Join Dr. James Dobson as he welcomes best-selling author and fearless advocate Vince Everett Ellison to the show. Vince shares his journey from a sharecropper’s son in Tennessee to becoming a powerful voice for truth and freedom. Discover his insights into the so-called ‘Iron Triangle’ and how it has affected the black community for decades.
You’re listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am that James Dobson, and I’m so pleased that you’ve joined us today. Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Roger Marsh, and in just a moment, we’re going to hear an extraordinary story of faith, perseverance, and speaking truth with a special guest who brought the crowd to its feet at a recent event sponsored by the James Dobson Family Institute right here in Colorado Springs. VINCE EVERETT ELLISON After working as a correctional officer and seeing the devastating impact of policies on the black community, however, Vince began speaking out about what he calls the Iron Triangle, a system he believes keeps many Americans trapped in cycles of poverty and dependence. He’s since become a bestselling author, and his appearances on major news networks have earned him a reputation as a fearless voice for truth and unity. During the next half hour, we’re going to hear portions of a presentation Vince gave to a gathering of supporters of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute here in Colorado Springs last fall. He’s going to share his powerful testimony of how faith, family, and the American dream transformed his life and why he believes these same values can heal our nation’s divisions as well.
SPEAKER 01 :
I understand how teenagers felt. When they saw Elvis. Because I just saw James Dobson. Got a little bit excited. I had to pull myself back and act a little cool behind him. I’ve been listening to him most of my life. He taught me how to raise my children. And they’re all splendid. They’re all splendid children. We had this calendar in the house where you’d pull it back every day and there’d be another quote from him. how to raise your children, and we still keep that calendar every day. It tells us like a Bible verse and tells us how to raise our children, how to love them. So thank you. You’ve changed the world for the better. Thank you, Dr. Dobson. Thank you. Y’all, my name is Vince Everett Ellison. I was born on a cotton plantation in Haywood County, Tennessee, 1963. My father was a sharecropper. The things that people read about regarding Jim Crow South, I lived. The only thing that kept me from being at the absolute bottom of American society was that I had a father. And my father aspired. All of his life, he had been on plantations, sharecropping. He was abandoned by his mother and his father when he was six weeks old. And his great aunt and uncle raised him, and they were sharecroppers. But my father aspired and he got involved in the insurance industry. Back in those days, black and white people did not have, poor whites and poor blacks didn’t have checking accounts. So if you had an insurance policy, you had to have somebody go around and pick up the money every month from the people. This was called a debit route. My father got a job from a black man that owned his own insurance company. He owned an insurance company and a funeral home. So he was making money hand over fist, wasn’t he? And he said, my father got a job going on a debit route. He was a very honest man. Some people would steal the money, but my father never stole. And he moved up in the insurance industry and finally opened up his own insurance company, bought us out of poverty. We lived in a house before then with no running water, wood heater. But my father and mother worked hard, bought us out of poverty in America because they believed in America. After that, because God had been so good to him, we started a gospel singing group called the Ellison Family. We went around the South singing good gospel music. We did that for about maybe 15 years, learned about the church, learned about the inner workings of it. And after going to college at the University of Memphis, I started working in a prison in Columbia, South Carolina. I thought we had overcome the black community. But then I saw in that prison, and this was during the 90s with the Clinton-Biden crime bill, they were locking up all of these men, mostly black men, all over the country. In South Carolina, before the 90s, you only had three prisons in South Carolina. Before the end of the 90s, they had over 30. And I think that some of us can remember that $40 billion crime bill with 100,000 police officers in prisons all over the nation and the crack cocaine epidemic. So as a young man working there, I was perplexed. I thought we had overcome. And so I started asking the black intelligentsia, why are all of these young men being locked up? Because they were about my age at that time, 26, 27 years old. And of course, the black intelligentsia gave me the same old refrain. Evil, rich, white, Republicans, conservatives hated black people and wanted to lock them up. Well, I was very naive. And I said, oh, really? So I said, I’m going to resign from the prison system. And I started a nonprofit to try to keep this from happening. Well, after going down into the ghettos, I saw something pretty interesting. When I got down there, I didn’t see any evil, rich, white, conservative Republicans anywhere. Matter of fact, you see a unicorn or a leprechaun before you saw one. But when I looked around, I saw a lot of black Democrats, a lot of liberals making a lot of money off of the chaos. And it’s these three entities that we’re really making a lot of money off of. And I call them the iron triangle to name my first book. Most black preachers, most black politicians, and most black civil rights workers. Not all, but most. And I found that there were conduits between rich white liberals in California and in New York City. And their job was to make sure that the black community voted for the Democratic Party by hook or by crook. Keep them poor, keep them uneducated, keep them afraid, but make sure they vote for the Democratic Party. I don’t care if you got to do ballot harvesting, street money, souls to the polls, intimidation, a bottle of liquor and a pork chop sandwich. Make sure they vote for the Democratic Party. And it was a machine. And it worked perfectly. But I knew that black people had Christian conservative values. but they were voting for these liberals, and then I understood why. It was a masterful, deceitful plan, and that started me on my journey. I wrote my first book, and Book Authority gave it number 61 of the greatest political books ever written. It sold tens of thousands of copies, but it blew the lid off of this plantation system that these leftists have kept going on for the last 150 years in the black community. So I decided that I was going to come out and I was going to tell everybody about it because there’s a penalty for lying to the strong. There’s a penalty for going out and telling people that their brothers and sisters are their enemy. I came to find out that black and white Christians believe in most of the same thing. And just like the snake in the garden, These evil liberals are making us fight one another and hate one another for political power. And I decided we’re going to stop it right here and right now. It was amazing what I saw. I would sit down and I would talk with black conservatives and I would talk to white conservatives. And I would say, man, we don’t disagree on anything. We’re pro-life. We believe in the Second Amendment. We believe in school choice. We believe in the right to keep and bear arms. We believe in the same way of disciplining our children. We believe in God. We love football. We love basketball. We love rock and roll. We love gospel music. I came from West Tennessee. And I was on Tucker Carlson earlier this year in June. And Tucker asked me about my upbringing. And Tucker said, the high school you went to, what was the racial composition? I said about maybe 60% black, 40% white. He said, did you ever have any racial strife? I said, no. No? Nope. You lived in a small town in Mississippi Delta. Did you ever have any racial problems? No. No fighting? No. Nope. I said, Tucker, I grew up in an idyllic environment where we all just got along. He said, well, where did this come from? I said, it’s a lie. They’ll find one situation that happens somewhere else in the country and they’ll try to apply it to the whole nation. And that’s what the devil does. He’ll find ways to divide like he did in the garden at the beginning. Whispering in your ear, whispering in your ear, they hate you, you hate them. And what do we do? We walk past each other and we don’t talk to one another because we believe what the devil says. At the beginning of our Bible, in Genesis 4, Cain was angry. We all know the story of Cain and Abel. I read my Bible many times, but about four or five years ago, I read this again and it had gone over my head my whole life. And this time it meant something else. Like Thomas Wolfe said, you see a thing a thousand times before you see it once. It’s one of those Thomas Wolfe moments. I read Genesis chapter four. Cain was angry because God had rejected his offering, but had accepted his brother Abel’s offering. Amazingly, Cain wasn’t mad at God. He was mad at Abel. God had rejected it. Abel hadn’t. He was so angry at Abel, he wanted to kill him. And God gave us an insight into how he had wired up the human mind. It was interesting when he came to Cain, his grandson, and said, Cain, why are you angry? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin waits at the door to master you, but you must master it. Listen to this now. He told Cain, if you do well, will you not be accepted? There it is. All my life, I’ve seen that to be true. Joe Louis walks up in the Yankee Stadium, fights Max Schmeling on the end at the eve of World War II, knocks him out in New York City, and America applauds Joe Louis. He did well. Jesse Owens goes to Nazi Germany, outruns all the Nazis, wins four gold medals, gets a ticker tape parade in New York City, loved all over the country. What? He did well. Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier, knocking home runs, stealing home on all of these great baseball players. And America loves him now. His number can never be won in Major League Baseball ever again. Why? He did well. If you do well, will you not be accepted? But instead, they put a lie in the minds of these children. And they told them, of course, you’re black, you’re poor. Because of some imaginary foe, you’ll not be accepted in America. That is a lie. We must go back to our Bible. We must teach our children the truth. And we must teach them that if you do well in this country, you’ll be loved, you’ll be respected, and you’ll be lifted up. They talk about white privilege. I tell people, yes, there is a privilege to be white. But it’s also a privilege to be black. It’s a privilege to be an Asian. It’s a privilege to be Jewish. It’s a privilege to be anything that God made you. So they want us to look at each other. They want us to hate one another. See, this is how they win, with division. Jesus’ last prayer before he went to the cross was to be unified. Then he demanded that we love one another. He knew what Satan was going to do. He was going to come in and tear us apart because these leftists know that if we ever come together, if the body of Christ ever comes together, they’re done. They know it. This is why I do what I do, because when I sit up and I tell a black congregation, I say, tell me something. Are you a Christian? They say, yes. You believe that Jesus Christ is all powerful? Yes. You believe that you are his child? Yes. Then how can you be inferior to anyone? Jesus Christ has ordained something for you. If he has ordained something for you, what man can stop it? So why are you marching? Why are you begging? Why are you on your knees? Stand up. Your freedom is to be exercised. It is given to you. It is a gift from God. And you don’t ask government for your freedom. You defy them to try to come and take it from you. I got in a little trouble, but I kind of like trouble. I started this journey, y’all, when I went to the Lorraine Motel. I was writing my book, and I was troubled. Because I saw these young men kneeling. Y’all remember that time, all the football players and NFL were kneeling. I was trying to figure out where all the anger was coming from. I mean, I was born on a cotton plantation. My daddy was abandoned. We weren’t angry. What these young men angry about? You know, he was Superman, millionaires, applauded and cheered by America. I mean, what do you guys got to be mad about? So I went to the Lorraine Motel. And as y’all know, it’s a civil rights museum now. And while I was there, they had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have a dream speech, and it was looping. I had another Thomas Wolfe moment. I saw a thing a thousand times, and you see it once. And I heard Martin Luther King Jr. give this, I have a dream speech. You know, it’s this iconic speech that all of our children are supposed to recite now in school. Previously, about maybe three weeks earlier, I had read John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Yes, I read it for fun. And in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, John Locke had said, he talked about unalienable rights. He said these rights are irrevocable, non-transferable, and unsellable. They’re a gift from God. And I said, well, I knew about unalienable rights, but I didn’t know that they were that deeply ingrained in who you were. Irrevocable, non-transferable, unsellable, a gift from God. That we were free. Our freedom was a gift from God. Jesus Christ said, he who the Son has freed is free indeed. You’re free. You’re free. So with that in mind, I hear Martin Luther King Jr. doing this I Have a Dream speech. And he said something that I heard a thousand times this time. I called it and I heard it differently. And I said, that’s the poison pill. King said in this speech, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Negro is still not free. And I said, that is a lie. My freedom is a gift from God. It is an inalienable right. It is irrevocable, non-transferable, and unsellable. He said that we have come to government to demand these unalienable rights. You don’t ask government for your unalienable rights. They’re a gift from God. They are so ingrained in who we were, Thomas Jefferson used these unalienable rights as a reason in our Declaration of Independence to separate from Great Britain. When King George said, I’m your sovereign, we said, no, no, no, you’re not. God is our sovereign. King George said, well, I’m going to show you. They said, no, we’re going to show you. And they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Now bring it. And we sent them packing back to Great Britain. We showed them who we were. Our rights come from God. He said again in that speech, Martin Luther King Jr., women will be satisfied. He said, we will never be satisfied, not until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. That’s the fancy way of saying never. But what does our Bible say? Jesus said, my peace I leave with you. But he said, we’ll never be satisfied? Never? When Jesus said, I leave my peace with you, a peace that transcends all understanding. No justice, no peace. Giving our peace over the man. Dreaming about a day that one day I won’t be judged by the color of my skin. What’s wrong with the color of my skin? When our Bible says we’re not to be concerned about how man views us. But I’m worried about a man judge me by the color of my skin? Never me. My job is to love you. If you don’t love me, that’s your problem. So when these people on the left come to you, and try to make you live in condemnation because of their wretched behavior, because of something that happened 150 years ago in slavery, when they start trying to make you feel something about something somebody else did with collective punishment, you tell them, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not going to live in condemnation for you. You’re not going to make me feel bad about your wretched behavior. You’re my brother. And my job is to help you elevate and find your gifts. And I’ll do that If you need a good doctor, I’ll help you find one. Need a good preacher, I’ll take you to one. If you need a job, I’ll help you get one. With that, we have to stand strong as Americans. We have to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have to tell the truth now. There’s no more time for playing. The barbarians are at the gate. This is Pearl Harbor. You know, we can have our little petty differences. But then when they bombed Pearl Harbor, we said, okay, now we’re fighting in a burning home. This stuff stops. Let’s go whoop these Japanese and then we’ll start fighting later. That’s where we are right now. We woke up one morning and we saw drag queens in our public education system shaking their hands in our children’s faces. And we said, where did this come from? We woke up one day and they were telling us, that our children are genderless. That XY chromosome doesn’t mean man and XX doesn’t mean woman any longer. We woke up one day and they told us they could control the weather. And I’m saying, what? Give us enough money and enough power and we can stop hurricanes and tornadoes. We woke up one day and they were aborting our children. Third trimester, second trimester, now all the way up to the ninth month. This is where we are in America now, and we’re fighting over trivial things. They’re trying to check our way out right to keep and bear arms. We woke up one day and looked on the TV, and the President of the United States of America standing beside a man in a dress telling you that you got to call him, ma’am, or her, or you’re going to get fired from your job. I’m telling you today, my tolerance has ended. No more of this. Read a book, saw a movie. I think y’all might have saw No Country for Old Men. Awesome movie. It’s a period piece, early 70s, where they started bringing the drugs into America. In the movie, Tommy Lee Jones plays an old country sheriff trying to stop all of this mayhem. The cowboy comes up on the drug deal that’s gone bad. Everybody’s dead, but the money is still there. Big satchel full of money. And he takes this money, but he doesn’t know that the cartels have put a homing device in it. And they send this psychopath out to find this money. And throughout this movie is all of this violence, all of this killing. And Tommy Lee Jones is in the midst of it trying to save this cowboy from what inevitably is going to happen. I’m not going to give you the ending, but at the end of the movie, Tommy Lee Jones is telling his friend, his friend found out he’s quitting. He said, I can’t do this any longer. And his old friend asked him, why are you quitting? He said that I could stop this violence, but in order to stop it, I’m going to have to become something I want to become. And it’s not what I’ll have to do to stop it. It’s what I’d have to become. And what I have to become is going to put my soul at hazard. And I can’t do that. Y’all, it is not what you have to do to be on the left to support these people. It’s what you have to become. What you have to become will put your soul at hazard. You have to become a mass murder of children. You have to become an anti-Christian bigot. You have to become a pervert and a liar. Yeah. You have become a genderless, mindless, atheist, sulking beast. You have become an affront to God. And I will not do that. I’ve been fighting these people for most of my adult life. I have fought them in the halls of power. I have fought them in the prisons. I have fought them on the street corners. I will fight them until hell freezes over. And when hell freezes over, I’ll fight them on ice. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Dobson. Thank all of you for the invitation. God bless you all. Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
When we embrace faith, family, and freedom, there’s no limit to what we can achieve here in America. You’re listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, and we’re featuring a powerful message about unity and hope, featuring our guest speaker, Vince Everett Ellison, on today’s broadcast. Truth spoken with love has the power to bridge our deepest divides. And Vince’s journey from a sharecropper’s son to a renowned author and speaker reminds us that America’s promise is alive when we choose faith over fear. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast or you’d like to share this message with a friend, go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. Or remember, you can also access all of our audio programming on the family talk app. Well, Valentine’s Day is just two days away, and as it approaches, we are reminded that real love isn’t just about roses and chocolates and ice cream sundaes and things like that. Sometimes love, quite frankly, is tough. That’s why we are so excited to offer a brand new five-part email series on the topic of Love Must Be Tough. Over these five days, you’ll receive encouraging messages based on Dr. Dobson’s groundbreaking book with that title, Love Must Be Tough. along with practical tools for strengthening your relationship through life’s challenges. These proven principles have helped countless couples find healing and restoration in their marriages. And the email series is completely free. You can start receiving it even today. Go to DrJamesDobson.org and simply enter your email, follow the prompts, and you’ll start receiving the Love Must Be Tough series. Again, go to DrJamesDobson.org for more information. Here at the James Dobson Family Institute, we believe in investing in the next generation. Every day we receive messages from parents and families whose lives have been transformed through these broadcasts. But we can only continue this vital work through the generous support of friends like you. Consider making a donation today to support the ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. It’s completely tax deductible and secure. Go online to drjamesdobson.org or call us at 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of Dr. Dobson and the entire staff here at Family Talk, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
