Charlamagne tha God showed up to this interview wearing a Wu-Tang Clan baseball cap (don’t let me find out they brought back Wu Wear) and a hoodie that says Assholes By Nature — with the intention obviously being to troll Shkreli.

He’s done this before, wearing a Combat Jack Show ball cap (nhjic) to an interview with Troy Ave. Troy Ave has beef with Combat because Combat wouldn’t include the 30-ish Troy Ave on a list of hot young artists, and then Troy Ave accidentally sent Combat a text message in which he called Combat a sucker or some such.

Watching Charlamagne call Shkreli all kinds of names and ask him ridiculous questions was kinda amusing, except that what could Shkreli have done? He wasn’t about to reach over and slap the shit out of Charlamagne. As much money as he has, he probably can’t afford to buy the station and fire Charlamagne, as Jay Z was once rumored to be considering.

Hip-hop radio shows, podcasts, magazines and what have you are good for shitting on people who don’t have any real power and then playing kiss-ass with big corporate backed artists. It’s gross. To his credit, Charlamagne tha God is the hip-hop radio personality most likely to keep it real with a guest.

Right before Shkreli got locked up, he was looking into bailing out Bobby Shmurda. Shmurda could have been home shortly after he was arrested, but his label, the LA Reid-run Epic Records, wasn’t about to put up the $2 million. Now that Shkreli’s got his own case to worry about, he can’t be out here posting bail for gangbangers, he explained.

Charlamagne tha God took this as an opportunity to get Shkreli to say the name of Bobby Shmurda’s one hit song, “Hot Nigga.” I’m kinda surprised he didn’t just say it. The ban on CAC dreaded n-word usage is generally understood not to extend to direct quotes. Plus, I don’t even think white people under a certain age even understand that white people used to get beat up for using the dreaded n-word.

On social media, young CACs use the dreaded n-word as if it’s going out of style, and this has become a main focus of Black Lives Matter. If they can’t get a single cop arrested for shooting an unarmed black man, at least they can ruin the reputation of some dumbass child.

Later in the interview, Shkreli seems to take a certain glee in invoking the famous saying “I wish a dreaded n-word would,” but of course without the dreaded n-word. Like CAC high school graduates who don t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Nigga we made it,” Shkreli seems convinced that he won’t get his ass kicked for dissing Ghostface Killah.

You can never really know what Ghostface is thinking.

On the cusp of 35 years young, I can still remember listening to Ironman for the first time, 20 years ago (yikes), and being confounded by rhymes in which Ghostface seems to congratulate himself for not putting a shoe on an unfaithful lover. What part of hip-hop culture was this? The soon-to-be-dead Biggie Smalls never would have pulled some shit like that.

Many a Ghostface song is peppered with pro-life messages, probably the political stance I’m most against, for obvious reasons (i.e. children). Is that a Muslim thing? If the honorable Elijah Muhammad had sprung for abortions for his teenage jumpoffs, Malcolm X might still be alive today. (It was revealed in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable, that one of said jumpoffs was also Malcolm X’s jumpoff, and this was the real source of the beef.)

Ghostface expressed (perhaps understandable) disgust with gay marriage on Supreme Clientele, only to find out years later that one of his sons is gay — though fortunately not Sun God, the one he runs trains on girls with.

When Action Bronson dissed Ghostface on ESPN this past summer, Ghostface filmed a YouTube video in which he threatened to set fire to Action Bronson’s beard, to the sweet sounds of Teddy Pendergrass (no pun intended). But lest we forget, it was Popa Wu who ran up on Action Bronson at Sean Price’s funeral — as good a place as any, I’m sure he figured.

According to some podcast I once listened to, or maybe it was a video I saw on Vlad TV, Popa Wu has upwards of 20 kids, and they’re all known shooters. That’s who Martin Shkreli ought to be worried about. Ghostface, meanwhile, is now 0 for 2 as far as disciplining CACs for talking shit about him is concerned.

Fortunately for Shkreli, he lives in Manhattan, which from what I understand, is a surveillance state that would impress Orwell, and I can’t imagine he’s not being monitored by law enforcement. Additionally, as the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, he’s probably required to have private security, the funding for which comes from the ridonkulous amount he charges for that AIDS medicine.

If one of Popa Wu’s many children were to so much as think about running up on Martin Shkreli, I’m sure they’d get caught up in a “random” stop and frisk. 5–0 now has software that can predict crimes, like in Minority Report. There was an article about it yesterday at the Verge. They’re already using it here in the STL.

Ironically, Martin Shkreli, avowed would-be Black Lives Matter supporter, benefits from the intense police scrutiny of black men.

So maybe there’s minimal risk in dissing Ghostface Killah, but how can doing these interviews possibly benefit Martin Shkreli’s legal situation?

I’m convinced that the government is going after Shkreli not because what he did is at all different from what every pharmaceutical exec who ever walked the earth did, but because he drew a little bit too much attention to the fact that drug companies jack up the price of prescription meds to astronomical amounts for no reason other than to line their own pockets. They can’t have people finding out how the game is played.

I’m no expert on the law (I was pre-med), but I have seen two episodes of Showtime’s promising new series Billions, so I feel like I have an idea of who prosecutors decide to go after. Basically, all of those big Wall Street guys engage in insider trading, or something along those lines, but prosecutors only go after the ones who are balling a little bit too hard, or the ones they have a personal vendetta against.

Shkreli fucked up by jacking up the price of that AIDS medicine to like $750 per pill quite literally overnight. Instead, he should have gradually increased the price every few months, like they do with all of the other prescription meds. And then he compounded his error by spending $2 million for a (most likely) garbage Wu-Tang album in a fancy box.

Once he started talking about bailing out Bobby Shmurda, the TIs knew they had to pounce. There’s no greater emotion, for the black community, than when one of our young brothers comes home from jail. It’s like watching a kid graduate from college, except even better. If you count bailing out Bobby Shmurda as part of Black Lives Matter, it would have been that movement’s only victory.

Unlike Shmurda, Shkreli only did a few hours behind bars, probably until his lawyer could find a woman to do his paperwork. And they had him in a room by himself, so a Puerto Rican couldn’t give him the ol’ finger in the culo, now known as a Kanye.

He’s still got a trial coming up, but even if he is convicted he’ll just get sent to some country club for wealthy white offenders. The fact that he’s since ceased cutting checks to black kids suggests to me that the TIs may have convinced him of the error of his ways. They could care less about people giving interviews, or else there would have been consequences and repercussions for that interview the Breakfast Club did with Farrakhan.

It’s a testament to the perceived influence of hip-hop media.