← Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
America’s Unaffordability Crisis, and ICE Protests (with Jelani Cobb)
01:06:55
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- [00:00]
Stacey Abrams
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- [01:22]
Jelani Cobb
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- [01:58]
Stacey Abrams
Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams. Before we get to our guests, I'd like to talk about affordability, but to give context, I want to introduce a clip of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in an interview on News Nation. I think the question you're asking, and it's a really important one, is while we're asking Americans to reconsider what they're eating, are we actually asking Americans, especially those who are living on the margins, are we asking them to spend more on their diet? And the answer to that is no. We've run over a thousand simulations. It can cost around $3ameal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, corn tortilla, and one other thing. And so there is a way to to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money. So in addition to telling us that we shouldn't worry about the rising cost of groceries if we just have a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, and a corn tortilla. This administration and this Republican regime has gone even further. On January 15th, open enrollment for healthcare coverage under the ACA closed for the federal plan and most state plans. So millions of Americans who are figuring out how to feed their families are now also without life saving insurance. Or they're facing the prospect of defaulting on car notes and student loans in order to pay premiums that have doubled or tripled because this administration and this regime refused to take action. Inflation remains at 2.7%, but as Secretary Rollins tells us, the cost of groceries and natural gas might be going up, but we should just eat less. So the ability to eat and the ability to heat your home is more expensive, but that's on you. Job growth is stagnant, as are wages. Housing costs continue to rise, and solutions seem further and further out of reach. And yet the President of the United States calls affordability a hoax. And his regime offers us piecemeal solutions that barely cover the issue. And we can tell that they don't get it. We can tell that they don't care, because only 17 House Republicans joined Democrats to save the ACA subsidies. And the Republican controlled Senate is refusing to offer a solution. They keep promising something that has yet to materialize. And you and it's been more than a decade. In 2026, affordability will absolutely be a buzzword. But it's also a rallying cry for millions who know that making ends meet isn't just hard, it's a struggle. It's a struggle that so many of us either grew up with, lived with, or are trying to survive now. And it's made even worse by how this Republican authoritarian regime has slashed the social safety net. They've suspended childcare payments for millions of working families, and they've refused to help anyone except the wealthiest Americans, all in a naked pursuit of power. Because that's what this is about. It's about who holds power, who counts. But you see, solving the affordability crisis is about saving American families and saving democracy all at the same time. Yesterday I had a call with a young entrepreneur and one of our topics for discussion was. I have a bit of a wide range of pursuits. I do politics, I write books, I podcast. I am also a small business owner myself. I have employees, I've got people I need to take care of. And she asked me how I do all of it. And I told her, as I've told others, that what drives me every day is A core belief that poverty is immoral, it is economically inefficient, it is wrong, and it is solvable. But how do we solve it? Democracy. Now, before you turn away, let's understand democracy is our best way to tackle the horrors of poverty, to achieve the goals of affordability. Because democracy at its core is about ensuring that people have a choice. It's about making certain that we have a voice. A voice in education, what we know, a voice in the economy, what we do, and a voice in elections. Who is in charge. Remember I said this is about power. Well, power in the United States is allocated through our votes and through who's in charge and. And who gets to control what we do. And that is decided through democracy. The reason I do what I do, the reason I do all of the things I do, from voting rights, to defending dei, to hiring local workers to help families lower their costs, all come from the same place because I understand what democracy can do when it works. Democracy is an act of defiance. More and more of us demanding more and more of each other and refusing to believe that the scarcity they tell us exists is actually real. It's not. There's more than enough for all of us. But what they don't want us to know is that we have the power to demand it. We can demand affordability, and our tool is democracy. You see, democracy is about sweeping away the crumbs they give us to get our piece of the real, tangible pie, the real opportunities. It's how we make our pain heard. It's how we hire those to address the barriers that keep us from achieving success. Democracy and affordability go hand in hand because we don't get things that are affordable as long as people who don't care have the power. Authoritarians want poverty. True. Democracy is about opportunity, access, and thriving. And so for me, I do all of this because I want democracy. It's why I vote. It's why I show up after elections. It's why we talk about all of those things on the show over and over again. Because democracy isn't about the concept. It's about what it can get us. Economic populism gets this connection. The people who use it, they understand it. But when the rhetorical power of the words falls into the hands of charlatans and authoritarians, it's the people who lose. Economic populism raised up Hitler in Germany. It raised up Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And we watched it raise up Trump and his regime right here in America. But when the people have been sold a lie, they lose faith. And when the liars gain and hold power, the people lose the right to be heard. Unless we fight for democracy, unless we connect it back to what we need. But here's the thing. All is not lost. This Republican authoritarian regime. And it's more than Trump. It's more than Brooke Rollins. It is every single one of them who refuses to take action to make life more affordable. They are at fault. But they've also handed us one of the tools to resist and build a stronger America on the other side, but only if we're not too timid to wield it. That is to connect the dots. And speaking on behalf of my party, too many Democrats have stopped talking about the connection between what democracy is and why we need it. We need democracy to get the stuff we need for life. We need it for services. We need it for protection. We need it for progress. We need democracy and to get true affordability that lasts no matter who's in power. So if we want to win elections, we talk about affordability. If we want to win the future, we talk about the power of democracy to demand affordability. And then we deliver. We can no longer treat these as separate ideas. We'll talk about affordability here and democracy there. We have to have real policies and real conversations that yoke them together and prove they work. And I can tell you that this is a formula for success. It's what Mondani did in New York. It's what Tim Walls did in Minnesota. It's what we do every time we push harder and refuse to settle. And we use the language not of pundits but of people. It is not affordability or democracy. It is affordability and democracy. That's how we win, and that's how we save America. Joining me this week to break down the mass movements that have shaped the United States over the past decade, the relentless attacks on dei, the widening divisions around race and culture, the state of journalism and press freedom, and how all of these threads interconnected is Jelani Cobb, staff writer at the New Yorker, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and author of Three or More Is a Riot, a book that offers a powerful look at the moments and movements that have shaped and defined our times. Jelani Cobb, welcome to Assembly Required.
- [11:21]
Jelani Cobb
Thank you.
- [11:23]
Stacey Abrams
So I wanna start with your book, Three or More Is a Riot. It serves as an anthology of your writing, particular primarily from the New Yorker, but also shorter posts and feature pieces on the subjects of blackness and American culture and politics from 2012 to 2024. Tell me about why this is the title you chose.
- [11:45]
Jelani Cobb
So first, you know, thank you. I'm very happy to be able to talk with you today. And the title came from a particularly difficult moment because I was reporting on the aftermath of the Charleston massacre at Emanuel AME, which, you know, listeners may recall. This is 2015, June of 2015, when a white supremacist gunned down nine people in the basement of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in the course of that, it becomes clear that this person is bizarrely reflective of this bigger concern about demography and this fear that black people are wielding too much power. He says this in this manifesto that he writes. And that's a very particular thread in South Carolina's history because it was the only colony that had a majority black population and the only state with the exception of Mississippi, which later became one as well. But South Carolina was, as a state, the only one that had a majority black population at that time. And I recalled my background is as an academic historian of mostly practiced journalism. And there was a slave revolt in 1739 in South Carolina called the Stono Revolt. And in response to it, the colonial legislature passed a law that effectively defined a slave revolt as three or more Negroes, as black people would have been called at the time, three or more Negroes outside the company of a white man. And to see the way that that same sort of concern about demography not only resonated in South Carolina, but resonated nationally made me think that, you know, I wanted to do something with that line to kind of hearken back to that history. And three or more is a riot is what came out of it.
- [14:11]
Stacey Abrams
When we come back, more from my conversation with Jelani Cobb. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year is a good time to reflect on the changes, big or small, that can improve your life. Therapy can help by offering an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motivations and emotions. That's where BetterHelp comes in. The first step is finding a therapist who is the right fit. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience and industry leading. Match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and and are fully licensed in the United states. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com Abrams that's better H-E-L-P.com Abrams assembly required with Stacey Abrams is brought to you by Found Assembly Required Listeners know I was a reluctant entrepreneur who has now started multiple small businesses. I've learned to love the challenge, but but starting up a small business can be incredibly daunting. That's when you discover all the moving pieces needed to make money, make payroll and make your business grow. Found eliminates the clutter by giving you one platform that handles it all. Baking, bookkeeping, invoices and taxes. No more paying for multiple subscriptions and dealing with clunky, outdated apps that only sort of stick solve your problem. Found identified the tasks that create the most hassle for small businesses. Things like categorizing expenses, preparing for taxes, managing invoicing, and dynamic budgeting. Then they built an app that does it all directly from your business checking account. Found makes it easy to regain control of your business finances so you can get back to doing what you love. They understand the unique challenges facing small business owners and entrepreneurs. The app automatically tracks expenses, which means you no longer have to carve out time every week to go through purchases, hunt for missing receipts and scramble to ensure everything is accounted for. And you can easily create and send invoices directly from the app. Having an app like this when I first started out with our beverage company, Nourishment would have been game changing. So take back control of your business today. Open a Found account for free@found.com that's f o u n d.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with Found so Jelani. We are recording this on Thursday, January 15th and as of today, Donald Trump and Kristi Noem have both mentioned invoking the Insurrection act in response to the protests that are in response to the killing of not only Renee Goode, but the shooting of another immigrant. But also this came about because of the I don't the disinformation campaign that was initiated most recently by a YouTuber. But it all focuses on Somali immigrants and Somali citizens where race is once again a predicate for action. And in this case, they are saying that the protests that are happening where three or more are being gathered, that that would be a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act. Can you talk a bit about why this is part of the through line that you trace in your book, but also how you are thinking about this as both a journalist and an historian?
- [18:54]
Jelani Cobb
Yeah, so this is, you know, a direct part of the direct lineage of the history that I'm writing about and the connections that, you know, we see here, because Donald Trump represented that same sort of reactionary movement away from the idea that black people had any purchase or any non white people had any purchase in America, and that democracy could extend to the entirety of the population, not just the privileged few, as it had been in the earliest parts of the country's history. And so the Insurrection act is bizarre because, you know, we saw, we haven't forgotten what happened on January 6, that we saw a armed attack with the intention of preventing the peaceful transfer of power, which is explicitly an insurrection, as opposed to what we're seeing now, which are nonviolent protests from unarmed people who are nonetheless facing down people who are heavily armed and in the case of at least two individuals having been subject to gunfire in one instance, fatally, and that being reframed as an insurrection of some sort.
- [20:23]
Stacey Abrams
Well, last Wednesday, Trump said in an interview that he believes that the civil rights era protections resulted in white people being quote, treated very badly. And this is a part of recent efforts on his part and on the part of his administration and more broadly on the part of the Republican regime to urge white men to file their grievances in this case, file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but writ large. We have seen this play out in attacks on national, not just on dei, but on this idea that anyone who occupies a position of power that is not a white man is somehow unfairly there. Can you knit this together for us? How does this tie back to what you've just laid out about the history of three or more as a riot and how black and brown people have occupied space in the U.S. oh, I.
- [21:18]
Jelani Cobb
Mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the afternoon. There are a few things, one of which is that the logic hearkens back to the segregationist opponents of the Civil Rights act of 1964. When you go back and you read the congressional testimony and you read the political rhetoric from that time, they oppose the then bill, 1964 civil rights bill, because in their minds, it will bestow upon black people rights that white people don't have, namely, the right to be protected from the deprivation of your right to vote in the first place. And so it's almost like saying, we've called an ambulance, this person's been hit by a car, but we haven't called any ambulances for the people who haven't been hit by cars. So that constitutes discrimination, by my understanding of it. And so the legislation that was meant to protect civil rights of a disempowered community is being framed as a advantage, being framed as an entitlement that is discriminatory toward the class that had not suffered such discrimination in the first place. If you leap from 1964 to 2026, that's what you get. You get a re articulation of that logic. The other thing, and I've been pointing this out everywhere I go, is that historically, I won't go through all of the threads, because there are a lot of them. Historically, efforts to suppress African American voting have been. Have occurred in tandem with efforts to monitor, control, or minimize immigration. Because this is, again, about demography. We could go through many examples of this. But one of the things that I'll say is that the Voting Rights act of 1965 was signed in August of that year by Lyndon B. Johnson, and then about six or seven weeks later, he signed the Immigration Reform act of 1965. Both of those laws were part of LBJ's effort at wiping away a legacy of racial discrimination in the United States. They took aim at the infrastructure that had eliminated black people from contention as voters throughout the south, throughout the states of the former Confederacy. And it took aim at the racist. And this is their language. It's like the racist 1924 Johnson immigration restriction act, which was meant to allow only a small number of people from overwhelmingly white European countries to immigrate into the United States.
- [24:30]
Stacey Abrams
And you and I have had lots of conversations about voting rights and the historical threads, and I want to pull on this one a little bit more, because in 1975, there was a situation that led to the expansion of the Voting Rights act to include the Hispanic population, largely because of language discrimination that was fomented by a gentleman known as William Rehnquist, who in the state of Arizona, basically used Spanish as a way to reinstitute poll taxing. And because of his behavior, he led to the expansion of the Voting Rights act in 1975 to cover additional communities, namely Hispanic communities and eventually Asian American communities. His protege later on was this gentleman known as John Roberts. And so would love to have you talk about the Intersection of. Of immigration, the evolution of language in this country, and the continued assaults on the Voting Rights act that we're watching today.
- [25:31]
Jelani Cobb
So we're 1975. We're going to jump backward for a minute to 1798 and come back to 1975.
- [25:39]
Stacey Abrams
I'm ready for it.
- [25:40]
Jelani Cobb
Because in 1798, we have the Alien act, which is passed and signed into law. And the way I learned it in social studies was inert. It just changed the amount of time it took to become a citizen from five years to 13 years. And I was like, I don't care. As a high school student, like, all right, it is what it is. What I didn't learn until later was that John Adams knew that he would likely face a challenge from Thomas Jefferson in the next presidential election. And that, you know, his party, Adams Party, the Federalists, had very weak support among immigrants. But you know who the immigrants really loved? Thomas Jefferson. And if you change the amount of time it takes to become a citizen from five years to 13 years, you eat into an entire swath of the electorate. Who, were they able to go to the polls, would vote for Thomas Jefferson. And the fact of it is that the first immigration restriction law was also a voter suppression law. Like those two things have been wed since the outset. Now, of course, Thomas Jefferson winds up winning the election for other reasons that are even further complicit in this, which is that the electoral power of the slave states, because they had counted the bodies of enslaved people, gave them more power in the Electoral College than they reasonably should have had. And that made the margin of difference for Jefferson's election, which is why Jefferson's enemies, political enemies, would derisively refer to him as, quote, unquote, the Negro President. We jump up to 1975 and the voting Rights act becoming an even more powerful tool for inclusion. It is precisely because this is a tacit recognition of this dynamic of cooking the books, essentially, of curating the electorate and determining who can get access and who can't get access. I'll say one last quick thing, which is that in the last mayoral election, the one we just had in New York City, I took my daughter with me to the poll and I showed her the ballot. And my daughter's 8. I showed her my ballot, and we walked through. I told her who I was voting for and why. We talked about all the issues and so on. But before I did that, I showed her something that was very important about the New York City ballot, which is that that ballot includes all of those questions in like nine or 10 languages. And I said this is because the Voting Rights act that you learned about with Martin Luther King, the Voting Rights act protects immigrants so that if they come to the polling place, they will have materials in the language they are most familiar with. And that is what democracy is supposed to do.
- [28:47]
Stacey Abrams
Okay, much more when we come back from the break. Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is brought to you by Quince. Starting the year with a wardrobe refresh, Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished. They're perfect for layering, mixing and building a wardrobe that lasts. Their versatile styles make it easy to reach for them day after day. Quince has all the staples covered from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. Their wardrobe essentials are crafted to last season after season. Their Italian wool coats are real standouts. They're beautifully tailored, soft to the touch and built to carry you through years of wear, not just one season. The quality shows in every detail. The stitching, the fit, the fabrics. Every piece is thoughtfully designed to be your new wardrobe essential. And like everything from Quint's, each piece is made with premium materials in ethical, trusted factories, then priced far below what other luxury brands charge. I personally love their cashmere sweaters and tops and I know they will make great gifts even beyond the holiday season. So refresh your wardrobe at Quint's. Don't wait. Go to quints.comstacy for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.comstacy to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comstacy assembly required with Stacey Abrams is brought to you by Wild Alaskan Company. When was the last time you truly trusted the seafood you brought home? Growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, my family always knew that the catch of the day was easily within reach. Now that we live in Atlanta, far away from the Gulf, it's not as easy. That's where Wild Alaskan Company comes in. Wild Alaskan Company is the best way to get wild caught. Perfectly portioned, nutrient dense seafood delivered directly to your door. You haven't tasted fish this good. My parents love having a box delivered directly to their doorstep so they don't have to bother with the hassle of shopping and can get straight to cooking. Wild Alaskan company is 100% wild caught, never farmed. This means there are no antibiotics GMOs or additives. Just clean real fish that support healthy oceans and fishing communities. Wild Alaskan fish and is frozen off the boat to lock in taste, texture and nutrients like omega 3s and it is sustainably sourced wild caught from Alaska. Every order supports sustainable harvesting practices and your membership delivers flexible shipments, expert tips and truly feel good seafood. Right now my parents are enjoying the Pacific Rockfish and Pacific Halibut. Try it risk free with a 100% money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with your first box, Wild Alaskan company will give you a full refund. No questions asked, no risk, just high quality seafood. Not all fish are the same. Get seafood you can trust. Go to wildalaskan.com assembly for $35 off of your first box of premium wild caught seafood. That's wildalaskan.com assembly For $35 off of your first order. And thanks to wild alaskan company for sponsoring this episode well, at the top of today's episode, I talk about how we have to better concretize what democracy means. I focus on affordability because affordability is how we live democracy. And it's one thing democracy can give us. You can't get affordability if the only people in power don't care about how poor you are. You can't have affordability if the people making the choices own everything and really just need you to buy more things. And so democracy is how we get affordability. Similarly, democracy and immigration have become separated conversations. And I think part of what you're laying out is how critical it is that we start to reconnect why the things are the way they are, why five years became 13, why we have multiple languages on a ballot. But I think the other part of what this current situation reveals to us is that immigration is also part of other movements. And I think back to how you talk about the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2000s. This is a movement that fight fundamentally changed how the country talked about police brutality and violence against black people. But we've also seen tremendous backlash in recent years against that conversation and what often feels like extreme regression. And I would argue that the power and influence of this movement is incredibly pertinent, especially today as we talk about what ICE is. But that all of this, that the conversation of police brutality, the conversation of who has the right to take American lives, that all of these are democracy conversations. And so would love to have a conversation with you for a second about how does this feel? How do we continue to use history and movements to connect Ourselves back to what democracy is supposed to be.
- [34:45]
Jelani Cobb
You know, I think that, you know, it's clear even in the kind of most flawed examples. But when you go back and, you know, you read Lincoln, who is all over the place, you know, the people who hate Lincoln point out a whole bunch of stuff that he said that was unconscionable. The people who love Lincoln point out a whole bunch of stuff he said that was incredible. And they're both right, depending upon who you're talking to. But when you go back that what, you know, you find in his writing and his rhetoric is this grappling with exactly that, like, what are the imperatives of democracy? And so if democracy requires that you move in a direction that will leave you far out on an island until people can catch up with you, you actually might have to do that. That might be the thing that's required of you. And so when we're looking at now, because we haven't taken the definition of democracy seriously, we're able to countenance things that are wildly authoritarian, autocratic, at the very least anti democratic, and believe that that falls within our fold. So if we look at the Renee Good situation, we see an unarmed woman in a car driving away from a federal officer. We see a heavily armed officer who not only has firearms, but is surrounded by other federal officers who have his back. And we're able to actually listen to someone say that the federal officer is the person who is under threat and that if he acts in a way that takes the life of this protester, this unarmed woman, that that is a fair use of federal authority. And so this is really key. It's fundamental to the questions that we should be grappling with now.
- [36:52]
Stacey Abrams
One of the critiques of the law enforcement that we've seen that really got great airing during the Black Lives Matter movement was, was the similarity between the behaviors of certain members of law enforcement today.
- [37:08]
Jelani Cobb
Sure, yeah.
- [37:09]
Stacey Abrams
And their legacy and connection to the Fugitive Slave Acts.
- [37:12]
Jelani Cobb
Yep.
- [37:12]
Stacey Abrams
And then you fast forward to what we're seeing with ice, which is sometimes being compared to the secret police that we see in a number of nations that have fallen to autocracy. But there's also, of course, the very clear and strong analogy and to the Fugitive slave acts in 2026.
- [37:32]
Jelani Cobb
That's right.
- [37:33]
Stacey Abrams
Can you talk about the similarities and the differences that you see between the reactions that we're having to this state violence that began with Ferguson and what we're seeing now with ice? But go ahead.
- [37:44]
Jelani Cobb
Yeah. So one thing I think that the Black Lives Matter movement did that brought so many of these questions to the foreground from your previous question was that they did raise this question about federal authority and for government oversight. Police are. I mean, all sorts of parts of the government can make your life miserable. You can get taxes, you can get a code violation for something at your house. There are all kinds of things that government has that we may or may not like. You may get a speech ticket or any other things to regulate things in society, but only one part of government has the authority to kill you. And that that authority should be heavily regulated. And that seems to be a reasonable perspective. But what Black Lives Matter had to do was actually create a whole movement to actually make that apparent to people. And I think that that was what was significant. It was one of the kind of things we kind of put a pin in that. And come back to the Fugitive Slave Act. When I teach the Fugitive Slave act to my students, I would talk about the tremendous response people in the north would have when these fugitive patrols would show up and try to grab people and drag them back into bondage. You know, it's like the case in Boston where 2,000 people come out, you know, to prevent a black man from being returned into slavery. You know, the case, Christiana, you know, affair in Pennsylvania, where people come out and actually begin armed exchange firearms, like firing at, you know, these slave patrollers to prevent them from dragging people who had escaped slavery back into bondage. And my students will say, also, all these people were abolitionists. And I'm like, no, no. People had a wide array of views about the question of slavery. What they did not tolerate was the idea of their neighbors being ripped out of their community. And in a democracy, the fundamental civic unit is neighbor. And so that is what we have would be. Fast forward, forward to what's happening with ICE now. You know, I would wager that if you were to take a poll of the people who are in the streets, their opinions about immigration will be a wide spectrum of views. But what they will be united on is that they will not be okay with Joe or Brenda or Lisa or the person who has been in their community for 10, 12, 15, 15 years, the person whose kid played Little League with their kid, the person who helped you the time your tire blew out on the road with you, dragging those people out of their homes and shipping them to, in the cases of what we've seen in Latin America, places where they may well be tortured with no justification whatsoever. And I think that that is the. The vital thread that we see connecting Those two things.
- [41:06]
Stacey Abrams
I love your framing that the vital unit of siviks is neighbor. And you have been very clear and very precise in the language you've used for years, especially as you knit together our political and cultural challenges and moments. And, in fact, you were ahead of the curve in identifying Trump's first election as a warning sign of authoritarianism, which is antithetical to the notion of a democracy and protecting our neighbors. There was a short piece that you wrote on November 4, 2016, and you argue, quote, some element of national humiliation and decline predisposes nations towards fascism. And you went on to say that while President Barack Obama's election was widely hailed as a national triumph, many Trump voters experienced it as an American humiliation ritual. What were the signals that you were seeing at the time that told you that the country was headed towards authoritarianism as a structure and fascism as an ideology? And given your knowledge of history, do we have time to turn?
- [42:20]
Jelani Cobb
Yeah, so I had studied authoritarianism, and I wrote a doctoral dissertation about the Cold War, and we'd looked and talked a lot about the kind of political development of autocracy and fascism in Eastern Europe. And the interesting thing to me about that was always this question that emerged about the similarities between those societies and the American South. The sense of grievance, the sense of national humiliation, which is what the lost cause really was, this simmering grievance that people experienced about not having won the war that they really thought that they should have won, and that being passed down from generation to generation to generation, and the cult of personality, the single party state and all those kinds of things, and saying, well, we have this element here. And so the obvious point is that, well, Donald Trump is not a Southerner. No, he's not. But when we get back to that great American pot boiler classic, Birth of a Nation, what that film was really about, people think that the film is offensive because it's racist and it depicts black people as a caricature and so on. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. There are lots of stuff, lots of things that do that. You know, the real disturbing thing about Birth of a Nation, where it stands out, is that D.W. griffith is posing a sort of reunion of the country along their shared contempt for the Negro. And this is like, we can. The lingering wounds of the war can be cemented with our common disdain for the black inhabitants of this country. And so when Donald Trump, who is as queens as you get, I grew up about three miles from where he grew up, the thick queen's accent shows up in Alabama at the very beginning of this. And Jeff Sessions, who's the first Southern politician to endorse him, comes out and gives him this raucous endorsement. I was like, this is what Griffith was talking about. This is what Griffith was talking about, that same dynamic. And so I think that is what I was looking at those things partly sparked by the fact that I had been in South Carolina thinking about the Dylann Roof stuff, and I was like, oh, this is what this is. And that was my idea of like how this all comes together.
- [45:11]
Stacey Abrams
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- [47:07]
Jelani Cobb
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- [47:39]
Stacey Abrams
So I have a framework that I call the 10 Steps campaign and its mission is to lay out the common moves that authoritarian leaders make to dismantle democracy, but also to talk about the 10 steps that we can take to seize freedom and power back. Step six is the attack on the media. It's the attack on the truth, how they discredit journalism and replace it with propaganda. And under this Republican regime, we've seen this escalation on attacks on press freedom. We've seen billions in cuts to public broadcasting, the defamation lawsuits as extortion. We've seen the head of the FCC threaten to take away opportunities unless more propaganda flows. We've seen the press pool devolve. We've seen traditional Pentagon press corps kicked out in their entirety. And then just last week, the FBI executed a search warrant on on a Washington Post report at home in an effort to crack down, ostensibly on leaks. But what we know is that this is a tremendous violation of how this country has always protected journalism. As the dean of journalism at Columbia and as someone who teaches young journalists, how do you explain this moment in terms of understanding what this means for democracy, but also, what do you tell them their role is to protect and restore democracy through their lens?
- [49:14]
Jelani Cobb
You know, I have been trying to reiterate a message of humility, because I think that, you know, in the United States, we've tended to think of ourselves as the best exemplars of all of these dynamics. But our peers and our colleagues who have reported in authoritarian countries or lived in authoritarian countries really know more about this than we do. And so we had a program here last academic year where we brought together journalists from around the world. Journalists who had reported in Turkey, journalists who had reported in Algeria, journalists who had reported in Brazil, journalists who had reported in the Philippines. And just said, we have an audience of overwhelmingly American journalists. What do we need to know? How does this go? How does this operate? How do you protect your integrity? How do you protect your safety? How do you protect your source? And then we just sat and listened because these are things that we really don't know. I have found myself looking up the memoirs of black journalists who reported in the American south during the era of Jim Crow because they confront very many of those same dynamics. And I think that we have to begin with humility and then start drawing up really clear lines. You know, what we do, what we don't do, how we report that's different than the way we once did. You know, things that you do. Like, you know, in many instances, we are still reporting on this administration as if it were a normal administration when we had the incredible, ridiculous fight over the Gulf of America, resulted in the Associated Press being ejected from the White House press pool. I've said this to people in leadership news organizations. It's like nobody else should be in that room. If the Associated Press is ejected. CNN shouldn't be there, New York Times shouldn't be there. The Washington Post shouldn't be there. No one should be in that room. And that was not how they responded. But. But we really have to change the way that we approach to match the level of the threat that we're facing right now.
- [51:53]
Stacey Abrams
Well, given what you just laid out, do you think the current media ecosystem and its uneven leadership be generous? Do you think it's capable of meeting this moment of fulfilling the roles and responsibilities of the fourth Estate?
- [52:12]
Jelani Cobb
I mean, this is going to be one of those frustrating questions. I think it's like yes and no, but I mean, some parts of it yes, other parts of it no. And it's not hard to tell which is which. Look at the coverage, look at the positioning, look at how people, the statements people are making. Look at the institutions that are trying to cozy up to the administration as opposed to recognizing that journalism fundamentally is at odds with any political administration. Now, it's supposed to be kind of loyal opposition that you all are, in theory, interested in the same thing, which is the preservation and betterment of democracy. And you go about it in very different ways, but it is an oppositional position in the same way that the courts, the Congress, and the executive branch are supposed to compete with each other for power. James Madison says it, you know, you set this up so that they will jealously compete against each other and none of them will acquire too much authority. So we're supposed to be a version of that that is outside of government. But, you know, in many instances, that's not what's happening. By the same token, I have been impressed by the heart and the temerity and the courage of outlets that many people haven't heard of, where people are going to report, they're going to tell the story, that they're going to do it unflinchingly, and they're going to say, come what may, we will do what we can to inform our audiences.
- [53:49]
Stacey Abrams
So in an interview, you said that DEI has become the boogeyman for everything. I mean, we know if there's a tragedy, if something goes wrong, if people are feeling anxious or angry, somehow in this day and age, DEI gets blamed. And on assembly required, we talk a lot about the importance of dei. And we do so because I very firmly believe that the mission of this authoritarian regime is a Christian nationalist, white supremacist nation, which means that the antidote to that, but also the core pillar of a pluralistic democracy is dei. And on our last episode of the year, I said, I will never stop talking about it. Knitting together what you have written, what you have watched, especially as you think about the genesis of three or more as a riot, how do you understand DEI and its relevance at this moment?
- [54:49]
Jelani Cobb
First, I understand DEI as democracy, as a fundamental element of democracy, which is at its most simple, the idea that everyone should be included equally. That's it. When we talk about the transformation of institutions and the incorporation of people who have historically not been present into those institutions, it is about the work of undoing the legacy of exclusion. I think Pete Buttigieg had a really good point when he said, if you want the opposite of dei, you want the opposite of diversity. Well, that's exclusivity. If you want the opposite of inclusion, that's exclusion. And if you want the opposite of equity, it's inequity. And so if that's what you want, then you should just say that. You should be upfront about that. But the battle around this, and I think we have to not relinquish that language, the battle around this is fundamentally a question. The DEI is the institutional version of pluralistic democracy. Do we want a pluralistic democracy in which everyone is included, or do we not? Do we want institutions in which everyone is included, or do we not? And depending upon your answer to those questions will determine kind of where you stand fundamentally on the question of how we proceed from here.
- [56:19]
Stacey Abrams
What we call things matters. And as you just pointed out, whether we're talking about DEI or what we call democracy, one of the issues that we are facing is this not revisionism of history, this erasure of history. This administration has changed the names of people, places and things. They have changed the images that people are allowed to see of themselves and of others. They rewrote the story of January 6th to your point, claiming it's no longer an insurrection. And yet we know that revising history in the United States has worked many, many times. The loss, I mean, as a child of the south, the lost cause. I was raised in my schooling to call it the War of Northern Aggression. Luckily, I went home to two black parents who had their minors in black history. And we were very clear about what it was. But it matters, because what I understood that period of history to mean was very different than my friend Misty, who went home to a very different family that used a different language. So what can we learn about how this distortion of the public record? Because this isn't just happening in the abstract. When the President of the United States, with the full imprimatur of the entire federal government, can change plaques at national parks, can change images in national museums, can put his own name atop memorials, what do we need to understand about how this can affect our collective memory, our collective consciousness, and our ability to respond and to fight back?
- [58:04]
Jelani Cobb
So there's a story that I tell, you know, and I usually tell some version of this every Black History Month. You know, we are about two weeks from the beginning of Black History Month. And I'll indulge, which is, you know, I point out that the first black person to get a PhD from Harvard was W.E.B. du Bois. And the second black person to get a PhD from Harvard was Carter G. Woodson. And both of them got their doctorates in the same subject, history, and then went on to these careers that were very much steeped in the battle for democracy and the battle for black freedom in the United States. And, you know, I would ask students, well, why was it that, you know, in Carter G. Woodson, whose parents were slaves, like, not like I have slaves in my lineage, his parents were slaves. And he gets a PhD from Harvard. And the first thing he's like, I have to become a historian. Why did they think history was so important? Because they understood that battles over the past are never about the past. They. They are always about the present. And that you were trying to create a precedent in the past to justify something you're doing at the current moment. And it said, in order to even get to unwinding and dismantling segregation, we have to go back to slavery. We have to go back to prior to slavery to prove that black people actually had civilizations, to prove that we are human and that we are therefore equal and that we are therefore able to participate in democracy. We have to go back and rewrite the history of the war, why the war happened, the Civil War, that is. We have to go back and talk about Reconstruction. And that is the life work that those generations, that entire generation of historians, black historians, and some conscientious white historians set about doing, which was creating a version of the past that would justify actually humane society. What we're seeing now is the opposite. They're seeking to justify the inhumanity and the brutality and the cruelty by creating a fictive version of history and inverts the victims and the attackers. And so that you can actually have the sense. And this is why, I think, going back to the point about the skewed, upside down version of the civil rights movement, in which he says white people were badly treated, and that is in order to justify ultimately what we see from white men in the administration and what we see from white men in ice, and what we see in all the other kinds of, like, downstream things that we've been talking about.
- [61:04]
Stacey Abrams
Jelani, in the last article in your book, you close with Harris's loss in 2024. And one line that really resonates is, quote, we believed that we had broken history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact broken some part of us here at assembly required, much as you do at the School of journalism, we like to give our listeners homework. And this time your homework is to give them a little bit of hope. We've all felt the weight of this authoritarian overthrow of our country. We have seen its very stark and cruel behavior, but we also have power. And one of the through lines of your book is not just the history of what has gone wrong, but the stories of people who have fought to put it right. What is your call to action to our listeners so that they can be part of the right side of history and how we reconstruct what we deserve?
- [62:07]
Jelani Cobb
I think that the most important thing to keep in mind, what I take from history and my study of history, is that the people whom we admire, one, anyone who we talk about in history and who we've deemed worthy of recording it, has generally been because of what they did under adverse circumstances, not what they did under comfortable ones. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that they have generally done those things against longer odds than the ones that we're currently facing. And so for people who had the audacity to believe that slavery could somehow end despite the fact that people lived entire lives, born, raised, aged, and died in the system of chattel slavery, but still audaciously believed that they could be free, much less that they could participate in democracy. For people who believed that women could attain the right to vote, that they did, that a woman was not bound to be the property of her husband, that could conceive of a world in which that was, even though the world they lived in gave them no reason to suspect that that was possible for people who led labor movements, for people who organized immigrants, for people who led movements for the protection of children and the elimination of child labor, we could go through all of the things that people had to fight for. They were fighting against longer odds than the ones they're fighting against now. And it's always important to remember that though we have suffered grievous, difficult setbacks, the momentum has generally fallen in our favor.
- [63:57]
Stacey Abrams
Jelani Cobb, thank you so much for joining us here today on Assembly Required.
- [64:01]
Jelani Cobb
Thank you.
- [64:10]
Stacey Abrams
As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real, actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges. First, be curious if you enjoyed my conversation with Jelani Cobb. Check out his book Three or More Is a Riot. Number two, Solve Problems. Today I want to list lift up a group taking action and having a major impact. A group of cyclists known as Cycling X Solidarity are riding across Chicago buying out food carts from vendors who may be undocumented so the workers can stay home without losing wages. And they're distributing the food they purchase to help those in need across the city. So I'm encouraging you to check them out@cyclingxsolidarity.com to support them and consider whether you and your friends could do some version of this. You don't have to buy out every cart in your city, but maybe there's a store or a vendor or a worker you all can support with regular investment. That reduces their risk from ICE raids. Every little bit not only helps, it creates real change. And third, do good. Last Tuesday, the U.S. supreme Court held oral arguments on the constitutionality of of state bans on transgender women and girls participating in sports that align with their gender identity. Republicans at every level of government, including governors and federal officials, are hell bent on eliminating transgender people from public life as part of their broader attacks on the LGBTQ community and their loathsome commitment to forcing all people to return to to a regressive traditional gender role. But we can fight back. So volunteer with and donate to organizations like the trevor project@thetrevorproject.org to support LGBTQ youth at this difficult time. Assembly Required continues to grow its audience, but we need your help. We reach more people when you tell others about us. And it's working. So when you add us to your feed and share your favorite episode, it helps make sure you actually subscribe on all of your favorite platforms, not just one, and boost our visibility by rating the show and leaving a comment. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. Please also check out my substack Assembly Notes, where we dive deep and where I share more of my thoughts on how we are understand and then fight back against this authoritarian regime. Thank you to the thousands of you who have signed up for the 10 Steps campaign at 10stepscampaign.org we offer information in English and Spanish to help you recognize what's happening, activate around solutions and build a better America. Well, this wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Do good out there and I'll meet you here next week. Assembly Required is a crooked media production. Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Kiril Palaviv is our video producer. This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Our theme song is by Vasily's Fotopoulo. Thank you to Matt De Groat, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote and Priyanka Muntha for production support. Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams. We know you'll always find ways to look out for the people you love. And with Amica Life Insurance, we'll help build a plan to make sure you always can. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.