In This Episode
The Justice Department moves to block the release of Epstein files, SpaceX rockets explode over active flight paths with little consequence, and a prominent gospel singer faces sexual abuse allegations—another reminder of how power shields itself across institutions and industries.
News
Justice Department urges a judge to reject a request from US Reps on the release of Epstein files
“We’re Too Close to the Debris”
Grammy-winning gospel singer and pastor accused of sexually abusing a young man
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People. On this episode, it’s me, Myles, and Sharhonda. Back to cover all the unreported news with regard to race, justice, culture, and equity. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at @PodSaveThePeople. Here we go. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: It’s an ice cold world out there. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson on Instagram at @SunPulpit.
Sharhonda Bossier: This is Sharhonda Bossier at @BossierSha on Instagram at @Bossiers on Spill.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, we should start with the most important news in the media and around the country today. I feel like I have lived through three separate most important news moments about the police, but we are now talking about ICE. And, you know, before I do a lot of framing, obviously we know Renée Good was killed in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis conversation has taken over. There was polling that shows that ICE is less popular than they’ve ever been, which is interesting. And it seems important that the majority of Democrats, a lot of moderates, and even a one in four Republicans now say that they support abolish ICE, whatever that, however they define that, which, you know, could be, mm could be could be a little rough. And that Trump actually, with regard to immigration, is polling down. 77% of Republicans said that the shooting of Renée Good was justified, which I will just bring up, cause I thought that was interesting, um but abolish ICE as a phrase is turning up. The last thing I’ll say before I, you know, these aren’t really comments, this is just framing, is I was shocked, there was a YouGov poll that showed that 75% of registered voters say they personally saw the video of Renée Good. And I thought that was really interesting because we get these watershed moments, it was like Mike Brown, we get George Floyd, and then Renée Good are the three incidents I’d say where like everybody sort of had a take on it, everybody saw it. There were obviously other big national stories in between these three that people talked about and that were really big. But the idea that 75% of registered voters saw the video feels big to me, especially because during George Floyd, we were all stuck at home. So that was sort of how people explained away why everybody sort of saw that one. But this feels, this feels a little different. So to just go over the YouGov economist polling, it was 46% supporting, uh supporting abolishing ICE, and 43% um opposing abolishing ICE at the aggregate and it is disaggregated, obviously, but I’ll stop at the framing there because I want to know what y’all think.
Sharhonda Bossier: I am struggling with what this polling data tells us about people over the long term. I think the proximity to like the incident always makes people go, oh, this is wrong and this is bad. But you know, you get a little bit of emotional distance because I think people are acting from a really, really emotional place. You have a couple of “skeptics,” quote unquote, say things like, Well, sure, maybe ICE is a little rogue and a little out of control, but how else do we X or Y or Z, right? And then you have someone who people trust and look to as a leader on the left, like a Cory Booker, you know, proposing things like body cams and better training and people feel like, yeah, that’s, that meets our demands, right. And so I feel like we eventually find ourselves right back in this space of negotiating of just how evil we will allow our law enforcement and immigration enforcement to be. And we’ve talked about this before, where one of the tools that the right gets to leverage is nostalgia and certainty, right? So either like this idea that we can harken back to this time of the golden era, or this sense that like, sure, it’s not working how we intended, we can fix it. But those people who were telling you to tear it all down, don’t know what they’re going to build in its place. And that place of uncertainty is really destabilizing for people. And so I think we still haven’t. And in policing you know, DeRay, you talk about this all the time, is like if we have not helped people see what can exist in its space, then people are going to stick with the devil they know and try and fix that. And so my concern is that like in a couple of weeks, again, a little bit more emotional distance from this particular incident. People are going to find themselves wondering what’s next and the question is who is there to help us dream up something different fundamentally, right? Because otherwise I think we do find ourselves looking at people who are proposing, you know, fixes because they’ve at least given us something concrete, right, and the ambiguity and the gray is, yeah, it’s it’s unsettling for people.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I agree with everything that you just said. And then I also think the same people who helped feed the nightmare can’t help dream people out of it. Um. And I think the people who are usually assisting people in dreaming yourselves out of the nightmare have been um successfully censored from speaking and dissenting. Again, I’m always advocating for my writers and kind of like my millennial core um folks because we always commiserate around how we were able to dissent and be critical. And we kind of have the backing of so many um companies and stuff to be able to just sit and we just do not have that anymore. And when people are getting shot in the neck, who’s gonna do that by themselves?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: As great as Substack is, but, you know what I mean? So like, so so so it’s just interesting to see this kind of nightmare unfold. And my fear is, I guess, more of a long-term fear, is because I always think Black people are the trendsetters, even when the trend is bad. And I think us seeing Black people being depressed this political cycle, because what you did was activate and energize Black people, feed them to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party doesn’t do [bleep]. And then when you see you not go anywhere, it depresses you and it makes people stay home or it makes people figure out alternative ways to be political that does not involve government. So you’re gonna keep on doing that. And now you’re seeing white people do it too. So now you got a new group of white people who are like, well, this just can’t happen. Oh my goodness. And they’re gonna gag because they’re going to get the reformist incremental bull [bleep]. And nothing’s gonna change, and they’re gonna be depressed, and they are not gonna be activated anymore. And it makes me sad that there hasn’t been any creative ways to figure out how to keep people not just involved, but caring. With caring and attached to it, and really thinking that something else can happen. But [?] listen I’m a sunny person, follow me on @SunPulpit. [laughter] But I really think we’re in a bit of an Afro-pessimistic, nihilistic reality. And I think until we confront the reality we’re in, we can’t shift it. I don’t think realities are life sentences, but I think we have to confront the reality that we’re in, in order to shift it, and we’re still, like, are you kidding me? Like, body cams? Like.
DeRay Mckesson: I will say, you know, I’ve gotten a lot of calls, people are like, what is Campaign Zero doing? What am I doing? I, we actually plan to do something, release something next week about ICE, uh which is historically, we’ve not really done a lot with ICE, because ICE has had natural limitations, they don’t own a lot of property. They, you knows, it’s been hard for them to sort of detain people. They’ve been a nightmare, but it just wasn’t a lot officers over there. And then all of a sudden, it’s just like, you know, it is blown.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: They’re trying to build warehouses across the country. It’s just like a whole I’m interested in what you all think about what this says about the state of the movement. I’ll just say out loud that obviously mass mobilization 2014 changed the game all across the world. 2020, I feel like, you know, as somebody who was on the street in 2014, 2020 was all the people who didn’t do anything in 2014 who were like, I’m gonna do something now. Okay, cool. They were out in the street in 2020. 2026, I look around and I don’t know if I see even the organizing infrastructure. I’m like, who do I haven’t called that I think is organizing in a small amount of way that feels real. There were people who sort of specialize in immigration activism, I don’t know what happened to those people. But I’d be interested to know like what you all think of sort of what happened to however you define the movement, given the incredible waves that we are I mean it brought us together, we wouldn’t be here if not for the protests in at least the first wave in 2014 after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson.
Myles E. Johnson: DeRay, I met you at Trappy Hour in Harlem, shaking yo ass. No, I’m just joking. I’m just joking. That is a lie.
DeRay Mckesson: [indistinct]
Myles E. Johnson: That was a Trumpian lie. No, no, absolutely, absolutely. I think we’re just living in the failure of it, 2014 and 2020 and stuff, right? So I’m not saying there wasn’t successes and victories, but I think right now we’re saying, yeah, there were some successes and victory, and this thing was implemented and this thing changed in the culture, but now we’re confronting. I think everybody’s confronting the failures of it, even as a writer. I mean, I think that I was innovative and ahead of the curve by leaving the internet and saying, oh, I don’t think I’m helping anymore. Like, oh I have to kind of like I have to kind of pivot. And I think, that everybody, no matter where you were in those conversations or where you were in that movement work, you have to kind of look at it and say, okay, well that was a failure and now we have to figure out how we can be successful with it. But my big thing is, and I just don’t see the actual organizing. I know there are organizations. I know that there are great places here in Cincinnati like Tribe Foundation. There are places across the South in America. So I’m not saying that, but just to sound redundant, we have bled out politically and culturally. Like, and you can’t organize people around crisis. You can’t organize people every single time a bad thing happens. And I’m not even just saying that as in strategically you can’t do it. I’m saying philosophically you can’t do it because people do not actually wanna do that. So people feel compelled to do it morally, so you can guilt people a few times to doing it, but it only takes but so many times for somebody to say, you know what, I’m a little stiff or lie about where they gotta go or, oh my goodness, I was trying to come but I had to work overtime. People do not want to do it. So to me, what felt obvious is to organize around culture and I don’t see that happening. And I have my thoughts as to why you don’t see that happening because who’s usually in charge of organizing these days. Last thing I’ll say is the last organization I was a part of did that really, really well because it combined with nightlife that had its own battles because leadership was addicted and and and doing weird stuff that happens in nightlife, unfortunately, but I did see a difference when you’re constantly gathering people around nightlife, when you’re constantly gathering people around culture, when you’re constantly gathering people. I think that again, one of the reasons why I’m so interested in BDSM, because here is a built in queer leftist spaces that have people who are interested in those types of things. Can there be some bridges between Black organizing and kink? Not that there aren’t Black people in kink, but it’s largely white. So so like are there those like bridges that you can build so people aren’t just um communing over tragedies. I guess what I’m trying to say.
DeRay Mckesson: I have a question. This is a push to understand when you say not a push a challenge when you say organize your own community, you mean sort of getting people together outside of crisis regularly. So by the time crisis comes, people already have relationship instruction stuff and the crisis is not the glue that keeps relationships together. Is that what you mean?
Myles E. Johnson: That’s what I mean. And also you have recognition outside of political recognition, right? So we know that like, I’m saying it to you. I’m acting like I could hurt DeRay’s feelings, I can’t. But you know, and I know that all of the good things that Campaign Zero is doing, it only takes one bored Candace Owens to ruin it. And there’s no infrastructure outside of the good work that Campaign Zero is to protect them from doing that. So now the community, does not most people don’t know what’s going on unless they follow the social media or they felt they felt it directly and then you don’t have any other ways to touch the community because most people naturally do not want to organize or don’t want to be a part of it so that so yes to what you’re saying but just uh a broader reason as to why I say it.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay, I do have another question, but Sharhonda I want to know what you think.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I think I want to build on Myles’s point around like the infrastructure we have or have not built. I think we built a ton of like digital and virtual infrastructure. And as increasingly people are leaving those spaces or the algorithms are suppressing, you know, a lot of activist content, there’s a question of like how useful those spaces remain to us, right? And we did not build the same offline infrastructure between 2014 and 2020. We just didn’t, right? And so even if you ask people who were organizers in that moment, how they would reach people now, like do you how do you reach people, now? You know what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: It’s so easy, like off the top of my head, it baffles me that like one of my good friends, one of best friends is Michael Dante and they do Black House Radio. Black House radio is a huge deal. It baffles me that Michael Dante has get calls from Sprite, calls from other big artists that I can’t name because they’re not announced yet, but has not gotten a talk from organizers.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Has not got a talk from um those type of places. So there actually have been a lot of third spaces that have been created that offshoot digital and also places where other places can learn from because Black House Radio thrives on YouTube, thrives on the internet, and thrives in person. So I think that there’s a way to not do a either or. The last thing I’ll say, because you know I gotta I gotta hit it, a lot of that is because of the neoliberal Black excellence nonprofit bull [bleep]. So in the midst of it, things that Michael Dante were doing, Black House Radio were doing. I’m talking too fast, so there’s other places I can name y’all. But those were discredited, not seen as serious, respectability politics killed it, and now you need that bridge because most people don’t wanna go to NAACP’s thing. Now we see, even if you wanna go to Essence, now you see the the the backlash of Essence. Uh we saw the backlash of afro punk I was there during the transphobia backlash of um of afropunk. Asked to help assist in repairing it couldn’t do it because they’re transphobic for real but like but like, but even during those times like saw those like kind of bridges being destroyed and it’s now we’re in the consequence of that to me.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I think those spaces exist. I think my point is that most of the organizers who were leading in the digital space are not in community with those people who have built those offline spaces, right? Like–
Myles E. Johnson: Then you’re not organizers if you’re just in a digital space.
Sharhonda Bossier: Some people would disagree.
DeRay Mckesson: Well I mean.
Sharhonda Bossier: And a lot of people raised a lot of money and went on speaking tours and wrote entire books claiming to be organizers because they had massive online followings and–
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, that’s not that though that’s a lie. And most people there’s a lot there’s a there’s a lot of people who–
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah but Myles people wouldn’t say it was it was you would get kicked out the room if you said that was a lie in ’14, ’15 and ’16. People would have been like–
Myles E. Johnson: Well, I’m somebody who got kicked out the room.
DeRay Mckesson: Right.
Myles E. Johnson: Because I was I was saying that when [?], well, not ’14, ’15, ’16, but I was saying that in 2017, I didn’t get popular because I as a writer, because I was getting along with everybody, I was dissenting, I was saying.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Don’t call me an activist, don’t call me a organizer, don’t just throw that on me. Even as I was seeing other people um around me who are still–
Sharhonda Bossier: Embrace that term yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Embracing those things. I was like, no, you can be, maybe because the term content creator didn’t come in, you can be a social justice content creator, if that’s what it is, but there is a specific skill that you know you have to have in order to organize people digitally and to galvanize that into something in person. So if you’re even struggling to get people to come to your book signing, you’re not an organizer. And that’s okay, but you have to be real about that and the lies around it is is is is hurting us. And if you could do something digitally, be with somebody who could do something in person.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: And collaborate.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. The last point, I don’t disagree with you. I think we’re saying the same thing. I think the last point that I would make also builds on a point you made earlier, and that is the role of institutional philanthropy in standing up organizing entities and organizers, right? I think a lot of us understand the sacrifices that people who choose to do organizing full-time make. A lot of us have been organizers around specific issues for specific causes or for specific campaigns, right. And we were like, you know, absolutely you should be able to earn a living. Absolutely you should be able to X or Y or Z. But what happens as somebody who also, you know, leads an education non-profit full-time, is that the moment you sit down and you put your metrics in a grant report and you got to report to a program officer who has to report to a board of trustees, then your ability to pivot, to actually follow people where they are. And to do work that might be meaningful to the people you hope are the actual beneficiaries of your work shifts significantly, right? Because now one of your chief stakeholders is the person who wrote the check to you, right. And if your work is funded by the winners of capitalism, if your is funded by the people who enjoy privileges in the current system, then your work is never going to be funded to undermine this current system. And I say that as somebody who literally depends on the winners of capitalism to fund her full-time work and pay her mortgage, right? And I’m aware that because of that, there are constraints on what I can say, what I can do, et cetera. The moment you enter into that kind of relationship with philanthropy, and I think we saw this in 2020, right, all of this money flowed to social justice organizations. And I know not every organization that people assume got the money, got the money, right? Like a hundred percent understand that, but a lot of people did and they tried to stand up permanent infrastructure. They had fixed costs, they had staff, and then they became something very different than even I think they imagined they would be. And I think we also have to contend with that. What happens when your donors are not people who are writing you five and ten dollar checks every pay period, right? But what happens when your donors are the people who are writing you six and seven figure checks, right? Because it’s a fundamentally different ball game when that happens. [music break]
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: I will say I’m very proud of my organizing career and, um, and my organizing work. And I remember in starting Campaign Zero, I was also, I, you know, I had a big online presence, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, I too am like, you know, if you can’t get people in the room, oh no, like, you know if you’re not doing that in real life, it makes me nervous. And we, you know, we have lists in five cities where we can get people in rooms and dah, dah, dah, and I’m like proud of it and cool. But I would say, Myles, to your point, there are some asks that I’ve made around and I do work in education and obviously the police. But they’re asks that I’ve made to people who run big things in New York City that you know, and people don’t want to touch the police. They, you know they like, DeRay, I got you on the kids. I do some stuff with schools. They get a little nervous about the police, and I’m always interested in that. But I agree with you about the, you know, it’s I’m also in runs with organizers who I’m like, you cannot give this speech in a community center. You could nail it. You couldn’t. You couldn’t talk to somebody aunt and uncle about this. Like you couldn’t, like you actually don’t, you know how to talk to an Instagram video. You don’t really know how to talk to a person about this and I do think that people have relationships with people. I’m interested to see where this goes because this will be an important next couple of weeks for the Democrats because the funding has to go through Congress by January 30th and there have been calls to not fund ICE at the current levels, to freeze the funding, to move the money. Body cameras, masks, like the whole, you know, we will see it all before the 30th vote comes. And it’ll be interesting. I’m also interested to see what happens in the purple districts. The the full-blown Republican districts, I think, are a mess. But there are purple places across the country where, you know and we poll a lot, people, even the people that like the police don’t think they should be crazy. Like, you know, it’s very popular to be like, don’t do this, da-da-da, so I’ll I’m interested. I think the purple districts are actually real swing spaces for us. And the only group of people who don’t overwhelmingly say they don’t like ICE is actually Republicans. And the the only thing I would say our learning is from the defund era is that whoever defines abolish ICE first will will have a lot of power. And I do think abolish ice right now sort of means something very different to different people. And I think that that is showing up in the polling.
Sharhonda Bossier: Can you say even just like, you know, three or four categories or groups of people, like what you think abolish ICE means for folks right now?
DeRay Mckesson: Oh just like defund, you know, I think that abolish ICE for the far left means like no more ICE, and it means like we shouldn’t have a national police force that polices immigration. I think for I don’t think there are three buckets. I think they’re really two buckets. I think that for the rest of the people, it means ICE should not terrorize people. And there should be oversight and they should operate with accountability. And I think the about they they use the term abolish ICE, just like the defunded, like just like some of the people who said defund and they really just meant move some of the money and like make them less bad. But we need the police. Like I think that that and I think that Trump their team has nailed this like illegal immigrant thing. You’re like, y’all, it’s no crimes. It’s no like the number of people that I talked to still are like, well, you know, but they shouldn’t give a crap. You’re like what crimes? There’s no crimes y’all like.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: This is the fictiveness of of of the um of the campaign is stickier than I think people realize.
Myles E. Johnson: And I guess just like to reiterate, it’s the result of no storytelling, not good storytelling or bad storytelling, no storytelling.
DeRay Mckesson: No yes I think that’s right.
Myles E. Johnson: There’s no storytelling that I can see about what a society looks like with an abolished ICE. What does a world look like with no prisons or police? Like, what does that look like? And even if we are not going to inherit that abolished utopia, what does it look like today? What can we do today to in order to do that? There’s there’s there’s none of that going on, even though. Democrats, I won’t say the left, but Democrats have mainstream media, but Democrats are not interested in any of those radical positions, which to me is where the pessimism and nihilism is born from is because, sorry, y’all, but like I do think it’s hard for me to get like excitement or get interest in these kind of incremental, what’s gonna get funded month by month. I mean like, when I get it on the news clip, I’m I’m right with everybody else. I’m like, what is going on?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: And seeing what’s going on. But to me, what I see long is, oh, we’re just going, we’re just moving, America’s going to erode and we’re just going to and America’s gonna be known as a privatized nation. And most people are gonna be poor and dead and dying and dying out. And most people are just gonna have to privatize all their life from health insurance, education in order to do it. And that will successfully irrigate any type of non-compliance out just because the crush of poverty will be so hard and it’s not going to be a spectacular death, it’s going to a slow boring one and and and with these absurd moments that we that we see in between.
DeRay Mckesson: Myles, uh switching topics, I was waiting deeply to ask you about Candace Owens because I just I like couldn’t get on this episode fast enough to ask you.
Myles E. Johnson: I was in yoga class when I saw your tweet, when I saw your text, I was in yoga class and I was like, I’m gonna come back to it. But I was, like, I don’t get, okay, go ahead. Ask me what you ask.
DeRay Mckesson: I love it! Candace is saying that Charlie Kirk was a time traveler and that he had agents monitoring him from childhood and that he was killed because he tried to disturb the space-time continuum. Talk to me about your girl!
Myles E. Johnson: Now she, now she my girl now she my girl now if I came over here and said talking to you about your girl with the with the mansions and the brunch.
DeRay Mckesson: Shady Boots. But I was like what does Myles have to say.
Myles E. Johnson: When’s the last time you had deviled eggs?
DeRay Mckesson: What does Myles have to say about time traveler theory? Candace.
Myles E. Johnson: I never have anything to say about what she spews like as far–
DeRay Mckesson: Okay.
Myles E. Johnson: –as like literally like what she’s spews of course, I think that she’s a far-right grifter. I think that she–
DeRay Mckesson: I know but where do you think this comes from? I’m like enter this line? Cause the other stuff you could be like, okay, but the time traveler really caught me off guard. What–
Myles E. Johnson: It doesn’t, it shouldn’t catch you off guard. And it actually and it actually should be something we take notes on if you’re interested in organizing people because what she’s able to do is talk philosophically and abstractly about a thing. It’s ridiculous to us, but we all know somebody who believes that we was kings. We all know someone who believes that we all, we all– [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: Myles I love you.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m being for real. I’m saying.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m like looking up last late last year, you have globs of Black people going to Stone Mountain because they thought that aliens were coming down. So we have to really confront that people during this era are having philosophical, spiritual and abstract conversations with themselves specifically as the world looks odd and she is a good couch for it. So even if she is ridiculous. She gives space for other people to have abstract ideas, whereas I feel shaky even saying that I think certain deaths are that we’ve been experiencing feel ancestrally aligned. Like I think I don’t think that it’s coincidence that one of the frontrunners of the civil rights movement dies as we’re seeing our belief in what the civil right movement did in the ’60s die. I think those things are metaphorical and on purpose and I think our ancestors speak like a poet speaks in rhymes in poetry. I think our ancestors speak in lifetimes in nature. I, it took me a very long time to be able to speak like that. And it didn’t take her a long time to speak that, so yes, she’s ridiculous. Yes, it’s stupid. Was he Neo? Probably not. But could we have more space for people to talk abstractly about their ideas? Um. Briahna Joy, she had astrologer and tarot readers on. I think a lot of people who are not necessarily in this kind of like neo-liberal MSNBC bubble are kind of seeing that people want more. People are exhausted by it. And I think that what you see with Candace is somebody who’s willing to feed it just through her right-wing propaganda mess. And last thing I’ll say too is, Matrix is reappropriated on the right. All this stuff is is is is is uh is conservative gumbo. So she’s a lot of this stuff is just mad lib that she’s creating and she knows how to speak really well, like how I stutter and stop and whatever, she does not have that. So she’s able to line all types of bull [bleep] up because she doesn’t stop to think. Don’t be destructive.
DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah I, [sigh] oh man, I wish I’d gone first because I just feel like she’s having a break from reality, you know? [laughter] I don’t I don’t have anything else to wrap around it. Um.
Myles E. Johnson: That makeup is too good to have a break from reality. [laughter] She don’t got that conservative hair either. One thing about Candace is she be looking sickening. So I know she got her right mind. She’s like, listen.
Sharhonda Bossier: You know what, there’s a little body, there is a little balance.
Myles E. Johnson: But Taylor Lorenz um and a couple of other people have recently dropped these deep dives on Candace. I did not know Candace was as inside of the Democrat bubble as she was like, she was doing lots of work there. There’s posts of her being pro-LGBT, posts of being very clearly anti-Trump. So some of this too, I’m gonna be real with you, even with Kanye, even with um other people that we see who used to be on the left, who are now on the right, a lot of this is just revenge. A lot of this is I’m playing a game, y’all are playing a game too. We know y’ all playing a game, and I think that she doesn’t see herself any different from Don Lemon. I think Don Lemon is a performer who’s good on it, but it just so happens that his performance and his people stand on the right side of history. And she sees herself as the same thing. And she says, I’m gonna, I don’t I don’t think she feels as personal about her audience as we wanna think she is. So she takes it off when she gets off. And she said, oh, I lied and I um and I said some lies in order to make some money. And what’s more American than that? Candace for president, 2028.
Sharhonda Bossier: Or maybe Reverend Candace, you know, maybe that’s her next step.
Myles E. Johnson: Maybe both. [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, I’m with you on the break from reality.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: You’re like, but the hair is laid. It is a this is a very, very well, well manicured break from reality. I wanted to ask you and Sharhonda, I’ll start with you, Jasmine Crockett, what’s what’s your James Talarico, Jasmine Crockett? We obviously talked about this when she put her name in the race, her hat in the ring, whatever the phrase is going to be what’s where are you now on Jasmine? Idea sister Jasmine.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh, my goodness. So first, I think we have to talk about the the culturistas podcast um and their conversation about Jasmine Crockett. Right. And I felt like Ta-Nehisi Coates in that moment where I was like, was silence not an option? You know, like shut the [bleep] up. It just was not helpful. You know what I mean? And I think that and we talked about this, right, like Jasmine has been very, very intentional about messaging to people like, look, I know y’all think this is a long shot because I’m a Black woman running for statewide office in Texas, but like, I think we can do this. And the only way that we do it is if people are not defeatist out the gate, you know what I mean? If people don’t accept that it’s an impossibility out the gate and having people like you know, I don’t listen to them. It seems like they have a pretty big following. I don’t think I’m their target demographic. Right. Say say things like this um about someone who is running. You know yeah, it’s like, if you can’t be helpful in this moment, particularly to a Black woman who’s running for office, then shut up. And it feels like we learned that around Kamala. You know like the best way sometimes to be an ally is to be silent and to be honest about the sway, influence and impact of your voice. Um, look, I think she knew it was an uphill battle. It feels like she’s committed to staying in the race. I haven’t seen anything that I have thought was a particularly terminal blunder. Um. And I haven’t seen a lot of conversation where people are like, ooh, she really stepped in it. I do think that one of the questions is that everyone is asking is could she win? And people like to bet on what they think is gonna be a winning horse. And I feel like Talarico is benefiting from that, right? For all of the ways that he shows up and all of ways that, he checks a lot of boxes that Democrats are comfortable with, but also feels moderate enough um that people who are willing to cross the aisle could stomach. Um. And then the last thing I’ll say is that, you know, people have said, you know that Jasmine Crockett represents like an anti-Trump almost caricature, but they’re not sure what else she stands for. And I think that there is something about why we are subjecting her, her platform, you know, to such intense scrutiny, we can set that aside. But I do think what we talked about when she first announced, which is like you’re, you’re going to have to define something other than being anti-Trump as what you stand for, if you want people to get behind you remains true.
Myles E. Johnson: I have a lot of complicated feelings about this, right? So my first thing is just like I tried to do when um when Kamala was running, I tried be supportive even though I thought she was not a good candidate. And I thought that her strategies were disappointing to say the least. But I tried keep like my most scathing critiques to after I you know you see the aftermath which I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing but it was a thing that I tried to do um and that I saw a lot of people try to do. And even with Jasmine like lately like anytime she comes up I even defended her strategy with with with Texas I still defend it. I still think that she has a really good intuition on what if she were to win how to get get how to win she has to activate and elect a part of the electorate who is not normally activated, just like Obama did. My big thing is always going to be people are not going to activate people anymore. We were thirsty. We like, you know, we’re millennials, Gen X, we were thirsty for a Bill Cosby in the White House before Bill Cosby was Bill Cosby. You know, We wanted to see a Black. We wanted that representational thing. We wanted to see Michelle Obama’s six foot beautiful ass in that White House and we wanted to piss off some white people. We have to be real about what motivated them. That is not going to motivate people with Jasmine Crockett like it once did. What’s going to motivate people is reparations. What’s gonna motivate people are policies that are probably racialized, that we get white people, guilty white people leftists around and Black people motivated by. Be like, oh, a check is there for your vote. That is anything else is a waste of time, in my opinion, to me, in my opinion. But my thing was, what was weird was that kind of split that I’ve been talking about for like the last year or so really happened. So when you see them give her those critiques, you see this very specific, loud, big sloth of people on the internet attack them and they they they get named sycophants. They get named people who are blue MAGA and they’re Black and they are women and they’re Black and Gay and they’re college graduates. They are what I would describe as that kind of like Black neoliberal class. And you see a lot of people not taking them seriously. And a lot of people saying you’re so behind that we’re not even going to truly wrestle with what you’re saying. And to me, the byproduct of that, even if it’s not ever articulated, I think the by-product of that is that a lot of Black people and a lot Black movements are just not gonna be taken seriously because these are the people who are the front-runners and because anybody who is seen as somebody who’s dissenting against that is either silenced, not heard of, not privileged by the algorithm or whatever. And that’s what kind of scared me about the situation was that on this moment you have these two people saying something that to me, I think painting it with a massage noir brush exclusively felt lazy. It felt like you weren’t really listening to what they were saying. She did define herself as an anti-Trump candidate.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: She has not talked about anything, a lot of things outside of that. Anytime I see a clip of Jasmine Crockett, she’s talking about he’s what he was doing, what he was doing, so they were right about maybe needing somebody with a blank canvas. They were right about needing somebody who wasn’t so well-defined as an anti-Trump candidate. That wasn’t a lie. And for everybody to kind of jump on them and say shut up, shut up shut up felt weird to me. And it felt like, what are we gonna do when it’s time to have some true inter-communial conversations around what candidates actually will help advance a Black progressive movement. Because it felt like we weren’t prepared like we weren’t prepared to do that, even with them. So how are we gonna be prepared to that with ourselves? And I think that’s gonna be bad for us.
Sharhonda Bossier: I don’t disagree on the content of the commentary. I think for it to come up on a podcast that’s about kind of catty pop culture stuff from two people who are not Black and are not women was just not the right venue for it. And I don’t think it sparked a serious conversation. I just don’t think they were the people to kick it off. And I think part of having a platform like that is knowing when you’re well positioned to lead on a conversation and not.
DeRay Mckesson: I think I’m with Myles on this one.
Sharhonda Bossier: Okay, I yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Only because I, here’s what I think is true. I thought it was weird. So I think misogynoir was a part of it for sure. Like in the tone and like all that stuff is real and we got to contend with that. But with Jasmine, I remember watching her campaign launch video and it was just about Trump.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: I was even shocked by that.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: I was like, that was sort of a weird thing, right? Now what I will say is that the danger of the backlash to them is that nobody actually addressed their concerns. So people will still feel exactly how those people felt and they just won’t say it out loud. And I actually think that hurts Jasmine. That is dangerous for Jasmine in the long run because she will think it’s sweet because people are just going to be quiet now. They’re not going to say nothing about her because they don’t want to happen to them what happened to those two guys. So then she will not be a better candidate or like a more skilled candidate when people just don’t talk about her in public. They will just kill her quietly. And I think that that will be the death of her campaign. And I think that that is that makes me nervous for her. I think she should have, like, what I would have loved for her from her campaign was for her to be like, heard you. Like, da da, or like somebody like engage the arguments and sort of address them and the misogynoir. But the backlash was so intense that I do think the silencing and I think this happened with Kamala. The number of people who called me and hated Kamala, they would never stand online, never. Cause they know they would get tore up. But her campaign thought that people just like rocked with her. You’re like, no girl, people got serious concerns about you. We know we just can’t say this in public. So people just not going to say it. And I think that that tanks Kamala too.
Myles E. Johnson: And it’s weird to see people weaponize language specifically made for people to be able to push on power and to see um people who are running for Senate or for President weaponize that language to silence people who are pushing and dissenters. So you shut up or you’re misogynoir. Or you shut up, or you are xenophobic. You shut up or you’re or you’re these things when you shut up and vote for my candidate unless you’re these things. Like that feels so weird to me. And then again. If you’re gonna be, cause I would love, I would love, oh my God, oh my god. Like it would be utopian for me to really believe one of these Senator candidates, presidential candidates was a Black power candidate and that they were, then they, that they were going through, cause just like they have white power candidates and people go into ICE to be, uh to do white power movements and just how they have people running for Senator and running for different um leaderships for white power. I wish that we had that in our community, but we don’t. So just like Obama said, oh I’m not the president of Black America or white America, I’m a president of America. So that is the same thing that Jasmine has been doing kind of. She she she hasn’t, besides a voice, a code switch and esthetic signaling, she hasn’t actually said anything specifically to Black people about what she’s going to do for even those Black Texans. And I’ve researched her. Like she, it’s the trickle down that, oh, I’m going to do a good thing so that will help Black people. But I have not seen any of those policies and that it feels strange to have somebody who’s not actively being a Black power candidate try to hide behind her Blackness in order to not get, like, critiqued. That feels weird for me.
DeRay Mckesson: You know what I say, the thing I hated the most about their comments actually was the centering of whiteness. I hated, they were like, oh if a white man couldn’t do it then she did it. And I’m like, now that is a, hate it. I’m like, hate it, hate it, hate it. Like that era that Beto ran in was a different moment than that. Like so many things are different about this moment. And I didn’t love that framing of the way they talk. Like I just, I, I hated it. Everything about that centering I hated. But the other critiques they made about her as a candidate, I thought were spot on. Like it, I thought they were fair enough to engender a response.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. And everybody was showing their political incompetence, right? Like during that time, that’s that’s a little bit of reason why I don’t quite I’m not quite on your ride, Sharhonda, even though usually I am.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: It’s because it is it’s cool. You know, as the relative usual solo rider. [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: I’m the swing vote here. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I did want to just shout out Claudette Colvin right now because Claudette Colvin becomes a national figure again as a result of the most recent protest, 2014, sort of recovered her name from history because she was one of the first if not the first person to protest in Montgomery and refused to get off the bus, but she wasn’t the perfect the perfect person to be the media representation of this.
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: So we all know Rosa Parks who was a trained organizer. Rosa Parks becomes the historical figure that we still revere, and we should. She was an organizer. It was important that she did that. It changed the game. And Claudette Colvin is also a part of what made that possible. And she recently passed, so I just wanted to acknowledge that on the pod.
Myles E. Johnson: Rest in peace, rest in peace. Um. Again, I think that we, so as I say, we’re making that we made mistakes in 2016 and 2020 and stuff like that. I don’t I think we inherited those mistakes. I think the respectability politics, those sins of the ancestors we like to talk about so much, we we now have to deal with those sins. I think, that we are dealing actively the fact that we need to incorporate more people who don’t have college degrees, who do not look the way that you want them to look, who don’t speak the way you want them to look. Who don’t have life styles the way you want them to look. Because that is where our genius comes. And us trying and I think that sometimes we’re even trained to look for the most respectable amongst us. Even if we don’t register that’s what is happening. And we think that one Juneteenth celebration or one ability to be able to electric slide now makes you a part of the gang. And it really don’t work like that. And I think where we’re we’re reaping what we sow by not hooking ourselves into non-respectable, alternative Black spaces in order to get leadership and to get thoughts and to get um ideas that can help us out of this hellscape.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. The only thing that I would add is like, I am always reminded of how recent that history is. Um, right. She was 84, right? Which is not that old, you know? And it’s just a reminder of both how far we have come and how recently we’ve had to fight those battles.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, I’ll go to my news. It’s about the Epstein files. I will tell you, because organizing is my day-to-day job, I’m like very deep in police, prisons and jails. I know it very well. I spend a lot of time learning something new every day, da da da. There are some other issues that, you know, activists ask me to take positions on that I just like do not know as well. So I’m learning as everybody else. Palestine, Israel was one of them. Somebody asked me to come to like a nurses rally on Monday, because the nurses are protesting, I’m like, I gotta read up on the nurses, I don’t know what they striking about, you know, like, they’re, so there are things that I’ve had to like, learn. I will tell you the Epstein files is sort of interestingly, one of those things that, I’d like, you now, I saw people talking about it, I’m like, okay, like release the files, like I believe in transparency. And then the more as time went on, I’m, like oh, some, they are fighting this so hard, something has to be here. Before I like very I was just like, oh, you know, like, release the files because I’m it seems like the right thing to do. And my news is me is the crystallization of being like, okay, now I actually got to like read a whole lot more about this and I got to be an expert because they are fighting this really deeply. The DOJ in court is now arguing that Congress doesn’t have the legal authority to force them to release anything. So you remember there was the Epstein Transparency Act that said there was a deadline by which Congress had to release the Epstein files. They released a lot of things that were essentially redacted either partially or completely. Then they come out a couple weeks later, they’re like, oh, we found a million more files. You’re like okay, well I, you know, we’ve had the files for a long time. So, yeah, okay. And now they still have not released a totality of the files. And their their argument is literally that Congress can’t do it. I will read from their brief, it says respectfully, the government submits that the court lacks the authority to enter the request of release. When the when quote, “the constitutional laws of the United States do not support a cause of action, a federal court cannot reach out to award remedies.” So they are arguing that like Congress can’t, the courts can’t. I’ll continue to say it says because quote, “the statute does not advance Congress’s intent to create the private cause of actions asserted this court may not create the action.” They’re essentially saying that like neither Congress nor the courts can actually force the release of the documents. Fascinating. Congress already passed this law. You know, Congress is suing, obviously, like, everybody’s suing. They’re like, okay, now comply with the law. And they’re like JK, y’all can’t make us. And that law that Congress passed also didn’t do it. What is in these files? I mean, like wam bam what is going on? I just have to bring it because I’m like, this just, you know, I don’t even want you know because I need to know. I don’t even want to sit down. I have to read more about the Epstein files. I got enough going on with the police and ICE. I have be an expert on ICE now. You know, it’s just, it is too much, but I wanted to bring this here.
Myles E. Johnson: Again, I ask, is Congress just designed by Schiaparelli or Chanel and just there for decoration and accessory and just something that we just think is cute. So I feel like I spoke a lot around the Epstein files, but I think one of the reasons that this article gave me as to why I think this is why this is important to look at even to see what they’re doing is because we, in my opinion, to me, only mine, I think that there are a lot of people–
DeRay Mckesson: I love when you do that Myles, it kills me. We need to make that like a t-shirt. In my opinion.
Myles E. Johnson: Listen.
DeRay Mckesson: To me.
Myles E. Johnson: To me.
DeRay Mckesson: Only mine.
Sharhonda Bossier: Only mine.
Myles E. Johnson: Allegedly, allegedly I think that there are a lot of powerful people, including the president of our United States, who are implicated inside of those files for doing–.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: Heinous things, violent things, sexually dubious things. I think we all kind of think that, right? But I also want to submit to people’s consciousness. If I can just offer you something, is that there are also people who know the same things that we think that we know, and they know it for sure, and they have a different psychology around what powerful men do. So they think to themselves, these people who want the Epstein files, who are gonna do these things to these men, they don’t really understand powerful men. That’s just how powerful men are. That is that is a part of, this is a, I don’t know if y’all got–
DeRay Mckesson: Intresting, interesting.
Myles E. Johnson: I don’t know if y’all got to see Kubrick’s um Eyes Wide Shut. But once you get to a space where you through your will, and let’s be real, we’re in the wild, wild west, right? America. So once you go from whatever privilege you had in Queens to the President of the United States, or wherever you came from in Queen’s scamming like Epstein did into billions of dollars, they see it as you have understood how to transcend this society, how to bypass all the loopholes and morality does not exist outside of society. And now that you’re on top of society, not inside of it, on top of society, there are things you can do that they can’t. That’s why your ass goes to jail for um what you do with your taxes and they don’t, because it’s not the same thing. And that also is looped into sex and violence and all these other things. We even see it with Diddy. I think a lot of things that Diddy was able to get away with is not just, oh, boys will be boys, but powerful men need to do powerful things that you just won’t understand. This baby blood, this thing that he’s doing with the crows, this things that he is doing with these men is a part of his power play and it is helping him continue to be in power. And I think that once you make again, just dance with that inside of your brain and your consciousness. You’ll begin to see a lot of the moves that are happening in front of us. To me, in my opinion, allegedly.
Sharhonda Bossier: I don’t have anything to offer. I will say, this feels like it’s in keeping with how this administration has behaved on myriad issues, right? They will say something and then, you know, Trump was like, we’re committed to transparency, we’re gonna release the files, blah, blah blah blah, and then do just enough for the people who are chomping at the bit that they hope that the next shiny thing will come along and distract us. And this is one of the places and one of the ways that Americans actually have been like, no, no no no, we are like, it feeds our conspiracy theorist brains, right? And so like, we’re not yet satisfied. We are not yet satiated. And I think in some ways, maybe the Trump administration thought we would be. And they were, they were like, we’ll do this little thing, and then we’ll move on. And people will count us as having like fulfilled our promise to be more transparent and release the files. And I think they’re just like, you know what, y’all know everything y’all gonna know, we not gonna tell you nothing else. And what you gonna do? You know, and I just think we’ve seen them again and again and again say that they are to Myles’s point above society and above the law, right? And this is just another incident in which that’s the case. And again, you know, echo underscore share Myles’s sentiments. So they are ours and ours alone on the passes that we give, um, powerful men to behave poorly. You know? Yeah, uh speaking of powerful and rich men that we allow to do whatever the hell they want, my news this week is about our dear, dear, dear friend and leader, Elon Musk, who, as you know, Elon Musk is someone who is selling us all on a vision of the future, where we will, you know be able to visit other planets and travel space pretty regularly. And part of that is trying to build what he is calling the world’s most powerful rocket. And ProPublica has done some reporting on the consequences and fallout, literally, from some of those test launches. And so I really hope that you all will actually go to the notes in this episode and read this article because you can hear the pilots talking to the air traffic controllers. As they are trying to figure out how to navigate some of the debris that is resulting from some of these rocket launches. So just to read a couple of sentences from the article. So the FAA, which as we all know oversees Commercial Space Launches, predicted that the impact to the national airspace would be minor or minimal akin to a weather event um and that no airport would need to close and no airplane would be denied access for quote unquote “an extended period of time.” But that reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety. And I’m bringing it here because you know we have in previous episodes talked about the staffing challenges at the FFA, right? Talked about like, there not being enough air traffic controllers. I live in Los Angeles, Burbank had to shut down flights for half a day because there were not enough people. You layer on top of that, this idea that this very rich man is being allowed to use this very busy airspace as essentially his testing and his playground. And you’re like, well [bleep] here’s another thing that I have to be worried about that I didn’t even know to be fearful of, right? And that is that we are not appropriately regulating how this industry is testing things. We are putting people’s lives at risk. And even the experts, like the pilots who are flying these planes and having to navigate these explosions and having to figure out how to not collide with the debris are saying, yo, this is dangerous, rein it in. And Elon Musk is you know able to make jokes about it, right? He’s tweeting things like, oh, entertainment guaranteed, et cetera, right. And again, just a reminder of like how he has tricked us all into thinking he’s some sort of visionary and that everything he does is good and for the advancement of humankind and our government particularly given his close relationship with this current administration is not reining it in and we are all at risk.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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DeRay Mckesson: This to me is a reminder of the failure of the news because I feel like I’m pretty plugged in. And I never heard of this. And I think frankly if, if we polled this and people knew the debris was still hanging out, then support for this would be in the trash can. It I just think it would it would not last. But my zoom out comment is, you know, this just makes me think about what other regulatory failures are happening under this administration that are hurting people, like we know a lot of stuff, like, we know like measles and, you know, like we know the big things aren’t being problems. But I have to, I have to think about, um like even, you know, we talked about with Utah and the non-regulation of AI coming from the federal government with regard to giving out prescriptions. It’s like, what are all the other things like this where like somebody is just sort of like the people who are watching, watching the space are suddenly not watching it or you get this story, and you’re like, thank God, ProPublica randomly wrote about it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: But there’s another world where this would be national news. This would be on the news.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: This would be we’d be talking about the debris. And it wouldn’t be somebody in their living room being like, oh, there’s debris in my kitchen. It’d be the pilots and you’re like okay, okay okay.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay because who wants to get on a plane when a pilot has to navigate through space debris that like take me off that flight? The airlines would be under such pressure to respond to this commercially. You know like, there’s a world where this would be a huge story, but it’s not. This is also what I’d say, you know and I am hoping to write about this. One of the reasons why under Trump, accountability can never be the demand is that they have already said that it is not neutral.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So in another world, if the DOJ is actually a neutral third party, you can actually ask for accountability. That makes sense. That as a demand, that is a real thing. Pass a law criminalizing it. Outlawed the thing, da da da da, changed the policy, but in a world where the DOJ is his personal agency.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Musk is fine. What? Worst thing that’s going to happen to him is that a state sues him, where Trump can’t intervene, but the likelihood of that is so low, maybe has some civil claims, but what happens when the accountability mechanism has told you on the front end, we got this.
Myles E. Johnson: I love how you kind of like absorbed that because that’s kind of like where my, like how my mind was going because all of these things that should kind of maybe heighten people’s concerns, if you already have, if every single thing is a bipartisan politicized thing, then you could actually just manufacture consent on whatever you want because you just make it a part of bipartisanship. So, you know, Republicans like spaceships in the future and Democrats don’t. So there you have 50% of America like not like you know not caring, and then you have you know whatever pieces of Democrats who do care, or people on the left who like who do care, and then those numbers influence what maybe a news outlet will like will even say. The other thing I wanted to say, so I’ve been like obsessed with Mumbipoetry, she is TikTok, and she talks a lot about African time and she just has like a lot of interesting theories around time. And she also talked a lot about African philosophers and their ideas on time. And a lot of those things have really resonated with me. And this kind of has to do with your news and then the news before last around just reminding people. She didn’t say this, this is just me. So if I’m wrong, this is on me, not Mumbipoetry. Go figure to go check her out for yourself. But what I’ve been thinking about since discovering her is how Elon, Donald, how they control time. And you know how like last year, how people will say, Oh my God, last year went so quickly, but it felt so long. It’s like, if we were only talking about Epstein, if we were only talking about the debris, that last year would have feel long because there would only have been those two news stories. And if you want to cover up for Epstein. If you want cover up how you are um destroying our planet with your capitalistic ventures um to colonize the skies. If we wanted to do those things, then we could, but because they have figured out how to make everybody focus on their central problems, and then they kind of influence time. So if they want to give us a moment where it feels long, then they’ll stretch out a moment. Oh my goodness, we’re talking about Charlie Kirk for three weeks. And if they want things to go fast, Venezuela, Nigeria, they’re controlling time. And something about this story and the space and the technology and the last story just reminded me of those ideas that um were sprouted from the brilliance of Mumbipoetry and her research. So that’s all I have to offer to that story, unfortunately to y’all. My news is about another powerful man. You know, but you know, because in my head, I’m always talking to Black people, even if that’s not always the truth, which is beautiful too. But I’m always talking to Black people, so I always like for us to look in the mirror. So my powerful Black man is one old Black singer, Donnie McClurklin. So I don’t know if y’all know about this story, but Donnie McClurklin is being um is being sued.
DeRay Mckesson: McClurtkin, McClurkin.
Myles E. Johnson: McClurkin need to go to jail like I don’t know. [laughing] McClurkin the jail. Um. But Donnie, we’re gonna call him Donnie.
Sharhonda Bossier: We gonna call him Donnie.
Myles E. Johnson: Donnie is being sued by Giuseppe Carletto. One of the things that was really fascinating about this is A, he’s being sued for grooming him, sexual harassment, sexual assault. Please read the story. It is a really disturbing one. I don’t really want to repeat all the details of it, but it gets wild in there. But the other thing that’s really interesting is that Giuseppe also gives us a email from Donnie. He gives us an email, and in this email, it is Donnie admitting to be a dirty old man. Being allegedly, allegedly from what I can see from the news report, allegedly he’s admitting to being a dirty, old man. He’s being, he’s admitting to being inappropriate. And of course, all those things, the grooming, the sexual predation is heinous. But also when I read this email that I really do believe that Donnie wrote to him, I see somebody who is so deeply tortured by queerness, that it produces such a sad, sad existence as a closeted queer person that not only, because I don’t think queerness when closeted just disappears and stays in the corner silent. I think that it eats itself. I think it turns into a monster. And I think that it has people do heinous things. I think that’s why we see Diddy. I think that’s why we see, again, Donnie. And I’m sure there’s other people who I’m forgetting right now, who have been shown to be sexually predacious. But also have queer inclinations. And I don’t think those things are opposite. It’s hard to talk about because we don’t want to stereotype queer people, specifically queer men, as being groomers or as being um or as being pedophiles. But I think that we have to talk about Black queer men and their predation when they do not sit with their queerness and accept it and how the church facilitates that type of uh that type of predation. Again, last thing that I’ll say before I get y’all thoughts on it too, I think this is something that the church produces. I think that these people, this predation, I think the church creates it. I think that it shouldn’t surprise anybody. I think that there needs to be real conversations around it. I think, that there needs to be continuous conversations and real conversations are around it, we need to stop hiding people. Oh, Tyler Perry. I think that we, I think we need to stop having these bull [bleep] conversations to be frank around it and trying to make it seem like everybody is just trying to get money or extract resources from a person or is just disgruntled. We need to be able to say, no it, we know what we looking at. We know what we looking at? I used to say when I, when I did um my critique of Michael Jackson, whom I love and who I adore, but I also think he did that. And I think that if you had a Michael Jackson down the street who was doing the same things, you would think the same thing too. It is the it is the the the music and the celebrity and the amazingness and excellence of his performance that is shrouding your common sense and your intuition. And that is a very dangerous place to be with society. And it’s interesting to be in a space where so many to me closeted Black queer men are getting their comeuppance of um maybe trading in the acceptance of their queerness and their own queer power for capitalistic power, and seeing what that actually creates. It never seems like a quiet, happy story. It always seems like it creates a monster. Have y’all heard about it? Do y’all, do y’all got thoughts?
Sharhonda Bossier: I had a lot of complicated feelings about this story when I saw it, right? One is like knowing Donnie McClurkin as a quote unquote “ex-gay,” right, and always having my own feelings around how people choose that path, right. Um. And in a lot ways having deep sympathy for those people, right, because I can’t imagine fighting myself in that way. Right? I think this builds on the conversation that we were having earlier, which is like he is a powerful man, right? Like people know Donnie McClurkin. That’s why this young man sought him out for advice and counsel saying, I see myself in this story that you’re telling in this memoir, right. Like I too want to overcome my homosexuality. You know what I mean? And like, you can help me get there. And so this is another example of another powerful man, regardless of sexuality, abusing that power and abusing that privilege and abusing that access that comes with that power, that visibility, that celebrity. I think the thing that is always hard for me in this moment is something that you hit on, Myles, is thinking about being a queer person who actually desires to be in community with and mentor younger people and trying to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn’t lead to people wondering if I’m doing something inappropriate with that young person, right? And it’s, I think, something that as a queer person you always have in your in the back of your mind, right. So as an example, when I moved to New York in 2008, I was teaching 10th grade US history and we had an advisory system and every teacher was assigned a subset of students to be the advisor. And I got assigned because I was the only Black woman on the grade team. Um, a group of 15 girls and we were the sisterhood advisory, right? And then I was the young women’s initiative, you know, staff sponsor, cause anybody who’s been a young teacher knows they sign you up for every damn thing, right. And one time it was, we were going to go on a camping trip, right, these are Black and Latina girls from Brooklyn. Many of whom have never spent the night, you know, in like a quiet place. And I opted out of going on the trip with my girls. And I opted out of going on the trip with my girls because I was out and I was queer and I didn’t want I didn’t want anybody to say anything or any parent to wonder or any so there was there was all of this policing and when stories like this come out, you know I’m just like you had an opportunity to really be a force for good in a young person’s life and you blew it for what you know? And it is about power. It is about exploitation. It, you know, I understand. I do understand. I do understand, like that is not the same, but then I’m like, there are ways where, like with the younger people in my family, obviously I don’t have that same set of concerns, right? And so I get to be an out and and and like solid queer role model for them. And there’s so many ways where there have been other young people who have come across my path, but too many stories like this are in the back of my mind that like, I just don’t engage. And so I feel like there are there are so many young people are missing good, healthy, queer mentorship because of people like Donnie McClurkin. You know what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: Absolutely. Absolutely.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, the only thing I’d say is, um, abuse rarely happens without enablers.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And I just think about how many people sort of around, Donnie’s old too, you know, like it’s not Donnie is not like a spring chicken. So the number of people who I think have probably enabled his abuse, I also just want to name that that like that is a thing. And I think Myles is right, the church produces this sort of a particular type of lying about identity and calling it holy and and then when he the ex-gay thing I always was like, I don’t even know what that means. What does that mean Donnie? What does it mean? Tell me what it means. And Sharhonda, I share with you the like, you know, I’ll never forget. I wasn’t I wasn’t anything when I was like I wasn’t out. I hadn’t kissed anybody. I hadn’t done anything when I was a teacher. And I’ll never forget, I kept this girl early. It was like my fifth day teaching. This girl needed to stay after school to like she needed some help. So she stays after, I don’t know, you know, I’m new, I don’t know to call her mom and get permission. I don’t know she just stays after and I have like window walls. So we knock it out. She leaves my classroom, she has fractions down, boom, boom. I get a call, I get called to the office. I’m like, I just can’t, what could I have possibly done? They like, DeRay, who else was in the room with you? I’m, like, it was just me and her, we going over the, we going over fractions. Why? I’m like because she didn’t, you know she was crying because she didn’t know how to do it in class. Like I sat with her, we got one on one time. I was happy to do it. This whole thing. So it’s like a thing. Her mother comes the next day and watches me teach from the hallway to like, to like we have to prove to her that the window to the wall was big enough that if anything had happened, we weren’t really alone.
Sharhonda Bossier: So we could see it. Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Like the door, somebody can see it. But it’s like, like that was like early in my teaching, I couldn’t have been teaching for two weeks when that happened. And it like really shaped my like I, you know.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Because I’m sitting here like I’m helping her with fractions you know I’m like, [?].
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: And by the end, me and her mom were like, you know, that’s my girl. We had a great the kid was, me and the kid never had a problem. She was always great. Me and the mom had a had a great relationship too. But it really shaped the way I like I was so hypersensitive about all of these things all of a sudden. Um. And I know this situation is very different, but the collateral consequence of it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Is not different. And the way people sort of think about adults with young people would be my offering.
Myles E. Johnson: You all’s confessions, not confessions but like you all kind of like telling that made me think, I was like, oh, I don’t have that. And I’m like, oh, I’m lying. That’s exactly what, so when I was 23, I did Large Fears, which was a children’s book, LGBT children’s book. Um. Damn, that was so long ago. But it got national coverage and we would do community um outreaches in Atlanta. So we would go different places in Atlanta and we would do a lot of community outreach. And that was part of my pivot. That was, I felt when I was doing those things and it was mainly the book was around Jeremiah Nebula, who was a Black boy who loves pink and it was around self-acceptance and all that other stuff. I’m 34 now, it was 23 years ago, it’s over 10 years ago now. You can imagine how uncomfortable I felt and that really informed me wanting to pivot into more adult stuff. And I never.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: It was something that was so matter of fact that I never thought about it. And I guess maybe because I felt like that work was like, okay, I did it. I did about five.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Now I’m done. But like I, that was a huge part of that, too, because I didn’t want any drama with anybody when it came to those kind of things. But I do think the answer is is for queer people who are not predators to consistently critique queer people who are.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: And create an ecosystem that purifies it just in the same way. I think that we on the left should be critiquing Blue MAGA, who’s keeping us conservative, because by the time it gets to the right, we ain’t gonna have nobody to talk to.
Sharhonda Bossier: I think that’s right.
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]
