DEI? You’re Fired! with Heather McGhee

Speaker 1 Even though severe cases can be rare, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is still the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under one.

Speaker 4 RSV often begins like a cold or the flu, but can quickly spread to your baby's lungs.

Speaker 8 Ask your doctor about preventative antibodies for your baby this season and visit protectagainstrsv.com.

Speaker 7 The information presented is for general educational purposes only.

Speaker 10 Please ask your healthcare provider about any questions regarding your health or your baby's health.

Speaker 13 Hello, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show program.
My name is Jon Stewart. I am coming to you on, well, today is Wednesday, April 16th.

Speaker 13 You'll probably see this tomorrow, I guess, Thursday, April 17th, because crack team, they turn this shit around on the double.

Speaker 13 And believe me, it's no easy task, given the general audio and visual flubs that are my podcasting style.

Speaker 13 Very frequently, just to give you people a hint of the behind the scenes issues, I have to be told at the beginning of every episode, please try not to keep kicking your desk because people then begin to think there are mild earthquakes in your region, and it may be slightly disturbing.

Speaker 13 Speaking of mild earthquakes, folks,

Speaker 13 the interesting thing to me, so how

Speaker 13 fucked up do you have to do something that can turn our attention from a global economic meltdown,

Speaker 13 self-caused, an economic punching ourselves in the dick of these tariffs? What would you have to do to kind of divert the attention from that? And what you would have to do is hold

Speaker 13 maybe one of the most

Speaker 13 chilling Oval Office meetings.

Speaker 13 I can't even begin to describe when the president of El Salvador, Bukele, came and sat with President Trump. There is a gentleman from Maryland that they say is a terrorist and is

Speaker 13 MS-13, but they've offered no compelling proof of such other than

Speaker 13 I guess he has a Chicago Bulls hat, which, by the way, as a Knicks fan, I am not against sending people to prison camps for being fans of the Chicago Bulls.

Speaker 13 Please don't misunderstand.

Speaker 13 I just want due process for these types of actions. But the thing that I found, I think,

Speaker 13 most chilling was the enjoyment, the pleasure that they seemed to take

Speaker 13 in flouting whatever due process or whatever safeguards have been put in place by a system. They are there to protect

Speaker 13 bad, to make sure that bad people and good people are offered the same kinds of rights.

Speaker 13 That's the whole measure of a functioning society, a good society, is that we are secure enough and strong enough to provide for our most vulnerable, that they are provided the same rights and regard that everyone is.

Speaker 13 That's the point. And to see

Speaker 13 them

Speaker 13 gleeful about this individual's deportation to a horrible, legendary prison in El Salvador, where his family has not even been able to have any contact with him.

Speaker 13 To see that, with no real proof that he's done anything other than be in the country, I guess, illegally, which, if you think that should be the punishment for someone seeking asylum, well, I don't know what the fuck to tell you.

Speaker 13 And to see

Speaker 13 the ghoul of ghouls, Stephen Miller, just get

Speaker 13 fucking hard

Speaker 14 talking about it.

Speaker 13 It's shocking. But in it,

Speaker 13 the buds of the resistance are starting to flourish. And where do they come from? Harvard.

Speaker 13 None of us want to take their side, but it's, yes.

Speaker 13 Harvard, finally, an organization has stood up and said, oh, you know, I actually think this is so fucked that we're actually going to risk huge financial penalties to stand up on principle.

Speaker 13 Thank God.

Speaker 13 You know, I was going to go to Harvard.

Speaker 13 A lot of people don't know that. I was going to go to Harvard, but they

Speaker 13 had a test to get in. And

Speaker 13 yeah, so then I didn't end up going because it was

Speaker 13 because they had a test and it was really hard. So I

Speaker 14 went somewhere else.

Speaker 13 But this, you know, look, aid and comfort wherever we can get it. And I think it could be the beginnings of other organizations finally realizing that there is no gain

Speaker 13 in subservience to immorality. And let's hope.
And our guest today, boy, she has written about the perils of immorality and what it does to a society and the way that it erodes it. And I'm so excited.

Speaker 13 I haven't spoken to her in,

Speaker 13 God, it's got to be a year or so. So I'm delighted that she was able to join us today.
So let's get to her.

Speaker 13 So we're going to bring in our esteemed guest. I'm so delighted to have an opportunity to speak with her again, ladies and gentlemen, Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us.

Speaker 14 Heather,

Speaker 14 John,

Speaker 14 what

Speaker 14 the hell

Speaker 13 is happening?

Speaker 14 Well, you know, I wrote this book, The Sum of Us, and the central story was when many white townspeople, officials decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them.

Speaker 14 And I feel like that's what's happening to our entire country right now. It is like...

Speaker 13 We're draining the pool.

Speaker 14 We're all in the bottom of the drain pool. That's right.

Speaker 13 It does feel like there is an awful lot of cutting our noses. to spite our faces.
And there's so many different things to begin with.

Speaker 13 So let's start with, in that regard, the attack on American universities. Let's just start there and we'll move along.
In order to keep people from teaching about slavery or gender,

Speaker 13 they are willing to sacrifice American ingenuity in research and education and the value of all that, not just to the country, but to the world.

Speaker 13 Are you surprised at how easily they dismiss the contributions of

Speaker 13 these institutions?

Speaker 14 You know, it's a really good question.

Speaker 14 I am

Speaker 14 because,

Speaker 14 you know, they're going to get cancer too, right?

Speaker 13 Well, they're going to give it to us, Heather, that's for sure.

Speaker 14 That's for sure, right? But, you know, I mean, they are in vulnerable human bodies. Maybe Elon Musk isn't because he's mainlining some kind of, you know, asteroid juice or something.
But,

Speaker 14 you know, certainly the octogenarian in the White House is in a vulnerable human body and is, you know, kids and family members, right? But more broadly, right, the Republican Party,

Speaker 14 they just do not appreciate how much the foundation of their daily lives depends on public goods.

Speaker 14 Public goods that have been invested in, you know, and catalyzed through research in universities, in partnerships with, you know, private companies, and then, of course, things like, you know, making sure we have clean air and water and a public health system and all of that.

Speaker 14 And so I am shocked at the short-sightedness, the meanness, the

Speaker 14 commitment to just

Speaker 14 dominance, right? Because this is what this is really about, right? It's using race and gender as the wedge, as the cudgel, as the sort of excuse.

Speaker 14 But what Donald Trump is trying to do is exert his control over every institution of civic life. And that is straight and simple out of the Autocrats playbook.

Speaker 14 And that's where we are right now, as political scientists would say.

Speaker 13 And it is a purposeful control, Heather. The thing that's interesting to me is it's not mere flattery.

Speaker 13 It is truly purposeful in the sense of realigning what they believe to be the values that the country should uphold.

Speaker 13 And what I found so interesting, you know, I was listening to them talk about manufacturing and bringing back manufacturing, the resilience of it.

Speaker 13 And I've yet to see somebody suggest that it isn't a good idea to bring back some manufacturing or to try and make the country more resilient.

Speaker 13 But they talk about it in terms of we've lost masculinity. And I keep thinking to myself, so wouldn't that be some type of affirmative action?

Speaker 13 Are we DEIing male jobs? Do they not understand

Speaker 13 they're willing to pull trillions of dollars out of the economy to readvantage men?

Speaker 14 What?

Speaker 14 What's happening?

Speaker 14 Yes. I mean,

Speaker 14 let's be clear, affirmative action

Speaker 14 was invented for white men, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, we had for most of our history until the mid-1960s, we had a system where every part of our policy structure, our economic incentives, the rules, written and unwritten, were set up to allow white men to flourish and everybody else, you know, to ask for permission to merely, you know, have a job and have a family, right?

Speaker 13 It was the default setting, the default setting of America.

Speaker 14 That's the default setting.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's right. And I mean that literally, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, in the book, I write about all the different policies that explicitly say that, you know, you cannot get a mortgage if you are in this neighborhood with a high Negro concentration.

Speaker 13 Please run those through. Run through the explicit policies because this is such an important issue, Heather, because they keep talking about manufacturing was hollowed out because of policy.

Speaker 13 So we have to, and I hate to use the word reparations, but we have to repair the damage of these policies.

Speaker 13 So please explain specifically some of those policies that excluded people from building equity.

Speaker 14 So the Social Security Act, right, which made it so that people could retire with dignity.

Speaker 14 It excluded the two job categories that most black workers were in. This was a compromise between the Jim Crow delegation to Congress in the New Deal, right? The domestic work and agricultural work.

Speaker 14 We had at the beginning of the 20th century a massive investment in housing, right?

Speaker 14 Most many of our houses, right, and apartment buildings and everything were built through this huge influx in the first half of the 20th century in housing that working people could afford.

Speaker 14 And then on top of that, something really unprecedented, which was the idea that there should be mass home ownership. So the government made a system where we have this thing called a mortgage, right?

Speaker 14 Where you could be a working person and just pay off something over time and own property that would be the basis for intergenerational wealth, right?

Speaker 14 That was all government planning and it was all based on the never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much for credit risk.

Speaker 14 And so literally, like the progressive FDR federal government drew maps of the entire country and

Speaker 14 surveyed them down to the block level for their racial and ethnic character and said the areas with a high Negro concentration, for example, do not lend in these areas.

Speaker 14 Levittown, something I think you're familiar with, right? Other,

Speaker 14 all right, as just one example.

Speaker 14 What does that sound? That's amazing.

Speaker 13 Heather, it's just, because that's the one, you know, and I talked to O'Reilly's whole like persona comes out of that.

Speaker 13 Like, I'm from Levittown, hard scrabble people that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and did the values. And you're like, right.

Speaker 13 And you know, black people weren't allowed to live there, right? Yeah. Right, right.

Speaker 13 Those GI bill homes that were built and paid for by the government excluded specifically black people.

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 14 The language in the in the deed said these can be sold or leased only to people, quote, wholly of the Caucasian race, right? No octorooms may apply.

Speaker 13 Can I tell you something? And you got to test. You got to do the pinprick and you got to make sure.
That's right.

Speaker 14 That's right. That's right.

Speaker 14 Right. So that's example.

Speaker 14 And housing, of course, is very significant because that's how we build our wealth, right? That's how we have intergenerational wealth. And that's a lot of why today,

Speaker 14 if you are a black college graduate, you have less wealth on average than a white high school dropout.

Speaker 13 Say that again.

Speaker 14 If you are a black college graduate, you may have a higher income, you may have a better job, right?

Speaker 14 You've done all the things, you've gone to college, but you will have less household wealth, like your assets, things to rely on, your home equity, stocks and bonds, et cetera, than a white high school dropout.

Speaker 14 And that's entirely history, history showing up in your wallet, right? But, you know, this

Speaker 14 administration literally banned the word historically from

Speaker 14 being eligible for research grants, right?

Speaker 14 They're actually canceling history so that we don't know that and we return to a privileged-based economy so that they and people like them can be the only ones to thrive and my point overall is that that is

Speaker 14 not good for anyone right we need diversity in order to thrive we need economic racial uh gender diversity as a way to innovate and

Speaker 14 we are simply if if if everything they're trying to do goes through and is maintained by this supreme court i think that our country will economically, not just morally, but economically, be shoved back a generation or two.

Speaker 14 We will lose our place at the top of the economic pyramid.

Speaker 13 So, this is the argument, Heather, that I think is so important,

Speaker 13 which is to separate the moral component from the practical and pragmatic component, because I think so often the morality of it is centered at the argument, and people forget that this is also

Speaker 13 a practical argument. So

Speaker 13 here's their counter.

Speaker 13 We need to live in a meritocracy and to advantage, you know, okay,

Speaker 13 there was slavery and Jim Crow and you weren't allowed to buy houses and you were excluded from certain places. So we're going to give you two points on your college application.
So we're good, right?

Speaker 13 And then the other people went, two points on a college application. That's so unfair.
That's not America.

Speaker 13 The argument against it is always, oh, you're going to, you want to reach out and bring in people of color to be pilots. Oh, don't they have to learn how to fly planes?

Speaker 13 As though it's only race or gender or that that's what diversity is.

Speaker 13 How do you

Speaker 13 talk about that?

Speaker 13 with people who believe that? And how do you not help them understand that opening up these supply lines that have not been used

Speaker 13 is actually increasing competition?

Speaker 14 Yeah, well, I think there's two ways to do it.

Speaker 14 One is where you simply can remind folks that a system where only white men were allowed to hold top positions or not even top positions, you know, like, you know,

Speaker 14 a machinist, a manufacturer, right? Like a, you know, a pilot, a driver, et cetera, was itself a formative of affirmative action that diminished competition, right?

Speaker 14 If you didn't have to compete with anyone but anyone who looked like you,

Speaker 14 and, you know, increasingly now the majority of the country is not sort of eligible for various reasons for these jobs, you know, that was its own kind of affirmative action. And then we saw once we

Speaker 14 unleashed the power of competition, we saw our country's innovation and prosperity really,

Speaker 14 really explode, right? And I think that that's one way to talk about it in terms of competition, right? People should have to compete.

Speaker 14 But the other thing, you know, that I would say is that it took a lot of work to hold back women and people of color and immigrants who come to this country from non-white non-white parts of the world, right?

Speaker 14 And that's because like there is a ton of grit and excellence. And black women have the highest average degrees right now in the country, right? Immigrants create jobs twice as often, right?

Speaker 14 I don't know that it's really about

Speaker 14 being worried that things are going to get worse if they're competing with these other groups, but rather perhaps a fear of losing, right? And that's just, that's just real talk.

Speaker 13 Like a resource guarding, the sense of.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's like hoarding resources. I'm saying basically, maybe the fear is not that

Speaker 14 the black pilot will be, you know, worse, but rather that maybe the black pilot will be better, right? That someone who has overcome all of these challenges, right?

Speaker 13 Certainly not how they're framing it. I mean, do you remember the plane goes down just recently, right after the inauguration in D.C.

Speaker 13 And the first thing they did is come out and say, the reason this happened is because of our DEI policies.

Speaker 13 For God's sakes, there might have been a lesbian air traffic controller or there might have been.

Speaker 14 John, that's just message discipline. It's just message discipline, right? Because what it was was a head fake away from the cuts that they were making to the FAA, right? Away from the fact that...

Speaker 13 So you think cynical, purely cynical. Oh, absolutely.
They don't believe any of this shit.

Speaker 14 Well, some people do. Some of them do, right? Some of them are believers.

Speaker 14 But again, everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. So if you live in the right-wing, you know, sort of message ecosystem, right?

Speaker 14 If you're on Elon Musk's Twitter, which used to be this great, you know,

Speaker 14 platform for the world and is now like a white supremacist message board, then yes, right, that's what you've been taught to believe.

Speaker 14 But it's not true. And more importantly,

Speaker 14 we still live in a privilege-based society. I mean, and look at, you know, for example, the law firms, right?

Speaker 14 So the administration had these shakedown executive orders to all of the top law firms, which were retribution and trying to get hundreds of millions of dollars of free work for right-wing causes and, you know, for Trump and, you know, et cetera, right.

Speaker 14 And the attack was, cancel your DEI programs because they're illegal and they've run amok.

Speaker 14 I want to be clear that in all of the law firms in the country, there are only less than 3% of the partners are black, right? There are about 50%

Speaker 14 of the

Speaker 14 law firms, the big law firms, right? The ones with like a lot of lawyers and that are like really elite, 50% of them have no black partners, right?

Speaker 14 And so, what we're saying is this is like still an industry where white men are dominating,

Speaker 14 and yet the administration is using the excuse that diversity has run amok

Speaker 14 to literally just shake them down for money for their causes? It's all about the money.

Speaker 13 Yeah, they got, I think, $900 million of pro bono, which reminds me of like, it's like a lifetime supply of turtle wax. Like, who's going to use 900 million hours?

Speaker 14 Oh, they could do a very, well, first of all, lawyers' hours are very expensive.

Speaker 13 Maybe I haven't had a lawyer in a while.

Speaker 14 So, this is this

Speaker 14 this is trying to rig the marketplace of ideas, right? So

Speaker 14 lawyers, very educated people who know the Constitution, who know the law, are not flocking to defend these crackpot legal theories. And so they literally have to force them to do it, right?

Speaker 14 It's the same thing with the attacks on universities, right?

Speaker 14 In the marketplace of ideas of rigorous scholarship, What the administration is trying to do with these shakedown executive orders is say you have to hire scholars who are conservative.

Speaker 14 Not you have to hire people based on their identity, right? But you have to hire scholars who are conservative. And, you know, I mean, these are institutions where,

Speaker 14 sure, there may be a

Speaker 14 plurality of people who have liberal thoughts and ideas. Right.

Speaker 13 And not necessarily activists. They may, you know, there's a difference also between ideologue activists and people that just lean left.

Speaker 14 Read a lot. Yeah.
Read a lot.

Speaker 14 people that listen to the radio on anything people that that learn history and and right and so what they're saying is uh you know for example the the attacks on these ivy league institutions that are shakedowns for um for money and for rigging our whole civil society

Speaker 14 not only to a conservative bent to say, you know, put the thumb on the scale and say, if any department doesn't have enough conservatives from the White House with a stroke of a pen, i have to i have the power to change that or i will remove all of your research grants for pediatric cancer i mean truly it it it is

Speaker 14 it is so disgusting it is so nefarious it's wild we're gonna take a quick break we shall be right back

Speaker 2 Even though severe cases can be rare, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is still the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under one.

Speaker 4 RSV often begins like a cold or the flu, but can quickly spread to your baby's lungs.

Speaker 8 Ask your doctor about preventative antibodies for your baby this season and visit protectagainstrsv.com.

Speaker 7 The information presented is for general educational purposes only.

Speaker 10 Please ask your healthcare provider about any questions regarding your health or your baby's health.

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Speaker 14 We're back. Heather.
You know, I just spent the last two days with a

Speaker 14 scholar

Speaker 14 of autocrats, right, who studies this stuff.

Speaker 14 And they're from Harvard.

Speaker 14 I actually won't name them because

Speaker 14 of the attack. Why are you hanging out with these elites, Heather?

Speaker 13 Why the elites?

Speaker 14 Well, I mean, listen, if anybody else has studied autocracies from across the world, I'd be very happy. Right.
Right.

Speaker 14 And this is the playbook, right? It is to go at the parts of society that have the power to mount a defense to total control and to bring them to heal.

Speaker 14 And I think that's the piece that is scarier than anything else about what's going on right now: is that we, in many ways, have moved into

Speaker 14 what political scientists would call right now a competitive autocracy, meaning there are still elections, right? It's not like a military coup,

Speaker 14 but it is an autocracy in the sense that we have someone in office who wants to uh rule by signature, right? I mean, he's got a majority in Congress, by the way, has signed no legislation, right?

Speaker 14 Zero, it's insane, zero, he's got the Congress in his party, they will do their lick spittles, right?

Speaker 14 And yet, right, he still wants the feeling of being able to just sign a pin and change American law firms, and change American universities, and change American media and cut

Speaker 14 hundreds of billions of dollars, fire tens of thousands of public servants,

Speaker 14 flouting the separation of powers. And ultimately, that's about his control.

Speaker 14 Even the tariffs, John, really, I think, are, because there's something, you can have an industrial policy, right?

Speaker 14 In fact, Joe Biden's industrial policies brought manufacturing back to the highest level it had been since the 1970s.

Speaker 14 But the way, the chaotic form of these punitive tariffs is really just about him exerting maximum control over companies, industries, and world leaders, and then asking them to beg for permission to be

Speaker 14 accepted from

Speaker 14 these tariffs.

Speaker 13 I remember even right afterwards, he was at some dinner, and it was so stunning to see all the chaos that had been created. And he's up there in his tuxedo going, they're all kissing my ass.

Speaker 13 All these countries, they're kissing my ass as though,

Speaker 13 you know, that was the goal is to make sure that they paid tribute. Has it surprised you that corporate entities and educational entities and law firms have been so

Speaker 13 supplicant, have been so subservient, have done this so easily. It was when Harvard said, Yeah, we're not going to do that.
And you thought,

Speaker 13 Oh my God, I'm going to have to take the side of Harvard.

Speaker 14 What?

Speaker 13 But when they did that, you thought, Well, is that only because they have an endowment, or is this the beginning of a bulkhead? You know,

Speaker 13 were you shocked by how quickly

Speaker 13 Apple and Amazon and they were all at the inauguration, everybody bent the knee?

Speaker 14 I mean, so I was less shocked that some of of the world's richest men

Speaker 14 were

Speaker 14 willing to stand behind someone who had made it very clear that if you weren't behind him, you were in his sights, right?

Speaker 14 They have so much to gain by cozying up to him and flattering him.

Speaker 14 And of course, let's be very clear: everyone at that income and wealth level has to gain from the tax cuts that are barreling their way through Washington, which is the number one goal, obviously, of Elon Musk.

Speaker 14 It's about clearing the way of these pesky vaccines for children in Africa and lead pipe mitigation in your neighborhood.

Speaker 13 Removing regulation, removing anything that would stand in their way, right?

Speaker 14 Exactly, in order to justify massive tax cuts, right? So it's about the tax cut. It's about the fact that he is very easily flattered.
And so, for example, smartphones.

Speaker 14 Whoops, smartphones are all of a a sudden, you know, exempt from the tariffs, right? So, that made sense to me. What didn't make sense was the law firms.

Speaker 14 The law firms didn't make sense.

Speaker 14 The law firms didn't make sense because, first of all, the executive order, the shakedown executive order, was so illegal on its face, and that is their job to determine that, right?

Speaker 14 So, they didn't wait for the litigation to go through. And of course, there are some law firms that have signed on to

Speaker 14 litigation to take it all the way to the supreme court to get those shakedown eos uh uh nullified but what what was the shakedown heather is it because i i still don't quite understand

Speaker 13 what he was threatening or or why i know he was going to say oh i'll strip your security or i'll make it harder for you to get clients but i the why of it is what is he saying they've done

Speaker 14 Very good point. He's saying that one or more of their partners, there's a few things.
Basically, they've defied him, right? So

Speaker 14 one or more of their partners or people who work there at some point was part of a litigation against him, right? So you have people who were U.S. attorneys who were part of litigation against him.

Speaker 13 And is she suggesting that that is an illegal act that they undertook?

Speaker 14 Absolutely, because he's the law.

Speaker 13 You just get, that just, that did not go well with my spine right there.

Speaker 14 John, you got to know what time it is.

Speaker 14 Can I just say something about like why it's like easy for me to say that and accept it?

Speaker 14 And it's kind of harder, I think, for many people in this country to wrap their minds around what time it is right now. Please.

Speaker 14 So we've always been taught, I think, that there's such a thing as autocrats and dictators. And we go to war against them, right?

Speaker 14 Those are in foreign countries that don't believe in democracy like we do. But black people in America lived under autocracy for most of our history.

Speaker 14 Black people in the deep south, in many places, live under a version of autocracy today, right?

Speaker 14 And so

Speaker 14 a world where

Speaker 14 there is a law that is

Speaker 14 the effective law that is

Speaker 14 used and enforced through violence, the threat of violence, being willing to take resources away from a community. Right.

Speaker 13 Economic damage.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 14 That's what has been done to black America.

Speaker 14 That's Jim Crow America, right?

Speaker 14 And so we're not as shocked that this would happen in America, right?

Speaker 14 And I think it's really important

Speaker 14 for everyone in this country to know what time it is, right?

Speaker 14 To learn from the resistance and defiance movements all around the world, but also the movements that end the Jim Crow autocracy in the United States, to learn how to be vigilant, to not be surprised, to know that they're strengthened in numbers, to know that if you give an inch when you don't have to, they will take everything, and to know what their vision is, the kind of world that they would like to see.

Speaker 14 And it is a world where a law firm that has been around for 120 years, has represented conservatives, corporations,

Speaker 14 civil rights lawyers,

Speaker 14 the whole thing, can be brought to heel

Speaker 14 for

Speaker 14 essentially, you know, A, having a DEI program, right? That's a diversity program that is that is in the executive orders usually. But as I said, you know, it's not doing much.

Speaker 14 It's not like it's been taken over by, you know, communist, you know, trans black people. Right.
Because these law firms are still mostly white men at the top, right?

Speaker 14 As I said, you know, like just a few percent of black lawyers are partners at these big law firms. But most importantly, for

Speaker 14 violating the law, which is do not cross Trump. And then, of course, strategically, if I want to be a dictator, first destroy the lawyers and bring them to your side.
Second, capture the media.

Speaker 14 Third, distract the university. Yes,

Speaker 13 who's going to be there to file the lawsuits, right?

Speaker 14 Right, exactly. So you need, and to intimidate the judiciary as well, right?

Speaker 14 When the judges who are in the same class as these big law firm partners are looking around and seeing the people who usually come you know and go to trial in front of them yielding without even putting up a fight that influences the judiciary so this is all about a sectoral approach to bring the entire society under heel and i i know for some people hearing this it may sound like oh you know she's crazy she's saying that you know the the her hair's on fire right like she's exaggerating she she's you know she's exaggerating what's going on.

Speaker 14 But I really want to implore you to just think about the sort of through line across all of what Trump is doing. You know, they didn't break the law.

Speaker 14 They broke the

Speaker 14 law that says, you know, Donald Trump is the law.

Speaker 13 And they use the law, Heather. I think

Speaker 13 what's so interesting in this moment is how thorough they've been in using the law and the history of this country. I feel like

Speaker 13 one of the mechanisms that they utilize is catastrophizing the moment that we were in to justify emergency powers.

Speaker 13 And then they're going through and they're saying, let's use the Alien Enemies Act from

Speaker 13 this era. Let's use in 1950s.
There was an emergency tariff construction use that was used for that. Let's use what Roosevelt might have used in the the 40s.
So they've actually,

Speaker 13 they've gone through and they have built their own

Speaker 13 justification and infrastructure through the history of this country. They have used it

Speaker 13 historically.

Speaker 14 Yes. Now, obviously not Donald Trump, who doesn't read, but

Speaker 13 how fun was it watching him go, I'm going to use the illegal aliens, you know, like somebody, you just wanted to say, like, who told him about that?

Speaker 14 So obviously, right, there's an entire

Speaker 14 right-wing infrastructure folks who put out things like Project 2025 who have been looking for

Speaker 14 all the different moments in our history when the executive, the White House, had the most power possible. Right.

Speaker 13 Generally, under emergency powers.

Speaker 14 Yes, that's right. Right.
And what is the emergency today? The emergency today is that there's too much diversity. There are too many immigrants of color, right?

Speaker 14 It's a racial emergency. Let's just be real, right? And so this is why it really is drained pool politics.
It's saying that there's too much diversity in our country.

Speaker 14 And so we have to actually just, you know, drain the pool and get rid of government.

Speaker 13 It's a reset.

Speaker 14 It's a reset, right? But of course, it's a reset that is going to cost people white, black, and brown, native-born and immigrant,

Speaker 14 their jobs, right?

Speaker 14 He's destroying tens of thousands of American jobs, just himself, much less the knock-on effects of things like tariffs and the tax cuts that are skewed to the wealthy while actually raising them by about $1,000 for middle-class families.

Speaker 14 It's costing American lives.

Speaker 14 We are going to see kids poisoned by lead because of the cuts to the EPA.

Speaker 13 Kids dying of measles.

Speaker 14 Kids dying of measles. People dying of diseases that were research funded by, in part by the American taxpayer, has already been frozen, curtailed, threatened because

Speaker 14 he wants power over the institutions, the universities that partner with them, or because they've said something like

Speaker 14 female. in the grant proposal.
Right. Sorry, that's who gets breast cancer.

Speaker 13 But that's what's been so wild to watch is the way that they have manipulated what some of this research entails to make it seem as though it's whimsical diversity porn, that it's it's literally just universities going, oh, we've got all this money, but we we have to give out at least half of it to wheelchair-bound lesbians.

Speaker 13 Like they're making it seem utterly arbitrary arbitrary and based on guilt.

Speaker 14 That because what it does is, I mean, yes, there are a number of grants that are studying, you know, lung cancer in minority populations, in rural populations, in underserved.

Speaker 14 I'm like naming words that are disqualifying now, right? Right.

Speaker 14 And the only reason why that is

Speaker 14 the only justification for that being something that you can cancel without any kind of feeling or sentiment or sense about it is if you just totally dehumanized those populations, right?

Speaker 14 Because we get lung cancer too, right?

Speaker 14 And if you're in a country, in a society that is about 50, 50 people of color and white, it should matter if people are dying and getting sick because of diseases that can be cured, right?

Speaker 14 It's really, the dehumanization is what happens first.

Speaker 14 And then, of course, you're right, John, that it is just an excuse to exert control.

Speaker 13 Quick break. We shall be right back.

Speaker 14 We are back.

Speaker 13 And I think they've done something even more insidious,

Speaker 13 which is to suggest as common sense

Speaker 13 the idea that if a black person or a woman or

Speaker 13 anyone who is not of the default setting has a position, that it is a position that has been gained through the manipulation of a system.

Speaker 13 I have a friend whose daughter is brilliant, black woman, young, you know, just getting out of college. And what he was saying is, she's summa cum laude.
And you know what the like fucked up thing is?

Speaker 13 No one's going to believe it. Is the way that he set it up is

Speaker 13 she is only there by the grace of liberal guilt. She is only there because

Speaker 13 the lack of meritocracy put her in that position and elevated her and gave her the thing. And it was so clearly upsetting to him, the idea that her achievements would now

Speaker 13 be cast in that type of

Speaker 13 negative light. And I want to see if we can sort of,

Speaker 13 their objections to that is somehow they keep saying we want to get back to that meritocracy, but

Speaker 13 when was that? Like what are they talking about?

Speaker 13 And how do you address that idea that these people who are achieving things in spite of

Speaker 13 their circumstances are now being viewed suspiciously?

Speaker 14 I I think it's really important. You know, I was touched by the sort of anguish, you know, that you cited from your friend.

Speaker 14 My thought when you were saying it was they'll think that until she opens her mouth, right?

Speaker 14 There is a way in which,

Speaker 14 as a black woman,

Speaker 14 myself, who, you know, was a nerd and skipped a grade and, you know, went to schools that nobody like me should have been able to go to and thrive and graduate at the top of my class. And

Speaker 14 I associate myself with the black women who did the math to return the moon landing, right?

Speaker 14 the black people who, despite literally being not allowed to hold any positions of power in society, I'm talking about, you know, the first three quarters of the 20th century, you know, invented the furnace, the gas mask, the, you know, the stoplight, the filament in the light bulb, you know, the satellite, the GPS technology, a black woman, right?

Speaker 14 Like all of these things that.

Speaker 13 Are you serious? Because that is the only thing that allows me to work.

Speaker 14 The only technology that works.

Speaker 13 It is the only thing that allows me to get places now, even reasonably on time, is I need to thank whoever that is.

Speaker 13 I need to write them a thank you note.

Speaker 14 You do, you do, right? I mean, I'm just saying, like, there, there is this counter. And I know

Speaker 14 I'm very happy to you know sort of argue about the meritocracy but in some ways I just want to

Speaker 14 say that there is

Speaker 14 the other truth that has to be at least for people who are the targets of this kind of dehumanization and diminishment a real knowledge that is at your core that the entire society had to be structured to hold you back or else you would fly.

Speaker 14 Like you just have to know that,

Speaker 14 you know, as I said at the beginning, there was a system that used every part of society to prop up one identity

Speaker 14 and to oppress and hold back everybody else. And that when we are given an equal playing field,

Speaker 14 we fly.

Speaker 13 Boy, Heather, that's such, you know, look at what's happened now in education. So

Speaker 13 years ago, they thought, well, women are being held back. So let's encourage them.
Let's encourage them to get into STEM. Let's encourage them to get education.
And now the big talk is, hey,

Speaker 13 what about boys? They're getting their asses kicked by women. As though

Speaker 13 women have been so advantaged now that boys can't compete on that level

Speaker 13 that it's too skewed.

Speaker 13 And so they're, it's so interesting to me to watch them say, so we must repair the damage that's been done by equality.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 13 I mean, that is sort of what.

Speaker 14 That's what they're saying. Right.
That's what they're saying.

Speaker 13 And so they have to take, it's such an interesting thing to watch, but it also gets to the point that somehow there are metrics to a meritocracy that are not.

Speaker 13 subjective, that somehow hiring in the good old days was not subjective. Right.
That it was, no, it's based completely on qualifications, which everyone knows is nonsense.

Speaker 13 College applications are subjective. Hiring is subjective.
Everything is.

Speaker 13 Other than things that are literally math. Like if you watch a dude score 35 points a game and get 11 rebounds, that is unassailably objective measures.
But as far as who you're going to hire,

Speaker 13 you of course it is, oh, he was recommended by Johnny and Johnny's a good dude, so I'm going to get him. Or I talk to him and I feel comfortable with him.

Speaker 14 I feel comfortable, right? The like me bias, right? So, what is diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, right? It is, it has been,

Speaker 14 and ever since you know, the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then the 70s with the feminist movement brought in women and gender into this. An idea

Speaker 14 that

Speaker 14 we as a society and workplaces individually, and the research has continuously borne this out, We do better

Speaker 14 when

Speaker 14 you really have the best and brightest. And that means everyone in your society is able to come through the door and participate.
It's like, you know, it's like if you have a problem, right?

Speaker 14 You have a problem that you're sitting with, and you have only one identity, one group of people with the same general set of background and assumptions, and, you know, and where they come from and the way they see the world.

Speaker 14 You can only see part of it, right? There's this whole other part of it that someone who came from a different set of circumstances would be able to see. And together,

Speaker 14 you solve the whole, right? And that has what has been borne out. Literally, more diverse juries remember more facts.
More diverse teams come up with breakthroughs in problem solving faster.

Speaker 14 More diversity in the classroom creates better educational outcomes, not just for the kids of color, but for the white kids too, right? We have reams and reams of research about this. And yet,

Speaker 14 this

Speaker 14 formula, which I think is America's superpower, and the idea that we could keep optimizing for that, keep making workplaces more diverse,

Speaker 14 which, by the way, is popular with over three-fourths of the American public, right? The idea of diversity in workplaces, it's like,

Speaker 14 it's actually common sense.

Speaker 13 And by the way, too, diversity is also, as you say that, race, gender, but also veterans.

Speaker 14 Veterans, thank you. Or people

Speaker 13 might have a disability. Like there's so many different metrics to that.

Speaker 14 I mean, this anti-diversity regime is not stopping with affirmative action in schools, which already the Supreme Court did away with.

Speaker 14 It is. It's coming for the breastfeeding rooms in your offices, for veterans hiring programs, for, you know, right? It's coming for

Speaker 14 all of the systems that make the world more inclusive and accommodating. And so often, this is the way drain pool politics goes, right?

Speaker 14 It's like, it's supposed to be an attack on the least of us, but in the end, it's an attack on almost all of us.

Speaker 13 You know, Heather, I want to ask you, were there excesses in the DEI?

Speaker 13 Because everything that you're saying and my experience with it as well, has been that, even to the point of like, if I'm putting together a writer's room, forget about, you know, women or people of color, all that.

Speaker 13 Like, I need a couple of people who are really good short joke writers, but I need a couple of people who are more absurdist thinkers, or a couple of people that are more like you design something so that everyone doesn't bring the same skill because then you have no reach.

Speaker 13 So, what happened

Speaker 13 that suddenly made this the driving force in many respects of an utter transformation of American politics? Was it the seminar?

Speaker 13 Is it me too? Is it the idea that I can't even look at a woman? You know,

Speaker 13 is it the idea that,

Speaker 13 oh, now I have to think about if someone in my office might be gay, so I can't do the voice I like doing? Like,

Speaker 13 what drives this?

Speaker 13 Because I've always looked at DEI programs as what

Speaker 13 the hierarchical system allows you to do. Rather than attack what are the real issues of communities left behind and do the real work of building equity in places that had equity removed by

Speaker 13 literal legislation, they make sure that there's somebody who has an office that says diversity and they make you sit through an hour once a year.

Speaker 13 Like, what is going on?

Speaker 14 So I want to say two things. One,

Speaker 14 Trump got 49 and some change percent of the people who voted, right? And 80, 90 million people didn't vote.

Speaker 14 So, right, and even of the people who voted for Trump, the idea of canceling diversity programs across the country is not overwhelmingly popular. So,

Speaker 14 this is a faction using this as an excuse. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't way more people who are,

Speaker 14 you know, sort of susceptible to the anti-diversity arguments than I feel comfortable with?

Speaker 13 And suspicious of diversity, really suspicious of it. Yeah.
Of those programs.

Speaker 14 So I think two. So one, I want to just like put it in its place, right? We still have polling that shows that diversity and diversity programs are largely popular in the country still, right?

Speaker 14 But you had

Speaker 14 social movements, you know, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, Me Too,

Speaker 14 the Movement for Marriage Equality equality and for inclusion on gender and sexual identity that in a very short period of time

Speaker 14 signaled to,

Speaker 14 you know, a lot of influential people that they needed to hurry up and get on this train. And so I do think you did see people who were not true believers.

Speaker 14 in the idea, right? I'm talking about like C-suite executives, right? Who said, oh boy, George Floyd was murdered. The whole world's attention went to it.
I got to put out a statement.

Speaker 14 I got to, you know, bring that person in the diversity office that I haven't ever wanted to invite to a meeting in and ask them what to do really quickly.

Speaker 14 And just as quickly, as soon as Trump was elected, they were willing to drop it, right?

Speaker 14 So that's why, you know, all the black people I know haven't been to Target since they dropped their DEI, right?

Speaker 14 You know?

Speaker 14 And we've got these like economic boycotts of Target that are happening, whereas, you know, Costco and Delta have stood fast with their CEI programs and they're doing better financially, right?

Speaker 14 So there has been a like, it was a fad of

Speaker 14 some

Speaker 14 sectors of our society, and they dropped it just as quickly.

Speaker 14 And that's a shame, right? Because I do think the companies that have really meaningfully seen it as a part of their growth model before George Floyd was murdered by a cop and

Speaker 14 and still after Donald Trump won 49% of the popular vote.

Speaker 14 Those are the companies that are going to continue to thrive in a diverse America.

Speaker 13 The ones who weren't being performative.

Speaker 14 That's right.

Speaker 13 Do you think, Heather, that is it a misunderstanding of what diversity initiatives mean? Is it a poor design of those programs within the workforce?

Speaker 13 You know, what they would say is it demonizes white people.

Speaker 13 It makes them all seem guilty of something that they had nothing to do with. It's giving jobs out.

Speaker 13 If I'm up for a job and a person of color is up for a job, I know I won't get it because the playing field is now tilted the other way. You know, that is the prevailing wisdom of the backlash.
Right.

Speaker 14 And still big law firms own 50% of them have no black partners. But every black person who's ever gone up for a job is going to get it.
Okay.

Speaker 14 So.

Speaker 13 And in the NFL, they have to interview at least one black person.

Speaker 14 They just have to.

Speaker 14 Exactly. That's why there are so many black head coaches.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 So, what those

Speaker 14 the thing I'm joking about, obviously, is that the bias still persists. And so, this idea that a white man can't get a shot anymore is just not borne up by the numbers.

Speaker 14 And I think it's really important to remember that because if you think, because you have to state and remember the discrimination that exists, the like-me bias that people have who are in power, and most of them are white men.

Speaker 14 That bias exists, the bias that comes from social distance. Like, I'm just not familiar with that person's jokes, their hairstyle, the school they went to, the references they make.

Speaker 14 It makes me uncomfortable.

Speaker 14 I'm a little bit scared of these people that I didn't grow up, you know, barbecuing with, and that I, you know, lived in a very segregated neighborhood and went to a very effectively segregated school or private school to keep away from people like that.

Speaker 14 And now all of a sudden, you know, I'm looking at their application and woe and behold, research shows that if people on an application for a job have a black name, a black sounding name, right, they are much less likely to get a callback, even if they have a ton of degrees and experience than someone with a white sounding name with less of that.

Speaker 14 So if you don't recognize the bias still exists, it can feel arbitrary. Like, why should a black person get a job? You know, why, you know,

Speaker 14 but it's important to remember that.

Speaker 14 It's important that we still have a lot of ways to go in this country for anything approaching full equality and that full equality will be great for everyone in the country.

Speaker 13 Do you have at hand sort of the idea of here's a, here's some DEI programs that I think have been really effective, that have done it the right way, that haven't used sort of pro forma shame or,

Speaker 13 you know, sort of just finger wagging and are designed in a way to effectuate the proper change without creating that resentment.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I mean, I think there's two things.
One, I think that, you know, any kind of

Speaker 14 change, being made aware of something that you were like willfully lied to about can be uncomfortable. But of course, discomfort is where learning happens.

Speaker 14 That's what, you know, somebody who's a science teacher would say, right? You know, it's just, it's uncomfortable to be learning something new, and that should be okay.

Speaker 14 I just want to say that from the outset. But I also think that there is

Speaker 14 a way in which,

Speaker 14 because there's so far to go, because,

Speaker 14 you know, when I first wrote my book, so that was, you know, leading up to 2020,

Speaker 14 10% of high school seniors could accurately say that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. How many? 10%.

Speaker 13 Come on, Heather.

Speaker 14 Come on, right? So we have so far to go.

Speaker 14 So imagine, right, that 90% of high school seniors, they graduate, they go into an office, you know, and someone at the Black History Month thing is saying something and they're like, what are you talking, right?

Speaker 13 What do they even say? It was

Speaker 14 states' rights. States rights.
Their rights to be states.

Speaker 13 Even though it's

Speaker 13 South Carolina, I think, specifically in their declaration of war, was like, slavery's got to be here.

Speaker 14 Or we're leaving. Exactly.
Wow.

Speaker 14 Right. But so that's just an example to show how the mass consciousness raising that happened after 2020

Speaker 14 was like, you know, going from zero to 100 very quickly for a lot of people who were lied to, right? I do not blame people for going to schools where the textbooks are full of lies.

Speaker 14 That is not their fault, right?

Speaker 14 So I think there is that that we have to just understand.

Speaker 14 But also, yes, I do think, and I have experienced

Speaker 14 efforts that are more about creating the desired state than educating people

Speaker 14 about all the things on the way.

Speaker 13 Okay, talk about that then.

Speaker 14 And the desired state

Speaker 14 is where you have a sense of belonging everyone. The desired state is where you connect.
on the level of your common humanity.

Speaker 14 So, for example, I happen to be very lucky that my amazing mother is someone who's been doing this work for a long time, not as like a DEI practitioner,

Speaker 14 but she was in philanthropy and she pioneered this program that she calls RX Racial Healing. And it's for racial healing in communities and in institutions.

Speaker 14 And one of the things you do is you get a diverse group of people, you put them in a circle, and you don't ask them to share their greatest trauma and a history of you know oppression and exclusion those people need to know that stuff right but it's sort of like

Speaker 14 this is you know sort of hopefully for people who you know are at a 2.0 or they go through this program and then they go and read about that on their own but in terms of you know the real work in the circle it's Tell me about a time in your life when you felt awe.

Speaker 14 Tell me about a time in your life where somebody really believed in you and it changed what you did. And so you get people sharing their stories.

Speaker 14 And it is a white cop and a black kindergarten teacher.

Speaker 14 It is, you know, an Indigenous person who is, you know, fighting for land rights with somebody who's, you know, just not designed to shame either party, designed to facilitate.

Speaker 14 It's designed to connect first at the level of our common humanity. Because of course, what is racism?

Speaker 14 It is the lie that we are not all human beings that are driven fundamentally by the same needs and emotions, right?

Speaker 14 And so if you experience

Speaker 14 the

Speaker 14 actual act of hearing someone's story about when they felt certain emotions,

Speaker 14 when their humanity was touched, you connect on that level. And it in of itself gives lie to...
the racist belief in a hierarchy of human value.

Speaker 14 And then you can do the work.

Speaker 14 So that's just one one like design element of what I've seen be much more productive at diminishing defensiveness among people from groups that have historically been privileged, but also that get you to a place of trust.

Speaker 14 Because when someone's like told you about

Speaker 14 beautiful stories from their childhood,

Speaker 14 that's a trust.

Speaker 13 Let's talk about that because the word privilege,

Speaker 13 when we talk about in the language of snow, snowflakes and things like that, you know, the triggering, you know, people's lives are hard.

Speaker 13 White people's lives are hard. And so when they can hear you're privileged, it can trigger a kind of wait, you know, and that.

Speaker 13 How do you separate that idea that this isn't about saying your life is great and mine sucks because I'm in a minority group, but that, you know,

Speaker 13 life is, life is hard.

Speaker 13 And how, you know, in many ways, these racial and gender and all these divisions are there to prevent people from coming together and effectively pushing against the real issues of corporate dominance or other things along those lines.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 13 How do you take the power out of that word so that people don't feel attacked immediately with just the use of it?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 I know. I'm like, I want to say, on the one hand, we have so many crazy.

Speaker 13 You're about to go. You just tell them to get fucking over.

Speaker 14 That's what you tell them.

Speaker 14 Get over it. Not me.
That's not me. No, it's not at all.
It's not.

Speaker 13 You're the nicest person I know. All right.

Speaker 14 But, you know, don't be so fucking fragile. Exactly.

Speaker 14 No, no, no, really. No, listen, I,

Speaker 14 when I wrote The Sum of Us, it was trying to make the case that we have all

Speaker 14 been poorly served in an economy that is, you know, where inequality is rampant.

Speaker 14 And the excuse that the people driving that economy of inequality have used is racial divisions, racial grievance politics, right? And so I absolutely believe that people in power,

Speaker 14 especially right now, are selling a zero-sum story that says that

Speaker 14 progress for people of color and women is coming at your expense, that more immigrants are taking your jobs, that if there is, God forbid, less than 1% of the population that needs to become the gender that they know themselves to be, then that means that your daughter is never going to get a softball scholarship, right?

Speaker 14 Like,

Speaker 14 it is a zero-sum story that says fear your neighbor instead of joining forces with them to take on the people who are actually miserating us who are the you know the the greediest man in the world for example who's literally um you know the one trying to take away clean air and water and cancer research from all of us right so that is that i believe that so deeply that these racial divisions are holding us back from a society where we would all prosper more.

Speaker 13 How do we litigate that, Heather? Because that's then

Speaker 13 the final piece of this is you've got the evidence, you've got

Speaker 13 the story to tell. How do we litigate that case? Because I don't think it's been litigated well.

Speaker 14 So I think

Speaker 14 we are living in the

Speaker 14 sort of fulfillment of three decades of a right-wing takeover of the information ecosystem.

Speaker 14 We don't not only like, is there not the message discipline that would have,

Speaker 14 everyone who wants to see unity and prosperity in our country singing from the same hymn book,

Speaker 14 but they're just not the channels anymore.

Speaker 14 And so I think that's a real problem, right? We've lost almost half of the newspapers in this country.

Speaker 14 Sinclair is broadcasting to 70% of American households, and that's a company that's ideologically right-wing. Real information and facts are behind a paywall, right?

Speaker 14 So you have this education gap where the stuff that's free is just, you know, flooded the zone, frankly, crap on social media.

Speaker 14 That's free. And then you have to pay 80 bucks a year for the Washington Post or the New York Times.

Speaker 13 And algorithmically driven, yes.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 14 So we've just got an information ecosystem that is really distorted and that's dangerous. But fundamentally,

Speaker 14 the American people know that the economy is rigged

Speaker 14 for the very wealthy. That is something that

Speaker 14 the majority of Republicans believe.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 it is something that when we have a

Speaker 14 Democratic Party, and I'm talking about politics now because of the laws that matter, that change the economy, but also because

Speaker 14 people listen to politicians explain the world to them.

Speaker 14 That's part of how we get a story in our head.

Speaker 14 The Democratic Party is seen as well-meaning but weak.

Speaker 13 And defending the status quo.

Speaker 14 And defending the status quo at a time when the status quo is just not working. People know their kids will be worse off than them.
That is a fundamental violation of the American dream.

Speaker 14 And so, yes, 49% of the country was like, I would rather choose something different than the status quo.

Speaker 13 And by the way, huge inroads into the very communities, minority communities, he did much better than

Speaker 13 he had previously done. But you used a great word, emiserated, and you talked about the rigging of the economy to the very rich.

Speaker 13 And yet I think the prevailing emotional drive of that electoral change is the economy is rigged in favor of black people, women, and undocumented immigrants.

Speaker 13 Like the very people that suffer the most in most economic outcome studies are the ones apparently who have been elevated.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 that is because the people holding the bullhorn who are telling, selling that zero-sum story for their own profit,

Speaker 14 are saying, blame your neighbor, blame the person right next to you that you can see, and not the billionaire.

Speaker 13 You're working hard, but you're not getting anything out of it. They are those

Speaker 13 welfare people.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the undeserving other. And I just, you know, you said this, so I should address why is it that more

Speaker 14 Latinos and more

Speaker 14 young people, especially young white people, more Asian Americans, more Muslims, a few more black men, but not that many. We're still, you know, black people are still the

Speaker 14 most

Speaker 14 skeptical. They're still in their lives.
They're still going, really?

Speaker 14 Come on.

Speaker 14 You know, why that shift?

Speaker 14 I I think we have to get a little bit more sophisticated about race and understand that it's not the story that

Speaker 14 the right wing that Donald Trump was selling was not that all immigrants are bad, all black people are bad, all, you know, it was that the underlying negative stereotype about the racialized other, that people are lazy, that they're criminal, that they're dangerous, that they're a threat, right?

Speaker 14 That was so like hyperbolically used, right? That it was like criminal migrants who were, you know, torturing your daughter and, right?

Speaker 14 That even people who themselves are immigrants or themselves have immigrants in their family were like, well, let me check the box to say not me, right? Right. All right.

Speaker 14 I'm going to check the box to say that's not me. And yes, you should deport those bad people because they're giving us a bad name.
Right. And lo and behold, we've got people.

Speaker 13 Lo and behold, they're like, is that a Chicago Bulls hat?

Speaker 14 You're out. El Salvador for you.
Boom.

Speaker 13 It's wild, Heather. Final

Speaker 13 question.

Speaker 13 As you watch this

Speaker 13 sort of

Speaker 13 build momentum in the wrong direction, are you seeing the nascent buds of an effective block, an effective unified

Speaker 13 group? that can build some guardrails where so many others have failed and and is there any advice that you give about sort of becoming a useful part of that?

Speaker 14 Such a great question. Thank you.

Speaker 14 So the moment is for defiance, right? It is for defiance of a hostile regime that is attacking our country as if they're going to war against it, right?

Speaker 14 That's what you do. to a country that you're going to war against.
You fire the scientists and the civil servants. You attack civil society, right?

Speaker 14 You try to dismantle the institutions of it that serve the people and that create independent power. And that's what this regime is doing.

Speaker 14 And so we owe it to ourselves and to the country that we love to defy that regime.

Speaker 14 And the good news is that even though there have been a bunch of really early losses, right, absolutely self-owns that were totally unnecessary by places like Columbia University and law firms like Paul Weiss and others, there have been both elites like Harvard, which really

Speaker 14 succumbed to a pressure campaign from the inside and the out, right? Like the city of Cambridge did a unanimous

Speaker 14 resolution saying stand up to Trump, right? This is before

Speaker 14 the executive order. The faculty, 800 of them signed a letter, right? Like

Speaker 14 it was a campaign because people knew it was coming to sort of buck up Harvard. And they did the right thing.
They said, you know what, our research matters, our institution matters, and that's great.

Speaker 14 Some of the lessons there are:

Speaker 14 A, you know, know your worth, anticipate that they're going to come for you, right? Like a lot of my friends work in nonprofit organizations.

Speaker 14 We just saw the first, you know, attack, the desire to get doge employees in any institution that accepts federal money, right?

Speaker 14 So you'll have like Elon Musk's henchmen henchmen sitting in your nonprofit office if you accept federal dollars. Wow.
You know, that just happened. So know that they're coming for you in the sector.

Speaker 14 Know that they're coming for media, right? Know that they're coming for you and get together.

Speaker 14 The lesson there is be in solidarity.

Speaker 14 One of the things that happened with the law firms is that instead of calling up Paul Weiss when they got that executive order, all the other law firms called and tried to pick off their clients and tried to pick off their best lawyers, right?

Speaker 14 They were like, great, blood in the water, let's do this. And so then all of a sudden, you know, the people calling the shots at that firm were like, we're not going to survive the next 72 hours.

Speaker 14 We've got a cave, right?

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 the understanding that there's strength in numbers against tyranny is very important.

Speaker 14 Get ready, right? Stay ready so you don't have to get ready, right? Know what time it is.

Speaker 14 Also, we had one of the largest demonstration days in American history all over the country, all 50 states on April 5th, the hands-off rallies.

Speaker 14 We had massive economic pressure being put from, you know, things that are being organized by black pastors against Target, you know, saying choose Costco, not Target.

Speaker 14 So we've got all of these different places.

Speaker 14 You know, one of the big wedges has obviously been about anti-war protesters being picked off the street street and deported.

Speaker 13 For writing an op-ed in a Tufts University paper.

Speaker 14 Exactly. And so we had, you know, Jewish parents and Tufts alumni having, you know, a protest and a day of action to get that young woman back and safe, right?

Speaker 14 So we've seen a lot of solidarity movements happening. And I think that right now it is scary.
People do feel like we tried so many things the first time around and here we are.

Speaker 14 People feel like he won the popular vote. And so maybe this is just America and I need to keep my head down.
But that's why I keep saying 49% of the popular vote, right? This is

Speaker 14 the majority of America.

Speaker 13 But you do have to be cognizant that, you know, we keep saying this isn't us. And you do think like, well, it is kind of us.
And you have to be, you have to be clear-eyed about

Speaker 13 who you have to persuade and how much it needs to happen.

Speaker 13 And also maybe, and I love the analogy of be ready, sort of, it's Heather McGee saying, balls of the feet, people, get, get in ready position and, and get ready to go.

Speaker 13 But also, we, we live in an era of immediate satisfaction. This is going to be a slog,

Speaker 13 as they always are.

Speaker 13 And, you know, they always, it's the thing I like to say when they say, you know, the, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And you think, well, not by itself.

Speaker 13 And there's certainly a lot of people trying to bend it back.

Speaker 14 That's right. Not by itself.
And it's not linear, right? I mean, so maybe I'll just end with this, John. So when I was in law school,

Speaker 14 I read about

Speaker 14 the civil rights cases of 1881 to 1883. And it like really changed my perspective on how progress happens in America.
So I,

Speaker 14 like everybody, sort of had this sort of linear narrative of progress of our country, right? There was slavery and there's Civil War, and then there was Jim Crow.

Speaker 14 That was better than slavery, but it was really bad. And then there was Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and then

Speaker 14 Obama, right? You know, like it's just like this, right? Right, right, right.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I learned that after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed civil rights laws,

Speaker 14 and there was integration in the South. There were, you know, black leaders.

Speaker 13 Black people started getting elected mayor.

Speaker 14 Exactly, right? There were black people in Congress, right? We had

Speaker 14 something that

Speaker 14 just was the fruits of the incredible sacrifice of the Civil War. And then the Supreme Court knocked down those federal civil rights laws in 1881 and 1883.
And then we had 75 years of Jim Crow.

Speaker 13 Oh, see, I did not realize it was the Supreme Court. I thought it was a political compromise, but it wasn't.
It was.

Speaker 14 It was both, right? The political compromise, it's always a little bit of both. But like, literally, the laws that had been passed were

Speaker 14 knocked down by the Supreme Court. Yes.
And so, you know, what that tells me is that progress is not linear. Right.
And that we may find ourselves living in a time when there is great retrenchment.

Speaker 14 And it may come from a narrow faction, right?

Speaker 14 And it may create the kind of suffering that I think we're going to see all over the country as

Speaker 14 this destruction happens coming from Washington, as so many of the

Speaker 14 jobs that help our country thrive are being snatched away, as so much of the funding that helps our country be at the leading edge is being flushed down the toilet over nothing.

Speaker 14 There is going to be misery.

Speaker 14 You know, the fact that we are in this place where autocracy is on the march is going to be difficult.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 we also know that if the generation that experienced, you know, the previous retrenchment had despaired, we wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here, right? You wouldn't be here.
I'm here.

Speaker 13 You just turned it around for me. You had me going.
I was heading down into the hole, Heather. You just turned it around for me.
Keep it going, Heather. They didn't despair.
What did they do, Heather?

Speaker 14 If they had despaired, we wouldn't be here, right? Yes. They said that there is a wall in front of us, and I'm going to keep hammering at it.

Speaker 14 And I may not be the one to see it fall down this wall of injustice, right? But it will fall down because of the blows that I made. That's our job.

Speaker 14 That's our job right now in this moment, to keep hammering at the wall of injustice, to adapt, to be smarter, to be more persuasive,

Speaker 14 to

Speaker 14 find new ways to bring people in and call people in. Yes, but also to keep our eye on the prize, as my people would say, because we have got to keep going.

Speaker 14 And so for everyone who feels like, oh my gosh, I can't watch the news anymore. I'm anxious.
I'm depressed. I don't know what to do.
I marched. I called.
I donated.

Speaker 14 Now I don't feel like doing any of that. Like, I hear you.
I feel you. Trust me.
I do. And yet, we have to, for ourselves and for future generations, keep doing something.

Speaker 14 We have to keep taking these blows because what an autocrat wants is for the good civil society majority to fall back.

Speaker 14 And we can't do it. A better country is in our future.
I have no doubt about that. And it'll get better because of what we've had to face about ourselves in this dark period.

Speaker 13 Oh, man.

Speaker 13 You just blew my mind in the sense of not only that we'd be a better country, but because of the trial,

Speaker 13 you will come out with

Speaker 13 a greater resilience and a greater understanding and a stronger foundation.

Speaker 14 I believe that.

Speaker 13 Than when you went in. It's an inoculation

Speaker 13 against those ills. Heather McGee, that's just, that's just, that's just beautiful.
God,

Speaker 13 how tiring is it for black women to always have to pull even well-meaning white dudes out of a hole?

Speaker 14 Oh, it's all right. You know, I mean, it's like part of the job.
You know,

Speaker 14 it's like being a teacher, right? I love it. I love, I love seeing the lights go on for people.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us. I can't thank you enough for spending the time.
And

Speaker 13 it's always such a pleasure to talk to you. And I can't wait to see what's coming next from you.

Speaker 14 Thank you, John.

Speaker 13 Folks, that was a roller coaster ride for me. I got to tell you, there were moments of despair, but the beautiful thing about Heather McGee is she will lay it out there steely-eyed and clearly.

Speaker 13 And just as you are about to maybe

Speaker 13 you feel that little hint of resignation crawling up your back, she will bring you back to that sense of duty and power and really invigorate you that this is a worthy moment, a worthy moment, and you won't always be ready to do what's necessary, but that you have to keep yourself absolutely ready.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 she just fabulous sobering, but also, I think, inspiring. So, thank you guys very much.
You can always reach us on social media.

Speaker 13 As always, I want to thank lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mimedovic, video editor and engineer Rob Batola, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer Jillian Spear, and our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray.

Speaker 13 Thank you for joining us. And

Speaker 13 see you next time. Bye-bye.

Speaker 13 The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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Speaker 1 Even though severe cases can be rare, Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is still the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under one.

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