April 30, 2025 • 23 mins
Today's special guest is Journalist and TV News Host Joy Ann Reid. She joins Hosts Ramses Ja and Q Ward to recap the "Democracy Under Fire " event at Howard University and also share news on her upcoming projects.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A self described writer, podcaster, documentary filmmaker, and professional blurred
fan of democracy and og hater of fascism and apartheid.
Joy Anne Reid is best known as an American political
commentator and television host. She was a national correspondent for
MSNBC and is best known for hosting the political commentary
(00:20):
program The Readout from twenty twenty to twenty twenty five.
Her previous anchoring credits include The read Report from twenty
fourteen to twenty fifteen and Am Joy from twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty. Fresh on the heels of her panel
discussion at the Journalism under Fire Guarding Against Threats to
Our Democracy fireside chat that took place in.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We have one of the greatest defenders of democracy, advocates
for marginalized people, and one of the brightest political minds
of our time, the one and only Joy and Read.
This is the Black Information Network Daily Podcast. I'm your
host Ramses Jack and I'm your host q Ward. All right,
Joy and Read, Welcome to the show. How are you
(01:04):
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Thank you? I'm doing better now. After that introduction, I
need to take y'all with me everywhere I go.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
We'll get on the stage, we'll make you. We'll let
people know exactly who they got got coming up, so
you know, we wouldn't be mad at that at all. Listen,
I want to say our listeners know this, but I
want to make sure that I say it to you
that you are more than the introduction. You are more
than you know. What you represent and the work that
(01:32):
you do really does matter. And I just I met
a loss for words. It's just it's a very very
special episode to be recording with you. You know, we've
we've kind of been in similar circles over the years
and you know, tried to get a word to you,
but we understand and respect the work that you're doing,
(01:53):
and when the time is right, you know, maybe we'll
get a chance to have a conversation with you.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
And today is that day.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So this is kind of like, you know, all of
our stars in Alignment and ten Christmases at once. So
welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
All right, absolutely, all right, So first stuff, talk to
us a little bit about the fireside chat that I mentioned,
because that's kind of been the big deal in the
news So this took place at the Journalism under Fire
event for people that weren't able to attender, people that
might have heard about it and been curious about it,
talk to us about, you know, what took place and
(02:30):
maybe what people should know what the people that attended
might have learned from that event.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, I mean this was an important conversation, of course,
Nicole Hanna Jones being one of the most seminal and
important figures in modern journalistic history. I mean, obviously her
creation of the sixteen nineteen Project Blew Up the World,
broke the brains of the entire American right, said Christopher
UFO and others off on a taiar to try to
destroy diversity, equity and inclusion and their version of critical
(02:59):
race theory, which they did and even clearly understand. But
I think what's happened now is that, particularly after the
election for the second time of Donald Trump, is that
you have a real aggressive Project twenty twenty five driven
right winging Christian nationalists, driven war on everything from journalism
to basic freedom, to immigration to potentially birthright citizenship, you
(03:23):
name it. It's all being torn apart. And this particular
gathering was to really talk about the journalism piece, and
how in each of these three instances there was a
woman from the Los Angeles Times who actually left there
because the owner of the La Times has decided to
turn that seminal really August paper into a mouthpiece for
(03:47):
Donald Trump and to suppress anti Trump views at the paper,
all the way to Robert Kagan, who is a conservative
who used to write for the Washington Post until he
resigned because of Jeff Bezo's takeover of the paper and
his attempt to root out anti Trump views or critical.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Views of Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Although I have to say that there are still people
that are writing critically about Donald Trump at the Washington Post,
but he's warped the mission, right. He even got rid
of democracy dies in darkness and said now they're now
going to be about individual liberty or something like that.
Some neoliberal you know, he cannot make principle. And so
that's happening everywhere. And of course, you know, I, you know,
(04:26):
I like to quote the Friday thing. I don't know
how youre gonna get fired on your day off, but.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I did get fired.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I'm like, I remember that, like Friday, But you know,
and you know, I was never told why I was,
and I said this on stage. I was never given
a reason why I was let go and why my
show was canceled, and why more than a hundred really
experienced long time staffers of MSNBC producers were essentially thrown
(04:56):
out of their jobs and forced to reapply doged.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
But but I could take a guess.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
You know, I don't think it helped my case that
I've been a very firm supporter of DEI of diversity,
equity and inclusion, that I've been a very firm believer
that Donald.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Trump is a fascist.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
That as his two for his former chief of staff
and Mark Milly, his former joint chiefs of staff chair.
They both said he's a fascist to the core. That's
their view, not mine. His own vice president has said
he may be America's Hitler, then he became his vice president.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You name it.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
It's clear that he has fascist instincts, and he's married
himself to a group of white Christian nationalists who are
very clearly trying to move the country into fascism and
Christian nationalism.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
So saying that is probably not helpful.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Also probably not helpful that I was pretty firm that,
you know, it's probably suboptimal for the United States to
be arming Israel with two thousand pound bombs to drop
on Palestinians at school and in their apartments and destroying
mosques and everything else.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So yeah, I can take a good guess.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Unfortunately, I think we can all take a good guess
with all the major shakeups that we are all collectively
witnessing in the media landscape since Trump's reelection. What are
some concerns that you have about the state of journalism
in the United States.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
I'm very concerned, honestly. The resignation recently.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
We also talked about this at the Forum of the
some thirty five year leader of sixty Minutes head of
sixty Minutes, Bob Owens. That was alarming, and he resigned
very clearly, saying that he was leaving because he felt
that he no longer had the editorial independence to cover
(06:47):
the news without fear or favor the way that sixty
minutes has done since I've been watching it since I
was in junior high school, and it has not changed.
It's very tough on any president. It's not partisan in
any way. But you know, they recently did a really important,
I think report about the two hundred and thirty five
men and we think some women who.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Were shipped to El Salvador.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Into a prison, into a gulag without any due process,
and that seventy five percent of them have no criminal
record anywhere, and highlighting the cases of people like kil
Maar Pardego Garcia, who was literally renditioned out of the
United States, out of Maryland without due process, and they
did a really critical story on that. They've also done
(07:32):
really important reporting on the war in Gaza and on
the human rights violations therein, and on the allegations of
genocide therein. And they were in a lawsuit with Donald
Trump because he claimed that their interview with Vice President
Kamala Harris, which is a perfectly normal interview for a
presidential candidate, was somehow biased. And he's sicked the FCC
(07:55):
on not just CBS, but also on ABC because he
doesn't like the coverage of himself on ABC, on Comcast,
my former employer, because he doesn't like the coverage from
MSNBC or the financial accurate, financial coverage I suppose from CNBC,
which is talking about his failures on the economy, you
(08:17):
name it. The media is under fire, and I think
when you see people like Jeff Bezos, who is not
a journalist, interfering in the way that the Washington Post
does what it was designed to do. When you see
the owner of the Los Angeles Times bending the nee
to Trump and essentially requiring his editorial page to do
the same. And then when you're also seeing a takeover
(08:40):
of even a lot of local TV stations by organizations
like the Sinclair Media Group, which is a right wing
Fox style organization and entity that's now taking over your
traffic and weather together and replacing political news with what
amounts to conservetive, you know, conservative idea as an ideation.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's a problem.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
We can't have a free society if we don't have
a free press and there's an attack on the free
press unlike anything I've ever seen, and that to me,
I can't like into anything other than the McCarthy era.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
You know what's interesting about that is that working in
this space, we pay particular attention to the same things
that you're mentioning now. And you know, our listeners, our
viewers around the country, they they often remind us to
(09:38):
be encouraged to keep going. Our voices are more important
now than ever. And you realize that how important that
infrastructure is. You mentioned the Sinclair Media Group, you mentioned
the Washington Post, you know, and who owns that infrastructure
is critically important now and we'd lean further into our
(10:01):
relationship with like Real Times Media, a lot of like
black owned newspapers around the country, because you know, as
source material a but also as UH partners and ensuring
that we are strengthened that they are strengthened, because you
realize how vulnerable you are when there's a shift and
(10:22):
the power is concentrated into the hands of just a
few people. And so this is kind of an interesting development.
But we only have one story to tell, and it's
our story and it's the truth. And so you know,
I commend you on not not only enduring, but but
(10:42):
maintaining and you know, having these important conversations and that
you know, that brings me to the next thing that
I wanted to ask you about, because I heard about
the State of the People tour. So for folks that
don't know myself included, talk to us about the State
of the People tour and and make sure you give
the web site too, especially for our listeners that are
kind of interested in staying plugged into something that is
(11:06):
a little bit more accurate, a little less biased.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and I'll just to your previous point. I want
to note that you know, id B.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Wells was operating as an independent black woman journalist at
a time when the media was essentially controlled by two
men and William Randolf Hurst, and when the white media
refused to report on lynchings in any other way than
to say that the dead man, woman or child that
was lynched committed a crime with there was again no
due process. So there's a through this, and you know,
(11:34):
it is really critical, you know, now more than ever,
that we strengthened. You know, there are thousands of black,
independent black newspapers, but they are you know, withering away
in terms of support from the public and then our
access to you know, being able to have a wider
audience as you all are able to do through syndication.
That also is in many ways dependent on corporate America.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And if you look at the place where our creators,
black creators have had the most access, it's been through
social media. It's been through YouTube and TikTok and Instagram,
and companies like Matta are also bending the need of
Trump gave a million dollars to the inauguration. You know,
TikTok suddenly put out a blast to every single person
who owns TikTok and uses it in the United States,
glorifying Donald Trump for not following the Supreme Court order
(12:19):
to make them be sold right and for supposedly saving
TikTok when he's the one who created the crisis in
the first place. So you're seeing the social media. You know,
there used to be a thing called black Twitter. Black
twitter is is what built Twitter. Twitter would have been
nothing without black people making it popular. And yet black
people own none of that ip. The content was not
(12:39):
owned by anyone. They were just giving that content to
previously Jack and then Elon Musk for free. So we
really have to be cognizant, I think as a people
of number, not only where we're getting our information, how
to avoid disinformation, and how to share information amongst ourselves
in a.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Way that can be authentic.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Which brings me to the State of the People tour
on the night of the it wasn't really a State
of the Union. It was technically a joint addressed to
Congress that Donald Trump February there were a group of
us who are a combination of activists, you know, and
people like Angela Rai, who used to be the chief
counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus and who's now a
(13:19):
podcaster and activist in her own right, Lolo Smith. There
are a bunch of people in the Advancement Project, you know,
Rashad Robinson, formerly of Color of Change. Just a bunch
of us decided that we were going to do a
twenty four hour live stream across all our platforms. So
I co host a podcast called Read This Read That.
We streamed it on the Read This Read That YouTube channel.
(13:42):
It was streamed on, you know, Mark Thompson's channel, and
all of us just live streamed together twenty four hours
of content in which we, as black creators and an
activists and speakers and media people all came together. And
by the way, these were black folk who generally had
never worked age before. Some of us didn't even know
each other personally. But you know how you know, white
(14:03):
people assume all black people know each other. We all
know each other, do right, And so we all came together,
people who didn't even really know each other, had never
worked with each other before livestream twenty four hours of
content in which we just talked among ourselves about what
we need in our community, about what the state of
the Union is for us. And so out of that
came this idea that we needed to take that live
(14:24):
stream that over a million people watched on these collective
all common channels, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera, and decided to
take that on the road.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
So the Stay of the People Tour. It was a
very fast.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Put together by Angela and some other folks, and the
idea of it is to go into ten communities, really twelve,
because Rowley and Durham are two different places. Birmingham and Montgomery,
both in Alabama, but ten very heavily black cities Detroit,
New Orleans, Newark, New Jersey, Los Angeles, California, Durham, you know,
(15:00):
sort of all over the country and go and do
two things. Number one, find out what people need. Because
one of the things that I think is generally a
problem is that a lot of us do a lot
of talking about what people should do and not a
lot of asking what people want. Yeah, exactly right, And
so I think for our community and a lot of
(15:21):
people didn't vote, But a lot of people didn't vote
mostly because they didn't know the issues, weren't paying attention,
weren't really read in, and really weren't sure that voting
does anything for them. Even voting for Obama, it doesn't
feel like it did anything for them. So going in
saying hey, register to vote or you know, that's not
going to help anymore. We need to just ask people
what they want, ask people what they need, what would
make their lives better, provide services, offer assistance where we can.
(15:44):
And then the second piece is to rally people's spirits.
Because Hit Strategies, which is a really terrific black owned
polling firm, did some really scary data after the twenty
twenty four election that found that Black Americans have not
felt this disempowered for a generation. We are seeing generational
sense of disempowerment among black people after the failure of
(16:05):
Kamala Hairs to win. So we need to reverse that
by letting people feel empowered, feel community, feel a sense
of community, and also to do these field hearings to
find out what people need and what they want. So
we're going to twelve cities. We started in Atlanta and
started by delivering food to seniors and then rallied folks
together and had a bunch of smaller group conversations, including
(16:28):
a land giveaway, you name it, and we're going to
take that on the road. And so that's what the
State of the People Tour is. And you can register
for your city and find out what cities were coming
to and you can do that at State of the
PPL dot com, STATEOFTHPPL dot com, and that's also on
Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
We are here today with American political commentator, best selling author,
and television host Joy and Read.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Ramsey and I have to figure out how to get
to one of these cities because that definitely sounds like
something that we'd like to be a part of and
support you in any way that we can. You kind
of touched on some of this already, so I want
to kind of bring it back to you. Trump is
dominating headlines with several different initiatives that like muzzle Velocity,
(17:22):
just there's something every day. Ramsey and I were discussing
how everything seems to be aimed at tearing some group
of people down. He's not proposing anything that seems to
help anyone, but all of these initiatives that he's so
happy to do. His photo op with seem to be
targeted at some group and tearing these particular groups down.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
As you were speaking to how.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Black people feel so disempowered and kind of hopeless. What
are some things that we one should be paying attention
to and what are some things that we can kind
of grab a hold to so we don't feel so
hopeless and so disempowered, like there's nothing that we can
do but just accept this new state that we're in,
and that that is a really, as you could imagine,
(18:08):
difficult thing for even us collectively to do in the
space that we work in. But for those who are
even less connected and less informed than we are, what
are some things that we can that we can share
or say to people.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, and you know the thing that so you know,
sort of frustrating for.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You know, just watching it happen, is that when you
are attacking everything, as you said, everywhere, all at once,
and people are also just concerned about economic survival, right,
because for a lot of folks, thing one is how
he's destroying the economy and their opportunity to just be
able to pay their bills and afford food, Right, that's
number one. I mean attacking the economy that you know,
(18:49):
you can, you can. You can love or hate Joe Biden, okay,
and a lot of people don't like them. But the
economy was stable and was growing and actually was the
best economy in the West after and during COVID. But
I think people didn't feel it in a lot of ways,
and so they roll the dice thinking that Trump would
improve the economy. A lot of us, a lot of
us that voted for him, and now they're finding that
(19:10):
they're just getting destroyed. Food prices are going through the roof,
gas prices are up.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
It's kind of it's.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
All going in the wrong direction, and it's making it
hard for people to live. So I think the main
thing that people are paying attention to is just how
hard he's making it to live. And when you're feeling
economically unstable, it's very difficult to have those strength and
the time on your hands and the will to fight
everything else. So the challenge is number one, we need
(19:39):
to start focusing on how to get resources into our
communities to make sure our people are not hungry, are
not evicted, don't lose their health care, like, focusing on
those local issues to keep our people alive. Frankly, in
this moment. I think that's number one, because you can't
focus on everything. We can't stop him from doing everything,
(20:02):
But we need to really start thinking locally and thinking
in community terms. How do we keep people in our
communities alive and in their homes with a roof over
their heads and food on the table.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
That's number one.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And then I think the second piece is if you
do have the capacity to broaden out and do more
the things that he's attacking that in the end are
really going to affect us. Number one, this attempt to
attack birthright citizenship. Know that that's you know, I'm a
daughter of immigrants, so that definitely affects if you're a
first generation immigrant right, or if you're an immigrant yourself.
(20:35):
But it also affects if you're an African American because
the only reason black folks have citizenship at all is
the Fourteenth Amendment, because after you know, during enslavement, black
people were not considered to the citizens of the United States.
The dread Scott case said that black people were not
citizens and had no rights at whites were bound to respect.
It was a fourteenth Amendment that made black people's citizens.
(20:56):
If you undermine the Fourteenth Amendment there's almost nothing you
can't do to us. This man has already his administration
is regime as I call it, has already deported American citizens.
That's the thing that's already happened, including American citizen children,
one with cancer, a seven year old. So they've already
done that, and they've done it to brown people. But
we know that they always get to us eventually, So
we actually have to start paying attention. As angry as
(21:19):
a lot of black folks are with the brown people
who voted for Trump, you need to watch that because
we're on the list. Whatever they do to them, they're
eventually going to want to do to us. Now, can
they deport where they're gonna deport us to? I don't know,
Mississippi right, Bigger You can't. But they're not deporting people
to where they come from. They're deporting people to a
foreign prison that we're paying to take them. And Donald
(21:41):
Trump said on an open mic to Naive Bukelly, who
is the president of El Salvador and calls himself the
world's most popular dictator, Trump said to him, the homegrowns
are next. Ye, homegrowns are next? What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Maybe it means they're going to try to find some
first generation Brown people and send them to prison, or
maybe that means anyone in a disfavored group. And there's
no group more disfavored than us, So I think we
need to really pay attention to that. I think the
third thing, as much as voting doesn't solve everything, this
Save Act is a problem because if they pass it,
(22:18):
it's going to make it much harder for us to vote.
They're building things into that bill that are designed to
make it harder for women and people of color to vote.
I just recently, I just got off this morning a
public Religion Research Institute presentation of their latest polling. It's
one of the largest polling organizations in the country. They
pulled five thousand people. It's a big sample poll with
(22:40):
a one point seven percent margin of error. White Christians,
white Evangelical Christians stand alone in fervently favoring everything Donald Trump, Doge,
and Elon Musk are doing, including them taking our data.
They stand in favor of having concentration camps in America
to put quote unquote illegal immigrants in. They believe in
(23:03):
white replacement theory by a majority, and they believe that
it is white Christians who are being discriminated against, not
anyone else, and so they want to end any programs
that favor people of color. This attack that feels like
it may be on somebody else is on us. So unfortunately,
if we have the bandwidth beyond saving ourselves and saving
(23:25):
our communities from economic harm immediately, we do need to
start thinking about what this man is doing to undermine
the democracy because we got nowhere else to go but
here and potentially to a foreign prison.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah. This concludes part one of our two part conversation
with Joy and read right here on the Black Information
Network Daily Podcast. Be sure to check back in from
part two right here on the Black Information Network
A self described writer, podcaster, documentary filmmaker, and professional blurred
fan of democracy and og hater of fascism and apartheid.
Joy Anne Reid is best known as an American political
commentator and television host. She was a national correspondent for
MSNBC and is best known for hosting the political commentary
(00:20):
program The Readout from twenty twenty to twenty twenty five.
Her previous anchoring credits include The read Report from twenty
fourteen to twenty fifteen and Am Joy from twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty. Fresh on the heels of her panel
discussion at the Journalism under Fire Guarding Against Threats to
Our Democracy fireside chat that took place in.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We have one of the greatest defenders of democracy, advocates
for marginalized people, and one of the brightest political minds
of our time, the one and only Joy and Read.
This is the Black Information Network Daily Podcast. I'm your
host Ramses Jack and I'm your host q Ward. All right,
Joy and Read, Welcome to the show. How are you
(01:04):
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Thank you? I'm doing better now. After that introduction, I
need to take y'all with me everywhere I go.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
We'll get on the stage, we'll make you. We'll let
people know exactly who they got got coming up, so
you know, we wouldn't be mad at that at all. Listen,
I want to say our listeners know this, but I
want to make sure that I say it to you
that you are more than the introduction. You are more
than you know. What you represent and the work that
(01:32):
you do really does matter. And I just I met
a loss for words. It's just it's a very very
special episode to be recording with you. You know, we've
we've kind of been in similar circles over the years
and you know, tried to get a word to you,
but we understand and respect the work that you're doing,
(01:53):
and when the time is right, you know, maybe we'll
get a chance to have a conversation with you.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
And today is that day.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So this is kind of like, you know, all of
our stars in Alignment and ten Christmases at once. So
welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
All right, absolutely, all right, So first stuff, talk to
us a little bit about the fireside chat that I mentioned,
because that's kind of been the big deal in the
news So this took place at the Journalism under Fire
event for people that weren't able to attender, people that
might have heard about it and been curious about it,
talk to us about, you know, what took place and
(02:30):
maybe what people should know what the people that attended
might have learned from that event.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, I mean this was an important conversation, of course,
Nicole Hanna Jones being one of the most seminal and
important figures in modern journalistic history. I mean, obviously her
creation of the sixteen nineteen Project Blew Up the World,
broke the brains of the entire American right, said Christopher
UFO and others off on a taiar to try to
destroy diversity, equity and inclusion and their version of critical
(02:59):
race theory, which they did and even clearly understand. But
I think what's happened now is that, particularly after the
election for the second time of Donald Trump, is that
you have a real aggressive Project twenty twenty five driven
right winging Christian nationalists, driven war on everything from journalism
to basic freedom, to immigration to potentially birthright citizenship, you
(03:23):
name it. It's all being torn apart. And this particular
gathering was to really talk about the journalism piece, and
how in each of these three instances there was a
woman from the Los Angeles Times who actually left there
because the owner of the La Times has decided to
turn that seminal really August paper into a mouthpiece for
(03:47):
Donald Trump and to suppress anti Trump views at the paper,
all the way to Robert Kagan, who is a conservative
who used to write for the Washington Post until he
resigned because of Jeff Bezo's takeover of the paper and
his attempt to root out anti Trump views or critical.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Views of Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Although I have to say that there are still people
that are writing critically about Donald Trump at the Washington Post,
but he's warped the mission, right. He even got rid
of democracy dies in darkness and said now they're now
going to be about individual liberty or something like that.
Some neoliberal you know, he cannot make principle. And so
that's happening everywhere. And of course, you know, I, you know,
(04:26):
I like to quote the Friday thing. I don't know
how youre gonna get fired on your day off, but.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I did get fired.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I'm like, I remember that, like Friday, But you know,
and you know, I was never told why I was,
and I said this on stage. I was never given
a reason why I was let go and why my
show was canceled, and why more than a hundred really
experienced long time staffers of MSNBC producers were essentially thrown
(04:56):
out of their jobs and forced to reapply doged.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
But but I could take a guess.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
You know, I don't think it helped my case that
I've been a very firm supporter of DEI of diversity,
equity and inclusion, that I've been a very firm believer
that Donald.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Trump is a fascist.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
That as his two for his former chief of staff
and Mark Milly, his former joint chiefs of staff chair.
They both said he's a fascist to the core. That's
their view, not mine. His own vice president has said
he may be America's Hitler, then he became his vice president.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You name it.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
It's clear that he has fascist instincts, and he's married
himself to a group of white Christian nationalists who are
very clearly trying to move the country into fascism and
Christian nationalism.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
So saying that is probably not helpful.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Also probably not helpful that I was pretty firm that,
you know, it's probably suboptimal for the United States to
be arming Israel with two thousand pound bombs to drop
on Palestinians at school and in their apartments and destroying
mosques and everything else.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So yeah, I can take a good guess.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Unfortunately, I think we can all take a good guess
with all the major shakeups that we are all collectively
witnessing in the media landscape since Trump's reelection. What are
some concerns that you have about the state of journalism
in the United States.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
I'm very concerned, honestly. The resignation recently.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
We also talked about this at the Forum of the
some thirty five year leader of sixty Minutes head of
sixty Minutes, Bob Owens. That was alarming, and he resigned
very clearly, saying that he was leaving because he felt
that he no longer had the editorial independence to cover
(06:47):
the news without fear or favor the way that sixty
minutes has done since I've been watching it since I
was in junior high school, and it has not changed.
It's very tough on any president. It's not partisan in
any way. But you know, they recently did a really important,
I think report about the two hundred and thirty five
men and we think some women who.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Were shipped to El Salvador.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Into a prison, into a gulag without any due process,
and that seventy five percent of them have no criminal
record anywhere, and highlighting the cases of people like kil
Maar Pardego Garcia, who was literally renditioned out of the
United States, out of Maryland without due process, and they
did a really critical story on that. They've also done
(07:32):
really important reporting on the war in Gaza and on
the human rights violations therein, and on the allegations of
genocide therein. And they were in a lawsuit with Donald
Trump because he claimed that their interview with Vice President
Kamala Harris, which is a perfectly normal interview for a
presidential candidate, was somehow biased. And he's sicked the FCC
(07:55):
on not just CBS, but also on ABC because he
doesn't like the coverage of himself on ABC, on Comcast,
my former employer, because he doesn't like the coverage from
MSNBC or the financial accurate, financial coverage I suppose from CNBC,
which is talking about his failures on the economy, you
(08:17):
name it. The media is under fire, and I think
when you see people like Jeff Bezos, who is not
a journalist, interfering in the way that the Washington Post
does what it was designed to do. When you see
the owner of the Los Angeles Times bending the nee
to Trump and essentially requiring his editorial page to do
the same. And then when you're also seeing a takeover
(08:40):
of even a lot of local TV stations by organizations
like the Sinclair Media Group, which is a right wing
Fox style organization and entity that's now taking over your
traffic and weather together and replacing political news with what
amounts to conservetive, you know, conservative idea as an ideation.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's a problem.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
We can't have a free society if we don't have
a free press and there's an attack on the free
press unlike anything I've ever seen, and that to me,
I can't like into anything other than the McCarthy era.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
You know what's interesting about that is that working in
this space, we pay particular attention to the same things
that you're mentioning now. And you know, our listeners, our
viewers around the country, they they often remind us to
(09:38):
be encouraged to keep going. Our voices are more important
now than ever. And you realize that how important that
infrastructure is. You mentioned the Sinclair Media Group, you mentioned
the Washington Post, you know, and who owns that infrastructure
is critically important now and we'd lean further into our
(10:01):
relationship with like Real Times Media, a lot of like
black owned newspapers around the country, because you know, as
source material a but also as UH partners and ensuring
that we are strengthened that they are strengthened, because you
realize how vulnerable you are when there's a shift and
(10:22):
the power is concentrated into the hands of just a
few people. And so this is kind of an interesting development.
But we only have one story to tell, and it's
our story and it's the truth. And so you know,
I commend you on not not only enduring, but but
(10:42):
maintaining and you know, having these important conversations and that
you know, that brings me to the next thing that
I wanted to ask you about, because I heard about
the State of the People tour. So for folks that
don't know myself included, talk to us about the State
of the People tour and and make sure you give
the web site too, especially for our listeners that are
kind of interested in staying plugged into something that is
(11:06):
a little bit more accurate, a little less biased.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and I'll just to your previous point. I want
to note that you know, id B.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Wells was operating as an independent black woman journalist at
a time when the media was essentially controlled by two
men and William Randolf Hurst, and when the white media
refused to report on lynchings in any other way than
to say that the dead man, woman or child that
was lynched committed a crime with there was again no
due process. So there's a through this, and you know,
(11:34):
it is really critical, you know, now more than ever,
that we strengthened. You know, there are thousands of black,
independent black newspapers, but they are you know, withering away
in terms of support from the public and then our
access to you know, being able to have a wider
audience as you all are able to do through syndication.
That also is in many ways dependent on corporate America.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And if you look at the place where our creators,
black creators have had the most access, it's been through
social media. It's been through YouTube and TikTok and Instagram,
and companies like Matta are also bending the need of
Trump gave a million dollars to the inauguration. You know,
TikTok suddenly put out a blast to every single person
who owns TikTok and uses it in the United States,
glorifying Donald Trump for not following the Supreme Court order
(12:19):
to make them be sold right and for supposedly saving
TikTok when he's the one who created the crisis in
the first place. So you're seeing the social media. You know,
there used to be a thing called black Twitter. Black
twitter is is what built Twitter. Twitter would have been
nothing without black people making it popular. And yet black
people own none of that ip. The content was not
(12:39):
owned by anyone. They were just giving that content to
previously Jack and then Elon Musk for free. So we
really have to be cognizant, I think as a people
of number, not only where we're getting our information, how
to avoid disinformation, and how to share information amongst ourselves
in a.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Way that can be authentic.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Which brings me to the State of the People tour
on the night of the it wasn't really a State
of the Union. It was technically a joint addressed to
Congress that Donald Trump February there were a group of
us who are a combination of activists, you know, and
people like Angela Rai, who used to be the chief
counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus and who's now a
(13:19):
podcaster and activist in her own right, Lolo Smith. There
are a bunch of people in the Advancement Project, you know,
Rashad Robinson, formerly of Color of Change. Just a bunch
of us decided that we were going to do a
twenty four hour live stream across all our platforms. So
I co host a podcast called Read This Read That.
We streamed it on the Read This Read That YouTube channel.
(13:42):
It was streamed on, you know, Mark Thompson's channel, and
all of us just live streamed together twenty four hours
of content in which we, as black creators and an
activists and speakers and media people all came together. And
by the way, these were black folk who generally had
never worked age before. Some of us didn't even know
each other personally. But you know how you know, white
(14:03):
people assume all black people know each other. We all
know each other, do right, And so we all came together,
people who didn't even really know each other, had never
worked with each other before livestream twenty four hours of
content in which we just talked among ourselves about what
we need in our community, about what the state of
the Union is for us. And so out of that
came this idea that we needed to take that live
(14:24):
stream that over a million people watched on these collective
all common channels, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera, and decided to
take that on the road.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
So the Stay of the People Tour. It was a
very fast.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Put together by Angela and some other folks, and the
idea of it is to go into ten communities, really twelve,
because Rowley and Durham are two different places. Birmingham and Montgomery,
both in Alabama, but ten very heavily black cities Detroit,
New Orleans, Newark, New Jersey, Los Angeles, California, Durham, you know,
(15:00):
sort of all over the country and go and do
two things. Number one, find out what people need. Because
one of the things that I think is generally a
problem is that a lot of us do a lot
of talking about what people should do and not a
lot of asking what people want. Yeah, exactly right, And
so I think for our community and a lot of
(15:21):
people didn't vote, But a lot of people didn't vote
mostly because they didn't know the issues, weren't paying attention,
weren't really read in, and really weren't sure that voting
does anything for them. Even voting for Obama, it doesn't
feel like it did anything for them. So going in
saying hey, register to vote or you know, that's not
going to help anymore. We need to just ask people
what they want, ask people what they need, what would
make their lives better, provide services, offer assistance where we can.
(15:44):
And then the second piece is to rally people's spirits.
Because Hit Strategies, which is a really terrific black owned
polling firm, did some really scary data after the twenty
twenty four election that found that Black Americans have not
felt this disempowered for a generation. We are seeing generational
sense of disempowerment among black people after the failure of
(16:05):
Kamala Hairs to win. So we need to reverse that
by letting people feel empowered, feel community, feel a sense
of community, and also to do these field hearings to
find out what people need and what they want. So
we're going to twelve cities. We started in Atlanta and
started by delivering food to seniors and then rallied folks
together and had a bunch of smaller group conversations, including
(16:28):
a land giveaway, you name it, and we're going to
take that on the road. And so that's what the
State of the People Tour is. And you can register
for your city and find out what cities were coming
to and you can do that at State of the
PPL dot com, STATEOFTHPPL dot com, and that's also on
Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
We are here today with American political commentator, best selling author,
and television host Joy and Read.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Ramsey and I have to figure out how to get
to one of these cities because that definitely sounds like
something that we'd like to be a part of and
support you in any way that we can. You kind
of touched on some of this already, so I want
to kind of bring it back to you. Trump is
dominating headlines with several different initiatives that like muzzle Velocity,
(17:22):
just there's something every day. Ramsey and I were discussing
how everything seems to be aimed at tearing some group
of people down. He's not proposing anything that seems to
help anyone, but all of these initiatives that he's so
happy to do. His photo op with seem to be
targeted at some group and tearing these particular groups down.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
As you were speaking to how.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Black people feel so disempowered and kind of hopeless. What
are some things that we one should be paying attention
to and what are some things that we can kind
of grab a hold to so we don't feel so
hopeless and so disempowered, like there's nothing that we can
do but just accept this new state that we're in,
and that that is a really, as you could imagine,
(18:08):
difficult thing for even us collectively to do in the
space that we work in. But for those who are
even less connected and less informed than we are, what
are some things that we can that we can share
or say to people.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, and you know the thing that so you know,
sort of frustrating for.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You know, just watching it happen, is that when you
are attacking everything, as you said, everywhere, all at once,
and people are also just concerned about economic survival, right,
because for a lot of folks, thing one is how
he's destroying the economy and their opportunity to just be
able to pay their bills and afford food, Right, that's
number one. I mean attacking the economy that you know,
(18:49):
you can, you can. You can love or hate Joe Biden, okay,
and a lot of people don't like them. But the
economy was stable and was growing and actually was the
best economy in the West after and during COVID. But
I think people didn't feel it in a lot of ways,
and so they roll the dice thinking that Trump would
improve the economy. A lot of us, a lot of
us that voted for him, and now they're finding that
(19:10):
they're just getting destroyed. Food prices are going through the roof,
gas prices are up.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
It's kind of it's.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
All going in the wrong direction, and it's making it
hard for people to live. So I think the main
thing that people are paying attention to is just how
hard he's making it to live. And when you're feeling
economically unstable, it's very difficult to have those strength and
the time on your hands and the will to fight
everything else. So the challenge is number one, we need
(19:39):
to start focusing on how to get resources into our
communities to make sure our people are not hungry, are
not evicted, don't lose their health care, like, focusing on
those local issues to keep our people alive. Frankly, in
this moment. I think that's number one, because you can't
focus on everything. We can't stop him from doing everything,
(20:02):
But we need to really start thinking locally and thinking
in community terms. How do we keep people in our
communities alive and in their homes with a roof over
their heads and food on the table.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
That's number one.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And then I think the second piece is if you
do have the capacity to broaden out and do more
the things that he's attacking that in the end are
really going to affect us. Number one, this attempt to
attack birthright citizenship. Know that that's you know, I'm a
daughter of immigrants, so that definitely affects if you're a
first generation immigrant right, or if you're an immigrant yourself.
(20:35):
But it also affects if you're an African American because
the only reason black folks have citizenship at all is
the Fourteenth Amendment, because after you know, during enslavement, black
people were not considered to the citizens of the United States.
The dread Scott case said that black people were not
citizens and had no rights at whites were bound to respect.
It was a fourteenth Amendment that made black people's citizens.
(20:56):
If you undermine the Fourteenth Amendment there's almost nothing you
can't do to us. This man has already his administration
is regime as I call it, has already deported American citizens.
That's the thing that's already happened, including American citizen children,
one with cancer, a seven year old. So they've already
done that, and they've done it to brown people. But
we know that they always get to us eventually, So
we actually have to start paying attention. As angry as
(21:19):
a lot of black folks are with the brown people
who voted for Trump, you need to watch that because
we're on the list. Whatever they do to them, they're
eventually going to want to do to us. Now, can
they deport where they're gonna deport us to? I don't know,
Mississippi right, Bigger You can't. But they're not deporting people
to where they come from. They're deporting people to a
foreign prison that we're paying to take them. And Donald
(21:41):
Trump said on an open mic to Naive Bukelly, who
is the president of El Salvador and calls himself the
world's most popular dictator, Trump said to him, the homegrowns
are next. Ye, homegrowns are next? What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Maybe it means they're going to try to find some
first generation Brown people and send them to prison, or
maybe that means anyone in a disfavored group. And there's
no group more disfavored than us, So I think we
need to really pay attention to that. I think the
third thing, as much as voting doesn't solve everything, this
Save Act is a problem because if they pass it,
(22:18):
it's going to make it much harder for us to vote.
They're building things into that bill that are designed to
make it harder for women and people of color to vote.
I just recently, I just got off this morning a
public Religion Research Institute presentation of their latest polling. It's
one of the largest polling organizations in the country. They
pulled five thousand people. It's a big sample poll with
(22:40):
a one point seven percent margin of error. White Christians,
white Evangelical Christians stand alone in fervently favoring everything Donald Trump, Doge,
and Elon Musk are doing, including them taking our data.
They stand in favor of having concentration camps in America
to put quote unquote illegal immigrants in. They believe in
(23:03):
white replacement theory by a majority, and they believe that
it is white Christians who are being discriminated against, not
anyone else, and so they want to end any programs
that favor people of color. This attack that feels like
it may be on somebody else is on us. So unfortunately,
if we have the bandwidth beyond saving ourselves and saving
(23:25):
our communities from economic harm immediately, we do need to
start thinking about what this man is doing to undermine
the democracy because we got nowhere else to go but
here and potentially to a foreign prison.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah. This concludes part one of our two part conversation
with Joy and read right here on the Black Information
Network Daily Podcast. Be sure to check back in from
part two right here on the Black Information Network
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