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Prediction markets turn global politics into profit as traders cash in on Nicolás Maduro’s capture, the federal government faces constitutional backlash for labeling ICE observers “domestic terrorists,” and Black women survivalists prepare for another Trump era by building systems of self-reliance where the state has failed.

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The Government Unconstitutionally Labels ICE Observers as Domestic Terrorists
Maduro’s capture gives Polymarket, prediction market traders huge profits

Black Women Survivalists and Preppers Are Ready for Trump Era

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TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: Shout out to 2026, Happy New Year. This is DeRay, and welcome to Pod Save the People. On this episode, it’s me, Myles, Sharhonda, and our guest contributor, Don Calloway. And we’re here to talk about what happened at the end of 2025 to lead us into 2026 with regard to race, justice, culture, and equity. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at Pod Save The People. Here we go. [music break] It is 2026 and it is great to be back. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter. 

Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @SunPulpit on Instagram. 

Don Calloway: This is Don Callaway at @DCalloway on Instagram. 

Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bassier at @BossierSha on Instagram. 

DeRay Mckesson: Let me just talk about saying I missed y’all and and Don, welcome back– 

Myles E. Johnson: Missed you too. 

DeRay Mckesson: –to the show. I missed y’all. You know, its been, we’ve been going back and forth on text with the just putting stories in, but because you don’t talk about them until we get here, it’s like there’s so much to talk about, but happy new year. Happy holidays. It’s good to hear y’all voices. 

Myles E. Johnson: Happy New Year. I missed y’all too. I was so excited to talk about everything. It feels like so many things happen when we are apart. 

DeRay Mckesson: It’s pretty nuts. Um. Well, let’s jump right in. So we’ll start with, uh Myles, I’ll pass it over to you. There is a rapper who really took a dive to MAGA land. [laugh] And before we end with Venezuela, which we clearly need to talk about, I want to start with Nicki Minaj. What happened? We all saw that conversation with Erika Kirk. We saw the tweets, but her on stage at one of the turning point affairs just seemed to be really the culmination of something and I was waiting to hear your take. 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. A, I resent having to talk about Nicki Minaj. [laughter] I thought that was one of the things I that we, I kind of missed. And I was like, okay, well, maybe I kind of got away from this, scot-free. But, um, as everybody probably who’s listening to this knows, Nicki Minaj sat down with Erika Kirk. Here’s my analysis of the moment. Cause I don’t want to bore anybody. Cause everybody by this time has seen it 10,000 times. Nicki Minaj has been showing us she was on this track for a extremely long time. And I’m saying pre the COVID incident and the made up cousin or nephew whose balls blew up because they they took a vaccine shot. Nicki Minaj has always played around with conservatism in her in her um lyrics. She has always played around with positioning herself in a way that aligns herself with power and exploitation and exploitive men. This is not really new. What I am kind of glad about is that more and more we’re seeing these people, specifically Black cultural pop figures, who are showing that I’m actually conservative and you painted me with a liberal brush because it was convenient for you and because of what I didn’t say. But there is no proof that I am not MAGA Barbie. There’s no proof that I am not a conservative and I love that we’re in this place where we really have to put people’s politics where their mouth actually is. And now we’re seeing who people really want to be a mouthpiece for. Last thing I’ll say about it, there’s been a lot of, and this might just be because of the corners of the internet that I that I like to be on. But there was a lot of ideas around Nicki Minaj doing this because of Cardi B, um a lot of people saying she’s doing this because of Doechi doing this. Because of she’s being competitive with other female rappers and stuff like that. I think that that is kind of a myopic way of um analyzing this moment. I think that Nicki Minaj is a woman who had a broken promise. I think tht Nicki Minaj thought she was going to be Jay-Z. And I think that now you’re seeing somebody who their husband is not going to the White House and talking about prison reform or rehabilitation. Her uh she’s not being requested to help Vice President Kamala Harris get elected. She’s not being included inside of the political power. Even when you think about real estate deals that you see Jay-Z getting and seeing all these different people getting these business opportunities, you don’t see her getting those things either. So more than anything, this is a power move by a woman who’s desperate for power. And now that she’s more into her 40s, she has less and less options. So I think that gaze of what she’s doing is a little bit more accurate than just thinking that this is um her version of a diss track, but on a stage with a conservative. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I had not thought about the power piece here, like that that is good, and that is like shaking some stuff loose for me, namely around the way that she has shown up with kind of more emerging artists in the genre too, right, where she has felt very much like people need to kiss her ring in order to, you know, be successful, to you know be the next hot girl. She does not have a good reputation as a collaborator, you, know, etc. Um I mean, people have also talked about the fact that she came to this country undocumented herself, right? Um. And that her citizenship is still, it seems, in question. And that part of what this might be, um one, to your point about who her husband is, right, is like something to lay the groundwork for something that he, because he might eventually need a pardon. Um. And then two, something that helps her secure her own citizenship. But as we know, like, that camp is not loyal to anyone. You know, they will deport her in a second and take her for everything she has while they do. 

Don Calloway: Yeah, I just feel like we really messed up approaching 20 years ago when we included celebrities in the realm of politics. Now, I blame Barack Obama for a lot of that. In case y’all forgot, that’s what I’m on. I love him but I blame him. [laughter] This is the natural outgrowth of that because the more we welcomed in celebrities, right. And John Legend is kind of at one extreme, a guy who’s educated and knows a few things. But you also open the door for where we are with the Nicki Minaj, someone who’s not educated on these issues, who knows nothing, but we have welcomed in people because politicians and political parties have been desperately in search of anything that can bring them eyeballs. The natural outgrowth of that is Nicki Minaja, fundamentally somebody who is sleeps with a pedophile and is frankly probably an idiot, but these are the people that we have invited into the political process. I find it unfortunate because Nicki Minaj is undisputably an extraordinarily talented rapper, particularly if she and her claim is true that she’s written all the stuff that she’s ever spit. Uh. And I just, I hate to see a talent go out like this because this is the idiot’s path. Uh. What I will say is that I almost kind of like bristle a little bit at even calling her conservative. Maybe she is in that tradition of like the West Indian New Yorker who are, you know, conservative people. But the reality is I just think she’s dumb. And that whole turning point USA–

[laughter] 

DeRay Mckesson: I didn’t know where you were going with that! 

Don Calloway: I just think she’s stupid and I saw no political ideas coming out of that turning point conference. I saw the gworls battling for attention in the attention economy, right? That’s what I saw and she was a part of that circus and it was just, it was deeply idiotic to me. 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh Don, you’re so hip. [laughter]

DeRay Mckesson: Is this when we say, six, seven, just to just to [?]–

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

DeRay Mckesson: Thank you. 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay DeRay. 

DeRay Mckesson: I have a niece and nephew. 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

DeRay Mckesson: Um that makes me I wanted to ask you all about, you know, Erika Kirk has been a topic of conversation, too. Obviously, she was in that conversation with Nicki Minaj. But independent of that conversation, she has become a political star in Turning Point, leading Turning Point in a way that she frankly was not when Charlie Kirk was alive. We never saw–

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: –Erika Kirk. She was not on stages, but she is coming out to fireworks and the whole nine. You know Turning Point is opening chapters at HBCUs, and they have a whole strategy around engaging college students that she is extending. She didn’t create it, obviously. Charlie was the person who did that. But I’ve been watching her and I’m like, I went from never knowing what this woman looked like, never hearing about Erika Kirk. And now she is seems to be a lot of places. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think she’s on deck to be J.D. Vance’s next wife. Um. And I think that’s also part of what they’re trying to do there. I think that you know his his current wife, you know when he thought he wanted to be an intellectual, when he though he wanted to like move in those circles was like a trophy in those spaces, right? But now that he has decided that he’s going to sit squarely in the MAGA camp. Um, he, I mean, he’s even talked about his current wife, Usha, right like converting to Christianity, you know what I mean? Like he talks about his kids as if he doesn’t realize that they are South Asian kids, you know what I means? So I think part of what they are trying to do in like positioning Erika Kirk as a celebrity is a little bit like, you know, the queen of England deciding that her son should marry the princess of Spain. That’s what it feels like to me, like a move to position her. Um, so that she takes on more formal kind of head of state, uh, you know, roles for the Republican party. And I think J.D. Vance is going to be her pathway to that. 

Myles E. Johnson: I think there was a little bit too much dip on their unsalted unseasoned chip though, because there’s a couple of things. First Don, you know me, I like to take it all the way back. So I think that the politics and the celebrity thing, I think, that we did definitely see an iteration and a mutation of that. And I think the marking of that about 20 years ago is so accurate. But I also want to say that Malcolm X totally critiqued this in his era too. He was talking about, why are these comedians? Why are these athletes being the political representation of what Black people are going through? And why does that not happen to um white people? In parentheses, that’s my new thing. In parentheses we know why that doesn’t happen to white people. But I just wanted to kind of like map that to like a larger system that has been making our voices trivial and making our voices and our and our um political positions um trivial. But to me how this connects to Erika Kirk is that I feel like using that celebrity culture, using pyrotechnics and stuff, like people are on it, like, people are realizing that they’re being sold somebody that um a tragedy is being turned into spectacle, and people are feeling the awkwardness. Again, people don’t necessarily know how to name the absurdity that they’re feeling, but they know that it’s absurd. And they can see that this doesn’t really feel how a grieving wife should feel. And I feel like, in my opinion, maybe this is just me being optimistic. I feel, like, them being so um forward with Erika so quickly has made a lot of people realize that there’s more performance than sincere emotion going on behind some of these moves, which I feel like has helped crack some of that MAGA facade. 

Don Calloway: Yeah, to me, uh and I’ll be brief, the whole Erica Kirk moment from basically 48 hours post-assassination through today has just felt really gross. The whole thing has felt performative and gross to me. Um. Now, listen, I come from the Black church. I just left church. I am, I listen. I spent enough time around the petty mothers to hear the talk. Is she pregnant? Who baby that is? Let’s do the math. And but, you know, so maybe that’s a little, that’s the most joy I can get out of, you know, however interesting that discussion. But all things Erika Kirk, everything I have seen from, you know, her immediate post-assassination speech well I’ll, I’ll let her have that. That seemed, you know, sincere. But from that moment to now, the J.D. Vance stuff, the revelation that she’s been a contestant in multiple reality/dating show competition spaces. You know, it feels like a modern day, Tammy Faye-ish, caricature-ish type of situation. And it just all feels really gross. To me, what feels the grossest about it is the mass amounts of people who appear to have been, since we’re talking Malcolm X, let her straight bamboozled, run amok here. Um. And it just, you know, I think I hate to sound like the old guy, but I am proud that I came from a time in which politics was a substance of enterprise taken on by serious people. Even if we didn’t agree, and this is the antithesis of that. And it just all, the only word I can come up with is, this Erika Kirk moment feels really, really gross to my spirit. 

DeRay Mckesson: You know, since you brought up church, I will be remiss if I did not bring up the passing of the one and only Richard Smallwood. 

Don Calloway: Indeed. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh my god, yes, yes 

DeRay Mckesson: Who gave us the legendary and my favorite, Total Praise. I mean, I can’t the idea that Total Praise–

Sharhonda Bossier: A beautiful song. 

DeRay Mckesson: –is not a 200-year-old song. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I know. 

DeRay Mckesson: Just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m like, that is God just sang that from the mountains. You’re like. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

DeRay Mckesson: What a what a beautiful song. But I wanted to recognize Richard Smallwood. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: Switching topics, the Palisades, so there was fire in LA. 

Sharhonda Bossier: A year ago. 

DeRay Mckesson: And there and Sharhonda lived through that. And there was an after-action report, obviously that would have to come out. As you remember, we covered that the fire chief quit, was fired, whatever version of that story you believe and she not there no more. But there was an after-action report and the Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief, Kenneth Cook, who wrote the after action report, declined to endorse the final version. He said, and I quote, “the current version appears highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.” And he put this in writing, and it just furthers the idea that the city has tried to throw the fire department under the bus and take no responsibility or little responsibility for preparation or the lack thereof that led to the fire. The reason I bring this up is that, you know, Myles, one of the things I thought about over break is a point you’ve made, Sharhonda, a point that you’ve make before, is that we talk about the difference between the parties so much, and there are huge differences between the parties for sure. And then there’s some stuff where you’re like, why is our side being shady? You know, we not supposed to be changing the reports. You’re like the report is supposed to be the report, we just deal with it. And when I read this, I was like, oh, come on, Karen Bass. This is, you know, you’re supposed to be the person sort of holding a standard over there and y’all over there changing the report. But I wanted to bring it here because the fires was obviously one of the biggest stories of last year. And I was worried that the report being changed, I hadn’t heard anybody talk about it. 

Myles E. Johnson: The first tin foil of of 2026. Um. [laughter] But I remember, um and I’ll put it in our chat so we can hopefully um include it in our links, but I remember there being a lot of information coming about this fire being strategic, like that it was an arsonist and that it was a nihilistic white supremacist uh fire set on purpose. I just sent some stuff from PBS News and a couple other things that were talking about that. So my mind automatically went to why can’t this report be clear? Why is there so much misinformation happening in this report. And why is there so much just mess going on with the report? And I was like, oh, it’s probably to cover this up. To me, every single thing that’s been happening, specifically since Trump has been elected, has been a way for him to do something or something to happen. And we not really know the reason or be able to kind of collect a story as to why it happened, or to reject the story and then kind of invent their own. And this doesn’t, this is not excluded from that. So that’s that’s my little conspiracy theory. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, you know, we go into primary season uh here this year, and Karen Bass is incredibly politically vulnerable, and her handling of the fires and the fallout is one of the big reasons behind that. Um. You know, I also think that part of what they don’t want to be honest about is that the city and the fire department just did not adhere to their own procedures and protocols, right? Like they didn’t staff up like they were supposed to. They didn’t deploy when they were suppose to. Like it was, you know, leadership failure after leadership failure after leadership failure. And when you have people investigating themselves, that’s the last thing they’re going to say, right. And I think Karen Bass will likely be a one term mayor. Um. And I thing a big reason for that is the fallout from this and what seems like to your point, DeRay, shadiness um from her from her office. 

Don Calloway: Yeah, so  um the cooking of books is something that one should expect from municipal executives at all times. We’ve seen it. I know everybody’s watched The Wire, DeRay you’re from Baltimore, we know what, you know, how crime statistics are manipulated across the country, but particularly in an instance of, you know, of something this devastating. I am certainly not surprised to see that happen. One thing that worries me most about the fires broadly is when you consider the area that was most devastated, the African-American community in Altadena. I happen to draw the parallel with the tornado, which I hope much like the, I hope the fires were an act of God, unlike sibling Myles may suggest, right? But I hope the fires were an act of God, certainly the tornado was an act of God, but it destroyed North St. Louis. So what happens as a result, and that’s something I think we should all be vigilant of is that the colonizers with bags of money are coming. Those neighborhoods will never look the same. They will not belong to us anymore. They will not serve us anymore, and those areas will look 10 years from now uh completely different. And so um, I still, that’s kind of where my heart continues to be on the fire’s tip. And yes, Karen Bass probably lost the mayorship if there is a strong candidate. Frankly, even the guy that she just beat, right, uh–

Sharhonda Bossier: Russo yeah. 

Don Calloway: –comes back. Russo comes back, along the same lines and says look I told you so but I’m just mostly thinking about those Black communities in these cities that are devastated and we should be vigilant about the patterns that come after these and the land that will be taken and just the broad scale pillaging of this real territory in these city’s across the country where we’ll see things like this unfortunately in the future. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I had an aunt lose her home in Altadena and her community is not rebuilding like her neighborhood is not rebuilding at the same pace that, you know, Malibu, the Palisades. I was in Malibu last week um on like a long run, decided to go get some coffee, and then, you, know, trying to avoid PCH went the back way. And there are homes going up again, right? Like there’s framing going up, like those people. are rebuilding. And to your point, Don, that community, for the most part, will remain in the hands of the folks who have owned it before who owned it before the fire. And Altadena is unlikely that’s unlikely to be the case. And you know I think a lot of what Black LA has talked about, particularly as our representation in the city has declined, is like what it means to lose a solidly middle class community. Um, in this moment when so many of our elders are passing on or don’t want to rebuild, can’t rebuild, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Um, so yeah, truly devastating, uh, to the, to Black folks in Southern California to have lost that community. 

DeRay Mckesson: And I’ll take us back to DC before we go to Venezuela, but the Kennedy Center renaming as the Trump Kennedy Center, which just is so sort of annoyingly stupid. And I don’t know if you saw that the bylaws were changed quietly, so only the people that Trump appointed could actually vote. So that’s why they went out and said there was a unanimous vote because the bylaws said that the only real votes are from his team, but they do not have the power to change the name, which you probably also know. Because the, you know, Congress named it, named the building. But I wonder, like, do you think these are distractions? Is this a part of, like the overtaking of culture? So he’s just going to slap his name on everything? You’re just like, of all the things going on, changing the building’s name just seems stupid even by Trump standards. So I wanted to, I wanted to bring it here to see if there was something I was missing. 

Myles E. Johnson: Well, if we think about the timeframe of him doing that, and then we know that he bombed Nigeria, we’re gonna talk about Venezuela, we talk about the Epstein files, that is such an easy way to um get people talking about something that has no results, but can distract people. It has no consequence, but it can distract people long enough, and to um just keep people off their balance. That is such a valuable way to keep people distracted and to keep people feeling dominated is to keep them off their balance. And this is one of those things to me. Um, but also is Congress just for decoration. Like what do, what do they do? [laughter] Is it just? [laughing]

Don Calloway: All the things that you said, Myles, are true. It is decoration. There are other things, you know, ostensibly more important things happening in the world. But uh to me, it’s directly connected to what we’ve seen in the last 20 years in the conservative movement, openly bemoaning the idea that arts and culture belong to liberals and arts and culture, you know have been a bastion of the left. Um. You know, it is not certainly to be detached from the notion of what the Kennedy Center has meant. For a national arts and community narrative. You’ve seen hip hop institutionalized via education, not just shows and programming, but educational programming and institutional programming via the Kennedy Center. You’ve seeing efforts for diverse acts performing and liberation-based acts performing at the Kennedy Center. They’re putting an end to all of that. And the Kennedy center is more than symbolic because like all of the Smithsonian institutions and the National Mall, this is America’s theater. I don’t, if you live in Wisconsin, if you live in Walla Walla, Washington, you have a stake in the Kennedy Center. It is your country’s signature theater. And this is Trump putting the conservative MAGA stamp on that, you know. And I’m proud to see artists leaving despite what Stephen Miller says in response. We’re very proud of the Alvin Ailey Gala, which all the DC politicos put on every year. We ain’t going no more, you know? And I’m proud to see that people who, I mean, the Kennedy Center’s a thing. You get dressed up, you go, it’s it’s wonderful. You take the pictures there and you post them next to the bust of Kennedy. And I just pray there’s not a bust of Trump because it’s a it’s a weirdly artistic kind of bust anyway. We don’t need that of Trump in the Kennedy center. Uh. But I have been proud to see the way that both artists as well as patrons of the Kennedy Center have kind of put a foot down and said, we’re not participating in this. And I hope that it’s something that can be reversed. Uh. If not, when Congress starts back tomorrow, it certainly can be reversed into the future because that’s just not a name that should be on there. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, they’ve changed everything right like down to the actual award, no rainbow ribbon, you know, now everything is gold and you’re just like, it’s just so gaudy and ostentatious. I think Don, to your point, it is also a fascist right wing move to try and take over arts and culture right because it’s a space where people dream, where people organize, where people mobilize and feel called to action and they are trying to put the kibosh on that. I haven’t seen as much like pushback on it as I thought I would see. Like I think Maria Shriver wrote one strongly worded tweet or something about it, right? But I haven’t seen a bunch of people saying like, this is absolutely wild. Last thing I’ll say is I did see someone tweet that if he wants to put his name on the Kennedy Center, he should have to earn it the same way that Kennedy did. And I was like, ooh, baby, the mouth of that boy’s finna be at your door. You can’t tweet that. 

Myles E. Johnson: You going to the camp first, you getting put in the camp first, that’s the lay low. Lay low, it’s not the time. I also do think that the non-response shows the dichotomy of importance of things in America. Like so growing up, I loved Touré, I loved reading um Cornel West, I loved reading Bell Hooks, and I also loved reading Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. And thinking about how they used hip-hop in order to establish this kind of, like, intellectual property. But that is also extremely classed. So, me, and, I don’t think you know this, Don, but in the last year I moved to Ohio, so I’m like in I’m in Cincinnati. So it’s so interesting to see so many people, Black people, regular Black people who do not care, who does not, it does not touch them. It does not feel like America’s theater, because people don’t feel a part of America. So people hear something is America’s Theater, and they automatically think it’s not for them. So I think that we could have done a better job, and I’m saying this so past tense, I promise you it’s not me being cynical, but I do think we could’ve done, and we can do a better job at making sure that the people who have the least, or the people who are in art and who have not learned how to navigate institutionalizing it, feel like it belongs to them too. So when things like this that are very insulting to them happen, it feels like it’s happening to them because it doesn’t really feel like it’s happening to most people unless you did a certain type of work and you wrote this acclaimed work that bridged intellectual thought and hip hop. Am I, does that make sense? 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah absolutely. 

Don Calloway: It does. [music break]

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: Now let’s talk about the bombings. We’ll start with Nigeria. On the 25th, the US government bombed part of northwestern Nigeria in coordination with the Nigerian government. They were allegedly bombing Islamic jihadis who were allegedly slaughtering Christians. That you know you’re like, where’d this come from? And I bring this up because Nikki did talk about this. This was a part of Nicki’s sort of turn to the right this is what she talked about before we actually get to the stage with Erika Kirk. But just like with Venezuela, I we were I remember the conversations about Iraq, I remember how much public debate there was about us going into another country. I mean, it was like, I remembered the Bowdoin student government had like a split boat in a split camp. I mean everyone was talking about it. With Nigeria and Venezuela, we woke up and you’re like, they bombed the country, we blew up some boats in the ocean. And we have captured a president but I guess we can talk about it all together. Nigeria on the 25th, Venezuela just happened. We invaded the country and Maduro is here in the United States, a captive of these great United States. Would love to know what you all think. 

Don Calloway: 1991, I’m in the sixth grade when Iraq happens, and Saddam Hussein then became our national enemy, just as though, you know, I don’t know, whoever was the czar of Russia was our parents’ national enemy. And so I remember that in ’91, of course, you all were around to remember ’01, when 9/11 happened. The thing that is so deeply disturbing about the events of yesterday in Venezuela is that, at least in ’91 and ’01, you have the requisite event preceded, right? There was something that took place that allowed, obviously, forces who wanted to do these things and had been targeting reasons to declare war. Obviously, this is something that folks wanted to do, but at least you had a ruse of an event, right, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and 9/11 in 2001. So the thing that to me is so disgustingly historically anomalous is that you have no event precedent to simply declare war and overtake a dictator in another country. That is extraordinarily dangerous precedent when you consider that this completely gives Putin full justification for the taking of Ukraine. Uh, it completely allows Putin or China or whoever else to, uh, who has the military might to simply overtake and and you know occupy their enemies as they see fit going forward. In college, I had a dean of students named Pharaoh Smith who passed away this past week. And he introduced me to one of the defining artists of my kind of thought process, the great Gil Scott-Heron. And Gil Scott-Heron on his last album, he has a song called Work for Peace in which he’s kind of mumbling almost incoherently, the military, the monetary, the military the monetary. He keeps saying it over and over as though he knows there’s a connection, but he’s trying to figure out how to articulate it. And this is from things that he’s observing as a young man in the ’50s and ’60s, because he’s talking about Eisenhower and how he saw the military industrial complex married to these extraordinarily pernicious capitalist interests throughout the world. And he keeps saying the military, the monetary, the military the monetary. And ultimately we’re gonna write this bitch an obituary. And I have never seen a more blatantly soulless, soullless marriage of the military and the monetary, and for the president of the United States to admit as much proudly right in front of the world, saying, yeah, we taking that oil. Yeah, this is about that. This is about oil. And people need to know, right? Just for the sake of geopolitical business and geography, people need know that all the oil in the world is not located in Iran, Iraq, in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. Venezuela has incredible, incredible reserves of a specific type of crude oil, the thick stuff that American refineries in Texas and a few in California survive off of. And so I’m thinking about Gill, but again, this is not disconnected from the Kennedy Center discussions, because when you think about somebody like Gill Scott-Heron, these are the type of voices of liberation that were elevated in spaces like the Kennedy Center under the control that has historically undergirded the arts in America. Those voices are out in this fascist regime. Those are not the voices that will be elevated on national theatrical stages. And that’s very intentional because arts are always the way that we have understood political events and more importantly, the human condition. And if you’re able to eliminate that space for people to be entertained, but also learn something, then that’s a very important step towards right-wing authoritarianism. And so you could say there’s more important things, but if you think about this thing holistically, they very much all work together. Because Gil Scott-Heron and other artists, liberationist artists of his time and of his ilk, told us about these type of things if you’d listen, and this government has no interest in creating spaces where those type of voices would be elevated. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Can I ask you a question, Don, based on that? Because I do think it’s important that they highlight that they are bombing Muslim jihadists, right, in the case of Nigeria, right? Who were allegedly killing Christians. So, like, how do you think about the leveraging of Christianity also as a justification in these moments? 

Don Calloway: Yeah, so that’s a very good question. And that is specifically why Pete Hegseth is such a tool, pause, because he is literally a tool of the monetary. Pete Hegseth, if you read his writings from his dissertation at Princeton, all throughout, you know, a couple of little books he wrote and put on the internet, um self-published, he sees himself as this Christian nationalist warrior, right? And I’m in the military. All those scant, hey I didn’t serve anybody who served them more than I did. But he, you know, he was not some, you know, you know, you was not the soldier he, he holds himself out to be. But his time in the military, his tattoos, his writings, all indicate that he is on this effectively a Christian jihad, right? It is especially important that a Christian nationalist warmonger like that was put in charge of the Department of Defense, now called the Department Of War, because he is literally a functional tool of the monetary capitalist, globalist capitalist interests who seek to take over the world. And you can convince people like Pete Hegseth that he’s doing it in the name of Jesus Christ, right, and taking over the word for Jesus, when the reality is he’s doing it to feed the pockets of you know, executives and shareholders of some of the world’s largest companies, right? It is to drive profit interests, it’s naked, there’s no real debate about that. But the Christian right, led by a warmonger Christian nationalist soldier, like Pete Hegseth, who believes that his mission from Jesus is to use war to take over the world in the name of Jesus, it is an ugly marriage between the two. And I believe that Trump has used Hegseth to the nth degree to be able to achieve that. So it really has nothing to do with Muslim terrorism or Muslim jihad. There are Muslim jihads happening all over the world. There are Christians killing Christians all over the world, but that ain’t what this is about, right? This is about taking advantage of natural resources and minerals for the monetization of the global nationalist interests that Trump serves. 

Myles E. Johnson: So I want to kind of rewind back to Nigeria, right? So this is how come we, I think we should never stay off of celebrities next and why pop culture is essential because as absurd and as wacky as Nicki Minaj was and is for saying these things, she was used, a woman who got her fame from rhyming words together to tell people that her P word is wetter and that she’s more rich than you. They used her to manufacture consent to do global terrorism. In the name of imperialism. That’s how come, even though it’s absurd, even though it’s silly, you can’t look away and you have to dissect it and you have to ground it because it has real effects. I love that you mentioned Gil Scott-Heron because for a lot of reasons, he’s just one of my favorite thinkers and poets. And I have so many records by him. And I got to write an essay called The Subject Was Faggots about his poem entitled the same thing, and just talking about Black revolutionary thought times homophobia, etc. So thank you for that. But as I bridge to as I bridge to um Venezuela, here’s my thing. And y’all don’t hate me. My thing is, now that Trump’s in office, he’s taking it one step further. But it shouldn’t be one step further. When you look at what Biden did to Syria, when you look at what Obama did to um like Libya, it’s not unprecedented. So now that we’re in this moment where you’re just taking that one step, is it one step too far? Maybe. But is it something that we are totally um, that’s totally unfamiliar? No. I think that’s one of the reasons why you just don’t hear a lot of Democrats critiquing this, not saying you don’t hear any. I know that Zohran made a statement and stuff like that, but you don’t hear a whole lot of Democrats critiquing it. Same reason why you don’t hear a whole lot of Democrats coming out super hard about the Epstein files cause they’re like, well hold on, we plan on doing that in 10 years too. We’re not gonna hold you. Now we were gonna give you gay rights with it but we wanted that oil too and we were gonna figure out a more strategic incremental way to manufacture your consent and we weren’t gonna be so rude and crass about it. So again, I think that we are in the results of so much kind of like moral relativism. We’ve kind of like followed that so hard that now we’re somewhere where now we can see that this is absurd, this is bad, but it was okay during other administrations, or people just didn’t talk about it in other administrions. So I guess my big push is when we go blue again, when there’s democratic leadership again, be just as committed to there being no fascism and no imperial takeover as we are now, and don’t be so hypnotized by fascism when it has a neoliberal cover on top of it. Be against it all the time. So these moments can’t happen because it just doesn’t feel. It feels high stakes and like we’re in a war, but it doesn’t feel like something that went from zero to 60, it feels like we went from 59 to 60. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I hear you and in some ways I feel like I’m, and this is a wild thing to say, I’m a little desensitized to the bombing, right? There is though the idea that we have captured Maduro and his wife, right, have brought them to the United States, are detaining them here. Like I do think there’s something to the facade of there being some sort of international will or alignment on this. And some international like justice process that like we would that these people would have to like go through. And it just feels like we are behaving unilaterally on everything and continuing to isolate ourselves in ways that I think are incredibly dangerous for Americans, right? 

Don Calloway: The thing that makes me most scared is that it does not appear that we need multilateral or multinational support from other countries, because this is broadly supported by the five major oil companies who run the world. And so for the first time, I was talking to my friend, Reverend Starsky Wilson last night, for the first time what we’re seeing is Dr. King’s teachings about the global monetary-military complex, which Gil Scott-Heron rapped about, right? Um. What we’re seeing is the first time of global militarization run by a global kind of economic state without a nation. That’s what feels like is controlling this, as opposed to individualized nation-states. So Emmanuel Macron makes his statement. And he sends his, you know, dignified tweet. So what, you can’t, he ain’t stopping nobody. You know what I mean? Um, even if the United Nations convenes next week in New York and puts out a, you know, a broad statement of condemnation, it’s hard to see that this is stopping because what the president has done is authorized, you know the, the private industries, right, who really are moving together in unison. He’s authorized them to begin the looting of Venezuela for oil reserves, right, and for commercial flow. Let’s be clear, Nicholas Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him were not good men. They were not good leaders of the people. However, what they did was claimed their natural resource, primarily oil, for themselves, and kept it for their nation and for their nation building and kept away from the world. This president has opened that up and authorized it. And what worries me most is that this is a purely commercial and economic, you know, driven decision, uh, is driven by the nationless corporations. And I don’t know that we needed in light of that, in light of this is controlled by the moneyed interests. I don’t know that we needed multilateral, uh political support from other independent nation states. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: The only thing I’ll add is um one of the things that worries me about the arc of Trump. So I think, Myles, I’m interested in this critique that this is not zero to a hundred. This is something else to a 100, right? It’s not, I don’t know if that, I think it’s 49 to 50, but– 

Myles E. Johnson: I was going to try to I was going to try to edit that. I was in my head–

DeRay Mckesson: Okay okay. 

Myles E. Johnson: –geeking, I was like, maybe I–

DeRay Mckesson: Okay. 

Myles E. Johnson: –would have picked a dumb and dumber, but, you know. 

DeRay Mckesson: Okay but yeah. But I’m with you that like, you know, the question about, did we always get consent to bomb countries? No, right? I think that is a fair push. And what is sort of wild about Trump is the nakedness of it. So you’re like, okay, this is he’s very much like, we he, the quote, “we run Venezuela now.” You’re like what does that even–

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: What does that mean? We run Venezuela. Like, I don’t even know. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: –what that, that is such a wild thing that he later walks back and people are like, well, is it really about drugs? You just pardoned the other guy. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Who trafficked 400 kilos or whatever of cocaine and he gets up there and he’s like, yeah, but it’s different. And you’re like, well is it? Is it different Trump? But the macro point that I want to make is, you know if due process is not a thing in general, if it’s not a thing internationally, not a thing domestically, then it’s like, well, what does dissent look like in a world where there is just no, where like the allegation from Trump alone is the conviction. That is sort of a crazy world. And I do think that is incumbent on us organizers and stuff to help people understand that. Because what I’m heartened by in all of this is that the performance of needing a Nicki Minaj and da da da reminds us that the consent of the people does matter. Now, the tools and stuff that we normally, like technology that we use to drive that have, we’ve screwed it, right? So TikTok, you can’t talk about Israel, you know, Twitter is a right-wing sort of platform all of a sudden, but the consent of the people actually is pretty important. And the question for me in 2026 is like, how do we recapture that in a way that like balances out the moment a little bit better because Congress is [?], but also I think it is fair that the how do we get a grounds fault to push them is a real question. 

Myles E. Johnson: Listen, we’re in a rape culture, right? I think it would be naive of us to think that there are not other ways that we are being um walked into stripping our consent. And I think that that is on purpose. And I think that how we communicate with each other all these different ways. Like, like again, I’m, and I, I mean, I need to stop apologizing for going in on the um Democrats sometimes. But I do think about Kamala Harris’s uh campaign where she did silence a lot of people. She did silence the trans community. She did silence um any type of people who uh had anything to do with Black power or to do with um Black Lives Matter or anything like that. She did do that. They did it in a softer way, but that has kind of been happening. I feel like that both in Republicans and Democrats, they want dissent to be a feature of the past. They want to be able to tell you, this is what we’re doing. Talk about it however you want to talk about it, scream in your scream in your screen, stream all day about it. Bet on it, but this is what’s going on. And that is where we’re getting pushed to. And I think that that was always the plan. I think the way that we’re doing that has been different. And again, I’m not talking about individual politicians, but I’m talking about people who are seeing the patterns of society, the patterns of now we live in a global community where everything’s connected. How do we still get more power and more money, even though more people than ever can dissent? We make dissent a feature of the past and there’s just different roadways of doing that. 

DeRay Mckesson: The only thing I’d add to that, Myles, is I think that I agree with you about dissent being a part of the past. I also think that there’s something about what happens when dissent becomes absorbed into popular culture. That is also sort of what we just lived through, right? Like, it’s like brunch and protest. Like, we we I’m like, I lived through being tear gassed being like a crazy thing to people being like, you know, I can’t wait to go outside. You’re like, this is a, or like, you know you see Congress kneeling and doing a die in after they just dragged us out the middle of the street for doing a die in. So I do think there is that, I think it is like a double, it’s doubled, it is like both a thing of the past, but it’s like the absorption thing feels real to me too. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

[AD BREAK] 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think to your both of your points about consent, manufacturing consent, and sort of the wisdom of the crowds, you know my news this week is about prediction markets, which as you know have been fascinating me, as troubling me probably is the better way to put it as of late. And we’ve talked about you know Polymarket, we’ve talked about Kalshi and like the way that people are betting on real life events on on those platforms. And just, you know, what caught my eye on this story is that on December 27th, um someone created a new Polymarket wallet and account, and they bet on two things. One, they bet that the US would invade Venezuela before the end of January, and two, that Maduro would be forced out of leadership, right? Those were their two bets. And obviously both of those things have happened. And whoever that person is made over $400,000 in less than a day having bet on those events. And so now people are like, now wait a minute, are there people high up in the Trump administration who are insider trading on national security stuff and getting rich off it? In these prediction markets, which again, we don’t really understand how they’re allowed to function. You’re not supposed to be able to access them from the, like a whole host of things. But I wanted to bring it to the pod, one, because it ties into this broader story about what’s happening in Venezuela. I do think it builds on you know something that you all are talking about right now, which is both the wisdom of crowds, but also our consent. And so it’s like. If I guess, is this like the if you can’t beat them, join them. If you can beat them like bet on it? If you can’t beat them like get rich off, like what what’s happening here? 

Don Calloway: If you can’t beat on them, bet on it, is good. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, you know. 

Don Calloway: Something like this does not happen without 500 people having substantial advanced knowledge. Um. The difference between, and 500 is putting it very, very lightly, right? The difference between this administration and administrations of the past is that there are no rules. There was in the past a governing ethic, right, um that that kind of, you know, maybe there were leaked and well-placed reporters at the New York Times and whatnot uh, but there were certainly not a universe in which people were placing predictive market bets, right? We have to remember, as you probably know, Sharhonda, that, uh, Polymarket was, and still is banned in the United States, but it was under SEC prosecution until this Trump administration, um, kind of wiped all of that out. Um, the moment that that investigation was completely quashed. Uh, we should have known that, you know, the flood gates were open and there are no further rules, uh, with respect to Polymarket, Kalshi, or any of the other stuff, and they’re not only are there no rules, but there literally are no regulations. This is not a regulated space as of right now, right? And the Trump administration thematically 2.0 has been anti-regulation in this space. Um, and we have seen that they have effectively governed themselves without an ethic when it comes to the profiteering of government. We saw the stock market whiplash all of last year, 2025. Um. And you know of course there were people with well-placed information, whether or not they were actually government office holders. Um. Of course there were people who have made actual dollars, who have profited off of this. But let’s be clear, it’s also profiting off of human misery and suffering, you know, that is what is taking place and uh and there are no rules around it. I think that it presents, obviously it’s ethically wrong and morally wrong and all this stuff, but we have to ask ourselves, I might get kicked off here or at least get beat down by the followers. You have to ask yourself, should we be participating in it since we know it’s happening? Should we put ourselves into the stream of information to attempt to participate? Because I think that the one thing that Donald Trump can look at them, look at the camera with a straight face and say is, it’s legal for everybody now, right? And so then we do have to ask ourselves again, hot take of the day. Tell Ray Ray to turn off DraftKings and turn to CNN and see what you can do on Polymarket as a result. Because the opportunity for the foolishness is equal for all of us. That was [bleep] up, but I’m just gonna say it. 

Myles E. Johnson: I’m glad you said it was [bleep] up. You earning the name Don. [laughter]  Because I think, and I’m specifically thinking about the Black community, I think that we have kind of, well, I’m just gonna worry about my bread. You know, what can I do ourselves into hell? And I’ve, on my stories, like even like said it, I was like, I’m kind of tired of people being like, well, you know, I need to figure out about my job. I need figure out how about me, or it’s just me and my family. I’m like, this individualism has really, really rotted us and it has really cost us a lot. And once we do get the thing that the individualism gets us, the big job, the money, whatever it gets, it’s not like the hoods are still hooding. The Black neighborhoods are still suffering and still riding out, so it’s not like it’s a Robin Hood situation where you’re taking from the rich and giving to the poor. You’re taking from the rich and you’re giving it to the even richer to maintain the richness. Like, so to me, Black people, culturally and politically, are at ground zero again, and I think that the more and more we sit and look at this era of 2025, we’ll realize, oh, wow, we’re at a ground zero. And I think the only way to recreate something above ground zero is by going by what we had to do first, and it’s by having clear morals inside of a moralist place. And I think just telling people to participate because these hoodlums are doing it. I don’t know, it don’t feel right. Now, don’t get me wrong, in a post-Diddy documentary world, I’m all about your morals having yoga and being flexible. I’m all about that, like specifically in this world. But I think that just getting the bag or just being able to participate because the white boys are doing it, I think, that that has really had us arrive at hell. And when we look at the nihilism that the government’s doing, it’s not unlike the nihillism that we see in the most violent Black neighborhoods. I think that nihiliism is contagious and we have to say no, as hard as it is for it to say no to a dollar sometimes, I think we just have to be like, no, we’re not doing that because we’re trying to grow something more solid on our moral muscles. 

DeRay Mckesson: Since you brought up Diddy, this is a random aside, but a lot of people are in federal custody in New York City all at the same time. We got Luigi. We’ve got Diddy. Maduro and his family might be there. It’s like a whole, you know, whoever thought that New York City. 

Myles E. Johnson: Start selling tables. 

DeRay Mckesson: For I you’re like, this is a lot going on. 

Myles E. Johnson: I’m starting a section. 

DeRay Mckesson: –in uh in federal custody here in New York City. Mine is about, quote, “doxing of ICE agents.” The not-liberal Cato Institute put out a notice on the 15th of December reminding people of this December 4th memo that the DOJ put out to all federal prosecutors that outlined a strategy for arresting and charging people who are, quote “labeled Antifa,” which again is supposed to be the umbrella organization of the anti-fascists or the people fighting this administration. It’s always interesting to me that people say Antifa because it’s like anti-fascist. It’s like, you should be against fascists. But what it does is that it implicitly argues that doxing, it doesn’t use the word dox, but this idea of asking or requiring ICE agents to give up their names or operate unmasked or to record them is considered an act of terrorism and that you can charge somebody with terrorism if they engage in these activities. So take a quote, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin reiterated the point in August that quote, “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents and we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents.” And they note the statutes, blah, blah blah. I bring this all up to say that um, you know, I spend my day job working on issues of policing and incarceration. And it is just so easy for one officer in one place in one moment to just change your life. And for most people, you get charged with terrorism and it doesn’t matter that you will get off. Just the charge itself fundamentally reorients how you are able to operate in the world. You are detained, it’s on your record and now you explain it. You try and get a job at Home Depot. You got charged by the federal government for terrorism. So that’s crazy. But the second part goes back to my point from one of the things we said before. Is that they understand that the optics of all of this stuff actually matters a lot. It is, if I have any critique of the left, it is our deep inability to understand the optics. Like just don’t get like, Mamdani gets it and I appreciate it. He giving out hot chocolate after the inauguration. I get you’re like, keep doing it, I’m here for it. I hope he is the best mayor this city has ever had. But the general left, you’re like, Hakeem Jeffries puts out, you know, well I think I think they’re having a Zoom on Sunday. You’re like a Zoom on Sunday? That’s the best [?] he is bombing Venezuela. And our side has tweeted about a Zoom on Sunday. You’re like, y’all, we ain’t got it. My father don’t know nothing about the Zoom. That’s crazy. Anyway, so I bring this here because this is originally about charging people who videotape ICE agents with terrorism. But it goes to a macro point about what it means to manage the storytelling. And this is a way that the right is trying to manage the narrative around this stuff in a way, they’re spending so much money on ICE. It is, we should be demanding every single day, healthcare, free food for people. We should be building houses for homeless people. I mean, the amount of money we wasted on ICE is really incredible. I’ll stop there. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I this is the most exasperated, I think I’ve ever heard, DeRay. Where he’s just like, I’m over it, I am over it. And y’all can’t see Myles’ face, but I wish y’ all could. Like, that that that was like an amazing, like, non-verbal exchange happening there. Myles, go ahead, because you got something to say. 

Myles E. Johnson: I No, I’m still cooking. Hold on. 

Don Calloway: It’s not detached. The notion of charging people uh with videotaping ICE agents is not detached from the broader what we saw a few years ago um of the book banning and the discussion of what materials could be discussed in schools because the narrative through line is very clear, whether it is the brutality of slavery or the modern day oppression that ICE is enacting on people on the streets. Let us remove your ability to tell what they did, to show the story of what they did to our people, to these people, to Americans in real time. And I think that is an extraordinary, potent tool of fascism, is the ability to, as you say, DeRay, they obviously on the right, and we see this with Turning Point, they have the ability build narrative. They also have the able to remove the resistance’s ability to build its own narrative. And I think that when you look at Democrats not being able to carry narrative, a lot of that is based in fear, because telling a story, particularly when you’re telling the story of a very clear and blatant oppression is an act of revolution. And so in many respects, ain’t none of us ready for revolution, for real, for real. Because we can talk about the story. Is y’all growing your own food? 

Myles E. Johnson: I am! 

Don Calloway: Is you learning how to shoot the gun? Uh see? 

Myles E. Johnson: Yes. 

Don Calloway: And if I had to ask who owned, who for real for real, that I actually know who is most ready for revolution, I would say it’s Killer Mike and Myles Johnson, right? 

DeRay Mckesson: What a group, what a group. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Exactly, exactly. 

Myles E. Johnson: Now don’t ask us to run, don’t ask to run nowhere. We ain’t the most nimble revolutionaries. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh lord.

Don Calloway: Strange bedfellows, if you will. But it underscores the need for actual journalism, for committed journalism, for citizen journalism, because telling the story is a revolutionary act. And what’s the scariest about this is that, you know, obviously this justice department is Trump’s personal law department, and it has nothing to do with constitutional principles. But what worries me about this, is this is one of the first times I know that we have seen. The blatant removal of First Amendment rights and privileges institutionalized through the mechanisms of the Department of Justice. 

Myles E. Johnson: This is very blatant, but not new to me. I talked to my friend Morgan, who listens, Morgan Jerkins, who’s an amazing writer, works at um uh Princeton, a great person. 

DeRay Mckesson: Shout out to Morgan Jerkins. 

Myles E. Johnson: And a lot of other people who I speak to too. And we talk about the organized effort to cap on dissent, and that happened with the Democratic Party. That happened with neoliberal culture. And I saw it, and even down to um a good example is actually the trans community too. So when the trans communities started making headways, there were both more people privileged to talk about it who were white. Who were early on in their traditions. We could I don’t wanna go into the politics of that and who were also rich. So when we think about the um the young trans white women who was on the Budweiser, um Dylan Moraney [correction: Mulvaney], something like that. So she now became the talking head for the trans community getting invited to the White House. And then we know that maybe a Janet Mock or a Laverne Cox, who sat down with Bell Hooks, both of them, had maybe more of a robust critique or dissent against the establishment and with gender. And to me, that feels really connected to this movement of not just saying what you can’t record, but who can say things and who cannot say things. Cause I do think the next wave is now that it’s Antifa, who can we now say is spreading radical gender theories? Who can we say is now Antifa? And now they’re going to be muting and censoring people, you know, like me, or being like, like, hey sissy, we ain’t gonna let you tell which which jail you want to go to, men or womens, we don’t care. We about to just lock you up. Like that is a real truth that’s going to happen. But it started so much earlier on when you would see these causes and somebody else decided who was a part of power, decided who gets to speak about these causes, who gets to talk about it, because this person will stay in line. They’re gonna sell our beer, thank the president and stay in line. That too is censorship. So again, it doesn’t feel always like we’re going from zero to 60. It feels like we are going to a number that is let’s say over 30 to 60. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Over 30 to 60. Or or or people will just self-censor, right? People will just say, I don’t want what I saw happen to this person happen to me. And–

Myles E. Johnson: Of course yeah. 

Sharhonda Bossier: The tamping down of dissent right and the censorship, some of it will just be self-imposed, right? Um. I think we see it in the stories that people are telling publicly. I think, we see it in the um media that is being greenlit now, like what shows, what movies, what, you know, all of that, people are like, we don’t wanna run the risk of putting anything on air that’s gonna piss off the president. And so people just preemptively decide themselves, like. We’ll just take care of the censorship ourselves. And I think that that’s happening at individual levels too. 

Don Calloway: A chilling effect, no doubt about it. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, for sure. 

Myles E. Johnson: You just made me think about that, Sharhonda, cause I was looking at so many people talk about one battle after another, and I was like, the other thing is too, now the only people who will be safe to make revolutionary content about what Black people are going through or about revolution will be rich, privileged white men. So we they get to shape revolutionary content and action in their white erotic fantasies. So now you have Jungle Pussy, who I love, who came to one of my shows. I love Jungle Pussy. But let me tell you something, you don’t got to be tap dancing to be cooning. And if you’re in this white man’s fantasy about what revolution and Black womanhood talking about your pussy, it becomes the singular way to talk about revolution, even though it’s based off of Assata Shakur, based off of Angela Davis, but it’s not really based off of that, because if it was really based off of that, it should scare you. If it really was based off that. So that’s another thing about that censorship and what it does. Now, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson will be our one pathway to revolutionary depictions. Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh no, Myles, you have your news. 

Myles E. Johnson: It actually is um perfect for this conversation because it’s about Black women survivalists. So what’s interesting about this story to me and about me talking about Black woman survivalists so much, and um just to let you know, this is from Capital B News, but what’s interesting about this story is that Black people culturally are trendsetters. And it’s funny because I don’t see people engaging with Black women discussing alternative ways of living as culturally trend setting. I think that in about 10 or 20 years, we’re gonna see even more people who maybe don’t fit the demographics of white and privileged talking about alternative livings, but for different reasons than, I just wanna be off the grid and I have a trust fund, you know? I wanna just read a couple of things. So the article is on Capital B News, you’ll be able to find that with the podcast, but I just wanted to read a couple of things from the Instagram assets that they did. So Kelly Pickleton is a member of tight-knit but fast-growing community of Black women, preppers, or survivalists across the nation. Many say they began their journey because of the climate change, civil unrest, or injustice between Hurricane Katrina to President Donald Trump’s first term, the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd and the January 6th um riot. One quote from her is, I would tell Black women for their own peace of mind and for their own health to stand up and walk away from a system that was not designed to benefit us in any way, shape or form, whether you are young or old. So again, I think that as we see this step into fascism, if we go into democratic leadership, it will be a step into neoliberal fascism. You’re seeing Black women who are not necessarily Black feminist scholars with the PhDs and the 10,000 books saying a really Afro-pessimistic thing without maybe ever reading Frank B. Wilderson and saying, oh, I think that this is the world and in order for this world to survive, I need to be in a part of the permanent underclass in order for me to find any type of peace in this world, that the world would need to either be destroyed or I need remove myself from it, which again is the idea that I saw get so much pushback and so much dissent and maybe just because pessimism is in the name, people will say, well, that’s pessimistic and we’re people of hope and optimism. It’s not about that. You can still have optimism and hope and faith that you can have a great life and Black people and Black Americans can find new futures without connecting those new futures to a system that is obviously dying and rotting. And now that it’s dying and rotting, it’s becoming desperate for power. And the first people who are being removed are the Black people. The first people who are being exploited are the Black people. So again, as I think about Doechii, as I thinking about Nicki Minaj, as I think about different Black women who are positioned in pop culture as trendsetters, I also think about the Black women who are trendsetters right now in ways that I think you’re gonna see a lot of middle class, working class, poor people finding these different ways of and modalities of being because they see that the American system has totally given up to exploiting them. So so, yeah, I wanted to I wanted to say that and hopefully keep this recorded so when there’s Amazon apartments and Amazon hospital and your kid got to go to Amazon school, you’ll be like, my auntie was right about going into the woods, I could have figured out what to do with that soil. To me, I see Black women, most Black women and specifically the Black women um talked about in this article as grounded, as forecasters of culture, forecaster of politics. So when I see them doing something like this, specifically we know our relationship as Black people with the woods and with the waters and with the wild lives, if I see Black people start doing it, who are not necessarily economically privileged, my my antenna goes up because it shows me that they’re probably predicting in an intuitive level what I’ve been predicting, maybe on a more literal level of, oh yeah, Trump will die, but Nick Fuentes will be 35. And when Nick Fuentes is 35, what he said 10 years ago, there’ll be somebody else who’s younger than him who said something more extreme. So he’ll now look as um conservative or as mainstream as they’re making Charlie Kirk look like. That is the cycle of fascism culturally in this country. And what alternatives do we have in order to transcend that? So that’s my news. It’s going to be more optimistic next week but this is what I had this week. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I was actually excited to see this. I have two Black women in in my circle who over winter break um secured citizenship in other countries. And I think you’re right, Myles. Like a lot of my black women friends are like, all right, girl, like what’s next? One of my home girls who’s been living in Mexico for the past year you know was talking about she feels the decline of the dollar because she’s constantly doing conversions. You know what I mean she’s like, I just every day I’m like, a dollar is this many pesos and every day a dollar is fewer and fewer pesos, you know? And so she’s like, I’m trying to think like, do I invest in other currency? Do I like buy gold? Like, what’s the thing? And so the Black women in my life are starting to like come together and organize around what it looks like for most of them that has meant leaving the country. And this I think is an interesting sort of alternative to that and something that, you know, is definitely going to be in my group chats after this. 

Don Calloway: It was a fascinating article, but it’s also not something that’s extraordinarily novel to us. What I think is novel is the physical removal of our presence from these cities and, you know, moving out into individual compounds that are ostensibly away from. But that is a domesticated universe of what Sharhonda just described, which is expatriation, which is something that’s been happening since, you know four hundred years now, DuBois died on African soil as a result of, you know, feeling as though he had no way out, Baldwin, so on and so forth. But I think it’s all core to this notion of Black people realizing and individualizing that we have never gotten over via government. Government has never been for us, right? Whether it’s a Democrat in charge or, you know, whether government is split. If Hakeem Jeffries takes the gavel in 2027, and it’s a triumphant day for me and Kappa Nation, that doesn’t fundamentally change, Founder’s Day tomorrow shout out to the [?]. That doesn’t fundamental change the plight of Black people in this country, right? And I think that that is something of a sobering and somber realization, but it also takes me back to that legendary Saturday Night Live Black Jeopardy skit. In which you saw Tom Hanks as the MAGA guy and all the Black folks. And it shows that, you know, the experience of being outsider in America is very much Fred Hampton was killed when he tried to pull together the Rainbow Coalition. Dr. King was killed in Memphis when he was talking about workers’ rights and the rights of the oppressed. And of course being oppressed is uniquely pernicious when you’re Black or when you are a member of the LGBTQIA plus 2S plus community. But oppressed and marginalized people have for a long time understood the notion of the need to extract oneself physically and spiritually, and or maybe sometimes just emotionally from these urban jungles in which the military and the monetary have clearly teamed, right, to oppress people who choose not to participate directly with them. And often people who have wanted to participate haven’t been allowed to play in those spaces. And so I think this article is fascinating because it shows that there’s a group of Black women doing that when usually Black women aren’t the face of that, but this is not a concept that is extraordinarily novel to Black Americans who have long known that we’ve only had to rely upon ourselves and ourselves. Unity is how we’ve gotten over, but we’ve also known that this country really has no physical place for us in a very real sense. And so Cliven Bundy and, you know, the Waco Branch Davidians are not the only face of people who have chosen to physically extract themselves. But it will be very cool to see these badass sisters toting pistols saying, hey, stay away from this fence on my 60 acres. 

Direct that, Paul Thomas Anderson. [laughter]

DeRay Mckesson: This made me think of two things. One is we’re getting ready for Black History Month, the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. And I have been obsessed with the Reconstruction, just like what it means that the that we cut the country up into five sections, sent the military down, made the military be in legislative assemblies to force white people not to be crazy. I didn’t learn about reconstruction until I was an adult, but I say this to say that there was an era where Black people did carve out these communities and were prosperous and it was a thing and it worked and it was so good that white people were like oh no no this is where the redemption era comes in and da da da so that’s one. The second thing is I’m always interested I’m not on Tiktok, I’m on instagram and a lot of things from Tiktok make it to instagram so there are I’m like sort of obsessed in some ways with the diy people on instagram like I just love it. I’m like build a thing and da da da. And I this article made me think about how Black people get excluded from things that we have been doing for a long time. So like, when I see the DIY people, I don’t see a lot of Black people just like on Instagram on it. But I’m like, the women that I grew up with did everything. They had the, you know like, people didn’t have money to task rabbit people. That wasn’t like a thing. You know what I mean? Everybody had to figure out how to build a thing or make a thing or do a thing and um I’m excited about what modern media that we control has allowed us to do is recover these stories that so like not everything is just white people doing something. You’re like, no, Black people have been doing this for a long, long time. And this just reminded me of it. 

Myles E. Johnson: I thought you were gonna go with the maroon communities. 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh, shout out to the maroons. 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, and my mom’s a, we’re Gullah Geechies. So like when I think about Black people, like existing culturally siloed from the American society that made me think of that too. But everything that you were saying too, like DeRay, I don’t know. Like to me, specifically with this article, maybe I didn’t articulate like what made it stand out to me wasn’t just what they were doing, but and but it was also the fact that Black people, to me, culturally, historically, do want to be a part of this American system. Black people love this. I think about I think about Baldwin a lot. I think about um a lot of the people who we think are articulating the strife of Black Americans, how much they love America. They would talk about that all the time. And there’s something about, to me, the people who built this country, specifically when I think about Black women giving up. To me, that feels like, what’s the phrase, the canary in the coal mine, that like that that that feels really unique. And I’m not saying that Black people haven’t built things or grown things or there’s not Black people who do who work the land but to see bBack women um, maybe it’s something about the 300k Black women getting laid off or whatever. It’s something about seeing Black people in mass digitally and in real life saying, you know what? I’m done. I don’t know if you’ve ever been with somebody who’s a bad ex and like you could or you had a friend who was a bad who was with a bad ex and you kind of could see it in their eyes that they’re done in a new way like that’s what this article did for me too so that’s a thing I wanted to highlight. That it wasn’t just I know Black people have skills. 

Don Calloway: I think there’s just a fascinating juxtaposition about what I’m done with this looks like. The wonderful Demetria Lucas is on Instagram showing how she left America and divested herself from America and go see some world, and she’s doing that in a beautiful way. But I think there’s something that is especially defiantly revolutionary about these sisters who are like, no, no no, I’m here, right? This is my 60 Acres. Don’t come up on it. Not about to go to Lisbon, expatriate, right? I’m doing this here. I will kill you if you step up on this, right. And I am teaching, and the other sister who I think was like the first sister named in the article and it was largely about her, she was like, yeah, yeah. I have long known who I am and I’m not alone. This is a place for childless Black women to grow and age beautifully and gracefully. I just thought that was wonderful. That like, there’s this notion, this spirit of people who are like, you know, this is my soil too, and I have the right to protect myself and preserve myself on this American soil. [music break]

DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week, and don’t forget to follow us at Pod Save The People and Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. And if you enjoyed this episode of Pod Save the People, consider dropping us a review on your favorite podcast app. And we will see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by AJ Moultrié and mixed by Charlotte Landes, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Myles E. Johnson and Sharhonda Bossier. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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