In This Episode
Dollar stores are caught quietly overcharging the very communities they claim to serve, a failed psychology essay at the University of Oklahoma ignites a national debate over religious discrimination, and CNN’s new partnership with a prediction market raises fresh questions about where journalism ends and gambling begins.
News
How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices
OU essay sparks religious discrimination debate: What we know
Kalshi to become CNN’s official prediction market partner
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda, talking about the news with regard to race, justice, and equity from the past week. And Lord knows there’s a lot going on. Also, make sure you follow the Instagram page at Pod Save the People on Instagram. Here we go. [music break].
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: It is almost 2026. Super wild. We have one more episode after this one. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles. I’m just in the universe, y’all, right now.
Sharhonda Bossier: [laughing] And this is Sharhonda Bossier. You can find me on LinkedIn or at @BossierSha on Instagram or at @BossierS on Spill.
DeRay Mckesson: There’s a lot to talk about this week that I am legitimately curious about what you all have to say. First is the color of the year. Pantone announced that the color of the year is white. And it called Cloud Dancer is the official name, but it is the color white. And the video of the Black woman, Sky Kelley, defending it was, I almost thought it was a spoof. I was like, oh, they found a comedian to pitch white as the color of the year in this political moment. And then it was real. And I was like, not the color of the year being white.
[clip of Sky Kelley] To address some of the online comments, let me state clearly that white is indeed a color. We knew that people would have emotions about this year’s color. When I first learned the color, I thought, this is gonna be pretty controversial. But the power of this program, the power of Pantone’s color of the year, is that it sparks a conversation. A conversation about color that everyone can participate in. At Pantone, we don’t dictate that conversation, we facilitate it.
Sharhonda Bossier: [laughter] Go ahead, Myles.
Myles E. Johnson: You you know, I I I stan the the absurdist moments that kind of highlight what I always kind of see, but I feel like sometimes it’ll feel like I’m being overly dramatic or taking things that are seen as really silly, really serious, and it’s kinda cool to see other people take the color of the year of like really serious. And I just think a couple of things that came to me. A, I had my African dance class yesterday, and we were dancing, and the dance teacher was saying, you know, Black people, African people, we’re um of the earth. So a lot of the movements that are in African dance, the bended knees, is because we’re earth people, a lot of things that we do go down and and are into that rhythm. And it started making me think about like what would be like a earth dancer, and I guess what I’m really trying to critique is Essence’s response is that there was so much more interesting ways that Essence took that, saw that that this huge company is deciding to align itself with white supremacy, deciding to dog whistle, deciding to partake in it, and then our only response is no, Black excellence. And I was just thinking, oh, we are lost. We are in the sunken place. Essence is in the sunken place, Panteen, whatever the name is, is in the sunken place. That Black woman, that Black woman who they got to defend that choice. She’s sunk and she is the she’s mistress of a sunken place. Like I I was not baffled, but I was a little bit baffled and I was a little relieved both at the same time.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, you know how like you see something and you just sort of yelp. I like could not wait to put this in the group chat. Like I could not wait to talk about it because it’s so absurd, right? And then when I saw similar to Myles, like the Black excellence response, I was like, oh man, this is just too it’s just too good. It’s so predictable, it’s so on the nose. It also is like Essence, y’all are not meeting the moment. Y’all are not reading the room, right? And similar to you, DeRay, initially when I saw the CEO, first of all, everybody’s response was like, it’s a Black woman over there leading. Like no one had any clue, right? She hadn’t been visible before. So I think that that was also a really interesting choice and moment. And then when she was like, you know, we don’t dictate the discussion, we facilitate it, right? And I’m like, she thinking she is spitting bars right now. And–
DeRay Mckesson: Killing it. Is white a color? Yes, white is a color.
Sharhonda Bossier: It is not the absence of color. [laugh]
Myles E. Johnson: It’s such a weird question. I wanted her to blink twice if she was being held hostage by some people and and was being like, Oh, you gotta make white the color and she was like, Girl, if you only knew what I was putting up with, I was like, blink twice, sister. And then also Jesus. It’s it’s also the fact that as I was listening to her, I was and I said this in the group chat, I was like, Oh, she would make a good president. She should be the next person the Democrats run. Cause I feel like everybody’s on that bull [bleep]. I feel like everybody’s on that type of time of talking around stuff and using this non like that that kind of nonprofit corporate nothing language and using it when we are in dire times. It’s not fake Nazis, it’s real Nazis. They’re not cloud dancers, they’re white supremacists. And I really prophesize if I can do that as a as a not profit. But like I really prophesize that America is going to choke and die on its own absurdity. I think that we wait for it to look serious or look like German brutalism and look like all these other kind of like design moments that have happened and look gray and look like um what’s that theater? Uh. With the with the with the poor people?
Sharhonda Bossier: Les Mis? [laughing]
DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, the fact that you picked that out was crazy. [laughter]
Myles E. Johnson: Thank you.
Sharhonda Bossier: I spend a lot of time around Black people trying to figure out songs, names of things. You know what I mean?
DeRay Mckesson: Clearly.
Sharhonda Bossier: I’m like, uh how do I– [laughing]
Myles E. Johnson: You look at it and say the Les Mis’s, that would be really Black if I made it plural. But um I think that we think it’s going to look like that, but America is an absurd failure of a project and when we see it be demolished, it’s going to look absurd. It could destroy you and look like a SNL skit.
DeRay Mckesson: I do think what is interesting, a little bit of what you said earlier, Myles, is, you know, when you see these things and you’re like, am I, you know, you don’t want to be like the person who always is like, this is sort of a thing. I do love that while while there’s a class of people that is becoming more and more absurd, certainly the political class and and social economic class, there’s a group of people that gets it, that we don’t have to say this, that they are in the comments who they were they were not in the comments 10 years ago. They are like, yo, that’s crazy. So I am heartened by the fact that like this sort of absurdity has not taken hold of the I think the whole spectrum of people, I would say. I and I appreciate that. No, you disagree, you push?
Myles E. Johnson: I don’t know if I disagree or if it’s a push. A, we should all center our breath. But I also I also. [laughter and groans] I I think think that would make me feel–
Sharhonda Bossier: Y’all are in rare form today.
Myles E. Johnson: It’s Sunday. Um. I think the thing that would make me most excited and make me feel most most hopeful if people weren’t seeing these different things as different events, these little fires and these little moments of white supremacy, and like pull it back. That’s why I think I’m always like, Okay, this moment, lynching postcards, this moment, you know, whatever happened in the 1920s, because I really think that we don’t understand I think we get fascinated by the proverbial mermaids that get on shore, and we’re like, Oh my god, that’s absurd. But I want us to realize the entire water we are swimming in is absurd and white supremacists and it’s giving us some warning signs, even in those absurd moments that we see.
DeRay Mckesson: I think in some ways that’s coming, Myles, in the sense that people, there are enough things that people are like clocking that I think the next part is what you’re saying. Like, how do we string them together? But before, people weren’t even seeing the it was what we said about Bell Hooks that’s time. It was people seeing her say, you know, white supremacists, dominant patriarchy, and people are like, okay, that’s a lot. Now people are like, Bell, you got it. You nailed it. Like that is, so I think that’s that’s powerful. I was waiting to talk about the Diddy doc year because I do think there is so much to talk about, almost independent of Diddy himself, but but about what Diddy represents, about the role of this documentary, about the response to it, about the rise and fall of that type of celebrity, which feels like a moment in time in some ways. I want to just open it up to see what you all have to say about it. But I have been productively surprised by how many takeaways the everyday person has had about this this documentary and around sort of the political moment around it.
Sharhonda Bossier: I have hated the amount of mainstream news coverage the release of this documentary has gotten. I have absolutely hated how much I have seen 50 Cent sitting behind a desk on a cable news network. Um. Not because I don’t think the conversations are important and not because I don’t think that there’s potentially something we could collectively learn from this moment, but because it has all felt really gossipy, right? And it has all felt not about how we interrogate power or the role of celebrity in our country and in our culture, but about what other freaky thing we’re gonna learn Diddy did or did not do. And that has been really disappointing. Also, 50 is like not a good person just because he financed this documentary being released, right? And so in some ways, I think there’s a little bit of absolving of 50 of some of his problematic behaviors and tendencies too in this moment, which I’m also watching, which I don’t think solves for the thing that you are talking about, DeRay, right? Which is like the fall of that type of celebrity. I think while Diddy may have like been pushed out of that seat, I think we’re seeing people kind of form and a natural kind of heat map evolve and build around 50 in a way that I also think is deeply problematic, right? And so what I will say is that people have said who have watched it, right, that they found that they learned something new and it has continued the conversation. I also feel very strongly like we couldn’t have released this documentary pre-trial, right? Like regardless of what Diddy was convicted of, I do think that people would not have given credence to a lot of what was said in this documentary if some of this had not already been adjudicated in a court of law, which makes me wonder about the role of these types of projects in shedding light on the like misdeeds of others. Like I’m thinking about, forgive me because I’m not going to remember her name, but the woman who did the project on Russell Simmons and and his abuse of power and abuse of her, right?
DeRay Mckesson: Was it Drew Dixon?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes, there we go. Drew Dixon, right? That did not get the same reception as this. And I think some of that is because Russell Simmons has never stepped foot in a court of law, right? And so what does it mean also about our culture to feel like we need for things to be adjudicated in court before we will actually engage with them as real possibilities in popular culture?
Myles E. Johnson: I was trying to look up the um video that one of you sent about the Black woman talking about the other Black woman news correspondent. I I couldn’t um–
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: I couldn’t find it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm. Talking about Abby Phillips. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, there was a Black woman talking about Abby Phillips and saying that what she was doing was um you know just in essence a circus and that it’s not news or journalism, it’s entertainment. And I think that that is a key to how come 50 cent can be on cable news, because I don’t think cable news even exists in that same way. I think that why shouldn’t 50 Cent be on cable news? Cause it’s all a clown show, it’s all a circus. Um. So so like he a big Black clown. Why can’t he be a part of it? So my thing is the documentary is good. So he didn’t waste your time. So yes, it’s salacious, it’s what you need in order to be a good documentary today, because people want to know about the sex, people want to know about the queerness, people wanna know about the brutalization of women. We all have a a thirst for that, and we like that. That’s how come Epstein stuff is successful. It’s not just because people just care about women and children’s safety, it’s because we like to hear about brutality. Again, the water is not clean here. Um. So I think when I look at anybody critiquing 50 Cent being a part of it, I think my thing is I think specifically if it’s from a Black person, I think sometimes it’s just because we have our own associations for 50 Cent and we’re still living in this made up hierarchy that white people threw away a long time ago. Shout out to Hegseth. Like white people have been said, if you can get popular and you can be in the center of cultural power, you could be in the center of power, period. We don’t care about your education anymore. It’s actually kind of ideal and communistic if it wasn’t so fascist and and evil. It’s actually that that that literally anybody can get a chance over there to be an evil white supremacist and in in in the center of power. And I think that we see the same thing happening in Black culture. Last thing I’ll say is it reminds me of um Jason Lee when we were reading that article and how and how Jason Lee was quoted and I thought he was going to be quoted as like, you know, whatever media mogul, gossip columnist, whatever. But he was quoted as vice mayor, which he is.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Which means he was able to go from messy, messy, messy gossip mess, gossip mess to political power.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: That’s the new reality we live in.
DeRay Mckesson: I’m interested too in you know the number of victims Diddy had, just like across a life. The number of people that he used structural tools to silence, to hurt, to harm, people who tried to tell pieces of this story sort of along the year, right? Because that’s one that critiques the documentary, right? Is that nothing’s new. It had all been told in some form before, blah, blah, blah, blah. But just to think about what had to be true to allow him to last for that long. I mean, he he got away with a lot for a long time, you know? Which is sort of like a fascinating, wild thing to watch. And then you think about this documentary, you know, his ego is a central part of who he is. That is the thing. And I think this documentary makes it very hard for him to return to, I think that the Cassie video was bad. People would have still stood by him. He doesn’t get convicted on the hardest things. I think the documentary makes it hard, or what I’ve experienced, people be like, you even did your people dirty. You did like your friends and like you just did everybody dirty around you, and it is all coming um to a head. I was fascinated by that, and people’s reaction to it.
Sharhonda Bossier: But wasn’t that always clear too? I mean, as someone who was nowhere near the industry at the height of Diddy’s fame, I feel like it was well known he was ripping off his artists, right? I felt like that was part of the deal and you you knew that, you know?
Myles E. Johnson: That’s what makes um Diddy interesting to me is because y’all liked it. Donald Trump too. Y’all like him firing people. Y’all like how he yells at people. Y’all like Dame Dash. Y’all like the performance of it. But so it’s really not about him being evil and have that reputation. It went too far. And I would say that really the too farness really came when the queerness started happening.
Sharhonda Bossier: With the queerness yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: With it. That’s what’s that’s what it started making him a cultural pariah. But I just saw somebody snap on somebody. Basically, they were saying Suge Knight maybe wasn’t a villain, right? And.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: The North remembers, the North being anybody born before 1995, that Suge Knight is a villain by himself. And it’s nothing Diddy could have done that could have erased the things that Suge Knight has done. But the thing is, we like that, or we liked that, and we still do. We still like that Young Thug is still have a hit. Kendrick Lamar was not able to dethrone Drake based off of his abuse or misogyny. He was able to dethrone him off of what he was calling like this kind of extreme sexual deviancy in the form of pedophilia. That’s what he was able to do. So I think that’s the answer is it didn’t stop because we have an appetite for that. We have an appetite for–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –men in power, showing off how powerful they are. It we like it. We meaning y’all. [laugh].
DeRay Mckesson: [laugh] We meaning y’all. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: You know, I also wanted to talk about the challenge to birthright citizenship. I think we talked about it a little bit on the on the pod, but you know, as you know, if you’re born in the country, you are a citizen. And there are very few caveats to that. And he’s trying to do some major caveats that say if you are visiting temporarily or are, quote, “here illegally,” the children of those people, they are not citizens. And as you can imagine, the constitution is clear to most people that the president can’t just undo that, which is why, you know, we put it in the constitution, the 14th Amendment specifically. And the Supreme Court has signaled that they are willing to entertain the Trump argument that he actually can stop issuing citizenship documentation to children born to parents who were in the country without full legal right to be here or visiting temporarily. So I wanted to see um what you what you thought of this in the Supreme Court. What’s going on?
Sharhonda Bossier: I mean, I don’t think I’m surprised by this, right? We knew that this was an evolution that was likely to happen. I think we’ve talked about it in various iterations. You know, people who are the children of immigrants who were born here are worried about, you know, their citizenship being rescinded. I think Myles, you know, last week said this is all an attempt to get to who they really want to get to, right? Which is like Black Americans, and that those of us who don’t see ourselves as implicated in this are likely to be real surprised when they try to figure out a way to denaturalize us also. I’m deeply worried that the court is hearing this case. I’m deeply worried that the court has decided to expedite this case’s sort of movement on the docket and to prioritize hearing it soon because this court has demonstrated that it is willing to do Trump’s bidding, right? And willing to give him the legal cover to do what he wants to do, whatever they need to do to sort of make it sound like it’s rooted in precedent or sound judicial reasoning. Um. And that’s terrifying to me.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m being hashtag hope core. Um. I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna try that out for at least until my birthday in March. But um I when I think about this moment, I think about gay marriage and how that just came up and how what appears to me is a lot of these moments are just to say that you did it and to say that we we looked at it, we gave it a fair thing, and we ruled that it’s still unconstitutional. So my hope as of recording this, my hope is that they’re just going through the process and performing a fair try and say, you know what, that will be unconstitutional to take away people’s citizenship like this when it comes to this, and now let’s move on. That’s the hope I can offer.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, I love you being the hope, the hope dealer on the call. The last thing I’ll talk about is, is and Myles, I was really interested in you to see if you situated this in a larger context. And Sharhonda, if you had heard about it, that Trump’s birthday, which they are reminding us is also flag day, is where national parks are free. But importantly, in the official announcement, it says Trump’s birthday/flag day. Like that is important, is now free. And King’s birthday and Juneteenth are no longer free at national parks. So he he’s like doing a swap out. And it was interesting. I saw this segment on one of the right wing places, and they were like, you’re just being woke. This is not, it’s not really Trump’s birthday. This is just flag day. They don’t really explain like what happened to MLK Day and Juneteenth, but they sort of like use Trump as the foil. And I struggle with it because it’s like in the grand scheme, I’m not sure this is like the biggest thing, but it feels like it’s the small things that become the big like you chip away at it piece by piece. So suddenly there are no remnants or memories of Blackness in the American structural apparatus, is what it feels like to me. But I’d be interested to know uh what you all think.
Myles E. Johnson: I resist the idea that there’s ever gonna be a space in history where people do not know who King is. That’s just where I am. I think that this is political porn. I think that he can’t do other things. He won’t do other things. He is held hostage by other things. But what he can do is defile this sacred cow. I think um, I think a lot of it, um ooh, I’m about to get in trouble, but this is how I feel. I even witnessed somebody who I won’t like name, attempt to like almost like defile Toni Morrison. And I was like, oh, this is kind of like intellectual porn. Like, you don’t actually have true critique of Toni Morrison, you’re not really engaging with her work, you’re not deeply thinking about it and and and engaging with it and writing an essay or a book about it. You’re just creating Twitter storms or social media storms because it’s exciting and and it and it stops people from being bored, and people would rather be upset about something than bored. And that’s what’s coming. And I think that is what this is. I think thatum a lot of people, specifically on the far right, love the idea of defiling MLK Jr. because at the end of the day, if Christians have Jesus, America has MLK. That is the person who foresaw a type of America that we have still yet to see. He is the prophet of what America could be, and there’s there’s so much hate for MLK for being that symbol, and specifically once he died. He’s still seen as even more sacred. I think it’s that stuff. Like I don’t think that anybody actually thinks the the government doing that is going to stop people from knowing about MLK Jr. and I know that other people know Black folks’ traditions when it comes to media, when it comes to culture, when it comes to art, specifically working outside of government and outside of education. So you know we know how to keep something eternal without institutional help. So I I just think that it’s just giving people something to politically masturbate to because he’s not giving you these Epstein files.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, you know. I really gotta build that tinfoil hat. Like I just I need it. I need I also am surprised, honestly, that they didn’t do the thing that states like Mississippi have done and said, fine, MLK, but do MLK/Robert E. Lee Day. Because that to me seems in line with what Myles is describing, right? Which is the like, you get to have your thing. It’s just that we also, if we’re gonna honor American heroes, right? If we’re gonna honor people who were pushing us to live into our true values, and MLK is one of those people for you and for us, it’s Robert E. Lee. Why can’t both of those things happen? Right. So I’m I’m a little bit surprised at the move to like remove it and not try to like reclaim it or cram Robert E. Lee in there in the way that they’re trying to do with Trump’s birthday/flag day, right? But I hear you. And it I I also just think that like the symbolic attacks, because that’s really kind of what this is, you know, especially because like increasingly people ain’t even got MLK off work no more. You know what I’m saying? So who going to the parks for free anyway? Our employers have already clawed that day back. So it I it just feels like a chipping away of the spirit too, right? Where you’re just like, how many more of these things, as absurd and potentially even insignificant as they are, can we take? Um. And it just feels like death by a thousand paper cuts.
Myles E. Johnson: But it’s also like so artificial. I really don’t believe that most Americans are getting their cues from the government. I think the government gets their cues from culture. So let’s say Campaign Zero, right? So so this is looks Campaign Zero can easily say, Oh, 2026 is MLK year 365. And Essence can do that, BET can do that. There’s so many institutions, both big, small, and medium, inside of American culture that can totally make obsolete what the government decides to do when it comes to stuff like that. So I just think that the reason why I resist it being like death by a thousand paper cuts, because I don’t think that’s where our spirit ever was. That’s where we pretended it was, but I don’t think that matters. That just happened. I’m happy that it happened and Stevie Wonders sang about it and made the happy birthday song. Like I’m glad that it happened, but that it that is not what we needed in order to immortalize King. We needed ourselves in our own own imaginations, and that is that is not dying.
DeRay Mckesson: I agree with you. And I would say that I don’t want to take for granted with the quickest and easiest bully pulpit, the power of that. So I I’m with you in terms of like building real power, it’s the same power. I think our culture has done it. I think it also matters when like the president calls the Somali disparaging that like it matters that that somebody with such a big platform can just do things so quick. Like this can be just a quick hit and we’ll recover and we’ll figure it out. And you’re right. Like who even knew that the parks were free, right? Like, cause who can go to a park on MLK day you know, da da, I can’t. But I do think that it signals something. And if there’s not a good counter signal, sometimes I do think it is disruptive. And Lord knows our counter signals are struggling right now.
Sharhonda Bossier: A hundred percent.
Myles E. Johnson: That to me is the critique because they weren’t just struggling because Trump got elected, they’ve been struggling.
DeRay Mckesson: They’ve been struggling.
Myles E. Johnson: It’s been to not up to par and I think this Trump presidency highlights that oh wow.
DeRay Mckesson: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: All of our institutions, all our media platforms have been struggling and we got along to get along ’cause wasn’t nobody attacking us, but now somebody is. So let’s get this together because once it’s Nick Fuentes, I’m not that um hopeful. So listen.
DeRay Mckesson: Or like I think about the protests. We did that. We did that absent structures helping us. But then all of a sudden, you know, things get institutionalized and they they lose the nimbleness and the scrappiness and the craziness that we had in the street. It came to us. And then you see how that sort of scrappiness sort of gets lost when it’s everybody’s a consultant and a thing and a da da like it just dies a little bit.
Myles E. Johnson: So much around the trans conversation, the gender conversation. I’ve been talking to like to a lot of trans queer people as as a as a trans queer person. But like so much of what has to to like defang trans movements and queer movements is that absorption into the institutions. Because we shouldn’t be trying to regress and say, oh, we’re trying to make ourselves seem more respectable or validating or whatever, or say, like, oh, we took it too far. I’m like, no, it still needs to be gender abolition. How my mind works and how I see things is when people try to make you be more conservative. I believe all of this is is malarky. And I think all of it’s crumbling, you know? Like, that’s how I think you should go about it and not try to fit in and go along, get along. Cause you already lost once you start doing that.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, and it this is like, I mean, this is what I wish more of the civil rights people had written about. I think about the people that I was, some people I was close to, and it’s like they get older, you got bills, you all of a sudden have all these things that you just didn’t have before that just changed the way you make decisions. Not necessarily what you believe, but certainly changes the way you make decisions. But back to the central point is that our counterculture things are struggling and the opposition is rooted in lying, but they are nailing us and and frankly stealing our best ideas. Like they’re not even original. You know, they just are taking what we’ve done really well. Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: I’ll tell you, we’ve talked about the dollar store a lot on the podcast since it started. I remember my very first article that the dollar store misplaces more mom and pop shops than Walmart. And I remember being like floored by that because I’d always heard that Walmart was the thing killing mom and pop stores. And then I was like, I forget about the dollar store. But then I look at this article that just came out about how the dollar store is overcharging people routinely. I had no clue. And I don’t even know. You know, I do check the price on some stuff, but at the dollar store, I’m sort of like, I don’t know, it’s the dollar store. So I’m not even.
Myles E. Johnson: Dollar twenty five.
DeRay Mckesson: I’m not even checking it.
Myles E. Johnson: A dollar twenty five everything in the dollar store.
DeRay Mckesson: So, first of all, I also didn’t know that there were inspection programs in almost half the states that they go in and inspect the prices at the cash register. Shout out for regulation. But this one inspection, I’ll list some things. Red baron frozen pizzas listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stoffer’s Frozen Meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, Ibuprofen, Klondike Minis. Wild, all overpriced. Pedigree puppy food listed at $12.25 rang up at $14.75. 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register, a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date. I say this because this article starts by talking about an inspection that happened in 2023. It was the store’s fourth consecutive failure. But the thing is that in North Carolina, the law caps the penalties at $5,000 an inspection. So there’s really not much incentive to change. The reason I bring it here is I think about the vigilance it requires to just navigate whether you got money or don’t. I’m like, I just didn’t even think that you have to double check the prices at the dollar store to make sure that and and they know they’re charging you wrong. And if you go tell them, this is in the article, if you tell them, they’ll adjust the price. But it’s the dollar store.
Sharhonda Bossier: Have you ever been into a dollar store? Cause who you gonna tell? Who working? [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: That part. [laughter]
Myles E. Johnson: I just went through my whole library. I said, Oh, you ate that. You ate that. That is that is the truth.
DeRay Mckesson: And there’s some states like Wisconsin. Wisconsin actually does have some penalties. And the 23 months after Dollar General agreed in November 2023 to pay Wisconsin $850,000, its stores failed 31% of their price inspections during the same period, Wisconsin’s Family Dollar stores failed 30% of their state inspections. So I say this to say that what blew my mind was not that it was one store in the dollar family thing, but this is actually like this is a scam that the dollar stores are running. No one [?] the dollar stores. People with no money are just screwed. People with all money are screwed. But I’m like, people go because they don’t have a lot of money and they need things that are not expensive. So I’ll stop rambling, but it really did just blow my mind because Dollar General operates over 20,000 stores in 48 states, more than any other retailer of any kind in the United States. They have more than 195,000 employees and net sales of 40 billion dollars. And you are scamming people at the cash register.
Myles E. Johnson: My thing is that it’s in our hands to stop this. A couple of things that went in my through my mind. A, apologized earlier. I think I’m thinking about the Dollar Tree. I was just watching somebody by the name of Lushious Massacr. Um. You spell that L-U-S-H-I-O-U-S Massacr. She’s a trans girl but also a drag queen and hilarious. And she goes to different retail stores and talks about how bad the products are. And it’s like really hilarious. And she’s just one of my pieces of joy this week. But it watching her made me think of two things. One, as I always think, this will be somebody so productive to plug into something that is around anti-capitalist highlighting um predatory behaviors of companies. The other thing that came to my mind too is that this is innovation because we see that everybody’s doing this. We just did an article around how other stores outside of Dollar Generals and dollar stores are doing these um price gauges and changing it what what do they call it?
Sharhonda Bossier: Dynamic pricing where the price goes up based on time of day, based on demand for an item, et cetera.
Myles E. Johnson: But there are companies that do it based off of location and based off of where they are. So it’s not just this this cloud dancer story. It’s also it’s just everything. It’s all these stores are doing it. I always was suspicious about how Amazon started taking EBT because–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Now you know who’s low income and who’s shopping with you and who’s to stop somebody from making sure that you’re paying ten dollars for your chicken and somebody else is paying seven dollars for their chicken, right?
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
Myles E. Johnson: This is one of those stories for me that A, yeah, like F the dollar store. And I think there are just ways culturally that we could totally torpedo like a brand, but also just know that this is not unique. This is something that all stores and all retail services are doing because that’s really the only way they’re gonna get us to spend anymore. Cause so many people are kind of relieving themselves of certain types of consumerism, which kind of gets me excited. But so many people are saying, I want to do something different. So they’re like, we’re gonna squeeze the money out of you.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. And we saw similar articles around like Uber and and Lyft, right? Knowing that they could charge you more for a ride if your phone battery was low, right? Because you were more desperate to like get a car, that kind of stuff to Myles’ point. I don’t have a ton to add here. I think, you know, what came to me is like the Baldwin quote where he says, anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how incredibly expensive it is to be poor, you know. But the second part of that quote is really resonant for me in this moment, which is, and if one is a member of a captive population economically speaking, one’s feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. And just thinking about all of the conversation we’ve had about how extractive this current model and phase of capitalism is, how so many of us are going to have to work for longer in order to just afford like more hours, more years, et cetera, right, to afford basic necessities. And this feels like yet another example of that, right? Cause it’s like when you go to the dollar store now and you’ve got to pay more for your paper towels than you even thought you were going to pay. And the option for you, if they’re saying like, oh, you have a gap in, you know, your income and versus your needs, like pick up this gig roll, right? Like is this the constant, like it’s meant to keep you hustling to be able to afford [bleep] paper towels, you know? And that’s wild. My news actually sort of builds on this in terms of like what people do and are willing to do and are willing to try uh to survive and potentially financially or economically thrive in this moment. We’ve talked before about people leveraging gambling because that feels like an opportunity for them to like, I don’t know, acquire wealth, right? And it feels like they’ll have a greater likelihood of winning the lottery than they will of like having a job that will pay them a livable wage. We talked about KALSHI, one of the platforms that’s a prediction market because you’re not technically allowed to bet. But you know, you can predict an outcome. Um. And in the last set of elections um happening across the country, people realized that the predictions that were made on this platform were in a lot of ways more accurate than the survey data we were seeing coming out of some of the more traditional and legacy polling firms. And so CNN announced this week that they are partnering with Kalshi to share their prediction data. So now when you turn on CNN, you will be able to see what the quote unquote “prediction markets” are saying about various real life instances, occurrences, etc. Also, when we talked about Kalshi a couple of weeks ago, talked about the fact that Donald Trump Jr. had joined their advisory board. I don’t think we can ignore that connection, particularly in this moment, as we’ve also been leveraging so many critiques against media. And then lastly, I will say that one of the co-founders of, you know, Kalshi is a woman who is 29 years old, former ballerina, white, et cetera, et cetera. And people are like, she’s now the youngest self-made billionaire, dethroning Taylor Swift. So there’s also a celebration of that element of this platform moving into kind of more mainstream political and media spaces. And so bringing it to the pod so we can talk about the evolution of this thing that we talked about a few weeks ago here, and that um I’m imagining some of you probably heard about for the first time on the pod. Um. But also just so that we are keeping track of like how these things that are online phenomena move into the real world and begin to really shape our experiences and our behaviors in the real world. Um. And who we are seeing get rich when this stuff happens.
DeRay Mckesson: So this is I didn’t realize that Kalshi contests the idea that they are a gambling platform. That they just are like, this is not gambling. And you’re like mmm uh it is gambling [?]–
Sharhonda Bossier: It’s a prediction market. You’re saying this is gonna happen or this isn’t. It’s not gambling.
DeRay Mckesson: This is gambling. But I just wanted to read a quote that was reported by SBC Americas from a Kalshi lawyer about regulation and gambling. The lawyer said, quote, “people are adults and they’re allowed to spend their money however they want. And if they lose their shirt, that’s on them.” And you’re like, oh, you take no responsibility for what happens that we will be turning people’s phones into just easy gambling. And it’s not like at least the lottery, which like, you know, shout out to Black people for the numbers.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: At least the lottery in places like, you know, some states is like reinvested in public education. So at least if you’re gonna let people do something that might not be the most productive, it’s gonna fund public services. This is, this isn’t the stock market. It’s not going back into anything. People are just gonna lose a ton of money. And as much as I’m interested in the prediction market, it doesn’t have to be rooted in money like this. But I was actually really surprised that they um that they are a gambling company, but some states are pushing back and making them like file at the state level to be a regulated sort of gambling gambling lottery company. And I think that makes sense. I also I think there are a lot of bubbles out here. This to me feels like a bubble. I think AI is a bubble. And the thing about bubbles is that white people get super rich in bubble land.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yep.
DeRay Mckesson: Which is how this woman can be seven years old and the billionaire for she didn’t invent like prediction money. You know like, she wasn’t the person to invent that. But just the audacity, especially when the economy’s crashing, the idea that people will just like put their money in dollar chunks da da. Again, at least the lottery is paying for public services. This is just seems like a scam. And I and I read an article that said that the there’s a study that put out that like the average person will lose twenty two percent of what they put in. You know, like this is a losing game.
Sharhonda Bossier: I will say that when I first read this article, I was in the back of an Uber coming from LAX. And um because I live alone, I also I often talk aloud and don’t realize that other people can hear me. And so my Uber–
Myles E. Johnson: You live alone with guns.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes, but you know what I mean. But my Uber my actually I do. Um. My Uber driver was like, what’s happening? Right. And so I was telling him and he was like, Oh my God, I’m trying to download that now. I can’t figure out how to place a bet. And then he started asking me questions about whether or not I knew how the platform worked. And I was like, Oh my God. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: There’s so much here. First thing, because DeRay talked about the bubbles and stuff like that. What’s interesting is that this seems like such an obvious problem. And then you’ll have other people. Like there is a Black person, like a Black neoliberal capitalist out there right now that’s like, how do I make the Black version of it? So I’m sure there is a young hot ebony version coming to us that is directly for us. And I’m sure there is a rainbow capitalist that’s going to make the quote unquote “queer version,” because that is the solution. But I also I get reminded that predatory governments create predatory marketplaces. And this is a predatory company. You know, it’s it’s saying, look how desperate people are. How can we make money off of desperate people? And how can we use their hope and suck it for a couple more pennies? But I don’t think that you get there without Obama or a Kamala using your hope and seeing how they can suck that too. I think that that is just the dance that we are all in because it’s a predatory dance, and people in power use your little bit of hope that you have as a desperate person in order to sustain that power and to get what they want. And I think that oftentimes our companies just mirror those things. They don’t necessarily invent those things. So again, it’s not just about this one rich ass seven year old girl. It’s about [laugh] it’s about the legacy of predatory companies and marketplaces and what they do to desperate poor folks. And I guess not to say that everybody who’s doing it is poor. I know there’s some people just doing it for fun, but.
Sharhonda Bossier: Those people are fine. Those are never the people we’re talking about. You know what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: Right, right. Absolutely.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
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Myles E. Johnson: So I wanted to take a little break. I’ve been studying so much around just different Black artists and different Black institutions I had no idea about. So I’m very excited to get back on it. But I want to take a break because Essence has Black excellence this week. So I decided let me do let me do white mess since Essence got it on lock with Black excellence. So let me just go to white mess. So um I’m curious to know if y’all heard of this story because this is a wildfire story on TikTok, but then I’ll talk to other people who I think are like pretty sufficiently plugged in and they have no idea this story existed. So I’m like curious about if y’all even knew this existed. So anywho, a University of Oklahoma student goes to class and she writes an essay. The essay is in response to a study that was basically talking about the popularity of children. The idea is do kids that fail gender actually get bullied or get worse outcomes than kids that are successful at gender. What I mean by successful at gender is they show naturally masculine interest in performances versus a girl who acts too much like a dude or a boy who acts too much like a girl. And of course, the study shows that specifically boys who fail gender have worse outcomes socially than girls who um who fail gender. So this student, the assignment was for the students to respond to this article. So instead of this student responding to the article that was there, she cites the Bible and says, I think it’s okay. I think it’s, I think it’s all right. I think that it’s part of God’s plan for girls to act like girls and boys to act like boys. And I think any type of bullying is, these are my words, is a is a is a kind of recalsification of what God’s plan was. So I, in essence, reject the premise of this assignment. So the teacher fails the student, gives her a zero, and then the student complains, then the university puts the teacher on leave. And we’ll see what the outcome is. The reason why I’m bringing this to the podcast is because A, I love gendered mess in America. Cause I think I think that’s where so much of our stuff is getting worked out. And the other thing is too, is listen, my relationship with college, not significant, right? I was an adjunct professor for about a year at the New School, and I never did undergraduate. It baffles me though, the idea that somebody goes into college in order to show a student body or a teacher what their opinion is and not show them that they successfully understand how to do assignments. The actual essay is not in here, but I follow somebody, her name is Kat Blaque. B-L-A-Q-U-E, another trans girl. I’m just giving all the trans YouTube girls shout-outs. But her name is name is Kat Black, but she actually read the essay. The essay was horrendous. Now, I am the kind of person where even if I don’t agree with what your essay’s saying, if you successfully cite things, if you successfully make an argument around why this is still good, I might still think that you’re wrong, but I’ll say, well, you did the assignment. You didn’t do the assignment, and now you made a spectacle out of it. And it makes me, you know, I don’t need no tinfoil hat. You know, I’m just gonna say I got a tinfoil brain. It’s just part of me. And I’m turning the switch on because it makes me wonder now that we know how Erica Kirk was created, how we know Charlie Kirk was created, how all these kind of conservative pundits that seem to come out of nowhere were all formulated somewhere. It makes me wonder: are you purposefully going or getting kids from high schools to go into these colleges to make spectacles in order to create political discourse that furthers your political destinies? Is that what y’all are doing, Republicans? Because it’s hard for me to believe that somebody would have written that article, been in that class, and thought that would be a successful completion of the assignment. I don’t think that you actually thought that. I think that you knew it was gonna be a spectacle, and it makes me wonder even more, are there other people around you who are orchestrating the spectacle so we cannot talk about what we need to be talking about, aka these Epstein files? That’s where I’m at with this. Like I’m all I’m always gonna have a tinfoil hat version of anything that goes on now because that’s where you gotta be at with it because a lot of times some of the conspiratorial things just prove to be prophetic. We just didn’t have the evidence yet. So I think my new thing is always to give two analyses of what I can say that can be published and have journalistic integrity, and what is just me kind of in my in my tinfoil hat bag because it was so weird that it just felt so odd that this is what a student would really would would would try to do with this assignment. And the very last thing that I’ll say before um y’all comment on the story is I want people to start calling people like stupid.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
Myles E. Johnson: I want people to start shaming people for not being intellectually rigorous and still trying to participate in certain conversations. I play a lot. I read a lot too. A lot of these conversations and a lot of people having entryways into these conversations is because we have made certain type of discourse democratic. And I don’t care about the word democracy. I don’t care about the word democratic. I don’t care if you do not know what you’re talking about. I don’t care if you don’t have lived experiences and have read books on this. And the fact that you’re in school where your job is to be learning, and you still think that your opinion is good enough to tell a teacher instead of doing your assignment, oh, we need to bring intellectually shaming people back, specifically people who are white, because I cannot even imagine being Black and doing this in a school because I want to make a good grade because I want to get a good job. That’s the whole idea. That’s the basis of the scam. So are you so solidified in your social space that you think that you can still get a good job even though you’re doing horrible at your work? Like, is that what’s going on? Like hmm.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, as someone who works full-time in education, we’re seeing really coordinated attempts across the country to ensure that there is no intellectual rigor in our classrooms, to ensure that there is no diversity of opinion in our classrooms. And increasingly, honestly, to reduce federal oversight, which while not perfect, did ensure some degree of equity across the country is rolled back. We’re seeing increasingly people also choosing to homeschool their children for a variety of reasons. But one of the largest homeschooling communities are white evangelicals who write and publish books that say humans walked the earth at the same time as dinosaurs, right? And like that is literally the science that their children are learning. And when we look at academic outcomes in the United States, we know that our young people are nowhere near as academically prepared as their peers in other countries, right? And no matter how much we get that data, your average person who is not obsessing about that data, right? As part of their job or their passion, is not saying, like, okay, maybe education should be a top three investment in the United States. Instead, we’re seeing the exact opposite thing happen, right? And I think culturally, right, for this young woman, I could totally understand why she would not think, oh, I should at least do the assignment and argue what I believe, citing my sources, even if the Bible is one of my sources, right? Because to your point about who has made it to celebrity status, to your point about who’s been able to earn millions on the podcast and speaking circuit, it’s the people who have prioritized their opinions, right? And then back to our earlier conversation about the state of cable news, it’s a whole bunch of people up there talking about what they think and what they feel, right? And so this young person is looking at this, having no understanding of the work, the research, the preparation that used to be required before a professor would even meet with you. You know what I mean? Like I was in college not that long ago. That’s what I’m I’m standing by that. And I remember like saying, I’m there’s not a world in which I’m gonna go toe to toe with a professor without at least having done the reading. You know what I mean? And there were some econ classes where I was like, oh, this is deeply problematic, or like, I don’t believe this, right? And even at a quote unquote “liberal or progressive school” like UC Santa Cruz, right? I read a lot of political and economic theory that just was like, this is how we got here. Like, y’all not even interrogating the fact that like this is how we got to this real [bleep] up system that we’re all trying to fix. But I knew that if I was gonna sit with a TA or a professor to go toe-to-toe with them on something, I had to have at least done the reading, you know, and be able to cite my sources. And I think we are seeing culturally a devaluation of that kind of thought and of that kind of rigor and of that kind of thinker and leader in service of someone who can shout their opinion on the biggest megaphone from the highest mountaintop. And so I kind of don’t blame this young woman for thinking that this was how you get things done. She’s got so many models for that being the case, right? And she’s likely grown up in an academic, I want to know where she went to school, right? I want to know who her what her K-12 experience was because I I bet you that could have predicted that this is how she would behave when she got to higher ed.
DeRay Mckesson: The only thing I’ll add is I am surprised at the lack of courage in higher education. And I get it, Trump has been such a wild bully, has made all these schools give up hundreds of millions of dollars, turn over the like we’ve never seen this and they’ve been unprotected. The courts haven’t protected them. The legend Congress has been asleep at the wheel or has tacitly endorsed it.
Sharhonda Bossier: But their endowments have more money than God. They could withstand this storm is my position.
DeRay Mckesson: I get that. What I think was shocked me about this is that they had another instructor rate her essay, still failed her.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And then they told the girl that no matter what happens, this won’t count against her final grade. I’m like, what?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: You have no courage. I remember being in college.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: If you were failing, you were failing. It just was a, you know, and they would–
Sharhonda Bossier: Correct.
DeRay Mckesson: –support you and da da, but it wasn’t. And I I I’m sort of um surprised at how quickly the institutions have just completely collapsed to hold up standards.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, just to put a bow on it because I know that we’re about to close the podcast, but she’s a cloud dancer, and I think that that is I think that I think that is what is being I think that’s being reinforced. I think that’s what’s being reinforced is that like yeah white people can do things that y’all can’t do. That was the invisible first amendment.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Before freedom of speech it was white people can do things that everybody else can’t do because we are white and this is a white supremacist uh country and I feel like so many of these um decisions to your point Sharhonda, around these different colleges folding and stuff like that. Again, it’s that recalcification. It’s so it’s not just like oh you’re being cowards or whatever, you’re not being cowards you’re realigning with what you care about, you’re the University of Oklahoma. We know what time you’re on, now you have an excuse to be who you want to be so it doesn’t matter if it’s American Eagle American Eagle had to say American Eagle but we all knew American Eagle meant white eagle because we know what the American flag really means. Once you read American symbolism for real, and you know when you’re in Mississippi and you see a lot of American flags, you start getting scared. You’re able to read a whole bunch of other moments for what they are. And it’s about now we have an excuse to go back to the power structures that birthed us and we don’t have to bend and mutate ourselves to pretend to care about you all because we don’t.
Sharhonda Bossier: Touché. [music break]
DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week. And don’t forget to follow us at Pod Save the People and Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. And if you enjoyed this episode of Pod Save the People, consider dropping us a review on your favorite podcast app. And we will see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by AJ Moultrié and mixed by Charlotte Landes, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors Myles E. Johnson and Sharhonda Bossier. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
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