Episode 284, May 30, 2026 - "I break chains all by myself - Won't let my freedom rot in hell" Beyoncé

Welcome to Rational Black Thought, the podcast where we examine politics, religion, culture, and society through the lens of critical thinking and Black consciousness. I am your host, Neo Griot. Our title today comes from Queen B’s Freedom, because, if I must, I will break chains all by myself, but I would rather have the assistance of likeminded people.

This week's episode is about reality itself.

Not politics. Not Democrats versus Republicans. Not Left versus Right.

Reality.

Because one of the most dangerous developments in America isn't just political polarization. Human beings have always disagreed about politics. That's normal. The deeper crisis is that we're rapidly losing the ability to agree on what's objectively true.

We're becoming a nation divided not merely by ideology, but by epistemology. By competing understandings of how truth is determined.

One side still believes that facts matter, evidence matters, expertise matters, and that reality exists independent of our emotions.

The other side increasingly believes that truth is whatever emotionally validates the tribe.

And once a society reaches that point, democracy itself becomes unstable.

Because democracy requires a shared reality framework. It requires some common understanding of facts, evidence, and objective conditions. If citizens cannot agree on what is real, then politics stops being negotiation and starts becoming psychological warfare.

And let me be blunt.

Black people cannot afford to be confused about this moment.

We have spent centuries surviving propaganda. We survived slavery mythology. We survived Lost Cause mythology. We survived welfare queen mythology. We survived crime panic mythology. We survived voter fraud mythology.

That makes this moment especially important.

Because now the entire country is beginning to experience what Black Americans have long understood:

Let’s get to this week’s agenda:

Intro:
Quote of the Week: bell hooks
Unmasking the News:

• Democracy Watch: Stacey Abrams and the Warning Signs
• MAGA and the Epstein Conspiracy Implosion 
• The Religion Business 
• Good News: Building Institutions That Can Survive the Collapse     

Strategies for Black Power: The War Against Reality
Reflections and Call to Action:
Closing/Outro:
Sources:

• https://thegrio.com/2025/07/14/stacey-abrams-warns-people-of-the-autocracy-happening-right-now/
• https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/magas-coming-demographic-apocalypse
• https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/controversial-documentary-sheds-light-on-lack-of-accountability-within-religion-301955128.html
• https://jbhe.com/2026/05/local-connecticut-lawmakers-aim-to-establish-an-hbcu-satellite-campus-in-new-haven/

Power Concedes Nothing without a Demand...

Transcript

0:00

Hello, and welcome to the Rational Black Thought Podcast. I am your host, Neil Griot, and this is episode number 284. It is May the 30th, the holiday weekend of 2026. And our title today comes from Queen B, Beyonce. And that title is, I break chains all by myself, won't let my freedom rot in hell, by Beyonce. And the reason that I selected that for the title of the podcast this week is because if I have to, I will break chains all by myself. But I'd rather have the assistance of like-minded people like those of you that are listening to this podcast, so we can break chains together. Now, this week's episode is going to be focused on something very fundamental. It's going to be focused on reality itself, or from a philosophical perspective, it is going to be based upon both epistemology, the nature of reality, and epistemology, how we know what we know about that reality. So we're not going to be talking necessarily this week about politics, not Democrats versus Republicans, not left versus right. But what we are going to be talking about is reality. We're going to be talking about what constitutes reality, and how do you know that what you know to be true about reality is in fact true. Because one of the most dangerous developments in America today isn't just political polarization, which is certainly... We've reached a level unseen before. But it is about human beings. Because here's the situation. It's not just about polarization, because human beings have always disagreed about politics, okay? We have already always rather had debates about a conservative point of view and a more left point of view, or progressive point of view. No. And that's true. Right. That's normal. But the deeper crisis is that we are rapidly losing the ability to agree on what is objectively true. And so in the past, when we debated about the the the best approach to achieve a goal, we all had the same idea about what constituted reality. But now that that's no longer true we we do not yet now agree on what is objectively true what is objectively false and what is subjective versus objective so we are becoming a nation now and i'm speaking primarily about the united states but you can see this in other countries as well we are becoming a nation divided not merely by ideology which has always been the case but by epistemology by competing understandings of how truth is determined now there's one side that believes that facts still matter that evidence matters that expertise matters and that reality exists independent of our emotions but the other side of that equation increasingly believes that facts still matter and that reality exists independent of our emotions the truth is whatever emotionally validates them and their group and once society reaches that point and we'll see this later on in in a graphic that i have in in one of the the segments once society a society reaches that point democracy itself becomes not just unstable but untenable it becomes impossible to have a democratic society when society reaches the point where the truth itself what is objective reality is not agreed upon by the majority of the citizens because democracy requires a shared reality framework it requires common understanding of facts evidence and objective conditions if citizens cannot agree on what is real then politics stops being negotiation and compromise and it starts to be a psychological warfare and let's be completely blunt about this black people cannot afford to be confused about this moment we have spent centuries surviving propaganda we survive slavery mythology where where they told us that our condition was biblically ordained we survive a lot of propaganda we survive lost cause mythology we survive welfare queen mythology we survive crime panic mythology and we are in the process of surviving voter fraud mythology and we have uh we have survived that in the past but what makes this moment especially important is that because now the entire country is beginning to experience what black americans have always understood is that we are in the process of surviving voter fraud mythology and we have we have survived that in the past which is the fact that if if you allow them there are other people outside of yourself that will define reality in a way that is detrimental to your own well-being and they will have you responding to their definition as if it is your own we know that and so we know the tools that we can utilize in order to circumvent that process but now other people are going to have to begin to uh have to find that out as well so let's go ahead and move into the agenda that we have to for today so first up in the agenda is that we're going to have the quote of the week and the quote of the week is coming from bell hooks and bell hooks has been our quote of the week many times in the past and again today because i think the quote that i'm going to use today is telling us something very very important about what we're going to be talking about today and i'm going to talk about where we are in this whole idea of understanding reality objective reality and then being able to respond to that reality after the democracy watch we're going to get to or i'm sorry after the quote of the week we're going to get to unmasking the news and the first news story is democracy watch where we're going to talk about stacy abrams and the warning signs that she's been presenting lately now she just recently published a new article in the new book she's finished another book it is a novel but during her book tour where she is doing what authors do on book tours promoting her book she is also talking about the situation that she sees in america today and giving us some warning signs that we should take to heart and and so i'm going to take a look at at that this week after that we're going to talk about something we haven't talked about in in a while and that's the book that we're going to be talking about today and while but it's still relevant and that's uh megan and the epstein conspiracy implosion uh and so donald trump has done a number of things uh to prevent talking about um the epstein files he kidnapped a foreign leader uh he's starving out another country bombed a different one and threatened to destroy their entire civilization so he's been doing all kinds of crazy shit so that the the uh epstein files are not uh coming into the forefront but i'm going to review that and and especially since upcoming this week there is going to be some uh testimony in congress uh from some of the people around that topic again so i want to ground us again on what that situation actually is and then for religion this week we're not going to talk about a specific um religious corruption incident but more we're going to talk about a specific um religious corruption incident but more we're going to talk about um the religion business uh as it exists today and and so what we're going to take a look at is how how so many of the so-called religious organizations operate not like a religious organization within the context uh that was defined for non-profit religious organizations uh in the constitution but they're operating more just purely as businesses bringing in extreme uh amounts of money uh that all flow into the the leaders and to their lifestyle after that we're going to end the news with with some good news and we're talking and we're going to talk about building institutions that can survive the collapse uh because we uh quite often see this uh which i've talked about in the past this backlash against um against black progress and so we need to build institutions that once that that backlash occurs they still stand and we're going to talk about a particular organization that is doing something like that after that this is the week for strategies for black power and as it relates to what we talked about early on uh in in in the beginning of this introduction uh we're going to talk about the war against reality the war against reality itself and we're going to talk about the war against reality itself and we're going to talk about the war against reality itself which is what where we're currently at in this country uh after that we'll reflect on this week's episode and i'll present some calls to action uh and then after that we'll have the closing and the outro so what we're going to do right now is to um take a quick break and when we come back we'll get to the quote of the week from bell hooks the quote of the week this week is uh from bell hooks and uh the quote is very short simple and to the point the classroom remains the classroom the classroom remains the classroom the classroom is the most radical space of possibilities uh in the academy and that's bell hooks and so what was she talking about when she said that and and and let me let me characterize this a bit more because the quote hits differently today than it did when she first made that statement and the reason it does is because our authoritarians understand something that the so-called liberals and progressive often forget that education is dangerous education is dangerous to the authoritarian the the authoritarians are not afraid of job training they're not afraid of standardized testing they're not afraid of rote memorization that happens in many classrooms but actual education is what they fear the kind that teaches people how to think critically how to evaluate evidence how power operates and how language manipulates perception if you teach people the the truth then it is very difficult for authoritarian states and other uh ill-minded individuals to pull the wool over their eyes that kind of education that true education threatens authoritarian movements because authoritarianism depends on a obedience emotional manipulation and intellectual passivity there's a reason that authoritarian governments throughout history attack universities historians journalists scientists and teachers throughout history that it's happened time and time again and the reason is that independent thought is dangerous to symptom systems built on mythology if you have a system whose foundation is based in myth that myth is uncovered it becomes impossible to get people to buy into that mythology as if it is true and that's exactly why the modern right the the so-called right spend so much time attacking education itself you notice the the the pattern that they have books are dangerous so they burn them teachers are dangerous so they try to have them fire professors are dangerous so they want to contextualize them diversity is not only about the manifests are dangerous so they want to send them to camp professors so they can't run them professors are dangerous so they want to contextualize then you see that there's thishm itselfiye between education and education Diversity is dangerous because they don't want any other points of view. Black history is dangerous because it makes them look bad. Critical thinking is dangerous because now you know the truth and you operate from the perspective of your own best interests. Why? Because educated people ask uncomfortable questions and propaganda cannot survive sustained scrutiny. Bell Hooks understood that education is not merely informational, it is liberational. It is an act of strategy, it is an act of resistance. The true classroom is one of the few places where people can still be taught how to distinguish evidence from manipulation. And we need to fight to educate our people in truth, not in lies and mythology that are merely useful to the state. So what we're going to do now is to, that is it for this week's quote of the week. So what we're going to do now. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we are going to get to unmasking the news where I try to expose the truth behind the headlines and highlight what matters most for our community. All right, welcome back. And welcome to the unmasking the news. And so I've already kind of gone through what we have on our agenda this week. So I'm not going to go through a lot of information on that. Again, the only thing that I'm going to do is just go through briefly and reiterate what stories we have. So first of all, we're going to talk about. Some of the things that Stacey Abrams has been saying, and just to provide some context to that, I believe this is just my own personal opinion. You can have a different, a different opinion, but I believe that Stacey Abrams is the most, the most prophetic and the most effective and intelligent political strategist that we have had on our side in a long time. The. Her ability to. To dissect, analyze and understand the situation and to be able to put in place a process for overcoming the challenges is just in my it's unparalleled, in my opinion. And so that's why I'm really, really interested in presenting her or some of her ideas. After that, we're going to talk about mega mega and the Epstein conspiracy in place. So they started off with Epstein being the linchpin, the key that was going to unlock all of the criminal activity in the on the Democratic side and send a bunch of the Democrats to jail. That never happened. And now they are fighting through cognitive dissonance, trying to find out exactly what happened. And then we're going to talk about the religious business, the actual business of religion and how it makes. And then we're going to end on a good note, talking about building institutions that can survive the collapse. So let's go ahead and get to the first story, which is Stacey Abrams. So, like I said, Stacey Abrams is on a book tour right now. And but unlike many political figures promoting a book, she's not merely just selling a product. Many times when you see people. On these book tours, all they talk about is their book. But that's not what Stacey Abrams is doing. She's sounding a fucking alarm in the process. She she is is not because, again, like I said, her book is a novel and there could be some parallels to our society and her novel. But that's not what she's focused on. What she's focused on is reality, talking about reality and where we are right now. So in her recent podcast episodes and interviews. Discussing her book and her book, the name of the book is Coded Justice. Abram is speaking plainly about the authoritarian drift that is happening in America today. She's correctly identifying what is at stake. And like I have said many times in the past, she is saying, as I say, that this is an existential crisis that we're in. She's pointed out that we are witnessing the normalization of rhetoric and policies. That. That would have been politically retroactive. She says 20 years ago, I say 12, 18 years ago. Well, 20 years is probably about right. Right before Trump came on the scene. The kinds of things that are now being normalized were unheard of and would have been would have sounded a death knell for anyone who had talked like that prior to Trump's entrance on the political scene. We're now talking about the deployment of military force domestically, the criminalization of protest, the open discussion of punishing political enemies and the systematic suppression of voting access, as well as targeting journalists and claiming that journalists now are the enemies of the state, rather than protected by the Constitution and a necessary component of the Constitution. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And what makes this moment so dangerous isn't merely that these things are happening because they are happening. But what makes it dangerous is that millions of Americans are becoming psychologically acclimated to it. They have. And by millions, I just don't mean the millions who voted for Trump and the roughly 30 to 30 to 40 percent of the Trump base. a mega base that that will never ever depart from him but it is that even those of us many of us who find these actions abhorrent still believe that that is the that that this is now our reality it has become our normality we don't fight back we don't get outraged that's one of the things that my wife says all the time when taking a look at the corruption in the trump administration it's like why aren't people more outraged his i i i just saw for example on the news that that the white house itself helped donald trump jr to get a 685 million dollar loan the white house worked on that why the fuck aren't we outraged but anyway i'm getting a bit off base so one of the other things that abrams is pointing out is that our modern voter suppression no longer looks like it did in the past we don't have like bull connor with dogs and fire hoses uh trying to keep people from the polls now we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a we have motherfuckers in suits and now we have them hiding behind what they call administrative procedures now it appears as voting purges id restrictions shortening voting windows polling place closures and endless bureaucratic friction the objective still remains the same though whether it's a water hose and dogs it is still to reduce the democratic participation among populations viewed by the the existing power structure as politically threatening that's what stacy abrams is warning against this is having the exact same effect as dogs and fucking water hoses so and let's stop pretending that this is subtle that this is hidden the modern republican party like i have always said is no longer a political party it has become and is increasingly hostile to democracy itself and the reason for that is that it understands the demographic reality a genuinely multiracial democracy threatens permanent minority rule but they want permanent minority rule so they don't want democracy the the the the modern gop is no longer a political party it is a criminal organization that is hell bent on the destruction of democracy and the overthrow of democracy in america that's the core issue not an election integrity not voter fraud it is about power pure power and and and permanent power that's what we are fighting against and abram also made another point that deserves attention and that is that authoritarian movements begin by demonizing vulnerable populations immigrants what did trump do with the first time he came down the fucking golden escalator immigrants are bad people black people are bad lgbtq people are bad journalists educators all of these people are bad there can they are diluting the whiteness of america which is its greatness that's what they do first to attack vulnerable populations and the reason they do that is because once a society is a society of people who are vulnerable to society and we have to make sure that our society accepts dehumanization rhetorically then actual repression and oppression becomes easier politically if you are violating the rights of someone that they have already deemed to be unworthy to be american then you don't have as much outrage and that's the part that liberals still trunks it keeps struggling to fully grasp they don't get it people consistently underestimate irrational systems. They assume facts alone will stop extremism, but it won't. Facts do not automatically defeat propaganda. If you want the truth to win, then the truth requires institutions. The truth requires repetition. The truth requires organization. The truth requires political power, and it requires us to be willing to use that political power in a fight. Otherwise, lies outperform truth emotionally, and emotional narratives spread faster than objective reality. And that's the battlefield now. Not merely politics, but reality itself. And we're going to talk about that in Strategies for Black Power. The war now is beyond politics. We're not in a political battle. We're in a battle around the definition of reality and what methodology you use to determine that reality. We are in a metaphysical and epistemological battle that we have to win if we are going to maintain democracy in this country. All right, let's go. Let's go on to the next story. In this particular case, like I said, we're doing a bit of a flashback into MAGA. Like I said, it hasn't been in the news much recently because Donald Trump has been distracting everyone with so much other bullshit. But it's coming back again because of some comments that were made by some of the survivors and also because of, uh, testimony that is going to be happening in Congress this coming week. So, but when you look at this, it's one of the most fascinating political, uh, implosions that has ever happened that is happening right now in the MAGA movement. Because the MAGA movement now is beginning to choke on its own conspiracy culture. And one of the things that they are, that they are, are doing, like I said in the intro, is that this whole MAGA, or whole Epstein conspiracy thing, has started to produce cognitive dissonance in their mind. But, but whenever cognitive dissonance shows up, the disingenuous, which the MAGA, which MAGA is, will always seek to change their perception of reality rather than to acknowledge reality and change their view of what they thought was true. So, so rather, uh, uh, uh, some of them, of course, have gone now to say that perhaps Trump is hiding something. But the majority of them are, are, are sitting trying to figure out, like in one article that I read, that there was an, an individual MAGA supporter who was going through the millions of pages of, of Epstein files on a daily basis, still trying to find the democratic corruption that he was promised. And he keeps running into roadblocks. But he keeps shifting through it, convinced that he is going to find the key that shows that it was Bill Clinton all along, not Trump, that, that was raping kids. So, for years, the MAGA influencers built an entire mythology around Jeffrey Epstein. Not, and again, not Epstein, the actual person, the predator, and not the wealthy sex trafficker protected by elite connections. Not, and again, not Epstein, the actual person, the predator, not the wealthy sex trafficker protected by elite connections. They transformed, that is, MAGA transformed Epstein into a giant cinematic conspiracy universe where every QAnon fantasy would eventually be validated. Because what they said was that, that this, there was a, there was a vast cabal, as they called them, of democratic elites, progressives, who were involved in child sacrifice, child rape, and, and, and, and they were doing all of this with Jeffrey Epstein as a collective entity. There was supposedly a secret client list that they had, a hidden global cabal, like I said. They had mass blackmail operations in place, satanic elites that were sacrificing kids to stay young. And then the deep state was, and somehow, even when the Republicans became in charge of everything, the deep state was still supposedly democratic. How the fuck is that? Does that make sense? But they were saying that that's all of what was going on, not the fact that it was just an elite, rich sex trafficker and pedophile who was, who had connections and was hiding behind those connections. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Because all of this other shit was going on and that Trump would deliberately, or first of all, Trump magnified this. Trump, because they said that once Trump was in office, he would expose it all. And Trump said that, yes, he would expose it all. And then Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Laura Loomer, the entire carnival of clowns spent years telling their audience that, once Trump returned to power, all the hidden truth would finally be exposed. So they said that if you put Trump back in power, which of course eventually happened, that now they would expose what Epstein was up to and all the Democrats in the deep state that he was working with. They would expose all the people on the client list. They would put all these people in prison. They would expose all these Satan worshipers who were drinking the blood of, of frightened kids because they said that it, it, it would keep them young. Well, now they control the DOJ. They control the FBI and they have access to all of the information and reality has become inconvenient. Suddenly the massive revelations are gone. Suddenly there's no giant client list. Suddenly the promise apocalypse of elites arrested has gone away. But the movement, the, the, the, the, the grassroots MAGA is furious about that. They're upset because conspiracy movements are not built around evidence. They're built around emotional identity. People don't join conspiratorial ecosystems because they're rationally persuaded. Because how could you be rationally persuaded that Hillary Clinton was killing a baby and drinking his blood based on what there's no evidence of that. And if you had evidence, you would have been arrested and in jail long ago. So these people did not become persuaded by rational facts. They joined because conspiracy provided emotional satisfaction to say that these people are not like us. These people are brutal. Satan worshipers where we're good, fine Christians. Conspiracies make people feel special. They make people feel enlightened. They make people feel like heroic, insane, inciters fighting heat, hidden evils. And once a movement becomes psychologically dependent on those emotional rewards and reality itself becomes secondary. And that's why Trump now can't control the very conspiracy culture he helped create. He lit the fire. Now the wildfire is burning down his own movement. But again, like I said, there's still 30 to 40 percent somewhere in the 35, 37 percent range that are never going to leave him. Those are the individuals like the guy that I talked about that is searching the files every day, still trying to find evidence of these democratic elites, this deep state cabal of devil worshipers. And that's the really larger lesson. A society trained to prioritize emotional satisfaction narratives over evidence eventually becomes ungovernable because every disappointment becomes another conspiracy. Every contradiction becomes another coverup. Every prediction becomes proof of deeper hidden manipulation. The only one that that that loses is reality and those of us that find reality to be valuable and that's precisely why propaganda is so dangerous not merely because it deceives people which it does but because it gradually destroys a population's ability to psychologically tolerate objective truth. The objective truth now is the enemy of many people in the mega world. They they rejected out of hand and they rejected forcefully because the truth contradicts their worldview that is built brick by brick on propaganda, conspiracy theories and bullshit. And so that's where we're at today with mega and the Epstein. And so that's where we're at today with mega and the Epstein. And so that's where we're at today with mega and the Epstein. So now let's move on to religion and like I said, I'm not really going to talk about anything specific today. I'm going to talk about the religion business and more specifically the religion business is the name of a docu series that has just come out. So what we're going to be talking about is another institution that has spent centuries training people to suspend critical thinking and to operate under a mythological. process. And that's organized religion. So there is a some relatively new seven part docu series called the religion business and it exposes something that many of us have understood for years. And that is that large percentages of organized religion function less like moral institutions and more like tact exempt corporations wrapped up in some fucking spiritual brand. understanding that they have in order to shield themselves from taxes. Some of these so-called megachurch operations look less like churches and more like luxury lifestyle companies with gospel, and they have gospel-themed marketing, but it's like lifestyles of the rich and famous, private jets, mansions, designer suits, million-dollar campuses, massive salaries, no financial transparency, and minimal accountability. And all of that, all of this largesse, is financed largely by working-class believers convinced that they are funding God's mission. Meanwhile, many of these churches spend shockingly, well, not to me, it's not a shock, but to you it may be, shockingly little on actual community assistance. They don't do shit for the community. All of this money is coming in. And I did a... a story in the past about the black community, or the black church and the black community. The black church brings in billions and billions of dollars a year, and they don't do shit for the black community. Or, I won't say they don't do shit, they do shit some crumbs on it every now and then, so, but they do very little. So, now I'm going to pause and be a little nuanced, because I believe in intellectual honesty. So, when I say organized religion, I am primarily talking about the prosperity gospel megachurches, and also the white supremacy-based Christian nationalist institutions, that both of those have aligned themselves with authoritarian politics. So, I am basically talking about those organizations that have aligned themselves with the GOP to create a religious-political ideology that is based upon white supremacy. Now, the black church is just as flawed, just as flawed, but there is a little bit more nuance to it. Because, yes, the black church still elevates faith above evidence, which, in my opinion, is a fatal flaw. And, yes, it also creates... And, yes, it also creates a protected zone where ordinary skepticism is suspended, and so I stand by the claim that I always make that faith is a piss-poor epistemology. You cannot know anything about reality based on faith. But, and this is the nuance, the black church has also been the site of liberation theology, civil rights organizing, and community survival, and they did those things when other institutions that should have... did not show up. Frederick Douglass, as an example, didn't emerge from a secular humanist think tank. Dr. Martin Luther King didn't organize from a podcast studio. So, there are two truths that we have to hold simultaneously. Religion normalizes belief without evidence, and it is bad for everyone, and black religious institutions have been essential survival infrastructures for us in the past, and even in the modern day. On occasion, they do organize in the right direction, and that tension matters. Because one of the deeper issues that we have isn't about spirituality. It isn't about whether you're a believer or not. What it's about is epistemology. Christianity literally elevates faith above evidence. Believing without proof becomes a virtue in Christian organizations, black or white, and doubting becomes a weakness. Questioning becomes rebellion and can get you kicked out of the fucking church. And once a society normalizes the idea that emotionally comforting beliefs deserve exemption from evidentiary standards, that mindset spreads beyond religion into politics, into media, into conspiracy culture, and into a cancer of our reality. Faith, then, or the faith ideology, the whole evidence of things not seen ideology, becomes a generalized habit of mind. So then, no matter what you have coming into you information-wise, you base it on that ideology of faith, which is emotional rather than rational. Now, am I saying, then, that every single religious person, every single believer is irrational? Not exactly. Many believers function perfectly rationally in every area of their life except for religion. But religion creates, like I said, this protected zone where skepticism is suspended, and in that zone, bad things happen. In that zone, reality is... You fail. You fail to comprehend reality. In that zone, you can be tricked. In that zone, you can have the wool pulled over your eyes, and in that zone, you can normalize authoritarian ideology and aggression. And that's why authoritarian movements often naturally align with religious extremism. Both depend heavily on obedience. Both discourage criticalization. Both discourage self-examination. And both reward emotional conformity. And both frame doubt as a moral failure. So truth should survive, or if truth should survive scrutiny, if it is the truth, if what you say is the truth, then it should survive scrutiny. And that's in politics. That's in religion. That's in everything. You should welcome questions. You should welcome doubt. If what you say is the truth, then the truth should survive an examination. If a belief system requires special exemptions from evidence, from rational analysis or critical questioning, then it deserves suspicion, not automatic respect, not elevation as a preferable way of seeing the world. It should be suspicious to you that someone ask you to believe without evidence. So, but that is the religious business now. It is selling a faith ideology that allows for the fleecing of the flock and for the aggrandized lifestyles of those who are of the faith. It should be Film. It should be Film. It should be Film. running the whole thing so let's go ahead now and move on to uh the next and final story which is our story our good news story and the the reason for this and and the the good news story the title is building institutions that can survive the collapse and so despite all of the madness that we just went through in the news there's still some good news to be said or to review and one of the the things is that black people have always understood something essential when that is when dominant institutions fail you which they will you then you have to build your own and and so i have some some good news on that front and this comes from new haven connecticut and the board of alders there recently approved a proposal to apply for state funding to establish an hbcu satellite campus and and and so that in and of itself would be good but the historical context makes this story extraordinary nearly 200 years ago connecticut lawmakers blocked an attempt by local evolutionists to establish what would have become the first black college in america so so white backlash killed it at that time and later connecticut connecticut after that literally passed laws restricting black education and and we have talked about this before whenever there is some semblance of black progress then there will be white backlash to that and they will try to take you further away from uh even where you were uh not and and definitely no closer to where you were trying to get to so that's what happened here 200 years ago they wanted to establish a a black college the first one in america uh it was pushed back and then they made they they put together laws to make it impossible or illegal uh to to educate black people so now in 2026 the city is finally attempting to partially and i say partially because this is good news but this they should do more uh they're trying to partially repair that history and this is what repair looks like when it moves beyond apology and starts rebuilding the infrastructure that racism deliberately blocked because here's the situation it's like it's like the u.s wants to and they don't even go this far but the the u.s the u.s sometimes tiptoes around the the the ideology of uh of making an apology for slavery but reparations never gets any light of the sun so it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a night of day uh and the reason for that is uh because uh they do not want to repair the damage they they they they and that's one of the reasons why the apologies are so hard because if they if they apologize and that will have to that that will prove the damage and then they would need to do something about it and so they don't even really want to apologize but they if they go as far as to apologize they will say that that happened in the past and it's nothing to be done about it so i think that's the part that i think is what's very important that's the part i think is important about it now. But for this to happen, we need it because independent black educational institutions are not merely academic spaces. We talked about this with the Bell quote. And because what these institutions are, are survival infrastructure. And even more than that, they institute survival and then give us the requisite knowledge to be able to thrive in society. And especially when we're talking about a society that is increasingly hostile to truth itself, we need these institutions where that truth can come out. And HBCUs have historically done more than educate students. They preserve black intellectual life. They cultivate leadership. They protect historical memory. And they create intellectual spaces for black thought beyond white institutional control. And so Bell Hooks was right when she said education remains revolutionary. It is revolutionary. It is about protests. It is about fighting. It is about educating ourselves for the required battle. Because ignorance is the fuel of authoritarianism. And and every classroom that teaches critical thinking becomes an act of resistance. All right. That is it for this week's Unmasking the News. And so we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we are going to cover strategies for black power. And this week, we're talking about the war against reality itself. All right. Welcome back. And welcome to this week's strategy for black power. And I do want to say I went through the news. I did have a video that I was going to show, but I didn't get a chance to do so. It was Tim Miller on one of the MSNBC's. now shows talking about the destruction of shared reality for that segment we started out with. But anyway, I didn't show that, but I did restate a lot of the factors that came into that in that news story. In actuality, I think what I'm going to do now is in this segment to talk about that because it is directly related to this as well. So I'm going to play that video. But what we're going to talk about is the war against reality, and we're going to define it this way in the strategies for black power. We're first going to define the operating problem. What is it that we're actually dealing with? We're going to review some of that. We're going to talk about some historical truths about the way things exist today, and we're going to talk about the strategy, five imperatives for black power in an age of unreality, and then we're going to close out for this week. So what I am going to do then right now is to go to the video that I was going to show earlier in the news segment, and I'm going to show it now as a definition of the operating problem. So let's go. Let's go ahead and take a look at that video. Again, is it for Donald Trump to corrupt the gathering of data in this country? The Washington Post argues it is very significant. John. So I'm picking this up where what they're talking about is that Trump has said that he's going to stop gathering information in order that shows how things are going in this country. And the Washington Post put out an article in relation to that. So let's go ahead and take a listen. Lanchester, writing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, says this. The gathering of data exemplifies our ambition for a stable, coherent society. The United States is an enlightenment project based on the supremacy of reason, on the idea that things can be empirically tested, that there are self-evident truths, that liberty, progress and constitutional government walk arm in arm. And that's what I'm trying to say. The United States is an enlightenment project based on the supremacy of reason, on the idea that things can be empirically tested, that liberty, progress and constitutional government walk arm in arm. And together form the recipe for the ideal state. Statistics, numbers created by the state to help it understand itself and ultimately to govern itself, are not some side effect of that project, but a central part of what government is and does. It is so fundamental to us as Americans, but also to us as humans. And I'm going to pause there for a moment because I want to summarize what she was reading from the Washington Post. Post article. What they were arguing was that Donald Trump's statement that he is going to stop gathering information about the performance of the government because the numbers show that he's not doing a good job is fundamentally out of alignment with a functioning government and with reality itself. Donald Trump is saying, I don't want to know what's going on. If it is. not align with my idea of the way it should be. I'm going to report fucking good news. I'm going to piss on your head and report that it is raining every single time. And the Washington Post was pushing back on that. Now, I'm going to listen to a little bit of what some of the other individuals in this discussion have to say, and then we're going to move back to strategies for black power. To want to know what the best option is. I mean, that's why there are top 10 lists. That's why Wirecutter exists. That's why when you want to buy a new air conditioning unit, you go and you say, well, what does the Wirecutter say? What does New York Magazine say? What does Good Housekeeping say? What is the best thing that I can get? And we as a country gathered that data to make decisions, as Justin said, for business, for economics, for making people's lives better, vaccines, et cetera. And we're losing that. And I wonder how the American public is going to react when they suddenly actually can't trust things and have one set of numbers, but then have a different experience. I'm going to give you a dark answer to that, because this has been a long time coming. Trump wants to deconstruct truth across a lot of variables. And it's not just Trump, right? With AI, we have a lot of new images and movies now that are not real. And people want to be told what they want to hear. People want to be told good news. This is not a unique thing. This is not a unique thing to Donald Trump. But he's been just particularly good at weaponizing it and deconstructing truth when it doesn't serve him. We saw that after the 2020 election. And so I think that the public will probably go along with it. The question is, why aren't business leaders pushing back on this more aggressively? I had Jason Calacanis as the Silicon Valley guy on the pod this morning. All right. I'm going to stop it there, because that gets to the point that I wanted to make here. And the two points that Tim Miller made, and the first point that he made was, well, actually, three points. The first part he made is that Trump and his administration and the entire GOP has been in the long exercise of deconstructing truth, of eliminating fact-based reality as a consideration in doing anything. And the second thing he said was, which I think is even more important, is that the majority of the people have and will continue to go along with it, because they, that is, his supporters, anyway, his supporters will go along with it because they want to hear what they want to hear. And it's like this dichotomy now between, for example, the price of gas and what Trump said he was going to do. And people's experience. Every time, my wife just filled up at the pump, and it was funny, but not in a way, because it cost her more to fill up than ever before. But there was a little sticker that someone had put on the gas pump with Trump, and he was pointing upward, and the caption said, I did that. And so it's like, this is my fault. But MAGA goes to the pump, they see what the price of gas is, and somehow they still believe Trump when he says that he's made gas prices lower. I don't understand that dichotomy, that dissidence. How is, how do they have this kind of cognitive dissonance in their mind and come to the conclusion that Trump is still right? But that's what Tim Miller was saying. And then the second thing he was saying is, that businesses should push against it, or the third thing, rather. Now, I understand why businesses aren't, because the businesses believe that, especially, well, I would say specifically as it relates to the market, the stock market, the stock market can grow on erroneous good news. And so if all the, if Trump pushes all of this good news, and enough people believe it, then they are going to, even though they're going broke, they're going to continue to spend money, and just continue to make the economy go forward until it collapses into low. So anyway, that, I wanted to play that video as an example of the problem that we're talking about. And if you're checking this out on YouTube, you can see Maria Ressa, and I've used this quote before from her on the screen, and it says, without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, which is what we're talking about, no democracy, and it becomes, quote, impossible to deal with our world's existential problems. So we don't, and that's where we are in America right now. And this, we're going to deal with this central strategic question of the moment, which is, how do you fight for justice? When millions of people no longer share the same reality? Like I had said earlier, America is now divided by epistemology, not just ideology. We are not presenting, and I'm not presenting a rhetorical question when I'm talking about that. This is the operating problem of American politics in 2026. We are not simply fighting bad policies, corrupt politicians, voter suppression. Racist policing, Christian nationalism, or authoritarian judges. We've had to fight all of those things in the past. But what's different now is we are fighting all of that inside of an information environment where facts no longer automatically settle disputes. In too many spaces, facts are treated as partisan artifacts and not objective facts. Now we have... We have people where evidence is treated as an insult. Expertise is treated as elitism. Journalism is treated as propaganda unless it flatters the tribe, unless it flatters the group that's listening to it. And that happens on the left as well. It's like, and I would say even to me, my wife points this out all the time. I refuse to listen to Fox, but I will listen to MSNBC. Now, because they're only going to talk about the things that I believe in and I agree with. Well, not only because some half the time I don't agree with them as now either. But we live now where conspiracy theory is treated as courage because it makes... And this is the core problem. Conspiracy theories and this fight against reality itself makes ignorant people feel like prophets and gurus. And that's why we are where we are. And that's the crisis in America. It's not merely that Americans are divided by ideology. America is divided by the definition of reality itself and how we know what that reality is. And so once politics reaches the point, and that's in the quote from Maria Ressa, once we reach the point where there is no shared reality, then democracy breaks down. Because it depends upon a civic premise that we can disagree about values, priorities, and policy, but we still have some shared method for identifying facts, the truth. But that premise is collapsing. Now, RAND, the RAND Corporation, which is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization, caused this phenomenon, truth decay. Meaning that the declining role of facts and analysis in public life. And that phrase is useful because it captures the rot that we are experiencing. This decay is not a single lie. It is not one bad news cycle. It is not one deranged uncle on Facebook discovering another meme created by someone whose research decree came from a basement and a Wi-Fi fucking connection. Which, again, like I've said this before. But when people tell me, do your research, I hate that fucking shit. All they're talking about is Google or look on TikTok or Facebook or prompt an AI to give you the answer that you were already looking for. It's a structural weakening of the public's ability to distinguish evidence from assertion, journalism from entertainment, and scholarship from propaganda and reality from emotional theater. We are becoming a population that doesn't fucking know what reality is. And understand this very clearly. Propaganda does not have to persuade people that every lie is true. That's amateurish thinking. Mature propaganda has a more dangerous function. It exhausts the public. It floods the zone. It creates so many competing claims that people stop trying to know anything at all. When people say you can't trust anybody, the propagandist has already won the battle. The goal is not always belief. Sometimes the goal is cynicism. Sometimes the goal is confusion. And sometimes the goal is to make truth look impossible so power can operate without accountability. You take, for example, Trump's repeated assertion that he... that the 2020 election was stolen from him. By all objective facts, that account is false. But he has said it so many times and instituted so much emotion that there are millions of people that now, even if they don't say that that is true, they say, I don't know. I don't know if it was stolen or not. That's what most of the Republican politicians say when they're cornered. I don't know. But you can know. There's enough information, there's enough fucking facts that you can know. So the propagandist, in this case Trump, has won the battle because even though he hasn't gotten the majority of the people to believe that the election was stolen, he's gotten enough of them to either believe it or to question it, that now that is considered incontrovertible. conversation as a normality as a normal thing to discuss and that's why the old liberal fantasy that the facts will speak for themselves is strategically useless facts do not speak they they don't say a goddamn thing people speak institutions speak media systems speak schools speak churches speak logarithms speak billionaires can speak with their money political parties speak facts only matter when they are carried by institutions with credible repeated and trusted messengers defended by organizations people and then that translates into power you can't speak truth to power if you have no power to begin with even me screaming on this fucking podcast is going to do very little because i don't have millions of followers if i had millions of followers and this would make have a larger impact but because if if you don't have this power and and and the infrastructure behind truth then the facts just sit there like a fire extinguisher in a burning building while the fools argue over whether or not the smoke is a liberal hoax or is caused by fucking biden that's where we're at every goddamn thing is like Charleston's consult even though by your for two years what we need to do is to take a look Him some historical truth need to think this is worth black people need to think with historical discipline because we have been here before maybe not but we've been here before video live under manufacturing Realitymos the forgive level movie original video since the beginning of this country america created myths to justify every single stage of our oppression slavery was called natural because it was a biblical divine order theft was called settlement and i mean it's like it's like one of the which i know this might sound crazy but one of the arguments that i have uh with with one of my ais is is the fact that there there are they it's like i ask for um uh a uh interesting fact from this date in history every morning and a lot of time it gives me a so-and-so discovered this or that land on this date and i always go back and say were there people there already and yes then how was that a discovery how was it how was it a discovery and it's like oh yes well you know that that comes with a lot of problems it's a complicated issue i'm like it's not complicated this this was impossible imperialism this was theft that's what it was it wasn't discovery so we've already had to deal with this shit shit terrorism was called law and order segregation was called tradition white violence was called self-defense black resistance was called criminality welfare myths crime myths voter fraud myths fatherless black children myths intelligent myths cultural pathology myths all of those were deployed as political weapons against us so so we've already seen this destruction of reality before directed directly at us so we now need to stop pretending that propaganda is new the technology is new the machinery is faster the logarithm or more precise the stupidity now has broadband but the structure is old and it is exactly the same same and and we can talk about this from individuals ida b wells understood this when white america used the lie of black male sexual violence to justify lynching wells didn't respond with vibes she investigated she gathered evidence and she studied cases she exposed the pattern she showed that lynching was not about justice it was about racial terror economic control and white power protecting itself through murder wells understood that truth requires method she did it did not merely say that the dominant narrative was false she proved it she published it and she organized around it and web dubois understood this too the crisis his paper was not our magazine was not simply a magazine it was an information weapon it used journalism data art argument and political education to build a black counterpublic dubois understood that oppression that oppressed people cannot rely on the dominant public sphere to tell the truth about their lives we have to build our own infrastructure that is not separatism that's not what we're talking about it is survival with a printing press in order to get to the point where we can thrive the black press the black churches when they're functioning as liberation institutions rather than prosperity vent prosperity vending machines black schools barbershops beauty shops mutual aid networks civic organizations fraternities sororities unions and freedom schools all serve as information infrastructure they help black people interpret the world when america's official story was a lie with a flag pin to it so that is the model we need now we need modern black truths infrastructure built for an age of national logarithmic propaganda and a r go core broken couple tension of allies the mistake vinnie rational people make is a suing that misinformation is mainly eight knowledge problem it's partly a knowledge problem but mostly it's not a it most political misinformation isn't than any problem people what allow them to remain loyal to their group they believe what protects you they are not trafficking repeat operations and misuse of our forces for themselves obviously nc by Brexit Trump Erdele he just put mal inaccurate persuasion of the government that black teachers would divorce them if they are not legitimately hid�emer their innocence. They believe what makes them feel heroic. They believe what gives their fear a target, and once a lie becomes part of identity, correcting it feels like an attack. So when, even though it's a lie, when the lie is about the great replacement theory that white people are being replaced with brown and black people, that's a lie, but when you tell someone that, then every additional person they see that is black or brown becomes an enemy. It becomes a fulfillment of their belief system that they are being replaced, and this is why arguing with some people is like really trying to teach an algebra to a brick wall that watches cable news. You're not dealing with a person's evaluating evidence, you're dealing with a nervous system defending belonging, and that doesn't necessarily mean that persuasion is impossible. It means persuasion has limits. We must stop wasting strategic energy trying to convert the deeply, the people that are already deeply captured, and I say this all the time. There are some people who are... There are some people who are too interested in unreality because unreality protects their status. A white nationalist does not need better footnotes. A Christian nationalist does not need one more civic lesson. A QAnon addict does not need a carefully sourced explainer. At some point, the problem is not confusion. The problem is commitment. They have become what I call willfully ignorant. And the same is true for... For those that are believers. It's like I still will engage in some friendly debate and banter with my family around religion, but I never do that any longer with a goal of persuading them because they are invested in what they believe, and they did not come to that belief through facts and rational thought. So therefore... Presenting them with facts and rational thoughts is never going to change their mind. So our strategy then has to be sharper than that. We should not organize at all around the fantasy of persuading anyone, and certainly not persuading everyone. Some people are persuadable, so we can persuade some, but we can't have a strategy that the only successful outcome is to persuade everyone. We organize... We organize around the goal of strengthening the reachable, protecting the vulnerable, and mobilizing the aligned and isolating the dangerous. So we need to understand that what we are looking at is grouping thoughts and ideology and the people that express them, and then operating appropriately in each of those areas. So again, we can't persuade everyone. We are organized... We... We... We... We... We are organized around the goal of strengthening the reachable. So those that can be persuaded, we want to strengthen them, protect the vulnerable, the people that are going to be the attacks of this unreality, and that's always going to be black people, brown people, LGBTQAI plus community, et cetera. We mobilize those that are aligned with us to fight, and we isolate the dangerous. We cut them off. We don't debate them. We don't... We don't discuss with them. We don't want to hear their point of view. We want to isolate them and let them destroy themselves. And that gives us five, then, strategic imperatives that we need to work with. And the five imperatives on dealing with this are the following. Strategy one, to build black truth infrastructure. Strategy two, media literacy as self-defense. Strategy three, stop debating bad faith. Strategy four, organize around trusted messengers. And strategy five, convert truth to power. And you can see how these naturally flow from what I talked about before. So let's go ahead now and go through each of those strategies in a bit more detail. So strategy one is to build black truth infrastructure. So we need independent black media, not just podcasts like this one and commentary, but we need local information networks that people actually trust. Community newsletters, YouTube explainers, WhatsApp, and text alert systems, civic education channels, black-owned local reporting, school board trackers, court watchers, city council summaries, et cetera, et cetera. Election protection briefings, mutual aid directories, digital libraries, and community fact sheets. All of that. The goal is not to... The goal is not to imitate corporate media or the major media. The goal is to make truth usable. People need to know what happened, who benefits and who is harmed, what the historical pattern is, what the power and what power is being exercised, and what action is required. So we need to do that ourselves. We need to build this infrastructure for ourselves. That's how we move from information consumption to politically educated. A headline tells people what occurred. Political education teaches people how to interpret the occurrence in a way that leads to structural power. I hope you see the difference. Now going on to strategy two is to teach media literacy as self-defense. And if you're checking this out on YouTube, you can see that I have a graphic up. It shows on one side the rage-baiting economy. Like all of the headlines and loud messages and all of that sort of thing, likes and shares and so on. And then on the other side, it says an essential form of literacy, which is media literacy and analysis, critical thinking, et cetera. So that's what we need. So media literacy cannot remain some polite classroom. It can't be something that's just filed next to digital citizenship or some other phrase that is designated to sedate the living and get you bored. It has to become an essential skill, and it has to become a meaningful skill for survival in the black community. Black communities need practical training on how propaganda works and how to use it in the right way. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how propaganda works. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how propaganda works. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how propaganda works. And how to deal with it. And this means teaching people how to check sources, how to read laterally, how to identify emotional manipulation, how to spot scapegoating, how to recognize fake expertise, how to distinguish evidence from assertion, and how to pause before sharing outrage bait. Young people need it because their news environment is social, visual, fast, and algorithmic. And older adults need it because many were trained in a slower media environment and are now in a more social, visual, fast, and algorithmic environment. And they're now being haunted by forwarded foolishness dressed up as concern. The rule should be simple. Do not share what you have not checked. Do not amplify what you cannot verify. Do not confuse confidence with credibility. Do not confuse a screenshot with evidence. And do not confuse a preacher, influence, celebrity, or politician with a source. and and we should only look at firsthand and at most secondhand sources when we are talking about facts and we should teach deep uh pre-debunking or pre-bunking and that means warning people about manipulation tactics before they encounter them teach people the tricks false equivalency cherry-pick statistics racial scapegoating fake crisis language moral panic they don't want you to know that those kind of headlines always will will stimulate something in your mind but it is usually fake or or or false and and so we those are the classic authoritarian move of making every situation look corrupt except the strong man asking for power is the only one that that looks like they are telling you the truth the third strategy uh is to stop debating and to stop debating and to stop debating and to stop debating and to stop debating and to stop debating bad faith as if it were confusion and this is an important one and the one that i have taken to heart and if you're checking on youtube it says stop arguing with people who love chaos over truth stop arguing with people who are never going to change their mind it is a fucking waste of time every argument is not an invitation to reason every person who initiates an argument is not necessarily inviting you to have a reasoned discussion some arguments are trapped some are performance some are designed to waste time some are designed to make truth defend itself endlessly while the lies move freely we need better discernment ask three questions before engaging with someone in an argument and by argument i don't mean like the the derogatory terms for it as a derogatory term I mean it from the the actual use of the word which is which is a reasoned debate as an argument presenting a hypothesis using deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning and the evidence for that as an example but ask three these three sessions or questions before you get into an argument with anyone is the person reachable is the person that you are about to exchange a factual discussion with are they reachable or are they someone that could change their mind if presented with accurate factual information that's number one number two is there an art are they or is it an audience worth influencing are the people that you're about to engage with are they an audience worth influencing are they an audience worth influencing are the people that you're about to engage with worth the time and if even if they are reachable is it worth your time reaching them and then the third question is is this conversation tied to an outcome and if the answer to any of those questions is no then stop feeding the circus we do not need to win every comment thread we need to win power and so if the if the person isn't reachable or the audience is not worth influencing or if the conversation is not going to lead to a positive outcome then save your energy what is the point we need power and there's no power in arguing with someone that is not going to to if you win the argument and by when what I mean is to present a preponderance of facts that lead to a rational conclusion which they accept is if that is not going to lead to us increasing our ability to claim power then it was an exercise in futility and this is especially important for black activists and intellectuals because white supremacy has always tried to drain our energy through endless demands for explanation prove racism exists prove slavery was bad prove voter suppression matters prove violence is structural prove diversity has value prove black people are human prove racism exists prove slavery was bad prove voter suppression matters prove violence is it's finally that specificallyoch it's as we see what people on the white worried about before they can garlic went to the American how to Robin White because apparently I'm American memory a little from the white the class come someone would factory defect where they keep putting getting what we told no we don't know infinite remedial education of people committed to staying ignorant if you want to be any hurt if you want to think that black people or or You could come to a reasoned conclusion. You don't want to, and I'm not going to waste my fucking time talking to you. Our responsibility is to build capacity for community and persuade those who can still be moved and whose movement matters only. I'm not talking to anybody else. The fourth thing is to organize around trusted messengers. And if you're checking out this on YouTube, you see, again, I have agency and access, trust and influence, and kind of an infinity loop on what we talk about as it relates to trust from a message delivery perspective. Because people rarely change their minds because a stranger humiliated them with superior source. Now, I must admit that. I do enjoy that. I do enjoy humiliating someone that has an erroneous point of view with superior source material and facts that they can't recount. But that's not going to, and it has never, ever changed someone's mind. So I acknowledge that. It's maybe some bit of a mischievous enjoyment for me to do so, but it doesn't change minds. People will change their mind because someone they trust gives them permission to reconsider. And so that means movements need messenger strategy rather than my humiliation strategy. And I fully acknowledge that. Is that my general approach when I'm talking with someone, but again, I'm talking mostly with those people like I just went through that don't matter. But occasionally I like to argue with them for enjoyment, not because I intend to. I don't want them to change their minds, but we need educators, elders, barbers, stylists, coaches, nurses, librarians, union leaders, students, veterans, entrepreneurs, artists, clergy, who still have a moral spine. And we also need local organizing organizers trained to communicate clearly. So all of those all of those individual groups, we need them to have the ability. To communicate the messenger must fit the audience that is like me as an atheist. I can't talk to a to a religious community, but but but a properly chain trained and there are some there are there are probably trained pastor or clergy can communicate positive messages to their congregation. And there are some that do that. So. And that's why I'm saying the messenger must fit the audience. The language must fit the room. Me talking about objective facts and rationality to a group of believers isn't going to sit well. But if you if the pastor contextualizes it within the the Bible and belief in the Bible, then they will take that forward. But they'll still do the same thing that I was trying to convince them to do. So. The right facts in the wrong format fail the right analysis without trusted channels fail and that is why institution building matters because a trusted institution compounds credibility over time, it becomes a place people return to when confusion spikes. That is what we need institutions that can hold the line when the information environment becomes toxic, which it has. And we have to be careful. And the last of the five, and certainly not the least, is to convert truth to power. And we've talked about this a little bit already. And that is the final mistake is treating truth as an end point. Truth is not the destination. Now, you might think it should be. And maybe it should be, but it's not. Truth is the map. Once we know what is happening, we must decide what to do about it. And so. So therefore, I mean. example one of the objective truths in america today is that we are operating in a a political economic and cultural system that is heavily influenced by and controlled by systemic oppression that is the truth but that in and of itself does not do anything for us we need to convert the truth of that into a strategy that will lead us into power to dismantle that reality so and another example is if the truth is that voter suppression is being redesigned through bureaucracy then we need voter registration ballot cheering uh cheering transportation poll watching legal defense and election board monitoring the truth is one thing but then what we do with it is something different if the truth is that school boards are being captured by reactionaries then we need candidate recruitment parent organization organizing curriculum defense and meeting attendance if the truth is that the local news is collapsing then we need to fund black media subscribe to credible outlets support libraries and create local reporting capacity if the truth is that a logarithms reward outrage then we need discipline sharing trusted channels and community standards you see the the the line there truth without organizing becomes commentary commentary without action becomes therapy and therapy has its place but it will not stop fascism it will not stop white supremacy or corporate greed the world is not short on people describing the fucking fire that the country is on fire we know need more people building water lines and throwing buckets of water on the fire we need people doing shit not just talking about it and pointing it out so that in that brings us to the conclusion of the segment today and here on screen if you're taking it on youtube i have the very famous philosopher george clinton on the screen and this quote is attributed to him whether or not it's actually his quote or not i don't know but i do like the quote and that is quote whoever controls the flow of information dictates our perception and perspectives whoever controls the news shapes our destiny end quote and and that's basically what we're talking about because whoever controls the flow of information and our perceptions and our perspective the news they are creating reality they are creating a reality in modern in this modern day that is disconnected from objective truth and thereby they are controlling our destiny if we live within their unreality sphere like the the people on ms now a lot of them like to talk about there is an earth one which is reality and earth two where maga lives and and and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and we are getting getting pulled into earth two and operating as if per mill to was a true reality and want this segment uh... of the strategies for black powers trying to say if we need to start to take that back so here's the doctrine black liberation in the unit reality requires epistemic power that means that organizing organized abilities to produce true you Verify truth, teach truth, and distribute truth, and defend truth, and convert truth into collective action. That's what we're talking about. We cannot assume that America will ever return to a shared reality on its own. In fact, we can assume that it won't. Too many people profit from confusion. Too many politicians need ignorance. Too many media companies monetize outrage. Too many religious leaders depend upon treating faith as a substitute for evidence. Too many billionaires benefit when citizens fight phantoms instead of the true power structures in the country. So we have to build our own infrastructure. We train our people. We protect our minds. We discipline our information habits. We refuse to waste time on bad faith. We support black journalism, black scholarship, black schools, black libraries, black civic organizations, and independent politics. We teach children how to think. We teach them not what to repeat, not what to memorize. We teach them how to think. And we teach adults how to verify, not how to panic. And we treat truth as a collective asset for our community. Because this is the strategic reality. Whoever controls the information environment shapes the political imagination. Whoever shapes the political imagination shapes what people believe is possible. Whoever shapes what people believe is possible shapes what they are willing to fight for. Or as George Clinton said, our destiny. The struggle for reality is not now an integral part of the struggle for black power. And if we lose reality, we lose everything. Because we lose the ground on which every other fight stands. Democracy cannot survive when the truth becomes optional. Liberation cannot survive when lies travel. And justice cannot survive when people cannot tell the difference between evidence and propaganda. So no. Facts alone will not save us. But disciplined people armed with facts, institutions, strategy, and power can still change history. And that has always been the lesson. Ida B. Wells knew it, like we said. And Du Bois knew it. The black press knew it. The freedom schools knew it. Every serious liberation. Every movement that we have seen in the past knew it. Truth does not defend itself. We defend the truth. And in this era, defending reality is not intellectual housekeeping. It is black power building at work. It is black power building at scale. It is black power building using the necessary framework that the moment requires. All right. That is it for this week's Strategies. For Black Power. And so we're coming to the end of the podcast. And it did run a bit long today. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll have reflections and a call to action. Thank you. All right, welcome back, and welcome to Reflections and Call to Action. So, what did we learn? Well, this week we learned that the central crisis facing America is no longer merely political disagreement. It is the collapse of shared reality. We examined how authoritarianism normalizes itself through exhaustion and propaganda. We saw how conspiracy culture consumes even the movements that it created. We exposed organized religion's role in normalizing belief without evidence while acknowledging that the black church has a dual legacy as both epistemological problem and an institutional refuge. We also explored why black educational institutions remain essential defenses against historical amnesia and manufactured ignorance. Most importantly, we learned that truth alone is not enough, that truth must be organized, protected, repeated, institutionalized, and it must be defended because propaganda does not defeat itself. So, based upon what we learned, what can we do? Well, first of all, let's support independent black media institutions and media. Defend public education and critical thinking. Teach media literacy aggressively in our communities because we all need to understand how to consume and if we promote to put out. Stop assuming every political actor operates in good faith. Don't argue with everybody just because they want to argue. Some of them just want to waste your time. And then organize locally and build durable coalitions with others. And lastly, but not least, invest in independent black information networks so we can continue that flow. And the primary thing is to understand this. Democracy survives only if enough people are willing to defend, whether that be the access of our moral values, whether that be to murdering the black population andkey troisième ends. But the business should prove to be more effective by providing content about diversity towards its projectors. I think the best way to protect those issues is to thrive together. It'sigkeiten that work, act based preeminence. І t sounds good. It sounds final. all right welcome back and welcome to the outro so as i said this show is available on youtube if you're watching it on youtube make sure that you click the like button button the hands up just to say that you like the show if you have any comments you can leave comments right there on youtube and make sure that you subscribe to the channel and hit the bell that way you won't miss any episodes if you're listening to this on one of the audio platforms then you can send feedback to me at feedback at rationalblackclaw.com and you can also let me know if there's anything you'd like to see in the next episode of the show so i'll see you next time bye the show that you'd like to hear about and if it's not on the platform where you typically get your shows just send me an email and i'll make sure to have it just as a reminder the intro music that you heard in the beginning of the podcast was transcend by k-a-r-k and the outro music playing in the background now is ending by and i'd like to leave you as i always do with these words from frederick dunks if there is no struggle there is no progress those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want props without plowing up the ground they want the rain without the thunder and lightning they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters the struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one and it may be both moral and physical but it must be a struggle power concedes nothing without a demand it never did and it never did and it never will thanks for listening to everyone i look forward to being with you back again with you next week for another episode of the rational black thought podcast so have a great week and we'll see you back again next week