The Daily Signal - #472: How to Achieve Racial Unity in America

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

We live in divided times—that's no secret. And sometimes, those divisions fall along racial lines. Former NFL player Miles McPherson dealt with racism daily growing up in an interracial family. Now as a pastor, he's seeking to build a more perfect and racially unified nation. Today, I'll have Pastor McPherson on the show to share his story, and his hope for America.We also cover these stories:-Special counsel Robert Mueller breaks his silence on the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign.-Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., ramps up calls for impeachment.-Another House member blocks disaster aid.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, May 30th. I'm Daniel Davis. We live in divided times. That's no secret. And sometimes those divisions fall along racial lines. Former NFL player Miles McPherson dealt with racism daily growing up in an interracial family. Now he's a pastor and he's seeking to build a more perfect and racially unified nation. Today I'll have Pastor McPherson on the show to share his story and his hope for America. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on a iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Special counsel Robert Mueller held a press conference Wednesday in which he said he would reveal nothing further than what he had put in the report on the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and did not want to testify. He also said this. If we had had confidence that the president

clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime. The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited.

The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. Mueller also announced he'll be leaving the Justice Department. President Donald Trump reacted to the Mueller press conference on Twitter, tweeting, quote, nothing changes from the Mueller report. There was insufficient evidence, and therefore, in our own. our country, a person is innocent. The case is closed. Thank you. Senator Corey Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, tweeted, Robert Mueller's statement makes it clear. Congress has a legal and moral obligation

to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. Representative Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, given that special counsel Mueller was unable to pursue criminal charges against the president, it falls to Congress to respond to the crimes, lies, and other wrongdoing of President Trump, and we will do so. No one, not even the President of the United States, is above the law. A 19 billion disaster aid bill has been stopped by Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky. Since the House is on recess, a single House member can block a bill. If the Speaker of the House thought that this was a must-pass legislation, the Speaker should have called a vote on this bill before sending every member of Congress on recess for 10 days.

Massey, a Republican, said when he blocked the measure on Tuesday. You can't have bills passed in Congress with nobody voting on them. Massey added, that is the definition of the swamp, and that's what people resent about this place. The move was met with criticism from Democrats with Representative Sanford Bishop of Georgia, saying that, quote, many will not be able to plant this year if the disaster aid package does not go through. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas on Friday, also objected to the the disaster aid bill blocking its passage. On Twitter, Roy said that, quote, Congress should not attempt to pass major spending bills when members of Congress aren't even

in Washington, D.C., to debate and vote on said bills, especially when that bill provides no funding to address the humanitarian crisis on our border. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked what he would do if there was a vacancy in the Supreme Court in 2020 via TV station WPSD. Thank you. This is great for justice next year. We'd fill it.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted that McConnell was, quote, a hypocrite. In 2016, McConnell blocked then President Obama's pick Merrick Garland. However, then Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats the presidency, and according to USA

today, McConnell has argued it's a different situation when the same party controls both. California Senator Kamala Harris said that an abortion rights plan announced Tuesday night that she thinks the Department of Justice should give pro-life states a quote pre-clearance in order for them to pass pro-life legislation. Harris's new plan, according to CBS News, calls for pre-clearance from the DOJ for quote any new abortion law in states and localities that have a pattern of violating Roe v. Wade in the preceding 25 years. Up next, an interview with pastor and former NFL player Miles McPherson.

Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at letters at dailysignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Well, I'm joined now by Pastor Miles McPherson. He is the senior pastor of Rock Church in San Diego, California. And you may know him if you're a football fan, former corner. back for the Chargers. Long time ago. That was in the, what, 80s, 90s? 82 to 85. Wow, fantastic. Well, I'd like to spend a whole other podcast talking about your football career,

but today we're here to talk about your book. It's called The Third Option, Hope for a Racially Divided Nation. That's right. And, you know, it's a, you've got a lot of, in fact, I'm looking at here at your book, Drew Breeze has written the forward to it. You've got a lot of folks supporting the book. What led you to write? I was actually writing a book on something else, and one of the chapters was on racism, and as I was writing that chapter, I just felt like, man, we'd love to write a whole book on it, and that's what the publisher asked me to do. Our country is so divided, and it seems like everyone's fueling the fire with reasons they think

were divided and why their side is right. I wanted to write a book that gave people tools on how to come together and be united, and so this book is all about how we can honor what we have in common. You know, in our culture, we have us-first-them-divided culture. And you always feel like you have to pick aside against some group. This book talks about how we can honor what we have in common because we're all more similar than we are different. Yeah. And you've, you know, for several decades, you know, you've been, you were in the NFL in the 80s, as you mentioned.

So you've been, I assume, at least a part of this conversation for a while. Have you? I mean, at least longer than I have. Yeah. Do you think things have gotten worse in recent years? You know, I think things are, in one sense, worse. People are more outspoken about their bias and hatred and opposition to people. But I think it's backfiring.

I think more people are now becoming more vocal about being united, where people just kind of before just kind of silently sat in their corner and said anything. Now people are starting to step up and say, look, can we talk about this? Can we do something about it? And so in one sense, yes, it's more out in the open, but that is also a good sign that people are now talking about it. And I think that people want to learn how they can be more divided and understand the issues better. Yeah.

So what is it that keeps us divided in a part? You know, we're a country, we're a nation, we play football together. Yeah, yeah. We have things that unite us. But the racial divisions continue to a large extent. What is it that keeps us? There's a lot of factors. In this book I talk about being in a group, us versus them, and we identify people who are like me and people who are not like me.

And there's a lot of reasons, a lot of groups we can be in, whether it be football versus baseball. But when it comes to race, it's people who look like me or people who identify with ethically. And we have assumptions about people who are not like me because we don't know them. We have assumptions about them. And a lot of times those assumptions are reinforced by the people who we hang out with. And so I think how to break that down is to build relationships with people. Often we have assumptions about people why they do what they do, why they think what they think. and we treat them based on those assumptions.

But if we can spend time getting to know each other and realize that we all have the same wants, we all want families, we all want to have a career, we all want to know what our gifts are and talents are, and we all want to have love in our life and be happy and find purpose. And if we all could work together to accomplish that for each other versus getting mine against yours.

If I have to get mine at the expense of you, then we have a problem. Yeah. Well, a lot of this in recent years has come to a head in the NFL, actually, you know, the kneeling controversy. I think has surprised a lot of people with just how different perspectives people have. It would seem, at least, that, you know, being patriotic and carrying, you know, holding a certain political view or caring about, you know, those who are in prison are contradictory. And yet, that doesn't seem to be the case. No, yet, I think that...

But yet we're missing each other. We're talking past each other. Totally. And you hit it right on the head. We're talking past each other because those guys... There's a kid in the New York, Khalid Corrata, who was arrested on an accusation. He stole a backpack.

And he was in prison 1,000 days on that accusation. And he was in solitary confinement, 700 of those days. He was... I never had a trial, and they tried to kill himself multiple times, on an accusation. and they end up letting him go with no trial and he killed himself

when he got out because his experience was so traumatic but he was only there for an accusation the reason those guys knelt is because of things like that they weren't kneeling to you know disrespect the flag matter of fact they were told to kneel by a Marine but the point was missed

and I think that was the tragedy of that whole thing yeah you know there's also been Black Lives Matter has emerged in response to some of this controversy. You've got people responding to that saying, no, all lives matter. Again, the talking past each other. Exactly.

How do we bridge that divide? And again, we're talking past each other. People can talk with each other like this, right, and say, tell me what your point of view is. Tell me what your pain is. Help me understand your perspective. When we identify the group that we're, with our in-group, as I'm going to talk about, We understand the people who are like us, but we don't understand the people who are not like us. And when we make assumptions about the people who are not like us, not having spoken with them, not having spent time with them,

it's easy for us to make assumptions and to come up with reasons and excuses for what they do that make them look back. I think one of the best things we can do is talk with each other and spend time with each other and go to each other's neighborhoods and go to each other's houses and go to each other's football games and have fun. football games and have friends and real relationships with people who come from a different world than us. So were there any formative experiences your own life that shaped your approach to this? Yeah, yeah. You know, I have a white grandmother. I have a half-Chinese black grandmother and two black grandfathers, so I have a whole

lot of stuff in me. Right. And I went to school in a white neighborhood for eight years and got harassed because I wasn't white. I lived in a black neighborhood and got harassed because it wasn't black enough. So my childhood was filled with tension, plus I was in the 60s, so Martin Luther King was killed when I was eight. And so there was a lot of racial tension in my life growing up.

But when I played football, we had an integrated team, and we all got along. We fought together. We played together. We worked hard together. And in my family, we all got along. So I saw my family, my football teams getting along, but yet society, and when I went outside the house, it was a little different. And so that formed my opinion about things.

You know, my brother played in NFL. I played in NFL. I have another brother who played. I was an eighth-ranked boxer. And so we saw racism even in sports and what position you played. My brother was a quarterback, and in the 80s of black quarterback wasn't a fashionable thing like it is today. Right. So we did have a lot of racial tension and division in our family, against our family.

And so that shaped how I saw the world as well. So you feel like you kind of had to deal with it because it was just on your plate every day. Yeah, old people have got to have to deal with it all the time. Yeah, yeah, all the time. So that's nothing new. That's not anything unique. Yeah. Well, now you're a pastor in San Diego.

How do you approach this issue in the context of your own church? Exactly. And how does your faith weigh in on the issue? You know, our church is about 20,000 people every week. We have seven locations, and we are as diverse as the United Nations. In San Diego, we pretty much match the demographic, and we have more nationalities and ethnicities than we can account. And the Bible tells us to love everybody

as we love ourselves. And in matter of fact, Jesus said, the greatest commitment is to love God, it's your heart, mind, and soul. The second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Well, everybody's my neighbor. I can't pick and choose. And so I teach that, look, look next to you and you're going to see someone from a different ethnicity,

a different country, that's your neighbor. No matter what they look like, no matter what their experience is, that's your neighbor, when you change someone's label and you label them something less the neighbor, you dehumanize them and you disqualify them from you have to love them, but it's the wrong thing to do. So I teach the church, look, everyone in here is your neighbor, we have to love everybody and encourage them, point them to Jesus, that's our job, and realize that they have the same needs. You know, every person is 99.5% genetically identical.

So you and I are 99.5% genetically identical. That's a whole lot of things in common, right? If a doctor cuts you open, you're going to have a heart just like me and the intestines just like me. And so we have a lot more in common. And if we can focus on how to understand those things and honor those things and place value on that, then our differences of culture will be a benefit. We can learn from each other. Well, I love that. And it seems like, you know, church is such a great place to lead on this.

I mean, my own church as well, you know, hear the pastors say, look, there's no Gentile, there's no Jew. in Christ, all are one. And that's such a cool place to try to model that. I always thought that if the church could model racial unity, then society could look to that and see that it really is possible. We have to model it. I mean, you know, that's what Christ called us to do. It's our greatest number one responsibility to love him and love our neighbor.

And when people look at us and see us segregated on Sunday morning, we kind of look somewhat hypocritical and saying, hey, we love everybody, but we're going to go to church, only with people who look like me. That's right. And so that's where the balamese start. Wonderful. Well, Pastor Miles McPherson,

thank you so much for joining us. The book is called The Third Option, Hope for a Racially Divided Nation. I assume it's on Amazon and all those websites. It's on Amazon. It's on Amazon. Go get it. The third option.

Go get it. Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you. Do you own an Amazon Echo? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily Alexa Flash briefing. It's easy to do.

Just open your Amazon Alexa app. app, go to settings, and select Flash Briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your Flash briefing so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. Hey, this is Kelsey Bowler, a senior writer and producer for The Daily Signal. I am here at the Heritage Foundation's Resource Bank with the one and only Mary Catherine Ham, CNN contributor and author of the book, End of Discussion. I'll let you explain the long title. I don't want to mess it up. You know what? I still mess it up. It's fine.

End of discussion is good. You'll find it that way. And she is also the co-host of the podcast, Lady Brains. Mary Catherine just at Resource Bank gave it fascinating to talk on socialism versus capitalism. She has a lot of experience going around to different college campuses addressing this issue. So today, Mary Catherine, I want to ask you, what have been some successes on? that front. Yeah, so what I tell people is that this, it's a long road, okay? Like, when you go to a college campus, they're going to expect to dislike you if you're a conservative. They might protest you or worse. In general, I don't get that kind of treatment. I've had really, I've had

some very good experiences. But one of the, one of the, one of, a couple things I tell people is one, do not attempt to convert people, attempt to engage them. My whole attempt with college students is to make them think, because they're so surrounded by someone, by the complete opposite views of mine, that I just want to go, I want them to go, huh, I've never thought about it like that before. That's all. That's all I'm looking for. Just plant the seed. And I think that people read it as, rightly read it as disingenuous if you come into a conversation being like, I'm going to make you pro second amendment by the time we're done with this. It's not, it's not realistic. And I don't think it's helpful. Another thing that I talk to them about, because I think,

look, as sad as it is, if you get into the history of socialism, which I care deeply about, because socialism is really great except for all the murder you have to do to have it. So, you know, equality about murder. Anyway, it's bad, bad, bad, bad. We all know that. We've talked about it for years. That part of the discussion is not as effective with young people. One, because I think socialism sounds very simple and nice.

and two, because Ronald Reagan and Americans and the free market defeated the USSR so soundly that people have forgotten just how bad that system of government can be. Now, Venezuela is a reminder, but I think it too often has written off as something else. It's not really socialism. So I kind of move on to their personal lives and what hits them at home. And the thing that hits them at home, I think it's helpful to explain to them why they might not want government programs to run every corner of their lives is young people are deeply dependent on their phones. They love their phones. There's some crazy stat that's like far more than 75% sleep with their phones next to them.

I mean, this is, I'm one of them. They're important to them because they are made for them. And by that I mean they are tailored in every single way. by the user. Mine has the wallpaper I want on it. It has every single photo I want on it. It has all the videos I want on it. It has every playlist that I've created for myself. Every single thing on my phone is customizable in about a thousand ways, more than that really, like infinite ways. And every single person you know, their phone is different because it's built the way they wanted to build it. but then they think about health care, this incredibly intimate, important, really vital good in their lives.

And they go like, yeah, just give me one-size-fits-all and let the federal government run it. That sounds awesome. That is a terrible idea, as we have seen many times over. The VA is a perfect example. We don't even serve those who are most deserving of our good care in a good way because the system is not built to serve. individuals it's built to make just one size fits all and millennials actually don't want that they just don't know they don't want that if they look at their phones they'll realize it so that's one of the illustrations i use to say like maybe think about how much you customize your daily life

and whether you want the federal government to be pronouncing the ways you need to live your daily life and so that's it's just an interesting way to think about it I think for millennials um that hits them literally in their pocket. And then you also talked about the importance of personal storytelling. And I think of the famous tagline from Ben Shapiro, facts don't care about your feelings. I struggle with that sometimes because he's right. Facts do not care about your feelings.

But your feelings care about facts. So why is personal storytelling important for this? There's a marriage of the two, Because I hate to go and public speak or be on TV without some backup data. I desperately want the government to have data about the things it's doing usually badly so that we can then use that data to either eliminate or improve the things it's doing. Now, we rarely do that. I would like if we did that.

But I like to go on with data, with facts, with numbers that back up what I'm talking about. but you really get people to care when you tell a story. And the example I used is with Obamacare, I argued against it. I knew what was going to happen. I was not alone. A lot of people knew. A lot of people said it. And we were called liars or partisans when we were not.

And then lo and behold, all of those things happened. And then they happened to me because I was in the private insurance market. I knew what was going to happen. My prices went up. My insurance became basically unusable. I lost four or five plans. No one cared. Everyone still called me a liar.

I'm talking about like, you know, the people, the adversaries who were pro-Oabomacare. Until I told the story about being a 32 weeks pregnant recent widow who received the letter that said, hey, your plan's gone again. And I had to call around to doctors and insurance companies to make sure I could actually have this baby in this crisis point in my life. under insurance or if I was going to have to pay for it with cash, when I was told a thousand times over that I would never lose a plan or a doctor. So when I told that story, everyone went, oh, wait, there's real people who were hurt by Obamacare? Yes, guys, that is what I have been saying.

But those stories will make people think about things in a different way and finding those stories. And we are not always the greatest at reporting and finding those things. one of the reasons I like the Daily Signal and products like it is because they seek out those stories and they're really important. My last question for you is as someone who is a frequent visitor to college campuses, are you optimistic about our future? Or how do you feel about this question of socialism versus capitalism? And with more and more polling showing that younger generations do have some strange affiliation

towards socialism? Yeah, it's disconcerting because I don't think that they truly understand the horrific consequences that it can have if you go too far down this road and how much we have that we take for granted. And we really, the things we take for granted, including myself, I try to think about them, are just infinite. I mean, that we live in a more prosperous moment and time and place than any time in human history. And so it's easy to take that. for granted. But I will say the people who are loudest on college campuses and as the most anti-free speech and the most pro-socialism is a smaller crowd that is bullying a larger crowd into silence. And that's true in the Twitter world and in the political world as well. And one of the things

we have to do is not like buckle under to the bullies as much. You need to make your voice heard. you need to remember that sometimes a Twitter mob is just three angry people. Like that's all it is. And especially on campus, often the ideas are far more mainstream than the feeling you get about campus, even in Ivy Leagues. And when I go, I often have a more pleasant experience and a more open and tolerant experience than I expected to have. And by the end of the time, now it's a slow road. like I said, I'll spend four or five days speaking, and by the end of it, you make a little progress with a few people, and they say at the end, I had never thought about it like that before.

And that's all I'm looking for, and I do think there's hope in that. Good to hear. Well, Mary Catherine, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily Signals podcast. For those interested following your work, where can they find you? And, you know, our listeners might not always be tuning into CNN, but if they want to see you in the fray, is there a specific time they can tune in to watch? Yeah, actually, Jake Tapper's show at 4 p.m., the lead. I'm often on that show, and it is a good show, and Jake is a great anchor.

So you can tune in to that and watch, you know, half the panel look at me like I'm crazy. And then that's what we do in TV. And I'm on Twitter at MK Hammer, Instagram at MK Hammer Time, and I write freelance, so you'll see me around. And end of discussion is available and a fun read. Thank you. Go buy it. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation.

Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. You've been listening to The Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis, sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.