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June 9, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

53:08

How The Protests Turned Into A Movement

Protests around the nation (and the world) has proven that when Americans realize they have power they're unstoppable. Hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton discuss developments, the concept of defunding law enforcement, and the dangers that still lie ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	I think what we're seeing now, the most massive protest movement I have ever seen in my life, I think this suggests that the country is getting wise to this and we're not going to put up with it anymore.
	We need a voice against racism.
	We need many voices against racism and against brutality.
	We need to stand up and say that black lives matter.
	Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying there's a great thing that's happening for our country.
	There's a great day for him.
	It's a great day for everybody.
	Hey everybody, your co-host Jared Yates Sexton here for the Muckrake Podcast.
	As always, I am joined by my loyal, lovely co-host Nick Halseman.
	It's been an interesting couple of weeks.
	As we talked on the last episode, it feels like something has shifted in America as if There's an inkling of hope.
	It seems like the protests have started to win, if not actual gains in some places, certainly rhetorical battles.
	Polls show us that three-quarters of Americans understand systemic racism, which is a small miracle in and of itself.
	Donald Trump has been neutralized for the moment.
	God knows how long that will last, but I don't know, Nick.
	I'm hopefully optimistic.
	I what's actually hit me more is the reaction around the world.
	It's mind boggling how big these protests have been in London and Australia and everywhere else across the world.
	It's really like that.
	That's what's giving me kind of hope only because like humanity realizes the issues here.
	It's not just in our country anyway.
	But I don't know.
	That is what actually resonated with me even more.
	Although as it's coming in now we're seeing more and more footage across the U.S.
	We've never had a sustained, I mean, maybe in the 60s, in the late 60s during the Civil Rights Movement, we've never had since a sustained period of people coming together and it's basically peaceful to let their voices be heard and there's no question that something's happening.
	I'll tell you for those of you who haven't seen it, I got a real joyful kick out of watching a statue of a slave trader get brought down in England and then rolled into the water and just kerplunk it's gone as people cheered.
	That felt really amazing, actually, and really inspiring, and the idea that these things can happen.
	And again, we're talking about symbols, and then we're talking about gains.
	I mean, Confederate memorials are being taken down all over the country right now.
	People are just like, yeah, you know what?
	This is bullshit.
	These don't need to be up anymore.
	They need to go.
	Which is certainly a cultural win, if not necessarily a political win.
	Although, I would argue it's probably both.
	Yeah, we need to talk about the history of this thing.
	And, you know, we had talked about this, basically, when we first started this podcast, this idea that there are periods where Americans forget that they have power, and that they have agency, and that they have sway over political progress.
	And up until A couple of weeks ago, Americans had kind of forgotten that politics was supposed to serve them, and that the government was supposed to serve our will, and there was a social contract in place between the two of us, and that the government got its sovereignty from us.
	And unfortunately, we were stuck in a cycle of looking at politics as if it was a spectacle, a television show that we watched and were either petrified by or repulsed by or inspired by.
	Well, what was incredibly damaging on the Republican side is their whole ideology is centered around the fact that the government's not supposed to help you.
	You're supposed to pull yourself up by its bootstraps.
	Meanwhile, everybody relies on some version of the government to help them, right?
	We all do.
	It's vital to keeping this society going.
	But in their, you know, sort of ivory tower minds, it's insidious when you think about it because it's the crumbling of our infrastructure based on that ideology initially.
	And that's what's the culmination of decades of this kind of thought process.
	And, you know, maybe now we're going into a point where we realize, you know what?
	These taxes we pay actually do things that matter and save lives and make our lives better.
	Wait, you mean that our tax money shouldn't go to buy tanks to terrorize us and crush us in the streets?
	I mean, that's a revolutionary idea, Nick.
	I don't know if I can get behind that.
	Hey, those are hand-me-downs.
	That's right, that we paid for in a different way.
	Yeah, you know, you brought up the idea of Republican ideology, and we've all seen that it's horseshit.
	It's not real.
	Like this ideology was never actually real.
	Like they would say that, you know, the government's not supposed to get their money.
	And then immediately when they win the presidency or when they win Congress, they just spin like there is no tomorrow.
	Right.
	They're not afraid of deficit when it's in pursuit of their own goals.
	Right.
	But let's not forget they're blowing the deficits up so they can cut all the social networks.
	Sorry, social safety nets.
	That's what they're doing when they're blowing up a deficit.
	They can cry poor and cut all the things because the government's helping these welfare queen people and all that kind of stuff.
	So remember, there is a method to that, what they're thinking, and it's not just willy-nilly, we're just going to have a party and throw out our ideals.
	They have an idea of what's going on.
	Well, the amazing thing about it is that the Republican Party has completely swallowed itself and then turned itself inside out.
	And they're totally fine with welfare when it's for corporations and the wealthy, right?
	They're not actually for open markets.
	They're all about supporting their chosen businesses, right?
	That's what they love to do.
	They like to sit there and say, "We shouldn't pick winners and losers," and then meanwhile, they rewrite the entire legal system to pick winners and losers.
	But what's happening here is it's been this trick for a very long time, and the trick said this.
	Well, you can't do things like defund the police, which by the way, we have to go on the record saying, "Defund the police does not mean that you abolish the police." It means that you take resources that have been used to turn the police into a militarized occupying force and you relocate that money For other programs like, I don't know, education or infrastructure or roads or mental health programs, you know, anything that would actually help people.
	But for years, we've been told that if we cut law enforcement budgets, that if we caught military budgets, then we were just done, right?
	That was the end of America.
	We were going to be destroyed and we could never, ever let that happen.
	Well, the lie got exposed.
	I mean, during the pandemic, these people who said that they would be there to protect us, They whiffed.
	And by whiffed, I mean they didn't even try, right?
	They basically, and this is how it always ends up, and we're going to talk a little bit about the history of protest movements and realizing power from moments of powerlessness.
	This was the let them eat cake moment.
	It was like, here's your $1,200 check.
	Choke on it.
	Right?
	We're going to give you one check for $1,200.
	Meanwhile, we're going to distribute God knows how much money to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.
	Right?
	Or any number of our corporate friends.
	And this was the let him eat cake moment.
	And you can't do that.
	You can only push a citizenry so far.
	Which is why we're seeing this moment right now.
	Yes, it's about George Floyd's murder.
	And yes, it's about Breonna Taylor's murder.
	But it's actually about a larger system that has just told the American people to pound sand.
	We're not going to help you.
	And this government is not for you.
	These masks are for the federal government.
	They're not for you.
	Right?
	The idea that it's two separate things.
	And that just reaches a point.
	It can only build for so long.
	The studies are clear as well that when the police do not escalate the stress levels of these protests, they remain calm and they remain peaceful.
	And, you know, again, this guy on Twitter who is now, it's probably over 250 tweets at this point, of just unprovoked aggression by the cops is what makes these things devolve most of the time.
	And I know we're going to have the law and order silent majority people who are going to this even today are going to insist that it's Antifa and sort of this this rogue wing and they have a hard time separating the peaceful protesters from anybody who might be looting which you know by the way the looting is pretty much gone away we haven't really had an issue with that for several days really on any kind of major Isn't it weird, Nick, that the looting kind of went away the moment they started arresting white supremacists and it became very clear that they were escalating on the corners of things?
	Isn't that really odd how that just went away?
	Yes.
	And speaking of corners, meanwhile, there are these small towns that have been held hostage by the rumor of busloads of Antifa coming for you, much in the same way as these caravans were coming up from You know, south of the border to terrorize you and God knows what they thought was going to happen.
	We actually had these small towns get out their guns.
	It was like a weird western from the 50s.
	They were waiting for them, standing in the streets with their arms and their guns, sorry.
	I don't know, I guess to shoot these people.
	And they even terrorized a family who was driving a little bus on a vacation.
	They thought this was Antifa coming.
	And I just have to imagine when you say it out loud, when you describe this notion of a bus.
	It's the bus that's kind of funny.
	Is it like the Partridge Family bus?
	Like, I don't even know what it looks like.
	But, you know, a bus of Mary, you know, Antifa people coming, they murder you.
	It just sounds so, and I think it sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud that they kind of get sheepish and melt away back into their huts or wherever they live.
	But that's what's been happening across the country and it's startling to me.
	Yes, so they waited outside of Chicago in a suburb, I believe it was Crown Point, and just waited along the protest line.
	In your home state.
	In my home state.
	I guarantee you, by the way, in Indiana there were more than a few small towns that with anxious moments waiting on Antifa to show up.
	I'll tell you that that probably took place in Indiana.
	It's a total myth.
	I mean, Antifa, we've talked about it before, and we just have to state for anybody who's not familiar, it's not an actual organization.
	There aren't roving bands of Antifa members going across country hurting people.
	It's a complete, absolute, absurd, insecure, white, paranoid fantasy.
	And what has actually happened, and this is one of the reasons why I think that things have shifted, and I was posting about this the other day, because I've said it before on this podcast, I'm not a person who likes to tread around in hope and throw it around lightly.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, I've been sounding the alarm on everything that's been going on for a while.
	But we have to give due where due is due.
	And in this case, something has changed.
	The narrative has changed.
	And as soon as the police got out, right?
	And it started with Donald Trump and Tom Cotton, of course, calling for blood in the streets.
	And when it became clear that the military wasn't going to do it, and once the police started getting spotlighted as being violent and destroying people in the streets, they backed off.
	And when they backed off, it was a bunch of peaceful protest, a bunch of people who were out there speaking their minds.
	And then all of a sudden, the paranoid, delusional, paranoid white supremacists that we're talking about start showing up with guns.
	I wrote about this today on The Muckrake.
	There's a guy who got arrested in Chattanooga.
	He was up on top of a building with an AK-47.
	And you saw this other time.
	A guy drunk.
	You saw another guy running around screaming slurs while, you know, waving a chainsaw.
	You have another guy who's out there with like Wolverine style hand blades.
	You know, people with bow and arrows.
	And it becomes increasingly clear That this part of America that unfortunately our media has given a lot of press and a lot of time and a lot of normalization, they're insane and they're dangerous and they're paranoid and they're delusional.
	And all of a sudden it becomes very clear which side of this situation you need to be on, which is one of the reasons why we've had the progress that we have in the past few days.
	These are peaceful, righteous protests and people are remembering that they have power.
	And when those things come together and all of a sudden the narrative becomes very clear to John Q Public sitting at home, things start to shift.
	And things are shifting right now.
	If you're interested for Trump to lose in November, then the polling right now is really encouraging.
	And it's no doubt that there's a connection.
	And here's the subtle thing that I think the media is missing on right now in their coverage, is we have to kind of get a handle on what about these protests are protesting police brutality and their methods, and how much of this is protesting Trump?
	Uh, that then-diagram has a lot of crossover, and what I think Trump doesn't understand, because he keeps double-tripling and quadrupling down with horrible tweets, and he keeps whistling to the cops about domination, even now, is that that is simply going to conflate him with this issue, and this issue is not going to get fixed before November.
	And it will increase the percentages.
	It will increase Biden's lead.
	What makes me worried, though, is that the more this increases, the more erratic and the more ridiculous his behavior is going to become.
	I'll just promise you this right now.
	I've been looking into trying to figure out what they're going to do.
	How much more corrupt can they get?
	How much more blatantly outrageous can they behave and what can they say?
	There's a lot of room there.
	There's a ton of room.
	I mean, let's call it what it is.
	His stunt with the Bible and calling himself the Law and Order President and calling for the military to get in the streets, that was a dictatorial gambit.
	He tried.
	He really did.
	Like, it didn't succeed because America was disgusted by it and saw through it.
	You know, and our military leaders pushed against it.
	He tried.
	Like, that was legitimately what that was.
	Like, there's another universe split off from here where it worked, and we are in Deep shit.
	You know what I mean?
	where something about it connected and things are really, really bad. - Well, wait, I want that pitch meeting.
	Okay, they're in the White House, it's early on Monday, and they're like, yeah, you should walk across Lafayette Square to the church.
	Okay, that's good, yeah, and then you can stand there.
	No, we can't just stand there.
	Well, hold up a Bible.
	Oh yeah, that's good.
	Like, I don't, I can't even believe that that was the thought process, right?
	Or was it all organic and they just sort of at the spur of the moment came up with the Bible?
	I mean, somebody had to bring a Bible, right?
	And he held it upside down, which is the sign of the devil.
	The story is that Ivanka was behind the Bible stunt, but I don't completely buy it.
	It's way too orchestrated and it's way too focused at what I've come to call the cult of the Shining City.
	Like there's somebody, and here's the thing about it, and people don't want to talk about this and don't want to look too far into it, there are people on Trump's team who They are paid or part of their purview is to focus on conspiracy theory messaging, right?
	Like, it's not an accident that he, you know, tips towards QAnon.
	That's not an accident.
	It's not an accident that when he was running for president he basically retweeted an anti-semitic tweet every couple of days.
	It's not...
	It's not an accident that he did this to send a message about holy war.
	Like all this stuff, I don't know if it's Miller, I don't know if it's Bannon calling in, you know, halfway through a bender or whatever, but somebody knows this stuff and tells them.
	And there is, again, there's a reality out there where this thing worked because it was a gambit.
	He tried, he put all of his chips in the middle, but that doesn't mean that he's done.
	And I want to tell people this, and I really want them to hear me.
	Just because it's working doesn't mean it's worked.
	Right?
	Like, what people feel right now is an intoxicating thing.
	It feels like you're winning.
	And I can tell you, as somebody who has fought a lot of these battles, you don't win very much.
	You know this.
	American politics breaks your heart.
	It really does, all the time, and you get very, very few wins.
	This thing's not over just because the Democratic Party knelt and promised to bring reform.
	Who knows if they can even pass that reform?
	It's not over because Minneapolis disbanded their police department.
	They're going to move towards community policing.
	That doesn't mean you've won.
	If nobody shows up tonight, no one shows up tomorrow, nobody shows up the next day.
	And by the way, it's not a coincidence the country's reopening.
	They want to get people back at work so they're not, you know, protesting and in the streets and all this stuff.
	That's probably going to be one of the next things that happens.
	You have to go out.
	Like, if you want to win this thing, if you want to keep constant pressure on Trump, because you're exactly right, Nick, he has promised to take care of this thing.
	Every night that it's not taken care of, he's failing.
	And I think everybody at home recognizes that the God Emperor Trump doesn't have control over this thing.
	And this goes back to what I wanted to talk about today, which is, when the American people realize that they have power, they don't lose.
	We're taught to think that we don't have power.
	There are all these moments in American history where we're overwhelmed.
	I don't know if people know this, but the Federalists, after the Constitution was ratified, they cracked down on every right that Americans had.
	It was really bad.
	John Adams was, like, a dictatorial president.
	And then, of course, you have, like, the election of 1800, which was a people's revolution.
	Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, the robber barons had complete control over this country.
	They bought and sold the government.
	And then, when the people started marching and they started fighting against them, they hired mercenaries to go in the street and machine gun them and kill them.
	I mean, there was basically a labor-civil war in this country to start off the 20th century.
	But Americans, when they gather together and when they do this and they make their voices heard, they win.
	They just win.
	That means that you can't stop right now.
	It has to be an ongoing, sustained movement.
	Because if people back off right now, they'll wipe this from the face of the earth.
	They'll put it in the year-end review, but it's not going to do anything.
	It's got to be sustained.
	Absolutely, and just a quick reminder that we are on YouTube as well, and it would be great if everybody listening to this would just hop over there and subscribe to the Muckrake Podcast on YouTube, and you can watch Jared in his green shirt make his coherent points, you know, and how well it goes with his eyes.
	But here's the thing.
	Eric Holder, by the way, said this.
	He's like, is this a movement or is this just a series of protests?
	And I think he weighed in and said it wasn't a movement yet.
	And I'm not sure.
	I think I might agree with him because it's not I don't know of everyone.
	I think we're all sort of looking at this.
	Out of the corner of our eye, going, okay, is this going to be, is it at the tipping point, and does it become this movement?
	And I think what the key here is, and what I mentioned before about Trump and police reform, like, the more those things become entrenched, this is, I think, what becomes the movement.
	Honestly, I really do feel like, and this is what has to be dangerous, because we mentioned defund the police a little bit without getting too much into it, but what's scary is that defund the police is a loser for the Democrats, if that becomes the mantra and the rallying cry, because That doesn't mean what it sounds like.
	And I kind of want to wonder, if it's a propaganda thing like Russian bots, who amplified the phrase, defund the police?
	And by the way, it's not like it's completely made up because they painted it on the street next to Black Lives Matter on Pennsylvania Avenue.
	So it is an accepted phrase, but I'm a little bit concerned because it sort of deals with this notion of change happening too fast.
	This kind of could be a bad thing for America.
	Okay, I'm going to say this.
	I'm going to push back a little bit on this.
	And I'm going to say this, Nick, and it's with a lot of love to people that I know listen to this podcast.
	Okay?
	People that I know right now.
	I've got your names in my head.
	I know you're getting ready to hear this.
	I say this with a lot of love and a lot of affection.
	And I'll start it with a rhetorical question.
	Nick, how good has the Democratic Party been at winning elections over the past few years?
	Not great.
	Correct?
	If you were watching on YouTube, you could see my thumbs down.
	That said, 2018 is not to be ignored, but yes, they're not great days.
	The Democratic Party has failed consistently to know what type of messaging actually wins over voters.
	Every election cycle, they come out and they tell you that this word or this phrase is a loser and whatever, and then they lose.
	And then all of a sudden, CNN goes into their ballroom on election night and everyone's crying into their cocktail sauce.
	So here's the thing.
	Do I think that the phrase defund the police is a loser?
	I have no idea.
	I really don't.
	I know that it tells me exactly what I think should happen.
	We need to take the money from them.
	And I actually was talking about this earlier online.
	It should tell you everything that there's not an easily understandable word or phrase to explain how to do this.
	Because it's one of those things, it's complicated on purpose, right?
	We lack the linguistic understanding to actually talk about what, I mean, you could say relocate resources, but that's just, wow, that's like eating a mealy apple.
	And I don't know what it is.
	Defund the Police, I think, works.
	And again, I'm a professor of writing.
	It sounds good, you know, rolling off the tongue.
	It's got a good, strong sound to it.
	But whether or not that will actually translate or not, I don't know.
	Because the one thing that we keep seeing is the Republicans are hitting on it very, very hard.
	And they're saying they want to get rid of the police and abolish the police.
	And they're playing rhetorical games.
	I don't know what the winner is.
	I don't know what the loser is.
	But again, with a lot of affection, the Democratic strategists that I've seen coming out against this thing.
	And by the way, Nick.
	A lot of never Trumpers out there.
	A lot of never Trump Republicans are saying don't make this argument.
	They haven't won a lot of elections recently and they want an outsized amount of control over the Democratic Party.
	So I'm just saying I don't know what the answer is.
	I don't know what the correct phrasing is.
	I've been thinking about it, but I understand why people are concerned.
	Well one thing the Democrats are great at is wringing their hands and getting their knickers in a punch, and that's what we're doing off of this.
	But here's the thing, like Camden, New Jersey is a great example, there's a great article written about this, where they basically defunded the police, they basically tore it down, fired everybody, got rid of the union that was involved, and then rebuilt it In an entirely different way, and it went from being the murder capital of the country to a flourishing city that doesn't have as issues with crime as much now, or at all.
	And the key here was accountability and training and all those things, and also getting out a lot of those cops who clearly needed to get out, who consistently get rehired or not punished for really bad behavior.
	So that's what that all means, and I don't think that that's unreasonable.
	Now, by the way, while you're at it, if you want to do something like that, do it for the educational system, too.
	You know, having been, I worked as a teacher in LAUSD, I think it's the largest collection of public schools in the country, and you have so many rules, regulations, and structures put into place at different times across this decades and decades, and they're in direct opposition of each other.
	And you get this gridlock, and it's completely frozen, and there aren't many other solutions than to just tear the whole thing down and rebuild it.
	The biggest thing that people made about the cop stuff is that we simply ask them to do a ridiculous amount of things.
	They cannot possibly handle, and help me with the list, but it's like they have to go from traffic stops to mediating domestic abuse or domestic violence to what else do they have to do?
	I mean everything.
	Child services.
	They have to mediate mental health disputes.
	They have to do mental health check-ins.
	They also have to fundraise.
	That's the other part about it, is that they are told that they have to pay for parts of government by handing out a certain amount of traffic tickets and handing out a certain number of citations.
	They have to meet goals.
	They have to do all this stuff, which goes back to one of the main problems about all of this.
	You brought up the educational system.
	The educational system has been screwed with and screwed with and screwed with by a bunch of technocrats who put in goals, right?
	You have to meet this goal.
	If you don't meet this goal, you're gonna get funding taken away or you're gonna receive this sort of a thing or whatever, as if we're machines.
	Right, because people are so stupid and worthless that they can't actually police themselves, right?
	Which is also one of the problems with the police, is they have been indoctrinated and told that they are in opposition to us.
	And by the way, if you really want to get frustrated and pissed off, go online and look up some police training seminars.
	They have completely changed.
	So many of them now are about, you have to be okay taking a human life.
	It's you or them.
	You are the thin blue line between society and chaos.
	You are what stand between your loved ones and being raped and murdered and all this stuff.
	And by the way, when you hear all that stuff, that's the exact same thing that gets you on a building in Chattanooga with an AK-47.
	Right?
	It is indoctrinating.
	It is radicalizing.
	And so, meanwhile, all these people who are in this thing, they're being given military-grade weapons, they're given, you know, who knows what these people have?
	And a lot of these people think that they're fighting a war.
	I mean, there's a bunch of white supremacists involved in this.
	There's a bunch of people who want to be involved in a war.
	There's some out-and-out fascists in these groups, right, who have fantasies about being the punisher or something approaching this vigilante status.
	And you get all this stuff together and it's combustible.
	It has to be torn down and rebuilt.
	It doesn't mean that we can't have police.
	God knows that we're going to need some sort of law enforcement.
	But I'll tell you this, like you said, we don't need someone out there who's taking care of traffic stuff.
	Also, going over here and dealing with a person who is homeless or mentally ill, or going over here and checking on children, or going over here... I mean, they need to be taught... Investigating murder.
	Right.
	You need different types of jobs.
	And instead of looking at it from a punitive, punishing sense, let's look at it from how to build a society that works.
	Let's get people who are taught to de-escalate to go in and deal with the mentally ill people.
	Let's get social workers out to deal with the homeless.
	Let's get child care specialists out there to deal with child situations.
	Let's have domestic dispute experts who go in and take care of this thing instead of getting ready to pull a gun and blowing someone's head off.
	There has to be a better way to do this and we have to have that conversation.
	Well, I think the key here is I'm not sure people understand what the cops really do.
	They're reactive.
	They show up after the crime is committed, right?
	They're not really preventing crimes.
	They're always there after it happens and have to clean up and deal with whatever's going on there.
	Which then brings me to the idea that like, is it the fear of being arrested that keeps people from committing crimes?
	That's an interesting question and we've brought this up before in other podcasts but this is a really important concept because I think it will affect how you want to shape a police force because we need to figure that out if it really is.
	The crimes that we see and all the looting and all that kind of stuff, is that going to stop happening because they're simply afraid that they're going to get thrown in prison or do they have a notion of right and wrong and they know that they shouldn't be doing it or do we police ourselves and is there a community that could be part of this?
	We saw this, right?
	We saw A lot of protesters get in the way of stopping looters and say you better stop doing that and they get in the way and they call out that people are doing it.
	That probably goes as long away as any kind of a show of law enforcement.
	No, I mean, that's 100% right.
	I want to make a couple points.
	Number one, when I was younger, I was the child of a single mother and my mother was getting systematically harassed by a stalker who would like show up in the middle of the night, try and break into our house, just harassed and terrorized us for weeks.
	We would call the police and the police would tell us that my mother was hysterical and tell her that they weren't going to help her.
	It was like a legitimate emergency.
	That's not protecting.
	And the women of America can tell you that they don't feel necessarily protected by the police, right?
	Like, it's an arm of the patriarchy.
	It's a brutalizing force.
	So it's not even about actual protection.
	It's about punitive, right?
	It's about punishing.
	And that entire mindset, what you just talked about, and what we're talking about right now, is a thing that particularly, I mean, it took place for decades, but let's start with Reagan, like we always do.
	And the idea that when you get into hypercapitalism, People who are criminals are criminals because they have failed at capitalism.
	There's something inherently wrong with them, and they are criminals.
	Right?
	So if you start off saying that human beings are criminals or non-criminals, those criminals are dangerous, right?
	They're not just human beings who have had situations happen to them, or who have had financial difficulties, or mentally ill, or haven't had the support that they could have had.
	Which, by the way, they would have had that support if Reagan and people like him hadn't cut every single social program and spent it all on the military, right?
	So, all of a sudden, what we're talking about now We're not even actually talking about policing.
	We're talking about preventative measures that make lives better and make society better.
	And when you start going that route, all of a sudden you're not criminals and non-criminals.
	All of a sudden you're people and things are complicated and you have to figure out ways to make life better as opposed to, yes, we'll pay you a ransom.
	However much you want.
	Make the bad people go away.
	Make them stop.
	Oh, by the way, officer, I have a homeless person outside of my house.
	Come over and take care of them.
	Oh, a black man's harassing me in the park.
	Right?
	So instead of paying... What is it?
	Oh, it's when the mob comes around and you pay them the money.
	Protection money.
	Right?
	Okay, law enforcement has turned into a situation where it's protection money.
	And going back to our favorite Bill Barr, who said, oh, if you don't respect law enforcement, maybe they'll stop coming to your city.
	You know?
	Oh, nice state you have here.
	It'd be a shame if something happened.
	It's a protection ring.
	It has nothing actually to do with productive and working societies.
	It's about telling people, this is death at your doorstep.
	Which, by the way, doesn't hurt that the Republican Party and Fox News and people like Donald Trump, all they can do to win elections is tell you who to be afraid of and who's going to come kill you and rape your family.
	It's protection money.
	It has nothing to do with actual law and order.
	It has nothing to do with working society.
	You need to pay this money to be protected from fear.
	That's all it is.
	Yeah, and meanwhile they're also putting quotas on meeting out punishment.
	So you have these cops, like I just read a great article about how a guy did, or as a Twitter thread, he went on a buddy on a drive around, whatever they call those at night, And it's really boring, right?
	Nothing is happening.
	So you get these cops getting amped up and amped up desperate to find anything to pull somebody over for and also then amp up that situation to make it worse so that they can do the arrest.
	They're like wanting to do it.
	Then you throw the fact that the people will go get, you know, thrown in prison for a felony, they pay their due to society, their dues to society, they get out, and then they won't let them vote without some sort of a poll tax now, which is happening, right?
	Like, at what point did that become a thing?
	Well, I mean, I think, historically speaking, this was to disenfranchise black people, I believe, right?
	was the root of this, where even though they were thrown in prison, and a lot of those people were thrown in for trumped up charges, when they get out, they were like, well, we've got to figure out a way where we can't let them vote anymore.
	And they're still doing it now.
	Is it Florida, where they're trying to basically make them pay a certain amount of money before they can then be eligible?
	Yep.
	And there's two magic words that have not been spoken yet and have to be spoken, which is white supremacy.
	They have decided, and by they I mean white supremacists in power, the wealthy and the powerful white supremacists, have decided it is much more lucrative to throw black men into jail and keep them in a system of punishment And, you know, suppression than it is to actually help anybody or use social programs or invest in education and infrastructure and healthcare and basic human dignity.
	Everything you just talked about is about suppression of people.
	It's not a coincidence that this is a black movement.
	It's not a coincidence that this is all based upon the needless, senseless murder of black men.
	Because all of this has always been about white supremacist suppression.
	I mean, I wrote about this on The Muckrake.
	America was founded on this stuff.
	I mean, not only just on racial suppression and slavery, but one of the reasons we have a federal government in the first place is because they didn't know under the Articles of Confederation how to put down multi-state, quote-unquote, rebellions.
	And this was a bunch of poor people like Hayes Rebellion who were paying taxes but didn't get any government representation or anything nearing a working government.
	They were going from state to state and people like George Washington, by the way, was terrified of them.
	Terrified George Washington's letters about Hayes Rebellion are like he is petrified of what could possibly happen with another American Revolution.
	The basis of this country was put in place to control African Americans and also keep down resurrections of poor people.
	And so that's why we're in the situation we are.
	It all ends up here, which is why we have to have a very large conversation.
	If we don't have it, it's just going to keep going.
	That's why we have to be in the streets.
	We can't just stop.
	Like, this is something that has to go all the way, or it's just going to keep happening.
	Well, you know, the let them eat cake moment is a direct reference to the French Revolution, which is, you know, there are some parallels.
	And by the way, it's like, three years ago, if you would have told me, you know what, there could be people shooting each other in the streets.
	I would have been like, you're fucking crazy.
	That's not America.
	But you know what?
	As we're seeing, that sniper up there was drinking beers with a lot of ammo.
	It's just the rage.
	I've seen people protesting on a corner and a guy get out of his car and just get into the face and try and cause a fight.
	There's no question, if there was a gun around, He wouldn't have thought twice about grabbing it, at least.
	I don't know if he'd fire it, but that's what we're seeing.
	So we are inching closer to this thing, and I think the only thing that worries me is, what is that percentage of people that have that rage?
	And if it gets over a certain line, then we're going to be really in trouble as a country.
	That's the really frightening part about all of this.
	And again, this is the PSA for the day.
	There is hope, but that doesn't mean there isn't danger.
	I mean, there are people right now who are itching for a fight.
	I mean, again, people showing up with chainsaws and bow and arrows and AK-47s.
	I also want to point out, it's the white people with the guns, right?
	Which, by the way, they buy the guns because they've been afraid of a race war.
	I've been around a lot of people in my life that I grew up with, people that I've loved, people in my family who talked about being ready for a race war, and that's why they have all these weapons, and that's why they prep, that's why they, you know, they learn how to grow, you know, vegetables in their basement.
	It's because they expect a race war to happen.
	Well guess what?
	They're pushing that.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, they're actually sort of manifesting the thing by being worried about it.
	And will somebody go out and do something like this if this sustains and continues?
	I mean, there's more of a chance every day that it does, but does that mean that you stop?
	Does that mean that when they were marching into Selma just because they got rocks thrown at them and they were their heads beaten in and the blood was running in the street?
	It doesn't mean you stop.
	Because these people will intimidate.
	Fascists intimidate, and they want to keep you in a position of fear and intimidation so you won't act out.
	People have to keep going, and is this going to end up tragic?
	Is something really, really bad going to happen?
	I hope not, but I mean, yeah, that possibility exists.
	It does.
	Okay, so here's my take on this because what makes it a movement, or what can get it to be a movement, is leadership.
	Now, if you think about the 60s, we had people.
	We had Martin Luther King.
	We had Malcolm X. We had Bobby Kennedy, Abbie Hoffman.
	I mean, you had leaders of these movements that were inspirational.
	Now, we know what happened to Bobby and Martin Luther King and to Malcolm X, which then doesn't make me surprised that we might not have these people now.
	I don't think we have any leaders.
	We certainly don't have anybody like that.
	You might want to argue Barack Obama could be that position, but he's not out there doing what Martin Luther King did.
	And understandably so to some degree because it's a it's a horrifically dangerous position to be in even now.
	That's what's really frustrating to me.
	It might not be like quote unquote as dangerous to be a leader like a leader like Martin Luther King would be now in 2020.
	But it's dangerous.
	And it's clearly what would limit people from wanting to be in those positions.
	And that's what I'm wondering is, I don't know if we have that kind of leadership that will ultimately make it into the kind of movement that we're looking for.
	So there's a couple things happening with what you just said.
	The leaders that you were talking about all got killed.
	Right.
	And so what ends up happening in America?
	And this is, again, I talk about CNN time-life documentaries, right?
	And how they smooth out a narrative and they don't really tell you what actually happened.
	They want to portray RFK or Martin Luther King or Malcolm X as slain martyrs, but they don't want to talk about the slain part.
	You know, the fact that like these are the people who had high profile positions and then they were murdered.
	People who don't want change, fascists who don't want change, they'll kill you rather than let you achieve change.
	So I think Americans have been largely made fearful of the fact that they could be killed if they spoke out.
	The second part is I think there's a combination of things.
	And I think in part it's because of social media and the internet, but it's also following sort of in the ancestry of the Occupy movement.
	The idea that there doesn't have to be leaders at the head of a thing, it can be like a, you know, an asynchromatic-- - An amoeba. - An amoeba, if you will.
	I think it's much more of an internet social media phenomenon, but also I think, I was talking about this the other day, The Occupy movement sort of fell apart because to go to a meeting of it was exhausting.
	Right?
	Anybody could talk at any given time.
	You had to take votes constantly.
	It was the human megaphone and it was... and I actually think that that movement set up this movement.
	The idea that all this stuff can take place in disparate different places and there didn't have to be someone in charge of each of them.
	Now whether or not a leader will rise up and like actually start directing this thing, I don't know, but I also think it's really important that politicians in this country, and I want to say this and I want to get it right, okay?
	I want people to hear me with love and affection and patience.
	Politicians in this country should be afraid of the people.
	And by that I mean they should be afraid of losing elections.
	They should be afraid of political repercussions.
	I don't mean violence.
	I don't mean stuff like that.
	The government should be afraid of political repercussions for not doing the business of the people.
	And right now, you have millions of Americans out in the streets who are unhappy, and people need to perk up their ears.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, they need to understand, okay, like, obviously, you've decided there's a major systemic problem we're going to start working on.
	Now, the Democratic Party started today.
	Right, working on this thing.
	That doesn't mean they're going to fix it.
	Some of their optics are a little weird.
	The Democratic Party has its problems, but we need to start working toward it.
	Like, the first step is to admit there's a problem and then we got to figure it out.
	And people, they should be afraid of the people.
	They should.
	That's how this stuff is supposed to work.
	I mean, listen, it's working.
	Minneapolis fired those cops.
	They charged the cop with murder.
	Buffalo, the same thing.
	So you can't say it's not working.
	It's not having an effect.
	It's a little bit interesting to see the reaction by the police force to what was going on.
	The Buffalo cop.
	No.
	had a standing ovation, I believe, for him.
	There's another cop who severely injured a student at Temple University, and he also got a -- they gave him a standing o as he walked in to turn himself in or whatever.
	And again, you know, go back to what we talked about earlier as far as the systemic sort of -- it's not even corruption in the police department.
	We've all seen Serpico, right?
	If we haven't, he's an undercover cop who's surrounded by every other cop who's dirty, and he doesn't want to be dirty, and it basically almost costs him his life.
	That's not that far off.
	It's based on a true story, and there's no question it hasn't changed much.
	The reason why the systemic issues are there is because even if you're not committing these horrible things as a cop, you might be covering it up.
	Right?
	Or just looking the other way.
	Or not willing to testify when you see it happen.
	And those are all, you know, as egregiously as the actual crime itself, as we've seen when if you are part of a crime and you don't actually commit it and they can prove it, you go to prison for the same amount of time or it's a very punitive as well.
	So they don't have the same standards that they administer as far as the laws go.
	Yeah, and I want to break this down and I want to try and put this in some language that people can understand.
	And Nick, of course, has a lot of history in the sports world and, you know, basketball and all that.
	I want people to think about a player and a team that enter into salary negotiations, right?
	Like the contract is up.
	Player X wants to stay in City Y with Franchise Y, right?
	What is happening right now with the protest and with our politicians is like a salary negotiation, okay?
	It's like a standoff where, okay, they have made their voice heard, right?
	Like Player X made a hubbub.
	They're like, I deserve to get paid more, right?
	And I hate to break this into financial terms, but just to try and show you how this thing should work.
	And all of a sudden, you know how it is.
	Every owner in the world is like, well, we'd love to keep you.
	We'd love to make you happy, but I just don't know if we can do that, right?
	And then they'll give them an initial offer.
	And then the player is like, that's not going to do it.
	Here's my counter offer.
	And they go back and forth.
	Meanwhile, What happens is, in the modern era, all this plays out on like an ESPN, right?
	And it's fodder every day for the talk shows.
	Oh, I think that player is greedy.
	That player is being irresponsible and they're holding up these people.
	That's what's happening right now with this protest and with our government, right?
	It's not enough that Minneapolis is disbanding their police force.
	That's a bargaining chip.
	It's something they should do anyway, right?
	This is why you have to stay out in the streets.
	It's because this is a negotiation.
	It's not a... I mean, the Democrats today proposed banning chokeholds.
	They talked about a national registry in terms of, like, police brutality.
	They talked about changing the way training works and body cams.
	Those are all great things that need to happen.
	That's not enough.
	Okay?
	Like that's not enough to get the people back in the homes.
	That's why you have to stay out.
	You have won things.
	You are playing with house money right now.
	But there's momentum to keep the heat on the government.
	Because the government knows they're whipped right now.
	Because right now the media is like, these people are out in the streets.
	This is what the people want.
	Things are shifting.
	And all of the story has moved over into that direction.
	But you have to stay out in the streets.
	You have to keep fighting.
	Because otherwise this battle gets lost.
	Well, Terry Crews was out there on Twitter talking about a little bit of this idea of the speed of change.
	And what happens is, is if you try and demand change too quickly, you lose enough of that segment of people you need to bring along with you, and then you end up getting gridlock and nothing gets done.
	You know, try telling that to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, because their arguments... Or FDR.
	Or FDR.
	The argument tended to be like, no, I'm not waiting around.
	Why should it have, you know, why should this person, you know, let's just say gay marriage, for instance, why should they have to wait 12 years?
	And oh, don't worry, it'll happen.
	It'll happen.
	Why do they have to wait 12 years to get married?
	Or why, why does this law, why am I going to get busted today for having some weed?
	And then like, you know, I have to wait four years and then all of a sudden it's totally cool and no one's going to bother me, right?
	Why do we have to wait that long?
	And then, you know, the other argument would be the more radically you are, then you get the people straggling along, they'll actually bring up the rear a little bit quicker that way.
	So there's a lot of arguments for both of these things.
	And it's frustrating because there's no question we need this kind of change to result in death.
	This isn't like, OK, we're going to try and adjust, you know, something about standards of reading in the third grade or whatever.
	This is about death and dying in people's lives.
	And that's what needs to change a lot quicker.
	When did women get the vote, Nick?
	1919?
	1920.
	1920.
	I'm like Trump with the whole... When did African Americans become integrated in public schools?
	Well, Brown vs. Board is 52.
	It's in the 50s.
	And by the way, I know people whose parents were still in schools that were being integrated.
	You know what I mean?
	Where it just kept going and going and going and going.
	You know, when was the Voting Rights Act put in?
	You know what I mean?
	There are these moments.
	And what we just described was over a century.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like stuff that should have been in place the entire time and it took a century.
	These people will nickel and dime you to death.
	What they want to do, and this is the negotiation, this is how it works.
	They want to give you some things.
	Like again, banning chokeholds.
	By all means, ban chokeholds.
	But that's a beginning, right?
	That is like, that is like baseline level stuff.
	and we need if we're ever going to have big large systemic change it has to come now because what are we going to do are we going to replicate this during a pandemic when you know we just started a recession and all of a sudden none of us are going to work no you know you everything is in its perfect place right now and unfortunately it's on the back of a lot of human suffering That's the unfortunate thing in all of this is it had to be birthed out of terrible, terrible human suffering and all of these different elements that come together.
	It is an election year.
	We have a openly fascistic and just completely incompetent president and all of these things have come together.
	It's not a time to nickel and dime.
	It's a time to go all the way if we possibly can.
	Can you understand why people will be extremely frustrated with Joe Biden?
	Absolutely.
	He's the guy who's going to do this.
	I can easily see why.
	We would need somebody.
	He's never going to get behind anything remotely like what they did in Camden to re-ramp the whole police department.
	We are a fair podcast, right?
	Yeah, we try to be.
	Yeah, we don't shy away from this stuff.
	Let's be honest about something.
	Joe Biden is one of the architects of the modern police state.
	I mean, he has his fingerprints all over the crime bill.
	His entire career, he has talked about arming police and getting them out there and giving them more power and giving them more money.
	I'll tell you something about Joe Biden, though, his rhetoric has changed.
	He's not over the finish line yet.
	But he has admitted, he's said he was wrong, he's tried to evolve and all this stuff.
	Does that mean he's going to end up on the other side of this thing?
	No, he's not.
	No, he wouldn't.
	But I'll tell you this, having four more years of Donald Trump, or however long he would stay in office, is a completely different ballgame.
	And if you think that that one fascistic attempt failed, Like, just wait for the next one because there's probably going to be one here soon.
	That's the unfortunate truth of it.
	And if he's in office another four years or however long he would stay, I mean, it'll happen again.
	So yeah, I understand the frustration with it.
	And I hear a lot of people who are like, well, you can't have this movement with Joe Biden.
	And it's like, well, it doesn't have to be about Joe Biden.
	It can be ground up.
	That's what Americans need to remember is it can be ground up, not top down.
	Because we've been looking at America as a top-down institution, as a spectacle, something that isn't about us.
	It needs to be about us.
	It shouldn't be about them.
	I agree.
	And again, we're very encouraging that we've sustained it for this long, even for the two weeks.
	And there's plans to have bigger marches into August.
	I know I mentioned it to you, there's supposed to be a big march sponsored by the Floyd family on the anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech.
	These are all a movement that we're starting to see the very beginning, like 10 years from now or a year from now, we might look back and be like, this is it, this is when it started.
	So we're getting there.
	We really are.
	And it is encouraging.
	And you're right.
	It's like the alternative.
	It's simply not an alternative.
	And we'd be in real trouble if he does get elected.
	Now, that said, you have to hear the watch thing.
	You have to keep your eye on the things.
	What are they going to do?
	Trump has been signaling that they're going to do something about the economy, like right before the election.
	And to me, that's like, well, what are they going to do to the market?
	They've already manipulated the market now, where it is soaring back to where it was.
	They've lied about the unemployment rate.
	You know, it's completely, it was off by three points.
	It did go down, but it's going to go back up again if the COVID thing starts happening and become a problem, which it seems like it is.
	Which is spiking right now.
	Right.
	And so, and that like wheeze of like life and then whatever could be more devastating to the economy anyway.
	So, but you have to watch for it because it's going to be coming and it takes away some of the power if we're prepared for it.
	Like, that's why I almost would have wished Colin Powell would have just said, The tweet's coming in about five minutes.
	He's going to say I'm overrated and I'm whatever he said about him, right?
	It almost would take away his power.
	So hopefully people like that who want to stand up to him will sort of acknowledge beforehand what Trump is going to say.
	It might just sort of dissipate some of the outrageousness of what's coming out of his mouth, out of Trump's mouth.
	I want people to think about this, and this is going to sound dramatic as it comes out of my mouth, but I promise you it's not dramatic.
	It's true and real.
	I don't know how many of our listeners were part of the counterculture in the 1960s and 70s.
	Um, or if their parents were, but I'm sure you've heard them talk about it.
	Because it was a moment in time that everybody who was involved in it looks back on and is like, that is when I might have been at my best.
	Right?
	I was, I was focused and I cared and I did the best that I could for humanity.
	That's what this is.
	I, I'm sure you can feel it.
	Like if your antenna is working and you're like tuned in on this thing, you understand that this is larger than each of us and it has so much potential and so much kinetic energy that it can get things done.
	You're going to want to talk about this when you get older.
	And so just keep fighting and you got to have hope and you got to celebrate your victory.
	So again, cheers to everybody.
	Well done so far, but it's not done.
	This is the beginning of something, not the end of something.
	And, you know, we just want to say thank you for your hard work there.
	We want to say thank you for your continued support of the podcast.
	Just to be frank and open and honest, because I'm feeling emotional about what's been going on.
	The support for this podcast has been really incredible.
	And it has just been really overwhelming and it's filled my heart.
	And so thank you for that.
	People keep asking how they can help.
	We're not asking for donations or anything like that.
	We just need you to like and subscribe and leave comments and tell people about it.
	Share it on social media.
	Let people know we're having conversations other people aren't.
	I know that that always sounds really pat and not like sincere, but it helps.
	It's helped with this podcast and we're blowing up right now and it's because of you.
	So thank you so much.
	Until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.
	We will be back.
	Hopefully we won't have to record an emergency podcast between now and Friday.
	Knock on wood.
	In the meantime, keep fighting and just be safe.

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