Air Date 9/17/2024

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Air Date 9/13/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. 

We've been living through the modern equivalent of the oil boom, back when poking a hole in the ground would make one of the world's most valuable substances upon which entire economies would be built, simply bubble out of the ground. But in our case, it's not oil—it's data. Now, we are at a pivotal moment as the old, unchallenged master of data, Google, has been found guilty of illegal anti-competitive behavior, at the same time as generative AI companies are in a new, desperate rush to stake claims on every last piece of data they can find. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in under an hour today include Andrewism, Your Undivided Attention, the 80,000 Hours Podcast, POLITICO Tech, The Hartman Report, and The Socialist Program. Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections. Section [00:01:00] A, the threat. Section B, big tech lobbying. Section C, regulation. And section D, thinking through solutions.

The New Colonialism of Big Tech - Andrewism - Air Date 9-3-24

 

ANDREW SAGE - HOST, ANDREWISM: Colonialism never ended, it simply evolved. Historically, colonialism involved the capture of land and labor. Between 1800 and 1875, on average, 215,000 square kilometres were added as colonies every year, or approximately one Guyana. Between 1875 and 1945, 620,000 square kilometres were added as colonies each year, or approximately one Ukraine.

By 1945, one in three people lived under colonial rule. In the decades following World War II, despite the waves of independence, we are still dealing with the consequences of colonialism. It has taken on many forms over its time span, from exploitation colonialism to settler colonialism. In their book Data Grab: The New Colonialism of [00:02:00] Big Tech and How to Fight Back, which you absolutely should read, sociologists Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explore one of colonialism's latest forms.

Data Colonialism, which captures not land, but data, and has quietly grown to threaten new dimensions of our lives and futures. 

Just to be clear, we're not saying that today's digital wars are equivalent to the brutality of colonial life in previous centuries. That would be absurd. Land and data are two very different types of assets. Rather, the framework of colonialism makes it possible for us to understand our current digital lives and power relations with the corporations that define them. including how those power relations came to be and continue to exist. 

Data colonialism is a social order in which the continuous extraction of data from our lives generates massive wealth for the few and suffering for the many on a global scale. This process is extensive in its appropriation of human life, as it captures and monetizes nearly everything about [00:03:00] the way we live, move, consume, and converse, with worrying implications on education, healthcare, housing, agriculture, policing, and more. With 3 in 8 people using Facebook and 1 in 8 people using TikTok, with 329 million terabytes of data harvested per day and projections for 2025 estimating 181 zettabytes of data being gathered, the conquistadors of the cloud are pillaging nearly everywhere and everyone.

This isn't to condemn the mere concept of collecting data. That would be as absurd as condemning the telegraph for the role it played in British colonialism, or condemning modern medicine because many of its earliest breakthroughs were appropriated from indigenous peoples. Data's not bad in and of itself. We need data about the world around us, how it affects us, and how we affect it, so that we can understand and change for the better. 

The issue is really how data is extracted: from what, from whom, and on what terms. When data is merely a tool for generating profit in the hands of corporations, that's when we have to stand up and challenge those terms and [00:04:00] conditions.

Data colonialism is not separate from other forms of colonialism. It is an evolution, a continuation of their compounding effects. By understanding the meaning and consequences of data colonialism, along with the civilizing mission used to justify it, we can determine ways to resist its rule and decolonize data for a better tomorrow.

Like other forms of colonialism, data colonialism is deeply intertwined with capitalism. Far from being separate stages in some teleological process, capitalism cannot be understood without its connection to colonialism. The wealth generated in the colonies financed the factories, it enriched and empowered Europe's proto capitalists, and innovated methods of rational management that would be taken from the plantation ground to the factory floor.

The divisions of our capitalist world cannot be properly contextualized without a colonial framework, and by understanding that connection, we can recognize the resemblance between the land grabs of the past and the data grabs of today. Colonialism and capitalism are continuously mutating and [00:05:00] adapting, though their core mission remains the same. Of course, colonialism will look different today because the kind of violence it establishes in the first place set up the social relations that enable it to continue through less overt and more symbolic forms of violence. As Mejias and Couldry put it, "Your dispossession, your loss of control over the data that affects you, and the impact that this has on your ability to control the terms on which you work, get loans, educate your children, and so on, may be no less absolute." 

But no violence is needed to persuade you to click the box that says "I agree to the terms and conditions" before installing an app. That click alone, by virtue of the vast legal and practical infrastructure of capitalist social relations, is enough to plunge us into endless spirals of data extraction. In other words, today's forms of extraction are almost frictionless, although that doesn't mean their long-term repercussions are entirely non-violent. 

Despite being an ardent decolonialist, one of the video game genres I used to enjoy the most was the 4X sub genre of strategy games. I spent many [00:06:00] hours of my youth playing Civilization V and later Civilization VI. A few years ago, I quite enjoyed playing Humankind. I was never particularly good at these games, mind you, but they were certainly designed to help you grasp and internalize the 4Xs of colonialism: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Historical colonizers explored to find places to control; expanded their holdings by forced, appropriate labour and resources; exploited the colonies for all the wealth they could squeeze; and exterminated any opposition through direct violence, or indirectly, through the suffocation of social and economic alternatives to colonial life.

Data colonizers also explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Rather than exploring land, With the rise of internet use, data colonizers establish and explore data territories, also known as platforms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, where interactions can be mediated and harvested. Within such territories, the innocuously-named "cookies" have [00:07:00] become one of the most powerful means of capturing massive amounts of data about internet users.

Data colonizers further seek to expand computers into every interaction and expand the platforms and connections between platforms to gather even more data. Everything from your phone to your vacuum to your fridge to your doorbell to your watch can now gather data about your habits, interactions, opinions, and spaces. Data grabs are taking place in the data territories of agriculture, education, health, and especially work. John Deere tracks its tractors. Google Classroom and other edutech services are expanding into more classrooms and doing who knows what with the data. Fitbit information is being fed to insurance companies. Surveillance, while always being part of capitalist management, has expanded significantly within workplaces, punishing desperate gig workers with lower wages, keeping warehouse workers scanning continuously, and tracking every office worker's keystrokes.

Of course, simply having the data is not enough. Data colonizers must exploit that data. Google's vast data territory is among the [00:08:00] most lucrative sites for exploitation. They have "pioneered" -- cloning language very much intended -- new ways to sell ads using previously untapped swathes of data. Data colonizers convert data into wealth and power through targeted advertising, user manipulation, and predictive, often discriminatory algorithms.

Finally, data colonizers exterminate, not through physical violence, but symbolic and systemic violence, by eradicating alternative ways of thinking and being, and by creating monopolies that are so powerful that they shape the course of genocides and health crises.

Tech's Big Money Campaign is Getting Pushback with Margaret O'Mara and Brody Mullins - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-26-24

 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Okay, so Brody, I want to set up this conversation with a bit of historical context. There's so much in the press about lobbying and dark money, and people might forget or don't realize that lobbying actually has a long history in American politics, right?

BRODY MULLINS: Yeah, lobbying's been around for a number of years. In fact one of the things I found interesting in researching for my book is that the Founding Fathers envisioned a day in which there would [00:09:00] be lobbying. They called lobbyists "factions", and they thought they'd be a pro-industry faction and a pro -worker or consumer faction. But they thought those factions would be about the same size and strength. They'd battle each other to an equilibrium to create laws and regulations that both sides supported. The problem that we've had that we document in our book is in the last 50 years, companies have gotten so powerful and spending so much money in Washington that they've really outflanked, outgunned, outspent the consumer side, so that right now in Washington, big companies, particularly the tech companies, have all the power and influence over shaping our legislation, and the consumers, the rest of us, the little guy, have no influence. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: What changed over the last century in lobbying? 

BRODY MULLINS: Yeah, basically from the New Deal to the Great Society, companies actually had very little influence in Washington. Companies did not spend much money trying to influence public policy. Business was good, profits were high, companies cared about their employees. And everything changed in the 1970s. In the 1970s, the economy cratered with [00:10:00] stagflation. We had inflation. Oil prices, gas prices quadrupled. And that really dragged the economy into the tank.

And what business people did is they look around and said, Hey, what's the problem? Well, what's going on with our profits? Why is our business not doing well? And they saw the incredible growth of the federal government in the last 50, 60, 70 years had created so many rules and regulations that were required to comply with and spend money complying with.

As a result, companies for the first time in the 1970s started investing in Washington. And when I say investing, I mean hiring lobbyists, making campaign donations. And from that period until now, corporate America has been incredibly powerful in Washington, more powerful, as I say, than any other interest group in town.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I believe it's a quote from your book that from 1967 to 2007, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington exploded from some five or six dozen to nearly 15,000. Is that right? 

BRODY MULLINS: Absolutely. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Margaret, your thoughts? 

MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah. I think that, just as Brody said, lobbying has in some form been around since the founding of the [00:11:00] Republic. There have always been people trying to persuade the legislature and the president to do their bidding. 

The other thing that was happening in the 1970s or at the beginning of the 70s was that big business was not very popular. If you go to a college campus that's where students are mobilizing against the Vietnam War, they're also mobilizing against big business and defense contractors and any part of the establishment. And so part of this was also trying to make business great again and bring it back in favor, as an American enterprise was core to the American project. 

So, yes, there's active lobbying on particular pieces of legislation. But there's also broader PR that is maybe Washington-focused or policy-focused, but spills out into something that everyone notices and sees, that the public image of a company or an industry is something that plays a big role. And certainly that's played a big role in the story of tech. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, I think that's really important, actually. It's so easy to look at lobbying and just synonymize it with pure greed or pure influence peddling. And I think that's what's confusing about lobbying is it both is an [00:12:00] influence peddling game and it's also a public relations game.

BRODY MULLINS: Yeah, to go back to make one point again, a good detail here is that in the 1970s, or right before the 1970s, companies had so little influence in Washington that General Motors found itself in a fight with Ralph Nader. You know, Ralph Nader was a individual consumer advocate who took on General Motors -- is the General Motors as in, "What's good for GM is good for the country." and Ralph Nader beat them on auto safety regulations. And what that shows, one, is how much influence consumer groups and Ralph Nader had in that period, but also how little influence companies had. General Motors got beat by a consumer group, and therefore everything is switched after that. General Motors and other companies realized they needed to get in the game.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, and Margaret, what was Silicon Valley's relationship with D.C. and lawmakers during this period? 

MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah. In some ways, Silicon Valley benefited from the broader sentiment against big business or old economy business in the 70s and even into the 80s, not really a great time for the US [00:13:00] economy. This is part of the reason Ronald Reagan was elected, promising "morning in America" and a really fundamental turnaround and which also included business deregulation. 

But for tech companies, while Republicans were, certainly in the Reagan area a very clear champions of business and a more deregulated business, that the tech companies were something that both Republicans and Democrats could get behind. This is the beginning of a more centrist Democratic Party with centrist leaders like eventually Bill Clinton and Al Gore who were elected in 1992, but also many others in Congress of their generation. They're trying to signal that, hey, we care about American economy too and business flourishing as well.

 There was a real embrace of this tech industry. And they didn't have to work very hard, initially, to have organized lobbying efforts, because lawmakers loved them. They thought they were great. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, and Tristan and I were both in Silicon Valley in the aughts, which is a little later than what you're talking about. But I remember being there and there was this mentality that said, you really don't want to get caught up in the traditional games, that all we needed to do was to [00:14:00] build things and the government was too stuck, or too captured, or otherwise too corrupt to deal with it. One shouldn't play that game. You should just build great things. And then, Margaret, what was it that convinced Silicon Valley that they really had to start paying attention to this lobbying game? 

MARGARET O'MARA: The first moment that starts the mobilization is actually one that didn't happen in Silicon Valley itself, and one that Silicon Valley interests were cheering, which is the US government's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, which happened in the late 1990s, and it ended with a decision that ruled that the company had to be broken up, and for various technical reasons it didn't actually have to do that, but it did have to effectively slow its role significantly. And that moment was, for Microsoft as a tech company, a real watershed, moving it from being a pretty inattentive to anything that was going on in Washington at all, they were really, truly heads down. Bill Gates famously, when the FTC brought a motion against Microsoft for predatory [00:15:00] monopolistic behavior in in 1994, Gates's famous reaction to that was like, Ah, the worst thing that could happen to me in Washington is I fall down the steps of the FTC and die or something like that. It was kind of this old-style Bill Gates kind of brash, like, I just don't care about what they do. This has no bearing on our business. 

And what the DOJ lawsuit showed Microsoft, and then in turn showed the Valley later, they realized they can't blow off regulators, that antitrust is a real threat, and this is a constituency that needs to be worked with, and they can't just take that support for granted. 

Before the DOJ lawsuit, Microsoft's entire Washington lobbying operation was one guy working out of their Bethesda suburban Maryland sales office, and it was a drive between Suburban Maryland and Capitol Hill, and he was it. And after the lawsuit, and after the DOJ decision, Microsoft starts building a fundamentally different, and now what is, perhaps the most, one of the largest and most sophisticated and very successful [00:16:00] lobbying operations in D.C.

Nathan Calvin on Californias AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy - 80,000 Hours Podcast - Air Date 8-29-24

 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: I basically want to dive right into SB1047. Can you start by saying what kinds of risks from AI the bill is trying to address? 

NATHAN CALVIN: I think it's very much trying to pick up where the Biden executive order left off. And so I think there are three categories of risks that the EO talks about in terms of risk from chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and ways that AI could kind of exacerbate those risks or kind of allow folks who were previously not able to weaponize those technologies to do so.

And then another one is very severe cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. And then another one is AI systems that are just autonomously causing different types of havoc and evading human control in [00:17:00] different ways. 

Yeah, so those are the three categories of risk that the Biden executive order lays out. And I think that this is very similarly trying to take on those risks. 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: What can you say about how the bill came to be, including any involvement you've personally had in it? 

NATHAN CALVIN: I think that Senator Wiener got interested in these issues himself just from talking with a variety of folks in SF who were thinking about these risks. And I think for people who have spent time at SF get-togethers this is a thing that people are just talking about a lot and thinking about a lot, and it's something that he got interested in and really taken with. So, yeah, then he put out the intent bill and then was looking for organizations to help make that into a reality and make it into full detailed legislation. And as part of that process got in touch with us—the Center for AI Safety Action [00:18:00] Fund—as well as Economic Security California Action, and then Co-Justice, and we really worked on putting additional technical meat on the bones of some of those kinds of high level intentions that they laid out, and working really closely with the Senator's legislative director and the Senator himself, who's been, yeah, I think, really... I think there are some authors in the representatives who I think, you know, defer a lot to staff and other folks they're working with. But I think Senator Weiner was just, like, very deeply in the details and wanting to make sure that he understood what we were doing and agreed with the approach. And I think that [has] really been a pleasure to work with him and his office and kind of the amount of involvement and interest he's taken in the policy.

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: Cool. Okay. So, in just incredibly simple terms, what does the bill say? 

NATHAN CALVIN: Yeah, I think the way that [00:19:00] I think I'd most straightforwardly described the bill is, you know, there have been a lot of voluntary commitments that the AI companies have themselves agreed to, of things like the White House voluntary commitments. There was also some additional voluntary commitments that were made in Seoul, facilitated by the UK AI Safety Institute, and, you know, it's saying a lot of things around testing for serious risks, taking cybersecurity seriously, thinking about these things, and what I really view this bill as is taking those voluntary commitments and actually instantiating them into law and saying that this is not something that you're just going to decide whether you want to do, but something that they're actually going to be legal consequences if you're not doing these things that really seem very sensible and good for the public. 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: Hey listeners, a quick interruption. So, to give ourselves more time to chat through objections to the bill, misunderstandings about it, and so on, Nathan and I [00:20:00] didn't dive any deeper into the details of the bill during our actual interview.

So, I wanted to jump in and give a few more concrete details about what's actually in the bill as of August 23rd. So, first, it's worth emphasizing that all of the provisions of the bill only apply to models that require 100 million dollars or more in compute to train, or that take an open source model that is that big to start with and then fine tune it with another 10 million worth of additional compute.

At the moment, there are no models that meet these requirements, so the bill doesn't apply to any currently existing models. But for future models that would be covered by the bill, the bill creates a few key requirements. So, first, developers are required to create a comprehensive safety and security plan, which ensures that their models do not pose an reasonable risk of causing or significantly enabling critical harm. Critical harm is defined in the bill as mass [00:21:00] casualties or incidents resulting in $500 million or more in damages. 

That safety and security plan has to be able to explain how the developer is going to take reasonable care to guard against cybersecurity attacks to make sure that the model can't be stolen; how it would be able to shut down all copies of the model under their control if there were an emergency; and how the developer would test that the model can't itself cause critical harm. And the developer then has to be able to publish the results of those safety tests. 

And finally, that plan has to commit to building in the appropriate kind of guardrails that would make sure that users can't use the model in harmful ways. In addition, developers of these advanced models are required to undergo an annual audit. If a developer violates these rules, And their model, in fact, causes critical harm itself, or is used by a person or group to cause critical harm, the developer can [00:22:00] be held liable for that harm and fined by the attorney general. For fine-tuned models that involve $10 million or more in expenditure, the fine-tuner bears responsibility for all of these things. For those spending less, the original developer holds responsibility.

Finally, the bill creates protections for whistleblowers. So, in other words, employees of AI companies who report noncompliance will be protected from retaliation. There are a few other bits and pieces in the bill, but those were the things that struck me as most important.

This Moment in AI How We Got Here and Where Were Going - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-12-24

 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: One of the weird things about wandering around the Bay Area is the phrase, can you feel the AGI? That is the people that are closest... I know, right? 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Seriously? 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Feel the AGI. There's t shirts with it. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: There's t shirts with it on? 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I've walked into dinners and the first thing that somebody said to me is like, [00:23:00] you're feeling the AGI. He looked at my face. I was really concerned. I actually hadn't been sleeping because when you metabolize how quickly everything is scaling up and the complete inadequacy of our current government or governance to handle it, it honestly makes it hard for me to sleep sometimes and I walked in, he looked at my face, and he's like, Ah, you're feeling the AGI, aren't you?

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: This is AGI as in artificial general intelligence, which some people outside of the Bay area don't ever think that we're actually going to get to. So you're talking about something which is, you know, it's just normal in the Bay Area to be working towards that and thinking about it. 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And I should be really clear here, because there is debate (inside of both the academic community and the labs} of does the current technology—you know, this transformers-based large language model—will it get us to something that we can replace most human beings on most economic tasks as the sort of the, [00:24:00] like, the version of AGI, the definition that I like to use. And the people that believe that scale is all that we need say, Look, if we just keep growing and we sort of project out the graph of how smart the systems have been—four years ago, it was sort of at the level of a preschooler, GPT4, level of a smart high schooler, the next models coming out, maybe it'll be at PhD levels. You just project that out and by 2026-2027, that they will be at the level of the smartest human beings and perhaps even smarter, there's nothing that stops them from getting smarter. And there are other people that say, Hey, actually, large language models aren't everything that we're going to need. They don't do things like long term planning. We're one more breakthrough away from something that can really just be a drop in human replacement. Either one of these two camps, you either don't need any more breakthroughs, or you're just one breakthrough away. We're very, very close. At least that's the talking side of Silicon Valley.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: You [00:25:00] know, if you talk to different people in Silicon Valley, you really do get different answers and it really feels confusing sometimes. And , I think the point that Aza was making is that whether it is slightly longer, like closer to, I don't know, five to seven years versus, you know, one to two years, still not a lot of time to prepare for that.

And when, you know, artificial general intelligence-level AI emerges, you'll want to have major interventions way before that. You won't want to be starting to figure out how to regulate it after that occurs. You want to do it before. And I think that was the main mission of the AI Dilemma, was how do we make sure that we set the right incentives in motion before entanglement, before it gets entrenched in our society. You only have one period before a new technology gets entangled, and that's right now. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah. I mean, it's hard sitting all the way over here in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. And I do have a sense from my perspective that there's been a little bit of hype, you know. Some of the fear about AI hasn't [00:26:00] translated. I mean, it hasn't transformed my job yet. My kids aren't really using it at school. And when I try to use it, honestly, I find it a little bit crappy and not really worth my while. So, how do you sort of. take that further and convince someone like me to really care? And what's the future that I'm imagining, I guess, even for my job five or 10 years into the future?

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I think one thing that's important to distinguish is how fast AI capabilities are coming versus how fast AI will be diffused or integrated into society. I think diffusion or integration can take longer, and I think the capabilities are coming fast. So, I think people look at the fact that the entire economy hasn't been disrupted so quickly as, you know, creating more skepticism around the AI hype. I think certainly with regard to how quickly this transformation can take place, that level of skepticism is warranted . But I do think that we have to pay attention to the raw capabilities. If you click around and find the corner of Twitter where people are [00:27:00] publishing the latest papers in AI capabilities, you will be humbled very quickly by how fast progress is moving. 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I think it's also important to note there is going to be hype. Every technology goes through a hype cycle where people get over excited. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And we're seeing that now, right? People are, OpenAI is supposed to be potentially losing $5 billion this year. You know, there's a but of a feel of is there a kind of crypto crash coming, you know, with the energy around AI at the moment? 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Right, exactly. So, and that happens with every technology. So, that is true. And also true is the raw capabilities that the models have and the amount of investment into the, essentially, data centers and compute centers that companies are making now. So, you know, Microsoft is building right now a hundred billion dollar computer super center, essentially. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Okay, I do want to move on now to questions around data because there's been a huge amount of reporting recently about how large language [00:28:00] models are just super hungry for human generated data and they're potentially running out of things to hoover up and ingest. And there's been predictions that we might even hit a data wall by 2028. How is this going to affect the development of AI? 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I mean, it's a real and interesting question, right? Like, if you've used all of the data that's easily available on the internet, what happens after that? Well, a couple of things happen after that. One, and we're seeing this, is that all the companies are racing for proprietary data sets, sitting inside of financial institutions, sitting inside of academic institutions is a lot of data that is just not available on the open internet. So, it's not exactly the case that we've just run out of data, like the AI companies may have run out of easily accessible open data. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Free data.

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Free data. The second thing is that there are a lot of data sources that require translations. That is, there's a lot of television and [00:29:00] movies, YouTube videos, and it takes processing power to convert those into, say, text. But that's why OpenAI created Whisper and these other systems. There's a big push in the next models to make them multimodal, that is not just speaking language, but also generating images, also understanding videos, understanding robotic movements. And it is the case with GPT 4 scale models that as they were made multimodal, they didn't seem to be getting that much smarter. But the theory is that's because they just weren't big enough. They couldn't hold enough of every one of these modalities at the same time. So there's some big open questions there. 

But when we talk to people on the inside, These are not like the folks like the Sam Altman's or the Dario's that have an incentive to say that the model search is just going to keep scaling getting better. What we've heard is that they are figuring out clever ways of getting over the data wall, and that the scaling does seem [00:30:00] to be progressing. We can't, of course, independently verify that, but I'm inclined to believe them. 

Newsoms AI dilemma To sign or not to sign - POLITICO Tech - Air Date 9-6-24

 

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: So the California legislature has passed a hotly debated AI safety bill, just as the session comes to a close. What made it into the final version of the bill? 

JEREMY WHITE: This bill would require the largest artificial intelligence model, so called 'frontier models', to undergo safety testing before they are released onto the market, essentially ensuring that they don't pose a risk for catastrophic harms like bio attacks and that type of thing.

Companies would essentially be exposed to civil penalties if the state finds that they are not doing their due diligence on these models that they're seeking to release into the market. And the mechanism for enforcing this became a central point of contention with this bill. The message from a lot of the tech company foes all along was, rather than apply liability at the front end before we release these [00:31:00] models, punish us if harm occurs. If our models go out into the world and they wreak havoc, then yes, we deserve some accountability. And the response from proponents has been, you wouldn't wait to regulate nuclear energy until you had a Chernobyl. And essentially that we need to be proactive and preemptive about preventing these harms.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Got it. And so with all of that debate, the legislature still passed it. And that bill now needs to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. And there's a lot of pressure on him to veto it. Do we know what he's expected to do? 

JEREMY WHITE: The governor has, as he generally tends to do with legislation, not said specifically where he's leaning. I do think, given the governor's history of being close to the tech industry, and his record of having rejected some bills that passed the legislature that the technology industry did not like, such as regulation last year on autonomous vehicles, I think the even money is on him being more likely to veto this than to sign it. That said, the [00:32:00] governor has, again, been pretty diligent about not giving a clear indication either way, beyond saying that he believes that artificial intelligence, while it merits regulation, is an important industry and one that helps California maintain its competitive edge. 

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Right. Well, and that's always the tension there in California when it comes to regulating tech. And as you said, Newsom, in particular, has relationships with these tech companies going back many, many years and through many, many different roles that he's had. What are companies saying now that the bill is heading to his desk? 

JEREMY WHITE: I think all along, there has been a hope among people in the industry that the governor would be an ally and a backstop on this one. That certainly isn't to say that they didn't try to stop it or substantially amend it in the legislature, but I do think there's been this dynamic for a while in which groups see that when it comes to regulating tech, they're more likely to have an ally in the governor often than in a majority of democratic legislators. People are continuing to bend his ear, [00:33:00] [unintelligible] the people warning that if he doesn't sign this and there's some sort of catastrophe that's on him; to people warning you're gonna be the one who's responsible for sort of killing the golden goose that, not just California, but San Francisco, a city that he was mayor of, don't forget, is looking to drive its economic engine.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Some other pushback has also come from Washington, which, you know, Washington has not passed any meaningful AI safety legislation of its own, and yet we have seen California lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi, Ro Khanna, Enzo Lofgren, all kind of come out against this California bill. How is that message being interpreted there?

JEREMY WHITE: Certainly the fact that these lawmakers represent the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and adjacent districts, I think it is a strong signal from them that they have heard from folks in their districts and in this industry. In Congresswoman Lofgren's case, she had her staff talk to people and make a recommendation that this is going to be bad for innovation. This is [00:34:00] going to hurt these businesses that again, are major economic players in this area. I think Congresswoman Pelosi's intervention was also read in some quarters as sort of putting a marker in a succession fight. The state senator carrying this bill, Scott Wiener, is known to be all but certain to run for Nancy Pelosi's seat when she leaves. Some people saw this as perhaps the speaker emerita creating some space for her daughter, Christine, in that race. That aside, I think clearly these members of Congress represent a lot of the executives and workers and headquarters of these companies, and so they are channeling some of those very significant industry concerns.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Got it. So, some policy behind it, but also it sounds like politics being played as well, which is not, I guess, unexpected. 

You know, we have seen this dynamic, though, where Washington fails to regulate or fails to act in tech and so the California legislature kind of steps in to regulate. We saw that with [00:35:00] privacy, you know, kids online safety. Is that dynamic involved here as well? Have we heard from any federal lawmakers that they don't want to be preempted again by California on tech regulation? 

JEREMY WHITE: That is absolutely a dynamic in play. I've heard over and over again from California lawmakers, whether it's Scott Wiener or one of the many others doing AI bills that they felt they had to act because it was clear to them Congress was not going to. 

There has been some back and forth between Sacramento and Washington on this. When I spoke to Congresswoman Lofgren, she told me that's nonsense, we have been working on it. And she said there are some areas in which she thinks there's an appropriate role for California to move ahead, things like data privacy and clean car regulations. But on this matter, which she cast as a matter of national security and importance, she was adamant that this is Congress's turf and they should be the ones to move first.

So, there has definitely been some tension between Democrats in different levels of government on this one. 

At Last Big Tech's Free Ride May Be Over - The Hartmann Report - Air Date 9-4-24

 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THE HARTMANN REPORT: [00:36:00] I have spoken on many occasions here and also written over at Hartmann Report about back in the day when, back in the late 70s, early 80s and through the mid 90s, when, Nigel Peacock and I were running, and Sue Nethercote was in another area, but, you know, we were all working with CompuServe forums. Nigel and I ran some 30 of them. We had the IBM forum, we had the Macintosh forum, we had the ADHD forum, we had the JFK assassination forum, we had the international trade forum, we had a bunch of them. And, you know, the two of us and about a dozen other people that worked with us were paid— specifically I was paid and I shared that revenue with all of them—we were paid to monitor the forums on CompuServe. Because this was all before 1996. And CompuServe, at that [00:37:00] time, was the internet actually up until the mid 90s. AOL and CompuServe were pretty much all there was. And they were viewed legally the same as the New York Times, essentially. They were a publisher, or as a bookstore. They were a distributor of content. Now, the content was being created by individuals, you know, people who were participating. But, just like if you were to write a letter to the New York Times threatening to kill the president, or send the New York Times a photograph of, you know, somebody being murdered or somebody being tortured or raped or something, and they published it, they could be held responsible for that. The New York Times could be held responsible for it. And if a bookstore was selling, you know, for example, child pornography, they could be held responsible for that. 

And so as a consequence of that, because CompuServe and AOL were [00:38:00] viewed as bookstores or as, you know, publishers, they had to hire people like Nigel and me to run and police these forums. And we made a good living doing it, by the way. I mean, you know, it was not inconsequential amount of money. And then in 1996, Congress got together and said, you know, we really want to turn this internet thing into something. We think it has great potential and we want to encourage companies to jump in. And so, we're going to pass a law—it's called Section 230 of the Decency and whatever it is Act, which is a subset of the Telecommunications Act of 1996—we're going to pass Section 230, which says that these publishers, you know, AOL, CompuServe, and then what came after 1996 was Facebook and Twitter and everything else, that they no longer have liability, they no longer have responsibility for what they publish. So, if somebody puts [00:39:00] child pornography on their site, or somebody puts, you know, a call to murder the president on their site or whatever, they can remove it if they want, and they probably should, just as good business practices, but we're not going to punish them, we're not going to prosecute them, we're not going to fine them if they don't. So, you can have the Wild West. 

And it succeeded in jump starting the Internet. Between 1996 and 2005, the Internet went from basically, you know, AOL and CompuServe, which was small and limited, to just exploded, worldwide. And I have been saying for some time that Section 230's time is past. That you could argue that it was useful to have there for five or ten years, but we no longer need these big companies. They're multi billion dollar companies. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is the richest millennial on earth. He has, I mean, he's worth, you know, hundreds of [00:40:00] millions of dollars. I don't know his exact net worth. He's worth a pile of money. And he can afford to pay somebody to monitor what's going on on Facebook. Just like CompuServe used to pay Nigel and me. I mean, CompuServe, you know, Facebook is, I mean, some of these companies are showing like 40 percent profit margins. They're spending off billions of dollars in profits every single month. So, you know, if they have to hire a small army of content moderators, and/or change their algorithm to make sure that the kind of stuff that they're pushing out isn't getting pushed out, they can afford to do that. And they should be doing that, both morally and under the law, except that section 230 says they don't have to do it. So, they don't, they just take the money. 

Well, things got really bad for a family. The family of 10 year old Nylah Anderson. [00:41:00] And this was on TikTok. And TikTok has an algorithm that decides what to push to people. And little ten year old Nylah got a blackout challenge pushed to her. It's where you hang yourself and then try to save yourself just before you blackout. You cut off the blood to your, to your brain and then, and Nylah died, she hung herself, as a result of this thing that TikTok had actually sent to her. She did not follow this person. She did not solicit this. She did not ask for it. She received it and she did it and she's dead. And so her family sued TikTok. You know, TikTok, they argued in court, they said that TikTok knew that such videos were causing kids to get into tragic accidents, yet their algorithm targeted children nonetheless. They sued under Pennsylvania state law for product liability, negligence and wrongful death. [00:42:00] And this court, it's been through a couple of courts, and then it finally went to the Third Circuit, the Third Federal Circuit of the Appeals Court, and three judges, two of them Trump appointees, one of them an Obama appointee, wrote, this is what one of the judges wrote: "Today, Section 230 rides in to rescue corporations from virtually any claim loosely related to content posted by a third party, no matter the cause of action and whatever the provider's actions". And they basically said, you know, we're not going to let this happen anymore. They blew up these provisions of Section 230. 

Now, this is just a major rollback to Section 230. They said, because "TikTok's algorithm", I'm quoting now from the decision, "TikTok's algorithm curates and [00:43:00] recommends a tailored compilation of videos for users FYP", that's, you know, a homepage or whatever they call it, "based on a variety of factors, including the user's age and other demographics, online interaction, other metadata. It becomes TikTok's own speech". In other words, if somebody were to simply post some terrible thing on TikTok and only the people who follow that person saw it, that would be one thing. But because TikTok has this algorithm, and they're not unique in this, of course, this is true of all the social media sites, they have this algorithm that decides which posts to push out to people who haven't asked for them, this court ruled that this is not the speech of the person who posted it on TikTok, it has become the speech of TikTok itself. And TikTok is responsible for this. They are liable for this. 

Now, oddly enough, Clarence Thomas agrees with this. [00:44:00] Proof that a broken clock is right twice a day. He wrote, Back in 2022, he said, "The reason for this use and misuse of Section 230 is simple: advertising money. In particular, the kind of advertising facilitated by large swaths of personal data depends on Section 230 immunity. Otherwise, dominant platforms would have to spend large amounts on content moderation". He goes on to say, actually this is Matt Stoller writing about what Clarence Thomas is saying. Matt Stoller goes on to say, "He pointed out that Facebook refused to do anything to stop the use of its services by human traffickers", now this is a quote from Clarence Thomas, "because doing so would cost the company users and the advertising revenue those users generate".

Where AI Isn't a Four Letter Word China Builds Robots to Aid Workers - The Socialist Program - Air Date 9-4-24

 

RICHARD WOLFF: Imagine we have an enterprise, a workplace, with a hundred workers, and they make shirts, let's call it, for lack of a [00:45:00] better one. They make shirts. These hundred workers make shirts. And along comes a new invention, whatever it is, automation of one kind or another, and it is now possible to get the same number of shirts coming off the production lines every day or every week as you used to but you no longer need 100 workers. Fifty workers can do it because the new machine, the new technology, the new software, whatever it is, allows those 50 workers to be doubly productive compared to what they used to be, and so the employer, whoever that might be, fires half of the workers because they don't need them to produce the same number of shirts. 

Now, here follow the example, the simple arithmetic. If you're producing the same number of shirts, you're [00:46:00] getting the same revenue. Let's assume, simply, the price is the same. Whatever you got for shirts before, you get for shirts now. You make the same number of shirts, the hundred workers in the old days made, now you only need fifty workers, you make the same number of shirts. Okay, if the price is the same and you're producing the same amount of shirts, you're gonna get the same revenue. But the employer claps his hands together because he may be getting the same revenue, but he has fired half of his workforce. He is saved on labor costs, the way those people put it. Half of the revenue he got that he used to have to pay to a worker, he keeps for himself. So whatever his profits were before, his profits now are much higher because he's keeping, for himself, what he used to have to pay to the workers. No wonder he [00:47:00] will spend the money to get that machine installed that will make his workers more productive, because he's going to end up with more profits. 

That's the story. That's the way it's carried in the textbook. That's the way it actually works. Notice in this story, nobody seems to be worried about the 50 workers who got fired. What happened to them? What happened to their husbands, their wives, their children, the elderly who depended on them? What happened to the stores in the community that depended on these people having money to spend for their groceries, for their clothing, for their amusements? All of that damage done by technical progress, we're not supposed to think about. And that's not because it's bad news. It's because it highlights that technology is installed [00:48:00] if and when and to the extent that it is profitable, not for any other reason. 

And so let me now conclude my little example by giving you the other reason. What could have happened in this shirt producing enterprise is something completely different. The people there could have utilized the new technology in an altogether different way. And it's really very simple. Here's what they could have done. They could have said to the 100 workers, stay right where you are. You are not going anywhere. We are going to have you come here and produce the shirts the way you always did. However, we're going to cut the labor day, the working day, from eight hours a day to four hours a day. And why? Well, it's very [00:49:00] simple. In four hours, with these new machines we're going to get, you are twice as productive as you used to be. The company will produce the same number of shirts with you working half time as we did before. We'll sell them, we'll assume the same revenue comes in, and we will pay you as we always did, but you will have to do only half a day's work, five days a week. In other words, the technology frees up human labor. The technology helps everybody have half as much time to work for the same income they got before.

Is that possible? Of course it is. Has that been done in history? Yes, it has. You know who would do that, [00:50:00] who has done it? A worker cooperative, because they are workers who together decide what to do about new technology. A worker co-op has the workers being their own boss, so they make the decision. And of course, this decision is a no brainer, because for the workers as a whole, the hundred workers, it would take them exactly one second to choose between half of them losing their job while the others continue, versus all of them getting half time off for the same salary they got before. That's easy. Which one of those is better? Well, if you're a democrat, with a small d, you would obviously favor the second one. Why? Because a hundred workers [00:51:00] getting half a day off every day from now on is serving the majority, whereas firing half the workers so that the employer can make a bigger profit, well, that's serving the minority with more profit at the expense of one half of the majority. No democratic decision making. would ever end up that way. 

And now let me simply apply this to the story about the Chinese robots. China calls itself 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. Well, this is a very old problem. And what the robots enable the Chinese to do is to make a really big decision. Are you going to go down the capitalist road, sacrificing workers to make more profits for the [00:52:00] employer, whether that employer is a private individual or a company on the one hand, or a state operated and owned enterprise on the other? Or are you going to use the exploding technology in China to give people a quality of life that the rest of the world has only dreamed of? Put people on half time. Imagine with me, if the Chinese choose, and it's an open question, which way they're going to go, but if they choose to do what the worker co-op would do, to utilize the new technology, the robots, that they are already the number one producer of in the world—the Chinese are, they're also the number one market for robots already—but if they were to choose to really do this, to make use of robots on a massive [00:53:00] scale, and not just robots to produce shirts and ice cream cones and all the rest of it, but robots to produce the robots so that we really don't need people to do hard drudgery labor, eight hours a day, five out of seven days a week, you know, what we're all used to. Then, the struggle between China and the West will be won—not by a war, not in the old ways, not by saber rattling against each other, not by tariff wars or trade wars, all of it—the war will be won because the whole world will watch while Chinese workers work fewer and fewer hours per day while earning the same amount of money, and the struggle between systems will be resolved that way, and no [00:54:00] war will be tolerated by either side. It'll be a no brainer which way to go. 

Tech's Big Money Campaign is Getting Pushback with Margaret O'Mara and Brody Mullins Part 2 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-26-24

 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: So in this conversation, we've diagnosed a bunch of problems. You know, we've diagnosed that there's a complexity gap. Technology's moving faster than, you know. the law and when technology companies see Ted Stevens say the internet is a series of tubes that's not them just advocating for their position that's realizing that there's a lack of understanding in government and we want to preserve the kind of lobbying that's educational, right? But we don't want the kind of lobbying where there's let's say a thousand to one difference in the amount of resources that companies and private interests can deploy compared to that which might be good for people. So, when you think about this perspective, what are the kinds of mechanisms or interventions that would lead us to a more humane world with a better balance of power? Brody? 

BRODY MULLINS: Uh, that's a tough one. You know, I feel like reporters are really good at pointing out the problems, but not very good at coming up with solutions. [00:55:00] But in what we've talked about, you know, these companies, as we've said, are spending far more money to get far more influence than regular Americans. But at the end of the day, regular Americans do have the power. They have the votes. They're the ones who send members of Congress to Congress in the first place. The problem is that, you know, most consumers and Americans are not mobilized and organized. There's not one big organization that's pulling people together. But if there was, if the American people can come together and talk to their members of Congress in an organic way, you know, similar to the shutdown the internet day that Google and the tech industry organized, if there was an organic movement like that, the American people would have far more power than corporate America. It's just that they're disorganized right now. 

MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah, I think for so long Silicon Valley or the tech industry in DC have kind of seen one another through a glass darkly, not quite understood and appreciated the role of the other in the broader project in which all are engaged. [00:56:00] Silicon Valley, you know, has its origins in government spending and defense spending during the Cold War. The government policy towards higher education, research and development as well as spending on tech and buying tech things and encouraging the development of them, has been foundational to the Valley from the Manhattan Project to today. And that's something that isn't fully appreciated, and I think kind of drives some of the antiregulatory feeling in the valley, when we move beyond the kind of C suite of these biggest companies, but it's kind of this feeling like, Oh, if you regulate us, this innovation machine is going to stop. And actually the longer history shows that is not the case, that there has been a real robust government role that has encouraged the growth of the Valley. 

So, I think that's one thing. I think the other thing, Tristan, you point out this growth and balance in expertise and resources, which is, I think, a result of, this is something where government itself, it's the reflection of this dismantling of the expertise from within the government at the federal level, where you have [00:57:00] industry, you know, agencies like the FTC that are kind of operating on a shoestring and tin cans between them and basically with very little expertise, and where, particularly in the last 15 years, there's been this giant sucking sound that has drawn expertise from academia and from government towards industry because the paycheck is just too good.

So, we have this real severe imbalance. So I think part of it is Washington or the public sector, the public building up its capacity to be good partners, be good regulatory partners, and to understand how the tech works and to do smart regulation that may well cut into profits, but actually will ultimately benefit the consumers and market competition, which is the point of the whole business.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Well said. 

MARGARET O'MARA: And actually, when you look over time, you see kind of a swing towards less regulation, more regulation. You see, you know, change happens slowly, then happens all at once. And so the kind of political dysfunction of Capitol Hill will not be [00:58:00] forever, if history is any guide. History doesn't repeat itself, nothing's inevitable, but we generally have some good proof points. And also, if you again go back to the early 20th century and kind of the extraordinarily concentrated wealth and power, what dismantled that, and it took a long time, but it involved government, it involved citizens mobilizing together in interest groups of their own, lobbying groups of their own, and the voters, the voters voting, and voting for pro-regulatory policies and lawmakers, and gradually things do shift. 

Note from the Editor on a possible future for humanity

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Andrewism describing the elements of neocolonialism inherent in big data. Your Undivided Attention described the dawn of the big tech lobbying era. The 80,000 Hours Podcast looked at the proposed regulation in California. Your Undivided Attention described the difficulty of balancing AI growth and safety. Politico Tech dove deeper on proposed [00:59:00] legislation. The Hartmann Report discussed the lawsuit against TikTok that put the danger of Section 230 in stark relief. The Socialist Program spoke with professor Richard Wolff about the options for using technological advancement to relieve people from the drudgery of work. And Your Undivided Attention explained the need for public mobilization to demand regulation of Silicon valley. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in [01:00:00] the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue to the Deeper Dives half, I have just a couple of notes to add. The first is a great reference that I don't think it's mentioned in the show today. It's regarding the phenomenon of training AI models on any data it can get its hands on. Inevitably leading to the model ingesting data that itself was created by other AI models, leading to the degradation of the AI generally. One metaphor that gets used is mad cow disease caused by feeding dead cows to other cows. Bad practice. Don't do that. Another metaphor is inbreeding and the genetic defects that can come from it. Stemming from the inbreeding idea, and this is my favorite reference, one writer coined the term "Habsburg AI", which is a wonderfully deep cut to the old Royal family of Austria that's famous for having deteriorated [01:01:00] genetically due to generations of inbreeding. So, I enjoyed that. There's also something extra poetic about referring to a family dating back to the 11th century to describe potential problems with AI. So, nicely done. 

Secondly, Yuval Noah Harari wrote a piece in The Guardian that makes some fine points. It's titled "Never summon a power you can't control. Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world". So, you know, nothing too heavy. It's a breezy 18 minute read if you want to check it out. He starts with a couple of old stories meant to warn humanity away from harnessing power that it can't control. The first, a Greek myth, took this pretty literally as it was about a mortal attempting to harness the chariot of the sun and drive it across the sky with predictably disastrous consequences. The second story is a lot more whimsical thanks [01:02:00] to Walt Disney and Fantasia: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey Mouse unsatisfied doing menial work, conjures magic to have a broom do the work for him only to have the situation get wildly out of control. So, Harari points out that these stories don't have any suggestions for how to get yourself out of a predicament like this, other than to have like a God or a magician on hand to set things right. So, the real lesson is just don't do that. Don't get yourself in that situation. 

Toward the end of the piece, he turns to game theory to describe the degree of danger we may be in. After describing the mutually assured destruction dynamic of the nuclear age, he points out that those same dynamics do not apply to cyber warfare. "Cyber weapons can bring down a country's electric grid, but they can also be used to destroy a secret research facility, jam an enemy [01:03:00] sensor, inflame a political scandal, manipulate elections, or hack a single smartphone, and they can do all that stealthily. They don't announce their presence with a mushroom cloud and a storm of fire, nor do they leave a visible trail from launchpad to target. Consequently, at times it is hard to know if an attack even occurred or who launched it. The temptation to start a limited cyber war is therefore big and so is the temptation to escalate it". 

So, it makes carrying out a first strike a little bit more tempting and then he points out, "Even worse, if one side thinks it has such an opportunity, the temptation to launch a first strike could become irresistible, because one never knows how long the window of opportunity will remain open. Game theory, posits that the most dangerous situation in an arms race is when one side feels it has an advantage, but that this [01:04:00] advantage is slipping away". 

Now earlier in the piece, it's described that the data systems of the world previously thought of, even if this wasn't exactly accurate, sort of thought of basically as an interconnected web. that paradigm would begin to Balkanize as different nations begin using data protectionism as a way of sort of jockeying for power on the international stage. This could end up leading to a very siloed digital experience of the world and of reality for all of the people in the world, driving people's farther apart without them necessarily even knowing it. So he concludes, "The division of the world into rival digital empires dovetails with the political vision of many leaders who believe that the world is a jungle, that the relative piece of recent decades has been in [01:05:00] illusion, and that the only real choice is whether to play the part of predator or prey. Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as predators and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorize for their history exams. These leaders should be reminded, however, that there is a new alpha predator in the jungle. If humanity doesn't find a way to cooperate and protect our shared interests, we will all be easy prey to AI". 

Sort of makes me think of all those people back in the sixties, watching the Jetsons and following the space race, who just couldn't wait for the future to arrive. Well, here we are.

SECTION A: THE THREAT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, Section A:. More on the Threat. Section B: Big Tech Lobbying. Section C: [01:06:00] Regulation. And Section D: Thinking Through Solutions.

The New Colonialism of Big Tech Part 2 - Andrewism - Air Date 9-3-24

 

ANDREW SAGE - HOST, ANDREWISM: Data colonialism shares six distinct similarities with colonialism's past and present.

First, it is also founded on the appropriation of resources, with the shared mindset regarding that appropriation that the resources are cheap and unbound from ethical or environmental considerations. The spice must float. Historical colonialism's focus was on appropriating land, as the savages weren't using it properly, and labour, as the savages were predestined to servitude.

But data colonialism is focused on appropriating human life in the form of data, as clearly, every detail of our lives exists to maximize shareholder value. In any case, it's free real estate. And unlike land, data is a non rival good, so it's ripe for exploitation by multiple parties at once. The second similarity to the appropriation serves to build a new social and economic order that benefits the colonizer, [01:07:00] whether Britain or Big Tech.

The default position is now to extract data from whatever people do, no matter how trivial. Platforms and apps organized around the collection and exploitation of data are now the near inescapable infrastructure of daily life. Third, colonialism continues to be a private state partnership. It was never solely the domain of Church and Crown.

Chartered companies and enterprises have always played a role. Today, various players in the data extraction game form what Mahias and Couldry call the social quantification sector. Opaque and utterly unaccountable companies like Palantir quietly work hand in hand with governments to maintain smart borders and predictive policing that terrorize vulnerable populations.

The more famous Big Five of Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are just as collaborative with the state and carry on colonial legacies of dispossession and injustice. Data harvesters and data aggregators, large and small, have coalesced into a parallel of the old colonial [01:08:00] administrations. As a few thousand coders, designers, managers, and marketers control the lives of billions.

Fourth, both forms of colonialism devastate the physical environment. Historical colonialism set the precedent for the natural world being viewed as cheap and ripe for large scale extraction, while today's data colonialism continues to devour precious minerals, energy, and water to sustain itself, expanding its data centers across lands in the global North and South while expelling metric tons of carbon with every Amazon package delivered, Bitcoin verified, or satellite launched.

Fifth, all forms of colonialism generate deep inequalities between colonizers and colonized, exploiters and exploited. On its face, data colonialism may not seem as physically violent as historical colonialism, but it certainly creates asymmetric data relations that deepen existing inequalities of class, race, gender, and more that affect people's ability to live, and it relies on the continued exploitation of historically colonized people to mine its much needed materials, thus [01:09:00] enabling systemic violence.

Furthermore, these data relations are absent of physical limitations in size, connectivity, depth, and transferability, thus opening up new forms of colonial power and control. Sixth, historical colonialism was justified with the civilizing mission, or white man's burden, of evangelizing Christianity and asserting racial, scientific, and economic superiority.

These days, such narratives have been thoroughly discredited, so data colonizers have turned to new justifications. Data colonizers speak of ushering in the inevitable progress of a new machine age or fourth industrial revolution and extol the convenience and connection that their extraction enables.

When you put it that way, why would anyone oppose convenience and connection? When cloud storage and WhatsApp groups make it easier than ever to save and share, why resist? This is precisely how big tech wants us to see things. They're not calling out the [01:10:00] costs of our convenience. They're not bringing attention to the asymmetric relations that our data empowers.

They won't raise the alarm on the new forms of exploitation that their extraction brings, especially when it impacts the workers, or contractors, and not the end users. They'll sell you convenient solutions to the problems they create, if you can afford that convenience, of course, and you'll have to accept it, because you're not able to opt out without significant consequences once these platforms have accrued enough power.

When they become THE social operating system, you kinda have to click I agree. But hey, at least it's convenient, right? Don't even get me started on the convenience offered to the Global South, when a combination of these countries weak infrastructure and tech corporations massive resources has enabled the continuation of our dependence on the Global North.

How can we ever gain our independence and truly decolonize when we're reliant on the external provision of WhatsApp, to facilitate our day to day existence? We should really be asking if the only form that convenience can take just so happens to coincide with [01:11:00] the extractive ambitions of tech conglomerates.

These companies also love to sell us on connection, but do we as a social species need social media companies to connect when we've been connected on small and large scales for tens of thousands of years? Obviously, as a writer who has chosen to distribute my work on social media, I can recognize that such platforms offer some value.

I know that they've empowered political mobilization for better and for worse, but they also make it easier to surveil and suppress dissent. While echo chambers aren't nearly as common as is commonly believed, since being exposed to dissent and opinions is what keeps people hooked online, radicalization has certainly proliferated thanks to the profits over facts model of social media.

Fractures have long existed in our society, but social media certainly enhances those fractures. Meta wants us to believe that it represents the inevitable progress of human connection. But I'm sorry, how could a safe, global community ever be created from the exploitative, profit driven model of meta?

Why [01:12:00] should we accept their implicit claim that continuous data extraction is necessary for the human community to flourish? Don't we deserve to connect in ways that aren't dictated by their business model and disconnected from reality? But perhaps I'm asking too many questions. Maybe I just need to connect my toilet to the grid so that Amazon has a continuous reading of my stool samples for targeted probiotic advertising.

Maybe I should digitally bind every inch of my home to the global data colony. Maybe I should just hush from out and plug into the Internet of Things. I've been told that my data, in combination with that of countless others, has enabled the development of artificial intelligence, which as we all know is way smarter than any of us.

Or is it? As it turns out, the hype train of AI is simply a parade in praise of an over glorified, pattern recognizing parrot that replicates the racial and gendered biases of its massive dataset and still needs to be taught and corrected constantly. AI serves as a convenient cop out for folks who don't want to challenge inequality and would rather give it a neutral face while relying on marginalized [01:13:00] folks globally to actually teach the computer what to do.

Even the efforts to counteract these concerns with AI ethics boards fall flat, because their ethics codes are uselessly abstract, isolated from the levers of power, and thus utterly toothless. Particularly when these boards get their checks cut by the very same corporations they're supposed to be regulating.

There may be some real scientific value in AI for sure, but much of it is just marketing and party tricks. It might get really good at detecting cancer, but it shouldn't be clogging the internet with SEO optimized slop, and it certainly shouldn't be deciding the fate of real people. Whether it's Europe bringing progress and salvation to the savages, or Facebook graciously running internet infrastructure in over 30 African countries, colonialism often excuses itself with virtuous, civilizing missions that serve to justify or erase the reality of their exploitation.

Alternatively, following the shock doctrine, data colonizers use crises like the pandemic as an excuse to expand the territories of data extraction. In any [01:14:00] case, they need these alibis to distract us from the truth and capture the social imagination so fully that we can't even consider that there are alternative means of convenience and connection.

Just click I agree. Or don't. Maybe it's time to unaccept these terms and conditions. It won't be easy. Clonalisms past and present love to make us feel as though their power is incontestable. There's a lot of deception, exploitation, and coercion that gets us to accept this way of the world. But that doesn't mean we're completely helpless.

With the mental health impacts of big tech, the ongoing loss of workers rights, the ever growing authority of algorithms, the manipulation of populations for commercial and political purposes, the rising threat of disinformation and hate speech, and the decimation of environments by data centres, the threat of data colonialism seems insurmountable.

Yet data colonialism can be resisted. Once we identify our shared interests, build concrete solidarity, and develop our understanding of these issues.

This Moment in AI How We Got Here and Where Were Going Part 2 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-12-24

 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: [01:15:00] Some companies are turning to AI generated content to fill that void. This is what they call synthetic data.

What are the risks of feeding AI generated content back into the models? 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Right. Generally, when people talk about the concerns of synthetic data, what they're talking about is sort of these models getting high off their own exhaust, which is that if the models are putting out hallucinations and they're trained on those hallucinations, you end up in this sort of like downward spiral where the models keep getting worse.

And in fact, this is a concern. Uh, last year, Sam Altman said that one out of every thousand words that humanity was generating was generated by chat GPT. Right. That's incredible. That is absolutely incredible. Incredibly concerning, right? Because that shows that, um, not too far into the future, there will be more text generated by AI and AI models, more cognitive labor done by machines than by humans.[01:16:00] 

So that's, in and of itself, scary. AI is generated and what they didn't, and they're trained on that model, you might get the sort of downward spiral effect. That's the concern people have. But when they talk about training on synthetic data, that concern does not apply because they are making data specifically for the purposes of passing benchmarks and they create data that are specifically good at making the models better.

So that's a different thing than sort of getting high on your own exhaust. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Right. But it leaves us in a culture where we're surrounded or have surround sound of synthetically created data or non human created data, potentially it's non human created information around 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: us. And this is how you can get to, without needing to invoke anything sci fi or anything AGI, how you can get to humans lose control.

Because this is really the social media story said again, which is everyone says like when an AI. starts to like, control humanity, just pull the plug, [01:17:00] but there is an AI in social media, it's the thing that's choosing what human beings see, that's already like, downgrading our democracies, all the things we normally say, um, and we haven't pulled the plug because it's become integral to the value of our economy and our stock market.

AI start to compete, say, in generating content in the attention economy, they will have seen everything on the internet, everything on Twitter. They will be able to make posts and images and songs and videos that are more engaging than anything that humans create. And because they are more engaging, they'll become more viral.

They will out compete the things that are sort of bespoke human made. You will be a fool if you don't use those for your ends. And now You know, essentially, the things that AI is generating will become the dominant form of our culture. That's another way of saying humans lost control. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And to be clear, Aza's not saying [01:18:00] that the media or images or art generated by AI are better from a values perspective than the things that humans make.

What he's saying is they are more effective at playing the attention economy game. that social media has set up to be played because they're trained on what works best and they can simply out compete humans for that game. And they're already doing that. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: It's terrifying. Um, we'll, we'll still have art galleries in places that are offline though, that don't have um, AI generated content.

It'll, 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: it'll be art, artisanal art. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah. Artisanal art. Yeah.

SECTION B: BIG TECH LOBBYING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Big Tech Lobbying.

Nathan Calvin on Californias AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy Part 2 - 80,000 Hours Podcast - Air Date 8-29-24

 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: So we'll come back to more about what specifically is in the bill, uh, in a little bit, but I actually want to talk about kind of the proponents and the critics of the bill because it's become so incredibly controversial over the last few months and even just last week that I want to kind of look at that right off the bat.

So I guess, [01:19:00] who supports the bill? Who's in favor? 

NATHAN CALVIN: There's a, uh, a really wide variety of, of supporters. I think some of the most high profile ones have been Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell and Lawrence Lessig, kind of some of these, uh, you know, scientific and academic luminaries of the field.

I think there's also just a wide variety of, of different nonprofit and, uh, startups and different organizations that are supportive of it. Uh, SEIU, one of the largest unions in the United States is supportive of the bill. There are also some. AI startups including, uh, Imbue and, uh, Notion that are both in support of the legislation and wide variety of others, you know, like the Latino Community Foundation.

Like, there's just a lot of different kind of civil society and non profit orgs who have formally supported the bill and say that this is important. 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: I think from memory, like the vast majority, or maybe it's like three quarters of Californians also in a poll really support the bill, which [01:20:00] that quite surprised me.

I don't think of basically any legislation ever having that much support. And probably that's wrong, but it still seems, it still seems just intuitively high to me. But yeah, let's talk about some of the opponents. Um, I guess naively, I guess naively, It's hard for me to understand why this bill has become so controversial.

Yeah, in particular, because my impression is that nearly all of the big AI companies have already adopted some version of this kind of exact set of policies internally. And you can correct me if I'm wrong there. But yeah, who AI companies? The bill's big opponents. 

NATHAN CALVIN: Yeah. So I think maybe the loudest opponent has been Andreessen Horowitz, um, A16Z and some of their, their general partners have come out just, um, really, really strongly against the, the bill.

Um, 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: and just in case anyone's not familiar, they're like maybe the biggest investor. Ever, or, or at least in, in these technologies. 

NATHAN CALVIN: Yeah. Yeah. I think that [01:21:00] they're in their category of VC firm and they're probably different ways of defining it. I think they're the largest, you know, I'm sure you could put it in different ways such that they're lower on that list or something, but they're extremely large venture capital, um, firm.

So I think there's a mix of different opponents. I think that's definitely one really significant one. I think there are also folks like Yann LeCun who has. called kind of a lot of the risk that the bill is considering, you know, science fiction and things like that. I think there has also just been kind of more quietly, but just like a lot of the kind of normal big tech interests of, you know, things like Google and the, uh, you know, tech net, like the trade associations that really kind of advocate on behalf of, of companies.

in legislative bodies have also been quite strongly against the bill. I think we've also seen some folks in, in Congress weigh in and, you know, most recently and notably, uh, Nancy Pelosi, which is a little bit painful to me as someone who's a fan of her [01:22:00] and then has a, you know, a ton of respect for her and everything that she's accomplished.

And, you know, can talk a little bit about that specifically as well, but yeah, there's a mix of, of different folks who have, who have come out against the bill. And I think they have. some overlapping and some different reasons and I agree that I'm a bit surprised by just how controversial and strong the reactions have been given how like relatively modest the legislation I think actually is and kind of how much it has been amended over the course of the process and even as it's been amended to address different issues it feels like the intensity of the opposition has kind of Increased in volume rather than decreased.

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: I actually am curious about the Nancy Pelosi thing. Did she have particular criticisms? What was the opposition she voiced? 

NATHAN CALVIN: I think it's a, a mix of things. I mean, I, I do think that she, she talked about the letter that, um, Fei Fei Lee wrote in opposition of the bill and [01:23:00] cited that. I do think that that letter has one part that just is false.

Like talking about how the. The shutdown requirements of the bill apply to open source models when they're specifically exempted from those requirements. I think that the other sense of it is just, you know, I think they're pointing to some of these existing kind of. Processes and convening that are happening federally and just, you know, saying that it's it's, you know, too early to really like instantiate these more specifically in law and that this is something that the the federal government should do rather than having states like California move forward with.

And I think our response is really that California has done similar things on. Data privacy and, uh, on green energy and lots of other things where Congress has been stalled and they've taken action. And I think we do this similarly, and obviously they have a, have a difference of opinion there. But I do think that if we wait for Congress to act itself, we might be waiting a very long time.

Tech's Big Money Campaign is Getting Pushback with Margaret O'Mara and Brody Mullins Part 3 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-26-24

 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: [01:24:00] So one of the things that we think a lot about at the Center for Humane Technology, I mean, we have so many obvious issues with social media degrading the quality of discourse, causing addiction, doomscrolling, skyrocketing mental health issues for, for youth, teen suicides. And we know the cause of it. We know that it's driven by this engagement based business model, the monetization of our attention.

And so given the sort of obviousness of this, one of the things that we've noticed is that you see tech companies saying, we're for regulation. We definitely need regulation and they'll say that publicly. And then behind the scenes there, they'll do every tactic possible to kind of block things. Um, I was at Senator Schumer's, uh, AI Insight Forum in front of all the CEOs, you know, Jensen Wong and Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates and everybody was there in one room, Zuckerberg, Elon.

And Schumer opened the meeting by having people raise their hand if they agreed that the federal government should regulate AI. Literally every single one of the CEOs hands went up. And yet, the next day, all of their policy teams went to work saying, well, yeah, but not these kinds of regulations. We've seen Meta come out publicly in [01:25:00] favor of Section 230 reform, for example, and other social media companies who support kids online safety.

So I'm just curious, how are you seeing the companies evolve their strategies in this sort of backroom opposition? 

BRODY MULLINS: Yeah, you know, it's a fascinating area because, uh, unfortunately, you know, Congress is just so, they're, they're so ill equipped to passing any law on any topic at this point. And I think the tech companies and the AI companies are taking advantage of that.

I mean, Facebook has realized Congress is dysfunctional. They're not going to pass a law. So let's just say we support it and say, hey, you know, go for it. They basically challenged Congress to regulate them and Congress can't get its act together. 

MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah, and this is not the first time in American history this has happened, you know, where, where industries say, Oh, yeah, regulate us.

Um, but also there's, you know, it's a good reminder too that Silicon Valley is never, there are many Silicon Valleys, right? There, and every company and every part of the tech world has its own, um, policy priorities, and they may not be in sync. You know, if you go back to the 1980s, the chip makers and the [01:26:00] PC makers didn't have policies in sync with one another.

Chip makers wanted to retain their market advantage. The PC makers wanted to have really cheap chips from Japan, so they didn't care if the market was flooded. Um, and we see the same thing playing out now, so, and, and yes, I think what Brody's point about the level of dysfunction. Um, this again was, was pertinent in the Gilded Age.

It's one reason he didn't have much regulation, business regulation coming out of the late 19th century either when you are able to play on those partisan differences and the fact that the two parties have different ways, different means towards the same end or have different priorities even within something like social media regulation or privacy regulation.

And so where the lead has been. taken or where, where regulations come has come from other geographies, notably from Europe. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: So I, we hear this a lot, obviously, that Congress is dysfunctional, it's never going to pass anything. I just want to add to that picture that there are deliberate ways that companies will sow division about an issue so that it [01:27:00] prevents action from being taken.

The example that I'm most familiar with is Facebook turning the argument about what's wrong with Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. into a question about whether it's free speech or censorship, because they know that that philosophical question literally will never resolve. There is no conversation that will ever say the answer is clearly one side or the other.

And they by doing so distracted people's attention from their core business model, which is monetizing maximum engagement and attention, which is what's driving the amplification of polarizing content, oral outrage, et cetera. And so I'm curious if you have reactions to that, that one of the further strategies companies are developing is finding ways not to, uh, to sit back, but actually frame debates, actively use communication to, um, stall by using a false dichotomy.

MARGARET O'MARA: Well, these, these are companies that are very good at, uh, very persuasive, and they're to have the very persuasive tools at their disposal. And yeah, that's right. Sort of changing the conversation is a, is a key, uh, a key tactic here. It's not something the tech industry invented. And the, the tech industry [01:28:00] has, has always positioned itself for a very long time as different a different kind of business, kind of higher, kinder, gentler capitalism, um, don't be evil capitalism.

Right? And that has been part of its great appeal. Um, and, and it's genuine. I think it's earnest. It comes from a, from a genuine place. It has a history. There's a reason behind it. But at the end of the day, These are companies, these are, you know, a C suite that's accountable to its shareholders. These are publicly traded companies, they're accountable to their investors, they're accountable.

So they aren't that different from any of the other lobbying industries in Washington. Wouldn't you agree, Brody? 

BRODY MULLINS: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, this could be a good point to talk a little bit about how lobbies change also that, you know, You know, these are not companies that are hiring, uh, connected lobbies to go up to Capitol Hill and try to get a member of Congress to support them.

They're running basically presidential campaigns on behalf of their issues. And the one of the first things that you want in a good presidential campaign or a good national campaign is a good, easy to understand motto or slogan. And you know, that's what, why these companies seem to have these, these good arguments.

I mean, [01:29:00] back to the SOPA PIPA fight that we talked about earlier, the 2012 shut down the internet day. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um, you know, the company's slogan was these bills will kill the Internet. SOPA, PIPA will kill the Internet. That absolutely was not true. But it galvanized Americans. All of a sudden, Americans who don't pay attention to Washington, don't pay attention to policy, who certainly couldn't tell you what PIPA or SOPA stood for, you know, were saying, what?

You're going to shut down. You're going to kill the Internet. You can't do that. And you're calling and say, don't shut down the Internet. Um, you know, I mean, that's a tactic that, that, that was being used even before then, but it's certainly something that tech companies have gotten better at now. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And just to, well, just to slow you down for a second, because when you're saying they're running presidential campaigns, I think what you mean is that, like, a presidential campaign is a nationwide thing that takes hundreds of millions of dollars to sway public opinion, and I hear you saying that each of these campaigns about certain regulations or about certain things are, these aren't subtle things, these are multi hundred million dollar campaigns sweeping the entire nation.

BRODY MULLINS: Is that right? Absolutely. Uh, and what these companies [01:30:00] do, particularly when they're in a big legislative or policy fight is sort of set up, uh, legislative war rooms and they run these presidential campaigns not to elect a individual, but for a public policy issue. Um, so they have pollsters and they have grassroots organizers and they have poll tested messages and, you know, television ads.

Um, I mean, one of the reasons that some of these Uh, antitrust bills got killed in the Senate is that the tech companies went out to key, uh, states and ran ads saying, you know, don't let these bills pass. And that scared senators who thought that, uh, the tech industry could turn those ads against them in their reelection bids.

Um, so, uh, yeah, I mean, these, these tactics and campaigns and strategy are way more sophisticated than they used to be and, and much more like a presidential campaign than what most people think a lobbying campaign is about. Um, I 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: mean, that's wild to me. Even as an industry insider, it's wild to think about.

And I think when you, when you think about lobbying, you think about backroom deals, you think about, oh, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, you [01:31:00] pass this law. Not a hundred million dollar coordinated multi year influence campaign across, you know, I mean, it's just the scale is, is just unbelievable. 

MARGARET O'MARA: And this is a story of money.

I mean, this is reflecting that these companies, the industry and its largest companies have just piles and piles and piles of money. It's money they're throwing into building AI and they're throwing into these public policy campaigns. I mean, we think about the industries that are the biggest Washington lobbyists, um, by spend.

Um, they also happen to be the most profitable, um, pharma, oil and gas, and now tech.

Nathan Calvin on Californias AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy Part 3 - 80,000 Hours Podcast - Air Date 8-29-24

 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: Yeah, actually, can you give more context on that? Anthropic submitted a letter that basically said they'd support the bill if it was amended in particular ways. Is that right? 

NATHAN CALVIN: Yeah, and I think one important clarification that is I think some people interpreted a supportive amended to imply that they are currently opposed.

Uh, that's like not technically what it [01:32:00] was. They were currently neutral and they were saying that if you do these things, we will support. 

LUIS RODRIGUEZ - HOST, 80,000 HOURS PODCAST: We will actively support it. Okay. That is reassuring to me. I did, I did interpret it as, uh, we, we oppose it at the moment. 

NATHAN CALVIN: Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's some vagueness in it.

Yes. In this instance, that was not, not what was happening. Um, and I still think there are. These are large companies who I think have some of the incentives that large companies do, and you know, I think Anthropic is a company that is taking these things really seriously, and I think is pioneering some of these measures, but I also think that they're, they're still a large company are going to deal with some of the incentive issues that large companies have.

Um, and yeah, I, I really, you know, I think it's a little bit unfortunate, I think, how some of their engagement was interpreted in terms of opposition. And I think they do deserve some credit, I think, coming to the table here in a way that I think was, was actually helpful. But I think, you know, stepping back from Anthropic specifically and kind of thinking about folks who are opposing this, it's not like Anthropic is in any way like lobbying [01:33:00] against the, the bill, but there are other ones that certainly are.

And to some degree it's, it's not surprising. And it's a thing that, you know, I think we've seen before. And it's worth remembering of, you know, like Zuckerberg in his testimony in front of Congress, you know, said like, Oh, I want to be regulated. And, you know, it's a thing that you, you hear from lots of folks where they say, I want to be regulated, but then what they really mean is I want to regulate it in the exact way.

Basically, I want you to mandate for the rest of the industry, what I am doing now, and I want to just like self certify that what I'm doing now is happening. And that's it. That, that, that, that is, I think often what this really, um, And so there's some way in which it's like easy for them to support regulation in the abstract, but when they kind of look at it and, and again, like, I think there's some aspect here of, I think even within these companies of folks who care about safety, I think there's a reaction that says, you know, I understand this much better than the government does.

I kind of trust my own judgment about, you know, how to manage these trade offs and what is [01:34:00] safe, kind of better than, than some, some bureaucrat. And. You know, really it's ultimately good for me to just kind of make that decision. And there are like parts of that view that, that, you know, like, I guess I can understand how someone comes to, but I just think that it ends up in a really dysfunctional place.

You know, it's worth saying like, I am quite enthusiastic about AI and think that has like genuinely a ton of promise and is super cool. And part of the reason I work in this space is because like, I find it extremely cool and interesting and amazing. And just think that like, Some of these things are just some of the most remarkable things that humans have created and it is amazing.

And I think there is just a thing here of that this is a collective action problem where you have this goal of safety and investing more and kind of, you know, making this technology act in our, in our interests versus like trying to make as much money as possible and release things as quickly as possible and left to their own devices.

Companies are going to [01:35:00] choose the latter. And I do think that you need to Government to actually come in and say that you have to take these things seriously and that that's necessary. And I think that if we do wait until a really horrific catastrophe does happen, I think you might be quite likely to get regulation that I think is actually a lot less nuanced and deferential than what this bill is.

And so I think there's some level where they are being self interested in a way that, you know, that that was not really a surprise to me, but I think maybe the thing that I feel more strongly about is that like. I think they are not actually doing a good job of evaluating their long term self interest.

I think they are really focused on like, how do I get this stuff off my back for the near future and get to do whatever I want, and are not really thinking about what this is going to mean for them in the longer term. And I, I think that that has been a little bit disheartening to me. Um, I guess like one, one last thing I'll say here is I, I do think that there is a [01:36:00] really significant sentiment.

Among parts of the opposition that it's not really just that this bill itself is, is that bad or extreme that when you really like drill into it, like again, it is, it's, it's kind of a feels like one of those things where you like read it and it's like, this is the thing that everyone is. Screaming about, it's just like, I think it's like a pretty modest bill, um, in a lot of ways, but I think part of what they are thinking is that like, this is, you know, the first step to shutting down AI development or kind of that, like, if California does this, then lots of other states are going to do it.

And that kind of, we need to like really slam the door shut on model level regulation or else, you know, they're just going to keep going. And I think that that is like a lot of. What the sentiment here is it's like less about in some ways like the details of this specific bill and more about the sense that like They want this to stop here and that they're worried that if they like Give an inch that there will continue to be other things in the future And I don't think that is going to be tolerable [01:37:00] to the public in the long run And I think it's a bad choice, but I think that is the the calculus that they are making.

SECTION C: REGULATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, Section C: Regulation.

The DOJ beat Google in court. Now what - POLITICO Tech - Air Date 8-19-24

 

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Can you set the stage for us a little bit, Doha, and tell us why this ruling is so important? 

DOHA MEKKI: Sure, so the Justice Department has been enforcing the antitrust laws on behalf of the United States for a very long time, more than a century, and there are certain cases that are just synonymous with antitrust enforcement, um, standard oil.

AT& T, Microsoft, and now we have a fourth, which is United States versus Google, and the reason this is a really big deal is this is the most important case about the Internet since the invention of the Internet, and it's not very often that you get dense, meaty, [01:38:00] Opinions from federal courts. This one happened to be 277 pages, clearly outlining how a company can use its dominance to illegally maintain its monopoly power.

And the last time we did this was actually United States versus Microsoft, which is a case that was filed in 1998. And as I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk about, there are a lot of really important ways in which. United States versus Google, which is about Google's power in Internet search as all of us know it today and certain advertising markets that it uses to monetize its search functions really rhymes with Microsoft and you see it up and down the opinion.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Well, we will get into that. It has been reported that breaking up Google is now a next step under consideration. I know this litigation is ongoing and you are limited in how much you can talk about it, but we do have to ask, you know, is that something actually on the table? 

DOHA MEKKI: You correctly predicted that that is [01:39:00] not something that I can talk about because this is live litigation.

What I can say is that there is a process. Um, what the court did last week was hand down what is called a liability opinion, right? It found that Google is in fact a monopolist and that it had violated section two. And the next step is to, um, work with the court to, um, figure out a process for what a remedy looks like.

And so the last thing I would want to do is get out ahead of the court. 

JOSH SISCO: So, I mean, that is where. The rubber meets the road on this case is what happens next. Now we have to see how Google's business will change. Whatever ends up happening, if it doesn't force meaningful change, is this case, is this all for not?

DOHA MEKKI: So I have to challenge the premise. The liability decision means a lot. And as public enforcers, um, we attach significant meaning to the [01:40:00] liability phase. And that's because that is when the public gets a full accounting of what we thought the problem was. It's when the public gets to hear from witnesses that get to tell the story of not only how, but potentially why Google maintained.

It's monopoly power and ways that were ultimately found to violate the law. And so there's a lot of power and public accountability. And of course, we are very gratified that the court agreed with us that Google did, in fact, violate section 2 of the search Sherman act and is a monopolist. I think it's too soon to say exactly.

What a remedy might look like again, that is up to the court and we look forward to our role in helping to inform that, but I would not undercount or understate the power of a decision like this to transform not only how Google conducts itself, but how. These markets may evolve in the [01:41:00] future. And I think that without talking about this specific case, I think you can look to examples from other Section 2 cases like Standard Oil, like AT& T, like Microsoft to understand the power of a case like this, right?

A monopolization case to affect innovation going forward.

JOSH SISCO: You brought up Microsoft and there's a long history there that we can't really get into all those details, but this was the last time that the government took on a company of this stature. The government tried, came close, ultimately didn't break up Microsoft, but you went through this whole very prolonged convoluted remedy proceeding there.

Um, how was that informing what you guys are going to do now? 

DOHA MEKKI: So I think there are potentially a few Lessons to draw again [01:42:00] without speaking about USB Google specifically, it's it's good to be a good student of history about Microsoft. And so you might recall that when the USB Microsoft case was filed, the government did consider.

Breakups, right? Those were on the table. And what ultimately changed was decisions by new leaders. Uh, specifically, Charles James became the assistant attorney general, um, and ultimately made a decision, uh, to, uh, work out. What is essentially behavioral remedies with Microsoft as opposed to a breakup and so, um, you know, I, I can't sort of comment on that decision, but we can learn really important aspects of the Microsoft decree that again, many people will tell you were effective in making sure that Microsoft could not continue to abuse its monopoly power.

There is a monitor. There is a technical committee. There were affirmative and negative. [01:43:00] Obligations on Microsoft, um, in terms of how it engaged in these markets. And I think that there are, um, very obvious ways in which it was successful, right? It, um, ushered in different browsers. Um, companies like Google were able to offer search engines.

Um, and I, again, I think nobody would dispute that those were good things. I think what does become hotly contested is how much markets might have changed on their own apps and intervention. versus the efficacy of the actual decree.

Newsoms AI dilemma To sign or not to sign Part 2 - POLITICO Tech - Air Date 9-6-24

 

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: You know, this isn't the only AI bill in California. Lawmakers introduced more than 60 of them this session. What other bills passed? 

JEREMY WHITE: So to an extent that I think surprised some observers, a lot of the major bills actually did not make it to the governor's desk.

I'm thinking, for example, of a bill to outlaw automated decision making systems that display bias and [01:44:00] choices around Things like housing and hiring a bill to watermark or identify AI generated content. Um, so there were, there were certainly some big ticket items that did not make it to the governor's desk.

I think that's a reflection of the industry's, um, engagement on this one. There are a couple I'm watching, however, uh, dealing with elections, one of which would require companies to. take down deepfakes when they're flagged, another which would criminalize people who intentionally share misleading deepfakes in a campaign context.

The governor responded a few weeks back to Elon Musk sharing a deepfake of Kamala Harris by saying he would sign a bill outlawing what Elon Musk had done. Not a lot of detail about what bill the governor was talking about, either from the governor's office or from lawmakers, but the governor certainly signaled that he intended to do something on the sort of election interference and misinformation front.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: The California [01:45:00] legislature has such an interesting relationship with Silicon Valley, because, you know, tech drives a huge part of the state's economy, and yet California regulators, like, tend to be quite heavy handed. With the industry, how does a I kind of fit into that dynamic? 

JEREMY WHITE: I would say that in recent years we have seen a shift in the dynamic in Sacramento, where lawmakers have been increasingly willing.

To regulate these industries to say, look, these might be economic drivers, but we have to think about the societal impact. You've seen that with the gig companies like Uber, you've seen that with the social media companies like Meta, and now you're seeing it with AI. The consistent message from these lawmakers is we don't want to stop this industry.

We see that there are many benefits. We want to regulate it responsibly, and they see a cautionary tale in areas like social media where there's a widespread consensus that it got out of control before [01:46:00] lawmakers had the ability to regulate it. I think it's notable that the state senator carrying this bill Major safety bill.

Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and has certainly seen a lot of people, including people who have supported him politically opposing this bill. And so that dynamic has been there for a while. And I do think that tension between lawmakers wanting to regulate these society transforming technologies and lawmakers seeing that there are, um, Real economic benefits and a lot of political clout with these companies.

Um, I, I think there's a real collision there and it's, it's a needle that they're, they're always trying to thread. And I would just add that, again, this is one where there is a widespread perception that Gavin Newsom falls a little more on the side of the economic benefits, not to mention the tax revenue that these industries bring.

STEVEN OVERLY - HOST, POLITICO TECH: Right. What is the significance, you think, of all of this now? going forward. Obviously, it will depend on whether Newsom signs the bill or not. But what impact do you ultimately think this could have? 

JEREMY WHITE: That's a great [01:47:00] question. I think part of why these bills are so contested is that everyone recognizes if California does something here, it's essentially setting a standard for the country.

On the other hand, I think if Gavin Newsom vetoes it, it'll be interesting to see to what extent that motivates Washington to get more into this. On the other hand, I have no doubt that Scott Wiener, um, who's a pretty dogged legislator, is going to try again, even if this one gets vetoed. And so it'll be interesting to see if, uh, the governor's decision here resolves that tension between Capitol Hill and Sacramento or ramps it up.

The DOJ beat Google in court. Now what Part 2 - POLITICO Tech - Air Date 8-19-24

 

JOSH SISCO: So I wanted to sort of broaden out a little bit here at, uh, you guys have a number of other cases. The FTC has a number of other cases against large tech companies. You have another case coming up against Google. How are you sort of thinking about the impact of this case going for on, on your other matters?

DOHA MEKKI: So I think it validates the approach. [01:48:00] We worked very hard to put on a trial that was clear eyed and persuasive about market realities. Um, one of the things that makes antitrust kind of hard to understand for ordinary people, even the policy wonks and, um, folks who are really comfortable with technical stuff here in DC is that it seems very econometrically focused.

It's technocratic and it's difficult to understand, but here's a product. That almost all of us use and by explaining to the court with people who have real experience trying to bring these products to market. In many cases, Google's own executives, we were able to be more persuasive and kind of marry up the goals of the law with how these markets actually function.

And I think that that's something that you will see. In a lot of our cases, you know, you mentioned the Google ad tech case. That is a separate [01:49:00] litigation. That trial is starting in a courthouse in the eastern district of Virginia, um, on September 9th, but remember that that case is about digital advertising technologies, right?

So that case is about. Um, how Google owns a lot of the infrastructure that advertisers and publishers rely on to show you what's called open web display ads. And that's, that's different from the products that were at issue here. Um, but again, without, um, prejudging that recognizing that it's a, uh, live litigation, have, I think.

People should expect a very similar approach, which is to be experts on how these markets actually function and to, um, Do the best job we can possibly muster to tell persuasive stories about what monopoly power looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, but also how the effects of it [01:50:00] really reverberate for ordinary people.

And so when I think about a case like Google search, we told a story about, um. All of the innovation that we really lost out on and how the markets could have been more vibrant but for, um, some of the conduct that we saw and so like to put this in real terms for some of your listeners, you know, imagine a world in which we had, um, five or 10 different search engines, um, maybe.

You know, someone compete on privacy, right? Some would be particularly good for, um, I don't know. People have a particular interest. Um, there has been really interesting writing about, um, how the ability to conduct Internet searches empowers women to make decisions about. Their lives, including in the context of reproductive freedom and choices about their bodies.

And so again, [01:51:00] that restriction of consumer choice is a really important value and antitrust. And when companies resort to a legal means to maintain that power and maintain that control really limits our ability to make decisions about how we want to live our lives. 

JOSH SISCO: You've been at the division for about 10 years, I think that's maybe a little bit less than I've been up than I've been on this beat when I first started on, you know, covering this, it was a fairly sleepy technocratic area of the law.

Uh, it wasn't, it didn't get anywhere near the attention that it has now, and that has changed over the last four or five years. And so I'm wondering, like. What do you think are the biggest differences in like the administration's approach to antitrust and how that shift has been for you? 

DOHA MEKKI: Yeah. So this is my third administration.

And so I've been really pleased to see bipartisan interest in antitrust. But I'm also not surprised to see it. I think there are many, uh, [01:52:00] really smart people who have tried to unpack why antitrust is having a resurgence or whether, you know, why the public is more interested in antitrust and I think an explanation that I've often found.

Really compelling is that, you know, after the financial crisis, there was, you know, the two tiered recovery. Um, there were concerns about wage stagnation. Um, there was concern about the hauling out of the middle of the country. And I think that brought questions about political economy kind of to the fore and antitrust is not a great tool for answering.

All of those questions, but it does speak to things like economic coercion and the power of corporations over citizens. And what happened, I think, is that there was more research and more scholarship. That really reoriented all of us with the roots of antitrust and concerns. The founders may have had about corporations that [01:53:00] wield their power in ways that hurt citizens.

We're putting ourselves, you know, at bird's eye level with the corporate executives and market participants that are making decisions and trying to understand markets as they are, and then syncing that up with the facts. And so I think that's been the change. Um, I think there are ways in which we've been very successful and telling those stories, but no doubt there's more for us to do.

Um, and we're always learning about how markets actually work, um, and ways that corporate conduct may be hurting people and hurting innovation.

SECTION D: THINKING THROUGH SOLUTIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section D: Thinking Through Solutions.

This Moment in AI How We Got Here and Where Were Going Part 3 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 8-12-24

 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, well, that's a really good segue into what I wanted to talk about next, actually, which is that the work that CHT has been doing on AI is really on a continuum to the work that The organization first started to do on social media and you [01:54:00] know, I think that's something people don't always understand very well, so I'd love for you to have a go at explaining that.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah. The, the key thing to understand that con, that connects our work on social media to AI is the focus on how good intentions with technology. Aren't enough. And it's about how the incentives that are driving, how that technology gets rolled out or designed or you know, adopted leads to, you know, worlds that are not the ones that we want.

You know, a joke that I remember making ISA when we were at AI for Good was, imagine you go back 15 years and we went to a conference called Social Media for Good. I could totally imagine that conference. In fact, I think I almost went to some of those conferences back in the day because we were all.

Everyone was so excited about the opportunities that social media presented and me included. I remember hearing Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter on the radio in 2009, talking about someone sending a tweet in Kenya and getting retweeted twice and suddenly, everybody in the United States saw it within 15 seconds.

And it's like, that's amazing. That's so powerful. And who's not intoxicated by that? And [01:55:00] those good use cases. Are still true. The question was, is that enough to get to the good world where technology is, you know, net synergistically improving the overall state and health of the society? And the challenge is that it is gonna keep providing these good examples, but the incentives underneath social media we're gonna derive systemic harm or systemic weakening of society.

Shortening of attention spans more division, less of a. Of, uh, information commons driven by truth, but more the incentives of clickbait, uh, the outrage economy, so on and so forth. And so the same thing here. Here we are 15 years later, we're at the UN AI for Good Conference. It's not about the good things AI can do, it's about are we incentivizing AI to systemically roll out in a way that's strengthening societies?

That's the question. 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: It's worth pausing there because. It's not like we are anti AI or anti technology, right? Like, it's not that we are placing attention on just the bad things AI can do. [01:56:00] That's, it's not about us saying like, let's look at all the catastrophic risks that's, or the existential risks.

That's not That's not the vantage point we take. The vantage point we take are, what are the fragilities in our society that we are going to expose with new technology that are going to undermine our ability to have all those incredible benefits? That is the place we have to point our attention to. We have a responsibility to point our attention to, and I wish there were more conferences that weren't just AI for good, but AI for, you know, making sure that things continue.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Just one metaphor to add on top of that that I've liked using re recently is that you, you've, um, mentioned a few times is this Jenga metaphor. Like, you know, we all want a taller and more amazing building of benefits that AI can get us. But there's, imagine two ways of getting to that building. One way is we build that taller and taller building by pulling out more and more blocks from the bottom.

So we get cool AI [01:57:00] art that we love, but by creating DeepFakes that undermine people's understanding of what's true and what's real in society. We get new cancer drugs, but by also creating AI that can speak the language of biology and enable all sorts of new biological threats at the same time. So we are not people who are, you know, we are clearly acknowledging the tower is getting taller and more impressive exponentially faster every year because of the pace of scaling and compute and all the forces we're talking about.

But isn't there a different way to build that tower? than to keep pulling out more and more blocks from the bottom. That's the essence of the change that we're trying to make in the world. 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And this is why, just to tie it back to something you said before, half lighting is so dangerous, because half lighting says I'm only going to look at the blocks I placed on the top, but I'm going to ignore that I'm doing it by pulling a block out from the bottom.

That's right, exactly. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Okay, so what are some solutions to these problems? What kind of policies can we bring in [01:58:00] on a national level? 

AZA RASKIN - CO-HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, there are efforts underway to work on a sort of more general federal liability coming out of product law for AI. And I just wanted to have a call out to our very talented policy team at CHT, uh, You know, our leaders there, Casey Mock and Camille Carlton, they're often more behind the scenes, but you'll be able to listen to them in one of our upcoming episodes to talk about specific AI policy ideas around liability.

And another just sort of very common sense solution, and we can tie this back to the Jenga metaphor, is how much money, how much investment should be going into upgrading our governance. So we can say that at least, you know, like 15, 25 percent of every dollar spent of the trillions of dollars going into making AI more capable should go into upgrading our ability to govern [01:59:00] and steer AI as well as the defenses for our society.

Right now, we are nowhere near that level. 

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah. But who makes the decision about what should be spent on safety? I mean, is that something that happens on a federal level? Is that something that happens on an international level? Or do we trust the companies to make those decisions for themselves? , 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: you don't, you can't trust the companies to make decisions for themselves because then it becomes an arms race for who can hide their costs better and spend the least amount on it, which is exactly what's happening.

It's a, it's a race to the bottom. As soon as someone says, I'm not gonna spend any money on safety, and suddenly I'm gonna spend the extra money on GPUs and going faster and having a bigger, more impressive AI model so I can get even more investment money. That's how they win the race. And so it has to be something that's binding all the actors together.

We don't have international laws that can make that happen for everyone, but you can at least start nationally and use that to set international norms that globally we should be putting 25 percent of those budgets into it.

SASHA FAGAN - PRODUCER, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: So this conversation, like a lot of the conversations we have on the show can [02:00:00] feel a little bit disempowering because it can be hard to get a sense of progress on these issues. But there have actually been some big wins for the movement and I'd love to get your guys thoughts on these, especially on the social media side.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, um, there's actually a lot of progress being made on some of the other issues that CHT has worked on, including the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, actually issued a call for a warning label on social media. And while that might seem, like, kind of empty, or like, what is that really going to do, if you look back to the history of big tobacco, the Surgeon General's warning was a key part of establishing new social norms, that, that cigarettes and tobacco were, were illegal.

And I think that we need that set of social norms for social media. You know, another thing that happened is, you know, this group, Mothers Against Media Addiction, that we talked about the need for that to exist a couple years ago, uh, Julie Scalfo has been leading the charge. And that has led to, you know, in person protests in front of Meta's campus in New York and other places.

And I believe Julie and Mama were actually present in New York when they did the ban of infinite [02:01:00] scrolling. Recently in New York State legislatures, there's been 23 state legislatures that have passed social media reform laws and the Kids Online Safety Act just passed the United States Senate, which is a landmark achievement.

I don't think something has gotten this far in tech regulation in a very long time. And President Biden said he'll sign it if it comes across his desk, and that would be amazing. You know, and this would create a duty of care for minors that use the platform, which would mean that the platforms are required to take reasonable measures to reform design for better outcomes.

It doesn't regulate how minor search in the platform, um, which deals with the issue that would have a chilling effect on, on free speech, or especially issues on L-G-B-T-Q minors. So this is, I think, progress to celebrate.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. The Additional Sections of the show included clips from Andrewism, Your Undivided Attention, [02:02:00] The 80,000 Hours Podcast, and Politico Tech. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. And you'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. 

So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my [02:03:00] name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.

 

Air Date 9/10/2024

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[00:00:00] 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. It's said that we live in a melting pot here in the US. Perhaps it's more of a salad bar, who knows. In any case, there are a lot of people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, cultures, histories, and geographies, all about to vote in a few weeks. Today, we try to understand at least roughly how people's backgrounds influence their vote. 

Sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today, include the NPR Politics Podcast, What A Day, The Wall Street Journal State of the Stat, AJ+, Brown University, and Vox. Then, in the additional deeper dives half the show, there'll be more on three cohorts, or give or take. Section A is a bit of a mixed bag actually, including discussions on LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish, and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Section B [00:01:00] is on Latino and Black voters, and section C is White and rural voters.

A conversation about how demographic changes could impact the 2024 election - The NPR Politics Podcast - Air Date 9-3-24

 

SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Let's start with a group we hear a lot about, white voters without college degrees. Domenico, they're a key group because they're just a really big group in this country, right? How have their numbers changed? 

DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, they are a big group in the country. In fact, in all of the seven swing states that we're paying attention to—the three blue-wall states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the four sunbelt states: North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—they are the largest, single group, but they're on the decline everywhere, which makes the job for Trump and his campaign to turn out these voters a lot more difficult. 

SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: They're a key group for Trump, and they're a shrinking share of the electorate, essentially, right? 

DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, they are. And when you look at all the seven states, they've gone down a couple points just since 2020, and if you zoom out and go back to, 2008, [00:02:00] take Wisconsin, for example, was 66 percent non college, white voters. Now it's only down to about 58-59%. So that's a big shift. And you're also seeing an increase in those blue-wall states of white voters with college degrees, which is a group that's now moved more heavily toward Democrats, a group that had been pretty heavily Republican in years past. And now Trump has really traded out those white college educated voters, who tend to vote in higher numbers, for these lower propensity voters. And that is a big warning sign potentially for his team, especially when their turnout operation is also a big question mark. 

SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: But one interesting and important thing about this group, the white, non college voters, these voters are actually quite different depending on where in the country you're talking about. 

DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, that's absolutely true. Voters without college degrees who are white in the blue-wall states, for example, vote very differently than those same [00:03:00] voters in North Carolina and Georgia, the two Southern states that are part of this group of swing states.

When you look at the voters in North Carolina and Georgia, they voted something like 78-79% for Trump in 2020. When you look at the blue-wall states, they're only about the high 50s 60% for Trump, and that really makes a big difference. And that's something that Kamala Harris is continuing to try and do, which is reduce the margins with some of these heavy Trump groups.

ASHLEY LOPEZ - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: What I find most interesting about all this is yes, college educated voters are more likely to vote, so therefore this is a net positive for Democrats, but I would argue this does present a optics challenge for Democrats, right? The party has long promoted itself as the party on the side of the working man, so to speak, so it's not surprising that there is some concern that non-college, white voters having slipping support there is a problem. That's why you see so much jockeying for the union vote, for example. But I think this [00:04:00] concentration of college educated folks in the party is going to present an interesting issue as the party tries to tackle its elitism problem.

I think overall it is going to be interesting to see if this is a high turnout election or a low turnout election, because what we've seen is because so many higher education white voters are concentrated in the Democratic Party, it has been easier for Democrats to overperform in low turnout like special elections, but if this is a high turnout election, I'm curious to see what this would mean. 

SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: And Domenico, when it comes to the white voters with college degrees, I think I heard you say they're becoming higher propensity voters. What's happening with that group? 

DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: White college educated voters are among the highest propensity voters, about eight in ten of them vote in every election, as compared to white voters without college degrees, only about six in ten of them vote in these elections. The Trump folks see that as an opportunity, but in an election like this one, when turnout experts say it's going to be lower turnout than 2020 because of the lack of mail in [00:05:00] voting everywhere in the same way that it was during the pandemic, that these lower propensity voters tend to then go on the decline in those lower turnout elections.

But what we're seeing is in the blue-wall states in particular, the white population in those states is more educated than at any other time. Whites with degrees are up eight points in Pennsylvania, six points in Wisconsin, five points in Michigan since 2008. In Wisconsin alone, they're up four points just since 2020. And this really has to do with sort of the reshaping of the rust belt, where the jobs are. 

There was a time, obviously, when people could have jobs in factories, have two cars, own a home, maybe even have a vacation house somewhere. That's no longer the case, and the younger population knows that they need to get college degrees, and we're seeing that. Help increase the college educated white population in those states and that's helping Democrats. 

SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: So interesting. How does that translate into messaging from the campaigns and a turnout strategy? I'm thinking back to 2016 when we [00:06:00] heard Trump talk about I'm for the educated and the not so educated. He clearly knew who some of his constituency was, but what does it look like now? 

DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: The fact is, when we're talking about who these groups are appealing to with Democrats appealing more to white college, educated voters, and Republicans and Trump specifically appealing to white voters without college degrees, that means it's going to be a lot harder work for the Trump campaign to turn out their voters. And generally, now that we're past Labor Day, this is the time for mobilization. And the Trump folks have had a real question mark around their turnout operation. 

The Democrats have way more staffers on the ground. They have more volunteers that more offices. Of course Trump bucked those trends in 2016 as well, so we'll see what happens cause he has a very devoted and loyal base. 

ASHLEY LOPEZ - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: This is also why they're trying to increase support among groups that Trump has been doing a little better with compared to Republicans in the past, like Latino men and Black men in particular, because [00:07:00] there's only so much electorally you can draw from with just white, non-college educated.

The Gender Gap Is Widening In The 2024 Election - What A Day - Air Date 9-4-24

 

Juanita Tolliver: There is a growing gender divide among voters who support Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and a lot of the movement is happening among white voters. According to a recent ABC Washington Post Ipsos poll, Vice President Harris has a 13 point advantage among women voters, and Trump has a five point advantage among men, and that’s an 18 point gap between the two groups. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. Okay. Very stark here. You mentioned that most of the movement has been happening with white voters. So how have they been shifting? 

Juanita Tolliver: Yeah, the biggest change since the Democratic convention has been among white women, as Trump dropped from a plus 13 advantage among white women pre convention to now only plus two, which is within the margin of error for this poll. And then there are the white men who are flocking to Trump as his numbers jumped from plus [00:08:00] 13 to plus 21 in the same time period. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. 

Juanita Tolliver: Now, when we consider these numbers, we have to keep in mind the reality that according to the US Bureau of the census, current population reports, women have registered and voted at higher rates than men since 1980. So when it comes to voter power, it’s important to watch how women move. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Listen, based on what you’ve told me, that sounds A-okay to me, but really, such a divide here. How much weight should we give this gender gap as we get closer and closer to November? 

Juanita Tolliver: Like I always tell you, with every poll, this is merely a snapshot of the current moment. But there are reasonable questions to ask about the gender gap in the context of which issues motivate these splits, like the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs that overturned the right to abortion access. Also, how the divide is impacted when you consider race, age, and more. 

To dig into all of this. I spoke with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox, covering challenges to democracy and [00:09:00] author of the book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Here’s our conversation. 

So you wrote a piece back in March where you questioned the idea of a growing political divide between men and women, but given the recent polling that shows the gender gap growing between Harris and Trump voters, do you still think that divide’s overstated, at least when we’re talking specifically about American voters? 

Zack Beauchamp: The honest answer to that question is I don’t know. I don’t know because pre-election polling when it comes to demographic subgroups it can often be very unreliable. Right now, men and women are a sort of different case because they’re pretty large sample sizes. But also when you look at the attempts to try to figure out where this gender divide is coming from, you often end up looking at really small demographic sub slices like Gen Z men and women. There you’re going to run into significant sample size problems, and there’s going to be a lot of variation in each individual poll. And so you end up getting these polls, you’ve seen them a lot in this cycle, that showed Trump getting an [00:10:00] improbably large percentage of Black voters, for example, one that would defy anything close yeah– 

Juanita Tolliver: Cough cough. Yes. Yes. I see that all the time.

Zack Beauchamp: Some of those things are just not happening, and they’re probably a result of there being statistical noise in the sample randomness can generate random stuff, that’s how it works. That’s all a big caveat, though. It’s entirely possible that there is a growing gender divide in American politics. And when I wrote that article that you talked about a second ago, my conclusion wasn’t, this isn’t happening, it’s we don’t have enough evidence to know for sure that it’s happening. There’s some evidence. It’s very preliminary, it’s very new, and we don’t know how durable these patterns are. We don’t know how significant they are, and we know, based on past elections that the gender gap is typically overstated and, generally speaking, dwarfed by gaps inside of genders. 

White women and Black women vote much more differently than men and women do. Same thing with white men and Black men. We could go on down the list— race, [00:11:00] religion, sexual orientation, age, all of these tend to be more important than gender, historically. Again, that might change, and there’s some reasons to think it may in fact be changing, but I’m still on the cautious side, just because of how often this kind of thing gets overstated. 

Juanita Tolliver: I appreciate the caution, but I do want to focus on the evidence around this election in which gender has become a major issue. Polls show Harris has increased her margin over Trump with women voters by about 13 points, but that divide was there when President Biden was the presumptive nominee. So, we know reproductive rights has been a big issue driving women to Democrats in particular. But what else is pushing women voters to the left right now? 

Zack Beauchamp: A few of the plausible guesses include first, there’s a growing educational gap among women and men. Women are increasingly more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than men are. And we know that education tends to make people... well, I should be cautious about that. We know that people who have college degrees are [00:12:00] more likely to be Democrats. We don’t really know why. That’s another one of those fun puzzles that we’ve got in American politics. Where you look at these things and you have a bunch of different theories, you don’t really know why it’s true. But if it’s the case that women are increasingly making up the ranks of college graduates, men are less likely to graduate. That means that women are probably more likely to become Democrats disproportionately. 

Another theory is that it’s generational. Like Dobbs is part of it, maybe a really big part. But another part would be that a lot of women who are younger now were socialized in a moment where gender politics and conflict over gender became really salient, a really important part of their experience. I’m talking Donald Trump running for president after the grab them by the pussy comments, the MeToo movement that came after that, the rise of a lot of young men paying attention to misogynist influencers, people like Andrew Tate. 

If you’re a young woman in high school and the men are listening to a guy who is, there’s a lot of very good evidence that he’s an actual sex trafficker, and [00:13:00] that’s who they’re looking to for dating advice and advice about how to be a man in the modern world, it would make sense that a lot of women would come to see politics through the lens of gender. And that’s why a lot of the arguments about this, they tend to focus on younger women, because the divide is not very evident in older generations. But there’s some preliminary polling that you pointed to that tends to suggest a massive divide between young men and young women in political preferences. Again, we’ll see if that’s borne out in November. It may or may not be. 

Juanita Tolliver: I do want to go to the flip side of that and hear your theories as it relates to men, because American men have been riding with Trump and Republicans. 

Zack Beauchamp: But the thing I want to add, this is like a little fun wrinkle, is that it’s actually not that young men are more conservative than older generations. There is some evidence that a fringe of young men listen to these Andrew Tate type figures, but actually, on average, a Gen Z man is more likely to be left leaning than someone in older generations. Maybe not [00:14:00] millennials, but certainly older than that. But what’s really happened is that young women have swung really hard to the left. So a lot of the explanation is less what happened to men then what’s going on with women and why again if the state is right, why are women so left wing. That’s one of the things that we have to puzzle through right now. 

Juanita Tolliver: Let’s start to dig into it, because you mentioned a couple of things already. You mentioned the recording where Trump talked about grabbing women by their genitals. We talked MeToo movement. There’s Dobbs that we’ve already discussed as well, and a lot of that came up after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. So how do you see these kinds of events exacerbating, gender divide in American politics? 

Zack Beauchamp: There is a sense that the feminist movement and its gains are under attack in a way that they haven’t been in a really long time. And it’s not just a sense. Dobbs wasn’t just one political development among many. A lot of people treated it like that at the time, that it was just one [00:15:00] of those things that’ll happen and then people forget about it by November. We know that’s not what happened. We know it was one of probably the two most decisive issues, maybe the single most decisive issue in Democrats well overperforming in the midterm elections. 

This was an epical event for the way that a lot of Americans see their politics. And before that, abortion politics weren’t actually that polarized on gender lines. Men and women were similar when it came to abortion. But I have this theory, and I feel like it’s been borne out by a lot of recent events, that people don’t really appreciate something when it’s going to happen, it’s only when it actually happens that it changes the way they think about politics. 

Juanita Tolliver: Oh come on. I feel like Trump’s full administration was a case study in that reality check. Yeah.

Zack Beauchamp: Yeah. It’s like people were like, "okay, maybe this bad thing could happen, but you know, that’s could. That’s that’s a future problem. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t." But once the constitutional right to abortion was gone, and [00:16:00] you started getting states banning abortion altogether pretty much, or doing six week bans that were functionally the same thing, people really changed the way they thought about this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a gender gap emerged as a consequence, a durable and consistent gender gap, because it’s women whose rights are being taken away. Of course, like historically, people would puzzle why don’t women care more about this? And I think the answer we may have is they didn’t think that it was going to be under threat in the way that it is 

Why So Many Young Men Are Leaving Democrats for Republicans in 2024 - WSJ State of the Stat - Air Date 8-19-24

 

NARRATOR: In 2008, 58% of young people lean Democratic. 2012, 53%. And in the last two major election years, that percentage held steady at 55%. But in 2023, that number dipped below 50% for the first time since 2005. And you'll notice right here, they've started to lean more Republican. And that's partly because of one specific group, young men.

Young men have increased their support of the Republican Party from 35% to [00:17:00] 48%, a 13 percentage point increase in just seven years, and this is a new trend. While 2020 exit polls show that young men backed Biden by 15 percentage points, a February 2024 Wall Street Journal poll found they favored Trump by 14 percentage points. And this loss of young male voters is a major issue for the Democratic Party going into November. The question now, can Kamala Harris bring some back? 

Here's what's driving young men to support Republicans and what it could mean for the presidential election to come. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: When we ask young voters, "what issue is most important to you when you go to cast a vote?" Among young men, it's the economy. Among young women, it's abortion. 

NARRATOR: 17% of men say the economy is the most important issue, followed by democracy and immigration, whereas for young women, the top issue is abortion, by a lot. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: Why is this happening? Well, we put the reasons [00:18:00] into two different buckets. One is the life experiences that young men and young women are having. Those life experiences are diverging. 

NARRATOR: Young men without a college degree have seen the greatest decline in labor force participation. Meanwhile, a record 87% of college educated women are in the workforce. And today, women make up 60% of college graduates. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: This division that we're seeing between young men and young women, it goes beyond who they're going to vote for for Congress or President. It goes to a range of policy issues. So then let's look at what is offering. The Biden administration has moved to forgive federally funded student loans. That affects young women more than young men. 

NARRATOR: During the 2019 2020 school year, 49% of female undergraduate students took out loans, compared to only 42% of male undergraduates. And 66% of all student debt is carried by women. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: The young women favored forgiving student loans by [00:19:00] 45 percentage points. The young men were about equally divided. That's a big difference. 

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, young men support extending Trump's tax cuts by 23 percentage points, which cut the corporate tax rate and reduced some individual income tax.

DONALD TRUMP: And now because of our tax cuts, you can keep more of your hard earned money. 

NARRATOR: But women oppose the proposed extension by 20 percentage points, a full 43 point difference. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: That's data that goes like this. Young men headed in one direction and young women in the other. That's a big difference. Data does not usually segment young voters that remarkably. This is something new. 

NARRATOR: Which brings us back to this chart. 22% of young female voters say abortion is their number one issue in this election, a key aspect of Harris' campaign. 

KAMALA HARRIS: We trust women to make decisions about their own body. 

NARRATOR: Only 3% of young male voters said the same. And young men and women stacked up differently on other issues [00:20:00] as well. With immigration, Trump's policies are much more likely to be supported by men than women. Men support deploying troops at the border by 10 percentage points, whereas women oppose this policy by 15 points. And when it comes to building the wall, one of Trump's key immigration policies, men are only slightly leaning towards opposition, but women overwhelmingly oppose it.

These gaps are hard to explain just by differences in lived experience, which brings us to the second thing that explains the gap between young men and women. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: What are the candidates and what are the parties saying to young voters? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are putting out a lot of messages expressly intended to appeal to young men. Donald Trump has gone to ultimate fighting championship matches. He recently appeared on the podcast of Logan Paul. He went to a sneaker convention to sell his own brand of sneakers. 

DONALD TRUMP: We gotta get young people out to vote. 

AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: These are audiences that are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly filled with young men. And it's a way that [00:21:00] Donald Trump and his campaign have been saying, "Hey, young men, I'm with you. I'm on the same page as you. I understand you." 

A lot of the messaging from the Democratic Party has been towards issues that are more salient for women. 

KAMALA HARRIS: When I am President of the United States, I will sign into law. the protections for reproductive freedom. 

NARRATOR: So what does this mean for November? Young women historically vote at higher rates than young men, but experts say that with a tight election, the Democratic Party will need to draw in as many votes as possible. The next challenge for the Republican Party will be figuring out how to turn these young male supporters into actual 

What Will Black Male Voters Do In 2024? - AJ+ - Air Date 7-7-24

 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: The US's next president may be chosen inside sanctuaries like this. Detroit's Bethel AME Church is the largest precinct in Michigan. It had the highest number of voters registered and the highest number of ballots 2022 midterms. This year, Michigan is one of the most [00:22:00] important states in the election.

CHAD KING: Say hello to Coretta. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Is that the name of your gun? 

CHAD KING: Yes, Coretta. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Coretta. As in the civil rights activist? 

CHAD KING: As in Coretta Scott King, yes. I name all of my guns after historic Black women. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Gun rights are central to Chad's political views. 

CHAD KING: They always say you vote with your heart in the primaries, but in the general election, you vote with your brain. I haven't gotten to a point where I feel like I can confidently say, yes, Joe Biden is the person I should vote for. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: What are you iffy on him about? 

CHAD KING: I'm iffy about him, certainly on the firearms issue. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Gun ownership is almost universally seen as an issue for conservatives, white conservatives. It's a tenet of the Republican platform.

CHAD KING: I think that gun rights are just as important as voting rights in my opinion. In fact, I think they're inextricably linked. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: But Chad, who is the legacy of Black people's historic relationship with gun ownership, is no Republican. He's a self described moderate voter who never views his ballot solely through the lens of gun rights. 

CHAD KING: The [00:23:00] economy is a significant issue for Black men because without economic sustainability for themselves, they cannot sustain a family. If they can't sustain a family, they can't build communities. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Chad's focus on the economy echoed what I'd hear from so many Black male voters I spoke with in Michigan.

BLACK MALE VOTER: We need economic balance amongst us. 

The economy, obviously. 

Economy. 

Just talked to a brother the other day and he said, I can't hear anything that a politician Is saying with the echoes in my pocket. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: This reflects Black voters concerns nationally. The economy has ato, their list of priorities along with improving education, reducing healthcare costs, and dealing with problems in impoverished communities.

CHAD KING: We aren't being heard about what the issues are that are important to us as Black men. The ad is that what one won't do another will. That may be, some of the cause for a small migration over to another party. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Who do you plan to support this year? 

CHAD KING: I have no clue yet. I know I can't, in good conscience, support Donald [00:24:00] Trump. That's a non starter. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: US establishment news media continually has said Republicans are successfully courting large numbers of Black male voters. 

NEWS REPORT: The recent New York Times Siena poll shows 23% support among Black voters for former President Trump. That's up 19 points. I think that what you see is a decline, especially Black men, in support for President Biden.

Basically, it's Black men under 30 that are moving towards the Republican Party. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: The reality is, Black people, including Black men, are the Democratic Party's most loyal voting bloc. In a May 2024 poll of registered Black voters, 83% were Democrats, or leaned that way. Here's the caveat. US citizens actually vote for the Electoral College, and then it votes for the President. The Electoral College distorts the vote because it's disproportionately weighted, and it lets a winner of a state take all of its votes. Only six states effectively will decide this year's election. This is [00:25:00] why who turns out to vote is so important. 

Kermit Williams is a progressive organizer canvassing a Detroit neighborhood. 

KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: So I used to tell people if they didn't vote, shut up, you don't have anything to say, because I thought that it was laziness, really. But I had to realize that not voting is just as much of a choice as voting. I think that a lot of people are making that choice right now, not if they're going to vote Republican or Democrat. What I'm concerned about mostly is that there's a number of Black men that won't vote. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Kermit says he's seen Black men targeted on social media with specific talking points. 

KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: And so I started noticing that the algorithm and their YouTube clips or everything else used to have a commercial that was really leaning toward that conservative or culture war thing to say that Black men don't have a place.

They had one social media influencer going so far to say, "Oh, the president doesn't make any difference in your life. So you should just vote for your state representatives and others." 

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT: Black people, pull, pull your minds out of the [00:26:00] presidential election. Don't entertain that president talk. That's a distraction because you don't pick it.

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: This is an example of what Kermit says Black men are seeing online. He sent it to me. He also sent me this as an example of social media parroting conservative talking points to Black people. 

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT: We're giving one party our vote because they've successfully gone about the business of convincing our community that the other party, the Republican party, is completely against the interest of the Black community.

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: What do you think the GOP and Republicans are doing to woo Black men? 

KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: They're spending the money, and they're paying attention to Black men, and I think their messaging is working with some, because they've been intentional in spending dollars. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Trump supporters have even doctored and shared fake AI images online. None of these Black people exist because they aren't real. 

NEWS REPORT: There's at least a dozen images like this going around on social media. They found it's been dating back at least since back in October.

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: [00:27:00] Then there's the fact. Trump debuted $400 sneakers at Sneaker Con in February, 2024. 

NEWS REPORT: This is connecting with Black America because they love sneakers or into sneakers. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Many viewed it as a racist trope. 

KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: At the end of the day, offering tennis shoes with a sprinkle of racism is not the way to get people out and encouraged to vote.

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Trump even uses his criminal indictments as an anecdote to relate to Black voters. 

DONALD TRUMP: And then I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time. And a lot of people said that that's why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: One thing that I've consistently heard from Black men who plan to support Donald Trump is that their primary issue is the border.

KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: And that's because they've been targeted with it. I've got at least 17 social media videos sent to me about the border, but I don't really believe that that is a major issue. 

IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: All this targeting is important because voters of color make up a third of the electorate, though [00:28:00] they only cast 22% of the ballots. You'd think any increase in their participation would be influential, but that's not exactly accurate. More than half of Black people live in the South, but thanks to policies like gerrymandering, voter restrictions, and the Electoral College, the presidential voting power of a Southern Black voter is diluted. It's far less influential than that of a in a Midwestern battleground state like Michigan.

Ian Haney López, "Dog Whistle Politics: Coded Racism and Inequality for All" - Brown University - Air Date 8-23-17

 

Ian Haney López: So, here's Mitt Romney. 2012, here are the campaign themes, he's saying, "Vote against Barack Obama, he's all about welfare and giveaways," even if it's not true. "Vote for me, I don't care about half the country, but I do plan to cut taxes for the very rich, allow corporations the freedom to write their own regulations, and slash social services that might help anybody who's poor, or at least in the bottom half."

And how'd he do? Now, most of you know. [00:29:00] He lost. How about among whites?

This is what the electoral map would look like if you only counted white votes in 2012. Mitt Romney won three out of five white votes across the country. It wasn't just old white men. He won among white women as well. He won among every age cohort of whites. Three out of five whites voted for a candidate who warned them, who lied to them about Barack Obama and welfare, and who promised to give control of the government over to the very rich.

And this is where we are today. This is a sort of dog whistle politics. A couple of points. This is not a story of race declining in influence since 1964. If you want to find [00:30:00] presidents who've done better than Mitt Romney among whites, than Mitt Romney did, you have to look to Reagan's re-election in 84, or Nixon's re-election in 72.

Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote. 62 percent of whites voted Republican in 2014. We are deep in the heart of dog whistle politics. A politics that is wrecking the middle class through racial themes. 

Okay, I'm out of here. Oh, no, wait. I guess we should talk about what to do, maybe. Okay, let's talk about what to do, and this is where I'm gonna wrap up.

First, demography will not save us. Listen, you know how I was saying the Democrats have said we should stay silent? They're saying we should stay silent again, right? They're saying, don't talk about race in politics, don't worry about it. Why not? Because, take heart, America, whites will soon be a minority.

Right? So the Democrats are saying to themselves, hey, you know, whites are 65 [00:31:00] percent of the country now, but by 2043 they will be a minority and dog whistle politics will stop working then. And there's two reasons why that's ludicrous. Reason number one, it turns out when you tell white people that are declining share of the population, they don't get more liberal and they don't get more racially tolerant.

They go the opposite direction. Levels of racial anxiety among whites goes up, and conservatism among whites goes up. It is not helping for Democrats to be saying, we're not worried about this sort of politics because whites, your time has passed. Right that's not helping. 

Second, the idea that whites are going to be a minority in 2043 depends on the white category remaining stable. And indeed, more than that, it depends on the white category remaining the white non Hispanic category. But [00:32:00] already, half of all Latinos think of themselves as white. Now, that's different from how many whites think Latinos are white, but half of all Latinos think they're white. And when you look at the census numbers, and if the census includes among whites, not just non Hispanic whites, but Hispanic whites, Then in 2043, what will be the percentage of the white population in the country?

We're 65 percent now. What will it be in 2043 if you include Latinos? 72%. If, over the next 30 years, a significant segment of the Latino population comes to be accepted as whites, we may be in the midst of a historic expansion of white identity, not a move to whites as a minority in this country. And believe me, The Republicans/Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio understand this, right?

And this is why it's so important to understand this is not [00:33:00] about racism. They don't care if they win votes by bringing in Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Herman Cain. They don't care. They care about winning. They care about power. And if dog whistle politics can succeed by wrapping in new groups who can be made racially anxious, that's exactly what it'll do.

And at least within, among Latinos, and also among certain Asian communities, East Asian communities especially, but I think also South Asian communities, there is a receptivity to the idea that a chance of racial upward mobility is possible, and that they are under racial threat from poorer and darker and more recent immigrants.

This sort of politics will remain available couched primarily in terms of immigration and darkness, in terms of language [00:34:00] proficiency, in terms of professional credentials, this sort of dog whistling will continue. So what are we to do? Three quick things. We need to reclaim government. And this is just so foundational, and yet so many people have given up on government.

So I attend sort of progressive social justice conferences. I love all the conversation about creativity, and social media, and volunteerism, and new NGOs, and sharing. I got that. In our society, we will not have a broad, fair, and inclusive society. Unless government's on our side. If government remains on the side of the 1%, we're doomed.

All the volunteerism and creative NGOs and whatever, notwithstanding, we need government on our side. We're not going to win government on our side in the last two weeks of a campaign, right? We need a broad social movement that demands that government return, that government help everybody. So that's number one.

Number two. We need to reject racism. The minute we [00:35:00] begin to talk about government that helps everybody, we're going to be met with dog whistle narratives that say, "Don't you just mean give away stuff to minorities?" Because that's exactly how conservatives have been fighting, and Democrats themselves have been fighting this effort to make government meaningful for all of us.

So we need to reject that sort of racism. We need to surface dog whistling, we need to call it out, we need to repudiate it. This is just an aside. Think about what has happened with Indiana and Arkansas in the last week. That was dog whistling, right? Those states said, hey, religious freedom as code for homophobia.

And they got hammered, and they're backing up, right? This is what we need to do around race. I'm happy to talk about why it's much more difficult around race. I'll do that during Q& A. This is the sort of thing we need to do. 

Third, take pride. Democrats, progressives, for the [00:36:00] last 50 years have been saying, "Hey, people are being bamboozled by these identity issues. We just need to talk to them about how important this is to their checkbook, to their retirement, to their children's future. Let's talk to them about the hard reality of finances."

And how's that worked? Because people, they think in different terms. They think about their pocketbook. They do. But they also think about themselves, their sense of self, their sense of social position, who they are, whether the work that they've dedicated their life to is esteemed, whether their values are respected.

People think in those terms, and that means we need to respond in those terms. We need to respond in terms that give people pride in who they are when they resist divisive dog whistle politics. What would that look like? I think a campaign that focuses on Americans as hard working, [00:37:00] Americans as patriotic, Americans as generous, most importantly, tolerant.

Right? 90 plus percent of Americans identify tolerance as a quintessential American value. Now, I know, in lefty circles, "tolerance" is not such a great word. We would much rather "esteem" or sort of "inclusion," because tolerance implies this sort of mental reservation. I'll tolerate you, but the truth is I don't really like your kind.

I got that. But people don't need to like everybody. They need to tolerate them, and they specifically need to tolerate them in the sense that they need to refuse to be divided by dog whistling. By this sort of coded demagoguery that is so constant. 

Last point. I like the phrase "take pride" because take pride also has this sort of activist element and also this sense that we're taking it from someone, that we're taking it in opposition to someone. It's just not enough to [00:38:00] tell people let's hold hands and feel good about ourselves. You also need to tell people, especially people in crisis, who did this?

Who's doing this to you? Who is the threat in your lives? Because clearly things aren't going right. Who's doing this? And so take pride, not only in the sense of collaborative, shared effort, but also in the sense of who's not generous, who's not tolerant, who isn't hard working. Who are these people, the Koch brothers, who are doing this to us, right? We need that affirmative sense. 

Last, and here's where I'll end. Maybe this seems like it's at this sort of high level of abstraction, and in a sense it is, 40 year, 50 year phenomenon and how are we going to respond, broad social mobilization that reclaims government, rejects racism, takes pride. I get that that's abstract.

What does that mean for you as individuals? Dog whistling has skewed just about every area of American life. [00:39:00] Education, immigration, welfare, incarceration, the environment, the infrastructure. Every area. Pick an area. Whatever area you care deeply about. Get involved. Join an organization. Commit to shared mobilization and commit to building bridges.

To helping others in your area see that this is part of a larger practice, a larger pattern, in which government has been hijacked by the very rich through manipulations of status.

How Michigan explains American politics - Vox - Air Date 1-11-24

 

Adam Freelander: This chart shows how many people voted in Detroit in different elections over the years. You can see that turnout in presidential elections is typically higher than turnout in midterm elections, and that's true pretty much everywhere. But, look at the turnout in 2016. It's almost as low as, for example, the midterm election of 2006.

Now, two things are happening here. Detroit is getting smaller during this time. Its population is shrinking, so [00:40:00] fewer voters. But Trump had a role here, too. 

DONALD TRUMP: "Look how much African American communities have suffered under Democratic control." 

Unknown Speaker #1: The thing that I think Trump did effectively as far as interacting with African American voters is not getting them to become Republicans or switch their vote to the Republican Party. It's to get them to not be comfortable voting for anyone. 

DONALD TRUMP: America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings. 

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: Republicans don't have to move the needle that much in those communities to, to have a incredible impact on election outcomes.

Unnamed, WXYZ: I'm not convinced African Americans like Hillary Rodham Clinton as much as they liked Barack Obama. 

Unnamed, Detroit Public TV: No one in this race, on either side, has that same pull. 

Adam Freelander: If you don't like either side, maybe you don't vote. Now, there are of course other factors, [00:41:00] too. That outcome is just one more of many that take us from blue Michigan to red Michigan.

But remember, after 2016 is when Michigan starts to swing back. In 2018, the state elected a Democratic governor by a big margin. In 2020, it voted for Biden. And to see how we got there, we have to talk about white women. 

This chart comes from exit polls of white women in Michigan over 10 years of presidential and gubernatorial elections, and it shows us in the early 2010s, including 2016, white women in Michigan were voting more for Republicans.

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: In 2016, white women across urban, rural, suburban, educational level gave Trump a chance.

Adam Freelander: But after 2016, something changes, a big swing among that demographic towards Democrats. Now this chart doesn't tell us the reason for that, but there was something big [00:42:00] happening around that time. A kind of adjustment in the way that many women in the US were participating in politics. 

Demonstrators: "I'm Vice President! I'm Vice President! We will not be ignored!"

Unnamed News Anchor: Millions of people around the world marching for women's rights today. 

Adam Freelander: One part of Michigan was particularly energized during this period. 

Unnamed News Anchor: The largest of all was in Washington, D. C. 

Kimberly Gill: Everywhere we turned, we ran into somebody. From Michigan.

Various Demonstrators: "I'm from Huntington Woods." 

"Michigan."

"Waterford, Michigan." 

"Franklin." 

"We're from Ferndale!"

Adam Freelander: Huntington Woods, Waterford, Franklin, Ferndale. All in Oakland County. Women, especially white women in places like Oakland, were a big part of what drove the Democrats to their victory in 2018 and led to Trump losing the state in 2020.

Oakland County Voter 1: I didn't think I'd ever have to worry about whether or not the president of the United States was a good [00:43:00] role model, and I do now.

Oakland County Voter 2: I spent every day from 2016 through now, making sure I did everything that I could to make sure he's not re elected.

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: In some ways, Oakland is the mirror image, or maybe a 180 from Macomb County.

Adam Freelander: Oakland is the wealthiest county in Michigan and the second most well educated. And at one time, those things made Oakland a very Republican county. But those types of voters,wealthy, well educated, they vote differently than they once did. And you see that in exit polls, too. This one shows how college educated voters across Michigan have voted over the past few elections.

They've been trending heavily towards Democrats. You can really see the backlash to Trump in the raw voter turnout numbers in Oakland County. Turnout in 2016 was kind of unremarkable, basically in line with earlier years, but look at how many people voted in the first election after Trump won, the midterm election of 2018.

Almost as many as in a presidential election. And the 2020 count [00:44:00] was unprecedented. 

Okay, we finally made it to 2022. Democrats win it all. Okay, so sorry, one more thing. 

News Anchor 2: Proposal 2, the anti gerrymandering proposal. 

News Anchor 3: The state overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2. 

Adam Freelander: In 2018, by a big margin, Michigan voters approved an anti gerrymandering measure that took redistricting out of the hands of the legislature and gave it to an independent commission.

Over the next three years, that commission would replace these maps with new maps. And the first year that these maps would be in effect was 2022. In 2022, if you added up all the elections for Michigan state representatives, Democrats won every 51 percent of that vote. And under the new district alliance, they won 56 out of 110 seats, which is 51%.

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: Michigan's independent redistricting commission gave Michigan Democrats the [00:45:00] opportunity to finally have maps that weren't overly biased to Republicans. 

Adam Freelander: Redistricting unlocks a big part of how this happened. But there was more going on here. To really understand 2022. We have to look at these two stories.

One started with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. In Michigan, activists responded to that by putting Proposal 3 on the ballot that year, a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The measure was really popular and passed easily by more than 10 percentage points.

The other big thing was something happening in the Michigan Republican Party. 

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: By the time 2022 gets around, the Trump wing of the Republican Party had taken over entirely. 

Adam Freelander: These are photos from a Stop the Steal protest at the Michigan State Capitol just after the 2020 election. By May of 2022, a poll found that a majority of Michigan [00:46:00] Republicans supported overturning the 2020 presidential election.

Among Michigan voters as a whole, though, only around a quarter agreed with that. But Republicans running for statewide office in 2022 largely endorsed that idea. 

Ralph Rebandt: How many of you believe that the widespread election fraud was enough to swing the election toward Biden? Raise your hand with me. 

Adam Freelander: That is Tudor Dixon, who Michigan Republicans nominated for governor in 2022.

Kristina Karamo: The city of Detroit has been plagued with election corruption for years. 

Adam Freelander: And that is Kristina Karamo, the Republican who ran to be in charge of Michigan's elections. Both Dixon and Karamo would lose to Democrats by more than 10 percentage points. One place you could really see the reaction to abortion rights on the ballot and to the Republican focus on election fraud was the Michigan suburbs, which exit polls tell us had historically voted Republican until 2022. And the next year, Michigan Republicans met at their convention and they [00:47:00] chose Kristina Karamo as their new party leader. 

Kristina Karamo: We have to fight to secure our elections. It's the reason I did not concede after the 2022 election.

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: It's almost like that's all you hear from them.

Adam Freelander: It's tempting to think that Michigan is just a blue state now, but it won't take much to make it swing back. For example, Michigan is about 3 percent Middle Eastern, North African, doesn't sound like much, but that actually makes it the most Arab American state in the country by far. And that would be worth paying attention to if, for example, something were to happen that made Arab American support for Joe Biden go way down.

News Anchor 4: President Biden shows unwavering support for Israel with the civilian death toll in Gaza rising. 

Wayne County Voter: I did vote for Joe Biden in 

CNN Reporter: Do you plan to vote for him in 2024? 

Wayne County Voter: I do not. 

Adam Freelander: Still, if we look back at some of the big moments in this story. You might notice two things. First, it's Donald Trump who's actually [00:48:00] been the main character in Michigan politics going back almost a decade now.

And second, you probably saw some of these things happen outside of Michigan, too. This chart shows how every state voted in the most recent presidential election, 2020. If you put how the whole US voted onto this chart, it would go here. And here is Michigan. In other words, by at least one measure, Michigan is the state closest to the country as a whole.

Redistricting battles like Michigan's are happening all over the country. National exit polls show that college educated Americans everywhere have been voting more Democratic, just like in Michigan. And that non college educated Americans are doing the opposite. That's pretty indicative of where the parties are headed.

Unnamed Vox Interviewee: I do think that you're seeing party coalitions shift. 

Adam Freelander: There's also evidence that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a powerful motivator everywhere, not just in Michigan, with voters rejecting abortion bans in surprising places like Kentucky, Montana, Kansas, Ohio. [00:49:00] So, you know, Michigan can make or break a whole national election.

But, there's a better reason for Americans to be watching Michigan really closely. And it's that when we do, we're looking at ourselves.

Note from the Editor on the nature of demographic cohorts and the movement of the Democratic Party

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with the NPR Politics Podcast, breaking down college versus non college educated voters. What a Day look at the growing gender divide among white voters. The Wall Street Journal State of the Stat zeroed in on the gender divide among the youth. AJ+ focused on how Black men are being targeted to either vote Republican or stay at home. Brown University featured a lecture explaining dog whistle politics and VOX focused in on what can be learned from Michigan. 

And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by [00:50:00] members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. Sometimes just trying to make each other laugh. 

To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes. Through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. 

If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I have a couple of thoughts. The first came to me as we were putting this episode together. Breaking down the United States population into all of these different cohorts and trying to understand where everyone is coming from, this is a perfect example of exactly what Republicans try to criticize about the left. Right? Why talk about all of our [00:51:00] differences. It's part of their sort of mirror world vision of how racism works. They argue that acknowledging differences actually exacerbates them. And therefore the left are the real racists in the country, trying to drive people apart. As with all of the best propaganda talking points, there could be a kernel of truth in that, but in this case only if you take that logic to absolutely absurd lengths. You know, they say the left recognizes differences between groups of people, and so did the Nazis, right? 

But just because taking this idea of dividing and categorizing people can be taken too far, even catastrophic, dangerously too far. Doesn't mean that the best path forward is to attempt to paper over or ignore differences either. If we do that, we end up not being able to actually see people for their full selves. There's a huge amount that all people have in common. But it's often the [00:52:00] small differences in background geography, gender, race, and all the other factors we're talking about today, that help define our personal and collective culture, helps define how we think. It sort of makes us who we are. 

So seeing the differences in people, whether it be individuals or large demographic groups and trying to understand how all of these factors play into how people think, what they value and then ultimately how they vote. Isn't patronizing or insincere. It's a genuine attempt to see people more fully. 

Republicans by the way are completely full of shit about this. They'd like to claim that the only honest political message is one size fits all because we're all the same and you shouldn't divide us. But they obviously target different demographics with different messages as we're hearing about in the show today, even. So I'm giving this argument more credence than it really deserves, but sometimes it's nice to explain ourselves more fully, even if we shouldn't have to. 

The [00:53:00] second thing I wanted to mention today is about another cohort of voters, but a political rather than demographic cohort. Progressive's like me. There was this article that I came across as part of our research, "Bernie’s DNC Speech Sounded Like Everyone Else’s. That’s Astonishing." And it reads in part, "When on Tuesday night, Sanders said his vision was not a radical agenda. He was absolutely right. Much of it has become the actual agenda of the democratic party. There were very few themes in Sanders' speech that other democratic speakers hadn't already covered on Monday and Tuesday. Senators and governors and members of Congress alike made explicit mentions of class driven policy designs to help the working and middle class." And then the article goes on to describe a few more details and policies of the democratic party that are clearly Bernie influenced. And then it goes on , "It's an astonishing amount of influence for a man who [00:54:00] has never won the Democratic presidential nomination and doesn't possess once in a generation or a torical skills still in the eight years in Sanders failed to become the nominee the first time and the four years since he failed the second time he has managed to push the party toward dramatic policy and rhetorical changes. The substance of the 2024 DNC is a testament as much to his political legacy as to the party's actual presidents." 

Now, I don't want to dampen the mood too much. I want Bernie to get his due. I'll just also mention that what's being described here. Is also evidence of the macro shift in the culture, moving us slowly away from the failure of neo-liberalism into a new, as yet not fully defined form of economic populism that people are clamoring for across the political spectrum. Just coming at it from very different angles. So, Bernie didn't do it all on his [00:55:00] own, but he certainly helped push that change along. 

And it is his vision much more than, you know, Trump's bullshit vision. We did a whole episode about this recently. Go check out "Republican Nonsense, Populism" episode about JD Vance for more details. So clearly Bernie's vision is the one that we need to be sort of following the path on. But it is very exciting that this change is happening. I am very grateful to Bernie and the degree to which he helped bring it about. And for this entire confluence of events, we should all be happy.

SECTION A - THE MIXED BAG

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper in three sections. Next up, Section A, is the Mixed Bag, including LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Section B is about Latino and Black voters. And Section C, White and rural voters. 

'Impossible to be biracial in America'- Harris nomination shines light on mixed-race Americans - Morning Joe - Air Date 8-30-24

 

This was a fascinating conversation, just to [00:56:00] say the least. We talked to six people across a range of different racial, ethnic, and political backgrounds in my home state, the swing state of North Carolina, and many of them said that, look, the census forms and the boxes on polls, they give them pause, sometimes even panic because of the choices that those boxes force them to make.

But even though they said those boxes are getting better and a little bit more inclusive over time, people's perceptions politically can still be pretty narrow. Take a look. Identify as Indian American and white, Hispanic, Haitian. They're the face of a changing nation. When anybody asks, I just say I'm black and Puerto Rican.

All my grandparents are from a different ethnic background. Multiracial Americans are now the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the country over the last decade. And their voting power will be significant. In six battleground States, the population with two or more races has surged by more than 200%.

Including here in North Carolina's Mecklenburg County. Can you raise your hand if you are a Republican, [00:57:00] Democrat, Independent? Does the way that you identify racially impact your politics or specifically how you plan to vote this election? Absolutely. How so? I'm not going to lend my support behind someone.

Who does not support people who look like me. I don't think he sees me as a who I am. Former President Donald Trump. Yes. What about the rest of you? I just don't think that Kamala Harris has anything vested in the air finger quote black or hispanic experience in so much as it would be identified by anybody that lives in those communities.

You're saying you don't think that she can help black or brown people. No, I mean going to Howard don't make you black. A conversation that quickly turned to this moment in a July interview at the National Association of Black Journalists. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.

So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? What did you think when you heard those [00:58:00] comments? Highly offensive. I mean, I think Probably every multiracial mixed race biracial person has had the experience of someone else telling them that they are not something enough. I think it's kind of triggering, right?

I think it is. impossible to be biracial in America. And I think that it requires that you're covering all bases at all times. And um, it requires constant recognition of both identities. And I think when Donald Trump says stuff like that about Kamala Harris and implies that she's like picking a race for political advantage, it's tapping into an incredibly familiar sentiment that I think everyone on this panel can understand.

Lemarie and Adul, as Trump supporters, when you heard that comment, As mixed people, how did it register with you? Well, my first thought was, no, that wasn't very well thought out. At the same time, though, when I heard it, I didn't hear it as an attack on blacks or Indians. I heard it more so of him commenting towards [00:59:00] identity politics and the appeal that some take.

to play up one side of their race over the other. Adol, I see you nodding your head. I agree with him. I didn't know, I didn't know she identified as black because everything I saw was first South Asian, first Indian, there's none of that identified as black. Regardless of her parents, I mean She was born in this country, and she identifies as a black person in this country in an American way, in a uniquely American context.

I've never heard her identify herself as a black woman. She said multiple times she's a black woman. I've never heard it. But I'm black. Yes. And I'm proud of being black. Politics sometimes becoming personal this year, with mixed race Americans having representation on both tickets. I don't agree with anything J.

D. Vance has to say. I mean, almost nothing. But, um, I think it's incredible that we've gotten to a point where The vice president of the United States can have a wife named Usha Chilakari and a son named Vivek. That doesn't mean I won't vote against him in November. Even though you disagree with Kamala Harris politically, do [01:00:00] you feel some kinship towards her as a mixed person?

Not personally. I find a lot of her trajectory to not be my brand of woman, leader. We've got three major international crises going on and someone applying to be commander in chief. As a woman. I want to see you do more than, you know, appeal to giggling and having a girl moment on the stage. Was there ever a moment that sort of forced you to confront the concept of race?

For me, it's more about ethnicity. As you guys can see, I have an accent, right? And I speak with an accent. I don't think when an accent, you just learn to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. A conversation with implications beyond the ballot box. I think every time we see polling, it's about race.

Um, and, you know, as a candidate of color, you put a lot of, uh, stake into how this candidate represents, say, the black experience or the indian american experience. I think we will never ask Donald trump or joe biden. [01:01:00] Clinton or George Bush to do the same thing. I think white people are expected and people of color aren't.

To do what? To be in the highest office in the United States.

Plugged In: How LGBTQ voters could shape the upcoming presidential election - WABE - Air Date 6-21-24

 

You spent some time looking at how the presidential campaigns are engaging LGBTQ voters. But before we get there, can you tell me a little bit about what we know about this voter demographic in Georgia? Sure, Sam. So LGBTQ voters are a highly engaged and a growing voting bloc in Georgia as they are nationally.

They're reliable Democratic supporters, so much so that they might have made the difference for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Nearly 90 percent of LGBTQ voters in Georgia voted for Biden in the 2020 election. That's according to an analysis of AP voter data. And of course the state was decided by less than 12, 000 votes that year.

So getting those voters to come out again and force [01:02:00] this year, as they did four years ago, will be a key to Biden repeating his success in Georgia. And that's what Georgia Equality Executive Director Jeff Graham reiterated to me in an interview. There's been so much talk about people just being dissatisfied with the status quo, being dissatisfied with, um, the choices that they have before them, and they're just going to sit this election out.

We want people to understand that that too has very serious implications for the LGBTQ community. And, you know, LGBTQ voters, of course, care about a lot of the same issues as other voters. You know, cost of living, housing, healthcare, but maybe could you talk to me about a couple of specific policy issues that touch the LGBTQ community really directly?

So, LGBTQ people are strongly affected by non discrimination laws, and that's especially as it relates to housing, employment, and public accommodations. There's a long [01:03:00] history of LGBTQ people being discriminated against in those areas, whether it's getting evicted, or fired, or refused service because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

And there's been a movement in recent years by local cities and counties in Georgia to pass such a non discrimination law, as Gwinnett County did earlier this month. Thank you. But there are no statewide non discrimination protections in Georgia, which is something that LGBTQ advocates and groups like Georgia Equality have been really been pushing for recently.

Another issue is protecting and empowering LGBTQ youth. Now, here we're talking about anti bullying measures. There's also been a growing number of restrictions or bans on books in school libraries that feature LGBTQ people or themes, and transgender youth have been targeted by policies when it comes to playing in a sport that matches their gender or getting gender affirming medical care.

Okay, so let's stick with healthcare for a minute, Patrick. Tell me more about that. Yeah, I mean, taking a look at the HIV epidemic, you know, getting [01:04:00] access and funding for prevention, testing and treatment of the virus, you know, this is something that heavily affects LGBTQ folks, gay men and trans women in particular.

And it's an issue that's not gone away, Sam. It's still a major pain point, you know, and Atlanta has the third highest number of new HIV infections of any city in the US and while it might be hard to imagine since this has been law for nearly a decade, uh, Uh, same sex marriage rights is another, uh, big issue.

We have a very conservative US supreme Court now. And after the fall of Roe v. Wade, uh, LGBTQ folks are very nervous about a similar fate for the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage. Patrick, before we get to Washington, D. C., many of these policies that we're talking about are shaped under the gold dome at the state capitol here in Atlanta, where Republicans currently control the levers of power.

What have we seen pass in this space in recent sessions? Sure. So in 2022, as you and I closely followed, Sam, the legislature passed a law that empowered the Georgia High [01:05:00] School Association to ban transgender boys and girls from playing on the school sports team that matches their gender. And shortly after Governor Kemp signed into law, that's exactly what the GHSA voted to do.

Um, in 2023, the following year, the legislature passed a ban on most gender affirming healthcare for transgender children. And in this year's session, uh, Republicans in the legislature tried to expand that to a ban on puberty blockers for transgender kids. But that measure failed, and in fact, In fact, all the proposed measures that caused alarm among LGBTQ advocates in Georgia this session failed to pass, which was surprising considering the ramping up of such measures targeting LGBTQ folks in recent years.

All right, so let's extend that to Washington DC. What are some of the ways that control of the White House, of Congress and the US Supreme Court shape life for LGBT people and communities? Yeah, let me count the ways. So with presidency, a lot of [01:06:00] that power to shape life for LGBTQ people comes from their decision whether to sign or veto legislation passed by Congress.

A president can also throw their weight around in Congress as a measure is making its way through the process, either to help it pass or squash it. An example of that is a hate crimes measure that President Obama signed into law that protected LGBTQ people and ban on the don't ask, don't tell policy that prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the military.

Um, there's also executive orders. The president can also enact a slew of executive orders, protecting LGBTQ employees and protecting LGBTQ kids in schools, and they can appoint pro or anti. LGBTQ federal judges who have lifetime appointments to the courts. And the Supreme Court's actions are, of course, huge.

As I mentioned, the same sex marriage ruling in 2015, the concern over that being stripped away, and in recent years, the court passed landmark protections for LGBTQ workers. And you know, Patrick, I think you're [01:07:00] right. The court's ability to shape American life in fundamental ways is so huge. I was actually a Supreme Court runner for a network news correspondent on the day that the Supreme Court handed down that decision on same sex marriage in 2015.

And the crowds that were gathered outside and around the country, as I'm sure you covered here in Atlanta, Patrick, reacting to that decision and such a sea change in American life in a snap was Pretty striking to 

How could Arab and Muslim voters' disaffection with Democrats impact the US election? - DW News - Air Date 7-23-24

 

 Beyond campus protests, how big an issue is the Gaza war amongst voters? I think it's one of the main primary issues, um, that for Muslim American voters, um, on their current like agenda.

But I will start by saying that the concept of the Muslim American vote is a bit reductive, um, considering that it's a very diverse community in the United States. Both in terms of racially, economically, with regards to foreign [01:08:00] policy, and with regards to domestic policy. Um, just to give an example, to a study that was done in 2017, about a fourth of the Muslim American community identified as Black and African American, a fourth identified as White, where White has been conflated with many different groups like Arab, Persian, North African, and so on.

About a fifth identified as Asian, a fifth identified as Arab, and like, The remaining were mixed across the board for Hispanic and Indigenous American as well as other groups. So it's difficult to pinpoint a single Muslim voice on Harris as a presidential candidate. Um, but also with the issue of Gaza, um, that is still one of the main concerns for the Muslim American community.

Okay, so, I take your point about we're not dealing with a monolithic block here. Talk to us about How disaffection with the US position on this Gaza war has affected or has [01:09:00] swayed Arab or Muslim voters? And how that might affect November's outcome? Yeah, um, so based on what I'm hearing on the ground, um, there are four major perspectives with, um, Harris as a candidate, which this is only unfolding in the last couple of days, but, um, the first perspective I've heard the most commonly is this sense of apathy because Harris is viewed as basically an extension of Biden.

Um, and this segment is mixed across those. across the board wanting to vote third party or independent. Some of them are hoping for another Democrat to run against her. And in some cases, some people are choosing to be rational non voters. Um, and, you know, keeping in mind the Abandon Biden campaign that was taking place.

Um, so in order to win this group's, uh, vote, Harris really needs to showcase that her policies are her own and not Biden's, particularly with regards to race. Um, [01:10:00] so back in March, that was quoted earlier, she had called for an immediate temporary ceasefire on the one hand, while at the same time declared that Israel had a right to defend itself.

And for many Muslim Americans, this would be considering, like, batting for both sides of the team, or for, you know opposing sides of the team in that it will be difficult for Harris to win this group over as someone who was in the room during the Biden administration. But in order to do so, she'd have to have a clearer policy agenda with advancements made immediately moving towards peace with regards to Gaza.

Right. Okay. I know you had a list of, forgive me, right? Yeah, that's quite a long list. But let's stick with some of the points that you made there. Um, If her problem, if, um, Harris problem is that she's effectively more of Biden, if the, if, when it comes to a choice of more of Biden or Trump, [01:11:00] what's, what are people telling you?

Yeah, so that was actually the second main group that I've been hearing on the ground and this idea of like, pardon the way I say this, but this lesser of two evils or this rhetoric of that she's better than Trump. Um, so some people, um, this is a smaller group, but some people see Harris As a solid replacement for Biden, given the abandoned Biden campaign, um, as a vote against Trump, um, in the upcoming elections, um, it's a kind of cut your losses type of mentality because people are seeing it, uh, the presidential race as exclusively two party, um, rather than, you know, viewing third parties or independents as having a potential to win.

And so in this case, if the Democratic Party wants to win this group's vote. Um, they'd have to be really strategic in selecting Harris's running mate, um, and her policy platform. Um, but again, like was [01:12:00] noted, Harris is already on the campaign trail, and I listened to her, um, virtually deliver her speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin earlier today, and she's contrasting herself with Donald Trump, um, using her record as an attorney general, juxtaposed to Trump as a criminal or a felon.

And this positioning may be effective for the second segment of the Muslim American population. Um, but, um, again, I think the first group, um, still does not see her. As a viable candidate until she can clearly state her policy platforms, particularly on the issue of Gaza, as well on mass incarceration within the prison system.

Okay, they want to hear more definite policies from her. And given the US's long history of siding with Israel, when do you think that the Biden administration Um, realized, uh, the potential for a backlash from Muslim and [01:13:00] Arab voters, uh, over Gaza. Um, I would say that the Biden administration probably started to feel, um, the backlash when mainstream media started to cover the Abandon Biden campaign.

Um, I don't, Michigan is a swing state and And really, there was a poll that was done. Um, I can't remember who conducted the poll, but there's a stronger leaning towards, uh, Trump in the Republican party currently, and that was done at the end of June. Um, so I'm not 100 percent sure, but what I'll say is that, um, for Biden, And for many Muslim Americans, they see that Biden stepping down isn't only about what the media has talked about with regards to his age and his health, but also a response to the mounting pressure through the Abandon Biden 

Trump Trashes Jewish Voters During Unhinged Speech - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-4-24

 

[01:14:00] I've seen some, leftists for Trump, supposedly, uh, claim that Donald Trump has really stuck it.

To Netanyahu versus Kamala stuck it, you mean stuck his tongue in his mouth? I mean, pretty close. Here is, uh, President Trump. Now you may have seen footage or heard audio of Donald Trump six to eight months ago, pre Miriam Adelson basically giving him money. To annex the West Bank. And saying, uh, annex the West Bank for this hundred million dollars pack, money.

 Here is president Trump after that fact meeting with Israeli prime minister in Florida I guess in a, in the, the, uh, study room at Mar a Lago or somewhere. I don't know where it is cut. And, uh, I think her remarks were disrespectful. They weren't very nice. Can you pause it? Can you pause it?

We should say he's, he's referring to Kamala [01:15:00] Harris's uh, remarks that were, from our perspective didn't go nearly far enough but, uh, Donald Trump is going to characterize them as having gone too far. I wonder how much BB agrees with that. Probably a lot. That's what he told Axios.

Apparently, uh, they were very unhappy with how cold Harris was in comparison to Biden in that meeting. Probably because the bear hug Netanyahu strategy has been a disaster. Yeah, and from a policy standpoint, Trita Parsi pointed out, like, I think the rhetoric may get overplayed, but she did point out to Netanyahu as the impediment to the ceasefire talks, which is different than Biden.

Exactly. And, uh, I think her remarks were disrespectful. They weren't very nice pertaining to Israel. I actually don't know how a person who's Jewish can vote for her, but that's up to them. But she was certainly disrespectful to Israel, in my opinion. Mr. Trump has your relationship with the prime minister repaired [01:16:00] at all?

It was never bad. We was, uh, I would say it was over president is never bad. Oh, that's good. He was a little bit upset that Netanyahu recognized Biden as the president in 2020. Yeah, it took him a while to get over that. I cannot tell you how sick I am of other Jews or Gentiles, uh, explaining to me, uh, whether I'm a good Jew or not.

I saw somebody say this about like, if you're against Shapiro as the VP to pick, it's anti Semitism. But I didn't know that. Honestly, like it was the first time I even contemplated swearing on uh, on Twitter in years. I think I, that what I was going to quote tweet, it was like a pardon, fucking me. But uh, I didn't, but here is Donald Trump going even further.

I'm going to tell you something 65 to 75 percent of Jews in this country vote for the Democratic presidential nominee. That is both a historical fact. [01:17:00] And I get, I get some very bad news for Donald Trump. It is also a fact in November. It is not going to change. It is not going to change. Wait, let's hear about it.

But let's hear what he's got to say. I mean, maybe this pitch will work. The Democrats hate Israel. The Democrats largely hate the Jewish people. It's time for the Jewish people to stop. Step up and vote for Republicans and vote for Donald Trump. Savior you. We love you, Stanley. We love you Stanley. Thank you.

will you be the Jew that steps up, Sam? I gotta get my Coones go and, or my, uh, my, I gotta get my matza balls in order and step up and, uh, vote for, uh, Donald Trump. Now Kanye will be looking as someone that saved the Jews. the idea that this is going to motivate any Jews to vote for Donald Trump, I think it's really just [01:18:00] honestly about Miriam Adelson and a couple other maybe like a right wing Israeli supporters.

Yeah. Trump giving it to Netanyahu, is that, does he mean, they mean like giving the embassy to where he wants it, Jerusalem? That's what. Adelson's ask was last time. And Trump meeting with Netanyahu, I know no one cares about the Logan Act and it's vi it's invi it's violated all the time, I mean, including, I guess, a few weeks ago by Donald Trump meeting with Viktor Orban, but.

If you're not in government, you're not supposed to be doing any kind of meetings with foreign dignitaries that would approach some sort of official promises as it relates to United States foreign policy. Especially once taking a massive outlays from our military industrial complex.

Yeah. Some sort of top recipient of our military aid. It's technically against the law, but I guess maybe that's why the lighting in the room was so damn dim in that clip. It's under the cloak of 

What Matters to AAPI Voters? - Woke AF Daily - Air Date 5-21-24

 

[01:19:00] You know, with such a vast and rich community, how do you go about, and I know that I ask you this, but particularly as we're heading towards, you know, the most consequential election I think of our lifetimes, how do you part and parcel out what issues Are most affecting this very diverse population and how your community kind of measures against with what let's say the larger democratic priorities, values and such are for this term, it's so important that you're bringing this up because it certainly requires research and polling, right?

Which is which is done in politics every single day. Our community doesn't have the robust Yeah. Amount of polling as say mainstream politics. But that being said, when, when we are able to get access to research and data on what is moving the AAPI electorate, and frankly, and [01:20:00] frankly, we really have to segment it by the ethnicity to know because, uh, certain ethnicities feel stronger or weaker on, on issues.

But I'll give you one example. Gun violence, which is one of the key issues that we're working on in our community has risen to the top. Some polls have it number one as the number one issue going into this election. So think about it for a second. This is not an issue that was even in the top 10 three years ago, four years ago.

And now it's risen to number one. And we believe we have a little bit of data to, uh, to back this up, but the numbers started to really move in terms of the importance of this issue after Uvalde. In Texas, you know, two and a half years ago. And it was the intersection of historically important, uh, theme and issue education and schools.

Right. And the, the fact that this was a shooting in an elementary school, it [01:21:00] really was the, I would say the nexus point for when the numbers started to rise in terms of issue of importance. And we've seen similar parallels in the Latino community as well. And, and that's not something you hear about. I would say.

When you, if you're reading political news or you're reading about, you know, Biden, Trump, or, or the fall matchup is how far this issue has come. Now, reproductive freedom is going to be front and center, part and parcel, like central to this election. And a sleeper issue, I believe is it's going to be gun violence and these issues, they don't get talked about.

In an election without an impetus, without a push, just like the crime narrative is being pushed very hard on the other side right now that, you know, Democrats and the left are weak on, on crime, frankly, they're making that up, but the core of the issue for our community is gun violence. And if we decide to [01:22:00] put some money behind this messaging and this narrative.

I think that we can win on this issue as well. And I believe once again, that this is a once in a 50 year, once in a hundred year opportunity when you have two very galvanizing issues, like the, the, the basic rights that women have had in this country for 50 years, just taken away as well as You know, gun violence.

And I think a lot of API's view, view gun violence in the frame of crime. And so it may not be the winner issue that the Republicans are, I think, really trying to hit us on. They're going to view it in the issue in the framework of gun violence, and they're losing on that issue. And I like this issue specifically because the Republicans don't have a message.

Right now they don't even have a response. They decided that they don't even want to respond at least on reproductive freedoms. They're kind of trying to figure out what the magic number of weeks that might be palatable to restrict abortions, right? It's like pick a dart [01:23:00] and choose on, on gun violence.

They've chose to unilaterally disarm. And I, I like that political equation from, uh, from a math perspective. I wonder, too, as it pertains to gun violence, I mean, the, you know, community was visited upon, right, by a mass shooting, you know, God, what was it, maybe three or four years ago at this point, and I wonder that since that time, coupled with Uvalde, um, and that being a, you know, children being targeted, You know, has there also been a rise, or would your polling show, in gun ownership?

Like, because, you know, on both sides, as violence, you know, escalates when it is directed towards a particular community, like the AAPI community, both people want gun reform. Right, but then they also tend to actually go ahead and purchase guns. So what is, what does that look like for you all? What have you seen in, in your research?

So we went from [01:24:00] being the demographic with the least amount of gun ownership to now on a per capita basis, one of the fastest growing communities of guns. And it all started, frankly, with this cycle that really started with Donald Trump and his. Um, spewing of vicious rhetoric and hatred that led to sort of the next, you know, part of this was that it led to, you know, mass acts of hate and violence all across the nation.

And correspondingly, it led to the direct marketing by the NRA. Uh, because they saw their gun sales starting to flatten in the latter half of the Trump years and they were looking for new markets. They said, Hey, the Asian American community, they've got high net worth income. They've got high incomes, they're low ownership, and they started marketing.

In all their magazines and doing some advertisements, uh, centrally [01:25:00] towards the API community. So we responded in kind by buying guns now at very high rates. And now where we are, and everyone knew this was going to happen, that we have some of the highest suicide by gun rates in the country. 60, 60 percent of all the suicides that happened in the API community are suicide by gun.

Right. So we also know that by any measure that when a gun is in the home, that it leads to a number of negative consequences, intentional homicide, accidental death, accidental injury, intimate partner violence, all of that. And, and so this is what it's. Led to, and it started with the vicious rhetoric and I would say sort of the white supremacist, frankly, the white supremacist elements of not only the NRA, but I would say the gun industry, they, they use this and they capitalize on this fear and we respond because we think this is the only way [01:26:00] we're going to be able to protect ourselves and our protector 

SECTION B - LATINO AND BLACK VOTERS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Latino and Black Voters

Why Are More Latino Voters Supporting Trump? - The New Yorker Radio Hour - Air Date 8-16-24

 

Back in 2013, after Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama, a Republican autopsy of the campaign said that Latino voters were being turned off by the party's hardline stance on immigration. The report said, if Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States, they won't pay attention to our next sentence.

Well, that turned out to be wrong. Since 2015, Donald Trump has said any number of false, misleading, and racist things about people from Mexico and Central America. He put in place policies like child separation at the border. And yet, his share of the Latino vote increased in 2020, and the trend continues.

Comparing Trump and Biden back in July, Latino voters were split evenly. All [01:27:00] of this was on Geraldo Cadava's mind when he covered the Republican National Convention for the New Yorker. That sound you hear is Maracas for Trump and people at this Hispanic leadership coalition event have been instructed to shake them on the convention floor tonight.

This is a subject very close to Cadava's heart. He's the author of a book called the Hispanic Republican. Jerry, there have been a lot of headlines about Donald Trump's support among Latino voters, that it's increasing. And that's a phenomenon that Democrats, a lot of them find utterly baffling. And we'll get to that.

But before we get into the whys and hows, what's the scale of this? What do we know about the numbers and how the vote has shifted? What we know for sure is that Donald Trump increased his share of Latino support between 2016 and 2020 by about eight points. That's [01:28:00] the consensus view. And that was surprising to many because of everything that Donald Trump had said and done, especially in the arena of immigration, all of his anti immigrant policies that were seen to be a real turnoff for Latinos.

I think there's a real debate about how much Latinos are becoming conservative or whether that lower share of Democratic support had to do with Latino dissatisfaction with the candidates. Now, you went to talk to Latinos at the convention, the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Now, these are not your average voters.

They're very engaged political people, and some are truly liberal. Trump supporters, like a guy named Bob Unanwe, who's the CEO of Goya Foods. Why did you want to talk with him specifically? I wanted to talk to him specifically because I wanted to ask him directly about his experience of giving that talk in the Rose Garden at the White House in [01:29:00] the summer of 2020 because he said that we are blessed to have Donald Trump as our president.

First of all, I never knew Donald Trump until July 9th, 2020, when I was in the Rose Garden. I was appointed by him to be a commissioner on the White House Commission on Hispanic prosperity. He was very concerned. about prosperity for Americans and Hispanics. So he appointed a group of commissioners. After he said that we were blessed to have Donald Trump as a president, there were just widespread calls to boycott Goya beans.

And I really thought that Democrats, by going down the rabbit hole of boycotting Goya, really took their eye off the ball. What the event at the White House was about was about Donald Trump announcing new initiatives, including investments in Hispanic serving institutions. And those kinds of things are Core elements of his appeal to Latinos.

Meanwhile, Democrats just got [01:30:00] carried away with this story about boycotting Goya foods. When I said we were blessed, I'd hit home as, as a positive who were offended by that was, uh, Alexander Ocasio Cortez, Julian Castro, Lin Manuel Miranda, you know, the elites who are not, if you ask me, not, not truly Latino, because they, they have a privileged life.

Whoa. He said that Castro and Lin Manuel Miranda and AOC are not really Latino. Why not? Yeah, I should first say that I'm not really comfortable with the language of who is and is not a real Latino because I think, you know, there are 65 million Latinos in the United States and all of them have different ways of relating to their Latino identity, whether it's about family traditions or language or music or anything like that.

So I think that. It doesn't make sense really to talk about who is or is not a real Latino. And it's something you see the Republican party [01:31:00] doing right now. You know, not too long ago, Donald Trump also, uh, said that Kamala Harris was Indian before she was black and she might not be a real black woman.

And I think the Republican party is trying to scramble our concepts about ethnic and racial identity. This question about what people mean in the words they use came up in another conversation that you had with a woman named Betty Cardenas. Now, tell us who she is before we listen to her. Yeah, I find Betty Cardenas fascinating.

First of all, she is part of this kind of, power family in Latino Republican politics because her son is named Abraham Enriquez, and he's the founder of a group called Bienvenido US, but she has also served as national chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. And now she's also the president of the Bienvenidos Action Group.

Let's listen to your conversation with her. As you see Trump coming in, you see a message of more diverse, a little bit more [01:32:00] inclusive in the, in the platform. You even see it. Um, I think there's a, there's still a lot of work to do within the history. I mean, you see Trump, I think he will do a phenomenal, I hope he does a phenomenal job for the America First agenda that, that President Trump has, which America First means it has so much inclusivity and a lot of stuff.

I had never seen these signs. I mean, I'd seen build the wall, things like that. I had never seen a sign that said mass deportation. Now, how do you feel about those signs? Um, I can tell you, I mean, as a, as a, you know, coming from immigrant parents, I think when you see mass deportation, like I think you would, you won't see me raising one of those massive because there's so much significance behind there.

And I know where Trump's policies. That I know the policy makers behind that are going to be behind. And I know what mass deportation he's talking about. He's talking about [01:33:00] the criminals, you know, deport those criminal, those high risk criminals. And I think that's what's missing if they could specify, but also, I mean, it's a message of the, of the campaign.

I know in my heart what it means. I know who's going to be sitting down doing the policy, so it doesn't, I see it and I know it. It would be more like, Oh, mass deportation. Everybody, you know, even the students, the DACA students, everybody that here, I mean, it wouldn't be possible. And you and I know that it's not, it's not true.

So here she gets to a very crucial slogan of the Trump campaign, mass deportation now, which is a sign that you saw at the RNC quite a lot. And she says it just means deporting some criminals. How accurate is that where the Trump campaign is concerned? Well, I don't think it's very accurate if you take him at his word in terms of what he said publicly.

I mean, they're talking about deporting 15 million to 20 million people, which he [01:34:00] believes is the true number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. And it, and it has, it has echoes of, 1954, right? What happened? That's right. Well, it has echoes of 1954 when there was an operation called Operation Wetback that deported some 1.

3 million Mexicans from the United States. And now Stephen Miller and Trump together are calling for mass deportations that would be something like 10 times that, more than 10 million, 12 million deportations. I got this a lot from a lot of different people is that they think, first of all, that we are taking Trump's comments out of context, that what he really means is he's not talking about all Mexicans.

He's only talking about high risk, high threat criminals. And if you think about it, that's not all that different than what Obama was advocating to when he talked about like selective prosecution, he was going to go for the criminals. He wasn't going to prosecute the [01:35:00] people who'd been here for a long time and were just trying to make a better lives for themselves.

So when it gets down to it, I don't know that her vision of how this is going to work and Obama's are all that different, but she says that she has been in rooms with Donald Trump where he has talked to her about his views of immigration. And she knows that mass deportation is not in his heart. It's not what he means.

And she even brought out her phone. She had captured screenshots of old tweets that Donald Trump had sent that were in support of the dreamers. And she thinks that Donald Trump would still like to find a pathway for undocumented citizens, including dreamers. He would still like to fix things for them.

Well, it's striking. It's striking that she mentions the word diversity and inclusiveness as aspects of the Republican party. Those are usually Democratic Party buzzwords. And I almost wondered if she were, um, trolling you in a way, although she doesn't seem to have that kind of [01:36:00] personality. She means something different?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's what all, you know, not only Latinos, but I saw many Asian American Trump supporters, many Black Trump supporters, Native American Trump supporters there. They really want to believe that because the Republican Party, um, Aligns with their values that it is a truly inclusive message.

And in fact, they will say that Democrats are the ones that like to kind of divide and conquer all Americans by appealing to particular ethnic groups by having messaging that appeals to, you know, divides up the electorate and, uh, sees us all as a compilation of various interest groups. So I think she thinks that her message, the Republican message is more kind of all encompassing and all American

What the Harris campaign is doing to earn the support of Latino voters - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 8-20-24

 

AMNA NAWAZ: there's been a little bit of a reset with Latino voters in just the last month.

And your own polling from Voto Latino shows that Kamala Harris has 60 percent support in polls.

That's up from Biden's [01:37:00] 47 percent in April.

There's another Equis poll that shows that Harris is up 19 points in battleground states, when Biden led by just five.

What are you attributing that shift to?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: One is, is that she has been cultivating a lot of young Latinos since her president -- she ascended into her vice presidency.

So people are very familiar with who she is.

The biggest challenge, though, is that they like her, but they want to get to know her better.

But the poll -- what was really fascinating to us, the poll was with GQR.

It was 2,000 Latino voters in key battleground states.

And the biggest takeaway was not only was Kamala leading among the Democrats, but she was taking away roughly 17 points away from Kennedy.

And believe it or not, she was also taking away from Trump.

He is now -- so if you -- a head-to-head today, Trump right now is at 29 percent versus, with Biden, he was at 38 percent.

GEOFF BENNETT: And it's the younger voters, the younger Latino voters that account for that?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Disproportionally, yes, [01:38:00] and Latino women.

GEOFF BENNETT: Wow.

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: So, to give you an idea, since he was -- since there was a changing of the guard, at Voto Latino, we had registered 36,000 individual voters.

As of today, we have registered over 100,000.

We're -- 65 percent of them are under the age of 25.

I have been doing this, Amna, for 20 -- Amna and Geoff, for 25 -- 20 years.

I have never seen anything like it.

AMNA NAWAZ: Well, she -- we should also note, she's at 60 percent in your latest poll, right?

But Biden in the last election was at 65 percent.

So she's still polling behind where he was.

Where is the gap?

Why are Dems having trouble shoring that up?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Because we haven't had the convention.

I will tell you... AMNA NAWAZ: This is going to be the difference maker?

 Because, in August of 2020, Biden was at 50.

So we don't see the surge of enthusiasm until post-convention, after Labor Day, when all of a sudden Americans are going back to school, going really back to work, paying attention.

And for whatever reason, she has captured our imagination.

There is an opportunity for the Democrats to [01:39:00] cement states, even like Arizona, where Biden went by 10,000 registered voters.

Kamala Harris has the opportunity to capture the 163,000 Latino youth that have turned 18 since Biden was elected.

GEOFF BENNETT: There was a pretty significant ad buy we saw from the Harris campaign a couple of weeks ago that was focused on Latino voters.

And she really leaned into her personal story, talking about the fact that she is the daughter of immigrants and really trying to make inroads with that community based on her identity and personal story.

How resonant is that?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: When Biden -- joined the Biden campaign last time, she gave him a 15-point lift just on that story alone.

And because she was the mother -- she was the daughter of an immigrant single mother, it's really resonates.

What they're going to ask her next, though, is, what are you going to do differently than Biden did for us?

The biggest challenge Biden has had with the Latino community is communicating how he has changed their everyday.

They were [01:40:00] skeptical.

With her on top of the ticket now, they're very open to what is the possibility for an extended - - possibility with an extended four-year term.

AMNA NAWAZ: There has been this sort of long-term trend, though, weakening of enthusiasm among Latino voters, who we should underscore here are not a monolith, right?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Right.

AMNA NAWAZ: Yes.

But there has been really since Obama a weakening presidential election by election.

What do you attribute that to?

And what do you want to see from Harris and Walz that could possibly reverse that trend?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: So what we have found is that the way Latinos vote isn't that they're trending to the Republicans, is that they're not enthusiastic necessarily, so they stay home.

So what they want to be able to demonstrate is that not only is there a vision for the present, but also for the future.

The more that the Harris, the Harris/Walz campaign can talk about economy, small business, that she, yes, is for small business capitalism, because there's so many young Latinos and Latinos in general that are [01:41:00] entrepreneurs, that will penetrate in action, sound, letter, because the Republicans have been trying to pick people off and say, well, the Democrats are anti-business.

She says, no, I'm small business capitalist.

That will all of a sudden open up a whole different conversation.

GEOFF BENNETT: We should say the convention has gaveled into session, and we should apologize for talking through the national anthem, but this timing is sort of out of our control.

The Harris/Walz campaign has said that they see multiple paths to election through the blue-wall, but also through the Sun Belt states, Arizona, Nevada in large part because of the large number of Latino voters.

Are there other states where -- other states that might now be in play because of a similar population?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: I would say that there is an opportunity even in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but perhaps not for the top of the ticket, but in growing the electoral base.

You have the potential Senate pickup in a place like Texas because of the volume of young people that are anxious now to jump in the game, but there has to be a real strategic investment there.

AMNA NAWAZ: [01:42:00] There is, of course, the key issue of immigration that we know is really resonant, particularly with some majority Latino populations in border communities, where we saw many of them actually go for Trump in the last election.

How should this ticket message on this issue that has bedeviled the Biden/Harris administration?

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Well, I think we saw it when the vice president went down to Central America and convinced business to go to the root of the problem and start creating investments.

The more that she couches what is happening at the border as a Western Hemispheric issue and that we need more people involved, not just government, but our Canadian friends, our Mexican friends, our Colombian friends, for example, and great business, then we could have a conversation with the American people of, how do you actually talk about the undocumented people that have been here for 20, 30 years?

What the president did in June, where he provided and granted authority to stay for spouses of undocumented immigrants goes a long way.

That was roughly two million family households that were impacted.[01:43:00] 

There is now a narrative of, we have to fix the border, we have to be tough on it, but we do have pathways to safeguard the folks that are already here.

AMNA NAWAZ: Maria Teresa Kumar... GEOFF BENNETT: 

‘¡Sí, se puede!’- Latino voter enthusiasm for Harris skyrockets over issues like housing - The ReidOut - Air Date 8-30-24

 

It is kind of one of the puzzles that this is the largest nonwhite group in America, full stop, more than black voters. But the voting turnout is really low. It's almost like half their voting strength. Why? Yeah. I mean, even looking at 2022 now, there was this real sentiment of disillusionment among a lot of Latinos, right?

There was a lot of skepticism towards president Biden and a lot of that had to do and was rooted in this idea that. But according to many, there were a lot of broken immigration promises. And then suddenly, in the last two weeks, I've started to hear the si se puede again. And that is once again this idea that perhaps what was missing, the yes we can, but the si se puede in Spanish is so intentional.

And it points to this idea that it wasn't that the Democratic Party was fractured. You know, it was [01:44:00] at what was missing was injecting the inspiration, you know, the hope and change that Barack Obama did. And it is working. Now you do see Latinos being mobilized. That's sort of the messaging standpoint. And then on the other flip side, it's Republicans.

The moment that this country turned into majority minority. Majority minority, no? The understanding that Latinos are at the heart of the multi ethnic coalition that is leading to that change. There is a concerted effort to stop that growth and all of that is also being fueled by this conspiracy theory that is overshadowing everything.

Which is this idea that non citizens Exactly. Great replacement theory in this idea that non citizens are voting and you put those things together And the thing about it is, and let me actually get Mike Madrid in here, because some of it is, is people believe, misunderstand the demographics of Latinos.

They assume that most, I remember a poll back in many, many years ago that showed that Americans believe that like 75 percent of Latinos are undocumented, which is [01:45:00] insane. It's literally like 80 percent are citizens, right? And, and, and so there is this misunderstanding of who this constituency are and assuming, well, they're all undocumented because they may speak Spanish at home.

And so can you give us the real numbers and the real stats on this constituency and also how different it is across the country? Cause it's regionally very different. Yeah, it's it's actually not as different as we think it is. What is happening? This latinization of America is an extraordinary demographic transformation.

That's what I try to explore in the book here. You actually mentioned a lot of it in your intro with this 7 percent growth over just the past decade. It's overwhelmingly US board. right? A lot of this is what is happening with this balancing between the two parties. It's there's a demographic explanation for it as much as there is a political explanation for it.

So I think you accurately pointed out this is the largest ethnic group in America at this point. Yes, our voter participation is lagging every other [01:46:00] racial and ethnic group. I believe that there are strong demographic reasons for that. The fact that we're so young, by the way, is one of the main reasons.

Younger voters have a less propensity, regardless of race or ethnicity, to vote. We're working on that. Uh, Maria Teresa's group specifically has been working to address that for many years successfully. It is happening. The trajectory is on the right path. There's a lot of people who argue that simply by aging into the, into the, um, And to the electorate, Latinos will start to grow into greater numbers.

But of course, with so many eligible citizen eligible folks, we want to make sure that there are people not only registered, but mobilized and showing up to demonstrate that strength. But again, there's a lot of, there's also this endemic poverty problem that we have to recognize, which is also a function of youth, poor people, it doesn't matter whether you're black in the deep south or white in Appalachia or Latino in East LA.

If you're poor and young, you don't vote. They don't vote. Fair return. We've got to look for those policy [01:47:00] explanations as much as looking for these political solutions because it's pretty widespread. It's pretty deep. There's over 70 years of census data telling us that a lot of this is demographic.

Absolutely. And MTK, you've been in votes. I want to bring you in here because you've been working on this project of Increasing that both strength because again, you know, I, we had a guy on, uh, you know, earlier this year who made a really great point that America sort of styles itself as like a quasi European country, but we're really much more a Latin American country.

Our history, our demographics, a lot of it is much more like Brazil, right? That it is like England. And, and, but we just don't, we try to fool ourselves into saying that's not the case, but it kind of is right. And so how do you break that, that cycle? Because part of it is age and part of it is that people aren't voting.

But how do you bring more Latino voters online? So I think it's all it's all intentional. I mean, you cited what happened in 2022. I'll tell you that from 2022 compared to the 2018 midterm election, Latino vote participation [01:48:00] down was 37 percent down 37%. But if you look at who turned out in 2022, it was people over the age of 40 years old, and it was disproportionately Latino voters.

Individuals that were Republican, because what the Republicans did was invest in older Latino voters for turnout. However, when it came down to young voters under the age of 40, turnout was abysmal 24%. And that was because the Democrats read the headline, internalized it and said, Oh my gosh, Latinos, maybe they are going, they're fleeing Republican.

So there was a major lack of investment. When it came to communicating to young Latinos that the issues that they cared about in 2022 were on the ballot, and I think what we're seeing now with Kamala Harris is that she's meeting voters where they are. I can tell you anecdotally just from our work since the moment she came on the ballot, we have registered over 110, 000 registered voters.

But the key is, is that 65 percent of them joy are under the age of 25. I've been doing this for a minute. [01:49:00] I have never seen that type of enthusiasm. But it's not just because of what she represents. It's to Mike Madryn's point is that she's talking about policy they care about. The number one issue for 18 to 29 year olds in this country who are Latino in North Carolina, in Georgia, in Texas, in Arizona, The number one issue is housing.

It's rent. And so when she came out with a policy just last week, meeting people where they are, talking to them about providing affordable rent, affordable mortgages, that all of a sudden perked their interest because like, wait a second, she's someone who identifies me as an immigrant, you know, a child of immigrant experiences, but at the same time understands that what's making me struggle is whether or not I can balance the budget to feed myself or make them or make my ends meet at the end of the month.

And that is transformational

I spent a week with Black Republicans - Mother Jones - Air Date 8-13-24

 

In talking to Black Republicans, I found that their most consistent ideological North Star was an emphasis on personal responsibility. For those I spoke to, there was a real [01:50:00] value for rigid individualism as opposed to collective progress and identity. Take Topher, for example. He's a Christian rapper, has millions of followers online, and believes, according to him, in an individualistic approach to progress.

And that's one reason why I'm pro Trump and I'm a conservative is because I truly believe in the individualistic approach to the problems that we see within the black community or in America. As a whole, and you can think about it, black Wall Street, Harlem, Renaissance, all that time we was doing great, but when the policies came in and started destroying the black community slowly and slowly.

Matter of fact, it was supposed to get rid of poverty or at least lessen it. But we have more poverty now than we had back then. I think you'll notice a theme of dissonance present in these interviews. On the one hand, for example, Topher endorses and individualistic approach to solving the problems we face as a community.

But on the other hand, he points to Black Wall Street or the Harlem Renaissance. Communities that I would consider on the Mount Rushmore of black collective power, and he points to them as times we should look back on with [01:51:00] admiration. The question is, which one is it? Is it rigid individualism where we get it out of the mud on our own?

Or is it about creating communities where we work together to build our collective resources? What's also interesting is that somehow for him, these communities no longer exist because of liberal or progressive. Policy decisions when the policies came in and started destroying the black community slowly and slowly.

Matter of fact, it was supposed to get rid of poverty or at least lessen it, but we have more poverty now than we had back then. I think it's worth pointing out that this more poverty now than back then line is verifiably false. It falls in line with a theme that people like Byron Donalds have advanced continuously throughout this election cycle.

The idea that we were better off in any way during the Jim Crow era. During Jim Crow. The black family was together during Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative, because black people always have been conservative minded, but more black people voted [01:52:00] conservatively. It's worth noting that the black poverty rate Has been falling ever since black people started receiving civil rights protections.

It's almost as if these progressive policies worked. Now, you mentioned Black Wall Street, brother, and I want to be very real with you. Yeah. Black Wall Street was Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood District, where black people built their own community. Right. Had their own self sustained community. Beautiful economy making it for themselves and white people destroyed it.

Yeah, it wasn't policy. It was white people Well white people it was no. No, no, let's be very let's be very clear. It was white people. Let's be but let's no No, no, it was those white people. It was white people in that community. Absolutely And you know, let me just say this Elaine, Arkansas, Rosewood in Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, Sweet Auburn District, North Nashville in Nashville, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of these communities were booming black economies where white people, not in the same place, but it was, it was the same group of people every time destroyed those communities. So you can't say it's policy when these booming, when [01:53:00] black people do what they need to do and build for themselves and white people destroy it.

So why is it that you would frame it as a policy thing? I didn't, I didn't frame it as a policy thing. We can rewind it, but you said it was white people. You meant something. I said it wasn't white people, it was those white people. And the reason why I'm saying that is because now we're trying to categorize all white people as evil.

No. And what I'm trying to say is back then, because a lot of people don't know this, I'm gonna put this on record. Black Wall Street, we built themselves out of that. Four years after that, Black Wall Street, we built everything they had and they paid for it. Process for the next 40 years until policy came in and destroyed it because they decided to build a freeway over the town and that destroyed.

So what I'm saying is if we look at policy and, and the cultural essence of most things, right? It's not just policy, it's culture. I was trying to draw a distinction between the nature of progressive policy, like. The Civil Rights Act or Supreme Court decisions to overturn segregation and white supremacist policy like destroying black communities.

But the subject kept changing. Lucky for you. I actually made a video about [01:54:00] Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood district was definitely white racism that destroyed black Wall Street and other black communities through explicitly racist acts of state sanctioned violence. This is why an accurate full telling of history is so important.

Black oppression and black. Progress have always had a collective quality to the black people have been throughout American history targeted As a group from slavery to black codes to Jim Crow to mass incarceration to anti inclusion efforts today. But we've also made progress by harnessing the power of collective action during reconstruction and the civil rights movement.

And even today, during the black owned business boom, LBJ, that's why you say we have the Negroes voting Democrat for the next 200 years, but all those policies have not done what they promised. Would you agree? I would not agree. So you think we're better off as black people now than we were before LBJ passed those policies?

Yes, brother. We, we can vote without the threat of violence. Are you [01:55:00] talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Is that what you're describing as, as, as a negative thing? I'm not saying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was, I'm talking about That's LBJ, I just want to be clear. That's LBJ who you said, were we better off before LBJ?

LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I'm talking about the War on Poverty. I just want to answer that one. I want to answer that specific one first. Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a bad thing? I agree with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thank you. But at the same time, I'm also I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.

I don't know what that means. Explain more. What it means is I would rather, given the fact that even back then we still had our families together, communities were stronger back then, I would rather deal with the dangerous freedom of not knowing and controlling people with policies as much as possible, versus the peaceful slavery of being married and tied to the government.

Um, given Trump's well documented history of saying and doing racist things, I wanted to know how these black people could be drawn into Trump's political orbit. So I talked to Pastor Lorenzo Sewell. Yeah, so [01:56:00] anyone that wants to come to church, they're able to come. So when President Trump called, I thought about it like you calling me and saying, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who has 34 felonies.

Hey, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who is a womanizer. Hey, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who could be a racist. He's the lead pastor at a black church in Detroit that Trump visited earlier this year. And he was also a featured speaker at the RNC. To all my friends back in Detroit who are Democrats, I want to ask you just one simple question.

You can't deny the power of God on this man's life. You can't deny that God protected him. Could it be that Jesus Christ preserved him for such a time as this? Could it be?

Why should black people support the Republican ticket and Donald Trump specifically? That's a good question. You know, what I would say to any black person is this, specifically about the Republican platform. I would say, look, do your research, right? I would say, look [01:57:00] back. 270 years ago in this state, where a group of patriots stood up and they started that grand old party to stop the expansion of slavery.

If a black person said, well, Pastor, Donald Trump is racist, the Republican Party is racist. Well, let's play that theme out throughout history. Let's look at who was the party of slavery. Who was the party of Jim Crow, right? Who's the party of, um, you know, the slave codes? Well, well, you know, Those are Democrats.

Let's have that conversation. And when you look at when the Senate was integrated, those were black Republicans. When we look at Frederick Douglass, black Republican. So that's on the political side. Why believe that a black American should be willing to look at the Republican platform in terms of my convict my political conventions as a pastor, my conviction in my heart.

A black woman's womb is the most dangerous place for a black child to be. So, if a black American, specifically a [01:58:00] black woman, my conversation would be, give our black babies a chance. Look at the Republican Party in terms of President Donald J. Trump. This is what I would say. Don't look at the container, look at the content.

Right? Don't look at the man, look at the mission. Right? Don't look at his past. Look at what your agenda is for your community in the future. Conservatives are leading the charge to remove protections for voting rights, protections for maternal mortality, um, interventions in California, affirmative action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

These are all issues that pertain directly to the people that I know that you serve as your community. Why should they support the party behind the hindrance, the advancement of the very things that I know you stand for? Sure. Black people that I know, that I represent, that I've had these conversations with, they don't want to be put in a position because they're black.

There's not one black person I know that, that will say to me, Lorenzo, I deserve this [01:59:00] position because I'm black. But, but, but I want to, you, you, you know that that's not what DEI is. DEI is about fair, fair hiring practices, opening up opportunity, like creating pathways, like. But you're smart. You're, you're an intelligent man.

And those that would say this, I believe they're very intelligent. It costs more money not to hire the person who's the best than to be racist. It actually costs more money. So if you're the best at what you do, right. And I, let's just say I'm a racist. So I'm, let's just say that let's play that out. Right.

And let's just say, Hey, there are 20 white guys that are not as competent as you, but I'm not going to pick you. Because you're black. It's going to cost me more money. They don't even know that this qualified person exists, right? Sure, I hear you. The pathways are the problem. And a lot of what diversity, equity, and inclusion is doing is creating those and helping to clarify those pathways.

And so framing it as an unqualified person getting the job when we know, you and I both know, that there are [02:00:00] plenty of qualified black people or Latino people or women who don't end up with jobs. 100%. 100%. And I agree with you. I do think relationships and proximity matter. In his book, The Grift, Clay Cain details the history of how Black conservatives have thrown Black people under the bus to get ahead personally.

From Black Republicans like Isaiah Montgomery and Booker T. Washington, to modern Black Republicans like Clarence Thomas. Clay Cain makes the case that the modern Black Republican is likely, if not assuredly, a grifter. A person who is doing that which is politically. Expedient rather than doing what is right, doing whatever they need to do to get that all expenses paid trip to fancy places.

I couldn't help but wonder if some of the folks I was talking to fit that description

SECTION C - WHITE AND RURAL VOTERS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section C: White and rural voters.

Keith Boykin on Why White Voters Stick with Trump - Miss Jones Inc - Air Date 8-30-24

 

The overwhelming majority of black people. are not going to vote for Donald Trump. They're definitely 90 [02:01:00] percent of black people are not going to vote for Donald Trump. Uh, and, and the real issue, I think we should be asking, instead of pointing the finger at black people, why aren't we doing this or that we should be pointing the finger at white people.

Why is it that the majority of white people plan to vote for Donald Trump? Why is it that the majority of white people voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and they didn't vote for Barack Obama in any of his elections? Why is it the majority of white people voted for Donald Trump again in 2020 after all the chaos he created?

Well, what I say is why do birds suddenly appear? What? Because the thing is is like why the rainbows? Why is water wet? Like you understand what I'm saying? Like they Why does everything have to be about race? It's exactly right. Why, why, why? It's, it's, it's like white people are invested in protecting whiteness.

And that, and that's the thing we need to be focused on. Everybody's, everybody's focused on Joe Biden, not getting Muslim support or black support. Yeah, I get that. But you know what, the real [02:02:00] question we should be asking is why is it that white people continue to support Donald Trump? Why is it after, after being twice impeached, quadruple indicted, after having 91 charges against him, after six bankruptcies, after being convicted, after having his company convicted of fraud, after his, two of, three of his lawyers have been, have been convicted, after, Several of his top aides have been convicted after he's run a country for four years with chaos after everything he said about creating a dictatorship, pulling out of NATO, not willing to support our allies.

After all of this stuff that white people Who've been lecturing black people and Brown people for years about what we should be doing and how we should be respectful of our country. And we should be electing serious leaders. Why is it the majority of white people still want to vote for this guy? And that's the real issue that America's facing.

It's not about black and Brown people, not showing up for Joe Biden. It's about white people, racist, white people showing up to support Donald Trump. That's the [02:03:00] problem that America's facing. At the end of the day, they're, they're literally still the majority that gets to decide which way this thing tilts.

Well, yes, and, and, and that's, and that's part of the problem because there has, there has, there's not all white people who feel this way, fortunately, because there has to be some critical mass of white people who don't. That's the reason why Barack Obama was able to get elected because even though he didn't win the white vote, he got enough white votes to be able to support him.

But Donald Trump won the white vote in both of his elections. Barack Obama lost the white vote in both of his elections. What does that say about white people in America? White people in America. I think that you keep asking very rhetorical questions. Because it's all about race. White people are invested in protecting racist white supremacist policies.

That's the reason why they are voting for Donald Trump. That's the reason why they voted for Donald Trump in the past. That is, ladies and gentlemen, that [02:04:00] is the answer. But the reality is we're going to all continue to be gaslit. That that is not what we're talking. That's not the situation. So when we talk about voting, it's always protected in this thing of a civil duty that we don't talk about because it's my right to vote and I, you know, I vote personally and you don't have to discuss it and blah, blah, blah.

Meanwhile, you're living next door. To a Trump supporter and don't even know it. And they're going to blame us and say, well, black people, we only voted 85 percent for Biden instead of 88%. You know what, that's, that's, what the hell, that's how a lot of people are voting for him. But they're not, they're not, they're not pointing the finger at white people who are voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

That is, that is, that is some twisted logic to make us to blame. We are the ones that have to rescue the country from white people who are ruining the country by supporting Donald Trump

How can Democrats win back rural voters? - The 21st Show - Air Date 8-22-24

 

 A highlight. If you want to stay focused on rural America for a moment is Tim walls.

[02:05:00] A little background on my relationship with him. I was first elected to Congress in 2012. I live in Moline, Illinois. The district I represented was until last until a year ago. January included the Quad Cities, the only Quad Cities, Peoria and Rockford, but any in between there, 85 percent of the towns had 5000 people or fewer living in them.

And 60 percent have a 1000 people or fewer living in them. So a very rural district. So I'm elected in 2012. and at the time leader Pelosi had this mentor program where she would look at sitting members of Congress who had similar politics. Or similar districts to the new brand new members coming in. So she assigned Tim walls to me.

And so we started our relationship in 2012 before I was even sworn in in January of 2013 as my mentor in Congress. And so his district, as I [02:06:00] just described the 1 in Illinois that I represented, his district was similar. We have in the 17th congressional district that I serve, we have close to 10, 000 family farms.

He has family farms throughout the district he represented and obviously throughout the state of Minnesota that he served is serving as governor and a lot of manufacturing, not as many college educated voters as many other congressional districts. And so, um, when you saw the video about him leading into it, talked about him growing up on a, on a farm, um, signing up for the military right after he turned 17 and Glenn, you know, this as well, but, um, the military is represented in larger numbers percentage wise by people from rural America than urban America.

And so I think that people all over America could watch that and listen to Tim Walz's speech last night and say, you know what, I get this guy and I think he's going to get people like me. Well, Glenn Bouchard, same question to you and take it where you will. What do [02:07:00] you think about how the Democratic National Convention has been going so far, I guess, in terms of appealing to those rural voters?

Brian, I think this is my convention that I've attended over the years. And this is by far the best organized enthousiastic crowd that I've ever been to. Uh, the people are enthused, particularly the young people. There's a lot of young people here as delegates. And so I'm, I'm very pleased with the way things have turned around.

Uh, I think it's good that we've applauded the courage of President Biden. And, uh, giving up the presidency so that, uh, he could make way for Kamala Harris, who I think is very intelligent, very articulate, uh, is going to make a great president of this country. And I think she's going to get elected. And I think everybody at this convention thinks we got a great shot at this.

Let me, let's, let's now dive into then some of the, [02:08:00] uh, the issues that, that have, or what has changed, I guess, in, in rural and downstate Illinois in the past decades, Sherry Bustos, you are one of a relatively small number of legislators in both parties who won a congressional district that the other party's presidential candidate had won.

You were a Democrat elected in the Trump majority district. How did that inform your approach to politics? Well, in Brian, if I can offer a little more perspective to on the congressional district that I represented, um, it was 1 of the biggest swings in the entire country from Obama to Trump at congressional district.

The 1 I just described that goes. Up to the Wisconsin state line, the Mississippi River on the Western border of the congressional district, and then goes into central Illinois into Peoria. 711, 000 people I already described. It's very agricultural John Deere's world headquarters is in Illinois. So we do have a lot of manufacturing that supports that [02:09:00] caterpillars world headquarters had been in Peoria.

Um, we have a major UAW plant right outside of the district in Belvedere, Illinois. So many of the people in the Rockford area work there. So that's a that's a description, but it swung 17 points. From when Barack Obama won in his 2nd reelect. So, in the 2012 election to then when Donald Trump won in 2016, it was a 17 point swing.

So, um, I could feel it on the ground and Glenn, you can talk a little bit about what you were seeing in more Southern Illinois. Um, I'm a downstater, but you are in southern Illinois, but but I can feel it on the ground. And interestingly, that election that Donald Trump 1, our congressional district that I represented, I want it by 20 points.

So, what that means is about 1 in every 5 voters. That went into the, the voting booth that on that election day, um, 1 [02:10:00] in 5 voted for Donald Trump and then went down ballot a little bit farther and voted for me. Um, and so what what did okay so back to your question. I mean, you, if you, if you're representing a district like this.

That is truly a swing district. Um, you bet you better not be extreme. And, um, because that is not what the, a swing district is looking for. Um, we can talk a little bit about what I think was what proved to be successful for me. Um, but, um, you know, I'm a moderate Democrat, but that's, that's how I, how I was raised.

I come from a long line of family farmers. And teachers, and, you know, we're just we're pretty regular middle class folks. Um, but, um, I, I'm a moderate and that my politics. I don't know if they're always in style. I would say if you fast forwarded to 2018, being a moderate Democrat probably wasn't exactly in style.

I think is. Maybe back in style now, [02:11:00] because I see us as the pragmatists, the, the folks who, while we can always shoot for major change, it is really, really difficult, uh, legislatively to, to have major change. So, I do believe in, in order to make changes that are necessary, sometimes that does have to happen incrementally.

And over 

Crossing the Rural-Urban Divide (with Governor Tim Walz) - In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt - Air Date 1-11-23

 

Minnesota for people who aren't familiar with the state, like a lot of Midwestern states has a lot of democrats and a lot of republicans. That's right. It's got an urban urban center with a lot of, you Democrats, it's got a lot of rural communities with, with, that are with fair amount of Republicans.

You represented in the US congress, a very rural area with, of course, with some nice cities in it too. And, and, you know, you ran against someone who, uh, Scott Jensen, who is sort of out of MAGA central casting. That's right. Yet, The election wasn't, to be honest, it wasn't close and not only that, but you flip the Senate blue.

And for the first time in a decade, [02:12:00] you've got a full democratic governing coalition across the legislature and the governor's office. What happened? Tell us what this tells you about the state of the electorate . Yeah. It's a big deal. And Andy knows Minnesota well. And I think you're right. The one thing in there too, Andy, there is a big chunk of, you know, capital I independence, you know, Jesse Ventura's people, some of those are still there.

So right. Minnesota kind of represents that, that quintessential purple state out in the Midwest. You're right. I represented a district that when I won my last congressional race in 2016, Donald Trump won by 20 percent there. But I think it was the Minnesota, again, it's not, You know, Minnesota exceptionalism, but I think there was just a more grounded focus that the issues of the day coming out of a pandemic, the way we handled it, you know, that was the debate home to the Mayo Clinic, home to the, you know, the heart of the medical research and medical device industry.

And we had folks that were blatantly telling people this was a hoax and things like that. And as you said, you know, my opponent being a [02:13:00] medical doctor of all things and, and falling into that, I think that was. Well, you know, for what it's worth, my pro tip of the day was don't run on that. People were relatively happy.

We had pretty low death rates and things. And then I do think the, uh, the decision on row that came, um, it, there was an energized, you could feel it. You know, it's not, again, you, if you're counting on young voters to win for you, we've always been, all of us have been through this. It's hard to get them to the polls for different reasons.

They showed up this time and, and women again, we're speaking. And so I think what it was is there was a. Uh, basics about, you know what, we handled COVID the best we could. We're coming out of this thing pretty well, you know, focusing on that issue around on women's rights and reproductive rights. And then here in Minnesota, again, one of the things we're very proud of, and we rank very near the top on public education was a full frontal attack from the other side on, on the, just the whole concept of public education, that, that we should just quit funding them.

Right. That we should defund it and that we should go to vouchers for parents. So I think it was a [02:14:00] combination on this. You know, I, it's not the campaign that I would have run against me, um, if I was doing it. But I, I, I think in this, that both the mood out here. The general nature of, of the electorate, it did split on those things that you talked about, Andy, I run on one Minnesota and I, it breaks my heart to see our state so polarized, but you can take our state, just like you can the map of the United States.

And it's, you know, that red and blue as a geographer, there's been no bigger damage done to this country, but my, whoever put that on TV the first time showing these splotches of red and these splotches of blue, when we know that it is not that uniform, you know, right. The city of Rochester, Mankato in the middle, or sure.

So I think it was just voters knew they were there and then I do think it came to this that the candidates I, I think I got a pretty good draw on the candidate that I had, but I'd also like to think we did a pretty good job during covid we listened to experts. Um, we listened to the folks who cared and then I think we tackled head on a generational [02:15:00] reckoning on race after the murder of George Floyd.

So it was a, well, I'll tell you if, if, if you put a list of things together in a first term and thought that you were going to get reelected by a fairly comfortable. Well, margin, I would have bet against us. I think, yeah, that's a lot of challenges. I do want to go back to talk about some of the things that unite us because, because I think you make a really important point, you know, I think all of us are used to seeing elections where people have policy differences, you know, you're, you're used to running against people who you just adamantly disagree with from a policy standpoint, yet at some level.

It's okay because you know, they're being truthful with the public. That's right. What felt new and what feels like a new phenomenon is this cycle. You and a number of other, you know, national candidates for governor and for Congress were running against people who basically premised a lot of they're willing to premise a lot of their campaign on a lie.

That's right. Whether it's the lie of the 2020 election, whether it's just boldface, um, lying and telling [02:16:00] mistruths that worries a lot of us. I don't know how much it worries you. It was, it's, it's certainly confirming to see people like you who play it straight, whether the truth is good or whether the truth is bad, win against someone like that.

But how do you run against somebody who just is willing to invent their own playbook like that? Yeah, it was hard because I say this, I've run against really good people and I would have to say this. My, my first term for governor in 2018, I ran against a man who honorable, good guy, good father. I mean, lives up just, I think tells the truth every day, you know, kind of lives the life you'd like to see.

We just disagreed on tax policy, disagreed on some of those things, and we had a good spirited campaign on the issues. This one was just. You know, just wild out of nowhere, accusations, you know, I don't know if you followed it asking how you run against it. You have a good team around you to keep you from losing your mind on some of this because it was just, you know, I'm in a debate arguing that it wasn't COVID that killed [02:17:00] people.

It was the ventilators, you know, it was the vaccine and things. But I also was getting, I did 24 years in the military and someone who didn't do time, they came right at you that I somehow. Quit and deserted my people type of thing. You know, I don't know where it comes from. And now you're in the public who is predisposed for these massive attacks and massive lies.

We needed to be talking about how are we going to, in Minnesota and aging population,

And so what I said is how you run on this is, is my team did a great job of staying focused on the issues. What are we going to do to improve the lives of Minnesotans? I think, you know, the thing that my team and I remind myself is talking about the issues and talking about solving them and being as honest as you could with the public is That 

Credits

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [02:18:00] That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Morning Joe, WABE, DW News, The Majority Report, The New Yorker Radio Hour, Woke AF Daily, The PBS NewsHour, The Reid Out, Mother Jones, Ms. Jones incorporated. The takeaway the 21st show and in the bubble further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Aaron Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member [02:19:00] or purchasing gift memberships. 

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So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from 

Air Date 9/6/2024

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Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. We're living in a world that dark money in politics and Citizens United built. But since that Supreme court ruling in 2010, we've also invented cryptocurrency. That promises to be a brand new source of opacity and financial power built on smoke and mirrors. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes CounterSpin, Robert Reich, The PBS NewsHour, The Brian Lehrer Show, The Majority Report, Democracy Now!, CounterSpin, and Bernie Sanders. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more on four topics: 

Section A: The System,

Section B: Funding Republicans,

Section C: Funding Democrats, and 

Section D: Solutions.

Steve Macek on Dark Money - CounterSpin - Air Date 8-23-24

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Let's start with some definition. Dark money doesn't mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don't like, or from groups I don't like. In your June piece for The Progressive, [00:01:00] you spell out what it is and in terms of where it can come from and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money. 

STEVE MACEK: Sure. So dark money -- and I think Anna Massaglia of Open Secrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes such as elections.

Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission in 2010 and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections. Not all of that independent expenditure on elections [00:02:00] is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I'm sure your listeners are really familiar with, are super PACs, or what they're more technically known as IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.

There is this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a social welfare nonprofit, who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors. But they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend [00:03:00] 49.999 percent of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education or research that might in turn guide the creation of political ads and so on. 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it's not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate; that doesn't have to be involved at all.

STEVE MACEK: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they're working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate. 

But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressive article. This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022 and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground [00:04:00] states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border or for over kind of woke culture war themes. But they're spending 40 plus million dollars on ads, according to one estimate. What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor, and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors. It has been running this year in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads and putting up billboards, for example, attacking [00:05:00] Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general anti-woke -- they're very snarky, kind of anti-woke ads saying basically Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Right. Well, I think rich people influence policy. It's almost like dog bites man at this point, right? Yeah, it's bad, but that's how the system works. And I think it's important to lift up If it didn't matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn't be trying to obscure it.

And the thing you're writing about, these are down ballot issues where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that scrabbled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know, [00:06:00] to connect these financial dots.

STEVE MACEK: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money and these dark money organizations is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school board, or, as I discussed in the article, state Attorney General's races, right?

There is this organization that was founded in 2014 called the Republican Attorney General's Association or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym. And they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic State Attorney General's candidates [00:07:00] in the 2022 elections.

Now they are a PAC of a kind. They're a 527, so they have the same legal status as a super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is the group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million. Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump's Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal court.

His organization, this fund that he controls gave $17 million to RAGA, and we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who's funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country. That's alarming. [00:08:00] Because of course, some of these right wing billionaires and corporations have issues, have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position, because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly Attorney General in that position, State Attorney General in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.

Why Big Money Supports Trump -Robert Reich - Air Date 8-27-24

ROBERT REICH - HOST, ROBERT REICH: Fascism, backed by big money, is one of the most dangerous of all political alliances. We saw it in 1930s Germany, when industrial giants bailed out a cash strapped Nazi party right before Hitler's election, thinking that Hitler would protect their money and power. We're seeing something similar now.

Earlier this year, the GOP was running out of money. So, Trump turned to his wealthy backers for help. Many super rich donors, who once criticized Trump for stoking the violence of January 6th, have since had a change of heart, deciding their profits are worth more than our democracy. Trump has promised them that if [00:09:00] elected, he'll extend his 2017 tax cuts that went mainly to the wealthy, beyond 2025, when they're scheduled to expire.

And he's hinted at even more. 

DONALD TRUMP: The rich as hell, we're gonna give you tax cuts? 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, ROBERT REICH: He promised oil executives he would scrap regulations favoring electric vehicles and wind energy if they would give his campaign $1 billion. 

The Trump White House is for sale. And the wealthy are buying. 50 billionaire families gave at least $600 million in political donations as of May, with over two thirds going to support GOP candidates and conservative causes.

Elon Musk, one of the world's richest men, who also controls and manipulates one of the world's largest communications platforms, has committed to spending millions of dollars a month to elect Trump, and Trump has promised to make it worth Musk's while. 

DONALD TRUMP: We have to make life good for our smart people, and he's as smart as you get.

ROBERT REICH - HOST, ROBERT REICH: In previous [00:10:00] videos, I've highlighted alarming similarities between fascist regimes of the past and Trumpism. The alignment of American billionaires with Trump's anti-democracy movement. is one of the most dangerous parallels. 

The billionaires want the rest of us to fight each other so we don't look up and see where all the wealth and power have gone, so we don't join together and raise taxes on the super rich to finance childcare, better schools, our healthcare system, everything else we need. 

They fear democracy because there are far more of us than there are of them. We need to see through their fear tactics, and vote in overwhelming numbers this November.

We can learn from history and spot the danger. We are not doomed to repeat it. 

Trump shifts stance on cryptocurrency to win over new bloc of voters and mega-donors - PBS Newshour - Air Date 7-29-24

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: The incredible rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have created a new block of megadonors that voters and presidential candidates are now trying to win over. Former President Trump, who initially denounced cryptocurrency as [00:11:00] "highly volatile and based on thin air" back in 2019, reversed himself in his speech to the conference last Saturday by promising to make the US the crypto capital of the world, 

DONALD TRUMP: if crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It's going to be. It's not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it's going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way. And that's what's going to happen. No, you're going to be very happy with me. 

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Joining me now to discuss the ramifications of all of this is David Yaffe-Bellany from the New York Times. David, thank you so much for being here. Help set the table for us for people who have not been following this that closely. Remind us of where crypto was after its big fall, and now it's sort of resurged in the marketplace. 

DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: The last time most ordinary people tuned into the crypto industry, you know, top [00:12:00] executives were going to prison, the market was in free fall, and a lot of these kind of risky investments had been widely dismissed as worthless or scams. But a lot has changed since then. In January, the federal government approved a new investment product that's tied to the price of Bitcoin. And when that product started trading, it kind of opened up access to the crypto market to a whole lot of people who hadn't invested in it before. And as a result, the price of Bitcoin surged. It reached its record high a few months ago, and the prices of some of the other big crypto tokens have followed suit. And so the industry is in a much healthier state today than it has been for the last couple of years. 

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: So, as we just heard, the former President Trump made this very explicit pitch to the crypto world, saying, I might have been a skeptic before, but now I'm in full bore. What is his pitch, and why is this happening now? 

DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Look, the crypto industry is furious about the way that it's been treated by the federal government. The Securities and Exchange Commission has [00:13:00] embarked on a pretty aggressive crackdown on crypto companies, a crackdown so severe that it's essentially an existential threat. It could drive the industry out of the United States if it's successful. And so the embrace of Trump is really a response to that. And, you know, a cynical reading of this is that Trump is kind of opportunistically seizing on what's happening, you know, under the current administration. Seeing an opportunity to attract donor dollars from the crypto industry, and that's why he's making this pitch, promising that he's going to turn the US into a kind of inviting sort of capital for crypto companies, rather than the sort of aggressive cop on the beat that it's been over the last couple of years. 

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Let's talk about that 'cop on the beat'. Currently, that's the Biden administration's cop on the beat. What is it that they're doing, and what is their argument about why they need to be such a tough cop?

DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Sure. So, the leader of this push is the chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, and the argument that he has made over and over is that most [00:14:00] cryptocurrencies are essentially securities, which is to say that they're just like stocks and bonds that are traded on Wall Street and that they ought to be regulated as such and that crypto companies should have to make all the sorts of disclosures and follow all the same rules as people do, people who offer those traditional investment products. That is a legal argument that the crypto industry hates. You know, they're fighting back against it saying that if the SEC beats them in the courts on this issue, then they'll be driven out of the United States. So, that's sort of the crux of the debate. And, you know, Trump went in front of a crowd of Bitcoin supporters over the weekend and said, one of my first acts as president will be to fire Gary Gensler. And it got probably the biggest cheer of the day. 

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: So, do we know what vice president Kamala Harris might do if she were elected? Is it safe to say she would just continue the Biden administration's current approach?

DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: It's hard to say for sure. She hasn't said a ton publicly about her views on crypto, but obviously she's part of the current administration and so a lot of crypto [00:15:00] insiders are kind of assuming that if she wins, it'll be more of the same that they saw under the Biden administration. With that said, both the Biden campaign and now the Harris campaign have extended something of an olive branch to crypto companies, sort of invited them to come to the table and sort of talk about the policy changes they would like to see. But, the reaction among crypto executives has been pretty skeptical. Essentially it's been 'your talk means nothing to us, we've seen what you've done over the last four years and, frankly, we don't trust you'. 

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: We're talking about crypto here, but there has been in the broader tech world, as well as in the VC world—the venture capital world—this seeming move towards Trump and supporting Republican candidates. Is that all about this concern over too-strict enforcement as they see it? 

DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: That's really probably the key part of this. You know, even tech people who aren't directly involved in the crypto industry or see what's going on and say, you know, this is an administration that's cracking down on [00:16:00] innovation and there's a fear that there might be a crackdown on the AI companies that are proliferating now. And so that's a lot of what's driving the kind of rightward shift of the Silicon Valley elite toward Trump, but there are other factors as well. A lot of these top figures in the tech world have kind of bought into concerns about cancel culture and wokeness run amok. And so there are some of those kind of cultural issues at play here as well.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: And I'm sure it's also true that billionaires like tax cuts, which Donald Trump is promising more of as well.

Silicon Valley's Impact on the 2024 Elections - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 7-31-24

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Erin, you used this term before the break that I loved. You said 'liberaltarian' was a good way to describe the folks in the tech industry. And, you know, the splintering that we see in Silicon Valley right now has a lot of people speculating on why a powerful liberal, sometimes libertarian, group has gone so far right.

Recently, US secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who's stumping for Vice President Harris, weighed in. We've got a clip that I want to share with [00:17:00] you. Let's take a listen to what Buttigieg said on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this month. 

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I know there are a lot of folks who say, What's going on with some of these Silicon Valley folks veering into Trump world with JD Vance and backing Trump? What are they thinking? Silicon Valley is supposed to be, you know, they're supposed to care about climate. They're supposed to be, you know, pro science and rational and libertarians. Normally libertarians don't like authoritarians. What's up with that? I think it's actually, we've made it way too complicated. It's super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men. 

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: A lot of texts are coming in saying basically the same thing. That it all kind of comes down to money. So, Erin, what are your thoughts on what Buttigieg is saying? It's to what extent is this just all about money? 

ERIN GRIFFITH: I mean, I don't think, I'm not going to argue with that. That's a very, first of all, it's a great message, political message for him to be putting out there on the left. [00:18:00] And I think it's hard to argue with that. And one point that I'll just add to that is that if you look at Marc Andreessen's comments about his political journey and how he switched from having supported almost every Democratic candidate for president over the last couple decades to now supporting Trump. He pointed to this journey that people tend to go on in his industry where you make a lot of money, you're very successful in business, you're mostly left alone by regulators, and then you become a philanthropist. And he even made the point that, like, then you get a lot of praise for giving a lot of your money away. And he was really struck by the fact that philanthropists started getting criticized. And he even pointed out that when Mark Zuckerberg announced his Chan Zuckerberg [00:19:00] Initiative, there was some criticism around it and he was just like really taken aback by that. And so part of it is, I think these guys are surprised to find themselves as the villain and kind of bristling at this criticism.

And so I think there's a little bit of almost sensitivity or 'how dare you' kind of about it, too. And so, I think that's just worth playing into this, that it's not just money, but it's also like they're kind of like ego a little bit. I found that really striking.

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: So, it is not just about money, maybe legacy? Is that fair? Maybe about the ego, the point that they're making in the world. Once you make enough money, what else can you do? So they start looking at politics. Is that kind of what you're suggesting?

ERIN GRIFFITH: Well, yeah. And if you just think more broadly, the tech industry has been really villainized in the media and by politicians on both sides over the last few years. You know, even Trump is calling for breaking up big [00:20:00] tech and putting Mark Zuckerberg in jail, and so I think that kind of villainization is also playing into this a little bit. And I'm not, you know, weighing in on whether or not this is deserved or good, bad, whatever, but I'm just saying this is what I've observed when I talk to people, is that they take it a little bit personally, like, We're innovators, we're building the future for society. And they're a little bit dismayed at the fact that there's this aggressive regulation, there's lawsuits, there's some villainizing going on. So, I think that does play into it a little bit too. 

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: And it makes sense timeline-wise, right? Because if you go back, you know, 10, 15 years ago, back to 2010, tech was kind of, in many circles, seen as a panacea, almost. You could fix it if you lathered tech on top of whatever you were talking about. I'm sure moving on from there, 10, 15 years later, it's kind of a little bit of a 180 with AI, crypto, all of these things kind of seen as taking away from society. [00:21:00] Does that timeline make sense there? 

ERIN GRIFFITH: Well, yeah. I mean. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had very cozy relationships with the tech industry. And it wasn't seen as, you know, politically toxic in some ways that it is a little bit now, taking tech money. But that's, I think, partly because of how powerful the tech industry has become. It used to be this kind of quirky thing that happened over on the West Coast. And now it is, you know, a part of every single industry in our economy. It's these companies are among... the top five most valuable companies in the world are tech companies, mostly, and, you know, the tech industry is extremely powerful. And so it has become, you know... there's been a lot of criticism around the tech industry and a lot of scrutiny and a lot of regulatory scrutiny. And so all of that is a part of this. 

Dem Donors Want Harris To Bail On Biden's Best Decision - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-29-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Harris is getting pushed [00:22:00] by folks who are against genocide, who are against a, open air prisons and ethnic cleansing and killing of tens of thousands of children. On one side she's getting pressure in that way, on another side, on a big money and corporations and donors, she's getting pressured to roll back and undermine the antitrust gains that have been made at the FTC with Lena Kahn.

Here is from yesterday, CNN's Matt Egan on with Reid Hoffman, who is the LinkedIn co founder, apparently giving $7 million to Harris. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And there was one donor who was quoted in the New York Times piece about this who said that they think essentially she'll dump Lena Khan, and the source was one major Democratic donor 

I don't know this for a [00:23:00] fact... 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: This is the point We don't know what she's gonna do. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: We don't know, but it could be him. 

REID HOFFMAN: Trump wants tariffs, which is anti business. Makes this a very strange election indeed, because I think actually vice president Harris is much more of the pro-business candidate than Trump and Vance. 

CNN ANCHOR: But vice president Harris wants to raise the corporate tax rate. The, Biden Harris administration has imposed tariffs, so aren't there some anti-business concerns there as well. 

REID HOFFMAN: I think what's most important for business is stability of a country, unity, rule of law, and a percent difference in corporate tax, or two percent or three percent difference in corporate tax, is far less important. 

CNN ANCHOR: Now the Trump campaign of course has argued otherwise, saying that Former President Trump is the one that's going to put more money in the pockets of American families and blaming the Biden Harris administration for the high cost of living.

Now, even Reid Hoffman conceded that he's not thrilled with [00:24:00] all parts of the Biden administration. In particular, he strongly criticized Lena Khan, the FTC chair. He said that Lena Khan is "waging war on American business," and he went so far as to say that he hopes that a President Harris would replace Lena Kahn at the FTC.

Now, the agency pushed back, telling CNN in a statement that Chair Kahn is honored to work in this administration where she has worked to protect consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs from corporate abuses. And it's worth remembering that Lena Kahn, she's won some fans on the left for her efforts to fight monopolies, to try to Push back against big oil and big tech.

And interestingly enough, she even has a fan on the, 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: on the Republican side. I think he was about to say. This is an attempt, by the corporate interests on the Democratic side of things [00:25:00] to influence Harris and lay down a gauntlet, do these sort of like vague, passive, aggressive threats on some level tied him with somebody who's got the 7 million and whatnot, and we'll see what happens here.

 They know, or they think that they know that she's pushable on this. Does that mean that they're gonna succeed? No. This is the same dynamic I think that we're in terms of Gaza and the Biden administration's policies. In fact, I'm not convinced that Elizabeth Warren's coming early in this process and endorsing her, when there was still talk of some type of mini primary wasn't a function of her trying to get there first and make sure that she's in Harris's ear, and maintaining if not building upon the gains that Warren part of the party looking for antitrust is not carried forward. 

Here's IAC Chairman Barry Diller [00:26:00] talking to Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC, this all come from the business press, as to what he would do in terms of lobbying Harris.

 

DILLAR: Everybody flip flops because conditions change. You run in the primary to the left or to the right in order to get it. Then when you get the nomination, you cove towards the center, which is sensible to do. It's all pragmatic. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Let me also just weigh in on this. This is not so, so relevant to this, but this conventional wisdom, it's not really the case as much as it used to be. Joe Biden, when he was in trouble, when he was facing calls to be pushed out, he did not tack to the center folks. He came out and said 5% a cap on rent. He came out and said, expansion of, Medicaid and Medicare. He came out and said...

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: ...canceling medical debt...

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: ...canceling medical debt. These are tacks to the left, not tacks to the center. And [00:27:00] clearly this was him in the general election mode, although it turned out he wasn't in any mode.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's what we were saying, is part of the frustration was he was in a fight for his life for the Democratic nomination, and that's why he was pulling all that out. Harris now is actually in the general election, so it'll be fascinating to see without abilities to influence her throughout a long protracted primary process, who gets their way.

DILLAR: When you get the nomination, you cove towards the center, which is sensible to do. It's all pragmatic. Let's not talk about honesty in these contexts. 

CNBC ANCHOR: But there have been reports that a number of prominent Democrats have been lobbying Harris to drop people like Lena Kahn. Do you think that it's going to happen? And would you lobby? Yeah, I would. You would? Yeah, I think she's a dope. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Of course you do. And to your point about Warren, Lena Kahn is the chair of the FTC because of Elizabeth Warren, because Elizabeth [00:28:00] Warren endorsed Biden and dropped out, and was a part of that coalescence of candidates that dropped out to defeat Bernie Sanders. I think those were some of her asks, right?

So if she's as close with Harris as she says she is, perhaps she's an influence on the other side, but the stuff about Harris that's going to be the most, I think, problematic and stuff to watch for is her relationship to antitrust. She's going to be a bit more of an Obama type, closer with Silicon Valley than perhaps Biden is, maybe less willing to be an antitrust, break up big business type of person. And, she's probably closer with Wall Street than Biden has been, at least over the past four years. 

So those are the pressure points they're gonna try to push, but it remains to be seen what the end result is of that pushing, in the same way with the Gaza policy as well.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: We'll [00:29:00] see. 

Andy Levin, Pushed Out of Congress by AIPAC, Calls for Change in U.S.-Israel Policy - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-21-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency: Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman, here in Chicago with Juan González.

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We turn now to look at how AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has spent millions targeting Democrats who have criticized U.S. support of Israel. In June, AIPAC and the affiliated super PAC spent almost $15 million to defeat New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman. And then, two weeks ago, Missouri Congressmember Cori Bush lost her seat after AIPAC spent $8 million to defeat her.

We’re joined now in Chicago by former Democratic Congressmember Andy Levin of Michigan. In 2022, he lost his House seat after AIPAC spent millions in dark money to defeat him. Levin is a former synagogue president and self-described Zionist. Despite this, AIPAC labeled him as, “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress [00:30:00] to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Andy Levin is a former Democratic congressmember from Michigan. He’s part of a political dynasty. We thank you so much for being with us. 

If you could start off by talking about— when we hear about Bowman, we hear about Bush, you came before them. And talk about the race that unseated you—might surprise many that you were a synagogue president and a congressmember—and how you were driven out.

ANDY LEVIN: Had been a synagogue president until I went to Congress, and I felt I should stop doing that, because you have to devote all your time to Congress. And I had, mezuzahs, the little things that Jewish people hang on their doors, on all my doors in Congress. I’m a really joyous Jewish person.

And, I think they felt particularly threatened [00:31:00] by that, Amy and Juan. The idea—and plus, my dad and my uncle had served in Congress before me—my dad in the House, my uncle in the Senate. My dad was the president of the high school class of 1949 at Central High School in Detroit, right? They were from the bosom of the Jewish community there. And I think that these right-wing-on-Israel people can’t stand the idea that a Jewish person like me, who is fully for self-determination for my people in the Holy Land, was the loudest voice in Congress saying, “Well, that’s not going to be sustainable, and we’re not going to have peace there, until and unless we fully realize the human rights and the political rights of the Palestinian people, too.”

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I just want to talk about your family dynasty, the political dynasty.

ANDY LEVIN: We don’t talk about it like that. Yes.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Your father, Sander Levin, the congressmember; your uncle, Carl Levin, head of Armed Services in the Senate —

ANDY LEVIN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: —at the same time your [00:32:00] father was head of Ways and Means Committee?

ANDY LEVIN: Yeah, my—these two Jewish boys from Detroit. And my uncle, who passed away, never left the city of Detroit. They each served 36 years in Congress. They served 32 years together. In the 235-year history of our elected democracy in the United States, they are by far the longest-serving siblings, and even more than three Kennedy brothers, more than anybody. And I’m so proud of them and, their contributions to our democracy.

But, Uncle Carl got crosswise with AIPAC in the '90s, when Yitzhak Shamir was, I think, the secondly couped prime minister of Israel, and he said, “Land for peace? We're not doing land for peace.” And Carl, it may feel naive today, but he was like, “Oh my gosh! That’s the basis for any hope of peace.” And he wrote a letter to Secretary of State George Shultz, I think it was at the time. And he got [00:33:00] 30—on a Friday afternoon, he got, I think, 30 senators to sign this letter. It was supposed to be private. And they sent it to him, saying, “We have to have land for peace. Do something about this,” something like that. And one of the other senators or their staff made it public. Carl had shown the text to AIPAC beforehand. But when it went public, AIPAC went crazy, said, “This can’t be Carl Levin’s letter.” They demanded he retract it. They said, “It must have been the work of some staffer.” Uncle Carl totally stood by his staffer, who helped him write the letter. He said, “No, that’s my letter.” And anybody who knew Uncle Carl knew he went over every line, himself before they sent the letter.

And this is—look, if you are a Jewish person and you really want to be true to your faith, you have to treat the other as yourself. You have to love your—you the stranger, the neighbor. The most oft-repeated mitzvah, or requirement, [00:34:00] in the Torah, I think 36 times, which is a very significant number for Jews, is some version of that. Who is the most important other for us, honestly, if not—OK, a homeless person, someone who looks different than you, yes, treat them well. But, really, I think the acid test for Jewish people is how do we treat our Palestinian cousins. And so, we have to treat them as we would want to be treated. They are from the land. They’re there on the land. And if you come from Michigan, you know so many amazing Palestinian Americans who are your neighbors, your colleagues, your doctor, your friend, and we need to all get along there, and we need to work together here to make that happen.

And I don’t care what AIPAC does. The fact—it’s outrageous that they’re using money from Republican billionaires to decide who wins Democratic primaries. [00:35:00] That’s a problem for democracy, and it’s a threat to the soul of the Democratic Party, even from a kind of a dry political science point of view, right? If you are in a political science class and your professor says, “Well, there’s multiple parties, right? And they each have to choose their candidate that represents that party’s values or beliefs, to go up against some other party, right?”—if any party lets a different party, interest groups from a different party, billionaires from a different party, come and choose its candidates, it’s finished.

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I wanted to ask you—you mentioned, obviously, Michigan, where you’re from. Talk about the rise of the “uncommitted” movement and what kind of impact it’s had on the Democratic Party and on the process of choosing a president.

ANDY LEVIN: Juan, I am so proud of this movement. These are young people. This is a true grassroots movement. I remember when I went to a phone bank that they had during the Michigan primary, which [00:36:00] our primary for president was way back on February 27th. The energy in that room, the beautiful rainbow of people in that room, the food that someone had cooked, you know—if you’re an organizer in the social movements of this country, when you walk into a situation like that, you know if something has life, is authentic, has power. And not only did they get over 100,000 people to vote uncommitted in just a few weeks in Michigan to say to President Biden, “We want to vote for you in November, but you’ve got to change course on Gaza to help us do that,” it obviously went national, too.

And I’m so proud of these young people, because I don’t want Donald Trump to get anywhere near the White House ever again, but even now, in late August, I feel like Vice President Harris—I hope that she can reach out more. And it’s difficult as a vice president, right? But I think she has plenty of space to say, “Look, under a [00:37:00] Harris administration, we’re going to follow U.S. and international law on military aid to Israel and all of any other military aid,” right? And she could say—she has a lot of room to say different things that would win the support of the uncommitted movement, which I think it would be very helpful to win Michigan, which is necessary.

Steven Rosenfeld on Election Transparency, Ian Vandewalker on Small Donors - CounterSpin - Air Date 5-17-24

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, I will say when I first saw the headline of your report, Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction? I thought, Huh, who would say that? It turns out it's a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsel, who wrote, "for 200, a person can fuel the decline of our major parties." And then David Beiler at the Washington Post wrote, "small dollar donors didn't save democracy, they made it worse." So this is not a subreddit, obscure line of thought, so before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face [00:38:00] on it, what is the argument here? 

IAN VANDEWALKER: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing because anybody can be one, but if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gates. People who try to attract a lot of attention with whether extremist rhetoric or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is what small donors are really doing is they're encouraging these people who are showboating and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: So the idea, is it that these small donors aren't real, that they're orchestrated, that these, folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point, and it's not that actually it's people who can only give $12? 

IAN VANDEWALKER: I think there's something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream [00:39:00] media and social media click bait does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps, the world's going to come crashing down if you don't send me $12. So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, I can engage a national small donor fundraising base by saying crazy things. That exists.

Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don't actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House. 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: So first of all, I like how you're go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks won't. There's a political system and there's a media system and they're different. You're already saying, no, these things are intimately integrated. 

IAN VANDEWALKER: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn't happen in a vacuum. The internet has been a [00:40:00] huge Beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in, but one of the other effects of that has been this click bait world of say, the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small dollar fundraising. There's a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small dollar fundraising or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district, I think is a question we should also look into.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base, and so what do you say in this piece about when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find? 

IAN VANDEWALKER: So first of all, there's lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they're going to engage their [00:41:00] voter bases and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance. As I said, small donors, they give to people they've heard of. So one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it's certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find, policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven't mentioned yet is big donors. 

Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from big, the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 million, has increased even faster. So that's actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system. It's this big money and those people give to extremists as well. So it's hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money. 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don't have a million dollars, they're throwing in their [00:42:00] money wherever they throw it, is throwing off the system. It makes you ask what's the system? Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird. 

IAN VANDEWALKER: Yeah, that's right. I think one of the things, the thought experiment I like to do with these arguments is replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, that's just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate, and it's hard to say that that's, as you say, a problem with the system itself.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Obviously every election year is important, but who, boy 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are gonna be engaging this? 

IAN VANDEWALKER: Yeah, I think for reporters it's important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It's easy to say, oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene raised a bunch of small money, but there's data out there that can show you what are small donors actually doing across the entire system and that's a very different story. 

And it's for reforms. The [00:43:00] Brennan center supports a small donor public financing system that matches donations so it amplifies those amounts from regular people to make them competitive with the big donors, and that changes the way the candidates fundraise and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people's voices and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that's good for representative democracy because politicians are listening to the voters in another way. 

We need to move to the public funding of elections - Bernie Sanders - Air Date 8-29-24

HASAN MINHAJ: I believe at times you've been framed in the media as this kind of radical person. 

BERNIE SANDERS: Good point. 

HASAN MINHAJ: But I want to talk about your Guardian article. Because what you did is you conducted your own research and you showed that these progressive policies are actually super popular, ten toes on the ground. This is not a Twitter position. This is not an Instagram stories position. Real IRL Americans care about these issues. 

BERNIE SANDERS: What we did is we said, look, I'm called a far left guy, right? [00:44:00] Trump has decided that Kamala Harris is a communist. I mean, totally insane. So we asked the American people a lot of simple questions about some of the major issues facing this country. Republicans, Democrats, Independents. 

So we said, Do you think that the wealthy and large corporations should pay more in taxes? Shock of all shocks, over 70 percent of the American people said yes, including a majority of Republicans. Should we be surprised? No. No. All right. Yeah, of course. 

Question: Should we raise Social Security benefits by lifting the cap on taxable income and extend life by 75 years? In other words, asking the wealthy to contribute more to Social Security. Over 70 percent of the people said yes. 

Should we raise the minimum wage to a living wage? American people overwhelmingly said yes. 

Should [00:45:00] we expand Medicare? Right now, Medicare is a good program. It doesn't cover dental, hearing, and vision. Should we expand it over 70%? In all these instances, a majority of Republicans. 

So your question, I think is, if the American people feel that way, , why a haven't we done it? Why? 

HASAN MINHAJ: Yeah. Why haven't they been implemented? 

BERNIE SANDERS: And the answer, gets back to what I said a moment ago: it's money. The insurance companies don't like the idea. The rich don't like the idea of paying more in taxes. The insurance companies don't like the idea of expanding Medicare. 

HASAN MINHAJ: Is there a realistic path for my generation to remove money from politics? Is this something -- 

BERNIE SANDERS: God damn right there is. 

HASAN MINHAJ: You think so? 

BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. Yeah. 

HASAN MINHAJ: I'm 30. I have, hopefully I have a long way to go. 

BERNIE SANDERS: Alright. The answer, of course there is. Money has always played a role in politics. But it was greatly accentuated by this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. So we need legislation to get rid of Citizens United, and to move to public funding of elections.

If you do that, there will no more be super PACs, [00:46:00] billionaires will not be able to play the role they're playing right now. And again, not a radical idea. This exists in many other countries around the world.

Note from the Editor on the changing sense of urgency to address money in politics

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with counter spin, breaking down. Super packs. 5 0 1. And so on Robert Reisch looked at big money supporting Trump. The PBS news hour explained to Trump's embrace of crypto. The Brian Lehrer show discussed to the libertarian strain of Silicon valley. The majority report looked at pro democratic yet antibusiness regulation, mega donors. Democracy now explain to the role of AIPAC, the rabidly pro Israel at any cost organization. Counter spin discuss the media's perception of political influence. 

And Bernie Sanders laid out the importance of publicly funded elections. And those were just the top takes. There's more in the deeper dive sections, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of interesting topics, often making each other, laugh in the process to support our work and [00:47:00] have all those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members. 

Only podcast feed that you'll receive sign up to support. The [email protected] slash support. There's a link in the show notes through our Patrion page or from right inside the apple podcast app. 

If regular membership isn't in the cards for you. Shoot me an email request. Any financial hardship membership. Because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. Now, before we continue onto the deeper dives half, I have just quick thought, we're keeping this episode a little tight and I'll follow that trend. I've just been thinking about the nature of the discussion of money in politics. From the time I started paying attention just after the turn of the century, around the, uh, Iraq war invasion. And back then, I was able to feel pretty cutting edge to be able to identify big money in politics as one of the major sources of our political discontent. 

Then the 2010 citizens United Supreme court decision brought that perspective more into the mainstream. 

There was a [00:48:00] major backlash for the ruling and much hand ringing about the inevitable conservative tilt our politics would take after unleashing billionaires, who themselves tends to be more conservative, to pour effectively unlimited amounts of money into supporting Republican candidates. But with the rise of Trump things. I didn't go exactly. 

As we thought they would not quite as smoothly towards traditional Republican politics. Uh, , or even for the fight against big money from the opposition, but just didn't go that way. And I realized that one of the many casualties of the Trump show has been. A concerted opposition to money and politics. 

It's just sort of fallen off a lot of people's radar. 

Not because people stopped believing that it was an important problem, but because the emergency of Trump was just more pressing. Then the emergency of big money, swamping democracy, something that would have been nearly impossible to imagine in the early 20 teens, before Trump came on the [00:49:00] scene. And the biggest irony of course, is that as we're hearing in the show today, Trump actually used the public's anger at the corrupting power of money. To ingratiate himself with voters claiming to be self-funding his campaign and therefore immune to corruption himself. In order to get elected in the first place. And. What turned out to be laying the initial foundation that would become the cultish belief among his followers, That he is the only person in politics working selflessly on their behalf. And now he'd like to offer you a worthless NFT trading card for a hundred dollars.

SECTION A - THE SYSTEM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to the Deeper Dive, on four topics. Next up Section A: The System; Section B: Funding Republicans; Section C: Funding Democrats;, and Section D: Solutions.

Trump and the Billionaires Part 2 - The Socialist Program with Brian Becker - Air Date 7-16-24

NICOLE ROUSSELL - CO-HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: I want to bring up. One other thing that I think is another piece of evidence for your argument, essentially, that these are new capitalists funding Trump versus, you know, some of the old capitalists who are [00:50:00] mostly funding the Democratic Party, although I think there's a mix of both, but Project 2025, I think, is another example for me.

This is a right wing elite political program headed by the Heritage Foundation, Which is a very entrenched Washington, D. C. far right think tank. They've been around and they've been supporting, you know, the capitalist elite now for a very long time and we're on the Republican side of things. But different, different parts of the Republican side of things.

And Heritage has put out something like this, something like Project 2025 before every presidential election. But because Trump is so extreme in his willingness to smash people's rights, These, you know, disgusting, repulsive measures that Project 2025 is proposing are getting much more coverage and taking on much more significance.

And, again, just to connect this to what you're saying, some of the measures that they are proposing include abolishing the Department of Education, abolishing the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, getting rid of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, essentially tearing apart [00:51:00] any of the checks on corporate capitalist greed.

And the fact that this, you know, platform is supported by, and you know, Trump has disavowed it publicly, but it's very clear, you know, there's a lot of His former advisors, his former staff who are working at the Heritage Foundation or who are working with Project 2025, you know, it's very clear that they're, that they're tied.

So this seems to me like yet another piece of evidence. But these new capitalists, these billionaires, these venture capitalists, these investors where all the capital is now moving are doing this because it is in their economic favor and that is all they're thinking about. 

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think also, if I may, encourage people beyond getting caught up in the horror of all of this, which is so easy to do, is to take a step back and to ask yourself, Every person listening to this, thinking about the important issues your, your program brings up every week, in any case, take a step back and ask, why would this be happening?

[00:52:00] Why would we be seeing, in 2024, the United States hitting out like an angry bear at China, at the rest of the world, punishing big countries, little countries, or at least trying to? 

Why is this happening? Why is the United States isolating itself from the rest of the world more and more? The rest of the world is currently trading electric vehicles, mostly made in China, because they're the best vehicles at the lowest price, but not in the United States, which has closed itself off and not permitted them to come.

And the same is true with solar panels. And the same is true with all kinds of micro chips and on and on more and more each day. Why are we making statements that insult our allies? It's driving what remains of the NATO alliance closer and closer to [00:53:00] breaking up. The elections in England last month are frightening not only Mr.

Vance, but are underscoring they don't want to go in the direction of the United States. The British just voted the other way, and even more so the French, whose second round of their election on the 7th of July has placed into the governance of France. The most left wing socialists. That's who runs France from now on.

You know, they voted against the direction the United States is taking. We're becoming more and more isolated. What is going on? And the answer, I think, is that we are living through, and we ought to start facing it, we are living through the decline of the American empire. [00:54:00] That which began when World War I destroyed all the other countries and World War II finished the job.

And after that, starting in 1945, the United States was king of the hill. The rest of the world recovering from a war that did not happen on the soil of the United States after the initial bombing. Pearl Harbor. The United States came out on top. That was an anomalous historical situation. Couldn't possibly survive.

It never has in the history of the human race. The dominant position then had to be one that declined sooner or later. And sooner or later has now arrived. We are in decline, and instead of facing it and trying to come to some accommodations with [00:55:00] the rising part of the world, and in case anyone is wondering, the rising part is called the BRICS.

It's India, it's China, it's Brazil, it's all of those places that are now demanding their places in the sun. Or, in terms of the history of human civilizations, they are returning to positions of power and influence they once had and then lost for a while. It's not fun to be in a declining position, but you don't help it by pretending you're not.

By talking as if you were what you once were, but you aren't anymore, and it is shifting from scaring people to becoming laughable. These gestures are the gestures of a declining power. Yeah, you could hurt China if you do that, but it's [00:56:00] gonna cost you as well. That's what an out of control declining situation often gets people to do.

Busy holding on at their own expense without understanding it. I'm pleading here, for the kind of understanding that you get if you take a step back and ask why this theater at this time. You know, we are losing the protections that we spent the last century and a half putting into place. OSHA.

Protections against child labor, protections against extreme inequality, protections against spreading homelessness. We're losing them all because those at the top, who know that the system is declining, are using their wealth and their power to hold on. to the wealth they accumulated. Well, if you're holding on to the wealth and [00:57:00] power of the top, as the whole society goes down, you know who feels the going down the most?

The middle and the bottom. That's what's happening to us. And that's why the vast majority of Americans, in their interest, we should be sitting down with China and India and the others to work out a livable planet. So, they have their room to grow, and we have our space in which to decline without tearing ourselves apart.

If we don't do that, we will decline, we will tear ourselves apart, and the rich who hold on will be holding on to a ship that is sinking. The first class of the Titanic is sinking. also went down when that ship hit the iceberg. We are hitting an incomparable iceberg, and the crazy [00:58:00] thing is that those at the top want to pretend that nothing happened.

They're driving the rest of the people to anger and bitterness. Nothing that Trump and Vance administration proposes can solve the problems of the United States. In fact, things like a 60 percent tariff against the Chinese will make life harder in the United States. It will make the inflation much worse, and they all know it.

And that's gonna make the mass of people realize that going to the right, because this country is floundering, is not a solution. However full the symbolism might make you feel. And then they will discover what that they better find a solution on the left. Because the right has none. And I'm confident in that because that's exactly what just happened in Britain and France.

Steve Macek on Dark Money Part 2 - CounterSpin - Air Date 8-23-24

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: so here come [00:59:00] media.

And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the U. S. Press Corps as kind of like an old movie, you know, with, you know, the, Press cards in their hat band or, or, you know, Woodward and Bernstein, connecting dots, holding the powerful to account and the chips are just falling where they may.

And you make the point in the progressive piece that there has been excellent news media, corporate news media, you know, exposés of the influence of dark money connecting those dots. But you write that news media have. Missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered. What are you getting at there?

STEVE MACEK: I absolutely believe that so it is true as I say that there have been some excellent reports about dark money Here in chicago. We had this reclusive billionaire industrialist barry side who made What was most people say is the largest? [01:00:00] political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo.

Again, conservative judicial activist. The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for 1. 6 billion dollars. It's hard for the corporate media to ignore Political contribution of 1. 6 billion. That's a 1. 6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the U S Supreme court is going to be able to use.

He's a very right wing conservative Catholic to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported. Okay. And in fact, there have been some really excellent follow up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo affiliated organizations have influenced judicial [01:01:00] appointments and have influenced judicial elections.

So you have to give credit where credit's due. But the problem is That there are so many other cases where dark money is in play, whether or not you can say it's determining the outcome of elections or not is another story, but where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.

Think about the last month of this pandemic. Current presidential election. There hasn't been much discussion about the influence of dark money and yet open secrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year and might surpass the uh, 660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections.

So they're projecting that could be as much as a billion. billion dollars. We haven't heard very much [01:02:00] about this. I don't think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but certainly can make a difference in congressional races, attorney general's races, school board races, city council races.

That's where it can make a huge difference. And I do know that Open secrets, among others, have done research and they found that like there were cases where over 100 different congressional races, more money, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates, which is a scandal that outside forces, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding, can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: And it's It's disheartening that the idea that, well, you're swimming in it, like it's too big of an issue to even lift out. It is. And I think 

STEVE MACEK: that's also part of the reason why it's sort of accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that's part of the reason why. There isn't as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be [01:03:00] about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: That's exactly where I was going to lead you for a final question, just because that we know that reporters will say, well, they can't cover what isn't happening. But it is happening that legal and community and policy. pushback on this influence is happening. And so finally, what should we know about that?

STEVE MACEK: State level Republican lawmakers and state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501c4 social welfare organizations that I spoke about that spend money on politics.

So they're trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have [01:04:00] introduced Federal legislation that would do the same thing. Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this are based on a model bill that was developed by the American legislative exchange council or Alex, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Coke network of right wing foundations, millionaires, and billionaires, and they need every year to develop.

Model kind of right wing libertarian legislation that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country. And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia have all adopted some version of this Alec legislation that criminalizes disclosing [01:05:00] donors Two nonprofits that engage in political activity and In Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voters Right to Know Act, Proposition 2011, that would basically reverse The ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors, it would require PACs spending at least 50, 000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who had given more than 5, 000, a direct reversal of the ALEC inspired law.

Conservative dark money groups spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost, and then they Spent a lot of money challenging the new law in court, Proposition 2011 in court, and it has gone to trial, I think, three times and been defeated each time. Now, the [01:06:00] initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered.

To some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Meyer in the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.

SECTION B - FUNDING REPUBLICANS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Funding Republicans. 

Silicon Valley's Impact on the 2024 Elections Part 2 - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 7-31-24

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: So Aaron, the wealthy group of tech executives who are splintering along the political divide, the folks that you write about are sometimes called the PayPal mafia. Can you tell us more about who they are, how they know one another? 

ERIN GRIFFITH: Sure, and those are certainly some of the most prominent people that are kind of involved in this political infighting, and it has expanded to encompass many others, but the PayPal Mafia is kind of this iconic group of tech founders and [01:07:00] investors who all work with each other.

together at PayPal, you know, formed some very deep and lasting bonds there. And then they all went on to create very successful companies and firms. And they, they're kind of known for investing in each other's businesses. And you know, many of them are ones that you've heard of. I mean, Reid Hoffman is the co founder of LinkedIn.

Um, Elon Musk, obviously. He has created SpaceX, Tesla several other, uh, very successful companies. David Sachs founded a couple of companies that sold for billions of dollars and is now an investor. Peter Thiel very well known in political circles as well, but he, you know, is a founder of Founders Fund, which is a very successful venture capital firm.

And there are many, uh, that you know, Rulof Botha is the head of Sequoia Capital, which is one of the most well known venture capital firms. So it's this very interconnected network, and they've always had, divergent political views, but they still, come together around business and have [01:08:00] supported each other's businesses for many years.

And so, it's kind of crazy to watch them really fighting and their relationship starting to kind of unravel in public as they have around this upcoming election. 

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: There are some names that a lot of people will probably recognize that you just said, there's Musk, Teal, Sax. There's that second part of the moniker mafia.

Where does that come from? Can you unpackage that a little bit? 

ERIN GRIFFITH: I mean, I think this is a term that is now kind of common in Silicon Valley where when you're the alumni of one company all go out and end up starting their own companies and invest in each other. We call it, you know, the Uber Mafia or the Twitch Mafia, which is a company that sold to Amazon that, several of their, uh, founders and alumni have started another successful companies, and so and they all kind of invest in each other, and it's kind of like all interconnected may hire from each other and and it's kind of the way Silicon Valley works.

It's this interconnected ecosystem where they're all helping each other with talent [01:09:00] and money and strategy. And you know, that's part of the magic of this place, so in a way. And so, the mafias are certainly you know, numerous now, but PayPal is the original one. 

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: And you write kind of about the splintering that you were referring to before you've written that quote.

Quote, while tech leaders often criticize one another in private, they rarely do so publicly for fear of upsetting a potential deal partner or future job prospect. Erin, can you talk a little bit about some of the higher profile public battles happening? Some things that we could actually point to? 

ERIN GRIFFITH: Yeah.

And a lot of this is playing out on X formerly known as Twitter, but, but yeah, the industry is, Has always been sort of insular where it's like, okay, well, we can, you know, privately have our little debates about business and strategy and we can disagree on things but outwardly, we're going to present a united front because especially in the startup world, it's like we're the underdogs and it's us against the world.

We're disruptors. We're the pirate ship, et cetera. [01:10:00] Um, but, you know, we've seen like the node Kostla, who's, This very famous and successful investor and entrepreneur has been bickering on Twitter with Elon Musk, Kosell is, Democrat or a liberal and has been supporting Biden and now Harris.

And Elon has been arguing with him over the reasons of that. Roger McNamee, who's a well known investor and also has been a very vocal critic of Facebook over recent years came out and criticized Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are the founders of Andreessen Horowitz a very well known venture capital firm.

And, Ben Horowitz kind of slapped back on Twitter and was like, We've known each other for 25 years and we disagree on this and you're gonna take to Twitter, you know, instead of instead of calling me and David Sachs and Elon Musk have been attacking Reid Hoffman their former colleague and Over his support of Harris and [01:11:00] previously Biden you know, Hoffman and Peter Thiel got into a little spat apparently on stage at Sun Valley, which is the kind of elite gathering of, dealmakers that happened in Idaho recently where, they were accusing Hoffman of, uh, Essentially causing the assassination attack on Trump.

You know, it's it's been kind of ugly 

'The White House is for sale' Mega-rich donors race to back Trump - MSNBC - Air Date 6-8-24

STEPHANIE RUHLE - ANCHOR, MSNBC: In the week since Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a New York courtroom, some of the wealthiest Americans have come out to announce their support for him. Steve, I really, really want to talk about this because just in the last week, Donald Trump has this new crop of not even your average Wall Street business guys.

I mean, The top of the top, most successful coming out, throwing parties for him, supporting him. And they're even making arguments that aren't true, right? In the last 24 hours, I've heard some of these guys say, well, when Joe Biden passed that last COVID relief, which, you know, killed us in terms of inflation.

[01:12:00] Unemployment had already completely recovered. Right. That's a lie. It's a lie. And an uninformed voter might not realize that. Right. But I'm talking about the most successful guys in business, are pushing Trump lies on their, in a field that's their own expertise. Why is that? 

STEVE LIESMAN: It's quite extraordinary.

I mean, in the most cynical answer, you say they're protecting their tax cuts, right? The corporate tax cuts are going to be on the table in 2025. If you end up supporting Trump, you're most likely to keep those corporate tax cuts and lower tax brackets, because, by the way, I don't think Trump is going to address the deficit at all, either.

The record shows that Perhaps some of the fiscal spending had a part in the inflation, but it was more about supply shocks. The inability to get stuff into the country. The, uh, reduction in the ability to spend on services. So we all this money to buy patio furniture and barbecues and stuff like that.

All of a sudden that shot up and then we had problems with some of the food distribution and that's come off in a very big weight has been extraordinary progress. On the [01:13:00] inflation rate, but not brought down the inflation level. Um, by the way, don't overstate it a little bit step because Biden has plenty of very, very wealthy supporters in the business community, but you're right to point out how extraordinary it is that some of these folks, especially in tech land, are the ones who are out there saying, I'm going to vote for, for Trump or support Trump.

And to read like, for example, David Sachs, uh, tweet today on the economy is just to be, um, amazed that a guy with that much money, uh, is so ill informed. 

STEPHANIE RUHLE - ANCHOR, MSNBC: But here's the thing. I get that inflation is difficult. These people who are now supporting Donald Trump. Have had extraordinary, extraordinary last years.

I mean, Bill Ackman this week, what was it announced? He's worth 8 billion. Sure. Everything president Biden has done for electric vehicles, a huge win for, for, for Elon Musk yet they're railing against this disastrous economy when it's been a perfect one for them. 

PABLO TORRE: Yeah. I think first off like taxes, let's start with that.

And then get to realizing that for these [01:14:00] guys in Silicon Valley, especially, um, shame feels like a market. Inefficiency, right? Like, yo, wait, hold on. If I don't have to care about the judgments of people who are paying attention to the news, maybe I can do the thing that Donald Trump offers uniquely in my memory of American presidents, which is the ability to dictate actual policy, the ability to get favors.

I feel like this is the other part of the Trump administration that goes underrated because we're talking about the bed of nails that is every single scandal. He is for sale. Yeah. Look at the Adelson family. Look at what, I mean, go down the list of donors and what you get. And so if you're a tech billionaire, CEO, philosopher, king, right, that's what these guys really want to be.

They know better. They may think Trump is an idiot, and I think they do, but they also think they can puppeteer him in ways and they can help run the country. And that is something that Joe Biden does not offer them. 

STEPHANIE RUHLE - ANCHOR, MSNBC: The White House is for sale. Then in some way, is this like recreating Putin's oligarchs, [01:15:00] but here?

TOURE: Oh God, you know, I, I'm listening to you and I'm like, I can't believe we're here again talking about Trump again and again chance that he might win. And it reminds me of something I read that criminologists talk about the reason why jail does not work as a deterrent. Because a lot of people do a stint in prison and they come out and they go, Oh, I can do that.

I have, you know, so now I'm going to go back to the street cause like that wasn't that bad. And it's like, for a lot of people, they're like, we survived Trump. Like it wasn't that bad. Like the COVID does not count on his record for some reason. And they're like, we could do this again. And, and it doesn't make any sense.

Can 

STEVE LIESMAN: I give a footnote to the oligarch story? A lot of those guys ended up exiled and dead. And I don't know that all of the people who are supporting Trump understand the, uh, final end result of kleptocracy. 

Faux Populist Trump Promises Rich Donors He'll Cut Their Taxes at Private Fundraiser A Closer Look - Late Night Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has tried to cast himself as some sort of anti establishment, populist outsider, but this weekend, he held a fundraiser with a bunch of rich Wall Street [01:16:00] donors where he promised to cut their taxes. For more on this, it's time for A Closer Look.

When he first launched his campaign in 2015, one of Trump's big talking points was that he was unlike because he could use his own money to fund his campaign, so he would never owe anyone else any favors. 

DONALD TRUMP: Here's the good news. I'm very rich. I don't need anybody's money. It's nice. I don't need anybody's money.

I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using donors. I don't care. I don't want their money. I don't need their money. I'm turning down millions of dollars for the campaign. Millions. Everybody's offering me money, and I don't want it. So I'm turning down millions of dollars. 

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: I'm sure I've said this before, but really rich guys don't walk around telling people they're really rich.

They say things like, Look Seth, you're not good in sketches. Also, there's no way Donald Trump has ever turned down millions of dollars in his life. If you tied a 5 bill to a Roomba and let it loose in Mar a Lago, it would keep him preoccupied for the [01:17:00] rest of his life. Also, he'd get stuck in a corner. Of course, even back then, it was obvious that Trump's act was all bulls t.

He was a billionaire serving the interests of billionaires who had spent decades immersed in the grimy back rooms of Wall Street and Washington politics. Sadly, the only people who were willing to say that back in 2016 were far left, woke, America haters like this guy. 

TED CRUZ: Donald Trump is not an outsider. He is pretending to be an outsider.

Donald Trump has been supporting the Washington establishment, the Washington corruption. So to all the folks at home who are Donald Trump supporters, who are furious with Washington, I get that. But Donald has been funding and supporting everything you're furious about. Donald is going to cut a deal that favors Wall Street and big business and leaves the working man out in the cold.

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: Whoa, I don't have my glasses on. Is that Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow? Ted Cruz looked so much younger when his conscience [01:18:00] was clean. The second he endorsed Donald Trump, he aged like the picture of Dorian Gray. The point is Donald Trump is a creature of the establishment and always has been. He's a billionaire serving the interests of other billionaires.

After he won in 2016, one of the first things he did as president elect Was make a surprise appearance at a fancy Manhattan restaurant where he promised the wealthy patrons he would cut their taxes. 

NEWS CLIP: President-elect Donald Trump seen here alongside his family at his gilded apartment in Trump Tower last night, ditched the press to head to the Opulent 21 Club restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.

Keep going. 

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you. Thank you. Have a good meal. Thank you. Thank you, sir. President-elect. Thank you. Thank you, sir. We'll get your taxes down. 

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: Oh, look at that down and dirty populist out there shaking hands with the common clay of America, people who eat 100 steaks on a weeknight with cufflinks on. The only way Trump could have been any happier is if he went table to table and took a bite of everyone's meal.

We'll get your taxes down, hopefully to as low as 5%, which, [01:19:00] incidentally, is the same amount of your cheeseburger I'm now gonna eat. Trump's anti establishment schtick was a scam back then. It's even more of a scam now. Over the weekend, Trump rubbed elbows with some of the richest people in the country at a Palm Beach fundraiser, where he took in 50 million of that money he claimed he would never accept.

NEWS CLIP: Billionaires flocked to Florida last night for a glitzy fundraiser to bolster Trump's campaign coffers. Donors were invited to give upwards of 824, 600 per person. Trump's campaign said it raised a whopping 50. 5 million last night alone. Now, no reporters were allowed and Trump didn't take any questions, but he did address the media before heading in.

DONALD TRUMP: People are just wanting change. Rich people want it, poor people want it. Everybody wants change. Our country is really doing poorly. We're a laughingstock all over the world, and we're gonna get that change very quickly. And this has been some, uh, incredible evening before it even starts. 

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: It's been an incredible evening.

Just look at how thrilled Melania [01:20:00] is to be here. I know she looks super bummed, but trust me, that's her in a good mood. What's a 3 out of 10 happy face for most of us is a 9, 9. 5 for Mel here. Show us a smile, Mel.

I was worried that was going to happen. Also, can we go back to this? People are just wanting change. Rich people want it, poor people want it. I love Trump's little shout out to poor people. Like, he knows he's at an elite fundraiser with millionaires and billionaires, so he throws a little sop to the rest of his supporters.

Let's not forget the poor, especially the mouth breathers who come to my rallies. They could be here, but unfortunately the dress code says flip flops and American flag shorts are not allowed. Trump continued to drone on about the fundraiser. 

DONALD TRUMP: The election is going to be in now a little more than six months, and it's going to be the most important, I believe, election we've ever had.

I think it's going to go down as The most important date in the [01:21:00] history of our country, that's November 5th, will be the most important date in the history of our country. 

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: I think he's saying it's the most important date in our history because he doesn't know any other dates in our history. If you asked him what happened on the 4th of July, there's a good chance he'd say, that's when Tom Cruise was born.

And just to give you an idea of how elite this fundraiser was, check out the food they serve. The evening's menu included an endive and frisee salad. Filet a poivre and pavlova with fresh berries for dessert. That menu had so many foreign words, I'm surprised he didn't have it deported. There's also nothing on that menu Donald Trump would ever actually eat.

Or maybe those are secretly his favorite meals and his love of fast food is just a ruse for his supporters. After all, we've never seen him eat fast food. He just takes pictures with it, like some kind of reverse Instagram influencer. 

And just as he did in 2016, Trump once again promised behind closed doors that his real priority was making sure his wealthy donors could keep more of their money. 

NEWS CLIP: The former president made a policy promise to his donors [01:22:00] last night, tax cuts. But what else? Yeah, tax cuts among other things, Allie. It was a big night for the former president.

Off the campaign trail and into a big night of fundraising in Palm Beach, down the street from his Mar a Lago golf course. He did speak with some of the nation's wealthiest donors, around a hundred of them, saying that he's going to extend these tax cuts. 

SETH MEYERS - HOST, LATE NIGHT PODCAST: Of course he did. When he's talking to his supporters at rallies, he's ranting about bull like voter fraud or windmills killing birds or woke libs turning Christmas gay.

But when he's behind closed doors, with his rich buddies, he knows what they really want to hear. What happened to, uh, I don't want their money, I don't need their money? Trump's gonna have to go back and edit some of those old clips to make them more accurate. 

DONALD TRUMP: Everybody's offering me money. I want their money, I need their money.

SECTION C - FUNDING DEMOCRATS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C, with one clip on Funding Democrats.

AIPAC Spending Truckloads Of Money To Replace Katie Porter - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-6-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Other big stories, obviously California, we've talked about that, uh, shift got protested twice. It's a, it's a big loss to both lose Porter and Lee in the house [01:23:00] and to not have them in the primary. Because they need to step down because of California law, but in that Orange County district running to replace Katie Porter, talk about this AIPAC dynamic because AIPAC is going to be the big story in a lot of these primaries.

They dumped like something like four or 5 million into that race. You wrote a piece about 

DAVE WEIGEL: 5 million. Yeah. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Wondering why? I mean, I. I think there is, they, they do stuff to set an example in many respects. And I suspect they chose this one because even though Andy Min didn't necessarily show that he was, uh, Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib about this, they want to like set an example.

We'll come after you. If we even get a whiff that you could potentially be in, in some way, uh, a dissenting view on Israel, but he still won. 

DAVE WEIGEL: He still won. It hasn't been called yet. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Dave Meads, sorry I said Andy. Yeah, Paul. Dave, 

DAVE WEIGEL: oh yeah, I [01:24:00] know who you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, but I was in the district, uh, a week ago, really, with, with Mead and with Joanna Weiss.

And. Min said to me, I, I, I'm not entirely sure why, why he, why they did this. I asked him, what would you say to apac? I said, my first question, why'd you do this? The backstory as I know it is that yes, Minh did not call for a ceasefire. No one did Min's position on the war is basically identical to the Biden position of two weeks ago.

So I would say he's not, he, he might be to. Even talking less about the need for a ceasefire than Biden is right now. But, candidates have questionnaires, they have policy papers and position papers, and AIPAC asked for them, DMFI asked for them, J Street asked for them. My impression is that what Min said about his Israel positions did not check every box for AIPAC, and that worried them.

And that is how, that is how they prefer to operate, is by saying you, you need to, you need to be loyal, on these sets of issues you need to be [01:25:00] completely trustworthy. You're not going to bend on israel to get this kind of pressure So he wasn't out there endorsing bds or anything or you know putting up a leila khaled monument or something he just wasn't as adamant that he was going to support Israel in every decision that the current government made.

And based on that, based on their lack of confidence, they said, well, we have a candidate who is, and they went all in. They also had in that district, uh, Emily's List was supporting Joanna Weiss. So they had a credible Democratic candidate who agreed with them a hundred percent and also had a different story to tell.

Also, Min was, uh, vulnerable on the fact that he got a DUI during the campaign which he was telling me the fact that they spent 5 million mostly on that, on that attack. he thinks maybe inoculated him. He's apologized many, many times for it. He quit drinking after it. Voters have been forgiving of some things, not of others, but his thought was that, yeah, this was crazy that they were doing this, but it might help him.

But the reason AIPAC, etc. targeted him is that he just didn't, he was there on 90 percent of things, not [01:26:00] 100%, and they didn't like that he was. He's also, talking to him, he's a very confident guy. He doesn't genuflect. He might've come off as the sort of person who might, could be independent minded at some point down the line.

And they don't want that. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Okay. Here's the most important part of this though. How many losses does APAC have to have until their ability to raise this kind of money? You know, when you've got a hundred million dollars to drop 5 million in one of these races, because the person's a little bit iffy. You're doing that so that you don't impart so that there are other races in the future that you don't have to drop money into because you are disciplining lawmakers in that way.

But the question becomes when they start losing some of these races where they put five million dollars in, I'm thinking, you know, Summer Lee in the last cycle, but if there are three or four or five or six, you know, six Dave Mins out there. Where they lose their ability to [01:27:00] go back to their funders and say, Hey, we need to do this is going to be diminished because people are going to lose faith in them.

Do you have a sense of what that figure is and you know, where the other big races for AIPAC are going to be? 

DAVE WEIGEL: Well, yeah. And you mentioned Summer Lee. She lost, uh, they lost to her last cycle twice, lost in the primary, lost in the general. And she's still being targeted this year. She's actually, if she backed out of a care event.

In part because of pressure from APAC and from local Jewish leaders Saying that that we were they were worried their congressman wasn't was embracing people who'd said crazy things about october 7th so they When I talked to and you talked to the same same folks when I talked to activists on the other side of this They just assume there will be a cornucopia of money that never stops that there's never going to be a point where APAC, DMFI, etc.

Say You Oh, we're tapped out and we look kind of embarrassed because of this, this one loss this cycle. They're not saying they're going to beat everyone who has called for a ceasefire [01:28:00] taking out one or two members of Congress and Jim Bowman, Jamal Bowman in New York, uh, inquiry Bush in Missouri.

It looked like the most vulnerable for again, external reasons. These are both people who, um, have had. You know, in bonus case, the fire alarm story and Bush's case, you know, spending money on, on, on their family and security. These are stories that have hurt them locally, kind of like what happened with Dave Mint.

So they, they look for the member that is beatable for other reasons. With a credible candidate in the district. They've got that in new york, too They've um, it's it's debatable if they have that with with summerly I don't think that if they're lost if their win record is three for a hundred that's still three people that they took out.

I mean the justice democrat Not to make a i'm not making a one to one comparison obviously, but justice democrats lost most of its races in 2018 but It elected four squad members and it beat Joe Crowley and it beat Mike Capuano. You don't need to have that many shots connect.

And I, so I've not detected and talking to Mark Melman of DMFI and people over in this orbit, they're not [01:29:00] worried. If they, if they put money in a race and lose, that people know, look how much money we can, we can burn on a race without winning. It doesn't mean we're going to stop. You can, you can not stop.

This strategy so yeah, it's a good question. I don't I don't think they are actually looking at their budget and looking at their win loss record Will we notice a win loss record certainly, but if you're a member of congress just in a vacuum Would you prefer to have five million dollars spent against you or not have five million dollars to spend against you prefer to not?

Have it at all and just the threat of it remains really potent Even if they don't win everything 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: on some level losing and then being able to continue to spend is is almost more terrifying than winning in a couple instances

SECTION D - SOLUTIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D: Solutions.

How Citizens United Got Us Trump - Robert Reich - Air Date 12-30-2019

ROBERT REICH - HOST, ROBERT REICH: We're coming to the end of what might be called the anti democracy decade. It began January 21st, 2010, with the Supreme Court's shameful decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics, with the absurd claim that the First Amendment [01:30:00] protects corporate speech.

It ends with with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections. Trump is the consequence, rather than the cause, of the anti democratic surge. By the 2016 election, the richest one hundredth of one percent of Americans 24, 949 extremely wealthy people accounted for a record breaking 40 percent of all campaign contributions.

That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, senate, and house elections with 3. 4 billion of donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only 213 million. That's 16 corporate dollars for every 1. Big corporations and the super wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican Party because Republicans promised them a giant tax [01:31:00] cut if they won.

As Lindsey Graham warned his Republican colleagues, financial contributions will stop if the GOP didn't come through. The political investments paid off big. For instance, groups supported by Charles and the late David Koch and their Koch Industries spent over 20 million promoting Trump's tax cut. which will save them and their heirs between 1 billion and 1.

4 billion every year. And courtesy of the tax cut, the number of companies paying 0 in federal taxes doubled in 2018. Corporate profits are now at an all time high, but almost Nothing has trickled down. Companies have spent most of their extra cash on stock buybacks and dividends. Stock buybacks alone hit a record breaking 1.

1 trillion in 2018. This has given the stock market a sugar high, but left little for workers. Not even a sizzling [01:32:00] economy could match these returns. The anti democracy decade has been hard on American workers. Despite the longest economic expansion in modern history, real wages have barely risen. The share of corporate workers Corporate profits going to workers still isn't back to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis.

Never in the history of economic data have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long. The so called free market has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts, and corporate welfare. No wonder confidence in political institutions has plummeted. In 1964, just 29 percent of voters believed the government was run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.

But by 2013, 79 percent of Americans believed it. Enter Donald Trump. Big business, elite [01:33:00] media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent, Because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. That was what Trump proclaimed in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 2016.

And then he rode the rigging all the way into the Oval Office. It doesn't have to be this way. Even if Citizens United isn't reversed by the Supreme Court or defanged by constitutional amendment, a principled Congress and decent president could still rescue our democracy. House Democrats have already begun with their For the People Act, the first legislation introduced when they gained a majority.

It expands voting rights, stops partisan gerrymandering, strengthens ethics rules, and limits the influence of private donor money by providing 6 of public financing for every [01:34:00] 1 of small donations, up to 200, raised by participating candidates. A new Senate And a new president could make these reforms law.

On the other hand, a second Trump term could make the anti democracy decade a mere prelude to the wholesale destruction of American democracy. Trump himself couldn't care less. As he said in 2016, I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.

And that's a broken system. These might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from The Socialist Program, [01:35:00] CounterSpin, The Brian Lehrer Show, MSNBC, Late Night with Seth Myers, The Majority Report, and Robert Reisch further details are in the show notes. 

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So, coming to from far [01:36:00] outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay! and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

 

Air Date 8/30/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

Israel's assault on Gaza is fueled by pain. Rage. Trauma. A desire for safety. A desire for revenge. The hope for the safe return of hostages. It's a complicated mix of all of the above and more, and it will be different for each person. However, there's also a deep well of denial and delusion about the decades-old status quo between Israel and Palestine that made the current conflict all but inevitable, and the pursuit of genocide by some in the Israeli government, as well as the support of the US and other governments, possible.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include The Intercept, Citations Needed, Zeteo, This Is Hell, Double Down News, and Democracy Now!. After those first clips, I will have some thoughts on the nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, going back to the founding. Mostly though [00:01:00] I'll be sharing insights from an excellent long form piece that thoughtfully and empathetically explains why the project of Zionism can only be undertaken with a heavy dose of denial about the harms caused. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half the show, there'll be more on four topics: Section A. The Uncommitted; Section B. Torture; Section C. Arms Embargo; and Section D. Journalism.

Kamala Harris Mentioned Palestinian Suffering — in the Passive Voice - The Intercept - Air Date 8-26-24

AKELA LACY, THE INTERCEPT: It's been just a little bit over a month since Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee for the party. It's been 10 months since October 7th, and there have been tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza with weapons that the US is continuing to send to Israel.

Just the week before the convention, the US approved [00:02:00] another $20 billion weapons sale to Israel. And ahead of the convention, organizers and protesters were planning demonstrations in Chicago, which is home to the largest Palestinian population in the country. Delegates who pledged to be uncommitted rather than support Harris and her role in the Biden administration's arming of Israel planned to pressure the DNC to let them host events at the convention, but also to have a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage. 

ALI GHARIB, THE INTERCEPT: You wrote a little bit about some of these protests, both inside and out. And with regards to the uncommitted movement, there's the organized campaign for uncommitted delegates who are demanding a change in US Gaza policy before they would commit to any Democratic candidate.

But there are delegates who are committed to support Harris, who also were protesting. And can you tell us just a little bit about the protests that you covered inside where a banner was [00:03:00] unfurled and the kind of assumptions that were made about the uncommitted delegate who actually is an avowed Harris supporter.

AKELA LACY, THE INTERCEPT: So I went into the United Center on Monday night, against my better judgment. But it was good because I was there to capture the moment when a Florida delegate named Nadia Ahmad unfurled a banner that read, "Stop Arming Israel" a few minutes into Biden's speech that night. Ahmad and several other delegates held the banner together. Another Michigan superdelegate named Leanna Sharon and several other folks. And almost immediately I saw other delegates in their section and other people in the section behind them, both stand up to use the We Heart Joe signs that everyone had that night to block the sign, and then to start hitting Nadia and several of the other people who were holding the banner using the signs [00:04:00] to hit the banner itself.

Ahmad is a Harris delegate who has been pushing her for a ceasefire, one of around 200 or so delegates who are pledged to support Harris in November, who are pushing Harris and the Biden administration to secure a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo. 

That demonstration on Monday was notable because Nadia is a Harris delegate. She's not part of the uncommitted movement. And the narrative around a lot of the work that uncommitted has been doing is that they are undermining Democrats' chances of beating Trump in November by withholding their support for Harris. And that is the primary source of the opposition to the Biden administration's policy towards Israel. When the reality is that many of these calls are coming from within the party, from folks who are committed to helping Democrats win the White House, and that the [00:05:00] position against the current administration's policy towards Israel is the position of a majority of Democratic voters. 

ALI GHARIB, THE INTERCEPT: The kind of backdrop for all of this is that progressives have really come under attack from groups like AIPAC. You've done a ton of reporting about this. AIPAC has become the biggest player in Democratic primaries. And they actually took down a couple of incumbent Democrats, Cory Bush and Jamal Bowman in the House. And it's become this real rift within the Democratic party, which was reflected in the tensions around the convention, the protesters outside.

So it was even part of the rift between members of the Squad, which is the progressive group of members of Congress that Bowman and Bush were both part of. And your reporting this week touched on that. You contributed some reporting to a story by Aida Chavez, where you recorded Ilhan Omar making a remark about what was before Kamala Harris's speech, one of the only mentions of Gaza from the main stage, [00:06:00] which was by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but it was very much in the frame of cheerleading Kamala Harris's role in dealing with the Gaza crisis. Can you talk a little bit about what AOC said, and what you reported on Ilhan Omar, the progressive representative from Minnesota, saying about effectively about her remarks. I mean, it was a little bit veiled because she was addressing the Biden administration, but she actually quoted AOC directly.

AKELA LACY, THE INTERCEPT: Sure. So in Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday, she said that Harris had been working, quote, "tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza." 

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.

AKELA LACY, THE INTERCEPT: During a press conference the next day with uncommitted folks and Rep. Bush, Rep. Omar spoke about how she has been watching her colleagues in the Biden administration for the last [00:07:00] 10 months sweeping aside what the US has been doing to allow Israel to continue executing civilians in Gaza, and she said that "working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire" doesn't really mean anything when we're continuing to supply weapons to Israel. 

REP. ILHAN OMAR: It's been unconscionable for me in the last 10 months to witness my colleagues in this administration refusing to recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza. To not see the mothers with lost, helpless children, the babies whose dead bodies are being dug out. I do not understand that "working tirelessly for a ceasefire" is really not a thing and they should be ashamed of themselves. 

AKELA LACY, THE INTERCEPT: That was the [00:08:00] exact phrase that Ocasio-Cortez used on Monday. I don't know that Omar herself would characterize it as a direct attack on her, but that's certainly how many observers read it. We reported on that. And this has been part of the analysis of the evolving role in the Squad, both in Congress and in Democratic politics writ large. What, if any power they have been able to build, given that two of their members have been knocked out, that other progressives have been knocked out by the pro-Israel lobby in previous cycles, and what the strategy will look like as they wrestle with those attacks and those losses. There are people who say that AOC is the example of what progressive should be doing: building power within the administration, creating a space to be on the main stage at the DNC, just after several years after first being elected to Congress as this very much this progressive upstart who [00:09:00] was antagonizing, in a positive way, the administration to acknowledge what progressives wanted to see.

And the criticism from folks who don't necessarily see that strategy as being an effective one is that what is all of that worth if, when you do get that opportunity beyond the main stage, you conceal and hold water for what the administration is allowing to happen in Gaza.

Substance vs Vibes in VP Kamala Harris' Gaza PR Reboot - Citations Needed - Air Date 8-2-24

NIMA SHIRAZI - COHOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: The White House, as we've talked about on this show, since the Michigan primary, rather in anticipation and immediately after the Michigan primary, when the uncommitted movement was gaining steam, switched the definition of ceasefire to mean something completely different than what activists, what Oxfam, what Amnesty International, what UN agencies and the hundreds of ex-Biden alum and Nobel laureates who signed petitions calling for a ceasefire. They completely switched the definition of ceasefire to mean something else. And the question became -- and this bought them time, I wrote for my SubStack, this was a very successful PR effort. It took a lot of the heat off in conjunction with college campuses shutting [00:10:00] down for the summer and police crackdowns -- but this really helped contribute to a vibe shift away from blaming Biden because they could point to these nebulous ceasefire negotiations.

So what does that mean? I'll do a quick, brief recap of what that means. So in October, November, December, calls for a ceasefire had a very clear historical precedent based on previous conflicts. 2008, 2009, Cast Lead, 2014, Protective Edge, 2018, 2021. There was a precedent for what ceasefire meant, which means the US uses its dispositive leverage to compel Israel to stop bombing and invading Gaza, and then Hamas will stop as well. Typically, Hamas is the one that wants a ceasefire since they are a sub state actor. And they don't have an air force, so they benefit far more from that. And Israel, of course, has these bunker busters, these 2000 pound bombs, F-35s, F-16s, F-22s.

So there's a historical precedent for what that means. Everybody knows what it means. Everybody, at least for the first few months, didn't act like they didn't know what it meant.

But then when the uncommitted movement picked up [00:11:00] steam in February and March, and this is after the White House issued a memo in October 20th, rather the State Department issued a memo on October 20th, preventing all State Department employees, White House employees from using the word "ceasefire." So they initially rejected it because they knew what it meant, right? It had a very specific contextual meaning. In the context of Gaza, everybody knew what it meant. 

But then they realized they were getting hammered on this issue. This was right before the college campus protests really caught fire, but there were protests every day. And there was of course the uncommitted movement, which was leading to some embarrassing headlines, and delegitimizing the Biden 2024 run. So then they decided to do, again, if you paid me $700,000 and I worked for the White House and I had a soul lobotomy, this is what I would have suggested, which is to just say you're supporting a ceasefire, but just change the definition of ceasefire, right? This is kind of PR 101. Which is exactly what they did. Now it means temporary pause. It doesn't mean that actual cessation of killing people. It's just a temporary pause. 

ADAM JOHNSON - COHOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Well, it's a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges, immediately followed [00:12:00] by a firm commitment by Israel to continue the destruction of Gaza for quote unquote, "years if necessary."

And so people say, well, they wanted a temporary pause because it could lead to a longer. But that's actually not true. In fact, the second, then of course, on May 31st, Biden gave his deeply cynical speech where he calls for a quote unquote, "end to the war" that gave people some brief hope, until it was followed up by Matt Miller and others at the State Department who clarified that no, they support Israel's goal of quote unquote, "eliminating Hamas," a goal that is not possible by definition, even according to Tony Blinken, who told Netanyahu that behind closed doors in January, according to NBC's Andrea Mitchell. 

So they have a pretextual, and by definition, unachievable goal of eliminating basically an ideology or pretty much anyone with a gun fighting back, which, good luck with that. We saw how that worked out for the US in Afghanistan. And that is, of course, not really their goal. Their goal is to displace, to force emigration out of Gaza, to kill, to make life a living hell, as part of a very open policy of collective punishment. And so they want this to go on for as long as it needs to go [00:13:00] on.

Former Israeli Spy Chief- If I Was A Palestinian, I Would Fight Against Israel’s Occupation - Zeteo - Air Date 8-19-24

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Early in the war, you co-authored a piece for foreign affairs titled "Why Netanyahu Must Go". As the former head of Israel's security service, what made you want to make such a provocative intervention so early on? 

AMI AYALON: Well, when it comes to Netanyahu, I'm saying it for the last more than 18 months: since he created this very extreme right-wing coalition and he let Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, to lead Israeli policy. So, it's not new. I didn't say it only after the 7th of October. I think that, first of all, he himself, he's, in a conflict of interest. He's on trial and, the way it seems to me, he prefer his own future [over] the future of the state of Israel. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Just on Netanyahu and Hamas, pre-October the 7th, do you believe Netanyahu was deliberately propping up Hamas in Gaza as a [00:14:00] way of dividing Palestinians and preventing a two state solution?

AMI AYALON: Well, his policy, and he didn't hide it, he's totally against a reality in which there is a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He said it. His policy, the way he explained it, is divide and control to make sure that Palestinians will not have a unified government. And the only way to do it is to do everything in order to maintain Hamas in power. Even, if it was necessary to approve sending more than probably 1. 5 billion dollars from Qatar and every time when security leaders, military, and the Shin Bet came to him and told him, Look, Hamas, will not control his violence. And the moment that he believes that he can launch a war or a battle, he will do it.

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Yes. 

AMI AYALON: So he did not approve it. So, uh, [00:15:00] it's not a secret. Yes, this was his formal policy. He did everything in order to increase the power of Hamas and to make sure that, Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority will not be able to create a unified government. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: So, isn't the problem, Ami Ayalon, that even if Benjamin Netanyahu were to listen to you and quit and resign in shame, the problem goes way beyond Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. According to Gallup, 65 percent of Israeli adults are currently against a two state solution. So, Netanyahu disappears tomorrow, Israeli society has still moved over the last decade or two since you started campaigning for a two state solution way to the right. What do you do in a society like that when your fellow Israelis are not interested in the kind of deal you're pitching, they don't agree with you?

AMI AYALON: I present a political horizon. I can give you... the most important example during the... if you would ask Israelis during the first intifada, whether [00:16:00] they agree to negotiate with Palestinians, we would tell you that you are crazy, a lunatic, or whatever, because we hated them and we were sure that they will do everything in order to destroy Israel and we did not understand why they are doing it. But this is history. The moment that a new horizon and Oslo process was presented, it was a dramatic change in the Israeli street and among Palestinians. 

So, I believe in presenting new ideas. I see that Israelis and Palestinians, today, we hate each other. We are confused. We are humiliated. Both sides and, nothing good will come from Israeli leadership and Palestinian leadership. Most Israelis believe that all Palestinians are Hamas, and most Palestinians believe that all Israelis are Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu. And it is all totally wrong. Seventy five—by the way, you, you said something about [00:17:00] polls—seventy five percent of the Israelis, —and the question is, how do you present the question?—seventy five percent of Israelis will agree to stop the war and to create what we call the a regional coalition that will face Iran. We understand that the condition, in order to ignite this process, will present a future policy for a Palestinian state but we support it on the condition that all our hostages will be back and this coalition will be created with the support of America, of course, the [inaudible], the Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Okay. 

AMI AYALON: So, polls are very, very tricky.

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Fair enough. You mentioned Iran. Last week, Israel not only killed the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, while he was in Iran, but they also killed the top Hezbollah commander in Beirut. As the former head of the Israeli Security Service, as a [00:18:00] former Israeli Navy chief, tell me, in your view, Ami Ayalon, have those actions made Israel safer?

AMI AYALON: They are not making Israel safer. In certain cases, and I was in the Israeli Shin Bet and what we call targeted killing was based on a condition in which we know that a terrorist is going to attack, many Israelis will die, and there is no other option to stop him. We cannot arrest him. We don't have the operational capability to do it. Today, of course, Israel is taking a totally different type of policy. I think that too many Israelis and too many politicians believe that by killing leaders, you know, uh, the ideology will be evaporated. It's nonsense. Yes, you said something very, very true, by killing the leader, in our case, ideology even will be deeper rooted [00:19:00] within the Palestinian and Arab society. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: So, it's made Israel less safe from what you're saying. 

AMI AYALON: I think that it is a mistake. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: Has it made Israel less safe, those killings? 

AMI AYALON: Right, exactly. Exactly. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, ZETEO: So let me ask you this... 

AMI AYALON: And the only way to do it is to create this coalition and to present a different political horizon and there is a huge opportunity ahead of us on that note After the 7th of October, it is not a conflict only between Israelis and Palestinians. It is a conflict, a regional conflict, shaking the stability in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and with a global impact.

Torture Is Systemic in Israel's Prisons / Shai Parnes - This Is Hell! - Air Date 8-21-22

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: Welcome to Hell also states the logic of the base of the incarceration project is the same followed by the Israeli apartheid regime elsewhere. The differentiation between Palestinian prisoners from Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, and the varying laws and practices applied to them interchangeably, demonstrate how the Israeli regime tears apart and reconstructs the Palestinian [00:20:00] collective to fit its needs. Shai, what are the needs of the Israeli regime? If Palestinians are not allowed to democratically choose their government, what will whoever controls Palestinian lives in Gaza and the West Bank look like? What are the needs of Israel and Gaza? 

SHAI PARNES: It's not the needs, it's what Israel believes or wants to believe are their needs. And again, it's been true for decades, Israel wants as much territory as possible with as less, uh, Palestinians as possible. And the means, the tools are changeable. Sometimes it's war, and sometimes it's incarceration, and sometimes it's taking their lands. But the framework, the policy, the goal, the Israel regime and all governments is [00:21:00] practically the same goal: to take as much land and with as few as possible Palestinians living in it.

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: The report states that the testimonies reveal the policy implemented in these facilities since the declaration of a prison state of emergency and the pursuant enactment of a temporary order in keeping with the stated agenda of Minister Ben-Gvir. They indicate that this policy, which entails violation of the basic human rights, is targeted at members of a specific ethnic national group, Palestinians. As part of this new policy, Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are stripped of the basic package of rights to which they are entitled under Israeli and international law, as well as other universal rights. Was their debate over implementing the temporary order and... Shai, to what degree do you think the likelihood is that this temporary order will in fact be temporary?

SHAI PARNES: We [00:22:00] do have kind of a semi-joke, but, you know, as jokes are, that in the Middle East the temporary is the most certain thing. There was not any debate about this legal framework because it was the first days after October 7th and that's what I've said before. Ben-Gvir and the rest of this government took advantage, cynically, of what the public, the Israeli public really felt, and they did that to act out their own sadistic and racist agenda. What was worrying [was] that the entire system, the Israeli prison system or the entire legal system, [00:23:00] sometimes cooperate [with] and sometimes crumbled to this agenda and procedures. 

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: Just a few more questions for you. The report states that the High Court of Justice has thereby green-lighted the denial of Palestinians prisoners' basic rights. Meanwhile, judicial or administrative review of the arrests themselves has been suspended de facto for weeks or even months. The court's abstention from intervening in this matter too and the fact that it has knowingly allowed prisoners to be almost completely isolated, underscores the court's rule in lending the gross violation of prisoners' human rights a facade of legality. How long do you think they can keep that facade of legality up, Shai? 

SHAI PARNES: I don't know, because it depends [on] who's the observer. If you followed the ICC warrants requests, and if you followed the ICJ, they [00:24:00] already indicate that the Israeli Supreme Court or the legal system is just a whitewash mechanism. We at B'Tselem say that for many years now, the entire legal system or investigation system—and it doesn't even matter if that's the military police, Attorney General, or with the Supreme Court—they're all in power, part of different branches of the aparthheid regime and used as a whitewash mechanism. And for the last month, it's not just B'Tselem saying and reporting and publishing reports about that. It's the most respected legal tribunals in the world. It's the ICC and the ICJ. So, uh, it's very hard to [00:25:00] see it differently as long as your eyes are open. 

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: Israel is not only violating international humanitarian law, it's violating its own laws, as your report points out. What happens to any state when it not only violates global legal norms, but their own legal norms? What happens when a government decides to pick and choose which legal obligations to fulfill and which to ignore? What kind of government, to you, would that define? 

SHAI PARNES: Uh, I have to say again that it's not a new practice. Let's take what they called the illegal outposts versus the settlements. They're all illegal under the international law. But the Israeli governments—and again, not just the current real extreme government, but also the previous ones—say, Yeah, there is a problem with the illegal outposts. [00:26:00] Okay, but if you tour in the West Bank, you see that these outposts are defended by the military, getting electricity and water from the Israeli infrastructure systems. So, don't tell me they are illegal if you're building them. It was always the case, what's going on with the current government, I would say, as it's nothing hidden anymore. We don't play the game anymore that Israel used to do, like Saudi negotiating with the Palestinians and keep expanding the Palestinians. That is the real change. It's not hidden anymore. 

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: Has the Israeli system made Palestinian lives, and lifestyles, cultures, and traditions, crimes? Is the intended goal to make Gaza a place where the people do [00:27:00] not have a representative government? In Gaza, has Israel made democracy a punishable, detainable, torturable offense? Has Israel made Palestinian culture and Palestinian democracy, a crime? 

SHAI PARNES: As you've seen in the report, you can conclude that the only "crime" is detainees [being] charged of being a Palestinian. 

CHUCK MERTZ - HOST, THIS IS HELL!: Do you think that the goal of Ben-Gvir is to provoke Palestinians, even his policies prior to October 7th, into doing something? And if so, what are people like Ben-Gvir trying to provoke Palestinians into doing by employing strategies meant to humiliate torment and dehumanize Palestinians? 

SHAI PARNES: As I just said a couple of minutes ago, what's, I would say, good [00:28:00] about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and this government: you don't have to guess. They just say out loud [that] they want to resell the Gaza Strip, they want to make changes to Al Haram Ash Sharif / Har Habayit status quo, they want to annex the West Bank, they're not hiding it. They say it on their own, and in the Israeli press and also outside. One [doesn't] have to speculate anymore.

EXPOSED- Netanyahu's Plan to Set World on Fire - Double Down News - Air Date 8-23-24

DAVID HEARST: A war against Hezbollah is regarded as a matter of when, not if. If Israel has failed in its primary objective to dismantle Hamas after 10 months of unleashing more bombs on Gaza than the Allies dropped on Dresden and Hamburg in the Second World War, how on earth does it think it will unseat or push Hezbollah back? Hezbollah is much better armed than Hamas, with very [00:29:00] accurate missiles that can sneak under The Iron Dome system. So the whole of Israel is vulnerable to a regional war on five fronts.

This is fundamentally against all Western interests, particularly after a series of defeats for Western policy in Iraq, in Yemen, in Syria, in Libya. American foreign policy has basically labored under a huge self-imposed burden: They have been trying to persuade Netanyahu to stop the war, but they provided no incentive for Netanyahu to stop the war.

And it still remains a bipartisan policy of whatever happens in the Middle East, however badly Israel has behaved, we are going to support Israel. Which not even Ronald Reagan or H. W. Bush, the two Republican presidents, allowed themselves to work under. 

If you remember, Reagan stopped Yitzhak [00:30:00] Shamir from bombing West Beirut in 1982. Because the scenes of the nightly bombing were so grim on CNN that Reagan, as the sort of consummate television frontman, said, No, I don't want it. Stop it. And he stopped it. He stopped the shelling within 20 minutes. H. W. Bush threatened to cut aid off for every settlement that was announced. 

So now you've got a president in Joe Biden, who is an instinctive Zionist, a generational Zionist, who has given far more leeway to Israel, committing far more barbaric crimes over a much longer period of time and just giving it the green light for Biden now to say, stop, stop, stop is also an incredibly weak position because he could have said everything he's saying 10 months ago. Nothing has been achieved except the deaths of 40,000 Palestinians, 100,000 wounded. And even that could be a huge underestimate. [00:31:00] And it is in US policy's interest to deconflict the Middle East, their interest is in withdrawal to confront China in the China Sea. So all of this is absolutely against America's interest, and yet its default position is we've got to protect Israel. Israel has to have the arms it needs. So it is fighting against its own policy. There's no coherence in American foreign policy. 

The one obstacle to the deal is not the Israeli negotiators, not the Israeli deep state, not even the Israeli army. It's Netanyahu himself, because he fears his government could break up. As soon as the war ends, this king risks being deposed. 

After 10 long months, we've had some quite threatening and key statements from Netanyahu's point of view. The first was his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, saying that Israel could not achieve its objectives militarily. That's his own defense minister.

And now you've got Biden himself and the US saying Hamas can't be defeated militarily. Its tunnel network was much more [00:32:00] extensive than they thought. The only way of getting the remaining 115 live hostages out is through negotiation. And he doesn't have any trophies for this war. 

Mohamed Dief is still alive, according to top Hamas officials. He's directly responsible for the October 7th attack. And he hasn't killed Yahya Sinwar, who is now the new leader of Hamas. Gaza and Hamas and the resistance movement are very, very much alive, and still capable of firing missiles at Tel Aviv after 10 months. 

The one senior figure in Hamas that Israel has killed is Ismail Haniyeh. Ismail Haniyeh wasn't hiding in any tunnel. He was openly operating in Tehran as a spokesman and as a diplomat for Hamas. And it was the clearest indication that Israel was not interested in real peace talks and negotiations by basically killing the chief negotiator. And they didn't just kill Haniyeh. Before that, they had killed 60 members of his family, his sons and grandsons. [00:33:00] That act basically tore up negotiations and any thought of returning the hostages alive. Because one of the big, big tensions in Israel is that, incredulously, Netanyahu's policy on the hostages was that it is only because of our military pressure that Hamas will surrender the hostages. It's exactly the opposite way around. The main killer of hostages by far has been the Israeli army bombing itself. Even three hostages which were trying to surrender got gunned down by Israeli soldiers. 

But the only way of getting the remaining hostages back is through peace and through negotiations with Hamas.

It basically demonstrates the total folly, stupidity of Netanyahu's thinking, which is all about tactical strikes. It's not about the day after. Firstly, you can't decapitate an organization like Hamas or Hezbollah. So every time you kill one person, two or three people will step up. It's a proven system that [00:34:00] keeps the organization funding. If you take out the leader, you do not take out the organization. So that's mistake number one. 

Mistake number two, it is an open provocation and an escalation, and they know that. So, Israel escalates and then the rest of the world says, Oh, no, no, no, no. Don't reply to it. The chief of staff of Hassan Nasrallah was also killed in a related attack. Iran and Hezbollah have both said they will avenge the deaths. I think Iran has got Israel over a barrel because it has vowed revenge. Israel doesn't know where that wave of missiles is going to come from. Is it going to come from all five fronts simultaneously? And you've got this enormous pressure on Netanyahu himself now from a Western alliance that backed him, but now has basically had enough and wants the whole thing to come to an end tomorrow.

And also, most importantly, one of the war aims was to push Palestinians into the sea. If the war has been won by anyone, it's been won by the people of Gaza, not Hamas, but the people of Gaza, saying, [00:35:00] yeah, we're going to die here, rather than repeat the mistakes of 1948 or 1967. 

Netanyahu had a plan to thin out the population of Gaza and tasked his right hand man, Ron Dermer, with a plan for executing that. And it's clear from the bombing and from the pattern of strikes that the target wasn't Hamas, it was all the people of Gaza. And that was a fundamental strategic error. And it made the war an existential war for all Palestinians everywhere, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank too.

Israel has really damaged itself in this war. It's under huge pressure now, basically just to wave the white flag. 

Well, I would argue that Netanyahu isn't just a threat to the region, but he's a threat to Israel itself. Before this war, Israel had and has total dominance between the river and the sea. But Netanyahu wanted it all. This is the classic mistake of all colonial powers. Napoleon made [00:36:00] it, Hitler made it as well. Both thought that they could crown their military dominance of Western Europe by attacking Russia. And this is a classic case of colonial imperial overreach. 

The clearest historical precedent to what he is doing in Israel is Algeria under French colonial rule. They were the dominant power, the Colon, and they went too far. So in trying to seize all, France lost Algeria in its entirety, and this could be the position of Netanyahu in Israel today. 

Another example is South Africa, before the apartheid regime made its peace with the African National Congress and realized that they had to fundamentally undo everything they were trying to do. They were busy setting fire to the whole region.

Rami Khouri on Latest Israel-Hezbollah Escalation & Stalled Ceasefire Talks - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-26-24

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this escalation of violence. I mean, we haven’t seen anything like this on the northern [00:37:00] border between Israel and Lebanon in many months.

RAMI KHOURI: It’s an escalation of aggression by Israel and resistance by Hezbollah. And the mutual attacks back and forth have been going on for probably the last 16, 18 years, since the 2006 war between them. But this is significant for several reasons. First, it’s a much higher level of attack in the number of fighter jets from the Israeli side, and sites attacked and the number of rockets and drones sent by Hezbollah. Both sides are claiming things that we can’t verify, so we just have to wait a little bit, a couple days more, for the actual factual evidence to come out.

But what’s significant from the Hezbollah side is that they used Katyusha rockets mostly, which are old-fashioned, [00:38:00] limited-capability rockets, not very good in terms of hitting — being aimed, etc. And then they used some drones. And their focus was to detract the defense system in Israel, the air defense system, with the rockets, and then get the drones in to attack some military sites. They’re clearly targeting military sites. And the Israelis say everything is fine. Hezbollah says they hit some of their targets, but they’re assessing the situation now. 

But the more sophisticated weapons that Hezbollah has, with much better guidance systems, much more accurate and can evade the Israeli defense systems, haven’t been used yet. So, this is a sign from Hezbollah that they’re going to attack, to avenge the killing of their commander in Beirut about a month ago, and [00:39:00] they are going to do it with increasingly sophisticated weapons system down the road.

Their aim is to do psychological warfare, as well as actual damage. They want the whole country to remain on edge. They want the army to be preoccupied in the north. They want the 70,000, 80,000 civilians who were evacuated from north Israel to remain evacuated and annoyed and angry, disruption to businesses, to tourism, to all kinds of investments, and to keep the military guessing what’s going to come next. So, this is an escalation of a pattern that’s been really the norm for many, many years.

And both sides, remarkably, but expectedly, said earlier today that they have finished this phase, and therefore, they’re not going to continue large-scale attacks today or tomorrow, it seems, that [00:40:00] they’ve done what they did. And this is the pattern that one side does something, the other does something of equal magnitude.

And it’s going to go on until two things happen: The Israelis get out of Gaza, and Palestinians can rebuild their lives there, and, second of all, some signs of action or movement towards resolving the overall Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflict, some signs of that materialize, because, until then, this is going to continue. There will continue to be this antagonism by the Hezbollah and Lebanese and Syrians and Palestinians and others and Yemenis towards Israel for what it’s done in Palestine. And this has to be resolved politically. It can’t be resolved militarily.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Israeli army spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, speaking Sunday.

HASSAN NASRALLAH: [translated] We look around the state of Israel all the time, also at [00:41:00] Yemen, also at Iran. I remind you that Hezbollah is an extension of the Iranians. They are financed, armed, targeted by the Iranians. And I am convinced that this widespread shooting is also directed by Iran, also under Iranian responsibility. And we will attack and remove threats wherever necessary.

AMY GOODMAN: You can respond, Rami Khouri. 

RAMI KHOURI: This is a typical Israeli Zionist propaganda message that has been going on for years and years. They will always — and with the U.S. close behind them, following their lead -- they’ll always find some threat in the Middle East. Before, it used to be Saddam Hussein. It was al-Qaeda. It was the Russians. It was the PLO. Now it’s Iran is behind everything bad. And they will focus a lot of attention on addressing that issue, trying to evade the central reality that the Palestine-Israel conflict, the conflict between Zionism and [00:42:00] Arabism in Palestine, which has been going on for a hundred years, that’s the real core of the problem. So, these are evasive tactics, diversionary tactics.

Iran is a very close ally of Hezbollah. They’re deeply involved in increasing its technical and military capabilities, as they are with Hamas and the Ansar Allah in Yemen, the Houthis. But to say that Iran directs them and tells them what to do, I believe, is a bit of a stretch. 

So, it’s like the relationship between Israel and the United States. They’re very close in armaments and strategy, and the US now is actively, almost enthusiastically, supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But Israel does what it feels it needs to do, and the US doesn’t seem to be able or willing to stop it. And I think we have a similar relationship between [00:43:00] Hezbollah and Iran. They’re very close, but Iran doesn’t command, direct Hezbollah in telling it what to do. 

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about what’s happening right now, this whole — the Gaza ceasefire negotiations? Hamas sent representatives to Cairo. Israel had their delegation. Egypt and Qatar are involved. But it looks like they broke down once again, though they say they’re continuing. 

RAMI KHOURI: Well, they had reached an agreement in early July, when Biden announced his so-called plan for a ceasefire. And Hamas accepted it. Biden said this came from the Israelis. And then, when Hamas accepted it, the Israelis, Netanyahu came back and added more conditions. And this has been the pattern ever since. And whenever Hamas accepts it, they add more conditions, suggesting that Netanyahu doesn’t really want a ceasefire. He wants to just keep negotiating.

And I think it’s [00:44:00] pretty clear now that the ceasefire negotiations today are the equivalent of the so-called peace process in the bigger Arab-Israeli conflict over the last 40 years, which also was under US management or direction. And the ceasefire talks seem to be, in the eyes of most analysts and observers in the Middle East, seem to be a mechanism just to delay anything serious from happening, to allow Israel to continue with its genocidal killing of — the figures, the official figures, are over 40,000. Most people say it’s closer to 150,000 dead, but we’ll find that out in the future. 

So, the ceasefire talks are a fictitious political dynamic. And the reason they’re fictitious is because the United States is trying to be the main driver of the peace process, to the point where Biden announced [00:45:00] an agreement back in early July, but the US is also the main funder, arms supplier and political cover provider, diplomatic protector of Israel in the U.N. and other places. So, you can’t have the one party that is the major force for letting the genocide happen, technically and politically, and at the same time claim to be a mediator that’s trying to mediate between Israel and Hamas. This is the kind of fiction and fantasy that comes out of the State Department and the White House, and most of the world just watches this on TV, thinking, “Oh, something might happen.”

The important point is the Hamas — and you see it in Hezbollah — is that they have taken a much harder position. They say, “We accepted the ceasefire that Biden provided, that came from Israel. What more do you want from us? We are ready to [00:46:00] stop the fighting, exchange prisoners and hostages,” etc., etc. But they have certain hardcore demands. And what’s obvious now is that both Hezbollah and Hamas refuse to play the game that all the Arab governments, and Fatah under Arafat and now under Abu Mazen, the Palestinian leadership, played for so many years, which is to make concession after concession after concession, rely on Western or other international intervention, and then expect something to happen.

We’ve realized — everybody in the Arab region has realized that this is not a serious process. This is the latest manifestation of a colonial process managed by white, Northern, racist, militant groups, countries — it used to be England, now it’s the United States — that keeps playing games with the people of the region for [00:47:00] the benefits of either the Western powers or, today, for Israel. 

Note from the Editor on the deep denial at the heart of Zionism

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Intercept, analyzing the Democrats approach to addressing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Citations Needed looked into the rhetoric of a ceasefire. Mehdi Hassan on Zedio talked with a former Israeli spy chief who spoke with clarity about the disaster of Israeli policy against Palestinians. This is Hell discussed the systematic abuse and brutality in Israel's prisons. Double Down News discussed Israel's expansion of the conflict to Hezbollah. And Democracy Now! also looked at the dynamics and rhetoric of the expanding conflict. 

And those were just the top takes, theres a a lot more in the deeper dive section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process.

To support our work and get all those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to [00:48:00] support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support—there's a link in the show notes. —through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the deeper dives half of the show, we're I want to share a bit of a really good long form piece from New York Magazine titled My Father and the Withering of Liberal Zionism. So, the writer's father was part of the early days of settling Israel for Jewish people in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. he was part of the kibbutz movement based on what is generally described as secular socialism. So, like a hippie commune movement, if hippies had to fight battles with the native peoples in order to occupy the land. And if the idea of lefty hippies having to fight battles to take over a land feels like a bit of a [00:49:00] contradiction in political terms, that's exactly the right conflict to zero in on. 

From the article, quote: 

But this dream of a leftist version of Zionism, the dream my father nurtured for his entire life, cannot exist without denial of the crimes and atrocities committed both during the founding of the state and after. My father's fantasy of his war years and of the years on kibbutz is one all but devoid of Arabs. In his letters, he writes little of the Palestinians who were displaced, and only then with a casual racism that jars me, referring to them derisively as "Abdullah." He does not acknowledge that "the rocky spot south of Haifa" where he and the members of his garin learned how to farm was Kabara, once a Palestinian village of over 117 homes. He makes no mention of the village of Al-Zraiye, 2. 2 kilometers from Kissufim: 4,790 people [00:50:00] driven from their homes in 1948. 

 Don't mean to single my father out in this. Israeli society as a whole has conspired to eradicate the memory of the more than 500 Palestinian villages depopulated and destroyed in 1948, the three quarters of a million people expelled, despite attempts by some Jewish Israeli historians starting in the late 1980s to more accurately rewrite the narrative of the Nakba. This denial continues to this day. 

And then the article makes the connection from the past to the present, describing the media blackout that helps preserve this ignorance. It says, quote: 

Very few Israeli Jews even talk about what is happening in Gaza. When I asked why, I was told again and again that the Israeli media do not cover events on the ground. The public does not see images or hear stories of dead Palestinian children or devastated communities. Al Jazeera, the only network to reliably report on the horrors ongoing in Gaza, was recently banned in Israel. Yet we live in [00:51:00] an interconnected world; we live online. Though it's true that our social media and news silos can isolate us from the views and opinions of others, it's hard to imagine that anything but a concerted effort could keep a person from knowing the toll the war has taken on Palestinian civilians.

This carefully nurtured ignorance reminds me of my father and his stories about kibbutz life in the 1940s, which never included raids across the border into Gaza, the driving out of villages full of people, the murder of civilians. It reminds me of another saying we learned in Hebrew school: "A land without a people for a people without a land."

And this is what I really appreciate about this piece, connecting the dots between the past and the present that show how the pattern of denial runs like a straight line from the founding of Israel to the present. But, on top of the carefully nurtured ignorance, as the writer puts it, it's also important to recognize the dehumanizing propaganda that compounds the issue. For many, it is simple ignorance of the [00:52:00] destructive nature of the history of Israel, but for others, it's clear that incontrovertible evidence of atrocities would not be enough because they would always be able to simply fall back on the denial of the full humanity of Palestinian victims. Or, in the most extreme cases, they'll deny the existence of Palestinians as a people altogether. 

But there's more denial to be had. The article tells the story from the father's perspective of claiming that Arab militants in the 1940s were cowards, easily defeated. It's made blatantly clear in the article that this was a bald faced lie, but it's possible that myth of Arab cowardice influenced the thinking that led to the propping up of Hamas by Netanyahu as a political strategy.

So back to the article, it says, quote: 

"It was an enormous fuckup," Yosi says of Netanyahu's attempts to prop up Hamas, believing the group had lost the will to fight and could be isolated from the broader Palestinian [00:53:00] cause. "We were completely betrayed." 

 Only a country in deep denial could believe the Palestinians and Gaza would live in perpetually abject, but passive misery. It is a denial so ingrained that Jewish Israelis extend it even to Palestinians who live outside the occupation in Israel proper. 

Now, before I get to the closing section, it's important to strive for an understanding of where these layers upon layers of denial come from. Maybe not to excuse, but to understand. This next quote is about the aftermath of October 7th, but it could just as easily be about the aftermath of the Holocaust. In short, hurt people, hurt people. And here's why. Quote: 

Roni Aboulafia, a filmmaker and peace activist who believes a negotiated two state solution is the only way forward, has a compassionate explanation for why even liberals who consider themselves humanists in Israel are not [00:54:00] focused on the suffering of the people of Gaza. "We are all living through trauma," she said. "Every day brings new stories of the horrors that survivors went through and are still going through. The hostage situation is a very, very painful open wound." She added, "We are in a collective state of processing that limits our capacity to absorb Gazan pain and accept our accountability for it."

Just as there's a difference between explaining and excusing, it's then perfectly possible to have compassion without acting as an accomplice or enabler of destructive reactions. 

The events of October 7th were obviously traumatizing—they were intended to be—but that doesn't mean that any response by the victims becomes justified. Nor does it mean that allies of that victimized country then must support whatever retaliatory action is taken. In fact, it's the best friends who hold their friends back from their worst instincts in their darkest moments. [00:55:00] It's a poor friend who says, "Oh, you want revenge? Great, I'll get you some weapons and drive the getaway car." 

Now, I have one last excerpt for you and I know it's been a lot already, but there's so much more that's worth reading if you have the time. The last segment discusses the idea of sobering up, something many supporters of Israel have claimed to have done since last October. But, with just a little bit of clarity, it becomes obvious that sobering up from the defensive Israeli perspective is to dig deeper into a psychologically protective cocoon of denial and delusion. 

The writer starts the section by telling a story of an Arab woman living in Hafe on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in Israel. She grew up going to Israeli school and struggles with her identity and existence within a society that does not openly welcome her. And she concludes with this comment. Quote: 

"I don't want to be in partnership. I don't want to be in a place where I always have to convince the [00:56:00] other side that I'm human and my kids are worth living." Maybe, she said, she has also sobered up. 

Her use of that phrase, of course, is spiked with an irony entirely missing when it is spoken by left and center-left Jewish Israelis for whom to sober up means to reject the possibility of coexistence, to embrace the canard that Israel has no partner in peace among a Palestinian community of more than three million people. By the upside-down, looking-glass logic of modern liberal Zionism, a person of conscience and principle becomes "sober" by embracing a willed oblivion, remembering only incidents of Palestinian terrorism, and forgetting the generations of Palestinians who have sought redress through myriad legal and non violent ways. This "sobering up" is to focus on incidents of antisemitism on American college campuses, which are [00:57:00] analyzed in excruciating detail in the Israeli and U.S. media. It is to embrace the balm of victimhood, to wrap ourselves in the mantle of an age-old hatred that led to the murder of six million—victimhood that has now been transferred to October 7, which is referred to again and again, including by Netanyahu and President Biden, as the worst tragedy the Jews have experienced since the Holocaust, in order to expiate the shame of the war in Gaza. 

To "sober up" it is to forget the 750,000 Palestinians expelled and the 500 villages destroyed in 1948, and the massacres and abuses since. It is to mourn the 1,139 murdered in the horrific massacre by Hamas on October 7th, the 240 taken hostage, 70 of whom are believed to still be alive, while ignoring the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, among [00:58:00] them aid workers and physicians, the elderly, and women and children dismembered and burned alive.

So if you continue to deny or even attempt to justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the decades of injustice that preceded it, then the only explanation is denial. However, there are several levels of denial to choose from, so, from which are you, your loved ones, or members of your community suffering? I'll go back to what I've said before, Israel doesn't need shipments of weapons, or even, in the long run, peace negotiators. What they need, for both Israelis and Palestinians above all, is therapy.

SECTION A - UNCOMMITTED

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we'll continue a deeper dive on four topics. Next up, Section A, the Uncommitted; Section B, Torture; Section C, Arms embargo; and Section D, Journalism.

Palestinian-American lawmaker denied opportunity to speak at DNC shares what she would've said - All In With Chris Hayes - Air Date 8-23-24

CHRIS HAYES: This week we saw a really well produced Democratic Convention, which clearly was seeking to, and I think successfully, sought to construct this [00:59:00] big tent, right, that welcomes as broad a political coalition as possible. So for example, we saw Senator Bernie Sanders rallying against the ruling class, followed by Illinois Governor J.

B. Pritzker boasting the fact that he is a billionaire. We saw the exonerated Central Park Five on the need for criminal justice reform, followed by prosecutors selling Kamala Harris as the tough on crime candidate, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren rallying the progressive base, and former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan, former Congressman Adam Kinzinger welcoming Republicans in the fold.

There's one glaring exception this week, which was on the issue of Israel and Gaza and the ongoing war there. The convention heard incredibly moving, searing, compassionate words from the parents of Hirsch Goldberg Polen, who's one of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th. 

We've met with President Biden and Vice President Harris numerous times at the White House.

They're both working tirelessly for a [01:00:00] hostage and ceasefire deal That will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents, and grandchildren home, and will stop the despair in Gaza 

CHRIS HAYES: and Harris herself brought the crowd to its feet with a condemnation of Hamas' brutality. Paired with a call for Palestinian self-determination.

KAMALA HARRIS: President Biden and I are working to end this war. Such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self determination. But 

CHRIS HAYES: absent from the stage on any day across the four days were any Palestinian American voices.

The uncommitted [01:01:00] delegates attempted to negotiate a speaking slot with the DNC, but their efforts were ultimately rebuffed. So joining me now is one of the Palestinian Americans who requested to submit a speech to the DNC for vetting to deliver. Georgia State Representative Rua Roman, who attended the convention and intended to endorse Kamala Harris, but was not granted permission to speak.

Representative, it's great to have you. And I guess what I want to hear from you and Is what you wanted to say, what you would have told folks, uh, had you had the opportunity to, to get up there. 

REP. RUWA ROMMAN: Yeah. Thank you for having me. And I want to be clear, although I'm not an uncommitted delegate, um, I wasn't even a convention attendee.

I was there for a different panel with our American Institute. Um, I was asked by uncommitted, Um, I would help push for a speaker, and, um, that's sort of how the conversation about a speech even started. Uh, some members of Congress wanted to be able to vouch for a potential speaker, asked for some sample language, and we provided it.

And The language that we wrote was [01:02:00] meant to be in good faith. It included an endorsement. Um, it included a call for unity. Um, it included a personal story. Um, the reality is anyone who knows me knows I'm incredibly passionate about this issue. I am Palestinian. I have a responsibility for this. And so even though it doesn't call for an arms embargo, those are things we do work for.

Even though it doesn't call it a genocide, we still try to capture the massacres that are happening. But at the same time, we understood that this was going to be a moment to show some good faith. And so that is what we were going to talk about. 

CHRIS HAYES: Um, yeah, that, that, that, that point of the good faith, because I think a lot of the, the discussion about it I saw was about, well, you know, you don't know what they'll say.

And, um, and, and, and I think one argument which seemed legitimate to me is like, if a person's not going to endorse the candidate or they're going to trash the nominee, like we're not going to give them a slot. That seems reasonable. But I think the point that I'm hearing from you is like, You were willing to go up there.

I want to just read from the part of the speech that's okay with you because, um, you said this in the speech that you [01:03:00] released. You said, Let's commit to each other to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump, who used my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let's fight for the policies long overdue from restoring access to abortions, to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza.

Did you think there was a chance that this would happen? 

REP. RUWA ROMMAN: Yeah, I mean, um, from my understanding, uncommitted was told that as long as they were not told, no, there was a good chance this was going to happen. And so they were asked to submit names and this has been going on for a while. This did not start, you know, this week, this, these negotiations had been ongoing.

And from my understanding, I was basically myself and actually representative Abdel Nasser, who's also a Palestinian in Illinois. Um, we were kind of pushed as, okay, you're elected officials, you're Palestinian, surely, surely. We can at least focus on the two of you out of the list of many people that were already submitted, and we were already on that list to begin with, but it was just one of those, let's [01:04:00] focus on them, and we still don't understand why there wasn't a speaking slot for any Palestinian.

To be clear, it didn't have to be me. It didn't have to be Representative Abdel Nasser. It could have been, you know, Any Palestinian, and there wasn't a single one. 

CHRIS HAYES: One of the aspects of this that I found a little confounding about that, too, and again, like, conventions and candidates are going to enforce the discipline of what they want to say, and that is how this all works.

But, at this point, it does seem to me that, um, both the bulk of the hostages families, both American and Israeli, The bulk of, the bulk of the Israeli public, if you believe polling, the bulk of the Israeli security establishment, according to much reporting in Haaretz and other places, the bulk of Palestinian Americans all kind of want the same thing, which is the levers to produce a ceasefire.

REP. RUWA ROMMAN: Yeah, we had organizations. I mean, so many organizations from Ben, the arc to, um, you know, obviously uncommitted was pushing for this. We also had members [01:05:00] of Congress request this publicly and privately, including representative Richard at the representative Corey Bush representative Ilhan Omar. But also, um, you know, we had folks like, um, AOC and others who were pushing and saying, why is there not a single Palestinian speaker?

And again, Yeah. The ask wasn't sort of we want anything special or different. The idea was if this is going to be a big tent, can we please make sure it includes everybody that we are trying to reach this year?

The Young Person's Illustrated Guide to American Fascism + DNC Vibes - Refuse Fascism Podcast - Air Date 8-25-24

Listen to the doctors who went to the DNC to testify on this war on children in Gaza.

I'm fueled by a lot of rage. I was in Gaza, uh, working in the ICO, accession to the hospital for about three weeks. I have been to Gaza twice, uh, since the assault began in October. Went to Gaza in January. And was turned away in May after the border was stormed. I was in Gaza earlier this year and multiple times over the past [01:06:00] decade.

As a physician and as a witness on the ground, as one of the few international eyes allowed in Gaza by design, what I saw was indescribable with any other word other than I, as a doctor, cannot do my job if my elected leaders and my politicians are making it literally impossible for me to treat patients.

I can't save lives if you keep sending weapons. And it's really tough to reconcile with the fact that you're in the hospitals, you're watching people suffer and die, and to know that overhead there are fighter jets that came from America. They're making Gaza unlivable. They've destroyed the water infrastructure.

And so we were seeing kids die of diarrheal illness. They prevented all medical supplies in, and I can tell that by first hand witness, not by hearsay. They refused me the medical supplies that I was able to gather over months from wonderful people in Arkansas. Things like endotracheal tubes and Foley catheters, things like antibiotics and sedative medications that were [01:07:00] denied at the border.

First hand experience. They do not allow medical supplies in to treat children that are dying. You heard my colleagues speak just now at the press conference. The fact that. Uh, these children haunt us in our dreams, the fact that their parents come to us in our dreams, uh, asking us why we didn't save their children.

There's definitely a cognitive dissonance that's required to go from a place where you see children die every day from bombs dropped with a Made in USA sign on them, uh, then to come, to come here to the DNC and see almost a party like atmosphere, ignoring the fact that every day I was in Gaza, I heard children crying for their parents that were gone.

I saw the reality on the ground. I saw the product of our policies. I saw the product of the Biden administration's policies here. And for anybody to suggest that this is just a one issue, or we don't want to make this a one issue voter, uh, I'm offended by that, and I think most people who recognize the tragedy of what's taking place in Gaza, [01:08:00] they're offended by that.

And I think all of us are here not because, uh, we want to be, uh, we're here because we feel like it's important. It's our responsibility, uh, and we feel like we're, we're accountable, we're accountable to all the civilians who were killed, who were injured, who are killed today, who will be killed tomorrow, unless the U.

S. stops funding this. We are enabling a genocide, and that's what we're doing. That should be front and center stage, uh, at a convention of, uh, one of the main two parties, uh, of a country's political system. I know, that's, yeah, I don't, I don't have any capacity to give anybody excuses anymore. I, I literally can't, like, there's no excuse.

There's, yeah. 

Uncommitted Delegate Details His DNC Experience - Daniel Denvir - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-22-24

 I've got to say it was a spectacular act of anti Palestinian Racism to allow the family of israeli hostages an israeli hostage who obviously are going through hell But there are 40 [01:09:00] 000 plus palestinians dead in gaza since israel's begun this genocide and to refuse Any sort of palestinian presence on the stage, even though the uncommitted leadership is absolutely Open to negotiating on who that speaker is all the speeches here are very heavily vetted The same would be true for any palestinian who went up there And spoke but the fact that any palestinian saying anything at all the mere presence of a palestinian human being on the stage at the dnc Is on that that's impossible.

That's a spectacular spectacular spectacular evidence of anti Palestinian racism. Trump has been using the very identity of Palestinian, the national identity of Palestinian, as an epithet. It's clear at this point that many in Democratic Party leadership believe that being, being Palestinian is. is an epithet, is an ugly thing, is synonymous with terrorism, it's spectacular anti Palestinian racism.

And as we know with any form of racism, and Abbas said this last night, I believe when [01:10:00] Summer Lee was visiting the sit in, as Abbas, one of our leaders in Uncommitted said, um, racism is a, is a, uh, is a politics that legitimates Violence against the people who are subject to that racism and we're seeing that violence unfold right now with U.

s bombs being used to commit this genocide in gaza it is um notable to me that the president of the united states in my view is one of the Most rabid, uh, anti Palestinian and racist that I can remember in the Democratic Party, um, and seemingly is, is continuing to triple, quadruple down on this notion about a ceasefire being around the corner, um, and the, the necessity to negotiate a ceasefire.

The thing is, is that if it's so necessary, then you need to do the steps to make that necessary action happen. Um, and as we have seen. It's [01:11:00] not happening with the current strategy that Biden is employing, uh, arms, the arms embargo, which is a key demand, uh, or ask from the uncommitted movement doesn't seem to be breaking through with Biden.

Um, how have, uh, you and the fellow uncommitted delegates, uh, balanced trying to uh, Deal with the biden administration or biden himself and his team currently I think mostly across uh these negotiations Versus harris and putting that in the context of electoral politics as you're at the convention, right?

I mean, it's definitely like a series of balancing acts. We're inside the convention representing democratic primary Uncommitted voters, hundreds of thousands, over 700, 000, and those are only in the states that had an uncommitted option. Uh, far more than 700, 000, uh, Democratic voters in this country want an arms embargo on Israel and want the genocide to stop.

But obviously this is a, this is a, a tyrant act because we're representing this [01:12:00] within a Democratic party whose current President is sending the bombs to Israel that are being used to commit the genocide. I think everyone. Um, you know All sorts of democrats including those who very much including those who want an end to the genocide Which is a majority of democrats majority democrats want an arms embargo polls are clear on this um I think thinks that there's a better shot at getting a better solution under Harris. Biden has a deep sort of romantic, gentile, Zionist like attachment to Israel, that there's no limit to what Israel can do, clearly no limit that would cause him to actually put an end to this.

I don't think Harris and Walz have that kind of ideological commitment to Israel, but obviously this isn't just about the ideology of one president, this is a deep, structural, systematic Um piece of of how u. s imperialism And that and also american domestic politics function this attachment to israel And so changing out biden, we know is not gonna is not [01:13:00] gonna.

Uh, um, you know lead to you know Harris or walls taking office and and supporting our vision of of palestinian Liberation and, and, and freedom and equality and, you know, in the entirety of Palestine, you know, but there is, I think there is some grounds for hope of some kind of change from this and that's why we're inside making this fight and making this appeal that listen, we, none of us want Trump to win.

You know trump is a would would be monstrous on this issue and so many other issues But you know, I think some people in the democratic party leadership accuse uncommitted leaders of dividing the party It is we are the messengers of democratic voters who have been profoundly alienated from the party by President biden's support for the israeli genocide.

So for us the key it's not only a moral urgency To stop the bombs You It's key to ensuring that Harris can win against Trump. And it seems pretty obvious to me that that's necessary. That was the whole idea of Listen to Michigan, [01:14:00] which began the whole Uncommitted movement. You know, that like these, you know, in a state like Michigan, which was won by what?

I think it was like 10, 000? Votes last time that they're right. It's a low number. I don't have it off the top of my head, but yeah, there are a hundred thousand people who there, you know, and there's who voted uncommitted and there are tons and tons and tons of Arabs, Muslims, progressive black people, Latino people in Michigan.

And all across this country, who need to see a change to feel good about voting for Harris in November. This is a fact we're not create as on committed delegates. We're not creating that fact. We're not out there telling people, How to vote. We are messengers from those voters. Right. And, and I, I couldn't agree with the way that you've characterized Biden, um, more.

I mean, we, I quote this all the time, but we had Peter Beinart on this program. Um, and our listeners will probably have heard this for the 20th time, but it just stuck with me to such a degree. Um, where [01:15:00] People who believe and buy into the myth of America as a promised land on a hostile frontier also buy into the myth of Israel as a promised land on a hostile frontier, and it's the romanticism of colonialism that Biden Biden.

Has bought into, and from my view, his brain has ossified to the point where he's not able to change his racism and his view of this issue. Um, I read an interview, actually very good profile, uh, thankfully, um, of, uh, Abbas, uh, uh, Alawiyah, um, the, uh, one of the uncommitted, uh, movement leaders in the Washington Post.

That's very good. Uh, I'm glad that they gave, uh, him a voice in a way that wasn't, uh, you know, condescending in any manner, and it was good because he clarifies for that readership that he's going to vote for Harris in the fall, right? And it's the kind of thing where A lot of, some Democrats would just excommunicate you and not listen to you at all, if [01:16:00] you didn't bring that point up first.

I'm sure you've dealt with that, uh, a lot, but, uh, also seems to say that he feels like there has been a little bit more oxygen and more receptiveness, slightly, even if it's just lip service, like, is there hope there? Do you, do you feel, or is there an understanding among the rest of the uncommitted delegates that There's at least a crack in the door where it was a bit where it wasn't back the way it wasn't that way under Biden.

I, I certainly feel more hopeful now that Biden is not at the top of the ticket, but, you know, hope, hope is just not, not enough. The bombs raining down on Gaza, we need to have an indication and people will say, you know, that there'll be an actual substantive policy shift. And that substantive policy shift has to be to stop sending bombs. 

Um, and I think, you know, we get pressure from, uh, you know, various, you know, [01:17:00] with the response we get from, from Democrats here who are, who are more, you know, protective or, uh, of, of Biden, um, I'm sorry, of Harris is, you know, what do you want her to do? She's the VP to the sitting president. And obviously, yes, there are complications there, but there are things she could say, like under my administration, U.

S. military aid will. Yeah. Uh, be governed by domestic and international law. That that would that would say a lot. That would say a lot but they're not saying that. And you'd think that would be easy enough to say that the law will be followed. But it's not easy because the law is clearly not being followed right now.

All these weapons transfers in Israel under current domestic and international law are illegal. Israel's using them to Commit atrocities that's illegal. It's a violation of the Leahy law.

Omar Calls Out DNC’s Refusal To Acknowledge Israel’s Ongoing Genocide In Gaza - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-22-24

 As we see Alexandria Ocasio Cortez begin to, to shift, honestly, her rhetoric in a way that I, I'm disappointed about.

Um, Months ago, she was on the House floor calling it a genocide. And then she [01:18:00] did her convention speech as there were major protests outside. And she repeated the State Department Biden administration line about a ceasefire and hostages. That is not happening. Um, It's now quite clear that Benjamin Netanyahu will not agree to a ceasefire and it needs to be imposed upon them in the form of sanctioning Israel and doing an arms embargo.

These are the things that are going to be necessary because if the war Genocide stops. Netanyahu is both going to be under criminal prosecution, will be out of power, and the messianic freaks that are a part of his majority coalition government won't stop until they kill every Palestinian that they can, and also may, maybe, attempt to spark a regional war to drag the United States into it.

Um, we're, like, the, the amount of people that are dead in Gaza, We have no clue. Um, [01:19:00] a week or two ago, there was a letter written by American doctors working in Gaza that put that number over 90, 000. There are other estimates that put it in the hundreds of thousands. They've killed all the journalists and the record keepers.

So we're not, that's another part of why They aren't interested in ceasing fire because war crimes investigations will happen and will know the true death toll. If you're alive, but everyone you loved has been killed, um, or you are so emaciated that you'll never retain like your full health again. Like that doesn't count towards the, uh, conservative death tolls that we are talking about right now, which are on their own, uh, horrific or your limbs are gone.

I mean, the trauma that, that, that the people in Gaza. We'll live with, who survive for the rest of their lives. We saw so many Zionists talk about decapitated babies, I just saw the, another, and I retweeted it, another image of a kid's head splayed open because of a bombing. [01:20:00] A little boy, it seemed like, being held up by somebody.

I've seen a flesh of children that is so torn apart that it almost, it looks like, um, putty. Um, so with that said, uh, these protests are righteous, they're necessary, and I'm encouraged to see Ilhan Omar, who I gotta say is probably my favorite member of Congress because she both stands on her, on, on her principles and plays the inside game as like the progressive caucus whip, uh, really well.

She deserves more credit for her political shrewdness as well as her principles. So, And her ability to win in Minnesota, which I, yeah, like the people always want to suggest like, that's like a majority Somalian migrant immigrant. Uh, district. It is not. I would recommend looking into the demographics.

That is a single digit minority in Minnesota, if I'm not mistaken. That's just white supremacist, minnesomalia sort of talking point. [01:21:00] And and and so that's I'm I love that efficacy and I made this point the other week, but Corey Bush and Jebal Bowman lost, and I hate that they lost. Um, but In part because I think the members that staved off AIPAC from either, you know, not pouring a ton of resources in or staying away entirely, it was Summer Lee, it was Ilhan Omar, it was Rashida Tlaib, they were all state representatives before They got into Congress.

So they had this kind of like infrastructural support more of a machine then, you know, inquiry Bush just didn't have that Jamal Bowman had the Democratic Party that was actively hostile to him in New York State. So these are things that we just should flag. Uh, and now that Ilhan Omar has survived her primary, she's still keeping up the good fight.

This is what she had to say at, um, the uncommitted rally outside of the Democratic National Convention. Uh, just, you know, about an hour ago. Palestinians. [01:22:00] It has been unconscionable for me in the last 10 months to witness my colleagues in this administration refusing to recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza.

To not see the mothers with lost helpless children, the babies whose dead bodies are being dumped out. I do not understand that working tirelessly for a ceasefire is really not a thing, and they should be ashamed of themselves for saying such Palestinians. No. Yes. And by the way, that is a split from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and almost seems like, um, I don't know.

Direct reference. A direct reference. Which, I mean, I don't know, it's unclear to me, but just to say what she says there, um, uh, calling for a ceasefire is not really a thing and shame on the people who are [01:23:00] doing so. Now, I'd be curious what she said directly after that, but, I am, If it's not a shot directly at AOC it should be because AOC did do that That's what she did on the very first night of the election as people who helped the DNC Helped to get her elected were protesting that trying to get the more buy in for the uncommitted movement to get some movement on the Embargo if you know, I guess aid is maybe the where they're The Split the baby thing, but um Yeah, I mean good for Ilhan and shame on AOC is right And I think you know look AOC seems to have larger ambitions whether it's for Schumer Senate seat in In four or six years, I forget exactly when or whether it's to primary Kathy Hockel for governor.

And I hope she beats both of those people if she runs. She'd be better than both. But if the price is you have to lie about a genocide, [01:24:00] um, and about a party's complicity in doing so that we have to name that price. We have to be very clear about it. This, we need marketplace , transparency when it comes to the cost of doing business in the democratic party here.

SECTION B - TORTURE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Torture.

Palestinian Healthcare Workers Chained, Starved, Sexually Abused- New HRW Report on Israeli Prisons - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-27-24

MILENA ANSARI: The report on the torture and detention of Palestinian healthcare workers includes eight testimonies of Palestinian paramedics, nurses, doctors and surgeons who currently have been working in Gaza and living in Gaza for the past 10 months during the current hostilities. Many of the doctors and the nurses — six of them — were detained and arrested when they were actually in the hospital doing their duties and whatever they can to make sure Palestinians who are injured and Palestinians who need the medical care for their own survival are granted this humanitarian medical need. So, six of the doctors were detained during a siege on the hospitals, [01:25:00] as well as during coordinated evacuation missions from the hospitals that are in the northern area of Gaza to hospitals in the southern areas. So, what I’m trying to say is, clearly, these healthcare workers were detained while they were doing their job, tasked and in a situation where Palestinians in Gaza are urgently needing medical care and medical assistance.

The testimonies, as you mentioned, are consistent with many other testimonies gathered by OHCHR, for example, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, where it gives us a window into how Israeli authorities are treating Palestinians in detention. We were able to speak to eight healthcare workers in order to really connect and better understand the health infrastructure in Gaza. So, the detention and torture of healthcare workers at this current [01:26:00] moment in Gaza is only exaggerating and worsening the conditions of the catastrophic health infrastructure in Gaza.

So, the testimonies are of torture, beatings, punches, kicks with steel-toed boots by Israeli soldiers, using military dogs to attack and intimidate detainees, but as well as using stress positions for prolonged period of times while being blindfolded and cuffed by the hands and feet. Many of the healthcare workers we spoke to, as healthcare workers being experts in medical knowledge, testified to us and reported seeing and witnessing and being themselves subjected to medical neglect, where they have seen detainees with visible trauma and blunt trauma on their bodies, visible bites of dogs on their bodies, as well. [01:27:00] They told us, as well, from their wounds during their detention and arrest, they were not given any proper medical treatment. And when I talk about medical treatment inside detention, this is the bare minimum that’s guaranteed under international humanitarian law, where the Geneva Conventions require the detaining authority to provide proper medical healthcare, proper monitoring of the conditions. But then we have testimonies and we have reports that talk about amputation of Palestinian limbs, including hands and feet, from prolonged cuffings, and amputations without anesthesia, as well.

So, sadly, this is, honestly, just a small example of what Human Rights Watch was able to document. But we’re talking about hundreds of other cases of testimonies from either U.N. or Israeli human rights organizations that talk about some kind of a systematic [01:28:00] pattern of ill-treatment and abuse in detention.

And really important to highlight that when we talk about these eight healthcare workers, for example, for specific, they were not charged with any offenses. They were not brought before trial. So this is why we concluded that the detention was unlawful. They were either detained from seven weeks up to five months, none of them being informed why they are being detained or for how long they are being detained. They’re just experiencing ill-treatment and torture at the hands of the Israeli authorities, which is, again, only a window into the general detention conditions of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. And currently, we’re talking about 9,000 Palestinians who are in Israeli custody. Three thousand of them are under administrative detention, which is detaining a person without trial, without charge, for an indefinite [01:29:00] time. And this includes hundreds of children, dozens of women, as well, elderly, journalists and human rights defenders.

So we’re really ringing the alarm about the situation inside the Israeli custody and detention facilities. And again, when we talk about military bases or detention facilities where Palestinians are detained, these cases are of Palestinians who were taken outside of Gaza. So they were forcibly deported from Gaza into detention facilities and detention military bases inside Israel. And this is considered a war crime under international humanitarian law, of forcible deportation. And for those Palestinians who were detained inside the occupied West Bank or inside the Occupied Palestinian Territory, have been forcibly transferred outside of their occupied territory, which is also a war crime under international [01:30:00] humanitarian law.

So, the alarms are ringing. And this is why Human Rights Watch is calling for the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor to ensure including the treatment of Palestinian detainees and prisoners in their open investigation into the situation in Palestine. We know that the prosecutor at the ICC requested arrest warrants for two Israeli senior officials, as well as Hamas officials. So, for the Israeli officials, they are being — the arrest warrants are for war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, we did not notice that the ill-treatment, the detention and the torture of Palestinians inside Israeli detention was included during the calls or applications for arrest warrant. And we really sincerely put pressure on states and governments to also make sure that there is genuine [01:31:00] accountability for the treatment of Palestinians inside Israeli detention.

As you may know, or to really highlight this information, that the International Committee for the Red Cross, that’s mandated to monitor detention conditions in order to make sure they comply with international standards, has been banned, since the start of the hostilities, from monitoring Israeli prisons and detention centers, which rings the alarm and the bells even higher with regards to what exactly is happening inside detention and inside Israeli custody, because we are hearing about reports of Palestinian deaths in custody. According to Haaretz, there are 48 cases of deaths in custody since the beginning of the hostilities, of Palestinians who were declared dead or have been killed inside detention. And there is no clarity to the reasons or the circumstances that [01:32:00] led to their deaths. Physicians for Human Rights Israel was able to participate in the autopsy of five cases of Palestinian detainees who were pronounced dead inside Israeli detention. And some of the cases included clear medical neglect, and others included that the deaths was a cause of torture and ill-treatment. And I would just highlight that two cases of these deaths in custody were of Palestinian healthcare workers, like Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, who was declared by the Israeli Prison Services back in April killed, and as well as Dr. Eyad al-Rantisi, who was also killed during detention.

So, again, the bells are ringing. And there needs to be better clarity and understanding to what’s happening inside detention, but also to be confident in asking the question of “Why are these Palestinians inside detention, when they’re [01:33:00] being detained for prolonged periods of time without being brought before a judge or even without any charges presented against them?” So, there’s a lot of questions that should be asked.

Israel Accused of Running “Torture Camps” as Video Emerges of Soldiers Raping Palestinian Prisoner - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-8-24

ASHRAF AL-MUHTASEB: In another interview conducted by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 50-year-old Firas Hassan, an official in the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Youth and Sports, describes not only being beaten by prison guards while in detention, but hearing that their brutal attack is being live-streamed for Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security of Israel, to watch.

FIRAS HASSAN: [translated] On November 9th, 2023, two prison forces, the District Unit and the Initial Response Force, came into cell 14 we were in, on wing 28. We were 10 Palestinians [01:34:00] in the cell. The forces came in masked and beat us for 50 minutes. They laughed while they hit us and live-streamed it all. I understand Hebrew, and I heard one say, “We’re live-streaming for Ben-Gvir, directly to Ben-Gvir.” They beat us in various ways, with their hands and feet, and then brought in police dogs, after they tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us.

AMY GOODMAN: B’Tselem also spoke to Sari Huriyyah. He’s a 53-year-old real estate lawyer and an Israeli citizen. He was arrested and detained over a Facebook post November 4th last year. [01:35:00] In this clip, Sari describes 'Abd a-Rahman Mar'i, a 23-year-old man in the isolation cell next to him, screaming in pain and later being brought out in a body bag.

SARI HURIYYAH: [translated] He screamed in pain constantly, begging for the doctor. The guard would come now and then and swear at him and tell him to shut up. In the morning, the guards came to count us. One said, “Get up, you animal. Get up, you dog.” They checked him, and the whole place went silent. Finally, the doctor said, “There’s nothing to be done.” One of the guards said to them, “My condolences.” And they all started laughing. They put him in a black body bag and carried him out like trash.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Sarit Michaeli, international advocacy lead for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The group’s new report [01:36:00] is titled “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps.”

Sarit, thanks so much for being with us. Just as we listen to these horrifying accounts, please lay out your findings.

SARIT MICHAELI: I think on a very fundamental level, Amy, our findings look at the systemic, ongoing and state-sanctioned, government-sanctioned use of torture and abuse in the Israeli prison system vis-à-vis Palestinians, Palestinians who Israel considers to be — views as security prisoners.

Now, this is something that we have discussed in the past. I mean, torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees in detention and interrogations have occurred. They have been documented. But the level, the degree, the scope, the scale of this phenomenon since October 7th [01:37:00] are simply unrelated to anything we’ve seen in the past.

And when we look at the way these people are treated — you showed some of the testimonies. Some of the — many more testimonies are actually available on our website, and we are sharing them online. You see that, clearly, this isn’t the actions of any sort of rogue element of the Israeli prison system. It’s a government-sanctioned and also government-supported, government-mandated policy. And that’s the central conclusion that we have from all of the information that we’ve collected in recent months.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about Firas, who was describing not only being beaten by the Israeli soldiers, but also the fact [01:38:00] that this beating was being live-streamed for the national security minister of Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to watch?

SARIT MICHAELI: So, I just want to clarify: We know that the police say — or, sorry, the prison guards were discussing this. Certainly, we have not — you know, we clarified in our communications that we don’t know whether this was indeed, like, literally live-streamed for Itamar Ben-Gvir or whether it was more about the spirit of Itamar Ben-Gvir, because a lot of the things we see on the ground today in the Israeli prison system are directly related to the influence, to the spirit of Minister Ben-Gvir.

I think it’s certainly not the case that Minister Ben-Gvir is the only person responsible. Absolutely, the prime minister, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who gave him all of [01:39:00] his authority, is absolutely responsible and culpable for this reality. But the Israeli government and Ben-Gvir have shown again and again, since October 7th but also before October 7th, that they are hell-bent, that their intention is to cause this deterioration to increase the pressure on Palestinian prisoners.

And this was — this has been done, and we saw these kinds of developments even prior to October 7th. From the beginning of the tenure of Minister Ben-Gvir as minister of national security, he has been imposing his racist, his Kahanist agenda, both on the Israeli police, with great success, unfortunately, and also on the Israeli Prison Service. October 7th, the horror, the crimes committed against Israelis on October 7th, served as a golden [01:40:00] opportunity for Ben-Gvir to continue to cynically manipulate the Israeli trauma, the Israeli fear and anger, in order to push forward this agenda that he has been promoting even beforehand.

So, I think one of the clear things that we’ve seen on the ground and in the system since October 7th was that much of this Israeli policy, at least the parts about starving prisoners, about cramping them all together in large numbers in cells, canceling any possibility for them to have any sort of sustenance, to buy additional food, for example, all of these policies have been declared. They’ve been stated by the Israeli government. They haven’t hid this. Ben-Gvir himself has been on the media promoting these policies and showing — you know, having these, [01:41:00] like, show visits to visit prisoners that he claims are Nukhba — right? — are Palestinian, are Hamas fighters from Gaza.

But what we have seen again and again, based on the testimonies that we’ve taken, is that the Israeli policy wasn’t just applied Palestinian Hamas suspects. We would argue, by the way, that this is absolutely, categorically prohibited regardless of the crimes people have been — have committed. Torture and this type of treatment is absolutely prohibited. But Israel is claiming, and in some cases showing — right? — performing, in a way. And this is — I think the incident that was described in this testimony seems very much an example of this, not just the kind of actual violence and ill-treatment and humiliation, but making it very, very public. And this is something that [01:42:00] is simply chilling and is part of the really deep moral abyss that this report exposes, I think, within our society today.

Francesca Albanese on Gaza and the Anatomy of a Genocide - The InnerView - TRT World - Air Date 8-26-24

 What I've seen after the submission of my report, um, confirms my. My reading, my understanding, and I'm glad, very glad to see that exposing what I've called in the report the humanitarian camouflage, meaning Israel's use of international humanitarian law jargon and categories, like evacuation, safe zones, evacuation orders, or military objectives, uh, collateral damage.

This is, this is justified in Israel's view, um, the violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians. So by doing so, Israel has capsized. The value, the protective function of international law. I'm glad to see that this is shaping a little bit the [01:43:00] mindset of a number of observers who do see this pattern, which was already present prior to this, uh, this assault.

The third element is how my report was received. I, look, there is no much to celebrate with the genocide ongoing, but I do think that the report has made a huge impact in, um, at the, at the level of public conscience. And it has contributed to, uh, to the awakening and the conscientization around what Israel is doing.

Nothing, nothing of what I've said has been proven, has been proven wrong. Uh, rather the contrary it has been further corroborated by the massacres and the arbitrary killings and destruction of Of everything that is necessary to to live in gaza and unfortunately It's expanding beyond gaza. [01:44:00] Yeah, when you say it's expanding beyond gaza.

It's an interesting Opportunity for me to ask you technically when we look at the fact that it's not just gaza. We also have You Uh, a lot of conflict, a lot of violence happening in Northern Israel, Southern Lebanon. So the Israelis see themselves as fighting Hamas and Hezbollah on two fronts. So, you know, everything is interrelated here.

When it comes to that aspect of the conflict, are there limits to, to what you can analyze, what you can report on? Do you have to stay away from what's happening in, in Northern Israel, for example? Well, yes, there are limits, because my mandate only, uh, covers the occupied Palestinian territory, meaning the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Uh, I do refer to Um, to facts or legal implications that are relevant to the occupied Palestinian territory. But for example, in this specific case you are mentioning, I [01:45:00] cannot start an investigation on what's happening in, in Lebanon or in Syria or in Iraq or in Iran, which Israel has been bombing. Uh, so yes, the conflict is expanding, but what I, what I was referring to Imran is something else.

The threat against the Palestinians. The violence against the Palestinians that puts an obligation to prevent genocide on international community might be expanding to the West Bank, because the few that I see and other observers, like just today, B'Tselem published a report commenting on the systematic, uh, deprivation of liberty and abuses against the Palestinians in Israeli custody.

This gives a sense of how. How grave, how serious and perilous for the Palestinians the situation is in, uh, including in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, [01:46:00] which poses, as I said, an obligation on the international community, on member states, especially those who have influence on Israel, to intervene And, uh, uh, and, and stop the violence.

Right. It's interesting that you mention that, because a lot of, uh, experts have been pointing out the fact that perhaps the West Bank and East Jerusalem are, in a way, being ignored while the catastrophe is unfolding in Gaza, and it's worth people focusing their attention on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As well you speak of international intervention and in the recommendation Portion of your report you talk of an arms embargo you talk of sanctions Who's going to impose that when we have the security council as it is when we have the united states as it is How does this actually happen? How would you like to see it play out downstream?

Look at what ordinary citizens, especially in the West, are doing, uh, [01:47:00] through the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement. They are taking the situation into their hands and they are, um, activating in within the realm, of course, of their possibilities. Adherence with the International Court of Justice, uh, recommendations and, and provisions.

So each, each member state has the opportunity to impose sanctions on, on Israel. Of course, ideally it would be better if it were done by the security council, but With impasse that is registered owing to the persisting, persisting U. S. veto, it's more likely that individual member states would, uh, put an, uh, impose an arms embargo on, on Israel, cartel the economic ties, both the imports and exports and other forms of partnerships, including with the academia.

Which [01:48:00] has been supporting the, the legal endeavor that Israel has established to the detriment of the Palestinian people for decades, if not now, when? I want us to have a little watch and listen to something from three to four months ago, you had a q and a session at the UN Human Rights Council. There was a question asked to you by, I think a German journalist.

I want, I wanna play that and I wanna talk about it afterwards. Let's have a little watch and listen. I would like to ask you, do you have a written document by the government, which a cl with a clear intent to commit genocide?

Do you think that in Rwanda. And in Bosnia Herzegovina, any government officials wrote a document saying I want to commit genocide? [01:49:00] Have you seen anything like that? I'll answer this for you. No. It doesn't work like that. There is, those statements are just the tip of the iceberg because I have a word limit in, uh, in my reports.

Which is quite strict. Otherwise, we could write an encyclopedia with what has been said and done. And I said it, and I mean it. If the International Criminal Court is serious about investigating what Israel has done in Gaza, as of the 7th of October, only as of the 7th of October, it will be busy for decades.

I had to watch that a few times, and it felt like it was an onion clip. You know, it felt like satire for a for a second there at the beginning. Tell me what was going through your mind When you were asked that question And without wanting to sort of pinpoint too much on on this journalist and so on that's not the point But tell me about some of the frustrations [01:50:00] involved When you have to field questions such as that Um Look, I remember what I felt.

I that day I felt completely sick Which added to the dramatic reaction with the posing I, I had, I was really sick in my stomach from the very morning. And this is also because that it was, uh, it took a huge, uh, toll on me to investigate, uh, for that report and write that report. It was really painful. And probably after that, I felt as a sort of, uh, Relaxation.

So the day after when I had the press conference, I was not in the best of shape. At the same time, I had to pause and think how to answer that question, because it was very embarrassing. It was, again, I'm, I'm sorry for the journalist who has been vilified so much, but probably he embodied [01:51:00] a, a genuine spirit that many in Germany have.

They think that every, in order to have genocide, you need to have the written down, industrialized the policy of extermination that you had with the Holocaust of the Jewish people and the Roma and Sinti and others. Uh, and it doesn't work like that. This is not written in the genocide. So this is what I, this is what I thought and this is what I tried to say.

SECTION C - ARMS EMBARGO

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C: Arms embargo. 

The US is allowing Israel to get away with genocide- Marwan Bishara - Al Jazeera English - Air Date 8-14-24

 Going through the statements that we've heard before from the U. S. about the concern that they have for the number of casualties, particularly in Gaza, and she did say that Israel has a right to respond to threats, but how it does it matters.

Nevertheless, It seems as though she was, again, reiterating the U. S. line that any fault, any delay when it comes to negotiations lies with Hamas rather than with the Israeli government. And it seems to [01:52:00] be an encouragement to try to get Hamas to the negotiations, but of course, that may prove difficult.

Well, I tell you, I actually envy you for the capacity to repeat all of that. Uh, when we all know it's Groundhog Day. Every time the U. N. Security Council convenes and the Americans repeat more of the same. The same thing for the English. The same thing for the Algerians. They all seem to be, you know, um, basically political commentators rather than, uh, diplomats representing states.

With the exception, perhaps, of the Americans. And the American ambassador basically read the same soundbites, the same lines she did in previous speeches, with one difference. I'm not sure you've noticed, uh, perhaps our viewers around the world did. The United States is not just concerned now. The United States is deeply concerned.

That's the difference. Deeply concerned. I'm sure the people in Gaza, the children of [01:53:00] Gaza, are going to sleep better tonight because the United States is deeply concerned. While, of course, repeating more of the same mantras, it's very Orwellian for the United States to continue to talk about the United States.

defense and stability and peace and ceasefire and so on and so forth, while it's edging on financing, arming Israel. And here I'm repeating myself, shielding Israel at the United Nations, supplying it with all the arms it needs to carry its genocide and to carry violations of international law against Lebanon and Iran.

and to defend it when those countries would want to retaliate. This is basically, as I said, groundhog day every day, the past 24 times, as, uh, as Gabrielle told us earlier, since The Algerian representative, Amar Benjama, when he was speaking, and as I mentioned, it was Algeria who called this emergency meeting, was talking at [01:54:00] one point about the attacks that have been going on in the West Bank, but also particularly in Gaza.

He made the point that the attacks would not be possible without the generous support that Israel gets. Now, I'm paraphrasing what he was saying, but that was essentially what he was meaning. And As I was discussing with Gabriel Elizondo, a correspondent, almost at this exact moment, the notification started to come out on the wires that the U.

S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just approved 20 billion worth of U. S. military equipment to be delivered to Israel. And this is really where we see, as you were just talking about, the heart, the split, if you like, in the situation that we find ourselves, because on the one hand, the U. S. is Saying that it's concerned about the number of casualties that Israel has to the right to respond, but how it does it matters.

But at the same time, of course, it does not stop the flow of military aid to Israel. It's truly unprecedented audacity in international relations when it comes [01:55:00] to the United States justifying, um, Israel's crimes and supporting Israel's crimes. and arming and financing Israel as it carries its crimes, all the while talking about peace, stability, ceasefire, and the concern over it, the deep concern for casualties in Gaza.

It's an unprecedented, uh, audacity. It's, it's Orwellian in every possible way. But what, what is happening in the meanwhile? I mean, I'm not here. None of us is trying to be clever about this. At the end of the day, You can't really clever out, uh, death, right, and destruction and genocide, I should say. Because what is happening is through, through these 24 type meetings at the UN Secret Council and through the very support that you just spoke about from Antony Blinken on the lives, America sends its diplomats to the region.

Now, I [01:56:00] think three or four of them are going to show up. MacGurk, Antony, Blinken and, uh, and the CIA director, Bill Burns, and perhaps the UN, the US National Security Advisor, they will all be in the Middle East. All the while, it's sending armadas, strike forces, the most powerful armadas in the world, the biggest aircraft carriers the United States has, the Lincoln, right?

So it sends the diplomats, but it also sends the armadas. It talks about diplomacy. But it's really more or less like gunboat diplomacy, right? It's just sends in the armadas and threatens everyone around as if the Middle East is its background, back, backyard. The Middle East is two oceans away from the United States, but it behaves like it's the Gulf of Mexico.

It is not the Gulf of Mexico. The Middle East is the Middle East. American or North America is two oceans away. But anyway, be that as it may, and this is my real, you know, my essential point here. The United States is allowing Israel to get away from [01:57:00] with genocide by arming it, financing it, and shielding it at the United Nations.

The United States is enabling Israel's genocide and allowing Israel to get away with genocide. Not only that, now it's allowing both the Israeli government and its prime minister, to get away with their war crimes by shielding it by shielding them from the ICC and the ICJ and the riots. And even giving them all kinds of guarantees so that if they do reach a ceasefire, their government will not implode because secretly the United States is guaranteeing that Israel can go back to the war after phase one of phase three of three phases of the ceasefire, according to Israeli media reports.

So really, all in all, it is tragic. That we sit here and we try to analyze just to find any light in the end of the tunnel. And we find the word [01:58:00] deeply concerned instead of just concerned. While the United States, once again, is enabling genocide in Palestine. Marmon, we're waiting to hear from the Russian representative to the UN Security Council.

So I just want to keep asking you some questions until we get to that point. Forgive me if I have to break away if you're giving me an answer. But I want to widen this out a little bit and just talk about the negotiations themselves. Two things. Absolutely evident. Um, Hamas now has a leader, uh, Yael Sumwar, who is in Gaza.

Ismail Khaneo, when he was alive, uh, was the political head of Hamas, and he traveled the world as part of these talks in order to be part of the negotiations. Sumwar is in Gaza. He is very unlikely to leave Gaza. That's going to slow things down. any process down. Now, uh, Linda Thomas Greenfield saying, no, Hamas has to be at the table in these talks.

They have to be represented. Qatar says there will be some sort of representation. What kind of impact do you think this is going to have on the effectiveness of whatever talks we're going to see on Thursday? [01:59:00] Uh, I'm actually pretty sure, analytically and from the various sources and reports that I've seen.

That nothing changes with Sanwar being in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh being assassinated. In terms of the logistics and in terms of who makes a decision and how collective is a decision and how it's consensual and institutional within Hamas and why Hamas is in fact a very disciplined group regardless of who's on the head and regardless the geography of where is the person who hits it.

And I think they already said that, uh, that that issue is not going to be a problem and they've already made some proposal towards. How they see this thing needs to move forward in order to end as quickly as possible. Now having said that, let me remind our viewers around the world and let me tell you about the New York Times Report today.

It's a exclusive report in the New York Times, and I bet you anything you want that the American Ambassador already, just like the English [02:00:00] ambassador and the other ambassadors, they read it because it's a very important report in the New York Times that basically says that they got the documents. From the various ceasefire, uh, negotiations, from the various, uh, roundtables, you know, what went on and so on and so forth, what were the documents.

And the New York Times concluded that it was Netanyahu, Netanyahu, Netanyahu that obstructed the progress towards the ceasefire. That each and every time he either underlined, expanded, His conditions or added new conditions for why, at least since May, when the UN Security Council adopted that it's region 2735 for the worst, for the ceasefire, Israel has been obstructing its own or its American version of its own ceasefire proposal because Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire.

He didn't want the ceasefire. I'm not sure if he's going to be pushed in the top [02:01:00] corner now with Biden basically saying, If you're going to continue to obstruct as the New York Times reports, we're going to have to call you out on it this time because Biden basically is not running for re election and there's a good chance, according to at least a number of his reports, that Biden might Call him out on it this time around.

Israeli Holocaust Scholar- Why Gaza Is Genocide - w-. Prof. Omer Bartov - Owen Jones - Air Date 8-21-24

Following a visit to Israel, and it should be noted, I should make it clear, of course, you're an Israeli American, um, you've been convinced that it's no longer possible to deny.

Israels engage in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal ideations. And I think the key central point here is where you write, it is also clearly indicated the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable and debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out, or seek all possible options to flee the territory.

That brought to mind, to me, Giora Ireland, an Israeli [02:02:00] general who wrote a piece for Fathom, which is a journal, I should say, is affiliated to BICOM, the main pro Israel lobbying organization in Britain, which was cited in South Africa's case, alleging genocide, in which he set that out as a strategy, starve, stay and starve, or, um, and die or leave.

Um, and he's an advisor to Yov Galan. The defense minister. Is that I mean, is your do you think basically that now that's been the strategy from day one that the starting point is the entire population. We don't want them there. And how we get from them being there to not being there. That's where you know, the questions emerge.

What do you think? Well, you know, I mean, this is really the question, and I'm not sure we'll ever know for certain, uh, what the plans were and if there were any clear plans at the beginning, my own sense is that judging [02:03:00] by the general incompetence of army planning for this operation and the various voices that were raised, I think that there were pressures in one way or another.

I think there were people Meaning, I don't think that there was a clear plan from the beginning that everybody agreed on, but rather that there were various, uh, pressures, including, of course, the ideas by Giora Eiland. Um, the, the general idea, I think, was a combination of the goals that they had, uh, declared at the beginning, that they wanted to destroy Hamas and to free the hostages.

And that they wanted revenge and they wanted to flatten as much as Gaza as they could. This is, I think, the general outline that they had, but the operations, as they started rolling them out, and I think we talked about it last time, there was a certain [02:04:00] tactics, uh, that the IDF had used already in 2014.

That was scaled up to the whole of Gaza rather than to these more limited operation of 2014. And that means that in the areas in which you operate, you first of all destroy them. You destroy them by air bombardment, by shelling, by tank fire, by bulldozers, and then you move in. the infantry. So if you scale that up, uh, to saying I'm going to destroy Hamas entirely, then you are assuming already that you're going to destroy much of the area.

Now, as they were failing to do that, and as Hamas continued to fight, uh, I think increasingly the, those who were talking about taking over the whole thing, um, got the upper hand because had the army been more effective. And if, had it been able to, and I'm not sure it [02:05:00] was, but had it been more effective in, uh, accomplishing its goals, maybe there would have been fewer pressures.

But since, um, this was not going well, Uh, very slowly. Uh, I think those pressures built up and you can see that in the kind of policies that are being carried out right now. So a few weeks ago, there was a report that the whole northern third of Gaza. And this was a very detailed report with aerial photography and so forth.

That whole area has been flattened. Now there, there seem to be about 300, 000 people there, so most of the people have been kicked out, and most of the buildings have been destroyed, universities, houses, schools, uh, a new road has been paved, and army camps have been built there. Israeli army camps. Uh, now, whether this was the plan at the beginning, I'm not sure, but [02:06:00] as it is rolling out, this appears to be the case.

So if you try to connect this to the notion of, is it, uh, a, a premeditated genocidal plan or not, um, My own sense is that the whole thing was not premeditated, uh, but that it has become that. And so, in that sense, my evolving thinking has to do also with the evolving policy on the ground, and that by now, uh, conditions are such that if you look back at what has happened, you can see that over time, Um, this is what the IDF has accomplished.

And at some point, and I don't know that we'll ever know at which point, uh, this became, by and large, the strategy. Now, can it work? And I'm, I'm not sure. Uh, but it depends very much, uh, on outside [02:07:00] pressures. Um, as well as to some extent on internal Israeli politics, but internal Israeli politics right now is at a stalemate and Netanyahu has probably more power now than he did several months ago.

What you wrote actually made, it brought to mind what the International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor wrote in his application, um, for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, um, in which he set out. in detail. Um, well, he, he partly explained what the war crimes and crimes humanity alleged were in service of.

Uh, one of them was to collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza, whom they perceived as a threat to Israel. And I mean, if we go back to what, um, on the 9th of October, 2023, major general Gassan Alyan said, Israeli army coordinated government activities and territories. He [02:08:00] said, that Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified.

Human animals are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade in Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you'll get hell. Clearly no demarcation there. He means the entire civilian population. That's what he's talking about. Do you think that's what, you know, I mean, could you say whether or not there's a blueprint or not?

I mean, and, and lots of genocide throughout history clearly didn't have blueprints at all at the beginning. That's, I mean, we'll talk about that, but it was that this idea that the population, the civilian population collectively is held actually to be a threat that you can't demarcate, the enemy, military enemy, and the civilian population.

And that's where Israel starts with and then works backwards. Yeah. So, so first of all, um, there were many statements, um, not only by Hassan Ali and, but many others, of course, at the beginning, uh, that we should wipe them out, that there are [02:09:00] no uninvolved people, that everybody is involved somehow. Um, you add to that, the sort of rationale that the IDF is trying to sell that, well, they're using the civilian population as human shields.

Of course, if you operate in Gaza, there is no other way but to operate from within populated areas because it's a very small area, very densely populated. So anywhere you operate, there are civilians there. Uh, and so if you connect the Statements that were being made at the time. and the policies that have gradually rolled out, you see a logic there.

Uh, whether that logic was there at the beginning or not, as I said before, as a plan, um, that's not entirely clear. Uh, [02:10:00] the ICC, the, the prosecutor, was a bit wary of saying that too, and he really focused more on policies of deprivation of food, of hunger, because it was easier to prove that, right? Now, generally speaking, I think you're totally right.

That is, generally speaking, the problem, as it is seen by Israeli policymakers and the military, is that Gaza is an area that is full of, um, densely populated by Palestinians, mostly by refugees, uh, and that it is from that mass of population that, uh, as Israeli policy makers see it, um, uh, violence emanates toward Israel.

Uh, and how do you solve that issue? Now, obviously there are two ways, generally speaking, of doing that. One is political. [02:11:00] That is, you have to find some way of living side by side. The other is military. And if it's military, the military has not been able to resolve it. And this is not something that started this year or last year or in 2014.

This goes back, as I write in this piece, at least to 1956. That is that most of the Palestinians living in Gaza mostly descendants of Palestinians would live very close to Gaza in towns and villages in southern Israel, what is now southern Israel, northern Negev, southern Israel. And so if you don't find a political solution to this, You have to find a military solution to this and that military solution can be either to fence them in, which is what Israel has been trying to do.

And all this, um, [02:12:00] attempt by Netanyahu for years to bribe Hamas in a sense, to have money go to Hamas from Qatar so that Hamas could. run the business in Gaza. Um, and he could say that he cannot negotiate with Hamas because they are so, um, radical. And of course he can't negotiate with the people in the West Bank because it's so ineffective and therefore we can just manage things.

Uh, that, that kind of policy failed on October 7th. Uh, and so if you can't manage it and you don't want to politically resolve it. What is left? What is left is some kind of destruction. You have to flatten it. You have to debilitate the population. And if you can, you have to push it out. So the logic of this has always been there.

Uh, and it's [02:13:00] based on the, uh, on, on Israeli decision, which is not only by, by, uh, people like Netanyahu, he goes way back. He goes to people like Dayan, uh, Moshe Dayan in the 1950s. We cannot, uh, um, reverse things. We took over their land. Uh, and they know it and they will keep fighting us. And and then the question is, do we have a political solution to this or a military one?

And from the 1950s, the answer is a military one.

The UK’s refusal to ban arms exports to Israel - Today in Focus - Air Date 8-20-24

Mark Smith, this British diplomat is saying that the UK's arms sales to Israel may be making the country complicit with war crimes and possible breaches and humanitarian law. What exactly is he referring to here? He's referring to a variety of issues about the way Israel has responded to the Hamas attack on October the 7th.

He's referring to the blockages of humanitarian aid. He's referring to the, what he described as indiscriminate bombing [02:14:00] in Gaza. And he's also referring to the way in which leaders in Israel have openly expressed, in his view, genocidal intent, and that these are all issues that have been addressed by the international courts.

So for the UK to continue to sell arms to a country that has been found by the International Court of Justice, and more arguably by the International Criminal Court, guilty of all crimes, is, in his view, a breach not only of UK law, but of international law. How significant is it that a diplomat specialised in this area from the Foreign Office would take this view and then decide to resign from his position?

Well, I think it's significant because he's the first occasion we've known about dissent within the Foreign Office. It's been very well kept under wraps as to how the civil service have been viewing this over the last 10 months. He says that he's been raising this issue internally, including through the kind of formal mechanisms, as well [02:15:00] as in a letter to the current foreign secretary.

And largely he was receiving replies to the effect that, um, we note your concerns and, um, nothing more. So there is also going to be an issue to be discussed in the future about how the Foreign Office allows officials to make their dissent known and whether it is treated with any seriousness. But his resignation is the first by a UK Foreign Office official that has been parallel resignations been going on in the US State Department, including some quite high profile figures, but there's been nothing of this ilk inside the UK Foreign Office.

I raised it pretty much every level in the organization. That's my duty. And that would be quite normal. I think for public servants, we're very used to upholding the law. And so we would normally raise things internally. that we might have a question over, particularly if we have a [02:16:00] subject matter specialism as I do.

So, suffice it to say that any response was not satisfactory. Patrick, what's the nature of the UK's arms deal with Israel? What exactly do we export and how lucrative are these arms licenses? Well, there were some statistics that were produced by the previous government, and they showed that the UK had issued at least 108 arms export licenses to Israel since the Hamas attack on Israel on the 7th of October.

And the campaign against the arms trade, and these kind of statistics are very widely used, says that since, uh, 2008, the UK has granted arms export licenses that are worth 1 billion. 574 million pounds in total. But I think the amount of sales in the last year is down very considerably. Today marks a grim milestone for the world.

The people of Gaza are now grieving 40, 000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza's health ministry. [02:17:00] This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli defense forces. to comply with the rules of war. Patrick, what do we know about how these weapons exported from the UK to Israel are being used in this conflict?

Well, there is very little information about which arms have been used for what purpose. There was an attempt by the Foreign Office when, under pressure about the arms export licenses, they took a report. issued by Amnesty International, which had, I think, five or six specific episodes and incidents, which Amnesty said were particularly egregious.

And they wrote to the Israeli embassy and asked them to comment on those incidents. And the Israelis said they couldn't. respond, uh, about specific events and then gave a kind of general defense of its position. So there's been very little [02:18:00] tracing back of individual weapons and individual incidents.

It's very, very hard to do that. And also the complex nature of these sorts of supply chains, because it's about parts rather than the weapons themselves. Indeed, that's the case with the parts that the Brasiera Space supply for the F 35 jets that Israel uses. But I don't think, in a way, the whole of the case rests on the level of armed supplies.

There's also principles involved in terms of complying with. domestic legislation and international law and also the UK's international reputation. I think one can get lost slightly in the weeds of exactly what weapon and how many weapons have been sold. What, what does matter is whether we're continuing to do so as a matter of principle.

And I think it's one thing that's interesting out of this is there seems to be an attempt by the current government to see if there's a distinction that can be drawn between Arms export licenses for weapons that are used for offensive [02:19:00] purposes in Gaza and then weapons that are used for defensive purposes, for instance, to guard Israel against attack by Iran.

But whether that distinction is valuable or whether it can be made is one of the big issues that I think has to be discussed. So how does the UK compare with other countries that we know to be arming Israel? Well, we're a relatively minor player. The big player is obviously America, which has been through similar processes to try to judge whether any of its weapons are being used in breach of international humanitarian law.

Germany, Used to supply a large amount of weapons, but there's been again a big drop off since October the 7th. But America is the main exporter. The U. S. State Department also announced an additional 20 billion in arms sales to Israel for fighter jets, missiles, and tank ammunition, along with an additional aircraft carrier group.

How much international pressure [02:20:00] has there been to stop Israel getting these weapons from the U. S., the U. K. and Germany and others? Well, the reality is that there aren't that many countries that are saying that the U. S. should stop doing this. It's more that within each country, European and, uh, and within American politics, there is, you know, these very, very strong movements that are absolutely disgusted by what they've seen on their television screens and find it appalling that after 10 months, there still seems to be no end to this war.

SECTION D - JOURNALISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section D: Journalism.

Uncovering Settler Terrorism In West Bank | Jasper Nathaniel - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-24-24

JASPER NATHANIEL: The reality is in the West Bank, it's like, there's violence and destruction, and then sometimes they then sort of retroactively legitimize it with laws.

Like, a lot of these illegal outposts have been since recognized as settlements, which makes them legal. Under Israeli law. So like the law to a certain extent doesn't matter because they're either breaking the law. And then later it's being legitimized. They're breaking the law or they're not being convicted.

[02:21:00] Like 3 percent of violent settlers are ever actually convicted. Um, or they're, they're not breaking the law. They're, you know, being violent and destructive within the law. And I should also just say that like, What I write about in this article is that the man who shot Zechariah, Yitzhak Nir, um, his father was, uh, a convicted terrorist.

He shot up an Islamic university, killed three people, wounded 29 others with his brother. And they were part of this, um, movement of really extreme religious fanatical settlers who were very clear in what their aim was. In, uh, being in the West Bank, they were there to start a war with the Palestinians that would end in either the death of all the Palestinians or the Palestinians expulsion.

So it's not as if they were there to try to, you know, live there and have a good life and live, you know, potentially in, like, you know, side by side, like, they knew exactly what they were doing. Um, they were building outposts [02:22:00] in places that they knew were going to cause problems. They were, you know, instigating violence and, um, you know, that's exactly what's happened.

Of course, it's like, there's this constant violence now. 

SAM SEDER: All right. We just jumped over something though, that I think is like really sort of what your piece really captures. Um, you named the Jewish settler. I mean, we see the video, we see who shot, uh, Zachariah. Um, the, the, the guy shows up when Zachariah comes out of the hospital, he's outside the door, they know it, I mean, this is the part that I think is like, sort of like the, you know, as if it's like, uh, you know, uh, sort of our classic sort of mafia mob, uh, gangland thing, uh, but they're, it's like, uh, they're all on, you know, not literally on meth, but they're acting, uh, like it on some level, but the point is everybody knows who it is.

And so, I mean, take it from there because this is the part that I don't think that people [02:23:00] fully understand. You know, we hear the U. S. government is, um, uh, you know, uh, making what I think is just sort of like platitudinous, um, um, uh, issue out of, uh, settler violence in the West Bank. And supposedly this is, I mean, this isn't even at the level of an apartheid regime where there is no, there doesn't seem to be any accountability whatsoever, even in the context of a system that has 2 separate laws, like theoretically, it's still not legal for a settler to attempt to kill and shoot Uh, just a, you know, a Palestinian civilian for no reason whatsoever.

But so how, like, how is this guy identified and what has been the process. Uh, of, of like, uh, has he been reported? Like, why is he now able to continue to terrorize his [02:24:00] family? 

JASPER NATHANIEL: Let me just first clarify that we don't know that Yitzhak Nier himself has been back to Tawani, but other settlers from the outpost have, have been back.

Um, but okay. So, so this was also one of the most. to me, which again, in hindsight, especially after seeing what's happening in Gaza, it's, it's like, of course there's no accountability, but to me, it's like, it's on video. Clearly there's no, um, you know, legitimate claim of self defense, like how, how could this guy still be walking free?

So basically, um, this is what happened. So this was on October 13th. It was, you know, just, just under a week after October 7th, the, um, civilian security squad at this outpost had just been armed. By the military, so they were given assault rifles, American assault rifles, I should say, um, and military uniforms that they could, you know, be like conscripted into this war against, um, the, the, the Palestinians really.

And, um, [02:25:00] what, what they did is, you know, they, they went down, um, uh. They would, the Yitzhak here would later claim that he had a report from Shin Bet, which is the, from the Shin Bet, which is one of the intelligence agencies in Israel, that there was an attack coming from Attuani, which is almost certainly bunk.

Um, there's, there's no armed resistance in this village. I should say, like, these are farmers and shepherds. There's no guns here. There's really no, there's no violence. Um, so they go down, he claims that after they got this report, they heard a commotion, um, and they went down for, you know, in their capacity as the armed security.

Um, he goes down and he shoots Zachariah. And if you watch the video, you see them sort of like hiding behind a boulder, as if they're in war, when again, they've just entered this complete peaceful farming village, like hiding behind a boulder, coming out with their guns, And he shoots Zachariah and then he's called back by a [02:26:00] guy in military fatigues again as if they're in war So like to a certain extent they're cosplaying here They're pretending that they're in a war when they're actually just shooting unarmed people in a in a farming village um, but what happens is immediately after And I should say like just getting zachariah to the hospital was a debacle because of all the roadblocks um, and he almost bled out in the You In the car on the way there, they couldn't even get an ambulance to him.

But what happens is the police, um, according to the court documents, the police go, um, to investigate the next day, they immediately identify Yitzhak Nir as the man who shot him. I don't know if that was from the video or if, you know, somebody just outed him, but like they immediately knew it was him. Um, he told them that, uh, Zachariah intended to throw a stone at him, intended to throw a stone.

How he knew that, you know, anybody's guess. You can watch the video yourself and see if it appears that he intended to throw a stone. [02:27:00] Um, but that's what he says. The police, um, again, according to court documents, they, they take away his weapon. Um, but they don't do anything else. They don't take them into the station.

They don't investigate. So then the, that same day, um, Zachariah, who is, you know, he's in the ICU at this point, um, Really touch and go. His father and brother go to the local police station, uh, which is, you know, Israeli military police and they try to file a complaint and the police say the victim has to come in here and file a complaint himself.

A criminal complaint. And they say, well, you know, the victim, as you can see in this video here, which has a million views or something, um, was shot in the abdomen is, you know, potentially going to die in the hospital. They said, well, he has to come here himself and file a complaint. So they said, well, why don't you go to the hospital and, um, take, take his testimony.

They refused to do it. So again, according to the court documents, there's a five month investigation, um, and [02:28:00] then no arrests are made. The case is closed. So then finally, once Zachariah is well enough to travel, this is just in July. So, you know, nine months later, um, he and his lawyer actually do go, he and his attorney, who's an Israeli Jewish guy, um, go to the police station and file that criminal complaint.

So, uh, allegedly the case has been reopened, but I haven't been able to get any details on if there's another investigation going on. I should say they also did get a restraining order on, um, near. So he is. For 180 days, not allowed to go into a 20, um, and not allowed to carry a weapon. Now, why he should ever be allowed to go there is, is, you know, anybody's.

Yes. But so that's where we, that's where it stands today. 

SAM SEDER: How, how, how indicative, um, lastly of like, this is, you know, one individual story and people can say, well, the, you know, there was a bureaucratic snafu. How indicative of, is this, uh, you know, based upon your having spent, um, [02:29:00] uh, fairly considerable amount of time over the past eight months there, I guess.

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah. I mean, I'll, I'll just put it this way. Um, when, when I was traveling around with my fixer, uh, uh, You know, we kept meeting these people who had been maimed by, um, bullets by IDF bullets or settler bullets, or they had lost a son or a father or somebody to the IDF, and I would ask them, you know, what was, what, what was your recourse after?

Who did you call? What was the investigation? What was the, the, what were the proceedings like? And Zaed would sort of smile. Uh, my, my fixer and then he would translate and they would look at him like they didn't understand the question because just the concept of there actually being any recourse against this violence from soldiers and settlers is so absurd that people don't even, they didn't really even understand the question that I was asking.

So, so this is incredibly typical. His attorney, his attorney said it himself. Um, this happens all the time. It's happened since [02:30:00] well before October 7th. It got worse in 2022 when, you know, this new Israeli government came together and, and further emboldened this violence. But yeah, the only difference here is that this was caught on video, but otherwise, you know, this happens every single day.

Emmys Defend Nomination Of Gaza Journalist Bisan - Novara Media - Air Date 8-22-24

 That documentary was awarded a prestigious Peabody Award for excellent journalism earlier this year. And in July, it was nominated for an Emmy Award in the category Outstanding Hard News Feature Story Short Form.

But not everyone was happy about it being recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This is from a write up in film industry paper, The Wrap. A pro Israel non profit called the Creative Community for Peace, or CCFP, wrote a letter to the Academy calling on it to rescind Basson's nomination over her alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The rap goes on to say this, CCFP, a pro Israel non profit organization, [02:31:00] discovered ALDA's long standing ties to PFLP, which has been a designated terrorist organization in the U. S. since 1997. The journalist regularly spoke at PFLP rallies and hosted events to honor Palestinians injured or killed in violent confrontations with Israeli soldiers.

In 2018, the PFLP explicitly referred to ALDA as a member of the Progressive Youth Union of the organization. And CCFP director Ari Ingle told The Wrap this. The ME's decision to honour someone with clear ties to a US designated terrorist group is inexcusable and should have never happened. It would be legitimising a terrorist organisation.

If the Emmys don't change course and rescind this nomination, they will be glorifying someone who is a member of an organization that has carried out numerous aircraft hijackings, participated in the October 7 massacre in Israel, carried out waves of bombings on markets and restaurants, and murdered innocent women and children.

The Emmys cannot allow their prestigious [02:32:00] award show to be hijacked by terrorists and instead should continue to promote peace and tolerance through the arts. And Ingle went on to say this, The entertainment community, including the National Television Academy, should use its voice to help build bridges for peace and understanding.

However, the Emmy nomination of Besan Aouda, someone with documented terrorism ties, is unfathomably irresponsible. With it, the Academy is condoning violence and helping to normalize PFLP terrorism around the globe. Now, more than 150 people signed that letter, including Will and Grace star Debra Messing and former CEO of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing.

Now, look, we can't verify those supposed links, but what we do know is that the PFLP, a revolutionary socialist group, has at times been opposed to both the Hamas government in Gaza as well as the more moderate Fatah party. Its members have included Palestinian liberation icon Leila Khaled, and yes, the group has committed acts in breach of international law, [02:33:00] including attacks on civilians.

Now, the academy has responded to the letter from the CCFP with its president, Adam Sharpe, saying this. The news and documentaries Emmys have recognised excellence in television journalism for nearly half a century. The honoured programmes and reports have taken viewers to the front lines of every world conflict, probed political and cultural divides, and sought to illuminate even the darkest circumstances.

Some of these works have been controversial, giving a platform to voices that certain viewers may find objectionable or even abhorrent, but all have been in the service of the journalistic mission to capture every facet of the story. Natas is aware of reports cited in your letter and initially surfaced by a communications consultant in the region that appear to show a then teenaged Bissan Alda speaking at various PFLP associated events between six and nine years ago.

Natas has been unable to corroborate these reports, nor has it been able to date to surface any [02:34:00] evidence of more contemporary or active involvement by Alda with a PFLP related event. organization. The academy also in that letter rejected the request from the CCFP, meaning Bissan and Al Jazeera are still in contention for the prestigious TV award.

Helena, Bissan's journalism has opened a lot of eyes, a lot of people's eyes, to what's happening in Gaza. It's been incredibly important in many ways. So what do you make of this story? I mean, there's a large level of hypocrisy here as well, where of course, as you said, there have been plenty of attacks that the PFLP have done historically.

There have been violations of international law. The IDF, they violate international law all of the time. Do you think there would have been the same reaction if somebody else had previously served in the IDF? was being given an award somewhere else. Do we ever, ever, ever see anyone wanting, anyone being removed from a potential category for any kind of award show off and being acknowledged in terms of the [02:35:00] things that they do with for the arts?

Do we ever, ever have these people, their awards rescinded because they have previously served in the IDF? Of course we don't. Of course we don't. And even then, like she has, been speaking at rallies. She allegedly has links to a social movement that has links to the PFLP. Has she ever been a member of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades?

No, they have no evidence for these things. Again, we've got to separate the fact that the PFLP are a political organization and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are their military wing, who are the ones who have previously engaged in violations of international law, some terror attacks as well on Israeli soil.

For example, but the last claimed terror attack by the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades was in 2015 anyway, before any of these claims about Bisan were even talked about. One point that they made in the letter too, was saying, oh well this is a group that was involved in the October 7th massacre in Israel. Um, Well, whilst again, there were plenty of violations of international law and war crimes that [02:36:00] were committed by the Azad Din al Qassam brigades and the al Quds brigades on October the 7th, there's been no evidence, at least not that I could find, that there were any terror attacks or any violations of international law committed by the PFLP's Abu Ali Mustafa Brigade specifically on October the 7th.

Even NGO Monitor, a pro Israel front group that is used to smear anti Zionist groups, even NGO Monitor couldn't provide any evidence at all that the PFLP did anything that was targeted at civilians specifically, let's say, on October the 7th. There are plenty of videos of the PFLP's militant wing attacking military targets, but that is, of course, a legitimate target for people attacking an occupying force under international law.

And if that's all the NGO monitor has, like, again, a pro Zionist a pro Zionist group used to smear anti Zionist groups, then that's not really particularly good evidence that it's now, is it, that they participated in October the 7th massacres? Because we definitely, there's no evidence that's been [02:37:00] provided, at least not that I could find in terms of this.

So using this pretty weak, this pretty weak evidence to be able to remove Bissan's incredibly important journalism from such prestigious awards, it strikes to me, like, that it's desperation to ensure that we do not actually have proper credit being given to somebody who's done a lot of good work to expose the failure of American foreign relations with Israel at a time where this should be being put under as much scrutiny as possible.

And it seems like some people want these, what the hands to be washed of this, rather than for everybody to see this in the open and have the people who have exposed it rewarded, at least given recognition for the hard work that they have done in exposing America and Israel's crimes.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in—I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from All In with Chris Hayes, a montage of [02:38:00] doctors speaking out against genocide, The Majority Report, Democracy Now!, TRT World, Al Jazeera English, Owen Jones, Today in Focus, and Novara Media. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers and all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the [02:39:00] discussion. 

So, coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay! and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.

Air Date 8/27/2024

Full Notes Page

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Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

People feel a lot of ways about immigration. Sometimes it's fear of the other, other times it's not about the people, but just dismay over a broken system. The validity of these concerns and others certainly exist on a spectrum. Some are utter bullshit. And others aren't. Left-wing political parties tend to do a terrible job at creating immigration policy, in that they just don't do it at all. While the right wing is all too happy to create an implement terrible policy. And given a choice between action and inaction, regardless of how misguided the proposed action, people, and importantly, voters with concerns, will choose action. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include The Brian Lehrer Show, Today Explained, The Times from the LA Times, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Real [00:01:00] News Network, and This Week in Immigration. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more on four topics: 

- Section A: the UK Riots 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: -Section B: California Proposition 187 

-Section C: Trump vs. Harris, and 

-Section D: Migrants.

The UK's Far Right Riots - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 8-8-24

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Can you just start by explaining, giving us a little brief on exactly what happened in Southport? Really tragic. Such a sad incident. What can you share about this knife attack?

MAX COLCHESTER: Essentially, a week ago, a 17-year-old boy walked into a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club with a knife and indiscriminately stabbed young children in that club, killing three young girls. He was then tackled to the ground and arrested by police. In the aftermath of this tragic killing spree, the police did not disclose the [00:02:00] assailant's name because in the UK, you cannot disclose someone who's alleged to have committed a crime, the name of them, if they're under the age of 18.

In that information vacuum, stepped a huge misinformation on social media where someone came up with the idea that the assailant was a Muslim who'd recently arrived in the UK as an undocumented migrant and was known to security services here. Now, this was false. The person who allegedly did this was not born abroad, was born in the UK, the son of migrants from Rwanda, a largely Christian country.

Nevertheless, this took hold and within a day of this tragic killing, far-right people online were whipping up anger. Soon there were protests in [00:03:00] Southport against the police and against the local mosque. That lit a fuse, really. In the following days, we saw looting, arson, attacks on police in a dozen or so cities across the UK in some of the worst violence we've seen, really, here since at least 2011.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Now, just to back up a second, the motive of the attacker, do we know what that was in any respect?

MAX COLCHESTER: No.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: No, we don't know what the--

MAX COLCHESTER: We don't know what the motive of the attacker was. The police have said it's not terrorism-related, so it seems not to have been inspired by any particular ideology, but that's all we know at the moment.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Then the spread of this misinformation that this was a migrant, new migrant, how did this spread so quickly online? Was it just the nature of bad actors on the Internet [00:04:00] and then people jumping on that?

MAX COLCHESTER: Well, it's a toxic combination of A, far-right commentators who've been allowed back onto a lot of platforms, notably X, formally, Twitter, in recent years by Elon Musk, and have built up large followings there were tweeting this out aggressively and we're using and piggybacking off this rumor to say, "We need to reclaim our streets. We need to protect our society from foreign influences. We need to fight back." This was also being parroted by bots run by state actors in Russia and so forth.

It did tap into an underlying sentiment in some quarters of the population that immigration had run out of control in the UK.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Sure.

MAX COLCHESTER: Because you have to remember, there is a real problem here, or a real issue here, which is that the government essentially has allowed [00:05:00] huge amounts of migration in the last two years, up to 2.5 million people have come and settled here and has not found a way to stop people coming and settling illegally in the UK by sailing in small boats across from France. That's one of the rumors after this killing was that the person who did this had arrived in the UK on one of these small boats from France. You had this toxic brew going on and it just span out of control.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: You have this tragic incident, the misinformation follows, and then the violence. Were you out in the streets? Did you witness some of these scenes of violence and vandalism?

MAX COLCHESTER: The violence was really quite indiscriminate. That's what's really shocking here, was that it was against-- it wasn't even that targeted. There were libraries being burnt down, police stations being burnt down, shops. It was opportunistic and it was being committed by people who had nothing. Not all of them [00:06:00] are far-right activists. A lot of them were bored teenagers on their summer vacations, or disaffected locals who got carried away.

It really did light a tinderbox, this tragedy. It's taken a long time to start to bring under control. The one thing, if there is a positive to come out of this, it's that last night we expected another evening of mass unrest with 100 or so protests planned across Britain. Actually what transpired was that there were protests, but they were counter-protests, there were anti-racism protests where thousands of people filled the streets of cities across the country to say, "We don't stand for this and we're not going to put up with it. Stop racism and stop the far-right."

As a result, there wasn't any unrest, which is hopefully going to take the energy out of some of this and bring an end to this period of violence.

Riots in the UK - Today, Explained - Air Date 8-7-24

ROBYN VINTER: Well. Some of the protests are [00:07:00] kind of local to a situation. But there are kind of broad themes. You know, you hear the phrase we want our country back. 

 <CLIP> 

PROTESTORS: We want our country back… we want our country back… 

ROBYN VINTER: A lot of it is about anti… a kind of broader anti-immigration sentiment. There was a feeling – definitely in Rotherham, where I was, where the rioters attacked the hotel housing asylum seekers – that asylum seekers were getting better treatment in the UK than British people were… 

<CLIP> 

PROTESTOR: It’s our country, and we’re gettin’ pushed out. I understand how the Native Indians felt in America. Now because that’s what the white man did when he pushed ‘em out. Only it’s the white man gettin’ pushed outta this country. 

ROBYN VINTER: You know, people were saying, ‘Well, I have to pay my bills. I have to put a roof over my head. I have to work. And these people are coming here and they're living in a hotel and they're not working, not doing anything. They don't have to worry about paying bills.’ There was also – which I found very sinister – there were rumors going [00:08:00] around in certain communities that certain men had been following women home. Or, the rumor in Rotherham was that two women had been raped by asylum seekers and that the authorities had covered it up. And obviously that, you know, for me, that – as a journalist – that would be a very good story if I could stand that up. And I'm just completely unable to find any evidence that that's the case. But it sort of doesn't matter because it, it goes around on social media. People hear it. Everybody has heard… heard it from somebody else. You know, nobody's the person that it's happened to. 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: And those who are in the streets rioting, injuring police officers, destroying public property. What are the rioters saying about what their intent is?

ROBYN VINTER: Yeah. It's interesting, because I think there are kind of different groups involved in these riots. So there are the kind of really traditional old school far right. We used to have a group in the UK called the National Front – well, it still exists, but it's not as significant as it was in the [00:09:00] 1970s and 1980s – that was a very strong far-right group. A racist group. And so there are some of those kind of people, but there are a lot of younger people. And I think it would be naive to say that they're… that they’re only coming for a fight and they're only coming… You know, in the same way that that we might have football hooliganism in the UK, you know, some people will say that they're they're coming for that, they're coming for the sport of the riot and they're coming to, you know, exert themselves and to, to get something out of their system. There may be a few cases of that – I think there probably are a few cases of that – But there's also, you know, the young people that I heard in these riots chanting things, you know, were saying a lot of the same racist stuff as the older people. So you know, maybe people haven't thought too much about it. Maybe they're not very political people, but, you know, they they might still use a racist slur because they can and because it makes no difference to them and because they don't really think about the harm that those things can cause.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: [00:10:00] This, this all got started with a rumor that the boy who had stabbed these, these little girls was an immigrant. Have rumors continued to contribute to what's going on? Either rumors or deliberate misinformation – sometimes called disinformation, I suppose.

ROBYN VINTER: I think disinformation and misinformation has had a really pivotal role in the last seven days. 

<CLIP> 

FARAGE: It seems – whenever these things happen – there is a reluctance to tell us the full truth. <fade under> 

ROBYN VINTER: There have been a lot of deliberate instigators on social media.

<CLIP> 

TIMES RADIO: Elon Musk has actually said on his social media platform X that civil war is inevitable in the UK and he’s also said that the reason for these riots is a lack of integration between different communities… <fade under> 

ROBYN VINTER: You know, a lot of people, actually, who wouldn't perpetrate violence themselves because they don't want to put themselves at risk and they don't put their families at risk, but will easily goad other people into doing so. 

<CLIP> 

TOMMY ROBINSON: That’s what you’re [00:11:00] seeing. Huge resentment, built up over years if not decades of being treated like shit by your government. And a two-class policing system <fade under> 

ROBYN VINTER: Something I haven't mentioned so far as well is there’s something that the far right kind of instigators on social media are calling “two-tier policing.” And that's something where they believe that white British people are getting worse treatment, they're getting more heavy handed treatment by the police than, you know, Muslims or other groups of people.

<CLIP> 

FARAGE: We use a softer approach on some groups than others… 

REPORTER: Ok. And your example for that is? 

FARAGE: Well, I think Black Lives Matter, the way that was policed was very interesting. I mean, people tearing down statues and chucking them in the dock, and police just standing by and watching, and I think if you contrast… 

REPORTER: Those people were arrested. 

ROBYN VINTER: And so that's a huge… I wouldn't maybe go as far as saying conspiracy theory, but it's kind of a huge talking point [00:12:00] among the far right. And even today we heard Elon Musk describe Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “Two-tier Keir,”... 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Mmm. 

ROBYN VINTER: …obviously referencing this nonsensical and non-existent idea of two-tier policing.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: How is… Keir Starmer is just about brand new in the office. This would be his first real crisis – and it is a real crisis. How is he perceived to be handling this and how is he handling this?

ROBYN VINTER: Keir Starmer is a very interesting character because, when we had some riots, a very kind of different set of riots in kind of urban areas and London and other cities in 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions. So kind of like your chief prosecutor, essentially making decisions about how these rioters would be handled by the courts, how they'd be prosecuted. And his method of prosecuting was bringing [00:13:00] people in quickly, prosecuting them quickly. So there were late night courts running, courts running over the weekend in order to process the large numbers of, of rioters. And so, so far we're seeing something very similar to, to back then he's, you know, he he's very keen on clamping down immediately on the rioters. And you can kind of see the method in that as well.

<CLIP> 

STARMER: Be in no doubt: those that have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law. The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow, and convictions will follow. I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder, whether directly or those whipping up this action online and then running away themselves. 

ROBYN VINTER: You know, when people start to see the large sentences that people will be getting for attacking police and for setting fires, [00:14:00] they're going to be more likely to think twice before they get involved in the violence. 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: I want to go back to something you said at the beginning of our conversation, which is: We are expecting more of this. More protests. Potentially more rioting, potentially more injuries, potentially more clashes with police. The key point you are making is that this does not appear to be over. What should we take from all of this? What does this tell us more broadly about what is happening in the UK right now?

ROBYN VINTER: I think this year, this summer of 2024, is going to be defined, I think, as being a summer of, of rioting. We may have seen the worst of it. That, that could obviously be famous last words, but one thing we do know, obviously, in the UK is: when the weather gets worse, we're not going to see people out on the streets in the same way as we do over the summer.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Mm. 

ROBYN VINTER: We have very short summers in the UK, so you know, we're talking about weeks of this, not months of [00:15:00] this, from what I'm able to gather. And so although the riots, I think, will start to die down in the next couple of weeks the sentiment will not go away. And I think it's something that's going to… It's going to take as long as it took to kind of build it up as it is to dissipate it. 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Mm. 

ROBYN VINTER: And I don't have any answers about what we can do to kind of improve that sentiment. And, you know, that's… It’s something that I feel very worried about. And I feel… although we, we in the UK rarely descend into any kind of real nationwide violence, you know, there's – people from abroad have been saying that, ‘Oh, you know, it's going to end in a civil war.’ And it's, you know, that's absurd. But, we do have to worry about… about this.

 SCORING 

Introducing 'Battle of 187' week! - The Times Essential news from the L.A. Times - Air Date 7-19-21

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Take a look around the California of 2019. The state is a beacon for progressive politics in the US, a land of environmentalism and [00:16:00] multiculturalism, where vegans and Priuses roam, and taco trucks stand on every corner. And it's the center of the hashtag resistance to President Trump and his policies. 

NEWS CLIP: The Trump administration and California are swearing off again. 

California is vowing to take the administration to court. 

After the Trump administration announced that the 2020 census will include a question about citizenship, the state of California announced that it would sue to challenge that decision.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Democrats control both chambers of the state capital with super majorities. They hold all offices of California's executive branch. Even Orange County, a place Ronald Reagan once described as where [in comic Reagan voice] "all the good Republicans go to die", is going Democrat. 

But it wasn't always this way. California was once something of a red state, or at least a purple one. It gave the US Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. 

RONALD REGAN: When people need a [00:17:00] little sunshine in their lives, and a feel for the optimism that fills the soul of this beautiful country, then I can assure them they'll find it in Orange County. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In 1994, California also gave us Proposition 187. It was one of the harshest laws targeting immigrants in modern US history. And, that same year, the state gave us this ad. 

POLITICAL AD: They keep coming. Two million illegals in California. The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: It was a campaign spot for Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican running for re election. That wannabe scary voice plays over grainy footage of people sprinting across the US-Mexico border like it was some 5K run. And then the ad ends with this really hopeful, angelic music as Pete Wilson promises to crack down on "them". 

PETE WILSON: I'm suing to force the federal government to control the borders. Enough is enough. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Yet 25 years later, [00:18:00] Proposition 187 and Pete Wilson made the Golden State bluer than indigo. You're probably saying, Wait, what? How? But that's what this series is all about. About the time in 1994 that California Republicans went to war against illegal immigration and lost. Bad. And how the legacy of those battles from 25 years ago influences America even today. Because before President Trump, there was Proposition 187. 

DONALD TRUMP: Illegal immigration is going to stop. It's dangerous. It's terrible. We either have a border or we don't. And if we don't have a border, we don't have a country. Remember that.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Now, let's begin our story. We're in fall 1993. Dr. Dre and Ice Cube are [00:19:00] bumping on the radio in Southern California. The whole state is still reeling from Rodney King and the LA riots. National pundits say the California dream is over. And in the pretty suburban town of Yorba Linda, Orange County, Proposition 187 is about to be born.

Yorba Linda is Nixon country, literally. He was born here. Big suburban tract homes that owners try to pass off as if they're in old Mexico, with the tiled roof and street names in Spanish. Not many Mexicans around here though. Just saying. 

Hi, Barbara.

BARBARA KILEY: Hello! Yes.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Gustavo Arellano, with LA TImes. 

BARBARA KILEY: Hi, how are you?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Barbara and Bob Kiley love here, in a two story home with 1980s-era tan carpet and fluffy couches.

They're out of the game now. But for years, they managed local Republican campaigns as political consultants. They've worked together for decades and can usually finish each other's sentences and stories. I'm visiting Barbara and Bob because they ran the 187 campaign. You could say [00:20:00] they're 187's unlikely godparents.

Unlikely because... 

BARBARA KILEY: We actually did not see illegal immigration as a big problem for us. We live in a nice community. We didn't see it, but we did have a friend by the name of Ron Prince, and Ron was really looking to get involved. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Ron Prince plays a big part in our story. Lanky, with bushy eyebrows and a comb over, he was a gadfly in local Republican politics. 

BARBARA KILEY: He wanted to do a statewide proposition on anything. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In California, anyone who gets enough valid signatures, around 400,000 of them at that time, can place a proposition on the ballot about anything. It's a kind of direct democracy you don't see in most states. So, Ron Prince, according to Barbara, wanted to think of an idea that might actually have a chance of passing. 

BARBARA KILEY: He'd come here in his cowboy boots, and we'd give him a yellow legal pad and a pen. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: And they'd tell him, go find an issue people really care about. 

BARBARA KILEY: And ding dong, on the doorbell on Saturday morning, [00:21:00] he said, I think I have one. I just got ripped off by an illegal alien, and he was supposed to be a contractor, and he ripped me off. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: So here's what happened. Ron said a contractor he was working with ripped him off for half a million dollars. According to Ron, the guy was an illegal Canadian. Later on, reporters would track down the contractor, and it would turn out he was a legal resident.

But anyways, Ron thinks: illegal immigration, that's a winner. And he goes out with his legal pad to a grocery store up the block from the Kiley's home and asks people a simple question. Do you believe illegal immigration is a problem in California? 

BARBARA KILEY: He comes back with pages of signatures. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: On that first time.

BARBARA KILEY: On that first time. You know, Ron, I think you got something here.

The Battle of 187 ends — and the war begins - The Times Essential news from the L.A. Times - Air Date 7-20-21

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Whether or not Pete Wilson regrets 187, a lot of people will tell you that it had profound effects on California, especially on Latinos in California. [00:22:00] In 1994, Gerardo Correa was a high school student who had a political awakening when 187 landed on the ballot. His entire life, he had assumed that he was just like anyone else in California. As American as a bald eagle. The night 187 passed, Gerardo realized in the eyes of his White neighbors, he'd never be American enough. So, he vowed to do something about it. 

GERARDO CORREA: And for me, it really was about going to school. Like, I'm gonna go to college. Like, I was going, hell or high water, I'm going. And I'm gonna graduate. And it was all started from there. Like, I found myself, if you will. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Now, in the California of 2019, Gerardo's an assistant principal at Saddleback High School in Santana. He's of average build, grey at the temples, and always peppy. During our interview, I asked him a question I've been thinking about a lot.

Do you think ultimately 187 won? 

GERARDO CORREA: Well, I think it initially won, obviously, because it passed, but no, it didn't. It lost, and it lost in so many different aspects. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Like which [00:23:00] ones? 

GERARDO CORREA: Well, look at the health of the Republican Party in California today.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Every year, Gerardo visits the state capital in Sacramento with the latest class of the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project. It's the group he belonged to when he first heard about 187. Gerardo's now president of the non-profit. 

GERARDO CORREA: When I went to the conference in '94, I sat in the assembly floor and I remember seeing two, maybe three, Spanish surnames. But now I went back and I counted 36 names. So, you talk about impact, you talk about a change. I mean, I'm looking at this board of legislators. I'm like, there it is. It's right there. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Gloria Molina has a similar take on 187. 

GLORIA MOLINA: We became voters. We started changing things. People like my mother stood there and filled out her application for citizenship and she became a citizen. So it changed [00:24:00] people's minds immediately and everybody woke up and said, It passed. What happened? It shouldn't have passed. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 187 changed Kevin de Leon, too. He's one of the activists who organized a big LA march in October, 1994. 

KEVIN DE LEON: The thought that politicians could actually tear at the fabric of who we are as a great country got me to thinking, along with my colleagues, maybe one of us should run for office. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In 2014, Kevin becomes the first Latino California Senate president in 130 years.

KEVIN DE LEON: My political awakening was Prop 187. There's no question about it. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: The prevailing narrative is that Wilson's embrace of 187 doomed the Republican Party in California forever after. Wilson and his defenders reject that, of course. But just ask the Latinos who lived through 187 and are still around. Ask people like me. Better yet, ask California's Latino Legislative Caucus. To coincide with the 25th [00:25:00] anniversary of Prop 187, they're releasing a short film titled Thank you, Pete Wilson.

POLITICAL AD: Thank you, Governor Wilson. Now, on this 25th anniversary of Proposition 187, we have a roadmap for the entire country to follow. A roadmap on how to fight back against racist, xenophobic policies and an opportunist leader, one person at a time. [different people saying thank you] Thank you, Pete Wilson. Thank you, Pete Wilson. Thank you, Pete Wilson. Thank you, Pete Wilson. Oh, and happy anniversary.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Savage. But if Pete Wilson and the state GOP met their Waterloo with 187, the proposition didn't suffer the same fate nationally. It inspired dozens of states and cities to craft similar measures. 

NEWSCLIP: On its first hearing in early December, the Costa Mesa City Council voted 3 to 2 to become the first city to have its cops enforce immigration law.

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma Legislature passed what many consider one of the [00:26:00] toughest bills in the country aimed at discouraging illegal immigration, making it a felony to shelter or transport an illegal immigrant. 

In one Virginia county, a proposed measure would require all county agencies to check on immigration status, including police, schools, libraries, hospitals, clinics, swimming pools, and summer camps.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 187 has also manifested itself in the White House. And President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric sounds a lot like Pete Wilson's of 25 years ago. 

DONALD TRUMP: As we speak, the Democrat Party Is openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders, and overwhelm our nation. That's what's happening.

They beat us at the border, people are flowing through, drugs are coming across, pouring across. 

They're giving us their worst people.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: What do 187's architects think about all this? We don't know what Ron Prince thinks. He has no [00:27:00] listed address or phone numbers. Barbara Kiley said she'd forward my request to Ron for an interview, but I never heard back from either of them. In any case, Barbara and her husband, they'll take Trump. 

BARBARA COE: I don't have to like Trump, but I like what he does. And we elected him and Bob and I voted for him. We needed a junkyard dog. We needed somebody who could repo your car and not even think about it the next day. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Peter Nunez is also a fan. At least when it comes to the president and immigration. He sees Trump's election as proof that most Americans want tougher immigration policies. Policies like 187. 

PETER NUNEZ: Nixon used to talk about the silent majority. Uh, I think that silent majority still exists and that's why Trump got elected. And immigration was a big part of that. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 187 creators like Núñez and Barbara Coe have had a big voice in the country's anti-immigration movement over the past 25 years. Nunez's group, the Center for Immigration Studies, and its sister group, [00:28:00] FAIR, now have Trump's ear on immigration issues. 

For Californians who fought 187, it's déjà vu, all over again. Or maybe it's even worse. Just like Wilson, Trump bashed immigrants, and won. I asked Gerardo Correa what he thought about that. 

It seems, at least right now on the national scale, that's a playbook that will win just like it did in '94.

GERARDO CORREA: Yeah. And I think it will have some momentum, and I think he's gonna get a lot of support by it, but I think time is what's gonna hurt them because demographics are changing 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In the end, those of us shaped by 187 believe that Trump, just like Wilson, shall pass. 

When I covered a 2016 Donald Trump rally in Orange County, I saw and heard a lot of the hostility from his supporters that I remember from the 187 days. Hell, I was half expecting those White boys from Anaheim High to start yelling at me again. But I also saw young Latinos protesting Trump while waving Mexican flags. My generation needed [00:29:00] 187 and Wilson to jolt us into activism, and now this generation has Trump. 

This awakening isn't just in California either. Anthony Rendon is the state's current Speaker of the Assembly. He sees other states going through the same kind of demographic changes that California went through back in the 90s. 

ANTHONY RENDON: I remember I was in North Carolina, like four or five years ago, just driving around eating barbecue. And the only things on the radio were, it was Spanish language radio stations and Rush LImbaugh. And I remember thinking like, Wow, this is, something's got to pop, something's got to happen here, right? 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Something has happened. Latinos have organized in many of the places that have attempted to pass laws like 187. 

DEMONSTRATORS: People want to know! People want to know! 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In Arizona, the so-called "Show me your papers" law, SB 1070, seems to have backfired. Now, Arizona is looking more and more like [00:30:00] a purple state. 

Anthony Rendon, the Assembly Speaker, thinks a lot about all these demographic changes and what they mean for the country. 

ANTHONY RENDON: I have a chief of staff who's White and she kind of talks a lot about being a Californian. And she says, you know, the White people in the rest of the country are going through what we went through in the nineties. And she said, from the perspective of a White person, I can tell you that things are better now, and the food tastes better, too. 

RNC & ”Migrant Crime”- Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 7-25-24

DONALD TRUMP: We have to stop the invasion into our country that's killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. 

GREG ABBOTT: Biden has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists. 

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: We are facing an unprecedented invasion of millions of [00:31:00] illegal aliens across our southern border.

JIM CHELTON: It looks like and it feels like an invasion, because it is. 

TED CRUZ: We are facing an invasion on our southern border. Not figuratively; a literal invasion. 

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: I do not like that man, Ted Cruz. I do not like his toxic views. I do not like his nasty speeches. I do not like the shit he preaches. I do not like him when he fishes. I do not like him when he kisses. Pulling off that beard he ain't, that man, Ted Cruz, looks like a taint. 

And I will say I know the Republican Party gets a lot of shit for only landing D list celebrities, but I do have to hand it to them. Booking the actual pair from the American gothic painting was a pretty good get.

And look, it's no accident Republicans were focusing so hard on immigration. Recent polling shows it's the second most important issue among Americans. But a big [00:32:00] reason for that is the relentless, bad faith fear mongering around the issue by the Republican Party itself. Perhaps best summed up by the startling growth this year, of the toxic phrase, "migrant crime".

Now, starting in late January, Fox began using it a lot, and always to build a very specific narrative. 

NEWS CLIP: Concerns of a migrant crime wave are growing across New York City. 

Every third day, there's a story about some sort of migrant crime. 

There's a migrant crime spree killing Americans, and the president's an accessory to murder.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Yeah, out of nowhere, there was a surge in talk of migrant crime, which went from occasional mentions in December and January to over 300 mentions in February. Basically, migrant crime is a phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere And then we're suddenly all over the place. Like, "what the sigma?" And "skibbity toilet". And by the way, those are real phrases used by the younger generations, or they were, until I just ruined them by having them slide out of my old mouth. 

And as the use of that term skyrocketed, there was a correlating spike in concern about [00:33:00] immigration, with the number of Americans who viewed it as their number one issue jumping eight points between January and February. But, this wasn't reflecting anything happening in the real world. Because to be very clear, there is no migrant crime wave happening right now. In fact, there is no crime wave at all. Crime in general has been trending downward in recent years, including this one, with murder, rape, robbery, and property crime all decreasing, even as talk of migrants committing those crimes has exploded.

As for migrant crime, specifically, experts will tell you there is no evidence of a relationship between somebody's immigrant status and their involvement in crime. In fact, while most states don't track crime data by immigration status, in the one state that does—Texas—researchers have found the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate is roughly 45 percent below that of native born Americans. And yet, despite that, there has been a wave of conservatives claiming there is a wave of migrant crime. And that is almost definitely going to be continuing until November. 

So given that, tonight, [00:34:00] let's talk about "migrant crime". And let's start with where exactly the term came from. Because if you listen to Trump, which obviously you should not, he'll say it was all his idea.

DONALD TRUMP: It's a new, it's a new category. I don't know if you've heard this, but I came up with this one: migrant crime. There's crime, there's violent crime, there's migrant crime. We have a new category of crime, it's called migrant crime. And it's gonna be worse than any other form of crime. 

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Okay. Obviously, that is not a new category of crime, and obviously, he didn't invent it, because you can't invent putting two words together. Although, I will say, he has tried to innovate the phrase. At one point this year, he told an audience that it should be called "Biden migrant crime", but that's too long, which is true. And luckily, he workshopped a solution to that problem in real time. 

DONALD TRUMP: Because Joe Biden allowed this to happen. We will call it from now on, Biden migrant crime. Okay? It's Bigrant Crime. This is, we'll call it, I got it, [00:35:00] Bigrant. Let's call it Bigrant. Biden Crime. Oh, that's good. That's... smart. 

Election 2024 As 'neofascist' Trump targets immigrants, how will the left respond w Juan González - The Real News Network - Air Date 7-28-24

JUAN GONZALEZ: Emily, your perspective, especially in terms of the repeated claims of some of the leaders of the Republican Party that many countries are sending migrants here to participate in the 2024 election to rig the election.

EMILY LEE: Right. Thanks so much, Juan. I mean, I think, just to acknowledge what we’re living through right now in terms of the political turbulence we’re seeing for the last few weeks in the United States, obviously, the Republican National Convention just happened this week, where they called for the largest deportation operation in US history, saying they’re going to deport pro-Hamas radicals, to make our college campuses safe and patriotic again. I think these conditions that many of us are organizing in for this current election, the stakes are higher than ever.

And you can see the rhetoric is about… [00:36:00] It is about the threat and the fear, fearmongering that the Republican Party is doing, in which Donald Trump has made his main rhetoric and his main charge, even his pick of his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. He’s not trying to bring people of color, BIPOC voters in with him. He’s doubling down on a white nationalist, white supremacist platform.

So I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that’s a political moment that we’re in. And the conditions are extremely heavy. They’re very difficult.

We have a escalating genocide in Gaza and a sitting president who continues to support it while we also have the threat of Trump who’s openly sharing plans to destroy progressive social movements in the United States and communities of color.

So these times are just very difficult, and we’re holding both the urgency of the crisis and this current election, as well as the long-term root causes we need to be addressing and the long-term strategy we have to build in order to end the violence that immigrant communities are [00:37:00] facing in all these shifts.

So I think that what I would like to speak on a little bit is just the threat of MAGA and what is really the difference between a MAGA administration and a Democratic administration.

Obviously, we know that Democrats and Biden have not delivered on immigration. Everyone knows that. The last attempt to push forward in 2020 and 2021 was not successful, and that Biden has continued to not deliver around asylum, and the way that he’s continued to “close” the border has also been extremely anti-immigrant and led to a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment as well.

But I think we have to be clear that with the Trump administration, they are going to continue to… Stephen Miller will continue to be his senior advisor on this, who was the architect of the Anti-Immigrant Family Separation Program during the first Trump administration, that the defensive layers that we had previously in the courts and the appellate and Supreme Court, that’s not the [00:38:00] same as the previous administration.

We had the previous Supreme Court who actually made the DACA decision. This Supreme Court will not do anything that’s going to be beneficial for immigrant communities. So overall, as we know, the environment is going to be more anti-immigrant and more favorable for Trump to exploit in that direction.

So I think I just want to be clear that the threat that we face, we do believe it is an existential threat, the drive towards more authoritarianism, towards fascism, and that that’s going to have some very serious consequences for immigrant communities.

And I think that Biden, for all his faults, he is trying to signal that he is trying to do some more proactive immigration. On June 18, he just announced his program for about half a million undocumented spouses who are married to US citizens would meet the requirements for parole in place. They’re trying to signal to Democratic voters that they will not be the same as a [00:39:00] Trump administration.

And in terms of what you said earlier about the mythology of immigrant voters being trucked in, driven into the US so that they can influence the results of the 2024 election, obviously, those are factless and baseless, and the reality is that this is their number one issue. They will be using this rhetoric and this message to stoke fears among a white nationalist voting base, and it has been proven to be very effective.

And so I think what’s going to happen this November is going to be… It brings us in two different paths. There’s some very stark differences in the fork in the road depending on what kind of administration we have this year.

And obviously, there’s so many things we don’t know, especially given rumors that President Biden might drop out of the race. We’re less than four months out and still, this is the type of year we’re looking forward to.

So yes, it’s very tumultuous [00:40:00] and a lot is unknown. And anybody who said that they can predict what’s going to happen and knows, that’s just not true. We don’t believe that. No poll can predict what’s going to happen. These margins are very close. And so I just also want to emphasize that this is not the time to despair, to give up. This is the time to take action and make an intervention.

Employment Visa Paths for Dreamers and a Harris vs. Trump Presidential Race - This Week in Immigration - Air Date 7-30-24

THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: So I think we've covered that a lot on this podcast, but just to kind of reiterate: President Biden ran in 2019 and 2020 on a set of immigration policies that were sort of directly in opposition to what we're seeing as some of the harshest policies that President Trump put in place. Things like the so called Muslim ban, the policies of separating kids and families at the border, the Remain in Mexico program at the US-Mexico border, which forced migrants to wait in Mexico for asylum hearings, increasing crackdowns on immigration inside the country as, you know, deportation efforts and, you know, [00:41:00] certainly harsh rhetoric around immigration.

So, Biden came in with, I think, a much more progressive immigration policy, if you will. It's definitely more immigrant friendly. And one of the issues he ran on was rather than trying to increase deterrence of migrants at the border, he wanted to address the so called root causes of migration from what was then the biggest group of people coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, which were El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

And so in 2021, he issued a series of executive orders very early in his presidency to undo some of President Trump's policies, and he asked Kamala Harris to take point on and run his administration's efforts at the, what they call the Root Causes Strategy, which meant dealing from a diplomatic and development perspective with addressing the so called push factors from migration.

And those are things like [00:42:00] crime, and governance, rule of law, poverty, lack of opportunity. So, it was a combination of bilateral relationships with the governments in those areas, both to increase their own border security, but also to create investment opportunities, working with USAID, getting private sector commitments to invest money in those countries to help create jobs. 

That was her role. Of course, we've seen the Biden administration pivot, particularly in the last year and a half, with regard to the border. Two more, I would, some say, Trump like policies about restricting access to asylum at the border, asking Mexico to do more to prevent the migrants from coming up through Mexico to the border. And that seems to have been having an effect. We have seen migration go down in the last few months from the record high it was in December of 2023, but we also should take note that the countries that Kamala Harris was directed to [00:43:00] work with, those countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America, no longer represent nearly as large a proportion of the migrants we're seeing at the border.

They're coming from a lot more countries, lots more from South America, especially Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, but also more than a hundred countries around the world. So, that Root Causes Strategy, which was aimed at what was then sort of this large number of migrants from a particular area, probably is a little less relevant today for dealing with the border only because the migration is from so many other places.

JACK MALDE - HOST, THIS WEEK IN IMMIGRATION: And some people have been calling Kamala Harris the border czar. I'm not actually sure if I'm saying that word correctly. Um, is that accurate? 

THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: I think that's not accurate. Look, you know, I think Republicans have tried for a very long time to make the state of the border under President Biden a liability, [00:44:00] particularly from a political standpoint, and Republicans in the House, since they took back the House two years ago, have been hearing after hearing after hearing about Biden's border crisis, and one of the pieces of that is saying, well, Kamala Harris was supposed to be the border czar and solve all this, and she didn't.

The fact of the matter is, no, Kamala Harris was not named the border czar. Matter of fact, her remit really didn't have anything to do with the border itself. It was this sort of development and diplomatic effort with those countries to reduce the push factors. The border is and remains the provenance of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who to be clear, has faced his own share of criticism from Republicans in Congress, including an impeachment effort over the management of the border. But I think it's not accurate to call her a border czar, and it should be noted that there is no such title in the federal government of border czar. You know, the moniker of czar is sort of a shorthand for [00:45:00] anyone in an executive, you know, branch who's sort of put in charge of a large issue area to come up with policy solutions to work across the federal government in doing that. It's a thing that the media applies, but there is no formal like role that's called a czar in the US government. I think it's worth reminding people of that. 

JACK MALDE - HOST, THIS WEEK IN IMMIGRATION: So, prior to becoming Vice President, Kamala Harris held several other public positions. She was US District Attorney in San Francisco, Attorney General of the State of California, and a Senator from California when she ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 2019, before finally becoming Joe Biden's running mate and vice president. We also know that she's a daughter of immigrants to the United States from India and Jamaica. So with all that having been said, do we know much about where Kamala Harris stands on immigration issues and how closely aligned is she with President Biden? 

THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: So, I'm going to take that last part first because I think it's worth [00:46:00] looking into that a little bit. It has been a long time since a sitting vice president was running for president when the president they served under is still in office. I think Al Gore and Bill Clinton were the last time we saw that happen, because Joe Biden did not opt to run in 2020, uh, I'm sorry, in 2016. So, this presents a little bit of an issue. As I mentioned, Kamala Harris is part of the Biden administration. She is his partner on the ticket. She was, until recently, his running mate. Now, she leads the ticket. She has an opportunity to say where she might do things differently than President Biden. But, at the end of the day, I think it's gonna to be very hard for her to say, Oh, the things President Biden did were not things that I would have agreed with, because that would make it seem like she, you know, either wasn't involved at all, or disagreed with things that the president did.

So, I think this is a little bit of a [00:47:00] tightrope she's going to have to walk. People are trying to read the tea leaves from where she was when she had all of those previous positions, or when she herself ran for president, or ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019. I think it's worth saying that back then, first of all, she came from the San Francisco Bay area, which everyone knows is a very, very progressive liberal area of California, which is a progressive liberal state for the most part. And so her positions tended to reflect that, but she was a prosecutor. So I would say that she had a pretty much, a relatively tough on crime image when she was Attorney General of California, however, she supported the law that was passed in California called the Trust Act that protected localities under sanctuary laws. So, that's something that I imagine Republicans might take issue with. In 2019, she and many other of the Democratic candidates supported broadly, for example, decriminalizing border crossings. There was a Democratic primary debate where they were asked about whether or not they [00:48:00] supported that policy. She initially indicated she did, and then sort of seemed to step back. And I think it was unclear by the time she dropped out of the race. 

But I think, you know, the Democratic politics of the time were very much, you know, wherever Trump is, we're the exact opposite. But if you look at the Biden-Harris administration, certainly what they ran on in 2020 and where they are today is a different place. And so, it's quite possible that in her time in the vice president's office and seeing what it's like to actually try to implement policies that have effect on immigration and border, she may have shifted her views. And I think that's going to be important for her to delineate as she tries to campaign.

But it is worth saying that as the first generation daughter of immigrants, she has a personal stake in this, too, and that may well impact some of her policy decisions going forward. 

Editor's note on the electoral politics of immigration policy

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Brian Lehrer Show, explaining the outbreak of [00:49:00] riots in the UK. Today Explained looked at some of the grievances of the rioters. The battle of 187 was told by the LA Times, John Oliver on Last Week Tonight dove into the anti-immigrant rhetoric at the RNC. The Real News Network looked at the Democratic stance and policies on immigration. And This Week in Immigration compared to Biden, Trump and potential Harris policies. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and often funny topics. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the [00:50:00] way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I have a thought or two to add about the way Harris is currently framing her stance on immigration. As I mentioned at the top of the show, people have a lot of feelings about immigration that land on a whole spectrum. But, as evidenced by people supporting the Trump campaign and the UK riots, those feelings can easily turn into real world action and the left tends to not do a good job addressing immigration because we don't want to make it a big issue. And we don't wanna make it a big issue because the right enjoys a huge lead in polling support for their terrible immigration plans over the lefts' general total lack of immigration plans. 

But it is exactly that kind of avoidance of the issue that leads to such low support, and rightfully so. How can people support the Democratic position when no one can even describe what it is? The best we generally come up with is to downplay the doomsaying of the GOP because they're full of [00:51:00] shit. But we don't actually propose policy changes that would address the concerns regular people actually have The kinds of concerns that, founded or not, lead them to support people like Trump or in extreme cases join or support the sentiments behind riots, like what we just saw in the UK. 

Well, a UK think tank supporting their center-left Labor Party has put some thought into this issue and written a paper with some suggestions for the newly elected Labor Party in the UK to enact. And it's notable that they came up with some of their ideas by looking at the Biden administration as a cautionary tale of what not to do. 

They identified three primary concerns the public has about the UK immigration system. Number one, dismay that it appears to be in a state of chaos. Number two, worry that migrants undermine economic opportunities. And three, fear that migrants do not "integrate in their new [00:52:00] home". And that last one, it's important to be clear and honest that this could come from a place of bigotry, but it doesn't have to. Often that call for immigrants to "assimilate" or "integrate" is a dog whistle or maybe a train whistle demanding that foreign born people lose their culture, drop their language, and become Americanized or Anglicised for the comfort of Americans or Brits. But it's a concern that could also stem from a genuine desire for new arrivals to be able to find a place for themselves within the existing society, rather than feeling like a perpetual outsider. Unintegrated communities may end up being insular, which could breed suspicion and distrust on both sides. And in the worst case scenario, they could end up as ghettos. So, a desire to see migrants well-integrated in their new home, if it's coming from that positive angle, is a totally legitimate concern. 

So, [00:53:00] the paper makes three recommendations to the Labor government in the UK. Number one, clearing a massive backlog of asylum claims to bring order to the system. Number two, cracking down on exploitation of migrant workers. Exploitation has a dramatic impact on job opportunities and wages being paid in job sectors where migraines are taking work. And number three, investing in strained public services that voters fear cannot support growing immigrant communities. And then, additionally, and I really liked the sound of this one, they want a "world-leading scheme for local and community sponsorship of refugees and other vulnerable groups that could help new arrivals find a welcoming environment and make voters less likely to see them as foreigners adrift in Britain". 

Now diving more into the opinion polls in the UK, it says, "Opinion research found room for center-left leaders to make the [00:54:00] case for inclusive immigration policy. Most voters were open to viewing immigration as a helpful thing for the economy and responded warmly to the idea of foreign-born people becoming British citizens". However, the positive vision was contingent. It continues, "Openness depended on voters trusting that labor was serious about bringing order to the system overall". And so the experts advised, "The center-left needs to project a message of something like control and compassion. The feeling that migration is out of control is a really strong one and just kind of dismissing it is not a good thing to do". 

So, in the UK, Labor went with the message 'Smash the Gangs' as a way of differentiating between desperate migrants and gangs profiting from human trafficking and other cross border crimes. Right? Control + compassion. And that [00:55:00] helped them in their election that got them into power recently. And this appears to be the strategy we are now seeing from the Harris campaign. They're using her history as a prosecutor and attorneys general in California, and are highlighting that she "took down the trans-national gangs" as part of her work in California. And the article concludes saying that it will likely help him in the election to recast "the Democratic agenda in more disciplined terms and drawing a contrast with Republicans' raw hostility to migrants". 

I don't see why Kamala Harris couldn't do something similar, say, 'my main goal is to smash the gangs, not to punish the migrants'. That's the important needle to thread because no one should really be against heightened enforcement against actual criminals. It's just the framing of all migrants as criminals that we object to. So you need to be able to do both, say both at the same time. Now the one [00:56:00] important caveat though to all of this, is that it's really important to invest heavily on making legal avenues for migration and asylum seeking possible because any crackdown on illegal means and gangs without opening up legal pathways will just force the gangs to get more organized and smarter about how they go about their illegal business. The way to put smuggling and human trafficking out of business is to make it unnecessary. 

Now, of course, this is where Congress comes in. So, not only do Democrats need to finally face this problem head on rather than running from it, they need a trifecta in the House, Senate and presidency to pull it off. But part of their messaging needs to be a demand to s mash the gangs in the human trafficking and point out that the way to do that is to make legal pathways abundant and accessible and put the Republicans on the defensive. If they don't support those legal pathways, they are the [00:57:00] ones increasing cross-border crime.

SECTION A - THE UK RIOTS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, Section A: the UK Riots. Section B: California Proposition 187. Section C: Trump vs. Harris. And Section D: Migrants.

The UK's Far Right Riots Part 2 - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 8-8-24

MAX COLCHESTER: I mean, he's got a point in the sense that the last time we saw something like this was mods and rockers in the '60s and '70s in the UK during a period of economic deprivation, tough times economically. There's no doubt that Britain is in the midst of a cost of living crisis. It's been affected by high inflation and you know the causes of that, the hangover from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and so forth, and people are really hurting.

There's no doubt there's deprivation in the UK. Social services are not what they were, people are suffering. Is there a system exploiting that? I suppose you could claim there is. You could say that there is an element [00:58:00] of the far-right that is piggybacking on that general feeling of dissatisfaction and blaming those ills on migrants, which is an age-old issue, which is to say, if you're struggling, it's because a foreigner has taken your job or has taken your council house or taken your place in the hospital bed. That's an age-old tactic and it is very effective. You can see how that could take root. Yes, there is an underlying trend there.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, the UK government, effectively, unintentionally, pretty much let in 2.5 million people into the country in the last two years. It didn't control migration properly. It tried to juice the economy by letting in a lot, a lot of workers. That, again, has given the far-right ammunition. It's made the job easier for the far right. Say, "Look, we've lost control of the borders. Everything's going wrong here. The economy's not delivering for you guys. It's because all the foreigners [00:59:00] arrived."

Yes, there are underlying trends here. I think those who just say, "Oh, these people are just kind of-- you legitimize what they're doing by pointing to the underlying trends. Well, I don't necessarily agree with that. I think there are underlying trends and you can say that people are dissatisfied with their daily lives, but obviously this kind of violence is totally, totally wrong.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Can you give us a quick reference? Mods and rockers, a little historical reference for those of us who aren't necessarily familiar with that term. That's something Jay mentioned. Most violence [unintelligible]

MAX COLCHESTER: It's sort of like you punks, I suppose, is how you guys would [unintelligible] . There was a movement in the '60s where you saw punks and other groups kind of clashing famously on the beaches in the south of England. That was during a time of economic difficulty in the UK.

Riots in the UK Part 2 - Today, Explained - Air Date 8-7-24

TIMES RADIO: Last night, the information came up around this supposed teenager called Ali Al-Shakati…we now know that the only place posting this is not a news outlet, it has no named [01:00:00] journalists, it’s not what it claims to be. It’s apparently run by some random Russian lads, and they’ve got no legal recourse to be using someone's name.

ROBYN VINTER: And there's been, quite similar to a lot of European countries and the same as the US, there has been kind of underlying anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK for quite some time. That seems to have gotten worse. We've got a few high-profile politicians that have made very strong anti-immigration comments. There's a guy called Nigel Farage who's just been elected as an MP in the UK. 

<CLIP> 

MP NIGEL FARAGE: The police say it’s a non-terror incident… I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don't know the answer to that but I think it is a fair and legitimate question. What I do know is something is going horribly wrong in our once-beautiful country.

ROBYN VINTER: And so that kind of anti-immigration sentiment is kind of built. And then what happened then, the following [01:01:00] night, was a kind of outpouring as people took to the streets and rioted in Southport. 

<CLIP> 

ITV NEWS: We don’t know where they streamed in from, but they’re believed to be supporters of the English Defense League <crowd noise> Just before 8:00 they met outside a mosque in the town where a few hundred people threw bricks and fireworks at the windows. The suspect behind yesterday's attack isn’t known to be Muslim, but a connection was drawn nonetheless.

ROBYN VINTER: You know, it was adequately defended, I would say, by, by locals and by the police, who arrived and kind of started to contain the violence. But in the meantime, you know, they had managed to do quite a lot of damage and that was kind of damage that then, in the morning, the kind of ordinary citizens of Southport came out and, and repaired and restored and, and it was certainly… The feeling the next morning was certainly that people in [01:02:00] Southport don't condone the violence. And they, you know, that is not what Southport is.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: But then unfortunately, the unrest spread. 

ROBYN VINTER: That's right. Yeah. This had happened on the Tuesday night. And by the Friday, there was a list of places where demonstrations were going to be held, or, you know, they were described as protests. So fliers were going around social media that said, ‘A protest is going to be held outside this mosque.’ And then we saw a kind of large-scale pockets of far-right riots, a lot of violence in a lot of towns and cities across the UK.

<CLIP> 

SKY NEWS: Another fire, another night of chaos this time in Sunderland a police station attacked. The property next to it, set alight. 

ROBYN VINTER: There was a hotel that was housing asylum seekers that had come to the UK that had been the scene of protests before, and that was kind of on the list of places where a protest was going to be held. And that one got out of hand [01:03:00] very quickly. It was under-policed, partly because the police were stretched because there'd been another one organized in a city nearby and they perhaps underestimated how many people would attend early on. And Rotherham isn't, isn't a place like Liverpool, where there's a large number of anti-fascists and a large number of people who will go there and, and, and stand up to these people. Although there were counter-protesters there, you know, they were immediately cattled by the group of far right and had racist abuse shouted at them, and the police had to take them a mile away to safety. In total, there were about 750 rioters. They were kind of physically attacking police, you know, physically smashing windows, burning things, you know, the real – as you'd imagine what a rioter looks like – the real kind of hardcore rioters.

 SCORING <Kos Kar, APM>

 They managed to set fire briefly to the [01:04:00] hotel with the asylum seekers inside. There were about 240 asylum seekers inside. Which was obviously terrifying. You know, they were… the windows were smashed and the asylum seekers were appearing at the windows. And, you know, I managed to shout through a window to some of them and they looked… you know, they were all fairly young. The ones I saw, you know, teenagers, early 20s, all looked very scared, worried. I shouted through the window, ‘Are you okay?’ And I was holding, holding a thumbs up, and I was saying, ‘Are you okay?’ And they were, a lot of them were replying, ‘Okay, okay.’ You know, a lot of them don't have good English. And then one man shouted down, ‘I am not okay.’ So I think there was a real… you know, this was a, this was a very dangerous situation. 

<CLIP CHANNEL4 NEWS> 

ASYLUM SEEKER: They want to kill us… if they catch us.. they gonna to kill us… 

REPORTER: watching on in horror from their window as an angry crowd tried to turn over [01:05:00] a police van

<CLIP> 

THE GUARDIAN: <<shouting>> GET THEM OUT GET THEM OUT GET THEM OUT

ROBYN VINTER: They, you know, the police were covered in sparks and they were wearing fireproof gear and helmets and had big riot shields, so they were safe from the fireworks. But you know, there was quite a lot of times when I saw the police had been relieved from their shift, kind of on the frontline of this battle against the rioters. And they, they'd gone round the corner, gone down a side street. And they were just sitting, you know, with their heads in their hands because it had been such a draining and exhausting day. And a few, a few police officers said to me that, you know, it had been by far, you know, the biggest riot that they'd ever attended. 

 SCORING

The UK's Far Right Riots Part 3 - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 8-8-24

MAX COLCHESTER: this morning, and we have to say he's been railing against the British government for several days already. This morning, Elon Musk posted basically an image of an article which alleged that the British government was going to deport protesters to [01:06:00] an island in the South Atlantic called the Falkland Islands. Now, this article, it looked like an article, was actually completely made up. It was made up by someone who runs a far-right entity in the UK.

This stayed up for several hours. I think if you look at the post in question, it was viewed by around 2 million people before it was-- if you clicked on it, it sort of disappears. What's been incredible here is that Elon Musk has really lent into this whole protest. He's actually become something of an agitator himself. We've seen him repeatedly repeat talking points from the far-right in the UK.

One of the key talking points they have is that there's a two-tier police system in the UK. It's sort of like the opposite of what you guys saw with the Black Lives Matter, is that the police actually go down much harder on white people than minorities, which is false. Anyway, [01:07:00] this trope has been pasted all over X in recent days, and Elon Musk has been tweeting away saying, "Hey, I kind of agree with this, and the government should take this seriously." He also tweeted that civil war was inevitable in the UK because of high levels of immigration.

It's been really quite incredible to see him really lean into this whole thing as opposed to-- Most other people would be trying to say, "No, no, we carefully moderate our site and we make sure that extremist content is not promoted." That's what Meta does and that's what TikTok does. Actually, you've got the owner of the site promoting this stuff himself.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Incredible. You said that he has allowed back some far-right activists who maybe were on the site before kicked off, and he's let them back. I know that's happened here in the US. Is that also the case in the UK?

MAX COLCHESTER: Yes. Absolutely exactly the same thing happened in the UK. You saw, there's a fellow called Tommy Robinson who is a figurehead for the far-right [01:08:00] in the UK, and he was banned in 2018, by what was then Twitter. Last year, Elon Musk led him back on, and he's now got 900,000 followers. This fellow, he spent time in jail. He's a well-known character. He's a well-known troublemaker on the right, to be honest.

This guy, he's on holiday in Cyprus, Tommy Robinson, right now, and he's firing away these tweets claiming that Britain's going up in flames and that people need to start cracking down on immigration and protecting British values. That's what's happened, is that Musk has been very clear that he wants to protect free speech on his site and that he wants everybody to be able to weigh in equally. The result of that is that a lot of people, it's become a sort of talking shop for some pretty extremist views.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: What are some of the actual groups and political parties on the far-right that are involved here?

MAX COLCHESTER: [01:09:00] Well, that's the thing about the UK, is the UK isn't like other European countries, like Germany. You've got the AFD, or even France, which obviously, Le Pen's movement have kind of gone a bit more mainstream, but started out on the far-right. In the UK, there's actually a kind of proud tradition of anti-fascism. Historically, it's kind of been on the fringe.

In recent years, you've seen a sort of, some people say that there's this politician called Nigel Farage here who promoted Brexit and is very close to Trump, who espoused anti-immigrant views. Some say he's now managed to normalize this debate, all these questions over immigration. There isn't really a far far-right mainstream political party in the UK. That's why I think a lot of people were surprised by this, because I think for years, everyone thought the far right were a sort of busted flush, and they didn't really have much sway here. Suddenly, to see all these protests in the [01:10:00] street has shocked a lot of people.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: It doesn't seem to us over here on this side of the Atlantic, as organized as maybe in Germany or France, the far-right. There's not a figurehead. There's not somebody that we would often recognize.

MAX COLCHESTER: No.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Interesting.

MAX COLCHESTER: I think that's what's made it really hard to police, actually. When you talk to officials trying to control this, it's not like there's the head of a group you can go and talk to and say, "Guys, please tamp this down a bit." It's really figureheads firing away on social media and then loose groups of people on Telegram getting together to basically organize a ruck a fight. It's very hard to know where these guys are going to pop up or what exactly they're going to target or how many of them will actually show up. It's proved a real difficult one for the authorities to manage. 

SECTION B - CA PROPOSITION 187

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: California Proposition [01:11:00] 187. 

Introducing 'Battle of 187' week! Part 2 - The Times Essential news from the L.A. Times - Air Date 7-19-21Marker

BARBARA COE: So the experiment was, could you collect enough signatures for and pass a grassroots proposition with no big money behind it, just simply enough, are there enough people involved and angry about a situation?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: First things first, they need to assemble a committee of people to write it. 

BARBARA COE: You know, we just went, okay, well, who do you know? 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: They look around and begin to put together a kind of ragtag Avengers, or Thanos, depending on who you're rooting for, of California anti-immigration hawks. They start with Harold Ezell, who used to work for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

HAROLD EZELL: What we're saying is. Anybody that isn't here legally should not be rewarded for coming illegally 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: before working for the INS. Harold, or Hal for short was an executive at Weiner Schnitzel, a hotdog fast food chain. He has a reputation as a loudmouth with a singular obsession to stop illegal immigration in reference to undocumented.

I. [01:12:00] He once told Time Magazine, if you catch him, you ought to clean him and fry him yourself. 

BARBARA COE: Howell actually knew everybody who was involved in anti illegal immigration movement. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Through Howell, the Kileys hooked up with Alan Nelson. Alan was Howell's former boss at the INS. 

ALAN NELSON: The illegal alien comes without any checking, and they often bring the diseases.

So most of the contagious diseases Are being brought in by the illegals. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Hal and Allen are connected to fair, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. It's an anti-immigration lobbying organization law, and controversial for the white nationalist writings of its founder. They also connect with a woman named Barbara Coe.

She's a former crime analyst for the Anaheim Police Department and a petite chain smoker who wears Granny glasses, co-star a group. that leaves cards at businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers. The cards read, Stop the invasion. Close our borders now. Deny benefits to illegal aliens now.[01:13:00] 

More people eventually join, but this is the core of the Pro 187 crew. They're an odd mix of former immigration officials and middle aged suburbanites.

BARBARA COE: So, um, we started to have meetings. With 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: their Avengers assembled at a private, members only club in Costa Mesa, They start to work on writing the actual proposition. It's October 5th, 1993. 

BARBARA COE: Everybody knew that history was going to start. We knew, we knew that. We knew this was going to make a difference, whether we succeeded or failed.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: What they put together is an all out assault on undocumented immigrants. There's eight sections of 187, so I'll just sum up the lowlights. Block undocumented immigrants from social services and public health care. Force workers in those sectors to report anyone they suspected of having no papers to the INS.

But the group saves the worst for last. Kids without papers would no longer be able to attend public schools, from [01:14:00] kindergarten to college. The Kileys and their crew know that this last provision is extreme, and probably unconstitutional, but they put it in anyway. 

BARBARA COE: So it would gather the media attention, so it would send up the red flags that everybody wanted to talk about it, and everybody would have an opinion about it.

And that's when it really took off. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Once 187 is written, the Kileys send it to the Republican mailing lists to see if they can get enough signatures for it to qualify for the November 1994 ballot. Every day, their P. O. box is full. Full of signatures pledging support for their proposition. Full of envelopes stuffed with donations.

Here's Barbara's husband, Bob. 

BOB COE: And it just caught on. It was like wildfire. I mean, you'd go to the mailbox. We had a small mailbox. Yeah, well, they told us to stop that. How [01:15:00] many of these 

BARBARA COE: boxes do you have? We have three. 

CLIP: Three. Today.

187 says nothing about any ethnic groups. It didn't have to. Why do you think the issue resonated so much with people? 

BARBARA COE: Because all of a sudden, I think, in certain areas of Santa Ana, in L. A. and there, there was a huge influx of Latino people. And I think a lot of white people like I am were felt threatened.

BOB COE: In a poor area, they took over the neighborhoods. And that, the people there, some of the people there resented the fact that that's what was happening to their neighborhood. It's true, you know. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: When my family moved to a new home in Anaheim in 1989, our street was half white. By 1994, only two white households remained.

Those who left missed out on my dad's awesome carnitas, so they're lost.[01:16:00] 

Anyways, on June 23, 1994, Ron Prince's crusade qualifies for the November ballot, where it'll go by Proposition 187. By coincidence, the same number that California's Penal Code assigns to murder. The group decides to try to get support for their anti immigrant measure by using a new tagline. Save our state.

Who thought of the idea to call this a Save Our State initiative? 

BARBARA COE: Uh, about four, uh, margaritas at, uh, El Torito. 

Damn. El Torito is a Mexican restaurant chain in Orange County. Now, I'm not sure that the Kailis and their crew purposefully ate Mexican food. On the day they raised their margarita glasses and toasted to an attack.

An undocumented people, but they probably imagined they were on the right side of history when they named their campaign save our state S. O. S. For short, the logo of their campaign was an inner [01:17:00] tube. They imagined they were throwing out to a drowning California what the group didn't know in that moment.

Was that Latinos weren't going to take 187 quietly. That both sides were getting ready to gear up for one of the most dramatic fights in California's political history. One that still resonates all over the country today.

The Battle of 187 ends — and the war begins Part 2 - The Times Essential news from the L.A. Times - Air Date 7-20-21

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Back in 2000, I got a Democratic Party mailer that had a fuzzy photo of him with a caption, just when we thought he was gone.

He's back!

When I got this mailer, I remembered Wilson's They Keep Coming TV ad, the one that used fuzzy footage of Latinos crossing the US mexico border to imply we were invading California. Now? A few years later, he's the scary scapegoat.

Not long after I got that mailer, I wrote an article for OC Weekly. It came out on November 23rd, 2000. [01:18:00] Here's what I wrote. Like the Mexican legend of La Llorona, the ghost woman whose story is used to strike fear in the hearts of children. Pete Wilson's name was invoked in mailers, radio commercials, And a popular song during the recent election cycle.

Always to signify something truly horrifying.

This was the first article I ever got published. I wasn't even a reporter back then. I was a film studies major in college. But something about doing that story got me. It was like my own little personal revenge on 187. So I framed the mailer, the little story, and my pay stub. 100 for 700 words. Sadly, freelancer rates haven't improved, but California sure has.

So I guess I might as well say it right now. Thank you, Pete Wilson. Without you, I wouldn't have a career.

From the Los Angeles Times and Futuro Studios. I'm Gustavo Arellano, and [01:19:00] this is The Battle of 187. Part 3? 

NEWS CLIP: Thank you, 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Pete Wilson. 

NEWS CLIP: Voters decided 59 percent to 41 percent to pass the measure, which cuts off nearly all public services to illegal aliens.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: If you've been listening to this series, You have a sense of how intense the campaigns for and against Prop 187 were. Once it actually passes in November 1994, a lot of people are left asking themselves, What's next? Barbara Coe, one of the leaders of the Prop 187 move, says her phone has been ringing off the hook since last Tuesday, as individuals and organizations seek help in setting up similar campaigns in New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, even Iowa.

The president of Mexico in his final weeks in office has called on Mexicans working in the United States to come home. Remember, Latino voters overwhelmingly [01:20:00] reject 187. Many see it as an existential threat and are terrified that their lives are going to get difficult, fast. That La Migra is going to come knocking on their doors or show up in school and ask for papers.

So just a day after the election, before any parts of 187 can go into effect, Federal and state lawsuits are filed, eight in total, claiming that the proposition is unconstitutional. 

NEWS CLIP: Portions of Prop 187 were to go into effect immediately, but court orders were issued today holding off the new law until its constitutionality can be examined.

The move works. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: The court freezes 187. Most of it won't go into effect until the lawsuit is heard. Which is a big relief for immigrants. Among the plaintiffs, the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF. Gloria Molina serves on the L. A. County Board of Supervisors. We heard from her earlier.

And she tries to convince the county to join the suit. After that, you start getting a lot of hate [01:21:00] mail again. 

GLORIA MOLINA: Yes, I did. And I just had to put up with it. People came to the board, attacked me, uh, letters that I would get. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: When Gloria says people attacked her, she's not kidding. She becomes a target of pure venom.

Here's a letter she gets from someone in Long Beach. If you and your protesting Mecs are so great, why don't you go to Mexico and build your own country? You Mecs are the divisive ones. You don't assimilate into US society. You want your divisive language, or divisive holidays, and on and on and on and on.

The place for what you want is Mexico. And it isn't just nasty letters. 

GLORIA MOLINA: They were angry. I remember going to Trader Joe's one day and being attacked by a woman there, and talking about, you know, what kind of representative am I? You know, if you're just siding with Mexico, why don't you move to Mexico? And, and, uh, I, uh, Said, thank you for your views.

I know you feel that way. I feel differently. And then afterwards, when I went out to the parking lot to get in my car, I almost could swear she was ready to run me down.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 180 7 hits a national nerve from [01:22:00] coast to coast. People wanna rail against immigration, period. Take these callers on NPRs talk of the nation. 

NPR CALLER: It's an invasion. It's a, it's, it's, it's a, it's like a, it's a passive. There's, there's really nothing else that you can call it. I mean, it's just incredible. 

This thing about discriminating against, uh, illegals or whatever, to me, is just a bunch of bull.

And I don't believe it one bit. I am for that proposition.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In California, 187 is the first in a string of propositions that target people of color through the 90s. In 1994, voters also passed the infamous Three Strikes initiative, which lands hard on Blacks and Latinos. Two years later, voters ban affirmative action. In 1998, it's bilingual education. But while all this is going on, 187 itself stays tied up in the courts.

For years. In 1997, a federal judge finds it [01:23:00] unconstitutional. AKA, goodbye 187. But, then Attorney General Dan Lundgren, a Republican, he appeals the decision to try to keep it alive. Peter Nunez is one of the architects of 187 that we heard from earlier. He thinks Lungren isn't fighting hard enough for 187.

And just a warning here, he describes Lundgren with pretty sexist language. 

PETER NUNEZ: I am convinced that Lundgren didn't like it and let it die. 

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Why do you think Lundgren held back? 

PETER NUNEZ: I think he was a p Maybe he had political ambitions and he didn't want to piss off the Hispanic population, the Latino population.

Shameful. He was shameful. He was the Attorney General of the state of California. He had an obligation that he failed to uphold.

Lundgren has denied those accusations.

187 finally dies for [01:24:00] good in 1999, when Pete Wilson's successor, Gray Davis, drops the appeal. In the end, the big parts of it never go into effect. Started with a bang, ended with a whimper. But Latinos from California like me, never forgot it.

SECTION C - TRUMP VS HARRIS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C: Trump versus Harris. 

WATCH: Where RNC delegates stand on immigration - PBS Newshour - Air Date 7-17-24

THOMAS FUGATE: I have a lot of friends at the border, um, different counties down there. Um, obviously a massive problem just with like housing them. Um, there's a lot of trash that gets washed up. There's concerns about crime, um, particularly in those communities. There's a lot of different information that's getting out.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on, but in general, it's disorganized, it's dysfunctional, it's a mess, and it's probably bad for all parties involved, including the migrants. and everyone else. 

DEBBIE MCCORD: We're area. So we don't have th illegal immigrations and illegal immigration. But we live right outside.

We're only [01:25:00] 75 80 miles from Athens. So the lake and Riley killing murder really affected my community. I mean, people are very upset about it. Um, I've had kids in college. Uh, you never want to feel like your child can't go out for a run or a walk and not be safe. 

KAY RENDLEMAN: We're getting immigrants coming in.

Fortunately, we are not a sanctuary city. A lot of them are getting sent to Denver where they're having a lot of difficulty and problems. It's creating, um, a lot of financial stress and strain on the city in Denver. But, um, we have, you know, made it clear that we're not A sanctuary town. So, uh, we've had much more limited.

impact in our city.

CINDY SPRAY: Immigration is a big problem in every [01:26:00] community in the United States for us directly, especially for school districts, not only in my county, but all over. We're getting a lot of Children that do not speak our language. So that language we have is just, it's jus languages that we are try to understand english.

So challenge. 

JACI LOPEZ: My husband's a driver and he frequently Laredo and every time he semi trucks pulled over by Border Patrol with 50 75 100 illegals that are pouring out of it and being lined up there. You think about that? They're stuck in a hot box with no ventilation, no water, no bathroom, no food, no airflow at all whatsoever.

And that's a problem. That's a big problem. The cartels are benefiting from this because they're making the money. [01:27:00] Um, Our, our country is suffering from it. The people that are trying to cross because they are looking for a better life are suffering. They're being sold a bag of lies. And, um, it's not right.

It's inhumane. 

CHRIS SLINKER: The border is a big issue to me. I think the fact that we're disrespecting this country in a way that we are literally letting anyone walk in and do whatever they want. These are not bad people. We're not saying they're bad people. We want to give them a chance to come in, but can we do it right?

Can we also give them a real chance instead of them sneaking in and then feeling left alone or left helpless? That is literally what the Democrats are doing. They are literally just trying to flood the gates. 

CINDY SPRAY: When President Trump talks about the mass deportation, I don't see him going to get the grandmother that's taking care of their grandchildren.

Or somebody here. that's been here for a number of years, have, have, uh, [01:28:00] contributed to our society, have worked and have never committed a crime and have been basically a citizen. I could see that they need that pathway to citizenship a little faster than those who just came across the border. That's, that's where I am with it.

I'm a republican. Everybody like, no, everybody's got to go through the process. Well, process is too long. So I think that there is a way that we could do that. 

THOMAS FUGATE: The Democrats don't negotiate in good faith. And we've tried this before under Reagan. We've had mass amnesty under Ronald Reagan for millions of illegal immigrants.

And they told us, the Democrats told the Republican party that after that, there would be no more. That they're going to change and fix the immigration system, the asylum system. It's never happened. Republicans are always the ones to give in. They're always the one to compromise first. The Democrats don't ever give us anything on our side.

So we've given amnesty before we've tried it. It hasn't worked. And so we're not keen to try that [01:29:00] again. 

RNC & ”Migrant Crime” - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 7-25-24

NEWS CLIP: A gang of migrants broke into the country, pummeled two NYPD officers, and while walking out of jail without bail, flipped the double bird to the country they let them in.

The two birds heard around the world. The symbol of the Biden presidency, right there. Okay, 

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: for the record, the symbol for the Biden presidency is absolutely not two birds. As we all know, it is a bunch of piss stained Democrats nervously Googling, how old is a person allowed to be? But that image of the guy flipping off the camera was used constantly on Fox from February through early March.

It was used in at least Sixty six segments during that period, with the man's fingers blurred out, presumably, to protect the eyes of the innocent children who are forced to watch Fox News at Grandma's while they eat their Dinosaurs Lived With Humans nuggets. Fox kept hammering their coverage of that incident, with perhaps the apex being a segment where Sean Hannity did an interview with Curtis Sliwa, the head of the vigilante group, The [01:30:00] Guardian Angels, live from the U.

S. Now, during the interview, Sliwa's fellow angel suddenly mobilized towards something off camera, and he later explained they'd had to get physical with a migrant whom they'd seen committing a crime. 

NEWS CLIP: Well, he had been shoplifting first. The guardian angel spotted them, stopped them. He resisted, and let's just say we gave him a little pain compliance.

His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations. He's sucking concrete. The cops scraped him off the asphalt. He's on his way to jail, but they'll cut him loose. We gotta take 42nd Street back, Sean. These illegals think they own this street. They think they rule the night. This is our country. If they can't abide by the rules, then we're gonna kick them back from where they came.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Hold on. First, rule the night on 42nd Street? I call bullshit. Anyone who lives here knows the night there is ruled by groups of 13 year olds leaving Aladdin on their way to the Red Lobster one block away. Let me say this [01:31:00] clearly. Immigrants are not invading our country, and they are not taking over 42nd Street, but if they are, they can fucking have it.

But there's a few other things that feel important to mention about that. First of all, First, you can't just beat someone up if you think they're committing a crime. And second, you should never go out in public dressed like that. He looks like Alan Arkin playing one of the Angry Birds. He, he looks like a divorced strawberry.

He looks like if the G. I. Joes had an off hours bowling team. But, but it gets worse. Because it turned out the man they'd beaten up wasn't actually a migrant at all, and there was no evidence to support the allegation he was shoplifting. It seems like what actually happened is that Sliwa's goons apprehended the guy for allegedly attempting to disrupt a live interview, which is not a crime, and also not what he did, since surveillance footage apparently shows he was just trying to maneuver through the crowd when the vigilantes confronted him.

But, Sliwa said he believed the man was a migrant because he was speaking Spanish. Something that could be said. of about, roughly, [01:32:00] 25 percent of this city, including, by the way, me. Qué vas a hacer, Curtis Lee Wa? Soy emigrante, y estoy hablando español. Me vas a mandar? Tú pendejos, hijo de puta? Tu cara es demasiado estúpida y tu cara también.

Eres una mierda y no creo que tu mamá esté orgullosa de ti. And it turns out, even the facts of the original Times Square incident that started all of this fell apart in similar fashion because when more camera footage came out, it revealed how the whole incident had begun and made the NYPD look less like unwitting victims and more like the instigators.

NEWS CLIP: NYPD body cam video takes us inside that Times Square brawl that made national headlines. That and new surveillance video police released raising more questions tonight whether the January altercation should have happened at all. The two officers approached the group of men. [01:33:00] 

RNC SPEAKER: The crowd is giving direction to please disperse that they're blocking the sidewalk.

NEWS CLIP: The video doesn't support that as people are seen walking by. Most of the group immediately moves. But you'll Henry Brito in yellow is the last to leave telling police don't touch me. But when he starts to finally obey the officer's orders, pushing the stroller away, the group begins singing a derogatory song.

And then this. Immediately after Bruto yells looks like ugly Betty to the group, the officer is shown pushing him up against 

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: a wall. Yeah, if you watch the wide shot it becomes clear that what set the whole scuffle off is one cop choosing to push that guy up against a wall after the other one got called Ugly Betty.

And for what it's worth, this is what the cop looked like. And if you're thinking, well he only kind of looks like Ugly Betty, let me remind you, in Latin America, Ugly Betty looks like this, and that is a [01:34:00] fair hit. And violence is not an acceptable response to someone being insulted that correctly. Do you think there haven't been moments when I haven't wanted to throw someone against a wall because they called me worst Sheldon or a less sexual Screech or what would happen if the Rat and the Chef and Ratatouille fucked?

Sure, sure, it hurts my feelings mom, but it's also fair and it doesn't justify violence. But wait. Because there's one more twist here. Remember the guy flipping the double birds, who was on Fox News at least 66 times? The symbol of bigrant crime. Well, funny story, the Manhattan D. A. ended up dismissing the charges against him because it turned out he had nothing to do with the incident.

He wasn't even there! The NYPD apparently mistook him for a completely different person for a mystery reason that I'm sure wasn't racist at all. So, he was arrested for something he didn't do. Spent two nights in jail, and then had cameras shoved in his face. Now, I personally cannot think of a scenario in which flipping two middle fingers is more appropriate there.

Honestly, if he [01:35:00] could have grown another hand in that moment, I would not have blamed him for throwing up a third bird for good measure. But the facts that came out afterward didn't really matter. Because by then, migrant crime was already out there as a phrase, and ever since, Fox and the Republicans have been hammering the idea that migrants are dangerous.

And because, again, there is no data to back up claims of a migrant crime wave, they've instead had to resort to anecdotes or exaggeration. For instance, the Republican National Committee made a website tracking alleged examples of migrant crime called BidenBloodBath. com. If you go to it, you'll find the names of 13 different states, which you can click on to find evidence of so called migrant crime there.

But for four of those states, when you click through, you'll find all they're able to cite is those states overall rates of fentanyl deaths. And look, those deaths were tragic, but you cannot connect them to migrant crime, given that to the extent fentanyl has been seized at the border, 90 percent of the time, it was seized during legal crossings, and 91 [01:36:00] percent of those seizures were from U.

S. citizens. Which, of course, they were. If you want to move drugs across the border, you're going to do it with American citizens because they attract less attention from authorities. I'm not telling you how to move drugs. But if you are going to, that is the only smart way to do it. So I have just told you how to move drugs.

And as for people crossing illegally, just 009 percent of people arrested by Border Patrol last year were found to possess any fentanyl whatsoever. So, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I don't know if BidenBloodbath. com Is the reliable source of news and information that we all thought it was.

And look, I am not saying that there haven't been individual migrants who've committed crimes. Of course they have, because migrants are people. And some people do bad things. In the same way, some Abba fans and some people with SpongeBob tattoos have committed crimes. And if it so happens that there is someone out there who is a migrant Abba fan with multiple SpongeBob tattoos, the only thing they're likely to be guilty of is being an [01:37:00] utterly fascinating human being.

What is your story, dude? I have so many questions about what brought you to this point. The thing is, if you want to prevent crime and death, that's a great idea. And there are absolutely ways to do that, but when you draw a circle around a few members of a particular group, especially one identifiable by race or nationality, then generalize about what this means about all of them.

No matter what you say, you're not having a reasoned debate about crime or safety, you're being racist. And the depressing thing is, all this fear mongering has been effective. Over 70 percent of Republicans now believe there is a high risk of people illegally coming to the US and committing crime.

Something which, again, is demonstrably and provably false.

Harris touts immigration reform at Arizona campaign rally - NBC NEWS - Air Date 8-10-24

KAMALA HARRIS: We, we will move forward and take on the biggest issues facing our nation. For example, the issue of immigration. So I was Attorney General of a [01:38:00] border state. I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels, and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.

So I know what I'm talking about. We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it. Comprehensive reform that includes

strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.

But Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem. Be clear about that. He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, [01:39:00] but he does not walk the walk. Earlier this year, everybody here knows, earlier this year we had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades.

But Donald Trump tanked the deal, because

he thought by doing that it would help him win an election. But when I am president, I will sign the bill.

So Arizona, ours is a fight for the future and it is a fight for freedom. 

Trump & Harris Each Vow Border Crackdowns as Immigrant Communities Demand Positive Change - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-21-24

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. If you can respond to what he says, but then, overall, what you think the issues are that should be being addressed [01:40:00] here, and what is being addressed?

MARIA HINOJOSA: The chaos? There is no chaos on the border, I just need to say. There is a humanitarian crisis, but the chaos was created by the policies initially of Donald Trump. So, let’s just put that — I just think it’s important that we change the narrative entirely. He’s right, what we should be talking about right now is comprehensive immigration reform, comprehensive, and a pathway to citizenship. In that sense, he’s right.

If I was giving counsel to Kamala Harris, what I would say is, “You need to have a primetime address on the issue of immigration. And you need to come to the camera and say, like, unequivocally, 'We are stopping this narrative about immigrants and refugees as a problem, as bringing in crime, as affecting our economy in negative way.'” We have to — she needs to make a statement based in reality — right? — which is, stop with [01:41:00] this notion of the border as a place where people are coming in, and nobody knows. She needs to take the moment, because she can, because she’s the daughter of immigrants. There’s nobody who can better do it than her.

Also, Joe Biden’s parting gift — I know people think I’m like out of this, you know, when I say this. Joe Biden’s parting gift needs to be actually for him to say, “Executive order, pathway to citizenship, now.” Why not? What is stopping him? I mean, even the Supreme Court has said that a president is not liable. He’s not breaking the law. He will actually — if he does that, he will guarantee — I’m saying this, and I don’t like to make these predictions. If they do that, Kamala will win, because all of those immigrants who are questioning her position, when she’s like, “We want to be tough on the border,” etc., etc., they would say, “Oh my god! This is in fact our party. This is in fact our candidate.” And they could win. I think it would be a game-changer.

And it needs to stop, this narrative about [01:42:00] criminals and immigrants and breaking laws. That is not who we are. And you have to talk to people who have actually been to the border, like Marisa, like myself, like Oscar, to understand that that narrative is not true.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Maria, when you talk about changing the narrative, this whole emphasis on immigration and crime is really a modern version — isn’t it? — of the Willie Horton approach to finding an other to rally the right-wing populists around? Because the reality is that crime rates among immigrants are far lower than they are among U.S.-born citizens.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Hence why when Kamala Harris does her primetime address on this issue, she actually goes really nerdy and has a whiteboard and says, “Let me show you, so it is unequivocal, that the FBI has said that over the last 30 years, violent crime has dropped precipitously. Let me show you on my little [01:43:00] whiteboard that the cities where immigrants are arriving to are among the safest — New York City, for example.”

Now, when you take a people, like vulnerable migrants and refugees, and you have them, like in New York City, what’s happening now — you put them into Roosevelt Hotel, then you’re taking them out, then you’re leaving them on the streets, and then you’re moving them around, and then you’re having them in encampments — this is a recipe for disaster. New York should be — I’m just saying New York because that’s where I live — should be doing a much better job, because, sadly, that reality is going to create a very ugly, visible situation, where you’re going to have migrants and refugees sleeping on the streets of New York, which is happening now. That is unacceptable. But then again, the mayor of New York needs to do something. Point is, massive change of narrative that only Kamala Harris can do.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Marisa, I wanted to ask you, in terms of what you would hope — what do you think Kamala Harris needs to do to set herself apart from previous policies of [01:44:00] the Biden administration, the Trump administration, and even the Obama administration to some degree?

MARISA FRANCO: Well, one, I think that, you know, one of the tenets of her campaign is freedom, and specifically talking about reproductive freedom, reproductive justice. And inside of that is bodily autonomy. And I think there’s not that far to understand then the freedom to migrate and the freedom to move and the freedom to pursue a better life when we’re talking about immigration. I think there’s a recognition for that.

And to be able to resist the sort of political ploys of the Republican Party, but then also resist the lack of political courage that the Democrats have shown, there is executive orders. There’s pushing what we can push through Congress. But there’s also standing up to the likes of Governor Abbott in the state of Texas, who has taken the mantle that was, you know, very much in my home state of Arizona, and standing up to Greg Abbott and the things that he’s doing and that he continues to do, and standing with Mayor Johnson here in Chicago, who [01:45:00] has been receiving folks coming, and different mayors across the country, and being able to actually push forward at the municipal level policies around immigration that I think we have had comprehensive — we have had immigration reform; it’s just been all enforcement.

And so, we need to really turn toward the question of legalization. I think also other key issues, the question of care, and how much she’s been a champion on that, labor, healthcare, education. Like, these are all things that I think people would really support. And finding, you know, the sweet spot between policies that are possible but impactful in our communities, I think, is what people are looking for. I think voters are looking for who gives — who cares about me, who cares about my future. And I think those types of things are things that people would really respond to.

SECTION D - MIGRANTS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D: Migrants.

Election 2024 As 'neofascist' Trump targets immigrants, how will the left respond w Juan González Part 2 - The Real News Network - Air Date 7-28-24

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, José Luis, can you give us a perspective from the work that you have done in Mexico Solidarity, how the [01:46:00] immigration debate is being framed in the United States and how it should be framed?

JOSE LUIS GRANADOS CEJA: Absolutely. It’s really good to be here with everybody on this program to talk about this topic. I think it’s one of the major issues that’s going to be talked about on the campaign trail. And often, it’s actually quite disappointing to see how little we talk about where Mexico fits in, in all of this. Much of what’s being discussed is going to have repercussions, not just for Mexico, but for all of Latin America.

And so I think when we talk about this, we have to have a regional perspective. And I don’t mean to replicate some of the rhetoric that we hear. Often, political leaders in the United States talk about having a regional response or about attending to the root causes, but actually involving Latin American countries, migrants themselves as part of this conversation.

And what they’ve insisted, I think, at least from what we’ve seen here in Mexico, is that they need to recognize the role that migrants play in the US economy, in the North American economy more broadly.

I think one of [01:47:00] the things that we need to talk about more as well is the regional perspective, which is talking about the root causes in a serious way, not in the way that has been done historically by US politicians where they try to frame things in a way that’s, actually, ultimately, going to favor the interests of US capital and the owners of capital in the United States. These programs that talk about investing in Central America or in Latin America but, ultimately, are all about continuing the exploitation and the oppression of the peoples of Latin America. But actually figuring out what’s going on and talking about the root causes in that sense in terms of what’s driving people to migrate.

One of the things we often come across when you talk to any migrant that is crossing through Mexico is that they all say that we would rather stay home. They are fleeing their situations. It’s not that they’re choosing to migrate. It’s a very different kind of phenomenon.

And so if we talk about the root causes, well, what does that mean? And one of the things that I think is often missing as part of the debate is [01:48:00] what is US foreign policy? What’s the role of US foreign policy in all of this? And when I mean that, one of the things that I think we should be highlighting, for example, is something that came out of the Palenque Summit.

It was a gathering of regional leaders: Nicolás Maduro, Díaz-Canel, López Obrador, the presidents of Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela were present. And what did they say? Well, we need to see an end to US intervention in Latin America, an end to the brutal blockade of Cuba, an end to the sanctions against Venezuela, and also talking about a way that actually invests in these people’s communities so that they don’t have to feel like they have to flee.

And I think that’s something that we need to hear more in the discussion about this. There are deeply integrated issues, migration and US foreign policy, and often, that doesn’t come up, even though there are efforts to try to amplify this.

Like I said, how is it that we’re not talking about what was said at the Palenque Summit? We talk about the Los Angeles Declaration, but why not that one? And I think [01:49:00] that’s one of the key things, I would say, needs to be part of this conversation. How do we get to a point where we’re pressuring US politicians, be they Republican or Democrat, to recognize the world that US foreign policy plays?

And I’ll close on this note. When we think about where do migrants come from, they tend to come from the countries that are facing US repression. Right now, one of the greatest communities that is seeing a movement towards the United States comes from Venezuela.

Venezuela, right now, is under a difficult economic situation as a result of US sanctions. US sanctions make it impossible for Venezuela to sell its oil, its number one export commodity, on the international market in a transparent, open way. They have to go through intermediaries, they sell things at a discount. It’s a very important resource to Venezuela’s economy. They can’t benefit from the way that they used to, even with prices being high.

And so that’s why we see the economic issues happening in Venezuela. We’ll try to blame the government and Nicolás Maduro, but I think much of the blame lies with US sanctions.

Same with the case of Cuba. In Haiti, right now, the destabilization as a result of [01:50:00] historic interventions in that country. That’s why we see migrants coming from this. And I think the more we talk about US foreign policy as being one of the root causes of migration, the further we can get in terms of this conversation of actually tackling the issue and making it so that migrants leave only because they want to, not because they have to.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring in Nana Gyamfi, a long-time attorney with immigration issues and with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Nana, what about this issue of US foreign policy? And also, the issue that much of the focus has been on Latin American migration, but the reality is, even as Donald Trump said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, that people are coming not just from Latin America, but from Asia, from Africa, from the Middle East. And of course, he was talking about it as they were sending criminals and rapists and murderers and terrorists, all of these countries [01:51:00] sending them to the United States.

NANA GYAMFI: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. I’m very excited to be here. I’m having this conversation, such a critical conversation in such a critical time. There are migrants that are coming, believe it or not, from Black countries, Black people, that are coming here to the United States. Many more are coming through the border than were coming previously through the US-Mexico so-called border.

But there’s just generally been an increase in Black migrants, particularly from the continent, not surprisingly, as we go from the late ’80s into the early ’90s when you see the United States playing out its efforts to push back against leftist socialist governments that were coming to the fore on the continent at that time. And of course, the US intervention, it has always intervened with coups, with assassination attempts, et cetera, on the continent.

And in the Caribbean, you see, again, in the [01:52:00] Caribbean, where they were talking about Grenada, Haiti, other places, as you have the US trying to fight to be able to keep its racial capitalist system rolling, the effect has been for people to flee.

And as we often talk about here at BAJI, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, what you see is Black people fleeing from majority Black countries — And also countries that are not majority Black — What Black people were fleeing from the United States, coming from the South to the North, to the Midwest, and to the West: economic terror, social terror, political terror.

And much of that terror has the face of the United States behind it, either directly or through the IMF, the World Bank, various UN entities that are, allegedly, used as diplomacy, as a weapon through their [01:53:00] connections and contacts working directly with the European Union, working also with their own military.

AFRICOM is all over the continent. You have these US military bases all over these areas in Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean, and those places include places where Black people are living. And the result of that is Black people coming into this country in numbers that really haven’t been seen before, particularly over the last 30 years. And then as I said, with this border, the US-Mexico so-called border, really over the last five years.

It is an important conversation to include. As we know, this country is built upon the enslavement and continued exploitation of Black people, as well as the genocide of Indigenous people. And when we look at who is really being rejected at [01:54:00] the border, we’re looking at Black folks, we’re looking at Indigenous folks coming particularly from Central America and Mexico. A lot of the issues that we face are the result of the same kind of racism, the same kind of discrimination, particularly anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, that we see in the United States.

Election 2024 As 'neofascist' Trump targets immigrants, how will the left respond w Juan González Part 3 - The Real News Network - Air Date 7-28-24

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to follow up on that. In terms of the Mexico situation, first of all, clearly, what most people are not aware of, although Mexicans historically were about two-thirds of all the undocumented migrants in the United States, the last 10 years, there has actually been a shift.

More Mexicans have been leaving the country than have been coming in over the last 10 years, so that the Mexican percentage of the undocumented population has been dropping precisely because, as you mentioned, there was a doubling of the [01:55:00] minimum wage, there was a right of unions to finally break free from government-controlled unions and elect their own leaders. There was a much more vibrant labor movement, and so many people didn’t feel the need to leave as they have in the past.

But I wanted to ask about these class battles within these communities. For instance, one study that I’ve been involved in shows that the Venezuelans, for instance, the Venezuelan migration of the last five years has been the most educated migrant group in American history. 61% of all the Venezuelans who have come to the United States in the last five years have a college bachelor’s degree or higher. The adult US population, only 34% have a college degree or higher.

So the Venezuelans who are coming are twice as educated as the average American, and they are much more of a [01:56:00] middle-class migration similar to that, that came after the Cuban revolution in 1959. And once they learn English and adapt to their environment, they will probably be a very middle class and somewhat conservative wing of the Latino population of the United States.

Likewise, some of the migrants that are coming from Caribbean or African countries don’t come from the working classes or the peasants, the peasantry of these nations, but are pretty much often educated or middle strata people who maybe have a different political perspective from the historic migrants from Haiti and Jamaica and other countries that have come in previous decades.

I’m wondering how you see class conflict developing within the migrant communities of the United States and how that will affect how these communities act politically in the future?

NANA GYAMFI: Absolutely [sung] . Absolutely. [01:57:00] Absolutely. And I think that goes with some of what you were talking about, Juan. A piece that I neglected to mention earlier that is very important when you talked about the Global South and the migration in the Global South.

The United States and Europe have extended their borders way beyond what is considered the border of the geography map into other countries, including some of these countries that are considered more leftist. Black migrants are not enjoying their lives in Mexico. They are not having a grand old time because of changes that have occurred. Same in Colombia and in other countries. Brazil is probably one of the few exceptions.

And the reality is that, that extension, part of the purpose of that is like a continuation of having certain people come over. Remember when Trump was like, why don’t we get Norwegians, and talked about the [01:58:00] s-hole countries and who people were. There’s always been this effort, but it’s been even increased over the past 10, 20 years to have a certain crew of people come.

So you can come through this program for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but you got to fly in. You can’t walk in, you got to fly. You got to have a ticket, you got to have a sponsor. So someone with money who’s able to not just take care of themselves in the United States of America, but has the capacity to extend care to someone else coming in from another country and say, I got them. I can cover them, also has to be involved. They’ve got to have a job. They’ve got to have all these things.

That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have working-class people that are going to be able to do that. But for the most part, even if the person coming is working class, clearly the person sponsoring has got a little bit of funds. I’m not saying they got to be wealthy rich, but they’ve got to have [01:59:00] some expendable income in order to make that happen.

And you see the same thing that’s happening in Europe where those borders are being extended into the continent so that, again, you keep people from being able to come in unless they come through these very narrow pathways that I refer to as obstacle courses.

They’re actually not pathways. They’re like capitalists, who can make it through, type of energy, where people who are going to come and become part of this wannabe middle class, excuse me, are going to come. And that is creating a situation in which you have, again, people looking at folks within our own communities in this stratified way.

And so, Africans want to be seen as, and talk about the fact that they’re amongst the most educated populations that come to this [02:00:00] country, but they’re driving Uber. They don’t want to talk about the fact that they’re driving Uber. Something wrong with driving Uber. You get my point, right?

Because that part of wanting to hold on to this idea that we are middle class is so important and looking the nose down at those Africans that are on the bikes delivering for DoorDash, et cetera, when, in fact, we know that your degree, whether it’s your attorney license, your medical license was torn up and thrown in the trash when you got to the United States, and you had to go through all kinds of hoops in order to become a medical tech and a paralegal after all these years that you may have been doing something else. 

That stratification is there, and the embarrassment about not being in this middle class, the respectability politics that I know we’ll talk about later also [02:01:00] serves as a sort of class conflict-inducing source.

Trump & Harris Each Vow Border Crackdowns as Immigrant Communities Demand Positive Change Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-21-24

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Maria, I wanted to ask you, in terms of this narrative and the work that Latinos do in this country, immigrants especially. Here in Chicago, 70% of all the landscapers in the city of Chicago are Mexican, half of all the restaurant workers. And you could go on, all of the low-paid work that is done here by migrants that have helped to revive some of these cities, and yet the narrative is always about the criminality and those who are bringing problems and seeking to use government resources.

MARIA HINOJOSA: So, what I say is, open your eyes — which, again, Kamala should be saying. Enough with what you hear. Actually open your eyes and see the immigrants all around you. And be like, “Huh, oh, this one’s working at 4:00 in the morning doing this or that.” Also, I like to remember, and [02:02:00] it’s important that we — I mean, Oscar is a professional. Marisa is a professional. I’m a professional. We’re all immigrants. My father helped to create the cochlear implant here at the University of Chicago, steps away from where we are. So, yes, we are all of those things, Juan. We are the laborers, but we’re also the brains behind this country.

So, that, that has to be so important, because, you know, Juan and I, we’ve been around so long that I know I say, “How is it possible that our Black brothers and sisters and that our fellow Latino, Latina, Latinx and Latine immigrants, sons and daughters of immigrants, are buying into these lies? How is it possible?” It truly is brilliant in the sense of mis- and disinformation. But what we have to do is to then replace that with — every single one who’s listening and watching this, when people say, “I don’t know what to do,” you know what you do? You go and tell the next person that you see, “Hey, do you see that immigrant doing this job? Do you see the immigrant doing this job? Do you know about my immigrant neighbor?” [02:03:00] It has to be person to person and just an onslaught of these other messages to combat what we’ve had to deal with over the last several decades.

OSCAR CHACON: I mean, after all, Trump is absolutely correct: Say a lie a thousand times, people believe it. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. I mean, the only reason immigration is such a hot topic is not because it’s real. It’s been manufactured by lies.

MARISA FRANCO: There’s something, I think, also, just to name. Like, we’re talking a lot about immigration and Latinos, but this is a really important moment for Black Americans. I mean, the possibility of a Black woman president, I think, is significant. And I think there’s really important things that Michelle Obama actually talked about yesterday that I think actually speak and relate to immigrant people, people of color, people who don’t come from money that do something, that do something, so, like, changing the narrative. A lot of us did not have the privilege of [02:04:00] being able to fail forward, as like the likes of Donald Trump.

And so, I think there’s a piece there that — because there is real — we have to come out of this with a stronger coalition of communities of color and low-income communities. And I think that there is real jewels in some of the narrative that she was putting out that connects deeply to values that are commonly held across communities. So, I really wanted to lift that up and also recognize how important of a moment it is and how beautiful it is to see the community mobilizing behind her and how much it’s transformed the campaign. I can say that in Arizona and some of the different states we work in, it is truly shifting at the ground level.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And we only have about a minute, but what is Mijente planning to do from now until Election Day? You haven’t endorsed anyone yet. You did endorse Bernie Sanders in the primaries in 2020. What do you see as your work after this convention?

MARISA FRANCO: We are doing a national tour of over 20 cities called “El [02:05:00] Chisme,” that’s broadening the frame beyond the top of the ticket and looking at the local levels. We’re having an event — Maria is joining us — tonight here in Chicago. We’re mobilizing voters in four states, in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. And we’re preparing to hit the ground running in 2025. Pasa lo que pasa, whoever ends up winning, we’ve got to keep organizing.

AMY GOODMAN: You helped Biden win Arizona, turning it blue. You haven’t made an endorsement this time.

MARISA FRANCO: We did not. We did not. I think we’re prepared to mobilize, but we don’t endorse every time. And for us, you know, our members were not — we were not going to endorse Biden. And when it shifted, we were a little bit too far in the game. So, we’re mobilizing, but we did not endorse.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Maria, in New York, Make the Road did endorse Vice President Harris to be president.

MARIA HINOJOSA: That’s why I’m saying this is a particularly fascinating moment. And you have progressive organizations like Make the Road endorsing, others still waiting. But this is why I’m so glad, Marisa, [02:06:00] that you brought up the importance of the Black, Latino — also, there are Afro-Latinos. There are so many Black Latinos. That question, like, “Will Latinos vote for a Black man, or vote for a Black woman, in this case?” Yes. And we have to. It’s a historical moment. You know, I’m a kid, a Mexican kid, who grew up here on the South Side of Chicago. My mom, who’s 88 now, made the decision of, “Well, we’re Mexican immigrants, but we are siding with Martin Luther King. That is our guy.” So, that notion of the solidarity between Black and Latino communities must exist.

 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from The Brian Lehrer Show, Today Explained, The Times, The PBS NewsHour, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, NBC News, Democracy Now!, and The Real News [02:07:00] Network. Further details are in the show notes. 

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So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, [02:08:00] from bestoftheleft.com. 

 

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Air Date 8/23/2024

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Air Date 8/17/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. James Baldwin's 100th birthday passed by recently and we're using the occasion to draw on his moral clarity and eloquence, while we assess the state of race in America. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today, include 1A, ThroughLine, Democracy Now!, The Thom Hartmann Program, Woke AF Daily, The Majority Report, and a speech by Cory Bush, then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more on Baldwin the Writer, Race in America, the White Lie, and Global Connections.

Celebrating James Baldwin's 100th Birthday - 1A - Air Date 7-30-24

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: James Baldwin is one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels, essays, short stories, poetry, even a screenplay. He's best known for his affecting prose, his depth of thought, and his clear moral vision for the country. He was also a bit of a character. In interviews, he's often smoking a cigarette with his legs crossed, [00:01:00] casually calling the interviewer baby with a grin.

But Baldwin is perhaps best known for his philosophies on race. 

JAMES BALDWIN: I don't believe in White people. I don't believe in Black people either, for that matter. But I know the difference between being Black and Whiteness and, and at this time, it means that I cannot fool myself about some things, but I can fool myself about it if I were White.

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: As an openly gay man, Baldwin spoke about sexuality in a time when it was unheard of for many Black men to do so. 

JAMES BALDWIN: Homosexual is not a noun. It might be a verb, transitive. It is certainly an adjective, but it is not a noun. To ask the question means you don't know anything about human experience—where it can take you, what it can do.

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: Nearly 40 years after his death, much of what he had to say about the U. S. continues to resonate. 

JAMES BALDWIN: The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as [00:02:00] bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives. It is entirely up to the American people.

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: This week, Baldwin would have turned 100 years old. In a moment when democracy is at risk, when wars abroad are being protested at home, when race continues to shape American politics, what can we learn from Baldwin about a moment not so different from his own? 

James Baldwin's Fire - Throughline - Air Date 9-17-20

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Yeah, so the lie is what I call the value gap. And that is the belief that White people matter more than others. And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements. And they're protected by the lies we tell ourselves. 

You know, Baldwin in 1964 wrote an essay entitled "The White Problem", and he has this wonderful passage, it's so poignant, where he—and I'm paraphrasing here—where he says, you know, the founders of the country had a fatal [00:03:00] flaw, they said that they were Christian, they said that they were founding the nation on these principles, but yet they had chattel, they had us, and in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings, Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed.

And then here's the line, "That lie is the basis of our present trouble". And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said. And we tell ourselves we're the example of our democracy achieved, as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba, or what we did in Puerto Rico, or what we did in Hiroshima, or what we did in Nagasaki, right? So, we do all of that to protect our innocence. 

So, Baldwin is insisting, you know, we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise. And that, [00:04:00] at the personal level, also must happen at the societal level. So, we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way,

RUND ABDELFATAH - HOST, THROUGHLINE: You know, those lies that, as you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially—like, as a society we tell ourselves—on the one hand it's that sort of self preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro and macro level and it just makes me think, there's a certain vulnerability that it takes to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say this is not the truth 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Yeah. 

RUND ABDELFATAH - HOST, THROUGHLINE: And so, in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to go through just to tackle this subject is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience.[00:05:00] 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Yeah, you know, it's confrontation is also a sign of maturity, where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly. He has this line, and I'm paraphrasing again, you know, is that the trouble we're in is deeper than you thought because the trouble is in us. You're so right to say that we have to confront it, it requires being willing to be vulnerable.

RUND ABDELFATAH - HOST, THROUGHLINE: There is this personal versus systemic tension in Baldwin's writings, in that he deeply reflects on the personal impacts that America as a country has had on individual people in terms of what it does to their self confidence and that actually brings me to one of the quotes from your book that really stuck with me.

I want to [00:06:00] read it really quick for you if that's okay. 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Sure. 

RUND ABDELFATAH - HOST, THROUGHLINE: [quoting Glaude] "America and its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But he insisted, we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a Black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a Black man. Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves, together as a country, we must do the same. The two are bound together". What I love is while it's deeply personal, it's very much examining the systemic, of the broader responsibility of the country, of its government, of its policies.

Today, there seems to be a real tension between those things for many people with the popularity of a book like Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, where [00:07:00] there is this very direct pointing at individuals, around individual kind of responsibility. What do you think Baldwin would have made of that tension today?

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Well, you know, so one of the most powerful things about Baldwin is that he goes to the interior, not to stay there, but as the launching pad to go outward. So, the interior is the basis for moving to a broader form of social criticism. Some people will move from social criticism to the interior and you end up with this kind of narcissistic kind of account where it's just simply, you know, about the individual and their own pain and suffering, right? For Jimmy, that individual pain, as early as reading Notes of a Native Son, right?, where you end with him at the funeral of his stepfather with the birth of his youngest sister and him leaving to get ready to go to Paris, and of course the [00:08:00] riots in New York. So, there's a way in which the autobiographical is the kind of point of entry to the broader social context.

I think that's really important in our own moment because we live in a moment that's so driven by our own individual brands, right? You know, our social media platforms are micro reality shows, right? It's very difficult for us to move outside of our own selves into a broader understanding of our genuine relationship with others. You know, what would he make of something like White Fragility? You know, what would he make of something like How to Be an Antiracist? Look, they, those sorts of books have their place, but we're talking about something deeper. 

DR. KENNETH CLARK, INTERVIEWER: Jim, what do you see in the recesses of your own mind as the future [00:09:00] of our nation?

JAMES BALDWIN: Well, I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: When Jimmy says choose life, don't wallow in the illusion, don't settle for safety, that's not about a 'how to manual', that's not about a corporate strategy for dealing with difference in your midst. The point here is to choose life is a deeper existential question about who do you take yourself to be. 

JAMES BALDWIN: Now the artist, no matter how he sounds, is by definition a religious man, believing that we can create and transcend [00:10:00] all our gods, that it is entirely up to us as the work of human being to make the world more human.

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: We travel and we move around the surfaces, right? Because we're afraid of what's in the dark cellar. We don't wanna look the terror squarely in the face. But, you know, America's like Never-never Land. You know, we all want to be lost boys and girls, where we don't wanna be responsible or accountable. We'd rather be safe and secure in our innocence.

JAMES BALDWIN: One of the things that most afflicts this country is that White people don't know who they are or where they come from. That's why you think I'm a problem, but I am not the problem. Your history is, and as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're going to be the prisoner of it. 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: And, you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says people either [00:11:00] don't know or they don't want to admit, in effect, what's happened to thousands of thousands of their countrymen. And he says you can't be innocent in the face of that. The innocence is the crime. 

JAMES BALDWIN: When "White people" talk about progress in relation to Black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word progress is how quickly and how thoroughly I become White. I don't want to become White. I want to grow up, and so should you. 

“Justice for My Brother”: Sister of Samuel Sharpe Speaks Out After Police Killing During RNC - Democracy Now! - Air Date 7-19-24

NERMEEN SHAIKH - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Well, Representative Darrin Madison, if you could respond to this tragic incident and the fact that Black people in Wisconsin are nearly six times more likely to be killed by police than White people? If you could just say what specific measures you’re advocating?

REP. DARRIN MADISON: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one, I want to uplift that community over there. There’s Repairers of the Breach in that neighborhood, which is a 24-hour-a-day shelter [00:12:00] that provides services for folks who are unhoused in that community, which — that’s why that encampment is there, and that’s why local law enforcement know a lot of the folks in the community and know how to navigate those relationships.

As it relates to the broader context of our local communities, you know, we — Black folks in this city have navigated police violence since the 1950s. That was one of the first killings of a Black male by the hands of law enforcement reported in our state. And that has only happened more and more times throughout history. In recent years, that’s happened a series of times, which has led to communities crying for real change as it relates to law enforcement procedures and practices to ensure that [00:13:00] folks can be safe in their own community.

Some of the bills that, you know, I’ve been working on over the past year have called for, one, police decertification for law enforcement when law enforcement officers are involved in these situations and they are found guilty. What often happens is, instead of being held accountable, a law enforcement officer will quit and then go work in another department in another community nearby, right?

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And you have, in the case of D’Vontaye Mitchell — and let’s just be clear, Sam was killed on Tuesday.

REP. DARRIN MADISON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: D’Vontaye was killed — oh, it was June 30th. That was a few weeks ago. And he was held down not by police, but by security guards.

REP. DARRIN MADISON: By security.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And I have to say, yesterday, when we went to the Hyatt and I went to the different [00:14:00] police to say, “Can you tell me where exactly D’Vontaye Mitchell was killed?” they would say, “Uh, uh, uh, I don’t know. You know, I am from Chicago,” or “I am from” — and they named all these different places — “Ohio,” “I am from” — because they were all different law enforcement. And, of course, the local police, they also wouldn’t tell me.

REP. DARRIN MADISON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: But these weren’t even police. They were security guards. That he was held down?

REP. DARRIN MADISON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Explain. And then talk about what you’re demanding, what police have responded in both cases.

REP. DARRIN MADISON: Yeah. So, in the case of D’Vontaye, what had happened was there was a — you know, the staff claimed that there was — he was being disruptive in the —

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In the Hyatt.

REP. DARRIN MADISON: In the Hyatt. It eventually led to them assaulting him in the space. Apparently, he ended up in a bathroom at some — a women’s bathroom at some point, and then was chased outside, in which he was pinned down on the ground by at least two confirmed security guards. The other two [00:15:00] folks, it wasn’t confirmed if they were security or they were Hyatt staff.

What we do know is that the Hyatt has fired that security team, as well as a few other staffers who worked in the space, for not being compliant with their own policies. What that tells us — and, you know, the lawyer of D’Vontaye’s family said it best — is that there is skepticism, at least from the Hyatt’s perspective, in that whole altercation.

When Milwaukee law enforcement arrives, they tried to — they found him unresponsive and tried to resuscitate him, and he, sadly, lost his life. One of his — what we know was his last words was “I’m sorry.” And often in these situations where folks are losing their life, they are pleading, with someone who has dominance, for their life. And they don’t respond and do anything. And that hurts.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And [00:16:00] the videotape in both cases is devastating. We only have 30 seconds, but, Angelique, we’re talking — this is our last segment here in Milwaukee. Outside the Republican convention, has the Trump team gotten in touch with you? Have your local police gotten in touch with you?

ANGELIQUE SHARPE: They absolutely have not. And I don’t understand, you know, when we have evidence that Sam called home, that the shelterless community down there, by all accounts, of his character, and the character of the other person, it’s absolutely not making sense.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: What do you want right now, as you speak to a global audience? We have about 10 seconds.

ANGELIQUE SHARPE: Yes. I want transparency. We want not the clips of the video; we want full clips. We want the autopsy report. You know, we really want justice for my brother.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Well, we’re not going to stop here, even as we go [00:17:00] back to New York. I want to thank you both for being with us. 

Why JD Vance and the MAGA GOP Do Not Represent the True Idea of America & Our Core Values - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 8-2-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: French President Emmanuel Macron got it right when he recently said "patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism". See, these guys are buying into nationalism and they're promoting nationalism. And patriotism is a very different thing. President Macron said, "Nationalism is a betrayal. By pursuing our own interests first with no regard to others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and what makes it great: its moral values". 

You know, the French experienced the difference between patriotism and nationalism when Hitler flipped Germany into nationalism in the 1930s. And thus, the former, late president of France, Charles de Gaulle, put it very clearly. He said, "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first, [00:18:00] nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first". 

Abraham Lincoln made this distinction between patriotism and nationalism in the Gettysburg Address after having defeated the White Christian identity nationalist Confederacy movement. In the Gettysburg Address he said, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. It is rather for us to highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

But then J. D. Vance comes along in the Republican National Convention in his acceptance speech, and says, "You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. But America is not just an idea. It's a group of people with a shared history [00:19:00] and a common future. Now, that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. If this movement of ours is to succeed and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation and citizens deserve leaders who put their interests first".

Now that's a perfect articulation of nationalism. You know, just reject the idea that America—and, I mean, this is literally the truth—America is the first country in the history of Western civilization that was founded on an idea, rather than on DNA, rather than on language, rather than on culture, and rather than on geography. Yes, you know, I would be the first to acknowledge that DNA, you know, [00:20:00] basically White men, played a huge role and controlled all the power at the founding of our republic. But every generation over these 240 plus years, every generation has gotten us closer and closer and closer to that founding mission statement, that founding goal, which J. D. Vance rejected in his acceptance speech. 

Patriotism expresses love and devotion to one's country as a whole, including all of its people. Nationalism, on the other hand, focuses on a devotion to a specific ethnic, cultural, or national group within the country. Patriotism refers to our country. Nationalism refers to our homeland. Patriotism requires both tolerance and appreciation of other countries and cultures. Nationalism preaches superiority over other cultures, nations and, and groups. Patriots can accept criticism of their country [00:21:00] and seek improvements. Nationalism rejects criticism and says 'my leaders, right or wrong'. 

In 1937 at the Nuremberg Rally, when Rudolf Hess—and, Sean, I'm going to play some audio out of my computer here—when Rudolf Hess introduced Adolf Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg Rally, he switched from the traditional German patriotic Vaterland—Fatherland—and went with instead the nationalistic German Heimat. Heimat zu sein. Heimat is the German word for homeland. This is Rudolf Hess introducing Adolf Hitler in 1937: [Thom reads translation over German archival audio clip] "Germany will become a homeland. A homeland for all the Germans in the [00:22:00] world". 

So, that was Hess introducing Hitler, introducing the word homeland into the German vocabulary. At that point, the Nazis stopped referring to Germany as the fatherland and started referring to it as the homeland. Now homeland, after all, invokes blood and soil. It's where your ancestors lived, where your family came from. It's the core of your religious, racial, national identity. We are not a heterogeneous... we're not all one people. We are a multiracial, pluralistic, multi-religious and secular and democratically governed nation.

Yeah, I lived in Germany in the 80s. I knew actual Nazis, people. You know, I knew a guy who had been at that Hitler rally in 1937, marched up and touched the blood flag as part of his initiation into the army. And in my entire [00:23:00] lifetime, until 2001, when George W. Bush started using that word homeland, I had never heard an American politician use that word. Have you? Never. Which is why when Bush came up with the word homeland and created the Department of Homeland Security, a chill went down my spine. And I wrote several op eds about it. It was one of the things that got me, that provoked me to start this radio show, frankly.

So now we've got this movement, this MAGA movement, this nationalist movement that wants to strip the history of African-Americans and queer people out of our history books. They want to pass laws to make it harder to vote. They want to trash economically marginalized and discriminated against people. They use the phrase DEI as a slur. They even ridiculed Biden, President Biden, when he said, this was last week, he said, "America is an idea, an idea [00:24:00] stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It is the most powerful idea in the history of the world. The idea is that we hold these truths to be self evident. We're all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Instead, J. D. Vance is telling us, no, no, we're just, we're just a bunch of White people here. 

So, what is the, what is the Republican Party doing to impose their nationalist view on America? First, they're trying to break our ideals and credential-based bureaucracy by Trump's Schedule F. Right? Fire all the civil servants. Loyalty to country is replaced with loyalty to the leader in their party. Next, they're working to fully legalize political bribery. The Supreme Court took the lead on this one. Then they want to destroy our faith in the rule of law. The law is for thee, but not for me. And they're running a felon for president. And finally, they want us to [00:25:00] lose trust in our institutions, like the free press. Hitler called it the Lügenpresse, the lying press. Trump calls it the fake news. Our national motto, E pluribus unum, out of many come one, summarizes the idea of America. Trump's motto, "go back to your S hole country", expresses, to paraphrase President Macron, the exact opposite. 

The work of our day, is to restore the idea of America, an egalitarian, pluralistic, democratic republic, and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years. I'm signed up for it. Are you? 

Truth, Privilege, and James Baldwin - Woke AF Daily - Air Date 10-3-23

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: I always loved the sentiment of him being a witness, you know?, to what is happening. And I think that good writers are. They're both a witness and a mirror for us to see the world through. And, you know, when you talk [00:26:00] about history and the importance of history being able to create empathy, we're at a time, Greg, right now, where history's being rewritten and erased, right?, where legislation literally has been passed to ensure White comfort. 

GREG GARRETT: In my state of Texas, in Florida, across the South. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: In Florida, across the South. And so for you, right?, knowing that the purpose of history is just not to repeat it, it is to create a sense of empathy and understanding about the human condition, both our potential, and our detractions from ourselves and from our character and from our moral standings. And so, what comes up for you and what does it mean for you to be [00:27:00] putting out a book in this time when a Baldwin would have been banned, and is probably banned, and it is banned, right? Um, so please. 

GREG GARRETT: Well, first, I have had this conversation with my students here at Baylor. And Baylor, of course, is a private school in Texas, so, I look at colleagues at the University of Texas, the flagship school of our state, who are starting to wrestle with these questions and these issues and I have said, I said to a reporter from Fox News not too long ago, if I taught at one of our state schools, it's very likely I would get fired. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

GREG GARRETT: And so one of the first things, I mean, just directly to your question, which was actually posed like a historian. I don't know what your major was... 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: Political science, but thank you!

GREG GARRETT: Ok. Well, my historian friends would say, Yay, she got the whole history thing. 

When we don't tell the [00:28:00] truth about who we are, and this is personal, you know, I think about the former president who can't tell the truth about who he is as a human being and how detrimental that is not only to him, but to all of us. I think about people in my life. I mean, and I can't name names because like, you know, we're on the air. But I think about people who are unable to face who they are and be honest about where they come from and about their failures and about their mistakes and so are unable to correct them. And those people are trapped in the same way that Baldwin talks about White being trapped. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: Yeah. 

GREG GARRETT: So, if, forever, Black people have been the way that you measure Whiteness, you know, and if the lost cause myth, for example, is partly built around, you know, however difficult your life might be, if you're a poor White person in the American South or [00:29:00] anywhere in America, in the Midwest, any place, at least you're notBlackk and you can set that Blackness as a lodestar. And so Baldwin asked his nephew to think about this. What would it be like if you woke up in the morning and you looked at the sky and everything was different, you know, the sun was out, but the stars were blazing, it would freak you out. And so he had this incredible compassion, you know, this recognition that asking people to be honest about their history is going to shake up who they are because it's going to force them to tell the truth and acknowledge things. 

But one of the things, and I had mentioned to your producer a while ago that Robert Jones is coming to Baylor next week and we're going to do an event together here. Robbie's new book about the roots of White supremacy is so good at telling our historical truth. Like, I went to [00:30:00] high school in Oklahoma. We did not learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre. We didn't even hear it called the Tulsa Race Riots. We just didn't learn about it. And if you don't learn about it, then how can you correct it? And, it just, when you don't deal with history, particularly history that's uncomfortable, then it just allows the status quo to be maintained. And Baldwin talks about the status quo a lot and he says it's already hard enough to change the status quo. Because, you know, as Dr. King said, people who are in a position of privilege don't want to give that up.

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: Right. Right. 

GREG GARRETT: But if you don't even tell the truth about it, and if you don't even say, Here are the reasons that people in privilege need to reckon with who they are and what they've done, then, then how can anything ever change? And that for me is the distressing thing about the legislation you're talking about and honestly why I feel not only do I need to write about it, but I need to speak, I need to preach, I need to get out there in every venue that I can [00:31:00] and stand there looking like me and say, Hey, people who look like me, we got to think about this stuff. 

Celebrating James Baldwin's 100th Birthday Part 2 - 1A - Air Date 7-30-24

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: For fall of 2024, I'm teaching American History II, a course from the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the present, using the 14th Amendment as the story arc to provide a clarifying structure for the course content. While I was already a big fan of Baldwin's, I was unaware of the Baldwin and William Buckley debate in Cambridge in 1965.

I heard snippets of it this morning on NPR and have already included it in the syllabus. Thank you, NPR. It's a republic if we can keep it. 

Let's play another clip from that 1965 debate between James Baldwin and conservative writer William F. Buckley. 

JAMES BALDWIN: The ex attorney general, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro president.

And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to White people. [00:32:00] They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. And did not hear, and possibly will never hear, the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn in which the statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday.

And now he's already on his way to the presidency. We've been here for 400 years, and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you're "good," we may let you become president. 

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: Now, the first Black president wouldn't be elected until 43 years after this debate and now we're facing similar questions about Vice President Kamala Harris, who's the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

Professor Glaude, it's been nearly 60 years since Baldwin said this. If he were alive today, what do you think he would say about this moment? 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: You know, I'm always a bit leery of trying to anticipate Jimmy's [00:33:00] words. He has over 7, 000 pages of writing and we probably could glean something from, from that about what he would say.

I know what I've learned from him that will allow me to say something about this moment. And that is, how can I put this? No matter what or who resides, no matter who resides in the White House, if the nation refuses to confront itself honestly, it will continue to be monstrous, right? We can become the face of the empire.

We too can become monstrous, but unless the country confronts itself honestly about who and what it is and what it has done, it can't release itself into a new way of being, right? And so he, I think from what I've [00:34:00] learned, he urges me to be cautious. To understand, let me use this phrase, to understand the "fragility of hope" in this moment.

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: Robert, we have just, we have just about 30 seconds left here, and I want I want to make sure to bring you in because I want to know what you might say to Baldwin in this moment if your adopted godfather was here? 

ROBERT JONES JR: You know, I don't know what I would say to him. I know that I would hug him and have to be pried away because I'm always thinking about the human being that Baldwin was not the writer, not the eloquent speaker, but the human being. And I think about his love for children right now. He has this quote, "The children are always ours. Every single [00:35:00] one of them all over the globe. And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

And that to me cuts to the quick of everything we're facing here and abroad. 

US' Unconditional Support For Israel Making The World More Dangerous - The Majority Report - Air Date 8-2-24

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So, I would love your assessment of this. I think people think it's impolite—I don't really care about being impolite to Joe Biden because he's presided over a genocide—but I think people think it's impolite to ask this question. Has he been entirely manipulated by Benjamin Netanyahu because his brain is not seemingly working anymore and he doesn't know when Netanyahu is humiliating him on the public stage? Like, I'm only speaking about self-interest from a political perspective, about not getting humiliated, about trying to have some dignity. I mean, all these politicians have enormous egos. As, somebody who's been an advocate for Palestinians, you're a Palestinian-Canadian and of [00:36:00] course have been immersed in this for so long, like, what do you see here with the Biden-Netanyahu relationship that makes this so uniquely destructive and that Netanyahu has clearly taken advantage of?

DIANE BUTTU: Look, I think the big thing is that Biden has always said that he himself is a Zionist. And if you look at his record, his record of voting, he's always been on the wrong side of history, incidentally. But particularly on this issue, he's always stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel because he is a Zionist.

Now, since he authorized the genocide back in October, I think that he has not only continued to dig his heels in, but I think he's dug his heels in even knowing that this would eventually cost him the election. I think that it's a mistake to think that Joe Biden stepped down and isn't going to run just because of his age. But I think that there were other [00:37:00] factors as well, that when you look at younger voters and people who are of conscience, they're saying we're not going to vote for Joe Biden because he is Genocide Joe, because he's been the person who has presided over this genocide. 

Has he also been played by Netanyahu? Yes, I think he has. And Netanyahu is somebody who has made it clear that he wants to see a Trump presidency, that he likes President Trump, which is why he went to Mar-a-Lago and so, for him, he liked having Republicans in office because it allows him to push his agenda even further.

So, he's trying to push this as far as possible until the next election, hoping that it will be a Trump win so that he can then continue the next phase of his plan, which is, not only the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, but turning his sights to the West Bank as well. And we've already seen this. We've already seen him start in on the West Bank with more than 500 Palestinians killed [00:38:00] just since October. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And Smotrich being in charge of that and also basically removing military authority and just having the settler gangs that he's a part of being now the primary authority in the West Bank, a part of that as well. But yeah, I mean, it is just astounding to me, I guess, from a really 40,000 foot view, that Biden's emotional attachment to a Zionist project, which is a colonial project and one that inherently involves murdering, since 1967, since 1948, it's been about ethnically cleansing and ruining millions of lives. How one can rationalize that through racism and still have an emotional connection and idealize that project in the year 2024, that's the thing that I just can't put myself in that mindset. And even to tank your own electoral chances, knowing that it's this much of an emotional project for you and... I don't know. Uh, [00:39:00] Diana, your final thoughts there. 

DIANE BUTTU: Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, I don't think that people realize what Zionism has meant for Palestinians and what it has done to Palestinian lives, to Palestinian land, to Palestinian bodies. When people try to downplay it and somehow talk of it in its nice version, or even they try to kind of say that it's like, Oh, it's got many faces. No, there's really only one face, and that's the face that I and so many others, so many other Palestinians, have lived with, which is a settler-colonial movement that aims to remove us from our land. And in the process of removing us and erasing us, it's violent on every single level.

And to somehow buy into this violence and think that this is okay, it's not even [that] troublesome is the word, but one would expect that in the year 2024 that there would be a wake up call, that [00:40:00] people would ask Palestinians, What's it like to live under Zionism? What is it like to live under this settler-colonial regime? And we can easily just point to what Israel is doing in Gaza, because that is what Zionism is about. It's about killing Palestinians. It's about erasing them. It's about destroying their homes, taking over their land and pretending that somehow everything is lovely. It's a project of Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinians who are the indigenous people. And it's terrifying and really must come to an end. 

Raw video- Rep. Cori Bush concedes 1st Congressional District primary race to Wesley Bell - KSDK News - Air Date 8-7-24

CORI BUSH: So every time I stand on the House floor or I speak in the committee here, and you all know the first words that come out of my mouth: St. Louis and I rise. So I'm gonna get to my speech. [laughter, encouragement from crowd] 

St. Louis and I rise to [00:41:00] say thank you to all the people who showed up and who support me and support this incredible team and the vision that we have for our future, a future that works for all of us. And so let me say to my Arab and Palestinian, our Muslim community,

I hope that the new member of Congress that will be taking over in January, you know, right before his trial starts. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Jesus. I'm sorry. I... let me say this though, because I'm not here, we need to build the community back because [00:42:00] what just happened helped to rip the community apart. The thing is, I'm not, I don't want to feed into that because we have to be one St. Louis because we have to grow and so I just hope he actually takes the time to learn about our Palestinian and our Arab and our Muslim communities, that he actually speaks to you and that he sees the beauty in what we have created that transcends our ethnic backgrounds and our religions and the way that we have been able to do that. And so I just want to put that out there to him as some homework. This race, you all, was unlike anything St. Louis has ever seen. The flood of outside Republican money into this district, this Democratic district, was staggering. This was [00:43:00] the second most expensive congressional race in our nation's history. Nineteen million dollars and counting. And so that's how much they spent in this race. Mostly far-right-funded super PACs against the interests of the people of St. Louis, the people of Missouri's first, they sought to divide us. But we've always been clear that St. Louis is a vibrant and a resilient community, one that refuses to be undermined, one that won't be taken for granted. And together we will continue to rise and stand up against the far-right, Republican extremism. Oh, he don't know what he's about to have to deal with, but I hope you fight! [applause] 

And the thing is, you up after me, so your fight got to be bigger and better than mine. And it's okay. If you got that, I hope you got that. Because the people deserve that. We'll switch from a fighter to a... 

[encouragement [00:44:00] from crowd, someone shouts "take your time!"] 

We'll stand. As a beacon of hope and light and human rights for all people, we'll keep doing that, I will keep doing that work, this team will keep doing that, we'll continue to fight for the rights of all people no matter the race, the faith, or the background, the ethnicity, the religion, the age, the occupation, the gender identity, we'll keep fighting for you, we will keep fighting, we will stand up for what is right no matter the cost, which we just paid a cost but actually it's going to propel us forward.

Always fight for our unhoused communities, our elders, our children, our families, our veterans, our, our... we will keep supporting a free Palestine, [00:45:00] a free Congo, a free Sudan, and keep opposing genocide and human rights abuses worldwide. We will always stand up for the safety, for the dignity, for the self-determination of all people, from St. Louis, to Palestine and Israel, to Bosnia, to India, and everywhere else. We will always keep it real, and we will always keep the truth. 

And, I'm going to continue to act with the dedication that you all have seen over the years. I will continue to work to bridge divides and address your concerns and build a stronger, more unified community. And so St. Louis serving as your Congress member has been the joy of my life, and I'm not done yet. [00:46:00] [applause] 

It's just that now I'm about to be outside-outside. And so, so, let me lastly say this. Let me lastly say this. You all have been what has undergirded me and what has strengthened me. And I want to say this to all the little kids that have come up to me over even the last week, the little Black girls that see themselves in me and all the little girls that see something in me. [00:47:00] Let me say this to you: We did not fail. You did not fail. You keep rising. You keep going after what God has given you to go after. You keep fighting. You keep, you hold fast to who you are and what you believe because this is only the beginning.

Note from the Editor on the need for national self-reflection

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with 1A introducing James Baldwin on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Throughline discussed the importance of confronting truth when lies get in the way. Democracy Now! looked at the police killing just outside the RNC. The Thom Hartmann Program clarified between patriotism and nationalism. Woke AF Daily talked about Baldwin's compassion with the understanding that asking White people to face the lies of Whiteness is very destabilizing. 1A discussed the need for the nation to begin to tell the truth about itself. The Majority Report looked at Joe Biden and the nation's [00:48:00] role in the Gaza genocide. And finally we heard part of Cory Bush's speech after she was defeated in the Democratic primary by a wave of right-wing money, including from the pro-genocide wing of the pro-Israel lobby. 

Those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives sections, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I have a few [00:49:00] thoughts to tie together. The first is something that I've been reminded of over and over again from James Baldwin's words and today's discussion. Just recently, I came across a parody of the Bible story, the "Parable of the Good Samaritan". It's called the "Parable of the Good Sociologist". And this was referenced in a Guardian article about the recent racist, xenophobic riots in the UK. In this version, when the traveler on the road to Jericho is assaulted, the first sociologist crosses the road and passes by on the other side. The second does the same. But the good sociologist rushes to the scene, cradles the victim's head and says, "Boy, the person who did this to you really needs help". And the connection I think is pretty clear. The fascists in the UK starting riots, they need some help just as people in the US, whether they realize they're racist or if they've just been steeped in the myth of White supremacy for [00:50:00] so long that they're like a fish who doesn't realize they're in water, they all need help. And I think I may have only said this on the bonus show for members, but it bears repeating here: Israel doesn't need peace negotiators or weapons sales so much as they need therapists. Palestinians aren't in the same position of power as Israel, so it's not an equal comparison, but the same basically goes for them. 

The situation over there has been completely effed up for basically a full human life span. Of course, everyone who lives in the area has been completely messed up and warped by the conflict. And ultimately there is no way forward but to face the truth that's currently being obscured by lies. And there's one last thought related to all this: the Olympics wrapped up last week and the occasion of Simone Biles dominating the women's gymnastics again, gave the excuse to dig up an old quote from JD Vance about her. In the Tokyo games, Biles withdrew from competition for mental health reasons. [00:51:00] She had what she later explained as "the twisties", which is the phenomenon of a gymnast losing full awareness of their body in time and space while performing their physics-defined routines. As is now a well known story, Biles went through therapy and training to confront the problem she was having, and then, having overcome the twisties, she returned to the Olympics to win three gold medals and one silver this time around. Biles was praised by many, though not all, when she withdrew in Tokyo. 

And the line, I would guess, is drawn between those who recognize the need for mental health, self-reflection, self-care, facing hard truths, all that kind of stuff, and those who think that the greatest sign of strength is to just stick it out. Plow forward. Don't ask questions. Don't look back. JD Vance being a sort of cartoon villain who praises his grandmother for not getting a divorce from her horribly abusive husband even though, as it turns out, she probably wasn't able to [00:52:00] because they had not implemented no fault divorce in her state. That's an aside, anyway. JD Vance is clearly in the second group. Stick it out. Plow forward. Don't ask questions, right? And this is what he said about Biles withdrawing from the Tokyo competition: " I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we tried to praise people, not for the moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments". 

And that really lays it out, I think. If you equate therapy and self-reflection with weakness and as antithetical to heroism, then you're destined to always continue to make the same mistakes, likely hurting yourself and others in the process. The big picture argument that's been made over the past few years as Americans have argued over what kind of history we want to teach our kids about the country, is that teaching the bad stuff is akin to wanting to feel bad and wanting others to feel bad [00:53:00] about the country. So, the other side proposes the opposite, a sort of nationalist history that only tells positive stories so that kids can grow up feeling proud. But that's how you continue to cause harm by perpetuating a lie. Plowing forward, not looking back, not stopping to reconsider. But our vision, the vision of telling the truth, even though it's uncomfortable, as Baldwin said, "It'll be unsettling to rip away the lies, like it would be unsettling to be able to see both the sun and the stars at the same time". But our description of that vision, can't stop with the discomfort. We can't pitch the idea that things will be better if people feel bad about the country. No-one's going to buy that, and, by the way, it's not true. People need to feel good about the place where they live. The pitch is that by going through a period of self-reflection, a period of sort of national therapy, that we will come out better on the other side for having done the work. People cry and feel [00:54:00] uncomfortable during therapy, but they don't go to therapy to cry and feel uncomfortable. You do it to get better. That's what's heroic about it. That's what was heroic about Simone Biles in Tokyo, taking the time to stop, reassess, self-reflect. That's what opens up a better and healthier path forward. And that better path is the pitch the left should be making when debating how we talk about our history. It's about being factual, yes. But it's also about making the country, the policies it writes and the actions it takes, match our self-conception. 

Right now, we basically have the twisties. Too many of us think we've overcome the ills of racism and sexism, but reality belies that claim. The vast majority of Americans think that we're the type of country that would stand up against genocide anywhere in the world. And yet we are the primary backer of the genocidal, far-right government of Israel. Our perceptions and our body politic are wildly [00:55:00] out of sync. It's time to do the heroic work of reassessing and self-reflecting.

SECTION A - BALDWIN THE WRITER

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, to continue that self-reflection with Deeper Dives on four topics. Next up, there's Section A: Baldwin, the Writer; Section B: Race in America; Section C: The White Lie; and Section D: Global Connections.

Brian Lehrer Weekend 100 Years of James Baldwin; Election Integrity and National Security; New York City Etiquette - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 8-3-24

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: . In this segment, since we're doing a hundred years of a hundred things, maybe we should go through it chronologically.

Start at the start. The title of your book is begin again, James Baldwin's America and it's urgent lessons for our own. So help us put Baldwin into context a little bit. What was his America specifically? What was New York City like where he grew up? 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: Well, you know baldwin comes of age in a sense, you know, he's he's the child of southern migrants So he's that first generation born after there's this mass movement his stepfathers from louisiana his his mother's from the eastern shore He's born in august of 1924.

So you can [00:56:00] imagine he's coming of age right against, you know, you can juxtapose the holland renaissance with You know, the Great Depression, uh, his family was profoundly poor, so, you know, he, he struggled. And you can see, you know, he's not, he's not, um, shall we say, uh, African American who comes from Sugar Hill, right?

He's, he's born and raised in the bottom, as it were. And so that distinction, you know, I think shows up in his voice. He's a childhood preacher. You know, um, father was an itinerant stepfather was an itinerant preacher. Um, and then he decides that he cannot, you know, engage in this, this lie. The stories are running around in his head.

He wasn't the best student in the world, but he was obviously brilliant. Um, and, you know, he had, Desires, you know, he was coming to terms with his own sexuality. You can imagine, uh, the, the [00:57:00] challenges of feeling what he was feeling on the inside and for others and having to deal with his father at the same time.

And so you get this young man who leaves and, and moves to the, to, to, you know, Greenwich village and, and there, when you, when he tells the stories of what he's, what he's What he experienced, he not only experienced a kind of freedom, but it's clear that he was haunted by sexual violence, uh, and then he decides to leave in 1948.

And he says that he, he could have gone anywhere, but Baldwin was lying at that point. He, you know, he goes to Paris, um, and he goes to Paris because there's this wonderfully rich expat community there. And it's in Paris that he does something extraordinary. He He literally wills himself into becoming one of the greatest writers the world has ever produced.

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: And that writing has affected a lot of people. We're getting a lot of calls. I'd love to hear from some callers right now. Yeah, let's go to Chuck in Philadelphia. Hey, Chuck, welcome to the show. 

CALLER: Hi, and thank [00:58:00] you, uh, Eddie, for all that you do and, uh, the great work that you do in the vein of, uh, James Baldwin.

Uh, let me just say, I love the fact that James Baldwin was a luminary in the realm of civil rights. And I, uh, admire the great profundity that he brought to humanitarian issues, uh, because civil rights is a humanitarian issue, and people forget that. But I just want to say, can people please read James Baldwin?

for the joy of reading James Baldwin. He was a prolific and beautiful writer. His words are painterly, and he is just, um, a wonder on the page. And so, uh, with all of the great things that he has done impacting our society, I think it's equally important to appreciate him for the tremendous writer that he is.

And [00:59:00] speaking of his time in Paris, if you're interested, there's a great little book called Giovanni's Room, and um, it takes many of his, uh, uh, experiences in Paris and puts them on the page in such a way that it And thank you guys for allowing me to just say this about him. Thank you. 

KOUSHA NAVIDAR - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Oh Chuck and so beautifully said too.

So thank you for that. Yeah, go ahead professor. 

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: No, he's right. I mean the first thing we have to understand is Baldwin is an artist. Right. And he's an extraordinary artist. I mean, Toni Morrison at her, uh, eulogy at her eulogy for Baldwin, uh, when he dies in December of 1987, um, she, she says that, you know, she found language in Baldwin, uh, the way in which he, How can I put this?

He takes the sound of the black preachily tradition, the black homiletic tradition. He takes the eloquence of, uh, the King James Bible. He, he, he's, he's, he, he's a student of [01:00:00] Henry James sentences. So when you, when you. Re Henry James is the ambassadors. You can see Baldwin inside those sentences. He's thinking with Proust.

He's, he is in so many ways, the inheritor of Emerson just on the other side of the tracks. So Chuck is absolutely right. We can never lose sight. Of Baldwin as the artist as the poet in the broadest sense of that word 

Celebrating James Baldwin's 100th Birthday Part 3 - 1A - Air Date 7-30-24

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: In 1971, poet Nikki Giovanni interviewed, uh, he was 47 years old at this point, James Baldwin in London, in a conversation that's been widely circulated across social media in recent years.

We heard from Dominic who says, thank you so much for doing this show. James Baldwin had a profound impact on my life as he met me at the intersections of race, sexuality, civic duty, and democracy. I'd be curious to think about what it means to be out based on Baldwin's work. Additionally, I'd be curious to think about Baldwin's thoughts on misogynoir, given his 1971 conversation on black relationships with Nikki Giovanni on [01:01:00] soul.

Let's hear a little bit of that conversation. I 

JAMES BALDWIN: have to smile all day and take out on the job at the foreman. I can't give a performance all day on the job and come home and give a performance all night in the house. Okay, so one of the performances will stop. Yes, so you say, and okay, I might be willing to go with it, but who's going to pay the rent?

The rent will get paid. Look, baby, I'm willing to play it your way, but you have to see my point of view. I see your point of view, but the rent will have to get paid. The price of the house. No, no, I don't want you prostituting yourself. I demand. I don't want you prostituting yourself either. One of us has got to work.

JENN WHITE - HOST, 1A: Now, Baldwin is often associated with his commentary on race, but Professor Glott, what were his views on, on gender? Ooh, 

ROBERT JONES JR: you know, they're complicated. [01:02:00] You know, let me just say this. Uh, Notes was published in 1955 in Giovanni's room is 56. I want to be clear about that. Um, That exchange between Jimmy and Nikki Giovanni freed me to write Begin Again.

Say more. Because I was, I felt, I was drinking too much Irish whiskey. Baldwin's was, Baldwin was demanding a certain kind of honesty, uh, that threatened everything that I had built over a life lived. Um, and the way she said lie to me, Right? I can't lie to you. No, no, no. You lie to him all day. Come home and lie to me.

And that exchange where she, and she's young, she's brash, uh, she's telling him, No, no, no, no. We, together, you and I, in love, we could, we could pay the rent. Right? That's gonna get paid if we're in, if we risk ourselves with each other. [01:03:00] So she, she let me know that Baldwin could be wrong. Right? That you could challenge it, which freed me up to think about him because, you know, otherwise you just consent to the eloquence over and over and over and over again, right?

So, his, his views on gender are really, really complicated. You know he has a very complicated, you know, you read Here Be Dragons, you read, um, the stuff on, um, Uh, the early stuff on male prisons, you see Baldwin understands the constructed nature of gender, right? But you also see him inhabiting traditional gender roles and actually repeating them.

So if you, there's a moment where he's debating or having a conversation with Audre Lorde at Spellman. Oh my God, Audre Lorde handed him his behind, right? Because Baldwin was again, inhabiting a certain, a certain. a certain understanding of patriarchy and what this understanding of manhood distorts that if we're going to allow because the basic claim as I [01:04:00] understand it Is if we're going to deal with patriarchy, we're going to have to de