May 7, 2025 • 32 mins
Herby shares his unique perspective on racism based on his experience as a Jewish man who served time in Arizona state prisons where racial segregation was strictly enforced.
• Prison life organized by racial groups: Woods (whites), Chicanos (American-born Latinos), Paisas (foreign-born Latinos), Chiefs (Native Americans), and Kinfolk (Black inmates)
• Herby taught re-entry classes and formed connections with Black inmates by being honest about racial issues
• Using Jewish historical persecution as a comparative example to discuss different approaches to discrimination
• Challenging the narrative of Black victimhood by promoting self-determination and practical solutions
• The "Find a way and Fuck 'em" philosophy that resonated with inmates across racial divides
• How DEI programs often increase rather than decrease racial tensions
• Why focusing on building businesses, community institutions, and family structures creates more change than focusing on racism itself
Don't forget to check out Herby's book "A Radical Reset" describing Anti-politism, a republic by merit-based lottery, available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning everybody.
It's me, herbie.
Welcome to another episode ofthe Spiritual Agnostic, and
today we're going to talk aboutracism.
Now I have, I think, agenuinely unique perspective on
racism because of my genuinelyunique life experience, and when
I say unique, unique amongpeople of my background, so you
(00:24):
know those of you who haven'tbeen around for the first 12
episodes.
In a nutshell, I was born intoan extremely abusive situation
Jewish family on top of that,raised by a stepfather who was a
pedophile and child beater.
Both and I was the target forboth Lived a life of, let's say,
(00:45):
two different levels ofexistence.
Maintained a secret life is oneway of looking at it.
I think of it as a fantasyworld that I lived in because it
was less painful than mypresent, but that's not an
excuse.
I want to make crystal clearfor those of you who are not
familiar with me that I ownembrace and am incredibly
(01:05):
remorseful about what I did todeserve going to prison
ultimately.
But when I went to prison youknow there aren't too many guys
who start off my businesspursuits prior to prison were
successful and I was a self-mademillionaire, and then, of
course, I lost it all.
The captain went down with theship and I ended up in prison.
I was very unusual, and I wasunusual for a couple of reasons.
(01:27):
Number one there weren't toomany Jewish people in prison.
Number two even among the whiteguys, I was by far the most
educated, both in terms of howfar I went in school which
really wasn't all that far I'mmore of an autodidact but being
able to string words togetherand being functionally literate
as opposed to illiterate.
And, by by the way, if youthink there aren't illiterate
people in America, you havenever been to the prison system.
(01:49):
I mean literally illiteratepeople who write their names
with an X.
And so I was unusual even amongthe white guys, and I went to
prison not knowing what wasgoing on, but I treated it just
to review with you guys.
I've talked about this a littlebit before, but I'll make this
quick.
I treated prison as a monasticexperience For me.
(02:09):
Prison was it was a punishment,but it was also a relief.
It was both you know, thingscan be more than one thing at
the same time both good and bad.
And for me prison was a chanceto reset.
You know, there comes a pointand I've used this metaphor to
the point where it's probablytired, but it's just accurate.
(02:30):
I was so drenched by the waterof my own, the downpour of my
own guilt, that nothing elsecould possibly come up that
would make me feel any worse,and there's something incredibly
liberating about that.
And then somehow, through aprocess of contemplation and
study because you have a lot oftime on your hands in prison I
(02:50):
turned the corner in my life andhere we are today.
Now I don't want to spend a lotof time on that because this is
not about me at all in thispodcast.
This is about racism.
So prison when you get to prisonnow that I gave you a little
quick background when you get toprison, the first thing that
you would notice and I'mspeaking about state prison as
opposed to federal prison I wasnot in federal prison.
(03:12):
I was in Arizona State Prison,first in Yuma, arizona, and then
in Kingman, arizona, and I wasin a low-medium security yard.
Arizona only has one minimumsecurity yard per se and it's
very, very tiny, so very fewpeople go to it.
I was there at the very end ofmy time.
(03:32):
It's just outside of Phoenix,but I was there such a short
period of time.
I don't really include it in myexperience it's more of a you
know showing me out the doorsort of thing.
But those two primary prisonyards I were in and they move
you so you don't get toocomfortable where you are.
Basically, you know scheminglittle minds that inmates are
prisoners.
(03:53):
Inmates it's an interchangeableterm.
I don't know why I evenbothered to catch that.
Anyway, so you get to prison.
The first thing that screamedout to me was that it was
racially segregated.
So I just didn't expect it.
It's just not again, I'm notfrom that socioeconomic group
that dominates prison.
You know 99% of the people inprison.
It's almost a lifestyle and I'mnot exaggerating.
(04:15):
I probably slightly exaggerated, but not by much.
I'm not kidding.
It's a lifestyle.
They expect to go to prison.
They've been to prison before.
It's a revolving door, I liketo call it.
They're all doing life terms onthe installment plan, so they
may not get a life sentence perse, as in they murdered somebody
.
You have to have five years orless before you're out the door.
(04:42):
I was sentenced to five years,by the way.
That's how I got in there and Ihave a low community risk level
.
In other words, I'm no threatto the community.
They rate you from zero to 10.
I was a zero.
I represent no community risk.
(05:10):
But violent criminals, likemurderers, can be in a
low-medium yard on their way outthe door.
So if they've served, let's saythey were sentenced to 25 years
for second degree murder, whichmeans they killed somebody in a
fit of rage as opposed tothinking about it first.
That's the difference betweenone and two.
So they're sentenced to 25years instead of life, and so
they're at the end of theirsentence.
They've been good boys all theway through and remember I
wasn't in with any girls, sothey were good boys all the way
through to the last five years.
And then, as a reward, they'resent to a lower security yard,
because there's much morefreedom involved in a lower
(05:31):
security yard.
So I don't know why that phonewent off.
I thought I put it on standby,but anyway.
So I was shocked to see howdivided it was.
Now here's how the groups brokedown.
There were the white guys, whocalled themselves the Woods,
which is, by the way, short forPecker Woods, and I don't know
(05:52):
why white guys called themselvesthat, but okay, it's the Woods.
Then there are the Chicanos,which are the American-born
Mexican-Americans, and thenthere are the Paisas, stemming
from the Spanish word paisa,which means country, and those
are the foreign-born LatinAmericans, mostly Mexicans, but
from all over Latin America, whoare incarcerated in the United
(06:15):
States but are not Americancitizens, and they divide, they
hate each other.
It has to do with a lot ofcultural reasons and how Spanish
is spoken and so on and soforth.
I'm not going to go into it inthis podcast, but the Latinos
are broken into two groups, asI've said, and then there are
the Native Americans who callthemselves the chiefs, and there
(06:35):
are the black guys who callthemselves the kinfolk, and each
group is led by a boss.
On the yard there's a yard boss.
The yard boss is generally agangster from whatever gang like
.
For example, among the whiteguys.
Our leadership was always AryanBrotherhood or Skinhead, which
is the same thing really, and Idon't know who elected them
(06:58):
leader, but they are.
And there's no elections.
I used to joke about that untilI almost got my head knocked off
for it.
But I used to say about thatuntil I almost got my head
knocked off for it.
But I used to say, like, whenwas the election?
How did you guys get to be theleader?
But that didn't make me popularwith them.
But because I was an OG.
An OG is when I went to prison Ithought it meant old guy.
It actually stands for originalgangster, but that was my title
(07:20):
in prison OG all the old guysare.
And I was in my 50s when I wentI'll be 68 next week, just to
give you some guidelines there.
And when I was in there I was,you know, I already had gray
hair, yada, yada, yada, and Iwas unusual and so.
But they don't pick on the OGsper se.
Ogs are exempted from the loweryounger, for example.
(07:46):
Younger guys have to go out andwork out with weights.
It's not a choice every day.
They're supervised by theiryard boss.
And then there's your run boss.
So there are different buildings.
Each building is called a run.
Within the runs are your houses.
House is another word forcubicle.
So in a medium security lowmedium security prison there are
no cells.
You're not slammed behind acell door, you know, pacing back
(08:08):
and forth like a scene out ofsomething from Alcatraz.
It's more like a giant men'shomeless shelter.
So you live in what essentiallywould be a barn-like building
with very, very high ceilings,and it's all the ductwork and
plumbing exposed above.
There's no effort to coveranything up aesthetically,
because it's a prison.
Why would there be?
And then within the buildingthere are the houses, which are
(08:33):
cubicles that are like half wall.
So you have approximately a Iwould guess to say maybe a five
foot by seven foot cubicle.
Roughly, you have about 35square feet of your own.
There's a locker that you canput a padlock on for a few
things, but most everything elseis out in the open.
There's a rack, which is thebunk.
(08:54):
It's a hard metal shelf on topof which you lay a mat which is
it's not a mattress, it's abouta one, depending on which one
you get.
How lucky you are and you'reand you're getting mats.
It's a one to two inch pad sortof.
It's not really soft.
It lays on top of the metalshelf.
That is your mattress, and thenyou know that's it and you can
(09:15):
purchase with your own money a13 inch TV that you can plug in
within your house and watchtelevision up to a certain time
at night, and there are I thinkwhen I was in there were a dozen
stations, and that's prettymuch what it is to be in prison,
and then hours and hours, andhours and hours and hours of
downtime and the prison doescertain.
You know programs forrehabilitation, which are all
(09:35):
just make-believe programs thatno one talks about.
But anyway, that brings me tothe story I'm going to tell now
that I've set the situation.
So I'm in prison, I'm in Yuma,arizona, and it became evident
to the CEOs, that's, thecorrection officers, that I was
smarter than the average bearand I got along with them.
You know, unlike.
There's a cultural thing and Igot in trouble for this more
(10:00):
than once when I say trouble,spoken to by my own Peckerwood
leaders that I was too nice tothe CEOs and I was too
respectful and I said thank you,and you know things like that
and was polite because I'venever, under you, catch a lot
more flies with honey than flypaper.
And I made a decision earlythat I was going to make prison
(10:20):
as tolerable as possible bylearning its ins and outs.
You know, within aninstitutional setting it's not
that tough to do.
And it wasn't long before allthe CEOs on the yard and all the
inmates to kind of recognize meas both a father figure because
that's my energy when you'rearound me I have a very fatherly
energy and and also as go-toguy for all the stuff they
(10:41):
didn't want to do, like, forexample, teach these bullshit
classes pardon my language, butthat's what they were about
reentering the mainstream whichwent on every day.
So I used to teach theseclasses and not get paid for
them, but I was remunerated withfavors by the corrections
officers.
So I got a lot of little favorsyou know the front of the line,
(11:03):
sort of things all because Iwould teach these classes for
them and I would digress fromthe classes.
And here comes the whole pointof this discussion.
One of the classes I taught wasabout reentry and because there
were a lot of black inmates,the reentry course itself was
full of.
Again, I'm gonna use the wordbullshit again.
This is the bad word I'm goingto use today.
(11:23):
Let's call them bullshit-isms.
You know things that are putinto these, these diversity
courses, that are just nonsense,you know just.
You know the pablum of.
You know, trying to changeattitudes by just deciding that
you're going to change yourattitude, which is ridiculous.
You know, things like racismare very deeply embedded.
(11:47):
I learned that right away.
The white guys a lot of the,for example, the Aryan brothers
and stuff really, really hateJews, and I made no secret of
being a Jew.
But when I would get them intoconversation they couldn't tell
you why.
They just hate them.
You know they don't go into.
You know I was taught incatechism prior to 1968 that the
Jews killed Jesus.
(12:07):
They don't go into thatnonsense and they don't discuss
any of the tropes that you wouldthink about anti-Semitism.
They just hate Jews.
And because they just hate Jews, I spent a lot of time with the
black guys.
In fact I was protected by thekinfolk on the prison yard.
So in Yuma, when I got there, Ilearned right away that I made a
(12:28):
mistake in rolling white tobegin with.
As a Jew, I could have rolledwith any other racial group I
wanted.
Rolled means within the chowhall is the best example.
No one can sit together andyou're not allowed to go into
the house of anybody else ofanother race.
It was just.
It was an unwritten but verystrictly enforced rule.
So in other words, if I feltlike sitting down with some of
my Chicano friends and I had alot of Chicano friends because I
speak Spanish and I hang outwith those guys I couldn't do it
(12:51):
in the chow.
If I did, it would start itwould literally have started a
riot on the yard, it's just sothe only time I could talk to
them is like when I was out onthe exercise yard or walking
around the track, and this isjust strictly enforced.
So.
But so what I should have done,frankly, is rolled black rolled
kinfolk because I got alongbest with that group as,
(13:12):
generally speaking, and in Yuma,I discovered right away.
So, at my prison job and I knowI'm jumping around a little bit
, but I'm just trying to coversome of the background as I get
into the solution, which isremarkably simple.
When I get to it, you'll beshocked by my solution to racism
, or to racism as it pertainsparticularly to the black
community in this podcast.
What's the word I'm looking for?
(13:36):
I kind of lost my train ofthought, but the whole point is
I could have rolled black WhileI was in Yuma.
My prison job is I worked in acall center, so Yuma is called a
working yard, meaning thateverybody in the prison, all the
inmates, have a job.
It could be sweeping floors, itcould be putting together
(13:57):
wheelchairs for a company thathad a plant on the prison site.
There were a lot, of, a lot ofcompanies that would use inmate
workers at paying them next tonothing to do, just above slave
wage labor.
But but they were consideredgreat jobs by prison standards,
because most prison jobs paid 25cents an hour and a lot of
these jobs paid two and threedollars an hour.
(14:18):
And I made three dollars andsomething an hour working in a
call center selling safety.
The company was called SafetyServices.
It was OSHA compliancematerials anyway, which, by the
way, my libertarian heartstrongly disagrees with.
But I'm not going there today.
I just did it because that wasthe most.
That was the best paying job onthe yard, and I'm really good
(14:39):
on the telephone is what it was.
Although nobody knew they werebeing called by prison inmates,
they were, um, all over thecountry, yada, yada, yada.
But as, anyways, result of thatjob, I worked in there with a
guy and his, his prison monikerwas drop.
He had teardrops coming out ofthe corner of his eye and you
remember I told you thatmurderers can end up in a low,
(15:01):
medium security yard like thison their way out.
That was drops.
Every teardrop theoretically atleast, this is what I learned
in prison represents someonethat this person had killed
along the way, maybe in prison,maybe out of prison.
And I want to say drop hadmaybe two or three teardrops
coming out of the corner of oneeye.
You've seen these.
You're looking at a murdererwhen you do, or at least the guy
(15:22):
that pretends like he committedmurder.
And then, but his real name wasRobert and I'm not going to use
Robert's last name, but Irefused to call him Drop it.
Just it felt funny coming outof my mouth.
I called him Robert.
I was the only guy that evercalled him Robert, not Bob, not
Bobby, not Rob Robert.
And I treated him with greatsuccess and Robert was typical
of American black men in that hewas deeply suspicious of
(15:45):
everything I said or did as awhite guy, because I was quickly
elevated into a supervisoryposition within the phone room
where I basically was the guythat doled out the leads which,
like if you ever saw that movie,glen Gary, glen Ross, you know
there are the good leads and thebad leads.
Well, I generated the leadsmyself.
That was part of my job, and asI generated them, I would then
(16:06):
dole them out, and the theorywas I doled them out blindly and
equally, but my predecessor didnot and, um, when I did it,
robert was deeply.
He really was kind of anasshole.
Oh, another bad word.
Sorry about that.
There's no other way todescribe prison, frankly, but I
don't think these are twostronger words.
So any kids listening you knowlike cover your ears when I say
(16:27):
those words, but they're,compared to what's usually said,
like in hip-hop lyrics, prettymild Anyway.
So where was I?
So we're going through thiswhole song and dance and Robert
is deeply distrustful, but overtime he grew to really trust me
because he realized that notonly did he get a fair amount of
(16:49):
leads, but in a couplesituations that I won't bother
to tell you the background on, Ihad his back.
I defended him to the bossesand saved his job a couple of
times and, by the way,rightfully so.
I wasn't falsely defending him,I was correct.
He was being unfairly labeledsomething.
I forget what the whole storywas, but I had his back.
So because of that he became mydefender.
(17:10):
And then, through him, I met theKinfolk Yard boss, a guy named
Big Chris.
Again, I'm not going to tellyou Chris's last name, but Big
Chris was just what you wouldpicture the name would be.
Weirdly enough, it could be 117degrees outside in Yuma, which
it really got that hot and BigChris would be in sweats.
I don't know why, but we hadorange sweats for winter.
(17:31):
It got cold in the winter butChris would wear them year round
, always had a towel around hisneck.
Great big, giant guy but a veryerudite, bright guy who in
another life, if he had beenborn to a different family,
would have probably been a brainsurgeon.
A very, very smart guy and heand I.
He had a lot of questions andwe used to have long
(17:51):
intellectual conversations andbecause of all of this, the
kinfolk made clear to theskinheads don't touch a head on
the OG, don't touch a hair onthe OG's head, because if you do
we will beat the living shitout of you.
And that was good enough for me.
I used another bad word, half ofthe one I used before, sorry,
and I was protected, and ithappened again in Kingman as
well.
There's a network among theprisons where the gang leaders
(18:16):
in one gang can talk to the gangleaders at another yard.
Somehow they pass theircommunications.
Actually I know exactly how,but I don't rat out my prison
brothers, it's just an unwrittenrule.
And you know I it's funny, Istill run into them every now
and then, like in underpasses,which I know sounds really weird
, but like I'll be making a leftturn off the freeway onto the,
onto the main drag, near where I, and there'll be a guy I was in
(18:39):
prison with.
I mean I'm giggling but it'sjust amazing Anyway.
But also I run into guys likeyou know, I'll go into a Circle
K and there'll be some guy thatI serve with and I was hyper.
There weren't a lot of guyslike me, so I'm pretty memorable
, I get a lot of.
To this day.
I'll go into a store and thisis you know.
We're going on nearly a decadelater and I'll go into a store
(19:00):
and I'll hear, oh, jay, and I'llturn around and be some guy I
serve with and I, you know still, because I was just and I don't
look a whole lot different thanI did then, other than being a
little bit older.
So anyway, now we're going toget down to the point of the
(19:22):
story.
So I teach these re-entryclasses, really as a favor to
the CEOs, because they didn'twant to do it and my classes
were jammed.
The inmates used to come to myclasses just because I would
deviate from the curriculum andkind of teach it the way I
wanted, and even though therewere cameras and microphones in
the classrooms monitoring, theonly place you're not under
camera in a prison is whenyou're pooping.
Other than that, you're undercamera all the time and I knew
(19:44):
that.
But somehow I guess the powersthat be didn't mind the way I
taught the courses, because Itaught them.
I taught it the way I thoughtwould be more practical, as
opposed to the idiotic cookiecutter you know nonsense that
you find.
If any of you have ever beenforced to take a DEI course
where you work, that's notdissimilar from a reentry course
.
Back into the mainstream, and Italked about things besides
racism with these guys.
(20:05):
Obviously One of the thingsthat everyone liked a lot, by
the way, was because of myfinance background.
I taught everybody how tobudget and how to sit down in
the month and when you get Xnumber of dollars, and I know
this seems simple to you, but itwasn't simple to these guys who
literally were raised on thestreets, you know, like wild
wolves, having to figure it out,and really didn't have basic
(20:26):
life skills.
So, and those that even thosewith a high school diploma
somehow graduated illiterate.
I won't even go down that rathole in this podcast.
Maybe another day We'll talkabout education.
But the point was these guyswere woefully lacking in life
skills.
Black, white and brown, itdoesn't matter, and I would do
budgeting and I would talk aboutinvesting and mutual funds and
(20:48):
simple things they can do tobuild a life, and I hope you
never know, but I hope that atleast one of them you know today
looks back at stuff he learnedfrom me.
You know, that's kind of how Ilook at making contributions.
It's not in real life.
You don't worry about theawards because you're not going
to get one and you're not goingto worry about recognition.
So where you get your pleasureis the hope that something you
said affected somebody enoughthat down the road it made a
(21:10):
difference in their life,whether you find out about it or
not.
And I feel fairly certain thatI made a difference in a lot of
young men's lives.
But anyway, let's get back tohow I handled racism.
So, black guys, you know if youare tired, regardless of your
race, of the public narrative inthe mainstream today of black
victimhood.
You know reparations, thelegacy of slavery and all that
(21:33):
stuff.
I was point blank blunt withthe black guys and I said to
them.
Look guys, there's no legacy.
There's nothing new aboutslavery.
There's nothing unique aboutAmerican slavery other than
we're the only country in theworld that ever freed the slaves
through a war.
Everybody else managed to do itwithout firing a shot and
slavery ended in 1888 in theWestern Hemisphere and Brazil
was the last country to freetheir slaves.
(21:55):
And there were far more blackslaves in the Caribbean.
Of the roughly 11.5 millionslaves that were sent to the New
World from the Old World, fromAfrica, to the Americas, north
and South America, of the 11.5million, half a million went to
the United States.
The other 11 million ended upin the Caribbean and South
America and that's why there area lot of black people
(22:17):
throughout those areas, eventhough black people are not
indigenous, particularly toBrazil.
And they managed to all getfreed without firing a shot.
And slavery ended because itwasn't economic and I went
through the real history of it,not the well, I'll say it again,
the bullshit history that youknow.
Blacks were spent.
You know I pointed out there'sno such thing as a white slaver,
(22:37):
that every single black thatwas ever sent to the new world
was sent by a black slaverbecause white men would die on
the interior of Africa ofmalaria in an average of nine
months.
So every single black sold intoslavery was sold into by
another black because white mensimply couldn't do it.
They were not immune to malariaand malaria wasn't in the new
world until slavery started.
(22:57):
It was one of the reasonsslavery ended because the
mortality rate on slave shipswas exactly the same for the
guys above the deck as below.
While it was horrific for thepoor people being taken over to
be slaves below the decks inshackles on top of the decks,
the sailors were dying at thesame rate of malaria and that's
why slaving ended in.
I think it was.
I want to say it was.
(23:18):
1838 is when slaving ended in.
I think it was.
I want to say it was 1838 iswhen slaving ended.
So that was well before the endof slavery itself as an
institution.
But they stopped shipping inslaves from Africa and anyway,
long story short, I pointed outhow not special black slavery
was in the United States.
It was simply recent.
And then I pointed out thehistory of the Jews, because I'm
a Jew and I would contrast thesuffering of the Jews over the
(23:43):
centuries versus the sufferingof blacks and frankly I would
tell them.
There's just no comparison.
Jews are far and away,inarguably, demonstrably,
objectively the most persecutedpeople in the history of
civilization.
We are unique in the beatingthat we have taken over the
centuries and I went throughsome of it with the black guys
(24:03):
and I gave them.
I didn't treat them like theywere stupid.
I knew they were uneducated,but there's an enormous
difference between ignorance andstupidity.
And they were not stupid andthey ate this stuff up.
They'd never heard it before.
They asked a lot of questionsand because I was an inmate like
them no better, no worsedressed in orange, a lot of
questions.
And because I was an inmatelike them no better, no worse
dressed in orange, the equalitythat that lent to the situation
(24:26):
meant.
And because I was very sincereand a lot of them knew me for a
long time, I never got the.
I wasn't accused of being aracist.
In fact it was.
I'm so blunt it was almostfunny.
They would say something likebut you don't know the way it is
, and, yes, I just imitated ablack accent, because that's how
it really is in prison.
And I would say back to theirface hey brother, you can say
anything you want, but the truthof the matter is you guys need
(24:47):
to try something else.
This isn't going to work.
There's never going to be apenny of reparations.
All this whining is onlywhining.
It's creating more racism, notless.
Writing end racism in the endzone of a football stadium isn't
going to end racism.
You know, you don't.
Racism is a thought crime and Iexplained to them the nature of
a thought crime.
I talked to them about Orwell.
(25:07):
I mean it was funny, these guyswho could barely write their
name were getting you knowdiscussions on Orwell.
But anyway, the bottom line wasI told them that the reason
that the Jews have made it inthe United States is that,
instead of whining about ourbackground and blaming every
Catholic or Christian forpersecuting Jews and demanding
reparations or whatever it mightbe and all of I mean what's
(25:30):
that?
I mean come on the Holocaust.
I mean how much I realized thatwas in Europe.
But you know, like we knew whatour president, who was going on
, he turned a blind eye.
I mean I don't want to go downthat rat hole today.
Let me just say that If youdon't think the Jews are the
most persecuted people inhistory, you need to study more,
or you're an anti-Semite, whichmeans I can't talk to you, and
(25:51):
so you know, okay, be ananti-Semite, because here's how
Jews handle anti-Semites.
And this is how I taught blackguys to handle racists Find a
way and fuck them.
I'm sorry I had to use the Fword, there's no other way to
describe it.
That became my chant with theseguys.
Guys, I used to use thecomparison of Hollywood and the
reason that there were so manyJews, the reason that Hollywood
(26:12):
traditionally was controlled byJews and the big studios were
all controlled by Jews, likeLouis B Mayer and the rest of
those guys off the top of myhead.
I just can't think, but it's afact.
To this day it's aJewish-dominated business in
Hollywood, and the reason forthat is we invented the business
, and the reason for that is weinvented the business.
And the reason we invented showbusiness or the movie industry
at the turn of the 19th to the20th century, when moving
(26:35):
pictures were first invented,was because we weren't allowed
to be in much of anything else,contrary to public belief.
We weren't allowed to work inthe banks.
We weren't allowed to join thebig law firms.
This is at first.
Over time we worked our way in,but all the things that that
would have been higher paying.
A lot of them shut us outbecause no Jews allowed, period,
and those anti-Semitism wasopen in those days.
(26:57):
A good example is Henry Ford.
Henry Ford was not only ananti-Semite, he was a rabid
anti-Semite and an earlysupporter of Adolf Hitler before
the Second World War and had anewspaper in Detroit I forget
the name of it that he published, but it was no different than
the Fokuser Beobachter, theofficial paper of Nazi Germany.
(27:18):
You know it was very open.
Father Coughlin, a Catholicpriest, was giving enormous, you
know, sermons of anti-Semitismand the mud people of the Jews
and all that nonsense on publicradio.
It was just out in the open.
But Jews, we don't sit there andwallow and worry about it.
We find a way and fuck them.
(27:38):
So in that case we founded ourown industry and I also told
them there was frankly nocoincidence that all the early
famous gangsters were Jews andItalians.
That's because we both cameover on the boats at the same
time.
We were both shut out ofindustries for reasons of
prejudice.
A lot of businesses wouldn'thire what they used to call
dagos or wops or whatevernegative, pejorative,
(28:01):
anti-italian term they used, notto mention the kikes, the Jews
like us and the hebes andwhatever they called us.
They had a lot of sheenies orsomething I forget.
They had a lot of names for us,but anyway, we never got into
the.
We're a victim.
Find a way and fuck them.
So I said to them look, guys,you need to stop whining and
start building businesses inyour own community and marrying
(28:23):
the women that you knock up.
And I spent a lot of time onbaby mamas and et cetera, et
cetera.
But the bottom line was Itaught them, instead of whining,
find your own way, find a wayand fuck them.
And it became so popular on theprison yard that as I would
walk across rock around the yardin the morning doing my morning
exercises, the black guys wouldyell out to me as I walked
(28:43):
around the yard yo, og, find away and fuck them.
And they'd raise their rightarms and, you know, kind of like
a demonstration at the olympicgames.
I don't know if you those ofyou old enough to remember the
1968 olympics, but anyway, a lotof fist raising and a lot of
find a way and fuck them and I.
This happened both in humankingman and it made me realize
that with proper leadership andproper discussion and talking to
(29:05):
people.
Here's my, here's what I think.
I think we're also walking onpins and needles, so afraid to
say a word like the N-word or,you know, kike, like I said out
loud, call it the K-word, it'sthe equivalent of the same thing
to us, jews, or whatever itmight be.
We're so afraid of accidentallyusing some sort of hate speech
or offensive speech.
We're not having an honestdiscussion, and the only way to
(29:28):
have an honest discussion is toconfront first your own
culpability, and that's what Iwould talk about.
I would talk about blackpeople's culpability and
contributing to their ownproblems, which is the more you
whine, the worse, the more youjustify the racists.
So, instead of whining andbecoming a victim, the solution
to racism is to find your ownway, no matter what group you're
(29:49):
in, whether you're a blackperson or a gay person or
whatever it might be, that'sbeing persecuted Latino, chinese
, japanese I don't like to lump.
I talked about this on anotherwebsite.
I don't lump Asians togetherbecause a Japanese person is as
different from a Chinese personas they is tonight.
But anyway, all the differentracial groups, that everyone who
(30:10):
perceives any kind ofpersecution, let it go.
You're not going to do anythingabout it anyway.
It's a thought crime.
The people that talk about itaren't the racists to begin with
.
The real racists are the onesthat are quiet and all the signs
and talking and rah-rah andcourses.
I mean the sociological data isin on this DEI nonsense taught
in businesses and the reason onebusiness after another is
(30:32):
stopping doing it is becauseit's been shown clearly and
objectively to make racism worsein these companies.
It makes people resentful ofhaving to go through this
nonsense.
So be quiet.
Everybody those of you,particularly those of you who
are black, who are out there theresponsibility of ending racism
does not lie in the hands ofthe racist, because the racist
(30:52):
is you cannot adjust a thoughtcrime.
So the way to end racism isthrough the demonstration of
being able to perform with theculture you live, and that boils
down to find a way and fuckthem.
Find your own way, come up withyour own businesses, your own
leadership.
Find your own way.
(31:20):
Come up with your ownbusinesses, your own leadership,
your own morality.
Return to church, return or goto philosophy like me if you are
too agnostic to do it otherwiseand find a way and fuck them.
This as an explicit podcast.
To be fair, I don't really wantchildren to hear the F-bomb.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it.
Don't forget to go over toAmazon and buy a copy of A
Radical Reset.
That's my book that describesanti-politism, which is a
republic by merit-based lotteryas opposed to election, and
(31:42):
eliminates parties, money,favoritism, criminality all
kinds.
It's as close to a perfectsystem of Republic government as
possible.
I know it all sounds prettystrange.
Check it out at a radical resetby me, herbie K, at Amazon on
Kindle, paperback and hardcoverAlso.
Please share this with yourfriends.
Tell them that, if nothing else, I'm way out of the box.
(32:05):
And until next time and I hopethat's amusing to you until next
time.
This is your pal, herbie.
I'll talk to you in two daysAgain.
We're going to do Mondays,wednesdays and Fridays from here
on out.
This is a Wednesday.
I'm recording this.
Have a beautiful rest of yourweek and God bless you.
Good morning everybody.
It's me, herbie.
Welcome to another episode ofthe Spiritual Agnostic, and
today we're going to talk aboutracism.
Now I have, I think, agenuinely unique perspective on
racism because of my genuinelyunique life experience, and when
I say unique, unique amongpeople of my background, so you
(00:24):
know those of you who haven'tbeen around for the first 12
episodes.
In a nutshell, I was born intoan extremely abusive situation
Jewish family on top of that,raised by a stepfather who was a
pedophile and child beater.
Both and I was the target forboth Lived a life of, let's say,
(00:45):
two different levels ofexistence.
Maintained a secret life is oneway of looking at it.
I think of it as a fantasyworld that I lived in because it
was less painful than mypresent, but that's not an
excuse.
I want to make crystal clearfor those of you who are not
familiar with me that I ownembrace and am incredibly
(01:05):
remorseful about what I did todeserve going to prison
ultimately.
But when I went to prison youknow there aren't too many guys
who start off my businesspursuits prior to prison were
successful and I was a self-mademillionaire, and then, of
course, I lost it all.
The captain went down with theship and I ended up in prison.
I was very unusual, and I wasunusual for a couple of reasons.
(01:27):
Number one there weren't toomany Jewish people in prison.
Number two even among the whiteguys, I was by far the most
educated, both in terms of howfar I went in school which
really wasn't all that far I'mmore of an autodidact but being
able to string words togetherand being functionally literate
as opposed to illiterate.
And, by by the way, if youthink there aren't illiterate
people in America, you havenever been to the prison system.
(01:49):
I mean literally illiteratepeople who write their names
with an X.
And so I was unusual even amongthe white guys, and I went to
prison not knowing what wasgoing on, but I treated it just
to review with you guys.
I've talked about this a littlebit before, but I'll make this
quick.
I treated prison as a monasticexperience For me.
(02:09):
Prison was it was a punishment,but it was also a relief.
It was both you know, thingscan be more than one thing at
the same time both good and bad.
And for me prison was a chanceto reset.
You know, there comes a pointand I've used this metaphor to
the point where it's probablytired, but it's just accurate.
(02:30):
I was so drenched by the waterof my own, the downpour of my
own guilt, that nothing elsecould possibly come up that
would make me feel any worse,and there's something incredibly
liberating about that.
And then somehow, through aprocess of contemplation and
study because you have a lot oftime on your hands in prison I
(02:50):
turned the corner in my life andhere we are today.
Now I don't want to spend a lotof time on that because this is
not about me at all in thispodcast.
This is about racism.
So prison when you get to prisonnow that I gave you a little
quick background when you get toprison, the first thing that
you would notice and I'mspeaking about state prison as
opposed to federal prison I wasnot in federal prison.
(03:12):
I was in Arizona State Prison,first in Yuma, arizona, and then
in Kingman, arizona, and I wasin a low-medium security yard.
Arizona only has one minimumsecurity yard per se and it's
very, very tiny, so very fewpeople go to it.
I was there at the very end ofmy time.
(03:32):
It's just outside of Phoenix,but I was there such a short
period of time.
I don't really include it in myexperience it's more of a you
know showing me out the doorsort of thing.
But those two primary prisonyards I were in and they move
you so you don't get toocomfortable where you are.
Basically, you know scheminglittle minds that inmates are
prisoners.
(03:53):
Inmates it's an interchangeableterm.
I don't know why I evenbothered to catch that.
Anyway, so you get to prison.
The first thing that screamedout to me was that it was
racially segregated.
So I just didn't expect it.
It's just not again, I'm notfrom that socioeconomic group
that dominates prison.
You know 99% of the people inprison.
It's almost a lifestyle and I'mnot exaggerating.
(04:15):
I probably slightly exaggerated, but not by much.
I'm not kidding.
It's a lifestyle.
They expect to go to prison.
They've been to prison before.
It's a revolving door, I liketo call it.
They're all doing life terms onthe installment plan, so they
may not get a life sentence perse, as in they murdered somebody
.
You have to have five years orless before you're out the door.
(04:42):
I was sentenced to five years,by the way.
That's how I got in there and Ihave a low community risk level
.
In other words, I'm no threatto the community.
They rate you from zero to 10.
I was a zero.
I represent no community risk.
(05:10):
But violent criminals, likemurderers, can be in a
low-medium yard on their way outthe door.
So if they've served, let's saythey were sentenced to 25 years
for second degree murder, whichmeans they killed somebody in a
fit of rage as opposed tothinking about it first.
That's the difference betweenone and two.
So they're sentenced to 25years instead of life, and so
they're at the end of theirsentence.
They've been good boys all theway through and remember I
wasn't in with any girls, sothey were good boys all the way
through to the last five years.
And then, as a reward, they'resent to a lower security yard,
because there's much morefreedom involved in a lower
(05:31):
security yard.
So I don't know why that phonewent off.
I thought I put it on standby,but anyway.
So I was shocked to see howdivided it was.
Now here's how the groups brokedown.
There were the white guys, whocalled themselves the Woods,
which is, by the way, short forPecker Woods, and I don't know
(05:52):
why white guys called themselvesthat, but okay, it's the Woods.
Then there are the Chicanos,which are the American-born
Mexican-Americans, and thenthere are the Paisas, stemming
from the Spanish word paisa,which means country, and those
are the foreign-born LatinAmericans, mostly Mexicans, but
from all over Latin America, whoare incarcerated in the United
(06:15):
States but are not Americancitizens, and they divide, they
hate each other.
It has to do with a lot ofcultural reasons and how Spanish
is spoken and so on and soforth.
I'm not going to go into it inthis podcast, but the Latinos
are broken into two groups, asI've said, and then there are
the Native Americans who callthemselves the chiefs, and there
(06:35):
are the black guys who callthemselves the kinfolk, and each
group is led by a boss.
On the yard there's a yard boss.
The yard boss is generally agangster from whatever gang like
.
For example, among the whiteguys.
Our leadership was always AryanBrotherhood or Skinhead, which
is the same thing really, and Idon't know who elected them
(06:58):
leader, but they are.
And there's no elections.
I used to joke about that untilI almost got my head knocked off
for it.
But I used to say about thatuntil I almost got my head
knocked off for it.
But I used to say, like, whenwas the election?
How did you guys get to be theleader?
But that didn't make me popularwith them.
But because I was an OG.
An OG is when I went to prison Ithought it meant old guy.
It actually stands for originalgangster, but that was my title
(07:20):
in prison OG all the old guysare.
And I was in my 50s when I wentI'll be 68 next week, just to
give you some guidelines there.
And when I was in there I was,you know, I already had gray
hair, yada, yada, yada, and Iwas unusual and so.
But they don't pick on the OGsper se.
Ogs are exempted from the loweryounger, for example.
(07:46):
Younger guys have to go out andwork out with weights.
It's not a choice every day.
They're supervised by theiryard boss.
And then there's your run boss.
So there are different buildings.
Each building is called a run.
Within the runs are your houses.
House is another word forcubicle.
So in a medium security lowmedium security prison there are
no cells.
You're not slammed behind acell door, you know, pacing back
(08:08):
and forth like a scene out ofsomething from Alcatraz.
It's more like a giant men'shomeless shelter.
So you live in what essentiallywould be a barn-like building
with very, very high ceilings,and it's all the ductwork and
plumbing exposed above.
There's no effort to coveranything up aesthetically,
because it's a prison.
Why would there be?
And then within the buildingthere are the houses, which are
(08:33):
cubicles that are like half wall.
So you have approximately a Iwould guess to say maybe a five
foot by seven foot cubicle.
Roughly, you have about 35square feet of your own.
There's a locker that you canput a padlock on for a few
things, but most everything elseis out in the open.
There's a rack, which is thebunk.
(08:54):
It's a hard metal shelf on topof which you lay a mat which is
it's not a mattress, it's abouta one, depending on which one
you get.
How lucky you are and you'reand you're getting mats.
It's a one to two inch pad sortof.
It's not really soft.
It lays on top of the metalshelf.
That is your mattress, and thenyou know that's it and you can
(09:15):
purchase with your own money a13 inch TV that you can plug in
within your house and watchtelevision up to a certain time
at night, and there are I thinkwhen I was in there were a dozen
stations, and that's prettymuch what it is to be in prison,
and then hours and hours, andhours and hours and hours of
downtime and the prison doescertain.
You know programs forrehabilitation, which are all
(09:35):
just make-believe programs thatno one talks about.
But anyway, that brings me tothe story I'm going to tell now
that I've set the situation.
So I'm in prison, I'm in Yuma,arizona, and it became evident
to the CEOs, that's, thecorrection officers, that I was
smarter than the average bearand I got along with them.
You know, unlike.
There's a cultural thing and Igot in trouble for this more
(10:00):
than once when I say trouble,spoken to by my own Peckerwood
leaders that I was too nice tothe CEOs and I was too
respectful and I said thank you,and you know things like that
and was polite because I'venever, under you, catch a lot
more flies with honey than flypaper.
And I made a decision earlythat I was going to make prison
(10:20):
as tolerable as possible bylearning its ins and outs.
You know, within aninstitutional setting it's not
that tough to do.
And it wasn't long before allthe CEOs on the yard and all the
inmates to kind of recognize meas both a father figure because
that's my energy when you'rearound me I have a very fatherly
energy and and also as go-toguy for all the stuff they
(10:41):
didn't want to do, like, forexample, teach these bullshit
classes pardon my language, butthat's what they were about
reentering the mainstream whichwent on every day.
So I used to teach theseclasses and not get paid for
them, but I was remunerated withfavors by the corrections
officers.
So I got a lot of little favorsyou know the front of the line,
(11:03):
sort of things all because Iwould teach these classes for
them and I would digress fromthe classes.
And here comes the whole pointof this discussion.
One of the classes I taught wasabout reentry and because there
were a lot of black inmates,the reentry course itself was
full of.
Again, I'm gonna use the wordbullshit again.
This is the bad word I'm goingto use today.
(11:23):
Let's call them bullshit-isms.
You know things that are putinto these, these diversity
courses, that are just nonsense,you know just.
You know the pablum of.
You know, trying to changeattitudes by just deciding that
you're going to change yourattitude, which is ridiculous.
You know, things like racismare very deeply embedded.
(11:47):
I learned that right away.
The white guys a lot of the,for example, the Aryan brothers
and stuff really, really hateJews, and I made no secret of
being a Jew.
But when I would get them intoconversation they couldn't tell
you why.
They just hate them.
You know they don't go into.
You know I was taught incatechism prior to 1968 that the
Jews killed Jesus.
(12:07):
They don't go into thatnonsense and they don't discuss
any of the tropes that you wouldthink about anti-Semitism.
They just hate Jews.
And because they just hate Jews, I spent a lot of time with the
black guys.
In fact I was protected by thekinfolk on the prison yard.
So in Yuma, when I got there, Ilearned right away that I made a
(12:28):
mistake in rolling white tobegin with.
As a Jew, I could have rolledwith any other racial group I
wanted.
Rolled means within the chowhall is the best example.
No one can sit together andyou're not allowed to go into
the house of anybody else ofanother race.
It was just.
It was an unwritten but verystrictly enforced rule.
So in other words, if I feltlike sitting down with some of
my Chicano friends and I had alot of Chicano friends because I
speak Spanish and I hang outwith those guys I couldn't do it
(12:51):
in the chow.
If I did, it would start itwould literally have started a
riot on the yard, it's just sothe only time I could talk to
them is like when I was out onthe exercise yard or walking
around the track, and this isjust strictly enforced.
So.
But so what I should have done,frankly, is rolled black rolled
kinfolk because I got alongbest with that group as,
(13:12):
generally speaking, and in Yuma,I discovered right away.
So, at my prison job and I knowI'm jumping around a little bit
, but I'm just trying to coversome of the background as I get
into the solution, which isremarkably simple.
When I get to it, you'll beshocked by my solution to racism
, or to racism as it pertainsparticularly to the black
community in this podcast.
What's the word I'm looking for?
(13:36):
I kind of lost my train ofthought, but the whole point is
I could have rolled black WhileI was in Yuma.
My prison job is I worked in acall center, so Yuma is called a
working yard, meaning thateverybody in the prison, all the
inmates, have a job.
It could be sweeping floors, itcould be putting together
(13:57):
wheelchairs for a company thathad a plant on the prison site.
There were a lot, of, a lot ofcompanies that would use inmate
workers at paying them next tonothing to do, just above slave
wage labor.
But but they were consideredgreat jobs by prison standards,
because most prison jobs paid 25cents an hour and a lot of
these jobs paid two and threedollars an hour.
(14:18):
And I made three dollars andsomething an hour working in a
call center selling safety.
The company was called SafetyServices.
It was OSHA compliancematerials anyway, which, by the
way, my libertarian heartstrongly disagrees with.
But I'm not going there today.
I just did it because that wasthe most.
That was the best paying job onthe yard, and I'm really good
(14:39):
on the telephone is what it was.
Although nobody knew they werebeing called by prison inmates,
they were, um, all over thecountry, yada, yada, yada.
But as, anyways, result of thatjob, I worked in there with a
guy and his, his prison monikerwas drop.
He had teardrops coming out ofthe corner of his eye and you
remember I told you thatmurderers can end up in a low,
(15:01):
medium security yard like thison their way out.
That was drops.
Every teardrop theoretically atleast, this is what I learned
in prison represents someonethat this person had killed
along the way, maybe in prison,maybe out of prison.
And I want to say drop hadmaybe two or three teardrops
coming out of the corner of oneeye.
You've seen these.
You're looking at a murdererwhen you do, or at least the guy
(15:22):
that pretends like he committedmurder.
And then, but his real name wasRobert and I'm not going to use
Robert's last name, but Irefused to call him Drop it.
Just it felt funny coming outof my mouth.
I called him Robert.
I was the only guy that evercalled him Robert, not Bob, not
Bobby, not Rob Robert.
And I treated him with greatsuccess and Robert was typical
of American black men in that hewas deeply suspicious of
(15:45):
everything I said or did as awhite guy, because I was quickly
elevated into a supervisoryposition within the phone room
where I basically was the guythat doled out the leads which,
like if you ever saw that movie,glen Gary, glen Ross, you know
there are the good leads and thebad leads.
Well, I generated the leadsmyself.
That was part of my job, and asI generated them, I would then
(16:06):
dole them out, and the theorywas I doled them out blindly and
equally, but my predecessor didnot and, um, when I did it,
robert was deeply.
He really was kind of anasshole.
Oh, another bad word.
Sorry about that.
There's no other way todescribe prison, frankly, but I
don't think these are twostronger words.
So any kids listening you knowlike cover your ears when I say
(16:27):
those words, but they're,compared to what's usually said,
like in hip-hop lyrics, prettymild Anyway.
So where was I?
So we're going through thiswhole song and dance and Robert
is deeply distrustful, but overtime he grew to really trust me
because he realized that notonly did he get a fair amount of
(16:49):
leads, but in a couplesituations that I won't bother
to tell you the background on, Ihad his back.
I defended him to the bossesand saved his job a couple of
times and, by the way,rightfully so.
I wasn't falsely defending him,I was correct.
He was being unfairly labeledsomething.
I forget what the whole storywas, but I had his back.
So because of that he became mydefender.
(17:10):
And then, through him, I met theKinfolk Yard boss, a guy named
Big Chris.
Again, I'm not going to tellyou Chris's last name, but Big
Chris was just what you wouldpicture the name would be.
Weirdly enough, it could be 117degrees outside in Yuma, which
it really got that hot and BigChris would be in sweats.
I don't know why, but we hadorange sweats for winter.
(17:31):
It got cold in the winter butChris would wear them year round
, always had a towel around hisneck.
Great big, giant guy but a veryerudite, bright guy who in
another life, if he had beenborn to a different family,
would have probably been a brainsurgeon.
A very, very smart guy and heand I.
He had a lot of questions andwe used to have long
(17:51):
intellectual conversations andbecause of all of this, the
kinfolk made clear to theskinheads don't touch a head on
the OG, don't touch a hair onthe OG's head, because if you do
we will beat the living shitout of you.
And that was good enough for me.
I used another bad word, half ofthe one I used before, sorry,
and I was protected, and ithappened again in Kingman as
well.
There's a network among theprisons where the gang leaders
(18:16):
in one gang can talk to the gangleaders at another yard.
Somehow they pass theircommunications.
Actually I know exactly how,but I don't rat out my prison
brothers, it's just an unwrittenrule.
And you know I it's funny, Istill run into them every now
and then, like in underpasses,which I know sounds really weird
, but like I'll be making a leftturn off the freeway onto the,
onto the main drag, near where I, and there'll be a guy I was in
(18:39):
prison with.
I mean I'm giggling but it'sjust amazing Anyway.
But also I run into guys likeyou know, I'll go into a Circle
K and there'll be some guy thatI serve with and I was hyper.
There weren't a lot of guyslike me, so I'm pretty memorable
, I get a lot of.
To this day.
I'll go into a store and thisis you know.
We're going on nearly a decadelater and I'll go into a store
(19:00):
and I'll hear, oh, jay, and I'llturn around and be some guy I
serve with and I, you know still, because I was just and I don't
look a whole lot different thanI did then, other than being a
little bit older.
So anyway, now we're going toget down to the point of the
(19:22):
story.
So I teach these re-entryclasses, really as a favor to
the CEOs, because they didn'twant to do it and my classes
were jammed.
The inmates used to come to myclasses just because I would
deviate from the curriculum andkind of teach it the way I
wanted, and even though therewere cameras and microphones in
the classrooms monitoring, theonly place you're not under
camera in a prison is whenyou're pooping.
Other than that, you're undercamera all the time and I knew
(19:44):
that.
But somehow I guess the powersthat be didn't mind the way I
taught the courses, because Itaught them.
I taught it the way I thoughtwould be more practical, as
opposed to the idiotic cookiecutter you know nonsense that
you find.
If any of you have ever beenforced to take a DEI course
where you work, that's notdissimilar from a reentry course
.
Back into the mainstream, and Italked about things besides
racism with these guys.
(20:05):
Obviously One of the thingsthat everyone liked a lot, by
the way, was because of myfinance background.
I taught everybody how tobudget and how to sit down in
the month and when you get Xnumber of dollars, and I know
this seems simple to you, but itwasn't simple to these guys who
literally were raised on thestreets, you know, like wild
wolves, having to figure it out,and really didn't have basic
(20:26):
life skills.
So, and those that even thosewith a high school diploma
somehow graduated illiterate.
I won't even go down that rathole in this podcast.
Maybe another day We'll talkabout education.
But the point was these guyswere woefully lacking in life
skills.
Black, white and brown, itdoesn't matter, and I would do
budgeting and I would talk aboutinvesting and mutual funds and
(20:48):
simple things they can do tobuild a life, and I hope you
never know, but I hope that atleast one of them you know today
looks back at stuff he learnedfrom me.
You know, that's kind of how Ilook at making contributions.
It's not in real life.
You don't worry about theawards because you're not going
to get one and you're not goingto worry about recognition.
So where you get your pleasureis the hope that something you
said affected somebody enoughthat down the road it made a
(21:10):
difference in their life,whether you find out about it or
not.
And I feel fairly certain thatI made a difference in a lot of
young men's lives.
But anyway, let's get back tohow I handled racism.
So, black guys, you know if youare tired, regardless of your
race, of the public narrative inthe mainstream today of black
victimhood.
You know reparations, thelegacy of slavery and all that
(21:33):
stuff.
I was point blank blunt withthe black guys and I said to
them.
Look guys, there's no legacy.
There's nothing new aboutslavery.
There's nothing unique aboutAmerican slavery other than
we're the only country in theworld that ever freed the slaves
through a war.
Everybody else managed to do itwithout firing a shot and
slavery ended in 1888 in theWestern Hemisphere and Brazil
was the last country to freetheir slaves.
(21:55):
And there were far more blackslaves in the Caribbean.
Of the roughly 11.5 millionslaves that were sent to the New
World from the Old World, fromAfrica, to the Americas, north
and South America, of the 11.5million, half a million went to
the United States.
The other 11 million ended upin the Caribbean and South
America and that's why there area lot of black people
(22:17):
throughout those areas, eventhough black people are not
indigenous, particularly toBrazil.
And they managed to all getfreed without firing a shot.
And slavery ended because itwasn't economic and I went
through the real history of it,not the well, I'll say it again,
the bullshit history that youknow.
Blacks were spent.
You know I pointed out there'sno such thing as a white slaver,
(22:37):
that every single black thatwas ever sent to the new world
was sent by a black slaverbecause white men would die on
the interior of Africa ofmalaria in an average of nine
months.
So every single black sold intoslavery was sold into by
another black because white mensimply couldn't do it.
They were not immune to malariaand malaria wasn't in the new
world until slavery started.
(22:57):
It was one of the reasonsslavery ended because the
mortality rate on slave shipswas exactly the same for the
guys above the deck as below.
While it was horrific for thepoor people being taken over to
be slaves below the decks inshackles on top of the decks,
the sailors were dying at thesame rate of malaria and that's
why slaving ended in.
I think it was.
I want to say it was.
(23:18):
1838 is when slaving ended in.
I think it was.
I want to say it was 1838 iswhen slaving ended.
So that was well before the endof slavery itself as an
institution.
But they stopped shipping inslaves from Africa and anyway,
long story short, I pointed outhow not special black slavery
was in the United States.
It was simply recent.
And then I pointed out thehistory of the Jews, because I'm
a Jew and I would contrast thesuffering of the Jews over the
(23:43):
centuries versus the sufferingof blacks and frankly I would
tell them.
There's just no comparison.
Jews are far and away,inarguably, demonstrably,
objectively the most persecutedpeople in the history of
civilization.
We are unique in the beatingthat we have taken over the
centuries and I went throughsome of it with the black guys
(24:03):
and I gave them.
I didn't treat them like theywere stupid.
I knew they were uneducated,but there's an enormous
difference between ignorance andstupidity.
And they were not stupid andthey ate this stuff up.
They'd never heard it before.
They asked a lot of questionsand because I was an inmate like
them no better, no worsedressed in orange, a lot of
questions.
And because I was an inmatelike them no better, no worse
dressed in orange, the equalitythat that lent to the situation
(24:26):
meant.
And because I was very sincereand a lot of them knew me for a
long time, I never got the.
I wasn't accused of being aracist.
In fact it was.
I'm so blunt it was almostfunny.
They would say something likebut you don't know the way it is
, and, yes, I just imitated ablack accent, because that's how
it really is in prison.
And I would say back to theirface hey brother, you can say
anything you want, but the truthof the matter is you guys need
(24:47):
to try something else.
This isn't going to work.
There's never going to be apenny of reparations.
All this whining is onlywhining.
It's creating more racism, notless.
Writing end racism in the endzone of a football stadium isn't
going to end racism.
You know, you don't.
Racism is a thought crime and Iexplained to them the nature of
a thought crime.
I talked to them about Orwell.
(25:07):
I mean it was funny, these guyswho could barely write their
name were getting you knowdiscussions on Orwell.
But anyway, the bottom line wasI told them that the reason
that the Jews have made it inthe United States is that,
instead of whining about ourbackground and blaming every
Catholic or Christian forpersecuting Jews and demanding
reparations or whatever it mightbe and all of I mean what's
(25:30):
that?
I mean come on the Holocaust.
I mean how much I realized thatwas in Europe.
But you know, like we knew whatour president, who was going on
, he turned a blind eye.
I mean I don't want to go downthat rat hole today.
Let me just say that If youdon't think the Jews are the
most persecuted people inhistory, you need to study more,
or you're an anti-Semite, whichmeans I can't talk to you, and
(25:51):
so you know, okay, be ananti-Semite, because here's how
Jews handle anti-Semites.
And this is how I taught blackguys to handle racists Find a
way and fuck them.
I'm sorry I had to use the Fword, there's no other way to
describe it.
That became my chant with theseguys.
Guys, I used to use thecomparison of Hollywood and the
reason that there were so manyJews, the reason that Hollywood
(26:12):
traditionally was controlled byJews and the big studios were
all controlled by Jews, likeLouis B Mayer and the rest of
those guys off the top of myhead.
I just can't think, but it's afact.
To this day it's aJewish-dominated business in
Hollywood, and the reason forthat is we invented the business
, and the reason for that is weinvented the business.
And the reason we invented showbusiness or the movie industry
at the turn of the 19th to the20th century, when moving
(26:35):
pictures were first invented,was because we weren't allowed
to be in much of anything else,contrary to public belief.
We weren't allowed to work inthe banks.
We weren't allowed to join thebig law firms.
This is at first.
Over time we worked our way in,but all the things that that
would have been higher paying.
A lot of them shut us outbecause no Jews allowed, period,
and those anti-Semitism wasopen in those days.
(26:57):
A good example is Henry Ford.
Henry Ford was not only ananti-Semite, he was a rabid
anti-Semite and an earlysupporter of Adolf Hitler before
the Second World War and had anewspaper in Detroit I forget
the name of it that he published, but it was no different than
the Fokuser Beobachter, theofficial paper of Nazi Germany.
(27:18):
You know it was very open.
Father Coughlin, a Catholicpriest, was giving enormous, you
know, sermons of anti-Semitismand the mud people of the Jews
and all that nonsense on publicradio.
It was just out in the open.
But Jews, we don't sit there andwallow and worry about it.
We find a way and fuck them.
(27:38):
So in that case we founded ourown industry and I also told
them there was frankly nocoincidence that all the early
famous gangsters were Jews andItalians.
That's because we both cameover on the boats at the same
time.
We were both shut out ofindustries for reasons of
prejudice.
A lot of businesses wouldn'thire what they used to call
dagos or wops or whatevernegative, pejorative,
(28:01):
anti-italian term they used, notto mention the kikes, the Jews
like us and the hebes andwhatever they called us.
They had a lot of sheenies orsomething I forget.
They had a lot of names for us,but anyway, we never got into
the.
We're a victim.
Find a way and fuck them.
So I said to them look, guys,you need to stop whining and
start building businesses inyour own community and marrying
(28:23):
the women that you knock up.
And I spent a lot of time onbaby mamas and et cetera, et
cetera.
But the bottom line was Itaught them, instead of whining,
find your own way, find a wayand fuck them.
And it became so popular on theprison yard that as I would
walk across rock around the yardin the morning doing my morning
exercises, the black guys wouldyell out to me as I walked
(28:43):
around the yard yo, og, find away and fuck them.
And they'd raise their rightarms and, you know, kind of like
a demonstration at the olympicgames.
I don't know if you those ofyou old enough to remember the
1968 olympics, but anyway, a lotof fist raising and a lot of
find a way and fuck them and I.
This happened both in humankingman and it made me realize
that with proper leadership andproper discussion and talking to
(29:05):
people.
Here's my, here's what I think.
I think we're also walking onpins and needles, so afraid to
say a word like the N-word or,you know, kike, like I said out
loud, call it the K-word, it'sthe equivalent of the same thing
to us, jews, or whatever itmight be.
We're so afraid of accidentallyusing some sort of hate speech
or offensive speech.
We're not having an honestdiscussion, and the only way to
(29:28):
have an honest discussion is toconfront first your own
culpability, and that's what Iwould talk about.
I would talk about blackpeople's culpability and
contributing to their ownproblems, which is the more you
whine, the worse, the more youjustify the racists.
So, instead of whining andbecoming a victim, the solution
to racism is to find your ownway, no matter what group you're
(29:49):
in, whether you're a blackperson or a gay person or
whatever it might be, that'sbeing persecuted Latino, chinese
, japanese I don't like to lump.
I talked about this on anotherwebsite.
I don't lump Asians togetherbecause a Japanese person is as
different from a Chinese personas they is tonight.
But anyway, all the differentracial groups, that everyone who
(30:10):
perceives any kind ofpersecution, let it go.
You're not going to do anythingabout it anyway.
It's a thought crime.
The people that talk about itaren't the racists to begin with
.
The real racists are the onesthat are quiet and all the signs
and talking and rah-rah andcourses.
I mean the sociological data isin on this DEI nonsense taught
in businesses and the reason onebusiness after another is
(30:32):
stopping doing it is becauseit's been shown clearly and
objectively to make racism worsein these companies.
It makes people resentful ofhaving to go through this
nonsense.
So be quiet.
Everybody those of you,particularly those of you who
are black, who are out there theresponsibility of ending racism
does not lie in the hands ofthe racist, because the racist
(30:52):
is you cannot adjust a thoughtcrime.
So the way to end racism isthrough the demonstration of
being able to perform with theculture you live, and that boils
down to find a way and fuckthem.
Find your own way, come up withyour own businesses, your own
leadership.
Find your own way.
(31:20):
Come up with your ownbusinesses, your own leadership,
your own morality.
Return to church, return or goto philosophy like me if you are
too agnostic to do it otherwiseand find a way and fuck them.
This as an explicit podcast.
To be fair, I don't really wantchildren to hear the F-bomb.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it.
Don't forget to go over toAmazon and buy a copy of A
Radical Reset.
That's my book that describesanti-politism, which is a
republic by merit-based lotteryas opposed to election, and
(31:42):
eliminates parties, money,favoritism, criminality all
kinds.
It's as close to a perfectsystem of Republic government as
possible.
I know it all sounds prettystrange.
Check it out at a radical resetby me, herbie K, at Amazon on
Kindle, paperback and hardcoverAlso.
Please share this with yourfriends.
Tell them that, if nothing else, I'm way out of the box.
(32:05):
And until next time and I hopethat's amusing to you until next
time.
This is your pal, herbie.
I'll talk to you in two daysAgain.
We're going to do Mondays,wednesdays and Fridays from here
on out.
This is a Wednesday.
I'm recording this.
Have a beautiful rest of yourweek and God bless you.
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