American Thought Leaders - Ravaged Communities: Ja’Ron Smith and Chris Pilkerton on Globalization, Drugs, and the Erosion of Civil Society

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In the last few decades, a combination of drugs, crime, and violence have ravaged certain communities in America. At the same time, we’ve seen a shift of jobs overseas, an erosion of civil society, and an overall decline in economic mobility—with many now feeling the American Dream is just a pipe dream after all, according to Ja’Ron Smith and Chris Pilkerton.They’re the co-authors of the new book, “Underserved: Harnessing the Principles of Lincoln's Vision for Reconstruction for Today's Forgotten Communities.”During the Trump administration, Ja’Ron Smith served as deputy director of the Office of American Innovation, and Chris Pilkerton as acting head of the Small Business Administration.How do we revitalize these forgotten communities? How do we reverse the economic damage caused by pandemic-era policies? And how do we unite the 2 sides of the aisle?We discuss the matter in this episode of American Thought Leaders.

The circumstances, as tragic as they've been to this point, when you talk about destruction of certain communities and small businesses that have closed and all of these things that have happened, the reality is we have the ability to reverse that. In this episode, I sit down with Jerron Smith, former deputy director of the Office of American Innovation, and Chris Pilkerton, former acting head of the Small Business Administration, both under Trump. They are co-authors of Underserved, harnessing the principles of Lincoln's vision for reconstruction for today's forgotten communities. We haven't really filled the gap on how do we bring those individuals into jobs in the 21st century

that will pay a living wage and let them pursue the American dream. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Well, welcome and Dron, it's great to have you back. I think the last time we interviewed, you were actually heading up the Office of American Innovation and the Trump administration, some remarkable work done there. You guys have written a fascinating book. You chart

the vision that Lincoln had for reconstruction after the Civil War. And you argue that this is something that ended up being rather incomplete. So why don't we just jump in with that? Sure. So yes, it was incomplete, mostly because President Lincoln got assassinated. And the person who took over, who was his vice president, who became president, didn't actualize his vision. He actually went in a different direction. You know, Lincoln had a vision for bringing the country together, having a plan for poor blacks and poor whites, and reimagining America. He was really thinking about how can we use this opportunity to really bring our country together, versus Johnson, who had his own issues growing up in the South, used it as a political opportunity to grant pardons to Southern leaders,

and set up the tentacles of what would end up being, became Jim Crow. And so post-Civil War, you know, a new America emerged, and we never really dealt with some of the issues related to the Negro, except for when Grant, of course, took over. But we're talking about immediately after when Lincoln passed away. Maybe you could tell me about some of those issues. So when I think about Lincoln and sort of his vision, it all started from his youth, right? I mean, he grew up in a prairie, wasn't educated, everyone's heard the stories

about all the books that he's read, but the reality was that he was fighting for folks like him when he was running for Congress and running for elected positions. When he actually went through the Civil War, he saw this as an opportunity to reconstruct America, to bring economic opportunity for all. In one of his early campaigns, he talks about this. It's probably the equivalent of the Shining City on the hill, but he called it Huron. It wasn't a real place, but it was a place where there was going to be bustling labor and market activity and what have you. And that was sort of his vision as he continued down the road.

And as Jerron was saying, President Johnson, when he took over, you know, there was a lot of baggage, so to speak, that President Johnson brought to that office. And if it wasn't for people like Thaddeus Stevens and others who really held Johnson's feet to the fire, overturned vetoes, then even the movement, the positive movement that happened during Reconstruction wouldn't have happened because essentially Stevens was reverting back to the Southern Democrat that he and many of his colleagues were. After we had this Reconstruction period, you had this whole period of Jim Crow in the South where you had African Americans

who never fully got their rights. You know, had things like poll taxes. You still had a robust amount of lynchings in the South. A number of different things that, because they weren't intentionally set straight in the beginning, right after reconstruction and it took a civil rights movement to finally kind of give those individuals their right as citizens and us having to participate in a force integration as a country. But still, to Chris's point earlier, there wasn't a huge focus on the economic piece

related to American citizenship, the opportunity piece that we think is so vital. And as we move through the 70s and the 80s and started to be at the end of the industrial movement, labor has changed in a major way. The type of blue collar jobs that pushed people into the middle class in the 30s, 40s, 50s started to go away, go overseas. And so that brings us into where we are now. We've been in an area where economic mobility has continued to widen for middle class and low income individuals because we haven't really felt the gap on how do we bring those individuals into jobs in the 21st century that will pay a living wage and let them pursue

the American dream. So I just want to touch on this. I've learned a lot over the last few years about the impact of certain policies on the family. And you could call it like the destruction of the family, especially in the black community. There's a very huge number of households, which are single parent households. And as I've also learned, coming from a, let's say, a nuclear family household increases your likelihood of success dramatically. In fact, it's one of these

very few things which everybody agrees on. So it seems like it was this perfect storm almost, right, where you had, I mean, a negative perfect storm where you had, on the one hand, you had globalization and deindustrialization. At the same time you had this these policies that kind of hurt the family unit dramatically and then so you end up with these underserved communities both black and white actually and now now competing and this you know wealth gap larger and the mobility being very very restricted right and then we just had a series of policies implemented related to the pandemic, which seems, I mean, we're economically devastating and in particular affecting those communities the most on top of everything else. So it feels like we're in a very dark place. It is. I think that I will also offer some hope, which we tried to hope cut through the book.

Me and Chris both having Christian backgrounds, which has helped us be resilient and also shed a light on a shining star or a North Star for us to kind of work towards with service. It's the future of our country is being able to harness our most important asset, which is people. And where we are is a darker place, but we didn't get here overnight. And it's a combination of a number of things. There has been erosion of civil society probably over the last hundred years. And one important institution that's eroded in many communities has been the church or the faith community. At the same time, we also had a shift in encouragement from the government with certain policies that may have encouraged lower income people not to get married. And so if you have the erosion of particular institutions that encourage marriage, at the

same time incentives by the government, and then at the same time less incentives to work or to be able to charge you on court, of course, it created a powder keg. If you layer on top of that certain things like more drugs being in the community, more crime, then you really have a strong powder keg of a lot of explosive activities happening to the detriment of human beings. And I think that in fixing that issue over the last 40 years, we've kicked the can on like, okay, we're going to study this first.

We're going to study that second and then not really focus on a solution. We maybe demonize certain populations and sent them to prisons for drug abuse. We instead of creating institutions that could deal with the mental health piece, we got rid of our mental health institutions instead of trying to fix them in a way that can right-size the issues that were wrong with them in the first place. And then we also had that economic mobility widened where there was less job, less diamondism. And then we had pockets of America

where you saw the tale of two cities. You know, you saw a very vibrant New York, but you also saw underclass New York. So a vibrant Detroit, but you saw underclass Detroit. And now since the pandemic has happened and we actually did just start to kind of move away from that and being very attentional in the Trump administration by making sure there was more access to opportunity. We started to see wage gaps lower. We started to see more employment and less unemployment, specific records in unemployment. But it still wasn't enough because as soon as we did the lockdowns, it kind of like,

you know, bankrupted everything that we had. And the parts of society where that economic prosperity had not yet reached, you know, it set them further behind. So you're talking about kids that needed access to schools were shut down from their schools. Already access to a failing school, but then you saw how much that school was failing when they were sent home and had to do it virtually. Then parents, they got to see that, like, oh, this is what you're teaching my kid. You're not really teaching them anything. Or if the kid was in a household where you didn't have both parents or parents were at work,

maybe that kid wasn't even going to school or even showing up. And so in the wake of that, what you saw is high truancy rates. You saw kids stop going to school. You saw an increase of crime. You saw kids stop going to school, saw increase of crime, saw more addiction, saw more domestic violence. And so this is what we're dealing with now. But I think there's still promise based off of some of the work Chris and I have done and what we talk about in the book, that there is still opportunity for elected leaders, civil society leaders, and philanthropists to work on the same side on a plan that can help revitalize underserved communities all across the country.

So I want to touch on this. You guys talk a lot in the book about public-private partnership, okay? And for some of the viewers of this program, this has actually almost become a bad word, because we have a ton of evidence now of both government working with non-profit organizations, ostensibly civil society, and then also with big tech to censor Americans to create narratives without removing certain types of information, promote other types of information. It's an unbelievable thing we've come to discover. This is absolutely public-private partnership, but of a sort that maybe shouldn't exist,

many people would argue. On the other hand, you're talking about a public-private partnership of a different sort so i want to i want to get you to kind of comment on how this will actually what you were talking about how this will work so for this brief moment during the beginning of the pandemic there was this massive bipartisanship and when i say massive we were speaking to folks on both sides of the aisle organizations that that, civic organizations that may have, you know, typically been left of center, right of center, what have you. We would talk to mayors, we would talk to governors, both Democrat and Republican. And ultimately what we were doing was putting together this sort of massive public policy project of, you know, where does the local government fit in, where does the federal government fit in,

how can this nonprofit help, and what have you. Now granted, there is the bureaucracy of government, but what we saw was that if these groups are working together in an efficient way, that you actually can advance the specific goals of that community. And it ties back to Reconstruction. We delve deeply into the black churches,

and the black churches were just so critical for the African American community during Reconstruction because not only were they there to worship and pray, but they were educated there. And folks were discussing politics and how can they get involved in elected office. So what we're proposing here are the best practices. And those best practices can only come about if both sides sit down and they say, all right, we're gonna simplify the system,

we're gonna have trust amongst ourselves, we're gonna collaborate, which are all points that we make in the book. But at the end of the day, if you don't have that, then certainly the public-private partnership can become a bad word because it can be corrupted, abused, and all the kinds of things you're talking about. But at the end of the day, it's really about taking these best practices and applying them

across the board. And that's where the data and the outcomes come from. So this is absolutely fascinating, Chris, this brief moment of bipartisanship that you described, everyone getting together around policy. Now looking at it from the vantage point, as viewers of this show will know, I've been kind of trying to understand how that whole everyone getting on the same team happened around policy, which ended up being catastrophic. This is the part.

So maybe I want to, if we could talk a little bit about that, like you guys were in the room in some cases, you know, of what was happening over there. And this is, you know, it's very rare to be able to kind of know what was happening, right? And when I'm talking about, you know, catastrophic, for example, right, we saw small business, right? This was, of course, your area, right? Absolutely decimated. And that gap and the ability of people who are, you know, basically, you mentioned this term, pulling up yourself by your bootstraps, people need more. And today, there's a lot more of that that's going to be needed than was needed.

It would have been needed before 2020, as an example. So tell me about what you remember. So as far as the policies, you know, all of that legislation starts on the hill. There was the Paycheck Protection Program, the CARES Act. Obviously, the White House had a hand in that. And when you look at it from the small business perspective, PPP was the initial lifeline. And that came out, and then that rolled out to small businesses across the country there were criticisms of the program you know there certainly have been criticisms with respect to risk metrics and fraud and things recently but at the end of the day that program according to recipients you know helped

save small businesses was it it perfect? Absolutely not. But this was also an incredibly unique situation. So there were policies that obviously could have been tightened, could have been better, but you have to remember the uniqueness of this. And I bring this up because, look, this was a pandemic, and this is once in a multi-generation event. But we're going to continue to have economic crises. And if small businesses are impacted in a negative way, that's going to affect the businesses a pandemic or it's just an economic crisis, which is awful. We really have to be able to focus on that. And once again, you know, during these pieces of legislation, there are folks on the Hill, Democrats and Republicans, that are trying

to negotiate and what have you. And you can't negotiate or you shouldn't negotiate probably out of thin air. If you have something to point to point to maybe you disagree with it but at least that's a place to start yeah i can add a bit to that you know i'll go back a bit further you know when this pandemic first happened you know i remember the fauci curve right i remember seeing that in real time because you know we were uh we had just did an Opportunity Now Summit in February, and essentially what that was, we were bringing federal, state, local sides of government and bringing private sector leaders, businesses, all for a summit to kind of talk about how you create opportunity where all the different pieces,

was it public safety, economic development was it entrepreneurship you know education and workforce all in one building having a conversation that's that's the movement we were pushing this is just in February I think we had just went to Treasury at the beginning of March and we had a Freedmen's Bank summit to talk about capital access literally that that next week I went to Cleveland, Ohio to a prison with the Cleveland Cavaliers and we were talking about how do we help reform the prisons and help those individuals who are in prison when they leave be productive individuals. And then I had some meetings with some elected leaders.

As soon as I came back, I was told that like some of the folks on the Cavs may have got COVID from someone from the Utah Jazz. Two, three days later, we decided to shut down. And I was still called into work because we were looking at, since they had shut down all the schools, places in New York where we can retrofit schools into emergency hospitals if we need that. Because you understand the issue at the time was hospital capacity. We wanted to stem the amount of people going to the hospital and stemming and spread. And then I remember going to HHS and seeing a very empty building, you know, because HHS was supposed to lead on pandemic preparedness. You know, the infrastructure that they had in place just wasn't the emergency infrastructure

needed for the pandemic, you know. And this is the challenges that we had as a country. We wasn't really ready for a pandemic, even though you had people in that building that had supposedly prepared for it. And so we ended up doing a merger between FEMA and HHS, which put that emergency infrastructure there. We ended up learning that some of the supply chain needs, some of the issues that states were having with hospital capacity. FEMA knew more about them than HHS did. And so that kind of changed our calculus. But this was about a month in that we've created this new engine towards it. And as a result,

we still were late, because by that time the damage had already been done with some of the shutdowns. And so I remember being called back to the White House to get back to my regular job, which is focusing on underserved communities. Then we had this agency that we put together that we talk about in the book called the White House Opportunity Revitalization Council. There was an executive order that President Trump led us with, and that's how we did the Opportunity Now summits,

and me and Chris started to work together. I had to take that whole infrastructure and focus it on COVID, on COVID response, because we realized very swiftly that those communities were getting hit hard, the hardest, with the pandemic and specifically the shutdowns and so what i had suggested then was like look we need to kind of um take these opportunities such as like what lincoln did and maybe look at this opportunity to kind of right size what we've done on underserved communities, you know, and make a major investment here with the private sector. And that's honestly what me and Chris fought for, for about four or five

months, a real Marshall Plan for underserved. We never really got, we never convinced people of the critical piece of it. You know, another piece that I really was fighting for was that pandemic preparedness, that resiliency, you know, because when I was thinking, you know, war on COVID, I was thinking like, okay, let's see who are all the healthy individuals in each community and let's make sure they stay at work. You know, all the folks who aren't as healthy or at risk, those are the folks that should work for home. And then now we're really fighting against a pandemic with the power and the continuity of communities. You know, but we never got quite there. And I think part of it was because of the political piece.

At this, while all of this stuff is going on, we're going into a major presidential election. And I think that's more than ever what really kind of disrupted us kind of playing in one tent together. Because it was a certain point me and Chris were meeting with all these elected officials. And then at one point it became way too politically sensitive to work with us. And as a result, you know, then it became a game of politics. And then we started getting into arguments on mask, no mask, and all the other political issues around the pandemic, mandating vaccines, et cetera, et cetera. You know, shutdowns open, and then it became more political than like looking at what's right. Well, so this is what I find particularly crushing, actually, because,

you know, there's actually, I saw a ton of really good policy coming out of the Trump administration. Not that a lot of people know about it, because it just simply wouldn't get covered in many media, right? And the work that you both did was incredibly important and valuable. And actually, I actually think moving the needle, opportunity zones, one particular realm I'm thinking of, you know, what you've talked about. And then just as this whole pandemic policy came in, it just kind of wiped it all out. And it's terrible. That's terrible. One thing I will add to that, Jan, is that one program that the president implemented was the Pledge to America's Workers. That was a plan, and this is the great thing about this plan.

President brought all these top CEOs around the country and basically said, look, we want to create opportunities, we want to create apprenticeships, we want to create jobs for folks. They went back to their companies and figured out ways to do that at their companies or within the local ecosystem. And I believe the number was up to 16 million jobs that had been identified for training. That didn't cost any money to do that. It was the ability of the government to convene and then scale these programs.

Once again, the president very involved, cabinet agencies very involved, president's daughter, Ivanka Trump led the effort. But it just demonstrates that public-private partnerships can work, but they have to be done efficiently and the model shouldn't be broken. It should continue to do those kinds of things. This is something I wanted to talk about. A lot of conservatives, I can see you've written the book for a conservative audience, they imagine government programs bad. That's being a bit glib, but the types of programs which you are promoting in the book or that you envision in the book, and frankly, your whole approach, from what I can tell, all involve in empowering people to be successful themselves, right? Again, giving them the little bit that they need, right? Because they're in one of these underserved or disadvantaged,

or whatever you want to call it, communities, and then sort of be able to kind of strike out on their own, in contrast to a lot of these other programs that we think of. Like, for example, one of the things you talk about in the book quite a bit is what a terrible situation it is when welfare just becomes the thing that you do and becomes a generational thing. But that's what you think of. That's what a lot of conservatives, they think of government programs.

They think all of it is kind of like that. I mean, it's one of those things of incentives, perverse incentives. Like if you don't have to work, your housing and stuff is paid for. You may incentivize a person not actualizing, using their gifts. And I think that what we're advocating for is just reimagining infrastructure for opportunity. But the key word is opportunity. You have to step into it. You have to take that opportunity and then actualize it yourself. This is completely different than saying that you're just going to get taken care of. Across the Republican Party, that's what you hear us talk more about.

Rather it's Tim Scott's opportunity agenda or President Trump talking about the America First agenda. In many cases, we talk about it in jobs because a person's ability to get that first job puts them in a position to start to chart their course. Because once you're making resources for yourself, then you can plan, you can make some decisions. And that's what we're talking about reimagining. We realize that a child sometimes can't control the environment that they're brought into or brought up in. You know, obviously a person could be born and not have both of their parents or not have family. You know, and what's the infrastructure we have for that child to ensure that we can take that individual and he can or she can actualize themselves. And it's that type of infrastructure that we're talking about.

Or, you know, some things happen. You know, a person loses a father or loses a dad, you know, or has issues come up in their community. You know, what we're trying to do is create more infrastructure around the things that we haven't traditionally planned for, like not having institutions like churches, you know, or not having community or not having a safe community to live in. You know, these are all things where we're meeting people where they are now. Now let's put on top of that three or four generations. So if you have three or four generations of individuals who've lived in a poor environment, hasn't been economically mobile,

do you throw on top of that sexual abuse, mental abuse, or drug abuse. Those are a lot of layers to peel up out of. And what we're suggesting is that sometimes the government doesn't have the answer to that. They don't have the heart to deal with that person or that individual, that resiliency that would help build a person out of that. And what we're suggesting is that this infrastructure of opportunity that we're talking about needs

to be led by civil society, a community of individuals that do have a heart. Now what we're saying is that the government does have the ability to scale, though. We can learn from what worked in that community and see if that can scale to another. And though it may be different because it may be a rural or urban community, you can account for those nuances, the ability to be able to articulate what works for the masses is something that government could do. But what we're suggesting is that that is not one or the other.

It's not necessarily rugged, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it's certainly not absolutely all the government's responsibility. What we're saying is, is meet people where they are, you know, and let's take an all-above approach and create partnerships that will help collaborate around this new infrastructure opportunity. Well, and this is John, as I mentioned, this isn't academic for opportunity. Well, and this is John, I just want to mention, this isn't academic for you. You come from what you would exactly call an underserved community and kind of figured out

how to navigate your way. Sure. Right? Yes, and it wasn't perfect. I was blessed to have a strong father, also have a strong mother, but they weren't always in the same household most of my life I had to deal with the crack cocaine epidemic you know I'm just like a lot of families are dealing with the opioid epidemic you

know so I empathize with some of the things that happen in life you know people make mistakes you know and those mistakes affect other people, but then ultimately you're responsible for how you want to see your life and you have to figure out how you can pick yourself up and build. And it takes having people around you that can be encouraging. In cases where my parents weren't encouraging, I had a football coach, I had mentors. I had my own village or infrastructure around opportunity that helped me become resilient. In many cases, that doesn't exist for some people. They give up hope.

That lack of resiliency can become very dark, you know, where you don't care about your life, you don't care about others' lives, you know, and then you have anger and then violence comes out of that. And what we're trying to do is build back, peel back those layers, you know, onto the human level and help people actualize because ultimately if we as society do nothing and keep people at the margins you know that comes back to us because we also all live in a country together you know and so you can neglect a kid but that kid becomes an adult and then like neglected adult could become a very dark individual that can do things that affect society. And so that's why we're all in this together.

And so that dark age that you're talking about is going to be on us as individuals, a community of individuals to help build us out of that. And I think, and Jerron can speak to this really well when you look at something like the First Step Act, because you had very liberal Democrats and you had conservative Republicans working together. And I will tell you this, when I came over to the White House, and I give Jerron a ton of credit for this, when President Trump signed an executive order back in June of 2020 during the height of the riots, we had groups from the left, community groups, and, you know, I guess most of the law enforcement unions at the table, and at the end of that process,

they agreed on 90 or 95 percent of what ultimately went into that executive order, and that came from the work that Jerron and some of our other colleagues had done to really get that trust during the development of the First Step Act. And that comes from the methodology that Chris and I talk about in the book, you know, being intentional, building trust, collaboration and partnerships, creating outcomes, and then studying what works. You know, When the First Step Act came about, we knew that in states like Georgia and Texas, they had reformed their prison systems in a way that lowered recidivism, reduced crime, and

ultimately saved their budgets because they spent less on the prisons. And that's the infrastructure or idea that we used to come about with the First Step Act. But then when we dealt with Congress, we had to deal with very tough on crime individuals from the past that just wanted to lock everyone up and throw away the key. Then you had other people that deemed the whole justice system as racist. And so as a result, let's just get rid of prisons and everything to begin with and have no accountability to individuals. And so in between that, you know, as individuals who are deserving of a second chance, you know, individuals that probably need to be in prison a little bit longer for our public safety.

But we had to navigate that practical reality. And in doing that, it took us getting coalitions from the ground that represented families and then coalitions that represented law enforcement and being able to bring them together to say, hey, what is the smart way to reform our system in a way that protects public safety but allows for second chances and creates a more robust system. And then we were ultimately able to get almost 90% of the Congress or 80% of the Congress to support that. But it wasn't because the Congress wanted to do that. It's because the people that they represented supported that.

The law enforcement groups, the families, the community supported that. And so that's how you really kind of push our elected members and hold them accountable because ultimately they're supposed to represent us. We live in a representative government. And that's the movement that we're on. We're on a movement that like, how do we empower people? We want to educate people. That's why we wrote the book that like these things can happen. You don't have to wait for reform or opportunity, but let's work on this together. Let's reimagine what this looks like and hold ourselves accountable with the actions that we

want from our elected officials to make our country the country that it can be. Listening to both of you speak right now, it's fully dawning on me how relatively short a time period all this was from pandemic policy being implemented in March of 2020, and then the BLM riots and so forth, and then the election. I mean, it's all just incredibly, incredibly short period of time, just tons of what you might even call shock and awe. I mean, it's almost hard to fathom being in the government during this time. You're laughing, but yeah. I mean, I'm only laughing because it just makes me more dependent on God. God is funny. And that none of us ever saw this. And I'd certainly, growing up, African American kid

from Cleveland, Ohio, didn't see myself working for a Republican president, you know. But all my life experience, experiences prepared me to kind of be in that position, to be able to give a different perspective, you know. And that's the funny thing about life. You don't know where, why, or when, or why God kind of created an avenue for you, and then it clicks.

Like, oh, this is why that happened. This is what all of this meant. And then ultimately, when I left the administration and had children, it made me understand the work that I did in service even more. There's no time to waste. That's why we decided to write this book, because we think it's important to be intentional right now, because we want to see our country be passed on to our children

and be even better than what we had. In order to create that environment, we have to be intentional ourselves about being the change that we want to see in the world. You know, when Reconstruction ended, Grant had left office and Rutherford Hayes had won the presidency and there was a dispute in the election and ultimately there was an agreement that troops would leave the south and then all of Congress would confirm that Hayes had won and that was essentially the end of Reconstruction. The reason we're doing this now is that the time period that you're talking about, it was traumatic for so many communities.

I mean, I remember walking into the White House at the campus at like 5 o'clock in the morning. We were writing the executive order and seeing tanks. Obviously, the riots had been going on. You saw the destruction and what have you. And the reality is we have to do it now. In other words, both sides need to come together and listen to the voices that Jaran's talking about. The circumstances, as tragic as they've been to this point, when you talk about, you know, the deaths from COVID and you talk about the destruction of certain communities and

small businesses that have closed and all of these things that have happened. The reality is we have the ability to reverse that and we think this plan can really help with that. It strikes me that the First Step Act is a kind of a model of success in this, what we're discussing here. Do those coalitions still exist? Do those people, like,

are these people still working together? Or was it a one-off miracle? No, because when you look at the discourse, you know, it seems to be the discourse in mainstream media and social media and so forth, you would seem there's very little middle ground. Well, the coalition, that coalition is still working. I mean, honestly, it's not the same environment.

You know, we had some other things that happened. I mean, I look at, you know, rogue DAs who aren't holding certain criminals accountable to the defund movement makes it harder for a coalition to articulate the promise of smart on crime policies. The defund the police movement was a political movement and that's hurt, especially underserved communities that need police officers. This know, this whole movement to take a blanket approach with violent offenders on accountability is a political movement. It's not about keeping communities safe. You know, so all of that makes it harder for a coalition like ours, because when people are hurt by a reform of the criminal justice system, that impacts people. Like, people could lose their life, you know,

and you have family members that are victims. And those are hard things that we went back to trust on. And so in this environment, that's made it difficult. But, yes, the coalition is still working. The coalition is also still working on opportunity zones. Opportunity zones has a lot of promise. Did a lot of promise. Did a lot of great work, $50 billion worth of new investments in over 3,000 different zones throughout the country.

But there's still more work to do there. You know, there are certain areas where they didn't leverage it the right way. There's other parts of the legislation that weren't passed that would focus on jobs and small business growth or affordable housing that wasn't in the original bill. So we don't have that data to talk about the efficacy of the program. So there's still work to do there. And Chris and I haven't stopped one day with leaning into each of these issues. I mean, we talk, I don't think there's been a week that's gone by that I haven't stopped one day with leaning into each of these issues. I mean, we talk. I don't think there's been a week that's gone by that I haven't talked to Chris in the last three years. And we're constantly at work, constantly on watch on these issues. What we're doing is inviting more people to grow that coalition because it's going to take more effort than ever before post-pandemic

to kind of pick up these pieces and rebuild our country to the place where it can be. Well, Jerron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Jerron Smith and Chris Pilkerton and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.