Trump Slammed After Disaster Ruling, Rev. Al Sharpton Sounds The Alarm

0:04Joining us today on IHIP News is the iconic Rev. Al Sharpton. You are in for a treat. He serves as the founder and president of the National Action Network, anchors Politics Nation on MSNOW, hosts the nationally syndicated radio shows Keeping It Real and The Hour of Power, holds weekly National Action Network Saturday rallies and speaks out on behalf of those who are in the United States. who have been silenced and marginalized. It sounds like you're really busy, Reverend. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Yeah. All right. So you're one of the preeminent civil rights leaders of our time. And give me some perspective here.

0:43Give my listener and viewer some perspective here. How far does the SCOTUS decision set us back with the Voting Rights Act? I think it sets us back in a very impactful way in the sense that now that they've said that you can no longer protect people's rights that says that they've been discriminated against in terms of voting participation by race or for that matter they said that they are going to allow them to redraw the lines where they the district lines are voting so your congressman or congresswoman may no longer reflect the community you're in. I think the whole purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to try and make sure that everyone had fair access to the ballot.

1:36What the Supreme Court has done is overturned that. So if you're in a state that you have, for example, they just did the ruling, the vote yesterday in South Carolina, where you have a state over 30 % black, they wanted to take out the only one black majority district, Jim Clyburn. So that means that you would then chop up the black community and other little districts, and there'd be no collective way for them to say, this is a guy that represents our interests because we still deal with inequities in this country. Yeah, I've seen some of these redrawings, and they're pretty crazy. I mean, you've got some where they've drawn a really blocked out a lot of the black vote, taking an urban area and getting adopting all this rural area, absorbing it into that district.

2:31How many seats do you anticipate black politicians will lose because of this gutting? There's been one study that says we can lose 16 to 19 seats. And I think that it's the challenge of our time because the fundamental advantages that we got out of the 1960s civil rights movement was the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. So here you have a year and a half into Trump's second term. He's going after DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is the Civil Rights Act, making sure that people are diverse, not only in government, but in the private sector. And that includes women, gays and everyone.

3:15Yeah. And then the Voting Rights Act. So it's almost like he's coming with a mandate that I'm going to reverse the civil rights and human rights wins of the 60s. And there are those of us that have to resist that across racial and gender lines. Speak a little bit about how Donald Trump arrived in 2016, but there have been forces organizing and fundraising to dismantle the Voting Rights Act long before he descended on that escalator. I'm talking about the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society that groom these Supreme Court justices to get them in this position to execute this form of, you know, exclusionary and, in my opinion, downright racist, regressive laws.

4:06Can you speak to that a little bit? I think that, you know, I grew up in the civil rights movement. And I became youth director of the Economic Operation Breadbasket, Dr. King's organization. A year that he died, Jesse Jackson appointed me. I was a 12-year-old guy that went to rallies. Then I was already a boy preaching. And then at 13, he appointed me that in New York. So I know a lot about the history because I was under the guys that did it. And I think they started then trying to dismantle. And it grew into a movement from the moral majority, who also wanted to change some of the voting stuff, some of the Civil Rights Act, all the way to when you saw the Tea Party, then the birtherism movement.

4:57It's been a consistent line. And it's interesting to me that people act like those of us that's been in the civil rights a long time. Oh, they're talking about the 60s. So are they. They're going back to their roots. So why would not it be the same on the other side? And I think what they lacked was a charismatic figure that could kind of bring it all under one tent. And Donald Trump was the personality that could do that. Because Donald Trump was always more entertainer and personality than he was politician. But he was able to symbolize for them at that time. The other thing I think that people shouldn't underestimate is that Donald Trump was the immediate successor to Barack Obama.

5:48So it was almost like backlash. And I think that the election and re-election of Obama helped to really incite a lot of those elements that had racial problems, as well as Obama ended up supporting same -sex marriage. Obama ended up supporting a lot of the things in the cultural wars that they were opposed to. So they overreacted by putting in a guy who's absolutely, in my opinion, demagogic, racist, and fascist. Totally. I grew up in Oklahoma City and just recently moved to New York City. And I remember when Obama was president, he came to Oklahoma City to—because he was president. You know, he was coming there for some oil pipeline.

6:36I can't remember what it was, but some national business he had in the state. He was greeted by the citizens of Oklahoma City with Confederate flags. And I was just, I mean, it sickened me. It sickened me to my core. So my question is, after the Civil War, you have the South that has been romanticizing and playing patty cake with these Confederate soldiers and generals, and they have statues of them. If we look to other mass egregious genocides or human rights violations, like what happened to the black population in America, if you look at Germany, they would never have statues of any Nazi soldiers.

7:18You have the benefactor for Clarence Thomas, a man named Harlan Crow, who collects as a hobby Nazi China. Have we not been crystal clear enough about we will not tolerate this type of racism? Because it's in recent, like in the last 10 years, that they really started pulling down these statues, which I think might have exacerbated this backlash that you're talking about as well. Can you speak about that as reckoning that? I think you raise a good question. I think that it became acceptable to too many people. And those of us that were offended were too, I would say, not loud enough that they existed in the first place.

8:04so that, I'm talking about the Confederate statues, so that when they were taken down, people reacted because they really never had to be confronted with how can you honor these people in the first place? Right. Because not only were these people bigots, they divided the country. They were against the union of the country. The Confederates were not only racist, they were trying to overthrow the U.S. government. So how does any government celebrate the people that tried to overthrow them? I mean, it's irrational on several levels, but that's what happened. And when they started taking down the statues of Robert E.

8:45Lee and others, Confederates, people act like you're attacking our culture. No, we are correcting our history. And as you rightly pointed out, no nation in the world, Germany is the example you use, would be celebrating people that not only were bigots, but tried to destroy the country. The Confederates tried to overthrow the government. Yeah. And if you can let digest that, then you can fast forward, sit around and say, let's have a slush fund to take care of the guys that did January 6th that literally beat up policemen. They're supposed to be pro-police. They beat up law enforcement, desecrated the capital, and it's the same kind of irrational kind of rationale that they've tried to sell, because it's on the emotion of thereafter us, not understanding that you are us in another sense.

9:46I mean, who is paying higher gas prices because I rent? All of us. Yeah. I mean, all of the things that they think is us against them, they, in terms of that Trump voting base, they suffer from that. Yeah. So when they said, I remember when we were dealing with the Affordable Care Act and trying to, you know, rally around in certain states, our tour, this rally around to make sure people put pressure on their senators and congressmen to vote for it. And I said to a lady, a lady stopped me in the airport and said, Red Mal, I don't agree with you on that Obamacare thing. I know what you're in town for.

10:27I said, so you're against the Affordable Care? She said, oh, no, I'm for the Affordable Care. I'm just against Obamacare. I said, it's the same thing. That is what it is. Because they get them up on this us against them thing that they don't understand what they're really talking about. So you spoke about how we, in the South, they kind of celebrated and idolized the people who tried to overthrow the country. And it's almost as if that incubated, you know, decades, decades, decades later, what happened with Donald Trump. And I think what also has incubated the violence we're seeing in the streets between the ICE agents and the killing of protesters, I think that us ignoring over policing in black neighborhoods incubated for that moment.

11:19Because so many people are like, oh, my God, they shot, you know, Renee Good and Alex Preddy. Horrible, horrible to see. But people in the black community would say, this isn't new. Right. This has been happening, and we've been trying to tell you. So what happens when we don't link everybody's rights together? You just spoke about gas prices hit a triple trumper, and they're going to hit Al Sharpton. Nobody is immune from gas prices. What happens when we say, okay, here's all the universal human rights, when we start grading them and deprioritizing them? I think that when we don't do that, we give them too much room in the middle to go through and continue to do what they're doing.

12:03If we explain to everybody exactly the way you laid it out, that this is not us against each other, but they're playing all of us against each other so that they can benefit at the top of the economic ladder and with political power. So when I see a Renee Good killed in Minneapolis, I thought about how it was just six years ago I was in Minneapolis marching and doing a funeral for George Floyd. And if you allow a law officer, which he was not allowed because of the protest, he did go to jail, but to put his knee on someone's neck, then you allow an ICE agent to come in and just shoot a woman through the window of her car in the middle of her saying to him, I forgive you, you're all right.

12:55I mean, once you go down that road, nobody can stop it. Because once you permit that there's going to be no kind of boundaries on law enforcement, it can start with blacks. Then it'll go to immigrants. Then it'll go to whites. Then it'll go on from there. And I think that that is something that we must work hard to do. Martin Luther King III and I have a march, August 28th in Washington around some of these issues. And what we're saying is we want everybody to march with us. It's not a black march because that's what his father did. His father died, was killed trying to get everybody together, Poor People's Campaign, because poverty is not a just black thing.

13:43Jesse Jackson, who mentored me, Rainbow Coalition. We need to return to that because what Trump in this era and this ilk is doing is hurting all of us. So even though we may have different lanes, we're all on the same highway of needing to have freedom protected for everybody. Yeah. And I think that the ignoring of anti-Black racism has incubated, like you said, a rise in homophobia, a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, transphobia, anti -Semitism and Islamophobia. But it seems to me like the group out of all of the people who get picked on by the MAGA Republicans that are really suffering materially right now are Black Americans.

14:31When you look at unemployment, it's Black women who have suffered the most. When you're talking about 16 to 19 seats. So you hear a lot of people on cable news and on podcast spaces talk about the rise of this, the rise of that. the rise of anti-Black racism is a 911 house is on fire, in my opinion. No doubt about it. And those of us that raise that issue, we become controversial. And you need to sit back sometime and say, well, wait a minute, what is controversial about saying that people should not be treated differently because of the color of their skin? The fact is that once you get away with that, then you can go on to gender, then you can go on to anti-Semitism, on and on and on.

15:17Because once you allow the choosing who is equal and who is worthy, then you've already started to give legitimacy to people making choices. We're all human. And we all should have the same human value. The reason why blacks have been more impacted is because the country started enslaving blacks, identified easily because of our color, and they made it law that blacks were three-fifths of a man. No one else had a legal situation against them. But once they did it normal, just like blacks had problems with women, couldn't vote. And then it goes on and on. So I think that once we deal with the commonality of being victims of bias, then that's the majority of the country.

16:16I want to show you an image. And this is something that I would think I would see in a textbook from the 1950s, 1960s. This was the last couple of weeks. Pop this up. And, of course, this is Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson blocked from entering the chamber. This picture was taken while a Republican-controlled legislature passed a new map to eliminate the state's only black majority congressional district. Democratic lawmakers were blocked from entering the chamber. When you see this, having worked with all of the iconic champions for civil rights, and you see this here, how does that make you feel?

16:58It makes me feel like the photos I saw as a kid of them blocking Fannie Lou Hamer or blocking Dr. King. And then when I got in my teenage years, I would hear stories from Reverend Jackson and others telling me about what they couldn't go to school at a certain place. You know, my parents were from the South. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. So I didn't have that experience, but I was told that experience. And it was unimaginable to me, certain exclusion. It is now happening in real time. To block an elected official like Justin from going in a hearing that he was elected to do, that is, at one level, bigotry.

17:46But at another level, you don't even believe in the tenets of the democratic process that you claim to believe in. Because you're not letting an elected representative go in a hearing that he's supposed to be party to. So all rationale is thrown out the window. And the real patriots are the ones that stand up for what the country fought for and got to in some places, not the ones that are saying we're going back into the pre-1940 days. It's so upsetting to me. And what do you say, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently spoke out about a ruling, let's pop up her. She says, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says her colleagues handling on the Louisiana voting rights case may have been compromised, may have compromised the court's impartiality in political matters.

18:41I think she has just a horrific job with the co-workers that she has. And just as an aside, I want to point out that the emotional hysterical person in his hearings recently in front of the Senate was, of course, Brett Kavanaugh. This woman handled herself incredibly. And she has to work with these people who are completely compromised, bought up by corporate interests, her co-workers on the bench. And you have three justices here who are trying to hold the line. What do you think about what's happening state by state, how targeted this is, how much this is rising up right now. What do you think can halt this?

19:26I think the only thing that will halt it is what halted it in the beginning, and that's mass movements united. So when you had the Dr. King-led movement and SNCC and others, because it wasn't just Dr. King, but he's the one that had notoriety, they had partners in the Jewish community, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in labor, Walter Ruther. I think it's going to take that kind of movement. That's why when Randy Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers asked me, would we join in my organization, National Action Network, would No Kings March? Yeah, and I marched with Robert De Niro right here in New York with thousands.

20:09It's important we come out and show we are together and that we understand that all of us are under threat. And it's going to take that kind of movement. And we've got to also address some of those in our own silos that don't understand that. So I'll have people in Black churches say to me, how can you stand up for gay rights and same-sex marriage? I said, because they have the right to do that. And once you start limiting people's rights, then they can limit your rights. Nobody's forcing you to believe in whatever lifestyle, but how do you have the right to decide somebody else's lifestyle? And I think that when we all that are visible in our silos stand up and defend the fact that we've got to work with everybody, then I think that we will have a movement they can't stop.

21:02Because Trump and others, they, Major and Master, divide and conquer. And if we can break that, I think that we can turn this clock back. I hope so. Final question, Reverend. I'm very worried about, you spoke about the Tea Party earlier, and I think the Tea Party incubated MAGA. Right. Trump's not a spring chicken. He doesn't look very healthy. Right. Appears, in my opinion, I'm not a medical professional, but appears to have out-of-control runaway dementia. That's just my opinion. So what is he incubating? incubating. And you go to these corners of the internet that I used to think were fringe.

21:42I used to think like people that wanted to support Donald Trump in the primaries in 2015 and 2016, I thought that was fringe. Now the Fringers have the whole federal government. And then you go to like the Nick Fuentes, who is an unapologetic, bigot, neo-Nazi, misogynist, homophobe, all this stuff to his core. You have this America first movement that is popping up on the right via Marjorie Taylor Greene, via Tucker Carlson. And I'm very skeptical of these people, these movements, because as a woman who grew up in flyover America, you have a demagogue like Tucker or Marjorie or Nick Fuentes or somebody that says, you know, we're sending all these bombs here and, and that's not America first, we're America first.

22:29And somebody consumes that in a 30 second little hit. And then you look at the record of these people. They don't give a shit about black Americans. No. They don't give a shit about gay Americans. No. These people do not are not in favor of universal human rights. And so are you worried about once this man dies, what he has incubated? What is out there simmering right now beyond MAGA? I'm very concerned about it because I think that and I'm happy you raised it. I think we're ignoring that he's incubated this. And we are not on the other side incubating. One of the things I've tried to do with National Action Network is develop young leaders and give them the head out chapters.

23:12They are out front in our rallies. Because we've got to incubate people, and we've got to incubate them to have comfort level across different silos. because that's the only way it's going to—we can't let leaders die and the movement die with them. And I think that the incubation of what has happened on the right, what Donald Trump has done, is a danger to my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, if I have it. And we've got to understand that it's not going to end with the personality of Donald Trump. So even in 28, when he leaves office, and he's going to try not to, I think, but when he leaves office, it doesn't mean this is over because he's unleashed a spirit and some of them are in power.

24:01And we've got to counter that and we've got to be unashamed of it. I agree. And bold about it. And yes, you're going to get hit. They're going to call your names. But if you get in the ring, you're going to get hit. You just have to throw more blows. I completely agree. I think that we need to shame racists and racism. And I totally agree with you that we need to incubate our own goodness and our own opposition to this. And it takes allies because none of us are free until all of us are free. And I have lived in a MAGA super majority state. It is a race to the bottom with bigots in charge. And it is a miserable, miserable place for people to live that want freedom and equality.

24:48Reverend thank you so much thank you for having me it's so important that we continue to fight this all together yes ma 'am all right thank you