America Is Broken

queer people, for bipoc people, for people with uteruses. It is just it's too fucking much, and I am really struggling. And so I'm just going to be transparent about that fact and that I don't know what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks, let alone the next couple of months. As we make our way to midterms. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are offering nothing in terms of their leadership except for more finger wagging, more thoughts and prayers, and more bullshit about what it is that

they can't do. I've never heard a party say how much they can't do something than Democrats. Never hear Republicans when they were in the minority, ever say that they can't get something done. They block shit, they throw wrenches in everything, And when Democrats are in the minority, they just go along for the get along, hoping and praying that then the big bad bully will be nice to them when it's their turn. Wake up, they don't give

a fuck. Chuck Schumer and a pressor is like, oh, right now, more than ever following this Texas massacre, we need bipartisanship. Shut up, like, are you stupid? Do you not get who you were dealing with? These people don't give a fuck about bipartisanship. They don't give a fuck about the Constitution. The only thing in the Constitution that they care about is the right to bear arms. They don't care about civil rights. They don't care about kids.

And I wish that you would just fucking say so, oh, I know that in their hearts, But no, you don't. I don't know how many times people have to show you who they are? How many times this Republican Party has to show you who they are? Greg Abbott in his bullshit press conference that he gave yesterday one or two as my friend Wajahat said, Chicago this incident. Oh, well,

look at Chicago and they're gun violence. They have laws on the books, and people still get killed ya from guns that are coming in from out of that fucking city. You want to tell us that teachers need guns, and this classroom, this school, Roba Elementary needed more doors, and that, oh,

the shooter clearly had mental health issues. It's not as if, first of all, Republicans give a fuck about anybody's mental health because you don't fun health insurance and you voted sixty six times to try and fucking overturn it, not to provide anything better, just to get rid of it all together. So you want to talk about mental health and lay everything on mental health, but then do absolutely

nothing about that. You want to talk about how you're the party of family values, how you're the party that cares about babies, and that you're pro life. No, what you are pro aar fifteens. Greg Abbott has seen at least according to Beta of Rourke, five mass shootings in the state of Texas. And do you know what he did,

not a fucking thing. What he did instead was decided to allow Texas to be the easiest state in the country for you to get a gun in you don't even need to do many training, you don't need to need a background check, you need nothing. You can walk into the state of Texas as the fucking shooter did by two ar fifteens over the course of twenty four hours, four hundred nearly four hundred rounds of ammunition and not

near fucking red flag go up. But Abbott wants to sit there at a press conference and say, let's not politicize the issue, but you are passing policy to ensure that Texas is ground zero for as many mass shootings as possible. But the people of Texas, you'll keep voting for this motherfucker. Vete Work interrupted his bullshit narrative and said you were doing nothing, that you have blood on your hands. He was escorted out by police people saying, oh,

this is not the time. Tell me when the fucking time is, because it surely isn't in the in between between anybody's mass shootings, because then we've all moved on to another crisis. Ten days, folks, ten days between Buffalo and Texas, And do you know what happened in between those Sandwich historic massacres? Multiple shootings across the fucking country. There have been, according to CNN, two hundred and twelve

mass shootings this year. We are in May. There haven't even been two hundred and twelve days in the fucking calendar yet, but that's how many mass shootings we have had in America. This is a uniquely American problem, this love affair with guns and violence and white supremacy. I have no faith. I have no faith, and I have no hope that anything is going to change. Yet anything is going to get better. As a matter of fact, I am pretty certain, pretty sure, and pretty certain that

shit is going to get a lot worse. We can't get through two weeks without hearing about a another historic mass shooting. Nineteen children from grades two to four went to school on Tuesday. They didn't come back home. And we are telling parents and caregivers in this country to just suck it up that there is nothing we can do. No rephrase that there is nothing the leaders in this country want to do. Governor Abbott is leaving that press conference and head it over to Houston to be one

of the headline. It's for the NRA where guess what. The NRA rally has decided that they're not allowing guns into their own fucking rilly, Well, why is that? I thought guns were safe in the hands of good people, and I thought that all you brought into the NRA, we're good people. So why can't you have fifty thousand guns there for all fifty thousand participants. Why not let them bring in two three a person turn it into a full on shootout. Oh no, but they're banning guns there,

But you can't ban guns across the country. You want to ban it for your protection, but not the protection of children and those that want to worship, or go to the grocery store, or go to the fucking movie theater, or leave their homes safely. This country is so fucking sick. And the thing is is that we are all complicit because if you don't vote, you voted for a massacre. If you did vote and you voted Republican, you voted for a massacre. This system is broken, This ship is

no longer working. And how I am feeling is what I said yesterday on woke Wednesday. The system needs to be brought to its needs. This country needs to be shut the fuck down. What happens if everyone decides that they are not going to work anymore. What happens if there is a massive boycott organized ain't nobody work in. Teachers are not going to school across this country. Your kids will not be going to school. What happens if all the nurses and doctors decide that they are not

going to work. What happens when all the police say that they're not going to go to work. When the grocery store clerks say, hey, you know what, this job is too dangerous? Am I going to get how zard pay? Shut it the fuck down. That's what needs to happen to America. I would love to see what members of Congress would do on both sides of the aisle. The cult and then feckless democrats would do if Americans decided,

you know what, we're fucking done. Democracy is supposed to be about the people's power, So we have the power to unplug this shit and plug it back in. When you have some fucking sense and decide that you can actually institute policies that are going to be for the betterment of this country and not its obstruction or its demise, it is time for us to begin the plan to unravel this system that is no longer working. America is broken and the reality is we're the only ones that

are going to be able to fix it. Coming up next, welcoming back to the show for the first time in a very long time, doctor Britney Cooper, who and an associate professor at Rutgers University. Brittany has been the subject of many a documentary including In Her Mother's Garden, including

Who Is Pauli Murray? Among others. She's also an accredited author and a truth teller, and she will lay down some gems in this conversation that left me speechless, that actually left me invigorated for the first time in a long time. She said this, they are going to kill us, We are going to war with white supremacy. But the reality is is that they cannot kill us all, and so we need to go out fighting, fighting for the future generations, just like our ancestors, for freedom that they

would never see. Take a listen to this conversation with our friend doctor Britney Cooper, Folks, I am super excited too, I guess welcome back after so many moons, so many moons and crises, the wonderful professor doctor Brittany Cooper, who's attended professor at Rutgers University in the Women and Gender

Studies Department. And if you have not seen multiple documentaries in Her Mother's Garden Paul Murray's documentary Brittany, you are everywhere and doing everything and have been for quite some time. We are living in We'll let me say this for myself. I have never felt the way I feel right now in America as a black queer woman. I feel scared. I feel a sense of fear and urgency that the series of shootings, murders, the rise of this radicalized Republican

white supremacist party. What are you feeling and have been feeling in this time, Because you are so connected to the truth telling of our stories as black women, as black people, what are you feeling these days? You know, I feel distressed and exhausted, and I'm not sure how

we get off of this track as a country. And I think that part of the challenge we face is precisely a crisis of truth telling and who we're going to how we're going to tell our own stories, and who we're willing to listen to to sort of let guide us. And so I think we're in a battle royale between different stories about what this place is, what its past is, and therefore what its future is. And right now, quite frankly, I don't think that those of us will on the side of justice are winning. But

I don't think that it isn't because we're trying. I think it is because in part we don't do a good job of assessing what the stakes are. So I think that we're continuing to try to fight with like reason and severity in a world where the other side has decided that rules don't matter, that ethics don't matter, that it's just a brazen power grab. And I can appreciate the moral struggle of that. Right, if you become

like your enemy, then what distinguishes you? And yet I think that there is so much more ground and territory for us that doesn't require us to then use power for negative ends. And I think that we have to keep in mind that the goal is justice and that we have to be fierce fighters and defenders of that, and that can't just be about discourse and online battles. It really does have to defeat to the pavement kinds

of work. Right now, you know when the League decision Brittany came out, Now, a couple of weeks ago, and I read through it. I had said to folks before, I said, these Republicans are not playing games, okay, And I said Donald Trump became president. I said, marriage equalities on the chopping block. I said, school desegregation is on the chopping block, women's rights. You know, all of these things. Folks kept telling me, don't be so hyperbolic, Danielle, this

guy is not gonna fall. Everything is cyclical, right, you see by virtue of what was laid out in the draft decision, what they are looking at and what they are coming for. Tell us what use foresee following the finality when this decision is now final, what you foresee for Black America, black women that is at stake for us. So it's very interesting the folks who say, oh, this is cyclical. The thing to remember about cycles is things

are cyclical. I think that when Trump got elected, folks had a narrative that he was like Nixon, and many of us were historians and who work in history, said oh, no, no, no, this is not a twentieth century playbook. This is a nineteenth century playbook. And so I just like to remind folks that after the Reconstruction period in the US, which

was the period after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, black people could vote, they could hold national office, We had black senators, you could ride on, desegregated transportation, many of the civil rights that we understand coming after the sixties. But there was a generation of black people in the eighteen seventies that experienced the world in that way and then had it all ripped away from them in a period of about fifteen to twenty years. Right, that's what

I see. I see these guys playing a nineteenth century playbook in which they want to go back and do all of the things. They want to restrict. They want to restrict women and childbearing people's right to control their their reproductive autonomy. They want to strip the vote away

from us. They want to go back to this sort of American exceptional narrative you know, about American greatness, wherein you know, racism was merely a blip, and it is not a thing that that children are taught about, and all of it is designed to sort of control the narrative about who the country is. Because these folks have decided that racism and sexism and classism are not the problem, but Rather, it is those who fight against those things that are the problem, and it is our willingness to

tell the truth about them that is the problem. One of the scariest things about the leaked decision is that we have to remember that when Rovie Wade was decided, it wasn't decided it as a woman has a right to an abortion. It was decided as a woman has a right to privacy in making sound medical discision with her doctor. The problem with this privacy versus public thing is that I think we're not talking enough about the

assault on private rights, because privacy is every Look. This is also the way that this country terrorized gay folks by saying you couldn't you know, this is how the country came into the bedrooms of gay people right and criminalize gay sex right. And so when you keep the right to privacy, you protect intimate space. When you take it away, then everything becomes on the chopping block. It doesn't just become about being able to give birth. It

also becomes about intimate relations. It also becomes about search and seizure and the ability of the police to come into your house and do anything they want. And I think part of the challenge of this moment. Last thing I'll say is that one of the reasons that we struggle in the messaging on the left about this is because you have black folks who say, well, how is

that different than before They've been restricting abortion. The police have been doing anything to things right, but there's a difference between the de facto actions of the law and what is on the books. If the books give them the right to do these things, then there's no recourse whatsoever, at least when they're going against the law, there's a basis for us to fight back. Without that, the gloves are off and they can do anything that they want to do, which is what they have been asking for

license to do. The Damage Report with John Idarola is one of the most popular shows on the TYT network that serves as your daily breakdown of the genuine threats and challenges facing our country and world. These days, we're confronted with an overwhelming sea of shocking, confounding, and devastating

news stories. The Damage Report is your life raft, helping you navigate the day's news and understand the damage caused by the corrupt establishment, politicians, corporations, and everything in between. Join the Damage Reports notorious fan club, the Dragon Squad, where you become part of the fantastic community of progressives. Create a fun dragon nickname that fits your personality, collaborate and participate in fun activities like voting for the Garbage

Person of the Week, and much more. Listen to The Damage Report on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Hey, I'm David. Plots of Slights Political Gabfest. As another election season accelerates, it can be tricky to sort through all the noise and the news. Each week, on The Gapfest, John Dickerson, Emily Bathlon and I decipher the headlines, break down the races,

and tell you what issues really matter. We do not always agree, We definitely do not always agree, but we always deliver thoughtful debate and we always have a good time. So subscribe to Slates Political Gapfest new episodes every Thursday. There has not I've been asking this question, and I'm going to ask it to you. Has there been a time or a place or a country where you have seen them lose democracy and gain it back within you know,

within a generation. Absolutely not not not that I could immediate, not that comes to mind. And look and this is why, you know, when when when there were black folks online, right if the you know when Putin invaded Ukraine and said, what does this have to be? You know this happens to you know, black folks on the continent all the time. What does this have to do with us? And my thought was, yes, the country has been racist in its

global foreign policy. That doesn't change the fact that if a Western democracy can be invaded and basically shut down by a fascist madman, a fascist madman that our last president was deeply in bed with, right, come on, a significant portion of this country would give him another shot to go back to those very policies again. Then what we're looking at is a prelude to what the MAGA movement in the US wants to make happen in this country.

Ukraine for them becomes a marker of what they would like to see us do, even when they won't acknowledge it because they don't want democracy. If democracy doesn't mean white supremacy anymore, how do we battle a party that has thrown out the constitution, that has no rules, that has no allegiance to anything other than power and white supremacy. And if we can't do it with facts and truth, because the whole of the country could care less. You have twenty five percent of the country that is in

glee mode right now. They are excited. They are looking at you know, the terrorists in Buffalo and Kyle Rittenhouse and Dylan Ruth as a blueprint. Right. You see a Wisconsin in man in just got ten years in jail for throwing acid on a Latino man because he said,

you're going to replace me? Right, So, if you have this party that is escalating in their violence and are saying we have no rules, and then a tepid Democratic party that believes that they are operating still in this closed door, bottleless scotch smoke filled handshake, white man deal world, how do we battle through that? Yeah? You know, And

I tend to take two approaches, right. The first is that I think that the democratic parties, such as they exist, have got to have bolder solutions, in more creative approaches. So we've got to stop worrying about what they're going The thing that that's interesting about Democrats is they continue to govern for future in which they're not empowered and

the Republicans never do right. So the Democrats say things like, well, we can't be bold because if we do this, then when they get back in power, they're going to do it too. Yeah. Well, create a world in which their ability to get back in power cannot happen outside of

fair and square means they don't have power. Because look, you know, I just like to remind people we have had what six presidential elections in the twenty first century two thousand, two thousand and four, two thousand and eight, twelve,

twenty sixteen, twenty twenty. In five of those elections, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote in five of the six elections, and yet somehow right you ended up having a democratic, i mean a Republican president in three of those elections, even though they only won the popular vote in one. That tells me something about the country. The country actually is not voting for right wing policy. They are voting for more liberal policy, and yet liberals continue

to govern as if they don't have a mandate. Republicans govern as though even when they continue to lose the election and by the numbers, as though they do so. If we governed like we had a mandate, Biden would go ahead and pack the court. Yes, I hear the folks who say, what happens if we just get into a court packing scheme. You pack the court with people who then support the kinds of jurisprudence that make it less necessary to need a packed court in the future. Right,

do you use your executive power. We've already taken the gloves software executive power is concerned, So use it for good. We already know the other side is going to use it for evil. Our job is to use it to try to balance the tables and to create the kind of power structure in which then we can actually we can actually put some stops to some of the voter suppression and other things. The other thing that we have to have, though, given the tepidness of the Democratic Party,

is robust social movements. That's the only thing you can do when you have to rise up against governments that do not serve your interests. And so I think we're going to see more and more forms of protests. I think we've seen a decade of it, and I think that part of the challenge for us is to not get tired and to try to stay clear for me. The challenge of protest movements is that then they tell people, well, don't vote because nothing changes, and it's like, I don't

agree with that, right, I am a radical. I think like the government is a ship show in many ways. And I also think like, if you don't have a government coordinating, for instance, your pandemic response, then you arrive at a world where one in every three hundred and thirty black people has died of COVID in two years, one in every three hundred and thirty in the country period. Right, that is not something that social movements can solve by themselves.

You need good government to solve that problem. And you need social movements to keep on upping the stakes and the anti so that good government knows where its compass is and what it's agenda should do. And we've got to be able to balance both of those things. And part of the challenge we have across the board is that we can't get to a common narrative that is

both experience. It's enough for us to have lots of points of view and then a kind of a ground that says, all right, we've considered all of this, here's how we're going to move forward. I think that those things are possible. Right now, I think the ground is super muddy, and I'm not sure yet how we're going

to solve that particular roll. You know, when when you look at history, Brittany, as a student, as a professor, as a doctor of history, and you said earlier you had about ten twenty years of reconstruction where black excellence was able to excel without the obstacles of WoT, the overt obstacles of white supremacy. I'll say then, following that was a century of Jim Crow? Yes, do we? I mean, is it even conceivable for us to have a century of Jim Crow in this version of America? Right now?

Because what I and I asked that question because what I see is the only direction that this is headed in is violence. I do not see that. I don't I don't see us voting our ways our way out of this. I do not see us marching our way out of this. Ye, So please tell me what you

see following what would have been perceived. I guess the Obama years were what our eight little mini years of of reconstruction, our eight little window years of seeing ourselves in the house that enslaved African our ancestors built, and then now what we're supposed to sit quietly down for one hundred and fifty years of Jim crow Esquire. Yeah. Look, one of the biggest issues of this moment. You know, I've been saying since twenty eighteen. Oh, I don't see

how we get out of this without violence. Part of the reason here is like one place where I think if we're going to change this, that hasn't happened. I think the Biden administration is missing a critical thing. They had to figure out how to regulate and break up the right wing media ecosystem. Come on, because that is the thing that is seen in all of this, this radicalization of people on the right. That's the thing that's doing.

It's Fox News, it's news Max, it's all the YouTube channels, it's eight Chan, it's all of the you know, Reddit right. There is not a concerted effort to you know. And part of the problem is the Biden administration and all of us who are liberal modic keeps saying freedom of speech. Freedom of speech, yes, but not freedom to impose whatever violent consequences as a result of that speech on anybody

that you want to. And so the problem, of course, is that freedom of speech becomes about white folks ability to see the ground of the country with all kinds of terrorism to at the expense of the rest of us. And we don't have a you know, an expense of enough discourse to understand what we really mean when we say that speech ought to be free right, or that you ought to be able to speak freely in the public.

So if if we cannot as a country figure out how to break up the ecosystem and recognize that half of the country has been brainwashed into foolishness, and white people really think they're under attack, and that's why they don't think that they need to play by the rules, because they believe that they have been victimized. They emotionally are invested in this narrative of grievance against them even

as they perpetrate against us. Then we are going to end up in civil war because you cannot have you know, two groups of people but both fearful of one another and one group heavenly armed and brainwashed, and it not leads to violence. And the thing we're gonna have to figure out on the left is the right wants to relitigate the civil war. They think that this time around they can win. And what is not clear to me is I think they could win because they have more

guns than the rest of us. Yes, I don't know what to do about that, given that I don't believe in guns, like you know, I mean, I'm in the country. If you know, you're look at we're on zoom. My parents have guns in the background of this picture. So you know, I come from Southern people who believe in guns, but not in like automatic weapons and things like that. So what do you do if the other side is

heavily armed? They are gunning for a fight. Dylan Roof and then Peyton Gendren, those boys, those young men wanted to set off a race war. That's what they keep trying to stir. And at some point they're going to be successful. And then what are we going to do if we're sitting ducks for all of this stuff? And so you know, I feel violence in the air. I have been saying that. I am already thinking about you know, where will I where will I run to when you know,

when this goes down? And what kinds of skill sets will I need? And you know, and I will say to you Danielle It, I'm I am an optimist, so like you say that I am, I am an optimist because you know, because the other thing about studying history, though, is that our ancestors never stopped fighting. That's the thing, right, even the black women who you know, I write about these black women who came who were born into and came of age during reconstruction and the end of reconstruction.

So there, so the Ida B. Wells is a person who as a young person could ride on desegregated transportation in her twenties and thirties, and by the time she got to be a young thirties married mom, all those rights went away. So when we think about like who we are as thirty forty fifty somethings watching it he snatched away, we should think about somebody like Ida B Wells.

That was her context, was that she grew up thinking the world was one way, and then and then came into adulthood and all of a sudden it was a different way. And I think she becomes a model for us, her and her colleagues and comrades about they just kept saying, we tell the truth, we fight, we fight, we fight, we confront, we agitate, we dun't back down, and I to be well said, And you know, Winchester Rifles should have a place of honor in every black home, you know.

And I think that she has to become the model for how we think about this moment because she and her peers are the only other group of black folks who live in this moment. Parents born into slavery, they had a war, they got rights, and then they saw those rights legally stripped away, and then they had to

rebuild a world where they could get rights again. So our people, I'm hopeful because while enraged and disheartened, I know that our people have actually lived through a version of this, having everything given and having everything taken away. And their response was, U, MS are not gonna get away with this. We will fight you until the day that we die. And if that is the place that we have to sit and struggle, my hope is that

we will just recognize it and be here together. And they might kill many of us, but they can't kill all of us, and that has to it. It is not sufficient, it is not deserved, but that too is the truth, right, that they cannot kill us all. And if they cannot kill us all, then everybody has to fight like hill. Damn doctor Brittany Cooper, let me tell you something. I would go back to school to be educated by you. You would you would be worth the loan debt to be re educated by last quick question

for you. I know that you're on sabbatical, but what do you tell your students who are living in this moment? When I was taking political science, when I was majoring, the world was hopeful. I wanted to be a part of that change. What do you what are you telling them now? I'm you know, I look, none of us has the none of us has the privilege or the right to just lay down and take it. We come from people who were enslaved, who were dragged here against

their will. Why do we think that this thing that we're about to go through in America is the worst thing that black people have ever been through? What do I look like telling the folks who my people, who are in slaved not far from where I'm sitting right now, that because white folks are showing themselves to be who they've always been, that I want to lay down and take it, you know, or that there is nothing to

hope for. I try to have the hope of the ancestors that got up every day, the ones who were born into slavery and never saw freedom and yet made it because we're here. That to me is like I literally just strip it back. I say that I come from people who never saw freedom, and yet somehow I'm here. And so how dare I decide in my deep despair that there is nothing worth fighting for? And the other thing that I say to my students is and these are the tools that are gonna help you change it.

The reading, the studying, the community, the connection, the claim charity about the problems. The reason that folks are fighting so hard against higher education and against teaching proper American history, which they call critical race theory in schools, is because there is something that white folks and those who are committed to this fascist part, not all white folks, but those committed to this project of fascism and white supremacy understand.

And what they understand is that an educated citizenry is dangerous. And so I try to help my students to understand this is why they don't want you to have it, So you better come forward and get it with all that you've got. And then if you do that, then you will have the space to figure out the ways in which to use it. But all we have before us in the absence of freedom is fight, and that is something. It is not what we should have, It is not what we deserve, it is not what we

are owed. But it is the agency that we have to make a difference. And either we're gonna use it or they're gonna kill us. And so you ain't gonna kill me without be fighting. So I'm gonna have to track. And this is and standing reading these books, getting these ideas, speaking truth the power. Those are all sins of fight and they matter. Amen, Doctor Brittany Cooper, please come back

to will gay f again. I needed this fire, this energy, this like moment of honoring our ancestors through this conversation. I so deeply appreciate you. Thank you. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy

Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws, and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast, New episodes every Tuesday. That is it for me today, folks, on this very exhausting Thursday. I wish you grace and peace. Power to the people and to

all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter.

Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast, New episodes every Tuesday.