Love and Loathing at the DNC
At the DNC in Chicago this year, we are asked to “hold it all.” Some reflections from the seat of Empire and also from this place — this idea, this illusion, this dream — we call “America” … The All of It.
These are daily posts and personal reflections from a roving reporter and “journalist-activist” for the public radio station KSQD on the California Central Coast. These begin on Day 1 of the DNC and end the Saturday after the DNC.
Featuring: our KSQD team’s encounters with the former MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan and the “Uncommited Movement,” GOP strategist and ne’r-do-well Karl Rove, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, massive TikTok influencers Walter Masterson and PearlMania500, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and more.
Monday, August 19: Not there yet!
Good morning! Today is the first day of the Democratic National Convention. … I am not allowed to leave for the convention until Tuesday, my daughter’s birthday, because she said so.
But I’ve been doing some research and I am particularly drawn to this convention because it is in Chicago — a city I grew to love when I was at Northwestern University, studying journalism and radio, television and film. I got to meet Howard Zinn there & helped bring Noam Chomsky to Northwestern. I got arrested protesting the CIA at Northwestern and then went on the Studs Terkel Radio Hour with other student organizers. (We were going to go to trial & make CIA activities the real crime, but they backed down. Chickens.)
I sold beers and pop out of a cooler to make extra money one summer at the Blues Fest on the lake. I performed in the musical, “Tommy” (small role!), and briefly dated the Friends actor David Schwimmer, a remarkable actor & director even then. One summer, I traveled to Chile & Cuba with the Institute for Policy Studies (also interned in DC).
Chicago is a GREAT city. But I have not gone back until now. Even with all these things I did at NU, I remember myself as being very insecure. It was a shock to my system to end up at a university with all these wealthy midwesterners who seemed so comfortable in their skins.
Whereas, here I was, a mixed race, young woman, daughter of a hippie & a Chinese immigrant, who had bounced around from state to state all her life and even up to Canada. I went to three junior high schools in two countries. I have this psychological thing where I always feel like a bit of an outsider, trying to fit in. (Yes. I know everyone feels a bit like this. That is also true. I see you!)
I am excited to go back and embrace all the big-muscled goodness of that city. Maybe to heal a little (& yes, I know healing is an inside job, but still). Some of my college friends are organizing a dinner — all smart & amazing women who are pumped for Harris.
The other reason I am drawn is because the DNC convention in Chicago in 1968 is world famous and sports all these parallels to what we are looking at today.
1968 was the year of my birth and so I have paid some special attention to it. I was born on January 1, and so, I consider the whole year to be mine. 🙂
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April, 1968 and Robert Kennedy was killed in June. He was running to be the nominee. Now his son is running, for what that is worth (not much in my mind. Most unfortunate.) Lots of upset, protests, unrest about all of it.
So, it ended up Hubert Humphrey was the leading candidate after President Lyndon Johnson resigned & stepped out of the race, just like Biden.
The Vietnam War was raging, the Summer of Love was raging and President Johnson was trying to figure out how to wind down the war but also not willing to stop bombing North Vietnam (sound familiar?). The voting age was 21 and there was a demand to make it 18 because 18-year-olds were the ones going off to kill & die in Vietnam.
The “Yippies,” Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden — “the Chicago Seven” and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther, who was bound and gagged during the trial that followed — and all kinds of protesters descended upon Chicago … Today, there is another war people are fed up with, even though US troops are not (yet!) being sent to Israel and Gaza, etc.
Like then Chicago Mayor Daley, the current city government is trying to keep protesters away from the convention. Daley responded so severely, it helped create the clashes that actually turned off a lot of television viewers and helped get Nixon elected. (There was also a certain amount of chaos on the convention floor.)
Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (Trump’s 2016 campaign managers) were Nixon groupies and just getting their hellacious engines revving. Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back. And the Kremlin Op that is Stone-Manafort is a major reason we got Donald the Dumpster Fire in 2016, along with all that Russian interference.
Anyhoo, there’s more to say, of course. But I think we have had enough for today, right?
Tuesday morning, the 20th. Some notes on Harris and Israel-Gaza-Palestine:
Last night, KSQD reporter and my colleague Chris Krohn reported on the first day of the DNC and I followed that show with my interview with the author of Tinderbox & founder of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, Stephen Zunes. Zunes is controversial for some folks, but he knows his stuff. I wanted to talk to someone who could lay down some geopolitical facts and talk about real strategies going forward. Reality often sucks, but it’s what we’ve got.
I think the interview was important and we spent some time talking about where Vice President Kamala Harris might go with Israel — Palestine, and where a Trump administration has gone and likely will also go (beyond current rhetoric). See Zunes’ article on this for The Progressive. Most third party & independent candidates are not on the ballot in all 50 states & honestly, have no path to victory.
The deadline to qualify has passed in many states and RFK Jr. has been using a fake address along with GOP minions & money to get his petitions in, with many fake signatures. So I’m just saying (again): Reality & stuff.
Zunes is an expert in his field and I recommend the show.
In the meantime, the two “Sad Francisco: JD Vance & the Tech Bros of SF” shows are VERY important, pretty shocking and essential as a precautionary tale re: what is happening in San Francisco and possibly “Blue” cities across the nation. (Here’s the post-convention article I wrote about all this.)
Those two shows are now up at our show pages and at Podcast Land (search “Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills” at your favorite sites … & you have to add my name or you’ll get the show FEATURING Vance and not covering Vance. Not kidding. 😬)
Tuesday evening, Aug. 20. Arrived at O’Hare at 7pm. Got into town at about 8:30 pm. This thing was still raging.
Now I know where the phrase: “the crowd roared” comes from. That was insane. The DNC is packed, as you can see on TV. Please tell Donald Trump it’s true.
Feels like half of Chicago is out here working the convention at United Center. Lyft and Uber drivers having a field day … field days.
Lots of big, black SUVs, sometimes with police escort and — wait, that might have been the Obamas!
Personally, flooded with feelings and memories driving in on a Lyft myself, but no time to unpack any of that, nor my actual baggage. Had to meet Chris Krohn and get to United Center. We passed Medea Benjamin of the anti-war group Code Pink on the way, sitting on the sidewalk rummaging through her stuff. Chris stopped and said hello, but I was halfway down the block (he told me when he caught up).
United Center is the largest sports arena in the United States, and holds 23,000. It’s totally chaotic for someone coming in mid-way with a press pass who has never been to a convention. I was spending a lot of time with secret service asking “which way do I go?”
(Also: “What really happened in Butler, Pennsylvania?”
… Naw.)
A few pro-Palestinian protestors still had the energy to shout at the security line into the Center, along with Christian folks dearly concerned for all our souls. The war on Gaza is the darkest stain on these proceedings and creeps in as this ribbon of doubt and dismay as the Obamas and everyone else stoke the crowd.
I saw our gal, the intrepid, omnipresent activist Nadine Seiler, “Warrior Goddess for the Resistance” (one of our MOT shows) while I was in line and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then the line moved. I’ll find her again.
And, yes, the crowd was stoked. I was stoked. I am going to admit it.
California delegates are the biggest crew here and they get prime floor space, front and center to the stage. I can tell you they are here to represent and they do! I texted our local delegate Lani Faulkner, but she was down there somewhere in the sea of roaring crowd and I think she replied at 1 am.
Chris headed off to catch a Jill Stein function and good riddance. (Just kidding — kind of — I’ll get the report from Chris today).
The media tents outside are huge. Everyone is here. I found that if I wave my pass around confidently, staffers will generally let me get to where I want to be — as long at that place is not too VIP. I ended up with a bunch of other press, pretty high up and close to the stage.
Further up still are the CNN (& so on) studio rooms and rows and rows of black tables with power and wifi where journalists click away at their laptops. The speaking stage is wild and all lit up and dominates the space. It amazes me that human beings can organize themselves like this, for an event like this, and even though there is some chaos, cheers to us for being the amazing, collaborative, smart creatures we are.
OK. On to the show. Mixed feelings. A bunch of protesters from yesterday ended up at the hospital due to rough treatment from police. The local National Lawyers Guild reported that one was shackled by her arms and legs to a wall so tightly, her joints swelled up.
But inside the convention, all is love and light, of course.
I have to sit inside these contradictions, but I’ve been doing this all my life. I didn’t tell you that when I was here as a student, getting arrested myself at Northwestern University, I was hired by the Bill of the Rights Foundation and the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation to write a book about CIA activities on college campuses and around the globe.
As mentioned, I went to Chile and Cuba one summer, interning with IPS* and traveling to Santiago with Isabel Letelier, whose husband was killed in a car bomb in DC by Pinochet’s agents. Pinochet, of course, is the Chilean dictator we supported in the 1973 coup to stop Salvador Allende from nationalizing stuff and doing what he was elected to do. That coup started with all kinds of Chileans getting rounded up and shot in their national stadiums, like the United Center. That’s just one story of far, far too many.
I know Empire.
I saw a quote that said (roughly): the last phase of empire is that the tactics used abroad finally come home and are used on empire’s own citizens. I see that as MAGA right now, but others would say the Democrats can do this too. And yes, they sometimes do. But “Democrat” these days is a word that signifies so many different people, and I am really sorry I missed the progressive Democratic meetings on Sunday and Monday. There are some excellent Democrats.
This moment feels like a struggle between some kind of hope beyond hope and the way power has operated throughout recorded history, IMHO. If we are to have any chance of survival on this planet, if we are to live in peace, we are going to need to address the corporate voraciousness and mass consumption that drive imperialism and exploitation. We need to dramatically change our systems. We need to address the greed and sense of internal emptiness that drive greed. We need to actually face that emptiness and find the thing and no-thing beyond it.
Wisdom, love, letting go.
Being at a convention of the national party that might win the White House in November — in perhaps still the most powerful nation on Earth — and to have a Jewish, white man (Doug Emhoff) talk about how he quit his job to move to DC to support his mixed-race Black and Indian wife as Senator, and then to have that woman be our Presidential nominee, with a VP who, as a high school football coach, organized his school’s first gay-straight alliance … and to have the night be headlined by a Black couple, held aloft by this roaring crowd … this means something.
I think it means more than a lot of cynical people, and especially folks who are not people of color, nor women, nor Queer, know or feel.
What we don’t know yet is if the experiences of oppression so many of us have lived with will translate into domestic and foreign policy that is about liberation for poor folks, POC, and women and Queer people around the world. Because it is these groups that best understand the ravages of runaway capitalism, racism and patriarchy. Of greed.
I was moved at the convention. I allowed myself to be moved because, really, we have always lived in this world of human contradictions, of love and war. Of great kindness and horrific calamity. I will be moved as well as horrified. Otherwise, I am not really living. As the spiritual teacher Gangaji has said: “The heart can bear it all.”
So, I was jumping up out of my seat and clapping in the press seats at moments, along with, frankly, other Black journalists and a few other reporters (but not too many. We are “objective” here, dontcha know.) The young gal beside me was stern and aloof and I asked her where she was from and she said “The Wall Street Journal” and I said,
“Well, that’s unfortunate.”
JUST KIDDING.
I did think that.
We all know Rupert Murdoch has his own special spot in Hell. But she was young and, whatever. Better than Newsmax, I guess, which has its own makeshift “lounge” and reporting studio in the outside media tent. Gross. Walter Masterson went over there to mock them on TikTok.
Funniest moment: when Obama talked about how Trump was fixated on crowd sizes and used his hands to show how.
Most moving: Black people as our nation’s leaders right now.
I’ll end with a quote from the CSL** national election prayer line I got this morning. I didn’t catch the man’s name, but the quote seems apt. Some is paraphrased:
“Our elected officials are flawed, like us. They can represent us, but not do the work for us …
WE are the imagineers of the beloved community. We can cheer with ecstasy for our politicians or jeer with disdain.
But there is no hope, except in we the people.
Be engaged.”
Reporting this evening at 5 pm at KSQD 90.7 FM Community Radio and praying with all my might the tech works. Thanks to Nyanko Nyasu who is holding down the fort at home.
***
(Note, coming up on our radio show: Terra Vance — Marked Melungeon IS related to J.D. Vance and will be on our show in October.)
P.S. My hotel room is tiny box with a full size fridge in it and a view of a power pole. Weirdly, there is only decaf coffee in the coffee pods (emergency situation!) In the distance, a brown-brick church, the Chicago skyline.
It’s great to be here. This hotel looked WAY better in the photos, but folks here are pumped. Visitors from Australia (Labor Party) tell me our politics becomes theirs and they are so relieved that Kamala Harris is our Democratic nominee.
A wonderful and non-stop Dem volunteer, a Black woman from Houston, Judy, told me she was going to John Legend’s party (at midnight or so) and said I could jump in her Uber with her! I just could not do it, my legs were shot. I’ll ask her how it was. I know. So lame. I KNOW.
xoxox
*Institute for Policy Studies, **Center for Spiritual Living
Wednesday, August 21: Mostly at United Center
Believe your eyes: that is a keffiyah on a Hindu priest on stage at the DNC. Of course, this was at the very end, as people are filing out. These two spoke & urged peace & an end to oppression.
In other photos, the young social influencer known as “Harry,” who seems to have some ambitions, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former “fixer” and now a leading Trump critic. I have a photo of the back of Mehdi Hasan’s head in the crowd 😁. I did speak with both (Michael and Mehdi) & thanked them for their work. Cohen seemed stressed, so I put a hand on his shoulder. These are the weird moments that happen here.
A few notes this morning:
1) it is already hot and it is 8:30 AM so, at least we got some lovely Chi-town summer weather for three days. The heat will probably make everyone a little grumpy. Or not! People are ridiculously jazzed.
2) as per my first graf, our intrepid Moment of Truth reporter, Meilin Obinata, is reporting that several journalists were arrested at a protest yesterday. I’ll try to find out more and report at 5 PM on KSQD.
3) watching clips of the speeches on TV is quite different than being here. Actually, it’s better on TV. You just can’t see much of people’s faces nor even hear so sharply & you are kind of distracted by the crowds. And so Bill Clinton came off much better on TV than he did in the arena. Actually, everybody did, and I realize that in many ways they are really setting this up for the TV audience.
The speech by the parents of the hostage Hersh*: I am watching these parents in post interviews talking about how they expected perhaps hostility (& were coached this way!) and this seems to be one of the central threads of disinformation/BS about how protesters feel about Jewish people. It is stated again and again that protesters are anti-Semitic and yet we see consistently that so many are actually Jewish. No protestor I have ever spoken to has expressed anti-Jewish sentiments. Upsetting.
Of course, our hearts go out to these parents and of course, we must have a CEASEFIRE & we must put tremendous pressure on Netanyahu and much much more than we are now. Protesters are calling for an arms embargo. To me, it is a wonder we can have these two parents on the stage — a good thing! — and we cannot have anyone who is a family member of a Palestinian lost in Gaza. This is the biggest hypocrisy and tragedy of this DNC.
*Post DNC Note: RIP Hersh Goldberg Polin. RIP 40,000 Palestinians, most of whom will not get this kind of coverage and mourning globally. This war needs to end yesterday, months ago. Make this happen, Joe Biden.
Friday Morning. Post DNC. Pretty tired, but OK.
The Breakdown: featuring encounters with Amy Goodman, Mehdi Hasan, Cory Booker & Karl Rove
As we all know/felt/saw, this convention knocked it out of the park for Democrats. That also means, YES for: democracy, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, a free press, continued forward movement on climate (not fast enough, not nearly, but so it is), continued forward movement on social and racial justice, on union momentum, voting rights and a chance for progressives to move their agenda forward. For migrants, I don’t know what all is in that bipartisan legislation that Biden and Congress tried to pass. I assume more sanity than under Trump but also tighter enforcement of border control and less relief for struggling people coming from terrible circumstances.
Finally, this convention is a YES to stopping fascism in the United States and stopping Putin too. There is a literal definition for that word and M@G@ fits it. … I do not accept when folks say: “Oh, we are already fascist,” or, “the border is fascist” or “what is happening in Gaza is fascist,” so who cares?
There are specific words to describe the horrors of all those things (we can agree they are horrible) and there are systemic reasons for them, but we do not need, via fuzzy thinking, to allow the worst of those in our politics here to bring them all home to roost and to grow and hurt people.
We must fight this MAGA insanity off and back and defeat it decisively so that it is done and so we can breathe and move forward in every other way. IMHO. We simply must.
The polls are still tight (insane!) and being excited is not going to win this election. Translating excitement — or pragmatism — into action is. That is gong to take ALL of us. I have my first stack of letters to voters to write at home. How about you?
Moments:
Sitting in the “nursing room” as designated by the DNC, in the press building, trying to negotiate for quiet and keep folks out (not nursing women! Didn’t see babies at all, actually) as we prepared to go live.
The room had been discovered and we had to share. At one point, a woman from Slate was recording her intro to her podcast with progressive Democrat Pramila Jayapal, huddled underneath the desk we were at with an easy chair pulled up in front of her to minimize echo (I think?)
I finally caught up with former MSNBC host, Mehdi Hasan. MSNBC cancelled Hasan’s show after the start of the Israel-Gaza war. I’ve learned you don’t ask a celebrity like this for an interview (unless they look bored), you just turn on your recorder and start asking questions, sometimes, following them as they rush to their next event.
Hasan was depressed, he said. He couldn’t figure why a Palestinian speaker was not allowed on stage at the DNC.
“It’s a moral disgrace. It’s fundamentally racist and I think, electorally, it’s mad. Why would you not want a Palestinian speaker on stage endorsing Kamala Harris? That should be good news for the Democrats at a time when a lot of Americans are refusing to vote for Kamala Harris in key states like Michigan … It’s depressing.”
Chris Krohn ran out to the press conference by Uncommitted delegates when their deadline for the DNC to respond to their request to have a speaker onstage had passed. This was just before our broadcast. Some of the delegates stayed and slept overnight on the cement from 8pm the night before. Chris got an incredible shot of Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! seemingly in tears there.
(Symbolic of how this whole thing went down, DNC staffers brought the delegates pizza and some pillows, but then, leadership did not allow an Uncommitted speaker. Senator Cory Booker, Ayanna Pressley and other Congresspeople had come out show support, one protestor said, and many were posting about this group on social media.)
Chris and I had fun chasing after folks and Chris is more dogged than I! He chased after Booker, asking him about the protestors (no luck) and then he chased after Ayanna Pressley (never got that report back.)
He chased after freaking Karl Rove, the notorious GOP strategist, and asked him if he’d been surprised at the convention and Rove said “there have been lots of surprises!” and then Chris asked about the pro-Palestinian protests and Rove stalked off. Good riddance, Karl Rove!!
MSNBC (for all its faults) is the only network I can stomach these days but I notice their Gaza coverage and commentary is way down from just after Oct. 7.
Host Lawrence O’Donnell has been talking about meeting Harris at a small meeting in Los Angeles many years ago and thinking: “this is the next Black and first female president.” … Right? The media coverage of her as VP has been awful.
But he also said Karl Rove had his eye on Harris in the 2020 primary and was doing everything in his power to keep her down. What does this actually mean, action-wise? I have no idea.
Tony Russomanno (a Santa Cruz, CA delegate), who used to be a reporter for NBC, was sending us emails with commentary on our broadcasts and that was great. Tony wanted us to track down Maxwell Frost (young Democratic Congressional rep out of Florida and a rising Dem star) who became homeless after running for Congress. We should ask him about housing issues and the Harris platform, Tony said.
But tracking down someone in that crowd without multiple assistants and a rock solid, little black book is impossible. Maybe Tony has some tricks up his sleeve. He still does reporting and commentary for KSQD on “What a Week!” (Saturday mornings).
I did find a media booth that would hook radio folks up with willing interviewees, but like most of the media info tables, kind of lame!
Example one: the main entrance to the huge media tent adjacent to the Center had an info table and they were out of everything all the time (the printed speeches, which come out daily, and the daily schedule!)
When I got there at 3pm one day. I asked about wi-fi and it took them ten minutes to find the password and then they did not know the network name (OK?) I kept asking questions that all these volunteers did not have answers to.
There must a be a thousand things seasoned reporters here knew that I did not know, but I found the whole thing totally chaotic. Chris and I guessed the DNC did not expect these numbers due to Biden being the orginal nominee and so had to scramble to get organized and there wasn’t actually that much Kamala swag to sell. But, Leslie Steiner, I got you a T-shirt and I hope I chose well!
Nonetheless, you may know I used to be an on-staff reporter for Metro and I have to say, I absolutely loved being a reporter and I have loved being here and running around in the chaos. As for a lot of folks, there is a let down after such massive flurry of, well … it sounds sappy, but …
togetherness, actually.
Beyond the protests (and we covered these quite a bit on the radio show) there was common cause … and all sort of people. And, even within this highly produced, massively watched and televised event, this media circus and VIP extravaganza, the love, I believe, was real.
You saw it in Doug Emhoff, watching Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s son when he stood up and shouted in pride for his Dad, with tears in his eyes, and, I believe, in the love that people have for one another, as humans, in general — which, we pray, will create and bolster policy and actions toward, as CSL* says often: “a world that works for everyone.”
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Much, much more on the radio shows. They are all up now at the KSQD app, website and etc., filed under “Talk of the Bay.”
The interview with author and Middle East expert Stephen Zunes and his analysis of what Harris might do on Israel-Gaza-Palestine is now up too, under “Moment of Truth.”
Saturday Morning. Post DNC. Reality Strikes.
Finally had a day off in Chicago and used my time to get down to the Chicago river and take the Chicago River Architectural Tour, as recommended by someone in my Facebook comments. One of the first things I saw by the river was Chicago’s Trump Tower.
Reality strikes. This race is still close.
A television journalist from Texas got off the boat. I recognized her from the DNC and asked her how it was for her: “It was a lot,” she said and that’s the same sentence I’ve been using over and over.
“The best thing I could think of to do was come down here and get on a boat for an hour or so,” she said, looking seriously run down. I wished her a good day and got on the boat.
(The tour was well worth the cost of admission. Photos below.)
Outside of a lunch spot in the newly developed Fulton Market neighborhood, a young woman with three children, including one infant, sat on the sidewalk next to a stroller seeking donations. I gave her a ten and talked to her a bit, though her English was extremely limited and my Spanish is too. She was staying at a shelter with her children, she said.
I got the sense that she was one of the thousands of migrants from Latin America that Texas GOP Governor Abbott has been busing to Chicago, a “sanctuary city.” She did not seem terribly unhappy to be on the street with her three kids and it occurred to me that being here was better than being wherever she had come from.
After my boat tour, I met a friend who works for the City of Chicago for drinks and she told me that these immigrants had packed the police stations and finally been moved into shelters and some into apartments. This is creating tensions with various working class constituencies in Chicago, who are upset that the migrants are getting, perhaps, more support than they are.
There’s a method to the madness of the GOP. They are sending migrants to Blue cities to score cheap and cynical political points … but also to ensure that any migrants who might become citizens and vote Democratic will not do so in Red States. And hoping they might cause chaos in Blue states.
(Also, a lot of MAGA is built on the projections that white people will become a minority in 2045 or so. I believe the GOP is trying to keep this from happening. This is partially why they want to ban abortion within the nation and lower the working age for children — so that they can have white workers in fields and factories and not brown. The truth is: we need migrants.)
Remember, the Democrats and Harris are not actually running against Trump. They are running against a fire hose of disinformation that is coming at us from every direction and worming in (no pun intended) through groups which harbor government skepticism already. The pundits are talking about how RFK, Jr. is not going to affect the Harris campaign because it is “Right wing conspiracy theorists” who support RFK (MSNBC this morning). But I know quite a few people in my circles who are typically liberal, or left, who support RFK. Trump is gaining votes either way.
I was surprised when I posted a video of Walter Masterson at TikTok to see a bunch of seemingly Black TikTokers jump on that post and start talking about how Masterson is racist. When I clicked through to where they were getting that, it was Black, female Trump supporter with tens of thousands of followers and bunch of posts decrying Democrats as racist.
THIS is what we are up against, including the algorithms social media platforms may be intentionally using — along with bad actors — to flood the population with disinformation. The Black community was also targeted heavily in 2016 by the Russians, as were Bernie supporters.
Case in point: on a Lyft ride back to my hotel, my driver, a young Black man, told me — after days of ferrying around excited and happy DNC-goers — that he was a Trump supporter.
He talked about the stimulus checks from 2020 and how the Democrats did not want to help. “Trump is going to help people like me,” he said. “That money means a lot to people like me.”
I asked him where he got his news. Social media. I spent some time trying to give him good info and he thanked me for that, but then when I got out, I told the young female staffer outside the hotel, also a woman of color, about how I had to talk to that Lyft driver because he was going to vote for Trump and “can you believe it?”
And she said, “Well … “ and then she mentioned that the new immigrants in Chicago were getting $15,000 a month from the city government and I said: “What?”
And she said, “Well, maybe not each month” and I said:
“I don’t think that’s true.”
I asked her where she got her info and she said a police officer found a debit card (issued by the city) for migrants with $15,000 on it. I said: “Where did you see that? Was it a video, or … ?”
Yeah, she said, social media.
I said, look, half of this stuff is not true. If not more. Which is the same thing I said to my Lyft driver.
So, reality strikes. The GOP and their collaborators across the globe are targeting low information, working class voters where they are most vulnerable and where it matters: their bank accounts.
So, the buzz and excitement of the DNC is starting to fade for me. I hope the DNC has some kind of strategy for reaching out to potential voters like this. … It takes a personal connection and not insulting people right off the bat. I know that’s hard and I sometimes fail — when so much is at stake, including, for many of us, our personal rights and freedoms.
There is a lot do to and the clock is ticking. It’s time to get home and get to work.
