Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Donald Trump has called on ABC to fire its entire staff since nothing is ever his fault. We have such a great show for you today the Leadership Conferences. Maya Wiley talks to us about her new book, Remember You Are Wiley. Then we'll talk to doctor Nicorlai Corte about his book Kamala, The Motherland and Me. But
first we have NBC News is John Allen. John Allen is a senior national political reporter at NBC and the author of Lucky How Joe Biden Barely won the Presidency. Welcome back to Fast Politics, my friend John Allen.
Hey, Molly, I wanted to.
Talk to you because I felt like I wanted to know what is going on after this debate, like what your take was on the state of the race and if it changed things.
So I think it did change things in some ways that may not, you know, immediately show up and pulling. I think, first and foremost, it appeared that Kamala Harris's goal was to get under Trump's skin, and I think she did that. Yeah, and he had been riding pretty high. He just knocked out the previous Democratic nomedy. In the most recent debate, he was feeling pretty good about himself, and he looked very agitated in the debate at various times. So I think, you know, she was able to knock
him off his game a little bit. What I'm not as certain about is whether she has persuaded all those folks or even a majority of them who still feel like they don't know enough about her or enough about her plans that you know, they're ready to cast ballots for her. From a first debate perspective, I think she hit the mark that she wanted to. You know, we'll have to see if they're necessarily the ones she needed to.
I would suspect that there will be another debate, that both sides will feel a desire to do that.
WHOA, you think there's going to be another debate. I mean, this is like the hot topic. Now, why do you.
Think that give you our Harris? You still have to feel that deal. He's still to finish making that case, that positive case for yourself. It is an imaginary bar, but there is some bar in every voter's mind for when somebody has shown themselves to be presidential, and I think obviously for most of the Democrats, Konwall Harris is not Donald Up and therefore is more presidential than Donald Trump. I'm not sure she's cleared that bar yet for all of the people that she needs to clear that bar.
Trump has been president. It is not hard to imagine him as president because we all watched it for four years. You know, she's trying to effectively unpresident him right now, and I think that's a tall order. I think that she's still got some work to do to convince people either that he has disqualified himself or that she has qualified. And I think at the very least, you know, she'll
want another opportunity to hammer him from his perspective. I think there's incentive to do another debate because it was pretty clear that he lost it, and you don't have to ask Democrats that or independent political analysts that. You can just see what Trump dide. He showed up in the spin room right after the debate. You don't have to spin if you win. He blamed the moderators. You
have to call out the refs if you win. And you know there was all this sort of conspiracy chatter about Kamala Harris wearing an earpiece rather than in the ear a sort of ridiculous conspiracy chatter that, you know, is another sort of tell that Trump and the people close to him felt like he lost because if you win, you don't accuse the opponent of cheating.
Yeah, those were just Tiffany earrings.
By the way, the whole idea that she's somehow needed to have an ear piece to come up, It's like a lot of these conspiracy theories. I feel like we're built around the idea that Joe Biden had dementia. So the idea was Joe Biden might need an ear piece because he has dementia. Okay, he doesn't have dementia and
he didn't have an earpiece. But the idea that then fifty nine year old former prosecutor, sex crimes prosecutor, attorney's General, senator who has done this kind of thing for the last like thirty years and she's been in career government work somehow need a magic earing your.
Piece just is pretty dumb, isn't it.
Yes. Also, if you watch the debate, it's pretty clear that she rehearsed a lot of what she was saying. Which, by the way, all the candidates do. It did not look like she needed somebody to tell her what to say. You know, you could see her going through the progressions of her answers to various questions in my debate time.
I would just say that, like over the course of the last twenty years, there have been any number of debates where candidates accused the other candidate of having some sort of communication with their rank, and not once, is that anyone ever shown that to me? True?
It's a pretty good sign you want, isn't it.
Yeah, on the other side saying that they think you were so good you cheated, Yeah.
I feel like that's a pretty good sense that you might have won. Absolutely, let's talk about what she did on the stage. Because I have this theory if I'm wrong, you can tell me i'm wrong.
I want me to confirm your bias.
No, no, I want you to maybe tell me I'm wrong and then have the people who listen to this podcast and really like me get mad at you.
I mean just kidding. No, No, I'm just kidding. I don't want that.
Well, I sort of want that, but maybe I'm maybe I'm right, So talk to me about this idea. I have this idea that she kind of flipped the script a little bit during that debate, that she was able
to kind of bait him. I mean, obviously she was able to bait him into going crazy, but one of the things she did was because she has this rhetorical style that's very call and response and that's very sort of well thought out, she actually seemed very powerful, and then he tried to do some of the things she did, like I'm speaking, and he seemed really diminished. Does this sound right to you? And if it's wrong, why, And if it's right, expand on it.
I think you're right that she has a commanding presence on stage. I mean, I think that's something that we saw when she watched her first campaign. It's something we saw, you know, on the debate stage in twenty nineteen when she ran for president. You know, having that presence is not a problem for her. She's got that presence, she's got that thing. That doesn't mean that he doesn't.
No, he's very charismatic.
So the two of them, you know, present as people on relatively equal footing on that, saye, and that's somewhat different for him. You know, most of the times he's debated, did all those primary debates in twenty twenty, and you know, he was a more commanding presence than any of the other people in the debate stage. And I think you know, in the debates with Joe Biden, both in twenty twenty and earlier this year, you were more transfixed by Trump
want stage than you are by Biden. It doesn't mean that, you know, Trump necessarily won all those debates. It just means he was sort of a dominant figure on stage. And that's not the case with Harris. She has whatever that is, that factor that you do as a viewer, you gravitate toward her too, So there's a much more equal footing.
I thought one of the things that sometimes was Hillary Clinton, she would struggle to be heard or she would struggle to project in a certain way. It seems to me that Harris doesn't have that problem at all.
Yeah, Harris says just such a different style, right, and her style is one you know, she does project well, she does deliver. Part of that, I think is probably the courtroom prosecutor's experience of you know, selling a case to the jury and being believable and being you know, having convictions not convictions like thirty four felony convictions in
New York, but having the convictions of her principles. And you know, look, you could see during the debate there were times where she felt like she was on more comfortable ground, particularly around you know, when she was talking about abortion, where you see, you know, kind of that full energy and that full authority from her in times where you know, she felt less comfortable. The first question to her was whether people are better off now than
they were four years ago? And she walked right around it, right, So, you know, I mean, she's still finding her way a little bit, and maybe that's what she would want to do if given another opportunity, walk right around that very difficult question to answer at a time when a lot of Americans don't feel like they're better off today than
they were four years ago. But I think if she can get a little more consistency, if she can, you know, rise up on those things that she made feel like a little less comfortable on and have more evenness, that's a benefit. Tournament.
You saw that there were a number of focus groups we saw so along well right about this in the Atlantic. Obviously, all these focus groups are anecdotal at best, right, because they're small groups, but.
Like three people in our rooms right in town.
They are anecdotal. But like you know, so are polls.
Right now, let's look at the state of the race, right, how are we going to look at it?
Polling?
Voter registration, which again is not a straight line and sometimes doesn't mean anything. Though I think this huge surge from the tailor swift voter registration might mean more, but it might mean less.
We don't know.
Well, you'd rather have people who agree with you registering to vote than.
Not, right, So registration, focus groups, polls, donations, and I mean that's it, right, is there?
And lawn signs? I mean, is there.
Anything else that we should be looking at as an indicator of this election?
I mean, I think the big question in my mind is, you know, typically the end of an election, and our elections are drawn out more now because there's more early voting, but you know, typically toward the end of an election, the undecided will break in one direction or the other.
And I think, you know, not one hundred percent in one direction, but say say it's ten percent of the electorate, you know it'll break seventy thirty in one direction or the other, and that will help determine who the president is. You know, I think trying to watch if there are
any indications among that set about where they're weaning. And some of that's deeper polling questions, not just cruity you want to win or who are you going to vote for, but some of the deeper questions that get to people's values and their fears and you know what they're going
to vote on. Those may provide some indications. But if you look at polling, we're basically in the place with that we were, you know, prior to the June debate, where you've got two candidates that are locked in a very close election and the handful of swing states that will determine the outcome. I would say the only difference is that there's probably greater variance with Harris than there
was with Biden, meaning her ceiling is probably higher. Right, she has the ability to break out past where Biden would have been able to, and her floor is probably a little lower then pre debate Biden, Post debate Biden, the floor you know, there wasn't a floor, The floor was lava.
And then versus Trump, whose ceiling is lower and whose floor is about forty two.
Right, there's been nobody in American politics who has a more consistent base than Donald Trump. Right, his force seems to be pretty immovable. But I guess what I would say is that there's some ability to, you know, on the Democratic side, to move it a little bit right, to take people who are thinking beforehand, like I don't really like Biden, I don't really like Trump. I'm going
to hold my nose and vote for Trump. There's some ability to take that layer, that very sort of thin and loose layer of his support and move it.
Part of the secret sauce of Trump was that he got these low frequency voters, these ones, right, So low frequency voters one in a two or people who never vote. A four and a five are people who vote in you know, the five is someone who votes in every primary everything. Right, So one of his secrets was that he got these ones and twos to vote. I mean, to have that happen again. I mean, do you think that is that it's for sure that he will get those people out again, or do you think there's some
waning enthusiasm. Remember, like I'm just thinking about twenty sixteen, and you had he lost by five million obviously won the electoral college. Twenty twenty, he lost by seven million, but it was still more voters than had ever voted before.
Yeah. I mean, the conclusion that I think you should draw from that is that he brings out low propensity voters on both sides. So he brings out the local pensity Republicans, but he's also bringing out low propensity Democrats. The increase in the raw total of Democratic votes between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty was more than twenty percent. Never seen anything like I saw in twenty twenty in terms of voter turned out, and a lot of those people were turning out to stop him from getting a
second term. And that's a challenge for Harris. She's got to try to keep that, you know, maintain that energy on the Democratic side. And I think that's one of the reasons you you know, you saw her spend time attacking and trying to get under his skin and trying to remind Democratic voters of what they don't like about She's still knew for a lot of these voters. I
know that sounds weird. She's been vice president for four years, but you know, as the presidential candidate, she still knew if there are voters that she's got to get out to the that are not already super attached to her. Yes, by the way, So I think the conclusion from you know, from what we're seeing from the Hairs campaign so far is that in order to attach them to her, it's really more about attaching them to the idea of stopping Trump.
Right.
Whether or not that's the right strategy, I can't say, but it does appear to be the strategy that they are pursuing.
Right. For example, his strategy is to tarnish her without tarnishing himself more than he already has, right, Yeah.
But he benefits from me from the inability to make people dislike him more.
Why is that.
I think it's because if you are inclined to dislike him, you really dislike him. It's not like people are like, oh my god, that that's a new gutter for Trump.
Right, Right, that's that's.
Than he was before.
Right.
They haven't watched him over the last ten years, and they're suddenly discovering that they find him to be, you know, objectionable on a personal level, or you know, find that his policies that don't match up with their views.
So let's talk about the eating dogs.
By the way, I am certain that you eat peace and ducks. I am sure that you have had floggra.
I have to tell you that I had a Actually I'm not going to finish the sentence because it sounds so bad, But just assume that something fancy happened with the geese.
There's a whole term that someone's goose is cooked right, right right, and you would only cook a goose if you're planning to eat it.
So what we're talking about here is the lie that Trump said that people were eating dogs that Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
It's a very specific lie, we're eating dogs and cats.
There is no evidence of this that it has been just routinely debunked as debunked as a lie could possibly be.
But Jadie Vance is not convinced.
Yeah, I mean, look, there were there have been complaints registered, but no evidence of that happening. I think there was a video of really showing up in a nearby town where where like that. Someone who was on drags was like, mostly it's not that it comes from nowhere, I guess, but like I'm not sure how like this before we overblown and relatively unfounded allegation how that has anything to do with immigration policy for an entire country.
Right, Like right, But it's more like this is the thing, right, this is the Trump thing. But more importantly than this being Trump's thing, it is also pretty clear indication of where Trump is that he's not gotten any less racist.
The whole concept, right, is fraught with that. The guy's seventy eight years old. They're like, do you expect him to suddenly become somebody who wasn't.
You'd think that saying that kind of smear would make him unelectable. I was surprised by that there were still undecided voters who were like, yeah, he talked about people eating dogs.
Yeah, they don't care. People who will look at Donald Trump and say he's racist and that they think that racism is bad and still vote for him because it's not the thing they care the much about.
Insane.
There will be young black men who think that Donald Trump is racist to will vote for him. Will be young Hispanic men who think that Donald Trump is racist or anti Hispanic and still vote for him. I don't think it will be the majority in either case. I don't think it'll be close to the majority in terms of young African American men. Democrats will still window by a large margin, but there will be some who say, like, this isn't my biggest issue, and I like the cut
of his jib or whatever. Probably won't actually use that term.
Yes, thank you, Thank you John Allen for.
Using the most anniquated possible term.
We have even more tour d eights for you. Did you know the Lincoln Projects. Rick Wilson of Fast Politics MALEI jug Fast are heading out on tour to bring you a night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh at the Region Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest. We'll be at the Bavarium in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September, and on the twenty second, we'll be
in Chicago at City Winery. Then we're going to hit the East coast. On September thirtieth, we'll be in Boston at Arts at the Armory. On the first of October we'll be in Affiliates City Winery, and then DC on the second at the Miracle Theater, and today we just announced that we'll be in New York on the fourteenth of October at City Winery. If you need the laugh as we get through this election and hopefully never hear from a guy who lives in a golf club again,
we got you covered. Join us in our surprise guests that help you laugh instead of cry your way through this election season and give you the inside analysis of what's really going on right now. Buy your tickets now by heading to Politics as Unusual dot bio. That's Politics as Unusual dot bio.
Maya Wiley is the CEO of the Leadership Conference. Doctor Nikorlai Corte is the author of Kamala, The Motherland and Me Welcome Back Too Fast Politics, My friend.
It's so great to be with you, Amali always.
I really love you and respect you and am in awe of you. And by the way, I often want to know what you think of things, so it's pretty fun to get to have you on the podcast for that reason.
Well, thank you, and you know I love you right on back, Molly, you know that.
Yeah, it's really mutual.
So before we talk about your book, remember you are a Wiley, which is a memoir. I want to also point out that you and I are doing a book event together.
Yay.
It's Monday, September twenty third at seven pm at the Strand Bookstore in New York City, which is very cool because the woman who owns the Strand is just a very wonderful person whose family has owned the Strand since it was the Strand. So it's a very cool New York story. Maya tell me about the book.
Well, the book is a memoir, and in a way it's as much a family memoir as a personal memoir, although obviously it's very personal because as I was reflecting on, you know, this era we are in as a country and era where frankly, racism and sexism are set out loud as if they're legitimate and longer shun at a time when we're also seeing protests and protest movements increasing everything from Black Lives Matter we had Times up five for fifteen, all of the things we you know, and
also even on the international front in terms of thinking about justice issues and all the complexity it creates, and all the things we need to do in the society to make this country wonderful place for all of us.
You know, it was very hard for me not to be really thinking about what shaped me and what the struggles are to be an advocate, an activist, a mom, a black woman in a context where we're constantly trying to make this a better place and how much it's shifted and what hasn't shifted, and you know what I feel like, you know are sometimes we have to share our personal struggles to empower the next generation to keep on plowing right on through.
You and I both come from politically minded families. Just tell us a.
Little bit about how your parents shaped what you do now and how you see the world.
Yeah, well, I mean know, first of all, you know, my parents were an interracial couple. A father black man and then trained as an organic chemist, which was its own major milestone back in the fifties. And my mother is a white woman from West Texas from you know, the Southern Baptist tradition, the Southern Baptist tradition that is also a racist tradition, that is a tradition that only
in the late twentieth century apologized for segregationist views. And that's how she was raised, but it is also what she transcended. So the very fact of their marriage and relationship and how they both navigated in a hostile society, and the lessons they taught about that, and even the personal decisions and their personal bravery in refusing to accept the boundaries of a race and sexist society was its own modeling. But they part of that modeling was that
they left it. My father left organic chemistry and a promising career as a professor to be one hundred percent full time in the civil rights movement and at the forefront of the economic justice movement, and my mother as very much a partner, very much the one who was more radical when they first met in terms of her activism, but also the one who became the wage earner so
that he could be an activist. All of those things were personal decisions that modeled that you do what your passion and your heart tells you to do, and you find a way, but that you also always leave with love and with a strong sense of living your principles. And they did it with joy. You know. I think about that a lot as we're in this moment and watching Kamala Harris be joyful, a joyful warrior. But that
was my parents. They were joyful they were silly, they were funny, and you know from your own family history how dangerous the work can be, and how this society has always skirted on the edges of authoritarianism because that's
what racism and sexism produces. And so the fact that we have family members who have lived that dangerous experience and yet, you know, learning just compassion and joy and hope in that fight, in that struggle in difficult times was a big, big, big part of what I learned from my parents.
Right, let's talk about the sort of connection between the Jim Crow South and the way in which democracy was really taken away from a group of people and what Trump and Trumpet are trying to do more generally.
Right, there's a connection there.
Oh yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I really look at this time we're in right now with the outright now, it's no longer dog whistle racism, you know, the racism that Southern strategy where it's like coming out of the Jim Crow South and the success of the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties, which came with blood, sweat, tears, life loss and danger, beatings all the things, and my father and mother working very hard to show that the North was not better. Black
folks got beat downs by the police. Is Syracuse, New York, black housing was being torn down. There was no replacement for that housing. They were fighting school segregation, they were fighting for a housing opportunity, they were fighting police brutality in the North in Syracuse, New York, in a college town. They even had to fight to buy their house because my father was black. Of course, yeah, and there's a great story there about how my father did that joyfully
and did get his house. But I think the point is the connection to showing that racism in this country is throughout this country and intentional, but having won that getting to a point in this country where it wasn't okay, racism was still there. Sexism is still there, but it wasn't okay to be out front and out loud and
explicit about it. And you know, the era we've returned to and what Trump is them because it's not only Donald Trump, right, it's the wave he rode, but those roiling waters were there and as far too many Americans will want to jump into that water and create those waves.
Are hate groups, our extremism are telling people that their problems are people of color of this what we just saw in this last debate round, which was not only the most crazy and offensive lies about Haitian people eating dogs for God's sake, but the fact that those sane people who had been in these community for a long period of time are now getting death threats, are getting
rape threats because of this disinformation. What this has unleashed is the permission to suggest that there is nothing wrong with hate, and that there is nothing wrong with the violent expression and threatening nature of hate, and that there's nothing wrong and that you can claim the mantle of somehow defending this country by tearing it apart and using race and using gender and tapping all the hate and
misogyny of that. To do it is very much a demonstration that this is a marathon and a relay race. You know, that democracy is no promise. And my parents used to debate this, like, what's the endgame is it? Can we ever hope to get to the endgame? You know? And at the end of the day, my mother's lesson was a powerful one that has really kept me motivated in this really dark time we're in, and it's a
time that will only get darker. Unless we get more activists, and that's also what I learned from them, and not shirk away from the dangers of this time and recognize that the dangers are real, but that the reality is we've always been facing this down as a country, and the way we have made progress is that we have faced it down and that people did do it with compassion. They did it with love, they did it with principle, they did it with joy, and they did it by
creating coalition. And my mother used to say, you know, she she would say she was not optimistic that this would we would ever be done with this, but she was absolutely committed to the fight and that the fight was the point. And I just think we have to hold on to that rather than saying, well, we won't fight unless we know we're not that everyone says this, but we won't fight unless we know we're gonna win. No,
we all fight because that's how we win. And we don't know how long it's Goi'll take, but guess what, every generation's got to pay a forward. And that's really what my parents taught me, and that's what their experiences taught me, and I draw strengths from that in these times.
Yeah, I mean that lie and then the fact that they won't admit that it's a lie.
Ye together, I don't know.
I mean I was thinking about my grandfather and the Peak skill riot. Yeah, and when we were talking about the racism that absolutely occupied the North. And obviously from watching that insane debate, we know that racism is really everywhere. And I think what you said is really important. That it's maybe not the same way that it was in certain ways, but the blatantness of it is obviously. You know,
we will never stop fighting this kind of thing. But I wonder how much of the last gasps of a smaller and smaller group of people who are just trying desperately to hold on to their privilege.
I think of this in a couple of different ways. I mean one and to your point, Mollie, the majority of this country thinks this is offensive and appalling. Right, there's no question about that. I actually have a pillow behind me. I'm sitting in my office at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. You know, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights coalition. I mean, we got
over to one hundred national organizations. They look like America, that's you know, almost every racial group, gender, that's LGBTQ, that's religious, faith based, many different faiths, geographically diverse. We've got unions, we've got service providers, we own everybody. But it really is and all of the polling, we know
this from all the research. A majority of this country wants well, not just a stronger democracy, you know, believes that everyone should have opportunity, believes that everyone deserves a fair chance, believes that hat should not divide us, believes diversity is important, believes we should have voting rights, all the things. But you know we are the majority. Is the pillow I had in my office and it's our
mantra here. But I think the issue is, and this is how countries fall into authoritarianism, is that if the minority can take over the leavers of democratic institutions, which is exactly what we're seeing. That's what Project twenty twenty five out of the Heritage Foundation is all about continuing. But it's what Donald Trump did as a president and
trying to control the Department of Justice, for example. But it's also what we're seeing in states in the twenty six states that have put bans on our bodies or are fighting about whether we can learn history, actual factual history in our schools about racism, or about immigration or about you know, gender, that we're seeing books being banned
by a minority of people. It's always a minority. But if you read the rules, if you and if we allow the rules to be rigged, whether it's voting, whether it's fear mongering, and sometimes this happens in blue places too. It's not just a partisan issue. I mean, New York City is putting police officers in civilian departments right now. I mean, all of these things are the kinds of
things we have to say. We have to recognize that we got to fight to protect all our democratic institutions, and that includes our government and our ability to have a say and who leads us. That means that we have to be involved locally, It means we have to be involved at state level. It means we have to
be involved at federal level. And we have to understand that that is a long term fight because they've done a lot of work right now, that minority of extremist people, and to your point about the history, they haven't stopped since the Civil War. This is an ongoing ideological front
of extremism. Of white ethno nationalism at its core, that it has been and has had a long term project of doing things like ensuring its ideology is represented on the Supreme Court, ensuring that it has control of state houses because it makes it harder for people to vote because it's not the majority. So I agree with you about the majority, but it's only a last gasp if we are able to focus our strategic attention as a coalition of the willing, which is the majority, to say
we're going to take back our institutions. We aren't going to allow where we don't have perfect agreement, because we don't, but but where we can say we agree that everybody should have a right to vote. We agree that it's a big lie that our elections are not free and fair. We agree that there has to be some protections against racism. There has to be robust civil rights laws. We have to have a free press. We have to have journalism do better. We have to have more mechanisms for fact sharing,
and social media companies got to get in line. We got to regulate artificial intelligence because it's spreading disinformation. You know, all of these things are about democracy and democratic institutions that don't serve in ideology, but that do serve the democratic promise of the people deciding and figuring out how to make this a more perfect union. And that's something that we have to fight for even though we're the majority, because they have been so effected at stealing power from us.
Yeah, exactly. So let me ask you, as you look back on the sort of legacy of the civil rights movement and the fight that your parents did, what do you think that our place in this is?
You know, one of the things, and one of the things that motivated me to write the book was the incredible importance of compassion coupled with our fierceness.
Right.
My parents had and the civil rights movement had a very big vision about what the country should look like. So I mean that big vision was citizenship, not in the sense of a passport, in a sense of being treated fairly and equally, but that meant things like we should have housing, we shouldn't have housing torn down and people not getting housing they can afford. In other words, the schools and school integration was not just bodies sitting next to each other.
It was the.
Quality of learning and the quality of relationship and citizenship that gets the developed out of that and that nobody should be hungry in this country. And this was part of why my father started organizing on welfare rights, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Like the promise of the Civil rights movement was that we were going to end poverty. I mean, that's a big vision.
You know.
The vision of the civil rights movement was that we would have peace, you know, I mean that was a big vision, that we would be a country that lived our principles and that mint all our people had everything they needed. It was a big vision, and it was a racial justice vision, but it was a big vision for everyone. But there was a compassion in that that was constantly expressed in how the protest, how the activism happened.
That's why nonviolence was such a critical part. That's why, I mean much of the civil rights movement came out of the faith community.
It's not about.
Being religious per se, but it was the principle of that beloved community. But it was also very strategic, meaning it understood that it had to help build the tent and the will of the American public that didn't understand that wasn't experiencing racism. You know, my father, you know, very famously got a Goldwater Republican, a guy named Jaqui who actually thought that, you know, the Rockefellers were not conservative enough for New York State. Wow, and was a
very Goldwater Republican. I mean, you can't think of farther to the right in those times, right in those politics of that era. And my father convinced him, figured out how to convince him by helping him feel the experience of black people to support school integration. So there's a story in the book about that. But if you think about and then all the strategies both of protests but also persuasion and connection, that was part of the strategy.
I think it is critically important that we understand how that contributed to the success of the civil rights movement. It was radical, It was a big, radical vision for the country. It had the militancy of protests, it didn't shy away from it, but it expressed itself in a
compassionate and human and connecting way. And I just think that that lesson, those lessons learned is something that we have to make sure we are continuing to utilize because when we do, we are the majority and we win, and because we.
Can so true.
Thank you so much, Maya, Thank you so much, Molly. I am so looking forward to speaking with you at our event at the Strand on September twenty third at seven pm.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five
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Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, so please watch it and spread the word. Maya Wiley is the CEO of the Leadership Conference. Doctor Nikorlai Corte is the author of Kamala, The Motherland and Me.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Doctor Corte.
Well, thank you for having me.
You're an academic really.
But you went on this trip that was not your beat, and tell us about this trip, and then you wrote a book about it.
Stuart stortaet wiving of myself as a scholar practitioner, and I spent a number of years doing advocacy on public affairs work before I returned to my first love of journalism. And so I cover national affairs. I cover campaigns and elections, and so that is my typical beat. But you're right, this was a very unusual assignment. I'd never taken on an international assignment, but I couldn't resist this dream assignment to cover Vice President Harris's voyage to Africa. It was
a trip written in the stars. You might know that my father was born and raised in Ghana. My mother is Black American. They met at an HBCU in Texas and had me many years later in California, And so you can already see the parallels between my story and Vice President Harrison's story. Being the daughter of immigrants, this was such an incredible opportunity at a time where there's so many divisive efforts to erase black history and to ban books. And so although I didn't think I was
going to write a book about this. I knew that I needed to capture this story on the page.
Yeah, so important, and also there were so many similarities here. But this Africa trip was a big trip. It was a long number of days, You went to a bunch of different countries. Can you explain to us a little bit about why the Vice president decided to do this trip and sort of what was the larger diplomatic effort.
This trip was over a year in the making. The Vice President Haser team with planning a trip to Africa that wouldn't be your typical public health trip or your typical humanitarian aid trip, but a trip that allowed her to turn the page on how we view Africa, opportunities
for investment, opportunities to support entrepreneurship. Every stop on the trip, Vice President here has reminded us, but by twenty fifty one and four people on the planet will live in Africa, and right now the average age on the constant is nineteen years old, and so the continent really is oh a potential full of possibilities when we think about the
global economy and supercharging the future of this economy. But while on the trip, the Vice President took on issues related to national security issues related to reorganizing the debt
of our allies on the continent. At one leg of the trip, she was joined by Emmy Award winning actress Shiry Lee Ralf and actor Didris Elba to shine a light on some of the opportunities there with the creative economy, you know, and to invest in some of the infrastructure that would allow people to you know, create movies and TV shows and other content on the continent. And she didn't back away from the opportunity to shine a light on some of the climate resilience work that's happening right
there on the continent. We visited a farm, Panuka Farm in Zambia, where they're using a high power technology to better manage their crops and their harvest and to maximize the yield there. And so I had even some of my assumptions about Africa, you know, as a Ghanaian American, some of my assumptions about Africa were disrupted on this trip.
And I thought, what a shame if more of our fellow Americans didn't know the real story here, didn't know how competent, capable and cutting edge our Vice president is on the world stage. And now well received.
She was, Yeah, we're going to go back and talk about this fucking election that will be the end of all of us a lot of times, a lot of the or at least I've read these focus groups with undecided voters and they will say even women voters, which to me, as the daughter of of a second wave feminist, it just I kind of begin to comprehend how stupid it is. But it is something that people do say, So we're going to talk about it, even though it's stupid.
Is that they're worried about her on the world stage because she's a woman. It's sexist, it's bullshit. But talk to us about what you saw because you observed her on the world stage.
Yeah, I mean I saw her being very well received by men and women on the world stage. I saw her use her bully pulpit to shine a light on the fact that two thirds of folks who have access to the internet on the continent of Africa are men, not women, so much that she has championed an initiative
around digital inclusion. You know, this is a vice president that isn't shy about working the phone and reaching out to corporate partners to figure out what it is that they can do to do more to provide infrastructure and to address a critical need that's leaving out a lot of women from participating in the economy across the continent.
That's no different from how Vice President Harris has governed here in the United States, calling attention to the issues that impact the women that make up more than half of the electorate here. Right. I mean, she's not just out there talking of women's reproductive rights and unapologetically, but she's out there talking about economic issues that impact women, that impact families.
Right.
That twenty five thousand dollars first time home buyer credit, that six thousand dollars tax credit for new families, that thirty five or thirty nine hundred dollars child tax credit. You know, that makes a difference in the lives of families across this country. But it makes a big difference in the lives of women who are oftentimes I'M not able to fully participate in this economy because they don't
have the capital to do so. And so you're seeing Vice President Harris on the world stage use her political capital to reinvest in women, to reinvest in people across Africa. It was very, very well received, and I might add, Molly, you know, I remember, on a lighter note, when we were in Tanzania, and it's important that your audience knows that Tanzania had their first black woman vice president that became the first black woman president of the.
Country, and President Hassan.
During a joint press conference, at one point, she turns to Vice President Harris and she addresses her as my dear sister.
Right, And something as small but meaningful as that is a sign that the world is open.
The world is open to embracing a woman like Vice President Harris to become the next leader of the free world.
Yeah, no, really good point.
I've interviewed her, but obviously I've never taken a trip with her.
What did you feel that she was like? I mean, just tell.
Us what your sort of impressions of traveling with her work life.
I found her to be very focused, very disciplined, joyful, warrior. I think those are two words to describe Vice President Harris. She is very well aware of where she stands in history, and she is doing her very best to meet the moment, and to do so in a way that is me eatingful,
to do so in a way that's consequential. This is someone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area like me, a part of the country, a part of the world steeped in the history of the women's liberation movement and the anti war movement, and the Black panther movement and the gay rights movement, and so it's no surprise how she shows up on the world stage. She shows up with an appreciation, with a respect, with a reverence for that kind of movement building.
And I think, you know.
She sees herself as an extension of all of those things, right, and I think people feel that when they are engaged with her more directly. It's very interesting when you see people engage with her in person versus how that gets reported on or you know, how that gets packaged for
mass media consumption. I found that there's a bit of a gap in the in person experience versus you know, the second or third person experience and Molly, That's a part of the why I thought it was so important to write the book Kamal of the Motherland and Me, so that folks could re examine some of their assumptions about mad and Vice President, about the continent of Africa and ourselves.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. So there has been really horrible, stupid, fucked up lie and it's also racist lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs. There is nothing to this. It is disgusting. We have seen a lot of really good reporting about the incredible way that Haitian immigrants are serving the population, that are working hard in factories and have been brought to Ohio and are actually doing incredible stuff. Talk to me about what this lie is about.
Really, I think this lie is a continuation of the grievance politics that the former president and the Republican Party are so invested in. You know, I was in the spin room following the presidential debate in Philadelphia, and you know, I was personally taken aback at how many Republicans we're willing to turn a blind eye to that. I didn't see that as weird or cringey or hingey right or beneath the office of the president of the presidency, and
you know, you meet. Al Sindoor recently filed a report for NBC Nightly News that focused on the very human impact that this conspiracy theory is having on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And we forget these are real people, these are real families. We remember what happened when the former president was out there making our fellow Asian Americans the target of his conspiracy theories in the early days of the COVID pandemic, calling it kung flu and creating a rise and hate
crimes impacting Asian Americans. And so you know, as Vice President Harris has said, it's the same tired playbook. The only difference is now the target of this aren't Haitian immigrants. It is wrong, Republicans should condemn it, and ultimately, our fellow Americans have an opportunity to weigh in at the ballot box.
Yeah, exactly.
If you are a Haitian immigrant in Ohio, or if you love Haitian immigrants or in Ohio, or if you know a Haitian immigrant in Ohio, you should fucking register to vote. I'm obviously a Jewish immigrant, several generations removed from my immigrant experience. But again it's the same idea that they are just trying to other right, I mean, it's racism, but it's also othering. Do you think that the electorate is hearing this racism for what it is and getting galvanized by it.
There's a critical mass of people that hear it. They hear the dog whistle, they see the racism, they see the sexism, they see the massage noir right, and I think they have decided that this race shouldn't need to be close, right, and they have made their decisions. But there are somehow, these undecided voters out there there, you know, that are somehow waiting for the former president to suddenly lose the spots, right.
I mean, you know, it was.
Maya Angel who said, when people show you who they really are, believe them the first time. And you know, it's hard to believe that there are still enough of our fellow Americans that are unwilling to believe what they have seen on repeat again and again and again and again. Meanwhile, every hurdle that's been put in front of Vice President Harris, she seemed to clear that hurdle. You know, there were
people that weren't so sure if she could raise the money. Well, she's raised more money than any candidate running for president in the history of this country. You know, there are people that weren't so sure. You know, is she going to be able to assemble a unity coalition, right, Uh, the Obama coalition.
Well, she's done even more than that. We're seeing you know, Democrats, Independents, Republicans. I mean, who would have.
Ever thought Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, you know, John McCain's kid, to over two hundred Republicans that work for Bush and for Rama and more lining up behind Vice President Harris. Right, and oh, well, what about policy? She needs to make
her policy clear. If you are not more clear after this week's presidential debate, you know about what it is that Vice President Harris is intending to do for our fellow Americans as a matter of economic policy, right, you know what her foreign policy priorities would be, and why you know? Then I would say, replay the tape. Right, So every hurdle being put in front of her, she's
clearing that hurdle, you know. Yet and still there's still some people that are wringing their hands in I don't know, right, And so our job is to turn up the volume and shine a light on the truth. Right. And that's the part of why I wrote this book, and so people could get a third party view, you know, of who she is when she's not in country. Who she is when she's on the world stage. You know who she is when she is representing the values of this country.
Yeah, and really important.
What do you think the best way to push back against this racism is?
I think the best way to push back against the racism and the sexism is to register to vote. Is to text ten friends and make sure that they're registered. You can go to I will vote dot com get all the information that you need, no matter where you live. But my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Eddie May Thomas, Missi, rests in peace. One of the things she taught me that I hold on to and I will offer to you and your listeners is that we got to pray
with our hands and pray with our feet. Pray with our hands and pray with our feet. And praying with our hands also means using our voice and not taking our vote for granted. Praying with our feet means doing everything we can to spread the truth while others decide to spread lives. We've got to spread the truth. We've got to correct misinformation. We know that some of us, not all of us, are the target, you know, of
misinformation campaigns. That is what we can do do what you can and where you are with what you have, and I think we will feel a lot better about the future of this country after election day.
Yeah, I hope. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us what the book's called again.
Thank you, Molly, and thanks to all of your listeners and followers. Please pick up Kamala the Motherland and me an opportunity and invitation really to re examine your assumptions about mad and Vice President, the continent of Africa and ourselves.
Thank you, thank you. No moment, Jesse Cannon.
Molly jog Fast, you know what you want. A debate with the dog warden of a small town in Ohio has to get involved.
You'll remember that during the debate Donald Trump he said a racist smear where he said that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs.
There is absolutely no truth to this. Smear is a lie. It is a big, big lie.
But because it's happening in Ohio and because j Devance as an enabler, Jademan said, well, maybe it's happening, maybe it's not happening, because we've heard from constituents.
There is no truth to this.
The Clark County dog Warden, by the way, when you get the dog Warden involved. Things have really gone wrong. Refutes the viral pet eating allegations in Springfield, Ohio, after Donald Trump regurgitated those unfounded claims. So this is what she said, Sandy Klick. She's going to end up getting death threats because this is how this works in this new country, this new America we live in.
But she says, nobody has proof of anything. It's all just a bunch of hearst and that is our moment of fuckery.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.