Sisters-In-Law: The Podcast | Episode 7: Can This Nation Endure?
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Good afternoon and welcome to Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, episode seven, Can This Nation Endure? We are Janice and Davina Mathis, real sisters, real lawyers, and we hope to give you a real good talk.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We all know these words, but there are more words that refer to those words written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Another president, Abraham Lincoln said,

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. And so, Jan, that's where I start. Can this nation endure this great divide that I believe we're suffering right now? Let's talk about it on Sisters-in-Law, the podcast. Thomas Jefferson certainly wrote some beautiful words.

But his English was very good, but his math was very funny. All men created equal, endowed by their creator with unalienable right, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We're equal, but we're only three-fifths human, at least we were. Do you think Thomas Jefferson ever meant those words that he wrote? I think at best he was deeply conflicted.

Because he was living such a dual life. He told a lie each and every day that he walked the earth after he was an adult. But that doesn't trouble me so much. You know what I focused on is the word inalienable or unalienable. I noticed you say unalienable, and that's probably correct. You can't give them away. To alienate something means to give it away or surrender it. Right. But it certainly can be taken away from you. And I think that...

in their greed, in their lust for power. Just think, they were like global rock stars walking the earth, having created something out of what they considered to be nothing. But in effect, what they were doing was taking the indigenous people's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that of the Africans who were scattered all across the Atlantic and North and South America,

and creating for themselves a sort of a fake, ephemeral reality where they were the masters of the universe and everyone else served at their feet. There was an awful amount of hubris involved in it. I often note with humor that of all the founding fathers, the one who doesn't have a monument is Adams, and he's the only one of that first group.

Well, and now Alexander Hamilton, you can help me understand about that, who would not themselves slavers. Washington and Jefferson have, oh my goodness, gargantuan monument right on the river where everyone has to see them. And so, no, I don't think the promise, I think, shall the nation endure? I think it will endure because the Rainbow Coalition is here and it's getting stronger every day. And part of what we're seeing is the reaction of

The resentment and the fear that comes from knowing that the white era, the white epoch is coming to an end.

Well, let's break that down a little bit, Jam. I want to start a little backwards. I kind of think that Thomas Jefferson was a great writer. His sentence that I read earlier is said to be the greatest sentence written in the English language. And OK, I'll take that. The greatest sentence written in the English language. But it was fiction then.

And I think it's fiction now. I believe that the unalienable right is the right that God gives you to be free. And I don't think they could take it away, but I think they have spent every year since 1776 or really 1619 trying to take those God given rights away from the people of African descent.

I think Thomas Jefferson was reveling in his ability to write, but not really meaning what he said. And none of those people in the Constitutional Congress or any other body that fought for liberty that we celebrate, well, some celebrate on July the 4th, I don't think any of them meant for those beautiful words to apply to Black and Brown people. They certainly didn't mean for it to apply to the Indigenous people, and they didn't mean...

I was just going to say that Jefferson was questioned about that by the French. Oh, Mr. Jefferson, all men are created equal. Is that what you believe? And he was embarrassed and angered by being called on that. So it wasn't that he wasn't aware of the controversy. And, you know, I don't...

What difference does it make now? I guess it matters because the same structures of hierarchy and class and economic wealth and oppression and exploitation still exist today. Why are the front line workers going out and dying and people who only work on machines that they carry in their pockets don't have to go out at all?

Well, I like to say we are dealing with the third and fourth great-grandchildren of that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Madison, and Adams generation.

And, you know, Lincoln referred to it. And when he was referring to it, like he said, it was four score and seven years ago at that point, looking back on this nation that was conceived in liberty, or at least in name was conceived in liberty, not in actuality, but in name and writing and words. And that's where the question comes from, from the Gettysburg Address. Will it endure?

Well, I think this is my grand view of the world and you can call it a, or whatever you want to call it. But I think that those grand words were just that grand words. They were meant to apply to white men and not to black and brown men, women, boys, and girls. And let's bring it forward to the third and fourth great grandchildren of those people.

I think now that the population in America is going closer and closer to being a majority brown and black, that those third and fourth grade grandchildren sense the end of that privilege, which they have enjoyed. And those words that were meant to apply only to them and a system that was meant to only apply to them.

Now that we're taking hold of those rights that they said they believed in, they no longer believe in them. White men who conceive these things or this country don't believe in it anymore because it does not afford them the privilege that they have enjoyed for so many years. Well, I think that's right. I think that the only thing I might add to that is to say that even that group

was an elite group. Not all white people were included in that group. If you didn't own land, and certainly if you were female or woman, you weren't in that group. And so that leaves, you've got a small coterie of well-connected, intelligent, let's give them that, traveled white men. But the people who didn't have land, the people who didn't have

clout, the people who were women, the people who were indigenous. It was certainly a minority proposition. And so it's interesting that now that if you believe in, we have sort of expanded who gets to participate. Women can participate. 18-year-olds can participate. Reverend Jackson talks about this better than anybody I know.

Well, it was Reverend Jackson that 40-some years ago started talking about the Rainbow Coalition. And it wasn't just because that was a cute-sounding name. He was talking about the time when black and brown and so-called other people would be in the majority in the United States, and that those people, we should form a coalition to change the narrative of this country.

Well, when I listen to him and Skip Gates's piece on a movie documentary about life, America since Dr. King, America since Dr. King. And it seemed to me that he thought the time had already come because he certainly lumped in women and Spanish speaking people. And it wasn't just blacks versus whites that he was talking about, clearly.

that we were already in a majority. He talks about us having grasshopper complexes, that we're bigger than we think we are. We're more influential. Our time has come. So it's just interesting to look at it coming now in terms of color. 2020 is the first year that all children under 18 are more likely to be black or brown than to be white. And that's the way it is.

That means a lot in terms of agenda, political agenda, not just political agenda. There's always been culture and a society, but political agenda means that the agenda that we as black and brown people think is important will be important for the nation if we vote. If we vote, if we engage in the process. And the reason I guess I emotionally push back a little bit about whether they meant it or not, whether they meant it, we meant it.

And that's what the struggle has been to me is a contest between those who wrote it and those who intend to enforce it. And so whether they meant it or not, we've spent the last 250 years trying to prove the proposition that all men are created equal. When I say we, I mean we, Black folk, poor folk, non-English speaking folk. We are the world.

And so it's just a terrible time, but it's an inspiring time at the same time. Well, will the nation endure? Well, let me just add this to the conversation. I spent last Saturday, the 4th of July, you know, I've been obsessed with Frederick Douglass, and Frederick Douglass ought to have a monument in Washington. They're pulling down monuments, but they ought to be putting up some to Frederick Douglass.

And they ought to be putting up Sally Hemming and all her children and every black person, a monument to every black person that was on Thomas Jefferson's plantation. They ought to put them all around the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and put monuments to George Washington's Africans all around his memorial and let them go into history together because that's the way they were in real life together.

This country could not have been built without that system. We built this country. And yeah, Jan, we are the world. So I think we should have monuments to our Africans. I like pulling them down, too. I like pulling the slavery, slavery's monuments down. But if we can't pull them down or even if you can put up some monuments to persons of African descent. But I spent last weekend watching Hamilton on Disney+.

I wanted to see it in person. And, you know, I'm one of those people that would fly to New York and see a show and turn around and come back to South Carolina. But I just didn't get to do it because the tickets weren't available. But Hamilton finally came out on Disney Plus and Avery and I started watching it. It's a show that lasts two hours and 40 minutes with a one minute intermission.

But I knew the story, but we had to keep stopping it because we had to keep Googling what was going on. It follows history.

very closely for a Broadway musical. It follows history very closely. It's the story of an immigrant. And Lin-Manuel Miranda tells the immigrant story very well. What impressed me is that this immigrant was very persistent, came to America with nothing, persisted and got an education at what became Princeton University.

was a financial wizard and genius.

a general and a strategist, a man of war, and also a man of numbers who created the federal banking system that exists today. He was ostracized, outcast from the rest of the privileged like Thomas Jefferson, but George Washington saw something in him and aided his rise to the top. He would have risen farther except for a scandal about committing adultery.

When he found out they were going to use the scandal against him, he put it out himself in a pamphlet for everybody to read. If you're going to try to blackmail me with a scandal, I'm going to put it out myself, which is a kind of modern concept. And what I really found modern about this story is that all these people that we read about in history, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Lafayette,

those people were played by African Americans or Hispanic or African Hispanic people, which was interesting, very interesting. It made me focus more on the story. And I probably watched it 10 more times before I can really say anything about it. But it made me realize it put into a musical that this country was built by immigrants and Black people.

And we've never seen that before on Broadway. And the other thing that I don't have much of a sense of, I know it's true, but I've never been there, that there are more Africans in Brazil in the slave trade than any other single country in the so-called Western world. Well, that's true. And we were in some sense, and still are, separated from each other, even though we come from the same

from the same places, but we are separated and we have been separated from the Afro-Brazilians. I don't know what it means, but yeah, that's true. Well, I think it means that if, for example, here in the United States, Black people pretty much coalesce around each other, no matter where they're from. You have Jamaicans in their own enclaves and

And Dominicans and all that. But here in the United States, because of the national identity, they tend to coalesce, at least in elections and some things. And it would be interesting to see what global African solidarity look like. Well, let me bring this conversation about can this nation endure a little bit to the present?

It's hard for me to watch the news. I have given up trying to watch it at night before I go to bed because it will keep me up all night long. But just to state a little bit of it, Trump commutes the sentence of Roger Stone. Roger Stone lied to Congress, among other things, and was found guilty by 12 of his peers.

And the president of the United States, the one who swore to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States, commutes his sentence. Now, I thought he would give him a full pardon, but he commuted the sentence. In other words, he was still found guilty, but he won't have to go to jail. This whole coronavirus situation yesterday, and I try not to say dates on the podcast, but yesterday was July the 10th, 2020.

We reached another all-time high in cases of coronavirus in the United States. While the president runs around and we're making improvements, it's getting better. You don't need to wear masks and insist that the children go back to school.

He he's battling his own doctors, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Briggs, who are saying just the opposite, that we have not gotten through the first wave and a second wave is coming. And we've got to take steps to stop the spikes and the resurgence of the coronavirus. While the president just defies science and logic, apparently, to say that we're OK. It feels like jam.

that the president has a totally different agenda from eliminating the coronavirus. It feels like he has a different purpose for the coronavirus or he expects something different out of it from everybody else with good sense. It feels like

since we found out that blacks are performing two and a half to three times greater in getting the coronavirus and dying at a greater rate than white people, that Trump would kill off as many people as possible if it would help his reelection chances. How's that for some conspiracy theory? Well, we don't have any evidence to conclusively prove it, but his actions are consistent with that point of view.

And certainly, how many times have we heard him called incapable of empathy and narcissistic? Certainly, that is consistent with not caring whether people die or not. And he has always made cavalier statements about, well, you know, people just, we have to keep the economy open. And interestingly enough, he's found some allies in that. There is the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a study saying that

They thought it was important to reopen schools, which the administration repeatedly touted this week, criticized Trump's threats to hold the money from the schools and misguided them. Even though this American Academy of Pediatrics said open schools, they termed his effort to withhold the money as misguided. And I do think that this is a good time to remind ourselves and our listeners, presidents don't appropriate congressional funding.

That's why we had that whole scandal about the Ukraine. Once Congress votes the money, the president can't reach in and say, give it back to me. First of all, it's taxpayer money, like you always point out. But second of all, it's not his role. There's a separation of powers and it's not his duty or his responsibility or his power, frankly, his power to withhold a congressional appropriation, except under some very narrow and tailored circumstances.

Well, you're talking about congressional appropriation. Let's break it down even further. The money that comes from the federal government that goes to the states to aid in education is the kind of appropriation you're talking about. And the president doesn't have power or authority over that money. But he talked all week as if he did. Well, yesterday he took it back.

Well, it's hard to keep up, isn't it? Yes, it is. But he got so much criticism. He and Betsy DeVos both threatened to withhold funding. And then the Secretary of Education or the Superintendent of Education, I think it's in Montown, said that Elsie Arnson, the Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction in Montown, said in an interview Friday that she supported the Trump approach.

And she didn't think that he meant that he would be taking away money.

Well, everybody always says what he meant. It's just like the Ukraine situation. He told them that they wouldn't be getting the $500 million unless they got dirt on Joe Biden. And everybody was talking, all the Trump supporters and sycophants were talking about how, oh, he didn't mean it like that. Of course he meant it like that. He said it plainly over and over again to a whole lot of witnesses who testified. And he meant it when he was talking about these funds, federal funds for education.

But it's just one other signal of how little he understands about the US system of government. And frankly, most of us don't understand a whole lot more about it. And that's why the best disinfectant against a dictator is knowledge.

And so we really have to equip ourselves. When we get to talking about Stone again, I want to give you an example of how the evidence can be twisted in a case to make it look like something that isn't true is.

Let's talk about it. Well, Stone was commuted, right? So he's going to be a convicted felon. He is a convicted felon. Yeah, that won't change. I heard an interview saying that, well, he'll still be convicted, so that's okay. But they tried to compare it, say that this was nothing unusual about this commutation and that he was due to report back to confinement

soon if it hadn't been done this week or next week. But they used examples, presidents who had given pardons. They went all the way back to Roosevelt and talked about a pardon that Roosevelt did. But the difference between these other pardons, yes, they were people that the president knew, people that maybe the president had been cronies with.

But none of those presidents were subject one of the investigation in which the pardoned person was convicted. Right.

Yeah, these have been focused on efforts that Trump was involved in, like the firing of the Southern District, the district attorney in the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York. And in Washington, D.C., those federal prosecutors were removed because they were all investigating Trump. And it wasn't.

Just his friends was Trump they were investigating and he was person one or suspect one, crony one in their investigations. Maybe not named, but he was certainly understood to be under investigation by all three of those federal United States Attorney's offices and all three of those heads were fired.

It makes Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre look like a tea party. But this person went on and on comparing these other parties, but in none of the parties or commutations, but in none of those instances was the president himself a target of the investigation or had any prosecutorial risk himself. It wasn't just that Trump is part of Stone. Trump is assuring his own defense.

Well, like always, Trump is protecting Trump. And let's get back to the election. His getting reelected is a way of protecting him from prosecution. And don't even mention civil liability, but prosecution, because they're not going to prosecute a sitting president. And as long as he is the president, he will not be prosecuted. And I believe, this is just my belief, along with my other beliefs that I've voiced,

that one reason he wants to get reelected so bad is so he won't have to face prosecution. Exactly. And that's why we were going to talk about the Supreme Court today. But there's no point in talking about it because even though it was a victory for the government legally, as a practical matter, unless the court really gets busy and resists all the political pressure that's going to be put on them to wait until after the election,

Trump gets what he wants, which is he'll be able to kick the can down the road. And that's been his M.O.

That's his MO. If he can get past this election, he'll get past the next four years without getting prosecuted. And maybe there'll be some day who's Mackinac in his story that will reach down and grab him out of the jaws. Oh, my goodness. You know, that brings me back to something a friend of mine said. We've been on now about 25 minutes. Do we need to take a break or not?

No, keep going. Let's keep going. One of my friends on Facebook, I wish I could find that post because she was just irate. I could tell from the words that she used and the emphasis that the way it was written, that she was just disgusted that we were not able to stop President Trump. Say, what is this democracy come to that it can't stop this man? Well, I think it goes back to the point you were making earlier, Davida, which is

When demographics makes it hard for people who've been used to winning to continue to win elections, democracy becomes less palatable and less desirable. You start looking at other systems. Maybe you'll flirt around with a little Austrian economics, or maybe you'll flirt around with a little fascism, a little totalitarianism. Maybe you make Putin your best friend. I don't know.

But you start looking at other systems. You start wanting to change the rules when you can't win under the old rules. I don't think we're recording. It says we are. Yours says we're recording. It does. Okay, I just can't see it. Okay. Should we start over just in case? Mine says this episode doesn't have any audio yet. So let's stop for now and let me figure out what we got. Okay. Should I turn it off?

I'm going to see if I can turn it off. Okay. All right. Okay.

Thank you.

I want to go back and just have a little bit more discussion today on Sisters in Law, the podcast, episode seven, to let you know that our president has been on the rampage against public schools and colleges all week, threatening to use the power of the federal government to strong-arm officials into reopening classrooms.

But now his effort is creating a backlash because he's got his supporters, but an overwhelming alignment of state and even Republican organizations are beginning to oppose the rush to reopen schools. Surprise, surprise. One Republican lawmaker said, well, if they can open Disney, they can open the schools. How many times do you take your child to Disney in their lifetime? I did it. I took mine once.

I think I've been to Disney, well, not actually Disney, but to Universal Studios maybe four times. Those children are now in their 30s. I'm lying. I took Avery twice. I took her to Disney World and I took her to Disneyland in California. Oh, you did go to Disneyland. I never did that. She went with her school one time. She went three times. I took her twice. And you know, we went the year we went in 1992. Okay. Do you remember that trip?

I remember 1991. You went in 92 as well? No, no, no. Maybe it was December of 91. Yeah, that was a year Mama passed. But at any rate, he's on the rampage. But Jay Hoffmeister, Republican state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, said Friday, we don't need to be schooled on why it's important to reopen. I sense a little frustration in that statement.

Betsy DeVos, who knows nothing about public education, much less public education funding, also issued a threat. But within 48 hours, both she and the president had to take it back because that's not their role. But you've got these Republicans saying, look, stop breathing down our necks. How can you compare taking a child to Disney World once in their lifetime to sending them to school every day in the middle of a pandemic? It's foolishness.

Well, you know what I think changed, Jan? If you listen to the polls, if you listen to the people in the news talking about the polls, the issue that causes Americans not to be in favor of Trump in this 2020 presidential election is the issue of the coronavirus. It cuts across demographics. It cuts across party lines. And Trump was...

suffering with like a 37% approval rating. And the reason people disapprove was because of the coronavirus. Today, I understand he's going to wear a mask for the first time in public. And he so-called changed his mind or stopped pushing so hard for people to go back to school because the polls are showing that's what's making his approval rating so low.

Well, that makes all the sense. And it reaffirms, that's when you say, shout this nation, endure. Even though they were slavers and misogynists and rapists and every other thing, they put together a system built for endurance. And I just believe that the people will prevail. When the people express themselves, that's the point I'm trying to make, is when only 37% of people agree with him, you can change even a Donald Trump's behavior.

Well, I certainly hope so. Well, indeed, you just provided the proof. He's going to wear a mask. Now, that's a small thing, and it certainly is not enough, but he wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for the expression of the people's opinions.

Well, that's true. But God knows what he'll do next because he's going to do something even more horrible than demand that children go back to school. Here in South Carolina, the first reported very young child passed away. A five-year-old passed away from coronavirus. And I pay attention to the data that comes from the Department of Health and Environmental Control here in South Carolina. A lot of people are not experiencing

exactly coronavirus, but that mutation that seems to affect children. And so they're not reporting in the coronavirus numbers. You know, Trump wears a mask in public for the first time, but it took a week for

him to do it. So you're right. Which week? They've been begging for months to wear masks. And that's what Dr. Fauci and Dr. Brist, his doctors, the government's doctors that have been speaking on the coronavirus since March, have been saying that wearing a mask is effective. Wear a mask, stay out of crowds, and wash your hands. Now, I don't know if he's washing his hands, but I know he's not staying out of crowds.

He had that crowd out in Oklahoma. He had the crowd in Arizona. He's planting more crowds. He won't wear a mask when he goes. And what's the poor man's name, black man that ran for president? Herman Cain. Poor Herman Cain has the COVID right now because he went to the hospital. And is in the hospital. Of course he is. He's a cancer survivor. He had some health risks, some underlying health risks. And he's African-American.

His association with Trump won't save him. And I say it all the time and I don't mean to be facetious, but people act like people who walk around without masks and go to the beach and bunch up in clubs and malls and places act like Trump.

Trump is Jesus Christ. He's going to save them from coronavirus, but he can't save us. That's why we have these spikes and these relapses all over the country. And if you look at the maps that they show, show where there are spikes and the numbers are going up very dramatically. It's all across the South, across the Confederacy and even in the West, in Arizona.

Texas, Arizona and states like that that believe in Trump. Trump won those states. Oklahoma got hit too. And Tennessee and North Carolina that act like Trump can save them. Not only can he not save them, he's a poor example and nobody with good sense should follow him anywhere. Do you know anybody who doesn't believe that we went to the moon? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's that kind of conviction. It is that kind of conviction.

I'm not trying to be funny when I say it's the Confederacy. It's the Confederacy plus Arizona and a couple more states that weren't states when we had the Civil War. We're still fighting it. And they're fighting it, in my opinion, more fiercely because what we talked about earlier, the country is getting browner and blacker and pretty soon the

The rest of the country will be just like the population under 18, mostly brown and black. And there's a lot of fear associated with that. I don't know why. I don't either. Because we've never done anything to white people. Because they're still going to have all the money. We're still not going to have the 10% of their household wealth. Right.

And we've never done anything to hurt them. We didn't come over here voluntarily. When we had the opportunity to hurt white people in very large numbers because there were millions of slaves in the South, we didn't poison them. We didn't kill them. We rebelled and ran away, but didn't hurt them. So I don't know why they would be afraid of us. And since we've been free from slavery, we still haven't hurt them.

And I really don't know, Jan, why they turned against us after the Civil War, because it was the United States of America and the Confederate States of America that were fighting. We didn't start the war. It was about us, but we didn't start it. And when it was over, we became the enemy of the United States of America and of the Confederate States of America. And that I don't understand. But that's history. But bringing it to the present,

We have this president who's drawing the Mason-Dixon line all over again and heating up the battle. And we're asking, can this nation endure? One of the reasons that President Trump seems so distraught and is all over the place is that he believes that his political survival depends on exploiting the differences among Americans rather than bringing them together. Joe Biden gets very high marks when it comes to the leader that people trust

to handle foreign affairs and to bring all Americans together, especially during this pandemic. Seventy percent of Americans disapprove of the fact that the president has presided over 134,712 deaths from coronavirus that we know of so far, with an estimate of 200,000 deaths by September.

One of the tools that he has used consistently to exploit the divisions, whether it's based on partisanship or gender or region of the country, is the Internet. And I don't know whether listeners have heard, but they probably have, that some corporations have decided not to advertise on Facebook. 90% of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, so it is significant.

But what are some of those companies, Jan? Well-known companies like Levi's and the Coca-Cola Company have withdrawn their enthusiasm for Facebook ads. It was started by Color of Change, Rashard Ritchie, and Derek Johnson at NAACP.

And in CNW is weighing in on it too, because we have been meeting with Facebook for the last two years to get them to understand that you can't leave provably false information paid for by a political candidate on the platform without at least a warning to say, you need to check further to see that whether this information is reliable or not. Last year in CNW,

proposed to Facebook that we do a digital literacy project. In other words, how can we help younger voters and people, period, understand that you can't believe everything you read on the internet? You told me something interesting and I hadn't thought about it that way. But Facebook is not concerned about our democratic rights or the sanctity of our elections or anything other than their own profits. And they will do almost anything that is

possible to maximize those profits. Well, it's interesting, Jan. It reminds me of those so-called founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the like.

You know, I talk about the beautiful words Thomas Jefferson wrote about the unalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It appears to me that he was talking about white men, the white rich men of that time. And Mark Zuckerberg reminds me of that because Facebook seems to favor itself, the white rich man who owns it or who started it.

And its only purpose is to make money for white rich men without regard to how it's made. Well, it's been a controversy over Facebook and political ads ever since 2018. And the Internet Research Agency and Volunteer were discovered to have conspired with the Russians to interfere with U.S. elections. Now...

Shifting because it is believed that domestic actors will interfere. And Facebook has taken down some fake accounts. They've discovered some unauthorized, coordinated, inauthentic behavior connected to folk trying to interfere with the election. But this is something that we're going to have to look out for.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg says, well, we all have the right to free expression and we don't have the right to censor anybody. But when you know the president of the United States is saying things like put bleach in your arm to fight the coronavirus or some other harebrained scheme, then people need to be warned that that is not true. There are billions of people on Facebook at any given moment.

And so it's just very unfortunate. Now, we took the original position of being sort of, okay, we're going to try to work with you all, because it wasn't clear whether they didn't know any better or they didn't want to do any better. But after two years, last year, we asked them about this digital literacy project. If we, poor little NCNW, knew that it would take a year to prepare for the elections, then surely...

Mark Zuckerberg and all those smart people out in Silicon Valley could figure it out, too, but they have not. They made some steps in the right direction, but it's been haphazard. You can tell that it's been half-hearted and kind of scatterbrained. They, you know, they give ambivalent answers about whether they even think they are subject to civil rights enforcement. Now, he testified on the Hill a couple of years ago that he does not oppose reasonable legislation.

And to tell you the truth, that might make his job easier because they had a civil rights audit just implement the recommendations of the audit. Some of the recommendations that NCNW make into Facebook include deletion, the takedown of content or the removal of accounts deemed to be provably false or dangerous. Just take them down. That's what YouTube does. Google does with YouTube.

demotion. Tweak the algorithm to prevent or reduce the exposure of users to dangerous speech. You can give a person a platform, but they can engineer it in such a way that it limits the audience. Disclosure is something else we propose. You can provide users with the information as to the identity of the speakers. You can publish a list of ads that

Politicians have published even without censoring them. Or you can delay. You can slow down the spread of the online communication. They certainly control the traffic on the platform. You can dilute and divert. Combat bad speech with good speech.

You know, they tell me that they can flood the zone with healthy content or redirect users' attention because you never know how many hits or likes or comments you're going to get on Facebook because they have a role to play in that. And deterrence. They could raise the cost. You know, they could fine people. They could put them off the platform. They could have a reputational sanction to force them to behave better. Interestingly enough, Tucker Carlson's writer,

resigned the day before yesterday. And Tucker Carlson is the anchor, I would say the lead anchor on Fox Network. That's exactly right. His chief writer had to resign because they found him making some awful racist and homophobic and anti-feminist comments on a so-called secret posting site.

So now he's out of that job. I'm sure he'll get another job right away. And I'm sure Tucker Carlson will find somebody equally reprehensible to do his writing for him. Well, I was shocked that Tucker Carlson wasn't already doing his writing. But, you know, I guess the days are gone where news anchors do their own writing and editing. In other words, that they actually know things and they know how to present it. Well, they all have lots of help if they have primetime programs.

And I'm certainly glad that Joy Reed now has her own slot in the afternoon during the week. The other thing I wanted to mention was digital literacy, which is what we'll be doing. Something that Avery Allen named for me called Adulting 101, which refers to the way that younger people

view the adult responsibilities and they have a term for it that they call adulting. I'm adulting today. I'm doing my laundry. So we're boosting a program throughout the month of October that will encourage young folk to adult and participate in the electoral process. Interestingly, Black women were less affected by the propaganda on Facebook and other social media platforms.

If they were middle-aged, you know, once you get in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, we were relatively unscathed. But in 2016, there was almost a 15% decline in the rate of voter participation among young Black folks. So that's what Adulting 101 is aimed at. But the president is busy trying to exploit our differences whenever there was a time that we needed to come together. That time is right now during this pandemic.

Well, you're absolutely right. One thing I think about, Jan, is why would the president not want to improve his ratings or the polls? Because he became a hero in reducing the effect of the coronavirus on the American public. The issue of coronavirus has divided people, Republicans, Democrats, young and old alike.

And the verdict is that most people think he's handling the coronavirus wrong. So to fix that, you would think logically that he would change his course on how he's handling the coronavirus or failing to handle the coronavirus. But for some reason, he persists in being terrible at handling the coronavirus, being terrible in responding, even being terrible in helping the states respond to it.

And there must be some motive in doing that. I end where I start.

What is the motive for not doing better with handling the coronavirus? Because that's the area where people give him extremely low marks because he's been bad at it. Why not get better? There's a certain kind of willful stubbornness, a willful willingness to not pay attention to anybody. I'm the only one who can solve your problems.

That sort of mentality, I guess. I don't know. Well, I read excerpts from his niece's book and his niece says what we already know, that he's a narcissist, that he was poor in school, that he paid someone to take the SAT for him, that he lies constantly and for recreation. I accept all of that is true.

But I also think... He lies for recreation. Yeah, she talked about a lie he told on her at a party. Said she was on drugs. Said she was on drugs and then winked at her because he knew he was lying. He was just doing it for fun. Now that's a devil. That's a devil, but I think he's crazy like a fox. I think this strategy of dividing is a strategy that could work.

How do we stop it? I think they've gone a long way in addressing how Facebook is involved in the use of, well, the misuse of information and the spread of misinformation. Facebook needs to be challenged on that. Mark Zuckerberg has created this website.

gargantuan platform, but he tries to pretend like he's still operating a college Facebook. It's not a college Facebook, and he's going to have to take the responsibility of any other media conglomerate. NBC doesn't broadcast false reports without saying, oh, this report was false, or we have not confirmed the truth of this.

CBS doesn't give statements, even from the president, when they don't say we don't have any factual basis for this claim. For example, when he talked about drinking Clorox. Well, he gets, Zuckerberg gets terribly upset when you call him a publisher.

He says, I only provide a platform. I am not a public, but that is ludicrous. Well, the platform is publishing. It's a publishing platform. It's a media platform. People, many people don't read except to read from that platform. So that's a false distinction.

He is a publisher. He presents information to the world. And he should be held to the standard that any news media would be held to. And that's a part of the legislation that I think he bristled at. Do you remember his talking about that when he testified? Whether Facebook should be held to the standard of a news outlet. He is not a news purveyor. He absolutely is.

And it'll be up to some court at some point in time to make that decision formally. Yeah, but how do we get young people to understand, not just young people, there's some old people too, but a lot of young people whose only source of information is the internet, Facebook, Instagram.

How do you get them the truth if the truth is not even considered in being presented and what's being presented on Facebook? But what's so interesting to me is when I try to publish a flyer for something simple like the King holiday, it's questioned, it's stopped, it's delayed. And I've had flyers that they reject because they have a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King on them.

Right. And see, that was part of what has made this boycott stick so far is the fact that they have they have a rule. Facebook has a rule that if something is provably false, they will take it down. They've taken down all kinds of people. You know, you've got this movement that doesn't believe in vaccinating their children.

They've taken down their post. They've taken down other posts. But with this one, because it was opposed by the president of the United States, they are not exercising the they're not implementing their own rule. And so you put your finger right on what the real problem is, which is the president wants is getting treated to a different standard. And people think that that is unfair. Well, it's unfair and it's dangerous.

It's dangerous because we spend decades not teaching children history or not teaching it right and not teaching civics. And now we are at a point where most people don't know anything about the Constitution, about the First Amendment, nothing about the Bill of Rights. And I'll tell you this, they know more about that than they know about the practical everyday workings of government.

Don't ask them who this whole thing about the money, who appropriates money for school, not the president. The president is not on the Appropriations Committee. Doesn't have anything to do. Yes, he has a budget by those people who are elected to represent those cities and states.

It's just sad. But I encourage people. And that's why we strain up and do this podcast. Hopefully it'll shed a little bit of light so that we can be better prepared to protect ourselves. Because clearly the president of the United States is not trying to protect us. And behemoths like Facebook are not trying to protect us. So we better start trying to protect ourselves. Yeah, but just the fact that Trump has his platform, Facebook and others, Instagram, Twitter,

and others and says i'm gonna withhold the money for schools if you don't go back to school people who don't know believe he can do it and so they react as if they if you go on twitter and facebook right now you will find people concerned that he that's why he had to take it back because people were getting so upset about it yeah the last place children need to be right now is in school

If I had a small child now, I believe very strongly that I would change my profession and change the way I practice law so that I can stay at home and take care of my child. I believe I would, Jan, because it's that dangerous. I wouldn't send a young child. And I hope that the kids down in Atlanta don't end up having to go back into a school because it's very, there's a lot of virus being spread down there right now.

Yeah, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, all the Confederate states are having a spike or a surge in coronavirus. And their governors are insisting that they open up, that they remain open, except maybe Texas. The governor is saying he's going to lock it back down if they don't start wearing masks and behaving more responsible. You know, it's just so odd to me that people think it's such an affront to wear a mask or to remain distant.

You know, we've had to suffer so much as a nation. And even in my lifetime, we've had to suffer so much. I remember when people lined up at schools, parents and children alike, and got polio vaccines. I do too. We've suffered all kinds of things that were inconvenient. And in the light of things that we suffered as a nation, wearing a mask doesn't seem like such a big deal. Right.

You know, you just mentioned the polio vaccine. I felt privileged to have it. I thought it meant that they cared that I wouldn't get sick. I think they did care. I was a weird little child. I thought they did care. You know, we had a weird mama. Our mama told us stuff like that. Remember, mama told us when the nurse, the public health nurse would come to the nursery to give us shots and she would say, oh, no, you won't cry because you're fortunate to get a shot.

No, I don't remember that, but I don't remember crying. I remember her saying that the children that cried didn't understand that they were privileged to get a shot. And so I made it my business never to cry when I got a shot because I thought I was the lucky one. Maybe that's where I got that from, and I got it from someplace. It was where I got it from. And so I feel lucky to be able to get around and move around and have a profession where I can put on a mask and still go to work.

But why people think they need to wear it? Why do they feel put upon to put on a mask and stay out of the mall? Well, they turned it into a political trope. They made it a sense. It became a dog whistle, I think. It's really not about the mask. It's about like, I don't know, the Lone Ranger being out with a mask on. Well, if the Lone Ranger can wear a mask, we can too. It's just ridiculous.

Yeah, but it's Trump's way of turning this country against itself, a continuation or a brand new civil war, as we talked about in a previous episode. But this is what I want to know. What do you think about this? Wonder, has he been to the bedside of any of those sick Secret Service agents who went with him to Oklahoma? Absolutely not. Has he gone to see Herman Cain? Of course not.

Has he been to the bedside of any of those ground people that went out and did advance work for him for Arizona and Oklahoma who have coronavirus? Of course not. Of course he has some.

I really think, Jan, this is just me. I really think that his strategy is the fewer people who vote, the better his chances of getting reelected. Let's be clear. That's been the Republican strategy. And we tend to isolate Trump. And, you know, it's good that we got the Never Trumpers and the Lincoln Project and all this. But they flirted with this. George Bush went down to somewhere in Mississippi or came down to South Carolina and went to Bob Jones University.

This is not new. It's just embarrassing now because people are dying. Yeah, and Reagan went down to where did he go in Mississippi to announce his re-election campaign? Exactly.

And Nixon had the Southern strategy. Well, we thought it was sentenced to them, but it has reached a life or death proportion now. And it's all spinning around the coronavirus. And so you're talking about Arizona. No, Arizona wasn't in the Confederacy, but it is a reliably very conservative state. And I remember when they refused to acknowledge the King Holiday. Exactly.

You know, it was a symbol. The King Holiday is a symbol. It didn't free anybody. It didn't get anybody any jobs, but it gave us a holiday. And it also was a barometer of how racist they were. And it was a lot of fun. As part of his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan made an appearance at the Neshoba County Fair where he gave a speech on August 3rd.

1980. That would be, let's see, 20 plus 20. That would be 40 years ago.

in Neshoba County, Mississippi. That's what I was talking about. That's where Chaney Goodman and Schwerner were murdered in 1964. It's just like him going to that Oklahoma town where those people were burned out of their homes. On Juneteenth. He was planning to go on Juneteenth, but if anybody knows about the celebration of Juneteenth, they celebrate all weekend. He was planning to go on June 19th, changed it to June 20th, but the message was still the same.

And it was chosen for that reason. That's a Republican ploy. And I'm glad to have them because I'm glad they have their money. I'm glad they have their messages. They got some very hard-hitting advertisements. But having said all that, where were you in 1980 when we were veering in this direction? Bakke was decided in 78. Right.

You know, it helps to have a little perspective on history. It doesn't seem so scary. I go to sleep at night. I watch TV for a while, and then I go to sleep. Because we've seen this movie before, several times. Well, it's just part 100 of the same movie. Because if 1968 wasn't the same movie, I don't know what was. Dr. King gets his head blown off. The Poor People Campaign splutters.

It was a terrible time. Fannie Lou Hamer gets beat like she stole something. And so it's just over and over and over again. What about 1876? That was a tough year. Yeah, it's the year the United States of America decided to bail from the South and bail from African-Americans. You know, I don't know much about U.S. history. I count on you to tell me that. But anytime white folks start compromising with each other. Oh, we lose.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Can this nation endure under the pressures of the coronavirus and Trump's obvious lack of concern for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, only the pursuit of his happiness and his interests and his reelection? Can we endure? Well, as Lincoln said,

It's rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that we resolve that those who have died have not died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. You've been listening to Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, Can This Nation Endure?

I'll answer, yes.