Are We Still Boycotting Target and WTF Is Going on With Iran? | The Joy Reid Show LIVE!

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Are We Still Boycotting Target and WTF Is Going on With Iran?”

The Joy Reid Show LIVE! — March 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This two-hour episode of The Joy Reid Show dives deep into two major issues capturing national and global attention:

1. The status, impact, and competing narratives around the ongoing boycott of Target, including its evolution, leadership disputes, and tangible outcomes.
2. The latest U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran (notably the bombing of Tehran’s iconic Azadi Stadium), government transparency about war, and the role of corporate and sports institutions in global propaganda and repression.

Guests include Pastor Jamal Bryant, journalists Georgia Fort and Dave Zirin, and activists Tamika Mallory and Nina Turner—each adding insight and personal experience to unravel the multi-layered stories.

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Main Topics & Key Discussion Points

1. Oscars Recap & Cultural Commentary

• Joy opens with a vibrant, satirical rundown of the 98th Academy Awards, highlighting diversity wins, historic moments, and political statements from the stage.
  • Memorable quote (05:05):
    “I think they really enjoyed the sort of, I don't know, like racist America, civil rights, warped porn. I don't know what that was. It was a good movie, though.” — Joy Reid

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2. The Target Boycott: Is It Over? Is It Ongoing? Who Decides?

A. Origins & Fractures (06:30–22:30)

• Jamal Bryant initially announces (06:31) “victory” for the Target boycott, only to issue an apology after backlash for overstepping:
  • “I made assumptions that were not true. And I wanted to apologize to you for being a leader that was out of touch with what it is that the community wanted and sensed.” — Jamal Bryant [08:15]
• Joy emphasizes the distinction between the “Target Fast” (religiously-led, Pastor Bryant’s initiative) versus multiple “Target Boycotts”:
  • National boycott (spearheaded by Senator Nina Turner, Tamika Mallory, Pastor Bryant)
  • Local/National boycott (Minneapolis-based, led by Nakima Levy Armstrong, Monique Cullors Doty, Jaylani Hussein)
  • Additional factions (e.g., activists protesting ICE collaboration in Target stores)
• Parallels drawn to civil rights movement history: Leadership contention is a legacy theme (Medgar Evers vs. Bob Moses, local vs. national).

B. Minnesota Organizers & Nuanced Demands (22:47–36:25)

• Georgia Fort describes the powerful, multi-racial, intersectional boycott movement in Minneapolis, highlighting:
  • Expansion from DEI rollbacks to opposition of ICE activities in Target stores [27:56]
  • High Somali and Latino community engagement due to Trump-era anti-immigrant policies
  • Unique local impacts: physical proximity of Target HQ to George Floyd protest sites

C. Local v. National Frictions & Media Failures (36:25–41:49)

• Local leaders (notably, Dr. Nakima Levy Armstrong) express resentment toward national media and celebrity activists for overshadowing/minimizing grassroots efforts.
• Georgia Fort points out: Information silos and media shortcuts have blurred the distinction between movements, fueling misunderstandings.

D. National Leaders’ Perspectives & On-the-Record Timeline (40:12–52:52)

• Nina Turner & Tamika Mallory clarify:
  • They never encouraged folks to resume shopping at Target [40:12]
  • A boycott call was publicly issued on Jan. 25th, 2025, by Turner, adding:
    “There is no way that, that someone can co-opt a movement or steal something that they started and put out into the world first.” — Tamika Mallory [45:20]
  • Acknowledge persistent tensions due to media oversimplification and personality clashes between local and national organizers.

E. Current Status & Achievements (52:52–69:39)

• Is the boycott over?
  “The boycott continues. We don’t have the power to stop a boycott. The boycott continues.” — Nina Turner [53:54]
• Impact: Boycott correlated with Target’s stock drops; company has reportedly shown some transparency and “progress” in DEI and financial commitments, but not enough (per activists).
• Media’s role: Mainstream coverage focused on celebrities/leaders, ignoring the ground game and parallel organizing.
  “The only villain in this story is Target.” — Joy Reid [70:37]

F. Summary Table: The Parallel Target Boycotts

| National Boycott Leaders | Local/MN Boycott Leaders | Additional Demands/Groups | |----------------------------------|----------------------------------|---------------------------| | Nina Turner, Tamika Mallory, | Dr. Nakima Levy Armstrong, | Anti-ICE activists | | Jamal Bryant | Monique Cullors Doty, Jaylani Hussein | |

• Key Demands (from Minneapolis coalition): Explicit DEI restoration, ICE-free Target, transparency in community engagement, end to racialized surveillance, justice for Mahdi Ali

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3. US/Iran: War, Propaganda, and Bombing of Azadi Stadium (80:00–106:00)

A. Media Censorship and Authoritarianism Allegations

• Joy details government intimidation against media (FCC threatening licenses for ‘bad war coverage’), drawing historic parallels (Vietnam, Iraq).
• Notable Quote (81:44):
  “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest or they will lose their licenses. Changing course is in their own business interest, since trust in legacy media has fallen to an all time low.” — quoting FCC Chair Brendan Carr

B. Destruction of Azadi (Freedom) Stadium

• Dave Zirin (Nation): The U.S. bombing was “an act to kill hope,” symbolically and tangibly devastating Iran’s youth, sporting culture, and women’s rights movement.
  • “If you understand the genocide in Gaza as basically a dress rehearsal...now this administration thinks it can get away with [it] throughout the Middle East.” — Dave Zirin [88:15]
  • Parallels to Israel’s bombings of sport venues in Gaza; warnings of a “Joyless World Cup” and real concerns of international boycotts, travel advisories, and U.S. “totalitarianism.”
• Discussion of sport as soft power and FIFA’s complicity, with scathing criticism of U.S. plans to replace bombed societies with stadiums intended for Western/international audiences.

C. Broader Geopolitical Disillusionment

• Joy: The U.S. public is being “herded away from blaming the countries who started the war.”
• Emphasizes the need for skepticism about all government war narratives, citing the fog of the Vietnam war and Iraq War lies [107:07 ff].

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4. Immigration “Backtrack,” Policy Hypocrisy, and Who Really Profits (110:52–124:10)

• Joy exposes the “scam” of mass deportation rhetoric: Despite promises, Trump administration actually deported fewer people than Biden, with negative net migration harming industry and the economy.
  • “MAGA, you got played so bad...What did you get for your vote? If you can tell me one thing you got. By the way, they're going to close the Kennedy center for two years...” — Joy Reid [119:39]
• Highlights the perverse profit motive for private contractors, the collapse of Social Security, and ongoing “slavery” via forced migrant labor.
• Bitter sarcasm about how the only winners are contractors and oligarchs—not the people who voted for these policies.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Victory is ours... I'm appreciative. And sometimes we've got to celebrate small steps. But this fight for us has now reached its conclusion.” — Jamal Bryant (declaring end of Target fast) [06:31]
• “Please tell me what [Nina Turner] is, because I know her to be a black woman...It almost feels so petty to have a 'who started it first' conversation.” — Tamika Mallory [45:20]
• “The boycott continues. We don’t have the power to stop a boycott. This is the people's movement.” — Nina Turner [53:54]
• “We should call it the Trump Epstein administration at this point.” — Joy Reid [100:12]
• “If you want to go far, go together. Many hands make for light work...We all came at this with integrity, but nobody is perfect.” — Nina Turner [62:09]
• “They may have felt they won the battle about ending the Target fast... But the boycott itself, which was a separate thing, is not over.” — Joy Reid [71:14]
• “The media has really gotten it wrong. We have to continue to hold the line and continue to bring factual, accurate, timely information to our community.” — Georgia Fort [36:47]
• “If there's one thing they probably know about soccer...unless you're a goalie, you're not supposed to touch the sports soccer ball with your hands.” — Dave Zirin [91:07]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |--------------------------------------------|-----------------| | Oscars & Opening Monologue | 00:00–06:00 | | Target Boycott: Jamal Bryant’s Statements | 06:31–08:46 | | Deep Dive: Boycott History & Discord | 08:46–22:47 | | Georgia Fort: MN Perspective | 22:47–36:25 | | Media's Role & Parallel Organizing | 36:25–41:49 | | Perspectives: Mallory & Turner | 40:12–69:39 | | War on Iran, Media Censorship, Zirin | 80:00–106:00 | | U.S. Immigration Policy Hypocrisy | 110:52–124:10 | | Closing/Joy’s Podcast Plug & Outro | 124:10–end |

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Original Language & Tone

The episode keeps Joy’s trademark satirical, irreverent, and incisive style. Guests are candid, occasionally fiery, and deeply personal. Tense debates are addressed head-on; moments of humor, sarcasm, and resignation punctuate the dialogue, especially around media and political failures.

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Takeaways for New Listeners

• The Target boycott is ongoing—“ended” only in narrow contexts (the clergy-led fast). Local and national efforts continue independently.
• Movements are complex: Genuine grassroots activism often gets erased or confused by national figures and media who favor more prominent names over nuanced, on-the-ground organizing.
• Media and government are failing the public—whether by trivializing resistance, silencing dissent, or obfuscating the grim realities of war.
• The U.S. is facing internal contradictions between stated policy goals (on immigration, civil rights, democracy) and real-world outcomes—often to the profit of elites at the cost of ordinary people.
• Hope and resistance depend on local journalism, intersectional organizing, and honest, critical engagement—against corporate and governmental overreach.

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For deep context, check out further reporting by Georgia Fort (georgiafort.com), Dave Zirin’s coverage at The Nation, and the demands of the National Target Boycott coalition.

Transcript

[Joy Reid]

Okay,

Well, everyone, happy Monday and welcome to the Joy Reid Show. Hope you guys had a fantastic and fabulous weekend. Big up to everybody that is in the chats. Hello to everybody over here on YouTube to my right. Also in front of me on Substack, as well as on Facebook, our adorable Twitchies on Twitch, of course, our friends on LinkedIn, as well as all of those listening on podcast platforms like Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening, we just appreciate that you're here. Please be sure, if you have not done so already, to go ahead and hit like. Even though I've only said about two dozen words, you could still hit like, because you've liked the words I've said. They've been very nice. You can also hit share if you want to tell a friend, maybe telephone, maybe a. A Trump loving for Trump loving relative. You want to just piss them off, go ahead and share it with them and let them get. Get down with it. Yes. Hello, everybody saying, hey, Auntie Joy. Hey, hey, y'.

[Tamika Mallory]

All.

[Joy Reid]

And I'm definitely in auntie mode today.

[Jamal Bryant]

Say hi, Jason.

[Joy Reid]

Say hi to everyone. He's just audio. He's audio, Jason. Today I've got my cup of tea. Still trying to get over a little bit of a cold. So thank you all for bearing with me. Everybody says, happy felon Day. That's hilarious. We are answering the questions about Target. We are. And we have two of the national organizers of the Target boycott, which we're going to explain to you the difference between that and the Target pass. We're also going to talk Iran. Very excited that Dave Zirin is going to be here an hour too. We're going to talk about the destruction of that iconic Iranian football stadium and what that means for the way that the US Is, you know, sort of prosecuting the war and also whether you can trust the information that you're getting from your government when it comes to the wars. We have a big show tonight, but I want to. First, before we get to that, let me get to some of the headlines from last night. We, of course, know that last Night was the 98th Oscars, the Academy Awards telecast. Ooh, that's a different one. That's on it, Jason. That's on it. And so it is the big winner. Oh, well, that. That's a one. The big winner was one battle after another, which took Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson, among its total of six statues, as well as the first ever Oscar for Best casting. A new category, Sean Penn who was the best supporting actor winner wasn't even there. He's actually in Ukraine, where he's instead met with President Volodymore Volodymyr Zelensky. That's what he was doing. Sinners, which had a record 16 nominations, only got four. They got a fourth of the ones they were nominated for, including best actor for Michael B. Jordan, who played twins Smoke and Stack, prompting many in the new black Twitter called Threads to joke that a brother has to play two people to win one best actor nod. Tip your waiters. In his acceptance speech, Michael B. Jordan, he thanked the black actors who came before him. It was a really lovely speech center cinematographer Autumn Derald Arkapa made history as the first ever woman to win best cinematography. And Sinner's director Ryan Coogler accepted the Statue, the Oscar for Best Original screenplay. So it was interesting you knew one of the two was going to win best picture because one battle after another got best adapted screenplay and Sinners got Best Original Screenplay. So it was kind of going to go one way or the other, but it was definitely a one battle after another night. Meaning that, you know, Hollywood, I think they really enjoyed the sort of, you know, sort of, I don't know, like racist America, civil rights, warped porn. I don't know what that was. It was a good movie, though. But anyway, that's the way it went. Frankenstein, which is actually a very good film, it took home three Oscars, while K Pop Demon Hunters won two, including the Oscar for Best Original Song. They beat the Sinners theme song in that one. A lot of people were upset about that. The Perfect Neighbor, which told the story of a story that I covered back when I was at the Artist formerly known as MSNBC. The murder of a GK AJ Owens in 2023 by her unhinged neighbor. And this doc was told entirely through police body cam footage. It was such an innovative doc, I thought it was going to win. It surprisingly did lose the best feature documentary award to a film called Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The winners of that gave actually a really impactful speech. I'm sure it's a terrific film, but I would have argued that Gita Gandhier should have taken that Oscar home. That's just my opinion. A portion of the show was dedicated to the many actors, writers and filmmakers who died in 2025. Billy Crystal gave a moving tribute to Rob Reiner, who, of course, with his wife Michelle, was murdered, allegedly by their son. There was also tributes to Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, other legends like Diane Keaton, who he Lost last year. A good reminder that Robert Redford was a good looking man. Those young pictures, I was like, ooh, he was handsome. One of the high points of last night was the Sinner's musical performance featuring I Lied to you, which was done by an all star cast of musicians which was led by Miles Caton. Raphael. Siddiq Shabuzzi was in it. Misty Copeland. It was actually one of the most amazing performances I personally have ever seen at an Oscars telecast. Javier Bardem did some politics. There was a few of the actors who were wearing anti ice and pro Palestine pins. Javier Bardem got up and said, f ice and free Palestine from the stage. He was the only person to do something overtly political. Jimmy Kimmel got a testy response from the White House spokesman for making fun of Melania's documentary Bomb, which did bomb, and of Trump. So there was that. They wigged out over that. So that's it. So let's. That is the kind of update on last night's Oscars telecast. Moving on to the other thing that was still cooking over the weekend, and that is the question of whether the Target boycott is over and the question of whether we still boycott in Target or not. And I got a lot of text in my phone on this question. Somebody said, boycotting until Jesus comes. That's not the. Okay, well, so, so, so essentially there was a. I don't know if you have the clip. It's labeled a four on my end, Jason. It should be a video and it should be a four. That's what it should be labeled. If you've got that.

[Jamal Bryant]

That we can claim in this hour that victory is ours. It was done because black people and brown people and conscientious people had a made up mind that we can make a difference and we can make an impact. And so could things be different? Yes, but things are better. And I'm appreciative. And sometimes we've got to celebrate small steps. The question that has been asked of us over the Last year of 35 Fortune 500 companies who have walked away from DEI, why did we pick Target first? And the answer to that, resoundingly, is Target is the only one we invited to the cookout. They were the only ones we felt were kissing cousins. They are the only Fortune 500 company that got a hood nickname. We, we called them Tajay because we had let them into the house. And so it was not just a abandonment of dei, but we felt as if it was a betrayal to it. We are effectively today closing this chapter because we have other fights that we've got to see and other things that we've got to tackle. But I'm grateful and I give God all of the glory for what it is that he's been able to do. So thank you for praying with us, marching with us, and standing with us, and stay tuned for the next fight. But this fight for us has now reached its conclusion.

[Joy Reid]

Well, that was Wednesday. By Friday, that seemingly conclusory statement by Pastor Jamal Bryant, who was a. You know, he's obviously a legend in terms of civil rights activism and pastoring, morphed into an apology. And let's see if you have that.

[Jamal Bryant]

A five, Jason saying, no matter what happened, you were not going back. I was reading from a different sheet of music. I made assumptions that were not true. And I wanted to apologize to you for being a leader that was out of touch with what it is that the community wanted and sensed what it is that the community were demanding. It's much greater than those four, and I've heard you overwhelmingly so. And.

[Joy Reid]

And so it was very clear that Pastor Bryant got the message that folk ain't going back to target. There was lots of social media response, lots of people saying, yeah, I. Yeah, we're never going back. And that when saying that was over. But the story of the boycott is. Is. Is. First of all, it's much bigger than the target fast, which was not the whole boycott. And I can't say this enough. The target fast and the boycott were actually two different things. And what Pastor Bryant did, and somebody who said they respect humble apology and they expect humility, is because people had been conflating for 400 days his target fast with the overall target boycott. There was a local boycott, a boycott that sprung from the Minneapolis community. There was a national boycott, which I'm going to explain to you going forward. And then there was the target fast, which was the one that attracted the most attention. Because Jamal Bryan is famous, if we're just being honest, and the mainstream media is always going to gravitate toward the most famous person. That target fast that Pastor Bryant was leading was not, and I cannot say this enough with a capital not. Was not the target boycott. It was one aspect of the target boycott. So when Pastor Bryant declared the end of the target fast, people thought, oh, hold on, he's trying to say we're ending the boycott. That wasn't quite true. There were tensions existing between the national and the local activism. There are acts of activism that were not always aligned and that were definitely not the same I'm going to get into that more. But this is not new. This is not new, okay? The way that this whole thing has played out. And again, it's bigger than the target, fast. And it is a question that actually really dates back. You can go all the way back to the civil rights movement, namely, who is the leader of any movement? Is there a leader when there's a movement or does it just come from the ground up? And is that leadership self declared or imposed on a community? There's a difference. Let's go back. If you go back to the Medgar Evers era, which I wrote a whole book about, spent a long time researching it. When Bob Moses, if you've read Medgar and Merle, you will read in that book that when Bob Moses, who's the guy at the bottom there and who's also in the upper left left hand corner of your screen, came down to Mississippi, okay? And you can see him there with Julian Vaughn, that's actually Julian Bond next to him. When he came to Mississippi to go into the Mississippi Delta in 1961 to try to register voters in the hardest state in the country to register voters in, under the auspices of the great Ella Baker and the growing national SNCC movement. Medgar Evers, who was the main activist in Mississippi at that time and who would be the first field secretary of the naacp. He was NAACP field secretary. He welcomed them on the one hand, but he also expressed genuine frustration. I have the letters, I have the research to he expect incredible frustration at the fact that this nationalized effort of these Northerners, this mathematician from New York and his other fellow Northerners were coming down to the Delta and effectively blotting out the local efforts that had been in place for years. Some of the people in that photo that you see were already working with Medgar Evers and they were already trying to build a movement in regional Mississippi. And then in come the Northerners who know everything and are mathematicians and are brilliant and smart and said, we're going to register voters. And Medgar said both, I'm going to welcome you, I'm going to give you office space in our building that we're operating, then I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna bail you out of jail when y' all inevitably get arrested. But he did express a lot of frustration that these northern national people were coming and swooping in to his territory effectively and trying to redo efforts that were already underway. He told them, you're not gonna be able to register those voters. They're too Scared to vote. They're afraid they're gonna get lynched. Lo and behold, they didn't register very many voters. And. And he's like, I could have told you. They all worked together. We just never saw the rancor. Because the civil rights movement was like a duck, where it looked so serene on top, but the paddling underneath, you just didn't see it. You could say the same thing about Montgomery, Alabama. I promise you, if you could get in a time machine and go back to Montgomery, Alabama, I promise you, you would find some local leaders who were very attuned to what was happening on the ground, who were like, well, here comes Dr. King. Rosa Parks got arrested December of 1955. All of a sudden, in comes King in this national movement. And there were probably local people who were like, we already were trying to do something, and now y' all just paying attention to King. I promise you, we just didn't see it. Because now what's different is we have social media. The Montgomery bus boycott was only supposed to last very briefly, like a week. It ended up lasting 11, 13 months. And it wasn't initially planned to be that, but it grew. It expounded to the point where Medgar Evers, while being frustrated, was that the northerners were coming, wanted King to come and do a Montgomery style movement in Jackson, Mississippi. So it's like the national attention helps to boost the movement, but it also can frustrate the local movement. But you need to know that when Target made that announcement In January of 2025, January 25, that they were going to end DEI, there were local leaders, most who are already attuned to the movements following George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police and other murders by police who were already active on the ground. So even as Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, through her organization We Are Somebody, became the first person we've done the research to call officially for a Target boycott on January 25, and then recruited her friend and fellow activist Tamika, Tamika Mallory, and said, you can come and can you put your organization involved as well? Which is called Until Freedom. And also reached out to Pastor Jamal Bryant of New Birth Church in Atlanta. We call it Big New Birth because I used to go to Little New Birth in Miami when she recruited them. There were also local organizers in Minneapolis who were also making plans that would lead to the rollout of what they also called a national boycott against Target, which had its own demands. Here are their names and here's a picture if you have a seven. There they are. Monique Cullors Doty, who's the co founder of Black Lives Matter, Minneapolis, Minnesota and who is the aunt of a young man named Marcus Gold golden, who was killed by police in St. Paul. Jaylani Hussein, who's the executive director of Care Minneapolis, which is the Islamic directed organization that tries to bring Muslims into the civil rights space. And civil rights attorney Dr. Nikima Levy Armstrong of the Racial Justice Network who played a key role in getting those officers involved in murdering George Floyd arrested and charged. She also played a role in getting charges against the officer who killed a young man named Dante Wright. She was also a lead organizer after Jamar Clark and Philando Castile were killed. Remember? So those cases, all of those things happened in Minneapolis. So she's an on the ground organizer. And you will recall her if you do not remember that name from that church protest in Minneapolis if you have a 8. Jason

[Nina Turner]

David Easterwood is a pastor here. He is also the director of the field office for ICE in St. Paul.

[Joy Reid]

So someone who claims to worship God,

[Nina Turner]

teaching people in this church about God,

[Joy Reid]

is out there overseeing ICE agents.

[Jamal Bryant]

What do you think of this?

[Georgia Fort]

I mean, this is unacceptable.

[Tamika Mallory]

It's shameful.

[Joy Reid]

It's shameful to, to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship.

[Jamal Bryant]

But there are folks who will say,

[Joy Reid]

I have to take care of my flock.

Listen, we live in the Constitution, the

[Jamal Bryant]

First Amendment to freedom of speech and freedom to assemble and protest. We're here to worship.

[Joy Reid]

We're here to worship Jesus because that's the hope of these cities, that's the

hope of the world is Jesus Christ.

We are now engaged. We can pull that. We can pull. So that is Nakima Levy Armstrong. Dr. Nikima Levy Armstrong. So that's the same protest organizer who, who launched their own local, what they also called a national boycott against Target. That national Target boycott existed all this time alongside the national effort which started at Lent last year, of the 40 day target fast, which was led by Pastor Bryant who organized clergy to do this 40 day fast. And then the until freedom and the we are somebody efforts which merged with that, those were also a national boycott. You see how this became confusing. And then last spring after Easter when the Target fast was supposed to end, Pastor Brian announced they're going to extend it. We're extending it Montgomery bus boycott style. And it lasted through two meetings with Target because again, Target got to choose who they were going to talk to. They decided to talk with Pastor Bryant because he's the national figure. They weren't talking to the local people because they didn't want to and the local Minnesota leaders never got the attention from the heads of Target. The former CEO, though, had to resign because. Because Target's bottom line was getting destroyed. Traffic in the stores were going down. Target didn't know what to do. They tried to blame it on the tariffs, but they couldn't get away from the fact that the Target boycott was hurting them. People wouldn't go to ESSENCE Fest because Target was there and they were in the last year of a four year deal. There was a fiduciary obligation. ESSENCE couldn't just pull out of that deal. They would have gotten sued. But people were like, if Target's there, I'm not there. And that was all building. The these two parallel efforts were happening at the same time. And once Pastor Bryant said, we're extending it now, these two parallel efforts, the Target fast, which is literally clergy saying, we're going to keep our flocks out of Target, the national effort that Nina and Tamika are leading, and this local effort, which also calls itself the National Target boycott, all these things are motoring together, all, all happening simultaneously. But we out here in the world are viewing them as the same thing, viewing them as one big metastatic thing when they were not operating together in tandem ever, they were operating independently of one another. So when Pastor Bryant announces that he's going to end one of them, it was taken as he's ending all of them. But the problem is, and he humbly admitted this, and I will give him credit for that, that that was an error because the people had already taken the boycott from being a movement with a leader who people perceive to be Jamal Bryant and made it their own. And the local leaders, and you might have seen one of them, Nakima, on Roland Martin's show over the weekend, going off on Pastor Bryant and on Nina and on Tameka in very disparaging ways. I'm not replaying it because I think if you've seen it on there, you've seen it. But what you have now is a real rage from the local leadership who believe that their national boycott has been ignored with their specific demands that were slightly different from the demands in the national side. Add to that, I'm going to make it even more complicated. Then Donald Trump started rousting immigrants and Target cooperated. Target was allowing ICE to operate in its stores. We're now talking about George Floyd's Minneapolis, where you have Target operating and allowing its stores to be used by the regime to hurt people. And so then you get another set of activists who get on board, not the Original three in Minneapolis, a different set that, that have an ecclesiastical multiracial movement whose goal is to get ICE to, to get Target to stop cooperating with ice. So then they've got demands too. They're all churning in this one movement. But the most famous person, Jamal Bryant, is the person who comes out and makes the claim that something is ending without being able to, without having the authority to end it all. Joining me now is somebody who can explain all this much better than me because she is the award winning journalist who's been covering this from the Minneapolis side from the get go. The great Georgia Fort is here. Georgia. I have done my best to explain how these national and local movements have inter. Have not intersected actually, but have existed in parallel this whole time. Can you please talk to me about the origins of and personnel in the Minneapolis movement?

[Georgia Fort]

Yeah, absolutely. Joy, thanks so much for having me on. As you know, I am an independent journalist based in Minnesota and I have been covering what is called the national Target Boycott here in Minnesota since it started. And the one thing I think all of this has really illuminated, Joy, is that there is an information war that's happening that depending on what region you're in and, and who you follow and where you get your information, there are people who are here who never heard about what was happening there, and there's people there who never heard about what was happening here. But it doesn't negate that. There was a lot of things happening and their collective movements that, as you mentioned, were happening simultaneously, both evolved in their own ways. And so here in Minnesota, there are three leaders. One, I would say, is an international leader. You have Jelani Hussein, who is the executive director of CARE Minnesota. He represents the Somali community and he has been very vocal about Islamophobic attacks by the Trump administration. A lot of people don't know in Minnesota we have one of the highest numbers of mosque fires that happen. He's always there supporting his community and speaking out on international issues. He's a Somali man himself. Right. Then you have Monique Kohler's doty, who's the co founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota. Her nephew was also killed by police. Marcus golden here in Minnesota. And so she's been on the front lines for decades advocating for justice for local families. And then Dr. Reverend Civil Rights Attorney Nakima Levy Armstrong, who has been boots on the ground here from Jamar Clark to Philando Castile, George Floyd, Dante Wright on the front lines, always demanding justice. She's done op EDS in the New York Times. These are all prominent Leaders, not just here locally, but certainly nationally. And I think even with Jailani, some would say internationally. And so they sent out a press release Jan. 28. They, on Jan. 30, held their first press conference. And the thing I think that's very unique about the way in which the Minnesota national Target boycott happened is when people were seeing all of the ICE activity here. It really became, from my vantage point as a journalist covering this, it became an expansion of what the movement represented. Now, when you think about dei, which were always the original demands from all sides, right, DEI is very inclusive of the Latino community, but we certainly in those early months did not see a lot of Latino people speaking out very passionately about boycott. Boycotting Target. Well, in Minnesota. In Minnesota, that changed when there was a lot of ICE activity. Unidos Minnesota, and their leaders in the Latino community stepped out and said, hey, we're seeing ICE Stage at these Target stores. If you guys want to do something, just stop, boy. Just stop shopping at Target, right? And so the. The movement here expanded. And I think that was very significant. When Trump went On the Record nationally and attacked Ilhan Omar and then said all Somali people were garbage, Jaylani used his intersectionality in terms of his identity to call for the Somali community, his brothers and sisters, to join him in boycotting Target. And so we saw these expansions in the boycott here that seem to be very effective now. When I hear people talk about the Target fast and engaging the. The church community and 300,000 people signing up, I mean, that is a very significant impact for this boycott. And we saw it reflected, and we're still seeing it reflected in the financials. And so I think the difference with Minnesota, especially if you're not in the region, is you may not have seen it. What was happening here hit national headlines. There may not be a metric, a tangible number, to say 300,000 people signed up. But, Joy, you saw that photo in the middle of winter, negative 20 degrees, tens of thousands of people out protesting ice. There's so much intersectionality in the movements that are happening here. A lot of those people that you saw on the street asking for ICE to get out are the same people who are participating in the Target boycott. And. And so I think Jelani is a representative of that. Luis from Unidos is a representative of that. And when you talk about what DEI is, yes, originally the boycott was launched by black leaders all across this country, but particularly here in Minnesota, I think that they have done an extremely effective job of engaging other people who are impacted by dei. Rollbacks.

[Joy Reid]

Yeah. And obviously the Alex Preddy and Renee Goode murders. It all kind of rolls in because there were white folks who were saying, what is the action? We're taking it against who? Let me show a piece of video that became very. It's become iconic of the overall movement re ice. And this is Greg Bevino, who's no longer running border patrol, rolling through a Target. This is a dine if you have it, Jason. And so people recognize that Target, like Home Depot, became a seat of ice activity. Can you talk about their role there?

[Georgia Fort]

Absolutely. This is why in Minnesota, Joy, it is personal for people. At least that is what I have been hearing in the conversations that I've had with people as I've been reporting on this. You know, it's for people in Minnesota, a lot deeper than just a boycott. It's a lot deeper than just dei. This right here, this video that you're watching happened in Minnesota. Target is headquartered in Minnesota and they have a very prominent location that is located directly across the street from the third Precinct where Derek Shavin worked.

[Joy Reid]

The former Jason. As, as, as George is saying that a 10 shows actually that map which I actually got from the research from Georgia. We have that screenshot, if we could yet he'll show up. Keep going. Yes.

[Georgia Fort]

Yeah. And so you can see there, Target has a large amount of property directly across the street from where the third Precinct burned. That's the precinct where Derek sh. Work, the officer who worked for the Minneapolis Police Department. And so all those people, those thousands of people you see standing there. Target was the backdrop of their protests. A lot of them tried to go to Target to get milk when they got chemical agents in their eyes. Eventually Target ended up pushing people out and Target ended up getting looted and burned. But they made a commitment to Minnesotans. They said, we're going to stay. We are not going to abandon you. We're going to rebuild. And as a part of their rebuild, they engaged a lot of local black owned businesses. They tokenized them. They put their products and their faces in the entryway of that store. When you walked in and it looked like no other location. When you go in there now, it doesn't look like that. And so I think while people may have heard about the Target boycott from different places, places, Minnesota has been extremely consistent. Their campaign has been.

[Joy Reid]

We just lost your audio. Georgia, if you can hear me, we just lost your audio. Hold on. Give it another shot and see if we can get it back. See if we have you. Testing, testing. No. Okay, we're going to take you off stage for a moment and see if we can get it back. But, yeah, I mean, the, the, the reality is, and Georgia, again, has been the journalist on the ground who's been covering this. So Target's rollback of DEI was just one thing they were doing. That's just one thing they were doing. In Minneapolis, where they are based. They were doing a lot of things. They were under, essentially undergirding the police state in Minnesota. They were viewed as collaborating and collaborators with the state. Let's see if we can get Georgia back. And that is part of why they were being protested. Go ahead, Georgia.

[Georgia Fort]

Well, yeah, and so I think for people across the. The rest of the country, I know that there is a lot of people who have been paying attention to what's happening in Minnesota, and there's some who are unaware of anything that has occurred here. I have reported on more than a dozen different actions that have happened in relationship to the national Target boycott in Minnesota over the last year. And so I think what's really important for people to know who have not been following the Target boycott in Minnesota is that there are these nuances, these details like you showed Bovino going into Target, the Target being directly across the street from the third Pre Precinct, Target being headquartered in Minnesota. All of these details, I think, are why Minnesota is continuing to hold the line. And quite frankly, Joy, it sounds like the majority of the country is. Is with them. Because overwhelmingly I have heard, especially from black women, that they are not going back to Target. And so regardless of whatever the confusion was last week about whether the boycott is over or not, what we have heard from local leaders on the ground that they're continuing to double down on the national Target boycott.

[Joy Reid]

And you know, the question for Target has always been, is this a temporary breakup from black America or are they Denny's? Like, like, are they. Are they one of those companies that we just never go back to and we let them drift off like Woolworths, you know, that finally let black folk in. But then we were like, you know, it's really not worth eating there. The food is actually crap. And they didn't want to go back. And so that is their question. And I'm getting the sense that they are Denny's. Let's look at the website, because just to be clear, the national Target boycott, this is the website for it. I just went on it today and did this screenshot. It still exists. It's still recruiting supporters. It's still there. One of the things that is interesting is when you get to this part about co founders. Their pictures aren't there, which I always thought was a little odd, and I scrolled back on it. But there is still a national Target, which they call the National Target Boycott. We're going to now put up their demands. Jason, this is a 12. Their demands are they're slightly contiguous with what we saw in the Target fast, meaning restore and strengthen DEI commitments. But they want it explicit, not just renaming it something else, but explicitly restore it. They want ICE out. They want to publicly. They want Target to publicly oppose the ICE surge. They want community engagement and transparency. They want to end corporate complicity in racialized surveillance. They want to protect constitutional rights and Fourth Amendment policy and due process injustice. And there's somebody named Maddie Ali. Can you tell us who that is?

[Georgia Fort]

Well, and it ties into the surveillance piece, right. For the, the. The three co founders in Minnesota, Nakima Jelani and Monique, this has always been bigger than economics. It's always been about justice for them. And so they've pointed to research that has been done here about how Target has funded different surveillance, how they have funded forensic experts to testify in trials and even putting pressure on local prosecutions to deliver on convictions. And so they have always pointed to Mahdi Ali as being a young person who got caught up in Target's web of surveillance and faulty, corrupt forensic experts. And so they have petitioned and demand that he be released. And so when you research his case and you research the Target funding of the prosecution team, you'll see, you know, all of this actually turns up to be true. But obviously it's very more focused on what has happened here and the harm that Target has continued to inflict on this community. When you look at those convictions that the funding, you know, Target put towards, when you look at those convictions, it disproportionately impacted young black men. And so it's not just about Target being across the street from the Third Precinct. It's not just about the DEI rollbacks. It's not just about Bovino parading through. There has been a lot of harm that Target has caused being headquartered here

[Joy Reid]

in Minnesota, Georgia Ford, really, truly one of the best journalists in the country and also one of the most resourced and knowledgeable journalists in your home of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Before I let you go, I have to ask because the chat is going to really get on me if I don't. How are you and how can we continue to support your work?

[Georgia Fort]

Thank you so much for asking. You know, every day is a gift, and I am walking by my faith and so I'm doing well. If folks want to support me, they can follow the journey online through my website, georgiafort.com, where all my social media links are. I am continue continuing to do my reporting, continuing to be a voice for Minnesota. I think it's so essential that our story is told. Joy. What I realize in all of this target confusion, you know who the biggest antagonist is? The media. The media has really gotten it wrong. Minnesota media has done a terrible job. In fact, when the, you know, the confusion was going out about the target boycott ending the. They actually used a picture of Nakima's daughter. And so even the media has caused a lot of harm to our community. But we have to think critically because, you know more than anybody how. How there's a lot being weaponized against news outlets right now to keep the public from knowing the truth. And that's why you and what you're doing is so critical. And. And I believe that's why what I'm doing is so critical. We have to continue to hold the line and continue to bring factual, accurate, timely information to our community. So thank you again for having me on.

[Joy Reid]

Of course. And this is just a timely reminder to any of the fools in the department of injustice, the reason that Georgia was following that protest of the same person. This is why I wanted you all to see that Nakima is the same person. Levi Armstrong is the same person that was protesting that church is Georgia Ford is a local journalist who follows all of the story in its entirety. And Nikima is part of that story. So she was covering her just like she always covers her. And that is why she was at that church. So people who are wise and discerning understand what journalism is. Luckily, we do here at the Joy Reid Show. Thank you, my friend. Appreciate you, Georgia, doing such great work. Thank you. So that's Georgia Ford. Very important. So now do you guys see what we're seeing here? The media, because they didn't want to do the extra work of figuring out what was actually happening. And to tell the story of these parallel movements, just said, let's just book Jamal Bryant a lot, because this is the challenge of the media not digging deeper. And folks, the Lemonheads in the chat who are referencing our friend Don Lemon. Yes. If Don is now going to go into Georgia's home turf, what do you do as a journalist? You reach out to the most prominent local journalist, Georgia, and you say, what is happening in your town? I'd like to come and cover the Minneapolis protests. And then you all are going to wind up getting information because we always have sources. I have something called news tips@the joyreadshow.com People send information there. You follow up on it. You then cover the protest. You see how that is. Even the DOJ people who are mediocrities because they let go of all the smart people should be able to figure that out. Now, on the other side of this, what has become a messy situation, are the two women whose activism actually helped to nationalize the resistance to Target, and

[Nina Turner]

they are not encouraging people to go back and shop at Target. It really is a sin and a shame that it took them this long for us to get to this point. I think what the three of us, you know, for a brief moment. Let me just speak for the three of us, which is Leader Mallory laid it out that we came to give an update because the people who participated in this with us all over this country deserved an update. And to know where we are based on. Based on the update, the history, the information, and the update, people have to decide whether or not Target is worthy enough for you to go back in their stores.

[Tamika Mallory]

Well, let me just also say that I never claimed that I started a boycott. I've never said it. I haven't said it on this show. I haven't said it to you. I haven't said it on any other show. I've never even said it in the article. In fact, when Senator Turner called me in January, and thank you, Roland, for what I'm about to say, and February 12th, I had a new book coming out. So I have to be honest in saying that, you know, I was trying to get on shows and to be in front of the public to promote my book, which is my memoir about my personal life. And so while I was involved and I was doing much of the work behind the scenes, I was not attempting to play a very public role. I mean, obviously, I have a major platform. So when I posted that I had just joined the boycott and that I'm going to be a part of the organizing efforts, there are different entities that took that message and they ran with it and did whatever they chose to do.

[Joy Reid]

And there they are. Tameka Mallory and Nina Turner are two of the most prominent national voices who joined the effort for the boycott and nationalized it. Nina Turner and Tameka Mowry join me now. Nina Turner is the. Oh, okay. We'll. We'll start with Tamika Mallory, justice leader, movement strategist, and author of a. Of a book that. The book in question. That's why I wanted to play that clip which she was working on during all of this. And there it is. I lived to tell the story. A memoir of love, legacy and resilience. And my friend, this is the challenge. You had other things happening. You were. You were actually on a book tour during a lot of this, because I can remember trying to reach out to you for this. And you were like, I would love to do it. I'm in, you know, book tour, like often. This is the reason you all did not really see as we launched this show. Tamika, often, I hear, because she was on a book tour. Literally. Talk about how you were pulled into this national boycott.

[Tamika Mallory]

Thank you so much, Joy, for having me on. It's so important that we have spaces where we can really lay out the facts of what took place here. For the last several days, I have listened to people's story about what happened and how we came together and the different recollections, but it feels good to be in a safe space to really talk through how we got here. So Senator Turner called me around the 27th of January and said that she was working on this boycott. She had called for it on January 25, and she wanted me to work with, to get Until Freedom, my organization involved. So we are. Somebody was the front facing organization. And Until Freedom agreed to sort of help behind the scenes to do some of the organizing work and of course, to use our platforms to help share the message, spread the message, and to bring more people into the boycott. And so that was about the 27th. So it was about two days after. And then, you know, of course, the story goes that she called me and in the same day she also spoke to Pastor Jamal Bryant. And, you know, we began working together to organize the boycott.

[Joy Reid]

And so the thing that I think has frustrated a lot of people is the fact that, and I do see this as a media failure. I'm being honest, I think it was a failure because it takes more time to do more research to find out all of the different strands of a movement, right? And in this case, you had a Minneapolis movement, you had a national movement that you three were a part of. And I mean, the national movement always gets more attention because you all are just better known. And Jamal Bryan is a very famous person. And so. And of course, the media always gravitates toward men. And so. And when it, particularly when it comes to civil rights movements, they'll look for the man in question and say, well, he's the. He's in charge, right? And so he got a lot of attention which is the thing that happens. But the idea that has been frustrating to me personally is listening to some of the local organizers and I won't say some of, I will say the lead local organizer say that black women were being erased from the movement when I know two of the black women who are.

[Tamika Mallory]

Yeah, I've asked the question multiple times whether or not we consider Senator Turner to be a black woman. Perhaps we don't. And if we don't, then please tell me what she is because I know her to be a black woman and a black woman who has been organizing in many different fields for a long time. And you know, the story has been spreading everywhere that we co opted the movement. And I'll tell you that that is a very damaging thing to say about people who are in a movement. I have 30 years in this movement and never once in my life have I attempted to intentionally gone into a space and taken over something and not acknowledged the people who were already there doing the work. And I certainly acknowledge that the folks in Minneapolis, the work that they're doing there as leaders is important. And as I was saying to a few people, it almost feels so, so petty to have a who started it first conversation. But when false accusations are made against you, especially as I work across the country and trust me, this is not a, I'm not new to the rodeo, as they say. I've been in these conversations before, the local organizers, the national organizers, who gets to come in, who gets the platform, who gets to be on the press. And I understand it as well. I have felt in my work disregarded at times pushed aside and overlooked. So I totally understand why there would be folks who need to speak up for themselves and say, hey, don't overlook us because we've been doing this work and we matter in this conversation. Nevertheless, the false accusations is what is harmful. There is no way that, that someone can co opt a movement or steal something that they started and put out into the world. First. On January 25th, Senator Nina Turner put out a call for a boycott to begin on February 1st. That is a fact. That is something that is backed up in writing and it is in her social media post which by the way went very viral. It was several days later. In fact, the same, same day the one of the local organizers posted a question around whether or not folks, you know, what are you feeling? What is the feeling out there? What do people want to do? Which is great. And I assume there was feedback. I didn't see that post, but it doesn't matter. That's a relevant conversation to have with the community when you are engaging people and allowing them to participate, participate in the process. But it was five days later before there was an actual announcement for the February 1st date. And again, it almost feels so silly and just ridiculous to be here using your platform to hash out something like that. Which date did we start and end on? And if I was folks listening from around the country, it might make me tune out because it's just like, you know, why is this important? But again, when those false accusations are used against you and it is something that is harmful because as we go out and we work in communities, we don't want people to believe that we're showing up stealing ideas, stealing resources, stealing anything. We want to work more in a collaborative space. So unfortunately, I'm in a place now where after all week I've been accused of taking someone else's idea. It's time for me to speak and make sure that we show that the literal paperwork that proves the opposite.

[Joy Reid]

And I will also note, and I can say this, I won't speak for Roland, but isn't it true that Roland Martin did attempt to bring the two groups together at one point?

[Tamika Mallory]

Well, first, before Roland Martin attempted to do it, I did. So I was the first person to call local organizers in Minneapolis and asked to bring everybody together. And as you said, and I've acknowledged I was on a book tour or my book was just about to be released. And so I was in a chat with multiple people. And sometimes, you know, I would disappear and not necessarily keep up with the details of what was going on. And so over a course of days, obviously, things just went awry. I don't even need to try to explain what, because I still have not been able to have a very direct conversation about what took place. I asked the question after we were addressed in our meetings. We were addressed about people not feeling as though they were being respected. And this would be local organizers in Minneapolis feeling like they weren't being respected properly in this process. And I asked for specifically what is happening that we can try to correct. And I'm going to be honest with you, Joy, God is still working with me. So when I met with a certain type of aggression, sometimes I respond the same way. And I'm being very honest in saying that I did that. And if you watch the discourse that has happened over the last few days, if you watch the clip from Roland Martin's show or any other clip where we have been addressed, accused, and all the things that we've heard you will see the type of personality that I was met with. And so that doesn't work really well for me. I don't really work well with accusations. I like to have conversations. And it didn't work out. And that's just the reality of what took place. Roland was the second person to say, we can't leave this splintered. In hindsight is not even so much hindsight, but as I think about some of the issues that the larger community that our people are feeling in this moment, it's like, well, the target fast, the boycott, all the different things, different demands, all of that should have been under one umbrella, but we were not able to get there. And so that's something that I think we have to course correct as we move forward, that despite our personality challenges, we have to be able to come to the table and say, for the greater good of the movement, with respectful discourse. We have to have a process of all of us trying our best, trying our best to be together. And I'll say this and stop talking, but trying our best is important because this is not new that movements don't always. They're not always conjoined in the best ways. And now social media gives the opportunity for everybody to see the sausage before it's actually cooked up and served. But in the past, if we go back and study our history, it is not new that our movements would have different groups that are doing different things and. And, you know, hope all we can do is try to do better.

[Joy Reid]

And I started this conversation on the show by going back into my Medgar Evers wormhole and the ways in which he reacted when Bob Moses came from New York and he said, who does New Yorker coming into my territory, messing with my. You know, and it is something. I mean, look, y' all don't want me to go into the march on Washington. I'll have this going for an hour. And all the. We just see it now because of social media. Senator Nina Turner has joined me. We're gonna. We're gonna retwin ourselves later. Senator Turner, I want to talk about, because we do want to move forward, and I talked through the timeline and your announcement of a national boycott and the existence of this national boycott that is in Minneapolis, that is ongoing. You said at the end of the press conference in which Jamal Bryant spoke that you're not telling people to not boycott. So to you, is the boycott continuing?

[Nina Turner]

Yes, the boycott is continuing. I mean, and I love my sister leader Tamika Mallory. So glad she was on to give the narrative. And if There's a little echo. Forgive me, you guys, my flights were delayed today. Just a whole bunch of craziness. Same, but by the grace of God, I am here. So the boycott continues. You know, the three of us came to together to do some good, but once millions of people got involved. This is the people's movement. So it is not owned or operated or controlled by one individual, one entity. It is controlled by the people. Tamika and I, Leader Mallory and I were very clear that day. If people watched the entire press conference, we were very clear that we were not stopping this boycott. We don't have the power to stop a boycott. The boycott continues. Target has not earned the right. As far as I'm concerned, Target has not earned the right for those who have supported this boycott to receive their monies anymore. As a matter of fact, the last meeting that they had was with the D.C. boycott group, and they told them that DEI is divisive. Well, I got a problem with that.

[Joy Reid]

And, and let me play really quickly because here's the question. So I think one question I think we've answered is how did these boycotts start? They acted in parallel, only the Target fast has ended. So we now know that, so we can check off. We now organize ourselves nationally around because the people are still boycotting. And the question is, did up to now, this first 400 days yield anything? Jason, do we have B3? This is Jamal Bryant being asked that on CNN.

[Jamal Bryant]

Target announced their rollback.

[Joy Reid]

Sheriff, Target stock closed at $138.

[Jamal Bryant]

Yes.

[Joy Reid]

We should also mention that soon after

[Nina Turner]

the we are Somebody boycott led by

[Jamal Bryant]

Nina Turner and Tamika Mallory started. But the day your boycott began, it closed at $116, and then Thursday it

[Joy Reid]

closed at $93 per share. Again, we mentioned the other factors. How much do you think a boycott influenced that?

[Jamal Bryant]

Oh, greatly. Everywhere you go, you're seeing a great pullback of people nationally who are saying, I'm not doing it. And I want to note it is not just black people who are participating, but people who are sympathizers saying the country's moving in the wrong direction. Two different protests are happening in America at the same time. Tesla and Target, and the majority of people not driving Teslas, but Target is in their zip code. And so you're seeing the same impact, but this time we're protesting through our pocketbooks.

[Joy Reid]

The things on this list honor the $2 billion pledge because there was not a new a set of new demands. It was the 2020 original demands after George Floyd was murdered that they made these four commitments, $2 billion pledged to black businesses deposit $250 million in black banks. Fully restored DEI commitments, which is aligned with the local version of the national boycott, the Minneapolis version, and pipeline community centers at HBCUs. Have they done any of that?

[Tamika Mallory]

Yes. So I think one of the reasons why we heard Pastor Bryant talking about the progress in the conversations is because some of those things have been shown to us. In the meeting. We were able to see much of the backup to how the $2 billion was spent, which organizations, businesses, so on and so forth, have been beneficiaries of such. And we learned more about their continued diversity programs. The problem is that it's not my responsibility to say that it is Target's responsibility to communicate that to the community, to the community, the larger community. And I said that, you know, I raised that as a point to the executives at Target that no matter what we say, which we have a responsibility to report back on the meetings that we had, because if we didn't do that, there would be a whole different conversation that we met behind the scenes with the Target CEO and others. And what did we get for it? You know, and so, you know, it was important for us to come forward and say, here's what we discussed with them, but they have a responsibility to tell their own story. The CEO in the new CEO, in a conversation or a meeting with his staff, an all staff meeting, he made the statement that Target broke the trust with many black consumers and also with some of their employees, that they acknowledge that it's on them as a company and there's more work to do. And so my direct question in our meetings was, why not say that to my mother? Why not say that to other people who had a strong relationship with Target and want to hear that you first of all acknowledge the harm and then second, take us through as a community what your intentions are around diversity and other things going forward. And there was this issue that I saw online where people said, well, if belonging is a program that they have where they've kind of condensed much of their diversity work, and that already happened even before they are, I guess, at the point that they canceled their specific DEI by letters program, then what were we boycotting for? Well, let me take you backwards. When the first CEO, the original CEO, put out their letter on January 24th saying that they were ending their DEI programs, if you look at other companies, when they ended their programs, they cut contracts, they cut programs in general that were supposed to be to benefit the community. You know, I don't know if anybody Else knows, folks, but I know plenty of people who were actually fired from. From their jobs, their positions were terminated. We know that because there's more than 300,000 black women who got swept up in that mix. And so how do we know that you are going to keep the commitments that you told us? It's not by you just saying it. Maybe in a short statement somewhere. We need to actually be able to look at the numbers, look at the names for ourselves. You should be in a relationship with me when I say to you, hey, give me your phone and let me see who you were texting. Don't hide it. Because if you hide the phone, then I know I can't trust you. I can't believe you. And so that's why I asked them, please come forward with this information that we now have access to. We've been able to see much of it. I'm not saying it's perfect at all, but there is some work that Target has done. So tell the rest of the community, because we're not the marketing people for your company.

[Joy Reid]

That Target, if you look at their behavior locally and you look at their silence nationally, typically when a boycott ends, the person that was the target of the boycott, quote, unquote, the target, meaning the company, says something alongside the people who were boycotted. They've said nothing. They've also still not met with the local organizers who have a whole separate set of demands that are around their direct harmful actions to people in that community. So they seem to me, as far as I'm concerned, because they haven't said anything to me. They haven't done anything. So how is it possible at this stage, given all that's happened, given the fact that unfortunately the sausage making has been public, which we don't love, can these movements be united because the people, Senator Turner, are still boycotting? Yeah. I mean, so are we.

[Nina Turner]

I mean, Target is a national company. So let me just put that out there. And I don't think anybody has to ask anybody's permission to do good.

[Joy Reid]

That's right.

[Nina Turner]

I came in on the tail end of what my sister had to say, and she has been very gracious. We have been gracious. And I know, Sister Joy, you're trying to move us forward. People need to understand that we did not draw first blood here. You will not find. Find anywhere where Leader Mallory, myself, Pastor Brian, or anything said anything negative about the local organizers in Minneapolis.

[Joy Reid]

Okay?

[Nina Turner]

So people have to decide for themselves who is really doing this for the love of the people. Now, I'm gonna Put that in the parking lot. The bottom line is this, Target is a national corporation and everybody has the right to jump in and join in. So to answer your question, in short fashion, yeah, if want to act honestly, be honest brokers and honest actors. But I'm going to tell you something. Leader Mallory and her excellence in how to organize across the country. When I first called my sister and said, come with me to Ken, let's go. And she, no questions asked, we went, we picked up Pastor Brian along the way. And she said, sis, I'm hearing that some the where the headquarters is because it's lots of locals, the DC Boycott Coalition, who stood out in front of a target in D.C. every single Saturday since this boycott started, they local too. So when we say local, what do we mean by that? Because Target is national. But my sister said, I'm hearing that the headquarter group is thinking along the same lines. How about we all try to pull this together? And you know what I said, sis, Many hands made for light work. Hey, people want to get in on this? Let's do it together. So I want folks to understand the truth about how we got to this point. And then I know she explained the rest, how some stuff happened. She called me up, she said, sis, you know Nekima is upset about something. I called her. She wouldn't call me back. Maybe she might call you back. Would you try? And I called her. She never called me back. So as she said, to this day, we don't know what she got mad about and determined that she was gonna burn the house down. And I hope everybody who's seen the Roland Martin interview understand that she's doing exactly what she wanted, what she said she was going to do. The fixation should be about how we take the boycott movement to the next level and force all corporations to be responsible. There's a connection between bending to bigotry and the political class in the United States of America. There's a connection to doing black people wrong and then having other marginalized populations being done wrong. So the TARGET boycott was just an entryway to a bigger collective responsibility that we all had to do justice, to do right, to do good, to use our collective powers. But the nerve of her to not only throw gas on this fire, to disrupt people all over this country, but also to malign the integrity of the three of us who are leaders in our own right, have been leaders for a long time beyond target. It is a painful, painful place to be in. So go back to your question. Yes, if people want to do the right thing without ego. Because you know what is a saying that says, if you want to go far, let's go together. If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. Or the African proverb that says, many hands make for light work. We all came at this with integrity, but nobody is perfect. But what people will not see, they will not see. Leader Mallory, Pastor Brian and myself have ever said one negative thing about the organizers in the headquartered city. It's very important to say that Target is a national organization and I'm not asking anybody's permission to do good.

[Tamika Mallory]

Yeah. And you know, Joy, let me just also say that I think at this point I have seen some branding out of Minneapolis where they are also maintaining a national boycott. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think that's great. I think that the more entry points people have to get involved. That's what we want to see happen. And so there are going to be some folks who are going to hear about this because they have learned from those individuals there in Minneapolis. There are going to be some folks who are going to hear about it from. We are somebody from until Freedom from Joy and Reed show today. Joy, you've been with us from the beginning saying that you were not going in Target until these things have been dealt with. And you know, and I also, I think it's important when you said, you know, if they haven't come forward to talk to the community, to the people, then they really haven't done anything. And for us in our report, we thought it was important to be good stewards of the information that we were holding. Because to not do that, it's just, first of all, it's not right. It's important for us to be transparent about what took place in the meeting, what they said, what they have done and how that compares to what we asked them. The demands that were designed for the Target FAST were specific to protecting the commitments that were already made. For the most part, the HBCU piece kind of extends and of course the black bank investment, that is a consistent demand, if you will, that has been for many, many, many movements. Not just Target, not just the boycott against Target, but many movements. We are constantly talking to corporations about how to invest and put resources into black businesses, black banks, so that we have a place that is, that has the type of capital for black people to be able to go and access resources. And so other than that, though, we were really trying to stay specific to. You said you were going to do $2 billion. You said that you were going to maintain these diversity programs. And we want to know exactly what's happening with them and to make sure you know that. That the work gets done. And so, you know, you can take that. And there are people who say, I agree with that and other people don't. And that's the tension, the creative tension of movements that you will always have folks that have different ideas. Hence the reason that we cannot tell the folks in Minneapolis or in any other city, the folks in D.C. they have a different set of issues and concerns that they want to see Target and other corporations address. And all of these things, we should all be aligned. Even if we're not sitting in the same room, that wherever you see us, we're able to say, you need to check with this group or that group. And to be clear, the reason why the Boycott DC folks made it to the table with Target is because when we had our meeting, we said, we can't even proceed until you talk to folks who have been outside of your store every single Saturday for a year. So we're not perfect. Because I know I'm not perfect. I already told you, my problem is matching energy with energy. So I'm. I know that I'm not perfect. But we certainly tried to do good and to do good the right way. And I'm not gonna even say we tried. We are trying. We did, and we are trying. And we will continue to do so.

[Nina Turner]

We will. And we came at it with integrity. Now it's going to be up to other people to judge that for themselves. But instead of all of this back and forth and arguing, we got so much happening. War is happening, People being sent to the front line, people can't afford gas and food. And then you got folks who want to play games like this and seek to divide, judge us by who's dividing, who's bringing people together. You know, I think it was Booker T. Washington who once said that there are two ways for one to use their power. One is by lifting up and the other is by pushing down. Unfortunately, we are in a pushing down moment now. We don't have to stay there.

[Joy Reid]

Right.

[Nina Turner]

But the more that people are animated by the gossip of this all, well, don't know. Yeah.

[Joy Reid]

Well, I was just going to say that our goal here, we've gone way over in this segment. I appreciate you both saying no. I just want to. I don't want to cut either of the energy. I love you guys energy. But what I think everyone can agree on is that there only is one villain in this story and it is Target.

[Tamika Mallory]

It's Target.

[Joy Reid]

That's right.

Our opponent. Our opponents are not one another. Our opponent is very.

[Georgia Fort]

Shouldn't be.

[Joy Reid]

It is a corporation that is not done right by the. It's customers in D.C. or Denver and

[Nina Turner]

all over the country or Cleveland, anywhere.

[Joy Reid]

That's it. Anywhere. And until Target, do right by us. Come on.

[Georgia Fort]

Everything.

[Joy Reid]

Everything right by us. Black women made you. That's it. I'll make you.

[Nina Turner]

We're gonna make you.

[Joy Reid]

That's it. That's it. Thank y' all both very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Georgia Fort]

I appreciate you both.

[Joy Reid]

Okay, talk to y' all later. Okay, bye bye. Target is still the villain and Target is still getting boycotted. I just think they need to be very, very clear that they may have felt they won the battle about ending the Target fast, which is a religious, organizational, structured thing. But the boycott itself, which was a separate thing, he's not over. Let me let y' all know that we have some incredible sponsors that are making this program possible. This episode of the Joy Reid show is brought to you by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. No. No matter where you live or how much money you make, you do deserve to get the health care that you need when you need it. One in four people across this country has come to a Planned Parenthood health center for care. 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Over a thousand health professionals have supported or endorsed its use. It's increasingly becoming a go to natural tool in clinical settings, not just in goofy wellness circles. Go to 120life.com if you'd like to try it. That's 120life.com use my code joy or the code read for 20% off. Just try it risk free for two weeks. If your blood pressure does not come down, they'll give you a full refund. So go to One2Zero Life and use the code JOY or READ to save 20%. Don't wait until next month. Nothing's to lose here. And accept your high blood pressure. Go to 120life.com use the code joy or read for 20% off. And that is what are recommending for today. So I also should know that these statements have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Okay, welcome to hour two. We're running a little late on hour two of the Joy Reid Show. A reminder for those of you who are subscribers, we've now gone to 431,000 subscribers on YouTube, nearly 210,000 on Substack. But still, only about half of the people who watch regularly are subscribers, meaning like 45% are, like, lurking. Don't be a lurker. Go ahead and hit subscribe. If you haven't done it yet, do it now. And also if you want to join Team TJRS and become a premium subscriber, we would appreciate that, too. And, and we're going to be doing our live chat for members only. If you do become a member, that's going to be next Friday. So make sure that you join before next Friday so that you can be part of the live chat for our Team TJRS members and also for our readers who are premium subscribers on both platforms. We appreciate y'. All. So did y' all see, by the way, what Captain Kangals posted over the weekend? Did you see this? Donald Trump posted this thing here where he said, I've reshaped the media. And he showed a whole bunch of people who got fired under his watch. Terry Moran, myself, Jim Acosta, lots of other people who he takes personal credit for. He even took credit for Chuck Todd being out at Meet the Press. The sad thing about it is this is one of the situations where he's actually right. We have actually seen Donald Trump reshape the media in terms of bullying media into covering him more favorably or putting in place oligarchs who are already in his in his good graces and who are shaping the media to become more Trumpy Paramount cbs, Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post has gotten rid of all of the diverse people who work there. ABC telling the people to view, hey, the ladies on the View, hey, be less, less anti Trump, you name it. And now Donald Trump's latest effort to shape the media is this complaint he's made about the way that the media is covering the war. Here is the truth Social post. I will not read it. It's long and it sounds like Donald Trump. And it ends with thank you for like, your attention, this matter, whatever. But he's upset at the Wall Street Journal for a story they did about tankers that were taking incoming fire from the Iranians who we started a war with alongside Israel. When he posted that, the guy who runs the fcc, Brendan Carr, who has the power of the Government to fine or punish broadcast journalistic organizations reposted it and said broadcasters that are running hoaxes or news distortion, otherwise known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. He posts broadcasters must operate in the public interest or they will lose their licenses. And he says frankly, changing course is in their own business interest. Since trust in legacy media has fallen to an all time low. I wonder why, Brendan, I wonder why. And he's talking about not a ratings disasters and ratings declines. The American people have subsidized broadcasting to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation's airways. Very important to bring trust back into the media which has earned itself because of fake news. And listen to part two. Look at part two of his of his post. Next one. Yep. Nope. One. One back. There we go. No, there's one back. Even one back. Yeah, there it is. There's a second part. He says when a political candidate is able to win a landslide victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media and we can't allow that to happen. So he posts about Donald Trump winning the election, which of course is the way to ingratiate yourself with Donald Trump. This does not sound like an FCC chair. He sounds like a campaign manager. Chris Murphy, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. He posted about how dystopian this is. One back. There we go. This is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of a war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We are in the. We are on the verge of a totalitarian takeoff. We are in the middle of it. And a reminder that this is just half of Project 2025. I have it in a folder. Brendan Carr wrote the part of this that is about the FCC. Okay, this is Project 2025. My anchor producer made this for me back when I was at the Artist, formerly known as MSNBC. And now we can play C6 if you could. Jason, it's not there. It is. So this is what they want. And this is the only thing you can do to be safe in an authoritarian setting. Kirsten Welker, the host of Meet the Press, says Donald Trump told her in a phone call that Iran is ready to negotiate a ceasefire, but he's not ready to make a deal. There's no evidence of that. There's no independent way that we can confirm that. But this is what he wants. He wants the media to simply repeat what he says and say that is how the war is going. We have no way of knowing that. Let me give you guys one more before we bring our guest in. Oh, yes. He also demanded the death penalty for reporters. He went on an unhinged rant over the weekend. I think this was yesterday, where he basically said, anyone who is reporting on the war in a way that doesn't make it appear that we are obliterating Iran and that Iran has no chance and they're ready to fall. If you don't do that, he says, that's treason, meaning you should be put to death. Let me know one more sponsor before because we are very blessed today with lots and lots of support for this show. This show is brought to you by the folks who make the fabulous sweater that I'm wearing right now. Our friends at Quints now. These days, I am all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's literally not worth it to me. That is honestly why I love Quint. 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But also they occupied Lebanon for a long time and it is part of the dream of Eretz Israel. Do we have D1? You can throw that up. Even as the bombs are dropping in Tehran as well. There's also the destruction. And this is D2, if you could. Jason of Azad, this is criminal. It is a sort of beautiful stadium, at least it was where legendary soccer matches have taken place. And it is now a pile of rubble. Let me read you what was written about this in the Nation. It says the Israeli state's genocidal assault against the people of Gaza now appears to be the first installment in an ongoing series. The next episode is what the United States and Israel are doing to Lebanon and Iran. It's not just the relentless bombings and missile launches with little regard to civilian life that's so reminiscent of the war on Gaza. It's not just the slaughtering of children followed by easily debunked denials. The casual mendacity of both governments is jaw dropping. It's not the assassinations of government and religious leaders. It's the attempt to kill hope. And joining me now is the author of that piece, Dave Zirin. He is the sports editor at the Nation magazine and the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. His new book, which is out later this year, is a biography of the historian Howard Zinn called the People's Historian, the Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. We have a picture of it, Jason, whenever you have the chance for it. One of my favorite guests of all time, a regular on am, Joy there. And I missed you, friend. Dave, thank you for writing that piece in the Nation. Please tell us more about Azadi Stadium.

No, absolutely. First of all, Joy, it's so great to be on with you. I've missed you on television. I've missed your voice and the artist formerly known as msnbc. Michelle, without you, a shell of itself. Look, Azadi Stadium was a tourist attraction throughout the region. People would travel to Tehran just to see Azadi Stadium. Now why would they do that? Well, you do that when a stadium once held 128,000 people for a soccer match. I mean, it's just an untold number. You do that when a stadium once was the host of Frank Sinatra for a concert that filled the rafters. You do that when a stadium is so beautiful that if you're a sports fan, you make a pilgrimage there like people in this country do to places like Fenway park or Lambeau Field. That's what Azadi Stadium meant. And Azadi, by the way, is a, is a Irani word for freedom is what it means. But that's not all Azadi Stadium was. It was also a hallmark location for the women's movement in Iran and what they called the fight for fresh air. The idea of women having access to being able to be in the stadium and as many numbers as they want to sit wherever they wanted. This was a movement for four decades just to be able to enjoy an Azadi stadium. And that was a movement that was victorious in this country. So think about everything that Azadi Stadium represented to the people of Iran and then consider that the United States bombed it to smithereens. Now they didn't just bomb the stadium. Inside Azadi is a whole sports structure for youth. Inside Azadi is a, is a mid sized stadium for sports that Iran excels at internationally, like amateur wrestling, judo. I mean this is where they excel and this is where they train other sports. Basketball, volleyball, which is huge in Iran as we learned in a very tragic way with the killing of the volleyball players, the students, girls killed by US and or Israeli munitions. This is what. And of course they're still saying, well, we're trying to get studies on this, we're trying to figure out. But even the non full denial from the totalitarians running our country right now to me speaks volumes. So I'm sorry to filibuster on this, but it hits me so close to the heart, Joy, because I believe, and I've been arguing this for, for 20 years, when they go after sports facilities, it's not just because, oh well, you know, that's a place where they're firing missiles from, which is things they've said that Israel has always maintained. That's absurd. What it's for is to kill hope. It's to kill the idea that normalcy will ever return to your country. It's to kill the idea that someday on a Sunday in the near future, you're gonna go to the stadium for a soccer match and enjoy yourself with your family. And particularly it's to kill the dreams of children. This idea that if they have athletic aspirations. That's where they can go. This is about war strategy. And the attacking of these stadiums to me is a ruthless act. And by the way, it's also classified as a war crime.

Yeah.

And yet they do it anyway. And it's about the killing of hope. It's reprehensible. And I wish, you know, I got to tell you something, and this, I'll end with this because I really, I don't want to go on too long because I love hearing you talk. And that's just, you know, as I'm a fan of the show, I thought

you want to talk, my friend. I want to hear you talk.

All right, well, that's, that's very kind of you. This, the bombing of Azadi, the way they did. The other thing that it does is it replicates the practices of what Israel was doing in Gaza. And that should be very scary for people because if you understand the genocide in Gaza as basically a dress rehearsal or an opening salvo for what now this administration thinks it can get away with throughout the Middle east and frankly, beyond. If you saw the news today about Cuba and them demanding that their leader step down for the, for the price of just having functional fuel in the country. Israel and Gaza really laid the precursor for this. And Israel would bomb 10,000 seat Palestine Stadium. That stadium was rebuilt twice. A 10,000 seat stadium that they bombed twice for the purposes of killing hope in young people, killing hope in children. And what I always try to do when I talk about this is two things. One, I point out to people that it is a problem that one of the most famous stadiums on earth was bombed to smithereens and it's not mentioned on espn. And what does that say about our sports coverage? And what does that say about the manufacturing of consent by just keeping the news like this away from people? And you know why they don't talk about it? Because they don't want people to think to themselves not only about the kids and their dash dreams, but they don't think about, wow, what would it mean if Lambeau Field was bombed to smithereens? What would it mean if Yankee Stadium all of a sudden was rubble? Like that idea that was portrayed so beautifully in the movie Three Kings with Mark Wahlberg and Cube and George Clooney. This idea that if we start thinking what our lives would be like if it was us over there, then that actually would produce the kind of empathy that could have the capacity to end this horrific war.

And the reality is it's easy enough to get there because that is why terrorists targeted the World Trade Center. I mean, you could have, you could have targeted anything. But if you target something iconic, it's why now the current version of the FBI, which really isn't an FBI anymore, let's just be honest. It's just sort of the regime, police, you know, whatever they are considering themselves are saying, hey, they're going to be threats to the Golden Gate Bridge, they're going to be threats to iconic landmarks in California because they want us to think about Iran using its proxies and Hezbollah, et cetera, to attack iconic things that Americans love. Right. That is why New York, even though it's a blue city that has no beef with the world, gets attacked because it's full of iconic things. But you're absolutely right. That's what we've done there. The irony here is one of the many is that you now have the President's son in law and Steve Witkoff saying that one of the plans they have are to build soccer stadiums in Gaza on the rubble that they've created there.

Yeah, throughout Gaza. And that's part of the cozy relationship also between Johnny Infantino, the obsequious, pathetic, lick spittle head of FIFA. That's the organization of international soccer. Johnny Infantino, or Johnny Boy as his detractors call him, he's the person who gave Trump that absolutely pathetic FIFA Peace prize, which if people remember what that statue looked like, it was these hands looking like they were rising from a grave. I mean, holding up a soccer ball. And I always thought that was appropriate. Because if there's one thing that people know about soccer, whether you can't stand sports, if some of your listeners out there and some of your viewers, Joy, cannot stand sports, cannot stand soccer, one thing they probably know is that unless you're a goalie, you're not supposed to touch the sports soccer ball with your hands. And here's the statue with all these hands holding up a soccer ball. And I thought, how perfect for this upside down world that Donald Trump would get the FIFA Peace Prize and then, oh, by the way, start wars or continue wars in this case all across the world. And in return, what did Johnny Infantino get? He got an invitation to that ridiculous, what's it called, the Board of Peace. That's going to start. He was there at the meeting in Egypt where all of this took place, where the end of the war in Gaza was officially announced. Of course, it hasn't ended at all. More news of deaths just today, indiscriminate killings. Johnny Infantino has been actually part of this project and the building of the stadiums there, soccer fields there is an act of depopulation in Gaza. It's not for the people there. It's to replace human beings with stadiums for an international audience. Turn the whole dream of the Gaza Riviera. But people have to understand how institutionally the World cup is involved with the imperial aims of the United States. Johnny Infantino was at the inauguration, a prime seat at the inauguration. People might remember that he wears MAGA hats for goodness sakes. And this is somebody who is supposed to represent an international body that at least in. In word is committed to the idea of human rights. But it's an absolute joke. And that's why I've. I've been saying this. I couldn't believe the amount of support I got for this article. I thought I was going to get destroyed. Not the one that you read, but I wrote an article that this is going to be a joyless World cup because of what's happening in the world, because of the fact that Iran's team, for example, which qualified to come as probably going to be denied entry. They would be the first soccer team in 75 years to be denied the right to play in the World cup if they earned a place. That. That's, I think, just so emblematic of the totalitarianism that, that you mentioned that we are dealing with right now in Washington. And it, it, it's, it's a horrifying set of affairs. And the World cup feels very joyless for people, which is sad because if there's one thing that's always come with the World cup, it's this. It's this just incredible. And I've covered them for, for, for forever. It's just this idea of, okay, everybody on earth can sort of put down their weapons and put down their tweets and put down all our modes of combat and just a united global gaze on one event. That's the World cup and that's the joy that it produces. And even that at this point looks destroyed for the coming year.

And to stay on that for just a moment, I'm just not. If you have D5, maybe without the sound is there. There are all these videos. I mean, there are two sets of videos that are now going viral everywhere. Videos of the stadium, Lots of people posting videos of the destruction or pictures of the destruction. And this is one of the most arresting protests that we've seen. Iranian schoolgirls outside the UN office in Tehran calling for accountability for the massacre of their classmates. It's hard for me to imagine the country that is admitting that we probably did it in this one. They're not even trying to pass off blame onto Israel. They're admitting we did this. There's a former CIA analyst who said, or a CIA agent who said that he believes it was maybe deliberate as a way to do what you described, to kill hope, to let Iran know this is how ruthless we are. We'll kill your schoolgirls and then claim we're doing it in the name of freeing Iranian women from happening to bail. You know, and so to me, it's like a country that would do that doesn't deserve to host the World Cup. Do you believe that any countries, or many countries, forget not getting admitted, will actually boycott the US Matches of the World Cup?

Well, I'll tell you something. There is real talk about that. Will it happen? It's hard to fully envision that it would happen. I mean, because you look for historical examples. There was a huge, I mean, I'm going back almost 100 years. There was a huge push in 1936 for the Hitler Olympics in Berlin, votes in the United States, in the Amateur Athletic Union about whether or not there should be a full scale boycott. You know, people like Jesse Owens were questioned about this, like, should we boycott the 36 Olympics? Walter White, the head of the NAACP, was a leader of the campaign to attempt to keep the United States out of those 1936 Olympics. And even with all of that, even with Germany involved in bombing other countries, like for example, Spain during the Spanish Civil War at that time and providing munitions for that effect, it didn't make a difference. And I think that it'll be very difficult to see teams, see entire countries boycott the World Cup. But one thing that's real is that these discussions are happening where people are saying, how can we do this? And they're not saying it because they oppose necessarily the war in Iran or not. The reasons they're giving is our players are not safe to come to the United States.

Correct.

The family members of our players are not safe to come to the United States. Travel advisories for the World cup have been issued throughout Europe for their citizens coming to the United States. And that in and of itself is a remarkable state of affairs if you just take a step back and think about that and how unsafe people are feeling. And one of the things that that's produced is that there is a real softness in terms of ticket buys, in terms of plane tickets. I mean, so if you ask me what I think is going to happen I think the boycott that we're talking about, it may not take place among teams, but it will take place among international fans. And it's going to be an interesting contrast because I think the stadiums are going to be sold out in Canada and Mexico.

Yeah.

And then in the United States, they're going to be scrounging to get people into the stands.

Can I just say that the thing that's so kind of depressing about it, and I'm actually glad Jesse Owens went to those Olympics in the Nazi Olympics, because he showed them. He took their belief in their superiority and rubbed it all in their face. But at the same time, this is what's sort of shocking to me. There was less of a chance that Jesse Owens would be detained by the Nazi regime in the 1930s in Germany than a athlete from Peru or an athlete from Mexico being detained here today. They're not safe. The players are not safe. If you are a brown fan, you're not safe. Hell, if you're Irish. We detained an Irish guy for like 60 days just because I guess he had on his phone maybe some anti Trump things. No one here that comes to the United States to watch the World cup is safe, including the players.

Exactly.

And.

And when you factor. Yeah, yeah. And ice is going to be heavily involved in the security for. For the World cup as well. That's been announced. JD Vance has already cracked jokes. And when I say jokes, I'm putting them in quotes, not just because they're not funny, but because he's not funny and he has the charisma of a toadstool. But he's joked about the fact that, you know, you better leave this country the day you have to leave this country, because we're going to have ice out there. That was his message to foreign guests for the World cup, and he said it was tongue in cheek. But again, this is not a person who does humor. And I think that their boastfulness about ice being involved in the security, it's one of the things that's also going to undercut is Donald Trump's dream of sort of standing astride the globe as the person who is the great overseer of the most popular event on earth. That's his dream for the World cup, and that's his dream for the 2028 Epstein Olympics that are going to be taking place in Los Angeles. I only call it that because the person who's in charge of those Olympics, Casey Wasserman, is all over the Epstein files, and people like Karen Bass, Mayor Bass, are trying to get him to resign from being the head of LA 2028. So, you know, it's, it's amazing, like the tentacles that, that connect that with.

Oh, and I'm sure plenty of people who are in the Epstein files will get premium seats. They'll have their own suites. They're going to be treated, you know, like rock stars. Because this administration is sodden with Epstein people. I, I've started, you know, saying I think we should call it the Trump Epstein administration at this point.

Yeah. Or we could call it the, the NFL Owners island, because the number of NFL owners that are in the Epstein files, I mean, is, is. I mean, I hate to say it's disturbing to the, to the nth degree. Not only because everything about the Epstein files is disturbing to the nth degree, but because these, it goes back to our first point. These are the people we entrust with our dreams, the dreams of our children. These are the people who oversee this stuff. And, and the fact that they're, they're, they're not only corrupt and venal, but that they're involved, either tangentially or directly, in the ruthless exploitation of children in the most horrid possible way or turned a blind eye to it when it's in their presence, I mean, just shows you once again that they're not worthy to actually oversee sports the same way that a president who would bomb a place like Azadi Stadium and joke about it is not worthy to host the World Cup.

Yeah. Or Jim Jordan, a man who seems to have looked the other way as young men, or at least allegedly look. Looked the other way as young men were abused at an Ohio college wrestling team, is the head of the oversight committee that gets to decide what we get to know about the Epstein files. It's all just very bizarre. I want to show you a piece of video and Jason, you can pull the sound down if you have D6 is last week, a Muslim man was on a plane and he was pulled off the plane and arrested because people heard the call to prayer in his phone. I guess he had it maybe as his ringtone or he had it set so that he would remind himself to pray. And you see what happened here. Everyone had to put their hands up, heads down. It was, it had to be a terrifying moment for everyone on the plane. This would never have happened to anyone of any other religion. I've heard, you know, Jewish people pray. I've heard Christian people pray on planes. But he gets arrested. You just wrote a piece and the title of it is Iftar with the Nick and the mayor, the mayor of, of of New York, Zorhan Mamdani, has gotten a lot of heat for simply holding an iftar dinner, which Joe Biden and Barack Obama did as well in the White House. But he himself is Muslim. He's being continuously attacked, continuously demonized. There's your piece. Talk about your piece. And what do you think it means for us to have a Muslim mayor of the financial capital of the United States?

Well, I mean, first of all, I was just in New York and I was able to be, to sit in on that dinner. It was between, as you said, Zochran Mamdani, the mayor, and also a 20 year old member of the New York Knicks named Mohamed Diawara. And Diawara is as well, a Muslim man. And they sat together and it was just fellowship. The mayor's a big Knicks fan. And I went, I was able to go to the table and talk to them about politics, the political athlete. And it was only after I left that it really did occur to me that, you know, they kept saying this wasn't political, but in a climate of rampant Islamophobia, in a climate of everything you just described, in the climate of the bombing of Iran, even if it doesn't call itself political, and even if it's a darn shame that it even has to be political, the mere fact that they would come together and do this and invite a member of the media to do so is in of itself by necessity a political act. And then when we took to the streets afterwards, we were on 129th in Lenox and we walked to the Marcus Garvey Courts and people were cheering the mayor coming. And I know the mayor has his critics certainly on the right, also on the left. To me, that's less important for this conversation than the fact. And I was like running to the side and talking to everybody who was cheering him and trying to say, why are you cheering? And they're still in the kind of honeymoon phase of, yeah, we elected this guy and that means anything can happen. You know, that means my kid can be mayor. That means anything. And this is like immigrant populations, people who've lived in Harlem for generations just stoked that, you know, a lot of them were really like, kind of like New York, like proud to be New Yorkers. Like, yeah, this whole country is saying that this guy was unelectable, but he was the best candidate and we elected him.

Yeah.

And there's a kind of like New York City chestiness about it that, you know, I really appreciate it so much and and one last thing about it, and you've been so generous with, with your time with me here. Politics these days so seems like a place where hope goes to die. And so to actually be in what I would argue is the most important city on earth, walking with the mayor and seeing people with faces of hope when they see their elected official. I mean, for a while it felt like I was in some sort of good version of the Twilight Zone. I was like, wow, people are proud of their politics here.

That's it.

What year is this again?

Indeed. And also the fact that he, like myself, is a Nixon fan means that he knows suffering and he has eternal hope. He never gives up hope because all we do is suffer. But. But we still have hope. Talk about your book before we leave. That Howard Zinn is one of the most important voices really ever, ever, ever talk about it.

Oh, well, yeah, it's. The book's out in August and basically I wrote it because so many people were asking me, what do you think Howard Zinn would stick day say about and then fill in the blank? And people would ask it in a way that was almost like nervous, like, what would he say about Trump being elected? What would he say about rising fascism? What would he say about these things? Would it have caused this incredibly hopeful and optimistic historian to actually lose hope? And so that was my starting point. I've never written a non sports book, but I was, I started because I knew Howard at the end of his life, and I started to get like, kind of monomaniacal about this question, like, well, what would he say? And I realized the best way to do it would be to hit the archives and go back into his life and try to figure out where that sense of radical optimism came from. And what I found out is that it was always grounded in history and it was always grounded in facts. And it was something that he was able to hold on to even if the times were at their worst. Like, he didn't just live through the good times, he lived through the Red Scare. He fought in World War II. I mean, Howard Zinn hated fascism so much, he became a bombardier even though he'd never been on a plane. I mean, do you realize how much you have to dislike fascism? I mean, I have trouble getting on a plane to go from New York to Boston, for goodness sakes. You know what I'm saying?

Maybe it's the Z's, but to me, you are a Howard Zinn character when it to comes comes to sports history. One of the best sports historians and commentators really Ever. And I just so appreciate you so much, Dave. You, you, you do the thing and explain the things so well so clearly and with such heart. I just appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here.

I'll just say, Joy, you are what my teenage son would call one of one.

Oh, thank you. That is very kind. Thank you. Tell your son he is now my publicist and I will pay him later. You got it. Thank you very much. Take care, Dave Zirin. And we're going to make sure that we get this book into the pre order so you guys can check it out. Howard Zinn, if you haven't read the People's History of the United States, it's one of the things you really actually must read. It's very long, but it is very important. It's something I go to online whenever you want to, you know, double check your, your, your, your history to see what is sort of a progressive view that's factual and really gives you nuance. Howardson is great and Dave Zirin, brilliant. You guys should subscribe to the Nation because you get Dave and Elie Mistahl. You want that? All right, y', all, let's talk about a couple of these last things. The thing that you have to realize is that you are not, you don't know what's happening in Iran. You have no idea what your government is doing. You have no idea probably how many US Troops have died or have been killed and how many have been injured. You just have to assume that what you're hearing in this country is non factual until proven otherwise. And then there are fewer and fewer media organizations who you can trust to prove otherwise or to tell you what's happening. Both Israel and Iran and all the Gulf states effectively prohibit people from reporting on the ground the way that people were able to do in Gaza. No one wants pictures of their own country being bombed by broadcast. But now the United States has become an equally authoritarian actor in which we too are being shielded from whatever the facts are. In this case, we're even being effectively herded away from blaming the two countries who started the war to hear if, if you didn't know any better and you just sort of, you know, woke up one day and weren't paying attention, you would think Iran attacked Israel and us and that's why we hit back. No, no, no, no. There's a reason why the Department of Defense has been renamed, at least unofficially, the Department of War. They wanted to make war. There's a reason that this same department is threatening Cuba has already Threatened Panama, has threatened Greenland. We have a country that is lawless. Somebody posted about the Supreme Court. There's no Supreme Court. There is just all of Donald Trump's various adherents, helpers, caregivers, boosters. There's no FBI, there's no CIA, there's no Justice Department. The government has been dismantled. It's gone. And so we find ourselves much where we were during the Vietnam War. If you have D7, Jason, we were a country that, oh, okay, we may not have it. We were a country that claimed that we were going to war against Vietnam for very murky reasons that were really not explained. But before too long, our troops were burning down Vietnamese people's homes. Let's play this video.

[Nina Turner]

Hurry up down that town.

[Joy Reid]

And our troops were doing that because we were being told that the people whose homes they were burning down were the bad guy. We were being told they were communists who somehow threatened the United States. I think to this day, most Americans could not explain to you why we were at war in Vietnam. You probably can't quote off the top of your head how many people died, but you do know someone in your life that is a Vietnam veteran. I'm sure you do, because most people do. And most of them came back from that war either broken or addicted or stressed because of the things that they were told to do without them ever being told why they were doing it. Same thing happened in Iraq. A lot of Iraq War veterans went there believing that they went there because Saddam Hussein was responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers, which he wasn't. And so there they were, in some cases, torturing people, hurting people, threatening people with dogs. You know, when in their culture, there's a deep fear of dogs doing things that they must have nightmares about now, doing horrific things for a reason that they really weren't explained. Right now, your government is not telling you the truth about anything. Jason, if you have E1, your government told you that the reason Donald Trump got elected is because they were going to do a mass deportation, the largest deportation you've ever seen in history, the largest deportation ever. That they were going to deport a million people a year, 2 million, maybe, a year. If that's why you voted for Donald Trump, I'll bet you don't know that they deported fewer than 300,000 people last year, that they deported fewer people than Joe Biden did in a calendar year, and that now, now, because of the number of people they deported who work in very important industries like agriculture, which are already stressed because of the tariffs, the same administration Whose adherence in the media and mouthpieces in the media constantly tell you that the reason Donald Trump got elected was immigration. People wanted the border closed. People wanted the migrants sent back. They wanted them all sent back. Not just the criminals, all of them. Donald Trump is now saying, we need migrant workers. Keep anyone back up. They are going to make it easier for immigrant farm workers to work in the United States. If you voted for Donald Trump because you wanted mass deportation, surprise, surprise. He's not mass deporting people. He's doing two things with people. They're detaining them and they're grabbing people off the street, at least they were. And throwing them into detention because he promised the Geo group bodies that they would get paid per head for. He sent them to El Salvador because we were paying them $25,000 ahead and they wanted to make that money. And so they held Those men for 200, 230 men, tormented them, in some cases harmed them, and then they sent them back here or sent them somewhere else. There was never an attention, an intention of finding all the bad guys. And now get us, guess what else they're doing. They're now saying that the door to door raids, the street raids, the whole thing that was supposed to terrify all the illegals into self deporting. Well, people are definitely self deporting. The US has now. No, they have negative net migration. The problem is the negative net migration is harming the hotel industry, the restaurant industry, the farm industry and all the industries. So now they're saying reverse, reverse. We need migrants. Help, please send us your. You're tired, you're poor and those yearning to breathe free. We need them to work on our farms. And if they don't send them, they're probably going to take those people they've detained and put them in the fields and make them work because that's the 13th amendment. Slavery. There you go. Forced labor. They don't have enough workers. Did you, have you seen the latest unemployment numbers? They're terrible. They've gutted all of these industries, including your government industries. They're now complaining that because of the Congress they can't pay TSA workers. They're going to. They've received their first zero paycheck. Why is the TSA essentially is defunded because they were doing the mass immigration raids because they were turning over the AREPA lady on the corner and some guy that worked in the kitchen at a restaurant. They were terrorizing people with mass agents that killed at least two people, actually three that we know of. And Then one who was killed by an off duty ICE agent. They were killing people, harming people, terrorizing people and frightening people. That's why they got defunded. And now because of that happening, they have fewer workers, the economy is getting worse. We have net negative migration, which is hurting our industries, hurting our economy. Now the war has made everything more expensive, hurting our economy even more. So now their emergency strategy to try to fix it is let the migrants back in. Ain't that the reason we defunded DHS in the first place? The whole thing was done for nothing. You mean you're just going to stop? So now all the MAGA right wingers are pissed off because they're like, what happened to our mass deportation, you fools? They never were going to do mass deportation because anybody who understands basic economics understood that we need the immigrants. They're the youngest workers. They're the hardest workers. They work in many cases for lower wages and they don't get Social Security, meaning they pay into Social Security but never take out. So you need them to make Social Security function. Wait till Social Security's future is now destroyed because of all this. And now that you've done all of that damage, cost TSA workers to lose their money, effed up the economy, started a war in which you're probably going to need some immigrants to go put that uniform on and go to Iran to fight for Israel. You're going to be asking to do that. You're not going to deport them. Then. Now you want to let the immigrants come in. They can come on back in if you're a maga. You got played so bad, I can't even begin to explain to you how foolish you are, how foolish you look after all they've done to destroy, including causing the TSA to workers to not get paid so that your travel is now hell. Those people, some of them are driving Uber. They can't get. They can't pay their mortgages. All of that. And now you're just calling off the mass deportation pardon. Y' all got used. Everyone is making money off of these lies except you. Geo Group got paid. Core Civic got paid. All these defense contractors got paid. Palantir got paid. They got paid for the technology that helps them find the immigrants. Billionaires got paid. All of these billionaires got paid. Your Amazon guy, Jeff Bezos, got his check cut. All those people at the Washington Post just to please Trump. Now the Washington Post is going downhill, but he's still got his defense contractors. You don't care. The guys over of The Ellison family, they got CBS Warner. They about to get cnn. They got Tik Tok. They got all that. They got paid. Donald Trump's sons are invested in drone technology. They're going to get paid off this war. Everyone is going to get paid. And the people who are forced to go and fight for Israel in the Middle east, in Iran, are going to come back with PTSD disabilities, maybe a missing arm, a missing leg. There's that Vietnam veteran who said, don't let your sons fight in wars that politicians start. The people who are going to suffer are ordinary Americans, many of whom voted for this shit because they thought they were getting. Drum roll. Mass deportation. Well, how's your mass deportation looking now? It's looking like they freaking canceled it because it's unpopular and it's going to hurt Republicans in the midterms. So you're not even getting that. What did you get, maga? What did you get for your vote? If you can tell me one thing you got. By the way, they're going to close the Kennedy center for two years. The board voted up the prize and the. They destroyed the Kennedy Center. They destroyed the East Wing, they destroyed farms, they destroyed the soybean industry, they destroyed the farmers legacy, they destroyed the tsa, they've destroyed the federal government, they've destroyed Social Security and let all of your Social Security data go to a private business, probably Palantir or some of the other surveillance company. What did y' all get? Because I can tell you what you didn't get was mass deportation. You fools. They were never going to do that. Not for you. Build the wall. You didn't get that either. Build a wall. First of all, you can't build a wall. A lot of it is the Rio Grande. That's water. You got nothing except a destroyed, decimated country that's going broke, that's in debt that our great grandchildren are going to have to pay off because of that tax cut that the rich got. We're now in deeper debt than ever and we're spending, what, $2 billion per missile per day to shoot down $20,000 drones. And Iran can do this all day, baby. They're just. And by the way, there is an Amir, one of the big investors out of the Gulf states, who wrote to Trump saying, who gave you the authority to put all of us in danger and to drag us into a war? Who said you could do that to us? Dubai, a rising economy shuttered, shattered. The Emirates airline that was doing so well, effed up all that tourism. All those comedians that Were going and all the fashion show done. This man has destroyed the Gulf states, the Gulf economy, oil prices, your electric prices. The AI goons are building AI factories in all of your towns and making you pay the bill while they're poisoning you and poisoning your water, poisoning the air. Y' all got nothing. You got nothing. They got Project 2025 and you didn't get shit. If you voted for Trump. You didn't get nothing. Nothing. Even the end of dei. We played you the boys that's doing that, right? A couple of mediocre young men who don't know nothing. Canceling all y' all expensive studies and PhD funded cancer research. Done. Done all that research. If it's, if it's a research about a woman or some Jewish people or black. These boys got rid of all y' all grants. Gutted your universities. Universities fell on their knees. The media fell on their knees. Gutted the media. Trump is right. He completely gutted the media. Mainstream media has lost credibility, lost clout, lost viewers and maga. What did you get? Not a damn thing. Well done. Well freaking done. You could have asked us, we would have told you that man is a crook and a. And a grifter and a liar. He been that. We tried to tell you. You didn't listen. All right, let's. Let's leave out of here with our moment of joy. This week or last week, I appeared on a really, really fun program and it is. Sorry that. Yes. Oh, yes. And it. 154 podcast. The 154 podcast. And it is hosted. It is. Well, let me. I'll make sure that I get the right name for. Is it called the 154 podcast? It is so much fun. I just call it the Godfrey show because it is so much fun. And it is the 154 pocket, but it's O N E 54 podcast and it's hosted by Akbar Gabama Jamila and who is a former NFL player. And Godfrey, the comedian, fabulous Godfrey, they host this incredible show called 154podcast.o n e5 4. If you guys have not watched it, it is such a fun podcast. It has produced so many amazing light moments. It's the one that produced the moment where they found out what the song in Lion King was. And it's just, oh, there's a lion. It's a lion. Oh, my God. That's what produced that. Okay. 154 podcast. It is so much fun. Godfrey is hilarious. Akbar is hilarious. We had a great time. Let me play you the little promo that they made for the episode. Here it is.

[Nina Turner]

Here we are. Joy. Look at her. There she is.

[Joy Reid]

Fake news.

Can you believe it?

[Nina Turner]

Just had an interview with. It was so fantastic. She was asking me good questions because

[Joy Reid]

usually they're so terrible.

[Nina Turner]

Joy Reid had to get her off tv. I couldn't stand her. I had to get rid of these black reporters. But here she is, she has her own show and she's back with her again.

[Joy Reid]

Can you believe it?

[Nina Turner]

Look at her. Look at immigrants Make America great. I hate you so much. But I have to be on her show because I'm a social media, that's why. Look at Joy Reed. She's just so happy. Look at, she thinks she's smart. She went to Harvard. She got so lucky. I'm surprised it had to be dei. I'm sure it was. Look at her. Oh, I'm sorry. But anyway, Joy Reed, look at her. Fake news.

[Joy Reid]

So God can do anybody. We did, if you guys watch the episode, we did an Obama off. I did my, my, my little Obama. In my impression, he just, they, I, I lost. I, I was third out of three in the Obama impressions. But we, yeah, Jason says I lost. I know. I, I, I did my best, okay? I did my best. Godfrey is absolutely hysterical. Akbar, wonderful guy. We had a great, great, great time. If you guys get a chance, please watch the 154 podcast. I will post a link to it in the bottom of this chat. And also we reversed it and interviewed Godfrey. So stay tuned. Same bad time, same bad channel. We will be playing what he said to us when we got to reverse on it, reverse the cameras on him and interview Godfrey as well. Godfrey is great. He's brilliant. We appreciate him. Super knowledgeable, brilliant political mind, but just a lot of fun. Akbar as well, brilliant. And we had, we talked about being, you know, African, kids of Africans and also kids of immigrants and all the things. So it's really fun. So I hope you guys watched it. All right, guys, thanks for tuning in to the Joy Reid show. Please like and subscribe and we'll see you next time. And until then, fake news, everybody. Fake news.

[Georgia Fort]

News.

[Joy Reid]

Fake news. Getting back to the basics, grassroots level. Let me dig a little deeper with the shovel.

[Nina Turner]

Plenty can't tell the force from the trees that I'm hard to detect Like

[Jamal Bryant]

a black hole in a dog Injustice

[Joy Reid]

anywhere it's a threat to justice everywhere Let me make this clear I got

[Nina Turner]

a bone to pick and I'll never fear the threat of poverty they don't

[Joy Reid]

want to talk about it.

[Nina Turner]

They rather party.

[Joy Reid]

So I'm a real talk about it for sure.