Sharpton & Crump Hijacked Nolan Wells' Funeral to Shake Down Mississippi | Jason Whitlock Harmony

**Jason Whitlock** (0:00)
There's a 1988 movie, you may have seen it, called Mississippi Burning. Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, two FBI agents investigating the murder of three civil rights workers in the American South, 1964 A devastating film, a powerful film, a film about a real era of real terror. That era ended. The terror is gone, but somebody didn't get the memo because right now, in the summer of 2026, a group of men is trying to remake that movie from scratch, using Mississippi as their set, a grieving family as their cast, and the tragic death of an 18-year-old boy named Nolan Wells as their script. The new title, I'm calling it Mississippi Looting. And unlike the original, this one isn't about justice, it's about money.
In 2002, a journalist named Kenneth Timmerman published a book called Shakedown, Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. I need you to understand what that book documented, because what it documented is not ancient history. It is a playbook. And that playbook is being run right now in real time in the state of Mississippi. The book detailed how Jesse Jackson, the man the media called America's preeminent civil rights leader, systematically extorted major American corporations. Find a corporation, find a racial grievance, real, exaggerated, or manufactured. Threaten a boycott. Threaten to brand them as racist. And then just before the hammer drops, offer them the escape hatch, a donation, a contract, a partnership with Jesse's organization, the Rainbow Push Coalition. Company after company, Toyota, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, wrote the checks, not because they were guilty, but because the cost of being called a racist in America is higher than the cost of the shakedown. That is the playbook, written by Jesse Jackson, perfected over decades. Today, it has new directors. Their names are Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump, and they've upgraded the formula. Jesse went after corporations. Sharpton and Crump are going after states. Before I explain the financial scheme, I want you to stop and think about something that should make every person watching, regardless of politics, furious. The night before Nolan Wells left for Horn Island, the night before he disappeared, his mother cooked salmon. The family sat down together. They ate, they talked, they had no idea that would be the last meal. That woman, that father, those are the people who knew Nolan Wells. His coaches at Ocean Springs High School knew him. His teammates knew him. The people of that community, that Mississippi community, they knew that boy. So I want to ask you a simple question. Who delivered the eulogy at Nolan Wells' funeral yesterday?
What in his pastor? What in his coach? Wasn't a family friend who watched him grow up?
Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy. Al Sharpton, who lives in New York City, who had never met Nolan Wells a single day in Nolan Wells' life.
Al Sharpton flew into Mississippi, stood over that boy's casket and turned the family's most sacred moment of grief into a press conference. That's not ministry. That's not comfort. That is a hostile takeover. You know what we used to call people who descended on the south from the north to exploit the chaos for personal gain? We called them carpet baggers. They came with their schemes and their moral superiority. They used southern pain to enrich themselves. And then they left.
Al Sharpton is a carpet bagger. Ben Crump is a carpet bagger. Tyler Perry is writing a check so he can eventually be the producer of the carpet bagger movie. And the Wells family, who say they just want to know what happened to their son, they are props in a divisive production.
Nolan Xavier Wells, 18 years old, Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He went to Horn Island, a barrier island, eight miles off the Gulf Coast, with three friends on July 4th. He was last seen at 3 p.m. His body was found two days later by the US. Park Service Ranger. The Jackson County Sheriff's Department said they believe Wells drowned and do not suspect foul play. No final autopsy results have been publicly released. The investigation is ongoing. Those are the facts. Now, here is what Sharpton and Crump have done with those facts. They held a press conference. They questioned why a young athlete who could swim would drown. They started comparing Nolan Wells to Emmett Till. They started insinuating to the world that Mississippi, the state, is responsible for Nolan Wells' death. Before the investigation is even complete, before a single autopsy result has been released, because they don't need the facts. They need the narrative. And in Mississippi, the very name of the state does the work for you. Let me explain why the Emmett Till comparison is not just wrong, it is morally dishonest. Emmett Till was 14 years old. He was murdered by specific identified white and black men. The white men were acquitted by an all-white jury. In a Mississippi that legally enforced racial apartheid. Those murderers confessed after the verdict because they knew the state would protect them. That Mississippi no longer exists. To transpose 1955 on to 2026, using the death of a young man whose cause of death has not even been officially determined in order to generate political leverage and financial pressure on a state government. That is not civil rights work. That is what I call a shakedown by geography. Sharpton and Crump don't need a villain. They don't need a bull Connor. They just need Mississippi. Invoke the name. Let the history do the heavy lifting. The very word becomes the indictment.