Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with me your girl, Daniel Moody recording from the Home Bunker, Folks. I will say this that the decisions that are coming out of this administration as it pertains to the continued humanitarian crisis that is happening at the hands of the IDF in Gaza, the looking away that the United States government is doing as we are seeing pictures come out that show terror tactics being used on Palestinian men and boys.
The idea that you would have a US government official when asked, and I've posted this exchange in my stories on Instagram, when asked by Sky News if they supported the images that have been circulating of men and boys being stripped down to their underwear and thrown in the back of IDF military vehicles and being detained. Understand first that the detentions that Palestinian people are put under are basically they are held without any type of due process.
The people that were released in the exchange for hostages are people that never even knew in large cases what the fuck they were being held for in the first place. They never saw a judge, right, they were just picked up and put in jail indefinitely. So when the US government's response is, oh, we're asking them to look into it, and oh, we find the images disturbing. And the follow up question from Sky News was so, either you condemn
the images or you don't. Either you still have leverage with the Israeli government or you do not, And you could see the growing irritation and frustration from the US official who was trying to make it seem as if this reporter was, you know, asking a quote unquote gotcha question. This is not a gotcha question. Either you are a democracy that condemns acts of terror or you don't. I don't understand why we need to get a better picture
of the nuance here. It's bullshit, and it's becoming increasingly increasingly fucking difficult to stand up and tell people that they need to vote to save democracy when clearly we don't give a fuck about democracy elsewhere. One hundred and fifty three nations signed on to the UN resolution for a ceasefire because eighteen thousand.
People are dead and a majority of them are children and women, because that's how you ensure there are no further generations.
So, folks, you know, I find myself some days in absolute tears, in dismay, just you know, weighted by grief, and the challenges that we are facing right now just feel in some ways insurmountable because we don't seem to have a government that actually gives a shit. And I don't know how I personally continue on the grounds of we have to fight to preserve and sometimes we have to fight to hold on because folks, I understand the anger and the pain because I feel it. I also
know that things will get incredibly fucking worse, irreversibly. So if Donald Trump is in the White House again, we are absolutely between a rock and an hard place. We are absolutely not in the place of luxury where we get to be excited about and put on T shirts for a knock on doors for a candidate who we believe in. That's not where the fuck we are, and we just have to get over it. It is disgusting.
It is a hard fucking pill to swallow, and I ask you to take in as much water as possible in order to do so, because that's what I'm doing. I'm not out here raw ryeing for Biden. I'm not. I never have been. I did when he was able to usher in the vaccines I did when he was able to topple Donald Trump. But that wasn't about Biden. It was about the people of the United States recognizing the stakes that I pray to God that we continue to do so in twenty twenty four, because you know,
what we are seeing is disgusting and indefensible. Because if you were to swap out those fucking pictures and put it in Ukraine, then this president would be all full throated and have a whole fucking lot to say about Putin and his tactics and being a war criminal. But somehow that is not the case here. And the question
that we have to keep asking ourselves is why. Coming up next my conversation with the founder of Spread the Vote, the executive director Kat Calvin, who has joined our show before, to discuss the ID crisis in this country and how it affects our ability to vote, to move, and for people to have a voice in our democracy. That conversation
is coming up next, folks. I am very happy to welcome back to wok F Daily the founder of Spread the Vote, which is a nonprofit organization working closely with some of America's most vulnerable population, including the incarcerated Cat Calvin,
welcome back. We are at a precarious time. And I say this because while I know that it's eleven months out from an election, the rumblings that I'm hearing from people who follow me, from people who I am friends with, are not good about their feelings about voting right now. This is your bread and butter, your you know of your business, and so I just want to start off with asking you what are you hearing right now?
Nothing good? I'm you know.
The situation that we've been in for many cycles over the past years, are everyone's sort of feeling forced to choose the lesser of two evils, right. We're very rarely, particularly in national elections. You may have like a city council member or something that you like, really love, but for bigger elections, for Congress, for president, I'm you know, even obviously a lot of times for governor. For bigger elections, it's usually I hate both of these people, but I
hate this person less writer. I hate both of these people, but one of them is want to be fascist, right or something like that, And so I'll just vote for the lesser of two evils, and like it's exhausting, it gets hard. It's also you know, we're at like, what is this the fifth election cycle where the message is vote or it's the end of democracy?
Right? Yeah?
Yeah, And so that is.
What we've had over and over and over, and people have shown up over and over and over. And the problem is on both sides of the aisle, both parties have completely failed their voters in every way. I'm for Republicans, I mean we even now have Republicans in Congress saying, can you give me one thing we've done that I can go back to my voters with and they can't.
For Democrats, not only have they absolutely not done anything, but the positions they support are increasingly untenable to more and more of their voters, and not just sort of young people or the TikTok crowd. My mother, my aunt's, you know, my grandmother are all like, what is going on? How can they be supporting these issues? What are they doing? I' And so now we're at a point where voter it's the end of democracy?
Is it working?
Because neither side really seems to be standing up for democracy? And we keep showing up and voting and working. I mean, the American people have worked hard since twenty sixteen, to help make elections, you know, fair, to help get people to the vote. Have really put their hearts and souls into it over and over and over, and they've been failed over and over. And I think we're at a moment right now where between you know, the many genocides
happening around the world, between the economy. They keep telling us the economy is great, but I don't know anybody who isn't a millionaire who doesn't feel the economy is absolutely failing them right, and the desperation and failures on every front, and everyone's looking around at this you know nation burning down around us and saying, well, we keep saving democracy and it's not doing anything.
And I think that we are in real trouble next.
Year because it is again going to be an election between two people everybody hates. But this time, I don't know what argument can be made, particularly on the dem side, that voting for Biden again is going to do anything, because we've now seen that's he's not much better than anybody else who we could choose.
I think it's and I hear everything, and those are exactly the responses that I'm getting right now from people and I'm just like, I just want you to imagine what could be potentially worse than the four years that we experienced under Donald Trump. Like, if you are hurting now, I want to know what you think will happen with somebody that says that they want to be a dictator and they are saying so out loud to rousing applause that when they put people in camps like that, they'll
continue that. And so what should the narrative be if it can't be we need to save democracy again.
I mean, here's the thing.
Trump at least is saying out loud he wants to be a dictator, but Biden is spending our tax money funding a genocide, right, and so like this is the problem is that you know that I was in a meaning today and I got this news alert from The Atlantic saying that ty had said out loud that he wants to be a dictator, and I sort of like saw it to like write it out to everybody, And everyone's response was sort of like, I mean, at least he's honest, you know, like, at least you know what
you're gonna get. But we keep voting for these dums who we know are a little bit or a lot racist, right, who we know are mostly owned by corporations who we're not I mean, we're not seeing democracy in action right now, and so I think that's the problem. You know, what needs to happen on both sides of the aisle is both parties need to say we are not going to have these same men run as our candidates, right, because.
We're also now seeing how many I mean now Mansion wants.
To run a third party campaign.
Right, Joe Stein hasn't learned a damn thing, right. But of course all these third parties. There's these two women who are women of color and they're socialists, and they're running and they're really taking off on TikTok because young people are like, young women of color, who is socialist, Let's vote for them? And this is the thing, right,
there's so many third parties that seem attractive. And what the Republicans and what the Democrats need to do is going to Trump, who's about to be a convicted fella, and go to Biden, who everybody hates, and say, you guys aren't running, We're gonna have primaries, we're gonna choose someone else. But you can't, you cannot they're not gonna do this because it takes balls of the type that politicians don't have.
But no, they are.
We're now gonna have two nine hundred year old white men who have failed this country over and over again running And I don't know what the answer is. I don't you know, because what what kind of democracy is worth saving if it's the kind that we are living in now?
Right, I've had a nightmare the other day as a black queer woman in this country that like it's either I'm gonna have to either I'm gonna need to go underground or like be in a cam and like I want to tell myself that I'm just making up paranoid stories and it and it could never possibly happen. But the fact is that all of our worst fears can and will happen, particularly if Donald Trump becomes president again.
But I am someone who does not want to sell people fear, right, like I want to sell you hope of you know the fact that you do have the power to shape this very imperfect democracy. But the fact is that you're right. We're looking at what is happening in Gaza, We're looking at where our tax dollars are going we're looking at what the lives that is ripping apart. We say that we give a shit about children, and clearly we do not, right, But as black people, we knew that.
Right, And that's the thing.
We don't care about children in this country. And you know, it's interesting that this conversation sort of keeps happening on so many different levels, because you know, during COVID, we magically solved child hunger in America.
We were like, oh, you know.
What, as for a beat, well, just for a hot minute, we could do that.
And then the second they could, they were like, never mind, way to let kids starve again. Right, Like, we solved child hunger in America and then made the active, involuntary decision to allow children in this country to starve again. So anyone who's surprised that we don't care about brown children dying in any other country, right, Like anyone who doesn't care about the fact that we're not even talking about the genocides in Congo and Sudan has got a
saying about those. No, but those are all based on our and the Western worlds, where we are the biggest economic engine of that. It's our fault, right, And I think that that's what's frustrating for people. And it's particularly frustrating because us as citizens, we would not make these choices, and we would gladly make sacrifices to not have those
things happen. I think probably every millennial Gen z Er and Gen x or would happily throw our iPhones into the ocean if we knew that that would end a genocide, right. And we saw this during apartheid, right when it was students who were chaining themselves to their classrooms and shutting down colleges saying you have to defund from the businesses
that are funding a part time right. And it was those kinds of movements we see over and over again, like if we have the choice of where our taxes were being allocated, we'd have the best education systems and the best healthcare in the world.
And so I think that's what's most frustrating is we're.
Being forced to pay for these things. We're being forced to not feed children in this country, which no one would voluntarily choose. And I think that's you know, and the argument that we always make with folks is eighty percent of the decisions that are made that impact your life are made.
By state and local government.
So even if you hate your member of Congress, even if you hate you're the president, whatever, the people who are really impacting your life are city council, board of supervisors, right, your state, rap et cetera. But even now that argument doesn't really wash because we are watching that twenty percent impact the world and impact us in ways that are massive. I mean, look at you know, it's the eight percent interest rate to buy a house right now, right which
it was impossive for most people. It was two percent, you know, and so like it's everything. I think we're at a point and everyone sees it, accept the people in power, which is unbelievable to me.
Oh no, not see it. They just don't give a damn right because they're projected.
They don't care.
We're at this point and we've seen this. We saw this in Nazi journey in Germany. Right, We see this in every single country where the people voluntarily choose a dictator, it's because their country is at this exact point. There was a really good opinion piece in Washington Post. I think I came out yesterday the day before, but he literally broke down like this is actually how Trump can easily become a dictator. And he is exactly right on
every point. And he made the point at the end where he was like, you know what, you could say that I'm being overreacting. You could say there are a million things that could happen, that maybe that this will happen, but look at the.
Reality of the situation. Mean's not wrong.
And if you look at history, this is how it Loo came to power because Germans felt this way after the war right, and so we I don't know, I've been trying so hard to figure out because you know, we've got to start our election work in January.
We start really early, yep. Yeah, and it's already.
Really difficult to talk to folks who are unhoused, to talk to folks who are returning citizens, who are former foster youth. You know, the people we work with are the people the government absolutely does not care about. You know, we just put out a report. We have a national program to help incarcerated people vote, and we work really hard and we have a seventy nine percent turnout rate
among acarcerated voters. And it takes a lot of work to try to convince folks who are incarcerated to vote right, But I don't know what our message is going to be because it's it's difficult to find where that hope is.
And that's the thing is like, again, you are working with the population of people that on a good day, on a great day, people don't care about right, let alone elected officials. And so now that we are in a series of very good terrible bad days, no good days, it's like, how do you convince people that they have power to your point when it's just like, aha, and I voted the last you know, the sky is falling twenty sixteen, twenty twenty. You know here I am twenty
twenty two. You know here I am now again on the precipice of twenty twenty four. And if I'm looking from that span of time, is my life better? Right for a lot of people, No, it's not. It's measurably not.
Who has to go to the grocery store knows that it's not right. I and that I know, and that's you know, And it's so it's hard to because people aren't stupid. And I think that one thing that social media and you know, I have a lot of respect for the kids on the TikTok which I'm too old.
I look at it. I'm like, you guys are doing You're doing all right.
I mean some of you maybe not stop trying to sell me things I don't want. But you know, they put things together and then they now have the medium to be able to spread these messages. And so, you know, once people started to understand the amount of money that gets sent to Israel every year, the amount of money that we've spent on the war in Ukraine, right, all
of these things, and they're putting comparables together. And this is the thing I've been, you know, for a long time doing because I'm trying to convince Congress to pass ability in every one ninety I'm and you know, it would cost America about twenty billion dollars to sell homelessness, which is a lot less than we spend on a lot of foreign worths. It's less than we're spending on murdering children in Gaza, right, Like, And people are putting
this together, and they're like, wait a second. For the amount of money we've spent, we could have better healthcare, we could have this or that, but I have all these you know, I'm credit card debt is at an insane hi in America and no one has any savings. And you know, their story after story after story of all these people working three or four jobs and they're having one or two meals a day, and yet we have the money.
To murder people, right I.
You know, Jeff Bezos is getting into real estate now, So good luck to anyone who wants to have a roof over their heads in the next twenty years. And I think that's that is where we are now. And it's hard. It's hard to talk to people, to people about building a bench. And you know, oh, well, there's these young people of color and they're queer, they're immigrants this or that, and they're running and if we vote for them in forty years.
Maybe one of them will be a senator. Right Like, it's a hard argument.
It's a hard argument.
And the Democratic Party is not helping. No you, no, I'm the Republicans aren't interested in helping. And so it is.
I don't know anyone right now who has any sort of answer besides the thing we always keep hearing, well, you have to save democracy, you know, vote to save your vote. It's like, well, I'm voting to save my vote for what purpose? Because the vote keeps feeling wasted, like it's those those same arguments aren't going to work, and there really needs to.
Be a fundamental shift in how.
Both parties, but particularly the Dems, choose to operate. I mean, really, what needs to happen is, you know, Biden needs to not run, right, I'm Trump needs to not run. If it's you know, Nikki Haley and and you know one of the cash Frow brothers like that, you know, that's a race people can get be hided. It's just they need to understand that having these same people. You know, McCarthy is stepping down now, thank god, maybe McConney.
I mean, ain't nobody wanted him there in the first camp, you know, But now now we're looking at a potential one seat majority the Republicans will have in the House. So oh dear God.
More and nothing's gonna happen. You know.
Look, I hate to say it, but how did we just have a whole pandemic that killed senior citizens but it didn't kill any of the most evil one suit we actually need to die.
I don't know. The Grim Reaper is off. I don't know. I don't know. Valid question valid not a one of them. Oh dear god, it's because they Oh I'm sorry, wait no, let me say this. Why didn't happen? Because they have the healthcare the rest of us don't. They have the access to the platinum health care package that our tax dollars are paying for. So that's why.
And you know, it's funny because I I think a lot of people don't know. So there last week. I think maybe even were, but there were, you know, all of these sort ninety nine year old was very prominent, ninety nine one hundred.
Ye Kissinger, Santadey O'Connor, yeah, passed away yep.
And you know all of these people are like, how are they all living so long? And I and I actually saw a TikTok on this and I realized, Oh, people don't know that there are wildly expensive, extraordinary health care services for the wealthy.
You know, you can go full body scans yep, the executive the executive.
Executive health memberships and things like that, yep. At all of these university hospitals and Johns Hopkins, et cetera. They have them, and you can, you know, you pay twenty five thousand or something. I had a friend in undergrad who came from I had a lot of friends Underrada came from very wealthy families. But one of them, her
grandmother was very sick. But they had you know, the executive whatever at Johns Hopkins, and she was telling me about what the health services were like, and like they have a private suite and they do this and that and whatever, and that's how these people live for so long. And I think that people are just starting to wake up to how drastic the inequality is.
I don't think, you know, most Americans.
And it's interesting because actually Canada is also at a
really bad place right now. And I think most people have not understood because it's been all of these secrets of the wealthy, like of what actually they have access to when you can lose your home because your child was in the hospital for a week, right I And people have no idea, And now they're starting to figure it out, and they're starting to realize, like, wait a second, even when it comes to something as basic as just surviving COVID, every single two hundred year old in Congress
came out just fine, and yet my grandparents and parents are not and ancles passed away. Why is that is it. Well, it's because of the inequality and healthcare. They were always going to be fine. They will always be fine.
Let me tell you something. I am so grateful for you for bringing up that very clear distinction, because it's something that I have been thinking and saying privately but just not publicly. And that is one hundred percent right. It's like every time that I get to notice that one of these that one of these hundred year old have passed away, my thing is, oh, you know, rest
in power for you and your platinum healthcare. While we have while since COVID, the life expectancy in America fell rolled back about two years and for black people rolled back about three to five yep, right, And we're just like, oh, well, that's just the way it is. And the reality is it isn't.
And you know, even.
For for seniors who are not wealthy. You know, obviously we have this huge divide between like the way boomers understand the world and what the rest of us do. But you know, so my grandmother is ninety two and I'm she was in civil service for her whole career, and my grandfather was in the military until he died in seventy three. My grandmother has Tricare, which is the military health insurance for life. He passed away in seventy three. She still has it. She has Medicare, and she has
a third health insurance. I can't even think of.
Right.
She has access to so much because in the seventies, if you were a civil servant, if your husband was in the military, or even if you got a pension, way you still had all of that. So she's ninety two and she'll have it forever. And I am so grateful for that because it's my grandmother, and she has incredible She has a home blood pressure machine and we have to take her blood pressure every day, and if it's just a little bit low, somebody calls and asks
eighty five questions to make sure she's okay. And it's not even because she's a millionaire.
She's not.
It's just because they had those things set up, and those things are dying out. There's probably nobody under fifty who has access to those services because they're going to expire, as all of these older generations expire, and so then they look at us and they don't understand why we don't have, you know, four forms of health insurance or can't buy a house for fifty two cents, right.
Or all of these things right. And you know, I was just reading an article.
That the biggest percentage of people buying homes right now is boomers buying their second, third, fourth house because they have all the equity from the house they bought for nothing when they wear a grocery store clerk in sixty four.
Right. And so there's this.
Gap because Joe Biden, you know, and anyone in power, they have no concept of what the world actually looks like right now. Yeah, and so there's no way that they even can adjust it or make it work for us, even if they wanted to, which they don't, you know, And they don't listen. They just dismiss the few young people who are in Congress.
They don't listen to them. They don't care.
They have no power. You have no power in Congress until you've been there for eighty five years. And so we you know, And yet they're living longer and longer and longer. They're actually I don't know how people aren't talking about this. I read this in Scientific Americana, which is one of my favorite magazines, a couple of years ago, maybe even one or two. But uh, scientists have actually
cracked aging. They have figured out how to reverse aging, and they can even do it by a certain number of years, right, because they could say, well, we want to reverse it ten years before you got cancer or whatever.
This is the thing now that will actually be available in pill form in a couple of decades. You know who's gonna get it? You and I are not getting this now.
And we're both really relatively privileged black women, and we still will not get this.
Right.
But Norman Lear could have lived to two hundred and fifty if he just waited around until that pill came out. Right, McConnell will never well evil.
It's keeping that man alivee. But like, you know, these.
People are going to be living longer and longer and longer because in their generation, you know, they all Biden has literally been running for president since I was born. Because back then, when you were in your thirties and forties, that's when you got into power.
But now millennials are in our.
Thirties and forties and we can't because they're still hanging around in their nineties.
You know, it's just it's so disheartening. And this is I mean, just to bring it back full circle as we close out like this, This is the reason why people have become disenchanted with voting with the systems, because while these people continue to hang on right to their lives and are able to do so because of wealth, right because of access, the rest of us are just left trying to hang on the side of a cliff. And that is and that's and that's the reality and.
Completely connects back to why people don't want to vote right now because they are hanging on to old values.
You know, even Obama, who.
I frequently have beef with and I particularly have beef with now, who was like, ugh, well, you kids are only you know, upset about Gaza because you're on the TikTok. It's like, no, we're upset about it because children are dying, right. But they're so far removed, and so they keep making policies and laws and political statements that are based on a political world that existed twenty.
Three twenty years ago, you know, just like you know.
Biden's entire Democratic Convention when he was running was all about how what great Frindsy is with Republicans because he did not understand that that work across the aisle stuff is not work anymore, right, and so no one wants to vote because we're voting for people, or we're supposed to vote for people who are fighting for a.
World that hasn't existed in ages.
And it's really hard to look at a twenty two year old who already grew up in a world where they we're taught very clearly the adults in charge in this country do not care if someone is going to shoot you in your classroom. They're not going to do
anything about it. They've already been taught that the adults in power don't care if you're going to run out of water and the polar ice caps are going to melt and your entire way of life is going to have to change because of climate change, they're not going to do anything about it. They've grown up in a world where it's been very clear that the adults in
power don't care whether they live or die. And now we're telling them, okay, but now you have to vote for those people, even though the world they're trying to uphold is a world that is irrelevant to ninety nine percent of us.
And it makes it difficult.
And I am still, you know, really struggling with what's our message going to because we're already hearing it. We're going to hear it a lot when we are out there trying to get people to vote next year, of why should I? What's going to change? And I don't have an answer for that right now.
We will have to come back again figure and figure this out. But I so appreciate the work that you continue to do at a time when it is hard to have hope and you continue to try and spread the vote as your organization is aptly titled, because regardless, that's what we need to keep doing. So really really appreciate you.
Well, thank you so much, thanks for having me on.
That is it for me today, Dear friends on Woke a f as always Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.