Stories of Us — Marathon | Marathons

Black people and white people don't have to hate each other. Citizens don't have to hate the police. This is all a manipulation. I'm Brandon Strock, and this is my story. The majority, if not the totality, of my political opinions and identity as a Democrat, as a liberal, stemmed almost entirely from my sexuality, from being gay, and the way that I felt about religious people, conservatives, Republicans. Around 2013, I'm still an active alcoholic. I'm still an active cocaine addict. I started reaching out to people close to me and saying, I really think I have a problem, and I really, really think I need help. And everyone was like, you're fine. You're fine. Everybody goes out and parties. Everybody goes out, and don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And I was like, no, but this isn't fine. I know it's not fine. It's not okay. I ran into this guy when I went home for Christmas back to Nebraska. And back then, he had a horrible crystal meth addiction. He was in really, really bad shape as a human being. And he looked amazing. He was so physically fit. He looked so attractive. He looked so happy. And he said, well, I've been sober for more than seven years. He's like, I hit my rock bottom, and I had to get sober. At that moment, I just thought I was meant to run into this person. And I just said, help me. Please, please, please help me. And so he said, yes, I will help you. I joined a 12-step program. I started going to AA meetings. It was Monday through Friday. It all boiled to a head one day at a meeting that I went to in Berkeley, California. And this is when the world really started to change their opinions about the gay community. The Supreme Court that year decided that marriage equality would be the law of the land. And it became clear that as a society and a culture, we were reaching this tipping point where people were now starting to view the gay community differently. And I raised my hand to share. And I didn't know that this was all going to purge out of me. I had no idea. And somewhere in the middle, it turned. And by the end, I was almost in a rage. And I kept saying to everybody, it's great that you guys have all changed your mind. Good for you. But I was like, I want an apology. I need an apology. I need to know that people are sorry. And it was awkward when I got done. And they were like, thank you, Brandon. Joan? You know, and then they sort of moved on. But when the meeting ended and everybody just lined up in front of me and literally just said, I'm sorry, Brandon. We're sorry, Brandon. It healed my soul. Something lifted out of me on that day. And I stopped feeling burdened by this feeling of resentment toward heterosexual people, toward conservative people. And suddenly, I started to feel free to get to know these people on a different level. That leads us to the 2016 election. For me, it was a no-brainer that I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton. I bought into hook, line, and sinker the media narrative of who Donald Trump was, who his supporters were, and what he was all about. And then finally, I posted that I would never be able to understand how anyone could vote for a man who stood before a cheering crowd and mocked a reporter's disability. One person responded to me. She said, look, I'm not trying to start a problem with you. I'm not trying to have a fight. I'm just asking, have you seen this? What happened next changed my life forever. It was a compilation of footage of Donald Trump in numerous circumstances throughout the years, doing that exact same voice and that exact same gesture. And it became very clear that this had nothing to do with the reporter's disability. My brain was saying, oh my god, I don't think he mocked that reporter's disability. But my heart was saying, yeah, but we hate him. But we hate him. This presented an even bigger conundrum for me. Because if Donald Trump did not mock a reporter's disability for me, why did CNN tell me that he did? Because CNN had never lied to me before. So why all of a sudden did CNN start lying on that day? So what I chose to do was go to work. And when I came home from work, I would get on my computer. And I would watch videos. And I would read stories. And I would research as much as I could possibly research. And what I discovered was astounding. All of this fear and all of this terror that I was experiencing, which was affecting the way that I feel, was a carefully crafted narrative. But why would they do this? I thought that they cared about the gay community. I thought that they cared about Black people. Black people and white people don't have to hate each other. Citizens don't have to hate the police. Gay people and straight people don't have to be at odds with one another. This is all a manipulation. And I was thinking about this. How am I going to wake people up? How do I capture people's attention? And I felt on this day in April of 2018, like I'd been struck by lightning as I was out jogging. I felt and heard in my own mind this voice say, once upon a time, I was a liberal. And that speech, it's like it downloaded into my brain. Like line by line. And I became so exhilarated that I ran home as fast as I could. I got a couple of friends together and I borrowed a camera. And we went into a dark room with a dark background and a little ring light. And I just read my script that I had written into the camera. Once upon a time, I was a liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago, I was still a liberal. I became a liberal because I felt I'd found a tribe whose values aligned with my own. In an effort to gain voters and maintain power, the Democratic Party that I once loved has joined forces with the extremist left. I knew that there must be tens, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who were feeling exactly the same way I was feeling. And so I put the video out on Memorial Day of 2018, May 26th. And the video just exploded. WalkAway is not about becoming a Republican. It's not about becoming a Trump supporter. It's about doing your own homework, doing your own research, thinking for yourself. But never again will anybody have to walk away from the political left and be alone. And so my advice to anybody would be make that decision because it's the best choice you'll ever possibly make in your life and join the rest of us. And you will be so much happier that you made this decision. The Black Lives Matter movement is literally telling Black people that you're nothing. I'm Amir Odom, and this is my story. I was born into a pretty middle-class family. I feel that a lot of my childhood pain and my pain in middle school came from just everything hitting me at once. You know, this idea that there was a white man over me that's suppressing me and that's going to make it really harder for me to do things in life because I was Black, because that's just what I was told by my family and by mass media that, you know, being Black is going to be way harder for you. And another thing that added to it was my sexuality, because at this time, I knew I was gay. And being gay is something that I always just heard was a bad thing to do, a bad thing to be. It was just so much. And the things that I would try to distract myself with ended up kind of hurting me in the long run even more. You know, being Black, I would try to act Blacker because I was always told, you know, I mean, you're an Oreo, you're acting white. Why are you Black and listening to rock music? Why are you Black and you want to read books? So I would try to act Black. I would get girlfriends, try to hide me being gay. There was one night where I was laying in bed, and I was just thinking about all the things going on in my life. And I just said to myself, you know what? This is the time. I'm going to take my own life. It's over. Game over. I ended up leaving the house. This was around 8.30 p.m. I left. I went to my friend Jerome's house. He answered, said, yo, bro, love you. Gave him a hug. And then I walked about half a mile over to my friend Chidi's house. Chidi comes down. I give her a big hug. And so from Chidi's house, I'm walking back home, and I'm just really thinking about, you know, how am I going to do this? I want to die now. I said bye to the people, to two people who I just love so much. And how can I, how can I just go? And I see the cars, and I'm just, you know, I don't want to jump. I go home. I'm like, I don't want to end up cutting myself anymore. I don't want to jump in the lake. And so as I was walking home from saying goodbye to my friends, I went home, and I was laying in bed, and I'm like, crap. Like, I left to go kill myself. I didn't want to come back home. Now I'm back home. So you're back to square one. What are you going to do? I'm laying in bed, listening to Panic! At The Disco, New Perspective. The song New Perspective was really just talking about, I want to live a life from a new perspective. In my head then, all I heard was, I want to live a life from a new perspective. And that was just ringing in my head nonstop, because I did want to live a life from a new perspective. I didn't want to feel this pain and rage anymore. So let's just try this New Perspective gig. Let's just see what happens. What can we do? From that point on, I made a pact with myself that I will always try to make each day better than yesterday. While I was in college, during the summers and the winters, I was interning at a mortgage company that I worked for. At this company, there was a boss named Matt that really became a mentor, so to say, and really became like a father figure to me. And he showed me all the things that I missed out on my childhood. The more time I spent with Matt, the more time I realized I was being lied to in my life regarding the media. My personal life is not lining up with what the media was telling me to be. I'm sitting here like, what is really going on? I go on a date with this guy I met on an app just to, you know, make friends. So we're sitting here at this date talking, and we get into the debate between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. And I'm like, Black Lives Matter? And he's just very calm. Of course, I'm the angry, emotional one. Black Lives Matter, you know, even though like not all black people get killed by the cops, it happens too much. We have to defend these black lives. And he's just sitting there like, it doesn't happen that much. You like me, I'm white. You clearly like me. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, well, doesn't my life matter too? And I'm like, well, yeah. He's like, OK, well, you should just... Are you fine with looking into some videos? And I'm like, sure. So he told me to Google Stephen Crowder's Changed My Mind. I went home. I watched a couple of Changed My Mind series. I went down a tunnel of watching the five-minute series from PragerU. I watched Candace Owens. I watched Charlie Kirk. I watched Brandon Tatum. And my mind was just obliterated because I already don't like being lied to. And all these videos are just pushing nothing but the facts. Black people are not dying as much as the media say they are. And the amount of weight that was lifted off my shoulders, I'll never forget that moment because I no longer saw myself as a victim. I always thought the cops were out to get me. I always thought I was going to die just for being Black. And watching Candace Owens, Brandon Tatum, they just pushed in me like, no, you're good. This is not the case. Context matters in a lot of these situations. And when I looked into all these situations that the media was pushing, it really wasn't what they said it was. Coming out as a conservative was 10 times, I don't know if 10 is the number, way more harder than coming out as gay. And so being gay was just like, hey, I'm gay, and then that was it. Being conservative and saying I'm conservative has completely rocked my world because it's like, I'm not just in there, in the left's eyes, and my friends are liberals, I'm not just conservative, I'm racist. How? I don't know. I'm homophobic. How? I don't know. They have a really hard problem with the things that I say about Black Lives Matter. The problem that I have with Black Lives Matter is what they're doing to people like me. And it's a lot of people like me. The reason why I speak out so much about this is because I don't want another black boy to go through what I went through due to Black Lives Matter. I have a lot of friends, a lot of black friends, who've gone through the same things with cops, and they're fine, and they know not all white people are bad. But you have Black Lives Matter pushing and throwing fear onto our black youth. The Black Lives Matter movement is literally telling black people that you're nothing. You have to march in the streets, otherwise you're going to die. You're not going to amount to anything. You're a victim. March for us so that we can defund the police. Why are you taking the police away from the communities on which my little cousins reside in? They're great. They're running away from bullets. I have such a strong disdain for Black Lives Matter now because I'm actually seeing what they're doing and what they're pushing forward. Again, I was there. I was in the streets marching. I was in the streets crying. I was in the streets hurt. I am begging Black Lives Matter to stop using black people like me to push a political game. I am not your puppet. I am not your tool. Stop pushing this unnecessary fear and unnecessary idea that I'm just going to get shot down by the cops when it's not going to happen. And you're making all these young black boys and young black girls marching in the streets thinking that their lives don't matter, that it could be them. If I can go back to the freshman year of me in college, the super SJW liberal, I was on the left, viewed myself as a victim. I'd give him a hug. And I'd say, hey, one, look at your past. Pay attention to what you've been through in your life. You know this isn't the case. You know you are not a victim. You are a victor. And you've accomplished so far. Why are you letting the media take that away from you? Looking back through everything, I feel like I do have privilege. And it's a privilege of being in America. And it's the same privilege that we're all afforded and that we all have. We live in one of the greatest nations to ever exist that is so free that you can really do whatever you desire to do if you work hard enough and put your mind to it. And I'm just thankful to be here. And I love America. As a black man in America, growing up and from pure influence, Democrats are full of black people and Republicans are racist white people. That's what I grew up knowing. My name is Brennan Tatum. And this is my story. I was born in Fort Worth, Texas. I came from a split family. Had very good parents. And I would say that most of my childhood, I was, I guess my heroes were athletes. I think I wanted to be like Michael Jordan. That was my favorite sports icon. Growing up in Texas, you know, you go to church, you play football, and that's it. You know, so being in Texas, growing up in Fort Worth, I mean, everybody plays sports. And so I was no different, you know. And my son was born in 2010, which was towards the end of my college career. And in 2010 was also the year that I was eligible for the NFL draft. I had an agent and it was projected that I would get drafted in the sixth or the seventh round, which is the last two rounds of the NFL draft to the Oakland Raiders. So my family threw a birthday party and a draft party same day. My agent told me that the Oakland Raiders had contacted him. They're going to draft me for sure. And the sixth or the seventh round would be the first safety goal. That opportunity came and went. On that draft day, he passed on me. They decided to pick another player and I was devastated. I was devastated. I cried like a baby. And I had to make a crucial decision to say, okay, now that I put the X on the calendar, where do I go from here? So I decided to do a ride along. I just went to a random substation and that's why I believe that things are meant to be. And so I pull up to the substation. I pull right up on this officer. I pull right up next to him and I said, hey, can I do a ride along with you? And officer Champagne, who's a white officer, he looked at me, I can tell you, shocked. He was like, what is this guy doing? And then I asked him to do a ride along. And he said, of course, man, come by next week. We'll get you signed up for a ride along. And I went to do the ride along with Champagne. The emergency call of a young man who's actively committing suicide. And I literally saw them save this kid's life. He was actively cutting his wrist at a table at the back near the kitchen of this little small studio apartment. And I remember him saving his life. They ended up getting him to safety, getting him to some help. And we get back in the car. And I remember before we went to the call, Sean was asking me about my family. He was talking about my mom and dad. And then we get back in the car. And I remember him resuming the conversation. And I was at a loss of words. I mean, my heart was still beating like this. And I remember him asking me, what were you saying about your mom? And I'm like, my mama, I have a mama? I was totally just flustered. I asked him the question. I said, man, did this happen every day? He like, oh yeah, I do this every day. And at that moment is the moment that I first discovered a hero. For the first time, I saw a hero. And I used to think that athletes were heroes. And nothing against athletes. You know, you work hard. I know the sacrifice that's being made. But that's nowhere near what I saw from Sean Payne doing that on a day-to-day basis and being able to recompose himself or gain his composure after seeing something so horrific. And at that moment in the car, I said, this is my calling. This is what I want to do. I want to be a hero like Sean Payne. And I became a police officer. And I was a police officer for six and a half years. When I was growing up, automatically, I was a Democrat. My whole family was. They were all Democrats. And as a Black man in America growing up from pure influence, Democrats are full of Black people. And Republicans are racist white people. That's what I grew up knowing. And it held true even when I was a police officer when I first got on the police department. But I began to be challenged by other police officers. Some of them were my friends that loved me, cared about me, and knew me better than just by anybody else. And they would always tell me is that, OK, look at what this side is saying, the Democrat side is saying. Look at what they stand for. And people would tell me, that's not what you stand for, is it? You're a Christian. You believe in this. That's not what they're saying. And I would often say, oh, but I don't agree with that. But I still believe in this side. And over time, it began to wear on me. Those seeds were planting in me to really look at it more consciously. Barack Obama began to say things that were degrading and damaging to the image of law enforcement in America. With Michael Brown and with the police officers that arrested a guy, I think he was a professor at Harvard or something like that. And they arrested him because it appeared he was breaking into a house. It happened to be his house. But the police officers didn't know that. And Barack Obama didn't verify that. But the first thing he said is that those officers were acting stupidly. I physically saw the reaction of the community from the things that he was saying. People would begin to attack us. People would begin to, especially African-American people, were, oh, man, you put me over because I'm Black. Man, y'all just out here just doing whatever. And they were directly hearing from the commander-in-chief at the time. It broke me from that loyalty to not being open-minded. And I said, you know what? I will never support anybody who will not stand behind men and women who wear the uniform. And that's what caused me to just be more open to saying, let me look at both sides and not just to stay on one side when it comes to politics. I've never met a racist police officer, ever. I've never known anyone that I even thought was a racist, even if they didn't project it. It's very difficult to be a racist police officer. Given the fact that you can't monitor who you go and serve with your life. And all of us police officers, whether you're Black, white, male, female, we all worked as a family. I would die for any one of those police officers, no matter what color they were. And the white police officer in our department would die for me in a minute. And they would defend me harder than anybody else. You know, I'll never forget the scenario where it was a young officer. He was fresh on the police department. I had a couple of years on him. We went to a call of a white supremacist or white nationalist or something that he was. And he did not want a Black man taking his, a Black police officer to be at his call. We show up. He said, I don't want the Black man here. I just want the white officer. And my friend, he's my friend, we got close after that. He ripped his behind. I mean, I almost had to step in the middle of him. He said, how dare you say that to my fellow police officer? We'll leave. We don't have to, we won't serve you. You a piece of crap for saying that. And I supported that. And me and him became close friends. Never had a racial interaction with, never had a negative racial interaction with any of the police officers I was a part of. And a lot of policing in America has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with behaviors. Because this is what people fail to realize. Because they're ignorant and they have an agenda. The advice that I would give the younger B. Tatum is that first, build your relationship with God. That's the most important thing that you can do. And secondly would be believe in yourself and dream big. People are going to consistently try to put you in a box, tell you what you should think, tell you where you should go. But you got to understand that you're an individual. And that just like you have an individual fingerprint, you are an individual person and you have your own mission in life. And you have to follow that mission. Don't believe in this oppression. Don't believe that you, you know, live in the worst country on planet Earth. America is the greatest country that we have ever seen. You have an opportunity to be whatever you want to be in this great country. Have integrity. You work hard and never let anybody stop you. And you will be successful. Women are completely dominated in America. We get more college degrees. The gender wage gap was a complete myth. It was little by little the modern feminist in me was just sort of dying. My name is Gina Florio and this is my story. I grew up in a Christian home. Yeah, my parents really taught me that this is the land of opportunity. And my mom always told me, she says, you can do anything you want to do. She says, you can be anything you want to be. I remember hearing that from a very early time when I was a kid. She said that as long as I got a great education, that I'd be able to do pretty much anything I wanted to do with my life. So that was a really big moment for me when I got into Harvard. But I got there and then I also even then remember because it was a divinity program. That's where you really get the machine of the brainwashing and the indoctrination. I took a class my first year called Race Ethics in the U.S. Prison System. And the professor, she flat out told us that it was a white supremacy system that ruled America and that the U.S. prison system treated Black people like slaves. And we read The New Jim Crow. And so I was really digging deep into this theology, into this critical theory, and I was getting deeper and deeper. But when I got done with my degree program, even more I asked myself, what on earth am I going to do with this? I have to take responsibility too. But I think in a way, higher education kind of destroyed me. It little by little took away all the layers that really gave me grounding and meaning. And it gave me an entirely new viewpoint of the world, a new lens through which to see the world. And that lens did not see the world kindly. There was an agenda there. They wanted us to hate America. They wanted us to hate the free market and capitalism. I came out of Harvard not only as an atheist, but I was angry. I hated America. And I wanted to leave. So at the end of that year, I moved to Australia. I just picked up my stuff. I got rid of my apartment. I was like, I am out of here. And I was convinced that I was just going to kind of live in this little small beach town called Byron Bay. I was really soul searching. I was searching for something. And because I had abandoned all of the things that were most meaningful to me, I felt so empty. And I kept denouncing all the things that I had held dear in my life before. And I spent a long time looking for meaning and happiness in all the wrong places. I was partying a lot. I was doing a lot of drugs. It was a rough time. And God happened. I mean, I don't even know how to explain it. I was turning on the gas tank to the barbecue. And the gas tank wasn't hooked up correctly. It set off. The gas tank exploded. I ended up going to the hospital. I had first and second degree burns all over my face, my neck. My face was just completely charred. All of the delicate skin that was peeling off. A couple of weeks went by. I had to leave the country in order to renew my tourist visa. They found out that I was essentially working on a tourist visa, which is obviously illegal. And I had no choice but to go back home. And my mom said when I called her from the detention center, she said she was so relieved. She was so relieved. Not only because I was alive, but because I was coming home. Sorry, I never expected to cry doing this. It was a rough time. And it was strange. I feel bad. I put my mom through that. She had to watch me go from a straight-A student and having real ambitions for my life. And then all of a sudden, I was just sort of like, you know, kicking it all away and saying, I don't want any of that. I just want to be free. I was a freelance writer for a couple of media publications. You write whatever they give you. So at the start of a week, my editor would give me a list of SEO phrases, a list of topics, and I could choose which ones I wanted. And the list was always something like 10 ways you can be more of an intersectional feminist, 10 ways you can support more women-owned businesses, 10 ways that cultural appropriation hurts everyone, especially minorities. So they would assign us very, very leftist, very feminist issues that we would just sort of have to produce because the name of the game for these media companies is quantity over quality. It's all about clicks and views and traffic because that's how they make their money. That's how the advertisers will buy ads. So they just give you topics that they know will get a lot of clicks and views, and you're just expected to write them. One year, they asked me to write 10 New Year's resolutions that people of color have for white people. And I ended up writing that. And so I was, you know, taking everything that I learned from college and university and graduate school and then being in this media environment, it was just the perfect storm of a place to produce content where it was very anti-America, very anti-men, anti-capitalism. But what's interesting about that time is that my ex-husband red-pilled me. Little by little, we would have these conversations at home. My husband at the time asked me if I would watch an interview. And that interview was Candace Owens, the first time she was on The Rubin Report in 2017. And I just remember watching this girl and thinking to myself, I am being lied to by the media. There's something wrong here. And then I took a deep dive. I was just binging. I watched so much Victor Davis Hanson. I watched a lot of his speeches. I was listening to The Rubin Report a lot. That marriage played a really big role in my life because it brought me, it pulled back the veil. He really helped me understand that a lot of the things that I was taught, a lot of the things that I was producing as an editor and as a writer were just patently, blatantly false and a complete lie. Really big sort of red pill for me was the lie of modern feminism. The relationship between men and women is not the way that modern feminists say it is. And then I started researching more about how women were doing in America. And I started to realize that women are completely dominated in America. We get more college degrees. I learned that the gender wage gap was a complete myth. A lot of the PragerU videos at the time. I remember watching the video of Christina Hoff Summers talking about the myth of the gender wage gap. It was little by little, the modern feminism, the modern feminist in me was just sort of dying. All these facts and data and statistics that were just kind of bubbling up. All of the lies of America being a racist, white supremacist country was, it was really dividing us. I started doing jujitsu when I was in San Francisco towards the end of my time there. And something occurred to me that sports and fitness are almost inherently conservative. They're based on merit. They're based on hard work. They're based on tangible results. No matter where you come from, no matter what the color of your skin is, no matter what kind of background you had, what kind of socioeconomic status you come from, if you work hard enough, you can lose 20 pounds. If you work hard enough, you can win that jujitsu fight. I do think there is a very strong, a very interesting connection between getting physically fit and going through that process because I found myself very inspired to improve every other part of my life. I look back on all of my experiences and I just really hope, I just hope and I pray that all of the pain and the suffering and the turmoil and the chaos and the inner struggle that I dealt with as a woman in my 20s, I hope that my story can really inspire young women to take the narrow path and not be seduced by the lifestyle that I think is pushed today in mainstream media, is pushed by our culture and our society to be free. I love, love, love this country. I love the opportunities that it's given my mother, that it's given my family. I love the opportunities that it's given to me. Every Fourth of July now, I just, I have a deep reverence for this country and I really believe that God has blessed America in unique ways. We are a very, very unique experiment that has gone right. Right now, I'm reading Dinesh D'Souza's United States of Socialism and you know, these books really make me, I clutch the book to my chest and I'm just so grateful that I was born here. And my mom always told me, since I was a kid, she said, girl, she said, you got the golden ticket, you were born in America. And my mom was right. I'm so, so lucky now and so fortunate to be here. I just love America. I love our country.