Candace Owens — What Direction Is Our Culture Going In? | With Brandon Tatum

So let's talk about culture, Brandon. We were just having an interesting discussion backstage. Why don't you start off and just tell me, I guess, what your viewpoint is on the direction that black culture and culture in general, I think, would be fair to say, is treading right now in America. Well, I think culture is, you know, people are so soft these days. I mean, this weak, soft crybabies. Men don't want to be men anymore.

Um, it's and it's across the board. And, you know, you can see that with people who lack personal responsibility. You know, I was raised that everything that happened to you has everything to do with your attitude and the way you, you know, handle adversity. It's not somebody else's fault. You can't blame the white man, you can't blame your cousin them. You can't blame none of these people. You got to look in the mirror at that person that you see every day and say, do I want to win today or do I want to lose?

Do I want to keep selling drugs or do I want to put the drugs down and actually live a life of freedom? You know, do I want to be married? Do I want to, you know, keep sleeping with women? I'm not married? You know, put myself in a position to have children out of wedlock. Those are decisions that you make as an individual. And I feel like people want to pass the bucket to everybody else instead of looking in the mirror.

Start looking in the mirror, start being the best version of yourself, and I think that that will change culture for the better. I want to add to that, because I actually had done an event the other night, and what you're talking about is a generational change. The mindset has changed from one generation to the next. And I, you guys know, my grandfather is my, I am, he's my biggest fan, and I am his biggest fan, and he really is my idol.

And it's so interesting to me to have lived, you know, been raised by a man who lived through real racism. When I say real racism, I'm talking about real systemic oppression, Jim Crow laws, right? A grandfather who grew up in a segregated South, and to speak to him on a daily basis, and to have him never complain about anything, right? Then you find your average American today. And they never stop complaining about anything, right?

It's a nonstop complaining. And so you look up a generation, you say, just a couple of generations ago, the average age of D Day, when they landed those ships, in France, the average age of a soldier that fought. It was an absolute slaughter fest. Obviously, you know that on Omaha Beach. We got the bad beach. It was just bad luck. You know, we went with the Canadians, the Britons, Americas. Americans got Omaha Beach.

The average age, as they were crossing the English Channel, they were crying, saying that they wanted their mother was 22 years old. 20 years old. Your average 22 year old today. I don't care what race you are, right? If I find a 22 year old today, the average one on a college campus is crying because Ben Shapiro's coming to speak and I just can't deal with it. It's pathetic. Yeah. You know, I was I was just saying Clemson, speaking, and they they had all these people out there protesting and saying that our presence on the campus was oppressive to them and that is somehow, I don't know if it's hurting the grades or whatever, because we're, I just don't, I don't understand.

And another thing with culture nowadays is people are so uninformed. I mean, they make such emotional decisions about everything. You know, they read a headline and that's what they go. They'll down that hill. One perfect example and I'm detouring just a little bit. One perfect example is the young guy that got killed, the 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo got killed by a police officer. And if you look at the news, you look at everybody's outrage, they want to protest, they got t-shirts already printed out, and they're going, this guy didn't have a gun, the cops just murdered them in cold blood.

We need justice. We need the demilitarized police. And it's like, you guys are completely missing a point. You're completely wrong. The kid had a gun. It was unfortunate, but he had a gun. The biggest question that we should be talking about if people want to hold themselves accountable. He said, why does a 13 year old have a gun at 2 a.m. shooting the gun off in an intersection and running from police? And I'll add this other one in with Dante Wright.

Okay, you know, I wish that people would not resist the rest. I mean, it's kind of it's just simple. Like, I get put over by a cop because I'm wrong, whether I'm wrong or not. I'm not going to resist and I would live 9 times out of 10 for sure. But the question is, to me, is that why is a 20-year-old man, on social media, waving around a gun, smoking a blunt, with Hennessy in his hand, with a warrant for his arrest for robbing a choking and robbing a woman at gunpoint and not showing up to court, driving on a suspended registration?

What culture, what type of young men are we creating that this young man is doing all of these things at the age of 20? Annie had a young daughter. That is, that to me is more baffling than the police interaction. Because all of these things that has happened in his life, all of the choices that his parents made and that he made, got him in a position for a police officer to make a mistake. Now don't get me wrong. She should never be a police officer again, in my personal opinion.

It's no way you should confuse the... Now, there's a psychological reason why you could, but there's no legitimate reason why you should confuse the two. But all of these things led this young man to the position that he was in, we see the same thing with George Floyd. We see the same thing with all of these people that are getting killed by police. It's decisions that they are making and not holding themselves accountable.

And I think one of the things to ask ourselves is why we're not allowed to ask why, right? So you have a situation that happens and everybody wants you to react emotionally. And in an ideal scenario, they want you to go out and they want you to riot and they want you to loot, and for whatever reason, they want you to steal a TV from Target. Because right now, I feel like that's the thing, right? I feel like now, actually, people aren't even upset, and they're just going, yay, it's steal a TV from Target night, and we can run in and we can steal a TV.

But what I have found interesting is that these are really important questions, why these people have guns? Why did George Floyd? You're saying you're doing this because black lives matter, but you refuse to discuss the fact that this individual, George Floyd, aside from being a drug act, let's not forget, when I first did that video, everyone swore he was St. George, they were saying that he had just gotten his life back together.

All of these lies were making their way around the world. And I just asked a simple question. I just Googled his record, right? And I said, if you're talking about preserving, you know, black lives or helping black lives, this man spent his entire life traumatizing black people. He was arrested for armed robbery several times. He spent nine stints in prison. He was moving drugs. So you're moving drugs into the black community.

You're getting arrested, you know, for armed robbery. You put a gun to a black or Hispanic woman, you know, a minority woman's stomach, while her two year old was in the room. Her toddler was in the room. You've traumatized black people your entire life, and you want me to go out, and riot and loot on your behalf when on a day that you were ingesting drugs, and you were high on fentanyl? Isn't this just called, like, you know, a cycle of crazy?

You want me to go risk being arrested? So you have a bunch of people who don't have records, who are told that they're supposed to be emotional. They supposed to go out, they're supposed to riot, they're supposed to loot. In turn, what is the circumstance? You have one black person, you know, who died that day, and what seems to be clear to me from his medical records is of a drug overdose, whether or not, let's not even discuss Derek Chauvin, just purely one person, one black life, and you are willing to kill how many black lives for that, right?

We're hurting the black community. And yet when two people get on stage and want to talk about that, we're told, we're the Uncle Tom's, we're the coons, because we are not falling for what seems to me to be a more nefarious media message, which is that black people are only worth anything, if they're outside and they're angry and they're riding and they're destroying their own communities. Amen. One of the issues that I see is that I feel like that many people, you know, including Americans of African descent is what I like to call black people in this country, like losing the connection with God is where I see the biggest problems.

We're not connecting with God like we used to. Big Mama used to have a big old Bible that she carried around all the time and you get in trouble, she'd probably pop you in the head with it. In the name of Jesus. pow. So, you know, but we grew up in, you know, believing in God and grandma used to always say, you're going to go to jail or hell if you keep going down that path, selling them drugs, and don't get your lesson.

Grandma, you say lessons. You don't say go to school. you can get your lesson. I'm like, give my lesson. But that used to be valuable to us. Going to church, being a man of God, teaching young people how to be leaders and servants serving in the church and different things like that. I mean, even if you're not a Christian, you can understand service. I learned a long time ago, and the reason why I love this country so much is when I started serving with my life.

When I became a police officer and I had to put my life on the line and I said, you know what, I'm willing to die for people that I do not even know. That made me more patriotic. That made me feel like I have value. And the problem is... that without God, and without serving others, our young people don't feel like they have value, and they gain value from gangs, listening to Cardi B, twerking and doing all this other crazy stuff, and they see the value there.

And that doesn't get you far in life. That's not going to make you successful. That's not going to put you in a position where you really want to be.