"Do you think Donald Trump is afraid to debate you?" Kamala: "He should be."

[Kind of Blue]

14. To paraphrase Maya Wiley, "Then I don't know what we're fighting for."

In what I think is a powerful discussion on Chris Haye's All In the other night, Harry Seigel, senior editor of The Daily Beast, Zelinda Maxwell and Maya Wiley spoke to a lot of what I think are your concerns, TexasTowelie. And I don't mean concerns in a sarcastic way at all. But please have a listen to Zerlinda Maxwell and Maya Wiley's responses to his fears about dealing with racism now. They speak for me and I think for a lot of people who are not afraid anymore. The panel discussion, imho, is excellent. But my focus here starts at about 11:37 to about 19:20. I think at the end, unless I'm terribly mistaken, Siegel could only summarize the situation but had no good response, again imho, to the case Maxwell and Wiley make.

I did the best I could with the transcript following this video.

Hayes: What's the right way to characterize a crowd that-- overwhelming a white crowd, not exclusively but overwhelmingly a white crowd chanting "Send Her Back," about a black woman who is a U.S. congressman and U.S. citizen?
Seigel: Racist, xenophobic, cruel, un-American. The question is what the rest of us are going to do about this as these animal spirits, if you like, have been unleashed. Look, Trump won a very weird-- had a very weird path to victory. In a lot of ways he did not win the popular vote and he's aiming for that same path again. Except now he has a tremendous war chest and the power of the incumbency that the further excites all of these people who, if they thought these ways weren't chanting for the most part, were quiet about it. I think it's going to take a tremendous political force and the next year and change to hopefully get us back to that sort of moment. But people are not ashamed of shameful behavior right now, they're chanting it.
Hayes: Yeah, I mean it's-- I also think it's-- well, there's two things here. I think he's radicalizing people. I mean it's happening in real time like we're watching it happen. it shows up in the public opinion polling data. The antecedents were there. we know they were there. It's not like Donald Trump invented racism and even his tactics if you read "Nixonland," Rick Perlstein's great book about Nixon, like it's just kind of a dumb, more vulgar version of Nixon. It's not that-- it's not something like--
Wiley: Well, actually he broke Nixon's playbook because remember, Nixon was the Southern Strategy done right. And the Southern Strategy done right was we will code it. We will not be explicit. In fact, we think explicit racism is the third rail. We won't touch it because we'll be electrocuted. What we will do is veil it so that it's acceptable. And what Trump has really done is said if we pair economic populism with racism, overt explicit, we think we win and that's what we have to say no, you don't.
Hayes: But he's also making-- I think he's making people worse. He is making-- like there's an idea that there's a sort of question of like is he just unleashing what people want to do anyway or is he-- and I think he keeps setting a bar for people and leading them towards things that--
Maxwell: I mean the saddest thing is when you have this conversation, I'm sure all of us have this week in particular with white people who are like, well, you know, the economy is doing great. You know,, they don't want to jump into this conversation about racism. But when are we gonna have it? Because black people are being shot by the police, nobody is getting in trouble. Eric Garner was just-- that case just-- the Justice Department just decided they're not going to pursue it. And that's just a reminder to people of color in this country that our lives are not as valuable as everyone else's. And I'm tired of being reminded of that. I'm tire of being reminded by the president of that every single day from his tweets and from his words. And so, I think this is a come-to-Jesus moment for the country. Are we gonna deal with racism or not?
Seigel: I am worried that if we deal with racism that we are gonna end up with more Donald Trump. I think that's absolutely right that these aren't things you can just put off or be patient or let's just wait until a few more people get shot. But Hillary Clinton ran a campaign where she was bringing up mothers who've lost their children. She went as far in that direction as any mainstream Democrat at that point and Trump was American carnage and there was a response to that. And I don't know where the--
Wiley: But that’s not why she--
Maxwell: We won the popular vote so the ting that I think about all the time is that when people say, "This is why Trump won," every single reason listed is correct on that front. But, again, he won by such a slim margin with so many weird factors in this election that I don't know that we can then predict out that, you know, the racism is working for him as if we're not an emerging majority of people of color in this country.
Wiley: What are we trying to win? I think fundamentally we're trying to win democracy. And so where I get concerned is both these points, which is to say we have to recognize we're talking about all of us but that can't exclude people of color. And I don't think that was Hillary Clinton's mistake. I think I was to --
Maxwell: We could have went further.
Wiley: We could have gone further. Remember that Wisconsin was fundamentally about voter suppression and trying to bar black people from the ballot and Latinos and others. We're seeing that now in the citizenship fight, the Muslim ban. Everything we're being told is about who is America and I think it isn't working and that's part of what we saw in the in the 20--
Hayes: 2018.
Wiley: 2018 midterms and we shouldn't forget the call to our better angels. And if we don't my concern is I'm not sure what we're fighting for.