This thing quacks pretty hard like racism.

Well, 100%.

So it's...

We've completely lost track of the trajectory of how we got to this point.

So that's how you want to look at it.

And so they're saying that even the Civil War itself, and we talk about, again, Lincoln was, you know, all these books written about Lincoln, and he's like this great unifier.

Kamala Harris did better in her election than Lincoln did in his.

Is there a tonic for this? I mean, is there, what is the, what do you suggest? And from what possible perspective can this be diluted anyway?

Go for it, Steve.

Well, I started on the book in the context of the... asking what happened to the commitments around racial justice after George Floyd was killed.

You had this kind of brief period of racial reckoning, lots of commitments, Walmart sang an ad, Black Lives Matter, and people making these different commitments, including Walmart, $100 million for a racial justice center, et cetera.

And then obviously everybody has backtracked, which is important to note, predated this current Oval Office occupant coming into office.

And so you have that reality.

And so that was the original inquiry.

then you have the ferocity of these attacks from the current administration so and we had the underlying inequality which everybody had said that they cared about six years ago now you have all these attacks on any remedy to the inequality and so what are we saying about what that inequality and now we okay with that and then do we think that white men are overrepresented because they're smarter so this was the basic premise In this process, it became clear to me that I do feel we've reached the limit of the approach that we had been taking, which was to focus on the underrepresentation of people of color and of women.

So all the

[laughs]

... before it was a holiday.

And so I had all those different elements.

And so when Reverend Jackson ran, it brought all those pieces together.

I was 20 years old at the time, so trying to understand the world.

How do you advance electoral politics? How do you connect to the civil rights movement? What's the modern-day expression of the work from the civil rights movement? And so what Reverend showed was how all those things come together, and that, you know, I, I, I dedicated the, the Brown is the New White in part to Reverend Jackson, saying that he had demonstrated the power and potential of a movement for social and economic justice in the electoral sphere.

I was paying attention.

He was one of the, um, first Black billionaires that bought a company and did a number of acquisitions to build a billion-dollar company, and he wrote a book that was titled Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? And it's kind of interesting that, that Steve has written this book, um, uh, Are White G- Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Um, did, did, uh, Reg's book have any impact on you indirectly or directly? And tell us a little bit about, a lot, a lot about your, uh, your most recent, uh, writing.

Why do you think the weak finish, I don't want to call it a third place finish because it's not definitive yet with so many votes uncounted, but certainly didn't propel him to the front of the pack.

Yeah, it's a good question.

There's some level there's a tactical issue is that, and I'm not quite sure who was advising Tom or whether or not, and it's always interesting for really almost a decade that Tom has been running ads since he started running for president and, you know, the next gen work and the environmental piece.

And almost all of these ads are just Tom talking to the camera.

And you know, when he was doing the ads in like around 2018, 2020, I'm Tom Steyer.

And it made a certain amount of sense when he was raising his name ID to run for president.

But clearly after $200 million of spending your numbers, not moving in the polls, you should switch it up a little bit.

What do you think happened there?

Mm-hmm.

So we're having this conversation, the country is engaged at this point in time in the context of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

And so the two pillars that I use in my book to frame this moment and this analysis and this inquiry are the Declaration of Independence and the George Floyd racial reckoning moment.

And so the founding document of this country, even though most people couldn't participate when it was actually founded, is that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all are created equal, and then was reaffirmed in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address during the Civil War, where he was saying that we went to war, literal war, to defend the proposition that all are created equal.

So that's a very American notion.

And so it's not a question of a radical composition or radical articulation that should be scaring people off.

And the other aspect of this is that we should be forcing a conversation and a dialogue.

How does power, not persuasion, work? And how can it help a multiracial democracy defend the gains and build on them?

Hmm.

But we can continue to shine a spotlight on the problem.

And I do believe that the majority of people, m- not the overwhelming majority, but the majority of people want this to be a, a country, right, we're talking about where there is preferences for none and justice for all, in that we don't, and, and this is also th- just substantively and then strategically and tactically, is that-Nobody, even including the sitting president of the United States, is going to or can or will de- say that there should be preferences for white men.

They might think that, but nobody will say it out loud.

Like Erica Green of The New York Times did this interview, or she was part of a team that interviewed the president around race, and he talks about, you know, things being unfair to white men, et cetera.

But I was struck by how, uh, timid he was in that regard for somebody who clearly has been so forceful around articulating the grievances of, uh, whites and white men, that he was qualifying his language and saying different things.

So even he, with all of his power and all of his, uh, you know, positioning, won't forcefully say that we should be preferring white men.

Mm.

Tell us what the heck is going on.

Look, the city moves fast, so I don't think there's a lot of time to relax.

But I'll tell you this.

I mean, look, if you look back over the last two weeks, I think it's been from the business standpoint, a up and down narrative, you know, on the downside, the video, you know, singling out somebody in front of their home.

That was the Ken Griffin story.

I mean, the concern was horrible, horrible.

Yeah, because I don't think you should turn anybody into a villain, especially in a world where you have CEOs that were assassinated, like the UnitedHealthcare situation.

And they're going to suffer.