ANOTHER GILDED AGE...

THE WHOLE WORLD IS THE STAGE... AS WE EXIST INSIDE OF THE PRISON OF ANOTHER GILDED AGE...

THEY ARE BURNING THE HOUSE DOWN WITH US IN IT.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Trump said that we are in a golden age. They told you a golden age was coming. Didn't they? They stood behind podiums and pressed microphones to their lips and said the words out loud. The golden age of America is here. And I need you to sit with that for a second. Not because it is true, but because they crackers believe it. See, the first time they call something a golden age, Mark Twain had to correct them, and he said, No, that ain't gold. That's guilt. G-I-L-T. Guilt, a thin layer of gold paint overwrought. Guilt a thin layer of gold paint overwrought. He called it the Gilded Age because underneath the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the monuments they built to themselves and to traders. There were broken bodies, exploited labor, displaced people, a population that was formerly free, but functionally in chains. Black people were free then too on paper, free to be convicted, free to be sharecropped, free to be terrorized out of every dollar they earned and every vote they tried to cast. Formally free, functionally dependent. And here we are, and they are using the same words again. Building a golden age. For who? Because right now, black unemployment just hit seven point three percent, the highest since twenty twenty one. Inflation is at 3.8%, and it's not landing evenly. It never lands evenly. It lands on the people who spend the highest percentage of their income on food, on gas, on rent, on utilities, on staying alive. Mortgage rates climbed to 6.65%, pushing home ownership further out of reach for the same people who were redlined in the 1930s, denied GI Bill benefits in the 1940s, blockbusted in the 1960s, and subprimed in 2008. Three and a half million people just lost their SNAP benefits. The Federal Reserve confirmed it. American families skipping meals. And while they skip meals, one man, one man became a trillionaire, Elon Musk. One trillion dollars in one pair of hands. While the bottom eighty-five percent watch their wages stagnate or decline. A golden age, for who? For who? I don't come to you quoting Scripture to perform religion. I come to you quoting Scripture because the pattern is undeniable. Deuteronomy twenty eight verse sixty six and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee, and thou shalt fear day and night, and thou shalt have none assurance of thy life. Read that again slowly. Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee. That is not ancient. That is a black mother checking her son's location at eleven PM. That is a black professional watching DEI dissolve and wondering if their position survived the quarter. That is a black woman walking into a hospital to give birth, three to four times more likely to die than the woman in the next room, knowing the statistics before she gets there. That is the daily grinding, relentless uncertainty of existing in a system that was not built for your survival and being told while it crushes you that you are living in a golden age. Man, a nation which thou knowest not shall eat up the fruit of thy land and all thy labors. Fourteen trillion dollars in American wealth built by black laborer. Never never fourteen trillion dollars built by black labor. Never shared. The stranger within thee shall get up above the very high, and thou shalt come down very low. Black medium wealth twenty four thousand dollars, white medium wealth one hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars. Thou shalt serve thine enemies in hunger and in thirst, and in nakedness and in want of all things. Thirteen cents an hour. That's what prison labor pays in twenty twenty six. Under the Thirteenth Amendment, loopholes that say slavery is abolished except as punishment for crime. Except they left themselves an exception. And then they built the largest prison system on earth. Five percent of the world's population, twenty-five percent of its prisoners, and fill it with the people they needed to keep the exception alive. And here's what the gilded age doesn't want you to know. Every single time this pattern has played out, it has consumed itself every single time. The first gilded age collapsed into labor revolts, antitrust movements, and the progressive era. Reconstruction was destroyed, yes, but the destruction created the pressure that forced the civil rights movement into existence. Jim Crow lasted decades until the children and grandchildren of the people it crushed burned it down with boycott, with boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and a refusal to keep living inside the lie. Concentrated, unaccountable power does not sustain itself, it cannot, because a system built entirely on extraction eventually runs out of things to extract. And right now they are extracting from the poor, from black professionals, from the middle class, from black women, from their own base whom grocery bills are raising, arising while they are told to clap for a monument. They are building an art of Trump on Memorial Bridge with a billion dollars in taxpayers' money, while families skip meals. That is not a golden age, that is a house with a fresh coat of paint and termites in every wall. So when they stand at that podium and say golden age, I do not argue with them, I do not perform outrage for the algorithm, I don't beg them to see what they refuse to see. I do what I have done for thirty years. I hold my nine ether gaze, unbroken, uncompromised, unedited, and I speak clearly, calmly with my whole chest to the people who are still listening in one hundred and thirty-two countries, whom hear the frequency beneath the noise, who know the difference between gold and guilt. The golden age they are declaring is the gilded age they cannot see. And the people they are trying to erase, we are still here, the nine ether gaze intact, my voice intact, my memory intact, and we have always been the ones who outlast the collapse not because we were spared, but because we were built for what they cannot survive. That's yours, my listening family. I wanted you to know exactly what is happening in America. The Empire is burning. The house is burning down with us in it. I do not hate, I elevate.