A Word For Kamala Harris Ft. Ta-Nehisi Coates

So we are talking a lot on this show about Donald Trump's kind of exposing himself and really exposing who he is and what he is so that the world truly understands it. Which is a good thing because it is now a fact that more people understand that it was a huge mistake to give him the power that he has. But that is only step one. The next choice that has to be made by the American people is where do we move on from here? Who should hold that office next and what will they offer? What will they put on the table that is different from what we're seeing today such that they can clean up the mess that Donald Trump has made but also give people hope that there is any hope that the American presidency can be moral, can be effective at making people's lives better? Because there's a lot of doubt about that. I mean, I'm in New York City today where people are starting to feel good about at least city government being able to materially make your life better. That is Mamdani's sort of coup that he's pulled off is that he's been able to show people that a government leader can actually materially make your life better. That's one of the great things that he's done. But the question is, do people believe a president can do that? And so there's a lot of talk, you know, I would tell you even my reporting is that most of the people in the know believe that Kamala Harris is going to run for president again. We know that her run for president, that 107 days we interviewed her about it on this show, was a whirlwind. But it was also her attempting to run in a handoff from Joe Biden, in a handoff from Joe Biden, who had one glaring mark on his presidency and his otherwise effective presidency. Very effective at domestic policy, very effective at rebuilding infrastructure, not so effective at communicating because that's not his game, he's not a communicator, and also not at all effective at getting the right to stop trying to destroy him and his son and accept the bounty he was delivering mainly to red states. But when it came to his international foreign policy, Joe Biden was a typical American president in that he was aggressive about the use of a military power. And also, sort of strangely for how empathetic he was, completely blind to the pain of people in the Muslim world, completely disinterested in the lives of the Palestinian people and in their deaths, completely cold to them, and completely warm to whatever Israel wanted to do. And Kamala Harris got burdened with that. So at a recent conference at the annual Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative's Austria World Summit in Vienna, Kamala Harris gets asked, because a lot of people, including Trump, were claiming that if she became president, she would start World War III. Remember that? That meme was very prevalent throughout the interwebs and even in these streets. So she was asked about Trump and Netanyahu's war in Iran, and this is what she said. If you were president, you'd never start this war. Absolutely not. And let's be clear about this. Let's be clear about this. Thank you, Tim. Let's be clear about this. Whatever is being negotiated, this president is going to declare victory and we'll end up where we were after the JCPOA and call that a victory, the JCPOA that he withdrew from. The Obama nuclear agreement. And so you're not, I mean, that's your thought on this potential deal? I have more thoughts, but that's not why we're here. I would love to hear her more thoughts. She did expound on it a little bit more. But seeing Kamala Harris talk about the Iran war does cause one to lean into the questions about the opportunity cost of making the choice that, to David K. Johnson's point, a majority of Americans made as opposed to choosing her. It is a question that sort of remains unanswerable in many ways of what would have been the difference had she been the person in charge. Now it's clear that there'd been no reason to start a war with Iran if she were president because we already had the JCPOA and, you know, she wouldn't have pulled out of it in the first place. Maybe she'd have gone back into it. I don't know. But in the really terrific piece called The Next Black President, one of the seminal thinkers, public intellectuals of our time, one of the great writers of our time, Ta-Nehisi Coates, takes us through the history of American empire and asks the question, if a black and Asian woman, the daughter of immigrants who came from countries that had been the victims of colonialism, came from colonial entities that had been besieged by Great Britain, right? If somebody, the daughter of two parents from that background, and who's also a woman and a black woman and an Asian woman, a woman of color, can she truly embody the imperial state? Now, this piece was written on the presumption that Kamala Harris indeed will or at least could run for president. The piece is called The Next Black President. Here's a quote. A black presidency is a contradiction. It owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home, but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad. And joining me now is award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He's currently contributing editor at Vanity Fair. And this is his The Joy Read Show debut, but always one of my favorite interviews. Ta-Nehisi Coates, welcome. Joy, thank you for having me. I'm glad we finally made this work. Absolutely. Same here. So, Ta-Nehisi, your piece was excellent, by the way, and I've cautioned everyone they should read it and take it all in. I've read it twice. Talk to me about this, because the idea of empire, and you go through the sort of brain-numbing sequence of American empirical aggression, and then say, you're going to land that in this lady's lap? What? Say more. Yeah. Well, I have to say one thing, first of all. I owe this piece to you, Joy. That's the first thing. If there's one person who inspired this piece, it really was, I mean, there's a famous clip now, it's viral, as they say, of you on CNN describing to people the history of American aggression towards Iran and the response. And what really stunned me about that was, first of all, I didn't really have a history down myself. Let me start with my own ignorance. But I don't go on TV and present myself as an expert on why the United States should go to war with Iran. But the people on your panel did. And it became very, very clear to me that they did not know the history either. It wasn't like they were disputing the points you were making, you know what I mean? Right. Or the history. They literally just did not know it. They did not know it. And I'll just say that what has happened in my life personally over the past few years is I have spent more and more time around people who live under the weight of this country's imperial ignorance. And I have asked myself, you know, what I feel like is an existential question for us as black people, for the struggle that we root ourselves in, for the ancestors that we feel ourselves tied to, for the progeny that comes after us. And that is, what is the nature of our struggle? Is the nature of our struggle to, as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley says in that article, bring others along with us? Or is the nature of our struggle to do, as so many other groups have done, we've come into this country, and that is to become a part of the machine and to integrate, as James Baldwin once said, a burning house. You know where I stand on that and what my thoughts are on that. But probably over the past couple of years, that question has become more and more urgent. And the last thing I'll say is the reason why is because this is 2026. So we are going on 25 years now of black faces that have been representative of doing great violence in the Arab and the Muslim world. We had Condi Rice. We had Colin Powell. We had President Barack Obama himself. We had Linda Thomas Greenfield. We had Susan Rice. I make no condemnation particularly of these people outside of any condemnation I would deliver to anybody else. That's not really my point. But my point is, by becoming part of the machine, this is an inevitability. It is not that they have greater or lesser moral character than anybody else. It is the nature of structure. And it was always my hope that we had come to trouble structure, not to just merely accept it. Yeah, I mean, it has always sat a certain way in my spirit that it was President Obama that killed Muammar Gaddafi. You know, you can think whatever you want of Muammar Gaddafi, you know, he was represented as a bad guy. But if you go on the continent, they revere, a lot of people there revere Muammar Gaddafi because he was trying to bring Africa under one currency. And they saw that as a valuable thing to try to fight the West, right? You know, you enjoy it, not just please, not just killed him, had him dragged out of a pipe and sodomized and killed. And then his secretary of state laughed about it. Yeah. Like, yeah, that was our message to the rest of the world. You know, sorry. Forgive me. No, no, no, not at all. And that is after President Obama had gone to Cairo and given this beautiful speech about having to change the way that we interact with the Muslim world. That is the guy that then gets tasked with, you know, with this assassination, as you said, with a bayonet. I mean, they literally, you know, sodomized him with a bayonet and then killed him. The Americans didn't do it, but we delivered him to that, pulled him out of a drain pipe so that could happen. Even with Saddam Hussein, you reminded me in this piece, in your piece, in the Vanity Fair piece, Saddam Hussein was only in power because of us, because we overthrew the previous government, put him in, and we said, this is our guy. And then I do recall that when it was the Iran-Iraq war, we sided with Saddam, gave him the chemical weapons with which to kill Iranians, and then said, hey, man, you got chemical weapons. It's like, yeah, you gave them to him. And then we toppled his statue, and we're the hero. But it is a strange thing to say for a black woman, because I remember when Kamala Harris said, we're going to be the strongest military on earth. That's what she has to say, but is that what she should say? Most lethal, most lethal, that's what it was, it was the lethality of it. And I think, let me speak first of all in sympathy, because look, I get it, you're a black woman, your name is Kamala, you know what they're going to say about you, the campaign that they're going to wage around. I am under no illusions as to the weight that she was carried and the viciousness of the attacks that came her way to continue to come her way. That is not in question for me at all. On one level, I am deeply, I mean, it hurts to have this conversation because I feel bad for her, right? On one level, I feel bad that this is the weight, you know what I mean, that you have to carry. But at the same time, it's like, what was the struggle for? And the fact of the matter is, any sort of ancestral consideration of this says that this is what we have already done. Look, Fannie Lou Hamer, who Kamala and the entire DNC cited, she didn't have to say anything about Vietnam. You know what I mean? In fact, there were tons of voices within the movement that wished that she did not. Coretta Scott King, before her husband, before her husband, in 1965, goes to New York, allies herself with other anti-war forces, and says, listen, I'm heartened that Johnson has such great sympathy for us, but how can he not have sympathy for the children of Vietnam? She didn't have to do that. She didn't have to do that, and the SCLC was very upset that she didn't do that. So this is the tradition, you know? Yeah, and the thing is, if you think about it, it's the harder route, right? Muhammad Ali giving up his title belt to say, I'm not fighting those men in Vietnam. It's the Fred Hampton route, which can be deadly. And it's the King route. As you said, King didn't get more popular when he turned against the Vietnam War. He got more unpopular. People hated him. And so it's like the idea of a black, you know, Shirley Chisholm did it. Shirley Chisholm was like, this is where I stand on people of color around the world. And you see, she didn't get very far being incumbent president. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a danger. Look, I- So if you think about where Kamala will be going, please. No, no, I just wanted to say, I was just affirming your point, having no illusions about the danger of it and the weight of it, none. But Joy, if that isn't the case- So, yeah, go. If that's the case, don't hold your convention and shout out Fannie Mae. Like don't shout out the person, don't say my inspiration is the person that walked that route, because that's not your route. That's not your route. That's not what you're doing. That's not what you came to do. You know? And so I feel that while there may be a pragmatic argument for maybe not, although I don't think it's a real one, but you know what I mean? If you want to make that argument, you can't then shout out the visionaries and the people that carried the burden. You can't have it both ways. Yeah. The other thing that your article brings out, and it's something that you've taken heat from, at least from CBS News, from the current anchor of CBS Evening News, who had a problem with it. But the issue of Palestine is something that was a ballast around the ankles of Kamala Harris. Just whether they like it or not, they don't seem to be excited about admitting it. But you talk about some of the people that you and I both know who have been to the region, LaTosha Brown, Tiffany Cross, people who've been there and said, oh, I see apartheid here. Jotaka Eaddy, who saw it. They saw the apartheid just as you did. And so it's hard for, I think, folks like that to imagine, it was hard for me to imagine, why Kamala Harris, who clearly has been to the region and knows the region, would not be more forthright in saying, this is one piece of oppression I can stand against, and I will stand against as president. I will stand for the Palestinian people. I think a couple things, man. I think one of the things that I was reminded of, by people in that piece that I probably disagree with on her ultimate stance, right? But you learn from, especially your sisters, even when they land, you learn from her, right? So one of the things that I learned was that to understand Kamala Harris as an abstraction, in other words, as an individual, first black woman president, is actually the wrong way. You have to understand her as the result of a movement that began circa 2020, certainly has roots earlier than that. That delivered you your first black Supreme Court justice, that delivered you your first black woman, I'm sorry, first black woman Supreme Court justice, delivered you your first black woman on the Fed. Led to Joe Biden appointing a record number of black women, led to all of these policies around that cut child poverty, cut black child poverty, cut black, these are real things, right? People are not just making ---- up and becoming cowards, and so it takes a lot. That's a movement that folks have worked for, that stands on the shoulders of other movements. And you really want to believe that, okay, if we can get her through, once she's through, you know what I mean? She will do the right thing, I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know that I came away from this piece thinking that. I came away from it thinking, of course, she would have been better than Trump, we all know that, we do know that. That's not the bar for me, that may be the bar for my vote, and it was the bar for my vote, but voting is not the end of my politics, so it's not the bar for my politics. Can you, having gone through this exercise of really thinking through how a black president, cuz we've seen a black president that did not really stand against empire, unfortunately probably couldn't because it was the first. Can you imagine a black president that could? Yes, yes I can, I actually can imagine her doing it, I can imagine her. Because I think one of the things that gets missed is, I can't tell you if she had affirmed the humanity of Palestinians, if, you know what I mean, she had done the things that I think a lot of us wished that she had done. I can't tell you she would have won, I can tell you she would have lost with honor, though. And I can tell you that how people felt about her going into 2028 would be totally different, because it would be she lost over standing for Gaza. She lost on trying to prevent a genocide, and I think people would feel very, very different about that. But I just, I go back to where we started this at the beginning, Joy. It takes an incredible, incredible amount of courage, and it probably takes a movement. When you think about her getting there, it probably takes a lot more. And I don't know what that, actually I do, I do, what am I saying, I don't. The circle that was around her, the circle that, and not just because she's Kamala Harris, but because she was the Democratic nominee, and because she had such a short amount of time. Thus, the circle that would have been around any Democratic nominee at that time was not a circle that would have reinforced affirming the life of Palestinian people, and thus our own lives, by the way. I just, I gotta get that in, and thus our own lives. And I don't wanna talk too much, but I'll come back to that in a moment. No, no, I want you to say more, because I think that's the disconnect. Even some of the people in the chat, there's become a disconnect because a large plurality of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans voted for Trump in anger against the Biden-Harris administration. There's still a lot of anger, you and I talked about that, a lot of anger, residual anger at them from a lot of Black voters. But fundamentally, the rights of the Palestinian people, it is about us. It is about us, it is about us. And let me just, if you'll bear with me, Joy, I'm gonna lay this case out. The first thing is, what we were effectively asked to do was to look away from a genocide. And maybe people don't like that word. But I will just give you the numbers as laid out in the piece. The most lethal campaign this century against children that had ever been waged. And we were being asked to look away from the fact that our tax dollars was doing that in service of apartheid, a system that we ourselves have experienced. Now, I come from a people that uphold Coretta Scott King as a hero. I come from people that uphold Fannie Lou Hamer as a hero, that uphold Martin Luther King as a hero, that uphold Malcolm X as a hero. And so these are the best of us. And so the first question I have to ask is, ancestrally, as those of us who are rooted in a much larger struggle, what part of the game is this? Where is the alignment there? Secondarily, I have to ask practically. Practically, the fact that matters, maybe you don't think Gaza is that important. Maybe you think you have the ability to not really care about what your tax dollars are doing at this moment. The fact of the matter is the rest of the country is moving another way. You know what I mean? That's the fact. The real truth is that there aren't enough Arab Americans to cost her the vote, but there are enough young people that care about this to cost her the vote. So the very practical politics. So people say to me, Ta-Nehisi, you know what I mean? Why would you support this group of people and this struggle over your own? But I say to you, why are you tied to this ideology that you would sacrifice your struggle over your own? You think you have the luxury of ignoring this. You do not. War is at your door. And then thirdly, morally, morally, morally, I have to ask you. Those of us who are concerned about what we saw ICE doing in Minneapolis, those of us who are appalled when we see ICE officers rappelling from Blackhawk helicopters on the projects in the South Side, separating people by race. Brothers and sisters, where do you think that came from? How do you think that started? You think that started with us? Do you understand the history of where ICE and the Department of Homeland Security comes from? And so this notion that you can stand aside while they make war on another group of people and that's not going to come to you, you're out your damn mind. They are coming for us. Our enemies are looking around the world, making alliances. They're looking at Hungary, making alliances. They're looking at Europe, making alliances. And we have this notion that we can stay here and we can shut our eyes and we will be okay. And let me just amend that and say we don't have that notion. Because in fact, there are a lot of Black people who do see this. You know what I mean? In fact, we were the most concerned about that. So let me just say that there are some of us, there's some of us who have that notion that we can just close our eyes and wait for war to come to us and deal with it like that. I hear this notion, man, we're losing everything. They're taking away our right to vote. They're doing this. They are, it's true. It's true. But if you're fighting on one front and they're fighting you on 10, I mean, I don't see the practical win in that. I don't see the practical politics in that. And there's a one word answer to why that fight is our fight. And the answer is Palantir. Back when enslavement was taking place, they would perform experiments on enslaved Black women in order to create treatments and ways in which they could treat white women, right? And now the people being experimented with to death, which we were, are Palestinians. If you don't think that they practice clearing Gaza to show how you could clear Nigeria if they wanted that land or how the South Africans cleared the Kikuyu and the Xhosa off of their land, they practice on them. And Palantir works for both them and ICE. When they're killing them over there with drones, they now learned with precision how to kill Palestinians. And then they know how to kill Americans in Minneapolis and in New Orleans and wherever they want because it's the same company. And they're just using them as the experiments the way they used to use us. That is who Palestinians are. They're the unloved, uncared for people of the earth that the world has decided are useless and nameless and nationless. And you can do anything to them. And then once they're done doing it to them, y'all don't think they're gonna come here and do it to us? You think they're gonna stop there? You think they stopping there? Like, when has that ever happened? You know what I mean? And so, look, I sympathize with the perspective because, yo, it's a lot to carry. I get it. It really is a lot to carry. You know what I mean? You feel yourself under assault every day in your own community. And not only that, let's just acknowledge this, right? Like, people who I and you are asking us to be sympathetic about come to this country and treat us a way, right? Like, they treat us a way that is not great. You know what I mean? And they themselves are not always in solidarity with us. I see that. I see it. You know what I mean? And I know it is a huge, huge ask. But I don't have a version of love and care for the people out of which I come, the struggle out of which I come, the community out of which I come, the ancestors on whose shoulders I stand. It does not, you know, allow me to say the hard thing, you know? Yeah. And this is where SNCC was. This is where we were on South Africa, which most Black Americans at the time had never been to. But we were taking up the struggle of Black people far, far, far away because it was the same struggle. Because apartheid there was apartheid here. And, you know, it's interesting that, you know, when Black Lives Matter started, it was the Dream Defenders that was the original group. And the Dream Defenders was started at FAMU by a Black young man and a Palestinian young man. It was the two of them that started it. And so there's always been, I mean, people were holding Black Lives Matter signs up in the West Bank and Gaza. Because they saw from their end that it's the same struggle. Hip-hop was a foundational part of the early Palestinian struggle in the last 10 years. They see the struggle. And as you said, when people come here, yeah, the first card you punch is anti-Blackness. Everyone's taught that. But they're not taught that by us. They're taught that by the same people trying to hurt them and us. That's right. Look, there is a comfort in, you know, a kind of posturing yourself, you know what I mean? And Blackness itself has a kind of warmth, I get it. You know what I mean? And so, you know, look, there certainly is a feeling in our communities, you know, because, you know, we are the most segregated, right? And so, you know, we can go home and be perfectly happy, you know what I mean, with each other. But what I'm trying to say is that there are wolves at the door. There are wolves at the door. And the fact that right now the bombs are being dropped on somebody else, it just doesn't mean they're not coming for you. They always come for you. And the second part of that is, look, I just want to say on a human level. I just want to say on a human level. Look, during the election, I went before Arab-American audiences. I went before Palestinian-American audiences, Muslim audiences. And I was very clear about, you know, who I was voting for and why I was doing it. And I stand by that. I stand clear in my vote. But look, I got to tell you, man, I sat in rooms where people said things to me like, 200 members of my family in Gaza are dead. I just did not know how I could preserve my own sense of human decency and say, to save us collectively, you now have to vote for a member of an administration that was responsible for that. I just, I didn't have that in me. I didn't have that in me. You know what I mean? I just, you know, I couldn't get to that place. And when I thought about it, you know, I was like, well, does that mean, you know what I mean, I'm willing to see this country delivered into the arms of Trump. And as I thought through it, what I realized was, no, what it means is that if we have gotten to the point where we feel like our survival depends on telling another group of people that they have to watch their families be destroyed, we've done something wrong. Somewhere we've gone off track. Like something, like we kind of have lost the plot. Like, actually, we should step back and examine ourselves. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, abolitionists at the time were not saying, you know, okay, okay, okay, they're doing slavery, but, right? But, but, but there's no, but, like, if they, there's no, but, and the people who were saying that, you know what I mean? The people who are saying that, like, we, we don't actually, we don't hold them in high esteem. You know, we think they're terrible, you know, immoral people. Right, right. I sat in those rooms as you did. I sat with people who came to a book event or something and, you know, wanted to thank me for, for saying, you know, because people weren't saying anything. I think you and myself and Mehdi Hassan, two other people and Emma Moyadin, the four of us, and, you know, would sit and hold my hands and say things like that to me too. You know, a hundred of my family members are dead. All my cousins are dead. My parents are dead. And, and they, and they're, and when they're, I, I was like you, it, I couldn't have lived with myself if I had ordered and demanded those people to vote as much as I was very clear that I was for Kamala Harris and was, you know, eager for her to be president and thought she would have been a fantastic president in so many ways. But for me, the problem is not so much her. It's the party. The Democratic Party is as married to this Israel over everything. Israel, no matter what Israel, no matter what they do, no matter how many people they kill, the Democrats were as married to that as the Republicans. And so it would take a really strong Democrat. It would take a Mamdani style event to get a Democrat to say that they weren't getting down with that. But to me, I going forward cannot vote for a Democrat who does not pledge to end this relationship. This relationship needs to end. There's a nuclear armed expansionist power. They don't need our money. And they definitely won't get my vote. That's just where I'm at. So did you see Hillary Clinton's answer to the Trump question? Do you remember? Did you see this? Say more for those who don't know. I mean, Hillary Clinton was in an interview the other day. And obviously, there may not be a human being alive who has more reason to hold Donald Trump in low regard than Hillary Clinton. But the one area that she praised Donald Trump on was on his gossip. What? Yes, she did. She praised the Abraham Accords, which I'm like- But she also praised the new one, like the- And the new one, yes. She praised the new one too, which is absolutely- But I actually, I raised that. As bad as I think that is, I raised that to actually buttress your point, which is about the party itself. I get that certain people feel a kind of anger towards Kamala. But the history of politicians and politics in America is not necessarily one of great individual courage against systems. In fact, what it is, is movements have been built. Abraham Lincoln comes out of a thing, you know what I mean? It's not that, look, he was great and everything. But to subtract him from the actual movement that he was part of misses what actually happens. I mean, Johnson becomes this remarkable president in terms of civil rights, in terms of civil rights, largely because of the demands that were being put upon it. It became untenable. That's right. It became untenable. And Kamala Harris herself becomes vice president, first Black woman to become vice president, first woman to become vice president, because of movement. That's right. Organizes and demands it. Yeah, that's right. And hopefully the movement will try to shift the Democratic Party. I don't see it on a wholesale level. They're too scared. They're still scared. I don't think any of them have endorsed Mufti Ali in the leadership, so this is a longer conversation. I think it's going to be hard to get through the primary, though. I really do. Oh, no, I agree. I've made the prediction that I don't think a pro-Israel Democrat can get the nomination. I don't see how, because I don't think they'll have the momentum, and I don't see how they win. Because if the choice is the lesser of two evils, you're going to get what you got before, which is that the largest group of voters are the people on the couch, and they vote to stay the hell home. And that's what happened. And it'll happen again. The piece is called The Next Black President. I highly recommend you read it. Read it from the beginning to the end. Just the parts about Kennedy's part in the violent, empirical project will blow your mind. You will understand why Malcolm X of the Chickens came home to roost, because I didn't even remember half of the stuff. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates would do. I didn't know it. Yo, bruh. It's crazy. Every president is more black. Malcolm was right. Malcolm was always right. Ta-Nehisi, thank you for all that you do. I appreciate your voice more than you could possibly know. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joy. Thank you so much. Thank you. Y'all, please get the book. You can get his latest book, The Message, in the Derby Shop. I would highly recommend you get your hands on it, because it is so good. And it talks about his own journey to the Middle East, where he himself was able to see with his own eyes what that apartheid system looks like. It changed fundamentally the way he thought about the region and about the history. That is the book that he wrote that he was actually on CBS morning show talking about when he was shaded, not even shaded, I would say defamed, honestly, by Tony DeCouple and basically called a terrorist. And until you really wrap your mind around the horrors that we ourselves are funding in the Middle East, you cannot understand. There's some people in the chat who are talking about the selfishness of the Palestinian, pro-Palestinian voters. No, if 100 members of your family had been killed, me telling you to vote for somebody that was part of the administration that did it would actually be me being a horrible person. I wouldn't order you to do that at all. What I would say is that I can tell you that the alternative is worse, but that's a moral decision that I can't make for people who are losing their literal entire families. Back to the basics, grassroots level. Let me dig a little deeper with the shovel. Plenty can't tell the force from the trees that I'm hard to detect like a black hole in the dark. And justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Let me make this clear. I got a bone to pick and I'll never fear the threat of poverty. They don't want to talk about it. They'd rather party so I'm a real talk about it for sure.