Replay the Live Chat With Bill Moyers

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But we do appreciate all the questions and comments! Bill has seen them all.

Again, we’re sorry we couldn’t get to all the questions you sent. We had so many, there was no way we could get to them all.

Thanks to all of you for joining us today!

Oops! We’re out of time. But thanks to all of you for your questions even if I couldn’t get around to every one of them. Stay tuned to our
website BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there.

The film blows the possibility for true drama here — the drama of history happening right before our eyes. Nonetheless, go see it. You’ll be reminded of what happens when courage on the street is met by a moral response from power.

The nation was electrified. Watching on television, Martin Luther King wept.

Johnson was more animated and passionate than I have ever seen him, and I was standing very near him, off to the right.

In fact, he made that speech in the House of Representatives where the State of Union speeches are delivered.

Also, the director has a limpid President speaking in the Senate chamber to a normal number of Senators.

and within days he made his own famous “We Shall Overcome” speech that transformed the political environment. By the way, this is one of the weakest moments in the film.

He wouldn’t have welcome the bloodshed at the bridge, but when it happened he knew the time had come …

He asked King to give him more time to bring a few Southern “moderates” over to the cause, but after King made the case that blacks had waited too long for too little, Johnson told him: “Then go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.”

As he said to Martin Luther King, “You’re an activist; I’m a politician” and politicians read the tide of events better than most of read the hands on our watch; he knew he needed public sentiment to gather sufficient momentum before he could introduce and quickly pass a voting rights bill.

He was concerned that coming so soon after the Civil Rights Act of l964 there was little political will in Congress to follow up so soon with voting rights legislation.

casting the President as opposed to the Selma March, which the director does, is an exaggeration.

Then …

And even if you want to think of Lyndon Johnson as vile enough to want to do that, he was way, way too smart to hand Hoover the means of blackmailing him.

Some of our most scrupulous historians have denounced that one

…. suggesting the very opposite of the truth,in this case, that the President was behind J. Edgar Hoover’s sending the “sex tape” to Coretta King.

As for LBJ: There’s one egregious and outrageous portrayal that is the worst kind of creative license ….

To the courage and fear of those black people who put themselves on the line for freedom’s sake; the ambivalence in Martin Luther King facing the inevitability of leadership and the constant threat of death.

There are some beautiful and poignant moments in the film that take us closer to the truth than anything I’ve seen to date — to the cruelty visited upon black people by everyday whites and armed authorities.

Many people asked what I thought about the film ….

But someone had a question about the new film Selma, that I’ll answer now.

Our moderator’s computer just crashed …

How to save democracy? As Lewis himself says, only a determined people can do that …

But now the voices of the poor and working classes are silenced by the unfair advantage the John Roberts’ and the Mitch McConnells and their allies have given those who bankroll our politicians.

… He reminds us that the reason limits were placed on campaign contributions was to protect the integrity of the vote in in this country, so that no one individual or corporation would have the power to override the public will or dictate the outcome of elections.

Listen, no one says it better than John Lewis, who was almost killed in that Selma march across the Pettus Bridge in l965 but survived to serve 28 years in Congress, where he remains today.

And hammer, hammer away, at every level.

But we have to keep our goals clear — corporations are not people, money is not speech.

But it’s all over unless there’s a broad and sustained movement to take on the monied interests. It’s very, very hard to imagine making this happen, in no small part because the issues of money in politics are technical.

Each of us has a special interest in one issue or another – the Keystone pipeline, climate change, a living wage, saving the Grand Canyon….you name your own.

A real mobilization of citizens against the money power that now governs us.

Another one from email: What’s it going to take to save our democracy?

Yes, you’ll be able to replay the chat afterwards, Judith.

An ambidexterous demagogue. He’s able to pick the people’s pocket while aggrandizing his own self esteem. An Ivy Leaguer seemingly quite comfortable making a fool out of those who trust him.

Ted Cruz?

But setting aside 20 or 30 minutes a day to sample several sources of reporting and analysis is important if you can do it.

You won’t see the scope of what’s at stake if you only watch Fox or Good Morning America. None of us have all the time we need to keep up with a story like that.

But of course I have to read far more widely than one newspaper, one site, one source.

So far I’ve learned what I think I need to know about what happened in Paris.

Nourish our hearts and souls with the right word, the clear sentence, the perfect image.

Help us see the timeless truth beyond the rhetoric and propaganda — political and corporate . Enable us feel the experience of others (When King Lear asks the blinded Gloucester “How do you see the world?” Gloucester answers, “I see it feelingly.”

Knows the issue inside and out … You should also check out my interviews with Ai-Jen Poo, George Goehl and Peter Dreier.

Ganz was with Cesar Chavez and the field workers decades ago

Here’s the link: https://billmoyers.com/segme…

Ganz remains one of our most experienced strategists of organizing — teaches an international course on it at the Kennedy School of Govt at Harvard.

Hold on I’ll get the link.

The one with Marshall Ganz (check it out on our website).

But when he did the wrong thing — escalating the Vietnam war — the damage was irreparable.

He could absolutely do the right thing at the right time — the reassuring grace, if you will, when he was thrust into the White House after Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights Act of l964, the Voting Rights Act of l965 …

He had a passion for power but suffered violent dissent in the ranks of his own personality.

He was at times proud, sensitive, impulsive, flambuoyant, sentimental, bold, magnanimous, and graceful (the best dancer in the White House since George Washington); at times temperamental, paranoid, ill of spirit, vulgar.

He had an animal sense of weakness in other men — he wanted to know what you loved and what you feared and once he knew, he came after you.

But he was curiously ill at ease with himself.

I’ve said it before: Lyndon Johnson owned and operated a ferocious ego.

So we have now a good soldier for the conservative strategy of legal resistance to equal rights would now occupying its commanding heights.

He seems to believe discrimination has to be intentional to be unconstitutional – that there’s no such thing as systemic racism, or racism layered over decades or centuries.

Read some of the memos/ op-eds the younger Roberts wrote arguing for watering down the VRA and you’ll understand why the conservative movement saw him as their new white hope on the bench.

More or less what you can imagine a privileged elite of corporate law would think, no?

Roberts’ great conceit and it’s one shared by other conservative members of the court, including Clarence Thomas who keeps trying to kick over the ladder by which he himself was hoisted to prominence — is that racism is no longer the problem it once was.

You may know the chief justice was a young lawyer in Reagan’s DOJ during the l980s and doing everything he could to undermine the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act.

The George Wallace of then would be pleased with the John Roberts of today.

On the other hand, the reactionaries never give up.

He said no — we would have a woman first. Well, one down, another to go.

After he signed the Voting Rights Act I asked LBJ if he thought this meant we’d have a black president in our time.

We’re a different country today because of what happened then, obviously. with black Americans holding office all the way up to the president of the United States.

for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

Just as Lyndon Johnson said at the time, the right to vote is “the most powerful instrument ever devised …

Another question that came in via email: You were involved in passing the Voting Rights Act? How do you assess its impact all these years later?

Here’s that deep state link — for bedtime or morning reading:
https://billmoyers.com/2014/…

the rule of the wealthy few for the purpose of increasing their wealth.

.We are just this close …. I’m squeezing my index finger and thumb tightly …. from oligarchy

. Money’s always been a force, but never to the extent it is today ….

And finally — although I should have started with this one: The triumph of money over every aspect of government.

Rather, first thing in the morning. If you tackle it before bedtime, you won’t sleep!!

Read it before you go to bed tonight.

A long-time senior Republican staff member of Congress wrote an extraordinary essay for billmoyers.com under the title THE DEEP STATE.

There’s a vast government we don’t see.

Second, the growth of the Deep State — private instruments or agencies of power acting for and funded by the government (intelligence, the military, etc.).

The two of them — Dilulio and Fukyama — make this point brilliantly.

Check out a recent posting on billmoyers.com of an article by John Dilulio reviewing Francis Fukyama’s new book book on the state of democracy.

First, the sheer size and complexity of government

It was a strange experience but not the first one like it.

He must have been afraid that his own base would tar and feather him if he did.

In the studio he wouldn’t budge from his talking points.

I had on one of my programs last year the leader of a major conservative think tank. In the green room he was pleasant, reasonable
and engaging.

Honestly I don’t know how we can have a conversation with someone who doesn’t want one with us.

And studies show that many people prefer their opinions even if they are not supported by evidence than they want even infallible facts.

Steve Colbert calls this the Age of Truthiness — when the sense that something should be true is more important than whether it is true or not.

Good question!

AND don’t vote for anyone who refuses to take the pledge to cut this cancerous abomination from our body politic!

Confront your Member of Congress whenever he or she is holding a rally or town meeting.

It’s going to require activists, muckraking journalists, legal experts, and voters to band with like-minded people in the Congressional district where you live.

There has to be a long and concerted campaign to shame the politicians who participate in this perpetual system of bribery.

Here it is: https://billmoyers.com/2014/…

Remember the old African proverb: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together.”

I’ll get that link in a second.

Join with others who are already in the fight. You can learn who is leading the charge against money in politics in our recent feature: 8 Ways You Can Fight Citizens United.

Marde: This is typing only. There is no sound. You can follow along in the chat screen here. Bill is typing on his computer.

Meantime, it’s good to know you are out there and terrific to discover another kindred spirit at this stage of life.

I owe them some walks in the park, sometime at the Boathouse as the sun sets, and a few movies we want to see together. Then I can consider branching out and widening the circle.

First, though, I must pick up the thread with some nearby friends I used to see often before the weekly deadlines and demands of TV became so consuming.

And befriending an heir of that tradition 70 years later sort of rounds the circle.

I am touched by your invitation, all the more so because I was a kid of the comics growing up in Marshall, Texas,

I read the Comments section every day – I really do – and I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Our Website BillMoyers.com continues with contributions from a wide variety of sources on what we consider the perils to democracy – inequality, the corrupting power of money in politics, climate change.

So I’ll be more specific about the future after I give it more thought than has been possible to date.

The weekly deadlines and demands over the past decade – with only an occasional hiatus – have been unremitting, as you can imagine.

A few deep breaths – that’s my first priority.

Let’s start with the question that’s on everyone’s mind…

Hi there!

Hi Bill! Welcome to our chat.

Okay, Bill is here and ready to chat with you all.

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