We have to get at the roots of fascism, which means I’m going to Trump Country, Sister Amy. I’m going to talk to those white brothers and talk to those white sisters and say, “Quit scapegoating the most vulnerable. Let us confront the most powerful. I don’t have a minute for any kind of your xenophobia, but at the same time I know you’re catching hell. I know many of you have been losers in corporate globalization. You’ve been pushed against a wall by big monopolies and oligopolies. You have difficulty trying to engage in any kind of unionization. You have to transform and transpose and filter your fears through different means, rather than following a neofascist pied piper.” We’ve got to be able to speak to these folk directly and as fellow citizens. And I plan to do that.

And, of course, I come out of the Black tradition, and so I’ve got to wrestle with my own Black bourgeoisie. I’ve got to wrestle with my own Black politicians who reinforce the neoliberal hegemony in the Black community. And I’ve got to do it lovingly, but I’m going to do it in a very direct way, that they, in many ways, have given up on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. They’ve become intoxicated too often with the felicities of bourgeois existence, intoxicated with the wine of the world, as the great Negro national anthem “Lift Every Voice” says.

But we got Black poor, Black working people catching hell. Mass incarceration, crime against humanity. Who’s a major architect of mass incarceration? Joe Biden. Invasion and occupation of Iraq, how many precious Iraqis killed? At least half a million. Iraqi life has exactly the same value as a life anywhere else in the world, as a Palestinian life or Jewish life or Lithuanian life, an Ethiopian life, Mormon life, whatever.

[Er … pass the popcorn? Frankly, this all sounds as delusional as you’d imagine. I doubt that West will get any draught at all except among the radicals at Democracy Now! and Academia elite. Biden wouldn’t be able to count on them anyway. — Ed]