MAGA official points to 'Plan B' as Republicans lose faith in Georgia victory

Really happy to have you here. I have one quick thing to tell you before we start the show in earnest tonight, right after the midterm elections in like the week and a half or so after the midterms, I'm gonna be going out across the country doing live events and you are welcome to come. One week exactly after the midterms on November 10th, I have got my latest and my final book coming out. I'm not going to do another one. The book is called Department of Fate, the promise, the power and the collapse of America's most consequential institution. Again, comes out November 10th. The book is basically my thesis, my argument about what we need to do to rebuild the US government to basically refound the Republic after this authoritarian assault on it has been defeated. Again, the book is called Department of Fate. You can pre-order it now, so you will get it. The day it comes out on November 10th, but I'm also going to do these events. This is the list of events that I'm doing. You'll see up here on the screen. And the reason I wanted to mention this tonight is because you see how a couple of them are sold out already. These events have started to sell out. So if you want to come to one of these events anywhere in the country, you should buy your tickets now because you're already out of luck for a couple of them. They're sold out in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Kansas City, Missouri already. You don't want the others to sell out if you want to get a ticket. I also want to let you know that on the actual publication date on Tuesday, November 10th, my live event that day is the one that's in New York City. And we have now confirmed as of today that the person I'm going to be talking with that night, the person I'm going to be appearing with at that event in New York City on Tuesday, November 10th. It's going to be Hillary Clinton. Tuesday, November 10th at the Striker Center in New York City, me and Hillary Clinton tickets are still available for that event as of tonight. But if you want to go, you should buy your tickets soon. Then the next night, Wednesday, November 11th, I'll be in Boston with the great Nicole Wallace. Nicole and I together on stage in Boston, Wednesday, November 11th. I just wanted to let you know about those two. The other events all listed there on the screen for the book Department of Faith. All right, so that's it. That's the only business I'm going to do tonight. Thank you for that. Let's get started. Let's get started specifically in Ireland, in Dublin, Ireland, in the summer of 1984. A young woman who worked at a shop in Dublin grocery store, she was 21 years old. Her name was Mary Manning. And Mary Manning worked at a checkout line at this grocery store. She made the cash register. And one morning at her job on July 19th, 1984, customer came to her register to check out. But Mary refused to ring up the sale. And the reason she refused to do that is because among the things this customer wanted to buy were two grape fruits. And the rest of the groceries this person had in their cart, fine, no problem, but the grape fruits, Mary Manning would not ring them up. And it wasn't because she had like some personal grapefruit resentment or like superstition or allergy or something. It was because those grapefruit had been grown in South Africa. This was 1984. The apartheid regime was in full murderous control in South Africa. And one of the things the apartheid regime was exporting was citrus. In this case was grapefruit. And Mary Manning was in a union and her union had taken a vote and decided its members would refuse to take part in handling any goods from apartheid South Africa. As a way of protesting against the apartheid regime in South Africa. So Mary, that morning at her job in the grocery store, she said, no, not the grapefruits. I refused to ring those up. I refused to sell those to you. She got called into the manager's office. The manager told her, you know, really you're really willing to risk your job over this. Seriously, what's your connection to South Africa? Why do you care? She refused to back down. Mary Manning was suspended from her job. Even beyond that, she was told if she didn't fall in line, if she didn't get back behind the cash register and ring those grapefruits up like everything else, she wouldn't just lose this job in this store. She would be blacklisted from working at any other store in all of Dublin. Again, she's 21 years old, but she did not back down. And her colleagues decided to back her up. The other check-up clerks at that store and also the people stalking the shelves and otherwise working at the store. One by one, they said that they stood with Mary Manning. They said she had done the right thing. And so they would too. And one by one, they abandoned their posts. They all walked out. Now, rationally speaking, what was the point of them doing this? I mean, initially, at least to be honest, they were not doing this because they were super committed to making a grand political statement on this issue. Their union had made this decision about protesting apartheid. They were local members of that union. And to be fair, they and their union were at odds with the store that employed them. So when the store got mad at them on this issue, they decided they'd side with their union and against the store. No, we're not ringing up these fricking grape fruits. We're going to do what our union says, not what you want us to do. As one publication put it, quote, they were driven not by a position on apartheid, but by a desire to put two fingers up to store management. In Ireland, two fingers up is the same as one finger up in our culture. It's the same as flipping someone the bird. So they did it to oppose their bosses or they were mad at anyway, not necessarily to take a big political stand. Mary Manning herself later explained, she said it would be easy to say now after the fact that our action had sprung from a deep rooted concern for the inhumane system in South Africa, but the reality was quite different. She says, quote, on that morning of July 19th, 1984, if anybody had asked me or any of the other strikers, how to spell the word apartheid. Let alone explain its meaning, we wouldn't have known where to begin. To be totally honest here, Mary Manning and her co-workers didn't particularly care about South Africa. They hadn't much thought through this whole apartheid thing. They just thought they'd stick it to their bosses and be back on the job by the end of the week. They were not. The strike dragged on and on. Many of the shop workers, many of Mary's colleagues eventually gave up across the picket line and went back to work, but about a dozen of them, Mary Manning and another dozen or so of them, nearly all of them were women in their teens and early 20s. They decided to keep at it. And it was a big risk. It was a big hit. Some of them were single mothers with young children. So financially, this was a devastating thing for these young women, for these young moms, but that wasn't all that was hard about it. They also didn't really have support. They were attacked and criticized for doing what they were doing, sometimes by their own family members. Mary Manning says they were ridiculed for being, quote, "out on strike for a load of people you've never even met." But then one day, it stopped being about people they'd never met, because one day an elderly man, a black man from South Africa, asked to join them on the picket line. It was a man who was then living in Ireland, in Dublin, but he wasn't from there. He was from South Africa. He was an important South African dissident. He had in fact shared a prison cell with Nelson Mandela. And then he'd had to flee the country after the apartheid government sought to execute him for treason. His name was Nimrod Sejake. And Mr. Sejake turned up outside the store one day, outside the picket line and asked these young Irish women, outside their store if he could join them on the picket line. And soon he was there every day. He walked two miles every day from where he lived in Dublin to that shop, and then he walked the picket line with them all day long. So at the beginning, these young women were marching for people they had never met. But then it was also for one of their friends, who came out every day to support them too, when even their own families wouldn't. Mr. Sejake told them, he says, "You have to imagine South Africa as a pint of Guinness, "the vast majority of it is black, "and the tiny minority is white, "and just like a freshly poured pint, "the white sits firmly on top of the black." But they were really out there on their own. I mean, they didn't have much support, not only were they in dire financial straits. The kinds of attacks they were getting were really hard to cope with. I mean, priests in the local Catholic churches sided with the store and against the shop girls. They told parishioners in the local Catholic churches to cross their picket line. As the young women kept picketing, it got really hostile, it got physical people throw stuff at them as they walked the line. The local police used brute force to help push store deliveries through the picket line. The women say the police also screamed racist abuse them, but they kept at it. They kept at it through that summer. The started in June of 1984. They kept at it all through the summer and into the fall and then into the winter. And then they attracted the attention of one of the most famous and admired men in the world. Bishop Desmond Tutu. In the fall of 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu had been chosen to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent leadership against South Africa's apartheid system. And when he was on route to Norway, when he was on route to Oslo in early December 1984, to go pick up that prize, he insisted on making a stop along the way to go meet these young people, these young shopgirls who had been manning that picket line outside that one shop in Dublin. And he praised them and he shamed their store owner for turning on them. And that, while he's on his way to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize, kind of broke things open. With that cleaglight, with that moral spotlight, he brought that more clarity that he brought to what they were doing. All of a sudden, people everywhere decided that they could see the moral case that Mary Manning and these young women had been standing up for all alone. And so all of a sudden, a whole lot of people decided they wanted to associate themselves with those young women and with the moral stand they were taking. And so almost immediately, they were no longer alone. Tons of supporters started flooding that little picket line and marching alongside them. That included big names from our country. People like Senator Edward Kennedy and the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. They vowed their support to these young Dublin shopworkers. From the band YouTube, Bono personally met with those on the strike. And although the Catholic Church and Ireland officially chose to stay silent on the issue, Catholic nuns started showing up on the picket line. Quite a contrast from the priests who'd been urging their parishioners to cross that picket line and condemn those young women. So that point, you kind of think that would be it, right? Like, oh, it seems like it's all turned around. You might think at this point, the store might cave, might give in on this point, maybe the store might stop carrying apartheid exports, maybe even the Irish government would make that kind of decision for the country, not just for this one store. But that didn't happen. Yeah, there was this new support, arguably massive amounts of support, sparked by the attention from Desmond Tutu and the Nobel Peace Prize in that association. But the fundamentals didn't change. I mean, these young women were abjectly without money. They were without jobs. Their store hadn't given in. Their store was still selling South African goods. Their government was still refusing to take any action, even with the nuns on their side. The Catholic Church still wouldn't help. And so what did those young women do? They just kept at it. They kept it up. They kept striking. As the one year anniversary of their strike approached in 1985, the group was invited to South Africa by Bishop Desmond Tutu. He said, "Come here, come witness firsthand what you've been fighting for from 6,000 miles away." But again, these young women, they don't have any money. They don't have any institutional support. How would they pay for it? Not even their union who had sort of put them up to this in the first place. Not even their union would contribute any funds to send them. And nobody had any money to send them. Ireland at that point had a 16% unemployment rate. I think this is not exactly an environment where people have a lot of disposable income to support people who want to do something like this. But once again, these young women created their own luck. They decided that they would just force it to happen. They took buckets. Each of them took a bucket and they went from pub to pub to pub to pub until the working-class pubgoers of Dublin had filled those buckets and thus crowdfunded their trip to South Africa. In the span of one day, those young shopkids had raised more than 7,000 pounds in buckets, most of it in coins, from every freaking pub in the city. And with that money, they were able to buy their tickets and they boarded their flights and they flew across the globe to South Africa. And then they never made it out of the Johannesburg airport. When they touched down in South Africa, they were met by police and armed forces from the South African government. They held them in a windowless room at the airport and then never allowed them to lead the airport. They forced them back onto a plane that took them back home. Later, during a news conference, union organizer Brendan Archbold gave an account of the group's experience. I think first of all, I should caution everybody that on the basis of the reception you received in Johannesburg, they're probably in the presence of the eight most dangerous supermarket workers that you never like you to encounter. The group said they were treated like criminals and were urging the government to seek an explanation and examine the non-visor requirement between the two countries. We were certainly given, never given any reason for being refused, ever. To this moment, we'd, although then, this statement was issued between Red and London. So we would certainly like to know why we were refused, actually, and we would certainly like the government to find out it was if they can. I hope to have a little more success than we had. You're probably in the presence of the eight most dangerous supermarket workers that you're ever likely to encounter. If the South African government thought that that reception would make this problem go away, would intimidate the Dublin shop workers, they were wrong. In fact, the government's treatment of them had the opposite effect. It was galvanizing to a lot of people. I mean, there had been people protesting against apartheid before that trip, but now the crowds in Dublin were massive. Now there were huge protests across Dublin to support the anti-apartheid cause. After all of that failure, after all of that futility and their own families and their own church and their own police and their own colleagues telling them this was pointless, this was embarrassing, this was wrong. After all the sacrifice and all the times they were told no. This little group kept at it because they were right. They took a moral cause that was correct. And in the end, everybody else had to admit that they were right. And when they finally saw it, they joined them. After the shop workers were sent back in 1985, the Irish government announced an investigation into the use of forced labor in the production of South African goods. By the following year, 1986, that investigation was complete. By April 1987, nearly three years after Mary Manning started that strike, the Irish government had become the first western country to impose a complete ban of exports from South Africa. By 1989, the South African Prime Minister had resigned. By 1990, the ban on block political parties was listed, lifted in South Africa. Freedom of the press was reinstated and political prisoners were released. And Nelson Mandela walked free. And of course, a partite crumbled. Does protest matter? Does small scale local protest matter? Does saying no make a difference? I mean, sometimes just practically speaking, it seems fundamentally irrational, right? A waste of time at best, at worst, it can be a huge risk, in exchange for what, right? For some faraway prospect, some faraway change, of some faraway institution or problem that you have nothing to do with, and that rationally, you can't possibly influence from your neighborhood, from your little corner of your own private life. Or there's the real world history of human conscience and nonviolent principled protest that calls on people to see what is morally right and what is morally wrong, right? What is unconscionable in their own time? Whether or not there's some immediately apparent practical connection between the specific act of protest and what you're protesting against. It is often an act of faith that what you're standing up against will be at all affected by the act of you're standing up against it. And that is why principled protest, I think, so often, not always, but so often, comes with some relationship to a faith tradition. And again, not always, right? Tell the Dublin Catholic churches that were railing against these young shop workers picketing their store. But also, tell those Dublin nuns who saw through with the Catholic Church was telling them to do who joined them. And also look here, too, in our own country and our own time. Today is day seven of an eight-day 90-plus mile march in California, by clergy, by faith leaders and regular people, from the ICE facilities that Trump is operating, his three immigrant prisons out in the desert in Adelante, California. People this past week have marched for the last seven days, people have marched all the way from those facilities way out in the desert nearly 100 miles to downtown. Los Angeles. They're calling it a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage honoring the four people who have died at Adolanto under Trump, a pilgrimage to get those facilities closed. As far as why 96 miles it's that's the distance from Adolanto to the detention center in downtown LA and the distance is purposeful. Adolanto is placed so far outside of Los Angeles to make it hard to get to, to make it so that people are detained out of sight and out of minds. And so we're trying to highlight that distance. We're trying to draw attention to the fact that people are still here. We still see them. They're isolated. They're from their families, but they're not isolated from the human community. That 96 mile pilgrimage out of the desert finishes tomorrow in downtown LA. Then the day after tomorrow another one starts. This one starts in Seattle on Wednesday. Another pilgrimage. This one's due to be four days and 48 miles led by Japanese Americans who survived mass internment, mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and also their descendants. They're going to start at the King County International Airport, where they want Trump's deportation flights to stop. They'll be at the Tukwila Ice Facility, where they want to close down the holdrooms for immigrant kids there. They'll go to the Piala assembly center where Japanese American families were sent on their way to the prison camps back in World War II. They'll end up at the Northwest Ice Processing Facility in Tacoma, Washington to support the immigrants held there and to call for shutting that place down. That pilgrimage, that four day 50 mile pilgrimage, starts this week. We're also looking tomorrow to Pima County, Arizona, where a local group called Price, which stands for Pima Resists Ice. Price is going to be at the Marana Town Hall in Marana, Arizona just outside Tucson tomorrow because they want their town council to block the Trump administration's plans to open another large immigrant prison in Marana, Arizona. On Saturday this weekend, it was a really big protest on the east side of San Antonio, in Texas. Democrats including Congressman Joaquin Castro and local council members and a local Catholic priest who is a former San Antonio police officer himself all led a big group of San Antonio residents this weekend marching, trying to stop Trump from opening up a huge new immigrant prison in San Antonio. This today was Vermont, where local residents in clergy held a political funeral for people killed in Trump's ice prisons. Williston Vermont hosts an intelligent center for ice. As local activists see it, Williston Vermont is basically ice's national surveillance headquarters. They've been telling people, quote, deportations across the country all start in Williston, Vermont. And they've been mobilizing people across Vermont and across New England to try to shut that center down. All this week, people in Vermont are targeting that facility with non-violent protest led in large part by faith groups trying to get that ice intelligence facility, that ice surveillance headquarters in Vermont shut down. They want it out of their state. All month long, we've been watching protesters in for weeks now, we've been watching protesters in Alexandria, Louisiana. Alexandria, Louisiana is about as far as you can get on the ideological number line from Vermont, right? But there too, you've got locals from all over Louisiana, including clergy of all stripes, just hammering local authorities in central Louisiana, in Alexandria, Louisiana, saying they do not want a second Trump ice prison for kids and families to open up in their town. There's one already in Dilly, Texas, which you know about. That has been a moral and practical catastrophe. Now Trump is trying to open up a second prison for kids in Alexandria, Louisiana. Locals have mounted protests and marches and prayer officials. They've been hounding their local officials to try to stop this thing from opening. One local organizer telling nola.com this weekend, quote, "We're not going to put our hands up and say, 'Oh, well, we tried.' When it opens, it'll be even more important to put pressure on it to get it closed. At that point, people are being harmed. We are just going to keep making a stink of it. We'll never go away until it's closed." And that is central Louisiana. Do you think those folks have a shot at winning this? Do you think they're morally right in what they are asking for? Politics don't always unfold in a linear way, or even in a predictable or seemingly rational way. Moral catastrophes make for surprising alliances, and for weirdly shaped big tent politics, where surprising people end up aligning with each other on moral grounds. Tomorrow, the Interfaith Alliance is launching a national 15-state bus tour called The Vote Is Sacred to try to stop any effort to mess with the elections and to mess with people's voting rights. Today, the top elections official, a Republican in Red State, Utah, is also proclaiming in the same language that the voting rights of people in her state are, in her words, sacred. She is speaking out as the state's Republican lieutenant governor as the top elections official in the Red State of Utah, speaking out against Trump administration efforts to mess with the Utah vote, to mess with elections in Utah. She has reportedly been told for her troubles that she is under investigation by Trump's Justice Department for refusing to hand over sensitive information about Utah voters to the fence. She says Utah's voting rights are sacred. She is a Republican in that Republican-dominated state. Tonight, we're going to hear from a Fulton County Georgia official, who is screaming bloody murder, who's really sounding the alarm about a MAGA election denier official in Georgia state government, who is now explicitly inviting Trump's federal agents to come in and mess with Georgia's elections. She is a Democrat. We're going to hear from her tonight, but one of the people screaming alongside her is the Republican share of Georgia's elections board. And you see these kinds of strange bedfellows, dynamics over and over again. And I really think it's because people have big unpredictable hearts. I think moral issues make for unpredictable politics and surprising turns. As the White House considers its options for messing with these elections, so Republicans can't be turfed out of power and maybe Trump can't either. One recent poll asked Americans to choose a word to describe this president. And the one word out of the long list that most people picked was the word corrupt. Corrupt was first, followed in second place by dangerous, followed by out of touch, followed by cruel. Corrupt dangerous out of touch, cruel. You know a gazillion people are going to protest against Trump in one way or another on October 17th on the next no Kings Day, Saturday, October 17th. But open your eyes to this stuff because today and every day until then, you know, there are our generation shopgirls, our Mary Manics, our regular folks in their own towns far away from the corruption and the cruelty that they are trying to stop. And yes, they get mocked for being impractical, for shouting into the void, for trying to change something way bigger than them, something far away from them, something they can't control. And that critique is fair and it is rational and it is true. It's true until it's not. Until making a moral case for what's right saves not only your own soul, but maybe your country's too. We've got a lot to get to tonight. Stay with us. In the great and important swing state of Georgia, early voting starts next week. And this just went out from the Georgia State Election Board to the Trump Administration in Washington. Dear Attorney General Todd Blanche, I am writing in my capacity as Executive Director of the Georgia State Election Board to request the Department of Justice's review and where appropriate investigation and intervention concerning Georgia's voting system. We want federal intervention in Georgia's voting. Georgia appears to be slipping out of Republicans grasp in some important political ways. In Georgia's U.S. Senate race, Democratic Senator John Ossoff is running for reelection. Republicans used to think this seat was theirs for the taking. This was their big chance to peel a Senate seat away from the Democrats. That is not happening. John Ossoff, it turns out, is a great candidate. And Republican candidate Mike Collins is turning out to be a real disaster. Politically, it is not going their way. That apparently means they are activating Plan B. Magga Republicans have gotten a toehold at the Georgia State election board. The executive director of the board is a dyed-in-the-wall election denier, and he has now taken action. Writing to the Trump administration, saying Georgia's official state election board explicitly requests that Trump's attorney general and the feds must come into Georgia and take over the elections, intervene there as soon as possible. Like I said, voting starts next week. Well, here's a twist. Two members of the Georgia State Election Board, two Republican members of the election board, now tell the news outlet vote beat that they don't agree with this, and that although this was done in their name as the Georgia State Election Board, they never authorize this letter to the Trump administration. The board's Republican chairman, saying, quote, "We have no control over our executive director and he does whatever the hell he wants to." Asked whether that was an ongoing problem, the chair replied, quote, "You have no idea." But authorized or not, this letter could of course achieve its goal just by existing, right? If Trump wants to try to seize control of an election, of voting in a state Republicans are likely to lose, well now this letter provides a convenient pretext for them to do it. This letter inviting them in. In Fulton County, Georgia, County Commissioner Dana Barrett says this is, quote, "About undermining confidence in the elections process so that they can claim any results they don't like on November 3rd are fraudulent." She says, quote, "This is not about issues with 2020 or with the machines or with whatever nonsense they come up with next. It's about controlling the outcome of the 2026 and 2028 elections. Joining us now is Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett. Commissioner Barrett, thank you very much for being here with us tonight. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I think a lot of people looking at the news of this think that this is dangerous, that this letter from the state election board could be used as a pretext by the feds to come in and somehow meaningfully take over the election processes in the vote in the state. Do you see it as that kind of threat? I mean, absolutely. It's just one more sort of excuse they have to take unprecedented action that is unconstitutional. We know that they don't care about what's in the Constitution and we'll do whatever they want and wait to be taken to court to try to stop them. That's exactly what this is. Even if they don't directly intervene, as I said in my comment, they will use this as more evidence that something is wrong in Georgia if they don't like the results, which we now, as you said, that they want. Republicans, though, are not united on this. I was very interested to see not just your characterization of what kind of a risk this is, but to see other Republicans on the state election board, including the chair, say, we want nothing to do with this, this had nothing to do with us. This is not something that we support, not something that we want. To what extent is there a sort of a war going on among Republicans here about whether or not to let the elections properly go ahead? Well, I think this has kind of been quietly going on for some time, but the reality is that as we saw with James Mills in this letter, the Maga folks are running the show and the few Republicans that are not in agreement with them have kind of allowed it to happen and allowed it to get to this point. That's, you know, they kicked Raffensberger off of this commission a long time ago because they didn't like that he did the right thing. You know, they've been taking over and they've been getting away with it and so it's kind of a breath of fresh air that finally two of them have spoken out and said this is not what we ask for, not acceptable. In Fulton County and to the extent that you know at the state level, has there been sort of war gaming going on in terms of what practical steps people can take in Georgia to defend the election if in fact Trump and or the Justice Department some element of the federal government comes in and tries to either stop the vote to stop the count or to seize the results. Oh, absolutely. All across the state, we've been coordinating with groups on the ground, with our Congress people, with officials at all levels, county elections, officials, county commissioners across multiple counties, in particular in Fulton, looking at, you know, coordinated response, both with our law enforcement being prepared for anything that might happen in terms of federal law enforcement showing up or trying to intervene, you know, with our lawyers, making sure that we have legal defenses ready to go. The minute something goes awry to make sure everybody is trained, our poll workers and our election workers know what to do if something does seem to be, you know, being interfered with in any way that's inappropriate by anyone. And this is a level of effort and tabletop exercises and coordination that we have never had to do before and that we have never seen before. We are doing the best we can to be prepared for every eventuality. Yeah, you never should have to do it in a free country, but that work is that may that work may prove absolutely invaluable toward protecting free and fair elections in this country. You're right there at the tip of it. Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, thank you so much for helping us understand. I would love to have you back as things progress in your county and in your state. Thank you so much. All right, much more news ahead here tonight. Stay with us. We are saying that the right of the people to have a voice in determining their own future is sacred. Voting is not the whole of democracy, but democracy cannot be whole without the votes. My goal is justice. My goal is freedom. My goal is inclusion and I ain't gonna let no box or nothing turn me around. That was from a gathering of faith leaders in Kansas City, Missouri earlier today at the start of a 15 state bus tour that kicks off tomorrow under the banner, the vote is sacred. They're gonna start in Omaha, Nebraska tomorrow and then travel to 15 different states to spread the word and to get out the vote, but also crucially to train local faith communities about how to defend the vote, how to defend the election and the integrity of election results from threats coming from Donald Trump and the Trump administration. I mean, if you're the federal government, it's one thing to plan to mess with local officials in order to mess with the elections, right? It's another thing entirely to gird up to fight with local churches and synagogues and clergy. The tour again is called the vote is sacred. Joining us now is Reverend Paul Brandeis Rouschenbush, he's president and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance, which is leading this bus tour. Reverend, it's really nice to see you. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I am delighted to be with you. Thank you so much, Rachel. So tell me about this event today, how you conceived of it and what's gonna happen when you start tomorrow. Today we had an amazing group of faith leaders all across Missouri who were, you know, Missouri has had its own experience of gerrymandering, racist gerrymandering and the people, faith communities rising up and saying, no, not on our watch. We are going to show up. We are going to speak out. We are going to organize and we're going to bring the power of faith communities to our democracy. Another example of faith communities moving our democracy forward, expanding our democracy. And so that's what happened today. It was the kickoff to, we are about to go 9,000 miles, Rachel, all across this country, meeting with amazing communities who are doing similar things in their local communities and who are rising up and saying, we are going to stand up for democracy and we are going to bring the power of our spirituality and our faith traditions and bring them to bear to preserve our democracy and allow everyone the right to vote. We're used to seeing faith leaders and faith communities do get out the vote works. I think about souls to the polls, right? We're used to seeing faith leaders and congregations call the people's conscience in terms of standing up for people who are being victimized or downtroddened people who need somebody to stand up for them. But you're also talking about something very practical, preparing faith-based communities to defend against potential election interference. Tell me what that looks like and how faith communities can help do that work. Listen, we're kind of believing them when they say they might send people to the polls. You know, it is, unfortunately, this administration has threatened to disrupt and there are threats to disrupt, but actually people are getting trained up to say, we are going to be present. We are going to be watching and we are going to bring the non-violent spiritual mobilization that has been with us and we're going to be trained up all across the country in every location that we're stopping. We're doing a training. We're doing a celebration of that faith community and we're making sure they are ready and encouraging people to vote early. And that's really important. We don't want to need to wait until the day. Vote early as soon as you're able. So we're in a moment where unfortunately there is an adversity towards voting. Faith communities are saying, well, we're going to address that head on. And so we are doing trainings across the country. But there's a great tradition of this, Rachel, that you know in history of America, where faith communities have shown up and help people get the right to vote and protect the right to vote. And we are going to do that again in 2026 for these midterms. Reverend Paul Brandeis, Russian Bush, the President and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance. The vote is sacred to 9,000 miles, 15 states, starting tomorrow. Thank you so much for being here, Reverend. It's great to see you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. All right, we'll be right back. Stay with us. One of the reddest places in the whole country, one of the most Republican of all American cities is right here in Durant, Oklahoma, about a half hour north of the Texas border. Durant is in Bryan County, Oklahoma, Donald Trump won in Bryan County by 59 points. Not he got 59 points. His margin was 59 points in the last presidential election. So you would think that when the President went to visit Durant, Oklahoma, to campaign ahead of the midterms, he would have gotten the warmest, friendliest welcome he'd get anywhere in the country. Actually, he got this. All these locals waiting for his motorcade to roll by, so the President would see their protest against him. I mean, it's politically, it's already a bad sign when a President feels like he needs to go to maybe the most reliably red part of the country to give Republicans a boost ahead of the midterms. You shouldn't need to get a boost like that. But it's even worse when you get this kind of reception, right? And it turns out this is not an Oklahoma-specific problem. President Trump was in Mobile, Alabama on Friday, another campaign rally for him and another safe space, reliably Republican place. When he ran for President, the first time Trump drew huge crowds in in Mobile, north of 30,000 people, one of his big signal events of the presidential primary in 2015. This time as President, he couldn't even fill a venue a third that size. There were huge pockets of empty seats. And again, look, even in deep red Alabama, even in Mobile, locals turned out to protest against him when he arrived. Welcome to Mobile, Mr. President. Now, the President in his typical cool, calm, collected way responded to these protests and to the empty seats at his rallies by furiously blaming the press for reporting on it, saying the New York Times ought to be in jail for reporting on even just the empty seats. The President today borrowed Politico from participating in the press pool of his trip to Nebraska. Politico is one of the outlets involved in ongoing litigation with our own network and with CNN over the President banning reporters from the White House grounds. As of now, a federal judge has put a temporary pause on that ban. Tonight, the three networks, including ours, made their latest filing asking the judge to extend that so they can keep doing their jobs while the litigation continues. While the President rages against anybody factually reporting on how poorly he's doing, it is now 29 days until the midterms. Mar ahead tonight. Let's stay with us. All right, that's going to do it for me tonight. Thank you so much for being with us.