Monday Morning Politics With Maya Wiley

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Our first guest for this week is Maya Wiley. It's been a couple of years since she was on, that's since she was running in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in 2021, which Eric Adams eventually won, of course, in the ranked-choice voting system. Those of you who watch MSNBC have certainly seen Maya Wiley doing legal analysis there.

Last week, she had a very unusual role to play in American politics when the Republicans in the House of Representatives called a hearing to give Robert Kennedy Jr. a platform for his vaccine and other conspiracy theories, did you see coverage of that, including ones that are widely considered anti-Semitic and anti-Asian hate speech about COVID-19, the Democrats chose Maya Wiley to be their main counter-witness. We'll debrief her on that strange scene a little bit. Ask her for the first time on this show how she thinks Mayor Adams is doing, including on criminal justice.

Remember, under Mayor de Blasio, Maya ran the Civilian Complaint Review Board that adjudicated complaints about the police. We'll get some legal analysis, including of the evolving Trump trial universe. There's some developing news on that front, even more over the weekend, and talk also about Maya's actual day job these days as President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Maya, always good to have you, it's been a minute, like I said, so welcome back to WNYC.

Maya Wiley: Thank you, Brian. It's always wonderful to be on with you.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with your unusual appearance on Capitol Hill last week. What we know is that the Republican House wanted to give a boost to RFK Jr's profile because he's the best-known challenger in the Democratic presidential primary against President Biden. Why did the Democrats call you in that same hearing?

Maya Wiley: I was asked to come, frankly, and share some truth, both about what was happening with mis and disinformation, what the harms were, what we need to be concerned about, and frankly, why it is so critically important that we all pay attention to the truth and why it matters to all of us. I was privileged to have the opportunity to play that role.

Brian Lehrer: By the way you said mis and disinformation, do you make a distinction between misinformation and disinformation?

Maya Wiley: There is a distinction in that there are people and organizations, particularly organized hate groups, foreign governments that actively work to create and put fake news, false information out into social media platforms. That's disinformation. Misinformation, frankly, can just be understood by the folks who then copy-paste, retweets, repost, who aren't aware necessarily that that's what they're sharing. It is exactly the viral components that we have to be concerned about.

Brian Lehrer: Disinformation is the intentional kind. My sense from the coverage of the hearing was that the Democrats on the committee didn't want to dignify Kennedy's evidence-free conspiracy theories by engaging directly on the content, and so they had you there to talk about the repeated acts of bigotry contained in some of his remarks among for other reasons. Would that be an accurate take?

Maya Wiley: I would say the take is, they actually did take some of his content on quite directly. I think the point was to understand the harms and hopefully have an opportunity to really talk about what we should be concerned about and to the extent necessary, also explain the law, because part of the mis and disinformation related to whether or not there is censorship happening on these platforms completely misunderstands the law and actually what was happening here, which is really a conversation about whether social media platforms, private companies that have the lawful right to decide what content is on their sites that have policies that say, "We will take action if you share false information about vaccines in the context of a pandemic."

Hate that has the potential to harass or do harm to others, and that the issue is compliance with their own policies. That was really something that was important that we didn't frankly get to enough.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that was officially the point of the hearing, was to talk about alleged censorship against conservatives, I think that was their watchword, again, by some of the social media platforms. They were using Kennedy as an example of somebody who allegedly has been censored because his views were not politically correct. I want to talk more about what RFK said in a minute, but that's a tough call for a media show, even this one, and social media platforms because you want to give as wide a range as possible to different opinions on issues.

You don't want to censor people because they have different points of view on contentious issues of the day, but by the same token, we have a responsibility not to spread things that are patently false. Sometimes-

Maya Wiley: Yes, that's correct.

Brian Lehrer: -there's a gray area there. There's sometimes tough call for whether you're Twitter or Facebook or anyone else, right?

Maya Wiley: Absolutely. Look, everything you said were the very legitimate issues that should have been discussed in that hearing. It's just not what we were discussing. That's the problem because the reality is, let's start with the whole, frankly, what is unsubstantiated and, frankly, evidence against the point of view that says conservative voices are being silenced on social media platforms. That in and of itself has been, frankly-- New York University Stern School has a report in 2021 that was quite a deep report that showed that, if anything, the algorithms that social media platforms are using actually elevate some extremist content over others.

We've seen in the civil rights content, we've seen the, actually, some of the banning inappropriately of content that has to do with racial justice and racial issue. The reality is these platforms have algorithms and those algorithms function in a certain way, but it has certainly not functioned to reduce the voice of conservatives because they're conservative or of extremist content, in contrary the opposite, as well as the fact that there simply has been no study to show that there has been any ideological removal of content.

I just want to point to this because it was such a glaring example. One of the things that, sadly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had posted was a tweet that said, Hank Aaron died of-- his death was suspicious. The thing is Twitter didn't even take down that tweet. I would argue that was a violation of their own social media policy, but it didn't even come down, and yet it showed up as part of the argument that somehow there was actual ideological discrimination against its content, rather than [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: He was asserting it was suspicious that he might have died in reaction to a COVID vaccine, right?

Maya Wiley: Yes, right, but the medical examiner had already publicly stated that there were not suspicious causes to the death. It was actually counterfactual and it went exactly to this point about the policies of social media content that said explicitly that they would take down content that was mis or disinformation about the efficacy of vaccines. Frankly, one of the things that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in that hearing, he said, "I've never been anti-vax."

Then you had outlets like MSNBC fact-checking that the Beat put out on Instagram showing a video clip of him doing exactly the opposite of what he stated in that hearing, which he's never done. In fact, the Children's Health Defense, which is the organization that he helped found and draws a paycheck from, is explicitly, overtly, and constantly anti-vaccine. Now, let's be clear, you can take a position on being anti-vaccine. The question is whether you're providing content that does not comport with the science. That's what the social media platforms have to navigate. In all sense, that stays up.

Let me put one other thing out to you, Brian, which I find is part of the hypocrisy of the entire proceeding is that-- the question is right to say there's gray area, right to say that it's actually really hard work. One of the things we've been concerned about is that social media platforms have been frankly shrinking their trust and safety staff and divisions, Twitter cut it 80%. Those are the people who help try to monitor and navigate this. We should all have a shared interest in making sure they're not doing that.

If you look at what Donald Trump did in May of 2020. In May of 2020, he put an absolutely unsubstantiated tweet out that said there is zero likelihood that you could have mail-in balloting that wasn't fraudulent. This was May of 2020. There is readings of research that show that that is not true. Twitter then puts a fact-check label on it. There's simply no politician, elected official, or candidate for office that doesn't get fact-checked by news media outlets, for example. They put a fact-check. They didn't take the tweet down. You could argue that that violated their policy, but what they did is they put a fact-check label on it.

He then takes to Twitter to threaten to bring the entire power of the federal government down on Twitter and even potentially close them down. Now, if in this hearing there was a real honest concern, if any of these electives had said, "We think that's government being coercive and trying to silence social media platforms for complying with their own policies," we would have been having a more honest conversation. That is not the conversation we were having.

We were not pointing to all the various ways in which we've had plenty of reason to be concerned, even about protecting truthful information about our elections and what is, in fact, to be concerned about in protecting our democratic process and what is fictitious.

Brian Lehrer: Maya Wiley is our guest, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights at the House hearing last week that was purportedly about censorship by social media platforms at which the Republican majority had RFK Jr. as their primary witness. The Democrats had Maya Wiley as a witness for them. We can take phone calls for Maya Wiley on a number of things. They can be on her testimony in Congress at that hearing. They can be as a legal analyst on the Trump cases, which we'll get to, or as a former mayoral candidate and CCRB chief on how the city of New York is doing under Mayor Adams, her rival for the nomination two years ago in the criminal justice arena.

In particular, we're going to get to the federal government's interest in taking over Rikers Island as we go. Any of those things from Maya Wiley, comments or questions, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call us up or shoot us a text. Let's talk for a minute about the irony of the son of the civil and human rights champion, the late RFK senior, engaging in some of the kinds of speech that he has. A recent example is that he was caught on tape in a video from a private event of some kind, but then this was published by The New York Post.

On the video, Kennedy says about the COVID virus, "There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese," from RFK Jr. on that video published by The Post. I don't know if that's more offensive against the unnamed scientists who allegedly created COVID with specific ethnic targets in mind, or more bigoted against Jews and Chinese people who are historically targeted by bigots as trying to control everybody. How did you hear that?

Maya Wiley: I heard it as a very disturbing example of taking stereotypical tropes, not only driving a conspiracy theory, but one that has racialized and anti-Semitic roots. There's not question that this notion of the-- I don't really like to repeat it too much because, frankly, we had Robert Bowers, who was just being sentenced last week at the same time we were having this hearing, who has killed 11 people, wounded 6 others because they were Jewish, because he was anti-Semite.

That these are the kinds of theories that people like Robert Bowers have been consuming and sharing, which is the suggestion that there's some grand conspiracy and cabal of people because they're Jewish, who are somehow either immune, and so the subtext-- I'm not going to say what was in Robert F. Kennedy's mind when he shared this incredible misinformation because there's zero evidence of what he stated in terms of weaponization of the pandemic, but it was also picking up a trope that could lead. We saw in New York, trying to unite, sadly, and so many New Yorkers, the violent attacks on people who are Asian solely because they were Asian when Donald Trump had started calling it the Chinese flu.

There was a suggestion that somehow there were people to blame. This actually played into that. Whether or not he intended it, I cannot say. I can only say the work that it does, both in terms of giving it a platform, giving it any credibility, and watching the work that organized hate groups. We've seen a rise. Folks like the Proud Boys have attracted more adherence since January 6. This is the kind of thing that is actively happening. We all have to be very responsible about what we say, how we try to learn and understand facts, and how we separate out fiction, and making sure we are not racializing or otherwise othering people because--

I'm going to say this as someone who is Black. There is a reason that many more Black people die, and Latinos, and people who are Native American, and people, anyone who is in overcrowded housing, frankly, in some of the orthodox city communities in New York because of the overcrowded housing, all the things that lead what we call the social determinants of health, the ways in which we live, or what access to health care we have or don't, or whether we're in a job where we're more likely to have to be a first responder or an essential worker and therefore are more exposed to the spread of an airborne virus. These are the things we need to be talking about. This is not only a distraction and disinformation, it's dangerous.

Brian Lehrer: Previously, when the COVID vaccine and vaccine mandates were enforced, when the vaccine was new for entry to some places, when the virus was still raging at the levels that it was at that time, Kennedy said, diminishing the Holocaust, "Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did." When he was criticized for that, he tweeted and wrote an apology. I'm going to read a little bit of this because of another offense that's baked into the apology.

He said, "I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past Barberism to show the perils from new technologies of control." Even in that apology with respect to the Holocaust, there was his conspiracy calling the COVID vaccine a technology of control rather than a public health tool. We see, of course, the much lower death and hospitalization rates among vaccinated people who get COVID, but to him, it was essentially a technology of control.

Maya Wiley: Yes. First of all, I just have to say how offensive that is. No one who is sensitive to the devastation of the Holocaust-- my partner, the father of my children, my kids' grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. Their great-grandfather was in Sachsenhausen. There's simply no way you can hear-- no one could even lightheartedly make that comparison to suggest that Anne Frank, who died in a gas chamber was somehow-- had some privilege or opportunity. I just want to say that. I think, to your point, which is absolutely accurate, this is the same man who in that congressional hearing yesterday absolutely lied when he said, "I've never been anti-vax." That's yet another example.

Brian Lehrer: There's an episode of the sitcom, The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling, where her character is a new mom about to get her baby his routine shots. She has a babysitter in one episode who's anti-vax. The babysitter says something like, "You're doing business with big pharma?" Mindy says, "Yes, I don't want to do business with big polio or big mumps." Very funny, but it made the point, right?

Maya Wiley: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get off RFK, the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, this weekend, after watching your hearing, raised the conundrum of how the Democrats and the media should respond to Kennedy being so out there with his views, but also being well known and with his pedigree, talk about legacy admissions, and with him getting 20% or so in some Democratic primary polls. Bump wrote this, "What is it about Kennedy that demands a response at all? Is it his name because he's getting more than 0% in polls? Is it simply that Kennedy affords Democrats an opportunity to reinforce who they are relative to what he presents? Or is it also that the party has seen what happens if you don't challenge the fringe assertions of a long-shot celebrity candidate for the presidency?" That from Philip Bump.

That last reference, obviously, to Trump and the Republican lack of condemnation for the last seven years, no matter what he does. It is a conundrum, right? It's a conundrum for us. We had the conversation among my team whether to even do this segment with you at all, because why give oxygen to RFK Jr. at all? The question is-- and we came down on the side of accountability, and you have to call out damaging conspiracy theories and hate speech if they're coming from prominent enough places to have an effect if they're not challenged. That's where we came down.

That might be wrong. What do you think the right balance is between just not giving discredited ideas oxygen versus making sure to denounce things that are counterfactual from prominent figures that are in circulation so they don't take hold more in the population?

Maya Wiley: I think, and I share the complexity of this, and I have myself, for example, not retweeted things that I could attack on social media because I didn't want to give it oxygen. I think we have to make that judgment one case at a time. When is it giving it oxygen versus absolutely necessary because it's already getting oxygen? That really is the point about this congressional hearing that is about weaponization of the government, but an example of weaponizing Congress by giving not just him, but also a reporter at Breitbart News all these opportunities to essentially reassert conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories that are not only dangerous, they actually don't have any real deep newsworthiness other than the fact that the hearing was happening. The reason I showed up and came was because the hearing was going to happen whether I came or not. The news cameras were going to be there whether I came or not. It was important, and it's why I expressed gratitude for the opportunity to come there to try to insert into the proceedings both fact but also a reminder of what we should be talking about. We should be talking about what do we do with the fact that we've had this historic rise in antisemitism.

What does that mean about the social media platforms and what government does and does not do in balance of all of our constitutional rights? How do we better understand as a society how we live together? How do we understand how racism is working right now in society when we're sitting here talking about censorship, and what does the governor of Florida do try to indoctrinate students about slavery, having brought some benefits to Black people? That's what's happening in our country right now. That's what we need to be talking about. Sometimes we have to use the platform. Sadly, that is before us because to your point, Brian, sometimes you have to have a counterweight.

Brian Lehrer: Elicia in Queens. You're on WNYC with Maya Wiley. Hi, Elicia.

Elicia: Good morning. I'm the first to say that RFK Jr. is not the right spokesperson for any of these topics. He really hasn't presented himself orally well, but I think it's a disservice not to have the debate. He started to mention the Mayo Clinic, and they wouldn't even let him finish his sentence about what he was going to quote from the Mayo Clinic. I think that one of the things that we do is we like to put people into boxes. There is not a box, anti-vax or pro-vax. There's so many other different categories of people, people who don't believe in forced vaccination, people who believe in safe vaccination. There's so many different categories, and people don't fit in those two little boxes of anti-vax or pro-vax.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Elicia. That's true. I mean, there are people who are anti-vax, and that's an ideological position. The other side of that is science. Of course, there are questions of when you should force somebody to take a vaccine. Nobody forced anybody to take the COVID vaccine. However, if people wanted to protect the public health integrity of certain spaces voluntarily, then they said, you, if you're not vaccinated, can't come in here. Nobody forced them to go in those places. Nobody went to anybody's homes and force needles into their arms. There was no forced vaccine in the United States. Just to be clear about that point.

At the hearing, I guess, to one of Elicia's points or implications is that they could have gone another way. Instead of having somebody like you there, they could have had a vaccine scientist or a doctor who's expert in the field to come on and go point by point through RFK's conspiracy theories and debunk them. They chose not to do that. Is there any world in which they should have done that?

Maya Wiley: It's a hard question for me to answer. Obviously, I was not part of the conversation or consideration about how they were thinking about calling witnesses. We'll say this, the hearing was supposed to be about the question of social media platforms and censorship and the lawsuit of Missouri versus Biden. Frankly, I was prepared to do a lot of talking about the case itself, the law itself, the social media platforms, and the policies itself, because if the topic is censorship, if the topic is not about digging into what his views are or are not on vaccines, it's a different conversation.

One of the things that are so difficult about this particular House committee, not the only one, the House Judiciary as well, is that frankly and sadly, and I say this with sadness because I think there were some things we could agree on is that there are more theater and efforts to drive, frankly, some specific ideological theories rather than to get at what a congressional legislative hearing should be, which is a real discussion of the facts and the topics that were teed up. I don't think that was happening there, sadly.

I think there were huge opportunities to have a real deep discussion about what is gray, what the law does say, how do we think about the very harms, where and how is speech happening well, and where and which do we have some challenges. That would have been a great conversation to have. Like I said, I think there would have been some points of agreement. It was theater, and it was theater, frankly, for partisan ends, and that was a very difficult space to be in.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Maya Wiley, and we're going to turn the page from Maya Wiley congressional hearing on censorship witness to legal analyst Maya Wiley and former mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. They will both be with us when the Brian Lehrer Show continues in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Maya Wiley, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, former mayoral candidate, former head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City. Let me ask you to put your legal analyst hat on now and give me your take on some of the latest Trump case news.

The judge in the classified documents case, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee known to be pro-Trump in some past rulings that got overturned on appeal, has now set the trial date for next May. As most of our listeners probably know by now, that would still be in presidential primary season if it's a close race, or at least in the heart of the election year, even if, let's say, he's the presumed nominee by then because he won enough primaries. It is a unique conundrum.

We were talking about media and social media conundrums earlier. It's a unique conundrum for a judge, I imagine. You don't want to play a role in the electoral process, but you don't want to let a defendant in a serious case slide for a year just because he's a candidate or use his candidacy as an excuse to get out of something for a long time. What's the right thing? What do you think?

Maya Wiley: I think the right thing for the judge to do, what I hope is what the judge did, and it looks that way to me, and this is a judge whose decision in the past on the Mar-a-Lago case I have criticized publicly, but which is to look at how much time is it going to take to have a fair trial? What's the volume of evidence? Now, I think that the judge could have agreed with Jack Smith and his team, with the federal government, in saying, "We'll schedule it in December." The likelihood is it would have been pushed off.

Even I think the Department of Justice acknowledged that that was a possibility, that knowledge that there was 1.1 million documents and so many hours of videotape. The defense gets an opportunity to look at that evidence and to have time to prepare defense. Hard to find one in this case, but nonetheless, they are entitled to it, and we have to protect that. In this case, what it looks like she did, she made sure that she was scheduling appropriately for the case that was before her. All I can say is for me, the litmus test was, is it going to be before the presidential election?

Because I think it's incredibly important, and I didn't see any reason why it should delay beyond that. That the American public get some understanding of what did, did not happen here, and their own opportunity, not only to see what a jury of their peers will decide but to also get some view into this themselves since it involves national security and some of the most sensitive national security issues we have. I would say it's critically important that it happen. There's no reason for it to go beyond May, and it looks like a reasonable decision in my view.

Brian Lehrer: There's also the target letter that Trump announced he has received from the special counsel, Jack Smith's office, which to many legal analysts suggest Trump will be indicted soon in connection with January 6th itself, or the larger conspiracy, including through nonviolent means to overturn the election. What, to your eye, is he most likely to actually be charged with, specifically?

Maya Wiley: It's really looking like there's a conspiracy here-- in terms of what the evidence suggests and what we know of the investigation, there's the conspiracy to defraud the government, which is the fake electors' conspiracy. That looks highly likely from where I'm sitting. Then there's obstructing Congress, which is its own charge, which relates to his pressuring Vice President Mike Pence on the actual certification of the electoral college votes. We're hearing that there can be others from tampering with witnesses to actually a charge that relates to civil rights statute, criminal statute that we have coming out of the Civil War.

I think at the root is it's all the same conduct that we've been hearing about, very curious about the witness tampering possibility. I think the point is, there's so much evidence already in the public record, thanks to the January 6 committee, but also the news reporting we're getting about who has been interviewed, including Mark Meadows, including the most recent news about Mark Meadows joking about not being able to find those votes in Georgia, which really start to become additional pieces of information that suggests that there's really strong evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Also what we know about, frankly, from the president's own advisors and team about the pressure he put on Mike Pence as then Vice President. I don't think we're going to be that surprised, but there may be some additional charges that we've heard less about.

Brian Lehrer: I'm very interested in the civil rights charge, the potential civil rights charges, and, of course, a lot of our listeners will remember from the January 6 committee hearings, the Black mother and daughter team in Georgia, last name Moss, it was the Moss family. Trump and Giuliani were saying they were passing around thumb drives with fraudulent votes on them to enter them into the system. That was thoroughly investigated by Georgia officials, and that did not happen, they were passing ginger mints. [laughs] It got established.

That could be a civil rights violation that they were doing that because the public would believe that these Black women were inclined to be criminals, that kind of thing. Witness tampering, I'm really curious to hear what comes out with respect to that. We know the kinds of things that Trump has been heard on tape saying to various people he knows who could be witnesses in trials. On the pressuring Pence and the fake electors, he could say he was simply arguing to use the powers of government, of state legislatures, and of the vice presidency that he believed they had in light of the election fraud that he'll claim he believed had taken place.

They all rejected using such powers, or that those powers even existed, thank goodness, but that was just politics, not crimes. I imagine his lawyers might say. What could the prosecution say in response to that?

Maya Wiley: This goes-- and I'm just going to cite evidence that we've heard that's in the public sphere. Let's take Nevada, you've got literally two Republican operatives having an exchange by text, talking about whether or not they can count on the Republican secretary of state essentially to do this fake electors scheme, and that they don't think that she'll do it. They don't think that she'll do it, which itself is an indicator that they don't believe that there's going to be a factual predicate for doing it, facts that support doing it.

Then the day after the election, there's a text exchange between them where one of them who happens to be the Republican committee chair for the state, I believe, but certainly a high-level Republican operative had a conversation with the President of the United States at the time, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and I think Mike Meadows may have also been on it, don't hold me to that, making it clear that they had a whole discussion about pressing forward on this. Couple that with the evidence that we've heard from others who testified before the January 6 committee from Donald Trump's own Office of Legal Counsel inside the White House, saying, "This is crazy."

I think when you look at these things and understand there's both documentary evidence in the forms of text messages, memos, and then you add what they probably have from witnesses who've already testified before Congress, they may have given and said more. We know that there has been immunity, limited use immunity to a couple of witnesses. I'm assuming you're not going to see an indictment from a Jack Smith team, from a Department of Justice set of prosecutors that hasn't thought through that defense and identified what evidence they have that trumps Trump.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, one correction from our earlier exchange about the Holocaust in the previous segment, a number of listeners have pointed out that you said Anne Frank died in a gas chamber. She certainly died in a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen-

Maya Wiley: Sorry, apologies.

Brian Lehrer: -but she's believed to have died of a disease, not actually in the gas chamber. Just making that correction.

Maya Wiley: Correct.

Brian Lehrer: I know we only have a--

Maya Wiley: I contradicted that.

Brian Lehrer: We only have a few minutes left. We've given you two years, Maya, since you lost to Eric Adams to not ask you to grandstand from the outside and to let him get his mayoralty off the ground, but after this much time, how's he doing in your opinion?

Maya Wiley: Brian, first of all, let me just say, I don't grandstand. I don't like grandstanders myself. Look, I'm a New Yorker, as you know, and I'm very concerned about the direction of this city. I'm very concerned about what we're hearing at Rikers. We've had, I think we're up to seven deaths this year. We had 19 last year. I'm very concerned about the fact that we have real need to have to address homelessness, to consider how we manage a crisis in housing.

I have to tell you, I was having a conversation. I went to vote recently, went to my usual early voting polling sites, and I had a poll worker, someone I've seen before because I usually do early voting. I usually go to, therefore, the same site. Black woman, she called me aside and she said, "I need help. I work part-time for the police department at doing traffic safety." She said, "And I am about to become homeless. I have a voucher I can't use because I don't have children. I am going to be homeless and I don't know what to do."

That's a city worker. That's someone who is working on our public safety. It is a crisis that-- and her plea was like, "Nobody-- I can't find a way to get any help." That is a story that's happening all over the city, whether people are working or not working, whether they've been in shelter or just facing eviction because all that rent moratorium is coming due and they can't pay it, of course, because they went so long without working. All of these issues have not gone away and have not lessened. They're very tough ones, but I honestly feel like there's more we have to do. There's more creativity, there's more big ideas, and there's more thinking about how we come together on it, and [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, what would you be doing specifically that he's not doing?

Maya Wiley: I had a plan to think about how we subsidize rents, so fewer people were going to face eviction, and so that we could keep people in the units who were in them so we could then focus on also making sure people who are in shelter were getting housed. We've talked about the fact that we spend up to $80,000 a year to house people in shelter when, of course, some people need transitional shelters because they may have rehabilitation issues, they may have supports they need, we need supportive housing.

There is a way for us to look creatively at our resources, to think about how we spend so many of our precious dollars in ways that are solving the housing problem and keeping people in their homes. That's what I'd be looking at doing.

Brian Lehrer: Maya Wiley, now president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Good to talk to you again. Thank you very much for coming on.

Maya Wiley: Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

 

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