Heather McGee

Tanya, thank you so much for having me.

I want to say, first of all, that

In a really masterful way, everything that the Trump administration is doing is both about what it's doing, asking for people to complain to the government about perceived bias, and about driving an underlying core narrative.

And that core narrative is an us versus them, zero-sum story.

It's a story that says that there can be no mutual progress.

that if people of color or women get ahead, if there are more immigrants, then that must come at the expense of white people, of men, of native-born citizens, right?

It's this core zero-sum lie.

I call it a lie because the facts make it very clear.

In fact, civil rights have been a benefit to most sectors of the society.

that anti-discrimination laws have had beneficiaries from people with disabilities, first-generation college students, white women have been the disproportionate beneficiaries of affirmative action, and that even white men have, because of longstanding deliberate and explicit bias towards them,

have actually benefited from companies and institutions that have been more successful because of their diversity.

And so we really have to both take the face value of what's happening and also understand that for this new EEOC chair to say, white men, you are being hurt by this new pandemic,

as in the last 60 years, regime of civil and equal rights is really about both soliciting plaintiffs, but more importantly, it's about selling a story, selling a story to white people that says you should fear the progress and even the presence of people of color.

You know, it's funny now because I wrote The Sum of Us in the era of 2017 to 2021.

And I had to do a lot of legwork to find where this zero-sum narrative was coming from, who was selling this idea for their own profit, and, of course, ultimately what it was costing people to buy this idea that there's no mutual progress, that they should fear profit.

their neighbor and their neighbor's success.

Of course, now in the year 2026, we hear that zero-sum story everywhere.

Us versus them, as the fascism scholar Jason Stanley says, is the core story of fascism.

Yes.

I mean, when I look at the history of this country, in many ways, the zero-sum story was even older than the 20th century.