In This Episode
Trump signs a “Board of Peace” charter as allies push back on his Gaza plan, Illinois investigates allegations that a landlord tipped off ICE to target Black and Hispanic tenants in a Chicago building, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners makes Oscar history with a record 16 nominations.
News
Trump signs Board of Peace charter at Davos as allies split on Gaza plan
Illinois Investigates Claim That Landlord Tipped Off High-Profile ICE Raid
‘Sinners’ tops Oscars with record 16 nominations.
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles, and Sharhonda, back to talk about the news that you haven’t heard about or the news that is the hottest news with regard to race, justice, culture, and equity. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at Pod Save the People. Lets go. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: We are all anticipating snowmageddon. Here we go. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @SunPulpit on Instagram.
Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier at @BassierSha on Instagram and at @BossierS on Spill.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, again, another week. This will be uh what we say to the end of this administration, another eventful week. But let’s start with Minneapolis, Minnesota, what’s happening with ICE. It seems that every single week there’s more and more to talk about. Sharhonda, I’ll start with you. What have you learned in the last week? Or is there any different perspective you have today than you had when we talked about this a week ago?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I think I’m learning, uh probably like a lot of other people, that we have no idea what’s really happening in Minnesota, right? That we are experiencing a bit of a news blackout, that some of what’s coming out of Minneapolis is coming out in very fragmented ways, that the administration and presumably a lot of the social media companies are working to make sure that we’re only getting part of the news story. The Intercept also did a piece on the Somali-led resistance to ICE, which we can link in the show notes for people to check out. But it feels like the community is really organizing for themselves, right? I think there’s a sense that outsiders don’t have any sense of how severe and dire the situation is on the ground, that they are the only people who are best positioned to serve each other. And so we’re seeing like mutual aid things pop up. We’re seeing people be in the street to protest what’s happening. But I think we are also seeing, and I think the set of feelings that are hardening for me right now are my disappointments in Democrats, right? Because I feel like people are issuing strongly worded statements and pretending like that’s going to move the needle, and it fundamentally is not. And so it’s been really disappointing to watch people, even as the situation in Minneapolis continues to escalate, say things that lead me to believe that they actually think they can shame this administration into changing its behavior.
Myles E. Johnson: I’ve just been more interested and you know, as always, I’m interested in Black people’s response to things and like the Black consensuses, and kind of surprised at how much a lot of Black people are not on this anti ICE train. It’s really interesting, seeing the response to the woman who gets who gets arrested.
DeRay Mckesson: Nekima.
Myles E. Johnson: Nekima she gets she’s so she gets arrested and seeing so many Black people kind of respond [?] in my personal life and in the digital life. What was yo’ ass doing there protecting those Somalis, seeing Kelis, who is an alt Black American icon.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Who I love, who I think has transferred her kind of alt girl brand to this kind of bohemian farm life brand. And so many Black people find so much Black excellence in her and her getting a backlash for her anti-ICE and her um pro-immigrant stance in her comments.
DeRay Mckesson: Wait, wait, Kelis said something?
Sharhonda Bossier: She released a shirt collab, right, that said, f**k ICE, and as part of the advertisement, there is an image of a Black man burning the American flag. And the comments are all people saying, like, okay, yo, we’re down with f**k ICE, but you can’t disrespect America like that. And it’s truly wild.
DeRay Mckesson: Really?
Sharhonda Bossier: To see in the comments.
Myles E. Johnson: I saw a lot of stuff being like, why are you over there talking about these Somalis? You’re a Black American. I think that so many people don’t, again, I am a broken record. But–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: But I think so many people don’t actually understand where Black American culture is and where Black culture is, and that naiveté and quite frankly that ignorance and that distance is costing us so much.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Because even when it comes to Kelis, she doesn’t know who she’s actually marketing towards when she goes to Kenya and creates a farm and says Black excellence and creates industry in Kenya. She’s seducing a conservative audience. And even though that conservative audience is not what we normally associate with conservative, it’s still conservative. And she learned once she did some anti-American and pro-immigration content, which I thought was fascinating to see. And you know, I get a little scared. I’m like, I hope Black people, if you find yourself in any type of Black leadership, any type of Black visibility, I hope you’re really, really intelligent about how you interact with this moment because the sentiment around it is not the neoliberal Don Lemon watching sentiment. That is a very loud, very, I think, politically right minority. Black people are not collectively feeling that way around this moment.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, I’d say to both of you, the last polling that came out shows that 45% and 45% are against ICE. Black people are overwhelmingly, and I think this is of voters, Black people are overwhelming in favor of getting rid of ICE. So that seems to show up in the polling. We have talked before though, that all you need is sort of one viral moment of a quote, “immigrant” doing something bad, and then the polls swing back. What do you think comes out of this Minneapolis moment? I ask because in another world, the backlash that they’ve gotten would make them chill out a little bit or would make them fall back just a tad. And in this moment, you see like a wild doubling down. I didn’t realize that that he has this really big fixation with Minnesota. I didn’t realize that he has thought that he got hoodwinked out of the votes for the last three times he was on the ballot. I didn’t realize that the Minnesotans are very proud of never having voted for Ronald Reagan. You know, like, there are all these things about Minnesota, that I was like, oh, I didn’t realize he’s obsessed with them. But but what do you think comes of this? Do you think, Myles, that Black people will be on board even more and be like, you know what, yes, this is our fight too, and other groups will. Sharhonda, do you think that he will cave eventually and that this is a test to see how far he can go? And that, you know, because the Minnesotans are putting up a fight. This is organized in a lot of ways more than people thought they would be. But I’m interested in where you think this goes, both of you.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think we’re past the tipping point, right? I don’t see this administration pulling back at all. And I think to Myles’ point of this being a new or additional front in the diaspora wars, right, I think you’ve also seen the accounts that are showing like faces of ICE in Minneapolis, right. So they’re taking pictures of ICE agents. There’s a lot of Black people in those photos, right any I am worried. I think our algorithms, Miles, might be teeing up different comments right based on like the content we follow and et cetera, et cetera. So I didn’t see that emerging fracture point around like you know Black Americans and people who are more recent immigrants to the US, Black immigrants to US. I’m thinking about like Nekima too, right? And I think one of the reasons why they chose to arrest her is that a lot of the online chatter was that they were wrong to disrupt a church service, right? They were wrong to be in a place of worship protesting. And I think the administration has its ear to the ground. And regardless of what other people might be saying in public or not saying in public, similar to the conversation we had about how people really felt about Kamala or feel about Jasmine last week, they know that what she did, even if people ultimately agree with her point, was an unpopular tactic and they are seizing that moment, right? And so I think they are finding every window of opportunity and exploiting it. I don’t think we see them dial down the intensity.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, especially about Nekima is, you know, I know Nekima, Nekima has been at this for a long time. And for local politics, the mayor, Mayor Frey, he’s come out very publicly on Nekima’s side, which is a big deal locally because–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: They had a very heated race against each other.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: And they had sort of been on opposite sides politically for a lot time. But when Nekima, I don’t know if you saw the video that Nekima did or any interviews. But Nekima is a pastor, a reverend. She’s one of the two. She is a lawyer. And she was like.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yup.
DeRay Mckesson: We were invited in here. We were.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: We did not like break into the church. We were invited into this church. It reminded me of a tactic we did in Ferguson when we did this Black church protest where we stood outside of the churches and hummed Wade in the water. We hummed. We didn’t even chant. We hummed in one synagogue. And when I tell you, you would have thought that we put smoke bombs in the churches.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Like, the reaction from the protest community was so, we were like, y’all, we hummed outside with signs that said, Mike Brown was the least of these, Jesus was a protester. Like, we hummed outside, and one church called the police on us, another church had their vans block us. But I was shocked that the protestors were like why would you do this at a church? You know, we like, we didn’t even go inside. We was outside the church. But people were really hot. It was the one protest action that I was a part of that almost broke us all.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, and what’s also interesting is that photo of Nekima, who it wasn’t enough to see her arrested. They had to AI generate her kind of more crying and and looking more sad than she was as she was getting arrested, which was interesting to me because, interesting in air quotes, but interesting to me because it kind of showed you that like so much of this is about the cruelty and so much of it is about the theatrics of cruelty. So in order to really satisfy the hunger that the base has for that theater of cruelty. They had to AI generate her crying because her looking stoic and being arrested wasn’t enough.
DeRay Mckesson: Myles, why don’t they get in trouble for that? So like, clearly it’s AI, how do they get away with this over and over?
Myles E. Johnson: Why doesn’t the Department of Justice get in trouble? [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: Like why is there not a blowback from their base about these sort of ridiculous, easy, those sort of lies? If our side did something like that, people would be really judgmental, like, why are you AI [?] or maybe Sharhonda, I don’t know, whoever. I’m interested in whoever has a response to that.
Sharhonda Bossier: I think their response has been they were like, well, it’s not propaganda. It’s a meme, right? They’re like it’s–
DeRay Mckesson: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Sharhonda Bossier: That’s how they have have spun it.
DeRay Mckesson: Crazy.
Sharhonda Bossier: And so, you know, they’re like, well, this just goes to show if you do something, then you’ll end up a meme too. And it’s wild because people are calling it rightfully what it is, which is a tool of propaganda and it coming from the White House account made people believe that it was the actual image of what was happening, and they’ve dodged the question by saying, oh, no, we just made a meme. Which is something that everyone online has done, seen, engaged, shared, et cetera. It’s not a meme, but that’s how they’ve justified it.
Myles E. Johnson: And you know all sides do do it, like the liberal left, the democratic left does do it. And that’s how come Kamala Harris lost because they created from meme culture, from brat, from all that [bleep] that they were trying to put out. They were trying to manufacture this excitement that wasn’t there. And they lost. But the thing with Trump is. Trump is actually utilizing and manufacturing excitement that is there. There is a taste for misogynoir, as we know. So I think both sides do it. I just think one side does it well and wins.
DeRay Mckesson: No, I don’t know. I mean, I hear that. I don’t think both sides do it. I don’t think we it would be acceptable for a Democratic president to do anything like this and call it a meme. And I find it hard to believe that anything that might have been Kamala’s, I dunno, I can’t imagine a meme that Kamala put out that is in any way similar to what they just did with Nekima. That, to me, doesn’t, this feels like apples and oranges. And to conflate them feels dangerous, dare I might say. So, no, I actually don’t believe both sides do this, or if you’re equating the activist left with the president, then I think that also is just like a faulty, I don’t know, I don’t I don’t see this one. I’m with you in general, but this one, I’m like, I dunno.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah well. Wait a couple of months. [laughter] It’s just, to me, very obvious that both are trying to do it. I think that the audience of the left oftentimes doesn’t fall for it, so they have to be different about it. But it’s very obvious, that the Democrats are trying and have tried to do the same thing and the same manipulations with us. You know what it almost reminds me of? It reminds me of Gaza. It reminds me of like now, Democrats are trying to show us showing the Gaza Strip and aren’t you upset that they’re going to turn it into casinos, and then you read Kamala Harris’s book and she tells you Biden was just as mad and had the same plan. So it’s just different audiences, so what you can get away with. But to me, it doesn’t feel like apples and oranges. It feels like, I don’t know, SNL versus in Living Color. Just two different audiences. You can get a way with two different things. But same effect.
DeRay Mckesson: No. But I hear you on the like the way the left pretends as if we have no memory. I’m actually with you that I understand much more because I even think about Pelosi kneeling in Kunta Kinte cloth.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh, yeah, not Kunta Kinte cloth.
DeRay Mckesson: Is crazy to me. And that whole group of people demonized the protesters for so long. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson:
.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh.
DeRay Mckesson: –went to Greenland. It looks like we’re not gonna invade Greenland, but when I saw the tech people sort of endorse this Greenland thing, I’m like, what world are we in that that the conversation about the United States owning Greenland is a real conversation happening in the country? I, this is what I also am at a loss for.
Sharhonda Bossier: I just encourage everybody to reconnect with your high school history teachers and ask them to talk you through how the world tries tried to appease Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Right. Like it was an actual strategy, you know, that Chamberlain led and that a lot of other quote unquote “European powers” agreed to. And it was this whole idea that if we just give Hitler and Nazi Germany what they want, then we can avoid conflict. We know that that is not true, right? And in my family, in three generations, right, we’re finding ourselves back in a position where the world leaders, y’all can’t see my air quotes, right, are choosing a strategy of appeasement. And the strong man in this moment happens to be the U.S. President. But the potential fallout and consequences are looking very much the same to me right now. And I don’t understand why we have such short historical memories in the quote unquote “West,” but we do. We know that this is a strategy that does not work. And I don’t understand why people are playing along in this way.
Myles E. Johnson: I think this Greenland story really really aggravated me. It was one of the stories that I intentionally did not follow because I was trying to try out my little them manipulating time theory because I knew that he was saying something really ridiculous in order to get something done that is actually a part of like a, it was already a planned out neoliberal fascist imperial strategy. So us acquiring Greenland where we actually are with it right now, many presidents, many imperial leaders in America have already discussed this, have already made this as a goal. What Trump does though, is that he knows that with controversy, with the Epstein stuff happening, he can actually say something that stays in the news cycle, that gets people scared, that has people commenting, that the poor people of Greenland and Denmark talking about how they’re sovereign people and how they are [?], and those things go viral, and now all of the sudden we have this totally manufactured [bleep] storm, that now that it’s settled and what was never going to happen doesn’t happen, nobody was ever going to do that, but now he does get a deal with Greenland that probably would have happened under a lot of presidencies, but with less controversy because other presidents, you know, we would assume wouldn’t be on the Epstein list and wouldn’t need to create these controversies to hide the bigger scandals. So just to wrap it up, this is one of those things that I just kind of observed. And just kind of made my prediction on. And the prediction was right. I hope we get sarter. I hope we get smarter I hope we get like smarter and more savvy when we see these bigger things happening because it feels like we’re not getting smarter and it feels like we’re just getting more exhausted and less cunning. And that’s concerning because Trump is actually getting dumber and and and getting wilder. So it should be easier to see these things for what they are, but it seems not to be.
DeRay Mckesson: Myles, what’s the framework you use to decide between the things you think are just sort of for the attention and distraction, versus the things that you’re like, oh no, he really, he this is a real thing, this isn’t like some weird distraction thing?
Myles E. Johnson: Trump’s framework, Trump’s framework. [laughter] It’s like, like, like he does the same thing. If you really know, if you don’t just care about global politics and imperialism and white supremacist patriarchy, only when Trump is in the office, if you actually apply that across board, you can kind of see this imperial map coming. So if you see something that we didn’t want Biden to do, and then we see something that we didn’t want Kamala Harris to do and we saw something that we didn’t want Obama to do. Then we also know that if Trump is threatening to do something in that area, he’s probably going to land where they land, but he’s going to do it different. Now, if he’s saying something that we would have never expected anybody ever to say, we know that’s a controversy. We know that’s a controversy, but if you can make a clear line between what he’s saying to something that your Democratic incremental fave is saying, he’s bull [bleep] you. He’s bulls**ting you. To me, that has been the framework that has never failed me. I’ll give you an example, because Gaza’s a good example, again. The reason why we know that he’s going to turn Gaza into casinos and make it into a tourist attraction and expand Israel, because that is what Biden was doing. And people who did not want to critique Biden, did not want to critique Vice President Harris, would not say anything about it, would ignore that it’s happening. But because we already know that that was the bigger American imperial plan, him mapping his desires on top of it, it doesn’t matter if he creates an A.I. cartoon about it. We know that that’s probably gonna happen. We know that’s probably going to happen. Now, if he comes and says he’s gonna arrest Jeff Bezos, never gonna happen, never gonna happen. Never going to happen. If he says he’s going to do anything that is compromising these billionaires, we know that he’s just he’s just playing a show. We know that. That’s the best example I can do, because every single other example that I thought of, I was like, oh no, the Democrats are probably definitely going to end up doing those things, but just in a softer way that most people don’t talk about.
Sharhonda Bossier: Your brain is the, like, U.S. bombers and then U. S. bombers with the pride flag on the back. That’s as great a distinction as you see between the two. [laughing]
Myles E. Johnson: That is the that is the only distinction, and that’s what I–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –love about this moment. That’s what I love about so many people, even when you look at the I’ve had it women who are going from wine moms to going what they call dark woke. I love seeing people kind of awaken to the actual system, and I really hope it doesn’t get reversed, because that really is, it’s like, oh, we’re still going to be imperial, but you’re going to have Juneteenth ice cream, and you get to be gay.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, that was a great thought. U.S. Bombers with the pride flag, U.S. Bombers without. Myles, I appreciate you keeping the fire alive. I wanted to, Sharhonda to bring back a story that you had talked to us about before, that 19-year-old, it was this is one of the one of the issues you had brought up before.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so we reported earlier on Utah allowing for AI to write prescriptions for certain kinds of conditions and certain kinds of medications. And I shared a story of a reaction that I’d had to medication that had been prescribed and how having humans in my life who knew what was happening [laugh] actually probably saved my life or prevented me from experiencing further medical harm. And so, in follow-up, we saw a story of a teen who died after getting drug advice from AI. And just wanted to bring it back because I think it’s really important that we don’t lose these kinds of threads because I do think sometimes people might hear how we talk about these stories as a bit alarmist or over the top. And you know, I know we sort of laughed at Myles’ like, okay, we’ll wait a couple months. You know, come back, but I think it’s true. And some of the stories that we’re bringing here, and one of the reasons why we’re trying to stay on top of, you know conversations as they emerge is we want people to pay attention to the human toll of these tools and and the pace at which we are adopting them because there are real lives on the other side of these choices. And I wanted to make sure that people understood that the thing that we called out as potential the worst possible scenario has unfortunately happened.
DeRay Mckesson: We don’t have enough conversations about the role of regulation because we take, we rightly so take the regulators for granted. You’re sort of like, of course, there’s only stuff in the grocery store that would not kill me today.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: It might kill me in 20 years if it’s not gonna kill me today. And I think we, you know, Myles, when you talk about the veil being lifted, I hope that this moment, if we survive it, also allows us to talk about those things. I do want to add another health related thing is that I had the flu this week. And shout out to urgent care. And shout out to um XOFLUZA. If I can do ads for XOFLUZA, which is a one pill.
Myles E. Johnson: You shouldn’t because we don’t like Big Pharma.
DeRay Mckesson: Tamiflu has been replaced, but in terms of our conversations, I didn’t realize that Black people are 80% more likely to be hospitalized due to the flu than white people and children of color are more likely to die from the flu than uh white children. And I thought about like, I’m so fortunate to have this urgent care close by that is open 24 hours. I went in at nine o’clock at night. I got an IV. This is my first time I’ve ever had an IV drip. It was a liter. I was like, woo, this is a lot of dripping to happen.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And then they did some tests. They were like, okay, you have the flu, boom, boom. Like I took the pill and I was really good. It was I was surprised, but this is what healthcare should be like for everybody. And I was, like, oh, I actually see how, like I have never had the flu before. And I was like I actually see how people could be really, you know, if you can’t get to a doctor or can’t get to somebody or, and I live alone. So like at a point I finished my meetings, it’s 6.30, I have this headache all day, I’m in the bed in fetal position like DeRay, get up. Like you got to get up, it just, I felt awful. And I never get headaches. So in the morning I had a headache and I was, like, oh, I’ll drink some water. And then at six o’clock I still had it and was like, something’s wrong. But I was like oh I see how people can make choices that really put them in hard positions because of our access to healthcare.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, and get the flu shot. I’ve gotten it the last few seasons. It helps.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, specifically as like more people don’t care about COVID, so like it’s just ravishing bodies. So things like the flu will ravish your body differently, more intensely than it does. I did want to um talk about the alarmist accusations. I don’t know who’s giving these accusations. Now if you are, and you know, I’m not, I really tried to not use ableist language, but it is, I’m sorry, dumb is kind of, and stupid is coming back to my tongue. God forgive me. But if you do not see that there is a conflation of the normalcy and the boring and the absurdist and the violent coming together, so you get to watch Netflix as there are slave catchers. If you do, if you don’t see that those things are happening. That means that you are not really doing the self-aware, critical work to see what’s going on, just because you are comfortable, right? And this is something I have to tell myself too, just because you are comfortable in that you live a great urban girlfriend or friends, whatever lifestyle does not mean that the world is not destroying itself. It does not mean that these alarming things aren’t happening around you. In fact, the individualism of America. That’s literally the technology of individualism is so you can feel like you’re in your little corner of the little world and everybody who’s on the same class trajectory as you is saying everything’s fine and we can all drink mimosas and if they would just go vote right and vote the correct way, we will all be fine. That is the lie that is being told. But there is a subjugated oppressed lower class that is not only becoming more nihilistic and not voting and becoming violent, but also is being preyed upon. And if you can’t handle both of those things, then that’s a reading thing. That’s a, we afraid of books thing in my opinion. But the last thing to the actual story that you um presented is a little bit of a challenge towards it as well. Is as much as AI, as much as specifically, I’m just thinking about technology overall, is something that we should be thinking about specifically as like a global community and a national community. I don’t want suffering to mutate and us think it’s new. That boy’ was participating in psychedelic hard drugs and he was asking AI the good concoctions of it and he was already participating in risky behaviors. So again, I think that the real question always is, why does American society produce the type of nihilism and escapism that makes this type of drug participation a valid pathway to escaping your reality? And I think that that didn’t really change in the 60s. It didn’t change in 70s, the 80s, 90s. And it’s not changing now, it just has technology plugged into it. But there is a deep American sickness of nihilism and escapism that we have not been able to cure. And now it’s just mutating. And I hate the idea that we are demonizing or better yet projecting all of this bad American stuff on technology as if it just came out of nowhere when we’ve always been dealing with it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. That’s a fair push, yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: That’s fair, before we go to the news, I wanted to ask about TikTok and how TikTok is about to come into US ownership for the first time. Twitter is all a buzz about it, that the terms of service seem like more, like worse for people than they’ve ever been. I completely forgot that it hadn’t happened already because I know a lot of people who feel like they’re being shadow banned on TikTok already. So I’m like, woo, didn’t think it could get worse. But now that it’s about to be owned by the Trump allies, It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I don’t know if you, have you heard people talking about this?
Myles E. Johnson: Yes, because I’m a young spring chicken surrounded by Gen Alpha and Gen Z. Of course, I’ve heard everybody talk about TikTok because it’s all I think about. No, I have heard people talk about it. Here’s my thing. Sometimes I wish I can go into a time machine and go 50 years in the future because I promise you, specifically around Palestine, we would unsurface what the Democratic left was doing during TikTok. We would understand how all of these social media companies have been like manipulated. And I feel like now, because it’s becoming an announcement. Again, to me, my instinct is something is becoming an announcement and a controversy around what has always been going on. And what’s always been manipulated. I’m so interested as to what did the Democrats do or what did people, or I’ll just say people who are um politically powerful do post the BLM movements and post Ferguson and how those things might’ve been manipulated in order to make sure that something like that couldn’t happen again. Like, I’m curious about that. But again, to your point, people are already talking about people being shadow banned who have really political content on TikTok and who have trans content on TikTok, that was already happening. So it’s like now we’re creating this scandal because somebody turned up the volume. But if we really wanna make sure nobody can turn up the volume, we can’t accept it even when it’s like incremental or soft enough for us to be able to like.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I have a TikTok account. I’m rarely over there. I have have a sibling who’s 14 years younger than I am. And when she sends me stuff, I’m on TikTok. [laughing] But I think to Myles’s point, people for a long time had been complaining about the censorship that was happening. And I think a lot of that censorship was being done by the previous owners in the hopes of preventing a sale of TikTok, right? In the hopes of saying like, we will also cave to your pressure if you won’t force us to sell like the US arm of this thing. What I have also noticed is people saying that they are trying to figure out new code words or language or symbols to use to get their point across to like evade some of the large scale censorship. But I don’t think that that is working for a lot of people. I think once you’ve been tagged or once your account you know is associated with a certain set of discussion topics that I just think it doesn’t work for you. I have also seen you know various groups of people who have been influencers, paid influencers. Right? Talk about how in this moment, the pushback against anything that has been remotely seen as progressive or inclusive has meant that they’ve gotten left out of deals. That’s everything from fat content creators, right, to more leftist political content creators. Because there’s this move to make sure that everything that’s at the top of our feeds and showing up in our feeds fits this very narrow esthetic and politic. And so I think TikTok is just sort of, to Myles’ point, the current wave of that and the current focus and the thing that we’re, you know, honing in on is around people’s political positions, but it’s literally everything from the bodies people occupy to the politics they espouse being censored.
DeRay Mckesson: Minneapolis is a great example of what happens when the internet becomes corrupted and it just rebirthed offline organizing. So one of the things that’s driving ICE nuts is the ICE patrols. Have you seen them in Minneapolis with the ICE whistles? That there are people all across the neighborhoods who whistle when ICE agents are near. And it really does matter, but this is like offline, or you can’t do that on Twitter. That is an–
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: –offline organizing thing. Or one of my friends’ family members is now running one of the funds where because they can’t go grocery shopping, there are people who are delivering groceries. And there’s this whole infrastructure to be able to deliver groceries to people’s houses who are afraid to come outside right now. We have seen in real time in this moment, like the offline organizing skills re-emerge in a way that I’m like, whew, yes. And I think that it’ll only grow as the internet algorithm-y world becomes less reliable. And I say that as somebody who like, I would not be a national figure, I would not be here in this way, if not for online organizing, but it is a very different platform than it was before. I think a lot of, I see these creators online who, and I’m like, I’m so happy I did not come up in this ecosystem of sort of internet activism this way, cause this would drive me a little bit nuts. And I’m happy that we weren’t able to monetize like views, that that wasn’t a thing, because I wouldn’t have been able to tell what was true and what’s not true back then. Cause I can’t tell now. I’m, like, I really don’t know on the internet. It’s very, very hard for me. But Myles, it seemed like you had a reaction to one of the things Sharhonda’s saying.
Myles E. Johnson: Sorry, Sharhonda. It wasn’t a reaction to like literally what you were saying. You had mentioned the article that we had saw and I have an associate friend. I was her manager at Afro Punk semi. And then she was like, became one of my like tarot clients. So like the very like casual relationship, but a little frustrating to read her inside of that article, if I’m being honest, because–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: If I see somebody who’s like an Amazon influencer, right, and I see somebody who totally bankrolls on this consumerist slave labor industry, and now you’re upset because you got digested by it, it’s just frustrating to hear people who totally were willing to participate in consumerism, totally willing to participate in capitalism. And then when capitalism digests you, then you, all of the sudden, we have like commentary and it feels so flat and shallow, which is how come I think so much of the influencer and the online commentary and just people in general just interact with each other is just losing its soul because there’s just no coherence. Ask somebody who’s a bigger person and a bigger body as of right now. But like as somebody who’s a bigger person in a bigger body, like what do you want me to actually care about? Do you want me to care that Amazon is not giving you money from the people they’re exploiting anymore? Is that what you really want me to care about? You want me to care that Netflix is not giving you a check? Is that what you really what me to care about, like that feels tone deaf to put it the lightest.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: Well, on the culture side, it seems like there is a movie that has gotten the most Oscar nominations in Oscar history, which is, you know, these these things don’t feel like they mean as much anymore because every year there’s a movie that has gotten the most, so I’m like, I’m always nervous. As problematic as One Battle After Another is, I love seeing Teyana happy and I’m torn, but the video of her celebrating being nominated for the Oscar was just so. I was like, I love it. I love happy Teyana, crazy movie, weird take on the revolution. And shout out to Teyana.
Myles E. Johnson: So sometimes what I really like about not writing critically in public anymore is that I don’t have to like over explain that I can love something and critique something and critique is a function of love. I do not critique things I do not care about. You have never heard me critique South Park. No matter what, you have never heard me critique things I do not like. But also it becomes frustrating to continuously try to show people, specifically people who are grown, specifically people who are college graduates. Like the connection between media and minstrelsy and the evolution of it. So if we know minstrelsy, and then we know that the next explosion of minstrelsy, even if you like it, which I do, is like Black exploitation, and we understand that Pam Grier participated in that, and we love Pam Grier, we can very well see the connection between Teyana Taylor’s character. Pam Grier, and then we can go ahead and rope it back to minstrelsy. So just because we like Teyana Taylor and we are happy for her and it’s [bleep] Iman and all that other stuff, and we would love seeing Black women and she’s pretty and she is talented and we’ve been riding for her forever and we’re happy to see her, does not mean she did not have to participate in the minstrel capitalist apparatus in order to get her gold. That doesn’t feel controversial and I really wish, not even just Black people, the general audience, we will mature our thinking. That becomes really frustrating to me.
DeRay Mckesson: I think that’s right. Sharhonda, anything to say about Teyana?
Sharhonda Bossier: You know, randomly, I ended up down a rabbit hole about Sammy Davis Jr. last night. This is related because, no, I’m really fascinated by what it took for Sammy Davis Junior to live the life he lived and have the career he had. And I was in an argument, men, around the Black comedic tradition and the role of Black comedians as like, broader social theorists and critics, right? And how I feel like a lot of contemporary Black comedians have abandoned that very critical role in Black culture. And we started talking about like, you know, the ways in which Black comedians, particularly Black men comedians had to show up in order to enjoy a degree of commercial success, right, and who we felt had like been able to navigate that dynamic successfully and still get their point across, and then people we think navigated that dynamic in a way that has essentially defanged them, right? So I would put Pryor in the category of like having successfully done it, and I would put no shade to Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy in the, you know, bucket of like essentially being defanged as a social critic. So anyway, so we talked about Sammy Davis, Jr., because no one ever talks about him as an inspiration for their work or why they wanted to get into entertainment or why they wanted to be a performer despite his very clear commercial success, right? And so I was like, I wondered what his contemporaries thought of him, right. And like, what was the conversation in Black cultural circles around Sammy Davis Jr. and I think what we’re seeing around the Teyana stuff is to Myles’s point. Her trying to figure out how to make a way for herself in an industry that requires a certain kind of performance of a Black woman, while also trying to push the envelope creatively, which we’ve seen her do in so many ways and in so many moments. And I think there are two conversations happening. There are the public conversations that we know white people are going to access and elevate, and then there are the conversations around the performance and the movie that are happening in Black cultural circles that are very different. And so I feel almost like we’re having another Sammy Davis Jr. moment, right? Where you’re like, this woman is going to be elevated on the highest stages, performing with the biggest white celebrities. And there’s going to an entirely separate set of conversations and feelings about that in Black cultural spaces.
Myles E. Johnson: I forgot, I’ve gotten more radical on this standpoint, where like if you have ever been on a red carpet, you have class traded. There is no participating inside of that apparatus and helping Black people. If you are seducing Black people, if you are making with your body, with your Black work, with your Black talent, if you’re legitimizing anything around Hollywood, anything around the entertainment industry or the media industry, you have class traded. That is me, that is you, that is we. That is what’s going on. And just because one individual person to me what any Black celebrity symbolically, no matter what what it is, it shows the desperate constraints. Um. I was autistically obsessed with Sammy Davis Jr. and seeing how people were up and down with him and how people liked, people loved him. And he was actually kind of weaponized against Black people. And–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Sammy Davis Junior had um so many different performance opportunities where he tried to kind of court Black audiences back. It reminded me of Whitney Houston. It reminded me of Michael Jackson and some of the choices that he made in order to do that too. It even reminds me of Janet Jackson and how come she came out so afro-centric at a point in order to distance herself from her brother who was seen as a sellout and distant. That is the thing. We are in such economic and societal desperation that one of the only pathways we can find to a life worth living is through the very system that seeks to dominate us and absorb everything and leave nothing but scraps. Like that’s just the situation we’re in, and I think trying to pretend that Teyana Taylor is somehow, like, I want all that bull [bleep] to die. I want it all to die, all the Black girl magic, all that stuff, not literally, but like, I want all of that seduction into media in Hollywood to die because it is worthless, and anybody who is trying to seduce you into it is full of [bleep], in my opinion.
DeRay Mckesson: On the topic of movies, there is a movie that is the most nominated movie in the history of the Oscars. And like I said before, it is Sinners. Myles, lead us.
Myles E. Johnson: Yes, so Sinners has I believe like the one that I remember because I saw is All About Eve because Betty Davis is one of the greatest actresses ever to act and I love All About Eve. And I know that that was a film that used to have that crown and Sinners beat that film out, which is really cool. So here’s my thing and here’s something that I’ve seen happen at least in the digital space. I’ve not met any regular Black people who care about the Oscars. I’m in the Midwest, I’m like so I’m not going to, so this is all just kind of like from my like digital ecosystem. But what I’ve been excited to see is more Black people seeing these announcements of like excellence and not being moved by them. I’m so excited to see Black people who, of course there are Black people who are kind of like who to me have this kind of incestuous relationship with Black success stories, whereas if somebody else is successful, you take it as more than another Black person to be proud of, and you take as like a marker of your own success, which I think has been really, really weird to um witness, if I’m being honest. But I’ve been really excited to see so many Black folks say, no matter what happens, the win for Sinners is the fact that we got to see this movie, the fact that this movie was made and we enjoyed it, but there is no legitimizing Sinners through the Oscars. There’s no legitimizing the goodness of this film through the Oscar’s. And even though I would say kind of like the neoliberal Black digital ecosystem is always gonna be louder and just a bigger population because I remember being so lonely in my feelings with the Beyonce article, with my Moonlight article, when that happened to Moonlight and me just trying to get Black people to just disconnect from these legitimizing forces that are totally informed by capitalism and white supremacy. It made me excited to see so many Black people, specifically young Black people if I’m being honest. I feel like millennials and Gen X Black excellent people are a little bit of a lost cause, but it’s exciting to see Gen Z and younger Black folks say, we don’t care. Stop doing this to us. And then if the Oscars happen, we hope that they get everything that they deserve. But then if they don’t get best picture, then we’re in a controversy and then Oscar’s so white and then we need a hashtag and da da da. And then in five years we get disrespected again. I think I’m glad to see so many Black people get off of that merry-go-round of humiliation and disrespect to our culture and our art. It makes me happy. Sinners is a great movie, period.
Sharhonda Bossier: As you both know, I was not going to go see it until y’all were like, you have to go see it so we can talk about it. And I slept with the lights on that night and because I’m a I it was terrifying to me. But I don’t know, I do think that there is something about wanting your art to be appreciated by the people you consider your peers, right, that I totally get. You know I’ve also heard from people that like when you win the awards, you can demand more, right? You get more latitude, you earn more, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve talked about on the pod before how winning has also meant that Black actors have been sidelined for a while because people don’t want to pay them what they’re now worth as Academy Award winning actors and, you know, et cetera. I think what’s been interesting to me also is that everyone feels like the nominations are a participation trophy. Like there was so much conversation and discourse around Sinners. You kind of had to nominate it in all of these ways, but it feels like Beyonce at the Grammys where it’s like she was not gonna win album of the year. We knew it was gonna go to Adele, even if we liked Beyonce’s Lemonade better. And I think people feel similarly like they’re about to Beyonce at The Grammies, Ryan Coogler at the Oscars, you know? So it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
DeRay Mckesson: This is what I always will say about the Oscars that completely blew my mind, is that I did not know that they don’t have to watch all the movies. Now that I know Oscar voters, I didn’t realize they don’t watch all of the movies! That is crazy to me! That just feels nuts. So like, now they’re trying to make it better, but I don’t know, that just feels like a crazy thing. The second is that it wasn’t until I had a more national perspective on a lot of things that I have realized how hard the campaigning goes. So like the public thing is its own thing. But there’s so much work to get Oscar voters just in the room to watch the movie.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Which is where they spend so much money. And I was like, that is just fascinating to me. So those two things just continue to blow my mind. I think about the film, I you know I echo most of what you would say, Myles, is that this was a great film, regardless. Zero awards, all 16, it was an incredible film. I think what’s a little different for me about this is that it seems like we do have a collective appreciation for Ryan Coogler. I know I do as, you know, Fruitvale Station is his first major film in that way and about an issue very close to my personal life and my professional life, and would love for him to get every ounce of recognition he possibly could get, though he doesn’t need this to be suc– he is already Ryan Coogler. And you know people make fun of Michael B. Jordan for some things, but I’m like, he played two characters. I thought that was great. And definitely, if it’s him and Marty Supreme, you know I saw Marty Supreme and Timothee Chalamet was whatever, but like what was going on in that movie? So I’m hopeful. I don’t know what other awards there are. You know, I remember Solange obviously being like, you know “We should make our own stuff.”
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: After she won her Grammy.
DeRay Mckesson: After [laughter] Myles, with that, it does feel like it would be really beautiful to be recognized by your peers. And I, you know, Ryan saying that he’s not a voter because he doesn’t want to judge art, I think is the most Ryan Coogler thing you could possibly say, which I also kind of love. But what I don’t like is if they win nothing, I think I’m team for the call to burn down the Osc– like whatever.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Whatever our collective call is, if you lose all 16, I’m pissed.
Myles E. Johnson: It would be so ridiculous to see Black people go from like a digital cultural ecosystem of resting and the thing that activates us is losing an Oscar. I would pray that we would have collectively more self-awareness to say, oh my goodness, all this other stuff, but that Oscar. We in the streets, or we’re in this digital like panic over that. I really hope Black people let it go. And again, this is like Dr. Bell, who like I really enjoy watching and reading and who has illuminated me a lot about like the narratives that are around Black excellence and Black capitalism and the myths around it, and he’s written extensively around it. And he also kind of like annoyingly but accurately reminds us that these films that garner billions of dollars and millions of dollars are going to the same executives and the same companies that are helping–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –fascists take over the government and helping bombs.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –go to these different places, so a lot of times the price tag and the numbers don’t really mean s*** and maybe, and I kind of interrogate what peeship is. So I understand peer ship as in you’re a director and another director, but I think as Black people just like we change certain things from scraps to soul food or to instruments to jazz, I think that we should shift what peership is. If you are really one of us, which I feel like Ryan Coogler has totally shown that he is with the story he tells and how he presents himself, I think that he should think of peershp as how do I get this economic success to the people who I am using because I know they are thirsty for identity. And I think that his, again, I think his films have been brilliant. I think the reason why he has captured the Black audience is because of his masterful knowledge of film. But I think that if you really want to show and get appreciation from peers, remember Black folks, all Black folks. Regular Black folks are your peers too. And how do we create economic systems from this successful film to the Black community? If it’s not that, then to me, all-Black art is a failure if it’s not trying to do that work.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. [music break] My news is about the Board of Peace. I don’t know how much you all have paid attention to the Board Of Peace, but this is another thing that I thought was not real. And I thought, frankly, I thought it was like a internet creation. I was like, oh, Trump’s on the Board of Peace. And then I was, like, oh, snap. This is like a real, legitimately trying to make it a thing. So what I’ll remind us all of is Trump’s obsession with being labeled as a international peacemaker so there’s a Nobel Peace Prize, which he didn’t get, but he has received the last winner of the Nobel Peace prize, he now has her prize, but the Nobel folks are like, that’s not how it works. He created the FIFA Peace Prize as a way to receive somebody’s Peace Prize. And that was a thing. Again, there’s never been a FIFA Peace prize before that. And now he has made what he’s called the Board of Peace. Now, what I’ll tell you, the wildest thing about the border of peace to me is that I did not realize that it was approved by the UN Security Council. I thought this was like some random thing that Trump just like made up in his backseat, like he made up the Trump phone and the all the other things. I didn’t realize that the UN security council has been a part of the shenanigans the whole the whole way. And then, Myles, this goes back to your bombs with bombs with the pride flag and bombs without. Because the whole point of the Board of Peace is a part of a broader plan that includes establishing a security force in Gaza. Now, who’s a part of the board of peace? There are 20 countries, including Argentina, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates. And the only way to get permanent membership on the board of peace is to donate a billion dollars. Now there is no dollar amount to be included as a member, but the only way to get permanent membership is the billion dollar minimum. Who is the chair? The charter says that Trump is the Chair of the board and can be replaced as the Chairman only quote, “through voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity as determined by unanimous vote of the executive board.” So he has installed himself as the chair of the billion dollar minimum permanent membership committee of the board of peace. Now, importantly, there are some groups that have chosen not to participate, like the great country of Canada, the UK, France has not yet signed on. But I was just shocked that so many people are participating in this Board of Peace nonsense that is happening. And the reason I brought it here was because I wanted to see what you all thought about it. When I it was different to me when I thought this was like one of his Trump specials. When I realized that the UN Security Council is also part of it, it reminds me in so many ways how many people were not paying attention around what was going on in Gaza and how the Gaza Strip is even more important for these leaders than even the far left activists ever pushed for people, that this is this remains a huge topic. And I will just shout out the Palestinian activists, the free Palestine activists, who forced this conversation about Gaza to be a national conversation, who refused to let up even when they were shunned from the left because as with most of the activists’ work, they were right.
Myles E. Johnson: I think I’m curious as to like what surprised you most about it or anybody like the most about it. Again, there’s a parallel world where the same thing happens and nobody cares. I think because of how A, the mainstream media, legacy media for justifiable reasons hates Trump. So I think that they end up catastrophizing specifically what Trump does, but then staying mute on what Democrats do, and then they kind of erase the narrative of how these two things are working in concert or in parallel, or they’re not that different. And that to me is really, really frustrating. I think that it’s obvious to me that something would have been erected inside of Vice President Harris’s or Biden’s presidency that was something that keeps the Middle East on an American imperial control. And I think the way that Trump does it, I think the fact that he sprinkles some money laundering on top of it, which to me, what a lot of this is, is a way for him to get money from these other countries, the way that he is such an egomaniac. So he is going to be, announce himself chair and he can’t leave it and all that other stuff. I think all those things are absurd and wild and I’m totally in agreement. But I think the meat of what’s going on is something that we’ve witnessed happen in that Vice President Harris explained to us what was going to happen. So I’m always a little confused out, sometimes I feel like maybe I’m missing something around other people’s surprise around Trump doing it. Cause I feel like Trump already lets us know how he’s going to do it. So like what outside of the how that he’s doing it is the thing that is the most disturbing is always a little confusing to me.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I’m going to put back on my US history teacher hat and encourage people to go back to their unit of study on what was called the scramble for Africa, because we’ve seen this play out before, where we had European countries convene conferences and summits right, to talk about how they were going to parse the continent of Africa. And all of that coincided with the second industrial revolution, right? So it’s the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th century when we need new kinds of natural resources, minerals and materials to power the second Industrial Revolution and age. And so we again have seen these bodies be established before. We have seen strong European or Western powers position themselves as the deciders and build something, right, when they don’t like the existing world order, when they don’t like the existing systems that allow for these things to happen, to create something under the guise of legitimacy and authenticity to meet their imperialist and colonialist aims. And we’re seeing the exact same thing, right? We’re seeing a plan for a region of the world that is being led by outside entities under the guise of something that is legitimate and lawful, right? We have a charter, we have a governing board, right, we have criteria for membership, criteria for presumably anyway, a transition of power, so should the current head become incapacitated or pass away, et cetera, et cetera, right. And all of this is simply the ongoing legacy of imperialism, right and I think for a long time, we have talked about imperialism as something that happened. Right, and no longer is happening. But we’re seeing them deploy the same tools, create the same entities, and leverage the same playbook centuries later.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I think the thing that shocks me is just how, and I know, I know in my heart, I’m like, DeRay, you shouldn’t be shocked, but it’s just how brazen it all is. Like a billion dollar membership, he is essentially the chairman forever until, like there’s no mechanism to remove him. All these other countries are like, yeah, this makes sense too. That like, it just, I guess another way to say it is, I don’t know what it’ll take for for people to realize that they’re being hoodwinked. Like, if this is not enough, if all of these things are not enough then I’m like, I don’t even know what could pull the veil back. Or you’re like, yeah, all of this is a scam.
Myles E. Johnson: Who’s being hoodwinked?
DeRay Mckesson: The people.
Myles E. Johnson: People on the left are not for Trump, right? So we know they’re not being hoodwinked, they see it. So like.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Who else is there to be hoodwanked? People on the right like this, people on the right like this imperialism. People on the right believe there is no compromising with Palestinian or Brown people because they are savages. They are Muslims. They want to do global [?[ and that we are just a naive leftist and liberals who don’t know any better and who have this kind of um fanciful way of that we see the globe and so they’re okay with this of all education backgrounds, mind you the dumbest on the right, the smartest on the right, they are okay with this. That is the part about being on the right, is that you think imperialism is good. You want there to be an Amazon, Apple, global worlds where you can go anywhere you wanna go and that your American passport makes you dominate anywhere you go. That is the plan.
DeRay Mckesson: Maybe I still hold a false distinction between the Trumpers and the general right, but I do think there are people on the right who, that there is a base of the right who doesn’t support all of this foolishness that, like I even think about the small fraction of the right who is team get rid of ICE, is that that seems like it matters and that there’s a way that they actually don’t agree with some of this stuff. Maybe I’m wrong. There used to be a time when there was a super clear distinction between the right, like the sort of traditional right, the MAGA people, at least first term of Trump. That has become much blurrier this go around, which I totally get, I just, I look at his approval ratings and stuff like that, even on the right. And it just doesn’t seem, it seems like the media representation of how popular he is and the message does seem outpaced with even the polling at the base. That would be my offering.
Myles E. Johnson: My thing is, who is this traditional right? Sorry, just speaking like this. I’m not speaking like literally to DeRay. But like, I’m just speaking so like when I hear stuff, I’m like, did your family go untouched by crack? Did your family not have a JFK story when JFK was saying that he was going to make this world better and somebody shot him and said, no, you won’t. Like did you, were we not here? Like the right has always been an anti-Black, anti-human advancement apparatus. And what the Democrats say is don’t kill our friends, we’ll find use for them. We actually think we can integrate them. They won’t be you, but we don’t have to kill them. We can actually still look good to our more civilized European neighbors, and we don’t have to keep them enslaved. We don’t have to keep us segregated. Come on, there’s a better way to do it. And so the Democrats have always been going from that angle, and the right has always been saying, F that, we do not want them there. But there’s presidents recorded talking about how it goes from you being able to say nigger to talking about policy and how some of the right’s policy has become so abstract that people are forgetting what we stand for. The right has always been an evil apparatus. To me, what I hear, I love that there is no more blurry lines because I cannot stand somebody talking about I am an economic conservative but a social liberal. That doesn’t exist. That is some BS. If you are on the right, you are part of an evil regime and when Trump dies, you will still be a part of the evil regime. If you voted for Bush, you voted evil. If you voted for his daddy, you voted for evil. If you voted for Reagan, you voted for evil, you like that.
DeRay Mckesson: So you’re sort of like big bomb, little bomb, still a bomb.
Myles E. Johnson: It’s not big bomb, little bomb. It’s not big it’s not big bomb because of Obama.
Sharhonda Bossier: Its bomb, or pride flag bomb.
Myles E. Johnson: Obama put a bigger bomb. Obama did more drone strikes. It’s not, it’s a bomb and a bomb.
DeRay Mckesson: It’s a bomb and a bomb.
Myles E. Johnson: It’s like Obama still did more drone strikes, a lot of what the Democrats have been doing is in order to try to court this um right back into liking them. And the big part of it is they want to be racist. They want to be sexist. They want policies that keep people at a permanent underclass. They do not want to advance socially or economically. That’s a big part of them. If you are still calling yourself a Republican based off of policies in 2026, you are a white supremacist. I can talk to you and tell you what flavor you are, or if you’re sugar-free or you got the full sugars in it, but you are still the white supremacist. Just all that fantasy around voting right in America. What? And then speaking of Canada, you go to Canada and their furthest right is me. I’m seen as a neoliberal to a lot of Canadians. We’re in such a fiction in America that it’s baffling to me sometimes. I’m like, what?
DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, do you? What’s your read on that?
Sharhonda Bossier: I mean, I do think that we have talked about Trump as if he is particularly bad, and I don’t think he is. I mean in some ways, I think that he’s sloppy and that’s a lot of what we’re noticing, but I think Trump is Reagan 2.0, right? And we’ve talked about that before in like a lot of ways from the silly like Reagan’s critique of roots, right, to the political, right that has a real impact on people’s day-to-day lives. Like some of the policies that Reagan and his administration championed and are still with us the consequences at least today. I also think that we skip over the fact that the republican party as a party has had an organizing force internal to it that has moved it further and further, right? If you look at Newt Gingrich and his contract with america. If you kook at the tea party, which we also skip over right now, right. Like the tea party used to be a radical radical fringe and then the “middle,” quote unquote, of the Republican Party moved to absorb the Tea Party. So they were already further right before you get the rise of Trump and Trumpism.
DeRay Mckesson: I’m philosophically here I think but I’m just like, I don’t know, it feels, something feels different. It feels very different what Trump is like firing 300,000 federal government employees and taking 1.5 million people’s visa statuses in one moment, freezing food stamps, like targeting states that disagree with them, deploying ICE as his personal police department, like those things. That feels very different than, and maybe it is that the the other right had more of a reliance and belief in like procedural something, but this doesn’t feel, it doesn’t all feel the same to me.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, ask people how they feel about Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, right? Who had people in tents in the hot Arizona sun when he was detaining them on suspicion of being undocumented. Ask people how the felt about [?]–
DeRay Mckesson: But that’s to me the police, so that’s the the police are one broad brush to me. That’s not you know.
Sharhonda Bossier: Okay.
DeRay Mckesson: The police are. The police
Myles E. Johnson: You know, like the languages and you know, I always get some, you know well-meaning older white people after these kind of go on who want to discuss it, who I encourage to talk to me, you know, um, I’m nice as long as you don’t get on my nerves, but there’ll be like, well, Trump just feels like different and stuff like that. I’m like, yeah, he’s way more inconvenient. So that’s what I’m saying. If we even look at like somebody like Mitt Romney. He was such an abstraction from the right’s original project that they began failing. So they finally found a mascot that activates what the right was always supposed to symbolize, which was keeping this a white, male, ethno, national state that has a underclass of people of color, but does not have equality. That is what we see going on. And when Trumpism, Trump passes or whatever happens you’re still going to have to deal with that reality. Like, you’re still going to have to deal with that. And I think the inconvenience of Trump and the sloppiness and the fact that he’s activated people who were unactivated before because they wanted somebody who was like, I don’t stop talking to me about these taxes. Are you going to keep those N words in their place or not? Stop talking to me about smaller government. Are you gonna make sure my wife can’t leave me even if I beat her ass or not? That’s what people want to know. And Trump said, I’ll let you know.
DeRay Mckesson: What I do hear in what you’re saying, whether the what I’m calling the traditional right publicly believe these ideas are for or legislated them, what is true is that when Trump came and said them, people did not say, not me. People did not say, I’m not voting for it. People did not say I don’t believe those things. People voted for it, that the votes were there. They’re like, somebody came out and did it. They might not have said it before.
Myles E. Johnson: Both times.
DeRay Mckesson: Right? When they had a chance to, they did. And I will give you, I’ll give you that.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so my news is a piece of news and follow-up to an immigration raid from September 2025 on a residential building in Chicago. We talked about immigration agents who were propelling down onto the building from Black Hawk helicopters, you know, busting down doors, detaining people, because the Trump administration claimed that they had gotten a tip that the building was occupied by mostly undocumented Venezuelan gang members. And there were lots of questions swirling around that raid, especially because people were like, this is a random building in a random part of Chicago. Like why this big military operation? And even then the quote unquote gang cover story, right? Just didn’t sound right to people. And so since that raid, the state of Illinois has been investigating claims that it’s actually the building management and ownership that tipped off authorities because they have been in a protracted fight with residents over the living conditions of the building and that this was an attempt by building ownership and management to force out “undesirable,” quote unquote, tenants, right? And I’m bringing it to the pod because, you know, DeRay, you just mentioned Trump deploying ICE as his personal police force, right? But what happens when the moneyed class also thinks about deploying ICE as their personal police force? We saw another story, I think this week, around a public’s executive trying to leverage immigration enforcement against his ex-wife, like just wild things are happening. And just wanna bring this again, because I think often our memories are short. We don’t think about the consequences of these kinds of actions on people over the long term. And we’ve been talking about the need to organize in place, in person, and what happens when people are displaced and dispersed. So yeah, wanted to bring that to the pod for discussion.
Myles E. Johnson: I think we don’t talk about enough how there are, like, philosophical, dare I say, like even like spiritual realities that make people land at conservatism. And you kind of mentioned it, I put it in the group chat earlier, around this comedian building these fake websites where people can call ICE on people and would document the phone calls and what people were doing. And you kinda hear something that is disturbing because you hear people calling ICE on X, Y’s or on employees they don’t like and stuff like that. But what you do see is a consistent pattern of cruelty that lands you in conservative action. And I think that’s to my point, but again, where it’s like, if you’re a one-issue voter and you’re a landlord and you say, I vote Republican because economically that is what’s best for me, I must still name you a white supremacist. You don’t have to get it in order to be it. That’s why I want to be a little bit more clear and a little bit more broad when it comes to how I name these things because it doesn’t matter if it hurts your feelings or if you don’t get it, it’s what you’re doing. You’re being a–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –white supremacist capitalist and you’re utilizing imperialism for your patriarchal capitalist needs and and wants. That’s what your doing. You don’t gotta get it. You can have an accent, like the person who was calling on his ex-wife is an immigrant too, you can hear the accent. So, again, this is not something that I’m when I say white supremacy, I’m just talking about white people, I’m talking about a disease, a psychological, philosophical disease that has inhabited people, and we call it conservatism, or we call it Republican. It’s not just that, that’s how come these wild things are happening when the Republicans are in office, because it truly is an illness of having a society that we split and we make seem that we’re in a binary instead of we’re all living on some type of gradient. When you split people into thinking they’re binaries, bigotries are birthed, no matter if we’re talking about a gender binary or a political binary, and we’re seeing the results of that. Again, like just to like wrap it up, when it comes to that landlord calling ICE on his building, I think I love that this is being reported, but I think thinking that this is the only individual instance of this.
Sharhonda Bossier: Sure.
Myles E. Johnson: And then also not connect this to the anti-Blackness that is connected to gentrification and noise complaints.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: And all these different things that people have tried to tell people about and show people that these landlords have a different mind or have a different motivation than you would think like now we’re in this place where you know essentially, Trump did greenlight, you have your own police force. That is what he signaled to us. But I think we’ve already had Black people and different thinkers already kind of try to call the alarm. And the last last last, I lied, last last thing that I’ll say is, is that it’s hard for me and like, usually when I write or when I speak, I really try not to critique organizing or, you know, anybody who’s like in the activism and on the streets. But I really hope that like a lot of people who do organizing and a lot of people who um have resources and are thinking about where to put their money resources, see how important housing is and how housing can transform whatever you do. Like, I don’t want to go on the rant that I went on earlier in the group chat, but what I will say is that, like, us ignoring the essential needs of a Black community and just going by what the media had allowed us to take storm from has had us suffer, you know? Like, I do think that we’re in a moment where so many people are already pressed. I don’t know what anybody’s mortgage is, but can anybody really afford to pay a second mortgage on anybody else, even if you’re getting a lot of money? Isn’t everybody paying these big rents and stuff like that? And I wish that we were more strategic around regular Black folks and housing, and not just Black folks, but Black and Brown folks in housing because I think that’s how you keep a loyal base to activism.
DeRay Mckesson: This just reminds me about how easy it is to participate in the police state or fascism, whatever you want to call patriarchy, that the invitation is always there. And the question is, like, have we primed people to say no or have we made it so seductive and so easy to say yes? And the answer in almost all of the things is, like, it is just really seductive because people can talk themselves out of a police state da da they’re like, oh, no, this is for my safety. This is for da da. Like you can rationalize something else that is not the seductiveness of the police state or fascism, and by the time it comes back to you, because you realize that the monster always eats itself, especially if you don’t have the luxury of being a white straight man with the structural power. If you are anything else, the system will often eat itself. And even if you are that man, it will eat you alive too. You just might still be here, but spiritually dead, right? That it always does something to you. But it is always seductive. And I think about the number of people in my day-to-day job who call the police with the best intentions and then the police come shoot them. And you’re like, well, yeah, because this is how it works, is that the thing doesn’t work. But participating in it often feels like the right decision or a decision that you can make feel right. [music break] 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]
