Transcripts

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we come to understand the neoliberal legacy of the new Democrats, which continues to loom large, but also see that it really does seem like the progressive wing of the party and the broader demand for populous economic policies has had a positive effect. Now people just need to know that it's happening. Sources today include Prospect Generations, Against the Grain, Start Making Sense, The Majority Report, The National Rational, and The Bitchuation Room, with additional members-only clips from Deconstructed and Start Making Sense.

But before we dive in, a quick note: we are talking a lot about the Democratic party and some specific Democrats today, which may bring up feelings for people. You may feel particularly hostile towards Democrats, you may feel defensive of them, or somewhere in between. I have more thoughts that I'll share at the end of the show, but I'll leave you now with the suggestion that you set emotional feelings aside and think of [00:01:00] these clips as I've intended them, not to pinpoint a place for blame, but to learn from the past so that we can do better going forward. Criticism has two definitions: expression of disapproval is the one we most often think of related to politics, but the other is the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of something. This is more often used in relation to literary works or art. I think we'd all be better off if we more often applied the latter to politics rather than the former.

American Socialism - Prospect: Generations - Air Date 4-6-23

HAROLD MEYERSON: The view of the Biden administration on the left is understandably complicated. He certainly has adopted some of the Bernie platform. But he is not Bernie. He is not even the most articulate representative of his own approach there. There are others who can do that better. And so, even when he , you know, is fighting, has been trying to push things like free tuition, free public universities [00:02:00] and affordable childcare and such, it doesn't rally, you know?, it's not wrapped up in a nice package that really kind of excited the people you were just talking about who remain currently and somewhat understandably unexcited.

LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Right. Right. These are the two bases though, you know, of the party. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's somewhat in tension. Also, I think probably the other major challenge that we'd want to touch on here is exactly that though the kind of Bernie wing has gotten closer to the Biden administration, probably, you know, closer than in recent memory, that also has its own problems. Which is that without fully being in power, you're still also kind of blamed for certain policy failures or strategies. There's a target on you and not everything [00:03:00] is fully in your control as well, which I think going forward, is going to be one of the bigger problems that the organized left has to deal with.

HAROLD MEYERSON: That's historically been a problem with the left. I remember, you know, I attended the two speeches Bernie gave, one in 2015, one in 2019, at Georgetown University here in Washington, which were billed as his defining "My Kind of Socialism" speech. And in each case, he really didn't reference earlier socialists. He didn't even reference his hero, Eugene Debs, except in passing, but he pointed out that a lot of what he was about was just fulfilling what Roosevelt was for. The Roosevelt State of the Union address in 1944, an economic bill of rights... so, there is this sense of mushing things together and after his first version of the speech in 2015, I came back here to The Prospect and wrote a quick piece saying, Well, when Franklin Roosevelt was president, the Republicans said he's really a socialist. [00:04:00] Today, Bernie Sanders said the Republicans were right. And so, yeah, just attacking the kind of moderate social democratic policies can be advanced by a Biden or by many Democratic members of Congress as socialist. You get the attack without actually being the person who puts it through, who implements it, or even who can claim credit for it.

You know, I mean, when the left has succeeded, the left's version of success, at least in this country, is it argues for a program and 20 years later it becomes sort of center left and it gets adopted in attenuated form. The socialist leader, Norman Thomas, who led the Socialist Party in the thirties and forties, some people would say to him, Well, you know, Roosevelt has carried out your program. And Thomas would say, Yeah, it was carried out on a stretcher. This is the kind of conundrum that the American left and the American socialists often confront.

LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, right, right. And another topic that I [00:05:00] thought would be good for us to get into: today there's the rebirth of the socialist left. There's also a rebirth of the new Brandeisian, anti-monopoly left. Now, these two groups are clearly in coalition with one another, at least in terms of the political terrain today, and, certainly throughout American history, are really both drawing on similar traditions, at least, you know, the populist uprisings of the late 19th and early 20th century, and of course, the New Deal. These are really the two planks of the New Deal program, you know, antitrust and social programs. I'm wondering how you see the way these two groups have, at this period in time, at least, come together. Because of course, philosophically, there are some key distinctions as well.

HAROLD MEYERSON: And not just philosophically, sometimes operationally. One of the best unions in the country, the Communication Workers of America, the CWA, [00:06:00] which, God bless it, was the only major private sector union that, from the 80s and the 90s and the aughts and the teens, kept striking and winning when every other union had given up striking as something they couldn't win. So, the CWA had worked out a deal with Activision and Microsoft, and Activision and Microsoft, said, Yeah, we'll let you unionize the workers. We'll go neutral. We will not oppose it. But the antitrust people are vehemently against Microsoft's basically purchase, but called a merger, of Activision because it certainly reduces competition.

So, you get these distinctions and sometimes these distinctions are a concern. With the worker concern, you are concerned about the nature of the corporation and with antitrust you're concerned about the scope of the corporation. So, you know, that's an inherent obstacle, but there is so much that nonetheless unifies these groups, even [00:07:00] while these divisions exist that, notwithstanding CWA versus antitrust, I see it less of a conflict and more of a being able to work together.

The Legacy of the New Democrats - KPFA - Against the Grain - Air Date 8-17-22

LILY GEISMER: There's a group of Democrats who come into office in 1974. They're called the Watergate Babies. The name assumes that they were opposed to Nixon, but actually who their big main opponents were, what they were acting against, was actually the Democratic Party. And a feeling that the kind of Great Society, New Deal approach was outdated and that the party was too beholden to that style and needed to rethink the ways in which it addressed issues of poverty and inequality, but also the way that who it envisioned as its core constituencies, and particularly were critical of the Democratic Party, the ways in which the Democratic Party was beholden to organized labor and wanted to shift the party in a new direction away from those older kinds of relationships.

And they still believed in that, in the ideas that it's [00:08:00] government's responsibility to help people in need, to create equality. They just increasingly start to see different mechanisms such to get there.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: When you say that they saw the need to shift away from organized labor, who did they envision as their model constituents?

LILY GEISMER: So they speak it--and this is something I actually address in my first book as well which was about suburban liberals--they primarily see as the core constituency of the Democratic Party and who it should be really securing as its base, really, suburban knowledge workers and more moderate suburbanites who they understood to be this critical worker of the future.

And I think that it's actually goes in 2 ways. So on the one hand is this idea of that's the kind of base that can be a more stable base for the party. But the other thing that they start to increasingly believe in--and this goes to their bigger vision of shifting away from older sort of model of the Democratic Party and liberalism--is towards the different types of political economy. [00:09:00] And that leads them increasingly towards a more post-industrial model, in particular this idea of really rooting the nation's economy in new sectors, so what becomes known as the new economy, but especially in the tech sectors, finance and free trade, and they become early proponents of a more globalized economy in the 1970s.

So that has an idea of there's an economic component to that. But it's also focused on political strategy, and those are the kinds of sectors that many of their own constituents worked in, or the people that they were trying to target. And so the two go hand in trying to create a new base for the party, but also a new mechanism for for economic growth in the country.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: Was there a political component in wanting to move away from feeling beholden to the unionized working class?

LILY GEISMER: Absolutely. I think that becomes really critical to a lot of the messaging. And there's this whole idea, so when Gary Hart, who's one of the early standard bearers of this idea, and so they're called the [00:10:00] Watergate babies and they get known as the Atari Democrats. But when he comes into office in 1974, he says we're not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys. And that's actually an explicit reference to Humphrey's relationship to the labor movement and this notion that particular kinds of Democrats had become so basically beholden to organized labor and so they wanted to move away from those ideas. There's either somewhat hostility towards labor or just ignoring or not addressing questions of labor in a lot of their platforms and then also in their core economic agenda.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: How did the ideas of the New Democrats differ from those that we associate with the right? Those of Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher?

LILY GEISMER: So some of these ideas and what my book traces as they become articulated early through in the 1970s through these Watergate babies who become the Atari Democrats because of their connection to tech, and then it really takes off with the New Democrats and the Democratic Leadership [00:11:00] Council which gets founded in the mid-1980s.

And the critical difference is they, in many ways, someone like Reagan or Thatcher, believe in the market as both a means and an end, that they see this faith in the market to do its various different work to help. And it's less this idea of helping people. It's much, much more focused on individual responsibility and individuality. And so that's a more traditional kind of neoliberal model.

The new Democrats still believe in certain ideas of some mechanisms of that it's a responsibility of government to help people. They just increasingly see them using market means to get there. And so it's more about, that's the kind of the means and the methods to get to traditional liberal ends.

While by 1990, the DLC as part of its platform this idea that the goal is to expand opportunity, not government, they still believe in a space for government. And the idea really is they see government as a catalyst. So it's the responsibility of government to connect the public and [00:12:00] private sectors. So that still has a place for government in a way that the traditional. Thatcher or Reagan approach does not. So they express hostility to big government bureaucracy and that's one of their critiques of the Great Society approach, that it was overly bureaucratic, but they're not anti-government in the same way that someone like Reagan or Thatcher was.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: So would it be wrong, then, to conclude, as some have, that the path that Democrats ended up taking, the New Democrats who emerged in the 1980s particularly, was a rupture from the Democratic Party tradition of the New Deal? It's certainly been framed that way. How do you understand their relationship to that longer historical tradition?

LILY GEISMER: This is where the academic in me comes out, where it's complicated. So on the one hand, I think it actually stands for forms of continuity and change. And so some of this has to do with how you interpret the New Deal. [00:13:00] And in many ways, they're actually building on a New Deal approach. The New Deal itself always was a--and the scholars are increasingly looking at this--had some of the roots of neoliberalism in it. It advocated shoring up markets. That's when they particularly embrace the Keynesian model. They also really believe in public-private partnerships and other mechanisms such as a mechanism of delivery. So to me, those are the places of continuity.

I think the critical difference and rupture comes in the ways in which they want to connect the markets and government. And so in my book, I look at a lot of this idea of doing well by doing good. And the traditional New Deal approach was doing well. So building up the economy and then having compensatory welfare programs that's attached to that, so big government programs. The New Democrat approach is to combine those things. And the idea is that you can grow the new economy and that's going to help people, but also that you can use traditional [00:14:00] mechanisms --not traditional, actually; new economy mechanisms like finance from finance, tech and trade, and those can actually help poor people as well. So it's fusing those together. And that, to me, stands for a different kind of approach of the Democratic Party. So they're much, much more focused on using market means than previous generations of Democrats were, and especially when you look back to the kind of New Deal or Great Society models.

One of the things in the book I look at, they're very critical of the New Deal and the Great Society often in their language, and they have this constant mantra that the solutions of the 30s can't meet the problems of the 70s or the 80s or the 90s--they updated each decade.

But one of the things that's important about it is that actually much of their criticisms of the New Deal and Great Society aren't necessarily accurate depictions of the New Deal or Great Society, especially overcharacterizing how redistributive those programs were. And so I think in some ways the New Deal was never a universal program. It was never universal welfare. It was always work based. So it's [00:15:00] actually limited in that capacity. And it wasn't as redistributive as it often gets subsequently presented. And the same thing goes for the Great Society, which was not a redistributive program. And so I think that those are some of the ways that you can see more continuities too. And so they rhetorically position themselves as a separation. But if you actually look more closely, there's more continuities than might initially appear.

Clinton’s ‘Fabulous Failure’ Part 1 - Start Making Sense - Air Date 10-4-23

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Clinton’s idea was that a globalized economy would give the United States the high technology, high-skilled entrepreneurial heart of the world economy, and indeed, we did get Apple, but also, in that era, we got Walmart, we got McDonalds, we got Amazon, low-wage, low-skilled retail companies that have fought unions ruthlessly. How much of that is Clinton’s responsibility?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Well, obviously these things were happening independent of the President. Clinton didn’t come in with that idea that you just expressed. He was [00:16:00] defeated, and then by the second term, very much, Clinton and the people around him are talking about a new economy. That’s the phrase, “New economy,” which meant Silicon Valley, transformations of telecommunications, all of that, and they were very excited about it. They thought, “Well, we don’t need regulation.”

“We can have deregulation. We can have free trade because we’re going to be on the top.” I think they were seduced by that idea, and really, the new economy was not just Silicon Valley, it was Walmart. It was low-wage service sector. I mean, and when you look at the number of jobs being created, the number of janitors and home healthcare workers, and retail clerks does, in fact, far outstrip the number of computer programmers and things of that sort.

I mean, I could go into this, there were still some things in the second term that they did. For example, CHIPS, the Children’s Health Insurance program, which was a kind [00:17:00] of consolation prize for not getting health insurance. The big plan, that went into effect, very successful, and all the Clinton people were very proud of that, and they’re right to be, because it helped tens of millions of kids. But basically, the economy was increasingly financialized, and tremendous deregulation, which really were ticking time bombs which would in fact explode in the next decade.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: So your argument in this book is that Clinton’s turn to the right was not, I’m quoting, “Not merely a product of defeat at the hands of corporate enemies and political foes. It was also bred by a series of illusions, his illusions.” And in some cases, the chickens didn’t come home to roost for a long time. It was eight years before we got the financial crisis in 2008. How much is Clinton to blame for that?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: This is the deregulation of derivatives. It wasn’t as if these things, where there were no people [00:18:00] inside the administration saying, “This is a bad idea.” There were. Now, derivatives are kind of insurance products that are really wagers, that seemingly are safe bets, because some companies are not going to go bankrupt, and therefore, you can have a highly, highly leveraged insurance, as it were, and you’ll come out okay, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. So the idea of the deregulation of derivatives, they’re sold without any regulations.

There was a big debate about this. A woman named Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodities Futures Trading Corporation, which had usually, in the past, “Oh, it would regulate hog bellies and corn futures.” Well, futures on stocks, futures on other kinds of financial instruments, which derivatives were, she wanted to regulate them and said, “This stuff is growing by leaps and bounds, it’s unregulated, and it’s going to explode.” Fortune Magazine had articles, “Yes,” saying that. They call them alligators in [00:19:00] a swamp. They’re ready to snap, but Rubin, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and others, they all, again, came down on Brooksley Born with a ton of bricks, and a financial law was passed, which completely unregulated derivatives.

These things grew by the trillions and trillions of dollars, and then they imploded in 2008 and nine. It just completely imploded.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Looking at lessons that Clinton’s successors learned from his failures and disasters, Obama did pass his number one priority, a national healthcare program. Obamacare is not what we wanted, it’s not what he had promised, but he succeeded where Clinton failed. What had Obama learned from the failure of the Clintons? Why did he succeed, where the Clintons failed?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Well, I think he succeeded because he did see the problems of Clinton, which was various sectors of capital, big insurance, certain kinds of insurance companies, [00:20:00] pharmaceuticals, abandoned ship. They said, ‘No, we don’t want to do that.’ So Obama said, ‘I’m going to structure this so Walmart can be on board, so the big insurance companies will make more money.’ These deals, you think of Obama as kind of an idealistic character, they made some real crude deals in the run-up to that, and therefore, the big insurance, Big Pharma, the low wage retailers were not opposed. The Republican party, yes, was 100% opposed to Obamacare, but I think the fact that it passed anyway, that there weren’t that many defections among the Democrats, indicates it’s because the big players, the big companies, they said, “Yeah, we’re going along with this,” and they weren’t going to lobby against it, and they didn’t.

So I think Obama learned that. He also put a tax, paid for it with a progressive tax, which I think Clinton was afraid to do, and I think that turned out – that was also one of the reasons for opposition, but that turned out to make one of the most progressive features of Obamacare, [00:21:00] is in fact, its tax system.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: That was eight and nine years after Clinton. 16 years after Bill left office, Hillary lost the presidency to Donald Trump, and you call election day 2016 the Clinton’s day of reckoning. Let’s talk about that. Is Trump really part of the Clinton legacy?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Well, insofar as he, for a moment there, and clearly, his main appeal is ethnonationalism and worse, but in ’16, he did, in fact, win some of those Midwestern states that had been hollowed out by trade with China, and China was not a fair trading partner in any way, shape, or form. China certainly was managing its trade with the U.S. Anyway, Trump took advantage of that. And I would also say that by 2016, I mean, if you’re in politics for 25 years and Hillary was, you become a more tempered kind of [00:22:00] figure, and so she really, she’d had no program that could really excite, and Bernie, Bernie Sanders, he didn’t have to denounce Hillary to make her look bad. He just had to say, “This is what I stand for.”

In comparison, she just looked tepid, really. And so Trump squeaks in there. I mean, she still won three million more votes than he did, but nevertheless, he squeaked in there, and the Clintons are in the doghouse, and I think they were not in the doghouse until 2015. Bill had given a very good speech in 2012, defending Obamacare at the Democratic National Convention. Hillary was kind of a popular Secretary of State, but it was when Bernie, on one side, Trump on the other, that just put the Clintons in the doghouse.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: You say Trump’s victory over Hillary had one salutary impact. What was that?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Usually, when the Democrats get defeated, they move to the right. That was true after [00:23:00] Carter, and I think it’s true after Clinton defeated by Bush. Usually, they move to the right, but when Trump wins, the Democrats move to the left. I think part of the reason is that the Democrats more united, the Southern Democrats were gone. The other thing, of course, is that Trump did put on the agenda, issues of trade in a way, and I think the illusions about free trade and creating, for example, democracy in China or civil society in China, I think those were coming apart, and in fact, today are, no one would make the point at either economically or politically about the virtues of free trade.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Last question, what do you think Joe Biden has learned from the failures of Bill Clinton?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Well, Joe Biden was a centrist Democrat, really, a kind of Clinton loyalist, but he realized that a kind of industrial policy or reindustrialization was important, both economically and politically in the Midwest, and [00:24:00] he brought into his administration some people who would’ve been considered really radical in the 1990’s: Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and others, and Brian Deese in charge of industrial policy at the National Economic Council. He has brought all these young left liberals or even radicals in, and given them positions of responsibility and pushed through some very large trillion-dollar bills involving infrastructure and the welfare state that were way beyond what Clinton could even have conceived, and I think that Biden thought, ‘Well, there’s a thirst for that, and I’m going to do it.’

A Win for Workers: New Ruling Empowers Unions In Fight for Representation | Harold Meyerson - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 9-10-23

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: One of the things we kept hearing over and over again for decades, literally for decades, since Clinton, was we're going to have Medicare negotiate for drugs. The big thing 20 years ago was card check. Card check, card check, card check. That was one of the big disappointments that didn't happen during the Obama administration. And this is like card check light. Walk us through what [00:25:00] this does.

HAROLD MEYERSON: Sure. Well, Democrats are aware that the National Labor Relations Act has been steadily weakened by court decisions and some of the NLRB rulings when they were controlled by Republicans. And they've been trying to strengthen labor law, basically all the way back to Lyndon Johnson's presidency. And every time they've tried under Johnson, under Carter, under Clinton, under Obama, they have never gotten to 60 votes in the Senate. So as a result, in the private sector, when workers try to unionize, it's a very, very common practice for employers to do things that are illegal, according to the National Labor Relations Act, like firing the workers who are leading the campaign to unionize, for which the penalties are virtually non-existent. And because this has been completely the norm, increasingly for the last [00:26:00] 40 years, most unions have ceased doing major organizing campaigns.

I remember when John Sweeney was running for the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995, one of his talking points was that, if you added up all the unions and looked at their budgets, they were spending about 3 percent of their budgets on organizing, because they knew they would lose.

All right. The new--not new, but Biden's appointee, confirmed by the Senate as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, and she is basically the boss of all 500 lawyers working for the Board across the country, Jennifer Abruzzo, has been determined to, as much as it is possible, restore that original National Labor Relations Act--which was written to give workers the right to collectively bargain--restore it to the point at which it was effective. She put that out in a memo shortly after she took office, in a memo to her lawyers. And [00:27:00] she got a case that she brought before the Board, which the Board issued this Cemex decision on Friday. What the decision says is: If enough workers to constitute a majority have made clear they wish to affiliate with the union by signing cards or some other measure, the employer then has a choice: the employer can voluntarily recognize the union, which 99.9 percent of the time the employer will not do, or the employer is legally obligated to file for a Board-run election, then--here's the teeth in the decision--then if the employer commits an unfair labor practice, the very sorts of things they routinely commit by forcing workers to go to propaganda meetings that are anti-union, by firing pro-union workers and so on, those are unfair labor practices, but there's been no [00:28:00] penalty. In this case, if the employer during the runup to the election or during the election itself commits an unfair labor practice, wham! The union is immediately recognized. And the company is ordered immediately to commence bargaining with the union.

That is a huge change.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Okay, so one of the examples I used yesterday was Bessemer. When Amazon workers at Bessemer, Alabama, I think it was a warehouse, they signed cards. They want to get a union, so they apply, essentially, to National Labor Relations Board. The National Labor Relations Board looks at those cards, determines that they're valid, and says, okay, we're going to issue an election, right? And because Amazon obviously does not want to have a union. And then the election, how long out was there? Are there constraints on how long out that election has to take place within?

HAROLD MEYERSON: Absolutely not. And [00:29:00] delay is a common tactic of employers who do not want to have a union, it can be delayed. And the more you delay it, the less workers generally are determined still to push through. And in the case of Amazon--where the average Amazon warehouse worker lasts about eight months on the job before the demands of the job, which are ridiculous, just wears that worker out, and he or she quits--a delay is fatal.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But Amazon does, they bring in managers from all around the country. All of a sudden it's like three managers for every worker there for a brief period of time. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. And they bring in young union-buster lawyers and they bring in union busting teams, and they start to intimidate people and they do all this. And so in Bessemer, the election happens, but afterwards, the union, or the would-be union, files grievances. And the National Labor Relations Board says we recognize these grievances, and they call for [00:30:00] another election, and they end up losing that election.

But now, once they got to that point where they recognize the unfair labor practices, boom! The union exists.

HAROLD MEYERSON: Boom and second boom--the company is ordered to go to the bargaining table with the union.

Stephen A. Smith Goes In On Hillary Clinton Following "Get Over Yourself" Remark - The Rational National - Air Date -3-24

JIMMY FALLON: Biden versus Trump. And we know that.

HILLARY CLINTON: It is. It is!

JIMMY FALLON: What do you say to voters who are upset that those are the two choices?

HILLARY CLINTON: Get over yourself. Those are the two choices.

JIMMY FALLON: Yeah. I love that.

And, and, you know, it's kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies. I don't, I don't understand why this is even a hard choice, really. I don't understand it, but we have to go through the election and hopefully people will realize [00:31:00] what's at stake because it's an existential question, what kind of country we're gonna have, what kind of democracy we're gonna have, and people who blow that off are not paying attention because it's not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they wanna do. I mean, they're pretty clear about what kind of country they want.

DAVID DOEL - HOST, THE RATIONAL NATIONAL: Hillary Clinton once again reminding us how terrible of a communicator she is. Even though there are elements of this that I think are also obvious, and I agree with, couching this in the idea that telling people to get over it is the way to get them out to vote, I think it's absolutely the stupidest way to go about it. I mean, and don't take it from me, take it from her election loss. This is the only person to lose to Donald Trump. So, uh, Hillary Clinton, if she wants to help Democrats, needs to stop making public appearances. But let me get to Stephen A. Smith's reaction to this.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST: Stephen, great to have you on set. So what do you make of that? "Get over it?"

STEPHEN A. SMITH: I don't think it was a very wise statement on her [00:32:00] part. How did that work out for her in 2016? I think that's something that we have to recognize. Yeah, she won the popular vote, but at the end of the day, she wasn't the president of the United States. It was him. You can look at her not campaigning in Wisconsin in the last days, not campaigning in Pennsylvania in the last days. You can look at some of the stuff that they were saying about her that sort of distracted things from where it should have been in terms of Comey and his report from the FBI. You can bring up a whole bunch of things. But at the end of the day, the last thing you need to do is to do anything that could agitate a potential voter in this particular election.

DAVID DOEL - HOST, THE RATIONAL NATIONAL: Hearing him talk about Hillary Clinton and politics and getting this bang on just makes me wish he's paid more attention to hockey. I would love to hear his opinion on hockey. He's a great communicator. He's very engaging. He's very opinionated, but he's someone that I think holds maybe a little sway, in terms of, at the very least, he gives you the idea, or gives you an idea, of how typical people [00:33:00] think. And this is bang on. And, as I said, there's more to it, to his argument here.

But, just on the points he made: Hillary Clinton needs to understand that she is the reason she lost the election, and she does not understand that. I mean, her book is all about blaming everybody else for her election loss. This unwillingness to look at the mistakes that you made as a politician, take accountability for that, and learn from those mistakes. Hillary Clinton does not possess those abilities. And if she had, she could have been a great voice for Democrats. If she had learned from the mistakes that she made, realize that she wasn't speaking to working class voters, realize she completely ignored certain stations that she took for granted, realize that she completely sidelined Bernie Sanders and the entire movement he had built throughout 2016. If those lessons were learned, then she could have been a solid asset for Democrats, if she had come out of that with those lessons. But clearly she has not.

Now, I want to get to Smith's last half of his comments here. [00:34:00]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST: What do you make about the actual argument that she's making? I mean, she's basically saying two old people, yes, but they're substantively different. I mean, one has 91 counts against him.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Absolutely. Well, listen, Nobody's brought that up more than me: 4 indictments, 91 counts, impeached twice. I'm not voting for him. I've said that to a lot of people. I've said that to you. But at the end of the day, what I'm saying is, is that at some point in time, you got to take into account what the voters thinking about. The voters, a lot of them out there, tens of millions of them out there, by the way, don't care what he's going through right now. They don't care about his guilt. or innocence, his perceived guilt or innocence. They don't care about the 91 counts. They're thinking about their lives. And a lot of times we see politicians taking the positions that they're taking and while we can respect their candor and their honesty, they do seem a bit detached at times from what the voters are actually feeling and what the voters are actually thinking.

Nobody wants to hear that from Hillary Rodham Clinton at this particular moment in time, because especially if you're Joe Biden, what are you really, really worried about [00:35:00] right now? You're worried about folks coming to the polls. You're worried about them showing up to the polls to vote for you. You're not worried even about them voting for Trump. You're worried about them not showing up to vote for you. That doesn't exactly encourage them to get up out of their seats and go to the poll.

DAVID DOEL - HOST, THE RATIONAL NATIONAL: This is the message that is often lost on the Democratic party. And in a bit here, I'm going to get to some polling showing you just how bad things are looking currently for Joe Biden and how they clearly need to turn it around by, at the very least, pushing Hillary Clinton off television.

Let's, at the very least, try to avoid that. Because telling people that already are not feeling great about Joe Biden to get over it, when has that ever worked in any situation? If someone's mad at you and you tell them to get over it, are they going to go, Oh, you know what? You're right. I'll get over it now. Has that ever been effective in any situation?

So, turnout is the most important thing here. Democrats win when turnout is high. They lose when [00:36:00] turnout is low. This election is not a horse race between Biden and Trump. It's a horse race between Biden and the couch. If people stay home, Biden will lose.

Looking at polling and looking at people who people previously voted for compared to, you know, if they may vote for Joe Biden or not, people that are potential Democratic voters did not vote for Donald Trump last time and they have no plan to vote for Donald Trump. They plan to stay home or vote for Biden. So, Trump is not your competition. Pointing out Trump's, you know, the fact that he's a criminal is obvious. People that would vote for Biden at this point already know that. Reminding them of that is not necessarily going to get them to come out and vote. You have to both present a... it's both a message, but it's also action.

Biden is currently the president. And there are a number of issues where the Democratic voter base, especially younger people, marginalized people, are very upset with him for good reason. His Middle East policy currently is [00:37:00] supporting mass destruction. This is not a winning position. It's both morally the wrong thing to do, it's also politically the stupid thing to do. If he continues doing that, at the very least, he's losing Michigan. So, there has to be a massive turnaround on Middle East policy specifically. But even when it comes to every other issue, like, this is less about. Trump and a lot more about Joe Biden.

What Good Things Has Biden Done In Four Years? - The Bitchuation Room - Air Date 4-3-24

DAVID DAYEN: The Inflation Reduction Act gave a host of grants, I think 369 billion, that's what it was assumed to be, that was the estimated cost. Turns out it's going to be much, much more expensive than that. And that's actually a good thing because what it means is these credits, which go towards energy efficiency, which go towards renewable energy production, which go towards rebates for electric vehicles, which go towards charging stations, which go towards a whole host of things across the... and all attempts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, [00:38:00] turns out they're very very popular and Goldman Sachs about a year after the IRA put out an estimate and said we're actually going to give four times as many tax credits as we thought we were.

Where we've seen this so far is in a boom in manufacturing construction costs. So, first you have to build the factory, right? If you're making, whether it's a factory to produce minerals for the clean energy transition for electric vehicles, or for batteries, or whether you're building electric car factories, whether you're building renewable energy sites, you got to build them first. So, you're going to see this first in the construction. And if you look at a graph of manufacturing construction, it's a straight line upward and it happens right at August 2022 when the Inflation Reduction Act comes into force. So, that's a good thing. We don't know that those jobs are going to be good jobs, that are created.

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: I mean, he had Sean Fain, he rolled out Sean Fain, you know, head of the UAW. So, you, arguably they would be [00:39:00] union jobs.

DAVID DAYEN: Initially, but it's nowhere in the law does it say they have to be, right?. And there are ways that the administration is trying to nudge that forward. There's a....

WAJAHAT ALI: Inshallah. It's the inshallah policy.

DAVID DAYEN: One good case study was in, I believe it was in Alabama. There's an electric bus factory, Bluebird, and they got a grant from the EPA, okay?, to do electric buses. And in that grant it said, You have to be neutral if there's a union activity, an attempt at union bargaining at the plant, and there was an existing union organizing campaign going on there. And so the company had to remain neutral in that campaign and the campaign won. We actually wrote about that. It was in Georgia not Alabama. It was in Macon, Georgia And we wrote about that in The Prospect as part of our "Building Back America" series, which you can look at if you go to prospect.org.

So, those are good examples. And then we have other [00:40:00] examples like, you know, a good one that we've written about is the, uh, it's part of the CHIPS Act, it's a different bill. But it's the semiconductor factory they're making in Phoenix, and it's a company called TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, making this huge, huge campus in Phoenix...

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: Wait, it's from Taiwan? I thought this was all about "America's stuff", without Asian sounds on it.

DAVID DAYEN: Well, in fact, TSMC is one of the largest, if not the largest, semiconductor manufacturer in the country and has a monopoly on a lot of these high-end chips. So, if you're going to deal with a company trying to bring them, shore them onto the United States, you're going to have to go through that. But unfortunately, TSMC isn't sort of down with letting American workers do this. So they tried to import a bunch of Taiwanese workers. They were bringing... we went to the factory and there were all kinds of license plates from Mexico there. They're bringing in foreign workers from everywhere. A lot of these workers can't talk to each other. It's led to delays at the [00:41:00] plant...

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: Sure, sure.

DAVID DAYEN: ...we found at the plant that was because of this miscommunication.

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: Oh my God.

DAVID DAYEN: So, you know, there's the good version of this and the bad version of this. And, I would say TSMC is maybe part of the bad.

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: There's a lot we could talk about. I mean, I really appreciate you because it is wonky, but it's important. It just, like, all of these fix its and changes, again, I would say like nibbling at late stage, rampant capitalism and trying to reign it in in various ways, whether antitrust or whether these initiatives, and yet it still feels like, Is this enough to stop the coming fascist takeover and/or like the complete collapse of the economy and class warfare? I mean, like literal...

DAVID DAYEN: Well, it's tough, but I mean, the area where I think you could, that I at least see the most hope is, is an antitrust, where we've had a number of really positive developments in a really recent period of time over the last 34 months. [00:42:00] We saw the Justice Department sue and have what looks to be a fairly successful trial against Google that could end up with a breakup of that company's dominance over search. There's another Google case over there, Ad Tech, which they control every side of the transaction on, where that case is going to trial in May. We've seen high profile mergers be broken up, like the Jet Blue-Spirit merger, which the Justice Department blocked. There was another merger between - speaking of semiconductors - between NVIDIA and a company called Arm, that was blocked. Adobe was trying to merge with somebody, that was blocked. I almost can't name all of them because... there's a more recently a case has been filed against Amazon. There's a case that was filed against a proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons, which would create the biggest supermarket in the US, and Kroger has 20 different names, right? So, you're talking about Ralphs, you're talking about King Soopers, you're [00:43:00] talking about like, you think it's like two companies, but it was actually like 30 different mergers that would be going on there.

Anyway, the Justice Department antitrust division and the Federal Trade Commission have really created a sea change in our relationship, the government's relationship, to corporate power. And, uh, you know, presidencies are not monoliths. There are good people and bad people in administrations. There certainly are policies that I violently disagree with that are being undertaken by the Biden administration, but there are also, you know, when you talk about these binary choices in elections, it's also about Lina Khan. It's about Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ antitrust. It's about Rohit Chopra at the CFPB. That's doing really good stuff. It's about the National Labor Relations Board, which is doing amazing work. So, you have to look at this as a whole.

WAJAHAT ALI: I'm critical of Biden, but if you look at his policies and what he's done with the American Rescue Plan, if you do with the Inflation [00:44:00] Reduction Act, you know, the promise to raise taxes on the billionaires, make them pay their fair share of taxes, there are a lot of wins. I think the failure is that they still haven't been able to communicate these wins in an effective way to the voters. And I think the best way to do it is do the compare and contrast. This guy, raising taxes. I will, like, lower taxes. This guy, you know, doing tax cuts for the rich. I am not for that. You know, this guy wants to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. I just feel like if they do that type of very simplistic messaging, and bank on the wins, then people will know. Because otherwise people have no, like, people have no idea.

BONUS Price Controls An Inflation Solution That Doesn’t Screw Workers - Deconstructed - Air Date 7-7-23

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Can you talk a little bit about the way that price has come to be understood by the mainstream economics profession, and the way that the idea that price could be under democratic control really was—as far as I understand it—the real battle that was fought in the 1950s ‘60s, ‘70s, but has vanished as [00:45:00] a battle. It is now just kind of assumed that it is off the board—that these are matters of physics, rather than matters of laws.

JAMES GALBRAITH: No, it’s not an unreasonable interpretation of that course of economic thinking to say that the experience of price control and of wage price guideposts—which continued up until the first days of Reagan’s administration in 1981 when the last vestige was abolished (the Council on Wage and Price Stability in the White House)—that the idea that the price mechanism and freely adjusting prices is the core of a well-functioning and efficient economy was, in a sense, aimed at demolishing those structures and removing them from the sphere of legitimate discussion. And were very [00:46:00] successful in doing that.

But the reality is, first of all, that no modern economy, certainly, and I doubt that any economy—even going back to classical times, any real-world economy—has ever actually functioned that way. And the assumptions required, even in theory, to make a freely price-adjusting economy into an efficient system are assumptions which basically violate it. They’re completely unconnected to the world in which we actually live. They rest on the notion of so-called “perfect competition,” in which every business is a very small operation competing with many other identically situated very small businesses to supply—equally disorganized—a vast number of independent households, and that’s not the way the [00:47:00] world is organized. In fact, practically every major line of activity is organized through structures in which a relatively small number of major enterprises are involved.

The realization in the 20th century that you could, in fact, control prices, was based on the fact that there were large organizations that were already controlling them. So you simply shifted some of the authority to an institution that was serving public purpose rather than relying on the good behavior of individual enterprises.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: And, despite what feels like the complete victory of the Milton Friedman view of prices, it does actually feel like there are still assumptions embedded in us as people—that price controls are important. And what I’m thinking of is Biden’s use of the strategic petroleum reserve. That was—very directly—a White House effort to [00:48:00] control prices.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Absolutely, absolutely. And it was a successful effort. They were faced with a major spike in oil prices, which followed a major slump in oil prices. And what happened in the slump in 2020, among other things, was that the price of oil properties—for example, in the Permian Basin—fell to very low levels, which meant that they were a very good bargain for private equity and others to move in and take control.

Those entities—their behavioral pattern, their focus, is on shareholder return. They’re not out to maximize production, they’re out there to increase the return to their investors; you could read about this in the press in Texas, in the oil country.

When demand recovered they had a plan for increasing production, but it was not to increase production to meet [00:49:00] the demand, but something below that, and allow the price to rise dramatically. Which is what it did. And the effect of that was that on the barrels that you were producing, you enjoyed a very healthy windfall. The White House, obviously aware of this process, stepped in, with releasing from the strategic reserve, and that then caused a peak and a decline in the price of oil.

The price of gasoline, which is what ends up in the Consumer Price Index, follows that process with a lag. That’s the price which, of course, is politically sensitive. That’s what people see at the pump.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Are there other examples of that, that an administration could handle? Because it feels like an a-ha moment for a White House to say, "Oh wait, it is politically popular to control prices. We can control prices. We’re going to be punished." Because in a lot of the political debate you hear Republicans attacking Biden for the price of eggs, or the price of [00:50:00] this, that, or the other thing. But you never hear them suggest what they’re going to do if they get into power.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, there were a range of things in the supply chain that were affected by the pandemic, obviously. The delays in the buildup and congestion at Long Beach and Los Angeles for a certain period of time were a factor driving up shipping costs and delivery costs. And, again, the administration did have people working on that problem, which eventually gets smoothed out. So, yes. I think that over a spectrum of specific interventions, you can have an effect.

Another area was with the—which I think was simply resolved over time—was the shortage of semiconductors as a result of the decision by semiconductor producers that forecast in the pandemic that people would be buying a lot more household appliances and [00:51:00] fewer automobiles. And when they then didn’t produce the semiconductors for new cars, new car production got jammed up, and the effect of that was to drive up used car prices. Used car prices you can’t control. That’s an asset, which is, basically, anything the dealer can get you to pay, you will pay. So, they rose by 50 percent or so, and that shows up in the Consumer Price Index.

So, again, these are supply issues which can, in fact, be addressed and resolved, and may take some time, but they’re not related to some notion that households had too much money to spend.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: The fact that Weber is now an in-demand policy advisor around the world, with countries asking her, “What can we do about prices? How can you help us?" shows us that there’s some purchase there in government spaces, but I’m curious. In the economics field, is there any more openness to this way of thinking about the economy? Or is there going to have to [00:52:00] be an entire new generation that comes around?

JAMES GALBRAITH: I think it’s very hard to get serious openness on this question. There were some measures taken in Germany, and Isabella Weber was involved with the commission, and I think it was basically her idea for a price cap on natural gas for households that was implemented. But the reality is that, in order to do this, you have to have governments that are seriously capable of implementing that policy. And that means they have to be somewhat independent of the mainstream economists. And the economics profession has become so hidebound in its views on these matters, and so committed to a particular ideology, that one cannot be optimistic that sensible ideas will prevail anytime soon.

BONUS Clinton’s ‘Fabulous Failure’ Part 2 - Start Making Sense - Air Date 10-4-23

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: We think of Bill Clinton as the centrist who triangulated with [00:53:00] Republicans to move American manufacturing offshore, as you say, complete the transformation of the industrial heartland into the Rust Belt, eviscerating the American Labor Movement, adopting right-wing ideas like ending welfare as we know it. Of course, he recruited Wall Street support for the Democratic Party by deregulating banks and telecommunications. And he proclaimed the era of big government is over. Reagan himself couldn’t have said it better. But, you say that’s not the program Bill Clinton campaigned on. When he first ran in 1992, he ran—you say—as a Progressive. So tell us about the Clinton agenda in 1992, which I guess begins with James Carville’s unforgettable slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Right. Clinton did run as a more progressive figure, certainly than Jimmy Carter and anyone since LBJ, and he had a lot of ideas and people [00:54:00] around him. The phrase “industrial policy,” which is now in the news—Biden’s "Build Back Better" is really "industrial policy." He was in favor of that. His health reform proposal was actually to the left, I think, of the one that was eventually passed under Obama.

He wanted to keep his eyes focused on the economy, not on culture war issues, which some of his advisors were in favor of, and of course, the Republicans were beginning to do at that time. And so part of the failure is a failure of a progressive initiative.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Let’s start with healthcare—which for millions of people, was the biggest failure of the Clintons. We thought Bill and Hillary were going to transform the country and create universal coverage, health insurance for all Americans. The plan was that they thought they had the support of some of the most powerful forces on the business side—the big insurance companies that would make a lot of money from a government program that paid [00:55:00] them—and also, they thought they had the support of the big, unionized employers like GM, who would not have to pay health benefits to workers if the government took over. So by preserving private insurance companies, they thought, it seemed like this would pass and become law. What went wrong with the Clinton health care plan?

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: That’s right. There was a big slice of American capital that was burdened by healthcare costs—usually the manufacturing sector—and they wanted something that would relieve them of that cost, and the Clinton plan would do that. And those firms would then have some influence on the Republican party. They overestimated that, for sure. Of course, it had opposition, and it wasn’t just from the right-wing of the Republican party. Newt Gingrich’s power was growing a kind of hostility to any sort of reform, but what was also happening was I think the Clintons misjudged the shape of where power really lay in the [00:56:00] economy: less with General Motors and more with Walmart.

By the way, they weren’t the only ones. The editors of Fortune Magazine had kept the retailers—low wage, low benefit retailers—out of the Fortune 500 until the year 1995, and then they say, “Well, I think we better put Walmart and Sears...” What happens? They come up number four or number five, and by the year 2000, Walmart’s the biggest company by sales and by employment in the country. So the Clintons misjudged that.

That’s why I think the shape of American capitalism, the nature, where certain people are strong, where they’re weak in terms of trade, in terms of finance, this is essential for historians to understand why Clinton failed and why today—is Biden going to succeed or fail? I think we have to understand those things. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s not just the foibles of Bill or Hillary or anyone [00:57:00] else . It’s really more fundamental than that.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Clinton brought us a lot of the economic changes that Reagan had argued for—the market ruling everything, Wall Street in command—but when Clinton became President, you point out in the book, there were other varieties of capitalism in the world, and several of those were a lot closer to what Clinton tried to do in Arkansas and what he and a lot of his advisors were interested in—using the power of the state to boost the economy. And he brought people into his cabinet who wanted him to do that, especially Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor. So there was a big debate inside the Clinton administration, and the progressive side had some good models in the world and some good arguments. Arguments that Clinton was sympathetic to.

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Yes. Initially, yes. Paul Tsongas, who ran against Clinton in the ’92 primaries, he had a phrase. He said, “The Cold War is over. Germany and Japan won.” And Clinton agreed with that basically. [00:58:00] Germany and Japan represented these different models of capitalism, a kind of social market in Germany, and in Japan, a kind of finance, banks, big companies, all much closer together in a corporatist arrangement.

Clinton, as governor of Arkansas—a very poor state—he was desperately trying to figure out how to industrialize it and get more jobs and better jobs. He went all over the world, to Northern Italy, to Germany, Japan, et cetera, looking for models. Not just investment—"Oh, we have cheap labor, come!"—but looking for models. He didn’t really want that cheap labor argument for investing in Arkansas. He had people he brought into the administration. Robert Reich, who, today, is actually much more to the left than he was in 1992, but the other figure who, I think, is very interesting is Laura Tyson, who was at Berkeley. She and others had this roundtable on international economics. They were very much in favor of both industrial [00:59:00] policy at home, meaning, "Yes, we’re going to target new investments in the same way that Biden’s doing it now," and also managed trade abroad, meaning, "No, we aren’t going to just let the free market." So when Clinton had to decide who was going to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, this tells you about his mindset at this time.

Who were the candidates? Larry Summers, who would go on to be a very conservative figure, although his background wasn’t that, Paul Krugman, who of course, now is very famous, but at that time, he was very much an advocate of free trade, and Laura Tyson. Laura Tyson was by far a less distinguished economist than the other two, but she was an advocate of industrial policy of the same sort that Clinton and Reich, and Ira Magaziner, and many others were thinking about. So she was made head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Unfortunately, as head of that council, I don’t think she did that much with it, but she was selected because of her particular economic [01:00:00] policies.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: You say the Treasury Department became the most important force in the Clinton administration. Explain that.

NELSON LECHTENSTIEN: Yes. Well, I say there were two forces that Clinton could not control, and it was quite frustrating. One was the Federal Reserve Board, run by Alan Greenspan, which has been independent for more than half a century, and is always an independent force for any president. The second is Treasury, where first Lloyd Bentsen—a more conservative Texas Senator—and then mainly Robert Rubin, were Secretary of Treasury.

The reason I say that, in theory, all cabinet positions are subordinate to the President, [is] the weight and authority of the more orthodox—or you could call them neoliberal, and we could define that phrase in a second, neoliberal—economists at Treasury were so great that I found time and again Clinton would have some progressive idea, "Hey, can we limit executive salaries?," [01:01:00] or, "What about the East Asian countries are getting all this hot money? What can we do about that?" and he’d send this over to Treasury. And back would come a five-page, single-spaced, well-argued, “

JAMES GALBRAITH: No.”

Final comments on the way we think about political criticism

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Project Generations, looking at a bit of history of socialism in America. Against the Grain looked at the legacy of the new Democrats. Start Making Sense looked more specifically into the legacy of the Clinton administration. The Majority Report looked into Biden's much more positive approach to labor. The Rational National discussed election messaging through the lens of recent comments from Hillary Clinton. And The Bitchuation Room looked at some of the good things coming out of the Inflation Reduction Act.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from Deconstructed, looking at the potential effectiveness of price controls. And Start Making Sense, examining some of the reasons Clinton wasn't able to accomplish some of his more progressive ideas. To hear that and have all of our bonus [01:02:00] content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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 to follow up on how I opened the show, I discouraged you from getting too hung up on blame so that we could focus on learning from the past for the benefit of the future. And I had this thought fresh in my mind, after a recent email exchange with a listener. Listener Alan wrote in, after hearing me make a criticism of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Basically, I said that the fact that the film focuses more on voluntary individual actions, rather than encouraging people to rally together and demand collective governmental action and policy was a missed opportunity. While individual action is necessary, depending on voluntary action was never going to be enough and regulation that both [01:03:00] imposes new rules on industry and also incentivizes individual action was always going to be much more effective and couldn't come soon enough. The Inflation Reduction Act is seen by many climate activists as the largest climate action legislation we've ever attempted. But the IRA was passed 16 years after the release of An Inconvenient Truth.

Now, I don't think that it was within Al Gore's personal power to have sped up that timeline on his own. But we all would have been better off if we could have spent a lot less time debating our personal carbon footprints and which light bulbs we should be purchasing for our homes, things that help a little, and focused more on the types of regulation that would have major impacts by going after the sources of the vast majority of carbon emissions. And, not to go too far down this path, but it is an interesting and important point I think. The film, by focusing their activism suggestions on changing your light bulbs and such, was actually playing into this long-running sleight of hand game that corporate polluters [01:04:00] have played time after time. Cigarette companies sort of started this off by running campaigns to basically blame smokers for smoking illnesses rather than the cigarettes. Litter problems that are endemic to single-use plastic we're blamed on litterbugs, not the makers of single-use plastic. For those who know that, like, the "crying Indian" commercial from the seventies, know that that ad was funded by polluters, not do-gooder environmentalists. And also that actor was Italian, not Native. That's just a side note. Additionally, the encouragement to recycle was also funded by those same companies to give plastic a better image in the minds of consumers, even though their own scientists told them that recycling wouldn't work at scale. And I think that the plastic pollution in the oceans and the microplastics in all of our bodies, gives a pretty good sense of how that worked out.

And then climate change was no different. The major polluters blamed [01:05:00] carbon emissions on individual choices, not corporate polluters. And it was even the polluters who came up with the idea of the carbon footprint calculator, the one factor that I would rank above all others in helping to convince people that navel-gazing on their own personal choices was the way to save the planet rather than getting together to demand systemic change. So, no matter how well-intentioned or how much other good was done by spreading awareness of the problem, I still think that's a valid criticism of Gore's film.

But getting back to listener, Alan, he wrote in to defend Gore by highlighting much of the good he's done for the cause. And we ended up going back and forth a few times with me trying to explain the narrowness of my criticism. Not that I was trying to discredit Gore entirely or anything. But by the end, I still didn't feel like we were really understanding each other. But it was something in Allen's last email, that helped it click for me in a new way. He said that because of all the other good Gore had done, it was "petty" [01:06:00] to criticize the film in the way that I was. And I sort of rolled that around in my head for a bit. I was like, "petty". Petty. And I was like, Oh, wait, I think we're using the word criticized differently. So, even though I don't think arguments should be won or lost with the use of a dictionary. I do think that they're useful for figuring out disconnects in communication. So, "criticism", as I mentioned at the top of the show has two definitions. The first is the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. The other is the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of literary or artistic work, but I argue that that should apply beyond literary or artistic work.

And, you know, arguably both of those could accurately describe what I was doing to Al Gore's movie anyway. But taking a look at the thesaurus, I think gives an even better sense of not just the definitions of words, [01:07:00] but how they likely feel to someone else when they hear the word, right? So, alternate words for criticism in the first definition include censure, reproval, condemnation, denunciation, disapproval, disparagement, fault-finding... you get the idea, right? Like, coming down hard on something. But alternate words to the second definition of criticism: evaluation, assessment, examination, appreciation, appraisal, analysis, judgment, commentary, and so on.

And then you're just, since I was on a roll, I went ahead and looked up "petty" as well. And the definition of petty is, characterized by an undue concern for trivial matters, especially in a small-minded or spiteful way. And I was like, Okay, this could not be more clear. Allen, in my [01:08:00] best possible interpretation, probably thinks that what I said about Al Gore was in some way out of spite, quite likely small-minded, and due to the comparison with the overall amount of good he's done, relatively trivial and not worthy of concern. Right? Whereas, you would never say that about someone who is just doing an evaluation, an assessment, an analysis, which is how I saw what I was doing.

Now today's topic: there was a critique of the Democratic party and some specific Democrats as well. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar feelings that came up on both sides. Some may have heard that criticism of Hillary Clinton and thought, Yeah, that's right. While others probably heard it and got annoyed and felt defensive over. Personally, I think neither of those thoughts is particularly useful. If you find yourself getting excited about criticism of a person, that's just about finding someone to blame because it's cathartic to have an outlet for feelings of frustration, [01:09:00] someone you can direct those feelings at. And if you're a reflexively defensive, though you may be justified in defending against some petty criticism, you may also end up dismissing and ignoring legitimate evaluation, assessment, analysis, what have you, that's intended to try to learn from the past for the sake of improving the future.

So, for my part, I'm going to keep my criticisms substantive and purposeful, not petty, and I hope others will do the same, not just for a healthier debate, but for the sake of making real progress.

That is going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me, as listener Alan did, to [email protected]. 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 [01:10:00] Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her behind the scenes work and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all 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 Patrion page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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 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 you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestoftheleft.com.

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#1620 Threatening the 2024 Election to Subvert Democracy, from Legal Maneuvers in Congress and Unconstitutional Congressional Maps to Violent Threats Against Election Workers (Transcript)

Posted by · April 03, 2024 5:00 AM

Air Date 4/3/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, in which, as the country gears up for election in November, we look at a variety of ways that the GOP and their election denialist supporters are preparing to subvert the democratic process to get the result they want. Sources today include The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast, the PBS NewsHour, The Majority Report, the Thom Hartmann Program, Alex Wagner Tonight, and The Rachel Maddow Show, with additional members-only clips from The Gaggle and the Thom Hartmann Program.

Election Dissection 'How can the election system be improved' - The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast - Air Date 3-27-24

DAVID BECKER: It's interesting because you see a national movement, not just here in Arizona, where people who are disappointed with the outcome of elections, be it 2020 or 2022, are being led to believe a set of lies. It's perfectly understandable to be disappointed about the outcome of elections. There's hardly an American that hasn't experienced disappointment that their candidate lost. And we live in a country that's divided 50/50. [00:01:00] Arizona is a state that's divided 50/50. Maricopa is a county that's divided 50/50. It should not surprise any of us when our candidates lose. And it's understandable that it's disappointing. But that doesn't mean that they didn't lose. And it doesn't mean that we don't know that they lost, that this is a knowable thing, provable, verifiable, thanks to things like paper ballots, and audits, and transparency, and the bipartisanship that encompasses Arizona's and others' elections.

And yet, we see good Americans, in many cases, who are disappointed about the outcome of the election, who have been preyed upon by lies, by, quite frankly, grifters, who have monetized their disappointment, who are raising hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars off their disappointment. They're highly incentivized to keep people who voted for the losing candidate angry and deluded about the loss of those candidates. And this has led to an effort to dismantle election integrity [00:02:00] in the name of "election integrity".

You see things where the people who are getting rich off of the lies are trying to create more chaos post-election, more doubt post-election, more time between the election and when we might know unofficial results because they know they can exploit that time and that chaos to get people angry and raise money.

That's why I think you see efforts to push hand counts, which are not only less accurate and cost a lot more money, but they take a lot more time. And that time can be filled with disinformation, with lies that seek to incite anger and even potentially violence. You see efforts to concentrate all of voting onto a single day, which is about the least secure thing you could do.

Why would you create a single point of failure where 160 million Americans have to do the same thing at the same time, [00:03:00] when instead you could spread voting out over a number of days and over a number of modes, in person and by mail. If you have any problem, if you have a weather event, if you have traffic, if you have a power outage, if you have a technical malfunction of equipment, if you have long lines, even if you had a cyber attack, you can recover from that if you've spread voting out over many, many days.

If you have any of that on a single day, where all voting has to occur in that time, you've created a huge vulnerability that I guarantee you our foreign adversaries will try to take advantage of. You also see it in the efforts to get states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center or ERIC where states like Arizona along with 23 other states and DC are sharing information on their voter records to identify when someone's moved out of their state or when someone's died, keeping their voter lists more accurate, preventing fraud and creating more perception of security as well at the same time. [00:04:00]

And so, states, when you're trying to create doubt about elections, you want dirtier voter lists. You want states to leave ERIC. You want states to try to hand count ballots. You want states to concentrate all of their voting activity in a single 12 or 14 hour period on a single day. And that's why we see these tactics come up again and again, not just in Arizona, but nationwide.

MARY JO PITZL - HOST, THE GAGGLE: So, your organization, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, recently released a report on the rise of early voting. This method's been around for decades in Arizona, and it's really popular. But as the COVID pandemic took hold during the 2020 election, more people turned to mail-in ballots than ever before. So, what role did COVID play in the future of early voting nationwide, and what are some of the cons to the process? Do those objections have any merit in your eyes?

DAVID BECKER: Well, one of the things we found when we looked at the availability of early voting, be it in person or by mail, in other [00:05:00] words, having options other than voting on a single day on election day, what we found was there is widespread bipartisan consensus. It is not even geographically focused, that states want to offer this option to voters. There are a variety of good reasons for it. [It] creates much more secure elections, because you don't have that single point of failure on a single day. Also, we shouldn't lose track of the fact that it's very popular. Voters like having choices. Voters, like everybody else, are busy. They have families. They have jobs. They have things they want to do. And voting during a single, you know, 14 hour period of time on a Tuesday in November might not be the most convenient thing for them.

And so what we've seen between 2000 and 2024 is that states across the country, states as blue as California, states as red as Florida, and Georgia, and Kansas have moved in a bipartisan way to [00:06:00] offer voters choices, to allow them to decide whether they're going to vote on election day or on a day before, whether they like to fill out their ballot at home and return it, or they'd like to go to a polling place.

In 2000, 60% of all voters in the United States had no choice but to vote on Election Day - 60%. Three out of every five. In 2024, that number is 3% - 3% percent in only 4 states: Alabama, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and Delaware have to vote on Election Day. In every other state, there is some option available. In 36 states, that option is to vote either in person early or by mail, and in another 10 states that option is to vote early in person and you need an excuse to vote by mail, but there's still an option. And that's really remarkable that there has been such a bipartisan consensus around this.

It doesn't really change election outcomes. I don't think it changes turnout just by existing. If [00:07:00] the only thing that affected turnout was how easy it was to vote, then we should have seen the lowest turnout we ever saw in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic where everyone was getting sick and we had no vaccines. But we saw the highest turnout in American history in 2020 by a large margin, by 20 million more ballots than had ever been cast before in any election. So that's where we are today in 2024 with nearly everybody in all states having some option available to them to vote early in 2020. The options to vote earlier by mail were accelerated due to the pandemic and voters understandably did not want to put their lives at risk, you know, they clearly wanted to vote to cast a ballot.

And so that's where we are today. States across the political spectrum - I cannot stress this enough, this was not just in blue states, this was across the political spectrum - made it easier for people to have a choice about when and how they voted. States with an excuse requirement for mail voting made COVID a blanket excuse [00:08:00] so that no one had to create a greater excuse than that. There were early voting options at places like sports arenas so people could be more socially distant. That was a wonderful innovation to deal with the crisis. And sure enough, we saw well over 100 million ballots cast in 2020 earlier by mail. The most ever. The largest percentage ever. But what we've seen in subsequent elections is we're starting to settle back down to types of voting we would see before.

In 2020, for instance, I know in Georgia, which has ample options for early voting and mail voting, about a third of all voters voted by mail, about a third voted early in person and about a third voted on election day. In 2022, the percentage of mail voters fell to below 10%, even though it's very easy and widely available. So, I think we're starting to see a normalization back to a standard here in Arizona, though it's very different. Arizonans are very comfortable and understand mail voting. [00:09:00] It's very common in counties for 85% or so of people to receive mail ballots; they know how to return them, whether it's by mail or returning them to an election office. They know about the options for early voting and election day voting, and yet still most Arizonans, by a large, large margin, choose to return their mail ballot.

Giuliani ordered to pay $148 million for defamation of election workers - PBS Newshour - Air Date 12-15-23

AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, NEWS HOUR: As we come on the air, a verdict tonight in one of the cases related to the 2020 election.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, NEWS HOUR: Earlier this evening, a federal jury in Washington ordered Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's former campaign attorney, to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers for distress caused by lies he spread following the 2020 election.

NPR's Miles Park was in the courtroom today and joins us now. So Miles, we should say this was a civil trial, and the jury was asked only to decide the amount of damages. Here's what Rudy Giuliani told reporters on his way out of the courtroom today.

RUDY GIULIANI: Very little I can say right now. I have to analyze this. Obviously, possibly we'll move for a new [00:10:00] trial. Certainly we'll appeal. The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, NEWS HOUR: So, he's calling that number, the $148 million, absurd. How did the jury arrive at that number and what message were they trying to send?

MILES PARK: I mean, it is a staggering number, isn't it? I think throughout the entire week, the plaintiff's attorneys were trying to make the case that the jury should send a message—that election lies, especially when the people pushing them are essentially using real people and who are getting caught up as casualties, that this is not acceptable. It made it clear that they wanted the jury to repair the women's reputation, but more than that, they wanted them to send a message that this is not how healthy democracies behave.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, NEWS HOUR: We heard from both Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, who were subject to Rudy Giuliani's lies about them. Here's what Ms. Freeman told reporters.

RUBY FREEMAN: Money will [00:11:00] never solve all of my problems. I can never move back into the house that I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, NEWS HOUR: How did their attorneys make the case to the jury that the extreme emotional distress, their damaged reputations, that that was worth X amount?

MILES PARK: Well, it really was kind of a two prong approach, where you had the practical aspect and they made that case. They had an expert witness who was a marketing professor from Northwestern come in and show how these lies reached tens of millions of Americans in the time after voting ended in 2020, and then had her put together a strategic communications plan, essentially. What it would cost to counter those lies and repair the reputation. That estimate was put at roughly $47 million. And so then on top of that, then they said, And how do you measure essentially the [00:12:00] emotional toll of this? And both women who were affected testified, both women got emotional, cried on the stand, the jurors and the public saw, I mean, more death threats than I could count. We heard racist voicemails that were left for these women that Shaye Moss's son reportedly heard. And so all of that was kind of taken into consideration when the jury was coming up with this $148 million number.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, NEWS HOUR: We heard Rudy Giuliani say an appeal is on the way. What happens next?

MILES PARK: It's a little bit unclear. He says he's going to appeal. I mean, throughout this entire process, one of the strange things about this is that while the attorneys for the plaintiffs say they want to send a message that this is not acceptable, Rudy Giuliani has continued to say these lies that he is being sued for here on Monday, after court ended on the courthouse steps, Rudy Giuliani said, Everything I've said about those women is true, and said, again, that they stole the election. So, what's next? I think [00:13:00] he is clearly indicating that he's going to appeal this decision. I think what's a little more unclear is how this penalty is going to affect whether he, and whether the former president, whether other people who have continued to spread these lies over the last few years, whether this affects whether they continue to do that looking ahead to 2024

Charlie Kirk Lackey Gets Humiliated By Election Official - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-3-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Turning Points USA field representative, Aubrey Savala, had this tweet. She is in Arizona, I guess, which is where Turning Points USA is located, and put most of their efforts in, and they funneled money into the Arizona governors and senate race. And they lost both. None of this turning college kids into reactionary right wingers stuff is really working, and it's not, definitely not working in Turning Point USA's backyard in Arizona.

So anyway, they're paid for by big right wing donors, and everyone's cashing in, even if the results are not showing. So Aubrey Savala, who works for Charlie Kirk's Turning Points [00:14:00] USA, tweeted this out about the mail-in ballots that she received in the mail. So trying to make some case that there's a lot of ballots out there and people are ballot harvesting and submitting all these fake votes in order to get Democrats elected. She says, "Maricopa County at its finest, my first time ever voting in the presidential preference election, and I received not one but two mail-in ballots. Thank you, @StephenRicher." And so she tags a Maricopa County recorder in her post, this guy, Stephen Richer, who's responsible for counting ballots, and he responds directly to her: " Hi, Aubrey. Thanks for reaching out. You changed your voter registration on the last day of voter registration, February 20th, from your Chandler address to your new Tempe address. Because early ballots must go out on February 21st, your Chandler ballot was already sent to go out, and so it [00:15:00] did. Then we sent out a new ballot to your Tempe address when we processed your voter registration modification. That's why you had to redact out different lengths in the address because they were sent to different addresses. You'll also notice that one of the packet codes ends in 01, the one to your old address, and one ends in O2, the one sent to your new address. As soon as the O2 one goes out, the O1 packet is dead, meaning even if you sent it back, it wouldn't be processed to signature verification and would not be opened. That's how we prevent people from voting twice. So just use the one with your new address ending in O2. That's the only one that will work. Hope this helps. Have a great evening. Happy voting."

And you know what I really loved about that response, in addition to her just getting so embarrassed, was the usage of the passive-aggressive "hope this helps," which we've all gotten an [00:16:00] email, or sent an email that includes "hope this helps." But rarely has there been a more satisfying usage of that passive aggression than in this particular instance, where she really thought she got them. She really thought she did something there. And too bad. There of course is a process of the ballots are not counted twice.

Thoughts?

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It is really funny to see that happen and play out in real time like that. I do wonder if she did that purposefully.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I don't think she thought he'd reply.

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I don't know if she knew what she was doing there or not. Wouldn't put it past her either way, honestly. But that's the thing here. So much of this is either these conservatives purposefully deceiving their audience by creating a scenario purposefully that makes it look like something more is going on there. Or the other option is that they are literally too dumb to know what's going on, which I don't know which one makes them look better or worse, honestly.

And the response to [00:17:00] that was great, 'cause it was a whole bunch of people obviously mocking the Turning Point USA person. But also there was someone --that person who questioned, how do they know? How do you know not to count both of them? Did you show that one? The response?

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: No, we didn't show that one.

How do you know not to count both of them?

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, some other conservative activist tried to poke holes in the guy's claim in the comment to his response, and he completely owned them.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Bradley's gonna try to find it. Yeah.

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: They might have deleted it. Who knows? But the basic crux of it was, Okay, so, how does the machine know that, if someone was to send both of them back, not to count one?

And the guy was like, Well, it's easy. Once we print up the 02 one, the number two one, the machine, the system knows to automatically deactivate the paper that has the 01 on it. So if you were to again, ask for another one, we would send you one out that said 03, and that would cancel out the 02 one and the 01 one would have been previously [00:18:00] canceled out when we sent out the 02 one.

And this other person really thought she was onto something too. It was like these people are stupid and they wouldn't know what they're doing.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: In the same way the bank has a system, if you try to electronically deposit a check twice, the same check, you're not going to be able to do it. Because the system then creates some sort of block so that it can't happen, because it's already registered that it's been processed. This is very simple computing.

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: They believe that there is some huge conspiracy out there where all this encrypted data is flying all over the place being sent everywhere to add votes here and votes there. Anything's possible. They could do anything to steal an election. But then they ask How does the machine know the difference between a paper that says number one on it and a paper that says number two on it? Explain that! Gotcha!

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean it does very much explain how they're so easily duped by Mike Lindell adjacent [00:19:00] pseudo mathematical speak where there's really just no coherent basis for any of it, but it sounds like it could happen. So this is what Vindor was referring to here @StephenRicher.

One, what happens if someone returns two ballots in the same envelope? Two, is there a way to tell if the first ballot ends up in the second envelope other than the CD mark? Say someone moves in with the CD but to another city legislative district or precinct, and he responds here--Stephen Richer, who knows his crap--"It's a great question! Each ballot has a code that also lines up with the return envelope. We check to make sure the right ballot style comes back in the envelope. Believe it or not, some people will send their primary ballot in their primary ballot for a general election. So, yes, you need to use both the new ballot and the new envelope if you moved, as you should suggest, into a new legislative district on the last day of voter registration, in the instructions. But also, we're able to [00:20:00] help identify which is the correct one on a one-to-one basis by phone or email, if needed."

So, the Goldwater Attorney didn't--

That's not the one you were talking about?

MATT BINDER - GUEST HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's not the one I was talking about, but it was the same thing, basically. But I didn't know he got multiple, they really tried to poke holes in this, like they were onto something here, like they thought of something that no one ever thought of before.

Far Right Plan Chaos Ahead of 2024 Election - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 3-22-24

THOM HARTMANN - THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: ...lay out this kind of second half of it, which I'm going to tell you about, but what Rolling Stone is pointing out is that all across the country or, well, not really all across the country, actually in swing states - I mean, they don't care about Mississippi and they don't care about California because they know Mississippi is going to elect Republicans and California is going to elect Democrats - but in the swing states, in Arizona, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Indiana, well, not so much Indiana, but in the swing states, what we're seeing is what looks like and have been watching now for three years, what looks like dress [00:21:00] rehearsals for this fall, which is where local election officials, who are at the bottom of the chain of command, as it were, for certifying elections, but if a local official refuses to certify a local election, that means those votes just don't get counted. They don't get moved up to the county level, or from the county level up to the state level and it just screws up everything. Right? And it can prevent certification of the entire state, if you do it in a large enough county, you know, like one of the big counties in Georgia, for example.

And this is exactly what's happening. Rolling Stone points out a startling number of Republicans have refused to certify election results in recent years despite their legal obligation to do so. In at least 15 instances since November 2020, local Republican officials in eight states have refused to certify election results in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. And these are all states that could go, you know, one way [00:22:00] or the other in the presidential election. Republican officials have refused to certify or delayed certification of results for the election of local, state, and national candidates. This is from Rolling Stone.

And now, why are they doing this? The why of this, Rolling Stone doesn't get into, other than, you know, "create chaos". They mentioned that several times in the article. But, you know, some while back, I wrote an op ed pointing out that I have heard from Republicans who I know, or at least two Republicans who I know, from my days living in Washington, D.C., and, you know, people that I've become acquainted with over the years, and also stuff that I'm reading online, that the plan for this fall is to prevent certification of the election, of the electoral college votes, in enough states that neither [00:23:00] candidate reaches 270 electoral votes.

Now, here's how it works under the 10th Amendment. If no candidate gets, or excuse me, the 12th Amendment, if no candidate gets 270 votes, if no candidate hits that threshold, then the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives. And each state gets one vote. So, there'd be 50 votes for President. There are 26 congressional delegations controlled by Republicans, 23 that are controlled by Democrats, and one Pennsylvania that's split 50/50.

So, if the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, even if Joe Biden wins by 10 million votes in the popular vote, I mean, he won by 7 million last time around, Hillary Clinton won by 3 million, Al Gore won by a half million. I mean, even if he wins by 10-15 million votes, even if he's, you know, 30, 40, 50 points ahead in the Electoral College, you don't hit that [00:24:00] magic number, then the people's vote doesn't matter at all. The House of Representatives decides the election. This has happened before, by the way. This happened in 1876 in the election with Rutherford B. Hayes and, and, uh, who was the guy he was running against? Hayes ended up president. Samuel Tilden was the guy, was the Democrat he was running against. And Tilden actually won the election, he had more Electoral College votes and he had more popular votes. But Hayes ended up president because the thing got thrown to the House of Representatives. And they cut a deal to end Reconstruction. I mean, there's a whole ugly story here, you know, stab Black people in the back and the Republican becomes President. And it also happened with the election of John Adams' son, John Quincy Adams. , I believe that was like, what, 1838 or 1836 or whenever it was, in the 1830s. And he became president, he held the office for one term, and then he went back to the House of Representatives because Congress had passed this law saying that you could not mention [00:25:00] the word slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives. And John Quincy Adams, after he left the White House, went back to Congress, ran for election, won, went back to Congress just so every single day he could stand up and protest slavery in the United States. He did that. I mean, that's a man of integrity. But anyhow, he won the election even though he didn't win the election, as it were. I mean, he was put into office by the House of Representatives. So was Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 which, by the way, led to an amendment to the Constitution, I believe the 12th Amendment.

But this is what their plan is. And, again, last night, whoever was interviewing Justin Glawe, you know, the Rolling Stone reporter, I believe it was Rachel, did not get to that question of why? How do they intend to game this out? Well, I'm telling you. This is what they're gonna try and do. And by the way, it would be perfectly legal. If they can get a handful of states, arguably even [00:26:00] red states, although, you know, we're talking about having to get Biden votes, right?, so they're trying to knock off the swing states, the one's that could vote for Biden. If they can get a handful of states to be unable to certify their election results because local, Republican election officials... I mean, in Georgia, even Democratic areas are controlled by Republican election officials. This was, you know, that law that the Georgia legislature passed three years ago. If local election officials refuse to certify the local elections, it echoes all the way up to the state being unable to submit a slate of electors. And what do you get? You get Donald Trump as president.

'The real voter fraud' Supreme Court stalling leaves illegal gerrymandered map in place for 2024 - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 3-30-24

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Imagine you find out that your state's congressional map was gerrymandered to illegally dilute your votes. Even a panel of judges ruled the map unconstitutional. You'd probably expect that by the next election cycle that unconstitutional map would be thrown out. That is not the case in South Carolina.

The state will [00:27:00] continue to use an unconstitutional congressional map for the foreseeable future, even though a panel of judges concluded that the state's conservative legislature exiled 30,000 Black voters from the state's first congressional district to make it safer for White, Republican incumbent Nancy Mace.

South Carolina appealed the judge's decision, sending the gerrymandered map to the Supreme Court for an expedited decision. And now almost six months after hearing the case, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether or not the map needs to be redrawn, allowing South Carolina to use the old, unconstitutional map, the one that exiles 30,000 Black voters this election cycle.

Back with me is Maya Wiley, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Maya, thank you for sticking around to be incensed with me here.

MAYA WILEY: Thank you for allowing me to be incensed with you.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: I mean, this is the real election fraud. Here it is, right? That's it. You can't get an election back, Maya. How is this happening? [00:28:00]

MAYA WILEY: It starts with the fact that the Supreme Court said, we're going to create "get an election free" cards. Because it started saying things like, Oh, you know, we're going to decide a year takes too long to organize a new election, new maps. That's before this case, but this is what's happening with the lawyers in this case who have been trying to vindicate the rights of Black people in South Carolina, people who the district court said had been bleached. The district they were removed from had been bleached. That's a quote, okay? That is what's happening here because if you can take Black people and dilute their vote, you can essentially muffle our votes, our voices, our ability to say who leads.

But this is something that we've seen, frankly, in far too many legislatures, but unless the Supreme Court is willing to do what the Constitution demands, which is to say, No, you don't get to steal elections. It's actually fundamentally [00:29:00] not what we allow, particularly when you're doing it to take elections away from people who are Black. That's not what our Civil War amendments were written to allow. That is not what we will now. And this is why we need to fight for voting rights legislation because otherwise we keep having our election stolen from our democratic process, from our people.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Why the slowdown at the Supreme Court? I mean, they were asked to expedite this. They know presumably full well that this is happening. And yet no ruling.

MAYA WILEY: Not only do they know full well, they're the very ones who started to say, Okay, we'll let that gerrymandered district move forward, even though a district court said it was discriminatory. We'll let that work, because we didn't have enough time. This case was January 23. This they've had time to decide this. And frankly, I can't say what's going on, but I will say this: what's going on ain't right.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Yeah. I mean, there is a pattern here. Louisiana, Alabama, you know, states of the Confederate South, South Carolina, they are the [00:30:00] ones that keep having these problems. And we live in a world where the justices on that same Supreme Court, the conservatives, would like to say, we're in a post racial America where racism is no longer a problem. The shadow of the Confederacy still looms large even today in this kind of voting rights legislation.

MAYA WILEY: Being race blind in this country today means being blind to injustice and refusing to address it. That is not good for democracy and that's why we're not going to stop fighting for voting rights.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Maya Wiley, I'm going to, like, say that we're ending on an up note because the fight goes on, the warriors in the fight continue on this Friday night.

MAYA WILEY: And it's a big coalition and we are a majority of this country and we are not letting it go.

Maddow joins colleagues in objecting to McDaniel for legitimizing Trump, attacking democracy Part 1 - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 3-26-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: So it's February 28th. The County Board of Supervisors was holding one of its regular meetings. This was in Arizona, Maricopa County, Arizona, and there were discussions about proposed zoning changes and a new irrigation district and bringing certain roads into the county highway system. There was even a pet showcase for adoptable dogs. Oh, hello. [00:31:00]

Maricopa County is home to the city of Phoenix, it's home to over 60 percent of the population of the State of Arizona. There's a lot of local governance to cover at these Board of Supervisors meetings. But as this meeting approached the two hour mark, something changed in the room that was definitely a vibe shift. You could see the supervisors looking around, starting to whisper to each other, they seemed to sense something was about to happen. And then the chair abruptly adjourned the meeting, at which point some version of pandemonium broke out.

JACK SELLERS, CHAIR OF MARICOPA COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS: This meeting is now adjourned.

PROTESTORS CHANTING: Sellers, runnin' for the hills.

We the people will have answers.

You are being served. You are being served. You are being served. You are being served. You are being served.

You will go to the other side of this board.

You are being served.

[00:32:00] We will vote in new officials.

It shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be hostile like this. It's only like this...

You are treasonous. You are treasonous.

It's only like this because of you guys, because you're corrupt. It shouldn't be like this.

William. William.

Do your job.

You are being served.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: This is where election denialism hits the road. This is what it looks like in real life. You can see in the video how the Maricopa supervisors, they hustle out pretty quickly, law enforcement blocks these people who are yelling at them and jostling, jostling them. And if you're wondering what all the yelling is about, all the shouting about "treasonous" and "you are being served", after the supervisors left, one person in the crowd laid it all out.

PROTESTOR: Twelve signatures, which means each individual person is personally liable for over 21 million dollars, just from this paperwork. If they don't resign within three days, they will be personally served with a writ of quo warranto and an opportunity, again, [00:33:00] to rebut any one of our claims, which I'm making right now. None of them have signed a oath of office. None of them are bonded to we the people. All of them are foreign invaders acting as government. They are not our government. Therefore, we will be serving them a writ of quo warranto with a waiver of tort. And, if they still do not rebut, we'll be notifying the military, and they can be held off, hauled off, I'm sorry, to a military tribunal, and I think we all know the penalty for treason. Thank you.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Thank, thank you. Thank you. We'll be serving them with a writ of quo warranto with a waiver of tort, if they do not rebut, we'll be notifying the military, and they can be hauled off to a military tribunal, we all know the penalty for treason, thank you very much.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, for what it's worth, almost all of them are Republicans, they're all foreign invaders who are now liable for millions of dollars because somebody yelled, "you're being served". If they don't resign in minutes, the military will come and execute them. And however this might look to us watching it on video, for the Maricopa [00:34:00] Board of Supervisors, having a bunch of people rush the dais where they're sitting, yelling that they're traitors and they should all be killed, is scary. Here's how the Washington Post reported it. "The scene at the February 28th meeting terrified many county employees and others who were reminded of what happened after Joe Biden won the county, and with it Arizona, in the 2020 presidential race. Back then, Trump supporters used baseless claims of fraud to try to pressure or scare elected leaders into changing the county's election results".

After the 2020 election, you might remember this was the scene for days on end outside that county elections department when the votes were being tabulated. There were mobs of often armed Trump supporters gathering outside the building, yelling at the election workers inside. At one point, they surrounded one elections worker outside the building. The person had to be pulled out of the angry crowd by a sheriff's deputy.

Arizona has been a hotbed of election denialism ever since, as epitomized by the [00:35:00] circus of that bizarre arena audit of the 2020 election. The state's attorney general is closing in on a decision now whether to criminally charge the fake electors from Arizona who signed forged documents after the 2020 election, claiming that Trump had won the state, rather than Biden.

Just today, a man was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison for making repeated death threats in 2022 against Katie Hobbs, who was then Arizona's top elections official and is now governor. The head of the U. S. Justice Department's Elections Threat Task Force had a press conference in Phoenix today after that sentencing to drive home the message that threats against election officials will not be tolerated, they will be prosecuted, and you will go to prison.

Election Dissection 'How can the election system be improved' Part 2 - The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast - Air Date 3-27-24

SASHA HUPKA - CO-HOST, THE GAGGLE: Moving away from early voting for a moment, I want to chat with you a little bit about the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which is something that you helped launch in 2021. It's an effort to connect election officials with free legal advice and free communications advice. [00:36:00] How is that working so far?

DAVID BECKER: We launched the Election Official Legal Defense Network in September of 2021 with co-chairs Bob Bauer, former Obama White House counsel, and Ben Ginsberg, former campaign counsel to Republicans, including President George W. Bush and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in an effort to assist election officials with something we are becoming increasingly concerned about. They were experiencing challenges they had never experienced before I get asked a lot, Is this the worst we've ever seen it with regard to election officials being threatened or abused? And my answer is, We've never seen this before. Before 2020 election officials were doing a vital function in our democracy. They give us all our voice. But they're largely anonymous. You'd never see an election official look for praise. There's never a headline on the Wednesday after an election that everything went great. You just forget about them. And that's the best case scenario for election officials: anonymity. Unfortunately, since 2020, [00:37:00] the worst case scenario has not been a mistake. It has been mental and physical abuse, threats, harassment, sometimes even coming from government entities that are supposed to be there to support your work. And we've seen that here in Arizona in places like, for instance, Cochise County.

So, what we started in 2021 was we recruited an ever growing network of attorneys who were willing to be matched with an election official and serve pro bono to advise them with whatever might be coming up. It could be about abuse and harassment. It could be something imminent, like a sheriff is banging on their door saying they're going to seize the voting machines. That has happened. It could be that they're worried about their personal safety, or the safety of their families, or the safety of their staff, or their facilities. And that lawyer will work for them, for free, even if their own lawyers at the county level are actually some [00:38:00] of the people engaging in the harassment. We have paired lawyers with election officials here in Arizona, and I can tell you right now we're seeing as many requests for assistance in the last few months as we did in the first few months.

SASHA HUPKA - CO-HOST, THE GAGGLE: For a lot of these election officials, these are threats of violence, and there are some that are leaving office because of that or choosing not to run again. And I've done some reporting around the fact that this is also trickling down into poll workers, the front line people who greet you when you come into the voting center, who are usually paid around minimum wage. And those positions are increasingly becoming harder to fill. Is there anything that local or federal election officials, or maybe even law enforcement, can do to address this problem? Is there a way to ensure physical safety at the polls?

DAVID BECKER: Yeah, I think there's several things that need to be done. And I actually want to call out Maricopa for, I think, having a successful model for that. One of the things that Maricopa does exceptionally well is the partnership between the Board of Supervisors, the [00:39:00] Recorder's Office, and the Sheriff's Office, [which] is absolutely crucial. And that partnership - there's constant communication going on between those entities. They are ensuring that facilities and staff are protected. I have talked to multiple election officials in Maricopa about this, as well as representatives of the Sheriff's Office, and it's very clear the Sheriff's Office is incredibly responsive when there's even a hint of a problem in some way. The facilities are very secure, even when they are very clearly being targeted with bullying and threatening activity, if not actual violence. I think Maricopa is a model for the nation in that regard.

But I think more has to be done beyond that. I think everyone should try to build that cooperation between law enforcement and elections, so that law enforcement understands what elections do, so that to the degree they might be consuming lies about the election, that they can understand how transparent and protected the process is.

But I think another very crucial aspect of [00:40:00] providing a safe environment for election officials and voters is the deterrence that comes from accountability. We need to hold those who have broken the law, who have created an environment of fear and potentially violence, accountable under the law. That's why the January 6th prosecutions are so important. That's why, where there's evidence, prosecutions against those who might have been at the top of this pyramid, at the top of the scheme, the investigations of fake electors, for instance, those things are absolutely crucial. People need to be - where they've committed a crime, where there's probable cause to charge them - they need to be brought to court. They need to be forced to show evidence to prove their innocence if they have it. And if they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, they have to be punished under the law. I think we are in the early stages of that process. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it's absolutely crucial that it continue.

That's why I think the investigations of fake electors, not just in Arizona, but [00:41:00] in other places like Michigan and Wisconsin and elsewhere, are really important. And one of the questions I often get is, Does this become partisan in some way? And the answer I always have, and I know this is true to the core of my belief, is I ask people to ask themselves what would you say if the party identification on everybody that was being charged was different? If the result of the election had been different, would you want the other party to be investigated and prosecuted that way? I know the answer. The answer is yes for me. And in fact, in the book that I wrote with Major Garrett, The Big Truth, we discuss a hypothetical in the post-2016 environment, where what if Secretary Clinton had engaged in efforts to overturn the will of the people in an election that she lost? She won the popular vote, but she lost under the rules that we had. And I said it at the time, but what if she had started to do even a fraction of the things that we saw the losing candidate in 2020 do? What if she had tried to weaponize the federal government under the [00:42:00] Obama administration to do the same thing? What if she had organized a rally and incited anger and urged those people to march violently to the Capitol to stop a crucial constitutional task? We, of course, would expect some of the same people claiming that the January 6th defendants are hostages to be saying lock her up. And that's where we cannot clearly identify that it's not those of us who are demanding accountability that are being partisan. It's actually those that have spread some of the lies and rumors who seek absolution for their acts in delegitimizing democracy.

Maddow joins colleagues in objecting to McDaniel for legitimizing Trump, attacking democracy Part 2 - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 3-26-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Quote: "In training poll workers for this year's presidential election, the office of Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes is preparing them for a series of worst-case scenarios, including combat, coordinating active shooter drills for election workers, sending kits to county election offices that include tourniquets to stem bleeding, devices to barricade doors, hammers to break glass windows."

[00:43:00] Arizona has been ground zero for election denial and threats and intimidation of election workers ever since the 2020 election. Things do not seem to be getting better ahead of this next election, but this time at least state officials do know a lot more about what they're up against.

Joining us now is Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate your time.

ADRIAN FONTES, ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: Thank you so much, Rachel, for having me.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Is it fair to say that things aren't better since 2020 in Arizona, and that as we head toward this next election, you're expecting to see a continuation or maybe even a worsening of some of the sorts of threats, and sort of craziness that we saw in Arizona a few years ago?

ADRIAN FONTES, ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, I think in balance, things are actually better, with our elections officials are much [better] trained. They're more prepared. We know what to expect for the most part. There are some new emerging wrinkles. But we've been here. We've seen that. And those pictures you showed of those armed crowds outside of the warehouse, that was my warehouse. That was my election in Maricopa County in 2020. [00:44:00] We got through that. We got through 2022. We will get past 2024 and we will protect democracy.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Tell me some of the specifics of your planning. This is obviously a threatening environment, not just in terms of physical safety for you and your staff, but in terms of making sure the election can be carried out without being hindered by external forces.

ADRIAN FONTES, ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: Yeah, well, first the background. We've lost senior election officials in 12 out of our 15 counties here in Arizona. But to shore up the load, we're making sure that everybody who is coming in--most of whom really were already in elections, at the the next level down positions--that they're prepared. And we're focusing on the fundamentals, but we're also adding in some augmented training, including some AI training like we had at a recent tabletop exercise. That's a training that law enforcement and the military used to role play, throw scenarios out there. We've also got some Tiger teams from our office that are going out to make sure that our IT security systems are locked down, that [00:45:00] folks are well trained, and we have worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security, both at the state and federal level, and CISA to shore up all of our physical and cyber security needs.

But at the end of the day, it is fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals, and the folks who are running elections in Arizona are ready.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: I know that the Justice Department had a press conference today in Arizona and Phoenix after the sentencing of a man sentenced to more than two years in federal prison after threatening your predecessor, who's now the governor of the state. Do you feel like the criminal law part of this, obviously threats and intimidation, are always illegal, let alone violence itself. Do you feel like, on the criminal law side of this, that Arizona is doing a good job at prosecuting the stuff and that you have the support that you need from the Federal Justice Department to do what needs to be done?

ADRIAN FONTES, ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, I've been openly critical of the Department of Justice and the FBI for not celebrating their wins in the courtroom enough, to act as a deterrent against this sort of thing. And it looks like they're coming [00:46:00] around a little bit. The press conference today really does show that accountability matters. And it's important that we let folks know that threats or violence against elections officials--look, at the end of the day, that's domestic terrorism; threats or violence for a political outcome is terrorism. And that's just what's happening in America today. It's inexcusable. And law enforcement at the federal and state level needs to step up not just the investigations, but promoting the convictions that have been had, so that folks understand clearly: threatening election workers is not an American thing. It is criminal. Acts of violence against election workers, election officials is also criminal. And we cannot have this kind of activity and maintain the civil society that we purport to love.

BONUS Election Dissection 'How can the election system be improved' Part 3 - The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast - Air Date 3-27-24

MARY JO PITZL - HOST, THE GAGGLE: When the Supreme Court recently ruled that Trump can remain on the ballot in Colorado, you noted that the court didn't address the question of, you know, could Trump have been ineligible because of inciting an insurrection? But you said that argument might still come up maybe when the Congress meets as the [00:47:00] electoral college. What do you foresee coming when you made that comment?

DAVID BECKER: Well, it's not that I foresee it. It's a possibility. I try to stay away from predictions as much as possible. But, should Donald Trump win the election, should the results be certified in such a way, and should he have 207 or more electoral votes after the electors meet on December 17th, there is a significant possibility, maybe even probability, that members of Congress who oppose Donald Trump will raise his ineligibility under the 14th Amendment as he engaged in insurrection. And one thing left open by the Colorado case is that it appears that all of the justices believe that Congress does have the power to create a framework whereby someone could be held ineligible under the 14th Amendment. And certainly, the January 6th joint session of Congress is a potential opportunity for them to exercise that power.

So, I think that I would expect that if Donald Trump wins, that there will be some [00:48:00] members of Congress who will raise that as an objection. I should note also, there has been some strengthening of the Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform Act was passed in 2022 during the lame duck session. And it requires greater thresholds to bring an objection, 20 percent of each house in order for it to be debated in those houses. So, whether it will meet that threshold or not, I think it's highly possible that it will be raised. And so there were many, and I consider myself among them, who were hoping that the Supreme Court might find a way to get at the core factual and legal issues about whether or not Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and was an officer who had sworn an oath to the Constitution sufficient to be disqualified from office. But they didn't go there. I can understand why they didn't go there. The decision to overrule the case was 9-0. There were vastly different grounds there. And some concern from at least three justices, and possibly four, that [00:49:00] the majority had gone too far in kind of restricting Congress's power. But all that said, if Congress seeks to act in that way, if Donald Trump wins, we could find ourselves in somewhat of a constitutional crisis again.

SASHA HUPKA - CO-HOST, THE GAGGLE: You recently said on social media that you're very confident that the 2024 election will be safe and secure. What is your basis for that comment? If I'm a voter, what kinds of things should I be looking for to evaluate whether an election is well run or not?

DAVID BECKER: I'm so glad you asked me that question. Our elections today are the most secure, transparent, and verified elections we've ever held in American history. And that's not just the opinion of Trump's own DHS. It's not just the opinion of conservative legal scholars who wrote a report called LostNotStolen.org about the 2020 election. It's not just the opinion of 60+ courts. It's just objective fact when you look at what we have in our elections right now. Ninty-five percent of all Americans vote on verifiable, auditable paper, like [00:50:00] Arizonans have for decades. That percentage was only about 75-80% in 2016. Between 2016 and 2020, the entire states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia moved to paper. All paper. All recountable. Georgia's presidential ballots, on paper, were all recounted three times, three different ways, once entirely by hand. That's incredible. The only states that still have some number of non-paper ballots are not swing states, states like Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee. Every swing state, every battleground state has paper, and we have more audits than ever before. All of those states that have paper, audit those ballots. That means they take a sampling of those ballots, they count them by hand, and they confirm those counts against the machine totals to make sure the machines work right. If there's a problem, they count more ballots to see if they can identify what the problem is. And if there's ever litigation, the losing candidate could always go back to those paper ballots and have a judge review them and confirm what happened.

We've had some very close elections in American history, not just Florida in 2000, but for instance the Minnesota Senate race in [00:51:00] 2008, which was decided by a couple hundred, all paper ballots in that race. That was finally decided by a court in the summer of 2009 and Al Franken was seated, having been declared the winner over Norm Coleman. That's why we should feel secure. Our voter lists are more accurate than ever before. More states are keeping their voter lists more accurate because they're sharing data between states. They're sharing data within their state with Motor Vehicles, where people go when they have a move, for instance. So those voter lists are much more accurate.

We have better tools to prevent fraud than ever before. We have more pre-election litigation than ever before, for good or bad. That means we're clarifying the rules. And we apparently are going to have more post-election litigation than ever before for the foreseeable future, perhaps mostly in Arizona. For those law students in Arizona right now, it's a bull market for you to join the election law field if you want to. So, we should be absolutely confident that our elections are secure, that we can document, show our work, to confirm, even in a case like the [00:52:00] state AG's race in 2022, where the margin was very narrow, we know who won. It was really close, but we know there was a winner and by how much. But ultimately no matter what happens, and even perhaps no matter what the margin is, there are going to be losing candidates and their supporters who are highly incentivized to spread lies and incite anger and violence, and importantly, to raise money.

So, the election officials in Arizona, nationwide, can do the best possible job. I have every confidence they will, even with all the stress they've suffered since 2020. Think about the 2022 election and how well it went. There was a problem here in Maricopa, but ultimately that was handleable and that was... nationwide though, hardly any problems. 2021 and 2023, where there were off-year elections, went very, very well. The primaries are going very, very well nationwide. They are doing their jobs, even with the stress and the abuse and the turnover. And the question is, will it matter if the [00:53:00] losing candidate won't accept a loss, no matter what the margin is?

BONUS Exposing Secret Fascist Plan To ‘Win’ 2024 Election - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 2-26-24

THOM HARTMANN - THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: About four years ago, actually four years ago, two weeks from now, March 13th, 2020, I published a piece over on Alternet laying out how Republicans were then, 10 months before January 6th, planning on stealing the election for Donald Trump with fake electors and with Mike Pence not certifying all of the votes.

When I published that article 10 months before January 6th, People were saying, Eh, number one, don't give them any ideas, --you don't have to worry about that, they already were thinking about it. And number two, Eh, Trump would never do that, that's too audacious. He's not gonna do that, and if he did, he wouldn't get away with it.

But I was right. And that's exactly what Trump did. And now I'm hearing a new story--and by the way, this isn't just unique to me, Joy Reid talked about this on Friday of last week, the editor-at-large of Newsweek has written about it, and other places--that the Republicans have a [00:54:00] new scheme.

First, they need to maintain control of the House of Representatives. The House is sworn in on January 3rd. The President is certified on January 6th. So, on January 3rd, the Republicans need to maintain control of the House, even if Democrats win a majority of the House seats. Now, how do they do that? The same way that, that right now, we see that Tom Suozzi, the guy who won the race in New York's 3rd district, I believe it's the 3rd, has not been sworn in yet. Eric Swalwell is talking about this. He says, Eric Swalwell just announced on MSNBC that Republicans are refusing to seat Suozzi because their majority in the House is so small. This is pretty straightforward stuff.

And, I don't know how long this is going to hang on here, how long they're going to be able to get away with this stuff. But, they're saying that they're going to swear in Suozzi on Thursday of this week.

But the fact of the matter is, they could have sworn him in [00:55:00] before they adjourned, and they didn't.

So how do the fascists win? Well, number one, you do that. You hold on to the House of Representatives. So, Johnson continues to be Speaker of the House, even though the Democrats got more votes for the House of Representatives. He would just say, oh, well, we've got these seven Democrats--who just happen to make the majority--who we think there are problems with the elections in their home districts. And so we're going to hold off on seating them for a couple of weeks while we examine the irregularities in this election.

So he gets to stay speaker. And then as speaker, he gets to lead the effort on January 6th to say, no, we're not going to accept the electoral college certificates of election from a couple of states where we think something skeezy went on. And as a result, there are not 270 electoral college votes for Trump [00:56:00] or Biden. Neither one. So what happens then? Then the election gets thrown into the House of Representatives. And in the House of Representatives, each state has one vote. Now, there are 26 states that are controlled by Republicans, 23 states that are controlled by Democrats, one that's 50/50, Pennsylvania, in terms of their congressional delegation. So you would have a 26 to 23 vote in the House of Representatives for Donald Trump. And he would become president.

And Republicans are betting that, just like when Hillary Clinton won by three million votes and Trump became president anyway, just like when Al Gore won by a half million votes and Trump became president anyway, there was no large, wide scale outrage. People didn't show up on the streets. And so the Republicans are guessing that this time there won't be either. That it'll be, oh yeah, everything's good. Trump is president again for four more. Yeah, there'll be some protests. But then President Trump comes in and he starts putting [00:57:00] down the protests. This is Project 2025, right? Impose fascism on the United States. Or at least that's how some would characterize it.

So I think that this is actually a possibly really big deal. And then, of course, once they have done this, once they have put Trump back in the White House and they're maintaining a Republican control over the House of Representatives, then the Republicans pursue their actual agenda, which is to end gay marriage and criminalize being trans, outlaw abortion and most forms of birth control, end the teaching of black history, outlaw DEI and affirmative action of any sort, shut down most functions of the EPA so the fossil fuel and chemical industries can do whatever they want to our air and water, end enforcement of our anti-monopoly laws, fire thousands of IRS investigators to make America safe for the morbidly rich tax cheats, shut down all the green initiatives and instead [00:58:00] "drill baby drill," sell off public lands and parks to the highest bidders, privatize Social Security and end traditional Medicare, end federal funding for public schools and colleges and outlaw unions.

They're not hiding any of these things. These are the things that are at the top of their agenda.

Final comments on the backfire effect of lies about mail-in voting

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with The Gaggle: An Arizona Politics Podcast discussing the impact of election denialism in the state. The PBS News Hour reported on Rudy Giuliani's defamation case brought by election workers in Georgia. The Majority Report discussed the feeble arguments against mail-in voting conservative conspiracy theorists come up with. Thom Hartmann discussed the impact of Republican county officials who refuse to certify election results. Alex Wagner Tonight looked at the case of South Carolina's unconstitutional congressional map.

The Rachel Maddow Show showed the threats to the Maricopa County board of supervisors. The Gaggle discussed the necessity of the Election Official Legal Defense [00:59:00] Network. And The Rachel Maddow Show looked at some of the measures being put in place to defend the election system.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from The Gaggle, which discussed the question of whether Congress could object to a Trump win based on the 14th amendment. And Thom Hartmann described another potential maneuver the GOP may pursue to elect Trump against the will of the people. To hear that, and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support or 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, to wrap up, acknowledging that this is a pretty dark topic—because it's always difficult to be up against a group of people who are willing to cheat and lie to get their way—I have just one positive element of the election to end on, which also happens to be a little funny. [01:00:00] Early voting and voting by mail continue to be two of the best tools for increasing voter turnout, and smart Republicans working to drive Trump voters to the polls know this, but there continues to be a hangover from Trump's associating mail-in voting with fraud. This is from an NBC News article :

" When Donald Trump held a rally last year in Erie County, an important area in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the top Republican official there went one by one to the 11,000 people waiting in line to ask one question: would you like to vote by mail?

It didn't go well.

'I tried to give them a mail-in ballot application, and could only get out about 300,' Tom Eddy, head of the county’s Republican Party, said. Every one of them said either, "No, that's not the right way to vote," or "Trump does not agree with it."'"

The article goes on to explain that Republicans across the [01:01:00] country are trying to change the perspective on early and mail-in voting because they understand that giving up on those tools will hurt them politically. By the way, you may recall from election coverage in 2020 that Republicans used to be big supporters of mail-in voting. Continuing from the article:

" It starts at the top. As the leader of the Republican party, Trump has used his position to blast, without evidence, mail-in voting as a Trojan horse for widespread voter fraud. In the process, the former president has eroded trust in a method that was once widely embraced by many people in his party, putting Republicans at a disadvantage against Democrats."

And, you know, with all the instances that we can think of where the liar's dividend does, in fact, give an advantage, it's good to hear of cases like this—where attempts to subvert democracy through lies and casting unfounded doubt looks set to backfire for a [01:02:00] second presidential election in a row. Now, it's not like that's enough to get Republican states to certify their election results or anything, but I'll take my good news where I can get it.

That is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. 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 on our social media outlets, activism, segments, graphic designing web mastering, 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 Podcasts [01:03:00] app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny bonus episodes in addition to there being extra content, no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes along with a link to join our Discord community where you can continue the 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 you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

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#1619 A Guide to Protests Against Injustice from the Peaceful to the Deadly (Transcript)

Posted by · March 30, 2024 8:30 AM

Air Date 3/30/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast in which we look at the fact that we are living through a sort of age of protest, from the opposition to the Iraq War, the Arab Spring uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, all the way through to marches against Trump and now the war in Gaza. So, we thought we should take a look at the art and science of protest itself. Sources today include Novara Media, Chapo Trap House, Second Thought, The Majority Report, and Democracy Now!, with additional members-only clips from Outrage and Optimism and Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

The Missing Revolutions of The 2010s | Ash Sarkar Meets Vincent Bevins Part 1 - Novara Media - Air Date 10-29-23

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: There's a conventional understanding of why left wing protest movements fail, and I think that if you asked somebody who worked for the Times or the BBC, they'd say, well, the problem is is that they're too left wing.

They're too left wing, they're too disconnected from where the majority of people are at, and that means there's a kind of right wing backlash, which operates as [00:01:00] a sort of course correction. It's because these people are too disconnected from where the median citizen is at.

Don't really feel that that's your thesis in the book, but yours is something else.

VINCENT BEVINS: Well, that, I think, is what happened very often throughout history. I protested the Iraq War in 2003. And what happened at that point, it was this huge outpouring of opposition to the invasion of and destruction of that country. But what you can do as a government is simply ignore it. And that's what happened, I think, in 2003, and I think very often in history, we are not surprised to see that the people in power choose to see whatever outpouring of sentiment on the streets as a minority that we already knew about, we're going to ignore them. What is very strange about what I call the mass protest decade, the period of 2010 to 2020, just to summarize, I try to write a history of the world in that decade built around mass protests, treating the history of the world in that period as if the most important thing that happened was unexpected mass [00:02:00] protests and their unintended consequences.

What happens in that decade is not that their fringe elements that are ignored by elites is that in many, many cases, they become so big that they actually unseat or fundamentally destabilize existing elites or existing governments. So many "normal people" -- and this becomes important because everyone, every person is a concrete person, which group of individuals you get in the streets always matters -- but you got so many " normal people" that actually this worked sometimes much, much better than anybody expected, and worked to an extent that opportunities were generated that other people took advantage of.

So the strange thing in the 2010s is not, oh, nothing happened, because that's normal. It's normal if they say, well, we already knew that 1 percent of the population feels this way and they're going to be very noisy. We're going to ignore them. What happened very, very often in 2010s, and I build the story the protests that get big enough to do this, is that people join the streets in large enough numbers that they either dislodge or fundamentally destabilize governments around the world.

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: So in [00:03:00] 2003, I attended my very first protest. I was 11 years old and I went on the protest against the Iraq war. And for that period of my childhood, I was going on pretty regular anti-war protests and they were very formulaic. They went from A to B, you marched, you did some chanting and nobody gave a solitary flying fuck. We used to bunk school en masse to go on these protests and nobody cared.

And then my first experience of going to protests where people cared about these protests and they made it into the news, it was from 2010 onwards. It was the student movement, it was the anti-austerity movement, and the Arab Spring happens slap bang in the middle of all of that.

And I saw firsthand that our political vocabulary for what we were doing changed. So when Milbank got smashed up, when the protests at Parliament Square got violent, very violent with the [00:04:00] police, there was some sort of experimental terminology being thrown around, like, Oh, are we doing a civic swarm? Are we doing something else? And then Tahrir Square happens. We go, this is what we're trying to emulate. We're trying to create this space in which we're making a revolution amongst ourselves, and then it might spread out to other things. So how did the Arab Spring become this blueprint for leftists all over the world?

VINCENT BEVINS: And indeed, all kinds of movements, indeed, movements that you would not consider left wing at all. I think that the way that Hong Kong -- well, Hong Kong is an explicit copy of Occupy Wall Street, which is a copy of Tahrir Square, which is inspired by Tunisia. And Hong Kong, I don't think that you would call led by leftists, Maidan in Ukraine also is interpreted in such a way, interpreted with the lens of Tahrir Square in ways which are ultimately important, I think, without that being a movement that is primarily leftist.

You're absolutely right, that this moment, the inspiring -- and I think it's easy to recognize why it was so [00:05:00] inspiring -- scene of Tahrir Square really defines a lot of the rest of the decade. A lot of the rest of the decade is about either movements intentionally trying to reproduce that, or being interpreted as if they are that by the media.

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: So what was going on in Tahrir Square that was so exciting?

VINCENT BEVINS: Absolutely. So it really starts in Tunisia at the end of 2010. And in Tunisia, you have an uprising which begins in the interior of the country with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, but you get a revolution which proceeds in more or less normal terms in North African history, you do get a set of concrete actors. You have a very radical left wing party. You have the union, UGTT, which ends up acting in a way which is very important. You have professional associations which end up putting pressure on the dictator who flees. And then there is a process to create a new government.

Now in Egypt, which is not far away, but politically different enough that the original organizers of protests on January 25th in Cairo, which [00:06:00] was initially a protest against police brutality, like so many others in the 2010s. This was held on Police Day. Even though that they knew that Tunisia would be inspiring to some extent for Egyptians, they did not expect to take Tahrir Square. They did not expect to even make the call for Mubarak to be overthrown. They expected, hopefully, to get some people together to protest police brutality. They knew that the inspiration of what was happening in Tunisia would be important, but they did not expect to take Tahrir Square, which they do on January 25th. And they certainly don't expect what happens on January 28th, which is that essentially that night, there is a battle with the police and the police lose. So the people that have swarmed into the streets behind the original organizers of January 25th and 28th are so massive in numbers that the police rip off their uniforms and run away. And at this point, the Egyptian revolutionaries --

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: That must have been so exhilarating to be a part of.

VINCENT BEVINS: I'm speaking with some of the people that organized January 25th and January 28th, and now in the context of what's happening, the way that Tahrir Square has been taken again for the first time in a [00:07:00] very long time because of pro-Palestine solidarity, and it was, I think it's worth mentioning, pro-Palestine solidarity that led to the creation of many of these groups in the first place. It was often support for the Second Intifada that really created the tactic of taking Tahrir Square.

But to go back to January 28th, at the moment when the police flee, and as you say, the people that I'm speaking to now that I was spoke to for this book, they say that day was so beautiful that I could relive it for the rest of my life. Even knowing how badly it turns out two years later, I could relive every moment for the rest of my life. It was the most alive I've ever felt. We were making history. We were pushing across the bridge and with every push of our bodies, we were pushing history forward.

The Uncommitted Movement feat. Layla Elabed & Waleed Shahid - Chapo Trap House - Air Date 3-8-24

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: I think it's unquestionable that the campaign has made an impact because the reactions in the media that now have to talk about this and deal with this have been quite irate. So, starting with you, what do you say to the criticism that the Uncommitted campaign is either unwittingly helping Donald Trump or just simply being useful idiots to secure his reelection.

WALEED SHAHID: Well, this is a big tent campaign from like loyal Democrats, even liberal Zionists, all the way [00:08:00] to anarchists and socialists who have been protesting in the streets. This is a way to bring people together who are pissed off about the war and want to make their voices heard at the ballot box. And so there are definitely some people who are voting uncommitted who are not going to vote for President Biden and probably vote third party or sit out come November.

But I think the vast majority of people who are voting uncommitted would - and the polls I've seen show this - if Biden was to end funding toward Israel's war in Gaza, if Biden was to call for a permanent ceasefire, if Biden was to end funding for the occupation, these voters would come around, obviously. You know, it is a big stretch for Biden to go from here to there. But every poll I've seen is that voters who are uncommitted right now would come around if Biden were to change his position dramatically.

I think this is a warning. Everything I heard from the political establishment and like media and journalists I talked to was that Biden doesn't take these Arabs, these young people, these Palestinians, Muslims, seriously. He thinks by [00:09:00] October, when Biden reminds Muslims and Arabs and young people about the Muslim ban, they will come around and vote for him. I personally wanted to send the media and political establishment a message that these voters are serious about their uncommitment to Biden and then it's a warning sign for Democrats that if they're going to put Netanyahu above defeating Trump, if they're going to put Netanyahu above American democracy, then the bill will come due for disregarding Palestinian lives. And so, I think the Biden campaign is starting to understand that these voters are serious. So, either they will continue what they're doing, which is to rebrand themselves as, Oh, we're nice to the Palestinians. We have nice messaging about Muslims. Or they'll abandon Muslims and Arabs and young people and go for Nikki Haley voters, or they'll change their position and try to earn the support of the voters who care about human rights for everybody. And so we're waiting to see a policy change. But you know, right now it's not good enough.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: And, Layla, when you campaign on this issue, do you encounter a Democratic voters who maybe feel [00:10:00] upset by Biden's support for the war on Palestine, but sort of, I guess, ultimately think that's over there, there's nothing I can really do about it, and I just can't bear the thought of Trump being president? What do you say to these voters or is this sort of a voice from nowhere? Do you not encounter people like that?

LAYLA ELABED: Well, I think that Michigan voters showed the Democratic Party exactly how they felt. In Michigan, we had 73 out of 83 counties vote at 10 percent or over for uncommitted. And so, I think that's a good example of how broad this campaign was.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: In terms of the reaction of the Democratic Party and its leadership, do you think that they were maybe caught a little off guard that this movement is not just a movement of Arab and Muslim Democratic voters, but has sort of crossed demographic lines in a way that can't be sort of easily cordoned off or jettisoned as a small sort of ethnic voting group?

WALEED SHAHID: Yeah, I [00:11:00] think they're definitely caught off guard. In Minnesota, there was The New York Times did a graph showing that the largest size of the vote for uncommitted came from voters under 35, and that multiracial, multifaith, multiethnic. And so we have statistics showing that this is not just an Arab and Muslim issue, but this is particularly a generational issue.

It was definitely intentional that Kamala Harris made her rebrand on ceasefire in Selma, of all places. She was speaking to an older, Black, Christian audience and for people who've been paying attention, several, like, a thousand Black pastors wrote to the White House saying that they were against the funding of the war. The AMU church for Biden.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: That's surprising to me as well, if I could interject here, that's surprising to me because I remember when protesters disrupted Biden's comments at that famous Black church. I was assured that this would turn off the entire sort of African-American faith community. But that doesn't appear to have a...

WALEED SHAHID: You must watch a lot of [00:12:00] MSNBC. So that church, that church where Biden was disrupted and the entire Democratic establishment said like, How rude, these protesters, this is a historic black church. So, that was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the largest Black congregations in the country. That denomination put out a statement a few weeks after that disruption saying they could no longer support funding of Israel's occupation or war. And so, you know, maybe people have their feathers ruffled for a couple of hours, but I think those protesters got their voice across because literally that denomination is now against the war and calling on Biden to end his support of it.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: And so like in this process, the Uncommitted campaign has picked up a number of delegates. Well, will you be sending those delegates to the convention? And what does that practically look like? I mean, it's not going to be enough numbers to deny Joe Biden the nomination, but do you plan to send delegates to the convention, and what does that practically look like?

WALEED SHAHID: So, Listen to Michigan is figuring out a plan to coordinate and organize these delegates. Each Democratic Party in these states has a [00:13:00] little bit of a different process to make sure the delegates are the delegates from the Uncommitted campaigns. But I imagine they will go to the convention to hold whoever the nominee is accountable to their anti-war agenda, to use the process of the convention to put forward their vision of what the Democratic Party should stand for. And some of it is bureaucratic and arcane, but I imagine they will, you know, this is a core part of the Democratic Party. Like, half of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 believe Israel has committed a genocide. And so I think there'll be carrying the voices of Democratic voters, who elected them in these primaries, to the convention in Chicago.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: All right. Waleed, I know you have to go in a second, but I guess just like to conclude with you, you said Wisconsin and Washington are the primaries, the big ones where uncommitted is on the ballot line. When are those primaries? And what do you want people to know, both in those states and the country at large, going into this, into these primaries?

WALEED SHAHID: Yeah. So, Washington's primary is this coming Tuesday on March 12th. [00:14:00] There is an amazing effort underway there that's humble and low budget, but that is on Tuesday, March 12th. I don't know when this episode is coming out, but hopefully people can plug in. You can go to ListenToMichigan.com to get plugged in, donate, volunteer, phone bank for that effort. And then the other one is Wisconsin, which is in April. That's also looking like a pretty significant organizing push and an organized one. That election is April 2nd. And so if you miss the Washington one and can't plug in to the phone banks or can't donate it to it, you still have a month to get involved in the April Wisconsin Democratic primary.

WILL MENAKER - HOST, CHAPO TRAP HOUSE: Okay, great. Layla, I'm sorry we lost you there, but I just wanted to follow up, to finish the question I was going to ask you about: When you campaign on this issue, do you encounter voters that are angry at Biden's policies supporting the war on Palestine, but, like, just can't bear the thought of Trump being president. Like, how do you talk to those voters? Or, is this even an opinion that you encounter?

LAYLA ELABED: Well, [00:15:00] yeah, it's definitely an opinion that we encounter, but what I can say about the Arab-American and Muslim-American community is that, you know, this runs deep, this betrayal that we felt from the Biden administration and from the president runs really deep. Because we are directly affected by what is happening now in the Gaza and in that region, in the South of Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen. And so we are watching our loved ones, our friends, our family members, be murdered through our American taxpayer dollars. And so, yes, I do think that, on one hand, you have folks that say, you know, I don't support the genocide. I don't support our complicity in this war, but I cannot have another four years of Donald Trump. And what we say to that is that this is a primary, this is our chance to use our vote as our voice to hopefully get Joe Biden and his [00:16:00] administration to change course and reevaluate their policies when it comes to this unchecked and unconditional military funding that we provide.

And so, these votes don't carry over into November and everyone is going to have to vote their conscience and hopefully that we see some change on behalf of the Biden administration.

Why Peaceful Protest Won't Solve Anything - Second Thought - Air Date 8-12-22

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: The principled debates in the assembly. The decisions made by the Supreme Court. The enforcement of laws by judges and overly militarized police forces. These are all just procedures. It's civil. It's well organized. It's legitimate. And therefore, even when the consequences are brutal, it's not even really violence.

Kavanaugh doesn't deserve all this violence on his doorstep. He deserves to live a normal, peaceful life. All he did was vote in a way that you didn't like. And there's nothing violent about voting. It's easy to see how the contrast between angry people yelling and people in suits talking quietly reflects this idea.

And that's the image politicians like to invoke when they're talking about [00:17:00] civility. But the state has never been a non-violent institution, the American government especially. For starters, the liberal regimes most of you watching this video live under are entirely the product of bloody, violent revolutions, like those in France and the US.

Nobody voted the king away or acted all that civilly. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of early Americans participated in the genocide of Native Americans that is still going on. Today, the state relies on the tremendous violence of the police, the carceral system, and the military, with the US accounting for nearly 25 percent of the world's prison population, and spending more money than the next 10 countries combined on its armed forces.

There's more. Every day, the governments we live under choose not to end homelessness, poverty, and malnutrition, despite these measures being well within our means, and in so doing, subject millions of people to a more structural form of violence.

Governments allow, and often encourage, [00:18:00] fossil fuel companies to destroy local environments, and rip through reservations with oil pipelines that have a historic record of failure. That's more violence. Without needing to go back very far, we can see that the liberal government we live under survived for generations by capturing and enslaving human beings.

These same liberal governments also colonized entire continents, crushing their native populations without remorse. And once colonialism was formally ended in many parts of the world, former colonies were kept under the imperial boot in a series of neo-colonial, neo-liberal market reforms. At times, governments even carry out direct, very targeted violence against their own people in horrific acts like the move bombings that wiped out an entire bloc. Or the, uh, "removal" of Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Government, and specifically the kind of government that you most likely live under, is tremendously violent. It's not civil at all, it's just very efficient and formal with the way it [00:19:00] conducts its violence. When politicians are confronted with this evidence, which frankly doesn't happen very often, their last resort is to rely on the idea that this violence is legitimate.

The violence may exist, and it may be deplorable, but it is ultimately publicly sanctioned. The way this violence gains its legitimacy in the 21st Century is by claiming that all this awful stuff is just what the people want. At the end of the day, in liberal democracies, the government acts as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the will of the public.

So, if something bad happens, it's just because the people wanted it to. Or they just didn't vote hard enough. This is how Obama recently explained it in an interview for a show that he produced. In this clip, Obama was just asked why the massive desire for change and an end to much of the state's violence in 2008 never materialized.

Obama responds by saying,

BARACK OBAMA: Except it turns out Mitch McConnell was elected, too. Right? Precisely because the country is a big, diverse, complicated place. Look, here's the [00:20:00] thing...

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: The idea here is that because people are just so different in this big country, putting an end to this violence is too difficult. We need to compromise. Except Obama's time in office was full of moments where he led the charge on increasing the state's violence without facing any resistance.

For a long time, Obama was called the "Deporter in Chief". Because of how aggressively he pursued the deportation of, at the conservative end, 2.5 million people. His legacy is also one of over 540 drone strikes and hundreds of civilian deaths, also unopposed by the Republicans he's trying to pin the blame on. Obama also imposed, once again without staunch opposition, the brutal austerity politics that made the 2008 crash so violent for millions of Americans.

The banks were bailed out, but many Americans were just left out to dry in sudden, brutal poverty. And it wasn't because Americans disagreed with one another, it's because their voice didn't matter as much as those of business interests. This is because, unlike what Obama is trying [00:21:00] to convey, the government is not an impartial institution.

The state is not a perfect expression of democratic will. It is the crystallization of class dynamics. When they act, our capitalist governments do not exclusively consider the public's demands. Every decision, whether small or large, gets filtered through the long term preservation of capitalist interests.

While some decisions the public supports make it through, many do not. And imposing that corporate filter is precisely what the appeal to civility is trying to do. By calling for civility, by insisting that the only legitimate channels for political change are those of the government, liberals and conservatives alike are intent on submitting every desire for change to the approval of the ruling class.

If that sounds a bit far fetched to you, consider this. Researchers have found that in over 20 years of congressional voting records, the preferences of the bottom 90 percent of the population have, "a minuscule, near zero, statistically non significant impact upon public policy". [00:22:00] Near zero. Almost nothing.

That begs the question of who does have influence, if not the public. And helpfully, the same study goes on to say, "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose". Our elected leaders can act in our interests, they just don't if it conflicts with those of capitalists.

This is because, at the end of the day, our elected leaders run on campaigns that need to be funded by billionaires. They are personally invested in the stock market to the tune of millions of dollars, and they are consistently and overwhelmingly lobbied by business interests. The US government, like many all over the world, was founded by liberal thinkers, who sanctified the private ownership of productive resources and, in so doing, created government institutions that would always protect this right, even when it conflicts with the well being of the population.

The American government is not neutral. By constructing it as the only [00:23:00] civil way to do politics, those critical of protesters are intent on keeping politics in favor of some over others, and shutting up those who speak out.

If all that wasn't enough, it's important to remember what's being asked of protesters here, in real terms. Protests never begin as violent. Almost every protest movement that's had any element of violence or generic uncivility has come after decades of by the books peaceful protesting being casually ignored. Decades of state sanctioned, pre-approved protests that do not produce even the mildest discomfort. People protested to enshrine abortion for decades before showing up in front of Kavanaugh's house. The movement for Black Lives was not only overwhelmingly peaceful, the few instances of violence only appeared after generations of Black suffering being systematically ignored.

People asking protesters to remain peaceful at all costs are doing so knowing full well that they have had their chance to hear them out. Think of it like this: if the purpose of a protest is to [00:24:00] force the government to act on something, and the government is the one telling you what is an acceptable protest, do you really believe they'd allow a protest that would actually make them uncomfortable or force their hand in any way? Of course not. The people calling for civility in a society with this power distribution recognized that the outcome of their proposed civility would be the maintenance of the status quo, the status quo that benefits them, those at the levers of power, and the violent state apparatus they wield.

As much as we can wish that asking nicely for things will solve all our problems, history has shown us that simply won't be the case. In every era, it has been the actions of countless ordinary people working together to force the change they want to see. Throughout history, protests, demonstrations, and mass movements have always been the main drivers of real change.

Gaza Protesters SHUT DOWN Schiff's Victory Speech - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-6-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Perhaps what was most impressive was the relentlessness of, if not now, activists confronting Adam Schiff on his support for the massacre that's happening in Gaza. This is really [00:25:00] important. The more pressure that you know, they see in the White House on other Democrats in other places, the more they will feel it, et cetera, et cetera. And they dogged Adam Schiff yesterday, and, uh, good for them. Takes a lot of guts to do stuff like this.

PROTESTORS: This man is sending your tax dollars to kill children in Gaza. How do you work your tax dollars? By sending our tax dollars to Gaza. Free Palestine! Free Palestine! He is killing children with our tax dollars. Where do you find money?

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That was earlier on, right?

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: What happened? Why did they, can you let it play out a little more? That is 20 seconds. It's just 20 seconds. Oh, okay. But I think we just went 16 seconds there, but that's okay. Nevertheless I'll tell you why I think this is effective. As opposed to even like maybe when you're in a big crowd like this, it is disturbing what they're trying to do in a way that is different than like pursuing them individually. Like, when you go and you disrupt a [00:26:00] fundraiser or when you go and you disrupt a party when you go and disrupt, uh, you know, as we've seen with Biden has canceled a lot of his college tours, uh, they're feeling it. It is causing them... there is a political price that is associated with this.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And it's also just really brave. It's, if not now, it's Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups, we should say, that are organizing this in California. Like, I saw, at the NBA All Star Game, there was a Let Gaza Live banner unfurled. People are going to get beers dumped on them. People, I mean, Joe Biden was getting interrupted by someone , Jill Biden, criticizing Biden's policies in Gaza and she must have been a, she was a young woman and you see these older people just grabbing at her and being kind of violent. So, it takes bravery on a number of levels.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So that was a campaign event earlier in the day. And here is Schiff with his victory speech.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: He didn't get to finish it.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Check it out. I

PROTESTORS: [00:27:00] want to thank, I,

I want to thank you all.

COMMENTATOR: Someone came up and said to Adam Schiff, who was reading off a prompter, who was trying to stick to the prompter, to wrap it up. He went and finished it up. These were people who came in, about five or six to start with that said, ceasefire now, ceasefire now. Security ushered them out. And then another couple popped up. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. And then some more came in the middle. Security could not get them out. They were scattered through the room here at the Avalon Theater and the nightclub. Go down there and pull down in the crowd for me, please. And you see that, you know, there's just a lot of arguing, a lot of disagreement. Again, they were chanting, Free Gaza now. Let Gaza [00:28:00] live. Cease fire now. Let Gaza live. And the protesters remain here in the center of this floor. So what was supposed to be a victory celebration and a scripted speech that Adam Schiff was reading off prompter when no doubt he had carefully crafted a long time ago was cut dramatically short and he was now taken off the stage.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Whew. Great stuff. Also, this has been a hallmark of these demonstrations too, how they stagger their disruptions. It's so effective because like they can't get you all out at once and they don't know when one member of the crowd is going to start chanting. This has been done, I think at one of Biden speeches, with the one in Virginia?

BRADLEY ALSOP: The Biden speech at the one in Virginia is the one that I think precipitated his staff doing their best to not allow that type of disruption to happen again at any event. And also it happened in one of Tony Blinken's House committee [00:29:00] hearings.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. The Virginia speech, Biden was interrupted 17 times.

BRADLEY ALSOP: Yeah, it was like constant.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yep. So, good job guys.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, really important. I mean, that is there's no way that the White House isn't aware of this and realizes that this is going to be a problem. You see press reports that they're creeping ever so slightly to pressuring Israel. Benny Gantz was in town, and supposedly they gave him an earful. All of which is, you know, irrelevant until they actually start to put some muscle behind this.

But we had Ken Klippenstein reporting on a leaked diplomatic cable, I mentioned that, that was basically coming from the the American embassy in Israel saying, and these are not people who are not sympathetic to Israel, I can tell you, in the Diplomatic Corps. They're basically saying like if they go into Rafa, it is going to be an unmitigated, in many [00:30:00] respects, incomprehensible disaster.

You have, literally, hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people living in tents there. Just horrible. So, good for those folks who are out there protesting in what was really probably the most high profile speech of the night, I mean outside of maybe, I don't know, if Trump gave one or not.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And he's going to be the senator from California, Schiff. Like, that was why he spent, I think, over half of his money that he spent on advertisements, advertising for Garvey. So, this is like the moment to say, we are your constituents too, buddy, and this is the future here in California.

The Missing Revolutions of The 2010s | Ash Sarkar Meets Vincent Bevins Part 2 - Novara Media - Air Date 10-29-23

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: I want to talk about strategy, because really that is what this book is about. As much as it's also about these moments of huge, quite romantic moments of confrontation. It's about the kinds of strategies and lack of strategies that were going on at these particular times. There's an account [00:31:00] of the ways in which horizontalism fails to be organized enough to take advantage of the moments that it produces. So what are the kinds of alternatives that are available for people?

VINCENT BEVINS: Yeah, and it's really about a very specific package of tactics that comes together historically and ideologically that is often divorced from strategy. Sometimes it works great when inserted into a larger strategic vision. Sometimes it is divorced from that strategic vision, and this often becomes tragically clear to the participants at the moment when, Oh my God, we've disrupted this power center. We've created a power vacuum, but we cannot fill it, because we don't have the kind of movement that could fill a power vacuum who's filling it is now our enemies, right?

So this particular set of tactics like this repertoire of contention, to use the sociological language, would be the apparently spontaneous, apparently leaderless, digitally-coordinated mass protest In public squares and public spaces.

So all of those elements [00:32:00] come from somewhere. They don't need to go together, but they really seemed like they were supposed to all the time in the 2010s. So you can do protests that are different, or you can do things that are not protests. So strikes and boycotts are often proven historically to be very effective at putting pressure on elites, often more so than protests. Protests, I think, are fundamentally communicative acts. That doesn't mean that that's not a problem, but I think understanding that helps us to understand that they work best when in dialogue with or when supported by other types of actions or by organizations that can put pressure on existing elites on the state. An answer that comes out of many of the interviews at the end of the book is the creation of organizations to do what you can, in accordance with your vision of the future you want to build in accordance with where your actual goals are, to build organizations when it seems like nothing is happening, to build the kind of collective capacities for action -- to build the kind of collective capacities for [00:33:00] action that can respond to changing circumstances, that can act in the long term. And these often work really well in concert with protests when they do happen, because I don't think the mass protest is going away. Social media has made it quite easy to bring lots of people together around a particular cause or often like a particular post, like a viral image, very quickly.

So one of the answers, and this is something that I really do try to really give to other voices at the end, Rodrigo Nunes, he's a Brazilian philosopher, he's now here, he talks about an ecology of organizations, organizations that are not necessarily permanent vanguards, but can act in a vanguard manner in relationship to other movements.

And then not a lot of people get back into labor organizing. This is something that never went away in the UK, but in the US, this is something that a lot of people in the Bernie generation have gotten into for the first time.

ASH SARKAR - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: So let's talk about labor organizing, because something which I've been thinking about a lot is about what kind of labor organizing people are doing. And it seems that you've got a generation left scenario here in the UK. You've got lots of people who are politically active during the Corbyn movement and are [00:34:00] now looking for something to do. And it seems to me that there are lots of people who go, okay, well, my job is to unionize wherever I am, but often that's not in strategic sectors. So it's like NGOs and charities or left wing organizations. And then there's a smaller group of people who are saying, okay, well, actually what we should try and do is identify choke points in capitalism and all, almost do the Alliance for Workers Liberty thing of taking up jobs in strategic sectors so we could do labor organizing there.

In terms of your sense of what's strategically useful and what's worked in other contexts, what should you do? Should you organize what's close or organize what feels like it could be most disruptive to capitalism?

VINCENT BEVINS: So recognizing this is now outside of the scope of the book, but this came up a lot because I understood this in the US and a lot of people have read the book and they brought their own experiences, either what they have done after Bernie, what they'd have to done after the George Floyd uprisings. I would say that some of the most important victories in this very incipient rebirth of a labor movement in the United States had to do with the second thing that you said, going to [00:35:00] Amazon or going to form a reform caucus within the UAW, which changes the leadership, which allows for one of the most important strikes in a very long time in the United States, going to strategic sectors.

But I would also say that not everybody is a full-time dedicated professional revolutionary and doing what you can around you is better than not doing anything. I think that, again, you can have both. I think that being very strategic has been proven to be effective in the US context, but not everybody has to do that.

And I think that, again, the kind of lessons that come out of a lot of the conversations at the end of the book revolve around some kind of message that says, just join an organization, whatever it is that you care about. It doesn't have to be a dedicated fully a revolutionary party, if that's not what you want to do with your life. But something where that gets you together with other human beings that you can work collectively on building something that can act locally, nationally, internationally -- whatever you think is best is better than what we're all doing now, [00:36:00] including myself, sitting at home alone on the computer, getting mad at the computer.

The Life & Death of Aaron Bushnell: U.S. Airman Self-Immolates Protesting U.S. Support for Israel - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-28-24

JUAN GONZÀLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This issue of self-immolation, we’ve already had two now in protest of the war in Gaza. But you noted that during the Vietnam War, as many as five Americans self-immolated themselves in protest against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I’m wondering if you could talk about that? You wrote about that recently for Common Dreams.

ANN WRIGHT: Yes. It’s a sad situation, for sure. Our hearts go out to Aaron’s family and Aaron’s friends.

And the same back in — 60 years ago almost now, in 1965, as the U.S. War on Vietnam was starting up, first we had an 82-year-old Quaker woman, Alice Herz, committed suicide by self-immolation, and then followed about six months later by another Quaker, Norman Morrison, from Baltimore, who went to the [00:37:00] Pentagon and set himself on fire, little knowing the place that he had picked at the Pentagon was right below where Secretary of Defense McNamara had his office. And apparently, his self-immolation had a strong effect on McNamara, although he didn’t stop the war initially, but it did have an effect on him personally and on his family. And then followed by a young man in New York at the U.N. Plaza. So, yes, there were five people that burned themselves to death over a political decision of the United States to go to war.

And so, now we have — 60 years later, we have two people in less than three months who have done the same, I would say, courageous act of taking their own lives to bring the attention of the American public and the world to what the United States is complicit [00:38:00] in, which is the Israeli genocide and U.S. genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I just wanted to go through a few more of those examples in history, that sent shockwaves through multiple conflicts. You had Thich Quang Duc, a monk who drew attention to the treatment of Vietnamese Buddhists by the government; and then Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, who sparked the Arab Spring when he set himself on fire — this was before Egypt, and that sparked the uprising in Tunisia; Malachi Ritscher, a musician who called for an end to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A pro-Palestine protester also self-immolated outside the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in December, but we don’t know her name. It hardly got any attention.

And there’s been a whole debate in the media right now, those who talk [00:39:00] about it as — don’t even want to talk. I think as it started, papers like The New York Times didn’t even say he said, “Free Palestine,” and other outlets, as well. But then, as time went on, they did talk about what happened. But the whole issue of going into a debate about mental illness and not wanting to encourage something like this, versus you hear someone like Ali Abunimah talking about Aaron’s incredible bravery. Your thoughts?

ANN WRIGHT: Well, it is incredibly brave. And a person — well, there’s no evidence at all that Aaron had any sort of mental illness. He was a very conscientious person who saw what the U.S. was doing in his position in the U.S. military. And one might say, he’s not the first person to have committed suicide over what the United States has been doing. If you look, 22 veterans a day commit suicide over what they’ve done in the U.S. [00:40:00] military. What Aaron did was very, very courageous. I can’t imagine taking that step. It was an act of courage, an act of bravery, to call attention to U.S. policies.

JUAN GONZÀLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Levi Pierpont, I wanted to ask you — you grew up as an evangelical Christian. Aaron Bushnell attended Catholic religious services while at basic training. How do you think his religious views informed his beliefs and, ultimately, his action?

LEVI PIERPONT: I think, ultimately, by the time that he did what he did, he didn’t identify with any particular religion. But I know that for me, even though I’m more agnostic than I grew up, my evangelical roots still influence me. They influence my sense of justice. And they told me since I was a young child [00:41:00] that you have to stand up for what you believe in. And I can imagine that it was the same way for Aaron. And so, even though I don’t believe that he still believed in the Catholic faith by the time that he died, I know that that upbringing had a profound impact on him, and I’m sure that it influenced his sense of justice.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Levi Pierpont, Aaron was living in San Antonio, where Lackland base is. He was doing a lot of mutual aid work with people who were unsheltered there, very well known in those encampments. What do you want us to remember him by, as you think about him in these last few days, what you’re talking about in the vigils and with your friends?

LEVI PIERPONT: I want people to remember [00:42:00] that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message. I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to. I would have done anything I could to stop him.

But, obviously, we can’t get him back. And we have to honor the message that he left. I would have told him that this wasn’t necessary to get the message out. I would have told him that there were other ways. But seeing the way that the media responds now, now that this has happened, it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I want people to remember his message.

JUAN GONZÀLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Ann Wright, your sense of how the movement here in [00:43:00] this country to stop this genocidal war in Gaza has been building, and what Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice may contribute to that?

ANN WRIGHT: Well, it’s a huge, huge movement. And the Biden administration must recognize it, as your previous guest said. The voters are telling them a message. This is a massive, massive movement of youth, of people of all religions, that are saying, by any religious teachings, this killing is wrong. It has to end.

And I would say to Levi, we have Veterans for Peace, and we have About Face, veterans organizations that would like to offer you support, because this is tough, really tough. But it’s for the people of Gaza, the people of Palestine, that we do this, to stop these horrible, horrible policies that our country has right [00:44:00] now. The killing of innocent people for the United States and for Israel, it has to end. And ceasefire now.

BONUS Farmer Protests - Outrage + Optimism - Air Date 2-2-24

TOM RIVNETT-CARNAC - HOST, OUTRAGE + OPTIMISM: So I Live in a rural area of Devon, and I have a very good friend who farms a few hundred acres nearby, and I actually invited him to come on the podcast and talk to us. And he didn't want to do that for reasons that will be clear in a minute. But he had a really interesting perspective. He said, look, I'm a fifth generation farmer, and what is being asked of me by government is shifting. However, I see that weather patterns are changing. I see that we're in an emergency. So I'm engaging with it and I'm struggling with all these online systems. And when I do that, and I try to listen to what's being told to me, I shift partially away from food production, I shift towards nature restoration alongside food production. And actually financially, this is just the UK, he told me that he can do very well as a result of that. [00:45:00]

And so his analysis of this situation, and this is why he didn't want to come on the podcast, is that much of this protest is about a nostalgic, harkening back to a imagined status quo in the past, when everything was great and a refusal to change for lots of reasons that many of us can understand, but that what is being presented to farmers is an opportunity for transformation that many of them are being unable to grasp because they are unable to deal with the bureaucracy of transformation. But if they were able to grasp it, some governments, and I can't say this for everyone where there are riots taking place, are providing a pathway where that is feasible to do both.

I don't know that I can come down that harshly. I think your neighbour is incredibly enlightened and perhaps quite unique, because it seems to me that [00:46:00] farmers in Europe, but anywhere else, speaking from Costa Rica, very agricultural country, are actually unfairly squeezed, is my sense.

CHRISTIANA FIGURES - HOST, OUTRAGE + OPTIMISM: Because, as your friend has just told you, he inherited agricultural practices from his grandparents, their grandparents, way up the line, and most farmers, be they men or women—most farmers in the world are women, by the way—are still practicing agricultural practices that they have inherited from many generations in hundreds of years.

They're also trying to operate within financial, political, economic paradigm that operated well in the past. [00:47:00] So their practices are the ones of the past and the paradigms that surround them, be they the policies, the subsidies, the trade agreements, operated more or less well in the past. The challenge that they face, consciously or not, is not, I would call it nostalgia, I would call it, just complete paralysis, because that world that they inherited and that they operated in and that their parents and grandparents operated in is no more, because we're now hit by climate change, invariably, which is the most deeply disruptive factor to agriculture for sure, as well as to everything else. It is completely predictable that we will not return to what used to be the norm. That is no longer the norm.

So [00:48:00] how can you blame them for operating in a reality that no longer exists? And for that reality that is emerging, we frankly do not have the policies, the subsidies, the trade agreements, all of the paradigm that would truly help them to shift from where they were to where they need to go, which is high resilience, regenerative agricultural practices, restoration of nature, a completely different paradigm. But they're not being helped by that. They're not being helped by that, because governments are themselves still struggling to figure out what are the new policies, what are the new subsidies, what are the new agreements. They don't really have a clear idea.

All of this, frankly, is they're all in unknown space, trying [00:49:00] to figure out together or individually. And so the farmers are frankly very squeezed here. They're very squeezed. I don't think it's about romantic nostalgia. I think it's frustration. And I'm closer to where Paul mentioned. This is a true threat for them. It's a threat for their livelihood because they're operating according to one paradigm. Nobody's really giving them the support to shift to another paradigm, and the difference between those two is a direct threat to my livelihood. So I'm more in paralysis, frankly, and anger than nostalgia.

BONUS “They’re Inside for Us, We’re Outside for Them” - Uprising Support on Anti-repression, Building Memory, Care, and Resilience - Millennials Are Killing Capitalism - Air Date 8-30-23

JARED WARE - HOST, MILLENIALS ARE KILLING CAPITALISM: Can you say a little bit about the scale of state repression that took place in response to the George Floyd uprisings? You mentioned earlier on in this discussion about one of the things that drew you to it is just starting to see, wow, there's a lot of federal charges that are pretty significant that are coming down early on. I know it's sort of an impossible question, but I'd love to hear what you think. I know [00:50:00] you all probably pay paid more attention to trying to answer that than a lot of folks have.

CAPPY: Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to answer this and talk about the scale. If we're just reducing it to numbers, we know that, probably over 350 people received some type of federal charges, and the nationwide, I think the last biggest number I saw was like over 14, 000 people across the country that got arrested for something during the uprising. But I don't think that really tells the story very well, and I think there's also a implication of finality when putting a number on it. So thinking about the ways that the repression against the uprising is ongoing, and also how the impacts of the uprising and, maybe, in some ways, the uprising itself is also ongoing.

If you're trying to quantify the uprising itself, you can do that in terms of number of buildings set on [00:51:00] fire, cop cars that were broken, or city budgets that were changed because of that, or police departments that got defunded or something, but it doesn't tell you the story about people's consciousness that were transformed, and the skills that people learned and the connections, and the growth that people experienced through participating in that or through watching that.

So thinking about how the the uprising and the repression against it are this dialectic of one another that sort of moved forward. And I think one space to look at that is in Atlanta and the struggle against Cop City, and how the impetus for cop city grew out of the uprisings in Atlanta, the U. S., but especially Atlanta that summer after the murder of George Floyd and then the subsequent murder of Rashard Brooks, and how, because of that, they're like, oh, we need this like police paramilitary training facility. But then also how the uprising [00:52:00] informed the movement against Cop City and how this focus on resisting the expansion of policing and militarization of policing morphed into the movement against Cop City, and how wild the repression against Cop City has been over the past couple of years.

I think the other part that I was talking about, on the previous question is like thinking about repression and the ways that it's sometimes less tangible in the ways that I think one big part of how repression works is through forgetting and through whitewashing things that happen and creating new narratives so that we forget what actually happened in the streets. And I think this is something that we've seen pretty heavy handedly from a lot of more liberal sources where they try to downplay the militancy and the revolutionary content of the uprisings and talk about how it was mostly all just peaceful compliant protests, [00:53:00] and people were protesting passively and there were some exceptions from some bad actors or something.

But this narrative that defies the reality of the people experienced in the streets and watched on national TV seems to have really taken a hold in a lot of more liberal Consciousness and narrative as the years have moved on. So I think in thinking about repression is forgetting one part of anti repression work is the work of memory and affirming what we all experienced and remembering that and the remembering the lessons of it.

So I think it's fairly straightforward and not controversial to say that the repression against the uprising was truly massive in large part because the uprising itself was truly massive. It was extremely decentralized. It was happening in cities and towns and other places, [00:54:00] all over the country, places that aren't known for its radicalism, places that aren't known for having uprisings or rebellions of this sort, so the repression took a lot of forms.

A lot of it was immediate. Extreme violence from law enforcement, mass arresting people on trumped up or bogus or completely fabricated charges, and then also this more specific targeting of people with federal charges for even more severe prosecution. At the time, who's the attorney general then Bill Barr, I think sent a memo to all the U. S. attorneys across the country being like, "focus your prosecution on these types of offenses from these type of people," and it's really centralized effort from federal law enforcement to target and prosecute people for federal charges from the uprising.

There's that stuff that was happening in the days and weeks around the uprising, but then the repressive game of forgetting and retelling [00:55:00] narratives and revisionism happening on an ongoing level. One question that I got a lot, especially after Biden got elected was, how is the new Biden administration going to change the repression that's happening against the uprising, and I can't say for absolute certain, but I think not much at all. I think there's possibly an argument that some people have maybe gotten better plea deals or less stringent sentences because of maybe less centralized pressure from the attorney general's office about it, but it's not like cases were getting dismissed, it's not like prosecutions were getting dropped or anything of that sort. So, yeah, I don't think that the changing of the guards changed the overall repressive apparatus in response to the uprising.

Final comments on the importance of building momentum over time with protest

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Novara Media, discussing the importance of protest movements having a plan. Chapo [00:56:00] Trap House looked at the uncommitted voter movement against the US support for the war in Gaza. Second Thought examined the idea of violence in relation to power and protest. The Majority Report highlighted the birddogging campaign against Democratic politicians not opposing the war in Gaza forcefully enough. Novara Media dove deeper into the types of organized movements that are most successful. And Democracy Now! discussed the self-immolation death of Aaron Buschnell.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from Outrage + Optimism discussing the causes of the current farmer protests in Europe. And Millennials Are Killing Capitalism looked at how the state often responds to uprising protests.

To hear that and have all of our bonus contents delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, or shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a [00:57:00] lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now to wrap up, I just want to acknowledge that the vast majority of us won't be the ones actually guiding the tactics and strategies of protests. So today's episode could feel merely informational, but not necessarily actionable for most of us. But I think I can fill that gap a bit, because the success of movements depends on the willingness of people, average people like you and me, to stick with it over a period of time. And an essential element for being willing to stick with something over time is to have a deeper understanding of how movements work, and to have proper expectations about progress.

The most important and least understood element of politics and movements, I think, is the fourth dimension of time. People often casually talk about politicians playing four dimensional chess, but they mean it as a metaphor that doesn't really mean anything other than it's complicated. [00:58:00] But genuinely, I think it's a much better metaphor when describing time. Politics, movement building: it's all about managing time. People are impatient, and justifiably so when they're protesting against injustice. And impatience can energize a movement with a sense of urgency, which is great. But if expectations are set wrong, like with the idea that one big protest should be enough to get the results you want, then many can become disappointed and disillusioned and drop away, which actually weakens the movement.

So, although you may not be the one organizing the next protest, you can help maintain the momentum by always asking, What's next? And encouraging others to do the same.

Always make sure that organizers for causes that you believe in can reach you and encourage others to do the same, because every event, every march, every lobby day, every birddogging protest is an opportunity to build and [00:59:00] prepare for the next one.

People talk about going through the motions of protests and feeling like it's not making a difference, which is dispiriting. But you'll tend to have that feeling more the less connected you are to the movement. If you know that a protest is just one step along a path, and that the intention is to continue to build power by growing the ranks of the activists, the marchers, the protestors, then it feels like momentum, which is inspiring.

So stay connected, stay engaged, encourage others to do the same. And never stop asking what's next, because the fight for justice is never over. There is always something to do next.

[01:00:00] Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to our producers, Deon Clark and Erin Clayton. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew. And thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes. And of course, thanks to those who 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 bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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 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.

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#1618 Forget Equality, Embrace the Feminism of Freedom - Breaking entirely free from the structures of White supremacy and heteropatriarchy (Transcript)

Posted by · March 23, 2024 5:03 PM

Air Date 3/23/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we look at the idea that, although equality has been at the heart of civil rights movements for decades, what we have failed to see is that, in striving for equality, we cannot help but reinforce the unquestioned preexisting structures of society, which themselves may be at fundamental odds with true freedom for all. So maybe we should forget about equality, and focus on freedom.

Sources today include Politics and Prose, The Overpopulation Podcast, The Majority Report, and Chair in Transgender Studies, with additional members-only clips from The Majority Report and The Overpopulation Podcast.

Marcie Bianco — Breaking Free - with Charlotte Clymer - Politics and Prose - Air Date 9-23-23

MARCIE BIANCO: Equality is a lie. It is a myth perpetuated to coax women into complicity with their oppression. Women are not equal to men. No two people are equal. We are not born equal or with equal advantages. We do not experience [00:01:00] life equally.

And while we all eventually die, we do not encounter death on equal terms. We each come from different backgrounds, possess different qualities and talents, cultivate different knowledges and expertise, accrue unique experiences, have distinct desires and needs, and have been systematically advantaged or disadvantaged based on the social identities we have either willingly chosen or had imposed upon us by others.

It is not simply that we are not equal because we are different. Rather, we are not equal because our differences have been manipulated by a society intent on justifying and preserving its traditions and norms. Our differences have been systematized and moralized over generations, such that we have been conditioned to believe, for example, that men are superior to women and that white people are superior to all black and brown and indigenous people.

In the United States, what [00:02:00] we designate as inequalities -- political, economic, or social -- are nothing but the measured effects of the discrimination of difference in relation to the white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

US social movements fighting against racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ discrimination have found more success in redressing measurable inequalities in laws and policies than in eradicating the pervasive oppressions at the root of this nation and its values -- oppressions that have inflicted incalculable pain and trauma on generations of people.

The feminist movement is one such movement that has measured women's progress in terms of equality. To be clear, the movement is not a monolith. Parallel and often intersecting versions of feminism have coexisted for decades, distinguished by their particular ideologies and players, from single issue to multi issue feminism, liberal to radical feminism, black to White feminism.[00:03:00]

Despite the plurality of feminisms, the unfortunate fact is that equality feminism has had a stranglehold on the movement's values, political strategies, and agenda for more than a century, while not without some resistance. Equality feminism has been embraced across sectors: government, industry, and media, and commercialized to the point of cultural saturation.

Equality signs everywhere: on billboards and t shirts and mugs and dog collars. The sign, in fact, says it all. Equality's broad acceptance is due in part to its perceived logical simplicity, rendered as equal rights under the law, equal representation in government and industry, and equal participation in society. And American feminism has long held this idea as the solution to systemic misogyny.

But equality will not free us. Women's liberation cannot be achieved through assimilation into patriarchal [00:04:00] institutions. Plenty of radical Black and lesbian feminists have told us this for years. And the current political moment, the unyielding assault on civil rights and the criminalization, imprisonment of people seeking health care proves the lie of equality.

This moment reinforces to us that equality is contingent upon the whims of the people in power. Affirmative Action, case in point.

It's a cruel joke because despite various rights, laws, and legal mechanisms, from voting rights to equal protection and due process, promised as correctives to societal oppression and systemic discrimination, equality remains elusive.

Even worse is how the language of equality is weaponized to protect the status quo, either to assert that equality really exists because it is written into the law or to stymie justice efforts intended to help society's most marginalized and disadvantaged communities. Examples abound from the "separate but equal" clause of Plessy v. Ferguson to the [00:05:00] equal right to vote of the 15th and 19th amendments, to the most recent efforts by conservatives, arguing that "equality begins in the womb," as part of their oxymoronic argument about fetal personhood, which is like my referring to living persons as undead corpses.

Equality as sameness is easily fabricated by collapsing difference. Here the differences in stages of life constituted by time.

Equality feminism proposing that inclusion can lead to a reformation of our misogynist and racist institutions is nothing less than White feminism, which amounts to little more than the white supremacist heteropatriarchy in a dress because these institutions cannot bend. The capitalism undergirding them has proven inescapable because it is an economic system that incentivizes exploitation for profit.

Plenty of feminists have debated equality as our end game. Black and radical feminists in particular have called out [00:06:00] equality as a principle of sameness that relies on the erasure of our differences and a centering of whiteness and patriarchal values. And yet equality has persisted. Feminist scholars have reached a kind of ideological detente with a vague and uninspiring definition of equality as a "negotiation of differences," which ultimately calls for a third entity to determine how to account for people's differences while ensuring their equal value, equal rights and equal opportunity to participate in society.

This commitment to equality demands too much complicity and affords too much grace to white supremacist heteropatriarchal institutions to do the right thing. I mean, we only need to turn to the US Supreme Court to see who has historically set the conditions for the negotiation of our civil rights, and by extension, our humanity.

Equality is both the wrong ideal and the wrong endgame if we truly desire to end systemic racism and misogyny. Feminists cannot smash the patriarchy by [00:07:00] fortifying its walls. Revolution and inclusion are at odds here. Seeking equality within our existing institutions means desiring to join the very institutions that have depended on women's subjugation.

Angela Saini The Patriarchs 'How Men Came to Rule' - The Overpopulation Podcast - Air Date 2-6-24

ANGELA SAINI: In your research for The Patriarchs, you go as far back in history as the current archaeological evidence might allow, and it took you several years of traveling and research to write this book, so we appreciate the depth of work that's gone into this.

What can we learn from archaeological evidence about the existence of gender inequality in prehistoric times?

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: It's such a fraught question because we project onto the past, obviously, and we do that even with the recent past, but we do it even more so with prehistory because there's so little we know.

The archaeological data is ambiguous, and especially when you go as far into prehistory as I've had to go, which is more than 9,000-10,000 years—this is pre writing, or as far as we [00:08:00] know, pre writing—so we can't know what people were thinking, we have to infer so much. And that inference involves, of course, a lot of guesswork on the part of the researchers, and when researchers are biased or loaded in the way that they're looking at history, then it can give us a vastly different perspectives on what is happening. And I was conscious of that throughout when I was researching this.

And in fact, I had to keep checking myself to make sure that I wasn't falling into the trap of drawing these big brash narratives about history based on what I would like to be true. And as soon as I stopped doing that and just taking more of a sober look at what we do know, and how ambiguous that evidence is, then the picture you get is one of huge social variation, so many differences in the way people lived and could live. Changes even within settlements over generations. So they would decide on [00:09:00] something, they wouldn't work for them, and then they would choose something else.

A variety of different ways of producing food. So, for example, even hunter gatherers and farmers living with each other, or choosing whatever systems work for them depending on the local environment at the time or the seasons, and also in gender relations. So the oldest settlement that I was looking at was Çatalhöyük southern Anatolia. So this is in Turkey near the border with Syria, near the Fertile Crescent. So a very famous and well studied part of the world in terms of understanding prehistory. And Çatalhöyük, when it was first excavated in the 1960s caused waves, understandably, because here was a Settlement where thousands of people must have lived, which is very sophisticated. You see houses of the type that we might recognize with walls and windows and, or not windows as we might recognize it now, because actually [00:10:00] people entered and left their homes through holes in their roofs. So they had ladders and that's, that would be how they got in and out of their homes. But there were big frescoes on the walls, beautiful, vivid frescoes of hunting scenes and vultures picking over dead bodies, bull horns embedded in the walls, quite elaborate burial rituals that also involved people sometimes disinterring the dead, plastering their skulls, and then those skulls being passed around.

So much we can recognize, so much that we don't recognize. But in terms of gender, what is very clear, and has only become clearer over time, is that there doesn't seem to have been a huge difference in how men and women lived. As far as we can tell, from the evidence that we have, and it's not exhaustive, It may well change as more of the site is excavated, but from what we can see so far, men and women did pretty much the same kind of work. They ate the same kind of foods. They spent the same amount of time [00:11:00] indoors and outdoors. Children didn't necessarily live with their parents, so we can see that children aren't buried with their biological parents always. And even the height difference between men and women was slight, which I think is important because I write a lot about biology, sex difference, and how that's mediated by how we live, and I think we sometimes underestimate how much sex differences are made more profound by the ways in which we live, in the food we're expected to eat, the quantity of food we're expected to eat.

Even to this day, sometimes I'm surprised that nutrition guidelines... just today I was reading how much water you should drink is divided by men and women. So women should drink this amount, men should drink that amount without any real consideration to the size of the human being. Surely that would be the most important factor. So we live in an age in which we think about this very binary way of imagining gender, but as far as [00:12:00] we can tell in Çatalhöyük, people just didn't think about it that much because it doesn't seem to have been a big part of their lives.

ANGELA SAINI: Yeah. The one that fascinated me the most was this non blood tie notion of family. That family was just kin and biological children were brought up by lots of people, and you weren't necessarily related to be living together. And that's something you talked about also is seen as a really futuristic notion, but people were living like this thousands of years ago for such a long time. I wonder if it's a way of patting ourselves on the back to believe that we're somehow on the leading edge of some kind of feminism that has never existed before and we're much more futuristic than past societies have been.

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: Yeah. And history shows us again and again, increasingly that so much of what we think of as novel now in terms of [00:13:00] equality is not novel at all, because you can see it in different societies throughout time at various moments and various geographical locations, and even into the present, which is why I was so keen to open The Patriarchs with mention of matrilineal societies, because I think there is still this widespread misunderstanding that patriarchy is universal, that we all live this way, that there was some single moment in history at which everything changed and now we're just living with the effects of it.

The existence of so many matrilineal societies, which we can't, with any conviction, say are truly patriarchal because generally in these societies, power and authority are shared between men and women and often run along age lines rather than gender lines. We know that there are non patriarchal societies out there. There are some societies that are less patriarchal than others, and patriarchies take on so many different tones and tenors, and they're still being reinvented.

In Afghanistan right now, under the [00:14:00] Taliban, patriarchy is being reinvented for the 21st century. Some of that is drawing on religious ideology or conservative ideology, ideas about tradition in the past, but a lot of that is a manipulation of what we imagine history and tradition to be in order to be suited to the 21st century.

The Fraud Of 'White Feminism' w Kyla Schuller - The Majority Report - Air Date 1-20-22

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: We have talked about— it's the favorite topic of mine— talking about the perils and pitfalls of White feminism and what it represents, and we've talked about it on the show before, but your book described it in such a succinct way and I loved this definition: 'White feminism is theft disguised as liberation'. Can you explain what you meant by that? And we can start there.

KYLA SCHULLER: Yeah I really wanted to understand the details and contours of what White feminism is and does when I wrote this book. And I think it's so useful the way that people are using this term widely to understand the kind of [00:15:00] feminism that is putting gender above all and then ends up as a result actually leaning in to other forms of inequality like structural racism and capitalism and climate change because of...

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: ...you lean in there, did you do that on purpose?

KYLA SCHULLER: Exactly. Exactly. And because I'm putting gender above all. But I found that one of the most common ways that we talk about White feminism doesn't actually fully grasp the full extent of the problem. And that is that one of the most common definitions is, White feminism is a kind of feminism that ignores women of color, poor women, and other marginalized folks. And I thought that that idea that White feminism ignores more marginalized people actually is too benign. It underestimates the threat, the extent of the problem, which is that the trouble with White feminism is not that it is committing a sin of omission. It's actually an act of dispossession. [00:16:00] It actually ends up reinforcing other forms of inequality in the struggle to get women to the top. And Sandberg, Sheryl Sandberg being a perfect example of working so hard, as she argues, to get women to be corporate CEOs in contemporary capitalism. The problem is that if the goal is getting women to the top of our current structures, you actually end up reinforcing some of the other inequalities that have created that hierarchy in the first place.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So it creates, it redefines White feminism as an action, as active, as opposed to the more passive exclusion in the way that it had been currently previously discussed.

KYLA SCHULLER: Yeah, exactly. That's a good way of putting it. And then it also means that the solution to it needs to be more active also. The solution to White feminism is not only including people of color, the poor, trans people. It needs to be more active than that. The solution is actually to [00:17:00] dismantling the idea that we can't have a feminism that is ever separate from the fights against racism, wealth inequality, and many of the other structural inequities we have today.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So would you say that White feminism has defanged and depoliticized the feminist movement to a degree? I know that's not a direct process and often that's just sometimes what happens. Over time, like I feel like we saw an example of that with MLK on Monday, right? Every brand is tweeting out quotes from MLK and every Republican politician has no problem using his name. And I feel that there's a very similar thing that has happened with feminism that you describe.

KYLA SCHULLER: I think it probably might be a little worse than that, though, which is that it's less that it has depoliticized a feminism that fights for real equality, and more that there have always been two distinct different kinds of [00:18:00] feminism that actually have competing politics. And one of those is White feminism that is quite cozy with empire, et cetera. And the other is intersectional feminism, which fights for a broad based structural equality for all.

So, for example, one of the most shocking details I found when I was researching this book was that, according to a recent poll, 42 percent of women who vote Republican in the most recent elections consider themselves feminists. So, it's actually that there is a strong, active, conservative, even sometimes explicit White supremacist feminism alongside this other form of feminism that supports things like Black Lives Matter and police reform or abolition. And recognizing that there is different kinds of feminism, I think actually is one of our central struggles.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So what does White supremacist feminism look [00:19:00] like? Often online you see tiki torches and men, right?, in Charlottesville, if you're thinking of that in like the past five, six years but what you're saying makes total sense. It's not incompatible. It's just maybe that it's not represented in the way that we think about White supremacy in our cultural eco....

KYLA SCHULLER: Yeah. But in a less obvious way, it looks like Ivanka Trump in 2016 on the campaign trail saying 'my dad is a feminist'. In a more explicit way, it looks like the work that sociologist Jessie Daniels has found in researching online platforms like Stormfront and other White supremacist sites that there are actually active groups of women on these... feminist sub threads on these sites, people who support pay equality, people who support some kind of gender balance at home in terms of sharing [00:20:00] workload, and even people who support abortion in these White supremacist sites but often with a caveat that they support abortion for people of color, because they want to prevent more births by people of color, but they don't support abortion for White women because they want to protect a White majority.

Julia Serano Moving Trans History Forward 2023 - Chair in Transgender Studies - Air Date 7-17-23

JULIA SERANO: So, in the 15 years since Whipping Girls come out I still sometimes write about cissexism and transmisogyny, but in those years, a lot of my attention has been turned to adjacent matters that grew out, post [Whipping Girls] coming out, that I've been thinking about and grappling with, so I'm going to talk about these two main things.

So the first one was, I was struck by all the parallels that exist between these phenomena and other forms of marginalization. So as but one example, transness and femininity are both routinely mischaracterized as artificial, irrational, superficial, frivolous, and manipulative relative to their cisgender and masculine counterparts, which are typically [00:21:00] seen as sincere, serious in comparison. In Whipping Girl, I made the case that these overlapping stereotypes associated with both transness and femininity help drive trans misogyny and also the disproportionate attention that the media has historically played to those of us on the trans feminine spectrum because we're easier to sensationalize and to depict as fake.

Similarly, there are all sorts of parallels between cissexism and heterosexism. Since the latter concept was familiar to a lot of people when I was first giving talks about Whipping Girl, I would often make comparisons when I was doing talks about the book. I would make direct comparisons between the two. So I would point out, for example, that both heterosexism and cissexism are centered on the assumption that all people must be heterosexual and cisgender by default. This is what creates the ideas that we are in the closet, that we have to come out, and that we pass.

Furthermore, when we are known to others, heterosexism and [00:22:00] cissexism are what lead people to view us as inherently remarkable. That is, people will comment about the fact that I'm bisexual or transgender in ways that they would never comment about me if I was heterosexual or cisgender. They also lead people to view us as questionable. That is, they may ask, how do you know that you're really bisexual? Or when did you first know that you were transgender? Which are questions that heterosexual and cisgender people never experience.

Basically, both heterosexism and cissexism lead people to project ulterior motives onto us. So, for example, they might say, "you're not bisexual or transgender, you're just confused", or "you're looking for an alternative lifestyle", or "you're out to sexually deceive other people", and so on.

So notably, the parallels that I've just described between heterosexism and cissexism aren't specific to those two, and actually pop up over and over again with a lot of other forms of marginalization. In [00:23:00] fact, marginalized groups are often viewed as remarkable, questionable, irrational, artificial, and manipulative. So, I wanted to better understand why these recurring features of marginalization happen. But then second, and this was strange being that there are all these parallels that were really obvious to me, is that it struck me that despite these parallels, many people seemed reluctant or incapable of recognizing these connections.

So for instance, back when I was giving early Whipping Girl talks, and I would draw comparisons between heterosexism and cissexism, a few people would act baffled, or sometimes incredulous, sometimes even arguing that heterosexism was a real form of oppression, whereas cissexism was a fake concept that was invented by trans activists. Now of course, you could make the exact same argument about heterosexism, which was invented by gay activists in the 1970s.

Here's an even more pertinent [00:24:00] example. So just before Whipping Girl came out, I had a chance to talk at an Association for Women in Psychology conference, which is basically, it's a feminist psychology conference. And I was at the plenary talk, and there's this woman who was giving a talk about how feminism informed her experiences as a therapist. And in the middle of the talk, she talks about two trans clients of hers. One on the transmasculine spectrum, one on the transfeminine spectrum, both of whom were considering transitioning.

And when she talked about the transmasculine spectrum client, she was very serious, she referred to the person's gender presentation simply as very butch, and basically the audience listened very seriously and attentively. And then, out of the blue, when she starts talking about the transfeminine person, she became really animated, and she's like, "this person walked into my office, and her hair was like this, and she was wearing this, and she had her makeup done like this", and everyone in the [00:25:00] audience was giggling, and I was like, "Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening at a feminist psychology conference".

And it seemed really obvious to me that if we were at a regular psychology conference and a cis man got up and talked about one of his female clients entering the office and her hair was done like this and she was wearing this, people would be like, oh my god, that's so sexist. And I think that they just couldn't see the connections because the person who was being described didn't fit their imagined view of who is the victim of sexism.

So, It would have been easy for me to dismiss that all these attendees were transmisogynists through and through, but I don't believe that was the case. And in fact, later in the day, I gave my talk, and I looked it up, because this is a history conference, my talk that day was, The Psychiatric Sexualization of Male to Female Transgenderism. That's very old school talk. And, many of these same audience members came to my talk. So they obviously wanted to hear what a trans woman had to say. [00:26:00] And, since my talk touched upon trans misogyny I decided to use the plenary experience, not in a gotcha sort of way, but in a teachable moment sort of way.

And after my talk, many of these people came up to me afterwards, said they liked my talk, and a few of them expressed their embarrassment that they were one of the people who giggled during that session. And, in talking to them, they were really sincere about the fact that they didn't pick up on how sexist, that comment was. And again, I think this is because that person didn't fit their stereotypical image of who is affected by sexism, well women, aka cis women.

So to be clear, I still think it's really useful to talk about cissexism and transmisogyny and sometimes I write about those things, but it seems to me that there was a really foundational problem that was going on here. One that not only contributes to trans exclusion, but also to the exclusion of other marginalized groups from social justice movements. Basically, even those of us who are dedicated activists are [00:27:00] often not very good applying what we already know and understand about some forms of marginalization when it comes up with somebody who's a new group, who faces obstacles that seem new to us.

Angela Saini The Patriarchs 'How Men Came to Rule' Part 2 - The Overpopulation Podcast - Air Date 2-6-24

ANGELA SAINI: And speaking of the different ways in which that tension exists, the anxiety exists in trying to keep certain people in their place, you discussed specifically the role that patriliny and patrilocality have played throughout history in creating patriarchy. You've shared several personal examples of how patriarchy shows up in India, many of which rang true for me, having grown up there, and seeing it firsthand within my own extended family.

Of course, India's just one example, there are so many across the world. Can you describe the power of those in entrenching and maintaining patriarchy?

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: Well, as I said before, there's not one single explanation for why patriarchy exists. The rise of the state is not a [00:28:00] necessary condition, and it's not a sufficient condition either. I think patriliny and patrilocality combined with those other pressures led to the development of patriarchal societies. Because what is patriliny and patrilocality really? It's about saying to women that when you get married, you will no longer live with your childhood kin, you will live with your husband's family. That's the case in modern day patrilocal societies.

And immediately that creates an imbalance of power. Necessarily. It has to. There's no way that it can't, because if you're being taken away from your natural sources of support and becoming alienated in a community or a society in which you have no more natural sources of support, you are immediately vulnerable.

And that's what we see. We see in India famously, but also across the region, across the Middle East and Asia. This is less true, I think, in the West, because people tend to live in nuclear families, but certainly in [00:29:00] societies where extended families are still common, not as common as they used to be, but still common, the in laws are an incredibly important vehicle for the perpetuation of patriarchy, especially mothers in law. We neglect this, I think, the role that women play in the perpetuation of these deeply damaging ideologies, I think because it doesn't fit well into the way that we imagine gender depression. We tend to flatten it out. We think that all men are oppressing all women, but it doesn't really work like that. There are layers to this, and they operate in different ways.

But as the sociologist Denise Candiotti wrote in the 1980s, what you see within the patriarchal family are these bargains happening, these patriarchal bargains, where the older women know that in order to make it the best for themselves out of the situation that they're in, their only real source of authority is over the new younger women coming into the family. They [00:30:00] exercise that control over them in the same way that would have been done to them. And as Candiotti writes, the daughters in law endure this in the knowledge that one day they will have sons, their sons will marry, and then they will be the mothers in law, and then they will exercise the authority and power over that next generation. And that power can be immense.

Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist wrote, this is many decades ago, how in traditional Moroccan families, the mother in law was such an important figure, such a figure of authority in her household, that the mother was like the only person a man is allowed to love at all. He's not really allowed to love his wife because that would mean splitting loyalties. It would mean exchanging that power, giving her more power than his mother might have. Daughters in law were expected to kiss their mother in law's hand and call her Lala, which means mistress, which is again the language of slavery, of [00:31:00] ownership.

So that dynamic, I think, is important for us to understand how within patriarchal societies in which women are disadvantaged, women can still lobby and negotiate for power, knowing that it disadvantages them at certain stages in their life, but really having no other choice.

ANGELA SAINI: You give the example of female genital mutilation, that is instigated often by mothers and aunts onto these young women. And that's, I think, also another really great example of how layered the oppression is.

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: Yeah, and it's wrapped up in, like I said, age. Age is a very important axis of power that we sometimes don't think about that much, because we all age, I guess, so we all acquire that sense of authority or respect as we get older, or to some degree we do. But also tradition is wound up in so many different aspects of our life that become interlinked. And tradition is a very [00:32:00] powerful one. This is part of the reason that FGM continues, is because it seems a traditional practice, and just be seen as an authentic or traditional person, you have to be seen to keep doing that over generations. So these mothers and aunts who are encouraging their girls to get cut, knowing how painful it is, knowing how traumatizing it can be, are doing it because it will be easier for them to get married then, because they are then fitting into society.

But to some extent, don't we all do that all the time? Don't we all instill things in our children that we know are maybe not the very best for them, but we know will help them fit into society, that will smooth their passage through life, given the society that we're in? The fact that until relatively recently, people were so dismissive and judgmental of gay people, mothers and fathers themselves would disown their own children for being gay, because they wouldn't fit into society, because then they [00:33:00] wouldn't fulfill the pattern that was required in order to be part of the world in the way that they needed them to be part of the world.

And all of this, for me, it comes back to this fundamental question of who do we exist for? What the patriarchal state has done is made us believe that we exist for the state, that we exist for an entity that doesn't really ultimately care for us that much, necessarily. I mean, it may, depending on the state, be more benign or less benign, but we will forgo our own relationships with the people we love, we will sacrifice those relationships because of the sense of duty to the state. And that psychologically is why patriarchy continues to have so much power, because it has wheedled its way in to our minds to make us believe that we owe the world a version of ourselves that may not be true to who we are at [00:34:00] all just because we've been told by the state that that's how we should live.

Marcie Bianco — Breaking Free - with Charlotte Clymer Part 2 - Politics and Prose - Air Date 9-23-23

CHARLOTTE CLYMER: You make a point early in the book that knocked me over sideways, because -- that happened several times in the book, by the way. But this really blew me away. Because it's not just laypersons who don't know how to define equality. You talk about the University of Chicago Social Survey. Tell us about this, because this blew me away.

MARCIE BIANCO: Okay. This is wild. This is another moment in time where I thought, I need to write this book. I was writing an article about a new general social survey report based on 40 years of GSS data that a scholar at the University of Chicago, Newark, was doing. And the end product that came out in the report, the running headline was like, More people want equality in the workplace and in the home.

And I was tasked as a freelance writer to write an article about this survey. So of course I tracked down the survey, dug around. There was no [00:35:00] definition of equality provided, not just in that report or the most recent survey, but I asked The GSS folks, the staff, I emailed them and I said, Have you ever provided any respondent a definition of equality? Because if I'm answering questions about equality, I would like to have, for level setting purposes, I would like to have a set definition so that we all are operating on a shared understanding of what this huge term is, the operational term of the study.

And they emailed me back saying, No, we don't give anyone a definition of equality. Which blew my mind because I thought equality means different things to different people, depending on your ideological beliefs. If I came from a particular background, I could believe that equality literally means my wife stays at home and raises the children. There are very strict gender roles in accordance with my ideological beliefs, and therefore she has her equal domestic space, [00:36:00] and I have my workplace space. Therefore, we are equal, one and one, half of a whole. That is one way, possibly, someone could define equality.

So really, to me, the definition is subjective, but it just blew me away that there was an actual survey that did not provide respondents from all across America, just a set definition, because how are you supposed to come to any conclusion about cultural understandings of equality without providing just a definition?

So that, yeah, that really blew me away. That was something else that I locked away and, said, Oh this has to come back later somehow.

CHARLOTTE CLYMER: It's crazy because we're both nerds, right? We're both very steeped in nerdiness. And the folks who did the survey are nerds. The folks who read those kind of surveys are nerds.

And yet this is the first time I've ever seen anyone point out with one of these surveys, by the way, did you define this term for people?

MARCIE BIANCO: But you know what? And apologies to every [00:37:00] sociologist out there. So my background, I studied politics and I love politics. And then I went into literature because a Shakespearean blew up in my mind. And I was like, wow, language and words and how we communicate and share our space with each other and grow and make culture, right? This is in college because I didn't have books as a kid. It was just so earth shattering to me.

Oh my God, what was I saying? Remind me of what I was saying. I lost my train of thought.

CHARLOTTE CLYMER: Social survey.

MARCIE BIANCO: Oh yes. So a couple of years ago I took up a job at a gender research institute run by sociologists, and they would run these similar surveys. I was the communications editorial director. And I would ask them if they would have actual definitions of major terms that they were operating upon, that they were drawing conclusions for. And there was no attention to definition or language or just even like cultural differences in how language was being used, because they were sociologists; they weren't linguists. They weren't [00:38:00] really involved in the word play, like the language play, the culture play, of language.

So I actually don't think it's unique for sociologists, but then, someone's going to come and strike me down. Let me preface this by that's just my personal experience.

CHARLOTTE CLYMER: But that is very worrisome, right? We're trying to get to a point where we do have a society in which all people are liberated. And even the folks who are pushing this and studying it don't even know how to define the terms, or haven't come to a common term that everyone can agree on. That's worrying.

MARCIE BIANCO: And I, there are a few things about that. One, again, equality exists in application. It is an artifice that needs to be constructed. It is not organic. I think there's something that -- even though this is an ideas book and again, it's toothy, but I think people can really feel like, Oh, there are moments in my life when I have felt free, and I know that I understand my capacity for freedom, or that I understand my situation and what I'm capable of through dialogue with other people. [00:39:00] Hannah Arendt said you need to be in intercourse with people to understand your freedom, which I thought was different uses of the word. But I guess you could mean that like how we understand intercourse today.

But equality really depends on the people, again, the people in power who are writing those laws, who are implementing those laws and policies. So it really depends on how, say, a law is applied and practiced within an institution. And I use the metaphor of a Play Doh mold. If you have a white man-made mold, and you squeeze through an amorphous concept like equality, it's gonna come out the other side looking like that mold. And yet we continue to be really disappointed with any kind of equality measure. It just never satisfies. And at the same time, I always think in our daily lives, how does that, if we live by a politics of equality, then what does that mean about how I understand my desires, my dreams, my aspirations? Does it have to be hemmed into an equality mindset? Which feels very [00:40:00] limiting to me.

And something I didn't write about a lot in the book, but something I wrote about for NBC this past year was the Respect for Marriage Act, which was passed and it actually does not codify equal marriage, but it ensures protections for marriages that already exists. The only reason that passed, the only right reason that Republican senators got on board, was that they were able to shoehorn in like a Trojan horse all of these religious liberty protections. And we're seeing them being weaponized now in states across the nation to prevent -- right? I feel like our politics, it's like we're waiting for breadcrumbs, waiting for this equality, and yet we're going to be always disappointed and it's never going to be good enough in order to create a society where we feel we have meaningful lives, where we respect each other, and where we feel, I don't know, cared for, like care is such an important part of what I'm trying to do and it's integral to my definition of freedom.

So how do we feel cared for by each other [00:41:00] and in our society, but also by our institutions? But that's my own ideological beliefs that we live in society, for better or for worse, even if you put on your little VR glasses and abscond to your metaverse, you still live in society.

So we should actually act like we live in society with each other.

Marcie Bianco — Breaking Free - with Charlotte Clymer Part 3 - Politics and Prose - Air Date 9-23-23

MARCIE BIANCO: Feminists need a new tool, a new guiding idea, that allows us to build a society on something other than patriarchal values and to cultivate lives not circumscribed by them. One that finds dignity in difference, and from that recognition helps us create a society that cherishes independence and interdependence, autonomy and belonging, accountability, care, and justice. And that idea, I believe, is freedom.

And just a little on freedom. I'm gonna give you a little bit more.

In this book, I unpack the lie of equality to show how this long cherished ideal no longer serves the feminist movement. I take up feminist scholar Linda Zerilli's call to action. [00:42:00] What if instead of thinking about and practicing a feminism under the banner of equality, we thought and practiced feminism under the banner of freedom? To propose that freedom is the tool we need to revitalize feminism and cultivate more dignified, caring, and joyful lives. It can usher us beyond visibility, representation, false equivalences, and the harmful expansion and replication of systems of oppression.

I define freedom as an ongoing process of self-creation and world building rooted in accountability and care. Freedom practices are those that foster our authenticity and honor the dignity of all people. They demand the recognition of our mutual coexistence. Freedom means, for example, reorienting our thinking about our health, not as personal health, but as public health; of healthcare, not as a personal matter, but as a public responsibility; and reconceptualizing our politics to recognize healthcare, not as a personal benefit afforded by our employer, but as a public good provided by our government.[00:43:00]

In this sense, freedom is both a personal ethics and a collective politics. The practices of freedom are grounded in the development of a critical consciousness of how our mutual coexistence necessitates working toward our mutual freedom. The internal work and external practice continuously inform each other and evolve through our encounters and relationships over time.

The political power of this freedom work is that it can build movements that intermingle, deconstruct, and redeem spaces that have been historically exclusionary and toxic, and that generate intersectional frameworks and policies that intend to make all of us feel safer and feel more cared for and enbue us with a sense of belonging.

One freedom practice threaded through this book is the creation of our gender, both in our choice of an identity and in the stylistic expression of who we are and are becoming. Equality feminism, I argue, relies on the gender binary, which binds women to men. [00:44:00] But what if we freed ourselves of the mindset that has conditioned us to understand woman through men's gaze and values? And what if we understood that this liberation did not erase women, but removed the traditional strictures of womanhood? And that woman is not half of a whole, but rather can be a constellation, abundant in its variety? How might this mutual recognition and respect for all women transform our politics? How might it liberate us from a standpoint of oppression and a scarcity mindset that has us fighting each other about who gets to be a woman, and instead allow us to imagine new ways to strengthen and enlarge our freedom to care for ourselves and each other?

BONUS The Fraud Of 'White Feminism' w Kyla Schuller Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 1-20-22

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So I guess let's move a little bit forward. I want to go through a lot of these examples, but let's talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe versus Harriet Jacobs in this time period. Tell us a little bit about the way in which, I guess I don't know how to describe it, but there was a contrast in the way that [00:45:00] White versus Black feminists were owning their own power to a degree. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

KYLA SCHULLER: Yeah, so Harriet Beecher Stowe, of course, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was the second best selling novel of the entire 19th Century in the United States. And it's a novel that really positions White women as the saviors of enslaved people, that they will be the teachers, trainers, really discipliners of their servants and of the enslaved. And that's part of her vision of abolition. Versus Harriet Jacobs, who is a another really compelling figure, you know, extraordinary figure actually. And someone who it's amazing we don't have five movies about Harriet Jacob's life 'cause among many things that she did was when she self emancipated from slavery to run away from her enslaver, she actually hid in a tiny attic [00:46:00] space so small, she couldn't even stand up. And she hid there for seven years until she had the opportunity to take a boat north and escape North Carolina. She wanted to tell her story to support the abolition movement in the 1850s and had a colleague approach Harriet Beecher Stowe to say, Hey, could you write this person's story? And, you know, Harriet Jacobs escaped in part because of the sexual abuse she was suffering at the hands of her enslaver. And they thought, Well, Harriet Beecher Stowe might be the right person to bring that view of the sexual abuse element of slavery into the national eye. Instead Harriet Beecher Stowe said, Thank you for telling me these details of this amazing story of her hiding in the attic for seven years, I'm going to use these details in my next book. And then never replied to any of the increasingly desperate letters afterwards saying, No, we're not asking you to steal this woman's story. And Harriet Jacobs was [00:47:00] so incensed that she actually wrote her own story. She was lucky enough that she was literate from youth. And it is now, you know, deemed the most important woman's slave autobiography. She's the first Black woman to publish her own story, and she actually literally published it herself because she couldn't find a publisher to support it. And it's a brilliant example of the kind of self determination that guided intersectional feminism.

And meanwhile, Harriet Beecher Stowe becomes the sort of patron saint of abolition. And then after reconstruction, she and her husband bought the largest orange plantation in Florida so that she herself could experiment with disciplining and civilizing the formerly enslaved. And there are really dramatic examples of that sort of self-led versus White maternalist version of feminism that tried to enact a literal theft.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And that brings us back to what we were talking about with Afghanistan, [00:48:00] and it's, it's just a thread through colonialism, as well. We are going to civilize this population, and it's all inherently very narcissistic, of course. And we had someone write in to ask you a question, and so I don't want to move past that, even though we're going a little bit backwards about Stanton. Margo from Mass writes in, "I had read that Stanton and the early conferences were originally urged to work for suffrage by Frederick Douglass, and they didn't agree on it as a goal until Douglass encouraged them to fight for it as a means to get other rights. Is that true?"

KYLA SCHULLER: It is absolutely true. I mean, it's really one conference. The conference is often considered the start of women's rights in the U. S., and this is the famous 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. And Stanton had said, We want to support the fight for women to vote. And nobody would support it until Douglass stood up. And Douglass was the only Black person in the entire [00:49:00] many hundred person convention. And he said, I will not fight for my rights without fighting for the rights of women. And then the vote passed, but it wouldn't have passed In 1848 without Douglass, which made her later betrayal of him and of the rights of African Americans, especially poignant.

BONUS Angela Saini The Patriarchs 'How Men Came to Rule' Part 3 - The Overpopulation Podcast - Air Date 2-6-24

ANGELA SAINI: I mean, even in the current political and media narratives that we see how the decline in fertility rates is being reported as a panic because all these older people who are no longer productive are now being seen as burdens to society. And then women are measured in their ability to reproduce. And as you've said the way motherhood has been internalized by so many women because it's been pushed for so many thousands of years as the norm, but then you also talk about the first Roman emperor who actually [00:50:00] legislated marriage under the guise of, Well, that's just what's natural. Women just want to have children and they need to be under the control of their husbands. But the question you posed at the end of that was very interesting: Well,, if it's natural, why do we need to legislate something, unless it's for the state?

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: Yeah, you're right. I mean, again and again, what you see in antiquity... so antiquity comes after all of this. So, here in ancient Greece and Rome, we see the final effects of a state that is deeply preoccupied by what's happening in the family and really takes it to its absolute limits. And I think in ancient Athens you see, that most of all, the emergence of this idea of the oikos and the polis, that whereas humans before would have just lived in a quite casual communal way, but now there are spaces for women and there are spaces for men. There's a domestic and there's a public, and there's this gendered division in terms [00:51:00] of who occupies which space, at least for certain classes. And of course, this isn't really true for the working classes who are still living the same way.

But the literature from ancient Greece is deeply misogynistic. It is so, like, dripping with this hatred of women, suspicion, and fear. And we have to ask ourselves why? Why would societies be so afraid of half of their own populations? Why would they have that kind of dripping misogynistic fear or anxiety, which is the way I prefer to see it in ancient Athens, it's as anxiety. And of course, an unequal society is always an anxious one. It has to be because it is predicated on keeping a certain group of people in their place, telling people what to do, knowing deep down that they are imposing rules on people that perhaps they don't naturally occupy, that they're not naturally comfortable with.

Slave owning societies are the same. [00:52:00] They've always been anxious, uncomfortable, you know, wrestling not only with their own moral anxieties, but also the understanding that things could change, that the slaves could uprise and things could be very different. And you certainly see that in ancient Greek literature and ancient Roman literature in, for example, the myth of the Amazons, you know, race of women who are stronger than the men who are more powerful and could easily overtake them.

But you see that in other cultures, too. There are so many cultural myths about the power that women used to have that was then taken away and the need to put women back in their place. Why would you do that unless you were anxious, unless you felt that this was an unnatural way to organize yourself?

ALAN WARE - CO-HOST, OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: And that's interesting. I had no idea, as you mentioned, Egyptians, Spartans, others, were not nearly as strong, gender-defined, and oppressed as the Greeks. And that the Greeks then influenced the Romans, which then influenced [00:53:00] Europe. And then the fact that the polis, the public part, actually you mentioned ends up oppressing women more, right? The division between the oikos, the house, or domestic...

NANDITA BAJAJ - CO-HOST, THE OVERPOPULATION PODCAST: Yeah, it is fascinating. And often in Western societies, at least, we draw on ancient Greece as a kind of template, a model for how a perfect society should be organized. Although we do that selectively, you know, we don't take everything, we only take certain things. And some of those certain things, for instance, are democracy and... famously, ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy. We choose to forget that these were democracies that deliberately excluded, of course, slaves, certain classes of people, and women. Although when we recreated democracy later in modern states, we borrowed that. We didn't have to, but we did.

And I think that speaks to the way that power works in every generation, in every society and civilization, is that those [00:54:00] in power almost always try and take from tradition and history, but they're always selective in the way that they do it. Why did they not borrow, for instance, from ancient Egypt, contemporary to ancient Athens, a society in which women had a lot of power, they worked in the professions, they were medics, they were very well educated, very well read. We know that there were famous Egyptian pharaohs, queens, who were women. But no, that's not what we borrowed from. The men deliberately chose to borrow from what was perhaps one of the weirdest societies even by the standards of its time.

Final comments on what the path beyond equality and toward freedom looks like

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Marcy Bianco at Politics and Prose reading from her book, Breaking Free. The Overpopulation Podcast looked at some archeological evidence for egalitarian societies. The Majority Report brought racism into the discussion of historical feminism. Julia Serrano was featured on Chair in Transgender Studies, discussing the [00:55:00] sexism infused into discussions of trans identity. The Overpopulation Podcast discussed how adherence to expectations of society is strong enough to destroy personal relationships, including family relationships. Politics and Prose spoke with Marcie Bianco about the fruitlessness of defining equality. And finally, Marcie Bianco read another passage from Breaking Free.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from The Majority Report further discussing some of the embedded racism in early feminism. And The Overpopulation Podcast went back as far as ancient Greece and Rome to understand the effects of having the state deeply preoccupied with what's happening within the family.

To hear that and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of [00:56:00] funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now to wrap up. Freedom, I will admit, is not exactly a policy prescription. In fact, the author of Breaking Free, in the discussion that we heard parts of today and during a part that I didn't have time to play, was pretty open about being more focused on the big ideas and letting the policy be crafted by other people who are not her. But I do think that freedom is a useful re-imagining of the direction that both advocacy and policy should go. And this might be more easily understood with a negative example.

So, the focus on achieving marriage equality as part of the broader LGBTQ rights movement was both energizing, but also limiting. And I've heard from people inside the movement that once marriage equality was affirmed by the Supreme court, nearly all of the energy and particularly the funding of the movement dried up, [00:57:00] leaving very little left over to continue other related LGBTQ fights, including trans rights more broadly. So, in that example, you can see how the fight for equality created a sort of finish line that, when crossed, felt like an end to many. Whereas a focus on freedom broadens the perspective in multiple directions. It expands the scope of the avenues we may want to take, both policy-wise as well as culturally, and it also lengthens the time horizon we're working on, so that people really understand the bigger picture and don't mistakenly pack up and leave early.

And to be clear, you do need wins along the way. So, you need sort of intermittent goals that you're working to achieve, but it should all be understood as part of a much bigger project that needs continuous effort and funding.

So continuing with the marriage equality example, not [00:58:00] everyone wants to get married. And I think people find that sort of shocking when they first hear it. I actually remember when I first heard that and was sort of shocked by it. Well, not that there were people who didn't want to get married, but that there were members of the LGBTQ community who opposed the fight towards marriage equality. I just remember my mind being blown by that. 'Cause it was like, Why would you not want everything that is the same as what everyone else has? And the answer is just like, Yeah, that's just not what I'm interested in. Like, I just don't want to fight for a thing I don't want, was kind of the answer. As like, I want to fight for my right to do what I want and not be penalized for it.

So, in the marriage equality example I've, I've heard it described - marriage - as coming with 'administrative privilege'. You know, you get all those benefits that married couples get either in the tax code or other things like hospital visitation privileges, et cetera. In a [00:59:00] freedom mindset, we wouldn't force anyone to adhere to traditional marriage ideals just to access these types of what should be basic rights for people. Marriage equality should have been a no brainer, right? It's just like, Yeah, obviously. Anyway, moving on. Marriage rejection, without penalty for those who want to opt out, that's an example of one of the steps on the path to freedom.

That is going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. 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 [01:00:00] Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, and a 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 today by signing up at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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 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, from bestoftheleft.com.

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#1617 The Profitable and Political Moral Panic Around Trans People: Debunking Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, Groomers, and Detransitioning Misconceptions (Transcript)

Posted by · March 21, 2024 9:13 AM

Air Date 3/19/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we break down some of the pseudoscience the trans panic is built on, look at the political drive to erase trans people, understand how language of moral panics shift over time, and present an alternate view of societal healing for a healthier humanity. Source today include It Could Happen Here, The Thom Hartmann Program, Upfront Ventures, Medium, The Majority Report, and Variety, with additional members only clips from Medium and It Could Happen Here.

The Anatomy of a Moral Panic Ft. Dr. Julia Serano - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 2-21-24

MIA WONG - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: I wanted to talk a little bit about " rapid-onset gender dysphoria," because that's been all over the place. There was a New York Times article talking about it two weeks ago, and it's really been a fiasco. Especially given how unbelievably tenuous the stuff they faked—or, not as they "faked"— unbelievably tenuous the " study" they did, that got retracted, was.

JULIA SERANO: This is [00:01:00] something that I actually saw developing firsthand and then did research on in 2019. Let me frame this, I'll tell my personal, short version —my oral history of this. It was around 2017 that I first heard the idea of children becoming trans because of social contagion, and it just seemed to come out of the blue . It's like, what? Gender identity is not contagious! If it was, trans people would have infected way more than the less-than-one percent of us that actually exist. Not a very effective contagion, as far as contagions go!

MIA WONG - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: (Laughing) "30 percent and rising!"

JULIA SERANO: Exactly. Once you start looking at it, it seems ridiculous. A lot of it was because, "My kid was hanging around a trans person, or started watching trans videos on YouTube and now they're trans!" Maybe they were hanging out with that trans friend and watching the YouTube videos because they are trans and they just hadn't come out yet or they're just, they're still figuring it out.

2018 is when the Lisa Lippman paper on rapid-onset [00:02:00] gender dysphoria came out and I wrote this essay at the time talking about all the things wrong with it . Then in 2019, I'm like, "Where did these ideas come from?" I should say that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is basically "transgender social contagion" wrapped up in a medical-sounding diagnosis.

If you read the initial descriptions of transgender social contagion and the description of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, they're basically the same—it's that kids are "infecting" one another. The idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria was meant to describe this quick infection of "transness" that supposedly was happening.

In 2019, I basically did a deep dive—I'm not an investigative reporter, but that's what I did—into where the origin of this was. Basically, all of this came down to the website 4th Wave Now, which often worked in coordination with two other anti-trans parent websites.

4th Wave Now is an anti-trans parent website, arguably the very first one that came [00:03:00] out. A parent posted the idea that her child was being infected by a transgender social contagion. It's almost definitely clear now—I will leave a little caveat, even though I think the evidence is pretty strong—that was Lisa Marciano, who is an anti-trans therapist, who's very, very involved in anti-trans activism right now. Everything points to that being her, and she also seems to have, in some capacity, worked with Lisa Lippman. Basically, the first paper about rapid-onset gender dysphoria that came out was not Lisa Lippman's—it was actually Lisa Marciano's, which came out in 2017.

So it grew from these anti-trans parent websites. Within six months, not only was Lisa Lippman doing her survey, Lisa Lippman—being someone who has no experience in trans health ever before then —decides to go in and to only survey parents from three anti-trans parent websites.

And it gets taken very seriously [00:04:00] because the media fanned the flames. A lot of these groups were very excited to have something that seemed to be a case study on their side. The paper was heavily critiqued when it came out. There are now—I described this in an online essay I have, it's free, if you google my name, " all the evidence against social contagion," it's in there—there are now ten papers that have tested the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria and/or social contagion, and found evidence that contradicts the hypothesis.

It's still being talked about by Pamela Paul. It was an op ed that looked like an article in the New York Times—it's not the first time Pamela Paul and/or the New York Times has done this. They seem to have a particular axe to grind against trans people and putting out specious articles suggesting that gender-affirming care, especially for trans youth, is bad when actually all the evidence points to the [00:05:00] opposite.

That's a brief discussion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which I think is the most popular of these pseudoscientific ideas, but there are definitely others. There are about four or five others that I could get into—I do get into in the afterward and in some of my other writings. I don't use the word "pseudoscientific" lightly.

There's "science," which is where different research groups try to answer a particular question, and if they all get similar answers, then that seems to be established. Now, let's work from there and ask more questions and do more studies.

"Junk science" is when you do a crappy study that doesn't really interrogate all the possibilities, that either doesn't use controls, or only looks a bias sampling size or a bias sample or small sample sizes and comes to a conclusion that it wants to come to. That's junk science.

And then "pseudoscience" is when multiple independent groups all find something different to what you're saying, [00:06:00] but you keep touting the thing you're saying as science. That's definitely where ROGD is right now. Same thing with one of these ideas that I talked about way back early in Whipping Girl and both academic papers and online essays about this concept of "autogynephilia," which is this really old theory— this zombie.

It doesn't matter how many groups find evidence to the contrary, it jibes with what certain gender-disaffirming practitioners and researchers and anti-trans activists—it jibes with what they want to say, so it continues to be out there.

MIA WONG - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Something that—Garrison, we were talking about before this—is the extent to which the extent to which the rapid-onset gender dysphoria study is almost exactly the same study as the first anti-vax study.

It's the same thing, where you find a group of people who think their kid has autism because they were vaccinated, or you find a group of people who think their kids are trans because " social contagion" or something, and then you ask them about it. Then you report the results of the study— you report the results of you asking the people the [00:07:00] thing that they believe, and now it's a study. It drives me insane—the extent to which it is literally exactly the same thing!

Are Red States 100 Committed to Erasing Trans People - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 1-8-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: You have been covering trans issues and transphobia and violence against trans people and the, just the. This insane hatred of trans people that the Republican Party has been spreading just brilliantly. Today's piece that you sent out, Florida bill would make accusation of transphobia defamation with a $35,000 penalty.

Tell us about this.

ERIN REED: Yeah, so this just came out this morning and a particular lawmaker in Florida filed a bill that would basically say that if you accuse somebody of transphobia or sexism or homophobia or racism they could sue you for defamation with a penalty of up to $35,000. Interestingly enough usually the defense of defamation is truth is an absolute defense against defamation, so there is a separate paragraph that says that you cannot use their religious or scientific beliefs to prove truth of your [00:08:00] accusation.

So basically, a pastor, for instance, could get up on the pulpit and spew a bunch of hateful rhetoric, and you could not call that pastor transphobic or homophobic without risking a $35,000 lawsuit.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: That's insane. That sounds like censorship more than anything else to me.

ERIN REED: It does. And in fact, the same lawmaker last year was famous for the "blogger bill", which made national headlines. It was essentially a bill that would require all bloggers to register with the state if they criticize the government.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Wow. Wow. A couple of days ago you published a piece only five days into the new year and 125 anti-trans pieces of legislation have been introduced around the country. What is the state of the safety of trans people around the nation, and how bad is it getting in red states, and how clearly differentiated are red states from blue states right now on these issues?

ERIN REED: Of course. So in the three days since I've published that, we are now up to 151 and we continue to grow every day. In terms of [00:09:00] safety, I am in touch with many parents, family, friends, et cetera, who are fleeing these states and seeking refuge in blue states. I know some people, for instance, that have fled a state like Alabama to a place like Massachusetts and they are living out of their van because it is safer right now to be in a van in Massachusetts with your kid than it is to be in Alabama having your kid pulled off medication and potentially harassed in school, kicked out of bathrooms, and worse.

We see bills in some of these states like Florida and Ohio that make it impossible to get your health care. It pulls people off of medication. It makes it in Florida, for instance, if you go to the bathroom that matches your gender identity if it's not of your assigned sex at birth, you can be in jail for up to a year if somebody tells you to leave. And so the temperature is getting hotter and hotter.

And actually, I want to close off by saying in Texas, even if you leave, even if you get out and you go to Seattle, to Washington [00:10:00] state, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit to pull all of those patients back to pull all of the medical records from Seattle children's hospital back into Texas.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Presumably, so he can go after these trans people?

ERIN REED: Presumably. We know that, for instance, a couple years ago, he was the one who started child abuse investigations against the parents of trans kids in the state. And judging that he is now trying to grab medical records from out of state, from the people that left Texas, one presumes that he is going to use those records for some legal purpose.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah. This is a guy who proclaims his great morality, but can't keep it in his pants with regard to cheating on his own wife. It's just bizarre.

You published a piece titled Governor DeWine uses anti abortion tactic to target trans adults with de facto ban. Tell us about that.

ERIN REED: Yes, of course. So this is a new tactic that I'm seeing that is an echo of a lot of the abortion bills that we saw during the Roe v. Wade [00:11:00] era, pre Dobbs. And so what we're seeing right now is in Ohio, we saw Governor DeWine veto an anti-trans bill that would allow trans youth to obtain gender affirming care, which was a great, it was a great thing that he did. However, he then turned around only three or four days later and released regulations that essentially act as laws that do not outright ban gender affirming care for transgender adults, but make it so that all of the clinics that provide that care would be closed.

I'm going to remind your listeners of what happened during the abortion fight whenever they, for instance, passed bills, that said that all abortion clinics had to have hallways that were 14 feet wide. And so what that does to all the clinics in the state is it says either you have to tear down your clinic and build it a new and extend out all your hallways or your clinic is going to shut down because you don't have the money to operate that clinic.

So we're seeing the same thing in Ohio. There are a lot of regulations. For instance, they say that a bioethicist has to be on your team and signing off on all your care, as well as a number of other professions. I don't [00:12:00] know when the last time you have visited a bioethicist to get basic health care needs met, but I'm just saying that's not part of most of our routines.

Jamie Lee Curtis Interviews ALOK on the World Beyond the Gender Binary - Upfront Ventures - Air Date 3-9-23

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: You've written many things, but this beautiful book, Beyond the Gender Binary, is incredibly special. In the beginning of it, you talk about:

" In other words, there's been a lot of talk about us, but very little engagement with us. This has led to misinformation and outright lies, which have distracted from the realities faced by gender non-conforming people. Bias and discrimination are not just being endorsed, they are being given the green light. This gives many people permission to harass us in public everywhere we go. I do not have the luxury of being. I am only seen as doing. As if my gender is something that is being done to them, and not something that belongs to me."

Now, it's 2023. When [00:13:00] did you write this?

ALOK VAID-MENON: I wrote it in 2018, it came out in 2020.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: And where are we now?

ALOK VAID-MENON: Worse. There are over 400 pieces of anti- trans legislation that have been introduced in 2023 alone. And it's only March, mind you.

It's the best of times and it's the worst of times. It's "the best of times" in that our community is more powerful and resilient and visible than ever. It's "the worst" because we're having to deal with attempts to criminalize us for getting access to life- affirming healthcare. To criminalize us for existing in public.

And I think what breaks my heart the most is that there's been an orchestrated attempt to make people think that trans and non- binary people have access to some mythological power, but where was that power when I got beaten on the street? Where is that power when I get spat on, on the street? Where is that power when I am abused relentlessly online, [00:14:00] told to kill myself, and the same social media platforms that say happy pride to me are silent when we say it's happening?

Where's that power when queer and trans people have to deal with the stochastic terrorism that leads to incidences like Colorado Springs? When no one believes us that we're being hunted or attacked because it's easier for them to believe that we're resilient than it is for them to remove the hands that are wrapped around our necks?

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: Children— you wrote, "That's the thing about being an LGBTQIA + kid. You often don't have the luxury to come into yourself on your own terms because other people have made up their minds for you. I wish that my family had been more proactive. I wish they had introduced a conversation about bullying so that I knew I could speak about it happening, too. I wish that they could have let me know that this was not okay."

Today, young people are [00:15:00] more in a relationship with tech, than they are with people, I think. I fear. Sorry, but I do. I fear it. What role do you think tech is playing in this conversation, in the work you're trying to do?

ALOK VAID-MENON: On the one hand, tech has been so instrumental in helping us, as LGBTQ folks, connect with one another. We grow up often feeling like we're the only person who experiences the world as we do, and then we can log online and say, "There's someone else who shares my pain, someone else who shares my beauty," and I think that's tech in its best form.

But then, at the same time, what we've seen happen in the past few years is a relentless disinformation campaign on these social media platforms where people are peddling lies about trans people, myself included, as a way to push an agenda. It's not misinformation, it's disinformation. It's intentional.

There's been an orchestrated effort to make people believe [00:16:00] that LGBTQ folks, and specifically trans people, are to blame for every ill will that there is. There's a long history of scapegoating. We shouldn't have to name it, but we have to every time. Vulnerable minorities are told that we have some mythological manufactured power because the people with power, the people who actually have power, like to create it as a diversionary tactic.

They give no economic plan. They give no agenda to stave off some of the biggest issues of our times, like climate change. They distract people by making up issues. Like criminalizing drag. Making up issues like going against the American Psychiatric Association, Psychological Association, Medical Association, and saying that trans healthcare is somehow ominous or wrong.

They make up these issues to distract people, and that's what social media has facilitated— a mass weapon of distraction where people think that targeting trans people is [00:17:00] somehow going to give salvation or stability, and it's not. That's why I feel so much sadness, even for the people who are harassing me. Because they, too, have been misled. They think that this is going to give them access to some kind of power or stability, and it's absolutely not.

I think what's really heartbreaking to me is that social media and many tech infrastructures are actually profiting from this hate. We spoke a little bit there about my experience as a child— it feels like being bullied, like when I was younger with everyone watching and no one doing anything, but what feels different now is that tech companies are making millions of dollars from it. We have evidence to show that Meta actually makes money from ads that call LGBTQ people "groomers." We have evidence to show that many tech companies make money from trafficking and anti- LGBTQ discourse online because it's viral. Because fear is a false prophet. Because it keeps people viewing their screens to view their ads.

What we really need [00:18:00] is a moment of reckoning that the self- regulating tendencies of tech aren't working, and that they're endangering our lives. And what that endangerment looks like is a constant sense of terror.

I wish I could be proud. I spent so much of my life wanting to be able to look like this. Wanting to be able to accept myself. And yet, when I look in the mirror I can't tell whether to cry or to smile because it's still so hard. Every single day I have to worry that people believe falsehoods about me and my community, and that those people are gonna come and target me.

That's the devastating part that I have to tell a lot of trans and gender non- conforming young people. It doesn't get better for us. And it's not getting better for us because people are profiting off of our subjugation.

How the Media Gets Trans Coverage Wrong - Medium - Air Date 8-19-23

KATHERINE ALEJANDRA CROSS - MODERATOR, MEDIUM: I think it's quite fair to say that the media landscape, especially although not exclusively in English language media, is either anti-trans or vigorously platforming anti-trans voices in the name of false balance and covering [00:19:00] the issues of the trans community. Certainly in the case of the British media, there's been an almost wholesale institutional capture by anti-trans moral panic. And yet as recently as 2014, there was a sense that we were at a trans tipping point, per a famous headline in Time Magazine, one that heralded a new age of acceptance. But in the nearly decade since, we've reached a nadir of moral panic, urged on by large sections of even liberal press.

So big question, I know, but how did that happen? And why, in your estimation?

JULIA SERANO: I think there were a whole bunch of different forces that all came together to conspire to make that happen. As someone who was already an established writer about trans issues when the tipping point happened, I would almost say that there was somewhat of a trend where the media had ignored trans people for a long time, and then suddenly there were all these TV shows and movies and stories about trans children, and the [00:20:00] media acted as though they had to catch up to that. So that was the only time in my life for a couple year period where mainstream publications would actively reach out to me without me doing anything and saying, "Hey, would you like to write for us about trans stuff?"

And that was going on for a couple of years. Most of those stories were positive, and then there was a backlash that happened again, for a number of reasons. A lot of it was very coordinated anti-trans activism, particularly around 2015 to 2016. A mixture of social conservatives, so called gender critical or TERFs. People who have anti-trans feminist views. Something that rarely gets talked about, but there's a huge anti-trans parent movement that's much like the anti-trans vax movement of parents trying to seek out their own information and then they stumble onto a lot of anti-trans, trans skeptical stuff.

And then there's some establishment gatekeepers and so on, medical gatekeepers, [00:21:00] who still hold anti-trans views. And all of that kind of came together to slowly create a moral panic in the media, particularly where there was certainly something wrong with all these trans people suddenly appearing.

And there weren't trans kids 20 years ago, were there? And so, it was very much coordinated is important, but also just feeding on the perpetual sense that trans people are a novel phenomenon that always needs to be explained.

JUDE DOYLE: Right, and if I can jump off that, the media does not have a really good immune system when it comes to dealing with this kind of misinformation, because there are very few trans reporters who have been around in the issue long enough to know who these hate groups are. There are plenty of trans reporters, but they're not typically employed at these big legacy publications.

So you have, most recently and most horrifyingly, the New York Times feeling that in the interests of fair coverage or impartial coverage, they need to give equal [00:22:00] airtime to both sides of this issue. And the anti-trans groups are incredibly coordinated, they're very good at playing the game, and they know how to reach out and say, "well, I'm just a concerned parent, and by the way, all of my concerns happen to come from this organization. You don't necessarily need to credit them or say that I'm aligned with them when you publish this on the front page of the New York Times."

So, it's really easy for misinformation to sneak into the mainstream because we are not comfortable with allowing trans people who just, on a practical level, are a little bit more able to identify the misinformation. We're not comfortable allowing us to write those narratives, and the level of education is so low that it's really easy for a bad actor to sneak on into the mainstream.

In some cases, some of these reporters are actively [00:23:00] facilitating that. We can all name a few reporters who have actively tried to sandpaper off the trademark and just push anti-trans talking points into the mainstream, but I genuinely believe that a lot of the reporters that are publishing this are just publishing it because they don't know better and it sounds like they're being fair if they quote enough people from both sides.

DEVON PRICE: Yeah. And that speaks to exactly what I wanted to say. It's a very coordinated series of hate groups that have tried to seed a lot of the discourse on this subject, but it's also been platformed by journalists, specific ones in a very deliberate way.

I think many of us who care about this issue remember the Atlantic piece When Your Child Says They're Transgender. That piece profiled a number of so called, and we'll talk about this more later, detransitioned people, but they were all actually detransitioned people who knew each other and were part of a coordinated TERF movement. And we only know about that now because there's people who have left that movement, like Ky Schevers, who also writes on Medium, by the way, who's talked about how this [00:24:00] was a coordinated effort to reach journalists who were already critical of trans people, to lay down the groundwork of fomenting a lot of fear and misinformation. And then it found its way in the hand of legislators who were all too happy to also feed on that that ideology.

And the only thing that I'll say to build on what Jude and Julia already both said is that the trans tipping point, as much as I'm someone who benefited from it someone who transitioned after it, it was in terms of media reception, it was a movement, I think, of personal identity rather than collective liberation or really talking about the policy demands that we need to make as a marginalized class and what some of the healthcare needs that we have, that we have in common with other groups, including detransitioners, including women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, lots of other conditions. Instead it was just a very personal identity, celebration of personnel identity, making people as individuals more visible kind of movement. And visibility is not necessarily liberation. A lot of times it's vulnerability and putting a target on your [00:25:00] back.

The Anatomy of a Moral Panic Ft. Dr. Julia Serano Part 2 - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 2-21-24

MIA WONG - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: One of the things that you talk about both in the Afterword and in Sexed Up is about the relationship between stigma and contagion and how it's this incredibly powerful force for mobilizing moral panics. Can you explain how that works?

JULIA SERANO: Sure. This was something that when I was first working on Sexed Up, it wasn't my idea, I didn't think I was going to write about the concept of stigma that much, but it really ended up being very central to the more research I did into it. And so I think most of us are familiar with the idea of stigma in terms of feeling embarrassment or being made to feel lesser than other people because of some aspect of your person. And there is that aspect of it that's often called felt stigma, but then there's the way that other people view stigma. And so, people aren't necessarily stigmatized in that way themselves. They might view people who are stigmatized in particular ways, and one aspect of stigma that... I learned a lot of this [00:26:00] from psychologists, I think it's Paul Rosen—I know the last name is Rosen—and also Carol Nemeroff, and they both worked together and they had other colleagues who worked on this.

But a lot of this comes from this really unconscious idea of contagion, that seems to be, it's like pan cultural, it's just a way that people tend to view the world, kind of like, a lot of people in a lot of cultures have essentialist views, contagion is along those lines. It's often described as a type of magical thinking. And the idea is, if something in your mind has this contagion, if you get too close to it or you interact with it, it can permanently corrupt or taint you. So it has this kind of contagious like property in people's minds. People often view groups who are stigmatized, especially groups that are highly stigmatized, as essentially contagious, where that stigma that they have could rub off on you if you get too close to [00:27:00] them.

And so this happens, like when I was really young, the idea of if you were friends with a trans person, a lot of times people, or even someone who was gay back then, people would be like, "oh, so what are you? You must be gay too, right?" It's almost as if that stigma would then migrate to you.

And that's a lot of why stigmatized groups face a lot of ostracization in society. This idea of contagion has been around. I think groups who are lesser stigmatized, one of the ways that that plays out is they're viewed as less contagious. When I was really young, the idea of if you had a trans person in your life, people would really question you. Whereas, by the time I came out, you could have a trans friend and that would be fine, it wouldn't necessarily be contagious. Unless, of course, you were interested in them and then that stigma would, if you were attracted to them, then there's that stigma. And I think that stigma plays a lot into dynamics of, and I write about this in Sexed Up that the whole idea of fetishes and chasers and all that, that's basically all the stigma, the contagion stuff [00:28:00] playing out in different ways.

Anyway, so I also think that, and I write about in Sexed Up, I think people view sex and stigma as really closely intertwined, such that I think people view, the average person views heterosexual sex as a stigma contamination act, where the male is the corrupting force, and it's the woman who is corrupted by sex, which is why virgins are pure, but then once a woman has sex, she's become contaminated or tainted. And she has a lot of sex, then people view her as ruined. So that idea is built in there. And I think this combination of viewing sex and stigma as intertwined leads to the sexual predator stereotype that we're seeing play out in really strong ways with trans people right now. But actually, if you look throughout history, a lot of marginalized groups deal in different ways with the [00:29:00] sexual predator trope.

And I think this really clearly plays out with what I call the groomer explosion that started in 2022, where people were accusing trans people being groomers before then, but it really exploded in 2022. And if you listen to what people are saying, they're using the word groomer, which sounds like a sexual predator thing, like there's a real thing of grooming children that sexual abusers do, but they're using it against trans people in a way that has nothing to do with that. What they're talking about is corrupting.

So their children who are presumed to be cisgender, and who often, I think this is why a lot of these anti-trans discourses continue to paint trans children as being girls cause, then it plays into these feelings of transgender people are the adult men corrupting young girls. It plays into a lot of people's messed up heteronormative views of sex, and fears of sexual abuse, [00:30:00] child abuse being a very real thing, but people greatly misinterpret it so that the people who are the usual perpetrators, which are usually by and large straight men who are adults who are close or sometimes even family members of the child in question. But when they say grooming, they just mean corrupting or contaminating.

And I think that both grooming and social contagion, I think both of these basically play off of this stigma contamination idea. The kids are pure, but then transgender is like a type of cooties that if one kid becomes trans, then they spread it to the other kids. And yeah, and so I, I feel like it plays a really big role, not only in moral panics, which almost all moral panics are. There's some kind of corrupting force that is often attacking otherwise pure and innocent children. Sometimes it's technology, and so people will be like, "Oh, we have to ban social [00:31:00] media apps, because it's hurting the children", or it could be transgender people who are the things we need to ban because they're corrupting the children.

But I definitely think that both these ideas of stigma and contagion play a big role in the way in which moral panics... why they resonate with a lot of people, even though they don't make any rational sense if you just think about them from a very realistic, practical point of view.

The Unabated Red State Assault On Trans Rights w Erin Reed Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-10-24

ERIN REED: And in fact, just yesterday we saw in Iowa the governor, Ken Reynolds, submitted a bill that would end all legal recognition for trans people and require trans people to have special markers on their birth certificates that identify them as trans. And in this bill, it actually redefines this...

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: On their birth certificates or on their licenses?

ERIN REED: It was going to be on the birth certificates and driver's licenses. Right now it's only on birth certificates. They've amended out the driver's license portion, but they have kept the birth certificate portion.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Meaning amending someone's birth certificate with a little special marker?

ERIN REED: With a [00:32:00] marker that identifies them as trans. It'll have both gender markers on there. It's something that, a lot of people compared to the pink triangle laws back in the 1940s, where LGBTQ people were forced to identify themselves.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I need people to sit with this for one second. That this legislation forces basically a scarlet letter of transness onto a birth certificate to amend someone's birth certificate so that employers, potentially, if you're giving documentation or if you're giving it to a bank, they get to be like, "oh I know what your genitals are." that is the purpose of this legislation, and that is... it shouldn't be astounding to me, but that is very disturbing in what it's trying to do.

ERIN REED: Absolutely. And not only that, there's another aspect of this legislation that didn't get much coverage until yesterday, in that the legislation actually redefines the word equal. It says that equal no longer means same or identical when it comes to trans people. And then it goes on to say separate does not always imply equality.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So if I [00:33:00] understand what you're saying, they're changing the definition of what essentially discrimination would be to say that you can do these things based upon this information that you gleaned from the birth certificate. What ostensibly is the purpose? When there is a rationale that if I'm a trans person, I'm in Iowa, I got to go back and change my birth certificate to reflect this new, marker as it were, what is their rationale for why this needs to happen? What is the problem that, ostensibly, they're trying to fix?

ERIN REED: Absolutely. And that question was directly posed to the representative. And one of the representatives who was sponsoring the bill stated that, "Well, it's your birth record and we need to have an accurate record of that." But then whenever you look into Adoption, for instance, we allow people to go back and change their birth certificates whenever it comes to adoption, so that rationale does not hold up whenever it comes to trans people. They don't have a rationale for it, not one that makes sense.

For instance, when asked about changing the word equal, the person was asked, "what does the word equal even mean now?" [00:34:00] And she responded, "equal would mean, I would assume it would mean I don't know exactly what it means in this context." That is specifically what she said.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Where are they getting these ideas from? Is this an ALEC type of situation or is there some sort of, I don't know, more conservative cultural version of ALEC these days.

ERIN REED: Of course. So the Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage Foundation are the two major players right now. We know that the Heritage Foundation released a report called Project 2025, where they intend to make transgender and LGBTQ people obscene and apply obscenity laws towards them, as well as ban LGBTQ people online as pornographic and a number of other things. Visions for the future of America, such as making the presidency absolute in power. This is what they were trying to do with these laws. This model legislation gets shotgunned everywhere. It was called out in Iowa for being from outside of Iowa. And in fact, 300 people showed up against the bill. Only three or four showed up in favor.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Amazing. It's amazing though, the durability of [00:35:00] this as a issue within these groups, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be a significant constituency that is actually genuinely interested in it. I think for a while it was probably providing some clicks for some podcasters across the spectrums, but in terms of just, real people. I think mostly people are just baffled by this.

You had a piece, I guess it was a week ago, there was audio from a Twitter Spaces where Michigan Republicans, along with Ohio Republicans, said their end game is to ban trans care for everyone, and as a Michigan Republican, aren't you like, "hey guys, maybe we should work on something else." But no. It's fascinating to me.

ERIN REED: Absolutely. And this is Representative Gary Click out of Ohio, the person who wrote the anti-trans ban in Ohio that was vetoed by Governor DeWine. It blew up into national news whenever DeWine vetoed it. He had a meeting with a bunch of Michigan Republicans, [00:36:00] where they stated that the endgame, and this is the words that they used, the endgame is to ban this for everyone whereupon Representative Click came back and said, "Yeah, but you gotta do it in small bits and incrementally, that way we can get there."

And so they're talking about this openly. They're talking about what they want to do openly, and they don't intend to stop, regardless of how popular it is, because at this point, they've got the dollars, the advertising dollars from the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. They've got the lobbyist money. They've got the very far christian right that has attempted to take hold of the country through the extreme wing of the republican party.

Jamie Lee Curtis Interviews ALOK on the World Beyond the Gender Binary Part 2 - Upfront Ventures - Air Date 3-9-23

ALOK VAID-MENON: I think what we really have to understand is that the majority of representation of trans people is not from us, it's about us. When people are getting to know trans life now, they're getting to know it from cis people's anxieties, fears, and projections about us—not our lived realities.

When people are Googling "transgender," they'll quickly be sent in two or three clicks onto a right wing news site that teaches them that trans people are predatory and dangerous. That's [00:37:00] what's fueling this anti-trans legislation and sentiment: misinformation and disinformation online. So, the first thing that we need to do is we need to actually start regulating the rampant disinformation that's spreading complete falsehoods about trans life in this country.

We need to recognize that tech is actually one of the biggest media producers now. That when people are going for news, when they're going for entertainment, they're actually seeing content that sees violence against trans people as a form of entertainment. That's the reality that we live in right now, and we have to address it.

I think the second thing we have to do is we have to stop relying on LGBTQ communities to blow the whistle. At this point, it's no longer blowing the whistle, it's no longer a dog whistle, it's an emergency siren. I keep wondering, how bad does it have to get? How many of us have to die? How many of us have to be beaten?

How many incidents like Colorado Springs do there have to be for non-trans and non-queer people to recognize that this is a state of emergency. We need [00:38:00] everyone to say this is a state of emergency. We need everyone to say that there is no factual basis in the scapegoating of LGBTQ communities, and that we cannot profit off of these hate and fear mongering campaigns.

What we need is not just resisting this legislation, but actually creating proactive legislation that protects us, that includes us in discrimination ordinances, that includes us in workplaces. Ultimately, what we need is to reframe the dialogue. That's why I was so excited to speak with you.

This is not a minority issue. We can't talk about this as a majority of people offering to assist a minority. Why would we ever want to live in a world where people are hated for expressing themselves? That's not a world I'm interested in being a part of. There is no dignity, let alone decency, let alone glamour, let alone beauty, in a world where people are persecuted for self expression.

What this attack, what this crusade, what this theology that masquerades itself as [00:39:00] biology, is actually about, is about limiting possibility for all people. It's about telling people, "You have to stay in the boxes that you were confined to growing up. You don't get to figure yourself out on your own terms."

Of course, they're coming for trans people first—because we might be the most visible—but they're gonna continue to come for everyone else right after that fact. That's what we have to reframe the dialogue. This is not about allyship. This is about the creation of a more beautiful world.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: How do we do that?

ALOK VAID-MENON: I think we gotta heal. I sound like a broken record here, but you and I both know this. We live in a culture where everyone is trying to escape from their pain. We live in an escapist culture and an addiction culture that teaches people that they have to numb themselves to their pain.

That's what transphobia is—a mass coping ritual for people to numb themselves from their own pain. It is easier to demonize trans and non-binary people. It is easier to believe in lies about us than it is to confront the fact that you were made to feel like you were never [00:40:00] gonna be woman enough, that you were never gonna be man enough, and that it was people who said that they loved you who did that to you first.

It was people who tried their best to destroy you and called it "love." It is easier to demonize me than it is to reckon with your own heartbreak. So what I read the rising tidal wave of transphobia in this country as is a grief. An unprocessed grief that people are all actually suffering from gender norms.

The thing about suffering is that it's really difficult to stay in, so people look for escapes. I think that so often the question gets framed "trans people are advocating for our humanity," and I want us to refuse that. Actually, we know our humanity. It's those who hate us who don't. We are reminding you of your humanity.

That's the difference. The truth is, in a culture that is pain escapist—in a culture that seeks to anesthetize us from actually being present in our bodies—that's not what [00:41:00] humanity is. Humanity is compassion. Humanity is interdependence. Humanity is, "If they're coming for my friend, they're coming for me."

That's what's been lost. In the silos and the borders that have been created, people can maintain the ultimate western performance art called "individualism," and it's disintegrating. So people often ask me, "Why do you continue to dress as you do, to live as incandescently as you do, knowing that you'd experience violence?" To which I respond, why do you continue to lie to yourself, knowing that you'll experience depression?

Why do you continue to sacrifice your authenticity, knowing that you're never going to experience happiness? Why do you stay in relationships that aren't serving you? It's because you're afraid, and your fear is holding you back from actually being alive. You hate me because I template what it means to be alive.

You hate me because I show you that you didn't have to clip your own wings. That you didn't have to live an abbreviated version of your joy. That you didn't have to wait for Pride. That it could be [00:42:00] Pride 24/7. That you didn't have to dress up for the event or the red carpet. That every motherfucking street could be your red carpet.

That's why trans people are being targeted. It's not because we lack, it's because we love, and we have the audacity to love the parts of ourselves that other people hate in themselves. So what I want is, actually, a societal mass reckoning with healing. I want more comprehensive therapy for all people. I want more resources for people to understand what trauma does.

I want real conversations around addiction and escapist culture. I want real conversations around the crisis of domestic violence and intimate partner violence. I want us to actually say, the reason that you're typecasting an entire group of people as predatory and dangerous that you don't know, is because that's easier for you to do than implicate your own parents, than implicate your own family, than implicate the people around you.

The reason that you're scapegoating these strangers you don't know is because you have some unresolved pain in you. The truth is, your [00:43:00] hatred is not going to help you. It's gonna premature your own death.

Jodie Foster Thinks Warner Bros. Support for Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie' is ‘New for Women Directors’ - Variety - Air Date 1-20-24

INTERVIEWER, VARIETY: Alok, I was wondering, is there a politician or somebody that you would like to talk to speak to, and sit down and really drill down your message of responding to situations with love, and how that could impact so many things in the world that are wrong and not going well?

ALOK VAID-MENON: I'm down to have hot chocolate with any of them because I think at the heart of it, as I talk about in the film, people want to make these issues deep and complex.

But when you really distill them down to the DNA, it's because people are operating from fear, from pain, from grief that's unprocessed. When you zoom in on that, when you actually remind people that we're all human, it's hard to hate people up close. What I've seen happen, especially in my community, is more people report seeing a ghost than a trans person, which means I have to text back my friends, I know. (Laughing)

I feel like what's happening right now is people don't [00:44:00] actually encounter us face-to-face. They just read articles about us, they Google us, but they don't know us. Maybe I need to do a tour across America where I just invite anyone to come and have a hot chocolate with me and ask the questions. Because once you actually encounter us, you realize that we're dealing with the same issues and all this division is holding us back from our shared humanity.

INTERVIEWER, VARIETY: The documentary starts and ends with the pronoun of "we." What do you hope resonates with audiences about that idea?

ALOK VAID-MENON: I think there's a way in which so many issues get seen as "us" and "them." Even within the LGBTQ movement, there are allies and then there are people impacted. But why would we want to live in a world where people are persecuted for being glamorous?

That's not a world that's good for anyone. "Trans rights" is not just for transgender people. It accelerates freedom, joy, and beauty for all people. So, why "we" is important, is that the point of activation for all struggles shouldn't just be, "I'm in solidarity with." A world in [00:45:00] which Native filmmakers can tell Native stories creates a better industry for all of us, even if we're not Native because it reflects what life actually is.

And I think that's what the goal of cinema should be. For so long, it's been about marketing aspiration, but I hope the next generation is, "Let's really get honest about how painful and how wonderful the world is."

BONUS How the Media Gets Trans Coverage Wrong Part 2 - Medium - Air Date 8-19-23

KATHERINE ALEJANDRA CROSS - MODERATOR, MEDIUM: Yes, and speaking of that sort of thing, one of the recurring motifs in the moral panic has been the press sort of channeling this anxiety, whether sincere or cynical or some combination of both, about detransitioners, those people who took significant steps to medically transition genders but then reverted to their starting gender. And so, why is this and how might the story of this real but rare phenomenon be better served by the press?

JULIA SERANO: So, uh, I should say since we're, with this is Medium day, my most recent Medium article is called [00:46:00] "Spotting Anti-Trans Bias on Detransition" and I go to a lot there, including like delving into the statistics of detransition and regret, talking about dynamic transgender trajectories that sometimes involve people detransitioning or deciding, Hey, I'm non-binary now, and all of that.

The one thing that I feel that is really important as I was working on it is, even though detransition is a very complex phenomenon and people detransition for lots of reasons, including pressure from family, societal transphobia, the one thing that comes up over and over again is it seems like audiences and journalists really gravitate towards what I call in the piece the mistaken and regretted detransition or the mistaken and regretted transition And this really preys on two biases that cisgender people generally have, which is, one, they just assume everyone's cisgender, so when people are transgender, [00:47:00] they tend to assume that we're merely confused or deluded cisgender people. And the second one is people tend to see, and this is true of all dominant majority groups, but with regards to cisgender versus transgender, cisgender is constructed as natural and pure and transgender is viewed as artificial, defective, and corrupted.

So, when you take that together, when people hear about someone de transitioning, they often jump to the conclusion that, Oh, see, they really were a cisgender person who realized that they were just confused or deluded, and now they must regret what happened to them because, God, what worse could happen to you than, you know, being a cisgender person trapped in a transgendered body?, which I kind of took that phrase from the more typical cliché that a lot of people are familiar with. But I think it immediately resonates with people and people immediately jump to the conclusion, when you say detransition, even though I know lots of people who have detransitioned for all sorts of different life reasons, that [00:48:00] is the conclusion they jump to and that conclusion very much plays into the idea that transitioning itself, especially for trans youth, must be suspect and dangerous.

DEVON PRICE: Yeah, I think that is a very real instinctual reaction, or, you know, maybe not actually instinctual, but you know, this knee jerk reaction that a lot of cis people have to the idea of detransition. And it also, again, bears mentioning that there was a very coordinated attack on the part of TERFs, first of all, to recruit, and conversion therapy people, primarily transmasculine people, into being members of their movement and into being the faces of "transition regret", and even some of those people, again, who have been really prominent voices in that movement have already desisted from the detransitioner TERF movement and recognized it as a hate group that it is, and been outspoken now again about the role that they once played in advancing transphobic legislation and how much they regret that.

People like Carrie Callahan, people like Ky Schevers, and [00:49:00] other people in the group Health Liberation Now, if anyone's curious about that. That was part of how, you know, maybe understandable given the understanding of gender that most cis people have, that those fears that they have, it was really taken advantage of and put to use by a really coordinated attack and one that even did get some trans people in the loop and weaponized them and they also played an active role in it to a certain extent.

BONUS The Anatomy of a Moral Panic Ft. Dr. Julia Serano Part 3 - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 2-21-24

GARRISON DAVIS - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: This is something that you mentioned briefly in the, uh, afterward. That's something that we've reported on is how a lot of this groomer thing that started in 2022 and a whole bunch of this kind of modern wave of transphobia. Is mirroring a lot of the anti gay stuff from like the 80s that was pushed forward by a lot of like evangelicals, and then into just like mainstream conservatism, and specifically how it functions as this sort of like moral panic and even social contagion, the way homosexuality was treated as this thing. And this sort of social contagion aspect is so common now. I mean, even the way, we've already alluded to Musk, even the way he mentions [00:50:00] like the woke mind virus is exactly this thing. And as it relates to like moral panics and stuff, right?, this was kind of predated by the critical race theory debacle which then got, you know, turned into the groomer thing.

MIA WONG - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: And it is now the DEI thing.

GARRISON DAVIS - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, exactly. And now it's even changed again. And these moral panics can have like devastating results in terms of pushing forward legislation that outlasts the actual moral panic. But the actual things themselves are very short lived. They don't seem to have very much like staying power as like cultural moments. They move on so quickly. Like, no one talks about critical race theory anymore. You don't even hear this sort of groomer rhetoric as often as you did two years ago. It's being replaced by new versions. And yeah, like Mia said, the DDEI thing is the current thing that is wrecking American society, if you ask about maybe one third of the population. But yeah, how do you feel about the life cycle of these moral panics and how they relate to the social [00:51:00] contagion aspect?

JULIA SERANO: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with all the things you're citing. I think these are all different variations of kind of the same idea. And I do really appreciate the idea of the woke mind virus as being kind of like the perfect, like, the exemplar of this, in that people were complaining about stuff being woke for a while, and you know, usually it's often coded as something that's woke is like antiracist or is something, like, it's very much associated with, infused with... when people complain about wokeism, a lot of times they're racist, or at the very least they have fears about the corruption of pure whiteness being corrupted by increasing people of color and, you know, like making gains in society, right?

But the woke mind virus, because no one could really explain what woke is, because then it keeps shifting and it refers to trans people or critical race theory and et cetera, and the woke mind virus is like perfect because [00:52:00] that's how they think it all works. Like, it's just this thing that infects people, especially children, and the way in which there is... a recent thing just today, I think it was Ackerman, the billionaire, who's been involved in a lot of this DEI stuff, complaining about his child being infected in college with Marxism, and Elon Musk had similar issues with his trans daughter, like, becoming pro-Marx or anti-capitalist, and so they just assume that like, No, my child was pure, but now they're infected. It's like, Well, maybe there are other ideas out there that are better than your idea. And maybe that's all it is.

But, but yeah, so I think in all of these cases, yes, I think that there's this idea of a contagion or corruption often involving children. And it is, yeah, a lot of the moral panic, [00:53:00] a lot of the literature, like the social sciences literature on moral panics, they often describe them as fleeting. The anti-trans one isn't fleeting enough right now, from my perspective. But people will tend to kind of move on. Like the satanic panic of the 80s, you know, like that was a really big deal and then all of a sudden it was just gone. And no one ever talked about it again. I think the difference here is that a lot of these moral panics are really tied together with what's happening in the country, more generally with anti-democratic and authoritative views coming from, particularly the right wing of the country, like one of the two major political parties. It's really pushing a lot of, just generally across the board, you know, they're against feminism, they're against people of color, against LGBTQ+ people, and I think it's all wrapped up [00:54:00] into the same thing.

I think that while individual parts of the moral panic may go away, they may talk about critical race theory for a bit, and then shift to trans people being groomers, then shift to DEI, but I think a lot of this is they're all intertwined, and actually I think that's, like... the last couple paragraphs of the 'Afterword', I talk about that as a potentially good thing, because even though it's been a harrowing time to be a trans person, with all the anti-trans legislation, and all the anti-trans news stories, all the pushes back on gender affirming care, despite all that, I think, the good thing is that there are clear sides here. And I think, while this wasn't true early on in the anti-trans backlash, in the 2010s, I think most people realize now that all these things are tied together from the right wing perspective in this country. It's just against all these things. They want [00:55:00] a White, Christian, straight minority of people running everything about this country. And so I think the rest of us really need to recognize that and work together to defeat that.

Final comments on a new reframing of the right to the freedom of sex

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with It Could Happen Here debunking some of the pseudoscience around gender. Thom Hartmann discussed the states attacking trans people. The Upfront Summit featured a discussion between Jamie Lee Curtis and ALOK that looked at the financial incentives to subjugate trans people. Medium looked at the media role in trans panic. It Could Happen Here discussed trans stigma and how it's communicated. The Majority Report looked at the conservative organizations pushing trans subjugation. Continuing the discussion, ALOK connected the persecution of trans people to the pain of others. And Variety also spoke with ALOK, who pointed out that it's difficult to hate people up close.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard a bonus clips from Medium, tackling [00:56:00] some misconceptions about detransitioning, and It Could Happen Here looked at how moral panic language has morphed over time.

To hear that and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feeds you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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 to wrap up, I wanted to tell you a bit about this article from New York Magazine. The headline is "Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies". And it's long and in depth and very interesting. I recommend you check out the whole thing, but at its absolute core, it is a fundamental reframing of the debate over the right to gender affirming care. And up to this point, the argument for supporting access to needed healthcare for trans people has been based [00:57:00] on a medical diagnosis, right?, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. And the article argues that "by insisting on the medical validity of the diagnosis, progressives have reduced the question of justice to a question of who has the appropriate disease. In so doing, they have given the anti-trans movement a powerful tool for systematically pathologizing trans kids".

And the risk here fundamentally is that if you base rights on something medical, then, if the medical evidence is at all debatable, which is basically what the whole trans debate is about right now, then so are the rights. So, if the medical evidence can be debated, refuted, called into question, then all of a sudden people's rights are also being called into question. So the fundamental reframing of this debate goes something like [00:58:00] this: " We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history".

So, the article goes on to give examples of instances when people are given access to medical care to help maintain aspects of their sex, which society currently deems to be an unquestioned right, including menopausal hormone therapy and genital reconstruction surgery, "the result of Pentagon-funded research aimed at [00:59:00] restoring the dignity of soldiers whose genitals were damaged or destroyed by improvised explosives". And so in a sweeping statement about fundamental rights, referring to trans people who are being targeted to halt access to medical treatment, the article draws this contrast. "The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are White and affluent, this right belongs to them, too", trans kids, it's referring to. "We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse, but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious foods and [01:00:00] clean water, and crucially the right to health care. I am speaking here of a universal birthright: the freedom of sex. This freedom consists of two principle rights: the right to change one's biological sex without appealing to gender, and the right to assume a gender that is not determined by one's sexual biology. One might exercise both of these rights towards a common goal, transitioned, for instance, but neither can be collapsed into the other".

In essence, this boils down to giving everyone healthcare and the freedom to access it as they see fit. And I think the response to that would be like, Oh my God, you're just going to let anybody do whatever they want. And it's not that there aren't safeguards described in this article, but the safeguards are also inverted from barriers to rights. Continuing, [01:01:00] "As for transition-related care itself, the right to change sex includes the right to receive counseling, to understand the risks, or to be treated for co-morbidities. In fact, society has a duty to make these resources freely and widely accessible to trans kids". And the reference to co-morbidities is part of the argument that, Well, what if these kids aren't really trans? What if they're just something else? What if they're just autistic or stressed or confused or whatever? And I think that is what this is referring to. Yeah, people should be treated for everything, given the counseling they need, and then still allowed to choose whatever they want to do with their own bodies. And so to directly address the worry of people still going ahead and making the wrong choices for themselves, the article takes this head-on as well. "The freedom of [01:02:00] sex does not promise happiness, nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the fixation on the health risks of sex changing care, or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will".

So at the very core of this reframing is the simple idea that freedom to choose one's own path should be at the [01:03:00] forefront and should not be contained within existing social structures. And really that's a much better foundation to start from than the medicalization of trans people, when forming a debate. Give people all the information, let them choose for themselves, and acknowledge that regrets are in escapable, but a completely worthwhile trade off for the benefits of freedom. Put in any other context, who would argue otherwise? And if not, then why not also here?

If you do want to do a deeper dive, definitely check out the full article. Again, it's "Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies". It's from the New York Magazine 'Intelligencer'.

That is going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at [01:04:00] 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 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 on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, 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 bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find the link to sign up in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord [01:05:00] community, where you can continue the discussion.

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 from bestoftheleft.com.

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#1616 The Party of Putin and the Propaganda Leading the GOP to Trump and the US to Russian-Style Autocracy (Transcript)

Posted by · March 14, 2024 2:10 PM

Air Date 3/15/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we take a look at the result of Republicans having been trending toward Putin fandom for more than a decade, but with each passing year, the stakes get higher, the propaganda gets more brazen, and what they're willing to support gets more grotesque.

For context, my first glimpse into this worldview was from a conservative listener around a decade or more ago, who kindly explained to us on the left, that what we were not getting was that Republicans actually like Putin. At the time there was maybe confusion over the pivot from the cold warrior, anti-Russia all the time perspective to the new sort of, at the time, lukewarm embrace of Russia on some issues. And what he explained was that clearly times have changed and Putin was the kind of strong man leader conservatives liked. So why not like Putin's Russia? Why not, indeed?

Sources today [00:01:00] include Brian Tyler Cohen, MSNBC, On the Media. The Hartmann Report, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The BradCast, with an additional members-only clip from Gaslit Nation.

Chris Wallace DESTROYS former colleague Tucker Carlson - Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 2-10-24

CHRIS WALLACE: Tucker Carlson showed up in Moscow this week to interview Vladimir Putin. It turned out to be anything but an interview. Putin droned on for two hours and seven minutes, while Tucker sat there like an eager puppy. Occasionally, but rarely, he got in a question, like this one, about the power of the deep state in Washington DC

TUCKER CARLSON: It sounds like you're describing a system that's not run by the people who are elected in your telling.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: That's right. That's right.

CHRIS WALLACE: But more telling than what Tucker asked is what he didn't ask. Nothing about why Putin invaded a sovereign country. Nothing about targeting civilians. Nothing about Russian war crimes. A reporter can [00:02:00] ask Putin a tough question, if he wants a real interview.

Why is it that so many of the people that oppose Vladimir Putin end up dead or close to it?

But apparently, that's not why Tucker went to Moscow. During the Cold War, gullible Westerners who spread Soviet propaganda were dismissed as useful idiots, but calling Tucker that is unfair... to useful idiots. No he's made a cynical decision to chase MAGA's affection for dictators. And what better way to cash in than Putin's Kremlin?

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRAIN TYLER COHEN: Now you might have seen Tucker Carlson's big hard hitting interview with Vladimir Putin, which was definitely not right wing Russian propaganda, as evidenced by statements like this.

TUCKER CARLSON: We ourselves have put in a request for an interview with Zelensky and we hope he accepts. But the interviews he's already done in the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning pep sessions specifically [00:03:00] designed to amplify Zelensky's demand that the US enter more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it. That is not journalism. It is government propaganda. Propaganda of the ugliest kind, the kind that kills people.

At the same time, our politicians and media outlets have been doing this, promoting a foreign leader like he's a new consumer brand, not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.

Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine, or what his goals are now. They've never heard his voice. That's wrong.

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRAIN TYLER COHEN: Most Americans have no idea why Putin launched his invasion into Ukraine. Not like he's been broadcasting his desire to take back territory that was lost during the fall of the Soviet Union for years. Not like he's already tried to annex Crimea and Georgia, and most recently announced the annexation of four regions in Ukraine, which Putin himself said would be "Russian forever". But sure, we can't possibly figure out why he launched this war. [00:04:00]

And one more point on Tucker. Thank God we have someone like him to call out those in the media who lie in service of the government. That's right, without totally independent, impartial Tucker Carlson, who would be there to call out all of the partisan hacks who advocate openly for one political party over the other? At least someone out there is willing to keep the government honest But also, think about why Tucker Carlson and the rest of the right wing ecosystem love Vladimir Putin and Russia. The answer is that they are aligned.

Trump and Republicans support Russia because Russia is content to meddle on their behalf, just like they did in 2016. And while Donald Trump loves to rewrite history and yell no collusion all day, just remember that the Russia investigation resulted in 34 people and 3 Russian businesses indicted, as well as 7 guilty pleas.

And because Republicans are solely interested in power, and yes, that very much includes Tucker Carlson, then they welcome the support from the Kremlin and are happy to reciprocate. And in terms of what Putin gets out of the deal, Russia wants Trump in power because Trump will help undermine NATO, which is the biggest [00:05:00] impediment to Russian expansion and imperialism. Trump today expressed his desire to do exactly that.

DONALD TRUMP: One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, "Well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?" I said, "you didn't pay, you're delinquent?" He said, "yes." "Let's say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay."

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRAIN TYLER COHEN: Again, a mutually beneficial relationship. Putin helps the Republicans electorally, who will then take power and push us away from NATO, which will allow Putin to expand his empire. Putin found a useful idiot in Trump, and he'll be damned if he's not gonna do everything he can to help him, Which means getting Republicans in power. Again, a mutually beneficial relationship with a bunch of autocratic egomaniacs at the center.

In terms of what Tucker stands to gain, Chris Wallace noted it perfectly. He is cashing in off of MAGA's affection for dictators. Look, it's already clear that there's a love affair between Trump and Putin, the reasons for which I just laid out. And so because the cult [00:06:00] leader says that Putin is good, then the rest of his cult blindly follows along. And so knowing that Putin's stock is rising within the cult that is the Republican base, Tucker is simply jumping on the bandwagon and meeting the Republicans where they are. Remember, right wing media doesn't influence the base, the base influences them. During Trump's election theft claims of 2020, Fox News, for example, knew that it had to repeat those claims or risk losing audience share to Newsmax. They won't report the truth, but they report what the base is desperate to hear. It is the tail wagging the dog.

Plus, of course, the other side of that, Republicans love Putin because he's an autocrat. Trump has spent years fawning over Kim Jong un and Duterte and Erdoğan and Bolsonaro and any other right wing autocrat who catches his eye. There is nothing more the right in general loves more than the appearance of a strongman. For a bunch of self proclaimed alphas, they spend an awful lot of time demanding that a tough man rule them. These people love nothing more than to be under the thumb of a powerful man, and that's exactly what they got from Donald Trump.

And by the way, don't take my word for [00:07:00] it, take Trump's. It was him who demanded that a president should be able to do whatever he wants with impunity. He is arguing right now in court that a president should be able to commit crimes and not face any prosecution.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I can say presidential immunity, which we'll be talking about because that will be upcoming. It's very, very important for a president to have. If a president doesn't have immunity, he really doesn't have a presidency. He can be told to do things that he would never do. He can do really bad things for our country. Presidential immunity is imperative. It's going to be very, very important.

And I'd rather talk about that next week, but there is nothing more important to a presidency than immunity. Because they have to be free to make decisions without saying, Oh, if I do this or if I do that, as soon as I get out of office, we're going to be indicted. We're going to have trouble and the other party will do that.

I think we've seen that they've done that. There's some very bad people. And you have an opposition party and they will do things that are very bad. If you don't have immunity, you could be blackmailed. [00:08:00] You could be, as a president, they'll say if you don't do this, this, and this, we're going to indict you as soon as you leave office.

You cannot allow a president to be out there without immunity. They don't have immunity, you don't have a presidency. You lose all form of free thought and good thought.

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRAIN TYLER COHEN: And it's worth noting, by the way, that presidents already have immunity from civil litigation. You can't sue a president for policies you don't like, for example. It's just criminal violations that a president can be prosecuted for. If your argument is that a president needs to commit felonies while in office to be able to effectively govern, you might have just lost the plot. So good on Chris Wallace for calling Tucker out for doing what he and so many others in the right wing media ecosystem have made a living doing, clinging onto the dictatorial tendencies of Donald Trump and cashing in for relevance. These people are a bunch of barnacles attaching themselves to a sinking ship, and we should do whatever we can to make sure that it sinks even faster.

Trump voters tell NBC Reporter that ‘Russia is not our enemy - MSNBC - Air Date 2-27-24

VAUGHN HILLYARD: If Russia did take over Ukraine, would it give you any [00:09:00] pause?

NEWS CLIP: I don't have a problem with Russia, I really don't I have a problem with Ukraine. They're corrupt. I think that people are just ridiculous that they think that Putin is such this enemy. He isn't doing anything. He just wants back what was his.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: He invaded Ukraine, killing thousands of people.

NEWS CLIP: That's fine. That's fine with me.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: As a veteran yourself, does it concern you at all that Russian aggression could move even beyond Ukraine?

NEWS CLIP: I don't think Putin's a problem. I think Zelinsky is the problem.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: Why do you think Putin's not the problem? He's the one that invaded Ukraine and has killed thousands of people.

NEWS CLIP: Because Putin is trying to save his country from the likes of idiots like Zelensky and the elitists.

This administration's trying to start a war with Russia. Russia's not our enemy.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, MSNBC: Russia's not our enemy. Wow. It's chilling. It fits in. Those people weren't asking to have their voices altered or talking to Vaughn behind curtains, talking to him on camera. It fits in [00:10:00] perfectly and alarmingly with our new series, American Autocracy, It Could Happen Here. We are so lucky that Vaughn has agreed to help us understand how we got here.

In the coming weeks, he'll be joining us with his reporter's notebook, his exquisite ability to cut through the noise that happens in studios like this, one and help us understand what's actually happening in the country. So we were talking before about how this vote to not provide funding for Ukraine in Washington gets covered as though it is detached from these kind of women who love Putin and hate Zelensky. Knit those things back together for us.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: I think it's important for folks to understand that while we go to these Trump rallies around the country, engage in these conversations, it's not a matter of whether the US should be engaged either with personnel or with aid in foreign wars. That's not what the conversation is. It's a matter of whether Vladimir Zelensky is evil or not. Or whether Putin is in the right to further move beyond [00:11:00] Russia's own boarder lines.

This is where it is difficult and complicated because we're talking about the conditioning of his supporters. Ruth Ben Ghiat and Ian have been so poignant about this year, because from two years ago, when we were first having conversations about the devastating images coming out of Mariupol. We're talking about war crimes. And where over the last two years we have gone after listening to Donald Trump suggest that he would broker some deal between Ukraine and Russia, never a flat out condemning Vladimir Putin's aggression here, suggesting just last week that Russia could do whatever the hell they want. Those words have impact on these communities around the country and these folks that we are talking to because it hits at the crux of what the US 's role in the world is as a democracy and whether we are going to be defending other democracies and our allies against the autocrats like Vladimir Putin.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, MSNBC: Let me ask you this. Are these people, does it expand to relitigating the Cold War?

VAUGHN HILLYARD: [00:12:00] This for them is, it's a matter of what you heard that one man say, "what is Russia's". That this is a matter...

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, MSNBC: But that's what the Cold War, right? Do they want the wall back up in Berlin? Do they want to give it all? Is it that deep or is it a more shallow, reflexive affection for Putin and animosity for Zelensky.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: I think largely it is very shallow. This is, when we're talking about Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson's conversation just two weeks ago with Vladimir Putin that went on for more than two hours. The number of folks that told me that they listened to it and they walked away more sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, that they understood where he was coming from. Tucker Carlson is somebody who Donald Trump has floated as his vice president. That Don Jr. has said that he would wish for him to be the VP. That's where Donald Trump's words have impact, because he is telling folks that this is somebody that you should listen to, that this is a valid voice. And when that valid voice goes over to Russia and talks with Vladimir Putin, you have, therefore, legitimacy in these folks minds to go back into their communities, talk with their family members, go to their churches, go to their kids [00:13:00] schools, and echo, parrot, Russian propaganda. That the US should not be sending our own taxpayer money to Ukraine because it's It is Ukraine that is evil that is the one that is corrupt. And this is where it is so tough, so often, to untangle the the lies, the Russian propaganda and frankly, the conspiracy theories that, again, it doesn't hit at the heart of the normal foreign policy conversation that we, as Democrats and Republicans have...

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, MSNBC: Somebody says your out to get sound. Let me show some of what you're hearing. Can we play that?

VAUGHN HILLYARD: Does Russian aggression concern you, that they could...

NEWS CLIP: No.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: Why not?

NEWS CLIP: Because I watched Tucker Carlson's interview. Putin don't really want to do anything, I think that's old news. I don't really think that he wants to do anything.

VAUGHN HILLYARD: Do you think that Russia has ill intent towards the United States?

NEWS CLIP: I don't. No, I don't. After watching the interview with Tucker Carlson, I do not.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, MSNBC: What do you do?

VAUGHN HILLYARD: To my point exactly. The hardest part [00:14:00] about these conversations is this woman otherwise seems like a nice human being. Producer Dan, who is shooting all this video with me. He's been traveling with me since the summer to go and shoot all of these interviews. We have not shown any of them till now, here. This one was just last week, but producer Dan, he actually did five stints in Ukraine, working with our colleagues over there, each one of those was a month. In the hardest part for him and conversing with him here is just how separate of a reality that he witnessed with his own eyes, civilian deaths, and you come back here in this person, and then a woman like this can go there with confidence and say that Vladimir Putin is not an enemy, that Russia is not an enemy of democracy, of the United States.

We are suddenly at the brink of having a legitimate conversation in our communities that our kids are engaged in on whether Russia, who has slaughtered thousands of people in Ukraine, is in the right or in the wrong. And those are the [00:15:00] conversations that are happening in our communities around the country.

American Patriots Support... Vladimir Putin - On the Media - Air Date 3-4-22

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Spencer, a White supremacist, has described Russia as the sole White power in the world. Although it isn't, because it's multi ethnic, like we are.

CASEY MICHEL: One of the great ironies in following all these White nationalistic figures, and they're overweening support for Putin, lusting after this kind of strongman type in Washington is they have a very particular view of Russia and of Putin in particular. He is a White, masculine, Christian, European leader.

They don't usually refer to him as a dictator, but that's obviously what they see him as. Pushing back against same sex marriage, pushing back against any kind of expanded understanding of notions like gender identity. They do not understand that Russia is this remarkably diverse country with great numbers of ethnic and religious minorities. I think they have this image that Russia is a White man's paradise for them without actually realizing what it's like on the ground in Russia itself.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You write that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard [00:16:00] of the Knights of the KKK. has said Russia is the key to White survival and that other far right figures should go there to better learn how to grow their movements here.

CASEY MICHEL: David Duke lived in Russia for a number of years and we still have very little idea of what he was actually doing over there. We know that his book, this incredible racist tract, was sold in the Douma Bookstore, the bookstore for the Russian parliament. But we still don't have any idea about the kinds of connections he made, the kinds of potential funding that he received. In addition to all these other White nationalistic figures whose links we're still beginning to sift through to figure out how some of these groups may be involved in ongoing interference efforts here. Certainly in 2016, but by no means limited to that election.

I think David Duke is symptomatic of the hard right Christian nationalist, White supremacist contingent over the past two decades gravitating to of all places, the Kremlin, which is such a whiplash from where things were during the cold war, obviously when the Soviets were around. It is a one 80 that I still haven't [00:17:00] wrapped my mind around.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You spoke to Cole Park, an LGBT researcher with Political Research Associates who told you it's difficult to say who's inspiring whom, but there's a lot of cross fertilization, it seems, going on.

CASEY MICHEL: These are mutually reinforcing dynamics. You have those in the United States that are watching this incredible demographic change take place. They're watching, in 2008, the election of the country's first Black president, they're watching things like same sex marriage become legalized, and beginning to search out other sources of inspiration and support for what they see as traditionalist values. While in Russia, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, you have the consolidation of power in Moscow. You have any kind of dreams of broader democratization falling away. You have the return of Putin to the presidency in 2012. And all of a sudden you see these elements of this outreach looking for broader fertile audiences to spread Moscow's message.

And what we see taking place, especially by the early 2010s is this [00:18:00] activation of these different networks targeting American White nationalists, far right separatists and secessionists, American evangelicals. And all of a sudden you begin looking into these interpersonal linkages, these organizational linkages, funding linkages and funding mechanisms to specifically groom and hopefully activate these White nationalist contingents in the United States, to sow chaos, to lead to potential bloodshed and if Putin would have his way, potential state fracture in the United States itself. Again, remember, Putin very much blames the United States of America for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fragmentation into 15 new countries.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: As to when all this began, you say it was the late 2000s and the early 2010s that were an inflection point. And of course, you can't underestimate the impact on these extremists of having a Black president.

CASEY MICHEL: This is exactly where Donald Trump emerges from. Trump rose to political prominence, claiming that Obama was born outside of the United States. It's this [00:19:00] broader rubric of racist, racialist pushback against the way that the country is going and into the breach these Russian funded figures and organizations step. Certain oligarchs, networks, organizations, reaching out and building bridges to Americans on the far right and the hard right and building these kinds of, they call it the traditionalist international, building this broader movement to a greater degree than they probably ever thought.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And you've said that at a 10,000 foot level, the goal of the Christian White nationalists here is to find and elect a Putin style figure with a similar political dynamic to unify various Christian nationalist groups.

CASEY MICHEL: It is as clear as day that these organizations and groups and networks would like nothing more than to have, whether it's Donald Trump or some other similar figure in power in the White House. If they can't get their way, they're willing to lead separatist or secessionist movements and do what they can to, if [00:20:00] nothing else, throw sticks in the spokes of America's broader democratic experiment of alliances and of the West's broader efforts to push back against things like the aggression we are now seeing out of Moscow and all the bloodshed in Ukraine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You've also written that the White nationalist, Matthew Heinbach, he's the head of the Traditionalist Workers Party, considers Putin to be the leader of the free world, and seeks to create a global network called Traditionalist Internationale.

What is that, and how hypothetical is it?

CASEY MICHEL: Thankfully, we are a long way away from the realization of the Traditionalist Internationale, but the fact that we do see support for it in the United States, in Europe, and certainly out of Moscow, is something that we have to continue watching. At the end of the day, it's exactly what we've been talking about is the entrenchment of Putinist style regimes in Washington, Ottawa, London, Brussels, and [00:21:00] elsewhere.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Okay, so let's talk about what happened in 2015. The leading lights of Europe's far right, including members of Austria's Freedom Party, people from Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, the UK, they got together in Petersburg. You say this meeting was one of the most notable gatherings of Europe's xenophobic far right, but was it significant?

CASEY MICHEL: It was again one of these signal flares where you realize. That there is far more organization, there is far greater depth to these networks than would seem at initial blush. Usually these organizations, they operate in a domestic context. You don't see these international gatherings, anything like this magnitude, except once almost in a generation. And that just so happened to be in 2015, in Russia, in St. Petersburg.

These groups didn't come back to Washington, or come back to Athens, or come back to Oslo, and all of a sudden begin implementing legislation, but one of the things that we have seen time and again out of Russia is an ability to [00:22:00] build these bridges across Europe, across North America.

Brooke, I don't think there's any surprise that while that conference was happening, the same exact type of transatlantic transnational conference was happening of separatist and secessionists in Moscow, many of whom are also on the far right from places like Spain, like Italy, including Texas secessionists flying over to Russia to coordinate with all these other separatists organized out of Moscow.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: What happens if we ignore Putin's role as a global leader for White Christian nationalism?

CASEY MICHEL: I do want to encourage listeners to maybe broaden their aperture about what potential outcomes we may be facing later this decade. I'm not saying anything like this is going to happen during the midterm, it's not going to happen in the run up to the next election, but this is a period of drastic, change coming ahead of us. Any number of outcomes is possible. I'm not at all saying that this White Christian nationalistic outcome is the one that's staring us in the face, but there's certainly a [00:23:00] possibility in which, say, Joe Biden runs again in 2024, wins again, Donald Trump refuses to concede, and we see an expansion of the January 6th type violence, and what flows from that, I have no idea.

The Dark and Destructive Vision of Putin's GOP - The Hartmann Report - Air Date 2-27-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Heidi, welcome back to the program. You've been writing about Mike Johnson and his ties to Russia. Tell me about that.

HEIDI SIEGMUND CUDA: As the second anniversary of the large scale invasion of Russia's war of aggression was approaching, I was thinking that the most important thing that we can do as investigative reporters is focus our energy on Mike Johnson.

Because as you know, Ukrainian soldiers are counting their bullets on the battlefield right now. Well, in 2018, Mike Johnson was taking money from Russian oligarchs. And how do we know that? Because there were enough investigative reporters still around then to actually report that there was a company called American Ethane, lol. It's actually funded. The main shareholders were three Russian oligarchs.

And why does it matter? Because one of them owns a munitions [00:24:00] factory in Russia which is producing the ammunition that is currently being used to commit genocide in Ukraine. So it's very important that nobody confuses who Mike Johnson really is. This is a mild mannered domestic terrorist who has spent a career trying to take away our rights, my rights, my children's rights. And now he is actually doing photo ops in Mar a Lago while the body count around this man is really piling up.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I noticed that the amount of money that he received was not that great. Do you think that it was just something that slipped through?

HEIDI SIEGMUND CUDA: It's not the point. It's that Russia continues to be a malign influence on our elections. This is just one example. He got funding from Robert Mercer. What else did Robert Mercer fund? Breitbart, Parler, Cambridge Analytica, and Mike Johnson, who might be the greatest weapon of democratic destruction.

So for me, it's not about the amount of money or whether or not he returned the [00:25:00] money, it's that we have. Russian oligarchs having a malign and outsized influence on our elections. And this is just one example. And as you know, there are multiple ties between Mike Johnson, the Council for National Policy, a shadowy network, that is also tied to a religious extremists in Russia, all funded by the fossil fuel industry.

So it's the same cabals that we continually report on, and yet we miss the big picture that this is part of a religious extremist power grab in America that is also tied to religious extremists in Russia.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah. It's almost like there's a confluence of religious crackpots, right wing religious crackpots and the fossil fuel industry getting together. Both here in the United States and certainly in Russia. Putin is going out of his way to declare Russia a Christian nation, and his anti gay [00:26:00] laws that he's just passed in the last few months, and the real crackdown on the LGBTQ community there. It's pretty grim stuff and it clearly is the vision that these people have for America

HEIDI SIEGMUND CUDA: It's a very dark and destructive vision, and Thom, my work is informed by two documentaries that I just watched, Bad Faith and God and Country, and both of them show that the religious extremist movement, this decades long plot, was actually the origins are from racism. The origins are from school integration and religious extremists that tried to have their own private schools to deny that integration. And when that was not allowed, you had these extremists realizing that's not going to be a narrative to mobilize voters. So that's how they came up with this anti abortion narrative, which Mike Johnson is right in the heart of. So much of his work is built around that. And in fact, he [00:27:00] had a nonprofit where one of the CNP leaders, Tony Perkins, was also part of that.

So he is part of this very dangerous network that actually wants to, take away our rights and turn America into this religious theocracy, which is not what we are about. And Thom I want to let you know, I saw God and Country, which is a Rob and Michelle produced film. And I saw it in Sonoma yesterday and Sonoma, California, you think of it as this beautiful progressive enclave. What's happening in Sonoma now is that an affiliate with a core member of the CNP is buying up a lot of real estate, affiliated with a megachurch, and people in Sonoma are looking around going, what's happening to my community? Thankfully, there's an organization called Wake Up Sonoma that is trying to wake people up.

But this is being replicated throughout the country, and Mike Johnson is the apex of this. He [00:28:00] is, like I said, a mild manner, in my view, domestic terrorists, religious terrorists. These are extremists. And one thing I would like your viewers to think about that I'm putting a lot of effort thinking about is how un American this movement is.

Christian nationalism is un American. It has nothing to do with Christianity. In fact, I think if people who were truly religious knew how their empathy and hearts were being weaponized to destroy democracy, they might not actually like it. But I find him to be incredibly dangerous. And while he's having photo ops in Mar a Lago, people are actually dying.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Christian nationalism is an oxymoron. I believe it was a centurion came to Jesus and said, " should I pay my taxes?" and Jesus said, "whose face is on the coin that you'd pay with?" And the guy said, "Caesar", and Jesus said, "render unto Caesar what Caesar's, render unto God what's God's." Basically, separation of church and state. I'm not seeing that being respected by the Republican and religious right that really, as [00:29:00] you correctly point out, really got kicked off in 1954 with the Brown vs Board of Education decision.

HEIDI SIEGMUND CUDA: Yes, exactly. We can't underestimate these dangers. And we also need to remind people that these are extremists, and they are doing these extreme moves because they do not have the votes. And what happened when Roe was overturned, they found out 70 percent of the population did not like that. And they will continually now, in order to create that outrage and that perpetual state of fear that they keep people in, they will continually find new witches to burn.

Former CIA Director explains how Russia is using 'Republican lawmakers as tools’ - MSNBC - Air Date 2-25-24

MICHAEL STEELE - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: I want to continue down that line because I'm particularly offended and just really annoyed with the constant nonsense coming from leaders who have the intelligence. These are not folks who are sitting in a closet, unaware of what's going on around them. I want to play for you, you've got James Comer talking, he and Jim Jordan, talking about this whole situation. If we could just [00:30:00] take a quick listen at that.

NEWS CLIP: We never knew who the informant was. All we knew was what Christopher Wray said. Now we see that the FBI arrested him for lying. It doesn't make sense. It's not the same treatment that we saw when the FBI figured out that the Steele dossier.

Who knows? Maybe this guy lied to the FBI, maybe they're right, but I just see a pattern that seems to be developing here over the last three presidential elections.

MICHAEL STEELE - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: Maybe it was this. I didn't know about that. Oh, maybe the Steele dossier. It's just the shear incompetence behind what we see these members who are sitting on important committees that have this information. What is the impact inside of the various agencies, our intel agencies, when they see members taking intelligence and using it this way?

JOHN BRENNAN: Well, I think it's very much appalling to my former colleagues who worked so hard to try to protect our country's national security. But then we have the Republican lawmakers right now [00:31:00] who are using things like this as a way to attack the president, and quite unfairly. But also, I think that my colleagues are concerned that the Russians see the Republican lawmakers as tools. They are so willing to accept anything, and Russians use information operations very effectively. And I have no doubt at all that they're going to continue to use it in this presidential election.

And the fact that Comer and Jordan and others willingly accept these things, and they don't care whether it's true or not, as long as it's salacious, as long as it's something that they can use. This is something that I think the Russians recognize is ready for their exploitation.

ALICIA MENENDEZ - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: Bingo. And we heard something very similar from Congressman Jamie Raskin. I want you to take a listen to what he said and we'll talk about it on the other side.

JAMIE RASKIN: Yesterday's revelations demonstrate that Putin's pattern of interference and destabilization of foreign democratic elections around the world, including in America, has continued to this very day. And this impeachment investigation [00:32:00] is nothing but a wild goose chase that is based on Russian disinformation.

ALICIA MENENDEZ - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: So this is about injecting an element of chaos. We know from the Mueller Report 2016, there were signs of Russian interference. 2020 reports of Russian interference in US elections. As we approach 2024, we have to presume that there will be similar efforts. Do you feel that the CIA, that the FBI are prepared for the possibility of that type of interference? What are they doing right now?

JOHN BRENNAN: Well, I think they're trying to uncover all the things that the Russians are trying to do and information operations takes many different forms. It can be disinformation. It can be fabricated information that is provided to human sources like a Mr Smirnoff. It can be allowing the dissemination of information that is going to advance their interests in terms of things that they want to help Donald Trump, in terms of his campaign. Also things to smear Joe Biden. So their information operations, fabrication, dissemination, propagation is trying to influence the attitudes and the views and therefore, the Republican [00:33:00] lawmakers who are willing to be able to take this and to use it for their in their efforts, I think it just demonstrates to the Russians that they should continue along this line.

SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: This is very serious. I think a lot of times people hear... As soon as I heard the story about Smirnoff and the revelations that the FBI had charged him for lying, and then the Russian component, I was shocked, but then you look at the papers or you look at social media, you turn on some, SOME cable news shows and you just have folks saying, "Oh, here go the Democrats again, screaming Russia, Russia, Russia."

But this is an attempt, potentially, if it is true that the Russians fed him this information, this is yet another attempt of a foreign government, a hostile foreign government, attempting to meddle in, not just our elections, but truly try to take down the American president.

ALICIA MENENDEZ - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: And let's layer in the fact that this past week we had the, we've been reckoning with the death of Alexander Navalny, and there has been a global conversation among leaders about the US 's role [00:34:00] and the most immediate to do on the list is to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine. You can't get Republicans to do the most basic thing and use the most basic tool they have to stand up and say, we stand on the side of democracy, against autocracy. They are unwilling to meet that basic function.

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes, and it's so appalling that there's growing sympathy within the Republican party and among the MAGA base for Mr. Putin in Russia. I'm sure Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave right now, because this sentiment that is " give Putin the benefit of the doubt on these issues", clearly the death of Navalny was a result of what Putin has done. Clearly what's happening in Ukraine is just demonstrating how aggressive Russia is going to be to try to go against its neighbors as well as the West.

And also their involvement, I think, in our election coming up is going to really be an effort by them. to be able to bring Mr. Trump back into the White House, because clearly Mr. Trump is very, very sympathetic to Mr. Putin. He's [00:35:00] intimidated. He's cowed.

ALICIA MENENDEZ - CO-HOST, THE WEEKEND: He hasn't called him out on Navalny yet.

JOHN BRENNAN: It is just, and the fact that there are so many Republicans in Congress, both in the Senate and the House that kowtow to Mr. Trump, and continue to allow Russia to get away with what it has is something that is so inconsistent with what the Republican party has stood for for so many years, but also is so against what our national security really demands, [which] is for us to be able to stand with our allies, NATO partners and others, to be able to risk resist these Russian efforts to try to continue to undermine Western democracies.

With each new election cycle, Republicans accept Russian help with greater ease - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 2-26-24

FIONA HILL: The Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Fiona Hill testifying at President Trump's first impeachment, describing [00:36:00] how our faith in our own democracy is the kind of center of the bullseye. It's what they're aiming at when they try to hurt us the worst. Well, now in this election cycle, Republican members of Congress have been trumpeting claims that turn out to have come from Russian intelligence.

The informant at the center of their impeachment push against President Biden today was ordered jailed as he awaits trial for lying to the FBI, feeding them what prosecutors say is disinformation targeting President Biden that he got from Russian intelligence. Joining us now is Fiona Hill, former Senior Director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council.

Dr. Hill, it's really nice of you to be with us tonight. Thanks very much for making the time.

FIONA HILL: Thanks, Rachel.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Both NBC News and The Washington Post today led with big stories about how this is the third straight election cycle where we've got pretty aggressive Russian efforts to mess with us in this election.

Do you agree with that characterization?

FIONA HILL: I do. And look, very sadly the Russians have been at these kinds of operations for an extraordinary long time. [00:37:00] Going back to the Cold War, there were lots of efforts, as well. But unfortunately, we've made it easier for them than ever before to be able to penetrate our politics and to be able to influence, because of the structure of our election campaigns, we've got, basically our own political parties who are trying to destroy each other. And, as you've been pointing out through the course of the program, we've got actors in our own political system who are just as keen on using disinformation as foreign adversaries.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Because that you look at it with that long sweep, I feel like that's one of the, one of the big reasons I wanted to talk to you because I've been very focused on 2016, 2020, and 2024, when Russian disinformation, Russian targeting of us wasn't just about making us hate each other and making us weak and making us distrust our democracy, it really was dovetailing with and therefore boosting Donald Trump and the Republican campaign and helping one side and hurting the other.

And maybe that's. It's not their long term goal, but it's at least been their sort of short to medium [00:38:00] goal. And that seems to be activating an instinct in the Republican Party that, if Putin likes us, maybe we should like him back. And I'm wondering if there is, if you see a way to, to interrupt that.

FIONA HILL: Look, I think it also requires responsible people within the Republican Party themselves to push back against this. It's not every single person who's a member of that party. We've got Nikki Haley out there who's running now what seems almost a futile campaign to compete with Donald Trump, is obviously saying something quite different and calling out.

And , on the disinformation, perhaps not going to quite the same way that you are, but she's certainly trying to do that. And you know, and I know, and many other people know that behind the scenes, there are members of the staff, senior staff, so on Capitol Hill, people in the Senate and , surprisingly still, members of Congress who, behind the scenes, are really deeply troubled by this and are trying to do something.

But in the heat of this campaign, as you're pointing out, they seem to be much more interested in taking potshots of president Biden or, basically trying to [00:39:00] bring down their opponent than thinking about national security And I would have thought, however, that given everything that's happened with the war in Ukraine, the recent death of Alexei Navalny, and just this piling up of information just as you're saying now, this criminal campaign rather, this prosecution of this FBI informant, that surely people would have woken up to this.

This is an issue of our national security, not just something about whether your guy is going to win in the election.

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: On the national security point, I think of the United States as having a lot of tools to stand up for our national security, a lot of resources to bring to bear. But when it comes to defending ourselves against Russian election interference when it comes to standing up for our ally in Ukraine and all the different ways that that means, when it comes to responding to the murder of Alexei Navalny in Russia, could the US government be doing more? Anne Applebaum joined me last week here and she said something that stuck with me all week. She said that if the United States government really wanted to get more serious, one of the things they could do was they could have thousands of [00:40:00] people working on enforcing sanctions to make sure they bit harder and that they hurt the Russian government more and more effectively.

I wanted to get your response to that, but also just to find out if you think there's more we could be doing.

FIONA HILL: There's certainly a lot more that we could be doing. As Anne points out sanctions enforcement is part of the problem. I mean, we're actually seeing even some of our own allied countries that are basically buying more and more oil from Russia and they're labeling them to bring in more revenues, of course, to keep on prosecuting the war against Ukraine.

We've got NATO allies— European countries, as well as I said, these larger global partners— we're going to have to figure out how we work with them directly. It's going to be a stepped up diplomacy which the administration's already talking about. But she also does have a point about putting more resources toward this now.

We are, of course, also on the verge of a government shutdown. We also have members of the Republican Party and others and Donald Trump talking about basically dismantling the state apparatus, which make it very difficult. But we can be much more creative. We can work very closely with other [00:41:00] European allies who actually have really woken up to the threats and to get them to also exert pressure and to push back.

We've got the debate about. What we can do about Russian frozen assets, for example, which is a major issue right now, which I know you've covered quite recently as well. And then when we get back to the topic they're talking about, about disinformation, some of the other cases that are running through, even including in the Supreme Court right now about freedom of speech and the regulation of the social media platforms become relevant as well.

Because, basically, X, that used to be Twitter, in terms of stepping back from the regulation of some of the content on their platform have opened it up even more to disinformation from Russia. And other companies like Meta, for example, and Microsoft, they have actually been trying to do more here, but we should also be encouraging the private sector to step up at this crucial time.

From Russia With...The Left; Beware of Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine Part 2 - The BradCast - Air Date 2-26-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: I received a note from a long time, previously good, progressive here in Southern California, I believe he's a long time KPFK listener as [00:42:00] well, his name is Jim. I'm not going to mention his last name because I'm not trying to embarrass him, but I do wish to talk to my own peeps here, the folks on the progressive left who have been so woefully disinformed via Kremlin talking points that they seem to have forgotten what it is they stand for. And of course the saddest part is, I honestly do not think those folks understand how they are being used as dupes and useful idiots by the Kremlin.

So Jim sent me an email citing an opinion piece in The Hill over the weekend arguing that those of us who believe Ukraine should be aided in their fight for their fight for themselves in favor of democracy and against fascist autocratic invading neighbors are just doing so because we are, as the headline in The Hill says, privileged enough to be willing to, "fight to the last Ukrainian." You may have heard that quote before. It's been used a lot over the past several [00:43:00] months and now years of Putin's assault on Ukraine. As the opinion writer in The Hill argues, if the idea of supporting the Ukraine war with Russia was to, "save the people of Ukraine and the country's infrastructure, then those who advocated for that course of action have failed miserably."

The writer goes on to ask if any of that matters to the, "privileged and neocon class on both sides of the Atlantic, who, from the safety of thousands of miles away, continually advocate for the youth of Ukraine to march into the teeth of the Russian war machine. The writer then offers a familiar argument heard from both the far right and, yes, from the far left.

And, coincidentally, as luck would have it, directly from the Kremlin itself that , "If they have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, for the leveled infrastructure, for the six million plus who have fled Ukraine, or for the billions of US tax dollars, then what is their opinion with [00:44:00] regard to triggering World War III?"

It's literally the argument straight out of the Kremlin. It's echoed, that argument, by both the right and, sadly, the left. Even though nobody wants World War III, but nobody is forcing the youth of Ukraine to march into the Russian war machine. Other than Russia, by the way. They are. But those of us who think that Ukraine should be allowed to defend themselves if they choose to, which they have valiantly now for more than two years, from an invasion they neither caused nor invited, that somehow we are the privileged and, amusingly, the neocon class, really?

It's quite amusing because if only this particular piece in The Hill sent to me by an actual progressive citing it, I guess, favorably— or at least a one time progressive— to argue against my position on Ukraine. That article in The Hill was actually written by a guy named Doug McKinnon. He used to work for the [00:45:00] Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush White Houses, and the Pentagon under the Bush administration, he was press secretary to Bob Dole. But he's the guy progressives are citing now? On Ukraine? To support their position? He's the one who's worried about the privileged and the neocons? And he's being promoted by a supposed lefty for these peaceful views on Ukraine.

Really? Anyway, I want to focus on the claim included in the headline of that Hill piece. It was sent to me by Jim to, "raise your privileged hand if you're willing to fight to the last Ukrainian." In fact, Jim's email to me including nothing, included nothing more than a link to that article. With a subject line on the email that read, " Raise that hand, Brad."

And I honestly believe that Jim has no idea that he is literally helping to circulate literal Kremlin [00:46:00] propaganda on that fight to the last Ukrainian line. I suspect Doug McKinnon does know it. I don't know if Jim does. But, you know, I'd like to think he doesn't. And I'd like to think that many of the folks that you may hear echoing these exact same lines— including folks you will hear right here on my own flagship station in Los Angeles on KPFK, and probably across many other Pacifica affiliate stations— maybe they don't realize that this disinformation comes literally straight out of the Kremlin. But it does. As the Washington Post reported in an exclusive last week headline: "Kremlin Runs Disinformation Campaign to Undermine Zelensky, Documents Show."

Kremlin instructions to circulate pretty much all of the talking points that I just mentioned. That McKinnon, on the right, passed along to Hill readers, and that Jim, on the left, then passed on to me. These are all [00:47:00] now well-documented as being ordered specifically by the Kremlin, making their way onto social media, and then into the mouths of knowing or unknowing useful idiots.

The post writes in their exclusive, "The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe. The files numbering more than 100 documents were shared with the Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society. Efforts that Moscow dubbed, 'information psychological operations.'"

The article goes on to list Moscow's four key objectives as detailed by the document, which, "show that progress was monitored at near-weekly Kremlin meetings where the strategist gave presentations showcasing the most widely read posts [00:48:00] that they planted. In social media. Among the material they highlighted was a top post they cited of a fake video on Telegram claiming that the main war aim of authorities in Kiev was, " to fight to the last Ukrainian.

That's the exact argument that appeared in The Hill last week from a right winger, was passed on to me from a supposed left winger. Not a supposed left wing. An actual one. I know him. But like too many on the left, he has fallen prey. Yes, just as the House GOP has. Two talking points literally straight out of the Kremlin.

And while there are many out there calling out Trump and his Republican party at this point for becoming useful idiots for Vladimir Putin, few, if any, are calling out those on the left who have done the same thing. Who have fallen for it even at the potential cost of Western [00:49:00] democracy.

BONUS Trump Backers Kill Navalny - Gaslit Nation - Air Date 2-20-24

ANDREA CHALUPA - CO-HOST, GASLIT NATION: Without question, and I want to point out that you wrote a very brave piece for the Washington Post years ago calling out Navalny's more chauvinistic, far right, Russian imperialist attitude towards Ukrainians. He was all in favor, initially, of Russia keeping Crimea, which it seized— invading another country and just seizing some of his land as Hitler did in the 1930s— and Navalny is like, "Yeah, no. Crimea is ours now." He got a lot of pushback for that including in your piece, which you got a lot of heat for because the West has a tendency of wanting to put opposition figures— who are, of course, risking their lives and being very brave— on pedestals, and simplify their story.

Where you presented Navalny as more complicated than that. Thank you for doing that because, when his murder was announced, you had a lot of leading Ukrainian journalists and civic society leaders going, "Let's be real here. This one man's death doesn't overshadow the fact that every single day Ukrainians are being [00:50:00] slaughtered." Civilians are being slaughtered, just two sleeping, I believe, last night were just killed in a Ukrainian city.

Thank you for doing that.

TERRELL STARR: Thank you. I appreciate that, because there are many obituaries about Alexei Navalny. When we think about Alexei Navalny's death and the many obituaries that are written about him, that are tweeted about him, that are Instagrammed and TikToked about him, it really is a microcosm of life.

During death, because that person is no longer here to defend themselves, we tend to say we want to "give deference" to the dead, right? However, if you are a public figure, in the case of Navalny, you no longer have that cover. You took the pledge of being a public figure. Particularly one in his case, where he took a very brave moral high ground that we all can learn from. Which is fighting kleptocracy.

Many people say, "What can we learn from Navalny's death?" I think there are a couple of things. One, I wish that he had lived long enough to show that he could be a better human being than [00:51:00] he actually was. That his actions betrayed. For example, notice that most of the people who are giving cover to his racism, to his nationalism and his xenophobia, are white men in the West and people who are banned from going to Russia.

These are people who have grievances with Putin, I think they have such strong tunnel vision that they can't see anything else. I remember having a very vigorous debate about his nationalism at a think tank here in DC. One person that was in the Zoom call basically said, "I know he says some racist things," and that's it, and brushed it aside.

I'm like, "Okay."

It was as if I was not even in the room! What if someone that you like says some racist things about Black people? Are you just going to say, "Well, he said these things in the past, but he 'kind of' acknowledged it," then we're going to move on?

Navalny did not make himself accountable to his strongest critics and the people with whom he claimed that he wanted to lead a better Russia with (i. [00:52:00] e. the central Asians who are colonized— the Georgians, the Armenians, the Ukrainians). Those are the people who I wish that he could have proved that he was a better human being to.

Moreover, when we think about kleptocracy, and Biden saying, " Putin is responsible for his death, and we need to pay tribute to Navalny." You know what we can do? We can stop the kleptocracy here in the United States of America. We can really reverse some of these laws that make it so easy for money —PAC money —to influence our elections. We could do a better job to stop washing oligarch money in our country.

There's a really great researcher, his name is Casey Michel, who does a lot of work on this. In his book, he talked about Ihor Kolomyskyi, who was buying industrial businesses in the Midwest. He really didn't care about the workers. Really did not care about their safety. It was just a place where he could wash his money— he could hide it. Because those local communities were so cash-strapped and desperate for investment, they didn't care about the origins of [00:53:00] his money. So, if we really cared about kleptocracy, we can at least do that. I think that's one thing that we can honor Navalny for— by being better human beings to each other. What do we value most? Do we value human rights? Are we bloodthirsty capitalists who don't care about the moral fabric? About where the money comes from? We really want to invest in Navalny's legacy, why don't we start there?

ANDREA CHALUPA - CO-HOST, GASLIT NATION: Without question! America is one of the largest money laundering paradises for the corrupt. We have all the oligarchs from around the world hiding their money in our real estate. One insanely rich woman from China bought an apartment— a $6 million apartment— that's sitting empty because it's for her two-year-old child.

That's who we're competing with for real estate here in New York City. All of these corrupt oligarchs laundering their money in cities like New York. And that's just one place; it's happening all across the country. Then you have our easy LLC shell company system [00:54:00] where anybody from anywhere can just open up a company and park their money here.

As a result, you have these corrupt officials from around the world laundering their money across the US and further entrenching their influence with their money across the US. Then we're wondering why Donald Trump is just a heartbeat away from becoming president states? Because there's this larger culture of corruption that has gone unchecked for too long because of hyper capitalism.

The most amazing thing is people — especially Republicans, especially conservatives —are pulling their hair out going, "How did my beloved,"— and I'm speaking from their point of view, I'm not speaking for myself because Reagan is a mass murderer in his own way, they're saying, "How did my beloved Reagan, 'Morning in America,' —how did the 'Party of Reagan' become the party of Putin?"

It's so simple. Reagan laid the groundwork for that with "Greed is Good." The Kremlin took advantage of that. The Kremlin's like, "Yes, greed is good. And, we are going to invade your country through the front door — through your greed." That's what they're doing now.

TERRELL STARR: Isn't it [00:55:00] ironic that Ronald Reagan, who we both abhor, was totally correct about blunting the expansion of the USSR, but he was completely wrong about everything else that helped them to really insert themselves in our democracy financially. Isn't that ironic?

Final comments on the global vaiew of autocratic propaganda

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Brian Tyler Cohen, breaking down Tucker Carlson's Putin interview. MSNBC looked at how propaganda has normalized autocracy. On the Media looked at the connection with Christian nationalism. The Hartmann Report tied in Mike Johnson to the discussion on theocracy. MSNBC looked at how Russia is using Republican lawmakers as tools of propaganda. The Rachel Maddow Show discuss the national security implications of Russian election interference. And The BradCast broke down a piece of Russian propaganda aimed at the progressive left. That's what everybody heard, but members also heard a bonus clip from Gaslit Nation, getting into some of the messy details of the death of Putin opposition leader, [00:56:00] Navalny.

To hear that and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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 to wrap up. And this may not need to be said, but we're not just facing a Russia problem. You know, we're facing an authoritarianism problem and that is around the world. Trump's authoritarian ambitions are coming ever clearer into focus as he describes what he would like to do when reelected but he also met up recently with Viktor Orban of Hungary who has already put in place all of the basic mechanisms Trump would like to use to ensconce himself into power indefinitely.

And that was a good reminder that Tucker Carlson did the exact same thing with Orban as he did with Putin. He traveled to Hungary, interviewed Orban, and spoke at length about why Hungary is so much better than the US. [00:57:00] It's really just boiler plate normalization of authoritarianism at this point. CPAC, the far right annual American political conference where GOP presidential candidates used to regularly appear to present themselves to the grassroots of the GOP, has also set up shop in Hungary now. Their third conference in Budapest is happening next month.

So in terms of defeating this spreading wave of autocratic energy, it's definitely a 'think global act local' kind of moment. On one hand, I think it is important to understand all of the interconnectedness of what's happening on the far right globally. But it's also important to not become overwhelmed. Everyone has a role to play in the lead up to the coming election in November. And that needs to be the focus. Find a way to get involved, help any way you can and stem the tide of dictatorship where you can have an impact. Don't get [00:58:00] overly wrapped up and stressed about everything you can't have an impact on. You cannot change the tide of right-wing thought around the world. But you can take action where you live to help this year's election be a bulwark against that tide of authoritarianism.

That is going to be it for today as always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].

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 now Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, and a bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift [00:59:00] memberships. You can join them by signing up today 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 bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes all through your regular podcast player. 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 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.

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#1615 Envisioning a Leftisț Economic Future of Postcapitalism (Transcript)

Posted by · March 01, 2024 3:50 PM

Air Date 3/1/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left Podcast, in which we think beyond the fears of a world in which work, and the ability for millions to support themselves financially through work, is lost to automation and artificial intelligence. Because that is only a capitalist future in which the benefits of technological advancement are hoarded by the already wealthy. Today, we imagine a different path.

Sources today include the book Inventing the Future, Novara Media, Second Thought, 1Dime, and Futurology, with additional members only clips from Novara Media.

Introduction to Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Srnicek & Williams - Dank Audio Stash - Air Date 4-8-21

AI NARRATOR: Where did the future go? For much of the 20th century, the future held sway over our dreams. On the horizons of the political left, a vast assortment of emancipatory visions gathered, often springing from the conjunction of popular political power and the liberating potential of technology. From predictions of new worlds of leisure, to Soviet era cosmic [00:01:00] communism, to Afro futurist celebrations of the synthetic and diasporic nature of black culture, to post gender dreams of radical feminism, the popular imagination of the left envisaged societies vastly superior to anything we dream of today.

Through popular political control of new technologies, we would collectively transform our world for the better. Today, on one level, these dreams appear closer than ever. The technological infrastructure of the 21st century is producing the resources by which a very different political and economic system could be achieved.

Machines are accomplishing tasks that were unimaginable a decade ago. The internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard, bringing global participative democracy closer than ever to existence. Open source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing all portend a world where the scarcity of many products might be overcome. New forms of computer [00:02:00] simulation could rejuvenate economic planning and give us the ability to direct economies rationally in unprecedented ways.

The newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated. Clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production. And new medical technologies not only enable a longer, healthier life, but also make possible new experiments with gender and sexual identity. Many of the classic demands of the left, for less work, for an end to scarcity, for economic democracy, for the production of socially useful goods, and for the liberation of humanity, are materially more achievable than at any other point in history.

Yet, for all the glossy sheen of our technological era, we remain bound by an old and obsolete set of social relations. We continue to work long hours, [00:03:00] commuting further, to perform tasks that feel increasingly meaningless. Our jobs have become more insecure, our pay has stagnated, and our debt has become overwhelming. We struggle to make ends meet, to put food on the table, to pay the rent or mortgage, and as we shuffle from job to job, we reminisce about pensions and struggle to find affordable childcare.

Automation renders us unemployed and stagnant wages devastate the middle class, while corporate profits surge to new heights. The glimmers of a better future are trampled and forgotten under the pressures of an increasingly precarious and demanding world. And each day, we return to work as normal, exhausted, anxious, stressed and frustrated.

At a planetary level, things appear even more ominous. The breakdown of the global climate continues unabated, and the ongoing fallout from the economic crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral of austerity. [00:04:00] Buffeted by imperceptible and abstract powers, we feel incapable of evading or controlling the tidal pulsions of economic, social and environmental forces. But how are we to change this?

All around us, it seems that the political systems, movements and processes that dominated the last hundred years are no longer able to bring about genuinely transformative change. Instead, they have forced us onto an endless treadmill of misery. Electoral democracy lies in remarkable disrepair. Center left political parties have been hollowed out and sapped of any popular mandate. Their corpses stumble on as vehicles for careerist ambitions. Radical political movements bloom promisingly but are quickly snuffed out by exhaustion and repression. Organized labor has seen its power systematically taken apart, leaving it sclerotic and incapable of anything more than feeble resistance.

Yet, in the face of these calamities, today's politics remains [00:05:00] stubbornly beset by a lack of new ideas. Neoliberalism has held sway for decades, and social democracy exists largely as an object of nostalgia. As crises gather force and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.

Under the sway of folk political thinking, the most recent cycle of struggles, from anti globalization to anti war to Occupy Wall Street, has involved the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds. Rather than undertake the difficult labor of expanding and consolidating gains, this form of politics has focused on building bunkers to resist the encroachments of global neoliberalism. In so doing, it has become a politics of defense, incapable of articulating or building a new world.

For any movement that struggles to escape neoliberalism and build [00:06:00] something better, these folk political approaches are insufficient. In their place, this book sets out an alternative politics, one that seeks to take back control over our future and to foster the ambition for a world more modern than capitalism will allow. The utopian potentials inherent in 21st century technology cannot remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination, they must be liberated by an ambitious left alternative. Neoliberalism has failed, social democracy is impossible, and only an alternative vision can bring about universal prosperity and emancipation. Articulating and achieving this better world is the fundamental task of the left today.

The People's Republic of Walmart Interview with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski - Novara Media - Air Date 6-13-19

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: To what extent are modern day free market economies actually free?

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: That's a good question. They're free for some, I think is the answer to that, when most of us go into, and unfree for a lot of others, I should add. That's the other side of that. I think when most of us going to work, [00:07:00] we experience that as a huge realm of unfreedom for the vast majority of us who who do work for a living once we enter, the shop, the factory, the whatever, the hospital, school, it's what the boss says goes. The boss on the other hand has a lot of freedom.

The argument we're we're making in the book is that a lot of the world's biggest, or not a lot, most of the world's biggest corporations are huge spheres of economic planning. That sort of old bogeyman of the right that the right has used as a cudgel against the left. If you try to consciously control the economy, it'll never work, and we'll probably get into that later. Well, it turns out that once you enter the four walls of the firm of the corporation it's a giant plan system where the managers... and that's where I think that division in freedom exists. That there's a lot of freedom for managers and bosses to set plans, obviously the market imposes some limits on that, but there's a lot of rational planning, but for the vast majority of people, for workers, it's a realm of unfreedom where our shared human capacity for decision making is [00:08:00] completely not even underutilized, but largely unutilized.

And I think that's something that we set out to challenge in the book.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Leigh to what extent do we live in a planned economy? To what extent is the idea of the free market just a mystification then, building on that?

LEIGH PHILLIPS: The economy as a whole is not a planned economy, but within these very, very large entities, as Michal was saying, they are entirely planned. This is fascinating for us because the argument that we have from the right is the market is always consistently the optimum way of allocating goods and services, but internally, as Michal said, they're entirely planned.

What's fascinating with Walmart is it's the largest corporation in the world. It has the largest number of employees. It's the third largest enterprise after the People's Liberation Army and the Pentagon. If it were an economy it would be not in the G20, but on the size of a Sweden or a Switzerland. It's slightly smaller but on the scale of the Soviet Union at the height of the 1970s before stagnation sets in.

So that's really interesting because one of the [00:09:00] best arguments that the right ever mounted against the left, against socialism was that the price signal in the market basically captures an infinitude of information within supply chains. Not just that, but also discovers as a mechanism of discovery of information. And that if we want to avoid all of the problems with market exchange in terms of the growth of inequality, irrational production, and so on and so forth, and replace it with planning, you would have to have this army of bureaucrats that would not be anywhere near as good as capturing all that information, and that would lead to a mismatch between supply and demand on a gross scale that would produce significant shortages, in turn chaos. The only way that you could, grapple with that chaos would be some sort of authoritarianism, and then, bada bing, bada boom, you have the Soviet Union.

That was the historical argument. It's a really bloody good argument. The trick is, that if that were true, then Walmart shouldn't work, Walmart shouldn't [00:10:00] exist. Because if it is an entirely planned economy, I guess it exists with a sea of prices, but internally it's entirely planned, what makes it work compared to the Soviet Union? We should take some lessons from this in that basically it shows that planning works. However, It's authoritarian planning rather than democratic planning. Maybe we can get into that in a little bit.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: So we're obviously talking about the firm to an extent. We're talking about Coase's theorem.

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Ronald Coase

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: And he stumbles upon this really in the '20s the '30s I was talking about this a few weeks ago, to a gentleman who writes The Economist. He came on, and he was talking about, just intervention in free markets, and obviously it's the paradigmatic example. And it's really striking how few people actually, on the left, engage with this issue, where, we have this mystification that any intervention in free markets will create a mismatch of resources, create disequilibriums, etc. And like you say, the absolute heartbeat of modern economies are firms which don't operate like that.

Now, is there any countervailing account [00:11:00] that could come from somebody who's defending the status quo, who might say, well, so what? That's irrelevant. We already know about Coase.

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: Yeah. I think the traditional argument has always been, but ultimately they still rely on prices. So it doesn't matter how big they get, they're still existing, like we said, in this sort of sea of prices, and that's the bit that delivers crucially useful information to them.

And I think the counter argument there is that we see increasingly, and this is where I think, today differs from the 1930s, which was the last time when the left and the right were hashing this out, is that we do have an increase in information technology that basically produces this total surfeit of information of various kinds of useful information. I just think it's a poverty of imagination to think that this is the one method of finding a way to basically align social goals [00:12:00] with individual or lower level goals.

That's ultimately the rights argument, that you need some sort of mechanism that'll align, what do we want to do as a society with what do individuals or individuals through the units like firms do. And I think throughout history you've seen that there's different ways of doing that, and especially now when we have information. One very small thing, Hayek had this semi mystical quote where at one point he calls price's action at a distance. And I'll find it funny reading that today, in 2019, when each of us has a, or most of us have a smartphone in our pockets. And this idea that this gee whiz, action at a distance, it happens through the price system, which just seems quaint.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Is it fair to say actually that the idea of markets functioning through prices like that is in itself a form of machine control? Because you've got Paul Mason recently in his book, Clear Bright Future, and he says we have all these existential quandaries about, oh, would we ever allow an AI to run society?

Well, we already delegate. A vast amount of, ethical decision making to, well actually, this computer says no, except it's not the [00:13:00] computer, it's the market. Is that a fair, is that a fair, assessment? And then I want to ask you about the socialist calculation debate.

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: I'll be quick. I think that's overall generally fair. I think there's maybe a bit more to it, but generally yes, this is a mechanism. And a lot of the Austrians did in a way refer to it as a computer but one that's able to deal with indeterminacy. So that's the one thing that I would add that the right really sees this as a specific kind of computer that doesn't take a set program, but is one that's able to deal very well in a dynamic environment. But overall, I think that's a very good way of looking at it. And again, demystifying some of this ideology around the free market and around freedom.

The Two Futures Of Automation Capitalism VS Socialism - Second Thought - Air Date 12-15-21

JT - HOST, SECONDTHOUGHT: But first, let's start with a history of automation in general. If you're willing to go back far enough, humanity's evolution has always been directly related to our ability to mechanize and improve upon our physical abilities with tools. Our bodies and societies have progressed [00:14:00] alongside, and as a direct result of, our ability to create objects that make our lives easier, that allow us to produce and consume more efficiently and in greater quantities.

At first it was simple handheld tools made of stone, then crude metals, until eventually we started truly automating basic tasks by powering the first primative machines with flowing water, steam, and finally, fossil fuels. We continued innovating, creating ever more complex instruments, until they moved beyond completing simple tasks and started dealing with abstract concepts, the same way our brains can. Very quickly, we get to something like proper automation—machines doing things on their own. Specifically, we get to automation under our current economic model, capitalism.

Since the origins of modern capitalism coincide roughly with the beginning of industrialization in Britain, that's where we'll start. At its birth, industrialization radically changed many things. The new machines of the industrial era were nothing like the tools that had dominated the [00:15:00] history of humanity. They were bigger, more complex, and they needed several people with very particular roles just to function properly. They could produce like no human ever could, and with ever decreasing levels of human involvement.

Right away, this made a massive difference in the working arrangements of most people. From individual shops and farms, industrial machines and factories brought hundreds away from their personal businesses under a single factory roof in increasingly densely populated cities. Supervised by a growing, but tightly guarded, class of wealthy individuals, workers from neighboring regions were brought into factories, where they no longer had control over the process of production. Their roles became specialized, repetitive, and dull. Work for a wage became compulsory for more and more of the population, as the concept of poverty became, legally tangible. Capitalism had begun and at its core were the new machines.

With this new social model came new relationships and interest groups—the owner class and the working class. [00:16:00] Those who owned the factories and the machinery, and those who sold their time and energy to them. While this is going on, machines are growing in their power. They do more, produce more, and take up an ever greater chunk of the responsibilities of workers. And this starts creating problems.

Some of the first observers of this era, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were quick to realize the impact that the ever more capable steam powered machines would have on this new labor force. They saw, of course, the slums and depths of poverty that these industrial towns had created, but more than that, they saw a new form of power emerge. Automation subjected workers to invisible pressures within the workplace, when, as production processes became more automated, human workers had to adapt to the pace set by machines. A pace determined by the capitalist who manufactured and implemented them.

Unsurprisingly, this feature of automation hasn't disappeared under more advanced stages of capitalism. Take Amazon warehouses, where workers who are entirely reliant on now fully [00:17:00] automated systems have to adapt their working speed to the inhumane rate of maximally optimized robots. Workers lose their independence and their very humanity when they have to complete tasks in 11 seconds or less and take no breaks, otherwise, they threaten to disrupt a long production chain, of which they are only a minor part.

Automation breeds its own forms of surveillance, and by that token, its own discipline. The consequences are not just a loss of independence, but also a profound feeling of alienation, personal anguish, and the all too common injuries At a full 10 per 100 workers in Amazon factories specifically. And that's not all.

For Marx, this power was only one side of technological growth. Machines gave the capitalists much more. For starters, these machines made for a perfectly exploitable employee. And it's pretty obvious why. A machine demands no wages. It doesn't demand adequate working conditions, reasonable hours, or bathroom breaks. A machine costs what it costs to buy and maintain, and [00:18:00] every single penny of its 24 hour our workday afterwards goes back to the capitalist. It's a perfect arrangement. At least, that's the way it seems. 1Dime covers this aspect of automation extensively in his video. Of course, this arrangement has its own consequences.

Suddenly faced with a new machine that performs better, cheaper, or faster, an entire workforce might be more easily undermined. In theory, its value plummets to the robot's standards, allowing the owner class to threaten mass unemployment, and eroding whatever resistance workers had created with their collective power. If the employee is not entirely replaced, their job either becomes more menial and alienating, or more brutal and unprofitable. Workers are pitted against the machines they are now directly threatened by, rather than the capitalist class, which can shield itself behind the values of technological innovation.

Today, this process is happening across all sectors of the economy. Factory jobs were of course the first to go, but they were soon followed by many service and white collar jobs. [00:19:00] As AI progresses, even highly specialized tasks are delegated to machines, taking with them jobs for which humans are no longer the cheapest option. And this poses a dilemma for workers. Asking for higher wages is both good and necessary, especially as living costs everywhere go up, but it puts them and their industries at greater risk of their labor being automated. You can't bargain when someone is holding all the chips. So, rather than settling for low wages out of fear of automation, we should embrace automation, demand higher wages, or perhaps some form of universal basic income, which will not only be necessary for workers, but may even be necessary for capitalism itself to function.

Planet of the Robots: Four Futures of AI (Documentary) - 1Dime - Air Date 10-15-21

TONY CHAMAS - HOST, 1DIME PODCAST: In this third future of socialism with scarcity then, people no longer have to work nearly as much as to survive, yet people are also not free to consume as much as they like. And even though capitalistic economic classes will be presumably abolished, some kind of government will probably be [00:20:00] required to distribute resources, making pure communism a stateless society, an unlikely option. Given the need to determine and maintain stable levels of consumption and thus set prices, the state can't entirely wither away just yet, as it does in the communist scenario. And where there is scarcity, there will surely be some sort of political conflict, even though if it is no longer the same class conflict.

However, this form of socialism does not have to adopt. The exact same systems as previously existing socialist countries did. We can learn from the drawbacks and the benefits. In addition to being sabotaged by catastrophic wars and economic sanctions, experiments like the USSR, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, and China started off with significantly lower levels of development and did not have the access to the technology that exists today. Facing this underdevelopment, these countries resorted to modes of production that could be described as [00:21:00] capitalistic, while having some form of socialist redistribution.

Despite this, however, these systems were nevertheless able to drastically improve their societies. Just look at the development from before versus after their transition to socialism, if you even want to call it socialism—which is more a matter of semantic debate. The point is that different socioeconomic conditions lead to different outcomes. After all, Marx himself thought that communism would be impossible without first passing through the stage of capitalism, which he saw as a necessary evil that would exploit workers to death, but would develop the forces of production and create a lot of wealth, which could then be distributed and utilized for the common good during the transition to communism.

With the exception of the exploited Global South, most of the Global North countries like America, Canada, and Western Europe are already highly developed and we are starting to have access to labor saving technologies which can accelerate production while giving people more free time from work, which could [00:22:00] potentially one day allow us to transition to the fourth and most promising future, communism—an egalitarian society with abundance. But as mentioned before, if a worsening climate crisis and disappointing results of space exploration make this possibility too late, then we can settle for a socialism where we are given life's basic necessities and more freedom from work, but still have a limitation as to how much we can consume. Maybe it won't be fully automated luxury communism, but maybe we can get a partially automated socialism.

But assuming resources are not scarce, and climate change is slightly ameliorated, or we happen to find an abundance of natural resources in outer space, then, let's envision what a full communism with abundance could look like. Communism, egalitarianism, and abundance. It is already hard to escape the capitalist mind prison, but it is even harder to imagine what full communism could look like. The term fully automated luxury communism [00:23:00] has been popularized by theorist Aaron Bastiani in his book of the same title. This book deserves a video of its own, and it has quite a lot of compelling insights and evidence, despite what the goofy title might suggest.

This might all sound like an impossible utopia, yet the trend of widespread automation could very well make this a possibility, or at the very least, allow us to start liberating people from work. We can try to envision a classless society of abundance that was envisioned by theorists like Karl Marx. A partially automated communism, perhaps.

A communist post scarcity society would require a combination of labor saving technologies with an alternative to the current unsustainable energy system that still exists today, which is limited by the physical scarcity and ecological destructiveness of fossil fuels. Once again, this is not a guarantee, but there are hopeful signs of progress.

For instance, the cost of producing and operating solar panels has been falling [00:24:00] dramatically over the past decade, and based on their current trajectory, they will soon be cheaper than our current electricity sources. Now the notion of post work tends to confuse a lot of people. People often think about this issue in a very binary way, in which either we live in a society where we don't work at all, or we work in a society where we have to work just to survive and be entitled to life's basic necessities, and this really misses the point. In a post scarcity society, it's not like all work would be abolished in the sense that we would all just sit around like sloths. As Karl Marx put it, labor would become not only a means of life, but life's prime want. People could just continue doing whatever activities, hobbies, and projects that they did out of their own will because they found them inherently fulfilling, not because of a needed wage.

The profit motive is unnecessary, especially considering the degree to which many decisions about work are already driven by non material incentives. [00:25:00] Among those who are privileged enough to have the option, millions choose to go to graduate school, study degrees with little job prospects, become social workers, make music, make art, or start small organic farms, even when there are far more lucrative careers open to them.

It is also worth noting that even this post scarcity communist future would most likely still require some sort of human labor for certain occupations that can't be automated. We would most likely have to have a certain level of labor hours to complete in exchange for labor vouchers. Which could then be used to purchase leisure products and services provided by small worker cooperatives, perhaps. Those who put in more labor time could get access to more labor vouchers, which they could then use to purchase more goods and services. Thus, while arbitrary economic classes would be abolished, there would not be inequality of outcome, which is essentially impossible. Rather, society would be formulated according to need and ability. [00:26:00] "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Although there are many possible ways to allocate the necessary labor that a communist society would still need to do, I would recommend looking into the various theories of Michael Albert and Paul Cockshott, who hold different compelling ideas. The demise of wage labor may seem like a faraway dream today, but at one point American and European labor movements used to demand shorter working hours as opposed to just higher wages and employment.

Workerism and the Protestant work ethic is an ideology that must be overcome. To get past wage labor economically, we must get past it socially. The idea of post scarcity communism has been loosely represented in one of the most popular works of science fiction—Star Trek. Now keep in mind, even a post scarcity communist world would still have its own conflicts and contradictions, rather than one in which we all live in perfect harmony and politics comes to a halt.

There would probably be some sort of [00:27:00] social hierarchies, probably based on reputation and clout. But if it's not a vision of a perfect society, this version of communism is at least a world in which conflict is no longer based on arbitrary classes and control over scarce resources and the means of production. It is a world in which not everything is decided by money.

To conclude, these four different futures are useful to speculate about, but we might not necessarily only get one of them, we could get them all. And the author of the book, Four Futures, notes that there are paths that lead from one future to all of the others. And in many ways, aspects of all four of the futures are already partially here, but it's ultimately up to us, the masses, to build up the collective power and organization to fight for the futures that we desire.

Universal Basic Income Explained (An Automation Solution) - Futurology - Air Date 5-28-24

HOST, FUTUROLOGY: It is not a discussion of the technological revolution in automation without mentioning universal basic income, and for good reason, as in our and many others opinion, it is one of the best potential solutions to the automation conundrum. [00:28:00] In the simplest terms, UBI is about giving every member of society enough money to cover, as the name implies, the basics in life. This is not a new concept, with the idea of a state run basic income going as far back as the 16th century, and Sir Thomas More's book Utopia, which depicted a society in which every person receives a guaranteed income and is relieved of the burden of their essential needs. For what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?

Moving forward a few centuries, what we now know as UBI has been championed from a diverse group of individuals of every profession, race, and political stance. From Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, Stephen Hawking, Alan Watts, the Pope, we can go on and on.

The premise of the UBI has also inspired policy, with economist Milton Friedman's negative income tax. He held that the NIT would raise the poverty floor without negatively affecting the price system and market mechanisms. This would then go on to inspire the earned income tax credit from the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Essentially, a tax credit benefiting individuals who are [00:29:00] earning a low or moderate income the most.

After a relatively dormant few decades, it has only been since recently, 2015, where the UBI discussion has been picking up steam again, as it's started to become a prominent talking point amongst technologists, such as many of those working in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. This makes intuitive sense, as deep learning was starting to make rapid strides forward around this time period, and many in the industry were extrapolating forward and beginning to realize the long term impacts in terms of automation, which then led tech CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates to talk about UBI, thereby raising public awareness.

Beyond awareness, in our opinion, when UBI as a policy really began to spread through the mainstream consciousness was during the presidential run of Andrew Yang. While he did go on to lose that race, Yang and his team truly understood the impacts of automation and broke it down in a concise and easy to understand way for the general public, while also highlighting the need for a UBI, or as they called it, the Freedom Dividend of $1,000 a month, translating to $12,000 a year, just around the US poverty line.

With the origins of Universal Basic [00:30:00] Income understood, we can see that UBI has taken on a few distinct forms in different historical and geographical contexts. However, the core defining characteristics of it always remain the same. 1. A UBI is periodic. In other words, a recurring payment, for instance, every month as opposed to a one off grant. 2. A UBI is paid in cash, allowing recipients to convert their benefits into whatever they would like. 3. A UBI is paid per individual person versus per household based. And 4. A UBI is truly universal and unconditional, paid to every member of society, and not targeted to a specific population.

A universal basic income following these core principles intuitively makes sense. When you're a shareholder for a profitable company, you expect a dividend. And likewise, as citizens of countries with GDPs worth trillions, which are only set to increase as automation increases societal productivity, a UBI can be considered a dividend of this productivity to the populace. A UBI would also value much work today that, while important, society doesn't monetarily value.

For instance, stay at home parents and [00:31:00] caretakers. People in these roles work just as hard, if not harder than those in typical full time roles, and are needed for a society to function. However, they are not currently monetarily compensated for their work. In the age of automation, as more jobs are lost to technological change, and as society gets more productive, no one should have the burden of worry about covering basic living expenses, such as rent, food, electricity, internet, and so on.

While this all sounds great in theory, the benefits of a UBI can also be backed up through real world testing. Since the 1900s, there have been many pilot tests for a UBI, from the United States, Canada, Kenya, Finland, and India to list a few. And these tests are only increasing in frequency as more countries, private entities, and non profits are entering the space. From the tests that have already been completed, many come to the same conclusion, that a UBI boosted recipients mental, physical, and financial well being, decreased the consumption of vices such as tobacco and alcohol, and led to modest improvements in employment.

To give more concrete results, an Ontario Canada's UBI pilot project of 4, 000 subjects over the course of 17 [00:32:00] months with a $1,000 basic income, 79 percent of subjects reported better physical and 83 percent better mental well being. 50 percent reported a decrease in drug use, and while 17 percent did leave employment once basic income payments commenced, most significantly, nearly half of those subjects who stopped working during the pilot program returned to school or university to upskill for future employment. It is worth noting many argue the less than expected increases and sometimes decreases in employment are due to the efficacy of these tests.

In Ontario's case, the decrease could be attributable to conditions about non trial earned income, in which basic income payments would be reduced by 50 cents for every dollar of earned income. Efficacy issues of other trials include but are not limited to small sample sizes, short time frames, and too low of an amount of monthly payments to actually provide the stability of a real UBI.

The Two Futures Of Automation Capitalism VS Socialism Part 2 - Second Thought - Air Date 12-15-21

JT - HOST, SECONDTHOUGHT: As a quick refresher, a socialist economy is one in which the means of production, meaning factories, machines, farms, and so on, are owned in common rather than by private individuals. This can vary quite a lot in practice, but the [00:33:00] basic idea is that the economy is subject to democratic practice, not the whims of deeper pockets. In general, socialist economies are characterized by the provision of basic services to everyone. Food, water, shelter, and medicine for all are the greatest priorities of this economic model, rather than profit, which often comes from gatekeeping these essential needs.

In this kind of system, automation looks very different. While automation, under any system can bring improvements in the quality of life for all under a socialist economy, it does not do so at the expense of the security of the individual. You might lose your job to a more productive machine, but that won't suddenly throw you into your savings and threaten to kick you out of your home. Quite the contrary, in practice, this can mean any number of things. Where innovations in medicine or agriculture are developed, they are no longer held hostage by intellectual property patents so that only a few people can gain access and only for the highest prices. Vaccines and other life saving innovations don't have to be life saving and [00:34:00] profitable to be worthwhile. They can just be life saving. This is innovation under a very wide lens.

But automation specifically works in just the same way. And the best way to prove that is to look at how automation affects work under a socialist economy. Whereas the capitalist exploits the advancements of technology to pit the workers against themselves, bringing down their wages, working conditions, or kicking them out of their job entirely, a socialist society has no such pressure to exert. Work being taken out of human hands is just that, no strings attached. Even if automation does not abolish all work, in capitalist or socialist economies alike, it will definitely reduce the amount of work we have to do. Whereas A capitalist system responds to this with unemployment, worsening working conditions, lower wages, or even meaningless jobs that only serve to increase profits without improving anything, a democratic organization of the economy can simply grant the worker more free time.

Picture your average day at work when automation has all but taken over. [00:35:00] With fewer responsibilities and fewer hours of human work needed, divided across more people whose jobs are also largely taken care of, a work day could be just a few hours long, if that. A work week just a few days. You could return home after a short day, knowing that your needs are taken care of, allowing you to spend your free time whichever way you like. More time means you can take up more hobbies, continue your education, or simply enjoy your life a whole lot more. You could take pleasure in activities that make you more fulfilled, or choose to spend your time working in your community, teaching classes, helping to plant trees, fixing potholes, whatever you want.

In our current society, this kind of freedom is a luxury awrded only to the lucky few. Under its automated extreme, that same freedom is lost to meaningless work, to fatigue, and desperately trying to stay afloat. In a system where your survival isn't directly tied to the hours you work, automation is a blessing, both for you and for everyone else. Automation grants you more freedom rather [00:36:00] than punishing you simply for existing in a society with scientific progress. It could allow us to move beyond our basic necessities, and start climbing up our hierarchy of needs the world over. To start pursuing what really interests us in life. To take up educational, artistic, innovative, or creative pursuits that we would normally not be able to under capitalism without taking immense personal risks or being born into similarly immense privilege.

The truth is, we've been waiting for this for decades. Back in the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advancements would allow his grandkids generation to only work for 15 hours a week, long before automation and artificial intelligence showed us the extent to which human labor could be replaced. The only reason we aren't there yet is the unnecessary capitalist obsession with always extracting more profit. But we can improve our lives without that suicidal greed, and so long as we continue to ignore that fact, our future is clear.

Universal Basic Income Explained (An Automation Solution) Part 2 - Futurology - Air Date 5-28-24

HOST, FUTUROLOGY: Speaking of payments, this is one of the largest reasons [00:37:00] a widespread UBI hasn't taken off in the decades it has been in discussion. There are valid concerns on how to fund an initiative of its scale. Using the USA as an example, and assuming a $1,000 UBI, that would be on the order of $2-3 trillion a year. Do we dare utter the dreaded T word as a solution?

Whenever there is talk of taxes, it comes with many interesting connotations. In terms of a robot or automation tax, it is an even more contentious topic, as many believe it is disincentivizing innovation. However, the argument of a robot tax is not to prevent innovation, but slightly slow down the speed of automation adoption, as we figure out how to transition into this new economy.

In fact, currently there exists incentivization in the exact opposite direction. A business that pays a worker $100 pays $30 in taxes, but a business that spends $100 on equipment such as robotics pays only $3 in taxes. The 2017 Taxes Cuts and Jobs Act lower taxes on purchases so much, that you can actually make money buying equipment. In other words, the USA in some ways is paying companies to automate. By introducing a robot tax, [00:38:00] we can even the playing field so to speak, so that we can more gracefully transition into an automated society.

There could even be an incentivization to retrain or upskill employees by introducing tax credits on the robot tax. This tax could also slow down or prevent what we like to call toxic automation, in which a company's sole purpose is to automate as rapidly as possible without any regard for its employees. What is commonly seen in many gig employment companies such as Uber, in which they are not only paying below a fair market wage, but also use those excess profits to fund autonomous vehicle initiatives, with the goal to replace those very same workers.

In addition to the robot tax, there are many other methods of taxation and talks as well on the technology sphere, which can help curb or rein in companies on the more unethical end of the spectrum, and give back to society what they have taken. For instance, the data tax or data dividend as it is often called. Data is often referred to as a new oil due to how valuable it is, especially for deep learning algorithms. It is also one of the progress traps of the information age, as it could be used to build better, smarter applications, but often at the trade off of our privacy.

While this is [00:39:00] a topic for another video, the key takeaway is that our data is worth billions. The data brokerage industry alone is estimated to be worth nearly half a trillion dollars, with near 50 percent of the revenue coming directly from selling consumer data. And these numbers don't even take into account companies made to solely profit off our data such as Facebook, which made $86 billion in 2020. Taxing for storing excessive quantities of data, transference fees of sending data between different brokers, or a host of other methods could be another way to collect revenue from companies who are benefiting from our data. and in many cases using it to automate away jobs.

The robot and data tax are two potential policies that can ensure increased production due to automation and technological change is not just captured by a select few at the top, but rather is spread across society by funding a universal basic income.

Furthermore, to the aforementioned sources, funding from a UBI can come from various other tax or budget adjustments, which in many cases is dependent on the values of the society implementing a basic income. For instance, funding could come from a value added tax, VAT, which some nations already have. Reducing the defense [00:40:00] budget, a wealth tax, inheritance taxes, fees on financial derivatives contracts, and so on. Beyond taxes, another substantial funding source was best stated by Milton Friedman about the negative income tax, but also applies to UBI. That being, a UBI would reduce the paternalistic and intrusive state bureaucracy required to decide who among the poor merits assistance.

As you can see, by removing the excessive amounts of bureaucracy in our current aid system, about who and how they receive aid, tens to hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved. That could go straight into funding a universal basic income. A UBI as opposed to welfare programs would additionally end up motivating individuals on these systems to pursue other job opportunities, volunteer work, etc. With welfare as it presently is, each program comes with its own set of stipulations to receive money.

Take as an example disability income. If you break those conditions by say getting a part time job or freelance work, you can end up making less money than if you had just stayed on welfare. As the name implies, with a UBI, it is universal, meaning there are no stipulations, and an individual would not be penalized for looking to earn extra [00:41:00] income. To transition gracefully from our current welfare system, many have suggested making a UBI opt-in, in which case you would forgo any welfare program you are currently enrolled in.

While the funding sources we have discussed thus far would work in making a UBI economically viable, there is a much simpler option.

Quantitative easing, or put more simply, money printer, go brr. Now on a more serious note, whenever money printing is brought up, it does bring with it inflation fears. However, automation by its very nature is deflationary, so if we QE proportional to the jobs automation displaces to fund a UBI, these forces could balance out. To add to this, this pandemic has shown that governments around the world have the ability to print trillions of dollars when push comes to shove. Unfortunately, much of this money has gone directly to corporations, with what was told to us is that it would trickle down throughout the economy. In reality, this money has only gone into inflating asset prices and the coffers of executives and shareholders, thereby widening the wealth gap and increasing societal inequality.

If instead this money was provided to the general populace, rather than a wealth ceiling, it could serve as a floor for the new [00:42:00] economy. With people no longer burdened by their basic needs, they could afford that car repair they've needed, daycare, little league sports, and so on. Put another way, money provided by UBI actually trickles up through society, benefiting people who need it the most.

There is real world data to back this claim up. Referring back to Ontario's UBI pilot project, there was an uptick in economic activity, with individuals paying for education and student loans, purchasing new eyeglasses, paying for transportation costs such as bus fares to work rather than walking, purchasing necessary items like fresh produce, hospital parking passes, winter clothes they couldn't previously afford, and so on. One couple even used the money to keep their business afloat. Furthermore, an IPS study supports this take, in which for every $1 given to high income earners results in $0.39 added back to the economy, whereas for every $1 given to wage earners, it results in $1.21 added to the economy. In economics, this is referred to as the multiplier effect.

Another area where we would see this multiplier effect would be in an increase in entrepreneurship. Currently, entrepreneurship is not as prevalent because the [00:43:00] last thing someone who is struggling to pay for basic living expenses thinks is I'm going to start a business or a non profit. What is more common is that once one acquires financial security, and thereby more risk taking capacity, they can start a business. With the safety net provided by a well designed UBI, more organizations could come about, with some focused on tackling global problems, and others focused on the local community and hiring people, thereby spurring economic activity and generating wealth.

While on the subject of wealth generation, an important note to make here is that we have been looking at implementing a UBI from a purely capitalistic, GDP oriented perspective, when in actuality, we need to re envision this economic structure entirely for the technological revolution.

The People's Republic of Walmart Interview with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski Part 2 - Novara Media - Air Date 6-13-19

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Finally. Regarding states and markets, what can socialists do in the here and now? What sort of, what sort of demands can be made if you're a Bernie supporter or AOC follower on Twitter or a Labour Party member here in the UK or anywhere else in the world and you're a socialist and you're engaged in electoral democratic politics or even non-electoral democratic [00:44:00] politics? What could you learn from this book and then say to people that hold public office, we should be doing this?

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: I think a lot of the things that, at least when I think of, for example, Bernie in the U. S., a lot of things that they're doing are already on the lines of this. For example, I think the Medicare for All demand in the U. S. as sort of, in a way, absurd, it seems, say, from Canada or the U. K., where we've had socialized health care for 50 years, even though it's not perfect, even though it's not democratic, even though it is sort of, you know, it's kind of paternalistic nationalization at times, at least it is sort of a decommodified, democratically, in some way, decided over sector. I think that demand is a really good one. And then, for example, in the U. K. and other countries, I think, looking at big sectors of the economy that could be de-commodified, where there are already existing movements to start to do this. Pharmacare is another one and looking at actually the production of pharmaceuticals, which we don't have time to go into, but there's huge, huge, you know, problems with markets allocating resources for what gets produced, especially in terms of [00:45:00] antibiotic resistance, all this kind of stuff. Child care, transit you mentioned already. So I think on that sort of very, very high level social scale, like here's a sector of the economy that we could run democratically in, in the sort of very abstract overarching way. But I think at the same time, and I hope that comes through in the book, looking at, you know, that sort of low level of democracy, how can we democratize workplaces?

And I think that's where UK Labor is doing a really good job under Corbyn at looking at both of those, right? What are alternative models of ownership for particular enterprises, particular projects? And ones that give people more of a say, more of a capacity to participate in that planning at the sort of shop factory whatever level, and hope fully you kind of have those those pinchers that are moving in both directions from the bottom up and from the top down. And I mean, we talked about central banks a lot, I think doing that job of demystifying these big institutions, repoliticizing them and [00:46:00] cutting against that really strong neoliberal argument, that I think is falling apart slowly, that these are just like outside the realm of politics, that this is just like pure dry economics kind of working itself out. I think being, being really brave and forward about saying, No, we can have different social goals, you know, right at the heart of monetary policy or at the heart of these like large institutions that already have a coordinating function, but that have been effectively depoliticized.

So I think there's a whole host... in short, there's a whole host of things, because I think we, as we try to show that planning is really everywhere in our economy. It's just making it explicit and making it participatory, making us actually be the agents of it rather than small groups of people.

LEIGH PHILLIPS: The two examples I would give concretely would be, one, yes, I do really want to underscore the scale of the threat that we face from antimicrobial resistance. It was fascinating a few weeks ago to see the UK's antimicrobial resistance czar discuss the idea of potentially nationalizing big pharma in order to resolve this problem. [00:47:00] Viewers might not be aware but basically 30-35 years ago, the major pharmaceutical companies got out of the business of doing any sort of research and development or even commercialization of new classes of antibiotics. Research continues to happen, but at public universities or government labs, which do not have the money to engage in clinical trials.

And so, the UK antimicrobial resistance czar happens to be a former executive with Goldman Sachs. And his argument is that they might need to be nationalized because the antibiotics are simply insufficiently profitable. If you, you know, take a course of antibiotics for five, six weeks, at the end of that, you want the infection gone. You're not going to be taking a drug every day for the rest of your life, as you would with some sort of chronic disease, which is where the real money is. And that, the scale of the threat there is sort of undermining modern medicine. It is probably even more of an existential threat to our modern [00:48:00] way of life, throwing back to Victorian sort of types of medicine. Most of modern medicine depends upon a background of antimicrobial protection. Even diagnostics sometimes do that. So, it really is very existentially threatening. And that would be a... I would add that as a sort of number one... in fact, I kind of wish that there was as much of a left movement around antimicrobial resistance as there is around climate change. It's happening much faster. With, the green deal, I'm very excited about that framing because... and it is about planning now, it's talking about infrastructure, state-led development, full employment, and it leaps over the two sort of main framings of the climate threat that we've had so far, which are both forms of capitalist realism.

One is sort of, like, market mechanisms of carbon taxation or cap and trade, or feed-in tariffs, which end up, you know, more negatively impacting working people. On the other side, there's a sort of, like, personal, individual, what can I do? Can I, travel, you know, fly less or whatever? And again, it's this [00:49:00] sort of individualized, capitalist realist conception of responsibility for this. The Green New Deal framing for the very first time locates the real source of the problem of market failure, of who is responsible, not as individuals, but a system, the market system.

Some of the particular demands within it, I would like to see a little bit more robust. So, I have some minor criticisms there. I'd like to see more engagement with trade unions from the get go, where Green New Deal activists have, from the start, worked with trade unions, they've had much more success than those areas where, sort of, activists or environmentalists have come up with their series of demands and never spoke to trade unions. And now there's a number of trade unions who've actually been protesting the Green New Deal in California and elsewhere in the United States, even some quite radical unions like the electrical workers. So, there needs to be a sort of finessing of that. But overall, the framing is absolutely an example of what we're talking about in terms [00:50:00] of planning as a solution to climate change and a raft of other environmental issues, rather than degrowth or individual consumption or market mechanisms, cap and trade or whatever.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: It's interesting you mention the pharmaceutical stuff because in my book I talk about a great disorder and all these crises. I don't talk about that one, but most people aren't aware of this: in 1900, the leading causes of death globally, pneumonia, infections, disease...

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Influenza.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: ...yeah, exactly. It's all infections. And we just take it for granted that increasingly causes of death will be dementia, cancer, stroke, age-related conditions, but the other...

LEIGH PHILLIPS: That was one of the greatest humanitarian developments. It is such a precious thing, you know, a price above rubies, antibiotics.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: And they weren't patented. Fleming didn't patent penicillin, which is interesting.

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Oh it is, yeah, absolutely. There's all sorts of lovely little...

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Comrade Fleming.

LEIGH PHILLIPS: ...all sorts of lovely stories of, sort of socialist ethoses, of socialist values within the history of modern medicine. And [00:51:00] revival of that is absolutely necessary.

BONUS - The People's Republic of Walmart Interview with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski Part 3 - Novara Media - Air Date 6-13-19

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: So the socialist calculation debate, which you explicitly talk about in the book, we've already sort of really touched upon it, is this idea that it's only really through the price mechanism that you can have this optimal allocation of resources, and it feeds into sort of everyday, off the shelf ideology for just capitalist realism, right? You don't even need to think that you're defending capitalism. It's just that's how prices work. That's how they always work. And what Hayek and Friedman and people like this say is that this will always be superior to centrally command economies because they are acting with limited information. Now we can debate whether that was ever true or not. Let's say it was true. Let's say it's historically contingent, it was limited to a certain period of time. What you guys are saying is that technology now makes that general debate quite moot. And furthermore, if anything, big data gives us far greater information than prices do. Is that correct?

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, you could also say that, if that were the case, if you [00:52:00] require some sort of external prices for that, then you could say the same thing about the Soviet Union. Soviet Union traded with the rest of the world. So that doesn't really work. So you have to have some other explanation as to why the Soviet Union did not work, rather than simply planning. Because if planning, if a command economy is the reason that Soviet Union didn't work, then neither should Walmart, neither should Amazon, neither should any of these, and just sort of saying, Oh, well, we know about Coase, I mean, that's their sort of get out of jail free card. And they, basically what we're doing with this is, we're looking at it a little bit more seriously, investigating that, and really thinking about it more deeply. And the reason that this is absolutely necessary for us as socialists, why we need to return to the socialist calculation debate, is because it is hard. if we are going to replace the market and all of the inequalities and the irrationalities that accompany that, it is not just enough for us through the force of will and our optimism and sense of injustice to right the wrongs. We actually do have to think very [00:53:00] seriously about the challenges of calculation.

And what's fascinating about the socialist calculation debate from the 30s to the 50s, and why Hayek and so on and so forth made such really good arguments was because they, in some respects, were on the back foot. With the existence of socialism, social democracy, militant trade unions, they were responding to an ascendant, sort of intellectually confident left. And they had to be as good. And now what we see, and we were talking about this just before we started here, the right's response to our book already and I think to yours as well, is that it's sort of off the shelf arguments. They're not really responding to this. And I find it very interesting and exciting to be in a moment where the left once again is beginning to be intellectually confident, and that they're having to respond to us once again, which is nice. Sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: No, no, it's good. I mean, I've just, because obviously my book was launched yesterday, Tuesday.

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Congratulations.

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: Congratulations, yeah.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Happy to be joining this oeuvre of, you know, quite inflammatory opinion on the left that the right feel they [00:54:00] have to respond to. And yeah, the responses were, or even the responses in the reviews prior to the publication, Danny Finkelstein in the Times, and it's just churlish, undergrad, Facebook-post level prose. And it's like, okOkay climate change, demographic aging, automation, the collapse of the neoliberal model since 2007-2008, whatever your politics, we can all agree this is a thing. And they're not even talking about that. They're not talking about, for instance, this book as an intervention to those debates. They're just saying, do you apologize for 1917? Will any sort of effort to make society better result in, you know, the Russian Civil War mark two or, you know, the Ukraine famines and so on. I'm like, it's an off the shelf debate. Are there any smarter people on the right? There must be people. For instance, my book got positive reviews. I know you have as well in certain publications one might not expect, the Financial Times, for instance. Are there not people in those [00:55:00] circles who look at this and go, there's something really here that's quite interesting. Have you encountered any reviews like that?

LEIGH PHILLIPS: The anarcho-capitalists vey much...

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: Yeah, I was going to say, of all people, the anarcho-capitalists are willing to take it. So, you know, a fringe, but again, someone like Hayek was a fringe figure in his time, but there's definitely people on the right who are willing to take it seriously. There's the Reinventing Capitalism book, Schönberger, this, I think he was like a...

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: ...consultant management sort of, you know, management consultant who's written kind of the definitive kind of pop book on big data and now has a second one about how big data is going... you know, he's basically making some of our arguments in, you know, the usual type of thing of saving capitalism from the right, but he's even willing to say that maybe this new system enabled by information technology will not really be capitalism, but something else, but we'll still have the hierarchies and all of that. But yeah, so there's definitely people on the right thinking through this stuff. And I think there's a big contrast between them and the people who [00:56:00] are just, you know, like making these off the shelf arguments and, you know, Laffer Curve, writing on a napkin level of intellectual curiosity, right?

LEIGH PHILLIPS: Mayer-Schönberger, I think, is very, very interesting and because, as you say, he's in many respects making some of the similar arguments we make, but from the opposite point of view. He's nakedly pro-capitalist and he's just finding it fascinating that more and more transactions already are taking place where the price signal is playing a smaller and smaller role now that we have sort of machine learning, big data allowing for multi-dimensional comparison of different factors. He uses the example sometimes of airline ticket recommendation engines, where you, as a human, might find it actually quite difficult to like, Okay, so I want to fly on this date or possibly these other dates, and I don't want to fly out of this airport, but I could if it were cheap, and, but I want an aisle seat, and my wife wants a window, but I don't want any, uh... all those different things, and we actually find it very difficult as [00:57:00] humans to have that multidimensional comparison, but the recommendation engine knows, having seen how you've purchased things in the past, begins to actually know you better than you know yourself, is able to make these recommendations. And price is just one smaller aspect of this.

What's fascinating, I think, there, with him, is that you can sort of see, you know, there's a challenge to neoliberalism since 2008. They haven't really grappled with the... they haven't fully resolved the crisis. And there are interesting figures, horrifying figures on the right that are like people like Marco Rubio, who are making arguments that there needs to be more state planning, more intervention, more industrial policy for the United States to be able to compete against China. And you could imagine a world where sort of after neoliberalism, where the right fully recognizes once again the necessity of planning, but hierarchical, authoritarian planning, a return to that, and never being any sort of, like, final reckoning between the classes. And so our [00:58:00] argument is, it is sort of the flip side of that, which is planning is possible. It's everywhere already. It's hierarchical. And what we need to be doing is making it work for us. We need to make sure that it's democratic.

BONUS - The People's Republic of Walmart Interview with Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski Part 4 - Novara Media - Air Date 6-13-19

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: Yeah, because I look at big data and I look at all the tendencies you're talking about in the book and I basically see two potential futures. So one is data-driven public services, universal basic services, which are freely available to all on the back of declining cost of information, energy, labour, etc. I think that's one highly plausible future. So, permanently cheaper. The question is, how cheap, right? And then a big variable in all of that will be big data. So if you've got universal basic service of public buses, free public buses for everybody everywhere. Obviously, predictive modeling about who's going to go where, for how long, etc, would be very good at allocating resources for a public transport network. So that's one future. Another is China, where you have WeChat, which is not just a social network, but also a payment system. You [00:59:00] have smart cities, which have facial recognition around them. And people would be fined for jaywalking or so on. Something like that, a minor infraction, and they'll be immediately fined. It'll be through their mobile phone. Is that a fair conclusion to say that? Planning of a considerably increased kind is inevitable. The question is, in whose interests?

LEIGH PHILLIPS: You hit the nail on the head, absolutely. This Marco Rubio report that came out a couple of months ago, Made in China 2025, where he makes this call for, you know, more planning so the United States can stay ahead in robotics, AI, biotech, a number of other areas. Then Intel came out with a similar white paper making an argument for more an interventionist industrial policy. And one can absolutely imagine a sort of convergence of these ideas and the dystopia is genuinely that inability to, I think, make a distinction between the sort of surveillance capitalism of Amazon and Facebook's of the world and the surveillance communism of the people's Republic of China, and, yeah, [01:00:00] social credit and all these, convergence of those. I'm not predicting that that's going to happen, but I do think that the key at the moment for the left is, in the face of both of these sort of tendencies, is to remain as the guardians of freedom. That whatever path that they go down along this more definitely surveillance sort of planned market economy, our responsibility is to be the champions of freedom and democracy in those situations.

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: And we already see how much Silicon Valley cooperates with the U. S. government, with the surveillance state, with the national security state, all that. We also see, I mean, the upside is we also see tech workers starting to rebel against that, and some, you know, very nascent forms of organizing there that are partly driven by working conditions, but partly driven by these sort of, you know, deeply political pressures where people see these possible futures. And again, not making really super dystopian predictions, but even today there's enough there that people don't want to be involved in whatever projects, whether at home or abroad... we saw that with Microsoft and some of the facial recognition stuff and other things. And yeah, in terms of the sort of smart city thing, we're already seeing that there's Sidewalk [01:01:00] Labs, which is run by Google, setting up shop in actually Toronto, Canada, and trying to create these sort of model, the first sort of model neighborhood that would take this sort of capitalist road of big data and planning, marrying urban planning with economic planning, with a host of other things and enabling the kinds of fairly, again, authoritarian technocratic solutions that we're deeply critical of here.

AARON BASTANI - HOST, NOVARA MEDIA: I mean, it's one of the things I really agree with in the account of Marx's Grundrisse by Antonio Negri. There's lots of things to disagree with Antonio Negri, but the idea of the real subsumption of society, the gradual expansion of the surveillance of the factory, superimposed onto society at large, I think that's quite a clear and prescient account of what Google wants to do, for instance, with smart cities, it seems to me. They want to gather and collect as much data as possible about every iterative act, every movement, and somehow subordinate it to the profit motive.

MICHAL ROZWORSKI: Yeah. Yeah, and I think the challenge for the left is to [01:02:00] come up with, uh, and I don't think we even pretend to do that here, but to start to come up with ideas for these kinds of coordinating functions to be done democratically, to be done in a way that, you know, somehow walks that tightrope between centralization and decentralization, between decision making at the individual level and freedom and control, as well as sort of those big broad social goals that we'd want to achieve together in a way that avoids exactly this kind of subsumption. And I mean, yeah, I think that that observation is happening. The one we quote in the book is, that also famous quote from Marx, where, I won't get it right, but it's something about, you know, how we learn about society at the factory, like, you know, the factory, in his time teaches us just how reliant we are on other people, just how social beings we are, where, you know, production under feudalism or under other social systems would not have taught that. And I think this is, you know, sort of like the next logical step. If that's [01:03:00] already implicit in capitalism, is this sort of reliance on others and this common building of a world, why don't we actually, actualize that, which is sort of trying to show us where we actually socially decide on what we want to be doing.

Final comments on living our values and stepping away from work

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with the introduction of the book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Novara Media challenged the arguments against a planned economy. Second Thought laid out what mass automation under capitalism would look like. 1Dime explored the ideas of socialism under either scarcity or abundance. Futurology gave some historical context on universal basic income. Second Thought continued the discussion of a democratically controlled socialist economy. Futurology also looked at how to pay for UBI. And Novara Media continued their discussion about planned economies.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard more bonus clips from Novara Media, getting deeper into the weeds. To hear that [01:04:00] and have all of our bonus contents delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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 to wrap-up, I don't really have the time or energy to say much today, which is actually right to the point because we're getting ready to try to live some of the values discussed during today's show. It wasn't really planned, but it worked out nicely that this episode brings us right up to a vacation week, but not to worry, we have automated some hand-picked episodes from the archives to drop into your feed. So be on the lookout for those. In the meantime, we will not be working, not defining or valuing ourselves by our work, and if we're really lucky, hardly looking at the internet at all, and then we'll be back refreshed and recharged, ready to face the absurdity that is 2024 a new.

That is [01:05:00] going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. You can leave us a voicemail or send a text to (202)999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 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 trio, Ken, Brian, and Ben for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, 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 impressively good and often funny bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers and all of our regular episodes all through your [01:06:00] regular podcast player. In addition to the warm and fuzzy feeling you get by knowing that your support helps the people who make this show go on vacation every once in awhile. You'll find that link to sign up in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue to 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.

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#1614 Deep-Fakery and Deep Consequences for Democracy (Transcript)

Posted by · February 28, 2024 4:05 AM

Air Date 2/28/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast in which we grapple with the fact that AI generated deepfakes, entirely fabricated audio and video of recognizable people, are here. They have been on the horizon for years, but they have finally arrived during the biggest global election year in history, which may prove to be a make or break year for democracy itself, as we struggle to separate fact from fiction and autocracy is on the rise around the world. Sources today include Forbes, CYBER, All Things Considered, Aperture, On with Kara Swisher, and TED Talks Daily, with additional members-only clips from Forbes and What Next: TBD.

Deepfaking Democracy: Why AI Threatens News And Global Elections In 2024 Part 1 - Forbes - Air Date 2-6-24

UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: 2024 will be a record year for elections around the world. Over 4 billion people, more than half of Earth's population, are expected to cast a ballot. 7 out of 10 of the most populous nations are going to the polls. [00:01:00] And many elections will be in countries consequential to the news cycle.

Taiwan held its presidential elections on January 13th, which saw William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party win with over 40 percent of the vote. Lai's election is expected to make relations between Taiwan and mainland China more antagonistic. Both Ukraine and Russia, who remain locked in war with one another, have scheduled elections in March and U. S. elections in November are bound to draw intense international attention in what is shaping up to be a rematch of the 2020 elections.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Democracy is still at risk. This is not hyperbole.

UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Many academics, political analysts, and think tanks expect 2024 to be a major stress test on the concept of democracy itself. And one particular variable that will further complicate this test is the rise of AI tools, and the ability to create convincing, deepfake news content.

JORDAN PEELE AS VOICE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA DEEPFAKE: We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any [00:02:00] point in time, even if they would never say those things. Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet. It's a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources.

ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE, FORBES WRITER: deepfakes and cheap fakes are not new. But with the explosion of AI that was ushered in by the introduction of ChatGPT just over a year ago, we saw deepfakes proliferate. And the types of deepfakes that we've been looking at, which are these fake news segments using the real likeness and real logos of real news outlets and the faces of real broadcasters, are seemingly new and they are particularly problematic right now as we are heading into a really high stakes election and also as we are in the midst of a war.

We have seen deepfake news segments from top prominent anchors at all sorts of outlets ranging from CNN to CBS and beyond.

YENA LEE, FRANCE 24 NEWS ANCHOR: Truth or fake? You're beginning with a story of a [00:03:00] video on social media where President Zelensky appears to surrender to Russian forces. What's that about?

CATALINA MARCHANT DE ABREU, FRANCE 24 CORRESPONDENT: A false video of President Zelensky was diffused yesterday where he's apparently making an announcement giving up to Russian forces. This video was diffused on a hacked Ukrainian news website called Ukraine 24.

HANY FARID: I've been seeing it sort of come in and out for several years now, but in really seeing it consistently in high quality, I would say in the last 12 months.

DEEPFAKED PRESIDENT ZELENSKY: I have to make difficult decisions. At first, I decided to return Donbas. It's time to look in the eye.

HANY FARID: There's two main reasons for it. One is that the technology to create deepfakes of news anchors has just gotten better. But two, and I think this is also important, is that most of the major social media companies have eviscerated their trust and safety teams. And that's not just Twitter, by the way. That one's easy. But it's even the Facebooks of the world, the YouTubes, and the TikToks. [00:04:00] And so, as a result of that, when people create fake content, it's much, much easier to distribute.

So, remember that when we're talking about deepfakes, there's really three parts to it. There's the underlying technology, the bad actors who are misusing these technologies, but then there's the spread of that. And the spread of that technology is not an AI question, that's a social media question. All three things have now lined up. The technology is getting better, bad actors are figuring out that you can monetize or abuse this content, and the social media companies have fallen asleep at the wheel again.

BILL WHITAKER, CBS ANCHOR: Using video from the CBS News archives, Chris Ume was able to train his computer to learn every aspect of my face and wipe away the decades. This is how I looked 30 years ago. He can even remove my mustache.

HANY FARID: There are two approaches to detecting manipulated media, what we call proactive and reactive. So, the reactive is sort of my bread and butter here as an academic at UC [00:05:00] Berkeley. What we do is we take an image, an audio or a video, we run it through a battery of tests, and we try to figure out if it's been manipulated or AI generated, all after the fact, right? So, stuff gets online, some fact checker contacts us, we analyze the content, and we eventually tell the fact checker and they eventually set the record straight, and meanwhile the whole world has moved on and gotten defrauded to the tune of millions of dollars.

So, the reactive stuff is good, if you will, as a post-mortem, but at the speed at which social media moves, half life of a social media post can be measured in minutes, you're not there fast enough to deal with the damage. The proactive techniques, the way they work, is that if you pick up your phone and record something, or you are in the business of generating AI content, you can inject into that content, whether it's real or AI generated, a digital watermark that is cryptographically signed and then downstream your browser or a piece of software can read that watermark and say, Nope, I know that this is AI generated, or in [00:06:00] fact that it is real, and you can do that instantaneously.

This only works when you have good players. So, when Adobe decides it's going to put watermarks into its content, well great, I trust Adobe. But, a lot of bad players out there, and a lot of this code for creating deepfakes is open source. So if you have open source, and you've got some code in there for inserting a watermark, well the bad guy's going to go in there and remove that code, and we're off to the races.

So, the watermarking absolutely are going to play a role here, but they will not, in and of themselves, solve the problem because there's always ways around this technology and there's open source and there's bad actors. But I'm super supportive of that for the big players like Adobe, OpenAI, and MidJourney, and maybe we lop off half the problem.

AI Deepfakes Are Everywhere and Congress is Completely Out of Their Depth - CYBER - Air Date 2-9-24

LIA HOLLAND: This is incredibly complicated, but one of the places to start is with the existing laws that a bunch of these people who've been affected that we're already talking about, are already suing under. Most states have a right of publicity law that allows, you know, celebrities or public figures to [00:07:00] sue if people misuse their images in some sort of manner that is commercial or could be construed as commercial. And then at the same time, we have defamation law, which can often be a way for average people to sue those who humiliate them, while it protects celebrities less.

So, between those two, depending on where you live, and in the majority of states, there's some good stuff there. There's some good mechanisms, at least in terms of if you want to get a lawyer and if you want to sue the person who's causing you misery. But still that doesn't actually give victims of these deepfakes a real time way to say, Hey, get this disgusting porn of me off the internet. This is humiliating me and it's spreading everywhere. And while it pains me, because I know how extensively something like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been abused, these sort of notice and take down systems, I'm talking to [00:08:00] a lot of people and none of us really see another way to make something that is actually responsive to the harms that people are going to be experiencing. But what we can get right this time, and I think, you know, with Donald Trump right now claiming that actual photos of him are deepfakes is that unlike the, we could build a system where there are actual consequences if you abuse it, if you say that's an embarrassing video of you or a video of police misconduct or what have you is a deepfake and it actually isn't. So that's where I'd start.

MATTHEW GAULT - HOST, CYBER: Oh, that's interesting. I didn't even think about the possibility of a public person getting into trouble for lying about a real image being a deepfake.

LIA HOLLAND: Oh, yeah, that's coming.

MATTHEW GAULT - HOST, CYBER: Has anyone proposed legislation? Or is this just like conversations?

LIA HOLLAND: This is conversations because I think that a lot of the people who are looking at No Fakes or No AI Fraud or what have you and saying that these are [00:09:00] terrible laws with unintended, extremely harmful consequences are also really feeling for the reality that people are going to face with these technologies and knowing that we need to do something. And happily, we're having much more of a proactive conversation here amongst ourselves about what we do want, then I think we have maybe with previous online revolutions.

JANUS ROSE: That was one of the things that struck me when initially I wrote about the No Fakes and then there was another law in Tennessee that I think was proposed the same day, which is that, you know, and this is like what I wrote about in the article I wrote a couple of weeks ago, which is like, it seems like the gist of these laws is sort of intended to protect celebrities, and maybe the rest of us, too, kind of, sort of? And that's kind of like where I came at this from, which is like the fact that like, you know, a lot of people have been talking about this as a concern for a while, but now that Taylor Swift is mad, now that, like, The Weeknd and Drake are mad about this... and it's not just, you [00:10:00] know, like photos. It's also, like, voice rights, music, and then all other kinds of stuff that could be considered intellectual property or personalized, sort of like, intimate representations of someone's person.

It seems to me like that's where this always starts and ends, when we get "privacy protections" or something that is supposed to at least in theory be like protecting privacy, is that it's generally winds up protecting famous and rich people and doesn't do a whole lot for regular people who are facing abuse and harassment and, you know, sexual violence. And the copyright system, as you were just mentioning, like the copyright system, you're saying, like, Oh, we keep looking at this, like, we don't see any other way of enforcing that. So, like, what what would be different about this compared to, like, you know, the fact that when artists, for example, have people profiting from their art that they release, [00:11:00] like music or otherwise, there is a mode for redress, but it's not very accessible unless you have a lot of money to litigate it. So, what's the fix here when it comes to this stuff, if in the past, this has been kind of the status quo?

LIA HOLLAND: That's a great question, uh, because we are really swimming upstream against the headline grabbers here. If something horrible is being done to Taylor Swift and, you know, by God, Josh Hawley can trot out there with a bill and wave it in the air and it's going to get covered, you know, all over creation, the motive there is really clear and straightforward. Politicians like laws that grab headlines. They like flashy partnerships with celebrities. And I would also say that the lobby of those IP rights holders, the major labels and publishers and content companies and what have you, is extremely powerful and really well organized. And from the moment that this all blew up, they've been in legislative offices, you know, gunning for a bill that's going to benefit, you know, the Universal Music Groups of the world.

And yeah, and that's [00:12:00] why, for myself, I turn towards - and I think that there are also legislators who are thinking in this way - better tools for everyday people, because I don't think that there's going to be an effective way to censor, or we can't put the rabbit back in the hat with AI. What we need is proactive tools to address it in a way that is, you know, minimally invasive when it comes to surveillance and censoring speech, and slapping upload filters across the whole Internet isn't the right thing either. I would look at something like, Well, we've got Google reverse image search and we know that that works pretty good. And we've got, you know, the, the DMCA and that, you know, there's an established protocol for that. And we've got this idea that... and we've learned a lot since since that legislation went in. And so, can we slap something together that doesn't reinvent the wheel and just gives people the right to say, Hey, this is [00:13:00] a horrific fake photo of me, please scrub it off the internet. And they can make that request in a way that the platforms have to be accountable to. Cause I think that's the other thing. It's really hard to be heard as an individual when platforms are dealing with so many users.

JANUS ROSE: About that point on platforms being accountable: this is kind of like something I say a lot when I'm talking about this topic, is that like, we're kind of addressing a symptom of a problem here and not the actual problem. And the problem is that we have all these giant tech companies that are producing this technology and they basically have no regulation and they're kind of just doing whatever they want. And that's, you know, there's even, these lobbying groups, like, Elon Musk has this AI institute that's essentially saying, You must let us develop AI and if you don't, then you're killing people. People will die. That's kind of, like, what I always frame this around is, we're dealing with a symptom and not the actual problem, which is that, even the way in which these tech companies address [00:14:00] this problem sometimes is very much like Band-Aid oriented. I was writing an article a couple of weeks ago about the filtering system on some of these things. OpenAI has been constantly needing to patch ChatGPT and Dall-E and all these image generators, because people keep finding ways to get past the content filter system that prevents them from generating certain types of images through all these kind of tricky ways. And it's just this cat and mouse game. And, you know, when it comes to some of these - I was reading this paper - and when it comes to some of these systems, what they're actually doing is that they're still generating the content and then they're just not showing it. So, it's not even that they're preventing the content from being created in the first place. They're just filtering it out.

MATTHEW GAULT - HOST, CYBER: But really, it's off-camera sketching that image you asked for and just storing it in a digital warehouse somewhere and all the forbidden images you'll never be able to say.

JANUS ROSE: Yeah, but it's like, even if nobody sees that image, [00:15:00] that's indicative of a larger problem, which is that we don't actually know how to stop that from happening, because the training has already occurred. These systems are already built on top of billions of images that were taken without permission. And, you know, some of them - we wrote another story about this a couple of weeks ago - LAION, which is a probably one of the most commonly used image databases used in generative AI, it contains billions of images that are taken from web scraping and it was found that I think about 3000 instances of CSAM, of child exploitation, were found in this massive database. That's kind of an example of what we're dealing with here. It's like, the sort of, like, base problem has already occurred. We're just getting the results of it now and you can filter the results, but that doesn't ultimately solve the fact that where this all came from.

Tech giants pledge action against deceptive AI in elections - All Things Considered - Air Date 2-16-24

JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: More than 40 countries are set to hold major elections this year, and many experts worry that rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technologies could [00:16:00] disrupt those votes. Just a few weeks ago, an apparent deepfake robocall that sounded like President Joe Biden told people not to vote in New Hampshire. Today, 20 major tech companies announced they are going to do their part to avoid becoming the story.

Joining us now to talk through this new agreement are NPR's Shannon Bond, who covers how information travels, and Miles Parks, who covers voting. Tell us about this agreement. What's in it?

SHANNON BOND: Well, it's aimed at AI-generated images, audio and video that could deceive voters, so whether that's by impersonating a candidate doing or saying something they didn't or misleading people about, you know, when or how to vote. And the companies are agreeing to some pretty broad commitments here to develop technology to watermark AI content and to detect and label these kind of fakes. They're pledging to be more transparent about how their tools and platforms are being used. They want to educate the public about AI.

Now, look. Many of these actions are things some of these companies are already working on. And what's notable [00:17:00] here is that this agreement does not outright ban this kind of deceptive use of AI in elections.

JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: Right. OK. Let's dig in a little bit here. Does this agreement actually bind these companies to do anything or is this more of like a mission statement?

SHANNON BOND: Yeah. This is a voluntary agreement, so it's not binding. And remember, just because companies create policies about AI doesn't mean they always effectively enforce them. Now, this agreement came together in just the past six weeks. And in many ways, you know, it seems like it had to be pretty broad to get this many companies to agree. We spoke with Microsoft President Brad Smith today. He said that unity itself is an accomplishment.

BRAD SMITH: We all want and need to innovate. We want and need to compete with each other. But it's also just indispensable that we acknowledge and address the problems that are very real, including to democracy.

SHANNON BOND: And indeed, even as these companies, including Microsoft, are saying, you know, they're on guard over risks of AI, they're also continuing to roll out even more [00:18:00] advanced technology. Like, just yesterday, OpenAI, one of the other companies that signed this agreement, they announced this tool that allows you to type in a simple text description to create a really realistic high-definition video.

JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: I mean, hearing you describe that, it's easy to see how a tool like that could be used to spread lies about voting, for example. Miles, over to you. How are elections officials feeling about AI right now?

MILES PARKS: They are thinking about it a lot. Last week, I was at a conference with some of the top election officials in the country. They don't want people to panic. Generally, they see AI as more of an extension of problems they were already working on. That's how Adrian Fontes, who's the secretary of state of Arizona, that's how he put it to me when we were talking.

ADRIAN FONTES: AI needs to be demystified. AI needs to be exposed for the amplifier that it is, not the great, mysterious, world changing, calamity inducing, you know, monstrosity that some people are making it out to be.

MILES PARKS: That said, there are a myriad of ways experts can imagine these tools threatening democracy even beyond, I think, the most obvious use [00:19:00] case, which is, you know, making a fake video of a candidate saying something they didn't actually say.

JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: Walk us through, if you can, some of those scenarios.

MILES PARKS: Yeah. I asked Smith from Microsoft about this, And he said specifically he's worried about people using AI to dub over real videos with fake audio. That could be a lot more convincing to people than creating a whole new video. But there's also a bigger picture worry that I heard percolating at this conference last week, that as more fake stuff is swirling online, the public will slowly lose trust in all information. That's one of the hardest aspects of this accord.

The tech companies say they want the public to be more skeptical of what they see online, but that can lead to this feeling among people that nothing is true or real. And bad actors can capitalize on that too, by then being able to claim that real information is fake. It's called the liar's dividend. With more AI-generated stuff floating around, it's just going to become more and more common that candidates when real bad information comes out about them, they can just say, no, that's fake. That's AI-generated.

JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: I mean, we should just point out here that policing [00:20:00] truth and lies online is really fraught these days. The political right in particular has cast these kinds of efforts as politically biased. Are tech companies worried about diving in here?

SHANNON BOND: Yeah. I asked Brad Smith of Microsoft about this. You know, he and other tech executives involved in this, they say there is a clear distinction here between free expression, which they say they're all committed to, and using AI or other kinds of technology, you know, in a way that is really deceiving, misleading voters, interfering with the election process. They're very much framing this fight as one against fraud.

MILES PARKS: I do think that we'll probably see companies jump in a lot harder against things that are explicit lies about how people vote. Think of like a video that claims Election Day is on Friday versus Tuesday. That's pretty easy to police. I think it's the content that raises doubts about the trustworthiness about elections, that it's still an open question how companies are going to police that sort of content in 2024.

Deepfake Adult Content Is a Serious and Terrifying Issue - Aperture - Air Date 5-1-23

MIKE MCEWEN - HOST, APERTURE: As of 2019, 96 percent of deepfakes on the [00:21:00] internet were sexual in nature, and virtually all of those were of non-consenting women. With the release of AI tools like DALL·E and Midjourney, making these deepfakes has become easier than ever before, and the repercussions for the women involved are much more devastating.

Recently, a teacher in a small town in the United States was fired after her likeness appeared in an adult video. Parents of the students found the video and made it clear they didn't want this woman teaching their kids. She was immediately dismissed from her position.

But this woman never actually filmed an explicit video. Generative AI created a likeness of her and deepfaked it onto the body of an adult film actress. She pleaded her innocence, but the parents of the students couldn't wrap their heads around how a video like this could be faked. They refused to believe her. And honestly, it's hard to blame them. We've all seen just how good Generative AI can be. This incident, and many others just like it, proved how dangerous AI adult content is and, if left unchecked, it could be so, so much worse.

[00:22:00] At first glance, AI pornography might seem harmless, if we can generate other forms of content without human actors, why not this one? Surely it may reduce work in the field, but it could also curb more problematic issues in the industry. If the AI was used to create artificial people, it wouldn't be so bad, but the problem is that the generative AI has been mainly used with deepfakes to convince viewers that the person they're watching is a specific, real person, someone who never consented to be in the video.

Speaking of consent, by convincingly portraying women in suggestive situations, the perpetrators commit sexual acts or behaviors without the victim's permission, and that, by definition, is sexual assault. But does using generative AI to produce these videos cause any actual harm beyond being defined as assault? For the victims involved, there are numerous consequences to being portrayed in these videos.

QTCINDERELLA: This is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet.

MIKE MCEWEN - HOST, APERTURE: QTCinderella is a Twitch streamer who built a massive following for her gaming, baking, and lifestyle content. [00:23:00] She also created the Streamer Awards to honor her fellow content creators, one of whom was Brandon Ewing, aka Atrioc. In January of 2023, Atrioc was live streaming when his viewers saw a tab open on his browser for a deepfake website. After getting screenshotted and posted on Reddit, users found that the site address featured deepfakes videos of streamers like QTCinderella doing explicit sexual acts.

Cinderella began getting harassed by these images and videos and after seeing them she said, "The amount of body dysmorphia I've experienced seeing those photos has ruined me. It's not as simple as just being violated, it's so much more than that". For months afterwards, QTC Cinderella was constantly harassed with these reminders of these images and videos. Some horrible people sent the photos to her 17 year old cousin.

And this isn't a one off case. Perpetrators of deepfakes are known to send these videos to family members of the victims, especially if they don't like what the victim is doing publicly. The founder of Not Your Porn, a group dedicated to removing non-consensual porn from [00:24:00] the internet, was targeted by internet trolls using AI generated videos, depicting her in explicit acts. Then, somebody sent these videos to her family members. Just imagine how terrible that must feel for her and her relatives.

The sad truth is that even when a victim can discredit the videos, the harm might already be done. A deepfake can hurt someone's career at a pivotal moment. Cinderella was able to get back on her feet and retain her following, but the school teacher, who lost her livelihood, wasn't so lucky. Imagine someone running for office and leading in the polls, only to be targeted with a deepfake video 24 hours before election night. Imagine how much damage could be done before their team could prove that the video was doctored.

Unfortunately, there's very little legislation on deepfakes, and so far, only three states in the US have passed laws to address them directly. Even with these laws, the technology makes it difficult to track down the people who create them. Also, because most of them post on their personal websites rather than on social media, there's no regulations or content moderation limits on what they can share. Since [00:25:00] tracking and prosecuting the individuals who make this kind of content is so challenging, the onus should be on the companies that make these tools to prevent them from being used for evil.

And in fairness, some of them are trying. Platforms like DALL·E and Midjourney have taken steps to prevent people from creating the likeness of a living person. Reddit is also working to improve its AI detection system and has already made considerable strides in prohibiting this content on its platform. These efforts are important, but I'm not sure they'll completely eliminate the threat of deepfakes. More generative AI tools are coming on the scene and will require new moderation efforts, and eventually some of these platforms won't care, especially if that gives them an edge over well established platforms.

And then there's the sheer influx of uploaded content. In 2022, Pornhub received over 2 million video uploads to its site. That number will likely increase with new AI tools that can generate content without needing a physical camera. How can any moderation system keep up with that insane volume?

The worst thing about these deepfakes is that the victims can't just log off of the internet either. Almost all of our [00:26:00] livelihoods depend on the internet, so logging off would be an enormous disadvantage in their careers and personal life. And expecting anyone to leave the internet to protect themselves isn't a reasonable ask. The onus isn't on the victim to change, it's on the platforms and the government to create tools that prevent these things from happening so easily. If all the women who are being harassed went offline, the trolls would win, and this tactic of theirs would be incredibly successful. They could effectively silence critics and whoever they felt like attacking.

There is another problem with generative AI tools producing so much adult content. It introduces strong biases to the algorithms and how women should be presented. Many women have reported that they're often over sexualized when they try to create an image of themselves using AI tools. These biases are introduced by the source of the AI's training data, the internet. Although nudes and explicit images have been filtered out for some generative AI platforms, these biases still persist. These platforms have to do more than just let the open internet train their AI if they want to prevent the overt sexualization of women to be their normal output.

[00:27:00] Deepfakes may be making headlines now, but the truth is they've been around in spirit for a very long time. Before generative AI, people used tools like Photoshop and video editing software to superimpose celebrities heads on the bodies of adult film actors. Broadly, these doctored videos weren't compelling, but the things are now very different with AI. We're careening dangerously close to a point where we can no longer discern the real from the fake. French postmodern philosopher Baudrillard warned of a moment when we can no longer distinguish between reality and a simulation. Humans use technology to navigate a complex reality. We invented maps to guide us through an intricate mass of land. Eventually, we created mass media to understand the world around us and help simplify its complexity. But there will be a point where we lose track of reality, a point where we're spending more time looking at a simulation of the world on our phone than we will be participating in the real world around us, and we're almost there now.

With generative AI, our connection to reality is even further disconnected, because technology can convincingly replicate reality on our [00:28:00] devices, we're less inclined to go outside and see what's real for ourselves. This inability of human consciousness to distinguish what is real and what is simulation is what Baudrillard called hyperreality. A state that leaves us vulnerable to malicious manipulation, from things like deepfakes to people getting fired, to propaganda leading to the loss of millions of lives. You might remember that a couple of years ago there were numerous PSAs, often from celebrities warning us to keep an eye out for deepfakes. They were annoying, but ultimately, they succeeded in making the public hyper aware of fake videos. But not so much with the deepfake adult content. Maybe it's because the PSAs about deepfakes didn't mention pornography, they addressed fake speeches by presidents and famous people instead. Or maybe it's because those who consume this content don't care whether it's real or fake. They're okay with the illusion. One thing is true though, if the general public was trained to recognize deepfake pornography, the potential for harm would be limited. By being more critical as information consumers and reporting these harmful videos when we see them, we might be [00:29:00] able to curb the effects of this dangerous new medium.

It's not like we're strangers to being critical of what we see and read online. When Wikipedia was first introduced, the idea that it could be a legitimate source of information was laughable. It was mocked on sitcoms and late night television, it symbolized the absurdity of believing what you read on the internet. That perception changed with time, deservedly so for Wikipedia, but we had a healthy skepticism towards user generated internet platforms for a while. The question is can we be critical and discerning towards deepfakes while acknowledging that some content is real? Will we lose track of what's simulation and what's reality and just distrust whatever we see online? Or worse, will manipulators succeed in making deepfake inflicted suffering an everyday occurrence, and we end up accepting that as the cost of existing online? And is there any hope of regulation stopping the constant assault of generative AI on our well being?

Will Killing Section 230 Kill the Internet? - On with Kara Swisher - Air Date 2-23-23

EVELYN DOUEK: I think that there are real legitimate questions about the breadth of 230 is the way the lower courts have interpreted it. I think, you know, Hany talked about the Snapchat case earlier, which is [00:30:00] a good example of where 230 immunity was pierced. And I think, you know, there are other really good questions around really bad actor platforms that know all of this stuff is going on and not taking action.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: Team mental health, for example?

EVELYN DOUEK: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's going to be causal chain problems on some of those cases, but, you know, I do think that Hany's absolutely right. The court took these cases because there's sort of hunger, that's, Everyone's talking about section 230. We should be talking about section 230. But I think that these weren't the fact sets that they thought. And so it'll be interesting to see if they come back and have another bite at it soon.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: Jeffrey, is there another case?

JEFFREY ROSEN: Well, the ones we've talked about from Florida and Texas, which, as everyone said, the court will take next year, involve a different question about the scope of 230, but one that the court is likely to divide over, and it's possible that that could have implications for how liability is applied in other cases too. But that's going to be absolutely fascinating and so squarely poses the conflict about whether or not the platform should be treated as common carriers and obey First Amendment standards and in some ways, those will even [00:31:00] be more constitutionally significant than these cases.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: All right. Is there any other industry that gets blanket immunity protections the way social media companies do? Everybody gets sued, except them. Is there any sort of parallel here? Can any of you think?

HANY FARID: No, there isn't. I mean, I'm not the legal scholar here, but we've heard this, and I think even one of the justices says is during the Gonzalez hearing is why does the tech industry get so much protection? Every other industry has to internalize these risks and deal with it. And I don't know of any other industry that has this type of almost blanket immunity.

EVELYN DOUEK: I mean, you know, the tech industry obviously gets sued all the time, but I do think that there, I mean, this is a somewhat exceptional statute provided for what Congress recognized at the time as an exceptional situation, which is, you know, these platforms have been the become the custodians of all of our speech. And I think, you know, the important thing to remember at section 230 is, yes, it provides platforms immunity but it also provides users immunity and the point of that platform immunity is to [00:32:00] protect the speech of users. I'm sounding much more libertarian on this podcast than I intended to, I have to say. You know, I really do think...

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: That's alright. You've lived in Silicon Valley.

EVELYN DOUEK: Yes, six months. That's all it took. There's something in the water.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: You can be libertarian-light, which is most of them, honestly. They call themselves that.

EVELYN DOUEK: I think content moderation is extremely important. I just get nervous about government rules that incentivize overmoderation and that platforms that don't care about sort of marginalized communities or disparate impacts end up, you know, we have seen this before with sort of the Foster amendments as well, taking down speech of people who, you know, don't have the same resources. So.

HANY FARID: Can I follow up on that, Kara? So. Evelyn raises an absolutely valid point that we do have to be careful about overmoderation. I will point out, however, that when we passed the DMCA, the Digital Millennial [sic] Copyright Act, these same claims were being made by the tech companies that you are going to force us to over moderate to avoid a liability, and it wasn't true. And look, DMCA is not perfect, but it has largely been fairly effective and [00:33:00] it created a healthy online ecosystem that has allowed us now, for both creators and producers, to monetize, music and movies and art. And so when you have rules of the road, they can actually be very, very good at creating a healthier online ecosystem. And since the companies are incentivized to keep content up, that's the financial side, I think that on balance, this might actually work out even if there is more liability with reduction of 230 protection.

JEFFREY ROSEN: I would just say that industries that are immunized from suits include lawyers, the ones who are most protected and all the privileges that the courts have protected against ineffective assistance of counsel claims or the lawyer-client privilege, are designed to protect deliberative privilege and First Amendment values; the same with executive privilege, when you can't sue the executive to get the deliberations so that you can get. advice. So, this immunity, as Evelyn [00:34:00] says, for the platforms is designed to achieve a First Amendment value, which is, deliberation and not overmoderating. And it's heartening, despite the really tough questions that are on the horizon involving the scope of the First Amendment, to see a consensus that 230 did achieve its purpose. And there's a reason that the US has a freer free speech platform than Europe, for example, which lacks this immunity, and the consequences of abandoning it might be severe. So, let's just pause during this brief moment of agreement, not to sing Kumbaya, but to say it's great that thinking about this hard, the justices may be inclined to think that 230 isn't so bad after all.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: So, my last question because, that you led me perfectly to it. There's two ways to go here, is that, you know the swirl and how powerful these social media companies are. There's one way where Google, Twitter, Meta, et cetera, gets their ships in order without legislative or judicial action because they should be in charge of all this stuff because they were duly elected by nobody. Or, as Kagan [00:35:00] specifically called out Congress to act, which are our elected officials, as damaged as they may be. Two things: one, who should be running the show here? And let's imagine a world with rational internet regulations, what would those be and what would the internet look like? Hany, you start with the first one and then Jeffrey and Evelyn you can answer the second one

HANY FARID: There is no evidence that the technology company can self-regulate. The last 25 years has taught us this. And not only that is that the business model that has led to the Googles and the Facebooks and the TikToks of the world continues to be the dominant business model of the Internet, which is engagement driven, ad driven, outrage driving. And that business model is the underlying root poison, I would argue. I don't think we can sit around and wait for the companies to do better. I don't think they will. There is no evidence of it. I think despite the fact that I don't want the regulators putting rules of the road, I think there is no other choice here. Ideally, by the way, the [00:36:00] consumers would have made the choice. We would have said, okay, we don't like the way you're doing business, we're going to go elsewhere. But in addition to phenomenal wealth they have virtual monopolies and so we as the consumer don't even have choices and that means the capitalism won't work here. And so we need the regular regulators to step in.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: All right, Jeffrey. Congress should act? My feeling is Congress should have done privacy and antitrust legislation and taken care of this in a whole different way. But, what do you think about that part?

JEFFREY ROSEN: I guess the quick question first is, will it act and what should it do? And will it? Probably not, because there's not consensus as we've been discussing with conservatives more concerned about content discrimination, for better or for worse, and liberals more concerned about hate speech and harmful conduct. I find it hard to imagine what a national free speech regulation would look like. And in fact, I can't imagine one that's consistent with First Amendment values short of imposing them, which there's an argument for not doing at the federal level because companies need some play in the [00:37:00] joints to take down some more offensive speech than the First Amendment protects, while broadly allowing a thousand flowers to bloom.

The one interesting consequence of this argument is to make me think, you know, the companies, although it's messy and there's lots to object to, it may be better than the alternatives of either really sweeping, imposing a First Amendment standard on the federal level or allowing a great deal more moderation than would be consistent with First Amendment values.

KARA SWISHER - HOST, ON WITH KARA SWISHER: Evelyn, you get the last word. 230 looks like it's going to live to fight another day.

EVELYN DOUEK: Yeah. There is no rational world where the best way to make tech policy is by nine, you know, uh, older justices weighing in on a case every 20 something years to sort of catch up on what's been going on. That is not how this should happen. Absolutely, Congress, you know, if it could get It's act together it could pass some legislation enabling a digital agency that could be even more nimble, and sort of, you know, gather facts and understanding in which to make [00:38:00] policy that's more sort of finally attuned to the problem. And, you know, then we could talk. Absolutely, Kara.

You know, you mentioned privacy and antitrust, that would be a hundred percent the sort of place where I would start. I would also really start on transparency legislation and data access. You know, what are these platforms doing and are they doing what they say they're doing? Let's get researchers in. And that's where I'd start. Cause you can't solve problems that you don't understand. And I think that that's step one. And the only other thing, you know, before we close, this has been a very sort of parochial conversation, but there are other legislatures, and Europe is taking action. The Digital Services Act is coming, and so these platforms are going to have to change and adjust anyway, because they're going to be regulated, you know, no matter what the Supreme Court does.

When AI can fake reality, who can you Trust? | Sam Gregory - TED Talks Daily - Air Date 12-20-23

SAM GREGORY: The last thing we need is a diminishing baseline of the shared, trustworthy information upon which democracies thrive, where the specter of AI is used to plausibly believe things you want to believe and plausibly deny things you want to ignore. But I think there's a way we can prevent that future, if we act now; that if we prepare, don't panic, [00:39:00] we'll kind of make our way through this, somehow. Panic won't serve us well, [it] plays into the hands of governments and corporations who will abuse our fears, and into the hands of people who want a fog of confusion and will use AI as an excuse.

How many of you know someone who's been scammed by an audio that sounds like their kid? And for those of you who are thinking, I wasn't taken in. I know how to spot a deepfake, any tip you know now is already outdated. Deepfakes didn't blink. They do now. Six fingered hands were more common in deepfake land than real life. Not so much. Technical advances erase those visible and audible clues that we so desperately want to hang on to as proof we can discern real from fake.

But it also really shouldn't be on us to make that guess without any help. Between real deepfakes and claimed deepfakes, we need big picture structural solutions. We need robust [00:40:00] foundations that enable us to discern authentic from simulated, tools to fortify the credibility of critical voices and images, and powerful detection technology that doesn't raise more doubts than it fixes. There are three steps we need to take to get to that future.

Step one is to ensure that the detection skills and tools are in the hands of the people who need them. I've talked to hundreds of journalists, community leaders, and human rights defenders, and they're in the same boat as you and me and us. They're listening really closely to the audio, trying to think, can I spot a glitch? Looking at the image, saying, Ooh, does that look right or not? Or maybe they're going online to find a detector, and the detector they find they don't know whether they're getting a false positive, a false negative, or a reliable result.

Here's an example. I used a detector which got the 'pope in the puffer jacket' right, but then when I put in the Easter Bunny image that I made for my kids, it said that it was human generated. This is because of some big [00:41:00] challenges in deepfake detection. Detection tools often only work on one single way to make a deepfake, so you need multiple tools. And they don't work well on low quality social media content. Confidence score; how do you know whether that's reliable? If you don't know if the underlying technology is reliable, or whether it works on the manipulation that has been used. And tools to spot an AI manipulation don't spot a manual edit.

These tools also won't be available to everyone. There's a trade off between security and access, which means if we make them available to anyone, they become useless to everybody. Because the people designing the new deception techniques will test them on the publicly available detectors and evade them.

But we do need to make sure these are available to the journalists, the community leaders, the election officials globally, who are our first line of defense, thought through with attention to real world accessibility and use. Though, at the best [00:42:00] circumstances, detection tools will be 85 to 90 percent effective, they have to be in the hands of that first line of defense. And they're not right now.

So for step one, I've been talking about detection after the fact. Step two: AI is going to be everywhere in our communication. Creating, changing, editing. It's not going to be a simple binary of, Yes, it's AI, or, Phew, it's not. AI is part of all of our communication. So we need to better understand the recipe of what we're consuming. Some people call this content provenance and disclosure. Technologists have been building ways to add invisible watermarking to AI generated media. They've also been designing ways, and I've been part of these efforts within a standard called the C2PA, to add cryptographically signed metadata to files. This means data that provides details about the content cryptographically signed in a way that reinforces our trust in that information. It's an [00:43:00] updating record of how AI was used to create or edit it, where humans and other technologies were involved, and how it was distributed. It's basically a recipe and serving instructions for the mix of AI and human that's in what you're seeing and hearing. And it's a critical part of a new AI-infused media literacy.

And this actually shouldn't sound that crazy. Our communication is moving in this direction already. If you're like me, you can admit it, you browse your TikTok 'For You' page, and you're used to seeing videos that have an audio source, an AI filter, a green screen, a background, a stitch with another edit. This, in some sense, is the alpha version of this transparency in some of the major platforms we use today. It's just that it does not yet travel across the internet, it's not reliable, it's not updatable, and it's not secure.

Now, there are also big challenges in this type of infrastructure for authenticity. As we create these durable [00:44:00] signs of how AI and human were mixed, that carry across the trajectory of how media is made, we need to ensure they don't compromise privacy, or backfire globally. We have to get this right. We can't oblige a citizen journalist filming in a repressive context, or a satirical maker using novel gen AI tools to parody the powerful, to have to disclose their identity or personally identifiable information in order to use their camera or ChatGPT. Because it's important they be able to retain their ability to have anonymity at the same time as the tool to create is transparent. This needs to be about the how of AI human media making, not the who.

This brings me to the final step. None of this works without a pipeline of responsibility that runs from the foundation models and the open source projects through to the way that is deployed into systems, APIs, and apps to the platforms [00:45:00] where we consume media and communicate.

I've spent much of the last 15 years fighting essentially a rearguard action like so many of my colleagues in the human rights world against the failures of social media. We can't make those mistakes again in this next generation of technology. What this means is that governments need to ensure that within this pipeline of responsibility for AI, there is transparency, accountability, and liability. Without these three steps, detection for the people who need it most, provenance that is rights respecting, and that pipeline of responsibility, we're going to get stuck, looking in vain for the six fingered hand or the eyes that don't blink. We need to take these steps, otherwise we risk a world where it gets easier and easier to both fake reality and dismiss reality as potentially faked.

And that is a world that the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described in these terms: "a people that no longer can [00:46:00] believe anything cannot make up its own mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge, and with such a people, you can then do what you please".

That's a world I know none of us want, and that I think we can prevent.

BONUS - Deepfaking Democracy: Why AI Threatens News And Global Elections In 2024 Part 2 - Forbes - Air Date 2-6-24

ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE, FORBES WRITER: One of the most interesting pieces of this, and troubling pieces of this, is that in many cases the deepfake news segments that we found were getting more views and more virality than actual news segments from those same outlets that were posted to their blue check verified social media accounts around the same time.

One example that we found was from Face the Nation. This YouTube and TikTok creator had a segment that was actually one of his more innocuous segments that was about a group of kids jumping in an elevator and the elevator crashes down and then they owe this building more than half a million dollars in damages.

NEWS ANCHOR: Over 560,000 dollars in damages liable after TikToker Krishna [00:47:00] Sahai destroys elevators.

ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE, FORBES WRITER: So, it's not the most threatening example but what was so fascinating about it was that it was viewed more than 300,000 times and it used again the Face the Nation logo and on the Face the Nation's social media account on TikTok, the post from the same day only garnered 7,000 views.

So, when fake news segments from a creator that uses the outlet's logo or anchors from that station is in fact getting more eyeballs than actual news clips from the actual outlet's blue check social media accounts, you can see how that could become extremely problematic and deter people from actually following what is considered real news.

KEVIN GOLDBERG: So, even deepfake technology is protected by the first amendment, lying is protected by the First Amendment. I could make false statements and I am not going to be punished unless that false statement carries some additional harm with it. Direct harm. Usually harm that is perpetrated against an individual. And [00:48:00] frankly, when you're in, you know, you're in a situation talking, making political statements, that's the strongest protection the First Amendment gives.

So a general statement of a political nature, which I think a lot of deepfakes we're seeing in this coming year will be, are actually protected, even when they're lies, unless there is some direct harm that is inflicted upon an individual or even, you know, to some degree, a small segment of society. And what we're talking about here are things like defamation. You know, if I say something or if I use a deepfake in a way that makes a false statement about you, harms your reputation, that would be something that is now outside of the First Amendment, not protected by the First Amendment.

While we do have a collective media literacy problem in this country, where people don't know the difference necessarily between news and opinion, or even within news, the difference between a good source and a not so good source or an outright lying source that has an agenda of its own, we're getting better with that. I think people collectively, and this is anecdotal, people collectively are getting better [00:49:00] at identifying, you know, separating truth from falsity. It's harder when you bring in video, because they don't know the same tells that we're already being trained to look for in printed or online information.

So, there's a level of validity, a veracity to something that they see in video and they go, Oh, it's video. It's really hard to fake that. And it's happening so much, and frankly, it's mostly being perpetrated by people who want to take advantage of it. You know, we know that in the 2020 and 2016 elections, a lot of the misinformation during the election period was coming from overseas. From places we aren't going to be able to get to, to, you know, to punish. And I think that's probably what's going to happen again, which is what makes it so difficult to combat.

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN ANCHOR: This is the most comprehensive report that we've gotten about the 2020 election and foreign interference by the intelligence community and it does make clear that this massive Russian influence campaign was designed, orchestrated by Putin, to denigrate Joe Biden and to support the re [00:50:00] election of President Donald Trump.

HANY FARID: You know, I've heard people say, Look, disinformation, deepfakes, they can't change an election. And I don't think that's true, because if you look at the last two election cycles, the difference between one candidate or another in terms of the electoral vote came down to some 80,000 votes in a handful of states.

You don't have to move tens of millions of votes. You have to move tens of thousands of votes. And not only that, I know where those votes are. If I'm the bad guy trying to interfere with your election, I know exactly what states, I know exactly what towns, what localities, and I know how to find these people on social media and manipulate them.

That, I think, should worry us. You need a series of defenses, and so you need a series of proactive defenses and a series of reactive defenses, and you need better corporate responsibility, and you need some liability, and you need some regulation, and you need good consumer protection. And so, you know, when you put all those pieces together, I think we can start to trust things that we see online a little bit.

KEVIN GOLDBERG: It's possible. It's difficult. Both in a legal sense and a [00:51:00] practical sense to bring a defamation lawsuit against someone based on their creation of a deepfake. So let's just say you create a deepfake about me. I have to show very specifically that not only you lied, you harmed me in some way and specifically you harmed my reputation. But beyond that, I have to show a number of other things. I have to show a statement, specifically, that you made a materially and substantially false assertion of fact about me that was published and harmed my reputation and that you did it with some level of fault.

TIM BOUCHER, AI ANALYST: This ability to create so many images so rapidly, it's an incredibly powerful tool.

DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: New artificial intelligence technology makes it easy to create fake images that can look very realistic. Like these created by artist and online trust and safety expert, Tim Boucher.

HANY FARID: I think absolutely we are going to see the campaigns use it against their opponents. We also can see campaigns using it to bolster their own opponent, to create images of them looking more [00:52:00] heroic, or taller, for example. But here's the other place that we can, that the candidates can use it. Imagine now there's a hot mic of a candidate or a sitting president saying something inappropriate or illegal. They don't have to cop to it anymore. They can say it's fake. And so they can also deny reality. So, the deepfake technology is a double edged sword. You can create harmful content, but you can also dismiss real content by simply saying it's fake and muddying the waters.

ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE, FORBES WRITER: I think the most important thing right now is to remind people to think before they share, to be a bit skeptical of what they are consuming, and to really try to pay attention to the source. If the source is an authoritative news outlet, great. I don't think we can rely anymore on which accounts are blue check verified accounts and which aren't because now we know that many of the social media platforms allow people, any person, to purchase verification where the bar is significantly lower for verified accounts.

But I think that you should really be focused [00:53:00] on where the news is coming from, who is posting it, what their motive may be, and what sorts of perspectives they are including in the clip. I think all of those things are able to help us, especially in a very fast moving news environment, better calculate what is worth sharing versus what isn't, and help us better understand what we are consuming.

BONUS - The Taylor Swift Deepfake Saga - What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Air Date 2-2-24

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Tell me about the Telegram channel where these images were originating. What is it for? Who’s in it? What do they talk about?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: It’s like, imagine the id of a horny teenager. That’s kind of the vibe. It’s kind of dark. It’s not a pleasant place to be, I have to be honest. It’s a channel with tens of thousands of people. I don’t want to be too specific so as not to direct people to it.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah.

EMANUEL MAILBERG: There are like sub communities within it. So, some of them are doing this deepfake stuff, some are doing photoshops, some are doing stuff... I’m just going to say it, and you can cut it out if you want, but it’s like there’s a tribute channel, right? And what is a tribute channel? A tribute channel is people [00:54:00] share photos of celebrities or people that they know in real life, and they film themselves masturbating against the images. And that’s something that people enjoy doing. It’s an underbelly of sexuality and online pornography that is not the kind of stuff that you would easily find on, say, a pornhub, but is readily available if you’re still inclined. And many people are.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: And before these images were on Telegram, they were on 4chan. I mean, what does that say about the scope of this issue or problem, do you think?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: 4chan has been trying to find these loopholes and these free AI tools since they became available. So, last year, in November I think, we reported on this image of SpongeBob SquarePants doing 9/11. I don’t know if you saw that.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Should we be clear that SpongeBob didn’t do 9/11?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: As far as we know, cannot confirm that he was [00:55:00] involved. And they did it with Bing, right? And Bing obviously does not want people to make images of 9/11 with their software. So you couldn’t type in 'twin towers collapsing' or anything like that. But if you were to type in SpongeBob SquarePants in a cockpit of a jet flying towards two tall skyscrapers, it would generate the image, and it would look exactly like the twin Towers. So that is the kind of thing that they’ve been doing for months. And I think just recently it has become apparent that they found loopholes that allow them to do pornography.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: But, I mean, for all the horrors of Telegram and 4can, most people saw these images on X for the first time. Do you know how long they were there before everything kind of got amped up and went viral, et cetera?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: I think they went viral within 24 hours.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Wow.

EMANUEL MAILBERG: And I would say within, I don’t [00:56:00] know, 12 hours, 6 hours, the Swifties were on it, and they were pushing it down the feed, and by the next day, it was gone. Even X under Elon Musk with all the terrible content, I think this got so much heat that, I was surprised that it was removed that quickly, given the stuff that they do allow and the stuff that Musk himself puts out there.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: So it takes Taylor Swift to get Elon Musk’s X to do any content moderation.

EMANUEL MAILBERG: It takes the biggest celebrity in the world, with the biggest, most devoted following in the world, to get Musk to move. Yeah, and the White House as well, right?

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: I mean, what do regular people do? What do C-list celebrities do when something like this happens? What can they do?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: I mean, unfortunately, I hate to say this, but if you’re not Taylor Swift, you’re kind of screwed. And I see this all the time, and it’s heartbreaking and it’s horrible. This is true both of minor celebrities, Instagram influencers, Twitch streamers, YouTubers [00:57:00] who are deepfaked regularly. It happens every day. I see it every day in my reporting. And they either don’t know that it’s happening, and if they do know that it’s happening and you approach X or you approach whatever platform that is hosting and enabling that content, wherever it is hosted, chances are they’ll do something about it. But that puts those people in the impossible position of policing the entire Internet to remove that content, and it’s not possible. We know people who have tried to do this, and it’s not only very hard to do, it’s retraumatizing. We see this with what’s colloquially called revenge porn. It’s a terrible process. Some people try, some people, it’s like too painful for them to even pursue it. There’s no good answer. Part of the amazing thing about the Taylor Swift story is that you do see action. You see action from Microsoft, you see action from X, you see policy efforts, and [00:58:00] you’re not going to get this as a normal person or a minor celebrity.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: So, I mean, as you've explained, deepfakes took some technical know-how and some effort, but now these image generators, I mean, they’re really easy to use. I even tried the Microsoft tool earlier today and my prompts were generic and boring. So, I’m not a visual artist in any way, but I mean, it’s really easy to use these things. Are we just facing down a potential, just, explosion of these kinds of images of most people? I mean, most women and girls?

EMANUEL MAILBERG: Yeah, we’re in it. It’s very important to make clear that this is primarily targeting women. Overwhelmingly targeting women. And there’s data to back this up. People often talk about the political implications of deepfake and misinformation. And when you look at the data, that is not what happens. Most of what people are doing with it is creating non-consensual images of women. We’re in the thick of it. Like, it’s happening. The [00:59:00] explosion is here, we’re in the middle of it. The good news is that I truly don’t think that it’s going to stay this way. Because when we report on this stuff, the companies that make these tools are embarrassed and horrified, and they make changes. And the thing that we’re doing right now is going case by case, company by company, image by image, and reporting on it. And we’re seeing results. Like, improvements are being made. But I think that in order to see a big improvement, I think something worse is going to have to happen. I think we’re going to have to see some truly horrible, either it’s a specific case that goes to court and somebody gets sued, or it’s like some viral media story about somebody who got really hurt. We need to hit rock bottom, I think, in a way, before we really see big changes.

EMILY PECK - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Emanuel sees a precedent here: another time when there were big changes in porn on the Internet. And that’s what happened at Pornhub.

EMANUEL MAILBERG: When we started reporting on [01:00:00] Pornhub, the state of the platform was that anyone can upload any video. Obviously, because that was the case, we were reporting on many cases of abuse, and we spent a few years reporting on this, reaching out to Pornhub for comment and telling them what we’re seeing and publishing stories about it. And they were very dismissive. It was always like, You know, we have, it’s like we have moderation methods and you can issue takedown requests and we’re responsive and responsible and blah, blah, blah. But the abuse continued and then the lawsuit started to pile up. There was child abuse. There’s this big GirlsDoPorn case where 400 women were exploited by this porn company that published its videos on Pornhub. And it got to a point where the platform really had to change. They purged it of millions of videos and they changed the rules of the platform, where now every single person who is in a video on Pornhub needs to provide written, active consent for them to appear in the video. Pornhub changed its name, it changed its ownership. [01:01:00] It’s a completely different Internet platform, but it only became that way because things got really bad. And I think that’s the path we’re on.

Final comments on even more dangers from news sites populated with AI-generated content

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Forbes, looking at reactive versus proactive approaches to detecting manipulated media. CYBER advocated for new federal legislation to regulate tech firms. All Things Considered looked at big tech taking baby steps on self-regulation. Aperture discuss the real world harms that AI is already having on women and girls around the world. On with Kara Swisher considered the difficult balance of freedom of speech and online regulation. And TED Talks Daily looked at three tools to create an infrastructure of authenticity.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from Forbes looking further into deepfake news stories made to look like legitimate mainstream outlets, and What Next: TBD analyzed the impact of the recent Taylor Swift deepfakes [01:02:00] event. To hear that and have all of our bonus contents delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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 to wrap up, I just want to add one more thing, at least. I know there's more than one, but for now, I'll add one more thing that you should be worried about regarding AI. Which is that the widespread availability of AI text generation has begun to make it much, much more likely that a random new site you may stumble upon through just a regular Google search will actually just be a wasteland of clickbait content designed to rank highly in search results, but give no valuable information. Sometimes these sites will even manage to get the URLs of former legitimate news sites.

So, for instance, two local newspapers might merge [01:03:00] and one or both of the original URLs stops being the official site of the new merged paper. Then, if those old URLs are allowed to lapse, you know, the company doesn't keep up on payments and they're allowed to go back on the market, one of these clickbait farms can and likely will grab it and repopulate that site with their own AI generated content, making it look more legitimate thanks to the seemingly trustworthy URL, maybe even a URL that users had been used to going to and trusting for years. So, it's becoming even more important now to get your news from trusted sites or trusted aggregators. For instance, Apple News or Google News or apps like a Ground News, won't be likely to feature articles from unverified sites. You know, there may be a case where they'll get tricked into it, but generally that won't be the case just as, you know, we certainly do [01:04:00] our due diligence researching any news sources that we take on before we feature them here on the show.

But as it was hopefully made clear in the show today, this is yet another systemic problem requiring systemic solutions. Humanity will have very little chance of overcoming the problem of AI disinformation with a simple libertarian, buyer-beware sort of approach. We are just not wired to function in a world where we have to disbelieve everything we see and hear until it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It's actually an evolutionary benefit of ours to have a basic tendency towards trust in other people and in what we see. Human superpower is our ability to work together in flexible ways and that requires trust. We couldn't have evolved to be able to build the complicated society we have today, that can actually sustain the number of humans on the planet, [01:05:00] without bad tendency towards trust. We would have gotten stuck way back along the evolutionary line.

And to be sure that tendency to trust has been exploited by bad actors all throughout human history, but that tendency towards trust has maintained itself. But now, the ability of bad actors to use people's trusting nature against them is reaching a truly unprecedented level. And we really need to understand it as the existential threat that it is, or existential threat to democracy at least. Society will probably be able to carry on either way, but it may just be in the form of autocratic rule over a subjugated people because as has been well known since at least Thomas Jefferson's time, that, as he said, "an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people". And that's simply not something that is possible to have when [01:06:00] people are a wash in disinformation.

That is going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 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 Trio, Ken, Brian, and Ben, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, 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 at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patrion page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny bonus episodes, in addition to there [01:07:00] being extra content, no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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 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.

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#1613 Breathless Speculation: Biden's Baggage, Trump's Tyranny, Misleading Media, Courts and Criminality (Transcript)

Posted by · February 23, 2024 10:05 AM

Air Date 2/23/2024