The Rev. William J. Barber II is pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and leader of a non-violent social justice movement called Historic Thousands on Jones Street.
The video above is his response on July 8 to the killings of black men by police in Baton Rouge and in St. Anthony,, MN, within a 24-hour period, followed by the killings of five police officers in Dallas. The video below is from his address to the Democratic National Convention on July 28.
… Ronald Reagan is the man whose name improbably electrified the Democratic National Convention … .
… . On Wednesday night, Barack Obama said: Ronald Reagan called America “a shining city on a hill.” Donald Trump calls it “a divided crime scene” that only he can fix.
On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton said: He’s [Trump] taken the Republican Party a long way… from “Morning in America” to ”Midnight in America.” He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.
And just in case the point wasn’t clear, a former official from the Reagan administration enchanted a crowd of screaming Democrats with this one-liner …): Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan.
People say that a vote for a third-party candidate such as Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. But in reality, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to empower future candidates such as Donald Trump.
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, and Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of Truthdig, talk about how the candidacy of Donald Trump is a product of the failures of Democratic leaders such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
For the past 20 or so years, as Frank points out, the leaders of the Democratic Party have turned their backs on working people on the theory that such people have nowhere else to go.
Now Donald Trump has come along and given them somewhere else to go. He doesn’t have good answers, but he is the only one of the two major-party candidates who is an alternative to the status quo.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will pursue the same policies, and, four years from now, there will be another Donald Trump—but one more self-disciplined, less openly racist and less obviously foolish and ignorant. And that Donald Trump will likely be elected.
The video above is 47 minutes long, but worth watching. Thomas Frank is an entertaining talker and he knows what he is talking about.
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