Pod Save America - “Juneteenth.”

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Color of Change Chair Heather McGhee joins as a guest host to talk about Trump’s speech on police reform, the Senate Republican bill, where Joe Biden and the Democrats stand, and how we can ensure that this moment becomes a durable political movement to fight systemic racism. Then Reverend William Barber talks to Dan about the Poor People’s Campaign and this weekend's Moral March on Washington.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Dan talks to Reverend William Barber about the Poor People's Campaign and the Moral March on Washington this weekend. Before that, we are very fortunate to have a guest host with us today who you may have heard before on this pod and on The Wilderness. She's currently working on a book called The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. She's the chair of the Board of Directors of Color of Change. Heather McGee is here. Heather, welcome back to the show. Hey, I'm so glad to be here.

It's great to have you. So we're going to cover the latest on police reform between Trump's executive order, the Republican bill that was introduced Wednesday, and the proposals from Joe Biden and the Democrats. But we also thought that after a few weeks of protests and with Juneteenth tomorrow, we could take a step back today, talk about some of the ways to make sure that this moment becomes a more durable, transformational political movement, you know, which is I know is a topic we can knock out in about an hour. But but first, a few quick housekeeping notes. Check out this week's Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk about eroding press freedoms in the Philippines,

Trump's failure to get any concessions from North Korea two years after his Singapore summit, and how the protests against police brutality and systemic racism are playing out in France. Also, Dan, you have something to tell us about a new Pod Save America miniseries. Yes, I am joining forces with all of our best friend, Alyssa Mastromonaco, for a three-part series to help explain the process by which presidential candidates pick their vice presidential nominee, how they do it, why they do it, and why it matters. It is a three-part Pod Save America miniseries that you will get on this feed that will start on Friday, June 26th. Excellent.

Well, I'm excited for that. And then you guys are going to be able to tell us who he's going to pick by the end of that. No, this is, to be very clear, this is not about who we think Joe Biden should pick because we are not in the prediction game. It's sort of, in all seriousness, inspired a lot by the series that Tommy did on Iowa to help take this very important, often behind the scenes process and explain to people what it means in a level of detail that we just simply can't do on a normal Positive America show.

Excellent. Well, I'm excited. All right. Let's start with what's happening with police reform in Washington right now. Senate Republicans introduced a bill on Wednesday that they want to start debating next week. Basically creates new incentives for police departments to meet higher standards and new reporting requirements on the use of deadly force and no knock warrants. But it doesn't ban chokeholds. It doesn't ban no-knock warrants. It doesn't in any way limit the ability of police officers to use excessive force.

And it doesn't touch qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being held accountable if they use excessive force. Donald Trump announced a similar set of fairly toothless reforms via executive order on Tuesday in a speech where he made no mention of racism at all, repeatedly praised police and said this. Americans want law and order. They demand law and order. They may not say it. They may not be talking about it, but that's what they want.

Some of them don't even know that's what they want, but that's what they want. Some of them, they don't even know they want it. They want it. You know, they know they don't want it, but they want it. But they want it. Yeah. Heather, it seems to me that both Trump's executive orders and Tim Scott's Senate bill are giving Republicans an opportunity to say they're doing something while actually doing as little as possible to reform policing. But I did see Van Jones on CNN, who's done a lot of work on criminal justice issues, say that Trump's EO is a good thing because it raises the floor on reform. What do you think?

Listen, I think this shows that the movement for Black lives is winning. I think you know that, you know, first they fight you, then they ridicule you, and then they join you. And that's obviously what's happening, right? They're trying very hard to say, we've done something, we hear it, just as they did on criminal justice reform, because you've now got a multiracial, bipartisan, majoritarian desire to get something done. What is important for us as progressives and for movement leaders is to continue to signal to the same people who are outraged right now, exactly what the solution looks like. Because Washington's going to do what Washington's going to do. You know, Washington's going to Washington this, which is, you know, create a database

that doesn't ever get filled up. They're going to, you know, do an executive order that has no teeth. They're going to, you know, have some Black people in the Rose Garden, and it may even be some victims' family members, and that will be, you know, hard. But ultimately, the change is going to happen at the state and local level. And that's where you're really starting to see some more meaningful reform. And that's where it's really important just to keep up the pressure. Dan, why do you think Trump continues to amp up his rhetoric around law and order and his

silent majority tweets, which he's been tweeting up a storm about lately, when there is no evidence so far in any of the polling from the last several weeks that this is working for him. Well, John, I know it's not working. You know it's not working. Heather knows it's not working. But I'm not sure Trump knows it's not working, right? Like, he does not believe the polls. He went and hired a person known specifically as America's worst

political pollster to explain to him why the CNN poll didn't work. And so I think part of this is he always thinks he's right. So he can't understand a world where his strategy is not working. But it's also this is who Trump is. Like, I was struck in that speech by how Trump, as someone who doesn't release his tax returns, doesn't respond to subpoenas, doesn't respond to Congress, is sort of the most transparent president of American history. Because when he was reading the parts about George Floyd and other African Americans who were killed by cops, and there was no emotion, right? He could have been reading a recipe for beef stew.

But when he got to the law and order part, you could feel the enthusiasm. Like, this is who he is. This is always who he's been. We've known this since the Central Park Five. And so he's just sort of being his authentic self. And I don't think we should read a lot of political strategy into it. I think he also knows he has a six to one, I think, fundraising advantage in his own coffers, not to mention, you know, the gap between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and all the different super PACs. And he knows that, you know, nine out of the top 10 most active news slash activism propaganda outlets on Facebook are conservative. I think he feels like this is going to be a slow burn. Like, if I just keep up with the messaging, the white

American middle is going to tire of this, we're going to be able to define this issue in the end. And so I agree with you that, you know, this is who he is. But I also think he, he has a lot of faith in his ability to control the narrative and the message. And American history is on his side, right? Yeah. And so I think, I think that is right. If you were to pick what given to the positions currently and what the strategy is morally repugnant as it is that would have the best chance of success for him, it's probably the one he is choosing. And he's having it both ways, right?

He can point to this executive order and say, I did something and Van Jones liked it. And then he can say, but my rhetoric is just the same. I also think he knows it's his only play, right? Like he, I mean, being the culture warrior and, you know, going with white identity politics is really, it's worked for him so far. It's all he really knows how to do. He knows that trying to appeal to any kind of moderate voters, to voters of color, to people in the suburbs, it's going to come off as inauthentic. He sort of gets that because that's, like Dan said, that's not who he is fundamentally. And so he feels like I'm just going to go with what got me here. And he doesn't really

know of another strategy. Back to the Senate, McConnell now is basically daring Democrats to block the Republican Senate bill, asking if they want to make a law or just make a point. And they think that they have, you know, they have a talking point here that if Democrats block police reform in the Senate, then that's somehow a win for Republicans to say they tried, but Democrats blocked it. Do you think, Heather, that Democrats should negotiate to get something passed or should they just reject this as a stunt? So if the Republican plan was going to save lives, I would say maybe you should negotiate and do something. That said, it's not going to. It's

not going to change fundamentally the amount or tenor of the police presence in Black and brown neighborhoods. It's not going to take funding away from the police and orient it towards the kind of quality of life investments that, you know, white folks in the suburbs have been able to depend on to have their own safety and quality of life. And it's not going to hold bad repeat offender, excessive force using white supremacist cops of which, you know, there's some in every state, I am sure, accountable and let families hold them accountable. So for that reason, I don't think you squander what is a watershed historical moment of multiracial, bipartisan uprising in every state in the country from, you know, Tuscaloosa to Salt Lake City on something that is not going to change the game. And I think that, you know, what we have to spend our energy on is defining the win in ways that will actually change people's lives and save people's lives and save people's futures and then fighting like hell for it. Dan, what do you think? What would you do?

I think the test that Heather puts on this is exactly right, which is if there was a deal that could save lives, then regardless of how close we are to the election, Democrats have a obligation to try to achieve that. But that is not what's on the table here. And I think this is certainly a conversation that should be led by and the Democratic leaders should listen to the activists who've been in the street and those who've been working on this long before the mobilization of the last few weeks. I think that the way this will play out, regardless of what Democrats do, is let's say they decide, they listen to Pod Save America, they listen to Heather, and they say, we're going to reject this outright. We're not going to readily accept the invitation to play a lead role in Mitch McConnell's Kabuki theater. And they'll block it, right? And then what will happen is the Mitch McConnell staff will spin a lot of credulous Capitol

Hill reporters about how brilliant Mitch McConnell is and that he has checkmated the Democrats by forcing them to object to something that happens in the well of the Senate when no one is watching. And that won't matter, right? I don't think that there is some play on the floor of the Senate that is going to absolve a party that has enabled a racist president and, you know, run on explicitly white nationalist agenda that is going to somehow make them look less culpable for the situation we are in. Just because Brian Schatz blocked a motion to proceed to a Tim Scott bill like that does not seem like it's going to have real impact politically. Right. And I think what will have real impact politically is the stuff that we can control,

which is what the Democrats do and what Joe Biden does. And this week, 50 liberal groups sent a letter to the Biden campaign. This was anchored by folks like Dream Defenders, Mi Gente, and Our Revolution and the Working Families Party saying, we need you to stop talking about community policing. Because, I mean, just think about it, you know, community policing is not what the suburbs have, you know, or the wealthy suburbs have. They just have a good quality of life and enough money to meet their needs, right? They have housing and good schools and safe streets with, you know, lights and good infrastructure. And so there's a real push for Biden to change his response to this moment and stop trumpeting. I mean, basically what he said was, we need to fully fund the program that we put out in the crime bill under the Clinton White House. And, you know, community

policing is not something that anybody in over-policed communities really wants. People want a total shift in the priorities of the local and state government spending in their communities. And so it's really important, I think, for organizations that are representing working-class brown and black folks to be able to have some influence on our standard bearer, given how much the Biden campaign needs our vote.

Yeah, so I want to I wanted to talk about that. So, you know, clearly, Biden has moved to a better place on policing and criminal justice reform than he was throughout most of his career, even throughout most of the primary. Right. So he's he's he's he's embraced some reforms. He's called for national use of force standard, more diverse police departments. He's probably he's embraced much of the Democrats bill been on chokeholds, no knock warrants, reform, qualified immunity. But like you said, he's got this calling for funding for community policing.

He has explicitly come out against defunding the police. So, I mean, how much should activists sort of expect to get him somewhere better by November? And from the Biden perspective, what I wonder is, you know, he's not going to wake up tomorrow or maybe any time between now and November and say, OK, now I'm for defunding the police. But what could he embrace that would meet the moment, but also be authentic to or at least realistic about who he is? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the key things to remember is that the police union really wrote, you know, Joe Biden's crime bill. And that's a really helpful sort of when you think about all of these provisions in local police union contracts that give such immunity and lack of accountability to police officers, you know, and make that sort of code of silence, you know, that's who was really at the table. And oftentimes we like for labor unions to be at the table, you know, writing bills about workers, but not when those workers have guns.

And so, you know, the question now is what can Biden do? I do think that Joe Biden is a weather vane, and he does recognize that the weather has shifted. And I think it is, I always believe, you know, that the left has less power than we think we do. And, you know, if our goals are important enough, then they're going to be hard to accomplish, right? And so I think it's incumbent upon the movement to do the work between now and November to use this incredible amount of attention that these issues have to educate the public and keep moving the needle. People are open who have never thought about something like defunding the police. So like, okay, what would that look like? And there are examples, right? The city of Camden, New Jersey, you know,

disbanded its police department. The country of Georgia disbanded its police department because it was just so corrupt and started from the ground up. You know, we're about to see what's going to happen in Minneapolis. And so I think it's really important for the, it's incumbent upon the movement and democratic leadership actually to keep up the education of the public about how much we spend on police departments. I mean, in New York City, it is 6 billion with a B dollars a year. It's just like an astronomical figure. And we've got to educate people so that Joe Biden, who's always going to want to seek a compromise, who's always going to want to be somewhere slightly left of center, is going to find that political train totally shifted under his feet by the time it comes to really legislate, hopefully with the Democratic majority in January. What do you think? You know how the Biden campaign can be.

They are especially right now. They're probably there. They're looking at their lead there. It's probably making them a bit more cautious. They're probably thinking to themselves, well, he has he has moved a bit from where he was. They like, as Heather was saying, that he sort of always likes to be in the center of where the party is. And so he will move based on that. But what do you think we can sort of hope from Joe Biden on this? I mean, I think all of that assessment is right. And I think it is the right of these groups to continue to put pressure on Joe Biden and every Democratic leader, right? Like Joe Biden would not be a Democratic nominee without Black voters, and he will not be president of the United States without Black voters. And these groups should make sure that their agenda gets a hearing. And it would not be realistic to think that Joe Biden

is going to adopt everything in that letter. But can they move him on some things? And I think potentially the community policing part may be the easiest place to move him, even though that is a program that Joe Biden has been very closely associated with. It is a very, very reasonable and rational request that is actually consistent with some of the other positions that Joe Biden has adopted to not put more money into police departments at this moment. And so I think they can and should push for that. The thing that I would hope would be that Biden would sit down with these people and have a conversation. And I think that like that, like, because like, we should think about this. Like, we have a lot of work to do to win this election. But if I was Joe Biden, I would think about this as the beginning of a governing partnership. Let's have these conversations now,

because we are going to have to work together to solve these problems come January. And they're very, you know, the first group on that list is Black Voters Matter. And that is, you know, that's Latasha Brown, who is very familiar to people in this podcast, who is as reasonable and rational a person as there is. She just talked about a lot of these issues with us a couple of weeks ago.

And that would be a good conversation for Joe Biden to have. So I hope they have that. And it's not simply like this either doesn't get ignored or is an exchange of letters. I think he himself has potential to be very, very good in that conversation and explain his point of view. And I think he will listen to them, which is the thing Elizabeth Warren always says about Joe Biden is he listens. I was thinking what you said, Heather, about sort of the obligation for Democratic leaders and activists to sort of do a lot of education on this, too, because, you know, I mean, the polling is moving around all over the place,

which we're going to talk about in a second. But, you know, when you ask people about defunding the police or cutting police funding, you know, it's it's it's not that popular yet. When you, you know, Data for Progress, we talked about this a couple weeks ago polled would you support an alternative to policing where sort of unarmed folks went and responded to mental health calls and things like that and it was like 58 percent of people support that you know and some of this i wonder if it's about sort of framing this in a way that is at least gets majority support within the party or within the American public. And then you at least then you can go to someone like Joe Biden and say, you should be for this. Most people are

for this. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think, you know, at this moment when Americans watched the, you know, slow motion execution of a defenseless man for eight minutes and 46 seconds, rightly so, corporate America, white Americans, you know, most people of color who are not black are sort of saying, okay, you know what? We get it. We're listening. Tell us. And like, there's a moment right now where George Floyd's murder is making people who weren't listening, listen. And so that moment of conversation that's happening, that's putting books about racism on the bestseller list, that's making

everyone from Pepsi-Cola to Vaseline to Tampax donate to the NAACP. It's an important moment for education. And so putting something out there that smashes through the Overton window, something like defunding the police, which is really focusing just on what we don't want, it's not focusing on what we do want, is a powerful intervention. But I completely agree that the question needs to be, what do we want instead?

And fundamentally, it's a question of housing affordability, the foster care system, which often leads back to housing affordability, because foster care system, which often leads back to housing affordability because parents can't afford to keep a roof over their children and so end up losing them. It's about food insecurity. It's about wages. It's about social workers. Yes, but it's also about just having the dignity and the resilience and the strength because you have enough money and enough resources to just take care of your family. And it's also about getting cops out of schools where you're constantly criminalizing kids for what would have just been, you know, a detention. I really do think that

focusing on what we do want, there's an ad that the Republicans have already started running that's like a white woman running around in her house because there's a home invasion, which is of course like, you know, the single scariest thing, right? And it really was a huge part of the NRA kind of surge after Ferguson was this idea that there were going to be more home invasions after riots. It was like immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and, you know, thugs on the street are going to invade your home. So that's why you need to buy all these guns for protection, not for hunting. And, you know, the Republican ad says Democrats want to defund the police. So there's no 911. Like she calls 911, there's no one there. And I do think we need our own ads that are like, here are the reasons why people call 911 and just show what would happen instead, right? I'm calling 911 because I hear somebody fighting next door

and it's worrying me, right? That kind of welfare check is actually one of the huge things that happens. Instead, you get someone who doesn't have a gun. You get someone who's a social worker. You're worried about your neighbor's kid. You know, you have someone who comes and gets them connected to food aid.

You know, you're worried about your own safety. You actually are able to get someone who can just get you out of the situation and get you into stable housing. These are the kinds of things we need to see as a totally different version. That's not gutted out social services and a gutted out family economic security.

That doesn't depend on the police to oppress people who are, whose only crime is, you know, often being working class, poor, black and brown and indigenous. You, you touched on some of these sort of broader issues that I want to talk about. I mean, George Floyd's murder was the spark for these protests and this reckoning that's taking place right now. And a lot of the focus has rightly been on police and criminal justice reform.

It's also opened up this bigger conversation about how to address systemic racism. Friday is Juneteenth, which is the day 155 years ago when the last enslaved Americans were freed. And I think these last few weeks have made it painfully obvious that we still haven't grappled with that legacy. From a policy perspective, obviously a lot of this is about prioritization, especially when we're talking about government. If in November we have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, where would you begin? So I think first we need to recognize that part of the reason we haven't made more progress on racism in this country is because we have always had a well-funded economically, politically, and socially powerful minority that has never wanted to change the racial order. And they have been organized since our founding. And certainly, I think even with more money and tools to influence our democracy since the civil rights movement. And now, you know, they're known as, you know, sort of the Koch network. And they have all these other things that they espouse, whether it's, you know,

attacks on government, the desire not to regulate, but fundamentally they want the racial and economic status quo. And part of the tools that they have used has been to fund a dominant story. And we see it all over right-wing media. We see it all over the right-wing social media, but we also see it in our classrooms. It just minimizes racism and blames people of color for racial inequality and racial disparities. And so we've never actually been on the same page about the extent of racism and why we are in this place that we are today. So that's why I think it's really important for us to do what 40 other societies that have had the kinds of trauma that we have had to recognize that we need a truth commission in this country. And I'm not saying like shunt it off to a commission. I mean,

something that has, where you can do it in every single community in the country. Right now, there's a template called the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Effort that is happening in 20 campuses and 14 states and cities. I was just visiting with the one in Dallas. And you just have to rewrite your racial history. A friend of mine put it this way. She said, you know, I always thought that we were a country with racist people in it. I didn't realize that we were a country with racist people in it. I didn't

realize that we were a racist country. And if you don't really believe that a country that was founded on a belief in racial hierarchy and founded on stolen land and stolen labor and only had a majority of white people believing that Blacks and whites should marry in the 80s is not a racist country. And that, you know, most of our laws and programs were created at a time where it was government policy to segregate and discriminate. And we've had some tweaks around the edges, but we haven't fully uprooted them. And as soon as we did start to do that in the 1960s, the Supreme Court spent about 10 years in that business, and then the Supreme Court changed, and they've actually been the ones to stop racial progress time and time again, use the Equal Protection Clause to defend corporations and to defend white people from

from, you know, affirmative action and voluntary school integration and other such evils. action and voluntary school integration and other such evils. So we've actually not had a sustained period of all hands on deck, let's solve this. And so I do think we need something like a truth and racial healing and reconciliation, whatever you want to call it, commission that gets us all on the same page so we can begin to turn it. And I do think that we need to recognize that your success as a family, so much of it depends on your inherited wealth. Even if it's like your aunt's $10,000 savings bond or like a little bit of stock from your grandmother. Black people were officially denied that with every single, in every single way that the government created white wealth from the Homestead Act to the affordable mortgages to the DA to the GI Bill to the subsidization of the suburbs. Every single one of those moves explicitly denied that to black people.

black people. And so we have to have some kind of reparations, not even for slavery in my mind, but more for the inequalities in wealth building that happened in the 20th century. And frankly, well into the current decade with the financial crisis that could have been stopped and resulted in a loss of wealth for black families of about 50% in the course of a handful of years. Dan, could you see President Biden leading something like this in early days in office? I mean, I would hope so. You know, I think it's a very powerful idea. And I think it requires requires a shift in how all of us, from Joe Biden to us to Democratic Party leaders, think about institutional and structural racism. I've thought a lot about this in, like John, you and I, primary experience in politics was helping the first African-American president get elected and then working in that White House for

some number of years. And I think about how in 2011, when Donald Trump was doing his birther stuff, and Obama finally responded, and we sort of launched a full response to it. Never once did Barack Obama or any one of us explicitly say what he was doing was racist? It obviously was, but we did not say that. No, we were all scared of saying that. He was scared of saying that. Yeah, and because of the double standard and tremendous expectations and burdens that were put on him as an African-American, what he could get away with compared to a white male president,

just like what a white male president could get away with that a Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate could not get away with, dictated the corners of what was acceptable. And since Trump was elected, Democrats politically and people around the country are more willing to explicitly call out racists and the racist things people say. But what I think that masks is it creates this narrative about racism that if we can just get the racist out of office, we're going to solve the problem. When the problem isn't racist, it's racism. And it is institutional and it is structural. And it embodies every part of our life and our economic history. And like, that is really the conversation that I hope we're having today that Biden has, which is what does a politics and policy that truly attempts to

grapple with institutional and structural racism looks like, right? Because it is so much bigger than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is president president because we have a whole bunch of institutions in this country that are designed to disproportionately reward white people with power. He did not get the most votes. He won because we have electoral college, which gives massive amounts of political power to people in the whitest states in this country. And there's a policy agenda. There's a political strategy. There is structural reform. There is thinking about the cultural forces that we are up against. And it's just thinking about the conversation around the police and that,

and why that ad that Heather mentioned is so powerful is because it, we have a hundred years of popular culture that glorifies police and even bad police. Like that's been the theme of the last 20 years is the, the crooked cop who saves the day. You know, they call her outside the lines and, you know,

and like, we're like pushing up against all of that. Like what we're taught in schools, like Arnie Duncan tweeted, you know, our former education secretary this other day, how many of you learned about Tulsa in school? And the answer is almost no one. Right. Our history is the history of as taught in schools of race in America is slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights legislation, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama gets elected. That's it, right? Like there is no discussion of the legacy of that, how it impacts

things now. And like, that's all a part of this bigger conversation or commission, as Heather talked about, that we need to have. I sort of see this as, you know, there's, I think there's a real opportunity right now. And then there's a challenge with sort of the coalition that the Democratic Party has right now and sort of where public opinion is. Opinion on issues like race, the police, the Black Lives Matter movement has moved dramatically over the last few years, even the last few weeks. There was just a Quinnipiac poll out today that shows voters now support the removal of Confederate statues by 52 to 44 percent when they opposed it 39 to 50 percent just three years ago after Charlottesville. So you have these attitudes changing. We have a coalition in the party now that has many more college educated people in the party. party, white attitudes have shifted. The challenge, as I see it, is I sometimes worry that the response to this becomes individualized or is limited to changing personal behavior or influencers posting or brands donating or corporations donating, right? And sometimes it's harder to get people to focus on, I know, Heather, this is your life's work,

sort of the larger economic structural issues at stake, right? Yeah. Because you can feel good about donating, but the federal government can move trillions of dollars around and we have schools, districts that are still segregated, affordable housing isn't built in our richest neighborhoods with a bunch of white liberals who are very well-meaning, right? There are these sort of big structural policies and challenges that we don't take on. And I wonder sort of how we get everyone oriented around the idea that sort of that's the ultimate

challenge here when we're talking about systemic racism? A hundred percent. I mean, I think two things need to happen. One, this is a moment where a lot of white folks are educating themselves. And that is super important because they're unlearning a lot of the crap that we've been taught in schools. A lot of the, you know, terrible narratives from the media, Color of Change, the organization where I'm a co-chair, has a series of reports about how much the police procedurals and the crime procedurals have undergirded the mass incarceration system, exactly what Dan was talking about. And I think that's important, right? Like, read The Color of Law by Richard

Rothstein to really understand how much the government segregated Americans. You know, read The Warmth of Other Suns. Go ahead and read White Fragility. Read The New Jim Crow. Read How to Be an Antiracist. And then, though, don't stop with having educated yourself, right? Like, that is a very individualistic, which is a trap, which is a, you which is a trap of white American culture in many ways. It's sort of one of the dominant stories that we're told is like, it's just us on our own when we don't see the sort of invisible help that we've been given.

So you educate yourself, but don't stop because no enduring change has ever happened in this country without collective action. And that's where you just you need to get involved. And I think, you know, so many of your listeners have seen that happen with electoral politics over the past three years, you know, and have seen that actually when I get involved in a campaign and I knock on doors and I make phone calls and texts, I'm actually doing something collectively to change the structures of power. Imagine doing all of that on candidates, campaigns, ideas, organizations that are fighting against structural racism. That's what we need. That's 100% what we need. And then I'd say the other part of it is really incumbent upon the democratic leadership, which is still overwhelmingly white, from the donors to the electives to the consultants, to really, you can have a completely woke electorate that wants really big things. And if, you know, the elected officials just don't put it on the table, it doesn't really

matter. And so actually the biggest education needs to happen in Congress and among the consultant class and the donor class. And it just needs to be, you know, a broader set of agenda items. Because I do think that people will follow something that is bigger than the kind of piecemeal stuff that, you know, we've gotten from Democrats for the past 20 years. Well, and part of it is sort of the message and the story that we tell as Democrats, too. I mean, Trump has sort of perfected, you know, a brand of white

identity politics that Republicans have been practicing since the late 60s. They scare white Americans into thinking that progress for black Americans can only come at their expense. And I think because this has worked for Trump and for Republicans, especially in swing states that have a greater share of white voters without a college degree, you get a lot of Democratic politicians who've been hesitant to take on systemic racism. And this is, you know, even sort of what Dan was talking about just a few minutes ago. You've done a lot of work, Heather, on how Democrats should think about this from a messaging perspective. Yeah. And some work on the race class narrative. Can you talk a little bit about that? How that fits with the moment? Yeah, I mean, what we found was that, you know,

there's sort of three categories of voters, the, you know, our base, our opposition or their base, and then, you know, over 60% of folks are persuadable, which means not that they're like, you know, completely moderate and in the middle. It means that they hold the progressive story on race and the economy and government in their minds. And they also hold the conservative story. It's like, we've heard both stories. Sometimes the person who tells me the conservative story is compelling. And sometimes the person who tells me the progressive story is compelling. It's really weird for people like us who are like, you know, really see the world with our own story, but it's true and it's the majority of people. And so what we found was that those, that 60% of persuadables was actually really supportive of policies to address systemic racism, if they had a broader description and

story of what racism was, who was selling it, who was benefiting from it, then the normal, you know, I'm a racist person, so I do something bad to someone. Rather, if we could tell the story of racism as something that is a political and economic weapon that is wielded by a few self-interested, sold and marketed to, you know, a broader public, but ultimately that doesn't benefit that broader public. Ultimately, these rules of white supremacy, these rules that support the fallacy of white supremacy are the kinds of rules that keep our tax code totally upside down, the kinds of rules that keep public education

underfunded and in the category of things that people have to mortgage their entire futures just to get a decent shot at. It keeps college affordability out of reach for the middle class who needs it the most. It keeps our public purse spending more money on war and warrior cops than it does on clean water and bridges that don't fall and dams that don't break. I mean, it's not working for our country. The coronavirus pandemic is just laid so bare that we are acting like a fifth-rate country. And so much of it is because we have prioritized all the wrong things. We have let self-interested, greedy and racist and sexist people kind of loot the country and not invested in all of us because of this view that there are

some groups of people that are just better than others. And so who's really benefiting from it? Is a white working class who can't get in, a guy who can't get into a union because unions have been busted with a lot of racist fear-mongering politics, is that guy really benefiting from racism? You know, I want to look at who's selling racism for their own profit more than who's desperate enough to buy it. And I think when we start asking that question, we will see that, you know, the Republican Party and the people who feed the Republican Party in its current iteration are selling white Americans a bill of goods that has worked, right? The majority of white Americans have voted for a Republican for president since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, right?

Like, it is a white party with a white identity politics, white leadership, and a white base. And yet it is screwing the country, gutting it and stripping it for parts. Dan, what do you think about this? Because, you know, you can see how a lot of Democratic politicians could sort of fall into the trap of embracing an almost colorblind economic populism, because we've sat in how many meetings with consultants and seen how many polls where the policies that poll the best are taxing the rich and, you know, investing in this and everything that is sort of economically populist in nature. And then maybe they'd want to sort of shy away from more direct discussions about race, because that's not how you win over those swing

voters. But I think, you know, Heather makes the point very well from a ton of research that actually naming the people who are doing the dividing, that are dividing us against each other, white, brown, black voters, so that they can like loot the rest of the country. That's a much more powerful argument for a lot of these voters. I understand why Democratic politicians and Democratic consultants have made the decisions they have in the past. It is based on an outdated view of politics. And it's also based on this idea that racism is a binary choice between white supremacists and woke.

And there's nothing in the middle. And it doesn't accept what Heather's research very clearly shows, which is people have very confusing, complicated, and often conflicting views about race. You know, and I have followed the work that Heather has done on this very, very closely, and it really sort of blows me away. And I have this YouTube series where we look at political ads where I talk to Anat Shanker, sorry, a collaborator on this work that'll be out next week. And what I think is a way to think about it is Republicans are running a very explicit, racially divisive messaging and political strategy.

And Democrats have tried to run an implicit racial unity strategy. And I think what is very compelling about what Heather is talking about is that you cannot ally the conversation. In a world where there is fear-mongering from a very, very, very powerful set of messengers on the right, You have to take that on and explain why it's wrong, who is funding it, and who it serves. And I think that's very, very important. And I also think that movements matter and movements work and movements shift opinion. I mean, you know, it's just, it's, it's not just Donald Trump. It's not just the public execution of George Floyd. It's also six years of a Black Lives

Matter movement that has been shaping consciousness and shaping the consciousness of Black people. All right. I mean, you know, from Barack Obama to many, many others, you know, this particular level of consciousness around Black identity and reclaiming um you know blackness and and reclaiming our history and being willing to be you know unapologetically black is is actually new right i mean our generation of kind of older millennials or younger gen x are we grew up in that colorblind era as well. And so right. That, that, that black lives matter has changed the world without a doubt. I also think that this narrative sort of,

it speaks to a longing that a lot of, I think Americans have right now, which is people don't, people don't want to be divided by, by race. Right. People don't want that of all races. And the opposite of that is they don't necessarily want some sort of happy unity that like papers over all the real differences and struggles, but there's sort of a longing for a solidarity that you can empathize with other people's struggles.

And I don't think we've had sort of leaders who can really call on that desire that people have to sort of stand in solidarity with one another. Yeah, I don't think there's any more important word in America right now than solidarity. And I think it's, it means exactly that, that sense of having each other's back. It's not like a Kumbaya. We're kind of all the same. Right. It's not, it's not that it's saying actually our struggles are different, but you know what, we're going to support each other through them. People are very scared for good reason. The, you know, plants melting and you know, our institutions are collapsing. I mean,

everyone gets it, right? Like on a fundamental level, people are very, very scared. And so the idea that someone has their back is extremely powerful. And I think that the protests and the demonstrations and the uprisings in, again, all 50 states and just, you know, smashing through stereotypes of who actually goes out to protest. So much of that was primed by this precious moment of solidarity, of national solidarity that we had at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, where we showed that we were all willing for a few weeks to freeze our lives and do things that we never thought we would do in order to be a part of a shared national effort to save ourselves, to save our neighbors, to save our friends, save our families,

to save the country. And we did it right. Like essential workers did it and, you know, parents did it. And, you know, many, in many cases, local officials did it and teachers did it and childcare workers did it. Washington really didn't do it, right? We had leadership that was really unwilling to sort of stand and have our backs. But there was this moment of real sense of vulnerability and fear. And also, I'm actually willing to do something for my neighbor. And I'm, and I'm feeling a shared sense of, of, of struggle with my neighbor,

even though obviously it laid bare all these inequalities, I think the impulse that Americans had and just seeing each other and seeing the whole country do the same thing, which, you know, it's just so far from our individualized kind of consumer marketplace culture. It just really, I think, primed us for showing up for Black lives in the wake of George Floyd's death. Well, hopefully we can turn that into something more lasting and durable than just a fleeting moment here. And I hope we will. Heather, thank you so much for joining us.

This was a lot of fun. My pleasure. It's always good to be with you. And, you know, folks who are listening should read up, you know, do all the education you can, black, brown, and white folks and everybody in between. Learn about our history, the stuff that, you know, we've been lied to about, but also take action and join up. And there's so many organizations out there that are great and nothing feels better than moving in action in solidarity with your fellow Americans. Just along those lines, I would highly recommend Heather's Ted talk on this very topic,

which is very, very powerful and very compelling. Thank you. Absolutely. And, and please come back so we can, I think we should keep having these conversations because it's, it's important.

Sounds great. Happy to. When we come back, we will have dance conversation with Reverend William Barber. He's the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and the president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach. Reverend Dr. William Barber, welcome back to Pod Save America. Thank you so much for allowing us to be on. It's always good to be with you.

Well, we are so grateful to have you. You revived the Poor People's Campaign in 2018, but this weekend you're starting a new push with new demands. What has or hasn't happened since 2018 that makes this such a critical moment for your campaign? Well, along with Reverend Dr. Leo Harris, and now with 45 state coordinating committees, we revived in 2018, but we were just beginning. And we knew that the first thing we had to do was audit America. So we did an audit of America, some of the best economists and others in the world. They actually get a handle on what was going on. And we found out, we hear 39 million people in poverty, but it's actually

140 million people, poverty and low wealth, 43% of the country, just to give you one of the glaring numbers. And 700 people were dying a day from poverty, quarter million a year. The next thing we wanted to do is we wanted to launch the campaign. We did six weeks of launching in 41 state capitals in the District of Columbia, putting our demands in place. And one of the things that has done, it has pushed the issue of poverty and our five interlocutory justices, systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, the war economy, and this false modernity of religious nationalism into the public square more and more and more.

And people are organizing at a very deep level. As I said, we now have 45 state coordinating committees, poor people, moral leaders, and advocates. We have 19 major religious denominations of every different religion in the country who are connected now. We have over 150 partners now that have connected. And we have somewhat in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 unions that have connected. And people are really starting to see how we have to deal with these five interlocking evils, interlocking injustices. And then in 2019, we had a big Congress, and we actually proposed a budget. We found the money.

We took on the lie of scarcity. And we actually presented that budget to the House of Representatives of the United States Congress at their budget committee. The first time ever that poor people, white, black, undocumented, native, had actually gone to the Congress and said, here's how we can fix these problems. Here's what needs to be done. And since that time, we've been doing a, we must do more mobilizing, organizing, registering people, what's called mobilizing, organizing, registering, educating people for the movement

who vote. We did another study because we want our things based in reality. And one of the things we found out is from Columbia University study, that if you just register 15% of unregistered poor and low wealth people in this country, you could fundamentally shift the politics. And so we began a tour to do that, register people across the country in a very targeted way with the goal of changing the narrative and building power. And we were headed to D.C. for June 2020 on Pennsylvania Avenue when COVID hit right in the middle of it. And when COVID hit and exposed the level of poverty and the level of racism in this country and how the pandemic exported those, it drove more and more of our issues right into the heart of the political dialogue that poverty and racism and the other things we have mentioned are actually threats to our very national security threats to who we are as a society and now we are headed

toward this massive for People's Assembly moral March on Washington the largest most historic gather of poor and low wealth people and their allies a digital gathering and happening on the same day that Trump is in Tulsa insulting the history there and the ugly racism of bombing and rioting and destroying a black community. And we're going to be the contrast that day with hundreds of thousands of people online of every race, creed, color, sexuality saying that we need to be about the business of addressing these issues and bringing people together to change society rather than bringing people together to continue to divide society.

The Poor People's Campaign is a nonpartisan organization, but much of what you call for in your budget and in your activities is generally considered to be progressive legislation. When you're out there making the case for your agenda, how do you make it to folks who do not necessarily identify with the Democratic Party or with progressivism? Well, I don't define progressivism quite the same way. You know, Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, and he talked a lot about progressive ideas back in the area. I think too often that's exactly the mistake we've made. We see the issues we talk about as constitutional issues and moral issues. You know, in our deepest religious faith,

it tells us that how we treat poor people and the immigrant and the sick are moral issues. They're not left and right or progressive versus conservative. Our Constitution says establish justice. That isn't a progressive or conservative. It could be both. If you're going to be a constitutionalist, then you want to conserve what's in the Constitution. And one of the things you want to conserve is the establishment of justice and providing for the common defense. But you would also want to be progressive in those things in order to make sure that you're constantly examining the areas of your society that are not just and being progressively active toward changing that and so

i think you first of all don't get tied up in the language of division we have too much puny language left versus right democrat versus republican conservative versus liberal it just gets tired and people are hurting fixing or are going into communities like Appalachia where coal miners don't have health care, but they have black lung disease. They don't want to hear about these little terms that we get caught up in, you know, talking heads. They want to know how is it that I can get health care? How is it that we can get living wages? How do we get clean water? And if you can show them that the very people, for instance, that are pushing voter suppression laws and when they get elected through voter suppression

laws, it's targeted at black people. Once they get elected, they use their power to block health care that hurts coal miners, that block corporations from poisoning their communities, that hurt Black, white, Asian, and Latino and First Nation people, people began to see something. They began to see that they actually should be together. And so what we do is we just go to the people and we teach the truth. We show people that there's a connection between that poor person, the Delta of Mississippi, and that poor farmer out in Kansas. Both of them need health care. Both of them are struggling with wages. Both of them find themselves being constantly undermined by the corporate interests of this country.

We can find people that are willing to have grown-up conversations about how systemic racism, whether it's against Black people, Latino people, or Indigenous people, systemic racism is not just against those people. It's targeted at them, but it's against the democracy. It holds us back. And we found that there's a whole lot of people that are ready to get away from the labels and start dealing with what affects life. You know, what we do is we show people that poverty kills. It has a death measurement. Quarter million people a year die and don't have to die if we address the issue of poverty. Denial of health care kills. There's a death measurement. We know that thousands of people die for every 500,000 people that do not have health care. We've shown people in the South that all of the southern states that denied health care or the Affordable Care Act, the majority of the people that would have been impacted by receiving that health care are white.

But most of the reasons why the governors and the legislatures deny it is because they hate a black man who happened to be a president named Obama. We have to have grown up conversations. And when you do that, you get around a lot of these labels. When you use moral fusion movements, not labels, not party, you begin to talk about what's right and wrong, not what's left and right. It is amazing how that changes the whole conversation and pulls people together. You know, you have been marching and organizing and having registering voters and talking to people face to face. But now we're existing in a pandemic that's going to make a lot of those traditional forms of organizing less frequent or perhaps too dangerous for people to do. Beyond having the march

transitioned into a digital gathering, what else are you thinking about how you're going to do your work amidst this pandemic? Well, first of all, it's not a march. It's a poor people's assembly moral march on Washington. And I think it's important for us to describe that. We never intended to just have a march. We intended to bring together poor and low wealth people because who will gather on Pennsylvania Avenue, now they're going

to gather digitally. They will in fact, first of all, tell their stories and the pain that's being caused by these five interlocking injustices. And it'll be a counterintuitive presentation. As I said, you'll have a Latino from California standing with a fast food worker from the Carolinas. You'll have a farmer from Kansas standing with coal miners from Kentucky, standing with poor and low-income people from Mississippi, counterintuitively,

and saying, look at us, look at us. We are America. Look at how these things are hurting us and destroying our lives. Listen to the 140 million people. How do you ignore 43% of the nation? Then they will change the narrative by changing the faces and presenting this to America and to the world. And then we are committing to be a power, but we are also presenting a demand list because the demands are not, we don't believe you should just curse the darkness,

but have demands. Now we started using social media long ago in this movement. We used it when we organized in six weeks of action. We've used it in our mass meetings that we've had throughout the country. We've used it in our mass meetings that we've had throughout the country, used in our training. We've built a massive following on social media. So we always have

planned to use it. The pandemic is forcing us to use it. Even if we were on Pennsylvania Avenue, we were also going to be using massive social media. But because of our advisors, our PhD epidemiologists have said it would not be responsible to put people on planes and trains and buses and cars and bring them to D.C., we're utilizing this format. We have now over 200 Facebook accounts that are going to be streaming with us. MSNBC is giving us their platform. ABC, their social media platform will be utilized. We are using every tool, every tool, social media tool known to humankind to pull people together. And we believe that the movement has to use all of the tools. We see it happening with many other groups.

We need to continue to do that. I often say Harriet Tubman got 700 people out of slavery. She never had Google. She never had Instagram. She never had Gmail. She never had a cell phone. She had moss on the north side of the tree, a North Star in the sky, and a.38 pistol in her pocket. And that was to protect herself as she was rescued and saved. But the fact, no matter what, if she had had all of the tools we have, and what we say is, we cannot see people in the past who did less with more, and we don't do more with more. We have more than they ever had. We cannot do less than they did. And so we're using every form of social media. We've also created a newspaper to reach down to people who may not have social media

and who may be homeless and otherwise, because we really are building a movement from the bottom up. Here at Crooked Media, we have a program called Adopt a State where we're encouraging our listeners to pick one of the six battleground states to digitally volunteer, donate money, try to help push those over the finish line. One of our six states is North Carolina. That's the state I'm on. You have been organizing and working in North Carolina for a very long time. What advice would you have for our listeners who have adopted North Carolina as to how you build political power in that state? our listeners who have adopted North Carolina as to how you build political power in that state?

Well, in North Carolina in 2012, we had a very, very bad election that was determined by the 2010 redistricting that was later has been proven to be unconstitutional and racist, but it was allowed to go through by the Justice Department at that time. We disagreed with it. We took him on in court, but it took us six years to win. And because of that, we had more people vote in a more forward-thinking way, but the redistricting created a supermajority General Assembly, and it was a supermajority extremist Republican. I don't even call them Republicans. It was something other than Republican, maybe Tea Partiers. And in the first 50 days, they went after, took, blocked health care, blocked living wages, blocked increasing unemployment, cut a billion dollars from public education, went after women, went after gay people, went after Latino people. And then in April of that year, they even decided they were going to go after voting rights.

They passed a bill held on to until after June 25th, the day that the Shelby decision was decided and gutted both Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And then they passed the worst voting rights voter suppression bill we had seen since Jim Crow. We fought them in Mall Monday for four years. Over 1,200 people were arrested. We registered people to vote. We took them in Mall Monday for four years. Over 1,200 people were arrested. We registered people to vote. We took them to court. And in 2016 and 2017, and even as late as this year, we won every battle we took on against massive voter suppression.

And now the lines, the redistricting lines have been drawn. The voter suppression tactics to end same-day registration early voting have been stopped. Voter ID efforts have been stopped. The courts have called what they did surgical racism. In 2016, when we had just won a few things, we were the only state that beat Donald Trump down ticket. We won the governor's race. We won the AG. We transitioned the Supreme Court to be one of the most progressive Supreme Courts in the South ever. More black women on the Supreme Court than ever, more African-Americans than ever.

And now we have a chance in this election to fundamentally shift it. There's an opportunity now to unseat Tom Tillis, who was the architect of voter suppression in the state, as well as turn out in a massive way. There are 4 million poor and low-income people in North Carolina. If poor and low-income people registered to vote, we could fundamentally shift that state. I think Trump may have won by about 160,000 votes, but some 500,000 African-Americans alone that were already registered didn't vote, and tens of thousands of other people who did not vote. So where would you invest? In massive GOTV efforts. I know we're going to be doing efforts like that with repairs of the breach and the Poor People's Campaign and others. This right now, the biggest focus for North Carolina is massive voter registration, voter protection, voter mobilization.

And it doesn't even have to be partisan. If people know what has happened, I believe people in our state are very bothered by the fact that we have a general assembly that even in the midst of a pandemic, we would still not expand Medicaid, would still not increase unemployment. They are regressive. They are extremists. They're mean-spirited. We've seen it. As I said, they cost $1,200.

Norland needs to get arrested in this campaign. And people have been waiting and waiting and waiting. And now, in 2020, we'll beat back the suppression laws, and it's time to use those victories and do massive, massive voter turnout. That's what we're going to be doing. That's where I believe people should be invested. North Carolina is a battleground, not only for the presidency, but for the United States Senate,

and to turn around a Southern General Assembly and make it what it ought to be, a representative of the people. Reverend Barber, thank you so much for the work you're doing. You are an inspiration to all of us. Thank you for joining us here on Positive America. I encourage everyone to go to www.june2020.org to sign up for your assembly. And thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. Join us, everybody. And don't ever forget, no matter what, forward together, not one step back. Take care. no matter what, forward together, not one step back.

Take care. Thanks to Heather McGee, and thanks to the Reverend William Barber. John, John, and Tommy will be back on Monday, and I'll see everyone next week. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.