Lift Every Voice, Bad Apple Back Stories

This story sounds too brutal to be true. A NY city police officer takes an innocent man to a police station and beats and sodomizes him with a stick. The so-called good apples in the police station protect the officer. Some even participate in the crime. Not all police are bad, but we can stop pretending that most are good. This is another tragic bad apple back story.

In this episode, we discuss the ways powerful/rich white men in the US main fool the rest of us. They maintain power and get richer while we continue to struggle and, for good measure, fight each other.

President Reagan's political strategist Lee Atwater proves the observations of former president Lyndon Johnson who said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Lee Atwater instructed the republicans on how to do it when in a 1981 interview he said Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced bussing, states rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner."

"Trump often compares himself to another president, But it's the wrong one..." Paul S.

In this episode we explore some similarities between the Racism of Trump and Willson.  There is the obvious like Wilson and the KKK, Trump and the Radical Evalgelical Christian Terrorists organizations. But what else is there, and why is it important to know?