A Decade of Division

MAGA has destroyed our country, and it's going to take a lot of time & hard work to rebuild it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WOKF Daily with Meet
your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker, Folks,
What can be said? I'm recording this knowing that the
timeline for the final day to vote is twenty days away.
By the time that you listen to this, we will

(00:34):
have hit the teens and it will be nineteen days away.
And I want to reflect on the fact that since
Vice President Kamala Harris took the reins of this election,
she has run one of the most stellar campaigns I

(00:57):
have ever seen. And the fact is that I've said
this before, if we were living in normal political times,
if Donald Trump had never become President of the United States,
or say this was his first you know, I don't know,

(01:17):
but I think that it would be a hands down,
without a doubt, given that she would win. She has
the plans, the smarts, the charisma, all of the things
that are necessary in order to become president of the
United States. She differs greatly from Hillary Clinton in the

(01:42):
fact that she hasn't been a part of the American
psyche for three decades. While she has built an incredibly
stellar career as a prosecutor, as a senator, she wasn't
a fit sure, And I think to that point, particularly

(02:03):
at a time when Americans are exhausted, I think in
a lot of ways, by legacy, Kamala Harris brings common
sense and care and empathy and joy back center stage
in America when for nearly a decade we've been trapped

(02:25):
in the funhouse of horrors of Donald Trump and Maga,
we cannot really begin to understand, truly, I think, without
like great distance from this time, how much Donald Trump

(02:47):
and Maga destroyed our country, destroyed our faith and institutions,
destroyed our faith in each other a decade near a
decade of division. For the first time in our lives,
in our modern lives, we at a president that did

(03:09):
not even pretend to try and bring people together. On
his inauguration day, Donald Trump talked about American carnage. Inauguration
Day is usually the day that people talk about their
vision and hope. The picture that Donald Trump painted in
January twenty seventeen was one of darkness, misery, and despair.

(03:33):
I honestly don't know how Republicans listen to Donald Trump, like,
actually listen to him, not do their fucking sane washing
and interpretation of what it is that they think that
he is saying. But when they actually listen, when they
actually read a transcript and think to themselves, Yes, this

(03:54):
is the country that I want to live in, and
this is the America that I want for my children
and my children's children. That's how you know that this
is a cult. Because there's no way that you watched
what I talked about yesterday with Donald Trump being on
that stage in Pennsylvania and just looking out of his

(04:15):
fucking mind swaying and just not making any sense, not
answering any questions. And he didn't do any better when
he went to the Chicago Economic Club when faced with
a journalist that had real questions and real follow up
and wasn't allowing himself to be put off track by

(04:37):
Donald Trump's normal, well you're not that smart and nobody
knows anything but me attitude and say, okay, well, the
question that I asked was about X, not about whatever
fucking tangent you want to go on. That's what journalists
are supposed to do. Get to the heart of the heart,
get to the truth, and the truth is is that

(04:59):
this country has been in a downward spiral for nearly
a decade, and Kamala Harris and Tim Walls over the
last three months have brought in a sense of possibility,
hope and light. I don't know, folks, how this all
turns out. I have no idea, none of us do.
I don't want us to just hope and pray for

(05:20):
the best. I want us to activate. I want us
to run through the tape. If you are feeling fearful, volunteer.
If you are feeling hopeless, phone bank, knock on doors, donate,
talk to your neighbors and your friends, have the brave conversations. Engage.
But just sitting around and having cast your ballot and

(05:45):
then wanting to spin yourself dizzy into a place of
hopefulness is not going to do anything except feed the
fear that we've been subsisting on for the last nine
goddamn years. I posted this the other day that my sister.
I woke up to a message from my sister. I'll

(06:07):
read you what I wrote. I said, I woke up
this morning to a message from my sister, who is
feeling a lot of fear and despair about the election.
I told her this. I go through these moments too,
but it takes just as much energy to hope as
it does to despair. George's early voting is breaking records.
Hold on to that, and then I went on to say,

(06:30):
we cannot lose focus now and allow them to break us.
The hardest part of any race is finding the energy
to run through the tape when every part of your
body wants to quit. We can do this.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
We are doing this.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
Folks. You've been listening to me for a long time,
many of you, and you know that prior to July,
I was in a very dark place. Turning on this
microphone and sitting and recording this show became utterly and

(07:10):
completely painful. Not because I'm not grateful for the opportunity
to connect with people every day through this podcast, but
because I had nothing good that I felt like I
could offer. Everything felt dark, everything felt hopeless. I ran

(07:31):
into a colleague the other day who said, Danielle Man,
let me tell you something about what gives me faith.
And she's like you, because I've never seen someone do
the kind of turnaround that you've done over the last
couple of months.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
If you have a.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Shred of hope, given where you were, then all of
us can muster the same energy, And that's the truth.
I don't lie on this show, right I don't, you know,
try and put on a happy face when I'm not happy,
and maybe that makes the numbers go down. But the
fact is is that sometimes when you are down and out,

(08:10):
it's hard to get back up. It's hard to recognize
that there is something other than the grief that you
are sitting in. But I will tell you that when
you get the strength to open up the curtains, to
open up the window, to move your body and get
back out into life and into the light, you realize

(08:33):
that you can do anything. Here's the thing, folks, because
I want people to be really clear, even if the
vice president wins the election, this country remains extraordinarily divided,
and there will be so much work to do, because

(08:54):
what we will have done is given our democracy a
four yearly s extent. But to believe, as we wanted
to believe in twenty twenty, that oh, that election will
just fix it and will be good, Donald Trump will
go away, Well, look at where we are four years later.
If there is anything for us to take from this time,

(09:18):
it is that we cannot obfuscate our responsibility as citizens anymore.
We don't get to just tap back out, because that
is what the Maga Republicans will wait for and pounce on.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
I hope that what we.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Gain if we win is the belief that we can,
that yes, we can. When Obama told us, and use
that phrase, what feels like eons ago, he empowered a
generation of people to reimagine what this country could be,
who we all could be. He gave us hope and

(09:57):
inspiration for the fact that we do have the power
and the ability to change the status quo, that we
can flip the script. And I want to remind us
that the reality is is that we're always going to
go through moments of progression and regression because we are human,
and there will always be forces at play that do

(10:21):
not want progress and will throw a wrench and as
many obstacles in the way as they can to slow
us down. But progress is like a train without breaks.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
It will keep going if we continue our momentum, and friends,
if we lose, then we are going to be in
for the fight of our lives.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
For our lives. There will be a privileged set that
is able to leave. There will be those that will
have no choice but to stay, even if you do
have the ability to leave, you gotta continue fighting for
those that are behind. We could be entering one of

(11:10):
the darkest periods of this country's history, which would be
a Jim Crow two point zero. Jim Crow lasted a century,
a century, generation after generation born into an apartheid system.
Even if they move to the North, the North, don't
get it twisted. People were still getting lynched, still not

(11:33):
being able to work. It was just maybe less on
a day to day. I believe that we have the
power to make it to the other side. I do.
I believe that there are more of us who believe
in the possibility of America than those that want to
pull us into the dredges of white supremacy. I said

(11:57):
back in twenty sixteen that the election of Donald Trump
was white supremacy's last stand. I also said I didn't
know how long that stand would be, but I knew
that they were losing their grip on this country. I
stand by that they are not a party of winners.
They are so shortsighted, so small in their thinking, so

(12:21):
narrow in their experience. As Willy Wonka said one of
my favorite movies, and I mean the original, we are
the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams. We
have to awaken our ancestral fire, that fight, that resistance.

(12:43):
It is within each and every single one of us.
There's a saying that has gone around. I don't know
who said it originally. I see it every once in
a while on T shirts and on different memes. But
for those of us who are black and brown, we

(13:06):
come from a line of people that couldn't be killed.
That's how we made it here. Our line kept getting
stronger with each and every generation. It is how we
have arrived at this moment. So to give up, to

(13:28):
make it so that one election could wipe out centuries
of resistance and work would be an insult to our
ancestors that got us here. So I think it is
important in these next weeks, the final weeks of this election,

(13:51):
that we light the candles, we say, the prayers, we do,
the meditations, we put in the spiritual, mental and physical
work to win, because I believe that we can. It
will not be easy, and it may in fact be bloody,
but I believe, like I've said over and over again,

(14:12):
there are more of us than there are of them.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
We just need to awaken.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
That's it. Their numbers are small, folks. They are just
really fucking loud and have created this hostile echo chamber
that projects out. But when you see these people, when
you see their small sad rallies, their numbers are not big,

(14:37):
and we have got to remember that. Sometimes I say, oh,
it's fifty percent of the population that is maga. I
don't actually know if that's true. I really don't. I
know that they are loud, and I definitely know that
they exist, but I don't know if it's fifty to fifty.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
What matters is what we do.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
What matters is the faith that we have. What matters
is that we keep pushing, that we run through the tape,
that we leave everything on the field, that in the
moments that you start to despair, do something, as Michelle
Obama said, don't just sit on the fucking couch and wallow.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Do something.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Activate because by you doing that, then the people around
you follow suit. And that is what we want to
be Contagious is our fight and our hopefulness. That is
it for me today, dear friends on woke AF As

(15:41):
a reminder, the Danielle Moody Show is live everyday Monday
through Thursday, five pm. Eastern on my YouTube channel. I'm
having a great time over there and building an incredible
community and conversation where folks can engage in real time.

(16:01):
So do join me over there. Even if you say, ah,
YouTube is not for me, just give it a try.
As always, dear friends, Power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.