Speaker 1: On today's episode of Civic Cipher, we have a very
Speaker 1: special guest writer, podcaster, documentary filmmaker, and professional blurred fan
Speaker 1: of democracy and og hater of fascism and apartheid, Joy
Speaker 1: and Read, fresh on the hills of her panel discussion
Speaker 1: at the Journalism under Fire Guarding against Threats to our
Speaker 1: Democracy fireside chat in d C. We go now to
Speaker 1: our conversation with Joy. All Right, Joy and Read, welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Our listeners know this, but I want
Speaker 1: to make sure that I say it to you that
Speaker 1: you are more than the introduction. You are more than
Speaker 1: you know. What you represent and the work that you
Speaker 1: do really does matter. And I just I met a
Speaker 1: loss for words. It's just it's a very very special
Speaker 1: episode to be recording with you. You know, we've we've
Speaker 1: kind of been in similar circles over the years and
Speaker 1: you know, tried to get a word to you, but
Speaker 1: we understand and respect the work that you're doing and
Speaker 1: when the time is, I you know, maybe we'll get
Speaker 1: a chance to have a conversation with you, and today
Speaker 1: is that day. So this is kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: all of our stars in Alignment and ten Christmases at once,
Speaker 1: so welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: It's good to be here, all right, absolutely, all right,
Speaker 1: So first stuff, talk to us a little bit about
Speaker 1: the fireside chat that I mentioned, because that's kind of
Speaker 1: been the big deal in the news. So this took
Speaker 1: place at the Journalism under Fire event. For people that
Speaker 1: weren't able to attend, or people that might have heard
Speaker 1: about it and been curious about it, talk to us about,
Speaker 1: you know, what took place and maybe what people should know,
Speaker 1: what the people that attended might have learned from that event.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, this was an important conversation, of course,
Speaker 3: Nicole Hannah Jones being one of the most seminal and
Speaker 3: important figures in modern journalistic history. I mean, obviously, her
Speaker 3: creation of the sixteen nineteen project Blew Up the World,
Speaker 3: broke the brains of the entire American right, said Christopher
Speaker 3: UFO and others off on a tear to try to
Speaker 3: destroy diversity, equity and inclusion and their version of critical
Speaker 3: race theory, which they didn't even clearly understand. But I
Speaker 3: think what's happened now is that, particularly after the election
Speaker 3: for the second time of Donald Trump, is that you
Speaker 3: have a real aggressive Project.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty five, driven.
Speaker 3: Right winging Christian nationalists, driven war on everything from journalism
Speaker 3: to basic freedom, to immigration to potentially birthright citizenship, you
Speaker 3: name it.
Speaker 2: It's all being torn apart.
Speaker 3: And this particular gathering was to really talk about the
Speaker 3: journalism piece and how in each of these three instances
Speaker 3: there was a woman from the Los Angeles Times who
Speaker 3: actually left there because the owner of the LA Times
Speaker 3: has decided to turn that seminal really August paper into
Speaker 3: a mouthpiece for Donald Trump and to suppress anti Trump
Speaker 3: views at the paper, all the way to Robert Kagan,
Speaker 3: who is a conservative who used to write for the
Speaker 3: wh Washington Post until he resigned because of Jeff Bezo's
Speaker 3: takeover of the paper and his attempt to root out
Speaker 3: anti Trump views or critical views of Donald Trump. Although
Speaker 3: I have to say that there are still people that
Speaker 3: are writing critically about Donald Trump at the Washington Post,
Speaker 3: but he's warped the mission, right. He even got rid
Speaker 3: of democracy dies in darkness and said now they're now
Speaker 3: going to be about individual liberty or something like that.
Speaker 2: Some neoliberal, you know, he.
Speaker 3: Cannot make principle. And so that's happening everywhere, and of course,
Speaker 3: you know. I you know, I like to quote the
Speaker 3: Friday thing. I don't know how you're gonn get fired
Speaker 3: on your day off, but I did get fired. I'm like,
Speaker 3: I remember that, like Friday. But you know, and you know,
Speaker 3: I was never told why I was and I said
Speaker 3: this on stage. I was never given a reason why
Speaker 3: I was let go and why my show was canceled
Speaker 3: and why more than one hundred really experienced long time
Speaker 3: staffers of MSNBC producers were essentially thrown out of their
Speaker 3: jobs and forced to reapply doged. But I could take
Speaker 3: a guess. You know, I don't think it helped my case.
Speaker 3: That I've been a very firm supporter of DEI, of diversity,
Speaker 3: equity and inclusion. That I've been a very firm believer
Speaker 3: that Donald Trump is a fascist. That as his two
Speaker 3: for his former chief of staff and Mark Milly, his
Speaker 3: former joint chiefs of staff chair.
Speaker 2: They both said he's a fascist to the core. That's
Speaker 2: their view, not mine.
Speaker 3: His own vice president has said he may be America's hitler.
Speaker 3: Then he became his vice president, you name it. It's
Speaker 3: clear that he has fascist instincts, and he's married himself
Speaker 3: to a group of white Christian nationalists who are very
Speaker 3: clearly trying to move the country into fascism and Christian nationalism.
Speaker 3: So saying that is probably not helpful, also probably not
Speaker 3: helpful that I was pretty firm that, you know, it's
Speaker 3: probably suboptimal for the United States to be arming Israel
Speaker 3: with two thousand pound bombs to drop on Palestinians at
Speaker 3: school and in their apartments and destroying mosques and everything else.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I can take a good guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Unfortunately, I think we can all take a good
Speaker 4: guess with all the major shakeups that we are all
Speaker 4: collectively witnessing in the media landscape since Trump's reelection. What
Speaker 4: are some concerns that you have about the state of
Speaker 4: journalism in the United States.
Speaker 3: I'm very concerned, honestly. The resignation recently. We also talked
Speaker 3: about this at the Forum of the some thirty five
Speaker 3: year leader of sixty minutes, head of sixty minutes, Bob Owens,
Speaker 3: that was alarming, and he resigned very clearly, saying that
Speaker 3: he was leaving because he felt that he no longer
Speaker 3: had the editorial independence to cover the news.
Speaker 2: Without fear or favor.
Speaker 3: The way that sixty minutes has done since I've been
Speaker 3: watching it since I was in junior high school, and
Speaker 3: it has not changed. It's very tough on any president.
Speaker 3: It's not partisan in any way. But you know, they
Speaker 3: recently did a really important, i think report about the
Speaker 3: two hundred and thirty five men and we think some
Speaker 3: women who were shipped to El Salvador into a prison,
Speaker 3: into a gulag without any due process, and that seventy
Speaker 3: five percent of them have no criminal record anywhere, and
Speaker 3: highlighting the cases of people like kil Mararbordego Garcia, who
Speaker 3: was literally renditioned out of the United States, out of
Speaker 3: Maryland without due process, and they did a really critical
Speaker 3: story on that. They've also done really important reporting on
Speaker 3: the war in Gaza and on the human rights violations therein,
Speaker 3: and on the allegations of genocide therein. And they were
Speaker 3: in a lawsuit with Donald Trump because he claimed that
Speaker 3: their interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, which is a
Speaker 3: perfectly normal interview for a presidential candidate, was somehow biased.
Speaker 3: And he's sicked the FCC on not just CBS, but
Speaker 3: also on ABC because he doesn't like the coverage of
Speaker 3: himself on ABC. On Comcast, my former employer because he
Speaker 3: doesn't like the coverage from MSNBC or the financial accurate
Speaker 3: financial coverage I suppose from CNBC, which is talking about
Speaker 3: his failures on the economy, you name it. The media
Speaker 3: is under fire, and I think when you see people
Speaker 3: like Jeff Bezos, who is not a journalist, interfering in
Speaker 3: the way that the Washington Post does what it was
Speaker 3: designed to do. When you see the owner of the
Speaker 3: Los Angeles Times bending the knee to Trump and essentially
Speaker 3: requiring his editorial page to do the same. And then
Speaker 3: when you're also seeing a takeover of even a lot
Speaker 3: of local TV stations by organizations like the Sinclair Media Group,
Speaker 3: which is a right wing Fox style organization and entity
Speaker 3: that's now taking over your traffic and weather together and
Speaker 3: replacing political news with what amounts to conservative you know,
Speaker 3: conservative ideas, an ideation. That's a problem. We can't have
Speaker 3: a free society if we don't have a free press.
Speaker 3: And there's an attack on the free press unlike anything
Speaker 3: I've ever seen, and that, to me, I can't like
Speaker 3: into anything other than the McCarthy era.
Speaker 1: You know what's interesting about that is that working in
Speaker 1: this space, we pay particular attention to the same things
Speaker 1: that you're mentioning now. And you know, our listeners, our
Speaker 1: viewers around the country, they often remind us to be
Speaker 1: encouraged to keep going. Our voices are more important now
Speaker 1: than ever, and you realize that how important that infrastructure is.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the Sinclair Media Group, you mentioned the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: you know, and who owns that infrastructure is critically important
Speaker 1: now and we lean further into our relationship with like
Speaker 1: Real Times Media, a lot of like black owned newspapers
Speaker 1: around the country because you know, as source material a
Speaker 1: but also as UH partners and ensuring that we are
Speaker 1: strengthened that they are strengthened, because you realize how vulnerable
Speaker 1: you are when there's a shift and the power is
Speaker 1: concentrated UH into the hands of just a few people.
Speaker 1: And so this is kind of an interesting development. But
Speaker 1: we only have one story to tell, and it's our
Speaker 1: story and it's the truth. And so you know, I
Speaker 1: commend you on not not only enduring but but maintaining
Speaker 1: and you know, having these important conversations and that you know,
Speaker 1: that brings me to the next thing that I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about, because I heard about the state
Speaker 1: of the people tour. So for folks that don't know
Speaker 1: myself included, talk to us about the State of the
Speaker 1: People tour, and make sure you give the website too,
Speaker 1: especially for our listeners that are kind of interested in
Speaker 1: staying plugged into something that is a little bit more accurate,
Speaker 1: a little less biased.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'll just to your previous point. I want
Speaker 3: to note that you know, id B. Wells was operating
Speaker 3: as an independent black woman journalist at a time when
Speaker 3: the media was essentially controlled by two men and William
Speaker 3: randolf Hurst, and when the white media refused to report
Speaker 3: on lynchings in any other way than to say that
Speaker 3: the dead man, woman or child that was lynched committed
Speaker 3: a crime with there was again no due process.
Speaker 2: So there's a history of this, and you know it is.
Speaker 3: Really critical, you know, now more than ever that we strengthened.
Speaker 3: You know, there are thousands of black, independent black newspapers,
Speaker 3: but they are you know, withering away in terms of
Speaker 3: support from the public and then our access to you know,
Speaker 3: being able to have a wider audience as you all
Speaker 3: are able to do through syndication that also is in
Speaker 3: many ways dependent on corporate erica.
Speaker 2: Right, and if you.
Speaker 3: Look at the place where our creators, Black creators have
Speaker 3: had the most access.
Speaker 2: It's been through social media. It's been through YouTube and.
Speaker 3: TikTok and Instagram, and companies like Meta are also bending
Speaker 3: the need of Trump gave a million dollars to the inauguration.
Speaker 3: You know, TikTok suddenly put out a blast to every
Speaker 3: single person who owns TikTok and uses it in the
Speaker 3: United States, glorifying Donald Trump for not following the Supreme
Speaker 3: Court order to make them be sold right and for
Speaker 3: supposedly saving TikTok when he's the one who created the
Speaker 3: crisis in the first place. So you're seeing the social media.
Speaker 3: You know, there used to be a thing called black Twitter.
Speaker 3: Black twitter is what built twitter. Twitter would have been
Speaker 3: nothing without black people making it popular. And yet black
Speaker 3: people own none of that ip that the content was
Speaker 3: not owned by anyone. They were just giving that content
Speaker 3: to previously Jack and then Elon Musk for free. So
Speaker 3: we really have to be cognizant. I think as a
Speaker 3: people of not only where we're getting our information, how
Speaker 3: to avoid disinformation, and how to share information amongst ourselves
Speaker 3: in a way that can be authentic, Which brings me
Speaker 3: to the State of the People tour on the night
Speaker 3: of the It wasn't really a State of the Union.
Speaker 3: It was technically a joint addressed to Congress that Donald
Speaker 3: Trump February. There were a group of us who are
Speaker 3: a combination of activists, you know, and people like Angela Rai,
Speaker 3: who used to be the chief counsel to the Congressional
Speaker 3: of Black Caucus and who's now a podcaster and activist
Speaker 3: in her own right, Lolo Smith. There are a bunch
Speaker 3: of people the Advancement Project, you know, Rashad Robinson up
Speaker 3: formerly of Color of Change. Just a bunch of us
Speaker 3: decided that we were going to do a twenty four
Speaker 3: hour live stream across all our platforms. So I co
Speaker 3: host a podcast called Read This Read That. We streamed
Speaker 3: it on the Read This Read That YouTube channel, it
Speaker 3: was streamed on, you know, Mark Thompson's channel, and all
Speaker 3: of us just live streamed together twenty four hours of
Speaker 3: content in which we as black creators and an activists
Speaker 3: and speakers and media people all came together. And by
Speaker 3: the way, these were black folk who generally had never
Speaker 3: worked together before. Some of us didn't even know each
Speaker 3: other personally. But you know how you know, white people
Speaker 3: assume all black people know each other. We all know
Speaker 3: each other, we do, right, And so we all came together,
Speaker 3: people who didn't even really know each other, had never
Speaker 3: worked with each other before livestream twenty four hours of
Speaker 3: content in which we just talked among ourselves about what
Speaker 3: we need in our community, about.
Speaker 2: What the state of the Union is for us.
Speaker 3: And so out of that came this idea that we
Speaker 3: needed to take that live stream that over a million
Speaker 3: people watched on these collective all common channels, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Speaker 3: And decided to take that on the road. So the
Speaker 3: Stay of the People Tour. It was a very fast
Speaker 3: put together by Angela and some other folks. And the
Speaker 3: idea of it is to go into ten communities, really twelve,
Speaker 3: because Rowley and Durham are two different places. Birmingham and Montgomery,
Speaker 3: both in Alabama, but ten very heavily black cities Detroit,
Speaker 3: New Orleans, Newark, New Jersey, Los Angeles, California, Durham, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of all over the country and go and do
Speaker 3: two things. Number One, find out what people need. Because
Speaker 3: one of the things that I think is generally a
Speaker 3: problem is that a lot of us do a lot
Speaker 3: of talking about what people should do and not a
Speaker 3: lot of asking what people want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right, And so I think for our community.
Speaker 2: And a lot of people didn't vote.
Speaker 3: But a lot of people didn't vote mostly because they
Speaker 3: didn't know the issues, weren't paying attention, weren't really read in,
Speaker 3: and really weren't sure that voting does anything for them.
Speaker 3: Even voting for Obama, it didn't feel like it did
Speaker 3: anything for them. So going in and saying hey, register
Speaker 3: to vote or you know, that's not gonna help anymore.
Speaker 3: We need to just ask people what they want, ask
Speaker 3: people what they need, what would make their lives better,
Speaker 3: provide services, offer assistance where we can. And then the
Speaker 3: second piece is to rally people's spirits. Because Hit Strategies,
Speaker 3: which is a really terrific black owned polling firm, did
Speaker 3: some really scary data after the twenty twenty four election
Speaker 3: that found that Black Americans have not felt this disempowered
Speaker 3: for a generation. We are seeing generational sense of disempowerment
Speaker 3: among black people after the failure of Kamala Hairs to win.
Speaker 3: So we need to reverse that by letting people feel empowered,
Speaker 3: feel community, feel a sense of community, and also to
Speaker 3: do these field hearings to find out what people need
Speaker 3: and what they want.
Speaker 2: So we're going to twelve cities.
Speaker 3: We started in Atlanta and started by delivering food to
Speaker 3: seniors and then rallied folks together and had a bunch
Speaker 3: of smaller group conversations, including a land giveaway, you name it,
Speaker 3: and we're going to take that on the road. And
Speaker 3: so that's what the State of the People Tour is.
Speaker 3: And you can register for your city and find out
Speaker 3: what cities were coming to and you can do that
Speaker 3: at State of the PPL dot com State of THEPPL
Speaker 3: dot Com and that's also on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 4: Ramses and not have to figure out how to get
Speaker 4: to one of these cities. Because that definitely sounds like
Speaker 4: something that we'd like to be a part of and
Speaker 4: support you in any way that we can. You kind
Speaker 4: of touched on some of this already, so I want
Speaker 4: to kind of bring it back to you. Trump is
Speaker 4: dominating headlines with several different initiatives that like muzzle Velocity,
Speaker 4: just there's something every day. Rams and I were discussing
Speaker 4: how everything seems to be aimed at tearing some group
Speaker 4: of people down there. He's not proposing anything that seems
Speaker 4: to help anyone, But all of these initiatives that he's
Speaker 4: so happy to do his photo op with seem to
Speaker 4: be targeted as some group and tearing these particular groups down.
Speaker 4: As you were speaking to how black people feel so
Speaker 4: disempowered and kind of hopeless, what are some things that
Speaker 4: we once should be paying attention to and what are
Speaker 4: some things that we can kind of grab a hold
Speaker 4: to so we don't feel so hopeless and so disempowered,
Speaker 4: like there's nothing that we can do but just accept
Speaker 4: this new state that we're in and that that is
Speaker 4: a really, as you couldmdgen difficult thing for even us
Speaker 4: collectively to do in the space that we work in.
Speaker 4: But for those who are even less connected and less
Speaker 4: informed than we are, what are some things that we
Speaker 4: can that we can share or say to people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know the thing that so you know,
Speaker 2: sort of frustrating for.
Speaker 3: You know, just watching it happen, is that when you
Speaker 3: are attacking everything, as you said, everywhere, all at once,
Speaker 3: and people are also just concerned about economic survival, right
Speaker 3: because for a lot of folks, thing one is how
Speaker 3: he's destroying the economy and their opportunity to just be
Speaker 3: able to pay their bills and afford food. Right, that's
Speaker 3: number one. I mean attacking the economy that you know
Speaker 3: you can.
Speaker 2: You can. You can love or hate Joe Biden, okay,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people don't like them.
Speaker 3: But the economy was stable and was growing and actually
Speaker 3: was the best economy in the West after and during COVID.
Speaker 3: But I think people didn't feel it in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways, and so they roll the dice thinking that
Speaker 3: Trump would improve the economy. A lot of us, a
Speaker 3: lot of us that voted for him, and now they're
Speaker 3: finding that they're just getting destroyed. Food prices are going
Speaker 3: through the roof, gas prices are up. It's kind of
Speaker 3: it's all going in the wrong direction, and it's making
Speaker 3: it hard for people to live. So I think the
Speaker 3: main thing that people are paying attention to is just
Speaker 3: how hard he's making it to live. And when you're
Speaker 3: feeling economically unstable, it's very difficult to have those strength
Speaker 3: and the time on your hands and the will to
Speaker 3: fight everything else. So the challenge is number one. We
Speaker 3: need to start focusing on how to get resources into
Speaker 3: our communities to make sure our people are not hungry,
Speaker 3: are not evicted, don't lose their health care, like focusing
Speaker 3: on those local issues to keep our people alive. Frankly,
Speaker 3: in this moment, I think that's number one, because you
Speaker 3: can't focus on everything, right, we can't stop him from
Speaker 3: doing everything, but we need to really start thinking locally
Speaker 3: and thinking in community terms. How do we keep people
Speaker 3: in our communities alive and in their homes with a
Speaker 3: roof over their heads and food on the table.
Speaker 2: That's number one.
Speaker 3: And then I think the second piece is if you
Speaker 3: do have the capacity to broaden out and do more
Speaker 3: the things that he's attacking that in the end are
Speaker 3: really going to affect us. Number one, this attempt to
Speaker 3: attack birthright citizenship. Know that that's you know, I'm a
Speaker 3: daughter of immigrants, so that definitely affects if you're a
Speaker 3: first generation immigrant right, or if you're an immigrant yourself.
Speaker 3: But it also affects if you're an African American because
Speaker 3: the only reason black folks have citizenship at all is
Speaker 3: the Fourteenth Amendment, because after you know, during enslavement, black
Speaker 3: people were not considered to the citizens of the United States.
Speaker 3: The dread Scott case said that black people were not
Speaker 3: citizens and had no rights. That whites were bound to respect.
Speaker 3: It was a fourteenth Amendment that made black people's citizens.
Speaker 3: If you undermine the fourteenth Amendment, there's almost nothing you
Speaker 3: can't do to us. This man is already his administration
Speaker 3: is regime as I call it, has already deported American citizens.
Speaker 3: That's the thing that's already happened, including American citizen children,
Speaker 3: one with cancer, a seven year old.
Speaker 2: So they've already done it, and they've done it to
Speaker 2: brown people.
Speaker 3: But we know that they always get to us eventually,
Speaker 3: So we actually have to start paying attention. As angry
Speaker 3: as a lot of black folks are with the brown
Speaker 3: people who voted for Trump, you need to watch that
Speaker 3: because we're on the list. Whatever they do to them,
Speaker 3: they're eventually going to want to do to us. Now,
Speaker 3: can they deport where are they going to deport us to?
Speaker 3: I don't know, Mississippi right, Bigger you can't. But they're
Speaker 3: not deporting people to where they come from. They're deporting
Speaker 3: people to a foreign prison that we're paying to take them.
Speaker 3: And Donald Trump said on an open mic to Nai Bukelly,
Speaker 3: who is the president of El Salvador and calls himself
Speaker 3: the world's most popular Dictator Trump said to him, the
Speaker 3: homegrowns are next. Homegrowns are next. What does that mean?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe it means they're going to try to find some
Speaker 3: first generation Brown people and send them to prison.
Speaker 2: Or maybe that means anyone in a disfavored group.
Speaker 3: And there's no group more disfai than us, So I
Speaker 3: think we need to really pay.
Speaker 2: Attention to that.
Speaker 3: I think the third thing, as much as voting doesn't
Speaker 3: solve everything, this Save Act is a problem because if
Speaker 3: they pass it, it's going to make it much harder
Speaker 3: for us to vote. They're building things into that bill
Speaker 3: that are designed to make it harder for women and
Speaker 3: people of color to vote. I just recently, I just
Speaker 3: got off this morning a public Religion Research Institute presentation
Speaker 3: of their latest polling. It's one of the largest polling
Speaker 3: organizations in the country. They pulled five thousand people. It's
Speaker 3: a big sample poll with a one point seven percent
Speaker 3: margin of error. White Christians, white Evangelical Christians stand alone
Speaker 3: in fervently favoring everything Donald Trump, Doge, and Elon Musk
Speaker 3: are doing, including them taking our data. They had to
Speaker 3: stand in favor of having concentration camps in America to
Speaker 3: put quote unquote illegal immigrants in. They believe in white
Speaker 3: replacement theory biomajority, and they believe that it is white
Speaker 3: Christians who are being discriminated against, not anyone else, and
Speaker 3: so they want to end any programs that favor people
Speaker 3: of color. This attack that feels like it may be
Speaker 3: on somebody else is on us. So unfortunately, if we
Speaker 3: have the bandwidth beyond saving ourselves and saving our communities
Speaker 3: from economic harm immediately, we do need to start thinking
Speaker 3: about what this man is doing to undermine the democracy
Speaker 3: because we got nowhere else to go but here and
Speaker 3: potentially to a foreign prison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's that's I was watching something that
Speaker 1: kind of spoke to that.
Speaker 2: Dynamic in you know, Middle America.
Speaker 1: We'll call them like, you know, those those reliably red states,
Speaker 1: you know, God's Country or however you want to call it,
Speaker 1: And you're right, those those people are the most likely
Speaker 1: to believe conspiracy theories. They're the most likely to support
Speaker 1: Donald Trump and whatever he does, giving him the powers
Speaker 1: of a king essentially. They're the most likely to be racist,
Speaker 1: They're the most likely to consume propaganda, they're the most like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a whole list, and they fail on
Speaker 1: all of these like critical you know, uh headings. You know,
Speaker 1: under underneath all these critical elements that are important to
Speaker 1: a reasonably informed voter base, they're the most likely to
Speaker 1: ignore harms, things that will harm their own communities and
Speaker 1: shape their own outcomes negatively in order to.
Speaker 2: What they what they feel is protect their.
Speaker 1: Long term interests and their long term interests in their
Speaker 1: minds aligned with those of exceptionally wealthy white Christian men
Speaker 1: who were born healthy, uh and straight. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: that's a problem that we've found. But often when we
Speaker 1: try to engage, you know, people that that feel that way,
Speaker 1: there's a pushback. And the pushback is that, well, look,
Speaker 1: these people are not racist. They're not racist. They just
Speaker 1: want everything fair. They don't believe in white privilege. You know,
Speaker 1: if they if what is white privilege, they just cannot
Speaker 1: conceptualize that they were born with anything extra. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that we try to say, and i'd
Speaker 1: love to get your thoughts on just kind of this
Speaker 1: whole group of people as it relates to people who
Speaker 1: try to engage and people that try to inform them,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we say is white privilege
Speaker 1: is being able to be you know, born and run
Speaker 1: your race from the starting line.
Speaker 2: If you get to start with zero, that's white privilege.
Speaker 1: You know, anything else is being born with a strike
Speaker 1: against you, essentially, and you have to work a little harder.
Speaker 1: You may may have some hurdles on your lap where
Speaker 1: you know, a person who was born that straight, Christian,
Speaker 1: healthy white man gets to just run a fair race
Speaker 1: and if we catch up to you, I think that
Speaker 1: that kind of attacks your concept of white superiority must
Speaker 1: be buried somewhere in your head. Please share your thoughts
Speaker 1: on you know how challenging this has been to engage
Speaker 1: this community, or maybe some strategies you know, or ways
Speaker 1: around it perhaps.
Speaker 3: Okay, So you know, I would say that for those
Speaker 3: who believe in their minds, and I think that most
Speaker 3: people who are MAGA who support Donald Trump, they don't
Speaker 3: think of themselves as racist. Yeah, and would be quite
Speaker 3: offended by the idea that anyone thinks they're racist. And
Speaker 3: what they'll often say is, as you did, they just
Speaker 3: want everything to be fair.
Speaker 2: But with the data show.
Speaker 3: What the data shows, including this new data, the Pew
Speaker 3: Research data, the PRII data you name, it is that
Speaker 3: only white Americans agree in a majority with the following statement,
Speaker 3: discrimination against white people and discrimination against white Christians is
Speaker 3: as bad as discrimination is against other people. No other
Speaker 3: group agrees with that. They're the only group that views
Speaker 3: discrimination in their mind against white people and discrimination, I
Speaker 3: should say, against Christians generally, So discrimination against Christians and
Speaker 3: discrimination against whites is as bad as it's been against
Speaker 3: other people. In a country where black people were enslaved,
Speaker 3: where there was an Asian Exclusion Act, where non white
Speaker 3: immigrants were banned from the country in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 3: and could not get jobs, there were signs held up
Speaker 3: that used to say no Jews, no Cubans, no blacks.
Speaker 3: There have never been signs in America that say no Whites,
Speaker 3: no Christians. And yet only white people, white Christians, not
Speaker 3: even just all whites, but white Christians. Because white unaligned
Speaker 3: folks don't agree with this. White Christians are alone in
Speaker 3: the polling in a majority, and I'm talking about two
Speaker 3: thirds of them believe that there is rampant discrimination against
Speaker 3: white people and against Christians. And also only white Evangelicals,
Speaker 3: white Mormons, white Catholics, white Christians in general in a
Speaker 3: majority believe right that Donald Trump should be given all
Speaker 3: the powers he needs in order to set the country right,
Speaker 3: and that diversity programs and that diversity in general is
Speaker 3: more harmful than helpful to the country.
Speaker 2: There is no other group that believes that.
Speaker 3: So, what I would challenge white Americans to do is
Speaker 3: ask yourself, why do only white people believe that.
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 3: And back off from the question of whether you yourself
Speaker 3: are racist? As a white person, can you explain why
Speaker 3: white Americans are alone in these belief systems, why no
Speaker 3: other group sees it. The sense of victimization, the sense
Speaker 3: that white people are being victimized by immigration, victimized by diversity, equity,
Speaker 3: and inclusion, and also that elections are being stolen from them.
Speaker 2: No other group agrees with that, no other group. They're
Speaker 2: the only ones.
Speaker 3: If white Americans went into were beamed up into space
Speaker 3: like you know, Scotty beamed them up to to the enterprise,
Speaker 3: and they were all the earth, no Republican would ever
Speaker 3: be elected in the United States. Again, because only white
Speaker 3: Americans vote in a majority for Republicans. Ask they should
Speaker 3: ask themselves why every other group is over here and
Speaker 3: they're over here. Some thing's going on and you can't
Speaker 3: find any other factor.
Speaker 2: Sorry, this is my dog.
Speaker 3: You can't find any other factor that is relevant when
Speaker 3: you peel away all the other factors economic condition, educational attainment.
Speaker 2: No other factor explains it, but race.
Speaker 3: And all of the islands that white Christians exist on ideologically,
Speaker 3: you can't align them with anything else income, region, age,
Speaker 3: race is the only one in which they all align.
Speaker 3: So I would just challenge people who are white to
Speaker 3: ask themselves why that is if it is not about
Speaker 3: a sense that white people guard their superior condition in
Speaker 3: the original Constitution and believe that this country was created.
Speaker 4: For You know, we often find when trying to have
Speaker 4: these types of conversations that we are not dealing with
Speaker 4: the same facts. We are not living in the same reality,
Speaker 4: which becomes the non starter. Like right at the beginning
Speaker 4: of the conversation, we realize, Okay, the facts and the
Speaker 4: truth cannot be two sided. There's no two sets of
Speaker 4: facts that mean the same thing. There are no two
Speaker 4: realities or two truths. But as you just explained, when
Speaker 4: dealing with people, especially specifically MAGA Trump supporters, who I
Speaker 4: think identify a piece of themselves in him, so they
Speaker 4: end up defending themselves while trying to defend him.
Speaker 1: Joy.
Speaker 4: How do we have these conversations when we can't start
Speaker 4: from the same place. What are some tools that we
Speaker 4: can use to even try for our neighbors, for a
Speaker 4: family member that thanksgiving, for those who just are contrarian
Speaker 4: in nature, What are some starting points to try to
Speaker 4: get us at least back to the same set of
Speaker 4: facts and living in the same reality.
Speaker 3: I think part of the problem is it's hard to
Speaker 3: do that because, as I have observed trump Ism, I
Speaker 3: no longer view it as a political ideology. I view
Speaker 3: it as essentially a religion, a religion that has in
Speaker 3: many ways replaced traditional Christianity and become a version a
Speaker 3: sect of Christianity, because again, white Catholics, Evangelicals, Protestants, and
Speaker 3: people who are Latter day Saints all line up together
Speaker 3: on one side for the party that is against immigration,
Speaker 3: against feeding the poor, against helping the sick.
Speaker 2: Esus stood for correct.
Speaker 3: If you just listen to the red letters in the Bible,
Speaker 3: it states that we and actually the pope who just died,
Speaker 3: Pope Francis his last speech, his last you know, incyclicals
Speaker 3: to his public, was that we must care for the
Speaker 3: immigrant and the poor. He named himself, Francis, after Saint
Speaker 3: Francis of a CCD patron of the poor, patron saying
Speaker 3: of the poor. There's never been a previous Pope Francis.
Speaker 3: And there's a reason for that that no pope, you know,
Speaker 3: in their gilded you know fancy, you know, silk slippers,
Speaker 3: wanted to be associated with me, you know, Saint Francis
Speaker 3: until him and he said he would say, I am
Speaker 3: of the poor and the poor army, I.
Speaker 2: Am of them.
Speaker 3: Right, And Christians in America, Evangelical Christians, disagree with that.
Speaker 3: They disagree with the red letters of Jesus. So what
Speaker 3: I tend to think is it's a religion. I couldn't
Speaker 3: talk someone out of being a Buddhist if I tried,
Speaker 3: and I wouldn't try. So I don't try to talk
Speaker 3: people out of mechanism because I think it's a religion,
Speaker 3: and I can't talk people out of their religion. But
Speaker 3: what I do think that is useful when you're talking
Speaker 3: to people who are aligned with him, it's just ask
Speaker 3: them some very simple questions and ask and keep asking
Speaker 3: and drilling into the facts they think are true. When
Speaker 3: they say tariffs are going to make the economy better
Speaker 3: say why, how, well, because the foreign government's going to
Speaker 3: pay them. Really, because when the importer brings them in,
Speaker 3: the importer has to pay those tariffs. Right, how does
Speaker 3: the country get involved in that? That sent them that
Speaker 3: they're not involved, and just keep making them justify what
Speaker 3: they're doing. I think at a certain point you see
Speaker 3: a lot of these people do this on TikTok where
Speaker 3: they try to get mag of people to explain the
Speaker 3: things they believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they generally.
Speaker 3: Can't, they can't support it. Just let them try and
Speaker 3: see and see if that breaks the spell.
Speaker 1: I recognize and have for some time that, you know,
Speaker 1: we're in a challenging place, but there's this sense of.
Speaker 2: What should we focus on? What first? What's the most
Speaker 2: important thing?
Speaker 1: Obviously we've talked about Donald Trump himself and the strategy
Speaker 1: of his regime.
Speaker 2: I like that word.
Speaker 1: We've talked about white evangelicals and and how they feel
Speaker 1: as though the country is being taken from them specifically,
Speaker 1: and that they are being treated unfairly. We've talked about
Speaker 1: we've touched on, you know, maybe the strategies that that
Speaker 1: democrats should you know consider, you know, using I know
Speaker 1: that you're doing it with the with the tour. But
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's not inconceivable to to see Democrats
Speaker 1: implementing something similar.
Speaker 2: Just asking people what do you want?
Speaker 1: And you know, this conversation obviously is a lot bigger
Speaker 1: than today's episode. But I think that you know, just
Speaker 1: coming from your your mind and your vantage point, this
Speaker 1: question could certainly at minimum be interesting, you know, to
Speaker 1: get your response, but for a lot of people it
Speaker 1: could you know, give them a sense of Okay, here's
Speaker 1: what we should be focusing on. So I'll ask if
Speaker 1: you had a magic wand and you could make an
Speaker 1: instant change to I'm not going to ask about the country,
Speaker 1: because obviously I think I know what that answer would be.
Speaker 1: But if you could make an instant change, let's say
Speaker 1: to the Democratic Party, what would you change about the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party that you think would would lead to better
Speaker 1: outcomes not just for Democrats but for the country.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a long conversation. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Having worked in Democratic campaign politics, I think the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party has a lot of problems, sure, and I would
Speaker 3: I would point to I'll just point to two that
Speaker 3: I think are really big. I think one of them
Speaker 3: is democrats general refusal to embrace the base they have,
Speaker 3: rather than coveting the base Republicans have. I think, in general,
Speaker 3: my experience with the Democratic Party is that their base
Speaker 3: is multiracial. It's heavily black. Democrats really rely on black
Speaker 3: voters and on brown voters, but they really want white voters.
Speaker 3: They really really want white working class voters back, and
Speaker 3: that has caused them to fixate on those voters almost
Speaker 3: to the exclusion of everyone else, to make assumptions about
Speaker 3: black and brown and young voters and aapi voters that
Speaker 3: are not supported by evidence.
Speaker 2: They just assume the blacks will come out and vote,
Speaker 2: especially for Kamala Yeah.
Speaker 3: Correct, and so yeah, percentage wise they will. But there's
Speaker 3: also a third person always in every race, and it's
Speaker 3: called the couch. And in this race, millions of us
Speaker 3: chose the couch. Millions of young voters chose the couch.
Speaker 3: Thirty percent of Americans voted for Kamala Harris, thirty one
Speaker 3: percent voted for Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: The rest voted for the couch. That's a problem.
Speaker 3: The pri polls show that a third of the voters
Speaker 3: who chose not to vote in the last election now
Speaker 3: regret their vote, and a majority of those who did
Speaker 3: not vote in the last election. This is across all races,
Speaker 3: and who regret their vote. About seventy percent of them
Speaker 3: believe Donald Trump is a dictator. So there is a
Speaker 3: pool of voters out there who you could pull off
Speaker 3: the couch if you would.
Speaker 2: Just focus on them and ask them for their votes.
Speaker 3: The second issue I have with the Democratic Party is
Speaker 3: that they are also very married to neoliberal economics. You
Speaker 3: hear Democrats talk a lot about the middle class, the
Speaker 3: middle class, to the middle class, the middle class, the middle
Speaker 3: class is shrinking. A lot of their voters are not
Speaker 3: middle class, they're barely middle class, or working class, or
Speaker 3: or Democrats ignore them completely.
Speaker 2: They don't talk about them.
Speaker 3: They only talk about this mythical middle class, and they
Speaker 3: focus their economic ideas on this mythical middle class. College
Speaker 3: educated and college educated, people whose kids go to college,
Speaker 3: people who themselves went to college or have PhDs, people
Speaker 3: watch MSNBC.
Speaker 2: That is a part of the electorate.
Speaker 3: But in America, only about at maximum forty percent of
Speaker 3: Americans have college degrees, and that's only in about twenty
Speaker 3: two states. In the rest of the states, fewer than
Speaker 3: thirty percent of Americans have college degrees. College entertainment is
Speaker 3: not a majority position.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I may, I want to make sure that
Speaker 1: I interject this and qu don't let me jump in
Speaker 1: front of you. But I heard something said recently. I
Speaker 1: think that the gentleman's name is doctor Roy Casa Granda,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, that's his name. But he said
Speaker 1: something that was so potent, and he said that the
Speaker 1: difference between middle class and poor is essentially it's just
Speaker 1: stable housing. And so I think it's it's important to
Speaker 1: kind of help illuminate the point that you're making in
Speaker 1: terms of how the middle class is shrinking and what
Speaker 1: we would typically conceive of as middle class that is
Speaker 1: very much a myth nowadays.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1: For folks to hyperfixiate on the mythical middle middle class
Speaker 1: ignores the reality of our current predicament. And they're they're
Speaker 1: playing politics as usual, and this is not the state
Speaker 1: of plan anymore.
Speaker 2: So so continue.
Speaker 3: Absolutely no, and and and you're and you're absolutely right
Speaker 3: in that if you only focus on the middle class
Speaker 3: and suburban college educated voters and you're going for the suburbs,
Speaker 3: will the poor and the working class include rural people,
Speaker 3: not all of them are white. That includes people who,
Speaker 3: as you said, have unstable housing. That includes people who
Speaker 3: are one paycheck away from poverty, people who are using
Speaker 3: payday loans to pay for groceries, which is an increasing phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Democrats don't talk about that. They don't talk like that.
Speaker 3: You know who talks about the working class Republicans, and
Speaker 3: they don't even care about the working class. They could
Speaker 3: give it him. They only care about the super rich.
Speaker 3: But they talk like they care about the working class.
Speaker 3: And the third thing I would say about Democrats that
Speaker 3: is a problem, if we had to have three big diagnoses,
Speaker 3: it is their fervent defense of the system. Democrats are
Speaker 3: systems people, and they insist that what we must do
Speaker 3: is defend democracy, defend the system.
Speaker 2: Well, the system doesn't.
Speaker 3: Work for a lot of people, and so when you're
Speaker 3: a person defending the system, you are essentially rejecting people
Speaker 3: in your own base who think the system is failing
Speaker 3: and who voting for even Barack Obama did nothing for them.
Speaker 3: They didn't get anything materially from it, Whereas when Donald
Speaker 3: Trump got elected, in their mind, they got a check,
Speaker 3: even though the check was from Nancy Pelosi. But the
Speaker 3: Democrats weren't smart enough to put the Donald Trump put on.
Speaker 3: So they think Trump is a check. They think Trump
Speaker 3: eagles checks. I'm arouving your converse with a United States
Speaker 3: senatorial candidate who said, well, what should I be saying?
Speaker 3: And I said, cut all the rest of your speech
Speaker 3: out and just say checks. Let's say check works. That's
Speaker 3: what people need.
Speaker 4: You spoke about college educated, and immediately what popped into
Speaker 4: my head was the dismantling of the Department of Education,
Speaker 4: the other side trying to rewrite or erase our history
Speaker 4: and major institutions of higher learning kind of bending the
Speaker 4: knee preemptively to the wishes of this administration and the
Speaker 4: newly re elected president. Your alma mater, however, made the
Speaker 4: news for some different reasons recently. As a Harvard graduate,
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about your thoughts of Harvard
Speaker 4: to just not bow to that pressure that the Trump
Speaker 4: administration is kind of blanketing all institutions of higher learning with.
Speaker 3: I was very pleasantly surprised. I was very proud of Harvard,
Speaker 3: and I haven't said that very often since I graduated
Speaker 3: inteen ninety one Harvard. You know, I took ten at Harvard.
Speaker 3: Harvard is not a liberal institution. The idea it's liberal
Speaker 3: is kind of ridiculous. It's full of very rich people.
Speaker 3: Legacies are about forty three percent of the admittees who
Speaker 3: just get there because the granddaddy went there and they're
Speaker 3: super rich, and they have named some of the buildings
Speaker 3: are named after him. Harvard teaches neoliberal economics and nothing else.
Speaker 3: They teach against equity and inclusion. They're just not liberal.
Speaker 3: But in this case, they are one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: years older than the United States, and they have a
Speaker 3: fifty three billion dollar endowment, and they're not going to
Speaker 3: be told what to do by a mere president of
Speaker 3: the United States, who, in their mind is an ephemeral
Speaker 3: figure who will be out in four years or maybe
Speaker 3: eight or maybe twelve or until he dies or guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I'm proud of Harvard, and I wish more institutions.
Speaker 3: I think Columbia was of the opposite and abject failure.
Speaker 3: Didn't defend their students who are being deported without due process,
Speaker 3: didn't defend democracy, and it bent the knee. So I'm
Speaker 3: hoping that Harvard and also the Big ten. I'll give
Speaker 3: the big ten colleges there due that they're standing up
Speaker 3: to him. I think any way that people are standing
Speaker 3: up to Trump in large ways are small, big ups.
Speaker 3: To Jalen Hurts, I'm about to be an Eagles fan
Speaker 3: for life now because that way, that wasn't even my team.
Speaker 2: But he's like, yeah, I got.
Speaker 3: Other things to do than to go stand around with
Speaker 3: Donald Trump, you know, and I'm not doing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I liked that, couldn't cur I'm with that. I
Speaker 2: like that absolutely. I know that.
Speaker 1: We're short on time, but I wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: that we ask you about this because you know, you've
Speaker 1: had a lot to say about, you know, the boycotting
Speaker 1: of Target, and you know, just the resistance. You know,
Speaker 1: we talked about obviously Harvard and the Big ten U
Speaker 1: and I applaud them as well, them getting together and
Speaker 1: figuring out ways to resist Donald Trump. But that's as
Speaker 1: people as individuals who can choose to shop here to
Speaker 1: shop there, you know, talk to us about maybe and
Speaker 1: talk to our listeners. I should say about maybe the
Speaker 1: long term strategy of boycotts and how you see them
Speaker 1: as having the potential to shape political outcomes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I would say is that, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: a student of the apartheid movement in South Africa, and
Speaker 3: the way that eventually South Africans, Black South Africans broke
Speaker 3: apartheid was through general strikes. It was by making the
Speaker 3: country ungovernable and economically unsound. And that was through a
Speaker 3: combination of encouraging divestment and boycott externally and using general
Speaker 3: strikes and economic resistance internally. And that is the way
Speaker 3: you ultimately can break autocracy and in our country. I
Speaker 3: just wrote a book about Medgar Everson Marley Evers Williams,
Speaker 3: and one of the ways that Medgar fought against autocracy
Speaker 3: here was to encourage people to use boycotts and to
Speaker 3: use boycotts to break the autocracy in Mississippi. And what
Speaker 3: he would say is that not everyone has got the
Speaker 3: capacity to march, or has got the courage to march,
Speaker 3: or has got the courage to engage in civic activism,
Speaker 3: because it's risky to go out there and put yourself
Speaker 3: in the you know what, the police and the authorities.
Speaker 2: But everyone can do a little something.
Speaker 3: He launched his boycott against the Jackson retailers who would
Speaker 3: not respect black customers by saying and he launched it
Speaker 3: during Easter, and he said, rather than go and buy
Speaker 3: your new Easter outfit this year, Maybe make an outfit
Speaker 3: or where what you wore last year. Just refuse to
Speaker 3: shop when you're not respected. And I believe that Meger
Speaker 3: was right. I would not set foot in a store
Speaker 3: that treated me with disrespect. And Harvard treated our community
Speaker 3: with disrespect. They don't deserve our dollars. Walmart did the
Speaker 3: same thing. All of these companies, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, these
Speaker 3: companies that have said we don't want diversity, then fine,
Speaker 3: you don't have to have diversity in your customers either.
Speaker 2: Ooh.
Speaker 3: That is to me, the small thing we can each do.
Speaker 3: We can just choose to shop elsewhere, choose not to
Speaker 3: hand our money to people who would bow down to
Speaker 3: a wanna be dictator. If you can just do that
Speaker 3: little thing, you are already doing the activism that's possible
Speaker 3: for you, and you are already doing something heroic for yourself,
Speaker 3: your community, your dignity, and your country.
Speaker 2: Joyanne Red.
Speaker 4: We already express to you that you are literally a
Speaker 4: superhero to us. Our listeners, we assume and I'm not
Speaker 4: even assume, and I know how they feel, are going
Speaker 4: to be just as excited to hear your voice as
Speaker 4: we are to be having this conversation with you, catch
Speaker 4: us all up on what's next for you, how we
Speaker 4: can keep what with you, social media websites, whatever that is.
Speaker 4: Because I was talking to a great friend of ours,
Speaker 4: Jamail Hill, who loves you to life. Uh, And we
Speaker 4: just all want to be able to show up for you,
Speaker 4: specifically in this moment and moving forward and the best
Speaker 4: way that we can.
Speaker 2: So how do we support you? How do we keep
Speaker 2: up with you?
Speaker 4: Besides Ramses and I crashing this tour and showing up
Speaker 4: to give you a hub. How can we all collectively
Speaker 4: be a part of the Joyanne read movement?
Speaker 3: Well, I appreciate that, you know, Jamel Hill, that's my girl,
Speaker 3: that is my Machete's sister and vacation buddy.
Speaker 2: So absolutely love her.
Speaker 3: And big up to Jamail who is fighting the good
Speaker 3: fight in a tough atmosphere. She did that a y
Speaker 3: which is a rough atmosphere. Yes, indeed, and one and
Speaker 3: beat them at their own game.
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 3: I keep it real simple. Pretty much everything that I
Speaker 3: do is at Joyanne Read. So I am at joy
Speaker 3: and read on Instagram, I am at joy and read
Speaker 3: on threads. I'm at joy and read on Blue Sky
Speaker 3: and my sub stack is.
Speaker 2: Joyanneread dot com.
Speaker 3: The only places it's a little bit different is on
Speaker 3: TikTok and Facebook. I'm joy read official, and if you
Speaker 3: subscribe to me on nread dot com, I do not
Speaker 3: charge for subscriptions. You can just subscribe for free. The
Speaker 3: only people that I charge a fee too is if
Speaker 3: you want to comment to me because you're gonna troll me.
Speaker 3: You're gonna have to put some coins in the bucket
Speaker 3: you want to be a comment or you gotta pay
Speaker 3: is free. I don't believe in paywalls. You guys can
Speaker 3: just subscribe to my subsecon on joy andread dot com.
Speaker 3: I try to post every day some kind of thought
Speaker 3: or thing, and I will also be announcing there and
Speaker 3: of course on Read This, Read That, my podcast with
Speaker 3: Jackie Read my Sore Sister Cousin Friend, and I will
Speaker 3: be letting folks know on those two forums when my
Speaker 3: new show, which is going to be called The joy
Speaker 3: Read Show, will be launching. So I am launching a
Speaker 3: new show. Find out when I'm giving you all the
Speaker 3: little sneak peek. The show is going to launch very
Speaker 3: soon and I'm going to make the announcement on Joynread
Speaker 3: dot com and I'll read this read that.
Speaker 1: Well, listen, we will, we will take it, and we
Speaker 1: will continue to watch you you, to watch you shine
Speaker 1: and support you however we can, as Q mentioned, So
Speaker 1: with that in mind, I'd like to say thank you
Speaker 1: again very much for taking time to come here and
Speaker 1: talk to us, to share your insight with us, You're
Speaker 1: brilliance with us, and to obviously to make an announcement
Speaker 1: on your forthcoming show and how people can stay in
Speaker 1: touch with you and hopefully become fans of you if
Speaker 1: they haven't been before in the same way that we are.
Speaker 1: So once again, today's guest is American political commentator, best
Speaker 1: selling author, and television host Joy and Read.
Speaker 2: Ramsey is and cute. Thank you all very much.
Speaker 3: Look as an old hip hop head, first of all,
Speaker 3: I will take those CARDI B tickets.
Speaker 2: If you want to. And look, I'm look my theme.
Speaker 3: Song when I graduated from Harvard me and my best
Speaker 3: friend shots to you. Unfortunately pass since then our theme
Speaker 3: song was can I Kick It?
Speaker 2: Yes? You can? You? Can?
Speaker 3: You tipping the trial called quest? I'm a o G
Speaker 3: hip hop fans. I appreciate y'all It's always great to
Speaker 3: be with fellow hip hop fans.
Speaker 2: I appreciate