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This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511.
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James Gearing and this week
it is my absolute honour to welcome on the show Air Force veteran and the man behind
One People's Project Darrell Lamont Jenkins.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from his journey into the military,
his love of punk rock, anarchy in music, the incredible success he's had with some young
men escaping neo-Nazi groups, One People's Project, his perspective on racism in America
and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for
others to find and this is a free library of over 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said I introduce to you Darrell Lamont Jenkins.
Enjoy.
Darrell I want to say thank you so much for taking the time and coming on Behind the Shield
podcast as we were discussing before I hit record I first came across you and just one
of the minute chapters of your life in the movie Skin and then have since obviously followed
you and we've interacted on Instagram but now we're talking so I want to say welcome
to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you I'm glad to be here, glad to be able to talk to you today.
So where on planet earth we finding you this afternoon?
I'm in the office in New Jersey and this is basically my sanctum sectorium and it gives
me an opportunity to just mull over things and just talk freely without any mixed company
around to try to explain what it is that I have been doing over the past 30 some odd
years.
Alright well let's start the beginning of that journey then so tell me where you were
born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic what your parents did how many siblings?
Well I was born in North New Jersey in 1968 I'm old and my parents it was really interesting
when it comes to my family because black families usually especially black families of the age
that I come from there aren't a lot of people who go the professional route and pretty much
all of my family did that.
My father was raised in North New Jersey which was a little bit rough and tough I mean he
you know the cool thing about graduated from the school of hard knocks that was dad but
he also graduated from Rutgers University so and he was a counselor he was a teacher
he was in many respects a therapist and in particular a drug counselor at near the end
of his life he had to retire but that was the last job that he had and you grow up learning
how seeing him come home with that kind of you know baggage that not baggage but rather
the sympathy on his shoulders for those that he was trying to help and my father was a
tough dude my father was a tough dude and he and that will come out in just like sometimes
frustration or sometimes a success because um a feeling of success because this was what
he wanted to do all his life help people get through that life when they didn't feel they
can and so that so that was that that was that he grew up with a lot of these folks
that were going through hell and he spent the rest of his life trying to get them out
of that hell him and his brothers him and his brothers did that because my um because
everybody was the basically the family business with education my mother was a teacher she
was also a nurse and a missionary and she still is a missionary she's a mother in the
church um right now and um so you learned how to deal with people through how my dad
dealt with people my brothers and sisters they have families of their own they're doing
well and um i have um two sisters one brother and everybody for the most part no one for
the most part really knew what kind of work i was doing until you know the movie came
a movie was being produced and once the movie and by that time dad was already gone but
um by that time um when they got to see what it was that i was um i was doing what it is
that i produced to be um precise then they realized that there was something serious
going on and i had um done some work out there that they knew nothing about because one of
the reasons why you didn't know anything about the work was the fact that i was trying to
protect my family from um any kind of blowback that i might have to um deal with i didn't
want them to catch any of that shrapnel so so um but i grew up and um in new jersey i
graduated high school immediately went into the air force didn't take long for me to get
out because um that wasn't where i needed to be and um they agreed
and uh and needless to say i didn't have the best of time of it i actually was um discharged
um well before my time i was supposed to stay in i was only supposed to stay in four years
i ended up getting out two years eight months and ten days later because i was not a good fit
but it was only because that wasn't how i wanted to fight that wasn't how i wanted to um apply myself
um in the future as a as a um as a human being as a as a person who wanted to try to do something
with their lives that wasn't the direction i should have been going and i was a cop i
i don't think that um i would have been uh as successful a cop as i am maybe doing what i do
today there's no way it's so funny because when you hear people laugh and um joke about okay would
you want a cop to show up or a social worker to show up i'm gonna tell you flat out after what i
see my father my uncles my mother and a whole bunch of other people in my family do social worker
it's best to build those lives up instead of um having to tear them down you know
well speaking of that i want to go back to your dad because this is a such a an important
conversation there's so much and we'll get to obviously modern day but as we sit here this
the last eight years has been so much finger pointing well it's this person's problem that
the country is this way well this person hadn't opened the borders you know whatever it is it's
it's it's them them them them them and there's that quote if you want to change the world start a home
and you mentioned about you know your father and your uncle creating this environment where they
not only you know we're healing in their own homes but then going out and and healing others
it's funny because you talked about that kind of vicarious trauma it reminds me of michael
clark duncan's character in the green mile where he's just taking on that pain taking on that pain
and the first responders this thing you know we we totally understand that we're empaths too um yeah
but so talk to me about that what was it whether it was you know their parents what was the
environment that caused those young men to decide to to do such good in their own communities
i mean when you grow up with that kind of pain with that kind of trauma um and you have figured
out that you need to get out of it and then you look back and see all your friends and all their
families still struggling you don't want to leave that behind this is the this is the world that you
knew and you love that world you love everybody in your community and you want to leave that behind
you want to see things better for them i mean these are your friends and these are your family
let's not forget these are family people that need help you don't want to just say okay i got i mean
my family was not of that mindset of i got mines you get yours kind of thing and uh it was it and
i think it was probably one of the most important things that um my um my family could have ever done
and we're not just talking like i said before you're not just talking about my father you're
talking about my uncle my um my uncle bob was a psychologist and my um my uncle lenzel worked
within the um north school system as as did my um my uncle pip they called him and you see
and they all used to just basically um compare notes but what it is they were doing and i mean i
when i hear people on the political level when i hear people um down that kind of work because
they'd rather go out and have a cop shoot somebody um and that's where the problem usually is when it
comes to issues with police and all that it's the people behind them who don't really care about the
communities um when you hear them down the uh the work that say my father did or even my mother as
a missionary or as a teacher herself um you're not dealing with serious people you want to solve
problems and that's what my father was trying to do and he did and and it and it did frustrate him
like i said they did get to um there were times when it would just get to him not in any kind of
um rage-filled way or where he took it out on his family or some nonsense like that but just
what do i do here because remember i grew up in the 80s 80s was aides crisis my father had to deal
remember as a drug counselor my father had to deal with people who he knew were going to die of aids
you know who was going to was not going to be there in the next couple of months in the next
couple of years and i remember him saying to me one time and remember i'm a teenager i'm a
teenager when he's telling me this how do you tell them that everything's going to be okay
when he knows full well that it isn't and i've seen and i saw that time and time again with my
father that's the kind of frustration that you had or if somebody washes out of the program that's
frustrating especially when he um liked the person and wanted that person to do better
and even what and there are times when even when they do wash out of the program he figures out a
way to actually try to help them from um falling down the hole sometimes i mean sometimes they just
have to they're on their own i mean it all depends on the person but he will do what he can to help
people he will do what he can to help clean folks up and that's one of the things that i took away
from um his work i mean i think that i have to approach things the same way that my father did
with the drug lens um my perspective of being a first responder for 14 years and seeing you know
all the all the ripple effects plural of drug prohibition so you've got the gangs you've got
the homelessness you got the prostitution you've got the overdoses um you know coming from from
the uk which has a similar prohibition stance as the u.s which was actually forced upon it as i did
the research um you you just realized it's been an epic failure the the war on drugs criminalizing
addiction have you ever had any discussions on the kind of the root cause of a lot of the addiction
that your dad interacted with and and maybe that same empathy and compassion being applied to an
addict versus the legal system i think really my father was focused more on how to fix the addiction
as opposed to how to fix the system i mean he was not a politician he didn't approach this
um from a political um from a political perspective i don't i mean very seldom would you hear my father
talk politics unless it was right up front and in your face but his whole thing was you need to get
some work done we need all the all the complaining and all the lobbying in washington isn't going to
do a damn thing for my man who's sitting there getting ready to um stroke out on um on an
overdose or something like that you know um somebody who just doesn't know how to um basically change
their life that's what you're trying to do you're trying to deal with that you're trying to deal with
that person and the people um around him so he didn't really focus on it and i think that's the
other thing that um i have to take away from um the work that he and my mother did because
in the end we're dealing with human beings who need help and we are also dealing we're dealing
with folks who can't wait for you know your politician to get it right they're not going to
get it right for various reasons unfortunately i'm a cynic that way but uh but if that's the case
what can you do what can you do i mean that's uh that's the question you have to do and uh
you have to ask yourself rather whenever um whenever you're approaching the situation what can
you do absolutely well with your kind of your childhood firstly what were you playing as far
as sports when you were a young man i tried to play football i didn't i couldn't stay in that but um
baseball softball that was my thing but there was no real league or anything like that so
that was my thing but there was no real leagues going on there was nobody really doing little
league around so we used to just play um baseball with the neighborhood kids or or or softball with
the neighborhood kids and uh but that that was my thing that was my thing and i used to talk all
day long about um the various uh baseball players back in the day whether you're talking about
willy star joe or catfish hunter or something like that um but uh but that was uh that that was my
thing um as time went along it wasn't really sports or anything that i was interested in
rather some sort of comic book or history or music music really just began was the thing for me once
i got out of the air well no well before that but really once i got out of the air force and i
started getting into some of the scenes out there so what about when you were in the school age you
mentioned about going into the air force is that what you were initially dreaming of becoming or
was there another career aspiration well see that was that wasn't where i was going i mean my father
um just suggested it to me because he figured that that was just a way to build some sort of
a foundation and all um my mistake was looking at it as solely that and not recognizing that there
was a lot more behind um being in the military that you had to respect and that you had to
basically apply yourself to i never did that so once i got out once i got out i immediately went
to college i immediately went to college and then i found my footing now in your upbringing prior to
leaving the military um had you been exposed to any kind of supremacist groups or overt racism up
to that point well that was a crazy thing because no and i didn't really start seeing them face to
face um until i would say maybe 92 or when i was probably like three or four years out of the
military i think um what i was um what whatever it was i saw it would have been on television
um in the news um in your newspapers and things like that and i think my involvement was just
was started really out of a curiosity about them they didn't really to me at the time pose um the
kind of threat the clan didn't pose a kind of threat that they did maybe um at that time
remember it was the 80s i mean 20 30 years ago um but the thing that really raised an eyebrow as
time went along was the fact that you heard things said by those that had influence that you heard
some clansmen say on donahue and that was what made me say okay let me follow this and see where it goes
well before we get into that journey talk to me about your journey into to punk because firstly
you know it's an interesting journey you know regardless i know i've had some guests i don't
know if it's the same era as you but i was educated on the fact that you had straight edge punk so you
had guys in the punk scene that weren't drinking and you know we're living a very clean lifestyle
with water yep there we go but then also punk is associated with some of the skinhead movements
and some of the the neo-nazi movements as well so what was your journey into punk and kind of which
which of those subsets did you find yourself amongst well it was interesting because i was
like listening to um when i was growing up i was listening to strictly hip-hop and r&b
excuse me the original like the early hip-hop um too when we're talking about um stuff that only
came from new york city and my first exposure to punk for real um there were several uh record
stores in this town new brunson and i have my own particular um record store called varsity but there
were other record stores that sold what us as kids called the white music excuse me and
when i went to those stores out of curiosity and it was more than just the white music more
than just the metal bands and all of that more than direct more than just the randoran you started
seeing um the whole punk um the whole punk groups and everything the stuff that you didn't hear on
the radio at all i mean you could find iron maiden on the radio back then you can find judas preach
you can find ozzy osbourne you wasn't going to find the agnostic front on the radio okay and
and warzone and you know and fugazi i mean you're not so that was really when it was like
underground and i was really curious i noticed something that was really curious in that
when i looked at those kinds of records when i saw the punk albums i noticed they looked like
the hip hop albums of the day because the hip hop albums the hip hop records of the day
were all indie labels still they weren't major labels yet they didn't have any music videos
you basically had to know where to find songs because a lot of the hip hop wasn't being played
on the radio yet and basically every time you went to go get a record of theirs you saw you saw how
bare bones it was same thing with some of these punk albums um but a lot of these punk albums
to be honest um there wasn't any full color albums um the um the artwork was basically graffiti
like just like the hip hop especially when you're talking about the uh the new york scene when
you were talking about hip hop and when you're talking about the new york punk it was really
um influenced by the hip hop scene at the time so and you saw it and you saw it on in their albums
so um i was starting to get interested in them but then i would play one of the records and i
was like no i'm not into this just yet what got me into is i got out of the air force um and i
started going and i went to a punk show the important thing for me was how much everybody
was involved and i mean whether he was on the stage or um or just watching them play and you'll see
them jump up on stage and i mean i was used to stage diving at this point anyway because even at
the arena shows i was going to at that point um you saw that happening or floating on um
um floating in the audience and things like that but you know getting up on stage and singing along
with the band that kind of thing that was new i was getting into it and then after after the show
we all went and hung out i mean it wasn't like it wasn't like uh these guys were on the pedestal
when they're gonna go somewhere with the girls and all of that like i was used to at that time no
we all hung out we all um if you drank got got stone cold drunk or talk everybody that was there
we was talking about starting our own bands and i was just like this is what i was looking for
this is what i was looking for this kind of camaraderie this kind of um um atmosphere
where everybody no one rather was waiting for um somebody to hit give them a record deal nobody
was waiting for them to let them play at a club and all of that um they just said they weren't
even waiting to see if they knew how to play an instrument they was basically saying we're good
we're just gonna do it we're just gonna do it and uh that's that's the attitude i was looking for
that's the attitude that i needed where you heard where you heard people decide that um i want to do
it and i'm gonna do it that's what got it was interesting what you're saying about the commonalities
between punk and hip-hop because you've got you know young men and women who are frustrated at
that some sort of system or establishment and his was was quite funny i got deeply into hip-hop in my
kind of i guess late teens and i was a farm boy in england and before that i was going to phil
collins and people like that and then i don't know what it was and all of a sudden like the you know
boys in the hood and some of these films just resonated so deeply i don't even know i probably
couldn't even explain it back then but it was just i think it was uh you know a sense of of wanting
to break the mold because if you think about you know boys in the hood their cage is the hood there
and they're both you know trying to break out and you know obviously it's a very tragic end but you
know there is that that real resonating with some of the the music the the messages even though the
actual lyrics might be completely foreign to you and that's one of the reasons why a lot of people
get upset when um when you apply say um nazis in the skinhead culture because when you talk about
the punk scene in the uk and remember i have never been to the uk so bear with me on this one um
what my vibe has been was that you saw a lot of um coexistence shall i say with between the punk
scene and the reggae scene back then and when you talk about um skinhead culture it was really a
lot of white kids that was emulating the jamaican rude boys that was coming into england to find
work and then because the way that the rude boys looked i mean not the rude boys yeah rude boys or
um skinheads looked that was how a lot of your hate groups and all thought that they can um angle
themselves into the culture into the punk culture which was big at the time they looked at um we
we don't have to wear mohawks we don't have to have our hair color we don't have to be against
anything skin we can we can um adapt the skinhead culture and make it our own because this is the
way we want people to look so and and that's how that was born but people fought it when i got out
of the air force when i came into the um just before i went into the air force um i started
hearing about skinheads i remember i wasn't in the punk scene yet after i got out of the air force
i started meeting them and it was a very different dynamic than what i saw on opera or dana here or
something like that and it was really important it was really important to um see and that was
another thing that said okay this is the direction i'm going in so let's start walking through that
direction because it was interesting i heard you on a podcast and i forget the the name of it now
it was um a gentleman in oh my goodness i'm gonna butcher the state even but it was a few years ago
i think it was right after covid it hit but um this just like you said this idea is presented to
sometimes an entire nation this group of people are like this and you could insert you know so
many different examples there and what i've learned you know over my 50 years and also in
all these conversations is this is the problem it's you know it's not all of anything and even you
know and i know this is my kind of opinion on this even slavery which is like a you know big
taboo topic i know but i was curious like you and i was like all right let me let me look at
how the uk was doing during the height of slavery bearing in mind that the british slave traders were
exchanging people in africa and then they were going to america washing their hands you know
getting tobacco and then coming to the uk i don't know what you're talking about there's no slaves
here um but the uk the british people were at some of their deepest uh poverty they've been
in years and years and years the way it's presented is the white people all benefited from slavery and
it's like no just like with so many other examples of tyranny a small group of people benefited from
the suffering of many but the moment you tire an entire country an entire race an entire religion
and tar and feather all of them you totally remove the ability to actually understand the
nuance and then move forward from it right and i think that um i think that's always important
whenever you're trying to um um prevail as the leader of a country so so to speak or leader of
a region or a society it's like there is that divide and conquer um mentality that you got to
work with you know and i think one of the reasons why we called ourselves one people's project is
because we wanted to show people that you're not going to divide us and you're damn sure won't
conquer us and uh and and it's important to maintain that thought it's important to maintain
that idea because uh it doesn't make any sense to go forward if you're not about that um and that's
one and again going back to the punk scene that was one of the um major things that got me um
really into it because a lot of the trappings a lot of the things that we grew up with as you know
this is how you're going to be and and so on i think that the punk scene is comprised of people
who didn't want to be that who wasn't going to be that but knew that they could still flourish
still flourish still still grow and still contribute i mean i talked about how after i got
out of the effort started getting into the scene i saw my first skin you know i also also met my
first gay person openly gay person at that time so a lot of things after i got out of the military
which is very regimented um remember the military was also the first time i got out of the house
and started experiencing life once i got out of the military i started experiencing everything
so going to um going to shows all the time really started giving me an idea of um what is really
out there and what is really important and what was really important to me at the time was
changing society in a way that um we all benefited as one people and we all worked together in
fellowship that's always been my attitude the other part of that however is if you're trying
to keep and this is the major part obviously um if you're trying to keep that from happening we're
going to fight you we're going to fight you um and that's where it comes into um dealing with the
nazis and in this day and age you know i had a guest on the show ron starworth i'm not sure if
you're familiar with with his story but he he was a subject of the film the black clansman
oh no no no that ron star okay yes actually saw the movie yes i'm teaching someone else i said he
was a boxer i'm sure there's a somewhat common name i'm sure but um but it was just fascinating
to hear again you know here's this this black police officer and he's a black man and he's
a young police officer at the time you know and then they infiltrate it between him and you know
the guy that she shows up in person who ironically and the movie is jewish i can't remember if he
actually was jewish i don't think he was in real life but anyway between the two of them they have
this thing going on and ironically one of the the top people in the clan of that chapter was actually
a local firefighter so here's here's an irony this guy risks his life for people whatever color and
creed they are and yet as part of the clan yeah there goes the insanity of some of these you know
these people's thought processes but you know it was really interesting kind of hearing you know
some of these little pockets that existed and this was back in the 80s so you mention about hearing
you know a political figure parroting something that a clan member had said so walk me through
that journey you're you're enjoying the punk rock scene you start to have this kind of aha moment
where do you go from there well it's funny because i was always a political well when i had um when
i while i was in the air force i started dealing with being more and more of an activist strike one
if you're in the military you're in trouble if you do that in the military and like i said
i was in trouble um so i started being a little politically astute um even more so once i got out
so by that point by the time i got out um my main um thing in politics politically speaking i should
say was dealing with civil rights dealing with the history of black people in this country
and most importantly dealing with the adversaries that we faced and where they were in this day and
age um talk radio started becoming a thing around that time and you started hearing um
people like rush limbaugh talk trash that you heard some plans to speak or somebody up here
in new york a guy named bob grant who would call martin luther king a scumbag on his airwaves
and would actually allow and invite um white supremacists to leave their um contact information
over the air and and his um station was abc you're talking mainstream um when you start seeing that
and then you realize just how deep this goes and you start trying to figure out okay how do they
get from point a to point b or maybe point a and point b was non-existent and it was it was all at
point a so um and that was one of the things that um i basically tried to um document over the
course of the past 30 years i still have a couple of um tapes from excuse me from bob grant and rush
limbaugh where they say some things that they probably would never say today i mean and um
and i think they're important for people to listen to now um so folks can understand
what it is um the mindset was back then versus now unfortunately neither of those individuals
are here today to um to answer for it um they answered for it in their day eventually um but
but um overall it's just basically right now today is just a um teachable moment for the rest of us
that that history a question for you because this is again you know something that i've observed um
i'll give you a prime example there was a famous news story a few years ago just up the road from
where i live where a preacher was going to be a preacher and he was going to be a preacher and
preacher was going to burn an entire you know pile of corans and and yes and someone told me that and
i was like i bet you that motherfucker has got a book and he's about to release it and sure as
shit this piece of shit had written some book this wasn't anything about some holy you know virtuous
movement it was simply so he could sell his shitty book and i hope it sold terribly but it really
frames the fact that when when i observe extremism by people with a large platform
usually there's a book or a tv show or a tour or something that they're basically promoting through
their toxic you know divisive spiel that they're putting out there what have you seen about some
of these you know bigger figures out there as far as the the thing beneath the thing they may say
that you know they may be preaching about whatever you know islamophobic or whatever it is but is
there a common thread where behind that there's there's greed and power to be gained yeah and
pretty much that's pretty much what you have these days that is what you have these days um
before reagan i mean remember reagan was the great communicator why was he the great communicator
because he was the first president to um actually look at a camera and say this is my friend you know
uh other um other presidents before then yeah they knew that they had to sell themselves to the public
of course reagan comes out of um comes out of a profession in which you knew how to do that
and after reagan after reagan your politicians started to um adopt that to the point where that
is the only thing they know to do so you have a lot of politicians that as james brown said in the
seventies are talking loud and saying nothing and uh and um in the eighties and nineties and
two thousand talking loud and doing nothing will be more apt um it's all about it's all about the
grip now so to speak and they know and i think it's a pretty telling thing in regards to how
successful the rest of society is because you're talking about conservatives out there who know
their ideals will not um go any further than um than their chatter
but their bank account will be amazing i mean i remember one time i heard ben shaper on um bill
mars show say flat out um when someone talked to him about um the kind of a criticism kind of um
um things that he's the slings and avocés gets for the things that he believes he says hey um i'll
cry about it on my bed of money or something to that effect and it's like that's what matters
that's what matters to the um for the ben shaperos and the candace homes and uh and michael
knolls and all that they're not really going to um put forward anything that is going to
benefit society but it's most certainly going to benefit them and it's been like that for years
you did have back in the 90s and back in the 80s you still had people who um who were going to do
some work but that became less and less especially as the liberals and the left and the democrats or
whatever you want to say um started applying themselves and started um getting themselves into
um the positions where we can actually make sure that things were done and that wasn't supposed to
happen but it happened and as we came up you know you're talking about the right just going down
to the point that all they have is the grift and um and then that's the issue that we have today
you take a look at congress today we have people in congress who have not done a thing marjorie
telegreen lauren bolbert matt gates but you see them all the time they haven't put any forth
put forth any kind of legislation or excuse me or anything that benefits um even their own constituents
but they say they say cute sound bites that will um that will get them at the next um right wing
conference that they can speak at or something like that i mean it gets them there and that's
all that matters that's really all that matters and that's frustrating for people who really are
looking for um folks who are going to um put their time in and do what we need them to do when we
elect them and uh and even if you're even if you are not going to agree with the darn thing that
i'm about at least um make sure that you know the society stays afloat but that's not where they're
at they couldn't care less i've made this observation recently it's extremely simple
a leader unites a nation and a tyrant divides them and again i would argue the last eight years
which spans both sides of the aisle we have seen nothing but division and so you know whether it's
local government whether it's you know a state or or a nation itself if whoever we have you know used
our tax money to fund to be at the helm of that organization if they are doing nothing but dividing
or doing nothing as you just mentioned with some of these people then there needs to be an awakening
by us all of the you know the the u.s you know the the entire nation to band together and demand
good people i mean it nauseates me i literally had the capacity to finally vote as an immigrant
and that was i think trump and clinton were my two choices and all i heard over and over again was
people say the words the lesser of two evils and i'm just like 330 million people you should never
hear that phrase if the system is right you should be like i really like this person but if we get
but if we get this person it's still going to be good it's not my favorite but it's still going
to be good but we have to choose from these freaking horrendous people every single four years
yeah and and it's by design because when now you're talking about um a political process that was
that's a complete mess right now voting for the lesser two evils is voting for evil
and evil is taking its toll to the point that this year you don't hear people saying lesser
or two evils anymore because they realize that saying that it's going to set up a lot turn on a
light bulb in that and a lot of people's heads and said wait a minute we just spent 48 years
of evil in control and you want me to vote for evil again no that's not the way this works
not the way this works and i think one of the things that um people are trying to do is i mean
a lot of people are trying to change that it's just a matter of knowing how and i'll be fair i'll be
honest this is one of the things that got occupy started occupy and i and i'm spending a lot of
time telling going around the country telling people this and talking on podcast because
everybody tries to pretend that they didn't know what occupy was about occupy was about finding
solutions to our problems without having to go through a corrupt political process to um to do
it you know i mean it's funny how um we're looking at the bridge in baltimore and and biden promises
60 million dollars to get the bridge rebuilt this is not a controversial thing but you have one of
those one of those uh republican congressman who's trying to make a name for himself trying to balk
at the idea of joe biden giving them all this money when just a couple of years ago there was
a bridge that collapsed in mississippi and they got three or four times that much um unanimously
without any controversy so there's i mean so now we're looking at there's really no controversies
going on except for the ones that um certain politicians create and create just to benefit
themselves so when you see a society um looking at that they say okay we really got to start
building and this is what i always um encourage start building up our institutions start building
um start building new institutions to replace old ones that will respond to our concerns and our
needs and like i said that's what occupy was trying to encourage people to do and i think to some degree
there was um success in that but i think um we need to just keep that momentum going even though
it's been what 2011 was when occupy happened so it's been about what 13 years or so and um
we're still trying to figure out how to get back to that so to speak how to um build off of that
and i think we're doing okay things are getting addressed in ways that um they will otherwise not
get addressed you know i mean i think that when you take a look at police brutality for example
um people aren't saying aren't asking the government per se to um to identify and try to um
i try to gather the evidence that will get bad cops out of there they're videotaping the police
now and and they're and they are showing everybody what exactly it is that um that we're upset about
and our concerns and that's why police who are doing wrong are going to jail today that's why
um that's what got a lot of these um police officers in jail today it was the people it was
folks out there in the street it wasn't our government when it comes to this conversation
because i mean i've you know i've i've had people on here many many times where we talked about the
cases where a police officer has absolutely made a mistake you know and actually ironically in the
george floyd case you know i had a guy who really broke down the whole case and it was just ultimately
they were completely wrong the the police and the paramedics in that particular case but they were
actually brought to justice the way anyone else would have been they were actually you know
that they received the judgment that they should have so then you look at the kind of massive
reaction to that they that one was actually handled the way it should have been what's very unfair
though i think and i just shared an interesting video it was an author talking about the police
an author talking about another author's book and he said um he was talking about poverty in this
particular case he said in the world of poverty in america it's like a burning building and
children are jumping from the windows to their death and all we're doing is focusing on the
children and not who started the fire and who benefits from it and i think this is the other
side you never ever hear when it comes to law enforcement in the states there are some incredible
men and women in in uniform some of them train despite their department i've worked for the fire
departments where i took my time off and my own personal money to get better at my job because
my department didn't support me that way but what we don't say is why are the streets of america so
unsafe why do we have gangs why do we have so much homelessness why i mean why do we consume 75 percent
of the world's opioids even though we're four percent of the world's population why do we have
20 percent are incarcerated of the entire world when we're only four percent so and i again back
to the drug prohibition i think that's a big part of it it really is and so as well as the let's make
sure that law enforcement are doing what they do let's also address the root cause of what's sending
innocent little children into gangs into violence in and out of all colors and creeds but into those
those kinds of human beings that are dangerous to other civilians and then also creating situations
in which sometimes they're justifiably killed in that particular situation or or sometimes
they're erroneously killed and shouldn't have been but the other side needs to be discussed and this
is all colors and creeds why is our multicultural nation so dangerous compared to so many other
places in the world well i think that's the main reason why i started this conversation the way i
did i needed to point out a that um ultimately that rest at the feet of our elected officials
and unfortunately um we have a lot of elected officials that benefit from the uh the climate
out there being the way that it is i also said that um before you even have a cop on the scene
you want to get those folks who are social workers you do want a social worker on the scene you do
want a counselor um in the middle uh in the middle of um some drama and somebody getting ready to
cause it because in all in all truth truth i think that um those who will be considered perpetrators
excuse me i mean in truth those who would be considered perpetrators
would listen to them quicker than they would a cop they don't look at the social worker as about
to ruin or end their life they look as at the social work as somebody who's trying to help them
and it is and that's true and it will be true for a lot of folks in law enforcement too except
they come with a gun in a badge they come with handcuffs and unfortunately they also come with
a very bad rep they come with a very bad rep and people are going to balk at that the moment that
um the moment that they step on the scene things are going to start getting heightened heightened
and it ironically enough police are supposed to be trained to de-escalate the moment a cop is on the
scene everything gets escalated and that is where i come in and try to say this is how you solve
problems by not by um trying to keep things from becoming a problem or too much of one if it's
already a problem um if things become a problem if you are dealing with um somebody who was a
bad actor um that is supposed to be protecting us and all that whether or not they intended
to be a bad actor it's going to it's going to reveal itself a lot more than um it would have if
um if it was if we only focused on um on the police if we only focused on that various incidents
that those various incidents that take place if you start holding um if you start holding
elected officials accountable for trying to benefit from that kind from that kind of activity um then
you will start seeing some sort of changes i think about um let's go back to 99 2000 when
Ahmadou Diallo was um was murdered in um in new york city something changed then because
we didn't focus on the police i still don't know the police officer's names
um we focused on um Giuliani who was the mayor at the time how was safer who was the police
commissioner at the time and said that you caused this because they were trying to use the police to
um advance themselves politically at the expense of a community that they were told that they had
to fight and uh that made all the difference in the world back in 99 that made all the difference
in the world unfortunately not for Diallo but the Abner Louima trial was happening at the same time
um where four cops were um in were on trial for assaulting him and um police precinct they ended
up going to jail some of them ended up going to jail one just got out just got out and
we realized then that we had a lot of strength a lot of um power within ourselves to solve
the problem even even before the cops show up we have the power to solve the problem
and when bad actors show up to say that they were going to and they ended up killing somebody we
also had the power to um to correct that one and that's what we start that's what we're seeing now
that's what we're seeing now um so uh in the end i think my main message is that it all the um the
solutions do begin and end with us i mean after all we are the ones that elect these officials
we are the ones that um put police on the street and make sure that they have money and that they
put police on the street and make sure that they have money and and and any kind of first responder
remember Elijah McLean um his death was um due to due to the uh incompetence of um not just police
but in particular the EMTs so we know what we have to do and we know how to do it it's just a matter
of being able to just buckle down and getting it done well i think again you know it's it's when you
look at the the environment we have created an environment that really does encourage failure
and people say criticize the police well they look like they're going to war it's like well yeah have
you seen some of the streets that they work in i mean i have you know personally pulled blankets
over so many dead young people in gang killings you know and it happens all the time in what people
think are very good areas too well can i make a point about something please here's where here's
here's where um we should start how we should start looking at things when we talk about um
the kind of jobs that police go deal with the kind of areas that they have to um uh police
uh that they have to patrol and they come home with a lot of ptsd and they're going through it
themselves i mean i recognize that but imagine they get to go home imagine those who get them
he'll have to live there what kind of ptsd are you dealing with there oh absolutely
that's why you see the kind of drama that you see in those streets you know and when people start
um respecting that and recognizing that um it can go a long way but again it does matter who it is
that we put in these positions of authority and in positions of power they have to care they have to
care and if they don't care then we put do we place them with people who do and um that goes back
and that's one of the things that i had said earlier about how we are able to put ourselves
in these positions um where we can solve problems whenever we see them and as we are coming up a
lot of your more right-wing figures like more conservative figures are going down they're losing
their influence and um that's why all you see from them now is just a grift it's just a grift or
somebody calling for a national divorce succession or whatever or a civil war i mean that's all
rhetoric because you really don't want us to have a civil war in this country you're not prepared
for that we are not prepared for that it will not go down the way that you think it will well i
think it's also i mean that's thrown around and and here's what i see and maybe i'm just naive
but what i see is that most people have so much more in common than they have differences and most
people live side by side and have no issues with color or sexual orientation or who they they pray
to they're you know they're in the communities we are a very diverse nation overall built on
immigration but in 2020 you know from 2020 especially forward i mean i mean if you can
divide over a bloody virus then you can divide over anything but it's like they put they gave the
microphone to the biggest fucking idiots in our entire nation and said have at it we represent
this entire country when they don't but the problem is i don't know why but the middle 80
percent just seemed to lose their voice that is the more dangerous part of that is the dangerous
part of these folks turning things into a grift um those come from conspiracy theories they were
all living conspiracy theories and a lot of them were in fact trying to their their focus was trying
to make sure that their political beliefs were still in the mainstream as they were leaving the
mainstream i always tell people you know what if we all decided that we didn't have to wear masks
and we didn't have to quarantine those same individuals we running around with masks saying
that if you're not wearing the mask you're hurting my child you know that it's it's all about it's
all about trying to maintain for themselves and none of it is real none of it is real
and i think their biggest problem in this year going forward until november is trying to convince
everybody that um that it's what they are about is real when we all know better we all know better
what they are about is real when we all know better we all know better we all know that um that they're
just running the game to try to stay in some sort of power and 2020 really irked people 2020 they
really irked people well we saw the leaders that we paid had no idea how to lead not i mean there
is a fact that we were still trying to figure out what was going on excuse me they exploited that
to say they didn't know what they were doing no they didn't but they were going to learn um
but they acted like they knew what they were they were doing and they didn't so here we have here
um at ruckus for example ruckus university is not too far from me here they just lifted um a um
a covet era requirement or something i cannot recall off the top of my head right now what it was
but now all the um branch convidians out there are are out there saying we won we proved ourselves
no we are now at the point where we don't need those provisions anymore because we got this under
control no thanks to you and and it's and it's frustrating as all get out because you got all
these conspiracy theories um confusing people when folks are actually trying to just work through
this help each other out we basically showed everybody what it was like to be a community
that cares in 2020 that segment of society for that segment of society that attitude is poison
that attitude is poison because that division is there basically life's blood
you know and you have to figure out i think the mission in life is to build as build everything
build grow evolve but beware of that crowd that doesn't want you to do that that doesn't want the
society to do that for whatever reason well i saw i saw it just as strongly the other side don't get
me wrong i heard the whole chinese conspiracy thing it was a real virus i've got i've got friends
that you know we're in icus that were seeing people dying you know we've had those stories on
the show but if we're talking again that middle 80 percent what should have happened and i'm not
talking hindsight four years ago i'm talking you know after we realized okay this isn't as horrendous
as we thought it was going to be everyone kind of reevaluated and went okay it's bad but it's not
that bad that we thought you know initially like it's going to sweep through and kill everyone so
then it should have been all right how can we make americans as healthy as possible let's focus on
everything we can do for mental health physical health you know emotional health and it wasn't it
was if you don't wear a mask and isolate and get vaccinated you're a murderer stay in the house we'll
tell you what to do and bear in mind i'm coming in from the middle i got vaccinated to travel to see
my my family i'm not anti-vax even though i wouldn't have had it if i didn't need to because i'm
you know healthy and i think it would have been another shitty flu and then i would have been
fine but the what should have happened with that captive audience where if we're talking about
coming together if we'd had a leader at the helm we would have absolutely done everything to isolate
the people that were vulnerable that was our main goal our selfless goal was to make sure the people
who really need medical care and isolation are given all the best areas there the people that
are the most um uh they're the strongest the least likely to have an issue keep the country running
but we make sure that you know in the meantime let's look at our pe programs in school let's
put real food back in school let's get rid of soda from school let's let's work on pedestrianized
areas let's give local farmers you know subsidies so they can start making clean food in every
neighborhood not just the mega farms but none of that happened so i saw it as a complete failure
of leadership from both sides one the scaremongering from one side and the other one the the dictatorship
that was stay in your house shut up we'll tell you we can get out which was you couldn't have done
anything worse to make people more vulnerable to a virus and as we've emerged now obesity is getting
worse mental health is worse so we are a more sick country now after such an incredibly powerful near
miss than we were in 2020 and that is a complete example of an absence of leadership from left and
right well what i will tell you is that i mean because i was definitely on that side of um if
you're not wearing a mask um you're not helping at the very least i don't know if i'm gonna sit
in and say you're a murderer or anything like that but i was definitely angry when people started
um playing games with it because we did not know what was going on yet did we have people that were
incompetent sure did we have people that was going to exploit our fears sure but by this but it was
something that we was just basically trying to get a handle on in those early days especially
what i would say however is that yeah you're right it was a perfect opportunity for us to do the
things and build the things that we needed to um needed to build and i think we still have those
opportunities we still have the opportunity to protect ourselves from that next wave whatever
it is that um however it is that it comes um forward and that's the thing we should be doing
a lot more pre-emptive stuff um that will keep us from falling into the trap that we fell into in
2020 and i mean across the board not just talking about covid but just economically um we we had
safety measures in place all right i'm not talking about the pandemic um pandemic office that was
shut down during the trump administration i'm not talking about that i'm talking more about
the um the things the mechanisms that we've always had in place the way we normally go about things
that um that we took advantage of at that time that we really didn't know existed until um until
we really needed to have them and a lot of that has gotten strengthened and i'm by that i mean
how we communicated um at the time how we um managed to um make sure that we still had the
things that we needed um no one starved during um during the pandemic you know we was able to
we was able to get around to the places that we can get around to at that time uh because we were
all because we all had some sort of infrastructure so to speak and we're still maintaining that
we're sitting up here on a stream yard um conversation right now the stream yard and
all the other uh all the other um video conference platforms got strengthened during the um during
the pandemic we're able to teach our kids remotely now even more so than we were before the pandemic
you know we are able to have things delivered to us if we if we're in if we're sick if we cannot um
get around you know all of that kind of thing says that we have put some sort of infrastructure
in place so that we can function as a society when we need when we need to be um and when we can't
in some aspects so um so so i i would say that while there are things that we need to do
there are things that we did do that we should appreciate today and um and i yeah i i'm one of
the things that um is really important for me is that i have to be an optimist i have to um
recognize that um the reason why i fight so hard that hard that i do is because um
i believe in us i really do appreciate um the things that we do as a society and i want to
preserve that i want to make it stronger and um if i'm going to come from that position
definitely appreciate it definitely help contribute to it definitely point out to everyone
just what it is we have that we should maintain and that will go a long way into people um being
um being a lot more proactive than they are today where they're not just sitting around and just
going enjoying their lives just going through their day to day and coming back and watching
television or something like that um excuse me um they see themselves as um a cog in the wheel that
they can um and they can be a very effective cog in that wheel so um never um never look at uh
us as being in the worst of times don't you don't have to look at us being in the worst of times
there we do have ways of getting out of whatever times we are in that are bad um we just have to
be mindful of them and appreciate them from down to down yeah i agree completely and i always call
myself an angry optimist i'm i'm super happy you know but i will push back sometimes if it's you
know if what it is is detrimental to people's health and happiness so i agree a thousand percent
and i see the potential and this is why i'm so passionate and what what i do you know why i do
what i do is because i people should be living healthy lives you know young boys and girls should
be growing up and actually doing the thing they dreamed of in preschool not getting dragged into
some you know street life or you know meth life or whatever it is that that they're dragged into
so um with that let's kind of share a pretty uplifting story from from your uh life up to
this point um talk to me about how you met Byron Whittner and uh let's kind of discuss excuse me
discuss his journey well Brian um it was really interesting because um excuse me i would say that
a lot of time a lot of times when i'm dealing with the um the nazis um it's always going to be
aggressive it's always going to start off aggressive i should say um but i always leave that little door
open so that they know that they can talk to somebody if they want to get out or if they want
to talk further about where you know things are i remember one of the nazis i remember one of the
nazis that i chased down at a glenn beck rally in dc um he found my number and i think he was
thinking about trying to just call me out on whatever it is um i did to him and we had about
an hour-long conversation he didn't know that i would be knowledgeable about this and that
and we still talk today i mean he's a trump supporter unfortunately but baby steps baby steps
and it's so funny because that conversation could not be had if i don't recognize the humanity in
everybody my mission in life is trying to get them to recognize their humanity before um something
bad happens because that's the only thing that um that that kind of hate migrant those kinds of
hate politics is going to lead to and unfortunately this is something that i'll get from my father too
by the way um this particular thing you can't uh go to them so speak some people can some people
can't but my approach has never been um to go to them and try to encourage them like i said i leave
the door open for them to walk through i try to leave a crack of the door open but the whole thing
ultimately is going to be up to them to walk through it and at some point brian did um his
wife called me said he wanted to talk and we talked about music about the punk scene about
everything but politics because you know as i said before we're human beings and that's the first
and foremost thing you want to talk about you want to talk about who you are and why it is you're
coming and coming to me and what is the direction you're going into now and that went on for about
three years that went on for about three years before we actually met erasing hate the documentary
erasing hate um when you saw when you see me in um that documentary that was the first time we
actually met face to face yeah i remember that yeah because uh up to that point that uh they were
worried that being seen with you was going to be dangerous for them and their little one absolutely
i mean you're talking about someone who was one of the biggest enforcers of this white supremacist
group and um and he was pulling himself out and there was a lot of things that he was trying to
deal with and he didn't know how to deal with it and um and i was one of the reasons why he was
able to and why they were able to um i mean sadly things aren't where they um where they should be
now they're no longer together um him and his wife but he's also no longer a nazi you know he's
that that is important and he is um going on with his life they both are and
that is that's is really the um the mission i mean you want people who are going to be productive in
their lives you don't want to destroy those lives um it's just an unfortunate byproduct
that if you're trying to preserve and protect a society there are some people who just need to be
dealt with but when those individuals show that they are not the people you have to deal with
anymore jump in with both feet and see if you can just make sure that um they're going to be okay
and the rest of the world is going to be okay it was beautiful getting the chance to um know brian
over these past couple of um past decade or so um and they're not the only and he wasn't the only
one there was um there's a lot of people um in this that was about that life that are no longer
about that life some of them actually became roommates and best friends of mine you know and
and i think that's really important um and when it comes to growth when it comes to how things go
forward uh and there's more out there that i can look at and say they're going to need help
eventually but again they have to come to us my obligation is always going to be to the people
they have the potential of hurting and that's the other thing um unfortunately no matter how much
they grow and no matter how much they build there's always going to be those folks out there
that are not going to forget what they were some of them have been hurt by them when they were that
thing and that's just going to be a big hurdle that they have to um they have to deal with they
probably would never be able to deal with that because a lot of the things that they were about
were frankly unforgivable um but um they still must try we all still must try and um
i guess well how should i say i guess the best thing to say is that it's not going to be easy
it's never easy but it's worth it's worth trying to pursue it's worth trying to pursue i could tell
you with via my friendship with brian and others that were a part of that scene once upon a time
it's definitely worth trying to pursue i'm glad i have the friendships that i have coming out of
that i mean if anyone hasn't seen the film i urge you to watch skin because i mean it's so well done
as well i mean the actual film um what i'm curious about what when you talk to these people whether
they reformed or whether you had conversations with them about what they were doing and what
conversations with them and they're still in that now what if any were the common denominators you
found between their early life because i don't believe that any toddler is you know baby is born
a racist it's a learned behavior so their early life and finding that particular tribe to be the
one that they latches on well i've been seeing it for years i actually studied on the montel
williams show it goes back in 2008 it's like you're talking about people who are in many respects
coming from a life that um doesn't appreciate them coming from a life that just basically
is a complete mess in many respects where they get frustrated and they're trying to make their
lives worth a damn trying to figure out how to make their lives worth a damn and it all depends
on who gets to them sometimes we all have that all of us come from them
sometimes we have family that are there which is basically you and i you know um but those who are
going through that real trauma that real pain um maybe you can't look towards family sometimes
you'll go to a church or a community center um you want to try to latch on to people who can help you
build and unfortunately there's the folks who just know how to exploit for their ends and you're good
at good for that in the movie skin there is a somebody that they recruit and and um i remember
in an interview that brian and he was he was a homeless kid in the movie and uh they came up to
him and they invited him to uh to hang out with him for a while excuse me to hang out with him
for a while in an interview brian said that you know really there were two people playing me
there was um jamey bell who played him in the movie and um the actor and i apologize for not
remembering the name off the top of my head but uh um the actor that played that kid that was um
the homeless kid that they recruited because that's how he got in that's what he um that's how he
became what he became so they used that younger kid just to show the two timelines of his journey
in the neo-nazi group yeah yeah and i think um and i think that's really important because
it means for the rest of us that when you do see somebody in pain and you're a positive mind and
ability um and you can do something do something remember that everybody comes from somewhere
and it's all a matter of what roads they take what roads we all take sometimes those roads are a
little bit rocky and other times you can be at the um end of that rocky road or somewhere along the
rocky road to try to get them on the proverbial straight and narrow you know so uh unfortunately
like if you if there are times when it can be too late and other times you can get them just in the
nick of time but i think that's one of the reasons why um i do what i do because um frankly
i can i have the mindset i have to come with the mindset that it's never too late um but um
but i also have to come with the mindset that sometimes you just can't save everybody and uh
but you try to save as many people as you can try to help as many people as you can
that underlines something i talk about all the time people love to find those failures and point
to them and go see it didn't work rather than all the people that it did you know and i think that
when you when we talk about exactly what we're talking about you know there's this this cycle
and i'm actually writing a second book at the moment that hopefully will kind of illustrate
this kind of multi-generational trauma if you for example are a young you know young boy somewhere
out in you know rural america and you know your you lost your father to an overdose and your
mother's you know incarcerated what are the consequences of that you know and what are the
incarcerated what are the chances of you then having this healthy nurtured life and then going
on and becoming you know a functional member of society they are reduced doesn't mean it's not
going to happen but we have now reduced the chance and the paramedics and firefighters and police
officers of the world see these homes on a daily basis the answer though is mentorship people
point and go oh it's these broken homes okay yeah it partly yes but what are we going to do to fix
it you know this is how this is 2024 welcome to america so and don't get me wrong there's there's
so many homes that are intact and doing very well but the other answer is if you are in you know in
a home firstly to to make sure your home is good you know be a good dad be a good husband or wife
or mother or whatever it is but then step outside your front door and be a mentor do something for
someone whether you're a mechanic or a plumber or a football coach or a chess master whatever it is
find a person or a group of people to bring in and do something positive and if we all did that
we would push the needle but if we just point at government buildings meanwhile the gang bangers
or the dealers or whoever or the fascists are scooping up our children then the cycle is going
to continue and it goes back to what i said at the beginning a leader brings people together and that
includes in your own community are you a leader or you're going to allow your community to be
divided and these children continuously go down this path that sadly guarantees you know a less
than happy you know teen and adult life or more to the point can your community lead you don't have
to be the leader or by yourself and i think that's one of the reasons that one of the things that
could be scaring folks too because they probably think i can't do this by myself you don't have to
because there's a whole bunch of people out there that are trying to do the same thing trying to
make sure that their society and their community is going forward and doing the right thing
work with others if you are about that and i'm talking about you don't even have to put too much
of an effort it's not like anybody's asking you to go out into the sticks or something like that and
just try to help somebody one-on-one or anything like that i mean your church if you go to a
church or if you have a community center help them with the programs that they have already built
there are people that are already doing it and they need your support even if you threw a couple
of dollars to them or whatever if you can do that anything that helps somebody not go in that wrong
direction is going to benefit in a in phenomenal ways believe me because i've seen it i have been
a part of it and that's the kind of people we are if there's anything that we've seen during the
pandemic is that that is the kind of people we are some folks actually um some folks close to me
i don't know if you ever seen um the documentary i was in called alt-right age of rage at the end
we were talking about someone the question was that we were at our most divided this was done
in um 2017 2018 and i said that i disagreed i don't believe us to be divided that we're frustrated
and we have questions but i don't believe that we are divided i remember when we did the premiere
somebody asked me about that and i said just you know what we are better people than we give
ourselves credit for you know and we are always going to be trying always going to try to do right
by each other it doesn't always come out that way but we will always try to do right by each other
pandemic showed that we showed that during the pandemic we would even if we disagree even if
we disagree with how we should be doing things we were doing things in a way doing things to make
our lives and our health better and um that is the takeaway from 2020 we were looking out for each
other and we will always do that see i agree again it goes back to the 80 i think that's
where most people were but people were just being kind of pulled like lean towards one way or
another but i think in the middle when you actually sat down with people they were like oh no this is
this makes sense like i just want to be healthy and happy well let's be honest that happens
we're always going to have disagreements of the direction that we're going in if you really do
care about society and about your community and about the lives that we all lead the disagreements
can be hammered out you may still be mad at folks but you're still going to be out there trying to do
um something and even if um there are disagreements there are things that you agree about
and you work along those lines but the fact of the matter is you are out there because you want to
do what's right i'm not talking about the folks who are um who are just basically negative and
trying to capitalize on that negativity i'm not talking about that i'm talking about
the folks who are actually trying to do right trying who actually do care and they actually
were the majority of people in 2020 we're buttonheads yes that's how it works like i said
we were still trying to figure out how to get things done and uh one person has an idea another
person has another idea they conflict that happens that happens but we work it out
i want to put one more area to you and then we'll go to some closing questions but it's it's uh
it's a probably an unpopular conversation but this is just the way that i saw things but
i'll give i'll give you another example first and i'll go to what i'm going to say so
you have to be very careful what you put out into the world in pursuit of your own personal gain
so for example nwa fuck the police you know i get that it was initially you know coming from a place
where that was their reality you know back in the 80s that was a war zone you know and like you said
at war with the police as well now you've got iced tea who wrote cop killer and you know ice cube in
nwa playing police officers on tv all the time i never hear that platform being used to be like hey
this is the gang lifestyle used to be part of but we need to get away from that there's nothing
glamorous about killing each other and slinging dope and all those kind of things and so i find
that very kind of um irresponsible to not use a platform to do good now conversely just to kind
of flip it on the other side now you have someone who's in a presidential role who you know a couple
of decades before called for the execution of five black teenagers in in central park who were
innocent of a crime now fast forward he's the person at the helm and he's making very inflammatory
statements that in my opinion james gehring's perspective poured the gasoline on the racism
that was evident now i do not think that a lot of people in the u.s are racists but you pour gas on
a single match you're going to get a big flame so it's not pointed just to ice cube but it's just
to me it's the responsibility or irresponsibility of causing that division of uh fanning the flames
of hate whether it's in the hood or whether it's you know from dc and the impact that it has on
actual real human beings lives in that country what i think in the case of um um that particular
person um and his um supporters i think they have given up on trying to appeal to the greatest
society and they only want um what's theirs they only want to um basically destroy so they can have
their own little society i don't think it would be fair to um look at them as um being responsible
to us because they don't think so there are people within the republican party there are
conservatives out there that are in fact trying to maintain this society maintain this um country
or what have you um that you can listen to they say you know what this is not what i signed up for
when i became republican or whatever now in regards to ice tea and ice cube and what it is they said
i'm sending songs they also um were saying in their regular songs back then too i mean there are
songs where um in particular i see talked about how things were um this is not the life for you
if you want to be a high roller you know this is what it means there's a song called high rollers
that he did back in the day and he talked about where this will lead there's also songs like um
self-destruction and we're all in the same gang and at that time there was in fact um hip-hop
coming from public enemy and boogie down productions that was about um some of it was about that
lifestyle but others was about trying to build yourself up so you don't have to be in that
lifestyle you know yeah like let's get all this music by the way i was listening to it religiously
yeah so so you so you know i mean as you get older as ice tea and ice cube and everybody look
what ice cube does now he does more family fare you know so and yes you do see ice tea playing a
cop but he still goes on stage singing cop killer because that is what um you have to try to reach
people in some way and um the um the audience that he deals with when he's on that stage
is not going to be receptive to i guess how should i say things that make it for lack of a better
term things that try to apologize for the things that um that we have seen in the streets you know
um so he knows basically he knows how to talk to them basically anybody that has come from that
world knows how to talk to his audience and i gotta trust him on that one i gotta trust him on that
one and uh it's frustrating when you are taking on a job where you're trying to help people and all
of this bs is happening um but i will strongly suggest that it's not going to be the entertainers
that are singing the songs that are going to be um necessarily the solution to the problem i mean
to some respects to some um to some point at some point they can be but in the end it's all going
to be about what we do as individuals and as a community um when we do see bad actors we have
to remove them no matter where they are and we if we're going to talk about trump we got to remember
he's a bad actor he's a bad actor and uh we have to deal with that he's a he's one of the um he's
a bad actor on high i think one of the things that's really important by the way is that not
just in the area of politics but in the area of um commerce um when you see a lot of your um
billionaires and such getting in trouble um you do see a society that's trying to um right the ship
where they are trying in fact trying to hold people accountable for the um for the things they've
done i don't care if you're talking about ken lay or bernie made off or or sug night all right i
don't want to say p-ditty right now because uh let that play itself out but i mean even with the
me too movement or whatever you know i mean you see a lot of people just i mean this is this
generation are giant killers they are trying to hold um hold you accountable no matter how much
money you have i want to see them go down michael jackson too i mean it's it's crazy how you know
there was so much abuse there and even if you none of us were physically there but firstly when you
watched the documentary those people weren't even paid so there's only one reason that you would
take all that time to tell that story but then you know there's no dispute at all that irresponsible
parents allowed their child children to be in a bed with michael jackson for days on end so you
know if take michael jackson out and put any other man that you know in there you would have not been
as us before you know before the day was out michael michael um actually um was clear to that
r kelly wasn't yeah but michael michael was clear to that because we're talking about childhood
trauma by people that hadn't really unpacked their own and it was and it was weird and uh
but i would say um that also happened at a time where we what where we were still putting um
celebrities on the pedestal we're not doing that the way we did it back then anymore we're not
doing that anymore and um and i think basically that should serve notice on anybody who's going
to get into get into today's society and get into that um echelon of um life um that your
celebrityhood or your prominence in um society is not necessarily going to save you um because if
we see something that is off if we see something that is not um i should i say compatible with
that if you're not out of a society um you're going to be held accountable for that and um and
i think that's important um basically put out there so people can um so so people can realize
that you better be on your um best behavior because we know how to do this
absolutely well just one more thing i guess i haven't really going to pull this out of you
there so you know there there is a tendency like we talked about you know you give someone the
you listen to some of the rhetoric you know in in the last few years you know everyone hates asians
all of a sudden supposedly it's asian hate everywhere and it's like no there's some
psychopathic horrible people that have absolutely preyed upon some asian people but that's not the
whole u.s with that being said you know you are physically there in these neo-nazi you know rallies
and you are you know documenting the activities of a lot of these you know racist movements
so talk to me about the landscape in the u.s so you can educate you know the people listening
like what are we what are we looking at right now and is it on a downward trend is it on an upward
trend it's on the downward trend and they are basically what we're seeing today are them getting
loud it's them pulling a hail mary really that's that's what we're looking at right now when trump
was elected they didn't expect that they saw an opportunity during none of us did or anyone else
it goes back to our 330 million people conversation yeah well we'll be here forever on that one my
attitude about that by the way and i don't want to get off track like it always do but i always tell
people that over the past 20 20 23 years um we have really been trying to get a hold um get a handle
i should say on um on our political process whether you're talking about and and and weird
things started happening because of that that's why jesse ventura became governor of minnesota
when he wasn't a democrat or republican whether or not you cared for him that's another story
that's why you saw um seattle blow up during the world trade organization meeting in um 99
that's why um after september 11th we really started becoming more active in on politics and so on
and that's also why donald trump um became president because one of the things that we was doing and um
one of the things that we were doing was trying to say okay we don't necessarily need to vote for
the lesser two evils we can still vote for who we want that fight is still on unfortunately
unfortunately and it's a bloody one i mean we got the first black president out of that you know so
and we are going to continue to fight that um but having said that um and i did lose my i did
lose where i was going we're talking about with the the upward spiral downward spiral and you said
when when the hail mary okay so here's the thing um as we know that we need to grow and i've said
this a couple of times today we know we need to grow we know we need to evolve we are going to
do both yes that is going to happen that means a lot of the old traditionalist ways are going to go
by the wayside there won't be the two major parties that we see today there won't be the um
the robber barons of today out there anymore i mean we are not going to go through the same
processes that we have seen over the past 200 years there are going to be changes a lot of
people who live their lives with what we are changing don't want that to change and yet they
have to see a change and they don't know what to do like i said when donald trump somehow became
president um it became more than just a campaign to call out the um to basically um champion those
causes now you had the opportunity to make sure that the things that you believe will stay in
place and they do not want to lose that they're still going to lose that but they do not want to
lose that um they know they're going to lose that which is why you hear them talk about
succession and civil war and all of that so and i will tell you right now again we're not prepared
for that because it's like what mike tyson once said everybody has a plan till they get punched
in the mouth you think it's going to break down a certain way when it comes to um a civil war
but it won't you're going to start seeing people um players that you did not um expect like those
um those robber banners that i was talking about the people with the most money are going to
benefit the most out of something like that and all of a sudden we got warlords and cartels that
are going to actually make up what we um what what counts as government and the government that um
that we have today is just going to be a puppet one for them so i mean that's the kind of thing
that you can expect i mean when um they think so to that end we the people who have not seen
a war on these shores since the civil war in um in the 1860s um i've been living in a
state of stability and peace with a few scuffles here and there amongst ourselves um and are not
really to give that up i don't think we're giving that up because um the hail mary um
is going to be intercepted well again i mean if if you get the 80 to communicate with each other
they're going to be like i don't want to fight you we all agree yes you know what i mean see that's
the thing there we are a society as i said before we're not divided we are all have been able to
come together for things like um trying to say protect ourselves with the pandemic you know we
we know the society that we want we know the society that we have so something like that fails
because it is not compatible with where we are going that's why shot when charlotte'sville blew
up everybody's um everybody started saying okay we're going to do this to make sure that doesn't
happen again that's why when january 6 happened we were like okay we're going to do something to
make sure that didn't happen again people who weren't involved in either people who weren't
paying attention to either saw both those things as being a threat and they took action
and that's as a society um even when even with the summer 2020 when every place on the planet
every place in the country was going crazy um even in the midst of a pandemic people now folks were
on um for the most part on the side of those that were in the streets at that time but they said you
know what we can do this a lot more responsible we don't have to um we don't have to tear everything
up we hear the message and we're going to we're going to see what we can do so as we are building
we also just have to be mindful of those who want to keep it torn down that's um that's
the never-ending um curse of freedom eternal vigilance you got to maintain that um that
vigilance otherwise you can lose everything that you're fighting for and in the end i think that's
what we are doing and even the folks who are part of these little kabobs that are trying to tear
things down even they appreciate that because ultimately as we were just talking about um just
a couple of minutes ago a lot of them are comprised with folks who are just trying to make their lives
worth a damn that's why i don't and and i think and i think it's important to remember that
um they don't really want to smoke either otherwise they would have brought it by now
so the question is okay so now what do we do with this and i think we're going to figure it out
yeah i mean that kind of goes back to what you said i think we've been moving there for a long
time and the thing is is that we've been moving to a place where we can't just go and do things
that we've been doing for a long time and the thing is it's the squeaky wheels pointing out oh
you know these guys don't get on with each other it's like just go to any town the way they they
portray that there's some big race war outside your front door okay we'll walk out your front
door what do you see oh actually i see you know kids of all colors playing football in the park
that's the america you actually live in are there pockets of places that are not so good
yes but most of this place we go to school together we work together we play together we pray together
we're all colors and creeds and orientations that is the beautiful tapestry that we live in so
open you know take who knows what might happen in the next couple who knows what might happen in
the next few decades america may not look like this um there may be some kinks in the armor that
cause us to um separate maybe um but in the end we're always going to come back to that community
that we have today we're always going to come back to what we have today and we're always going to be
striving towards that we're not going to let it completely fall i do not believe that one darn
bit a hundred years from now whatever society we have here in north america we're going to appreciate
i really do think that and i hope i'm here to see it me too all right well for people listening
where are the best places to find you online and or social media all right so some um well i will
tell everybody um first and foremost because i'm old school um one people's project is at one
people's project.com our news line is idavox.com um feel free to read whatever um read a lot about
us there and donate if you can um and um social media wise i usually go by the tagline d lamont
jenkins just look for d lamont jenkins on your favorite social media outlet whether it's instagram
or threads and the one that i'm not going to mention um OPP and idavox are also um one people's
project you can look for one people's project on instagram you can look for idavox on instagram
and yes i'm on facebook you can find me on facebook and um yeah i there's a couple of them out there
that i'm just getting on oh yeah tiktok i'm on tiktok i think under there i'm notorious doj
i think i see i don't even know my own screen name yeah i'm i have tiktok but i'm not on it
that much i just share some of my podcast promo videos basically yeah i'm on it all the time but
it's just like am i d lamont jenkins there i'm notorious doj i can't remember yeah because i
have two i have two screenings notorious doj and d lamont jenkins just let's throw that in the
google machine and you'll find me perfect well i want to thank you so much it's been such an
interesting conversation a very different perspective than a lot of people have but um you
know a much needed conversation this is a beautiful thing there's so many people out there that their
perspectives are just different and when we all talk to each other you know we meet in the middle
and we're like oh there's you know again 80 percent commonality and 90 percent commonality
so between what you've done and the the compassion that you brought from your dad and his brothers
through to what you've done and literally rescued young people from extremist organizations and
given them the ability you know to to lead normal lives i think it's phenomenal so i want to thank
you so much not only for your work but also for coming on the behind the shield podcast today
and i appreciate you having me thank you very much