Exposing the Right-Wing & Corporate Takeover of Education & Democracy – Jasmine Banks

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Episode 50
Guest: Jasmine Banks
Host: Shimon Cohen, LCSW

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Jasmine Banks—Executive Director of UnKoch My Campus and organizer exposing how right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and his network influence education, policy, and democracy—featured for her Doin' The Work podcast episode.
In this episode, I talk with Jasmine Banks, who is the Executive Director of UnKoch My Campus, a national campaign that investigates and exposes how right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and his Koch network influence education, both in higher ed and K-12. Many of you who follow the podcast already care about racial, social, economic, and environmental justice, care about multiracial democracy, but do we always know the hidden influences of the agenda that opposes all of this, utilizing right-wing think tanks, research, and targeted campaigns? Jasmine explains what the Koch network is and how, through multi-million-dollar contributions, they promote ideas and policies that suppress voting rights, question climate change while actually advancing it, deny the reality of COVID, attack workers’ rights, and are behind the wide-spread efforts to ban any discussion of slavery and systemic racism in schools by attacking critical race theory and the 1619 Project. She shares that Koch helped fund the January 6th attempted coup and that multiracial democracy is truly at stake. UnKoch My Campus has released reports of how the Koch network carries out its agenda and those reports are available on their website. Jasmine explains how UnKoch My Campus works with students who organize to challenge the Koch agenda. She explains how the ruling of Citizens United treated corporations like people and how there is basically unchecked financial influence corporations have over elections and legislation. Policy folks often say we need to “follow the money” and Jasmine does a phenomenal job in breaking this down. Jasmine also shares how she got into this work and talks about working as a therapist. I hope this conversation inspires you to action.

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Generation Common Good www.generationcommongood.org



Music credit:
“District Four” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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TRANSCRIPT

Shimon Cohen
Welcome to Doin’ The Work: Frontline Stories of Social Change, where we bring you stories of real people working to address real issues. I am your host, Shimon Cohen.

In this episode, I talk with Jasmine Banks, who is the Executive Director of UnKoch My Campus, a national campaign that investigates and exposes how right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and his Koch network influence education, both in higher ed and K-12. Many of you who follow the podcast already care about racial, social, economic, and environmental justice, care about multiracial democracy, but do we always know the hidden influences of the agenda that opposes all of this, utilizing right-wing think tanks, research, and targeted campaigns? Jasmine explains what the Koch network is and how, through multi-million-dollar contributions, they promote ideas and policies that suppress voting rights, question climate change while actually advancing it, deny the reality of COVID, attack workers’ rights, and are behind the wide-spread efforts to ban any discussion of slavery and systemic racism in schools by attacking critical race theory and the 1619 Project. She shares that Koch helped fund the January 6th attempted coup and that multiracial democracy is truly at stake. UnKoch My Campus has released reports of how the Koch network carries out its agenda and those reports are available on their website. Jasmine explains how UnKoch My Campus works with students who organize to challenge the Koch agenda. She explains how the ruling of Citizens United treated corporations like people and how there is basically unchecked financial influence corporations have over elections and legislation. Policy folks often say we need to “follow the money” and Jasmine does a phenomenal job in breaking this down. Jasmine also shares how she got into this work and talks about working as a therapist. I hope this conversation inspires you to action.

Hey, Jasmine. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. So excited to hear you talk about the work you're doing with your organization, UnKoch My Campus. And I'm excited to have learned about you all and have you on to share about this really important work.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Shimon Cohen:
Absolutely. So I think just to start out, maybe let folks know an overview of what you all do and then we'll get into a number of the specifics.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. So generally, UnKoch My Campus is a intervention or disruption campaign that targets Charles Koch and his dark money network. He is a really radical right wing billionaire. He has been characterized by historians as an oligarch, sort of like a corporate oligarchy. And you might wonder why it matters within education, public education and higher education in particular. Well, both K-12 as well as higher education are institutions that really help to preserve the possibility of a multiracial democracy. And Charles Koch, who is famous for being a climate denier, for stalling progress on voting rights and economic justice, and most recently helping fund the insurrection as well as COVID denial, utilizes his multimillion dollar nonprofit donations to universities to influence both ideas and culture, as well as policy production.

Jasmine Banks:
Most of the things that you are familiar with around legislation, well, they started at the side of the university, right. Like researchers and think tanks struggled through data and ideas and then they made recommendations to elected officials and the highest courts in the land and legislators in the land. And so through these think tanks that are majority at the side of the university, the Koch network has been able to roll back economic freedom, propose regressive social policy, as well as deregulate the fossil fuels industries at the peril of our climate and our communities. So it's really, really important work and I've been at it for, this is my fourth year now.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah, it's so important. And the folks who follow the podcast care about these issues, right. Like people who listen to this podcast or access this podcast through transcripts already for the most part, really care about multiracial democracy and racial justice and social justice. And I think often though, we don't know... Like you all peel it back and get back to like, okay, so we know there's voter rights and voter suppression going on in all these states, right. Or passing legislation to make it harder and harder for people to vote, especially Black people, right. And folks of color. So just on that issue, let's peel it back of like where does that begin and how do these strategies happen that are funded by this Koch network?

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. So there are things that the average person who's just like me, like a working class mom of four. Before I got in this work, I didn't know what a think tank was, but there are these things called think tanks and there are these folks called lobbyists. And ultimately, particularly after Citizens United, which was a ruling that made corporations into people and really changed how much money could be spent within elections, our current government construct is that whoever has the most money gets the most power. And that's really where the crux of Charles Koch and his dark money network and their power brokering is.

Jasmine Banks:
So why would they want to erode voting rights? Why would they attack communities of color from coming out and voting and governing? We the people are the people that the government should be answering to. Well, that's because the Koch network along with ALEC, which is American Legislative Exchange Council, which is sort of like their corporate business commerce wing of their network, they are disproportionately invested in the profits within their corporation and their shareholders desires, right. So if we the people on a grassroots level put a candidate in office that wants to check the monopolies of corporations, that wants to check fossil fuel production that's eroding our climate and killing our ecosystems, if we want to, I don't know, pass something like universal childcare or a care credit, those things that we would want to invigorate our communities and give us a chance to thrive as a society, are in direct competition or in opposition to the earnings of corporations.

Jasmine Banks:
Corporations depend on an extractive economic system to get their money. So at the heart of this really is an elite few utilizing greed and throwing all of their material resources at ensuring they continue to have political control and social control. And that really erodes democracy. That really harms our communities. It's creating a climate and ecosystems globally, particularly in the south, that aren't livable. And that's why it's a worthwhile pursuit to resist and organize around these folks.

Shimon Cohen:
So how do you do that? Because yeah, absolutely. We got to resist it. We got to organize. So how do you all do that?

Jasmine Banks:
So what we do is we track dark money. We start with investigate and audit. We're constantly watching where the Koch network is spending it's money. And we do this through public records requests, we do this through investigative journalism, we do this through like whistle blowers and students that are constantly pressuring their universities to turn over donor agreements. And we start to trace the money and we demonstrate how there are strings attached. Like for example, in 2018, we got access to donor agreements at George Mason University that dictated that the Charles Koch Foundation had the right to hire and fire faculty. They were allowed to determine what the curriculum was being taught. They were allowed to have access to graduate fellows that came into that program. And of course, as you expect, their curriculum and program was about this far right wing libertarian vision of the world.

Jasmine Banks:
And so after we connect with folks who are on the grassroots level who are impacted by these issues, we skill them up. We teach them about how to power map, how to base build, how to use communications as a tactic for storytelling and disrupting the disinformation cycle that is also a part of the Koch network. And then we put them in coalition with folks who have been doing Koch and dark money resistance work for the last 15 plus years in various states and locations. And so that really has helped us build sort of this grassroots resistance against the Koch network further capturing these democratic institutions.

Shimon Cohen:
It seems like a lot of their effectiveness is based on the secrecy of how they operate.

Jasmine Banks:
Yes, yes, that has always been the key. We have incredible folks like Jane Mayer who has absolutely done us a service in producing the book, Dark Money, helping us understand how these networks operate in the shadows. We've got books like Shadow Network. We've got, of course, Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains talking about the long term plan from the Koch network inspired by James Buchanan and Powell to really reshape our democracy. And my grandmama always used to tell me that like the best disinfectant is some sunshine. And so that's really what it is.

Jasmine Banks:
And as we and others who are a part of this sort of like follow the money check corporate power movement, as we've been investigating and telling these stories and exposing them, they've only gotten more sophisticated around the disinformation and basically being able to out pay some of us because they can buy news media. They can hire a thousand journalists to tell their version of a story. And so, as I'm sure so many are accustomed to now after COVID denialism and the insurrection, the coup that is still happening after the big lie, they are doing less of the hiding and more of doing it out in plain sight and then creating disinformation about what they're actually doing.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah. One of the campaigns that is really interesting to me that you're working on is what's happening in K-12 around critical race theory because when you hear UnKoch My Campus, at first I was like, oh, like they do work at universities and colleges, which I know you do, but then when I started looking into more of the organization, I saw that you did all this work around K-12.

Jasmine Banks:
Yes.

Shimon Cohen:
And especially now since there's been this very deliberate misinformation, it is totally rooted in misinformation because no school in K-12 is teaching the complexities of critical race theory, which is this legal theory although some of us also use it in social work too because it's branched out, right. So I'm really interested in that one and like the anti-1619 Project backlash that's happening and I was kind of hoping you could speak on that and how you're organizing against it.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. So our team back in the summer of 2021 started to see tiny, tiny little talking points emerge because again, we spend like, I like to say that like we spend our days steeped in the toxic waste of Koch think tank. So other people don't have to. And so we're always surveilling their websites. We're always like going to their... With Zoom now, they have so many like conferences and different press opportunities. And so we'll go on and we'll listen and we'll watch like what are they doing? What are they planning? And we started hearing critical race theory and then we decided we'll audit a select group of their think tanks. And so we went through about 28 to 23 think tanks and saw on their sites that they had provided toolkits and talking points and then were disseminating those to target Koch-funded elected officials on the state level.

Jasmine Banks:
And then within a couple of months, we started seeing Fox News as well as other fake news sites, some which are Koch-controlled or Koch-owned talking about critical race theory as a form of racism against White people. And we knew we had to act. And so we published our report. We demonstrated how just a small group of Koch think tanks created this wave. And then we also showed how many of the parent groups that were showing up to these key states, particularly in the south where there's an ability to swing working class White folks more toward the left started showing up at these school boards and creating this fake moral panic, like actual like astroturf groups who had never lived in that area, did not have kids in the school district, but were showing up.

Jasmine Banks:
And then of course the news broke that Chris Rufo admitted that he saw this as a power issue for the radical right in the midterms and moving on. And then they means tested their theory in Virginia, which led to the Youngkin win, which was a big upset. And so this is a thing that they have been doing forever. They did it with diversity, equity, and inclusion during the Obama race, and they did it prior to that when there was traction, particularly in 2001 around climate and they went to school board meetings and said, "You can't teach our children about climate because you're giving them anxiety." And it was a whole moral panic that just didn't exist.

Jasmine Banks:
And so what we did after our report was we began to reach out to our partners like National Public Education Association, like the Coalition for Public Schools, Save Our Schools Arizona and provide a political education. Gave them our resource and talked about how people can start pointing this moral panic, this new culture war back to the Koch network because communities need to understand outside billionaire corporate influencers are creating this radicalization and polarization in our communities. It's not us, right. Before this culture war was manufactured in our communities, we were just trying to figure out how to survive COVID in the schools, right. We were just trying to figure out how to balance these multiple threats and crisis.

Jasmine Banks:
And ultimately, our organizing is about political education, informing folks, and getting the word out. And so of course I've had multiple op-eds, one that was in The Nation called The Radical Capitalist Behind the Critical Race Furor. Charles Koch's public representative folks actually reached out to The Nation and tried to get them to take it down. The Nation said no. Here's all of her citations. It's all public information. And about a week after they refused to take it down and the article was going viral, Charles Koch Foundation and Stand Together issued a statement saying they did not support the banning of critical race theory. To date, ALEC, which is again, their corporate commerce for profit wing of what they do, has been proliferating model policy on the local and state level to ban critical race theory. Now, Koch Industries and their partners are major shareholders in ALEC. So again, another way that they're not hiding what they're doing, but they're using disinformation with journalism and earned media to really lie and sort of bait and switch folks their understanding of who's really behind all of this.

Shimon Cohen:
It is wild because you see all these viral videos of White parents and even some parents of color at the school board hearings and also then they're like terrorizing school board members too and people are leaving their positions and they're scared. Do you all like organize people to show up at these school board hearings or meetings as well and present a different view?

Jasmine Banks:
Yes. So we have done several statements helping to like build a coalition power with families who are attending these school board meetings and they need sort of like a national voice speaking to this. We've done a lot of virtual trainings for folks on how to do like a recruitment strategy. We have definitely amped up the amount of like scanning that we've done of media so that if we see that there's a new site where there's panic and this school board is about to be targeted, we can call on our coalition partners that are on the ground in those various cities and states and say, "Hey, this is about to come to your school board. Here's how you can counteract it and here's how you can diffuse the really like polarizing situation." So yeah, we do that work. With digital organizing, the limitations of COVID, and having such a small team, it's really difficult, but we've been rolling with what we have and we feel like we've been making an impact for sure.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah, it's so important to expose it. I'm in Florida and-

Jasmine Banks:
Ooh.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah.

Jasmine Banks:
You got DeSantis.

Shimon Cohen:
We've got DeSantis, we've got anti-CRT, and now we've got this anti-LGBTQ+ bill where like I don't even totally understand how this would even function where like you can't even talk about LGBTQ folks in schools. Like I am beside myself with it.

Jasmine Banks:
You also have a Koch-funded candidate who ran for president of university, lost, and now is trying to get DeSantis to fast track him as a candidate. And both of those folks have ties to the Koch network and I'm happy to send you some information on that. But it's really like a hostile takeover on all fronts. And what is produced from the things that the Koch network invest in is this authoritarianism. And this authoritarianism and fascism is a direct response to the fact that particularly in the last couple of years, folks have been able to see glimpses of having a multiracial feminist democracy. And they know that in a multiracial feminist democracy, it's not business as usual. Cisgender wealthy elite White Christian men are not going to be the "biggest recipients" of that kind of world.

Jasmine Banks:
And so really in their attempts to maintain the old world, the old way of doing things that is not serving all of us but only serving a few of us, they're creating the conditions for this fascism. I think in the United States, we have this belief of exceptionalism of like this isn't the United States. How could this happen? But globally, when you think about it, anytime like a majority race or like ethnoreligious group begins to lose power, particularly when in a democracy was attempted, it does devolve into this like authoritarian fascism. What no one expected was the massive amount of money that the Koch network as well as other right wing billionaires have been pouring into investing not relinquishing their power would fast track the United States in this way.

Shimon Cohen:
So would an overturning of Citizens United in and of itself put a huge block to what they're able to do?

Jasmine Banks:
I think there's a lot of folks, a lot of theorists and scholars who say that it's too late to overturn Citizens United, that the damage has been done, but I really feel that it would be a non-reformist reform, meaning that it would be an opportunity for us to really build power and check some corporations in some big ways. I also think that For the People Act if we could get it through would be another act of harm reduction while folks are doing systemic structural organizing and transformation work. But yeah, I would love to see Citizens United overturned in my lifetime.

Shimon Cohen:
Something that I'm thinking about, so we're recording this at the end of January. This is going to go live in February and Biden is going to be able to nominate a Supreme Court justice and he's promised to nominate a Black woman. And just today, because this is like brand new, I'm already seeing tons of right wing stuff about the whole qualifications issue and they're the ones making it about race because they've always had historically like White men who that was their main qualification as judges, right. Or they got Barrett through in like 39 days after Ginsburg died.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah, we should look at her qualifications.

Shimon Cohen:
Right. So I was like, to me it seems talking to you and thinking of these think tanks and Koch money and this network, like these talking points have been ready to go, right?

Jasmine Banks:
Yes, yes. Yeah, absolutely. You should check out the work of Lisa Graves, a great comrade and advisor to UnKoch My Campus and she has led around Koch work and ALEC work for a really long time and she's just like a vanguard. But she as well as UnKoch and other folks have been calling out how that Koch network has been court packing on every level pro Koch judges to the point where they'll hold seminars for judges or folks who are on the track to become judges. And there was a report that showed that after attending these seminars, they were harder on Black and Brown folks around criminalization. They were more lenient on fossil fuels, right? And so Amy Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, and what's the other one that I've like pushed out of my mind because he was so like-

Shimon Cohen:
Kavanaugh?

Jasmine Banks:
Kavanaugh. Yeah, sorry. We had actions against him for one of our students campaigns. And so I've just like erased him. So all three of them are DeVos family Koch network picks for the Supreme Court. And again, it's no accident that the Koch network's rhetoric and the underbelly of its rhetoric is antisemitic and anti-Black. And that's because understanding that those rising in majorities like people of color, folks who have experienced like genocide and dispossession, folks who have been enslaved for economic progress, like those stories and the rise of those folks go against like the ultimate myth of the libertarian movement, which is meritocracy and individual responsibility, right?

Jasmine Banks:
And to your point, I was listening to CNN this morning while I was getting ready with my kiddos and a person who considers themselves liberal was commenting and they were like, "Look at this woman. She's a Black woman. She's the daughter of slaves." And I just thought, how interesting that like the neoliberal cultural habits that are so deeply embedded in White supremacy is how you name and speak about a Black woman and without naming her achievements, but you don't speak about like Kavanaugh or Gorsuch or Barrett that way? Like what would it look like if commentators had been like, "Neil Gorsuch, a candidate for the Supreme Court whose family built their wealth off of enslaving Africans." But we don't say that about White folks. Black people always had to be like, "She's from the Indigenous people who were on the Trail of Tears or she was part of the Haitian enslaved people."

Jasmine Banks:
And that's not the full story of who we are, but yeah, you're right. These people are going to dog whistle White supremacy and anti-Blackness and misogynoir because these women are not going to represent to them through their lens of White supremacy and White nationalism qualified candidates no matter what their credentialing is.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah, they're really masters at flipping the narrative and controlling the narrative in the sense that... Like the word indoctrination, right. That's one of their terms that they're using about critical race theory, right. It's like, this is indoctrinating our students to hate White people and to hate this country where it's like, what have they been doing to indoctrinate? Like they're all about indoctrination. It's just they're indoctrinating what they want people to believe.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to Charles Koch's credit, one of the things he's always said because he sort of has this overlap in philosophy and like the sociology schools of thought is that like we're in a battle of ideas. But the reality is for so many of us who go, "Oh no, this is just a policy fight, this isn't a culture idea battle," is that the culture wars on the right, we keep losing because we don't have sites of belonging because we're not willing to wage in and we have this, oh... Particularly folks who identify as leftists have like, we have like this kind of like purity test where we don't engage in those kind of things. We're going to win in a fair way.

Jasmine Banks:
But the reality is we're all making culture. We're all creating behaviors and sites of belonging constantly. We just have to determine who gets to have a thriving generative existence in the kind of realities we're creating for ourselves. And so if indoctrination looks like children should have access to healthcare no matter their gender identity, children should have science-based sexual education and education on the climate reality. And we should teach factual history so that we don't repeat it and we can learn from our past. If that's indoctrination that they're afraid of, it begs the question, what kind of world do they want? Well, we know what kind of world they want because antisemitism and Holocaust nihilism is on the rise, right. People are quoting MLK to MLK's daughter on Twitter and saying that MLK would be ashamed of her, right. It's these folks who have been in their homogenous bubbles and believe that hegemony is the thing that will save them and preserve their wellbeing.

Jasmine Banks:
But the reality is the global majority has already begun to shift and we will continue to be the rising majority. And in a place in time where trans Black Southern girls with disabilities have what they need to thrive and have a meaningful life, that's actually the same world where White folks who don't share any of those characteristics can survive and thrive. It's not a limited world. It's an expansive abundant world, but because White supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy limits the imagination so much, those folks can't conceive of themselves existing in that world. And so they're reacting from this place of spiritual, social, relational fear and retaliation rather than figuring out how they might join with us to belong in this world where we have enough heat and cooling for everyone's homes and everyone has a home to live in and people have education and we're not killing our food systems and our animal relatives, right.

Jasmine Banks:
Like that's a beautiful version of the world, but what their corporate overlords are telling them, it is like the rhetoric that you hear. That they're all going to be put in internment camps with tags on their arms. And that is how people have utilized anti-Blackness and antisemitism to stoke this White anxiety and fear for centuries now.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah, they're the stuff that's going on right now around like vaccines and masks and the right and folks like saying stuff like we are all Jews and wearing stars of David. For me as a Jewish person, it makes me physically sick when I see that stuff because it's like, wow, like now you want to be Jew? The whole thing is just like so insane to me. It's like hard to even comprehend that people are doing that.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Yeah.

Shimon Cohen:
But there's clearly... Someone came up with that idea, right? Like something's behind all that.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Charles Koch and his PR tours around his book would quote Frederick Douglass and said that the reason why Frederick Douglass was like so fantastic was because he was an entrepreneur who taught himself to read and write after he was released from enslavement so he could get a job and earn like $1 a month. It's the myth of exceptionalism that hides enslavement and chattel slavery, right. It's like-

Shimon Cohen:
So for him, his interest in Frederick Douglass is to use him as an example around meritocracy or something like that?

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah, meritocracy and Frederick pulled himself up by his bootstraps. And so all other people can too because look at this.

Shimon Cohen:
Wow.

Jasmine Banks:
But the reality is that like Frederick created a pathway for sure, but the gag here is that like Charles wants us to work. He wants us to like start new businesses and do all kinds of different things because ultimately it's working for the ultra-wealthy elite, right. Like when we're investing in their version of the economy, they're benefiting off of our labor. So of course he's going to promote Latinx entrepreneurship or Black people from urban areas who need to start up new businesses because it all goes back to the same like commerce affiliations that he gets a dividend from. But if we reimagine an economy, one that was rooted in care, one that was rooted in liberation and not oppression, well, that's something that he's definitely been organizing against. And I think that's telling.

Shimon Cohen:
Absolutely. Yeah. Could you actually just kind of summarize some of like the key issues that the Koch network again? I know you talked about in the beginning, but just kind of go over like just so people can really hear that part of like these... Because someone's going to find either one or multiple of those issues that they care about. So can you kind of hit on what is like kind of like their key agenda, I guess, through certain issues that they're working on right now?

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Well, they work under an umbrella of privatization. So that's the first place that you start, corporate power and privatization. And then from there, they have done things like bolster the radical Christian right movements. Think about folks that have opposed LGBTQI marriage, trans bathroom bans, affirming healthcare for trans youth, trans youths participating in sports, they're behind that. Housing, whatever the housing moratorium was happening so that no one could be evicted, the Koch network had their lobbyists pressure the lifting of that. And once it was lifted and people particularly in the South, like through Texas began to be evicted, they bought that property. They bought up all of that land.

Jasmine Banks:
They're also buying public lands so that they can privatize and ensure that they can continue to operate. Our courts and our judicial system, they've been reshaping them, gosh, for the last 10 years plus stacking them with folks that are pro corporate power and anti-people power. And K-12 education in partnership with other billionaire donors, they have been resegregating schools by gutting public school funding and then proposing private charter schools. These private charter schools or even the school choice movement disproportionately keep out Black and Latinx folks. And on top of that, the curriculum that they provide is super regressive, right. Like it whitewashes history. It talks about enslavement and chattel slavery as a source of building the greatest economic system in the world. It erases Indigenous genocide and dispossession.

Jasmine Banks:
Goodness gracious, voting and electoral organizing, they've always been behind backing some of the most egregious candidates. I mean, DeVos who just completely obliterated our education system during Trump's administration is a part of the Koch network. So really wherever you turn, many wealthy people have invested their money in multiple things. Their investments happen to be just really nefarious and pernicious ventures.

Shimon Cohen:
Thank you for going over all that. Clearly they're involved with a lot. Almost any right wing type issue that we could think of, they're probably somehow connected to it is what it sounds like.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Well, and I want to be clear, yes, it's a radical right oligarchy, but they also have like moderate Dems, like corporate Dems like Sinema and Manchin have direct relationship to the Koch network. And guess what? They've held up some of the things that Biden promised the people. And when we voted for him in that fair election that we had, he had the responsibility to deliver these promises and thinking that we have a majority of dims, but it turns out the Koch affiliated folks are keeping us from getting the things done that we really needed to get done for our communities, especially after surviving this continued pandemic.

Shimon Cohen:
So Sinema and Manchin are connected to Koch funding?

Jasmine Banks:
The Koch network. Yeah. Yeah.

Shimon Cohen:
And Sinema's actually a social worker and still teaches policy.

Jasmine Banks:
And has been censured by the AZ Democrats I saw.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah. Which we're waiting on the National Association of Social Workers to actually do something. There's been a campaign and a petition started by the Boston-based Liberation Health Collective to put pressure on NASW. So for social work folks listening, we'll put a link to that in the notes, as well as some of the articles that you've talked about, I'll get those links from you and I'll put them in the show notes so people will have them. So you mentioned one thing about like you're a mom and as you live and working raising your kids, you didn't know what think tanks were and things like that, which I don't think most of us do too. So how did you get into this work?

Jasmine Banks:
It was really serendipitous. I had been fired from NARAL Pro-Choice America as a digital organizing fellow. I just didn't fit their White feminist lens of the world and kept trying to integrate racial justice into my digital organizing campaigns and it just didn't go well. And I was just burnt out with like the grasstops nonprofit like national sector of movement work. And so I was like, I love comms. I love digital organizing. I'll just do some consulting for a while. And I saw this RFP, this request for a proposal from a little student-led project called UnKoch My Campus and I was like, "I don't know who Charles Koch is and I don't know what any of this stuff is about, but I'll just apply."

Jasmine Banks:
And the vision of UnKoch at the time was around transparency and academic freedom. The co-founders, who were White folks, believed that if you could just tell the public that there were strings attached to donor agreements and you could get universities to no longer accept donor agreements that had strings attached, that it would equal justice. And so I dove into the history of Charles Koch and within two weeks of like reading all of the reports and the sided sources and doing a deep dive in the history, I was like, "Well, damn, I thought I was coming to do an easy job and just rest, but I happened upon the death star of the right." Like this is some real, real conspiracy that's happening.

Jasmine Banks:
I'm a Virgo and I'm a very protective mom. And when I realized that a vast majority of the threats that my family had directly faced were produced by Koch or the entities that are associated with the Koch network, I was like, "Oh, well, this is like an avenging kind of moment." So I did digital organizing from Koch for about nine months and then the co-founder started having quite a bit of infighting. And as like young nonprofit projects do, some folks went their own ways and the remaining co-founders voted that I step in as executive director. And so I've spent the last three, now going on my four years, revamping the strategy, reevaluating the tactics, and really pivoting the UnKoch work to be both an investigative journalism/base building/organizing operation because we really want the work we do not just to be an announcement of the problem, but an opportunity for folks to really take action and build shared power and solidarity around the problem.

Jasmine Banks:
We see ourselves as a disruption entity that puts up a good fight to block the right from further controlling and capturing higher education because it is a site of power. It is a democratic institution that can be reimagined and transformed for social good. Even though now it's becoming increasingly corporate and private, we're not ready to give up on higher education and education in general. And it says something that of all the places the Koch network invests their money, they most heavily invest their money in education. And I think that stems from their history of being the folks who resisted Brown versus Board of Education and school integration, and they understand that education, particularly public education, is a direct pathway to social and economic transformation.

Shimon Cohen:
Thanks for sharing how you got into it. And yeah, absolutely. Like they know that the power of education, right. Otherwise they wouldn't be putting so much money and energy into it. Where do you kind of pull strength from and kind of pull like your own thinking from?

Jasmine Banks:
Well, I'm in a deep relationship with a beautiful practice community of... It's intergenerational and 10 days of every month, we meet together virtually and engage in solidarity practice for care, BOLD, which is Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. Denise Perry, Alta Starr, their wisdom and their teachings have bolstered me and taught me about new ways of being in the world. I looked to visionary folks in the South like Suzanne Pharr who her work has taught me so much around the radical right, particularly the Christian right.

Jasmine Banks:
And then at the end of the day, it's my Black, queer, trans family. My daughter is about to be 15. She's a Black trans girl. And just to like live with her and see how she engages in self-determination and how she sees the world is always refreshing to me. And outside of that, I cycle a lot. I used to play roller derby because hitting people, body checking people is like a very therapeutic practice I didn't know that I needed. And when all of that fails, I'm either like baking bread in the kitchen with my wife or like drinking a lot of gin.

Shimon Cohen:
All right. I remember like when I was younger, like they'd actually have like roller derby on ESPN and stuff.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Yeah.

Shimon Cohen:
Like late night-

Jasmine Banks:
Banked track. Yeah. I was flat track and my roller derby name was Boombox.

Shimon Cohen:
Oh, I love that. I love Boombox. That is a great name. Thanks for sharing that and just about like your thinking and BOLD. And that's amazing that you have that too, that you are part of that just sounds phenomenal.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. The beauty is, and I think this is often lost in folks that part of social change movements or structures that have been captured by like the non-profit industrial complex is we have generations and generations of living elders who were doing this work before you got like a 501(c)(3) status to do this work, right. Like they were doing all kinds of dope community work. And actually one thing that I haven't shared with you is my original background is in communications and psychology. And I had a private practice as a licensed therapist. And it just got so difficult for me because I'm a doer and a systems thinker to constantly have my clients come in and we would get them to... I would watch them do this massive amount of work in transformation, get them to a place where they could go out feeling some rehabilitation and recovery from their suffering, much of which was an actually like a product of systemic oppression. And not from any personal failing.

Jasmine Banks:
And then they'd come back in six months re-injured by the same systems. And so I was like, okay, cool. I'll be a therapist on the weekend and then I'll be a systems change, organizer, activist Monday through Friday. And that's what I've been doing, right. Like would we have the rate of maternal mental health, perinatal mood and anxiety disorders if we had paid leave and birthing folks could stay with their babies and didn't have to dump them off at a daycare? And there's no disrespect to those who choose to do that, but there's just so many variables to like our wellbeing and our determinants of health that we're not naming are directly a result of capitalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy. And until we really come into conflict with those structures and start building new ways of being in community, we're going to have like soaring mental health pathology and struggles. And I say that as someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder and a multiple suicide survivor and have my own share of psychopathology.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing all that. And that's something a lot of guests of mine have touched on over a number of different episodes of like we can't CBT our way out of systemic oppression. It doesn't work that way. And that's real and we pathologize people when the pathology is really the systemic pathology.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Which is the trap of the narrative, the neoliberal society that we're living in, right. It focuses on like it's the individual and it's the individual, but the reality is like our communities are unwell. Like there's a collective unwellness. And there's some nuance around like madness and disability that I just want to hold intention that we're not erasing that that some of us are just like, that's who we are as people. And it's not necessarily a result of injury or even if it is a result of like psychic or physiological injury, it's still valid. You don't have to be like sane to count. But Lord have mercy, I would love to see a world where we start with care and healing and we have a beloved state that really works for us and not war and corporate consumption.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah. I don't know if it's the right term, but like, because I know there's like a lot of debate about this, but to me, White supremacy seems pathological to me. And I know other people don't like it sometimes when people say like racism is a disease and things like that. And I get that. I get that. But it's an irrational belief to believe that a group of people because of the color of their skin are superior to another group. That's just an irrational belief to have. So to me, there's pathology there, which then inflicts this harm on everybody.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. I was reading a case study a couple of weeks ago that talked about sociopathy and borderline issues as it relates to the population of like White young people in the millennial generation who were raised underneath evangelical movements. And I think that piece was sort of hitting on what you're talking about, right. Like we know it's a lie. Those of us who've seen behind the curtain of White supremacy absolutely know it's a lie. And when we don't live into that world, we experience a form of liberation and freedom that ultimately helps us reorient our sense of like our psychosocial development of identity. But I understand folks critique of it, but I also absolutely see where you're coming from, that it is a collective working delusion where many people are constructing these archetypes of their identity that's based in violence, subjugation, and domination.

Jasmine Banks:
And anytime you're in those spaces, it is inherently like soul draining. It's death making. And we as organic relatives to this earth are not suited for like death making work. It's just not how we thrive in community. Adversely, I think the folks that push back against the disease and pathologizing of it feel uncomfortable, not that I can speak for them in mass, but I think some of the points that emerge from their critiques of that approach, that analysis, is that it's also structural and institutional, right?

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah. 100%.

Jasmine Banks:
And so making it a disease sort of makes it hard to make the case for abolishing the systemic institutional and structural components of it. But on an interpersonal level, yes. I think that I've had folks that came into my office and were seeking help for all kinds of things. And I use narrative therapy approach as my theoretical orientation and we talk about identity. And for White folks who are steeped and like fully bought into White identity, their development of who they are as people is just not there. It's not there. And we go through sort of like this deconstructing process as a part of their work in therapy session and then building themselves up outside of this dominant narrative of like you are exceptional and you're the most respectable and you're good and you should strive for perfectionism and avoid conflict and it has to be either/or.

Jasmine Banks:
And then their anxiety dissipates. And then they can sleep better, and they have less intrusive thoughts and self-harm because the rigidity and the binary nature and the limiting imagination of White supremacy, it shaves off whole people and kind of puts them in the box. And that includes folks who come from Euro backgrounds who have White skin, right. It includes those people. So, I also come from the camp that folks have a lot of critiques for, but I come from the camp of people that say that White supremacy actually also harms White people intensely indirectly because it dehumanizes them and it assigns them de facto to a legacy of violence and domination.

Shimon Cohen:
Totally. And to be considered White, there's like so much that groups have given up. Like as a Jewish person, at one point we weren't... Those of us who get to be considered White because there's lots of Jews of Color, especially worldwide, but like what did we give up? Like I... my parents... my grandparents still spoke some Yiddish, but like they didn't pass it on. And that's like assimilation. That was like to assimilate. That's a small example, but it is a big one too actually with language is powerful.

Jasmine Banks:
Absolutely. But you see right now in this political moment how White supremacy and agents of White supremacy who were like, come over here Jews or White Latinx folks. You're White. Well, immediately, right. Like they didn't care if it was the White Latinx folks that they were putting in cages at the border. They don't care if it's Jewish folks who are now like antisemitic flyers being passed and the Holocaust nihilists being codified in school board meetings. So really White supremacy will possess and then dispossess depending on power. And so it's really on all of us those who... I can't move in and out of whiteness and I've been Black my whole life, but folks like you who could be maybe assigned as White and build power, it's like, well, actually if I'm going to be a White person, I'm going use it to disrupt this system. I'm going to use it to shift power and I'm going to demonstrate a new identity of, well, my whiteness can look like abolishing White supremacy. My whiteness can look like co-conspiring toward justice.

Jasmine Banks:
So you have the opportunity to create new identities, but like don't take the bait. Like there's no... Your enemy doesn't give you gifts. And White supremacy is an enemy to all of us. Like if you get something from White supremacy, that's because later they're going to call on you to take the pound of flesh. And sometimes it's more than a pound of flesh. It's your life or your family or the people you come from being decimated. And so, it's not worth the tradeoff.

Shimon Cohen:
Yeah. I really like how you said that. There was this journal called Race Traitor by Noel Ignatiev who passed away I think last year or the year before, and their kind of like main line was "Treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity." And I always liked that a lot, that line.

Jasmine Banks:
Yeah. Check out Dr. Barnor Hesse. He's got like The 8 White Identities, moving from like ally to like White abolitionist. And he puts it on a spectrum of White ally who like acknowledges White supremacy, but still fully benefits and does the performance of justice, but it doesn't cost them anything. Moving all the way down to the White abolitionist is like, no, Whiteness is a violent construct in this current iteration of society and we're going to abolish it

Shimon Cohen:
100%. So Jasmine, if folks want to get involved with the work you're doing, how can they support your work and get involved?

Jasmine Banks:
Well, goodness, we are actually launching a brand new project that would be perfect for any of the folks who feel that they're in alignment. So of course UnKoch My Campus is always going to be a student-led project. It's always going to be in universities, but we knew in this moment with like the threat to realizing democracy and the growing fascism, we needed to build out a coalition. And so we launched a project called The Common Good Generation. And The Common Good Generation is a multiethnic, multi-generational coalition that is going to really be demonstrating how we transform and reimagine democratic institutions. And so it's less of a disruption intervention campaign, which is what UnKoch is, and it's more of a cultural organizing base building campaign.

Jasmine Banks:
And so we're going to start bringing people in, encouraging people wherever they're at to start to launch a common good generation chapter and come organize and build with us because when we think about what we're going to be facing in the next two to six years, it's intense and we need to be sitting in intergeneration wisdom circles and learning from our elders. We need to be thinking about how do we not just complain about the things that we don't like? How do we build things that are generative and that are the futures that we want? And so this will be a site of experimentation. So yeah, check us out, thecommongoodgeneration.org, or you can drop me a line at jasmine@unkochmycampus.org. And we are looking for volunteers and paid organizers and folks who want to conspire with us to really reimagine how we can be in community.

Shimon Cohen:
That's awesome. Yeah, I hope some folks who are checking out the podcast will take you up on that and get involved. And I just want to thank you again for coming on here and really thank you for doin' the work.

Jasmine Banks:
Yep. Agitate, organize. Thank you.

Shimon Cohen:
Thank you for listening to Doin’ The Work: Frontline Stories of Social Change. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Please follow on Twitter and leave positive reviews on iTunes. If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who’s doing great work, please get in touch. Thank you for doing real work to make this world a better place.

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