Nicole Tisdale is a national security attorney with fifteen years of experience, including roles at the White House National Security Council, the US Congress's House Committee on Homeland Security, and the twenty twenty Biden Harris Transition. Her national security expertise includes cybersecurity, counterintelligence, and election security. And she is our guest today. This is Civic Cipher. I'm your host, ramses.
Jah, and I am q Ward.
All Right, so Nicole Tisdale, welcome to the show. I know that we've been waiting. We had to actually wait a little longer than we wanted to get to talk to you, but I'm glad that we get to talk to you today. How are you feeling this morning.
I'm feeling good. I'm so excited to be on this podcast. I'm actually a fan. Before I got outreached from you all, I listened to you all and so it was when I saw in the inbox, you know, it's the formal email of like this is the podcast. I immediately responded, I said, I know who they are, and yes, whenever we can figure out the timing, I'm going. So I'm happy to be here.
You you honor us, our listeners cannot see how big I'm smiling right now, But thank you so much, and like like ram to say, we are honored to be able to spend some time with you today.
Yeah, so so let's uh, let's get to know you a little bit better for our listeners. You have a Again, we start our show with a brief introduction, but you know, we like to open the floor to you to kind of establish a bit of rapport to our audience, or with our audience, I should say, so, you know, share a couple of details about your life, the things that
make you, the things make you human. You know, where you were born, how you grew up, what motivates you every day, and sort of what led you to today's conversation.
Sure, I'm happy to give folks some additional background. I will just start off because people are going to hear my accent and wonder how I'm in Washington, DC and I sound like this. So I'm originally from a no traffic light town in Mississippi. It's called Nettleton, Mississippi. It's two thousand people. It's a very uh working class town, but a lot of people live under the poverty line,
myself included. That's where I started. I am a first generation everything to I always tell folks that I'm like, you know, the first person in my family to go to college. But I'm also the first attorney in my town, and so I have. My introduction to politics and civics and civic engagement is probably a little bit different from some of your other listeners because I grew up in a family where sometimes they didn't vote. You know, I have cousins now who work in plants and their shift
is from seven am to seven pm. And guess what, the vote the Poland places are open from eight am to seven pm. So how are you going to vote if you have to go to work? But also, you know, because we live in a small town, most of us work and commute thirty minutes away. So the idea that you're going to like take your lunch break and be able to come back to your town vote and then get back to work, not only does that cost money, that cost time, and we don't always We didn't always
have that in my family. So I've all before professionally getting involved in politics, I would say I was always kind of a little bit of a distance. It just didn't feel like it was something that was a part of our everyday life growing up. That being said, when I was introduced to politics and really public policy, it just made a lot of sense to me. At most of my life, I wanted to be an attorney. I
wanted to be a lawyer. And then I went to college and I learned about public policy, and I remember thinking, oh, this is so much better than being a lawyer, because if I mess up, no one's going to go to jail and no one's going to lose any money. But clearly that's not how public policy work. But the idea that I could be a voice for people who didn't have a voice, and I could advocate, I could learn
systems and then go advocate for people. That was very similar to being a lawyer in a courtroom to me, and it was really appealing to me because I know how public policy benefits had changed my life. Right like I we were on the SNAP program. I remember how important that that food was for us, but those essentials were for us. My dad is a union worker. My mom was employed in various places but never had stable
employment after NAFTA was signed. So public policy had always been around me, but it wasn't until I got to college that I really understood how it was impacted my day to day life. And so this is turning into a really long answer.
But what we want to hear.
So after undergrad I went to law school. In law school, I really focused on public policy. So I always tell folks when everyone else was taking bankruptcy and corporate law, I was taken criminal procedure. I was taking legislative drafting. I was taking statutory law. I took every constitutional law
class you can take. I was obsessed with understanding how the Constitution was, the ideas that were behind and creating the Constitution, but then how it had evolved, and really figuring out strategies where I could use the Constitution to advance my community. And so after that I started working in Congress for Chairman Benny Thompson, who most people now know because he chaired the January sixth Committee where we investigated the attacks on the capital in January sixth of
twenty twenty one. But before that, he also was the top Democrat and continues to be the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. And a lot of your listeners, I always tell folks, people think they have a little bit of distance on homeland security until you start talking about how it shows up in their everyday life. So it's not just when you go to the airport. It's also when you have a natural disaster and FEMA is
there to help you and your community recover. It is TSA when you go to the airport, and I know people have strong thoughts about TSA, but it's you all are also based in Phoenix, Arizona. So it's also customs and border protection, so it is when you travel in and out of our country, and then some of the other things that we don't think about. It's also where
our cybersecurity is. How so the idea that we want to make sure that your data is protected, but also we want to make sure that the water plant in Phoenix, Arizona is protected from a cyber attack. All of that stuff lives at the Department of Homeland Security. And so for ten years I worked on that stuff, very focused on cyber security counterintelligence. Counter Intelligence is just a long
word for espionage policy, which is spypolgy. And then I also worked though I know everyone always thinks I'm a spy and then they're disappointed when I tell them that my spy tool is a word document, but you know, we got to have rules and regulations around how we actually do counter intelligence and how we do espionage. So Congress also gives money to agency so that they can conduct those activities. So you have to have someone in
Congress who also is working on those issues. And then the kind of the other issue that I worked on a lot, and I think we'll get into it a little bit is counter terrorism. And so when I started working on counter terrorism, that was at the height of ISIS and al Qaeda. But over time we also saw the theme that that black people have been trying to highlight for a long time, which is, yes, there are
foreign terrorists, but they are also domestic terrorists. And so you have the Charleston church shooting where Dylan Ruth went in and killed the black congregation member. That is the counter terrorism portfolio that I just kind of under the direction of Chairman Thompson, we were able to expand what counter terrorism is is not just isis them al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. It is the Kluklux Klan in New Orleans or in Louisiana. It is sovereign citizens in Phoenix, Arizona.
And so it was a really great portfolio. I loved it. After ten years and helping Democrats take back the House, happy to get into the politics of why that kind of is important, I decided to start my own company. One of the things that I saw, especially after Donald Trump was elected in twenty sixteen, we don't always our community doesn't always know how to advocate because no one has taught us how to advocate. So I spent a
lot of time. People would come and talk to me in Congress and they were really using activist tools, which are good tools. It's just they were trying to advocate with activist tools instead of advocacy tools. Or they're coming to us with like accountability tools, which is, well, we're not gonna we voted for you, so what are you doing? And it's like, well, the advocacy is what have you asked me to do, not we're going to hold you accountable for something we never asked you to do in
the first place. I saw this need in this understanding that everyone is not going to be able to afford a lobbyist. They're not going to be able to be a part of a trade association where you have professional
lobbyists who will go and advocate on your behalf. Once Donald Trump was elected, I think I personally felt that it was going to be my mission to teach our community, and I say our community, I mean any minority community how to properly advocate, because I think we are our best advocates, but sometimes if we if we don't structure our as advocacy in the right way, we're just not
going to get results. And I think the first election of Donald Trump really show people we really have to spend just as much time learning how to advocate as we spend learning how to mobilize and how to do activism. It's the same kind of work that needs to be done on the accountability side. Like we have the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It spends a lot of time and a lot of money on accountability measures that happen in the courtroom. Teaching people that middle wrong, which is advocacy.
For me, I was like, this is going to be the perfect place for me, and so I wrote a book on how Congress works, called Right to Petition, and I just really started traveling around the country, and then once COVID hit, traveling around zooms just teaching people how
to advocate. So people come to me with a problem and really just walking them through how to build a strategy and getting people to understand sometimes what you need is not a law, right Like a lot of people are like, well, we need Congress to pass a law, and you talk to them and it's like, you don't
actually need a law. The issue that you're having is an oversight issue, Like you just need you need Chairman Thompson to send a letter to DHS and ask them why are they collecting people's cell phones at the border? What are the privacy regulations that they're trying to enforce. You don't need a law right now. So I did that.
I joined the transition. The transition was something that I always worked on when I was in Congress, but I wanted to work on it with the Biden Harris administration because in twenty twenty, y'all, everything was such a mess, and I didn't you know, this is before January sixth.
We knew that the transition to the Biden Harris administration was going to be rough, because you know, I spent four years dealing with the Trump administration trying to do oversight, try to ask questions, and from the inside, we just knew that they weren't doing a lot of things like there wasn't going to be a smooth handoff of policy because it had been so much chaos and turmoil the
whole time that he was in office. So it was important for me to join the transition to do my part to really just make sure we could have as peaceful and smooth of a transfer of power and policy as possible.
I don't want to I don't want to throw you off track, but can you talk a little bit about what the turmoil and what the chaos was like or what does that mean that where you were able to anticipate there be problems there and then and then please continue.
Yeah, well, I mean very specifically, like a specific example for DHS. One of the things that Trump administration had done is really use the Department of Homeland Security to politicize a lot of the visceral and hate that he
had for communities of color. So I don't know if you all remember, but there was a time where ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, but also what we call FPS, which is the Federal Protective Service, they were actually going into places like Portland, Oregon where people were protesting Black Lives Matter and they were actually rounding up people. They
were being used to scare people. That's not their mission, right Like isis mission is a immigration enforcement mission, the Federal Protective Services mission is to protect federal buildings, to politicize them and use them in a way that you can really scare and target black protesters and the people who support the black protesters. That is something that it wasn't There were people who were writing about it. It was on the press, but it was not on the front page.
And that's what I always give as an example of a transition. A transition is responsible for digging through all of those all of those issues, whether big or small, and bringing them to the forefront and saying, this is what happened during the Trump administry, this is why it was unconstitutional, it was not the proper oversight wasn't there, and this is what we're going to do during the next administration. So it gets in the weeds. It's very weedy,
it's very nerdy. I'm very aware that, but it's also something that I really enjoy doing because so much of what actually impacts our day to day life isn't always on the front page of the newspaper. But for those protesters. That was a huge issue. A lot of them were arrested. Now they had charges on their criminal record. You have to go in and recognize one what can we do to fix what has happened? Repair what has happened. But a good transition is also very proactive. How do we
make sure this never happens again? And one of the things that we proposed and the Biden Heerents administration has subsequently done, is like, get really clear on what the mission of FPS is, who is doing oversight on FPS? And when they are doing things like rounding up protesters, Why are we still funding them? Why are we continuing to allow them to have this access? It gets very niche,
but honestly, that's what most of the transition is. You're just digging through policies of the other for this case, the Trump administration, making sure that those are priorities to be addressed in the next administration.
First of all, Wow, Yeah, the work that you're doing is so necessary, and I you know, we typically have an objective with these conversations, but just listening to you now, I am going to detour and as I say, cut across the grass here. How comes so many things? It seems rather that so many laws were broken, so many missions were violated, so many things were done incorrectly, seemingly
with impunity. With the former president. He seems to kind of spit in the face of our laws, our law enforcement, our criminal justice community, and as you said, weaponize them for his own means. We see now that he's already preemptively sowing misinformation in doubt with regards to our election integrity.
His his followers are setting ballot boxes on fire. That from your position, because those of us that are on this side of it are that are not as informed and you know, have not done the work which I'm signing Ramses and Eye up for your advocacy class, so you can go ahead and preregister us to tickets front row,
please please front row. But for the listeners who may have doubts or fears with regards to the protection of their vote, and again our former president getting his base rilled up and preemptively telling them that everybody's cheating and in your position, like, how do you deal with that? And how come again he seemed to be able to violate in all these ways with impunity.
Yeah, So two questions. I'll take the how does this happen question first, and then we'll talk specifically about election and security. So I think it's important for folks to know, one, this is my job, right Like, my job is to go in. I'm the inside woman, I'm the inside person. My job is to go in and figure out how these systems work, how to use them for the benefit of our communities, but then also hold people who are
abusing these policies accountable. I think it's important to realize some of the things that Trump was able to do was because he was president. So what I just told you, while the fps that did that wasn't there wasn't a violation of law that was enforceable. Most their missions, all of these things are really policies that are set into place, and the same way that I am, the kind of attorney who interprets can go in and interpret their mission
for good. With the Trump administration also had as people who were dedicated to interpret these missions for bad.
And so when that.
Is your goal and you are you know, he had attorneys around him too. The way these policies are ridden, you want them to have a level of flexibility in them. What had not been, what we had not prepared for is to have a president like Trump who would just see all of these missions as a blank slate to do whatever he wanted to do. And so to your
point of how is that possible. The way the I'm taking this a little bit into a civics lesson the way that kind of stuff happens is someone abuses the power and then Congress needs someone in the executive branch of abuses the power. Then Congress actually does have to go beyond we'll have a policy for this and say we'll have a law or we'll attach your money to it. And that's what we were able to do once Democrats
took back control of the House. Because just to backtrack a little bit, so you have when Trump won, Democrats were not in charge of the House and they weren't in charge of the Senate. During the midterms, the Democrats took back control of the House and they took back control of the Senate. The House is responsible all spending bills, every agency, fps in this case, their money starts with the House. So it matters when Democrats control the House.
Because what we were able to do with the Federal Protective Service is say this is the mission that we have given you. Money for when you go outside that mission. We're not giving you money for that. And that is just as that is just as much important to them as saying you will be eminalize for that. And I
say this with the understanding to your listeners. It may not be the kind of justice that you want, right like, we may want them to be criminalized, and you may want them in jail, but please understand, when these agencies, when you start messing with their money, it's like anybody else messing with your money, right like, you're trying to figure this out. And so we didn't have to pass a law that says fps will never do this again.
We were able to pass appropriations and pass laws with the money that said if you do this again, you won't have any money. And that is something that is much more responsive and it doesn't really require us to go to the to the judicial branch and then have them interpret what was a law broken. Also, trying to tie missions to money is much easier than just trying to pass a blank law that says you shall not
do X or you shall do understand. So yeah, you just I mean, honestly, that's one of the tools in the advocacy toolbox, like, yes, you can actually penalize people with with criminal laws, but you can also mess with people's money and that goes a really long way in terms of public policy too.
Sure.
Sure, Now, obviously you know quite a bit about I don't even want to start. You know a lot about a lot, and the rest of us are learning, and so you're in a position to do some teaching. And you mentioned earlier that you know you've authored a book, if I'm not mistaken, your your original title was, uh was Civic Cipher if I'm if I'm not mistake?
Is that right? Yeah?
Well I wanted to set up a newsletter called Civic SI.
That was it.
Yeah, okay, yes, that's actually how I found out about you all. So I decided, I am I work on civics. I also work on cybersecurity, right, like that is kind of like expertise in national security. And so Civic Cipher was the perfect and I got online and I'm like, somebody already owns it im And I really just thought it was going to be somebody squad or better just like someone. I was like, oh, I can do this better,
I can do better by this name. And then I found y'all, And I was like, Okay, so not only did y'all get the title before me and you have the idea before me, y'all are doing such a good job with it. Yeah, and to the point of, like my two love languages, right, like civics and cybersecurity, So I like civic cipher.
Okay, well, no, we'll take that. We appreciate it.
Yeah, it's a funny story how that name came together. But I'm glad that there's a little bit of i know, serendipitous energy in the conversation we're having today and that you can be on the show. But you know where I was going with that was that, you know, obviously being in a position to teach, uh, being in a position to write. One of the things things that we're aware of is that you authored the February twenty twenty four Wired article. It's called the Hidden Injustice of cyber Attacks.
So for those who haven't read it, discussed the scope of the article and kind of highlight a few things that people should know, things that you kind of imparted into that article.
Sure, well, the whole idea of that article is we, especially you all, we spend a lot of time talking about civil rights and human rights issues, but the cybersecurity community has not really been involved in those conversations. And so when I say cybersecurity, I just mean the policies that protect people in cyberspace. So these are protection policies in digital space. And so the way that I think
about it, I love analogies. Y'all. When you buy a new house, the plumbing, the appliances, the electricity, all of that is tech. That is tech policy. Your fire alarm, the lock on your door, that is cybersecurity. And so think when I tell people cybersecurity is everywhere you are, Like we are doing this interview right now on Zoom. The ability to adjust the mics and share the screen,
all of that is tech policy. But the protection to make sure that only the three of us are on this call, because that is the only three people who are supposed to be on this call, that is the cybersecurity. And so when we talk about the hidden injustice of cyber attacks, a lot of the domestic policy issues have been separated from cybersecurity. So I talk about the tacks that have happened with the SNAP program, which I used to be on. The Snap program, which is our Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance program is for low income families. It's also for natural disaster survivors, it's for veterans families, it's for anyone who needs help with food and essentials for a for a period of time. What we've seen in the last two years is attacks on these systems state by state have rose as much as twenty one hundred percent, which twenty one hundred percent sounds like a crazy number.
I had to like kind of check that myself. And the reason that the attacks have happened is because, unlike your debit card or your check or your credit card, they don't have chip readers in EBT cards right now. And so what has happened is the I don't know if you all have heard about skimming machines where someone like actually swipes their card and then someone is able to steal their information. The reason we started moving to chips in cards is because it provides an extra layer
of security. So what has happened a lot of and these are international criminal organizations figured out that we started protecting bank cards and credit cards but not EBT cards, and so these folks are actually stealing people supplemental nutrition program money.
That's food stamps.
Right, it's food SAMs.
People are stealing food stamps.
Yes, because your food SAMs not only can you buy food, you can also get cash advances, right, because these are it's covering more. The SNAP program is food, but it also covers other things. Took So what happens people show up, they're in Walmart. We've had story after story. You're in Walmart, you're at the grocery store, and you know, when you check your balance yesterday you had one hundred dollars on
your card. You go and you buy your groceries, You spend because you know, people who are on this program are really budget conscious. And then they're getting to the checkout line and they don't have anything in their accounts.
And y'all when I tell you these folks are draining their accounts, they're draining them down to the scent like and the way, from a policy standpoint, what happened is we didn't It takes a lot of money to actually give the state so that they can start to implement these EBT cars, and right now the states just don't have it, Like Arizona doesn't have the money to actually
put the chips into people's cars. But then also for our community, you got to make sure that the stores that are going to take the cars also have the infrastructure, which cost money. And so one of the things that I'm trying to do in the Wired article is used that as an example of that is a cyber security issue that is not a domestic policy issue. These are international criminal organizations who do not care about the SNAP program.
They do not care that people are going through the worst financial time of their life, right Like, if you're on the SNAP program, you are in financial straits. To take that money from them, and then we know that there is a security fix, but we're not giving people the security fix because they don't have the money. It's really just victimizing people over and over again. And so being really clear that the cyber security community cannot opt
out of what some people call social policy issues. That's not a social policy issue. When an international criminal organization is stealing two hundred five hundred dollars from the most vulnerable people in the United States, you.
Know, it's a really interesting thing that happens in our you know, in our democracy where the most vulnerable are really and Ramses has talked about this on the show before the most vulnerable are really by far the majority.
Of people in this country.
But in this time of hyperpartisanship, one side has done a masterful job of convincing those most vulnerable that they're not a singular community and sold seeds of division to make sure that there's no unity, which makes it, you know, easier to manipulate those of us that are most vulnerable to these type of attacks and least protected and have less in the way of means, resources and infrastructure. That brings me back to a conversation that we started earlier.
A lot of people are intimidated, afraid, worried about casting their vote for this election and security surrounding you know, actually going to the ballot box. And you know, Ramse and I saw some stories yesterday of ballot boxes being burned. I know that in the life that you live and in the advocacy work that you do, that you see these types of attacks you and you understand why people
have these fears. Can you speak to us about the efficacy of our election and how this is going to look for people who are voting early, for people who are mailing in their ballots and wondering whether or not they're going to get where they're going and all the stresses and the fears that come with that.
Yeah, and thank you for it's circling us back. You. You asked this earlier and I forgot to address it. Sorry about that.
I'm sure.
So what you've described, and I think it might be helpful to listeners, I'll go through and let's put these into categories, and then we can talk specifically about each category. So there are three pillars of election security. The first is digital protection. That's how we protect how you cast your vote, how you register to vote, all of the things that happen in digital spaces. That is the first pillar.
The second pillar is physical security, So to your point, that's making sure that you can vote without fear or intimidation, and so that's when we're talking about having poll watchers, but also in the case that you're talking about protecting the ballot boxes from arsonists and things like that. And then a third category is what we call the mental security and the psychological security. So when that comes up,
that is when we talk about disinformation and misinformation. But also specific to the black community, a technical term that we call malign influence operations, and an influence operation is not necessarily that the information is false, but it is meant to influence your decision to vote, who to vote for, and specific to black people, just to vote at all. And so when we talk about that first pillar, the digital infrastructure, we feel very confident about the digital infrastructure
that is in place this year. We felt very confident about it in twenty twenty. As a matter of fact, the head of the cybersecurity agency at DHS that we talked about in twenty twenty came out and said very clearly the election was not stolen, Votes were not changed. If you vote whoever you voted for, it was counted, and this was one of the most secure elections that
we ever had. Trump fire him on Twitter. Right, So I will say again the cyberse security community has come out already and has said we feel very confident about the elections. The vote that you cast is going to be counted, and we feel confident that there won't be interference. And the reason they're able to say that is not just to make people feel good. Since twenty sixteen, we've put so much money and so much work on our
infrastructure to make sure that everyone's vote is secure. And also we have a very decentralized system, right, So I always tell people squirrels are going to steal two on power lines and the Poland place may close. That does not mean that your vote isn't counted or there isn't going to be some type of backup plan. The second area, which is what we've seen increase since twenty twenty, is
the physical security. So when you're talking about making sure people feel comfortable and safe in casting their ballots, so when you go to the voting place, you're not going to have people who are going to be circling your car or who are going to be threatening you. It also includes protecting our poll workers because when you're talking about some of the things that we've seen, you know, just last week a poll worker in Texas was punched
in the face. When we say physical security, we're not just talking about making sure you are safe, but also the people who administer our elections are safe too. And I will tell you that is at a boiling point. The FBI, also other national security and law enforcement agencies are doing much more than they've ever done, but it's still a lot of rhetoric that is happening that's really just empowering people that they can do these kind of things right and not always being clear because and I
think it's important that people follow the thread. You can do these things and you're going to be punished for them, and so making sure people know and really kind of using that as a deterrent. I tell people, I'm like, don't let Donald Trump have you in jail, because he's not going to pay for your attorney. He's not gonna pay for your bun. And this is going to be something that stays with you and follows you the rest
of your life. The third area, which is something that we've seen much more targeting on the black community, is the psychological security and the mental security. And this is any type of digital operation that is really just impacting your will to vote. And this is something that I
talked about in that Wire article two. What we've seen in the intelligence in the national security community is there's been this shift away from black voters being targeted to say you should be voting for Kamala over Trump, or you should be voting for Trump over Kamala. What people are saying is nothing is going to change. Why are
you voting at all? None of this matters. You all were talking about this I think in response to some of the some of the people you love and you care about have been like, this really doesn't matter, like people are overhyping this. Nothing is going to change, I would say. And the warning for the black community is this is you are being targeted and you don't even know that you're being targeted. Because the thing about a democratic system is the people have to believe in the
democratic system. Democratic systems provide snap program benefits to people, right and so democratic systems make sure that their people have water. It is also about the economy. And if you can get people to stop believing that voting matters, the next step is democracy doesn't matter. And for some of the countries, and this is you know, this is
all real data and real information. For countries like a Russia, a China, or a run they don't actually care about the black community and the black community's issues as it relates to the economy, as it relates to police brutality. What they want to show is the democratic system is not serving you, it's not serving your family, is not
serving your community. And for authoritarians, which is like a technical term that I try not to use, but it's just people who feel that power should be centralized in the hands of few. Democratic systems are a competition for them because the way the United States is set up. We're on the show now, I'm talking about President Trump. Even if he gets elected, I'm still going to say these things. And I have the right to say these things.
You don't have the right to question and call out government in Russia and in China in the same way that you do in the United States. And for them to be able to show that you are safer in an authoritarian government, you are more you are more secure, and you can do we can protect you in a way in an authoritarian government that they can in a democracy.
That's the ultimate psychological game. And I think for black folks, and I talk to my family and friends, they're just always like, I don't think anybody in Russia knows that
I exist, And I'm like they do. We have for so long people have tried to tell us that we are not an empowered community that we've started to internalize that and so we don't actually think that an intelligence service or a military service in Russia cares about what's happening in Tuplo, Mississippi, or what's happening in Phoenix, Arizona in the black community. But time and time again, we've
seen the intelligence that they do. They are watching, they are seeing these messages in hopes that we will pick them up and we will stop to start to opt out of these democratic systems.
Okay, so.
I know that's a lie.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if this counts. But you made a comment earlier about counterinte counter terrorism, and you said we might circle back to that. What you've just said feels like a terrorist attack, but a digital or a cyber a terrorist attack on citizens of the United States of America right now, I don't know if I'm using the right terms. This is not my field of expertise, but I want to use this as an opportunity to circle back to your comments saying that you wanted to
develop more of a conversation about counter terrorism. So so just talk to me about kind of what was in your mind when you initially fired that word off, and perhaps what you've done or what you would like to see done in the next administration, and if if I'm connecting those two pieces at the right place, because that immediately made me think back to that point in the conversation. So yeah, explain.
I'm happy to so in terms of this election, and everybody can pick what their issues are, but I'm a two issue voter and everything that I vote for can be categorized in two areas. The first is this is a little bit of a sports analogy for the sports fan, it's defensive policy.
Right again, defensive policy, yes, So.
Two policy areas for me, defensive policy and offensive policy. Yeah, we talked a little bit about offensive policy. And offensive policy for me is what are you doing to stimulate growth? Right? And what that means is how are you helping poor people? How are you helping black people? Is that for giving student loans? Is that increasing social security benefits? Is that making the SNAP program more accessible for folks and increasing those issues? So when we talk about Kamala harris policy
on offensive policy, she's doing a really good job. I tell people, I don't actually know what Trump's offensive policy is other than he's going to give tax breaks to the rich. But I tell people I vote in my own interest. I'm not a billionaire, and so I'm not voting for billionaires to get a tax break that's not going to help me. So when we talk about this other option or the other policy option. That's defensive policy, and that's protecting minorities. That is where we talk about
counter terrorism. That is where we talk about counter intelligence, which again is counter espionage policy, but it's also where we talk about cybersecurity. I think people have gotten a little bit far removed from the Trump administration, so we forget about some of the defensive policies that he had. And so one of the biggest issues for me that I worked on in Congress and then to the White House to advocate that we never see something like this
again are black identity extremists. I don't know if you all remember this term, but in twenty seventeen, this is eight months after Trump got elected, the FBI decided that black people who have this increased perception of police brutality were a danger to police, and so they issued this it's an unclassified report and you can people can look
it up. It was an unclassified report issued by the FBI that went to every local law enforcement officer in the country that said, here are the things that you should be on the lookout for. Know and understand that these people may these black identity extremists, may be attacking you. I tell people all the time. That's a really good example of like why you need to dig through stuff. That policy came out eight months into the Trump administration.
Trump empowers people even when he doesn't put his fingerprints on it. I don't know that that memo made it up to the White House the way we know the separation of our intelligence gathering and our warnings versus the president, who is a political leader. I tell people he probably didn't know that that warning was gonna come out, but he empowered people at FBI that they could release something like that and they would be okay. Those people it
was eight months into his presidency. Those folks probably were there during the Obama administration, but they knew that wasn't gonna fly. They knew they couldn't do that. And so when you talk about domestic terrorism and what it means for Black Americans and black folks in their day to day, it was that because if you are a black identity extremist or if you just look like you might be, that means I can pull you over. That means we can do surveillance on you for prolonged periods of time
without a warrant, without your knowledge. It also means means that we can arrest you, and we can basically amplify the charges. So if you have a peaceful protest and something happens and maybe there's some kind of property damage, you're gonna get charged at a very different level if we have now decided that you're a part of a
terrorist movement called Black identity extremists. I don't want to get too in the weeds for people on that, because I will say one of the things that the Congression of Black Caucus and we were able to do in Congress is we made sure we talked about this widely to everyone but civics here, but also strategy. We were in the minority when that intelligence report came out, so we weren't in a place going back to the money to say FBI like we'd sent letters. We tried to
do oversight. We wanted to know who who signed off on this, who gathered the information, how long has this been in the works. But we weren't in the We weren't in the majority, and there's no substitute for being in charge. And the power that we were able to use was really the activist community. And so the advocates started talking to the activist community to be like, these are these police are going to be policing your protests, and now they have basically been given a blank check
to say that you are black identity extremists. We need to as a collective all say that this is bad and we won't stand for this. And so we were able to get the FBI to rescind the memo. But I use that as an example of like, that is some of the chaos and craziness that was going on during the Trump administration. The FBI created a new terrorist movement that was just focused on black identity extremists. And look, they said it was a lot of things. It was like, oh, well,
you know, some of these people are sovereign citizens. Sovereign citizens don't believe in federal government, they don't believe in policing, they don't pay their taxes. Well, you can, black people can be sovereign citizens. We were not saying that.
It is impossibly not the same. Yeah, it's just.
Not the same. And so when we talk about domestic terrorism and what that looks like, I think I think people may assume that it's going to be these big sweeping changes, but that is something that as you wherever you are listening to y'all's podcast. Your local law enforcement got that memo, and that put a target on your back, whether you knew the target was on your back or not. That is what happens when the Trump administration is in charge.
Wow. Yeah.
With regards to cybersecurity, we tend to pay a lot of attention to foreign interference. You know, we've spoken about Russia, We've spoken about Iran and China. I want to keep us where we are when we talk about domestic terrorism. You spoke earlier about mental and psychological security. That spoke to me specifically. You've listened to our show before, so you've probably picked up on this. Ramses is my brother
outside of Civic Cipher. But with regards to our show and all of the stories and information that we have to digest to do this show effectively, as you could imagine, a lot of it is heavy, a lot of it is discouraging, a lot of it is demotivating, and Ramses is like my optimist center, like everything's going to be OKAYQ.
You know, we're going to survive this. We're gonna be fine.
But he knows I've been exceptionally stressed out about this election and It has nothing to do with Russia. It has nothing to do with China, It has nothing to do with Iran. It has to do with places like Virginia, where the Supreme Court is saying that they can continue to purge the voting polls less than a week from
the election. It has to do with the United States, where on a microphone in front of cameras, Mike John and Donald Trump have set out loud that they have this secret, this little secret between them that he knows that they're going to be fine with regards to the House and this election. How are we supposed to feel watching things like this happen?
How do we go?
How do we move forward hopeful that our rights are being protected and that this thing isn't just being taken from us. They say that every accusation by the GOP and and you know Trump's MAGA movement, every accusation is really a confession. Everything that they want to say that we are going to do in the future they are actively trying to do. Now, how should we feel and what type of things are in place to fight against things like this When they're not even they don't even sneak,
they're not even trying to be covert. They're saying out loud that we're going to try to take this from you. And you know, there's election officials all over the country because you mentioned that there's it's not a singular centralized system. There's all these local governments, all these local offices that are facilitating our election, with people who seems Trump has indoctrinated saying that they're not going to certify this election
and all these things. For someone like myself, and I would imagine, you know, some of our listeners might feel the same way, this is terrifying to me.
These are heavy topics, and I want to take a point to just say you all have also done an amazing job this election season of having national security folks, having black people who work on these issues. You all have shared your platform with us, and so I one thank you all for that, but also put it in
context for you all. When we come on these shows, we are trying to talk to you about the worst that could happen, and we're highlighting the bad things that are happening because we want people to have an awareness and said, I don't want y'all to think about this all day every day. That's actually not what a healthy democracy is supposed to look like. Like you're not supposed to be in the grocery store worried about Russian criminals
taking money from people in the staff program. So know that you all are getting a disproportionate amount because you all are providing a place for us to have these conversations.
Okay, that's right.
The other thing that I would say is really kind of going back to democracy as a whole, which now I'm going to sound like the I'm being overly optimistic, but it is true. We have the systems in place. We just cannot give up on the systems. And that is what scares me the most where and it's why I try to double down so that our people know that you are empowered. Like you don't think that your vote will change anything, but people abroad, our adversaries abroad,
they actually know that it will. When you talk about how do you handle all of this, I will encourage you all to figure out how to compartmentalize this. You know, when I told I've shared this story with people, my job in Congress was to show up when things are at its worst. Right, So I tell you I worked on cybersecurity. You work on counter terrorism. You work on
counter intelligence. I don't show up with a whole lot of good news, right, And a member of Congress said this, He's like, every time I see you come, tell us something sad, or you tell us something that makes me mad. And I said yes, and then we do something about it. In twenty sixteen, when we saw and we have the reports now that the black community was targeted by Russia more than any other group, more than any other community.
Everything that we have done is the reason why I can sit here now in twenty twenty four and say your vote is going to be protected in terms of the decentralization of our elections. That's actually something that benefits
our country in a different way than other countries. Yes, there are election deniers who have a role in the election, but since twenty twenty, most states, including Arizona, you all have really almost taken away the power of one single person to make the final call, to make the final judgment. That's Civics in action. That wasn't the case in twenty twenty.
Arizona is a really good example. The way you all had your structure set up, you had given a lot of power to one person to certify now there are five different people across five different areas that have to certify you all's results. I'm not saying that y'all are not going to have a crazy person or an election denier, but I'm saying we got four other opportunities to get that right. To me, that is advancement, and that's what
growth looks like. The idea that everything will be perfect or that there won't be problems, it's too high of a bar, and you're gonna you're to feel overwhelmed and you're going to feel discouraged. I compartmentalized because I know I can't do all of these things. The reason I show up and I talk to black people and Hispanic communities and low income communities about China I run in Russia is because I don't show up and talk to
them about the Social Security Administration. I know that we have things that we need to be doing over there. I have to trust that there are other professionals who are doing this work too. I think that is the because even coming on here trying to make sure people have an awareness about the Hairst administration and what it will be, it is going to be lots of people making sure that nothing falls through the crafts, and if you try to take on everything at one time, you
are going to be overwhelmed. And I think that's also what's hard for voters in these elections every four years. There are now fifteen things that you got to worry about that you weren't necessarily thinking about before. The role is to elect the adult in the room who is going to make sure that professionals are working on this and then they're doing it in a strategic way that is going to benefit the most people. But you really
do have to compartmentalize this. And I will say because I, you know, you talk about these heavy topics and for the people who can't see us, I have on a red address and I try to do these intentional things because especially black communities, low income communities, we already have so many burdens on us. Yes, indeed, we already have so many things that we are worried about. The reason that I show up and I, you know, fight through speech impediments and nervousness because I would love to just
write about these things and never talk about them. It's because I want people to know. I don't want you to think about this every day, but know that I'm working on this every single day, like we are. I will make sure that we do not have another black identity extremist memo that is going to your local police officers. We are going to make sure where we are. Literally
now there's legislation in Congress. We're figuring out how to get these chips into these EVT cards because we cannot keep letting criminals take money from the most vulnerable votes. There are people who are committed to working on this, but every four years, every two years, every other year, for your local elections, we just need people to do one thing, and that is to vote, and to be
clear that that's the accountability piece, right. I think for us, the message that I hear are seeing that people are attacking our will to vote scares me more than any kind of terrorism issue, more than any other cybersecurity issue, because if people give up on this system, I don't know how I'm going to get them back.
Well, let's let's let's go with that for a second while we're here. You know, people.
Feeling disengaged, people feeling like you know they're they're vote won't make a difference. People who are susceptible to the subtle and deliberate influences of either foreign actors or people who you know, maybe they're domestic actors, but they pedal
misinformation and disinformation. Let's talk about not only the importance of civic education and certainly in a polarized political climate, how important civic education is, but let's also discuss for the benefit of our listeners and their communities around the country, maybe some best practices that they can adopt, especially when it comes to consuming online or other digital information.
Yeah, this is a really good question, and I get asked this a lot when I do community events. The number one thing I tell people is you have got to figure out who your trusted messenger is. People are listening to this podcast, if they've decided to cite that civic cipher, is going to be their trusted messenger. That is your trusted messenger. Now you got to be clear. Your trusted messenger is not going to cover everything that happens in the world and give you a position on it.
But remember I said, I have those two policy issues that are my primary concern I know who I go to to discuss those two issues. For me, my trusted messenger is the NAACP. But for other people it may be color of change, it may be urbanly. I tell people you don't have to have an affiliation with every organization.
I pay my membership dues to the NUBACP because I know that once a week I'm going to get a national newsletter and then I'm a part of a local chapter, and so I know they will tell me what's going on in Washington, DC. Because we also have city council elections that are coming up, we have mayorial elections. I can't keep up with all of these things, right Like, I wake up every morning as part of my job to read what happened in Russia and run in China.
I don't necessarily have the time or the mental space to keep up with what is going on in the city of Washington, DC. When you have a trusted messenger, they will clear through the noise for you. And I
think that's especially for folks in Arizona. But your listeners may be in Detroit, they may be in la If you start listening to everybody all the time, it is going to get really difficult to know who you can trust, and then you're gonna be inundated with so much noise that it makes it really will just make you hesitate to do anything. And so having trusted messengers that you can go to, and you know, it's more than just the newsletters, it's their social media and you can just
connect with folks on multiple levels. All I've been on you all socials too. You have this podcast, but y'all also in the comments, and y'all are talking to people and your question. But also when you don't know something. One of the things I appreciate about y'all, you say, I don't know, but we'll figure it out or we'll come back to y'all on that. And that's what I tell people when you're a trusted messenger. And as I'm a trusted messenger, that doesn't mean I always know the answer,
but it means I'm not giving you false information. And so when I say something, I'm saying it because it is true. That is how we build our trust. But also when I don't know something, I will tell you I don't know that. And I saw you all had Ambassador Susan Rice on here, who ran the Domestic Policy Council for the Biden Harris administration. They the Domestic Policy Council.
I was on the National Security Council. They work on so many issues that I would get overwhelmed, but I knew everything that they were doing it was important, but I had to just also entrust that they were doing what needed to be done.
Of this.
One of the things that happens with our elections is you are picking a president who will ensure that your priorities are being met even when you don't know all of the day to day things that are happening, and that's really what you want. Like I tell people, I'm like, you know, the Trump administration kind of drove us all crazy because every day people were getting fired on Twitter. All of these policies were changing at the speed of a tweet. That was overwhelming because we knew there was
no diligence that was going on behind the scenes. And also it was creating instability because day to day you didn't wake up and know what was going to happen. The Hair's campaign and what the Hairs administration would be is stability and calmness. And so some of this anxiety that you are feeling is, yes, because it's an election season and we all feel a little bit more anxiety, but it's also because we have a memory and we know what that anxiety was like during the administration and
for black people. I keep telling folks this. I'm like, some people are just going to vote, and it's like a football game, right Like, it's like I want my team to win. Black people, Hispanic people, this is our livelihood, right Like, I'm talking to you all about a lot of stuff. But the truth is, if my brothers are being pulled over by police in Mississippi and in Tennessee, I'm not going to be able to go to that White House and think about what's happening in China or
what's happening in im Prussia. Yeah, and so I say that to say I don't have that was a lot to say, I don't have an immediate If you do X, why will happen? But you do have to compartmentalize. And I would tell people use your anxiety for something positive, like what you are talking about, Q. And I know you've talked to other people and you've talked about this on the show a lot. I think people have to be reminded. People are getting too far from what Trump did.
The reason I talk about black identity extremists is because when we talk about Cointaeil pro people are like, oh, from the sixties and the seventies. I'm like, no, I'm talking about twenty seventeen. This is you. This is something
that happened to you. I do think there will be a period post election where the anxiety will come down, but we'll still have it because we got to wait on the election to be called, and now post January sixth, twenty twenty one, we all got to kind of, you know, you gotta be vigilant because we got to get through January sixth, and we got to get through the inauguration.
I will tell people there are folks that once we get past the election, if we elect Harris, there will be people who will make sure that folks who are committing crimes, who are being violent, who are intimidating post election are held accountable in a way that these people will be rested, They'll be charged so that the folks on January sixth show they know that they can't do
that again. Most of the things that have happened the January sixth Committee in Congress, but also those charges, those acquisitions are sorry, those convictions are to show people like there are consequences to your action, and just because we don't always know all the consequences. It does not mean that they aren't happening, but you have to just kind of dig at that and keep forward. But that was a lot to say. You all are getting one because of the work that you all are do, You're getting
a lot of incoming. And then two, you've felt this before. And also what you're feeling is we know how bad it can be. The black community knows how bad it can be and will be under the trumpet message.
We have memories, Like you said, we have.
Memories and they don't they're you know, you all talked about this. You know, Dixie was played at that rally.
On site a black speaker, and.
I'm like, you know, I went to the University of Mississippi. That song was played when when I was a student there. That song was still being played at our sporting events. When I was a student there, we still had a Confederate mascot. By the time I left, we didn't have a Confederate mascot. And I remember we as student organization, the Black Student Union, but also the Divine Nine. We worked really hard on that. Our strategy honestly became sports.
We were like, kids don't want to come play sports here. Y'all love sports. They don't want to come play sports because we got all of this Confederate, this Confederate signia insignia around. I remember there was a point we got the Confederate mascot to go away, so at that point you couldn't have a Confederate flag. We didn't have a Confederate mascot. Dixie was still on the table, and we
had a meeting. I was in law school, and I'm like, I can't do it all, Like it was really impactful, and I get that off the back and the strength of everyone else that had worked to get that mask out away. I knew those students were going to work just as hard when they were in undergrad when they were in law school. And five six years later, the
band doesn't play Dixie anymore. When I heard, because I didn't watch the rally, when I heard that they were doing that, I'm like, yes, that them playing that song was a dog whistle, a very overt dog whistle, but it's also a doll whistle to us to be like, now, these people are telling us who they are, They're being
very clear about it. So what are we going to do to find if they want to play that at Trump events, rally events, if Trump decides that he wants to play it at mar A Lago, I don't care, but you're not going to play that at my White House. You're not going to play that and stand behind my presidential podium. And that's what I can control. I can't control that he wants to have a rally and people will like, actually listen to that song and play. We have to focus on what you can control, and we
can keep him out of White House. We can make sure that that song is not ever played at any official presidential event. But we can't do that if he's the president.
You know. Unfortunately, some of those tactics are working. Some people in our community are being driven to apathy, being driven to tapping out, being convinced that their votes don't have power. Rams and I hosted a conversation with black men here in Arizona. Close to one hundred men came out, and one of them stood up and said that our votes don't matter. And that was really really discouraging because
this gentleman was old enough to be our father. But he's someone who most likely lived through a lot of the progress that has happened for black people in this country and has been in a position that he's in now where that progress has slowed to the point where he's just thrown up his hands, and you know, feels
like what am I doing this for? You have black celebrities using their voice in their platform to discourage us from participating, which is a really really confusing thing for me and even some who would position themselves black leaders. I won't even say his name, because other people have a lot more respect for this gentleman than I do.
You know, telling us don't vote until we get something, as if by not participating we'll be able to hold the accountability after the fact, after we don't get the result that we thought we wanted. A very confusing strategy by this supposedly very intelligent black man. Vice President Harris is doing something that I think is intelligent and I want you.
To speak to it. She seems to be going after.
Voters who might be a little bit disenfranchised or a little disconnected from the political process, who typically wouldn't participate, and even those who might position themselves opposed to her, So instead of attacking them, she's reaching out to them. Instead of feeling offended by the idea that there's this growing the erosion of black men voters that support her. Instead of positioning them as uninformed or stupid or her enemy, she's saying, no, you're right, I should have to earn
their votes. So speak about what you've seen. As far as her strategy in trying to attract these different sectors of voters who might feel a bit disconnected from the political process.
I think it's needed. I mean, I say this as a black woman, but also a Southern black woman. You know, the Hairs campaign. They have a robust campaign in Mississippi, and people might be listening and being like, why Mississippi the same reason that she's doing to outreach to black men. It is about showing people that I am going to be there for you as well. We know, I mean, I hope, I always hope that you know, Mississippi will be a Georgia and we'll be able to be purple
or will be able to be blue. But it's a very red state. That being said, it has the highest population of black voters who get to vote for president. Right they're behind DC. But DC doesn't get to vote for president. She doesn't have to campaign in Mississippi. She doesn't have to run ads in Mississippi. Her numbers are
probably going to be the same either way. But showing people that it does not matter if you if your state gets me to the office, I am going to be there for you and I'm going to work for you. I think that's the signal that you have to have. And look, it takes a lot of time to do to like have these conversations because they're conversations, right, Like I tell folks, I'm happy to come on y'all's podcast because we get like an hour to talk about this.
I'm actually really terrible at knocking on doors and canvassing because I'm the kind of person if you if that when he stood up and he said that, I am the like follow up with you afterwards and be like you want to talk about this, you want to talk about like very specifically what's happening in your life, and like let me you know, I'm an attorney, let me present the case of democracy and America. And I'm also
really honest with black people, especially us. This is all we got, y'all, Like this is not no one is going to wake up and just be like, you know what we have not been good to the black community. We should just stop. That's not going to happen. Everything that we get is through force and accountability. And to your point of this whole idea, what I just won't vote and it's like, okay, so how is that going
to advance what your issue is? And that requires a conversation with people, and you have to have these these very hard conversations. And I in the South and just pronounced in general with the black community, I think we've always had a lot of people talk at us and what people have no not being used to. But the Hairs campaign is doing She's having conversations with us. And that's what we have always wanted and honestly, that's what
we have always deserved, but people hadn't done it. There have been people that, you know, I hear people say, well, every four years, people keep talking about how important black folks are, and then we don't hear from them, we don't see them. Tell me break that down, like, where have we not shown up for you? Is it because we've done a lot, We've forgiven all this student loan
student loaned it. There are still people who are like, well, my loans weren't forgiven because of X or y okay, is that the number one issue is that what is like making you hesitant about her? Then it is more than fair to want to know what is she going to do on student loans? How is she going to make sure that other people advances. It's a conversation. It's not a bumper sticker, and it's not a like a hashtag. But what I want people to understand is you have
to make people give you what you need. It is not for us to say or to think it's dangerous actually for us to think that if we just remove ourselves from the political process, it's going to stop. It's going to continue whether we're in it or not. Do we want to be leading, do we want people to seek us, to court us to want to do the things that we need, or do we just want to like fall to the back. I'm not a person that is going to let other people dictate my life and
the policies that impact my community. And so I show up and I say these are the things that I want, and I want them to happen or else. And you can see that in other ways, Like in twenty sixteen, y'all, we didn't even know the Russians were targeting black votes until like a month or two months before the election. We immediately were like, we're never doing this again. I don't expect that anybody here has seen all the intelligence reports, but we make them give us these intelligence reports.
At Cambridge Analytica. Is that what I'm thinking different?
That was Cambridge and so what happened. That's a good example is they kind of did an after action. So we knew, you know, the DNC was hacked that summer, there were signs that something was going on, but the public announcement that Russia was interfering with our elections that didn't come until October of twenty sixteen.
Got it.
What we've seen since then is now we get reports one hundred days out and we get we are continuing to get reports. SBI is continuing to arrest people to do these citations. To me, that is progress because one of the things that was most harmful and hurtful is don't tell Black folks after the fact that we were targets. Tell me that I'm being targeting. Don't come and tell me after the election that I was targeted, because I
can't do anything about it. After the election. Those that's a love of nuance that requires you to sit down and do what Harris has done. She's doing the rounds on the podcast. And look, I'm in DC where all these people are like now the shade room. What is this? Also there's this former football player Shannon Sharp that has a podcast. This is new to them. But these are the voices that our community has been listening listening.
To your time.
Well, I want to make sure that I say something to our listeners. Obviously, we have a long standing relationship with our listeners, and most of our listeners are understand our plight here. But you know, we do our best to inform and empower our listeners to make the changes in their community. So I want to sort of piggyback off of what you said in so far as voting is concerned. I think I want to invoke like an old adage or an old like saying, it's the squeaky
wheel that gets the oil. If you make noise, if you make yourself visible, then you will get a response, certainly more quickly and more intentionally than if you don't. To know that we've been targeted is it's kind of a hurtful thing, but it's Also, I believe on some level it can cause a person to feel stupid, to
feel that vulnerable, to feel like they've been tricked. And a quote that we've resurrected here on the show Qan and I. It comes from Mark Twain, but he says it's easier to fool a person than to convince a
person that he has been fooled. And so for pe people who might be wrestling with what may go against their nature, you know what I mean, Like, in simple terms, the election is very simple, right, But people who are critical of a potential Harris president, someone who has not been the president, comparing her to someone who has actually been the president and has lived under that People that reduce the benefit of another Trump presidency to a twelve
hundred dollars check that they think that he gave to them, when in fact, it was a Democratic Congress that gave them a twelve hundred dollars For those people, those people who either would cast their vote the wrong way because they have been misinformed and they now feel like, well, I've been out loud saying this for so long, I have to like stick the landing and vote for Donald Trump. Or for those other people who say, you know, as human and there's an individual who's he used to have
more respect from us. We do our best not to tear down black men on this show or black women, so you know, but the fact that the facts are the facts, you know what I mean. We have a much greater agenda with this show. We built this show so that we could uplift black and brown voices and empower allies. So that is our first order of business for that individual and individuals who think like him that you know, just set this vote out and blah blah blah whatever.
I don't know if he had respect from both of us. I think he had more respect than he deserved from you. Okay, we'll say it that way.
But for folks that think the way that he thinks, you know, again, I want to make sure that you take away from this conversation that that squeaky wheel. I think that that really works to simplify things.
And then, you know, for everyone else, I think that you know what is next.
We've had a conversation. We know exactly what we're up against, we know exactly how to change it. I know that you wanted to circle back to the importance of having a democratic Congress. But I think that throughout the conversation you've touched on it at many points, and even if you hadn't, the contrast is a Trump presidency and a far right you know Congress, because you know, that's what
we end up with with a Trump presidency. My belief is that every single vote for a Democratic president pulls the entirety of our political system a little bit more to the left. Every single vote, even if it doesn't ultimately end up electing the president, they do have to pay Those on the right have to pay attention to those numbers. Hey, these policies were popular, These policies were unpopular. If we want to stick the landing on this again, we're going to have to back off of this, you know.
And it moves the entirety of the political system a little bit more to the left. And this is sort of something that people need to know. And I'm sure the same holds true for people on the right, you know. To be fair, you know that I don't believe that that is really the best version of this country. You know, that's very well documented on this show. I'm I'm over
there left, like I'm like throw a rock. That's how left I am, but you know, just to be fair, I believe that that is the subtle influence that even an individual vote can have on the entirety of a nation's political agenda. And so for a person to say that they do not want to vote because they don't think it counts, it's it's a drop in the ocean. Well, the ocean is made up of a lot of drops. That's how you get an ocean. And you know, your drop is just as valuable as any other drop.
And so.
You know, I want to make sure that we impart these things because the stakes are so high, as Q mentioned and as everyone knows.
And we don't get to really have as.
Many conversations with our listeners before election day because there are not as many opportunities, not there's not as much time as there once was, And so folks that are kind of at that last little, that critical moment of deciding whether or not they want to actually follow through
on what they've said or didn't say or whatever. I just wanted to add on to your words of wisdom, you know, some of our own, just as a kind of a final thought here, I'm not going to leave us with simply that because I know that this is an ongoing mission for you.
This is as you mentioned, you live in this space. You know how.
To dissect information and interpret data, and indeed you can share that with people who you know this is of interest to them.
You can inspire other black people.
You know, young black people, because you know, obviously we need to think about you know what comes next, and and you know the next generation coming up behind you.
And I know full well that you're an inspiration certainly art of the both of us. That's a fact.
So what we want to do in this moment is ask you to leave our listeners with some connective tissue, website article, you mentioned, your book, social media, all that sort of stuff, so that people can tap into your ecosystem and continue to be fed by this brilliant mind of yours.
Well, thank you. I am hyper aware that this is one of the last times that your listeners are going to hear from you all before the final day of voting, and so I appreciate that you all share time with me because I am also on that timeline. Yes, how do I have this conversation with as many people as possible? So thank y'all for being so gracious. I will say leaving for people, you should do what is going to
help you today? When people say they're not going to vote, I ask them, how is that going to help you today? And I think it really catches people. It like makes people take a step back because it is something to be said to be in a place where you don't think anything will change, But then what are you doing to change it? And so when you and you should vote for the person who's going to help you the
most today. And I tell folks you should never feel I don't care if you have been out here at the MAGA rallies, if you have been like Trump or nobody every day since he lost in twenty twenty, you go in that voting booth and you vote for who is going to help you the most today if in four years from now that is the Republican Party. Because you are a billionaire and you have made it big.
I'm not trying to squash on your dreams or what your aspirations are, but who is going to make sure that you can get that loan from the bank to start that business. Who is going to make sure that you get a child tax credit so that you have
extra money to put toward that billion dollar business. It's nothing wrong with us voting in our self interest, especially when someone is telling you, which is what Trump is doing, that he is going to do everything that is in his best interest, So do what's in your best interest. In my best interest is for Harris to be president.
That is my livelihood. I'm terrified. I remember all of us, remember, especially black men, Remember how much targeting was happening under the Trump administration, and when he just empowered people to openly hate us and openly attack us and openly surveil us. In terms of where we have these conversations, I tell folks, you know, I'm not in the government right now, which is why I can come on your show and be a little bit more open and have a different kind
of conversation than other folks can. But most of my writing, the things that I'm talking about, when I'm talking about these things are on LinkedIn. People should connect with me on LinkedIn. I will say I was perusing you all social media. I want to prepare people. My social media does not a little like y'all's. But I write about these things, and I talk about these things there, and I'm going to keep talking about this post election and it is. It's not something that other people will do.
But what I'm asking people is to give us a chance. Like I don't have a chance in the Trump administration. Y'all don't have representation in the Trump administry. I am not the kind of person that's like, if Trump wins, I'm moving to Canada, I'm going back to the mother Inland, to Africa. No, I'm going to be here. But give me a chance to help our community. We cannot do that when he is in office. He does not care
about us. And I could be fine with him not caring about us, but he takes it a step further. He attacks us m H Like I am not safe. You are not safe, your family is not safe. And I would love for people to vote from a place of empowerment and optimism, but at a minimum, just help yourself and protect yourself. Yeah.
Well, I think that those are about as profound of you know, words of wisdom as as we could hope for. I want to, you know, thank you for your you know, your time and the work that you've done and the work that you're doing doing.
It is special and.
Rare, and I know that there's a lot that goes into it on the back end, and so that's, you know, another reason why it's so special.
It probably takes.
A lifetime of courage and bravery and brilliance to even get to the point where you're able to articulate things like this to people like us, and we could not know the scope of your story or the amount of effort and resiliency that has gone into it. So, you know, we've said this before on the show, but you know, this is the platform where you come and we say to you black woman, that we are proud of you,
and we appreciate the work that you are doing. We you know, wherever you have to go next and wherever you were earlier. You know, they might not say it on ABC News, they might not say it at the Wall Street Journal, but.
We will say it here. We're so proud of you.
It's an honor to talk to you, and this is something that we hope that we will get to do more and more in the future. So again, thank you once again. Today's guest is Nicole Tisdale, a national security attorney with a career including roles at the White House National Security Council, the US Congress's House Committee on Homeland Security, and the twenty twenty Biden Harris transition.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank y'all,