Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody. Pre Recorded from the Home Bunker. Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to wok F Daily after a very long time away my friend the Reverend Mark Thompson, host of Make It Plain. You know, whenever Mark and I have the opportunity to get into conversation, you know, I never know where it is going to take us because there is always so much to cover,
and it is always so rich and informating. But also I said informing, I'm that informative, but you can tell I'm tired. But the conversations are always so good and and I talk about a range of things, but it always centers around justice. It always centers around what are we gonna do? Mark makes a joke on this episode that I always look to him to tell us about the Civil rights era as if he was, like, you know,
a grown man at that time. He was not, but he's older than me, so I always looked at him. And because he is, you know, and has been steeped in the Black church and in the you know, movement for Black liberation, and you know, has been shoulder to shoulder literally with some of the great leaders of our time. And so you know, I hope that you enjoy today's conversation. I always enjoy having Mark on the show, and I
hope that you take something good from it. My conversation with our friend Mark Thompson is coming up next, folks. I am so excited to welcome back to WOKF Daily after kind of a long time my friend, the Reverend Mark Thompson, who is the host of Make It Plain. Mark, we have been I don't know how many times people say the word historic, how many times people a week
say the word extraordinary. But we are living in some wild ass times, very unpredictable, increasingly dangerous, and I want to start with the fact that this Republican Party, who used to be about quote unquote law and order, used to hail the cops, used to uphold institutions and agencies around law, now openly threaten the FBI, openly threaten the CIA, openly threatened a now former general, the former Joint chiefs of Staff Mark General Mark Millie, now are just openly violent,
hiding behind the First Amendment. And I just want to get your thoughts on this moment that many people are living on pins and needles.
With Well, it's always good to be with you. Thank you for having me. This is a pretty incredible moment. I can't even take credit for him about to say, our friend and dear colleague, Joyanne Reid said this not too long ago, Danielle, and that is we are at the end of politics. So politics is supposed to be about how who gets what, winning wi and sometimes why.
That's it. This is a two party system in this country.
It's not a multi party democracy like even South Africas or other countries for that matter. And so when you have a two party democracy and one party is engaging in intimidation and suppression and violence and literally not governing, yes, that leads.
It to the other party.
Where in the way it's set up, it's not as if the other party has an absolute majority or able to govern. In fact, the party doesn't want to govern, is building super majorities around the country. So I want people to remember six years ago to the march on Washington, Doctor King said in a position in nullification, I hope everybody those are big words. Then what a mean what doctor King say in like fucking black church preacher, like doctor King say something heavy.
I don't know.
I don't understand what he said, but it shows sound good and now I hope people understand what he meant by that. This is the interposition and nullification of not just the functioning of the government, but the functionality of delivering services to American citizens, whom are taxpayers and whom are not even taxpayers. We're gonna shut it down, We're
gonna make it it's not gonna functions. It's a more sophisticated form of anarchy, but the violence and the threats of violence also bring about a more physical form of anarchy as well. So we are dealing with with with anarchists. So we're not talking about politics anymore. We're not talking about delivery of services. We're not talking about a two party system where there's a balance and one other political entity is seeking votes and support based upon policy that they want to happen.
They just want to stop everything.
Stop women, yep from functioning, stop voting, stop us from voting, just stop stop stop stop stop black people from walking.
Down the store. You know, anything you can stop.
And as Joyce said the other day, you know, the media also bears some responsibility in this because at some point people need to be made to understand that not only is this into politics, but there are there's no equivalency.
This is false equivalency. Yeap, what there is no.
Equivalent between Hunter Biden and Donald Trump. No, that's not about that. That does not nullify. That's not mutual nullification. Hunter Biden is obviously being held accountable for whatever crimes he's accused of Donald Trump. It is well, but Hunter Biden didn't run for president, and in living White House, he's not the president.
And it's never been an elected official, right, has never run for office. So what wrongdoing he does in his own life has the implications for his own life. The wrongdoings that Donald Trump and his criminalized family have done have implications for the nation.
Right, and Trump is the conclusion.
He is the He is the cumulative result of this effort, going back to Reagan, the stop government. Let's stop government. Let's stop government now, not only again, we stop it. We can be anarchists, we can be insurrectionists, we can overthrow it, we can literally stop elections. And he is the cumulative manifestation of this coming together at this hour. So this truly is a different place, and the sooner that people realize that and accept it and begin articulating it.
That's the only way of going to But we keep going around sinking, Oh, well, you know it's just high politics.
No, what is the policy?
What are we doing for people? You're paying taxes, you're not getting anything. Middle class is struggling, all right. I mean not saying the economy hadn't gotten better, but still that's relative. Yeah, economy is good, but people still aren't making the wages they should be making.
No, because inflation is still high, and the fact is that your dollar does not go as far as it used to. Right, And I think that, you know, here we find ourselves in this place that I don't think that we've ever been because you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Mark. But during the Civil Rights era, which was a dangerous time right in America, there was not
this or maybe I'm wrong. Let me ask you, what's there this allegiance to lawlessness by the Republican Party, by the white supremacy and the concernvatives that were working to not allow integration in schools that were bombing churches that were was there an overt allegiance by a political party to just okay it.
Well, to some extent, there was, especially when it came to some of the state governments and the southern governors.
Yes, George Wallace.
Sent the Alabama State troopers onto the Edmond Pettit's Bridge. Bull Connor sent the Birmingham Police Force to sick dogs on people and spray water from fire hoses.
So yeah, but this is the first time you've seen a national politician.
Not individual acts by people.
Yes, right, national politician encouraging it in this way, other than the Civil War of course, and what the Confederacy did. But the fact of the matter is that now with a national figure like Donald Trump, you have a president of the United States.
Think about it too.
Even in the South, Eisenhower was he got caught to middle Eisenhower had to respond to what was going on in Little Rock, even if he didn't want to, because at that time the presidency actually mattered.
Kennedy had to.
Get in things that he didn't when he was elected president of nineteen sixty he didn't plan to get in. Some of the things he got into that came on its own, and the movement made Kennedy an ally and for a moment, Eisenhower was too. When he sent in troops. But think about it, that's when the presidency.
Mattered.
The presidency no longer matters because we are at the end of politics, that this anarchistic, insurrectionist state. I've probably said this on your show before. We'll say it again for those who may have missed it. But if some of you've heard it, I apologize if it's ad nauseam. Remember you're you're coming from the civil rights era context and folks, Daniel's asking these questions. But I don't want you all to take her asking me these questions as
a suggestion that I was alive and fully grown. Do I'm not sure that's what they're trying to do, but I was a little bit came a few years later. Okay, now, but check this out. But I read I'm a student of history. Now when I say this, you all remember this too. When black people before integration, before desegregation, I'd like to say desegrogation, because we never were really integrated before desegregation. If we've scotten the white folks pool, they
had drained the pool. If we stayed in a hotel, there wasn't decerrogreated.
They had to burn the sheets. If you all remember in Django.
When Samuel Jackson played Stephen and he should have got an oscar for the iconic uncle Tom.
And when Dango shows up, he says, where's gonna sleep? Who's gonna burn the sheets? Right?
Lena Horne often tell the story when she was invited to play in big places, they try to put in the big hotels. Then they burn the sheets after she left. That was the mentality civil rights movement. So think about this, an intelligent, good looking black family of four occupied sixteen hundred Pennsylvania.
Yeah, to burn the sheets. Yes, in fact, you have to burn the build yep, burn the country down. I don't think that's heavy. I don't think you need no PhD.
We don't need no whole lot of scholarship or fellowships to figure out I think what I just I think I just said something.
This really ain't that complicated.
And we've always had to have have had to be the ones to articulate, hello, the truth about what they did to us. See, the oppressor of the predator never does that.
M HM.
Hitler would say, they framed what they were doing, They put their spin on what they were doing.
The Holocaust victims sayid, no, no, this is what's really going on.
Nobody heard them, nobody believed them even here in this country.
Oh man, Yo, they ain't nobody really doing that. They'll tripping same thing here.
They are burning the sheets and by this they burn the sheets in the sixties and during Django's time. I'm saying now in this era, they're burning down the country.
I mean, Mark, that is a word right there, got to preach one because, you know, because the reality is that we all know, right intellectually speaking, that this is
a white lash from the Obama presidency. But to say, to put it in the context of burning the sheets and the fact that this black family, this black man becomes president of the United States, not for four years but for eight right is still held up as and will be, you know, potentially remembered as one of the great presidents of a really interesting time in America because we don't know what this timeline is going to be
of destruction and anarchy that we're in. But to equate it to the fact that, I mean, this goes beyond Jonathan Metzil's book Dying of Whiteness. This is like, we are going to burn everything to the ground because this group, these people who we believe should still exist in shackles, should still exist solely in service to us. Dare to enter into that white house. We're voted in by Republicans, by white folks right twice.
And white women right in sixteen.
So I'm like so to turn around and say, but that was the whole point though with Donald Trump, because it goes to Johnson's You know, if you can teach the poorest white man that he's better than the best black man, you can pick his pockets. Right, So you give us your worst Donald Trump is the fucking worst, right.
Let you give us the most ignorant, the most egotistical, the most dangerous, the most selfish right white man that you could possibly put up to be president of the United States, the antithesis of what Obama is, and what Obama is stood for as a smush in the face to those of us that believed that we were on the beginning of America's progressive transition and not this place
of deep regression. So my question is if they if burning the sheets was the response, and burning down the country now is their response to black people being in a place of authority and power. Well, this doesn't ever end, Mark, does it? Until they are sufficiently have burnt shit down.
Well, and let's let's add to it. Let's let's add the ins to the injury for white folks. They what did y'all and Heston say when he was head of the NRA, If you want my gun, you have.
To come and take it from my cold dead hair, right.
Cry it from my prior. That was a metaphor for America, because is changing. America is becoming a majority minority country, all right.
So that's this is the last grasp. James Baldwin put it this way.
He said, we have come to the end of one language and are about forming a new one. America is the last white country the world will ever see. There's no more Western civilization, can't go no more west anymore. That can't explore no more. That's it's over. That's why you got to go out of space. Now, that's right there. That's that's another word. Because we can't do anymore here. So watch this, doctor King nineteen sixty five March from
some of the Montgomery at the Montgomery State Capital. How after the Civil War, America had to had to, as he said, engineer a segregated society. And this is what he said, through their control of mass media, they revised a doction of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds. All right, then they directed all of this. They put new laws on the books to Jim Crow, laws all of that.
And then doctor King says this, It may be said of the slavery are that the white man took the world and gave the negro Jesus. And then it may be said that the constructor reconstruction area era that the southern aristocracy Danielle took the world and gave the world
and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when white man had this Jim Crow, when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him to no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man better off than the black man.
Jim Crow was at birt.
So what is Trump is the current manifestations playing the race card. He's causing division because you don't want It's what's where Red and Barbara doing.
He's trying to do the poor people's campaign.
The Poor People's Campaign, which Doctor King starter was to correct what I just described.
Hey, guess what y'all poor people? You know? Let me tell you some commitment y'all doing mad as us?
Oh, white women in twenty sixteen, y'all know, robody now mock you and Danielle Tripping were.
Telling white women y'all about to lose role. They didn't believe it. Yep, we get it.
We're voting for the white woman that you don't vote for because y'all got crabs in the barrel. Remember we weren't serious exam when the white woman called my show and said my white women got crabs in the barrel.
Right. We tried to tell y'all nobody believe it. Oh, y'all just cu y'all been saying that for fifty years. No, they've been fighting it for fifty years.
If we fought for one thing for fifty years, rather than think we're gonna get it tomorrow on Instagram, think how far we would be. So doctor King's trying to correct that, they kill him right when Barbie tries to.
Correct it, and I going, I'm into West Virginia. How many these places people? I'm doing bad?
You got to distract them into Donald Trump and the foolishness and the hating us and trying to see.
We got to stop women. Man, yw you're gonna pay your rent now, I gotta stop women. But you ain't got no money. Let's stop stop right there. Let's talk about how to.
Get you some money, get you a real job, get you some real income. Nobody's a bigger reparations activist than me advocate. We are when white folks got fah loans, homestead act all the things that are set up the middle class. Middle class didn't come out from no cabbage patch. All right, All that's obsolete. Now we need reparations. And I would even dare say white folks need a middle class upgrade.
We do twice, they do once. So when you speak in those terms and.
People can't really get mad at you, they just ignore it because it's easier to be racist.
Yep, it's easier to hate ya.
It's easier, and it's the same thing.
It's no different. We all are guilty of it. We just had a strike, was striking over for the actors. Folks, Black actors got to stick together. We're still on strike. We all are anesthetized by media. Netflix. We don't Netflix and chill. We Netflix and get intoxicated and zoned out from reality.
Yep. And now because it's a pacifier, it is a pacifier.
But see for them Fox is there Netflix? That just ain't ours, ain't no different from us. They checking out on Fox. We check it out on something Helse or Love and Hip Hop or The Real Housewives. All right, because that is the anestetization, and that's an easy fix. That's the band aid for your everyday reality of working too many long hours for too little money. So where is the vision in America to change that? Where you
killed it in nineteen sixty five? You killed it in nineteen sixty eight, twice.
In April and in June.
Killed it November sixty years this November, all.
Right, you killed it, you know, you know.
Then Johnson comes in and he's able to do some things, but then that's the end of that. Then you bring in Nixon, and I'm antaed this lit nice little bow.
Stop Nixon.
Junkies who don't get help and don't go to any meetings, right, never admit the drug controls them. You always had a feeling you can beat the drug now that I'm saying junkies that can go for alcoholics, I got this.
I'm in control. No, you're not.
The junkies for this anarchy. Many of the same people that were around in the seventies with Nixon what a Knicks, always say this was a botched up job, botched up Burkeley, never an admission that you violated the constitution. You a dog on criminal, I'm not a crook. The people Roger Stone on Trump's man.
All the people, yep, yep, I like junkies.
They're still trying to prove that they got control over their behavior that the criminality doesn't have control over. So we can we can we we Nixon was botched up, man, but we're gonna we can do this for you.
We're gonna fix this.
At least Nixon had the sense they put he they put a mirror in front of him, and they put a crystal ball, and they said, you're gonna end up like a guy in the future named Trump. You're gonna lose all your business licenses, your businesses, if you're gonna lose all your property, you might go to prison. You're gonna have ninety one charges against you. And Nixon still had the sense, and he was now calling himself he still had the sense. You know what, I don't think
I'm gonna do that. I think I'll just resigned. That's the deal we're gonna cut. You resign and all that goes away. Trump doesn't get it because he's gonna go down with the white supremacist slave ship.
And you know, Mark, I really hope that that is the case. I really do, because you know, when Joyce said this is the end of politics, I had said in twenty sixteen, this is white supremacy's last stand that day,
Election Day. That is what I said. Here we are now eight plus years later, seven eight years later, and we're watching this play out, the ninety one charges, two impeachment trials, you know, losing the businesses on the hook potentially for two hundred and fifty million or more here in New York, right, We're watching all of this play out, and I'm just like, but will it be the death? Now? Do you know what I'm saying. If this is the end of politics, this is the last question for you.
If this is the end of politics, then what comes depth?
Yeah?
Hey, well, first of all, you said some Danielle that I really.
Just heard clearly, and I hope other people heard it as well. Years. If folks, time is not on ours, a time is flying.
Yep, y'all, we're almost a decade older than when now.
Trump came in power. Look at y'all. Do y'all look the same?
Does anybody listen to us look the same in the mirriad morning? They did ten years ago?
So that's ten years of foolishness and stress.
If any one of us was in a relationship, I'd like to think with somebody that's crazy in our house.
For ten years they got to we would have said it.
So the answer ultimately.
Is going back to the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, of the black power movement, of the revolution. Okay, and that is fundamentally changing this country. Well what does that mean? So, folks, it's two kinds of revolution. Is a revolution and a counter revolution. A revolution is for positive change. Counter revolution is to stop it. Counterintelligence is to stop that's cointeil pro.
So the revolution that.
Doctor King talked about, the Malcolm X talked about was transformative in the sense that America would live up to the true meaning of its creed, that America would ultimately endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in America would ultimately bring about reparations, and to break it down even more, that role would be restored, that the Supreme Court would be expanded, that there would be universal, same day, on
site automatic voter registration. Now, think about those last few things I said in comparison to the other more lofty ideas, though smaller things that don't sound like that doesn't sound like it's heavy of a lift, does it?
But it's up to us to do it because they're doing it.
We can't complain about the hatred and the vitriol and violence because the same people who look like you and me and doing it, they're out here doing it. We sitting home, Doh, what we're gonna do? Huh, what's gonna happen?
You know?
And and I love Danielle, but but Danielle can't curse everybody out to freedom.
No, we got, we got. I wish you could, you know.
But but we've got to organize, get ourselves together, take ourselves seriously, and make movement a part of our daily lives and our daily habits and not just succumb I'm gonna say this, and this may may be u controversial Gavin News some fills the seat in the Senate black woman pledges a black woman. We can leave no stone unturned when it comes to justice. No, no, no. If white politicians and the Democratic Party has seniority and are treated with seniority, black politicians should too.
Okay. So rather than people say, oh, you know and I know sister find this.
Oh that's all good, you think Barbe, But why not Barbaralye?
Yeah, she has.
This, why not Barbe? Oh it's her age, none of no that it's not because her age. She voted four hundred and thirty four to one. She was the one vote against against the war. We now know it was
a mistake. That was the Iraq War. So once you look at all our progressive friends who pretend to be our allies, allies to the black community, allies to the Latino community, allies to the LGBTQI community, allies to the to the women community, to the feminis community, the women's community in California, we're gonna stop barb bely because we're still on Iraq War time. This must be a total total overhaul of the way we think, of the way
we support people and accountability. We put on people and ultimately get to the place where we're not just voting for somebody to stop Donald Trump. Yep, that's all we're doing now. And yeah, to be fair, that didn't just start there.
For years.
We've been voting to stop people from somebody worse. If we do what we need to do, we'll be in the majority organically, not even by manipulation, not even through redistricting. All the Poles support the things we believe in in the majority.
That's what we gotta do.
My friend. If there is anyone that can make it plain, it is you. If there is anyone that can bring together the burning of the sheets and the burning of the country, it is you. Mark Thompson, always a pleasure when you come to wok Afi daily, and please come back.
And if there's anybody, if it's anybody. Story Steve Harvey Toad in Kings of Comedy. He didn't like to go to church until he went to church one Sunday and they folks, somebody jumped in line for the food after the church, and lit la in the church said if this MF And when Steve Harvey heard cussing in church, he wanted to go to church every Sunday after that.
So that's a little bit us too. We'd like to hear when you cuss folk out. So yeah, we love you. That ain't nobody cuss. It's funny. We love it, you know, love to have this. Just let you do one of these Republican debates.
I wish, I wish they would. I wish they would. It'd be the highest viewed. I'll tell you that. Appreciate you, my friends.
We all love you.
WOKF That is it for me today, dear friends on woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.