Trump files appeal to allow mail-in ballot restrictions

0:00for me being a part of this place has always been about the people not about the politics from the field to the studio. Jacob is finding the heart of the story connect with Jacob sober off weekends at 10 a.m. Eastern on MS now. It is Monday September 7th happy Labor Day and welcome to a special edition of the 11th hour which as you could see is airing in the 6th and 7th hour tonight. So you have two hours of me. I'm Ali Velschian there are 57 days until the midterm elections and it's still unclear if Americans ability to vote by mail this year will proceed like normal. Instead it now appears that the issue will have to be determined by an institution that has repeatedly enabled Donald Trump during his presidency. The Supreme Court. After a federal judge issued an injunction on Friday extending the legal block on the United States Postal Services new mail voting rule, the Trump administration quickly ran back to the Supreme Court. Yesterday it filed an emergency appeal asking the justices to lift the

1:00block and allow the USPS to move forward with its new rule. This is now the third time that the Trump administration has filed such an appeal with the Supreme Court in an attempt to implement its new changes ahead of the midterm elections. By the way we're not talking about tiny little tweaks to the process. These are major changes that could end up costing money and sowing chaos and confusion for the tens of millions of Americans who vote by mail. A handful of secretaries of state with whom I've spoken recently on the show have said that those changes may not just be possible at this point. For one thing some states don't even have the proper machines to print out ballots with these unique barcodes as required by the new rule. Election administrators would also have to upload sensitive voter information to a new online portal controlled by the Postal Service that may or may not be ready for use. The Justice Department declined to give a clear answer in court last week if the portal is even functional right now. And that could lead to other legal problems down the road since some states have laws that prevent the release of this voter data.

2:01For the Trump administration it's now a race against time. North Carolina already started sending out mail-in ballots to voters on Friday up next is Alabama which plans to begin sending out ballots Wednesday. The process is going to ramp up next week as we approach the 45-day mark to the midterms in all a total of 20 states have their own laws that require officials to begin sending out ballots at least 45 days before the election. That's according to the national conference of state legislatures. The Trump administration put it this way and it's appeal asking the Supreme Court to weigh in as soon as possible quote, once those ballot envelopes enter the mail stream there is no retrieving them end quote. So once again the Supreme Court is going to have a final say on mail-in voting which will be determined by what the Justices decide to do or not do in the coming days. Regardless the Trump administration may have already achieved what it set out to do with this rule change and that is to so chaos and create doubt about the mail-in voting system and the integrity of elections as a whole. The rapid fire legal back and forth which we've

3:03been covering and I got to tell you it is confusing. It's taken place over the last few weeks. It's not just confusing to me or to you. All sorts of people are unclear about whether or not they're allowed to vote by mail this year or whether or not they will even receive a ballot. Others say that they're going to if they get a ballot they're going to instead return that ballot at a drop box or at a polling location instead of using the mail because they're afraid that if they mail their ballot in it either won't be received or it won't be counted. Joining me now is the Congressman Jonah Goose, a Democrat of Colorado. Congressman, great to see you. Thank you for being with us. Good to be with you, Ali. Thanks for having me on. You're in one of these states where people use mail-in voting quite efficiently and are used to it. It really throws people like that into chaos because in these mail-in voting states where it's well established people have a rhythm. They have a routine. They know when to expect their ballot. They generally know when they're going to send it in and they trust that it works and that their vote will be counted. That's all up in the air now. Ali, I think first and foremost, you articulated the procedural posture of the litigation well,

4:07but also the larger impetus in my view behind Donald Trump's efforts to subvert a free and fair election is to also create chaos and doubt about the mail ballot system. As you know, here in Colorado, we have a gold standard system that we've had in place for over a decade. The vast majority of Coloradans that I represent in Western Northern Colorado and rural Colorado and in suburban Colorado vote by mail. It is a tried and true system. And clearly, Donald Trump would like to create enough fear and consternation amongst the broader electorate so that less people participate. At the end of the day, I have every expectation that the mail-balloting system that has served Coloradans so well and so many Americans across the country so well will ultimately endure and be vindicated by the court if and when the Supreme Court takes this unprecedented appeal up later next week. But like the Save Act, it's based on a premise that isn't true, right? The non-citizens voting is not only not an issue. It has never swayed an election in this country.

5:13Fraud by mail-in ballot is so infinitesimal that it has never swayed an election in this country. It is often caught, mostly caught by the state to audit them themselves. This is just not a problem. The saying, so in chaos is the important part here because if somebody wins in one of these contested states by less than the Department of Homeland Security has said that you've got illegal unregistered voters who are on the mailing rolls, that's going to be a reason for Donald Trump to say on November 4th or 5th or 6th or 7th that those elections are invalid. That's precisely right, Ali. And of course, it is not as though we have not been in this particular situation before. If passed his prologue, we know what will follow. I was on the floor on January 6th with my colleagues defending the electoral college certification process back on January 6th of 2021 and remember well the efforts by Donald Trump and so many of the sick offence that he's surrounded himself with to try to subvert that certification process. So yes, I mean, this is about ultimately creating enough doubt so that they can leverage that doubt for particular electoral gains

6:18down the stretch. I will also say to your point, the empirical data makes this clear, we can dispense with the logical arguments they are making about fraud. This has nothing to do with fraud. We know that the American people, we know that as well. And if anybody doubted that, they could look no further than the fact that Donald Trump himself votes by mail in the state of Florida. So clearly not not a legitimate or cogent argument on their part. Let's just, I want to just make sure my viewers understand this. Judge Ludig was on the show some weeks ago and he postulated that if Donald Trump starts with this whole nonsense about these are not valid because illegal people were voting or there was fraud or whatever the case is. The problem is he's got an ally in Mike Johnson. So at the beginning of January, Mike Johnson has to swear in all the new members and projections right now or that Democrats will likely take the house. They might even take the Senate. But we've seen this happen. We had somebody elected in a special election in Arizona and Mike Johnson just sort of refused to swear them in because it was at the Epstein case vote at the time. So there is a, there is a not just January 6 of 2020, but there's a more recent precedent

7:23where Mike Johnson might just say, well, these are, these elections are in question. Congress can't certify them. Well, and to take that even a step further is you know, Ali and you covered on your program, Mike Johnson is one of the original architects of election to nihilism going back to that pivotal 2020 election. Here's what I would say and would certainly assure your viewers. There are very talented, incredible constitutional scholars, prosecutors, lawyers within the House Democratic caucus who are spending a great deal of time working together. Ranking member Morelli, Joe Morelli out of New York, Ranking member Raskin who will be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee when we win the majority and several others engaging about various scenario planning that needs to take place. If that particular eventuality were to ever materialize and you know, getting into the details here, I would just tell you suffice to say that we are studying the various historical precedents and will have plans prepared ready to go. If and when our colleagues in the side of the aisle decide to perhaps engage in more nefarious attempts to subvert the certification

8:25process, but just to be clear, the best way to inoculate the country against that kind of outcome is to win a enduring and durable majority. Come this November 3rd and I believe we're going to do that. I've been traveling the country and of course, hearing Colorado across every corner of our state where we're poised to win several congressional seats and ultimately I think having a majority on November 3rd that is far larger that perhaps Mike Johnson or any other public and sick offence in Congress could ever deny. Congressman is always good to see you. Thank you for joining us. The Congressman Joe Nagus is the Democrat from Colorado. All right, coming up, the flashing red warning light that the American economy might be in trouble on a global scale. Plus, how a Trump administration or a new Trump administration plan could redirect childcare support away from working families and single mothers and where that money would go instead. And it's time to crack open your copy of Isabel Wilkerson's epic story of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. It is one of my favorite meetings of the Valshi Band Book Club and we'll bring it to you again just a hand. Ever since I was young, I've watched people working hard chasing opportunity, making sacrifices,

9:37doing everything they can to build a better life. And now we're shining a light on what matters most. Our economy, our national identity, our democracy, our future. The stakes have never been higher. It's all on the line. On the line with Ombicia Menendez, weekdays at 12 p.m. Eastern on MS now. All right, when we talk about the economy, some of us spend a lot of time talking about the stock market. For some people, myself not necessarily included, it's shorthand for how the economy is doing. And while that's not really true, your president enjoys making that comparison. What he rarely refers to is something far less flashy but much more important, the bond market. The stock market allows investors, including you and me to buy and sell shares in publicly traded companies. The value of your stock can fluctuate dramatically based on the broader market and on a company's specific performance. The bond market, by contrast, is used by companies and governments to raise money through debt.

10:43When you buy a bond, you're basically loaning the government or a company or a project, some money, and they promise to pay that loan back, plus a certain amount of interest, which in the bond world is called yield after a fixed period of time. There's much more money in the bond market than there is in the stock market. And the 10-year US Treasury note that's a bond issued by the US government is the most widely held, widely trusted financial asset in the entire world. That's because the US is the world's strongest large economy. For decades, investors around the world have believed that the US keeps its promises and pays its bill on time. But recently, we've seen a big warning sign, quote, last week, 10-year US Treasury bond yields, that's the interest rate, hit their highest points since January 2025, or when Donald Trump took office. Now, yields or interest rates go up when the demand for the underlying bond drops. So that means fewer people want US bonds. That's a sign that between rising inflation, the war with Iran driving up energy costs, Trump's tariffs, on our global trading partners, the ever-growing national debt, and general instability in terms of

11:48deals not being kept. Investors around the world are less and less confident about the US economy. It looks to those participating in the bond market that the US economy is one of high risk. One where inflation is going to keep growth slower. And that makes it riskier to take on some of that debt to loan the US government money, if you will. Now, amid this, central banks around the world that have been some of the biggest holders of US Treasury bonds are selling theirs, including the Bank of China, the Bank of Japan, and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Joining me now is Caleb Silver, Chief Business Editor at People Inc., and the Editor in Chief of Investopedia. Caleb, you and I have had this version of a conversation for 20 plus years, but it's becoming remarkably important because it is a bit of a signal. There's something wrong when US Treasury yields keep going up. It means there's some problem with the bond market. Yeah, it's about trust, the big T-word. And you said it right. The ten-year Treasury is the most widely held most trusted asset on planet Earth, or at least it used to be. And when you see yield rising, that is an erosion of

12:51trust. And investors, and you mentioned some of them, the Bank of China, the Bank of Japan, big pension funds, university pension funds, but also governments, and also corporations use that as a benchmark, as a safe place to put assets. And higher you see that yield rise, the less you see that trust sort of sitting in place there in that key asset. So there may be people sitting here saying, I don't buy Treasury bonds. I'm not in that business. But the effect of bond prices going down and yields going higher has a direct effect on, I would say almost every consumer. It's probably the most important benchmark because that's what the mortgage is based on. That's what new car loans are based on. That's what credit card APRs are based on. And you may say you don't buy them, but you probably do if you have a 60-40 portfolio, or if you have nearing retirement, you have more bonds in your portfolio, and they should be stabilizers. That's the whole point about the US Treasury. It should be a very stable asset. When you see yield rising like this, you know the price is falling, so you're getting less for your money. Now, for savers with money in the bank, you're actually seeing better yields and

13:53high yield savings accounts, and CDs. It's a double-edged short, but the main factor is there is less trust in this Treasury bond, and you can see the sell-offs happening week after week. What is the Treasury doing about this? Should they care about it? Should they be doing something about it? What are they doing about it? Yeah, well, what the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besson, calls Treasury Twist, Operation Twist. And that's when the Treasury is buying long-term bonds and selling short-term bonds to sort of artificially bring that yield down. Is it effective? For about 12 hours when the announced it a couple of weeks ago, but investors see right through this, and they say, you're eating your own cooking and you're artificially trying to suppress yields. That makes this trust you even less, and we saw a big sell-off. Right, because this is important, because there are lots of countries in the world who have difficulty raising money, selling their currency and raising money. And they've got to, if Turkey wants to attract your investment or Venezuela or something like that, they've got to pay massive amounts of interest, because if you want your money to be safe, you buy US Treasury's, because the interest rate's not that great, but you know your money will probably be there. Is this lack of trust thing meaningful? I mean, do people really think that the US will

14:55pay the bond? Well, as our friend, Muhammad Aliere, in like, to say, we're probably the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper right now. And there are still lots of investors that want to own our bonds and need to own our bonds. But when you see these yields sort of rising out of control, not out of control, but because we have higher energy prices, because we have a tariff war, because we overspend it, have a $40 trillion deficit. That's when you start to worry a little bit. You mentioned the fact that we pay a lot of attention to the stock market, the bond market runs things around here, and it runs everything from our JD day finances to decisions that small businesses have to make. Well, with Donald Trump announced Liberation Day with a tariff all over the world, it was the bond market reaction that caused him to pull back. What's the relationship? How should our viewers think about the relationship between what's going on in the bond market, and what's going on with their 401k portfolios, if they're mostly in stocks? Yeah, well, the higher you see bond yields rise, the more pressure you see on the stock market. We've seen that over the past couple of weeks. Now, the stock market is around 2 to 3% from all time highs, but the higher the yield goes, the more pressure stocks are going to be on plus, it gives big investors an alternative. When you see higher yields as an investment, you might be

15:57tempted to. Yeah, I'll put my money in treasury bonds and earn 5%. I can live with that, because there's a lot of volatility and uncertainty in the stock market, so it puts pressure on the stock market at the same time. Is there an investment play here for my viewer, who, as you said, depending on their age, they may have some of their portfolio in bond. Should you be messing with any of that stuff? Well, it depends how, who you are and what age you are, but you are getting better yields for those bonds. That said, if you've owned them for a long time, it's the price that you care about. But if you want to put money away, you're worried about the stock market, you're worried about the overall economy. As I said, it translates to high yield savings accounts, it translates to CDs and money market accounts. They're yielding now 4%. Or more, you want to lock up money and be a little bit safer. That's a play you can make at the same time. Kellb's great to see you. As always, thank you for being with us. Kim Lbsilvers, the Chief Business Editor at People Inc. and the Editor-in-Chief of Investopedia. All right, coming up, the new plan the Trump administration is reportedly cooking up to incentivize mothers to stay out of the workforce. Plus, it's too early to know what exactly caused the Amazon cargo plane crash yesterday in Miami, but the NTSB just issued an update

17:00this evening. There's one detail that they're focusing on. MSNOW, Senior Transportation Reporter Josh Eininger joins us to break it down. Okay, the New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, which is a policy that is championed by Vice President JD Vance using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents.

18:04That's according to people familiar with the discussions. About 80% of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to health department data. Okay, so what this means is this plan would likely redirect child care support away from working families who need the child care support because they're working and give it to and single mothers and give it specifically to married couples who make the determination that one parent will stay at home. This plan is a huge priority for JD Vance, whose criticism of childless cat ladies during the 2024 campaign brought attention to some of his radical ideas on family policies. As NPR noted at the time, he has called falling U.S. birth rates a civilizational crisis and has advocated in recent years that adults without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights end quote. Joining me now are Abiggy Livingston contributor at PuccNews and Dino Badala, the host of the Dino Badala show on Sirius XM and

19:05the spirit of Margaret Atwood. Dean, this is crazy stuff. It has been taken for what it's worth. It's not just a shifting of who gets the benefits. It's an ideology. It is because there are probably people listening going, this doesn't sound that bad. Correct. First of all, just so people know, people who brought you Project 2025 brought you this idea. So if you like the idea of them trying to dismantle our democracy, NDI programs, cancel Jimmy Kimmel, all that kind of stuff, this is where it's coming from. Secondly, this really is it's part of the right wing social engineering. They want women to stay home and they might be someone who want to stay home and have a child. Absolutely. So this is the choice. So it will be great. If you give me enough money, I'd say home. I mean, I'll, this is what I would love to do. But I sound like, but if you want to stay home, that's fine, but we've limited resources. So they're not going to fund the program for working mothers because they don't want women to be in the workplace. They want you home working with the kids, which is fine and taking care of the husband and the day, cooked dinner. But then it takes the funds away from the childcare for working families and those childcare centers are

20:05they're going to close down. So it really, it's about, it looks great on paper. If you funded it both, maybe you could do it, but it really is social engineering. Yeah, it's a lot of money. And other developed countries do fund healthcare and childcare in a way that America doesn't. They figured it out. Very few countries try this stuff. This stuff is about having more babies and having fewer immigrants. That's kind of the end goal that you don't have to have immigrants because you, you're having all the babies you need. Well, I think if you can step back from the ideology of it, I think of the fact that this is so zero sum in nature and that it would be taking away resources for single working mothers is where it gets complicated because I do think there's an argument that mothers who stay at home are doing a form of like a child care. But I just don't understand why you're rolling that out two months before an election in this zero something. Nobody in politics, I still care about this, but almost no one else does cares about the federal deficit. Why not just go through Congress and get both things done and fund them both because we don't care what it's going to do the deficit. So this is a good point because

21:07there are real arguments whether it's a caregiver, a caregiver of a mother raising their children, a person taking care of their parents, like we have to understand how that works, right? What there is value to that work and we don't value that work as a society. We also have another problem because we're getting rid of all these immigrants that we have a, we were going to have a shrinking workforce which means there's an impetus for people to go out and work even if they have kids. Right. So this is a big policy discussion that is not meant to be had with, you know, 50 days to the election. They have their own reasons for bringing this up. There's nothing, look, he can't run on the economy, Donald Trump. Right. J.D. Vance is getting ready to run for 2020. It's clear. You know, it's interesting to see how this plays out because I read that J.D. Vance had the idea but the Trump administration wants to roll it out and not give J.D. Vance credit for it. So we'll see how that plays out. But look, Ali, they talk about families. They cut Medicaid, which helps families. They cut SNAP benefits for and 40% of the recipients of SNAP are children. So you're going to tell me you care about families. It seems like they care about certain people. They don't care about immigrants, of course. They don't care about poor Americans who

22:08can't make ends meet. And partly the program is going to go directly to the families. It's going directly pay you cash, as opposed to like Medicaid, which goes to the doctor directly. It seems ripe for fraud. And a Democrat came up with this. They'd be saying, it's all about fraud. They're going to pay them to stay home. See what they're doing. But when Republicans do, it seems like, oh, that's a good idea. There's something that doesn't make sense. There's something unnerving when Project 2025 is involved. That's right. So Abby's point, if you take out the ideology, I want to talk to you about what what Hungary did. The BBC published this and they said, when Orbán was reelected in 2020, 2010, Hungary's fertility rate was among the lowest in Europe. His party, Fidesz, promised to tackle population decline. Quote, in the west, the answer to this is immigration. You bring in as many as you're missing. Hungarians think differently. We don't need numbers. We need Hungarian children. Hungary for a time was hailed as a great success story by some, especially US conservatives. But then the fertility rate began to drop. And in 2025, it had fallen to 1.31, not much higher than when these incentives first launched. So to JD

23:12Vance's thing about promoting fertility through federal government policy, there's this example, there's the example of Quebec. It just doesn't tend to work because of the world we're in. Well, yeah. And so I mean, you, the thing that is preventing people from having children in the modern day is affordability. People can't get a home. They can't get any of these resources, particularly about JD Vance's age, were the generation that got blasted with the financial crisis. And so there is no evidence on this largely speaking that the government, the current government is going to help young people raise children. And so I just feel like we're going in circles. Yes, it's a, it's a, it's a, it seems like a small solution to solve a substantially bigger problem. That said, who do you think this appeals to? What's this for? Oh my god. It appeals to the young right-wing people. The whole idea, they love tradwives, you know, traditional wives, stay home. You've talked, you know, you had Charlie Kirk talk about, you had many on the right talk about JD Vance over the years. This is not new. Even Rick Santorm,

24:15years ago, said the idea of women going to college is overrated, stay home, take care of the child, take care of the family. There's nothing wrong with it. I don't want people to think I'm some kind of democratic, was I don't want mothers to stay with their children. You can, you can fund both, but they won't. Look, they cut ACA subsidies, Medicaid and children, the idea of snap benefits of people. If you care about people, you would do that. This is an agenda that is on the right that the women Law Center calls it a disguised version of white Christian nationalism. The pro-natalist agenda of the right, that's what they call it. I'm citing them so I don't get in trouble. So that's the, but I'm saying that's the point, like they look at it for what it is. It's an agenda that's social engineering and we have to be aware of that. You can do good things on the right if they really were sincere, but I question everything knowing where it's coming from. Abby, I, I, just say what you talked about tomorrow night because we have a, we have another primary. The effect, it's the last. I know it's sad. It's primary, right? We got a new ham shirt tomorrow night. And it is an interesting race. Are you joining us? Or am I, is that should I leave this for a booker? Somebody. I'm available if you need that. Okay, good to know. Staff in the control. I mean,

25:16love you since available if we need her. Because you've been with me for most of these, these primary evenings. Tell me, I ask you this every time we have one. It is one of these things that every week when there's a new primary, we come away with something else. We learn something else. There's not a sameness to them. Well, it's because we have to competitive democratic primaries. Yes. Senator Schumer has been so successful at clearing the field for so many years. And he's, he's kept control of that process in several states. North Carolina may be coming off the, the block because of Roy Cooper. But, you know, we have a Chris Papis, the leading democratic candidate. New Hampshire was basically anointed to this role. And now he's got a viable challenger. And it's from the left from the left. Yeah. And, you know, the problem with New Hampshire is that it is such a light primary. And it's a little moody. And, you know, governor AOT is very popular. So there is a lot of, you know, this is, this is the week in every election cycle. And part of my term when Democrats bed wet. And so there is a lot of bed wetting around this race. Yes.

26:17Sometimes it's merited. Sometimes it's not. And I think we just have to give it a couple weeks before we find out how real this general election race is and assuming Papis is the nominee. So Papis had out an email, one of those fundraising emails that we're, you know, we're all on these lists. And it says we're in big trouble. I saw. That said, if you're ever, if you ever get fundraising emails, they all start like that. They all have some kind of dire prediction that if you don't send your five bucks in, we're going to lose this race. I don't know. What do you think? It's it's never got an email going. We're raising so much money. Have never left. You don't want to give this one away. But you don't even need your money. Of course, they always want money. Look, I see the same polling that he sees internally and also for the general election. Of course, he's concerned as Democrats who want to get control of the Senate, if we were to lose that seat, makes it so much harder to get control. But other Senate races are looking great for us. Sherry Brown, Abdul Leigh, Abdul Assad leading North Carolina, looking really good. You have I will really play in Texas. We can almost dream Democrats. Maybe this is the, I warn you all on Abbey from Texas, the dreaming in Texas. I sometimes come back to bite you, but I know.

27:21But that said, since we, you and I last talked about the problem the last Tuesday, the numbers in Texas have stayed where they are. It is still looking promising. Now, it is important to remember that polling numbers don't necessarily translate into what happens on Election Day because turnout is an issue and oversampling is an issue. But something is happening in Texas, which is keeping this democratic momentum in a very competitive spot. Oh, absolutely. I think with the polling right now, the biggest hesitancy is that there hasn't been a lot of Republicans spending and the cavalry has come in. So we are in a real wait and see period in Texas to see if that advertising is having any impact. There have been other races on the map where the blitz has not worked. And you know, this is about James Tolerico, whether he has a glass jaw. But I just got to say, there is a lot of complications in the Republican party that I've never seen before in Texas. And the Democratic side in Texas is working. There is a maturity

28:22to this party. They are working together. James Tolerico and Gina Hanna-Hossa are quite a tag team as a ticket. And so I don't think that it felt this way with Congressman O'Rourke in 2018. It was more kind of what is happening here. This is uncertain, but this is there's just a lot more evidence of trouble for Republicans. As I appreciate it, thank you. Abby Lundsen, contributor at Puck News and Dino Badala, host of the Dino Badala show on serious XM. All right, coming up, my conversation with the author of the groundbreaking 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Sons, a true story told in the narrative language of a novel of America's Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson joined the Velshi band Book Club and we will revisit that conversation next. We started the Velshi band book club more than four years ago on my weekend show. At the front end of an alarming assault on the freedom to read that continues today, unabated. Our mission was simple from the start. Reading as Resistance. Every week we'd read a

29:28band or challenge book together and talk to authors or scholars about it. We quickly learned that books tend to be banned for the same tedious, prosaic reasons, themes of sex, gender or representation, history that a dominant culture doesn't want you to learn, stories of oppression, but we also learned why a work of literature endures, including so many true classics and best sellers. Now sometimes it's the words on the page. Sometimes it's the theme of the text. Sometimes it's because of a remarkable author. Sometimes it's all three. And tonight's work is categorically all three. The landmark work of nonfiction, a true modern classic. One of my favorite books of all time, The Warmth of Other Sons, the epic story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It was named one of New York Times five best books of the entire 21st century. The Warmth of Other Sons tells the story of the Great Migration, the mass movement of some six million black Americans from the south to urban centers in the northeast, the Midwest and the West.

30:29Wilkerson masterfully tells the story through verifiable fact, intimate personal story and cinematic prose. At the center of the book are three real people, item A. Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster. After a cousin was nearly killed for a theft he didn't commit, a free-spirited Gladney, her sharecropper husband and their children, boarded a train for Chicago in the dead of the night. It was their first time stepping foot out of Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Before item A and her family headed out, quote, item A's mother drew them close to her as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter's family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car. May the Lord be the first one in the car she prayed and the last one out. A headstrong George Starling came to New York City's Harlem neighborhood by way of the citrus groves of Florida. He'd been an excellent student in Florida, Starling had been forced to drop out of college to earn money, but it didn't take him long when

31:30he was in those orange groves to demand fair wages and dignity for himself and his fellow workers. Quote comes back to him one image after another not just white against black or landed against lowly but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege. George Starling left all he knew because he would have died if he had stayed. End quote. And the remarkable Dr. Robert Foster packed his 1949 duic roadmaster with his sports coats and his medical bag and headed to California. He was a doctor, a surgeon who wasn't allowed to perform even a simple ton select to me at the hospital in the middle of his own Louisiana town because he was black. Quote the unfairness started to eat it, Robert. It was a curse to be able to see it. Better not to know, but the older he got the more he was starting to want. And that's just the beginning. The journey that these people take, the pain, the sacrifice, the joy, the triumph, all of the things that make up a life well lived is what makes the warmth of other sons a modern epic. I won't give much else away if you've not read it yet, but let me tell you

32:34there is a lot. This is a must read. The warmth of other sons is a book you have to read and experience for yourself every moment, every memory, every turn of phrase was included for a reason. As dire as the subject matter is, the warmth of other sons is truly an inspiring story. It's a story of multitudes of courage, a faith in yourself, and of something greater of resilience and survival. It's the story of some of the great black population centers of America and how they came to be what they are today. Chicago Detroit and Milwaukee drew migrating populations from the Mississippi Delta, Philadelphia, New York, Newark, and DC drew from Virginia, the Carolinas in Georgia, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Portland saw migrants arrive from Texas in Louisiana. Some books stop being books about America and become books that America uses to understand itself. Mirrors and windows. The warmth of other sons is one of those books. There's something Sarah and Dipitus about Isabel Wilkerson joining us on the Velshi Band Book Club tonight,

33:38when so many are asking themselves what it means to be an American. For the millions who made the Great Migration and for the countless others who've left one home in search of another on this land, Wilkerson has an answer, quote, by their action, they did not dream the American dream. They willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted, but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized, but that they had always been deep within their hearts. End quote. This is an American story. Perhaps the warmth of other sons is the American story. I'm joined now by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the author of the award winning and profoundly influential work, The Warmth of Other Sons, the epic story of America's Great Migration. And Isabel, you've written another fantastic book since then, but this one will always be mine. This is the one I think about when I think of you. Welcome again. It's always an honor to speak to you. Thank you for being with us tonight. Thank you so much for having me.

34:41One of the great things about this book is that it was hard. It was hard to write. It's not hard to read, but it was hard to write. It took you 15 years and what amounts to an audition to find your protagonist? You interviewed about 1200 people. How did you land on three people who have entirely different stories who would represent the story of the Great Migration, the Great Migration of Black people from the south and the southeast into the west and the Midwest and the northeast of this country? Well, I want to say that if there's a quintessentially American story, this is it. I was seeking to find three people who would represent the six million who were part of this Great Migration, which was the largest migration within the borders of this country. These people ended up being proxies for anyone who crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean, and the Rio Grande. So it shows all the things that we have in common as Americans. But the thing about this is the only time in American history that American citizens had to leave the land of their birth just to be recognized

35:42as the citizens that they'd always been. No other group of Americans had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens. So I was seeking to find three people who were part of this migration, who would represent each of the three migration streams up the East Coast, the Midwest, and out to the West. I need to have three people who had different experiences, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different precipitating events that had essentially forced them to reconsider where they were and to consider leaving all that they'd known for places that they'd never seen. I was looking for people who left with different reasons under different circumstances, but also I was looking for people who had a sense of humor because this is going to be really hard history. And I wanted to make sure that these were people who saw the world in all of its were wise in their own way, but also were able to look at this with a sense of recognition of what human nature is and also a sense of humor to get us through it. Yeah. And as I say, it was a hard

36:48book to write. For anybody who hasn't read it, it's not a hard book to read. It looks intimidating because it's a lot of pages, but it reads like a novel, even though it's truth. I want to read a passage from another of your central protagonist story, Robert Foster, quote, every few years, a teacher from Monroe colored high loaded a band of students onto the flatbed of the pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific railway tracks. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books, the white students were throwing away. That's how Monroe colored high school got its books. By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Robert was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. This passage struck me now differently when I first read the book because now that we've got this book club, it's the importance of books and how this in so many ways was a coming of age movement that is specific to some people within the great migration experience and the black experience. They got to see the world that they were prevented from seeing

37:48by law or circumstance through books. Yeah, one of what that reminds me of is the fact that they, this is not ancient history. This is something that didn't happen centuries ago. This is within a lifespan of people who are alive today because what he experienced really didn't end until the 1960s. So this is a continuation of that. And it's a, it's a reminder of the power of narrative nonfiction because the goal of this was to have people imagine for themselves what would they have done in a circumstance such as these, the people that they're reading about would have been. narrative nonfiction is in fact the, the closest to you come to being another person because these are real people whose stories are being told in the way in novel wood, but based upon their bible fact, all this research has to go into establishing learning and and and being able to encapsulate what they experience and then converting that into a narrative that people can follow as if they were reading a novel. So it's your reading and feeling the empathy for you. You're almost becoming

38:49them and it's a closest that you'll come to that. And so this is a reminder to me of ways that you're having to have these experiences that come alive for for the reader as they're reading about it. One of the themes in your book that is again weirdly relevant to me because I read this book a long time ago, weirdly relevant to me now is this concept of agency. You, you've called the migration, the great migration, an act of agency by people who had been denied it. These are people who couldn't vote in theory they could vote, but they really couldn't vote. So they moved. They couldn't get fair wages. They couldn't get fair treatment. They couldn't get fair housing. They, you couldn't get any of these things. They moved to the north where things were a little more fair, but they weren't completely fair in the north. But it was an active agency. Yeah, I'd like to say that, you know, I like to say that when you think about all that they had to go through, I mean, there were actually barriers and obstacles to them leaving. I mean, it wasn't as if they could just get up and leave in a way that we might now. Yes. Sometimes there would be, there would be, they'd be arrested at

39:50the railroad platforms. There were people who were who's tickets were torn out. There were a lot of efforts to keep them from leaving. And so this was not just a move. This was this was an outpouring a defection of seeking a political asylum within the borders of one's own country. And I often say that, you know, this because they're proxies for anyone who ever migrated from one place to another, you're reminded that, you know, no migration is about migration. Migration is about freedom and how far people are willing to go to achieve it. What a remarkable sentiment for where we are right now has your own book taken on a different meaning to you in in this moment in which we exist where we are talking about migration. It's not the great migration from this out, but migration is the central issue of our time right now. The rights of black Americans are the central issue of our time right now. And none of this neither the immigration issue nor the treatment of black Americans will change until we all realize that as long as one of us is chained, all of us are chained.

40:53Well, I think that, you know, when you think about how the universe brought the level of discord and division at the precise moment that the country is recognizing this historic landmark anniversary, 250 years. And what the book seeks to do is to have us think about what does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to encapsulate what it means to be an American? And one of the things that we have in common is that we, many of us, most of us, at the center from people who had to have done what the people in this book did, they had to have figured out that wherever they were was not where they could be their fullest selves. And they made they made the heartbreaking decision to leave all that they'd known for a place that they'd never seen and helps it live might be better. And I think that at this 250, we're all being asked to re-examine what does it mean to be American? And what kind of country do we want to be? I will end this discussion with the title of your book, which comes from the end notes of a long

41:59out-of-print copy you had a Richard Wright's 1945 autobiography called Black Boy. And he says, quote, I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part in the South, a part of the South to transplant an alien soil to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other sons and perhaps to bloom. Isabel Wilkerson, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for being with us tonight. Thank you so much. Isabel Wilkerson, as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of the Warmth of Other Sons,

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