Rising. We are now around 50,000 new ones a day. This is the american exceptionalism that donald trump has achieved, and there is no plan to turn it around. No. There is just a plan to try to convince americans this is normal, this is fine. Thats what we get from a guy who inherited a bunch of money from his daddy and then spent decades of public life bsing and bullying and tieing people up in litigation and acting so shamelessly he was eventually able to get over on people, wear them out. Its not been a huge success, companies have gone bankrupt. But it has been enough to con his way through. Now hes up against the virus and all these tools hes used in the Business World hes tried to apply them to the virus and it doesnt work because the virus doesnt care. You cant shame it or wait it out. You cant spin it or draw it out in litigation or file for bankruptcy or distract people away from it. That doesnt make it go away. None of his tricks work. You cant b. S. A virus. And, so, hes left to try to tell us all to just get used to it. Dont worry. Just accept the death and the misery and the illness and the failure. But guess what . People arent going to get used to it because its not getusedtoable. I dont know about you, something broke in me in the last two weeks as we watched the spikes across the country. Reporting on this now for months and talking to Public Health experts every night, i knew things were bad and we were not likely to get back to normal. But i feel it intensely now as i watch these numbers and i think the country does, too. Heres the thing. For all the talk, and there is a lot of it, about how wildly divided we are, donald trump is unpopular for a reason. Numbers keep getting worse. People are not used to the pandemic. There is a rough social consensus, it is not complete, but a rough social consensus that the virus is bad and scarey and people dont want to catch it and we should do what we can to get it under control and it is a failure of leadership if we cant get it under control. Look at the state of texas when the governor rushed to open his state before the virus was contained. Eventually reversing course as things went from bad to worse. In texas, they have seen a crazy spike in cases and it is getting worse with the state setting new records for daily reported records and setting records for hospitalizations. More than 8,000 as of yesterday, raising the specter of the overcrowded hospitals we have already seen too many times before in new york and detroit. Indeed, officials in several texas cities are worried that hospitals may run out of beds in two weeks, if not sooner. The numbers are increasing dramatically. The predictions are, as terrible as these numbers are, this is the beginning. They will double in the next two weeks and then double again the week after that. Now, the one Silver Lining right now is we are not yet seeing huge spikes in fatalities yet. Hopefully thats going to continue. Maybe we think because it appears to be that young people are getting the virus and also we have improved treatments over three months. Thats the hope. We dont know. Even if its not having the devastating fatality rate its had in other places yet, guess what . Texans are changing their behavior to stay safe. Look at this. Data from open table shows that restaurant reservations in texas are down dramatically compared to last year, a drop of 62 yesterday, a drop of 75 the day before that. New polling lays out how scared people are of the virus. 65 of texans, two out of three, think it is unsafe to send their children to school in the fall. 53 say it is more important to control the spread of the virus even if it hurts the economy. We understand the virus has to be stopped even if their leaders cant quite seem to get it through their thick skulls. Joining me is the most senior elected official in the county that is home to houston. And, judge, let me ask you first to tell us how things look to you in Harris County and in the houston area given what were seeing in terms of case growth and fears about hospital capacity. Were very concerned about the hospitals. Ever since may 29th, weve had an increasing trend. We havent had a decrease a single day. And, so, that tells you before memorial day, before protests already, once the reopening got underway, these cases were starting out. The first time we had this issue back in march, i was able to issue a stayathome order. People were part of it. We worked together, and we stemmed that curve. Now this time i dont have the authority to do that. Im watching this go by. I read the news today that the Miamidade County executive was able to order restaurants closed. I cant do that anywhere here. Restaurants are open. Indoor events can take place of any size as long as theyre indoors and yet were seeing these numbers. We have had a couple of days where the hospitalizations are still increasing but a little bit slower. We dont know if thats a trend. Certainly the sevenday curve is faster than the 14day curve, so i imagine its going to speed back up, but were watching with a lot of concern and im advocating for a stayhome order here for the authority to be able to issue that again because we cant just be asking folks to do it as a suggestion. This is an urgent situation. I should note, you are referring the Governor Greg Abbott has presented local ordinances. He blocked mask ordinances for a while. He released this sevenminute video where lo and behold you should wear a mask. There is a mandatory order in state counties with more than 20 counties. Increased between april and june from 29 to 51 . What is going to turn this around, i guess, is the question . You talked a little bit ago about philosophically where we should be. And philosophically it doesnt make sense for the plan to be that we fill up all our beds before we take meaningful action. Thats just not right from a human standpoint, especially when you see this as the community it is, the community that dealt with hurricane harvey, thats come together so many times, that places a high value on human life. But even if were thinking purely intellectually from a numbers standpoint, and we want to be intellectually honest, we have to recognize that flattening the curve, so to speak, at this very high level will never allow us to sustainably reopen. If you reopen bars and even more things starting up here, you are going to run out of space. And, so, we got to get ahead of this. If there is one thing i have learned in my time in office and i have dealt with massive chemical fires, with floods, now this, is you have to control the disaster. You cant let the disaster control you. Unless we implement a stayhome order at least in this county, the disaster will keep controlling us. We have reopen in a safe way and we cant reopen until that curve comes down because everyone had memorial day. Everybody had protests. But the communities that were careful, that stayed closed longer, that opened fewer things in each phase, those are the ones that are doing better. Now we have the opportunity of that hindsight that we can see what worked and what didnt. So weve got the cards that we can use. The problem is we need to step up and do it. Thats why im advocating for that stayathome order here and asking my community to stay home. I thought this story was a joke or a dumb parody from some website. Am i correct the state gop will have an in Person Convention in houston this summer . Thats right. In about a week or two, they will be gathering here at one of the citys convention centers. What do you think about that . You know, same concern. Right now we know what works. What works is a stayhome order. What doesnt work is what we have been doing, even what were doing now. I dont believe that we should be allowing any kind of gathering of that size. I dont believe restaurants should be open. I think we need a stayhome order right now to get the economy back on track, to get our health projections back on track. So that or any other gathering i dont agree with. But then again, you know, theyre allowed right now. It doesnt matter the size. If theyre indoors, theyre allowed. If theyre outdoors, there is a limit. Weve got to step up and get in front of this thing. Final question for you. So what im hearing from you is greg abbott clearly thinks that mask usage might be the thing that knocks the trajectory away from what it is right now. What im hearing from you is you are convinced the trajectory cannot be really bent without a stayathome order. Thats right. And thats because there is no evidence to the contrary. We scoured the country, the globe, for examples. There are other countries that have been able to flatten that curve to bring it down with masks. But also they had significant Contact Tracing efforts, much more sophisticating testing and some measures that wouldnt pass muster here for Civil Liberties reasons that we treasure. We dont have an example in this country of a place that has brought that curve down with just masks. And we are not in a position to experiment right now. So weve got to buckle down and get smart and get real and honest. Be intellectually honest and be really human about what were seeing in this community and in other communities as well. Harris county judge, thank you so much for taking time from a very busy schedule to talk to us tonight. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I want to bring in michelle goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times who has been writing a lot about the pandemic. I said this in the opening and you and i had an exchange earlier today about this, just the sense that a lot of people sort of convinced themselves, tried to talk themselves into some optimistic case where we would bear down for the shut down and then maybe after the shut down there could be something that kind of looked like normal, even though a lot of us knew we werent putting the things in place to make that possible. But it seems to me there is something breaking in the american psyche about this as you look at that curve and think about how other countries are getting back to normal and we are not. Thats whats so devastating, right . Especially if you had kids in school and you were experiencing the nightmare of remote schooling. A lot of us just thought, okay, just get to the end of the year. And now were suddenly facing not just a summer of, you know, kind of a summer of all activities canceled and trying to endure a summer without any sort of help as parents, but facing the extreme unlikelihood that were going to have anything like Normal School in september. And then meanwhile looking around the world and seeing that everyone else with a couple exceptions is getting back to normal. I think they had fewer than 300 new cases in all of canada yesterday. Right . Fewer than 200 new cases in italy. People are having normal lives. People are, you know, they kind of went through the same very intense process that we went through in new york, but then they came out the other side of it. And for us it just looks at this point never ending. And when you think about what it means to kind of just, as trump or as trump allies said, get used to it, thats florida, right, basically saying we cant beat this thing so were just going to learn to live with it. You see very, very quickly where that goes and where that ends up. So what we have all you know, i have a lot more privilege than probably a lot of our viewers and a lot of people in this country, but we have all seen the things that make life worth living taken from us, and there is no schedule for getting any of it back, for resuming anything like a livable life. You know, the one thing, the weird part of the it is not a Silver Lining, but the weird thing that keeps grounding me back to some sense that gravity still exists is this sort of bizarre mind trick of this is fine, people are dying, people are getting sick, its fine. Dont worry about it. It isnt working. I thought this polling on this net approval of governors handling, this is from an nbc poll on governor ratings. Its like michigan who has attacked the virus is plus 18. Desantis is minus 6. And ducey is negative 26. There is some basic relationship between the competence of managing this and the public opinion. Look, you know if people you know are in the hospital. You know if people you know have died. You know if people you know are sick. You know if you are enduring the incredible burden of having your kids at home and trying to hold down a job at the same time. There is no spinning some of this stuff. Yeah. I still think it is unbelievable and a sign of our extreme polarization that trump is at 40 and not 5 . If you focus on that part, too, that part of it does seem insane because in any objective sense. I mean, our lives are ruined. It is the case, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Its really right . And a lot of us have watched the institutions of this country burned. We have watched the things that maybe we thought made america what the kind of liberal democracy that our patriotism attached to, we have watched all of that being eroded. But now were seeing our daytoday lives become untenable because donald trump has done to this country what donald trump did to his stakes and casinos and to Everything Else that he has ever touched. Yep. And he did it and the two canaries in the coal mine is what he did to puerto rico after Hurricane Maria is in the direction of incompetent and cruel and to people seeking asylum in our country where they couldnt bother to put the Families Together in some database. Those were the canaries in the coal mine. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know, that i think its such an important the fact that people sort of thought that, you know, it was just them, that puerto ricans, he can the fact that they didnt apply that lesson to their own safety, that they didnt see in that a source of an ominous warning of what would befall them if they ever faced a crisis under this presidency is a sign of just how much his legitimacy has relied on dehumanizing large parts of the population because otherwise people wouldnt realize that Something Like this was going to happen. Michelle goldberg, im going to use that hes throwing paper towels at all of us line. Thank you. Thank you. See you. Coming up, the president s latest bogus claim about the coronavirus and the real toll that coronavirus takes on the bodies of many of those who survive it. Reinventing. Its what Small Businesses do. With comcast business, your Small Business can work faster, with powerful internet from the nations largest gigspeed network. Work safer, with all your connected devices automatically protected by securityedge. And work anywhere, with comcast business at home, our new businessgrade Internet Solution for remote workers. Whatever your business needs, comcast business has the solutions to help you not just bounce back, but bounce forward. Call or go online to find out more. The president celebrated july 4th this year with a speech at the white house front lawn where he made the claim that 99 of coronavirus cases in this country are, and i quote him here, totally harmless. That provably false assertion led to pushback from doctors and Fact Checkers alike, but also memorable squirming from trumps fda commissioner who refused to weigh in on the accuracy of the president s bogus statistic. Talk to any er doctor who has dealt with this disease, they will tell you reality is 15 of coronavirus confirmed patients to require hospitalization. Among these are the socalled longhaulers, those who exhibit symptoms for over 100 days. Chest pain, shortness of breath, nausea and heart palpitations for months. Nick cordero, the actor who had zero preexisting conditions, spent three months in the hospital, from everything from a heart attack to sepsis and leg amputation before succumbing to the virus. He was 41. This virus is still so knew and there remains so much we dont know about it even as day by day we try to learn more. Joining me now is an Infectious Disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins center for health security. I thought we would start on this topic of these longhaulers chronic cases because it is a really disturbing aspect of this. Obviously we know about the fatality rates particularly among people 70 or older. But this category, what do we know about the category of people that seem to have this and be very sick for a very long time. Well, what we know is that some people with any type of virus they get can have a post viral syndrome where after they cleared the virus the symptoms may decrease and theyre not having the fevers and chills, but they may have lingering symptoms like headaches, trouble concentrating, fatigue. We really dont know exactly why people get this, but there clearly are a subset of individuals who get a coronavirus, seemingly recover but then are plagued with these symptoms that are debilitating and can interfere with our quality of life. I wonder, have we seen things like this with sort of similar viruses in this family like sars and mers which never quite blew up here in the u. S. , but is there precedent for this . There is precedent with other viruses, but when it comes to sars and mers, they cause so much severe disease, we didnt see many mild cases of those. Right. And those that go into the icu with pneumonia, those people will always have a posticu syndrome. It is hard to compare this coronavirus. We definitely have seen it with any number of infection. There is this group of people that have post viral syndromes that we really find a mystery to deal with. You know, one of the things that struck me when the sort of first wave was hitting places like new york and i was talking to a lot of er doctors was this real manifest frustration with a lack of clear treatment protocols. They would do things that the symptoms were presenting this way. It would backfire and wouldnt work. It was a very confounding this disease. I thought this piece was interesting that there has been a lot of collective effort by doctors and clinicians to talk about treatment protocols months. Doctors collective experience is starting to build a frame work of how best to cope with coronavirus patients as many as 1,000 Covid Research papers are being written daily. Do you think we have made Real Progress on that in the clinical front in the last three months . I definitely think were in a better place now. I can say we got much better protocols. We have a much better answering of the disease, how it causes symptoms, what complications might occur, how to prevent those complications. We have remdesivir and the use of steroids in certain patients. Were much better at using mechanical ventilators and understanding there is a nuanced strategy. I do think thats been good that we have been able to do this and disseminate this knowledge widely around the world. It may help when he get more severe cases to decrease that mortality rate of hospitalized patients. There was news today i thought was interesting, caught a lot of peoples attention about the evidence for a mutated strain that is spreading in Harris County and around houston. Doctors say there is evidence there is a mutated strain that is actually spreading faster. So far it seems like there has been quite a lot of viral stability. What is your sense of what we know about this mutation and what more we need to learn . So all viruses mutate. Coronavirus mutates much less. But there is this one dominant mutation weve seen all over the world. What it looks like in the lab is that its more efficient to transmit. It gets up to higher viral loads. We havent been able to prove this happens in people or actually out in the wild. But it is something to look for. But it doesnt change anything about the virus in terms of its severity. It might be more contagious, but thats not been fully proven. It is something we have to watch but it really hasnt changed how we treat this, what social distancing measures we recommend and it is something thats really going to evolve, the virus is going to evolve and we have to be prepared for the mutations. Final question for you briefly. The aerosol controversy. We know the droplet spreader when you cough or sneeze. The question of whether it can hang in the air essentially and that can infect people has been a sort of controversial question unresolved. Right now we have 200 scientists from over 30 countries urging the World Health Organization to take this more seriously, say there is growing evidence the virus can spread indoors and can be infectious in smaller quantities than previously thought. How definitive do you think this is right now . Because it really has been a contested question. It is still a contested question. It is not very definitive yet. We know the droplet transmission for people in close contact with each other, thats where were seeing most of the transmission. Were not seeing the epidemiology consistent with measles or chickenpox which are classic airborne diseases. We probably are getting some, but is it driving transmission outside of for example hospitals where there is those procedures going on . I dont think thats the case. That will be a debate that will continue for some time. Thats a really fascinating point, those other precedents where we know that it is aerosolized and we know what those growth curves look like. That was really, really enlightening. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Still ahead, why donald trump wants to make the upcoming election all about big pieces of carved rock and why that may backfire. Audible is my roadtrip companion. Its kind of my quiet, alone time. Audible is a routine for me. Its like a fun night school for adults. I could easily be seduced into locking myself into a place where i do nothing but listen to books. I never was interested in historical fiction before, but im obsessed with it now. There are a lot of like, classic and big titles that i feel like i missed out since i dont have time to read, mean i might as well listen. If i want to catch up on the news or history or learn whats going on in the world, i can download a book and listen to it. Because i listened to her story over and over again, i made the decision to go ahead and follow my own dream, which was to help other veterans. I think theres like 180 books in my, in my library now. It changes your perspective; it makes you a different person. Its true, its so true. To start your free 30day trial, just text listen17 to 500500. To start your free 30day trial, this virus is testing all of us. And its testing the people on the front lines of this fight most of all. So abbott is getting new tests into their hands, delivering the critical results they need. And until this fight is over, we. Will. Never. Quit. Because they never quit. Donald trump and a lot of people in the Republican Party and conservatives on Television Want to turn the 2020 election into the statue election. They put out this hilarious campaign ad, the campaign vowing to protect the statue of christ the redeemer, probably the most famous sight in brazil as if antifa was going to rent a crane and like take down the 12 story statue for a few days. Clearly there is a line of thinking among republicans if they can defend the honor of George Washington on mount rushmore, for example, they can get back on the right side of public opinion. The problem is that the president as he has been doing ever since the birther controversy keeps saying the quiet part loud. There is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard, struggled, they blend to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of Violent Crime in our cities. That was just a little small portion of the president s weekend of unending toxic racial grievance culminating with a tweet storm today. Despite the fact that Bubba Wallace says he did not report it or even see it himself. The president also in that same tweet criticized nascar for banning the flag of treason and slavery from their events. He went on to slur elizabeth warren. Now, generations upon generations of White American politicians have learned how powerful it is to harness white racial grievance, but with a thin venire of equanimity and charity. One note, he has been playing for years and hes going to keep playing it come hell or high water. Right now, at least for right now it is not working. Well talk about that when we come back. So whats going on . Im a talking dog. The other issue. Oh. Im scratching like crazy. Youve got some allergic itch with skin inflammation. Apoquel can work on that itch in as little as 4 hours, whether its a new or chronic problem. And apoquels treated over 8 million dogs. Nice. And. The talking dog thing . Is it bothering you . No. Itching like a dog is bothering me. Until dogs can speak for themselves, you have to. When allergic itch is a problem, ask for apoquel. Apoquel is for the control of itch associated with allergic dermatitis and the control of Atopic Dermatitis in dogs. Do not use apoquel in dogs less than 12 months old or those with serious infections. Apoquel may increase the chance of developing serious infections and may cause existing parasitic skin infestations or preexisting cancers to worsen. Do not use in breeding, pregnant, or lactating dogs. Most common side effects are vomiting and diarrhea. Feeling better . Im speechless. Thanks for the apoquel. Aw. Thats what friends are for. Ask your veterinarian for apoquel next to you, apoquel is a dogs best friend. It was a brilliantly coined shorthand for the first term of obamas presidency. Informal campaign slogan. Osama bin laden is dead and General Motors is alive. That was the answer given by then Vice President joe biden during the National Convention in 2012 after republicans posed the question, are you better off now than you were four years ago. Here we are in 2020 and now your loved ones may be dead by confederate statues are still alive. Is the statue stuff going to work . Joining us the White House Correspondent for pbs news hour who on more than one occasion con fronted President Trump over his racist language. It is great to have you. I think there is sometimes a sense of like the president has some strategy, distraction, et cetera, and i think he does think there is some upside in this. It strikes me that most of the people in gop dont want him tweeting about Bubba Wallace and the washington football team, and this is actually just like what he thinks. I think youre right. There is part strategy, part impulse here. Now the president won in 2016 on just this strategy going after immigrants, talking about africanamerican saying, what the hell do you have to lose. So now were back in 2020 and the president thinking, this is a strategy that will work for me. Hes clearly settled on this strategy that is about culture wars and about pushing at the things that he thinks divides americans most. The issue is that some of these issues dont divide americans. Think about the issue of the confederate flag. The White House Press secretary said the president hasnt really settled on a stance when it comes to the confederate flag, which as you noted is a symbol of people who supported slavery and treason. You also think that the president is doing all this while we have a coronavirus outbreak that is just deepening all over the country and one that the New York Times had to sue the Trump Administration and the cdc to get information on that showed that its disproportionately affecting americans and latinos. It is with that backdrop that the president continues to do these things. Yes. There is also the fact that there is a sort of infamous memo that pat buchanan writes to nixon when hes talking about certain culture war issues. It does seem like cleaning the country in half and getting the smaller half is whats happening here. I thought this was interesting. Shes worked for mcconnell and rand paul. Seems potus is determined to give evidence to the i think hes trying to lose the election theorists. The professionals in the gop do not see this as a particularly winning strategy. Thats right. But the president also, i think, continues to go back to 2016 where people told him he was doing the wrong thing. It worked in 2016. Of course it failed miserably in 2018 when of course House Speaker nancy pelosi gets to be the House Speaker because President Trump decided to talk about american carnage and didnt have an answer for health care. In 2020, thats what hes leaning on. When i talk to historians, they say hes leaning in on White America and the history of america as essentially white. This idea that our heritage is at stake when hes talking about white heritage and the myth that was america of this place that treated everyone equally. So i think the president is also thinking this is what my base wants. These are the people that have stuck with me this amount of time and i can keep using those same people to win another election. There is also this comical inconsistency to the president. Like the virus is going away. Oh, it is actually the equivalent to world war ii. Hes done this with biden. He got away with it with hillary clinton. When it comes to joe biden, these are two ads currently running by the Trump Campaign about joe biden. One of them is you wont be safe in Joe Bidens America because he will get rid of the police. And the other is we do everything for hang people for jaywalking in this bill. Like there is some problem there in some kind of unified message if you are running both those ads at the same time. Thats why the president is making the case hes a law and order president while saying hes not going to usher in the next wave of mass incarceration. So i think there is a messaging issue there. I think also the big issue is that hes trying to make this message that joe biden is somehow incompetent and unable to do the job of the presidency while at the same time, hes getting crowds to clap for him because he can drink water with one hand. You see a president contrasting his messaging all over the place. I think part of the main issue and the main messaging problem is that you have in President Trump someone who does things from daytoday that really are just not at all, i think, in one line of a direct message. Today you think of the Washington Redskins tweet. Did he really have to send that tweet . But the president obviously couldnt help himself. He had to weigh in on this issue that is in some ways an unsettled issue. They should change their name. But the president cant resist. And as a result you have the campaign and the white house having to circle the wagons, something they didnt want to have to focus on today. Yeah. And its also i mean, the ultimate thing i keep coming back here is hes the incumbent and thats the reality here. In some ways, whatever criticisms he levels at whoever about the statues, like, there is a once in a century pandemic raging. And there is incredible reporting from some of your colleagues, you know, about this white house about, other, should we get people to get used to it . Does he have to talk about the pandemic . The way there is some way around this is nuts but apparently some people inside the white house think there is some path around it. Well, the president has settled on this idea that he needs to change the strategy of how he talks about the virus instead of the strategy on how he actually tackles the virus itself. Right. What you see is a white house and a presidency that wants to talk about the virus as being in the rearview mirror. Even at the white house, were not getting temperature checks anymore. Hes trying to move past it. When the numbers and the actual americans who are dying continue to be the issue that he cant get passed. As a result, people will be continue to be scared if their loved ones and neighbors are dying and thats something that the president just cant get around. The White House Correspondent for the pbs news hour, always great talking. Thank you. Thanks. Still ahead, senator corey booker is one of the several lawmakers who has been pushing the cdc to release key data on the coronavirus. Data has been released. He joins me to discuss next. Ne. 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And the results are disturbing as they are all too familiar. According to cdc data, black and latino people contract the virus 3 times the rate of the white neighbors that disparity is across different states, People Living in cities verse suburbs and even across different age groups. Whatever you control for, the people most affected by the virus are the ones that beared the brunt of the other plagues. Housing segregation. Wealth and equality. And this revelation comes as we are in the midst of a once in a generation civil rights demonstration from city to city against those same institutional prejudices. Joining us now is a member of congress that pushed for the release of the data, democrat from new jersey, senator corey booker. I know you and others were working on compiling it and getting it. Why was it so important to you . Well, we know we have a country with a wild Health Care Disparities already. And we knew that this was going to be in particular, a help in dealing with what i saw first hand as a guy who lives in a majority africanamerican city, that this city was ravaging africanamerican communities. If you address something, you need to have the data that forms those strategies. It was for me and other members of congress to get the information. What is your reaction to seeing it laid out in the way that the cdc has . I think we all anticipated the general direction of this. But, it is quite stark how consistent the pattern is across so many different areas. You know, it reveals what is the truth in our country, is we have these pro found Racial Disparities that penetrate so many areas of American Life. From employment to the criminal justice system, you have written about that eloquently, but also, to the areas of health care. You know, i have been dealing with one of the founders along with Tammy Duckworth of the environmental caucus, because we, she and i both know that the number one indicator of whether you are going to be drinking dirty water. Whether you are going to be breathing toxic air, whether you will live around toxic Super Fund Sites is the number one indicator and the color of your skin. And we have africanamericans that have less access to health care and more. So, this is not surprising to me, but it does highlight the urgency of this moment. Yeah, you know, i you mention, you talk about the disparities and its remarkable when you walk through just the data, right. Just this sort of objective conditions with the people of the country, in different racial categories and whether its Household Wealth and the ability to buy a home, and life expectancy. How many years are you going to live, Health Disparities and health outcomes, poverty and environmental justice, they are enormous. I am curious what you think of the moment we are in. It seems that the protests that are by some measures the largest we have seen in generations if not decades, starts with the killing of george floyd on camera, and addressing all the various Racial Disparities and how people are policed and Household Wealth. And theres to me a kind of desire to wrench them in to the sort of cultural symbolic realms that the answer is they take a golden girls episodes off the streaming service, but the disparities you are talking about, are so pro found, what do you think about the National Conversation that we are having right now, more than a month after mr. Floyds death . Well, so, first of all, im encouraged to see the kind of dialog, conversations and movement that we have had but we are just in the foothills of the mountain we have to climb in this country. And have to come to grips. And speak truth about. This is not going to be an easy quick fix. They are not some corporations who pull down their pancake mix or change the name of a product or put a little bit of, of sort of, more emphasis on diversity. Thes these are deep structural problems in our country that hurt everyone. Economic, education. These have a Financial Impact on the if flourishing of our nation as a whole, and theres a urgency that we go deeper than we are right now. So, this is an encouraging beginning, but if america really stops and looks plain at the data of, and really of the not deep historical roots. We dont have to go back that many generations. You wrote about it again in your great book, this was by design, in my lifetime. I mean, i told the story a lot about how on my, on the campaign trail last year, about that it was, i was a baby when my parents had to get a white couple to pose as them to buy a house in a, and to be the first black family to integrate a part of new jersey, because housing segregation was so stark. And following that, the disspirit Educational Opportunities and following that, following a whole bunch of other aspect of life opportunities. These are all deeply entrenched problems that we created as a society by consciously doing it, and now, its systemically apparent. But to deal with this, we have to have the same conscious intention and the first thing we have to do is be aware of the depth of the problem and thats where im hoping this conversation as a nation goes. You know, one of the other huge disparities in American Life of course, is the likelihood of particularly young black men being victims of violence, particularly violent homicide. We have seen in the, in the last few weeks there have been really some really worrying data out of cities like atlanta, minneapolis, chicago, new york, about year over year increases in shootings and homicides. Theres a certain argument being made explicitly by the nypd commissioner today by others who tend to be conservative saying look, this is what happens, you protest the police and you say you dont want to police and you say you want to defund the police and they go in a defensive crouch and then we have Violent Crime. And somebody who lives in newark still, i want to you to respond to that argument because it goes all the way up to the president of the United States. Its shamefully shallow and it hurts. I do not have to watch the tv, i have lived the experience, a block up the street from where i lived in the high rise projects, these beautiful, brilliant children, boys used to hang out in the lobby. First one died was hassan washington back in 2006, the last of the crew that died was shahad smith. Shot with an Assault Rifle at the top of the block i lived on. The numbers of kids that i know that are dead right now, in a world that is constantly assaulting them, from poisoning them with the water that they drink. Assaulting their lungs with the air they breathe. Denying their equal educational rights. I could go deeply on the causes. I could show you the data, extending medicaid lowers violence. Economic security programs, expanding the earned income tax credit lowers violence in america. Why are we thinking that Public Safety in america, true safety and security means more police or less police . True safety in america is investing in those things of human flourishing. When i was the mayor of the city of newark, and i asked how we solve the gang problems, and he said, we dont solve the problems. He knew that the problems stem from a poverty of empathy in our nation. And god, if we want to talk about being the kind of beloved community that is necessary to prevent this level of violence and death and attacks and assaults on black bodies in our country, we have to have a deeper conversation that is far more focused on a more substantive type of love that is evident in policy and investments and true caring in children to prevent problems from happening before we read about them in our newspapers and our statistics. Senator, corey booker of the great city of newark, new jersey, thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you, my friend. I am grateful for you, more than you know. Thanks. That is all in for this evening. The the 11th hour with Brian Williams starts now. Good evening once again. Day 1264 of the Trump Administration. Leaving 120 days roughly four months until the president ial election. Coronavirus cases are still spiking after what was a busy fourth fourth of july weekend. The surge in new cases comes as the president is working hard to downplay the virus and play up the culture war. The United States has recorded 250,000 new cases in just these first few days of july. Tonight the u. S. Is approaching the 3 million mark of confirmed cases, having already surpassed 130,000 deaths. According to the New York Times, new coronavirus cases are increasing in 38 of our 50 states. Ten states are up over 100 . Florida saw its highest oneday total on saturday with over 11,000 confirmed cases. So far the state has reported over 200,000 infections. Well have much more on the