As a 25-year veteran of the federal government, Deric Gilliard worked under five presidents before retiring in 2022. His tenure in the Department of Health and Human Services under the first Trump administration was so fraught with challenges — repeated attempts to scuttle the ACA, denial of COVID, and a general embrace of falsehoods — that he wrote a book about it, The Longest Four Years of My Life.
He is also a veteran of the civil rights movement, having done communications work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and written a collection of stories by men and women who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King during those challenging times. Today, he sees history repeating itself at the hands of the Trump administration’s masked police force under the guise of immigration reform.
“We are hurtling towards an autocracy very, very clearly,” he says. “It’s almost as unbelievable as watching January 6th.”
Many of the pictures we’ve seen of crowds of protestors being teargassed, taken to the ground, even shot to death, bring back scenes of brutality in southern locales during the 1960s at a time when black people were similarly attacked. But like then, Gilliard hopes that repeated images of brutality in the media, along with people of diverse backgrounds standing up for basic rights, will stop the violence and defuse the divisiveness.
Politics isn’t my usual wheelhouse for this podcast, but I thought the parallels between the civil rights movement and today’s uprisings by everyday Americans were too important to ignore. Hear more of Deric Gilliard’s historical perspective on this episode of Type. Tune. Tint. Video and podcast are below.