Derrick Grayson

For Sights on Senate, The Red & Black sat down with Derrick Grayson, more popularly known as "The Minister of Truth."

Grayson also ran for the Senate seat that David Perdue won in 2014, garnering just over one percent of the vote in a crowded primary. Grayson said he hopes to knock out incumbent Senator Johnny Isakson in the Republican primary.

Grayson is known in the Tea Party community as a firebrand outsider who is not afraid to speak his mind. He runs his own YouTube channel which has over 22,000 subscribers, and several videos with tens of thousands of views, as well as a few videos with over 100,000 views. His videos vary from his work as a minister, to campaign videos, to “Drive Time," a regular segment where Grayson monologues about political issues of the day or problems facing the black community.

The Red & Black: For college students who may not know you, tell me who Derrick Grayson is.

Derrick Grayson: Derrick Grayson is a constitutionalist, I am a conservative, I believe that the rights of the people, the Bill of Rights, is being trampled upon daily by the people that we elect and send to Washington DC ... Our campaign is focused on, more than anything, not stump speeches, but educating the voters as to what the current incumbents are engaged in, as well as what anyone running for office supports that is unconstitutional … if you don’t know what’s wrong you can’t fix it.

R&B: How do you go about educating people like what you’re saying?

DG: I do Drivetime videos. I post every single day, something on Facebook or Twitter. I actually engage the people, and as long as they can disagree civilly, I answer their questions … I explain my positions on everything. I don’t hee and haw. What you see is what you get. If you go to grayson2016.com, we list our core issues. They’re easy to read and everyone to see, it’s right there on the front. We talk about debts, the Fair Tax, all of those issues, that our federal government has broken. We need somebody to stand with a whistle, a broom, and a flashlight. To sound the alarm, clean up the trash, and illuminate the streets so people will know who is trashing our constitution. That’s what I do ...

R&B: Why are you the best for college students to vote for in the Republican primary?

DG: I have three daughters in college, I want there to be something for them when they graduate ... the reason that I’d be good for college students is I would engage in things like the Fair Tax, which one of its provisions is the revocation of NAFTA, which will encourage jobs to come back here to this country. What good is a college education when there are no jobs? Ross Perot once said that people who can’t make anything can’t buy anything. For the most part, we are making very little in this country.

Call Bank of America’s customer service, and you’ll find that the jobs are overseas. Cisco’s customer service is overseas. AT&T’s customer service is overseas. Those were American jobs at one point.

R&B: Was there ever a defining moment where you realized you wanted to enter politics?

DG: The election with Ron Paul, I went to the Republican National Convention in Tampa. The way the the Committee changed the rules … in order to block Ron Paul from being nominated on the floor. I saw first hand the corruption of our political system. Even more so, the unholy alliance between Republicans and Democrats. I was ready to drop out of politics altogether. 18 months into Obama’s first term, all the policy he engaged in, was the same that Bush engaged in, except Obama just sort of accelerated it.

A friend of mine told me about Ron Paul, so I began to study him, and it brought back what I learned when I was in school before the education system was co-opted by the Department of Education. I remembered what I learned about the Constitution and how important it was, that when you violate the Constitution you get the type of country that we have now. And the parallel of that was the Jews: they violated the word of God and they ended up going away in captivity.

So I decided, after studying Ron Paul, that I would support him. I furiously supported Paul, I made a video that got over 150,000 views, and I spoke on his behalf. When I saw what happened at the RNC, I realized that somebody had to stand up, and I decided to run for the US Senate.

R&B: So if both parties are corrupt in your opinion, why would you run as a Republican over running as an independent?

G: Georgia is a decidedly red state. That’s number one. Number two, the reason I will not run as a Democrat: The Democratic party is responsible for, solely, from the late 50s through the 70s and 80s, for the destruction of the black family, with the advent of the No Man in the House Rule, under the welfare system. So what they did to the black family, in my terms, is unforgivable. I would never run as a Democrat or be a member of the Democratic party ever again. While the Republican party is corrupt, they are the party that is responsible for the Emancipation, the freedom, of negroes in this country.

So I’ve been a member of the Republican party for a while now because I know what the party used to represent. My goal is not to go into the room and become like it, corrupt; but to go into the room and change it by purging the corruption that is in the Republican party to bring it back to it’s original conservative and constitutional ideals of limited government and the maximum amount of freedom for all peoples as long as they do not infringe upon the freedom of another.

R&B: It’s interesting that you brought up race. As a black Republican, which is frankly not very common, how do you believe that the party can improve upon its outreach to people of color?

G: They could improve it by embracing me, which is not what has happened, simply because I don’t represent the establishment. When they realized that I was not going to tote water for the party, I became shunned by the Republican party, much like Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and even Ted Cruz to a degree. So what the Republican party could do, if they wanted to be more inclusive, they should embrace a person who actually believes in the Constitution, who supports the Bill of Rights for all Americans ...

But my goal is to not just reach out to blacks, but to reach out to the disenfranchised, regardless of race. Those who are tired of the Republicans that we have elected time and time again, who go do the same things that they have been doing ... it’s about reaching out to all people, who want to elect someone who will do what they say they are going to do.

R&B: As I’m sure you know, since you have three daughters in college, tuition is very high and has been increasing rapidly over the past years; as has student loan debt. What do you think is the best way to help stop this problem?

G: Well, the college debt is out of control. I have more than $70,000 worth of loans for my own children. When I went to college, that was not the case. One year cost me $2,500. But now you’ve got college tuition that’s 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars a year at some of the more expensive places. I don’t have a specific solution to address the college situation, because I’m not in DC to look and see what they’re doing, but there is one thing I would like to see happen. It would alleviate a lot of college debt for students.

If you go and serve in the military, your college education should be free. That would be one way to offset college tuition. I know a lot of people feel that they should not have to do that, and that’s fine, but we will have to find ways of lowering the interest rates of college tuition, loans, and finding ways to work with institutions. But what needs to be understood up front as a Senator, there is nothing I can do from a legislative point of view, because that is not within the realm of a Senator’s job, all I can do is recommend solutions. That’s something that states need to work out with college institutions.

For instance: books. We used to, before we had the internet when I was in college, we used to buy used books, we didn’t always get new books, we’d go down to the bookstore and repurchase books. With all the technology we have today, colleges could easily eliminate that cost factor by providing books online, but the problem is that it’s a money making tool for colleges. So I can’t give you any specific solutions for college tuition at this point in time because I really don’t know enough about it to formulate a plan to address.

R&B: You have an interesting nickname. How did you start being called The Minister of Truth?

G: Before YouTube was even in existence, I was recording videos and putting them online, and many of the videos were related to situations within the black community. We have preachers, because you know that I’m a minister, and from what I observed in the black church was a situation where they would not talk about how to change the situation in our communities.

They focus mostly on how much people can give to the church, you know, "give a sacrificial offering, and God’s gonna open up the windows of Heaven coming out of Malachi.” That disgusted me, because they knew better, but they did it anyway for their own purposes. I coined the phrases "pulpit pimps" and "podium pimps." Podium pimps of course, are the politicians in Washington DC and the pulpit pimps are the ones in the church. So I started talking about the things that I knew black preachers would not talk about in the black community: the high illegitimacy rate, the high dropout rate, the high incarceration rate, which was completely disproportionate to other races in this country.

The bulk of it has a singular cause, that is the single black mother. So when I started to address those issues, people began to say "man, this guy don’t cut no corners, he’ll say plenty of stuff" and I was attacked for it. I was called an Uncle Tom etcetera etcetera for talking about these things. Maybe black folks would say that white folks do it too, and white folks may do it, but not at the rate that we are doing it, and when you see that we are only 13 percent of the population of the United States, it’s just much worse for us or something else is going on.

And that goes back to why I would never run as a Democrat. Because of FDR and his New Deal and how it ultimately impacted the black family, leading to this pandemic of single mothers. When you have babies having babies when they don’t know better, how can you expect their children to be raised. So you have a generation of kids that don’t value education, that don’t value work ethic and things of those natures. Because I was minister and I spoke the truth to power, I became The Minister of Truth. TMOT.

R&B: On your website one of your stated positions is “the protection of life, no tax dollars for abortion," but at the same time you also believe in as much liberty as possible. Do you believe that abortion has a place in society, and would you defund organizations like Planned Parenthood that, while they are involved in abortions, do other things related to women’s healthcare?

DG: While the Declaration of Independence says that we have certain inalienable rights, like the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So the government’s role is to ensure that those things are not infringed upon. Now me personally, I believe that when conception takes place, there is life. Life is anything that grows, whether it is a recognizable baby or not, when those cells start to divide, it’s growing, and that cell has a right to life.

If you have a house that you own outright, and somebody goes into your house, you may have the right to bulldoze your own home, but if somebody is in your home, you no longer have the right to bulldoze it. You have a responsibility to do no harm. So when it comes to the life in the womb. It’s the same thing. The man and the woman both have dozens of alternatives to prevent conception. That is their responsibility if they don’t want to have a child, if they do engage engage in an act careless or otherwise, that results in conception, then that life that is growing should be treated as any other life. I think it is hypocritical to charge a man who kills a woman that’s pregnant with two counts of murder, yet we turn around, and allow the woman to abort the child. Now, that was me speaking personally. Personally, I am against abortion.

But now let me speak as if I were a Senator. It is a state’s right issue to decide. Not the federal government. However, as a Senator on the federal level, I will do everything I can to ensure that the federal government does not engage in any activity that hampers life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So that means I will fight against funding any organizations that engage in activities that interfere with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Planned Parenthood can exist as a private organization, and states can decide if abortion ought to be legal within that state. The people of that state should decide.