Understanding the Black Conservative Vote with Janiyah Thomas

0:00Coleman Hughes:Welcome to a bonus episode of Conversations with Coleman. We release full episodes every Monday, but today we're releasing a mini episode because I had Janiyah Thomas on for a shorter than usual discussion. Janiyah was the black media director for Trump's 2024 campaign, and she's previously worked for the Republican National Committee as well as the campaign for Senator Tim Scott. In this episode, we touched everything from Charlie Kirk's assassination and his allegedly racist comments about Black women's brains that weren't exactly what they seemed, to Trump's deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C.

0:34Coleman Hughes:If you like little bonus episodes like this one, let us know and maybe we'll do more. And of course, we will be back with a full-length episode on Monday. So without further ado, Janiyah Thomas.

0:53Coleman Hughes:I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives.

1:29Coleman Hughes:And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retzig-Gor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare, and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. Okay, Janiyah, thanks so much for coming on my show. Yeah, thank you for having me. So before we discuss some of the news of the past few weeks, I want to get a sense of who you are. Where did you grow up and what is your story?

2:05Coleman Hughes:How did you come to be doing the work that you're doing now? So I was born in Virginia. I lived there until I was about eight years old and I grew up in South Carolina, right outside of Charlotte, Fort Mill, South Carolina. So it's, you know, one of the suburbs. But I mean, as you know, most people know, South Carolina is a very red state. So when I was in college, I interned at a law firm and they worked with the state party. And like that's how I became, you know, more affiliated with the political world. But for me, it was always more so about the communications journalism aspect of it that made it more interesting to me.

2:36So after school, I went to work for the Republican National Committee and I was our black media coordinator. Then I started doing on-the-record stuff for the party. And then, like, where do we go after that? Tim Scott did his campaign when I was there, when he announced until the end of it. And then I worked for a convention for a while as media relations director for the convention. And then went to the campaign and did all of those fun things.

3:03Coleman Hughes:So what is the source of your politics? Were you always interested in politics as a kid? or were there specific events or specific books you read that led you towards the Republican Party as opposed to Democrats or Independents or Libertarians? So when I was in school, I was taking a black political thought class. And this was around the time of COVID, BLM, all of the craziness of the news cycle at that time. And I was just like, we have all these different ideologies, but where are we moving with all of these? You know, it's like, what's the point of learning about all this if there's no like black people are better, we're better off in the 50s than they are now.

3:43So it's like, what was the point of all these different ideologies? And that's kind of how I got to the conservative movement, because I feel like as I grew up, you know, all of my family's principles have been very much very conservative. And then also like just the neighborhood I grew up in, you know, schools I went to, like we're all very conservative. And that's kind of how I lean more towards the Republican Party.

4:03Coleman Hughes:So you were director of black media for Trump during the campaign. What was your strategy? What were your goals and objectives in that role? And how did you go about achieving them? I think a lot of times in our party, we haven't always had people in positions that are culturally in tune. So I think that sometimes Republicans miss the mark on how to communicate to specific communities because they don't always have people that are in tune with the culture. And you can say the same thing about the left. But I would say that my overall goal was, you know, there's certain things that you can say in how you communicate certain topics and issues to black people that you wouldn't necessarily say the same way to somebody else.

4:46Like black people have, like it's been known that black people have a distrust in the media. So I've always thought like our main goal was, you know, reaching black male voters. Every black man I know, all they watch is podcasts. Nobody watches CNN. No one's watching ABC. They're all very in tune in the podcast world. A lot of them go to these podcasts for relationship advice, financial advice, political advice, you name it. So I think getting more in the weeds of those type of platforms is very useful in the campaign.

5:15Coleman Hughes:And do you think it worked? How do you account for the fact that Trump has been so successful compared to past Republicans, especially with young black men? Do you think that's part of that strategy? I think it's just the president's nature. I think he's very authentic and real and a straight shooter. And I think people like that. Most people are tired of the old guard of establishment, political candidates that, they talk like a politician. They act like a politician. The president is everything. He still is a politician, but at the same time, he can communicate to anybody. He can communicate to a five-year-old.

5:49He can communicate to a 12-year-old. I think his message resonates with people across the board.

5:54Coleman Hughes:What has your experience been like? I'll tell you what my experience has been like. So I'm not a Republican or a conservative, but a lot of my politics, especially on issues related to crime and the police and law and order, are basically conservative in the sense that I think more police is better. I think that crime, in a way, should be viewed as what people on the left would call a social justice issue because the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s has been homicide for a long time. And that's true of no other race. And a lot of what I spent my time doing around 2019 and 2020 was pushing back against the progressive movement, which said that police were basically an arm of white supremacy and colonialism.

6:45Coleman Hughes:and the best thing you could do for black neighborhoods is to get rid of the police, defund the police, or otherwise make the policeman's job harder. To me, this seemed exactly the opposite of everything that high crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black in the country, need. And combined with that, there was a persistent myth born kind of in 2012 and 2013 with the BLM movement, which was that it's open season on the cops killing black people. And if you actually dig into that issue, it happens to black people and white people every year in very small numbers, akin to getting struck by lightning in terms of how likely it actually is for an unarmed person to be shot and killed by police.

7:36Coleman Hughes:And the racial proportions pretty strictly match the patterns of crime in the country to begin with. So for every George Floyd, there was a Tony Timpa, who was a white guy that was in almost the identical situation, and on and on. And so to me, it seemed like, though on certain other issues I certainly lean liberal, it seemed to me the left had a huge blind spot on the issue of crime and race and exactly what was happening. And the result of all the 2020 policies that were ostensibly meant to help black people and help black neighborhoods hurt all of those neighborhoods. Not only the riots where you had, literally you have people destroying even black owned businesses in the name of anti-racism.

8:32Coleman Hughes:Or you just have people destroying businesses in black neighborhoods, which means that those neighborhoods are like people aren't going to want to live in those neighborhoods right and so anyway this is all to say like this was a lot of part of my frustration as a writer was trying to persuade people on the left that their own stated values should lead them to be pro-law and order so I'm curious if anything I just said resonated with with you. Well the beginning of what you said when you brought up the term like white supremacy I really can't stand that term. It drives me crazy because the term supreme has a positive connotation.

9:11But the term white supremacy obviously has a negative connotation. But it's almost like this backwards programming that has made Black people believe that someone else is better than you. And I don't like the way that people use that term against Black people. But to go back to also what you were saying about the crime situation, And, you know, a lot of these things, I think, boil down to, like, family and educational values and, you know, how we live in our communities. And then a lot of the things that we see in the news are coming from people that aren't in those communities, the people that don't see that stuff every day.

9:45You know, so sometimes when I talk to reporters, especially D.C. people, like the things that they care about and they talk about aren't reality to the rest of the country. Like if you go to, you know, people in Southside Chicago, if you go to people in Bankhead in Atlanta, like what their reality is and what we see is not the same thing. And so I think that, you know, we all need to like take a step back and like look at what's real in these neighborhoods and what's real in these, you know, communities. Because a lot of black people want more police in their communities. They want to feel safer in their neighborhoods, which boils back down to what the president's been trying to do, bringing in the National Guard to protect people in these communities.

10:21Coleman Hughes:Yeah, we'll get to that. A couple other touch points for me. I remember, so in 2014, Michael Brown is killed outside of St. Louis and Ferguson. And there's riots all over Ferguson. And I visited that neighborhood in, I think, 2019. So this is five years after the riot, right? And there were still literally empty mom and pop shops, including, I think, a black-owned barbershop that was still vacant to that day, five years later, as a result of those riots from 2015. And to me, it's like the perfect description of the limousine liberal luxury belief phenomenon, where you would have probably, if you go back to 2014, you probably have some New York Times op-ed writer basically apologizing for the riot, basically justifying it.

11:20Coleman Hughes:But that same writer is never going to go back there years later and look at how the ripple effect of that riot has actually affected people that live in that community and aren't going to leave that community, right? So there's like this sense in which the emotions of liberal elites in particular are really served and massaged and tickled in some way by the issue of black poverty and the police, but those politics don't translate into anything that actually helps those communities. So let's talk about the National Guard deployment in D.C. So obviously D.C. has been one of the trickiest cities in America because crime has long been a problem.

12:10Coleman Hughes:I mean, we often talk about Chicago or St. Louis when we think about crime. And in the 60s, people used to talk about the Bronx. But D.C. has been almost as bad as those places pretty consistently for a very long time. It's had an incarceration rate that is among the highest in the nation. I remember at some point it was like the balance between Black men and Black women that lived in the city was extremely lopsided. Like maybe one of the most in the country because so many Black men were in prison. And so talk to me a little bit about crime in D.C. as a problem. What makes it a unique problem and how do you view it?

12:53I think that what's very unique about the D.C. situation is a lot of it is juvenile offenders and not adult offenders. And, you know, I feel like the city doesn't do a good job of, you know, giving these kids more things to do in the neighborhoods. I live in Southeast, but Navy Yard. And Navy Yard's where the national stadium is. And any given weekend at 7 o 'clock, there's just kids running rampant with no parents. Where are the parents at? And I think what's similar to D.C. What D.C. has is similar to other cities is I think a lot of this is a parenting problem and family issue. I mean, we can bring in the National Guard, and that's a temporary solution to a long-term problem.

13:36I think there's a lot more that needs to be done with, you know, raising kids the right way and, you know, prioritizing their education. That, you know, the National Guard is, what it's doing is good and people want that in their communities. But long term, like, I don't think that's a viable solution.

13:53Coleman Hughes:So that's kind of depressing, though, because if it's a parenting issue, how does the government fix parenting? The federal government, the state government, the city government can't really force people's parents to become more functional. I think what the solution could start with is, you know, giving real consequences. I've seen, you know, recently they're trying to like change the age range where you can like convict a child that's like, I think they changed it from 16 to 14. I think giving people real consequences will make parents, you know, wake up more and realize they need to be more involved in their kids' lives.

14:28But I think that's the way that you balance the government problem with the parenting issue.

14:33Coleman Hughes:Yeah. So why is it such a young problem? Because I remember when I was at Columbia, there was an incident where I lived in Harlem at the time on the other side of Morningside Park. I don't know if you know that area at all. But Columbia's campus is to the west. And then there's a park that slopes almost steeply all the way down. And then Harlem is on the other side. And so I walked that park every day. And there's only like one or two ways to get across the park. There's like one staircase. And one day, an undergrad girl, she was walking down the park and just randomly got stabbed to death by somebody.

15:17Coleman Hughes:And that was, you know, that was a place I walked by twice a day. Like those exact steps where she died. And I remember before they had caught the person who did it, I talked to one of the cops in the park, and it's all anyone was talking about. I asked him, do you have any idea who it might have been or what it might have been? And he said to me, you know, I don't know yet, but it was probably like some 13-year-old kid. That was his guess based on the pattern of crime in the area as he knew it. Come to find out a couple days later, it was a 13-year-old kid that stabbed her to death. Maybe it was a robbery and then he panicked when she fought back.

15:58Coleman Hughes:Or maybe it was some weird gang initiation, egging on of a young person situation. Or maybe the kid was just a psychopath. I don't actually know. But what are we supposed to think of situations where we have 13 and 14-year-old kids committing crimes? Because on the one hand, you want to treat them like not a fully formed person. You want to give them a second chance because they're young. On the other hand, it seems like you think one of the solutions is to enforce consequences as if they're an adult. Yeah. I mean, I think when we're talking about certain situations, it's a situational matter.

16:37Like murder, I think that at 14, you know what you're doing. I don't think that boils down to they're not fully functional yet. I think we know what's right and what's wrong. And I think that's very clear to most people, unless they have a mental disorder, and then that's a different situation. But I don't think we all know the answer to that question at the moment. But I do think that, you know, when it comes to certain situations, like having a real consequence will make people more aware. But, you know, I could tell stories about my family members, for example. and from some of the situations I've seen a lot of this boils down to having you know family structure and especially having a father at home that refresh you've been putting off until the

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17:54Coleman Hughes:Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard has obviously rankled a lot of people, rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Do you think there's any merit to the argument that A, Trump's only doing it for reasons of political optics because he thinks it's good politics, right? It pisses off all the right people. It makes him look strong to his base. And it creates the kind of fight that he thinks he can win as opposed to a genuine concern for crime as such. That's a tough question. I think the president does have a genuine concern for crime. I do genuinely believe that. I think that if that weren't the case, you know, Mayor Bowser, she extended, you know, the National Guard being in D.C.

18:44because we're seeing that it's helping the current situation. But I don't think it has anything to do with politics. I think he's just a strong leader and, you know, he's using his power as the president to protect communities and make these neighborhoods safer. You know, one of the things he ran on during the campaign was make America safe again.

19:02Coleman Hughes:Yeah, so I mean the counter argument to that would be all of a sudden on January 6th he's on the side of the people beating up cops, right? And so if you look at Trump in his totality, it seems like he's for law and order when his base likes it. And when his base likes chaos, like on January 6th, suddenly he's against law and order and he's pardoning people that assaulted cops, you know? The president, I think, is leading the way he knows how, and that's being a strong leader. And, you know, some people take that the wrong way, whether that's, you know, how people feel about the January 6th situation or how people feel about, you know, him bringing in the National Guard.

19:46I think that what matters at this moment is what he's doing in these communities and what he's doing as the president this time by bringing in, you know, law enforcement to help protect communities.

19:59Coleman Hughes:Do you think there's any argument against it, or do you think it's just a pure positive good? I mean, there's an argument against everything. Let's talk a little bit about Charlie Kirk. Did you know him at all? I was thinking we met backstage behind a rally or something like that, but not friends or anything like that. Right. Yeah. What did you think of the reaction to his assassination? How people reacted? online and in the media? Obviously, you know, the people on the left, you know, turning this into a whole political thing when it shouldn't be about that. You know, somebody lost their life.

20:46Someone no longer has a father. Someone no longer has a husband. I think turning that into a political statement is very foul. It's distasteful. And it just shows that, you know, This is the party of, they try to make us seem like we're the lunatics here. But I think that a lot of us, we still value Christian morals and things. And I think that a lot of the people on the left don't. If they do value that, we don't see it. Because if you did feel that way, then you wouldn't respond to someone losing their life the way some of them did.

21:17Coleman Hughes:Right. Right. So I felt, I mean, it was really disturbing to see people on blue sky and left-wing spaces immediately celebrate his death. To me, it doesn't really matter whether you agree with what Charlie Kirk said. I agree with many of the things he would talk about on college campuses, and I disagree with other things. I think he was a complicated person because sometimes he would be super warm and super nice and very mature with his disagreeing with people. And other times he would be kind of bitter and kind of really kind of like acerbic and like poisonous in his rhetoric. But that's true of a lot of people in the political commentary space.

22:14Coleman Hughes:It's like you catch them in one mood and they're like a total shark and you catch them in another mood and they're very gentle. And he had all of those multitudes within him. So I've seen people cherry pick bits of his legacy to depict him in the best light and in the worst light. But to me, none of that matters because you can't assassinate people for disagreeing with your views. and you can't justify that when people do it. On the other hand, I also think, I don't think people on the political right can really be on the high horse about the issue because President Trump is famous for rhetoric that justifies violence, even if it's not assassination.

23:09Coleman Hughes:He's at a rally and he says stuff like, well, you know what we do with a guy like that back in the day? We'd rough him up, stuff like this. He's a tough talker. And in a way, I can't necessarily see how people on the right feel totally to be on a high horse when Trump talks the way he does and is the way that he is. You don't think so? And, you know, I'm going to be honest. I think a lot of people on our side, we don't always get it right when it comes to stuff like this. I think that a lot of the times some people have, and it's not just the right, the left too. Like there's hypocrisy on both sides.

23:55Like, you know, you can say what you want to say until you don't like what they're saying. You know, I think a lot of people on our side, especially with this whole cancel culture narrative that, you know, people are trying to go along with. Like, I think we should be better than that. I think that we can't get mad at people, you know, the way they perceive some of the things that people on our side say. And then when it comes to the opposing side saying things we don't like, then now we're, you know, trying to cancel them at the same time. I think we should be better than that.