At the America250 Youth250 Conference, panelists Dr. Colleen Shogun, Lindsay Williams-Strath (Forward Party CEO), and retired Navy commander Ted debate Gen Z’s demands for systemic change—critiquing institutions like the Electoral College while pledging to amplify young voices through essays, fellowships, and media. They contrast Jackson’s legacy of economic justice and voting rights with Washington’s paradoxical leadership, where Martha’s early First Lady role set precedents amid slavery’s contradictions. Meanwhile, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb warns at Munich that Putin’s imperialism risks destabilizing Europe, despite U.S. shifting priorities under "America First," while C-SPAN prepares to honor Jackson and cover Trump’s State of the Union. The conversation underscores tensions between procedural reform and radical reimagining of democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Even said it on the stage last year, maybe not in these terms.
A $2 trillion shortfall in the first 20 years of this century by countries not paying their 2% threshold is why we're here.
A $2 trillion shortfall collectively over 20 years.
Again, think about the demand signals, think about the industrial base that we could have in Europe.
Think about the interoperability, the power projection, maybe the deterrent that could have caused Ukraine to never happen.
So the president is right in being frustrated by that.
And quite honestly, if he hadn't used the sort of rhetoric that he did, we'd probably still be worried about how we're going to get to 2%.
Now we're talking 5%.
I don't necessarily use the same language as the president, but I do believe that that message needed to be said, and I think the transatlantic partnership is going to be stronger because of it.
Now, there are people that may or may not support President Trump.
I support the majority of his policies.
I support the majority of his what.
My differences have to do with the HALS and some of his advisors, like Stephen Miller.
unidentified
But you can watch this online at our website, cspam.org.
We're going to go live now to Philadelphia for a conference that started earlier today, where young adults representing Gen Z are gathered to mark America's 250th birthday and share their thoughts on the future of the country.
This is live coverage on C-SPAM.
I'm a person.
In that sense, I would say some have said unflappable.
That's the good way to put it.
I was tearing up.
That was really something.
And I was thinking about it.
And I'm curious, we'll get into some history.
But, you know, this is not the worst chapter in American history, definitively, right?
Let's remember that.
We had a civil war.
We've had many other dark chapters.
And yet, it feels like maybe what I'm hearing in these sessions all day today is a very existential feeling.
Are we even going to be a country?
And I appreciate the comment you just made.
I think from the perspective of so many of our native peoples in this country, that's already a threat that has been faced many times.
Are we even going to exist?
So I think that came through loud and clear for me today, but I'm really glad to be closing the day with our leaders here.
Our leaders respond.
I just want to introduce our panelists here, and then we're going to get into a discussion.
I'm so glad to be joined here today by Dr. Colleen Shogun here in the middle.
Colleen's having a big day because she just announced in pursuit this incredible collection of essays and pieces from presidents and presidential scholars authoring historical essays and she was on Morning Joe.
So thank you for being here.
Colleen was the 11th archivist of the United States and the first woman in America to lead the National Archives and Records Administration.
We love our archives.
She was also director of the David Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association, has worked in the U.S. Senate and the Library of Congress, and has done a lot for recognizing women's history, including being part of the commission that's going to put the first monument on the National Mall to women's history.
Thank you, Colleen.
Over on the end, we have Lindsay Williams-Strath.
Lindsay is CEO of the Forward Party.
And if you don't know the Forward Party, you might be interested.
This is an emerging enterprise to reimagine political and civic life beyond what is offered by the two-party system.
It was founded by Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman.
Lindsay was previously at Unite America, where she launched the Unite America Network.
She's mobilized $100 million towards nonpartisan democracy reform.
She's our finance girl up here because she has served as finance director and in advisory roles across the country for over a dozen U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races, including Senator Mitt Romney, the RNC, and former Speaker John Boehner.
And Ted, my colleague Ted, we're so lucky to work with Ted at Youth 250, a true multi-hyphenate, as Gen Z would say, and a great supporter of the next generation.
Ted is a senior advisor at New America, where he leads Us at 250, which was really one of the first to mobilize groups around the 250th.
Ted is the author of two books, fantastic books, one of Essays from Black Americana, and the other is about renewing the promise of America.
Ted is a columnist for the Washington Post, and he's a retired commander in the U.S. Navy, including service as a White House Fellow and as a speechwriter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Patriotism's Contradictions00:17:29
unidentified
I spent all this time on our bios, which we usually don't do because most people tune it out and we don't recommend it to our partners.
But it is so important today because you are bringing an experience across so many of our sectors in American life.
And I'm eager to hear from you today.
We're not shouting into the void here.
We've got the records, we've got the monuments, the think tanks, the media, the governance.
Thank you for representing these sectors and older generations.
So, enough from me.
I'm so eager to hear from you all what resonated with you today, what challenged you or inspired you?
What responsibility do you feel?
I'll let you each reflect.
Do you want to start, Lindsay?
Is that working?
Good.
Thank you so much for having me.
And the theme that I kept feeling, especially in these most recent performances, is vulnerability and courage and bravery.
You all are so brave.
I mean, you guys are so brave.
You're so much braver than we were.
We were all told to shut up.
Shut up, do what you're told, stay in line and follow the rules.
And we did, and you all aren't doing that.
And you all are questioning.
And you're doing it with incredible love and hope.
So you're not questioning in a cynical way.
You're exploring and you're opening things up.
And it's just incredibly inspiring.
And so I would just say that my biggest takeaway from the day is just your bravery and your vulnerability.
And what can we as older generations as older generations take from that and make sure we give you all space for that and lead in response to your courage because it's really difficult what you all did today.
I took a lot of notes, actually, on my little trusty iPad because just all the things that I was thinking as I watched the various performances and spoken word.
I thought that, you know, there's a big theme is contradictions, right?
So there's a lot of contradictions and even contradictions in that some of the tone was at times concerning, I wouldn't say pessimistic, but worrisome, right, about the future.
But then there were other aspects of each of the presentations that were also optimistic.
I mean, even in the last performance, the dance, it started out that way, and then at the end, I felt very, it had changed the tone.
It was very optimistic.
But that kind of is, that parallels the United States.
The United States is a nation of contradictions.
The Declaration of Independence itself is a contradiction, right, when it was written in 1776.
And so people would always ask me as the archivist of the United States, well, how do you make sense of this?
That Thomas Jefferson wrote these amazing words in the Declaration of Independence, words that were really the first time in which a country would be founded on these premises, these principles.
That just didn't happen previously in human history.
Yet we also knew, and I know Sarah's here from the White House Historical Association, and I knew from all the terrific historians and working at the White House Historical Association that Thomas Jefferson enslaved more people than any other president of the United States.
And so how could that possibly, how could he actually be literally writing those words or even James Madison, right, looking out as he prepared for the Constitutional Convention.
If you ever visit Montpelier in Virginia, and he was literally looking out into fields where people, where enslaved people were working as he was making those notes to get ready to go to the convention.
How could that possibly be these contradictions?
And the way that I would explain it is that Jefferson, he didn't think that these ideals or principles were true at the time that he wrote them.
I don't think so.
They were written as promises.
And it's our job always to try to deal with these contradictions and keep moving inch by inch closer to the fulfillment of those promises that are in the Declaration.
And we're not there yet.
Are we closer than we were in 1776?
I would say, yes, we are.
Have we realized them?
No.
And indeed, we may not ever realize them because that's really the purpose in some ways of the United States.
So I think that contradiction is endemic and expressed really beautifully through what we saw here today.
unidentified
Yeah, this is.
So I'll say, I mean, you heard my bio, I'm like the Navy guy.
And for me, patriotism, we were taught very early a toast from an Admiral Stephen Decatur that essentially says, our nation and her intercourse with other, or yeah, our country and her intercourse with other nations, may she always be in the right, but our nation right or wrong.
And it's this idea that patriotism at its heart is kind of uncritical because how can you love the place that you only critique?
And that's a very, I don't know if snobbish is the right word, but it's an elite kind of patriotism that I don't really think applies to most people who love America.
This country was perfected by the people on the margins of society insisting on inclusion, democratic inclusion, economic inclusion, social and civic.
And so what stood out to me was the expressions of patriotism on the stage and in the conversations and the overlook there were not the kind that would accord to a Stephen Decatur version, but are very much a modern conception of what patriotism looks like.
And it is a version that is created by the folks that were not included when the country was founded.
It was the folks that were left out.
Baldwin is famous for saying that it's because he loved America that he insists on the right to critique her.
And it's the love and critique together that give the critique power and that give the love power.
And so I think the thing that stood out to me most was: I'm a Gen Xer myself.
I turned 50 last.
I can barely believe a five is the first number in my age.
But this taught me that I need to update what I consider patriotic.
I think I can tell you, I'm from North Carolina originally, again, military.
A lot of folks would have looked at the performances on the stage, the words, and say, why are these young people so angry with the country?
And that is not what I heard.
It's a generation demanding that the nation be who it says it is, that it closes the gap between the words on the paper and the actions in real life.
That is from a place of love.
That is the ultimate kind of patriotism.
And it's the kind that is hard earned because it wasn't a silver spoon upon birth.
It's a patriotism that's earned through negative experiences, positive experiences, good encounters, bad encounters, but still resolute and resilient.
So it's been a real inspiration.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
Really interesting thoughts.
There are a lot of contradictions.
There's a lot of contradictions in your world as young people.
You know, I think that it's such a fluid and hybrid generation in so many ways, online, offline, different forms of identity.
So maybe you're better suited to handle the contradictions so it's easier to navigate or it's something you're used to having to do.
And yeah, absolutely.
The patriotism, it really, to me, reminds me of all of the legacies that came out of something like the Bicentennial.
And I keep thinking you all will be here at the 300th anniversary and maybe running a program like this, or maybe we don't need it because of what you just did today.
And I just think that, you know, people keep asking, is America only going to last 250 years?
No, but maybe most systems last 50.
And so maybe a lot of the definitions of patriotism and the systems that we've built that came out of the bicentennial, most of our history institutions, it was a great legacy of that.
Maybe we're reforming them now.
Where do you all see the greatest gap between what you heard today and the visions of America that are put forward and where we are now?
Lindsay, I see you're ready.
I think right now as a nation, this idea of contradiction and the idea of criticism and critique while holding deep love of country is something that we as Americans, there's not a glossary of terms for that right now.
I think we're really missing that.
And unfortunately, there is a movement in this country right now that has equated patriotism.
And I thought Michael laid this out really beautifully this morning.
You know, I mean, Michael challenged us to be audacious.
He challenged us to have great imagination because there are a group of people in this country that have that audacity and great imagination, and they have claimed the concept of patriotism.
We need to reclaim that and determine what is our language around that.
How do we create community around that?
How do we build a stage and think about what is our tribe?
Who are we as Americans?
You know, this is something I say all the time that's just overly simplistic, which is that there's just more of us than there are of them, right?
There are more of us that have this deep love of country and a vision for the future.
I thought Ariel talking about the great fragility of hope that Gen Z is experiencing right now is really important because it's not that there's no hope.
It's that there is a difficulty in envisioning what is next, what comes next, how do we paint a picture for that?
And how do we talk about it?
And if we talk about it, who are we?
And what does that mean, deep love of country, while also questioning, while building that all.
And so I think that's one of the great opportunities that we have.
Certainly it's a challenge, but I think a great opportunity we have as we look at the 250th birthday of our nation is what is next?
What does this mean to be this new movement?
How do we engage in systems reform to create space for that?
How do we talk about it?
How do we self-describe?
I think generationally, I'm a cusp.
I'm like that weird mix between millennials and Gen X.
And I think right now there's a huge opportunity for us to create a space for next generations that it's something different than what we were given.
And that's one of the reasons why I'm working in a new political party because I think we do need systems change and we do need more choices.
And so creating space and learning for language around that is something I'm really excited about.
One of my colleagues in the New America fellowship program that I was so glad to be a part of to help build this run an institute called Blanchard House Institute and they were mapping black Wall Streets across the country.
There wasn't just one.
There were many, many centers of commerce and culture.
And when these places were destroyed through racial violence, they described it to me that what was lost was not just this transfer of wealth, but a transfer of generational hope.
So you didn't have elders to pass on what could be.
And so what you're saying really reminds me that hope is fragile.
As you said in my biography, I spent not my entire career, but the vast majority of my career in federal employment.
So I mean, I worked in the legislative branch for the bulk of it, but then also did a stint in the executive branch as the archivist of the United States.
So my frame of thinking, a lot of it comes from that perspective and that experience.
I think from what I just impressionistically, I think there's a desire for results-based change, right?
There's a desire for inclusion.
There's a desire for transparency.
There's a desire for some degree of equality, right?
We heard a lot about equality here today.
And those principles being what this generation would like to see.
And so your question is, what's the gap?
You know, how these institutions actually operate.
Yeah, they don't probably operate based on those principles for the most part.
I mean, I'll just be very honest, right?
And when I started to think, when I looked at your question, like, how do these institutions operate?
They operate based upon procedure, based upon process.
And because of both of those things, they require a lot of patience.
So three P's.
Patience from process and procedure.
And that's what I saw an awful lot of, you know, throughout a lot of, as I worked my way up through different echelons within federal employment and civil service.
And that doesn't mean that we should get rid of, I would say, all of the process and procedure because it's in there for a reason.
But we need to find a way in which we can marry and modernize these principles so they can exist together.
Because right now we have a lot of one and not a lot of the other.
Now it might change over time because as people of your generation then ascend into these institutions, I mean institutions are really made by people, right?
Institutions are people that make decisions.
They don't, you know, just they do come with rules and they come from laws and things like that, but they are, you know, decisions are made by people.
So, as you start to move into some of these institutions and you start to change how decisions are made or how we think about outcomes, then we would probably see that change happen.
But I mean, really, the key, if you want it to happen a little bit quicker, is to find the people that are in there right now and make your arguments so that they don't like arguments where you just say, hey, stop doing this and replace it with what we want.
But if you can try to make that argument where we should try to figure out a way where we can merge these principles together, I think that's a possible outcome.
But I mean, I do think there is a real gap.
It's not just imagined.
unidentified
It's interesting.
You know, that's like the ultimate crossover episode.
That's what we need.
And I'm thinking of your substack.
You have presidential scholars.
Where are they?
In the archives, hopefully, you know.
And you're delivering this information in a very digital format.
You're building a new political party.
I mean, there can be new things that take old forms.
Ted, what do you see out there?
Yeah, new things taking old forms.
And when I say new and old, I mean constitutional amendments to redesign the republic.
I think the Electoral College, broken.
Impeachment process, broken.
Money and politics, broken.
And so the system is broken.
And so a lot of the dissatisfaction we have with our country is not with the country per se, but the way the country is run, the way the systems operate.
And so I am a proponent of revising the system that the founders designed.
If you read the Constitutional Convention notes or books by historians that were sort of look at those primary sources, many of the founders did not trust the public, the people.
They said the people were fickle and they couldn't be trusted and couldn't decide right.
And it was better that the decisions that matter are left to the elites, the educated, the well-born, because they know how to protect the Republic more than these fickle, uneducated, you know, worker-bee people.
It's a different country.
It's a different day.
And I think our republic should be redesigned to lean towards the democratic part of our democratic republic instead of protecting the republic from the people or from democracy.
And so people in my generation, as soon as you say, well, it will take a constitutional amendment to fix, they immediately chuck it and say, okay, well, what can we do with an executive order or with a compliant Congress?
Do not give up.
Constitutional Amendments Needed00:08:39
unidentified
Revise the Constitution.
Add amendments.
You know, they did it 100 years ago.
I think the last bit of amendments were like the poll tax and around congressional pay.
Why are we the generation that can't be bold and reimagine what the Constitution looks like?
I hope that it doesn't pass my generation by, but if it does, please, please, please add three, four, five more amendments to the Constitution to redesign the system.
It won't be perfect.
There will be bad actors that will exploit the system, but we can plug a lot of holes that have been left in it from the founding.
It's overdue.
And it's meant to be amended.
That's why we have them.
It's in the design.
So what do you think this moment, what you heard today, what does the next 250 years require of leaders in your position?
And we are, even though the room is full of young people, we are on, I think, on C-SPAN.
So there may be some other folks watching.
And I'm just curious, what would you say to other leaders?
I'm going to kind of double down on what Ted said because I do believe it's deep systems change.
You know, we have an incredible history in America of reimagining things.
The progressive movement happened.
The suffragist movement happened.
The civil rights movement happened.
These are things that we did and we built as Americans, individuals, and ultimately it forced things like constitutional amendments.
But I think right now we have a real moment.
You know, if you look at elected positions of elected office around the country, and I'll say this with like being the political person on the stage, I bet you guys don't know that there are over 500,000 positions of elected office around the country.
And you think about the things that can be done in your community to drive massive change, run for office.
You know, of those 500,000 seats, 70% of them go uncontested, which means if there's someone who is an obstructionist in your community who's upholding a system that doesn't work, there's a really good chance no one ran against them.
Go in and run for them.
You're all over 18.
It's amazing.
And look at what you can do in your community.
What we heard this morning from the amazing committee leader from Philadelphia, what she is, the stage she is building for young people in this city and how enfranchised they feel because of it.
And even to the point where she said that Philadelphia young people feel spoiled because they have such a seat at the table.
You all can create that in your own communities.
And a lot of those seats are actually nonpartisan.
You don't like the two legacy parties?
Guess what?
Most of those seats actually aren't Republican and Democratic seats.
Your local mayor probably doesn't have a party affiliation.
So there's an incredible opportunity for you all to engage and create massive systems change in a way that our nation has a wonderful history of doing.
So I see everybody in this room today and really listen to you all.
And I happen to be a mom of three kiddos, one's Gen Z, and I have two Gen Alphas.
You guys are going to crush it.
Like, I'm sorry for what we did, but y'all are just going to crush it.
And you really are.
And I think this is an incredible renaissance moment for our nation.
Thank you.
What would you, Deb, let's go to you?
What would you, what does this moment require of other leaders, not youth only?
Right.
So I think some of it is letting go of preconceived notions of what they think the country is or should be based on how they were raised and ceding some of the dreaming to the next generation because they can envision things that we can't begin to fathom.
Another thing I would say is in 67, I think it was, there was a sociologist from Berkeley, his name was Robert Bella, and he wrote an article called American Civil Religion in America.
I won't go into the sociology of it, but suffice it to say that the argument basically is there's a way to be American and all the things that make a religion a religion, like deities and rituals, et cetera, countries have the same thing.
We have our rituals, we have our anthems, we've got our row of presidents and monuments, et cetera.
And so as he sort of built his case, towards the end, he says, here's the thing about the United States.
It has embarked on three types of trial.
The first one was the The question of independence.
Can a nation built on the ideas of equality exist in a world where that was just not the norm?
A lot of nations were founded based on ancestry or religion or around a king or something.
The second trial, he said, was around the question of slavery.
Could a nation that basically atoned for its original sin and the question of slavery, even though that trial is not fully complete, the fact that we were able to emancipate or go through, have a civil war and pass the Reconstruction Amendments to emancipate or to abolish slavery under most conditions and then to grant birthright citizenship and then to ensure that race can be used as a factor for denying folks the right to vote.
The third time of trial in 67, he said, was the one that we're currently in.
And that is whether the United States can be an example to the world about how to build a just and prosperous, diverse nation.
That is an open question.
And no other nation, there's a reason people call this the American experiment.
No one has successfully done what we're trying to do here.
And so in 50 years at the tricentennial, I will be long gone.
I hope that you all will say, oh, the third time of trial, we've basically done most of that because what I saw on stage just now was the next thing after the third time has been accomplished.
And that is a nation-state that puts social and civic belonging ahead of national interests or national interests that would undermine or harm other people.
That is beyond what Bella envisioned, but that is squarely in the ballpark of what you guys have envisioned here today.
So 250 years, if we have achieved that, we will be a beacon into the world, as Bella suggested, and it will be beyond what he could have even imagined.
What I've been talking a lot about is I go around and I visit universities and colleges and talk about my public service and America 250.
What I've tried to talk about is the civic ideal of resilience because we do need to be resilient.
There is going to be we can change the system as the system is designed, though.
It is right now, it is biased against action, right?
You know, that is the American system.
There is a preference for stability and stasis rather than quick change.
That's just, as a political scientist, that's just a reading of the Constitution, and that was certainly intended by those that wrote it.
So that does breed in the American system this need, even when we've seen successful social movements in the United States, and that's why I do like to talk about the suffragists a lot.
And they certainly made a lot of mistakes and a lot of errors, so you can learn from their failures as well.
But, you know, that social movement took 72 years to be a reality.
It is, by most people, thought of to be the longest social movement in the history of the United States.
So they failed many more times than actually when they succeeded in 1920 and finally broke the code and got the constitutional amendment and removed barriers for women voting in the United States.
So, that resilience, when you are in your own, as you're coming up and you are running for office or you're leading institutions, you will probably experience failure in your own trajectory, or you'll be part of organizations that might experience failure or disappointments or setbacks.
Certainly, I was, I worked very hard and I became the archivist of the United States, which I was really excited to be.
And I became the first woman to serve in that role.
I was also the first person ever to be fired by a president as the archivist of the United States.
So, I made history twice.
You know, that was, I mean, I can tell you personally, I mean, imagine if you worked your whole career, you're finally in the job, you're making changes, you feel like you're doing a good job, you're following the law, you're being very careful, you're doing all these things, and then one evening you get fired by a tweet, and you get fired by the president of the United States.
I mean, that is, you know, it's a weird experience, that's all I can say to you.
As someone who has never been fired from a job before in her life, to have that be your first firing, there was a lot of things that I had to process after that.
But, you know, I'm proud of myself in that I, you know, I could have, I was lucky, I could have taken some time off from work and, you know, six months or a year or whatever to kind of get myself together.
But after, you know, a few weeks, I was like, I don't think so.
I think I, you know, I think I need to get back in the game, right?
I need to get back out there.
I need to start doing things that matter to me.
And this avenue is closed right now.
I'm not going to be in that position anymore.
But what can I do?
Can I do some of those things that I really cared about in that role?
Can I do it in another way?
And I looked around me.
Oh my gosh, there's all these civic organizations.
There's all these nonprofits.
And they were very welcoming, saying, yeah, come along, let's do it.
You don't have to be in that role.
You can find another way.
And that is what resilience really is, is not just surviving.
It's actually figuring out how to build back better and what's another path in which to get the same thing done that I wanted to do but wasn't able to do.
So I urge you, you know, in your own lives and then the institutions and the things that you're going to build, try to think about resilience.
It's important.
unidentified
Thank you.
This moment, everything we heard today is clearly going to require not only young people to step up, which you're doing and probably feel forced to do to some extent because no one else is coming.
But it also is going to require leaders to really reflect and say, it's okay to pass the mic, to pass the torch.
We wanted to have this panel all together at the end of the day to reflect.
But I'm going to ask each of you now to share one commitment that you might make to the next generation.
This could be formal or informal.
Something that you pledged today.
And I'll just say we have, we're running a National Youth Takeover Day on June 27th.
And I have personally found so much relief in passing the mic.
I mean, I'm literally holding it, so I understand the irony.
But it's been great to see a whole new Vanguard come in and you can share the burden sometimes of speaking about these things.
So I'm really curious to hear from you one commitment that you might make.
Does anyone have one on the top of their head?
Yeah, so, and this is something that I did recently.
I commit to platforming young voices with the platforms I have access to.
And so the quick story of this is that I wrote a column in the post about how basically all the things I said about the Republican design being broken, I basically said, look around the country and this is all the evidence you need to see about how these processes aren't working.
And a high school student from Dallas emailed me and said, what do you suggest we do?
And so passing constitutional amendments was one thing, but the more I tried to articulate something, I couldn't.
And I sent off the email and immediately thought, you know what, that answer sucked, and she deserves better.
And so I wrote another column talking about my inability to answer it.
And then I told the editor that we can do this column, but only if she can write a letter to the editor with her voice and not allow me to be the vessel for her ideas.
And they did.
And so, you know, hopefully that means it was meaningful to her and will be for a while.
But it taught me that just because you've got the header in the post doesn't mean that that space is just for you.
And so to the extent I can leverage my connections, networks, whatever, to facilitate new voices, then that's my commitment.
Thank you.
That's a great commitment.
Thanks, Ted.
It's wonderful.
And also reminds me of Michael asking us this morning to have some humility.
I mean, that's a moment when a young person asks you, what are we going to do about this?
And you're like, am I the person that's supposed to know that?
You know, as Carolyn said, you know, we're running this civics initiative in pursuit.
And it was, you know, very quick to get it up and running less than really about 10 months from when I started to lead the program to the launch that happened yesterday.
And we were very busy, you know, trying to raise some funds for it and do all kinds of different things and get things in place.
But I do commit to, we have a lot of different subpopulations that we're targeting.
Like we have a specific program where we're targeting rural Americans to engage because sometimes those folks get left out from, you know, as we cross the country coast to coast, you know, there's a lot of people that live in between.
So we're going to focus on rural Americans.
We're going to focus on teachers and K-12 students.
But we need a component of In Pursuit that focuses on this age group today, 18 to 30 year olds.
And I have at least two possible ways in which I can do that.
So I commit to following through on that as we are able to build this program out so that we are making sure that people of your age group can engage with not just the essays, but some of the lessons that come out from the essays, podcasts, and you can also be creative.
You don't have to agree with the essays either.
I want to say that this isn't like preaching to you.
This should be a starting point for dialogue.
Yeah, I agree with this interpretation.
I don't agree with this interpretation.
I wouldn't have said it this way.
I don't think this lesson is as important as that one, or it really does resonate with me and to build that engagement.
So I commit to building that 18 to 30 year old component of the program as we go forward.
unidentified
Thank you, Colleen.
Lindsay, over to you.
If you look at a lot of the leaders in the structural democracy reform and third-party space, it is overwhelmingly white.
And a lot of that is because to explore concepts of our democracy and think about reforming our democracy and having these like very kind of esoteric, thoughtful questions assumes all of your other basic needs are met.
Like, what a luxury to sit around and talk about the preservation of our democracy and thinking about what the next 250 years could look like.
Like, your car is paid for, it didn't break down, your kids taken care of, your parents are fed.
And that is a huge disservice to the entire democracy movement, and that we have a massive barrier for entry for people to participate in the narrative.
I loved hearing in the introductions to so many of the speakers today, their accomplishments as fellows, as interns, meeting members of your team who came to Made by Us because of fellowship opportunities.
And so, I commit at the Forward Party to make sure that we have fellowship opportunities for young people of different backgrounds and experiences, socioeconomic backgrounds, regional backgrounds, race, sexual orientation.
And I pledge to make that appeal to my peers who are leading other organizations in the space to make sure you guys have a seat at the table.
That's wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, we have had a fantastic day.
Thank you for these commitments and for listening.
I think it really is an important part of the intergenerational work that we need to do.
As we go forward, we're going to have a really cool part next where you're going to sign the Declaration.
But I did just want to say for leaders out there or those who might be watching on the stream, you know, there are still things that can be done to make way for the next generation, and it's not a handing over of power, it really is a passing of the baton.
So put them on your boards, your panels, your advisory committees, on your op-ed pages.
There's a lot of youth out there that want to contribute.
So thank you.
Thank our panelists once again.
All right.
So now I'm going to invite Alex back on the stage to tell us what's next.
And let's give Alex a round of applause.
Oh, well, let's give them one more round of applause.
It's an incredible panel.
I think C-SPAN's America 250 programming is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies that provide C-SPAN as a public service.
Every single day, we will stand up and we will fight, fight, fight for the country our citizens believe in.
unidentified
Watch the C-SPAN Networks live Tuesday, February 24th, as President Donald Trump delivers the annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress.
This speech will mark President Trump's first State of the Union of his second term.
The State of the Union Address, live Tuesday, February 24th.
Our coverage starts at 7 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN networks.
C-SPAN, bringing you democracy unfiltered.
The Reverend Jesse Lewis Jackson has died at the age of 84.
Known for his many years of activism in the civil rights movement, Reverend Jackson also gained national attention in politics when he launched a 1984 bid for the White House, becoming the second African American to mount a national campaign for president as a Democrat.
He came in third place during the primary behind Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale.
He ran a second campaign for president four years later, but lost that nomination to Michael Dukakis.
Continuing his political service, Jesse Jackson served as a shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997.
His primary role in the unpaid position was to lobby for D.C. statehood.
Throughout his career, Reverend Jackson established several advocacy organizations, which later merged into the current Rainbow Push Coalition, which champions for social justice, voting rights, and economic equality.
In 2000, Reverend Jackson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
Just last year, he was diagnosed with progressive supernuclear palsy, a rare brain disease that affects body movements with conditions similar to Parkinson's disease.
Reverend Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and their five children.
All day on C-SPAN 2, we're showing programming from our archives of Jesse Jackson in his own words, speaking at conventions about his life and legacy and his presidential campaigns.
You can also find appearances and events with Jesse Jackson in our video library at c-span.org by searching his name.
Following news of Reverend Jesse Jackson's death, the Reverend Al Sharpton held a news conference in his memory stating, Jesse Jackson literally changed American politics.
The two work together in historic campaigns, and Reverend Sharpton considers the Reverend Jackson a mentor.
About 2.30 a.m. this morning, around about 3, I received a text from Jesse Jackson Jr. that Reverend Jesse Jackson had passed.
And a couple hours later, Reverend Jackson's son Yusuf called me and put me on speakerphone where I had prayer with the family as they stood around his bed before taking him out to the funeral home.
So it has been a very sad day for me, even though we knew he was very ill.
When the moment comes, you're not prepared for it.
I first met Jesse Jackson when I was 12 years old.
I was a boy preaching the Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, New York, Washington Temple Church Regarding Christ.
And I'd become enticed with what was going on in activism because I was watching Adam Clay Powell on television.
My mother brought me to Bishop Washington, our pastor, and he said, no, I can put him with some ministers that's involved.
He brought me to Reverend William Jones, and they made me the youth director, 13 years old of Operation Breadbasket, under the national director, Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Reverend Jackson was about 27, I was 13, and ever since then, for 69 years, we bonded.
The last time he spoke in New York, he spoke at the House of Justice for us.
I can't think of a time that we were not spending time together.
Now, he was a hard taskmaster.
He would always get on me about why are you on this issue?
You need to be more studied on this.
But he was one who was more responsible than anyone for teaching me activism.
On a personal level, my family and I used to spend every Christmas at the Jacksons house.
And the last two Christmases took my daughters, one who's with us today, to Chicago.
We spent Christmas night at Reverend Jackson's house just five weeks ago.
And last Christmas, we would feed people at the House of Justice and then go to the airport in the afternoon and fly to be with him.
So I will always be able to cherish that I spent his last Christmas with him and spent last days even when he could no longer speak well.
What I think on a broader level is Jesse Jackson changed American politics.
Jesse Jackson changed the civil rights movement.
He was a consequential and transformative figure.
And he changed New York politics.
Let me go in that order.
One, it was when Dr. King died, was killed in 68, he was talking to Jesse Jackson and Ben Branch over the rail at the Lorain Motel in Memphis.
And Reverend Jackson was literally one of the two last people to speak to him.
I always wondered how much trauma that must have been for him to witness Reverend King's assassination.
He never would talk about it too much, but it drove him.
He kept saying, we've got to keep Dr. King's dream alive.
He was 12 years younger than King as I was 13 years younger than him.
And he would always challenge me that your generation's got to do with John Lewis and all of us that were younger than Dr. King did.
He kept the movement going by keeping the economic boycotts of Operation Breadbasket going, by dealing with diversity, by fighting for affirmative action.
You must remember when the late 70s and 80s, when Reaganism rose and there was this backlash on civil rights, Jesse Jackson took the front with John Lewis and others to restore what Dr. King had done.
We romanticized the 60s like they were never challenged.
They were challenged.
We had to renew the Voting Rights Act every five years.
We had to deal with state laws.
And it was Reverend Jackson that did that into our era of having to deal with racial profiling and driving wild black and all.
We learned all that from him.
It was in 1984 when he ran for president that he changed the rules that primaries were governed by.
Where in pre-Jackson, if you ran in New York, for example, and you got 104 delegates and your opponent got 100 delegates, your opponent got all 204 delegates.
It was Jesse that made it be no, you get your 100, they get 104.
With him changing it to proportional delegate representation is how Barack Obama was made the nominee.
Hillary Clinton won more big states, but he was able to accumulate more delegate votes.
So he literally changed the party in 84.
And then in 86, the midterm elections changed because he had registered so many new voters that had not been calculated before that many of the states turned and the U.S. Senate 86 became Democratic control and maintained a lot of the things that we would have lost under the Reagan era because Jesse Jackson registered those voters.
In 88, he ran, again, got 7 million votes, won the city of New York.
It was his 88 race where he won the city, lost the state to the caucus, but he won the city of New York, which made us believe in 89 we could win.
And we did by electing David Dinkins.
David Dinkins was his coordinator for New York City in 88 and became the mayor in 89 off Jackson votes and the belief we could win it because Jesse Jackson, despite the controversies around him, won the city of New York in 88.
So I'm not talking about somebody that just is some removed figure in history.
He literally changed American politics, New York politics, and kept the Civil Rights Movement going, and then raised some of us that have been in the forefront in the first part of the 21st century to do what we do.
And he's been there with us.
When we did George Floyd, he was right there in the church with us when I did the eulogy.
He was there with us with Trayvon Maud.
He never stopped.
I once said to him, you already in history.
You've gotten all the honors.
Why do you keep going?
He said, I never learned how to retire.
He said, you got to remember how Dr. King was killed at 39 years old.
Med Gevers was killed at 39 years old.
Malcolm X was killed at 39.
We were never raised to be 40 years old.
He said, I woke up one day at 55.
There's no retirement plan for us.
And he kept going until this morning.
So my whole life and the whole country and the world was changed.
Don't forget he went and got hostages from Iraq, hostages from Syria, that no one else could get for this country.
Never got the credit he was due.
But he said to me that those that need the credit don't deserve it, and those that deserve the credit don't need it.
Well, I'm going to make sure as long as I'm alive, he gets the credit, Reverend Jesse Jackson.
On this Saturday, our regular Saturday Action Rally will be at the historic Mother Amy Zion Church.
It's the church that Frederick Douglass spoke at.
It's the church that Sojourn the Truth at the altar, changed her name from a slave name to Sojourner Truth.
It's the church that Madam C.J. Walker's funeral is at, church that Paul Robeson was a member of.
His brother was one of the pastors.
So in Black History Month, we're going to dedicate the action rally this week to Jesse Jackson, which was the last place, last organization he spoke for in the city of New York.
Last time to Harlem, when he left the House of Justice, we took him to Sylvia's.
And I'll never forget when he finished.
We had to help with the fault.
And he told, wheel me into the kitchen.
And he shook hands with all of the people in Sylvia's restaurant, shook hands with him in the kitchen.
That's the last time he was here.
So we're going to honor him.
We're asking all of our city officials to join us there.
We are the organization that Dr. Jackson worked with.
And we're going to honor him this Saturday.
We want all of them to come and give their condolences in a New York salute to Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Any questions?
unidentified
Yeah, Reverend Charter, what did he open your eyes to?
What did he help you realize that you didn't know or weren't aware of?
He opened my eyes that we could make a difference, we could make change, that we could not be cynical.
So by him running, as never had been an elected official, with most black elected officials at that time not with him in 84, when he ran and did that, I believed that we could make a difference.
We could change laws, which is why I went from just being bitter to trying to be better and be able to help change the system by not just fighting the system, but fighting it inside and outside at the same time.
What he did for me personally, I was born and raised in Brooklyn.
My father left when I was 10.
Unlike many other ministers that I looked up to, I didn't come from a high pedigree, nice family with my father and grandfather and great-grandfather preachers.
My father left.
Jesse was born out of wedlock.
He taught me his slogan was, I am somebody.
It's not how you're born, it's where you go with it.
So he made me believe even a kid on welfare in Brownsville, Brooklyn, could be somebody because of Jesse Jackson taught me that.
Look what he did, born out of wedlock in Greenville, South Carolina.
If he could do it, I could do it.
It's easy for a preacher that's got PhD and his daddy was a big preaching granddaddy.
It's easy for him to do it.
It wasn't easy for Jesse.
And he taught me that it didn't have to be easy for me, but I can make it anyway.
He would call me and say, what are y'all doing about this referendum?
I said, how do you know about that?
But he was constantly kept his hand on the pulse on what was going on around the country.
unidentified
Reverend Charter, can you speak to how he was a bridge between generations of Dr. King's generation, your generation, and the generations today of the social justice movement?
I think that Jesse Jackson was a bridge that was not given credit for.
He was the youngest person on Dr. King's staff.
So he was attractive to people like me that was a generation behind him because he was more here.
He used to wear a Martin Luther King medallion.
That's where I got that from.
And he used to wear a vest.
I never saw him wear a suit and tie until about 1972.
And he had big afro.
So he wasn't the style of the conservative preachers like Dr. King was.
And he then was able to understand our generation of saying, no justice, no peace, rather than I am somebody.
And he was the bridge that would say, but let us get something done.
And he would be there.
So whether it was in the 70s and 80s where we were fighting around the issues of Howard Beach and Yusuf Hawkins, which he came in and visited the funeral home with me at Yusuf Hawkins, or then later in the 21st century, if it was Trayvon Martin, he came and stood with us.
He would stand behind us as much as he would lead us, but he would stand behind us.
I used to say he's leading from the back now because he'd be there.
And I think that he was never threatened by those older than him or younger than him.
He just wanted us to keep our eyes on the prize.
unidentified
And what about his commitment to peaceful protest and peaceful change at a time when there was a lot of violence?
He was adamant that we always keep nonviolence because he said you're going to, first of all, he said you must have the moral standing that those we're fighting don't have.
And if you become as immoral as them, not caring about life and the like, then you're not fighting a cause.
You're fighting for who can have more power.
So he definitely would always say that.
He would always say to me, if he heard I was going to do something, I'll make sure that there is no violence.
Make sure that you don't step outside of Dr. King's principles.
And I think he also would always reprimand us about language, not only violence in terms of physical, but your language must communicate justice, not revenge.
He was very, very hard on me about that.
unidentified
Reverend Morton, what would you say to those in the media, elected officials, others who are efforting to define Jesse Jackson's legacy in death by criticism, controversies that he had during his life, as opposed to the lifetime of accomplishments that you talked about briefly?
I think that there will be those that will raise the controversies and they will raise some of the things that they would consider negative.
But Reverend Jackson had a saying that he used to tell me that became something I lived by.
He said, turn your scars into stars.
And they can raise the controversies, but the fact that they've got to raise them at all means that he made his point.
He made a fact.
Nobody thought a kid born out of wedlock on Haney Street in South Carolina would be where he was.
So sometimes when you're climbing up steep mountains, you might slip and skid your knee.
But the story is he climbed that mountain.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you for having us.
I wanted to ask if there was anything from the Reverend's legacy you hope the new generation and the Democratic Party, the civil rights movement heed going forward.
I think that what I would hope they heed is that we continue to protect the right to vote, that we protect the Voting Rights Act, and that we protect the economic movements of not having an imbalance where the super rich get rich at the expense of the poor,
and that we remain rainbow, multicultural, that we fight for immigration rights and civil rights, that we deal with policing and deal with vice.
And I think that he represented that.
We cannot take the rainbow out of the movement.
We cannot take the nonviolence out, but we must protect the right to vote.
Everything Dr. King and Reverend Jackson stood for is at risk right now.
Supreme Court is weighing right now Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Right now we're seeing what's going on with ICE and deportation.
So we have the challenge not to mourn Jesse Jackson, but we need to use our mornings, which is what we're going to do Saturday to say there must be a movement.
He would not want us to have sanctimonious mornings if we weren't going to get up and do the work.
So many speeches over here, so many important quotes.
unidentified
Which one is the most significant to you or the most personal in terms of what you remember?
I think that his 84 Democratic Convention speech, Our Time Has Come, was a classic because it gave us hope.
I think that when he came back in 88, Keep Hope Alive was a classic.
There's so many, but Reverend Jackson had, the last time he was at, time before last, when he was at the House of Justice, he had a book of sermons that he had come out with.
And that's when I knew he was, I knew he was stumbling in that Parkinson's.
And I asked him to sign the book to me, and he could only do the first J.
And I keep that book at home, a book of all his sermons.
But he couldn't even sign his name, but he still came to Harlem to do what he could do.
In terms of his unfinished business around the economic justice issues like food insecurity, health care for people that he touched on at many points in his life, what do you say to that?
We cannot make mockery with just mourning him and letting it go.
And DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has now been wiped out by this present administration, that was Jesse Jackson saying we've got to diversify boardrooms, diversify employment for blacks, for women, for Browns, for LGBTQ.
So we are sitting at a stage where everything he fought for is at risk.
And if we want to mourn him, we've got to preserve what he fought for.
unidentified
Thank you.
So what is the plan in action to defend voting rights?
Well, I think the plan has to be how did we get voting rights in the first place?
And that is mobilizing, marching, nonviolent protests.
But the thing we have today didn't have a 65.
We have enough people in the Senate and the House to re-legislate if we come out and vote.
If we come out in the right numbers, a member of National Action Network named Hakeem Jeffries will be the Speaker of the House and can call the hearings and find out what's really going on in ICE.
So every time it looks hard to me, I think about how hard it was for Jesse when he was a student leader in North Carolina, how hard it was for Dr. King.
We don't have a right to complain.
They turned the country upside down and they didn't even have social media.
You know Dr. King didn't know what a cell phone was, didn't know what TikTok is.
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Martha Washington's Legacy00:08:26
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As we celebrate America's 250th birthday this year, the organization known as More Perfect has commissioned a series of essays about American presidents and first ladies, written and read by public officials, journalists, and historians.
The project is called In Pursuit.
Its goal is to bring American history to life through compelling stories.
Here's one of those essays.
Martha Washington by Karen Wolf.
Read by Karen Wolf.
Before women could hold office, she created one.
Martha Washington had not intended to be the first of anything, but rather to follow in the pattern of the women she knew as wives, mothers, and Virginia plantation mistresses.
Instead, she was the first of a long line of women who never sought the role that she inaugurated.
While the term First Lady was not regularly used for a century after her service, she felt the weight of its responsibility and the eyes of the new nation upon her.
Historians despair of Martha's decision to burn her correspondence with her famous husband just before she died.
Yet this first lady is not unknowable.
Like her husband, she's become somewhat calcified in American memory, but the historical record, including her correspondence with friends, family, and associates from her life in Virginia and then as First Lady in her later years, reveals a firm, lively person.
She could be direct, astute about politics, and attuned to fashionable clothes and household furnishing, sometimes all in one letter.
Portraits made during her life capture only a glimpse of the latter.
She ordered sparkling purple silk, silver embroidered, and sequined high-heeled shoes for her wedding, and she never stopped being fond of shoes.
As First Lady, she dressed somewhat more plainly, but her clothing was always of the finest quality.
Martha Dandridge Custis and George Washington were born less than a year apart in 1731 and 1732.
Theirs would be her second marriage, his first.
It was, by the accounts of those who knew them best, a loving partnership.
In a few surviving letters, George refers to her as his dear Patsy, and they addressed each other as my dearest.
George signed one urgent letter in the summer of 1775 as Your Entire.
They were happiest together at Mount Vernon, ever mindful of what was happening back at home during the long years of the war in the presidency, and of being apart.
Devoted to her husband, Martha spent every winter of the war with him wherever he had made camp for the season, including at Valley Forge.
George and Martha Washington were elite, wealthy Virginians through and through.
From her first marriage to the much older Daniel Park Custis, Martha carried into their union with George two children and an extensive estate that included more than 80 enslaved people.
They would not have children together, but they would raise hers.
At Mount Vernon, they oversaw a plantation complex worked by hundreds of enslaved people.
Through a combination of inheritance and acquisition, by the time of George's death, his real estate stretched across tens of thousands of acres and included some small industrial concerns.
But of course, their lives would not be confined to Virginia.
When she married him, Martha would have known that George was set up for public life, which in colonial Virginia was both an opportunity and a responsibility for elites.
The first hint of that came before they married, when he served as an officer in the Virginia militia during the Seven Years' War.
Then shortly after they married, George was elected to Virginia's Colonial Assembly, the House of Burgesses, where he would serve until the eve of the American Revolution, including working closely with her royal governor, Lord Dunmore.
Up to that point, Martha's life as his wife would have seemed a familiar echo of the women among her family and friends.
But when her husband's military leadership of the Revolutionary War and then political leadership of the new United States was required, Martha's life changed, along with those of everyone around her.
In the transition from colonies to nation, their friend, the historian and writer Merciotis Warren, said, events have outrun our imagination.
The Washingtons lived in three different presidential mansions as the capital city moved, the first two in New York, and then the third in Philadelphia through the end of the president's second term in early 1797.
These pre-Washington, D.C. and pre-White House residences have all since been demolished.
Glimpses of the Washingtons' efforts to create a new standard for a presidential life and for the First Lady's role come through, though.
George Washington held a regular formal reception on Tuesday afternoons for men, and Martha held a less formal one, ostensibly for ladies, but in fact men and women both attended on Friday evenings.
They called these gatherings levees, the name for formal public access to the French monarch.
Features of the Washingtons levees included Martha greeting people from a raised dais.
To be fair, she was petite at only five feet tall, which raised eyebrows and some critical commentary.
How was this democratic?
For that matter, how was one to be a first lady or a president when there had never been such a thing?
Borrowing some ceremonial features from the system they knew best, tempered by the sentiments of the revolution, seemed sensible.
Martha would hold the first rank in the United States, and what she did or said, where she went and what she wore all made for political fodder.
The Washingtons would step carefully but decisively together into this phase of their public life.
It was not without cost.
Using the same metaphor that her husband often invoked, Martha wrote of longing to be in the shades of Mount Vernon under our own vines and fig tree.
And yet I cannot blame him, she wrote, for having acted according to his ideas of duty in obeying the voice of his country.
For Martha, having been raised to hostist duties, managing the accoutrement of hospitality for diplomats, politicians, office seekers, and the general curious public was second nature.
She stocked the official residences with such supplies as china decorated with all of the states around the rim of the plates and her own initials in the middle, cutlery, wine, and more prosaic items like mops and clamps for scouring brushes.
They acquired printed invitations to dine, the President of the United States and Mrs. Washington request the pleasure, which could be filled in with the names of the lucky invitees.
Martha described both formal and less formal visits.
The practice with me has been always to receive the first visits and then to return them.
These included the ladies of the diplomatic corps introduced in their first visits by the Secretary of State.
In this innovation, borrowing from traditions, Martha Washington did something no American woman had ever done.
She occupied an entirely new national role, and she taught the country how to see a woman in it.
Did she encourage her husband's better angels?
In one respect, we know she emphatically did not.
She was casually cruel about slavery and her expectation of enslaved people.
Confounded when 17 fled with the British, who were promising freedom during the Revolution, she was infuriated when one of her maids fled from Philadelphia decades later and wanted her tracked down and then brought back.
She never was.
But did he encourage hers?
Perhaps.
When he died, George Washington provided that at Martha's death, the enslaved people he owned would be emancipated.
But for whatever reasons, possibly out of fear, she acted on that provision just a year after he died and a year before she followed him to the grave.
Martha Washington would prove a hard act to follow.
Before women could hold office, she had to create one by stepping onto the center stage of American public life without a script and making her role real through practice.
At the end of Washington's presidential administration, Abigail Adams wrote to the only woman to serve in the position she was about to hold that she would endeavor to follow your steps and by that means hope I shall not essentially fall short.
America 250 Moments00:02:48
unidentified
This essay is part of a series commissioned by the organization known as More Perfect as America celebrates its 250th birthday this year.
Public officials, journalists, and historians are writing about presidents and first ladies with the goal of bringing American history to life through compelling stories.
We'll hear more of these essays through the year on C-SPAN.
And to learn more about the project, go to inpursuit.org.
America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment.
From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sites, and the spirit that make up America.
Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can, and proudly supported by our television partners.
America 250, over a year of historic moments.
C-SPAN, official media partner of America 250.
The Reverend Jesse Lewis Jackson has died at the age of 84.
Known for his many years of activism in the civil rights movement, Reverend Jackson also gained national attention in politics when he launched a 1984 bid for the White House, becoming the second African American to mount a national campaign for president as a Democrat.
He came in third place during the primary behind Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale.
He ran a second campaign for president four years later, but lost that nomination to Michael Dukakis.
Continuing his political service, Jesse Jackson served as a shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997.
His primary role in the unpaid position was to lobby for D.C. statehood.
Throughout his career, Reverend Jackson established several advocacy organizations, which later merged into the current Rainbow Push Coalition, which champions for social justice, voting rights, and economic equality.
In 2000, Reverend Jackson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
Just last year, he was diagnosed with progressive supernuclear palsy, a rare brain disease that affects body movements with conditions similar to Parkinson's disease.
Reverend Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and their five children.
All day on C-SPAN 2, we're showing programming for our archives of Jesse Jackson in his own words, speaking at conventions about his life and legacy and his presidential campaigns.
You can also find appearances and events with Jesse Jackson in our video library at c-span.org by searching his name.
Arctic Tensions Rising00:09:59
unidentified
Well, up next, Finland's President Alexander Stubbs sits down with Politico at the Munich Security Conference, where he examines the relationship between Europe and the United States and warns of a lasting shift in American priorities.
Thanks, everyone.
Great to be with you.
Keep the faith, stay with us, and then have a drink afterwards.
I'm delighted to be joined for this session at this point at the end of such an eventful day by President Stoop of Finland.
Many of you will know that he is one of the most interesting thinkers about, I think, the geopolitics of the new era that we live in.
And his country lives in uncomfortable proximity to the cause of so much discussion across policy, security, and defense here in Munich and beyond.
So I'm going to just dive in.
Welcome, President Stoop.
Thank you.
Very nice to be here again for joining us.
Give me your response, if you could, to Secretary Rubio's appearance.
Somehow around in these halls, I've heard a mixture of, well, this is a very different tone to last year, much more conciliatory.
Europe, we love you culturally, you're kind of cool.
But at the same time, the message also echoed JD Vance last year to the extent of saying Europe needed to step up on its own security.
And there was quite a lot of criticism in there about the way that European societies have developed.
One is that I think we brought down the temperature in the transatlantic relationship, certainly from Davos, where the focus was a lot on Greenland.
And then probably the speech was different in tone than JD Vance's speech last year.
I had a chance to talk to Marco about it for about half an hour right after the speech.
So we gave a little bit of an analysis.
But the second observation is to say I think what we need to understand is that American foreign policy has changed.
And the definition of it is not only in Marco's speech and JD's speech, but also in the national security strategy from November 2025.
And that speech kind of has two strands.
One is ideological.
It's very MAGA.
So MAGA means anti-EU.
It means anti-liberal world order.
It means anti-climate change.
That's the ideological undercurrent.
And then the second sort of strand or pillar of the national security strategy, which you could hear a little bit of in Marco's speech today as well, is America First.
And that's a pecking order.
Number one is the Western Hemisphere.
And Marco is very strong about that.
Number two is the Indo-Pacific.
Someone like Colby is quite strong on that.
And then number three is Europe.
Number four is the Middle East.
And number five is Africa.
So when you put this ideology and policy together, I think you pretty much see where the US foreign policy stands at the moment.
unidentified
So you mentioned Greenland, and it doesn't seem things change so fast at the moment.
The cycle is moving fast.
At Davos, we ended up in that midweek where one minute we were halfway to the US declaring it would have Greenland in some form territorially.
And then what looked like a bit of a climb down from that position and clearly a massive diplomatic effort here in Europe by leaders to placate President Trump on that score.
Well, I think we had three scenarios when it all started, pretty much during the weekend right before Davos.
The first scenario was good, the second one was bad, and the third one was ugly.
And the good scenario was to try to come up with an off-ramp where we would set up a process to increase Arctic security and hopefully get something at the NATO-Ankara summit.
The bad scenario was a trade war and an increase of tariffs.
Remember, there were eight countries that were threatened with tariffs up to 25%.
And then the ugly scenario was the continuation of a military threat.
And I think we were able to take scenario two and three off the table and focus on number one.
And of course, you know, we speak about this a lot with European colleagues and certainly with Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen and the Prime Minister of Greenland.
It's not over yet, but again, we're back into Arctic temperatures on this, so we're not talking.
Well, I don't know whether we needed it or not, but it was a good exercise of how do you escalate to de-escalate and who do you contact and who you discuss with.
I think, of course, the lead was taken very much by Mark Rute on this in close coordination with the Danes and the Greenlanders.
And I think what happened was that the escalation part was very much out of the public.
So it was making sure that there's an understanding how much of the bond market in the US is European.
There's an understanding of what the ACI instrument is.
There's an understanding of how much of the US stock market is European-owned.
So Europe actually has all the cards or the instruments in these types of situations.
And the other one then was to try to find the de-escalatory language.
And I think we succeeded in that.
But I would be lying, and you know me, I'm an avid transatlanticist and pro-American and pro-European.
So I'd be lying if I said it didn't leave a scar.
Of course it does when you're talking about fundamental issues such as territorial integrity and sovereignty.
But now we have a couple of processes and I'm carefully optimistic that we'll get this, we'll land it in the right place.
unidentified
We heard Julia Navalny earlier here on stage talking to my colleague Gordon Lipinski, after that proof was forthcoming today, very joined up effort there by a number of European countries, clearly based on their analysis and intelligence services about the cause of death and the poisoning, fatal poisoning as they have proven it of Navalny.
In some ways it solves a horrible mystery.
It's a surprise that isn't a surprise, but even so the details of it are just so shocking and disturbing.
I made the comment that you're living in Finland in a cozy proximity, but so what difference do you think it makes?
Because we go through these cycles of being a sort of shock about Putin and then things get worse and the war continues of course in Ukraine.
What do you take away from a day like this in terms of the risk factor that you think Putin poses?
I try to read a lot and I just finished a book on Russian revisionist history by a BBC journalist called Six Smith.
It basically went through why Russia is using the language it is on Ukraine and how Putin has developed his thinking from the 1990s through to 2000, how he changed his language early on in this century and took it from there.
And I think the big things that we have to understand that the DNA of Russia, unfortunately, as a state, is an empire and the DNA is imperialism.
So it has often been about land acquisition.
And then you have to try to understand Putin, who is a rational individual, what his thesis is.
Well, his thesis is that Ukraine as a state shouldn't exist.
His thesis is Ruskimir, Great Russia, which means one Russia, one language, one religion, and one leader.
And this is his perspective and his thinking.
And it's not only this day, it was yesterday, it was last week, last month, last year, etc.
unidentified
I guess, I mean, just to push you a little further on that, I mean, what you say is right and thoughtful and reflective.
But when you see, I mean, just something like the use of poisoning of a key enemy like Navalny, it was clearly, you know, that was part of a trajectory of antagonism, hostility, in the end, prepared to being prepared to murder an adversary.
But when you, you know, as I say, if you're living in Finland or you're talking to European countries here now in this state, we talk about hybrid war, which in some ways I think is quite sort of cold language.
It's quite hard maybe to say to populations how dangerous this is.
I suppose I'm asking when you hear of something like that today, do you feel fearful for yourself, vis-à-vis Russia?