.
Keep the love, okay, everybody, So I gotta say, it's crazy how much has happened since we last got together. Joe Biden said he's ready to shut down the border. All the while, the House Committee on Homeland Security is teeing up an impeachment of the DHS Secretary of New Yorkis cities are reeling with the response to migrants, and residents are filling the pinch of being left behind. Donald Trump has designated Tim Sick and Tire Scott as the head of White Outreach.
Oh my bad, My bad.
It's supposed to be black outreach, but it probably should have been white either way. He's thinking there's a play for the blackmail vote on today.
Those are my bars.
Tip, You're not the only one, but I think this is not exactly the case. Meg the Stallion hissed that Nikki and send her into a spiral of online bullying for seventy two hours in counting.
Is that how we honor in hip hop fifty?
I don't know you've been following this for seventy two I.
Mean the people have said, speaking of hip hop, fifty K Solo said, your mom's in my business.
She's in my business.
I wonder what he would say about the NSA being in the business. So we can talk a little bit about that too. And it wouldn't be Home without our listeners and viewers. So we are doing Q and A throughout this episode to create even more of a conversation. And we even have some inspiration from a faithful listener that's a surprise, so make sure you stay tuned. Also today my governor and my co host, my brother Andrew Gillam, is sharing his very courageous story. You do not want
to miss this, y'all. This is episode for a welcome home. Okay. So from Kamala Harris's viral moment, do not come to the Biden administrations and initial proposal that was to restore humanity and American values to our immigration system, Joe's taking a hard turn to the right.
Joe Biden is now saying this not.
Biller the law today.
I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.
And Congress needs to get it done.
Okay.
So, as you all know, there is a lot going on with our community in particularly excuse me, in particular with immigration.
I think we're real divided.
We got a lot of pushback, even from the audience of Native lampod Last week. We were joking about New Hampshire, like what New Hampshire got to do with border security? But folks are like, actually a whole lot there are differing opinions here, and apparently, y'all we're not necessarily in lockstep with the culture. So I would like to have
y'all weigh in here. And I'm definitely not in lockstep but what Biden's talking about, and I'm even more definitely not in lockstep with what Donald Trump has said about the border.
So hey, aint, y'all what you got?
Yeah, I gotta tell you, angel I was really disappointed with a lot of the comments. They were very anti immigrant, and I just want to kick us off and is having this conversation by saying, listen, this country has not been kind to any community of color and weaponizing communities of color against each other. That is the devil's work,
and I just don't want us to do that. I think there are legitimate questions around the strain that immigration places on us from a federal policy, especially to a state.
And local government.
I actually I don't think we were really joking around New Hampshire, because it was a legitimate question, what is the huge immigration policy that would be number two that most New Hampshire states were voting on, particularly when that state is nearly ninety four percent white. So I think those were legitimate questions. I think the consistent comment in a lot of from a lot of our viewers was this notion that immigration takes away resources from black communities.
And I just want to say that is not true. Undocumented immigrants pay more than eleven billion dollars in taxes every year. Undocumented immigrants are not really eligible for a lot of federal benefits, and some of the labor shortages that we see in our community would have happened anyway. That is not You have to consider things like automation and the way the economy is going that is not
undocumented immigrants taking away from you. I understand that I'm speaking as someone who hasn't worked on this policy, but Andrew, you, I mean, you were a mayor, you were running to run a state. I'm really curious for you because you look at mayors like Eric Adams and what's happening in New York, what's happening in Chicago with these you know, immigrants getting dropped off? What is I don't want us to lose the humanity in all of this, but what
is like common sense immigration solutions? And do these folks have a point for being so upset about it?
You set it up well, Angela, and it is a real broad conversation. But I want to go back to the premise, which was Biden's talking point of I'm going to close the border. The American borders have always been closed. Let's reject the Republican talking points. There is always been a process for legal entry and asylum entry and a whole bunch of other designations we are not going to go through on this show. But there have always been processes in place by which people legally enter this country.
That's number one. Don't accept the Republican talking point and frame on this frame this thing to what it is in real life. To people who are you know, saying I agree with Trump and the Republicans, these folks who taking jobs. I am not going to tell you to betray your very beautiful twenty twenty vision seeing eyes because I know from experiencing my own community, and I heard
about it on the trail and otherwise. Jobs. At one time I could drive past and see black folk doing I've experienced it's largely in the blue collar sector where it's most visible when you're driving past and they're construction workers on the street, and they are folks who are doing the traffic, you know, the road repairs and all that kind of stuff. There used to be a lot more black men when I was growing up and where I live, and folks have noticed that the faces have
shipped have changed in that y'all. This is no different than what folks up in the Northeast during the still boom and industrial the Irish folks was coming in to replace the good white man. If you were in Detroit, Michigan working for Henry Ford, and he bought in Middle Easterners, which is why it's the largest concentration of Middle Easterners in the world outside of the Middle East is in Detroit. He bought them because he didn't want to shut the
factories down during the summer. It was molding hot, and he didn't want to have to take the workers off the line. He wanted to continue to produce. So what did he do. He got planes and boats, well not planes but ships, and bought over Middle Easterners who now are still huge constituency parts of Detroit and Michigan and all around. Our Congresswoman Rashida till Alive could tell us about that. But again, there was some replacement that was
happening for a corporate economic need. In my state of Florida, we have a lot of immigrants who do a lot of the farming grapefruits and oranges and so on and so forth, and those are tending to be around the people. But if an employer a company is prepared and willing and able to give away the work to workers who are willing to do it at either half the cost or off the books, or for a cash trade rather than whatever, then there's always going to be a market
for people who are going to do it less. And I think if we were serious about real immigration reform, we would put the emphasis on a national comprehensive solution that is led by cracking down on the economic powers of this country who are manipulating, using benefiting from the hard labor of folks, but they're not being paid with their worth and they're making the trade off. But displacing
a whole different set of people. But to your point, Tiffany, at the local level, these folks pay taxes that they don't get tax refunds for. And my state, where we don't have a property, we have a property tax, but we don't have a state income tax. The large percentage of taxes are collected through sales. So if you go and buy milk and eggs and groceries and you're paying the text of the gas station, you're contributing to Florida's
tax base in a regressive way. I might add, but you're paying into the system and you're not taking from it. I know you're never gonna believe that these folks are not here and replacing you, But the truth is they're here making contributions and are not getting the resources that they would otherwise receive, and we end up at the local level paying the huge lion's share of burden of cost here because the federal government isn't willing to do anything solve the problem by fixing the rules.
Well, I'm key, you're saying, but you're saying that we paid the burden of cost, and I think that's what a lot of the people who are leaving these comments suggesting that it is a strain on our resources.
Immigrants are and they're paying more. And by the way, these folks aren't wrong that they're seeing the bill because they see their taxes go up and they make the contribution. Well, y'alling. We're paying at the local level to solve an immigration and issue, more than Donald Trump paid in the entirety before becoming president of the United States or since, and taxes working folks have paid more than the wealthy class
and taking care of this problem. They give us lip service, but they don't give us no green you to help us through the Issuas.
You've reference the comments, I do want to get into the comments because this is a safe place for our audience, our listeners. So this is from Dina in New York, where we know there's also a migrant crisis that they're actively trying to solve. Dina says, how do we own the conversation surrounding the southern border? Black people in my community feel like Trump would handle the alleged crisis better
than Biden. Also, I'm extremely concerned that Biden will sign a bad deal to appease a voting block that will not vote for him anyway. I believe immigration reform is desperately needed, but this hardline position held by right wing Republicans will put us right back where we were prior to the Civil Rights movement, only allowing Caucasians into this country. I would love to hear your views on this. I love this question from Dina. I think she spot on.
This is exactly why I started with Biden's plan today. It is a hard right turn towards right wing Republicans that are never going to vote for him, and he's abandoning potentially some of his base.
TIF you had an excellent point before.
We got on today about why you thought he actually is not making the pivot to right wing Republicans.
What did you say, Tip.
And why that he's not making it? Well, I don't know what did I say.
You were talking about how you think he actually is trying to appease the base because to the point, we have black folks in our comments who actually agree with some of what Joe Biden has done.
Oh yeah, yeah.
So the different is I think both parties are right, but both parties are doing this by weaponizing communities of color against each other. Look, Republicans do not have any interest in protecting black men and their pathway to you know, being construction workers or black women in their pathway. But they're very strategic and targeting black men with that message, and so you hear a lot of people parroting those same talking points, which something that that you know was
going to happen anyway. My only point is that immigrants, undocumented immigrants even are not stealing those levels that level of resource from our community. It's just not true. Study after study, from the from the Pew Research Center to the acl you has shown that there's not some sort
of resource stuff going on. Angel I actually had a question for you though, because a lot of people don't know your policy background, but you actually started on Capitol Hill working on Homeland security for mister Bennie Thompson, who, as we know, yeah, when they were in the majority,
chaired the Homeland Security Committee. So I do wonder when we talk about a federal immigration policy, what could that look like, because then you get into the issue of states' rights and you know, usurping some of these local governments. So I don't know the solution, but I know I would like to take away that rhetoric of we're stealing, you know, the brown folks are stealing from us, because that's the devil's work.
It is the devil's work. Tip. I will say a couple of things.
One is, I think that we often forget that black people are immigrants too, and oftentimes, like I don't know if you all remember, of course, you remember the very traumatic photo we saw that took us back to slavery, when you saw that white border patrol officer on a horse almost cracking a whip on a Haitian migrant, right like, we have to remember our humanity first. I also and shout out to the indigenous community who've been so kind,
embracing and talking to us about this pod. These borders are artificially created, right Like, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be immigration policy, but we could. We putting up borders on land that wasn't theirs to begin with. You're putting up borders on stolen land, which is a mind boob. I'm not gonna say the cussword, but y'all know what I'm thinking. It's really like very triggering and traumatizing and
annoying to me. White folks can come in here and blend in and our folks stand out like sore thumbs, and we forget about it. So I would say to the people who at home, you know they will make a special exception for their girlfriend or their side piece, or their nanny or their cleaning lady. How about Milangya or your first lady, right like all of these other people, you'll make.
Except at the Einstein visa listen for some unknown talent. We have yet to discuss trying to figure out her unknown talent. Where is that she was able to leap frog over everybody. Here's that Ted talk and get this Einstein visa listen.
But they were fine with that.
Listen.
But from the very beginning, Congressman Thompson put out border principles, standards that we should be governing by legislation that we should be pushing. It's not just visas for folks that want to work in tech companies. You should care about the people who need work permits, who are picking fruit and repairing toilets and cleaning floors like we should be humane in our approach to our border security, which is why I'm so troubled by the direction that the Biden
administration is now taking. I will say it is also immensely troubling, and I'm sure that part of his strategy is including this to think that the Republican Party is impeaching Secretary Mayorcis for not enforcing border policy. And on top of that, Joe Biden has now said, Okay, fine, let's go with your plan, but they're not going to go for it because Donald Trump ain't about to let them go rogue and give Joe Biden this alleged win. I do want to pivot here, Andrew, and come back
to you. There was a Chicago City Council meeting on Chicago being a sanctuary city, and an Alderman spoke up in this meeting. I want us to roll that clip because I think, again, your perspective on local policy here is really important.
The reason I have brought this with some of my colleagues to the floor is not to eliminate Chicago as a sanctuary city.
But what it is is.
To find some kind of compromise and threshold to stop the bleeding that we're undertaking right now. When you look at what the city is dealing with, we're spending when we had twelve thousand migrants, we were spending thirty one million dollars a month at that time. We have twenty thousand migrants today, So what is the price tag on that now? And we can't get solid answers to what is costing us right now?
Y'all don't care what y'all trying to find.
Y'all trying to find housing.
For the for for for Venice, for for Venezuelans, for the Latinos, for all that, y'all, y'all keep it sending them over here when that needs to go back, y'all one time, y'all sent ice there, Ice need to come after.
There's prostitution. There's prostitution that's behind there's prostitution that's behind all of these police districts.
I love that Streeterville as prostitution right up the street.
I mean, it's it's it's it's it's a it's.
A disrespect, that's real. I don't like it. No, no, no, no, let me I hate it. All of us have to not like it. But the truth is this is where we create the way for Republicans to come in and go after very discreet sets of voters. We talked about this before. They don't need everybody, they don't even need most of everybody. They just need a few And so this is the kind of thing. We can't tell these folks to disbelieve their lying eyes. Their lived experience is
gonna be what it is, but very quickly one. This thing is based in a very racist and also separatists otherising American tradition of the elite and corporate interests finding and figuring out a way to keep us separate, divided, and conquered. When the union started to peep up during the early beginnings of the industrial complex and say, listen, these were white men. We're dying here. We need work hours that respect us, we need a weekend, we need
to pay that, they went and did that. What did the union bosses do, They saytiated them as best they could so they didn't have to kill them. Outside of the mills where they were blocking the entrances of them importing more cheap labor and to replace them, they blocked them.
And then they came up with a strata system. What they started giving these folks titles but doing the same work on the floor, so that the new title people who didn't even make more with the new title, they still made the same amount that everybody else did, but it created strata so that they could never come together and do this thing as a as a as a unit. So this has been an intention from the very beginning, y'all. Divide and conquer is the name of the game, and
the writers of the rules are these corporate interests. But as Angela and Tivity both said, the devil is a lie. But not only is the devil a lie, or this is the devil's work, it is also a lie that immigrants are not paying their fair share. But nobody's going to believe that. As a fact, they pay more than their fair share, therefore contribute more to the system than they take from Hate me, love me, don't have an opinion, it's a fact. The other thing, the other rising, is
a way to divide. And this whole thing, y'all, goes back to the very beginning, and it's divide and conquer. So long as they keep us thinking that the enemy is you and me, this and this, then we ain't never paying attention to how much the corporate board made.
I think that's such a I want to punctuate everything Andrew just said, because I think that's such an important point. I also want to make the point that Angela spoke about nine percent of Black Americans have a foreign born parent that their parent was also an immigrant, and one out of ten black people living in the United States is considered an immigrant as well. So those are all things to keep in mind.
But y'all also hit on the fact that we cannot ignore the racism that is steeped in our immigration policy. In Florida, we had wetfoot dry foot. If you were wet foot, it meant you came on a boat from Cuba. If you were dryfoot, it meant you. And they would let the boats that were coming from Cuba in and onto shore, they'd become dryfood Haitian boats. They wouldn't let them in the port. They turn them around in the sea so they couldn't get drift foot and send them
right back to Haiti. Everybody knows it. Why were there two different policies, didn't make sense. It's steeped in racism.
Well, I just think it's an important thing to point out to our audience that a lot of the reasons why these people are migrating to the US is because of how US policy has impacted their native countries. We have had an adverse impact on so many of these countries. Because if it's something that's good for ten percent of the people in the United States but bad for ninety percent of a population, guess what the United States does.
They proceed accordingly, and they prioritize our interest over everyone else. So before we shun people and lose our humanity and look at somebody trying to cross over a razor wire at the southern border with their child and their arms and watching them drown, just think about how you would like to be treated, and never lose sight that these are human beings that we are talking to under the most desperate of circumstances, trying to find a better life.
And by the way, we leave the master's tools with the master. We are on the same team, and we don't have the same vision. Our vision is that everybody out of work, make a good way for themselves, have opportunity to be able to produce, and that's it. The corporate agenda is not that. Yes, So the sides are not Americans versus internationals who want to come in and
take our things. The sides are those who believe in humanity, the ability to work hard, play hard, get what it is they deserve, versus those who want to keep more money, more recent sources pocketed amongst their ten set of friends. Those are the sides.
And speaking of more money in order for us to ensure that we can keep this pot going and keep your listener questions coming in.
We're going to take a quick commercial break.
All right, Welcome back, everybody. Something that has been the subject of a lot of conversation in your group chats, maybe, but this week also in the media, is this narrative around the black male voting block, even that descriptor. I have challenges with I have to tell you. But the Washington Post had a really interesting read this week that essentially suggested that Biden is having trouble with black men voters. I have so many challenges and issues with this, Angela.
You know, we're in a group chat where we talk about this kind of thing a lot all the time, and I just think the media framing on this is wrong. There are black people are one of the most faithful Democratic voters, and we've already talked about we're not faithful to a political party. We're faithful to ourselves. We're voting in favor of harm reduction. But this notion that somehow we're going to lay the failure of Joe Biden at the feet of black folks, particularly black men. I have
an issue with it. I think there is a small sect of black men who vote Republican. They certainly don't represent the masses. And when the media writes about this, I just want to scream, because you know who the largest conservative voting bloc is, white men. Write about white men voting overwhelmingly for this president with ninety one indictments, who brags about grabbing women by their private parts, who got one, two, three baby mamas all up in the
White House. Right about that group of people because of their conservative beliefs, they are overwhelmingly voting for him. Write about the people who sit at the right hand of that power, white women who support this president. So I have a lot of issues to say about it. But Angela, I, because we had talked about this so aggressively at our group chat, I know you have some thoughts about it too, because we have to ask the question how do we
engage black men in these conversations? And I have to say Vice President Kamala Harris, I think has been doing a great job at that. It's not highly publicized, but I know she's had some black mail centric dinners, and I think it's wise of the administration to do that.
I will tell you that I do have a lot of thoughts. But we also have a question that's closely enough related to this from one of our listeners, Monica Williams.
Hey Native Land Podcast Spam. I wanted to kind of get your thoughts. I saw in a Black Enterprise article recently that stated that about fourteen to thirty percent of the black vote was seemingly leaning towards.
Donald Trump, which I thought was kind of a.
Curious stat and kind of wondering what your thoughts are on that, if that stat is in fact true, or if you feel that it's leaning more or black men are going towards Donald Trump versus Black women, or kind of what that looks like, and if that's the case, if there's anything that the Democratic Party can do to kind of stop the faucet from running.
Yeah.
I think we know right that there's a distinction between black women vote and black men vote, and it's still not significant enough to call as much attention to it as is called in the press every single cycle. It's not new to tips point. I do think that I believe that there's an alarm being sounded, and it should be. There should be no light between people of color and Democrats in terms of policy, but there has been traditionally
and it continues to be a problem. This all hands on deck approach to recruiting back a base that Democrats lost long ago, and I would like to see them keep that same energy to ensure that our voters don't leave when they don't feel heard, aren't seen, you know, feel ignored, feel like their policy desires are not heard. I also think, again I say this every week now, that we need to be really clear about what our
demands are and what our agenda is. Andrew, I want to come to you, and then I want to go to one other clip.
Black male voters need to be talked to like a target community, as they would what you call the independent lane center voter. That we're going to spend what six times the amount we would on a base voter trying to get out and say that we're their choice. Black folks are not a monolith. We say this often, but increasingly when it comes to economic strata. If you are not talking to me about more than a social program, but one that yes, allows everybody to survive. But I
need a thriving agenda. I want to see the agenda on a small black business, recruitment development, early seed investments, and then the kind of coverage and support that folks need. You know, Donald Trump, you need daddy. God is from his daddy. But institutions who are supposed to do that, our banks aren't lending to us. So what public policy are you going to produce that makes that door opened
and easier? During COVID, what black women were the fastest starters of new business, yet something like ninety seven percent of all startup capital was going to white men. Yeah, make it make sense. The policy isn't lining up. So don't bring me no Chitlin circuit mess and think I'm going to be impressed by it. We are not. We now want you to go further.
It is.
It is boilerplate to take care of basic human needs. Now I need you to tell me how in second and third generation college we're gonna thrive. What's that agenda? And so we've got to be willing to speak to it. And if we don't, if we keep thinking that the same three things are gonna motivate us civil rights paved the way, and we owe our ancestors a lot. We
understand that, and it is baked in the cake. But those talking points are not applying to an emerging voter black men being I think at the apex of it, who want more. Yeah, they want more, and they deserve more, just as we would give more if they were considered a swing voter.
Absolutely, And speaking of just that, there's a man named Keith Rivers who spoke at a Black Voters Matter town hall recently. I want to shout out Roland Martin who gave us access to this footage for this town hall that I actually moderated in South Carolina last Friday.
Let's take a listen.
We are a little city that is right about twenty miles from the Virginia line, and so all of our media comes out of Virginia. So North Carolina doesn't see us, and we don't see North Carolina, and everything around.
Us is rule.
Within twenty four hours of the sharp.
And verdict right ouf the George Floyd excuse me.
On April the twenty first, twenty twenty one, they shot a brother in the back of the head with the AR fifteen rifle fired thirty some of the shots in his head when he was rolling out. He was goldly going away. The Corners report said that it was homicide, and the media came into our city. They sold out every hotel in the city, and we marched for almost a year. And we didn't burn down any buildings, We didn't shoot each other, we didn't do anything. And the
media left. The media left, and those deputies that murdered Andrew Brown Jr. Go to work every day. And my question is, where's the media now? Where's the black media who's telling our story? Now? Where's the black media to tell this story that these white deputies, one of them is by Ray. Sure, they don't make no difference. They all of them, that wall of blue. They shot this brother in the back of the head. And nobody's telling
this story today. And maybe if this story get told, the same sheriff got reelected the district attorney, it became a judge. We don't have a black judge in our district.
Who's telling our story in these rural areas.
But maybe if our media, if the black media start telling our story, we won't have a problem getting people to the polls.
Okay, So I know that you guys might be asking why did we play this clip around black media, But I think it is so clear, and I want to tell you, guys, because Andrew and tiff y'all are some of the greatest public servants I know. When I heard this man and saw this grown man cry at the mic like that, I said, I'm committing to you. We are putting this story on the podcast. We will talk about Andrew Brown Junior. But the thing that he said that is so poignant, and I know y'all feel this.
When we talk to rural black voters a lot of times, they say they feel forgotten. They are only thought about every four years. And he hits that right on the head when he says the media sold out these hotel rooms, that they were everywhere. They were swarming right after this man was shot and killed, but shortly thereafter because they left because there was no more attention placed on this. Because the tv ads are Virginia and not North Carolina.
The sheriff was reelected, the DA became an elected judge. And Andrew Brown Junior's legacy is brought on by the people who were to boost up and to fortify his killers. This I mean, if there's not something that encapsulates the problem better. I don't know what it is. Like the reason black men are like, yo, I'm not doing this, the reason our people are like forget it.
But the reason young people are like, I'm just trying to.
Understand what you're doing with Gaza though, like you're not speaking to my humanity.
In fact, you don't even see me until you need my vote.
That is the issue, Like we have to drill down on the actual problem. This isn't even about going at policy. Sometimes it's just like, do you see me? Can you acknowledge my existence?
I matter? Talk to me like I matter.
Latasha and Clip founded Black voters Matter, and they do the work all year long, not just in an election year, but three sixty five seven days a week, all of the time because we matter all of the time. Our engagement matters all of the time, and what we hear from this man. And I also don't want to blame
black media. We got a resource challenge rather just like everybody else, but like we have to do the work of staying engaged and ensuring that our folks feel seen all the time because we cannot count on any elected official, no matter the race, to do that all the time for us, We've got to do that. Thank God for a Black Voters Matter for making this happen. But truly, that's where I believe the work is, and that's where I think the disconnect really lies.
We got to do that well.
I think it's a really good point is about rural America, right, because when you hear people talk about rural America and the mainstream media, so often we are not included the rural America. In mainstream media, the white is silent. So assume that everyone lives in rural America is a white farmer who has somehow been disenfranchised, when in reality, more than seven percent of black folks call rural America home. And I want to say people of color comprised more
than thirty percent of rural America across this country. So yes, we see you, we hear you, we understand you. I have to too, echo Angela sentiments and defend black media. It is a more than a resource challenge. Media everywhere is challenged, and so if you can imagine that when it comes to black media, it is a severe resource challenge that they do not have the resources to be on ground and cover everything like that. So I wouldn't
lay that film at the foot of black media. I lay this failure at the foot of media, at white decision makers who do not see faces like this as being real America or the heart of America. That is a challenge that we all have to press forward on and we can't depend on, you know, white run newsrooms to do that for us. That's why there's always been such credo and importance to media that centers us black
run media, black owned media. But I just want to say that when it comes to because this was such a huge conversation around the Georgia race where Stacy Abrams ran for governor, and there was a similar conversation around black men. And you think about there's Atlanta, which is a hard blue spot on a very red map, and so as Georgia turns purple, you think about all the people in rural America there And just to give black men a shout out, because I know you all stand
with us. There's a small margin of people who venture over to the other side. But in Georgia, twenty seven percent or twenty three thousand people, excuse me, voted for Brian Kemp. Twenty three black men voted for Brian Kemp. If you took all twenty three thousand of those black men, they would have done nothing for the more than fifty thousand lead that he had. So I just rebuke any time we're laying failure in this democracy at the foot of black folks, we have to turn that mirror and say,
how are white folks voting? Because they are still the largest voting block.
Yeah, you don't go after your number two highest contributing member to your success period, bar nne By sharing the
vote and say you're the blame for the loss. If you got a fifty cheap, fifty numbered long list of who your constituency is, and black men right behind black women are the number one and two performers, you would think that your ad resourcing money would be so heavily concentrated on maximizing that community and being there and doing what needs to be done for that community that you make no light in between. But what black folks are willing to do in black men and black women too.
I think we're pragmatic voters. But let's just take what Donald Trump has said and is doing on the issue of criminal justice. I find it largely self serving given his particular condition right now, But his head face on attack about the corruption of the FBI and what federal prosecutors are doing and state prosecutors and so forth, that resonates with our community. Those were our talking points before he co opted them and the folks on the right
co opted them. We were saying, this is a system that is not designed for us, but it is except to our demise. If we let them run away with criminal justice as an issue, in the corruption of institutions as an issue, then I can tell you we will have something to worry about. Because I am done sick.
I no longer will lay down and blindly support any governmental institution or law enforcement entity, agency, or individual or set of people without scrutinizing it to the highest degree, because I've been on this where those systems have cooperated maliciously to make a thing that wasn't a thing a thing and ruining and crushing lives, communities, families, neighborhoods in between.
So when I look at MSNBC or CNN or any of these cable news networks, and I'm hearing the same black voices that were on there saying during Barock's administration that we need a criminal justice reform and a prosecutorial accountability who are now saying, hell, when prosecutors put together their case against Trump, you know they're not going to leave any stone unturned. And now giving these folks unfettered
credibility for their work, no, serve you lose me. I'm not with that because no institution's beyond reproach and certainly not a governmental institution. And I think he's tapping on something and people are willing to hear that.
Absolutely well, we got to pay some more bills and we'll be right back after this break.
Okay.
As you all know, politics are everywhere and they're definitely in hip hop. We have Nicki Minaj versus Meg the Stallion. Meg the Stallion his first with her track.
Called His These Hos don't be mad at Megan. These host made at Megan's law.
I don't really know what the problem means, but I get see y'all want me staring.
And Nicki Minaj hit back with a track called Bigfoot Shi by Bigot.
I want to talk about this because it just went a little far for me.
It went a little far for me, and I want to reference first in Meg's track Hiss, she referenced something called Meghan's Law. So she says, these holes don't be mad at Meghan. These holes be mad at Meghan's Law. And she referenced Megan's Law, which is about the required for a sexual offender to report that they are in fact a sexual offender. It's a federal law that requires law enforcement to make information available about registered sex offenders.
We know that Nicki Minaj is married to one Kenneth Petty who's a registered sex offender.
So Nikki hit back and she came at her about bigfoot.
Meg is five to ten and I guess this is something about that, as well as hitting at the fact that she was shot in the foot by Tory Lanes, which we all know anyway, we don't have to get in all that. But my question is, just like, what do we do with this. It's online bullying for seventy two hours. I thought we could leave it all on the sixteen bars, but apparently not. So I'd like to hear y'all thoughts about that.
Yeah, I gotta say, I'm so disgusted by this Angela. I think it's so tragic. Number one, that these two women are fighting like this and the public eye ladies, there is nothing attractive about tearing down another black woman. It just Isn't you look so much more secure and happy and together when you're secure enough in yourself to stand next to another queen whose light shines as bright as yours, and if her light ain't shining as bright as yours, you're trying to lift her up to make
sure her light shines as bright as yours. The challenge with this is when this kind of like petty back and forth, and I believe Nicki Mina said something about Megan's deceased mother. It feeds such a baser instinct and find you a tribe and let's celebrate sisterhood because I couldn't imagine Salt and Peppa going after MC light, who was going after mony Love Like we just didn't have that coming up. And I don't want a morphine. So one of those get off my lawn. Middle aged women.
I'm certainly not seeing the Lauras Tucker sitting up here on this panel.
But this ain't it.
You know, whatever you all think this is accomplishing, it doesn't. Sixty four percent of young adults experience online bullying. You have black people who say, oh, suicide that ain't something we do.
That is not true.
Suicides among black youth seventeen ten to seventeen years old is up one hundred and forty four percent, and that number is attributed to online bullying. So to talk about somebody who was a victim of assault, to talk about somebody's body shaping, I believe Niki is almost forty years old. If she's not over forty, over forty, it doesn't matter how old you are, but that kind of behavior is disgusting. I also want to make the point Angela that she
tweeted she was tweeting with Ben Shapiro. Nicki Minaj was Ben Shapiro is a right wing conservative zealot, a MAGA extremist. And so any time that you are so caught up in belittling another woman, you would align yourself with somebody who doesn't even see your humanity. I would hope that
you question yourself. And I pray for both their healing, but especially Nicki Minaj I pray for your healing, sys because something inside you was broken that you would go to that level of disgusting attack on someone who lost their mother and who was the victim of an assault. I don't like any of it, it's not entertaining at all.
To the point tip, just so you know, this online bullying, as we know, finds its way into what happens in real life. We saw that on January sixth, it turns into an insurrection. Well, there was an insurrection at Meg the Stallion's mother's grave site. Yep, they actually went to her grave site to deface the grave. That's where we are, Andrew, I saw you about to weigh in.
No, yeah, y'all, I'm learning about this as I'm listening to y'all, so quick question.
Yeah.
Nicki Minaj's critique before this thing seemed to degrade in the black hole, was that Meghan's law or.
My point was that Meg said in the lyrics, she says, you think Holds is mad at Meghan, but they're really mad at Meghan's law, like the fact that he has to report.
That's actually the lyric.
She's talking about Nicky's husband who's a registered sex offender. Meghan's law is yes, it already, but she's saying, oh.
Right, okay, so she threw it back at her as it did.
Nicki responded with bigfoot. But here's the other thing.
This is happening in real time, while like literally today we record, you guys know, we pre record. There is a Kids Online Safety Act being discussed in the Senate. This has everything to do with bullying and harassment and all these things. So I'm saying, you got adults demonstrating why this is so dangerous for kids. There are kids who, when they're bullied online, go home and commit or die by suicide. We have to be mindful of how we're
carrying ourselves, particularly when you have a fan base. Charles Barkley said in that commercial back in the day, I'm not a role model. Guess what you are as soon as you step in that limelight. There are kids who are emulating themselves to try to be like you. There are adults who are trying to be like you. Nicki minaj Sis you're forty one, I'm forty four. I'm just saying we might have to shine a light and be a role model, even for the sisters in their twenties,
like Meg. Meg's been through a lot, right, Like, I mean, come on, and it's hip hop there, I mean, you know.
It's hip hop. There's always been rap battles at hip hop.
You ain't gotta take its a Twitter.
It's too far.
Never like this, Never like this. I mean I do think of ll Cool Day and Cool Mode.
They had one of the dopest rat battles and when you you know, hear those jay z Exactly throughout history there's always been rat battles.
This is something else.
And the fact that people are going to her mother's grave debasing her grave, I just find it all disgusting. And listen, Angela and I and Andrew, all of us have been have experienced ugly comments on social media. I am a grown ass woman, so I know the difference between my real life and what people are on here saying, and still it can impact me when somebody overwhelmingly is
saying something. People have an opinion on your hair, your outfit, everything you look like, who you date, all of that stuff. It can be overwhelming to a grown adult who's securing herself. So you imagine being thirteen or fifteen and seeing this behavior play out and then mimicking it with your peers, and the consequences are dire. So monitor to social media. Kids, share responsibly, behave responsibly. If you're the victim of online bullying,
you can report those comments. There are some safe practices out there for you that you can google. But this is not This is not normal behavior. This is the behavior of at least one broken woman, if not too and it's nothing to celebrate.
I want to co sign everything again, less informed about it, but I do know this much. I don't have to be that informed to know this. This is the point at which the close friends, the enlightened ones who are close, respectively to these women. This is when you tell them on the side to take a bee, and y'all going to handle this inside the door rather than out in the yard, in the street, and up at the community plaza. Because these beats happen all the time. Grown folks have them,
young folks have them. It impacts all of us differently, in every one of us has areas of brokenness. But this ain't the forum and these women. My colleagues have pointed out many reasons why it isn't, but it to me underscoes why you have to have people around you who are willing to pull you up and out so you can stop being at the three inch level and get out to the three thousand level and see what
the big picture is. Then women don't know enough about each other to go at one another so viscerally and so personally. That's a disconnect. I used to feel this way when I get emails from people who would just tearing me to pieces. Don't know me from Tom Adam Katt except for the comment or the clip or whatever they read. And I had to quickly come to a place and I thank YACHTI for this. Angela knows her.
I had to get into a place where, look, your opinion of me is not my business, because you can't feel this much unless you've experienced something in your life personally that has been triggered and lifted and you are hurt. And so guess what. I know. You put my name there, but you can change it to whomever this is intended for, because some healing has to happen there.
You can't.
You don't know me well enough to feel that way about me? Whatsoever? Ought to take the time to write that much about me? To take take that back to who it is intended for, because your opinion of me is not my business.
It's not.
And these women need friends who are pulling them up all that time.
You spend all that time right into a stranger.
Okay, let me I just can I just say really quickly, because Angela knows this, like we there are different social circles, and you know, for the young people at what you do at twenty will still stick with you when you're thirty, when you forty. So you always want to try to live like a good life. And everybody deserves redemption. There are people who might be who I might not be their favorite person, you know, and they might say, oh,
Tiffany Cross, I don't like her. And somebody comes to me and they say, oh, well, Susie Q says she don't like you. At this moment, I have a choice. I can say I don't give a shit. If Susie Q don't like me, who cares? Or I can say, you know, that's really unfortunate. I've always liked her and I thought she was a pleasant person. But I hope she's well and I'm whatever I did, I hope that she can find healing in it for her own.
Life in that moment.
Who looks like the more senior person, So Nikki and Megan and somebody not everything so deserves the response.
My response with a band, why are you chasing over here to me to tell me somebody's business and why they feel comfortable telling you and not me.
Right, that's the whole other conversation.
What you say when they say they ain't like me, and why they feel comfortable telling you they ain't like me. That's something to think about too. Stay out of mess, keep your mouth shut, and stay out of mess.
Anyway.
So we spent a lot of time in mess today, and I just gotta say, you know who else is in our mess?
Didn't nobody ask them to be there? The n essay.
So the Senate has held a hearing on this because you know, we're trying to understand what tech company's responsibility to us. There's this ability right now for folks to buy internet metadata that is telling all our business. So you think you're going to do something online and you hit that delete button that's still there, booboo. And there's somebody who I'm really surprised I agree with, who had something to say about this. Let's roll that clip.
Mister Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us. I know you don't mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product. You have a product that's killing people.
Now.
Senator Blumenthal and Blackburn who've been like the Dynamic duo here have found emails from your company where they warned you about this stuff, and you decided not to hire forty five people that could do a better job of policing this. So the bottom line is you can't be sued. You should be and these emails would be great for punitive damages, but the courtrooms closed. Every American abused by all the companies in front of me.
Let me find out, Lindsey.
I mean, I feel bipartisan today because Lindsey tore that down.
Now it feels like that really went more with Meg and Nikki.
But I will say that on this the Senator has been relentless at figuring out what is happening with tech companies, like what their responsibility is to the general republic, particularly kids. Lindsey Graham mentioned Senators Blackburn and Blumenthal, who are also the co sponsors of the Kids Online Safety Act we just talked about. I have got to tell you the NSA spying is of course not a surprise, that's what
they do. But the ability to pass off our metadata without a warrant is deeply troubling for me, and I think this is a place where libertarian Republicans would also agree with us on this. I don't know if y'all have stuff on this, but I just I had to get that Lindsey Graham clip in there.
I was surprised, Yeah, I so, Lindsey Graham was.
Definitely it was in the hearing about online safety and online bullying, but the NSA a completely different issue. Look, this is surveillance capitalism run amuck. And obviously, as Black Americans, we know that government agencies has always taken license to spy on us, not just during co Intel pro but even in recent history during Black Lives Matter, when the FBI had a whole list of folks that they were targeting.
I think it's interesting how you know people are very paranoid and you know they won't do Certainly, they won't vote, they won't take the vaccine, and they won't do other things because they think people are spying on them. Let me tell you who's spying on you. This right here,
this phone in your hand. They are collecting all your data, all your information, and spoon feeding you information on your Google search, on your navigation page, on your Instagram landing page, TikTok et, cetera, and so you know, I think technology, as we've said many times before, is moving faster than law and policy, particularly when you think about some of the artificial intelligence tools that are feeding some of our
devices that we engage with every day. Even TikTok, this is not a business that was born here in America. I'm the owners of TikTok's are Chinese, and so there are features on TikTok that monitor how even your finger movements. They monitor how you hold your device, how you tap your device. Now, it might not matter if somebody is watching your ten year old now, but when that ten year old becomes a thirty year old and they work for the NSA and people are collecting their data, it
matters a great deal. So, you know, I wish I had a solution, but I appreciate you bringing this up, Angela and waving a huge red flag. But this is something that's happening and certainly something that we need to pay attention to and get ahead of these government agencies before they get too far ahead of us.
Well, Lindsey Graham could pass some laws number one, but until we get that done, he could begin his care and concern by stop being in an online bully harasser himself. It's hard for me to take him seriously when he uses these very same platforms to go individually after people, you call for violence, and states and the nations across
the world to threaten other political leaders for whom he disagrees. So, while y'all are working on the law, could you, at least I don't know self, govern and start to exhibit what it means to be a responsible user of this information, not just an abuser when it suits you and Zuckerberger, y'all, I'll just restate this, which is, let's not get the enemy twisted. It isn't left and right Republican man next to the Democratic woman. Corporate interests turn those groups on
and off at their pleasure. They create divides at their pleasure. They create wedges at their pleasure, because what they understand is that the matrix that they have built is resilient. It is intended to produce a certain outcome and to keep the powerful as powerful as they can be. They see nothing. They are ungenerous with it. And so I love to go after individuals and parties who do there whatever. But the real enemy here is the corporate interests who
have always been at the center of the design of systems. Well, they built the system to be resilient. It will not break because they have tried and true methods like won't you sick this group against this group, won't you sell this to this group? And we got to create these environments where you keep us the some of us, Heather McGhee separated, So I you know, thank you, Lindsey, appreciate it, practice what you preach. Okay, Oh we needed that Miami,
that South that base, South City Base. Okay, We're luking trita what you need and trick when you need them.
So speaking at a bounty, we're going to questions from the audience. So we only have one left because as you know, we've done such a wonderful job at integrating them this time. So we're gonna pause here for a questions for the audience.
Hello Native Land Podcast. My name is Norvel. I'm a grandfather, got two granddaughters, five children, and.
I'm a gen answer my question is how do you feel technology can help Black America and how do you feel it's going to hinder us if we don't get.
Involved with it now, especially with the election season in full swing.
That's real, brother, Leville. I was just doing the math on gen X. I was like, I think I'm one of them. These generations can be. It's not the point, I think, hopefully, what he is saying in the use of technology, It's evolved in a whole bunch of ways, not just sitting at a computer and reading articles, but
cell phones. How we vote? Should I be able to technology advance to a way where I can vote right from the comfort of my living room, where there are states that are exhibiting and some local communities are showing how that could work. I'm a huge advocate for our aging population to stay connected to technology for as good uses, because let me tell you, the right is using it, and they're using it against a lot of black folks who are on the internet and use technology.
I know.
Angela gave a story the other day I got way too many to give where my mother takes screenshots saying you need to contact this person about this bitcoin who sent me an email saying you know they had money for me. That folks are using these things for evil and they're getting directly to who they're trying to target,
and that's you. And what I would say is is certainly as we age, and with elections coming around, we have to check our sources primary source, which means that is a headline like the Atlanta Constitution Journal to tell us that whatever your legitimate sources of news, but you're sending me some Facebook ad article, some what have you picked up off of? I need sources, need sources, I need this has to be validated some number of places. Don't be giving your social security and all that stuff
out over the internet. All I'm saying is the tools exist there. They are getting to older folks. We just need to teach folks how to best use this so
it's not weaponized against them. And right now technology is being used on both politically for weaponization, but also the big bad enemy, the huge, huge, huge top one percent corporate interests, who has a reason for sending and allowing and not regulating certain things or allowing certain regulations so they could get directly to you for this very special purpose. But it's no mistake, it's intentional.
Yes, can I just I want to just jump in and say it's for younger people on technology. It's also a big deal black people over index when it comes to using technology, particularly social media. And so if we're over indexing there. I would love to see more people pursue fields of study in STEM learn to code, learn to design, learn how you can benefit financially from something
that you enjoy doing. And there are increased amounts of programs that support for young folks who want to pursue studies in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and.
Math and pursue it with an intention toward the greater good, achieve some good.
We have one more audience question, high Native Lampid.
My name is Tina West and I'm from Detroit, Michigan, and my question is how are we going to engage the younger generation and encourage them to show up and vote in the twenty twenty four election cycle. A couple of things. Everyday work in black folks, young folks, they are not feeling any of the effects of the Biden administration.
It's hard out here.
And then they sit on their phones and they see the genocide that's happening overseas at the hands of Israel, and they hear Biden saying that he's going to support them. How do we shift the focus on what is important here at home and encourage these people to get out and vote for their interests. How can we engage them.
Well, I'm happy that she brought up what's happening in Israel, because I wonder does the administration understand the why vast impact this has had on their voting base. You know, it's hard to look at the imagery that we see and not have some sort of disdain on what is
being allowed to take place and happen in Gaza. Regardless of where you stand on this divide in this issue, it is to me an issue of just humanity, and I think for people of color, it's hard to look at this and not identify with those people who we would call oppressed and oppressed people. And the bloody, gory violence this week. The latest video I saw was a grandmother who had been invited to safety walking with her grandson waving a white flag and you see her get
gunned down. It's hard to see that imagery and not be outraged about it. So I at least want to show up and first validate young people for feeling that way and seeing that, and we understand that, and we won't be one of the people who are going to spin in your face and try to convince you as reigning. No, that is real and you have every right to be outraged. I want to push back, however, on this notion that
gen Z does not benefit from the Biden administration. I think we have to do a better job at informing voters across every demographic, every age group we are benefiting from Democratic led policies, from Democratic push policies. I think we have to consider the states you live in. Often, when the federal government gives money, the local government controls
how that money is issued or spent. And so when Democrats vote for something, you know, a boost in federal funding that gets the states if you have a Republican governor controlling the purse strings, and that money does not always get to where it needs to get to, especially for people who look like us. I would hold up Mississippi as a perfect example of that with Tate Reeves, and look at what's happening with La Mumba down there in Jackson and their water system. So that's a top
topic for another day. But I just remember, young folks, there are plenty of policies coming out of the Biden administration, from infrastructure to the employment rate that are that are impacting you. And also remember those down ballot races and issues that impact you to from ballot initiatives to your city council, to your school boards, your local government. So if you don't participate in this process, you cannot shape them mindocracy to your liking.
Guess what we have this. I've been waiting for this the whole time. I'm so excited.
We have someone who's already such a fan, such a part of the Native Lampire community that they submitted a song. And it's not a traditional Q and A, but we were gonna take this moment really quick to play a song that was submitted, a little Native Lampire jingle from Daniel Lawrence, who I believe is a constituent of our good friend Ayanna Presley. He resides in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts.
Let's roll that bang, Welcome Home with the Natives, landing on the podcast Things six of a Breakness sixty minutes or so. Hit not too long for the graphigh level politics in a way that you can taste it, then digested politics such a shoe waven if you don't touch it. Getting Beth to across the tees and doctor I skill him back to get him standing on business. Will ri you could have been anywhere to play podcast. So bringing the trust.
Let me just let me just stand up, Let me just stand up. I'm just standing on. I'm standing on with you. Got back down.
Y'all can't see me standing up anything, speaking, standing speaking our centerments. We got another ad break, and after the ad break, our brother Andrew Gillam sharing this testimony.
We'll be right back. Okay, we're back.
Andrew, thank you, Thank you, Thank you, sisters, and to our amazing audience, thank you as well for listening and supporting. And last week Tiffany and La has some sympathy for my post construction mouth. Mostly they were looking at my odd expressions. I guess throughout I didn't see it didn't bother me. It's okay, but it was painful. And I'm thankful for y'all's grace and their grace and allowing me
to to start to ump. I love y'all back, to start to unpack a little bit of my own personal story and what has allowed me to arrive at this moment. And before I sort of dive in, I I want to just set the stage that part of my sharingness is actually I can say that what it's not about one. It isn't about explaining to anybody anything just.
Because you're curious.
It isn't about me feeling forced to do so by anyone for anything, for any money. It isn't about explaining for the per purposes of anyone understanding, even because I know that explanations doesn't necessarily lead to an understanding. And it isn't about addressing haters and others who have opinions of you that will not change. May not change because I have long ago suspended with the fact that people's opinions of me and my business, They've got to interrogate
why that is. And I hope this doesn't sound bymbassy to anybody, but I want to be very clear that my reason for wanting to share more about my walk and my experience is out of hope that through sharing that there are individuals who may be going through, have gone through, or whether they know it or not, will go through. That there are so many of us who stand on the other side of that journey, and I know there'll be many, many, many more life lessons for
me to learn from. I am I am thankful to God, and it's taken me some time to get here. For taking what others may have meant for bad and destructive, and I'll just say it, for my death may have been the exact things that conspired for my resurrection, and so to God be the glory for that. Many of you, all,
of course, heard about what happened in Miami. If you didn't know me from running for governor, but you heard about me running for governor, you didn't see me and my post selection work on CNN or traveling or public speaking. What you know and last got updated about was a hotel room and pictures that looked salacious and my inviting in folks to my bisexuality. But what you should know is that while Miami was loud and explosive and eye catching, it wasn't the beginning of the bottom mean for me.
It was me really hitting a rock bottom after many, many, many many years of work toward a thing, and then to not reach that goal, and to have a lot of pain and agony around really all of it, but nowhere to put it. You start to put it on yourself, and it becomes incredibly self destructive. So let me stop by saying politicians are oftentimes demonized because they run for office, and people those politicians, and so there's a thing that you expect from us, how we show up, what we say,
how inauthentic we may be. Well, I've lived too much of life at this point and experience too much for superficial, hype up, superficial really anything. I just want it real. And so you should know that I got into public service from a very very very young young age, and I was one of those kids, if you let my mom tell it, one of seven kids, you know, grew up in poverty, buying large economically down in Miami Dade,
Miami Richmond Heights, shout out. But my mother would joke as she tells stories of my childhood about how I would run around with penny loafers on after I got out of school, and I was particular about making sure my pennies were in there. How I was a very caring person, but often was very much about the plan, how are we going to get this done, How we're
going to get this done. And I also told the story when I was running for governor about some of the sadder instances of my growing up where I would see the police show up at the house and my mom would start crying hysterically because she'd been told that one of my brothers had been locked up or got into some trouble of some sort, and she'd have to go down.
And see about them.
And as the fifth of seven children, all boys and one girl, my baby sister and the first of my siblings to attend college and to graduate, much of the decision for me to go that route, to go the rite of service was I remember trying to commit to myself, if not verbally, to my mother, how badly it hurt me to see her cry in life. I just wanted to make sure that and the things that I did that I didn't make my mom cry for being sad.
But if she cried, it was because she was happy and proud, And I didn't want her to be visited by tears and anguish of me getting into some kind of trouble, but tears and joy over the good that I was doing. And so as a kid, I would watch c Span and I remember back in the day Maxine Waters, who was a young young girl woman she's still young in Congress, and she would be down on that floor speaking with all kind of power and strength and declaration and clarity, and I was like, I.
Want to be her.
I want to know that woman, and that's what I want to be when I grow up. Because she was talking like I didn't hear black people talk to white men. Miss us speak of us such and such and such, and you know, goe and on, and I was impressed by that power to be able to show up as us without compromising what it looks like, what it sounds like,
and what the truth is. I ran for student government I was in the sixth grade, got elected and served every year through high school all through college, becoming student body president of fam you and a member of the Board of Trustees, the first student ever to serve on that board, and then directly after that into city commission, where I got elected to a citywide seat in a city that at the time was almost seventy percent white.
That elected me citywide to the Chilisi City Council, becoming the youngest person ever in the history of the city to be elected to serve there, where I served for you know, three terms, and then ran for mayor and got elected. I say that to say I've been in service for a long time. And I say service for
a reason because I'm almost Pollyannish. I used to be giddy about it, not about the position, but about the fact that I could show up at a meeting on Monday night to deal with I don't know, high utility bills and make a decision on that same night that by Wednesday would lower people's rates and that they would see a system working for them.
And why that was important to me was because.
As a child, that will watch my mother make calls for help because she was a little low on what it was going to cost to make both rent and keep the lights on pardon me, okay, And I remember the feeling of feeling helpless because I couldn't do anything to help the situation, and that I was a burden because who was she keeping a roof over the head of and who was she keeping the light built on?
Boy?
It was us. She was doing what was needed to help us get by right, making a way out of no way, which we're all so familiar with in our community. But those early imprints have been everything to how I've approached governing and politics that this isn't this is not a game. What we're doing here tonight is not a joke. The decisions we're making have real, everyday impact on people's lives,
so it matters what we do. I say that because almost up into this day, that's the kind of feeling I've had about our government and what it can do, not all the bad treacherous things that have been done,
but the good that can be done there. So as a true believer, and when I decided to run for governor, I made that decision because I was clear about what I wanted to do for the people of the state of Florida, expertly clear on so many of the issues that I saw as a local official that showed up at the local level that the state didn't seem so hip or tuned to, or maybe they did, and they just were making the choice to communicate to me people who look like me and were situated similarly, that we
didn't matter. Medicare expansion, real criminal justice reform, where I would on the trail say that nobody should be judged forever by their worst day. Where did that come from? That came from the fact that my brother Chuck did time for being found guilty of drug sales and at
high qualities. And I remember my brother Chuck only as a person who was cutting yards at thirteen and going through the neighborhood, picking up stuff, I mean, finding any way he could to hustle so he could bring some cash home to my mom, so she could add a little bit more to the pot for what we were going to eat. So this out just this man who wanted to be a man for not just our host hole, but my aunties and others who were struggling. He did
what he could to make away for them. And so the fact that he was being judged by a singular conviction, to me, just didn't seem to make sense. And it maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. I stand with him, But why should we judge him and create policies that will keep him locked out on his neck and on his knees all the time because of the ways in which we eliminate folks. So when I said you shouldn't be judged for everybody your work, it was because I
believed it, because I had seen it. And y'all, it would come to pass that after losing that race for governor by zero point four percent difference, the closest margin in the history of the state of Florida, I ran also instead of choosing to run for reelection as mayor
of the city of Tallahassee. So for the first time in my life as a forty year old man going back to sixth grade, but certainly from the age of twenty three and I'm forty four today, I didn't have a title to give me a seat at the table where decisions were being made about the things and the people I cared about, as I had been able to do all of my life up until that point find solutions. And the night when I gave my concession, I broke down when I said that I was sorry to the voters,
that I could bring it home for them. And no one wrote that line for me. I knew it for myself because the loss was already beginning to feel like my skills could no longer be used for good, to help lift the community that I cared about, which were the people of my state, and particularly those who found themselves at the margins of everything always in my state, and that I had gotten so close and we just
couldn't get passed at all. And I started thinking about all the things that got in the way of that being possible, the fact that I couldn't do anymore, that I did everything that I could within my own power, to win the race for governor, but all the while was haunted by a particular set of headlines around me being under FBI investigation and whispers of corruption and corrupt activity on my part, and so on and so forth, and everywhere I went, I would have to ask answer
questions about these things, and I would I I was rehearsing and polished enough to say, I'm not worried about it. I have no idea, because I knew what my actions were.
But then to see leaks of information coming out throughout the course of the campaign that would again suggest that I was doing something unto ward, it became almost too much for voters to be able to overcome that, And could zero point four percent of voters in a state of twenty million where eight million plus people had turned out to vote, had been affected by a narrative that said that I was a taker in this for the wrong reason, corrupt and now trying to swindle the people
out of Florida so that I could, I don't know, just take care of myself, buy some new shoes.
Whatever that was about.
I say that all y'all to say that Miami was never just Miami me, And if you want to make this case in your own life. That thing that you're embarrassing shame for is never just that thing. We're not people who can be diced up into all these different varieties we like to think so, but everything is everything. If something impacts you in your walk to become governor and you lose, and so on and so forth, it contributes to the way you view the next big risk.
Do you go for that next big thing or are you too traumatized by what it felt like to not be able to do? And y'all, despite the way that I looked in the highlight reel that I tried to keep up with and posts over the course of the rest of twenty eighteen and through twenty nineteen, I was going off the rail, making horrible decisions for myself drinking.
And understand this whole drinking thing that I wasn't a drinker in college, didn't do it in high school, didn't the first us the time I smoke, we was in college. I can hope I can say that now, But no, hard, no, no, no drinking. My daddy was an alcoholic, my grandmother, relatives before I knew what that looked like. But I was so high on what I was doing being a service. I didn't need nothing to take me out of that reality.
But when you are then faced with another reality that the universe conspires with circumstances to then say you're not of service, you get busy, being busy, at least in my case.
To distract from whatever.
You can.
Fast forward to Miami, where this all hit ahead publicly. I am not going to get into two things that I don't know and put out speculation that I can't necessarily.
Confirm, and so on and so forth. I'm not going to do that to you.
What I will say is what I came to learn about the episode that evening, what I know today and what most people don't know in the public, you know, they don't match. And I'm not necessarily in a hurry to go and re litigate all of those pieces and parts, because in truth, my spiraling from twenty eighteen all the way to March thirteenth of twenty twenty Miami, there were too many nights in too many days where I should have deserved a lot worse because I made choices that
should have landed me in a lot worse. I was not a model father, not a model leader, not a model man, not.
A model husband and partner and best friend.
I was the antithesis of all of that by the point that I reached that day where I made the choice after a work day I did in Miami to try to connect with a guy who I knew from from from a number of times before, not during the campaign, where we had a special relationship. We'd get together and you know, enjoy the company of being around people who didn't.
Care that you.
You know, you're not mayor and you're not governor, and that you.
But certainly by my measure, pretty powerless, didn't care about that, but just thought I deserved to have fun.
And being being on how do you say company that was unjudging.
And all throughout the time, I wouldn't even bore you, and I wouldn't embarrass my family by going through all of mischief that you do when you find yourself at rock bottom. But I will tell you, regardless of the reasons for doing you think they are, there's a big, big wound that needs to be healed, and you just don't know it, so you're willing to fill it with
anything that at a time might feel good. I was there on Miami Beach on the afternoon of the eleventh, about five, after I finished some meetings, the text a friend of mine, Hey, I know you're down on Miami Beach from here in town. Let's get up. I've got to go to the airport and pick up a car and pick up my wife and some of my best friends that are coming into town for this wedding this weekend.
But you know, I'll drop by, We'll get a drink and whatever, you know, and I'll get onto the airport and I do drop by, and I do get a drink at about five thirty maybe six in the evening, and we'll need to leave soon after. And the last
memory I have is having that drink. And the next memory I have from that five or six o'clock in the afternoon is just around midnight, where I'm awake and maybe alert, and I'm sitting on the counter in the bathroom surrounded by what must have been maybe six Miami Beach law enforcement officers who are all uniformed with their cameras and on their bodies, and I am naked, on clothed, not even a towel, and I say, why is going on?
What happened to Da?
Da? And they start to say, we're responding to a medical call of an overdose. Da da da da. And I say, who overdose? Overdose? Of what what's going on? And they say, well, your friend and their pills and the and I said, what in the world are you talking about? And I then say, I'm sorry, but where are my clothes? I mean really, I'm coming to my awareness.
And a higher up turns the corner and comes in and he says, one of you go in there and grab his clothes, get him a towel, something, you know, decent, very sort of you know, just yeah, give him his clothes. I said, okay, Well, what time is it, y'all? Because I've got to pick my wife and some folks at the airport. It's whatever plass midnight. And now I'm in shock because I've lost all this time and I have no idea what went on.
Anyway, fast forward past that, they I get dressed.
I then say I've got to get back to my hotel and get my luggage and then get to the airport d D. And the officers say, and I said, no, I can uber, where's my face? Somebody gives me my fun I can call an uber And this sergeant says, oh no, we'll give you a ride, and I thought it was I say, okay, I put my clothes on.
We walk out of the bathroom and now it's about four higher ups, officers brass and we walked to the elevator and down the elevator through the lobby to their patrol car and we all get in the patrol car and I tell them where I'm staying, and they seem to know where I'm staying, but they take me back out of the beach and across the water back to my hotel. Well, and I get to the hotel of mine and I start they walk me and then they want to walk me all the way up to my room.
I allow them to escort me up and they tell me on the drive over, they say, one of those says, so listen, this is we know you're married, we know you have kids, but I just want you to know this is going to be public record because we we were responding at first to a medical call, but which would have not been public because it's just medical. But this was a potential homicide. I said what I said, Oh well it didn't, but we had to report it as a potential homicide and so it's going to be
made public at some point tomorrow. So I just want you to know, you know, so that you know the people you need to talk to you can do that. And I say absolutely, you know, thank you, thank you so much. Can you tell me about what time. Can y'all send me the report when it's written so that I can see what's in it before it goes Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I say, well, here's my cell phone. We get to my out there. They walk me up to the door. I'm not sure if they're going to come in, but
I kind of around and I say, thank you. I just got to get my luggage. I've got to get to the Airbnb. I gotta catch up myne And that's the end of it with those folks. But I'm still now just totally blurred. But I got to get to Jay and my wife and I've got to get to AIRBNBB. So I race there and I get there and it's early in the morning, and I don't want to wake anybody, but I go and I wake one of my guy
friends and I tell them what I think happened. I was like I was at this I went metaphor at a hotel I don't know what, you know went down, but it wasn't good. I was naked and so on and so forth, and he's probably like, what are you talking about? But I'm piecing it together, y'all as best I can, and I say, I gotta go up, and I tell and I gotta tell Jay. I'll let her
sleep a few hours, but I'll go up. But then I go out and I call the cell number of the guy who I will not name, that I was there to meet because I didn't see him before I left. I mean, I went from the bathroom, which was right by the door were out into the elevators to see if he'd answer and I could find out what this whole homicide thing was because I was totally unclear. And lo and behold he answers when I'm told that the homicide was. He almost dying.
So I'm like, I heard something happened.
Da da da da, And he's like, yeah, it was really bad.
I was just, you know, knocked out.
This is a sort of thing. But I'm thinking he's fully awaken. He's got his own cell phone and da.
Da da da da.
And I was like, you know, what if those officers never took a statement from me.
I didn't write anything, and.
If it was a homicide, why didn't I Why didn't I do any of that? Now I'm really confused because I'm like, I just called the homicidal victim and he answered the phone. And now these four guys have taken me back to my hotel, but they didn't get anything off me. And I don't remember ever taking a blood test, a drug test, getting.
Stuck by a needle. STD said nothing.
So it's still not making sense. But all I know is I made a set of decisions that landed me in this situation. And so when Jay wakes up, I say, I have to tell you something, and I don't know how you are going to react to it, but let me let me finish, because it's really bad. And I
start to say, what's what? And I start confessing to all kinds of things because I don't know what I did or what I didn't do, but I know that I've been modeled before, and so even if I'm confessing to something that I had done before and you needed to know it, this was the moment of release because
everybody will know it tomorrow. And thankfully my wife and I she already knew I was bisexual, and so she knew that before we got married, and we talked to you all that kind of stuff, So there was no blind spot here, and I could speak very openly about the things, except that what I said that night about what had happened I later learned in the days after weren't true when we were able to find through a lot of means all the footage from the cell phone
of the person that I saw there, and then those things were able to be provided to me later. But I don't want to jump the story. Jay takes it as best she can, and then I start to tell her we've got to be you know, we're there for a wedding. In fact, I am going to be presiding over the wedding of this friend in two days. That's why we're in Miami. And I say to them, we've got to tell them. I'm going to help them buind someone else to do this. I do not deserve this honor.
And I'll pack my things, you know, I'll get out of here and hopefully it'll tamp down so that their wedding doesn't become, you know, chaos. Ultimately, the couple came to me they were. She one of the bride stayed at the house that we were at for one night and she came to me and she said, we've talked and there is nobody else who will marry us. If it's not you, we will not get married this weekend. Of course, when I'm thinking the worst of myself and this is not what I wanted to hear from her.
I really wanted not to be associated with this big day, but I want to know Kneesha gave me.
A little modicum of humanity when she said that they wanted me to do that.
Okay, so now I know I can't just rush away from Miami because we got to stay another day because this thing has happened. We've got to manage this crisis. And the day is.
A disaster.
We break the internet, everything just goes Hey why or the report I was waiting for someone to send me never came. We learned about it from a blogger, a right wing blogger on the internet who released it, and so my first time reading it was from that as a source. So it is sufficient to say that the Miami Beach Police someone took a screenshot of their information and document and before I was ever notified it was given to a right wing outlet, and so the day
gets shaped by that. But my friends who are with me are just trying to keep things confined. The couple goes on eventually to cancel the regular ceremony and we do a very very very very early beachside ceremony with just a few of us. And then there is me trying to get out of Miami, and my brother who lived in Chicago, flew down to drive Jay and I from South Florida back to town. It has to avoid just the spectacle of going to the airport and being
in public. These people were camped out everywhere, and my friend Angie Angela put me with a therapist, a practice I had no real belief in before, because I just didn't understand the purpose of unpacking stuff with people who couldn't help you put it back together. They couldn't solve the harm, and they didn't create. They couldn't solve it. That was my thinking. But Yadi saw me and saved me. I talked to ijan Lea VanZant that day on the advice of Van Jones, telling her to give me a call.
I talked to Tyler Perry that day, and this is where I wanted to make a mention, because he said, Andrew, I'm so sorry this happened. I don't know the details. I don't know anything, but I'm glad that I'm hearing your voice right now. And I'm hating this, but I want you to know that you need to think on on this moment, what God may have saved you from. I thought back to homicide, and I'm thinking, I guess the picture. I guess the picture could have looked different.
I hadn't thought about that.
He said, I'm sorry for all that you will lose here, but who knows what God.
We're saving you from.
And we get in the car and we start to make the trip, and at different points, I am we're pretty much silent on the road. Jay and I are in the backseat of this suv. My brother's driving in front, and my phone's blowing up. Everyone is reaching out and I'm hearing both from good, bad and in in between, and I keep having these moments of breakdown, and this one moment where I have a breakdown, if you will, r J reaches over and she starts to rub my back.
I am bowed over in the seat, closed tight as I can tie as they could be my eyes, maybe thinking that if I blinked hard enough when I opened them, this will have been a dream. And I hear RJ shuffling, and I feel her britty body moving around, and I don't know what she's doing, but the silence was interrupted by a song coming on through the car speakers.
And.
In a moment where RJ had every reason to hate me, not want to share a car with me, not a car ride when I had, I've just been the most undeserving of partners in the world, a bad example of her dad, I don't know, a horrible human, but absolutely the worst of a spouse. She reached over to me and rubbing my back, and the song coming on, just in the moment to disrupt a thought that.
I was having about what it might mean to not be here, so that.
People may not have reason to talk about my wife and my kids anymore. And then the voice comes through and I recognize the song immediately, and the lyrics start and it says, you thought I was worth saving, so you came and changed my life. You thought I was worth keeping, so you cleaned me up inside. You thought I was to die for so you sacrificed your life so I could be free, so I could be whole, so I could tell everyone I know that you thought I.
Was worth saving.
And in the moment where I was thinking about not saving my life, the singer the lyrics, but most importantly, RJ saved my life right there in that moment, because I believed for a second that God was saving me rather than ending me. And instead of RJ being angry and mad, she saw the person who I was, who
she chose to marry, who was her best friend. And while I didn't understand in that moment the word grace, RJ taught me the meeting of grace, which is even when you don't deserve it, when you've done nothing to earn it, maybe you've done the exact opposite everything to lose it, that in this moment you deserve love and humanity.
And care.
So I want to thank RJ first and foremost for saving me in my life. To then go on and to then see how viscerally she was being attacked for her decision to stand by me sent me to a whole other level.
Because I could take what people were saying about me.
I deserved it, I thought, I couldn't understand what would cause people to go so horribly against the victim of the woman who was as in her right to be angry and hate me and as she can, But she chose in that moment that we were not gonna make big decisions about our men. We were going to deal with that, but right now, in this moment, we're just trying to save your life. So she showed up. She showed up for me. In the days following, I got back to Tallahassee, and I had to say goodbye.
To my three kids because I went to rehab a residential center, and this.
Was at the very start of COVID, and I left my wife and my family for a few months to try to get better. Because I didn't talk a lot about this, but that time caused me to do crazy things.
But I got to the point where a person who was not much of a drinker was hiding whiskey and my coffee mug in the morning because I knew it was dark and nobody would question me having a coffee big and deciding to drink drink, drink, drink, drink as much as I could before we went to public events so that I could get through them many times, those evenings ending with me not even knowing how I made it back to my hotel and to my bed. Being
at the events one Tiffany and Angelo. We were at Tyler Perr's event, a beautiful, beautiful dedication of his buildings in Atlanta, and.
Being so drunk the night of the.
Event that Kelly Rowland's at the table, of course, my friend Vergil RJ's there, Beyonce and Jay Z are like two over, Viola Davis's here, And someone comes around one of the celebrities that is there and is talking to me and saying, brother, you don't know me, but I've been praying for you since.
And I am practically rolling.
My eyes because all I know is I needed to get out of there. I had been drinking so much before we got there to get through the evening, but I had over drank, so we didn't stay for the great festivities because I told our jad to stay and stay with the car. I'll leave the car with her, but that i'd take a ober I get home. But she left the event that she looked so much forward to a beautiful, wonderful event in evening because she didn't want me to be by myself in this jounken state,
and that she was going to see me home. And I showed up the next day at CNN with you Angela that next morning in Atlanta, and we're all suited up and given our best political whatever. And I don't think I slept the night before. I was just hung over and whatnot. And I think about the times where I had friends cover for me, and it was happening increasingly.
And there's this one time, y'all. I was phoning out to Vegas to participate in this big speaking event, and I had gotten so sick from my alcohol intake the night before that when I landed, I didn't make it all the way to the restroom and time, and so I had to call my assistant, who was at the back of the plane, and see if he could bring me something when he got off the hotel plane, I mean the airplane to the bathroom.
That I could be appropriate to be in public.
And then we got to the hotel and I threw up, and I was sick, and I was supposed to speak the next morning. Suffice it to say, after speaking, I was supposed to be on a plane right back to East keeping my busy schedule. Well, I didn't make that speaking engagement that morning. I didn't make that plane. For four days, I convalesced in a Vegas hotel room that smelled like God knows what because I was that sick from my own abuse. So I had to go and
deal with me. But it was hard being away. I have not had a drink, and coming March in a few months, March twenty twenty four will make four years of never having touched an alcoholic beverage again. I, who didn't believe in therapy, was introduced to my healing sister Yachte through Angela, went to couple's therapy unpacked a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't even know was in
the way. For the first time, I was able to admit my grief and devastation from the race and all the people I blamed for it and had internalized but mostly blaming myself. I tried to make some catharsis with all of the bad decision making that got me to where I was, and we began to start to repair a little bit of the things that I wanted to try to make whole, and whether I chose it or not, a lot of the distractions removed themselves. A fall from grace tends to take care of those kinds of things
for you. And with the patience of my wife r J, the beautiful love of my three children, Jackson, Carolina, and Davis, my parents, a praying pastor and friend therapist, and a very very small group of people I can count on my ten fingers. They nursed me each day back to eventually a place where I could get up each day without breaking down from embarrassment or shame or what if. And I remember saying to my one healer that I'm just so worried that I'm not going to be able to put it back together.
Said to me, did you ever consider.
That when God broke it, he meant for it to stay broken, so that would never ever be put back that way again? I hadn't thought about that. And then we got into the healing of Like I said, I admitted to a whole bunch of things and took responsibility
for a whole bunch of stuff. But in rehab when I had the emergency be pulled over to hear from my lawyers and others about the images that were being distributed, and then through an extortion attempt, by this same person to get tens of thousands of dollars out of me and to set threatened to sell these photos to journalists.
We were able to get a New York journalist who was going to buy them, and we were able to get the catalog of them, and I started to go through them in this therapy period, and I see these images of myself in every single one of them that I see shows me that evening looking lifeless, with no movement except that I had been moved around the room, posed, and my lifeless looking condition was put in the shower, the showers raining down on me, and this person is
narrating something funny, but I'm not looking like I'm breathing. I was okay with take your responsibility for all of these things, because surely, since twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, surely I've done some things to deserve whatever happened.
And even though I can't remember a thing, I deserved it, that is a violation I can't even get. I can't even process because.
It hurt me badly to see those pictures. And then there was a video, supposedly a sex tape that I never looked at, but a woman who worked for me, and Rosie shout out to you for this. She and Katie Fang, who has a UH show on MSNBC now, who was my lawyer during this period. They did get the catalog and they did go through it. In this
video is not even of me. It's of some other some black guy images that were attempted to be sold and pass off as me that weren't me, an extortion attempt to get thousands and then to re sell them to these photo journalists.
It it.
It my fear of being hostage to this person and whatever machine they had with them. It ends today. You can't touch me. There's nothing you can do to me that I haven't already done to myself. And then some And what I thank God for Yati for was getting me to a place where she could say what happened wasn't right, It was a violation, It was foul, and you didn't deserve it forever to release this idea of what I deserved. And like I said, I can cop to anything that I knowingly do and participate in.
And I've been a shitty person a.
Lot of times, but nothing was sitting right on this except what happened and why and and shame for myself, but mostly shame because I thought I was going to and my generation make it easier for my kids who were going to come after me. And it just kept visiting me that I just made everything worse. But it's a process and we pushed through. And that year was hard to celebrate anything, my birthday, mind, whatever, my anything.
But we got to the point in this whole period of time and my periods of recovery, that last year r J wanted to you know, we have fits and starts of what she wanted to celebrate. Most days she wasn't celebrating anything they had to do with me and vice versa, because there was work to do and we've been doing the hard work. But we go out for Father's Day and she has bought tickets for me and the kids and her to go to this special brunch and we take this picture on the lawn or the
place where we have brunch for Father's Day. And I started to get this sense that all right, we won't be okay. And that's when the next week I get a call and the call comes through and it says this is agent you know such and such and I calling on behalf of the fbr of government, federal government. And I need to get with you because we got a what is it called a sealed grand jury indictment
of you on however mind accounts, he says. And I'm not remembering all this at the time, and we need to we need we know where you are so you can surrender yourself.
Yeah.
I know you're normally used to us having a call to action section. We're not going to do that at all today. Our only call to action is that you tune in next time to hear this second part of Andrew's harrowing testimony where he talks about United States of America versus Gillam. Before we end the show, I want to remind everyone to leave us a review and subscribe to Native Land Pod. We're available on all platforms and YouTube. New episodes drop every single Thursday. You can also follow
us on social media at Native Land Pod. We are Angela Raie, Tiffany Cross, and Andrew Gillim.
Welcome home, y'all.
There are two hundred and seventy seven days till election day. Native Lampod is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with reisent Choice Media. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.