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The Joy Reid Show
A Moral Monday: Israel Killing Journalists - Trump Killing Democracy |The Joy Reid Show LIVE!Aug 25, 2025
01:09:57
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
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Okay, well, hello everyone. Hello everyone. Happy Monday and welcome to the Joy Reid Show. Now we begin on this Monday after news yesterday that Donald Trump is planning to expand expand the deployment of the US Military beyond our now militarily occupied US Capital to even more Democratic run cities including Chicago and potentially Baltimore, Maryland, where Governor Wes Moore was crystal clear in our interview on this show with him and in subsequent media interviews that the state's National Guard will not participate.
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Well, I can tell you right now that there will be no military incursions in the state of Maryland because nobody has the authority to be able to.
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Put troops, especially if you're talking about Maryland Guard troops in any of our streets. Unless the authority comes from me. And yet, Trump is not stopping there. His TV host run Pentagon is now reportedly preparing to activate the National Guard in 19 additional states. 19 this time including 1,700 armed National Guard troops in red states, with Texas getting the largest number. But you can best believe the targets will be blue cities in those red states. The states to be included in Donald Trump's military style occupation include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, where Trump's immigration crackdown has already destroyed the economy in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, which I'm sure again excites Greg the racist gerrymander Abbott. Plus Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. And the occupation of some 20 US states is expected to stretch from August through mid November, according to Fox. And this is the part where I remind you that multiple states will be holding off year elections in November. November 4th is election day in several states, including California, which will vote on their Texas payback gerrymander ballot initiative, as well as New Jersey which is voting for a new governor. Plus Pennsylvania and Virginia, which have gubernatorial and state house elections. And of course New York City where Zorhan Mamdani is facing Andrew Cuomo and the weird hat guy Chris Kurt Curtis Sliwa, along with the current Mayor Eric Adams, whose rallies now apparently include red envelopes and even a potato chip bag stuffed with cash being handed out allegedly by an Adams advisor, including two reporters from Chinese language news outlets. Yeah, totally normal stuff. But all of these elections will apparently be taking place while armed National Guardsmen and federalized police, masked agents, or whoever those masked men are are patrolling our streets, maybe even the polling locations. Who knows? Maybe in all 50 states, you get a Gestapo and you get a Gestapo and you get a Gestapo. And if that sounds like martial law to you, congratulations, you're paying attention. Because it's not just giving Gilead, it's giving rehearsal for next November, when what's at stake in those midterms will be control of Congress, meaning whether Trump will be able to continue to rule this country like a monarch or whether a real Congress will be seated that can slow down his and his billionaire friends march toward turning this country into a Putin style autocracy. So, yeah, nothing to see here, right? Just the little troops on the streets. Totally normal America. All of this while Trump is gutting FEMA to the point that employees there worry that states won't be able to respond to natural disasters as hurricane season is heading our way, this year being the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. So what is FEMA spending its budget on? You guessed it, migrant detention camps. Of course, more than $600 million of your tax money worth. And the rest of the money that should be going toward protecting you from hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters is instead going to things like Trump's lavish new White House ballroom that's costing you $200 million. And by the way, they've canceled all of the White House tours to get it done for his orange Majesty. You will also be paying $930 million to trick out the supposedly free luxury plane Trump got as a push gift from Qatar. You'll also be footing the bill for the hot new Mustangs the regime is sending out into the world to try to lure people into signing up for jobs or with the ICE masked Gestapo. Seriously, because you know, Doge gotta save money because we're so broke we can't afford y' all to have Medicaid. Remember, no healthcare for you. What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses plus scratch resistant, smudge resistant and anti reflective coatings and UV protection and free adjustments for life. To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com that's warbyparker.com Meanwhile, Trump's other autocratic bestie besides Putin, namely adjudicated war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, is not slowing down either when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. He's ramping it up. Despite international condemnation over the deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza, the Israeli military is pushing forward with the total obliteration of the Strip. Just take a look at this report from Al Jazeera.
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Israeli missiles rain down on north and.
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Central Gaza as its military flattens neighborhoods.
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Blowing up buildings, killing civilization, civilians, and.
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Displacing tens of thousands of starving Palestinians. The United nations has officially declared famine.
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In Gaza City just as the Israeli.
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Military begins a major offensive to seize it.
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That decision drew criticism from some European members of the UN Security Council.
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All of this while settlers are just openly conducting ethnic cleansing, free from any and all constraints, taking whatever land they want under the full protection of the Israeli military. Take a look at this report from itv. Daniel says this valley is where Joshua led the Israelites to the promised land according to the scriptures.
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He, like all the settlers, believes the.
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Land is theirs and rejects any notion of a Palestinian state.
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I'm not angry. I'm not a, you know, one of those frothing at the mouth of the settlers who are going to like yell and scream and like, you know, start throwing things at you because I don't like what you're saying. I don't like what you're saying because what you're saying is wrong. It is not consistent with the historical record. There was never a Palestinian state. Even if I were to say, okay, well these poor people, they have to do something, they have to go somewhere. And I would say, well, not on my account, not on my, not on my, on my watch. Because not only is it, not only is it inimical to my essential national interest of settling the entire land of Israel, it's also an intrinsic danger, a clear and present danger to our physical survival.
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As the mourners gather, the Israeli army moves in. So can you explain why we have to leave?
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I'm sorry. Keep the press quiet. Keep the press quiet.
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It has been quiet to keep the press quiet. And when you see the utter destruction and devastation of Gaza, including Israel's deliberate starvation of children in a clear and present genocide, it is unfortunately all too common for Western media to take at face value, without much question at all, the religious claims being asserted by citizens of the nuclear weapon holding, expansionist Middle east superpower that is annexing land they have no legal right to as people coming from Europe, Russia or the United States and making those biblical claims that you heard that west bank settler make, shouldn't we at least question those claims? I mean, we don't normally decide borders and property ownership based on the Bible. Otherwise, isn't Iran still the Persian Empire? It's also tempting, as much of the Western media has done, to portray any resistance to this annexation by Palestinians, who are a mix of Muslims and Christians and whose parents and grandparents coexisted for decades with Middle Eastern Jewish people, but who have neither power nor protection in the territories occupied by Israel, to portray any resistance to their land being taken away at gunpoint as terrorism. Western media has also largely gone along with the narrative that the violence that we're seeing in the west bank, and particularly in Gaza, is new, or that it's solely Due to the October 7, 2023 attacks on Southern Israel by Hamas and the taking of some 1,200 hostages, dozens of whom remain missing, mainly because Netanyahu and his government will not agree to a ceasefire deal to get them back. As tens and tens of thousands of Israeli protesters and the hostage families keep screaming, the idea that the war on Gaza is solely about retaliation or about eliminating Hamas, which is designated by the west as a terrorist group, remains the prevailing Western media narrative. I mean, it's. If Hamas are terrorists, isn't what Israel doing how terrorists are handled? Well, not always. Historically, remember that up until the 1990s, the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela were literally and formally designated as terrorists by the US and many European governments because while their political wing sought to negotiate the end of apartheid, their militant wing, Nkoto Esizwe, fought it using whatever military means they could. But when Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after 27 years in a South African prison and he soon assumed the presidency of South Africa, the US and European countries were forced to treat him as a normal president. And even with that, his designation as a terrorist was not officially lifted in the United States until 2008. Obama time. Likewise, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat, were considered terrorists right up until the moment that Arafat attempted to negotiate the end of Israel's occupation of Gaza and the west bank and peace with Israel in the 1990s after more militant alternatives like Hamas began springing up in the late 1980s. Arafat even won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. You can see him here with. You can see him with President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Still, he was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium in 2004. Eventually, the PLO gave way to the PA, the Palestinian Authority, which after a 2005 election demanded by the George W. Bush administration, split power among the Palestinian people. Winning election in the occupied Gaza Strip. I mean, I'm sorry, the PA winning election in the occupied west bank, but losing to Hamas in Gaza. Something that none other than Bibi Netanyahu praised as an outcome because in his words, it would prevent the Palestinian people from unifying enough to actually form a Palestinian state. And while Israel's own history and Israel's own history shows how fluid this notion of who is and who isn't a terrorist is, including what the west allows to be done to the populations based on that designation. So let me tell you a story that you probably haven't heard. In the early 20th century, two organizations arose with the goal of pushing the British government out of what was then called Mandatory Palestine. Here's a map. Mandatory Palestine, a very European colonialist term whose population included Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, Druze Muslims and Mizrahi Jews, basically Jews from North Africa, Iran and other parts of the region. It was governed by the British as part of their colonial empire after they seized the territory from the Ottoman Empire after World War I. And the British controlled who could emigrate there, causing occasional blow ups along about the ways that they limited specifically Jewish migration from Europe. And So in the 1930s and 40s, militant organizations led by European Jewish immigrants arose to try to push the British out entirely because they considered them to be, wait for it, occupiers. Two of them were called the Irgun and the Stern Gang. And their methods, well according to the British government, the US Government and even Albert Einstein, they were terroristic. Here's how Britannica describes the Irgun. Irgun Zwei Leomi, a Jewish right wing underground movement in Palestine founded in 1931 in part by Russian born political activist Zayev Jabotinsky. At first supported by many non socialist Zionist parties in opposition to the Haganah, which was basically a militia, but one that opposed violence against indigenous Arabs. The Irgun in 1936 became an instrument of the Revisionist Party, an extreme nationalist group that had seceded from the World Zionist Organization and whose policies called for the use of force if necessary to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. IRGUN committed acts of terrorism and assassination against the British whom it regarded as illegal occupiers. And it was also violently anti Arab. IRGUN participated in the organization of illegal immigration into Palestine after the publication of the British White Paper on Palestine in 1939 which severely limited immigration. Irgun's violent activities led to execution of many of its members by the British. In retaliation, Irgun executed British army hostages and things got really, really violent. On July 22, 1946, members of the Irgun blew up part of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians. Arab, British and Jewish. On April 9, 1948, a group of Irgun commandos raided the Arab village of Deir Yassin, killing more than 100 men, women and children in what's known as the Deir Yassin Massacre. But for some members of the Irgun, the organization wasn't militant enough. This episode is brought to you by Lifelock.
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Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply. In 1940, a Polish immigrant named Avraham Yer Stern broke off from the Irgun to form his own group, the Lohemi Herut Israel, or Lehi, which translates to Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the Stern Gang. And they took things to an even more extreme level, assassinating a British colonial official named Lord Moyne in 1944 and even offering to partner up with the Nazi regime in Germany in exchange for the Nazis of allowing unlimited European Jewish immigration to Palestine. Which seems crazy, but it happened. According to scholars from Tel Aviv University. Leahy published a newsletter of sorts that contained articles referring to a Jewish master race and labeling Arabs as a nation of slaves, while advocating for mass expulsion of all Arabs from all of Palestine, including what was then called Transjordan, which which today is the Kingdom of Jordan. The Stern Gang did a lot of terrorism. Their forces attacked airfields, railway yards and other strategic installations in Palestine. In addition to the assassinations and according to Britannica, after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the group which had always been condemned by moderate leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, was suppressed, though its units were eventually incorporated into the Israeli Defense Forces. Now, unlike the Irgun, which is a precursor to the Herut, or Freedom Party in Israel, and the currently ruling Likud Party, which Bibi Netanyahu belongs to, the Stern Gang left no political party behind. Avraham Sturm was eventually assassinated, apparently by British police in Tel Aviv. But he's considered a hero by some far right Israelis to this day, including having a town named after him in 1981 and pilgrimages to his Grave. Yikes. And while he was despised by mainstream and moderate Israelis, his movement and the Irgun left quite a legacy. In fact, two Israeli prime ministers in the past were members of these groups. Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, for which he and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat share the Nobel Peace Prize, was a member of the Irgun as a young man. Here's his mugshot. And Yitzhak Shamir was also a member of the Stern Gang when he was younger. And here's his mugshot. And mind you, at no time were Prime Ministers Shamir and Begin written off by the west as terrorists due to their literal affiliation with terrorist groups. Nor would any sane person have supported Great Britain had they in the 1940s responded to the bombings, the mass shootings, and the assassination of Lord Moyne, who like carpet bombing Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and starving everyone who lived in Mandatory Palestine in retaliation. Had they done that, we would have looked back on such an atrocity and called it genocide. That was even before there was a genocide convention. Fast forward to today and we're seeing extraordinary violence play out in the west bank and Gaza, with well over 60,000 Palestinians killed that we know of, and 2 million people in Gaza facing famine. And the goal of this doesn't feel like it's just to eliminate Hamas. It feels a lot more like what people with bigger guns always do. Obliterate people with less firepower to take away their land, which is also called colonization, which, by the way, the original Zionists from Europe called their project. And yes, whether it's the Afrikaners who did it in South Africa or the pictures pilgrims in America, the justification is almost always God said this land is mine. One hopes that God is not so cruel. And because the media is given little access, honestly no access by the Israeli government, the horrors in Gaza in particular are being broadcast to the world largely by Palestinian journalists, who are essentially documenting their own assassinations and the obliteration of their own families and villages. In fact, in just 18 months, Israeli forces have killed more journalists than died in the civil war, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Afghan War combined with the latest toll, including five journalists killed just this weekend when Israeli forces bombed a hospital, killing at least 15 people, including the journalists who have worked for various international media outlets. A new film by Robert Greenwald tells the story of these journalists in stark detail. It's called Journalists Under Fire, and here's a clip.
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Such a massacre against journalists in such a Short period of time is unprecedented.
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Journalists have been deliberately targeted. That would constitute a war crime.
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No foreign journalists are allowed in unless.
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They are embedded with the Israeli army.
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These local journalists are the eyes and.
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Ears of the.
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Bilal was known as the father of the Palestinian press. Heba was killed in her womb in.
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An Israeli airstrike with her 5 years old daughter.
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Imagine if this was your father or if this was your sister or your brother or your son. It's just devastating to sit back and see it happen.
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Much of what is happening there has been done with US weapons.
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The US will take over the Gaza.
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Strip, we'll own it. A clear intention by the Israeli army to impose a media blackout on Gaza by rendering journalism a deadly profession.
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Hello. And joining me now is the producer of that film, Robert Greenwald, a longtime filmmaker, award winning filmmaker and documentarian of the truth. Robert Greenwald, thanks for being here.
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It's my pleasure. Thank you for what you've done in speaking up and speaking out on this so critical issue. You are one of the only ones early on to do something and it's much appreciated and much needed.
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Thank you. That's very kind of you to say. I feel real. I feel I'm very proud of myself that you have said that about me because I am a big fan of yours and a big admirer of your work. I watched this film yesterday and it literally broke my heart, these stories, I think particularly Heba, because as a mom, you know, I related to her so much. Talk about the process of making this film and how you chose these three brave journalists to highlight.
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The process started about maybe a year, a little longer as I started seeing the stories coming in. And as a someone who's done a lot of work around different war issues, I felt it was important that we speak up and speak out. Even though, by the way, we were advised over and over again when we started not to do it, we would lose funders, we'd be attacked, all of which happened. But I also felt particularly strongly having done the Iraq war and having done the Afghanistan war, having gone to Pakistan and interviewed drone survivors, I would be the ultimate hypocrite if I didn't try to do something here. And so it also came in factor as a New York Jew, a particular subset of Jewish people from New York who are not afraid of confrontation and speaking up and making noise. So we began the process then. The question, Joy, was what could we do that might make a difference? What could we do that could impact people and policy? Now I knew we would never get the haters, the racists, the people who were committed to the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. But I felt and believed and researched, supported that there were millions of people who maybe didn't care about the issue. And the idea was if we focused on journalists, we could reach people who maybe were not engaged, did not experience the moral importance of this, but felt it's not a good idea to go out and murder journalists. That began the process. And then we went to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, which has an extraordinary website in which they detail each one of the journalists who've been killed. We use that website as the starting point. And then the job was how to determine a variety of journalists because tragically, there are now over 200. So we wanted some in front of the camera, some behind the camera, some doing research. We wanted women, we wanted men. And then the key factor from our point of view, was could we bring any of these journalists alive even though they'd been killed by using their social media? So the team, small team, myself, Casey and Sean, dug into the social media and that's how we came up ultimately, with these three people. The sad and the painful, soul wrenching truth is we could have had many, many more, but that really was a process of elimination. And when I saw the video, it just breaks my heart as a father to even talk about it, of the young girl and her birthday. That's when I knew we could do something that would universalize the people who were killed, could break through some of the numerical abstraction and could break through, frankly, some of the racist name calling. These were people like you, like me, like our families, like our friends.
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I mean, and exactly the third young man that you end the film with, you know, he was 27 years old. You know, that's the age of my middle child. And they're so young. And these are such brave journalists. Talk about the. I mean, when the United States invaded Kuwait under George Herbert Walker Bush and during the Iraq war, there were a lot of limitations placed on journalists. The idea of embedding, of trying to sort of shape the narrative from the government's point of view. But you covered that war, you've covered a lot of wars. What is the difference, if there is one, in the way that Israel is limiting access to by outside journalists to Gaza?
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Well, Liz, Israel is doing a truly horrible thing. They are murdering and killing Palestinian journalists at the same time. Lethal combination. They're saying no international journalists are allowed in. And what is the result? The result is journalists trying to do their job are not in the country, they're having less and less access to the courageous Palestinian journalists. So who do they turn to? They turn to the idf. This is by design. This is not an accident. And it's really taking a terrible toll on the stories we've seen now in the last couple of weeks. It seems that in some way the dam has broken. Partly because every day, even yesterday I sent you the note about the four additional journalists were killed. It keeps creeping up and up the number. Then you have the awful images of starvation, and then you have clearly, and apparently that Bibi and the Israeli government does not want to make a truce.
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Or of any kind and is, you know, the killing of journalists seems to me to be a part of the genocide. Right. The idea is that these people will die and no one will ever know because they will kill everyone who will tell. That's what it feels like to me.
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That's exact. It sounds horrible, and it's exactly accurate and it's exactly what's happening, as people have said. So five journalists, is that an accident? 20 journalists, is that 100? 150? 200. And then you have all the medical workers, hundreds who've been killed on top of that, and you have all the children who've been killed. Are all of those accidents, are all of those mistakes? They're not. And it's painful to talk about it. I done a lot of documentaries and films and campaigns. This one joy gave me the worst nightmares. Not that it in any way compares to what the people in Gaza are going through. But when you look and deal with these images day after day, it gets to your gut, it gets to your soul. But the most important thing is there are things we can all do, and that's what the film is for. It's a tool we've now had over. Thanks to the extraordinary effort of the Brave New Film staff and team, over a thousand free screenings all over the world, from Gaza to Washington D.C. from Israel to South Africa to Los Angeles. And it keeps growing. And the reason for the screenings is to motivate people to take action. And that's beginning to happen more and more. Not enough, not fast enough. But the pressure on the elected officials is beginning. The pressure on the media to talk about this is increasing. Unfortunately, you are a rare voice here, but hopefully there will be more.
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What do you make of the bipartisan nature of the support for this slaughter? I mean, you know, Joe Biden is a good, empathetic man in a lot of ways, but not on this. Democrats are as hardcore about continuing to provide unlimited military supplies, bombs, 2,000 pound bombs, anything Israel wants, even as they sort of lightly condemn the genocide, but they won't use that term. You're seeing the Democratic Party almost go to war against Zorhan Mamdani in part because he would not commit to visiting Israel before visiting all the, you know, boroughs of the United of New York. There is this sort of almost a militancy in terms of the Democrats view, let alone the Republicans who are, you know, many of them Christian nationalists. What do you make of the fact that there really isn't a major political party in the United States that supports the majority opinion that this needs to not be done with our money?
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Well, I begin it by saying thank goodness for Bernie Sanders. He's been extraordinary on this subject. I mean, and he's connected, by the way, the morality and the politics of it. He's encouraging elected officials not to take AIPAC money. I think there were two members of the House who had taken it, who moved. There will be more, there will be more votes coming up. He didn't get all the senators, all the Democratic senators, but since they all, since seemingly every Democratic senator wants to run for president, there is an opportunity to create pressure on the Cory Bookers of the world and others who take a moral stance on everything but this issue. I think that AIPAC money, I think that ideology, I think that old boys club where they know each other and hang out. And someone was on Tucker Carlson show who's been very good on the Tucker Carlson has been very good on this issue saying every elected official has an APEC handler who comes and talks to them regularly. Well, that's an amazing and painful level of access that we need to counter.
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It is strange and it is and it seems, you know, we just heard about, I mentioned in the open the red envelopes being handed out at Eric Adams events to members of the Chinese media. United States would never tolerate that kind of incursion by Chinese interest groups into our politics. But AIPAC seems to have, you know, really, you know, solid control. Do you believe, just as a journalist, having studied this issue for so long, that AIPAC should register as a foreign lobby? As by the way, Tucker Carlson and I agree that they should.
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It's a hell of a day when we're agreeing with Tucker Carlson is all.
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I can see and Marjorie 10th and Marjorie Taylor Greene. But I, you know, I have to be honest. I think their reasons for it are different than mine. I mean I, my, my opinion on this has not changed since seventh grade. I think theirs might be brand new or that might be. Have some other issue that they might have about certain people. And I won't, I won't go further than that. I don't know what their reasons are, but, but my reasons have nothing to do with, with, with religion or, or, or any group of people. It's this state, it's this, this militarized nuclear, expansionist state that is massacring another people, in my view, not to punish Hamas or a terrorist group, but because they want their land. It's colonization.
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It's colonization to the extreme. It's been consistent with that. And Bibi has made it worse and worse and worse by killing literally, in order to stay in power. The fact that the change in public opinion, particularly among Democrats, has been faster and stronger than anything I've ever experienced is a sign of hope and encouragement. Now, the disconnect between what people, voters are thinking and feeling on this issue and most of the elected Democrats is extraordinary. But I believe maybe I'm naive, maybe the notion, you know, democracy can't be a spectator sport will sink in. Or maybe the Leonard Cohen quote, which I have posted on my bulletin board, there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. Maybe that combination of factors will move. But it also, and this again is where I hope you audience will use the film. It's a tool. It's a tool to reach people's hearts, to touch people's souls and to get them to take action. I know I don't want to. You haven't. And many people don't want to look back and say, what did you do when that happened? There's a wonderful book called One Day. Everything will always be. Everyone will have always be against this. And that's exactly what's going to happen. But there's important things to be done now. And that's why we make the film free on all the social media platforms. The full film, short clips, anything you want, so that people can do something and not just be helpless and furious and depressed.
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One of my absolute favorite journalists in the world, who I now get to fanboy in person sort of person, virtually. Robert Greenwald, you are absolutely someone I aspire to be like. You are so good and so great and a good man. And thank you so much for being here.
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My pleasure. Thank you for what you're doing. May we have more and more of people like you doing the right thing in this critical time. Thank you, Joy.
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Cheers. Thank you so much. And I want to let all the audience know we are going to put a link to this searing, heart wrenching but really important film right here below, right below on the show link so that you guys can watch it. It is free to watch Brave New Films makes their films absolutely free so that everyone can watch them. So thank you all very much and thanks to Robert Greenwald. Okay, and now for some much needed good news. A federal district court recently issued an injunction prohibiting Texas school districts from implementing a state law requiring all public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. In his decision In Rabbi Nathan vs Alamo Heights Independent School District today, U.S. district Court Judge Fred Byery held that Texas Senate Bill 10, which is due to take effect on September 1, likely violates both the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. In other good news, a separate federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the Freedom From Religion foundation by Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction and naked lady on the zoom screen practitioner Ryan Walters. Walters and the Oklahoma State Department of Education sued in March seeking to punish FFRF for sending advocacy letters to school districts objecting to religious activity in public schools. Oklahoma's state mandate is even more specific than the one in Texas, seeming to specifically require the Trump Bible made in China to be distributed to every school since it's also got a constitution in it. The American Civil Liberties Union and its Oklahoma affiliate, which represented FFRF in the lawsuit, Washington filed a motion to dismiss in May arguing that the suit was a frivolous attempt to silence protected speech. And those are just two ways that the Freedom from Religion foundation is winning on behalf of people who actually care about the Constitution and our freedom to not be in Gilead. As a born and raised Christian myself, I believe with all of my soul that religion is perfectly fine to use as a personal moral guide, just just not as an ideological political mandate or a school lesson. And that's why I'm so proud that the Joy Reid show is being brought to you by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Because we all know that what's happening in our public schools is not about religion, it's about power. Christian nationalists are pushing Ten Commandments in classrooms, not just in Texas and Oklahoma, but in other states too, replacing counselors with school chaplains and using taxpayer funded vouchers to bankroll religious indoctrination and gut public schools. This is not what this country is supposed to be about. And it isn't about protecting faith. It's about weaponizing it against the people. That's why the Freedom From Religion foundation is stepping up, fighting back, and winning FFRF defends the wall between church and state, in courtrooms, in classrooms, and in Congress so that we can all live our lives without having to say under his eye. Want to know how you can help? Go to FFRF US School or text my first name joy to 511511 to stand up for real freedom, text joy to 511511 because once you let religion make the rules in schools, it's only a matter of time before it's making them everywhere else. Go to FFRF US School or text JOY MY NAME to 511511 and message and data rates may apply.
- [42:01]
A
Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes. But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia. She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Oh, you were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [42:32]
B
Okay, so we've talked a lot about religion today and the way that it can be misused. But there is a big difference between religion and morality. Religion is a practice which can honestly be used for good or for conflict. Morality is quite simply the concept of knowing the difference between, between right and wrong. And a lot of what we see happening in this country, including in the guise of religion, is just simply wrong. Which is why I'm always glad to have my brother and friend, Bishop William Barber with us for another Moral Monday. Bishop Barber, welcome. How you doing?
- [43:10]
A
Oh, Joy. Joy Reid, thank you for this Moral Monday again and again and again.
- [43:16]
B
We love doing the Moral Mondays because, you know, as I was saying, you know, we talked a lot about religion in this show. We had Robert Greenwald on to talk about the horrors that are happening in Gaza and just in the west bank, where people are making biblical claims to land that belongs to someone else. And I feel like religion is one of the most misused things in the world. But morality is pretty simple. It's either right or wrong, and religion has nothing to do with it. How come people get those two things so mixed up?
- [43:42]
A
Well, you're exactly right. Some people treat religion like the south used to treat the Confederate, that it changes and goes from state to state to state. In fact, a lot of Western religion, that's part of the fault. We have a church on every block, a synagogue, as though somehow there's this deep separateness. But when you talk about Morality or even just the term righteousness or justice, love, truth, loving God with all the heart, mind and soul, loving their neighbors like it becomes pretty simple in all of the religions, right? And I think that we've also had in this country, Joy, this attempt to, to moralize or to codify wrong as right. You know, you. You can never overstate all of the efforts that were done in religious circles to try to make slave masters be able to sleep at night, to try to make people who wiped out indigenous people be able to sleep at night, to make them feel as though they were quote unquote on the side of God. And so from the very time that Jonathan Winthrop did that speech on a ship, a city set on the hill, the pureness of it lasted about two minutes. He really was. It's a scripture in the Bible. It comes out of Matthew. You don't put a light under a bushel, you know, you should be a tree city set on the hill. But it's talking about love and justice and mercy and following the Beatitudes the minute they hit shore. That was not the application. The application was destroy these people that are already here no matter what. As often say those areas, we had a sick sociology immediately that said some people have to be under and other people over them. A sick biology that people are different based on biological differences and it gives you a right to mistreat them. A pathological politic came in that said every decision we have to make will be about how white supremacy stays supreme and everybody else is pushed down. And then in the evil economics, that said, whatever you do, all that matters is does it make money? And if it makes money, it's every you can justify if you make particular for a certain group. And then they said, but we got to have one more piece. We got to have a. What we call a heretical ontology. And that is that God embraced all of this. And that's been our struggle, Joy. That's been our struggle. And you can find that struggle in the libraries at Yale and Harvard and, and many places where if you go read the books from the 1700s and on forward, all of these treaties in seminaries that were trying to justify slavery. I mean, the seminary I'm at, George, the founder, was a supporter of slavery, a defender of slavery. Now his son switched and about 40% of the people that graduated were not. They didn't follow that. But he actually was an apologist for slavery and had big money and a big institution behind that. So it's been with us a long time. And now, sadly to say today, what you have with Christian nationalism. Wait a minute, Let me stop. I never call it Christian nationalism, religious nationalism. I refuse to put that word on it, that term. But religious nationalism. And you look at a movie like Bad Faith and you read the books like the Purchasing of the American Pulpit, A One Nation Under God was written by Scarlet, Princeton and Joy. They can trace the money back to the National Chamber of Commerce, the National Manufacturers association, and oil money. And today, religious nationalism and oil money are so connected, it's one of the most unholy connections I've ever seen. That's undergirding.
- [47:43]
B
You know, it's interesting that you say that. A friend of mine that was over the house yesterday said something I thought was really interesting, that, you know, we'll call it religious nationalism is an op. Because if you think about it, it is religious nationalism that calls itself Christian, that is the real force behind the support for Bibi Netanyahu and what he's doing in Israel and what he's doing and his friend Ben GVIR and Smotrich, and they're making a religious argument, and they say it's out of the Bible that says we get to take this land from y' all and we get to kill any of you that we want and just declare you all to be terrorists. But if you think about it, if you go back to 1492, it was the Catholic Church that said, launch this age of exploration, and you get on those ships, and as long as you go and bring us back some gold to gild our churches, any people you find where you are, you can colonize their land, steal their land, enslave them, and if they don't want to convert, you can kill them. This was an edict of the church.
- [48:47]
A
Manifest destiny, all that stuff come, all of it.
- [48:50]
B
And so it's always been this religious. You know, the pilgrims said, well, we're just here because God told us to come here. The Afrikaners who are live now South Africa said, sorry, Kikuyu and all you other tribes, we're here because God said we could have your land. And it's always God saying, you can have stuff. Everybody who wants somebody else's land says it's God. They keep blaming God for all of their colonialism.
- [49:09]
A
And, you know, George. And what has been the failure of the critics is twofold. You know, the abolitionist movement grew out of the church. The church split in America in 1840s, just 20 years before there was a civil war in the church, before there was a civil war in the Nation. And that was a good thing that happened because what church, many church were saying, you're not going to keep doing this with our faith. Another thing you're not going to do is keep saying God said it when we actually know the scriptures and God did not say that. So for instance, when you see Netanyahu and what he's doing and anybody like that trying to justify death and justify killing people, I did a speech some years ago for a group entitled Jewish people in support of the Palestinians. And I started off talking about what the Bible says from verse 1, that all persons are created in the imago dehi, the image of God. So any interpretation after that that suggests that this group of people is less than that we have a right to take from is violating first principle of Scripture. First principle of scripture and the prophets in the Bible. The reason we have prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, because they stood up to their own government, they stood up to ancient Jewish kings and that was their job. In fact, one of my professors said that the prophets only arose when the priest and the kings were not doing their job. That's the only time you have a prophetic move. And nine times out of 10 when they rose up, this is what they would say. Have you forgotten when you were enslaved? Have you forgotten how it felt when you were under the arm and I mean the foot of Pharaoh? Have you forgotten that God created all people in his image? So when people say, just because you say God says something, what we have to have is somebody that says where?
- [51:19]
B
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- [51:47]
A
Where does God say that? And then if you say that, you have to be taught enough, schooled enough to, to go scripture to say, because that's what they'll say it, but they won't ever point you to a scripture, right? And if they do, it's a misinterpretation. It's like, so that's one of the reasons why many of us who are theologians and biblicists, we're saying no more. You don't get a pass anymore. You don't get to Go and just say this. We're going to counter with where because we know where it says the opposite. And you cannot say well just where you find some one way off scripture. And then that if you will excuses and pushes away the one truth. Anytime I treat somebody as though they were not created in the image of God, I have violated Principle 1 of what it means to be a personal faith.
- [52:44]
B
Well, let me. I'm gonna take you back to my, my old days. A little young Sunday school teacher at in Mont Bellow, at Mont Bellow Community Christian Church is is the idea used to be as far as I understood it, that there are dozens and dozens and dozens of red letter scriptures in the Bible that say that you are to care for the poor. The least of these and the immigrant. And I want to focus on the immigrant because we already know the, the so called Christians of the right really hate the poor. They have no interest in them. They want to take everything from them. They're dragging homeless people off the streets in D.C. everything they're doing. And they claim that this is part of being a Christian. Tom Holman, however, who says he's a Catholic, is leading this charge, he and Stephen Miller and others to essentially wipe out the immigrant population in this country. To remove them all if they can get all the brown ones to go. And Kilmar Abrego Garcia is one of them who they admitted, the government admitted they wrongly detained him in the first place. Then they sent him off to a gulag in El Salvador. They couldn't leave him there, so they finally had to bring him back. But now they're saying if he will not accept being deported because they can't beat him in court because they don't have a case against him, they're saying well good, if you don't accept it, we're going to send you to Uganda where he's never been. He's been arrested again. The persecution of this immigrant to me is the most glaring. Well he and the other immigrants is the most glaring proof that these people are not Christians. And you're right, they cannot use that word. They are some religion. Maybe their religion is maga or their.
- [54:19]
A
Religion is money, the root of money, the love of money is the root of all evil. Or their religion is power and money and which in fact can be a religion. It can't be Christianity. But it can because basically when you're saying something is a religion, it is what is your ultimate value? Value? What is your, what is your, your ultimate what. What do you run to when you're in trouble when you are scared of your Paul Tilly one of the great theologians said you can say your religion is whatever you want to call it but, but, but what gives you the courage to be, to exist? What makes you get up in the morning? That's, that's and so, so money can be related throughout the Bible. It that we call it idolatry. It's called false religion. When you mentioned joy a minute ago about not only dozen, it's 2000 scriptures, not dozen now it's dozens when you look at the red letters because the red letters are what just Jesus said. But none of the what Jesus said would ever say anything about hurting people. In fact Jesus would say welcome to immigrants. That's right, care for the poor. Which is why have you ever noticed that these so called religious nationalists never bring up Jesus ever.
- [55:37]
B
As a matter of fact, they think he's too woke. Bishop. They don't just bring him up apparently from what Christianity Today did a really shocking story several months ago that said that in these right wing churches the pastors have to stop talking about Jesus because their pastorate, the folks who attend their churches believe that Jesus is too woke and they can't stand understand him because they think that he's woke because he saw he cares about the poor and he cares about the immigrant. And they don't want to hear it.
- [56:06]
A
They don't want to hear it and that's why you don't hear them preaching from Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the prophets and Jesus. The truth of the matter, the way they talk, they'd be on the side of crucifying him. In fact their actions crucify Jesus all over again. Because if you started Jesus first sermon, Luke 4:18, which by the way almost got him killed by the quote unquote religiousness when he said the spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor. But the line that got them was, the line that got them was to declare the acceptable year of the Lord which was the year of jubilee, when everybody is accepted regardless of their birth. And Jesus just told a little story. He said, listen, Jesus is as concerned, God is as concerned about a Jewish leper as God is concerned about a leper of another country. And the Bible said they went crazy. They said kill him. And then of course at the end Jesus was saying, you know, when I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was negative, when I was an immigrant, did you welcome me? When I. Because the word stranger in scripture translated out of Hebrew and translated in Greek means immigrant Right. But Joy, this is what slave master religion does. This is why Frederick Douglass said to love the religion of Jesus is to hate. He didn't just say it's dislike, he said it is to hate the so called religion of the slave master. And the reason why we have this struggle is the reason why they put Christian on things is what they're trying to suggest is there's some kind of equal moral standard between Christian right and Christian left. Which is why those of us that debate this stuff can never use their debate rules. Their rules are designed to give some kind of equal standing. So I don't call anybody the Christian right because there's no rightness in it. I don't call folk Christian left. There's none of, none of those terms are found in scripture. And one of the first things we learn in theology is where the Bible speaks, we speak where the Bible is silent, we're silent. And you use Bible names for Bible things. So, so you, you, you don't get in a conversation with somebody and allow them to bring all these categories in that they have created to try to have, quote, unquote, stand, you know, like a law case.
- [58:31]
B
The judges.
- [58:32]
A
Well, do you have standing to even be here? They want to have standing in the conversation. They paid a lot of money, as I told you in that book, One Nation, the Purchasing of the American Pulpit. One Nation called, it's called. Yeah, the Purchasing of the American Pulpit, One Nation Under God. The author points out how a man went to the business leaders of this country and said, if you give me $10 million, I'll get you 20,000 pulpits. And he went out and even had preaching contests, sermon contests, who could write the best sermons that, that contradicted with the things that Jesus said, but at the same time made it seem like it was a Christian sermon. This is the extent to which this, this and, and the reason they did it because they hated the social gospel movement. They hated the movement of the abolitionists. And they, they realized at that particular time, it was in 1930s that the, the, the people who had their pulse on the moral leanings of the nation were pulpits. And there was no way that big business could even try to stop the New Deal or try to stop labor rights or try to stop any of those things unless they infiltrated. Right, the churches. And then later on, of course, it happens right around the Moral Majority. And if you read the stuff they said, they said, this is a takeover. This is a straight up takeover. Right? There's a. I don't mean to Preach too much. But there's a scripture in the Bible, Joy, in Acts, where this guy literally calls himself Bar Jesus. B A R J E S U S and he's going around faking like he knows Jesus. And one day he tries it and some demons beat him up. And this is what they said. We know Jesus and we know Paul. Who are you? This is not real. Bar Jesus is still alive today. Bar Jesus. The attempt to take what is unholy and wrap it in holiness. God. And we have to challenge it on this immigration thing. Joy, real quickly, I've been thinking about the current person who's over the agency that is recruiting is now going on college campus and using a scripture out of the Bible to recruit people to be ICE agents. The scripture is out of Isaiah, who will go for me and who will I send? And Isaiah says, lord, send me now. Isaiah, when he said, lord, send me, he meant send me to challenge unjust kings. Send me to challenge those who are legislating evil and robbing the poor of their right. They have twisted that and are saying to these young people, if you want a call of God, if you want to accept the call of God in this moment, then you accept putting on a mask and being an ICE agent and rounding up immigrants and throwing them out. Not only is what they're doing wrong, it is insane. I preached about that yesterday, that this level of when you get up in the morning and all you can think about is who you can hurt and who you can exile and who you can punish and who you can destroy, that is a level of insanity.
- [62:03]
B
Yeah, I have another word for it, Bishop. I would say it is evil. And this is the reason that we demand that separation church and state be enforced. Because the people who want to do wrong will always use religion to try to manipulate people who are easily led or who haven't read the book for themselves. And so this use of religion, this misuse of it, this abuse of it, is how we got here. Because so many people who call themselves Christian and who in their mind think they are good Christians, are the ones who are doing the things they did. The slavery they did, the Jim Crow they were the Klan, they were supposedly a Christian organization. This has been used so long and so horribly for 400 some odd years. It has to be stopped. Bishop Barber, it's always a pleasure. I want you.
- [62:46]
A
Can I say 20 seconds and say this. When King preached his sermon at the death of those four little girls that were blown up in Birmingham 17 days after the march on Washington, he said A line, though, that we can never forget. He said, in essence, why this goes on is not just what the extremists are doing, but the appalling silence. It was not until the abolition movement and ministers stood up in this country that they were able to push back. And what I want to suggest is church and state should always be separated, but I can never separate my faith from my actions in society. And that you can call fate your faith whatever you want to, but if at the end of the day, it doesn't have a quarrel with injustice and a quarrel with meanness, it is a form of evil. Evil is a form of heresy. It is in fact wrong. And what I struggle with, joy. And what we're pushing is a Pew foundation did a study a few years ago. They studied 50,000 sermons. They looked at the things Jesus talked about the most, poverty, hunger, the sick, the immigrant. And they found that those things were only preached about less than 1%, not in so called right wing churches, but in pulpits, period. That really is the failing of, and we need to repent of that in this country. And we need, and I'm saying to preachers and bishops and all, there's a reckoning that's going to happen with us if we sit around and allow these things to happen and claim to be clergy and we laugh at or dismiss this religious nationalism and we do not take it on funnelly and take it on with the gospel both in word and in action. That's what concerns me more than how can you be silent in this moment? How can you be silent with folk passing bills that are going to cost 50,000 people to die in one year, like with this deadly bill. How can you be silent with what's happening to immigrants and voting rights? How can you be silent? And if you, I said it yesterday, it might get me in trouble. But if you are a pastor or whatever and you are asking people to bless you for your pastor's anniversary, but then you are silent on what people need in living wages and health care, and you're not standing right beside them. And the immigrants in your community, you are engaged in a form of pastoral malpractice and you need to repent of it because there's no way in the world our pulpit should be this. And I'm not talking about just saying a sermon on King Day or one sermon out of a month, this, the times in which we live. There's no reason why every pastor that loved the Lord ought not have the Bible, the scripture, the scripture, the Bible, a death report and a newspaper in their hand and that ought to be the basis of their preaching every Sunday. Every Sunday.
- [66:02]
B
Amen. And I know one bishop who does, and that is you, Bishop William Barber. Thank you, my friend. I so appreciate you. Thank you.
- [66:08]
A
See you again. Take care. Bye bye.
- [66:10]
B
See you soon. Thank you very much. And Bishop Barber is going to come back because we have an issue that is going on with our indigenous folks, the Apache that he has turned me on to. We're going to do some research on that so that we can bring him back to talk about that. Because the evil against the land is part of the evil. Thanks always to Bishop Barber for another moral Monday. I want to thank all of you also for joining us today. Thank you to the Freedom from Religion foundation for also sponsoring us. We appreciate it. Thank you all for tuning in on YouTube, Substack and Spotify. Be sure to hit like and subscribe right below to keep this content coming. And be sure to hit share to add more members to our online family. Special big ups to our team TJRS members and also our readers who upgraded on substack. And and we do check all the chats. So yes, the merch is coming. I'm wearing some of the test merch right now. It is coming along with more chats and behind the scenes peeks. All the things, all the things are coming. So stay woke out there, stay safe and we will see you on the next the Joy Reid show. Bye bye.
- [67:17]
A
Okay, it.