Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award-winning journalist Karen Hunter, host of her own show on SiriusXM Urban View channel 126, joined Breitbart News Daily with host Stephen K. Bannon to talk about her “Party of Lincoln” app–currently available for free in the Apple Store, with a Droid version in the works.
The Party of Lincoln is a movement that reaches out to African American voters who feel “abused and taken for granted” by the Democrat Party and “ignored” by the GOP, as its mission statement declares.
Hunter said she designed the Party of Lincoln app to counter “the lack of diversity in technology, as far as it relates to African Americans in particular.”
She recalled:
I had Van Jones on my show a couple of years ago, and he was talking about an initiative he and Prince were working on called “Yes, We Code” to get a million kids in the urban community to learn how to code, to get involved with technology, because there are going to be a million jobs unmanned.
She continued, “And I said, ‘Well, what could we do?’ That’s always the question that I ask my audience, and I ask myself every day. What can we do to change the paradigm, to move the needle, to shift something in the universe? What can we do?”
She decided to launch her own tech initiative, including a “Tech Tuesday” with technology guests every week on her radio show.
“As we were listening to folks building apps, I’m like, ‘Let’s build an app,’” she said. “We had a political movement, the Party of Lincoln, and I was like, ‘Well, let’s do a political app.’”
“It’s a non-partisan app, which I’m extremely proud of,” Hunter said. Elaborating, she stated:
The political movement is different from the app. The app is really just about getting people involved, getting them engaged, and, more importantly, empowering them. You can pick your state [and] register to vote. Each state is different, of course; some states won’t allow you to do it online, so you can actually get the paperwork to register to vote.
“You can check facts; we have PolitiFacts on this app,” she continued. “You can check the latest polls. The latest poll right now has Hillary Clinton, a CBS poll, leading Trump by six points. You can get that on the Party of Lincoln app.” She also said, “The Constitution is on this app. You can run for office, and we can support you through this app; you know, we can donate to your campaign and even nominate folks. You can contact your local congressperson.”
“It’s all about getting people involved,” Hunter declared, explaining:
We even have a “Learn” section, where we’ve enlisted folks like historian Jason Johnson, historian Kenneth C. Davis from the You Don’t Know Much About series of books to give lessons on, for example, what’s the Electoral College? How did that come about? What was the Three-Fifths Compromise? Ari Berman talks about voter disenfranchisement on this app. We have legal expert Laura Coates breaking down the importance of the Supreme Court.
“If you don’t know anything about politics–which, it seems like we’re in a ‘low-information’ era–this app will get you on board,” she promised. “There’s even a link to Ballotpedia, where you can research the different various people, locally and nationally, who are in office right now.”
Hunter explained that development of the Party of Lincoln app was crowdsourced, along with investments from her show and its business partners, to ensure that it could be provided to users free of charge. She was proud to say her crowdfunding goal of $1,865–an amount symbolizing the year the Emancipation Proclamation was signed–was met in just four days, and the amount more than doubled by the end of the one-month fundraising period.
“It’s about social activism,” she said. “This is where we are right now. We need people to be completely active in their future.”
Hunter declared:
I want to show people that you do have power. When we did the petition to take down the Confederate Flag from the state house in South Carolina, three days, five hundred thousand signatures. People do have power, and if you come together around an issue, if you come together with a purpose, you can move the needle in this country. This is about We the People.
She was pleased to announce the Party of Lincoln app has “cracked the top 100” downloads on the Apple Store, with several thousand downloads occurring every day.
“I have teachers that are using it in their classrooms,” she said, “and for me, that’s the proudest thing–that we put together something that wasn’t out in the marketplace, but is absolutely useful, that you can go do every day, and even check if people are online, all of that. It’s very, very empowering, the app.”
“But the movement itself, the Party of Lincoln, which I actually wrote about in 2014 in The Huffington Post, is even deeper,” she said, then added:
It’s about not putting all your political eggs in one basket, and really using the system. You know, everyone’s talking about rules, and “the system is rigged,” and all this other stuff. But the system is only rigged when you don’t know how the system works. So it’s incumbent upon us to know what the rules are. How does this thing work, and where is the power?
With her app up and running, Hunter said the next step was “to figure out this political thing–because we’re in a world of trouble right now.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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