December 16, 2024 • 37 mins
The rot is being exposed in our capitalist society, and mainstream media wants to keep the public's eyes away at all costs.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WOKP Daily with Me
your Girl, Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. I
have been struggling because the dystopian times that we are
living in they're wild and it is taking everything in
(00:34):
me not to just follow the breaking news of the
moment and to really unpack what is underneath the dystopia.
And so that's what we're gonna do today, is try
and get underneath the mayhem instead of just remaining on
(00:57):
the surface. We need to be asking ourselves bigger questions
about this moment, why we're here and how we got here,
because I feel as if we don't if we don't
understand truly how we got into this moment where our
democracy is had hanging on by a thread, we're never
going to figure out how we fix it. And now,
(01:19):
when I say fix it, I don't mean as if
we're going to experience what comes post the fixing, because
that is going to be for other generations. But what
I mean by if we don't go back, we're going
to keep creating the same cycle over and over again.
(01:40):
I have been trying to figure out how to make
sense of this current moment that we're in. And what
I've said before is that I want to get to
the underneath, right, I don't want to remain on the
surface following the bouncing ball of fascism and everything that
Donald Trump is saying and doing and who is he,
(02:01):
who he's appointing to what and where. The fact is
is that none of that actually matters. I mean it will, right.
We know the harm that it's going to cause, We
know the pain that people are going to be in
that we are all going to collectively experience. But at
the end of the day, this is cyclical, right, what
we are running through and what is happening. And I
(02:22):
think that right now again what is being experienced through
this killing, the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, is
really drawing out the underneath, opening up the wound of
America that has been ever present. But we just keep
patching up the wound of inequality, right of economic inequality,
(02:48):
of racial inequality, of gender inequality. Like what has come
up in twenty twenty four and what's been coming up
is the driving force behind the greed right, the hatred
that has gotten us here. And I continue to say
that I am so disgusted with the current democratic establishment
(03:11):
right now, because they seem to not learn anything. And
so what I realize, and what I keep saying over
and over again, is that democrats are not going to
save us. I'm kind of in this space of really
like unpacking the greed that we are seeing that we
are all being exposed to and wondering like, how did
(03:33):
we get to this point where these billionaires are just
so insatiable right, Like it's never enough, Like they don't
have enough money, they don't have enough power. And it's
because capitalism has had us worship them like they were
the new gods. Right. We have turned our eyes away
(03:54):
from actual right religion and we have all been worshiping capitalism.
And so what does that mean? That means that those
that are at the top of the pyramid, the one percent,
we've looked at them and admired them and adored them,
followed their shows and follow their lives and say that
(04:16):
they're better than us because they have more than us.
But we've never actually asked ourselves why they have more
to begin with. But the lie that's been told, the
lie that's been sold, is that if you have more,
then you're inherently better. You're inherently smarter than the rest
of us. We don't look at the people at the
(04:39):
lower end of the economic pyramid and say, wow, how
were they able to make a dollar stretched so far
given that they have so little? That's real ingenuity. How
you actually turn how you make a dollar grow and
go when you have so little. But no, we look
and we glorify those that the top, and we never
(05:01):
stop and question how they got that fucking money to
begin with. I remember growing up actually on and I
will date myself Scrooge McDuck, Right, Scrooge McDuck had this
huge house in palace, and he had his nephews that
were living with him, and he had this vault, you know,
full of gold coins, and in that in that cartoon
(05:23):
really taught you about capitalism and how money actually works.
But the thing that we have not understood truly is that, like,
there are those that started way ahead of the starting line,
And so we've been fed the lie that if you
just work hard enough, you'll be able to catch up
to those that are wealthy because they inherited that wealth.
(05:46):
So the lie of capitalism is that all you need
to do is just work harder and work smarter. And
those that are the wealthiest, they work the hardest and
were the smartest. That's the fucking gag. They're not. They
just inherited their wealth, and then the rest of us
are forced into the cogs of the machine, believing that
(06:09):
if we just run faster, if we just do more,
if we just produce more, then we'll catch up to them.
So in this moment, we find ourselves reeling from this
murder because it exposes so very much about all the
things that are wrong. But we've been fed the lie
(06:30):
that we were wrong, that if we're not wealthy, that
if we don't have that security, then it must be
on us rather than on the system that's keeping us
stuck and keeping that kind of dollar floating in front
of our faces that we're chasing after. And so what
this murder has unearthed is questioning, wait a minute, who
(06:55):
actually is a murderer, because now there are multiple definitions,
and who should we really be chastising and questioning right now?
So I come in today with just my mind super
heavy and really trying to unpack the amount of lies
(07:17):
that we have all been fed in There's something about
getting older that has me really believe that like learning
never stops because we have to unlearn so much in
order to get to the truth, which they they the
big they don't want us to actually see. This is
(07:38):
why you ban books, This is why you threaten to
shut down information networks. This is why Elon Musk bought
Twitter and then destroyed it because the little peons that
they see us. The people were gathering, right, The people
were communicating, which means that then we were all of
a sudden going to realize that we were in each
(07:59):
other problem. We all had the same enemy. But if
you break down modes of communication and don't allow people
to assemble, then they'll readily eat the lies that you're
feeding them because they'll be nothing to rebuff it. So
Elon Musk saw Twitter. The billionaire class saw Twitter as
(08:26):
a problem to be solved because the people are getting
too ahead of themselves. The people are organizing too much.
It's really wild when you start to think about it.
I saw this post and it read you can be
driven into homelessness by someone like Brian Thompson. Brian Thompson
(08:46):
being the CEO who was murdered from United Healthcare. You
can be driven into homelessness by someone like Brian Thompson
then legally murdered by someone like Daniel Penny, the man
who killed Jordan Neely, the black homeless man and street performer,
by putting him in a chokehold and suffocating him to death.
(09:11):
And he was just acquitted because he was supposedly helping
the people on the train. He goes on to say,
while the money that could have saved you is spent
on murdering children in Gaza. So let me read that again.
You can be driven into homelessness, bankrupted by a healthcare
(09:34):
system that profits off of your despair and profits off
of denying you access to life saving healthcare. Then you
can be legally murdered by a white vigilante on a train,
and all the while, the money that you're paying into
the system is being sent elsewhere to murder women, children,
(10:00):
and men. Who is the depraved? Humanity is humanity, and
depravity is depravity. But this struck me. People say, oh, well,
Jordan Neely was threatening other people on the train. YO.
If you live in New York City, there are lots
of shit that pop off in the subway station. There
are lots of things that pop off in the street
(10:23):
all the time. Tell me why this former military man
didn't release at some point the chokehold on Jordan Neely.
Why is it acceptable for us to commit murder in
broad daylight but only when we can say, oh, I
feared for my life. It's the same refrain, folks, that
(10:45):
police officers and vigilantes have used in order to kill
black people. That is my truth. I live in New York.
There are people that are on these streets because of
the mental health care system has failed them. So what
this piece is saying right here, it's this system failed
(11:08):
Jordan Neely, which had him on a train begging people
for help, begging for a dollar. He was sick, and
so then that day it's okay for murder to be
committed and then use it as a ruse and say, oh,
I was trying to help other passengers on the train.
(11:29):
George Zimmerman too, said that he feared for his life
when he killed sixteen year old Trayvon Martin. You can
have your opinions, but we we literally have got to
dig deeper and really understand the root of the root
of what is happening here, what we are allowing ourselves
to think of as normal. So the killing of a
(11:52):
wealthy CEO, that's wrong. But the killing of Jordan Neely,
that's okay. Our humanity is being tested right now. Our
humanity is being tested by what it is that we
allow to sit okay on our spirits. Those young people
on the college campuses last year were being told that
(12:16):
they were radical, they were Antifa, they were this and
the other thing. Why because they care about what they
are seeing come across their social media platforms. And what
politicians were telling them is that no, no, it's okay
to see bits and pieces of babies that have been
blown apart. It's okay to bomb hospitals and universities, and
(12:37):
that somehow calling out this massive destruction and murder somehow
makes them the villains. That's extraordinarily insane. But we make
we continue to make these little compromises. This system, this
killing machine, this system, it continues to have us make
(12:58):
these compromises. And in the meantime, folks, we are compromising ourselves,
our humanity, and our values, and it is destroying us.
It is destroying us. Elon Muss is now worth four
hundred billion dollars, four hundred billion dollars, and this is
(13:19):
being celebrated as opposed to being questioned, no person should
be worth as much as a fucking country. While there
are people that are going hungry, while there are people
that are on housed, while there are people that can't
afford medication. And yet this is our new deity Elon
(13:41):
Musk and this billionaire fucking oligarch class because they extract
from us and then we turn around and then worship
their wealth. Folks, Come on, come on, we have got
to see the writing that is on the wall here.
(14:02):
Reality TV. Let me go off on a tangent for
a minute. Reality TV started where it was like, oh,
look at these look at these poor SAPs, look at
these folks, look at these people eating eyeballs, or look
at these people living in trailer parks or what have you.
And reality TV made us feel good about ourselves because
we were not them. And then all of a sudden,
(14:23):
it flipped the script and we went back to, you know,
the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and all of
a sudden, now we're watching the Real Housewives of This
and the Kardashians and blah blah blah and Super Sweet sixteen.
That and everything right was about materialism. How much can
you amass? How much can you flaunch, so much so
(14:45):
that several of those real housewives would end up bankrupt
or in jail because everything was smoking, mirrors and a lie.
But they knew that if they could trick the public
into thinking that they were wealthy, because we worship wealth,
then they would be able to trade on their brands,
(15:08):
because we've been programmed into worshiping wealth because wealth is
somehow equated with intelligence, with brilliance, as opposed to just
being a really good fucking scammer or being able to
turn your millions into billions. You know, I harken back
to the film, the movie Wall Street, remember the original
(15:32):
Wall Street, Gordon Gecko and greed is good. We were
all fed that. That's how people said, whatever happened to
the hippies, they turned into yuppies. They like nice things,
and so you feed on that and you give more
and more and more, and then you realize people aren'tsatiable.
(15:54):
The more they have, the more they want. It wasn't
enough to just have a mansion. Now you need all
of these MC mansions. It wasn't enough to fly first class.
Now you have a PJ, you have a private jet.
Everything is about more and more and more, and so
then you get here this piece that was in The
Hill back in September, the Hill dot com billionaires started
(16:17):
a class war. Americans must fight back. Let me say this,
This is what the author writes. Wealth is not a
moral failing, and Americans have long revered the entrepreneurial spirit
that animates small business owners to build a modest fortune
for themselves and their families. But a growing class of
(16:40):
malignant oligarchs has initiated a campaign to exert unchallenged control
over our democratic institutions and our economy. The war has
already started, and the billionaires have a significant head start.
He goes on to say, like a camp, sir, billionaire
(17:01):
control is metastasizing in every facet of America's socio political
and socioeconomic system. They control newspapers, television stations, and every
major social media platform. Last year, we learned the extent
of oligarchical control over our judiciary when it was revealed
(17:23):
that a handful of billionaires were showering Supreme Court justices
with lavish vacations and obscenely inappropriate gifts. And folks, what
happened after the big reveal of how Clarence Thomas has
a sugar daddy. How Justice Alido has a sugar dad.
(17:47):
What happened not a goddamn thing. So we know that,
for instance, Peter Thiel, multi billionaire right wing fascists, bought JD.
Vance and installed him in the Senate. We know that
Chief Justice John Roberts allowed for with the decision and
(18:10):
Citizens United, an influx of overwhelming amount of money that
now in order to run for office it costs a
billion dollars plus. And now these people who have amassed
as well, it's not enough for them to have money,
money of like a small nation. No, now they want
(18:33):
our democracy, they want everything. They want the justice system,
they want Congress, they want the presidency, and with this
incoming regime they have it all. And so when we
sit back and we look at how we are continuing
to be lied to, bamboozled, hustled out of our little
(18:59):
bit of resource that we're trying to hold together like
a bunch of squirrels, as they are fucking shaking the trees.
And their goal is to continue to pit us against
one another so that we remain fighting over the scraps
and the artificial scarcity that they create. But now in
(19:20):
order to ensure that we don't protest, that we don't
rise up. They have the government too, folks. It is
if Elon paid ninety percent taxes, he'd still have forty
billion dollars. Is that not sick? I don't know if
those exact numbers are right, but the fact is is
(19:42):
that if he actually did fucking right and paid taxes,
he'd still be a multi billionaire. His eleven fucking kids
would still be taken care of, as well as their
grandkids and their grandkids and so on and so forth.
But they're insatiable and there is never never enough. Meanwhile,
(20:03):
how did Donald Trump get into office this time lying
to people about the economy, telling them that he alone
can fix it? And then oh, well, last today is
he's ringing in the bell for the stock exchange. What
did he say, folks, Ooh, it's going to be very
hard to lower grocery prices, the very thing that he
(20:26):
told folks that he was going to do. But now
he says, ooh, not going to be able to do that, right, surprise, surprise,
And the post says, oh, maga got played. Everybody did
who thought that Donald Trump was actually going to make
good on any of his words? Donald Trump has said
(20:46):
to everyone while he was running for a president that
he was not interested in helping anyone, but it was
okay because we all hate the same people. I tell
you that it's a dark place. It's a dark place
that we're in, But I often say that we've been
(21:10):
here before. These are conversations that have been had, and
so I want to bring up. This is an excerpt
from a piece that Frederick Douglas wrote for The Northern Star,
and he said this, let me give you a word
of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the
(21:32):
progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made
to her August claims have been born of earnest struggle.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are
men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want
(21:54):
rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without
the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be
a moral one, or it may be a physical one,
or it may both moral and physical, but it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never
(22:18):
has and it never will find out just what a
people will submit to, And you have found out the
exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed
upon them. And these will continue till they are resisted
with either words or blows, or with both. The limits
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of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
they oppress. In the light of these ideas, negroes will
be hunted in the north and held and flogged at
in the south, so long as they submit to those
devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical.
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Men may not get all they pay for in this world,
but they must certainly pay for all they get. If
we ever get free from the oppression and wrongs heaped
upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must
do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if
need be, by our lives and the lives of others.
(23:25):
This is Frederick Douglas y'all completely different time, completely different century,
and yet offering the same truth. Greed right. But if
you can have people locked up in struggle, if you
(23:46):
can figure out the social engineering and just how to oppress,
and what they will take, and if you give them
a little bit of scraps, if you give white people
a little bit more then black people, then oh, they'll
continue to go along with the get along the oppression
and the racism because they think that they are within
reach of Elon Musk, They're in within reach of Zuckerberg,
(24:09):
just one lottery ticket away, one wish away, and so
they continue to give the people their oppressors the power
to step on their necks. This is why I say
that this moment is not calling for us to follow
the bouncing ball and all the distractions that this second
Trump regime are going to usher in. It is asking
(24:33):
us folks to dig deeper to get to the actual
truth of the matter. I am not saying that wealth
is bad. I am saying that greed is I am
saying that being celebrated for your thievery is the problem
that worshiping wealth. While most Americans can barely pull together
(24:58):
emergency funding, an emergency saving not because they don't work hard,
but because the system has been rigged for them to
remain on an absolute fucking hamster wheel. And so long
as you keep running and just trying to keep your
head above water, you don't have time to really question
and on earth and dig down into how you got
(25:21):
into that situation in the first place, because all of
the messages are telling you that you are the problem
and not the system, because the system is too big
to fix. We are in a time of a great reveal.
And there was at one time a young rapper and
(25:43):
also a poet who offered up a lot of hard
truths about America that folks didn't want to hear. And
arguably there are courses taught about his critique and a
now on America, and that is Tupac Shakur. And I
(26:05):
want to offer one of the most famous lines, got
money for war, but can't be the poor. Tupac Shakur,
a child of a black panther, offered a deep critique
on America using rap music. Rap music be nothing more
(26:26):
than poetry put two intense beats about the human experience.
Tupac talks about the fact that how can we live
in a society where there are billionaires, where somebody can
be worth And at the time of this right he
was talking about like forty billion dollars. I just showed
(26:48):
you four hundred billion dollars somebody being worth, and he's saying,
how is it that we can live in a society
where somebody can have forty billion dollars and people are
on hous that you can walk past people that are
begging on the street that have nothing, and you have
three thousand dollars in your pocket and you throw them
(27:09):
twenty five cents, And yet you want to judge how
they're spending that money. He said, if you want to
drink it, drink it. If you want to shoot it up,
shoot it up. What you do is your business. But
we would all have more if we thought in the collective,
if we thought about actually what it is that it
means to be part of a whole, and not find
(27:30):
ourselves thinking that we are better right because we have
a little bit more money than the person that is begging. Folks,
it is just one emergency. We are just one emergency,
one disaster, one tragedy away from having our handout and
relying on the kindness of strangers. That's the situation that
(27:52):
the insatiable greed of the one percent has put America in.
And now they are getting ready to take control and
power over everything, and if we do not stand united
in this moment, in this time, they will succeed. But
as we continue to say that no one right can
(28:16):
make you inferior without your fucking consent. So we cannot
fall for folks the lie that tells us that somehow,
because we have a little bit more than the person
next to us, that somehow we are better. We're not.
And things are going to get harder because they're purposefully
(28:38):
being constructed in that way, because a desperate people and
an ignorant people are a malleable people. A desperate people
and an ignorant people are a malleable people because you
do not have the energy to withstand their blows, so
you cower in defense before they even raise their hands.
(29:01):
So we have to decide in this moment how we
are going to respond, What are we going to do,
What are we going to allow? They already have a
head start, They have the courts, they bought them, they
bought this president. But they don't have all of us,
(29:23):
and I would argue that they don't even have half
of us. So how we move forward, how we move forward,
is going to determine whether or not America succeeds, whether
or not we're able to actually hold on for dear life.
And frankly, let's be real, whether or not the scraps
(29:47):
that we are holding onto are even worth it because
we need radical change. We don't need incremental progress anymore,
because everything that we have fed been fed has been
a fucking lie. And the work here, the work left,
is too unpack it and deliver that message to those
(30:07):
that have buried their heads in the sand. I do
want to read you this poem. And she wrote it
about Tupac. She wrote it about this messenger and his
critique of America. All Eyes on You by Nikki Giovanni
(30:29):
for Tupac Shakur, nineteen seventy one to nineteen ninety six.
As I tossed and turned, unable to achieve sleep, unable
to control anxiety, unable to comprehend why Tupac is not
with us. If those who lived by the sword died
by the sword, there would be no white men on earth.
(30:50):
If those who lived on hatred died on hatred, there
would be no KKK. If those who lived by lies
and died by lies, there would be nobody on Wall Street,
in executive suites, in academic offices, instructing the young. Don't
tell me he got what he deserved. He deserved a
(31:12):
chariot and the accolades of a grateful people. He deserved
his life. It is as clear as a mountain stream,
as defining as a lightning strike, as terrifying as sun
to vampires. Tupac told the truth. There were those who
called it dirty, gangsta rap, inciting. There were those who
(31:32):
never wanted to be angry at the conditions, but angry
at the messenger who reported, your kitchen has roaches, your
toilet is overflowing, your basement has so much water, the
rats are in the living room. Your house is in disorder.
And Tupac told you about it. What a beautiful boy,
graceful carriage, melodic voice, sharp wit, intellectual breath. What a
(31:57):
beautiful boy to lose? That is one of her most
just poignant in the moment critique on America. You see,
the powerful always go after the messengers. They try and
make examples of them, They try and silence them. They
(32:19):
call them traders, they call them terrorists, they call them liars,
They try and slander them for doing nothing more than
telling the truth. Because the truth really will set us free.
Knowledge really is power. It is the ability to think,
to ask questions and what the powers that be. What
(32:41):
they don't want now, for certain, is for you to
be questioning. You just need to go along with the
get along. You just need to live in the age
of cover your own ass. You need to be the
Christopher Ray that resigns in advance. You need to be
the Joe Biden that says welcome back. You need to
be the Representative Clyburne that says, oh, but give him
(33:03):
a pardon so we can have a clean slate. This
place will never be clean because it was born out
of blood and violence and torture and lies. So the
way to fight back is by uncovering the truth. The
way to fight back is to sharpen your intellect, is
(33:25):
to be able to critique and to share what you learn.
That's how you fight back. I say, start a book club,
start a band book club. My call to action today,
dear friends, as I close out, is this. I'm in
the midst of rereading James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time,
(33:50):
and I have to tell you it is a short read,
small read, but it is so dense, so rich, so brutal,
and so my call to action is to pick up Baldwin,
pick up Nikki Giovanni's work. Their words use them as food,
(34:14):
as fuel, as nourishment. We are heading into extraordinarily dark times,
and we need to be as full of the truth
using our ancestors, these ancestors, these thought leaders, these guides,
these spiritual torches, these lights as our guides. So what
(34:36):
I say today, my call to action is to read.
Read the words of those who you were never taught about.
Go down a rabbit hole and wrap yourself in the
words of Nikki Giovanni. She blew my mind away at sixteen.
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It was the same with Baldwin. It was the same
with Frederick Douglas. But ask yourself why the big the
greatest revolutionaries you don't know about but stumble on, ask
them why they give you the sanitized versions of these people.
It's okay to recite Martin Luther King, but we ignore
(35:20):
Malcolm X. It's okay for them to want to lift
up the Confederacy as their history and deny us the
black panthers that actually brought literacy programs in free food
and medicine to the black community when the white government
was denying black people care. They have made librarians the
(35:44):
most dangerous people on the planet. Right now, arm yourself
with the truth, open your mind, find yourself into a bookstore, say,
I'm looking for Nikki Giovanni, I'm looking for Baldwin, I'm
looking for Tony Morrison. I'm looking for people whose names
(36:05):
I don't even know why, because you are on a search.
You're on a hunt for the truth, because you're tired
of being lied to. So wild books are still with us,
and while as Erica Baidu says, it's still legal to think,
fill yourself with as much truth as you possibly can
(36:29):
because you are going to be inundated with lies. And
we need to ground ourselves because the tsunami of fuckery
that is headed our way will have us wondering which
way is up and which way is down. Our knowledge
is our power. That is it for me today, dear
friends on Woke af AS always, power to the people
(36:54):
and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay
woke as fuck.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WOKP Daily with Me
your Girl, Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. I
have been struggling because the dystopian times that we are
living in they're wild and it is taking everything in
(00:34):
me not to just follow the breaking news of the
moment and to really unpack what is underneath the dystopia.
And so that's what we're gonna do today, is try
and get underneath the mayhem instead of just remaining on
(00:57):
the surface. We need to be asking ourselves bigger questions
about this moment, why we're here and how we got here,
because I feel as if we don't if we don't
understand truly how we got into this moment where our
democracy is had hanging on by a thread, we're never
going to figure out how we fix it. And now,
(01:19):
when I say fix it, I don't mean as if
we're going to experience what comes post the fixing, because
that is going to be for other generations. But what
I mean by if we don't go back, we're going
to keep creating the same cycle over and over again.
(01:40):
I have been trying to figure out how to make
sense of this current moment that we're in. And what
I've said before is that I want to get to
the underneath, right, I don't want to remain on the
surface following the bouncing ball of fascism and everything that
Donald Trump is saying and doing and who is he,
(02:01):
who he's appointing to what and where. The fact is
is that none of that actually matters. I mean it will, right.
We know the harm that it's going to cause, We
know the pain that people are going to be in
that we are all going to collectively experience. But at
the end of the day, this is cyclical, right, what
we are running through and what is happening. And I
(02:22):
think that right now again what is being experienced through
this killing, the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, is
really drawing out the underneath, opening up the wound of
America that has been ever present. But we just keep
patching up the wound of inequality, right of economic inequality,
(02:48):
of racial inequality, of gender inequality. Like what has come
up in twenty twenty four and what's been coming up
is the driving force behind the greed right, the hatred
that has gotten us here. And I continue to say
that I am so disgusted with the current democratic establishment
(03:11):
right now, because they seem to not learn anything. And
so what I realize, and what I keep saying over
and over again, is that democrats are not going to
save us. I'm kind of in this space of really
like unpacking the greed that we are seeing that we
are all being exposed to and wondering like, how did
(03:33):
we get to this point where these billionaires are just
so insatiable right, Like it's never enough, Like they don't
have enough money, they don't have enough power. And it's
because capitalism has had us worship them like they were
the new gods. Right. We have turned our eyes away
(03:54):
from actual right religion and we have all been worshiping capitalism.
And so what does that mean? That means that those
that are at the top of the pyramid, the one percent,
we've looked at them and admired them and adored them,
followed their shows and follow their lives and say that
(04:16):
they're better than us because they have more than us.
But we've never actually asked ourselves why they have more
to begin with. But the lie that's been told, the
lie that's been sold, is that if you have more,
then you're inherently better. You're inherently smarter than the rest
of us. We don't look at the people at the
(04:39):
lower end of the economic pyramid and say, wow, how
were they able to make a dollar stretched so far
given that they have so little? That's real ingenuity. How
you actually turn how you make a dollar grow and
go when you have so little. But no, we look
and we glorify those that the top, and we never
(05:01):
stop and question how they got that fucking money to
begin with. I remember growing up actually on and I
will date myself Scrooge McDuck, Right, Scrooge McDuck had this
huge house in palace, and he had his nephews that
were living with him, and he had this vault, you know,
full of gold coins, and in that in that cartoon
(05:23):
really taught you about capitalism and how money actually works.
But the thing that we have not understood truly is that, like,
there are those that started way ahead of the starting line,
And so we've been fed the lie that if you
just work hard enough, you'll be able to catch up
to those that are wealthy because they inherited that wealth.
(05:46):
So the lie of capitalism is that all you need
to do is just work harder and work smarter. And
those that are the wealthiest, they work the hardest and
were the smartest. That's the fucking gag. They're not. They
just inherited their wealth, and then the rest of us
are forced into the cogs of the machine, believing that
(06:09):
if we just run faster, if we just do more,
if we just produce more, then we'll catch up to them.
So in this moment, we find ourselves reeling from this
murder because it exposes so very much about all the
things that are wrong. But we've been fed the lie
(06:30):
that we were wrong, that if we're not wealthy, that
if we don't have that security, then it must be
on us rather than on the system that's keeping us
stuck and keeping that kind of dollar floating in front
of our faces that we're chasing after. And so what
this murder has unearthed is questioning, wait a minute, who
(06:55):
actually is a murderer, because now there are multiple definitions,
and who should we really be chastising and questioning right now?
So I come in today with just my mind super
heavy and really trying to unpack the amount of lies
(07:17):
that we have all been fed in There's something about
getting older that has me really believe that like learning
never stops because we have to unlearn so much in
order to get to the truth, which they they the
big they don't want us to actually see. This is
(07:38):
why you ban books, This is why you threaten to
shut down information networks. This is why Elon Musk bought
Twitter and then destroyed it because the little peons that
they see us. The people were gathering, right, The people
were communicating, which means that then we were all of
a sudden going to realize that we were in each
(07:59):
other problem. We all had the same enemy. But if
you break down modes of communication and don't allow people
to assemble, then they'll readily eat the lies that you're
feeding them because they'll be nothing to rebuff it. So
Elon Musk saw Twitter. The billionaire class saw Twitter as
(08:26):
a problem to be solved because the people are getting
too ahead of themselves. The people are organizing too much.
It's really wild when you start to think about it.
I saw this post and it read you can be
driven into homelessness by someone like Brian Thompson. Brian Thompson
(08:46):
being the CEO who was murdered from United Healthcare. You
can be driven into homelessness by someone like Brian Thompson
then legally murdered by someone like Daniel Penny, the man
who killed Jordan Neely, the black homeless man and street performer,
by putting him in a chokehold and suffocating him to death.
(09:11):
And he was just acquitted because he was supposedly helping
the people on the train. He goes on to say,
while the money that could have saved you is spent
on murdering children in Gaza. So let me read that again.
You can be driven into homelessness, bankrupted by a healthcare
(09:34):
system that profits off of your despair and profits off
of denying you access to life saving healthcare. Then you
can be legally murdered by a white vigilante on a train,
and all the while, the money that you're paying into
the system is being sent elsewhere to murder women, children,
(10:00):
and men. Who is the depraved? Humanity is humanity, and
depravity is depravity. But this struck me. People say, oh, well,
Jordan Neely was threatening other people on the train. YO.
If you live in New York City, there are lots
of shit that pop off in the subway station. There
are lots of things that pop off in the street
(10:23):
all the time. Tell me why this former military man
didn't release at some point the chokehold on Jordan Neely.
Why is it acceptable for us to commit murder in
broad daylight but only when we can say, oh, I
feared for my life. It's the same refrain, folks, that
(10:45):
police officers and vigilantes have used in order to kill
black people. That is my truth. I live in New York.
There are people that are on these streets because of
the mental health care system has failed them. So what
this piece is saying right here, it's this system failed
(11:08):
Jordan Neely, which had him on a train begging people
for help, begging for a dollar. He was sick, and
so then that day it's okay for murder to be
committed and then use it as a ruse and say, oh,
I was trying to help other passengers on the train.
(11:29):
George Zimmerman too, said that he feared for his life
when he killed sixteen year old Trayvon Martin. You can
have your opinions, but we we literally have got to
dig deeper and really understand the root of the root
of what is happening here, what we are allowing ourselves
to think of as normal. So the killing of a
(11:52):
wealthy CEO, that's wrong. But the killing of Jordan Neely,
that's okay. Our humanity is being tested right now. Our
humanity is being tested by what it is that we
allow to sit okay on our spirits. Those young people
on the college campuses last year were being told that
(12:16):
they were radical, they were Antifa, they were this and
the other thing. Why because they care about what they
are seeing come across their social media platforms. And what
politicians were telling them is that no, no, it's okay
to see bits and pieces of babies that have been
blown apart. It's okay to bomb hospitals and universities, and
(12:37):
that somehow calling out this massive destruction and murder somehow
makes them the villains. That's extraordinarily insane. But we make
we continue to make these little compromises. This system, this
killing machine, this system, it continues to have us make
(12:58):
these compromises. And in the meantime, folks, we are compromising ourselves,
our humanity, and our values, and it is destroying us.
It is destroying us. Elon Muss is now worth four
hundred billion dollars, four hundred billion dollars, and this is
(13:19):
being celebrated as opposed to being questioned, no person should
be worth as much as a fucking country. While there
are people that are going hungry, while there are people
that are on housed, while there are people that can't
afford medication. And yet this is our new deity Elon
(13:41):
Musk and this billionaire fucking oligarch class because they extract
from us and then we turn around and then worship
their wealth. Folks, Come on, come on, we have got
to see the writing that is on the wall here.
(14:02):
Reality TV. Let me go off on a tangent for
a minute. Reality TV started where it was like, oh,
look at these look at these poor SAPs, look at
these folks, look at these people eating eyeballs, or look
at these people living in trailer parks or what have you.
And reality TV made us feel good about ourselves because
we were not them. And then all of a sudden,
(14:23):
it flipped the script and we went back to, you know,
the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and all of
a sudden, now we're watching the Real Housewives of This
and the Kardashians and blah blah blah and Super Sweet sixteen.
That and everything right was about materialism. How much can
you amass? How much can you flaunch, so much so
(14:45):
that several of those real housewives would end up bankrupt
or in jail because everything was smoking, mirrors and a lie.
But they knew that if they could trick the public
into thinking that they were wealthy, because we worship wealth,
then they would be able to trade on their brands,
(15:08):
because we've been programmed into worshiping wealth because wealth is
somehow equated with intelligence, with brilliance, as opposed to just
being a really good fucking scammer or being able to
turn your millions into billions. You know, I harken back
to the film, the movie Wall Street, remember the original
(15:32):
Wall Street, Gordon Gecko and greed is good. We were
all fed that. That's how people said, whatever happened to
the hippies, they turned into yuppies. They like nice things,
and so you feed on that and you give more
and more and more, and then you realize people aren'tsatiable.
(15:54):
The more they have, the more they want. It wasn't
enough to just have a mansion. Now you need all
of these MC mansions. It wasn't enough to fly first class.
Now you have a PJ, you have a private jet.
Everything is about more and more and more, and so
then you get here this piece that was in The
Hill back in September, the Hill dot com billionaires started
(16:17):
a class war. Americans must fight back. Let me say this,
This is what the author writes. Wealth is not a
moral failing, and Americans have long revered the entrepreneurial spirit
that animates small business owners to build a modest fortune
for themselves and their families. But a growing class of
(16:40):
malignant oligarchs has initiated a campaign to exert unchallenged control
over our democratic institutions and our economy. The war has
already started, and the billionaires have a significant head start.
He goes on to say, like a camp, sir, billionaire
(17:01):
control is metastasizing in every facet of America's socio political
and socioeconomic system. They control newspapers, television stations, and every
major social media platform. Last year, we learned the extent
of oligarchical control over our judiciary when it was revealed
(17:23):
that a handful of billionaires were showering Supreme Court justices
with lavish vacations and obscenely inappropriate gifts. And folks, what
happened after the big reveal of how Clarence Thomas has
a sugar daddy. How Justice Alido has a sugar dad.
(17:47):
What happened not a goddamn thing. So we know that,
for instance, Peter Thiel, multi billionaire right wing fascists, bought JD.
Vance and installed him in the Senate. We know that
Chief Justice John Roberts allowed for with the decision and
(18:10):
Citizens United, an influx of overwhelming amount of money that
now in order to run for office it costs a
billion dollars plus. And now these people who have amassed
as well, it's not enough for them to have money,
money of like a small nation. No, now they want
(18:33):
our democracy, they want everything. They want the justice system,
they want Congress, they want the presidency, and with this
incoming regime they have it all. And so when we
sit back and we look at how we are continuing
to be lied to, bamboozled, hustled out of our little
(18:59):
bit of resource that we're trying to hold together like
a bunch of squirrels, as they are fucking shaking the trees.
And their goal is to continue to pit us against
one another so that we remain fighting over the scraps
and the artificial scarcity that they create. But now in
(19:20):
order to ensure that we don't protest, that we don't
rise up. They have the government too, folks. It is
if Elon paid ninety percent taxes, he'd still have forty
billion dollars. Is that not sick? I don't know if
those exact numbers are right, but the fact is is
(19:42):
that if he actually did fucking right and paid taxes,
he'd still be a multi billionaire. His eleven fucking kids
would still be taken care of, as well as their
grandkids and their grandkids and so on and so forth.
But they're insatiable and there is never never enough. Meanwhile,
(20:03):
how did Donald Trump get into office this time lying
to people about the economy, telling them that he alone
can fix it? And then oh, well, last today is
he's ringing in the bell for the stock exchange. What
did he say, folks, Ooh, it's going to be very
hard to lower grocery prices, the very thing that he
(20:26):
told folks that he was going to do. But now
he says, ooh, not going to be able to do that, right, surprise, surprise,
And the post says, oh, maga got played. Everybody did
who thought that Donald Trump was actually going to make
good on any of his words? Donald Trump has said
(20:46):
to everyone while he was running for a president that
he was not interested in helping anyone, but it was
okay because we all hate the same people. I tell
you that it's a dark place. It's a dark place
that we're in, But I often say that we've been
(21:10):
here before. These are conversations that have been had, and
so I want to bring up. This is an excerpt
from a piece that Frederick Douglas wrote for The Northern Star,
and he said this, let me give you a word
of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the
(21:32):
progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made
to her August claims have been born of earnest struggle.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are
men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want
(21:54):
rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without
the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be
a moral one, or it may be a physical one,
or it may both moral and physical, but it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never
(22:18):
has and it never will find out just what a
people will submit to, And you have found out the
exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed
upon them. And these will continue till they are resisted
with either words or blows, or with both. The limits
(22:39):
of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
they oppress. In the light of these ideas, negroes will
be hunted in the north and held and flogged at
in the south, so long as they submit to those
devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical.
(23:02):
Men may not get all they pay for in this world,
but they must certainly pay for all they get. If
we ever get free from the oppression and wrongs heaped
upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must
do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if
need be, by our lives and the lives of others.
(23:25):
This is Frederick Douglas y'all completely different time, completely different century,
and yet offering the same truth. Greed right. But if
you can have people locked up in struggle, if you
(23:46):
can figure out the social engineering and just how to oppress,
and what they will take, and if you give them
a little bit of scraps, if you give white people
a little bit more then black people, then oh, they'll
continue to go along with the get along the oppression
and the racism because they think that they are within
reach of Elon Musk, They're in within reach of Zuckerberg,
(24:09):
just one lottery ticket away, one wish away, and so
they continue to give the people their oppressors the power
to step on their necks. This is why I say
that this moment is not calling for us to follow
the bouncing ball and all the distractions that this second
Trump regime are going to usher in. It is asking
(24:33):
us folks to dig deeper to get to the actual
truth of the matter. I am not saying that wealth
is bad. I am saying that greed is I am
saying that being celebrated for your thievery is the problem
that worshiping wealth. While most Americans can barely pull together
(24:58):
emergency funding, an emergency saving not because they don't work hard,
but because the system has been rigged for them to
remain on an absolute fucking hamster wheel. And so long
as you keep running and just trying to keep your
head above water, you don't have time to really question
and on earth and dig down into how you got
(25:21):
into that situation in the first place, because all of
the messages are telling you that you are the problem
and not the system, because the system is too big
to fix. We are in a time of a great reveal.
And there was at one time a young rapper and
(25:43):
also a poet who offered up a lot of hard
truths about America that folks didn't want to hear. And
arguably there are courses taught about his critique and a
now on America, and that is Tupac Shakur. And I
(26:05):
want to offer one of the most famous lines, got
money for war, but can't be the poor. Tupac Shakur,
a child of a black panther, offered a deep critique
on America using rap music. Rap music be nothing more
(26:26):
than poetry put two intense beats about the human experience.
Tupac talks about the fact that how can we live
in a society where there are billionaires, where somebody can
be worth And at the time of this right he
was talking about like forty billion dollars. I just showed
(26:48):
you four hundred billion dollars somebody being worth, and he's saying,
how is it that we can live in a society
where somebody can have forty billion dollars and people are
on hous that you can walk past people that are
begging on the street that have nothing, and you have
three thousand dollars in your pocket and you throw them
(27:09):
twenty five cents, And yet you want to judge how
they're spending that money. He said, if you want to
drink it, drink it. If you want to shoot it up,
shoot it up. What you do is your business. But
we would all have more if we thought in the collective,
if we thought about actually what it is that it
means to be part of a whole, and not find
(27:30):
ourselves thinking that we are better right because we have
a little bit more money than the person that is begging. Folks,
it is just one emergency. We are just one emergency,
one disaster, one tragedy away from having our handout and
relying on the kindness of strangers. That's the situation that
(27:52):
the insatiable greed of the one percent has put America in.
And now they are getting ready to take control and
power over everything, and if we do not stand united
in this moment, in this time, they will succeed. But
as we continue to say that no one right can
(28:16):
make you inferior without your fucking consent. So we cannot
fall for folks the lie that tells us that somehow,
because we have a little bit more than the person
next to us, that somehow we are better. We're not.
And things are going to get harder because they're purposefully
(28:38):
being constructed in that way, because a desperate people and
an ignorant people are a malleable people. A desperate people
and an ignorant people are a malleable people because you
do not have the energy to withstand their blows, so
you cower in defense before they even raise their hands.
(29:01):
So we have to decide in this moment how we
are going to respond, What are we going to do,
What are we going to allow? They already have a
head start, They have the courts, they bought them, they
bought this president. But they don't have all of us,
(29:23):
and I would argue that they don't even have half
of us. So how we move forward, how we move forward,
is going to determine whether or not America succeeds, whether
or not we're able to actually hold on for dear life.
And frankly, let's be real, whether or not the scraps
(29:47):
that we are holding onto are even worth it because
we need radical change. We don't need incremental progress anymore,
because everything that we have fed been fed has been
a fucking lie. And the work here, the work left,
is too unpack it and deliver that message to those
(30:07):
that have buried their heads in the sand. I do
want to read you this poem. And she wrote it
about Tupac. She wrote it about this messenger and his
critique of America. All Eyes on You by Nikki Giovanni
(30:29):
for Tupac Shakur, nineteen seventy one to nineteen ninety six.
As I tossed and turned, unable to achieve sleep, unable
to control anxiety, unable to comprehend why Tupac is not
with us. If those who lived by the sword died
by the sword, there would be no white men on earth.
(30:50):
If those who lived on hatred died on hatred, there
would be no KKK. If those who lived by lies
and died by lies, there would be nobody on Wall Street,
in executive suites, in academic offices, instructing the young. Don't
tell me he got what he deserved. He deserved a
(31:12):
chariot and the accolades of a grateful people. He deserved
his life. It is as clear as a mountain stream,
as defining as a lightning strike, as terrifying as sun
to vampires. Tupac told the truth. There were those who
called it dirty, gangsta rap, inciting. There were those who
(31:32):
never wanted to be angry at the conditions, but angry
at the messenger who reported, your kitchen has roaches, your
toilet is overflowing, your basement has so much water, the
rats are in the living room. Your house is in disorder.
And Tupac told you about it. What a beautiful boy,
graceful carriage, melodic voice, sharp wit, intellectual breath. What a
(31:57):
beautiful boy to lose? That is one of her most
just poignant in the moment critique on America. You see,
the powerful always go after the messengers. They try and
make examples of them, They try and silence them. They
(32:19):
call them traders, they call them terrorists, they call them liars,
They try and slander them for doing nothing more than
telling the truth. Because the truth really will set us free.
Knowledge really is power. It is the ability to think,
to ask questions and what the powers that be. What
(32:41):
they don't want now, for certain, is for you to
be questioning. You just need to go along with the
get along. You just need to live in the age
of cover your own ass. You need to be the
Christopher Ray that resigns in advance. You need to be
the Joe Biden that says welcome back. You need to
be the Representative Clyburne that says, oh, but give him
(33:03):
a pardon so we can have a clean slate. This
place will never be clean because it was born out
of blood and violence and torture and lies. So the
way to fight back is by uncovering the truth. The
way to fight back is to sharpen your intellect, is
(33:25):
to be able to critique and to share what you learn.
That's how you fight back. I say, start a book club,
start a band book club. My call to action today,
dear friends, as I close out, is this. I'm in
the midst of rereading James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time,
(33:50):
and I have to tell you it is a short read,
small read, but it is so dense, so rich, so brutal,
and so my call to action is to pick up Baldwin,
pick up Nikki Giovanni's work. Their words use them as food,
(34:14):
as fuel, as nourishment. We are heading into extraordinarily dark times,
and we need to be as full of the truth
using our ancestors, these ancestors, these thought leaders, these guides,
these spiritual torches, these lights as our guides. So what
(34:36):
I say today, my call to action is to read.
Read the words of those who you were never taught about.
Go down a rabbit hole and wrap yourself in the
words of Nikki Giovanni. She blew my mind away at sixteen.
(34:58):
It was the same with Baldwin. It was the same
with Frederick Douglas. But ask yourself why the big the
greatest revolutionaries you don't know about but stumble on, ask
them why they give you the sanitized versions of these people.
It's okay to recite Martin Luther King, but we ignore
(35:20):
Malcolm X. It's okay for them to want to lift
up the Confederacy as their history and deny us the
black panthers that actually brought literacy programs in free food
and medicine to the black community when the white government
was denying black people care. They have made librarians the
(35:44):
most dangerous people on the planet. Right now, arm yourself
with the truth, open your mind, find yourself into a bookstore, say,
I'm looking for Nikki Giovanni, I'm looking for Baldwin, I'm
looking for Tony Morrison. I'm looking for people whose names
(36:05):
I don't even know why, because you are on a search.
You're on a hunt for the truth, because you're tired
of being lied to. So wild books are still with us,
and while as Erica Baidu says, it's still legal to think,
fill yourself with as much truth as you possibly can
(36:29):
because you are going to be inundated with lies. And
we need to ground ourselves because the tsunami of fuckery
that is headed our way will have us wondering which
way is up and which way is down. Our knowledge
is our power. That is it for me today, dear
friends on Woke af AS always, power to the people
(36:54):
and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay
woke as fuck.
Host
Danielle Moodie
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