Transcript: Officer Tatum on TRIGGERnometry Podcast

So we had a dynamic of seeing both sides of it growing up.

And football in Texas is a big deal, right? You go to church and you play football. And so that’s what we did growing up. Me and my brother were both All-Americans. We went to Dunbar High School, which is a school in the inner city. A lot of violence, but a lot of talent comes from that school.

High School Football Success

My brother and I were US Army All-Americans. In the context of United States football, that means you’re the top player in the entire nation. So my brother led the way. He was a year ahead of me. He went and played for the University of Texas. I came out of college and played for the University of Arizona.

And the interesting thing is that going to Arizona, Arizona was a terrible team, right? My brother went to Texas. Texas in Austin won a national championship. My brother was there. Five or six guys go to the NFL almost every single year.

And for some reason, it’s not really some reason, I wanted to go to Texas. And as an All-American, I had a scholarship to go to just about every university. And Texas is the only school that did not offer me a scholarship because of my brother’s class. They offered all of the top defensive backs in his class. Six of them were All-Americans. So they didn’t have any space for me when I came out.

We ventured into me playing running back or another position to try to get me on the team, but it never manifested. And my high school defensive back coach one day told me, “Have you ever thought about University of Arizona?”

Choosing the University of Arizona

When you are an All-American athlete, you will have, the size of this table is deepest from the top to the floor, full of letters from universities coming after you, sending you letters, trying to get you to come to their university. So he had mentioned University of Arizona. He’s like, “You need to take a look at University of Arizona. It’s a hidden gem.”

One of the best college football coaches in the nation was Coach Mike Stoops. At the time he coached at Oklahoma and he had become the head coach there. One of my favorite athletes growing up was Sean Taylor. He played at University of Miami. And a defensive back coach at University of Miami who coached him was also a Stoops brother. He was Coach Stoops’ younger brother. He had gone to Arizona.

So my favorite player and the coach that coached my favorite player was at Arizona. And one of the best coaches had become the head coach. So it sparked my interest. I went back into my bin full of all these letters and I started pulling them out. And University of Arizona kind of stood out to me.

Their defense went from being the worst in the league to being one of the best in the league. And I said, “You know what? This is an opportunity for me to go to a university and play early and go to the NFL.” That was my dream.

College Struggles

And I get there. And of course, I came from a kind of a rough background, so my attitude was bad. You guys wouldn’t even recognize me, to be honest, from back then. I had gold teeth in my mouth, I got tattoos all over me, and I had a terrible attitude.

So as soon as I get there, I get in the doghouse pretty quickly because I didn’t like the coaches yelling at me and the things that they would say would spark me. I’m talking about throwing my helmet, wanting to fight people. And so I didn’t come to the situation prepared, and I was in the doghouse. I didn’t play much in college. It was very tumultuous.

And coming from being an All-American football player, being the guy, to going to a university and riding the bench and never really playing, being in the doghouse was just devastating for me. And it really brought me to my faith.

Finding Faith

Because growing up, believing in God, being a Christian my whole life, I wasn’t very serious about it when I was younger. But when I got to college and everything had fell apart, it really drove me to want to find my faith in God. So in 2008, which was my sophomore, junior year at the university, I got saved. I became a Christian. And it really changed my life personally, but it didn’t change my football career. My football career was still going south fast.

And so my career, I’d never played a start of a single game. I played special teams. And although I was one of the best athletes on the team by far, that was a very, very difficult path for me going through college.

The 2010 NFL Draft

So by the end of my college career, I was such a good athlete. Even though I didn’t play, I still had an agent and I still was in the 2010 NFL Draft. And I never forget this, and it’s a lot to the story, and we can go back and hit a couple of these points because I had a young son when I was, or at least my fiancée was pregnant when I was in college during this period of time.

So I get out, my agent tells me that the Oakland Raiders were going to draft me in the sixth or the seventh round, which is still pretty impressive to not play at all. And I get to the draft, I threw a draft party at my house. My whole family shows up, and we’re watching the draft.

And the way the draft works in the NFL is that you have day one and day two back then. Now they do it over multiple days. But day one was one through four rounds, which means that you’re the top player in the nation all the way to one of the top competitive players. And then the second day is the fifth through the seventh round, which you are kind of a later player. Either you are really, really good and they get a chance to steal you later because you have a little baggage or drama, or you’re kind of a decent player that’s just good enough to make the draft.

So I’m in the house. We got it on the TV. All of my family is thinking, “He made it. I’m going to make it out the ghetto.” I’m the ticket to my family. Because nobody in my family has ever made that much money. Nobody in my family has ever been that famous.

Draft Day Heartbreak

We’re sitting there watching the draft. My fiancée is pregnant at the time with my youngest, now my oldest son. And I’m watching the draft go. My agent calls me. It’s the sixth round. They’re picking out of order. He’s concerned. He’s like, “They’re picking a defensive back. They told me they wouldn’t pick a defensive back.”

Long story short, man, they get to the seventh round, Oakland Raiders go to pick, and they pick a guy from the University of Michigan. And that’s when I knew it was over. I didn’t get picked.

And in front of my family, I’m embarrassed. Everybody’s there. They’re like, “What’s happening?” I don’t know how to tell them. They don’t know how to look at me and say, “We’re going to go home now because you didn’t get drafted.”

And I remember running out of the house. I was crying. I ripped my shirt in the front yard. And I was devastated. And as a Christian, I was mad at God. I said, “You know what, God? How could you do this to me? I’ve been faithful to you all this time. I’m one of the best athletes to play college football at that time as far as athleticism.”

Athletic Achievements

I ran a 4.3 in a 40. I did the bench 26 times, which is better than almost all of the guys in the draft. Now, at my draft pro day, I didn’t run a 4.3, but that was my fastest time running a 4.3. I was a big safety, 6’2″, 215. I was one of the biggest safeties in the draft. A 44-inch vertical leap, 11’7″ on a broad jump. And if you understand the combine context, this was very impressive.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, 44-inch vertical, that’s NBA vertical.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, that’s the NBA. That’s one of the top vertical leaps. And I did numbers like this when I was a freshman coming out of high school. That’s how athletic I was. And because of the drama that happened on the football team, when it came to my pro day, I didn’t train. I didn’t have the right training or whatever. So my stats were kind of mediocre by the time I got to the draft.

However, the totality of what my athleticism was was far beyond what most NFL players were. And so that was really hurtful to me. And I remember being mad at God and saying, “You know what, God? How could you do this to me?” But God had a bigger plan, man.

The NFL Lockout

And so after that happened, I tried out for another year. They had the NFL lockout the day of my tryouts with the NFL teams the following year. And in the NFL lockout, you cannot train as a free agent in front of any of the scouts. So I paid $400, trained in Texas, went to Arizona.

Show up the day of, they locked the NFL draft out. I remember them shutting the door, this big gate to the field. They shut the door and said, “Look, free agents, we can’t even look at you. I’m sorry.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I…

BRANDON TATUM: And I’m like, “We can’t be on the field? I can’t just be out there? Maybe I can do some bench press or something in the locker room and show you guys what I could do.” And they’re like, “We can’t see anything from you.” And I was devastated again.

A New Path Forward

But God always has a plan. And I learned that over time because right after that, I had my son. And I had to make a decision as a man to say I have to be a good father. I cannot continue to chase something that’s not really yielding results. I got a kid.

And so I applied for everything in the city of Tucson, which is where I lived at the time. And the police department was a part of that application. Now, growing up, I didn’t like police. My first interaction with police, I got arrested when I was 8 years old for smoking marijuana in a vacant house. And it was actually me and six of my other cousins. And it was a very terrible…

FRANCIS FOSTER: Hang on a second. Eight years old and you were smoking weed?

From Troubled Youth to Police Officer

BRANDON TATUM: Eight years old is when I stopped smoking weed because of this situation. So when I was seven, my older cousins, we would go over to the house and they would buy weed for us and we would all smoke. Now imagine a 7-year-old smoking weed. I mean it took a toll on me. Now I can’t remember nothing because of that. But that’s kind of how we grew up.

And so I remember the cops that day, we were going to the vacant house and we knew better. You know, the grass was this high. We knew it was a vacant house. And of course we told my dad and my family that we didn’t know. My cousins kind of set us up in this situation, but we knew better. We were in the house, there were needles everywhere because people would go and squat in the house and do drugs. And that’s kind of why we went there, so we could smoke with just six, seven of us, we could smoke in privacy.

And I’ll never forget, and I wrote this in my book, that we were sitting there in a circle, we were smoking like a Black and Mild. We were smoking those while we rolled the blunts and we were getting ready to smoke and the cops burst in the door, in the front, in the side, they had guns drawn on us. It was dramatic. And so that was my first experience with cops and growing up black in America you’re taught to hate the police.

You’re taught that they are racist white people that just have to get you. But fast forward to becoming a man being saved. God kind of changed my perspective on these things. So I applied for the police position and they ended up calling me back. Now I knew nothing about real policing. So I remember thinking to myself like, let me give this a try. Let me be open minded. I’m going to do a ride along and see if I really like this.

The Life-Changing Ride Along

And I don’t know how much you guys know about law enforcement in America, but as a civilian you can do a ride along and just ride in a shift with a police officer and you get to experience everything they experience except for if they have to shoot somebody or they get into a shootout or something. They have you sit in the car and wait so you don’t get killed. But you do sign a waiver that if I get killed, it’s not the police fault, right?

So I do a ride along with a guy, Sean Payne, I’ll never forget. He’s one of the greatest men I ever met. And we do this ride along, and you got to think, I’m an athlete. I’m a tough guy. I grew up in the hood. So I’m like, this is going to be a cakewalk for me. First call we take was an elderly woman on the side of the road. We helped her change a flat tire. I remember looking at Sean and being like, you know, this is a simple job. I think I could do this. It’s not like, what, you know, like they have this big crazy show in America. They probably show it all over the world. It’s called Cops. And as a kid, you watch this all the time. But that’s not really how it happens, right? It’s a lot more to it.

So we do the ride along. We go to that call. The very next call was a suicidal subject. It was a young kid actively trying to commit suicide. He was cutting his wrist. He had the knife in his hand.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And.

BRANDON TATUM: And me and Sean get in the car, we take off, and we’re going 80, 70, 80 miles per hour down residential streets like this. And literally, my heart is about to jump out of my chest because I had never driven that fast in any context. And we’re dodging through traffic. I remember we get to an intersection. People don’t know how to move to the right, because when a siren’s on, you’re supposed to move to the right, let the emergency vehicle go. People are panicking. They’re stopping in the middle of the street. We’re swerving around people. We’re going through red lights.

And we finally get to the scene. We’re running through this apartment complex, trying to find a unit, because they didn’t really know which unit it was. We get to the unit, everything is quiet. And they warn me. They say, have you ever seen a person who had been killed? Have you ever seen a person who’s, because they thought the kid may have gotten a gun and shot itself in the head. So they’re preparing me for this gruesome sight. And now my heart is racing because I’ve never seen anybody dead before.

Witnessing Real Police Work

And they go. They let me sit at the end of the staircase, which is about two or three doors down from where they’re dealing with the subject. They force entry. They kick the door in. They go in, and then they let me come in and watch. And this kid is at a table like this with a knife in his hand. Blood is everywhere. And he’s cutting his wrist. And thank God he’s doing it incorrectly, because if he’d done it correctly, he’d have been dead before we got there. But he’s cutting his wrist.

And the crazy thing that happened here is that they’re beating on the door first, and nobody answered. So that’s why they thought he killed himself. When they kick the door in, there’s a bunch of kids, and I call them kids. They were probably in their teens. They were teenagers. And they were all asleep on the floor, making little pallets, like a sleepover. And so we’re stepping over these kids to get to him in the back room.

And Sean Payne was able to convince him to drop the knife. And then they ended up taking him into custody and taking him to what we call the crisis response center for people who want to commit suicide or danger to themselves and others. And I remember getting back in the car. Because Shawn was the lead police officer, so he didn’t have to do most of the investigation. He just led the action. And then he was able to get back in the car and take me.

And I remember getting back in the car, and my heart is racing from the drive. I haven’t even processed this kid with blood everywhere and them convincing him to drop the knife and how dramatic that was. And we get back in the car, my heart is racing. And Sean gets in the car, and he resumes the conversation we were having back at the traffic stop with the other lady. And he’s like, “What were you saying about your family?” And I’m stunned. I’m like, what family? I can’t even think straight.

And I remember in that moment, because I had idolized football players, right? They were the greatest people, right? To me, in my purview, these were the elite people of society. And I remember looking at Sean and being like, this guy’s a f*ing hero. How does he compose himself after all of this drama? And I remember asking him, “Dude, do you do stuff like this every day?” He laughed at me. He’s like, “Yeah, we do this every day.” And I remember in that moment, I said, I want to be a hero like Sean, and I want to be a cop now.

Building a Career in Law Enforcement

And so I finished the process. I became a cop. And of course, because I was an athlete, you know, I broke all the records at the academy with the, we had to run a 200 yard, the vertical leap. I think I still have the record for the vertical leap. Nobody was ever close. And it was a great career, man. It was a very big change for me. But it was right on par with being an athlete. You know, you have the team camaraderie, the adrenaline rush.

Every day was out of control because like Sean said, we do stuff like this every day. I think every single day on my shift I probably pull my gun out at least one time. Almost every shift, whether it’s clearing a house or whether it’s a combatant, every day chasing people down, fighting, I mean, fist fights. Almost every week I had a fist fight with somebody and it was very dynamic.

I worked the night shift, which is the fun shift, right? The daytime, all the normies are up and the kids going to school. At night, it’s just you and the bad guys. Because every rational person’s asleep at midnight and 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock in the morning. And I accelerated through the department pretty quickly because of my demeanor and my athleticism and how hard I was willing to work and working well with a team.

I became a spokesperson for the police department with two years on, which had never happened before. And that was a pretty fun position. Then I joined the SWAT team. I was a field training officer. I trained new officers how to be officers, which was another dynamic. You know, riding in the car with a rookie cop and letting them drive. And they don’t know how to drive, they don’t know how to go to the cars, they don’t know how to read the signs.

When you’re a cop, you don’t use GPS whatsoever. You have to understand hundred blocks. So when we were trying to find this location, you know, I knew right away which side of the street it’s on based on the numbers. And if you understand the grid of a city, it’s pretty mathematical. You can find an address in the grid which is off your memory, knowing 100 blocks. And so that’s kind of how we had to do, which was very difficult for younger officers. But I go on to do that. And then while I was a cop, I became political.

The Journey from Democrat to Republican

BRANDON TATUM: Growing up black in America, you’re a Democrat. Republicans are racist white people is what you grew up knowing. So I kind of still had a little bit of that Democrat mentality when I became a cop. I voted for Barack Obama. And I was still leaning towards racism as an issue and different things like that.

But hanging around my guys on the department, they began to kind of call me out on that. They were like, look, the things that you believe aren’t the things that they’re representing. You know, look at what their platform is. You’re a Christian, you believe, you’re pro-life. You know, you believe in lower taxes. That’s not what they’re preaching.

And then Barack Obama, and this is what just completely eliminated my thoughts and support for the Democrat Party, was that he was bashing police officers. It was the Cambridge Police Department who they ended up arresting a guy who was actually a homeowner. But the scenario was very complex, right? This guy is going through the window of his own house, but the neighbors don’t know it’s his house. He’s breaking out the window. He gets in, and then when the cops get there, they just, hey, sir, this is your house. He goes, this is my house. He gets belligerent and he won’t show an ID.

And they’re like, look, dude, we’re just trying to check and see if this is your house. And then it got to a confrontation. Barack Obama commented on that without knowing any information, he bashed those police officers. And then when the truth came out, because the body camera came out, he never recanted his statement. He would go story to story to story, bashing police officers and never recanting when the information came out that he was wrong.

And I remember thinking to myself, I will never in my life support anybody that can’t support the men and women that wear that uniform. And I just said, I can’t look at the Democrats the same. I’m going to start looking at Republicans.

Discovering Ben Carson and Donald Trump

Ben Carson was my favorite and I’m sure you guys are familiar with him. One of the greatest men to ever live in American history, world history, actually, when it comes to him separating conjoined twins from the head and, you know, infants. And he was running for office, and Donald Trump was running for office.

Now, the context of Donald Trump, I don’t know what the people are smoking today, but back then, before Donald Trump ran for office, he was the man. Donald Trump was world known. He’s, you know, a real estate guy that can make a lot of money. Everybody loved Trump. Nobody said anything bad about Trump unless they were jealous of his success.

So he’s running for office, and you got a serious man that’s a Christian, and you got Donald Trump. And at the time, Donald Trump, to me, it was like he was kind of mocking the political process, right? He’d go in, he’d say whatever you want to say. He’s making these people look stupid because they got to read a script and they got to say all these things, right? And he’s just saying whatever comes to his mind.

And in my mind, he was just doing that, getting fame, you know, he’s on television, name recognition, and he’s going to go off and be a billionaire and doing his own thing. But Ben Carson drops out of the race, and he endorsed Trump. And I’m like, Ben Carson is not a fool. It’s got to be some reason why he’s endorsing Trump, maybe Trump. And he was leading in the polls at the time. Donald Trump was.

The Trump Rally That Changed Everything

So in Tucson, Donald Trump has an event, he has a rally. And so I worked the night shift and I said, I’m going to stay up and I’m going to go to this rally. I need to see if this guy’s real. I mean, he’s really serious about this or he’s just a celebrity going on tour.

And in the media during that time, Donald Trump was considered a racist. They showed these videos of him kicking black people out of his rallies. And it was this whole sentiment of the white supremacists who were backing this guy and this racist guy who’s now doing all these things.

But I get there and the protesters were out of control. They were screaming at people. Somebody yelled at me and said I was a white supremacist. And you know how stupid that is. I mean, probably the only black guy there. I’m a white supremacist. And I get into the event, so I see how crazy and lunatic they burning incense. I mean, they trying to block the doorway. All my cops, all my cop friends are there trying to protect people. They got to lock arms so they don’t bum rush the doors. I mean, it was insane because Hillary Clinton had just come the day before her and Bernie Sanders did at the same venue. Nobody cared. Nobody showed up. There was no confrontation or nothing. They just came and went.

But for some reason, when Trump was there, they were acting a fool. We get into the event, everybody was nice, everybody was cool. It was like America. Everybody was blended. You had black, you had white, you had veterans, you had all this stuff. It was very different than what the media was showing.

Donald Trump comes out, he’s a rock star. Everybody loves him. He said everything that I believed in that I wanted America to be. Donald Trump was saying those things, and he kind of won my vote. And I said, you know what? The media was so deceptive and the lies that had been told was so ridiculous that I said, I’m going to make a video about it.

Going Viral

Now I didn’t make a video because I was a social media guy. I was not on social media whatsoever. I would just post scriptures on social media. I was a cop, and as a cop, you have to avoid social media stuff altogether. So I just didn’t want to type out my whole experience on some news thread. So I said, I’m going to make a video. And I made a video, went to sleep, and thought nothing of it.

I wake up to 35 missed calls. Now in my mind, I’m like, oh, I missed my shift. Am I fired? What happened? I didn’t think nothing about that rally or that video. I started to look through my phone. I see Sean Hannity, the Fox and Friends, the people that are calling me. The BBC called me, and I could see it on the call ID. And at the time, I wasn’t into politics like that, so I had no idea. I never even watched Fox News. I never, I didn’t know who Sean Hannity was, none of those things.

So I get to, I call the police station and I’m like, hey, what happened? Why are these people calling me? And they’re like, you made some video. And I still didn’t know what they were talking about because I didn’t think nothing of this rally. And I’m thinking to myself, what video did I make? Am I in trouble? Am I going to get fired? And then they dawn on me like, oh, that Trump rally video. And she’s like, yeah, you went to a rally or something? I’m like, oh, shoot.

And that kind of is where it all started. It went viral, and one reason, because Donald Trump shared it. And I think that at the time, I was one of the only black men who openly said something positive about Donald Trump publicly. And I think that’s why it went viral. And from that point on, I became a Republican, I was a Trump supporter, and I continued to realize that maybe I do have a voice. Maybe I should continue to speak the things that I’m saying.

And I would make Facebook videos live, because I didn’t know how to edit videos. I didn’t know you could make any money off this stuff. I was a cop. I loved being a cop. I wanted to be a chief one day. I thought nothing about social media. But I just kept making these videos and they kept going viral. I did that for about a year.

The Colin Kaepernick Video

And in 2017, Colin Kaepernick, he had done it in 2016 or something like that. This is when that knucklehead was kneeling for the national anthem. And kneeling for the national anthem in America for rational people is blasphemous. You know, not everybody, even to this day, everybody stands for the national anthem. You put your hand on your heart. Even if you don’t like the country or not, it doesn’t matter because the historical context of all that we’ve done in this country is all encapsulated in the national anthem, right? That the strides that we made forward going from slavery to equal opportunity for everybody in America.

And so him doing that was very angering to people like me that love my country and all of that stuff. And so I made a video one day and it’s a deeper story because being a police officer comes with a lot of stresses, you know, and you see the most horrifying things on a day to day basis. I mean, decapitated people, dead children. Nobody calls you when they’re having a good day, right? They’re not inviting you to the wedding. They’re inviting you when somebody got stabbed at the wedding and the marriage is just falling apart.

So it comes with a level of turmoil that matriculates down into every other aspect of your life if you let it get to you. And so at this point, to be honest, and I never really talk about this, but I was in a slight depressed state at this point. I had considered, and not in any meaningful way, right. But I considered, do I even want to live anymore? And it’s some more detailed stuff. I don’t, you know, I don’t want to get too crazy about it, but I was at a very low point, to the point where my dad was calling me and I didn’t answer the phone.

And my parents are like, you’re not answering the phone, something’s wrong, we’re going to fly out there. So my dad had flown out and my stepmom had flown out to Tucson. They came. I had no groceries in the refrigerator. Being a cop, you barely make any money. I was living check to check. And so I’m in this very depressed state. But I’m not telling anybody, right? I’m just kind of accepting it on my own.

And my dad never came out, and they stayed with me, and it made me feel a lot better. They brought me groceries, and so I’m feeling good. We all, my dad, stepmom and me, we all going to take a nap. We had all been out during the day. We going to take a nap. And I’m laying in my bed.

And one of my friends that I became really friends with lived in Australia at the time. And when I made that first viral video, me and him became friends. And he had told me because he had called me right when I was taking a nap, right before I went to sleep. And he said, hey, Brandon, you got to make a video about Colin Kaepernick.

And I said, you know what, man? Everybody’s made videos about him. I don’t need to make an additional video and be just one more person talking about it. One of my friends, James C. Harris, he was a radio guy, he had made a video, had 14 million views. And I’m like, there’s nothing more I need to say about this. You know, I’m going to take a nap and I’ll be done with this stuff.

He said, no, man, there’s something to this. You have a unique perspective. You need to make a video. And I kind of thought about it. I brushed him off. While I’m laying down, I’m texting a guy, arguing with a guy who I played football with, who played in the NFL, who was on my team. We actually played the same position. He played safety at the University of Arizona. Me and him going back and forth.

And he hit me with something that was like, I consider low blow. We’re arguing about Colin Kaepernick. And he tells me, “You just mad cause you didn’t play in the NFL.” Now, you know that all of that came to one bubble when he said it. And I just got infuriated. And it brought in perspective that, you know what? Screw you. Because being a police officer is a lot more honorable and have more integrity than being just a football player.

You know, being a football player, you lose a game, you know, you’re sad, you come back, you play another game. In policing, there’s no, there’s no losing games. You don’t come home, your family will never see you again. And the wins and losses in policing versus football is a different scenario.

So I get mad. I go to the car, put my SWAT hat on, I’m sitting in a hot car in the garage. Because, you know, I’m thinking I’m just going to rant for five minutes. I get in there, man, I do this rant. Didn’t say nothing I wanted to say, right? I had this plan of what I wanted to say during the rant. I do this rant. I didn’t say really nothing I wanted to say. I was just really angry. I get out the car, I go to sleep, take my nap.

I wake up and my phone is going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Every second for, it was doing this for a week straight. That video had gotten 70 million views of me in my car. And I remember riding with my guy Jake, and we were riding and he was driving, and I’m the passenger on duty, and I was just looking at my phone and these notifications are going off and millions of views coming in.

And I remember telling him, dude, I think this is going to change my life. And he was like, you say that about every video you make. I’m like, no, dude, this is crazy. It’s a million views almost every few hours. And it did. It changed my life.

Leaving the Police Force

Because organization out of Anthem, Arizona, which is just north of Phoenix, they, and it was a little backstory because I had met with them before because they were thinking about me doing some work with them while I was a cop. And I wasn’t popular enough for them at the time, right? So then this video gets 70 million views and they call me and they go, hey, we want to offer you a job. We want to offer you to be the spokesperson of Conservative Tribune, was the company at the time, and they were going to pay me $20,000 more a year than I made as a cop.

They bought all of my social media, which was the worst thing that I could have done, but God rescued me. And I’m going to tell you about that. They bought all my social media for like $30,000. Now you got to think I only made $45,000 a year as a cop before taxes. So really I was making about $30,000 or something a year after tax. So the financial offer that they gave me was almost something I couldn’t really refuse.

And they said, look, it’s just a year. If you don’t like it, you can go back to being a cop. And I said, I’m going to give it a try. So I left the police department and some people online, they go, you left because of the Ferris thing? They loved me on the police department. I was the mouthpiece of all the cops that couldn’t speak out.

And the unique part about it, because I was black, and so being a black cop was very different than the white cops, because a white cop would come out and criticize a shooting against a black man, and they call him a racist. I come out and criticize, and they couldn’t call me a racist. It wouldn’t stick. You know, it sounds stupid calling a black man a racist.

And so people on the police department loved me. All my lieutenants, the captains, they were like, keep going, Brandon. Keep telling the truth. So I go, I leave, and I join them. And three months in, Facebook changed their algorithm. They were getting 20,000, about 40,000 concurrent views, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Algorithm Change and Meeting Candace Owens

KONSTANTIN KISIN: When.

BRANDON TATUM: When Facebook changed the algorithm, it went down to 2,000 views concurrent. I mean, they lost. They pretty much lost their company. And this is right around the same time I met Candace Owens. She had hit me up on Twitter at the time, not X. So it was Twitter. She hit me up like, hey. And this is when she first started. She was Red Pill Black. She wasn’t even Candace Owens. She had made some little amateur video, and it was viral.

So her and I were like two viral black conservatives at the time. And we became really good friends. We met. There’s a whole story about the first time we met, and I have to tell you that. But we met and then, so therefore, when they started going out of business, they gave me an ultimatum. They said, look, we promised you a year, so you can stay for the rest of the year. And then we may have to let you go if nothing improves, or you can leave now and we’ll give you back all of your social media for free.

And of course, I was already praying to God, God, please let me get my social media back. I think it’s a mistake. They own everything I have. And at the time when they bought it all, I didn’t have much. So now it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the time, I had 34,000 subscribers on YouTube, 34,000 subscribers on Twitter. And I had a hundred thousand subscribers on Facebook, but my stuff was just blowing up.

And so Candace hits me up because she was begging me to come to Turning Point with Charlie and her. And when they finally was like, hey, we’re going to let you go, I called Candace. I said, hey, I’m free now. I’m a free agent. She’s like, you got to come to Turning Point with me. And I became the, I took about a month off, and I became the Urban Engagement Director. She was the spokesperson or something like that. And then Charlie, obviously ran Turning Point.

So that’s when I transitioned to Turning Point. And from there, it was history. From Turning Point to going on my own. And then I’m where I’m at now. But I got to tell you the story about how I met Candace, because this is just indicative of who Candace is and so who she really is. People don’t really know Candace. They think they know Candace, but Candace, she hit me up. And her family lives in Phoenix, some of her family, her dad, and some family members. And we were very close, even to this day.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Her.

BRANDON TATUM: Her aunt was at my son’s football game yesterday or two days ago. So she said, I want you to meet, and let’s see if we have some connection and we can do content together. So she lands in Mesa. We go to this restaurant. I’m thinking it’s just me and her. So we go. I show up. Her whole family’s there.

And we argued, me, Candace and one of her other family members against the other family members who were leftists, or not even leftists. They were Democrats. And we literally argued until they had to kick us out of the restaurant for like three hours of just arguing and arguing. And that was my first time ever meeting Candace in person.

So fast forward, we’re at Turning Point. We come together. Charlie and us. And then that led me to where I’m at today. I mean, I know it’s a mouthful.

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You set the record for the longest.

BRANDON TATUM: I was thinking, y’all going to stop me at some point.

The Black Conservative Label

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why would we stop you? That was fascinating.

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s a wonderful story packed with twists and turns. You know, starting off as a football player and what you call yourself, which is a black conservative, which is really interesting because when you came out, came out as it were, not literally like that, but you know what I mean. And you said, you know, they could never call a black man racist or that stupid. I was like, yeah, they can. I’ve seen it happen loads.

But why does that happen? Why is it the moment someone who is black or an ethnic minority says an opinion that is mildly conservative, all of a sudden that epithet is held at you?

BRANDON TATUM: Right? Because at first they couldn’t. Now they can morph themselves into whatever they want to try to claim that you are the black face of white supremacy, is what they say. I mean, I literally had DL Hughley just yesterday say that I’m a voice for pushing white supremacist talking points, which is the stupidest thing you ever say.

But when it first happened, when Trump was, it was an anomaly. Trump was never considered a racist then they made him a racist, but then all the black people support him. People hated on you, but they really couldn’t really put their finger on it. They couldn’t just call you a racist. That was a dynamic that didn’t exist at the time.

But then, now it is absolutely crazy what they say now, because they were losing the battle of ideas when the anomalies occurred. Like if a person who was gay was supporting Republicans or supporting Christians or something, it was like their mind started popping because that’s not in their bingo cards. And now they’ve morphed into finding a position to put you in now.

Now they can openly say that you’re working for the white man and you’re working for white supremacy and you’re a traitor to your race, or you’re a traitor to your gender, or you’re a traitor to the movement. And they’ve been able to morph that into reality. I think it’s completely ridiculous. But they don’t operate in reality. They operate off emotions and they weaponize empathy to get the people that they don’t like that are saying the things that contradict their entire existence.

They try to pigeonhole you. So people don’t talk about you anymore. Or at least they have a negative perception. They don’t want to hear what you have to say. So now I’m framed as a black man who don’t know my identity. I’m now a black man who love white people more than I love my own people. Like they say that I’m lost, I’m a slave on the plantation, which is obviously the complete opposite of what the reality is.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But what I don’t understand is how they don’t have just, it’s not intelligence, but just a self reflection to go, oh, what I’m saying is racist. Like some of them openly use racial slurs.

BRANDON TATUM: Oh yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you see white people doing it.

BRANDON TATUM: Oh yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: To black people because they have a conservative voice. And you go, my man, this is not a good look.

The Hierarchy of Victimhood

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, we don’t count anymore to them in their perspective of hierarchy, of victimhood. We don’t count anymore. If you’re a liberal and a black person and a white person say anything to you that could be an affront to your identity to them, they will counsel white people over that.

But if you’re on this side, you don’t count anymore as a black man, you don’t count anymore as being gay or whatever you are that’s opposed to their ideology. You don’t get the exceptions anymore. Somehow racism is a big thing in this world and discrimination against blacks is a thing to them. But then if you’re black and conservative, it don’t matter. They don’t care. They will discriminate against you. They will be racist against you, black and white.

And there’s another dynamic. And I’m sure we’ll get to that point now if you support Israel. Oh, it’s, I have never had people be more openly racist against me until I supported Israel. So now that’s another, like we go on the table of perspective is like, you’re conservative now, you voted for Trump, you have no exceptions. But they still kind of hold off a little bit. You support Israel, all bets are off. They can say they want to kill you and everybody will turn the blind eye to it.

The Shift in Left-Wing Rhetoric

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s so many, you bringing up so many things that I want to, like, we’ve got Israel, we’ve got Candace, we’ve got. But there’s something interesting. I mean, I feel like you guys are having conversations maybe a couple of years old, because the new left, the Mamdani type of people, they’ve moved on from the racial stuff. I noticed they don’t play that game anymore. They’re talking about economic inequality, which I think is a real issue in both our countries.

But I wanted to ask you about Mamdani, because it looks like he’s going to be the mayor of New York. And you’re a former police officer, and this is a guy who is on record over and over and over saying, defund the police. First of all, before you give your opinion about that, what would happen in America if you defund the police? If you actually don’t have as many police officers?

The Reality of Defunding the Police

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, we’ll turn into a third world country. I mean, almost. I don’t know. Give it six months. Well, let’s talk about defunding the police because the politicians say things that are not real, like they use the funding. There’s two sides of it. There’s the rhetoric of defunding the police, and there’s actually defunding the police.

A lot of times they use the rhetoric, but they never really defund the police because it’s fiscal year funding, right? So they go, “We’re going to defund the police. We’re going to defund the police.” But the police funding already exists. So they tell people that to get them to vote for them. And then in reality, they never really defund the police.

But then there’s people who actually do defund the police, which, and they lie about statistical data points. Because when you defund the police, therefore you have less police out, less arrests are happening, therefore the crime has gone down. Wait a minute. That’s not really what’s happening. It’s just that you don’t have enough police to actually stop people from robbing other people.

And when the people have lost trust that they can’t call the police and get a real response, they quit calling. They don’t mean that they stop getting robbed. They don’t mean people aren’t breaking in their cars. They don’t mean that sexual assault is not happening. They don’t mean that shots are not being fired in the middle of the street. It’s just that they’re not reporting because they’re not responding anymore.

When you defund the police, you demoralize the police. Because the rhetoric is demoralization even before you actually take the money. When you show the police department, men and women that go out and put their life on the line every single day, putting their goals, aspirations, lifestyle, family aside, to protect people who are perfect strangers, when your city says they don’t really care about your service, it becomes demoralizing.

Then cops are saying, “Well, they don’t care about me, so I’m not going to go above and beyond to do my job. I’m just going to answer the call when they call.” Because in America, there’s a thing called proactive policing, which is the biggest proponent of successful policing that exists. That means that before a person calls after they’ve gotten robbed or raped or something, you are out patrolling and looking and identifying things that could be an issue. Stopping people that are suspicious, and then you find out that that person is wanted for murder. You know, that proactive side.

The Cascade Effect of Police Demoralization

So when they say they’re going to defund you, the morale drops. Cops stop doing their job in, you know, as far as they begin to do the bare minimum. Then you have cops, people that don’t want to apply for the police department. So you’re left with two things when it comes to that category: good cops don’t show up. The bad people who just want a job or they got power trips, they show up to the job.

So now you’ve influxed bad cops into the scenario, and good cops don’t want to join. And good cops with veteran experience begin to retire early. That’s before you ever take the money. Then when you get to the point where you’re starting to take the money, you are now depleted and you cannot recruit.

And so you have cops that are disgruntled, waiting to retire, cops that don’t want to work. Then you cut the resources back from policing so it’s less cops. Then you can’t recruit any cops, so it’s even less cops. Then the public is now running amok. People are committing way more crimes. And then they want to refund the police, but you have no police because you’ve lost trust.

So that whole scenario is so detrimental to the success of policing in America that some places never recover, some places will never recover. They will never have adequate law enforcement. Because you cannot have a mayor say all the things that he said, lose the trust from NYPD, and then all of a sudden, he says, “No, I want to start recruiting again.” And they don’t believe you. You’re not going to really be, you’re a politician running your mouth. You’re not really going to do anything for us.

So if in fact all of the cities who are saying these things actually defunded the police, we wouldn’t have a country anymore. And I think people don’t understand that. And one reason is because they don’t know what cops do on a day to day basis. Thwarting the people before they kill you is something that police do. Actively arresting people and putting them in jail, people who would commit habitual crimes is something that they do.

The barking dog call, the disturbance call, neighbors having conflict that will lead to violence if there’s no intervention. Mentally ill people in this country running around everywhere we go. We were just driving over here and a guy sticking his middle finger up at, I don’t know, ghosts. That guy’s mentally ill. And the public is not equipped to deal with a person like that one to one, right?

Meaning you go to a bus stop and this guy’s crazy, what do you do? Then he stabs and kills you. Right? Versus a cop will pull over and check on him and be able to take him to a facility if necessary.

The Political Weaponization of Police Reform

So you know, we’re in a bad precedent if we begin to have mayors leading these cities. Because it’s not based on reality, it’s based on a virtue signal. It’s based on saying, “Hey, hey, people, constituents, let me play on your emotion, your victimhood. You are being mistreated by police. They’re racist. Yeah, we’re going to defund them. We’re going to bring public servants or not public servants, we’re going to bring civilians in to take over these things where police are too aggressive.” Yeah, that makes sense.

And they weaponize emotionalism against people to get the vote and then they get in the office and they fed over people. And what they do is they don’t fix it. They continue to blame other people for the fallout. Now Trump is the problem because he’s bringing in the National Guard. No, no, he’s not. You guys fed over the people by defunding police and all of that.

And now the crime is out of control and now the federal government has to get involved or the people will just be inhabitable, uninhabitable. They can’t live in an environment like that. And then, you know, it goes, the cycle goes and then the communities go to crap and it’s a negative scenario all around.

The Origins of Police Perception in Black Communities

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And where does this perception come from? I mean you talked when you were talking about your own story that growing up you were taught the police are racist, the police hate. You had bad experiences yourself with. Is the perception of the police being racist? Does that come from a history of being racist or present that there are some people who are racist within the police? Is it more of a myth? Where do you come down on that?

BRANDON TATUM: It’s a multitude of things. There are situations where people experience real racism from police officers, right? And then you have the dynamic of white cops patrolling black communities. And there’s a dynamic of racism that has occurred previously. And there’s also a dynamic of people being racially insensitive. Meaning if you don’t live in a community, you don’t know community norms and therefore conflict happens between people and there’s miscommunication.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BRANDON TATUM: A cop enforces the law, but they don’t understand that. For instance, black people have cultural differences just like any other culture. And if you don’t understand the cultural difference, you’re insensitive to the cultural difference. And people will see that as an affront versus seeing it as we’re just different.

So a cop may be heavy handed on a scenario that in the community is not as big of a deal. Like loud demeanor. Black people are loud. Not all, but it’s a thing, right? Black people talk loud. They are more, I don’t know, I want to say flamboyant to a certain degree. They’re more, I won’t say aggressive. It comes across as more aggressive. But black people in the community don’t see it as aggressive, right?

Loud talking, loud music, some people are sagging their pants and in the community it’s not as big of a deal. But when you’re a cop and you never lived in the community, now you see that, “Oh, that’s a threat.” And the miscommunication has happened over time. The cultural dynamic and miscommunication has happened over time.

And people pass that trauma down through policing when policing has changed a lot, right? It’s no longer police are enforcing segregation laws. But my grandmother still feels the effects of segregation laws. And grandmother passed it down to your dad and your dad passed it down to your son. But policing has changed. There’s no Jim Crow laws anymore. Policing has become a lot more dynamic, there’s a lot more accountability.

Inherited Trauma and Modern Policing

So some of it is coming from a history of racism in part and a history of a dynamic of racial clash without understanding. And the white man is the enforcer, the black man is on the other side of it. And I think some of those things matriculate down in a way that it shouldn’t have. I wish that people would mold with society and have open communication, but it doesn’t occur like that.

So my people in my community telling me to hate police come from something that I’ve never experienced and that’s not even real in my time. And I now see the world through a lens of somebody else’s trauma that I don’t really have a real experience with. So now when I see a cop that pulled me over, I’m looking through the lens of my grandmother, great grandmother, and I’m thinking, “Oh, they’re pulling me over because I’m black, right? Because this is what they do.”

When in reality that’s not what they do anymore. This is not a reality, but I have made it a reality which creates hate in my heart for cops. And then if it’s unchecked, you begin to teach your kids the same scenario. And then all it takes for politicians and the media is to weaponize the emotional experience.

The Michael Brown Case and Media Narratives

KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is the thing I was going to ask you about, man, because I remember I was completely apolitical. I was coming to the US and must have been 2014 when Michael Brown was shot.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I was staying with friends of mine who were black and they were talking about it on social media all the time, on Facebook. I see it every day, all this. So I was thinking, let me read up on it. So I read. I spent, I think a whole week. I didn’t have that good a job at the time. I had lots of spare time reading the transcript of the grand jury thing. Right. And I was thinking, and I kind of realized what the media was saying and what actually happened according to all the evidence were two very different things. And then case after case after case and look.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Correct.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Obviously, George Floyd was such a huge explosion in our country as well as yours. And to this day, I don’t know what happened. Right. But what I do know, everyone thinks it was a racist incident. No one has ever explained to me what the evidence of that is. Now, maybe there is evidence of that, I don’t know. But I haven’t heard it.

The Media Manipulation of Police Shootings

BRANDON TATUM: There’s no evidence of it. It’s the same traumatic experience passed down the lenses of racism, applied media manipulation for views, clicks, and pushing propaganda. Michael Brown. See, this is how I became very important in the space, because cops can’t talk about this stuff, but I could talk about it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So as a cop, you mean white cops?

BRANDON TATUM: White cops can’t talk about it, which is like the majority of cops. Well, majority of cops are the majority of the country. When you go to the south, there’s way more black cops. I mean, 50% of the Georgia Police department is black. So in the south, where most black people live, but the majority of the country is white.

So as a cop, when you listen to the story and it says Michael Brown had “hands up, don’t shoot,” and was executed in the middle of the street, the cop walked up to him in a black neighborhood and shot him in the head. Now the media wants to push the narrative because you know how crazy that sound. You know how many people are going to be mad. Uproar, clicks, watching. They want to see what’s going on. They manipulated that.

As a cop, you’re like, that doesn’t seem reasonable. A white cop in a black neighborhood has a young man with his hands up in front of everybody and walks over and shoots him in the head and executes him. That didn’t happen, right? And so a person like me is like, man, let me look into this a little more. But people who are low information people are susceptible to media manipulation. They jump hook, line and sinker.

Some of the witnesses on the scene said he had his hands up and he was shot. I said, no, no, no, let me look into this real quick. And then when you go to look at it methodically, you go, yeah, he pretty much did a strong arm robbery situation at a store. The cop didn’t know it, but he goes off. He’s walking in the middle of the street. Him and another guy, cop tells him please get out the street. The other guy gets off the street, he’s on the sidewalk. Michael Brown said he wasn’t going to do it.

He’s 6’5″ or 6’3″, 300 pound kid. The cop doesn’t know that he’s 17, 18, that’s like a grown man and he’s defiant. So then we, as we know the scenario, he tries to take the cop’s gun. There was a shot fired, he charged the cop, cop shoots him.

Barack Obama and his DOJ did a full investigation, and before the investigation was completed, Barack Obama and his DOJ went to Michael Brown’s funeral. Now as a cop, we know that it didn’t happen that way. But why is the president doing this? He’s virtue signaling.

The DOJ did a conclusive investigation that the police officer acted appropriately and according to policy and was cleared not only locally, state, but the federal government. Barack Obama never recanted, never said anything about it. But the images in the minds of black people who has this generational trauma that’s been passed down, see that Barack Obama went to the funeral of this young black man.

God is my witness. You can go to probably 40, 50% of black people today and they still think Michael Brown didn’t do that. They still think he had his hands up. On the news, they said, remember they had a, I don’t know if you guys remember this in America, they had a moment of silence where people in the media had their hands up for Michael Brown. He never, it never happened.

And this has happened time and time again. I write it in my book Beating Black and Blue. I went through every shooting and methodically explained exactly what happened in the manipulation. Eric Garner, who’s the guy in New York. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” That’s where that started.

I said, because as a cop, you know protocol, you know use of force policy, you know the force continuum and all this other stuff that you know as a cop. As soon as I saw it, I said, no, the cop is going to be cleared. This guy had been arrested 47 times already. He was clearly combative. And they didn’t try to kill him. They talked to him. They tried to use soft control and they escalated the use of force policy, which is according to the policy. They did everything within policy.

This guy happened to be a big guy, out of shape. He had a heart attack and died. They tried to render aid, everything. I’m like, they’re going to be cleared. But the media doesn’t care about that. They won’t interview a police officer and say, hey, what do you think about this? They run with a narrative to get everybody worked up.

That’s why I became really popular in 2020. I went from 400,000 subscribers to 1.2 million in one month. Because I was one of the only people who could have a voice that was the voice of reason in all these police shootings. Because I can articulate very clearly the policies that I’m saying in the law. And I put it all together. So that was one of the dynamics that really hurt us, was we didn’t have enough people that could have a voice bigger than the media that would at least tell the truth about some of these shootings.

The George Floyd Case

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so what is your perspective on the George Floyd situation? What do you think happened there?

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, I don’t think it was race related. There’s no evidence of it. You can’t just project that as race because it’s a white and a black person.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BRANDON TATUM: If you look at the fullness, well, first of all, let me start with this. Derek Chauvin is a nut. I don’t support him at all. I hope he goes to jail. He deserved to go to jail. He ruined policing. He ruined policing unilaterally because of his stupidity. And I’m going to get backlash from the conservatives on this, and I don’t give a f*. I was a cop and I did the job.

You don’t sit on a man like that that long while he’s grimacing and complaining that he’s having a heart attack or whatever he’s complaining about. We were not trained to do that in the academy. We’re trained to cover your own butt.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right?

BRANDON TATUM: Meaning that if you think the person is faking or not is irrelevant. You have to show a level of concern and at least do your due diligence and making sure that you roll a person in a recovery position, give them the aid that they deserve, even if they lie. I’ve had people lie 100 times to me, it doesn’t matter. We’re trained to treat, unless they’re a threat.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right?

BRANDON TATUM: Meaning a person, they can’t breathe, but they got a gun and they’re trying to fight. That’s a different thing. If a guy is not armed, you have him secured on the ground, his hands behind his back, two officers on his legs, we are trained to render aid to this guy in an appropriate manner. And I would have never done that. No cop that I know would have ever sat on that man that long and watched him die.

And he pisses his pants and he goes unconscious, and you still sit on the guy. It was so egregious to me. And it was the microcosm of a bad cop, not a racial encounter. Because if you look at the beginning of the scenario when they first made contact, Chauvin was very nice to George Floyd. He was being nice to him. I think he recognized him because he was a local criminal, and so he was nice to him. He put him in the car. It was nothing really exaggerated that happened until they got to the ground.

And so I don’t know what made Derek Chauvin act like he did. I don’t know if it was fear. I don’t know if it was because everybody was yelling at him. He, like, screw you guys. I’m going to just stand on this guy because I can. I don’t know what dynamic that was, but it was wrong. But there’s no evidence of racial bias. No evidence whatsoever.

And in the America we live in, the media and activists have a vested interest to make it racist, because there’s no money in it not being racist. Think about it. If it was not a racial encounter, it was just a bad cop. He got indicted. The next day he’s going to prison. Justice is served. So if it’s just a bad cop making a decision like this, there’s no George Floyd. There’s no worldwide outrage, because there’s no racial dynamic.

So if you are sitting in a boardroom, you want to push the issue that is racist, because you’re going to get clicks. And he got statues, and there are celebrities, and you’ve got a whole industry on George Floyd now because they made it a racial dynamic. There was a scenario, Tony Timpa. I don’t know if you heard of that story.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I have.

BRANDON TATUM: Was it more egregious?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: More.

The Tony Timpa Case

BRANDON TATUM: It was. I think Tony Timpa was more egregious than what happened to George Floyd because Tony Timpa was not committing the crime. He had had a mental episode, and he had called the police so that they can help him. They get there and they have him down on the ground and he’s struggling to breathe and he’s going unconscious, and he actually goes unconscious and they mock him and they laugh at him and they go, oh, the baby’s asleep now. They did all this stuff on body camera.

It was way more egregious than George Floyd, in my opinion. And of course, the cops didn’t know that he had died. They should have known better. But the stuff that they said about Tony Timpa while he was dead and the lack of aid that they rendered to him and he didn’t even commit a crime. He asked for help and they killed him. That was more egregious.

But because he was white, there is no money and no activism in a white man losing his life that way. And statistical data shows that white unarmed people get killed twice as much as black people. White people get killed twice as much as black people by police. And people will say, well, there’s more white people. Well, there’s not more patrol saturation in white communities like there are in inner cities where most of the violence occurs.

So when you look at the saturation of patrol in inner city communities, white people actually get shot at a higher rate than black people do at the same amount of patrol. And so if the world would know this, we would be a better place. But there is no money in sanity. There’s money in hysteria and getting everybody worked up.

Social Media and the Drift Toward Conspiracy

FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, it’s very, very true. Which brings us nicely on to the age of social media, where we are now, where people like yourself, you’re truth seeking and you’re trying to bust myths. It’s a valuable job and it’s an important job, which is why we enjoy watching your content. There’s other people, and we’ll get into that now, who maybe have started out like that. And slowly, because of the incentive structure within social media platforms have drifted away from truth into sensationalism and from sensationalism into conspiracy.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, it is. The amount of conspiracies around Charlie Kirk’s…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Death.

The Charlie Kirk Incident and Conspiracy Theories

BRANDON TATUM: Is literally one of the craziest things I ever experienced. I’ve always been on. I have never been a part of a conspiracy, meaning that this situation happened to this person. I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about the situation. I’m just watching on TV like everybody else. And then there’s conspiracies and then you may buy into the conspiracy.

No, I’m a part of this conspiracy. I knew Charlie. I know the security team. I know everybody that worked at Turning Point USA. I know the video team. I know Erica. My wife and Erica text. We know all of these people. I worked for Turning Point since 2017. I was the only person the last two years doing campus tours like Charlie was. He would do his tours. I do my tours. The same video team. A lot of them guys would work with me. The same security team protects Charlie for, I don’t know, 10 years now.

And so when I see people saying stuff, it’s like, there’s levels to it, right. I know some people are ignorant. They don’t know nothing about nothing. They just like to post. But then it goes to the point where there are people that know the same people I know and say things that are incendiary and makes my blood boil. I feel like I’m getting worked up now just thinking about it because it’s so egregious what’s happening to those young people that work for Turning Point.

The video team that they’re saying took a SD card. Mike Turek, who they were doing, he was doing a hat adjustment. I know that guy. Frank Turek is a great guy. He’s a Christian guy. He’s one of the biggest Christian apologists that go on campus every day. He was Charlie’s good friend. I was just at an event before this, a year before that, riding in the car with him. He’s a mentor. He’s a great man. And then people on TV saying he doing hand signals.

His security team, these guys are all professional individuals that protect Charlie with their life for several years everywhere he goes. And you think they’re doing a hand signal. Anyway, it’s very sad to see some people are taking advantage of the moment, which means that there’s a lot of money in conspiracies. Now that I found out, I wish I was a part of this, making way more money than making now.

But there’s money in conspiracies, but also there’s people who have another motive, and it’s rooted in anti-Semitism, which makes everything that happens go down the path to lead to Jew street, meaning that everything that they do have to lead to the Jews, which will make people go up and beyond, to outrageous lengths, beyond conspiracy to make this person responsible or this group of people responsible. So those are kind of the two phases and dynamics that I see in this whole Charlie Kirk thing and Israel in some cases.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That must be so incredibly frustrating because you said, you know Charlie, you know what he thought. And to have it misrepresented and to have people like Candace who were close to Charlie, who worked with you and then come out and take that thread, I mean, that must be heartbreaking in a way because that’s your friend or was your friend.

The Candace Owens Dynamic

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, I mean, Candace. It’s a dynamic with Candace Owens, with me that the public may not understand. Candace is like a sister, right? We’re not just. I knew Candace more than Charlie. I work with Charlie. We go on stuff. Candace is like my family, right? Me and her were like brother and sister ever since I met her.

We started Blexit together, nonprofit organization that has helped wake up so many people around the country. Her aunt and my mom are like best friends. Her dad was in the hospital, and I go to visit her dad at the hospital. We throw birthday parties for her dad. We are family. Her kids, we visit her kids, our kids play together.

And so people love to hear me just bash her online. And I don’t. And people probably wonder why is because she’s like my sister. And it’s hard to watch some of the things that she say because I don’t understand where it’s coming from. And I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to even address it with her privately because I don’t want to lose our friendship because it’s bigger than politics, right? You know, what happens when this stuff is over?

Well, I’ll say this. People would love to see me just bash her, right? But the same people would turn on me. If you ever noticed her content, she don’t never say anything about me. And she disagree with me. She probably adamantly disagree with me. I’m probably one of the people that she, or at least the ideology that I have, is one of the people that she probably hate.

But we don’t talk about each other publicly. One reason is because when all of this stuff settles, right, the people that follow me, the millions of people, when I say something wrong, they hate me and they unfollow me, and they never talk to me again. When you have a friend, it’s hard to try to damage that relationship, because one day we’re going to be old, our kids are going to be grown, and we may not even be in politics no more. And you don’t want to burn that bridge.

So it’s a difficult dynamic for me, and it’s the first time that anybody’s heard me really talking this to a certain degree, because I do. I am confused at some of the things that I’ve heard her say about Israel, about Charlie. It’s confusing to me. And Candace is stubborn, if you haven’t noticed, in our personal life. We argue back and forth, and I’m a stubborn person. She’s stubborn.

So it’s kind of hard to say, Candice, let’s sit down and talk about it. And one day I think I will. But there’s a danger of saying, is this going to be our last conversation?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BRANDON TATUM: Is this going to, we’re going to get into a big old argument and it’s going to be like, I don’t want to be your friend no more. And that’s as a family member, like a sister to me. I don’t want that to be a reality.

BRANDON TATUM: It is very difficult to see it because I don’t know where she’s coming from with some of this stuff.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BRANDON TATUM: I don’t know how to diagnose it. People in the public see her as a lunatic, but I don’t know her as that person.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

The Impact of Conspiracy Theories on Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

BRANDON TATUM: I don’t think there are people out here that I think are bought, somebody paying them to say this stuff. I mean, they’re out of control. Some people are saying things that they don’t mean because it’s a lot of money. Candace is very wealthy and successful. I think she actually believes what she’s saying. I think she really believed it with a whole heart.

Which is also confusing to me because some of the question marks that are popping up as far as who’s involved, who’s responsible, I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know how anybody would think that Israel killed Charlie. It is the most ridiculous claim that I’ve ever heard in my life because Charlie and I knew Charlie. I watch his stuff. You guys watch his stuff. Everybody can watch his stuff.

I mean, the guy was the biggest Zionist defender out of anybody. And yeah, he was frustrated with a few things and I understand that frustration. I don’t have the same experience he has, but I understand how he can be frustrated. When you got people, your whole livelihood is donors, right? I’m self-made. Only person that can tell me what to say is me. And I can’t even tell myself what to say half the time, right? My compulsion takes over me sometimes.

But when you have donors like that and you want to say something and they come down on you and they threaten you with removing money and your livelihood as a 31-year-old man, that can make you feel infuriated and want to lash out. That is the only reason why I think that Tucker is where he’s at. Not because Charlie really agrees with Tucker, it’s because you’re not going to tell Charlie, right? Charlie’s like, you’re not going to punk me and make me do something with dangling money.

Which I don’t agree with that approach that he did. Because when somebody’s giving you money, you accepted the money for the terms. This is a non-profit organization. Somebody gave you $2 million a year. And if you go and put somebody who’s antithetical to Turning Point USA up on the stage, somebody, one of your donors, I mean they raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This is one donor, $2 million a year. That’s, I don’t know, that’s maybe fund two days of Amfest.

So you know, it’s not in the totality of circumstances and donors. This is not going to make or break Turning Point. It’s going to make somebody upset, which it made Charlie upset.

The Trauma of the Turning Point Team

So back to the whole thing. I just think that I don’t understand the level that people go to to try to think or say that Israel was behind this, to say that Turning Point was behind this. I know these young people, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. I was on campus and I got attacked at UC Davis. Now I could have whooped all these little non-binaries myself. I mean I could have just, I wouldn’t even ball my fists. I could have just been slapping them left and right.

But I was trying to protect the image of Turning Point and not be the black man knocking out college kids. You know, I’m 30-something years old. So I kind of just made sure I defended myself or whatever the case may be. But the kids that were doing the film work were flustered. I mean, they’re shaking. They don’t know how to handle conflict.

I was a cop, and I fight people and pull guns on people. And so these young people are scared. They don’t know how to handle conflict. They’re intimidated. They don’t know what to do. They wanted to quit. They wanted to go home. And these aren’t people that will coordinate an assassination. You get what I’m saying?

These young people on campus are now getting death threats. Young people who are working with Turning Point are now being framed as being a part of some collusion to get rid of Charlie Kirk. And it’s very hurtful.

Erica, I don’t know her as well as I know Candace, but Erica, every time I’ve met her, she’s so sweet. You see her, that’s genuine. She’s genuine like that. When you talk to her, she’s so, “I’m praying for you. God bless you. I love you. Thank you so much.” It’s so sweet. Every time I see her, she’s like that.

So when I see her now in her grief, I’m like, this is exactly who she really is. It’s not up front. And she’s a really strong believer in God, you know, and so she knows how to compose herself to do a press conference. And then she’s probably falling apart at night. I mean, I can’t stop tearing up thinking about the babies, you know.

The Lasting Impact on Witnesses

So it bothers me when I see stuff. And it’s not just what Candace is saying. It bothers me when I see all these people saying these things, knowing that the video team is in fear for their lives. People want to kill them. People are shaming them, and they watched Charlie get killed in front of them.

These guys are not in war. They didn’t, they’re not like my guy who protects me, who’s a decorated military guy. They have never seen people get beat up in front of them. They never seen a conflict. They probably never fought anybody. To see Charlie get shot and blood gush from his neck and watch all this trauma happen, you know, they’re damaged for life.

I think people don’t realize this. The images of dead people that I see, what, 15 years ago? I still see these people. I still remember the smell, the look, the trauma, the feeling. I still dream about some of these people who I seen decapitated and bludgeoned. I can regurgitate minute by minute what I felt, what I thought, what I smelled in all of these situations of mass hysteria. And I did it for a living.

These kids don’t. They need counseling. You know, the security team needs counseling. I was worried. One of my biggest worries was that one of them would take their own life. You gotta think, man. They were responsible for protecting one of the biggest, most prominent conservatives of our lifetime. And they watched him get shot and killed, and they had to carry him, his dead body, into the truck. And they’re looking at him with a blank stare.

They failed in their minds, and they can’t go back. They have to live with that. They let Charlie die. And when people come out and put these videos out to go viral, they’re insensitive to the reality of those things. And it’s, to me, shameful. And, you know, so I try not to say much because I want to respect my relationship with Candace.

But, you know, I just, as you can see in my content, it eats away at me every day when I think about it, because I love these people, these young people that are doing this. And I love Charlie. And if he could come back to life and just sit back or even in heaven, if God let you look down from heaven, man, that’s a thing. He would be heartbroken at some of the people who he loved, he trusted that are weaponizing his name and his legacy.

How Conspiracies Could Damage Charlie’s Legacy

What I think is inadvertently happening from people like Candace and others is that what they’re doing is going to marry his legacy forever. In 10 years, the emotion is going to be gone. The Christian revival is going to be a thing of the past to a certain degree. It’s not going to be as fervent. They’re only going to talk about the conspiracies.

RFK assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination, to a certain degree, is just marred with conspiracies. And Charlie’s is the biggest, most prominent conspiracy avenue because we’re in the social media age. Everybody saw him die. And everybody’s comments are getting playtime. They say he got shot from the back of the neck, and it’s a through and through.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Boom.

BRANDON TATUM: Didn’t happen. We know it didn’t happen. And I wonder sometimes, do people realize, especially prominent people, that you could be a contributing factor to allow the killer to get off? Because if you are pushing content that creates reasonable doubt in the minds of the average human that is going to have to be selected for jury, and if they can’t see past the conspiracies that have been out there and they have this idea of not trusting the federal government and you have been putting out content every single day giving the defense team reasonable doubt to believe that the killer didn’t do it, you could be creating a case for the defense and not know it.

And all it takes is for one juror to hold out and you have a hung jury and he’s not going to be convicted. And this guy, I’m 99% sure he killed Charlie. The only determining factor that could make anything change at this point, because they have overwhelming evidence, if they didn’t find a round, if they didn’t find a shell casing or a bullet fragment, he would go to prison for the rest of his life.

They did find a bullet. If that bullet matches the 30-06, he’s doomed. He would get a death penalty. If the bullet doesn’t match the 30-06, we have a big problem. But every sign, symptom, everything that I know in law enforcement is pointing towards overwhelming evidence that this guy did it. And we can get into that in a minute.

The Evidence Against the Suspect

Because I’m like John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness. I’m like Noah, warning people, look, you better take your time and methodically go through this. There’s a lot of evidence. You cannot present a probable cause statement to a judge to indict or to the prosecution to indict somebody without evidence. And I read the probable cause statement. They have so much evidence against this kid that there’s no way he could get off.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Brandon, this is what I find very interesting and very weird because look, America is not like where we are from in Britain. We have left and right, sure, but there’s a lot of variability. There’s a lot of people in the middle. And what people don’t know about America, you know, America is you’re either right or you’re left. The independents are like this number of people in the middle.

So this avatar of young conservatism, brilliant man, father of two children, gets killed in this horrific way by a guy who is quite clearly a, quote unquote, and this is how they ruined language, “anti-fascist.” I’m using, for the people who are listening, inverted commas.

And you would think that the normal reaction for the right would be to say one of our people has been killed by one of their people. We’re going to come together, we’re going to unite, we’re going to work together. We’re going to honor our friend’s legacy, and we’re going to make sure that we live in a country in which this doesn’t happen again. And that’s what, I’ll be honest with you, I’m revealing my naivete here, because that’s what I thought would happen. And what’s happening is something crazy.

The Spiritual Battle in America

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah. It’s because it’s a spiritual thing that’s going on in America, in my opinion. This is bigger than just right left. As you can see, right left is on the same side of us, of this issue in many ways. So it has become no longer right left. It’s become right wrong.

Like these people over here, in my opinion, are being spiritually led by the devil. And I know it’s a strong statement. I really believe that with my heart. The devil is deceiving people, that they cannot see the reality of what’s going on.

Charlie Kirk, in his own words, had made mention before he died, and he will tell you the biggest threat that he felt. And he said the assassin culture of the far left trans extremists. We’ve seen them shoot up schools. They’ve done a whole bunch. And let me be clear about this, it’s not because they’re trans, is because they’re mentally ill. And trans is one of the outlets or the expressions of a mental illness in some of these people who are out of their minds.

Charlie Kirk mentioned this right before he died. Everybody that you see on this side that’s losing their mind mimicked and echo exactly what Charlie Kirk said when that transgender person went in that school and shot those kids at the—I forget the school that they just did it at. When he went and did that, everybody on the right was like, “trans issues. The transgender. Transgenders are murderers.” And all this other stuff, which I thought that they went a little too far by saying trans. It’s really the mental illness expressed in transgenderism.

And then when Charlie dies from the very thing that he said was what happened to him, his very fear, they lost their minds and forgot the whole plot. This is exactly who we think is trying to kill us. That is the people who have been brainwashed who have a mental illness, and they are hypersensitive in the trans world. And this person happened to be with a trans person, and he happened to shoot Charlie after a trans question.

It’s very clear to me that the enemy of the conservative is the far left extremist and maybe some jihadists. If it ever gets to that point, I think it will, but that is our enemy. But when you see people at the death of Charlie Kirk, it’s almost like God did a separation of the wheat and the tear. Charlie Kirk was like this, you know, I could say the crescendo of the separation between good and evil. I really do believe so.

His death should have been about revival, should have been about Christianity, should have been about the great things he’s done. The people that’s talking about him, that knew him should be raising money for his family, like we’re doing. I mean, we literally did a T-shirt for Charlie and we—100% of the profits go to his wife. This is what they should be doing. Instead, they’re following a path of division and evilness because some of them know better, but they’re still doing it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How do you know that?

BRANDON TATUM: Which one? The evilness or the—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How do they know better? How do you know? Because people say that about everybody on the Internet. They are a grifter. They sold out. They’re getting paid by Qatar or they’re getting paid by Israel or seven. You know, you and I are supposed to get $7,000.

BRANDON TATUM: Let me know when you get yours. Talk to that person.

Accusations of Grifting and Bad Faith

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I always wonder, because people say that about everybody, and people say that about me, and people say that, and I, sitting across from me, I know you saying what you believe and I say what I believe. I might be right, I might be wrong, but I say what I believe, and yet people say it about me. So how do you know that that’s what these people know better?

Because I agree with you. Look, I’m not a friend of Candace, and so I just look at what she says, and I think it’s crazy, and I say so. Right. But I believe that she believes what she believes. Yeah, I really think that.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. But so how do you—why do you say that some people know better?

BRANDON TATUM: When you look at their work product, you look at what they’ve said over the years and the things that they’ve done, and then you look at the new dynamic of how they’re presenting information. You’re like, well, you’ve never done this in any other situation that you’ve ever been involved in. Why are you doing it like this now?

Most of these people have always been, “wait till the facts come out,” right? All the police shootings. Oh, oh. Because the media jumps in. It’s race. It’s race. It’s race. All these people are saying, “no, no, no, no. It’s not about race. Wait till the facts come out. Wait till the facts come out. Wait till the trial.”

Kyle Rittenhouse, the leftist nut jobs were saying, “he shot black people.” That’s what they said. And he shouldn’t have had a rifle and he’s going to go to prison for life. And he was wrong and he was unprovoked and all this stuff. And the conservative people were saying, “well, no, no, no, no, let’s wait till the trial. Let’s wait for justice to come out.”

But then all of a sudden, in this scenario, we don’t need to wait. People have spent the last 10 years advocating for Donald Trump and advocating for conservatives to take control of prominent positions in the FBI, prominent positions in the House and Senate. And all the way up until now, Kash Patel was our guy. Dan Bongino has been the man we love. I love Dan Bongino. If he sat down in front of you, he would be just as genuine as I am.

Why all of a sudden are these people no longer relevant? Why all of a sudden these people are threats to society now? Why all of a sudden—

FRANCIS FOSTER: Can I just pause you there? Does Epstein play a part in this as well?

BRANDON TATUM: It’s two things. It’s like the cop mind in me is always two things. Yes, but for different reasons, for different people. Epstein is an excuse for anti-Semitic people to push against the government and say, “this is one more example that the Jews were involved in and the government is bad and we hate everybody associated with this because it’s got a Jew thing connected to it.”

Then there’s other people who, they have an idol in their theology, meaning that they want things to be true, believe in propaganda, and when it’s not what they think, they will turn on the reality for their own propagandist purpose. Some of them are unwittingly right. They’re not thinkers.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

The Epstein Factor and Conspiracy Theories

BRANDON TATUM: People are emotional. When Jeffrey Epstein whole thing happened, I realized that I wasn’t there. I’m not looking at the documents. I don’t know what the truth is. I know what I think and I know what I know. There’s got to be reality somewhere. So I’m always open to saying if it’s real, is real. If it’s not, it’s not. I don’t know. Hey, I think he didn’t kill himself. That’s too bizarre for all these things to happen.

But I’m open to hear somebody who’s actually looking at the information and giving us the facts, and I’m open to hear what you got to say. Some people are not like that. They built their life that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself in this whole conspiracy that they had. And then when the people that we trust, who also held the same conspiracy, mind you, Dan Bongino said it when he was on his show that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself and it was an inside job or something else happened and so did Kash Patel. That literally career was about this.

Then they come and they say, “well, we looked at it and this is what it is.” Some people were married to the God of their hypothesis. And now when something comes out that challenge the hypothesis, they’re willing to turn on everybody for the hypothesis. And but the other one is the Jew thing. Like people are making this, that the Mossad did it. And then therefore, if it’s the Jews, they’re willing to go down that path to the very bitter end.

So I think that it did have a lot to do with the distrust of the government. But these big social media people are driving that. If people just say everybody in social media was like me, they have the opportunity to come out and bash Kash Patel and all them, but they don’t. They say, “let’s be reasonable, let’s see how it all pans out.”

I don’t think Donald Trump—because if you look at them, a lot of the people on the left were saying Donald Trump was involved. In my mind, I’m like he definitely wasn’t involved because Biden would have exposed Donald Trump right before the election. They don’t have to tell everything in it, but they’ll just put Trump’s name out it. They’ll leak that Trump was involved. So the fact they didn’t do it in the last administration made me feel like, well, Donald Trump wasn’t involved in this.

So I’m willing to kind of slow roll and say, if he wasn’t involved, then what is he protecting? Let me let it play out more so than me jumping on the gun and saying I hate Donald Trump because he’s working for somebody else. But if every conservative was a little bit more patient and a little more loyal to the process, we wouldn’t see so many people distrusting the government. We wouldn’t see so many people turn on Kash Patel.

The Responsibility of Influencers

The people are following talking heads like me more so than we think they are. If I come out and say Donald Trump is complicit in this, there will be hundreds of thousands of people that will believe it just because I said it. Every one of us. Candace, me, Benny Johnson, I mean, all of the big name people have a cult following. And I know people may get mad at me for saying it, but it’s true.

I could say something wrong. And there’s people that say, “no, Brandon is right no matter what he say” because emotionally they feel connected to me. As you can see, Candace got a whole bunch of them and everybody has those people. That’s why it’s our responsibility as journalists to make sure that we’re balanced and we’re fact based and not emotional. And because we can, we can drive a whole generation of people off a cliff if we’re not responsible and careful about the things we say.

That’s why I try to be somewhere in the middle of—I don’t think Kash Patel is an evil person, a liar. But I do think something is weird about how the Epstein stuff is being projected. And it could be one or two things. It could be that there’s something in it and they jumped ahead of the curb and then they’re trying to backtrack because there’s something that they don’t want the public to know yet.

It could be a nothing burger, right? And everybody just got their hopes up because everybody wanted to play the conspiracy game and make all that money back when they had this thing that Epstein was just this bigger person. And Epstein could in reality could be like P. Diddy, the white version of P. Diddy, just a nasty freak person that get people involved in these sex things and you know, you know what I’m saying? It cannot be that deep of an issue potentially, you know, the music.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Not as good as the music. Not as good.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, his playlist probably. But he could be just another person that is wealthy. He could be blackmailing people, but not on a massive scale on behalf of the government. That may not be a thing.

So Donald Trump kind of screwed it up too, because I feel like Pam Bondi, she put her foot in her mouth when they released these binders and all this stuff. And I got the Epstein files on my desk. The level of stupidity and all of that is one of the reasons why this is a big fallout. Because I wonder where they trying to hype it up for the base. And then when they got the information, they like, oh shoot, there’s really nothing here. And now all of a sudden they got to say there’s nothing there. And now the people are in a frenzy because she should have never did that.

Kash Patel should have never disclosed information in Charlie’s case either. The way he did it, when the first time he came out on Twitter and said, we caught the guy, but he didn’t catch the guy. In law enforcement, you don’t say anything until you got the person you got because you also don’t want the suspect out there to know what you’re doing.

So these immature things that I think that, and I know I’m kind of jumping around, but some of the immature things that I think that the government has done, either lack of experience or whatever the case may be is causing a lot of this too. It may not be as bad as it looks if they’d have done it right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you’re fueling people who are already very suspicious. And this brings us to Israel.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah.

Israel and Anti-Semitism on the Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re one of the people on the right who has been pushing back very hard against the anti-Israel sentiment within the space. And it’s interesting because the right is very split on this issue. Very, very split. Why have you come out the way you’ve come out?

BRANDON TATUM: The same reason why I did it with police and everything else. When stuff gets so ridiculous, I can’t just not say anything. I knew nothing about Israel before I went to Israel. I thought Israel was, embarrassing enough, I thought Israel was a third world country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BRANDON TATUM: I thought when I got there it was going to be, they’re going to be in a desert like Afghanistan and stuff like that. I never left the United States of America in my life, so I never cared about it. I don’t live in Israel. I don’t even care.

Going to church as a Christian now I see pastors talking about it more. When I was growing up, nobody talked about Israel or nothing like that. It was kind of almost this replacement theory. They’re irrelevant. It’s just Christians that believe in Jesus. Everybody going to heaven. If you believe in Jesus, that’s it.

And then, because I never went to Israel, Pastor Allen Jackson of World Outreach Church, which is a tremendous guy, he’s one of my own, one of the few pastors that I actually believe in. The rest of them are kind of loony. But he said, we met, we just casually met at a NRB, which is a National Religious Broadcasting Network thing. And we just met. We were talking and he mentioned Israel. He’s like, have you ever been to Israel? And I’m like, no, I’ve never been to Israel. He’s like, well, we’re going as a church. If you’d like to go, you’re welcome. And I’m like, wow, I get to leave a country. I’ve never left the country before. I said, let me go to Israel.

I fell in love with Israel, obviously, for all the Christian reasons, right? I mean, we went on a Christian tour. This wasn’t an Israeli tour. We didn’t explore whatsoever about anything Israeli related, not even the history of the wars and all this stuff. We were just going to Christian sites, holy sites. We were worshiping and doing all this stuff. We had a whole Christian thing. Two weeks there.

I fell in love with Israel, but I also saw the reality of what was going on there, right? I mean, with all the Arabs that work in Israel, all the people that come from Gaza. We were going down to the Dead Sea. They was showing us the different license plates and stuff. And they were like, well, Israelis aren’t welcome there, but they come through and come and work in Israel. And they come from the West Bank. And this is, they were just saying all these things like, we couldn’t go nowhere in the Gaza Strip because it was way too violent.

We would go to Golan Heights and we could see the enemy could really attack Israel from the Golan Heights. And they were telling us, like, this is the bunkers and stuff they had up there because they would get attacked. And so I kind of got a perspective.

Christians are treated great in Israel. People kill me over that one statement I made to Benjamin about the little kids spitting at the pastor, and they really kill us over that. But in the same clip, the guy chastised him when he did it, the guy came behind and said, we don’t do that. That’s evil. And Christians are welcome to do everything there.

The Trinity Broadcast Network got a big old studio, probably the best view in the whole of Jerusalem. Christians do all kinds of stuff. Witness. They do all this stuff. And we were worshiping God and lifting up the name of Jesus everywhere in the Sea of Galilee. I mean, hundreds of thousands of Christians are there every day. I got “Jesus is Lord” in Hebrew tattooed on my arm in Jerusalem. So clearly it’s not really combative against Christians.

So all of that happens. I never really thought about it. I love Israel. There was no war, right? October 7th hadn’t happened yet. So I never thought about it.

October 7th and the Aftermath

October 7th happened. And after being there and realizing what the magnitude of what happened and some of the things that they were telling us about the threat from Gaza, it became a reality. Like, oh, my God. And then I saw the videos and beheading people, and I’m like, if this happened in America, it’d be a parking lot.

And I said this the moment it happened. I said, I hope they turn into a parking lot. Could be insensitive on my part, but I really believe that in my heart. Like, when you come into some, if they did that in America, whoever did that will no longer exist. And their kids’ kids’ kids will never know. They would be dust. They will be history. Nobody would ever know what happened to them.

We probably would kill everybody in their country, or not everybody. We’ll kill massive amounts of people in 48 hours. I mean, that’s what would happen. We were sending all our special operations teams. They would kill everybody in Hamas and probably, I don’t know, give it a week. Everybody. Hamas would be dead.

So I felt that same way about Israel because they’re a good nation, they seem great people and all this. And so I was very upset that they had mutilated and raped and kidnapped people, all on tape. And you didn’t kill all these people at the carnival. I’m like, these are clearly evil people against a good group of good, normal people. Not perfect, but they’re normal still.

I made my little comments and then I let it go. Israel is doing what Israel got to do. The end. I mean, they’re going to get to the end of this. And it’s going to be the end. Hamas is a terrorist organization designated by the United States of America. What are we even talking about?

Propaganda and Staged Videos

It wasn’t until recently. I’m online and I see all the anti-Semitism stuff, but I’m not, I’m an American. I’m not Israeli, so I’m not really involved that deeply. But I’m strolling through the Internet and I see a bomb blow up a building. And I’m like, that’s interesting. And once you watch it, the algorithm will feed it to you. The next video, a bomb blowing up a building. Next video, a bomb blowing up a building.

And I said, damn, this is kind of suspicious. Like, my cop brain came in. It’s like, how did they get the camera lined up perfectly on this building? I mean, they had one on the ground in between a building that was looking through a building to see a building that got hit by a bomb. All these other cameras are showing. I mean, I went through like 10 of them, and I’m like, this seems staged to me.

And then I go back and look, and I’m like, okay, the camera’s set up. The building comes down, and everybody’s running around, scrambling, like they’re shocked. Then how in the f* do the video guy know that the building is going to get hit and nobody around him know? I said, something is not right here.

Then I scroll through another one, and I see a kid. They got dirt on their face, and they doing this. And then one kid is laughing on the corner over here. I’m like, wait a minute. This…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is…

BRANDON TATUM: This is what they’re showing the world. I mean, 10 million, 50 million views. They’re staging this stuff. And I got pissed, man. I was like, I got to say something about this. And you guys could probably go back to that very video. I was like, somewhere, and I pulled my phone out, and I’m like, all these videos I see is the propaganda.

And then I started really going into it and showing the videos of kids who are hurt, injured. Well, how did they get hurt? How do we know how they got hurt? They don’t have a video of IDF shooting these kids. They just have a video running with kids limped and the buildings that come crashing down.

And then you realize it’s a terrorist organization. So you don’t know if they’re shooting these people themselves. You don’t know if they’re making them stay in a building when it comes crashing down, because they know they got the leaflets and it’s reports from people that on the pro-Israel side is saying that they’re doing that. They’re forcing people to stay in these areas. They’re getting them killed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t doing this for propaganda.

And it pissed me off so much that I just went crazy on it. And then I just continue to see the hate that come my way. I continue to see the lies and deception and the numbers, and it just started making sense to me that this is a big propaganda stunt. And I’m not saying nobody’s dying. It’s a freaking war. People are going to die. But to the extent that they’re pushing it, I saw the video of the IDF.

They saying the IDF is killing people at the feed zones. And I’m like, let me scour the Internet and see if I got videos. And the people, I’m like, send me the video if you can show me a video. The only video they have is them shooting the ground. Nobody in the video got shot. And I’m like, well, if somebody died during that incident, I’m sure they got it on tape. Somebody’s there filming them shooting. They would just pan the camera to the person that got hit in the head. Why does that footage not exist?

They say the IDF is shooting kids and killing them. Why does that footage not exist? They got the footage of the kid that’s limbs is hanging and flesh hanging off, but they don’t have any incidents where they’re showing where this is initiated. And I begin to be very skeptical of it.

And then I talk to people that I know in Israel, and I talk to people in the IDF, and they’re like, yeah, this is what they do. Then I realize Israel has to be the worst country ever for PR. Why the f* are y’all not showing the footage of October 7th? They are showing footage could be doctored. It could be from another, like some footage I’ve seen wasn’t even in Gaza. They showing pictures of people getting killed. It’s not even in Gaza.

You got the militants on top of these food trucks, running them, shooting at people. Israel, why are you not showing this? Why are you not showing the egregious nature? They did the little viewing, but they’re not showing the world how barbaric and evil these people are. Therefore, you can counter all of the barbarism that they’re claiming that Israel is doing with their videos.

But anyway, it just drove me into just theory on the lies. If people were telling the truth, I don’t care. I’m not going to argue with them if Israel is killing innocent people for no reason, like they say, sniping little babies and stuff. No f*ing way would I support that. Show me the video. I will critique the video. But no one has these videos. And maybe they do exist somewhere, somehow.

The Double Standard

And the double standard too is what bothered me. We killed so many people. America is the worst, right? I mean, Hiroshima, all of these nuclear bombs that we dropped are killing millions of people. And in Afghanistan, 400,000 people we killed in that war. Like a million in Iraq. A million in Iraq.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And then like they killed a million people died.

The Scale of War and Double Standards

BRANDON TATUM: A million people died. So we didn’t. But a lot of that was because of us, our incursion in it. But it was what, 20 some hundred people, maybe 3,000 people died in 9/11. And we killed all. And all these people died as a result. And we were in war for 20 years. We can even talk about some of the other wars where we killed millions of people. And there was 1,200 Americans died in that as a sparking point.

And nobody really say that America is committing genocide in a way. They say Israel is committing genocide. You see actual genocides, Rwanda genocide. I mean, they killed a million people in 100 days. Many of them were killed without guns. I mean, they were just dicing people up. The genocide that happened to the Jews in Germany, like, these are real genocides that’s going on.

Why are you guys unequally applying standards? That’s where it bothers me at. It’s like they’re fighting a war like anybody else. They’re giving leaflets, they’re feeding these people, they’re supplying them with water and resources. How in the f* are you saying this is a genocide?

If any other country was doing exactly what Israel is doing, they will be getting a pat on the back. Their leader would get a Nobel Peace Prize for how he was able to execute a war with the least amount of casualty to combatant ratio ever in the history of war. I mean, it’s the double standard that really bothered me, that got me so. That still got me worked up today.

Exposing Anti-Semitism

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s interesting you talk about the double standards because I was talking about this with Konstantin last night. And one of the good things to come out of October 7th, as awful as that statement sounds, is it really unmasked a lot of people to say, to look at her and go, who are Islamist, as in radical Islam, who want to eradicate the Jewish state, kill Jewish people and just straight up anti-Semites.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it really exposed them. And it exposed them in such an effective way. Literally the next day you had. I saw mainstream journalists tweeting from the river to the sea on October 8th. And I’m thinking, and then people attending demonstrations and you’re going to. This is what. The bodies weren’t even cold. What are you doing?

The Refusal to Condemn Hamas

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, and I think that was a moment of exposure because you can see very clearly. I don’t know if people just stupid or are they evil or ignorant. Stupid. Evil and ignorant. I don’t know what, I don’t know why a person would say from the river to the sea if they didn’t mean they want the Jews to be eliminated. What context are you doing this in if that’s not what you really believe?

Hamas is a terrorist organization. They have a history of doing, look at that, killing people in the middle of the street today. And people watch that and they still support them. There’s people on campus that I will speak to and they would just wouldn’t condemn Hamas.

For instance, there has been no pro-Palestinian person I have ever talked to or debated on campus that will condemn Hamas and be pro-Palestinian. That tells me what they really believe. And I’ll get him in a pickle. I’ll say, you support Palestinians. Okay, is Hamas. No. Because what I do is I walk them through the scenario.

I say, isn’t an apartheid state. They say, yes, which is the stupidest thing on planet Earth. It’s impossible to be an apartheid state. All the Arabs have almost every right in Israel is the Jews. So it’s definitely not a racial dynamic thing there. Is it a genocide? They say, yes, all this stuff. Are they occupying all this open air prison? They say all this stuff.

I say, okay, you believe that. So is it wrong for Hamas to fight back against all these things that you’re saying and then they get in the pickle and they got to go, well, yeah, no, no it’s not. Then I say, okay, you’re explaining to me that you think that what happened on October 7th is justified.

So don’t try to say you’re differentiating yourself from a terrorist organization because you have just laid out a plot which is false. But you’ve laid out a plot where you’ve given them justification for what they’re doing.

Targeting Civilians

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s worse than that, Brandon, because what your argument is that you’re putting to them, well, is it justified? Okay, let’s say, let’s accept it’s an occupation, all of this. Right, let’s accept it. Fine. Are they entitled to. If they will say, if you and I were men, right, if we grew up in that environment, would we fight back against the occupation? Okay, let’s say we would.

Would I go across the border raping and burning kids with. No, no. You want to fight the Israeli armed forces, you want to sabotage the trains? The partisans in World War II or the French resistance, they weren’t going around raping German civilians.

BRANDON TATUM: Right, Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s the thing. It’s like the thing that really got me about this is they actually support murdering civilians. Right. On purpose. It’s not we dropped a bomb because there was a terrorist there, but the terrorist family also happened to be there. Or the terrorist family deliberately are there. Right. And then they got killed.

It’s like, no, no, no. We see a woman with her kids and we’re going to kill her. We’re going to take a hostage and we’re going to rape her. That’s the thing.

Stories from Former Hostages

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah. I just interviewed a gentleman who was a hostage and he had 490 days.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Wow.

BRANDON TATUM: And he wrote a book and everything. And he was telling me how he could hear them in the kibbutz community he was in. He could hear them killing people and they were the alarms going off. They went into their shelter. They were there for four hours and then finally the terrorists got to them.

They start shooting through the bomb shelter door or whatever they have was like a security room shooting through it. They end up breaking in, they took him, they took the wife, the kids, and they were just going to take him as a hostage. And he thought since they had British passports, that they would have mercy on them and just take him and kill him or take him hostage for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, when he finally get out from captivity after 490 days, they ended up telling him that shortly after they took him, they murdered his wife and both of his girls. Murdered them in cold blood. That’s not resistance.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s not resistance.

Civilian Complicity

BRANDON TATUM: And I’ll tell you this, some of the other gentlemen I interviewed that were in IDF said that there was civilians that were involved too. It wasn’t just militants. There were civilians that were coming into kibbutz, stealing stuff, raping people and doing all kinds of stuff.

And I’ll tell you this, my only regret with the Gaza Israel conflict, my only regret is that I didn’t go harder against the Gazan citizens. I gave them a pass and I shouldn’t have. Most of them, I would argue that I saw and that for IDF soldiers and other people that lived there are saying is that no, they celebrated this. They were. A lot of them were celebrating this.

You could see them on the. Remember the chants they were doing. They were taking them in there, they chanting and some of the hostages. One of the guys that I interviewed said when he went in, they went to a mosque first and the civilians were taking him from Hamas and wanted to lynch him in the middle of the street. Hamas had to take him back from the citizens to take him in the tunnels.

He said before they went into the tunnels, because there was not enough room in the tunnels. They had too many hostages. And so they would put them in residence of regular citizens. And I asked him, I said, do you think that they were. This was done against their will, meaning that they were afraid of Hamas, so they had to bring. Did they treat you right or whatever?

He’s like, no, they were gladly supportive of what Hamas was doing. And these people were regular civilians. When they found some of the hostages last time, journalists were housing them, families were having them in their house.

So I felt like I was trying to be too nice, I think. And you got to think about this too. They’re raising up the next generation to hate Israel. The young people are going to camps and summer camps and learning how to kill. So why wouldn’t the majority of them feel that way?

Majority of the people in the West are saying that it’s an occupation. You think the people in Gaza don’t think it’s occupation. So why would they be against Hamas doing what they’re doing? They’re the freedom fighters.

The leader of Hamas, I don’t know if you guys remember that interview he was in. It was CBS or somebody interviewed. It was a real hard interview. And he said there’s no separation of Hamas like the people of Hamas. He’s pretty much saying that they’re a part of the community. And it made me realize that they are a part of the community. This is why they voted for him.

And many of them, not all, because there was obviously the ones that we see getting killed probably were against Hamas. Majority of them probably feel this way. It’s almost like if you replace Gazans and you put the leftist lunatics in our country there, they would all be against the IDF in Israel too.

So I would imagine that the Gazan people are even more vitriolic against Israel and they want them to be eliminated. And it bothers me that I feel like that people in our country are so naive to this stuff and it has gotten out of control to the point where I get so much hate online on basic facts.

Why Conservatives Don’t See It

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, see, the left, I understand, right, because the left hate the West, right? The fringe of the left, they hate America, they hate the West. They see Israel quite rightly, I think, as an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East.

And also they’ve got the whole colonist narrative in their head. So they see Israelis as white people and Gaza as the Native Americans or black people or whatever, whichever way you want to frame it. Right. That’s the left. Do you have a sense of why your conservative colleagues and friends don’t see the facts that you’re talking about?

BRANDON TATUM: I don’t know, it’s just very difficult because I don’t understand it. That’s why I go back to thinking this must be spiritual. It doesn’t logically make sense.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

The Woke Reich and Conservative Inconsistency

BRANDON TATUM: It’s not logically consistent with what conservatives have been standing for all of this time. Why all of a sudden conservatives are so anti-Semitic and so brainwashed. It’s not about the anti-Semitism part of it as much as it is that they’re brainwashed. We didn’t have conservatives ever just falling for things that they fall for as it relates to Hamas. We would never accept this in any other way. We would never accept a terrorist group.

Like for instance, show me any of these right wing, like Netanyahu, call them the Woke Reich. And I call them Woke Reich too. But show me any of them that were happy that the ceasefire was initiated. This was supposed to be a peace and end of genocide. Our guy did it. The guy we voted for did it. He negotiated peace. They wouldn’t even post it.

They got these people out throwing bricks on their legs, taking them out, shooting them and killing them. There’s reports that they’re taking media personalities into hospitals and they’re interrogating them and they never seen again. Why aren’t anybody on the right saying anything about this? To me, it’s a spiritual divide between good and evil. And there’s good on this side and there’s evil on the right and the left on this side.

Somebody that’s a prominent figure said this on their podcast not too long ago, is that they are starting to agree with the left. And this is a chance for the left and the right to come together against Israel.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Transformation

BRANDON TATUM: Like Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m listening to her, I’m listening to Tucker Carlson. I used to listen to these people. I knew Marjorie Taylor Greene. I didn’t know it, but I knew of her. I met her, we talked before she ever ran for office. And I remember her saying, I’m going to run for office and I’m going to win and I’m going to do this. I love Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was a right wing person then. She was pretty right.

Because I tell you what, they were at a conference and the N word came up and it was kind of like, because you had people on the right that were like, hey, you can’t say the N word. And Marjorie Taylor Greene and others like, why not? It’s just a word. And then another young lady with them was like, N word. And we’re in word. And I’m like, you got to put it in perspective. It is just a word. But you got to understand that the things that you say come with a connotation. So maybe you should avoid using that.

But Marjorie’s side was more like, it’s just a word. Why are you trying to suppress my speech? So she was kind of on the right back then, but when I listened to her now and she comes out and she talks about our government shouldn’t be giving money to Israel. We give $3.8 billion to Israel.

Well, hey, woman, you work in Congress. You know that we don’t just give them a piece of, you know, we write them a check. They have to purchase military equipment from us. And it’s military funding. They got to buy all of that military equipment from the United States of America. We almost have them on like a credit line. We don’t just give them the money. She knows it, but why does she leave that out when she say it?

The AIPAC Argument

BRANDON TATUM: They talk about the Israeli lobby. Okay, first of all, you got to be the stupidest person in America to say that AIPAC should be registered as a foreign entity or registered through FARA. They’re American citizens. American citizens can lobby whatever they want. If you don’t believe that American citizens should be able to lobby whatever they want, then you need to change the law. But to think that somehow the government is going to make them register as FARA and their American citizens lobbying on behalf of what they want, you’re an idiot.

And so she talks about AIPAC, but Qatar, Japan, Saudi Arabia, China, foreign registered lobby is far beyond what AIPAC is doing. Why don’t she say that since she’s so upset about foreign lobbying? The fact that they omit those things make me think that they’re not genuine in what they’re saying.

Tucker Carlson’s Shift

BRANDON TATUM: Tucker Carlson, I never like the way he present right into the laugh and stuff. He’s like a maniac. And he’s so condescending. The things he say. He talk in rhetorical sentences like, I just never really liked how he presented, but I always liked him because he always challenged people. He was like the firebrand. Donald Trump came to an interview, he would get on Donald Trump, he just destroyed Ted Cruz in an interview. He was mean.

He interviews the woman with the mustache, which I think she grew that thing out just for the interview, to be honest. He was interviewing the woman with the mustache and then pushed back on nothing. She said, this woman said that you can evangelize or that you can proselytize in the West Bank. That is a fundamental lie. You cannot convert people to Christianity in the West Bank or in Gaza. Why would she say that? And he let her say that.

She refused to say that Hamas was a terrorist group. She said they were freedom fighters. Tucker didn’t say nothing to her. He has had four or five interviews that I’ve seen where people have accused Jews of creating AI to destroy the world, that Jews were, I mean, just all kinds of crazy stuff. I can’t even remember all the other stuff that they’ve done. Why is he now all of a sudden doing that? These are the questions that I have for these people. And which is why I think that they’re on the side of evil. And that’s not a genuine change of heart in my opinion.

Tucker, when you look at the funding, he goes and interviews the leader of Qatar and of course through FARA, they paid him money to do it. Now, I don’t know what in dollar amount, but I’m pretty sure they paid him a lot of money. Then he had a person who appears to be a non-American. I could be wrong on this. That injected $15 million into the startup of his podcast.

Now I do podcasts and y’all do podcasting for a living. $15 million. He’s already Tucker Carlson, right? It’s not like you need a lot of advertisement. He went from Fox News as the number one person on Fox News, the number one person in America. His podcast was number one. He goes over and do his podcast. Naturally people are going to come watch his podcast. Why would he need $15 million injected into his podcast?

And then his podcast is now going from him being a more of a Zionist to him being completely open to Sharia Law. He’s the one in his podcast said Sharia Law, like, is that really a bad thing? Why don’t you just drink in the house? We need that in America. It’s such a turn of what he believed at one point. That’s why it’s suspicious, in my opinion.

I’m the same way through and through. I have never changed the way I believe. And when I adopt the belief system, it’s because I really believe it. And if somehow I change, it’s because I was wrong. And I’ll just say I was wrong. He literally had a well thought out perspective of why Israel is one of our strongest allies. Well thought out. He debated people on that topic and now all of a sudden he’s saying they’re the enemy of the world.

One guy said that on his podcast, said that Israel is the most barbaric. Don’t quote me on this, but like evil nation to ever exist. You don’t push back on that at all. You don’t push back on that. They observe Western values. You don’t push back on the fact that they’re not beheading people and throwing gays off. As a matter of fact, gay people have more liberation probably in Israel than they do in America. When I was out there, they had a gay pride flag on the embassy. So why would he let somebody say that unless there’s something deeper going on?

The Woke Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So, Brian, I don’t know if you know this. I’m one of the first people I think with a profile to ever use the phrase Woke Right?

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, Woke Reich.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Woke Right? Oh, Woke Right. Which you mentioned Netanyahu.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, he said Woke Reich.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Did he? Oh, I haven’t heard that.

BRANDON TATUM: They got mad at him because he said, he said in a little presser, he was like, they call it the Woke Right. We call it the Woke Reich.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, it’s evolved. I wasn’t aware of this. So that.

BRANDON TATUM: And I love that he said. Well, to a certain degree. Right. I think he was tongue in cheek.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, of course it is.

Real Anti-Semitism

BRANDON TATUM: But is it? You have people on the right that are the biggest anti-Semites that I’ve ever seen in my life. My wife hates to wear anti-Semitism because, you know, before, everybody called everybody anti-Semitic to shut you, to silence you. Right? And same thing with racist. Oh, you’re a racist, so they silence you. I used to believe the anti-Semitic was like taken out of proportion, right? And I was like, I’m not really using that word until I start seeing real anti-Semitism.

Like, wait a minute. There are people that hate Jews and they hate them for being Jews. There are people literally on their whole entire platform is blaming the Jews for everything. Everything. COVID, 9/11. One girl, she was a big billionaire. I think her company was a billion dollar company. Like a makeup artist. They canceled her or whatever. They were trying to cancel her because she said the Jews were responsible for World War I.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know, she like, at least it’s original.

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, that’s a new one. I haven’t read that one.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no. There’s a, just listen to a couple people on the right. They’ll say World War I, World War II, you know, even though, even before Israel was established as a nation, they claim Israel was involved in all these other things. The Ashkenazi Jews aren’t really Jews.

Wait a minute. There’s peer review research that shows that Ashkenazi Jews have a bloodline from the seed of Abraham. It’s research. People can do the research. One person wrote a thing. I forget the people’s names, but he wrote a thing, which is where a lot of the people on the right are drawn from. Not looking at the peer review research in 2017, 2018. I think that shows DNA sampling. They started here, they go to Europe and they come back. How do they not have a connection to the land?

But people who hate Jews will find any reason, any conspiracy to believe to make Jews wrong. They run America, do you know how stupid you have to be to think that Jews are, Netanyahu runs Donald Trump. I’m just being sick. Donald Trump don’t run Donald Trump, right? I mean, his compulsions overtake him in a lot of times. So why would he listen to Benjamin Netanyahu?

Donald Trump is the most stubborn person. Everybody knows that. Benjamin Netanyahu says, I don’t run Donald Trump. Donald Trump made him turn the jets around in Iran. He said, he said they don’t know what the f* they’re doing in front of the world. He said, turn the jets around and land them because they were going to go do another strike, a retaliatory strike on Iran. They listened to Trump and landed the things.

The Peace Deal

BRANDON TATUM: They negotiated peace. That I don’t think necessarily that they really had to. I think that they could have just, if it was me, just do whatever you got to do until it’s over. But they capitulated to a certain degree, compromised to a certain degree to negotiate peace on Donald Trump’s terms for the most part, because I don’t think Netanyahu was in agreements with all that, you know, letting them have, letting Hamas have sanctuary.

And after the war, they claim that they are going to disarm, they’re backing out, they’re giving terrorists back to Hamas. They didn’t have to do none of that. Could just continue to kill these Hamas soldiers until it was over. But Benjamin Netanyahu came to the table. He celebrated Trump.

You know, like, to think that they run America is crazy. We run Israel. I don’t know how people don’t get this. Without military aid from America, Israel will be no more. Without the support of Big Brother, people will be trying them every day. Hamas, you know, you go to Syria and Hezbollah and Houthis, they will try them more if we weren’t backing them, because we will wipe these people’s countries off the map if they attack Israel, and they know it.

All of that funding militarily comes from America. All the technology. We give them our latest stuff, not our stuff, right. We keep our stuff ourselves, but we give them the next best, greatest thing. If they didn’t have America, what would they have?

America’s Power and Influence

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know, it’s such a simple point. When we had Dinesh D’Souza on, we talked a little bit about this as well. I’m sure, you know, people work in the administration now. A lot of them are young kids, 23, 25, 27.

Now Britain is a lot richer, a lot more powerful, a lot more influential. It’s on the Security Council. When that 23-year-old kid from the White House goes over to Britain, all the 45-year-old British people are like, “Tell me what you want, how can we do this for you?” Because America is the most powerful country in the world and everybody, the reason every country in the world lobbies America is they want your help, to nudge you in the direction of helping them because you’re the most powerful country. The idea that Donald Trump is run by, it’s crazy.

The Israel Lobby Myth

BRANDON TATUM: The little country, that little bitty country on that map. I saw Benjamin Netanyahu doing a board and I didn’t realize how these Arab nations are just massively bigger in land and also persons than Israel and they share it with the West Bank and Gaza, little bitty place. They run America?

And then they go and say Netanyahu got us into these wars. You think we didn’t want to get into wars? I would argue that they had Netanyahu come as a front to what we already wanted to do to show Congress that, “Look, see, we want to go to war. See he’s saying that, he’s saying that, weapons of mass destruction.”

You think that they’re going to get us in a war that they didn’t even participate in? They gave us intelligence. But no Iranian or Israeli soldiers, I don’t believe, fought in that 20-year war that we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t think they did whatsoever. Jordanians did. But they, so you’re telling me they got us in a war for 20 years spending billions of dollars just because Netanyahu, who wasn’t even the prime minister at the time, came to Congress and said you got to do this?

Me and my wife used to argue about this and I’m glad she’s on my side now. We used to argue about this. I said, “Babe, do you not think we have intelligence? As much as you think Mossad’s got intelligence and they come and they spy on us, you think we’re not spying on them?”

What do you think America is? America’s probably one of the most corrupt countries in the world. I’m just being honest. I love America so it’s whatever, but we do some of the most corrupt stuff that you have.

Joe Biden’s son had a major position in a company in Ukraine with no experience getting paid millions of dollars. Joe Biden on television in front of the world said if Ukraine doesn’t get rid of the prosecutor who was prosecuting his son at the time, he’s going to withhold a billion dollars of loan guarantees.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It wasn’t Poroshenko, but it was the prosecutor.

BRANDON TATUM: Maybe not.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, it’s a different. I don’t remember the name of the prosecutor.

BRANDON TATUM: It was one of the prosecutors that was.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re 100% right.

BRANDON TATUM: Just.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I wanted to correct the name so people don’t be saying he don’t know what he’s talking about.

American Corruption and Double Standards

BRANDON TATUM: Yeah, you know, I got too much going on my mind. But it was somebody associated. But he said on TV, quid pro quo. He admitted to a quid pro quo and said, “I won’t give him the loan guarantees unless they fire this prosecutor.” And they did, and they gave him the money. That is a quid pro quo.

How does his son, smoking crack in another country, get money from all these countries? Hillary Clinton, why does she have a private server in her house? She didn’t need one. The government has enough servers to go around. They were doing crooked stuff on that server so that they couldn’t trace it to the government.

We know it for a fact because she deleted 30,000 emails after she got subpoenaed. The fact that she didn’t go to jail is insane. A private server, a regular citizen shares classified information, you go to jail. There was one guy, I forget his name. He shared some pictures on one of the submarines. Went to jail. You go to jail for stuff like this.

She’s sending and receiving classified and top secret information on a server that’s not monitored by the United States government. The IT guy that she had monitoring didn’t have a security clearance, didn’t work for the government, so he’s exposed to classified documents. Then when she gets a subpoena, she deletes 30,000 emails.

Who deleted the emails and looked through the emails to vet them? Her own attorneys who don’t have a security clearance, so they were exposed to classified information. So she’s exposing people to classified information. She’s sending and receiving classified information on a private server. They take the Blackberries and bang them with hammers and they use BleachBit to delete her server.

Why are they doing that? Because they’re doing dirty deals with other governments. So America is the most powerful and probably one of the most corrupt governments out there. We start wars, we do proxy wars, we overthrow governments. We do all kinds of stuff.

So for somebody to be acting like Israel, this sophisticated little group of people, they come out manipulating big bad America? That’s crazy. That’s insane. We went to war for 20 years after 9/11, 20 plus years. Where is the weapons of mass destruction at? Where is our justification? We don’t need justification. America does whatever America wants to do.

We rip our own people off. What do you think big pharma is doing? Why you think we have food dyes and stuff in our food and all these other chemicals and stuff that we put in our food? Because we want to continue for people to be sick so they can continue to make money on giving them pills instead of giving them holistic approaches to things. We’re crooked and corrupt too. So to think that they’re crookeder than we are is crazy to me. And to think that they somehow control us through a lobby is stupid to me.

The AIPAC Money Reality

I’ll give you an example and I will call Marjorie Taylor Greene on the carpet on this. One of my favorite people, Byron Donalds. He may be the governor. I hope that he’s the governor of Florida. Great dude. I met him, I know him. Solid, smart dude in finance. His wife is smart. The dude is him. He gets paid from AIPAC, right?

So these dummies like Marjorie Taylor Greene paint this picture that everybody that’s taking lobby money from AIPAC is controlled by AIPAC. So I went to the website, I forget the website. My wife knows the name of it. I looked it up to see who gets paid, right? So I looked up her. Obviously she doesn’t get AIPAC money. I just had to make sure Byron Donalds gets money from AIPAC.

Guess how much they gave him? $40,000. He raised $12 million in his campaign. You’re telling me $40,000, that’s a private jet flight for Byron Donalds to do one event. If he flew private and his team flying private to the west coast and back, that’s $75,000 probably on a private jet. That’s not going to sway a man in an election. $40,000.

And then you go and look at it, you go, “Oh, they give money to left and right.” Duh. They’re a lobbying organization. That’s what they’re supposed to do is lobby. And this is the thing that the woke right, can I use that on your show?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

BRANDON TATUM: My words, not yours. The woke right, this is what they, they have a lens of anti-Semitism. So everything they see has to be in the front. Maybe, just maybe, AIPAC supports people who support Israel. Not that AIPAC is making people support Israel through some little money that they’ve given them. These people already support Israel. If I ran for office, I would get AIPAC money.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why?

The Israel-America Relationship and Conservative Politics

BRANDON TATUM: Because I’m a Zionist and they love a person like me. They’ll give me money. It’s not that I don’t like Israel and I want nothing to do with Israel, but in order for me to get elected, they going to give me $40,000 and I’m going to somehow turn on my morals and turn against everything I ever believed to support Israel.

You know, there’s a very interesting dynamic that people who are anti-Semitic don’t see. There is a unique relationship between America and Israel. It’s not just an alliance because they’re not only that, they’re strategic in the Middle East, which they clearly are with their intelligence and military. They’re literally like a military base for America. And we just allow them to have sovereignty because Iran, what did they do? They went and struck Iran. They did all the military stuff and we just went and dropped the bomb at the end.

But the Judeo-Christian foundation of our country is why we have such a connection with Israel. They go, all the Christians have to go and kiss the wall. No dummy, we believe a Christian nation. All of our founding is in Israel. Everything that founded the Christian faith in Jesus Christ was all in Israel. All the prophets, all of what Jesus did, all of the sites that he walked when he got crucified and all this stuff. Paul, Peter, all of them is in Israel.

So this is why we have such a connection that’s beyond just political. And so I would love to go to Israel. Not because I’m going to kiss the wall and do all of this stuff is because my Lord and Savior and the foundation of my faith is in Israel. And this is why we don’t have the connection with Qatar, even though we work with Qatar. And we doing foolery with them too because they fund Hamas and I don’t know what our government doing but we’re doing shady business too.

But that’s the reason why we don’t have a relation in Qatar and Syria and all these other Muslim nations. We work with them, we do business with them. They got money so we’re going to do business with them. But Israel is deeper for America than just political expediency.

If they were to be taken, see some of these people on the woke right would love for Israel to be taken over by Muslim extremists. They want us to stop funding them. This is what Marjorie Taylor Greene is essentially saying when she says we shouldn’t give money to Israel. Well, okay, let’s not give money to Israel. And they get attacked. And then what’s going to happen?

They want to drive these Jewish people out, put them in slavery or whatever the case be, kill them, make them convert. And then Islamic terrorists will run Jerusalem. And Islamic terrorists will be able to tell you if you can go see Jesus’ tomb or where they believe his tomb was or the site where he was crucified or the city of David. And they’re going to be able to tell you if you can come in or not. They’re going to tell Christians, you can’t come here and proselytize. You can’t come here and build a church. You can’t serve in the government.

Jews don’t serve in the government in any of these Arab nations. No Jew. But Arabs serve in the government in the Knesset and they can serve in the military and all this other stuff. These idiots want them to be taken over and controlled, and then they control the Middle East.

Now if Israel was to lose in a battle, all of that technology, all of that equipment, all of that stuff will go to a terrorist organization, all of our jets and all that. Is that really what is smart for America?

The Problem with Isolationism

And I’ll just make this one point about Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she irritates me to no end. They go, they used to be America first. All right? They say America first. Okay, everybody, I’m America first. If it came down to America, Israel, I’m picking America, right? And then Israel be another state in America, right? If it came down to it. And the Christians would be able to do whatever they want there.

But she went from America first to America only. Isolationism is the stupidest thing that anybody with a working brain stem could ever say when it comes to world politics and geopolitical stuff and also the economy and free trade. It’s the stupidest thing ever.

We do have a vested interest in having our fingers in all of this stuff. If we withdraw, then what? China is not going to withdraw. China is going to start taking up land here and there. They’re going to end up having Mexico. They’re going to be in Canada. And what do you know? We are boxed in isolated and negotiation for tariffs and all this stuff is going to be all predicated to the biggest countries that are the biggest business.

And America is going to be right here. And they’re going to have their ships right in the sea. And they’re going to have their ships in places where we have our ships. If we begin to be isolationists, we need to work with Israel, we need to work with Qatar. That’s why we have a military base in Qatar. So we need to have that.

But these dummies are saying we need to be isolationists. We need to not give money to anybody. While in her portfolio, she trades, her retirement money is being traded with other foreign governments or the foreign countries. If you are America only, then pull your funding and your portfolio from every country but American companies. She won’t do that. She started as Alberta op-ed about this.

Political Hypocrisy and Wealth

She is the epitome of a politician. She started with a $700,000 net worth. Now she’s worth upwards of $20 million. How? What are you doing that? You in that position making $100,000 a year, you go from $700,000 to $20 million. It’s the same argument that conservatives have with all these politicians getting rich in politics.

She just came out the other day on a podcast and said, I’m going to get in trouble for this because Donald Trump is deporting everybody, starting with the criminals. And if you’re hanging out with criminals, you get deported, too. She’s saying this is not the right approach because I’m a business owner and we can’t just deport people that are working in our businesses.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You’re America first, you’re America only. You now are concerned that your company will take a hit if people who are illegally in this country are no longer working in your industry. Wait a minute. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is that your stance now? She’s getting backlash over it, which shows me, let me tell you guys this. You guys probably know a little bit about American politics.

The Reality Behind the Scenes

Ninety percent of the people are not who you think they are. When I go to events at Turning Point USA, I see these people in the backstage, and some of these people aren’t real. Some of these people are fake. Some of these people, you catch them on a hot mic, they don’t even believe the stuff they’re saying on stage. I’m telling you, most these people are fake. When I first started in the movement, I thought that everybody was in it for the right reason.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right?

The Conservative Movement’s Credibility Crisis

BRANDON TATUM: I’m a conservative. I want the country to… They’re not. We got people. Steve Bannon was associated with this, and I’m calling everybody out. His daughter, I love his daughter. She followed me. But Steve Bannon is nuttier than nutty. He came on the podcast saying Donald Trump is going to get a third term. What? That’s against the Constitution of the United States of America. But you claim to be a patriot. Donald Trump on a third term? He’s 80 some years old. Donald Trump is hanging on by a thread. Immensely too. You hear him ramble for 32 hours or four hours. I think he still got it. But you get what I’m saying. Like another four… He’s not even finished with this one. Another four years, he’d be 80 something years old. What rational person would say that?

He got caught up in a scandal with the Build a Wall scandal. Conservatives taking money from everybody, getting our hopes up. And these dudes are taking money. His other business partner went to jail, his wife doing OnlyFans. They’re supposed to be Christian conservatives. They are doing fraudulent behavior. They lied to us about the 2020 election. They lied to us. I think Trump got robbed. But some conservatives lied to us. “We got a smoking gun. Donald Trump is going to be the president. They got all this information. You just wait. Donate money here, donate money there.” And then when the rubber hit the road, they had nothing. They had nothing to present in court. They had none of the things that they said they had.

These same evil grifting people are doing the same thing now. I don’t believe nothing Steve Bannon says. I don’t believe… And it almost seemed like a lot of these people were falling for the woke, right? These people aren’t who you think they are. They’re backstage doing stuff. We got politicians that are conservative, sex tapes coming out, they’re getting canned, doing side deals. It’s a couple other people that I can’t remember their name right now. But so people can’t get it twisted. Like it’s not just the left that’s crooked, it’s people on the right that’s crooked too. And they’re getting worse and worse. And we’re seeing a divide like never before.

People are making money off Charlie Kirk’s death. They’re not supporting his family like they claim. You know, there’s… I can’t say too much about it, but there’s weird stuff in that atmosphere too because I just don’t understand why Tucker Carlson is lifted up in our movement the way he is.

Tucker Carlson’s Contradictions

He was just at a university cussing at kids and losing his temper because the kid brought up his dad who was in the CIA. And I got video. Nick Fuentes exposed them. And he’s a nut too. It’s like these nutty people exposing each other. They can’t… They’re trying to fight who’s the nuttiest one. So they want to expose those so they can have the crown.

Why would he go on and say he didn’t know his dad was CIA in the interview and then in a previous interview? But no, he was with Candace Owens. Tucker Carlson with Candace Owens on the interview, and he was acting like he just kind of found out for the first time through Nick Fuentes that his dad was in the CIA. “I was shocked. I didn’t know my dad was CIA.” Whatever. But before that, he was on Sean Ryan’s show talking about how his dad was in the CIA. So he lied. He told a lie in front of the world.

Tucker Carlson wrote a text message when he was with Fox News. I don’t know if you guys seen it, how he hates Donald Trump. He was caught on a text or something like that. They put it out in the world, and it was shocking to the world because he was saying how much he loved Donald Trump publicly. “And I support Donald Trump and I’m with him.” And then privately he said, “I hate his guts.”

A kid in the thing asked him the question, and he lost his mind. He was all upset with this kid. And it’s like, no, the guy asked you a real question. Answer the question, Tucker. Why did you say that you hate Donald Trump when you were promoting to the world that you loved him and you were supportive of him, and y’all were friends and everything like that? Why did you say that? And he couldn’t answer the question, and he beat around the bush and he got mad and he did this.

And then the kid came at the end and was like, “Why are you getting so mad? You know you’re worth like $50 million.” He flew off the handle because the kid said he was worth $50 million. Now, you guys are smart. If you do any research on Tucker Carlson’s earnings, he could very well be worth $50 million. He was making $20 million a year working for Fox. They had to… When they canned him because he lied about Dominion Machines and they got sued for a billion dollars, and I’m pretty sure the settlement was to get rid of him. They had to pay his contract out. So he was making $20 million not even working for them.

He was making some money not even working for them. He used to be, I think, a part owner in Daily Caller. He got a little dip company that he has now. That’s a little nicotine pack. I’m sure that company is worth tens of millions of dollars. And he has a podcast that’s the number one podcast. His YouTube channel is insane. And he had $15 million infused into his podcast, which probably helps it reach so many more people. He has to be worth between $20 and $50 million.

Why did he get so mad when that kid asked him and cuss the kid? And then he used the excuse of when the kid said, “Jesus Christ,” “Don’t take God’s name in vain. Get off the stage.” None of what he does and what he stands for was what Charlie Kirk stood for. Why is he still being elevated in the movement? A part of me thinks it’s money. It’s money and it’s connection to a person that had resources versus being principled and saying, “When you get out there and you are anti-Semitic, I no longer can platform you.”

I do not understand why he’s still platformed. And a part of me don’t understand why Charlie was friends with him, but I see it because I’m still friends with Candace. And so even though I don’t agree with this stuff, we still can be friends. And I think that that’s why, how he’s with Tucker. All the people that know him, that I know say he didn’t agree with Tucker and he definitely didn’t agree with Candace. But why are they platforming this guy?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that to me, isn’t it just basic numbers? I mean, Tucker has a massive audience.

BRANDON TATUM: Right, but that’s what I’m saying. It’s not necessarily about what…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What the truth is saying.

Influence Over Principles

BRANDON TATUM: Like, the young kids are coming up thinking that we’re trying to win our country. Other people got something else going on. Yeah, somebody is in business with this person that’s in business with this person that raised money for this person, and this person has got influence. So we’re going to act like we don’t see that. We’re going to act like we don’t see him cuss a kid out on campus, which was an embarrassment. And I said very clearly he’s antithetical to Turning Point USA.

The young people need to hear truth. They need to hear integrity. They need to hear love for country. They need to hear at least trust of the government, reasonably, not somebody questioning everything the government is doing. Tucker’s out there saying that Donald Trump is run by Netanyahu. He’s saying that young… This is why we have a divide of the next generation. You have the divide on the right because you got people that are reasonable. You got people like him that are pushing conspiracies, that are pushing hate against Jews, that are pushing at the government and somehow Kash Patel are evil. And I don’t understand.

But to your point, he’s the number one podcaster. He’s worth tens of millions of dollars, if not more. And he got mad at that kid. And he has a lot of influence, and some people rather have the influence than to be principled. I wouldn’t have nothing to say about him if he was, in my opinion, if he was being legitimate, he legitimately had questions about Israel, I’d be like, fine, I don’t care. I’m not Israeli. So if you don’t like Israel, then don’t like Israel.

But it’s just the way he’s going about doing things that make you feel like, “Dang Tucker, either you were fake then or you’re fake now.” Why did you believe that? And you changed. I don’t hear your conversion story. I don’t hear the story of why you now hate Israel. I don’t hear the story of why you supported Donald Trump all this time. And now Donald Trump is the enemy. He’s essentially saying that Donald Trump is committing treason. If you were beholden to another interest of another country as an American, that’s treason. He’s saying it, but he’s too much of a coward to call Donald Trump by name.

The kid came on stage at the event and told and said the governments are the same no matter who’s in office. Biden is in office and Trump is in office is the same. They’re still giving all our money away. They’re still not America first. And he agreed with it. Is that the message you want to teach young people, that you should distrust one of the presidents that’s probably the most pro-American, you know, pro-conservative, pro-Republican?

And so anyway, I could go down the rabbit hole, but I’ve learned over time, and I tell young people this all the time. Don’t glorify these people like they’re gods. Many of these people aren’t who you think they are. There’s a few that are real in this movement that are genuine that’ll go to bat. And you can tell because when the wind blows, they’re sturdy like this glass versus they’re over here when it’s popular, they’re over here when it’s popular. When there’s money over here, they say they believe something, but they like this person because it’s popular. And, you know, anyway, that’s the thing that bothers me the most.

Recognizing Authenticity

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I think, Brandon, one of the ways I found for myself to tell who is real and who isn’t on left and right is the people who are prepared to say that they don’t agree with their own side when their own side, in their opinion, has gone wrong. And I appreciate you coming on and talking about both sides and where they go right and go wrong and just sharing your opinions with us. We usually go for an hour. We went for three.

BRANDON TATUM: We’ve been here for three hours?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BRANDON TATUM: Oh, my God. Yeah, I apologize. You know, I’m a talker, man. I have my own show, so I’ll talk to you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no, no. We loved it. It was great having you on. We’re going to ask you some more questions from my supporters. Before we do, though, what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be as a society?

The Spiritual Foundation

BRANDON TATUM: As a society, I think we… I think we need to talk more about Jesus Christ. I mean, when Charlie Kirk died, I think people started seeing that revival come back. But we’re getting too secularized. We’re forgetting the foundational principle, and this is… I’m speaking as an American specifically, but we’re forgetting the foundational principles of where this country came, where our country was founded, all the greatness that we espouse and all the freedoms that we have.

We forget that that came from a Judeo-Christian background. All of our laws, people go, “It’s not secular.” All of our laws that we have now come from a biblical worldview. Constitutional rights come from God and liberal rights. All of those things on our money. You know, in the Congress, we have the judges, and one of the judges in our Congress is Moses. And so we got to start getting to the bottom of Jesus, faith in God and understanding. We’re in a spiritual war. And it’s not just carnal, it’s not just politics. It’s something bigger going on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Appreciate it. All right, head on over to Substack at triggerpod.co.uk where you get to see Brandon answer your questions.

FRANCIS FOSTER: How can we tackle accusations of coconutism where people are accused of being white, especially where the accusations are around pretty much anything indicating success?

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