Host Erik Fleming interviews Professor Sahar Aziz and Councilmember Wala Blegay in a wide-ranging episode about law, activism, and public service.
Aziz examines national security, Islamophobia, campus protests, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while Blegay discusses local governance, the impact of federal layoffs, EV infrastructure, and a Food-as-Medicine initiative to improve community health.
Together they explore how activists and elected officials work to protect civil rights, shape policy, and hold power accountable.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 I want to personally thank you for listening to the podcast.
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 If you like what you're hearing, then I need you to do a few things.
00:00:13 --> 00:00:19 First, I need subscribers. I'm on Patreon at patreon.com slash amomentwitherikfleming.
00:00:19 --> 00:00:24 Your subscription allows an independent podcaster like me the freedom to speak
00:00:24 --> 00:00:27 truth to power, and to expand and improve the show.
00:00:28 --> 00:00:32 Second, leave a five-star review for the podcast on the streaming service you
00:00:32 --> 00:00:35 listen to it. That will help the podcast tremendously.
00:00:36 --> 00:00:41 Third, go to the website, momenterik.com. There you can subscribe to the podcast,
00:00:42 --> 00:00:47 leave reviews and comments, listen to past episodes, and even learn a little bit about your host.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:51 Lastly, don't keep this a secret like it's your own personal guilty pleasure.
00:00:52 --> 00:00:57 Tell someone else about the podcast. Encourage others to listen to the podcast
00:00:57 --> 00:01:02 and share the podcast on your social media platforms, because it is time to
00:01:02 --> 00:01:04 make this moment a movement.
00:01:04 --> 00:01:10 Thanks in advance for supporting the podcast of our time. I hope you enjoy this episode as well.
00:01:11 --> 00:01:16 The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.
00:01:56 --> 00:02:01 Hello and welcome to another moment, Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.
00:02:02 --> 00:02:09 And today I have two guests on, and I was trying to come up with a title for
00:02:09 --> 00:02:15 this one because these two ladies are very unique, but yet they are very similar, right?
00:02:16 --> 00:02:26 One is a law professor and one is a practicing attorney who is now an elected official.
00:02:27 --> 00:02:33 And, you know, and just going over to, you know,
00:02:33 --> 00:02:38 the conversations with them and all that, the best title I could come up with
00:02:38 --> 00:02:42 was Actors of Democracy, right?
00:02:43 --> 00:02:46 Because they represent two different aspects.
00:02:47 --> 00:02:54 One, as I mentioned, is an elected official. So that young lady is doing her
00:02:54 --> 00:02:57 part to promote democracy by serving.
00:02:58 --> 00:03:09 And then the other guest, she is an actor of democracy by her activism and her
00:03:09 --> 00:03:13 role in educating future activists. Right.
00:03:13 --> 00:03:18 And so that's something that I think, you know, people need to understand that
00:03:18 --> 00:03:21 those two things work together.
00:03:21 --> 00:03:29 We have to have elected officials that understand the importance of public service.
00:03:29 --> 00:03:35 And then we need to have activists to hold those of us who have had the privilege
00:03:35 --> 00:03:37 of serving or currently serving accountable.
00:03:38 --> 00:03:41 Right. And so I think that's,
00:03:42 --> 00:03:49 you know, I mean, I'm not the best at creating titles, but I think that aptly
00:03:49 --> 00:03:56 applies to the two women, incredible women that I have on as guests.
00:03:56 --> 00:04:00 And I hope that you agree with my assessment as you listen to the interviews.
00:04:01 --> 00:04:06 Still trying to get subscribers, so please go to patreon.com slash a moment
00:04:06 --> 00:04:13 with Eric Fleming and sign up there, or you can go to momenteric.com and do the same thing.
00:04:13 --> 00:04:17 Plus, you can learn a little bit about the show and about me,
00:04:17 --> 00:04:22 and hopefully, you know, that you, if you like what you're hearing,
00:04:23 --> 00:04:24 you leave a review, all that stuff, right?
00:04:25 --> 00:04:34 So, you know, just please do that. The value of independent voices at this time is amazing.
00:04:35 --> 00:04:40 You know, when I sit and look at television news now, I mean,
00:04:40 --> 00:04:42 you get what you can, right?
00:04:42 --> 00:04:48 And I have seen some optimistic moments,
00:04:48 --> 00:04:55 but the real strength right now is those of us who have platforms like this,
00:04:55 --> 00:05:01 who can talk to whoever they want to talk to, talk to them as long as they,
00:05:01 --> 00:05:06 as you want to, and, you know, say what you want to say.
00:05:07 --> 00:05:12 And, and be as truthful as you can be. Right.
00:05:13 --> 00:05:17 Because there are forces on the other side that are doing the same thing.
00:05:17 --> 00:05:21 And so we have to continue to be out there.
00:05:21 --> 00:05:26 So support us, as many of us as you can, right?
00:05:27 --> 00:05:31 And again, the most important way to support us is to listen.
00:05:31 --> 00:05:36 So I, again, am grateful for y'all tuning in. All right.
00:05:36 --> 00:05:40 So without any further ado, let's go ahead and kick this off.
00:05:40 --> 00:05:44 And as always, we kick it off with a moment of news. with Grace G.
00:05:50 --> 00:05:56 Thanks, Erik. John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to President Trump,
00:05:56 --> 00:06:00 has been federally indicted on 18 counts related to the transmission and retention
00:06:00 --> 00:06:02 of national defense information.
00:06:02 --> 00:06:06 A federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to halt mass
00:06:06 --> 00:06:10 layoffs of federal workers during a partial government shutdown.
00:06:10 --> 00:06:14 Dozens of journalists from at least 30 news organizations vacated their Pentagon
00:06:14 --> 00:06:20 offices and lost their credentials after refusing to sign a new access policy
00:06:20 --> 00:06:23 that they claim threatens their ability to report independently.
00:06:24 --> 00:06:29 Several Republican activists were fired or demoted after a private leaked Telegram
00:06:29 --> 00:06:35 chat spanning 2 pages exposed racist, anti-Semitic, and violent messages
00:06:35 --> 00:06:37 exchanged between young Republican leaders.
00:06:38 --> 00:06:43 Sixteen people are feared dead after a devastating explosion at a munitions
00:06:43 --> 00:06:48 factory in rural Tennessee. A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration's
00:06:48 --> 00:06:52 request to immediately deploy National Guard troops to Illinois.
00:06:52 --> 00:06:57 A federal judge in Montana dismissed a lawsuit by youth activists trying to
00:06:57 --> 00:07:01 block President Trump's crow fossil fuel energy policies.
00:07:01 --> 00:07:05 Michael Randria-Narina, the new military leader of Madagascar,
00:07:05 --> 00:07:08 announced he would soon be sworn in as the country's president following the
00:07:08 --> 00:07:12 coup that ousted President Andrei Rajwalina. Former U.S.
00:07:13 --> 00:07:16 President Joe Biden, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in May,
00:07:16 --> 00:07:21 has started undergoing radiation therapy and hormone treatment as part of his care plan.
00:07:21 --> 00:07:26 The Oklahoma Department of Education is rescinding a 2024 directive requiring
00:07:26 --> 00:07:30 the Christian Bible in every classroom and its incorporation into lessons.
00:07:31 --> 00:07:35 And a Michigan mother is facing a felony food stamp fraud charge,
00:07:35 --> 00:07:40 punishable by up to 10 years in prison for allegedly using her EBT benefits
00:07:40 --> 00:07:44 to buy ingredients for baked goods she sold to support her family.
00:07:44 --> 00:07:48 I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.
00:07:54 --> 00:08:01 All right. Thank you, Grace. And now it is time for my guest, Sahar Aziz.
00:08:01 --> 00:08:07 Sahar Aziz is a distinguished professor of law, chancellor's social justice
00:08:07 --> 00:08:12 scholar, and Middle East and legal studies scholar at Rutgers University Law School.
00:08:12 --> 00:08:17 Professor Aziz's scholarship adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine
00:08:17 --> 00:08:19 the intersections of national security,
00:08:20 --> 00:08:24 race, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national security
00:08:24 --> 00:08:30 laws and policies on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the U.S.
00:08:30 --> 00:08:34 Her research also investigates the relationship between authoritarianism,
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 terrorism, and rule of law in the Middle East.
00:08:38 --> 00:08:43 She is the founding director of the interdisciplinary Rutgers Center for Security,
00:08:43 --> 00:08:48 Race, and Rights and a faculty affiliate of the African American Studies Department
00:08:48 --> 00:08:51 at Rutgers University, Newark.
00:08:52 --> 00:08:57 Professor Aziz serves on the Rutgers-Newark Chancellor's Commission on Diversity
00:08:57 --> 00:09:01 and Transformation, as well as the editorial board of the Arab Law Quarterly
00:09:01 --> 00:09:04 and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
00:09:04 --> 00:09:10 Professor Aziz teaches courses on national security, critical race theory,
00:09:10 --> 00:09:14 Islamophobia, evidence, torts, and Middle East law.
00:09:14 --> 00:09:20 Professor Aziz is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Soros Equality
00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 Fellowship, A New America, Middle Eastern,
00:09:23 --> 00:09:29 and North African American national security and foreign policy next generation leader.
00:09:29 --> 00:09:35 The Research Making and Impact Award by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.
00:09:36 --> 00:09:41 The Derrick Bell Award from the American Association of Law Schools Minority Section.
00:09:41 --> 00:09:46 And an Emerging Scholar by Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
00:09:46 --> 00:09:51 She serves on the Board of Directors of Rethink Media, the Project on Democracy
00:09:51 --> 00:09:55 in the Middle East, and Democracy in the Arab World Now.
00:09:55 --> 00:10:01 Professor Aziz's groundbreaking book, The Racial Muslim, When Racism Quashes
00:10:01 --> 00:10:06 Religious Freedom, examines how bigotry racializes immigrant Muslims through
00:10:06 --> 00:10:08 a historical and comparative approach.
00:10:08 --> 00:10:13 She has published over 30 academic articles and book chapters.
00:10:13 --> 00:10:17 Her articles are published in the Harvard National Security Journal.
00:10:18 --> 00:10:22 Washington Elite Law Review, Nebraska Law Review, George Washington International
00:10:22 --> 00:10:28 Law Review, Penn State Law Review, and the Texas Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Journal.
00:10:29 --> 00:10:32 Professor Z's commentary has appeared.
00:10:33 --> 00:10:38 In the New York Times, CNN.com, Carnegie Endowment, Sada Journal,
00:10:39 --> 00:10:43 Middle East Institute, Fox News.com, World Politics Review,
00:10:44 --> 00:10:49 Houston Chronicle, Austin Statesman, The Guardian, and Christian Science Monitor.
00:10:49 --> 00:10:54 She is a frequent speaker and has appeared on CNN, BBC World,
00:10:54 --> 00:10:59 PBS, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Al Jazeera English.
00:11:00 --> 00:11:03 She is an editor of the Race and Law Professor's blog.
00:11:03 --> 00:11:10 She previously served on the board of the ACLU of Texas and as a non-resident
00:11:10 --> 00:11:13 fellow at the Brookings Institute, Doha.
00:11:13 --> 00:11:17 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest
00:11:17 --> 00:11:21 on this podcast, Sahar Aziz.
00:11:32 --> 00:11:36 All right, Sahar Aziz. How you doing, ma'am? You doing good?
00:11:37 --> 00:11:40 I'm doing great. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast.
00:11:40 --> 00:11:45 Well, I thank you for accepting the invitation. You are one of the more dynamic
00:11:45 --> 00:11:51 intellectuals in this country, especially dealing with issues with free speech
00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 and Islamophobia in this nation.
00:11:55 --> 00:11:57 And I know you kind of got into...
00:11:58 --> 00:12:02 Some craziness based on that kind of stuff, you know.
00:12:02 --> 00:12:06 And so I want to, we'll touch on all that kind of stuff, but I'm just really,
00:12:07 --> 00:12:09 really honored that you came on.
00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 It means a lot to me and it'll mean a lot to the listeners.
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 So let's start this off with a couple of icebreakers like I normally do.
00:12:16 --> 00:12:18 So the first one is a quote.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:24 I do not care if you agree with me or not. It's not my job.
00:12:24 --> 00:12:31 My job is to expose you to a set of ideas, a set of analysis to provide this
00:12:31 --> 00:12:37 little evidence that I believe supports my conclusions. And then you guys do the research.
00:12:37 --> 00:12:41 Your job is to think. What does that quote mean to you?
00:12:41 --> 00:12:44 I think that was what I said to the Boston
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 College students a few semesters ago
00:12:47 --> 00:12:54 when I was giving a presentation about the way in which Palestinian human rights
00:12:54 --> 00:13:02 was completely erased by the pervasive pro-Israeli Zionist narratives that dominate
00:13:02 --> 00:13:06 Western media and dominate political rhetoric.
00:13:07 --> 00:13:12 And I remember when I was giving lecture series at the Center for Security,
00:13:12 --> 00:13:14 Race and Rights, which I direct at Rutgers Law School.
00:13:14 --> 00:13:20 And I'll put a pitch into the website, csrr.rutgers.edu and on social media at Rutgers CSRR.
00:13:21 --> 00:13:28 And I was getting quite a bit of pushback by those who disagreed with the positions
00:13:28 --> 00:13:32 that I was taking, which I'm sure to always cite facts because I am a lawyer.
00:13:32 --> 00:13:37 And so that is part of my training is if I'm going to make an argument, I'm going to cite facts.
00:13:38 --> 00:13:43 And I was being accused of indoctrinating students, which I thought was a laughable proposition.
00:13:43 --> 00:13:46 First is in college, the students are adults.
00:13:47 --> 00:13:53 And a lot of people don't seem to want to grant them that recognition.
00:13:53 --> 00:13:55 These are not children, actually. They are adults.
00:13:56 --> 00:14:00 And so when parents would be very upset, but why are these students being exposed
00:14:00 --> 00:14:05 to these professors, which the parents often didn't know much about what actually
00:14:05 --> 00:14:08 was being taught at university? They would say, oh, these poor students.
00:14:09 --> 00:14:12 And I thought, well, these are adults that you allowed to leave your home to
00:14:12 --> 00:14:15 go and learn for themselves and to be critical thinkers.
00:14:15 --> 00:14:18 And in fact, you're paying quite a bit of money for them to think for themselves
00:14:18 --> 00:14:23 because you could always have just indoctrinated them at home and just given
00:14:23 --> 00:14:26 them a bunch of things to read and say, memorize it, believe it,
00:14:26 --> 00:14:28 and don't debate anything.
00:14:28 --> 00:14:31 But i think most parents and
00:14:31 --> 00:14:34 families who send their kids to college who have
00:14:34 --> 00:14:37 that privilege and that access to do so do it because they want
00:14:37 --> 00:14:40 them to be exposed to different ideas and they want them to be the
00:14:40 --> 00:14:43 skills to be exposed to
00:14:43 --> 00:14:46 those different needs and to beat them and obviously in a
00:14:46 --> 00:14:49 way that is civil and professional and respectful uh
00:14:49 --> 00:14:53 and is not coercive or mean spirited but
00:14:53 --> 00:14:58 is going to make people uncomfortable because otherwise why bother right why
00:14:58 --> 00:15:02 bother going and learning about things that you either don't know anything about
00:15:02 --> 00:15:08 or you didn't you don't agree with initially so i wanted to just remind the
00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 students i had a big audience of college students at that time that.
00:15:12 --> 00:15:14 You don't have to agree with me.
00:15:14 --> 00:15:18 You chose to come to learn about my perspective of what, at that point,
00:15:18 --> 00:15:23 I was arguing that what Israel was doing in Gaza was a genocide at a time when
00:15:23 --> 00:15:29 that was not a popular position and when many people were challenging the very facts that proved it.
00:15:29 --> 00:15:35 And also I was arguing that the reason that the American society and media was
00:15:35 --> 00:15:39 refusing to recognize the genocide was because of the dehumanization of Palestinians.
00:15:39 --> 00:15:45 Part of that is the dehumanization of Muslims writ large, and I was providing them with the fact.
00:15:46 --> 00:15:50 And I also said something that was, I knew, controversial, but again,
00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 from the positionality of Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians,
00:15:54 --> 00:16:01 it certainly seemed to be the truth, which is that when it came to the debates on campus.
00:16:02 --> 00:16:06 When it came to the protests on campus, those who were the ones that were nonviolent,
00:16:07 --> 00:16:07 the ones that were civil,
00:16:08 --> 00:16:12 yes, he did contest it, but within the bounds of the law,
00:16:13 --> 00:16:18 that the universities were privileging the complaints and grievances of Jewish
00:16:18 --> 00:16:24 students while completely dismissing and violating outright the complaints or
00:16:24 --> 00:16:27 the rights of Palestinian students and Arab and Muslim students.
00:16:27 --> 00:16:30 And so I stated I wanted to show them and I showed
00:16:30 --> 00:16:33 the facts on the screen that this is how privilege works
00:16:33 --> 00:16:36 it is when two groups of people are similarly
00:16:36 --> 00:16:39 situated and that they get treated completely different
00:16:39 --> 00:16:43 one inferior and one superior and that
00:16:43 --> 00:16:47 you are believed when you complain or when you are claimed that you are hurt
00:16:47 --> 00:16:54 or offended or believe your rights are violated and you are granted all the
00:16:54 --> 00:17:01 due process rights you are your demands are accommodated and And that effectively
00:17:01 --> 00:17:02 you're treated like a human,
00:17:02 --> 00:17:05 an equal first-class citizen.
00:17:05 --> 00:17:08 And what we were seeing was that the Jewish students and the Jewish faculty
00:17:08 --> 00:17:10 were obtaining that status.
00:17:12 --> 00:17:15 Meanwhile, the Palestinian students, the Muslim students, the Arab students,
00:17:15 --> 00:17:17 were being treated as if they were criminals.
00:17:17 --> 00:17:21 They were being treated as if they were presumptively anti-Semitic,
00:17:21 --> 00:17:25 as if those protests were about hating Jews, when in fact those protests were
00:17:25 --> 00:17:29 about trying to save Palestinian lives from being killed by a foreign military.
00:17:29 --> 00:17:33 Military, in the States it was the Israeli military, by wanting to stop the funding of,
00:17:34 --> 00:17:39 by their money, by the American taxpayer money, the Israeli military that was
00:17:39 --> 00:17:43 killing Palestinians by the thousands and sometimes by the hundreds,
00:17:43 --> 00:17:44 sometimes by the tens every day.
00:17:45 --> 00:17:51 We now have at least 80 Palestinians dead and 68 have been reported dead.
00:17:51 --> 00:17:56 There's 12 at least under the rubble that they're now discovering and finding
00:17:56 --> 00:18:00 the skeletons under the rubble and hundreds of thousands that have been injured.
00:18:00 --> 00:18:05 And so the fact that the Palestinian students were being treated as if they
00:18:05 --> 00:18:12 had no right to dissent in a country that claims that free speech is a fundamental right.
00:18:12 --> 00:18:17 It makes us America, it distinguishes us as a country, while Jewish students
00:18:17 --> 00:18:21 and Zionist students, I shouldn't say Jewish, pro-Israel and Zionist students,
00:18:21 --> 00:18:23 most of them were Jewish, some of them were also Christian,
00:18:23 --> 00:18:28 were being believed even when they didn't even have evidence to show that the
00:18:28 --> 00:18:31 protests, for example, were actually violating the policy.
00:18:31 --> 00:18:38 So all that This is to say that we have to be able to listen to other perspectives
00:18:38 --> 00:18:44 and not presume that just because someone disagrees with us that they want to hurt us,
00:18:44 --> 00:18:49 or just because someone disagrees with us that they have bad intent.
00:18:49 --> 00:18:56 And that the response is not to assume, to demand that that person then gets
00:18:56 --> 00:18:58 canceled or gets silenced.
00:18:58 --> 00:19:02 The response is to either disengage if you don't want to engage in the debate,
00:19:02 --> 00:19:06 if you don't want to attend the event, if you don't want to listen, that's up to you.
00:19:06 --> 00:19:10 Or to hold that person accountable and say, well, here are the facts you stated.
00:19:10 --> 00:19:15 I'd like to offer alternative facts. I would like to show how what you're stating
00:19:15 --> 00:19:17 is actually false so there's a material omission.
00:19:18 --> 00:19:24 Or to hold your own event, right? And also not to assume that colleges are there for indoctrination.
00:19:24 --> 00:19:29 Because if anybody who's gone to college, you know it is not there for indoctrination.
00:19:29 --> 00:19:33 Unless we give the Trump administration what it wants. And then it surely will be.
00:19:33 --> 00:19:39 All right. So now I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20.
00:19:40 --> 00:19:46 All right. Here's your question. Do you think there is such a thing as unbiased news or media and why?
00:19:48 --> 00:19:53 There's no such thing as unbiased anything. We are humans and we have biases
00:19:53 --> 00:19:57 and anyone who studies social psychology or reads their literature knows that
00:19:57 --> 00:20:01 we are not designed, our brains aren't designed to be unbiased.
00:20:01 --> 00:20:05 We're constantly trying to identify what is dangerous, what is risky,
00:20:05 --> 00:20:09 what is harmful and avoid it. And oftentimes that leads us to have all sorts
00:20:09 --> 00:20:15 of explicit biases and implicit biases and in ways that can be very harmful, right?
00:20:15 --> 00:20:18 I mean, racism is also a form of bias.
00:20:18 --> 00:20:22 So I think that's where going back to critical thinking is so important.
00:20:22 --> 00:20:26 We have to always, when we read the news, we have to ask ourselves,
00:20:26 --> 00:20:29 who's writing it? What are their political meanings?
00:20:30 --> 00:20:35 What are their financial incentives for covering the story? Why are they covering
00:20:35 --> 00:20:38 the story the way they are? Who did they interview? Who didn't they interview?
00:20:38 --> 00:20:41 Who funds this particular outlet? And,
00:20:42 --> 00:20:48 The ideal scenario is that we can read three or four or five articles about
00:20:48 --> 00:20:54 a similar topic by sources that have different answers to those questions.
00:20:54 --> 00:20:58 And triangulating and eventually come to a point where we feel individually
00:20:58 --> 00:21:04 that there is some sense of truth by putting those different sources together.
00:21:04 --> 00:21:10 But I think all of us are biased. And bias doesn't necessarily mean we have bad intent.
00:21:11 --> 00:21:14 Why we're biased the motivation for us
00:21:14 --> 00:21:18 being biased is not necessarily malicious but
00:21:18 --> 00:21:23 that can still cause harmful consequences
00:21:23 --> 00:21:26 to society which we're already seeing in the
00:21:26 --> 00:21:33 algorithmic silos that social media is creating where we are reading our biases
00:21:33 --> 00:21:37 are being reinforced over and over again through these algorithms because every
00:21:37 --> 00:21:42 time you you like something or you share something or you slow down on a scroll,
00:21:43 --> 00:21:44 the algorithm knows, okay,
00:21:44 --> 00:21:49 this has caught that person's attention and presumes they want to see more of it.
00:21:49 --> 00:21:55 And if it's news reading, it can then become what we call validation bias.
00:21:55 --> 00:21:59 So it's just validating whatever you already believe rather than challenging
00:21:59 --> 00:22:02 it and making you think a little bit more expansively.
00:22:02 --> 00:22:05 So that is inevitable in every society. Yeah.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:10 I think the key, if we're trying to have as little bias as possible,
00:22:10 --> 00:22:16 or at least competing biases as accessible, is that we strive for independent media.
00:22:16 --> 00:22:21 I think the more that the media is controlled by the government,
00:22:21 --> 00:22:25 or controlled by very few people, oftentimes very wealthy,
00:22:25 --> 00:22:29 or very few people who have homogeneous political leanings,
00:22:29 --> 00:22:33 then it can get very dangerous
00:22:33 --> 00:22:37 in terms of creating a society that is
00:22:37 --> 00:22:39 in fact indoctrinated right has just simply not been
00:22:39 --> 00:22:46 exposed to other ways of thinking in in key facts that are they're relevant
00:22:46 --> 00:22:50 to that particular topic right in order to for us to analyze like how do we
00:22:50 --> 00:22:54 solve this problem how do we even define this problem when we're talking about
00:22:54 --> 00:22:57 a problem that affects the public, right, the public interest.
00:22:58 --> 00:23:08 Yeah. All right. So as we record this, the ceasefire has been agreed upon with Israel and Hamas.
00:23:08 --> 00:23:13 What is your initial reaction to hearing that?
00:23:13 --> 00:23:20 Well, this ceasefire should have been announced and abided by over a year ago.
00:23:20 --> 00:23:25 It was something that Israel had refused to.
00:23:25 --> 00:23:30 Israel just has no interest the current Israeli government
00:23:30 --> 00:23:32 I should say which is a very right wing government and
00:23:32 --> 00:23:38 even those the most supportive Israeli groups know that this is the most right
00:23:38 --> 00:23:43 wing government that this country has had since it established itself in 1948
00:23:43 --> 00:23:50 through a war through terrorist acts I mean I think we can't rewrite history 1948 48.
00:23:50 --> 00:23:56 Was when the militia, there were three groups, the Ergun, the Stern Gang, and the Hagina.
00:23:56 --> 00:24:00 And all of them had been engaged in terrorist acts, especially targeting the
00:24:00 --> 00:24:05 British before 1948, wanting to get the British out, and also targeting the
00:24:05 --> 00:24:07 Palestinians, who were the indigenous people.
00:24:07 --> 00:24:13 And in 1948, when the British had said, they succeeded,
00:24:13 --> 00:24:16 the British said, we're out, we can't handle this anymore, we can't seem to
00:24:16 --> 00:24:18 resolve this conflict, gave it to the United Nations,
00:24:18 --> 00:24:21 the United Nations offered a partition, partition was not
00:24:21 --> 00:24:24 binding the palestinians said no because why
00:24:24 --> 00:24:27 would we give half of our land to people who
00:24:27 --> 00:24:32 came from europe and that was essentially the impetus that oh the justification
00:24:32 --> 00:24:37 that these three militias and and extremist groups used to say okay we're now
00:24:37 --> 00:24:42 going to attack and we're going to take this land by force and we're going to
00:24:42 --> 00:24:45 target civilians and that's terrorism
00:24:45 --> 00:24:48 is politically motivated violence right and
00:24:48 --> 00:24:51 motivation was we want to technically cleanse you
00:24:51 --> 00:24:56 kick you out of this land that is your land and take it for ourselves because
00:24:56 --> 00:25:00 we've decided it belongs to us whatever the reason whether we believe god gave
00:25:00 --> 00:25:04 it to us whether we believe right makes right and if we can physically take
00:25:04 --> 00:25:08 it then it belongs to us you know there's all sorts of justifications but the
00:25:08 --> 00:25:10 point is that since that time.
00:25:11 --> 00:25:14 That we now have the most right-wing Israeli government.
00:25:14 --> 00:25:19 And that government has had every incentive and has stated it very explicitly,
00:25:19 --> 00:25:24 there's plenty of evidence to show, that what it wants is to get rid of every
00:25:24 --> 00:25:27 Palestinian in Gaza by multiple means.
00:25:28 --> 00:25:35 First, kill, bomb, sniper, booby trap, use drones, armed drones.
00:25:35 --> 00:25:41 The second is injure and let them die from the lack of medical care,
00:25:41 --> 00:25:45 which is why you have hospitals that were bombed. Almost every hospital has been bombed.
00:25:46 --> 00:25:48 Half of them have been completely destroyed.
00:25:48 --> 00:25:52 All the universities have been destroyed. The vast majority of schools have been destroyed.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:57 I believe 92% of Gaza has been bombed. And if you look at the pictures,
00:25:57 --> 00:25:58 they speak for themselves.
00:25:59 --> 00:26:02 And so by destroying the healthcare system,
00:26:02 --> 00:26:05 what you do is you ensure that those who are injured from the
00:26:05 --> 00:26:08 bombing don't have the health care that would
00:26:08 --> 00:26:11 prevent them from dying from the injuries so they will die
00:26:11 --> 00:26:15 and then there are the sick and the elderly and the disabled again
00:26:15 --> 00:26:18 when the health care system is completely destroyed
00:26:18 --> 00:26:22 intentionally those people will die when they otherwise would not have died
00:26:22 --> 00:26:29 then you start them which we saw we saw in its worst case from may until july
00:26:29 --> 00:26:33 that there have been multiple to iterations of intentional use of starvation
00:26:33 --> 00:26:36 as a weapon of war, which is legal in international law.
00:26:37 --> 00:26:42 And, in fact, you were saying, I think they had 450 that they counted as of
00:26:42 --> 00:26:48 today or as of a few weeks ago that have been killed that have died of starvation, children and adults.
00:26:49 --> 00:26:52 And then the rest, you ethnically cleanse. You push them to the south.
00:26:52 --> 00:26:55 You ask Egypt to take them. Egypt rejects.
00:26:55 --> 00:26:59 And then you start shopping around, which is when Netanyahu Day moves to various
00:26:59 --> 00:27:01 countries and said, will you take them?
00:27:01 --> 00:27:08 We'll pay you. We want to kick them out. So that is effectively what the primary
00:27:08 --> 00:27:11 incentive has been in the Nanyahu government since.
00:27:12 --> 00:27:15 At least november of 2023 and one
00:27:15 --> 00:27:19 could argue even as early as mid-october because
00:27:19 --> 00:27:22 the the response of israelis quickly
00:27:22 --> 00:27:28 shifted from self-defense to genocide right yes one week two week but the destruction
00:27:28 --> 00:27:34 was so massive so pervasive and so protracted and when there were offers of
00:27:34 --> 00:27:39 ceasefires which in one point it was a ceasefire and then israel started again bombing,
00:27:39 --> 00:27:42 it was clear that Israel didn't want a ceasefire.
00:27:43 --> 00:27:49 Yes, it wanted the hostages then, but it didn't want to stop its objective,
00:27:49 --> 00:27:55 which was, again, to eliminate Alistinians in all or in part in Gaza.
00:27:55 --> 00:27:57 And there are plenty of statements showing that was the intent.
00:27:58 --> 00:27:59 This has been litigated in media.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:03 It's being litigated before the International Criminal Court of Justice.
00:28:03 --> 00:28:08 So the evidence is very damning two years later.
00:28:08 --> 00:28:13 So I think that my first reaction is, why didn't this happen over a year ago?
00:28:13 --> 00:28:16 How many tens of thousands of Palestinians will still be alive?
00:28:17 --> 00:28:24 And the second thing is, I don't know if it will stick because Israel has shown
00:28:24 --> 00:28:25 that it is not trustworthy.
00:28:25 --> 00:28:31 And that's at this point, early on, in what started out as a war between the
00:28:31 --> 00:28:34 two, and then, as I said, transitioned into genocide,
00:28:35 --> 00:28:41 Hamas has no, it is an asymmetrical conflict, right?
00:28:41 --> 00:28:45 There's an asymmetrical war, if you want to call that, between the two of them,
00:28:45 --> 00:28:47 meaning that Hamas is not an army, it is not a military,
00:28:48 --> 00:28:56 it's a ragtag militia, its leaders were all killed within a couple months after October 7th, and.
00:28:57 --> 00:29:03 It was effectively defeated from a military perspective very, very early on.
00:29:03 --> 00:29:08 And after, within four to six weeks, everything after that was just collective punishment.
00:29:08 --> 00:29:12 Even if Israel said, oh, this is all about fighting Hamas. But the reality is
00:29:12 --> 00:29:15 that Hamas was weakened early on.
00:29:15 --> 00:29:20 And they had said, okay, we'll give you the hostages, but stop bombing.
00:29:20 --> 00:29:22 Permanent and ceasefire, not temporary.
00:29:22 --> 00:29:27 And we have to have an help, right? or whatever that may be.
00:29:27 --> 00:29:31 And there are different ceasefire options. At one point, there's reports that
00:29:31 --> 00:29:35 Hamas even agreed that the third or fourth round of ceasefire attempts that
00:29:35 --> 00:29:39 they said, fine, we won't have any role in the government in Gaza.
00:29:39 --> 00:29:45 But again, the Israelis rejected them. So I'm not optimistic that once all the
00:29:45 --> 00:29:49 hostages are released, Israeli hostages are released, that Israel will not just go back to bombing Gaza.
00:29:50 --> 00:29:53 The only person that can stop Israel is Trump.
00:29:54 --> 00:30:01 There's no other leverage over Netanyahu and his maniacal right-wing extremist government.
00:30:01 --> 00:30:05 Because once those hostages are released, and I think they should be released,
00:30:05 --> 00:30:08 I think they should have been released a long time ago, as part of a comprehensive
00:30:08 --> 00:30:14 ceasefire and a comprehensive peace deal, then what is to stop Netanyahu from bombing again?
00:30:15 --> 00:30:17 There's nothing stopping. Yeah.
00:30:18 --> 00:30:22 So how has this conflict affected you personally?
00:30:22 --> 00:30:25 And has it given you
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 more concern about things or
00:30:28 --> 00:30:31 has it strengthened your resolve to keep
00:30:31 --> 00:30:35 fighting the genocide in gaza again
00:30:35 --> 00:30:37 committed by the israeli government funded by the
00:30:37 --> 00:30:42 american government has validated to
00:30:42 --> 00:30:47 many palestinians and arabs and muslims in america and in the world that our
00:30:47 --> 00:30:53 lives have no meaning to the western world that a government and a military
00:30:53 --> 00:30:59 that has the full throttle support of europe and the u.s in political support
00:30:59 --> 00:31:01 and economic and military support.
00:31:02 --> 00:31:06 Can do things to our people, to people that look like us, or the people that
00:31:06 --> 00:31:10 are, in fact, our direct family, depending if you're Palestinian or not,
00:31:10 --> 00:31:13 to people who have the same religion, predominantly Muslim.
00:31:13 --> 00:31:18 In Gaza, I think there's only 5% Christians, although with Palestinians,
00:31:18 --> 00:31:21 it's between 15% to 20% worldwide that are Christian.
00:31:22 --> 00:31:28 But the vast majority in Gaza are Muslim. And that if any Arab country had done
00:31:28 --> 00:31:32 to Europeans or to Jews or to Christians and what the Israelis have done to
00:31:32 --> 00:31:36 the Palestinians and the Muslims, there would have been an immediate outcry.
00:31:36 --> 00:31:38 There would have been immediate military intervention. There would have been
00:31:38 --> 00:31:44 immediate leverage of international law to hold those criminals fallible.
00:31:44 --> 00:31:49 And instead, people just made excuses. They looked away. They were silent.
00:31:50 --> 00:31:55 Or they outright supported it. And so that is very, very disheartening.
00:31:56 --> 00:32:00 And I think what it shows is that we have a disease in the U.S. at least.
00:32:01 --> 00:32:07 Of hatred towards Palestinians and towards Muslims. And I think we have a lot
00:32:07 --> 00:32:08 we need to learn about Germany.
00:32:08 --> 00:32:13 We need to understand, you know, there's an entire industry that was created,
00:32:13 --> 00:32:17 a discipline that was created, called Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:24 It was spearheaded by Jews, rightfully so, because they thought, how did this happen?
00:32:24 --> 00:32:27 How did we get to this point where six million Jews were slaughtered.
00:32:28 --> 00:32:32 How do we get to the point where we have an entire society and societies who
00:32:32 --> 00:32:35 either outright supported it, did nothing, or were silent?
00:32:35 --> 00:32:40 And this doesn't happen overnight. And so for Palestinians, when your population
00:32:40 --> 00:32:46 is 2 million, and 80, and that's the conservative estimate, we're going to find out.
00:32:46 --> 00:32:50 There are some people who believe it's a quarter of a million that have been
00:32:50 --> 00:32:53 killed over the last two years, or that have died and should not have died, right?
00:32:54 --> 00:33:00 Had there been, you know, food and the publishing medical system and medicine. That is...
00:33:01 --> 00:33:06 20% of your population. This is not a small number from a percentage perspective,
00:33:07 --> 00:33:09 right? And in a very short amount of time.
00:33:09 --> 00:33:15 So I think that it just reminded us how much damage the war on terror had done,
00:33:16 --> 00:33:17 at least in the immediate term.
00:33:17 --> 00:33:20 I mean, before 9-11, and I wrote a book called The Racial Muslim,
00:33:20 --> 00:33:24 which talks about the pre-9-11 and the post-9-11 era and this racialization
00:33:24 --> 00:33:27 of Muslims and extrinsically also Arabs.
00:33:27 --> 00:33:35 But Poles and I never really laid that strong foundation that just dehumanized
00:33:35 --> 00:33:40 people who are associated with Islam and now even more explicit with Palestinian identity.
00:33:41 --> 00:33:46 Now, what I think is equally harmful, at least in a U.S.
00:33:46 --> 00:33:50 Context, is the fact that those of us who, like everything that I just said,
00:33:51 --> 00:33:53 will then invite hate against me.
00:33:53 --> 00:33:59 It will invite death threats, it will invite assaults, threats of physical assault.
00:34:00 --> 00:34:06 Doxing, harassment, intimidation, and the people who do it are not held accountable.
00:34:06 --> 00:34:13 So not only are you supposed to support or at least look away when Israel commits
00:34:13 --> 00:34:17 a genocide of Palestinians, but you can't even dissent against that.
00:34:17 --> 00:34:22 Because if you do, suddenly you're accused of hating Jews, when the entire reason
00:34:22 --> 00:34:25 why you're dissenting is because you're trying to get an Israeli government,
00:34:25 --> 00:34:30 a foreign government of Israel, to stop killing and starving and maiming Palestinians.
00:34:31 --> 00:34:35 That has nothing to do with hating Jews, right? That is about a stake.
00:34:36 --> 00:34:40 One of the most powerful states in the Middle East, with one of the most powerful
00:34:40 --> 00:34:46 militaries in the region that has attacked five Arab countries in the last two
00:34:46 --> 00:34:48 years. They have bombed Lebanon.
00:34:48 --> 00:34:50 They have bombed Syria. They have bombed Iran.
00:34:51 --> 00:34:53 They have bombed Yemen. They have bombed Gaza.
00:34:54 --> 00:35:00 This is not a weak state. This is a very, very strong state that is completely
00:35:00 --> 00:35:05 dismissing and refusing to follow international law.
00:35:05 --> 00:35:10 So I think it has caused, you know, different responses within our diverse communities,
00:35:10 --> 00:35:18 but it has also shown that international law is only relevant when Western countries, white people,
00:35:18 --> 00:35:21 white people in North America and white people in Europe,
00:35:22 --> 00:35:26 want to use it to prosecute black and brown people. Yeah.
00:35:28 --> 00:35:32 Countries that are not in Europe and North America. And that has really called
00:35:32 --> 00:35:35 that entire legal system into question.
00:35:36 --> 00:35:41 And the most perverse aspect of it is that that international legal system was
00:35:41 --> 00:35:42 created post-Holocaust.
00:35:43 --> 00:35:46 It was created so that there wouldn't be another World War II,
00:35:47 --> 00:35:48 so there wouldn't be a World War III.
00:35:48 --> 00:35:50 And it was created so that there wouldn't be another Holocaust.
00:35:50 --> 00:35:53 And it would be created that there wouldn't be other genocide,
00:35:53 --> 00:35:58 even if they didn't reach the same degree or severity as the Holocaust.
00:35:58 --> 00:36:02 Because what makes something a genocide is you don't have to have 6 million
00:36:02 --> 00:36:04 people slaughtered is what happened against Jews.
00:36:04 --> 00:36:09 It's not about the numbers, right? It's about the intent. It's about the methodology.
00:36:09 --> 00:36:15 It's about what ultimately, how many people and how they're being annihilated
00:36:15 --> 00:36:19 with the objective of annihilation in part or in part.
00:36:20 --> 00:36:23 So because i'm gonna i'm gonna combine a couple
00:36:23 --> 00:36:29 of questions i had written down into one do you and it's based off of what you're
00:36:29 --> 00:36:38 talking about with the dehumanization do you think that it is proximity to whiteness
00:36:38 --> 00:36:42 that determines the humanity or do you think that,
00:36:43 --> 00:36:48 Islam is treated more like a political ideology than a religion,
00:36:48 --> 00:36:50 or do you think it's a combination of both?
00:36:51 --> 00:36:53 Well, now you're getting into my book, the racial Muslim.
00:36:55 --> 00:36:59 And I am a critical race there, which also invites other forms of attacks,
00:37:00 --> 00:37:05 which effectively, you know, it argues that at least in the U S context,
00:37:05 --> 00:37:08 and I would say you could use it also in the European context,
00:37:08 --> 00:37:12 but TRT is very much based in U S history and U S politics.
00:37:13 --> 00:37:18 Is that there is a racial hierarchy. And those who are at the top of that racial
00:37:18 --> 00:37:20 hierarchy are the most privileged,
00:37:20 --> 00:37:23 those who are at the bottom are the least privileged, and then in between there
00:37:23 --> 00:37:30 is different levels of privilege, and that tends to shift around based on different points in time.
00:37:30 --> 00:37:36 And that racial hierarchy at the top are people whose race is socially constructed
00:37:36 --> 00:37:42 as white, and those at the bottom are those whose race is socially constructed as black.
00:37:42 --> 00:37:47 And I say social construction because it really, it isn't a biological fact,
00:37:48 --> 00:37:49 it isn't an objective fact.
00:37:49 --> 00:37:55 There are people who 100 years ago were Jewish and Eastern European and they
00:37:55 --> 00:38:00 weren't fully white in the social construction of race and whiteness.
00:38:00 --> 00:38:04 Similarly, Irish Catholics, similarly Italian Catholics.
00:38:05 --> 00:38:10 And there are now people who, for example, Arabs.
00:38:12 --> 00:38:15 Who phenotypically, in other words, how they physically look like,
00:38:15 --> 00:38:21 you may think, oh, that person is white in how we are socialized to see whiteness.
00:38:21 --> 00:38:25 But in fact, their name is Mohammed, or the woman wears a headscarf.
00:38:25 --> 00:38:30 And so now they're at the bottom or near the bottom of that hierarchy.
00:38:30 --> 00:38:36 And so they are not Black, but they have become close to Blackness, right?
00:38:36 --> 00:38:43 And they can shift up and down based on, again, multiple factors that change. Now...
00:38:44 --> 00:38:48 The reason why CRT can be controversial is because it rejects colorblindness.
00:38:48 --> 00:38:52 And it doesn't reject colorblindness because it doesn't want colorblindness.
00:38:52 --> 00:39:01 It's because it's not possible, given the realities that American society has undergone.
00:39:01 --> 00:39:07 When you have chattel slavery and genocide of indigenous people as the foundation of the system.
00:39:07 --> 00:39:11 Until that can somehow be remedied at a systemic level,
00:39:11 --> 00:39:14 and you have all then then you're going to continue to
00:39:14 --> 00:39:17 have these racial hierarchies because then you have the reconstruction
00:39:17 --> 00:39:20 and then the the regression against the
00:39:20 --> 00:39:24 anti-reconstruction and then you had jim crow right and
00:39:24 --> 00:39:27 then you have the chinese explosion and you can
00:39:27 --> 00:39:30 go all throughout american history and you will
00:39:30 --> 00:39:34 see this constant tension that
00:39:34 --> 00:39:37 repeats this racial hierarchy
00:39:37 --> 00:39:40 that reinforces the degree changes the
00:39:40 --> 00:39:44 severity changes the consequences change so thankfully being
00:39:44 --> 00:39:46 at the bottom of the racial hierarchy does not mean you are
00:39:46 --> 00:39:52 enslaved it does not mean that you are legally segregated but it does mean that
00:39:52 --> 00:40:00 you as a collective the probability of your chances and access to wealth gain
00:40:00 --> 00:40:05 for employment freedom physical liberty high quality education is quite love,
00:40:06 --> 00:40:12 because systemic racism has produced over-representation of Black people in
00:40:12 --> 00:40:17 prison, over-representation of Black people in very low-quality schools that
00:40:17 --> 00:40:19 are in high-poverty areas.
00:40:20 --> 00:40:22 That is not because there is something wrong with these people.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:27 It is the system. And so, until we can.
00:40:28 --> 00:40:33 Acknowledge that as a citizen, and really try to fix it meaningfully. We're not colorblind.
00:40:33 --> 00:40:38 So once you acknowledge that, then you have to say, okay, what do we do about it?
00:40:38 --> 00:40:42 And how do we understand society and how do we develop our policies?
00:40:43 --> 00:40:47 And so what I was arguing in the racial Muslim is, it's not just what you look
00:40:47 --> 00:40:49 like that racializes you, it's also your religion.
00:40:49 --> 00:40:54 And if you ask Jews about anti-Semitism in the early 1900s, that is exactly
00:40:54 --> 00:40:56 what happened to them, similarly to Italian Catholics.
00:40:56 --> 00:41:01 They were european they looked european they went the right kind of european
00:41:01 --> 00:41:04 and it was because they were jewish well it was because they were catholic but
00:41:04 --> 00:41:06 if you fast forward a hundred years later.
00:41:07 --> 00:41:12 Now they are whiteness has been reconstruction reconstructed socially it has
00:41:12 --> 00:41:19 expanded to include that so i think that we have to just recognize that at least
00:41:19 --> 00:41:22 at a macro level and at a systems level,
00:41:22 --> 00:41:25 there is still an enormous amount of inequality.
00:41:26 --> 00:41:29 And we were making some progress, and I think this is where the Black Lives
00:41:29 --> 00:41:37 Matter movement was really instrumental and quite revolutionary in terms of
00:41:37 --> 00:41:40 mobilizing a generation of people,
00:41:40 --> 00:41:44 especially young people, of various races.
00:41:44 --> 00:41:48 Yes, it was led by Black people, but if you looked at the protests,
00:41:48 --> 00:41:52 there were white folks, and there were Arab folks and there were Latino folks
00:41:52 --> 00:41:55 and there were, you know, various, and there were Jewish people and there were Muslim people.
00:41:56 --> 00:41:59 And it was quite a diverse movement
00:41:59 --> 00:42:03 that had recognized we have a serious problem with systemic racism.
00:42:04 --> 00:42:09 And while Blacks are the, again, my position based on my reading of history
00:42:09 --> 00:42:15 and my research, my position is the group that suffers the most from systemic
00:42:15 --> 00:42:17 racism are Black people.
00:42:18 --> 00:42:22 And then you start, but they are not the only people that suffer from racism.
00:42:23 --> 00:42:25 As systemic racism, and they suffer in different ways.
00:42:26 --> 00:42:29 So ICE is not going around picking up Black folks.
00:42:29 --> 00:42:34 It's going, picking up, and raiding, and ruining the entire safety and security
00:42:34 --> 00:42:38 of Latinos, and Afro-Latinos who are also social.
00:42:38 --> 00:42:40 I mean, they're Latin and Black.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:45 But they're not, right? And similarly, with national security,
00:42:45 --> 00:42:48 it was really focused on Muslim and Arab communities.
00:42:48 --> 00:42:52 So there are different ways that systemic racism functions.
00:42:53 --> 00:42:58 And so ultimately, I think we need to just understand those intersections of
00:42:58 --> 00:43:01 identity and understand how systemic racism operates.
00:43:01 --> 00:43:05 And the reason why Trump, with Steve Miller at the helm,
00:43:06 --> 00:43:12 is so obsessed with exporting, or excuse me, deported a million immigrants,
00:43:12 --> 00:43:18 a million human beings every year, is because, and the criminalizing DEI,
00:43:19 --> 00:43:24 criminalizing any talk about race, any talk about equity, any talk about.
00:43:25 --> 00:43:31 Racism is because they have seen how the Black Lives Matter movement and kind
00:43:31 --> 00:43:38 of the consequences of it have started to change how people think and have started to say, yeah,
00:43:38 --> 00:43:43 we do need to be more conscientious about how privilege is distributed,
00:43:43 --> 00:43:48 right, along race and how race and class intersect.
00:43:49 --> 00:43:54 And we need to start changing how we hire, how we promote, how we teach,
00:43:54 --> 00:44:00 how we live, how we set housing policy, how we set criminal justice policies,
00:44:00 --> 00:44:09 everything, and to try to finally break through this systemic racism that's gripped our nation.
00:44:09 --> 00:44:14 And what that's done is a white nationalist's worst nightmare.
00:44:14 --> 00:44:20 It has produced all of this diversity in powerful positions.
00:44:20 --> 00:44:23 Right they don't care about diversity among the
00:44:23 --> 00:44:26 lowest classes of society they
00:44:26 --> 00:44:29 don't care if there's diversity among those who are barely making a
00:44:29 --> 00:44:34 living wage they care about diversity in wealth
00:44:34 --> 00:44:39 positions of power positions of wealth in elected office in university presidencies
00:44:39 --> 00:44:44 administrations in ceo positions and so on and so forth because then you're
00:44:44 --> 00:44:49 going to have decisions that will not exclusively serve one particular or two
00:44:49 --> 00:44:52 particular groups it will because there'll be different.
00:44:52 --> 00:44:56 People in different perspectives and different lived experiences at the decision-making
00:44:56 --> 00:44:59 table, the decisions will be more inclusive.
00:44:59 --> 00:45:03 They will be more nuanced. They will be more sensitive to the way that something
00:45:03 --> 00:45:07 that's facially neutral may actually be very racist in practice.
00:45:07 --> 00:45:14 But step one is you got to get everybody at the table that has a state in the policies.
00:45:15 --> 00:45:20 So I'm not surprised at all about this white nativist, white Judeo.
00:45:20 --> 00:45:25 It's a Judeo-Christian nativist backlash because Jews and Christians who are
00:45:25 --> 00:45:31 white, who are of European origin, are groups that claim to represent them.
00:45:31 --> 00:45:34 They obviously do not represent all of those demographics, but they claim to
00:45:34 --> 00:45:41 represent them, are trying to reverse the diversity of the population.
00:45:41 --> 00:45:46 They are trying really hard to stop 2050 from being the year when people of
00:45:46 --> 00:45:50 European origin and Judeo-Christian faith are not the majority.
00:45:51 --> 00:45:58 Yeah. So you stated that, kind of touching on some of that answer,
00:45:59 --> 00:46:03 you stated that the Palestinian human rights student movement was a direct but
00:46:03 --> 00:46:07 underappreciated legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:46:07 --> 00:46:11 Where is the underappreciation coming from and why do you think that is? Thank you.
00:46:12 --> 00:46:21 Black Lives Matter was the movement for the generation of Americans that are
00:46:21 --> 00:46:26 between the ages of 20 and 35.
00:46:28 --> 00:46:31 Similar, comparable to the anti-Vietnam movement.
00:46:31 --> 00:46:36 If you meet people who were in college or in high school during the anti-Vietnam
00:46:36 --> 00:46:41 movement, It really shaped how they understood American society,
00:46:42 --> 00:46:45 how they understood politics and power and war.
00:46:46 --> 00:46:57 And I attribute their experiences to the subsequent decades of reforms to our legal system,
00:46:57 --> 00:47:03 reforms to our surveillance laws to make it more protective of privacy and not
00:47:03 --> 00:47:08 allow the government to just violate civil liberties as it please.
00:47:08 --> 00:47:16 Is they were much more sensitive to going to war abroad without believing wholesale
00:47:16 --> 00:47:23 that the wars were intended to keep America safe as opposed to expand its empire.
00:47:23 --> 00:47:28 And so these types of social movements, they shape an entire generation.
00:47:29 --> 00:47:34 And if you see the students who were in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement
00:47:34 --> 00:47:37 in college, and also those who were out in the streets,
00:47:38 --> 00:47:41 not just in college campuses many of
00:47:41 --> 00:47:44 them were in high school during the black lives matter movement so they
00:47:44 --> 00:47:47 may have been at the protest or they may have been watching what
00:47:47 --> 00:47:51 was happening on social media and they
00:47:51 --> 00:47:57 were also learning and being exposed to what is systemic racism what is anti-black
00:47:57 --> 00:48:03 systemic racism they were seeing live black men being shot they were hearing
00:48:03 --> 00:48:08 for themselves from Black communities saying, we've been living this nightmare for decades.
00:48:09 --> 00:48:13 We have the police are constantly engaging in excessive force against us.
00:48:13 --> 00:48:15 They're constantly racially profiling us.
00:48:15 --> 00:48:20 We have so many of our brothers who are in jail that we don't believe they should be in jail.
00:48:21 --> 00:48:24 There is, you know, innocence projects have been expanding.
00:48:25 --> 00:48:31 And now that DNA is being used, it has exonerated large numbers,
00:48:31 --> 00:48:33 sizable numbers of black men.
00:48:33 --> 00:48:35 And i think as they learn that
00:48:35 --> 00:48:38 so whether they learned it on social media whether they learned
00:48:38 --> 00:48:42 it by going out and joining the movement themselves they
00:48:42 --> 00:48:46 realize that the this is
00:48:46 --> 00:48:49 what you are told is not always the truth and
00:48:49 --> 00:48:53 that you don't know what is
00:48:53 --> 00:48:56 happening at if unless you
00:48:56 --> 00:49:03 listen to those who it's harmed the most and i think that mentality of empathy
00:49:03 --> 00:49:08 for those who are not the powerful in a particular dispute and also the ability
00:49:08 --> 00:49:14 to see for themselves i think they they are very sensitive to wanting to see not just be told.
00:49:15 --> 00:49:20 What's actually happening on the ground, allowed them to realize,
00:49:20 --> 00:49:25 okay, what's happening in Palestine, what we've been told about Israel is not true.
00:49:26 --> 00:49:29 They've been told that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,
00:49:29 --> 00:49:35 but then they learn about the way that Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank since 1967,
00:49:35 --> 00:49:39 and has similarly engaged until 2007, and then after that,
00:49:40 --> 00:49:45 it essentially imposed a blockade that was severe at some points,
00:49:45 --> 00:49:48 you know very severe less severe it learned
00:49:48 --> 00:49:51 that many of the palestinians in israel that's
00:49:51 --> 00:49:54 citizen share are second-class citizens and experience
00:49:54 --> 00:49:59 similar form of discrimination as african-americans it learned that in 1948
00:49:59 --> 00:50:06 it was not this war between two nations but in fact and it wasn't that the palestinians
00:50:06 --> 00:50:14 were trying to kill the jews but in fact that it was the jews would come from Europe seeking refuge,
00:50:14 --> 00:50:22 yes, but seeking refuge in a way that then had to kill or eliminate or occupy the indigenous people.
00:50:22 --> 00:50:27 And the American youth knew about the story of the American Indians.
00:50:27 --> 00:50:32 They were much more educated about what happened to the Native Americans in
00:50:32 --> 00:50:38 terms of the settler colonial experience and the genocide that their own country
00:50:38 --> 00:50:41 is a product of. So I think all of that.
00:50:42 --> 00:50:45 Caused them, and the Black Lives Matter also offered a model,
00:50:45 --> 00:50:49 movement of collective action, non-violent collective action,
00:50:50 --> 00:50:54 an agency, and a sense of distrust and saying, no, we're not just going to believe
00:50:54 --> 00:50:56 what the adults say or what those in power say.
00:50:57 --> 00:51:03 And we see, our eyes see for ourselves on the cameras of the citizen journalists
00:51:03 --> 00:51:04 and the Palestinian journalists.
00:51:04 --> 00:51:08 So by the way, every time a Palestinian journalist was successfully showing
00:51:08 --> 00:51:11 the amount of violence and murder,
00:51:12 --> 00:51:17 children being sniped, children who were orphaned, entire families being wiped
00:51:17 --> 00:51:21 out by the Israeli military, those journalists would get killed.
00:51:21 --> 00:51:25 They would get assassinated intentionally because Israel has a very,
00:51:25 --> 00:51:30 very sophisticated drone technology, very sophisticated surveillance technology.
00:51:30 --> 00:51:35 You can use your phone, your own iPhone as a way to surveil you and to track you.
00:51:35 --> 00:51:39 And they were realizing, wait a minute, every time a Palestinian journalist
00:51:39 --> 00:51:44 was reporting on what was happening, they would get killed.
00:51:44 --> 00:51:48 They would get assassinated by the Israelis. And of course, the Israelis say, oh, they're Hamas.
00:51:48 --> 00:51:54 And at some point, people realize this is just a cover. Everybody is not Hamas.
00:51:54 --> 00:51:58 Many of these people are just normal civilians who are trying to stay alive.
00:51:59 --> 00:52:01 And that just caused the students to be even more skeptical.
00:52:02 --> 00:52:06 But yeah, so I do think that the Black Lives Matter, and that's why Trump hates
00:52:06 --> 00:52:10 the Black Lives Matter. The white nationalist movement hates the Black Lives
00:52:10 --> 00:52:14 Matter movement, and they hate the Palestinian solidarity movement.
00:52:14 --> 00:52:20 They hate the labor union. Anything that is going to collective action, mobilizing people.
00:52:21 --> 00:52:26 To challenge those who have the disproportionate amount of wealth and power
00:52:26 --> 00:52:28 are going to be repressed.
00:52:29 --> 00:52:35 And that's kind of the myth of American democracy, is we're not that democratic.
00:52:35 --> 00:52:40 We're democratic alike. We're getting less and less democratic now with Trump.
00:52:41 --> 00:52:45 And then finally, I think the students who lived through the Palestine Solidarity
00:52:45 --> 00:52:49 Movement, which again is a generation right after Black Lives Matter,
00:52:49 --> 00:52:51 have learned a really hard lesson.
00:52:51 --> 00:52:55 That non-violent protest is essentially
00:52:55 --> 00:52:58 criminalized in this country that if
00:52:58 --> 00:53:02 you do if you do anything beyond just superficial
00:53:02 --> 00:53:06 performative protests anything
00:53:06 --> 00:53:09 that where you're actually going to change something you will get disciplined you
00:53:09 --> 00:53:14 will get expelled and that these universities that market and recruit based
00:53:14 --> 00:53:18 on the mantra of free thinking and critical thinking and the right to the scent
00:53:18 --> 00:53:20 and really trying to teach them
00:53:20 --> 00:53:27 how to be model citizens that think for themselves and act based on that,
00:53:27 --> 00:53:32 again, ways that are nonviolent, that they are selling them a false bill of goods.
00:53:33 --> 00:53:40 Yeah. So, and that kind of goes with something you had said before about racial justice.
00:53:40 --> 00:53:43 The United States has always been a cycle of violent repression followed by
00:53:43 --> 00:53:47 nonviolent in progress, prompting retrenchment by white elites.
00:53:48 --> 00:53:52 The only way I would, the only, well.
00:53:53 --> 00:53:58 The only thing I would argue with that is that there was one period in American
00:53:58 --> 00:54:00 history where there was violence. That was the Civil War.
00:54:00 --> 00:54:03 And that led to the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.
00:54:04 --> 00:54:12 But ever since then, it's been back to more traditional democratic strategies
00:54:12 --> 00:54:16 like going to court or protesting or those kind of things.
00:54:18 --> 00:54:23 So you know i i think i i think you're absolutely well i know you're absolutely
00:54:23 --> 00:54:29 right about that i just well i just want to i want to highlight that the my
00:54:29 --> 00:54:32 analysis in the u.s is highly raced,
00:54:32 --> 00:54:38 because america is a highly racialized society you can take that analysis and
00:54:38 --> 00:54:42 apply it to other countries and just identify who are the elites sometimes it's
00:54:42 --> 00:54:44 a particular tribe or group of tribes.
00:54:44 --> 00:54:49 Sometimes it's an hierarchy. Sometimes it is people of a particular linguistic
00:54:49 --> 00:54:52 tradition or people that are from the North versus the South.
00:54:53 --> 00:54:57 So the hierarchies exist, the hierarchies of power exist in every society.
00:54:57 --> 00:55:04 But in our society, in the U.S., race continues to be a master category.
00:55:04 --> 00:55:10 In other words, the race that you have been ascribed, that's socially constructed to you,
00:55:11 --> 00:55:16 contributes significantly to your life, opportunities, your access,
00:55:17 --> 00:55:22 your relationship or interaction with a state, with the police,
00:55:22 --> 00:55:25 with wealth, job opportunities.
00:55:25 --> 00:55:27 That is not something that any of us want.
00:55:28 --> 00:55:32 We identify because we want to stop it. We don't identify because we support it.
00:55:32 --> 00:55:37 But you can't stop it unless you identify it and study it and say,
00:55:37 --> 00:55:44 okay, what's happening here because the days of intentional discrimination have.
00:55:45 --> 00:55:50 Those are relatively long gone. Yes, we still do have people intentionally insufferating.
00:55:50 --> 00:55:55 But most of the discrimination happened at a systemic level,
00:55:55 --> 00:55:56 right? At a structural level.
00:55:57 --> 00:56:02 At what we call disparate impact. Where you have policies, you have laws that
00:56:02 --> 00:56:07 are facially neutral, but they are usually enforced in a way,
00:56:07 --> 00:56:13 either selectively or even non-selectively, but enforced such that one group
00:56:13 --> 00:56:16 of people, it's designed to disadvantage you.
00:56:16 --> 00:56:22 So if you make college expensive, and there's no scholarships,
00:56:22 --> 00:56:27 and there's no government-held grants to those who are low-income,
00:56:27 --> 00:56:32 you have designed college to be inaccessible to people who are low-income.
00:56:33 --> 00:56:37 And if you have a high concentration of a certain racial group who are low-income
00:56:37 --> 00:56:44 or multiple groups, then you have essentially shut the door to college education to those people,
00:56:45 --> 00:56:51 even if they may be have the intelligence, have the ability to succeed in college.
00:56:52 --> 00:56:58 Yeah. And, you know, you you're addressing hypocrisy, hypocrisy in that.
00:56:59 --> 00:57:08 Folks say, well, you know, we don't want and so many people getting accessing
00:57:08 --> 00:57:09 higher education, all that.
00:57:09 --> 00:57:14 But yet they still follow through tradition that was set by Eisenhower that
00:57:14 --> 00:57:18 college education is a national security interest.
00:57:18 --> 00:57:22 Right. So you've got to have people educated in the United States.
00:57:22 --> 00:57:27 So the next time we fight somebody like Germany that was technologically advanced
00:57:27 --> 00:57:29 for its time, we got to have smart people.
00:57:30 --> 00:57:33 But we're trying to pick and choose who the smart people are.
00:57:33 --> 00:57:37 And then it becomes a numbers game. So if you don't have the numbers.
00:57:37 --> 00:57:42 Anyway, that's a whole nother show, Doc. We'll get to that later.
00:57:43 --> 00:57:44 I want to close out with this.
00:57:45 --> 00:57:51 And it's kind of personal for me. And I think a lot of people like me that are
00:57:51 --> 00:57:52 black. So I grew up in Chicago.
00:57:53 --> 00:57:59 So my first exposure to Islam was the nation Islam, Elijah Muhammad,
00:57:59 --> 00:58:05 Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, even Wallace Dean, you know, Muhammad Ali.
00:58:05 --> 00:58:09 All those people lived in Chicago at one point. And, you know,
00:58:09 --> 00:58:14 you see the brothers with the bow ties and all that. So that was kind of a young
00:58:14 --> 00:58:17 black person's introduction into Islam.
00:58:18 --> 00:58:22 But as you get older, you realize, well, that's not the traditional Islam.
00:58:22 --> 00:58:27 And so when Wallace Dean broke from the nation and then you read into Malcolm
00:58:27 --> 00:58:32 X and how he made his pilgrimage to Mecca and how it changed their life,
00:58:32 --> 00:58:35 it's like, oh, well, so Islam is a lot more deeper than.
00:58:35 --> 00:58:40 And also, those are the people that I see coming out of these nice,
00:58:40 --> 00:58:47 fancy buildings, and they're dressed a certain way and all that kind of stuff. And so we were—.
00:58:49 --> 00:58:53 But all those images were positive to us.
00:58:54 --> 00:59:03 And my generation came of age to really how negative people perceived Islam at 9-11.
00:59:04 --> 00:59:08 So, you know, I've had guests on and we've, you know, people that have,
00:59:08 --> 00:59:12 you know, especially during this time, you know, and it's talking about the
00:59:12 --> 00:59:17 challenges that people that practice the Islamic faith deal with.
00:59:17 --> 00:59:24 But I want you to talk to me and talk to the audience about what is the most
00:59:24 --> 00:59:28 beautiful or satisfying aspect of the religion of Islam?
00:59:29 --> 00:59:35 Because I think, you know, to me, for one narrative, there always has to be a counter.
00:59:35 --> 00:59:39 So what if you, well, I don't want to say an elevator pitch,
00:59:39 --> 00:59:43 but what is an attractive thing about that faith?
00:59:44 --> 00:59:51 So, I'll start by recommending a book for non-Muslims called The Vision of Islam
00:59:51 --> 00:59:54 by Sachiko Murado and William Chittick,
00:59:54 --> 01:00:03 which I find to be a relatively concise description of the foundations of Islam,
01:00:03 --> 01:00:04 especially spiritually.
01:00:05 --> 01:00:09 Islam is a world religion. There are 1.8 billion Muslims.
01:00:10 --> 01:00:16 And as a result, this has been able to survive and adapt and evolve over more
01:00:16 --> 01:00:22 than 1 years in every single country in the world, different cultures,
01:00:22 --> 01:00:24 different languages, different times.
01:00:24 --> 01:00:31 So it is a tolerant faith, and it is a flexible faith, because otherwise it
01:00:31 --> 01:00:33 wouldn't have survived this long.
01:00:33 --> 01:00:36 It is grounded in the belief
01:00:36 --> 01:00:39 in the oneness of god and that to be a muslim is
01:00:39 --> 01:00:43 to worship god and to effectively
01:00:43 --> 01:00:46 live one's life worshiping god now
01:00:46 --> 01:00:49 worship doesn't necessarily mean just praying
01:00:49 --> 01:00:53 and fasting and doing rituals worshiping is
01:00:53 --> 01:00:56 how you live your life how you treat people right how
01:00:56 --> 01:00:59 you use your wealth how your your relationship with
01:00:59 --> 01:01:02 knowledge so some emphasizes knowledge as.
01:01:02 --> 01:01:05 A priority in every muslim's life you should always be learning
01:01:05 --> 01:01:09 and studying and it essentially
01:01:09 --> 01:01:13 teaches muslims that when you treat people
01:01:13 --> 01:01:16 with humanity with even a humaneness
01:01:16 --> 01:01:19 and charity and kindness that is a form of worship of god
01:01:19 --> 01:01:22 when you are generous with people and
01:01:22 --> 01:01:25 forgiving of people that is a form of worship
01:01:25 --> 01:01:28 right when you are forgiving
01:01:28 --> 01:01:31 and or striving to help people
01:01:31 --> 01:01:35 with your education with your skills or
01:01:35 --> 01:01:38 contributing to society and whether you're a
01:01:38 --> 01:01:41 lawyer or a doctor but serving the public interest again it doesn't have to
01:01:41 --> 01:01:46 be for free it's okay to earn money but you're you're striving for the common
01:01:46 --> 01:01:54 good in whatever way you do that is a form of worship of god so it is a highly
01:01:54 --> 01:01:57 spiritual religion but also a very inclusive one and in In fact,
01:01:57 --> 01:02:02 it teaches us that God intentionally made us of different races and different
01:02:02 --> 01:02:05 languages and different cultures so that we would get to know each other,
01:02:05 --> 01:02:08 so that we would learn from each other, not so we would fight each other.
01:02:09 --> 01:02:13 Not so that we would destroy each other. And that is also, I believe,
01:02:14 --> 01:02:19 one of the reasons why it was so inviting and attractive to many African-Americans
01:02:19 --> 01:02:20 in the early 20th century.
01:02:21 --> 01:02:24 And many of them identify as reverts, not humbers.
01:02:24 --> 01:02:29 Because if you study the history, there's a whole disappointment that's now
01:02:29 --> 01:02:33 risen about the first Muslims in America who were black, who were African,
01:02:33 --> 01:02:35 who were enslaved Africans.
01:02:35 --> 01:02:39 And they were, as you know, forcibly brought here as part of chattel slavery
01:02:39 --> 01:02:46 from West Africa, which at that time, Islam had existed for centuries and had evolved.
01:02:47 --> 01:02:51 And not all of the enslaved Africans were Muslims, but a large number of them were.
01:02:51 --> 01:02:59 But as part of the brutality of slavery, anyone who was not a Christian was a heathen.
01:02:59 --> 01:03:04 And part of Southern colonialism is it was a, quote-unquote,
01:03:04 --> 01:03:09 a civilizing project that was theologically grounded.
01:03:09 --> 01:03:15 And many of the, I'm saying that Africans, not all of them, whatever faith they
01:03:15 --> 01:03:16 had was literally beaten out of them.
01:03:17 --> 01:03:20 They had to hide it. And they couldn't pass it on to their children.
01:03:20 --> 01:03:25 And so at some point in time, Islam, as it was practiced in West Africa.
01:03:26 --> 01:03:33 Was no longer, at least in that same form, existed among African-Americans or enslaved Africans.
01:03:33 --> 01:03:38 And so many of the, they saw themselves as black Muslims.
01:03:38 --> 01:03:43 They saw themselves as rebirths. We're going back to this faith that used to be ours.
01:03:43 --> 01:03:48 And I think one reason it was so attractive is because it was so inclusive and
01:03:48 --> 01:03:57 it was so tolerant. and it really frowns upon or actually prohibits racism and that you are.
01:03:58 --> 01:04:03 You know, when you identify who are the better people, right,
01:04:03 --> 01:04:07 who is someone to look up to, who is someone to admire, who is someone to respect,
01:04:08 --> 01:04:09 it is about their actions.
01:04:10 --> 01:04:15 It is about their deeds. It is about how they treat people and how they live
01:04:15 --> 01:04:21 their life and follow the moral principles of the religion. It is not based on what they look like.
01:04:22 --> 01:04:26 It is not based on what language they speak or how much wealth they have or
01:04:26 --> 01:04:30 how much power they have. And in fact, when you see the rituals of Islam,
01:04:31 --> 01:04:33 it is quite egalitarian that we all pray together.
01:04:34 --> 01:04:38 It doesn't matter whether you're a king or not, whether you're a wealthy businessman
01:04:38 --> 01:04:42 or the person who's earning the lowest wage in the company.
01:04:42 --> 01:04:45 When it's time for prayer, everybody prays together.
01:04:46 --> 01:04:50 In the same room, in the same line, there is no hierarchy before that.
01:04:50 --> 01:04:59 And that is, I think that kind of signals what that tolerance and that egalitarianism.
01:04:59 --> 01:05:02 And also there is a strong emphasis on charity.
01:05:03 --> 01:05:07 Muslims are supposed to, according to their religion, get 2.5% of their wealth
01:05:07 --> 01:05:13 every year to orphans, to widows, to people who are not able to pay their medical
01:05:13 --> 01:05:17 expenses, to people who are permanently in debt and can't get out of debt.
01:05:17 --> 01:05:24 To people who are poor and are trying to help someone get educated,
01:05:24 --> 01:05:30 all of that counts as good deeds or blessings that are a form of worship.
01:05:30 --> 01:05:33 So that is the real Islam.
01:05:33 --> 01:05:37 That is the Islam that you learn when you go to mosque, when you go to your
01:05:37 --> 01:05:42 Islamic studies class, when you are studying the Quran. And it is the 99.9%
01:05:42 --> 01:05:45 of Islam that every Muslim is exposed to.
01:05:46 --> 01:05:53 Unfortunately, for malicious reasons and then politically motivated reasons that are, in fact...
01:05:53 --> 01:05:57 Are connected to empire. The only thing that
01:05:57 --> 01:06:01 Americans and Westerners tend to be exposed to when it comes to Islam are these
01:06:01 --> 01:06:10 extremist militia groups who are a direct product of wars and conflict and dictatorship
01:06:10 --> 01:06:16 and oppression in their physical locales and who have claimed,
01:06:16 --> 01:06:19 they have self-proclaimed that they represent Muslims.
01:06:19 --> 01:06:22 But if you actually look at how many people follow them and how
01:06:22 --> 01:06:25 many people they've been able to recruit out of
01:06:25 --> 01:06:28 1.8 billion people it's really small and those
01:06:28 --> 01:06:32 who they haven't been able to recruit are not
01:06:32 --> 01:06:36 your typical muslim and many of them and again all this has been studied and
01:06:36 --> 01:06:43 that many of them are not even trained formally in islam they don't have degrees
01:06:43 --> 01:06:48 in islamic law or islamic history just because you memorize the Quran doesn't
01:06:48 --> 01:06:50 mean you actually understand it.
01:06:50 --> 01:06:53 It's a very, very complicated book.
01:06:53 --> 01:06:59 It's considered the revelation of God, and it takes an entire lifetime to understand
01:06:59 --> 01:07:03 it, and many still don't understand everything about it. It's all kind of discipline.
01:07:03 --> 01:07:08 And so if you look to see, well, who are these people in Al-Qaeda or in ISIS
01:07:08 --> 01:07:13 or in Boko Haram, these terrorist groups, these militia groups, who are they?
01:07:13 --> 01:07:17 They are not schooled in the religion. And they don't have a deep expertise.
01:07:18 --> 01:07:24 They are gangs, and they said that, hey, we represent Muslims.
01:07:24 --> 01:07:26 The vast majority of Muslims look at them and go, no, you don't.
01:07:27 --> 01:07:31 The only people that recognize them as representing Muslims are Western governments.
01:07:32 --> 01:07:39 Because it's soon set to be able to say, oh, look, that's why we need to go to war in Afghanistan.
01:07:39 --> 01:07:41 That's why we need to go to war in Iraq.
01:07:41 --> 01:07:46 That's why we need to not support the Palestinians. That's why we need to support
01:07:46 --> 01:07:49 the dictatorships in a small majority of countries, right?
01:07:50 --> 01:07:56 Because we, God forbid, we would have those people that would otherwise rule, which is not the case.
01:07:56 --> 01:08:00 And I'll just kind of point as evidence the Arab Spring.
01:08:00 --> 01:08:03 The air spring was one of the most historic monumental
01:08:03 --> 01:08:06 events of that region in
01:08:06 --> 01:08:09 multiple generations and it was non-violent
01:08:09 --> 01:08:12 it was the people rising up and saying we
01:08:12 --> 01:08:16 don't want to be ruled by dictators we want self-governance
01:08:16 --> 01:08:19 we want our version of democracy we don't
01:08:19 --> 01:08:22 and these dictators are all propped up by the u.s
01:08:22 --> 01:08:25 and europeans and they are they
01:08:25 --> 01:08:28 had a chokehold on on our lives and
01:08:28 --> 01:08:31 on our futures and they all failed and
01:08:31 --> 01:08:34 if you go and as you study and i've written a lot about the airspace and
01:08:34 --> 01:08:37 some others it was a direct result
01:08:37 --> 01:08:44 of foreign intervention ensuring that there would not be democracy in these
01:08:44 --> 01:08:50 countries because that would most likely result in those countries not being
01:08:50 --> 01:08:57 the puppets of the west it would compromise and threaten especially the U.S.
01:08:57 --> 01:09:02 Hegemony in the region which would impact its hegemony on oil production and
01:09:02 --> 01:09:09 its military bases in the region and all of its global geopolitical interests. So.
01:09:12 --> 01:09:16 When Muslims did rise up, they didn't even rise up violently,
01:09:16 --> 01:09:18 but the repression was quite violent.
01:09:18 --> 01:09:22 And that's why, unfortunately, the reputation of the United States and many
01:09:22 --> 01:09:28 Muslim-majority countries is very low, because they live the brunt of the empire.
01:09:28 --> 01:09:36 They live the consequences of our military engagements, or in the case of Gaza, lack of engagement,
01:09:37 --> 01:09:45 that then causes havoc on their lives and oftentimes death and violence.
01:09:46 --> 01:09:51 But that is not the Islam that people are taught and people desire.
01:09:52 --> 01:09:56 And I'll just end by saying, you know, there is various sayings of the prophet,
01:09:57 --> 01:09:58 which are considered secondary sources.
01:09:59 --> 01:10:05 And there are multiple ones where it's clear that when there is the option between
01:10:05 --> 01:10:12 the most aesthetic versus the most luxurious or the middle, the middle is always chosen.
01:10:13 --> 01:10:15 Right? So it's like, do you want water?
01:10:15 --> 01:10:20 Do you want wine or do you want milk? And it was, in this particular kind of
01:10:20 --> 01:10:23 analogy, it was milk because that was the middle road.
01:10:23 --> 01:10:28 So that's the irony. Muslims are taught to always take the middle road to being moderate.
01:10:29 --> 01:10:33 And yet we're represented as exclusively extremists.
01:10:33 --> 01:10:40 And I think that those who believe that, what I think is a very racist and bad
01:10:40 --> 01:10:44 faith narrative, I would encourage you to read for yourself.
01:10:45 --> 01:10:49 And let your own critical thinking, and it's difficult to read for yourself,
01:10:49 --> 01:10:55 it's tedious, it takes a lot of time, but if you're truly interested in understanding
01:10:55 --> 01:10:57 your world, then you have to take that time.
01:10:57 --> 01:11:01 And I think, again, the vision of Islamism is a place to start.
01:11:01 --> 01:11:05 And I also would encourage people, if you want to learn more about Islamophobia
01:11:05 --> 01:11:08 and about Muslims in America, to go to the YouTube channel of the Center for
01:11:08 --> 01:11:11 Security, Race, and Rights and subscribe.
01:11:11 --> 01:11:17 We have numerous experts who write on the lecture series every year,
01:11:18 --> 01:11:21 multiple experts who come and talk about Muslims, South Asians,
01:11:21 --> 01:11:23 Arabs, or Muslim-majority countries.
01:11:23 --> 01:11:27 And we also, I'm also the host of the Race and Race podcast,
01:11:27 --> 01:11:31 which I'll put a little plug in if people want to expand their podcast reach.
01:11:32 --> 01:11:35 But I do think that, you know, the first word in the Quran is ikraq,
01:11:35 --> 01:11:38 which is read. So I would just encourage people to read.
01:11:38 --> 01:11:44 So if people want to reach out personally to you besides, you know,
01:11:44 --> 01:11:50 the other sites and so forth, or even, you know, get your book, how can they do that?
01:11:50 --> 01:11:56 I have a website, saharazizlaw.com, and so there is a way to contact me there,
01:11:56 --> 01:12:01 and I will try my best to respond.
01:12:01 --> 01:12:07 And also, you can also reach me at csr.redbears.edu, again, the Center for Security,
01:12:07 --> 01:12:09 Race, and Rights, which is the center that I direct.
01:12:09 --> 01:12:16 And I'm also on social media at saharazizlaw, and that's my tag on all the social media accounts.
01:12:16 --> 01:12:21 Well, Zahara sees, again, I knew this was going to be special,
01:12:21 --> 01:12:28 and I graciously appreciated the time and one of the advantages of having your
01:12:28 --> 01:12:30 own thing and you're not caught up with things.
01:12:31 --> 01:12:33 Headlines or all this stuff we could carry on this conversation.
01:12:33 --> 01:12:36 However, we cannot carry on this conversation forever.
01:12:36 --> 01:12:40 So we're going to have to end it here. But again, I just thank you for coming
01:12:40 --> 01:12:42 on the podcast. I greatly appreciate it.
01:12:42 --> 01:12:46 Thank you for hosting me. All right, guys, we're going to catch y'all on the other side.
01:13:06 --> 01:13:12 All right, and we are back. And so now it's time for my next guest, Wala Blegay.
01:13:13 --> 01:13:19 Wala Blegay was elected to serve her first four-year term on the Prince George's County Council.
01:13:19 --> 01:13:24 In the November 2022 general election, it represents Council District 6.
01:13:24 --> 01:13:28 She was elected as vice chair by our peers during her first term on the council.
01:13:29 --> 01:13:33 During her first term, she spearheaded an aggressive people-driven agenda,
01:13:33 --> 01:13:36 authoring legislation to encourage quality development in the county,
01:13:37 --> 01:13:40 limiting tobacco stores and marijuana shops in residential communities,
01:13:41 --> 01:13:46 incentivizing healthy restaurants, providing tax credits for public safety employees.
01:13:47 --> 01:13:52 Creating a task force to address emergency room wait times, requiring security
01:13:52 --> 01:13:57 cameras in high-capacity apartment buildings, rent stabilization, and more.
01:13:58 --> 01:14:04 As chair of the council, sitting as the Board of Health, She led the efforts
01:14:04 --> 01:14:09 of the council addressing nurse-patient ratios, long emergency room wait times, and mental health.
01:14:10 --> 01:14:16 She is passionate about civil rights, women's rights, and workers' rights,
01:14:16 --> 01:14:21 and the creator and host of the Chat with a Lawyer television talk show,
01:14:22 --> 01:14:24 a free legal resource for county residents.
01:14:25 --> 01:14:28 A grassroots organizer, she has committed her office to the engagement,
01:14:29 --> 01:14:33 education, and empowerment of all stakeholders. An adjunct professor at the
01:14:33 --> 01:14:39 American University Washington College of Law and former staff attorney for the D.C.
01:14:39 --> 01:14:45 Nurses Association, advocating to improve the working environment for nurses and working families.
01:14:46 --> 01:14:51 Councilmember Blegay has been noted as the working people's voice.
01:14:52 --> 01:14:56 She has previously served on the Maryland Governor's Task Force for the Study
01:14:56 --> 01:15:01 of Economic Development and Apprenticeship Programs, ACLU of Maryland,
01:15:01 --> 01:15:06 Maryland Legislative Agenda for Women, Board of Directors for the Training Source,
01:15:07 --> 01:15:13 Prince George's County Human Relations Commission, Prince George's County NAACP,
01:15:13 --> 01:15:17 Emerge Maryland, and the Maryland Coalition of Consumer Rights.
01:15:17 --> 01:15:21 She has published numerous articles related to civil rights,
01:15:21 --> 01:15:27 health care, and education, and is the recipient of the 40 Under 40 In Prince George's County Award,
01:15:28 --> 01:15:33 the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials Presidential Service Award,
01:15:33 --> 01:15:36 and the Daily Records Leading Women Award.
01:15:36 --> 01:15:41 Councilmember Blegay is a first-generation Liberian and Nigerian-American,
01:15:42 --> 01:15:46 graduate of the University of Maryland College Park with a BA in government
01:15:46 --> 01:15:51 and politics, and she earned a JD from the American University Washington College of Law.
01:15:51 --> 01:15:55 She is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated,
01:15:55 --> 01:15:58 a Prince George's County resident for more than 20 years.
01:15:59 --> 01:16:03 Councilmember Blegay resides in Kettering. Ladies and gentlemen,
01:16:04 --> 01:16:08 it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest on this podcast.
01:16:08 --> 01:16:10 Wala. Blegay.
01:16:21 --> 01:16:27 All right. The Honorable Wala Blegay Esquire.
01:16:28 --> 01:16:31 How are you doing, ma'am? You doing good? I'm doing well. Thank you.
01:16:31 --> 01:16:37 So, look, I wanted to get you on because you, well, you know,
01:16:38 --> 01:16:42 from what I can see, you're one of the up and coming political people.
01:16:43 --> 01:16:49 Oh, wow. Thank you for saying that. And you are a very active in what you do.
01:16:50 --> 01:16:53 And so a go-getter from what I've seen.
01:16:53 --> 01:17:00 And so there's been some issues on a national plane that have affected you.
01:17:00 --> 01:17:06 So I wanted to get into that and kind of introduce people to you in the time that I have you.
01:17:06 --> 01:17:11 I appreciate that. So before we get started on the interview part,
01:17:11 --> 01:17:14 I do a couple of things called icebreakers.
01:17:14 --> 01:17:18 And so the first icebreaker is a quote. And I want you to respond to this quote.
01:17:19 --> 01:17:23 The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in service of others.
01:17:23 --> 01:17:24 What does that quote mean to you?
01:17:25 --> 01:17:29 Well, it means that really you find your purpose when you serve.
01:17:29 --> 01:17:32 And that's what you learn, your purpose. You learn what you care about.
01:17:33 --> 01:17:37 You learn what drives you. You learn what frustrates you.
01:17:37 --> 01:17:43 Service is not an easy job. And service oftentimes gets you do feel sometimes
01:17:43 --> 01:17:49 alone or frustrated. But you can find your, you can find out that you,
01:17:49 --> 01:17:52 you can find your true purpose and what you're supposed to do.
01:17:52 --> 01:17:54 I think service is one of the best things, but it's the heart.
01:17:55 --> 01:17:56 It's one of the hardest things to grasp.
01:17:57 --> 01:18:01 Yeah. And yeah, I totally agree with that. Service.
01:18:03 --> 01:18:09 It's hard for people to give of themselves. And, you know, your natural instinct
01:18:09 --> 01:18:12 is to take care of yourself first.
01:18:12 --> 01:18:17 And you have to have a special heart to want to do that for other people,
01:18:17 --> 01:18:21 especially in the realm of politics. So I definitely agree with what you're saying.
01:18:22 --> 01:18:24 The next icebreaker is what we call 20 questions.
01:18:25 --> 01:18:30 So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. Seven.
01:18:31 --> 01:18:34 What do you consider the best way to stay informed about politics,
01:18:35 --> 01:18:36 current events, et cetera?
01:18:37 --> 01:18:41 Well, we have learned that that's one of the biggest issues with the county
01:18:41 --> 01:18:47 is that the lack of information that people feel they're not receiving.
01:18:47 --> 01:18:52 So one of the things we did is, first of all, we have a very active listserv that people can join.
01:18:52 --> 01:18:58 They can reach out to my office at Council District 6 at co.pg.md.us.
01:18:58 --> 01:19:01 We're also really active on social media.
01:19:01 --> 01:19:04 So if you're on the gram, you can follow me at WallaKB.
01:19:05 --> 01:19:10 And we make sure that we keep people very informed of everything that we're
01:19:10 --> 01:19:12 doing so that people can feel engaged.
01:19:12 --> 01:19:15 Because that's the biggest issue is that I found, and I tell people,
01:19:15 --> 01:19:20 I found out so much once I became a council member, which shouldn't be the case.
01:19:20 --> 01:19:22 But it's the case is that now I'm a council member.
01:19:23 --> 01:19:26 All these resources that we have, now I know.
01:19:26 --> 01:19:30 Now I know that they're available. Now I know how to promote them to the community.
01:19:31 --> 01:19:37 So I really actually have learned from that, that we need to do better getting,
01:19:38 --> 01:19:39 keeping people engaged.
01:19:39 --> 01:19:44 Okay. When did you decide that you wanted to be in the arena of law and politics?
01:19:46 --> 01:19:51 Very early on, actually. When I was in college, I started off as,
01:19:51 --> 01:19:54 first of all, I would say that some of the things that I've always told people
01:19:54 --> 01:19:55 to bring your kids in the room,
01:19:56 --> 01:19:59 and there's a reason why I've said that, because I've learned that a lot of
01:19:59 --> 01:20:04 my work started, my parents were really active, and especially the African community
01:20:04 --> 01:20:09 when I was young, because we had a lot of Liberians coming here through TPS,
01:20:09 --> 01:20:15 through the TPS program as refugees, and we would advocate for them to get.
01:20:15 --> 01:20:19 Even though we didn't come to the United States through that program,
01:20:19 --> 01:20:23 we were advocating for the large number of Liberians that were coming in at
01:20:23 --> 01:20:27 the time of the 90s when the war started.
01:20:27 --> 01:20:29 So we would meet with the council members in D.C.
01:20:29 --> 01:20:34 We even came to Prince George's County to meet with, at the time,
01:20:34 --> 01:20:36 the county executive was Paris Glenn Denning.
01:20:36 --> 01:20:40 So we did all of those when I was young. And I know that that never left me.
01:20:40 --> 01:20:45 And once I got to college, I started off with pre-med, but I took a government
01:20:45 --> 01:20:48 politics class and I realized that, you know, that was really at the center
01:20:48 --> 01:20:51 of my heart was that the community aspect. I wanted to do back,
01:20:52 --> 01:20:53 go back to what we did when I was young.
01:20:54 --> 01:20:57 You just don't quite understand what your path is taking you on.
01:20:57 --> 01:21:02 And I ended up interning in Annapolis for a delegate who was all about young people.
01:21:02 --> 01:21:06 So that was like the best storm to actually start off with someone that was
01:21:06 --> 01:21:10 like, I want young people to get involved. And that was like what he believed.
01:21:10 --> 01:21:13 He was so about young people getting involved.
01:21:13 --> 01:21:16 And that actually had such an impact on me.
01:21:17 --> 01:21:21 And after that, I became sold in getting involved with politics.
01:21:21 --> 01:21:23 And I worked in Annapolis.
01:21:23 --> 01:21:27 After that, I did organizing with the unions. I worked on campaigns.
01:21:27 --> 01:21:31 I was all in. And then later on, I decided to run myself.
01:21:31 --> 01:21:33 So you never know, like I said, bring your kids in the room,
01:21:33 --> 01:21:38 because I do believe this all started when I was basically...
01:21:39 --> 01:21:43 Going with my parents to all of those meetings as a kid. And I was like four
01:21:43 --> 01:21:47 or five years old. So it was not like I started off like as a grownup.
01:21:47 --> 01:21:51 It was really a baby and still engaged. Yeah.
01:21:52 --> 01:21:56 So I first found out about Prince George's County, Maryland,
01:21:57 --> 01:22:01 when it was recognized as the most populous and the most affluent African-American
01:22:01 --> 01:22:04 county in America. Is that still the case?
01:22:05 --> 01:22:09 Well, I would say they're arguing that we're competing now with Charles County.
01:22:09 --> 01:22:13 But what I will say is that Prince George's County has the most unique story.
01:22:13 --> 01:22:19 This went for a rural white town to a majority African-American affluent community,
01:22:19 --> 01:22:25 regardless of the fact that we're dealing with poverty in certain areas as we
01:22:25 --> 01:22:27 have an influx of people moving in from D.C.
01:22:27 --> 01:22:33 I mean, we went from, you know, a small county of two, three hundred thousand
01:22:33 --> 01:22:35 to almost a million people.
01:22:36 --> 01:22:42 And in the midst of that, we do have we have always had pockets of poverty within our community.
01:22:43 --> 01:22:47 And I think that some people have said, you know, oh, is there wealth if you
01:22:47 --> 01:22:50 have schools that are troubled and all of those things?
01:22:50 --> 01:22:56 What people don't realize is that the poverty in our community is seen in our,
01:22:56 --> 01:22:59 it's not seen in the big houses, it's seen in the school system.
01:22:59 --> 01:23:03 That's where people have to come to get education because they can't afford
01:23:03 --> 01:23:05 to put their kids in private schools.
01:23:05 --> 01:23:09 And that's where we see a lot of the poverty issues in the county.
01:23:09 --> 01:23:12 You see it right in the school system.
01:23:13 --> 01:23:18 So it is one of those things where while we have the wealth, we do have the wealth.
01:23:18 --> 01:23:22 There are things that impact our community that are unique to other groups.
01:23:22 --> 01:23:27 First of all, we do have, we're going to have pockets of poverty because with
01:23:27 --> 01:23:30 people of color, they're trying to climb up the ladder, they're trying to get where they are.
01:23:30 --> 01:23:33 We have pockets of poverty in our county that we are trying to address.
01:23:34 --> 01:23:37 And a lot of those things are going to see themselves in the school system.
01:23:37 --> 01:23:42 However, because of we have a lot of houses, but we have a very difficult time
01:23:42 --> 01:23:45 getting the quality economic development. Why?
01:23:45 --> 01:23:51 Because the big powers that be in the economic world don't value a majority
01:23:51 --> 01:23:56 African-American community. We have to do a lot to even attract them to consider our community.
01:23:56 --> 01:24:00 So some people are just sitting up there saying, well, why don't we why can't
01:24:00 --> 01:24:03 we get a Whole Foods and all that? Because we have so much to do.
01:24:03 --> 01:24:06 When we go and tell them, they'll tell us, oh, we're looking at it.
01:24:06 --> 01:24:08 This is not a good fit for us, all of this stuff.
01:24:08 --> 01:24:10 No one's going to say it's because you have Black people there.
01:24:11 --> 01:24:16 But we can sense where they're going and why they won't come.
01:24:16 --> 01:24:22 So because of that, we have our money, our revenues are smaller than surrounding
01:24:22 --> 01:24:25 jurisdictions like Montgomery County, even D.C. because D.C.
01:24:25 --> 01:24:29 Has a large, it's a city, so it has a large number of commercial development.
01:24:29 --> 01:24:34 So while D.C. has a $20 billion budget, Montgomery County has an $8 billion
01:24:34 --> 01:24:40 budget, we're out here struggling with a $5 billion budget, trying to take care of a million people.
01:24:40 --> 01:24:45 I mean, D.C. has only 700 people, and Montgomery County has the same amount
01:24:45 --> 01:24:50 of people and $3 billion more to play with, not to mention they don't have as
01:24:50 --> 01:24:54 much of the population of need that we have.
01:24:55 --> 01:25:00 So we have to, and then we also have to deal with the media and how they portray
01:25:00 --> 01:25:04 the county because of our cult, you know, because of our race.
01:25:04 --> 01:25:08 And let's just face it, I get more calls from the media when there's a fight
01:25:08 --> 01:25:10 at a school or a fight here and there. There's fights everywhere,
01:25:10 --> 01:25:12 but they're going to cover that.
01:25:12 --> 01:25:15 But then when we have good things in the county, we have a very difficult time
01:25:15 --> 01:25:16 getting them to cover that.
01:25:16 --> 01:25:20 So we have to learn to tell our own story. So while we have the wealth, we have the challenges.
01:25:21 --> 01:25:26 Yeah, that's enlightening to know. So and then your your county government is
01:25:26 --> 01:25:30 structured differently than a lot of county governments I've experienced.
01:25:30 --> 01:25:34 And that's one of the cool things about this country is that each state,
01:25:34 --> 01:25:40 you know, kind of operates and charters counties and cities in their own way.
01:25:40 --> 01:25:46 So you actually have a county executive branch and a county legislative branch,
01:25:46 --> 01:25:51 whereas like I'm here in Georgia and I lived a lot and lived in Mississippi
01:25:51 --> 01:25:53 and in Illinois and Chicago. primarily.
01:25:54 --> 01:26:00 And so the county officers, whether they call commissioners or supervisors,
01:26:00 --> 01:26:07 they have kind of a hybrid executive legislative function, but y'all actually have a separation.
01:26:09 --> 01:26:14 Yeah, I think that the charter, so smaller counties have county commissioners
01:26:14 --> 01:26:18 and county commissioners usually kind of run the government.
01:26:18 --> 01:26:22 They're one in the same there. They have a function of executive and legislative.
01:26:23 --> 01:26:27 But once you get a county executive charter, so that they changed the charter
01:26:27 --> 01:26:32 30 years ago for the county, creating, moving it from commissioners to county executive.
01:26:32 --> 01:26:37 And then that was for Montgomery County. So the bigger counties have what Prince
01:26:37 --> 01:26:40 George's County has. The smaller counties are still on county commission.
01:26:40 --> 01:26:43 In fact, you will see in Charles County, that's becoming a big,
01:26:43 --> 01:26:47 that's a big hot topic there because they're moving up in numbers.
01:26:47 --> 01:26:51 I think they're at 300 now. So they're ready to change.
01:26:51 --> 01:26:53 Some of the people are ready to change over the county executive,
01:26:53 --> 01:26:57 but there is a large group that doesn't want it because it's a big change and
01:26:57 --> 01:27:02 it gives an executive one person the power to make a lot of decisions regardless
01:27:02 --> 01:27:03 of a legislative branch.
01:27:03 --> 01:27:09 And so there is a debt is definitely a very controversial issue in Charles County right now.
01:27:10 --> 01:27:15 So I want to talk about, you know, a couple of issues before you have to go.
01:27:16 --> 01:27:21 One is talk about how the federal layoffs by Doge and then the current federal
01:27:21 --> 01:27:26 shutdown has impacted the citizens of Prince George's County.
01:27:26 --> 01:27:31 And what steps has the county done to navigate these situations? Yeah.
01:27:32 --> 01:27:36 Well, we've been put in a pretty bad situation. We do know and we feel very
01:27:36 --> 01:27:39 strongly that this attack has been on us.
01:27:40 --> 01:27:43 Like this is an attack on Prince George's County.
01:27:43 --> 01:27:49 And so we do get that and we understand that. And it is because we're a majority
01:27:49 --> 01:27:50 African-American county.
01:27:50 --> 01:27:54 We have seen record layoffs. If you see the numbers, they even show that the
01:27:54 --> 01:27:59 biggest number of individuals who have been impacted by all of these layoffs
01:27:59 --> 01:28:03 has been Black women, which is where we fall.
01:28:03 --> 01:28:08 Because we have a lot of leadership, a lot of women have gotten degrees, gotten into these jobs.
01:28:08 --> 01:28:12 So we do feel like this is an attack on us. We've had a number of attacks.
01:28:12 --> 01:28:15 Number one, we have over 73 federal workers.
01:28:15 --> 01:28:18 We've seen record numbers of layoffs. We're still trying to get the numbers
01:28:18 --> 01:28:21 of how many are just in the county because a lot of our federal workers might
01:28:21 --> 01:28:25 live here, but they work in D.C., Montgomery, Virginia, all over.
01:28:25 --> 01:28:27 So we're trying to still get the numbers of those.
01:28:27 --> 01:28:31 And the next other place is Montgomery County. So we've had record number of layoffs.
01:28:32 --> 01:28:36 We have been downgraded in credit rating because of the attack on our area.
01:28:37 --> 01:28:39 They're moving, trying to move federal rules.
01:28:40 --> 01:28:41 Agencies out of the county, I
01:28:41 --> 01:28:46 know you saw the recent talk is about the Bellsville Agricultural Center.
01:28:46 --> 01:28:50 They're trying to close it down and move the residents, move the workers out,
01:28:50 --> 01:28:55 which means that a lot of people are living in the county simply to be because
01:28:55 --> 01:28:57 they work for the federal government.
01:28:57 --> 01:29:02 So by sort of moving agencies outside of this region or outside of the county,
01:29:02 --> 01:29:08 we're going to lose residents. In addition, we're dealing with the FBI was supposed
01:29:08 --> 01:29:10 to be a game changer when it comes to economic development.
01:29:11 --> 01:29:14 We pretty much won the bid for that during Biden.
01:29:14 --> 01:29:20 But now Trump has ended that and started to move the FBI all over the country outside of the region.
01:29:21 --> 01:29:23 So now, for now, we're going to
01:29:23 --> 01:29:26 still fight. We're filing lawsuits and everything to still keep the FBI.
01:29:27 --> 01:29:30 But that was supposed to be really sealed the deal. You know,
01:29:30 --> 01:29:33 we have NASA at Greenbelt. Then we were going to add the FBI.
01:29:34 --> 01:29:38 We already have Fort Meade, not that far away. So this was going to be part
01:29:38 --> 01:29:43 of our economic package to the powers that be in economic development to bring
01:29:43 --> 01:29:46 quality to Prince George's County. That's impacting that.
01:29:46 --> 01:29:50 So we are getting hit all the way on the side. At the time that we're trying
01:29:50 --> 01:29:56 to transition ourselves from suburban to even urban areas, we're getting hit by the layoffs.
01:29:57 --> 01:30:00 If these layoffs get to the point that it impacts giving foreclosures,
01:30:01 --> 01:30:05 then we're in real trouble because that's going to impact our overall budget.
01:30:05 --> 01:30:07 We're already getting impact with our overall budget.
01:30:08 --> 01:30:13 The state has let us know that the Trump administration has refused to pay reimbursements
01:30:13 --> 01:30:16 for things like free and reduced lunches, things like that.
01:30:16 --> 01:30:20 So that's going to come back to us and we're going to have to look for ways
01:30:20 --> 01:30:23 to fill in the gaps of federal funding that we're going to lose.
01:30:23 --> 01:30:27 So I know that y'all were trying to create some kind of.
01:30:28 --> 01:30:32 Temporary stipend for the federal workers that were laid off.
01:30:32 --> 01:30:34 I think it was like a thousand.
01:30:35 --> 01:30:38 Yeah, that didn't go through because we don't have the funding.
01:30:38 --> 01:30:42 I couldn't get my colleagues to vote on that. What we passed was a priority
01:30:42 --> 01:30:47 hiring bill that would give priority hiring to those who are federal workers.
01:30:48 --> 01:30:53 And then also we were going to create a food bank database that will help people
01:30:53 --> 01:30:54 who need food to get food quickly.
01:30:55 --> 01:31:00 And so we're trying to do that. And then, of course, we're going to work with
01:31:00 --> 01:31:05 our workforce development arm and Poy Prince George's to make sure that they
01:31:05 --> 01:31:09 provide funding and support for training for our workers.
01:31:09 --> 01:31:15 But, yeah, we do have the state now has been able to put things in place,
01:31:15 --> 01:31:17 and the state has been really helpful.
01:31:17 --> 01:31:20 And that's been helpful for us.
01:31:20 --> 01:31:24 Got you. All right. The other thing that caught my attention,
01:31:24 --> 01:31:29 explain to the listeners about your legislation called the Food as Medicine
01:31:29 --> 01:31:31 Health Program Act of 2025.
01:31:32 --> 01:31:37 Yeah, I mean, that's really exciting. So we have a county, like I said,
01:31:37 --> 01:31:38 there's wealth in the county.
01:31:39 --> 01:31:43 We have a lot of big houses, but a lot of people are looking to actually get
01:31:43 --> 01:31:51 healthy. And then we are living in food swans where we have just communities of fast food.
01:31:51 --> 01:31:55 So we're trying to change that. We have a lot of farms in the county.
01:31:55 --> 01:32:01 So food is medicine. It's supposed to be a way to bring farm to table in communities
01:32:01 --> 01:32:04 to help us help deal with chronic illness and things like that.
01:32:04 --> 01:32:09 Our highest death rate is not gun violence. It is heart disease.
01:32:09 --> 01:32:13 So this is what we're trying to do to address this issue.
01:32:14 --> 01:32:17 And that's why we're working. We're trying to work on that,
01:32:17 --> 01:32:20 on the Food is Medicine is supposed to create a program under the Department
01:32:20 --> 01:32:28 of Health that will facilitate relationships when it comes to farmers, bringing food,
01:32:28 --> 01:32:33 connecting them with our health care systems to allow them to give almost a
01:32:33 --> 01:32:38 food pharmacy to residents that they will get healthy foods that will improve
01:32:38 --> 01:32:41 their blood pressure and blood sugar and such.
01:32:41 --> 01:32:47 I learned about bitter melon that's being sold right now at a farm in my district.
01:32:48 --> 01:32:52 Asawana Farms, and that is supposed to help bring down blood pressure.
01:32:52 --> 01:32:55 I mean, but blood sugar, if you eat it and know how to cook it.
01:32:55 --> 01:32:59 So they even have ways to teach you how to cook it and they have ways to tell
01:32:59 --> 01:33:01 you how to eat it so it can help your blood sugar.
01:33:01 --> 01:33:05 So I've been doing that. It has worked. So it's been really great.
01:33:05 --> 01:33:10 So I definitely think at this point that we are, this is a step in the right
01:33:10 --> 01:33:14 direction. We had a healthy restaurant spill last two years ago that I put forth
01:33:14 --> 01:33:19 that would give incentives to healthy businesses so that they could come to the county.
01:33:19 --> 01:33:25 And that was a way to kind of fill our shopping centers with healthier options versus food swamps.
01:33:25 --> 01:33:32 I mean, everywhere we turn, we've got a Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King.
01:33:32 --> 01:33:35 And, you know, so we're just trying to change that for our community,
01:33:36 --> 01:33:38 especially because we have a lot of people who want to be healthy and sometimes
01:33:38 --> 01:33:44 they have busy jobs. So, you know, they might not be able to go home and cook and everything.
01:33:44 --> 01:33:48 So what are our retail should support healthier options?
01:33:49 --> 01:33:57 Yeah. And so and just to break it down, the real concept is when you go to a doctor,
01:33:58 --> 01:34:01 the doctor can not only prescribe pills, but they could say,
01:34:01 --> 01:34:06 I need you to eat X amount of cabbage or, as you say, bitter melon.
01:34:06 --> 01:34:12 They can actually make a prescription for you to be able to get those those those food products.
01:34:14 --> 01:34:17 Okay. Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. They have a program at University
01:34:17 --> 01:34:21 of Maryland, National Capital Region, right in my district that has that.
01:34:21 --> 01:34:25 So what they would do is that technically this is something that we need to address.
01:34:26 --> 01:34:30 Our hospitals are saying there's nothing that gives them the authority to really
01:34:30 --> 01:34:36 tell you here's ways to bring down your blood pressure, but through pills, there's no coding.
01:34:36 --> 01:34:40 But what they can do is just refer you to the food pharmacy.
01:34:40 --> 01:34:45 And when you get there, they have a food pharmacy that's run by the Capital Area Food Bank.
01:34:45 --> 01:34:50 And that one has a lot of, it talks about what the foods have,
01:34:50 --> 01:34:53 you know, and basically what their health benefits are.
01:34:53 --> 01:34:56 Yeah. So I know I'm pressed for time.
01:34:57 --> 01:35:02 I didn't really, I wanted to get into one of the other things because you and
01:35:02 --> 01:35:08 I had some experience being on, dealing with transportation and talk about the
01:35:08 --> 01:35:10 EV charging stations and all that.
01:35:10 --> 01:35:14 But I know that's something that you're pushing very strongly.
01:35:14 --> 01:35:17 Yeah, and we passed that bill last year.
01:35:17 --> 01:35:22 And basically, this bill is supposed to allow electric charging stations for new developments.
01:35:23 --> 01:35:27 And this will allow it because what we found is that a lot of people want to
01:35:27 --> 01:35:31 buy electric vehicles, but they don't have any.
01:35:31 --> 01:35:34 The infrastructure for electric vehicles is very low in the county.
01:35:34 --> 01:35:35 There's not many charging stations.
01:35:36 --> 01:35:38 There's not many charging. And if somebody has that difficulty,
01:35:38 --> 01:35:41 I was one of those people that had an interest.
01:35:41 --> 01:35:45 If you look around and there's no charging station around, then you're not going
01:35:45 --> 01:35:48 to get an electric vehicle. You're going to keep with their gas powered vehicle
01:35:48 --> 01:35:51 because of the infrastructure is there. So.
01:35:51 --> 01:35:55 So we do, I mean, the most aggressive one has been the District of Columbia,
01:35:55 --> 01:35:59 and we're trying to follow along and making sure they require for new development,
01:36:00 --> 01:36:03 and they've had a lot of new development, that there'd be a pretty high percentage
01:36:03 --> 01:36:07 of electric charging stations.
01:36:07 --> 01:36:12 And now we do understand developers have been clear that it is costly for them,
01:36:12 --> 01:36:17 especially now dealing with the current administration, which doesn't provide
01:36:17 --> 01:36:20 the tax credits that were provided before. Right.
01:36:20 --> 01:36:25 All right. So let's close this out with this question. When your time on the
01:36:25 --> 01:36:29 city, on the county council is over, how do you want to be remembered and what
01:36:29 --> 01:36:34 impact do you want to have? I mean, my work is driven by one thing, people first.
01:36:34 --> 01:36:38 And I want people to understand that as I'm really running to representing,
01:36:38 --> 01:36:43 to represent them, that I'm thinking about their concerns with everything that I do.
01:36:43 --> 01:36:45 And I want that to be with people.
01:36:45 --> 01:36:49 I don't want to hear that, oh, she's in the bag with all these,
01:36:49 --> 01:36:52 you know, corporate interests against her own people.
01:36:52 --> 01:36:57 No. So then that's what I want people to know, that I am definitely focused
01:36:57 --> 01:37:01 on making sure that their voices are heard at every table.
01:37:02 --> 01:37:07 All right. Well, Wala Blegay, I really appreciate you taking the time.
01:37:08 --> 01:37:12 You've already kind of told people how to get in touch with you and all that. So I appreciate that.
01:37:12 --> 01:37:20 And I look forward to seeing more of you and hearing more about the good work that you're doing.
01:37:21 --> 01:37:25 And one of the rules I want to state before you have to go is that now that
01:37:25 --> 01:37:28 you've been on the show, you have an open invitation to come back.
01:37:28 --> 01:37:32 If there's anything that you want to say, hey, look, Erik, we need to talk about this.
01:37:33 --> 01:37:36 Just feel free to reach out before I have to reach out to you.
01:37:36 --> 01:37:37 That sound like a good deal?
01:37:38 --> 01:37:43 Yes. Thank you. All right. All right, guys. And we'll catch y'all on the other side.
01:37:54 --> 01:37:56 All right, and we are back.
01:37:57 --> 01:38:06 So I want to thank Sahara Aziz and Wala Blegay for coming on to the podcast.
01:38:06 --> 01:38:15 Professor Aziz is an incredible intellectual, and I'm glad that she is on the
01:38:15 --> 01:38:18 side of democracy and justice.
01:38:20 --> 01:38:27 And, you know, I know some people won't agree with everything that she says
01:38:27 --> 01:38:33 or does, but she brings receipts and, you know,
01:38:33 --> 01:38:37 and is very passionate about what she does.
01:38:38 --> 01:38:48 I stand with her on a lot of issues, but I know that not everybody does, and that's fine.
01:38:48 --> 01:38:56 You know, but, you know, her battle is to make sure that all of us have a voice in the process. Right.
01:38:57 --> 01:39:04 And the more intellectual debate, the better, because we're not debating just
01:39:04 --> 01:39:07 to argue with each other or score points over each other.
01:39:07 --> 01:39:14 The whole point of debate, the whole point of free speech was is to come up with solutions. Right.
01:39:15 --> 01:39:20 That's why it was the First Amendment. It wasn't about just saying what you wanted to say.
01:39:20 --> 01:39:26 There has to be a tangible point behind that. You say what you want to say because
01:39:26 --> 01:39:28 you want to affect change.
01:39:28 --> 01:39:30 Right. You want to make a difference.
01:39:31 --> 01:39:34 So you voice your opinion. You have the right to assemble.
01:39:34 --> 01:39:38 Right. And you have the right to exercise whatever faith you want.
01:39:38 --> 01:39:39 That's the very First Amendment.
01:39:40 --> 01:39:45 And so I am glad that there are people out there like Professor Aziz that.
01:39:46 --> 01:39:52 Passionately defend that amendment. And I look forward to future visits with
01:39:52 --> 01:39:58 her and the work that she is doing, right?
01:39:58 --> 01:40:02 And then the same can be said for Councilwoman Blegay.
01:40:02 --> 01:40:08 You know, she didn't really have a whole lot of time. She carved out some time to come on.
01:40:09 --> 01:40:14 But I wanted her to understand that it's more than just the people in Prince
01:40:14 --> 01:40:18 George's County that's watching what she's doing, right?
01:40:18 --> 01:40:24 You know, you want to lift up public servants who are doing the right thing.
01:40:24 --> 01:40:31 Who understands the commitment that you have to have to be in the public service.
01:40:31 --> 01:40:39 And, you know, how she is constantly pressing for the betterment of her district
01:40:39 --> 01:40:42 and the county as a whole, right?
01:40:42 --> 01:40:48 You know, I think that's an incredible idea to set it up where,
01:40:48 --> 01:40:53 you know, you go to the doctor and you need some help,
01:40:54 --> 01:40:57 help dealing with diabetes or dealing with high blood pressure,
01:40:57 --> 01:41:01 heart disease, whatever, and instead of just giving you drugs,
01:41:02 --> 01:41:03 they can prescribe food.
01:41:04 --> 01:41:11 That's a classic example of innovation, of American leadership at work, right?
01:41:11 --> 01:41:14 And, you know, and then I wanted
01:41:14 --> 01:41:20 to give a realistic picture of what's happening in those counties that have
01:41:20 --> 01:41:26 a lot of federal workers and that she's been on the forefront of trying to find
01:41:26 --> 01:41:33 some ways to help and then try to mitigate the economic impacts of those layoffs or firings, right?
01:41:33 --> 01:41:39 So I hope that you got that out of that. And it's a shame that we couldn't talk
01:41:39 --> 01:41:45 longer, but I think you got the gist of what she and others like her are dealing with.
01:41:46 --> 01:41:49 And so I definitely wanted her on to talk about those things.
01:41:49 --> 01:41:54 And I was glad we was able to get in some discussion about the EV charges as
01:41:54 --> 01:41:56 well, because those are a lot of her ideas.
01:41:56 --> 01:42:03 And there's a whole other issue where they're trying to continue to build up.
01:42:03 --> 01:42:06 That, you know, she talks about the FBI's building situation.
01:42:07 --> 01:42:12 So the FBI was supposed to move into Prince George's County.
01:42:13 --> 01:42:19 And now, you know, and then Kash Patel got in there and said,
01:42:19 --> 01:42:23 well, we're going to tear down the Hoover building or make it a museum or whatever, right?
01:42:24 --> 01:42:28 And then now all of a sudden, we're not going to move the FBI,
01:42:29 --> 01:42:35 at least not move the building. Now they're talking about, they don't want to have.
01:42:36 --> 01:42:42 They don't want to have a central main office. They just want FBI agents scattered
01:42:42 --> 01:42:43 throughout the country.
01:42:43 --> 01:42:48 And I guess the only central person you need to talk to is Kash Patel.
01:42:48 --> 01:42:53 So I guess the FBI can have a room in the White House. I don't know. Right.
01:42:54 --> 01:42:59 But I'm going to get into that a little more. But I just wanted to thank Councilwoman Blegay.
01:43:00 --> 01:43:05 And I hope that in the future we're able to get her back on and kind of monitor
01:43:05 --> 01:43:11 everything. She'll be up for re-election in 2026, along with all the congressional races.
01:43:12 --> 01:43:18 And so I wish her well in that. And maybe she can come on before that. I don't know.
01:43:18 --> 01:43:23 But those are the type of elected officials I want to, if I can get them on,
01:43:24 --> 01:43:28 is to constantly remind people that there are folks out there that take the
01:43:28 --> 01:43:34 OFA office to serve and understand the assignment, right? it.
01:43:34 --> 01:43:39 You know, I felt that I was that kind of a person. There are some people that
01:43:39 --> 01:43:41 disagree with that, and that's fine.
01:43:42 --> 01:43:44 That's why I'm not still in that position.
01:43:45 --> 01:43:51 But I felt that during the time that I did serve, I understood the assignment,
01:43:51 --> 01:43:58 and I did the best I could to help the people in my district and in my state do better.
01:43:59 --> 01:44:01 And I know that,
01:44:02 --> 01:44:06 I had a positive impact on what was happening.
01:44:07 --> 01:44:11 So, you know, that's all you can do is your best, right?
01:44:12 --> 01:44:19 Unlike the folks that are in office now, I think there's a number of people
01:44:19 --> 01:44:22 who don't understand the assignment.
01:44:23 --> 01:44:27 You know, they're in it for the wrong reasons. They're in it for publicity.
01:44:28 --> 01:44:31 They're in it for ego and ambition.
01:44:32 --> 01:44:35 And then there's just something that's in it, you know, just to say that,
01:44:36 --> 01:44:40 yeah, I did that. And they have no clue about what they're doing. Right.
01:44:41 --> 01:44:50 And, you know, their conviction is based on whoever the polls say is winning or whoever's in charge.
01:44:52 --> 01:44:57 And you can't do that. I'll never forget one of the disheartening things that
01:44:57 --> 01:45:01 ever happened to me when I was in the legislature was we were in a budget fight.
01:45:02 --> 01:45:06 And there were some of us that were kind of concerned about the way the appropriations was going.
01:45:07 --> 01:45:11 And it wasn't exactly in line with what the speaker wanted.
01:45:11 --> 01:45:15 So I'm in the lounge and it was I was talking to a member had been there for a while.
01:45:17 --> 01:45:19 And, you know, we got to talking about it and he just said, well,
01:45:19 --> 01:45:22 I'm just going to do what the speaker says. Right.
01:45:23 --> 01:45:29 And I said, say that again. He said, I'm just going to do what the speaker says do, you know.
01:45:30 --> 01:45:35 And then I asked them, I said, did the people in your district elect the Speaker
01:45:35 --> 01:45:37 or did they elect you? Right?
01:45:38 --> 01:45:42 Because now if everything that the Speaker is pushing for jibes with what?
01:45:44 --> 01:45:51 You know, is good for your district, okay, I get that, but I don't know.
01:45:52 --> 01:45:57 You know, they were talking about some cuts in education, some cuts in the Department
01:45:57 --> 01:46:01 of Transportation and different places, and it was kind of like,
01:46:01 --> 01:46:04 it seems like those were things we're fighting for, right?
01:46:05 --> 01:46:12 And, you know, I mean, again, people elect their representatives.
01:46:12 --> 01:46:17 They don't elect the leadership of the body once we all get there. We do that.
01:46:18 --> 01:46:20 We decide who the leadership is going to be.
01:46:21 --> 01:46:26 But, you know, even if we voted for these particular people,
01:46:26 --> 01:46:31 that doesn't mean that they get a pass on everything that comes out of their
01:46:31 --> 01:46:34 mouth or every idea that hits their brain. Right.
01:46:35 --> 01:46:38 That's what we're there for. We're supposed to debate these issues.
01:46:38 --> 01:46:43 We're supposed to come up with a solution that is beneficial to everybody in the state.
01:46:44 --> 01:46:50 Meanwhile, keeping an eye on what's best for the constituents that put us in that position.
01:46:50 --> 01:46:55 Right. And for black folks, sometimes the interests of black folks are not in
01:46:55 --> 01:47:01 the interest of the state or vice versa, however you want to phrase it.
01:47:02 --> 01:47:05 So, you know, we have to look out for that. And then,
01:47:05 --> 01:47:08 you know, I had a district where I had a lot of Republicans,
01:47:08 --> 01:47:13 so I had to weigh out, you know, what's in the best interest of black folks,
01:47:13 --> 01:47:18 what's in the best interest of some of these rich white folks I represented, and just try to,
01:47:18 --> 01:47:22 you know, come up with a balance that's fair for everybody, right?
01:47:22 --> 01:47:27 Because, you know, in economics, you've got a head start, but you wanted to
01:47:27 --> 01:47:32 keep the playing field as even as possible, and that's the challenge, right?
01:47:32 --> 01:47:36 But the lazy thing is to just say, well, I'm going to do what I want to do.
01:47:37 --> 01:47:41 And I'm not going to care as long as I get the benefit out of it,
01:47:41 --> 01:47:46 as long as I can make money, as long as I can get my name in the newspaper or
01:47:46 --> 01:47:52 on social media or on TV, radio, whatever. Right.
01:47:52 --> 01:47:58 You know, as long as, you know, everybody bows down to me, I'm good.
01:47:58 --> 01:48:03 That's not how this works. You know, I'm sitting up here and,
01:48:03 --> 01:48:09 you know, a lot of news agencies didn't cover it, but I saw where now the president
01:48:09 --> 01:48:14 is already in the middle of building this grand ballroom, which, by the way.
01:48:15 --> 01:48:19 During the federal shutdown, the construction of that ballroom is still going.
01:48:20 --> 01:48:26 But now he wants to talk about building something similar to the Arc de Triomphe, right?
01:48:26 --> 01:48:31 Or the arc that's in, I guess that's Washington Square in New York.
01:48:31 --> 01:48:38 You know, he wants to build an arc, like right in front of the Arlington National
01:48:38 --> 01:48:40 Cemetery or whatever, or nearby,
01:48:41 --> 01:48:47 in time for the 250th birthday of the United States, right?
01:48:48 --> 01:48:54 And so in the middle of a government shutdown, you decide to reveal this plan,
01:48:54 --> 01:49:00 which to me sends a message that you really don't give a damn about any of us at all.
01:49:01 --> 01:49:07 It's all about you and all about what you want to do and, again,
01:49:07 --> 01:49:10 how much money you're going to make and all this stuff.
01:49:10 --> 01:49:16 I just, you know, and I saw this sister come on TikTok and she's talking about
01:49:16 --> 01:49:23 she's apologizing for voting for Trump because what she's seeing now is not
01:49:23 --> 01:49:26 what she voted for and all that, that buyer's remorse kind of thing.
01:49:27 --> 01:49:37 But we, you know, I get that, but it's not like this guy wasn't president before, right?
01:49:38 --> 01:49:44 You know, he had four years and the people voted him out.
01:49:45 --> 01:49:51 And, you know, it's just kind of suspect that all of a sudden people thought
01:49:51 --> 01:49:52 within those four years.
01:49:52 --> 01:49:55 Now, mind you, during those four years, he wasn't president.
01:49:55 --> 01:49:57 He got indicted and convicted.
01:49:58 --> 01:50:06 He was found guilty of fraud. He was found guilty of sexual harassment or assault, right?
01:50:07 --> 01:50:13 Well, the sexual assault was a civil penalty, but nonetheless, he's guilty, right?
01:50:13 --> 01:50:18 Same way that people saw OJ was guilty, even though in the criminal case,
01:50:18 --> 01:50:22 he was acquitted. In the civil case, he was not.
01:50:22 --> 01:50:26 He was hit with a wrongful death. settlement.
01:50:27 --> 01:50:33 So, you know, Trump was guilty of everything that he went to court for,
01:50:33 --> 01:50:37 and he would have been found guilty in Georgia, right?
01:50:37 --> 01:50:44 So, because people pled guilty that were part of the plan, right?
01:50:46 --> 01:50:48 So, you know.
01:50:49 --> 01:50:57 Why millions of Americans felt okay after seeing all that, and then him being
01:50:57 --> 01:51:04 in denial that he lost the election and doing everything to create chaos in the middle of all that.
01:51:05 --> 01:51:11 It just, you know, I just don't understand why people thought that it was okay
01:51:11 --> 01:51:14 for him to come back. But nonetheless, he's there.
01:51:14 --> 01:51:18 And now people are seeing that, yeah, nothing changed.
01:51:18 --> 01:51:24 It's actually gotten worse because now all the stuff that he couldn't do the
01:51:24 --> 01:51:30 first time, you know, he's going whole hog on it.
01:51:30 --> 01:51:34 He's redesigning the White House to look like, I don't know,
01:51:35 --> 01:51:38 I mean, just, you know, gold everywhere.
01:51:39 --> 01:51:45 And I mean, it's just, you know, and then, you know, trying to indict everybody
01:51:45 --> 01:51:47 that he doesn't like, right?
01:51:48 --> 01:51:56 I just don't get it. I don't know what people saw.
01:51:56 --> 01:52:07 I don't know, but I guess the parallel in my mind is when Moses went to the
01:52:07 --> 01:52:11 mountain to go get the Ten Commandments, by the time he came back,
01:52:12 --> 01:52:18 the people were worshiping a golden calf instead of the God that delivered them
01:52:18 --> 01:52:20 from the dead. Bondage, right?
01:52:20 --> 01:52:24 Even though they know that golden calf had nothing to do with it, they created that calf.
01:52:25 --> 01:52:32 You know, but in the end of 40 years that they were wandering around and they
01:52:32 --> 01:52:37 didn't have to worry about food, their clothes didn't wear out, you know.
01:52:38 --> 01:52:41 They wanted to worship a calf. I mean,
01:52:41 --> 01:52:48 it's just a reminder of the human existence and how we can easily get fooled,
01:52:48 --> 01:52:56 how we easily can fall into a trap of what's before us instead of what the big
01:52:56 --> 01:52:57 picture is, right? Right.
01:52:58 --> 01:53:06 And, you know, and now we got people, you know, instead of and there's a lot
01:53:06 --> 01:53:08 of people protesting this. Right.
01:53:08 --> 01:53:13 You know, the no kings protests, all that stuff. So we know that people are out there.
01:53:13 --> 01:53:20 But, you know, the people that are going after the former vice president on
01:53:20 --> 01:53:24 a book tour and that she was a war criminal, all this stuff.
01:53:24 --> 01:53:29 And I'm like, one, that's a stretch, you know.
01:53:29 --> 01:53:32 I mean, it's a guilt by association thing, and that's what you want to do.
01:53:34 --> 01:53:39 But then, two, you know, she's not in a position to do anything.
01:53:39 --> 01:53:46 If she had won the election, it's like then the ceasefire, you know,
01:53:46 --> 01:53:50 between Israel and Moss would have been on her watch, right? Right.
01:53:51 --> 01:53:57 Possible end of the Ukraine-Russia war would be on her watch.
01:53:57 --> 01:54:03 You know, the war in the Congo and other conflicts in Africa, right?
01:54:03 --> 01:54:08 She would be dealing with the Madagascar coup, right?
01:54:08 --> 01:54:12 I mean, all these things would have been under her purview at that point,
01:54:12 --> 01:54:15 and then she would have had people in place to deal with that.
01:54:15 --> 01:54:18 But she's on a book tour because she did not win.
01:54:19 --> 01:54:23 So protesting her It's not the best strategy.
01:54:23 --> 01:54:28 And considering that the people who are organizing the protests against her
01:54:28 --> 01:54:34 are not from her community, that doesn't help at all. Right?
01:54:35 --> 01:54:39 So, you know, again, you have the right to do that.
01:54:40 --> 01:54:45 But you saw her response and she had the right to respond that way. Right.
01:54:46 --> 01:54:49 I just think that focus.
01:54:51 --> 01:54:56 Don't go for the low hanging fruit. Focus on what needs to be done.
01:54:56 --> 01:55:00 Let's really get in and do the work. I know it's going to be hard.
01:55:00 --> 01:55:05 It's going to be hard to fix the damage that's being done.
01:55:05 --> 01:55:11 Right. Because we're just talking about we haven't even finished the first year of the second term.
01:55:13 --> 01:55:19 So by the time this four-year term is over, it's going to be a lot of damage that has to be undone.
01:55:20 --> 01:55:27 And maybe a Congress that says no to the president for the last two years might
01:55:27 --> 01:55:33 ameliorate some of those damages or slow them down.
01:55:33 --> 01:55:35 But it's going to be a lot of work.
01:55:36 --> 01:55:42 But again, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for new leadership to emerge
01:55:42 --> 01:55:50 and take this country in another direction, hopefully in a more positive one,
01:55:50 --> 01:55:55 and drive out the voices of discontent, right?
01:55:55 --> 01:56:04 And when I say discontent, I mean, not the people who are disagree with a particular
01:56:04 --> 01:56:06 issue that we can debate.
01:56:07 --> 01:56:14 In the spirit of moving forward. But this, well, maybe discontent,
01:56:14 --> 01:56:21 maybe malcontent, I don't know, where you just don't like change because it's change.
01:56:22 --> 01:56:28 You can't get over the fact that the country is not a majority white country
01:56:28 --> 01:56:32 anymore or that, you know,
01:56:32 --> 01:56:38 people that work for a living want to get paid a wage where they can live their life,
01:56:38 --> 01:56:45 and, you know, that means that you might not make as much profit personally
01:56:45 --> 01:56:51 as you used to because you've got to pay people what they deserve, right?
01:56:51 --> 01:56:56 I mean, nobody is asking people to bankrupt folks deliberately,
01:56:56 --> 01:57:03 but if you can afford eight houses, Because you're probably running a corporation
01:57:03 --> 01:57:08 that you can pay people more than a living wage. I'm just saying.
01:57:10 --> 01:57:16 So, you know, I mean, that's what we got to get past.
01:57:16 --> 01:57:19 You know, this, I'm angry for what?
01:57:20 --> 01:57:22 Well, it just seems like, no, no.
01:57:24 --> 01:57:31 Substantively, why are you angry? Right? Now, if there's any people that can
01:57:31 --> 01:57:34 say they're angry, Black folks can say they're angry all the time.
01:57:35 --> 01:57:42 But then you'll say, well, we're being professional victims when there's evidence
01:57:42 --> 01:57:47 to show that a lot of stuff that you did to Black folks has had a generational impact.
01:57:49 --> 01:57:54 Native Americans, indigenous people. We just celebrated indigenous people today, right?
01:57:54 --> 01:58:00 They got a reason to be angry because you basically came and took their land, right?
01:58:01 --> 01:58:08 Which reminds me, before I sign off, you know, in the United States,
01:58:08 --> 01:58:12 indigenous people have dual citizenship, right?
01:58:13 --> 01:58:19 They're citizens of the United States. They can vote in presidential and congressional elections.
01:58:19 --> 01:58:25 And they have citizenship on their tribal land.
01:58:26 --> 01:58:33 And even though, you know, I appreciate Brother Echo Hawk's opinion about my thoughts,
01:58:33 --> 01:58:38 I still think there should be a division, even if you want to keep a division
01:58:38 --> 01:58:39 in the Department of Interior,
01:58:39 --> 01:58:45 I still think there needs to be a division in the Department of State to focus
01:58:45 --> 01:58:56 in on the political relationship between Native American nations and the federal government. Right.
01:58:58 --> 01:59:02 But they have dual citizenship. So as I'm looking at the situation in Israel,
01:59:03 --> 01:59:08 you know, these hardliners are saying, well, we don't want we don't want a Palestinian
01:59:08 --> 01:59:10 state. We don't support a two state solution.
01:59:11 --> 01:59:16 All right. Well, give the people that are there, every person that's currently
01:59:16 --> 01:59:20 in Israel right this minute, give them citizenship in the state of Israel.
01:59:21 --> 01:59:26 Stop running Israel as a theocracy. Run it as a true democracy.
01:59:26 --> 01:59:31 That way, it doesn't matter if you're Palestinian or Israeli,
01:59:32 --> 01:59:37 you know, Jewish, you're a citizen of the state of Israel.
01:59:38 --> 01:59:44 And, you know, even if the Palestinians say, well, we want a rebuilt Gaza or
01:59:44 --> 01:59:46 we want total control of the West Bank.
01:59:46 --> 01:59:53 Like, okay, but they still should have citizenship. They still should be able
01:59:53 --> 01:59:55 to travel throughout the country freely.
01:59:56 --> 02:00:02 They shouldn't have an area that's cordoned off from trade or,
02:00:02 --> 02:00:07 you know, and if you do provide a section for them to live,
02:00:07 --> 02:00:13 that you don't turn around and violate that agreement and build condos there all the time.
02:00:13 --> 02:00:15 Kibbutz, you know.
02:00:16 --> 02:00:19 Just, just give them citizenship.
02:00:21 --> 02:00:25 And give them the ability, so if you give them citizenship, then they can run
02:00:25 --> 02:00:29 for office, right? They can serve in the Knesset.
02:00:30 --> 02:00:36 Just saying, you know, at some point in time, this extremist,
02:00:36 --> 02:00:39 racist mindset has to end.
02:00:40 --> 02:00:47 We are all here on this planet to coexist. We are not here to isolate ourselves from the world.
02:00:48 --> 02:00:56 It's like, why do we have these computers in our hand if we can't interact with the rest of the plan.
02:00:57 --> 02:01:00 Everything that we get, that's why this tariff thing is a big deal,
02:01:00 --> 02:01:03 because the economy is global.
02:01:03 --> 02:01:06 It's not just American-made stuff anymore.
02:01:07 --> 02:01:13 Now, I would like to see more stuff made in America, so we have more products
02:01:13 --> 02:01:19 that compete around the world, but it's a global economy now.
02:01:19 --> 02:01:27 So that means we have to interact with people that are not Americans, right?
02:01:28 --> 02:01:33 And I know that's hard for some people to grasp, but that's the reality that we're in.
02:01:33 --> 02:01:37 And the sooner that you come to grips with that reality, the more peaceful our
02:01:37 --> 02:01:39 existence will be in this country.
02:01:39 --> 02:01:45 And I promise if we have a peaceful existence, it'll be infectious.
02:01:46 --> 02:01:52 I had a guest on one time that said that racism was an infectious disease, right?
02:01:53 --> 02:02:00 Infectious mental disease. And I agree with that. And I say the counter to that is peace.
02:02:00 --> 02:02:06 I think peace is more infectious and it's definitely healthier.
02:02:06 --> 02:02:09 And we need to start looking that way.
02:02:10 --> 02:02:13 You know, individually, you're going to have your struggles, right?
02:02:14 --> 02:02:17 But from a political perspective, from a government perspective,
02:02:18 --> 02:02:23 our job is to alleviate as many of those struggles as possible,
02:02:23 --> 02:02:27 to try to keep people from having to go through as many hardships.
02:02:27 --> 02:02:30 Individual choices are what they are.
02:02:31 --> 02:02:37 But if we really want to be Christ-like or we really want to adhere to the principles
02:02:37 --> 02:02:42 of God, as many, quote unquote, politicians say they do,
02:02:43 --> 02:02:49 then we have to have that kind of a mindset that we're here to provide you with opportunities.
02:02:50 --> 02:02:54 And people say, well, you know, people got opportunities now. Not enough.
02:02:54 --> 02:03:01 And just because we're on the same track, if you've got a 10-yard head start, that's not equal.
02:03:02 --> 02:03:07 Yeah, we're both on the track, but it's not equal, right?
02:03:08 --> 02:03:12 Or should I say it's not equitable, right? Because you can make the argument
02:03:12 --> 02:03:14 we're equally on the track.
02:03:15 --> 02:03:19 But if you've got a 10-yard head start over me, then it's not equitable.
02:03:20 --> 02:03:26 So we just got to get into a mindset of doing right with each other.
02:03:27 --> 02:03:31 And we got to elect people that understand that concept.
02:03:31 --> 02:03:36 You know, we understand that we're not electing saints. We're not canonizing
02:03:36 --> 02:03:39 people. We're just electing people to do a job.
02:03:40 --> 02:03:46 And, you know, when people fall short, they will either fall into the judicial
02:03:46 --> 02:03:51 system or they'll fall into a electoral system and be unelected.
02:03:51 --> 02:03:57 But we have that power to make that so. We can fix that mistake.
02:03:59 --> 02:04:04 So let's focus in on doing better. Let's focus in on treating each other better.
02:04:04 --> 02:04:11 And let's support those actors of democracy that are out there doing the right thing.
02:04:12 --> 02:04:17 Even if you don't agree with everything that they're doing from a political,
02:04:17 --> 02:04:18 ideological standpoint,
02:04:19 --> 02:04:25 if their heart's in the right place, we can have some peace and come up with
02:04:25 --> 02:04:27 a solution that benefits everyone. it.
02:04:28 --> 02:04:33 All right. That's all I got time for. Thank y'all for listening. Until next time.