#RolandMartinUnfiltered - 2024 Voter Suppression Analysis, DNR Chair Race, The Strategy Behind An Economic Boycott

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

1.27.2025 #RolandMartinUnfiltered: 2024 Voter Suppression Analysis, DNR Chair Race, The Strategy Behind An Economic Boycott Investigative reporter Greg Palast will explain how MAGA's mass purging of voters of color cost Vice President Kamala Harris the presidency. The Democratic National Convention's winter meeting convenes on Saturday to elect a new chair. Tonight, I'll speak with Wisconsin's Democratic Party Chair, Ben Wikler, about his desire to lead the party. Target's decision to drop its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies has led many Black consumers to call for a boycott. Tonight, I will outline the strategy behind economic boycotts and the importance of having specific goals.  Download the #BlackStarNetwork app on iOS, AppleTV, Android, Android TV, Roku, FireTV, SamsungTV and XBox  http://www.blackstarnetwork.com The #BlackStarNetwork is a news reporting platforms covered under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm real revolutionary right now. Support this man, black media. He makes sure that our stories are told. Thank you for being the voice of Black America, Roland. Hey, Blake, I love y'all. All momentum we have now, we have to keep this going. The video looks phenomenal.

See, there's a difference between Black Star Network and Black-owned media and something like CNN. You can't be Black-owned media and be scary. It's time to be smart. Bring your eyeballs home. You dig? Thank you. Hey folks, today is Monday, January 27, 2025. I'm Jeff, I'm a former partner on Fortune 65 and the Black Star Network. Investigative journalist Greg Palast said that voter suppression by President Kamala Harris did not win the 2024 presidential election. He'll join us to talk about his research also on today's show.

Donald Trump gets into a spat with the president of Columbia. Maga said, oh, the president brought him to his knees. That's not what happened. The lying as usual. And, of course, Pete Hicks said that we're going to give him credit for restoring the Tuskegee Airmen. He talked to U.S. Air Force recruits. No, we're not going to do that. And lots of people are talking about boycotting Target and other companies that pull back on DEI initiatives.

I'm going to do a masterclass, a deep dive on explaining the history of a boycott, what we must know and understand, and how we need to be very careful with how we communicate with Black-owned businesses. All of that and more right here on Roller Mark Unfiltered. It's time to bring the funk. Let's go. Best believe he's knowing Putting it down from sports to news to politics With entertainment just for kicks

He's rolling It's Uncle Roro, y'all It's Roland Martin Yeah Rolling with Roland now He's funky, he's fresh, he's real The best you know, he's Roland Martin Yeah, yeah. Rolling with rolling now. Yeah, yeah. He's funky, he's fresh, he's real the best. You know he's rolling, Martin.

Now. Martin. Man, folks, you're doing their autopsies, examining why did Vice President Kamala Harris lose to Donald Trump the 2024 presidential election. There are a variety of reasons. Did Democrats stay at home? They weren't interested in voting for her over the issue with Gaza. It was the price of eggs and groceries.

But investigative journalist Greg Palast, he says, no, voter suppression is the reason. And the fact of the matter is she could have easily won if it wasn't for that. He joins us right now. Greg, welcome back to the show. So walk us through what your research has determined. Okay. It's real simple. In fact, if you go to gregpallas.com, you can get all the numbers so you don't have to keep your calculator and a pen next to you while I tell you what's going on. For those who, by the way, don't know me, Greg Palast, I'm an investigative reporter. I'm especially known as a data journalist. I got the Global Editor's Award for that.

That means I'm a detective with a pen. And I used to work for the U.S. Justice Department and attorneys general. My degree is in forensic economics. Why am I telling you all these things? Because I'm going to give you a lot of numbers, and you better believe them instead of the junk you're hearing from mainstream press. Here's what happened to Kamala Harris. Here's what happened to our democracy. What happened was that vote suppression won this election. Trump would have lost except for, except for massive vote suppression.

And what I mean by vote suppression, that's a very polite term for shafting Black people out of their votes and other people of color, including a lot of young people whose votes are blue. Now, here's the calculation. And I'm very good at this stuff. I've been doing it for the NAACP, ACLU, Black Voters Matter, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson for years,, which would have given her a plurality of 1.2 million in the popular vote over Trump. Even more important, if not for Jim Crow trickery, which reached new, it's not new to this election, but it reached new heights in this election, Roland. Kamala Harris would have easily won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia

for a total of 300, excuse me, 286 electoral votes, and she would be president of the United States right now. And here's how it breaks down, Roland. And this is from, now this number is from the United States Elections Assistance Commission, an agency you've probably never heard of, but their job is to keep track of the votes in America. They track it, but they also do something else. They keep track of the non-votes in America. We are a nation that, America's nasty little secret, Roland, is that we don't let everyone vote, in particular voters of color. In leading, in 23, leading up to the 24 election, states purged 4,776,706 voters from the voter rolls. 4.8 million, almost 5 million voters were simply erased off the voter rolls. I've been I looked at elections in Venezuela, Liberia, Mexico, Switzerland, China, you name it.

They don't purge people off voter rolls the way we do this purge business. Now, who's getting purged of those 5 million voters, well, I took a deep dive into the purge of, like, a couple years ago, 300,000 voters in Georgia. I did this for the ACLU and Black Voters Matter and NAACP. And I uncovered that 198,000 voters in Georgia who were removed because supposedly they moved from their Georgia voting address. Not one of them moved. Now, I'm not guessing. I hired the experts who work with Amazon who know exactly where you live. There's a lot of Roland Martins in America, but you don't get someone else's tidy whities, do you? Because Amazon knows exactly where you live. And I got a special contract with the U.S. Postal Service to

hunt down people. We're not guessing. We went name by name by name, 198,000 voters who they said had moved out of Georgia. And there they were at their homes. Now, who were they? We called 800 of them, which is a very big statistical sample. Almost all of them were African-American voters in Georgia. That's who gets purged. In Wisconsin, and if it weren't for those purges, Kamala Harris would have taken Georgia and other challenges to black voters. In Wisconsin, Roland, there was a purge of over 150,000 voters. Again, I went name by name by name through that list for Black Voters Matter.

Literally, with computers, we went through every single name. Tens of thousands of people accused of voting from an illegal address, and they were purged from the voter rolls before this election. Now, I actually mapped this with The Washington Post, and we found out that almost every single wrongly removed, purged voters not allowed to vote were it was an African-American in Milwaukee. That was most of the list. And then some of the list were students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Well, you know, well-known left wing school. Those are not Trump voters. So it's young voters and black voters. There was a complete match between the number of voters who were purged wrongly and black precincts in Milwaukee. That's just the beginning. That's the purges.

2.1 mail-in ballots, Roland. Let me repeat this. 2.1 million mail-in ballots were rejected. People don't realize, according to NPR, 13.8 percent, that's about one in seven mail-in ballots, is thrown in the garbage. Let me repeat that. You mail in your ballot. It's very easy for them to knock off your ballot. They know who you are. They knock off your ballot. And they know who you are. They know your zip code. And in places like Georgia, they know your race because it says BLA next to your name if you're black in many states in the South.

That's still on the voter rolls. Now, if it was random, if anyone's mail-in ballot was thrown out, Roland, so big deal. But the state of Washington did an analysis of whose mail-in ballot gets rejected. And they found that if you are black, you are 400 percent more likely than if you are white to have your mail-in ballot rejected. You didn't put a middle, you registered with your middle initial, but you didn't include your middle initial, you registered with your middle initial, but you didn't include your middle initial on the outside of the envelope. Postage due, tricks like that. And it's all aimed at challenging black votes. Spoiled ballots, 585,000 ballots, which people voted in their precincts. They voted in their precincts and those ballots are rejected as supposedly unreadable.

All these gotcha things. Now, again, whose ballot gets rejected? Are you ready for this? The U.S. Civil Rights Commission did an analysis and found out that your chance of having your ballot rejected for some technical reason, whether it's mailed in or in precinct, is 900% higher if you're black than if you're white. Repeat that. I just told you about, altogether, about 3 million ballots rejected. 900% higher chance you will have your ballot rejected if you're black than if you're white. Provisional ballots. Roland, let me tell you something. There's this thing called provisional ballots. You go in, oh, your name's on the voter rolls. Don't worry. Fill out this piece of paper,

stick it in an envelope, this provisional ballot. I call it placebo ballots because they'll tell you the nice little lady behind it is going to say, hey, your ballot will be counted. Just fill out this form. Oh, yeah? Well, in states like Georgia, if you don't go into your county voting office, your clerk's office, and what they call cure your ballot, you have to show them your ID, you have to prove you're an American citizen, they're going to throw your ballot in the garbage. According again to the US government, the United States Elections Assistance Commission, this isn't just Greg Palast saying it, Roland, the US government says that 43 percent of all provisional ballots are thrown in the garbage. Whose ballots are they? If you're black, Hispanic or Asian-American, the chance you

will have your you will be shunted to one of these placebo BS back of the bus provisional ballots is 300 percent higher if you're a voter of color than if you're white. So whose provisional ballots are in that dumpster? Voters of color, you know. And how does this happen? The Brennan Center, if you go to Greg Palace dot com and actually see these, you can you can see this map that I got from the Brennan Center. 30 states. 30 states passed laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote in the 2024 election. That was Trump's victory map. Altogether about, because not everyone purged would have voted for Harris.

Not everyone purged would have voted for Harris. Not everyone purged would have voted. But still, you've got about 2.3 percent, 3,565,000 voters who would have voted for Harris were denied their ballot or denied the right to vote in the first place. And that's just the beginning of the ugliness. Greg, you called it Jim Crow trickery. What people have to understand, this idea in terms of how they change these laws. First of all, the person was a white man in Ohio who sued and went to the Supreme Court because Ohio purged, saying that, well, he had not voted in two or three elections. And he sued and he lost. Supreme Court cleared the way for purging. But then what we've seen is we've seen the legal purging where, oh, I'm so, oh, we didn't realize X amount of people were on the list. It happened in Virginia. It's happened in Florida. It's happened. And there's no coincidence that it keeps happening to African-Americans.

And it's all about creating massive hurdles. As you said, how you got to sound the outside and the inside. It's like all these different rules. And it happens in Pennsylvania and other places. And it's all designed to be able to confuse people. And if you don't follow every single step, then you're in violation. And you don't even know whether you followed the steps. For example, you fill out a provisional ballot and no one says, it says, oh, put in, like, for example,

in Ohio, it says, put in an ID number. Well, if you say, or driver's license number. And if you say no driver's license, they'll disqualify your ballot. They will disqualify your ballot. I didn't know that voting had to do with whether you had a driver's license or not. I thought it had to do with whether you're an American citizen. And by the way, when the Supreme Court said,

if you haven't voted a couple of elections, they can remove you. Supposedly on grounds you've moved away, that's why you haven't voted. Well, it says right in the 1993 voter registration act, uh, the national voter registration act, it says right there, you cannot be removed because you've chosen not to skip a couple elections for whatever reasons, by the way, I've skipped a couple of elections because I'm a journalist and I've had to go out on election day when I didn't expect to, you know, and but, you know, basically out of the white areas,

you know, I didn't get purged. I'm not going to get purged. What happens is, is that you get purged if you're in Columbus, if you're in Dayton, if you're in Atlanta. And again, 4.776 million voters purged. And when I went through that list, overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly wrong. Overwhelmingly wrong. And let me, you know, by the way, if you want to see what happens, I'm giving you numbers because I'm a statistician, but I want to tell you about human beings, Roland. If you watch my film Vigilantes, Inc., which, by the way, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio have made this film available to stream for free. If you go to gregpalast.com, and you will see me in an Atlanta voting station, at an Atlanta voting station, and I'll tell you about the man you're seeing right there, General Gamaliel, Major General Gamaliel Turner. Now, Gamaliel Turner,

this man who is the, who is, was 70 years old, the Pentagon's expert on warfare of the future. And if you can see on your screen, he is definitely African-American. He was assigned, he was assigned by the president of the United States to go from Fort Benning, Georgia, to a base in California. And he didn't get his vote. His mail-in ballot didn't come. And he calls up Georgia. He says, what happened? They said, well, Major Turner, you've been challenged. He says, what does that mean? He says, someone challenged your vote. And so you can't get your ballot. He says, well, what do I do? He says, well, just come on in and show your citizen that you live in Georgia. And he says, wait, I'm a soldier. I'm 2,700 miles away. And two days before the election, you want me to come,

just come in? Now you have to understand, one person challenged 4,000 people out of the Fort Benning area, almost all of them African-American soldiers. This was not a government official. This was a Republican Party official, the chairman of the Republican Party in southern Georgia. His name's Alton Russell. He even dresses like a vigilante. You'll see him in the film with a six gun. He thinks he's Doc Holliday. This guy challenged 4,000 voters. Now, I got to tell you, Major Turner actually flew to Georgia. He flew 5,000 miles to go to federal court to get his

ballot. One ballot counted. 4,000 others, again, mostly black soldiers out of Fort Benning, did not get their ballots. And you saw on the screen, you had one woman that I confront in the film. She works for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a white Republican. And I'm telling you, there were 88 challengers two years ago in Georgia, or four years ago. And all of them are white Republicans. They're not government officials. I'm not being racist about it. That's what they were. One single woman challenged 32,000 voters, and I showed her the pictures of her black neighbors. I said, do you know who these people are? No. You don't know who these people are, but you challenge their

right to vote. So they were challenging soldiers. They're challenging students. They're challenging just all their black neighbors by the thousands. And in fact, are you ready for this? By August, three months before the election, the Trump front group drew the vote, proudly announced that it had already challenged 317,886 voters. That's a third of a million voters in swing states rolling. A third of a million voters, overwhelmingly voters of color. And this is something that hasn't been done since 1946. This is the Ku Klux Klan plan of 1946, these mass challenges of black voters.

This is brand new to 2024. This is one of the reasons why, like in North Carolina, they want to strip the governor of being able to control the state elections board. This is why they're doing this. So the question is, and I got about 90 seconds before I go to the panel for them to ask questions. What is now happening in advance? Because now, of course, they control the Department of Justice. You're not going to see any voting rights investigations. You're not going to see any of this. They are going to be in charge of the levers of power. So what now? What happens next? How must people prepare themselves for what we are about to see? Because now they want to, now they're going to have the power to do this on steroids. Well, tomorrow I'm going to be having breakfast with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, or Wednesday,

and planning what our line of attack will be to protect these votes. I'm working with Gerald Griggs, president of the NAACP of Georgia, LaToya. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

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there. But the groups are organizing to stop this new Ku Klux Klan plan. You have to understand that in 1946, the Ku Klux Klan elected one of the Klan leaders, Eugene Talmadge, as governor of Georgia, by systematically challenging virtually every black voter in Georgia. Now, these Jim Crow laws are in the books of about 30 states still allow, I can say, dig this, Roland, I can say, oh, Roland Martin doesn't live where he says he is, he shouldn't be allowed to vote. Now, who's Greg Palast to say that? Doesn't matter. As long as you live in my county, I can challenge your right to vote and you're not going to get a ballot or worse, you'll mail in your ballot. You won't even know that your ballot wasn't counted.

Right. So here's the question. Let me do this here. I want to bring in my panel right now. Okay. I want them to get their questions in so we can—so people can really understand. Because the depth of this—and, again, we talk about it a lot that people don't fully, fully, fully grasp is how significant this is on many levels. At the Amakongo Dabenga Senior's Professorial Lecture, School of International Service, American University, author of Lives About Black People, How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why it Matters. Dr. Julianne Malbeau, she's an economist, author of Surviving and Thriving, 365 Facts in Black Economic History. She's also president emerita at Bennett College. Joining us from D.C., Joe Richardson. He is civil rights attorney out of Los Angeles.

Joe, I'll start with you. Your question for Greg Palast. Mr. Palast, appreciate you being here. Roland kind of took what I was going to ask next, but let me let me ask this. You've been doing what you've been doing for a long time. What's the next investigative frontier for you? Because I think one of the things that has to happen is that journalists that are actually looking for information that are not in the box, as it were, like the Roland Martins and the Greg Palast and things like that are going to have to help to uncover a lot of these

truths just through research. I love it that you're a statistician. What is it that you're going to be—you know, I know you're going to do some things related to this issue, but is there any other issues out there that connect to some of these things, some of these justice issues that you're looking at next? Well, I am very, very concerned about this, and I want to dig deeper into this, in the challenge, this mass challenge of voters by self-appointed vigilantes. Again, this is the Ku Klux Klan plan of 1946 and this Trump front group called True the Vote. They're the ones, by the way, that came up with this, with the film 2000 Mules, where they called 2000 black men. Every one of them was a black man. 2000 black men were supposedly stuffing

ballot drop boxes with multiple ballots. They were being paid supposedly by George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, $10 each to commit a felony crime. I got to tell you, every person that they showed on camera as black men stuffing ballot boxes, because every ballot box has a camera on top of it so they can see what voters. Every one of them was a legal voter, and they've been sued to a fair d'oeil, but they don't care. They don't care. They were proudly knocked off a third of a million voters by August. Their aim was two million voters by Election Day. What I have to do is I've been getting stonewalled by state officials who have not been giving me the

numbers. How many people in the end were challenged? How many people actually did lose their vote? I need those numbers. It looks like the numbers are huge, but I want to get a more exact analysis from each state. But they're stonewalling us, and we're not going to get the numbers from the Elections Assistance Commission until maybe even for another year, if at all, because the states are resisting and they're not required by law to turn over the data.

We're the only state, we're the only nation among so-called democracies where the vote count and the vote non-count is some type of state secret. We need to know how many ballots were rejected, how many voters like Major Turner lost their vote. When I was in it. And so I want to find out. I need to get those numbers because this is a brand new thing. This vigilante vote challenges of, again, not government officials, but self-appointed vigilantes who are getting lists. We had this one woman in Cobb County, Georgia, works for Marjorie Taylor Greene. She submitted 32,000 names in Cobb County, 32,000 names, one GOP official. And, you know, again, it's not just, and I want to tell you, it's very important. It's not just numbers. I was at the polling station when a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta was thrown out of the polling station where she'd voted for

50 years, 92 years old, and a walker thrown out into a storm. Her granddaughter in hysterics. Well, I went to the house that she said she no longer lived in. It was just down the street from the polling station. And there was a picture of her having dinner with Martin Luther King from 50 years earlier in that house. This was Martin Luther King's 92-year-old cousin. So if they can knock off Martin Luther King's 92-year-old cousin, they can knock off anyone, and they are. This is what I really want to look at, is this explosion of vigilante vote challenges.

And under Trump, if you think the Justice Department is going to stop it, think again. We have to stop it ourselves. Julianne Malveaux, your question. Julianne. How are you, Greg? Last time I saw you, we were at Reverend Jackson. I really appreciate your work always. You just do such great, great work.

Thank you. I really appreciate your work always. You just do such great, great work. So you looked at the presidential election and said Kamala would have won had that been for the suppression. Were there states where we also lost congressional seats? We lost Senate seats. We didn't have any close Senate races. But congressional seats, were there other races that should lift up that might have made a difference in this environment? Oh, absolutely. I was looking at close congressional races. I still haven't finished the numbers.

You know, one of the reasons it took me a couple of months, it's a lot of numbers to crunch, and I don't want to just throw stuff out there. But it looks like the Democrats would have picked up at least three or four congressional seats, if not for these vote suppression tactics. Because again, when you knock off Major Turner's vote, when you take away a soldier's vote, when you take away Martin Luther King's cousin's vote, that goes all the way down the ballot. And so that's, I have been very concerned that basically the GOP should not have control of the House of Representatives at this moment, except for their successful wielding of vote suppression tactics. But I will be issuing a report on the congressional races soon.

But I will say this here, Greg, that the voter suppression that we saw, it does have an impact. We talk about the Senate race in Pennsylvania, Bob Kasich. Yes. And I want to look at Pennsylvania because Cleta Mitchell, Donald Trump's lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, she challenged tens of thousands of voters in the Philadelphia area through an organization called Eagle AI, which is, by the way, which is a very interesting name because Eagle Eye was the name of a racist group back in 1964 that challenged a whole bunch of Hispanic voters in Arizona. They brought back this racist operation from 64. They brought back the Klan operation from 46.

It's shameless. And it's getting very little coverage in the mainstream U.S. press. Now, people should understand, I write for The Guardian and BBC, which are the world's major outlets in the English language, but it doesn't come into my home country. So I'm all over, I'm mainstream in the rest of the world, just not in America. Well, Makongo, what's your question? Thank you so much, Mr. Pallas, for this work. I want to touch on—and you also mentioned Cleta Mitchell, who wanted to target youth votes. So, I wanted to come back to your part on the youth vote.

As a professor, I see so many kids who are disenfranchised and the like, but they don't have this level of information. They're not getting it on the K-12 level. What is your charge? What is your opinion about what we should be doing with the young people as it relates to making sure they're aware of this as they're coming into the voting age and process? You're doing it. Education, education, education. The first thing I tell people, and really important for students, check your registration 90 days before an election. See if you've been

challenged. See if you've been purged. In most states, within nine days of election, you can re-register. In fact, if you haven't voted in a couple elections, just re-register. Even if you think, oh, I've been voting the same place for years. No, no, no, no, no. Check your registration. I had a student in Madison, Wisconsin that I put on camera, and you'll see him in my film Vigilantes, Inc., a Vietnamese-American kid, he had moved dorm rooms. He just moved a different part of the building. Well, under

the law, you don't lose your vote if you move within your county. But they do this to students if they've moved at all. They send them a postcard to confirm their address. And if they don't get that postcard, because it looks like junk mail, most people throw it away. I call it the poison postcard system. If you don't see that postcard and return it, you lose your vote. One way to get around that is tell all your students, tell everyone and tell them to tell their families, check your registration 90 days before. The problem with the new challenge system, for example, Georgia changed its law so that these vigilantes can challenge your vote on election day. They don't have to notify you for 30 days. Well, the election's over after 30 days. So you get challenged. In fact, it was only

by accident that Major Turner, this African-American officer, found out that his vote was challenged because he called. He said, where's my ballot? They didn't notify him. They just said, well, you've been challenged. So we have to tell people to check their registrations, check and check again and again. A lot of states now, dozens of states, have same-day registration. So bring every form of photo ID you have and something to show your address, like an electric bill or something. So you start out by protecting your vote. The second thing you do is you get active. If you have students that aren't part of an organization on the front lines, forget partisan stuff. I'm not talking about joining Democratic

or Republican parties. I'm talking about work with Black Voters Matter Fund, work with Reverend Jackson and Rainbow Push, work with the NAACP. There's great organizations out there, like less known to a lot of people as the Transformative Justice Coalition, headed by Barbara Arnwine, a great Hispanic organization on the ground, Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. If you don't get active, the other side is active. And by the ground, Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. If you don't get active, the other side is active. And by the way, they don't go to sleep in off years. Americans go, you know, progressives go to sleep in off years, whereas the vote purgers and the Jim Crow operatives, they're 24-7, 365 days a year, every year. They don't rest. And so we can't either. Greg Palast, I appreciate it. Thank you so very much. Before I let you go,

I have been interviewing some of the candidates running for DNC chair. So if you had to ask Ben Wickler a question, what would it be? So when are you going to take on Jim Crow and stop hiding on this issue? I can tell you right now, Reverend Jackson asked both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to watch my film, to watch Vigilantes Inc., America's New Vote Suppression Hitman, which, again, go to gregpalast.com, stream it for free. He said, watch it and do something about it. And Harris said, well, when I get elected, I'll sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. He said, well, here's the problem, Kamala, as you just found out, if you don't do something before the election, you ain't going to get elected. So that's what we have to do,

educate. And by the way, if you want to show your films in the class, in your classrooms, in your churches, go to gregpals.com and we can hook it all up and you can get that film so people can see for themselves a real story. And it's a movie. It's entertaining. But again, for for, you know, for those running for DNC chair. Hey, man, take on Jim Crow. We got to do it again. All right. Greg Palace, we certainly appreciate it. Thank you so very much. Thanks, folks. Take a real short break. We come back. We'll chat with Ben Wickler, who is running to become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. That's next on Roller Mark Unfiltered on the Blackstar Network.

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I'm Russell L. Honore, Lieutenant General of the United States Army, retired, and you're watching Roland Martin on Filth. February 1st, Democrat delegates will meet at their winter meeting to select their new chair. Jamie Harrison announced that he was going to be not seeking for reelection.

And so a number of people are vying for that post. There are a total of eight candidates. We've had two of them on the show. Now we're about to have our third. Ben Wickler is from Wisconsin. And he says that he believes he has a strategy to help Democrats win. Being glad to have you on the show. First and foremost, you heard Greg Palast there talk about voter suppression, its impact. He says some 3.5 million votes across the country were suppressed that could have paved the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to actually win. What is your strategy to combat what he called Jim Crow trickery by the Republicans? You have to fight back on this, and you cannot just wait until the

final stretch of an election. As Greg said, people who want to suppress votes and they target Black voters in Wisconsin and across the country, they do this year-round. They do this in state legislative sessions. They do this through judicial elections. It's systematic. It's per into office. And what did they do? They ran on this and that economic issue. What they actually did is immediately smash unions, which they know have been the backbone of building up the multiracial working class in our state and across the country. They targeted black voters and young voters with voter suppression. There's actually an account from a whistleblower who was a Republican legislative staffer who was in the room when Republican lawmakers were briefed on the impact on black and young voters—and obviously there's a lot of overlap—of the law that they proposed.

And he said that they were giddy with excitement about the impact it would have. It went to court. Republicans won with right-wing judges. The law went into effect in 2015. And immediately you saw black turnout and college student turnout plummet in the state of Wisconsin before 2018. It's a core part of their strategy. They smashed unions, they suppressed votes, and they gerrymandered maps. And I've been the chair in Wisconsin for five years. We have a year-round voter protection operation. We operate all over

the state, both in fighting in court, in working to make sure we're protecting votes at the polling place with voter protection hotlines, and going to city council meetings and organizing to make sure that there are polling places where there need to be, that Republicans can't take away voting rights over and over, and in fighting in judicial races, where a lot of this stuff plays out, to make sure that when Republicans come for people's votes, that we're actually fighting back. And we've been able to make huge strides in unrigging our state. We've ended the gerrymander. We've restored some voting rights through state Supreme Court decisions. But this fight is still going, and it is going intensively under the radar. And we need a nationwide strategy,

state by state, to fight back against it if we're going to have a shot in 2025, 6, 7, 8, 30 and beyond. But it also is important for where Democrats control both legislatures or in the governor's mansion to be much more aggressive at changing the laws in those states when they have the power. And that's what, listen, Republicans do that. I mean, Democrats have controlled New York state government for some time, and New York state has literally had some of the most awful voting laws in the country. This is it. Republicans, when they get power, the first thing they do is they change the rules to ensure that the people who don't have power will never get power.

And for Democrats, you know, there's one part is the kind of campaigns you run, the organizing you do, your voter protection work. But the other piece is around governance, that we need to get serious about unrigging a system that is rigged against working people across race and ethnicity and geography. And so often what happens, Republicans ratchet things down. They target black voters with suppression. And then when Democrats come in, it's not the top priority. So that needs to change the commitments we make when Democrats are running for office. They need to turn into

immediate action as a top priority to make sure we don't spiral down into a situation where millions of people can't exercise their franchise. And, you know, in Wisconsin right now, we have a state Supreme Court race on April 1st. So in our state party right now, we have 81 staff members. We are knocking on doors all over the state in freezing weather this coming weekend because we know that these races that often get no attention ultimately determine the rights that people exercise when it comes time for a presidential race. And the fight is so in our face in Wisconsin. The elections here are so close that we know to a certainty that if we're able to change these laws and actually restore the rights that everyone's supposed to have, that Vice President Harris would have won our state. Mandela Barnes would have won the Senate race in 2022. We know Republicans are doing this because they think that they've seen that they can win elections by doing it. But I think across the country, we need to sound the alarm, because these things that

are happening state by state right now, they're coming at us at a federal level. Republicans are planning massive assaults on voting rights through the U.S. Supreme Court, through Congress, through the Trump administration. It's all in Project 2025. The fight is here. And if we're serious about democracy, we need to take this seriously, as seriously as the Republicans do. One of the things that white Democrats are going to have to own up to is that this is a party that is largely run by white consultants, white strategists. They control the money. They treat

black staffers, black consultants, black pollsters, black campaign workers, and black voters as sharecroppers. The reality is that things have completely changed in that you cannot anticipate that black people are going to vote Democrat 90 percent. The further you get away from the civil rights movement, younger voters do not self-identify as Democrats. I say it consistently to the Biden-Harris campaign and the Harris-Walls campaign, that you're going to have to spend three to four times as much time and money talking to black people. You can't come to them two or three months out.

It has to be a much longer period because the voters are changing. Yet the exact same white Democratic consultants don't listen. In the case of Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign, General Malley Dillon wouldn't listen. David Plouffe wouldn't listen. Stephanie Cutter wouldn't listen.

And then it was even difficult, Quentin Foulkes, who's African-American, a lot of times wouldn't listen because he was taking marching orders from them. And so you have black folks in the party and outside who are frustrated, who are angry. And they're saying, well, all we see are white consultants becoming millionaires, having second homes and black folks having to run campaigns with small amounts of money. What are you going to do to change that? So day one, we need to actually audit every single consulting contract that the Democratic National Committee has. I'm coming in with zero commitments to any consultants, to any vendor. We should start from ground zero and build out how we spend our money in a way that reflects

our coalition, our values, the actual path to victory. And that's going to mean a ton more diversity and specifically Black vendors and pollsters and communities. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibbillion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1,

Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Communications professionals, I know in this last election, folks like Terrence Woodbury with Hit Strategies and Cornel Belcher did extraordinary research that helped inform a ton of the work that happened in Wisconsin and across the country. But so many of the organizations and the people who are best at this, a rising Black consultant kind of cohort of folks who have deep expertise in the communities that often feel like Democrats only show up at the last second. They didn't get funding until the very final stretch. And even that took moving mountains. I mean, you had some firms that were created in 2023 that let 100 million, 200 million in ad contracts were funneled through them. And it was like,

what the hell contract record is that? And it seems like it is a constant insider game. And I know black firms, black ad agencies, Fuse out of St. Louis, Liquid Soul out of Atlanta, Carol H. Williams out of Oakland,

reputable firms could not even get through the door and they were being shut out completely. And then as a result, black owned media was forced to starve big as a result of how they were being mistreated by those white ad agencies. So I will tell you in Wisconsin, which is I've been chair here for the last five and a half years, our state party makes investments in the spring, not just in the fall, in Black-owned media in Wisconsin. We are on Black radio. We work with Black newspapers. We work with candidates to make sure they're showing up on podcasts, on streaming platforms with

different folks. We work with cultural influencers, Black cultural influencers in Milwaukee and across our state, because we know that the places where people actually spend their time and attention, it is not just traditional corporate-owned media. It is a whole emerging cohort of different places. And we work hand-in-glove with black-led organizations on the ground that do organizing and communication and make sure that all the different political actors in our state are paying attention to the focus groups, to polling, to stuff we're actually hearing from black voters directly. And that work is best led by people who understand the communities that they're researching. So we have built an engagement strategy that is year-round, that is actually showing up. And we can see in the numbers the

impact that that's had. And this, I'm not saying this is just our state party. This is a unified effort across the union movement, grassroots organizations and the media and communicators, communication work in our state. Milwaukee, which is where 70 percent of black Wisconsinites live, it had the highest turnout of any city of the biggest 50 cities in the country. It was 89 percent. We added votes for Harris relative to Biden. And we did that by doing long term, serious engagement and investment. And, to me, that's the model. Like, it just doesn't work to have this be

the kind of afterthought at the last second or something that requires a battle to do up front. We should actually build the plan together from the start. And it should be part and parcel of our theory about how we win elections at every level of the ballot. It's not rocket science to do this, but for some reason, it's taken a long time for our national party to realize that what has been happening has not been working. And I think we can see that in this election result. We can see that in how things worked out differently in Wisconsin, frankly, where we added votes. And I want to bring this nationwide. I think it's an urgent matter of necessity for us to do this.

You cannot take black voters for granted and expect them to always show up and always vote with our party. And this is, you know, I want to say black women did vote in every, the exit polling, it's like 92% for Kamala Harris. This is an extraordinary level of commitment and engagement. And black men did vote like 78, 80% for Kamala Harris. So this is not to say that this election result was the fault of black voters who came through for the Democratic Party more than any other community in the nation. But it's to say that the Democratic Party needs to show up to engage these voters, to make sure that they are hearing from folks who understand the challenges that they face, the issues they face in their lives, the aspirations that they have, and are communicating in language and with visual communication that actually resonates culturally, if we do this right, we have a chance to build power together that allows us to win elections and then make a difference in people's lives, which ultimately is the basis for building the trust that builds a political coalition. It's how we actually deliver. But the first step has to be that we

invest earlier and in a different way with a more black-led set of folks on the front lines of figuring out what messages are going to work and then building the communication that actually does it. How do you also go be – look, the DNC chairs over the Democratic National Committee. And when I look at this, I look at the entire apparatus. I look at the DNC. I look at the DCCC. I look at the DNC. I look at the DCCC. I look at the DSCC. I look at the Democratic Governors Association.

I look at these PAC, House Majority PAC, Senate Majority PAC. I look at during this last election, future forward. And I can tell you right now, just straight up, my personal dealings, it is a whitewash across the board. They don't return emails.

They don't return phone calls. They don't reach out. It is the exact same thing. And so what ends up happening is folks are raising money, doing these things, and it's the same people freezing other folks out. And I've said to the other folks who are running for DNC chair, there should be a massive meeting of leadership and putting it on the table as well. And I can tell you, there are labor unions who are pissed off with all the money they keep giving to the Democratic Party, and they keep saying the exact same people. And I'll tell you right now, I got

no problem saying it. The guy who ran the Senate Majority Pact wouldn't respond to any of my emails, phone calls, nothing, and it wasn't until AFSCME called and said, why are you not calling Roland Martin back? Oh, then he immediately called, but he had to get threatened to do so. And so that's the crap that as African Americans we see, and then it shows up on the field when you don't have outreach, when you don't have investment, when they're not listening to black

people to say, this is how you communicate and target and outreach to black people, as opposed to having some white consultant who's not from Georgia, but then you got somebody who's running communications in Georgia, who don't know any media in Georgia, but then they're telling the black people on the ground, this is what you can and cannot do. I will say we need a new day, and that's going to mean having these conversations and actually having people in the room in these conversations that can speak directly to the crisis that you're talking about. I'm honored in this race to have the endorsement of the four big public sector unions, the NEA led by Becky Pringle, the AFT led by Randy Weingarten, AFSCME led by Lee Saunders, and SEIU led by April Verrett.

And that is three of the four big public sector unions have black leadership at this moment. The union movement, as you know, is a multiracial movement. And the reason why we are working together so closely in this race is because we understand that we actually—to connect with working people across race and ethnicity means actually communicating in ways that make sense in the cultural lives of the people with whom we're trying to communicate. And that means that the people building those communications have to reflect those communities and actually understand who they're talking to and how people talk in real life, not just the way that people talk in polls where everything is crafted and every message

takes 90 seconds. You actually have to go directly to the stuff that people talk about when they're trying to figure out how they're going to put the money together to pay bills and fill prescriptions at the same time. This has to be a movement that actually connects. And the Democratic Party, you're right, it's an ecosystem. It's a ton of different groups. We worked a lot with Collective PAC. And the ED of Collective PAC now is the executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia and did extraordinary work. And Democratic turnout rose in Georgia as well. And it was, I think, nationally, we can learn a lot about how if we'd invested maybe a little bit earlier and had recognized that Georgia was a battleground state a little bit earlier, we could have had an even

better result. But to me, this work has to be year-round with people at the table from the outset, which the union movement has to be at that table, building these plans. I think that the national party should be working with all the entities you mentioned and with unions nationally and in states to build out the long-term strategies up front and figure out, and I think Leader Jeffries has a very different vision for who's going to be driving this work

and making sure that we're actually working with vendors and with pollsters and with communications experts that understand how to interact and communicate to black people, we have a chance to build a party that gets this right in a different way in these next four years. And if we do that, we can demonstrate that there's a better model that is going to be more effective than is possible. And I think we'll be able to raise more money to invest more once you actually show results. And that's the work that we have to do.

Before I go to my panel with questions, my last question for you, and I ask this of all the other two candidates I talked to, Ken Martin and Mark Normale, are you also prepared to have a direct conversation with white working class voters and white voters? Everybody talks about, whenever conversations come up, people are very free to talk about black voters, Latino voters, but they never want to say white voters. And look, I wrote this book here, White Fear,

How the Browning of America is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds. I've been speaking on this since 2009 on CNN and every other platform. I've been seeing this since 2022. Everything that we're seeing right now, I actually wrote about it. And Democrats, when I see these stories, I hear Senator Bernie Sanders like, oh, we've lost the working class. I'm like, no, Bernie, the black working class is still with you. It's the white working class. And Democrats have not been willing to have frank conversations with white working class people that they are choosing culture and they're choosing these culture issues over their economic interest.

This is the only way that we've been able to do as well as we've done in Wisconsin. We don't win everything in Wisconsin, but Wisconsin is a majority white working class state. Most Wisconsin voters are white voters without a college degree who make, you know, working class, middle class salaries. It's a state with pretty low unemployment rates, but it is not a state of—there's right-wing billionaires. We don't have a lot of liberal billionaires in the state of Wisconsin. And we organize everywhere. We communicate everywhere. And we've trained our county party chairs on the race-class narrative, which is a way of communicating where you say, you know why Republicans are appealing to racism? It's because they're trying to divide voters by race in order

to rip off everyone. It's explaining why Republicans use these attacks. And they use them in every election in our state. It is totally standard, from Supreme Court races to state legislative races to Senate races to the presidential race. It is always, it's a racially coded appeal to fear and division in order to divide people by race so that they can, you know, put oligarchs in charge and rip everybody off. And we actually communicate about this and it works. There was a study, an analysis that looked at Wisconsin and Minnesota. And, you know, it's no secret that white working class voters have moved away from Democrats across the board. In Wisconsin, they've shifted 4.9 points from 2018 to 22.

In Minnesota, they shifted 8.9 points. We have a lot more to do if we want to gain ground. But we've slipped much less than our neighboring states, and we do much better. I think in every single county in Wisconsin, Democrats overperperform with white working class voters relative to the national average. There was a big Washington Post study that said that looked county by county and found that Green County in Wisconsin is the county with the largest white working class population that Biden won. It's 71 percent white working class voters. Right. Where Biden won in 2020. And we actually got more votes. We got more votes in most rural counties in Wisconsin in 2024

than we did in 2020. So you're exactly right. Democrats cannot just ignore this. And if they do, they're going to keep losing elections. And I agree with you that so much of the punditry is like, oh, Democrats lost because black voters didn't show up or Latino voters didn't show up. And most of the voters in this country are white voters, if you're not communicating and organizing with them. But it doesn't work if you pretend that the racist attacks aren't happening. That is the central Republican strategy. So you actually have to meet it head on and explain why they're doing it in a way that

allows you to bring the conversation back to the fact that, no matter what the color of your skin is, everyone needs a roof over their head and they need food on the table. And Republicans want people to think about something else because actually, economic solidarity has always been the bedrock of building a multiracial democracy. I got to get three questions in in two minutes. I'm a Congo. I know because being as a hard out at seven, I'm a Congo. Go with your question. My question is about the youth divide in the Republican Party. They all gathered around Trump, 78 years old. They fell in line.

What is your strategy for addressing the challenges that exist between the elder members of the party and the younger members? BENJAMIN WRIGHT, Former President of the Democratic Party of the United States, So, part of this is about where we communicate. And that, I think the Republican Party right now is showing up in a lot more alternative media, new media spaces. It's showing up a lot more on long-form podcasts and on vertical video, these places where young people overwhelmingly get their news. This program, my guess is, has a significantly younger average audience

than cable news and certainly younger than newspapers. And as Democrats, we don't do enough to invest in working with creators and working with people that are building alternative media spaces. So one piece of this is where we communicate. And then the second thing is what it is that we're communicating when we're there. And if you look at how the right has especially spoken to young people and to young men, it's so much about their aspirations and what they want to do. It's people that are trying to figure out how to get ahead, how to build wealth. It's people who are hustling and grinding and trying to figure out how to make it work. And as Democrats, we're often talking about people like they're under attack and they are.

That's real. But we also have to speak to what they want to do with their lives and be a party that is felt to be a partner in trying to build the lives that everyone wants to lead. So it is both where and what we communicate. And to get those things right, we need, as a party, to be working both with candidates and with consultants and pollsters and vendors that understand how to do this because they've lived it, and this is the media environment in which they live their lives as well. So it's every step in the chain. But to me, the endpoint has to be Republicans can't dominate the discussion about what Democrats are about. We need to tell our own story and show up in ways that demonstrate we actually get what's happening in people's lives. All right. That was a long answer, Ben. Can you take these other two questions?

Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. Julianne, question. Ben, first of all, thanks for being with me. Julianne, go right to the question. Go right to the question. What differentiates you from Martin O'Malley or from Ken Martin, but especially O'Malley, who is the one who has more, seems to have more, lots of support. You seem to have the most. He seems to have the next amount. He comes out of Maryland, which, as you know, very multicultural. What differentiates you? So I think the thing that differentiates me is that I come

from a state where the right took over and rigged everything in order to suppress votes, in order to break unions, in order to smash our democracy. And my experience in this moment in our history for these last five years has been fighting back to unrig a system that was rigged to not work for people. And with respect to the other candidates, they're in states where they haven't experienced the full brunt of the entire Republican machine. In order to win in Wisconsin, we've had to grow bigger. We've had to grow deeper, more intensely, more year-round in a deeper partnership with the union movement, with the ecosystem, with grassroots organizations across our state. I think that's the kind of fight we're in now as a country. And that's the kind of chair the DNC needs to have that recognizes the size of the threat that we're up against and with a track record of actually being able to

fight back against it. Joe. Everybody thinks they know why we lost and everybody has, the Democrats lost. Pick an issue that's a red herring and remind us that, you know, whichever one you pick and say, no, this is not what this is about. What are one of those red herring issues that are out there that people think the election was about, but it actually wasn't? So I think people think that this election was about trans issues. And when they say that, and they say that Democrats screwed up about this because they're constantly talking about pronouns, what they're actually describing is Republican ad campaigns that were saying Democrats care about they, them, not about you. The actual Republican message was Democrats don't care about you. They care about something else, someone else. It's the same con that they

always run. Sometimes it's targeting immigrants. It's usually targeting black people. Sometimes it's targeting gay people or trans people or black people. Sometimes it's targeting gay people or trans people or non-binary people. But that message takes hold when they're able to say that Democrats don't see you, don't care about your struggle. They have some other priority. And the way that we beat that is by actually showing people that we're fighting for them and we do understand them and we're fighting for them. It's not like Vice President Harris is not running the campaign that Republicans were claiming she was. That was the Republican narrative. Republicans ran on identity politics in this election in order to move the country away from seeing what the

actual impact of the policies of the candidates would be. And we need to disrupt that by explaining what they're doing and then bringing it back to the fact that Republicans are trying to rig this country for a handful of far-right billionaires that want to pull the ladder up and leave everyone else at the bottom. So I think that it is easy to totally misread the results of this election by falling into the trap that Republicans have laid. We don't have to abandon our values and being a big-time party in order to go where Republicans are trying to lead us. What we need to do is bring it back to a fight that Republicans don't want to have, that

they run away from, about who this country should work for. It should work for everyone. Everyone should have opportunity. Everyone should have the opportunity to build wealth and succeed and thrive in their communities. And Republicans want to take that away. And we need to fight them on that front, showing why they're trying to make this about appeals to racism and every kind of bigotry and prejudice in order to distract people from that fundamental fight. There's a reason why it was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It's because those two fights are inextricably interlinked. And when we build across all these different fights, we can build a movement that can change

this country. All right. Ben Wickliffe, we appreciate you joining us. Thank you so very much. Thanks so much for having me on. All right, folks, got to go to break. We come back. Let's talk economic boycotts. People are talking about bulkheading Target and other companies that are pulling back on their DEI initiatives. But it's a whole lot that we need to understand about this so we don't make mistakes. I'm going to unpack this in a masterclass over the next hour. Trust me,

it's a conversation you do not want to miss. Support the work that we do, folks. Join our Bring the Funk fan club. The goal is to get 20,000 of our fans contributing on average 50 bucks each a year. That comes out to $4.19 a month, 13 cents a day. And so if you want to contribute via Cash App, use the Stripe QR code, Cash App, close all of our accounts. And so this is how you're able to access us. You can also, if you're listening, go to BlackstarNetwork.com and you can actually see the QR code as well. PayPal is RMartinUnfiltered. Venmo is RMUnfiltered. Zale, Roland at RolandSMartin.com, Roland at RolandMartinUnfiltered. Roland at Roland Martin Unfiltered dot com. Send your check and money over to P.O. Box 57196, Washington, D.C.

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Women of color are starting 90% of the businesses in this country. That's the good news. The bad news? As a rule, we're not making nearly as much as everyone else. But joining us on the next Get Wealthy episode is Betty Hines. She's a business strategist, and she's showing women how to elevate other women. I don't like to say this openly, but we're getting better at it.

Women struggle with collaborating with each other. And for that reason, one of the things that I demonstrate in the sessions that I have is that you can go further together if you collaborate. That's right here on Get Wealthy, only on Blackstar Network. Coming soon to the Blackstar Network. Well, y'all, when you're on that stage and you're seeing two and three,

four generations in the audience, that's got to speak to you about the power of what y'all have become? Oh, most definitely. I think we were doing our show before our break. And remember, I was watching this kid. I could not take my eyes off him because he was about nine or so. He's sitting in the front row with his parents. Over on the right-hand side. yes, yes, yes, yes. I was amazed that this kid knew everything. And I was like tripping to see how many songs this kid actually knew.

And he knew them all. And he knew them all. We had to go over there and bring him on stage and take a picture with him at the end of the show and stuff, because it was just that amazing. It was like, this is crazy. You know, the music travels everywhere. You know, like what Phillip was saying,

seeing this young kid, then you see, hear our songs on commercials, cold commercials. Then you have the younger ones that seen or hear our music in animation. on a next a balanced life we talk about how to get in touch with your feelings emotions how to find your north star and how to move your life along. Because oftentimes what we'll do is we'll accept what the world says about us as the truth and how we see ourselves, which that can be completely contrary to what the Word of God says about who you are. That's on the next A Balanced Life here on Black Star Network.

How you doing? My name is Mark Curry, and you're watching Roland Martin. Unfiltered, deep into it, like pasteurized milk without the 2%. We getting deep. You want to turn that shit off? We're doing an interview, motherfucker. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts all right folks it has been quite a busy weekend and this weekend I spent a lot of time It has been quite a busy weekend. And this weekend, I spent a lot of time taking phone calls and on conference calls and text messages and looking at social media. And a lot of folks have been talking about Target, the latest company to announce

that they are ending their various DEI initiatives. They join the likes of Walmart, McDonald's, Lowe's, which actually has a black CEO, Toyota, as I said, McDonald's and other companies that have made these decisions. But you've had companies that have stood with their DEI initiatives. And in the face of these conservatives like Robbie Starbuck trying to push them to get rid of them. JP Morgan Chase, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, American Airlines,

Costco, Apple. So these are the various companies. Amazon has also said they will be pulling back some of their various initiatives. Now, while all of this is happening, while all of this is happening, African Americans have been responding by saying, what the hell? What's going on? Then, of course, on the federal level, you've got Donald Trump, who is ordering various, all the federal agencies to get rid of DEI.

And so they have made this the linchpin of their week one strategy. And you've seen this happen. You had folks, the Air Force, who decided to pull the teaching of the Tuskegee Airmen and so the conservatives in their effort to say, oh, no, that's not what we meant, so they said, oh, no, let's bring that back as we're going to give you some credit for that. So as a result, this organization called Strike for All, they announced that a boycott of Target beginning February 1st. And so you've seen the social media posts.

They have been loading, talking about boycott Target. And as a result, people have been saying that's right. That's the move. That's the way to go, that's what we need to do. This here, when it comes up, this is, you know, one of the posts on social media that they posted. And it says, only by minority owned. And so, only by minority owned. And so, what I have been saying is, well, actually, I posted on their Instagram page, I'm curious, you say only by minority-owned. And so what I have been saying is, well, actually, I posted on their Instagram page, I'm curious, you say only by minority-owned,

but I want to know, are those other minority owners standing with black people when it comes to battling these companies? The people who benefit the most from DEI policies are white women. White women have 70-plus percent of the actual DEI corporate jobs, and white people do. And white women, when it comes to minority contracts on the city, county, state, federal level, they get more contracts than anybody else.

So if we're talking about, okay, fighting for minorities and women, I need to know where's the National Organization of Women. I need to know where's the Women's Chamber of Commerce. I need to know where are all these women's organizations that largely serve white women. I need to know where are the Hispanic-Latino organizations.

I need to know where are the Asian-American organizations. Because what I'm tired of, I'm tired of black people, the ones who are the loudest fighting for initiatives, and other folks are the greatest beneficiaries. I want to know where are the Indian Americans, where are the Pakistanis? Everybody who has been a beneficiary of MWBE programs who is non-black, where you at? Where you at? And so that's critically important for us to say because again, we are the ones who are constantly,

are constantly having to shoulder the burden, having to do all of the heavy lifting, which I understand because on a federal level last year, Ron Busby, the CEO, President and CEO of the U.S. Black Chamber, Inc. He was on last week, and he said on this show that African Americans last year got the highest amount of federal contracts

we've ever had, $10 billion a year, but it barely hit 2%. It wasn't even 2%. Yet 78% of all MWBE federal contracts white women get. So where y'all at? So you have this call to boycott Target. And what happened over the weekend was that different companies, different black-owned companies

with products in Target was completely blindsided by Target's announcement. Target wasn't even smart enough to notify these black vendors first. And what ended up happening was, show the list. Here's some of the black brands right here. What ended up happening was these brands got hit with all sorts of questions from the public, and they were like, yo, what the hell?

They were blindsided by Target's decision. In fact, Target has made no effort to reach out to black-owned media and others to explain how they're going to continue their programs, what are they going to do to continue to invest in black-owned brands, to put their products on the shelves. And if you actually go to Target's website,

you'll actually see their black, you see they got their Experience Black History Month page up. And then if you go down here, their Buy Black button, and then you see down here Shop All Black-Owned or Founded Brands. And when you click that, you buy black button, and then you see down here shop all black-owned or founded brands, and when you click that, you will see there for the results are 1,073. And so if you scroll, you're going to see all of these products, all of these products from black-owned firms or black-founded firms, and the list goes on and on and on and on and on. And so

people started hitting up these owners and criticizing them and questioning them. And you had the sister who is the founder of the Lip Bar. You had Tabitha Brown who has products that are in Target stores and Amazon and Walmart as well, taking to social media, sharing their thoughts about this. Because there were people who were going to their pages saying, why aren't y'all pulling y'all products?

What are y'all doing? Here was a response that Tabitha gave on social media. She made a couple of posts, but here's what she said. I am in business in multiple ways. Do you have the lip balm? With Target, with Walmart, and Amazon, right? I sell Donna's Recipe, my hair care products, right, are on Amazon.

They're also in Target. And of course, I have a huge partnership with Target. I sell my seasonings at Walmart. I do business all over, just like many other people. And what I can tell you is if we all decide to boycott and be like, no, we're not spending no money at these organizations. Listen, I get it. And if that's how you feel, honey, I 1000% get it. But so many of us will be affected and our sales will drop. Our business will be hurt. And if any of you know business, it doesn't just happen overnight where you can just go take all your stuff and pull it off the shelves. There's a process. And then you got to like,

where are you going to put it? You got to have a place to store it. That's money, right? You got to have another place to sell it, which is money, right? You got to have another place to sell it, which is almost impossible sometimes. And even if you sell online, it's a process when it comes to business. And everyone does not have the funds or the means or the availability, the space to house their own products, right? But the thing that concerns me the most, and I want you to hear me and hear me well, if we all decide to stop supporting said businesses and say, you know, I can't buy nothing from there, even the businesses who were affected by the DEI ban, right? What that does is you take all our sales and they dwindle down.

And then those companies get to say, oh, your products are not performing. And they can remove them from the shelves and then put their preferred businesses on the shelves. And then what happens to all the businesses who've worked so hard to get where they are? Then what happens, right? Now, I know that something that could solve it is ownership of these big corporations, right? It's a long way to go there. There are amazing companies like the Village Market in Atlanta, right? Who support small businesses

and you can go in there and there's some amazing things that you can buy. But it's one store and it's very small. We're talking about mass market. You can't build that overnight. She said, we're talking about mass market. You can't build that overnight. Tabitha's absolutely, excuse me. Yeah, Tabitha's absolutely correct. And as I said, Melissa with the lip bar, she has posted a number of videos on her Instagram page. And she's posted the latest one, talks about selling out.

So I want to deal with these black firms first. And I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you are on social media and you are calling black-owned companies with products on Target shelves, and you're calling them sellouts and Uncle Toms, and you're questioning why they are not pulling their products, you should shut the hell up. And the reason you should shut the hell up, because you don't know a damn thing about business. Folks, I need y'all to understand something. There are contracts.

If they make various decisions, they could be in breach of contract, which means they get sued. They can incur legal expenses. Well, people also don't understand, especially people who have never been in business, who don't know what an EIN is, who have no idea what I'm talking about. What you don't realize is that when you own a business and you begin to, let's say you begin to place your products, they might start it in 10, 20 stores, but they might come back and say, we're not going to place your products in two, three, four, 500 stores. You now have to now go out and get capital to be able to acquire that inventory that's needed to sell in those stores. So now all of a sudden, here you are a small-owned business, and you might have, oh, let's just

say this book here, or my book, White Fear. I might have a print run of 5,000 copies. But then when Target says, we want to carry you in 500 stores, I now have to print 25,000 or 50,000 copies. Well, they're not giving that to me on consignment. I've got to pay that printing company for the 50,000 copies of that book to then to be able to ship to Target. And so then I'm shipping the product from the printing company to Target, and I'm not actually putting it in my own warehouse. So if some folks say, well, you need to take your product off the shelves, as Tabitha said, where in the hell am I all of a sudden going to place 50,000 copies of a book or where am I going to

pay for place pots and pans and seasoning or hair care products that's the thing I like a lot of us need to shut up and not realize you know nothing about business so stop making a demand of somebody when you do not understand their business circumstances because there are people who literally have put their life savings into their companies and they are now having to navigate this whole deal and they are, some folks may have taken out second mortgages and so you're talking about literal bankruptcy, losing it all if they make a rash decision. So that's important for us to state because I've just heard too much ridiculous

stuff about what a black business owner should do with their products if folk are talking about an economic boycott. So let me now move on to the next thing. Anybody who has watched this show, you have heard me often refer to Dr. King's sermon, April 3rd, 1968 at Mason Temple in Memphis.

You've heard me talk about economic withdrawal. that sermon how we are collectively or individually poor but collectively wealthy and how we need to be operating as a collective when it comes to trying to change the economics of our situation. You've heard me quote him in that sermon when he says we don't have to throw one Molotov cocktail. We don't have to yell and curse anybody out. He said what we must do is practice economic withdrawal. Companies that don't do business with us and don't hire us, we don't do business with them. In the exact same speech he also said to black people on that rainy

stormy night in Memphis how we must be supporting black institutions. He mentions buying from black insurance companies. He mentions how SCLC opened a bank account with a black bank there in Memphis. He talked about how we must be doing a bank in, a buy-in for black-owned businesses. He literally says it in a sermon. See, part of the problem is most black folk have allowed white folk to frame for us who Dr. King was and is. And so, therefore, when we talk about his mountaintop speech, all we talk about are the bottom two. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time.

Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. ...minutes of that speech, and not the other 41 minutes and 16 seconds of the speech that's why most folks listening right now have no idea what i'm talking about

because you don't even realize that that's what he actually said in that sermon because at one point he even references Jesse Jackson. He said, Jesse, what do you call it? Economic, he said, redistribute the pain. He said, so far, the black sanitation workers, they're the ones who have been enduring the pain. Now if we do an economic withdrawal, we must now redistribute the pain.

For all y'all who keep acting like that the king wasn't a radical, go listen and read that speech. So when we talk about boycotts, there are a number of things that we have to factor in that too often we don't. One of the things that you heard me say before on this show is that folk immediately yell, boycott! That's their first reaction to something that happened. But there's a problem with that.

You have to actually follow a process. I think I probably sold more copies of this book than the author. Martin Depp, who's still alive, I was texting him last night. White pastor in Chicago. He happened to be on the committee. He was on the committee with Reverend Jackson at Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. He was the pastor of a church, and what they did was he was on the committee. Now, when did was he was on the committee.

Now, when I say he was on the committee, that was a full committee. It was a full committee that dealt with the issues surrounding Breadbasket. They actually met together, and so they laid out the strategies involved in terms of breadbasket. Now let me explain breadbasket. His book is called Operation Breadbasket, an untold story of civil rights in Chicago 1966 to 1971. This is the book cover. I'm going to be out of the light here. So, but y'all see me sure. This is the book cover, okay? I've been talking about this book for more than a decade. Martin Depp writes in the book that there was a six-point strategy that they employed when it came to Operation Breadbasket. Before I show it, let me also help you. Credit must go to Reverend Leon Sullivan, the legendary pastor in Philadelphia who actually created this program. He told Dr. King about the program.

Dr. King invited Reverend Sullivan to come to Atlanta to present to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Board of Directors. He did so. They agreed to adopt the program. They renamed it Operation Breadbasket. He put Reverend Jackson in charge of it in Chicago. Now y'all have the history. So Operation Breadbasket had a six-point strategy. Pull those up. These are the six strategies. Number one was information gathering. Number two was committee evaluation. Number three was negotiation and education.

Number four was economic withdrawal. Number four, y'all. Number five was agreement and covenant. Number six was monitoring. Now let me unpack that. First and foremost, when they saw that was an issue, they went to said company and they sent them a letter and said, we need this information. How many black employees do you have?

What do you do with black-owned businesses? Do you put any money in black banks? There was a list of things that they asked for. And then the company could either respond to the request or the company could ignore the request. And so if the company responded to the request, then the Operation Breadbasket Committee then evaluated what they got back from the company. And then once they did that, they went through what is called negotiation and education. Now, in negotiation, what they would do is they plotted everything. They would go into the meeting and they would sit here and say, okay, your job is to pray.

Your job is to agree with nothing. Your job is to calm him or her down who agrees with, who doesn't agree with everything. And your job is to be the level-headed one everybody had a role to play in the meeting so they were going to the meeting and then the company uh company would either no we ain't doing that or yes let's move forward if the company said yes let's move forward they would skip to five. They would have an agreement with the company, establish a covenant bond, no different than David and Jonathan, a covenant. Remember in the Bible where Jonathan told David,

if anything happens to me, you take care of my family. He told him that three times. They established a covenant, which meant that word is bond. Covenant was more important than even a signed contract. But they would sign an agreement. And then they would monitor that agreement by checking to make sure the company's doing what they were doing. But pull it up, y'all. Pull it up. Here's why number three is so important. The education piece. What they would do is they

would go back to their churches and they would be educating the congregation about the company, about what they wanted, how the negotiations are going, how things are. So they were constantly educating them. They were constantly teaching them. And then if the negotiations broke down and they went to economic withdrawal, they would then launch pickets at strategic stores, not all at one time, and then ramp up from there. And the whole point was to keep folk from going into those stores. Now,

pull it back up. Look at number five. Agreement, covenant. The outset, the committee established what is it that we want from this company. Come on back to me. If you read this particular book, they laid out in this book that they weren't just interested in the company hiring black employees. They wanted senior level black employees. They wanted entry level black employees. But they also wanted

black owned company products on the shelves, shelf space. But I'm not done. They also wanted that store to put money in black-owned banks. I'm not done. They also wanted that company to hire black-owned companies to do jobs. So if that company had trash pickup, or if they had construction or whatever,

they wanted black-owned companies hired. It was a multi-pronged strategy. That's one of the reasons you saw so many black millionaires come out of Chicago, because Breadbasket was forcing the companies in Chicago to do business with black people. Now why am I saying this in relation to the call to boycott Target? Here is what I have not heard from any of the people who are yelling, boycott Target. What's the end game?

What is it that we're asking Target to do? I get boycott, but what do we want? Are we saying, Target, if you do not recommit to spending $2 billion a year with black businesses, y'all, and that's just not people with the shelves. That's actually everywhere. That's catering companies, limousine companies, black-owned advertising, black-owned media advertising. That's the whole deal, doing business with black people. Target had announced they're going to spend by 2025 $2 billion.

They announced in 2021 that they had gotten 1.78 billion. But 1.78 billion ain't 2 billion. That's $220 million before your goal. So what's the end game? What is it that we're asking Target or Wal-Mart or Ford or Toyota or any company, what are we asking of them? You don't launch a boycott until you know what you're asking for. You don't launch a boycott until you've educated your audience on what it is that we're actually doing. So now you have to factor in here. Now you

have to factor in. See, here's the thing, y'all. I think a lot of people right now are rightfully responding with emotion. King said you must channel anger into action. An economic boycott cannot be driven by emotion. It must be driven by strategy. That's what has to happen. And it can't just be we're going to spread the word on social media. There's a whole bunch of people not on social media. So here's the

question. If the boycott is going to start at Target on February 1st, have the organizers, and first of all, the question, who is the organizer? So is the organizer, are all the organizers Nina Turner's group? So I showed y'all that strike for all, that's her group. Or is it somebody else, like who is it? Are we organizing picket lines at various stores? Now we also have to factor in that some target stores have been placed in black communities where there are food deserts. See, I need us to be thinking. There are people who hit me earlier.

They said, hey, there are some target stores that are in rural areas. That's the only place in town. So the question then becomes, how do we properly execute a strategy? Now here's the deal. And I'll pull this up here. Target, just so we understand something, you You got to understand money. Right now, I'm going to pull this up for y'all. This is understanding money. Target's stock price today closed at $142.50.

Target's stock price was up 3.34% today. Come back. There's another figure that is important that you need to understand when you talk about corporations. That's the stock price. But then you have something called what is the market cap. This is Target's market cap, $65.3 billion. So Target's stock price is $142.50 as of today and Target's stock price is 65.3 billion. I'm sorry, it's market cap. So if you're talking about an economic boycott specifically of Target, what is your goal? Micro and macro.

So just so you understand, when we talk about Target, I'm going to give you some numbers to put this thing in perspective because people don't get it. And I was communicating with several people. I was communicating with accountants. People were sending me data. I'm trying to find. And people were emailing me. They were texting me. They were sending me.

And one person ran some numbers, ran some numbers, utilizing AI, utilizing AI. And here's what they said. 2022, Target did $109 billion in revenue. The black spending power was totaled $1.6 trillion. They said, you could approximate that African Americans represent 10% of Target's overall revenue, which is $10.9 billion.

This translates roughly to $29.9 million per day in sales from black consumers, which means if all black people, we know that's not gonna happen, but let's just say if all black people boycotted Target for one day, Target would lose $29.9 million in sales. If the boycott lasts seven days, Target would lose $209 million. If the boycott of Target lasted 30 days, that means the losses for Target could reach $897 million. That's 30 days.

That means that if the boycott starts February 1st, publicly traded companies think in terms of quarterly reports. January, February, March is first quarter. April, May, June, second quarter. July, August, September, third quarter. July, August, September, third quarter. October, November, December is the fourth quarter. So there are two months left in the first quarter. Publicly traded companies announce their earnings report in the second quarter about the first quarter.

So it will be in April or May. So if black folks collectively targeted Target over the next 60 days beginning February 1st, we could cause Target to lose $1.8 billion in sales. That means that that stock price of target, oh, it's going to drop. That market cap, it's going to drop. How many of y'all remember when Snapchat,

when Snapchat changed their design. Y'all remember that? Y'all remember when Snapchat did that? Well, a lot of folk forgot how influencers can change the game. Well, I never forgot that. Go to my iPad. Rihanna went on social media and she ripped the changes made to Snapchat, which caused Snapchat to lose $800 million in its stock price. Rihanna by herself, the singer posted a statement on Instagram, eviscerating the app for making light of domestic violence. Y'all, the value of Snapchat went down by $800 million after Rihanna did that.

So what then happens? If black folks have a sustained boycott of Target that's ramped up, we could potentially cause Target to lose 500 million to almost $2 billion. And let me tell y'all something. If a company does $10 billion a year in revenue And they lose $1.8 billion? Oh, I can guarantee you there will be changes. Ain't no company trying to lose that. Now, here's what's crazy. The reason these companies are ending their DEI strategies is because white conservatives have been threatening them with economic boycotts. Robbie Starbuck, go on social media. He's been throwing, I'm going to expose these companies

for their woke policies, and these companies are freaking out. Target is freaking out because when the evangelicals, when the hard right-wing conservatives, went after them for their LGBTQ displays, guess what that did? That caused Target's stock price to go down. It caused their market cap to go down. So Target is sitting here saying, we're going to cave to these anti-DEI folks because y'all ain't going to do nothing.

Y'all ain't going to do nothing. So now what's happening is now we're left with a situation. There are more than 1,000 products on Target's shelves that are from black-owned or black-founded companies. So do we leave them hanging? There are some people who are suggesting that what we do is we do a buy-in at Target only of black-owned products. That if you go to Target, you only buy black-owned products. Others are suggesting that no, you buy nothing from Target. Those things are happening.

And over the next week, we're going to be unpacking these things. But I wanted to walk people through this because I wanted our audience to understand that we cannot play lightly with this because the fear that I have is what happened when Colin Kaepernick, when they called for don't go to NFL games, stop watching. It was loose, it wasn't organized, and it fizzled because it was not organized. It was not strategic.

Folk made individual actions, but there was no collective action. Also keep in mind, there have been economic boycotts that black people have led since MLK and Operation Breadbasket. Color of Change led an economic boycott where they had advertisers that pulled their ads from Rush Limbaugh's radio show, from Fox News, and from Tucker Carlson's television show. Very effective. I'm wearing this shirt here. Where's our money? The black

folks in Cincinnati, people forget. They had some issues with police brutality there and they led and the city of Cincinnati was not responding appropriately. The black folks launched in Cincinnati, launched an economic boycott saying, do not come to Cincinnati. Remember, NAACP had a boycott of Mississippi and South Carolina because of that Confederate flag rising. Family reunions, NCAA regional championships, professional sports, avoided those states. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to

a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Until they brought the Confederate flag down. Those things were done because of collective action.

And so what I want us to do, I want us to be not emotional. I want us to take our emotions and channel our emotions into strategic. I want us to do this here. Pull the black businesses up. If you say, I'm sorry, Roland, I am going to make the decision that I am not going to go into a Target. Fine, but I need y'all to go to their websites. I need you to buy direct because here's the thing I need to understand. If you buy direct, you're actually increasing their profits because by buying direct, they don't have to share with Target.

I talked to one of the black owners last night. And you know what she told me? She said, Roland, during COVID, a lot of people for three months bought our product. And what happened was as business owners, we saw them buying our product. And so what we then did was we went out and we increased our production of the product. She said, but guess what happened? After three months, they stopped coming to the website. She says, so here we did. We ramped up our product, anticipating more business over the next three, six months,

and then it dropped off like a cliff. Why is that important? Because black folk, we love, we love talking about Montgomery. We love talking about the Montgomery bus boycott. But let me remind y'all the Montgomery bus boycott was supposed to be a one day boycott that went another 381 days. Let me remind you that the Montgomery bus boycott only happened because 50,000 black people decided

that they were not going to get on that damn bus. And it was cold, it was rainy, but they still chose not to do it. And see, y'all got to understand. Oh, it's black conservatives out there see, y'all got to understand. Oh, it's black conservatives out there laughing at y'all right now. Here's this little child, this little black MAGA girl, went to FAMU. Right here, Sharice Lane. Yeah, I'm calling you out. Look at her. Y'all be back at Target by next month. Look at Pastor Darryl Scott.

Another Trump MAGA. Target by next month. Look at Pastor Darryl Scott, another Trump MAGA. You mean next week. I've heard some others say it. Yeah. Yeah. Y'all ain't going to do it. It ain't going to last. This stuff ain't going to work.

It ain't going to last. We heard all that. That will only come true if we do not do what King said, which means operate as a collective. What they have to say will come true if it means that what we do is that we do not have sustained action. What I mean by sustained action is if you wear lipstick, stop buying it from Mac. Stop buying it from Sephora.

Actually, go to thelipbar.com. Black Opal. Is it Black Opal? Desiree? I mean mean buy black opal if you're looking for wine if you say you know what I want water right there drink water mint water honey pot now beaver was black founded but it's now owned by Procter and Gamble Waterman Water, Honeypot.

Now, Beva was black founded, but it's now owned by Procter & Gamble. But figure out the product that you want to use and then say, I'm going to buy just that product. You like some Mambo sauce? Go to shopcapitalcity.com. You want some muffin cakes? Go to littlemuffincakes.com. But what has to happen is we cannot do that once or twice. We have to create a state of mind where we are sustaining the action. The reason economic boycotts have failed

is when the people did not continue doing it. We love to talk about, and I'm being very serious right now, we love talking about, man, we got to buy black. Man, we got to do a black buy-in. Man, we got to buy black. Man, we got to do a black buy-in. Man, we got to support black on media. And I can't tell you how many people who call me for favors always talk about,

oh, man, we got to support black on media. Then I call Kenan and say, check their name to see if they name it on the list of donors. Have they even given a dollar? And the answer is no. So you can't sit out there and talk about, man, look what Target did, and man, we got a boycott. Were you buying any black-owned company's products?

Do you do it on a consistent basis every month, every three months, six months, nine months, a year? This is not a moment to be, all this stuff Trump doing, all this stuff the MAGA's doing, all this stuff they doing. Man, we're going to have to do what we did during Jim Crow. But what you going to do? How are you spending your money? How?

How? See, y'all don't. let me explain something to y'all. I've hired black folks, white folks, Latinos, it don't matter. I've hired folks to do work. But I'm intentional when I'm talking about how to expand the pie. See, I don't need an official DEI program. Because when you do the right thing, you do the right thing. And when you have people who understand how you operate,

that's what you do. I'm just going to tell you how this is. When we started this show, we had a handful of people. And when it came to our audio, we had four technicians, all of them white. And I was like, yo, we got to get some black people. Now, why was I saying that? I wasn't saying that solely for my show. Because I know what happens in Washington, D.C., how when crews are hired, how there are very few African-Americans. And it was like, we got to get some other folk in the pipeline to create opportunities.

Steve, to his credit, when other Steve left, Steve took over, Steve said, I'm training some additional folk, including African Americans. I didn't tell him to do it, but he understood how we do this here, what the need was. It's called creating space, creating opportunities. So now when people are looking for audio technicians, we've created a place for people to learn how to do it, and now they can get opportunities.

Same thing with being videographers. Same thing with being caterers. Same thing with being event planners. Same thing with being lighting company owners. thing with being event planners, same thing with being lighting company owners. I'm going on and on and on. The reason DEI programs even exist is because corporations were not doing the job in the first place. DEI today is nothing before the mama and daddy of DEI is the chief global diversity officer.

The mama and daddy of the chief global diversity officer is the vice president for community affairs. That's what they were called in the 70s and 80s. And then it became chief diversity officer, then global diversity officer, then it morphed into DEI. That's what this thing is all about. And see, I am not interested in DEI programs returning where 75% of the people with DEI jobs are, frankly, white women. What I care about are we going to lose supplier diversity programs, business diversity initiatives

that create economic opportunities for black-owned companies to be able to participate in this multi-trillion dollar economy. So if we're going to be sitting here talking about DEI and we're angry with what Walmart has done and Target and Toyota and Lowe's, what are we wanting to be done? Because there's going to be opportunity.

And here's my last point before I go to my panel. You got to ask yourself this here. How did these companies over here, JPMorgan, Apple, Delta, American Airlines, United, Costco, and a couple of other, how did these companies say we stand in with DEI, but these didn't? I talked to a corporate leader today, a long-time black leader, he said, you know what he said, Roland? It's the lawyers. It's the lawyers in the room.

He said, here's the reality. Quotas have been illegal. See, the robbing Starbucks and these white conservatives? Oh, no, no, no. Goals, that's just another phrase for a quota. No, it's not. Every company, every company sets goals. There's not a company in America that does not set goals. There's not a company in America that does not say the kind of growth they want to see in their company year over year. And you know what they do? They set a percentage. It's the same thing. So we cannot

allow these corporate lawyers to get skittish and scared and cause them to stand up. But it also requires board of directors to show some guts. Pull up Target's board of directors. The reason Target has rolled back their DI it's because of these people right here. These people right here. Brian Cornell, David Abney, Douglas Baker, George Barrett, Gil Boudreau, Robert Edwards. Switch, is that it?

Donald Krauss, Christine Leahy. Monica Lozano. Grace Puma. Derricka Rice. Dimitri Stockton. Is that it? This is a management team. Katie Boylan. Brett Craig. Kiara Fernandez, who I called today. Hard as hell to reach her, couldn't reach her, Michael Fidelke, Rick Gomez, Christina Hennington, is that it? Melissa Kramer, Jim Lee, Gretchen McCarthy, Lisa Rose, Jill Sando,

Mark Shindell, keep going, Cara Sylvester, Amy Tu, Pratt Vemina, Matt Zabel. I just showed you the board of directors and the management team. They are the ones who decided to roll back DEI. They need to answer why. How does it you, Target? How is it you, Walmart? How is it you, Toyota, Ford, Lowe's? How is it that y'all don't have the guts to stand up for inclusion,

but other companies have? What's the difference? And if y'all want to get rid of the DEI program, but you still say we're a committed target to the $2 billion a year to black products, show me how. Folks, what we have to prepare for, and I've been warned, I've been screaming this for years, I've been saying this to civil rights leaders, stop playing around, this thing is coming. I see it in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, that this third reconstruction needs

to last at least 20 years. Do not pull your foot off a folks' neck, but I'm going to tell you all right now, our civil rights organizations, they did because they got too many corporate checks. And they got comfy and they got comfortable. What we need to understand is that MAGA and the right, they want to destroy the entire civil rights infrastructure, and if you destroy the civil rights infrastructure, you destroy the economic infrastructure that black people have been able to build. It is not perfect.

It's not where it needs to be. It's not even close to that, but I would rather have what has been constructed than not to have it. And I'm telling you all right now, if we do not respond with economic withdrawal in a smart, efficient, targeted, strategic manner over the next four years, because you got no cover from the federal government, and that's going to now go to the states

and now go to the counties, to the city and the school boards, you are destined to see an economic hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, ravage black America because they are going to turn off the access to the contracts. And when they don't carry our products, you can't buy them, and those businesses can't grow and can't scale. And if our black-owned businesses can't grow and can't scale, we can't hire more people.

If we can't grow and scale, we can't give our contributions to HBCUs and to churches and to black youth groups and other organizations. And then all of a sudden, if we can't grow and scale, we can't hire people. Those people now can't take care of their families, can't buy homes, can't pay for college tuition. I need everybody watching and listening to me to understand

that what we are facing is literally the economic destruction of Black America. That is not fear-mongering. That is not fear-mongering. That is not me trying to scare you. It is me stating an undeniable fact. And my man John Hope Bryant said the reason he loves math

because he said math doesn't lie. If you begin to freeze us out of the path to economic prosperity through jobs and contracts, there is no place to go. Julian, I want to start with you. You're an economist. Your thoughts on all of this? Wow. Well, you laid it out very well. I think one of the things that you laid out most importantly is the notion of having organized boycotts. You just can't say, you can't pop up and say, let's boycott X and let's boycott Y because it isn't going to work. You've got to have your facts straight. You've got to build basically a campaign in the community. This is why we're doing this, y'all. Not just, you know,

somebody had an idea. All too often, we've seen boycotts fail. We've seen them fail because the work didn't go into the foundational work. So that book that you lifted up, the Montgomery Buzz Boycott, that's a great book. And I would advise people to check it out, mainly because it does do those six points. And you really are talking about not engaging, I'm going to boycott, but really looking at why you're boycotting. The other thing right now that I think is interesting is the notion of companies that merged. And so you have this interlocking thing. You say, I'm going to boycott Coca-Cola, but you go over and drink Dasani water. It's the same thing. So we need to know more about

corporate structures. I'm glad the sister put her stuff out there about her products and her brilliance in having multi-level platforms. But even with those, if we don't get the access that we need, the access that we need for contracts, for employment, for other things, we're going to be in a, basically in a rough spot. And as you said, there are all these people who keep saying they didn't think Trump was going to be that bad. Well, you found out, didn't you? And this is just week one. And nobody is making—I'm glad you showed the board of Target. You saw the two black people and a couple of people of color. But, you know, everybody brown ain't down and all of them are not necessarily affected by withdrawals from DEI. So what we have is a situation where we're living in an era of anti-blackness.

The fact that the Department of Defense would even dare attempt to stomp on the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen. Speaks to the—and then they reverse themselves, of course. But what they're doing is speaking to the rampant disregard for black people in this country. Rampant disregard for black people. And so we have to be prepared. And you have been talking about this for a long time, Roland, as many other people have. John O'Brien is great on this issue. There are others who have talked about what we need to do with our—we have a trillion-dollar-plus economy, black economy. people experience pain if we're willing to work in concert. The problem, as you said, the problem is that we don't work in concert as often as we should. I mean, we basically, there's not to be that much separation between us in terms of strategy. But you've got this group

going over this way, this group going over that way, this one not speaking to that one. That's not an effective way to construct a good economic boycott. We have—years ago, there's a brother down in New Orleans. I forgot his name. He owned a bank, Liberty Bank. And he said, we have everything we need in our community if we just talk to each other. Reverend Willie Barrow used to say, we're not so much divided as we are disconnected. Tell you all, this is a time to get connected, because what's going on is if you don't get connected, what you're going to end up with is a decimated community. They've done it before. Economic envy. Economic envy is a powerful thing, Roland.

They don't want to see us succeed. They want to re-enslave us. So you get rid of many of our historical markers. You get rid of the Department of Education essentially lowers wages implicitly. And that means it weakens communities implicitly. We will need to have to figure out, find out what we can do together, and we have to do it together. I'm so happy that you talked about the Montgomery boycott because it was organized. People met. They had a committee. It wasn't like somebody popped up and said, oh, we're going to boycott the bus. It was a lot more than that. And we really got to look at what

else can we do to ensure the strength of our communities? Because trust and believe these folks are, yes, out to get us. Yes, out to get us. Yes, to get us. Joe. Joe? You know, it's interesting in that I think that the point is well made that we are not as good about the historical knowledge as we need to be. And so without the historical knowledge, the success that there has been with targeted boycotts, et cetera, that were informed boycotts. Right. Without those things, you can't be successful as it pertains to a current strategy. So it is really important for us to look both ways before we cross the street. All those years ago in the 80s, when we wanted certain things to happen in terms of movies, you know, things that were getting to Hollywood that Hollywood was making.

Back then, I don't know where we are now, but back then, black people bought a third of movie tickets. And this is aside from the bootlegs. Now, let's keep it real. So whatever we wanted to happen in Hollywood could have happened if we came together on that. So we have to be very, very strategic, and we have to be wise about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the end game actually is. The other thing you have to remember, and this is why I think the urgency that you

underscore is really important for us to understand and to really get these companies running away from DEI. And I agree with the whole idea that the DEI thing as a goal in and of itself is a little bit of a misnomer because of who benefits from it, right? But the thing to understand is that these companies are doing something that they're not even legally required to do. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that

brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Right now, the Supreme Court hasn't gotten to the point where they've undone DEI programs in corporate America. You know, they're talking about colleges, et cetera, but that's been going on for

a while. You can go back to the Bakke case. You can go back and talk about burn the vaccine for a long time. They are running for the hills, and they don't even have a legal requirement yet to do it. And so that's where our urgency comes from. And without strategy, as it pertains to all of these things, and they all connect, whether you're talking about how you deal with voter suppression, how you deal with economic disempowerment, and how you make your dollars count and work. You know, my mom doesn't do Amazon because she's older. She'll have me do it, or she'll go to Walmart or Target herself, which means that with a lot of our consumers, social media is not going to do it. So you've got to be able to be strategic about what we do, why we do it, and what the end game is, because the things that are happening right now are not even legally required to be happening as it pertains to what these corporations are doing.

They're not even required yet, but they're scared of something. So let's get to a point where they're just as scared of an economic impact on this end. And then maybe we can start making some progress. I'm a Congo. Well, the question is, why are they saying this? Right. Because you have the organizations, you know, the Walmarts and the like and those ownerships who are committed to Trump. But I'm thinking about like like like a target. And I'm thinking they didn't even have to announce anything, kind of going off Joe's point, right? Like, they didn't even have to say anything at this particular point. So I don't even know if it's about a scare thing or if these organizations are emboldened to do what they didn't feel like,

to do what they've wanted to do all along. Dr. King talked about people believe in Black liberation on an installment plan, talked about Reconstruction ending, talked about civil rights movement, where people say, like, we've given you enough rights, and now we're stopping. You talked about coming out of the George Floyd murder. We needed to have a Reconstruction lasting another 20 years or so. And now we see that as closer to, like, three, like, two-and-a-half and the like, because of diversity fatigue. This is what we're seeing in these organizations. And so since Trump is emboldened to say stop all DEI, many of them are feeling emboldened to say the same thing. The way that we can be so successful

is going back to one of your first points you said, Roland. What other organizations, what other groups of people, non-Black groups, are going to be down with this? Because the fact of the matter is, is that when you look at it, there are more of us collectively, numbers-wise, than there are MAGA people. MAGA folks can't keep Target running and Toyota running and all these other organizations and corporations, but collectively we all can. But I feel like these companies are emboldened enough to say that folks are not going to come together, they are not going to stand strong as it relates to demanding DEI. And so we can basically run rampant and do whatever we want. And it is up to us to prove them wrong. When you went on Instagram earlier today and said

you were going to be doing this tonight, I put it on my story. I'm like, folks got to tune into this, because so many people were just waiting for a plan. When I saw some organizations say we're going to take 90 days and come back with a plan, I'm like, why wasn't there already a plan. When I saw some organizations say we're going to take 90 days and come back with a plan, I'm like, why wasn't there already a plan in place, given what Trump was already running on and what's been happening? So I respect you, Roland, for giving us a plan and a blueprint of where we should be going. And it doesn't take us that long to have to do it. So folks out there need to be listening to Roland right now, because not only is the institutional knowledge there, but the resources and the

connections of Dr. Malvolz and all of us are there who can help us in this particular time. So thank you, Roland. Folks, this stuff is real. So if you want to understand and this is, y'all, education is so important.

Get Martin Depp's book. I'm telling you, I know I've sold more copies of this man's book than he has. You can see how my book is worn. And the reason this is important because he literally details with the minutiae, the actual forms, the data on how they target companies. And one of the things that he said in the book was that the greatest mistake that they made after they had those covenants, they didn't have enough people to monitor them. So what happened is they ended up making deals, but they didn't follow through to make sure they actually got it done. The book is called Operation Breadbasket, an untold story of civil rights in Chicago, 1966 to 1971 by Martin Depp.

And that is so important to get that book because the mistake that I think that we continue to make and see is that people love to comment on speeches and events and things along those lines. And what they don't do is they don't take the time to go in depth and to understand the strategy. They don't take the time to say, okay, how was this constructed? How was this done? How did they do it? Which gives you, frankly,

the blueprint to then begin to follow. You know, how did Color of Change do this? How did they get these advertisers to stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh's show? How did they get it done? See, this is what has to happen. We've got to be operating in a constant state of information and education. And that, for me, I think is just our biggest struggle is that we aren't doing that. And so I want us to do that. I want us to look at the data.

I want us to look at how do we do this. I want us to look at how they achieve these things because it's there. And look, I'm going to tell you, but the onus also has to be on people who are watching. You know, I spent a lot of time trying to educate our people on what was happening in the advertising business and how black-owned media was getting screwed out of the money and how black-owned media was not able to get the dollars. I mean, look, I laid these things out. And you know what? If I commented on something else that really wasn't that big of a deal, oh, trust me, I would see the likes and everything.

But when I was talking about the money, folk were not listening. I reached out, because for me, I'm always looking at the strategy. This is a photo of me and Martin Depp at Rainbow Push when they installed, when they announced Freddie Haynes.

We were going to try to get him on the show. He said, listen, I'm moved that fast. So I hit him last night. I want to get him on the show today. So Carol's going to try to get him on the show. He said, listen, I'm moved that fast, so I hit him last night. I want to get him on the show today, so Carol's going to try to work because I think it's important to hear from the people. Tomorrow, I forgot, one of y'all mentioned Montgomery bus boycott. I'm going to bring in my book of the sister who folks don't give any credit because I want to explain to people the strategy of the Montgomery

bus boycott. Because again, we cannot have folk running around talking about let's boycott Target, boycott these companies if we don't understand the strategy, how they kept them together, how they planned it, how they organized it. All of that gives us, again, something to learn from today to move forward. And so that's what we're going to be doing all week. And so we're going to reach out to the folks with the strike organization because I want to ask some questions I want to ask some questions. I want to ask of them. I was talking to a pastor today and they are organizing something different

where it's going to be they're not calling it a boycott of Target, but they're calling it something else. So there are multiple things that are happening, but I do believe this. What Dr. King said, I agree with him 100% when he said we must utilize economic withdrawal when it comes to these companies.

And I want all of you who are listening to me to actually take the time. And I want you to go listen to that particular speech. I want you to listen to what he had to say. I want you to read the speech so you can actually hear when he laid this whole thing out. Because I'm telling you, every time I talk about this here, people think I'm crazy, and they go, man, I never heard any of that. And so what we'll do tomorrow is we're going to play that part where he talked about economic withdrawal, and we're going to play the part where Dr. King talked about how we need to have collective action, how we must have unity in order to

make it happen. And so that's what we're going to do. And so, y'all, this is why we don't waste our time with gossip and Real Housewives and all that kind of stuff, because there's enough of that mess out there in black America. This is real. We're talking about billions and billions of dollars. Let me say that again, y'all. The federal government spent last year more than $600 billion on contract and services. Just the federal government. Black people got 10 billion of the 600 billion.

In this space alone that we're in, media, almost 400 billion is spent every year on advertising, and black-owned media gets 0.5% to 1%. We can go sector to sector to sector, and we can show you 0.5%, 1%, 1%, 1%, 1%, 2%. It does not mean that we do not have the knowledge, the expertise, the smarts, the intellect. What we have not had is the opportunity to be able to access and show what we can do. And in America, if you want to understand America in a nutshell, only in America can you go from an esteemed, retired,

four-star general who is the Secretary of Defense to a Fox News host who's a white guy. That's America. And that's what we up against. Where they call the black guy four stars, led troops in command, a DEI hire, what they call an accused drunkard, a great choice. That is America.

That is America. Joe, Julian, I'm a Congo. I appreciate it. Thank you so very much. Folks, the work that we do is critically important. Your support is critically important for us to continue doing the work that we do. All of this costs money.

All of this, the ability for us to travel around the country costs money as well. And so when you donate to this show, you are helping to propel a black-owned media, news and information network that, again, nobody else is doing. What I have just laid out for you in the last one hour and 15 minutes,

you're not seeing this at Essence, Black Enterprise. You're not seeing it at Blavity. Matter of fact, I found out over the weekend that Byron Allen shut down the Grio network. They shut their app down. The linear network, it was dead as of January 1, 2025. So the Grio sure as hell not doing it. It's us. It's us. You ain't having this conversation on Revolt. You ain't having this conversation on the Black Tardy Network like Aspire and Bounce. It's us. And in order for us to keep doing what we do, we got to fund us.

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Actually, tomorrow. I'm in Atlanta, but we're going to continue this conversation. And then we're going to be doing it all week. So I'll see y'all. Take care. Holla! Blackstar Network News. Oh, no punch.

It's a real revolution right now. Thank you for being the voice of black America. All momentum we have now, we have to keep this going. The video looks phenomenal. See, there's a difference between Black Star Network and black-owned media and something like CNN. You can't be black-owned media and be scared. It's time to be smart. Bring your eyeballs home.

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