Freedom Fest 2023: The Illusion of Division

Hey all!

July was a very busy month for me and the rest of my team at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism! In addition to spending major amounts of time fundraising, I attended the Braver Angels Convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as well as Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, where I was honored to moderate a panel on depolarization with Chloe Valdary, Ilana Redstone and Ben Kawaller of The Free Press. I also delivered a presentation, The Heterodox Challenge: Bringing the Divide in Our Distorted Reality (sadly, there was apparently a mishap with the video recording, but I will try to upload an audio version in the next week or shortly thereafter).

While I was at Freedom Fest, I ran into several folks who attended the event last year in Memphis and told me how much they loved my presentation, The Illusion of Division. Since it wasn’t recorded, I promised to make the text available on my website. Predictably, I became busy and distracted and forgot to do this, so I’ve decided to make good on my promise here.

Look forward to your thoughts. Enjoy!

THE LABELS THAT DIVIDE US

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know America is broken. I’ve spent the past couple of months thinking about the most important message I can share with anyone who wants to know why our country is broken and what I believe we can do to save it.

I was thinking about this when I went to the hair salon a few weeks ago. I casually mentioned to my stylist that I would be speaking at Freedom Fest. She asked me what I was going to talk about, and I told her, and she immediately got it. Because who doesn’t know America is broken?

Then she said something that intrigued me.

“I just hope we don’t end up with Trump again. Then we’re really screwed.”

It’s something we hear a lot these days, right? If Trump gets back in office, our country is finished. Done. But if we can just keep Biden around for a little longer, we’ll be in better shape.

To be clear, I’m not a Trump supporter. But I am a person with common sense. And what she said didn’t make a lot sense to me. So I decided to tease out what was going through her mind.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, “When Trump was in office, was your life worse than it is now?”

She gives this some thought, and it was clear to me that she’d never asked herself this question.

“Hmmm….”

“Was inflation as high as it is now?” I asked. “Was the supply chain broken?”

She shook her head. “No…”

“Were we in a war?”

She paused. “Well, no…”

“Were cities like San Francisco literally drowning in crime and homelessness? Did we have so many people who just don’t want to work?”

“No.”

So I ask her, “Then what makes you think things will be worse if Trump gets back in office?”

She thought about it for a moment, then laughed. “I don’t know, I guess it’s because he’s so annoying. Maybe it’s just easier to blame him!”

It’s easier to blame the “other” side — the people we don’t like. We’re so busy pointing fingers at each other that we don’t focus on what’s really happening to us – and why.

We don’t pay attention to the fact that no matter who gets in the White House our who controls Congress, things just keep getting worse. This is what’s breaking America. But we’re just too divided to see it.

I couldn’t see it, myself — until I crossed the divide 12 years ago.

In 2011, I quit my job in L.A. as an executive at Viacom and moved with my family to a small town inMontana, a state that’s mostly conservative, 90% white, and overwhelmingly Christian. Since I’m gay -- and also black, btw -- so I’m THE definition of a statistical outlier. [I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure some of our friends were laying bets on how long a gay black woman would last– I’m guessing the “smart” money was on 6 months or less].

Before we left L.A., a concerned colleague emailed me an article about a Baptist pastor who moved from Florida to set up a church near our new home. Why was my colleague worried? Because according to the article, this pastor was a white supremacist. According to the article, the pastor thought people of color were “subhuman.” He wasn’t wild about gay people, either. He thought we should be killed. Understandably, my colleague feared for my safety. Who wouldn’t be terrified after reading something like this?

We ended up moving to Montana despite my colleague’s concern. I’m the kind of person who would have jumped in a covered wagon and headed west, even if everyone was warning me about bandits and Indians. That’s just who I am. But here’s where the story gets interesting.

Flash forward a few years. I’m at the Verizon store buying a phone and strike up a conversation with a young man who had relocated from Florida. We start talking, realize we had a lot in common, and we become friends. A year later, my new friend reads my blog and calls me.

“Hey, who’s that white supremacist pastor your friend warned you about?”

I give him the pastor’s name, and my friend does the last thing I would expect: he starts laughing.

“I know this guy,” he tells me.

“You’re kidding,” I say. And I’m waiting for my friend to give me the juicy, horrible details about his experience with this man.

“He’s my pastor,” my friend says. “My family followed him here from Florida a few years ago.”

“What?!”

My friend says he’s known this pastor most of his life, he’s been his mentor and confidant, and his family absolutely loves him.

He’s just blown my mind. But there’s a final twist to this story. You see, my friend isn’t white. My friend is black.

As you can imagine, I’m incredibly intrigued by all of this. I’m dying to know why my black friend would loves and respects a white supremacist. So I ask him, “Can I meet this guy? You think he’d have lunch with me?”

Now, I had no idea if he’d accept my invite. Maybe he doesn’t have a problem with black people, but how would he feel about someone who’s gay?

My friend reaches out to the pastor, and a few days later he calls me with a surprise. The pastor has agreed to meet me for lunch.

A couple of weeks later, I’m driving to meet him, I’ll admit, I was a little nervous. I’m thinking to myself, Why does he really want to meet me? What’s his game? Was this a mistake?

I get to the restaurant, and I scan the room, and see nothing but white faces — par for the course in Montana. Then I look to the back of the room and see an older man in his 70s at a table. I our eyes locked, and I knew instantly, even though I’d never seen his picture, that I was looking at the pastor. As I made my way over to him he slowly stood up. I couldn’t read his face, but when I reached his table he smiled. And he opened his arms wide.

“I am so glad you wanted to meet me,” he said.

And he pulled me close. And we hugged.

We talked for a couple of hours, but we could have spent the whole afternoon together.

• We talked about the labor shortage in our valley and how no one wants to work anymore.

• We talked about inflation and how hard it’s getting for us to take care of our families.

• We talked about the fentanyl crisis that’s destroying a generation of young people.

• We talked about the epidemic of homelessness in big cities and the homelessness we’re seeing in our own rural community.

• We talked about the billions we’re sending to Ukraine while all of this is happening.

• We talked about schools that are teaching our kids about sex before they’re old enough to read.

And we were on the same page about almost every single thing. No, I wasn’t ready to sign up for Bible school, and he wasn’t interested in attending a Pride parade. But what kind of world are we living in when a gay black woman can find so much common ground with — and be physically embraced — by a man who is supposed to be a white supremacist? How can this happen? I think I know.

It’s because America isn’t as divided as we’re led to believe it is. We actually have a lot more in common than we think. We just can’t see it.

That’s when I began to appreciate the power of labels that we use to define each other. They’re distorting our collective reality of the “other” side and convincing us we live in a world we don’t really live in.

THE ROOTS OF OUR DIVISION

I think that’s why America “seems” so divided now. Because we’re judging people we’ve never met based on labels other people have given them. And we’re using these labels in the broadest possible way:

If we’re on the Left and we believe in free market capitalism, but have a problem with the HUGE wealth divide in America? We’re a socialist.

If we’re on the Right and we think people of all races should be treated equally, but we have a problem with anti-racism ideology? We’re a white supremacist.

And if we question a popular narrative or don’t blindly trust “the experts”? We’re a conspiracy theorist.

When we use inflammatory labels so recklessly, it makes it easier for us to dehumanize people who seems different from us. A wall goes up, and we put them on the other side of that wall.

We don’t dig deeper to find out who they really are and what they believe in. We don’t ask questions to see if they might have been misrepresented. We don’t give ourselves the chance to find out if the people we fear are as scary as we’ve heard.

And the division is so insidious because it’s so binary. There’s never a middle ground.

Are we anti-racist or racist?

Do we support gender affirming therapy for children, or would we rather let them commit suicide?

Do we support the war in Ukraine, or do we want Russia to take over the world?

Will we get vaccinated to keep others safe, or are we selfish murderers?

We’re divided over the news we get about our world. Do we trust the “facts,” or are we listening to “misinformation”?

We’re relentlessly divided, and it’s distorting our reality of what the “other” side looks like. This isn’t just my experience. There’s data that backs this up.

According to the non-partisan research group, More in Common, Americans have extremely distorted perceptions of the “other” side. In 2019, More in Common conducted a study of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents called “How False Impressions Are Pulling Americans Apart.” Their research compared the extent to which these groups think they disagree on issues with the extent to which they actually disagree, or what they called the “Perception Gap.”

Their findings were mind blowing:

• Republicans and Democrats think almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views than really do

• The deeper their political allegiance, the more likely it is that someone will have a distorted views of the “other” side

• And most shocking, education doesn’t reduce the Perception Gap – and in some cases, it even increases it.

So, what’s causing these deep distortions in our reality?

Our media. More in Common’s study found that the more news a person consumed, the wider their Perception Gap. In fact, people who consume news “most of the time” are THREE as inaccurate in their perception of the “other” side than those who occasionally watch or read the news.

The media we rely on to inform us are manufacturing a deeply distorted reality that’s pulling us apart.

Even the words we use are dividing us. Language is supposed to help us communicate and share a common understanding of the world. But now we’re randomly redefining words, and it’s putting people on completely different pages. It’s forcing them into different realities.

Remember when we all understood what “racism” meant? Discrimination against a person of a different race. Now, racism also requires power. And since white people are the only ones with power, they’re the only ones who can be racist. See how that works?

Terrorism. Remember when a“terrorist” was someone in Al Qaeda or ISIS, radicals who highjack planes and blow up buildings? Now “terrorists” can be average Americans  who dispense “dangerous” misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Vaccines. Remember they used to keep us from getting infected and transmitting a disease. Now, a vaccine just needs to keep us from getting really sick and dying.

We can’t even agree on what a “woman” is anymore. Now the “science” says if you think you’re a woman, you are a woman.

Let’s not forget white supremacists. Remember when they were only white? Now anyone can be a white supremacist — whether you’re black, brown, yellow, even gay. Who would have dreamed that white supremacists would be the most inclusive group of people in the country?

Fighting over something as simple as our vocabulary creates manufactured division and unnecessary confusion. But it can also bring something more dangerous: hate.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said:

“I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other.

They fear each other because they don’t know each other,

and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other,

and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.”

When we’re separated, we’re more likely to think the worst of each other. In time, we start to fear each other. And that fear will turn into anger — and even hate. When we hate, we can’t see what we have in common.

That day I sat down with that pastor, I discovered what I had in common with a man I “should” hate — because I was told that he hates people like me.

WHY I SHOULD HATE

And as a black woman, as a gay woman, there’s a long list of people I should hate.

White men, white women, Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, Karens, Republicans, Christians, who have problems giving puberty blockers to 10-year olds — all these people are “racist.” Am I missing anyone?

I’m supposed to hate the state of Florida. The NAACP just declared a state of emergency for black people, and gay people got the same advisory — because Governor DeSantis has made it “unsafe” for us to visit. I can’t even take my family to Disneyworld!

As a black woman, I’m even supposed to hate my country. I’m supposed to resent the people who built this country. From George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt, they've trapped me in a system of systemic racism that makes it impossible for me to succeed.

The problem is, what I’m being told isn’t syncing with my reality — not just because of what I’ve experienced living in a red state full of God fearing, gun-toting Republicans for the past 12 years.

I don’t hate America because I remember what America used to look like.

I remember my grandmother, who never graduated from high school, telling me what it was like to pick cotton in a little town called Millington, about 19 miles from here, gnarling her hands for thirty cents an hour.

I remember my mother, who never went to college, telling me what it was like to sit in the colored section of the theaters here in Memphis, way up in the balcony, too far from the exits to escape if a fire broke out.

I remember my father, who never graduated from college, telling me how he applied to join the L.A. Country fire department in the 60s and was told that they just weren’t ready to hire a black man.

I remember what my own life was like. Going to a private high school in Pasadena in the 80s where black, Asian and Jewish kids couldn’t attend cotillion. I remember working at NBC Universal in the 90s when a colleague asked if I was bringing watermelon to the offie potluck.

These memories don’t fill me with hate or anger. They fill me with a profound sense of gratitude. Not because racism has disappeared, because it hasn’t. But because I don’t live in that world anymore.

I’m filled with gratitude because my grandparents never dreamed that a young black girl from a working class family could graduate from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

I’m grateful because my parents never imagined I would become a senior executive at one of the world’s biggest media companies.

And I never dreamed that I would start a family with the love of my life, a white woman — and create a life in the woods of Montana with neighbors who look nothing like me.

I don’t hate, because I realize just how far I've come. How far we’ve all come.

And yet, now I’m being told — by people who somehow understand racism better than I do — that I should forget the progress I’ve seen and experienced. I’m being told to hate the people who made this progress possible.

I’m being asked to forget that white Americans voted for a black man to lead our country — not once, but twice; that a black woman was Secretary of State and Head of the NSA; that a black woman is Vice President.

I’m being asked to believe all these things happened in a country that makes it impossible for people like me to succeed. And I can’t help but wonder: “Do these people think I’m crazy?” Because I’d have to be crazy to believe what they’re telling me.

Our reality is being deeply distorted to divide us, to make us hate each other, to make us hate our country, and hate our way of life.

The question we should be asking ourselves is: Why is this happening? Who benefits from this division?

ELITES USE OUR DIFFERENCES TO DIVIDE US

Life on this planet hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. Money has always determined how we live our lives. If we have a lot of it, we stay sheltered, well fed, healthy, and safe. Without money, our world becomes precarious.

Today, the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is wider than it’s been at any other time since the Great Depression.

But we don’t talk about this. Because we’re focused on our differences. Because we’re fixated on white privilege.

We don’t talk about the privilege that poses the greatest threat to all of us.

Elite privilege.

The unspoken power of the top 1/10th of one percent, who’ve amassed as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Since the pandemic, elite privilege has gone parabolic.

While we were locked down, 100,000 small businesses closed — and never re-opened — while U.S. billionaire wealth increased by almost HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS during the first 3 months of lockdowns.

That’s not white privilege; that’s elite privilege.

Nearly 1/4 of all dollars in existence were created since the pandemic hit. But most of that money didn’t go to average Americans; it went to venture capital firms and hedge funds. People with deep pockets made their pockets even deeper — and they went on a spending spree, buying any real estate that wasn’t nailed down.

That’s not white privilege; that’s elite privilege.

Our government is creating money out of thin air at a frightening pace. It’s fueling inflation that’s making our lives unlivable.

57% of Americans can’t come up with $1,000 in an emergency. Did you know that?

Black or white, straight or gay, Republican or Democrat, unless we have elite privilege, we’re ALL in a class war now that’s turning into mortal combat.

My friends, we don’t have a problem with capitalism. We have a problem with a government allows elites to abuse capitalism in a way that exploits us and destroys our quality of life.

That’s the real domestic terrorism. So why aren’t we talking about it?

Because our government and people with elite privilege would rather we fight amongst ourselves than see the true source of our problems. Because they know when people without power come together, something amazing happens. They become powerful.

Throughout history, elites have used the same tactic to make sure those without power don’t become powerful: divide and conquer.

Julius Caesar used it during the Gallic Wars to defeat the Gauls. The British used it to stop class rebellion in India. The U.S. government used it to turn Native American tribes against each another. And during the Civil War, wealthy white landowners used race to keep indentured white servants from joining forces with black slaves.

And now elites are using the same strategy to divide us — this time by our politics race, our sex, our gender — all in the name of “social justice.”

All of this has happened before, because as Maya Angelou said, we humans never seem to learn our lesson. We always allow ourselves to be led around with holes through our noses.

THE WESTERN WORLD IN CRISIS

America is in crisis, but we’re not alone. All around the world:

Debt is soaring to unimaginable levels.

Inflation is raging.

Supply chains are breaking.

The social fabric is coming apart at the seams.

And as the world falls into crisis, governments are using this opportunity to seize more control over our lives.

The surveillance state keeps expanding. Freedom of speech keeps shrinking.

Governments are working behind the scenes to make sure when the next pandemic hits, we’ll need vaccine passports to move “freely” through society.

Central banks are this close to rolling out a digital currency that will allow governments to track everything we buy. It will lay the groundwork for a social credit system that can control what we buy, we can say, and what we can do.

This is already happening in China. And we’ve all learned what happens in China doesn’t stay in China.

During the pandemic, millions of Shanghai citizens were locked in their homes. One of the largest cities in the world became a prison.

What did western countries do? They followed China’s example.

We saw it in Australia when COVID-positive people were sent to quarantine facilities.

We saw what happened in Canada with the Trucker’s Protest, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau locked protesters out of their bank accounts.

We saw what happened in our own country. Millions of Americans were forced to get vaccinated with a drug that couldn’t keep them from getting sick or dying — just so they could travel, go to school, or even work.

All around the world, people are losing their fight for freedom. But America is the line in the sand. If we lose the battle here, the world becomes a very dark place. Because this experiment has only happened once in human history — and if it ends here, it will never happen again.

That means the next revolution is upon us, my friends. But it won’t just be a fight for America’s freedom; it will be a fight for humanity’s freedom. It won’t be a revolution in the streets.

The next revolution will be in our minds.

WHAT MAKES AMERICA SPECIAL

What saddens me most is that so many of us have forgotten why America was born and what it stands for.

Today, our children are taught that America stands for white supremacy, that freedom is synonymous with white privilege. We’re chastised for thinking our country was ever great. And you know what? Maybe it wasn’t. But what America has always been is special, and that gives us the potential for greatness.

That potential is what we all need to fight for now.

The men who built this country weren’t saints. They didn’t think black lives mattered. They owned slaves. They didn’t believe in alternative lifestyles. They treated women like children. They were flawed human beings whose mindset, in many ways, reflected the mindset of their time.

Yet in other ways ways, the men who founded our country were extremely enlightened. It’s easy to forget the unless we remember what the world looked like when America was born.

250 years ago, monarchs ruled the world. Families with privilege we can’t begin to fathom controlled governments, economies, and even religions. The only people who owned land were men who did so by the grace of the monarch or the luck of birth.

250 years ago, a country built on the idea that of allowing people to vote — even if it was just white men — and determine how it treated them was revolutionary in every sense of the word.

But what began as an experiment that only favored white men would end up benefiting people our Founding Fathers never intended or imagined. People like me.

Our home has survived depression and world wars, massive social transformation, and global pandemics. It’s weathered impeachments and activist courts.

But what our home wasn’t built to withstand is bitter, unrelenting division. That’s our Achilles Heel.

Abraham Lincoln reminded us of our fatal weakness on the eve of the Civil War, the moment America almost ended: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Now our house is divided again. The roof is collapsing, walls are buckling, and the foundation is cracking.

But it’s not too late to rebuild out home. Rebuilding doesn’t mean destroying our home and starting with something completely new. We can — and we must — keep our home on the foundation it was built upon. The foundation of freedom.

If you want to understand why America is worth rebuilding, don’t listen to the media that tell us that America is synonymous with white supremacy.

Don’t listen to professors at elite schools who tell us that our Constitution is “outdated” and racist.

If you want to understand why this country is worth fighting for, talk to people who fought to get here. Ask an immigrant why they came to America. They’ll tell you that they came for the promise of a better life. They’ll tell you that a better life is based on something money can’t buy: freedom that’s guaranteed by law. Freedom our government can’t from us take without one helluva fight.

That’s what makes America special.

SOLUTIONS

We’ve been asleep for a long time, my friends. We’ve slept because we thought things were going well. But now we’re wide awake, aren’t we? The question many of us are asking is, Have we slept too long? Is it too late to save America?

My answer is NO.

It’s easy to feel hopeless now. Helpless. It’s tempting to think we’re alone. Because that’s the media’s job right now: to make us feel hopeless, helpless, and alone — by dividing us.

The media make us think we’re crazy. They tell us if we believe in free speech, we’re supporting hate. That if we love what America stands for, we’re racist. They make us believe we’re fringe thinkers.

But we’re not crazy, and we’re not alone. We are the silent majority. But we can’t afford to be silent any longer. 

It’s easy to feel defeated when we see so many people around us losing touch with reality, succumbing to manufactured division. We can’t help but wonder, “What can we do if half the country can’t see what’s happening?”

This is want you to keep in mind: we don’t need everyone to wake up. We only need a critical mass to come to their senses.

Some people have lived in a distorted reality so long, they’ll never wake up. And we shouldn’t expect them to. Our jobs to give each other the courage to keep fighting. Our job is to awaken the minds of people who know something is wrong, but may not appreciate the scope of what we’re dealing with — and there are a LOT of these people.

Here’s the other thing I want you to keep in mind: the people with elite privilege are terrified of us. Can you feel it? I can.

Because they know the only way you can really control 330 million people isn’t with guns or money. The only way they can control us is by controlling our minds. They know the moment they encounter civil disobedience on a mass scale, this game ends.

We’ve seen what happens when we push back. We’ve seen what happens when enough remote workers refuse to come back to the office, when enough employees refuse to get jabbed.

When enough of us push back, they back down. That’s the power of numbers.

We have so much more power than we realize. And the people desperately trying to take our freedom know this. They’re in a race against time. They know what’s possible when we awaken in large numbers.

And this is why they’re squeezing us so hard now — restraining our speech, restricting our freedoms, denying our bodily autonomy. But the tighter they squeeze, the more aware we become of their grip. And more people wake up. So their grip tightens, and more people feel it and wake up. It becomes a feedback loop.

This is the awakening. And it can’t be stopped. The people fighting to take our freedom have already lost. They just haven’t accepted it.

But there’s another reason they’ll lose this battle: freedom is part of who we are —not just as Americans, but as human beings. Denying us freedom goes against the laws of nature, itself. Once humans have tasted freedom, they can never return to a life of slavery. As a black woman who’s only six generations away from slavery, I can tell you I have a special interest in holding onto my freedom.

This is a battle for the soul of humanity.

I’d like to end by asking you to close your eyes and imagine we’re in a dark room. After a while, our eyes will adapt to the darkness, but we still can’t see much. Now, imagine someone lights single candle. What happens? The entire room changes. Suddenly, that single point of light allows us to see SO much. That single point of light is able to push back the darkness. And each time we add another candle, the darkness retreats further.

It doesn’t take much light to defeat darkness. That’s how powerful light is. That’s how powerful each and every one of us is.

So the most important message I can share with all of you is this: Stay strong. Stay together. Stand your ground, no matter what. This is how we will save America.

God bless you, and God bless America.