He's

still not called a genocide, so this sense of always being above the fray, as if he's just a spectator.

He was right at the center of battle, and he was cowardly.

He conformed the U.S. imperial policy.

These of the Israel, he didn't have a critical word to say.

That one moment when he called for an abstention of the vote in the United Nations, That was a different swerve.

Bush had done a similar thing.

might have

That doesn't exist anymore.

No, but I mean, I think when you talk about Brother Bernie or Brother Zoran, in an empire that has such weak class organization and such weak class consciousness, the best you're going to end up with is left populism.

It's like the flight of Sheldon Orr.

Now, populism is just people who work hard.

in churches, mosques, synagogues, and civic institutions who generate a condemnation of arrogant elite and bosses.

And usually, I mean, Debs himself, but I'm going to be part of the lower element.

I know as long as the soul is in prison and so forth.

Who is it and where does it come from?

You say what?

I said, it's the mutual gangsters club.

They both were co-conspirators and genocide and ethnic cleansing.

They both supported vicious occupation.

And they both, of course, based on just legal, let alone moral criteria, belong in jail.

So there's no doubt they'd come together.

But what's fascinating is the hypocrisy.

there breaking our necks, trying to speak precisely to

Right

...

in churches, mosques, synagogues, and civic institutions who generate a condemnation of arrogant elites and bosses.

And usually, I'll...

I mean, Debs himself.

I mean, when Debs talk about, "I'm gonna be part of the, uh, lower element.

I... as long as the soul is in prison," and so forth, that's spiritual moral language that's much more tied to left populism than serious class struggle.

But what I'm wondering is, if you had to think about or put, point a finger at who it is that controls this ether, the ether of denial that they're, they've been foisting on people for so long, who is it, and, and where does it come from?

Preference for something bigger.

Outside of time, beyond time.

Grounded in time.

And then over against the grain.

We were talking about John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, which is the second most popular book in the English language, other than King James Version.

And you have to be Baptist.

I just throw that in there.

That's valuable, is built on them.

Mm

...

the President of A- of South Africa.

Uh, so that there's been some real gangsters who have received the prize, but Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, and Tutu, they, they certainly deserved it.

And this, this sister certainly deserves it, too.

To use that kind of international moral authority to acknowledge just what has happened to precious Palestinians, uh, not just in the last couple of years, but for s- over 70-some years, is very, very important, though, brother.

And we've seen them try to say this, make s- similar kind of gestures, you know, be it in, uh, Guatemala, uh, I- Iran, or in, um, uh, uh...

Yeah.

there's just no

doubt about that now jay-z himself you know he's an artistic genius there's no doubt about it i've met him a couple of times he and i did his book together i like the brother in terms of one-on-one soul to soul but he's been wrong morally wrong ideologically wrong politically wrong we had to struggle around barclays center you remember that going all over when they had the Russian elites come in and told everybody Jay-Z got 15%, and I said, no, it's 0.15%.

That's a big difference.

But we were organizing to make sure that form of gentrification didn't push black people out.

It ended up pushing black folk out.

Reverend Dolcher and others were organizing to make sure that black people were treated with dignity.

They brought Jay-Z in.

And yet I wanted to play that because I want to get your take on what you think Donald Trump means when he says this is the final battle.

Hmm.

Coltrane has the intellectual sophistication, but he cultivates a unbelievable capacity to love, and you can hear it in his horn.

You could hear it in his dignified sound.

You could hear it with, when he's playing with Elvin Jones, another genius on the drums, or J- Jimmy Garrison or Reggie Workman.

I was just with Brother Reggie a few weeks ago.

He's still going in his late 80s.

And of course, M- McCoy Tyner on the piano, and then Alice Coltrane on the piano.

Mm

Let me now play Cornel West, and then I'll play for you from the weekend, Ed Sheeran.

I want to put in a strong word.

But my dear brother Macklemore, he has been in solidarity with people who are hated for a long, long time.

Way back when, standing with black people, standing with gay brothers and lesbian sisters and trans.

And yes, now he's standing with the hated people.

Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Anti-Palestinian racism cut very, very deep.

One, what do you make of what he had to say Saturday night? And number two, artists have agency too, do they not? They don't have to lean in politically if they don't want to lean in politically.

Take a listen.

I want to put in a strong word for my dear brother, Macklemore.

He has been in solidarity with people who are hated for a long, long time.

We And yes, now he's standing with a hated people.

with Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Anti-Palestinian racism cut very, very deep.

Now it cuts then.

West, we say what?

Lord, I'm

telling the world.

There was a star that was born to Sister Joyce Smiley.

He had a special calling, a special vocation, and it said, I want you to be a starter so that your light could shine because you got a calling and a vocation to be the salt of the world, to be a force for good, to fall in love with black people, to fall in love with people who are suffering and to be constant and consistent your whole life.

And here you are now, 62 years later, still constant, still consistent, letting your light shine the way Fannie Lou Hamer would put it.

and doing it with style and a smile.

So happy birthday, brother, and thank God for Atlantic Star, because they had their own star shining, too.

Take it away.

The

head of the Smithsonian, concerned about museums.

Truth-telling.

And no one of us have a monopoly on the truth.

We're all crack vessels.

But he was a grand and remains a grand quester for truth.

But the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.

So, Doc, with that said, you want to build on that a little bit, man? You got some time?

very,

very sad to see a nation and a people who are so locked in the forms of denial that they would attempt to erase and eliminate some of the richest and deepest traditions, of course, for truth and goodness and beauty in the history of America.

Can you imagine America, a nation, without the truth and beauty and goodness coming out of black America? It just means, in fact, that people are not serious about anything.

quest for truth, any quest for justice, any quest for beauty.

Now, the good news is that nobody that I know in human form is God.

So all the lies in the world that try to hide the crimes still can be exposed.

That all the attempts to deny the suffering of black people or indigenous people or working people or anybody else can still be exposed.

When you see those efforts now on steroids, again, it's hard to imagine, it's hard to believe that multiracial democracy is possible if that's the way they're going to show up, Doc.

that

there's a sense in which The worst of the species have always been addicted to self-destruction and wants to bring everybody else down with them.

Every religion, every morality, every form of art and spirituality is trying to break the human addiction to self-destruction.

And it is a perennial struggle.

Every generation you had to produce folk to try to convince people that the hatred and the greed And the envy and the resentment, which are the sources of self-destruction, have to be broken.

That's Ahab and Moby Dick and Melville's Moby Dick.

He's addicted to self-destruction.

Iranians, right? Mm-hmm.

feel it.

It's almost like the in the Judaic tradition, just overflowing with a love, overflowing with a genuine compassion.

And that's what I experienced.

Someone like James Baldwin said he found hatred in the Black church.

I found love.

He got it right before his view.

I found the exact opposite.

But the attempt to bring that about through politics is is is not some but you but you differ from that as i understand it and you actually think that no you're not quite as depressed about human ability to better ourselves than augustine was or you have a different reading of it

Uh-huh.

It's a, it's a whole different level.

We have to k- keep our standards up and defend at the highest level of our energy our finest, and this is something that I'm going to my grave defending the finest.

Not the you or Mark or Martin or, or people say C- Kamala Harris is Fannie Lou Hamer.

Get off the crack pipe.

No, Kamala sh- Kamala Harris is not one of our finest.

She's a mediocre politician who was very clever to do X and Y.

This Negro has lost his mind.

Why Sarah Vaughan today?

Oh, yeah.

No, I was just talking about the wedding anniversary to the beloved.

We've got the greatest vocal artist of the 20th century, Sarah Vaughan, from the chocolate side of Newark, New Jersey, and the great Irving Berlin, who wrote that classic song for the 1935 film, Top Hat.

with Fred Astaire singing it in the ear of Ginger Rogers.

But remember, brother, you and I come out of a great black prophetic tradition that says, if the kingdom of God is within me, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little heaven behind.

So no matter how nightmarish your situation, no matter how grim and dim your context is, You can bear witness and leave a little heaven behind because you got a love and a joy inside of you that the world didn't give you and the world can't take away.

And what does it say about the kind of candidate that people are going to be looking for when we get to that moment?

To those who have trouble squaring those two things, you say what?

I say that you never fit.

To be a misfit is to be in solidarity with people who are suffering across different systems, nations, and countries, and therefore you never fit.

You're always mildly adjusted to anybody's injustice.

It could be Mueller injustice.

It could be U.S. injustice.

It could be Russian injustice.

to justice and

Mm.

They had permanent integrity, permanent courage.

When you raise your voice and say, "We gonna treat Black people at Leimert Park with dignity," you're not talking about just their interests.

It's their interests in addition to something moral, something spiritual that's not reducible just to interests and power.

But it's this corrupt political system that reduces everything to transaction, everything to manipulation, everything to some short-term material interests rather than permanent interests that are shaping people's sense of who they are as human beings who are questing for dignity and questing for decency.

So I'm, I'm with my dear sister, Professor Carter, and yourself in that rich dialogue y'all had, but there's a rich connection to what you doing right now in Leimert Park and what the Black Congressional Caucus is not doing.

'Cause when you ask, where are ... what is the treasure, you can ... you know the treasure when you look at the, what, what people spend most of their attention are.

Mm.

Yeah,

I'm speaking to you.

I'm speaking to the brothers and sisters in Lamar Park.

I'm speaking to black people in America.

I'm speaking to decent people anywhere in the world who are looking for some form of hope, and you listen to the beautiful voices of the Burke family, those five children of Betty and Clarence out of Of course, you know, again, Tabitha, Curtis Mayfield wrote so many of their early songs in the world of fantasy.

And you waited too long.

This one was written by Stan Vincent, but still part of Curtis Mayfield's network.

It's all yours.

And we have to make the job description of our elected officials something different.

Doc? No, no, I love that.

Definitely.

You know, one of the things that I've always found striking about you, my dear brother, and I remember when Brother Tavis and I almost 15 years ago, we went on that anti-poverty tour.

And so many of the black leaders and elites and celebrities, of course, holding us at arms length.

They got protests out there.

And there you were on the panel, fearless, courageous, bearing witness, talking about what we were talking about, which is black suffering, black pain, black hurt, but also black creativity, black dignity, black sense of vision.

We could do this for hours if we have more time, Doug.

Anyway, Doc, your thoughts.

No, no.

I love my sister Megan because she's simply being honest when she talks about abolishing.

She knows it's going to be various means by which people are able to undergo rehabilitation and education.

She's simply against mass incarceration as disproportionately black and brown and poor tied to solitary confinement, which is a form of torture.

Same is true in terms of the police.

She wants systems of public safety that don't result in the kind of brutalizing and degrading of poor people.

They weren't feeling that, Doc.

been brought

to bear, and it would not have become visible if it were not for KBLA.

And that's very important.

It would have been invisible if you had not raised your voice.

And this is true not just in terms of political development.

You and I know that we always connect political development to spiritual development, to moral development, to economic development, to social development.

So this is not just a matter of narrow protest.

Can we start there for starters?

moral imagination

is empty without genuine courage.

Courage is the enabling virtue of all the other virtues.

All the other virtues are abstract without concrete courage.

And so when you really think about what it means to be willing to imagine another world, but at the same time fight for that other world, to be empowered, enabled, and ennobled, to be willing to sacrifice and pay a cost and bear a burden for that other world.

And one of the problems that we have these days It's easy to talk about another world.

It's even easy in some ways to talk about a moral imagination.

I'm not a pacifist.

though, that—

Brother Bill is a die-in-the-wool neoliberal.

And he speaks not just for himself.

He speaks on behalf of a whole wave of neoliberals in a moment in which neoliberalism is not only collapsing, but it's basically dying.

And so if the choice for a neoliberal is to opt for neofascism, or a populism that looks like a democratic socialism, he would opt for neo-fascism, but he's not alone.

One of the reasons why Trump himself is in the White House right now is because corporate media decided in 2016 they would rather cover every speech of every moment of Donald Trump rather than have cast any limelight on Bernie Sanders.

I was there with Bernie for 65 different events.

Talk to me.